The Rudolf Steiner Archive

On this occasion let me once more call attention to the fact that as the German Section of the Theosophical¹ Society we find ourselves in an epoch of importance. What has been said in different lectures with regard to the cycles which run in sevens is no mere figure of speech, but is in harmony with the laws of existence. And having now completed a 7-years' cycle in the life of the German Section we may do well to pause and look into our whole work and endeavour. This work is only possible if the spiritual Movement, in its development, contains in its inner ordering something of the laws of the great cosmic system. The cosmic system runs its course in cycles which can be reckoned according to the number 7; for we reckon 7 planetary conditions and so on.

In a Movement like our own, the number 7 also has a certain part to play, and after 7 years our striving in a sense turns back again to the beginning, for it has in the meantime incorporated in itself what has been achieved; our striving turns back again to its beginning, but at a higher stage. It is only possible to arrive at this by considering how the whole rests upon an inner law.

If you look back a little at the work we have done in these 7 years, you will be able to notice one thing: there has been a certain order and regularity about this work. Of course you cannot take what I have said as being correct to a day, but if you take it in its essentials, you will see that it is true.

In the first years of our work in the German Section we so to speak laid the foundations. What we did in the first four years was to acquire some knowledge of the paths-which lead to the higher worlds, of the great cosmic connections, and of the examination and testing of what is found in the Akashic Record with regard to the secrets of the cosmos. Those members who joined later have found it necessary—and will always do so—to acquire knowledge afterwards of this foundation of our work. This is indispensable for everybody; for it is not sufficient to assimilate only what has happened in the last three years and has enabled the Movement to progress in the right way. If you look back you will see that the last three years have brought about the development of those truths and facts which have been put before you of late, perhaps in a somewhat astonishing form. If you try to establish the connection with what was done in the first four years of our work in the four-fold foundation, as it were, of the whole, you will see that even those great and all-embracing truths which have been impressing you so deeply, have a very close connection with what happened in the first four years. You will be able to convince yourselves of this if you ponder it well. The younger members must bear written upon their hearts the absolute necessity of acquiring for themselves a firm and sure foundation. Wherever the work is being carried on, we are making it more and more possible for those who join later to pick up for themselves what has been accomplished here in the early days. It is really impossible for them to co-operate without this recapitulation; and the Theosophical Movement must be taken seriously in the deepest sense. In this connection we may perhaps speak to-day on a subject that concerns the theosophical attitude of mind and the whole manner of theosophical thought; and we will relate it to the significant time through which we are passing. I mean the question: “What is the right attitude for the theosophist to take with regard to Theosophy itself?”

What is here meant will be clearer if I put the question in another way: “Why is Theosophy taught to-day at all as it is taught? Why is information given about the higher worlds, information that is the result of spiritual research and clairvoyant consciousness? Could one not perhaps proceed in quite a different way?” Let us suppose, e.g., that we were to begin by giving each person certain instructions as to how he can develop those inner faculties which at present are dormant within his soul, so that by means of these instructions it would be possible for him gradually to penetrate into the spiritual worlds himself, without having first been given any of the facts of the higher worlds, as is done to-day.

This was indeed the custom formerly, to a certain extent: it was so before the Theosophical Movement in the modern sense came into being. For a long time it had been said: It is really not of much use for anyone to stand before the world and communicate the results of spiritual investigation. Such communications were accordingly withheld as far as possible, and only certain maxims were given to people as to how they should develop the faculties dormant within their own souls; as a rule people were not told any more than they had gradually come to see for themselves in the higher worlds. The question might now arise: Why is this path not taken to-day? Why are the results of spiritual investigation communicated to men?

This step has not been taken out of any personal preference or from any personal decision: there are good reasons for it. We shall understand it better if we constantly remind ourselves of what it is that Spiritual Science really tells us. It tells us of facts and truths from the realm of the higher super-sensible worlds; it tells us of that which clairvoyant consciousness can discover in these higher worlds.

Now it is of course true that one who hears of such things and is not himself clairvoyant cannot convince himself of the facts as such through his own immediate vision; it is quite true that he receives them and cannot prove them by clairvoyant evidence. That is true; but it would be quite wrong to imagine that the man who is not clairvoyant cannot in any way prove or have insight into the facts which are now being presented. And it would be wrong to assert that one must merely take in faith and on authority what is given out of clairvoyant consciousness. These communications would be in the highest degree imperfect, would lack something essential, if they appealed only to authority and faith. What is being given out in the right way—this has often been emphasised—can be discovered only by clairvoyant consciousness but when it has once been discovered—if only by one person—when it has once been seen and communicated, everyone can understand it by means of unprejudiced reason, that is to say by those faculties which are accessible to him on the physical plane. And it may well be said: Even if no one of those here present ever has the opportunity of proving everything immediately in the most comprehensive sense, everyone could at any rate make this possible if he had the time and the necessary mental faculties (I mean, faculties of the physical plane). Let us even consider such difficult matters as were treated of here in recent lectures, with regard to the incarnations of Zarathustra, such difficulties as, e.g. that Zarathustra's etheric body passed over into Moses²—let us even imagine that such difficult, far-reaching and significant subjects are being dealt with, even then let no one assert that he who knows these things as the result of spiritual research appeals for blind credulity! That is by no means the case. But suppose someone were to come and say: “I for my part am no clairvoyant. But here is someone asserting these things about Zarathustra and his incarnations. I will now lay hold of everything that is at my disposal on the physical plane, everything that history hands down to us, everything that is contained in the stone monuments, or in ancient religious documents, and I will test all these most carefully.” And suppose he were to say further: “Assuming that what is being said is correct, does it tally with the facts that can be externally corroborated?”—Such a person would then investigate thoroughly what can be confirmed by external means, and he would see that the more closely he investigated the more he would find corroboration for what the clairvoyant has set forth. If the word “fear” had any meaning at all in this connection, then one could say that the research of Spiritual Science might perhaps really feel fear of an inexact examination; but it could never fear those who are ready to follow fully and accurately the paths of material investigation. For such people will see that the more closely they pursue their investigations the more corroboration they will find for the facts which the clairvoyant communicates. But for the things that are not so remote or difficult, things which are connected with karma and reincarnation, and the life between death and a new birth—for these one only needs to observe, in an open-minded way, what ordinary life has to offer. And the more this is done, the more will confirmation be found for the facts communicated by the clairvoyant; that is to say, there are possibilities enough of convincing oneself that what is acquired from super-sensible worlds can be confirmed by the outer physical world. This is something which should not be taken lightly, but which we should look upon as an essential fact. We must in our own lives put to the test the facts that only a few can really investigate, we should not. always be repeating the phrase: That must be taken on trust! Accept as little as possible on trust; examine, test and prove all the time! Only be sure that you do it in an open-minded, unprejudiced way. This, then, is the first thing upon which stress must be laid.

But now you will find that a testing of this kind requires great effort, it demands thought and work. It means that one must really set out to find confirmations in the physical world for what is stated out of clairvoyant research. And here we come to a matter of which we shall do well to speak, a matter that is closely connected with our main question. Is it not necessary, is it not even good, for the man of to-day, besides striving (as he certainly should strive) to penetrate into the spiritual world, also to occupy himself at the same time with an energetic cultivation of the ordinary means of knowledge and the ordinary methods of thought? In other words: Does the theosophist not do well to overcome the indolence that is certainly prevalent in the world to-day, and to develop his world of thought in all earnestness, to lay hold of the means by which man can be comprehended even only on the physical plane, and to turn these to his use? Is it not right that he should learn a great deal, and especially learn how to think?

It is indeed very difficult to make clear to the consciousness of the present day what is meant by this. It once happened that someone who wanted to make progress in theosophical knowledge and at the same time to learn how to think the thoughts with greater exactitude, came and asked me to recommend him what to read. I recommended him to study Spinoza's Ethics, so that he would be able to formulate in clear-cut outlines the thoughts that were being given him. Not many weeks afterwards he wrote to me that he could not see why he should study this book; it was rather voluminous and the whole object was simply to prove the existence of God, which he had never doubted; therefore he saw no need to wade through long trains of thought in order to prove the existence of God!

This is an example of just that kind of indolence with which men approach Theosophy or Spiritual Science to-day. They are very soon satisfied when they have come to some belief or other, and they fight shy of the trouble of building it up for themselves, bit by bit, into conceptions which are, admittedly, troublesome to acquire. But for such persons the only possible result is blind faith, whereas you will find that it ceases to be blind faith if you will really school your thinking and not simply want, out of curiosity, to develop those powers which lead to an elementary stage of clairvoyance. I do not, of course, say that this could not run parallel, but we need to train at the same time the physical powers of thought, those faculties of knowledge that have been given to us here on the physical plane; these must be trained too, even if it is irksome, in order that we may be in a position to form clearly defined ideas and clearly defined concepts of what is communicated to us from out of the higher worlds. It is very easy to imagine that it is better to have clairvoyance in the very smallest degree than it is to understand through the reasoning mind ever so many of the facts of the higher worlds. It might easily be said: “I really do not know why I am a member of this Society; we are always being told things about the higher worlds; all that is quite nice, but I would much prefer it if I could catch the merest glimpse of them myself by means of clairvoyant vision.”—I know a very learned theosophist who had an intense longing to get beyond mere learning to direct vision, and he expressed this longing as follows: “If only I could once be able to see even the tip of the tail of one of these elemental beings!” Such a remark is quite understandable. This particular theosophist would never have been ready to give up his knowledge of theosophical truth in exchange; but there might well be someone ready to do so, if he could gain only a small degree of clairvoyant vision. Such a feeling would, however be wrong from every point of view. For we must consider the age in which we live. It is the age which, in the whole evolution of man, is the epoch when conscious thought must be developed, just as in the ancient Indian period a quite different kind of consciousness was evolved, a consciousness that was reminiscent of a dim, shadowy clairvoyance; the powers of the present day have gradually been developing ever since that time. It is only we in this age, who in conjunction with the development of the Spiritual Soul have brought human thinking into the sphere of earth-evolution. For this reason Theosophy must now, at this time, be brought down out of the super-sensible world and must make its appeal to the reasoned thinking of men.

We need to distinguish clearly between two conditions. Firstly: a man may not be much of a thinker, his thinking may indeed be quite primitive and yet he may at the same time be comparatively far advanced as regards vision on the astral plane, and even, up to a certain point, on the devachanic plane; he may be quite advanced in this respect and able to see a great deal. Or again, the other case is possible: A man who knows a great deal about the theosophical truths may yet be able to see nothing at all for himself, may not be in the position, as we were saying, to see even “the tip of the tail” of an elemental being! This is also quite possible. Now let us ask ourselves: What is really the inner connection between these different faculties of the human soul?

Here it must be emphasised that to have something, and to be conscious of what we have, are two distinct things. It is extraordinarily important to grasp this point. You will understand it rightly if the question is put somewhat differently. You were all once clairvoyant, in primeval times everyone was clairvoyant, and there was a time too when men were able to look back into the far, far past. And now you may ask: But how is it that we do not remember our former incarnations if we were once able to look back through the ages? Then you may ask: If we become clairvoyant now, will that help us in the next incarnation to look back?

This fact you must have clearly before you, that the old clairvoyance is of no use for looking back to-day. You once had this clairvoyance. How is it, then, that the majority of people to-day do not remember their former incarnations? This question is of the greatest importance. People do not remember their former incarnations—although in earlier epochs they were clairvoyant to a greater or less degree—because in those times they had not developed the faculties which are the faculties of the self, of the ego. For the development of clairvoyant faculties in the general sense is not the essential point.

Let me make this clear to you by a comparison. Imagine that when you woke up in the morning you could remember nothing about your experiences of the day before.—Now however clairvoyant people may have been in former times, if they did not pay attention to the development of the faculties of the ego, namely, the faculty of thinking, the power of discrimination, which are the special faculties of the human ego on this earth, then the ego was not actively present in the former incarnations, the self-hood was not there! What, then, is there for people to remember? A self-contained ego must be there in the previous incarnation. That is the whole point! So that to-day it is only those people who in their earlier incarnations have worked through the medium of thought, of logic, of discrimination, who can remember those incarnations. Thus however advanced a man is in clairvoyance, if he has not in former incarnations worked through the power of discrimination, of logical thinking, he cannot remember a former incarnation. For he had not at that time set up the signpost as it were, to which his recollection has to go back. So you will see that when one understands Spiritual Science, one cannot too quickly set to work to acquire just these very faculties of genuine thought.

Now perhaps you will say: But when I am clairvoyant I shall already have mastered the faculty of logical thinking. That is not so! Why have the Gods allowed human beings to exist at all? Because it was only in human beings that they could cause faculties to develop which otherwise could not have been developed at all. The power to think, to picture something in thoughts in which there is the quality of discrimination—this faculty can be developed only on this our earth; formerly it did not exist, it could only come about through the fact of the existence of human beings. We might take the following comparison.—Suppose you have a grain of corn—of wheat, let us say. However long you look at it, no wheat will grow out of it. You must put it in the soil and let it grow, you must let the growth-forces work upon it. That which the divine-spiritual Beings had before the formation of man may be compared to the grain of wheat. If this “grain of wheat” was to come to life in the form of thoughts, it had first to be cultivated by human beings on the physical plane. The only possible means of cultivating thoughts on the earth from the higher world is through human incarnations. So that the thoughts of men on the physical plane have a character which is entirely their own and must lead up to what is possible in the higher worlds. It was necessary for the Gods that there should be men on the earth. The Gods allowed men to come into being in order to preserve through them in the form of thought what they had had in the higher worlds. Thus what comes down from the higher worlds would never have taken form in thought, if man had not been able to give it this form. And he who will not think, on the earth, deprives the Gods of what they have reckoned upon, and he cannot accomplish what is his real human task and destiny upon earth. For he can only attain this in an incarnation wherein he really labours at the development of his powers of thought. If this is realised, all the rest follows from it.

That which brings revelations, real facts about the spiritual world, can enter the human soul in manifold ways. It is certainly possible for men to come to clairvoyant vision without being clear thinkers, and indeed this is very frequently the case to-day. The majority of those who become clairvoyant are not clear thinkers. But those who are clear thinkers and those who are not will have very different experiences in the spiritual world. The difference might be expressed thus: What is revealed from out of the higher worlds impresses itself most clearly into those forms of mental perception which we bring to the higher worlds as thoughts. Thoughts are the best vehicle for the revelations.

But if we are not thinkers, the revelations must seek other forms, e.g. a picture. The most usual way for one who is not a thinker to receive revelations is in the form of a sense-image. And you may often hear those who are visionary clairvoyants without being thinkers, describe in sense-images what they have seen. These may have beauty; but we must at the same time be aware that a thinker has a different. subjective experience from a non-thinker. If you have revelations as a non-thinker, the sense-image is there; this or that figure stands before you. It reveals itself out of the spiritual world. Let us say, you see the figure of an angel, or some symbolic form—perhaps a cross, a monstrance, a chalice. This is present in the super-sensible realm and you see it as a finished picture. You say to yourselves that it is reality—but actually it is a picture. New experiences of the spiritual world will present themselves to the subjective consciousness of the thinker in a rather different way. It will not be the same as for the non-thinker. For the thinker, the things will not suddenly be there before him as though they had been shot out of a pistol; they will appear in a different way. Take a non-thinking, visionary clairvoyant and a thinking, visionary clairvoyant. They may both receive the same revelations. Let us take some particular case. The non-thinking clairvoyant sees this or that phenomenon of the spiritual world. The thinking clairvoyant does not see it yet, but only later; and the very moment he sees it, it is taken hold of by his own thought and he can at once discriminate and know whether it is or is not truth. He sees it somewhat later, but when he does see it, it comes to him in such a form that he has already penetrated it with his thoughts, and can tell whether it is illusion or reality; so that in a sense he possesses something before he actually sees it. The revelation comes to him at the same moment as to the non-thinking clairvoyant, but he sees it later. When he sees it, however, it is already penetrated with judgment and thought, and he knows exactly whether it is an hallucination, i.e. whether his own desires are being objectivised, or whether it is objective reality. That is the difference in the subjective experiences of the two clairvoyants. The non-thinking clairvoyant sees the phenomenon at once, the thinking clairvoyant, later. In the ease of the former the picture will remain as it was; all he can do is to describe it. But the thinking clairvoyant will be able to link it up and bring it completely into line with what is present in the ordinary physical world; for the physical world, no less than the phenomenon which he has seen, is a revelation from out of the spiritual world.

From this you will see that if you approach the spiritual world equipped with the instrument of thought, you will be able to bring reliable judgment to bear upon what is presented to you.

But now something else follows. A person might dispute the value of communications from the spiritual world if he has not seen the phenomena for himself. Let us imagine a third person as well as the two mentioned. This third person is not clairvoyant at all but is informed of the results of spiritual investigation in so far as they have been acquired by clairvoyance combined with clear thinking. He looks upon them as reasonable. Yes, they are facts from the spiritual world. The thinking clairvoyant has acquired them, and anyone who has grasped them with his reason possesses them, even if he is not conscious of it. You do not need to be at all clairvoyant, yet you have the full value in yourself of what has been communicated to you.. There is a difference between having something and being conscious that one has it. The relation of a non-clairvoyant theosophist to a clairvoyant theosophist can become clear by thinking of the following.—Imagine that you had been given a legacy, but had not yet heard about it. If this were the case, the legacy would nevertheless have its value for you. Even if you do not hear about it until later, yet you possess it all the same. So it is with whoever learns of the facts of the spiritual world through Spiritual Science. They are his, if he has grasped them in an understanding way; he possesses them and need only wait for the time when he will become conscious of them. The becoming conscious of them, however, is not of equal significance with their possession. This is particularly noticeable after death. Which is of more use—if we may put it thus trivially, to make the meaning clear—which is of more use to man after death: to see something in a visionary way, without thought, or to receive purely theosophical communications without seeing things in a visionary way?

One could easily imagine that visionary sight would be a better preparation for death than merely to hear of the facts of the spiritual world. And yet the truth is that after death, what a man has simply seen in a visionary way is of very little use to him, while on the other hand an actual reality is immediately present, as soon as he becomes conscious of what he has received in spiritual communications, if he has grasped these with his understanding. It is what has been understood that is of value after death, whether it has been seen or not.

Consider the deepest Initiate. Through his clairvoyance he can behold the whole spiritual world! But this will not enhance his significance after death, if he is not able to express these facts in human concepts. All that will help him after death is what he has possessed here on earth in the form of clear concepts of thought. There are the seeds for the life after death. Of course anyone who is a thinker as well as a visionary clairvoyant can turn his visions to good account. But two non-thinking persons, of whom one is clairvoyant and the other merely listens to the results of the clairvoyance—these two will be in exactly the same position after death. There is no difference between them, for what we take into the life after death is what we acquire for ourselves here by means of clear thinking. This springs up like a seed; but not so, what we have merely already seen on earth of the worlds we now enter. What we receive here from the higher worlds is not given to us as a free gift so as to make it easier for us when we leave the physical plane, but in order that we may translate it into the current coin of the earth. What we have thus translated, just so much helps us after death. That is the essential thing.

Thus it is in regard to the life after death. But here on the physical plane too, the case of the visionary clairvoyant is different from that of the thinking clairvoyant. It is interesting and beautiful to see into the spiritual worlds, but none the less there is a difference when the spiritual worlds are beheld merely in a visionary way. Apart from the fact that it is impossible to be secure from illusions—and the only way to avoid illusions is to apply clear thinking to what has been seen—apart from this, let us suppose that a visionary clairvoyant has perceived this or that; then the form in which he perceives it, and which you can discover from his own account of it, is penetrated by elements of the physical plane. Has anyone ever described to you an angel that was not permeated by elements of the physical plane? He had wings. So have the birds. He had a human-shaped body. So has every human being on the physical plane. The things the visionary clairvoyant describes are, it is true, put together in a fashion that is not to be found on the physical plane, but the pictures are nevertheless composed of elements of the physical plane. This is not without justification; but you will see that such a picture has within it something that belongs to the earth. The forms and pictures in your vision that are taken from the physical plane do not belong to the spiritual world, they only give a picture of the spiritual world in the domain of the senses. This I have set forth clearly in my Occult Science, which has now been completed. I have there shown that present-day clairvoyance must indeed be of a pictorial character in its early stages, but that it must not remain there, it must develop to the point where the last remnant of what is earthly in the visions is cast aside. There is of course a certain danger for the clairvoyant when he thus strips off the last remnant of earth. For example, when he sees the angel and then strips off all that is earthly, he is faced with the danger of seeing nothing at all! What is it that can prevent one from losing the vision altogether on entering actually into the spiritual world? The seed that can spring up out of thinking! Thoughts afford the substance whereby what is in the spiritual world may be comprehended. We acquire the power really to live in the spiritual world by comprehending, in our world of the senses, what is no longer permeated by sense-elements and yet is on the physical plane. Thoughts alone fulfil this condition. The only thing we may bring into the spiritual world is thoughts. With regard to a circle, for example, nothing of the chalk drawing of it, but simply and solely our thoughts about a circle. With these thoughts you can ascend into the spiritual worlds. You must bring nothing of the picture with you.

And now I can describe the above-mentioned subjective process more exactly. Let us suppose, for example, that something is seen in the field of spiritual vision, let us say, a monstrance. I will now characterise the two clairvoyants, the merely visionary and the thinking clairvoyant, by supposing that the one sees the monstrance here (a) and the other, the thinking clairvoyant, only sees it here (b)

It is only from this point onwards that he becomes conscious of it. He receives it, however, immediately with thoughts, he penetrates it with thought. But at the moment when the thinking clairvoyant fills his image with thoughts, it becomes indistinct for the visionary clairvoyant. It becomes black and indistinct here at this point (b) and reappears only after some time. Just at the point where thought can unite with the image, it becomes indistinct for the visionary clairvoyant; he is really never in a position to unite thought with it, therefore he never has the experience: ‘I was there with my ego’. This experience can never come to the merely visionary clairvoyant.

All this takes us more intimately into the whole question, and it is exceedingly important to reflect upon it. It leads us to consider the necessity of developing our thinking, and of overcoming the disinclination to acquire an understanding knowledge for ourselves. It is a thousand times better to have grasped the ideas of Spiritual Science with thought first of all, and then—sooner or later, each according to his karma—to be able oneself to ascend into the spiritual worlds; a thousand times better than to have ‘seen’ straight-away and not to have grasped with thought the knowledge that is imparted in the Movement known as the Theosophical. A thousand times better it is indeed, to know Theosophy and to see nothing as yet, than to see something and not be able to penetrate it with thought, for that is how unreliability is introduced.

You can express the matter even more exactly, as follows.—You say: There are at the present time very clear thinkers who can understand the theosophical view of the world in an intellectual way. How is it that it is sometimes just these people who have such difficulty in reaching clairvoyance?—Those who are not clear thinkers find it comparatively easy to become clairvoyant, and they are then apt to feel themselves superior to the thinkers, whilst the latter find it difficult to become clairvoyant at all. Here is the point—distant by a hair's breadth only—where a certain arrogance in disguise begins to assert itself. There is indeed hardly anything that breeds and fosters pride so much as a clairvoyance which has not been illumined with thought, and that is why it is so dangerous, because the clairvoyant does not as a rule consider himself proud at all, but very humble. He has no notion of the pride that consists in undervaluing the activity of thought and laying the chief emphasis on inspirations. It is a terrible form of pride, a masked pride.

The question is really as follows: How is it that for many a thinker—as experience teaches us—it is so exceedingly difficult to come to the point of being clairvoyant? This is connected with an important fact. What we call power of discrimination, power of judgment in man, in other words the logical thinking of the thinker, brings about a definite change in the whole structure of the human brain. Clear thinking causes a change in the physical instrument of the brain. Scientific research knows little of this, but it is a fact that a physical brain that has been used by a thinker has a different appearance from the brain which belongs to a non-thinker. The fact of being clairvoyant does not change it much. The brain of a non-thinker has very complicated convolutions, but that of a clear thinker is comparatively simple, without any special complications. Thinking actually expresses itself in the simplification of the convolutions of the brain. Present-day research knows nothing of this. Clear thinking is thinking that can survey wide vistas, not the thinking that occupies itself with analysis. Hence the greater simplicity of the brain-convolutions of a clear thinker. Whenever scientific research does condescend in any way to test clear thinking in its connection with material conditions, then it very soon appears that scientific research corroborates the statements of Spiritual Science. The examination of the brain of Mendeleeff to whom science owes the exposition of the periodic system of the elements confirms what Spiritual Science says. His brain-convolutions were simpler than usual. Within certain limits he had the power of comprehensive thinking, and physical examination bore out absolutely the truth of what I have said.—I do not mention this as being of any very special value but only by the way.—Thus, as I have said, a change comes about in the instrument, and this change must be brought about by the activity of thought itself. No one is born with all the faculties he will possess later; he may have tendencies in certain directions, but the faculties themselves he must first develop. So it is a fact that changes take place in the brain in the course of a man's life. After a life of thought the instrument of thinking is different from what it was before.

Now the fact is that our etheric body, which for clairvoyant consciousness must be loosened from the physical brain, becomes more closely bound to the brain through the activity of thought. Thinking chains the etheric body firmly to the brain. If through his karma anyone has not yet the forces necessary to loosen it again at the right time, it may be that he cannot get far in clairvoyance in this incarnation; this depends on his karma. Supposing that in a former incarnation his karma had ordained him to be a clear thinker, then at the present time his thinking will not bind his etheric body so strongly to the brain; he will be able to set free his etheric body comparatively easily, and for the very reason that the elements of thought are the best preparation for ascending into the higher worlds—for this very reason he can investigate the secrets of the higher worlds in the most intimate way. Of course he must first set free again the etheric body from the brain. But if with what one may call the fine chiseling of thought the etheric body has become so caught in the physical brain that it is exhausted, then his karma may perhaps make him wait a long time before he can set it free again. When, however, the etheric body does become free, it will mean that he has passed the point of logical thought. Then what he has acquired can never be lost; no one can take it away from him. That is an essential and important fact, because otherwise clairvoyance can often be lost again after it has been acquired. Let me remind you once again that you were all clairvoyant in earlier times. Why is it that you no longer possess the faculty of clairvoyance? It is because in former times you were not bound to the earth's existence, because you were remote, in spiritual worlds; you did not bring the spiritual world down into your faculties; your visionary clairvoyance was based upon the condition of being remote from the physical world.

This must be clear to us. We must inscribe these fine shades of thought upon our minds and souls; we must be clear that the task of a real occult science to-day is to impart those results of spiritual investigation which are permeated with a thinking content, so that one can always clothe the results of spiritual research in such a way as to be comprehensible through thinking to the man who is not clairvoyant. To this end they must first be combined with thought. This is why there is such difficulty with old books which speak of phenomena of the higher worlds. If you take up old books of this kind and approach them with the attitude of modern Spiritual Science, you will find something lacking in them all. These old books may impart wonderful knowledge, but they are not of much use to the man of to-day unless he is himself clairvoyant and knows how to place the knowledge rightly. In the case of modern Spiritual Science, however, anyone who takes pains is able to make something of what it presents, because he can permeate it with the element of thought he acquires on the physical plane. For the same concepts are used to grasp what is in the spiritual world and what is in the physical world. Present-day Natural Science speaks of evolution; so does Spiritual Science. If you have grasped the concept of evolution you can understand what is set forth in Spiritual Science. You can create a concept of karma, because you can create a picture of it in thought. Of course if you simply say, as many theosophists do: “Every spiritual cause has a spiritual effect and this is karma”, you have then no conception of karma. You can see the law of cause and effect in a billiard ball, but that would be no right comparison for karma. But now take an iron ball and throw it into a vessel of water. If the ball is cold the water will remain as it is. But if you make the ball hot and then throw it in, the water will get warm as a result of what has been done to the ball. Here we have something which may be compared with karma; here we have a later event that is the result of an earlier.

It must be quite clear to us that one who permeates the facts of the spiritual world with thought can also impart them in such a way that everyone who has thoughts acquired here on the physical plane can apply these same thoughts to what is imparted from the spiritual worlds. If he does this he can understand it. Everyone ought to keep this in mind. Everyone ought to understand that the important thing is, not the fact that we receive knowledge from the higher worlds, but how we receive it—that we receive it in a way that is suited to our present earthly conditions. We must see to it that we do not receive knowledge from the higher worlds in any other way. It is tempting just to believe what is told us but this is very wrong. If someone is willing just to believe, it is as though he wanted merely to be told that there is a light; whereas he needs the light to light up his room! He must have the light; mere belief is no use. Thus it is important first of all to understand the nature of thorough, conscientious thinking, so that the knowledge of the spiritual world may be received through this channel. The knowledge can only be discovered if one has the power of clairvoyance; but when it has been discovered and investigated, it can be understood by everyone who receives it in the right way.

If one thinks in this way, then all the dangers which are otherwise bound up with what is called the Theosophical Movement, will be, in the main, averted. These very dangers will however immediately arise if people develop clairvoyant powers and do not see to it that their thinking, and more especially their perception and discernment, are enriched at the same time through their own thinking. Many people have the desire just to seize hold of something out of the spiritual world instead of carefully bringing their perceptive thought to bear upon what has after all to be acquired on the physical plane. Even a God cannot comprehend the world in terms of thought unless he incarnates on this physical earth. He can comprehend the world in other forms and ways, but to comprehend it in this form he must incarnate upon the earth. If you reflect upon this it will be clear to you that there are certain dangers connected with the development of faculties within oneself which are then wrongly used. He who develops a certain visionary clairvoyance and uses it wrongly by cutting off all possibility of convincing the world with it, he who remains on the astral plane alone and does not bring his experiences down on to the physical plane, is laying himself open to the danger that an abyss will open between his visions and the physical plane. Let us suppose that someone has had visions of real significance which belong to the astral plane. They may be true visions of reality—for this may happen even with the non-thinking, visionary clairvoyant. But now between him and the real foundations of the physical plane there opens out an abyss. Imagine for a moment that this cloth were the physical plane. The visionary clairvoyant is standing in front of it; he sees his vision. But behind the physical plane is the real spiritual world; the physical plane is Maya. The visionary clairvoyant does not strip away the physical plane; this can be done only by one who makes use of the means of thought. Then only do you penetrate behind the physical plane; only with thinking clairvoyance can you ever understand it. The physical plane is there, but you do not see the spiritual world, the real spiritual world. The abyss opens before you, and the physical plane remains as Maya. And the impossibility of penetrating through the physical plane rests upon the fact that the brain is not capable of eliminating itself. If you have learnt to think rightly, you do not directly use your brain in thinking. Thinking works on the brain, but the activity of thinking does not directly need the brain; it is nonsense to assert that the brain itself thinks.

About 35 years ago I was once walking along the street with a young student who was then well on the way to becoming an out-and-out materialist. He said “When a man thinks, the brain atoms are vibrating; every definite thought has a definite form”—and then he continued to speak of how it is really nonsense to presuppose anything like a soul which can think, for it is the brain which does the thinking.—I said to him: “Yes, but now tell me, why do you tell such fibs? If this is true you cannot say: I think! You must say: my brain thinks, And you must also say: My brain eats, my brain sees the sun! You would then be speaking the truth.” He would soon see then what nonsense he had been carrying about in his head.

So it is not the brain that thinks. It needs no very serious consideration, to get this point clear, unless one is a thorough-going modern materialist. Unless you are a ‘Monist’ in the modern sense of the word, you can easily be clear on this point. The activity of thinking is not primarily dependent on having the brain as its instrument. When thinking becomes pure, the brain is not involved. It only plays a part when a sense-picture is made. If you have a picture of a chalk circle in your mind, then this picture has been formed by the brain, but when you think of a pure circle apart from all sense-qualities, then the circle is itself the active element that gives form to the brain. Now when a man has visionary clairvoyance he remains in his etheric body and does not reach the physical brain. But the abyss can never be bridged by this method. What is there seen clairvoyantly is connected with what is behind the physical plane. He who scorns the path of thought develops powers which, so to speak, do not attain their object, do not really penetrate into the spiritual world. And the consequence is that there is a false relationship between what is continually being developed in his etheric body, and what he really is as man. The relationship is entirely false; his brain is not developed to the level of his clairvoyant faculties. The brain is crude, for the man has made no effort to ennoble it through thinking. It is crude, it has built up a barrier which it cannot penetrate and which hinders him from reaching spiritual reality in his visions. He goes away from reality, instead of coming nearer to it. And every possibility of making a judgment about the spiritual world is taken away. Such a man may certainly be able to see a great deal; but there is never any guarantee that what he sees will correspond with the reality. He alone is capable of judging who can distinguish between mere vision and reality. It is only the power of discrimination that can discriminate, and if this is lacking, mere vision can never be distinguished from reality. But this power of discrimination can be acquired only by effort on the physical plane. Thus one will be for ever hovering about without firm foundations if one scorns the activity of thinking—hard and troublesome as it is.

This is what we must have clearly in our minds. Then it will be impossible for conditions to arise which otherwise arise so easily and may recur again and again, when by developing visionary clairvoyance men build up a dam against the world of reality and live in their dreams—which comes to the same thing as losing one's bearings in the physical world, as being not quite in one's right mind. Mere visionary clairvoyance easily leads to this. One can acquire the power of thoughtful discrimination. by working in the only sphere where this can be developed, namely in the sphere of thinking, on the physical plane. If you despise the acquisition of this thoughtful discrimination, you will stray far from the path of truth. Discrimination is what we need, otherwise we shall bring about all the ills that are necessarily connected with what is called the Theosophical Movement. He who gives himself up to blind belief, who merely accepts without reasoned thought all the communications from the higher worlds on the authority of another, will be doing something that is pleasant and easy, but in itself is fraught with danger. Instead of working the things out for himself and reflecting upon them, he accepts the knowledge of another, he assimilates the things that another person has seen, and refuses to test by means of his own thought what has been communicated. This is the cause of the ills to which the Theosophical Movement is liable—but of course this should not frighten anyone from attaching themselves to it. It may happen that a person, who has blind belief of this kind loses his bearings altogether and can no longer discriminate between what is true and what is untrue. Nothing can breed untruthfulness as effectively as a certain kind of visionary clairvoyance which is not supported and controlled by thought. And on the other hand, such clairvoyance breeds another quality, namely, a certain haughtiness and superiority which can even lead to megalomania. This is all the more dangerous because it is often not noticed. There is very serious danger of coming to think oneself superior because one sees something that another person does not see. And usually there is no idea of how deeply embedded in the soul this self-importance that borders on megalomania can be. It conceals itself in a certain way, especially when the (clairvoyant swears by his own visions with absolute certainty and suffers no one to take exception to them. So we sometimes find people believing the most ridiculous rubbish, just because it has been communicated to them “from the astral plane”. They would never dream of believing such things if they had been told them as matters belonging to the physical plane; but if they are told them “from the astral plane” they believe them with the most slavish credulity. Whoever has freed himself from this habit will not be led astray by this or that swindle or humbug. But people will fall into the trap unless they develop within themselves the impulse to prove and test, instead of accepting and believing without effort or exertion. We must not make it easy for ourselves; we must consider it one of the most sacred tasks of man to reach a right conviction. If we think of it in this light, we shall spare no effort of real work, and we shall not merely listen to sensational communications from the spiritual world. Of communications from the spiritual world we have, so to speak, enough. It is necessary that we should have them, but it is also necessary to acquire the right attitude and the right kind of thinking to receive these things worthily.

This is what I wanted to say to you to-day. I did not want to say it merely as an admonition or a sermon. I wanted to show the whole basis and for this reason it may have been rather difficult to keep pace with it in your thought; but in the methods I use I always try to adhere to what may be rightly looked for in the Theosophical Society. Many people like pious exhortations. I dislike them! I try to present things in such a way that they can clothe themselves in true forms of thought. When things of the physical plane are expounded, as has been done to-day, it does of course often entail hard thinking; for such things are neither as sensational nor as attractive as communications from the higher worlds. They are nevertheless of extraordinary importance. And you will not undervalue their importance if you say to yourselves: If that is really to come to pass which ought to come to pass, namely, that in the course of ensuing incarnations a sufficiently large number of people have a memory of this present incarnation, then provision for this must be made beforehand. Develop, therefore, your power of judgment; then you are candidates for the memory, in your next incarnation, of the present one. See to it that you are able to follow the world with your thoughts. For however much you can see m a visionary way, it will give you no help in remembering back to the present incarnation. And it is the mission of Spiritual Science to prepare the way for what must needs come—namely, that there may be a sufficiently large number of people who out of their own knowledge can look back to this present incarnation. How many come to the point in this incarnation of accompanying their knowledge of Spiritual Science with clairvoyant powers depends on the karma of each individual. There are certainly many sitting here whose karma will not allow them to see the world clairvoyantly in this incarnation. But all those who acquire what is given in true Spiritual Science, clothed as it is in the forms of thought, will reap the fruits of it in the next incarnation; for in this one they will have laid the right foundation. A man may, so to speak, be a clairvoyant without knowing it; and one who studies Spiritual Science in the right way has the insight and can wait until his karma also allows him actually to behold the things for himself.

• 1. In connection with the use of the words ‘Theosophy’, ‘theosophical’, in this text, it will be remembered that from the beginning of the century until the years 1911 or 1912, Dr. Steiner had been able to work as an independent teacher within the framework of the Theosophical Society and was the General Secretary of the German Section. His teaching of the unique nature and position of the Christ was at variance with the tendencies which had come to prevail in that Society and the statements on this subject made by its leaders, and Dr. Steiner's association with it inevitably came to an end. In 1912 the Anthroposophical Society was provisionally founded and its Headquarters established at Dornach in 1913.
• 2. cp. The Alpha and the Omega. Lecture given in Berlin, 25.V.O9; also lectures 4 and 5 of the Course on The Gospel of St. Luke.

In the lecture yesterday we turned our attention to the life of Jesus of Nazareth from about his twelfth year to approximately the end of his twenties. You will certainly have realised from what I was able to tell you, that during this period many things took place of profound significance not only for the soul of Jesus of Nazareth but for the whole evolution of mankind. For your theosophical studies will have brought you the knowledge that everything in the evolution of humanity is interconnected, and that an event of such importance in the life of a human soul so deeply bound up with the destiny of mankind is also of importance for the whole of evolution. From many different points of view we are learning to realise what the Event of Golgotha signified for the evolution of humanity. In this particular course of lectures we are learning to realise it by studying the actual life of Christ Jesus. And so having turned our minds yesterday to the period described, we will turn once again to the soul of Jesus of Nazareth and ponder what lived in this soul after the significant events had taken place which led up to his twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth years.

We may perhaps begin to glimpse something of what was living in this soul, from the description of a scene which took place when Jesus of Nazareth was approaching the end of his twenties. This scene which I have to relate concerns a conversation between Jesus of Nazareth and his mother—she who since the amalgamation of the two families had for long years been his mother. For all these years there had been a very deep and intimate understanding between Jesus and this mother, a far closer understanding than prevailed between him and the other members of the family in the house. Jesus himself could have understood them but they, on their side, did not quite know what to make of him. Even in earlier years he had spoken with his mother about many of the impressions that had gradually taken shape within him. But in this particular period of his life there took place a memorable conversation which lets us see very deeply into his soul. The experiences through which he had passed had brought him increasing wisdom; infinite wisdom was stamped upon his very countenance. But as is often the case on a lesser scale, a certain inner sadness had come over him. The first fruit of this wisdom had been that the penetrating insight with which he could behold those around him brought him deep sorrow. Added to this, in hours of quietude at the end of his twenties, his thoughts turned more and more to one particular event in his life—to the great inner change, the revolution that had taken place in his twelfth year as the natural result of the transference of the Zarathustra-Ego into his own soul. During the subsequent years he was aware only of the inexhaustible riches of the Zarathustra-Ego within him. At the end of his twenties he still did not know that the Zarathustra-Ego had reincarnated in him, but he knew well that in his twelfth year a tremendous change had come about in him. And now he often felt: Ah! how different was my life before that change! His thoughts often went back to the preceding years and to the infinite warmth of heart that had characterised his life. As a boy he had lived entirely aloof from mundane affairs; he had been keenly sensitive to everything that speaks to man from the world of nature, to the whole greatness and splendour of nature. But he had little talent for the treasures amassed by human wisdom, human learning. Scholarship as such interested him little. It would be a complete mistake to imagine that up to his twelfth year this Jesus child was, in the outward sense, especially gifted. He had an inner gentleness, a profound understanding of human life, deep and sensitive feelings, tenderness, an angelic quality of being. Then, in his twelfth year, it seemed as if all this had been driven out of his soul. And now he was often mindful of how, before his twelfth year, he had lived in the most intimate communion with the deeper spirit of the universe, how open his soul had been to the infinitudes. Then his thoughts went back to what his life had been since his twelfth year, how he had found himself able to assimilate Hebrew learning which seemed, however, to well up quite spontaneously in his soul, how his journeys had then acquainted him with the heathen cults, with heathen knowledge and religion; he thought of how between his eighteenth and twenty-fourth years he had been brought into contact with the external treasures accumulated by humanity, of how, in about his twenty-fourth year, he had entered into the community of the Essenes and had there become acquainted with a secret doctrine and with men whose lives were dedicated to this doctrine. Many a time his thoughts turned to those years. But he also knew that it was only the store of learning accumulated by men since days of antiquity that had risen up into his soul-treasures of human wisdom, of human culture, great moral achievements. And he often thought of what he had been before his twelfth year, when he felt as if he were united with the divine ground of existence, when everything in him was pristine, spontaneous, welling up from a warm and loving heart and flowing into other forces of the human soul.

All these feelings led to a memorable conversation between Jesus of Nazareth and the mother. The mother loved him very deeply and had often spoken with him about all the beauty and greatness of the gifts that had shown themselves in him since his twelfth year. But he had concealed from his mother in earlier years the inner schism caused within him, so that she had seen only what was great and beautiful. Therefore in this conversation which was really like a full confession, much was new to her; but she received it with a warm and tender heart. She had a profound and intimate understanding of his mood of soul, of his yearnings for all that he had been before his twelfth year. And so she tried to comfort him by speaking of all the noble and splendid gifts of which he had shown evidence since then. She reminded him of the revival of the great Jewish doctrines, the Jewish wisdom-teachings and codes of the law. She spoke of all that had revealed itself through him. But his heart grew heavy while his mother was speaking in this way, prizing so highly what he himself felt had been surmounted. And he replied: Be that as it may. If through me or through another it were possible to-day to bring new life to all the spiritual treasures of ancient Hebrew wisdom, what significance would it have for mankind? All this is, in reality, meaningless. If among the humanity around us to-day there were any with ears still able to hear the wisdom of the ancient prophets, then a revival of that wisdom would be of value. But if Elias himself were to come to-day—so said Jesus of Nazareth—and were to proclaim to our humanity the greatest of his experiences in the realms of heaven—there are no men who would listen to the wisdom of Elias, of the older prophets, even of Moses, and back to Abraham. Everything these prophets might proclaim to-day would fall upon deaf ears. Their words would be preached to the winds. Everything that I believed had been bestowed upon me is valueless for the world to-day.—

This was the sense in which Jesus of Nazareth spoke. He also spoke of a man who had been a great teacher and whose words had only lately ceased to be effective. For—so said Jesus of Nazareth—although the good old Hillel [Hillel lived from 75 B.C. to A.D. 4.] could not rank as an equal of the ancient prophets, nevertheless he was a great and profound teacher. Jesus knew well what the aged Hillel had meant for very many souls in the Jewish world even during the days of Herod when it was hard for any teacher to gain authority. He knew how profound had been the words spoken by Hillel. It was said of Hillel: The Thorah [The Thorah is the collection of the oldest and most important Jewish laws.] has disappeared within the Jewish people and Hillel has established it once again. To those who understood him, Hillel seemed as one who had revived and restored to life the primal, original Hebrew wisdom. Hillel was a teacher who, like other teachers of the wisdom, journeyed about the land. He came among the Jewish people like a kind of new Messiah. All this is narrated in the Talmud and can be confirmed by external scholarship. The people were full of praise for Hillel and had much good to say of him. I can only single out one story in order to indicate the mood and vein in which Jesus of Nazareth spoke of Hillel to his mother ... Hillel is described as a man of gentle and mild disposition, who achieved mighty things through this very gentleness and loving-kindness.

One story that has been preserved about him is deeply indicative as showing him to have been a man of infinite patience with everyone who came to him. Two men once laid a wager about the possibility of rousing Hillel's anger; for it was known that nobody could ever make him angry. Having laid a wager, one of the two men said: I will go to any lengths to make Hillel angry. In this way he sought to win his wager. Just at the time when Hillel was most fully occupied, when he was deeply engrossed in preparations for the Sabbath, this man knocked at Hillel's door and shouted rudely, without any form of deferential address—although as chief of the highest ecclesiastical court Hillel was accustomed to be addressed with respect—Hillel, come out, come out quickly! Hillel threw on his garments and came patiently out. The man said brusquely: I have something to ask thee! Hillel answered: What then hast thou to ask me, dear son? I wish to ask why the Babylonians have such narrow heads? Hillel replied gently: The Babylonians have narrow heads because their midwives have so little skill. The man went off. Hillel had remained unruffled. After a few minutes the man came back again and called out gruffly: Hillel, come out, I have something to ask thee! Hillel threw on his mantle, came out, and said: Now what hast thou to ask, dear son? I wish to ask why the Arabs have such small eyes? Hillel answered gently: The vastness of the desert makes their eyes small; the eyes get small because they are always gazing at the great desert. The man who had laid the wager now grew very uneasy. Hillel returned to his tasks. But after a few minutes the man was back again and called out gruffly for the third time: Hillel, come out, I have something to ask thee! Hillel put on his mantle, came out, and asked as gently as before: Now what hast thou to ask me? I wish to ask why the Egyptians have such flat feet? Because the ground there is so swampy, answered Hillel, and went inside the house again. After a minute or two the man returned and said to Hillel that now he had nothing to ask—he had laid a wager that he would make him angry but he saw this was impossible. Hillel answered mildly: Dear son, better it is that thou shouldst lose thy wager than Hillel his temper ...

This legend is told as evidence of Hillel's patience with everyone who importuned him. Such a man—so said Jesus of Nazareth to his mother—is in many respects like one of the prophets of old; many utterances of Hillel sound like a revival of the ancient wisdom of the prophets. He cited many beautiful sayings of Hillel and then he said: The people say of Hillel that he is like an ancient prophet who has come again. Moreover it is dawning upon me that the knowledge I possess does not come from Judaism alone. And in fact Hillel was born in Babylon and only later found his way into Judaism. But Hillel was a descendant of the House of David, was connected from very early times with the House of David from which Jesus of Nazareth and his kinsmen also traced their descent. And Jesus said: Even if I too, as a son of the House of David, could speak as the great Hillel spoke ... to-day there is nobody to listen; such teachings are untimely. In olden days men would have listened to them but there are no longer any ears to hear. It is useless and meaningless to speak of these things. And as it were gathering together what he had to say on this subject, Jesus of Nazareth said to his mother: The revelation of ancient Judaism is no longer suitable for the earth, for the old Jews have passed away; the ancient revelation is worthless on the earth as it is now. With strange feelings in her heart the mother listened to what Jesus was saying about the worthlessness of what she held most sacred. But she loved him tenderly and was aware only of her infinite love. Therefore deep understanding of what he was saying welled up in her heart. Then, leading the conversation further, he spoke of how he had wandered into places where heathen rites were performed and of what he had experienced there. Remembrance came to him of how he had fallen to the ground while standing at the heathen altar, how he had heard the Bath-Kol in its altered form. And then there flashed up within him something that was like a renewal of the old Zarathustrian teachings. He did not yet know with certainty that he bore the Zarathustra-soul within him, but the Zarathustrian teaching, the Zarathustrian wisdom, the Zarathustrian impulse rose up within him during the conversation—and in communion with his mother he experienced the reality of this mighty impulse. All the beauty and glory of the ancient Sun-wisdom came up into his soul. And he reminded himself of the words of the Bath-Kol as I rendered them yesterday, and repeated them to the mother:

AUM, Amen!

Es walten die Übel,

Zeugen sich lösender Ichheit,

Von andern erschuldete Selbstheitschuld,

Erlebet im täglichen Brote,

In dem nicht waltet der Himmel Wille,

Da der Mensch sich schied von Eurem Reich

Und vergass Euren Namen,

Ihr Väter in den Himmeln.

AUM, Amen!

The Evils hold sway,

Witness of Egoity becoming free,

Selfhood-Guilt through others incurred,

Experienced in the Daily Bread,

Wherein the Will of the Heavens does not rule,

In that Man severed himself from Your Kingdom

And forgot Your Names,

Ye Fathers in the Heavens.

And with these words came a realisation of all the greatness of the Mithras worship. He spoke to his mother at length about the grandeur and the glory of what had been contained in the ancient Mysteries of the different peoples, and of how much of this had merged into the Mystery-cults scattered over Asia Minor and Southern Europe. But at the same time his soul remembered how this worship had gradually deteriorated and fallen prey to demonic powers which he himself had experienced in his twenty-fourth year. All that he had experienced at that time came back to him. The ancient Zarathustra-wisdom itself seemed to him to be something which the people of his day could no longer assimilate. And then he made the second significant utterance: Even if all the ancient Mystery-cults were united into one and all that former greatness could be revived, there are no longer any to respond. Those things are of no avail! And if I were to go forth and proclaim to men what I have heard as the altered voice of the Bath-Kol, if I were to disclose the secret of why it is that in their physical life men are no longer able to live in communion with the Mysteries, no human beings would understand. To-day it would all be distorted into demonic teaching. Even if I were to proclaim it, it would neither be heard nor understood. Men have ceased to be able to hear what was once heard and accepted.—For Jesus of Nazareth knew that what he had heard as the altered voice of the Bath-Kol gave expression to a sacred, primeval teaching and had been an all-powerful prayer in the Mysteries everywhere, a prayer once offered by men in the Mystery-Centres but now forgotten. This prayer had been revealed to him when he had fallen to the ground at the heathen altar. But at the same time he realised and emphasised in that conversation that there was no possibility of making it comprehensible to men. And then in this conversation with the mother he went on to speak of what he had learned among the Essenes. He spoke of the beauty, the greatness and the grandeur of the Essene doctrine, of the gentleness and meekness of the Essenes themselves. Then, however, he made the third mighty utterance, arising from his converse with the Buddha in a vision: that it is neither possible nor is it meet for all men to become Essenes. Hillel spoke words of profound truth when he taught: Sever not thyself from the community but toil and labour in the community: for if I stand alone, what am I! But that is what the Essenes do; they separate themselves from men who thereby suffer unhappiness.—And then Jesus spoke memorable words to his mother, telling her of the experience I described in the lecture yesterday. He said: Once when I was leaving after an intimate and most significant conversation with the Essenes, I saw Lucifer and Ahriman fleeing from the gate. Since then I have known that by their mode of living and their secret doctrine the Essenes protect themselves in such a way that Lucifer and Ahriman must flee from their gates; but thereby the Essenes send Lucifer and Ahriman to other human beings, in order that they themselves may live in blessedness. These words struck with tremendous force into the tender, loving heart of the mother. And she felt as if she herself were transformed, she felt as if her very being had become one with his. And Jesus of Nazareth felt as if with this conversation everything he had hitherto borne within him had passed away. He was aware of this and the mother, too, perceived it. The more he spoke and the more the mother listened, the more deeply did she discern all the wisdom that had been alive within him since his twelfth year. But from him it all seemed to have departed. He had laid as it were into the heart of the mother what had lived within him and what he had experienced.

And he too, after that conversation, was as if transformed—so greatly changed that the stepbrothers and other kinsmen around him began to think that he had lost his senses. It is sad, they said, for his knowledge was so great. True, he was always very silent but now he has completely lost his senses. He was given up as hopeless. And indeed for days he went about the house as if lost in dream. The Zarathustra-Ego was on the point of leaving this body of Jesus of Nazareth. And his last resolution took the form of impelling him to leave the house as if mechanically and to make his way to John the Baptist with whom he was already acquainted.

And then there took place the event I have often described—the Baptism by John in the Jordan. At that conversation with the mother, the Zarathustra-Ego had withdrawn. The being whom Jesus of Nazareth had been up to his twelfth year was present once again, but now with an added greatness. And at the Baptism in the Jordan the Christ Being sank into this body. At the moment of this Baptism in the Jordan, the mother too was aware of something like the climax of the change that had come about in her. She was then between her forty-fifth and forty-sixth years. She felt as though pervaded by the soul of that mother who had died—the mother of the Jesus child who in his twelfth year had received the Zarathustra-Ego. Thus the spirit of the other mother had come down upon the mother with whom Jesus had held that conversation. And she felt herself as the young mother who had once given birth to the Jesus child of St. Luke's Gospel.

Let us try to picture the infinite significance of this event! Let us try to feel it deeply and also to realise that an absolutely unique Being was now living upon the Earth: the Christ Being within a human body, a Being who until now had never lived in a human body, had had no earthly life, had dwelt only in spiritual realms, to whom the worlds of Spirit were known, not the world of Earth! Of the earthly world this Being knew only what had been garnered as it were in the three bodies: physical body, ether-body and astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ Being sank into these three bodies, into what these bodies had grown to be under the influence of that life of thirty years. He therefore passed through His first earthly experiences as a Being completely free of all antecedents.

The Akasha Chronicle and the Fifth Gospel reveal to us that the Christ Being was led, first of all, into “the loneliness.” Jesus of Nazareth, in whose body the Christ Being dwelt, had abandoned everything that had previously connected him with the rest of the world. The Christ Being had just come down to the Earth. To begin with, He was drawn to the impressions, engraved paramountly in the astral body, which had been made upon that body and had remained as it were in the memory. It was as though the Christ Being said to Himself: This is the body which experienced the fleeing of Ahriman and Lucifer, the body which perceived that the Essenes, by their very aspirations, drive Ahriman and Lucifer to other human beings. It was to these other human beings who had been delivered into the power of Ahriman and Lucifer that the Christ Being felt Himself drawn; for it is with these powers that men have to battle. And so the Christ Being, living for the first time in the body of a man, went out into the loneliness to the contest with Ahriman and Lucifer.

I believe that the following description of the Temptation scene is very largely correct. But it is very difficult to observe such things in the Akasha Chronicle and I therefore emphasise that one point or another could be slightly modified. But the essentials hold good. The Temptation scene is, of course, included in other Gospels but it is narrated there from different standpoints, as I have often stressed. I have made great efforts to investigate this scene of the Temptation and will relate it as it actually transpired.

First of all, the Christ Being within the body of Jesus encountered Lucifer in the loneliness—Lucifer with all his power and influence, who draws near to men when they prize the Self too highly and are lacking in humility and self-knowledge. Lucifer's aim is to play upon the false pride, the tendency to self-aggrandisement in man. Now he confronted Christ Jesus and spoke approximately as recorded in the other Gospels: Behold me! The other kingdoms into which man's life has been set, the foundations of which were laid by the primeval Gods and Spirits—these kingdoms have grown old. I will establish a new kingdom. If thou wilt enter my realm I will give thee all the beauty and the glory contained in these old kingdoms. But thou must sever thyself from the other Gods and acknowledge me! And Lucifer described all the glories of his world, everything that makes an appeal to the human soul whenever an iota of pride exists. But the Christ Being came from the spiritual worlds and knew who Lucifer is, knew how souls on earth must act if they desire to resist the temptation of Lucifer. Untouched as He was by this temptation, the Christ Being knew how the gods are truly served—and He had the power to repel the onslaught of Lucifer. Then Lucifer made a second attack but called Ahriman to his support and both addressed the Christ. The one, Lucifer, desired to goad His pride; the other, Ahriman, to play upon His fear. Therefore it came about that the one Being said to Him: If thou wilt acknowledge me, through my spiritual power, through what I can give to thee, thou wilt be able to dispense with what is now essential for thee inasmuch as thou, the Christ, hast entered into a human body. This body subjugates thee, compels thee to obey the laws of gravity. But I have power to cast thee down, since the human body prevents thee from breaking through the law of gravity. If thou wilt acknowledge me, I will nullify the effects of the fall and no harm will come to thee! Ahriman said: I will keep thee from fear: cast thyself down! And both set upon Him. But as in their onslaught the one held the balance against the other, Christ Jesus could save Himself from them. He found the strength that man must find on earth if he is to stand firm against Lucifer and Ahriman. Then Ahriman spoke: Lucifer, I cannot use thee, thou dost but hinder me, thou hast not enhanced my power but weakened it. Then Ahriman bade Lucifer depart, made the final attack as Ahriman alone, and spoke words of which the Gospel of St. Matthew contains an echo: Turn mineral substance into bread! Turn the stones into bread if thou wouldst boast of Divine power! Then said the Christ Being: Men do not live by bread alone, but by the spiritual forces which come from the spiritual worlds. None knew this better than He for He had just descended from the spiritual worlds. Then Ahriman said: Thou mayest indeed be right but that cannot prevent me from keeping a certain hold upon thee. Thou knowest only how the Spirit acts, the Spirit who descends from the heights; thou hast not yet lived in the world of men. There below, in the human world, there are men who must perforce makes stones into bread, who cannot draw their nourishment from the Spirit alone. That was the moment when Ahriman communicated to Christ something that could indeed be known on earth but that the God who had for the first time come to earth could not yet know. He did not know that there below it was necessary to turn mineral substance—metal—into money, into bread. Ahriman had said that men on the earth below must nourish themselves by means of “gold.” That was the point where Ahriman still retained power. And he said: I shall use this power. That is the true account of the Temptation. And so one thing remained unsolved at the Temptation. The questions were not all of them finally solved: the questions of Lucifer, yes; but not the questions of Ahriman. For that, something more was necessary.

When Christ Jesus went out of the loneliness He felt transported above everything He had experienced and learned from His twelfth year onwards; He felt that the Christ Spirit had united with all that had been alive in Him before His twelfth year. He felt no longer any connection with what had become old and withered in humanity. He was indifferent even to the speech used in His environment—and to begin with, he kept silence. He wandered around Nazareth and still further afield, visiting many places He had known previously as Jesus of Nazareth. And then a very singular thing happened.—Remember, please, that I am relating the contents of the Fifth Gospel and there would be no point in looking for contradictory passages in the other four Gospels. I am narrating from the Fifth Gospel.—In quiet reticence, as if having nothing in common with the environment, Christ Jesus wandered, to begin with, from one dwelling-place to another, working among the people and with the people wherever He went. Ahriman's words concerning bread had left a deep impression upon Him. And everywhere He found people who already knew Him, with whom He had worked before. They recognised Him and He found among them those to whom Ahriman actually had access, simply because it was necessary for them to turn stones into bread—to turn money, metals, into bread. His presence was not, after all, essential among those who observed the moral precepts given by Hillel or by other teachers. Christ Jesus consorted with those whom the other Gospels call the publicans and the sinners for it was their lot to make stones into bread. He was constantly among these men.

But now this strange thing happened. Many of these men had known Him in the period preceding his thirtieth year, for He had already been among them. They had come to know His gentle, tender wisdom when He had gone about as Jesus of Nazareth, and in every house, in every dwelling, He had been deeply loved. This love had remained. In these dwellings the people spoke much of the man Jesus of Nazareth who was so dear to them, who had visited their houses and villages. And the following happened—as if through the operation of Cosmic Law. I am narrating scenes which were very frequent and are revealed again and again to clairvoyant investigation. There were families among whom Jesus of Nazareth had worked and who after their labours would sit together after sunset, liking to speak of the man who as Jesus of Nazareth had come among them. They spoke constantly of His love and gentleness, of how their own hearts and souls had warmed when He had lived under their roof. In many of these dwelling-places, when for hours together they had been talking in this way, it would happen that the picture of Jesus of Nazareth appeared to them in the room, as a vision shared by every member of the family. He came to them in the Spirit, or they, on their side, conjured up a spiritual picture of Him. You can imagine how deeply such families were moved when He appeared to them in a vision in which they all shared, and what it meant to them when after the Baptism in the Jordan He came back again and they recognised His outward form ... only now the light in His eyes was stronger; they gazed at the radiant countenance that had once been so dear to them and the Being whom they had seen among them as a spiritual Presence. You can imagine, too, what an extraordinary stir was created among such families, among the publicans and sinners whose karma had brought them into an environment where all the demonic beings held sway at that time! And now, through the presence of Christ in Jesus of Nazareth, the change in this Being was revealed very clearly to these particular men. In earlier years they had felt His love, His goodness, His gentleness; but now a magic power went forth from Him. If in former days they had merely felt comforted by His presence, now they felt that they were actually healed. They went to their neighbours when they too were in distress and brought them to Christ Jesus. And so it was that after He had conquered Lucifer and only the sting of Ahriman remained in men under Ahriman's domination, Christ Jesus was able to perform the deeds described in the Bible as the expulsion of the devils. Many of the demonic beings He had seen when He was lying as if dead at the heathen altar, now departed from the people when He stood before them as Christ Jesus. The demons recognised their adversary. And as He passed in this way through the land, the behaviour of the demons in the souls of men reminded Him ever and again of how He had lain at that ancient altar where instead of gods, demons had gathered and where He had not been able to perform the sacrificial rites. Inevitably His thoughts turned to the Bath-Kol which had proclaimed to Him that ancient Prayer of the Mysteries of which I have spoken to you. And the middle line of the Prayer, especially, came into His mind: “Experienced in the Daily Bread.” These men among whom He sojourned were compelled to turn stones into bread; there were many who depended for their sustenance on bread alone. And the words from that ancient, heathen Prayer, “Experienced in the Daily Bread,” engraved themselves deeply in His soul. He realised and felt the whole process of man's incorporation into the physical world. He felt that because physical embodiment was a necessity in the evolution of humanity, men were prone to forget the “Names of the Fathers in the Heavens,” the names of the Spirits of the higher Hierarchies. And He felt that there were no longer any ears to hear the voices of the old prophets. Now He knew that what had severed men from the Heavens, what must inevitably drive men into egoism and lead them into the clutches of Ahriman, was the life that is bound up with the “Daily Bread.”

As with these thoughts He went about the country, those who were most deeply aware of the change that had come about in Jesus of Nazareth became His disciples and followed Him. From many dwelling-places one or another went with Him, followed Him—followed Him because of the feeling and conviction I described. And so very soon a band of such disciples had gathered together. In these disciples He had around Him people who in their whole mood and attitude of soul were new beings, who had become, through Him, quite different from those men of whom He had once been compelled to say to His mother that they had no longer any ears capable of listening to the ancient wisdom.

And then there dawned in Him ... it was the earthly experience of the God: What I have to tell human beings is not how the gods prepared the path from the Spirit to the Earth but how men can find the path leading upwards from the Earth to the Spirit. And now there came back to Him the voice of the Bath-Kol, and He knew that the ancient supplications and prayers must be re-cast, made new; He knew that now man must seek the path into the spiritual worlds from below upwards. He transposed the last line of the old Prayer, adapting it to the needs of men living in the new era and making it bear reference now not to the multiple spiritual Beings of the Hierarchies but to the one supreme Spirit: “Our Father in Heaven.” And the second line He had heard as the penultimate line of the Mystery-Prayer: “And forgot Your Names,” He transposed into: “Hallowed be Thy Name” as the words must run for men of the new era. And the third line from the end of the old Prayer: “In that Man severed himself from Your Kingdoms,” He transposed into: “To us may Thy Kingdom come.” And the line: “Wherein the Will of the Heavens does not rule,” He transposed into the form suitable for the ears of men now, since they had no ears to hear the old setting of the words—He transposed them because the direction of the path leading into the spiritual worlds was to be completely reversed: “Thy Will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” And the mystery of the Bread, of incarnation in the physical body, the mystery of the sting of Ahriman which had now been fully revealed to Him, He transposed so that men should discern the truth that the physical world too issues from the spiritual world even if this truth is not within their immediate ken. He made this line concerning the Daily Bread into a supplication: “Give us this day our Daily Bread.” And the words: “Selfhood-Guilt through others incurred,” He transposed into: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.” The line which came second in the old Mystery-Prayer: “Witness of Egoity becoming free,” He transposed into: “But deliver us,” and the first line: “The Evils prevail,” He changed into: “From the evil. Amen.” And so the altered voice of the Bath-Kol heard by Jesus of Nazareth when he fell at the heathen altar, was transposed into the “Lord's Prayer” known to Christianity ... it was the Prayer of the new Mysteries taught by Christ Jesus, it was the new Lord's Prayer. In a similar manner—and much remains to be said about this—arose the Sermon on the Mount and other teachings given by Christ Jesus to His disciples.

Christ Jesus worked upon His disciples in a strange and wonderful way. Please remember that I am simply relating what is to be read in the Fifth Gospel. As Christ Jesus went about, His environment was affected in a strange way. He was together with the Apostles and disciples and in communion with them, but—because He was the Christ Being—not as if He were merely present there in the body. As He went about the country, many a one felt as if He, Christ Jesus, were reigning within his own soul, as if this Being were actually within him, and he would begin to speak words which, in reality, only Christ Jesus could have spoken. This band of disciples went about and came into contact with the people ... and the one who spoke was by no means always Christ Jesus, but was often one of the disciples, for everything—even His wisdom—was shared with the disciples. I must confess that I was astonished in the highest degree when I discovered that the words in the conversation with the Sadducees related in St. Mark's Gospel were not spoken by Christ Jesus out of the body of Jesus but out of the lips of one of the disciples. It was a frequent phenomenon, too, that sometimes when Christ Jesus left the band of disciples, He was nevertheless still among them. He either went about with them spiritually or He appeared to them in His ether-body while He was actually far away. His ether-body was among them and also went about the land; and often it was not possible to distinguish whether He was present in the physical body or whether it was the ether-body that had become visible. Such was the manner of the intercourse with the disciples and with individuals among the people when Jesus of Nazareth had become Christ Jesus.

The experience He Himself underwent was as I have indicated. Whereas in the first periods the Christ Being had been comparatively independent of the body of Jesus of Nazareth, He had more and more to become one with it. And the longer His life continued, the more closely was He knit with the body of Jesus of Nazareth. In the last years, the union with the body of Jesus of Nazareth—which had itself become increasingly frail—caused Him deep suffering. Nevertheless a great multitude now accompanied Christ Jesus as He went about the country. Here or there one among the band of the Apostles would speak—here or there, another—and the people might easily believe that the speaker was Christ Jesus, for He spoke through all of them. One can listen to the scribes speaking together to this effect: It would be possible, after all, to pick out any one of these followers and put him to death in order to frighten the people; but it might be the wrong one, for they all speak alike. Such an act would be of no use to us, for the real Christ Jesus might still be living. We must find which one He really is.—Only the disciples themselves could distinguish Him but they most certainly did not divulge to the enemy who was the right one. But because of the question that had remained unsolved, the question that Christ could not solve in the spiritual worlds but only on the earth, Ahriman had gained sufficient power. As a result of the most terrible of all deeds, Christ must experience what it means to turn stones into bread. For Ahriman made use of Judas from Karioth. On account of the way Christ worked, there would have been no spiritual means of discovering among the men who revered Him which was, in truth, the Christ. For wherever the Spirit was working, wherever even a trace of convincing power was working, He could not be taken. Only where there was one who employed the means which Christ did not know, which He could only learn to know as the result of the most terrible deed wrought on earth—only where Judas was working could He be seized. The only means of recognising Him was through one who placed himself in the service of Ahriman, who in actual fact betrayed Him for the sake of money alone. Christ Jesus was connected with Judas because at the Temptation there remained something which, in a God, is comprehensible—He did not know that it is only true in the heavens that stones are not needed for bread. Because Ahriman had retained this sting, the Betrayal took place. And then Christ must come perforce under the dominion of the Lord of Death—and Ahriman is the Lord of Death. Such is the connection of the story of the Temptation and the Mystery of Golgotha with the Betrayal by Judas.

Much more could be said about the contents of this Fifth Gospel than has been said here. But as the evolution of humanity proceeds the other portions of this Gospel will assuredly also come to light. What I have tried to do by means of the narratives selected is rather to give you an idea of its character. At the conclusion of these lectures there comes before me what I said at the end of the first, namely, that it is a necessity of the times to speak now of this Fifth Gospel. And I would beg you, my dear friends, to treat what has been said as it should be treated. We have quite enough enemies to-day already and the way they act is really very curious. I do not propose to enlarge upon this for you probably know about it from the News Sheets. You are certainly aware of another strange fact. There are people who have been saying for a long time that the teaching I give is tainted by every kind of bigoted Christian dogma, even by Jesuitism. This malicious allegation is made chiefly by certain devotees of “Adyar Theosophy” as it is called and they talk sheer, unscrupulous nonsense. But our teachings have also been indescribably falsified from a quarter which had violently attacked the intolerance, the distortions and the allegations. A man from America who spent weeks and months getting to know our teachings, transcribed and carried them off in a watered-down form to America, where he has given out a plagiarised “Rosicrucian Theosophy.” True, he says he learnt a good deal from us over here but that he was afterwards summoned to the Masters and learnt more from them. He keeps silence, however, about the source of the deeper information contained in the then unpublished lecture-courses. When something like this happens in America, one may of course emulate the aged Hillel and be lenient; nor need one stop being lenient when these things make their way across to Europe. In a quarter from which the most violent attacks were launched, a translation was made of what these circles in America had taken from us and it was said in an introduction to this translation: True, a Rosicrucian conception of the world is making its appearance in Europe too, but in a bigoted, Jesuitical form; this kind of thought can really only thrive in the pure air of California. Well ... here I will pause! Such are the methods of our opponents. We may regard these things with leniency and even with compassion—but we should not shut our eyes to them. When things like this happen it behoves even those who for years have been remarkably forbearing with people who acted so unscrupulously, to be wary. Perhaps one day everyone will have their eyes opened. If the service of truth did not demand it, I should much prefer not to speak about these matters, but they must be faced fairly and squarely.

Even if on the one side these allegations are spread by others, we are not protected, on the other side, against the battle waged by people—and such there are—who find these things displeasing for rather more honest reasons. I will not bother you with all the foolish stuff which between them these two parties have written. The curious writings of Freimark, Schalk, Maack and others now being published in Germany may be ignored, for they are really too second-rate. But there are people who cannot bear the very thought of anything that resembles the nature of this Fifth Gospel. And perhaps no hatred was as sincere as that voiced by the critics who at once rose up in arms when something of the mystery of the two Jesus children—which also belongs to the Fifth Gospel—reached the outside world. True Anthroposophists will treat this Fifth Gospel which has been given in good faith, as it should be treated. Take it with you, speak about it in the groups, but also say how it ought to be treated! See that it is not irreverently bandied about among those who may scoff at it!

With things of this nature, based as they are upon the clairvoyant investigation that is necessary for our time, we stand opposed to the whole present age, above all to the kind of learning by which the age is dominated. Of this too we have tried to be mindful. Those of us who were together when the Foundation Stone of our Building was laid, tried to envisage the urgent need for spiritual teachings to be proclaimed with faithful observance of truth. We tried to picture what a wide distance separates the culture of our times from this search for the truth. It can verily be said that the cry for the Spirit rings through the age but that men are either too arrogant or too limited to be willing to know the actual truths of the Spirit. The sense of truth in the degree essential for understanding the proclamation of the Spirit, has yet to grow. For in spiritual culture as it is to-day, this sense of truth is not present in the requisite degree and—what is worse—its absence is not noticed. Treat what has been given here in connection with the Fifth Gospel in such a way that it is treated reverently in the groups. This we must ask, not out of egoism but for quite other reasons. For the Spirit of Truth must abide in us and the Spirit must stand before us in Truth. People to-day talk of the Spirit but even when they do so, they have no inkling whatever of the realities of the Spirit. There is a man—and why should names not be given—who has won great respect simply because he is forever talking about the Spirit. I refer to Rudolf Eucken. He talks the whole time of Spirit, but when one reads through all his books (just try it sometime) one finds ad infinitum: The Spirit exists, we must experience the Spirit, commune with the Spirit, be mindful of the Spirit ... and so on, in endless phrases running through every one of these books. Spirit, Spirit, Spirit! This is how men speak of the Spirit to-day because they are too lazy or too arrogant to go to the very wellsprings of the Spirit. And such men are greatly respected nowadays. For all that, it will be difficult in the modern age to make headway with anything drawn from the Spirit in such a concrete form as was necessary in describing the contents of the Fifth Gospel. Earnestness and an inner sense of truth are required for this. One of Eucken's most recent publications is a volume entitled: Können wir noch Christen sein? [Leipzig, 1911. An English translation, Can we still be Christians? was published in 1914.] Pages and pages follow one another merely reiterating Soul and Spirit, Spirit and Soul, and so it goes on through many volumes. For one gains immense repute and authority if one declares to the people that one knows something about the Spirit. In their reading, however, people do not perceive the inner untruthfulness of it all ... One would like to think that ultimately people really will learn how to read ... On one of the pages we find the sentence: Humanity to-day has passed beyond the stage of believing in daemons; one cannot any longer expect people to believe in daemons! But at another place in the same book there is this remarkable sentence: The daemonic arises when Spirit touches Soul. Here the man is speaking seriously of daemons, after having spoken, on another page of the same book, the words I quoted. Is not this the very deepest inner untruth? The time must come at last when such inwardly untruthful teachings about the Spirit are refuted. But I have never noticed that many of our contemporaries are alive to this inner untruthfulness.

And so when we serve the truth of the Spirit to-day we stand opposed to the times. This has to be remembered in order that we may see clearly what we have to do in our hearts if we would be co-bearers of the proclamation of the Spirit, co-bearers of the new life of the Spirit that is essential for mankind. When efforts are made through spiritual teaching to lead the souls of men to the Christ Being, how can one hope for much response in face of contemporary thought which contents itself with truths put forward to-day by all the shrewd philosophers and theologians: that there was a Christianity in existence before Christ! Evidence is produced to show that the cult and also certain typical narratives were already current in the East in pre-Christian times. And then these clever theologians explain to everyone who will listen to them that Christianity is simply the continuation of what was already there before. This kind of literature commands great respect, really tremendous respect among our contemporaries and they have not the slightest inkling what the real relationship is. When the Christ is said to have come down to the Earth as a Spiritual Being and then, later on, is found to be worshipped in forms of cult the same as those connected with the worship of heathen gods—and when such arguments are used, as they are to-day, to disavow the Christ Being ... this is a kind of logic of which the following is an illustration. Somebody or other goes into a house and leaves his clothes behind. It is known that the clothes belong to this particular man. A little later, such a man as Schiller or Goethe comes to the house and owing to certain circumstances is obliged to put on these clothes. Then he comes out in the clothes belonging to the other. And now somebody who has seen Goethe in these clothes, goes about saying: What are people talking about? Why is he supposed to be a man of special importance? I have examined the clothes minutely and I know that they belong to so-and-so who is a person of no importance whatever. Because the Christ Being made use of the garments, so to speak, of the ancient cults, there come these clever people who do not understand that the Christ Being clothed Himself in these forms as a garment only, and that the spiritual reality present in these old ritualistic forms now, is the Christ Being Himself.

And now—look through whole libraries, look through the countless dissertations of scientific monism to-day. All this kind of literature brings evidence concerning the garment around the Christ Being—and moreover the evidence, in itself, is correct! Dabblers in the field of the evolution of culture stand in high repute to-day and their science is accepted as profound wisdom. This is the picture we must have before us if we desire to realise not only intellectually but also in our feeling, what the communication of this Fifth Gospel means. It means that together with the truth known to us we must be alive to how and where we stand in the world to-day, realising how impossible it is to make the new tidings of the Spirit comprehensible to the thought-life of the past. And so when we have again to take leave of one another, reference may be made to words from the Gospel. With the way of thinking now prevailing in humanity, no progress is possible in the coming phase of spiritual evolution. Therefore this way of thinking must be changed, must be given another direction! Those who like to compromise and are unwilling to form a clear picture of things as they are and must be in the future, will not be able to contribute much to the spiritual teachings and spiritual service necessary for mankind.

It was my duty to speak of the Fifth Gospel which is very sacred to me. And I take leave of your hearts and souls with the wish that the bond created between us by many other things, may have been strengthened through this spiritual investigation of the Fifth Gospel—for this investigation is precious to me. Your hearts may perhaps be warmed by the thought that even if we are physically separated in space and in time, nevertheless we will remain together and feel together what we must inwardly assimilate and what is demanded by the duty laid upon the souls of men to-day by the Spirit. May the labours of every individual soul further our aims in the right way.

The considerations we are currently undertaking concern matters that are treated as mysteries by many people who know something about them in one form or another. And for certain reasons, knowledge of these things is kept away from the world from many sides, because it is believed that the things in question are parts of a comprehensive knowledge of supersensible matters that should not yet be communicated to mankind. I do not consider this view to be correct with regard to certain things that are being discussed here. On the contrary, it seems to me necessary for humanity to make the courageous decision to enter into a real consideration of the supersensible worlds. And one cannot do that otherwise than by directly grasping what is specifically considered in relation to the question in question.

Today, I would like to deal with a preliminary question first. Yesterday we spoke about the stages a person goes through between death and a new birth. A very common objection to discussing these things, not on the part of the initiated, but on the part of the uninitiated, is that one simply says: Yes, why is it necessary to know something about these things? One could indeed wait until one passes through the gate of death, and then one will see what it is actually like in the spiritual world. It is something that is said very often. Now, the thing is that we can never answer such questions from a so-called absolute point of view when we talk about reality, but that we, from a spiritual-scientific point of view, must always answer them from the point of view of the time in which we live. We live in the fifth post-Atlantic period, which began in the 15th century of our calendar. It concluded the fourth post-Atlantic period, which, as we know, began in the 8th century BC and came to an end in the 15th century AD. There are seven such cultural periods. From this, however, it can be seen that we have passed the midpoint of the cultural development of the earth, which was in the fourth post-Atlantic period, and that we are simply entering – we are, after all, also in the fifth great earth period – the time when the earth is in a descending development.

The considerations we have been making in these days can already draw your attention to the fact that it is important to look at the descending development, at that which is, so to speak, not in evolution but in devolution, which is in retrogression. Our whole evolution on earth is in retrogression. Certain abilities and powers that were present in the previous period of ascending development cease to exist, and others have to take the place of these ceasing powers and abilities. This is particularly the case with certain inner psychic abilities of the human being. It can be said that until the fourth post-Atlantic period, until around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, people still had the ability to have a certain connection with the supersensible world. We know that these abilities have disappeared in the most diverse ways. They no longer exist as elementary abilities; they have, so to speak, dwindled away. Not only has the life of man on earth changed between birth and death with regard to such abilities, but actually, and even more radically, has the life of man changed between death and a new birth. And it must be said that for this period of time, from death to a new birth, in the present cycle of mankind, which thus already belongs to the descending ones, it is so that men, when they go through the gate of death , they must have certain memories of what they have acquired here in the physical body if they want to find the right attitude and the right relationship to the events to which they are exposed between death and a new birth. It is one of the necessary prerequisites for a right life after death that people here before death acquire more and more certain ideas about life after death, because only when they remember these ideas, which they have acquired here, can they orient themselves in the time between death and a new birth. It is factually incorrect to claim that one can wait until death to have such ideas about the life between death and a new birth. If people continued to live in these prejudices, if they persistently refused to want to gain insights here already about life between death and a new birth, then this life, this life free of the body, would become a dark one for them, one in which they would be disoriented; they would not be able to penetrate their spiritual surroundings in the right way through everything that I described to you yesterday. Until almost the Mystery of Golgotha, it was the case that people brought abilities into their physical life here that originated in the spiritual world. That is why they had atavistic clairvoyance. This atavistic clairvoyance came from the fact that certain spiritual abilities extended from the pre-birth state into this life. That stopped. People no longer have abilities here in physical life that extend from the prenatal life. You know that. But the other thing must be done instead: people must acquire more and more ideas here on earth about the post-mortem life, the life after death, so that they can remember after death, so that they can carry something through the gates of death.

That is what I want to comment on in particular regarding this preliminary question. So the comfortable notion that one can wait until death to form such ideas does not apply if one considers in concrete terms at what point in time of the development of the earth we actually are. And this must always be borne in mind. For views that are absolutely valid, that apply at all times, do not exist; there are only views that can guide people for a certain period of time. This is what one must acquire in such an eminent sense through spiritual science.

And now I would like to discuss a few things that can bring our considerations to a preliminary conclusion. We started from the assumption that the present human being feels a gulf between what he calls ideals, be they moral or other ideals, which he also calls ideas, and what he feels to be his views on the purely natural order of the world. The concepts and views that man forms about the natural order of the world do not enable him to assume that what he carries in his heart as ideals has real power and can actually be realized like a natural force.

The essential thing to consider in this question is now the following: We now know how it is with the structure of the human being here on the physical earth. We also know how it is with the structure of the human being in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Some time ago I raised a question which actually already comes before the human soul as a concrete question when the human being looks at life, but which is precisely a question to which one cannot say anything when one is faced with the gap just characterized between idealism and realism between idealism and realism, that is the question: How is it that in our world order some people die very young, as children or young people or in middle age, while others only die when they have grown old? What is the connection with the order of the world? Neither idealism on the one hand nor realism on the other, which cannot regard ideals as real powers, can shed any light on such questions, which are, however, questions of life. These questions can only be approached if one has something very definite in mind. And that is to realize that the present human being, as he will one day stand before us as an earthly human being, can cope relatively easily with space, but he does not cope in the same way with time. In this respect, the sum of all existing philosophical views does not really offer any significant insight, and the question of the nature of time has so far only been treated in the narrowest human circles. It is not that easy to speak about time and its essence in a way that is accessible to the general public, but perhaps I can succeed in giving you an idea of what I mean by bringing time into discussion in analogy to space. I will have to tax your patience a little, because the brief consideration I want to give to this subject seems to have a somewhat abstract character.

If you simply overlook a piece of the room, you know that what you overlook reveals itself to you in a perspective character. You have to take into account the perspective of the room when you overlook a piece of it. If you now bring the piece of room that you overlook and to which you instinctively ascribe a perspective character onto a surface, then you take the perspective into account. If you look down an avenue, you see the distant trees of the avenue as smaller and closer together. You can express this in perspective, and you can, in a sense, express in perspective on a surface what you see in space.

Now it is clear that what you see in space is juxtaposed in a flat surface. In space, it is not juxtaposed; there are two trees in front (see drawing on p. 164), and two trees are far away. But by bringing the visible space into the flat surface, you place what is behind one another next to one another. You have the instinctive ability to transpose what you have painted or drawn on a surface into three dimensions. That you have this ability is due to the fact that man, as he is now as an earthly man, has become relatively detached from space as such.

Man has not detached himself from time in the same way. And that is something tremendously important and significant, but something that unfortunately is hardly noticed, hardly noticed by science. Man believes that when he develops in time, he has time. But in reality he does not have real time. He does not have real time at all, but what you experience as time is actually, in relation to real time, something that can be called an image. Just as this image (see drawing) in the plane relates to space, so what the ordinary person calls time relates to real time. The ordinary person does not experience real time, but rather experiences an image of time. And that is very difficult to imagine.

For example, it is extremely difficult for you to imagine that something that is effective today does not need to be present at the present moment in time, but is real at a much earlier point in time and is not real at the present moment in time. You can, so to speak, project that which is present in a very early period of time into your own time.

What I have just said has a very significant consequence. It has the consequence that everything we call nature has a completely different character than everything we have to regard as a certain part of the human being itself. For example, Ahriman also works in nature outside, or rather the Ahrimanic powers work; but the Ahrimanic powers never work in nature outside at the present time. If you look at nature as a whole, Ahriman is at work in nature, but he is working from a distant time. Ahriman works from the past. And whether you look at the mineral, the vegetable or the animal kingdom, you must never say that there is something in what is currently unfolding before your eyes in which Ahriman is active. And yet Ahriman is active in it; but from the past. If I were to describe the matter, I would have to say: Here is the line of development from the past into the future, and here you survey nature.

Yes, now you have to imagine looking into it. What you see before you in the present contains no ahrimanic powers, but Ahriman works through nature from the past, from a particular past.

And to you, Ahriman appears in nature, when you become aware of him there, in perspective. If you were to say: Ahriman is at work in the present — then you would be making the same mistake in relation to nature as if you were to say: When I survey a room, the distant trees stand beside the near trees (see drawing on page 164) because they can be placed in perspective within the space.

A fundamental requirement for a real view into the spiritual world is this: that one learns to see in perspective in time, that one learns to place every being at its correct point in time.

If I said yesterday that after death the I is, as it were, transferred from a fluid state into a kind of solid state, that is not all there is to it. Suppose you lived here on earth with your I from 1850 to 1920, and in 1920 you became aware of your I. I mean: you will become aware of it earlier, but now you look back, with the spirit self through the hierarchies you look back at your ego; there you see your ego always as it was from 1850 to 1920. The ego stays there, stays put. This means that your experiences do not go with you soon after your death, but you look back on them. You now look back from a temporally distant perspective and you see into the length of time, just as you see into the length of space here in the physical world. I can also express it this way: when you die, say, in 1920, you live with all that I described to you yesterday as the members of your being, but then you look back on the stretch of time in which you lived here on earth with your ego. And that stretch of time remains there, and you always see it as you continue to live in perspective, at the point in time where it was. And so you have to imagine that Ahriman is active outside in nature, but from an earlier point in time.

This is very important. It is something that is given very little consideration. If one wants to understand the world, if one wants to speak spiritually of time, then one must absolutely imagine time in a spatial way and must consider this connection of the spiritual substance with time. This is very important.

Now, what I said to you about the Ahrimanic powers, that they work from the past, is true for nature. But with human beings it is different. For the human being, while he lives here between birth and death, it is different precisely because everything that comes to an end in time becomes maya, deception, for him. While he lives here, the human being lives within the course of time itself, and by living through a certain number of years, he lives through the course of time. As time passes, he himself passes with time. That is not the case with space. When you walk down an avenue, the trees remain behind and you move forward, and you do not take the trees, which are left behind, and your impressions with you in such a way that you would have the impression that the tree image is moving with you when you take a step. You do that with the image of time. Here in the physical body you actually do this – because you yourself continue to develop in time – by allowing yourself to be deceived about time in relation to its perspective. You do not notice the perspective of time. And in particular, the subconscious mind does not notice it. The subconscious mind does not notice this living with time at all, and gives itself over to a complete deception with regard to the perspective of time. But this has a very definite consequence. It has the consequence that Ahrimanic powers can now work as present powers in what happens in man. Ahrimanic powers work in the life of the human soul as present powers. So that man stands in relation to nature in this way: when he looks out into nature, there is nothing Ahrimanic in the present. The Ahrimanic works in him as a presence, precisely as Maja, as deception. But the human being is given over to this deception about the things that I have explained to you, so that through the human being the Ahrimanic powers gain the possibility of creeping into the present, of walking into the present. We can say that the Ahrimanic forces – and the same applies to the Luciferic forces, albeit from a somewhat different point of view, which we will discuss in a moment – work in nature in such a way that they actually have nothing to do with the present, but extend their effects from prehistoric times. These Ahrimanic forces are currently at work in the human being.

What are the consequences? The consequence is that, in his deepest soul, man cannot feel related to nature in relation to the point just discussed. He looks at his being, or rather feels himself in his being, senses the nature-based being. Because ahrimanic powers are countervailing powers in him, and ahrimanic powers are past powers in nature, everything that is natural appears to him differently from that which develops within himself. Man does not unravel the difference he perceives between himself and nature in the right way. If he unraveled it in the right way, it would be as I have just explained. He would say: Outside in nature, Ahriman works from the past; in me, Ahriman works as a present power. But because of this, even if he does not know the difference, he behaves in the sense of this difference and perceives nature as spiritless. He does perceive that in the present the Ahrimanic powers are not directly active in nature, but he perceives nature as spiritless because he does not say to himself: Ahriman works from the past – instead, he only looks at present-day nature. Ahriman does not work in it.

But Ahriman, however strange it may sound, is the power that the general creation of the world uses to bring forth nature. When one speaks of the spirit of nature, when one speaks of the pure spirit of nature, one should actually speak of the ahrimanic spirit. There it is fully justified, the ahrimanic spirit. The beings of the normal hierarchies make use of the ahrimanic spirit to bring forth what extends around us as nature. The fact that we do not perceive nature in a spiritualized way is precisely because in the present life of nature the spirit is not contained, but works from the past. And that is the secret, I would say, of the world-creative powers, that they make use of a spirit that they have left at an earlier stage to work at a later stage, but let it work from the past.

When we speak of nature, we should not speak of matter, nor of forces; we should speak of ahrimanic entities. But then we would have to place these ahrimanic entities in the past. The result is a strange one: suppose some natural philosopher ponders, ponders what is behind the phenomena of nature. Well, he comes up with all sorts of theories and hypotheses about atomic connections and the like. But that is not the case. Behind what is spread out around us in a way that appeals to the senses, there is not actually what the natural philosophers usually assume, but behind all of this there is the sum of the Ahrimanic powers, but not as a presence. So if the natural philosopher is compelled to assume, let us say, that there are some atomic structures behind the chemical elements, then that is wrong; behind the chemical elements there are Ahrimanic powers. But if you could detach what you see from the chemical elements and look beyond, you would see nothing behind them in the present: it would be hollow where you look for atoms, and what is at work there comes from the past and works in this hollow space. That is how it is in reality. Hence the many unsuccessful theories about what the “thing in itself” is; for this “thing in itself” is not there at all in the present. Rather, where the “thing in itself” is sought, there is nothing; but the effect is there from the past. So that one could say that if Kart had sought his “thing in itself,” he would have had to say: Where I want to approach the 'thing in itself', there I cannot approach. — That is what he said. But he did not realize that in the beginning he would have found nothing there at all, and that if he had gone behind the veil of things, he would have had to go far back; then he would have found Ahrimanic powers.

In man himself it is different. It is precisely because man is vividly placed in time that it has been possible for the Ahrimanic powers to enter our world through the gateway of humanity and to work within man as such. And the consequence of the Ahrimanic powers working in man is that man detaches what he sees in the present from the spiritual, that man detaches his present existence from the spiritual. This is the consequence of our carrying the Ahrimanic powers within the Maja in us. So that one can say: Just as we view the world materially, detached from the spirit, as a mere natural order that believes it has reached its peak in the law of the conservation of energy and matter — which is an illusion — what we see as a natural order is merely brought about by the fact that we carry the Ahrimanic powers within us, and that they are not present as powers in nature outside us. Therefore, what we think about nature, in that we think of it merely materially, does not correspond to nature, but only to present nature. But this present nature is precisely an abstraction, because the past Ahriman always works in it.

Now, not only the Ahrimanic but also the Luciferic is at work in people. This Luciferic, however, has, so to speak, a different tendency in the universe than the Ahrimanic. Let us visualize the tendency of the Ahrimanic as we have now expressed it. The tendency of the Ahrimanic in us is to present the world in materialistic terms. That we conceive the world materialistically, that we think of a mere natural order, is the consequence of the fact that we carry Ahrimanic in us. That we carry ideals within us, which detach themselves from the general nature, according to which we want to orient ourselves in our mutual behavior, but which must appear to us only like dreams within the present world view, which are dreamed out when, according to the natural order, the earth has arrived at its final state , that is the consequence of the fact that the luciferic powers, which, like the ahrimanic ones, live in us, are constantly striving to tear the part of us that is accessible to them completely out of the natural order and to spiritualize it completely. The main tendency of the luciferic powers, insofar as they live in us, is to make us as spiritual as possible, to tear us away from all material life if possible. That is why they present us with ideals that are not natural powers, but that are powerless in the present natural order. And if, in the course of the future period of the earth, man were to fall entirely prey to the influence of Lucifer, so that he would believe that ideals are just imagined things towards which the mind can be directed, then this man would follow the luciferic powers. The material earth, to which we belong, would decay, scatter in the universe, would not fulfill its purpose, and the luciferic powers would lead man into another spiritual world to which he does not belong. To do this, they need the trick of making us believe in ideals that are actually mere dreams. Just as Ahriman, on the one hand, presents us with a world that is a mere natural order, so Lucifer, on the other hand, presents us with a world that consists purely of imagined ideals.

This is something very significant. And at present, I would say, a balance is only being struck in those areas that still lie in the human unconscious. But people must become more and more aware of this, otherwise they will not get out of this dilemma, they will not be able to build a bridge between idealism and realism, but this bridge is necessary.

What currently still creates a kind of balance is the following. When very young people die, for example children, these children – and the same applies to young people – have just looked into the world; they have not fully lived out their existence here on the physical plane. With a life unlived on the physical plane, they pass over into the other world, which is lived between death and a new birth, as I described yesterday. Because they have only lived part of their earthly life, they bring something of earthly life with them into the spiritual world that cannot be brought across when one has grown old. You arrive differently in the spiritual world if you have grown old than if you die young. If you die young, you have lived your life in such a way that you still have a lot of strength in you from your prenatal life. As a child and as a young person, you have lived your physical life in such a way that you still have a lot of the strength in you that you had in the spiritual world before you were born. In this way, a close connection has been created between the spiritual part that one has brought with one and the physical part that one has experienced here. And through this close connection, one can take something that one acquires on earth with one into the spiritual world. Children or people who have died young take something from earthly life with them into the spiritual world that cannot be taken at all if one dies as an older person. That which is taken along is then over there in the spiritual world, and what is carried over by children and young people gives the spiritual world a certain heaviness that it would not otherwise have, the spiritual world in which people then live together, gives a certain heaviness to the spiritual world and prevents the luciferic powers from completely separating the spiritual world from the physical one.

So you see, we are looking at an enormous secret! When children and young people die, they take something with them from here, which the luciferic powers use to prevent us from completely detaching ourselves from earthly life. It is extremely important to realize this.

If you get older here on earth, you cannot thwart the luciferic powers in the way described, because after a certain age you no longer have that intimate connection between what you brought with you at birth and physical life on earth. When one has grown old, this inner connection is dissolved and just the opposite occurs. From a certain age onwards we instill our own nature in a certain way into the spiritual substance within the physical earth. We make the physical earth more spiritual than it would otherwise be. So from a certain age onwards we spiritualize the physical earth in a certain way, which cannot be perceived by the outer senses. We carry spiritual into the physical earth, as we carry physical up into the spiritual world when we die young; we squeeze out, so to speak, spiritual when we grow old, I cannot say it any other way. Growing old consists in the spiritual sense from a certain aspect of squeezing out spiritual here on earth. This in turn prevents the reckoning of Ahriman. As a result, Ahriman cannot, in the long run, have such an intense effect on people that the opinion that ideals do have a certain meaning could completely die out. But in today's time frame, we are already very, very close to people falling into the most terrible errors precisely with regard to what has been said. Even well-meaning people easily fall into such errors with regard to what has been said. And these errors will become ever greater and greater and, with increasing earth development, can become enormous.

To give you an example: a very ingenious philosopher, Robert Zimmermann, wrote an “Anthroposophy” in 1882. I have already mentioned this in a context. This “Anthroposophy” is not what we now call Anthroposophy, it is more or less a concept jungle. But that is because Robert Zimmermann was not able to see into the spiritual world, he was only a Herbartian philosopher. Now he has written this “Anthroposophy”. But it is precisely in this “Anthroposophy” that Robert Zimmermann deals with the question that I have placed at the top of our considerations these days from his point of view. On the one hand, he sees ideas: logical ideas, aesthetic ideas, ethical ideas; on the other hand, he sees the order of nature. And he cannot somehow find a bridge between the logical, the aesthetic, the ethical ideas and the order of nature, but he does stop at it: on the one hand, there is the order of nature, and on the other hand, there are the ideas. And the conclusion he comes to is extremely interesting, because it is actually typical of a person in the present day. He comes to the conclusion that it is forbidden to man once and for all to populate nature with ideas and to ascribe to ideas the power of nature. The two worlds can actually only be connected in the mind of man. So he says. And so he means at one point, where he summarizes almost everything he says and thinks: “The realization of ideas is neither a fact of the past nor a fact of the present, but a task whose fulfillment lies in the future and in the hands of man. The dream of a “golden age”, of which a sober rationalist like Kant as of that of “eternal peace, as an extreme positivist like Comte as the ‘état positif’, raved about, will be fulfilled when the entire world of ideas has become real and the entire reality is permeated by the ideas, that is to say, when that which Schiller called “the secret of the master's art,” the “consumption” of matter by form, becomes manifest, or, as Schleiermacher put it, “when ethics become physics and physics become ethics.”

Yes, but that can never be! It can only be that people realize ideas in their social order. But when the earth has reached its end, the whole dream of ideas will have been dreamt. Nothing else is possible according to such a philosophy. Therefore such a philosophy always remains abstract and must finally confess: “A philosophy which, like the one above, neither takes the theocentric point of view, inaccessible to human knowledge, as in theosophy, and regards the ‘dream of reason’ as a reality that has long since been created, nor, like anthropology, takes the anthropocentric but uncritical standpoint of common experience, in order to view from there a reality filled with ideas as a 'dream of reason', which thus simultaneously wants to be anthropocentric, that is, starting from human experience, and yet philosophical, that is, going beyond it, at the hand of logical thinking, is Arihroposophie.” “Anthroposophy” is therefore here the admission that one can never cross this chasm between unreal ideas and idea-less reality.

But in man himself there is a natural being, which thus belongs to the natural order, connected with a spiritual being that can absorb the spiritual. This is not denied by an anthroposophist like Robert Zimmermann. But man cannot be regarded by contemporary science either in such a way that the riddle would be solved through man, through this microcosm.

Let us now look back at something we have already mentioned during this stay. We have said that we actually have to divide the human being into three parts, not as conveniently as the skeleton, of course, as I have already explained. But I have also spoken about this in the final notes to my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul). We can divide the human being into three parts: the head, the trunk and the extremities, with everything that belongs to the extremities belonging to the extremities, including everything sexual. If we divide the human being in this way and now apply what we already know: that the formation of the head, the shape of the head points to forces of the previous incarnation, the limb man points to the future incarnation and actually only the trunk belongs to the present. So, after what I have explained today, you will no longer find it very incomprehensible when I tell you: insofar as the human being carries his head, this head points back to the earlier incarnation, into the past. The forces of the past, Ahrimanic forces, are at work in the head, and what applies to Ahrimanic forces in general applies to the human head in particular. Everything that is actually formed in the human head does not actually belong to the present, but the forces of the previous incarnation have an effect on the head; and the creative powers make use of the ahrimanic powers to shape our head, to give our head its actual form. If the creative powers did not make use of the ahrimanic spirits to shape our heads, then we would all – forgive me, but it is so – wear a much softer head, but we would all have an animal head: one who is bullish in character would have a bull's head, another who is lamb-like in character would have a lamb's head, and so on. It is due to the influence of the Ahrimanic powers, which the creative forces use to shape us, that this animal head, which we would otherwise wear, does not really sit on us, as the Egyptians drew it on some of their figures; that we do not go around like these Egyptian figures, who have good reasons for this, because in the Egyptian mysteries, too, though from an atavistic point of view, things were taught that can be taught again now. We also do not go around like that, as in the Rosicrucian pictures, where every woman is painted with a lion's head and every man with an ox's head. That is the Rosicrucian painting of man. The Rosicrucians chose a more average animal and therefore gave the women the head of the animal that most resembles them, the lion, and the man the head of the animal that most resembles him, the ox, the bull. That is why in Rosicrucian figures you see man and woman placed side by side: the woman with the most beautiful lion's head, the man with a bull's head. But this is absolutely correct. That metamorphosis – to use a Goethean term – can take place, that our head, which tends towards the animalistic in its form, can be shaped so that it is a human head, comes from the influence of the Ahrimanic powers. If the deities did not make use of Ahriman to shape our bony heads, then we would walk around with animal heads.

But the divine powers also make use of the luciferic spirits. If they did not make use of these luciferic spirits, our limbless man would not be able to transform from the present to the next incarnation. The luciferic beings are necessary for this. And it is to the luciferic entities that we again owe the fact that, by dying, the form that the man of the extremities still has now is gradually transformed into the broader form that he is to have in the next incarnation. Then, in the middle of the path between death and a new birth, Ahriman must intervene to take on the other task: to reshape the head in the appropriate way. Just as we would go around with animal heads if we did not owe it to Ahriman that we get a human head, so our nature of the extremities would not metamorphose into the human until the next incarnation, but would pass over into the demonic. We lose our head, as we now have it, under all circumstances through death, not only as matter that unites with the earth, but also as form; in the next incarnation we carry over what will become the head from the extremity of man. But this would become a demonic being if we did not have the luciferic powers, who are connected with us, to thank for the fact that the transformation can take place from a demon, which is merely a spiritual soul, into the human form of the next incarnation.

Thus, Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers must participate in our becoming human, and the human cannot be understood without calling upon the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic for help. Humanity cannot be spared the task of truly understanding the activity of Ahriman and Lucifer in the future. The Bible quite rightly says that the Deity of whom it speaks at the beginning breathed the living spirit into man. But the living spirit works in the trunk of the human being. Insofar as we are dealing with the normally functioning divine entities, we are dealing only with the trunk of the human being. Insofar as we are dealing with the head man, we are dealing with an opponent of the powers of Yahweh, and thus also with an opponent of the Christ. And insofar as we are dealing with the man of the extremities, we are dealing with the Luciferic opponent.

Therefore, one will only understand the human being if one presents him under these three aspects. In our central group for our building, we therefore have this trinity: the representative of humanity, who is trained in such a way that the forces of breathing, of the trunk, of heart activity and so on are primarily active in him – this is the middle figure; then the figure in which everything main, head-related is active: Ahriman; and the figure in which everything extremity-related is active: Lucifer.

We must dissect the human being in this way if we want to understand the human being, because in the human being, the human being as such is united with Ahriman and Lucifer. At the same time, this is an indication that everything that is more or less connected with human thinking, which, after all, is bound to the head in relation to

its physical connection to the head — human thinking flows on the basis of perceptions as something external and obvious — that all this has an Ahrimanic character. Through the senses of the head we perceive nature primarily, and we build up an image of nature with the ahrimanic character just described, because we ourselves carry the ahrimanic in the formation, in the shaping of our head.

Ideals, on the other hand, have a great deal to do with love, with everything that belongs to the man of the extremities, inwardly, psychologically. I shall come back to this in the near future. That is why the Luciferic power has special access to ideals. Ahriman takes hold of us through our head, Lucifer through our extremities. Through our head Ahriman tempts us to conceive of nature without spirit; through our extremity man Lucifer tempts us to conceive of ideals without the power of nature.

But it is the task of the present human being, by surveying such things, to arrive at a correct overview. For you see, there is a certain boundary within us, precisely in our chest-humanity, in our trunk-humanity, whereby the forces of the head, which are Ahrimanic forces, are separated from the luciferic forces that belong to the extremity-humanity. If we were able to see ourselves completely by looking mystically into ourselves, then we would indeed comprehend the natural order through the head, but we would also see into ourselves through the natural order. And if the luciferic powers were to decide in us, then the luciferic powers would also enlighten us about the ahrimanic powers, and in this way we would come to a connection between the natural order and the spiritual order. But for a certain reason we cannot do this, and that is because we have a memory. What we absorb from nature in the way of ideas and concepts, of impressions, we store in our memory. And if here (see diagram on page 179) we have only schematically drawn the head human being, the trunk and torso human being, and the extremities human being, then in the trunk human being there is the septum, which leads to that which we take in through the head, in the natural order, coming back to us as memory material. As a result, we do not see down to the Luciferic, and thus we do not notice the Ahrimanic, as we do not see what is behind a mirror, but rather what is reflected. Here the natural order is reflected in what at the same time separates our Ahrimanic from our Luciferic, and what is the basis for the forming memory, for the forming power of recollection. If we could not remember the things we have experienced, if this partition were not there, if, looking into ourselves, we could see through ourselves, we would look down into ourselves as far as the Luciferic. Then we would also perceive the Ahrimanic.

But now consider: what appears to us in this mirror is what we live through in the course of our lives, what we look back on after death, what becomes a solid ego from a fluid ego. This is what we look back on. That is what we live with. And Ahriman and Lucifer work with us, working with us in such a way that Ahriman brings us to wearing a human head, and Lucifer brings us to not becoming a demon, but to having the possibility of coming to a next incarnation.

I have perhaps tried your patience a little with things that are perhaps a little more difficult to understand, but I wanted to at least evoke a feeling for what actually creates the gap between idealism and realism. It arises from the fact that the Luciferic in us arouses idealism, which is powerless in nature, that the Ahrimanic in us evokes the mere natural order, which appears spiritless to us. Thus idealists, abstract idealists, are actually under the influence of Lucifer, while materialists are under the influence of Ahriman. It is necessary to engage with these things, not just to engage in so-called theosophy in a schematic way, but to engage with these more precise things. For it is necessary that man should become conscious of the fact that he must do something to remain united with the spirit for the rest of his development on earth. It is an uncomfortable truth, one might say, even a hated truth, truly a hated truth, for it contradicts so much that is pleasant to man, that is pleasant to him out of laziness. Nothing is more difficult for people today than when they are told: If you want to maintain your connection with the spirit in the future, you have to do something about it. Most people would like the Mystery of Golgotha to have dissolved into the ground, so that they have nothing to do with their own affairs, so that they can be redeemed from their sins through Christ and go to heaven without having to do anything. And that is why most theologians get so angry about anthroposophy, because the anthroposophical side can never admit that man has nothing to do to maintain his connection with the spirit, that this can also happen in the future of the development of the earth without any action on his part. The connection between the physical and the spiritual, between what the members of man are between birth and death, and what the members of man are between death and new birth, this connection is called into question by the future development of the earth, and it will only not come into disorder if men will really occupy themselves with the spiritual towards the future. Spiritual scientific evidence for this already exists today. This spiritual scientific evidence is highly, highly inconvenient truth, but it sheds light on important and significant matters.

I would like to say that the connection between the soul-spiritual and the physical-etheric in the human being of the counterweight has already become very loose, and it is necessary for the human being to be more and more alert to himself, so that nothing happens in the connection between his physical-etheric and soul-spiritual that could, so to speak, suck him dry, that could suck him dry soul-spiritually. For when such prejudices become more and more active, when one does not need to know anything about what happens after death in life, or when the gulf between so-called idealism and pure natural order becomes ever greater, then people are in danger of losing their soul more and more. Today, I might say, this loss is still held in check by the fact that when young people die, a certain heaviness is given to the spiritual world and Lucifer is thwarted, and when old people die, so much spirituality is poured into the physical world that Ahriman is thwarted. But one must not forget that as a result of people turning away from the spiritual realm, the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers become more and more powerful, and that little by little, as the devolution of the earth goes on and on, this dam could no longer be fully effective.

That is what I would like to see emerging from our deliberations as a kind of bottom line, a feeling – and feelings are always the most important thing that can arise from spiritual scientific life – of the necessity of dealing with the spiritual from the present earth cycle onwards. I have emphasized this from the most diverse points of view, that it is necessary from the present point of view that people occupy themselves with the spiritual. And there will be no other way of dealing with spiritual matters in the future than by acquiring understanding and not resisting the process of really absorbing even the more difficult considerations such as we have been discussing in recent days and particularly today. People must come to understand the perspectivity of time. When this understanding of the perspectivity of time comes among people, then they will no longer say: Here is idealism, but it is only a mere dream that has no force of nature, and on the other side lies the natural order. Instead, people will come to recognize that what lives in us as ideals is the germ for the future, and that what is the natural order is the fruit of the past.

This sentence is a golden rule: every ideal is the germ of a future natural event; every natural event is the fruit of a past spiritual event. Only by this rule can one find the bridge between idealism and realism. But for this one thing is necessary: any ideal could never become the germ of a future natural event if this future natural event were prevented by the present natural event. We can put any hypothesis before our eyes. Let us assume the possibility that applies today, that through the so-called law of entropy, the evolution of the earth will one day pass into a kind of general warming, and that all other natural forces will cease, then within this final state, of course, all ideals would have died out. This final state follows quite well if one assumes that, according to pure causality, the present physical states will simply continue. If one thinks as present-day physics does, that such a final state will one day exist according to the law of conservation of energy and matter, then there is no room in this final state for an ideal to arise in it as a future natural event, because the future will simply be the consequence of the present natural event. But that is not how it is, that is not how it presents itself to the present study of nature, but it presents itself differently. All the substances and forces that exist today will no longer be there in the future. The law of conservation of matter and energy does not exist. Where we look for substance, we find nothing but the influence of something Ahrimanic that has passed away. And what surrounds us in the world of the senses will no longer be there in the future. And then, when nothing of what is physical now remains, when all this has been completely dissolved, the time will have come when the present ideals will join the natural process of what is now perishing.

This is how it is in the great universe. And for the individual human being, it is the case that he will be incarnated again in the next world incarnation when everything that he has grown into with the present incarnation has been partially overcome, when, that is, an environment can be created for him that is different from the present environment, when everything that is keeping him here on earth can be removed from the present environment. If all this has changed so that he can experience new things, then he will be incarnated again. The present ideals that can form in man will be nature, when all that is now nature will no longer be there, but something new will have emerged. But the new that arises is nothing other than the spiritual that has become nature.

Behind appearances and ideals we must seek that which forms the bridge over the abyss. But one must discover it. Today one can only discover it if one is not afraid to develop the concepts so powerfully that they themselves can penetrate reality. Therefore, the present time really has the necessity to engage very much in everything that can be experienced spiritually. But — let me add this as a postscript — it will be necessary for people to be able to develop ever greater and greater impartiality towards spiritual considerations. The day before yesterday, I ended by pointing out, as it might seem unnecessary to do for some people, but I do not like to do it, it is never unnecessary, a number of things that stand in the way of fruitful spiritual scientific work, including on the part of the Anthroposophical Society. Above all, what is needed here is real impartiality. Time and again, we see that the dissolving power that actually brought about materialism and destroyed the old spirituality is penetrating into human thinking, especially into the spiritual, into the willed spiritual. I have pointed out how materialistic some theosophical views are. Of course, it is not easy to find the right words when discussing spiritual-scientific matters, because our language today is no longer suitable for the spiritual, because we first have to search again for such a connection between language and the subject that is suitable for the spiritual. But it is necessary that the spiritual-scientific movement is not always corrupted by what is most harmful. One must characterize impartially what takes place in the spirit. Again and again I experience that I am asked: There is someone, there is someone who has spiritual experiences. — The meaning of the questions, which are often asked in this way, is that the actual question is: Is it now possible to surrender to what this or that person sees with blind faith in the truth? And if the answer is in the affirmative, then blind devotion arises; if it is in the negative, then the person in question is immediately denounced as a heretic and it is said: Well, that is atavistic clairvoyance, you don't give anything to that. — Yes, this either-or must be taken quite differently in this field. We must really face up to the statements about the spiritual with all our healthy reason. But if we want to become dogmatists, we cannot become spiritual scientists. If we want to either idolize or condemn, we cannot become spiritual scientists. There will also be infinitely valuable contributions to the characterization of the spiritual world from sides that one does not necessarily want to swear by.

On the other hand, there are times when people swear by some esoteric personality. Then it can be shown that this seer personality has at some point – well, maybe even once – retouched a little, or retouched a lot; then that personality is finished. Before, the same people swore by them, and now they have been undone.

Yes, you don't get ahead within humanity in this way. You don't get ahead within humanity with the either/or of deification or demonization, but only by facing things with your common sense. For example, it may also be the case that someone, of whom one even knows: Well, he does not disdain to tell a tall tale now and then – something quite true, important, essential comes out of the spiritual world.

We would not have the either/or that I am talking about if we wanted to introduce dogmatics, but if we wanted to place ourselves with common sense, precisely within this anthroposophical movement. That is one thing. The other is this: it is extremely difficult, because of the way things are often handled within our circle, to place the Anthroposophical Society in the cultural movement of the present day. This requires discernment on the part of those who are already members of this society. Once you are a member, you have a certain obligation to exercise this discernment. For we will go completely wrong with this Anthroposophical Society if we do not seek to connect with the general spiritual culture of the present, if we repeatedly and repeatedly fall back into the error of being sectarian. That will be the death of our movement if we become sectarian. Just consider that things like the ones we have discussed these days will not seem particularly strange to someone who is currently involved in science and cultural life, if he or she only acquires the necessary lack of prejudice. But in order to achieve something in this way, it is necessary to have the will to distinguish. With us it can easily happen that a question is asked in a stereotyped way when it is a matter of: should someone listen to anthroposophical lectures or should he be given a cycle? So the question is asked in a stereotyped way, without taking into account the level of education, the whole world position of the person concerned. But the stereotyped way is what is absolutely harmful to us. It is the schematic that makes it possible for a person like the one in Holland, around whom a whole bunch of nonsense has crystallized, to swim into the Anthroposophical Society and find protectors there, while people who are capable of judgment are often repelled by it.

To mention a specific example: some time ago, Mr. von Bernus appeared within the Anthroposophical Society with the clear aim — which one may find a little better, a little worse, as common sense may speak — of building a bridge between the general cultural life, the literary and scientific life of the present, and our anthroposophical life. Now, Mr. von Bernus, in his own way, has poetically reworked and brought out into the world a number of things, some of which are in my books and some of which are in cycles. He showed me himself: he has received a pile of letters, letters of criticism, because a truly contemporary attempt has been made here! One would not be surprised if someone who perhaps has a lot at stake could be repelled by such behavior as was perpetrated against him by the Anthroposophical Society in the past. Nevertheless, the journal he founded will be of tremendous service to the Anthroposophical Movement. He had, after all, managed to get the Anthroposophical Society represented in Munich in his art gallery. But everywhere one could see certain resistances to something that was as justified as possible! And if one looks at Bernus' experiences, they give a good picture of how the Anthroposophical Society should learn to be a real society.

In so far as the Dornach structure came into being, it is a society. But much else, in particular, is left undone, clearly showing that the Anthroposophical Society does not see itself as a society at all, but as a sum of individual sectarian little circles. But we must get beyond this stage of sectarianism. And we will not get beyond it unless some thought is given to the matter.

It is so difficult, and it is true that one does not like to say such things, but after all, many things are necessarily said to me because I am personally so closely involved with this anthroposophical movement. If the Anthroposophical Society should gradually develop more and more into a society with an expressed tendency to keep me completely quiet — which is what it is actually developing into and what it has always had as a tendency — then it is not a matter of personal vanity when I emphasize this. It makes me very uncomfortable that I have to emphasize it, but in the Anthroposophical Society there is a tendency to keep quiet about me, and there the personal is linked to the factual. Because of this – because everything that a society otherwise does is not being done – only the venomous words that the apostate members have created bubble to the surface.

Yes, these are things that I sometimes have to point out and that must not remain unspoken. I have raised them in the places where I have been able to speak recently, because I really believe that in these catastrophic times it is very important that anthroposophy is represented in the world in the right way. But it is so difficult to get people to reflect more deeply on how one should actually proceed in the anthroposophical field in order to make this Anthroposophical Society a real society. — Individuals have indeed made a start, but as a rule everything gets stuck in the starting blocks. Now, I think that perhaps, by drawing attention to the matter a second time, it will be given a little thought. I am not saying this for personal reasons, but because of certain necessities of the time, as you will indeed gather from what I have just said, from which you will be able to discern many seeds that can serve to help you understand our catastrophic times.

[Blackboard writing] September 2, 1918

Every ideal is a germ for a future natural event.

Every natural event is the fruit of past spiritual events.

First of all, I would like to remind you of something we discussed yesterday, so that we can then proceed to further considerations. Yesterday, I essentially explained that one cannot gain insight into the relationship between the ideal or spiritual and the material in the world, or into the purely causal natural order, without taking into account the nature of human sleep.

We started from St. Augustine's thought that he wanted to experience true certainty about the world in his inner experience. I said that we can no longer base ourselves on this thought for the simple reason that we have to know today that every human sleep refutes this thought. For we could never somehow hold on to the idea that what a person experiences within himself is preserved post mortem, after death, and that what a person experiences within himself is truly eternal, if we had to look at it from the point of view of the time from falling asleep to waking up, as ordinary consciousness today looks at it. The ordinary consciousness of today sees how, during sleep, what is experienced within the human being dawns. But now we said that as soon as a person completes the first step of looking into the spiritual world, he realizes that from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, what we call the human being's ego and its astral body – that is to say, the human being's actual spirit-soul nature – is so connected from within with the nature of the angels, archangels and archai, as the human being is otherwise connected here during waking life with the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. Only because man's consciousness is dulled during sleep by the powers opposed to the world is he not aware that during sleep he is connected to the hierarchy of angels, archangels and archai, that they imbue his ego and his astral body with their own being, that they hold and carry his astral body and his ego. And we have explained how three things arise from this connection between human beings and spiritual beings: Firstly, that we have the feeling of personality more or less clearly even in our ordinary consciousness. We know ourselves as an ego. We would never know ourselves as an ego with only what is available to us during waking hours. The feeling of free personality that continues during the day, while we are awake, is a kind of after-effect of what we experience during sleep. This comes from the fact that from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, we are connected with the angelic being from the spiritual world to which we belong. But the archangelic being, or actually a series of archangelic beings, is also connected with our spiritual soul being. And this is the reason why, when we are awake, we know ourselves as members of the whole of humanity, that we recognize ourselves as human beings on earth.

Every human being actually has an awareness of their free personality, even if it is not entirely clear. The awareness that one is a human being in general is already more shadowy in the background. Yes, certain philosophers, like Fewerbach or even Auguste Comte, have argued that it is a significant discovery for a person to come to feel that they are a human being in general, a member of the whole of humanity. And yesterday we heard Auguste Comte speak of the Great Being; by this he means nothing other than the human being. But Comte speaks from the standpoint of ordinary materialistic science; he does not know what underlies spiritually this consciousness that one is human, which lies in the background of our soul life. One would have no inkling of being a human being if that which is separated from our physical and etheric bodies during sleep were not imbued with the nature of the archangels.

And again, we are imbued with the nature of the archai from the hierarchy of the so-called Zeitgeist (the spirit of the age). But what comes from this remains a rather dark, shadowy consciousness. Indeed, today's humanity does not have it at all if it does not feel part of history, of historical life. The oriental world view has not penetrated to this consciousness of living as an earthly human being at all. This has been the particular task of Western culture: to feel like a historical being, as a being – let us say for ourselves – who belongs to the 19th, 20th century. But the present materialistic consciousness of humanity knows little more than the date and some other external historical data – we will hear shortly how little these actually have any significance for real life. For only spiritual science leads us to recognize how the human soul changes from millennium to millennium, how human beings become different, and how we now look back to ancient times and know that the people of the third post-Atlantic period, the Egyptian-Chaldean peoples, had a very different soul and human condition than we do today. This sense of being at home in the whole development of humanity is an echo of our connection with the archetype, with the arche, during the time from falling asleep to waking up. So that we should know that we are connected with this third spiritual hierarchy from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up. Now, how does our life differ from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, that is, every day, from the life between death and a new birth? Every evening when we fall asleep, we lay aside, I would say provisionally, our physical and etheric bodies. These remain with us. There we are connected with these entities of the third hierarchy; when we wake up, we return to our physical and etheric bodies. It is different when we can no longer return, when we have died. Then our physical and etheric bodies are apparently handed over to the driving forces of that which is becoming earthly. We know that this is only apparent, as we have recently discussed; but for our experience, our physical and etheric bodies are handed over to the spaces of earth and heaven. During this time between death and a new birth, we not only come into contact with the beings of the third hierarchy, as we do in sleep, but we also come into equally intimate contact with the beings of the second hierarchy, with the exusiai, that is, the Spirits of Form, with the Dynameis, the Spirits of Movement, with the Spirits of Wisdom, Kyriotetes, and also with the beings of the first hierarchy, with the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. Just as we, here in our human existence, focus on the world and, in the surrounding world, everything that is contained in the realms of nature appears to us, so we become aware, now not externally but internally, of the intervention of the higher hierarchies between death and a new birth. From a certain point of view, this is essentially the difference between sleep and death in a human being: that during sleep we are actually only indirectly connected with the beings of the third hierarchy, but after death we are connected with the beings of all three hierarchies, up to the highest spiritual beings.

Now, if you hold on to this, you will be able to see how man is placed in the whole universe, how man, as a microcosm, is connected to the whole universe, to the macrocosm. Let us visualize what I have said schematically. Let us say, then, that after death our spirit is inwardly connected with the beings of the third hierarchy, with the beings of the second hierarchy, with the beings of the first hierarchy, just as it is outwardly connected here with the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms, from which it is built. But there is another connection. When you get to know all the things that the beings of the third hierarchy initially work on – they also have other tasks, but we are only ever talking about things in parts, aren't we? The beings of the third hierarchy are individual beings that work individually and also through their work together through their effects, which bring forth something, create something. If you visualize what these entities of the third hierarchy work, it is first of all everything, I say, that happens in the historical life of humanity (see drawing on page 57). You can also grasp the thought in this way: No one knows anything of the reality of the historical life of humanity without having an inkling that what actually constitutes history is not made by human beings, but by the beings of the third hierarchy. The beings of the third hierarchy – angels, archangels, archai – actually make history, and man participates in the work of this third hierarchy by having his consciousness as a personality, his consciousness as a human being, as a historical being on earth, in the characterized way. So that man stands in the world is because these entities make up historical life, and man, in turn, has what he is inwardly and through which he is inwardly connected to historical life from these entities. The external historical life, which is recorded in popular history, which is essentially a fable convenante, is only a reflection of the inner historical life that is created in his development by the beings of the third hierarchy.

Now we may ask: What is the similar task of the beings of the second and first hierarchy, that is, the Exusiai, Dynameis, Kyriotetes, the form spirits, the movement spirits, the wisdom spirits? Yes, they have a much more comprehensive task. We will initially disregard their relationship to humans. You can best imagine this task in front of the soul when you focus on your etheric body. Right, when you start from your self and go inward, you come to your astral body. Through your astral body, you are connected to the historical life of humanity. In turn, the beings of the third hierarchy, who make up the historical life of people, have an effect on the historical life of humanity. But if you go further, if you go down to the etheric body, this etheric body is a very complicated entity. In today's consciousness, man is not aware of much of the complexity that underlies this human etheric body. But you do get a certain idea of what has to work in this ether body when you study “Occult Science in Outline”; there you are shown, in the succession of Saturn, Sun and Moon time, that is, the successive embodiments of our Earth, how this ether body develops from the entire cosmos, and how the beings of the higher hierarchies participate. If we express this in a vivid formula, we can say from a certain point of view: Everything in the becoming of the world that is now more comprehensive, with which our etheric body is just as connected as our astral body is with the historical life of humanity, is created and formed by the beings of the second hierarchy, by the Exusiai, Dynameis, Kyriotetes. So, to illustrate this, I will say: The beings of the second hierarchy create everything that has an effect on the human etheric body.

But this in turn gives rise to something else. When you wake up in the morning and immerse yourself in your etheric body, you actually plunge into the creature of the beings of the second hierarchy. And you also submerge into your physical body. Of this physical body, which is why the being of mystery calls it the temple of man, what the external anatomy and physiology reveal is really only the very, very outermost shell. One can only grasp this tremendous, wondrous structure of the human physical body if one knows that it is the creature of the interaction of the beings of the first hierarchy. When you descend into your physical body upon waking in the morning, you actually descend into the work of the highest hierarchies. So think about how things are distributed in life: here between birth and death, when we are awake, we first descend into our astral body, in which the historical life of humanity is effective. But we also dive into our etheric body, the creature of the second hierarchy, in which much of the cosmos is effective, the etheric life of the cosmos. And we dive into our physical body, which is the creation of the beings of the first hierarchy. And when we live between death and a new birth, we do not live with the creature, but with the creators themselves.

Now you have one of the considerable differences in the life between birth and death and the life between death and a new birth. Here you descend by immersing yourself in your physicality, in all that is a creature of the higher hierarchies. When you die, you descend into the hierarchies themselves. You go from the creature to the creators. That is how things are connected.

And now, looking at what we have just discussed, let us ask: What exactly is our Earth? What geology and other sciences usually explore of our Earth is, after all, only the outer shell. What exactly is our Earth? As you know, we have our physical body in common with the entire mineral kingdom. Because we share our physical body with the entire mineral kingdom, we stand in it in a part of the earth when we are awake. We share our etheric body with the entire plant kingdom, standing in a second link of our earth. We share our astral body with the animal kingdom. We have the I for ourselves. There we stand in the three kingdoms of the earth, and our whole earth actually consists of the three kingdoms. This is the ground, so to speak, on which we stand, not physically, but with our human nature. But this cannot be seen, it remains supersensible. By standing on this ground, its lowest link is the mineral kingdom.

Now you remember from the “Geheimwissenschaft” that the mineral kingdom was not present during the earlier embodiments of our earth; the moon did not yet have a mineral kingdom, nor did the old sun, nor did Saturn. You only need to read about it in the “Geheimwissenschaft”. It was only on the earth, during the fourth embodiment of our earth, that the mineral kingdom came into being. I ask you to take careful note of this. It is a difficult matter, but it is an extraordinarily important one. In a sense, three formations had to precede it before the mineral earth could develop. We call these three formations the three elemental realms; the mineral realm is the fourth. We could also speak in these terms about the earlier embodiments: During the Saturn embodiment of our Earth: first elementary realm; during the Sun embodiment of our Earth: second elementary realm - the beings that were in the mineral realm at that time were earlier in the elementary realm -; during the Moon time - not the present time, the old Moon time -: third elementary realm. As we progress to Earth, the mineral realm arises as the fourth realm. Man carries this within himself.

To stand in the mineral kingdom is to stand in the fourth formation. We carry this mineral kingdom within us; only through this are we actually visible beings. But this mineral kingdom is also the only closed one in us. Only when the earth will have reached its end, when it will have entered into a different embodiment, will man be just as closed in the plant kingdom as he is today in the mineral kingdom. Then he would stand in the fifth formation. So the Earth will come to an end state and will arise anew: Jupiter time; man will then have his relationship to the plant kingdom as he has his relationship to the mineral kingdom today. He will stand in the fifth formation. To stand in the plant kingdom means to stand in the fifth formation.

There will come a new incarnation of our Earth, we call it the Venus incarnation, the Venusian age. Man will then stand for himself in the animal kingdom, not be an animal, but stand in the animal kingdom; as you know, this is different from being an animal. But to stand in the animal kingdom means to stand in the sixth formation. And then comes the conclusion, I would say, the seventh of all becoming. We call it the volcanic embodiment of the earth. Man has then reached the highest level of his education, only then has he become fully human. To stand in the human kingdom means to be in the seventh education, to stand in the seventh education. And in seven educations the life of man is complete.

Let us take a look at the human being today. He stands, as we do, in the mineral kingdom; he does not yet stand in the plant kingdom. When man stands in the plant kingdom, his whole life will be different. He will not feel as a personality, but as he feels today as a personality, he will feel as a human being, he will feel as a member of the whole of humanity. He will, for example, when he once stands in the plant kingdom, find it unbearable that he has a certain degree of happiness when someone next to him is surrounded by misfortune. Today, the human being feels as if he is closed off from other people by a partition. It must be so, otherwise man would never be able to develop his personality. But in the future kingdom of Jupiter, where man will be in the fifth education, it will be different; then it will be an absolutely unbearable thought that one can be happy and the other unhappy next to him, because people do not feel like an organism, as one says in abstracto. Now they do not feel as an organism: but that is an untruth, a deception, a maja. But the time will come when man will stand in the plant kingdom, where he will not find individual happiness tolerable when there is unhappiness next to him.

This thought underlies those spiritualists of whom I spoke to you yesterday. I told you: in the future, the English spiritualists will have to fight a great battle against the entire English popular culture. The flower of this popular culture is utilitarianism; and what this utilitarianism has driven out in Bentbam is essentially the principle that was called the maximation of happiness. This utilitarianism will increasingly fill their thinking. Therefore, only the opposition of the spiritually minded will enable this thinking to become spiritualized. That is the perspective for the future: the spiritually minded will have to overcome popular culture, to overcome it to the point of annihilation. That is why I was able to quote to you that Bentham, who, starting from popular culture, came to the principle that the good on earth consists in the happiness of the greatest number of people, has his most fierce opponents in the spiritually minded people of his own country, who tell him: That is a purely devilish definition, because this definition can only be made if you consider nothing but the mere present. If you think a little about the future of development, you know that the thought is quite unbearable: the happiness of the greatest number, because the opposite would be the unhappiness of the least number, and that would have to be evil. But evil and bliss have nothing to do with each other; for in the future, when man feels that he is in the plant kingdom, he feels that he is a member of the whole of humanity, and this opposite will be an impossibility. Just as today an important organic limb cannot simply be cut out of a human being without the whole human organism perishing, so in the future, when the earth is in the plant kingdom, not one particular group of people will be able to suffer without the whole suffering. That is a certain state of development that is coming. And because Bentham's definition of happiness has no future, only the present, it must be fought against, especially by those who aspire to spirituality.

Yes, why should it be a contradiction when it is said that good is defined by Bentham as the happiness of the greatest number, and evil is defined as the happiness of the least number? It is not an abstract contradiction for the rational mind, but the spiritualist does not think abstractly; the spiritualist thinks concretely. He does not think: What is the opposite of the other? but he thinks of the real that develops and that mostly does not agree with the mere thoughts of people.

And in an even higher degree the individual human being will participate in the whole when he is in the sixth education. And then especially when he is a full human being, a completely spiritualized human being, in the seventh education.

Yes, but we have seen from this that, as we now stand on the firm ground of the earth, we as human beings, insofar as we are creatures, actually only come to the fourth education. We have the mineral kingdom, that is finished. The other kingdoms, as they exist today, will partly perish, and man will develop them in a different way: the plant kingdom, as I have described it. We will not describe the animal and human kingdoms today, but next time.

Thus, today, when man regards himself as a creature standing among other creatures, he stands in the fourth formation. But he extends into the other formations, for we have seen that even in sleep man is under the influence of the third hierarchy. This hierarchy is further than he is, and is already in the fifth formation today, and the other beings are further still. So he extends into the higher levels of formation. I ask you to have the patience to really think through these subtle thoughts, because you now have to make the distinction between thinking of yourself as a creature and thinking of yourself as an independent spiritual being, which you are, for example, in sleep or between death and a new birth. Insofar as you think of yourself here in your physical, in your etheric body, astral body and I, insofar as you think of yourself as a creature on earth, you are in the fourth formation; but you reach into the fifth, sixth and seventh formations. By not living only in your body, but also outside of your body, in sleep or in death, you reach into the other hierarchies, and these other hierarchies are further. We can therefore say: If we regard the earth, with everything on and in it, as a created being, then it has reached the fourth level as a created being, and we have also reached the fourth level with it. But we rise up into the other spheres, into the other elements of formation, because we feel that we are independent personalities, that we feel that we are human, that we feel that we are members of the evolution of the earth, that we know that our etheric body is a creature of the second hierarchy, our physical body is a creature of the first hierarchy.

But the seventh education is not the end. Evolution continues, and by projecting into the higher forms of education, we also project into an eighth form of education, the famous eighth sphere. We can safely say: in a sense, by reaching up to highly developed levels of higher entities, we reach into the eighth sphere of education by standing in the pool of God or the spirit realm – as you like. But we reach into this eighth sphere of education with the finest components of our spiritual being. This reaching into the eighth education is a great secret, but we can still get an idea of a, I would say, very slight, not very intensive reaching into the eighth education, if we imagine the following.

We know that at the center of the earth stands the Mystery of Golgotha. If we look back at this Mystery of Golgotha, as it took place from the year 1 to 33 of our era, in the 747th year since the founding of Rome, it is in the first third of the fourth post-Atlantic period. We speak of the cultural development of humanity into which the Mystery of Golgotha fell, as of the fourth post-Atlantic cultural level. We know that the third post-Atlantean cultural stage was preceded by the Greco-Latin cultural epoch. We are now in the fifth, because the fourth, into which the Mystery of Golgotha fell, ended in the 15th century AD. So we are in the first third of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period. Now, the human being develops through the cultural periods, but when we describe these cultural periods, we are actually describing something that the human being does not fully experience. You were all embodied in the old Egyptian-Chaldean period, which is the third post-Atlantic period, then again in the Greek-Latin cultural period and in the present one; but you only ever experience the successive time – if things go well, don't they, even if someone lives to be eighty – just eighty years, and in between lies the much longer time that passes between death and a new birth. So of what we describe by describing the successive developmental periods of the earth, the human being only experiences a part.

You could, of course, say: Well, man only experiences a part here in the physical body; but he truly does not live in vain in the physical body: he experiences the world from the point of view of the physical body because he could not experience what he experiences from the physical body between death and a new birth. Whether what a person experiences in the pure spiritual realm between death and a new birth is valued more highly or less highly is not what we wish to discuss today. But it is different from what a person experiences here through his body, and it is very important to take this into account. And it is truly not in vain that man is placed in the world through his body; for he could not experience through his body in the world, always in episodes of the development of humanity as a whole, if he did not have the development of the body. It is a thoroughly false idea to have an ascetic attitude towards the development of the physical body on earth, regarding it merely as the enemy of the higher human being. In truth it is not that, but that which gives man something that he could not attain in any other way. And the man is very much mistaken who despises the life in the body, who regards the body as something low, for it means just a highest, an most important, a most meaningful in the whole life of man. And spiritual science can least of all follow that mysticism or that wrong direction of Christianity – not the right direction, but the wrong one – which despises what it calls the earthly world. Between death and a new birth, the human being experiences the world from a different perspective; he experiences it as he can experience it: now it is not the creatures that affect him through the physical body and etheric body, but the creators themselves. There he experiences something different.

This is why we have the task during our earthly career not only to get to know the world of the senses, but also the supersensible. For the historical life of humanity, which is a result of the third hierarchy, we cannot get to know from the perspective of earthly life. And for our time – I ask you to pay attention to the fact that I say: for our time, because it was not so in the pre-Christian era – for our time it is essential that the human being becomes aware: he must, while he lives here on earth between birth and death, also get to know, if he wants to get to know himself as a historical being, what angels, archangels and archai work as historical life. If we only get to know the world in the way that today's scientists want to know it, if we only get to know the world as history describes it, as if history were made by human beings alone and not by the beings of the third hierarchy, then we only get to know the outermost layers of historical development. Only he gets to know history who is aware that he must, so to speak, contemplate here in the physical body what the beings on earth do between death and a new birth in a completely different way - if I may use the expression, which is only used comparatively - which he gets to know personally, individually, in their heavenly deeds. He must get to know it in its effects on earth in historical life.

'But it was not always like that; that is how it is in the time in which we now live. Above all, it was not like that in the third post-Atlantean period, before the year 747, in the Egyptian-Chaldean period. We know that the whole spiritual life, the whole state of mind of people was different then. Then the supermundane life radiated into the ordinary human life, then man knew, even if he interpreted it differently than we now interpret it in the mythologies: the entities of the third hierarchy worked into his ego and his astral body. He meant the beings of the third hierarchy, called them Osiris or Zeus or Apollo or Minerva or whatever, but he knew: these beings, which he only invented and interpreted in this way – but the invention and interpretation related to these beings – they have an effect. Even if he had not wanted to see them, he would have seen them inwardly, for in those ancient times there was not the same delusion of consciousness as there is today; but there was only the delusion of life, which, as one says, anthropomorphized these figures. But one knew about these figures.

This is also one of the points through which the whole life of people has changed. Today, people in their ordinary consciousness do not know what is playing into their lives. Man was born as a soul being in this third post-Atlantean time, was born again in the fourth post-Atlantean time, and was born again in our time. He does not see what the beings of the third hierarchy bring about as historical life, but he should get to know it, he should really get to know it! Not in its true form, but in mythological form, did the old man get to know it.

Now put yourself in the shoes of such a human soul – there are more incarnations, as you know, but let us consider three consecutive ones: one Egyptian, one Greek, one from the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period – let us put ourselves in the shoes of such a human soul. During the third, during the Egyptian-Chaldean cultural period, it experiences what it could experience through the fact that the entities of the third hierarchy played into life. This had gradually dawned. Some had still experienced it in the fourth, in the Greco-Latin period; many people had still experienced it in an orderly way until the year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha, then it gradually disappeared; then people had to more and more confine themselves to what is present in the external sense world, if they did not develop inwardly in such a way that they could get to know the spiritual world again in a different way and thus ascend to the entities of the third hierarchy.

And now, when we look at such a soul that is returning, it comes with all that it has absorbed in the third post-Atlantean period, in the Egyptian-Chaldean cultural period. It comes with all that, but let us assume that such a soul refuse to look at the deeds of the third hierarchy in the historical life of humanity in the present incarnation and say to herself: What do I care what the angels, archangels and archai have done; for me, history is what human beings have ever done here on earth. Such a soul does not take into account that in everything that human beings have done on earth, the deeds of the third hierarchy are involved. Let us now assume for the sake of clarity – for some souls it also applies to the fourth, the Greco-Latin period, up to the year 333 – but let us assume for the sake of clarity that such a soul comes over from the Egyptian-Chaldean, from the third post-Atlantean period , from the third post-Atlantean period, it would not need to make any effort to know about the deeds of the third hierarchy, because that came into human life by itself; that is what this soul still carries within it. So we say that this soul was able to process back then, and that is what it carries within it. One could not have said to an ancient Egyptian – he had no real concept of historical life, but he did look to historical life – but one could not have said to him about this historical life: people make history. He would only have laughed, because he saw that the entities of the third hierarchy made history, even if he also presented them in a sensuous way in his own way.

All this is within the present-day human being, but unconsciously, of course; it has descended into the subconscious. Now they believe that history is something that people on earth have made. This gives rise to a strange state of mind, which I ask you to consider very carefully. If we were to look at such a soul in the present, we would say that this soul refuses to place itself in the historical life of humanity in reality; it says: I want to know nothing of the deeds of the archai, the archangels, the angels; I only want to know from external testimonies what people have done since those ancient times. But in this way such a soul cannot develop further; in reality such a soul remains at the point of view at which it stood in the old Egyptian times; it only has the maturity of a soul of the old Egyptian times, it does not allow itself to grasp reality. The angels, archangels and archai have developed further, they have done what could be experienced by humanity since then. Such a soul says: What the hierarchies have already done up there in the spiritual world, I will not get involved in that; I will only get involved in my own abilities. But the abilities are none other than those which she already had during the ancient Egyptian times.

Numerous such souls live in the present, and think of the peculiar situation of such a soul! Until the year 333, a soul could not yet come into this situation, because the spiritual world still extended into it by itself; but now, since that time, souls can be in a strange position: they cannot resist reality, in reality they are naturally in it, in what the angels, archangels and archai do, but they deny this with their consciousness, they only take up in their consciousness that which has been brought about here on earth by people themselves.

This is a case where people as creatures are in the fourth formation, because the fourth stage of formation is everything that happens in a creaturely way. So what men on Earth have done since Egyptian times belongs to the fourth education, but man himself rises above that, and due to the fact that since the year 333 he cannot consciously reach into it at all with his whole being, into what he actually reaches, due to that he even stands with his nature above the seventh level of education, he stands in the eighth level of education. So that today there is the possibility that souls are in fact in the eighth stage of education, but do not recognize it because they do not recognize the activity of the historical life of men through the angels, archangels and archai, but only recognize the fourth stage, so that the eighth sphere remains unconscious in them. This is an extraordinarily important fact.

If a world view arises from this state of mind, what then arises? Man ignores his own reality, he does not admit that he extends into a high spiritual realm, although he really does extend into it, but he only admits that he is in the human realm. This state of mind has only clearly come to light in what I have called the industrial age in recent days. Only the fact that people are immersed in the whole of industrial life has led them to completely ignore the fact that man reaches up into the spiritual world within a world view and only to take into account the external deeds of men. That is something significant. One cannot understand the present if one does not know that there are numerous people today who, with their world view, reach into the eighth sphere, and ignore this fact, that is to say, they bring all the damage to earth that reaching into a sphere of the world brings when one denies its existence. For by denying that he is projecting into the eighth sphere, into the eighth stage of education, he shuts himself out from the good beings of that stage of education and delivers himself into the hands of the Ahrimanic spirit of that stage of education. His thinking becomes, instead of divine or spiritual, Ahrimanic.

When speaking in spiritual scientific terms, one must point to the facts of this world in their truth. And the truth is, for example, that something like the materialistic historical view of Karl Marx, who lived from 1818 to 1883, that Karl Marx's world view is a purely Ahrimanic one. Its secret is based on the fact that only what is materially occurring on earth is recognized, that the way in which the human being's spirituality reaches up into the supersensible worlds is ignored, and that as a result of this ignorance, the human being falls prey to the Ahrimanic powers. For as soon as man excludes his consciousness from the worlds into which he reaches up, he falls prey to the ahrimanic or luciferic, in this case the ahrimanic, powers.

Now, we are faced with the fact that numerous people today advocate a purely Ahrimanic world view, fight for this purely Ahrimanic world view, and thereby also conjure up over the earth all that must come when the Ahrimanic order spreads over the earth instead of the divine order. Bentham's philosophy, of which I spoke to you yesterday, is in the first place an external theoretical expression of this Ahrimanic view of life. Marxism is such an expression, which is also already creative, which is formative, which has an enormous influence. And the indolence of bourgeois life knows nothing about it and has not cared for decades what elements of such world views have developed in the sphere of social life. Marxism is an extreme expression of this. It will continue to have an effect. What at first was only meant to be knowledge will become an event, will actually become reality. Only insight into these things, which in turn forms the will, can help in these matters.

Such truths are drastic, such truths are truly not suitable for mere Sunday sensationalism; such truths are that which is most intimately connected with the whole cultural life of the present day. And much will depend on people's willingness to recognize that which lives in their thoughts in connection with the whole order of the world. For in our time we have entered the cycle of time in which we cannot advance without falling into terrible catastrophes if we do not understand how what takes place in the human being relates to the evolution of the whole cosmos.

Such truths, when they are discovered in the search for truth – you can take my word for it – are initially disturbing. If you have a feeling for the impact of the great truths in the world, you also know the feeling of being disturbed by these great truths. It is not easy to live in the life of truth. Only the superficial might think that it is not disturbing to have to say to oneself: people, a great number of whom believed – and that is also true! – that they honestly strove for the truth, are permeated by the spirit of Ahriman! It strikes at the heart, my dear friends! Therefore, when such truths arise, one tries to come to terms with them. These truths are not there to be let in at one ear and out at the other. Nor are they there to be found in one's lonely meditation and accepted as sensations. These truths are not there for that. One must come to terms with them. One must be able to find how what one knows as world evolution, what is all around one, also agrees with what people judge, that something like that is there.

Anyone who, like me, has seen how many people there are today - now people can see for themselves through external facts - who live by Marxism or Marxism-like views, is faced with the necessity of taking a closer look at these things. One often says to oneself: Perhaps you are an illusionist after all! Of course one need not immediately doubt the whole spiritual world, but with regard to such concrete truths one often says to oneself: Perhaps you are succumbing to illusions after all! — The deep sense of responsibility towards the truth must arise precisely in the face of spiritual truths. Then one seeks to dig deeper and deeper. But there is indeed not a little, but a great deal, a great deal, which provides terrible confirmation of what I have just explained to you as the ahrimanic character of, for example, Marxism or similar world views.

When I spoke here some time ago, I made a certain demand of you. I spoke about the fact that the time as we experience it is actually an illusion, that time is in reality something quite different from how man experiences it, because man does not take time perspectively, I said at the time. Man experiences space perspectively; he sees the more distant trees smaller than the nearby trees. In reality, time is also to be seen perspectively. Events that lie far apart in time are to be seen differently than those that lie close together in time. But this is only the basis for time really being what the researchers of all times have regarded it as: time is the most important medium of human deception. We imagine, for example, that the beings of the higher hierarchies also flow through time as our own soul life flows through time: there is no truth in this. In reality, the essence of the higher hierarchies lies in elapsed times, but they work across from the elapsed times, as one can work across in space from a distant place, for example, through light signals or something similar, to beings in a nearby place in space. Time is not what people see it as, nor is time what philosophers like Kant see it as, but time in its reality is something completely different. And what man sees as reality is also a maja, a great deception. Above all, what we believe to be past remains, because we live in time as a deception. But it remains there; time really becomes something like space. And one looks at past events in the same way that one looks at distant objects in space, if one truly sees. Time is an illusion.

And further, spiritual science knows that the sources of other great illusions in human worldviews arise from the fact that man succumbs to deception with regard to time. If there were many physicists among you, I could express myself here in purely physical terms. I could show you with the help of physical formulas that just as the physicist introduces time - t, as he merely calls it - into the physical formulas, this time is only a number, and thus something quite unknown, not a reality but pure appearance. The only thing that is real is the speed, but the physicist regards this as a consequence of time. Since you are not physicists and probably will not get involved in understanding the matter, I will not go into it further either.

Time is an illusion, that is a profound truth, because time as an illusion underlies many other illusions of life. For example, if you apply time incorrectly in the course of history, you see everything in the wrong light. People in the first three Christian centuries thought that certain things that had happened were over and done with. In reality, they should have thought: the archangel or being from the hierarchy of archai who guided the events of that time is still there; it continues to have an effect in a different way. The past is only an illusion. It is very important for people to realize that time has a perspective character for spiritual reality, that they must be just as mistaken about events in the course of time – while they do not believe this – as they are about events in space if they do not allow for perspective. Consider how great the deception would be if you did not allow for perspective, if you regarded what is far away in space as having the same effect as what is close by. You are looking at a distant mountain. Your health depends to a great extent on the air around you; the air on the distant mountain does not, because if you want it to be beneficial to your health, you have to go there. As soon as we are dealing with reality in life, reality is essentially connected with perspective. But it is the same with regard to time. We live in the present when we do not believe that the more distant events of the past can be weighed as much as the near events. If we look at the Egyptian-Chaldean period in the third post-Atlantic period and only consider what the documents provide and register them as Torengeschichte registers, the fable convenue, which today calls itself history, then we make the perspective mistake. For what people did outwardly during the Egyptian period has no significance at all for today's life, but what the angels and archangels and archai did has significance; but this only emerges in the perspective formed by observation. Therefore, it is a principle, and not only today, when we all have to rediscover these things on the basis of anthroposophy, but in all times it was a principle for all spiritual researchers, that time as such is an illusion, and never was time counted in such a way by a real knower of reality that it was thought to be a truth, that it itself would have been thought of as a true reality.

Now the strange thing came to light, this Karl Marx of whom I have spoken to you, to whom millions swear today, albeit more or less in shades, more or less in formulas - but that's not what . Those who know these things know that thousands of people swear by him, or if they do not swear consciously outwardly, they do so subconsciously. This Karl Marx tried to answer the question: what are the true goods of humanity? What is it really that is achieved in humanity? — He answers the question in an extraordinarily original way, for it has never been answered before; human goods have always been considered in some other way than Karl Marx considers them. What human goods are was considered, let us say, for example, in terms of whether it had to be brought from afar, whether a lot of understanding was needed to find it, or the like. I once tried to make this clear to you by saying: Human labor must also be considered qualitatively; one must generally get involved in the concrete. We consider the elaborate Gotthard Tunnel. No one today who builds something like the Gotthard Tunnel is unfamiliar with differential and integral calculus, and differential and integral calculus is a Leibniz or, if it is better liked in England, a Newtonian - the two were arguing about the honor - invention. So one can say that Newton or Leibniz helped to create the Gotthard Tunnel. Yes, without them it would certainly not have been built! Now, the work of Newton or Leibniz must be evaluated in a completely different way than the work of someone who lays one stone on top of another in the Gotthard Tunnel. This is one way of evaluating human goods, human labor. The theory of the value of human labor, of human life, has taken various forms. Labor, goods of life, have been evaluated from the most diverse points of view, but never as Marx evaluated them. Karl Marx takes up a single element in his theory of value. For him, everything that has value in human life is only valuable because it is condensed time, namely condensed working time. Whether something can be produced in three hours, six hours, or twelve hours is the measure of its economic and global economic value. A large part of Marx's theory, which is so common today that it is possible to see it when someone from the so-called higher classes talks about work from his point of view, is based on this. A real socialist, a worker, stands up and says: “Please look it up in Karl Marx – of course he doesn't have the book with him – please, page 374, you will find this or that there.

One must really know life in order to be able to judge life, otherwise one will be amazed everywhere that this or that happens here or there. What happens happens out of the impulses of the human soul. But if one cares as little as people on earth have cared in recent decades about what has actually been going on at the bottom of the human soul, then one should not be at all surprised when the whole thing finally collapses catastrophically. But I have explained this for a special reason. It is the first time that the original has occurred, that what is only the source of deception has been made the standard of all economic values: time in the form of working hours.

So take this from a higher perspective. People who understand reality have always known that time is an illusion. Now someone comes along and says: But what has value in the world has only as much value as condensed working time is contained in it. Does that not mean in other words that your reality is an illusion and only that which is condensed time has real value? The deception is made into reality right down to the form of time by those who want to be completely materialistic, who want to stand only on the ground of reality, and reality is overlooked.

This is just one example. I could show you numerous things that comfort when one is dismayed by truths that, if one has a heart for the life of humanity, thunder into the mind. But when one then studies the matter in detail, when one looks at the hand of someone like Karl Marx, whose spirit is known to be Ahrimanic, and asks him: How do you proceed in detail? — then it is indeed the case that one comes across the Ahrimanic, and one feels: You may admit such truths to yourself. — I just wanted to give you one example here. It is not easy to have to say: Everything that protrudes into the world anachronistically today does so because people have left the spiritual world, which thus becomes their eighth sphere, and they only perceive the world in material terms. If you take this, then you will feel with all its weight what it means when I repeatedly emphasize: Today it does not matter at all whether a person says something beautiful, something that can be admitted, but what really matters is what comes from what one says or does. I must tell again and again how I have been repeatedly tested – you know I am not saying this out of some silly vanity – to draw attention to the fact that it does not matter what one thinks, but that one sees what effect one's thoughts have. You can have a thought that is absolutely wonderful. But if you have no idea how this thought will work in reality, it can have the opposite effect. I have been trying to make such things clear in various examples for years. For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, I once gave a lecture in which I said – I will now summarize much of what was discussed at the time in a few words, because I just want to illustrate –: Today there are more people who are programmatic pacifists, talking very nicely about the leadership of humanity from their pacifist point of view. Pacifism has never actually assumed such proportions as in this time – so I spoke at the beginning of the century. And that is, I said, a clear sign that we are facing the greatest war of humanity. For people in the past did not think about human interrelations in such an unrealistic way as they have done within these circles, they only went so far as the content of their thoughts, and had so little awareness of the real effectiveness of what lives in the soul that one can only recognize it through the whole world perspective. This is only done in the age in which all the things we have been talking about have been spreading.

How is it that something that is no more than a train of thought, and a very unreal one at that, can set the tone for many people, a thought that can never have anything to do with what is happening? This is Woodrow Wilson's train of thought, Wilsonian train of thought, which is nothing more than Egyptian-Chaldean train of thought, which does not care that there is a spiritual reality in history, but only adds abstract thoughts to each other. It comes from all these peculiarities of our age. A future historiography will have to baptize everything that our time has produced in terms of unreal thoughts that bring about the opposite, in the name of Woodrow Wilson.

That is what is decisive in our world view, what must be decisive, and what must be considered not from today to tomorrow, but from the point of view of the whole of cosmology, from the point of view of being placed in it. He who answers such questions from the point of view that arises out of a complete world-view judges such people as Woodrow Wilson is, not from sympathies or antipathies, but judges as one judges objectively about something. But that is the anachronism, that very many people today cannot get involved in it, because it is uncomfortable to look things in the face. You cannot look things in the face if you do not research them in depth. This must be said of such souls, who today have no connection to historical life: they are souls who ignore what real history has been through the third hierarchy and therefore do not deal with the real impulses when they speak, but basically only with empty words.

This is a fundamental requirement of our time: that we come to terms with it and realize that, even if we have the most beautiful concepts that the human mind can grasp, the most beautiful concepts that are quite sufficient to explore the nature that is spread around us, we will never understand anything about history. For history does not unfold as natural life unfolds; history unfolds as the deeds of spiritual entities. This is what must be added to the other world views. From theocracy, as I described to you yesterday, people emerged by still remembering the old theocratic order during the time of theocracy; then the metaphysical time came, which essentially developed the civil service throughout the world; then the purely materialistic time came, the time of industrialists. This would lead completely into the unreal in relation to the spiritual, if it were not for the counterweight of working one's way back into the real, into the actual, which, however, can only be observed if one can ascend to that which is veiled for man in ordinary life in the present time cycle. We must learn again to speak of supersensible things if we want to speak of history. In the nineteenth century people often spoke of historical ideas. Everyone knows that you can't chop down a tree with ideas, but the followers of Ranke and similar historians believe that the historical life of humanity is brought about by ideas. We must realize that this time, the mere metaphysical time, must also be overcome, otherwise that world view, which is purely limited to the sensual, will become overgrown. Mankind must work towards the spiritual. It can only do so if it first works its way through the field of history, from the apparent succession of events in time to the real event, which, I might say, is so tangible behind the external sensory reality, especially in the case of history. Then, however, one will no longer create social or similar programs based on ideas that relate only to the external life, but one will proclaim one's social programs again based on the revelations of the spiritual world. But the programs that people create today are very, very different from these revelations from the spiritual world.

We will discuss this next time. I will continue these reflections next Friday; they cannot be concluded so quickly.

Only when they intervene in the organization, which also affects ordinary remembering - when they have the strength of sensory impressions - within the area adjacent to the sensory sphere - thus on the inward boundary.

The dream is experienced in the etheric body - movement only occurs when the astral body clings to the etheric body.

When the connection between the ego and the astral body becomes conscious, then one experiences in the will - a feeling of emptiness; when the connection between the physical body and the etheric body becomes conscious, then one experiences in the imagination - a feeling of density; the inner being is filled - as if spinning dreams formed this inner being. The imagination, becoming more and more ethereal, forms a picture, either within the senses (in waking consciousness) or behind them (in dreams or imagination).

In dreams, the temporal perspective that is experienced in waking life comes to our perception.

In imagination, the spatial perspective is removed – the images inwardly carry the movement.

The figures of the dream are alienated from the I; the imaginations are assimilated by the I.

The mystic withdraws from the world; the naturalist goes out into the world. The spiritual researcher enters with the world into his inner being and with his inner being into the world.

In breathing, the contact with the outer world is experienced dreamily in the rhythmic system.

In the inspiration that consciousness pours out through the imagination, this interaction is experienced with full awareness throughout the entire body.

But it is not air; it is ether - and with it its content - the soul-spiritual (astral). - Thus the world before and after earthly life is opened. - But with that, the ethical world has also merged with the physical world.

One converses with a dream figure as with a living person, without knowing that he has recently died - (Hartmann). One never does that in the imagination - because in it one lives only in the sphere of reality - one does not take into account in imagining anything that has not been experienced - one learns to live in images. -

One imagines that one has written a book and searches for the manuscript (Hartmann, Psych. p. 88). One does not do this in the imagination because one views the inner process that is present quite differently; not as a wish but as a task that arises. One finds in it the forces of survival. Not the desires are inwardly stimulated – but one remains fixed on the image = the image is not filled by the outer world, but by the activity emanating from within = Ordinary Consciousness: Wish-Image-Reality.

The title of the today's talk How Does One Disprove Theosophy? may appear strange at first. However, it seemed to me that it could be a good introduction to understand the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview to let our thoughts wander over this subject. If spiritual science wants to gain the hearts of many contemporaries, it is particularly necessary that it is not only a worldview but also that from this worldview and philosophy of life impulses originate which should give us strength, security, and hope for life.

Nothing is more dangerous for a worldview than fanaticism. This asserts itself just with the various worldviews; everybody knows this. If theosophy or spiritual science should give an impulse just in this direction, it has to be unfanatical, that means to understand its opponents and their objections completely. How easily does one regard an opponent as an illogical, maybe even as a bad person? Spiritual science should get itself into understanding the opponent and his reasons. It has every reason to do this. Indeed, it can satisfy some longings of life, but one must say on the other side, the way is rather far to the depths to recognise the validity of its assertions and teachings. The difficulties that face someone who wants to find the way conscientiously to theosophy from the everyday life are just the biggest ones.

Hence, I want to prepare the talk that I will hold on 25 March here and that shall introduce into the being of theosophy in positive way with a consideration of the possible and up to a certain degree entitled objections. However, to be able to speak about such objections, we have only to come to an agreement what theosophy—meant here—wants to be. Since it is sure that one cannot be successful with any theosophical book. Above all, I want to speak of theosophy as far as it claims to be taken seriously as science. What is now theosophy if we disregard everything that sticks to its heels in dilettantish way?

Theosophy wants to be a worldview that leads to the spiritual world. It wants to give scientific reasons of that view which states that behind everything that our senses say about the outside world that our mind engaged in the brain says about the outside world one can recognise a spiritual world. In this spiritual world, only the reasons of everything are that takes place in the sensory world and in the intellectual world.

With it, however, we would not differ as theosophists very much from supporters of this or that worldview. Since today more and more people, also of the outer science, are convinced that behind everything that the outer science can investigate something else is concealed that is unknown at first. Now it is not substantial for theosophy or spiritual science that one admits that something spiritual exists behind any physical, but the essentials are that the human being recognises to a certain degree and recognises in higher and higher measure—if he enables his own soul—what there is behind the physical world. Theosophy or spiritual science cannot agree with those who state that there are limits of human knowledge.—We have to confine ourselves, however, as human being to that which the senses recognise what methodical science can investigate. However, we can assume that one can extend these limits of human knowledge more and more, so that the human being develops his cognitive forces to be able to recognise worlds that are different from the world in which he is at first with his normal consciousness. From this viewpoint theosophy is inextricably connected with the requirement that the human being can develop spiritual senses, spiritual eyes and ears, higher organs, not higher physical organs, but higher spiritual-mental organs, so that for him at a certain time the great moment takes place. If this also happens on a higher level, nevertheless, you can compare it to the moment that a blind-born experiences if he can see after an operation. While before he had darkness around himself, now the world of light, of forms and colours presents itself to him. Thus, it is possible for every soul to experience the moment of awakening in another world, to behold different from in the world with the normal consciousness. In the characterised sense, one has to regard this new world as a higher, supersensible one.

Then theosophy shows the means to cause such a moment of awakening. About these means, I speak particularly in the next talk. Today I want only to outline the theosophical worldview.

Let us envisage the moment of falling asleep where all outer impressions stop, and where the reason that spreads out like a net about the sensory perception stops functioning. We may say, in such case the human being is in another form of existence; he can perceive nothing around himself if the impressions of the sensory world and the work of the reason stop. Of course, only the real experience can decide whether it is necessary that the human being always must get another condition if he receives no impressions of the sensory world which resembles the sleep, or whether there can also be another state. Only the experience of those can decide this who have gone through the intimate work of the soul by which they have developed such strong soul impulses so that something can happen to them that resembles the moment of falling asleep and, nevertheless, is radically different from it. It resembles falling asleep in this respect that all outer sensory impressions and intellectual activities stop. It is different because that who wants to become a spiritual researcher makes his soul active with exercises and gets such forces from its depth that he is not unconscious if he himself arbitrarily stops all outer sensory impressions and the intellectual activities, but he leads an inner conscious life. The soul orients itself, brings up abilities and forces from its depths of which the normal consciousness has no idea.

You can compare it with bringing up the eyesight of the blind-born after he was operated. From the depths of the soul, we can bring up forces which work if, otherwise, unconsciousness had to occur, and which work now in such a way that they connect the soul with a spiritual world that as really exists for the human being as our sensory world exists. Thus, that which leads the spiritual researcher to his science is, indeed, something subjective at first, still the observations of those who have done this experience got to according results.

At first, we want only to describe what refers to the human being how he faces us immediately. The human being appears to the immediate consciousness as physical body at first, with everything that one can touch with hands, can see with the eyes. However, theosophy shows us that the nature of the human being is not exhausted in that which we perceive with the senses, but that the physical body is embedded in supersensible, higher members that one can investigate only in the just mentioned way. Then there we speak of the fact that everything that causes the life phenomena in the human being is due to a supersensible member, to the so-called “etheric body” or life body. We speak of this etheric body in such a way that it can appear to the spiritual eye as the colour appears to the physical eye that it is an outer, indeed, only supersensible spiritual reality.

We further speak of the fact that except this etheric body another supersensible member exists—do not take exception to the term, it should be only a technical term—, the astral body. We call “astral body” the supersensible bearer of that which we experience, otherwise, only in our inside as our passions, as joy and sorrow, as pains, but also as the whole imagining surging up and down. Then we distinguish beside the etheric body and the astral body still the next supersensible member; since as the human being has a physical body in common with the entire mineral realm, he has the etheric body in common with all living beings, and the astral body with the entire animal realm. However, the human being still has a fourth member for himself by which he is the crown of the earthly creation that we call the ego-body or the ego being which the other earthly beings do not have.

Thus, theosophy says that we understand the human being completely if we consider him as consisting of these four members. It also shows that with the human being if he falls asleep a separation of his members takes place, while in the bed the physical body and the etheric body remain, and the astral body and the ego are separated from these and ascend to a higher world. As long as the astral body and the ego are separated from the physical and etheric bodies, the human being is so organised that his consciousness remains dark. Hence, the unconsciousness of sleep. Only the physical body and the denser part of the etheric body are subject to the temporal decay, the human essence consists of the ego, the astral body, and a part of the etheric body. This essence cast off the outer cover of the physical body and a part of the etheric body at death and goes through a life under other conditions in the spiritual world.

Then theosophy speaks of the fact that life does not only run between birth and death, but that the spiritual essence of the human being goes through repeated lives on earth in a physical body, while the forces which belong to the human being reach from that life to the other. Everything that we take up in our life as experiences between birth and death because we learn, everything that we do, everything that we accomplish while we burden ourselves with guilt or merit: all that develops forces in our souls. It does not die when the human being dies but remains united with the human essence. After the essence of the human being has processed these forces in a spiritual life between death and a new birth, he builds up a new bodily existence according to his destiny, so that we have the results and effects of former lives in this life on earth. We have created our physical body by our essence so that it has this or that ability now, can do this or that.

We call this law of cause and effect, which puts us at this or that place, in these or those conditions which our destiny develops after the former lives with the Indian word—because we have no suitable term in the western literature—the law of karma. With our essence of which we are not aware at first in the normal life, we have prepared our destiny. The human being experiences successive lives on earth. One could say that he experiences the chain of life that points beyond time and proves the eternity of the human being.

With it, I have today abstained from proving these things and have stated the knowledge only sketchily which forms the most elementary level of the theosophical worldview. What one can bring forward as documents, as proofs of reincarnation and karma, I want to treat that in the next talk. Today I wanted only to point out that it is hard for the scientifically educated human being of the present to find access to the just characterised truths of theosophy.

Now we want to discuss some of the possible serious objections that those persons can do who have only developed their worldview from the concepts and mental pictures of the present. For these persons it is exceptionally difficult at first to familiarise themselves generally with the idea that the soul can develop “spiritual senses”—if I may use this contradictory expression.

Let us assume that a person has done inner exercises, has tried to develop the willpower in such a way that he can imagine something if no outer impressions are there; that he has internalised himself so that he believes, even if he perceives nothing with the eyes and ears, that he sees and hears something. Why—somebody may ask—should one accept this generally as something entitled?—One has nothing at all to argue against the fact that a person gets by certain inner exercises to such experiences that have a certain liveliness, maybe even a higher liveliness than the outer sensory impressions and everything that our reason can attain. However—an opponent may say—does one not know illusions, hallucinations? Does one not know self-deceptions? Do not those swear who are subject to such self-deceptions and who are mentally ill that everything that they see is real that everything that they hear are real voices and regard them as real? Why should the visions that are artificially caused by soul exercises have another objective value?—We have to answer this at first

Spiritual science takes the view that they are not pathological states, but something that one attains by “artificial” soul exercises. What I have said now, is actually trivial. However, it does not matter that such a statement is more or less trivial or brilliant, but it matters what it releases in our souls how we position ourselves to it with our belief and our convictions. There one has to say, the conscientious researcher of truth has many reasons to speak about soul experiences this way, and we understand that serious research rejects them. We need only to imagine how evident it is for the human being of the present that serious scientific research could only have beneficial effects after all similar tendencies had been forced back as such which also seem to exist in spiritual science.

There we need only to go back to ancient times. Then we could prove how everywhere—even until the Middle Ages—in that which the human being perceived with his senses which he could investigate with the methods of his reason something was mixed that the human being believed to experience with inner mystic knowledge and how the sense percepts were interwoven with the inner experiences. You need only to look with the experienced eye into any natural-historical book of the Middle Ages. You see very odd fantastic animals there, and you soon recognise that any knowledge and view of that time were based on the fact that the human beings saw that inexactly which they had seen and then imagined it with that which they experienced in their souls. In what way did one overcome these deceits?—With the exact science that rests upon the experiences of the senses and on that which these senses teach our reason by observation and by experiment. We have sure scientific results only, since we have such a research by which every human being can check the results at any time. Today the human being is right if he wants to check everything.

Only spiritual science or theosophy can argue something against it. We look back at the times of the aurora of natural sciences, at a person like Kepler. In his mind not only those outer laws of the celestial mechanics lived which we can study today as Kepler's laws, but also a real spiritual-scientific view of the harmony of the universe. From the spiritual penetration of the universe he got his laws of the celestial mechanics only. There the spiritual scientist can say, look how fertile it is if we turn the spiritual-scientific view to Kepler. Nevertheless, Kepler's laws almost prove a spiritual world. Nevertheless, Kepler can persuade us of a spiritual world.

An opponent may say now, just with such a spirit like Kepler you can realise that he had, nevertheless, some weaknesses. With him, you could convince yourself how bad it is for the scientific security if in his soul such a thing lives like a certain mystic contemplation of the cosmic relations; since there you come again to the medieval mysticism and with it close to rather doubtful spiritual operations as, for example, astrology is with all its outgrowths.

This arose just because one developed the idea of the general celestial harmony in abstract way and said, nevertheless, there must be a connection of the big world of the macrocosm and of that which happens in the single human being. Then the medieval astrology arose from it. Now, however, astrology has a rather doubtful aspect. Nothing stirs up the human egoism as strong as just astrology if future events should be forecast using the constellations of the stars. If the human being wants to know them beforehand, it always has an egoistic reason. Kepler knew this and it distressed him very much that he had to cast a horoscope of a lord on order of his prince. In a letter to a friend, Kepler informs of his pain when he had to forecast particular things for a high personality. In this case, he said, it would be bad to inform the personality concerned of something and it would be better if this person did not know it because he would develop, otherwise, no care and no energy.—In another case he said, one had to call the person's attention to the possibility that a misfortune could approach.

An opponent may say, with Kepler the tendency of a doubtful morality also exists when he says, one must help in a way if one can determine the destiny of the human being from the spiritual world, one must not say the truth everywhere only, one has to consider whether the truth is good or harmful. Briefly, you can see with Kepler himself that a neighbouring area of spiritual science, astrology, just goes to the bad. Tragically can be experienced just with Kepler how a way that leads on one side to the highest areas of spiritual life can lead on the other side to the biggest superstition. Kepler himself had to fight with the crassest superstition of the Middle Ages to save his mother from the stake because she was charged to be a witch. Here we stand in a point where we can close the chain completely between beholding into the spiritual world and the crassest superstition. Who does not know how easily people who want to get to know the spiritual world also want to do this comfortably today and rather want to call the spirits in a doubtful spiritistic way and to make them manifest, than to rise by spiritual development into the spiritual world. Thus, an opponent may say, we see a proof with Kepler how the theosophical way of thinking can lead as the astrological one into doubtful areas. We could bring in many examples. We want to point only to an example that can be characteristic for others.

Someone who studied Hegel thoroughly, as I did, is also allowed to say the following: Hegel strove for a worldview that is independent of every sensory view. As long as one remains generally in a kind of blurred pan-theism, one can discuss about the authorisation of single things. However, if one pretends to know anything about the special constitution of that which arises from the supersensible world, then one has to be controlled by the facts. Now one of the areas which spiritual research enters first is the area of numbers and their harmony laws. Some philosophers have accepted such laws, Hegel too. Hegel tried to prove that a certain number rule forms the basis of our planetary system, and that according to this number rule we can know that our solar system must have so and so many planets, and that these move in certain distances. So Hegel meant, by reflection one must be able to control the planetary system. Hence, he supplied evidence that according to the number rules only so and so many planets are possible and except these no other planets were possible. Nevertheless, the planet Neptune was discovered later.

We could bring in many such examples, because they are knitted after the just characterised pattern. One just realises with it that not only the experiences are a source of evidence for the today's science, but that also a healthy control [must be there by the facts]. Where science accepts hypotheses, it accepts something only if the experience confirms the theories. Now the opponents of theosophy may say, science has positioned itself on a healthy ground; and now spiritual science comes and wants to mix something in science that comes from quite different sources, from a higher beholding, from karma laws and the like.

The spiritual researcher will maybe say, yes, but you could approach me so far that you admit that which I claim, for example, the teaching of karma and repeated lives on earth, as something that one calls a useful working hypothesis in science.—At that time when the so-called oscillation theory of the light originated, no one saw in it something else than “ether oscillations.” You can argue a lot against it; the whole theory was an invented system. One said, if we suppose that a world ether penetrates all material processes that everything is in motion, then these oscillations must take place according to the mathematically computable rules in such a way that this and that arises.—Then [the calculations] also turned out to be correct in the experience, for example, with light, heat et cetera. One calls this a useful working hypothesis if one says, this hypothesis even avails us to discover new facts; even if the hypothesis is wrong in itself, nevertheless, it led us just to the true.

Nevertheless, accept the ideas of karma or reincarnation as a working hypothesis, the spiritual researcher could say to the opponents of theosophy. Now against it one could argue: where it concerns so essential and important things that intervene so deeply in life, one cannot get involved with the possibility that the outer life can be explained if one does certain hypothetical requirements. Someone who has looked around a little more thoroughly in the logic knows that one can conclude correctly even from wrong requirements. Theosophy could be quite wrong, even if one supposes that the ideas of karma and reincarnation are right. The conclusions could be right concerning the outer life—even if the requirements were wrong.—However, a strict, succinct logic could say; with it, the theosophical ideas are rejected as useful working hypotheses.

It is even worse if one considers it epistemologically. There an opponent of theosophy may say, concerning knowledge it matters above all to investigate the objective validity. Now there is no possibility at all to distinguish truth and error of illusions, hallucinations and of any soul life generally than the control by experience. If one excludes experience and the soul life should proceed without [control by] experience, one gets into the area of absolute arbitrariness, of the uncontrollable. That means, a science that searches the principle of controllability has to consider the whole method of higher beholding as unjustified, and it has to agree with modern science that says, what one should consider as scientific, must be independent from all subjective experiences. It has to take place while we exclude everything that belongs to our soul life.

However, you say—the modern epistemologist may say to the spiritual scientist—that you want to remain just within your soul life and want to isolate it; that means that you enter an area which science has just excluded. Modern science has shown that it has found its sure results just because it has proceeded in such a way that it has excluded all subjective experiences. So one must say to the theosophists, do not mix anything into science that is warmed up old methods which one has overcome since the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries.

Thus, the mood, the sensation of someone may speak who faces spiritual science with the attitude of our time. However, one can penetrate even deeper and ask, is there any possibility generally to state that that which a human being beholds who has attained a higher beholding has a meaning also for other human beings?—There, however, spiritual science says, this higher beholding is necessary to visit the supersensible world and to investigate its truths. However, if the truths of the supersensible world have been found and are told, then they can be understood with any impartial logic and any natural sense of truth. As well as every human being cannot go to the laboratory to inform himself of the methods of biology and zoology and other fields and can still accept the results of these researches, one can also accept and understand—spiritual science says—what is investigated in the supersensible world.

Now one could ask, is such an assertion of spiritual research entitled? It would be entitled only if that which the spiritual researcher has to say could be understood by us after the pattern which we have formed for understanding in the usual scientific world. There the spiritual researcher says, for example, our current life between birth and death is an effect that arises from the causes of former lives; the former lives reach into our current life. I experience that which I experience now as good luck or misfortune, as my abilities, as my forces, my hopes, and my life security because I caused them in former lives. I must learn to consider the present life as an effect of those reasons that I caused in former lives. Against it, the opponent may say, we have such things also in the outer world that the effects go back to causes and that we recognise that something former lives on as effect in something later. Let us take an example that plays a big role in modern natural sciences. There we have the law that a being briefly experiences all those forms in its embryonic development that certain animals worked through in the course of their evolution from imperfect levels to more perfect ones. We know that the human being goes through a level during his embryonic development—possibly, from the eighteenth day after conception on—which copies the fish shape; then later he goes through other forms, so that he grows up gradually into the forms in which he is born. From that, natural sciences conclude that the outer, physical human being has descended from the more imperfect living beings, and that the figure of the more imperfect living beings has a lasting effect in that which is the human being before birth. There we see those forms working which we see in the lineage. You, spiritual researcher, have to show us that really in the life of the human being, in his mind and soul and in his destiny something lives with which one can recognise the origin of the former causes, as well as one just recognises the lineage by the embryonic development of the human being in which he accepts the animal forms.

However, spiritual research can now show that one cannot explain the certain soul processes which are individual with every human being as a product of heredity that his innermost essence gives something else than that which is the lineage. If then one pursues how the human life develops how the human being grows up gradually, then one realises how forces and abilities appear step by step. Then one can already recognise with outer means that heredity does not only give that, not only the education at first, but also that it has worked its way out of that which exists with every single human being. This is added to the inherited, and this must originate—if one does not regard it as miracles—from other causes that one can only lead back to a spiritual-mental life that the human being has already experienced earlier. One can find the causes neither in heredity nor in education. Such a conclusion is possible. The spiritual researcher may say, I can make people understand what I know from the spiritual beholding by such a logic as I have characterised it now.

The opponent may respond, something enters into life that would not be miraculous if you only consulted all usual conditions. Someone who looks with scientific methods deeper into life knows which big influence just the very first childhood experiences have on our souls. They are forgotten, remain concealed in the soul, but at the suitable opportunity they emerge, and we could easily believe if we see them emerging later that none of them lead back to education, also not to heredity, one has to explain them as originating from a former life. However, we do this only because we do not mind how the first childhood experiences take hold in the soul and that they have a much bigger significance than everything does later.

Hence, the outer science may say, we are not yet so far to investigate the life of the child sufficiently to be able to say how for the soul of the child the experiences of the first years develop. We have to wait, until we get deeper and deeper into this area, then we can explain something about which you, spiritual researchers, state that it comes from former lives, by things which happen in quite natural way.

Yes, the opponent can still go on further. He may say, for example, even those human beings who get by soul exercises to a spiritual beholding have to express what they perceive in a higher world—only to be understood—in the forms, in the symbols of physical reality. It is very strange: those people who have become clairvoyant, so to speak, express—the opponent would state - themselves in each case quite different. Around the turn of the eighteenth, nineteenth centuries nobody beheld something in the spiritual world that referred, for example, to electricity or to railways; now they behold the things which refer to electricity or railways in the spiritual worlds. Who would not doubt that unconscious things interplay in the soul which are transformed in such a way that these illusory spiritual experiences appear. Nothing could justify the pretensions of those who speak of ways to spiritual, supersensible worlds. The more exactly one investigates, the more the ideas of former lives, of karma dissolve. One should point repeatedly just to the first childhood experiences if such things are brought forward like the karma idea.

Spiritual science may probably say now, let us assume that a parental couple has three, four children—every child is endowed with other characteristics. If everything should be rooted in heredity, nevertheless, one cannot understand why the children of a parental couple do not have the same qualities because they originate from the same father and the same mother. Just this shows us, some defenders of spiritual science probably say, that in that which the human being has received as inherited an individual being was born, and from it, the difference explains itself.

Against it, the opponent wants only to argue, nevertheless, that which is handed down is handed down from both parents or also from the ancestors. The different qualities [of the ancestors] intermingle. Why should not different mixtures appear with the children and thus the most different individualities? If one could look once into the complex structures of heredity—the opponent may say—, all pretensions of the spiritual researchers would have be silenced which take the viewpoint of reincarnation. If—to support the idea of reincarnation—the theosophical literature points out particularly that even twins show different qualities, the opponent could reply, everything that one can show in such a way with children of different ages applies particularly to twins.

Others say—to prove the teaching of reincarnation—, the human being shows conscience, moral responsibility in his essence. If you consider yourself responsible for an action that you do, nevertheless, you must be able to have another opinion of your actions than to have done it only. You have to ascribe another origin to the human being than only that from the lineage. Certain theosophical authors understand conscience, responsibility and the like in such a way that they are evidence of the individual essence that goes through various lives on earth.

One only needs to point to the fact that already astute investigators explained conscience and responsibility in such a way that the human being developed slowly and gradually within the human society. For one can easily show in the case of conscience, for example, that the human being notices that certain actions bring him certain disadvantages. In his mind, he connects the concepts of the action with the resulting disadvantage. This settles down in him, so that he concludes, in the end: you are not allowed to do this.—Imagine that changed into an impulse and this impulse is handed down, and then we have conscience with the following descendants. However—the opponent may argue—it is superficial if you assume an inner essence of the human being that goes through various lives on earth from the fact of conscience.

Seen from without many a thing could appear to that who does not exactly look in such a way, as if one cannot prove it. Just a spiritual researcher has to watch out for the difficulties that just conscientious people have if they want to approach spiritual science. Since what I have said today is just for such people an obstacle; they do not get over it.

If we go on and investigate how an opponent can put the question, how does spiritual science behave in the area of morality - then theosophy normally says, which moral impulse that gives the human being if he hears that his current life is caused by reasons which the human essence, that is he himself, put in a former life, and that he prepares the causes for the next life with that which he does now. How are the moral views of such a human being designed? The opponent could ask that way.

He will say, such a human being will easily be persuaded to say about a not good action to himself, if I do it, I carry it into my next life and I myself get the punishment in my next life.—With such an impulse, he will omit certain actions. However, it is the most selfish impulse that there can be if the human being does the good because it brings effects in the next life which he wishes, and he refrains from the bad ones because they bring rather disagreeable and fatal effects. Hence, one appeals to the egoism of the human being if one refers him to the karma and says to him, by this or that action you cause bad effects in the next life!—

Where does remain there the great word that one acts morally if one does the good for the sake of the good? If anybody who believes in karma says to himself, I still do something that maybe brings disadvantage—then it brings an advantage in a later life, the good is not done in such a way for the sake of the good, but the human egoism is stirred up in the subtlest way. We take another case. We assume that a person believes that he experiences happiness or misfortune because he caused this in a former life to himself and he has to accept this without grumbling.—Such a disposition—so the opponent could say—turns out to be fatalism if the person ascribes everything that happens to his former actions. Instead of pulling himself up and intervening actively in life, he will rely simply on the principle: this you have let yourself in for that! Then this will cause that a theosophist if he is weak says, why should I pull myself up? My karma has made me weak; this has its good reasons in a former life.—In this way, a dreadful fatalism comes out. We can learn from it how the opponent can state egoism and fatalism as something that one can bring forward in the most substantial way against the theosophical principle of moral.

If we want to visualise now how theosophy has to work on the religious life, then we realise how leaders of the theosophical life define theosophy as a kind of religion of wisdom, as something that leads into the religious area from knowledge and cognition. Religion cannot exist without a spirit living in the world—no matter whether you imagine this spirit as many spirits or as one spirit. Without living spirit, that impetus of feelings and sensations cannot take place in the soul, which is necessary for a real religious life. This looking up at something spiritual—so the opponent could argue-, this devotion of an outer spirit which is the origin of the earthly events and the human destinies is clouded by the belief of a human individuality who goes from one life to the next. He has to come to terms with himself concerning the religious life; that means, to refer everything to himself. Thus, the heart cannot widen and the mind cannot open itself as it is, otherwise, the case if the human being not only looks into himself, but can also look up at something divine to which he belongs in which he has interest and with which he is in a living relationship.

If we want to summarise everything that one can argue against theosophy, an opponent could say, in moral and religious respects spiritual science leaves much to be desired. This appears in particular in the fact that people who are internally undisciplined or have a lax scientific conscience from the start, gradually develop quite strange impulses toward life. There one realises—and that applies to all followers of theosophy,—as it arises from observations—that people if they get involved with spiritual-scientific truths would lose the interest for the fresh, full life; one realises that they withdraw from the immediate problems of the outer world. They brood over that which has put them into life and even start despising the outer reality and feel fine only if they do no longer want anything from the outer world.

I want to speak only about that to which opponents of theosophy rightly could refer. They could point rightly to the fact that numerous theosophists with a more lax scientific truth feeling become useless for all performances which a strong, healthy life demands. For they do not stand in life, but are or become eccentrics; such people arise from theosophy!—The opponent could point to numerous examples. Furthermore, he could show how the lacking control by experience can become rather bad if the human being who wants to develop spiritual eyes, spiritual ears in himself has not developed a sense of truth and such an impulse of truth as the outer experience controls us. Then the spiritually beholding, the so-called clairvoyant human being loses the inner control that must be the more important if the outer control is absent. There it appears that a human being can get into untruthfulness—unaware at first—, into errors and finally into conscious untruthfulness, into lies whose consequences he does not figure out because he cannot distinguish illusion from truth.

Therefore, the need to behold into the spiritual world has to be founded on truth and morality. It turns out, why it could become such a big problem that, for example, Goethe expressed in his Faust. There Faust faces us, the typical human being, who wants to get into the spiritual world and to extend his individual life who, however, often has the possibility to stray, in spite of conscientious striving, and who says, after he has nearly completed his life: could I only remove magic from my path.—The confession of spiritual research can become so tragic.

However, we have to consider the human soul not only theoretically but also in the full life. There only the experience itself can give us the appropriate teachings. One may reason ever so much why our soul has this or that constitution if it wants to follow spiritual research—one can know for sure: theoretical sentences are the one side, mental impulses the other side. Everything may be theoretically quite logical, and the soul can stray, nevertheless, if it has not found security in itself. The opponents can rightly point to such a thing that exists in the most different forms. This can show us that we must not take objections easily because they are to be found easily.

You can find references in spiritual science or theosophy that an individual essence lives in the human being. One shows that only for the human being a biography is possible because only the human being has that characteristic, individual course of life that makes a biography possible. For the greatest as for the most unimportant human being, a biography is possible. We show the same interest for the single human being which we have for a genus of the animal realm. It is a superficial objection if anybody says, nevertheless, one could also write a biography of a dog or a cat. Indeed, one could do this. When I was a pupil, the teacher tormented us once to write the biography of our pen. One can transfer everything to everything, but one has to take the essentials of a thing into account. No spiritual researcher states that a dog or a cat cannot have a sum of individual qualities. One only says that we show the same interest, which we have as a human being for a single person, for the entire animal genus. Even the interest in an animal can be bigger than for a human being, but it is not the same interest. We consider every human being as an own type or genus.

A difference exists whether we face real opponents of theosophy or those who cannot overcome the difficulties that our whole thinking and feeling and our science give us. Today I wanted to tell such objections. Of course, we could go on talking until tomorrow morning, increase the objections, and go into details. I am aware that I have not even told the most important objections. I have only shown how one can consult epistemology, morality, religion and life security if one wants to deliver proofs against theosophy.

It is maybe the nicest result that can arise from spiritual science that one learns to practise true tolerance. One can have true tolerance only if one understands the various individualities, different thinking, and feeling. As long as we hear the proposed objections, they can stimulate us if we do not take them easily, but can find that which the opponent argues in ourselves. If we make, so to speak, a part of ourselves our opponent to cope with the entitled objections, then we practise theosophical tolerance.

In this characterised way, the spiritual researcher should always face all other objections that could be done from opposing side. The supporters as well as the opponents should consider facing the opponents with the counterpart of fanaticism that must be an impulse of the theosophical attitude so that you always ask yourself, which importance do their objections have?—Hence, no objection surprises the theosophist. Theosophy can advance only in right way if such an inner discussion can take place with every opponent.

The fact that this is a demand with which also our time struggles can appear if one believes repeatedly that the opponents could not estimate at all the weight and the importance of their objections. I have already pointed many a time to the viewpoint of Eduard von Hartmann that he represented especially in his Philosophy of the Unconscious which negative reception it had with his opponents, how he anonymously wrote a refutation that his opponents liked very much. Then he revealed that he had written the refutation himself and showed that he could very well do the same objections and nobody possesses the absolute truth.

However, the theosophists should not only know the objections [against theosophy], but it is also their duty as it were to deal with these objections. After we have today opened ourselves to these objections, we want to see in the next talk how this area appears from the other side from which we have shown the reverse more or less today. We want to see whether there are substantial reasons for the opponents if they state, leave us alone with your theosophy, because it is not only unscientific, but it also contradicts any higher morality, it founds inadequate ethics, it gives no life security, and it is religiously absolutely inadequate.

On the other hand, could anything be wrong that shows that all these objections are still wrong? However, we do not want to take these objections in such a way, as if we wanted to dismiss them simply as errors, but in such a way that we can learn from them. It is difficult for some contemporaries to find the way to theosophy. However, it could be also exemplary for some people who become light-hearted supporters of theosophy to confront themselves once with such difficulties. Since also the way to the stars could be rough, and it could be good unless we make ourselves too comfortable.

In the next talk, I show how the human being can familiarise himself with this world of the spiritual stars, and that he must not succumb to the objections characterised today but can overcome them.

Spiritual research, as it is meant here, is aware very well that there are some, also substantial objections against it. I tried to show that in the last winter with two talks that I have also held here How Does One Disprove Spiritual Science? and How Does One Reason Spiritual Science? At that time, I intended to discuss the pros and cons more from the point of view of general scientificity. This time I want to speak about the pros and cons from the point of view of the spiritual researcher in this and the next talk. I will deal less with individual questions than rather with the question how one gets to the truths of spiritual science and which errors confront the spiritual researcher as well as those who want to approach this knowledge and make them a component of their soul lives.

It could seem peculiar from the start that one can speak about numerous causes of error that refer just to the most important questions of human life. These are the questions of the nature and destination of the human being, of the soul experiences after death, of death and immortality, of repeated lives on earth et cetera, which are objects of spiritual research. Hence, it is the more inevitable to speak about the ways of truth and error to illumine these questions.

If it is talk of spiritual research, its truths and errors, I ask you to take into consideration that it concerns only the ways of this spiritual research at first, so attaining the truths of spiritual life. Here one has to consider as a basic requirement that the spiritual researcher has a generally healthy soul life. With it, I do not say that the results or the suggestions of spiritual research could only help a healthy soul. I do not at all claim this. On the contrary, these results have just something recovering, something that not only gets the lost soul, but also an ill soul life on the straight and narrow. This should be clear from the start. If today it should mainly be talk of a healthy soul life as the right requirement for spiritual research, this means that one can get to the truths in spiritual area only with a healthy soul life. What then spiritual science can give can be almost called a remedy for the human soul.

A healthy soul life is the requirement. Why? Because the origins of spiritual research are inside of the human soul because one can look into the concealed spiritual depths of existence only if one changes his own soul into a tool of spiritual research.

Talking not generally, I would immediately like to take something as starting point that I have already mentioned here several times. If the human soul should be transformed into an instrument for beholding into the spiritual world, then it is necessary that the soul forces that are sufficient for the everyday life are strengthened. In the everyday life, the human being is only concerned with that which his senses teach him and which the reason recognises. We already know from a trivial consideration of life that the statements of the outer senses as well as the usual reason are quiet if the human being is sleeping. Our everyday life proceeds between waking and sleeping. We notice that our senses gradually fail and we get to a state of unconsciousness. Now it would go indeed against the usual logical rules if one believed that everything that the human being experiences from morning to evening were extinguished at every evening and originated anew at the next morning. Everything certainly exists from falling asleep up to the awakening. The sleep does not cause that the experiences of the day do not exist at night in our soul life, but the soul forces are not strong enough to experience during sleep. It is easy to realise that everything depends on whether the human being is able to become aware of that which is unconscious during sleep.

Are we able to perceive if our senses are quiet if our brain is not called for its service—is it possible that we have an experience with that which is independent of body in us? Then this experience can already show us whether it is supersensible or not. That means so that the soul can become an instrument to perceive other things than with the instrument of the body, it is necessary to cause a state which is similar to sleep and is, nevertheless, completely different from it. In this respect, one has to extinguish the usual sense perception if the soul should become an instrument of another perception. However, unconsciousness must not happen; that is we have to evoke a state that is similar to sleep and is still dissimilar because full consciousness must exist.

One can cause such a state different. It is the healthiest way to cause it with methods, as I have described them in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and will outline them once again here.

You cause this state with inner soul work, with conceptual efforts that we do not do in the usual life. One calls them concentration of thinking, of imagining, of feeling or also meditation. We immediately want to bring in an example that appears weird at first, but from which we realise at once why it seems so paradoxical. It concerns that we evoke particular images to reach the desired state and relate to these images in a particular way. We imagine facing two glasses; one is half-full with water, the other empty. Now we imagine that we pour some water from the half-full glass into the empty glass, and the first glass would become fuller and not emptier. This is a paradoxical mental picture, isn't that so? Now you may have not only this mental picture and turn it over in your mind, but you have to connect a particular sense with this mental picture, then only it will become a meditation.

We all know one fact that flows through our life everywhere whose depth one can fathom difficultly. This is love in its different forms. Love has the peculiarity that the lover pours as it were his full heart onto the other human being that he does not become poorer with it but richer. This is the secret of love that the soul becomes fuller of contents, the more of it is given away. Love is something complex and deep that we can always grasp some sides of it only; however, its being is unfathomable. However, this one side of love can be symbolised by the image of the two glasses. We do something similar there concerning a moral experience of life that we experience, for example, also in geometry.

We take a round medallion of any substance. If we draw a circle with the help of the medallion we can study everything that refers to a circle, and this applies to that which we have as reality before ourselves. The geometrician forms symbols of reality with his figures. The soul can also create symbols of the everlasting if it gets clear about the fact that these are just symbols.

If we have such a mental picture like that of the two glasses and have the sensation that this picture points to such an important phenomenon as love, then we process this picture in the right sense if we try, by strong effort of will, to eliminate all images which come from the senses. As well all mental pictures disappear while falling asleep, one extinguishes everything arbitrarily that comes from without and everything that the reason can think, and all soul forces are concentrated upon this one picture.

Of course, it is not enough to do this only once, but one has to practise it in patience and perseverance repeatedly, then we strengthen our soul forces gradually. Then it happens that we become aware of such soul experiences by internal experience that a time comes at which we do no longer need to put such symbolic images before our souls, but gradually from deep, concealed depths of our soul life such pictures appear by themselves.

It is better that the human being uses such mental pictures with these exercises which are only symbols, that is they refer to no outer reality. One could also use usual mental pictures, but they do not work so efficiently. If anybody wanted to argue, it is foolish to imagine something that is not there at all, one has to say, this concentration work is not there to copy the outer reality, but it should educate the soul to get forces from it, which are not active, otherwise. This exercise is not there to recognise truths. It concerns education of the soul to get concealed forces from it.

If now the time has come when in the soul the pictures emerge, then you have to set the soul by a regular mental training into a particular mood. If we speak about this mood in which the soul must be if these pictures appear by themselves, there one has to point to the fact that this imagery appears to the layman who knows nothing of the whole matter as that which one regards as visions, as hallucinations and other phenomena of the pathological soul life. Someone who knows something of that which modern borderline sciences, between physiology and psychology, bring forward can think very easily—and this is repeatedly argued—that the spiritual researcher educates himself artificially for something that a pathological soul attains if it has visions, hallucinations, delusions et cetera.

Now, just by the education of the soul that we can only touch today, this soul can make an exact distinction between visions and similar phenomena and the symbolic mental pictures which spiritual science calls the Imaginative world. The spiritual researcher learns to distinguish these two worlds. Since that which is generally necessary to be successful is that one is hostile to all delusions, hallucinations and the like. It belongs to this spiritual training to characterise them distinctly.

There we want to indicate an important difference. Visions, delusions et cetera have something in common: they overpower the soul; they have something that demands the strongest belief for itself. One knows from the everyday life that it is easier to persuade a person who has visions or delusions from any fact of the outer life than from his delusions. He possibly finds the most astute reasons for his illusions. He has an invincible belief in these soul experiences. However, the spiritual researcher has to become free from any belief toward the Imaginative world. Although he has brought up the pictures in his soul and must regard them as worthy, he has to regard them as nothing at all that can give him objective truth. It would be his biggest error if he regarded that which he has attained there as something that refers to an outer reality. He has to educate himself just by strong soul forces and willpower that the soul settles in a world of pictures at first, which do not express any objective reality.

What do they express? They are only the expression of the soul life. One gets to know nothing by this imagery at first but the own soul life. One must not try at all to regard them as something else than that it concerns an outflow of the own soul life. These are the essentials.

If one wants to compare an Imagination to a vision, a hallucination on the way to spiritual research, one has to say, a vision, a hallucination overpowers the human being, it requests an almost invincible belief in the objectivity of this vision; against it the spiritual researcher is aware of the fact that he himself creates the Imagination.

He has to pass this state. He has to get out a rich Imaginative world from his inside to attain the consciousness at the same time that it is only a mirror of his own soul. This consciousness has something rather uneasy, because the world in which one settles down is like a second world, a world full of beauty and greatness, a beatific world. However, persons who settle in such a world get easily angry if one wants that they doubt the objectivity of this world because one lives well in it. However, just one has to overcome this good life. What happens in this world, actually? If I should describe this, we can compare it to a phenomenon of the everyday life.

Imagine that you have all mental pictures at this moment again in your soul that you ever had if all that were now in your soul—you could not live with it at all. The soul wants oblivion. We can bring up the forgotten again in our memory. As well as now in the usual life these images submerge in oblivion, the spiritual researcher must be able by the training of his will to forget his whole Imaginative life, this new world in which he liked to stay. The spiritual researcher has to make this Imaginative world disappear more and more often in the depths of his sub-consciousness about which he knows nothing at first. Then he has to cause moments again, at which the soul is quite empty, thinks nothing, feels nothing, remembers nothing, worries about nothing, has no affects and so on. Then gradually the Imaginations that he has sent down to the unconscious emerge again. The pictures return but quite different. They appear in such a way that one knows that they are not fantasies but expressions of realities. Toward these emerging pictures one has the immediate consciousness that they express something real.

What has one really done, while one has carried out this process? One has strengthened the inside of the soul life so that this soul life has completely developed its formative capacity. What one has produced, one has sacrificed, detached from himself. One receives it again. As well as you put out your hand in the physical world to touch something and thereby get knowledge of that which you have touched, one puts out his soul forces, one sends them away, they combine with the spiritual world, and something returns from the spiritual world.

The objection was mentioned already repeatedly that one could also harbour illusions because one knows that sensitive persons can feel this or that, even if nothing at all is there. Thus, there are, for example, persons who feel the taste of a lemonade if they only remember it. This is right. However, a healthy soul can still distinguish an only imagined lemonade from a real one; you can have the taste, but you cannot quench your thirst with an imagined lemonade. There is such an objection also against the thought of Schopenhauer's philosophy that the world is only our mental picture or idea. However, the trivial objection is right, one can imagine a piece of steel that is 1,000 degrees hot which will not burn your hands. You are able to distinguish imagination, mental picture, and reality in life. You do not have any other proof in the sensory world. The same applies to the spiritual world. If you enter into the spiritual world, then that returns quite different which you have sent down in the area of oblivion and is now expression of those spiritual beings and facts, which are behind the physical sensory world. You obtain mental pictures that you have not given yourself. Since the mental pictures which you have given yourself were there only to practise.

Thus, you get truths from the spiritual world, after the soul has gone through an only imagined mindscape first—not to recognise anything but to develop the soul, so that it becomes strong to perceive what it can only perceive with other forces than those of the usual soul life. Thus, you achieve raised cognitive faculties; the soul life becomes more concentrated, compressed. Then you live, so to speak, only in a world of cognition. All mental pictures of the spiritual beings that you get this way are completely saturated with reality. They are much more active than the impressions of the outer sensory world and still do not claim to be believed just like that. We will recognise immediately, how it behaves.

However, I have to repeat something important before: if the pictures of this Imaginative world that you yourself have created first appear before you have sent this whole symbolic world down to oblivion, they are ambiguous, oracular, and someone is on bad way who believes these ambiguous things just like that who gets involved with them. Even if by all available means of the spiritual-scientific training such pictures are obtained at first, it is impossible to assign any logical value to them. Not before they return and show full clarity, they are expressions of the spiritual world.

People think very frequently that spiritual research is done so airily, and then many objections are raised. One says, for example, how hard has the outer science to work to obtain its results. There these spiritual researchers come and believe to know everything, while they simply submerge with their souls in the spiritual world.—First no true spiritual researcher will claim anything else than that which he has really investigated, and secondly one cannot observe the inner soul work as the work in the laboratories and on the observatories. It is much more intensive than the work performed there. The conscientious spiritual researcher will reply, this is rhetorical-ness; the spiritual-scientific knowledge is attained really not easier than things of the outer science, but laboriously and gradually.

Every person without damage can carry out what I have described within certain limits. Today there are already methods with which one comes slowly and gradually into the spiritual world, so that that which could work frightening with quick coming into the spiritual world does not occur, but that one can enter quiet and calm into the spiritual world. This way is harmless and more reliable than all other ways because consciousness does not decrease. We are not put to sleep, but our soul is always awake. We perform every step that we do with a much stronger consciousness than in the everyday life. If one speaks about dangers of this real spiritual research, one just does it because one knows nothing about the fact that one performs all steps much more consciously than in the everyday life.

It is different if the soul forces are not used to get knowledge but to something else. This may happen. We have seen that the path of knowledge of spiritual research is based on concentration of the soul forces. However, the same forces—unless they are used to get knowledge but if the will and the mood are called—lead to the counter-image of the Imaginative knowledge. This counter-image exists with the medium. There is, actually, no bigger difference between the spiritual-scientific recognising human being who enters with increased consciousness into the spiritual world and the medium.

With the medium, just those forces, which must be conscious with the spiritual researcher, are pushed into the will and mood. The consciousness decreases, and the result is a certain degree of unconsciousness, at least of daze. The person concerned will carry out things as a medium with decreased consciousness to witness the direct influence of the spiritual world. With it, I do not say that with the medium spiritual things cannot appear and can be investigated; I only mean such cases where any dizziness and any charlatanism is excluded.

There already forces become known that lead us into the nature of the soul as far as this soul has no body, for example, after death. However, one has to stress that the spiritual researcher completely has himself under control, while the medium becomes dependent from the surroundings, or more precisely, he/she can be made dependent. Even if now and again right results may arise which are not to be doubted, one has to say that appropriate investigations in this area are only possible if they are carried out with absolute control of all appropriate laws. Since there one gets into dangerous things which an outer science cannot approach and, therefore, stares at them in a dilettantish way. Mediumship is just the counter-image of Imaginative cognition. However, within certain limits it is possible to convince a person of something that one can inform difficultly. Important things can be already revealed there, and one has to acknowledge as something important if anybody ventures on this field. I refer someone who wants to inform himself in detail to the book The Mystery of Man by Ludwig Deinhard (1847-1917, engineer, theosophist) and to the writing The Cardinal Question of Humanity by Max Seiling (1852-1928).

Thus, we realise that the human being attains a more intensive, more active consciousness than in the usual life on the path of higher knowledge at first. However, we also realise that mediumship is the counter-image where the forces directly work into the human being, so that he/she speaks or writes with decreased consciousness after instructions of a spiritual world. Not by some definitions, but by the fact that one describes the things, as they are, as they are experienced, one receives a concept of truth and error concerning spiritual research.

We have now to advance farther than to Imaginative knowledge. One calls the next level Inspirative knowledge. It occurs if the human being has repeatedly sent his Imaginations into the depths of his soul and has already attained knowledge on this first way and thereby his spiritual forces have become stronger and stronger. Then a state occurs in which he perceives something shapeless that does no longer remind of something that one can perceive with the reason in the physical world. The Imaginative world resembles our own soul life, for example, if the mental pictures return which one has sent down, and appear in colours and in similar figures, as one sees them in the outer world. It is hard to distinguish illusion from reality.

However, the Inspirative world has nothing at all that could be a quality of the sensory world. Against it, something appears on this level that you can compare with that process if the human being listens to his own speech. You have this consciousness immediately. You have the consciousness in higher measure than before that you are present with everything, that you only recognise beings and facts of the spiritual world if you submerge in them and witness them, as well as you can only speak your own words, if you use the own organs. About this fact, you must not deceive yourself: you yourself let your consciousness penetrate in everything and its life appears in the other things and facts. Because this is in such a way, the preparation of a true spiritual science is the possibility to regard that which you yourself create in the soul as nothing but what arises from your own arbitrariness.

The human being knows if he speaks that he can form words that he can express himself after his passions, depending on what he likes or dislikes. However, he also knows that there is already in the usual life a possibility to put forward not only that which is pleasant but also to speak about that which is true. Here one has to start. This development of feeling of truth is the most essential for the Inspirative knowledge. You can attain something in this area only, if you eliminate your own opinion, your preferences, everything repeatedly that you would like that it takes place in a way. You can develop these sensations. They only lead to a truthful knowledge in this area. I would like to give an example immediately.

The question of immortality belongs to the most important ones. In which question could the human being be more interested? An old wisdom saying of occult science says, only that can gain real knowledge of immortality who has advanced so far that the idea to be mortal or immortal is indifferent to him. Before, the interest clouds the real knowledge. It is a difficult inner work to regulate your sensations this way.

With the Inspirative knowledge it concerns to get the soul into a certain mood, in particular towards that which it can endure or which it does not like to endure. The human being often imagines that he can endure the one as well as the other thing. There he has repeatedly to go through renewed soul inspections to develop such a mood of calmness gradually, which enables objective knowledge.

If the spiritual researcher has attained Imagination, then he gets a view of beings of the spiritual world that are on par with our soul. However, our soul is connected with a physical body here in the physical world. We have to ignore this if we want to recognise beings that do not have physical bodies. One can reach spiritual beings and facts already on the way of Imagination. On the way of Inspiration, everything must be attained that refers to beings that contribute to the phenomena of nature. Natural sciences if they are aware of their limits know principles and accept forces that work there. However, the spiritual knowledge recognises beings that control the elements as it were and cause the phenomena of nature behind all that which is active in nature. The real creative in the world that produces the outer material things is accessible only to the Inspirative knowledge to which the soul becoming stronger gets gradually because it completely lives in the beings.

Then the level of Intuition follows where the spiritual researcher witnesses the actions of the creative forces that form the basis of the material existence that are of spiritual kind, but can embody themselves in space and time, either in the big nature or as single restricted beings. Our souls are concerned with the usual knowledge only. The soul that is our spiritual goes from earth-life to earth-life. We live a life from birth or conception to death, and then we live between death and a new birth in the wholly spiritual-mental, then again a life between birth and death and so on. There we deal with the soul.

If you develop the Imaginative knowledge sufficiently if you allow yourself plenty of time, until you really have the ability to discriminate that which comes from your soul and which emerges from the subsoil, then you can distinguish that which belongs to this one life and that which comes over from former lives on earth. With advancing Imaginative knowledge, you get to an insight into former lives on earth. This is relatively easy to get. However, this knowledge restricts itself at the own soul which goes from one life to the next. It is much more difficult to know anything about the former lives of another person. Since if one faces anybody, one is concerned with a physical body in which he lives, and you can only recognise the soul in it with Intuition. Hence, you have to ascend to this highest level of knowledge if you want to behold into the repeated earth-lives of another person. This belongs to the most difficult that the seer can attain. The same fact may still arise from something else.

Instead of Imagination, you can take, indeed, another way of self-knowledge to the spiritual world in certain restricted way.

If the human being knows the principle of karma and

If he does not only know but if he experiences in himself that he caused that which happens to him by former earth-lives,

If this self-knowledge is connected with the karma idea and

If he practises repeatedly to reflect on his own strokes of fate and abilities,

Then he may get to a kind of Imagination, but to a subjective, personal one that does not lead to objective truth and cannot be applied to every human being.

However, this way leads us only to knowledge of us. We cut ourselves off in our own soul. We can advance maybe to a certain knowledge of former earth-lives, but much uncertainty remains. However, we can never get to the objective knowledge that refers to another human being.

If you want to have a real concept of the truths of the spiritual world, you have to distinguish reality and truth. You get to know a new world, but getting to know and judging is not the same, it is very different. You can experience many things in the spiritual world, you can be able to tell many things of it; the things that you tell can be real pictures, you may have beheld the picture properly—however, it has not to be true. As paradoxical as it sounds, I have to say that it is something extremely important that someone who wants to enter into this spiritual world brings the judgement from the usual world with him.

Somebody who has learnt to develop common sense in the usual world who does not deceive himself and is not deceived by anything in the usual world will bring common sense with him into the spiritual world and will judge the things that he beholds there correctly. Only by own judgement, reality becomes truth. You cannot develop judgement in the spiritual world; you have to bring it with you. One is allowed to say, someone who thinks logically in the usual world will also find the right and the true in the spiritual world. He who is a fool in the usual world and thinks illogically will think even more brainlessly and illogically if he applies his thinking to the things of the spiritual world. The most necessary if the human being wants to make a decision of truth or error in the spiritual world is the development of a healthy sense of truth and a healthy talent for observing in the physical world. You should not trust in someone who does not note with attention, with healthy talent for observation how the things proceed in the physical world and who proceeds inexactly in the physical world, if he tells anything of the spiritual world. Since the things of the spiritual world become true only if they touch our sense of truth.

A certain moral sense and spiritual condition is also necessary. Someone who enters into the spiritual world with a moral spiritual condition will come into relation with the healthy forces of the spiritual world and get to know its truths. However, someone who enters with immoral forces, in particular not with a meticulous sense of truth beholds everything distorted, caricatured in the spiritual world and, hence, tells it this way.

What I wanted to reach today is to cause a sensation of the truth ways into the spiritual world. Nevertheless, any investigation in the spiritual world is based on the development of certain forces slumbering in the soul, which are connected with the human ego that has sympathies and antipathies, and forces, which can darken the truth. In the outer life, life itself controls and corrects. If we think wrong, the outer reality corrects us. To the spiritual researcher the direction of truth is only given by the direction of the soul. Hence, first one has to develop that truth which is independent from this subjective ego. That means, the soul has to outgrow itself if it has to become a spiritual researcher.

Moreover, the results of spiritual research have to be informed. As well as not everybody in the laboratory or on the observatory can investigate what the outer science investigates, not everybody can attain all results of spiritual research, although in our present everybody can cover a way to a certain restricted aim. But that who does not want or is not able to cover it cannot argue that he has to leave to the spiritual researchers to know something about the spiritual world. There the prejudice can originate about which we still want to speak the day after tomorrow that the spiritual researcher is a particular animal that simply thereby turns out to be a more valuable human being because he can behold into the spiritual world. We shall realise that that does not raise the value of the human being that the value of the human being depends on something quite different. It would be very useful if just this truth would find wide distribution that one has not to consider someone who makes himself a bearer of spiritual-scientific knowledge as an authority or the like. Against it, the true spiritual researcher has the obligation to incorporate what he can investigate into the concepts and ideas of his time.

This is even a difficult task to find an expression of that which one beholds in the spiritual world, so that every unbiased human being can understand the results. Since you must not believe that the spiritual researcher has anything for his own certainty and soul strength from that which he beholds in the spiritual world. It becomes a property of the soul, a soul food first if he expresses the beheld facts in usual concepts and ideas and makes them comprehensible. The destiny of our soul depends only on these concepts and ideas, it depends that we have strength. If the spiritual researcher succeeds in grasping the beheld truths with the laws of common sense and logic, they have the same value for him as for the other human beings. As long as he can only behold into the spiritual world, he has nothing for his soul life. Not before he can tell the things in such a way that the fellow men understand them with their logic, only then he has something from it. Hence, the essential task of the incorporation of spiritual research in our civilisation is not the development of the spiritual researcher, but the possibility to hand over the spiritual-scientific results to the common sense and the civilisation of his time so that every unbiased human being can understand them.

One understands them in a particular way, which we want to bring to mind by a comparison. Let us assume that we have a picture before ourselves. We only look at it, just without understanding. However, we can open ourselves to it, and after some time, after we have become engrossed in the picture, we understand its contents. Of course, we do not need that we ourselves paint the picture. It would be also misplaced if anybody said, you have to look at the picture this or that way, and then I can prove to you that the picture expresses this or that. Someone who wants to make us understand the picture by proofs would drive us to desperation at best, but would not make us understand the picture. Understanding the picture depends on the fact that something originates from the picture and that it is independent from the painter's ability to paint it. That also applies similarly to that which the spiritual researcher investigates in the spiritual world, and to that which he brings forward in the form of ideas and concepts to his fellow men.

You find two books by me on the book table. In one book, How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, I have described the ways how one can develop the soul, so that it ascends into spiritual worlds. In the other book, Occult Science. An Outline, you find results of spiritual science in the first part. As well as I could, I have tried there to formulate the investigated matters in such a way that now every contemporary who looks at them unbiasedly and with common sense can understand them. We face two things in these books: once the path into the spiritual world and secondly, the portrayal of the attained results in form of concepts and ideas that every human being can understand.

I understand very well that people say, nobody can understand this, because it is speculative fiction.—That is possible with those people who do not exactly go into it. However, if anybody goes exactly into it, that can occur which really occurred to me. A very prudent and clever man said that one can understand that which one can read in my books very well, so well that somebody can get on it by mere logic.—Well, you cannot investigate the things with the usual logic, but if they have been investigated, they can be understood with the usual logic. However, that man continued: I can hardly imagine that these things have been taken from the spiritual world, because they make such a plausible impression to me that they can be reached in only logical way without insight into the spiritual world.—I said to him that I would consider that as an advantage of the book and that I would like to hear that my description was successful.

This leads us again to that which the painter must be able to do. The spiritual researcher has to recognise in the spiritual world; if he processes the recognised, and conceptualises it, then it faces us as the picture of the painter faces us. Then the moment comes when that who opens himself to these results of the spiritual world understands the thing immediately, without doing research in the spiritual world. One can probably distinguish whether one dedicates himself to a belief or to the cogency of that which one has put in words.

I shall characterise the paths of truth even more if we get around to considering the almost more important part, the origins of errors of spiritual research, the day after tomorrow. However, that which one has always to consider with spiritual research may be mentioned already today at the end of this talk.

I have said that if the spiritual researcher has finally got to the formulated truth of the supersensible worlds every unbiased human being can open himself to its cogency. Then, however, the sum of spiritual truths is food for the soul, and then we attain something without which our soul cannot live in the end. One can take the spiritual food away from the soul but not the hunger after spiritual food. Even if the human being lives from day to day absent-mindedly and wants to know nothing about the spiritual food, the hunger after it continues, although the human being is not clear in his mind of the reason—namely that he does not want to approach the spiritual world. If this hunger is not satisfied, it destroys the whole soul life; this appears in all possible pathological phenomena of our time.

We get to know by the outer science that we have certain substances in the body that are the same as outdoors in space. We feel by spiritual science that we rest on the whole world. We recognise that that which lives in our soul and is intimately associated with the vicissitudes of life, is one with the spiritual-mental of the whole world that extends in space and time. In our spiritual part, we recognise what is effective outdoors all over the world. Then we feel what such knowledge can give our souls as strength, certainty, and health.

We can summarise this into two remarks. Goethe wanted to show once that the eyes must be created for the light—a thought that also some philosophers pronounced—and that the soul must have something spiritual in itself. He wanted to show this with the nice dictum:

Unless the eye were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force were in us,
How could delight us the divine?

However, Goethe also added that the human being was once a being without eyes and that the sun had to be there, so that the human being could have eyes that the light created the eyes. It is true that everything would be dark without eyes; the light must have been there to form the eyes. As well as the light forms the eyes, the spirit that penetrates the whole universe forms the human mind. We are allowed to say, you recognise the one-sidedness of a significant truth deeper just by such a thing. It is true that light and spirit must be present in us if we want to perceive light and spirit. It is true that the whole world must be filled with light if an organ of light should be created in a being by this light, and it is true that the whole world has to owe its origin to the spirit if in the human being the spirit should emerge.

However, it is also true if one adds another truth to this deep, but one-sided truth that arises from our consideration:

Unless the world does have the sun,
How could the beings get their eyes?
Unless existence were God's revelation,
How could suffuse us the divine?

Answer to Question

Question: Has one acquired anything of the fourth dimension and of higher ones spiritual-scientifically?

Rudolf Steiner: It is not easy to make you understand this. The human being takes the physical-sensory world as starting point, and there space has three dimensions. The mathematician forms, at least theoretically, mental pictures of the fourth dimension and of higher dimensions, extending the mental pictures of the three-dimensional space analytically with variables. Thereby one can speak of higher manifolds in the mathematical thinking. If anybody is familiar with these things, that means, who puts his heart into it and is familiar with mathematics at the same time, for that many things arise. I would like to point to the works of Oskar Simony (1852-1915, mathematician, physicist) in Vienna.

At first, it is only a mental picture. You get a view of it if you enter into the spiritual world. There the real necessity exists to familiarise yourself immediately with more than three dimensions. Since everything that is imagined pictorially—so still with the characteristic feature of three dimensions—is nothing but a reflection of your soul processes. In the higher worlds are quite different conditions of space and time, if one can even speak about conditions of space and time. Above all, those should take this into considerations who always argue that that which is claimed about the spiritual world is nothing but hallucinations. One does not consider that one works in the area of spiritual research with things that are quite different from hallucinations.

This question gives opportunity to complement what I have said in this talk, to point to the change that the things undergo concerning time and space if they get to the spiritual world. One cannot say everything in one talk, and today it has lasted already very long. If the pictures [of Imagination] return which one has sent as it were down to the underworld, that which returns makes sense generally only if one touches upon it as something multidimensional. This is a given then, as just the three-dimensions are a given in the sensory world. This is why one cannot apply the usual geometry to the things of the spiritual world.

For mathematicians I have to add that then the speculations of the fourth dimension start having real value. However, normally [the higher dimensions] are thought only as generalisation [of the three-dimensional space], not from reality to which these spaces do not completely correspond. One needs, actually, still better mathematics if one possibly wants to count in the things with which the spiritual researcher is concerned.

Nevertheless, I have to answer yes. Correlations to a supersensible world, also mathematical ideas of infinity become real, in particular things of the border area of mathematics. I once experienced, for example, a sudden insight into an exceptionally important quality of the astral space when I was occupied with modern geometry, as one called it at that time, and analytic mechanics many years ago.

The fact that with an infinite straight line the infinite distant point is identical on the left with that on the right that the straight line is a circle in reality and one returns to the starting point from the other side if one runs long enough—one can realise this, but [one should not draw] any conclusion from it. Conclusions lead to nothing in spiritual research. You have to open yourself to the things, this leads to the knowledge of the supersensible world. For generally the mathematical element should not be overestimated if it concerns the supersensible world. Mathematics is useful only formally; it cannot get to reality. However, mathematics can be understood with the forces within the soul, and it can be applied to any other human being. Mathematics has this in common with spiritual science.

Question: How do physical body, astral body, and ego coincide?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, these things become clear completely if one has done spiritual science for years. The things are not so simple, and what one simply states, sounds then, so to speak, like an oracle. The things of spiritual science cannot be taken as dogmas if one wants to understand them one day. I have described the sleep, for example, saying, physical body and etheric body are lying in the bed, and astral body and ego leave them.—How have we to imagine such a thing? At first, we have it to take as a picture. As a picture, it is right. If it may sometimes sound in such a way that a fact forms the basis of this picture, nevertheless, this is only quite one-sided. It is possible that one describes the matter exactly contrariwise, saying, in the wake state, the ego and the astral body are beyond the physical body in a way.

In Munich, as most of you will be aware, beside repeating last year's representation of Edouard Schuré's drama, The Children of Lucifer, we produced a Rosicrucian Mystery Play which seeks in manifold ways to represent some of the truths that are connected with our Movement. On the one hand, the Mystery Play was intended as an example, showing how that which inspires all theosophical life can also pour itself out into Art. On the other hand, we must not forget that this Play contains very much of our spiritual-scientific teachings, in a form in which we shall perhaps only discover it during years to come. This, above all, must not be misunderstood. You should take pains to read the things that are contained in it,—I do not say between the lines, for they are in the actual words, but they are there in a spiritual way. If you were really to take the Rosicrucian Mystery Play in earnest, and look for the things that it contains during the next few years, it would not be necessary for me to give any lectures at all for many years to come. You would discover many things which I am giving in lectures on all kinds of subjects.

It will, however, be more practicable for us to seek these things together than alone. In a certain sense, it is very good for that which lives in Spiritual Science to be among us in this form. To-day, therefore, taking our start from the Rosicrucian Mystery Play, I should like to speak of certain properties of human self-knowledge. But we must first call to mind how the individuality, living and working in the body of Johannes Thomasius, is characterised in this Play. Hence, I should like this lecture on self-knowledge to begin with a recitation of those passages which refer to the self-knowledge of Johannes.

(The second scene: ‘Know thou thyself, O man!’ and the ninth scene ‘O man, feel thou thyself!’ were read out aloud at this point.)

In these two scenes, ‘Know thou thyself, O man’ and ‘O man, feel thou thyself,’ two stages of development in the unfolding of the soul are brought before us. I beg you not to think it strange if I now say the following: I am in no way opposed to the Rosicrucian Mystery Play being interpreted as I have sometimes heard other poems interpreted in theosophical circles. For in this Rosicrucian Mystery there may well come before our souls in a more living and immediate form what I have often said in relation to other works of art I have interpreted. I never hesitated to say: Though the plant or flower does not know what the human being who beholds it finds therein, nevertheless, the flower contains what he finds. I said this once when I was about to interpret Faust. It is not necessary for the poet, when he actually wrote the poem, to have exactly known or felt in the words all that was afterwards found there. I can assure you, nothing of what I may now or subsequently attach to this Mystery Play, and of which I know that it is really contained therein, came to me consciously when the several scenes were created. The scenes grew out of themselves, like the leaves of the plant. One cannot produce such a form by first having the idea, and then translating it into the outer form. I always found it very interesting to see it coming into being, scene by scene. Other friends, too, who learnt to know the scenes one by one, always said. How strange it is; it always comes out differently from what one had imagined.

The Mystery Play is like a picture of the evolution of mankind in the evolution of a single man. And I will emphasise, for real and true feeling one cannot shroud oneself in abstractions when one wishes to set forth Theosophy. Each human soul is different from another, and must indeed be different; for everyone experiences his own evolution, in all that is given as our general teaching, we can only receive guiding lines. Hence the full truth can only be given if we take our start from an individual soul,—representing a single human individuality in a fully individual and characteristic way. If, therefore, any one studies the character of Johannes Thomasius, seeking to translate into theories of human evolution what is specifically said of him, he would be making an entire mistake. He would be much in error if he imagined: ‘I myself shall experience just what Johannes Thomasius experienced.’ That which Johannes Thomasius has to experience applies indeed to every man as to its general tendency and direction. Nevertheless, to undergo these individual experiences one would have to be Johannes Thomasius! Everyone is a Johannes Thomasius his own way. Thus, everything is set forth in a fully individual way, and by this very fact it presents in as true a way as possible, through individual figure, the characteristic evolution of the human being in his soul.

Therefore, a broad basis had to be created. Thomasius is first shown on the physical plane. Single experiences of his soul are indicated, such, for example, as this one, which cannot but be of great significance:—We are told how at a time not very long ago, he deserted a being who was devoted to him in faithful love. That is a thing that often happens, but it works differently on one who is striving to undergo an inner evolution. It is a deep and profound truth: He who is to undergo a higher evolution does not attain self-knowledge by brooding into himself, but by diving other beings. By self-knowledge we must know that we are come from the Cosmos. And we can only dive down by transmuting our own self into another self. To begin with we transmuted into the beings once near to us in life. This therefore, is an example of the conscious experience of one's own self within another. Johannes, having got deeper down into himself, with his self dives down in self-knowledge into another being—into that being whom he had brought bitter pain. So, then we see how Thomasius dives down in self-knowledge. Theoretically we may say: ‘If you would know the flower, you must dive into the flower.’ Self-knowledge, however, is most readily attained when we dive down into the events in the midst of which we ourselves have stood in some other way. So long as we are in our own self, we go through the outer experiences. Over against a true self-knowledge, that which we think of the life of other beings is a mere abstraction. For Thomasius, to begin with, the experiences of other human beings become his own experience. Here, for example, was one Capesius, describing his experiences. We can well understand how such experiences arise in life; Thomasius, however, receives them differently. He listens, but his listening (it is described so in one of the later scenes) is different. It is as though he were not there at all with his ordinary self. Another, deeper faculty reveals itself. It is as though he himself entered into the soul of Capesius and experienced what is going on within that soul.

It is exceedingly significant when he becomes estranged from himself. For this indeed is inseparable from self-knowledge: one must tear oneself free of oneself and go out into another. It is indeed significant for Thomasius when, having heard all these speeches, he finds himself obliged to say:—

“A mirrored picture 'twas of fullest life
That showed me to myself in clearest lines:
This spirit-revelation makes me feel
That most of us protect and train one trait
And one alone in all our character,
Which thus persuades itself it is the whole.
I sought to unify these many traits
In mine own self and boldly trod the path
Which here is shown, to lead unto that goal;
And it hath made of me a nothingness.”

Why did it make of him a nothingness? Because he dived down through self-knowledge into the other beings. Brooding into his own inner life, makes a man proud and arrogant. True self-knowledge leads at first to the pain of diving down into other selves. Johannes listens to the words of Capesius. He experiences in the other soul the words of Felicia. He follows Strader into his cloistered loneliness. All this, to begin with, is abstraction; he has not yet come to the point to which he is afterwards guided through his pain. Self-knowledge is deepened by meditation in the inner self. That which was shown in the first scene, is now revealed by deepened self-knowledge, which—rising out of the abstraction—enters into reality. The words which you have heard resounding through the centuries—words of the Delphic oracle—gain a new life for the human being at this point; yet to begin with it is a life of estrangement from his own self. Johannes, as one who is in process of self-knowledge, dives down into all other beings. He lives in air and water, rocks and streams,—not in himself. All these words which we can only shew resounding from outside, are really words of meditation. At the very moment when the curtain rises, we must conceive the words that sound forth in all self-knowledge—we must conceive them far, far louder than they can be presented on the stage. Then the self-knower dives down into a multitude of other beings. He learns to know the things into which he enters thus. And now the same experience, which he already had before, comes before him in a most terrible way. It is a deep truth. Self-knowledge, when it takes its course in this way, leads us to look at ourselves quite differently than we ever did before. It leads us to learn to feel our own Ego as a stranger!

In fact, it is the outer vehicle of man which he feels most near to himself. A human being of our time is apt to feel it far more nearly when he cuts his finger than when he is hurt by a false judgment passed by his fellowman. How much more does it hurt the human being of to-day when he cuts his finger than when he hears a false judgment! Yet he is only cutting into his bodily vehicle.

This is the thing that emerges in self-knowledge: we learn to feel our body as an instrument. It is not so difficult for a man to feel his hand as an instrument when he uses it to grasp an object; but he now learns to feel the same with one or another portion of the brain. This feeling of the brain as of an instrument occurs at a certain stage of self-knowledge. Things become localised. When we drive a nail in the wall, we know that we are doing it with a certain tool. Now we are also aware that in doing so we make use of this or that part of the brain. These things become objective—external to us. We learn to know our brain as something that is really separated from us. Self-knowledge brings about this objectivity of our own bodily vehicle, until at length it is as foreign to us as our external tools. And as we begin thus to feel our bodily nature as an objective thing, thereby we also begin to live in the outer Universe. Only because a man still feels his body as his own, he is not clear about it; he thinks there is a boundary between the air outside him and the air within. He says to himself that he is there within; and yet, within him is the same air as outside him. Take then the substance of the air; it is within and at the same time without. And so it is in every case so it is with the blood, and with all that is bodily. In a bodily sense, man cannot be either within or without. That is mere Maya. Inasmuch as the bodily ‘inside’ becomes external to us, it is prolonged into the world outside us, into the Cosmos. And so it is, in deed and truth.

The pain of feeling oneself a stranger to oneself,—this was intended in the first scene. It is the pain of feeling oneself estranged from oneself, by finding oneself in all outer things. Johannes' own bodily vehicle is like an entity that is outside him. Feeling his own body outside of himself, he sees the other body approaching him,—the body of the being whom he has deserted. This other one approaches him, and he has learned to speak with that other being's own words. This tells him that his self has now expanded to the other being:

“Ah, bitter sorrow hath he brought to me;
So utterly I trusted him of old.
He left me lonely with my sorrow's pain,
He robbed me of the very warmth of life,
And thrust me deep beneath the chill, cold ground.”

The reproach comes vividly into our soul, only when we are bound to utter the suffering of the other one, with which our own self is connected; for our own self has now dived down into the other self. Such is the real deepening of things. Johannes at this point is really in the pain which he has caused; he feels himself poured out into it and again awakened. What does he really experience? Taking it all in all, we find that the ordinary man undergoes such an experience only in the state that we call Kama-loca. The candidate for Initiation has to experience, already in this world, what the normal human being undergoes in the spiritual world. He must undergo within the physical body the Kama-loca experiences which in the ordinary course are undergone outside the physical. Therefore, all the characteristics which we may understand as properties of Kama-loca are presented here as experiences of Initiation. Just as Johannes dives down into the soul whom he has given pain, so must the normal man in Kama-loca dive down into the souls to whom he gave pain and suffering. As though a box-on-the-ears were given back to him, so must he feel the pain. There is only this difference: while the Initiate experiences these things within the physical body, the other human being undergoes them after death. He who experiences them now will live in quite a different way when Kama-loca comes.

However, even that which man can undergo in Kama-loca, may be experienced in such a way that he is not yet free. It is a difficult task to become completely free. It is one of the most important experiences of spiritual development in our time (in the Graeco-Latin age it was not yet so) to realise how infinitely difficult it is to get free of oneself. A most important Initiation-experience is expressed in the words wherein Johannes feels himself fettered to his own lower body. His own being appears to him as a being to whom he is enchained:—

“I feel the chains that hold me chained to thee.
So fast was not Prometheus riveted
Upon the naked rocks of Caucasus,
As I am riveted and forged to thee.”

That is a thing essentially connected with self-knowledge. It is a secret of self-knowledge.; we must only apprehend it in the right way.

Have we really become better men by becoming earthly men,—by diving down into our earthly vehicles? Or should we be better if we were able to be alone in our inner life,—if we could simply cast the vehicles aside? Superficial people may well ask, when they first meet with the theosophical life, Why should one first dive down into an earthly body? The simplest thing would be to remain above; then we should not have all the misery of diving down. Why have the wise Powers of Destiny plunged us into the body?

In simple feeling, one can explain a little if one says that Divine-spiritual forces have been working at this earthly body for millions of years. Precisely inasmuch as it is so, we should make more of ourselves than we have the force to do. Our inner forces are inadequate! The fact is, if we merely wish to be what we are in our own inner being,—if we are not corrected by our vehicles—we cannot possibly be equal yet to what the Gods have made. Life shows itself in this way. Here upon Earth, man is transplanted into his bodily sheaths - sheaths that that have been prepared by beings during tree Worlds. Man still has the task of building and developing his inner being. Here between birth and death, man is an evil being through the elasticity of his bodily sheaths. In Devachan he is once more a better being, for he is there received by the Divine-spiritual beings who pour him through with their own forces. In time to come—the Vulcan era—he will be a perfect being. Here upon Earth, he is a being who gives way to one lust or another. The heart, for example, is so wisely ordered that it withstands for decades the attacks which man directs against it with his excesses—as, for instance, with his drinking coffee.

Such as he can be to-day by virtue of his own forces, man goes his way through Kama-loca. In Kama-loca he shall learn to know what he can by his own force alone. And that, in truth, is nothing good. Man, to describe himself, cannot describe himself with any predicate of beauty. He must describe himself as Johannes does:

“Yet in what shape know I myself again.
My human form is lost and gone from me;
Like some fierce dragon do I see myself;
Begotten out of primal lust and greed.
And clearly do I see how up till now
Some dim deluding veil of phantom forms
Hath hid from me mine own monstrosity.”

Our inner being is harnessed, as it were elastically, and is thus hidden from us. Truly we learn to know ourselves as ‘some fierce dragon’ when we learn to know Initiation. Therefore these words are derived from the very deepest feeling; they are not words of morbid introspection, but of true self-knowledge:

“Oh yea, I know thee; for thou art myself:
Knowledge doth chain to thee, pernicious beast,
Chain mine own self—pernicious beast—to thee;”

Fundamentally the two are the same; first as the object, then as the subject. ‘I willed to flee from thee …’

This flight, however, leads him all the more into himself. And now the ‘company’ emerges—in which we really are when we look into ourselves. This ‘company’ consists of our own cravings and passions,—all that we did not notice before, because every time we wanted to look into ourselves our gaze was diverted to the world around us. Compared to the inner life into which we tried to look, the world is a world of wondrous beauty. Here, then, we cease to look into ourselves in the illusion or Maya of life.

When human beings around us indulge in vain chatter and we grow tired of it, we take flight in solitude. For certain stages of development, it is important to do so. We can collect ourselves. We should collect ourselves in this way; it is a means of self-knowledge. Nevertheless, there are these experiences we come into a ‘company’ where we can no more be lonely. For at this stage—it matters not, whether within us or without us—beings appear who will not let us be alone. Then comes the experience which man is meant to have. Solitude itself brings him into the worst society of all:—

“Man's final refuge hath been lost to me;
I have been robbed of solitude.”

All these are real experiences, but you must not let their very intensity become a snare. Do not imagine, if such experiences are presented in their full intensity, that you should therefore be afraid. Do not imagine that these things are meant to divert any one from diving down himself into these waters. One may not experience them at once with the same intensity as Johannes did. He had to experience them thus for a definite purpose,—in a certain sense, even prematurely. Regular self-development will go at quite another pace. The fact that it takes place in-Johannes so tumultuously, should be conceived as an individual matter. Because he is an individuality who has suffered shipwreck inasmuch as he infringes on these laws, therefore it all takes place in him in a far more tempestuous way. He learns to know these laws, in that they throw him deeply out of his balance.

Nevertheless, what is here described of Johannes is intended to call forth the feeling that true self-knowledge has nothing to do with trite or easy phrases. Self-knowledge, if it be true, can do no other to begin with than to lead through suffering and grief. Things that were hitherto a refreshment take on another countenance when they appear in the field of self-knowledge. No doubt, we can pray for solitude, even though we have already found self-knowledge. Nevertheless in certain moments of self-knowledge, solitude may be the very thing we lose, if we seek it in our hitherto accustomed way. It is in moments when we flow out into the objective world, and when the lonely one suffers the direst pain of all.

This pouring-out of ourselves into other beings,—we must learn to feel it rightly if we would feel what this Play contains. It is conceived with a certain aesthetic feeling; it is ‘spiritually realistic,’ through and through. A realist with true aesthetic feeling suffers a certain pain at an unrealistic presentation. Here again, that can give satisfaction at a certain stage can be a source of pain at another. All this depends upon the way of self-knowledge. When for example you have understood a play of Shakespeare's—a great work, in the external world—it may no doubt be a source of aesthetic pleasure to you. Nevertheless, there may occur a moment of development when you are no longer satisfied. You feel your inner being rent as you go on from scene to scene. You no longer see any necessity in the sequence of one scene after another. You feel it quite unnatural that one scene is placed next to the other. Why so? Because there is nothing to hold the scenes together,—only the writer Shakespeare, and the onlooker. There is an abstract principle of causality and no reality of being in the sequence of the scenes. It is a characteristic of Shakespeare's dramas; nothing is indicated that works karmically through and through and holds the whole together.

The Rosicrucian Mystery Play, on the other hand, is realistic—spiritually realistic. Much is required of Johannes Thomasius. Without actively partaking in any important role, he is there the stage. He is the one in whose soul it is all taking place. What is described is the development of the soul—the real experiences that are undergone in the soul's development.

The soul of Johannes, realistically, spins one scene out of another. Here, then, we see that the realistic and the spiritual are in no contradiction to each other. The ‘materialistic’ and the spiritual need not—although they can—be in contradiction to each other. The realistic and the spiritual certainly need not be in contradiction to each other. Moreover, a materialist can thoroughly admire what is realistic in a spiritual sense. Shakespeare's dramas can certainly be described as realistic in terms of an aesthetic principle. But you will also understand that an Art which goes hand in hand with Theosophy eventually leads to this:—For him who experiences his own self in the Cosmos, the whole Cosmos becomes an Ego-being. Therefore we cannot abide it that anything should meet him in the Cosmos which does not stand in relation to the Ego-being. Art will in this respect have to learn that which will bring it to the principle of the Ego. For in effect, Christ once upon a time brought us the I. In the most varied spheres this I will live and find expression.

This human reality of the soul, and on the other hand this dismemberment in the world outside, shows itself also in another way. If at that time someone asked: Which person is Atma, which is Buddhi, and which Manas? … truly it was a dreadful Art if it had to be thus interpreted, as saying: ‘This character or that is a personification of Manas.’ There are such theosophical abuses, trying to interpret things in this direction. One could only say of a work of Art that had to be interpreted in such a way, Poor work of Art! Certainly, for Shakespeare's plays it would be utterly false and laughable. These are but illnesses of childhood in the theosophical movement, and we shall wean ourselves of them in time. But it is necessary to draw attention to them. Someone might even set to work and look for the nine members of human nature in the Ninth Symphony!

Yet it is right in a certain sense that the single and united human nature is also distributed among many human beings. One human being has this colouring of soul, and another that. Thus, we can see the human beings before us, representing many sides of the total human nature. Only it must be conceived in a realistic way, it must arise out of the very nature of things. Even as human beings meet us in the ordinary world, there too they represent the several sides of human nature. As we unfold ourselves from incarnation to incarnation, we shall become a totality in time. To present the underlying truth of these things, the whole of life must be dissolved. So, it is in the Rosicrucian Mystery Play. What is intended, in a certain sense, to represent Maria, is dissolved among the other figures who are about her as her companions and who with her together constitute an Ego-hood. Qualities notably of the Sentient Soul are to be seen in Philia; qualities of the Intellectual or Mind-soul in Astrid; qualities of the Spiritual Soul in Luna. And in this sense their names are chosen.

The names are chosen for the several beings according to their nature. Not only in the names; in the whole way in which the words are placed, the characterisation of the three—Philia, Astrid and Luna—is exactly graded. This is especially true of the seventh scene, where the Spiritual—Devachan—is to be shown. The beginning of the seventh scene is a far better characterisation of ‘Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Spiritual Soul’ than can otherwise be given in mere words. Human figures are shown, in answer to the question: What is ‘Sentient Soul,’ what is ‘Intellectual Soul’ and what is ‘Spiritual Soul’? In Art, the different stages can be shown, through the whole way in which these figures stand there. In the human being they flow into one another. Once they are dissolved from one another, they present themselves in this way: Philia places herself into the Universal All, Astrid into the elements, while Luna goes outward in self-action and self-knowledge. And inasmuch as they present themselves in this way, the Devachanic scene contains all that can represent Alchemy in the true sense of the word. The whole of Alchemy is there contained; only we must gradually find it out. It is given not n the mere abstract content, but in the life and being of the words. Therefore, you should not only hear what is said,—and above all, not only what each individual speaks;—you should hear how they speak, in relation to one another. The Sentient Soul inserts herself into the astral body here, then, we have to do with weaving astrality. The Intellectual Soul inserts herself into the ether-body; here, then, we have to do with living, moving ether-essence. Lastly, we see how the Spiritual Soul adorns herself and with inner firmness pours herself into the physical body. That which works through the Soul, as light within the soul, is given in the words of Philia. That which works in an etheric way, so that we stand over against what is true, is given in Astrid. That which gives inner firmness, so that it is united with the physical body which is primarily solid, is given in Luna We must be sensitive to this.

Philia (Sentient Soul)

Ich will erfullen mich	I will myself imbue
Mit klarstem Lichtessein	With clearest rays of light
Aus Weltenweiten.	From cosmic spaces wide.
Ich will eratrnen mir	I will breathe deep within
Belebenden Klangesstoff	Sound-substance that gives life
Aus Aetherfernen,	From distant ether-bounds,
Dass dir, geliebte Schwester,	Dear sister, that thou may'st
Das Werk gelingen kann.	Succeed in this thy work.

Astrid (Intellectual Soul)

Ich will verweben	Through all the streaming light
Erstrahlend Licht	I will weave darkness in
Mit dämpfender Finsternis,	To cloud its radiant beam.
Ich will verdichten	I will make dense and thick
Das Klanges leben.	The living life of sound;
Es soll erglitzernd klingen,	That glowing it may sound
Es soll erklingend glitzern,	And sounding it may glow.
Dass du, geliebte Schwester,	Dear sister, that thou may'st
Die Seelenstrahlen lenken kannst.	Direct the soul-life's rays.

Luna (Spiritual Soul)

Ich will erwärmen Seelenstoff	Soul substance will I warm,
Und will erhärten Lebensäther.	Life's ether harden too.
Sie sollen sich verdichten,	That they may thus condense
Sie sollen sich erfühlen,	And may thus feel themselves
Und in sich selber seiend,	As living in themselves
Sich schaffend halten;	And powerful to create.
Dass du, geliebte Schwester,	Dear sister, that thou may'st
Der suchenden Menschenseele	Prove wisdom's certainty
Des Wissens Sicherheit erzeugen Kannst.	To mankind's seeking soul.

I draw your attention to the fact that Philia, in the last line but one, uses the words ‘Dass dir, geliebte Schwester.’ In Astrid's words we have the darker sound ‘Dass du, geliebte Schwester,’ entering into the denser element. ‘Dass du, ... dass dir ...’ And now in Luna's words it is interwoven with the still more weighty sound, ‘in suchenden Menschenseele.’ Here the u is so interwoven with the neighbouring consonants as to gain a still closer density.

These are the things we can characterise. They are indeed like this. It depends above all on the manner, not on the mere content. Compare the further words of Philia:—

Ich will erbitten von Weltengeistern,	From cosmic spirits I
Dass ihres Wesens Licht	Will beg their being's light
Entzücke Seelensinn,	The soul-sense to enchant,
Und ihrer Worte Klang	The sound too of their words
Beglucke Geistgehor;	To charm the spirit's ear;

with the quite different way in which Astrid speaks:—

Ich will die Liebesstöme,	The love-streams will I guide
Die Welt erwarmenden	That will fill the world with warmth
Zu Herzen leiten	Unto the heart of man
Dem Geweihten;	Who is initiate;

In all these words there is conveyed the inner life and being of the Devachanic element of the world. Through these things we must realise (and for this reason I mention them) that when self-knowledge begins to go out into the outer life and being of the Universe, we need to wean ourselves of all one-sidedness. We can but experience in a dead and Philistine way that which is present at each single point of existence. It makes us rigid to be held fast at a single point in space and to imagine that we can express the truth in words. Mere words cannot express the truth so well, for it is all involved in the actual physical sound. We must feel the quality of expression also.

Such an important process as the self-knowledge of Johannes is only rightly experienced when he courageously achieves it, when he grasps it bravely. This is the next act. Self-knowledge has shattered us and cast us down. Now, having learned in the Universe outside—having perceived the Cosmos as related to us; having known the very being of other beings,—now we begin to take it into ourselves. Now we make bold to live what we have known. It is only half the battle to dive down, as Johannes did, into a being to whom we brought suffering—whom we ‘thrust deep beneath the chill, cold ground.’ We now feel differently; we take courage to balance-out the pain. Then we dive down into this life, and in our own being we speak differently. This, to begin with, is what meets us in the next scene.

While in the second scene the other being called to Johannes:

“Ah, bitter sorrow hath he brought to me;
So utterly I trusted him of old.
He left me lonely with my sorrow's pain,
He robbed me of the very warmth of life,

And thrust me deep beneath the chill, cold ground.”

—now, in the ninth scene, now that Johannes has experienced himself at the place whither all self-knowledge drives us, now; the same being calls to him:

“Thou must find me again and ease my pain.”

This is the other side. First the shattering experience, and then the needed compensation. Therefore, the other being calls to him: ‘Thou wilt find me again.’

This lifting of experience into the Universe—this filling of the self with living experience of the Universal All—could be presented in no other way. True self-knowledge—emerging as it does out of the Cosmos—could only be presented in that Johannes awakened with the very same words. Quite naturally it must begin thus in the second scene:—

“'Tis thus I hear them, now these many years,
These words of weighty import all around.”

But then, when he has dived down into the ground of earth,—united himself with the earth beneath,—then there arises in his soul the force to let the words arise in a new form. That is essential (in the ninth scene):

“... For three long years
I have sought strength of soul, with courage winged,
Which doth give truth unto these words, whereby
A man may free himself to conquer first;
Then conquering himself may freedom find ...”

Then come the words: ‘Know thou thyself, O man!’ by contrast to the words in the second scene: ‘O man, feel thou thyself!’

Again, and again, the same picture meets us. While on the one hand the scene goes downward:

“It seems mine own peculiarities
And all the world besides live in these words:
‘Know thou thyself, O man! Know thou thyself!’”

afterwards it is reversed; it changes. The scene portrays the real process. So, too, we heard the terrible, shattering word in the second scene:—

“But then, Maria, does thou realise
Through what my soul hath fought its way but now?”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“Man's final refuge hath been lost to me:
I have been robbed of solitude.”

And in the ninth scene it is shown how his being only now gains confidence and certainty. Such is the congruence of the two scenes. These are not purposeful constructions. The real experiences are so and must be so—quite as a matter of course. Thus, we should feel how in a soul such as Johannes Thomasius, self-knowledge is gradually purified, till it becomes living self-experience. And we should feel how this experience of Johannes is distributed over many human beings. His own self-knowledge is distributed over all the human beings in whom—in their single incarnations—the several portions of his being are expressed. In the Sun-Temple at the last, a whole company of human beings are there. They all are there like a tableau, and yet all together are a single man. The properties of a single human being are distributed among them all. It is at bottom a single human being. A pedant would say: ‘Then there are too many parts, there should be nine instead of twelve.’ Reality, however, does not create so as to agree with theories; yet it is more in agreement with the truth than if in regular and theoretic fashion the several members of the human being were to be marched on to the stage.

Imagine yourself now in the Sun-Temple. There are the single human beings, placed in the actual way in which they belong together karmically. There they are standing together, even as Karma has put them -together in life. And now imagine: Johannes himself is there, and the character of every single one is reflected in his soul. Each single one is a soul-quality of Johannes. What, then, has happened—if we sum up the result? Karma has brought them together, as at a nodal point of Karma. Nothing is meaningless, aimless or purposeless. All that the single human beings have done, signifies not only single events, but in each case an experience of Johannes' soul. Everything takes place twice over: in the Macrocosm and in the Microcosm—the soul of Johannes. And that is his Initiation.

For instance, as Maria is to Johannes himself, so is an, important member of his soul to another member of the soul. These are the real congruences, strictly carried out. That which is action outwardly,—inwardly in Johannes is a process of evolution. That which the Hierophant says in the third scene is about to happen here:—

“Within our circle there is formed a knot
Of threads that Karma spins, world-fashioning.”

The knot has been formed. The well-tied knot reveals whither all is leading. On the one hand is the absolute reality—the way in which Karma spins, world-fashioning. It is no aimless spinning. It is the knot as the Initiation-process in Johannes' soul. And yet, such is the whole, that a single hum-an individuality is there over and above them all. It is the Hierophant, who plays his active part and guides the several threads.

You need only think of the Hierophant in his relation to Maria. This passage in the third scene can indeed illumine what self-knowledge is. It is no joke to go out of oneself; it is a very real process. The human vehicles are deserted by the inner force; then they remain behind and become a battlefield for subordinate powers. The very moment when Maria is sending down to the Hierophant the ray of love, can be presented in no other way than thus: Down there is the body, taken hold of by the power of the Adversary, and saying the very opposite of what is going on above. Above, the ray of love rays down; below, a curse is uttered. These then are the contrasting scenes: Devachan in the seventh scene, Maria describing what she actually did; and in the third scene the world below, where, as the body is left behind, the curse of the demonic Powers against the Hierophant is uttered. Here you have two complementary pictures. It would be very bad if one had to construct them so, artificially.

To-day, then, I have based my lecture on one aspect of the Mystery Play. I hope we have thus been able to illumine certain characteristic facts that underlie Initiation.

The fact that certain things have had to be sharply emphasised—so as to describe the processes of Initiation—should not render you pusillanimous in striving for the spiritual world. Descriptions of dangers have no other purpose than to steel the human being against adversary powers. The dangers are there, the pains and sufferings are certainly before us. It would be a very poor aspiration if we were only willing to ascend into the higher worlds, so to speak, by the most comfortable ways. The spiritual worlds cannot be attained as comfortably as in modern railway trains, where you simply let yourself be rolled along, or as the outer material culture generally does it in the things of outer life. That which is here described is not intended to make us lacking in courage; quite on the contrary. Our courage shall be steeled precisely by making ourselves acquainted in this way with the attendant dangers of Initiation.

Just as it is in Johannes Thomasius, whose tendency made him incapable of guiding the brush any longer, and this was translated into dire pain, and pain at length into knowledge; so too, all that which kindles pain and grief will be translated into knowledge.

But we must seek the path in real earnest. We can only do so by realising that the theosophical truths are not so simple after all. They are deep truths of life,—so much so that we can never come to an end in seeking to comprehend them. Examples of life itself enable us most nearly to comprehend the world. We can speak far more exactly of the conditions of higher development when we describe the development of Johannes, than we can do when we describe the human being's development in general. In the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, the higher evolution is described such as it can be for every human being. The pure possibility, which can indeed be realised, is there described. When we describe Johannes on the other hand, we describe a, single human being, and in so doing it is not possible to us to portray higher development in the abstract.

I hope you will not find occasion to say that after all I have not yet told you the truth. The fact is, there are two extremes, and we must find the grades between them. All I can do is again and again to give you hints and suggestions. These must then live in your hearts and souls. After the hints, I recently gave you on St. Matthew's Gospel I said, ‘Try not to remember the literal words, but when you go out into the world try to create in heart and soul that which the words will there have become. Try not to read only in Lecture Cycles, but also with earnestness to read in your own soul.’ To do so, however, something must first have been given to you from outside; something must first have passed into your soul; otherwise, you would only be deceiving yourself. Try then to read it in your soul, and you will see that that which has sounded into your soul from outside will yet resound there in quite another form.

This and this alone would be the true anthroposophical striving:—In every lecture that is given, there should be as many different ways of understanding as there are listeners present. He who would speak about Theosophy can never wish to be understood in one way only; he would fain be understood in as many ways as individual souls are there. Spiritual Science can afford this.

One thing, however, is necessary—I do not say it as a mere aside. One thing is necessary, namely that every single way of understanding be true. It may be individual, but it must be true. Some people go so far in their individual ways of understanding that they understand the exact opposite of what is said!

Thus, if we speak of self-knowledge, we must also realise: It is more useful in self-knowledge to look for the mistakes within us and the True outside ourselves. We do not say: ‘Seek for the truth within thyself.’ No! You will find what is true in the world outside, it is poured out into the Universe. We must become free of ourselves through self-knowledge, and we must go through all these stages of the soul. Loneliness can be a very bad companion; but we can also feel the full measure of our own weakness, when in our soul we sense the echoing greatness of that Universe from out of which we are born. And at this moment we take courage. If we make bold to experience in life what we cognise, then we shall find it confirmed:—Out of the loss of the last refuge of our life there will spring forth life's first and last refuge—life's first and last security. It is that certainty which makes it possible for us first to overcome ourselves, and then to find ourselves anew—in that we find ourselves within the Cosmos.

Oh man, experience the World in thee!
Then only, going beyond thyself,
Thou wilt have found thyself in thy true being.

If we feel these things as living experience, they will become steps in our evolution.

If I may indicate in a few words the point at which yesterday's considerations culminated, I would like to say that out of them the possibility should come to light for every man, through a deepening of his being, through a trust in the spiritual worlds, of causing to rise within him a soul-mood, a soul-disposition, which will say to him: “Into man flow not only the things which are in the periphery of the earth, not only those things which stem from the evolution of the earth itself, but it is possible for man to tune his soul in such a way that he receives out of the spiritual worlds helping forces which flow into him, which produce an equilibrium between the single egoistic I and the totality of his organization—if that possibility offers itself which has flowed into the earth-mission.” Whoever can attain this trust in this inflow from the spiritual worlds, no matter what he calls this inner event, this inner experience, has lived through the personal Christ-experience inwardly. The remainder of this matter will reveal itself to us if today we start by considering the third path to Christ, the path of initiation.

With the path through the Gospels, and the path through inner experience, we have the two paths to Christ which are accessible to every man: I say expressly—to every man. But to the path of initiation there belongs a certain preparation, as should be understandable to everyone. In our time this requires us to go deeply, in a real and not merely theoretical way, into the true, genuine spiritual science which, at least in our present time, must always be the point of departure, if we wish to understand what the way of initiation is. Regarding the essence of initiation it would be well to give a few introductory remarks in a certain direction. You see, initiation is the highest which man can achieve in the course of the Earth-evolution, for it leads man to a certain understanding, to a real insight into the secrets of the spiritual world. What occurs in the spiritual worlds is really the content, the object, of initiation, and a real knowledge, an immediate perception, of events in the spiritual worlds is attained on the path of initiation. When initiation is characterized in this way, something very special must strike everyone who lets this characterization work on his soul. This is really to say, fundamentally, that initiation is—allow me the expression—a super-religious way. The religions which in the course of human epochs have spread over the surface of the earth, and which still prevail among men, all of these, in so far as they are great religions, and in so far as we study them at their points of origin, were originally founded upon initiation, by initiates. They have flowed out of what great initiates have been able to give to men. But the religions were given in such a form that, in their contents, men received what was suitable to the time in which they lived, to the race to which they belonged, even to the region of the earth in which they lived.

Now today we live in a very special epoch of human evolution, and it is just the task of spiritual science to understand that we live in a special time. The way in which among our contemporaries spiritual science can be brought forth and spread, this was nowhere possible in past times. Anthroposophy as such could not be publicly taught. Only in our time do we begin to teach anthroposophy. The religions were once the channels through which the secrets of initiation were to be allowed to flow into mankind; to be allowed to flow in a manner suitable at a given time to a given group of men. But today we are in a position to give through anthroposophy something which is not adapted to a single race, to a single region, to a single group of men, but which can bring to every man, no matter where he finds himself on earth, something of those secrets of existence, for knowledge of which souls are yearning and which souls must have if hearts are to be strong for work on earth. But this already shows that through anthroposophy something is to be given which takes a standpoint higher than the religious standpoints were, or still are where these religious standpoints continue to be accepted. In a certain way anthroposophy is that which must propagate the secrets of initiation in a universal human way, whereas in the various ancient religious systems of the earth the secrets of initiation were always announced in a special manner, in a different way, adapted to the particular human group.

What follows from this? It follows that we find the most varied religions spread out over the earth, all of which point back to this or that founder. We find first the Krishna religion, leading back to Krishna; second, the Buddha religion, leading back to Buddha; third, the ancient Hebrew religion, leading back to Moses; and we find Christianity, leading back to Jesus of Nazareth. The religions having all flowed out of initiation, we must be quite clear that we cannot today take the position taken by the philosophers of religion who consider themselves “enlightened.” The philosophers of comparative religion have a secret outlook on religions; they regard them all either as false or as childish stages of human development. But we, as anthroposophists, since we learn to know that the religions are only different formulations of the truths of initiation, are in a position to grasp the true and not the false in the various religious systems. We do justice to all the religious systems in comparison with one another. We regard them as equally justified revelations of the great truths of initiation.

And from this follows something terribly important for practical feeling and practical activity. What is this important thing? That out of the anthroposophical mood will proceed complete understanding, hearty respect, and full recognition of the core of truth in all religions; and that those who, out of an anthroposophical attitude, reflect on the world and its course of development, will respect the truths of the various religious systems. There will be the highest esteem and respect. Yes, my dear friends, from the anthroposophical spiritual stream will result the following for the various religious confessions on earth: A man will go to the adherents of any religious system, and he will not think himself able to graft on to them, or inoculate them with, other confessions. Much rather will we go to them and, out of our own religious faith, discern what there is of truth in their faith. And a man who is born in a region where a particular religion holds sway will not, on account of this religion, intolerantly reject all other religions, but he will be able to approach them on the basis of what, as truth, is contained in the different religions. Let us take an example. Such an example can be grasped only by those who, in the depths of their soul, take seriously the anthroposophical attitude and all that must follow from a knowledge of the fundamental conditions of initiation. Let us assume that an Occidental has grown up within Christianity. He will perhaps have learned to know Christianity through having taken into himself the great truths of the Gospels. Perhaps he has already attained also to what is called the path to Christ Jesus through inner experience; perhaps in his inner experience he has already experienced the Christ. Let us assume that he now becomes acquainted with another religion, Buddhism for example. From those who stand within the sacred truths and knowledge of Buddhism, he learns to know something which is an annoyance to the materialistic Occidental but which we anthroposophists can understand: He learns to know that the founder of this religion, after having lived through many incarnations on earth as a Bodhisatva, was reborn as the son of King Sudhodana; he learns to know that in the twenty-ninth year of his life as Bodhisatva he rose to Buddha, and that with this rising to Buddha there is given in this religion—since it stems from initiation—the one great truth which is valid not only for Buddhism but for all men, and which is acknowledged by every initiate and by all men who understand Buddhism; he learns to know that the adherent of Buddhism says justly: “When the Bodhisatva becomes Buddha in a human incarnation, then this incarnation which the Buddha has to go through on earth is the last. Then he does not come back again in a human body.”

To one who stands within Buddhism it would be acutely painful, if it were asserted that the Buddha would return again in a fleshly body. Such an adherent of the Buddha would be deeply distressed, if anyone were to dispute this truth, saying that the Bodhisatva who became a Buddha could again at some time appear upon the earth in a physical body. But we anthroposophists recognize the truth in the religions; we take the position of seeking the truth of the various religions and not their error. So we go to those who understand Buddhism and we learn to know—or learn out of initiation to know—that it is true that that individuality who lived as Bodhisatva on earth and became a Buddha has since that time reached spiritual heights from which he need not again descend to this physical globe. From that moment on, if we stand on the ground of the doctrine of reincarnation, we shall no longer thrust upon the Buddhist the assertion that the Buddha could reappear in a physical body. Genuine knowledge will create an understanding for every form of religion proceeding out of initiation. We respect the religious forms which have been developed on earth, in that we recognize the truth which they have to give. Yes, my dear friends, I acknowledge as frankly and honestly as the strictest Buddhist this truth, that the Bodhisatva who was on earth and rose to Buddha reached therewith a height of human development which made it possible for him no longer to descend to earth. This is what we call having an understanding for the various forms of religion on the earth.

Let us take the opposite case: That an adherent of Buddhism should make his way to anthroposophical knowledge. Either out of a real knowledge of Christianity or out of the principle of initiation, he would allow it to become clear to him that in another region of the earth there is another form of religion, and that those who understand this religion are quite clear about the following: That there once lived a personality who really belonged to no nation, least of all to the Occident, and that from his thirtieth to his thirty-third year there lived in this personality that impulse, that force of the spiritual life, to which we pointed yesterday; to which, in their Vishvakarman, the seven holy Rishis also pointed; to which, in his Ahura-Mazdao, Zarathustra also pointed; to which, as their Osiris, the Egyptians also pointed; and which the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period named Christ. But that is not the point: The point is to recognize in Christ that which lived as an impulse for three years in the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, that which was not previously present on earth, that which descended from spiritual heights into the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, that which in this personality went through the Mystery of Golgotha, and that which as such a Christ-impulse is a once-appearing impulse for the earth and is not connected with any ordinary incarnation of mankind; that which was thus once present as Christ and can never return in any man, but will come, as the Bible says, in the clouds of heaven—meaning that as a spiritual revelation it will show itself to men. This is a Christian avowal.

Now, one who stands within Buddhism, imbued with theosophical earnestness and theosophical dignity, will have to recognize that he must pay attention to and respect this Christian avowal just as the Christian must respect his. The Buddhist who has risen to theosophy and takes it seriously will say: “Just as you as a Christian approach with trust the teaching that the Bodhisatva who became a Buddha will no more return to the earth, just as it seems to me fitting that you know that the Buddha cannot return, so I as a Buddhist acknowledge that what you call Christ cannot return in a physical incarnation, but as a once-appearing impulse lived only for three years in a physical human body.”—If in anthroposophy we find the reciprocal understanding of the religions in such a way that the initiation-principle can penetrate into man's heart in such a way that one man shall not impose an alien opinion on others, then we produce an understanding which unites men over the whole earth, we establish peace between the single religions on earth.

In Christianity the founder of the religion is Jesus of Nazareth. The Christian initiation-principle is concerned with the religion's founder, Jesus of Nazareth, only as with a fact, as with a fact which can be examined by occultists as a fact. With the same love, with the same care, as are used in examining the life of Buddha or of another founder of a religion, the life of Jesus of Nazareth is examined by those who are acquainted with the principle of religion. How this life of Jesus of Nazareth appears from the standpoint of pure occultism you will find described in my pamphlet: The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind. But the true Christian initiation-principle concerns itself with recognizing Christ, with the way to Christ. And this Christian religious principle was preparing for many years what was just now described as a principle of peace for the whole earth, in that it clearly does not proceed from the founder of a religion as such, but from a fact which occurred once in the world.

That is the basic difference between Christianity and the other religions. What the initiation-principle which leads to Christ has as a task in the world is different from the cultures which have proceeded from the other religious principles. What the Christian initiation-principle has as a task within the world-mission proceeded from a fact, from an event, not from a personality. This will be understandable if we mention first some preliminary conditions. We can put forward a single sentence, a single statement, and we have then characterized, although externally, the starting point of esoteric Christianity, of Christian initiation: It is the death which was experienced in the uniting of Christ with Jesus of Nazareth. The fact of this death, which we call the Mystery of Golgotha, is what should be understood through the principle of Christian initiation. Now, a true understanding of this death can be won only if we make quite clear to ourselves the mission of death within our earth-evolution. Yesterday we pointed out that frailty, infirmity, illness, and death are connected with the lack of harmony between our Ego, permeated by the Luciferic principle, and our organization. Death, after all, is connected with the Luciferic principle, and that in a very special way. It would be an entirely false idea if we were to assume that Lucifer brought death. Lucifer did not bring death, he brought what we can call the possibility of error (also of moral error), the differentiation of men into races, and the possibility of freedom. Lucifer brought these things. If only what Lucifer brought had been efficacious in mankind, if nothing had been opposed to him, then this Luciferic principle would have led to the point where mankind would have fallen out, would have broken out, of the progressive divine evolution. Man would indeed have spiritualized himself, but in an entirely different direction from that to which the progressive divine evolution led. To retain mankind within this divine evolution, to prevent mankind's being lost for the divine evolution, a particular arrangement had to be set up: Man had to be continually reminded of what the consequences are if he misuses the possibility of error and of freedom. All illness, frailty, infirmity, and death are reminders that man would have to estrange himself from the progressive divine evolution if, in addition to having the Luciferic freedom, he were healthy and full of energy. Thus illness, infirmity, and death are not gifts of Lucifer, but gifts of the good, wisdom-filled divine powers, who have therewith set up a dike against the influences of Lucifer.

Thus we must say that all that confronts us in the world as continuous human tribulation coming from outside, as illness and death, is there in order that we men may remain fettered to earth-existence until we have an opportunity to make amends; in order that we may have an education which will adapt us to our organization. We suffer in order that out of our suffering we may gain experience and find an equilibrium between our Lucifer-permeated Ego and our divinely-permeated organization. Our organization falls away from us repeatedly, until we have completely imbued ourselves, in our Ego, with the laws of the evolution which is progressive in a divine sense. Every death is therefore a point of departure for something else. Man cannot die without taking with him that which gives him the possibility of sometime overcoming death in his successive incarnations. All our pains are there in order that out of suffering we may gain the experience of how we must adapt ourselves to our progressing divine organization. This question, however, cannot be discussed apart from its connection with all of evolution.

We can study such a thing especially well if we examine occultly the connections between man and the next lower kingdom, the animal kingdom. We know that in the course of evolution man has always inflicted pain on the animals, that he has killed the animals. One who learns to know the Karma of human life often finds it highly unjust that the animal, which does not reincarnate, should suffer, should bear pain, and even, in the case of the higher animals, should go through death with a certain consciousness. Should no Karmic compensation take place here? Naturally, the human being has to make a Karmic compensation in Kamaloka for the pain which he inflicts on animals, but I am not speaking of this now; I am speaking of the compensation for the animals. Let us make one thought clear: If we consider human evolution, we see how much pain man has strewn over the animal kingdom and how many animals he has killed. What do these pains and these deaths mean in the course of evolution?

Occult study shows us that every pain which is inflicted on a pain-feeling being other than man, every death, is a seed for the future. Animals, as they are willed by the progressive divine evolution, are not destined to have incarnations like man. But, if a change comes into this wisdom-filled world-plan, if man intervenes and does not leave the evolution of the animals to be as it would have been without man, what happens then? Now, you see, occult research teaches us that every pain, every death, inflicted by man on the animals, will return and arise again, not through reincarnation, but because pain and death have been inflicted on the animals. This pain and suffering call up animality again. These animals on which pain has been inflicted will arise again, though not in the same form; but that which feels pain in them, that comes again. It comes again in such a way that the sufferings of the animals are compensated, so that to every pain its complementary feeling is added. These pains, these sufferings, this death, these are the seed which man has sown; they return in such a way that to every pain its contrary feeling is added in the future. To use a concrete example: When Earth is replaced by Jupiter, the animals will not appear in their present form, but their pains and sufferings will awaken the forces for the feeling of pain. They will live in men, and will embody themselves as parasitic animals in men. Out of the sensations and feelings of these men, out of their pains, the compensation will be created. This is the occult truth, which can be stated objectively and unadorned even if it is not pleasant to the man of today. Man will one day suffer this, and the animals will have, in a certain well-being, in a pleasant feeling, the compensation for their pains. This already happens slowly and gradually in the course of present-day earth-life, no matter how strange this seems. Why are men plagued by beings which are really neither animals nor plants, but stand between the two, by bacilli and similar creatures, which feel a well-being when man suffers? They have brought this upon themselves in earlier incarnations through inflicting pain and death on animals. For the being, though not appearing in the same form, feels this across time and feels the compensation for its pains in the suffering which man must undergo. Thus all the pain and suffering in the world are positively not without consequences. It is a seed from which proceeds what is caused by pain, suffering, and death. There can be no suffering, no pain, no death, without causing something which springs up later on.

Let us consider in this light the death on Golgotha, which followed from the uniting of Christ with Jesus of Nazareth. The first thing which becomes clear to anyone who goes through the requisite initiation is that this death on Golgotha was no ordinary death on earth, no ordinary human or other death. Persons who do not yet believe in the super-sensible can form no conception of this death on Golgotha. For even externally this Mystery of Golgotha has something very strange, something from which man has much to learn. This is that no historical writings tell of the Mystery of Golgotha, and the critics of the Gospels assert that the Gospels are in no way authoritative as historical documents. Principles of initiation are applied to that which was not written out of historical observation. What happened on Golgotha can still be perceived today by initiates, can still be seen today in the Akashic Record by people who undergo initiation. The writers of the Gospels also wrote only out of the Akashic Record; an event is described for which the original writers of the Gospels never thought of calling in the aid of perceptions on the physical plane. So strong was then the consciousness that one had to do here with something which stood in relation to the super-sensible worlds, and that the most important thing was to gain a relation to the super-sensible worlds. Out of the sense-world no right relation to these events can be won. What happened becomes clear through initiation. One could say that at the beginning of our era there lived a man, Jesus of Nazareth; that in the 30th year of his life he experienced a certain change through the reception of the Christ, and that after three years he was crucified. This would signify an event for the progressive history of mankind. If this were said, it would be the opposite of what the initiate learns to know; it would be an affair of men on earth, no matter how spiritualized it might become. With the initiation-principle, this is not the point.

Fundamentally, it might be said—but you must not misunderstand me—radically, it might be said that, at first glance, what happened on Golgotha was not an event which concerned men in so far as they are on the physical plane. At first glance! Not in the way in which it is related: A man once lived, Jesus of Nazareth, at the beginning of our era, who in the 30th year of his life experienced a certain change through the reception of the Christ, and was then crucified in his 33rd year—not so is the initiation-truth of Christianity told. It must be stated entirely differently.

It must be stated approximately thus: One who is to be initiated into the Christian principle learns the following: Before this Earth there was a Moon-condition. During this Moon-condition the Luciferic beings remained behind. These Luciferic beings developed further, alongside the progressive divine spiritual beings. In the Lemurian time Lucifer drew near to men, injected himself into the human earth-evolution, and brought about what was characterized yesterday. Thus Lucifer was inside the whole human development. Had human evolution continued in this way with Lucifer, it would gradually have happened that the mission of the Earth would not have reached its goal; man would have dried up, the human Ego would have separated from, would have broken out of, the divine spiritual evolution. On the old Moon a series, so to speak, of beings belonging to the super-sensible worlds learned that Lucifer had become rebellious, that he had taken up a position hostile to them. Thus the gods were compelled to see that Lucifer had become the adversary of the progressive divine development.—One can at first completely ignore all that concerns man in this. Let us consider all this as the affair of the gods and of their adversaries, the Luciferic beings, and let us consider mankind as a creation of the gods. This was the situation.

Now, there is a certain peculiarity in the spiritual, in the super-sensible, worlds. One thing is not present there which is present on the earth; death, in all its forms, is not found there. In the super-sensible worlds one transforms oneself, but one does not die. Metamorphoses, not birth and death, are present there. For example, the group-souls which are in the super-sensible worlds do not die; they transform, metamorphose themselves. Birth and death do not exist there, where the effects of the physical world have never reached. Only where the traits of the physical world have already been transmitted to a certain extent to the beings of the spiritual world, there is something which may be regarded as analogous to death, as with the spirits of nature; but we cannot go into this today. In the real super-sensible world there is no birth or death, only transformation, metamorphosis.

For the divine spiritual beings who may be designated the creators of men, birth and death do not come into consideration. Lucifer also does not incarnate himself as a human being in the physical world. He works in man through man; uses men as his vehicle, as it were. Thus we have to do with the gods and with the Luciferic beings, who look down, so to speak, upon their creations. Had evolution continued in this way, had nothing happened in the world of the gods, then the intention of the gods for men would never have been fulfilled; Lucifer would have thwarted the plan of the gods. The gods had to make a sacrifice—that was their concern—they had to experience something which was related to their sphere in such a way that it really could not be experienced by gods if they remained in their own sphere: They had to send from their own ranks down to the physical plane a being who experienced something which otherwise gods in the spiritual worlds cannot experience. The gods had to send the Christ down to earth to do battle with the Luciferic principle. In the course of time, when the time was fulfilled, the gods, whom we group together under the name of the divine Father-world, sent down the Christ in order that he should learn to know the unending pains of men, which mean something entirely different for a god from what they mean for a man. Therewith the gods entered the earth-sphere to do battle with the Luciferic spirits. A god had to suffer death on the cross, the most disgraceful human death, as Paul especially emphasizes.

We were allowed, once in the Earth's development, to be witnesses—because we looked as through a window into the spiritual worlds—of an affair of the gods.

Previously—so says the initiation-principle—man was compelled under all circumstances to rise into the divine-spiritual worlds in order to take part in the initiation-principle. The initiation-principle stands before the whole of mankind in the Mystery of Golgotha, an event which is at the same time sensible on the physical plane (if men would only see it) and super-sensible, a true affair of the gods. This is the essential thing, that a god once went through death, as a counterpoise to Lucifer, and that men were allowed to look on. This is what the initiation-principle gives as Christian wisdom, and this is the real origin of the faith that to men, as men, something can flow as a force which can take them beyond the earth-sphere and beyond death; because once the gods settled their affair on earth and allowed men to look on. Therefore that which streams out from the Mystery of Golgotha is something universally human. And if every pain, every suffering, every death has its effect (even those inflicted by men on animals) so does this death also have its effect. This death was a seed sown by the gods; it was something which remained bound up with the earth, and has remained bound up with it ever since, remained bound up with it in such a way that every man, through trust, through love for the spiritual worlds, will find it. He does find it!

The initiate knows that this is so; the believing-trusting man feels that from the spiritual worlds help can come to him for his striving, if he can only develop enough belief and trust. This will develop itself in a very definite way.

There were those who were contemporaries of the Egyptian initiates. Through initiation these initiates had made quite clear to their pupils the whole tragedy of the conflict of the gods with Lucifer, by setting before men symbolically in their mysteries the Osiris-Set myth. Just yesterday we considered what feelings the Osiris-Set myth called forth in the Egyptians. There lived the divine-spiritual to which men wished to attain; this was called Osiris. But on earth the human being cannot unite himself with Osiris; he must first go through the gate of death. On earth Osiris could not live; he was immediately dismembered; this was not the place for what was incarnated in Osiris. The last culture epoch before the Graeco-Latin looked up to Christ, to the Osiris-principle, as to a Beyond. Then came the Greek time, which was so deeply imbued with the feeling that it was better to be a beggar on earth than a king in the realm of shades. In the time in which this was still felt in Greece, in the time of the old heroes, men felt the whole discrepancy between the Ego, permeated by the Luciferic principle, and the progressive human organization. Men felt then that the fourth post-Atlantean culture period ran its course in such a way that they had to crowd in a great deal of what man can experience just here on earth. Thence the abnormal, the singular, in this period. In no other time do so many remarkable series of incarnations occur as in this fourth period. Men had to do a great deal here on earth, because they now looked more on this world than on the worlds beyond, as the third culture epoch had still done. The Greeks did not prize this incorporation into Osiris; they were more occupied with cramming as much as possible into the human incarnations, they wanted to get as much as possible out of the incarnation. Thence the remarkable fact that Pythagoras, the great initiator of a certain line of Greek culture, in an earlier incarnation had fought as a Trojan hero on the side of the Trojans. He himself says that he was a Trojan hero, mentioned in Homer, and that he recognized himself as an enemy of the Greeks because he recognized his shield. When Pythagoras says that he had been Euphorbos, anthroposophy teaches a full understanding of this assertion. The Greeks, even the greatest among them, laid especial value on what the single physical incarnations meant for them.

But the fourth post-Atlantean period had also to lead men to feel the spiritual worlds in their full significance, for in that time fell the Mystery of Golgotha. At the time when men in Greece were prizing the outer world most, there occurred in an unknown corner of the world the Mystery of Golgotha; on the earthly stage, where otherwise men carry out their human affairs, the gods carried out their own affairs.

Just as the Egyptian learned to look up to death when he thought of his Osiris, so man learned to know, in the fourth post-Atlantean period, how a contemporary religious form was present, in which lived the impulse which could bring to men the feeling that in this physical world something takes place which is really an affair of the gods; that there takes place the living refutation of that which the Greeks had until then believed—“Better to be a beggar on earth than a king in the realm of shades.” For now the Greeks learned to know him who, as a king, had descended from the realm of the gods, and, as a beggar, had lived out his destiny on earth among men. That was the answer to the feeling of the fourth past-Atlantean period. But this is also that complex of feelings from which the rays for the future earth-development can proceed. The Egyptian had looked up to Osiris, who for him was the Christ, in order to unite himself with him after death; in the fourth post-Atlantean period man looked upon the Mystery of Golgotha as the contemporary act which taught men that in the physical world an event had taken place which was an affair of the gods.

We are living in the fifth post-Atlantean period. In our fifth post-Atlantean period men will add the great teachings of Karma to the other teaching, they will learn to understand their karma. In our fifth post-Atlantean period, human beings are experiencing the third act which follows consistently after the Osiris act and the act of the Mystery of Golgotha. They will learn to grasp the idea: “I am placed on earth through birth; my destiny is on earth; I experience joy and sorrow; I must understand that what I experience as joy and sorrow does not approach me in vain, that it is my Karma, and that it comes to me because it is my Karma, my great educator. I look upon that which was before my birth, which placed me in this incarnation, because this, my destiny, is necessary for my further development. Who sent me hither? Who will continue to place me on this earth, into my destiny, until I have discharged my Karma? I shall owe this to the Christ that men can ever more be called to suffer their destinies, until they have discharged their Karma on earth.” Therefore Jesus of Nazareth, out of whom Christ spoke, could not say to men; “Try to escape as fast as possible out of the physical body”...but he had to say to men: “I will place you into your destinies on this earth so long as you have not discharged your Karma. You must discharge your Karma.” Men will learn as we approach the future that they were united with Christ before birth, that they have received from him the grace of discharging their old Karma in the incarnations.

Thus did the men of the fourth post-Atlantean period look up to Jesus of Nazareth as the bearer of the Christ. Thus will the men of our time learn that the Christ will reveal himself ever more supersensibly, and will govern more and more the threads of Karma in the affairs of the earth. They will learn to know that spiritual power as that destiny which the Greeks could not yet recognize, which will bring men to the point of discharging their Karma in the most fitting way in the successive incarnations. As to a judge, as to a lord of Karma, men will look up to the Christ in the succession of incarnations, when they experience their destiny. Thus men will stand in such a relation to their destiny that they will be stimulated increasingly to deepen their souls, until they can say to themselves: “This destiny is not allotted to me through an impersonal power, this destiny is allotted to me through that with which I feel myself related in my inmost being. In Karma itself I perceive what is related to my being. My Karma is dear to me because it makes me better and better.” Thus one learns to love Karma, and then this is the impulse to know the Christ. Men first learned to love their Karma through the Mystery of Golgotha. And this will continue further and further, and men will learn more and more that under Lucifer's influence alone the earth would never have been able to reach its goal, that the evolution of mankind would have had to become more and more corrupt without the Christ.

But Christianity does not look upon the Christ as a personality, as the founder of an abstract religious system. In our present time the founder of a religion, in accordance with the demands of our time, only brings about discords. Not from a personality does the Christian initiation proceed, but from a fact, from an impersonal act of the gods which took place before the eyes of men. That is why this secret of Golgotha, this event which took place at the beginning of our era and from which went forth the seed of this unique death, the seed from which now grows man's love for his destiny, for his Karma, has been transmitted to mankind in a special way.

We have seen that the death which man inflicts on animals has a certain consequence. The death on Golgotha works as a seed in the human soul which feels its relation to the Christ. So was it with the Mystery of Golgotha: The One died, and just as a single seed is laid in the earth, in order that it die and spring up in the field, and that there be an increase of that which proceeded from the one seed, so the death of a god was realized on the cross. The seed was strewn on Golgotha, the soil was the human soul; what springs up are the relations of man to the super-sensible Christ, who will never more disappear from the evolution of the earth, who will always appear to men in the most varied ways. As men were able to see him physically in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, so will they be able to raise themselves to see in the near future an etheric Christ-image; they will see the Christ as Paul saw him.

That which is contained in the Christian initiation was preserved in the symbol of the Holy Grail; it was brought into that community which imparts the Christian initiation. For those who receive the Christian initiation what is said here is not an abstract theory, not an hypothesis, but a fact of the super-sensible worlds. The cultivation of the Christian initiation was entrusted to those who were the guardians of the Holy Grail, and later to the fosterers of the community of the Rose Cross. What proceeds from the Christian initiation should, according to its whole nature, work impersonally. Everything personal should be excluded therefrom; for the personal has brought only quarrels and strife into humanity, and will do this increasingly in the future. Therefore it is a strict rule for those who, symbolically speaking, serve the Holy Grail or, speaking literally, serve the cultivation of the Christian initiation, that none of those who have a leading part of the first order to play within the brotherhood of the Holy Grail or the community of the Rose Cross—neither they nor those who live in their surroundings—may speak of the secrets which they know and which work in them, before the passage of one hundred years after their deaths. There is no possibility of learning the complete truth about a leading personality of the first order until one hundred years have passed after his death.

This has been a strict law within the Rosicrucian community since its foundation. Exoterically, no one knows who is a leader in the Rosicrucian community until one hundred years have passed after his death. Then what he has given has already passed over into humanity, has become the objective property of mankind. Thus everything personal is excluded. Never will it be possible to point to a personality in an earthly body as a carrier of the Christian mystery. Only a hundred years after the death of such a personality would this be possible. This is a law which all the brothers of the Rose-Cross well observe. Never will a Rosicrucian brother point to a living personality as a leader of the first order in relation to that which, as Christian initiation, should flow into humanity. In ancient times one could point prophetically to those who would come: The prophets were preceded by their forerunners, their prophets, and these prophets pointed to the founders of religions who should come later; in the time of Jesus of Nazareth the contemporaries, for example the Baptist, pointed to him who was their contemporary; but the spiritual organization of mankind, after the Mystery of Golgotha, of necessity became altered in such wise that it can no longer be the prophet's way to point to a personality who will come or who is already present. On the contrary, a person who was a bearer of the Christian mystery, of that spiritual fact which is tested by the hearts of men, will first be pointed out a hundred years after he has passed from the physical plane through the gates of death.

All these things do not happen out of human caprice, but because they must happen. They must happen because humanity now stands before a time when love, peace, and understanding must spread in the process of the development of mankind. But they will spread only if we learn to take impersonally what is present, if we learn to champion the truth-containing element which has been given to mankind in the course of human evolution. Never more shall we, if as Occidentals we meet a Buddhist, seek to make him a Christian through persuasion or compulsion; for we believe that what has been given to him, and is the deepest thing in his religion, will surely lead him to the Christ. We believe above all things in his own truth; we will not injure the feelings of the Buddhist by saying it is not true that the founder of his religion, after he had lived among men as a Bodhisattva, has as a Buddha no expectation of further physical incarnations. Thereby we establish peace between the religious confessions. In this way, in the future the Christian will understand the Buddhist, and the Buddhist will understand the Christian. The Buddhist who will understand Christianity will say: “I understand that the Christian makes his religious principle something impersonal, an impersonal fact, the fact of the Mystery of Golgotha, an affair of the gods which man may watch and through which he may receive what can connect him with the divine.” No reasonable Buddhist will come to the Christian and say that the Christ can be incarnated in a physical body. On the contrary he would see in this a transgression of the true religious principle. And so no new discord-producing confession with a religious leader of a personal sort will be brought into the world, but the initiation principle itself with its peace, its harmony, its way of producing understanding, will meet all religions with vivifying understanding, and will not wish to force the truth of one religion upon another. As the Oriental Buddhist would answer to the Occidental who said to him that the Buddha could appear in a fleshly body: “Then you do not understand the matter, you do not know what a Buddha is” so would the Buddhist who had grasped the true heart of Christianity, and who stood for spiritual knowledge in earnestness and dignity, reply to one who should speak to him of a Christ incarnated in the flesh: “You do not understand Christianity if you believe that the Christ comes again in a physical body; you understand Christianity just as little as one understands Buddhism who believes that the Buddha would appear in a fleshly body.” What the Christian, if he is an anthroposophist, will always grant to the Buddhist; this will the Buddhist, if he is an anthroposophist, always grant also to the Christian. And so with every adherent of every religious confession of the earth. Thus will anthroposophy bring the great and understanding union, the synthesis of the religious confessions on the earth.

The meeting today is an occasion that demands an introduction to our studies. It is the day known in the Theosophical Movement¹ as White Lotus Day, commemorating the yearly anniversary of the day on which Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of the present Theosophical Movement, left the physical plane. It will need very little effort to touch a chord in every soul present here today in order to evoke feelings of admiration, veneration and gratitude towards the individuality who came to the Earth in Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and inspired men to turn their minds again to the ancient, holy Mysteries whence all the forces and impulses needed for man's spiritual development have proceeded. By devoting herself to what she clearly realised to be the task of the modern age, H. P. Blavatsky was able to present in a popular form what was accessible to her of the Mystery wisdom, a form which differed from that in which Mystery wisdom has, through secret channels, influenced men's activities and endeavours. The significance of the modern age lies in the fact, that what was formerly accessible only to the few, must be given in a form comprehensible to wider circles. And to have acted, as she did at first, in accordance with this trend in the modern age—this was the mission of Madame Blavatsky. Thus, she turned the minds of men to something which has, in truth, always been held sacred by those who had knowledge of it. To indicate that this is so we will begin with the recitation of a poem by a thinker known to the so-called educated public—or rather known only as a dry, abstract thinker and as an architect of systems of remote philosophical ideas. But that what this thinker seems to give only in the form of crystalline ideas were the product of intense warmth of feeling, and that ideas alone were not the only expressions of the dictates of his heart—this he shows us in a poem addressed to the holy Mysteries.

Hegel—one can call him ‘the thinker of Europe’—who has become so ‘well known’ to modern scholars that in the libraries one can still find many uncut volumes of his—has left us a poem written from the very fibres of his heart. I mean the poem ‘Eleusis’, dedicated to Hölderlin, which will now be recited by Fräulein von Sivers. With the recitation of this poem we will pay our tribute to the genii of H. P. Blavatsky.

ELEUSIS

To Hölderlin

Rest all about me and within me rest,
The ever-grinding cares of busied men
Asleep at last! To me they proffer
Repose and liberty. My thanks to thee,
Dear freedom-bringer, Night! Now the moon veils
The uncertain outline of the distant hills
With gauzes of white mist. The clear line of the lake
Looks kindly on me.
The long-drawn-out loud noises of the day
Seem years and years away.
Thy image steals, beloved Friend, upon me
With joys from byegone days, with longings
That soon give way to sweeter hopes
Of future meeting. Fancy paints
The ardent, the long-hungered-for embrace,
The questions asked and answered;
Intimate probings whether time has changed
His mien, his look, his feelings—then the joy
Of certainty, finding the pact maintained
Firmer and riper now than then,
That ancient pact no oath had bound us to
To live for freedom and for truth alone,
Never and never to make peace
With the laws that rule sensations and beliefs!
Now the mood that bore me lightly over hills and dales to thee
Compounds with dull reality.
Ah, but a tell-tale sigh betrays their discord,
And with it flies away my fancy's happy dream
I look up to the eternal vault of heaven,
To thee, thou gleaming star of night!
Oblivion of all wishes and all hopes
Comes streaming down from thine eternity.
Reflection dies away in contemplation.
All that I labelled ‘mine’ is here no more.
I yield myself up to the Infinite,
I am within it, am naught else, am All.
Thought, soon returning, feels estranged,
Trembles before the Limitless; amazed, it cannot grasp
Such depths of contemplation.
Imagination links eternity
To sense. Ye lofty Shades, Spirits sublime,
Welcome! Ye from whose brows Perfection shines,
Ye fright me not. I feel: This also is my home,
This radiance austere that wraps you round.
Ha! Might the portals of thy Temple part,
O Ceres, erstwhile in Eleusis throned!
Drunken with ardour, now I feel
The terror of thy coming,
Even as thy Revelations dawn on me—
Then would I tell the sense sublime
Of figured images, would hear and understand
The hymns sung at a banquet of the Gods. Alas, thy halls are silent, Holy One!
Fled is the choir of Gods into Olympus,
Bare their polluted altars;
Fled from the grave of unenlightened Man
The genius of spotless magic that was here.
The wisdom of thy priests is dumb, no echo from their hallowed rites
Hath been preserved to us. In vain it quests,
The scholar's prying itch, without the love
Of wisdom. So possessed, they still despise thee.
Somewhat they hope to gain by grubbing after words,
Words that thy giant Meanings once informed -
In vain! They only turn up dust and ashes
And never never find therein thy life renewed.
What if in that disanimated trash
They found some pleasure? The complacent ghouls
Mistook: no vestige, not a trace remained
Of sacraments and images once thine.
Sons of initiation felt that high
Doctrine ineffable too full, too deep
To be bestowed in shrivelled vocables.
The soul touched by Eternity,
Immersed beyond the bounds of space and time,
By thought now unconfined forgets itself,
Then back to consciousness once more
Awakes. Who seeks to speak of this at all
To others feels, had he the tongues of angels,
The poverty of words—is horrified
To find the Sacred dwarfed by thoughts as small
As words will hold. His lips are sealed
Fearful before the sin of utterance.
What the adept forbade himself, wise laws
Enjoined on weaker minds: not to divulge
Aught that they saw, heard, felt throughout that holy night,
Lest the devotion of some better spirit
Be mischiefed by its noise; their pack of words
Might foster wrath with the Divine itself,
Were that so trodden in the mire
As even to be memorised, become
A toy, a Sophist's article on sale
For any shopper's obol,
Clothes for a fluent phraseman, even a task
Imposed on careless schoolboys—till at last
'Twere left an empty thing, its living root
Only an echo heard through foreign tongues.
Oh never, Goddess, did thy sons with greed
Bandy thy Honour in the market place,
Rather were fain to guard it well
Within the arcane sanctum of the breast.
Therefore, not on their lips, but in their lives
Thou lived'st. In their deeds thou livest yet.
This night I too discerned thee, Holy One.
Often thy children by their life reveal thee.
I scent thee as the Soul within their deeds!
Thou art the exalted mind, the constant faith
Which, still, though ruin reign, betrays not the Divine.

I feel in full accord with the individuality of H. P. Blavatsky if, especially on this day, a few words of plain truth are spoken about here. It was characteristic of her that when she was fully herself, she desired, above everything else, to be true. Therefore we can best honour her when we direct our grateful thoughts to her and speak a few words of unvarnished truth.

In her being as a whole, in her individuality, H. P. Blavatsky revealed what inner strength, what a powerful impulse was inherent in the spiritual Movement we call the Theosophical Movement. To substantiate this, I need refer only to the first of H. P. Blavatsky's more important works, Isis Unveiled. This book must give to an ordinary reader the impression of a veritably chaotic, bewildering hotchpotch. A reader who is aware of the existence of an age-old wisdom, guarded through the ages in the Mysteries and protected from profane eyes, and who knows that this wisdom has not been acquired by any external human effort but has been harboured in secret societies, such a reader too finds in the book much that is chaotic—but he finds something else as well. He finds a work that, for the first time, presents to the secular world, courageously and daringly, certain secrets of the Mysteries. One who understands these things finds what an infinite amount has been corectly interpreted—an achievement that would have been possible only by Initiates. Nevertheless, the impression of chaos remains and can be explained by the following reasoned consideration. The outer personality of H. P. Blavatsky, to the extent to which she was incarnated in her physical body, with her intellect, also with her personal characteristics, her sympathies and antipathies, shows us by the very way in which Isis Unveiled is written, that she could not possibly have produced out of her own personality, out of her own soul, what she had to give to the world. She communicates things that she herself was quite incapable of understanding, and if one follows this line of thought further it proves clearly that higher, spiritual Individualities used the body and personality of H. P. Blavatsky in order to communicate what, in accordance with the need of the times, had to be inculcated into humanity. Indeed, the impossibility of attributing to her what she has given is in itself living proof of the fact that those Individualities who are connected with the Theosophical Movement, the ‘Masters of Wisdom and Harmony of Feelings,’ found an instrument in H. P. Blavatsky. Those who see clearly in such matters know that the knowledge did not originate in her but that it flowed through her from lofty spiritual Individualities. Naturally, today is not the appropriate time to speak about these matters in detail.

Now the question might arise—and it often does—why did those lofty Individualities choose Madame Blavatsky as their instrument? They did so because in spite of everything she was the most suitable. Why did the choice not fall upon one of the learned specialists dealing with the science of Comparative Religion? We need think only of the greatest, most highly respected authority on oriental religions, the renowned Max Müller, and his own pronouncements will tell us why he could not have proclaimed what had to be communicated through the human instrument of Madame Blavatsky. When the religious systems of the East and the expositions of them through Madame Blavatsky became known, Müller said: ‘If, somewhere in the street, a pig is seen and is grunting, that is not considered very remarkable, but if a human being walks along the street grunting like a pig, that is considered remarkable indeed.’—The implication is that one who is not prepared to distort the religious systems of the East in the style of Max Müller is like a man who grunts like a pig. In any case the comparison does not seem to me very logical, for why should one be astonished when a pig grunts; but if a human being grunts, that would be a feat of which by no means everyone is capable. The comparison is rather lame, but that it could be made at all shows clearly enough that Max Müller was not the right personality.

So, the choice had to fall upon a person of no particular intellectual eminence—a situation which naturally had many disadvantages. Thus, Madame Blavatsky brought all the sympathy and antipathy of her extremely passionate nature into the great message. She had a strong antipathy to the world. conception which springs from the Old and the New Testaments, a strong antipathy to Judaism and Christianity. But to apprehend the ancient wisdom of humanity in its pure, primal form one condition is indispensable, namely to face the revelations from the higher worlds in a state of perfect mental and emotional balance. Antipathy and sympathy form a kind of fog before the inner eye. Thus, it came about that Madame Blavatsky's perception became more and more enveloped in a kind of fog, and her mind remained clear only for so-called purely Aryan traditions. Here she looked into spiritual depths with great clarity but became one-sided as a result and so it came about that in her second great work The Secret Doctrine, the early Aryan religion was presented in a biased form. To look for anything about the mystery of Sinai or of Golgotha in Blavatsky's writings would, because of this antipathy, be useless. Hence, she was led to Powers who with great forcefulness and clarity, could impart all non-Christian wisdom. This is revealed in the wonderful ‘Stanzas of Dzyan’ which Madame Blavatsky has quoted in The Secret Doctrine. But this diverted her from the path of Initiation in the physical world that was indicated, although only in a fragmentary way, in Isis Unveiled. But bound as she was by a one-sided Initiation, Madame Blavatsky could present in The Secret Doctrine only the aspect of spiritual knowledge that was inspired by the non-Christian world-conception. Thus, The Secret Doctrine is a book containing the greatest revelations of this order which humanity was able to receive at the time. It contains themes which can also be found in other writings, namely the so-called letters of the ‘Masters of Wisdom and Harmony of Feelings.’² There again some of the greatest wisdom given to mankind is to be found. But there are other sections of The Secret Doctrine, for instance those dealing in great detail with the Quantum theory. Anyone who, out of true understanding, includes the stanzas of Dzyan and the Letters of the Masters among the highest revelations vouchsafed to humanity, gains the impression from the extensive sections dealing with the Quantum theory that they were the work of a person suffering from a mania for writing down whatever came into his head and being incapable of laying down his pen. Then there are other sections where a deeply rooted passionate nature discourses on scientific topics without reliable knowledge of the subject. Thus, The Secret Doctrine is a weird mixture of themes, some of which should be eliminated, while others contain the highest wisdom. This becomes comprehensible when we consider what was said by one of H. P. Blavatsky's friends who had deep insight into her character. He said: Madame Blavatsky was really a threefold phenomenon. Firstly, she was a dumpy, plain woman with an illogical mind and a passionate nature, always losing her temper; to be sure, she was good-natured, affectionate and compassionate but she was certainly not what one calls a gifted woman. Secondly, when the great truths became articulate through her, she was the pupil of the great Masters: then her facial expression and her gestures changed, she became a different person and the spiritual worlds spoke through her. Finally, there was a third, a regal figure, awe-inspiring, supreme, in those rare moments when the Masters themselves spoke through her.

Lovers of truth will always carefully distinguish in Madame Blavatsky's works what is essential and what is not. To her who is in our thoughts today, no greater service could be rendered than to look at her in the light of truth; no greater service could be done to her than to lead the Theosophical Movement in the light of truth.

Naturally, the Theosophical Movement had at first to follow an individual course; but it has become a matter of great importance that another stream should flow into the Movement. It has become necessary to add to the Theosophical Movement the stream which since the thirteenth century has been flowing from occult sources—sources to which Madame Blavatsky had no access.

So today we are doing full justice to the aims of the Theosophical Movement not only by recognising the religious creeds and world-conceptions of the East, but by adding to them those that came to expression in the revelations of Sinai and in the Mystery of Golgotha. And perhaps today it may be permissible to ask whether the scope of the Theosophical Movement as a whole calls for the addition of what in the nature of things could not be given at the beginning, or whether specialisation of an extremely questionable kind should by means of doctrine or dogma be given out as truth? I for my part say unreservedly that I know how great a wrong we should be doing to the spirit of H. P. Blavatsky now in the spiritual world, if the latter course were taken. I know that it is not opposing but acting in harmony with that spirit if we do what it wants today, namely, to add to the Theosophical Movement what that spirit was unable to give while in the earthly body. And I know that not only am I not speaking against Madame Blavatsky but in complete harmony with her when I say to you: the one thing I wish for is that our Western conception of the world shall come to its own in this Theosophical Movement. In recent years knowledge and truths of many different kinds have become available. Now let us assume that in fifty years' time everything would have to be corrected, that of our spiritual edifice, as we picture it today, not one stone is left upon another, that in fifty years' time occult investigation would have to rectify everything fundamentally, then my comment would have to be this: May be! But one thing will remain of our aims here, and that it should remain is the object of the main endeavour of our Western Theosophical Movement. It is that it may truly be said that there was once a Theosophical Movement whose one ideal in the field of occultism was to establish only that which springs from the purest, utterly unsullied sense of truth. Our aim is that one day this may be said of us. Things still in doubt are better left unsaid than to deviate in any way from a course for which a pure sense of truth can take full responsibility before all the spiritual Powers.

From this, however, something else follows. Someone might feel called upon to ask: Why do you reject this or that? Our answer is: although others may have a different idea of tolerance, our conception of it is that we feel obliged to protect mankind from what could not hold its own before the forum of pure truth. Although our work may be misrepresented, we shall stand firm and try to fulfil our task by rejecting whatever must be rejected if we are to serve our purpose. Therefore, when anything conflicts with our sense of truth, we reject it, but only then. We obey no other reasons or sentiments. Nor will we indulge in trite phrases about equal rights of opinion, brotherhood, and so on, knowing that the love of men for one another can bear fruit only if it is sincere and true. It is fitting, particularly on this day of commemoration, that this will to be inspired by the purest sense of truth should be expressed.

Since new knowledge has been gained in the way I have indicated, much that can help to explain mysteries of the universe has come to light. Nothing is ever said to discriminate between the great cultures or religious movements of the human race. Has it not been said many times when considering the first post-Atlantean epoch with the spiritual culture inspired by the holy Rishis, that there we have something that is spiritually more sublime than anything that has followed it. Neither should we ever think of belittling Buddhism; on the contrary, we emphasise its merits, knowing that it has given humanity benefits such as Christianity will be able to achieve only in the future. What is of immense importance, however, is that again and again we point to the difference that distinguishes Oriental culture from Western culture.

Oriental culture speaks only of individualities who in the course of evolution have passed through several incarnations. For instance, it speaks of the Bodhisattvas and describes them as individualities who pass through their human development more quickly than is usual. Thus, Oriental culture is concerned only with what, as individuality, passes from incarnation to incarnation until in a certain incarnation such a Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha. When a Bodhisattva has become a Buddha—which he can do only on Earth—he has advanced so far that he need not descend again into a body of flesh. And so, the further back we go, the more do we find interest focused primarily on the individuality and less on the single incarnation. What is really in mind when speaking of the Buddha is not so much the historical Buddha, the Suddhodana Prince, but rather a degree of attainment, a rank which other Bodhisattvas also attain in the course of their successive lives.

In the West, however, it is different. We have lived through an epoch of culture which has nothing to say about the individuality who passes from life to life, but values only the single personality. We speak of Socrates, Plato, Caesar, Goethe, Spinoza, Fichte, Raphael, Michelangelo, and think of them only in the one incarnation. We do not speak of the individuality who goes from incarnation to incarnation, but we speak of the personality. We speak of one Socrates, one Plato, one Goethe and so on, we speak only of a single life in which the individuality has found expression. Western culture was destined to stress the importance of the single personality, to bring it to vigorous, characteristic maturity, and to disregard the individuality passing from life to life. But the time has come when we must again learn gradually to recognise how the eternal individuality passes through the several single personalities. Now we find that mankind is striving to apprehend what it is that lives on from personality to personality. That will fire the imagination and illumine the souls of men with a new light of understanding. This can be illustrated by a particular example.

We turn our eyes to a figure such as the Prophet Elijah. First of all, we think of the Prophet himself. But the essential significance of this Prophet is the fact that in a certain way he prepared for the Mystery of Golgotha; He indicated that the Jahve impulse is something that can be understood and grasped only in the ego. He was not able to reveal the full significance of the human ‘I’ for as regards ego-consciousness he represents a half-way stage between the Moses-idea of Jehovah and the Christian Christ-idea. Thus, the prophet Elijah is revealed to us as a mighty herald, an advance messenger of the Christ-Impulse, of what came to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha. We see him as a great and mighty figure.

Now let us turn to another. The West is accustomed to think of him as a single personality. I refer to John the Baptist. The West sees him confined within his personality. But we ourselves learn to know him as the herald of Christ Himself; we follow his life as the forerunner of Christ, as the man who first uttered the words: ‘Change the disposition of your souls for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ He indicated the impulse that was to come through Golgotha; that divinity can be found within the human ego, that the Christ-Ego is to enter more and more deeply into the human ego, and that this impulse is near at hand. Now, through Spiritual Science, we learn the truth that is also indicated in the Bible, namely that the same Individuality who had lived in the prophet Elijah, lived in John the Baptist. He who as Elijah heralded the Christ was reincarnated as John the Baptist, again heralding the Christ in the way appropriate for his time. For us these two figures are now united. Eastern culture proceeds in a different way, concentrating on individualities and neglecting the single personality.

Passing on now to the Middle Ages we find that extraordinary figure who was born—as if to give an outward indication of his special connection with the spiritual world—on Good Friday in the year 1483 and died in early manhood at the age of thirty-seven, a phenomenal influence through his gifts to humanity. I am speaking of Raphael. He was born on a Good Friday as if to show that he is connected with the event commemorated on Good Friday. What, in the light of Spiritual Science, can the West experience through the figure of Raphael? If we study this figure in the light of Spiritual Science, we shall discover that Raphael accomplished more for the spreading of Christianity, for the penetration of an interconfessional Christianity into the hearts of men than all the theological interpreters, than all the cardinals and popes of his time. Before the eyes of Raphael's soul there may have risen a picture of the scene described in the Acts of the Apostles.³ One stands up before the Athenians and says: Ye men of Athens worship the gods ignorantly, with external signs. But there is that God whom one can learn to know, the God who lives and weaves in everything that has life. That God is the Christ who suffered death and has arisen, thereby giving man the impulse leading to resurrection. Some did not listen, others thought it strange. In Raphael's soul this event came to expression in the painting now hanging in the Vatican, incorrectly named ‘The School of Athens.’ In reality it depicts the figure of Paul teaching the Athenians the fundamental principles of Christianity. In this picture Raphael has given something that seems like a heralding of the Christianity that transcends denominations. The profound meaning of this picture has not yet dawned upon men.

Of the other pictures of Raphael, it must be said that whereas nothing has remained of what cardinals and popes did for humanly at that time, Raphael's work is only today becoming a vital force. How little Raphael was understood in recent times is shown by the fact that Goethe, when visiting Dresden, did not admire the Sistine Madonna, having heard from the official at the Museum—and he was only expressing the general opinion of the day—that there was something commonplace about the facial expression of the Child Jesus, that the two Angels at the bottom of the picture could only have been added by some dauber, that the Madonna herself could not be the work of Raphael, but must have been painted over. If we look through the whole of eighteenth-century literature, we shall find hardly anything about Raphael; even Voltaire does not mention him.

And today? Today, whether Protestants or Catholics or anything else, people are inwardly moved by Raphael's pictures. It can be seen how in the Sistine Madonna a great cosmic mystery reveals itself to human hearts and will carry its impulse through them into the future, when mankind will have been led to an interconfessional, broad and all-embracing Christianity, as we already have it in Spiritual Science. And that impulse will continue to work as a result of the fact that a wonderful mystery has inspired human souls through the Sistine Madonna. I have often said that when someone looks into a child's eyes, he can know that what is gazing out of those eyes is something that has not come into existence through birth, something that reveals the depths of the human soul. One who studies the children in Raphael's Madonna pictures can see that divinity itself, an occult and superhuman reality, looks out of those eyes—something that is still present in the child in the earliest period after birth. This can be perceived in all Raphael's paintings of children, with one exception. The portrayal of one child is different—it is that of the Jesus Child in the Sistine Madonna painting. Whoever looks into the eyes of that Child knows that they already reveal more than can be embodied in a human being. Raphael has made this distinction to show that in this one Child, the Child of the Sistine Madonna, there lives something that is already experiencing, in advance, a reality of pure spirit, a Christ-like reality.

Thus, Raphael is a harbinger of the spiritual Christ who is revealed again by Spiritual Science. Through Spiritual Science too we learn that in Raphael there lived the same individuality who had lived in Elijah and in John the Baptist. And we can understand that the world in which he lived as John the Baptist reappears in Raphael when we observe how his relation to the historic Christ-Event is indicated by the fact that he was born on a Good Friday.

Here, then, we have the third harbinger after Elijah and John the Baptist. Now we understand many of the questions inevitably raised by those possessed of wider powers of perception. John the Baptist dies the death of a martyr before the event of Golgotha is drawing near. He lives through the dawn leading to the Mystery of Golgotha, through the time of prophecies and predictions, through the days of rejoicing, but not through the period of lamentation and sorrow. When this same mood becomes manifest again in the personality of Raphael, do we not find it comprehensible that with such deep devotion he paints pictures of the Madonna and of children, and is it not obvious why he does not paint the betrayal by Judas, the bearing of the Cross, Golgotha, the Mount of Olives? Any existing pictures of these subjects must have been commissioned, for the essential being of Raphael finds no expression in them. Why are such pictures alien to Raphael? Because as John the Baptist he did not live to experience the Mystery of Golgotha.

And then, as we think of the figure of Raphael, how he has lived through the centuries and is still living today, and then think of what remains of his work and what has already been destroyed, and when we reflect that all material things must eventually perish, then we know well that the living essence of these pictures will have been taken into the souls of men before the pictures themselves have perished. For centuries yet, reproductions will of course be available; but that which alone can give a true idea of Raphael's personality, of what he was, what his own hands accomplished—that will crumble into dust, his works will have perished. And nothing on our Earth can preserve them.

But through Spiritual Science it is clear to us that the individuality in Raphael bears with it what has been achieved in one incarnation, into the next. And when we learn that this same individuality appears again in the poet Novalis, and we take his first proclamation which, like a radiant sunrise, reveals a new and living concept of Christ, then we say to ourselves that long before Raphael's works disappear from the outer world, the individuality in that personality has come again, in order to bequeath his gifts in a new form to mankind. How good it is that for a time Western culture has paid attention only to the actual personality, that we have learnt to love a personality simply from the fruits of a single life! And how immeasurably enriched must our souls feel when we learn that the eternal part of man passes from personality to personality. And however different these personalities may seem to us to be, the concrete facts which spiritual knowledge can tell us about reincarnation and karma will somehow bring us understanding. Humanity will not profit as greatly from general concepts and doctrines, as from details that can throw light upon individual cases. Then much that is attainable only through intuitive vision and occult investigation can be brought to bear on these matters and at last we are able to turn our gaze to the Mystery of Golgotha itself and remind ourselves that in the thirtieth year of the life of Jesus of Nazareth the Christ Being entered into him and lived through the Mystery of Golgotha

When it is maintained nowadays that the Christ Being cannot incarnate in a physical body, it must be said that that has really never been asserted. For the physical body into which the spiritual Christ Being entered at that time was the sheath of Jesus of Nazareth. In that case it was not as it is with other individualities who build up their body themselves, but into the body which had been prepared by Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ Being descended only at a later point of time. True, there was then union, but we cannot really speak of a physical incarnation of Christ. These matters are self-evident to one who has knowledge.

But now we know that through this Christ-Impulse, as it streams into the different civilisations of mankind, something has come to the Earth, has flowed into humanity, for the benefit of all mankind. Thus, that which went through death is like a seed of corn which multiplies, can make its way into individual human souls and spring to life. As we know that the body of Jesus of Nazareth had received the Christ Being who, by passing through death, united Himself with the Earth, let us now ask: what will be the outcome of this when the Earth has reached its goal and comes to its end? Christ who united Himself with the Earth, will be the one reality on Earth when it has reached its goal. Christ will be the Spirit of the Earth. This in fact He is already, only then the souls of men will be permeated by Him, and men will form a totality together with Him.

And now another question arises. We have learnt that man in his form on Earth is to be regarded as ‘Maya.’ The form disintegrates after death; what appears outwardly as the human body is an illusion.

The external form of the physical body will no more remain than the physical bodies of the plants, animals and minerals will remain. Physical bodies will become cosmic dust. What is now the visible physical Earth will have completely vanished, will exist no longer. And what of the etheric bodies? They have meaning and purpose only as long as they have to renew the life of physical bodies, and they too will cease to exist. When the Earth has reached its goal, what will remain of all that man beholds? Nothing at all will be there, nothing of himself, nothing of the beings of the other kingdoms of nature. When the Spiritual is set free nothing will be left of matter but formless dust, for the Spirit alone is real. But something will then have become a reality, something that in times gone by had not been united with The Earth at all and with which human souls will now unite—namely, the Christ Spirit. The Christ Spirit will be the one and only reality that can remain of the Earth.

But how does this Christ Spirit acquire His spiritual sheaths? In the Mystery of Golgotha, He descended into the sphere of Earth as an Impulse, as the soul of the Earth.

It does not happen in the same way as in human beings, but the Christ Being too must form for Himself something that can be called His sheaths. Christ will eventually have a kind of spiritualised physical body, a kind of etheric body and a kind of astral body. Of what will these bodies consist?

These are questions which for the time being can only be hinted at. When the Christ Being descended to the Earth He had to provide Himself with something similar to the sheaths of a human being: a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. Gradually, in the course of the epochs, something that corresponds to an astral, an etheric and a physical body formed around the originally purely spiritual Christ Impulse which descended at the Baptism by John. All these sheaths are formed from forces which have to be developed by humanity on Earth. What kind of forces are they?

The forces of external science cannot produce a body for Christ because they are concerned only with things that will have disappeared in the future, that will no longer exist. But there is something that precedes knowledge and is infinitely more valuable for the soul than knowledge itself. It is what the Greek philosophers regarded as the beginning of all philosophy: wonder or astonishment. Once we have the knowledge, the experience which is of value to the soul has really already passed. People in whom the great revelations and truths of the spiritual world can evoke wonder, nourish this feeling of wonder, and in the course of time this creates a force which has a power of attraction for the Christ Impulse, which attracts the Christ Spirit: the Christ Impulse unites with the individual human soul when the soul can feel wonder for the mysteries of the world. Christ draws His astral body in earthly evolution from all those feelings which have lived in single human souls as wonder.

The second quality that must be developed by human souls to attract the Christ Impulse is a power of compassion. Whenever the soul is moved to share in the suffering or joy of others, this is a force which attracts the Christ Impulse; Christ unites Himself with the human soul through compassion and love. Compassion and love are the forces from which Christ forms His etheric body until the end of earthly evolution. With regard to compassion and love one could, to put it crudely, speak of a programme which Spiritual Science must carry out in the future. In this connection, materialism has evolved a pernicious science, such as has never previously existed on Earth. The very worst offence committed today is to correlate love and sexuality. This is the worst possible expression of materialism, the most devilish symptom of our time. Sexuality and love have nothing whatever to do with each other. Sexuality is something quite different from and has no connection at all with pure, original love. Science has brought things to a shameful point by means of an extensive literature devoted to connecting these two things which are simply not connected.

A third force which flows into the human soul as if from a higher world, to which man submits, to which he attributes a higher significance than that of his own individual moral instincts, is conscience.

With man's conscience Christ is most intimately united. From the impulses which spring from the conscience of individual human souls Christ draws his physical body.

The reality of an utterance in the Bible becomes very clear when we know that the etheric body of Christ is formed from men's feelings of compassion and love: ‘What ye have done unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’—for to the end of the Earth's evolution Christ forms His etheric body out of men's compassion and love. As He forms His astral body out of wonder and astonishment, His physical body out of conscience, so does He form His etheric body out of men's feelings of compassion and love.

Why do we speak of these things at the present time? Because one day a great problem will have to be solved for humanity: namely, how to present the figure of Christ in its relation to the various domains of life. This will be possible only if account is taken of many things that Spiritual Science has to say. When after long contemplation of the Christ-idea as conceived by Spiritual Science, an attempt is made to present the figure of Christ, the countenance will be found to contain something that can, and indeed will, baffle all the arts. The countenance will give expression to the victory of the forces that are contained only in the face over all other forces in the human form. When men are able to fashion eyes that radiate only compassion, a mouth not adapted for eating but only for uttering those words of truth which are the words of conscience, when a brow can be shaped whose beauty lies in the moulding of the arch spanning the position of what we call the lotus-flower between the eyes ... when it becomes possible to accomplish all this, it will be understood why the Prophet says: ‘He hath no form nor comeliness.’ (Isaiah, 53, 2.) What is meant is that it is not beauty that counts, but the power that will gain the victory over decay: the figure of Christ in which all is compassion, all love, all devotion to conscience.

And so Spiritual Science passes over as a seed into human feeling, human perception. The teachings that spiritual investigation can impart do not remain mere teachings; they are transformed into life itself in the human soul. And the fruits of Spiritual Science will gradually mature into conditions of life which will appear like an external embodiment of spiritual knowledge itself, of the soul of future humanity.

With thoughts such as these I would like to have spoken to you in the way that one likes to speak to those who are striving for spiritual knowledge, not in dry words, but in words conveying ideas and stimulating feelings which can live and be effective in the outer world. When such feelings are alive in men's hearts, they will become a source of warmth streaming into all mankind. And those who believe this will also believe in the effectiveness of their own good feelings; they will also believe that this can apply to every soul—even though karma may not enable it to be outwardly manifest. Invisible effects can thus be engendered whereby all that ought to come into the world through Spiritual Science can actually be brought there.

That is the feeling I should like to have awakened in you on the occasion of my present visit to Cologne.

• 1. Most readers of the Quarterly will be aware that shortly after this lecture was given, the Charter of the German Section of the Theosophical Society was cancelled by Mrs. Besant and the Anthroposophical Society was then founded as a separate body. The separation had become inevitable after the announcement in the Theosophical Society that the Christ would shortly incarnate in the physical body of a Hindu boy, a protégé of Mrs. Besant and Mr. Leadbeater. Such a development could not be countenanced by the members of the German Section who ever since the beginning of the century had been receiving the teachings of Western esotericism given by Dr. Steiner. In spite of this difference, however, the German Section had been an integral part of the Theosophical Society although always working quite independently and as Dr. Steiner constantly emphasises (e.g. in the lecture-course entitled Occult History, p. 55) in harmony with much that was originally transmitted through that ‘extraordinarily useful instrument, H. P. Blavatsky.’
• 2. The ‘Masters of Wisdom and Harmony of Feelings’ are individuals who have developed to stages of Initiation-knowledge beyond those attained by average human beings. The ‘letters’ to which Dr. Steiner is here referring are ‘communications’ in which much of the ancient Eastern wisdom, and also certain Rosicrucian wisdom, presented in Madame Blavatsky's works Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine was contained. The whole subject of these ‘communications’ is full of pitfalls and study of the many Theosophical publications dealing with the matter would be an arduous task. The best known publication on the subject is probably the collection entitled The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, compiled and with an introduction by A. T. Barker. (T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1923). But the contents of the letters—it must be remembered that they dated from the eighties of last century—vary considerably in value and it is questionable whether all of them emanated from genuine Initiates with no selfish or nationalistic aims and desiring only the good of humanity as a whole. Anthroposophist's will find the subject dealt with exhaustively in the lecture-course given by Dr. Steiner in 1915, entitled The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century. Publications dealing specifically with H. P. Blavatsky and the earliest occult ‘communications’ received and transmitted by her, are as follows: Letters from the Masters of Wisdom, a series published at Adyar, Madras; The Early Teachings of the Masters, edited by C. Jinarajadasa and published at Adyar; Reminiscences of H. P. Blavatsky, by Countess Constance Wachtmeister; vol. 5 of the Collected Writings of H. P. Blavatsky, edited by Boris de Zirkoff, published in 1950.
• 3. See, Acts of the Apostles, ch. XVII, verses 22-31.