The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In ancient mystery schools, candidates resolved to devote their incarnation entirely to initiation, for it was a do or die procedure. They had to undergo trials that required great courage. Terrifying things were shown that killed some of them. But if they survived, they had come to the other shore and were reborn. They had descended to the God within them, had encountered drives, desires and passions in their bodies and had passed the test. Then they would say of themselves: Ex Deo nascimur. Well, one could ask: Does this evil that one encounters on the way to the inner God also come from the Gods? Here we must tell ourselves that it was originally something divine which we made into something evil.

Men trod the path of ecstasy in the Druidic mysteries. The candidate united himself with the spirit that worked everywhere in nature: Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

These two paths are united in the Rosicrucian path, that is, what's good for us is taken from both. One can no longer initiate a modern unconsciously. Since the breaking in of the Christ-principle, a man must be there with his waking consciousness.

The meditations that the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings have given us are all directed towards the Christ, even if his name doesn't occur in them. The words: In the pure rays of light are arranged in such a way that if one makes oneself deaf and blind for one's immediate environment, one slowly lifts one's etheric body out of the physical one, and thereby one unites oneself with the Christ-etheric aura, which is now our earth's aura. If we would lift ourselves out of the body without our meditation's content, then our soul would be alone with itself. But now it's permeated by Christ and it experiences what Paul called “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.”

In the pure love for all beings. These words remind us that all soul things are woven out of love. This meditation is a slow dying of the lower ego. And we have the connection between the two paths in this dying into Christ and coming to life in him in: In Christo morimur. It's a conscious coming to life in the Christ spirit. That's why we've added the word Sanctum to the words Per Spiritum.

[ 1 ] Man bears within him a soul-centre belonging to a spiritual world. This is the permanent human entity, which passes through repeated earthly lives in such a way that in one earthly life it is trained in normal consciousness as a being independent of that consciousness, then experiences itself in a purely spiritual world, after human physical death, and in due time realises in a new earthly life the results of the preceding one. This permanent entity acts as the inspirer of man's destiny in such a way that one earthly life follows another as a consequence which is based on the order of the cosmos.

[ 2 ] Man is this permanent entity itself; he lives in it as though in his other self. Inasmuch as he, as a being, is that other self, so he lives in an astral body, in the same way as he is living in a physical and etheric body. Just as the environment of the physical body is the physical world and that of the etheric body the elemental world, so the environment of the astral body is the world of the spirit. [ 3 ] Beings of the same nature and origin as man's other self are working in the physical and elemental worlds as Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. The way in which they work makes the relation of the astral body to the etheric and physical bodies intelligible.

[ 4 ] The original source of the etheric body is to be found in a long-past period of the earth, its so-called Sun condition.

[ 5 ] In accordance with the foregoing, the following survey of man may be made:

[ 6 ] I. The physical body in the environment of the physical world. By means of this body man recognises himself as an independent individual (ego).

[ 7 ] II. The subtle (etheric or vital) body in the elemental environment. By means of this body man recognises himself as a member of the earth's vital body, and hence indirectly as a member of three successive planetary states.

[ 8 ] III. The astral body in a purely spiritual environment. Through this body man is a member of a spiritual world of which the elemental and physical worlds are reflections. In the astral body lives man's other self, and this comes to expression in repeated earthly lives.

The I as the animating and directing spiritual-soul, which exists in the thought witness; the I is initially embedded in the external and experiences itself in the semicircle of the thought-witnessing power that is unified with the world; thus it sinks into the etheric, in which the ordinary perceptions separate out of the semicircle, and there are the receptive perceptions. The “real self” forms the body of forms, separates from it the etheric body - here a boundary - from the other side the soul and the ego-concept arise. The head: the organ of thinking; physical formation: in it the processes of perception; etheric formation: in it the processes of thinking. Now the respiratory organism: in it the processes of feeling and the limb of will impulses. Then the nutritional organism: the will impulses and the movements.

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In the Organism of Imagination: the process of growth has gone beyond itself, entering mineralization: the spirit can be by itself: it comes to inner formation through imagination and partial inspiration: there it is met by inspiration, which becomes perception, and intuition, which becomes cognition.

In the rhythmic organism: it is based on inspiration – which is met by intuition of perception and inspiration of conception from the organism of conception – as negative content, which is fulfilled by positive inspirational content – and remains negative as imagination: this can be fulfilled by

the nourishing organism: this is developed in what the imaginative organism lacks: intuition and part of inspiration: it lacks imagination and part of inspiration.

The non-physical organism: it has within itself intuition and partial inspiration, from which it is closed off by perception and conception; the partial inspiration and imagination, from which it is closed off by feeling and willing.

Through birth, the I emerges from the intuitive and inspirational content of the world in order to intuitively connect with the organism of imagination; this organism is formed by the imagination and inspiration of the spiritual universe. The same forces are at work in it prenatally that arise postnatally in perception and imagination. After death, this imagined and inspired organism is seized by the inspiration and intuition of the spiritual universe. The organism of will: the I enters into the imagined and inspired content of the spiritual universe, connecting with the pictorial forces of the universe, of which the body-self is made.

From Notebook 21, undated, around 1917

The sense impression (physical) dies away in the sense organ - meets the physical there (this is where the physical mirror image is created); this mirror image is inwardly enlivened in the image body - it then runs in the nervous system - the ether process coming from outside - this comes up against the physical body at the nerve endings – it runs in the breathing system – the astral process – this comes up against the physical body at the end of the inhalation system – the I-process runs right into the metabolism – there it is reflected.

The opposite process: the metabolic process forms and collides with the ego process – it then penetrates as a movement into the breathing – collides with the astral process – penetrates through the breathing into the nervous process, collides with the ether process.

The middle process: the inhalation brings the formless substance, which meets with the ether process - then penetrates as an astral process and encounters the physical body - is detached from the exhalation, which underlies the astral - the astral remains in the person; the etheric goes further into the nervous process - remains there - and the physical (exhaled air) goes outwards. In the nervous process, the disconnected, I would say the killed thoughts, are the only ones that can be in the human body - the spiritual researcher must represent in thoughts which have not undergone this transformation through the body.

Who knows the essence of the life of imagination?

Schopenhauer's “the world is my imagination” is as if someone were to say of a person standing before him in the fullness of life: “this person is a corpse”. —

Ordinary thinking is such that the power of imagery inherent in the sensations is taken away; if it were not, man would not be able to distinguish himself from the external world - the power of the ether must flow into thinking - in which thinking is fulfilled through imagination. -

As the sensation becomes an idea, the inner ether process paralyzes the outer one - and in the imagination, the disconnected, paralyzed ether process comes to a continuous effect in the nerves - in the nerves, the after-effects of the ethereal processes: now one can animate thought to imagination – precisely at the thought processes that lead to boundaries – such boundaries represent the attempt to approach spiritual reality; but one cannot approach it because one has dead thoughts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We have been speaking of what hinders modern man from coming to recognition of the spiritual world, as it must be understood through the spiritual knowledge of Anthroposophy, and two things have been indicated as having been the cause of this hindrance. These two things are leak of courage, lack of strength where recognition of the spirit is concerned, and lack of interest about the actual form of the spiritual life. Now today I should like to go into these things from a point of view from which I have touched on them still more lightly. When such things are spoken of it must always be borne in mind that man's ordinary sound intelligence, as I have often said, suffices for understanding and receiving open-mindedly all things concerning Spiritual Science. If I may say so, through the fact that sound human intelligence; when rightly directed, is sufficient for the understanding of the things of the spiritual world today, in a certain sense through merely understanding, through open-minded acceptance, everyone may have all that the investigating Anthroposophist receives from the spiritual world. And with the courage and interest to receive these things with sound human intelligence, man has himself the possibility of rising slowly and gradually, in accordance with what his own karma permits, into the spiritual world. Already today it is necessary, and will become increasingly so for all men, to learn to understand the spiritual world, to learn to understand it with sound human intelligence in the way the spiritual world is spoken of in Spiritual Science. How far man can become ripe to look into the spiritual world himself is quite another question, a question that can be settled only by each individual in his own inmost soul, a question to which each one will settle in the right way in his inmost soul when he seeks to understand the things of the spiritual world simply through his sound human intelligence, and not through intelligence prejudiced by natural science or any thing else.

Now the next question that arises above all about this is why so many people today avoid making their sound human intelligence active so that it may understand, or be prepared to accept, what is derived from Spiritual Science? And something can be learnt about this question by hearing what the things and beings of the spiritual world actually look like when this world is entered by the spiritual investigator. In former times the Initiates were allowed to speak of a great deal about the spiritual world that was different from what has to be given out today. But naturally in those olden days much also could be said of a similar nature to what can still be said now. Thus, for example, it was always given out in a way that today is still right, what actually happens when a man seeks to enter the spiritual world before his soul is ripe to do so. Today this can indeed so happen that the man says to himself: What! Sound human Intelligence?—that is the last thing to bother about if one wants to understand the spiritual world! People are not fond of the effort entailed; they would much rather accept some particular thing through belief in authority. There is really far less liking today for sound human understanding than people imagine, and they would like to get round this need for sound human understanding by penetrating directly to the spiritual world in a way that they imagine to be easier, even though this is an unconscious opinion, namely, through all manner of brooding and things of that kind, which they call meditation. This preference for actually penetrating into the spiritual world without the help of sound human intelligence is indeed very common. Those initiated into such things however were already saying what is right concerning this in past times, and it continues to be repeated by Initiates today. When an attempt is made to penetrate into the spiritual world by anyone who is insufficiently mature in his whole attitude of soul, it happens all too easily that after some time he ruins his whole endeavour, brings it so near complete disaster, that he is left with a feeling like someone who, grasping a red hot piece of coal, is undecided whether to burn himself or let the coal drop. This is an experience arising very often in those who meditate. They do not seek to let their sound human intelligence prevail in the same measure as their zeal for the so-called exercises, which indeed in themselves naturally have their justification. It is always emphasised, however, that sound human understanding may not be excluded, it must be actively, diligently, applied. If for sometime it is sought to make a practice of excluding sound human intelligence and also of excluding the accompanying moral self-discipline that up until then has actually not been acquired, this characteristic feature will appear—that all this will be experienced as if someone were to touch a piece of glowing coal with his fingers, not only touched it but jumped back, thus men would jump away from the spiritual world. As I have said this is always emphasised. It is emphasised because it is an experience made in earlier ages by countless teachers of Spiritual Science in the form this took in atavistic times; it is an experience that can also be very prevalent today. This is emphasised; but today we must find out the reason why there should arise this sensation of touching and recoiling as if from glowing coals.

Now if we seek to understand this fact, we may be able to recall a basic truth of our Spiritual Science perfectly well known to us, namely, how we as men behave when we bear in mind our entire life in its alternating states of sleeping and waking. With the help of the old mode of expression, we might say that while we sleep we leave the physical body and the etheric body lying in the bed whereas with the Ego and the astral body we fly out, if I can put it thus, into the world that otherwise surrounds us; we do not inhabit our body when asleep, we are poured out into the surrounding cosmos. In this way when we are sleeping our consciousness as a man is slight. When the sleeping condition is unbroken by dreams which implies a certain increase in the intensity of consciousness, but when we keep in mind dreamless sleep, then our consciousness is so inconsiderable that we do not become aware of the infinite and important number of experiences gone through in the state between going to sleep and re-awakening. This is just that we really should keep in mind, and not the abstract words: In sleep, with our ego and astral body we are outside the physical body—no, we should bear in mind that our body is tremendously rich between going to sleep and waking up again: (Compare Z-233) we do not know it, however, because our consciousness is then weakened, because our sleep-consciousness is not yet as strong as the consciousness that is able to be united with the instrument of the physical body. In actual fact a tremendously intense experience takes place in ego and astral body within the world where we also are the rest of the time—an intense experience. Man, however, during his ordinary state on earth is protected from the immediate perception of this life, this life developed when we as ego and astral body force ourselves—if I may express it thus—through the same things to begin with in which we are when making use of our physical body and its organs. The life during the state of sleep is one of tremendous richness. But this life does not cease when we wake and plunge down into our physical body and etheric body. We are still connected through our ego and astral body with the world surrounding us in a way that the ordinary consciousness has no inkling of; only this remains quite unnoticed. We can now look at this precise relation more closely. It may be asked what actually comes to expression in this relation of our soul and spirit to our physical and etheric?

You see, for our present state of experience it would be a very bad thing were we henceforth always to have to perceive what in sleep we experience with the things outside in space and in time. We do not indeed do this, but were we to do it we should always have to go on doing it and could not do otherwise. Our body, that is to say, has a certain characteristic where these experiences are concerned. It may be said to weaken these experiences. Our body weakens all that in actual truth we experience with the surrounding world; we perceive only what has been weakened by our body and not our real experiences. Our real experiences are related to what we perceive of our environment through our body—and this is a very pertinent picture indeed because not only is it actually a picture but it corresponds to an occult reality—our body or the experiences of our body are related to our real experiences in the same way as the sunlight, that shines on a stone and is reflected back so that we can see the stone, is related to the actual sunlight streaming towards us from the sun overhead. Look at the stone the sunlight falls upon; you are able to look at the stone, your eyes can bear the reflected, thrown back light. When you turn from the stone to the sun and gaze straight into the sun you are blinded. It is approximately the same with the relation between our real experiences in connection with the world around us, and What we experience through the organs of our body. What we experience in reality with our environment has the strength of the sunlight, and what we experience through the organs of our body has of this strength only the weakened form which the weakened light of an object reflected back to us has of the strength of the real sunlight. In our innermost man we are sun beings, but so far we cannot endure what it entails to be sun beings. Therefore as with our external physical eyes we have to look at the softened down light of the sun because direct sunlight blinds us, we must also perceive our environment through what results in a softened down form from our body and its organs, because we should be unable directly to face what in reality we experience of our environment. As men we are actually as if we were blinded by a sunbeam and what we know of the world and of ourselves has not our real being in it, not as things would be experienced in streaming sunlight but in light thrown back from objects, light that no longer blinds the eyes. You can gather from this that when you wake up in the world that ordinary consciousness cannot endure, you have the feeling you are in sunlight as if you really would live with the sunlight. And in the actual experience, in the actual practical experience there is indeed a very concentrated sunlight.

There you have the facts about what is often said—that people throw away the experience of Spiritual Science as if it were a red hot coal. You come to a region of experience where you have experiences like that of the soul when your finger is burnt. You jump back and do not want to burn it. Naturally you need not twist round what I say. Nobody can come to spiritual experience by having his finger burnt. On that account I say like the soul experience when one burns a finger, for in Spiritual Science things must always be expressed with exactitude.

The real state of affairs is that entrance into the spiritual world is certainly not at first anything providing man with an empty kind of happiness; entrance into the spiritual world is such that it has to be bought with that inner, one might say, unhappiness, experienced when one is burnt by fire. (Naturally there are many other experiences of the same kind). To begin with man experiences spiritually with the things, beings and events of the spiritual world, exactly the same as, for example, when he burns himself. The real experiences of the spiritual world have to be acquired through these painful experiences. What gives happiness from these experiences of the spiritual world, what gives satisfaction to life, is the afterglow in thought. Those who have these experiences imparted to them and grasp them through their sound human intelligence, can have this just as well as anyone who enters the spiritual world. Certain individuals, however, must naturally enter the spiritual world, otherwise it would not be possible for anything at all to be experienced of the spiritual world.

These feats to which I have referred must be borne in mind. Fundamentally it is not very difficult just from the external facts to gather what I have been speaking of. You will find everywhere the spiritual world is spoken of seriously—not in the way of charlatanism but seriously—that the passing over is spoken of not as being made through pleasant but through painful experiences. And you know how often I have said that whoever in life has acquired a little real knowledge of the spiritual world looks back, but not resentfully, on the sorrow, on the suffering of his life. For he says to himself: The joys, the exhilarating moments of life I accept thankfully as a divine gift and I rejoice over the destiny that has brought me these exhilarating moments of joy. But all that I know comes from my pain, my knowledge comes from my suffering. Everyone who has gained actual knowledge of the spiritual world will see this. Only in this way are we allowed to acquire knowledge of the spiritual world while here on the physical earth.

And now you will be able to realise why people Shrink from understanding the spiritual world in spite of the fact that this understanding is to be acquired simply with sound human intelligence. Usually the only thing they do not recoil from in their understanding is what they would not recoil from in external life. Now you would naturally be most stupid and unreasonable if you wilfully burnt your finger just to find out what it was like. Added to which, if you burn your finger you pay so little heed to what your soul is experiencing that you do not gain any real experience of what it is like to burn your finger. Us, there is indeed a psychological fact rightly grasped only when seen in the light flowing from this knowledge. Now in that I am going to say I am not speaking here to you individually, for naturally I am not expecting each of you to do this, I only believe, of Course, that each of you will have heard of such things, you will have heard of them from others and remarked them in others. You will perhaps have remarked that people cry out when they burn their fingers. Now, my dear friends, why do many people cry out on burning their fingers? They cry out for the simple reason that by thus crying out the soul experience may be drowned. People cry out and make a noise at any kind of pain to make things easier for themselves. Ay crying out you will not be able to experience in full consciousness the whole extent of the pain; it is really drowning the suffering, sending it outside. In short, in ordinary life man has not much experience of the things that will be experienced in the spiritual world; nevertheless it is clear that these things can be understood with sound human intelligence because everywhere in the external physical world they have analogies through which we gather our experiences. It is certainly not the case that things of the spiritual world are incomprehensible; we must, however, make up our minds to strengthen certain qualities of our soul, for example, courage. We must have the courage not usually possessed when we do something and then recoil because it is painful. We must have this courage, for penetrating to the spiritual world always means pain. Therefore we have to strengthen certain forces of the soul, this is necessary. But many people today do not,want to strengthen their qualities of soul in the systematic way that is recommended, for example, in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. They have no wish to do this; they have no wish to enhance certain attributes of their soul. Were they to enhance them then in their capacity for forming concepts , in their sound human intelligence, there would easily prevail what is needful for understanding through this human intelligence he experience of the fingers in the spiritual world that, in the sense in which I have described it, is a painful experience. We are actually living in an age in which this strengthening of the human attitude of soul is a necessity, for otherwise mankind cannot reach their goal, and because catastrophe on catastrophe will have to arise bringing us finally to chaos.

Now, however, while discussing these things just at a time when it is particularly necessary, I have placed strong emphasis on something else. This is, that with the weakening of the attitude of soul existing among men today, there can be excellent scientists in the modern sense of the word. For even with the intelligence, that is not sound human intelligence but human intelligence carried to a high pitch through the authority of science, the external part of our physical environment can be particularly well understood. It cannot be understood inwardly, spiritually, but directly understood in its external aspect. What is not possible for people with the concepts given by science, with just what people today are accustomed to when applying their thought, is however to bring order into the social structure of man's cooperative life which is gradually becoming chaotic. To put it differently: Present social demands, and social demands for the near future, will never find their solution through what may be referred to as the thinking about nature and natural phenomena. It is on this very point that our contemporaries have terribly much to learn; in this very point again our contemporaries do not fall in with what must be told them by Spiritual Science out of its most intimate understanding of the being of our universe. Indeed, in spite of all the opposition which today will be forthcoming more and more, Spiritual Science must say just on this point that even with any amount of bungling around and doctoring up in the sphere of social questions no bungling around or doctoring up will lead to anything better; it will lead on the contrary to still greater social confusion than is already present in individual spheres of world existence unless it is recognised that insight into social questions can come only from the spiritual understanding of world existence. Social questions must be solved with knowledge of Anthroposophy—anything else in this sphere is dilettantism.

Thus we must turn to something else if we are to speak about things from a certain point of view. What largely holds men back from pressing forward to Spiritual Science is lack of interest in the spiritual life. This lack of interest in spiritual life is prevalent among modern scientists. They are indifferent about the spiritual life. They deny it or give laws to everything they can observe through the physical senses, everything that allows of investigation by means of microscope or telescope; but they take no interest in what is revealed every time there is real deep observation of nature, namely. that the spiritual holds sway behind all-phenomena of nature, all facts of nature. This lack of interest in the spirit is particularly noticeable today in those who would meddle in social affairs. And again there is a particular reason for this.

Now, my dear friends, from all kinds of things that I have spoken about lately, you will have gathered that when confronting each other as man to man we are in a very special inner life of soul. I have gone quite deeply into what kind of mood of soul we are in when as man we are face to face with another man. I told you that actually standing face to face with another man always has a soporific effect on us. Where the innermost qualities of our human nature are concerned we actually go to sleep in the presence of another man. It is not to be wondered at that outward behaviour deceives us as to this falling asleep. For we certainly see the other man with our eyes, offer him indeed our hand and touch him, do all kinds of things; but still this does not alter the fact that the other man causes us to fall asleep in the depths of our human being. Just as we are asleep to nature at night, something is sent to sleep in us by the presence of another man. When this goes to sleep, however, it does not cease to be active. Thus in social life there are always taking place between men activities about which, just because they are together with their fellows, people are unable to have any clear consciousness. People fail to notice in ordinary consciousness exactly what is of most importance in the social life, because their actual capacity for conceiving the most important things in social life has fallen asleep and they act out of instinct. It is no wonder that as in the forming of conceptions the intellect is most easily lulled to sleep, the most chaotic instincts should be taken as perfectly justified in modern social life because clear thinking about these things is sent to sleep simply by men being together. The moment a man enters the spiritual world, however, what was sent to sleep wakes up, and it becomes clear what is holding sway between man and man. For this reason the solutions can also be found of the so-called social questions and social demands. Thus, as I have already said here, it is possible to find these solutions only beyond the threshold of physical consciousness.

And what mankind will want to have in future through the so-called solving of social problems, if it is to be a real solution, can be found only on the path of Spiritual Science, that is to say, the science of the superphysical, since all the most intimate foundations of human life in co-operation are of a superphysical nature. (cf. Z-234)

But then, if we wish to experience spiritually the things that have to do with man, mankind, and also with the human social structure, into our whole capacity for conception, into everything we experience, we must bring something which you will realise at once is hardly present today in ordinary consciousness. There is just one thing here in the physical world in the way of sensations, of feelings, that each of us must have if he does not want to investigate the social laws, the social impulses, in an unreal but in a fundamental way. This is only found in a limited form here in the physical world, only indeed when an absolutely healthy, absolutely right, relation exists between a father, mother and child, in the interest between father, mother and child. It is not to be found in anything that can be experienced between men anywhere else in the whole round world, Certainly not in ordinary consciousness.

Now while you are getting clear in your mind about, let us say, the mother's love (you can do it too in this fundamental way) about the love developed in the mother immediately she bears a child—this love of the mother for her child which obviously springs from the very sources of nature—try to become clear about this mother love, and then ask whether this mother love is dominant in any scientific investigations ordinarily carried out by the well-informed, even by those who are doing research work in social science. This mother love must be there in the thoughts developed about the social structure if these thoughts are to have reality in them and not unreality. The only form of thought in human life that could be right socially is what is thought out socially and with mother love.

And now take the various social reformers and social thinkers. Try for once to let work upon you such writings, for example, as those of Carl Marx, or people of his ilk, Schmoller or Reacher or anyone else you like, and ask yourself whether these, while thinking out their so-called social and political laws, in this devising of social and political laws, let themselves be influenced by what is there in the mother's love for her child when this love takes a healthy course. This must have attention drawn to it, my dear friends! A sound solution of the so-called social problem is possible only if this solution is forthcoming from thinkers able to develop mother love in solving their problems; you will understand what I mean by this. The solving of present-day social demands depends on this very human matter. It is not a matter of sagacity nor ordinary cleverness nor of belief in what is learned; it is a question of enhancing the capacity for love to the degree to which mother love can be developed, or we might also say the direct, intimate love in the common life of father, mother and child.

Here you will be right in making an objection. You will say: Yes, on earth matters are so arranged that the social structure has in a certain sense the family as its unit, and on earth the family as such is undoubtedly fully justified, yet the whole of mankind cannot be one family! This is an objection that naturally will be forthcoming at once. If we are to think out social laws with mother love, however, the consequence would actually have to be the whole of mankind becoming one family. Naturally that cannot be, Whoever knows what a real thought is, a real thought with nothing of the charlatan or abstract about it, will have to admit that of course nobody is immediately capable of behaving to every child as though it were his own, that every child cannot behave to all other women, all other men, as it would to its mother or father. Thus all mankind cannot become one family. That is perfectly right, my dear friends, but just because that is right another necessity arises for us. As we live here as physical men on the physical earth we should by no means be able to succeed in making all mankind into one family; whoever wanted this would naturally be wanting an absurdity. But we could arrive at it another way and in another way indeed it must happen. As physical men we should not be able to stand in the relation of father, mother and child. But when there takes root in mankind the knowledge that spirit and soul live in every human being, that a divine spiritual being shines forth from the eyes of everyone, and the message of a divine spiritual being rings in his words, when in other words man's immortal soul is no longer recognised simply in the abstract, then, my dear friends, the moment will have arrived, not indeed where physical man is concerned but with regard to what man hides intimately within him as his baling of soul and spirit, when we shall be able to behave to one another as if all mankind were one big family. But this will not happen until people meet each other with immediate feeling and it is recognised: When I look people in the eye the infinite shines towards me; when I hear them speak it is not only physical sound speaking but the divine spiritual being of their soul—if this becomes direct experience, just as we experience any blue or red surface, then we shall feel that man when expressing himself is of a divine spiritual nature, and shall learn not to recognise simply with blind faith that a man has an immortal soul, but we shall directly perceive this immortal soul in what he utters. For in this way we shall be able to enter into connection with the soul and spirit of each human being. This is something that will alone make the solution of the so-called social question possible, the one and only thing. Therefore we find this solution of the social question in the recognition of man's divine spiritual nature, in the recognition that what goes around on the earth as the human physical body, is only the outward expression of what lights up in every man out of the eternal. We can have the same relation to what lights up in every man out of the eternal, as we can have in the right relation of the smallest family unit. This is possible, possible in every sense. When recognising this we can capture that love for all men which is as great as the love of family.

There is naturally no point in the objection, which would be superficial too, if we remarked about things in the following way: Yes, but there are also bad people. There are also bad children, my dear friends, whom we even have to punish, but there is love in our punishment. The moment we see the divine spiritual light up in human beings, when we see it is necessary we shall punish, but punish lovingly; above all we shall learn one thing which might be said to be practised only instinctively, that is, to meet other men as if we both belonged to the same family. When we meet another man in this way we punish but we do not hate the man; even when we punish him we do not hate the human being who is our son, but we hate his wrong doing. We love the man, we hate his misdeeds and his faulty training, and we know how to distinguish in him between the man and what has overcome him. When people have once understood the great, the infinite, difference existing between human love, and hatred of the misdeeds that assail mankind, a right relationship can be established among men. When we fellow our inmost human nature there is never any possibility for our hating anyone. Naturally we have much cause to hate human crimes, misdeeds, human weakness of character, human lack of character. Where we largely go wrong in our social behaviour is as a rule in bringing against the man what should be brought against the misdeed, the crime. We do this today instinctively, but must become conscious that the development of mankind today lies in the direction of distinguishing between hatred for the misdoing and the love that all the some can be felt for the man.

Oh, my dear friends, more would be done to solve the burning social demands of today by recognising truths of this kind than by much else going around the world as social quackery or social theory. In face of the materialism that everywhere employs what is grossly material, it is difficult to make any impression when speaking of such things as these, for the simple reason that people today are largely materialistic in their instincts, which is a more harmful matter than their holding materialist theories. Crime, lack of character, cannot be seen and do not exist materially. But because people want to hate what is material, they associate the material man with their hate and there arise countless misunderstandings.

What arises from this as a bad misunderstanding is that sometimes from some kind of misunderstood sensations and feelings, man is confused with what he does in another direction also. There is carelessness in judging what a man does when it is said: Oh, we do not want to hurt the man, now and then one has to overlook things for sheer love of one's fellows. If a verdict is given in the matter by turning ones's eyes towards the wrong doing and not confounding the man in his inmost life of soul with his misdeed, then indeed the right judgment will be arrived at. It is less trouble on the one hand, if you dislike someone, to mete out so-called justice to him; it is also easy because it suits us to excuse failings which may cause harm in the external world. In the common life of mankind a very great deal hangs on the way we are able to separate what ought to arouse our antipathy from the immediate being of man as man.

My dear friends, I have often emphasised that what is spoken here about these connections is not meant as a criticism of the culture and conditions of the times; it is simply a description of them. Therefore you will also understand when I say that mankind of so-called western civilisation, the people of Europe with their American cousins, for a time must go through the stage not only of taking things materialistically in accordance with science, but also of taking life itself materialistically confounding men with their deeds in the way referred to. This has to do with the education; for the right development of other qualities to be possible, men, must in this sphere, too, pass through the stage of materialism. Men, however, who have remained behind at earlier stages of culture have preserved a great deal of these former cultural stages in which there was still atavistic clairvoyance. And atavistic clairvoyance has since resulted in quite definite trends of feeling and attitudes of soul. We people of Europe can only be a match for what assails us from certain directions, if we reflect upon the arguments put forward today. For let us not forget this—that thinkers looked upon as very enlightened as, for example, Immanuel Kant, speak—not indeed out of a certain basis of Christianity but of the church—a thinker of this ilk speaks of human nature being fundamentally evil. And how widespread is this error—for it may indeed be called so—that human nature in its actual depths is evil: In the civilised world of Europe and its American sister country it is said that if human nature is not under control it is evil. This is actually a European opinion, an opinion of the European Church.

There is a race of men who do not hold this view, who have preserved another view from former times, for example the Chinese people. In the Chinese world-conception, as such, there rules the proposition, there rules the principle, that man is by nature good. Here is a mighty difference which would play a much greater part than is thought in the conflict that will develop between men. To be sure, speaking of these things today, people believe one as little as they would have done had the war we are now engaged in been spoken of in 1900. Yet it is true all the same that a struggle is also being prepared between the Asiatic and European peoples. And then quite other things will play a part than have been played, are played even now or will be played later, in the catastrophic struggle we are in the midst of today.

There is really a great difference in the whole way of experiencing whether the Chinese have the conviction that man is by nature good, or the European holds that human nature is fundamentally weighed down by evil—from the standpoint of the world-conception of the people there is a great difference in which way a man thinks. How a man thinks is expressed in the whole of life's temperament, in the entire attitude of the life of soul. For the most part men have their attention riveted on the outer features of life's conflict and they generally pay little heed to what is lying in the depths of the inner nature.

There is just one thing I should like to mention. You see, the fact that the European, although he may not generally admit it, is always at heart convinced that man is actually bad and has to be made good only through education and restraint, restraint by the State or any other kind, this outlook, from historic necessity, is closely connected with something else. It is connected with—not with the fact itself but with the qualities of feeling underlying the fact—connected with European people having developed through this a certain life of soul in the form we call logic and science. From this you will find it comprehensible that those who really know the Chinese—I don't mean Europeans who know them but those who, Chinese themselves, (cf. The Karma of Vocation) have got to know Europe too, as for example, Ku Hung Ming, often mentioned by me here—that these Chinamen lay stress on there being no equivalent in the Chinese language for logic and science. Thus for what we Europeans call science, for what we call logic, the Chinese have no word at all, since they do not have the thing, because, what Europeans believe to be Chinese Science is something quite different from what we call science and what we call logic, something entirely different from what we Europeans think to be logic in the Chinese soul. So different are men on earth! Attention must be paid to this unless attention is focused on this no discussion of the social problem can bear any fruit. But when heed is paid to such a matter the spiritual horizon becomes wider. And this widening of the spiritual horizon is particularly necessary for the sound understanding of Spiritual Science.

And when many different questions are asked concerning all these things—we have already touched on two today and could still touch on a third—when it is asked why today people in accordance with custom still keep their distance from the truths of Spiritual Science this reason is found among others, that the horizon, the spiritual horizon, of modern man is a very narrow one. However much man may boast of his spiritual horizon today, however greatly, the fact remains that this spiritual horizon is very narrow. Its narrowness is shown in particular by the extraordinary difficulty modern man generally has in getting out of himself where certain things are concerned. And this not only has an effect on his understanding, it influences also his whole life of sympathy and antipathy.

I should like to refer to a fact, a fact well known to quite a number of you, that is to say, the effect of this fact is well known to a number of you; this fact I have already mentioned to you once and should like to mention it again. Now you know that a certain relation existed some years ago between the so-called Theosophical Society and those who today form the Anthroposophical Society. I experienced something remarkable in connection with just those members of the Theosophical Society who were prominent. Already by the beginning of this century, as you know, I had published communications from the so-called Akashic Record, information which I venture to say rested upon personal experience, as does all the rest of what I impart out of the spiritual world. (see Atlantis and Lemuria) When these communications were read by a prominent member of the Theosophical Society people could hardly understand how it arose. I was asked how these communications were received? And it was really impossible to come to any kind of understanding, for the actual methods of anthroposophical research suitable for the present age were totally unknown in that circle. There, more mediumistic methods were used for investigation. Really what was wanted was the name of the medium or medium-like person responsible for these Akashic Record communications. That they were actually the result of the direct observation of a certain human attitude of soul projected into the supersensible, was considered an impossibility! The narrowness of man's horizon speaks in things of this kind. Even in so momentous a sphere, people consider possible only what they are accustomed to, only what is easily understood.

Now I have quoted this instance just because if one is narrow-minded it is really quite im possible to press on to Spiritual Science. In everyday life, however, this narrow-mindedness is the common thing today, always to relate everything back to just the personal, accustomed standpoint. This is what must above all be considered by those very people who are attached to our Movement for Spiritual Science. My dear Friends, I am now going to say something that perhaps there would be no need to say in this way were the things to be said intimately, systematically, but which it is necessary to say when it comes to the external conditions of life. You see, those who take a more particular, active interest in our Movement know indeed how many attacks are made on the sources of this Movement, how bitterly it is persecuted, how many come to hate it who were formerly keen adherents, and so on. Last time indeed I spoke about these things from various points of view. Now it will not be superfluous, from certain aspects, to make clear the reasons for such hostility, such antagonism. I talked to you about the reasons for the antagonism seen here and there last time. Such hostility very frequently becomes particularly strong, however, when appearing among people who also belong, let us say, to some occult society. The hatred that develops in many adherents of one or another society against what is seen here as Spiritual Science, sometimes is really strikingly conspicuous, at times even taking grotesque forms. And it is not superfluous, my deer friends, to pay attention to these things, for we should pay attention to everything that makes us take our membership of this Movement very seriously. It is very true that nowhere is there more charlatanism in the world than where spiritual matters are represented in all kinds of societies. It is easy, therefore, because of so much charlatanism in the world to be suspicious of what arises as a Movement for Spiritual Science. Then those who want to, can easily find support if they say: Yes, once a Society appeared which maintained that it spread abroad all the wisdom of the world—then it was shown up as mere charlatanism! And now another has arisen, again it has proved to be charlatanism'! This must be admitted; there is infinitely much of this charlatanism in the world. Here the capacity for discrimination must come in to distinguish the true from the false.

But another case can arise; something, for example, in the nature of uncertainty may enter the soul. This uncertainty can consist in the following. A man of this kind may come to know what goes on here. Now if he has not an open mind, if he pursues what is personal, he may arrive at the following divided mood of soul. It is possible for him to foresee all manner of danger and to say: Dear me, how is this? I have so often heard of these societies, occult or whatever else they may be; I have never come across in them any knowledge, any real knowledge. It is true, every possible thing is talked of, it is in their books and given out in their ritual, but there is no stream of living knowledge. Now is this Anthroposophy of the same kind or is it something different? And he can find himself in a divided mood of soul. You see, in common parlance, when it is not possible for anyone to go deeply into what is actually living here, it may be said: Is this the kind of swindle that I really find more pleasant since it does not ask so much of one?

My dear friends, the things I give out here are not so unreal as that! Above all they are spoken because I want to point to the necessity for earnestness, dignity, and the capacity for discrimination. I have said this repeatedly, so that the unpleasantness should not arise which very often arises, namely, that the real life of spirit is all around, whereas because it is less trouble people actually prefer to hear it talked about. What calls forth so much antagonism is just the fact of what I have emphasised in my book Theosophy being true here—that only spiritual experiences are spoken of. The antagonism of the Theosophical Society also actually first arose when they noticed our claim to speak of real spiritual experiences. That could not be borne. People are preferred who repeat what has been given in their lectures and repeat it with a certain zeal, but independent spiritual investigation was, fundamentally, the great sin against the Holy Ghost of the Theosophical Society. And this independent spiritual investigation is not as yet to be so easily found in the world today. Once again I have wanted to intimate this at the end of what we have been considering. And it will indeed be necessary for you, my dear friends, really to my heed to these things with a sound mind but also with all earnestness. The times are grave and the remedy for the times that we wish to receive from the spiritual world must also be grave.

We should like to go on speaking of these things tomorrow.