The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Wherever we, as human beings, have striven for knowledge, whether as mystics or realists or in any way at all, the acquisition of self-knowledge has been demanded of us. But as has been repeatedly emphasised on other occasions, self-knowledge is by no means as easy to achieve as many people believe—anthroposophists sometimes among them. The anthroposophist should be constantly aware of the hindrances he will encounter in his efforts. But the acquisition of self-knowledge is absolutely essential if we are to reach a worthy goal in world-existence and if our actions are to be worthy of us as members of humanity.

Let us ask ourselves the question: Why is the achievement of self-knowledge so difficult? Man is a very complicated being. If we mean to speak truly of his inner life, his life of soul, we shall not begin by regarding it as something simple and elementary. We shall rather have the patience and perseverance, the will, to penetrate more deeply into the marvellous creation of the Divine-Spiritual Powers known to us as Man.

Before we investigate the nature of self-knowledge, two aspects of the life of the human soul may present themselves to us. Just as the magnet has North and South poles, just as light and darkness are present in the world, so there are two poles in man's life of soul. These two poles become evident when we observe a person placed in two contrasting situations. Suppose we are watching someone who is entirely absorbed in the contemplation of some strikingly beautiful and impressive natural phenomenon. We see how still he is standing, moving neither hand nor foot, never turning his eyes away from the spectacle presented to him, and we are aware that inwardly he is picturing his environment. That is one situation. Another is the following: a man is walking along the street and feels that someone has insulted him. Without thinking, he is roused to anger and gives vent to it by striking the person who insulted him. We are there witnessing a manifestation of forces springing from anger, a manifestation of impulses of will, and it is easy to imagine that if the action had been preceded by thought no blow need have been struck. We have now pictured two contrasting situations: in the one there is only ideation, a process in the life of thought from which all conscious will is absent; in the other there is no thought, no ideation, and immediate expression is given to an impulse of will. Here we have examples of the two extremes of human behaviour. The first pole is complete surrender to contemplation, to thought, in which the will has no part; the second pole is the impelling force of will without thought. These facts are revealed simply by observation of external life.

We can go into these things more deeply and we come then into spheres in which we can find our bearings only by summoning the findings of occult investigation to our aid. Here another polarity confronts us—that of sleeping and waking. From the elementary concepts of Anthroposophy we know that in waking life the four members of a man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego—are organically and actively interwoven, but that in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, while the astral body and ego are outpoured into the great world bordering on physical existence. These facts could also be approached from a different point of view. We might ask: what is there to be said about ideation, contemplation, thinking—and about the will and its impulses on the one hand during waking life and during sleep on the other?

When we penetrate more deeply into this question it becomes evident that in his present physical existence man is, in a certain sense, always asleep, Only there is a difference between sleep during the night and sleep during the day. Of this we can be convinced in a purely external way, for we know that we can wake in the occult sense during the day, that is to say, one can become clairvoyant and see into the spiritual world. The physical body in its ordinary state is asleep to what is then and there happening and we can rightly speak of an awakening of our spiritual senses. In the night, of course, we are asleep in the normal way. It can therefore be said: ordinary sleep is sleep as regards the outer physical world; daytime consciousness at the present time is sleep as regards the spiritual world.

These facts can be considered in yet another light. On deeper scrutiny we realise that in the ordinary waking condition of physical life, man has, as a rule, very little power or control over his will and its impulses. The will is very detached from daily life. Only consider how little of all you do from morning to evening is really the outcome of your own thinking, of your personal resolutions. When someone knocks at the door and you say “Come in!”, that cannot be called a decision of your own thinking and will. If you are hungry and seat yourself at a table, that cannot be called a decision made by the will, because it is occasioned by your circumstances, by the needs of your organism. Try to picture your daily life and you will find how little the will is directly influenced from the centre of your being. Why is this the case? Occultism shows us that in respect of his will man actually sleeps by day, that is to say he is not in the real sense present in his will-impulses at all. We may evolve better and better concepts and ideas; or we may become more highly moral, more cultured individuals, but we can do nothing as regards the will. By cultivating better thoughts we can work indirectly upon the will but as far as life is concerned we can do nothing directly to it, for in the waking life of day, our will is influenced only in an indirect way, namely through sleep. When we are asleep we do not think; ideation passes over into a state of sleep. The will, however, awakes, permeates our organism from outside, and invigorates it. We feel strengthened in the morning because what has penetrated into our organism is of the nature of will. That we are not aware of this activity of the will becomes comprehensible when we remember that all conceptual activity ceases when we ourselves are asleep. To begin with, therefore, this stimulus shall be given for further contemplation, further meditation. The more progress you make in self-knowledge, the more you will find confirmation of the truth of the words that man sleeps in respect of his will when he is awake and sleeps in respect of his conceptual life when he is asleep. The life of will sleeps by day; the life of thought sleeps by night.

Man is unaware that the will does not sleep during the night because he only knows how to be awake in his life of thought. The will does not sleep during the night but it then works as it were in a fiery element, works upon his body in order to restore what has been used up by day.

Thus there are two poles in man, the life of observation and ideation, and the impulses of will; and man is related in entirely opposite ways to these two poles. The whole life of soul moves in various nuances between these two poles, and we shall come nearer to understanding it by bringing this microcosmic life of soul into relation with the higher worlds.

From what has been said we have learnt that the life of thought and ideation is one of the poles of man's life of soul. This life of thought is something which seems unreal to materialistically minded people. Do we not often hear it said: “Oh, ideas and thoughts are only ideas and thoughts!” This is intended to imply that if someone has [a piece] of bread or meat in his hand it is a reality because it can be eaten, but a thought is only a thought, it is not a reality. Why is this said? It is because what man calls his thoughts are related to what thoughts really are as a shadow-image is to the actual thing. The shadow-image of a flower points you to the flower itself, to the reality. So it is with thoughts. Human thinking is the shadowing forth of ideas and beings belonging to a higher world, the world we call the Astral plane. And you represent thinking rightly to yourself when you picture the human head thus—it is not absolutely correct but simply diagrammatic. In the head are thoughts but these thoughts must be pictured as living beings on the Astral plane. Beings of the most varied kinds are at work there in the form of teeming concepts and activities which cast their shadow-images into men, and these processes are reflected in the human head as thinking.

As well as the life of thought in the human soul, there is also the life of feeling. Feelings fall into two categories: those of pleasure and sympathy and those of displeasure and antipathy. The former are aroused by good deeds, benevolent deeds; antipathy is aroused by evil, malevolent deeds. Here there is something more than and different from, the mere forming of concepts. We form concepts of things irrespectively of any other factor. But our soul experiences sympathy or antipathy only in respect of what is beautiful and good, or what is ugly and evil. Just as everything that takes place in man in the form of thoughts points to the Astral plane, so everything connected with sympathy or antipathy points to the realm we call Lower Devachan. Processes in the Heavenly World, or Devachan, are projected, mainly into our breast, as feelings of sympathy or antipathy for what is beautiful or ugly, for what is good or evil. So that in our feelings for the moral-aesthetic element, we bear within our souls shadow-reflections of the Heavenly World or Lower Devachan.

There is still a third province in the life of the human soul which must be strictly distinguished from the mere preference for good deeds. There is a difference between standing by and taking pleasure in witnessing some kindly deed and setting the will in action and actually performing some such deed. I will call pleasure in good deeds or displeasure in evil deeds the aesthetic element as against the moral element that impels a man to perform some good deed. The moral element is at a higher level than the purely aesthetic; mere pleasure or displeasure is at a lower level than the will to do something good or bad. In so far as our soul feels constrained to give expression to moral impulses, these impulses are the shadow-images of Higher Devachan, of the Higher Heavenly World.

It is easy to picture these three stages of activity of the human soul—the purely intellectual (thoughts, concepts), the aesthetic (pleasure or displeasure), and the moral (revealed in impulses to good or bad deeds)—as microcosmic images of the three realms which in the Macrocosm, the great Universe, lie one above the other. The Astral world is reflected in the world of thought; the Devachanic world is reflected in the aesthetic sphere of pleasure and displeasure; and the Higher Devachanic world is reflected as morality.

 Thoughts: Shadow-images of Beings of the Astral Plane (Waking) Sympathy and Antipathy: Shadow-images of Beings of Lower Devachan (Dreaming) Moral Impulses: Shadow-images of Beings of Higher Devachan (Sleeping) 

If we connect this with what was said previously concerning the two poles of the soul-life, we shall take the pole of intellect to be that which dominates the waking life, the life in which man is mentally awake. During the day he is awake in respect of his intellect; during sleep he is awake in respect of his will. It is because at night he is asleep in respect of intellect that he is unaware of what he is happening with his will. The truth is that what we call moral principles, moral impulses, are working indirectly into the will. And in point of fact man needs the life of sleep in order that the moral impulses he takes into himself through the life of thought can become active and effective. In his ordinary life today man is capable of accomplishing what is right only on the plane of intellect; he is less able to accomplish anything on the moral plane for there he is dependent upon help coming from the Macrocosm.

What is already within us can bring about the further development of intellectuality, but the Gods must come to our aid if we are to acquire greater moral strength. We go to sleep in order that we may plunge into the Divine Will where the intellect does not intervene and where Divine Forces transform into the power of will the moral principles we accept, where they instill into our will that which we could otherwise receive only into our thoughts.

Between these two poles, that of the will which wakes by night and of the intellect which is awake by day, lies the sphere of aesthetic appreciation which is continuously present in man. During the day man is not fully awake—at least only the most prosaic, pedantic individuals are always fully awake in waking life. We must always be able to dream a little even by day when we are awake; we must be able to give ourselves up to the enjoyment of art, of poetry, or of some other activity that is not concerned wholly with crass reality. Those who can give themselves up in this way form a connection with something that can enliven and invigorate the whole of existence. To give oneself up to such imaginings is like a dream making its way into waking life. Into the life of sleep you know well that dreams enter; these dreams in the usual sense, dreams which permeate sleep-consciousness. Human beings need also to dream by day if they do not wish to lead an arid, empty, unhealthy waking life. Dreaming takes place during sleep at night in any case and no proof of this is required. Midway between the two poles of night dreaming and day dreaming is the condition that can come to expression in fantasy.

So here again there is a threefold life of soul. The intellectual element in which we are really awake brings us shadow-images of the Astral Plane when by day we give ourselves up to a thought—wherein the most fruitful ideas for daily life and great inventions originate. Then during sleep, when we dream, these dreams play into our life of sleep and shadow-images from Lower Devachan are reflected into us. And when we work actively during sleep, impressing morality into our will—we cannot be aware of this actual process but certainly we can of its effects—when we are able to imbue our life of thoughts during the night with the influence of Divine Spiritual Powers, then the impulses we receive are reflections from Higher Devachan, the Higher Heavenly World. These reflections are the moral impulses and feelings which are active within us and lead to the recognition that human life is vindicated only when we place our thoughts at the service of the good and the beautiful, when we allow the very heart's blood of Divine Spiritual life to stream through our intellectual activities, permeating them with moral impulses.

The life of the human soul as presented here, first from external, exoteric observation and then from observation of a more mystical character is revealed by deeper (occult) investigation. The processes that have been described in their more external aspect can also be perceived in man through clairvoyance. When a man stands in front of us today in his waking state and we observe him with the eye of clairvoyance, certain rays of light are seen streaming continually from the heart towards the head. Within the head these rays play around the organ known in anatomy as the pineal gland. These streamings arise because human blood, which is a physical substance, is perpetually resolving itself into etheric substance. In the region of the heart there is a continual transformation of the blood into this delicate etheric substance which streams upwards towards the head and glimmers around the pineal gland. This process—the etherisation of the blood—can be perceived in the human being all the time during his waking life.

The occult observer is able to see a continual streaming from outside into the brain, and also in the reverse direction, from the brain to the heart. Now these streams, which in sleeping man come from outside, from cosmic space, from the Macrocosm, and flow into the inner constitution of the physical body and etheric bodies lying in the bed, reveal something remarkable when they are investigated. These rays vary greatly in different individuals. Sleeping human beings differ very drastically from one another, and if those who are a little vain only knew how badly they betray themselves to occult observation when they go to sleep during public gatherings, they would try their level best not to let this happen!

Moral qualities are revealed distinctly in the particular colouring of the streams which flow into human beings during sleep; in an individual of lower moral principles, the streams are quite different from what is observable in an individual of noble principles. Endeavours to dissemble are useless. In the face of the higher Cosmic Powers, no dissembling is possible. In the case of a man who has only a slight inclination towards moral principles the rays streaming into him are a brownish red in colour—various shades tending toward brownish red. In a man of high moral ideals the rays are lilac-violet in colour. At the moment of waking or of going off to sleep a kind of struggle takes place in the region of the pineal gland between what streams down from above and what streams upward from below. When a man is awake the intellectual element streams upwards from below in the form of currents of light, and what is of moral-aesthetic nature streams downwards from above. At the moment of waking or of going off to sleep, these two currents meet, and in the man of low morality a violent struggle between the two streams takes place in the region of the pineal gland. In the man of high morality there is around the pineal gland as it were a little sea of light. Moral nobility is revealed when a calm glow surrounds the pineal gland at these moments. In this way a man's moral disposition is reflected in him, and this calm glow of light often extends as far as the heart. Two streams can therefore be perceived in man—the one Macrocosmic, the other, Microcosmic.

To estimate the significance of how these two streams meet in man is possible only by considering on the one hand what was said previously in a more external way about the life of the soul and how this life reveals the threefold polarity of the intellectual, the aesthetic and the moral elements that stream downwards from above, from the brain toward the heart; and if, on the other hand, we grasp the significance of what was said about turning our attention to the corresponding phenomenon in the Macrocosm. This corresponding phenomenon can be described today as the result of the most scrupulously careful occult investigation of recent years, undertaken by individuals among genuine Rosicrucians. These investigations have shown that something similar to what has been described in connection with the Microcosm also takes place in the Macrocosm. You will understand this more fully as time goes on.

Just as in the region of the human heart the blood is continually being transformed into etheric substance, a similar process takes place in the Macrocosm. We understand this when we turn our minds to the Mystery of Golgotha—to the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of Jesus Christ.

This blood must not be regarded simply as chemical substance, but by reason of all that has been said concerning the nature of Jesus of Nazareth it must be recognised as something altogether unique. When it flowed from His wounds, a substance was imparted to our Earth, which in uniting with it, constituted an Event of the greatest possible significance for all future ages of the Earth's evolution—and it could take place only once. What came of this blood in the ages that followed? Nothing different from what otherwise takes place in the heart of man. In the course of Earth evolution this blood passes through a process of “etherisation.” And just as our human blood streams upwards from the heart as ether, so since the Mystery of Golgotha the etherised blood of Christ Jesus has been present in the ether of the earth. The etheric body of the Earth is permeated by the blood—now transformed—which flowed on Golgotha. This is supremely important. If what has thus come to pass through Christ Jesus had not taken place, man's condition on the Earth could only have been as previously described. But since the Mystery of Golgotha it has always been possible for the etheric blood of Christ to flow together with the streamings from below upward, from heart to head.

Because the etherised blood of Jesus of Nazareth is present in the etheric body of the Earth, it accompanies the etherised human blood streaming upwards from the heart to the brain, so that not only those streams of which I spoke earlier meet in man, but the human blood-stream unites with the blood-stream of Christ Jesus. A union of these two streams can, however, come about only if a person is able to unfold true understanding of what is contained in the Christ Impulse. Otherwise there can be no union; the two streams then mutually repel each other, thrust each other away. In every epoch of Earth evolution understanding must be acquired in the form suitable for that epoch. At the time when Christ Jesus lived on Earth, preceding events were rightly understood by those who came to His forerunner, John, and were baptised by him according to the rite described in the Gospels. They received baptism in order that their sin, that is to say, the karma of their previous lives—karma which had come to an end—might be changed; and in order that they might realise that the most powerful Impulse in Earth evolution was about to descend into a physical body. But the evolution of humanity progresses and in our present age what matters is that people should recognise the need for the knowledge contained in Spiritual Science and be able so to fire the streams flowing from heart to brain that this knowledge can be understood.

If this comes to pass, individuals will be able to receive and comprehend the event that has its beginning in the Twentieth Century: this event is the appearance of the Christ as an Etheric Being in contradistinction to the Physical Christ of Palestine. For we have now reached the point of time when the Etheric Christ enters into the life of the Earth and will become visible—at first to a small number of individuals through a form of natural clairvoyance. Then in the course of the next three thousand years, He will become visible to greater and greater numbers of people. This will inevitably come to pass in the natural course of development. That it will come to pass is as true as were the achievements of electricity in the nineteenth century. A number of individuals will see the Etheric Christ and will themselves experience the event that took place at Damascus. But this will depend upon such men learning to be alert to the moment when Christ draws near to them. In only a few decades from now it will happen, particularly to those who are young—already preparation is being made for this—that some individual here or there has certain experiences. If he has sharpened his vision through having assimilated Anthroposophy, he may become aware that suddenly someone has come near to help him, to make him alert to this or that. The truth is that Christ has come to him, although he believes that what he saw is a physical man. He will come to realise that what he saw was a super-sensible being, because it immediately vanishes. Many a human being will have this experience when sitting silent in his room, heavy-hearted and oppressed, not knowing which way to turn. The door will open, and the etheric Christ will appear and speak words of consolation to him. The Christ will become a living Comforter to men. However strange it may as yet seem, it is true nevertheless that many a time when people—even in considerable numbers—are sitting together, not knowing what to do, and waiting, they will see the Etheric Christ. He will Himself be there, will confer with them, will make His voice heard in such gatherings. These times are approaching, and the positive, constructive element now described will take real effect in the evolution of mankind.

No word shall be said here against the great advances made by culture in our day; these achievements are essential for the welfare and the freedom of men. But whatever can be gained in the way of outer progress in mastering the forces of nature, is something small and insignificant compared with the blessing bestowed upon the individual who experiences the awakening soul through Christ, the Christ who will now be operative in human culture and its concerns. Men will thereby acquire forces that make for unification. In very truth Christ brings constructive forces into human culture and civilisation.

If we look into early post-Atlantean times, we would find that men built their dwelling places by methods very different from those used in modern life. In those days they made use of all kinds of growing things. Even when building palaces they summoned nature to their aid by utilizing plants interlaced with branches of trees and so on, whereas today men must build with broken fragments. All the culture of the external world is contrived with the aid of products of fragmentation. And in the course of the coming years you will realise even more clearly how much in our civilised life is the outcome of destruction.

Light itself is being destroyed in this post-Atlantean age of the Earth's existence, which until the time of Atlantis was a progressive process. Since then it has been a process of decay.* What is light? Light decays and the decaying light is electricity. What we know as electricity is light that is being destroyed in matter. And the chemical force that undergoes a transformation in the process of Earth evolution is magnetism. Yet a third force will become active and if electricity seems to work wonders today, this third force will affect civilisation in a still more miraculous way. The more of this force we employ, the faster the earth will tend to become a corpse and its spiritual part prepare for the Jupiter embodiment. Forces have to be applied for the purpose of destruction, in order that man may become free of the Earth and that the Earth's body may fall away. As long as the earth was involved in progressive evolution, no such destruction took place, for the great achievements of electricity can only serve a decaying Earth. Strange as this sounds, it must gradually become known. By understanding the process of evolution we shall learn to assess our culture at its true value. We shall also learn that it is necessary for the Earth to be destroyed, for otherwise the spiritual could not become free. We shall also learn to value what is positive, namely the penetration of spiritual forces into our existence on Earth.

* See also the section at the end of the text, containing answers given by Dr. Steiner to questions.

Thus we realise what a tremendous advance was signified by the fact that Christ lived for three years on the Earth in a human body specially prepared in order that He might be visible to physical eyes. Through what came to pass during those three years men have been made ready to behold the Christ who will move among them in an etheric body, who will participate in earthly life as truly and effectively as did the Physical Christ in Palestine. If men observe such happenings with undimmed senses they will know that there is an etheric body that will move about in the physical world, but is the only etheric body able to work in the physical world as a human physical body works. It will differ from a physical body in this respect only, that it can be in two, three, nay even in a hundred, a thousand places at the same time. This is possible only for an etheric, not for a physical form. What will be accomplished in humanity through this further advance is that the two poles of which I have spoken, the intellectual and the moral, will more and more become one; they will merge into unity. This will come about because in the course of the next millennia men will become aware of the presence of the Etheric Christ in the world; more and more they will be influenced in waking life too by the direct working of the Good from the spiritual world. Whereas at the present time, the will is asleep by day, and man is only able to influence it indirectly through thought, in the course of the next millennia, through the power which from our time onwards is working in us under the aegis of Christ, it will come about that the deeds of men in waking consciousness too can be directly productive of Good.

The dream of Socrates, that virtue can be taught, will come true; more and more it will be possible on Earth not only for the intellect to be stimulated and energized by this teaching but for moral impulses to be spread abroad. Schopenhauer said, “To preach morality is easy; to establish it is very difficult.” Why is this? Because no morality has yet been spread by preaching. It is quite possible to recognise moral principles and yet not abide by them. For most people the Pauline saying holds good, that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. This will change, because the moral fire streaming from the figure of Christ will intensify recognition of the need for moral impulses. Man will transform the earth by feeling with ever-increasing strength that morality is an essential part of it. In the future, to be immoral will be possible only for individuals who are goaded in this direction, who are possessed by evil demons, by Ahrimanic, Asuric Powers and more-over aspire to be so.

In time to come there will be on Earth a sufficient number of individuals who teach morality and at the same time sustain its principles; but there will also be those who by their own free decision surrender themselves to the evil Powers and thus enable an excess of evil to be pitted against a good humanity. Nobody will be forced to do this; it will lie in the free will of each individual.

Then will come the epoch when the Earth passes into conditions of which, as in so much else, Oriental Occultism and Mysticism alone give some idea. The moral atmosphere will by then have gathered strength. For many thousands of years Oriental Mysticism has spoken of this epoch, and since the coming of Gautama Buddha it has spoken with special emphasis about that future condition when the earth will be bathed in a “moral-ether-atmosphere.” Ever since the time of the ancient Rishis it was the great hope of Oriental Mysticism that this moral impulse would come to the Earth from Vishva-Karman or, as Zarathustra proclaimed, from Ahura Mazdao. Thus Oriental Mysticism foresaw that this moral impulse, this moral atmosphere, would come to the Earth from the Being we call the Christ. And it was upon Him, upon Christ, that the hopes of Oriental Mysticism were set.

Oriental Mysticism was able to picture the consequences of that event but not the actual form it would take. The mind could picture that within a period of 5,000 years after the great Buddha achieved Enlightenment, pure Akashic forms, bathed in fire, lit by the sun, would appear in the wake of One beyond the ken of Oriental Mysticism. A wonderful picture in very truth: that something would happen to make it possible for the Sons of Fire and of Light to move about the Earth, not in physically embodiment but as pure Akashic forms within the Earth's moral atmosphere. But then, so it was said, in 5,000 years after Gautama Buddha's Enlightenment, the Teacher will also be there to make known to men what the nature of these wonderful forms of pure Fire and Light are. This teacher—the Maitreya Buddha—will appear 3,000 years after our present era and will speak of the Christ Impulse.

Thus Oriental Mysticism unites with the Christian knowledge of the West to form a wonderfully beautiful unity. It is also disclosed that he who will appear three thousand years after our era as the Maitreya Buddha will have incarnated again and again on the Earth as a Bodhisattva, as the successor of Gautama Buddha. One of his incarnations was that of Jeshu ben Pandira, who lived a hundred years before the Christian era. The being who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira is he who will one day become the Maitreya Buddha, and who from century to century returns ever and again in a body of flesh, not yet as Buddha, but as Bodhisattva. Even now there proceeds from him who later on will be the Maitreya Buddha, the most significant teachings concerning the Christ Being and the Sons of Fire—the Agnishvattas—of Indian Mysticism.

The indications by which the Being who is to become the Maitreya Buddha can be recognised are common to all genuine Eastern mysticism and to Christian gnosis. The Maitreya Buddha who, in contrast to the Sons of Fire, will appear in a physical body as Bodhisattva, can be recognised by the fact that in the first instance his early development gives no intimation of the nature of the individuality within him. Only those possessed of understanding will recognise the presence of a Bodhisattva in such a human being between the ages of thirty and thirty-three, and not before. Something akin to a change of personality then takes place. The Maitreya Buddha will reveal his identity to humanity in the thirty-third year of his life. As Christ Jesus began His mission in His thirtieth year, so do the Bodhisattvas, who will continue to proclaim the Christ Impulse, reveal themselves—in the thirty-third year of their lives. And the Maitreya Buddha himself, as transformed Bodhisattva, speaking in powerful words of which no adequate idea can be given at the present time, will proclaim the great secrets of existence. He will speak in a language that has first to be created, for no human being to-day could formulate words such as those in which the Maitreya Buddha will address humanity. The reason why men cannot be addressed in this way at the present time is that the physical instrument for this form of speech does not yet exist. The teachings of the Enlightened One will not stream into men as teachings only, but will pour moral impulses into their souls. Words such as will then be spoken cannot yet be uttered by a physical larynx; in our time they can be present only in the spiritual worlds.

Anthroposophy is the preparation for everything that the future holds in store. Those who take the process of man's evolution seriously resolve not to allow the soul's development to come to a standstill but to ensure that this development will eventually enable the spiritual part of the Earth to become free, leaving the grosser part to fall away like a corpse—for men could frustrate the whole process. Those who desire evolution to succeed must acquire understanding of the life of the spirit through what we to-day call Anthroposophy. The cultivation of Anthroposophy thus becomes a duty; knowledge becomes something that we actually feel, something towards which we have responsibility. When we are inwardly aware of this responsibility and have this resolve, when the mysteries of the world arouse in us the wish to become Anthroposophists, then our feeling is true and right. But Anthroposophy must not be something that merely satisfies our curiosity; it must rather be something without which we cannot live. Only then are our feelings what they ought to be, only then do we live as building stones in that great work of construction which must be carried out in human souls and can embrace all mankind.

Anthroposophy is a revelation of world-happenings which will confront the men of the future, will confront our own souls whether still in the physical body or in the life between death and a new birth. The coming changes will affect us, no matter whether we are still living in the physical body or whether it has been laid aside. Understanding of these events must however be acquired during life in the physical body if they are to take effect after death. To those who acquire some understanding of the Christ while they are still living in the physical body, it will make no difference, when the moment comes for vision of the Christ, whether or not they have already passed through the gate of death. But if those who now reject any understanding of the Christ have already passed through the gate of death when this moment arrives, they must wait until their next incarnation, for such understanding cannot be acquired between death and rebirth. Once the foundation has been acquired, however, it endures, and then Christ becomes visible also during the period between death and the new birth.

And so Anthroposophy is not only something we learn for our physical life but is of essential value when we have laid aside the physical body at death.

This is what I wished to impart to you today as a help in answering many questions. Self-knowledge is difficult because man is such a complex being. The reason for this complexity is that he is connected with all the higher Worlds and Beings. We have within us shadow-images of the great Universe and all the members of our constitution—the physical, etheric, astral bodies and the ego—are worlds for Divine Beings. Our physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego form one world; the other is the higher World, the Heaven world. Divine-spiritual Worlds are the bodily members of the Beings of the higher spheres of cosmic existence.

Man is the complex being he is because he is a mirror-image of the spiritual world. Realisation of this should make him conscious of his intrinsic worth. But from the knowledge that although we are reflected images of the spiritual world we nevertheless fall far short of what we ought to be—from this knowledge we also acquire, as well as consciousness of our worth as human beings, the right attitude of modesty and humility towards the Macrocosm and its Gods.

Rudolf Steiner's Answers to Questions at the End of the Lecture

Translated by George Adams

Question: How are the words used by St. Paul, “to speak in tongues” (Cor. I: 12), to be understood?

Answer: In exceptional human beings it can happen that not only is the phenomenon of speaking present in the waking state, but that something otherwise present in sleep-consciousness only, flows into this speaking. This is the phenomenon to which St. Paul refers. Goethe refers to it in the same sense; he has written two very interesting treatises on the subject.

Question: How are Christ's words of consolation received and experienced?

Answer: Men will feel these words of consolation as though arising in their own hearts. The experience may also seem like physical hearing.

Question: What is the relation of chemical forces and substances to the spiritual world?

Answer: There are in the world a number of substances which can combine with or separate from each other. What we call chemical action is projected into the physical world from the world of Devachan—the realm of the Harmony of the Spheres. In the combination of two substances according to their atomic weights, we have a reflection of two tones of the Harmony of the Spheres. The chemical affinity between two substances in the physical world is like a reflection from the realm of the Harmony of the Spheres. The numerical ratios in chemistry are an expression of the numerical ratios of the Harmony of the Spheres, which has become dumb and silent owing to the densification of matter. If one were able to etherealise material substance and to perceive the atomic numbers the inner formative principle thereof, he would be hearing the Harmony of the Spheres.

We have the physical world, the astral world, the Lower Devachan and the Higher Devachan. If the body is thrust down lower even than the physical world, it comes into the sub-physical world, the lower astral world, the lower or evil Lower Devachan, and the lower or evil Higher Devachan. The evil astral world is the province of Lucifer, the evil Lower Devachan the province of Ahriman, and the evil Higher Devachan the province of the Asuras. When chemical action is driven down beneath the physical plane—into the evil Devachanic world—magnetism arises. When light is thrust down into the sub-material—that is to say, a stage deeper than the material world—electricity arises. If what lives in the Harmony of the Spheres is thrust down farther still, into the province of the Asuras, an even more terrible force—which it will not be possible to keep hidden very much longer—is generated. It can only be hoped that when this force comes to be known—a force we must conceive as being far, far stronger than the most violent electrical discharge—it can only be hoped that before some discoverer gives this force into the hands of humankind, men will no longer have anything un-moral left in them.

Question: What is electricity?

Answer: Electricity is light in the sub-material state. Light is there compressed to the utmost degree. An inward quality too must be ascribed to light; light is itself at every point in space. Warmth will expand in the three dimensions of space. In light there is a fourth; it is of fourfold extension—it has the quality of inwardness as a fourth dimension.

Question: What happens to the Earth's corpse?

Answer: As the residue of the Moon-evolution we have our present moon which circles around the Earth. Similarly there will be a residue of the Earth which will circle around Jupiter. Then these residues will gradually dissolve into the universal ether. On Venus there will no longer be any residue. Venus will manifest, to begin with, as pure Warmth, then it will become Light and then pass over into the spiritual world. The residue left behind by the Earth will be like a corpse. This is a path along which man must not accompany the Earth, for he would thereby be exposed to dreadful torments. But there are Beings who accompany this corpse, since they themselves will by that means develop to a higher stage.

Reflected as sub-physical world:

Astral World—the province of Lucifer
Lower Devachan—the province of Ahriman
Higher Devachan—the province of the Asuras

The two previous lectures were devoted to considerations intended to show how that tremendous change, which entered into the whole soul constitution of civilized mankind with the fifteenth century—that is, with the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period—continued to have an effect on outstanding personalities. Let me introduce today's lecture with a brief summary of these preceding considerations. I showed how intensely a personality such as Goethe sensed the continuing vibrations of the great change, how he sensed that it was a concrete experience to find intellectual reasoning entering into the human soul. He sensed that it was necessary to come to terms with the intellectual element of the soul and he also had an inkling of the direct intercourse between human beings and the spiritual world which had preceded this intellectual stage. Even though it was no longer as it had been in the days of ancient atavistic clairvoyance, there was nevertheless a kind of looking back to the time when human beings knew that it was only possible for them to find real knowledge if they stepped outside the world of the senses in order to see in some way the spiritual beings who existed behind the sense-perceptible world.

Goethe invested the figure of his Faust with all these things sensed in his soul. We saw how dissatisfied Faust is by stark intellectualism as presented to him in the four academic faculties:

I've studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,
And even, alas! Theology,
From end to end ...

He is saying in different words: I have loaded my soul with the whole complexity of intellectual science and here I now stand filled with the utmost doubt; that is why I have devoted myself to magic.

Because of dissatisfaction with the intellectual sciences, Goethe invests the Faust figure with a desire to return to intercourse with the spiritual world. This was quite clear in his soul when he was young, and he wanted to express it in the figure of Faust. He chose the Faust figure to represent his own soul struggles. I said that although this is not the case with the historical Faust of the legend, we could nevertheless find in Goethe's depiction of Faust that professor who might have taught at Wittenberg in the sixteenth or even in the seventeenth century, and who had, ‘Straight or crosswise, wrong or right’, led his scholars by the nose ‘these ten years long’. This hypothesis allows us to see how in this educational process there was a mixture of the new intellectualism with something pointing back to ancient days when intercourse with the spiritual world and with the spiritual powers of creation was still possible for human beings.

I then asked whether—apart from what is given us in the Faust drama—we might also, in the wider environment, come up against the effects of what someone like Faust could have taught in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries. And here we hit upon Hamlet, about whom it could be said: The character which Shakespeare created out of Hamlet—who in his turn he had taken from Danish mythology and transformed—could have been a pupil of Faust, one of those very students whom Faust had led by the nose ‘these ten years long’. We see Hamlet interacting with the spiritual world. His task is given to him by the spiritual world, but he is constantly prevented from fulfilling it by the qualities he has acquired as a result of his intellectual education. In Hamlet, too, we see the whole transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period.

Further, I said that in the whole mood and artistic form of Shakespeare's plays, that is, in the historical plays, we could find in the creativity of the writer of Shakespeare's plays the twilit mood of that time of transition. Then I drew your attention to the way in which Goethe and Schiller in Central Europe had stood in their whole life of soul within the dying vibrations of the transition, yet had lacked, in a certain sense, the will to accept what the intellectual view of the world had since then brought about in the life of human beings. This led them back to Shakespeare, for in his work—Hamlet, Macbeth and so on—they discovered the capacity to approach the spiritual world; from his vantage point, they could see into the world of spiritual powers which was now hidden from the intellectual viewpoint.

Goethe did this in his Götz von Berlichingen by taking the side of the dying echoes of the old time of the fourth post-Atlantean period and by rejecting what had come into being through intellectualism. Schiller, in the dramas of his youth, especially in Die Räuber (The Robbers), goes back to that time—not by pointing to the super-sensible world, but by endeavouring to be entirely realistic, yet putting into the very words characterizing Karl Moor something which echoes the luciferic element that is also at work in Milton's Paradise Lost.¹ In short, despite his realism, we detect a kind of return to a conception of reality which allows the spiritual forces and powers to shine through.

I indicated further that, in the West, Shakespeare was in a position—if I may put it like this—to work artistically in full harmony with his social environment. Hamlet is the play most characteristic of Shakespeare. Here the action is everywhere quite close to the spiritual world, as it is also in Macbeth. In King Lear, for instance, we see how he brings the super-sensible world more into the human personality, into an abnormal form of the human personality, the element of madness. Then, in the historical dramas about the kings, he goes over more into realism but, at the same time, we see in these plays a unique depiction of a long drawn-out dramatic evolution influenced everywhere by the forces of destiny, but culminating and coming to an end in the age of Queen Elizabeth.

The thing that is at work in Shakespeare's plays is a retrospective view of older ages leading up to the time in which he lives, a time which is seen to be accepted by him. Everything belonging to older times is depicted artistically in a way which leads to an understanding of the time in which he lives. You could say that Shakespeare portrays the past. But he portrays it in such a way that he places himself in his contemporary western social environment, which he shows to be a time in which things can take the course which they are prone to take. We see a certain satisfaction with regard to what has come about in the external world. The intellectualism of the social order is accepted by the person belonging to the external, physical earthly world, by the social human being, whereas the artistic human being in Shakespeare goes back to earlier times and portrays that aspect of the super-sensible world which has created pure intellectualism.

Then we see that in Central Europe this becomes an impossibility. Goethe and Schiller, and before them Lessing, cannot place themselves within the social order in a way which enables them to accept it. They all look back to Shakespeare, but to that Shakespeare who himself went back into the past. They want the past to lead to something different from the present time in which they find themselves. Shakespeare is in a way satisfied with his environment; but they are dissatisfied with theirs.

Out of this mood of spiritual revolution Goethe creates the drama of Götz von Berlichingen, and Schiller the dramas of his youth. We see how the external reality of the world is criticized, and how in the artistic realm there is an ebbing and flowing of something that can only be achieved in ideas, something that can only be achieved in the spirit. Therefore we can say: In Goethe and Schiller there is no acceptance of the present time. They have to comfort themselves, so far as external sense-perceptible reality is concerned, with what works down out of the spiritual world. Shakespeare in a way brings the super-sensible world down into the sense-perceptible world. Goethe and Schiller can only accept the sense-perceptible world by constantly turning their attention to the spiritual world. In the dramas of Goethe and Schiller we have a working together of the spiritual with the physical—basically, an unresolved disharmony. I then said that if we were to go further eastwards we would find that there is nothing on the earth that is spiritual. The East of Europe has not created anything into which the spirit plays. The East flees from the external working of the world and seeks salvation in the spirit above.

I was able to clothe all this in an Imagination by saying to you: Let us imagine Faust as Hamlet's teacher, a professor in Wittenberg. Hamlet sits at his feet and listens to him, after which he returns to the West and accustoms himself once again to the western way of life. But if we were to seek a being who could have gone to the East, we should have had to look for an angel who had listened to Faust from the spiritual world before going eastwards. Whatever he then did there would not have resembled the deeds and actions of Hamlet on the physical plane but would have taken place above human beings, in the spiritual world.

Yesterday, I then described how, out of this mood, at the time when he was making the acquaintance of Schiller, Goethe felt impelled to bring the being of man closer to the spiritual world. He could not do this theoretically, in the way Schiller, the philosopher, was able to do in his aesthetic letters, but instead he was urged to enter the realm of Imagination and write the fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Then Schiller felt the urge to bring the external reality of human life closer to the spirit—I might say experimentally—in Wallenstein (Wallenstein's Camp), by letting a belief in the stars hold sway like a force of destiny over the personality of Wallenstein, and in Die Braut von Messina (Bride of Messina) by letting a destiny run its course virtually entwined with a belief in the stars. These personalities were impelled ever and again to turn back to the time when human beings still had direct intercourse with the spiritual world.

Further, I said that Goethe and Schiller lived at a time when it was not yet possible to find a new entry into the spiritual world from out of a modern soul constitution. Schiller in particular, with his philosophical bent, had he lived longer and finished the drama about the Knights of Malta, would have come to an understanding of how, in an order like this, or like that of the Templars, the spiritual worlds worked together with the deeds of human beings. But it was not granted to Schiller to give the world the finished drama about the Knights of Malta, for he died too soon. Goethe, on the other hand, was unable to advance to a real grasp of the spiritual world, so he turned back. We have to say that Goethe went back to Catholic symbolism, the Catholic cultus, the cultus of the image, though he did so in an essentially metamorphosed form. We cannot help but be reminded of the good nun Hrosvitha's legend of Theophilus² from the ninth century, when Goethe in his turn allows Faust to be redeemed in the midst of a Christianizing tableau. Although his genius lets him present it in a magnificently grand and artistic manner, we cannot but be reminded, in ‘The Eternal Feminine bears us aloft’, of the Virgin Mary elevating the ninth-century Theophilus.

An understanding of these things gives us deep insight into the struggle within intellectualism, the struggle in intellectualism which causes human beings to experience inwardly the thought-corpse of what man is before descending through birth—or, rather, through conception—into his physical life on earth. The thoughts which live in us are nothing but corpses of the spirit unless we make them fruitful through the knowledge given by spiritual science. Whatever we are, spiritually, up to the moment when earthly life begins, dies as it enters our body, and we bear its corpse within us. It is our earthly power of thought, the power of thought of our ordinary consciousness.

How can something that is dead in the spiritual sense be brought back to life? This was the great question which lived in the souls of Goethe and Schiller. They do not bring it to expression philosophically but they sense it within their feeling life. And they compose their works accordingly. They have the feeling: Something is dead if we remain within the realm of the intellect alone; we must bring it to life. It is this feeling which makes them struggle to return to a belief in the stars and to all sorts of other things, in order to bring a spiritual element into what they are trying to depict. It is necessary for us to be aware of how the course of world evolution is made manifest in such outstanding personalities, how it streams into their souls and becomes the stuff of their struggles. We cannot comprehend our present time unless we see that what this present time must strive for—a new achievement of the spiritual world—is the very problem which was of such concern for Goethe and Schiller.

What happened as a result of the great transition which took place in the fifteenth century was something of which absolutely no account is taken in ordinary history. It was, that the human being acquired an entirely different attitude towards himself. But we must not endeavour to capture this in theoretical concepts. We must endeavour to trace it in what human beings sensed; we must find out how it went through a preparation and how it later ran its course after the great change had been fulfilled in its essential spiritual force.

There are pointers to these things at crucial points in cultural evolution. See how this comes towards us in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival.³ You all know the story. You know how crucial it was for the whole of Parzival's development that he first of all received instruction from a kind of teacher as to how he was to go through the world without asking too many questions. As a representative of that older world order which still saw human beings as having direct intercourse with the spiritual world, Gurnemanz says to Parzival: Do not ask questions, for questioning comes from the intellect, and the spiritual world flees from the intellect; if you want to approach the spiritual world you must not ask questions.

But times have changed and the transition begins to take place. It is announced in advance: Even though Parzival goes back several more centuries, into the seventh or eighth century, all this was nevertheless experienced in advance in the Grail temple. Here, in a way, the institutions of the future are already installed, and one of them is that questions must be asked. The essential point is that with the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period the situation of the human being changes. Previously it was inappropriate to ask questions because conditions held sway about which Goethe speaks so paradoxically:

The lofty might
Of Science, still
From all men deeply hidden!
Who takes no thought,
To him 'tis brought,
'Tis given unsought, unbidden!

In those times it was right not to ask questions, for that would have driven away the spirits! But in the age of the intellect the spiritual world has to be rediscovered through the intellect and not by damping down the processes of thought. The opposite must now come into play; questions must be asked. As early as Parzival we find a portrayal of the great change which brings it about in the fifth post-Atlantean period that the longing for the spiritual world now has to be born out of the human being in the form of questions to be formulated.

But there is also something else, something very remarkable, which comes to meet us in Parzival. I should like to describe it as follows. The languages which exist today are far removed from their origins, for they have developed as time has gone on. When we speak today—as I have so often shown—the various combinations of sounds no longer remind us of whatever these combinations of sounds denote. We now have to acquire a more delicate sense for language in order to experience in it all the things that it signifies. This was not the case where the original languages of the human race were concerned. In those days it was known that the combination of sounds itself contained whatever was experienced in connection with the thing depicted by those sounds. Nowadays poets seek to imitate this. Think, for instance, of ‘Und es wallet und siedet und brauset und zischt’.⁴ Poetic language has here imitated something of what the poet wants us to see externally. But this is mere derived imitation. In olden times every single sound in language was felt to have the most intimate connection with what was happening all around. Today only some local dialects can lay claim to giving us some sense for the connection between external reality and the words spoken in dialect. However, language is still very close to our soul—it is a special element in our soul.

It is another consequence of the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period that this has become deposited as something very deeply sensed within the human soul, again a fact which is left out of account by both philology and history. The fact that in the fourth post-Atlantean period human beings lived more within their language and that in the fifth post-Atlantean period this is no longer the case, brings about a different attitude by human beings towards the world. You can understand that human beings with their ego are linked quite differently to what is going on around them if, in using language, they go along with all the rushing of waves, the thundering and lightning, and whatever else is happening out there. This becomes ever more detached as the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period progresses. The ego becomes more inward, and language together with the ego also becomes more inward, but at the same time less meaningful as regards external matters. Such things are most certainly not perceived by the knowledge of today, which has become so intellectual. There is hardly any concern to describe such things. But if what is taking place in mankind is to be correctly understood, they will have to be described.

Imagine what can come into being. Imagine vividly to yourselves, here the fourth post-Atlantean period, and here the fifth. The transition is of course gradual, but for the sake of explanation I shall have to talk in extremes. In the fourth post-Atlantean period you have here the things of the world (green). The human being with his words, depicted within him, here in red, is still connected with the things. You could say he 'lives over' into the things through the medium of his words. In the fifth post-Atlantean period the human being possesses his words within his soul, separated off from the world.

Imagine this clearly, even almost in grotesque detail. Looking at the human being here in the fourth post-Atlantean period, you might say of him that he still lives with the things. The things he does in the outside world will proceed to take place in accordance with his words. If you see one of these human beings performing a deed, and if at the same time you hear how he describes the deed, there is a harmony between the two. Just as his words are in harmony with external things, so are his deeds in harmony with the words he speaks. But if a human being in the fifth post-Atlantean period speaks, you can no longer detect that his words resound in what he does. What connection with the deed can you find today in the words: I have chopped wood! In what is taking place out there in the activity of chopping we can no longer sense in any way a connection with the movement of the chopper. As a result, the connection with the sounds of the words gradually disappears; they cease to be in harmony with what is going on outside. We no longer find any connection between the two. So then, if someone listens pedantically to the words and actually does

what lies in the words, the situation is quite different. Someone might say: I bake mice. But if someone were actually to bake mice, this would seem grotesque and would not be understood.

This was sensed, and so it was said: People ought to consider what they actually have in their soul in conjunction with what they do externally; the relationship between the two would be like an owl looking in a mirror! If someone were to do exactly what the words say, it would be like holding up a mirror to an owl. Out of this, in the second half of the fourteenth century, Till Eulenspiegel arose.⁵ The owl's mirror is held up in front of mankind. It is not Till Eulenspiegel who has to look in the mirror. But because Till Eulenspiegel takes literally what people say with their dry, abstract words, they suddenly see themselves, whereas normally they do not see themselves at all. It is a mirror for the owls because they can really see themselves in it.

Night has fallen. In past times, human beings could see into the spiritual world. And the activity of their words was in harmony with the world. Human beings were eagles. But now they have become owls. The world of the soul has become a bird of the night. In the strange world depicted by Till Eulenspiegel, a mirror is held up before the owl.

This is quite a feasible way of regarding what appears in the spiritual world. Things do have their hidden reasons. If we fail to take note of the spiritual background, we also fail to understand history, and with it the chief factor in humanity today. It is especially important to depart from the usual external characterization of everything. Look in any dictionary and see what absurd explanations are given for Eulenspiegel! He cannot be understood without entering into the whole process of cultural and spiritual life. The important thing in spiritual science is to actually discover the spirit in things, not in a way that entails a conceptual knowledge of a few spiritual beings who exist outside the sense-perceptible world, but in a way which leads us to an ability to see reality with spiritual eyes.

The change which took place, between the time when human beings felt themselves to be close to the spiritual world and the later time when they felt as though they had been expelled from that world, can be seen in other areas too. Try to develop a sense for the profound impulse which runs through something like the Parzival epic. See how Parzival's mother dresses him in a simpleton's clothes because she does not want him to grow up into the world which represents the new world. She wants him to remain in the old world. But then he grows up from the sense-perceptible world into the world of the spirit.

The seventeenth century also possesses a kind of Parzival, a comical Parzival, in which everything is steeped in comedy. In the intellectualistic age, if one is honest, one cannot immediately muster the serious attitude of soul which prevails in Parzival. But the seventeenth century too, after the great change had taken place, had its own depiction of a character who has to set out into the world, lose himself in it, finally ending-up in solitude and finding the salvation of his soul. This is Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus.⁶ Look at the whole process of the story. Of course you must take the whole tone into account, on the one hand the pure, perhaps holy mood of Parzival, and on the other the picaresque, comical mood. Consider Simplicissimus, the son of well-to-do peasants in the Spessart region. In the Thirty Years’ War their house is burnt down. The son has to flee, and finds his way to a hermit in the forest who teaches him all kinds of things, but who then dies. So here he is, abandoned in the world and having to set off on his travels. He becomes immersed in all the events and blows of fate offered by the Thirty Years’ War. He arrives at the court of the governor of Hanau. Externally he has learnt nothing, externally he is a pure simpleton; yet he is an inwardly mature person for all that. But because externally he is a pure simpleton the governor of Hanau says to himself: This is a simpleton, he knows nothing; he is Simplicissimus, as naive as can be. What shall I train him to be? I shall train him to be my court fool.

But now the external and the internal human being are drawn apart. The ego has become independent in respect of the external human being. It is just this that is shown in Simplicissimus. The external human being in the external world, trained to be the court fool, is the one who is considered by all and sundry to be a fool. But in his inner being Simplicissimus in his turn considers all those who take him for a fool to be fools themselves. For although he has not learnt a thing, he is nevertheless far cleverer than all those who have made him into a fool. He brings out of himself the other intellectuality, the intellectuality that comes from the spirit, whereas what comes to meet him from outside is the intellectuality that comes from reasoning alone. So the intellectualists take him for a fool, and the fool brings his intellectualism from the spiritual world and holds those who take him for a fool to be fools themselves. Then he is taken prisoner by some Croats, after which he roams about the world undergoing many adventures, until finally he ends up once more at the hermitage where he settles down to live for the salvation of his soul.

The similarity between Simplicissimus and Parzival has been recognized, but the crucial thing is the difference in mood. What in Parzival's case was still steeped in the mind-soul has now risen up into the consciousness soul. Now caustic wit is at work, for the comical can only have its origin in caustic wit. If you have a feel for this change of mood, you will be able to discover—especially in works which have a broader base than that of a single individuality—what was going on in human evolution. And Christoffel von Grimmelshausen did indeed secrete in Simplicissimus the whole mood, the whole habit of thought of his time. Similarly you can in a way find the people as a whole composing stories, and gathering together all the things which the soul, in the guise of an owl, can see in the mirror, and which become all the tall tales found in Till Eulenspiegel.

It would be a good thing, once in a while, to go in more detail into all these things, not only in order to characterize the various interconnections. I can only give you isolated examples. To say everything that could be said I should have to speak for years. But this is not really what matters. What is crucial is to come closer to a more spiritual conception of these things. We have to learn to know how things which are presented to us purely externally are also connected with the spirit. So we may say: That tremendous change which took place in the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period can be seen everywhere, vibrating through the cultural and spiritual evolution of mankind. As soon as you step back a bit from this turning- point of time, you come to see how all the different phenomena point to the magnititude of the change.

Only by taking the interconnections into account is it possible to understand what lies hidden in the figures brought by spiritual and cultural life out of the past and into the present. Take Lohengrin, the son of Parzival. What does it mean that Elsa is forbidden to ask after his name and origin? People simply accept this. Not enough deep thought is given to the question as to why she is forbidden to ask, for usually there are two sides to everything. Certainly this could also be described differently, but one important aspect may be stated as follows: Lohengrin is an ambassador of the Grail; he is Parzival's son. Now what actually is the Grail community? Those who knew the mystery of the Grail did not look on the Grail temple as a place solely for the chosen knights of the Grail. They saw that all those who were pure in heart and Christian in the true sense went to the Grail while they slept—while they were between sleeping and waking. The Grail was seen as the place where all truly Christian souls gathered while they slept at night. There was a desire to be apart from the earth. So those who were the rulers of the Grail also had to be apart from earthly life. Lohengrin, the son of Parzival, was one of these. Those who desired to work in accordance with the Grail impulse had to feel themselves entirely within the spiritual world. They had to feel that they belonged entirely to the spiritual world and certainly not at all to the earthly world. In a certain sense you could say that they had to drink the draught of forgetfulness.

Lohengrin is sent down from the Grail castle. He unites with Elsa of Brabant, that is with the people of Brabant. In the train of Heinrich I he sets out to fight the Hungarians. In other words, at the instigation of the Grail he carries out important impulses of world history. The strength he has from the Grail temple enables him to do this. When we go back to the fourth post-Atlantean period we find that all these things are different. In those days spiritual impulses played their part together with external impulses that could be comprehended by the intellect. This is hardly noticeable in the way history is told today.

We speak quite rightly today of meditative formulae, simple sentences which work in the human being's consciousness through their very simplicity. How many people today understand what is meant when history tells us that those required to take part in the Crusades—they took place in the fourth post-Atlantean period—were provided with the meditative formula ‘God wills it’ and that this formula worked on them with spiritual force. ‘God wills it’ was a kind of social meditation. Keep a look out for such things in history; you will find many! You will find the origins of the old mottos. You will discover how the ancient titled families set out on conquering expeditions under such mottos, thus working with spiritual means, with spiritual weapons. The most significant spiritual weapons of all were used by knights of the Grail, such as Lohengrin. But he was only able to use them if he was not met with recollections of his external origins, his external name, his external family. He had to transport himself into a realm in which he could be entirely devoted to the spiritual world and in which his intercourse with the external world was limited to what he perceived with his senses, devoid of any memories. He had to accomplish his deeds under the influence of the draught of forgetfulness. He was not allowed to be reminded. His soul was not permitted to remember: This is my name and I am a scion of this or that family. So this is why Elsa of Brabant is not allowed to question him. When she does, he is forced to remember. The effect on his deeds is the same as if his sword had been smashed.

If we go back beyond the time when everything became intellectual, so that people also clothed what had gone before in intellectual concepts, imagining that everything had always been as they knew it—if we go back beyond what belongs to the age of the intellect, we find the spiritual realm working everywhere in the social realm. People took the spiritual element into account, for instance, in that they took moral matters just as much into account as physical medicines.

In the age of the intellect, in which all people belong only to the intellect, whatever would they think if they found that moral elements, too, were available at the chemist's! Yet we need only go back a few centuries prior to the great change. Read Der arme Heinrich by Hartmann von Aue,⁷ who was a contemporary of Wolfram von Eschenbach. Before you stands a knight, a rich knight, who has turned away from God, who in his soul has lost his links with the spiritual world, and who thus experiences this moment of atheism which has come over him as a physical illness, a kind of leprosy. Everyone avoids him. No physician can cure him. Then he meets a clever doctor in Salerno who tells him that no physical medicine can do him any good. His only hope of a cure lies in finding a pure virgin who is prepared to be slain for his sake. The blood of a pure virgin can cure him of his illness. He sells all his possessions and lives alone on a smallholding cared for by the tenant farmer. The farmer has a daughter. She falls in love with the leprous knight, discovers what it is that alone can cure him, and decides to die for him. He goes with her to the doctor in Salerno. But then he starts to pity her, preferring to keep his illness rather than accept her sacrifice. But even her willingness to make the sacrifice is enough. Gradually he is healed.

We see how the spirit works into cultural life, we see how moral impulses heal and were regarded as healing influences. Today the only interpretation is: Ah, well, perhaps it was a coincidence, or maybe it is just a tale. Whatever we think of individual incidents, we cannot but point out that, during the time which preceded the fifteenth century, soul could work on soul much more strongly than was the case later; what a soul thought and felt and willed worked on other souls. The social separation between one human being and another is a phenomenon of intellectualism. The more intellectualism flourishes and the less an effort is made to find what can work against it—namely the spiritual element—the more will this intellectualism divide one individuality from another.

This had to come about; individualism is necessary. But social life must be found out of individualism. Otherwise, in the ‘social age’ all people will do is be unsociable and cry out for Socialism. The main reason for the cry for Socialism is that people are unsocial in the depths of their soul. We must take note of the social element as it comes towards us in works such as Hartmann von Aue's Der arme Heinrich. It makes its appearance in cultural works in which it can be sensed quite clearly through the mood. See how different is the mood in Der arme Heinrich. You cannot call it sentimental, for sentimentality only arose later when people found an unnatural escape from intellectualism. The mood is in a way pious; it is a mood of spirituality. To be honest about the same matters in a later age you have to fall back on the element of comedy. You have to tell your story as Christoffel von Grimmelshausen did in Simplicissimus, or as the people as a whole did in Till Eulenspiegel.

This sense of having been thrown out of the world is found everywhere, not only in poetic works arising out of the folk element. Wherever it appears, you find that what is being depicted is a new attitude of the human being towards himself. From an entirely new standpoint he asks: What am I, if I am a human being? This vibrates through everything. So from the new intellectual standpoint the question is asked over and over again: What is the human being? In earlier times people turned to the spiritual world. They truly sought what Faust later seeks in vain. They turned to the spiritual world when they wanted to know: What actually is the human being? They knew that outside this physical life on earth the human being is a spirit. So if he wants to discover his true being, which lives in him also in physical, earthly life, then he will have to turn to the spiritual world. Yet more and more human beings are failing to do this very thing.

In Faust Goethe still hints: If I want to know the spirit, I must turn to the spiritual world. But it does not work. The Earth Spirit appears, but Faust cannot recognize it with his ordinary knowledge. The Earth Spirit says to him: ‘Thou'rt like the Spirit which thou comprehendest, not me!’⁸ Faust has to turn away and speak to Wagner. In Wagner he then sees the spirit which he comprehends. Faust, ‘image of the Godhead’, cannot comprehend the Earth Spirit. So Goethe still lived in an age which strove to find the being of man out of the spiritual world. You see what came once Goethe had died. Once again people wanted to know what the human being is, this time on the basis of intellectualism. Follow the thread: People cannot turn to the spiritual world in order to discover what the human being is. In themselves, equally, they fail to find the answer, for language has meanwhile become an owl in the soul. So they turned to those who depicted olden times at least in an external fashion. What do we find in the nineteenth century?⁹ In 1836 Jeremias Gotthelf: Bauernspiegel; in 1839 Immermann: Oberhof, Die drei Mahlen, Schwarzwalder Bauern geschichten; George Sand: La Petite Fadette; in 1847 Grigorovich: Unhappy Anthony; in 1847-51 Turgeniev: Sportsman's Sketches.

We have here the longing to find in simple people the answer to the question: What is the human being? In olden times you turned to the spiritual world. Now you turned to the peasant. During the course of two decades the whole world develops a longing to write village stories in order to study the human being. Because people cannot recognize themselves, at best looking in the mirror as if they are owls, they turn to simple folk instead. What they can prove in every detail, from Jeremias Gotthelf to Turgeniev, is that everything is striving to get to know the human being. In all these village stories, in all these simple tales, the unconscious endeavour is to achieve a knowledge of man. From this kind of viewpoint spiritual and cultural life can become comprehensible.

This is what I wanted to show you in these three lectures, in order to illustrate the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period. It is not enough to describe this transition with a few abstract concepts—which is what was naturally done at first. Our task is to illumine the whole of reality with the light of the spirit through Anthroposophy. These lectures have beenan example of this.

• 1 . John Milton, 1608-1674. English poet and puritan politician. His epic poem Paradise Lost was finished by 1665.
• 2 . Lecture Twelve, Note 7
• 3 . Wolfram von Eschenbach, c.1170-1220. One of the greatest medieval German poets. Parzival was probably written between 1200 and 1210.
• 4 . #8216;And it bubbles and seethes, and it hisses and roars’, Der Taucher by Friedrich von Schiller, translated by E. Bulwer Lytton in The Poems and Ballads of Schiller, Leipzig 1844.
• 5 . Till Eulenspiegel, a popular German peasant jester, was supposed to have died in Winn in 1350. The first extant text of the chapbook in High German chronicling his escapades was published in 1515. The name ‘Eulenspieger means, literally, ‘owl's mirror’. (Tr.)
• 6 . Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, d.1676. German writer. Simplicissimus, published in 1669, is said to be the greatest German novel of the seventeenth century.
• 7 . Hartmann von Aue, c.1170-1213. Middle High German poet. Der arme Heinrich (Poor Henry).
• 8 . ‘Thou'rt like the spirit’: Faust Part One. The Study.
• 9 . Jerennas Gotthelf (A. Bitzius), 1797-1854; Karl Immermann, 1796-1840; George Sand (A.A.L. Dupin-Dudevant), 1804-1876; D.W. Grigorovich, 1818-1883; I.S. Turgeniev, 1818-1883.

Dear attendees!

In our time, theosophy should deepen our entire cultural life on the spiritual side, so that through the theosophical cultural movement, humanity is once again pointed to the fact that everything in our physical, sensual life is based on the spiritual, the supersensible life.

All theosophical worldviews are based on two fundamental truths. The first fundamental truth is that our world, which is perceptible to our senses and our minds, is based on a supersensible, a spiritual one. And the other fundamental truth is that it is possible for man to penetrate into this supersensible, into this spiritual world.

In doing so, anyone who stands on the ground of this theosophical world view will very soon encounter resistance from some of our contemporaries and from those who claim that our science is beyond prejudice, that behind our physical world there is no superphysical, no supersensible world.

Others come and say: Of course, one may admit that there might be a supersensible, a superphysical world somewhere, but man's powers of knowledge, his faculties of perception, are in any case insufficient to reach such a world. The secret-scientific or theosophical world view should make man aware that although those powers of perception and abilities that make it possible for us to perceive the ordinary world around us do not lie in the supersensible world, the powers that lie dormant in every soul, when awakened, lead man into supersensible worlds. And if we want to clarify the whole relationship of man to the supersensible world in the sense of the theosophical world view, we do this best by means of a comparison, which shows that it is not fantasy and superstition when the theosophist speaks of distant spiritual worlds, but that these spiritual worlds are there, just as our world is there.

Let us assume that we could lead someone born blind into this room. He is surrounded by darkness and gloom, while you can see objects in light and color and shine. All that is around you is not there for the blind man. In the moment that we have the good fortune to operate on this blind man and give him the gift of sight, light and color and radiance emerge from the darkness. The whole world is now filled with new qualities and facts. And why? Because an organ of knowledge has been opened for him.

Just as a physical organ has been opened for this person, and a great experience is entering his soul, flooding it with a new world, so it is also possible that spiritual powers of knowledge and soul abilities, which lie dormant in every person, are awakened and that unknown worlds with spiritual facts and spiritual beings flow into the human soul. We cannot operate on everyone born blind, but these dormant abilities can be awakened in every human soul, enabling him to enter the [spiritual] worlds around him.

All that the spiritual, esoteric and theosophical spiritual current has to say to people today comes from such higher insights.

Now, our contemporaries who believe themselves to be on solid scientific ground will think that such a worldview will make us unworldly, will lead us away from the world, and will alienate people from the practical side of life.

Today we shall deal with a subject that is particularly suitable for showing how esoteric science or theosophy, based on its esoteric knowledge, is particularly suited to intervene directly in practical life; how it is precisely by revealing the forces and facts of the spiritual world that it becomes a useful means for people to work safely and appropriately in life.

We will follow a human life, a human course from birth to death, follow it from this theosophical or esoteric point of view, and see what practical aspects this theosophical school of thought can give us for such a view of life, which directly addresses the everyday, what is around us.

We do not want to talk about what Theosophy can bring in terms of knowledge for people, what extends beyond birth and death, not talk about repeated life on earth, not talk about the fact that Theosophy speaks of spiritual causes. We only want to look at the individual human life between birth and death with all the joy and pain, with all the expectations and hopes, with all the strength we need to lead this life as valuable as possible.

We see the human being enter life. But you all know that when a person enters life, they have already completed an important, essential part of their life, which is the part they go through as a human germ in the mother's body. There he is enveloped in a protective mother's shell, there he lives in this shell, and what does birth consist of other than in the fact that the human being, so to speak, sheds this protective mother's shell and steps out, so that his senses and his organism freely face the world and the elements?

Then, however, if we want to look at the effects of this external world on the human organs, we have to understand that the teaching of esoteric science does not only take this being as that which the external senses of human beings see, what the eyes perceive, what the hands can grasp, that for the theosophical view this is only part of the whole human being. When physical science takes this one part of the human being for the whole human being, it is not aware of the life that lies behind it in the superphysical.

In occult science, there is also talk of other garments, of a second garment; and you will immediately get an idea of what is meant by this second garment if we realize that spiritual science, like physical science, is based on facts, that [in the world of the supermundane life] the same substances are united by the same forces as outside in our seemingly inanimate environment.

There is a great difference between how these forces occur in a mineral and how they occur in human life or in any living life. This living life is the same forces that are out there in the inanimate world in the mineral kingdom, they are so intricately combined, so complicated, that this combination would immediately disintegrate if there were not a fighter against this disintegration of life in every moment of life. And this fighter is the second garment of the human being. We call it the etheric body or life body. And we say: every living being has such an etheric body, which prevents physical substances and forces from following their own laws between birth and death. Look at a crystal or another mineral. It has a form in which it presents itself to you. Through its chemical power it remains as it is.

A living being would never remain as it is through these forces. This is evident at the moment of death. Why then does the living being become a corpse according to its physical body? Why does it die? [Because at the moment of death the physical body has separated from the etheric body or life body.] Then the physical body follows its own substances and forces, its own laws, then it decays.

But spiritual science is well aware of the objections of physical science against the ether. However, this is not what we want to deal with today. We just want to sketch out how we have to consider the body according to the teaching of secret science.

We therefore have this second garment, which is a constant fighter against the disintegration of physical life. Then there is a third garment. This third garment is to be imagined as being in front of the soul. If you imagine a person standing before you and you ask yourself: Is there not something about this person that is much closer to them than a large part of their physical body and than their etheric body, they would admit: Within the skin of their physical body, they have something that is closer to them than their physical body and their etheric body. There is something even closer, especially if he is a naive person, if he is a primitive person who has not first convinced himself through scientific studies of what the inner man - his blood, his nerves, his muscles, everything that makes up a person - looks like, that is his urges, instincts, desires and passions. That is the body of sensations and perceptions, which flows up and down. This body of sensations and perceptions, the bearer of these cravings and passions, is the third garment of the human being, the astral body, as it is called for certain reasons in Theosophy.

This body is no longer shared by man with the plants. This body is shared only by the animals. The animals have just, like man, an astral body.

[But what makes man – the crowning glory of creation – stand out from animals is the fourth garment.] It is the sum of powers that command him to call himself an “I”. These abilities to call oneself an “I” mean more than many people consider.

This 'I' - or as one also says 'I am' - was, for example, called the 'unspeakable name of God' in Old Testament religions. Why? Because it was said that everything else in our environment, when it speaks or wants to speak to our soul, will speak to us in such a way that it speaks to our soul through the organs of the physical, etheric and astral bodies.

But that which flows through the world from divine beings does not need an organ to come to life in the soul. This announces itself to us indirectly in the soul. And when the soul says to itself, 'I am', and recognizes its own existence, at that moment it is rightly thought of as a drop or spark of divinity in the soul.

Some might object: Then you theosophists make a god out of man when [you claim] that the divine substances are contained in his ego. Anyone who makes such an objection could also say: If we take a drop from the sea and claim that this drop is of the same substance and essence as the sea water, then we claim that the drop is the sea. [Man's innermost self is divine in nature. It is a drop, a spark of the sea, of the divine, and therefore man also participates in the divine that flows through the world.] Just as the drop is part of the sea, so man is part of the divine.

These are the four garments. The physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the body in which the powers lie, whereby man can express his “I am”.

If man has even the slightest grasp of the facts of life, then he can understand the various facts of life in relation to these different garments of the being. He would soon see the difference between sleeping and waking. One would see that during sleep, only the physical and etheric bodies lie in bed. The astral body and the I are lifted out of the physical and etheric bodies, and because the astral body is the carrier of joy, pain, desire and suffering, of all perceptions and sensations, the experiences of the soul, when the astral body is lifted out, descend into unconsciousness. Why is that the case? Where then is this astral body, where then is this “I” in the night?

It would be illogical if any person were to say that man dies every night and is born again in the morning. [Only this can make it understandable, if one understands that the ego and the astral body submerge into the physical and etheric body in the morning, that the ego and the astral body use the hands, the eyes, the ears, the whole physical body with the brain, use the physical body as a tool to be able to do everything.]

The ego is the spiritual essence of man, which in the morning descends into physical life and which in the evening, when man falls asleep, goes into other worlds, into spiritual worlds.

This is an experience that every person has every day from the alternation of sleeping and waking. But in death there is a completely different experience. Then the physical body separates from the etheric body and the astral body and I, which remain together for a while in the next moment. And because the physical body separates from the etheric and astral bodies, because the fighter who was there from birth to death is no longer there, the physical body follows its own forces and laws and falls apart.

We had to learn this in order to understand the course of human life, because in spiritual science, only the physical human being is born at the moment of birth, the physical birth, when the human germ leaves the mother's body. What is initially exposed to the external elements is initially only the physical human body, because from a theosophical point of view, we are not just talking about one birth, but about several births, and this language of multiple births makes the course of a person's life fully understandable.

We speak first of a second birth of man, which occurs approximately around the seventh year, or rather when the human being changes teeth. For many people, speaking of a second birth seems very strange.

Just as the germ is in the mother's womb until physical birth, so is the human being's etheric or life body, the second garment of the body, enclosed by an etheric sheath, by the etheric mother, until the change of teeth, and only then is this etheric sheath gradually pushed aside.

At first this may seem like a gray theory, but it is not. Only those who know that physical life is born at the time of physical birth and that the etheric body is only present at the change of teeth, only then does this etheric body freely face the world, can unfold principles for the education of the child. Now we present what follows from this: as long as the human germ is in the mother's womb, it does not come into contact with external light or external influences. This would be impossible, otherwise the germ would be destroyed. They have to wait to influence the light until the eyes, until the person is born. Every materialistically thinking person can see that. But they do not know that it is just as bad for the spiritual person to allow influences to flow into the etheric body that should only flow in after the change of teeth, when the etheric body is exposed on all sides. This means nothing other than that we have to base our educational principles on this.

However, until the age of seven, when only the physical body is exposed to external conditions, particular attention must be paid to the development of the body in the growing person, because all the forms in which the physical body must take shape are developed by the year the teeth change. And whatever is not laid down in the body in terms of form, in coarse or fine form, is lost for the whole of human life. The human being grows and develops, but the forms that become larger are laid down in the finest form up to that point. Therefore, during this time, when one does not have an effect on the etheric body, everything must be done to make the forms as good as possible.

We can only mention a few aspects that will show how to do this. There is a word that comes before the soul like a magic word in development, for this time until the seventh year, that is, until the change of teeth, and this word is: “imitation.” There is nothing as important for the development of the physical body as imitation. Everything that affects a person only works through imitation. What the child sees in his environment affects him through the senses. And not only physical things, but everything that happens in the physical world, including the moral things that the child sees around him, also affect the forms until the teeth change.

Imagine a child who has seen only evil and wickedness for seven years. This has an effect on his physical body. It causes such forms in the brain that these forms will be particularly suitable for becoming a special instrument for immorality, and it is no longer possible to improve in education what one has neglected to teach the child through ignorance.

I will give you an example from which you will see that everything we show the child, everything we teach him as principles, is imitated by the child.

Let's take a very good boy - a really good boy - who embarrasses his parents by taking some money from the till one day. The thought arises in the parents' minds: How can it be that a boy we have raised in this way takes money from the till? The child has stolen, the parents think. No, they say from the theosophical point of view. It is precisely because he is a good boy that he has done this. But what have you done? Day after day you did it, every day you took money from the cash box, the boy saw it every day. He should do everything that his parents do, and that is right. Therefore, he also took money. The boy was not a thief, he did not want to use the money for himself at all, or use it, he gave it to another boy. He just showed himself to be particularly moral, especially in this act. You have to make it a principle to only do in the children's environment what the child could actually do. What it must not do must not happen in its environment.

This is also very important for the plastic development of the organs, and only spiritual science can provide the right principles for this.

You know that a muscle becomes more plastic when it is used correctly. At this age, everything must be shaped plastically. The colors that are in the environment – be it red, blue, green and so on – all have a certain deep meaning for the development of the internal organs, as far as the physical organs are concerned; and many mistakes are made here. Because, as you know, there are many people who talk about what have been called nervous children, children who have a very restless nature. They believe that green, blue and dark colors should be introduced into the environment to calm them down. Others have very calm children and they believe that they should be dressed in light, red and white clothes. The opposite is true, because it is not the colors that affect these children. It depends on how these colors affect the children's inner being. For example, if you see a red spot on a black background, you will soon see that green lingers. This means that while you are looking at red, the inner organism perceives green. And so, when a child is excited and you bring red into its environment, red will not affect the child as you think it will. And it is precisely this that the child needs until the second dentition, that is, until the seventh year. Therefore, you have to dress a child who is restless in red clothes, while conversely, when a child is very calm, too calm, lethargic, green, blue, dark colors are needed.

You have to listen to me carefully. It is very easy to make the following objection, which is made again and again. People then say to me: “You see, when I put a red umbrella on the lamp in the evening, it makes me feel agitated.” The answer I have to give to such a lady or gentleman is: “Yes, but you are not a child before the change of teeth either. Of course, one must not forget that, and should bear in mind that for further development, other conditions are also present.

As soon as the soul has left the etheric shell, it is a matter of finding the right occupation for the child, and there is much in life for which a materialistic approach is quite, quite wrong.

One could – although someone who is grounded in spiritual science should not do this – one could become sentimental when looking at the many mistakes and their effects that are made in these areas. One could cite many things from the youth and life of a person who has become a great materialist, who denies everything else because he believes that everything results from the combination of molecules and atoms. This is because this person did not receive the right toy in his childhood, the one that can present life to him. If, for example, you give a child a toy like this, where it can create a whole new picture by putting together stones, thereby combining them, then new forms are formed through this. Any toy that evokes imagination is the right toy. This toy creates the impulse for the child to develop. For example, give a healthy child a doll that you made out of an old handkerchief, with two plaits for legs, two plaits for hands and a few eyes drawn on with ink. In the long run, the healthy child will most likely enjoy such a doll more than a real doll with real hair and beautifully painted cheeks, because such a beautiful doll – which is nevertheless always hideous – does not activate the powers of creative imagination, whereas if you give the child a doll made out of a handkerchief, it will see that this is not a human form. Then the imagination must be allowed to work. Then the inner plastic forms are called upon to be formed, and must be formed. These forms lie fallow if you give the child a toy that does not allow it to use its imagination. If you are aware that, as with the change of teeth, the child has to shape itself plastically, then you will find a great deal of support for the whole of education in theosophy, all of which has a good, deep foundation. We can only mention a few points here, for example, in the feeding of children, how the child is to be “educated”.

It used to be thought that young children should be fed a lot of eggs. Now, the best principle for this age is to absolutely not exceed the necessary protein requirement, because an excess of protein causes the child to lose its food instincts and the ability to shape its forms. A child to whom you do not give much protein will only demand what is healthy for him, and that is what the child needs to develop plastically. What is in the protein is something that, through its power, makes the plastic form exceed itself, and in this way secure instincts are not developed. By overfeeding the child with protein, you kill the power.

This, then, is the care of the physical body, the body that is born first. Now, with the change of teeth, the etheric covering withdraws, and the physical body and etheric body are now there. Now is the time to work with all our might from the outside to develop the etheric body. We must therefore first realize what forces the life body is the carrier of. Today, we want to give special consideration to the spiritual. This body is also the carrier of everything, especially memory, and then it is the carrier of the worldly power of imagination. Everything that a person does not grasp with his dry intellect, but rather what he can grasp through the image. If one knows this, then one will realize that at the moment the etheric body is born, an education must take place that takes particular account of this. This is therefore the second birth.

[The third garment is now still surrounded by an outer shell, by a protection.] This protection, the astral shell, will also be withdrawn, repulsed, and stripped off later, but only around the fifteenth year, at the time of sexual maturity.

Then, in the fifteenth year, the third birth takes place, and everything that penetrates the astral body from the outside and sends out its effects without realizing that it is still enveloped, has the same effect as light would have on a germ while it is still in the mother's womb. Now, for the second period of human development, which runs between the change of teeth, i.e. the seventh year, and sexual maturity around the fifteenth year, there is again a certain path that we have to follow. Here, too, there is another magic word that is just as important as imitation for the first seven years, and the word for this second period of life is 'authority'.

There is nothing that could ever replace the tremendously beneficial influence of the right authority in this age of life in later life. Just as everything around us awakens us to imitation up to the age of seven, so between the ages of seven and fifteen, no intellectual judgments have any effect on the human being. No moral principles can influence this person. That is all a matter for the astral body, and that has not yet been born. But when we look at the embodiment, the ideal striving, and confront the child with a true authority, then the right forces are awakened in the soul, which could not otherwise be reached later. If only people knew how important and significant the right kind of authority is! This authority is something very important for the human being in his life between birth and death. And in this time between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, all teaching and education must be built upon it. It is not enough for us to only say good things to the child; we must influence it through authority. We must teach the child everything there is to know through pictures, because only when the child has absorbed the image for the various 'whys' of nature within itself will it be able to receive everything it has seen in concrete forms so far in abstract concepts of the mind when the astral body is born.

It is necessary for the child to know how everything relates to the soul. You have to teach it this in pictures. When you show the child the butterfly puppet and show how the puppet develops until the butterfly flies out, and you tell him that the immortal soul leaves the body just as the butterfly flies out of the puppet, how it goes to the other world. Now, in our time, one can object: But children don't believe that! Do you know why they don't believe it? Because the teachers, because the educators themselves do not believe it. Now the materialistically thinking person says: Now you demand not only that children believe it, but also that teachers believe it!

Theosophy wants to make it clear again how the soul continues to exist after it has left the physical body, just as it is the case with the chrysalis and the moth. Yes, we will be able to believe in it again, and that is the most beautiful achievement of theosophy, that we do not see these things as a mere intellectual exercise, but that we have truths again that can also be understood through feeling. When people understand this, then faith is also passed on to the child, and the more the child is supposed to grasp of it, and the more the child is taught about it, the better it is for the child to learn to understand it through imagination. It is quite a different matter whether a child has experienced the secrets of nature through feeling and thus comes to the abstract concept, than whether a child has to understand the dry concept beforehand, without feeling coming into it. And this feeling works best when the etheric body is developing – and that is why particular emphasis must be placed on this in education.

In our time, in many areas of Europe, there are views that one should not turn the child into a memory machine. It is said that the child must learn to think. They teach him that Ix1=1 very early on, and the child must learn many other things soon. But there is nothing worse than having to exert the pure powers of reason too early. First, a fund of knowledge must be available, then one can judge what one knows. Today, children are taught history without understanding it, because children cannot yet judge cause and effect. The child must first have a sufficient amount of thoughts, and when the child sees many things in his soul, he can compare. If you only know a little and you start judging, you cannot compare, and [then] man is stupid. You cannot do anything worse for development in this [section] of life, in which our memory should really be enriched, than not to pay close attention to the child's ability to compare, which enables him to judge better. This is not yet understood today, [and that has already led to bad things]. Young people today give their judgment on everything, and we have to experience that articles appear in newspapers written by young people whose astral body has only recently been born.

If one knew how the laws work, then one should know that the astral body is only really born at the time of sexual maturity – around this time – and before this time the child does not yet have the ability to judge. The time from the change of teeth to sexual maturity should have the magic words: 'authority', 'image' and 'memory'. We could mention many things here, but one thing is particularly important: as soon as the astral body is born, the development of the powers of the mind and the aesthetic disposition of the human being come into consideration. Just as during the first seven years the physical body was developed, from the seventh to the fifteenth year the etheric body was developed, so now the astral body comes into consideration. If we want to assess this correctly, we need to be clear about a great many things, because during this time a great many images are placed before the soul. During this time, the human being must have good role models and ideals to strive for. The magic word for this epoch of human development is “emulation”. One must give these people pictures of great men and women and make clear to them what these people have done in the development of the world. And what has been neglected during this time in order to educate the senses for the beautiful and artistic cannot be made up for later. With sexual maturity, what has been inherited from previous generations, from the family and so on, comes out with the person, so to speak.

Then, when a person has reached sexual maturity, when he has shed his astral shell, the qualities that he has brought with him from previous lives come to light. Their shadows had already been cast over the young child, but if we look at the essential, what emerges is what goes beyond death and birth: individuality.

At puberty, the astral covering is pushed back and the astral body is released. And now there come times for the person when other things are important. Now, consideration is given to education, to the power of judgment, to a person's sound judgment. But something else is even more important. That which the person has brought with them from their previous life comes to the fore in a special way, that they want to shape in this life between birth and death. During this time, the human being is not yet capable of observing the external world in an objective way. But that which enters the world is of a beautiful, ideal nature. [This nature also wants to come out, and here it is a matter of how this nature, insofar as it comes out as idealism, will face life as hope.] This hope and idealism reveal themselves in their true form between the ages of 14, 15 and 21 to 22. During this time, everything that wants to come out reveals itself, even if it contradicts reality. These are all memories from previous lives, with the new fresh powers of the astral body. Woe betide people whose ideals of hope are clouded during this time, whose expectations are dimmed, who are told that a large part of these things will later appear merely as spring hopes, that these are merely unattainable ideals and hopes. That is not the point. It does not matter whether the ideals can be achieved, but rather it is a matter of the forces that lie within them. These are the favorable life forces that, if well trained, make our astral body safe and secure for life. When we have these ideals, we make ourselves a strong third garment, and there is nothing worse than not taking care for this time, that idealism can develop, when one encounters this idealism with a Philistinism that wants to try to break the idealism.

Because it is only around the twentieth year that the actual self in man, which has been in its shell until now, is fully born. And with that, the human being enters the world in free communication, and has become a being that places itself in absolutely free communication with the outside world.

Only then is everything that was in him out. Now he has to educate himself by grinding down. This takes a long time. It continues like this until the thirty-fifth year. This is an important year in a person's life. This thirty-fifth year is considered a turning point by those who stand on the ground of theosophical spiritual science.

If we look at the average lifespan, we see that the thirty-fifth year marks the end of everything that was predisposed in the human being. Up to this point, he has acquired everything he could practise. Towards the end of the thirty-fifth year, when the time of apprenticeship and wandering is over, he begins to exercise his powers and abilities. But then the powers begin to decline again. From the age of thirty-five, the astral body, which until then had been in free contact with the outside world and in which everything that had been established was engraved, now begins to harden and regress. This lasts until the age of forty. This is an important epoch in the development of man, because this degeneration is one side of the matter - and the other side is much more important.

The moment the shell, the astral body, begins to recede, the moment the forces of the astral body are consumed, that is the moment the core in man, the eternal core, is emphasized. If a person is educated correctly, this core can develop all the more for the times after death. While the temporal disappears downwards, this eternal in man grows. This is very evident in the fortieth year, when, after the astral body, the etheric body also begins to disintegrate. Just as it happened first with the astral body, so it now happens with the etheric body, which has now begun to regress. We can see this clearly in many people who, around this time, remember a lot of what they experienced as a child. Especially from the seventh to the fourteenth year, while they have completely forgotten many things that they have experienced recently. These old memories come back when the etheric body recedes.

The last epoch is when the physical body declines. This is, by and large, when the physical organs, the entire bone system, deteriorates. We do not need to describe this physical deterioration, but we point it out so that you can see what can actually be said about this epoch of life.

Now all this is no longer generally known, but there were times, very long, long ago, when all this was known, when it was known, for example, that the thirty-fifth year is the midpoint of life, and that only after this time, when you are completely finished with yourself - and that is around the thirty-fifth year - that you are only then mature enough to give to others, to spend what you have in abundance. Only after the thirty-fifth year do you have an abundance. Until then, man has to take care of the development of his clothes. So until his thirtieth year, man has to deal with himself. When he no longer has to deal with himself – only after his thirty-fifth year, because then the bodies regress – then the forces that previously flowed into his physical body flow into his spiritual body, in order to have an effect on his environment. In the times when people had an inkling of these things, this thirty-fifth year was therefore considered so important. A person was only trusted with judgment after he had reached the age of thirty-five, when he had received all his powers. Only then, it was said, did a person become capable of judgment. Other people should listen to his judgment when he no longer has anything to do with himself; and then it was valid as long as the person had his astral body. When the etheric body begins to fade away, then his judgment is not only decisive to be listened to, but to be accepted as something that applies not only to him, but to the community in which he finds himself.

In ancient times, when this was understood, when it was known that the one who had entered this age no longer needed to add anything to his etheric body because it was already declining, in that age the person could give his judgment in the council of the community. In the times when people knew about this, when they knew life in this way, they organized their lives accordingly, and they said something wonderful in those times when they felt these things. They said: Only when a person has reached the age at which his physical body gradually decays, so that he no longer demands anything and his time fades away, only then can you listen to him, only then is his judgment exalted. You can accept his judgment. Such things have existed, and many were aware of them.

I will remind you of just one fact. Just read the beginning of Dante's 'Commedia'. Then read how he describes what he experienced, where he writes that the most powerful thing he experienced was in the middle of his life – that is when he was thirty-five. There he experienced this initiation, which could be called the 'initiation into the mysteries of existence'. And there is a secret training, an initiation into the secrets of existence in special schools, in mystery schools, under such conditions that a person is never declared mature enough to speak about the facts of secret science, a person who still has something to do with himself, who is not already on the descending line.

If you take all this together from the spiritual-scientific point of view, you will see that on the one hand you have a path along which the various bodies - the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body - develop, and a path along which these bodies regress, an ascending and a descending path. But it is on the latter, on which the eternal in man grows, on which the source decreases, and man then has to pass through the gate of death. Then the powers that have been mysteriously developing in the sheaths emerge. And the more a person strives to develop himself in his life, and the more he applies theosophical views in the practical world, the better he has understood the true spirit of them.

We have now seen that we have gained practical principles directly from these theosophical views, and yet there are many people who say: There are such strange people in the world who call themselves Theosophists, who claim such strange things about a world that [in addition] is supposed to still exist [which we cannot possibly know about]. A reasonable person considers all this to be fantasy. You can say all that, but we assume that such people rise up until they say: Now, when you meet and talk to a theosophist like that, they do have a reasonable judgment about other things. So let us listen to the matter for once, even if they tell us something that we cannot yet understand directly; perhaps there is something good in what these strange people claim, but we can try it.

You can make life itself the proof. You can prove through life what is right. All the talking and discussing is only partially very good, but it is not the right thing. With discussion, you can prove virtually anything you want. It is the same with remedies. The healer thinks that his remedy is the best. But someone else may come along and say that what he has is definitely better, that his remedy is the best there is. Then someone else may come along and say: none of it is worth anything, and he proves it too. You don't get anywhere with such discussions. You only get ahead by using the remedy. If this remedy helps, then it is proven that it is good. If it does not help, then it is not proven.

If Theosophy is to have any influence on our lives, then life must be the proof for such things. Let man dare to put life under the facts that Theosophy talks about. You will then see that man comes up higher, healthy in body and soul, that man will develop better. You will see that life is the proof of the correctness of what Theosophy has to give, and you may place your whole life under the sign of the views, the facts, and you will see that the whole of life will develop more beautifully. You will see that it is not necessary for our hopes and our efforts to wane for it. If we fail to prove the correctness of our views to you, then they were not correct for you. But we know that what we say is right. We feel and know that the temporal dies and that the eternal grows. We run counter to the moments when we are to pass through the gate of death.

Thus, Theosophy, spiritual science, gives us the means to intervene in our immediate, practical lives in a healthy way, and the lives that have been influenced by this will provide the best proof of its truth. People today need the influence of Theosophy in their everyday lives. And life becomes healthy and fresh and hopeful and capable of work when man knows everything that confronts him in the outer world through the strong powers of the spirit, on which everything is based. Then everything should be a reflection of spiritual facts. Then, in all truth, spirit encounters spirit in evolution, and when spirit ignites spirit in evolution, then this development truly progresses, upward to the salvation of all life, to the salvation of all existence.

[ 1 ] An intimation that the student has arrived at the stage of evolution described in the foregoing chapter is the change which comes over his dream-life. Hitherto his dreams were confused and haphazard, but now they begin to assume a more regular character. Their pictures begin to arrange themselves in an orderly way, like the phenomena of daily life. He can discern in them laws, causes, and effects. The contents of his dreams will likewise change. While hitherto he discerned only the reverberations of daily life, mixed impressions of his surroundings or of his physical condition, there now appear before him pictures of a world with which he had no acquaintance. At first, indeed, the general nature of his dreams will remain as of old in so far as the dream differentiates itself from waking phenomena by presenting in emblematical form whatever it wishes to express. This dramatization cannot have escaped the notice of any attentive observer of dream-life. For instance, you may dream that you are catching some horrible creature and experiencing an unpleasant sensation in your hand. You wake up to discover that you are tightly holding a piece of the bed-clothes. The perception does not express itself plainly, but only through the allegorical image. Or you may dream that you are flying from some pursuer and in consequence you experience fear. On waking up you find that during sleep you had been suffering from palpitation of the heart. The stomach which is replete with indigestible food will cause uneasy dream-pictures. Occurrences in the neighborhood of the sleeping person may also reflect themselves allegorically in dreams. The striking of a clock may evoke the picture of soldiers marching by to the sound of their drums. Or a falling chair can become the origin of a complete dream-drama in which the sound of falling is translated into a gun report, and so forth. The more regulated dreams of the person whose etheric body has begun its development have also this allegorical method of expression, but they will cease to repeat merely the facts of the physical environment or of the sense-body. As these dreams which owe their origin to such things become orderly they are mixed up with similar dream-pictures which are the expression of things and events in another world. Here one has experiences that lie beyond the range of one's waking consciousness. Now it must never be fancied that any true mystic will then make the things which in this manner he experiences in dreams the basis of any authoritative account of the higher world. One must only consider such dream-experiences as hints of a higher development. Very soon, as a further result of this, we find that the pictures of the dreaming student are no longer, as hitherto, withdrawn by the guidance of a careful intellect, but are regulated thereby, and methodically considered like the conceptions and impressions of the waking consciousness. The difference between this dream-consciousness and the waking state grows ever smaller and smaller. The dreamer becomes, in the fullest meaning of the word, awake in his dream-life : that is to say, he can feel himself to be the master and leader of the pictures which then appear.

[ 2 ] During his dreams the individual actually finds himself in a world which is other than that of his physical senses. But if he possesses only unevolved spiritual organs, he can receive from that world only the confused dramatizations already mentioned. It would only be as much at his disposal as would be the sense-world to a being equipped with nothing but the most rudimentary of eyes. In consequence he could only discern in this world the reflections and reverberations of ordinary life. Yet in dreams he can see these, because his soul interweaves its daily perceptions as pictures into the stuff of which that other world consists. It must here be clearly understood that in addition to the workaday conscious life, one leads in this world a second and unconscious existence. Everything that one perceives or thinks becomes impressed upon this other world. Only if the lotus-flowers are evolved can one perceive these impressions. Now certain minute beginnings of the lotus-flowers are always at the disposal of anyone. During daily consciousness he cannot perceive with them, because the impressions made on him are very faint. It is for similar reasons that during the daytime one cannot see the stars. They cannot strike our perceptions when opposed by the fierce and active sunlight, and it is just in this way that faint spiritual impressions cannot make themselves felt in opposition to the masterful impressions of the physical senses. When the door of outward sense is closed in sleep, these impressions can emerge confusedly, and then the dreamer remembers what he has experienced in another world. Yet, as already remarked, at first these experiences are nothing more than that which conceptions related to the physical senses have impressed on the spiritual world. Only the developed lotus-flowers make it possible for manifestations which are unconnected with the physical world to show themselves. Out of the development of the etheric body arises a full knowledge concerning the impressions that are conveyed from one world to another. With this the student's communication with a new world has begun. He must now—by means of the instructions given in his occult training—first of all acquire a twofold nature. It must become possible for him during waking hours to recall quite consciously the beings he has observed in dreams. If he has acquired this faculty he will then become able to make these observations during his ordinary waking state. His attention will have become so concentrated upon spiritual impressions that these impressions need no longer vanish in the light of those which come through the senses, but are, as it were, always at hand.

[ 3 ] If the student is able to do this, there then arises before his spiritual eyes something of the picture which has been described in a former chapter. He can now discern that what exists in the spiritual world is the origin of that which corresponds to it in the physical world, and, above all things, can he learn in this world to know his own higher self. The task that now confronts him is to grow, as it were, into this higher self, or, in other words, to regard it as his only true self, and also to conduct himself accordingly. He now retains, more and more, the conception and the vital realization that his physical body and what hitherto he designated “himself ” is only an instrument of the higher self. He takes an attitude toward his lower self, such as might be taken by some one limited to the world of sense with regard to some instrument or vehicle which serves him. Just as such a person would not consider the carriage in which he travelled to be himself, though he says “I travel,” or “I go,” so, too, the developed person, when he says “I go through the door,” retains in his mind the conception, “I take my body through the door.” This must become for him such an habitual idea that he never for a moment loses the firm ground of the physical world, that never a feeling of estrangement in the world of sense arises. If the student does not wish to become a mere fantastic or vain enthusiast, he must work with the higher consciousness, so that he does not impoverish his life in the physical world, but enriches it, even as the person who makes use of a railway instead of his own legs may enrich himself by going for a journey.

[ 4 ] If the student has raised himself to such a life in the higher Ego, then—or still more probably during the acquisition of the higher consciousness—it will be revealed to him how he may stir into life what is called the fire of Kundalini which lies in the organ at the heart, and, further, how he may direct the currents described in a previous chapter.

This fire of Kundalini is an element of finer material which flows outward from this organ and streams in luminous loveliness through the self-moving lotus-flowers and the other canals of the evolved etheric body. Thence it radiates outward an the surrounding spiritual world and makes it spiritually visible, just as the sunshine falling upon the surrounding objects makes visible the physical world.

[ 5 ] How this fire of Kundalini in the organ at the heart is fanned into life may only form the subject of actual occult training. Nothing can be said of it openly.

[ 6 ] The spiritual world becomes plainly perceptible as composed of objects and beings only for the individual who in such a way can send the fire of Kundalini through his etheric body and into the outer world, so that its objects are illumined by it. From this it will be seen that a complete consciousness of an object in the spiritual world is entirely dependent upon the condition that the person himself has cast upon it the spiritual light. In reality the Ego, who has drawn forth this fire, no longer dwells in the physical human body at all, but (as has been already shown) apart from it. The organ at the heart is only the spot where the individual from without enkindles that fire. If he wished to do this, not here but elsewhere, then the spiritual perceptions produced by means of the fire would have no connection with the physical world. Yet one should relate all the higher spiritual things to the physical world itself, and through oneself should let them work in the latter. The organ at the heart is precisely the one through which the higher self makes use of the lower self as his instrument and whence the latter is directed.

[ 7 ] The feeling which the developed person now bears toward the things of the spiritual world is quite other than that which is characteristic of ordinary people in relation to the physical world. The latter feel themselves to be in a certain part of the world of sense, and the objects they perceive are external to them. The spiritually evolved person feels himself to be united with the spiritual objects that he perceives, as if, indeed, he were within them. In spiritual space he veritably moves from place to place, and is therefore spoken of in the language of occult science as “the wanderer.” He is practically without a home. Should he continue in this mere wandering, he would be unable to define clearly any object in spiritual space. Just as one defines an object or a locality in physical space by starting from a certain point, so must it also be in regard to the other world. He must seek for a place there which Dream-Life

he practically completely explores—a place of which he spiritually takes possession. This he must make his spiritual home and set everything in relation to it. The person who is living in the physical world sees everything in a like manner, as if he carried the ideas of his physical home wherever he went. Involuntarily a man from Berlin will describe London quite otherwise than a Parisian. Only there is a difference between the spiritual and the physical home. Into the latter you are born without your own cooperation, and from it in youth you have acquired a number of ideas which will henceforth involuntarily give color to everything. The spiritual home, an the contrary, you have formed for yourself with full consciousness. You therefore shape your opinions when going out from it in the full, unprejudiced light of freedom. This formation of a spiritual home is known in the speech of occult science as “the building of the hut.”

[ 8 ] The spiritual outlook at this point extends at first to the spiritual counterparts of the physical world, so far as these lie in what we call the astral world. In this world is found everything which in its nature is akin to human impulse, feeling, desire, or passion. For in every sense-object that surrounds a person there are forces which are related to these human forces. A crystal, for instance, is formed by powers which, when seen from the higher standpoint, are perceptible as akin to the impulse which acts in the human being. By similar forces the sap is drawn through the vessels of the plant, the blossoms unfold, the seed-cases are made to burst. All these powers acquire form and color for the developed spiritual perceptions, just as the objects of the physical world have color and form for physical eyes. At the stage of development here described the student no longer sees merely the crystal or the plant, but likewise the spiritual forces behind them, even as he does not now see the impulses of animal or human being only through their external manifestations, but also directly as veritable objects, as in the physical world he can see chairs and tables. The entire world of instinct, impulse, wish or passion, whether of a person or of an animal, is there in the astral cloud, in the aura with which the subject is enwrapt.

[ 9 ] Besides this, the clairvoyant at this stage of his evolution perceives things that are almost or entirely withdrawn from the perceptions of sense. For example, he can observe the astral difference between a place which is for the most part filled with persons of low development and another which is inhabited by high-minded people. In a hospital it is not only the physical but also the astral atmosphere which is other than that of the ball-room. A commercial town has a different astral air from that of a university town. At first the powers of perceiving such things will be but weak in the person who has become clairvoyant. At first it will seem to be connected with the objects concerned, very much as is the dream-consciousness of the ordinary person in relation to his waking consciousness, but gradually he will completely awaken on this plane also.

[ 10 ] The highest acquisition that comes to the clairvoyant, when he has reached this degree of sight, is that by which the astral reaction of animal or human impulses or passions is revealed to him. A loving action has quite a different astral appearance from one which proceeds out of hatred. The sensual appetite gives rise to a horrible astral image, and the feeling that is based on lofty things to one that is beautiful. These correspondences or astral pictures are only to be seen faintly during physical human life, for their strength is much lessened by existence in the physical world. A wish for any object displays itself, for instance, as a reflection of the object itself, in addition to that which the wish appears to be in the astral world. If, however, that wish is satisfied by the attainment of the physical object, or if at least the possibility of such satisfaction is present, the corresponding image would only make a very faint appearance. It first comes into its full power after the death of a person, when the soul, according to its nature, continues to foster such desires, but cannot any longer satisfy them because the object and its own physical organs are both lacking. Thus the gourmet will still have the desire to tickle his palate; but the possibility of satisfaction is absent, since he no longer possesses a palate. As a result of this the desire is displayed as an exceptionally powerful image by which the soul is tormented. These experiences after death among the images of the lower soul-nature are known as the period in “Kamaloka,” that is to say, in the region of desire. They only vanish away when the soul has cleansed itself from all appetites which are directed towards the physical world. Then does the soul mount up into a loftier region which is called “Devachan.” Although these images are thus weak in the person who is yet alive, they still exist and follow him as his own environment in Kamaloka, just as the comet is followed by its tail, and they can be seen by the clairvoyant who has arrived at this stage of development.

[ 11 ] Among such experiences and all that are akin to them the occult student lives in the world that has been described. He cannot as yet bring himself into touch with still loftier spiritual adventures. From this point he must climb upward still higher.

The spiritual-scientific movement has arisen in our time not because of the arbitrary act of this or of that individual, of this or of that society, but because it is connected with the whole evolution of humanity and, as such, it should be considered as one of the most important of cultural impulses. If we would penetrate into the mission of the spiritual-scientific movement, we must transfer ourselves into the past and future of mankind.

Just as the individual human beings have evolved, from the moment when they first descended as individual souls from the bosom of the Godhead, so mankind as a whole has also evolved. Consider the differences, the changes and the development which may be observed upon the surface of the earth in the course of thousands of years! Consider how entirely things have changed during that time! Generally speaking, this is difficult to realise and to grasp quite clearly.

We should first explain that what we are accustomed to name “mankind” is only the product of the so-called fifth root-race. This was preceded by another human race, the fourth root-race, which lived on a continent that should be thought of as lying between present-day Europe and America. This continent was Atlantis. Here our ancestors had quite a different form and an entirely different civilisation. The ancient Atlantean did not possess a developed intellect and mind, but he was equipped with fine somnambulistic-clairvoyant forces. Logical power, a combining intellect, science and art, such as they exist now, did not exist in ancient Atlantis, for man's faculties of thought and feeling were quite different. At that time, he could not have combined thoughts, nor could he have reckoned, counted, or read; as men do now; yet certain somnambulistic-clairvoyant spiritual forces lived in him. He could understand the language of Nature and could hear God speak to him in the murmuring waves; he could understand the rolling thunder, the rustling forest, the delicate aromas of the flowers; he could understand this language of Nature and was in the whole of Nature. At that time, no law or jurisprudence were needed to come to an understanding with one's neighbour; the Atlantean just went out and listened to the sounds of the trees and of the wind and these told him what he had to do.

Folk-lore, which never contains anything haphazard or thought-out, has preserved the memory of ancient Atlantis in a beautiful way, when it speaks of “Nibelheim”, for instance, in the Nibelung Poem. In a delightful way it speaks of the Rhine and all these rivers as waters which have remained behind from the mists of ancient Atlantis. And the wisdom of Atlantis is referred to in the treasure which lies buried below their waves, On this continent, which was situated between America and Europe, we must seek the seminary of the ancient adepts, Those who were suited to be the pupils of the great individualities whom we call the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony-Feelings, were trained in these schools.

The seminary which flourished during the fourth Atlantean sub-race, this first school of adepts, would now be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. There, the pupils were taught in quite a different way from now. At that time, a powerful, influence could pass from man to man, through the force which still lay in the spoken word.

Simple folks of to-day still possess a fine feeling for the inner, spiritual and occult power of words. But it is impossible to compare the present power of words with that of the past. For in the past, this was something tremendous, and the word alone awakened forces in the soul of the pupil. A mantram of to-day has no longer the force of earlier times, when words were not so permeated by thoughts, as is the case to-day. The influence which went out from these words awakened the soul-forces of the pupil; one might call this a human initiation through the powerful effect of the language of Nature. ... A clear language was also spoken there by the smoke from substances such as incense, etc.

There was then a far more direct connection between the souls of teacher and pupil. The written signs in the Adept-School of ancient Atlantis were imitations of the phenomena of Nature, written by the hand in the air, these signs had their effect and also influenced the spirit of the population, arousing forces in the soul.

Thus every race has its task in the evolution of humanity. The task of our race, the fifth root-race, consists in adding Manas to the four members of the human being. That is to say, the understanding must be awakened through concepts and ideas. Every race has its own task: the Atlantean race had the task of developing the Ego. Our race, the fifth root-race, or the post-Atlantean era, must develop Manas, the Spirit-Self.

But the achievements of Atlantis did not die, when Atlantis was submerged, for the essence of everything that existed in the Atlantean School of Adepts was rescued by a small group of men. Under the guidance of the Manu, this small group journeyed into a region now known as the Desert of Gobi. And this small number of men then prepared copies of the former culture and teachings, but in a more intellectual form; the earlier spiritual forces were transformed into thoughts and signs. The various streams of culture then journeyed out from this centre like rays, or beams. First came the pre-Vedic Indian culture, which transformed for the first time the in-streaming wisdom into thoughts.

The second culture which went out from this ancient School of Adepts was the old Persian culture; the third one, the Chaldean-Babylonian culture with its wonderful star-wisdom, its lofty sacerdotal wisdom. The fourth culture to flourish was the Graeco-Latin one, with its personal colouring, and finally the fifth culture, which is our present one. The sixth and seventh lie in the future.

I have now characterised our task in the evolution of humanity: What once existed in the form of cosmic wisdom, must be transformed into thoughts and brought down to the physical plane.

When the old Atlantean listened, between the tones sounding round him, he could hear the NAME of what he recognised as divine: “TAO”, In the Egyptian Mysteries this sound was transformed into thoughts, script and signs—the Tao-sign, the Tao-books. Everything in the form of knowledge, writing and thought first came into the world during the post-Atlantean age. Before that time, nothing could have been written down, for the understanding for it would not have been there.

Now we are living in the middle of the Manas-development. It is the task of our race to develop intellectual culture, and at the same time to develop egoism in its extremest form. Though it sounds grotesque, we may say that never before was there so much intellectual power in the world, and yet so little capacity of inner vision as at the present time. Thought is at the greatest distance from the inner essence of things; it is far away from inner spiritual vision.

When the Atlantean priest wrote a sign in the air, its chief effect was on the pupil's inner soul-experience.

The personal element came more to the fore during the fourth, the Graeco-Latin epoch. In Greece, the personal element developed in art, and in Rome we find it in the structure of the government, etc. In our time, we experience egoism, the dry personal, intellectual element. But our task to-day is to grasp the occult truths in Manas, in the purest element of thought. The comprehension of the spiritual in this finest distillation of the brain is the true mission of our age. To render thought so forceful that it acquires something of an occult power is the task which has been given us. This task must be fulfilled, so that we may be able to take our place in the future.

Mighty flames of fire destroyed ancient Lemuria, and mighty floods ancient Atlantis. Our civilisation will also perish, through the war of all against all. This is what we must face. Our fifth root-race will perish, because egoism will reach its highest pitch. But at the same time, a small group of men will develop the power of Budhi, of the Life-Spirit, through the force of thought, in order to carry over Budhi into the new civilisation. Everything that is productive in the striving human being will grow stronger and stronger, until his personality reaches the summit of freedom. At present, every individual must discover in himself a kind of guiding spirit in the soul's inner depths:—This is Budhi, the power of the Life spirit. Were we to approach the future by taking up the cultural impulses as in earlier epochs, we should face the disintegration of humanity.

What do we see now at the present time?

Everyone wants to be his own master: Egoism, selfishness have been pushed to the extreme. A time will come when no other authority will be recognised except one which men recognise freely, whose power is based upon free confidence. The Mysteries which were founded upon the power of the spirit, are called the MYSTERIES OF THE SPIRIT; the Mysteries of the future, which will have trust as their foundation, are called the MYSTERIES OF THE FATHER. These will mark the end of our civilisation. The new impulse of the power of confidence must come, otherwise we approach human disintegration, a universal cult of the Ego and of egoism.

In the times of the Mysteries of the Spirit, which were founded upon the rightful power, authority and might of the Spirit, there were certain wise men who possessed wisdom, and only the soul who passed through difficult probations could be initiated by them. In future, we approach the Mysteries of the Father, and we must strive more and more that each single human being should attain wisdom.

Will this counter-act egoism and the threatening disintegration? Yes! For only when we reach the highest wisdom, in which there are no differences, no personal opinion and no personal standpoint, but ONE VIEW only, will men agree. If they were to remain as they are at present, following their different standpoints, they would become more and more disunited. The highest wisdom always produces a unanimous view among all men. Real wisdom is ONE, and it unites men again, whilst leaving them as free as possible, without any coercive authority. Just as the members of the great WHITE Brotherhood are always in harmony with one another and with humanity, so all men will one day be one, through this wisdom. Only this wisdom can establish the true idea of brotherhood. Spiritual science therefore has only one task: to bring this idea to men, by developing now the Spirit-Self and later on the Life-Spirit. The great goal of the spiritual-scientific movement is to make it possible for man to attain freedom and true wisdom; its mission is to let this truth and wisdom flow into men.

The modern movement of spiritual science began with the most elementary teachings. Many important things have been revealed in the years which have passed since the founding of this movement, and much that is even more important will be revealed. The work of the spiritual-scientific movement, is therefore to allow a gradual flowing out of wisdom of the great white brotherhood that had its origin in Atlantis. Such work has always been prepared for through long periods of time. The whole activity of the great founders of religions was a preparation for the ONE great event, for the appearance of Christ-Jesus.

Spiritual science seeks to be the testamentary executor of Christianity. And so it will be. When the Mysteries of the Father have been fulfilled, that is, when the development of Budhi is accomplished in every individual human being, then each one will discover within himself his own deepest being—ATMAN, the Spirit-Man.

The coming of Christ-Jesus was prepared for by the sequence of the founders of religions, by Zarathustra, Hermes, Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras. All their teachings pursue the same aim: To let wisdom flow into humanity, but in every case, in the form most suited to each people respectively. The essentially new element is not found in what Christ said; the new element in the appearance and teaching of Christ-Jesus is the force that lay in Him to awaken into LIFE all that, formerly was only teaching.

Christianity has brought men the power to be united in free-willed recognition of the authority of Christ-Jesus, whilst maintaining the greatest possible individualisation, so that they are able to join together in brotherly union through faith in Him, in His manifestation and in His divinity.

Between the Mysteries of the SPIRIT and those of the FATHER, stand the MYSTERIES OF THE SON. Their seminary was the School of St. Paul, who had appointed Dionysios as its leader. This school flourished under him, for Dionysios taught these Mysteries in a very special way, whereas St. Paul propagated the teaching exoterically.

Let us now seek an explanation from another side, so as to understand the meaning of the words: The MYSTERIES OF THE FATHER will come. In the old Atlantean schools for adepts the teachers were not men, but beings higher than man, They had completed their development upon earlier planets, and these beings, who had come down to the earth from other planetary developments, instructed a group of chosen men in the MYSTERIES OF THE SPIRIT. In the MYSTERIES OF THE SON, Christ Himself appeared as a teacher in the most solemn celebrations and was therefore also a teacher who was not a man, but God. But in the MYSTERIES OF THE FATHER, those who will become teachers will be men, These men, who develop more quickly than the others, will be the true Masters of Wisdom and of Harmony; they are called “The Fathers”, in the Mysteries of the Father, the guidance of mankind passes from beings who have descended from other worlds into the hands of men themselves. This is significant.

It is the task of spiritual science to prepare men to form a centre for this end, to prepare them for a universal wisdom, for an authority built only on trust and confidence, and to develop an understanding for this, to begin with, in a small nucleus of humanity.

The development of the materialistic civilisation reached its climax in the nineteenth century, and that is why the impulse of spiritual science entered the world at that time. Through spiritual science, something was called into life—and now exists—which counter-acts materialism: It is the counter-movement in the direction of spirituality. Spiritual science is nothing new, and even the spiritual-scientific movement is not new; it is only the continuation of what has already existed.

Materialism and egoism bring disintegration to humanity, for the individual human being only regards his own interests. Wisdom must therefore reunite the human beings who have thus become separated. Wisdom brings them together in fullest freedom and exercises no coercion whatever. This is the task of the spiritual-scientific movement in our time.

We must realise that wisdom must be acquired quite concretely. We all know the example of the stove which was given the task of heating a room. If we explain this to the stove in words as moving as possible, and entreat it to warm the room, it will not obey us unless we heat it; only then will it be able to fulfil its task. Similarly, all talk of brotherhood and of brotherly love is useless; only through KNOWLEDGE we draw nigh to the goal. Individual human beings, and mankind as a whole, can only reach the path of wisdom and of brotherhood through knowledge.

We have now followed this path by considering three kinds of Mysteries. Spiritual science must be able to awaken an understanding for such things in a small nucleus of humanity, so that when the sixth race appears this understanding can be awakened in all men. This is the task which spiritual science must fulfil.

A small part of the fifth root-race will forestall the course of evolution, it will spiritualise Manas and unfold the Spirit-Self. The majority, however, will reach the summit of selfishness. Only this nucleus of humanity, that develops the Spirit-Self, will become the seed of the sixth root-race, and the most advanced of these, the Masters, as we call them, who have grown out of mankind, will then be the leaders of humanity. The movement for spiritual knowledge strives towards this goal.

[ 1 ] Only a few personalities in the second half of the nineteenth century attempted to find a firm foundation for the relation of a conception of the self-conscious ego toward the general world picture by going deeply into Hegel's mode of thought. One of the best thinkers along these lines was Paul Asmus (1842–1876), who died as a young man. In 1873 he published a book entitled, The Ego and the Thing in Itself. In it he shows how it is possible, through Hegel's approach to thinking and the world of ideas, to obtain a relation of man toward the essence of things. He explains in an ingenious way that we have in man's thinking an element that is not alien to reality but full of life and fundamentally real, an element on which we only have to concentrate in order to arrive at the essence of existence. In a most illuminating way he describes the course of the evolution of world conception that began with Kant, who had seen in the “thing in itself” an element that was alien and inaccessible to man, and led to Hegel, who was of the opinion that thought comprised not only itself as an ideal entity but also the “thing in itself.” Voices like this found scarcely a hearing. This became most poignantly clear in the slogan, “Back to Kant,” which became popular in a certain current of philosophical life after Eduard Zeller's speech at the University of Heidelberg, On the Significance and Task of the Theory of Knowledge.

The conceptions, partly conscious and partly unconscious, which led to this slogan, are approximately as follows. Natural science has shaken the confidence in spontaneous thinking that means to penetrate by itself to the highest questions of existence, but we cannot be satisfied with the mere results of natural science for they do not lead beyond the external view of things. There must be grounds of existence concealed behind this external aspect. Even natural science itself has shown that the world of colors, tones, etc., surrounding us is not a reality outside in the objective world but that it is produced through the function of our senses and our brain (compare above, to Part II Chapter III). For this reason, it is necessary to ask these questions: In what respect do the results of natural science point beyond their own limits toward the higher problems: What is the nature of our knowledge? Can this knowledge lead to a solution of that higher task? Kant has asked such questions with great emphasis. In order to find one's own position, one wanted to study how he had approached them. One wanted to think over with the greatest possible precision Kant's line of thought, attempting to avoid his errors and to find in the continuation of his ideas a way that led out of the general perplexity.

[ 2 ] A number of thinkers endeavored to arrive at a tenable goal, starting from Kantian points of departure. The most important among them were Hermann Cohen (1842–1916), Otto Liebmann (1840 – 1912), Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1916), Johannes Volkelt (1842–1930) and Benno Erdmann (1851–1921). Much perspicacity can be found in the writings of these men. A great deal of work was done inquiring into the nature and extent of the human faculty of knowledge. Johannes Volkelt who, insofar as he was active as an epistomologist, lives entirely within this current, also contributed a thorough work on Kant's Theory of Knowledge (1879) in which all problems characterizing this trend of thought are discussed. In 1884 he gave the inaugural address for his professorship in Basel in which he made the statement that all thinking that goes beyond the results of the special empirical sciences of facts must have “the restless character of seeking and searching, of cautious trial, defensive reserve and deliberate admission.” It should be an “advance in which one must partly withdraw again, a yielding in which one nevertheless holds on to a certain degree” (On the Possibility of Metaphysics, Hamburg & Leipzig, 1884).

This new attempt to start from Kant appears in a special light in Otto Liebmann. His writings, Contributions Toward the Analysis of Reality (1876), Thoughts and Facts (1882), Climax of Theories (1884), are veritable models of philosophical criticism. Here a caustic mind ingeniously discovers contradictions in the worlds of thought, reveals as half truths what appear as safe judgments, and shows what unsatisfactory elements the individual sciences contain when their results appear before the highest tribunals of thought. Liebmann enumerates the contradictions of Darwinism. He reveals its insufficiently founded assumptions and its defective thought connections, maintaining that something is needed to fill in the gaps to support the assumptions. On one occasion he ends an exposition he gives of the nature of living organisms with the words:

Plant seeds do not lose their ability to germinate after lying dry for ages, and grains of wheat found in Egyptian mummy cases, after having been hermetically sealed and buried for thousands of years, when sowed in a moist soil, thrive excellently. Wheel animalcules (rotatoria) and other infusoria that have been gathered completely dried up from a gutter pipe are newly revived by rain water. Even frogs and fishes that have turned into ice cakes in freezing water revive when carefully thawed out. All these facts are capable of completely opposite interpretations. . . . In short, every form of categorical denial in this matter would be crude dogmatism. Therefore, we discontinue our argument.

This phrase, “We discontinue our argument,” really expresses, even if it does not do so literally, every final thought of Liebmann's reflection. It is, indeed, the final conclusion of many recent followers and elaborators of Kantianism. They do not succeed in doing more than emphasize that they receive the things into their consciousness. Therefore, everything that they see, hear, etc., is not outside in the world but within themselves and they are incapable of deciding anything concerning the outside. A table stands before me, argues the Neo-Kantian, but, really, this only seems to be so. Only a person who is naively concerned with problems of philosophy can say, “Outside myself is a table.” A person who has overcome that naïveté says, “An unknown something produces an impression within my eye; this eye and my brain make out of the impression the sensation brown. As I have this sensation brown not merely at an isolated point but can let my eye run over a plane surface and four columnar forms, so the brownness takes the shape of an object that is this table. When I touch this table, it offers resistance. It makes an impression on my sense of touch, which I express by attributing hardness to the picture that has been produced by the eye. At the suggestion of some “thing in itself” that I do not know, I have therefore created this table out of myself. The table is my mental content. It is only in my consciousness.

Volkelt presents this view at the beginning of his book on Kant's Theory of Knowledge:

The first fundamental condition that the philosopher must clearly realize is the insight that, to begin with, our knowledge extends to nothing more than our conceptions. Our conceptions are the only things that we immediately and directly experience, and for just that reason that we experience them immediately, even the most radical doubt cannot deprive us of the knowledge of them. But the knowledge that goes beyond my faculty of conception is not protected from doubt. (I use this expression here always in its most comprehensive sense so that all physical events are included in the term.) Therefore, all knowledge that goes beyond the conceptions must be marked as doubtful at the outset of the philosophical reflection.

Otto Liebmann also uses this thought to defend the statement: Man can no more know that the things he conceives are not, than he can know positively that they are. “For the very reason that no conceiving subject can escape the sphere of its subjective imagination, because it can never grasp and observe what may exist or not exist outside its subjectivity, leaping thereby over its own consciousness and emancipating itself from itself. For this reason it would also be absurd to maintain that the object does not exist outside the subjective conception” (O. Liebmann, Contributions toward the Analysis of Reality).

[ 3 ] Both Volkelt and Liebmann nevertheless endeavor to prove that man finds something in the world of his conceptions that is not merely observed or perceived, but that is added to the perception by thought—something that at least points toward the essence of things. Volkelt is of the opinion that there is a fact within the conceptual life that points to something that lies outside the life of conception. This fact consists in the logical necessity with which certain conceptions suggest themselves to man. In his book, The Sources of Human Certainty that appeared in 1906, we read Volkelt's view:

If one seeks the basis of the certainty of our knowledge, one finds two points of origin, two sources of certainty. Even if an intimate cooperation of both sources of certainty is necessary if real knowledge is to result, it is nevertheless impossible to reduce one source to the other. The one source of certainty is the self-assurance of consciousness, the awareness of the facts of my consciousness. That I am consciousness is just as true as the fact that my consciousness testifies to the existence of certain processes and states, certain contents and forms. Without this source of certainty there would be no cognitive process; it supplies the material through the elaboration of which all knowledge is produced. The other source of certainty is the necessity of thought, the certainty of logical compulsion, the objective consciousness of necessity. With it something absolutely new is given that cannot possibly be derived from the certainty of our self-awareness in consciousness.

Concerning this second source of certainty, Volkelt expresses himself in his book mentioned above as follows:

The immediate experience allows us to become aware of the fact that certain combinations of concepts show a peculiar form of compulsion to be inherent in them that is essentially different from all other kinds of compulsion that are associated with conceptions. This compulsion forces us to think certain concepts as belonging together, not merely in the conscious process in which we are aware of them but also in a corresponding objective interconnection, independent of the conscious conceptions. Furthermore, this compulsion does not force us in a manner to suggest that we should forfeit our moral satisfaction or our inner happiness, our salvation and so forth, but it contains the suggestion that objective reality would have to annihilate itself in itself, would have to lose its possibility of existence if the opposite of what it prescribes as a necessity were to take place. What distinguishes this compulsion then is that the very thought of the opposite of that necessity forcing itself upon us, would be experienced as a call that reality should revolt against the conditions of its existence. This peculiar, immediately experienced compulsion is generally called logical compulsion or thought necessity. The logically necessary reveals itself directly as an announcement of the object itself. It is the peculiarly meaningful significance, the reason-guided illumination that is contained in everything logical, that bears witness with immediate evidence of the objective, real validity of the logical connections of concepts. (Kant's Theory of Knowledge, pp. 208 ff.)

Otto Liebmann confesses toward the end of his essay, The Climax of Theories, that in his opinion the whole thought structure of human knowledge, from the ground floor of the science of observation up to the most airy regions of the highest hypotheses of world conception, is permeated by thoughts that point beyond perception. “Fragments of percepts must first be supplemented by an extraordinary amount of non-observed elements linked together and connected in a definite order according to certain operations of the mind.” But how can one deny that human thinking has the ability to know something through its own activity as long as it is necessary to resort to this activity even if one merely wants to obtain order among the facts of the observed precepts? Neo-Kantianism is in a curious position. It would like to confine itself within the boundaries of consciousness and within the life of conception, but it is forced to confess that it is impossible to take a step “within” these boundaries that does not lead in all directions beyond those limits. Otto Liebmann ends the second booklet of his Thought and Facts as follows:

If, on the one hand, seen from the viewpoint of natural science, man were nothing but animated dust, then, on the other, all nature, as it appears in space and time, when seen from the only viewpoint that is immediately accessible and given to us, is an anthropocentric phenomenon.

[ 4 ] There are many who hold the view that the world of observation is merely human conception in spite of the fact that it must extinguish itself if it is correctly understood. It is repeated again and again in the course of the last decades in many variations. Ernst Laas (1837–1885) forcefully defended the point of view that only positive facts of perception should be wrought into knowledge. Alois Riehl (1849–1924), proceeding from the same fundamental view, declares that there could be no general world conception at all, and that everything that goes beyond the various special sciences should only be a critique of knowledge. Knowledge is obtained only in the special sciences; philosophy has the task of showing how this knowledge comes about and of taking care that thought should not add any element that can not be justified by the facts. Richard Wahle in his book, The Whole of Philosophy and Its End (1894), eliminates with utmost scrutiny everything that the mind has added to the “occurrences” of the world until finally the mind stands in the ocean of occurrences that stream by, seeing itself in this ocean as one such occurrence, nowhere finding a point capable of providing a meaningful enlightenment concerning them. This mind would have to exert its own energy to produce order in the occurrences. But then it would be the mind itself that had introduced that order into nature. If the mind makes a statement about the essence of the occurrences, it derives this not from the things but from itself. This it could only do if it admitted that in its own activity something essential could go on. The assumption would have to be made that the mind's judgment could have significance also for things. But in its own judgment this confidence is something that, according to Wahle's world conception, the mind is not entitled to have. It must stand idly by and watch what flows past, around and inside itself, and it would only contribute to its own deception if it were to put any credence in a conception that it formed itself about the occurrences.

What final answer could a mind find that looked into the world structure, tossing about within itself problems concerning the nature and purpose of events? As it seemed to occupy a firm stand in opposition to the surrounding world, it has had to experience that it dissolved into a flight of occurrences and flowed together with other occurrences. The mind did no longer “know” the world. It had to admit: I am not certain that there are “knowers,” but there are simply occurrences. They do, to be sure, make their appearance in a manner that the concept of knowledge could emerge prematurely and without justification. . . . and “concepts” emerged and flitted by to bring light into the occurrences, but they were will-o'-the-wisps, specters of wishful thinking, miserable postulates whose evidence meant nothing, empty forms of knowledge. Unknown factors must rule the change. Darkness was spread over nature, occurrences are the veil of the true . . . (The Whole of Philosophy and Its End ).

Wahle closes his book, which is to represent the “gifts” of philosophy to the individual sciences, theology, physiology, esthetics and civic education, with these words, “May the age begin when people will say: once was philosophy.”

[ 5 ] In the above mentioned book by Wahle, as well as in his other books, Historical Survey of the Development of Philosophy (1895) and On the Mechanism of the Mental Life (1906), we have one of the most significant symptoms of the evolution of world conception in the nineteenth century. The lack of confidence with respect to knowledge begins with Kant and leads, finally, as it appears in Wahle, to a complete disbelief in any philosophical world conception.

My honored listeners!

The Gospel of John differs from the other three gospels in that it is attributed to a direct disciple of Christ Jesus, while the other three are attributed by name to disciples who were not direct disciples of Christ. One consequence of this is that we have to seek the deepest wisdom of Christianity in the Gospel of John.

Now the question arises for us: How should Theosophy relate to the Gospels and their authenticity? Theosophy cannot recognize as true anything that is not confirmed by occult research. We would not be able to extract any truth from a document. Theosophy can only be built on its own foundations, it can only build on the experiences gained by looking into the spiritual sources of the present and the past. The only truly historical document for Theosophy is what we call the Akasha Chronicle, that is, the spiritual record that the seer is able to see. So when we have gathered information from this spiritual record, we can compare it with what the historical records, that is, the Gospels, can provide. And no tenet is accepted by the occult researcher because it has been written in some written record, but because it has been found to be correct from our own research.

Yesterday it was mentioned in the introduction that the spiritual currents of the pre-Christian era converged in the event of Palestine - and, as we now want to see, in a higher form through the personality of Christ Jesus. This personality is incredibly complicated. How is such a personality possible, one that is able to absorb everything that came before into its personality and merge it into a higher unity?

In the Gospel of John, Christ is presented as the embodied, the incarnate Word of the World, as the incarnate Logos. To understand this to some extent, we have to go back a long way to the time of the emergence of the first cultural trends on our Earth. 600 years before the Palestine event, the mighty spiritual current that we call the Indian current had reached its high point and conclusion in the person of Gautama Buddha. But the same Buddha who worked in India was present in a certain form in Palestine at the time of Christ Jesus. What spiritual science means by the word 'Buddha' is not a specific person, but a dignity. Just as the individual human being develops more and more during his earthly life and is given ever higher offices, so an individuality can, through various incarnations, ascend to the Buddha office, to the Buddha dignity.

Before that, through many incarnations, the same individuality was not a Buddha, but a Bodhisattva. What is that? The Bodhisattvas have very specific tasks. They are the teachers and guides of humanity. All of humanity has passed through various stages.

The consciousness of today has been acquired by man in the course of time. Before that, our soul possessed different qualities. Reason, etc. have been acquired by man in the course of time; formerly man was endowed with different qualities. If we look back to the Lemurian period, we find a certain dull, clairvoyant realization in people. The whole of human life was not a spiritual self-awareness. Vague images arose in the soul in ancient times. Therefore, people could not be influenced in the same way as they are today, but only in a way that can be compared to inspiration or suggestion. And what they were told was not grasped by the intellect. The guides and teachers of humanity worked through suggestion, through inspiration, through their immediate presence, through the student's looking up to the great teacher.

The Bodhisattva taught in this way as long as he was not Buddha. Before his Buddha existence, he had repeatedly incarnated on earth in humanity, but he did not work in a physical body, only in his etheric body, and he could only have taught by not fully entering the human personality with his being, with his actual self. The disciple had clairvoyant consciousness and saw behind the personality of the teacher something like a mighty aura, which had no place in the human personality. The Bodhisattva allowed mighty images to flow into the soul of the disciple, as it were.

But not always should people unconsciously absorb this as an image, but should recognize from their own judgment what a person's goal was. What human beings had to conquer through their own efforts, namely love and compassion, was present in the human soul as forces, but was not consciously absorbed. Now the time had come for people to let love and compassion emerge from within themselves as something that arises from the human soul. In the past, these qualities were an emanation of the bodhisattva, but now they were to arise from the human soul itself.

Nowadays, there are many people who say: It is human to show love and compassion; but that was not the case before the appearance of the bodhisattva. Although love was present even then, it was more like an urge in the blood and was limited to the family and the tribe. The liberating, spiritual love, which is independent of all blood ties, was to become a reality only with Christ Jesus. In order to bring people to consciously develop love and compassion from within themselves, it had to be experienced first in a human body that love and compassion arise from the human soul. Then this can be passed on to other people. For this purpose, the Bodhisattva had to descend into the physical world, take on a physical body and, in the person of Gautama Buddha, work among people. This Gautama was not a Buddha at the time of his birth, but in the twenty-ninth year of his life he became a Buddha after leaving his royal palace and encountering grief and suffering outside the palace.

That is when love and compassion were awakened in him. It is said that a clarity arose in him and he understood that the human body could become an instrument of love and compassion. No individual had had this experience before. Through this experience, he attained a higher dignity of being, and thus the bodhisattva became a Buddha. He felt the inner impulse of compassion and love. This opened up the possibility for more and more people to experience the same thing and to feel it as their own impulse from their own soul. Everything must first be present in an outstanding personality.

When a Bodhisattva ascends to Buddha-hood, he receives a successor. Legend says: When he descended, he gave his successor the heavenly crown – 3000 years will pass before that Bodhisattva, who is such a one today, will ascend to Buddha-hood. The Eastern teaching calls the new Buddha Maitreya-Buddha. When can this happen? When a sufficiently large number of people have come to understand as their inner truth what Gautama Buddha experienced of love and compassion when he sat under the bodhi tree. Then a new mission will come to Earth through a new Buddha – the Maitreya Buddha.

This is how the wonderful Eastern legend about the mission of Gautama Buddha ends.

What became of Buddha after he left his earthly body? [Answering this question is important for Christianity.] When a Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha, he no longer needs to descend into a physical body. Legend also has it that Buddha took seven steps immediately after his birth and said that this would be his last incarnation. He can work in the etheric or life body. So he embodied himself in an etheric body. I ask my listeners to note how different such an embodiment is from the embodiment in a physical body.

To understand this, we need to take a look at the initiated person. What is initiation based on? On the fact that in ordinary human life one can make observations not only through the organs belonging to the physical body – eyes, ears, brain, heart and so on – but that one can already become independent of the physical tools in physical life. The initiate does not need his physical body to make observations in the world. He develops higher organs of perception in his etheric body when he trains himself to perceive supersensible things. While in the physical life man thinks, wills and feels, and holds these faculties together through the physical body, in the initiated man thinking, feeling and willing appear as three independent beings, and he has to do not with three powers but with three souls. When Buddha died and his physical body no longer held together the etheric body through its elasticity, it disintegrated into three independent beings and later, through their division, into four more, together seven souls, seven independently developed soul beings, over which he had to rule.

During life on earth, the physical body, through its elasticity, holds together the etheric body and with it the soul forces of the human being. After death, the ego is the only cohesive element. But if this ego is poorly developed, the person often runs a great risk of losing himself after death.

When such an individuality incarnates as a Buddha, it does not incarnate into a single spiritual being, but into a group of spiritual beings - the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha. This means that it does not incarnate into the physical world, but into a body that cannot be defined by anything in the physical world.

When there is talk of seven or twelve “disciples of Buddha,” this is often symbolic of the soul powers that emanate from Buddha's etheric body.

In this way Buddha lived when the event in Palestine occurred. That means: If a person who had become clairvoyant had been there, he would have found the Buddha leading a group of seven soul beings; but this Nirmanakaya of the Buddha, which was in Palestine at the time of Jesus and worked there was no longer the Gautama who had worked in India, but this individuality, as it had developed during the 600 years that had passed since his death, and had acquired even higher qualities. The Buddhism that we find in Christianity is also not the one preached in India 600 years before Christ Jesus, but the one that the Buddha, who had been taken to a higher level of development at the time of Jesus Christ, allowed to flow into Christianity from his etheric body. What Buddha had to give to Christianity will be described later.

[If standing still means death even for the ordinary person, then we must find even more plausible reasons why a being like the Buddha does not remain static in his development.

The second trend is Zoroastrianism.

What Zoroaster had to give at the time when Christ Jesus walked the earth was not what was imparted to the ancient Persian people under this name, not what is referred to in the history of the teachings of Zoroaster, and is not what we mean by it. Just as the name Buddha was borne by many teachers who proclaimed his teaching, so the name Zarathustra has passed over to his proclaimers. Five thousand years before Christ, he was the great teacher of the ancient Persian people. He was an outstanding personality of the highest degree, highly developed and a deeply initiated individuality. He not only had the teaching that we discussed yesterday, but also produced great disciples who could continue to plant what he had taught.

Zarathustra had two great disciples. He taught them the great secret. He taught one of them everything that can be known about that which is simultaneously spread out in space, that is, all the secrets of the cosmos as already present in space. He taught the other everything that can be known about the secrets of world evolution over the course of time. He went back to the primeval times of development and showed how the earth was formed. These two great disciples were re-embodied. The one to whom Zarathustra had taught all spiritual knowledge about space was re-embodied in that personality who had the mission to found the great Egyptian culture. He was thus reborn as the Egyptian Hermes.

A personality as lofty as that of Zarathustra acquires the ability to transfer the limbs that a human being has to others. This is symbolized in the Old Testament story of Shem. In this way, Zarathustra transferred his astral and etheric bodies, which were so highly developed, to others. These bodies were preserved in secret ways. He gave his astral body to the Egyptian Hermes, the founder of the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, so that it took on the perfect form of Zarathustra. This is how Zarathustra's first partial sacrifice occurred.

Zarathustra gave his etheric body to the disciple Moses, to whom he had revealed the successive stages of the development of the earth. How could this happen?

[The religious documents always tell in powerful images. For the spiritual researcher, these become clear when light from spiritual research falls on these images.

When a child develops, it is dull to its surroundings; only later do instincts, desires and passions emerge. The child, who was to take in Zarathustra's etheric body, therefore had to be protected from external impressions until his astral life woke up, until his life of desire woke up. Therefore, the child Moses was placed in a box and set in the water. Here everything that the etheric body of Zarathustra contained shone in him.

[Thus, through the sacrifice of his bodies, Zarathustra has helped to found Egyptian and Hebrew culture, these two significant spiritual currents.

Thus Zarathustra - the messenger of the spiritual sun-deity, of Ahura-Mazdao - worked through Hermes and Moses into Egyptian and ancient Hebrew culture.

And what has become of Zarathustra or Zoroaster's self? This self has reappeared as a human being. Through his brilliant initiation, he was able to create his new astral and etheric bodies. He was reborn several times as a leader of Persian culture and finally appeared, as Zaratas-Nazaratos, as a teacher in the ancient Chaldean secret schools. At that time he was simultaneously with Buddha and the teacher of Pythagoras; and when the Jews were led into Babylonian captivity, many of them became his disciples in Babylonia.

Thus, thanks to spiritual scientific research, we have traced the paths by which the teachings of Zarathustra - or Zoroaster - entered into Egyptian and ancient Hebrew cultures. The spiritual current emanating from him can be found in Palestine at the time of Jesus, side by side with the current emanating from Buddha.

All this had to happen for the event in Palestine. The gospels tell again what spiritual science has taught us. In Palestine, 600 years after the death of Buddha, two boys were born at the same time from different parents, both belonging to the House of David. These two children became important for the further development of humanity.

The House of David of the Hebrews had two lines: one through Solomon, the royal line; the other through Nathan, the Levitical line of the House of David. From the Solomonic line was one parental couple, and from the Nathanic line was the other parental couple. One child, the son of Joseph and Mary, was born of the Solomon line of the House of David. He was born in Bethlehem and was given the name Jesus. All three names were very common in Palestine at that time. Another child, Jesus, traces his origin to the Nathanic line of the House of David and was born in Nazareth. His parents were also named Joseph and Mary. Today we will focus primarily on the “Bethlehem Jesus”.

The individuality that was the founder of the ancient Persian culture was embodied in this boy, and which 600 years before had been the teacher of Pythagoras and many of the Jews who were taken into Babylonian captivity in the Chaldean secret schools. This I-ness appeared embodied in the boy Jesus, who had his origin in the Solomonic line of the house of David. This Jesus was thus the adolescent Zarathustra.

Alongside him, the other Jesus-child also grew. The two boys developed differently. The Solomon-Jesus developed all the qualities through which one attains clear and distinct concepts and insights into the surrounding world. How could it be otherwise? He grew to the highest abilities of human culture in a body from a royal lineage. He was a precocious child, capable of learning everything that had been accumulated over centuries and millennia.

The other boy, the Nathanian Jesus, showed very strange characteristics. He cared little about what surrounded us in the outer world. He had the highest inner development of mind and heart. Never has there been such a lovely child. His gaze went beyond this world into a completely different world, which had nothing to do with what the outer world had gone through for centuries. He was the delight of those around him.

These two children grew up side by side in the small town of Nazareth, where the parents of the Solomon Child had moved some time after the child's birth.

The two children were together until the age of twelve. To understand the nature of the Nathanian Jesus Child, we must try to understand the nature of his etheric body and, with the help of spiritual scientific research, find the hidden sources of his origin. We will come back to this tomorrow.

by the Translator

Odin

Odin's sacrifice of higher rank becomes transformed into a higher power—he becomes lord of the runes, the creator of language. In the language of the Mysteries this renunciation is described as the sacrifice of Odin's eye at the fount of Mimir. This eye is the clairvoyant eye which, as pineal gland, lost its function in the course of evolution. At the same time this sacrifice prepares the development of independence and freedom, for only by serving his intimate relationship with the Gods is man able to stand foursquare upon the Earth and become self-reliant.

Odin and the Fenris Wolf

(a) The prose Edda recounts the destiny of the three children of Loki: the Midgard Snake, the Fenris Wolf and Hel. Odin flung the Midgard Snake into the ocean, consigned Hel to Niflheim and kept the Fenris Wolf to himself. At the Twilight of the Gods the Wolf was destined ultimately to destroy him. The Ahrimanic forces which feed upon the living substance of the etheric body are portrayed in the figure of the Fenris Wolf. And because it threatened danger to the Aesir they bound it with a silken ribbon to a rock. (They were unwilling to kill the Wolf in order to avoid polluting the sanctuary with blood.)

(b) The original language of Atlantis was a unity. It was the creation of Odin with the formative forces of the laryngeal organism. Through the alliance of Odin and Loki, Ahrimanic forces entered into the etheric body and the organism of speech. The power of Ahriman (present in the undivided, primal language of Atlantis) perished after the Atlantean catastrophe—this is the Fenris Wolf of Nordic tradition. Wherever human speech or language becomes a means of concealing the spiritual world or denying its reality, we find the influence of the Fenris Wolf. Where the word describes only sensible phenomena or physical facts to the exclusion of supersensible or spiritual facts, Odin has succumbed to the Fenris Wolf. Ahrimanic influences gradually blunt the response of the etheric body. It loses its former receptivity to life processes: this is reflected in the shifting of consonants in the Indo-European languages (Grimm's Law). On the one hand, new elements are added, on the other, articulation becomes more indefinite, more insensitive; symptoms of paralysis set in—amalgamations, loss or disappearance of certain vowels and consonants. The original language which was a unity is split up into diverse tongues, into dialects. Here is seen the influence of the Fenris Wolf. Through the Fenris Wolf death enters into the organism of language—dead languages, e.g. Latin, have therefore become victims of the Fenris Wolf.

Odin and Thor

Thor is the son of Odin. Whilst the power of Odin is present in respiration and language, Thor works in the blood, in the rhythmic pulse-beat. Blood is the physical expression of the ego in the metabolic system. Thor is portrayed in the sagas as a choleric with red blood, quick to anger, ever ready to wield his hammer Mjolnir and endowed with a powerful will. Odin's sphere of activity is the astral body, that of Thor the etheric body.

The alliterative verse of Old Norse (the poetic Edda), Old English (Beowulf), Old Saxon (Heliand) and Old High German (Hildebrandslied) is based on two rhythmic laws—the rhythm of respiration and the rhythm of blood. A single breath corresponds to four pulse beats (eighteen and seventy-two to the minute respectively). This ratio of 1:4 is found in the long line which consisted of two half verses separated by a caesura. Each hemistich had two strongly accented syllables. Thus in the form and law of alliterative verse is reflected the relationship of Odin and Thor. The Voluspa was written in this metre known as Fornyrthislag.

This whole subject is treated in detail in Chapters IX and X of Ernst Uehli's Nordisch-Germanische Mythologie als Mysteriengeschichte (Rudolf Geering Verlag, Basel 1926) to which I am indebted for many of the above suggestions.

We get an increase in spiritual knowledge and forces through hard work at esoteric exercises such as the ones described in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and in other books. But we must heed certain practical hints that help us to get ahead.

A healthy condition of tiredness doesn't have to prevent us from carrying out concentration and mediation with great willpower. On the contrary. Nature does one part of the work for us, since it dulls the outer sense organs and lessens our ability to take in sense impressions. For the goal is to see without physical eyes, to hear without physical ears and to think without a physical brain. It's precisely when we are tired that we can illumine and warm our being with the luminous thoughts of meditation.

Abstention from alcohol is necessary, for this works on the ego that lives and works in the blood. Meditation pulls the spirit up and loosens its connection with the physical body; alcohol pulls it down and consolidates it in the same. Eating meat makes the spirit heavy. Eating plants makes greater demands on the physical body so that it's busy and can't hinder the spirit's work. But what else is brought about by abstention of fish and meat? The bad about eating meat is the lasting effect of hurting and killing animals. These martyred animals return in the form of creatures who turn their forces against the bodies of the descendents of those who once killed them. Bacteria are re-embodied tortured, killed and eaten animals.

Exercises bring about changes in an esoteric that he must pay attention to if he is to avoid injuries. Firstly, the intellect changes; the guidance of thought becomes different and so does judgment and memory. It becomes difficult for an esoteric to give logical and readily understandable reasons for his actions to an ordinary man. Such grounds aren't at all necessary, for at the decisive moment a real esoteric knows the right thing to do. But if he doesn't pull himself together and lazily avoids doing thought-control exercises, his thoughts may get confused.

Some immature people force their esoteric development and gain a certain power over others; but at the decisive moment they're stopped before they can do greater damage.

Secondly the way one speaks and makes gestures changes. A man must have himself under control so that his nervous system doesn't take over and he does all kinds of impermissible things.

Thirdly the physical body must not become injured by a forced, greedy tempo in esoteric development, otherwise an acute disease may set in, which however is curable and that warns the one who get it.

In the Hebrew mysteries, they spoke of four men who tried to go through the temple's portal—but only one got to it. Only one developed normally through particularly patient and consequent methods and reached the goal. The others who forced their esoteric development were harmed. This shows how necessary a rigorous execution of the accessory exercises is for the harmonizing and consolidating effect on man's whole being.

There are many powerful meditation materials, especially in the Bible. For instance, there's a description of creation's six days, the words at the beginning of John's Gospel, the appearance of Yahweh to Moses in the burning bush, the Gospel stories, “I am the light of the world,” and a particularly effective meditation is 1 Timothy 3:16 in the following translation: The mystery of God's path can be known. He who revealed himself through flesh, although in itself his being is spiritual, who is only fully knowable by angels, but could nevertheless be preached to heathens, who is alive in the faith of the world; he is raised to the Wisdom Spirits' sphere.

What bodhisattvas could give to men was inspired by Spirits of Movement. The lowest things that radiated from the Christ came from the sphere of the hierarchy of the Spirits of Movement. The Christ is above all hierarchies—he belongs to the Trinity.

Theosophy is an internalization in all areas of life. It is an impetus to reflect on religious things and questions, which is of particular importance for our time because science and old religious traditions are coming to the fore. These have given rise to the discouragement, indifference and tragedy of contemporary humanity. Theosophy is a reconciliation of science and religion. It does not start from a new form of religion, but encompasses everything that we are able to know about the supersensible worlds through knowledge and by living in them. Theosophy must gradually become a way of coming to knowledge of true life in all areas. Through theosophical explanations, true and genuine foundations of Christianity can also be found. Esoteric Christianity no longer exists today. What exactly is esoteric Christianity?

The Gospel of John is considered by many to be less valuable than the other gospels. The inner meaning of this document is felt when one experiences it. We must regard it as a Christian indication, as an offer of means that lead to participation in the spiritual world. This spiritual world exists around us and in us. Spiritual powers can be awakened in all of us. There have always been enlightened people throughout the ages, and from them the light has spread. These were the initiates. And they owed their best powers to the influence of the Gospel of John. There are different paths and stages that lead to initiation. But all initiation leads to the highest point: to the truth. The paths taken before Christianity were those of human power and wisdom. Christian initiation is the one that is based almost exclusively on the elements of the soul: mind, feeling and perception. But the basic conditions for Christian initiation are: spiritual knowledge, study and willpower.

The human being knew his physical body and had to learn to recognize that it is only one limb of his human essence. The disciple was taught to recognize the difference between his physical body and his etheric or life body, and between this and his astral body.

Furthermore, the student is taught that the consciousness of the soul or Manas is juxtaposed to physical consciousness. One's gaze was directed to the divine image of man or Atma - and to the living spirit - or Budhi.

There is one thing that distinguishes man from mineral, plant and animal and that cannot be named; this is the “I am”, that is the divinity in us. Through sound and voice alone we express this “I am”. In earlier times, for example among the Israelites, there was still a sense of the common people's I, but this was later lost. Mankind must also learn to feel that “I and the Father are one.”

Then the disciple was taught the seven stages of initiation, which are as follows: humility and compassion for the lower living creatures, for to them he owes his existence. Christ showed this humility to his apostles when he washed their feet.

Through pain and suffering, the disciple learns to strengthen his inner being and to feel no more suffering. That was the stage of scourging. Then the disciple had to learn to endure scorn, mockery, and contempt of the most sacred, and to find support only in himself. This was the stage of the crowning with thorns. The physical body had to become an instrument that he could renounce without difficulty. That was the crucifixion. Through the mystical death, he came to know all the depths of human pain and misery, and thus the spiritual light opened before him, and he attained enlightenment and awakening. The ego is now identical with the spiritual consciousness. Through the burial, he learned that his body was a part of the Earth planet and that his body would have to be reunited with the Earth. Then came the victory of life over death, the realization of the eternal, and this was the resurrection or the Christ experience and, in the spiritual body, the glorification or the ascension.

Christian initiation is therefore