The Rudolf Steiner Archive

To a theosophist the effects of Esotericism or Theosophy on the etheric and astral bodies and the Self are naturally much more important than the effects produced on the physical body. Nevertheless, we shall gain a foundation for the next lectures, when we have to consider the more spiritual principles of the nature of man from this point of view, if we also bear in mind what may be said about the changes in the physical body. It should, however, be expressly noticed that the changes dealt with here do not refer to the highest stages of initiation, but rather to the early stages of the esoteric or theosophical life, and are therefore of a certain general importance.

You will have gathered from the last lecture that under the influence of Esotericism, or the serious study of Theosophy, the physical body of man becomes more alive, in a certain way, more filled with movement inwardly; and it may on that account become more uncomfortable. It is more felt than in the external, exoteric, so-called normal life of man. We shall have to speak later of the difference between vegetable and animal food in connection with the other sheaths; but in the construction and organisation of the physical body, the difference between vegetable and animal food is greater to an amazing degree. Emphasis must always be laid upon the fact that it cannot be our mission to make propaganda for any particular system of diet, but only to state what is right and true on this subject; and as the soul develops, the matters now under consideration become matters of personal experience. Above all, it becomes a matter of experience that when meat is eaten our physical body has more to bear, more to drag about, as it were, than when we eat vegetable food.

We emphasised in the last lecture the fact that in the course of development the physical body seems to shrink; it separates from the higher, spiritual principles. Now, when animal food is taken, this is felt—as was described in the last lecture—in the human organism as something like a foreign substance, as a thorn in the flesh—if we may use a common expression. In an esoteric or theosophical development we feel the weight of the earth in animal food more than we usually do, and above all, we experience the fact that animal food inflames the instinctive life of the will. This more unconscious life of the will, which flows more in emotions and passions, is inflamed by animal food. Hence the observation is an absolutely correct one which declares that warlike peoples are more inclined to animal food than peaceful peoples. But this need by no means lead to the belief that vegetable food must take away all courage and energy. Indeed, we shall see that all that a man loses in the way of instincts, aggressive passions and feelings through refraining from animal food—all of which will be dealt with when we speak of the astral body—all this is compensated for from within the soul. These things are all connected with the whole position of man and the other kingdoms of nature towards the Cosmos, and we gradually gain—though perhaps not yet through higher clairvoyance—a sort of proof, a sort of confirmation of what the Occultist affirms regarding the relation of human life to the Cosmos. We gain a sort of proof of this when, through experiencing the more mobile and living processes of the physical body, we ourselves learn to a certain extent the nature and properties of those substances of the earth which are used for food.

It is interesting to compare three kinds of food with respect to their cosmic significance. These are: milk and all connected with it; the plant world and all connected with that, and the foods prepared from it; and animal food. We may learn to compare milk, plants and animals as nourishment when, through theosophical or esoteric development, we become more sensitive to the effects of these foods; and it will then also be easier for us to observe the verification obtainable from a rational observation of the outer world.

If you were to investigate the cosmos as an occultist, you would find milk-substance on our earth, but on no other planet in our solar system. That which is produced in a similar manner within the living beings on other planets in our solar system would appear as something quite different from earthly milk. Milk is specifically earthly; and if you wished to speak about milk you would have to say that the living beings on each planet have their own special milk.

If the plant system belonging to our earth be investigated by the occultist, and compared with that of other planets, with what there can be compared with it, we must admit that the forms of the plant nature on our earth do indeed distinguish them from the plant nature on other planets in our solar system, but yet the inner being of the plants on the earth is not merely earthly, but belongs to the solar system; this means that the plant nature on our earth is related to that of the other planets of our solar system. Thus there is in our plants something that can also be found on other planets of our system.

As far as the animal kingdom is concerned it follows, indeed, from what has been said about milk, and, apart from that, it can easily be proved by the occultist, that the animal kingdom of our earth is radically different from any corresponding kingdom to be found on other planets.

Now let us consider the experience of milk-food. To the vision and experience of the occultist this milk-food appears in such a way that to the human body—we will only consider man—it signifies that which binds him, as it were, to the earth, to our planet; it connects him with the human race on the earth as a member of it belonging to a common family. Owing to the production of nourishment by the living for the living in the animal nature, mankind, as regards the physical system of sheaths, forms one whole. And we may say that all that is carried into the human organism through milk prepares man to be an earthly human creature, it unites him with earthly conditions, but it does not really chain him to the earth. It makes him a citizen of earth, but does not hinder him from being a citizen of the whole solar system.

It is different with animal-food. Animal-food which is taken from the kingdom that is specifically earthly, and which is obtained not, like milk, directly from the life-processes of the human or animal living being, but from that part of the animal substance which is already prepared for the animal—this animal-food chains man specially to the earth. It makes him into a being of earth, so that we have to say: To the extent that a human being fills his own organism with the effects of animal-food, he deprives himself of power to become free from the earth at all. Through animal-food he binds himself in the highest degree to the planet earth. Whereas milk renders him capable of belonging to the earth as the temporary scene of his development, animal-food condemns him—unless he is uplifted by something else—to make his sojourn on earth permanent, a residence to which he adapts himself exactly. The resolve to live on milk diet means: ‘Though I will stay on the earth, and fulfil my mission there, I will not be attached exclusively to the earth.’ The will to eat meat means: ‘I so pledge myself to the earth-existence that I renounce all heaven, and prefer to be wholly and solely engrossed in the conditions of earthly existence.’

Plant diet is of such a nature as to bring into action in the organism those forces which bring man to a certain cosmic union with the whole of the planetary system. That which a human being has to accomplish when he continues the assimilation of plant nourishment in his own organism is to call forth forces contained in the whole solar system, so that in his physical sheath he becomes a partaker of these solar forces; so that he does not become alienated from them, he does not tear himself away from them. This is something which the soul developing theosophically or esoterically is really able gradually to experience within; with the vegetable food it takes into itself something not pertaining to the heaviness of the earth, but in a certain sense the peculiar property of the sun, that is, of the central body of the entire planetary system. The lightness in his organism which he obtains through a plant diet lifts a man above the heaviness of earth, and gradually develops a certain inner perception of taste in the human organism, so that it is as though the latter really in a way shared with the plant the enjoyment of the sunlight, which accomplishes so much work in the plant.

From what has been said you will gather that in the case of occult, esoteric, or theosophical development, it is extremely important not to chain oneself to the earth, as it were, not to make the heaviness of earth a part of our nature through the enjoyment of an animal diet, if, according to individual conditions and conditions of heredity, it can be dispensed with; the actual decision can, of course, only be made according to the personal conditions of the individual.

It would facilitate the whole evolution of a man's life if he could refrain from eating meat. On the other hand, serious consequences might ensue if a person were to become such a fanatical vegetarian that he avoided milk and all milk-products. In the development of the soul towards the spiritual, certain dangers may easily step in, because in avoiding milk and all milk-products, a person may very easily acquire a love of striving to get away from the earth and lose the threads uniting him to his human tasks upon the earth. Therefore it should be carefully noticed that in a certain sense it is well if the earnestly striving theosophist does not allow himself to become a fanatical spiritual dreamer by creating the difficulty in his physical sheath, which will separate this physical sheath from all that relates it to what is earthly and human. In order that we may not become too eccentric when striving for psychic development, in order that we may not become estranged from human feeling and human effort on the earth, it is well for us to load ourselves in a certain way like travellers upon the earth, by the use of milk and milk-products. And it may even be a really systematic training for a person who is not in the position to be always living only in the spiritual world, as it were, and thereby becoming estranged from the earth, but who, besides this, has to fulfil his duties upon the earth, it may be part of his training not to be a strict vegetarian, but to take milk and milk-products as well. He will thereby relate his organism, his physical sheath, to the earth and to humanity, but not chain it to the earth, and weight it with earthly existence, as he would were he to enjoy meat.

Thus it is interesting in every way to see how these things are connected with cosmic secrets, and how through the knowledge of these cosmic secrets we can trace the actual effect of food substances in the human organism.

As people interested in occult truths, you must gradually realise more and more that that which appears on our earth—and our physical body belongs above all to our earthly existence—is not merely dependent on the forces and conditions of the earth but is also absolutely dependent on the forces and conditions of supra-mundane life, of cosmic life. This comes about in various ways. Thus, for example, if we consider the animal albumen contained, let us say, in hens' eggs, we must clearly understand that such animal albumen is not merely what the chemist finds by analysis, but that it is in its structure the result of cosmic forces. When we speak of albumen, this in its construction is the product of cosmic forces. Essentially, the cosmic forces really only work upon this albumen after they have first worked upon the earth itself, and, moreover, chiefly upon the moon which accompanies the earth. Thus the cosmic influence upon animal albumen is an indirect one. The cosmic forces do not work directly upon albumen, but indirectly; they work first upon the earth, and the earth reacts upon the construction of animal albumen with the forces it receives from the cosmos. Chiefly the moon takes a share in it, but only in such a way that it first receives the forces from the cosmos, and only then, with these forces that it rays forth from itself, reacts upon the animal albumen. In the tiniest cells of animals, and thus also in albumen, one who is able to look into these things with occult vision can see that not merely the physical and chemical forces belonging to the earth are to be found there, but that the smallest cell in a hen's egg, let us say, is built up of the forces which the earth first obtains from the Cosmos. Thus the substance we call albumen is indirectly connected with the cosmos, but this animal albumenous substance as we know it on the earth would never come into being if the earth were not there. It could not originate directly out of the cosmos; it is absolutely a product of what the earth has first to receive from the cosmos.

Again, it is different, for example, with what we know as fatty substance of earthly living beings, which also forms part of the foods of those who eat meat. We are speaking of animal fat. What we call fatty substance, whether a person eats it or whether it forms part of his own organism, is formed according to entirely different cosmic laws from those forming albumen. While the cosmic forces proceeding from the beings of the Hierarchy of Form are concerned with the latter, pre-eminently those beings whom we call the Spirits of Motion are concerned with the building-up of fatty substance. Now, it is important to relate these things, because only in this way does one really gain an idea how complicated is such a matter, which external science may conceive of as infinitely simple. No living being could have either albumen substance on the one hand or fatty substance on the other if the Spirits of Form and the Spirits of Motion did not work from the cosmos—even though indirectly.

Thus we can trace the effects proceeding from the beings of the various Hierarchies even into the substance of which our physical sheath consists. Therefore, in the experience which comes when the student undergoes a theosophical development, the experience which he has in respect of the albumen and the fat which he bears in his physical sheath becomes more differentiated, more mobile in itself. This is one perception. The forces which in a man living the ordinary life are combined in a single sensation, namely, that which in his organism makes the fat and that which makes the albumenous substance, are now felt separately. As the whole physical organism becomes more mobile, the evolving soul learns to distinguish two different sensations in his own body, one which so pervades him inwardly that he feels: ‘This constructs me, and gives me stature’ ... he is then perceiving the albumenous substances within him. When he feels: ‘This makes me callous to my inner limitations, this uplifts me in some sense, above my form, this makes me more sluggish with respect to my inner human feelings,’ when he disdains those perceptions of his feelings (in theosophical development these perceptions differ very greatly)—this last sensation is aroused by his experiencing the fatty substance in his physical sheath.

Thus his inner experience, even as regards his physical body, becomes more complex. This is perceived very strongly when the experience of starch or sugar is in question. Sugar has especially distinct characteristics. In a classification of tastes, sugar stands out very strongly amongst other substances. This appreciation of difference can easily be observed in ordinary life, not only in children, but also very often in older people, in their preference for sweet substances; but usually this does not go beyond the taste. When the soul undergoes development, it then experiences all the sugar it takes into its body, or already has within it, as something giving it inner firmness, supporting it inwardly, permeating it to a certain extent with a sort of natural sense of selfhood. And in this respect a sort of eulogy might even be pronounced on sugar. In passing through a soul development a person may even often notice that he needs to take sugar, because the psychic development inevitably tends to make him become more and more selfless. Through an orderly theosophical development the soul of itself becomes more selfless. Now, in order that a man—by virtue of his physical sheath, having an earthly mission—may not lose, as it were, the connection of his Ego-organism with the earth, it is well to create an counterpoise in the physical, where, indeed, realisation of the Ego is not of such great importance as in the realm of morals. It might be said that, through eating sugar, a sort of blameless ego-sense is produced, forming a counterpoise to the necessary selflessness in the spiritual realm of morals. Otherwise there might all too easily be the temptation not only to become selfless, but also dreamy and fantastic, to lose the healthy capacity for judging earthly conditions. An addition of sugar to the food gives the power, in spite of the ascent into the spiritual world, to stand firmly on the earth with both feet, and to cultivate a healthy estimate of earthly things. You see that these matters are complex; but everything grows complex when one begins to penetrate the actual secrets of life. Thus to the student as his soul progresses in theosophy it becomes evident now and then that in order not to acquire a false selflessness—namely, a loss of his personality—it is necessary at times to eat sugar; and then his experience when eating sugar is such that he says: ‘Now I am adding to myself something that, without lowering myself morally, gives me, as though automatically, as though by higher instinct, a certain firmness, a certain sense of my Ego.’ On the whole, we may say the consumption of sugar intensifies physically the character of the human personality. We may be so certain of this that we may even say that it is easier for those who take sugar to imprint the character of their personality upon their physical body than for those who do not; but it stands to reason that this must be kept within healthy limits.

These things may even lead to the understanding of something that can be observed externally. In countries where, according to statistics, little sugar is eaten, the people have less character as personalities than where more sugar is eaten. If you go to countries where the people have more personality, where each one is conscious in himself, as it were, and then from there go into countries where the people have more of the common race-type and have less personality as external physical beings, you will find that in the former a great deal of sugar is consumed, and in the latter very little.

If we wish to have still more obvious ideas of this experience of various substances we can do so by considering the so-called luxuries, such as coffee and tea, of the effects of which we have already become vividly aware in external life. The experience of a normal person is greatly heightened in a theosophical student. As said already, all this is not an agitation either for or against coffee, but simply a statement of things as they are, and I beg you to take it only in this sense. Even in an entirely normal human life, coffee and tea act as stimulants, but these excitations are felt more vividly by the soul that is undergoing a theosophical development. Of coffee, for example, it may be said that it so works as to cause the human organism to lift its etheric body out of the physical body, but in such a manner as to feel the latter as a solid foundation for the former. That is the specific action of coffee. When coffee is taken, the physical body and the etheric body are felt as differentiated, but in such a way that the physical body—especially in its qualities of form—seems under the influence of coffee to radiate into the etheric body, like a sort of solid basis for what is then experienced through the latter. Truly this ought not to be considered as an agitation for the use of coffee, for it rests upon a physical basis; a person relying too much on the use of this substance would become a completely dependent being; we are only concerned with describing the influence of this food or stimulant. But as logical, consecutive thinking depends very much upon the structure and form of the physical body, so through the peculiar action of coffee, which, as it were, gives a sharper emphasis to the physical structure, logical accuracy is assisted physically. By drinking coffee logical accuracy, the arrangement of facts in logical sequence is promoted by physical means. And it can be said that even though there may be healthy doubts about drinking much coffee, yet for those who wish to ascend to the higher regions of spiritual life, it is not amiss; it may be very good, occasionally, to obtain logical accuracy by means of coffee. We might say that it seems quite natural for one whose profession necessitates a good deal of writing, and who cannot readily find the logical sequence from one sentence to another, and has to get it all out of his pen, to make use of the stimulus of coffee. This seems quite comprehensible to one who understands how to observe these things in their secret occult foundations. Though such a drink may be necessary for us for a time as citizens of the earth, according to personal and individual conditions, it must also be emphasised that the use of coffee, with all its faults, can contribute a great deal towards the acquisition of stability. Not that it is to be commended as a means of developing stability, but it must be said that it has the power of so doing, and that if, for example, a student's thoughts have a tendency to stray in the wrong direction, we need not take it amiss if he makes himself somewhat more stable by drinking coffee.

It is different in the case of tea. Tea produces a similar effect—viz., a sort of consciousness of difference between the physical nature and the etheric nature; but the structure of the physical body is disconnected in a certain way. The etheric body appears more in its own fluctuating nature. Thought becomes volatile when tea is taken, less fitted to keep to the facts; indeed, fancy is stimulated by it, very often in a way neither sympathetic to nor in conformity with truth or with sound proportion. Hence one may say that it is comprehensible that in gatherings where flashes of thought and the development of sparkling mentality are in question, the stimulus of tea might be preferred; on the other side, it is also comprehensible that when tea-drinking gets the upper hand, it gives rise to a certain indifference to the demands arising through the healthy structure of the physical earthly body. So that dreamy fancy and a certain careless, nonchalant nature, a nature that likes to overlook the demands of the sound external life, is awakened by tea-drinking. And in the case of a soul undergoing a theosophical development we feel tea less suitable, as a beverage, than coffee, since it leads more easily to shallowness. The latter tends to soundness, the former more to charlatanry, although this word applied to these things is much too severe.

All these are things which—as we have said—are experienced through the mobility acquired by the physical sheath of the student undergoing a theosophical development. Only I might add—you may meditate further upon this afterwards or try really to experience such things—that while coffee-drinking promotes something like stability in the physical sheath, and tea-drinking favours shallowness, chocolate promotes prosaic thought. Chocolate can be felt by direct experience as the true beverage of the commonplace merry-maker, when the physical sheath becomes more mobile in itself. Therefore, chocolate may well be recommended for commonplace festivities, and thus we can now understand very well—excuse this aside—that at family festivals, birthday festivals, christenings, especially in certain circles, on certain festive occasions, chocolate is the beverage.

Then when we bear in mind these things which are means of enjoyment, the case appears to us still more significant, because that which usually is experienced concerning the means of nourishment throws its rays upon the ordinary so-called normal life; moreover, not only in such a way as to bring to notice the material substance from which the body is constructed and continually renewed, but also—as was mentioned in the last lecture—the inner disconnection, the separation of the organs from each other. That is important; that is significant.

And here we must bring specially into prominence the fact that occult observation makes clear the experience of the relation between the physical sheath and the physical heart. The physical human heart is to the occultist an extremely interesting, an extremely important organ; for it can only be understood when we bear in mind the entire mutual relationship, including the spiritual relationship, of the sun and the earth. Even at the time when, after the Saturn period, the ancient Sun was a sort of planetary predecessor of the earth, even then began the preparation, as it were, of the relation which now exists between these two heavenly bodies, the Sun and the Earth. And we must so bear in mind this relation between Sun and Earth that we thereby really comprehend how the earth of to-day, being nourished, as it were, by the solar activities, takes in these solar activities and transmutes them. What the solid substance of the earth takes in as solar forces, what the earth takes up in its envelopes of air and water, in its changing conditions of heat, what it takes up in the light that encompasses the earth, what it takes up in that part of the earth which is now no longer physically perceptible in any way—the Earth-part of the harmony of the spheres—what the earth receives as life-forces directly from the sun—all this is in connection with the inner forces that work upon the human heart through the circulation of the blood. In reality all these act upon the circulation of the blood, and through this upon the heart. All external theory with respect to this process is radically wrong. External theory calls the heart a pump that pumps the blood through the body, so that one has to look upon the heart as the organ regulating the circulation of the blood. The reverse is the truth. The heart-circulation responds to the impulse given by the circulation of the blood, which is the original source of action. The blood drives the heart; not the reverse, the heart the blood. And the whole of this organism just described, which is concentrated in the activity of the heart, is none other than the human microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmic activities first received by the earth from the sun. The impulse received by the earth from the sun is reflected in that which the heart receives from the blood.

It is different with the brain. Some details of the correspondence of the brain were given in the last lecture. The human brain has very, very little to do directly with the solar activities on the earth. Directly, I say. Indirectly, as an organ of perception it is concerned with them; it perceives the external light and colour, for instance; that, however, is only perception. But directly, in its construction, in its inner mobility, in the whole of its inward life, the brain has little, scarcely anything, to do with the effects of the sun upon the earth; it is much more concerned with all that streams to the earth from outside our solar system; it is concerned with the cosmic relationship of the whole starry heavens, but not with the narrower relationships of our solar system. However, in a more limited sense, what we have to describe as the brain-substance is connected with the Moon, though only in so far as the Moon does not depend upon the Sun, but has preserved independence of it. So that what goes on in our brain corresponds to activities lying outside the forces which are imaged microcosmically in our heart. Sun dwells in the human heart; all else besides the sun in the cosmos dwells in the human brain.

Thus man, as regards these two organs, is a microcosm, because through his heart he is given up to the influences exercised by the sun on the earth, and reflects these, as it were; but through his brain he has an inner life directly connected with the cosmos outside the sun. That is a connection of extreme interest and significance. The brain is only connected with the effect of the sun on the earth through external perception. But just this very thing is overcome in theosophical development. Theosophical development surmounts the external sense world.

Hence the brain is set free for an inward life so cosmic that it is unsuitable for the specialised influence of the sun itself. When the student surrenders himself in meditation to some imagination, processes take place in his brain which have nothing at all to do with our solar system, but correspond to the processes outside it. Hence, in fact, the relationship between the heart and the brain is like that between the sun and the starry heavens, and this manifests, in a certain respect, in the experience of the soul developing through theosophy through the fact that while this soul is devoted seriously and deeply to purely theosophical thought, the heart forms, as it were, an opposite pole, and comes in opposition to what one might call the starry-brain. This opposition is expressed in the fact that the student learns to feel that his heart and brain begin to go different ways; while previously he had no need to give attention to both separately, because they were indistinguishable, he must now begin so to do—if he is developing through Theosophy.

It gives us an accurate idea of man's place with regard to the whole Cosmos when we thus consider the physical sheath, and bear in mind the position of man here upon the earth. Through his blood-system and heart there is within him the whole relationship between the sun and the earth, and when his inner powers are devoted solely to that for which on earth he needs the brain as his instrument, then in that brain there are cosmic processes at work extending beyond our solar system. It will be evident that the pupil has an entirely new experience with respect to his heart and brain. His sensations really classify themselves, so that in the serene course of the stars displayed in the heavens at night he learns to feel the processes of his brain, and he feels the movements of the solar system in his heart. In this you see at the same time a path which becomes more important at a higher stage of initiation; you see the doors, as it were, which open from man to the cosmos. The student who, through higher development, steps out of himself—as has been described even in exoteric lectures—and looks back at his own body, learns to recognise all the processes in his physical body; in the circulation of the blood and the activity of the heart a reflection of the hidden forces of the solar system, and in the processes of his brain, which he then sees spiritually from the outside, the secrets of the cosmos.

The matters expressed in this last sentence are connected with an observation which I once made in Copenhagen, and which then appeared in my book, The Spiritual Guidance of Man. From this you may gather that, in a certain respect, even the structure of the brain is a sort of reflection of the position of the heavenly bodies at the time of a man's birth as seen from that part of the earth where he is born. It is profitable to approach such things from time to time from a different aspect, for in this way you may appreciate the method of occult science and the narrow-mindedness that many critics show when such an observation is made from one aspect or another. Of course, one may explain important facts like this of the mirroring of the world of stars in the human brain from a definite point of view, and it may appear arbitrary. But when other points of view are added, these all support one another. Later you will become aware of what I might call other streams of occult science which combine and flow together, and their meeting will show you more and more clearly what you feel to be a complete proof, even to external reason, of things which, if they were expressed from one aspect only, might often seem open to question.

From this also you may gain an idea of the delicacy of the whole human structure. And if now you reflect that man, in the taking in of food, binds himself completely to earth, and only through some substances, such, for instance, as vegetarian food, releases himself again, if you reflect that precisely through taking in food does man make himself a citizen of the earth, you will then comprehend the threefold division of man with respect to his physical sheath. Through his brain he belongs to the whole of the starry heavens, through his heart and all connected with it to the sun; through all his digestive system and all appertaining to that, he is, in another sense, an earthly being. This also may be experienced, and is experienced, when the external physical sheath of man becomes more mobile within. Through what comes into him from the earth alone, a man may very greatly sin against what is reflected in him through the pure forces of the cosmos. By producing disturbances through his bodily food, by the purely earthly laws which act in the digestion and which work further as sun-laws in the activity of the heart, and as the cosmic laws outside the solar system in the activity of the brain—a man can, because through external nourishment he causes disturbances, sin very deeply against the cosmic activities in his brain; and this can be experienced by the theosophically developing soul, particularly at the moment of waking. During sleep it also comes about that the digestive activity extends to the brain, flashes into the brain. On waking, the power of thought works upon the brain; and the digestive activity in the brain then withdraws. When thinking is at a standstill during sleep, the digestive activity then works into the consciousness; and when a man awakes and notices an after-effect of it, his experience may then very well be a true barometer for the suitability or unsuitability of his food. He feels this extension of his organism, as it were, into his brain as deadening, stabbing sensations, sensations which—if he has eaten something unsuitable—may often seem like little benumbed centres in his brain. All this is experienced in the most delicate manner, particularly by the theosophically developing soul. And the moment of waking is tremendously important, I mean as regards the perception of the conditions of health in the physical sheath depending upon the digestion. In perceptions which gradually become finer and finer, localising themselves in the head, the student perceives whether in his digestion he is placing himself in opposition to the cosmic laws outside our solar system or in harmony with them. Here you see the wonderful relationship of this physical sheath to the whole cosmos, the moment of waking as a barometer showing the student whether through his digestion, he is setting himself against the cosmic conditions or placing himself in harmony with them. These observations will gradually lead us to the changes which take place in the etheric body and astral body through esoteric or theosophical development.

In the last lecture I referred to two legends, that of Paradise and that of the Holy Grail. I tried to show that these two legends represent occult imaginations which may really be experienced at a certain moment. When the pupil is independent of his physical body and etheric body—as he is unconsciously during deep sleep, and with clairvoyance consciously perceives his physical body, he experiences the legend of Paradise; when his perceptions are aroused by his etheric body, the legend of the Grail presents itself. We must now point out that such legends were given as stories or as religious legends, and so popularised in a definite period. The original source of these legends, which meet us in the form of romance or of religious writings in the external history of the development of mankind, is in the Mysteries, where their contents were established only by means of clairvoyant observations. In the composition of such legends it is especially necessary that the very greatest care should be taken that both subject matter and tone should suit the period and the people to which the legends are given.

In the previous lectures of this course we have explained how through his theosophical occult development the student undergoes certain changes in his physical and etheric body. We shall have now to consider the astral body and the self more closely, and then return briefly to the physical and etheric body. We have seen that when, in order to progress further through receiving the possessions of spiritual wisdom and truth, the student undertakes this self-development, he produces by this means changes in the various part;, of his spiritual and physical organisation. Now, from the information that has been given from the akashic records of various periods of evolution, we know that in the course of the ordinary historical evolution of man these various parts of human nature also undergo a change, naturally, as it were; we know that in the ancient Indian age, the first age of civilisation after the great Atlantean catastrophe, the processes of the human etheric body were conspicuous; we know that afterwards, during the ancient Persian age of civilisation, the change in the human astral body came into prominence, and during the Egyptian-Chaldean age changes took place in the human sentient-soul, and during the Graeco-Latin age there were changes in the human intellectual- or mind-soul. In our times the changes in the human consciousness-soul are more conspicuous. Now, when a legend is given in some particular age—let us say, in the age in which the intellectual-soul undergoes a special change, when the facts in this soul are of special importance—it is important that it should be given in such a way that special attention should be paid to that particular age, and that in the Mysteries from which the legend proceeds it should be agreed that the legend must be so presented that the changes which are going on in the human intellectual- or mind-soul during that age should be protected against any harmful influences incidental to the legend, and specially adapted to its favourable influences.

Thus there can be no question of following his own inner impulse alone, when a person belonging to a Mystery school has the duty laid upon him of imparting such a legend to the world, for he must follow the dictates of the age in which he lives. If we turn our observations in this direction, we shall better understand the changes that take place, more particularly in the human astral body, when a person undergoes an esoteric development.

In the case of an esotericist, or one who seriously undertakes a theosophical development, who makes Theosophy part of his life, his astral body lives a separate life; in the case of an ordinary human being it is not so free, not so independent. The astral body of a student going through development becomes detached and independent to some extent. It does not pass unconsciously into a sort of sleep, but becomes independent, and detached, going through in a different way what a human being usually does in sleep. It thereby enters the condition suited to it. In an ordinary man who lives in the exoteric world, this astral body is connected with the other bodies, and each exercises its special influence upon it. The individually pronounced quality of this human principle does not then come into notice. But when this astral body is torn out its special peculiarities assert themselves. And what are the peculiarities of the astral body? Now, my dear friends, I have often referred to this quality—perhaps, to the disgust of many who are sitting here. The quality peculiar to the human astral body on earth is egotism. When the astral body, apart from the influences which come from the other principles of human nature, asserts, its own peculiar quality, this is seen to be egotism, or the effort to live exclusively in itself and for itself. This belongs to the astral body. It would be wrong, it would be an imperfection in the astral body as such, if it could not permeate itself with the force of egotism, if it could not say to itself, ‘Fundamentally I will attain everything through myself alone, I will do all that I do for myself, I will devote every care to myself alone.’ That is the correct feeling for the astral body. If we bear this in mind we shall understand that esoteric training may produce certain dangers in this direction. Through esoteric development, for instance, because this esoteric development must necessarily make the astral body somewhat free, those persons who take up a kind of Theosophy that is not very serious, without paying attention to all that true Theosophy wishes to give, will in the course of it specially call forth this quality of the astral body, which is egotism. It can be observed in many theosophical and occult societies that while selflessness, universal human love, is preached as a moral principle and repeated again and again, yet through the natural separation of the astral body egotism flourishes. Moreover, to an observer of souls it seems quite justifiable, and yet at the same time suspicious, when universal human love is made into a much-talked of axiom—observe that I do not say it becomes a principle, but that it is always being spoken of; for under certain conditions of the soul-life a person prefers most frequently to speak of what he least possesses, of what he notices that he most lacks, and we can often observe that fundamental truths are most emphasised by those who are most in want of them.

Universal human love ought without this to become something in the development of humanity which completely rules the soul, something which lives in the soul as self-evident, and concerning which the feeling arises: ‘I ought not to mention it so often in vain, I ought not to have it so often on my lips in a superfluous manner.’ Just as a well-known commandment says: Thou shalt not take the Name of God in vain ... so might the following be a commandment to a true and noble humanity: you ought not to utter so often in vain the requirement of the universal human love which is to become the fundamental feature of your souls, for if silence is in many cases a much better means of developing a quality than speech, it is particularly the case in this matter; quietly cultivating it in the heart, and not talking about it, is a far, far better means of developing universal brotherly love than continually speaking about it. Now the advocacy of this exoteric principle has primarily nothing to do with what has been described as the fundamental quality of the astral body: egotism; the endeavour to exist in itself, of itself and through itself.

The question now is: How, then, is it possible to see this in a right light, this quality—let us calmly use the expression—of the astral body which seems so horrible to us, viz., that it wishes to be an absolute egotist? Let us set to work, beginning from the simple facts of life. There are cases even in ordinary life in which egotism expands, and where we must, to a certain degree, look upon this expansion of egotism as a necessary adaptation in life. For example, consider the characteristic of much mother-love, and try to understand how in this case egotism extends from the mother to the child. We may say that the further we penetrate among less developed peoples, and observe what we might call the lion-like way in which the mothers stand up for their children, the more we notice that the mother considers any attack upon her child as an attack upon herself. Her self is extended to the child; and it is a fact that the mother would not feel an attack upon a part of herself more than upon her child. For what she feels in herself she carries over to her child and we cannot find anything better for the regulation of the world than that egotism should be extended in this way from one being to others, and that one being should reckon itself as forming part of another, as it were, and on this account should extend its egotism over this other. Thus we see that egotism ceases to have a dark side when a being expands itself, when the being transfers its feeling and thinking into another, and considers it as belonging to itself. Through extending her egotism to her child, a mother also claims it as her possession: she counts it as part of herself; she does just as the astral body does, saying: All that is connected with me lives through me, to me, with me, etc.

We may see something similar even in more trivial cases than mother-love. Let us suppose that a man has a house, a farm, and land which he cultivates; let us suppose this man loves his house, his farm, his land and his work-people as his own body; he looks upon the matter in such a way that they are to him an extension of his own body, and loves his house, farm, land and people—as a woman may, under certain circumstances, love her gown, as forming part of her own body. In this case the being of the man expands in a certain sense to what is around him. Now, if his care expands in this way to his possessions and his servants, so that he watches over them and resists any attack upon them as he would an attack on his own body, we must then say that the fact of this environment being permeated with his egotism is extremely beneficial. Under certain circumstances, what is called love may, however, be very self-seeking. Observation of life will show how often what is called love is self-seeking. But an egotism extended beyond the person may also be very selfless, that is, it may protect, cherish and take care of what belongs to it.

By such examples as these, my dear friends, we ought to learn that life cannot be parcelled out according to ideas. We talk of egotism and altruism, and we can make very beautiful systems with such ideas as egotism and altruism. But facts tear such systems to pieces; for when egotism so extends its interests to what is around it that it considers this as part of itself, and thus cherishes and takes care of it, it then becomes selflessness; and when altruism becomes such that it only wishes to make the whole world happy according to its own ideas, when it wishes to impress its thoughts and feelings on the whole world with all its might, and wishes to adopt the axiom, ‘If you will not be my brother, I will break your head,’ then even altruism may become very self-seeking. The reality which lives in forces and in facts cannot be enclosed in ideas, and a great part of that which runs counter to human progress lies in the fact that in immature heads and immature minds there arises again and again the belief that the reality can in some way be bottled up in ideas.

The astral body may be described as an egotist. The consequence of this is that the development which liberates the astral body must reckon with the fact that the interests of man must expand, become wider and wider. Indeed, if our astral body is to liberate itself from the other principles of human nature in the right manner, its interest must include the whole of the earth and earth-humanity. In fact, the interests of humanity upon the earth must become our interests; our interests must cease to be connected in any way with what is merely personal; all that concerns mankind, not only in our own times, but all that has concerned mankind at any time in the whole of its earthly development, must arouse our deepest interests; we much reach the point of considering as an extension of what belongs to us, not only what belongs to our family by blood, not only what is connected with us such as house and farm and land, but we must make everything connected with the development of the earth our own affair.

When in our astral body we are interested in all the affairs of the earth, when all the affairs of the earth become our own, we may give way to the sense of selfhood in our astral body. This, however, is necessary, that the interests of mankind on earth should be our interests. Consider from this point of view the two legends I spoke of in the last lecture. When they were given to humanity at a certain stage, they were given from the point of view that the human being should be raised from any individual interest to the universal interests of the earth. The legend of Paradise leads the pupil directly to the starting point of our earthly evolution, when man had not yet entered upon his first incarnation, or when he is just beginning it, where Lucifer approaches him, when he still stands at the beginning of his whole development and can actually take all human interests into his own breast. The very deepest problem of education and training is contained in the story of Paradise, that story which uplifts one to the standpoint of all humanity, and imprints in every human breast an interest which can also speak in each. When the pictures of the legend of Paradise, as we have tried to comprehend them, press into the human soul, they act in such a way that the astral body is penetrated through and through by them; and under the influence of this human being whose horizon is expanded over the whole earth, the astral body may also make its own interest all that now enters its sphere. It has now arrived at being able to consider the interests of the earth as its own. Try, my dear friends, to consider seriously and earnestly what a universal, educative force is contained in such a legend, and what a spiritual impulse lies there.

It is the same with the legend of the Grail. While the Paradise legend is given to the humanity of the earth, inasmuch as it directs this humanity to the origin, the starting-point of its earthly development, while the Paradise legend, as given, uplifts us to the horizon of the whole development of humanity, the legend of the Grail is given that it may sink into the innermost depths of the astral body, into its most vital interests, just because, if only left to itself, this astral body becomes an egotist which only considers the interests that are its very own.

As regards the interests of the astral body, we can really only err in two directions. One is the direction towards Amfortas, and the other, before Amfortas is fully redeemed, leads towards Perceval. Between these two lies the true development of man, in so far as his astral body is concerned. This astral body strives to develop the forces of egotism within itself. But if it brings personal interests into this egotism it becomes corroded, and while it ought to extend over the whole earth, it will shrivel up into the individual personality. This may not be. For if it occurs, then through the activity of the personality, which expresses its ego in the blood, the whole human personality is wounded—one errs on the Amfortas side. The fundamental error of Amfortas consists in his carrying into the sphere in which the astral body ought to have gained the right to be an egotist, that which still remains in him as personal desires and wishes. The moment we take personal interests into the sphere where the astral body ought to separate itself from personal interest it is harmful, we become like the wounded Amfortas.

But the other error can also lead to harm, and only fails to do so when the being who suffers this harm is filled with the innocence of Perceval. Perceval repeatedly sees the Holy Grail pass. To a certain extent he commits a wrong. Each time the Holy Grail is carried past it is on his lips to ask for whom this food is really intended; but he does not ask; and at length the meal is over without his having asked. And so, after this meal he has to withdraw, without having the opportunity of making good what he had omitted to do. It is really just as though a man, not yet fully mature, were to become clairvoyant for a moment during the night, when he would be separated as if by an abyss from what is contained in the castle of his body, and were then to glance for a moment into it; and as if then without having obtained the appropriate knowledge, that is, without having asked the question, everything were again to be closed to him; for then, even though he wakened, he would not be able to enter this castle again. What did Perceval really neglect to do?

We have heard what the Holy Grail contains. It contains that by which the physical instrument of man on earth must be nourished: the extract, the pure mineral extract, which is obtained from all foods and which unites in the purest part of the human brain with the purest sense-impressions, impressions which come into us through our senses. Now, to whom is this food to be handed? It is really to be handed—as appears to us when from the exoteric poetic story we enter into the esoteric presentation of it in the Mysteries—it is really to be handed to the human being who has obtained the understanding of what makes man mature enough gradually to raise Himself consciously to that which this Holy Grail is. Through what do we gain the faculty to raise ourselves consciously to that which is the Holy Grail?

In the story it is very clearly indicated for whom the Holy Grail is really intended. And when we go into the Mystery presentation of the legend of the Grail we find in addition something very special. In the original legend of the Grail the ruler of the castle is a Fisher King, a king ruling over fisher folk. There was Another Who also walked among fisher folk, but He did not wish to be the king of these fishermen, rather something else; He scorned to rule over them as a king, but He brought them something more than did the king who ruled over them—this One was Christ Jesus.

Thus we are shown that the error of the Fisher King, who in the original legend is Amfortas, was a turning aside. He is not altogether worthy to receive health really through the Grail; because he wishes to rule his fisher folk by means of power. He does not allow the spirit alone to rule among this fisher folk.

At first Perceval is not sufficiently awake inwardly to ask in a self-conscious way: What is the purpose of the Grail? What does it demand? In the case of the Fisher King it required him to kill out his personal interest and cause it to expand to the interest in all humanity shown by Christ Jesus. In the case of Perceval it was necessary that he should raise his interest above the mere innocent vision to the inner understanding of what in every man is the same, what comes to the whole of humanity, the gift of the Holy Grail. Thus in a wonderful way between Perceval and Amfortas, the original Fisher King, floats the ideal of the Mystery of Golgotha, and at an important part of the legend it is delicately indicated that on the one hand the Fisher King has taken too much personality into the sphere of the astral body, and on the other stands Perceval, who has carried thither too little general interest in the world, who is still too [unsophisticated, who does not feel sufficient interest in the world. It is the immense educative value of the Grail legend that it could so work into the souls of the students of the Holy Grail that they had before them something like a balance: in the one scale that which was in Amfortas, and in the other that which was in Perceval; and they then knew that the balance was to be established. If the astral body follows its own innate interests, it will uplift itself to that horizon of universal humanity which is gained when the statement becomes a truth: ‘Where two are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them, no matter where in the development of the earth these two may be found.’ (Matthew 18, 20.)

At this point, my dear friends, I beg you not to take a part for the whole, but to take this lecture and the next together; for they may cause misunderstanding. But it is absolutely necessary that the human astral body should in its development be uplifted to the horizon of humanity in a very special way, so that the interest, common to all humanity, becomes its own, so that it feels wronged, hurt, sad within itself, when humanity is harmed in any way. To this end it is necessary that when, through his esoteric development, the student gradually succeeds in making his astral body free and independent from the other principles of his human nature, he should then arm and protect himself against any influences of other astral bodies; for when the astral body is free it is no longer protected by the physical body and etheric body, which are a strong castle, as it were, for the astral. It is free, it becomes permeable, and the forces in other astral bodies can very easily work into it. Astral bodies stronger than itself can influence it, should it be unarmed with its own forces. It would be fatal if someone were to attain the free management of his astral body, and yet were as innocent as regards its conditions as Perceval was at the beginning. That will not do; for then all sorts of influences proceeding from other astral bodies would be able to have a corresponding effect on his.

Now, what we have just mentioned also applies to a certain extent to the external exoteric world. Humanity upon the earth lives under certain religious systems. These religious systems have their cults and rituals. These rituals surround a member of a cult with imaginations obtained from the higher worlds by the help of the astral body. The moment such a religious community admits a man to its membership he is in the midst of imaginations which, while he is influenced by the ritual, liberate his astral body. In any religious ritual the astral body becomes, to a certain extent, free, at any rate for brief moments. The more powerful the ritual, the more does it suppress the influence of the etheric body and the physical body; the more it works by means of methods that liberate the astral body, the more is the astral body, during the ceremony, enticed out of the etheric body and physical body. For this reason also—though it might seem as if I am speaking in ridicule, which I am not—for this reason there is no place so dangerous to sleep in as a church, because in sleep the astral body separates from the etheric body and physical body, and because what goes on in the ritual insinuates itself into the astral body; for it is brought down from the higher worlds by the help of astral bodies. Thus to go to sleep in church, which in some places is strongly attractive to people, is something that really should be avoided. This applies more to churches which have a ritual; it does not apply so much to those religious communities which, through the ideas of modern times, have relinquished a certain ritual or limit themselves to a minimum of ritual. We are not now speaking of these things from any preference or otherwise for one creed or another, but purely according to the standard of objective facts. When, therefore, a person has emancipated his astral body from the other principles of his human nature, the impulses and forces obtained by the help of astral bodies may easily influence him. In this respect it is also possible that a person who has arrived at the free use of his astral body, if he is stronger than another whose astral body is to some extent emancipated, may obtain a very great influence over the latter. It is then absolutely like a transference of the forces of the astral body of the stronger personality to that of the weaker. And if we then clairvoyantly observe the weaker personality, he is really seen to bear within his astral body the pictures and imaginations of the stronger astral personality. You see how necessary it is that ethics should be in the ascendant where occultism is to be cultivated; for naturally egotism cannot be cultivated without really striving to emancipate the astral body from the other principles of human nature; but the most destructive thing in the field of occultism is for the stronger personalities to strive in any way for power to further their personal interests and personal intentions. Only those personalities who absolutely renounce all personal influence are really entitled to work in the domain of occultism, and the greatest ideal of the occultist who is to attain anything legitimate is not to wish to attain anything whatever by means of his own personality, but to put aside as far as possible all consideration of personal sympathy or antipathy. Therefore, whoever possesses sympathy or antipathy for one thing or another, and yet wishes to work as an occultist, must carefully relegate these sympathies and antipathies to his own private sphere, and only allow them to prevail there; in any case he may not cultivate and cherish any of these personal sympathies and antipathies in the domain in which an occult movement is to flourish. And, paradoxical as it may sound, we may say: To the occult teacher his own teaching is a matter of no concern; in fact, the matter of least concern of all to him is the teaching which he can really only give by means of his own talents and temperament. Teaching will only have a meaning when as such it contains nothing in any way really personal, but simply what can be of help to souls. Therefore, no occult teacher will at any time give any of his knowledge to his own age if he is aware that this part of his knowledge is useless to it, and could only be useful to a different age. All this comes into consideration when we are speaking of the peculiar nature of the astral body under the influence of occult development. During the preparation for our age and its progressive development a further complication arises. For what is our own age? It is the age of the development of the consciousness-soul. Nothing is so closely connected with the egotism which accentuates the narrow, personal interests as the consciousness-soul. Hence, in no other age is there such a temptation to confuse the most personal interests with those that belong to mankind in general. This age has gradually to gather the interests of humanity into the human ego, as it were; into that very part of the human ego which is the consciousness-soul. Towards the dawn of our age we see human interests being concentrated into the ego, the acme of the sense of selfhood. In this respect it is extremely instructive seriously to consider whether, for example, what Saint Augustine wrote in his ‘Confessions’ would ever have been possible in ancient Greece. It would have been absolutely out of the question.

The whole nature of the Greek was such that his inner being was in a certain harmony with his outer nature, so that external interests were at the same time inner interests, and inner interests extended into outer ones. Consider the whole Greek culture. It was of such a nature that everywhere a certain harmony between the human inner being and the outer must be taken for granted. We can only understand Greek art and tragedy, Greek historians and philosophers, when we know that among the Greeks that which pertained to the soul was poured into the outer culture, and as a matter of course showed its union with the inner. Let us compare this with the Confessions of Saint Augustine. Everything lives for himself; he searches, digs and investigates into his own being. If we look for the entirely personal, individual note in the writings of Saint Augustine we can find it in them all. Although Augustine lived long before our age, yet he prepared for it; his was the spirit in whose records we find the first dawn, long before the rising of the sun, the first dawn of the age apportioned to the consciousness-soul. This can be perceived in every line written by him, and every line of his can be distinguished by a delicate perception from all that was possible in ancient Greece.

Now, when we know that Augustine was advancing to meet the age when the sense of selfhood—the occupation of man with his own inner being even within the physical body—is as a sort of character of this age, we can understand that one who, like Augustine, has more extended interests as well, and observes the whole of the development of mankind, will truly shudder when a human being comes to him who gives him the idea that, on attaining a certain height, the astral body must naturally develop a sort of selfishness. Purely, nobly and grandly Augustine attacks self-centredness.

We might say that he attacks it selflessly. But he came into the age when humanity had separated itself from the general interests of the outer world. Recollect that in the third post-Atlantean age every Egyptian directed his gaze to the stars, where he read human destiny, how the soul was connected with interests common to humanity. Naturally this could only be attained when the human being was still capable, in the ancient elementary clairvoyance, of keeping his astral body separate from the physical body; therefore, Augustine could not but shudder when in contact with a person who reminded him, as it were, that with higher development comes selfishness. He can comprehend this, he feels it, his instinct tells him that he is living towards the age of egoism. When, therefore, a person confronts him who represents the higher development beyond that in the physical body, he feels: we are moving in the direction of egotism. At the same time he cannot comprehend that this person is bringing with him an interest common to the whole of humanity. Try to obtain a perception of how Augustine, according to his own confession, confronts the Manichaean Bishop, Faustinus—for it is he whom I have described. When he met with Faustinus, Augustine had the experience of a man facing the age of egoism in a noble way, wishing to protect it against egotism by the inner power alone, and who must turn away from such a man as the Manichaean Bishop, Faustinus. He turned away from him because, to him, Faustinus represented something in which he ought not to take part; for he conceals something within him which could not be understood at all in exoteric life in such an age. Thus the Manichaean Bishop, Faustinus, confronts the Church Father, Augustine; Augustine, who is facing the age of the consciousness-soul, meets with a human being who preserves his connection with the spiritual world as it can be preserved in an occult movement, and who thereby also preserves the fundamental quality of the astral body, at which Augustine shudders and, from his standpoint, justly.

Let us pass on a few centuries. We then meet at the University of Paris with a man who is but little known in literature; for what he has written gives no idea of his personality; what he has written seems pedantic. But personally he must have worked in a magnificent way; personally he seems to have worked principally in such a way that he brought into his circle something like a renewal of the Greek conception of the world. He was the personification of the Renaissance. He died in 1518, working until the time of his death at the Paris University. This personality was related to the Greek world—though much more on the exoteric side—in the same way as the Manichaean Bishop Faustinus was related to the Manichees, who above all else had received, among many other things in their traditions, all the great and good aspects of the third post-Atlantean, the Egyptian-Chaldean age. Thus there was this Manichaean Bishop Faustinus, who came in touch with Augustine, and who, through what he was, had preserved the occult foundations of the third post-Atlantean age. In 1518 there died in Paris a man who had carried over, though exoterically, certain aspects of the foundation of the fourth post-Atlantean age. This caused him to impress those who worked around him in traditional Christianity as weird, sinister. The monks looked upon him as their deadly enemy; yet he made a great impression upon Erasmus of Rotterdam when the latter was in Paris. But it seemed to Erasmus as if his external environment were ill-suited to the individuality which really lived within this remarkable soul; and when Erasmus had departed and gone to England, he wrote to this man, who in the meantime had become his friend, that he wished his friend could free himself from his gouty physical body and fly through the air to England, for there he would find in the external environment a much better soil for what he felt in his soul. The fact that the personality who worked at that time could give rise to Greek feeling and sensation in such an evident manner, we see with special clearness if we bear in mind the relationship between the refined and sensitive Erasmus and this personality. Thus, just at the very beginning of the age of selfhood, one might say, lived this personality who died in Paris in 1518. He lived as an enemy of those who wished to adapt the life of human souls to the age of selfhood, and who shuddered, as it were, at a soul who could work in such a way because he wished to conjure up another age, when man was, so to say, closer to the selfhood of the astral body—the Greek age. This personality who was called Faustus Andrelinus affected Erasmus very sympathetically.

In the sixteenth century, in central Europe, we meet with another personality, who is represented as being a sort of travelling minstrel, regarding whom we are told that he deviated from the traditional theology. This personality no longer wished to call himself a theologian, calling himself a man of the world and a doctor; he placed his Bible on the shelf for a time, and engaged in the study of nature. Now the study of nature, in the age when the transition took place from all that was ancient to all that is modern, was also such that it brought to man the astral selfhood, just as did Manichaeism and the ancient thought of Greece. Thus what stood at that time on the border between ancient alchemy and modern chemistry, between ancient astrology and modern astronomy, etc., brought the astral selfhood home to man. This peculiar flickering and shimmering of natural science between the ancient and modern standpoints brought home to man—when he laid his Bible for a time on the shelf—such an astral activity that it necessitated coming to an understanding with egotism. No wonder that those shuddered at it, who with their traditions wished to adjust themselves to the age of selfhood in which the consciousness-soul had already fully dawned; and there arose in Central Europe the legend of the third Faust, John Faust, also called George Faust, an actual historical personality. And the sixteenth century welded together all the horror of the egotism of the astral body by combining the three Fausts, the Faust of Augustine, that of Erasmus, and the Faust of Central Europe, into one—into that figure depicted in popular books in Central Europe, which also became the Faust of Marlowe. Out of a complete reversal of this character Goethe created his Faust, clearly showing us that it is possible not to shudder at the bearer of that which brings home to us the essence of the astral, but to understand him better, so that to us he may be evidence of a development which will call forth from us the words, ‘We can redeem him.’ Whole ages have occupied themselves with the question of the egoistic nature of the astral body, and in legendary stories and, indeed, even in history echoes the horror of man at its nature, and the human longing to solve the problem of this astral body in the right manner, in a manner corresponding to the wise guidance of the world, and to the esoteric development of the individual human soul.

If we look at the spiritual life in our age, we cannot but see – if we are sufficiently unprejudiced – that the whole and the great in this age have lost more and more of their soul, especially since the second half of the 19th century. Soul is missing from our contemporary civilization; and if the individual wants to awaken his soul to inner life, then it becomes necessary for him to do so not through experiencing the great traits of our civilization, but in solitude.

We have generally lost the ability to truly follow the basic impulses of our present life with an alert mind. There have been phenomena for external observation, which began in the 19th century, that should have called for a powerful attention to what is happening in spiritual life. But such phenomena have passed more or less without a trace. Indeed, it can be said that such phenomena have not even been formulated in modern times in such a way that their formulation could have made a sufficiently deep, awakening impression on modern humanity.

I would like to begin today's reflection with an observation that, on the basis of its externality, may be received by one person with a certain smile, by another historically registered as one of the many world-view aberrations with a neutral meaning, and by a third combated with some anger. Above all, however, I would like to try to simply formulate the facts as I see them.

In the last two decades of the 19th century, it often became an important question for me as to who was actually the cleverest person of the age. Of course, such things can only be understood in a relative sense. So please don't construe the things I will say in connection with this question too literally, of course; but with the necessary grain of salt with which one takes such things, I ask you to consider the matter as something that I may present as a characteristic of our age.

Our age is the age of intellectualism. Intellect has reached very special heights. And so one must ask oneself: What does the intellect of man actually depend on during earthly existence? Certainly, the powers of the intellect, the active part of the intellect, depends on the soul of the human being – and we will have to consider this soul later – depends on what the human being unconsciously carries within him for earthly consciousness in the form of an etheric organism, a body of formative forces, an astral body and the I organization.

But in the present period of the earth's development, the human being is simply not yet so far advanced that he can really bring the activity of the intellect, as it lives in these three links of human nature, to existence. If the human being did not have his physical body, the intellect would have to remain silent during his earthly existence. It would be like the way a person walking into a wall feels: when walking straight ahead and not even paying attention to his arms and hands, he sees nothing of himself, but if the wall he is walking into is a mirror, then he sees himself. Just as a person who does not see himself, so would the intellect of man be: he would not perceive himself if he did not have the physical body that reflects his activity, that throws back his activity. Thus man owes the greatness of his intellect in the present age to the reflection of his inner soul activity through the physical body. But while man will never mistake his mirror image for himself, this is precisely what happens with intellect. Man ultimately mistakes as intellect that which lives only in the physical web as the mirror image of the intellect. He surrenders himself to the mirror image. But then the mirror image will rule in him.

In a sense, man surrenders himself completely to his physical body with his intellect. If man succeeds in truly surrendering himself completely to the physical body with his intellect, then this intellect becomes highly perfected. When we allow our inner being to be active, then we still occasionally grope our way through all kinds of feelings and urges that we have, through prejudices, through sympathies and antipathies, then we grope our way into the intellect. There we make it imperfect. But if we become completely dry, sober, cold natures, if, to speak in the Hamerling sense, we combine the male soullessness of the billionaire with the female soullessness of the mermaid, as Hamerling has portrayed such a union in his “Homunculus,” and thereby acquire the ability to think as we must think in accordance with our physical bodies, then a relative perfection of our intellectuality is precisely possible in this age. Then we learn to think in such a way that, in a sense, the intellect moves itself within us, that the intellect becomes, in a certain sense, an automaton, playing at a relatively highest perfection.

I said this to myself back then in the last two decades of the 19th century and asked myself: Who is the cleverest person in contemporary civilization in this sense, that he has brought the intellect to a relatively highest perfection? Well, you may smile, but I really couldn't come up with anything other than that the cleverest person in contemporary civilization is Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the unconscious. It is by no means some kind of daring paradox, but something that emerged for me from a perhaps not entirely soulless consideration of the last two decades of the 19th century.

You can imagine that one has great respect for the person whom one considered the most intelligent person of the age. That is why I also dedicated what I wanted to express in terms of epistemology in my booklet “Truth and Science” to Eduard von Hartmann. So I am not speaking out of disrespect, I speak out of deep respect. The preconditions for Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy are, after all, that Eduard von Hartmann was actually trained as an officer. He made it to the rank of first lieutenant, but then contracted a knee injury and subsequently transformed the intellectuality that was actually intended for modern militarism into philosophy. It is interesting that this is precisely how what I can only formulate as follows came about: Eduard von Hartmann was the cleverest man of the last third of the 19th century.

He therefore also saw clearly what one can clearly see with the understanding of the last third of the 19th century. He saw through human consciousness, as it is bound to the earth, but bound to the physical human body. Being clever, he did not deny the spirit. But he transferred it into the sphere of the unconscious, into that which can never carry a body, which can never come into intimate contact with the physical, and which, therefore, since it is always extra-physical, that is, spiritual, can only be unconscious.

Conscious – Eduard von Hartmann told himself – one can only be in the body. But if the body is not the only thing, if there is a spirit, then the spirit cannot be conscious, only unconscious. When a person passes through the gate of death, Hartmann says, we cannot expect him to penetrate into a different consciousness, because beyond this earthly consciousness there is only the unconscious. The person enters the sphere of the unconscious spirit. The unconscious spirit is everywhere except where the person's consciousness is.

Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy is therefore a philosophy of the spirit, but a philosophy of the unconscious spirit. So that there is no consciousness except in the human body, that there is spirit everywhere, but spirit that knows nothing of itself or the world and nothing of itself.

Is it not absolutely clear that this unconscious spirit can never penetrate into anything outside of itself except through the physical human body? That is clear from the outset. But something very significant is said with this. It is said that this intellect, which thus elevates itself to the status of the unconscious, lacks love.

I am not saying that Eduard von Hartmann lacked love, but his intellect, which was precisely its significance, lacked all love. It is not possible for the loveless intellect to build the bridge anywhere. Therefore, it remains only in itself, but as a result, it cannot gain consciousness. He remains in the sphere of unconsciousness. One could also say that he remains in the sphere of unkindness.

This already indicates that this is also the sphere of soullessness, because where love cannot occur, soulfulness gradually fades away altogether. And so, I would say, we have to feel the atmosphere of unkindness from the whole and great civilization of the second half of the 19th century, on whose shoulders our civilization stands.

It is now highly remarkable where Eduard von Hartmann has led this indulgence of the unconscious mind, combined with unkindness.

He looked at this world of earthly life that gives man consciousness. But if we could not live as earth people in our body, if we could not submerge ourselves in our body with every waking and connect ourselves completely with our body, what would we face?

When we awaken as earth humans, the I and the astral body, which were secreted during sleep, return to the physical body and the etheric body. There the I and the astral body connect very intimately with the etheric body and physical body, and this I and the astral body become one with the etheric body and the physical body.

And as long as we are awake as an earthly human being, we must speak of an intimate unity of the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily. But if we separate the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily, as Eduard von Hartmann does intellectually, then the following reality would correspond to it: a reality that would occur when we, on waking up, enter our physical and etheric bodies, but do not merge with them, but only dwell in them. According to Eduard von Hartmann, the unconscious mind dwells in the body and thereby becomes conscious in physical life on earth. So it thinks something that, if it were to occur in reality, would be as if, when we wake up, we would indeed enter our physical and etheric bodies, but would not merge with them – but would live inside them, looking around as we look around in a house, seeing everything inside – so we would be separate inside. But what would happen then?

Now, if we, with our spiritual and mental selves, were not merged with our physical body but lived separately from it, then that would mean an unspeakable, unbearable pain for our soul; because every pain arises from the organ not functioning properly, from the organ becoming diseased, from us being expelled from a part of our physical body. If we were to be expelled altogether, if we were to be, if I may express it this way, 'extra' to our physical body, we would have to experience an unutterable pain. Every morning when we wake up, this pain threatens us, so to speak. We overcome it by immersing ourselves in our physical and etheric bodies and connecting with them.

Now, Eduard von Hartmann was certainly no initiate; he was merely an intellectual, the best intellectual of the second half of the 19th century. He merely grasped in thought what I have now painted before you as a reality. He presented the world as if we did not connect with our I and our astral body with the physical and etheric bodies. He imagined the relationship of the human being to his body as I have just described it in reality.

This led him to the following conclusion: He came to the conclusion of a complete pessimism. Of course, pessimism would be experienced if we were separated from our physical body when we woke up. Eduard von Hartmann conceived it. And what does he propose as the result of his thinking? The world is the worst conceivable. The world contains the greatest amount of evil and pain, and the real cultural development of humanity can only consist in gradually extinguishing, destroying the world. And at the end of “The Philosophy of the Unconscious” an ideal does indeed emerge.

Eduard von Hartmann lived in the age of ever-increasing technological development, when more and more machines were being used to perform this or that task. Anyone who takes a look at what is possible with machines is fascinated by the possibilities that lie within them. If you expand the possibilities that can arise for the world as the perfection of the mechanical, it has a tremendous suggestive power.

Eduard von Hartmann has surrendered himself to this suggestion. And he thinks that humanity – which, precisely because it has come to intellect, must gradually become more and more intelligent – must also increasingly realize that the right thing for this world is to destroy it; that humanity will one day will come to a machine through which one can drill down to the center of the earth and then set the machine in motion to hurl this whole worst earth into the vastness of the cosmos with everything that lives on it.

One can only say that the foundations for such a way of thinking are actually present in all others, who may not be as clever as Eduard von Hartmann, but are also very clever, but they have not had the courage to think the final consequences in this sense. And one can say that if one is really able to grasp what the intellect can achieve, detached from the rest of the world, then, with this one-sided development of the intellect, this ideal, as presented by Eduard von Hartmann, even appears, in a certain sense, necessary.

I said that one did not really come to formulate certain phenomena of the time that were there after all. But one should really aspire to a formulation that is as concise as possible by the philosopher of the unconscious, who presented this perspective to humanity in 1869. And in this, Eduard von Hartmann was actually also really cleverer than the others, because he did, after all, accomplish that deed, which I have often related, after he presented this ideal to people. In the same book in which he presents this ideal, he speaks of the spirit, albeit the unconscious spirit, but he speaks of the spirit. It was a terrible sin, because science had come so far that one was not allowed to speak scientifically of the spirit, even in the harmless way of leaving it entirely unconscious.

And so the other clever people saw this “philosophy of the unconscious,” which made itself very noticeable in literature, as dilettantism. Then Eduard von Hartmann played a trick on them. A refutation of the “philosophy of the unconscious” by an unknown author appeared. And in it, this spirit philosophy was thoroughly refuted. The writing was called “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent”. In this anonymous writing, the ghost of Hartmann's other clever minds was so strong – yes, I must say now, the ghost, because I am not allowed to say spirit in this case – that the most important natural scientists of that time, Oskar Schmidt, Ernst Haeckel and a host of others, wrote the most laudatory reviews of this anonymous book and said: “There's someone who has thoroughly dealt with this dilettante Eduard von Hartmann! It's a shame that he's not known, this anonymous. He should tell us his name and we would consider him one of our own.

It is understandable that after such a blow to the trumpet, the anonymous's writing was soon discontinued and a second edition was needed. It appeared: “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent, second edition, by Eduard von Hartmann”.

So, as you can see, Eduard von Hartmann also proved that he was already the cleverest, because firstly he could be as clever as he was, and then also as clever as the others, his opponents.

If yesterday I had to say that psychoanalysis is amateurism squared, then one would actually have to say that because soul qualities always multiply: the cleverness of Eduard von Hartmann was cleverness squared, multiplied by itself.

We should not pass by such a phenomenon of the age in such a deep sleep, as we do. We should formulate it and bring it to mind, then we would really have the absurdities of the age before us. And why was Eduard von Hartmann so clever? He was so clever because he really looked at everything that one was allowed to take note of in his time with a penetrating gaze. He became, so to speak, the naturalist of philosophy. It is, of course, rather like saying: the flour of soup. But he became the naturalist of philosophy.

Now it is a matter of realizing quite empirically, precisely in the face of such an occurrence, where one must go if one does not want to fall into these abysses. If one wants to find one's way out of the confusion that this civilization brings, one must look at what the human being really carries within.

But if we now move from the physical body of the human being and gradually move more into the spiritual, we approach the soul, as we discussed again yesterday, the etheric body or formative forces.

Eduard von

Hartmann knew nothing of such an etheric or formative body, in accordance with what could be known in his time. He did not ascend from the consideration of what is externally natural-physical to the next thing that borders on the physical, to the etheric or formative body.

We know that when a person falls asleep, his I and his astral body separate from the physical body and from the etheric body. The etheric body remains in the physical body. If a person merely applies earthly consciousness, he can never really know what the nature of his etheric body is. For when he is awake, he enters with his astral body and his ego into the etheric body. Then he is inside. Then he experiences what he himself has brought into it with his ego and his astral body. A being of a much higher organization would have to plunge into this etheric body during human sleep, while the I and the astral body are outside. Such a being, which could really objectively see how it actually relates to this etheric body, would find what the human being actually leaves behind with the physical body when he falls asleep, his etheric body. If one were to determine what it is that the human being leaves behind, one would find that this etheric body or formative forces body is truly the epitome of all wisdom in an earthly and in a much higher sense.

It cannot be denied for true knowledge: When we have left our physical and etheric bodies at night, the two that we have left behind are much cleverer together than we are when we are inside. For we are, in our I and our astral body, children of the development of the earth and the moon. The ether body, however, goes back to the development of the sun, and the physical body goes back to the development of Saturn. These are at a much higher level of perfection. Today, we in our I and in our astral body cannot measure up to what has accumulated over time from the solar developmental epoch here in our ether body as wisdom. One could say: this ether body is concentrated wisdom. But when we humans bring our wisdom into this etheric body with our astral body and with our ego, then we need a counterforce, just as we need the counterforce of the mirror if we want to see our reflection. We need the physical body as a counterforce. Just as we could not stand if we did not have physical ground, so we could not live in our etheric body without the etheric body bordering on the physical body and bumping into the physical body everywhere, having an abutment on the physical body. The etheric body with its inner life would be like a human being floating freely in the air without a base. In our ordinary earthly existence, we have only a soul life, which lives in the etheric body but needs the physical body as a support.

With this soul condition, we can only get close to the mineral world. We can only see through the inanimate. If we want to get close to the plant world, we need the ability to use the etheric body without the physical body.

How can we do that? How can we use our etheric body without our physical body? We can do this if we increasingly transform ourselves, through inner exercises, from people who live primarily through their physical body in the element of heaviness to people who live through the light in the element of lightness, who through the light no longer feel their connection with the earth, but with the vastness of the cosmos; when looking at the stars, the sun and moon, the vastness of the universe, gradually becomes as familiar to us as looking at the plants that cover the meadows. When we are mere earthly children, we look down at the plants that cover the meadows. We take pleasure in them, but do not understand them, because we are earth-bound human beings. But if we can learn to stand in the expanse of the universe, in the meadow of heaven, studded with stars — not on the floor but on the ceiling — and feel can feel a kinship with it, as we otherwise do with the soil of the earth, then we begin, by transforming our earthly consciousness into a cosmic consciousness, to use our etheric body in the same way as we otherwise use our physical body. Only then will we be able to penetrate to the plant world with our understanding. For plants are not produced from the earth upwards, but are drawn out of the earth through the heavens.

You see, Goethe was filled with this longing when he developed his Metamorphosis of Plants. And there is much that he said that is as if he felt he was such a person, inclined towards the sun rather than the earth, who felt how the sun draws the power of plant growth out of the earth even at the root , how the sun, with its powers, gradually develops the leaf in connection with the effect of the air, and how the sun finally, in the flower and in the formation of fruit, gradually cooks that which it has sucked out of the earth.

Just read this wonderful little book by Goethe, published in 1790: “Attempt to explain the metamorphosis of plants”, and you will find the beginnings of such a representation everywhere. Goethe longed to penetrate the plant world. But he repeatedly stumbled over the difficulty of really developing the ethereal vision instead of the physical vision. This is what was already present as an impulse in Goethe, and what the person who really draws on Goethe must further develop. This person does not want to take the dead Goethe, but the Goethe who continues to live and work.

For by realizing that the human soul can do something like this, if only it really becomes aware of its etheric body, it is able to feel its heavenly origin, its independence from the earth, its being on earth. The human soul can say to itself: You are of cosmic origin; you are on earth through the physical human body, but you are of cosmic origin. And when you can take joy in the plant world here, then that which rejoices in you is a son of heaven, who delights in what the heavens in turn draw out of the earth in the plant world. Man seizes himself soulfully from the earth by thus truly grasping his etheric or formative body in reality.

When one does this, that is, when one comes so far - and what can bring one to it is real love for the plant world - to live in the etheric body as one otherwise lives in the physical body, then not only one's own ether body is raised into consciousness, but in the same way as the physical nature is raised through our senses into our consciousness through our physical body, so the etheric world is placed into our consciousness through the etheric body.

And what do we feel when we look out, as it were, through our etheric body into the etheric world, just as we look out with our physical body into the physical world? We see there what is spread out before our physical eye, the real past from which this physical world has emerged. There we see in spirit the images of what was, so that the present can be.

Therefore, from the earliest times of humanity, the first initiation given to man was the initiation of the cosmos. In the oldest schools of humanity, people worked towards this initiation of the cosmos. The teachers of the first mysteries were the initiators for reading in the ether of the cosmos, which can also be called reading in chaos, in the Akasha Chronicle, reading the Akasha, reading that which has passed and has conjured the present before our eyes. And it was basically the first level of initiation that humanity has achieved in its existence on Earth, this initiation through the cosmos.

A second one that can be achieved is this: when we awaken, we let the astral body and the ego sink down into the physical body and etheric body. We animate the etheric and physical body, we connect with them. But we can only grasp as much of the infinite wisdom of the etheric body as we carry into it. But it constantly stimulates us. If we have a good idea somehow, then it is the etheric body that, because it is intimately connected with the ether of the cosmos, stimulates us to have the idea. Everything that a person develops in the way of ideas and ingenuity when they are awake comes from the etheric body and thus indirectly from the cosmos. The genius speaks with the cosmos by stimulating the astral body through the etheric body.

But the person who does not see this through lives in it, and his soul consists in that he sinks the astral body and the I into the physical body and the etheric body in the waking state.

When we make the stars our home, just as we do the meadows, we have the opportunity to experience the etheric, in that we make the world's widths the upper ground of our being. The human being always experiences it, only in his knowledge he does not penetrate there without initiation; but in reality every human being experiences it. If we look for a counterfoil for our astral body, this counterfoil is always there. It is only that spiritual science draws attention to what is present in every human being.

Suppose you could not see the physical floor, but you could stand on it, you would stand on it. If someone, who had only discovered through science that the floor was there, were to tell you about it, you would still stand on the floor. So the one who has mastered spiritual science can tell you that you are rising to the upper ground, to the starry heavens; but you are really rising all the same. And so the human being stands in another world with his astral body, in the world of living spirit beings, which we have enumerated as the world of the higher hierarchies.

Just as we, when we place ourselves in the physical world, have this physical world as our real one, just as there are minerals, plants and animals in this physical world and the soil is what the human being ultimately outgrows in the evolution of humanity, so the human being is in the world of the beings of the higher hierarchies with his astral body. When he lives in this world, he has the corresponding counterfoil for his astral body. But he always carries within himself that which he can only get to know through spiritual science. And he carries it within himself as the faculty of feeling.

Everything we make our own in the world through our feelings, through this most intimate life of the soul, exists in the undulations and weavings of the spirits of the higher hierarchies in our own astral body. When we become conscious of our feeling, this consciousness of feeling is what the human being has at first, but in this feeling the weaving and working of the spirits of the higher hierarchies lives through the human being. We cannot truly grasp the soul if we do not feel this soul immersed in the spiritual worlds of the higher hierarchies. And just as the past is revealed to us for the sensory present through etheric vision, when what has been developed in the first earthly mysteries as the initiation of the cosmos is recreated in a modern way, so too can the soul be so deepened that it attains an awareness of what is actually taking place in the astral body.

To do this, we need to lovingly immerse ourselves in what has been lived as a connection with the spiritual worlds in the great mysteries. If we allow the cosmos to teach us, under the guidance of the wisdom of initiation, we will arrive at the reality of the first level of the soul. If we can penetrate into what actually took place in the mysteries, we can, so to speak, not only read in the Akasha Chronicle the past of the stars, the past of the animals, the past of the physical human being, we can read what has lived in the souls of the great mystery teachers, we can truly awaken in us something like what I have tried to present in the way can be presented to the modern human being in my book 'Christianity as Mystical Fact'. If we can bring to life what the mystery teachers developed through their contact with the spiritual beings themselves, then we come close to that initiation which in later times on earth was added to the cosmic initiation and which I would like to call the initiation of the wise.

Thus one can speak of two levels of initiation: initiation through the cosmos and initiation through the wise. What the wise had taught as cosmic knowledge formed the content of cosmic initiation. Looking into the souls of those who preceded man in the life of the soul leads to the second level of soul being. Man can begin with all this in his outer historicity. When we grasp with inner aliveness what still shines through from ancient times – let us say in the wonderful Vedanta wisdom and other wisdom of older times – then in turn our own inner aliveness is grasped, and we are brought close to the initiation of the cosmos. And when one delves into such things with heartfelt love, as I presented them in my book 'Christianity as Mystical Fact', where an attempt has been made to present the old mysteries in their content in connection with the mystery of Golgotha, then one comes close to initiation by the wise.

And then, for the present, it is necessary to look honestly into one's own inner being and to get to know this inner being, one's own spirit, which then illuminates the soul from within. But I will speak in more detail about this, as the third stage of the initiation necessary today, next time. It is the initiation of self-knowledge.

But when spiritual science speaks of the soul today, it must speak from the spirit of these three stages of initiation: initiation through the cosmos, initiation through the sages, initiation through self-knowledge. In this way one measures the various boundaries of the soul's life. It is not possible to take even the first steps on this path without love. And I had to tell you that precisely the intellect of the present day, when it emerges at the highest level, forgets love, loses love. But in this way something very special takes place.

To really lovingly engage with what can be described as the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I,

can be done by hearing something of the voice of the genius that rules our time, if one has the good will to listen to the voice of the genius of our time. But can the man of the present day take what is said when one speaks of “the genius of our age” with the deep seriousness it deserves? When we speak of the genius of our age, does it not remain an abstract concept for most people? Think how far removed people are from grasping a truly spiritual force that is active, weaving and living in our time when we speak of the genius of our time.

But it may be said that even if people deny the spirit, they will not be rid of the spirit. The spirit is inextricably linked to humanity. Only when people renounce the genius of an age does the demon of that age approach them. And when the intellect had progressed so far at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century that it followed only the mechanism of the physical body, even became automatic, mechanical, and thus reached its highest level, so that it became as clever as it and as clever as the others are, when this intellect advanced to the point where the mechanical and material aspects of the intellect called into existence, the intellect behaved as a person behaves when they reject genius. 'Then the demon of the age takes hold of him. The intellect had separated itself from the soul. The intellect became mechanical, soulless, and in this state it founded a philosophy. It had no love, could not love wisdom. Its philosophy could only become the intellectual image of earthly demonology, that demonology that conceives the ideal of a machine that is drilled into the center of the earth and blows the earth out into the universe.

That is what the demon of the age has told the intellect of the age. The demon of the age will often make itself heard if one does not want to recognize the soul. Then it will appear to this intellect as man would really experience it if, waking up, he were to submerge into his physical and etheric bodies and did not unite with them, but remained inwardly separate from them. For this intellect is alien to the human being; it emancipates itself from the human being. The intellect that is connected to the human being struggles out of earthly consciousness and up to other states of consciousness. For the intellect that only binds itself to the earth, but then separates itself, and therefore has only the reflection of the intellect, all other states of consciousness become the infinite sea of the unconscious. The human soul ceases to become aware of its heavenly origin, to become aware of its independence from earthly life.

But the soul-life of man consists in this, that man in his nature vibrates between the bodily and the spiritual. It is in this vibration between the bodily and the spiritual that the soul-life exists. If man honestly believes only in the body, and because he cannot leave the spirit alone, it only becomes unconscious, then the denial of the soul-life occurs.

While Hartmann conceived the destruction of the earth in such a demonic way, as only a person could conceive it who would sleep in the physical body, but then would become clairvoyant in the physical body - while Hartmann came to an intellectual formulation of earthly suffering, a person who was a friend of his who had exchanged many letters with him, writhing in real pain on his sickbed, in whom it had come about that many organs of his spiritual soul had not let him into the physical, who was experiencing earthly suffering, not inventing it, could only treat the soullessness of his age in a satirical way. That is Robert Hamerling, who wrote his “Homunculus” in the 1880s, when the perspective of the soullessness of the age dawned on him: the human being who only strives outwardly, who only ever accumulates more and more outwardly, and who finally becomes a billionaire – this terrible perspective of the soulless age was before Hamerling's soul's eye. And the soulless billionaire, the homunculus, who is born not through the agency of the soul but only in a mechanical way, through mechanical procreation, Hamerling has married to the soulless elemental spirit, to the mermaid, to the Lorelei.

Thus Robert Hamerling saw the prospect of the soulless age before the eye of the soul in the striving of man, who works purely materially, for spiritless intellectuality, which is certainly present in nature spirits, but which, in man, evokes all the forces of destruction, up to the demonic destructive urge to blow up the whole earth into space. Robert Hamerling could only treat this problem of the soulless age in a satirical way.

But soul must be given to the newer civilization and culture again. This soul can only be given when the earthly experiences of man are illuminated by the light of a knowledge of the spirit.

And so that which has been presented in a truly terrible, one might say chilling, way to the cleverest man of our age and which, writhing in pain, has satirically presented itself as a perspective by the one who felt the cleverness of the age most tragically, must be transformed for people through spiritual knowledge into the perspective of the soul, towards which we must strive as a second perspective.

Yesterday we spoke about the physical perspective. Today we want to speak about the perspective of the soul, and tomorrow we want to speak about the spiritual perspective.

You will have been able to realize from the lecture yesterday that a certain state of consciousness, which was an actual experience to men of earlier times, has to some extent been lost. I told you that the special sort of waking consciousness we have today, which consists predominantly in more or less abstract ideas or at the best in shadowy pictures, did not then exist in the same form, and that in its place there was a kind of waking-dreaming, or dreaming-waking. This was not experienced as we experience dreams but as a living picture which corresponded pretty well with spiritual reality. There was a condition of sleep which, though it was dreamless, left an after-effect of the kind described, and there was a third state of consciousness beyond this which was experienced as a resting in the surging Moon-forces, forces which, reaching under the Earth, lift man out of earthly gravity and allow him to experience his cosmic existence. The essential point about these older conditions of soul was that they allowed man to experience his cosmic existence. In our ordinary everyday consciousness there is only a shadowy image left of that older state of consciousness—a shadowy image that is noticed by very few and is mostly entirely unheeded.

I will try to describe this survival of a primeval state of consciousness. When we observe our dreams—chaotic as they are—we find that all sorts of experiences drawn from earthly existence flow into them. Things long forgotten crop up altered in many ways, even things which passed unnoticed at the time. The times, too, at which events took place may be thoroughly confused. But if you look more closely into the details of a dream, you will discover the remarkable fact that in essence practically everything which crops up in it is related to the happenings of the last three days. You may perhaps have a dream about something that happened to you twenty-five years before; you may dream of it in all its vividness, though somewhat altered in detail. But if you study it closely you will always discover something of the following sort: in this dream about an event of twenty-five years before, a character appears whom we will call Edward, and you will find that you have somewhere heard the name casually in passing, or your eye has caught it as you were reading. In the details of a dream, even the remotest, there is always some relation, however insignificant, to something which has happened during the last three days. The reason is that we bear within ourselves the events of the last two, three or four days—the period is of course approximate—in a quite different way from those which occurred earlier.

Our perceptions are, as you know, taken up into our astral organism and our ego-organism, and the events thus perceived do at first live in direct connection with our consciousness. What we have experienced in the course of three days—that is, when at least three days have passed—goes more intensively into our feelings. Ordinarily we do not notice these things, but they are realities all the same. The reason is that all we perceive or think, which is taken up into the astral organism and the ego-organism, has also to be somehow imprinted upon the etheric body, the body of formative forces, and at least to some extent even upon the physical body. This process takes two to four days, so that we have to sleep two or three times on anything we experience before it is imprinted on the etheric and physical bodies. Only then is it firmly fixed in the etheric body so that it may be a permanent memory. Thus in man there is a perpetual inner reciprocity, a sort of struggle, between the astral and etheric bodies, and the result is always that what we have experienced consciously is imprinted into the denser, more material elements of our being. After three or four days, what was at first only a transitory sense-experience is transferred into the body of formative forces and into the physical body.

But how little of what I have been describing actually comes into men's consciousness nowadays! Yet it is something which is perpetually taking place in the life of the human body and soul. Every experience of which we have been aware has to wait three or four days before it is fully our own. It fluctuates between the astral and etheric bodies, and cannot decide—one might say—whether it has really been impressed into the etheric and into the physical body.

This is something of extraordinary significance. Remember that basically our true being is only our ego and astral body. We cannot really claim that the etheric body is our own property. In this materialistic age people talk as though the etheric and physical bodies were their, whereas actually they belong to the whole Cosmos. And so when in the course of three or four days, what our ego and astral body have experienced is passed on to the etheric and physical bodies, it is then part, not only of ourselves but of the Cosmos. It is only for three days that we can claim any action of ours in the world as significant for ourselves alone. After that we have, as it were, imprinted it on the Universe, and it rests within the whole Universe and belongs not only to us but also to the gods.

In very early periods of human evolution, as a result of that state of consciousness which is now lost and which has deeper than sleep, men had a definite impression of this remarkable fact, and the Initiates were able to give information about what lay behind it. Particularly in the epoch of which I spoke yesterday, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, it was only a vague feeling that men had. But the priests were initiated into the real nature of the fact. Whereas nowadays Initiation must be a purely inner experience of soul and spirit, at the most with symbols and rites of a physical nature only, in those earlier days Initiation was an external process and the effects of that external process passed over into man's inner being. To take one example: when a man was to be initiated, for three or four days he was put by the Hierophant who was initiating him, into this state of consciousness which we have now lost. The purpose of this was to enable him to see for himself what happens during these three days in the world external to him, and how it finds entrance into the real being of man. The Initiate was enabled to see what happens to an idea, to an experience or a feeling, before it becomes a man's own property.

Our materialistic attitude to the world today affords us no conception at all of the extraordinary significance of the wisdom that lay within this condition that is so deeply concealed from us. I can perhaps best explain to you what was accomplished in the three days of this Initiation during that dim condition of consciousness if I remind you first of our ordinary dream-life with an attitude based purely on what we might call scientific method, there is still something extraordinarily profound involved.

How is this dream-life really revealed? There are of course many kinds of dreams, but let us keep for the moment to what consists largely in the recollection of past experiences. Pictures of these experiences arise in dreams. How do they arise? You are aware that they appear radically transformed. This transformation may go a very long way; for instance, we may take the case of a tailor who in his ordinary life has never had the occasion of making a Minister's state robes; he may have made a number of coats and been very proud of them, but for all that he has not the slightest chance of making such a robe as he now dreams he makes. In a dream like this there may be a number of different influences at work. For instance, the man may in a former life have been the attendant of a Roman magistrate and among his duties had to help him on with his toga. A dim feeling of all this survives and what a man experiences in this life may be colored by what streams over from a previous one.

This is just an example of how the content of dreams may be altered; the important fact is that they undergo the intense transformations we all know. One must really ask what is contained in these dreams, what is at work in them. It is external events which give the occasion for this type of dream, but the external events make their appearance in a wholly altered form.

The reason for this is quite beyond the conception of our ordinary scientific ideas. The sort of law which we should recognize as scientific, the laws we look for in the external world by our method of observation and experiment, cease to be valid as soon as we pass inside the skin of a human being. We should be very much mistaken were we to assume that the natural laws laid down in the laboratory were valid within the human being. Not only are the substances transformed within our organism when we consume them in the ordinary course of nourishment, but the laws of the substances are also changed, down to the smallest atoms. What appears in our dreams is not just the abstract reflection of some reality; in our dreams we see the weaving of the organic laws within which man has his being. Dreams are much closer to us than is our normal abstract thinking; they show the way in which external substances act within man. Our dreams are a protest against the part of reality that is shackled within the laws of Nature. From the time you go to sleep until the time you wake, you live in a world where according to the scientist everything is controlled by these laws. Actually the moment you enter, even to the slightest degree, into the spiritual world through your dreams, your dream-experience arises as a protest against the laws of Nature. Dreams cannot run their course in the way of external events, or they would be very much like actual waking life. Dreams which emerge from real sleep are in their make-up a protest against the laws of Nature, and they concern us much more intimately.

In this regard modern investigators of a materialistic turn of mind have made some interesting discoveries. Some of you will know a book by a man called Staudenmaier, entitled Experimental Magic, which appeared a good many years ago and is typical of the spiritual constitution of many modern scientific thinkers. Staudenmaier wanted to find out if there is any reality in the spiritual world. Of Anthroposophy he admitted that he knew only what its opponents had written. People don't like studying Anthroposophy; they find it difficult, particularly if they are typical scientific thinkers of today.

Staudenmaier attempted, by spiritualistic methods, to get into the spiritual world. He dulled his consciousness until he was in a sort of mediumistic state; then he began automatic writing and was surprised that he wrote a lot of nonsense which did not at all agree with what he knew about reality. In particular, the fact that spirits seemed to be speaking to him did not agree with it! He knew that was impossible and yet what he wrote assured him that spirits were speaking. He was appalled by the lies that these non-existent spirits told him. You should read in his book all the incredible lies which flowed into his writing. He became—to use no worse a word—a medium, and he did not know what to make of it all. A friend advised him to give the whole thing up and to lead a normal, sensible life and go out shooting. So he did, and he went out after magpies; but even there he found that whatever it was he had stirred up inside himself continued its activity, and he could not rid himself of it. If he looked up at a tree, he saw, not a magpie but a fearful dragon with terrible fangs, which looked at him with horrifying eyes. The same things happened everywhere, and he lived in an inner struggle to get himself back into a normal condition.

I mention all this because here we have experimental evidence that there is an immediate protest against the external order of Nature as soon as we are not merely dreaming while awake but are using this device to contact and arouse the inner being of man. Obviously we regard it all as lies. When we have thought of a man as a friend and as a decent fellow, and if after he has got into this mediumistic condition we see him putting out his tongue at us or making long noses, then inevitably we say that the spiritual world is lying and that this experience is simply that of a dream. Now there is something in this. Whenever man approaches the spiritual world inside himself, within which everything inside his skin is enclosed, there is an immediate protest from this sphere against the natural order. It is not surprising that when a man enters it with underdeveloped faculties of judgment, all kinds of elemental beings appear and create delusion. But there is always this protest against the natural order when we approach the spiritual; and ordinary dreams make this clear.

We ought to realize that we then enter a quite different order of being, and, even though it appears only in the fleeting form of the dream, it is all the same a protest against those admirable laws of Nature which we establish by laboratory experiments. This is the first step into the spiritual world where we immediately find the protest against natural laws, which are, as it were, robbed of their dignity as soon as we penetrate a little into man's inner being.

The old Initiates knew very well through their three days' Initiation that there is not only a natural order, but that within and behind that natural order there is a spiritual one. It is moreover still possible for anyone who has acquired some knowledge of Initiation to penetrate with modern methods into these things and to pass through the experiences a really fearful torment of the soul. When dreams begin to weave their forms we actually enter a world where the laws of Nature collapse, and just because the ordinary laws no longer hold good, their interrelations change, however many recollections of ordinary life may still be effective. If we have come to regard natural laws as the last word, we find ourselves face to face with nothingness. It is painful, almost tragic, for a modern man, as he passes through Initiation, to experience entry into a sphere of being where this protest against the laws of Nature is encountered; he feels that everything he had got from his intellect, and which was determined by the laws of Nature is swamped. His soul can no longer breathe because he has been too much accustomed to the natural order. He finally realizes that an altogether different world is pressing in from a quite different direction. This is no longer a natural but a spiritual order, which is throughout permeated with what in the depths of our present-day human conscience we experience as a moral world-order. He gradually learns that on the one hand there is the order of Nature perceived by the senses, for which the laws have been established by natural science; on the other hand, if he moves out of this natural order, he moves into a world that protests against the natural order. As he experiences this protest, a sort of luminous water of life pours round him and he can once again breathe—this is the moral order which ultimately expands into the spiritual.

The highest knowledge gained by the ancient Initiates was when they discovered the protest against the physical world-order and saw the true moral world-order extend into the physical. It is indeed experienced in a much weaker degree during the three days described: whatever we experience in the external world, whether actions or feelings, takes three or four days to be imprinted on our organism. But when the process is completed, the imprinted form is not like that which we experienced externally; it becomes an impulse demanding a moral expression very different from the natural order. If we could see how our experiences have changed in our inner being during those three of our days, we should see that what we experienced in its natural form during our earthly existence has been imprinted in our external being and is no less real than it was in the external world. But now it lives within us as the impulse of a moral world-order by means of which we may move further over the ocean of life. Thus we carry the results of what we have experienced naturally as the moral foundation for our later life.

In recent periods of human evolution, however, when men plunged into that “lower sleep,” if I may call it so, that Earth-embraced sphere, he plunged into the outer ether. There his experiences find their compensation. He is not merely set within the moral world-order as regards the direction of his inner life; in that lower sleep he is set within the moral order of the Cosmos. Since this deep sleep has been lost to our forms of consciousness and we now have only a very faint echo of it in the three-days' experience described, this contact with the Cosmos has been lost also. Indeed, we should have been gradually thrust out of the self-subsisting moral world-order if a particular event had not occurred in the course of Earth-evolution. The experience undergone by the older Initiates so as to be able to tell men what happens during those three days, was undergone as a unique world-event, as an event in world-history, by the Christ Being who descended from spiritual worlds into the body of Jesus of Nazareth and, though a God, lived a truly human life. That experience of the three days now became available for all mankind. What could previously be discovered in the sleep of deep consciousness, taking place in man not consciously but at least subconsciously, in a natural way, had to be gone through in order that man might find his connection with what was brought about for earthly humanity by Christ in the Mystery of Golgotha. This was the vicarious deed of a God. Man was to take a step upwards in his evolution and to experience in moral form through Christianity what had previously come to him naturally. The Mystery of Golgotha is therefore closely related to the whole meaning of earthly evolution, because of its relation to the evolution of man's consciousness. We can understand what was to be accomplished by the Mystery of Golgotha only if we can look back on what had once occurred naturally and was now to occur morally.

In this respect, however, our modern consciousness, which runs its course between waking, sleeping and dreaming, has not yet attained inner harmony. Since the fifteenth century, when this modern consciousness first received its imprint, it has looked on Nature one-sidedly and has claimed to understand the order of Nature, considering that what is found there constitutes reality. Beyond this reality men will not look; they will not press forward to that strengthened form of human knowledge to which the spiritual reveals itself just as the natural order does. Thus it has become customary to speak of the moral order as of unknown origin. To do this was not strictly honest, since the common view of Nature cannot admit any reality in the moral order. One could, even if a little dishonestly, get over this difficulty by saying that on the one side we have knowledge, on the other, faith; and that the moral order belongs to the realm of faith; that knowledge cannot become faith nor faith, knowledge; and that the moral order belongs to the realm of faith. Such is the convenient formula which has become customary. The distinction has even come to be regarded as something specifically Christian, though even five or six hundred years ago no genuine Christianity, and certainly not original Christianity, would have admitted the distinction. Even today it is not yet Catholic dogma, however much it may be Catholic custom, to distinguish in this way between faith and knowledge.

We cannot get a proper notion of the relation between the natural and the moral-spiritual order because we are not aware of the transition between them; because the dream is not understood which leads out of the natural order and protests against it, thus preparing the way. If we have gone through this preparatory stage, we can make contact with the moral order of the world.

Only an honest view of the past of mankind, and of something which modern man does not yet possess, can lead to a satisfying picture of all this. Failing that, even historical documents of ancient times remain just things which can be studied but convey no real meaning. Now we spoke this morning a good deal about the opponents of Anthroposophy. I could say much that would be for their good, though certainly not in their favor. The comments of our opponents ... I often have to recall an anecdote supposed to be based on truth which the famous Professor Kuno Fischer was fond of telling. He used to relate how he had had two schoolfellows—they may have been brothers—with an uncle who was a thorough simpleton. The boys got to the stage of learning logarithms and having to buy log tables. The uncle caught sight of these tables and when he saw the mass of figures he asked his nephews what they were. The boys were completely at a loss to explain, but at last the young rascals conceived the idea of telling him they were the house-numbers of all Europe. The uncle believed them and finally thought it an excellent idea to be able to know at a glance all the house-numbers of London, Paris, and so on. Now people who are unable to see with insight into the meaning of the ancient documents are like the old uncle with his log tables. Our modern historians who edit these ancient documents do not tell us much more about them than the uncle did about logarithms when he took them to be the house-numbers of Europe. We must make it clear to ourselves how far their interpretation, based on present-day abstract thought, is removed from the real spiritual facts. We must have the determination to do that, or we shall never be able to see how man has developed into the present out of a past when he was very different.

We are living at a time when all sorts of inner conflicts must arise from our present-day experience of sleeping, waking and dreaming, if we are in the least capable of real self-observation. Just as men lost the real knowledge of that deep sleep which was so significant for them that the Initiates had to explain its nature to them, so in modern times our ordinary sleep tends to crumble to pieces. I do not mean that in the future men will dream the whole night through, but rather that their dreams will be dulled. Just as man has passed since olden times from that “waking dreaming” to our modern abstract thinking, our present-day chaotic dreams will be dulled, and that duller kind of sleep will become normal. Dreams will no longer extend into our consciousness, which will be overlaid entirely by our present-day form of abstract logical thinking. But then a super-consciousness will emerge, already apparent to anyone who can understand these things. This super-consciousness is concerned with the human will and with the effects of the will when it acts on the nervous system. If with the help of Initiation-knowledge you observe the unrestrained way in which human will is developing, you will be able to see how various psychological manifestations, sometimes going as far as actual physical illness, are really the herald of a form of consciousness higher than our present waking consciousness.

But there is something beyond this which men will not yet be able to experience unless they can actually acquire spiritual science: a science, that is, which needs a quite different sort of thinking from the normal and is in reality far more practical than the theoretical attitude to life, which is in fact completely unpractical. This spiritual science adds an inner living power of thinking to ordinary abstract thinking. Yet this is not something we can arbitrarily add or neglect; it occurs because an organism is coming into being within man which did not exist in earlier times and of which only the first foundations have so far emerged. The way in which the blood circulates through man's limbs, his arms, legs, hands and feet, is continually changing. What we often call “nervousness” (a nervous state) nowadays is an expression of the fact that a higher condition is striving to make its way into man, but that he is unwilling to accept it because of its strangeness, and this produces a restlessness which will cease only when he makes the new consciousness his own.

Thus we can visualize three further states of consciousness towards which man is making his way: a dulled dream life, waking, and a heightened state of waking. All the turmoil and upheaval which show themselves even in external conditions today are due to the fact that men are trying, for the most part quite unconsciously, to fight against something that is approaching humanity from the spiritual worlds. It is struggling to make its way especially into the human will. We shall have to understand—as nowadays we do not—that as soon as the spiritual comes into action, we pass at once into a sphere where a protest is uttered against natural laws. We shall also not properly understand the Mystery of Golgotha unless we can rise to the realization that the full import of that Mystery cannot be attained by our ordinary knowledge. To grasp its full meaning we have to develop a new faculty; we have to pass with right understanding beyond mere dreaming, which indicates a natural process, and penetrate to an understanding of the other side of being. It is from the side of the spirit that we have to acquire the elements of understanding adequate for future comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. What we must do is to set our experience of the present in this way between the past and the future, and so feel ourselves as a sort of bridge between them. Thus we shall increasingly achieve the understanding required for the use of spiritual truths alongside the natural.

It is easy to understand our ordinary illusions, just because the things that are false are so uncommonly logical. We do not suspect that falsehood can be so logical. What could be more logical than to argue as follows: first observe how long it takes some particular geological stratum to reach a particular thickness, then, if we are dealing with another stratum, divide the smaller into the greater thickness and multiply it by the time taken by that stratum to form, and so reach the conclusion that some epoch, the Silurian or Devonian for instance, was twenty or 200 million years ago. The arithmetical calculation is quite correct and there is nothing to be said against it. It is only ordinary logic that is here deceiving us.

This sort of logic always reminds me of the logic one of the greatest mathematicians of all times applied to his own life. When he had already reached a considerable age he suddenly became ill with some kind of lung trouble; and seeing that he had had a good deal to do with doctors, he had the idea of calculating how many tiny abscesses would have to be got rid of in order to shake off the lung trouble. His calculations about the further development of the illness showed him that it would take fifteen years, and then he would be cured. But ... he died two years later. That was the reality; the other was only logic.

The same sort of thing applies to the relationship between reality in the Cosmos and our ordinary logic. Things are very easily proved by logic, and the logic is perfectly sound. It is just as sound as if we calculated as follows: Our heart goes through certain phases of development; in a definite period it will have reached a definite condition; then we calculate how long it would take to reach that condition and the answer is 300 years. Then we can calculate backwards 300 years and see what our heart looked like 300 years ago. Unfortunately we were not alive, at least as physical beings, 300 years ago, and we shall not be alive 300 years hence. Equally the Earth did not exist in those past ages that are worked out by the geologists. The destinies undergone by the Earth can be known only in spiritual terms. That is the distressing thing about modern science: it can prove so logically what is really an illusion, and its proofs tell us nothing about reality.

Human beings today, though people do not realize it consciously because they refuse to be aware of it, are living with the unconscious fear that they are on the way to losing touch with truth. We can see this fear manifesting itself in various forms. Fundamentally, the people who base their philosophy of life on materialism are very ill at ease. They are always harassed by anxiety about the limits they have set themselves, for their cherished limits create appalling obstacles to living a fully human life. People already feel intuitively that if they have nothing more than the natural order to rely on, they cannot draw life from it; above all, that the ideas derived from this natural order cannot lead them to any genuine artistic and religious experience or ideas.

We must always remember that our existing religious systems originated in the times when men were dependent on that deep sleep I have described for their understanding of the Cosmos. All our religious institutions derive from those times: the religious institutions, yes, but not the Mystery of Golgotha. That is independent of any religious view; it stands grasped by those conditions of consciousness that are still in course of preparation. For centuries now, even millennia, the religiously creative side of man has lain barren and the same is true of real artistic capacity. With rare exceptions we have to live on what we can get from various cultural revivals. We do not possess any original power of creation. But that is what is seeking to make its way into this age, and the general unrest typical of our civilization today is something like the birthpangs of a new age, a new age in the scientific and artistic spheres but also in the social, religious, and moral spheres. The future of mankind—that is what we must strive to take to heart. There has never been a time when humanity has been less disposed to listen to Initiation-knowledge and yet never a time when humanity has been in greater need of it.

That is why I wished particularly to speak to you about the past, present and future of humanity from the point of view of the evolution of consciousness. Of course, in three lectures I could do it only in outline, but you can work out within your own hearts what I have told you. Because our consciousness lies closest to our own being, it is there that men can become most easily fruitful and be stirred towards spiritual experience. In order that present-day man may develop into a man of the future, what we need is not any materialistic experience but spiritual experience. Ever since we have been victims of abstract thinking and ideas, our inner habit is really such that anyone participating in our present culture must have the same sort of impression from any talk of the spirit as the simple old uncle in the story about the log. tables, and will interpret all the powerful evidence for the entry of the spiritual as if it were like the house-numbers of Europe. The analogy is a little far-fetched but if you remember what I have told you, you will understand what it means. Our normal attitude to life, or rather our ordinary judgments about life, penetrate into all our scientific thinking and produce there a philistinism and banality raised to the nth degree, even a moral hypocrisy claiming scientific validity. If there is any, even the slightest, sign of the entry of the spiritual, it is assumed to be something which intelligent human reason, according to this materialistic view, can only call “mad.”

There is a good story, founded on fact, which also illustrates this attitude. At the beginning of the forties of the nineteenth century the old philosopher Schelling was called from Munich to Berlin. He had held his peace for several years, but a high reputation had preceded him. People looked forward to lectures on philosophy of a more positive kind, as opposed to those he himself called negative. Anyway, in these lectures at Berlin University he was to deal with the spiritual development of man, the essence of religion and the Mysteries, in a much deeper fashion than anyone had done hitherto.

When Schelling began his lectures, the front rows were occupied by the most brilliant intelligences, the professors of various subjects, the heads of the teaching departments and the most distinguished representatives of spiritual life—certainly not mere callow students, who had to sit at the back. They were all waiting—as far as they were able to wait—to see what Schelling's great reputation would accomplish. As the lecture proceeded, the faces of the audience grew longer and longer. Schelling did in fact speak in a remarkable way about the spirit; just at the moment when materialism was reaching its climax and coming to its fullest flower, he spoke of the spirit. As he spoke, the faces grew appreciably longer because the audience had no idea what he was after. Trendelenburg, well-known later on as a philosopher, who was sitting in one of the front rows, said he thought he had understood a little, though most of it was beyond him; but he was not even sure he had understood that little!

Then, some days later, two of the people who had been present at the lecture happened to meet. There had been a good deal of discussion among Schelling's hearers, and these two had taken part in it, wondering why on earth he had been called to Berlin, since not a word of what he had said was intelligible. But one of them now had the answer: Schelling's daughter had got engaged to the son of the Minister of Education! So everyone could understand why Schelling had been willing to come to Berlin. The whole thing was explained!

It may seem strange to tell you these things, but I am obliged to talk to you in this way. For the form of thinking characteristic of the present day is so far removed from the sort of thinking proper to Anthroposophy, which is moreover not just a whim of ours but an absolute necessity for man's future unless he is to fall into decadence. Only this new form of spirituality will be able to experience fully the three stages of consciousness which will emerge in the future: namely, a damped-down dream-sleep, ordinary waking, and a heightened consciousness. Otherwise man will never be able to experience his humanity properly in future lives on Earth. For the gods wish out of present threefold man to form the threefold man of the future, as they have formed the present threefold man, the dreaming, sleeping and waking man, out of the former threefold man who dreamt in pictures, slept, and on waking experienced the after-effects of his sleep, and also slept deeply. In this present age of freedom, as I have so often explained to anthroposophists, we must resolve by our own free knowledge to live towards the goal laid down for us by the divine Powers of the world. If we do that we shall not only think, we shall above all feel, in the right way about the past, present and future. Then we shall also have the right will with regard to this life on Earth, in accordance with the divine-spiritual ordering of the world—from the past, through the present, into the future.

This is what I wished to talk about, and with these words I will bring our studies to a close, not however without expressing a wish that tomorrow a discussion may begin here which will show that in the Anthroposophical Society some desire exists to promote a fully living consciousness in this Society of what man in his fullness is to be—the whole man who must be comprehended as including man of the past, man of the present, and man of the future. For these three are also one. What man has been in the past, what he is in the present, and what he is to be in the future, will embrace in face of the divine World-Order the whole being—anthropos. But in order to strive for this there must be an enthusiastic, heart-felt grasping of Anthroposophy to lead us to the true anthropos, the whole man, man in his fullness.

My dear friends! First, we will speak the verse that comes to us as an adjuration out of the world-all itself, summoning us to self-awareness.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

It is most certainly insight into oneself, my dear brothers and sisters, that can lead us in a spiritual sense to insight into the world. And it has often been said, how appreciation must be there for the streaming forth of a true spiritual knowledge out of the spiritual world itself, how a person must have an appreciation of this, that of those who can impart such knowledge of the spiritual world, that they will certainly have approached the Threshold, at the Threshold where the Guardian of the Threshold stands, the Guardian that there protects a person in ordinary consciousness from entering the spiritual world unprepared.

But as soon as one gets to know this Guardian, initially through a healthy human mental appreciation, and later by really getting to know, after one’s healthy human mental appreciation leads the way to an appreciation of the true constitution, the reality in being of the Guardian, then this Guardian places there what we confront as an admonition, when we first seek to enter the spiritual world in the proper manner, and then in the proper manner when we seek to remain within the experience of the spiritual world.

Now as it has also often been said, remaining in the spiritual world for the most part proceeds improperly, due to one’s wanting something else to take place instead of the reality of being in the spiritual world. Such a person wants it to be similar to the sensory world. But this is not being in the spiritual world. It is suddenly supersensory, and it cannot simply lead to the sort of gazing about that is like gazing about with the senses. This sort of imagination of supersensory gazing is only a picture. It must lead to real experiencing of the spiritual world. And quite a few of you have this experience of the spiritual world, my dear brothers and sisters, many more than you might think. They just don’t quite notice it, they pay it no attention, how it actually maintains dominion within their soul experiencing. It actually rules, and part of its action there is to bring into intimate presence of mind the true realization of this ruling actuality.

Toward this end knowledge should flow ever and again, immediately out of the spiritual world into these Class lessons knowledge should be flowing to you, my brothers and sisters, and it should become ever more and more your actual point of departure in making tangible your human soul in the spiritual world. And the following can be such a declamation of wisdom.

Take any one of the mantras, or any other meditative verse, and recite all that lies within such a mantra. It certainly does not come down to which one it is, but rather to one specific mantra, one specific mantra, however, that is quite well known by you. For your meditation take the mantra and say it to yourself in the most beautiful manner in which you can say it, bringing it forth for yourself, into your presence. Make it, say it to yourself, not right away in a loud tone, but rather in a soft peaceful tone, and so bring forth the specific mantra.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

And then, when you yourself have brought forth such a mantra, try to sense how it works in you, how it is. In this manner try to reach it, so that you sense the speech, you sense what sort of difference there is in your body between the condition of your being at peace, and the condition of your speaking. And so try to sense the speech in your organs, in its coursing. You ought to feel it in its forceful coursing and reverberating entrainment even in the organ of speech.

And when you have caught the aroma of its sense and feeling, then each of you must ask the following of yourself. “If I am thinking about something so as to bring my attention to bear on it, perhaps something someone said to me and I am thinking about, an otherwise external experience that has made an impression on me, in order to make it clear, when I think about something in this way, as it were, can I also sense its aroma, its feeling?

Well, when you have learned to sense speech, then it will be easy for you in addition to become able to sense thinking, made immediate when presented in this way. So in this way you can also sense thinking. It is lighter and quieter in sensing than is speech, but it may be sensed. By sensing speech, you can learn to sense the aroma of thinking, to perceive thinking.

It is good to undertake such an exercise, for such an exercise generally eases the way to intimate self-observation.

And then you proceed, my dear brothers and sisters, so that you now make a thought active in yourself, a memory-thought, perhaps something that you thought about a few days ago, or weeks, or months, some thought, however, that you can make really active within yourself. Then try to sense this memory-thought, try to perceive it, and you will have the feeling that in perceiving it you localize it underneath speech, you perceive it therefore below, below the localization of speech [yellow]. And you will say to yourself something like, “When I speak, I experience it in the region of my organ of speech, when I think, I experience it over this in my head, but when I remember, I experience it underneath the thinking.”

For this to be intimate experiential knowledge for you, if you really feel it to be so, then you will have already engaged in the spirit to some extent, which can generally be the beginning of a further progressive spiritual engagement. A great disconnectedness from the other experiences of the day is necessary, however, in order to sense it inwardly in this way. And it is not good to say to yourself, “Well of course, to attain such disconnectedness, I must take a couple of weeks off sometime to go where there are no other people, where nothing will disturb me, where I will have absolute peace and quiet, away all by myself, possibly to a cottage on Mont Blanc, in order to bring it about.” It is not good to think like this, for what is best is rather to remain in the middle of all the strife of life, to be exposed to all that life brings from morning until evening, and through all this, through one’s own power of soul, to find a certain time, be it ever so brief, to be totally outside the strife of the world, remaining within yet totally outside, purely through the power of one’s inner nature totally outside. That is best. In the solitude of going away by oneself, in order to find peace and quiet, that is certainly not the thing that is most effective, but rather through one’s own power to engender the solitude, that is the very thing that absolutely and certainly can lead to the goal. And in this manner a good foundation will be established, concerning specifically the ability to practice meditating, which most certainly is needed.

You have become acquainted with mantras, my dear brothers and sisters, to be effectively spoken out of stillness of soul. The first mantras in the Class lessons have certainly been of this sort. But we have forged ahead by means of such mantras, which in part ring forth from the soul, and which also in part must be envisioned as intonations coming to us from the breadth of the world, so that in meditating we not only speak them inwardly, but also in meditating we hear them inwardly, so that we shift our position in thinking, and so hear them coming to us, being spoken to us, out of the depths of space, out of spirit-being. And directly out of this reorientation of ourselves into other entities speaking to us, directly out of this reorientation of ourselves in such a way, we may become able to really consummate this soul-reorientation inwardly, thereby feeling ourselves within the spiritual world.

Please note that today’s mantra ought to be given over to this goal. The human soul must now imagine itself to be entirely silent, utterly silent. But it should imagine that it is already on the other side of the Threshold, already in the spiritual world before which the Guardian stands, and there the soul hears three different intonations. While it remains entirely silent itself, it hears three different intonations. The first intonation resounds out of the breadth of the world-all. The second comes from the Guardian. And the third comes from the various beings that become identified by the mantra. So should it be thought, that which comes forth to your souls today as the mantra. So, out of the breadth of the world sounding forth and arriving from all sides,

Examine¹ the field of thinking.

Just so we take up, we focus our attention on becoming clear about the true nature of thinking by means of a spiritual, soulful experience of the world.

Then the Guardian speaks. And as the sounding forth unto us out of the breadth of the world fades away, the spirit of which we must dwell within, then the Guardian speaks.

He speaks, who you the ways
From earthly life to earthly life
Will show in spirit light:

That is the Guardian’s speech.

Then the Angelic being speaks, who accompanies us from earth-existence to earth-existence.

Look to your senses’ radiant nature.

That is also the being, that as an Angelic being, as an Angel, conducts us from incarnation to incarnation. So is this line spoken. We hear it living, inwardly in contemplation.

The Guardian speaks again.

He speaks, who on to souls
In realms of being material free,
Will carry you on wings of soul.

Then the next line sounds, spoken by a caring being watching over us from the hierarchy of the Archangels.

Look to your thinking’s forceful impact.²

That comes down from where the Archangels are.

First it was “Look to your senses’ radiant nature.” In reality, it really is this way, similar to the sun’s glowing in sensory life. In sensory life, our senses do not seem to glow, but in actuality, they also really glow. Nevertheless, even though our senses are actually glowing, we do not take note of it. So the being admonishes us, the being belonging to us from the ranks of the Angels, “Look to your senses’ radiant nature.”

As we go about thinking in customary awareness, we generally don’t really examine the thinking, we don’t really sense it as such. We don’t actually perceive it. The being that belongs to us from the realm of the Archangels admonishes, “Look to your thinking’s forceful impact.”

Now it progresses to where the Archai are. The Guardian admonishes in three lines, and we ought to hear this being’s admonition as coming from the ranks of the Archai. The next three lines are the lines of the Guardian.

He speaks, who among spirits
In creator fields far from earth
Will give you the grounds of existence-awareness.³

I could also say “the throne of existence-awareness,” but “the grounds of existence-awareness” is better, for it will give you a sort of spiritual floor, much as here in the sensory world you have a physical floor.

After the Guardian of the Threshold has spoken this, then the being from the ranks of the Archai speaks.

Look to memory’s picture-forming.

That is the third. First, we are to look to the radiant nature of our senses, then to thinking’s forceful affect working in us, then to that which lies deep underneath, to what lies underneath speech, to what lies in the constituting of memory, “Look to memory’s picture-forming.”

And so we ourselves have managed in this disparate fashion to bring the three-part speech to our ears, first the speech from the cosmos in the very first line, “Examine the field of thinking,” then the Guardian’s respective three lines lying between directives from the cosmos and the specific hierarchies, and finally the lines of the being belonging to us out of the actual realms of the hierarchies, always speaking the specific paradigm-line, in certainty to the most profound part of our being. It is all brought together in the following manner, which I will then write down.

Examine the field of thinking:

He speaks, who you the ways

From earthly life to earthly life

Will show in spirit light:

Look to your senses’ radiant nature.

He speaks, who on to souls

In realms of being material free,

Will carry you on wings of soul:

Look to your thinking’s forceful impact.

He speaks, who among spirits

In creator fields far from earth

Will give you the grounds of existence-awareness.

Look to memory’s picture-forming.

[The mantra was now written on the board and at the same time in the first line “thinking was underlined, and in each case the last lines of parts 1,2, and 3 were underlined.]

1. Examine the field of thinking

1. He speaks, who you the ways

   From earthly life to earthly life

   Will show in spirit light:

   Look to your senses’ radiant nature.

2. He speaks, who on to souls

   In realms of being material free,

   Will carry you on wings of soul:

   Look to your thinking’s forceful impact.

3. He speaks, who among spirits

   In creator fields far from earth

   Will give you the grounds of existence-awareness.

   Look to memory’s picture-forming.

With this we have it, which as an admonition for our self-awareness sounds forth out of the three lower hierarchies, experienced inwardly in soul: the first from the hierarchy of the angels, the second from the hierarchy of the archangels, the third from the hierarchy of the Archai. [“Angels” was written next to the first part, “Archangels” next to the second part, and “Archai” next to the third part.]

Before the exercise is utilized, soul-concentration can be engendered by means of a person’s bringing up before the soul a certain well-defined picture: picture an eye gazing overhead [an eye was drawn] beholding the sphere of the higher hierarchies [a curving arc] which the forces of the world allow to stream down upon the eye [upper rays], and that then beholds the sphere of the lower hierarchies [a wavy line] that intertwines itself with the higher hierarchies and sends the rays further on to human beings [lower rays].

This picture may be called up before the soul and held there in mind, the outward-looking eye, the two lines, one curved and one wavy, and the rays that come down. And you imagine yourself actually there while practicing the exercise, but without thinking further about the picture, so that while practicing the exercise, the picture remains before the soul, the picture of this outward-looking eye.

Then a person again takes up, attends to, hearkens to the sounding forth from all sides of the cosmos:

Examine the field of feeling.

Spoken then by the Guardian, the next three lines are:

He speaks, who as thought
Out of spirit sun-rays
Calls you to world existence-awareness:

It is already a higher speech, a speech that rings forth from higher hierarchies. Here [in the first mantra], we are always merely made to take note of what is already in us, whereas we are spoken to here in this mantra, by the Guardian, so that we are not merely called to observe our senses, our thinking, and our remembering, but rather so that we are called to taking note of how we ourselves are called out into the world, into world existence-awareness. That sounds forth from the hierarchy of the Exusiai.⁴

Spoken forth then by the being who belongs to us from the hierarchy of the Exusiai:

Feel in your breath life stirring.

Spoken again by the Guardian, the next three lines are:

He speaks, who world existence-awareness
Out of star-life-forces
Would bestow on you in spirit realms.

Then the being speaks from the hierarchy of the Dynamis:⁵

Feel in your blood’s welling-weaving.

Here we must think steadfastly on the interwoven fabric of the world, feeling it actually, within the vibrant activity of our blood.

And the Guardian speaks again, now admonishing us, that we should hearken unto what is spoken by the being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes:⁶

He speaks, who spirit-sense
In light-filled gods-high-realms
Will fashion for you out of will of earth.

Then the being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes speaks:

Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.

Only when a person feels this mighty counter striving of earth-forces can a person properly remain within the purely spiritual world.

So now experience this mantra sounding as a unity:

Examine the field of feeling:

He speaks, who as thought

Out of spirit sun-rays

Calls you to world existence-awareness.

Feel in your breath life stirring.

He speaks, who world existence-awareness

Out of star-life-forces

Would bestow on you in spirit realms.

Feel in your blood’s welling-weaving.

He speaks, who spirit-sense

In light-filled gods-high-realms

Will fashion for you out of will of earth.

Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.

In ascending into the ranks of the second hierarchy, self-awareness will be quickened in us, as an entity belonging to us from the ranks of the Exusiai admonishes us. At first the Guardian will direct us, then such a being will speak to us.

Now, my dear brothers and sisters, we think in life on earth, but our thoughts are quite in vain. When, however, a being from the ranks of the Exusiai thinks, it thinks us as such. Our ego is being thought. And it is brought into being as the thought of a being from the ranks of the Exusiai. If on the earth we say “I” to ourselves, just what are we gazing upon? Yes, this ego, when we say “I” [it was drawn, a circle with the word “I” in gold], we look back on this ego [red arrows], in articulating the word “I”. But for a being from the ranks of the Exusiai [green line], for such a being this ego is a thought, but a thought with more reality, with more actuality. We exist in that we are thought by a being from the ranks of the Exusiai. And when we say “I” to ourselves, we are certainly stating in this way, that we have been thought into being by a heavenly being. And in this thought-becoming by a heavenly entity is contained our higher being.

Then, an entity from the ranks of the Dynamis admonishes us, that we are endowed by him with spirit-presence-in-being, which he abstracts out of life-forces from the stars and bestows on us.

And a being out of the ranks of the Kyriotetes admonishes us, that what lives in us specifically as will upon the earth, will be drawn out into the heights of heaven, and in the transmutation that takes place there, our will of earth again will be given to us, so that we can then utilize it in spirit-willing. Earth-willing is merely a transmutation of spirit-willing. Earth-willing of course will be trundled out down below and also above. On high it is heavenly-willing; below it is earth-willing. Of this we are admonished in closing, first by the Guardian, then by the being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes, who says, “Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.” [Mantra II was now written on the board and at the same time in the first line “feeling” and correspondingly the last lines of parts 1,2, and 3 were underlined.]

2. Examine the field of feeling

1. He speaks, who as thought

   Out of spirit sun-rays

   Calls you to world existence-awareness.

   Feel in your breath life stirring.

2. He speaks, who world existence-awareness

   Out of star-life-forces

   Would bestow on you in spirit realms.

   Feel in your blood’s welling-weaving.

3. He speaks, who spirit-sense

   In light-filled gods-high-realms

   Will fashion for you out of will of earth.

   Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.

And so therefore the second mantra runs as follows:

Examine the field of feeling:

He speaks, who as thought

Out of spirit sun-rays

Calls you to world existence-awareness.

Feel in your breath life stirring.

He speaks, who world existence-awareness

Out of star-life-forces

Would bestow on you in spirit realms.

Feel in your blood’s welling-weaving.

He speaks, who spirit-sense

In light-filled gods-high-realms

Will fashion for you out of will of earth.

Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.

The first is intoned from the ranks of the Exusiai,
the second from the ranks of the Dynamis,
the third from the ranks of the Kyriotetes.

[Exusiai was written next to part 1, and correspondingly Dynamis and Kyriotetes next to parts 2 and 3.]

Once again in ending, so that we may remember what we have fashioned before ourselves as a picture, after all of it has run through us, so that we may have a clear experience of it all, let us place before ourselves once again the picture, which we were to have envisioned as ever standing before our souls during the entire exercise, let us pointedly place it once again before our souls. [This picture, already drawn on the board before the writing of the mantra “Examine the field of thinking”, was now again drawn on the board, the eye, the curving arc, the upper rays, the curvy line, and the lower rays.]

The further ascent into the ranks of the Seraphim, the Cherubim, and the Thrones will properly become appended to all this in the next Class lesson. However just now it may be possible to make somewhat more comprehensible and intelligible what the sense of the whole is.

My dear brothers and sisters, coming to us at the beginning of today’s Class lesson was the formulation, coming out of universal existence-awareness, coming forth out of the essential true nature of the world, admonishing us to self-awareness. Self-experience, it was alleged, leads to true knowledge of the world, although only if and when we can place the self in unity with the world.

But the self does not stand in fanciful relationship to any external entity or process of nature, but rather solely to what is in the spiritual world. That is where the beings of the hierarchies are. If we really wish to penetrate into our self, into the part of our being from which we can say “I”, then we must not coexist with external nature, but rather we must coexist with the beings of the hierarchies. For whatever emerges from external nature that can be spoken of as our inner nature, all that is certainly merely the empty external reflection of our true inner nature. What we truly refer to when we say “I” stands in the same realm within which also stand the higher hierarchies. As soon as a person enters into true self-awareness, he must enter into the ranks of the higher hierarchies. He must then take into account the language of the higher hierarchies.

So that one might do this with full force, not merely making it into a theory drained of blood, but rather doing it with full force, for this reason the admonitions of the Guardian of the Threshold are forever emplaced right there. So that the whole meditation approaches us with due greatness and majesty, for this reason placed there are the two powerful admonitions from the cosmos, “Examine the field of thinking,” and “Examine the field of feeling,” and subsequently the third, which we will hear next time.

If and only if we hold this three-part declamation within our hearts and minds full of life and force, if and when we experience ourselves in this mantric manner in the spiritual world, then we can really bring things forward. For only then have we grasped things in the appropriately correct spirited mood. We must seek this spirited mood in all things. For the actual inner sanctity which must be present, and meditation ought to be conducive, ought to lead to sanctity, this actual inner sanctity comes to one most certainly only through a spirited demeanor, through a specific spirited mood, one in which we are enraptured by the external world for a while, but one in which alone and solely within oneself the content and matter of the meditation is lived. When we entirely full of life attune our inner demeanor in this manner, then self-awareness is not just a sort of brooding within our inner nature, but it is rather a seed-awakening conversation with the world in the widest sense, with the Guardian, and with the Hierarchies. And then we find ourselves in the depths of true self-awareness.

This ought to be taken up by us quite broadly, so that we take it as a ground-rule, to avoid thinking on such things, unless at the same time we can bring this spirited mood to bear on it. And so we should henceforth only think about such things, such as were brought forward today, if and when we can really bring forth within the soul this demeanor, this fundamental accompaniment to our perception, as the majesty of world-wide cosmic distances presses in upon us with a universal thunderclap, as within this in a soft, admonishing voice is intoned all that comes from the Guardian of the Threshold, and as then in compelling fashion a certain being of the Hierarchies itself speaks to our souls.

And only then, when we keep this in memory, and when we bring up the feeling accompanying this memory, specifically only then should we think on this mantra, only then setting ourselves inwardly in relationship with this mantra, so that in this way we should not inwardly desecrate it, thereby desecrating its power, that we may well do by thinking about it with the type of customary, dry, philistine thinking with which we usually think, rather than placing ourselves first in the appropriate mood and demeanor of soul.

And in this regard, we should also make sure that we obtain this mood of soul in order to feel that human self-awareness is something special, serious, and holy, and that in fact, these things should only be spoken inwardly by the soul, silently then externally, so that they come into perception as serious, special, and sacred.

A great hindrance in progressing along an esoteric path is just this, that these things are spoken about so frequently in cliques, in which this serious, special, sacred, spirited nature is not developed at the same time, but rather, even in flights of fancy, these things are gossiped about. In doing this one forgets that in esoteric life all depends on the dominion of truth, proper full truth. Progress cannot be made in esoteric life by one who does not have this knowledge, that in esoteric life truth, full truth, must have dominion, that a person therefore cannot simply speak about the truth and then nevertheless approach such things merely in the way external profane things are approached, in the manner of making these things the subject matter of customary chitter-chatter.

And this, which happens so frequently, this customary chitter-chatter, this is what so very often places hindrances and constraints along the esoteric path. And so we must absolutely bring a serious, special, sacred, spirited tenor of soul along in focusing on all that belongs to self-awareness. Then we will also be able to allow the word to work on our soul in the proper manner, the word which in conclusion shall now be spoken again, just as it was spoken at the beginning of today’s Class lesson:

O Man, know yourself!

Yes indeed, that is a directive to self-awareness.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

Fundamentally, it is a question. The answer is given in such as this. [The mantras on the board were indicated.]

• 1. Vernimm is the modified second person singular command form of nehmen, and means “to take up and use.” In English it is much the same as an instructor saying, “Let us take up and examine …” Perceive, which means to understand, is not quite the correct translation, but is close. Examine is also a good translation in that it has a syntactical prefix modifying the base word appropriately. The base word is Amen, a very ancient word in semitic languages as well as in Greek, Latin, and in English meaning take this in, have faith in it, for it is the truth. The prefix ex- modifies it with the understanding that it is external to us, and we must use our powers of thinking, of feeling, and of willing in order to take it into us, to partake of it.
• 2. Kräftewirken: Wirken is something that really works, that has a real effect, a real impact. Kräftewirken then is forceful impact.
• 3. Daseinsgrund: It is not just Sein, which is existence, but Dasein, an existence which is conscious of itself.
• 4. Exusiai means to enthuse a thought with reality, to be the author of something that comes into being, and so the very name should fill us with enthusiasm and these beings are called authors, or authorities in English.
• 5. Dynamis means dynamic magical power, so these beings are called powers.
• 6. Kyrie, Eleison: Repetitive chanting of supplications did not last in the Roman rite, but the response Domine, miserere nobis (Lord, have mercy) persisted. After becoming Pope in 590 AD Gregory the Great changed it to the Greek Kyrie, eleison. It means Lord (in his aspect from the ranks of the Kyriotetes), grace us (undeservedly) with your glory and presence, but have mercy, do it gently, withhold your full glory and presence, as it would destroy us.

Today I would like to report to you on the second lecture I gave in Stuttgart. It will not be so much a verbatim account of what was said there as a fresh discussion of the matters dealt with in that lecture, and I shall also want to include some comment on the Stuttgart conference itself.

The purpose of the second lecture was to show the reasons why certain things that ought never to happen, particularly in a Society like ours, do nevertheless so easily occur and are such a familiar phenomenon to those acquainted with the history of societies based on a spiritual view of life. As you know, there have always been societies of this kind, and they were always adapted to their period. In earlier ages, the kind of consciousness required for entrance into the spiritual world was different from the kind we need today. As a rule people who joined forces to establish some form of cognition based on higher, super-sensible insight included among their goals the cultivation of a brotherly spirit in the membership. But you know, too, as do all those familiar with the history of these societies, that brotherliness all too easily came to grief, that it has been especially in societies built on spiritual foundations that the greatest disharmony and the worst offenses against brotherliness burgeoned.

Now if anthroposophy is properly conceived, the Anthroposophical Society is thoroughly insured against such unbrotherly developments. But it is by no means always properly conceived. Perhaps it will help toward its fuller comprehension if light is thrown on the reasons for the breakdown of brotherly behavior.

Let us, to start with, review the matters brought up yesterday. I pointed out that we distinguish between three levels of consciousness: that of ordinary waking life, that of dreams, and finally that of dreamless sleep. Man's dream pictures are experienced as a world he inhabits. While he is dreaming, it is perfectly possible for him to mistake his dreams for reality, for events just as real as those that take place in the physical world where he finds himself during his waking life.

But as I said yesterday, there is a tremendous difference between dream experiences and those of waking. A dreamer is isolated in his dream experiences. And I pointed out that someone else can be asleep beside him and have quite different dreams, hence be living in a different world. Neither can communicate anything about his world of dreams to his fellow dreamer. Even if ten people are sleeping in a single room, each has only his own world before him. This does not seem at all surprising to one who is able to enter the often marvelous dream world as a spiritual scientist, for the world in which a dreamer lives is also real. But the pictures it presents derive in every case from factors of purely individual concern. To be sure, dreams do clothe the experiences they convey in pictures borrowed from the physical plane. But as I have often pointed out, these pictures are merely outer coverings. The reality—and there is indeed reality in dreams—hides behind the pictures, which express it only superficially.

A person who explores dreams in a spiritual-scientific sense with the purpose of discovering their meaning studies not the pictures but the dramatic element running through them. One person may be seeing one dream scene, another an entirely different one. But for both there may be an experience of climbing or of standing on the edge of an abyss or of confronting some danger, and finally a release of tension. The essential thing is the dream's dramatic course, which it merely clothes in pictorial elements. This unfolding drama often has its source in past earth lives, or it may point to future incarnations. It is the unwinding thread of destiny in human life—running, perhaps, through many incarnations—that plays into dreams. Man's individual core is what is involved here. He is outside his body with his ego and astrality. That is to say, he is outside his body with the ego that he takes from one incarnation to another, and he is in his astral body, which means that he is living in the world that embraces experience of all the surrounding processes and beings in the midst of which we live before we descend to earth and find again when we return to live in a world beyond the senses after death.

But in sleep we are also isolated from our physical and etheric bodies. Dreams clothe themselves in pictures when the astral body is either just coming back into contact with the ether body or just separating from it, that is, on awakening and on falling asleep. But the dreams are there, even though one has no inkling of their presence when in an ordinary state of consciousness. Man dreams straight through the time he is sleeping. This means that he is occupied solely with his own concerns during that period. But when he wakes, he returns to a world that he shares in common with the people about him. It is then no longer possible for ten individuals to be in one room with each living in a world apart; the room's interior becomes the common world of all. When people are together on the physical plane, they experience a world in common.

I called attention yesterday to the fact that a shift in consciousness, a further awakening is necessary to enter those worlds from which we draw genuine knowledge of the super-sensible, knowledge of man's true being, such as anthroposophy is there to make available.

These, then, are the three stages of consciousness.

But now let us suppose that the kind of picture consciousness that is normally developed by a sleeping person is carried over into the ordinary day-waking state, into situations on the physical plane. There are such cases. Due to disturbances in the human organism, a person may conceive the physical world as it is normally conceived in dream life only. In other words, he lives in pictures that have significance for him alone. This is the case in what is called an abnormal mental state, and it is due to some illness in the physical or etheric organism. A person suffering from it can shut himself off from experiencing the outer world, as he does in sleep. His sick organism then causes pictures to rise up in him such as ordinarily present themselves only in dreams. Of course, there are many degrees of this affliction, ranging all the way from trifling disturbances of normal soul life to conditions of real mental illness.

Now what happens when a person carries over a dream conditioned state of mind into ordinary physical earth life? In that case, his relationship to his fellowman is just what it would be if he were sleeping next to him. He is isolated from him, his consciousness absorbed by something that he cannot share. This gives rise to a special egotism for which he cannot be held wholly responsible. He is aware only of what is going on in his own soul, knowing nothing of what goes on in any other's. We human beings are drawn into a common life by having common sense impressions about which we then form common thoughts. But when someone projects a dreaming state of mind into ordinary earth life, he isolates himself, becomes an egotist, and lives alongside his fellowman making assertions about things to which the other can have no access in his experience. You must all have had personal experience of the degree of egotism to which this carrying over of dream life into everyday life can mislead human beings.

There can be a similar straying from a wholesome path, however, in cases where people join others in, say, a group where anthroposophical truths are being studied, but where the situation I was characterizing yesterday fails to develop, namely, that one soul wakes up in the encounter with the other to a certain higher state, not of consciousness, perhaps, but of feeling awakened to a higher, more intense experiencing. Then the degree of self-seeking that it is right to have in the physical world is projected into one's conceiving of the spiritual world. Just as someone becomes an egotist when he projects his dream consciousness into the physical world, so does a person who introduces into his approach to higher realms a soul-mood or state of mind appropriate to the physical world become to some degree an egotist in his relationship to the spiritual world.

But this is true of many people. A desire for sensation gives them an interest in the fact that man has a physical, an etheric and an astral body, lives repeated earth lives, has a karma, etc. They inform themselves about such things in the same way they would in the case of any other fact or truth of physical reality. Indeed, we see this evidenced every day in the way anthroposophy is presently combatted. Scientists of the ordinary kind, for example, turn up insisting that anthroposophy prove itself by ordinary means. This is exactly as though one were to seek proof from dream pictures about things going on in the physical world. How ridiculous it would be for someone to say, “I will only believe that so and so many people are gathered in this room and than an anthroposophical lecture is being given here if I dream about it afterwards.” Just think how absurd that would be! But it is just as absurd for someone who hears anthroposophical truths to say that he will only believe them if ordinary science, which has application only on the physical plane, proves them. One need only enter into things seriously and objectively for them to become perfectly transparent.

Just as one becomes an egotist when one projects dream conceptions into physical situations, so does a person who projects into the conceptions he needs to have of higher realms views such as apply only to things of ordinary life, becomes the more isolated, withdrawn, insistent that he alone is right. But that is what people actually do. Indeed, most individuals are looking for some special aspect of anthroposophy. Something in their view of life draws them in sympathetic feeling to this or that element found in it, and they would be happy to have it true. So they accept it, and since it cannot be proved on the physical plane they look to anthroposophy to prove it.

Thus a state of consciousness applicable to the ordinary physical world is carried over into an approach to higher realms. So, despite all one's brotherly precepts, an unbrotherly element is brought into the picture, just as a person dreaming on the physical plane can behave in a most unbrotherly fashion toward his neighbor. Even though that neighbor may be acting sensibly, it is possible for a dreamer under the influence of his dream pictures to say to him, “You are a stupid fellow. I know better than you do.” Similarly, someone who forms his conceptions of the higher world with pretensions carried over from life on the physical plane can say to an associate who has a different view of things, “You are a stupid fellow,” or a bad man, or the like. The point is that one has to develop an entirely different attitude, an entirely different way of feeling in relation to the spiritual world, which eradicates an unbrotherly spirit and gives brotherliness a chance to develop. The nature of anthroposophy is such as to bring this about in fullest measure, but it needs to be conceived with avoidance of sectarianism and other similar elements, which really derive from the physical world.

If one knows the reasons why an unbrotherly spirit can so easily crop up in just those societies built on a spiritual foundation, one also knows how such a danger can be avoided by undertaking to transform one's soul orientation when one joins with others in cultivating knowledge of the higher worlds.

This is also the reason why those who say, “I'll believe what I've seen there after I've dreamed it,” and behave accordingly toward anthroposophy, are so alienated by the language in which anthrosophy is presented. How many people say that they cannot bear the language used in presenting anthroposophy, as for example in my books! The point is that where it is a case of presenting knowledge of the super-sensible, not only are the matters under discussion different; they have to be spoken of in a different way. This must be taken into account. If one is really deeply convinced that understanding anthroposophy involves a shift from one level of consciousness to another, anthroposophy will become as fruitful in life as it ought to be. For even though it has to be experienced in a soul condition different from the ordinary, nevertheless what one gains from it for one's whole soul development and character will in turn have a moral, religious, artistic and cognitive effect on the physical world in the same sense that the physical world affects the dream world. We need only be clear as to what level of reality we are dealing with.

When we are dreaming, we do not need to be communicating with or standing in any particular relationship to other human beings, for as dreamers we are really working on our ongoing egos. What we are doing behind the façade of our dream pictures concerns only ourselves. We are working on our karma there. No matter what scene a dream may be picturing, one's soul, one's ego are working behind it on one's karma.

Here on the physical plane we work at matters of concern to a physically embodied human race. We have to work with other people to make our contributions to mankind's overall development. In the spiritual world we work with intelligences that are beings like ourselves, except that instead of living in physical bodies they live in a spiritual element, in spiritual substance. It is a different world, that world from which super-sensible truth is gleaned, and each of us has to adapt himself to it.

That is the key point I have stressed in so many lectures given here: Anthroposophical cognition cannot be absorbed in the way we take in other learning. It must above all be approached with a different feeling—the feeling that it gives one a sudden jolt of awakening such as one experiences at hand of colors pouring into one's eyes, of tones pouring into one's ears, waking one out of the self-begotten pictures of the dream world.

Just as knowing where there is a weak place in an icy surface enables a person to avoid breaking through it, so can someone who knows the danger of developing egotism through a wrong approach to spiritual truth avoid creating unbrotherly conditions. In relating to spiritual truth, one has constantly to develop to the maximum a quality that may be called tolerance in the best sense of the word. Tolerance must characterize the relationships of human beings pursuing anthroposophical spiritual science together. Looking from this angle at the beauty of human tolerance, one is immediately aware how essential it is to educate oneself to it in this particular period. It is the most extraordinary thing that nobody nowadays really ever listens to anybody else. Is it ever possible to start a sentence without someone interrupting to state his own view of the matter, with a resultant clash of opinion? It is a fundamental characteristic of modern civilization that nobody listens, that nobody respects anyone's opinion but his own, and that those who do not share his opinions are looked upon as dunces.

But when a person expresses an opinion, my dear friends, it is a human being's opinion, no matter how foolish we may think it, and we must be able to accept it, to listen to it.

I am going to make a highly paradoxical statement. A person whose soul is attuned to the intellectual outlook of the day has no difficulty being clever. Every single person knows the clever thing, and I am not saying that it isn't clever; it usually is, in fact. But that works only up to a certain point, and up to that point a smart person considers everyone who isn't yet of his opinion stupid. We encounter this attitude all the time, and in ordinary life situations it can be justified. A person who has developed a sound judgment about various matters really finds it a dreadful trial to have to listen to someone else's foolish views about them, and he can hardly be blamed for feeling that way.

But that is true only up to a point. One can become cleverer than clever by developing something further. Supersensible insight can endow cleverness with a different quality. Then the strange thing is that one's interest in foolishness increases rather than decreases. If one has acquired a little wisdom, one even takes pleasure in hearing people say something foolish, if you will forgive my putting it so bluntly. One sometimes finds such stupidities cleverer than the things people of an average degree of cleverness say, because they often issue from a far greater humanness than underlies the average cleverness of the average of clever people. An ever deepening insight into the world increases one's interest in human foolishness, for these things look different at differing world levels. The stupidities of a person who may seem a fool to clever people in the ordinary physical world can, under certain circumstances, reveal things that are wisdom in a different world, even though the form they take may be twisted and caricatured. To borrow one of Nietzsche's sayings, the world is really “deeper than the day would credit.”

Our world of feeling must be founded on such recognitions if the Anthroposophical Society—or, in other words, the union of those who pursue anthroposophy—is to be put on a healthy basis. Then a person who knows that one has to relate differently to the spiritual world than one does to the physical will bring things of the spiritual world into the physical in the proper way. Such a person becomes a practical man in the physical world rather than a dreamer, and that is what is so vitally necessary. It is really essential that one not be rendered useless for the physical world by becoming an anthroposophist. This must be stressed over and over again.

That is what I wanted to set forth in my second Stuttgart lecture in order to throw light on the way individual members of the Society need to conceive the proper fostering of its life. For that life is not a matter of cognition, but of the heart, and this fact must be recognized.

Of course, the circumstances of a person's life may necessitate his traveling a lonely path apart. That can be done too. But our concern in Stuttgart was with the life-requirements of the Anthroposophical Society; these had to be brought up for discussion there. If the Society is to continue, those who want to be part of it will have to take an interest in what its life-requirements are.

But that will have to include taking an interest in problems occasioned by a constantly increasing enmity toward the Society. I had to go into this too in Stuttgart. I said that many enterprises have been launched in the Society since 1919, and that though this was good in itself, the right way of incorporating them into the Anthroposophical Movement—in other words, of making them the common concern of the membership—had not been found. New members should not be reproached for taking no interest in something launched before their time and simply seeking anthroposophy in a narrower sense, as the young people do. But it is these new enterprises that have really been responsible for the growing enmity toward our Movement. There was hostility before, to be sure, but we did not have to pay any attention to it.

Now in this context I had to say something on the subject of our opponents that needs to be known in the Anthroposophical Society. I have talked to you, my dear friends, about the three phases of the Society's development and called attention to the fact that in the last or third phase, from 1916 or 1917 to the present, the fruits of a great deal of anthroposophical research into the super-sensible world have been conveyed to you in lectures. That required a lot of work in the form of genuine spiritual research. Anyone who looks dispassionately at the facts can discern the great increase in the amount of material gleaned from the spiritual world in recent years and put before you in lectures.

Now we certainly have any number of opponents who simply do not know why they adopt a hostile stand; they just go along with others, finding it comfortable to be vague about their reasons. But there are a few leading figures among them who know full well what they are up to and who are interested in suppressing and stamping out truths about the spiritual world such as can alone raise the level of human dignity and restore peace on earth. The rest of the opponents go along with these, but the leaders do not want to have anthroposophical truth made available. Their opposition is absolutely conscious, and so is their effort to stimulate it in their followers.

What are they really intent on achieving? If I may refer to myself in this connection, they are trying to keep me so preoccupied with their attacks that I cannot find time for actual anthroposophical research. One has to have a certain quiet to pursue it, a kind of inner activity that is far removed from the sort of thing one would have to be doing if one were to undertake a defense against our opponents' often ridiculous attacks.

Now in a truly brilliant lecture that he gave in Stuttgart, Herr Werbeck called attention to the large number of hostile books written by theologians alone. I think he listed a dozen or more—so many, at any rate, that it would take all one's time just to read them. Imagine what refuting them would entail! One would never get to any research, and this is only one field among many. At least as many books have been written by people in various other fields. One is actually bombarded with hostile writings intended to keep one from the real work of anthroposophy. That is the quite deliberate intention. But it is possible, if one has what one needs to balance it, to foster anthroposophy and push these books aside. I do not even know many of their titles. Those I have I usually just throw in a pile, since one cannot carry on true spiritual research and simultaneously concern oneself with such attacks. Then our opponents say, “He is not answering us himself.” But others can deal with their assertions, and since the enterprises launched since 1919 were started on others' initiative, the Society should take over its responsibility in this area. It should take on the battle with opponents, for otherwise it will prove impossible really to keep up anthroposophical research.

That is exactly what our opponents want. Indeed, they would like best of all to find grounds for lawsuits. There is every indication that they are looking for such opportunities. For they know that this would require a shift in the direction of one's attention and a change of soul mood that would interfere with true anthroposophical activity.

Yes, my dear friends, most of our opponents know very well indeed what they are about, and they are well organized. But these facts should be known in the Anthroposophical Society too. If the right attention is paid to them, action will follow.

I have given you a report on what we accomplished in Stuttgart in the direction of enabling the Society to go on working for awhile. But there was a moment when I really should have said that I would have to withdraw from the Society because of what happened. There are other reasons now, of course, why that cannot be, since the Society has recently admitted new elements from which one may not withdraw. But if I had made my decision on the basis of what happened at a certain moment there in the assembly hall in Stuttgart, I would have been fully justified in saying that I would have to withdraw from the Society and try to make anthroposophy known to the world in some other way.

The moment I refer to was that in which the following incident occurred. The Committee of Nine had scheduled a number of reports on activities in various areas of the Society. These were to include reports on the Waldorf School, the Union for a Free Spiritual Life, Der Kommende Tag, the journals Anthroposophy and Die Drei, and so on, and there was also to be a discussion of our opponents and ways of handling them.

Now as I said, Werbeck, who has been occupying himself with the problem of opponents, gave a brilliant lecture on how to handle them from the literary angle. But concrete details of the matter were still to be discussed. What happened? Right in the middle of Werbeck's report there was a motion to cut it off and cancel the reports in favor of going on with the discussion. Without knowing anything of what had been happening in the Society, it was proposed that the discussion continue. There was a motion to omit reports right in the middle of the report on opponents! And the motion was carried.

A further grotesque event occurred. Very late on the previous evening, Dr. Stein had given a report on the youth movement. Herr Leinhas, who was chairman of the meeting, was hardly to be envied, for as I told you two days ago, he was literally bombarded with motions on agenda items. As soon as one such motion was made, another followed on its heels, until nobody could see how the debate was to be handled.

Now the people who had come to attend the delegates' convention were not as good at sitting endlessly as those who had done the preparatory work. In Stuttgart everyone is used to sitting. We have often had meetings there that began no later than 9:30 or 10 p.m. and went on until six o'clock in the morning. But as I said, the delegates hadn't had that training. So it was late before Dr. Stein began his report on the youth movement, on the young people's wishes, and due to some mistake or other no one was certain whether he would give it, with the result that a lot of people left the hall. He did give his report, however, and when people returned the following day and found that he had given it in their absence, a motion was made to have him give it again. Nothing came of this because he wasn't there. But when he did arrive to give a report on our opponents, events turned in the direction of people's not only not wanting to hear his report twice over but not even wanting to hear it once; a motion to that effect was passed. So he gave his report on a later occasion.

But this report should have culminated in a discussion of specific opposition. To my surprise, Stein had mentioned none of the specifics, but instead developed a kind of metaphysics of enmity toward anthroposophy, so that it was impossible to make out what the situation really was. His report was very ingenious, but restricted itself to the metaphysics of enmity instead of supplying specific material on the actual enemies. The occasion served to show that the whole Society—for the delegates were representing the whole German Anthroposophical Society—simply did not want to hear about opponents!

This is perfectly understandable, of course. But to be informed about these matters is so vital to any insight into what life-conditions the Society requires that a person who turns down an ideal opportunity to become acquainted with them cannot mean seriously by the Society. The way anthroposophy is represented before the world depends above all else on how the Society's members relate to the enmity that is growing stronger every day.

This, then, was the moment when the way the meeting was going should really have resulted in my saying that I couldn't go on participating if the members were solely interested in repeating slogans like, “Humanness must encounter humanness” and other such platitudes. They were paraphrased more than abundantly in Stuttgart—not discussed, just paraphrased. But of course one can't withdraw from something that exists not just in one's imagination but in reality; one can't withdraw from the Anthroposophical Society! So these matters too had to be overlooked in favor of searching for a solution such as I described to you on Saturday: On the one hand the old Society going on in all its reality, and on the other a loose confederation coming into being, eventuating in the forming of communities in the sense reported, with some bridging group to relate the two opposite elements.

For we must be absolutely clear that anthroposophy is something for eternity. Every individual can therefore study it all by himself, and he has every right to do so, without taking the least interest in the Anthroposophical Society. It would be quite possible—and until 1918 this was actually the way things were—to spread anthroposophy entirely by means of books or by giving lectures to those interested in hearing them. Until 1918 the Society was just what such a society should be, because it could have stopped existing any day without affecting anthroposophy itself. Non-members genuinely interested in anthroposophy had every bit as much access to everything as they would have had through the Society. The Society merely provided opportunities for members to work actively together and for human souls to be awakened by their fellow souls. But on the initiative of this and that individual, activities going on in the Society developed into projects that are now binding upon us. They exist, and cannot be arbitrarily dissolved. The old Society must go on seeing to their welfare. No matter how little one may care for the bureaucratic, cataloguing ways and general orientation of the old Committee, it must go on looking after things it has started. No one else can do this for it. It is very mistaken to believe that someone who is only interested in anthroposophy in general—a situation such as also prevailed in 1902—can be asked to take on any responsibility for the various projects. One has to have grown identified with them, to know them from the inside out.

So the old Society must go on existing; it is an absolutely real entity. But others who simply want anthroposophy as such also have every right to have access to it. For their satisfaction we created the loose confederation I spoke of yesterday, and it too will have its board of trustees, made up of those whose names I mentioned. So now we have two sets of trustees, who will in turn select smaller committees to handle matters of common concern, so that the Society will remain one entity. That the loose confederation does take an interest in what develops out of the Society was borne out by the motion to re-establish it, which was immediately made by the very youngest members of the youth movement, the students. So it has now been re-established and will have a fully legitimate function. Indeed, this was one of the most pressing, vital issues for the Anthroposophical Movement and the Society.

An especially interesting motion was made by the pupils of the upper classes of the Waldorf School. I read it aloud myself, since it had been sent to me. These upper-class students of the Waldorf School made a motion more or less to the following effect. They said, “We have been developing along lines laid down in the basic precepts of the Waldorf School. Next year we are supposed to take our university examinations. Perhaps difficulties of some sort will prevent it. But in any case, how will things work out for us in an ordinary university after having been educated according to the right principles of the Waldorf School?” These students went on to give a nice description of universities, and in conclusion moved that a university be established where erstwhile pupils of the Waldorf School could continue their studies.

This was really quite insightful and right. The motion was immediately adopted by the representatives of the academic youth movement, and in order to get some capital together to start such an institution they even collected a fund amounting, I believe, to some twenty-five million marks, which, though it may not be a great deal of money under present inflationary conditions, is nevertheless a quite respectable sum. These days, of course, one cannot set up a university on twenty-five million marks. But if one could find an American to donate a billion marks or more for such a purpose, a beginning could be made. Otherwise, of course, it couldn't be done, and even a billion marks might not be enough; I can't immediately calculate what would be needed.

But if such a possibility did exist, we would really be embarrassed, frightfully embarrassed, even if there were a prospect of obtaining official recognition in the matter of diplomas and examinations. The problem would be the staffing of such an institution. Should it be done with Waldorf faculty, or with members of our research institutions? That could certainly be done, but then we would have no Waldorf School and no research institutions. The way the Anthroposophical Society has been developing in recent years has tended to keep out people who might otherwise have joined it. It has become incredibly difficult, when a teacher is needed for a new class being added to the Waldorf School, to find one among the membership. In spite of all the outstanding congresses and other accomplishments we have to our credit, the Society's orientation has made people feel that though anthroposophy pleased them well enough, they did not want to become members.

We are going to have to work at the task of restoring the Society to its true function. For there are many people in the world pre-destined to make anthroposophy the most vital content of their hearts and souls. But the Society must do its part in making this possible. As we face this challenge, it is immediately obvious that we must change our course and start bringing anthroposophy to the world's attention so that mankind has a chance to become acquainted with it.

Our opponents are projecting a caricature of anthroposophy, and they are working hard at the job. Their writings contain unacknowledged material from anthroposophical cycles. Nowadays there are lending libraries where the cycles can be borrowed, and so on. The old way of thinking about these things no longer fits the situation. There are second-hand bookshops that lend cycles for a fee, so that anybody who wants to read them can now do so. We show ourselves ignorant of modern social life if we think that things like cycles can be kept secret; that is no longer possible today. Our time has become democratic even in matters of the spirit. We should realize that anthroposophy has to be made known.

That is the impulse motivating the loosely federated section. The people who have come together in it are interested first and foremost in making anthroposophy widely known. I am fully aware that this will open new outlets through which much that members think should be kept within the Society will flow out into the world. But we have to adjust ourselves to the time's needs, and anthroposophists must develop a sense of what it is demanding. That is why anthroposophy must be looked upon now especially as something that can become the content of people's lives, as I indicated yesterday.

So, my dear friends, we made the reported attempt to set up looser ties between the two streams in the Society. I hope that if this effort is rightly understood and rightly handled, we can continue on the new basis for awhile. I have no illusions that it will be for long, but in that case we will have to try some other arrangement. But I said when I went to Stuttgart for this general meeting of the German Anthroposophical Society that since anthroposophy had its start in Germany and the world knows and accepts that fact, it was necessary to create some kind of order in the German Society first, but that this should only be the first step in creating order in other groups too. I picture the societies in all the other language areas also feeling themselves obligated to do their part in either a similar or different way toward consolidating the Society, so that an effort is made on every hand so to shape the life of the Society that anthroposophy can become what it should be to the world at large.

Today, gentlemen, I would like to start by telling you a very interesting story that took place in front of witnesses, so it cannot be scientifically challenged. There was once a fisherman who held his fishing rod, was annoyed after a while that absolutely nothing wanted to bite, until suddenly there was a terrible jolt. Something very heavy bit. He held out the fishing rod and was very happy that he had now caught a big fish. But what did he pull out? A very large turtle.

Well, this big turtle stayed on the fishing rod, because it had swallowed the fishhook. It was inside her belly, and the fisherman couldn't get it out. The turtle pulled her head back a little. He tried to persuade the turtle, but she wouldn't let go of the fishhook. So he had no choice but to hang her from a tree branch, cut off her head with his sharp knife, and let her fall to the ground.

You will all agree: if this had happened to a human being – let's say, for example, during the French Revolution or some other beheading – well, he would have been a corpse. What did the turtle do? The turtle straightened up, calmly marched back into the water and disappeared into it. It didn't bother her at all that her head was cut off.

So, as you can see, gentlemen, this turtle did not need its head at all to continue living. How long it lived after that was, of course, not recorded at the time, but anyway, you can see from this: for everything that has to do with walking, for example, the turtle does not need its head at all. It can walk without its head.

I have told you many stories about animals doing all kinds of things, terribly clever things, and from this story about the tortoise you can conclude that the animals are not doing it with their heads, because you can cut off a tortoise's head and it will continue to move around and do everything else as usual. The turtle did not run away blindly, but straight into the water from which it had come. It could not have done it differently, or better, with its head.

Now you might say: That is a unique case. But it is not a unique case, because these experiments have been done and people are doing the same thing now. Those who can grasp the whole thing spiritually do not actually need these experiments. But these experiments are constantly being cited to contradict the matter. They do not contradict it, but they do confirm it. The experiments I am going to tell you about have been conducted countless times. You take a frog and cut its head off with a razor. Now the frog is there without a head. You put it back on the table. At first, it behaves extremely impertinently without a head. It sinks down a bit at the front, and at the back, quite impertinently with the back body, it lifts itself up and hops from the spot. But if you now take a caustic acid and touch the frog a little on the side (it will draw) – the headless frog is then there, has its legs there, only it has no head – so if you touch it a little with a caustic acid, which otherwise hurts, the frog first takes its hind leg and scratches itself there, without a head. You can repeat this over and over – the frog will use its hind leg and scratch itself, without a head. And if you add more acid, then he also uses his front leg to help. Then, of course, he tilts to the side. If you add even more, he also uses the leg from the other side to help. Then, of course, he falls over. So you see, the headless frog does everything he would otherwise do, regardless of whether he has a head or no head.

Not true, so you can see from this: When we go down from mammals to lower animals, these lower animals without heads do exactly the same as humans with their heads and higher mammals with their heads.

Now, however, we must be quite clear about what is actually going on here. So something has been proven. It has been proven that, when we ourselves have pain here, we raise our hand and rub ourselves, we do not need our head for that, because the frog can do that without a head. So that has been proven, that you can do it without a head. So we certainly don't have a head for scratching ourselves; we don't have a head for walking, running. Because the tortoise or the frog, they walk without a head. So we don't need the head at all for walking. We can't quite fulfill the story of the fable, the one about the lazy Hans, who you know, was too lazy to walk, but was very diligent when eating. So someone advised him to walk with his mouth and eat with his feet, in order to acquire a different habit. Of course that doesn't work, but the fact is that we don't need our head at all for walking. We don't need our head for moving our hands either. So why do humans and higher animals need their head? What is the difference – now with regard to the head – between humans and higher animals compared to lower animals? Yes, the difference is that the higher animals and humans die if they don't have their heads, but the frog, the turtle and all the lower animals stay alive. If you take even lower animals, for example worms – you can cut them in half – each half starts to move on its own. So you see, you absolutely don't need the head for what the body actually does. But the bad thing is that you need your head to live as a higher animal or as a human being. You need it to live. And since you need it to live, you die if you no longer have it. It is not because you have no head that you no longer wash off the acid when you are smeared with it as a human being, but because you die without a head. Man no longer washes off the acid when he no longer has a head. Man would have behaved differently if he had swallowed a fish hook and had his head cut off. In any case, something would have happened differently than with the turtle.

So we can say: In higher animals and in humans, everything that is connected with the head is not the cause of our body's movements, but we only have the head to thank for being alive. If we no longer have it, we simply no longer live. So in the higher animals, the life is in the head. In the lower animals, the life is in all the individual parts of the body.

But now I want to tell you something else that shows you that there is also a great difference between the higher animals and between man in regard to everything that belongs to this head and this whole organization.

You have probably already encountered this somewhat unpleasant disease in children, which is called whooping cough; in some areas it is called spasmodic cough. Actually, whooping cough is not so bad for a child at that age, because it usually goes away. The bad thing is what remains if you don't behave properly – that is, the doctors or whoever is responsible – while whooping cough is there. That's when the following can happen. What does whooping cough consist of? Whooping cough consists in the fact that the inhalation always remains proper – you can have a child with whooping cough as severe as you like: it breathes in properly; you can see that when you examine the matter – but when the air wants to come out again when you breathe out, it gets stuck, it doesn't come out properly again, and that's when the coughing fit comes. And because the air cannot come out properly, no fresh air can come in, and that is how whooping cough occurs; that is what it consists of.

But what is the underlying cause of whooping cough in children? You see, the underlying cause is that the inner mucous membrane of the respiratory system, of these tubes that go in and out of the lungs, becomes terribly sensitive. When the air goes in, it also goes out over the sensitive areas, because the chest is empty inside, and you can always pour air into the void. You only have to think of the air pump. The air pump consists of having a glass dome here (it is drawn); you pump the air out of it. Now it is empty of air. Then you can have an opening to support it. If you now take out the plug, the air rushes in with a whistle. There is no need for anything else under the glass cover but empty space. When we have exhaled, there is airless space in our lungs; so the air rushes in by itself. There is nothing special to be done to get the air in. So it is no wonder that air rushes in through the sensitive windpipe, because the air does not feel it. But if you want to get the air out of the air pump again, you have to do something, you have to pump it out. Likewise, you have to push out the air that is inside the lungs. Now, however, the child's respiratory tubes have become sensitive. They are just as sensitive as if they were scratched somewhere. So the inside of the respiratory tubes is a little scratched, they are sensitive. Instead of the act of the will, which drives the air out and expels the air, it scratches the windpipe, and instead of expelling the air, it is concerned with scratching the sensitive spot. You see, while the child wants to scratch, it forgets to expel the air, and then the air stops inside. Then come these fits of whooping cough. Then the body wants to forcefully expel the air, while in life what I recently called the astral body expels the air. You can tell exactly where the physical body is and where the astral body is by looking at a child with spasmodic coughing. When the child does not have spasmodic coughing, the astral body expels the air; the body is not bothered at all. If it is whooping cough, there is a sensitive spot. The astral body wants to scratch away; the physical body first has to come into action and has to expel the air spasmodically. This can even cause a spasm, and from that a secondary illness can arise.

So you see, it is not at all the case that one can say that the physical body does everything. Then one can never understand whooping cough. When someone has whooping cough, something strange is going on. One has to ask: what has actually happened to his astral body? His astral body has become headless, namely, like the other part of the astral body in the frog! As the frog wets its leg, so the astral body wets the air pipes internally, and the physical body then has to get rid of the air. So you can distinguish this quite precisely.

But now you can say: Give us some proof that the astral body, the soul, is really involved. I will tell you what can happen when a child has had whooping cough and therefore has sensitive spots in the windpipes and the astral body wants to clean them, which is when the child has these seizures. Suppose, while the child had whooping cough, the parents had bought a cat, or a cat had come to live with them – I am telling you something that happens quite often. While the child had whooping cough, the parents bought a cat or a dog. This made the child sensitive to the exhaled air of dogs or cats. It would not have happened if it had not had this particular sensitivity. Now it has become sensitive during whooping cough. Well, the whooping cough heals, but sometimes something strange remains. If the child is not used to cats, and a cat comes into the house during the whooping cough of the child, it remains that the child in question gets something – when it has just been cured, it does not occur immediately, but later on what is called asthma occurs, a recurring shortness of breath.

Now, when this shortness of breath occurs - asthma is something that comes and goes periodically - then you can examine and sometimes you will find something strange. For example, a man is having asthma and at first you don't know where it's coming from. If you pay attention, you discover that when a cat is near him or in the room, he is once again afflicted with asthma. If you move the cat, the asthma goes away. There, you see, he is reminded, and he does not need his head for that. He does not need to know that the cat is in the room. The cat can be in the room, he knows nothing about it, but he gets the asthma.

Yes, I can tell you an even more amazing case, a case that is quite strange. There was once a child who had whooping cough, and during the time he had whooping cough, a lot of buckwheat was eaten in the house. As a result, the child became particularly sensitive to buckwheat and developed a tendency, a talent, so to speak, for asthma every time buckwheat was in the room, or even just in the house. And then something very strange happened when he was already a grown boy, already a medical student. He lived upstairs on the top floor. Downstairs, two floors lower, was the kitchen. Once the boy upstairs got asthma, terrible asthma. He had only ever had it when there was buckwheat in the house. Now, of course, they were terribly unhappy. They had forbidden all the cooks to make any food with buckwheat. Buckwheat was not supposed to come into the house at all. What had happened? A new cook was there who didn't know any better. She had buckwheat downstairs, and the young student upstairs on the second floor got asthma! Such things look like fairy tales. But they are absolutely true.

And now you will also understand how human health and illness are related to the whole environment. It does matter for our health whether or not there are rats in our environment. You see, the story I told you about cats is so well known – because the human respiratory organs are particularly sensitive to cats – that there is even a name for it in medicine. You will find the name “cat asthma” in medical books. This is the asthma that people get when cats are around. There are, of course, many types of asthma.

The fact of the matter is that one must say: For the normal person, a dog or a cat or even buckwheat is often something that is taken for granted when they are around. This only makes an impression on his soul. But if the soul is not in order somewhere, then it makes an impression on his soul unconsciously. What actually happens to a person who gets either cat or buckwheat asthma?

Well, you see, whooping cough can be cured again in the following way. Let us assume that you are a child and have a sensitive windpipe; the windpipe and the bronchial tubes and bronchioles have somehow been cut open by coal dust. This can immediately lead to whooping cough. Such things arise from very tiny little things. So the child has a cut windpipe. What happens when a part of the body is injured in this way? You can see what happens when you cut yourself. If it were only a physical body, it would not hurt you. Imagine taking off a rather thick glove finger. You can form the glove just like the skin. You can cut into it and it won't hurt you. But why does your hand hurt when you cut into it? Yes, your hand hurts because, in addition to the physical body being there, the astral body is also inside. The astral body is used to being inside. If you now cut into the physical body – you can't cut into the astral body; now it suddenly realizes: Gosh, there is no physical body! It doesn't fit together! It hurts. Because only the astral body can hurt you. It hurts until it has healed again.

So the story is that where something is injured, the astral body is left to itself. It comes out of the physical body.

Now imagine you get this crack, this fissure in the inside of your windpipe; the astral body becomes somewhat free in the windpipe. Now healing can take place if you are very careful: let us say you have a child with whooping cough. First of all you put the child to bed and let it sweat properly – you can observe this step by step – so you put the child to bed, and it gets hot. The astral body unites easily with heat, with cold it is difficult. If you let it run around outside or just in a cold room, the astral body cannot attach to the physical body because the warmth is not there. But if you wrap the child up very warmly – people do this instinctively; they often tie a stocking around the neck to keep the warmth in – the astral body begins to be attracted to the warmth. The astral body is not attracted by anything else, by water or air, but it is attracted by warmth. So if you have left the child lying in this position for a while, and the astral body has been attracted by the warmth, then it has straightened itself out again towards the limb here. Then you have to take a cloth and put a few drops of lemon juice in some warm water, and put the cloth around it. This pulls together what is cut open, and then takes up the astral body again, and you can heal whooping cough well. You just have to do everything in the right order.

When healing, it is important to be able to see through the whole person and to do things in the right order. And then, during the whole procedure, you have to make sure that the child does not get a fright. Because when the child gets a fright, the astral body always comes out a little, and that makes you undo the whole healing procedure again.

Now, if you heal properly, then the whooping cough can run its course and the child will not get asthma later on. But if you heal wrongly, then these “fissures” in the trachea and in the bronchi and bronchioles heal together, and the child appears to be healthy, but the astral body has not completely entered, always remains a little outside. If the person is very weak, if the child is a weakling, then it will immediately get asthma because it is not breathing out properly. The astral body is not sufficiently present. The astral body, which is outside, cannot properly participate in the exhalation. But when the child is a little stronger, it just uses the other part of the astral body, and the result is that only when a new illness occurs in life, for example when the child gets the flu later or something like that, the rest of the astral body proves to be too weak, and then the child gets asthma.

This is a good way to get inside a person. You can tell when the soul is involved and when it is not.

But now look at a person with asthma. The astral body is at work here. It constantly scratches internally, just as the frog scratches externally when it is wetted with acid. You see, there you have the story, gentlemen, there you have the astral body, which behaves like a frog, like a tortoise. We can actually study the behavior of our astral body in lower animals. If the head could be involved in this activity of the astral body, it would be quite different. We just can't get at it with our head. The fact is that we are not yet human with our astral body. We are human on earth with our physical body, but we are not human on earth with our astral body.

What happens as a result? Yes, as a result, this astral body also behaves like an imperfect being. It behaves in an animalistic way. So don't think you can educate a person by, say, constantly beating him. It is actually quite remarkable how widespread this kind of education still is. There is a person today who is otherwise not pleasant to me, he is boring to me, but he is very interesting. He has also traveled around Europe, he was also in Basel, Rabindranath Tagore, who captivates people today. Isn't it true, an Asian is something else; they go there! A European could do much more; but an Asian, that interests them, that's a rare animal! You see, he has now given his life story. The life story is actually boring too; but it is very important to read the first chapters of this life story. There he tells how he was actually always beaten by everyone. One person in particular, who is now one of the learned Asians, the learned Indians, traveling all over Europe, says that the whole education was actually based on constantly beating the children. So this is not just a European peculiarity. It is precisely from this biography that one sees that the Asians have also been terribly beaten.

Well, Tagore then became a poet, did all kinds of things, so that's no longer so clear. But when someone is constantly beaten as a child, it doesn't just affect the physical body – precisely because the child's mind is not constantly active – but it affects the astral body. And the result is that the astral body becomes like a beaten dog. You can tell a battered dog from a lovingly raised dog. But it is the same with people. When a person is beaten as a child, later life may make him a little more courageous, but his astral body remains beaten throughout his life because it is still at the animal level.

Yes, you see, gentlemen, but you realize how not only physical beatings go into this astral body. At most, the physical beatings create welts. It is not the physical impression that makes the astral body beaten up, but the moral impression. In this astral body, we carry our moral impression from our entire life on earth. And it is true: One person was beaten as a child; later on, his astral body is like that of a beaten dog. Another person beat his teachers (there are such people, too). His astral body is like that of a lion. You look like that inside – you could also say, spiritually, let's say astral, because spiritual has already become a very abstract word and people don't think anything of it anymore – you become so astral inside that you take on one or the other form, depending on the moral impressions you have had in life.

But that is the way it is in life. If a person has a slave nature, he takes everything in a different way than if he has a free, independent nature. If a person has a slave nature, he puts up with everything. Then his astral body becomes stooped, and as a result becomes something dog-like. If a person has a free nature, he does not put up with everything. His astral body becomes somewhat human-like as a result. We can see inside and see what is actually going on with a person during their life on earth.

But now, gentlemen, we die. We have made it clear to ourselves; only the physical body descends from us. It goes away. But this form, which I have described here, remains. With it you go through death. And the one who has acquired a higher knowledge through the means I have described, and which are particularly described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', can now distinguish exactly with what character a person passes through death. The moral impression of life is in it. Now you have to enter the world from which you form the next life on earth.

Yes, gentlemen, if you were to enter the world from which you form your next life with an astral body that has been created by the beatings of life, you could become a dog. But a human being cannot become a dog; that is the story. Through the moral impression of life, a human being comes out of death in such a way that he could become anything that comes from his moral impression. If someone has been brave, he could become a lion. Perhaps some people would like to be a lion in their next life. But a person cannot become a lion because he is not predisposed to it by the world, by the cosmos. Another person feels a bit like a cat; he would like to become a cat.

Don't the anthroposophists, after all, reproach the unintelligent people for thinking that the soul goes into the animals afterwards, and that the soul's migration should consist of the soul coming into the animals afterwards? That is nonsense, of course. What is true is that the soul retains an impression of it: one is lion-like, cat-like, tiger-like, crocodile-like, when one has died. And since one must become a human being again, one must first discard that. And one does just that during this one-third lifetime, which I told you about last time. If someone has reached the age of sixty, he needs twenty years for this. This is not plucked out of thin air; we know this because, curiously enough, a person becomes so when he falls asleep at night. He is only preparing for it then. And sleep lasts a total of one-third of life. He needs such a third of life, such a period of time, which thus takes up a third of his lifetime, to free himself from this moral impression.

But, gentlemen, when you are asleep, you are unaware of the whole story that you are going through between falling asleep and waking up. And that is good. Because as a result, the moral impression that you have only comes through a little as conscience. If you have to look at it all, it comes through much more strongly.

And why does it only come through a little as conscience after waking up from what you experienced during sleep? Because you submerge in the physical body, which obscures it. Otherwise, you would remember in the morning when you wake up what sleep has told you, what a horrible guy you are. During sleep you have experienced all of that. It sometimes haunts dreams. And such dreams are particularly interesting to study, in which something is haunted, which actually makes one a dreadful fellow. But in general one does not know that. But when one has no physical body after death, everything that is in the astral body enters into the ego, and in the ego one now has it inside. Now you have to go through the whole time. When you have discarded the astral body, then you have what you have discarded only in the ego. But now you can prepare yourself for the real physical body of the next life. That takes as long as I explained to you last time.

So you see, you just have to look at a person properly as they are now in their earthly life to get a very accurate idea of how these four parts of the human being – physical body, etheric body, astral body and I – are connected.

You see, gentlemen, I will tell you something else: Imagine there is a person's heart. It sits there. Two nerve cords go to the heart. They start from back there, go down there and go to the heart. One goes and then spreads out in the heart. Then another goes and also spreads out in the heart. Now imagine that I am passing an electric current through the nerve. I can observe something remarkable: the heart starts beating faster and faster. Why? Because the electric current excites the nerve, the heart starts beating faster and faster. The electric current excites the nerve.

Now imagine that I don't electrify this nerve, but I electrify the other nerve, the second one. Now you might think, a nerve is a nerve. I electrify it. And you might think, right, the heart starts beating faster and faster again. But it's not like that. When I electrify the nerve here (the first one), the heart beats faster and faster. But if I electrify this one (the second), the heart beats slower and slower. And if I electrify it very strongly, the heart stops beating altogether. I have to stop quickly, otherwise the person will die of a heart attack. It is the case that there is no difference in the construction between this one and that other nerve. They are both constructed in the same way. Yes, what is the matter here?

You see, it's like this: when this one is electrified, the astral body goes in, stimulates the heart to beat faster, because the electrical current takes over a task that the heart would otherwise have to do itself. So it can work faster in the heart. Now suppose, however, that the other nerve were to be electrified. Now the astral body wants to make the heart beat faster; but from the other side an obstacle is put in its way. As soon as it wants to start making the heart beat faster, it cannot through on the other side. This excitation (at the first nerve) is useful to it because it takes over a task from it. This excitement (the second) is harmful to him because it meets him halfway. If I could go into the heart and electrify it from there, it would also make the heart beat faster and faster. But if I electrify this nerve from the outside, the astral body cannot move the heart because there is more and more of an obstacle.

From this you can see that you can see very clearly how things actually work in the human body, how the astral body, on the one hand, intervenes just as it would if, let's say, I wanted to turn a wheel: I push it, turn it further; but if I turn it in the opposite direction, it doesn't work. It is the same with the heart, the same with the lungs, with every organ. Every organ is supplied from two sides with nerves; but what engages is the astral body.

Now you may say: But is it not perhaps the head that is at work in the astral body? No, gentlemen, if it were the head, you would have to electrify at the top of the head. But that would not help you at all; you have to start electrifying from there. If you cut off the head with the astral body, it still always hits the spot, as with the frog or the turtle. You have to electrify where the nerve is still located, which the frog also retains. This point is called the medulla oblongata, or extended marrow. You have to electrify there, and the head does not need to know anything about it.

Incidentally, it is also easy to see from other things that the head does not need to know anything. Yes, think, first of all, if you had to let your heart beat from your head, that would be a nice story. The heart would have to beat seventy-two times every minute, you would have to think about it seventy-two times every minute. So that wouldn't work. And when you sleep, your heart would have to stop. So with the head it is not yet done with these movements, which take place inside the person. They are carried out as they are in the frog or the turtle.

If we now have asthma, these internal movements are carried out in a pathological manner, while when we are healthy, they are carried out normally. You can see from this that everything that goes on inside a person in terms of movements and so on, goes on unconsciously, guided by the astral body.

And this astral body is the one that, after death, must first give up the moral impression that it has received from the world to the I, so to speak. Then the I can form a human life on earth again. These years after death, when the human being lives in such a way that he can discard this inner astral form that he has acquired during his life, are therefore such that he can prepare himself again for a new life on earth, where he can truly be human.

And how does one now bring what one had in the previous life into the new human life? Yes, you see, gentlemen, it is just that the child sleeps at the beginning of his life. If the child were conscious, it could not carry out what the ego has brought with it; after all, it has only unlearned from the astral body. In the astral body, the I is still inside; only the I does not need to work before conception, but the astral body has to work, the astral world has to work, as I told you the other day, from the stars. The child must come in asleep, learn to walk, learn to speak, learn to think. In this process, it pours into walking, speaking and thinking that which is the moral impulse from the previous life and seeks out. That is our destiny.

This does not affect our freedom. I think I already told you that. We carry our destiny within us, we prepare our destiny ourselves. But our freedom is not affected, just as little as our freedom is affected by the fact that we have black or blonde hair, brown or blue eyes, or cannot reach the moon. In the same way, our freedom is not affected by the fact that we bring something or other with us from our previous life on earth, being this or that as a human being. But people are different because they bring something or other with them from their previous life on earth.

Now you may say: But that leads us back to thinking that we will continue to return to further earthly lives forever. — No, gentlemen, there was once a time on earth when man did not progress at all, as a small child is today. In the beginning of the earth, in prehistoric times, he could not yet walk, could not yet speak, could not yet think. He was in such a state that, because the Earth – now remember what I have otherwise told you about the Earth – was still thick, he was not surrounded by air, but by a thick sauce, as I told you at the time, did not need to learn to walk. This thick sauce carried him. He was also more animal, more dependent on his astral body. In relation to the physical body, he has become human today. In relation to the astral body, he is still at the animal level at which he previously stood. He did not bring anything with him, but it gradually emerged. By learning to walk, speak and think, what is his destiny has also come into being. And when man now learns again to absorb something spiritual during his life, then he also gets out of the animal habit again, and then he gets used to a world in which he no longer lives in the way of walking, speaking and thinking, but again in a different way.

So there is a space between these two states, and in this space we come again and again in a certain life.

Now, you see, gentlemen, there is still a question. We will have to discuss that next time, next Wednesday at nine o'clock. That is this important question, which is raised again and again, that someone says: Well, it's easy for you to talk about your past life on earth, but I don't remember it. What I don't remember, I don't believe. Next time I will explain to you how it is with this remembering, and what the reason for it is. Then we will have come a little further again. Then we will have more or less dealt with the question for which we have prepared ourselves.

It is in the nature of the case that the subject of a lecture course like this one is inexhaustible. Matters could be elaborated and looked at more thoroughly. But since, unfortunately, we must come to an end, we have to be content with given guidelines and indication. Today, therefore, I shall only supplement the scanty outlines and hints already discussed to that in a certain sense the picture will be rounded out.

Proceeding once again from the being of man as viewed by spiritual science, we must say that we member man into physical body, etheric or formative forces body, astral body (which essentially represents the soul life) and ego. Let us be clear that properly speaking the physical body resides only in the small part of the human organization that we can describe as solid and sharply defined. On the other hand, all that pertains to liquid or fluid forms is taken hold of by the etheric body in such a way that it is in a constant process of blending, separating, combining, and dissolving. It is in perpetual flux. Then there are the gaseous, aeriform elements, such as are active in oxygen and other gases. In these, the astral body is at work. Finally, the ego organization is active in everything that has to do with warmth.

What I have just outlined cannot, however, be reduced to a diagram. We must clearly understand, for instance, that because the formative forces body pulsates through all fluid and liquid elements of the body, it also sweeps along the solid substances. Everything in the human organization is in close interaction, in constant interplay. We must always be aware of that. But now let us also remember that this human organization has been experienced in different ways in the course of evolution. This was one of the main themes of these lectures.

What is described today as the subject matter of external physics or mechanics, was originally attained through an inward experience of the physical body. Our present-day physics contains statements that originated because there once existed an internally experienced physics of the physical body. As I have explained a number of times, this inward physics was divorced from man and now continues to function merely as a science that observes outer nature. During the decline of the medieval alchemy the same thing happened with what lives inwardly in man by virtue of the etheric body. The work of this body in the fluids was once experienced, but now it is only dimly perceptible in the fantastic, alchemistic formulas that we find in ancient writings. Originally this was intelligent science, but inwardly experienced within the etheric. In a way, this is still in the process of being divorced from man, because as yet we really do not have a fully developed chemistry. We have many chemical processes in the world that we seek to understand, but only in a physical and mechanical way.

In the beginning man experienced all this inwardly by means of his organization, but in the course of time he cast it all out of himself. In this process of casting out all our science developed, from astronomy to the meager beginnings of modern chemistry. On the other hand, thinking, feeling and willing, the subject matter of abstract psychology (which today is no longer considered real) was in former times actually not experienced inside man. Man felt himself at one with the external world outside his own being, when he experienced the soul life. Thus what was corporeal was once experienced inwardly, whereas the soul element was experienced by leaving one's being and communing with the outer world. Psychology was once the science of that aspect of the world that affects man in such a way that he appears to himself as a soul being. Physics and chemistry were cast out of man, whereas psychology and pneumatology (which I shall discuss directly) were stuffed into him and lost their reality. They turned into subjective perceptions with which nothing could be done.

What was experienced together with the cosmos through the astral body (which leaves us in sleep) has become the subject of psychology. What man experienced as spirit in union with the universe was pneumatology. Today, as I have already pointed out, this has shrunk down to the idea of the ego or to a mere feeling. Therefore we now have as science of external nature what was once inner experience, while our science of man's inner nature is what was once external experience.

Now we must call to mind what is needed, on the one hand for physics and chemistry, and on the other for psychology and pneumatology, in order to develop them further in a conscious way, since man today finds himself in the age of the development of the consciousness soul. Take physics, for example, which in recent times has become mostly abstract and mechanical. From all that I have said you will have seen that the scientific age has increasingly felt impelled to restrict itself to the externally observed mechanics of space. Long ago, man accompanied motion by means of inward experience and judged it according to what he felt within as movement. Observing a falling stone, he experienced its inner impulse of movement in his own inner human nature, in his physical body. This experience, after the great casting out, led to the measuring of the rate of fall per second. In our attitude toward nature, the idea prevails that what is observed is what is real.

What can be observed in the outer world? It is motion, change of position.⁸³ As a rule, we let velocity vanish neatly in a differential coefficient. But it is motion that we observe, and we express velocity as movement per second, hence by means of space. This means, however, that with our conscious experience, we are entirely outside the object. We are not involved in it in any way when we merely watch its motion, meaning its change of position in space. We can do that only if we find ways and means to inwardly take hold of the spatial, physical object by an extending of the same method with which we separated from it in the first place. Instead of the mere movement, the bare change of position, we have to view the velocity in the objects as their characteristic element. Then we can know what a particular object is like inwardly, because we find velocity also within ourselves when we look back upon ourselves.

This is what is necessary. The trend of scientific development in regard to the outer physical world must be extended in the direction of proceeding from mere observation of motion to a feeling for the velocity possessed by a given object. We must advance from motion to velocity. That is how we enter into reality. Reality is not taken hold of if all we see is that a body changes its position in space. But if we know that the body possesses an inner velocity-impulse, then we have something that lies in the nature of the body. We assert nothing about a body if we merely indicate its change of position, but we do state something about it when we say that it contains within itself the impulse for its own velocity. This then is a property of it, something that belongs to its nature. You can understand this by a simple illustration. If you watch a moving person, you know nothing about him. But if you know that he has a strong urge to move quickly, you do know something about him. Likewise, you know something about him, when you know that he has a reason for moving slowly. We must be able to take hold of something that has significance within a given body. It matters little whether or not modern physics speaks, for example, of atoms; what matters is that when it does speak of them it regards them as velocity charges. That is what counts.

Now the question is: how do we arrive at such a perception? We can discuss the best in the case of physics, since today's chemistry has advanced too little. We have to become clear about what we actually do when, in our thinking, we cast inwardly experienced mechanics and physics into external space. That is what we are doing when we say: The nature of what is out there in space is of no concern to me; I observe only what can be measured and expressed in mechanical formulas, and I leave aside everything that is not mechanical. Where does this lead us? It leads us to the same process in knowledge that a human being goes through when he dies. When he dies, life goes out of him, the dead organism remains. When I begin to think mechanistically, life goes out of my knowledge. I then have a science of dead matter. We must be absolutely clear that we are setting up a science of dead matter so long as the mechanical and physical aspect is the sole object of our study of nature. You must be aware that you are focusing on what is dead. You must be able to say to yourself: The great thing about science is that it has tacitly resolved that, unlike the ancient alchemists who still saw in outer nature a remnant of life, it will observe what is dead I minerals, plants, and animals. Science will study only what is dead in them, because it utilizes only ideas and concepts suitable for what is dead. Therefore, our physics is dead by its nature.

Science will stand on a solid basis only when it fully realizes that its mode of thinking can take hold only of the dead. The same is true of chemistry, but I cannot go into that today because of the lack of time.

When we look only at motion and lose sight of velocity, we are erecting a physics that is dead, the end-product of living things is then our concern, and the end-product is death. Hence, when we look at nature with the eyes of modern mechanics and physics, we must realize that we are looking at a corpse.

Nature was not always like this. It was different at one time. If I look at a corpse, it would be foolish to believe that it was always in this condition. The fact that I realize that it is a corpse proves to me that once it was a living organism. The moment you realize that modern mechanics and physics lead you to view nature in this way, you will see that nature is now a corpse so far as physics is concerned. We are studying a corpse.

Can we attain to something living, or at least an approach to it? The corpse is the final condition of something living. Where is the beginning condition? Well, my dear friends, there is no way to rediscover velocity by observing motion. You may stare at differential coefficients as long as you will but you will not find it. Instead, you must turn back to man. Whereas formerly he experienced himself from within, you must now study him from without through his physical organism, and you must understand that in man—and especially in his physical and etheric organizations—the beginning of a living condition must be sought.

No satisfactory form of physics and chemistry will be attained save through a genuine science of man. But I expressly call attention to the fact that such a genuine anthropology will not be reached by approaching man with the methods of present-day physics and chemistry. That would only carry death back into man and make his body (his lower organization) even more dead than before.

You must study what is living in man, and not revert to the method of physics and chemistry. What is needed are the methods that can be found through spiritual-scientific research. Briefly stated, spiritual-scientific research will meet the historic requirements of natural science.

This historic requirement can be put in the following words: Science has reached the point of observing what is corpse-like in nature. Anthroposophical spiritual science must discover in addition to this the beginning of a living condition. This has been preserved in man. In former periods of evolution it was also externally perceptible. At one time, the processes of nature were totally different. Today, we walk around on the corpses of what existed in the beginning. But in the two lower bodies of man, the beginning condition has been preserved. There we can discover all that once existed, right back to the Saturn condition. An historical approach leads beyond the present state of science. It is quite clear why this is so. We are in the midst of a period of development. If, as is so frequently the case, we consider today's manner of thinking to be the most advanced and do not realize that the real course of events was very different, then we are looking at history the wrong way. As an example, a twenty-five year old person need not only be observed in the light of the twenty-five years that he has been alive,—one must also observe the element in him that makes it possible for him to live on. That is one point.

The other point is that our psychology has become very thin, while pneumatology has nearly reached the vanishing point. Again, we must know how far it has gone with these two sciences in the present age. If one speaks today of blue or red, of C-sharp or G, or of qualities of warmth, he will say that they are subjective sensations. That is the popular attitude; But what is a mere subjective sensation? It is a “phenomenon.” Just as we observe only motions in outer nature, we study only the phenomenon in psychology and pneumatology. And just as velocity is missing from motion in our external observation, the essential thing—the living essence—is missing from our observation of the inner soul life. Because we only study phenomena and no longer experience the living essence, we never get beyond mere semblance. The way thinking, feeling and willing are experienced today, they are mere semblance. Modern epistemologists have the man who wants to lift himself up by his own pigtail, or like the man in a railroad car who pushes against the wall without realizing that he cannot move the carriage in this way. This is how modern epistemologists look. They talk and talk, but there is no vitality in their talk because they are locked into the mere semblance.

I have tried to put a certain end to this talk. The first time was in my Philosophy of Freedom,⁸⁴ where I demonstrated how this semblance, inherent in pure thinking, becomes the impulse of freedom when inwardly grasped by man in thinking. If something other than semblance were contained in our subjective experience, we could never be free. But if this semblance can be raised to pure thinking, one can be free, because what is not real being cannot determine us, whereas real being would do so. This was my first effort. My second effort was at the Philosophical Congress in Bologna, when I analyzed the matter psychologically. I attempted to show that our sensations and thoughts are in fact outward experiences, rather than inward ones, and that this insight can be attained by careful observation.

These indications will have to be understood. Then, we shall realize that we must rediscover being in semblance, just as we must rediscover velocity in movement. Then, we will understand what this inwardly experienced semblance really is. It will reveal itself as the initial state of being. Man experiences this semblance; experiences himself as semblance and as such lives his way into semblance and thus transforms it into the seed of future worlds. I have often pointed out that from our ethics, our morals, born of the physical world of semblance, future physical worlds will arise, just as from today's seed the plant will grow.⁸⁵ We are dealing with the nascent state of being. In order to have a proper natural science, we must realize that psychology and pneumatology must understand what they observe as nascent states of being. Only then will they throw light on those matters that natural science wants to illuminate. But what is this “nascent” or “initial state?”

Now this nascent state is in the outer world, not within. It is what I see when I behold the green tapestry of plants, the world of colors—red, green and blue—and the sounds that are out there. What are these fleeting formations that modern-day physics, physiology and psychology regard only as subjective? They are the elements from which the worlds of the future create themselves. Red is not engendered by matter in the eye or the brain, red is the first, semblance-like, seed of future worlds.

If you know this, you will also want to know something about what will correspond in these future worlds to the corpse-like element. It will not be what we found earlier in our physics and chemistry, it will be the corpse of the future. We shall recognize what will be the corpse of the future, the future element of death, if we discover it already today in the higher organization of man, where astral body and ego are active. By experiencing the final condition there in reference to the initial one, we at last gain a proper comprehension of the nervous system and the brain insofar as they are dead, not alive. In a certain sense, they can be more dead than a corpse, inasmuch as they transcend the absolute point of death—especially in the case of the nervous system—and become “more dead than dead.” But this very fact makes the nervous system and the brain bearers of the so-called spiritual element—because the dead element dwells in them, the final state not yet even reached by outer nature—because they even surpass this final state.

In order to find psychology and pneumatology in the outer world, we shall have to discover how the inanimate, the dead, dwells in the human organism; namely, in the head organization and in part of the rhythmic organization, mainly that of breathing. We must look at our head and say of it that it is constantly dying. If it were alive, the growing, sprouting living matter could not think. But because it gives up life and constantly dies, the soul-spiritual thoughts, endowed with being, have the opportunity to spread out over what is dead as new living, radiant semblance.

You see, here lie the great tasks that, by means of the historical manner of observation result quite simply from natural science. If we don't take hold of them, we move like ghosts through the present development of science, and not with the consciousness that an epoch that has begun must find a way to continue. You can imagine that much of this is contained implicitly in what science has discovered. Scientific literature offers such indications everywhere. But people cannot yet distinguish clearly; they like what is chaotic. They don't care clearly to contemplate physics and chemistry on one hand, and psychology and pneumatology on the other, because then they would have to consider seriously the inner and outer aspects. They prefer to vacillate in the murky waters between physics and chemistry. Due to this, a bastard science has arisen that has become the darling of natural research and even philosophy; namely, physiology. As soon as the real facts are discovered, physiology will fall apart into psychology on the one hand—a psychology that is also a perception of the world—and on the other, into chemistry, meaning a chemistry that is also a knowledge of man.

When these two are attained, this in-between science, physiology, will vanish. Because today you have a morass in which you can find everything, and because by juggling a bit to the left or the right, it is possible to find a bit of a soul or a corporeal element, people do quite well. The physiology of today is what above all must disappear as the last remnant of former conceptions that have become muddled. The reason physiological concepts are so abstruse is that they contain soul and corporeal elements that are no longer distinguished, thus they can play around with words and even juggle the facts. One who aims for clear insight must realize that physiology amounts in the end to fibbing with words and facts.

Until we admit this, we can't take the history of natural science seriously. Science does not proceed only from undetermined past ages to our time, it continues on from the present. History can only be understood, if one comprehends the further course of things, not in a superstitious, prophetic sense but by beginning now to do the right thing. And infinitely much needs to be set right, particularly in the domain of science. Natural science has grown tall; it is like a nice teenager, who at the moment is going through his years of unpolished adolescence, and whose guidance must be continued so that he will become mature. Science will mature, if murky areas like physiology disappear, and physics and pneumatology arise again in the way outlined above. They will come into being, if the anthroposophical way of thinking is applied in earnest to science. This will be the case, when people feel that they are learning something, when somebody speaks to them of a real physics, a real chemistry, a real psychology and pneumatology; when they no longer have the urge to comprehend everything concerning the world and the human being through bastardized chaotic sciences like physiology. Then, the development of human knowledge will once again stand on a sound basis.

Naturally, therapy is particularly affected and suffers under present-day physiology. You can well imagine this, because it works with all manner of things that elude one's grasp, when one begins to think clearly.

We cannot confront the great challenges of our time with a few anthroposophical catchwords and phrases. It also does not suffice to dabble with physiology on the borderline between psychology and chemistry. The only way to proceed is to apply the methods of spiritual-scientific anthroposophy to physics and chemistry. If you are lazy—forgive me for this harsh expression, I don't mean it in such a radical sense in this case—you say: These matters can only be correctly judged, if one is clairvoyant. Therefore I will wait until I am clairvoyant. I won't venture to criticize physics and chemistry or even physiology.

My dear friends, you need not have insights that surpass ordinary perception in order to know that a corpse is dead and that it must have originated in life. Neither do you need to be clairvoyant in order to analyze properly the true facts of today's physics and chemistry, and to refer them back to their underlying living element, once your attention is directed to the fact that this living element is to be found by studying the “lower man.” There you will have the supplement you need for chemistry and physics. Make the attempt, for once, really to study the mechanism of human movement.⁸⁶ Instead of constantly drawing axis of coordinates and putting the movements into them apart from man; instead of multiplying differential coefficients and integrals, make a serious attempt to study the mechanics of movement in man. As they were once experienced from within, so do you now study them from without. Then you will have what you need, to add to your outer observation of nature, in physics and chemistry.

In outer nature, those who proclaim atomism will always put you in the wrong. They even work themselves up to the very spiritual statement that when one speaks about matter in the sense of a modern physicist, matter is no longer material. The physicists, themselves are saying it;⁸⁷ our very opponents are saying it. In this case they are right, and if we in our replies to them stop short at the half-truths—that is to say, at the final conditions of being—we shall never be equal to that which issues from them.

Here lie the tasks of the specialists, here lie the tasks of those who have the requisite preliminary training, in one or another branch of science.

Then we shall not establish a physicized or chemicized Anthroposophy, but a true anthroposophical chemistry, anthroposophical physics. Then we shall not establish a new medicine as a mere variation on the old, but a true anthroposophical medicine.

The tasks are at hand. They are outlined in all directions. Just as the simple heart can receive the observations that are scattered everywhere in our lectures or lecture cycles, and that give spiritual sustenance, so too the need is to take up on every hand the hints that can lead us to the much-needed progress in the several domains of science.

In the future, it will not suffice if man and nature do not again become one. What physics and chemistry study in nature as the final state of being, must be supplemented by the state of being in “lower man” belonging to the realm of physics and chemistry—in man who is dependent on the physical and etheric bodies. It is important that this be sought. It is not important to single out as essential the valences of the structural formulas or the periodic law in chemistry, because these are but schemata. While they are quite useful as tools for counting and calculations, what matters is the following realization. If the chemical processes are externally observed, the chemical laws are not within them. They are contained in the origin of chemical processes. Hence, they are found only, if, with diligent effort, one tries to seek in the human being for the processes that occur in his circulation, in the activity of his fluids, through the actions of the etheric body. The explanation of the chemical processes in nature lies in the processes of the etheric body. These in turn are represented in the play of fluids in the human organism and are accessible to precise study.

Anthroposophy poses a serious challenge in this direction. This is why we have founded research institutes⁸⁸ in which serious, intensive work must begin. Then the methods gained from anthroposophy can be properly nurtured. This is also the main point of our medical therapy; namely, that the old, confused physiology finally be replaced with a real chemistry and psychology. Without this one can never assert anything about the processes of illness and healing in human nature, because every course of illness is simply an abnormal psychological process, and each healing process is an abnormal chemical process. Only to the extent that we know how to influence the chemical process of healing and how to grasp the psychological course of illness will we attain to genuine pathology and therapy. This will emerge from the anthroposophical manner of observation. If one does not want to recognize this potential in anthroposophy, then one only wants something a bit out of the ordinary and is unwilling to get to work in earnest. Actually, everything that I have sketched here is only a description of how the work should proceed, because a genuine psychology and chemistry come into being through work. All the prerequisites for this work already exist, because very man facts can be found in scientific literature that researchers have accidentally discovered but don't understand. Those of us who work in the spirit of anthroposophy should take up these facts and contribute something to their full comprehension. Take as an example what I emphasized yesterday⁸⁹ in speaking to a smaller group of people. The essential point about the spleen is that it is really an excretory organ. The spleen itself is in turn an excretion of the functions in the etheric body. Countless facts are available in medical literature that need only be utilize—and that is the point: they should be utilized—then the facts will be brought together and what is needed will result.

A single person might accomplish this if a human life spanned six hundred years. But by that time, other tasks would confront him and his accomplishments would long since be outmoded. These things must be attained through cooperation, through people working together. So this is the second task—we must see to it that this becomes possible. I believe that these tasks of the Anthroposophical Society will emerge most clearly and urgently from a truly realistic study of the history of natural science in recent times.

This history shows us at every turn that something great and wonderful has arisen through modern science. In earlier times, the truly inanimate dead aspects could never be discerned, hence, nothing could be made of them. In those times inward semblance could never really be observed; therefore, it couldn't be brought to life by human effort, and hence, one couldn't arrive at freedom. Today, we confront a grandiose world, which became possible only because natural science studies the dead aspects. This is the world of technology. Its special character can be discerned from the fact that the word “technique” is taken from the Greek. There, it still signifies “art,” implying that art reveals, where technology still contains spirit. Today, technology only utilizes spirit in the sense of the abstract, spirit-devoid thoughts. Technology could be achieved only by attaining a proper knowledge of what is dead. Once in the course of humanity's evolution it was necessary to concentrate upon the dead; it thus entered into the realm of technology. Today, man stands in the midst of this realm of technology that surrounds him on all sides. He looks out on it and realizes that here at last is a sphere in which there is no spirit in the proper sense. In regard to the spiritual element, it is important that in all areas of technology human beings experience this inner feeling, almost akin to one of pain over the death of a person. If feeling and sensation can be developed in knowledge, then such a feeling will arise, somewhat like the sensation one experiences when a person is dying and one sees the living organism turn into a corpse. Alongside the abstract indifferent cold knowledge, such a feeling will arise through the true realization that technology is the processing of the inanimate, the dead. This feeling will become the most powerful impetus to seek the spirit in new directions.

I could well imagine the following view of the future: Man looks out over the chimneys, the factories, the telephones—everything that technology has produced in wondrous ways in the most recent times. He stands atop this purely mechanical world, the grave of all things spiritual, and he calls out longingly into the universe—and his yearning will be fulfilled. Just as the dead stone yields the living fiery spark if handled correctly, so from our dead technology will emerge the living spirit, if human beings have the right feelings about what technology is.

On the other hand, one need only understand clearly what pure thinking is; namely the semblance from which can be brought forth the most powerful moral impulses—those individual moral impulses that I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom. Then, in a new way, man will face the feeling that was once confronted by Nicholas Cusanus and Meister Eckhart. They said: When I life myself beyond everything that I am ordinarily accustomed to observe, I come to “nothingness” with all that I have learned. But in this “nothingness” there arises for me the “I.” If man really penetrates to pure thinking, then he finds in it the nothingness that turns into the I and from which emerges the whole wealth of ethical actions, that will create new worlds. I can imagine a person who first lets all knowledge of the preset, as inaugurated by natural science, impress itself on him and then (centuries after Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus) turns his gaze inward and with today's mode of thinking arrives at the nothingness of his inner life. In it, he discovers that the spirit really speaks to him. I can imagine that these two images merge. On the one hand, man goes to the place where barren technology has left the spirit behind. There he calls out into cosmic expanses for the spirit. On the other hand, he stops, thinks and looks within himself. And here, out of his inner being, he receives the divine answer to the call he sent out into the distances of the universe.

When we learn, through a new, anthroposophically imbued natural science, to let the calls of infinite longing for the spirit, sent out into the world, resound in our inner being, then this will be the right starting point. Here, through an “anthroposophized” inner perception, we will find the answer to the yearning call for the spirit, desperately sounded out into the universe.

I did not want to describe the development of natural science in recent times in a merely documentary fashion. Rather, I wanted to show you the standpoint of a human being, who comprehends this natural-scientific development and, in a difficult moment of humanity's evolution, knows the right things to say to himself in regard to the progress of mankind.

• 83. See Drawings, pages 92, 95 and compare with the ones on page 125.
• 84. See footnote 45.
• 85. See Rudolf Steiner, The Karma of Vocation (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1984).
• 86. Literature: Adolf Fink has studied the mechanism of human movement and the heat produced by muscular work, and published in 1857, 1869, and 1882 Gesammelte Schriften, (1903–06 in German).
• 87. In the beginning of the century Rudolf Steiner pointed to the speech of the philosopher and Prime Minister A.J. Balfour of August 17, 1904, in front of the British Association, immediately after it was held; see Rudolf Steiner, Lucifer Gnosis (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1969), GA Bibl. No. 34, p. 467. Often Steiner also mentioned the lecture of Max Planck of 1910: “Die Stellung der Neueren Physic zur Mechanischen Weltanshaung” in Max Planck, Physikalische Abhandlungen und Vorträge (Brunswick, Germany, 1958), Vol. 3, pp. 30–46.
• 88. In 1920 a research institute was founded in Stuttgart for physics and chemistry, with a biological branch through the joint stock company “Der Kommende Tag.” A few years later it was transferred to Dornach. The first works from the Institute were published in Der Kommende Tag: Scientific Research Institute News. It contains Heft I (1921), “Milzfunktion und Blaettchen Frage” von L. Kolisko; Heft II (1923), “Der Villardsche Versuch” von Dr. Rer. Nat. R.E. Maier; Heft III (1923): “Physiologischer und Physicalischer Nachweis Kleinster Entitaeten” von L. Kolisko. Later works appeared in the volumes Gaea Sophia, Jahrbuch der Wissenschaftlichen Sektion der Freien Hochschule fuer Geisteswissenschaft am Goetheanum, Volume I (1926), etc.
• 89. From this scientific discussion of January 5 no known copy exists.

[ 1 ] In the last lecture I told you that contemporary humanity cannot know anything because our thinking nowadays does not lead to real knowledge. In earlier times, say a thousand or fifteen hundred years ago, whoever wanted to learn anything had to undergo special training in thinking. People did not believe that they could understand anything of the spiritual world with their ordinary, everyday thinking, and therefore there existed a kind of schooling of thinking. Today, on the other hand, none of the education we receive enables us to educate our thinking in any real way.

[ 1 ] This means that we are quite unable to think. I will give you an example that you probably saw in the newspaper a few days ago.⁶ There was an article on a very common dream, a recurrent dream of flying. We can all remember dreams of flying, floating, or falling. Such dreams often occur soon after we go to bed. But you know all this. In this article a writer, versed only in today's natural scientific thinking, attempts to explain this kind of dream. You will see that this kind of thinking leads nowhere in such matters. He says: "This dream of flying, according to Dr. Richard Traugott, is actually induced or triggered by a contraction of the body." What is the writer saying here, what does he believe? He thinks that at the time of going to sleep the body contracts or twitches. But, I ask you, has it not happened to you that you have had this same experience when you are awake? And when does it happen to you? As far as my own experience goes, this kind of sudden jolt or start happens when you are afraid. It is when you experience something startling or frightening that you experience that kind of bodily jerking or contracting. The same thing can happen if, let's say, you go out onto the street and you see a man whom you believed to be in America. At the moment you notice him, your body is jolted—because you are surprised. Now you could not imagine that starting with what has just been described you would feel yourself flying! The problem is that people can invent all kinds of ideas, but those ideas do not particularly fit the observation. The thoughts seem to fit as long as one makes experiments in the laboratory with lifeless matter; but the minute one tries to explain something real, they don't fit anymore.

[ 1 ] Let us continue with this writer. He says: "The cause of this contraction resides in the difference of muscle tension in sleeping and in waking. In the waking state there is a constant flow of energy from the central nervous system to the muscles." He assumes that in the waking state there are constant electric currents moving between the muscles and the nerves. "These energy currents create the muscle tension necessary for the maintenance of the bodily balance that the harmonious interplay of the musculature requires. In sleep this muscle tension largely disappears. During the period of going to sleep the reflexivity of the spinal cord actually increases, and thus the relaxation of the muscle tension, or rather the stimulus that this process exerts on the spinal cord, easily leads to this twitching reflex." So presumably, in the nervous system of the spinal cord there is a stimulus that is continuous and that increases the muscle tension. The writer goes on: "Other sensations that exist in our organs, particularly the rising and falling movements of the chest musculature and the rib cage, may even more directly influence the development of this feeling of flying, floating in the air, or swimming." In other words, muscle tension increases, contracting the body to such an extent that finally, when we are asleep, we experience a condition like that of flying or swimming.

[ 1 ] Now, after all this, just think back in your own experience to when you were breathless (panting) and your chest was tight. Did it ever occur to you that you were having a swimming sensation—not to mention the sensation of flying? On the contrary, in such moments you feel particularly heavy. The article goes on to say other things. For instance, attention is called to the amount of pressure and resistance we feel, when awake, on our bodies where they rest on something. Then, supposedly, when we fall asleep, we become aware of the lack of pressure and resistance. But really, gentlemen, this doesn't make sense. After all, when we are awake and walk, we actually are supported only on a very small surface! We feel that we are walking on the soles of our feet. Of course, when we sit down, we are resting on a larger surface than the soles of our feet. But even if you were to add the surface area of both these places where the body contacts the outside world, this still does not compare to the surface we need when we are asleep. So, as you can see, this kind of thinking really leads one to talk nonsense. This kind of thinking is what passes for science today. Our same scientist tells us that the electric currents in the nerves are stronger when we are asleep; they stimulate the muscles, and they cause the sensation of flying—so that one believes one is flying. Or he tells us that the support disappears when we sleep! One can hardly believe what he goes on to say, for he speaks of: "the disappearance of the perception of pressure and resistance, that in the waking state is present in all the parts of the body that need a support . ." It is not to be believed that he could fail to take into account that there is a much larger surface being used in sleep. But he doesn't care about this, because contemporary thinking never really reaches any real explanations or clarifies what really happens when we go to sleep.

[ 1 ] Let me now clarify what really happens when we go to sleep. From this you will see how one can really achieve insight into the higher, spiritual world. First I will show you this in an image. Remember that this is only an image! Let's assume you have here someone's physical body. (He draws it on the blackboard, left) Within it, there is an etheric, supersensible body—I will draw it in yellow. This fills out the physical body and is invisible. When we are asleep, these two bodies remain behind in the bed. When we are awake, the astral body is also within those two bodies—I will draw the astral body in red here. Within the astral body there is the ego, the fourth member—I will show it in violet. This, then, is the human being when awake: physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego—inserted one within the other.

[ 1 ] Let us now look at our sleeper: when he is in bed, he has only a physical body and an etheric body (drawing, center). Outside these are his astral body and ego (drawing, right). What lies in the bed therefore may be compared to a plant, for the plant also has a physical body and an etheric body. If a plant had no etheric body it would be a stone, and it would not be alive and could not grow. So what is lying in bed is like a plant—the plant does not think, and what lies in bed does not think in the sense of conscious thought. But it is also true that thoughts are in there somewhere, as I have already explained to you; and sometimes these thoughts are even more clever than those we use when we are conscious. However, there are no daytime thoughts such as we are used to, and in this respect what lies in bed is like a plant.

[ 1 ] But when we describe what lives outside that which lies in bed, this feels no boundaries. You can start to have an explanation of this, if you notice that when you leave the boundaries of your body, your consciousness disappears. When you are in your physical body, your astral body has to be as big as it is; but when you leave it, then your astral body suddenly grows—it grows to gigantic dimensions, because the physical body no longer contains it and makes it small. At the moment you go to sleep, at the moment you move out of your physical body, you feel as if you were growing larger and larger.

[ 1 ] Now, let's say you drink a glass of something. I guess I'd better not talk about a glass of alcohol, or else the word would be spread that I speak in favor of alcohol. As you know this is a rather unpleasant issue in Switzerland these days. So let us say you drink a glass of water with a little raspberry juice. If you put some raspberry juice in a glass of water, you can taste the raspberry juice easily. If, however, instead of a glass, you take a small bucket containing the equivalent of five bottles of water, and if you put only the same amount of raspberry juice in it as you put earlier in your glass, the raspberry juice is diluted—spread out over a much larger amount of water. You have much less of the raspberry taste. When I was a little boy, I grew up in the vicinity of a winery. There were big cellars with barrels of 400 buckets of wine. If we had filled one of these with water instead of wine and had added a little raspberry juice and stirred it, you could have drunk the water without at all realizing there was raspberry juice present. This is clear, I am sure. Now, gentlemen, as long as the astral body is as small as the physical body it is like the raspberry juice in the glass of water; your astral body expands only to the limit of your physical body. But when you leave the physical body in sleep, it no longer contains the astral. The astral body spreads out, just as the raspberry juice spreads out in the 400 buckets of water. Therefore in your astral body you have no consciousness. Consciousness is created through the fact that the astral body is concentrated or contracted.

[ 1 ] Here you have a true explanation for what actually happens when you go to sleep. As long as we are awake, our astral body is in our fingers and our toes, in all our muscles. When we feel the astral body in our muscles, we have the feeling of being dependent on our physical body. The physical body is heavy. We feel the heaviness of the physical body. In the moment we leave the physical body, we leave behind its heaviness. In this brief moment before consciousness has completely disappeared in sleep, we no longer feel the heaviness. We do not feel that we are falling, for in fact we are rising; we feel, rather, that we are floating into the air. This sense of not being bound to a physical body, this sense of enlargement, is what we experience as flying or swimming. We can feel ourselves moving freely until consciousness disappears and we go to sleep completely. In contrast to what has just been described, all the natural scientist can say is: our muscles twitch. And, as you well know, when our muscles twitch we feel them more than we usually do, and when that happens, it does not make us feel that we are flying—on the contrary, that is when we feel most narrowly tied to the physical. Another example is that when someone is surprised—Wow!—his mouth gapes open. This is because he is then so much connected with his muscles that he can no longer control them. The experiences of one's muscles twitching in surprise, or loosing control when "wowed," are the opposite of those prevailing when we go to sleep. When we go to sleep, we leave behind our muscles; therefore there cannot be a contraction of the muscles. When we lie down and rest on a larger surface of our bodies, there is rather a relaxation of the muscles. We do not need to hold our muscles together by means of our astral body. They relax, they do not become tenser. Because we no longer need to exert an influence on them, we believe that we are free of our muscles, and because of this we fly away with our lighter astral body.

[ 1 ] Now consider for a moment what I told you last time about learning to think in a way opposite to our everyday thinking. Here you can see how today's ordinary thinking, when trying to explain the human being, results in the opposite of the truth. Therefore the first thing you must do is to think correctly—which really means being able to think the opposite of what holds true in the physical world.

[ 1 ] People have lost the habit of thinking correctly. They can no longer think in such a way that they can reach the spiritual world through thinking.

[ 1 ] There are many people today who speak our language, and this language contains the word "spirit," so they use it. The problem is that they no longer have any real picture of what the word "spirit" means. They can make mental pictures only of physical things. But if we want to think of the spiritual, we come to something without physical characteristics, and therefore to something that you cannot perceive in the physical world. But thinking nowadays is so tainted that people actually wish to see the spiritual world in a physical way. As a result of this, they become what we call spiritists. They say to themselves: If a physical body can move a table, the fact that I can do this means I exist. Then they continue: If a spirit exists, it must also be able to move a table. And this is how the practice of "table-tapping" originated. People rely on table-tapping for signals from the spiritual world. This is because their thinking has become twisted or warped. Their thinking is materialistic in nature. It says: I must have the spiritual, but I must have it in a physical guise. Spiritism is the most materialistic concept of all, and it is very important to understand that.

[ 1 ] Now perhaps someone will say: But I have been present where people sat around a table and linked hands in a chain, and the table started to move and hop around, and all kinds of things of that sort. The external facts are true. It is quite possible to sit around a table, to make a chain of hands, and at some point the table will be set in motion. But this is the case when any small motion in some way starts a larger motion. If we have a railroad train with a locomotive and an engineer, the driver does not get out of his engine and go to the back of the train and start pushing it when he wants to start moving. In fact, he would not be able to do that. He would never be able to set a train into fast motion in this way. As you well know, the engineer makes a very small motion, and the train soon starts to move very fast and pull many cars. Why? Because the connections are established in the right way so as to result in the train moving. In this way, physically, a very small motion starts a larger motion.

[ 1 ] This is the case in the purely physical process of people creating a chain of hands around a table. They then start to twitch very slightly and, lo, and behold! from these small motions a larger motion results. This motion is transferred through the material plane. But this is really a very ordinary physical event.

[ 1 ] Now, if there is one person among those present at the table-tapping who has any thoughts in his subconscious, then these thoughts are translated into the twitching of the finger tips, causing a response, which forms letters which we can then read. However, what we read as an answer in such cases was always present somewhere in the subconscious of one of the people there. This is true, no matter how clever the answers seem to be. I have explained to you that when a person enters into the subconscious, he is entering something much more profound than his ordinary consciousness. This is can be seen in the practice of table-tapping. Nevertheless, the fact of people turning to spiritism is proof of the strength of materialism in our time.

[ 1 ] Ordinary thinking does not bring us to any true explanation of what a human being is. That was obvious from the newspaper article I mentioned here today wherein there was an attempt simply to explain a flying dream. The author of the article explains it in exactly the opposite way to which it should be explained. People no longer seem able to study things of real interest. I have often talked to you about dreams. Let me now repeat a few important facts.

[ 1 ] Let's say someone dreams he is in Basel in some town square. Suddenly—in dreams everything is possible—he finds himself standing in front of a fence.

[ 1 ] The fence has pickets: here one, there another; and here one is missing and there is a gap; and then another picket, and another gap. Now he dreams that he wants to jump over the fence, and he impales himself on one of the pickets, and this hurts—hurts so much that he wakes up and notices that he has not been impaled, but rather that he has a terrible toothache. He has a toothache and it wakes him up. He has a missing tooth in his upper jaw and he also has another missing tooth and this is what he saw in his dream picture as missing pickets in a fence. There was an exact correspondence to his upper jaw and its missing teeth. He then touches one of his teeth and he finds out which one hurts him. There is a cavity, and it hurts. One can certainly have such a dream.

[ 1 ] What is really happening here? This whole episode was actually played out in the dreamer's waking life. You can really say: So long as I was asleep, I was happy; I did not feel my awful toothache. Why not? It is because the astral body was outside the physical body, and the etheric body does not feel the toothache. You can hit a stone as much as you want, and even break little pieces off it, but the stone as such does not feel it. You can tear a plant and the plant will not feel it, because it does not have an astral body—it has only an etheric body. You would soon stop picking roses and other flowers in the meadows, if the plants were to hiss like snakes because it hurt them. However, it does not hurt the plant, and a human being, when asleep, is like a plant. As long as we are asleep, the tooth does not hurt. But when the astral body slips back into the physical body, as soon as this happens, we 'inhabit' our teeth. Then, you see, the astral body is in the teeth. Only when we are completely in our body do we feel what hurts our body. When we are not quite within our body, what hurts appears to us as an external object.

[ 1 ] Say, for instance, I burn a match: when looked at from without I will see it burning white. But if I had somehow lived within that match with my conscious astral body, I would not have only seen it externally. I would have felt it as a pain! In the case of the teeth, until I am fully in my body, when I first slip in, I feel them as if they were external objects, and I therefore make an external picture of them for myself that in some way resembles some aspect of them. Since I cannot make quite the right picture, which I could do only through spiritual science, I make a picture of a row of pickets instead of a row of teeth. Where there are gaps in my row of teeth, I have gaps in the row of pickets. As you can see, as a result of the confused picture that arises as a consequence of not quite being fully in the body, there is an error. Because when we are asleep we are outside our bodies, the inner is interpreted as the outer. I have been able to study what happens in such cases when observing little children as I taught them. They have no feeling as yet for the correct use of speech and I have often experienced that a child who has just started to write "Zahn," the word for tooth, will instead write "Zaun," the German word for fence. Such a child has to be told that this is false, wrong. Somehow the child was scared entering his body—not leaving it, but entering it. This does not cause a flying dream but a fearful dream, a nightmare. The child has a nightmare and somehow expresses this in the form of the fence dream. There is a connection between the child's misuse of words and the images of the dream. The images of the dream come into existence through words. There are always verbal connections. These help us to see more clearly what is really happening.

[ 1 ] The man I referred to before—Richard Traugott—has written a great deal about dreams, most of it is as absurd as what he wrote about the flying dream.⁷ When he speaks, equipped with ordinary science, he says exactly the opposite of what is actually the case. He does not understand that because the astral body grows larger when leaving the physical body it perceives itself as flying, and that when it is forced to shrink on reentering it pictures itself as someone (or something) who is squeezed somehow. The muscles tighten, causing an anxiety dream. The anxiety dream occurs precisely when the man who wrote the article would claim that there should be a flying dream. It is also possible to have anxiety dreams when the process of going to sleep does not proceed properly. Let's say, for example, that you are lying down and you have the sensation that you are being strangled by someone. This can happen if you are in the process of going to sleep and somewhere there is a disturbance, so that you cannot go to sleep, but you keep trying to do so anyway. You pass in and out of sleep, and returning into your body correctly is not quite possible because you are still tired. This can be felt as a strangling sensation, because the astral body is being forced in some way, and cannot quite enter correctly. Knowing this kind of thing, you can explain all these matters much better.

[ 1 ] This brings us to the fact that one more thing is necessary if we really want to know the spiritual world. One must be absolutely clear about the fact that the physical body is not involved here. One must be able to live in the astral body alone, in a way that does not involve the physical body at all. If one wants to know the spiritual world, one must induce a sleeplike condition in oneself. In ordinary life this occurs only when one slips out of one's physical body, which is viewed externally as the condition of sleep. But as I mentioned in my example of the raspberry juice in the large casks of water, in sleep the astral body (or juice) normally becomes gigantic and this must not be allowed to happen. The astral body must be held together through an inner effort of another body. Do not think now about the astral body and the human ego, just think again about the image of the drops of raspberry juice. Create a vivid image of a glass of water with only one drop of raspberry juice in it. The raspberry juice expands in the water to the limit of the glass, but it is still perceptible. But if you assume a container a hundred thousand times larger, then you would not be able to perceive anything of the juice, and this is comparable to our normal inner experience in sleep. Now, imagine for a moment that this drop of raspberry juice takes on an impish character. I put this impish drop in a cask with four hundred buckets of water; it has a real temper and says to itself: I am not going to let myself get mixed up in all this water, I am going to remain myself. Were this to happen, you would then have a huge casket with one drop of raspberry juice in it; and if you reached this drop with the tip of your tongue, if you went through all that water to the exact spot where the raspberry juice held itself together, then you would actually taste the sweetness of that single drop.

[ 1 ] I must stress here that I am speaking only metaphorically about the raspberry juice with its impish character. The opponents of Anthroposophy can be quite funny at times. There was once an article in a Hamburg newspaper in which Anthroposophy was insulted from all possible sides; and there, it is true, I was actually seen as an imp or devil, and in that case indeed it was meant very seriously, as if I myself were not just an imp but the devil's own helper—as if I were the very devil come into the world. To return therefore to the image I gave you: the drop of raspberry juice is only a devil's imp insofar as it can keep itself quite small when it is put into the water.

[ 1 ] In the case of the astral body, it is possible for it to stay as small when it leaves the physical body as it is when it is within the physical body; but it can develop the forces necessary to do this only by learning to think sharp, well-honed thoughts. I told you we must develop independent thinking. This independent thinking is much stronger than the weak thinking possessed by most people.

[ 1 ] The first requirement for knowledge of the spiritual world is very sharp and well-honed thinking. The second requirement is the ability to think backward. The outer physical world proceeds forward, therefore one needs to learn to think in reverse. This strengthens one's thinking. One must learn that truth which I told you about last time: the part is greater than the whole. This once again is something that contradicts what the physical world seems to indicate; but if one can do this one can put oneself into the spiritual world. All these things I have mentioned cause the astral body to remain small in spite of the fact it is not contained in the physical body—so that it does not simply flow out into the common astral ocean.

[ 1 ] All these requirements fit together, but you must be careful that all these things are taken with the same sobriety and the same scientific attitude with which the physical world is ordinarily examined. The moment we slip into fantasy, we are finished with the scientific. Our clear and definite approach must never be allowed to turn into fantasy.

[ 1 ] Let's take the case when one has a pain in one's big toe. You feel this pain through your astral body. If we had only a physical body, we would not feel the pain; and likewise if we had only an etheric body, we would not feel the pain. If this were not true, the plant would squeal when it was plucked! But we squeal when we have a pain in our big toe—of course, we don't actually squeal, but you know what I mean. We all feel like making a noise when we experience a pain of this kind. Why is this?

[ 1 ] Our astral body is spread throughout our whole physical body, and when our astral body reaches the spot where something in our big toe is out of order, this is brought up to the brain by the astral body, and we have a mental picture of our pain. But let's assume someone has a sick brain that does not allow him to register the pain in his big toe in that certain spot in the brain where it is normally felt. One needs a healthy place in one's brain to be able to register the pain in one's big toe. Assuming this spot in the brain is sick, and remembering what I have told you—that neither the soul nor the astral body can become sick—the pain in your big toe cannot be registered. What happens under these conditions? The specific place in the individual's physical brain is sick, but this still leaves the etheric aspect of the brain. The etheric aspect of the brain that remains is not properly supported by the physical part, and we may therefore ask: What will the etheric body do in such a case? The etheric body makes a great deal of this toe; not only does it notice it, it makes a mountain of it. The pain to the etheric body will appear to us as little beings, little mountain-climbing beings sitting in this mountain. So here we have the big toe transferred into a spatial picture, into a large space—just because the brain is sick. If this were to happen to you, you would swear that there was a mountain in front of you. In actuality this mountain is only your big toe, and it is clear that this is a delusion. It is very important to protect oneself from such sick delusions when one penetrates into the spiritual world, or else one can slip into total fantasy. How can we avoid these delusions? This has to be done through real schooling. We must learn what can result when the physical body becomes sick in any way, so that we will not be confused when merely physical manifestations appear to be real spiritual occurrences! For this reason we must learn truly active thinking, thinking backwards, thinking such as I described last time—a thinking very different from our ordinary thinking in the physical world. In this way one will be protected against delusion, and one will recognize the physical origin of what we have just described. In earlier times people were prepared so to penetrate safely into the spiritual world. There was a real method or art of preparation, which was called dialectic. This meant that people really had to learn to think. Nowadays, if one were to suggest to people that they must first learn to think, they would pull our hair out—for everyone is convinced that they already know how to think. But if one looks back to earlier times, it is actually true that there was a real schooling of thinking, or a dialectic. One had to be able to think both forward and backward, and one had to be able to form concepts in the right way.

[ 1 ] How, we might ask, did this training take place? It took place through the activity of speaking, and at the same time as one spoke, one learned to think. I have just given you an example of this, when I talked of children first learning to speak and then learning to think. But of course such thinking is at first entirely childlike. Nowadays this childlike thinking is preserved by people throughout life, although it is worthless in later life. If one were to continue to learn thinking through speaking this way, then one would have to ensure that with each in-breath and each out-breath the air moved correctly in and out for correct speaking is connected with correct breathing. For speaking to be rightly connected to the breathing process the air must come in and go out in the proper manner.

[ 1 ] Much depends on one's being prepared for correct speaking, because correct speaking prepares one for correct breathing. Whoever knows how to breathe correctly can also speak for a long time without becoming tired. Through the art of dialectic, one once learned how to speak and breathe correctly, and therefore how to think properly. These days, however, people are no longer able to think properly, for their breath keeps bumping into the organ of their breathing at every moment. Just listen to some academics when they speak. First of all, they do not speak very much in general; they usually read, and they use their eyes very much for support. But if you listen to an academic speaking, for the most part it is as if the person were short of breath. It is as if he were constantly bumping into his own body.

[ 1 ] For this reason everything that is said becomes a picture of the physical body. Whether one has a sick spot in one's brain, and consequently makes a mountain, with mountain spirits, out of a painful big toe; or whether one keeps bumping into oneself with one's breath whenever one thinks, with the result that true thinking cannot emerge—it is all the same. Because your breath is constantly bumping into your physical body, you will perceive the whole world as a physical phenomenon. Now, what really is the source of this materialism? Materialism comes from two facts: people do not know how to think correctly, and they do not breathe out correctly. It seems to them as if the whole world were made up of pressure and thrust—which they have in themselves—because they have not been prepared through right thinking. Therefore we can say: A person is a materialist because he cannot get out of himself; inwardly, he keeps bumping into himself.

[ 1 ] Let us return for a moment to Mr. Traugott. What he should really say is that the flying dream is caused by the fact that we go out of ourselves, and the astral body starts to grow larger. However, he does not conclude this. He thinks, indeed he thinks a great deal. And what happens if someone wants to think, and think some more, when in fact he is unable to think? What really happens? First of all, you will see him frown, and if this doesn't help he will hit his forehead and thus tighten his muscles, and then he tightens them some more, and he may even hit himself again so that his muscles are really tight. What is Mr. Traugott really doing when he is thinking about dreams. Instead of looking at things as they really are, he tightens his own muscles, and what he finds is what he himself is doing—muscle tension. I've got it he says: the dream is caused by muscle tension! He confuses his own attempt at thinking about dreams with reality. We can all learn something from Mr. Traugott. We can learn what is happening to him when he thinks about things, and when you yourself read the story. What happens today when we read what people print is that we learn what they themselves imagine is true. Whenever we read the newspapers today, we have to say we really learn very little about what is really happening in the world, but we do learn what the people who sit in the editorial rooms would like to be happening in the world.

[ 1 ] The same is true of today's materialistic science. Through it you will not learn what the world is; rather, you will learn what materialist professors think about the world. If you penetrate this a little, you will see that Anthroposophy has no intention of deceiving the world, but in fact it wants to put honesty in the place of deception and illusion, and in place of what is often untrue, very often consciously so.

[ 1 ] You may see from this discussion that honesty, inner honesty, is the fourth quality that must be present if we are to be able to reach into the spiritual world. If you contemplate the world in this way, you will see there is very little honesty operating in the world, and it is no surprise that not much of it can be seen in science.

[ 1 ] We have therefore seen four required qualities: independent thinking, thinking not linked to the outer world, thinking whose quality is completely different from the physical world, and thinking honestly. We will look at other characteristics next time.

• 6. The report appeared in the Basler Nachrichten, July 5, 1923.
• 7. For example: The Dream, Psychologically and Cultural-Historically Viewed, Würzburg, 1913.

1.) Natural science creates the necessity for man to know himself. But it contains no means of acquiring such knowledge. Behavior of natural scientists: Nägeli, Hertwig, Ziehen.

2.) In discussions about scientific questions, e.g. about the life force, I am always on the side of the natural scientists: according to du Bois Reymond. But he too used a dictum to inhibit the transition into the spiritual realm.

3.) One cannot speak of a speculated life force, but one can speak of a perceivable body of formative forces. But in order for such perception to come about, mere imagining must be transformed into perception. The “seer” and the “non-seer”. —

4.) For a long time, only body and soul have been spoken of. This was acceptable as long as the soul was attributed spiritual properties. When this was no longer done, the natural consequence was “psychology without soul”.

5.) The spirit cannot be known through the usual soul experiences. Not even if these are “mystically” intensified.

The physiologist says: a chemical change in the blood is necessary for the feeling of hunger. The spiritual researcher says: for an idea to have a will-arousing effect, it must undergo a change in its imaginative content.

6.) One speaks of the phenomena of the soul in such a way that one regards as its laws precisely that which causes the spirit to perish: associations.

7.) Drawing from the “I”, which is “spirit” after all.

8.) In the soul, mere sensing, etc. of the truth, the soul allows a glimpse of a supernatural world, etc. The spirit allows it to be recognized: it is the eternal.

Du Bois Reymond believed that where supernaturalism begins, science ends: a future view of the world will only recognize a knowledge of nature to the extent that it is based on supernaturalism:

Where supernaturalism ends, science dies.

Because you have: atoms without content.

Laws without entities.

Apparitions of souls without ego entities, etc.

In ordinary life, the soul does not have the strength to know itself as “spirit”. It has even less strength to recognize the spirit in the outside world. In the outside world, the soul encounters the supersensible when it becomes more powerful within. When the ability to live in mere imagination is developed, when it is heightened to an imaginative cognitive faculty, then the world of life presents itself as an impression from the outside – one gets to know the different pace between one's own and the foreign course of life – for this it is necessary to go back 2-3 days in one's life – then behind it lies the true soul. This is no longer influenced by the remnants of sensation - to see it as a product of the brain would be like wanting to see the table or another person as a product of the brain, because one knows: with everything one is through the brain, one stands outside of this true soul. It includes practical realization: Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu nisi ipses intellectus. —

This “true soul” must not evoke dreams or fantasies, or even visions or hallucinations. For all these arise through the bodily organism: what is no longer bodily must be sensed like an external object -: one returns to the sensation - one senses the “spirit”.