The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Now we know that this extension is usually reckoned according to three dimensions, height, breadth and depth or length. It is, you will agree, a common, almost a trivial truth that things are extended in space according to three dimensions. We must, therefore, recognise as the most evident characteristic of matter its extension in three dimension. Now, as we saw, we cannot apply conditions of space to what lies in the soul. It is, therefore, obvious that something else must exist in the world, other than what fills up space as substance or matter. For we have evidence, even on the physical plane, of processes and conditions that are not extended in space—soul experiences, as we call them.

Now if we approach soul experiences with as little prejudice as we did the conditions of matter in space we shall very soon find in them another quality without which these soul experiences would not be there at all. And that is, we are bound to admit, that soul experiences take their course in time. Although we cannot say that a feeling or an impulse of will is five yards long or five square yards in size, yet we must admit that what we think or feel, in short all soul experiences, take their course in time. It is not only that we need a particular period of time for experiencing them, but also one soul experience comes earlier, another later. In short, what we, experience in the soul is subject to time. Now as a matter of fact, in our reality, in all that surrounds us and in what we ourselves are, space and time conditions are everywhere mixed. In the outer world things happen in such a way that they are spread out in space and also follow one another in time, each requiring for itself a certain time. Before we can come to the occult truth about all this we must put the question: How then does space stand in relation to time? And so, you see, in this anthroposophical course of lectures we come quite innocently up against a very great philosophical question, one upon which—to speak metaphorically—countless heads have been broken! We come, that is, to the relation of time to space. Perhaps it will not be easy for you to follow the train of thought fully now that we have in such an innocent way come up against the relation of time to space; for the greater number of you have had no special philosophical training. But if you will take a little trouble to try to follow, you will see how fruitful such thoughts are, and how, if you work them over in meditation, they can lead you further in your study.

It is good to take your start from the time which you experience in your own soul. Ask yourself how you experience time in your own soul? Let me speak more clearly. I do not ask you to think of time as you see it on the clock; there you only compare your inner experience with outer processes. I want you now to put right out of your mind all reading of the clock and other outer events. Consider only how does the time relationship express itself in your soul? Ponder over it as deeply as you will, and you will find that you can think of nothing as a standard for time but the following: you can grasp a thought when it is aroused in you by some external perception. You are looking at something, and a thought or idea arises in your soul. When you enquire more exactly into the relationship between yourself and the idea or the thought, you have to answer: While I have the thought, I myself am actually the thought. Try and think the thing over to the very end and you will say: While I am engrossed in the thought, then I am, in my innermost being, the thought. It would be mere prejudice to say that together with this concept you had also the idea of the “I am.” The “I am” is not there while you have surrendered yourself to the thought. You are yourself the thought. Without a certain practical training you cannot be something else simultaneously with the thought which you hold.

Firstly then, man is in the thoughts and feelings which are directly given to him. Suppose you let this piece of chalk incite you to a thought; then, if you exclude everything else, if you are absorbed in the idea that has been stimulated in you by the perception of chalk, your inmost being is one with the idea of chalk. But now suppose you have grasped this idea and all at once you remember that yesterday you also saw chalk; and you compare the idea of chalk that has been given you by direct perception with what you experienced yesterday. And you will be aware that though you are completely identified with the chalk observed to-day you cannot identify yourself with the chalk of yesterday. This latter is a memory picture and must remain so. You have truly become one with the chalk of to-day, but the chalk of yesterday has become something external for you. The chalk observed to-day is identified with your own inner being of to-day; your memory picture is, to be sure, something upon which you look back, but in comparison with the other it is objective and external. And it is the same with everything you have experienced in your soul with the exception of the present moment. The present moment is for the moment your inner being; everything that you have experienced—you have rid yourself of, it is already outside you. You may imagine, if you wish to have a picture of it, that the present moment with your concepts is a snake, and what you put outside you is the cast-off skin of the snake. And as the snake casts its skin again a second and a third time so you can have ever so many cast-off ideas which are for you something external in comparison with your temporary present inwardness. That is to say, as far back as you can remember, you have continually been making outward what was first inward. The idea of the chalk, for example, which you now have, the very next moment you have made it external to you, while you yourself have passed on to something else. That is to say, you are working at a continual exteriorisation. You are perpetually creating something within you and then leaving it behind; this innermost that you have in you at once becomes an outer, just like a sloughed skin. Our soul-life consists in this—that the inner is continually becoming an outer; so that within our own being, within this inner spiritual process, we are able to distinguish between the real innermost and the outer within the inner. We are all the time within our own being, but we have there to distinguish two parts: first, our real inwardness, and secondly, the part of our inwardness which has become an outer.

Now this process which we have seen accomplished of the inner becoming an outer—this really gives the content of our soul-life; for if you think it over you will find you can call your “soul” all you have experienced, right back to the time which you first remember in early childhood. One who has forgotten all that he has ever experienced would actually have lost his ego. Thus in the fact that we can put memories behind us, and yet keep them, like continually cast-off skins—in this possibility lies the reality of our soul-life. Now one can conceive of this reality of soul-life as being fashioned in all manner of different ways. Let me ask you to observe how in each single moment the soul is shaped differently from what it is in any other moment. Suppose you go out into a beautiful starlit night or suppose you listen to a Beethoven symphony; you have in those moments identified with your own inner being a wide region of soul-life. Suppose you step from this starlit night into a dark room; it is as if this soul-life of yours were suddenly shrunk together; only a few ideas are there. Or suppose the symphony comes to an end; then the region of ideas, in so far as they come from hearing, dwindles away for you. And when you sleep then your soul-life shrinks right up until you wake up again and spread it, like a bird ruffling its feathers. So you have a continuous re-shaping of the soul-life. And if we now draw—but this is only a symbol; for we must draw in space, and yet we mean time, which is not spatial—if we would draw the content of our life of soul, then we could form it in many different ways. Here (a) it is shrunk, here (b) it expands, we should have to think of it as shaped most variedly, while here (c) there is always the content of soul-life. From this symbol, making the invisible visible, you can recognise the shrinking and the enlarging. A soul-life which listens to a symphony is richer than one which hears only a single note. So one can say that the soul-life opens out and then draws itself together, expands and contracts—only as we say this we must not let any space conceptions mix in with it. During this expansion and contraction one thing is unquestionably present, and that is inner spiritual movement. Movement! Soul-life is movement.

Only we must think of movement not as movement in space but as we have described it. And this expansion and contraction gives forms. So you have movement, and the outer expression of movement in certain forms. But there are no space forms. The forms here meant are not spatial forms, but forms of expanding and contracting soul-life. And what lives in this expansion and contraction? You will get near the reality if you consider a little what must live therein. Therein live your feelings, thoughts, impulses of will, in so far as that is all spiritual. It is like water which swims along, moving in forms, but it is all spiritual. And now we shall need still another conception in order to realise the whole. We said: Thoughts live therein, conceptions, feelings, impulses of will. But the impulses of will are, in a certain sense, more fundamentally necessary than the thoughts themselves. For if you consider how this soul-life is at times in quicker motion and at times in slower motion, you will perceive that it is really will itself which brings it into motion. If you stimulate your will you can bring the thoughts and feelings into quicker flow; if the will is indolent then it all moves along more slowly. You need the will in order to expand your life of soul. So we have seriatim, first, Will; then, all that lives in feelings and conceptions, all that is within our soul-life—I say advisedly, our life of soul—and this we can grasp as a manifestation of Wisdom; then we have Movement—expansion and contraction; and then Form, which appears as the expression of movement. You can quite exactly differentiate within your soul-life: will, wisdom, movement, form. These weave and live within the life of soul.

It is a pity that this cycle of lectures could not last a month for then we could speak more exactly and fully. And you would see how it can be accurately established that there, in your own soul-life, a process takes place which has its root in the will, and contains within it wisdom and movement and form. Now you will see that the series we have here given for the life of soul follows, in a wonderful way, the names we had to give for the successive hierarchies—Spirits of Will, of Wisdom, and of Movement, and Spirits of Form. In presenting our soul-life in this manner we have, so to say, surprised the hierarchies in one spot, we have really caught them inside there. There they reveal themselves in a most singular way in the inner soul-life of man—and they reveal themselves in such a way that their activity is entirely unspatial. And if we have gained nothing more, we have at least established this important point; we have gained, as it were, a first conception of an important quality of these four hierarchies, namely that they are not of space. We know, therefore, that by “Form” is meant the unspatial spiritually formative power of form. That is very important. So when we speak of “forms” created by the Spirits of Form we do not mean external forms in space but those inner formations that only exist for consciousness and that we can grasp in the course of our soul-life. Everything passes there in time alone. Without time you cannot imagine it at all. If you look away from the illustration, which is of no importance for the thing itself, you must imagine it in so far as you remain within the soul-life, as unspatial space.

And so, my dear friends, when we say that the Spirits of Will worked first on Old Saturn, the Spirits of Wisdom on Old Sun, the Spirits of Movement on Old Moon and the Spirits of Form on the Earth, we must bear in mind the purely inner quality of the Spirits of Form, and we shall have to say: The Spirits of Form created man on the earth in such a way that he still has an invisible form. This agrees, in a wonderful way, with what emerged yesterday. Invisible forms, not forms of space, were first given to man by the Spirits of Form at the beginning of his earthly evolution. And now we must at the same time bear in mind that not only we ourselves but all outer objects that come to meet us, and of which we are aware in the outer world by means of our senses, are nothing less than an external expression of an inner spiritual. Behind every external material thing in space we have to look for something similar in kind to what lives in our own soul. Only, of course, we do not encounter it with the outer senses; it is behind what the outer senses offer.

How can we now represent an activity out beyond that of the Spirits of Form, beyond what they create as not yet spatial form? This is the question we now have to face. When this activity goes further—beyond will, wisdom, movement, form—still further beyond form, what happens then? That is the question. You see, if a process in the universe has come as far as Form—which is still altogether in the realm of soul and spirit, and is not spatial at all—if the process has advanced as far as this super-sensible form, then the next step is only possible through the form, as such, breaking up. And that is exactly what shows itself to occult knowledge. When certain forms, created under the influence of the Spirits of Form, have developed up to a certain point, then they break to pieces. And if you now fix your mind upon these shattered forms, if you think of something that arises through the breaking up of forms that are still super-sensible—then you have the transition from the super-sensible to the sensible and spatial. Broken-up form is matter. Matter, as it occurs in the universe, is for the occultist nothing more than form broken, shattered and split asunder. If you could imagine that this chalk were invisible and yet had this characteristic parallelepiped form, and if you were then to take a hammer and strike the chalk smartly so that it crumbled into a lot of little pieces, then you would have broken up the form. Supposing in the moment in which you broke up the form the invisible were to become visible—then you would have a picture of the origin of matter. Matter is spirit that has developed as far as form and then burst and broken into pieces and fallen together in itself.

Matter is a heap of ruins of the spirit. It is extraordinarily important to grasp this definition. Matter is a heap of ruins of the spirit. Matter is, therefore, in reality spirit, but shattered spirit.

When you come to think it over, my dear friends, you will perhaps say: “Yes, but we have spatial forms such as the beautiful crystals; in the crystals we have very beautiful spatial forms—and now you say that all matter is ‘a heap of ruins of the spirit,’ is ‘shattered spirit.’” Let me give you a picture of it.

Think of a falling cascade of water [see diagram (a)]. But imagine it is invisible, you do not see it. And here (b) you put an obstacle in its way. When the water strikes here (b) it scatters into drops (c). Now we are imagining that the cascade of water is invisible, but that what is broken up becomes visible. Then you would have here a cascade shattered in pieces, and would have a picture of the origin of matter. But now you must think away this obstacle down below, for it does not exist; if it did we should have to assume that there was already matter there. You must imagine it in this way. Without there being any such obstacle you have matter—spiritually, that is, supersensibly—you have matter in movement. In the act of assuming form, it is in movement; for movement precedes form. There is not anything anywhere but is permeated by the deeds of the Spirits of Movement. And this movement, this form, arrives at last at a point where it becomes, so to say, exhausted and splits asunder in itself. We must so grasp it that we have, to begin with, something streaming out which is entirely soul and spirit. Its impetus is limited, it comes, as it were, to the end of its energy, is thrown back upon itself and thus breaks to pieces. So wherever we see matter we can say: Behind this matter lies a super-sensible, which has come to the limit of its activity and there split up. But before it split up it still had—inwardly and spiritually—form. And when it shattered the spiritual form went on working in the separate scattered ruins. Where it works strongly, then, after the breaking and scattering, the lines of the spiritual forms continue, and in the lines they then describe we can still trace an after-working of the spiritual lines. There you have the origin of crystals. Crystals are reproductions of spiritual forms which through their own impetus still kept their original direction but in the opposite sense.

What I have here sketched for you is very nearly exactly what occult observation finds in the case of hydrogen. The origin of hydrogen is as though a ray rushed out from eternity, became exhausted and flew asunder; but we must draw it as if here the lines overshot themselves and so kept their form.

This is what hydrogen looks like to the occult observer. There is something like an invisible ray coming from endless world distances and finally breaking—like a ray which flies asunder. In short, matter everywhere can be called broken spirituality. Matter is indeed nothing else than spirit, but spirit in a broken-up condition.

There is still another difficult idea which I must place before you, which is connected with what I said at the beginning of the lecture. I said that within the soul and spirit itself we have to distinguish between an outer and an inner. Now it is of such contrasts that all space dimensions are really composed; so that everywhere where you have a dimension of space you can think of it as proceeding somewhere or other from a point. That point is the “inner,” and all the rest is the “outer.” For the plane, the straight line is an inner and all the rest an outer. Space is, therefore, nothing else than something that originates together with matter when spirit is shattered and thereby goes over into material existence.

Now it is extremely important to understand the following. Suppose this breaking-up of spirit into matter happens in such a way that the spirit breaks, shatters, of itself, without having come up against any kind of external obstacle that should cause it to split up and shatter. Imagine that the breaking-up takes place, so to say, in the void. If spirit breaks into the void then mineral matter results. Thus spirit must first of all actually break up in itself from out of spirit: then mineral matter arises. But now suppose you do not have a process that takes place in the universe in such a virginal way; suppose you have a breaking that takes place out of the spirit but finds a world already prepared; a breaking in pieces that does not take place into the void but, for example, into an etheric corporality that is already there. As I said, if it develops into the void the result is mineral matter. But we are supposing now that it develops into an already present etheric corporality. Thus the spirituality splits up and breaks into an etheric body, and the breaking material and the etheric body are already present and prepared. Not into the “virgin soil” of the world but into the etheric body, spirit breaks and becomes matter. And when this is the case plant matter originates.

Now yesterday we came across a peculiar etheric substance. You will remember what we wrote on the blackboard. We found an etheric body which outweighed the astral substance, which, so to say, overshot the astral substance. And we said that that was due to Luciferic influences which had been brought to bear upon man. But we found something more. We found also physical corporality which had a preponderance over etheric substance, that is to say over the etheric body. As a matter of fact, we found that first, did we not? I want you now to give your attention for a moment to this remarkable connection that we found in the badly combined organisation of man—a connection between the bodies which is really entirely due to Luciferic influence. There, where the physical meets with the etheric body and the etheric body is everywhere diverted by the preponderance of the physical body, we have, not a condition where spirit breaks and scatters merely into etheric substance as such, but where it rushes into a bodily condition that is certainly etheric, but which is outweighed by the physical. And when spirit breaks into such a substance, then nerve substance, nerve material, arises. Spirit streaming into etheric corporality that is overweighed by physical corporality gives rise to nerve matter.

We have now three stages in materiality. First, the ordinary mineral matter that we come across in the sense world. Then the matter that we find in the bodies of the plants; and, lastly, the matter that we find in the body of man and of animals, and that arises owing to the presence of irregularities in these bodies. Now think of all we should have to do if we wished to reckon up all the various conditions that give rise to the manifold kinds of matter in the world! We saw yesterday what a number of irregularities can occur through the Luciferic influence. We saw, for example, how the etheric body may outweigh the astral body. When spirit rushes into an astral body of this kind, that is, into an astral body which is outweighed by an etheric body, then we have muscle matter. This is why the matter of which nerves and muscles are composed has such a strange and unique appearance; you cannot compare it with anything else. It is because in both cases the matter comes into existence in such a complicated manner. It will help you to form a true picture if you think of the different results you obtain when you take some molten metal, and first let it spurt up into the air, then into water and then, let us say, into a hard firm substance. In a like complicated way do the various kinds of matter in the world arise. My main purpose in all I am telling you to-day is to show you into what depths of existence we have to descend if we want to investigate these things at their, foundation. Consider, for instance, a condition that takes us still further into matter; consider the irregularity brought about where the ego outweighs in its ego-ness the astral body, when you have spirit spraying and dispersing into this condition, the result—but only after long détours—is bony matter. It all depends ultimately, as you see, on the conditions under which the matter sprays up and scatters when it arises out of spirit. Keep well in mind what I have told you even if you have not been able to follow every thought in detail. You will have grasped the main point, which really comes to this—that we have to look upon matter always and everywhere as spirit that is splitting up and scattering, but that there can also be something already there which opposes the breaking spirit. And according as this or that meets it, the spirit will spray out into something different; and thus arise the various configurations of matter—matter that composes nerves, muscles, plants, etc.

But now a question will arise in your minds. You will ask: How would it have been with man if the Luciferic influence had not entered into him in this connection? We related yesterday how it would have been in many different aspects, but what would have happened in this connections. Well, you see, man could not have had such nerves as he has to-day. For these nerves only arise in their particular form of matter through the fact of the irregular connection of the bodies of man. Similarly he could not have had bones or muscles if it had not been for the Luciferic influence. In short, we have seen how the various kinds of matter arise through forms being spiritually poured into something which is only there at all because of Luciferic influence. None of these different substances—muscle, nerve, etc.—could have come into existence without the Luciferic influence. With still more intensity than we did yesterday must we ask the question: What then is man altogether as material man? Man as he meets us externally is simply and solely a result of the Luciferic influence. For unless the Luciferic influence had been there he would have had no nerves, no muscles, no bones in the present-day sense of the words. Materialism describes nothing but what Lucifer has made of man. Materialism is thus in the most eminent degree discipleship of Lucifer; it rejects all else.

Let us then ask: What would man be like if he had remained in Paradise? In order that tomorrow we may be able to carry our study further—and with rather easier conceptions—I will give you now to-day a brief sketch of what man would have become if it had not been for the Luciferic influence. If it had not been for this influence, then we should have in human evolution on the earth, to begin with, what came from the influence of the Spirits of Form. For the Spirits of Form were the last Spirits of the higher hierarchies who worked into man. Now these Spirits of Form created a purely super-sensible form—nothing spatial at all. What man would have been—I will only sketch it for you in quite a cursory manner to-day—what man would have been, no outer eye could see, no outer senses could perceive; for pure soul forms cannot be perceived by outer senses. What man would have been coincides with something I have described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds—it coincides with what is there given as Imaginative knowledge. An “Imagination” would man have been, created by the Spirits of Form. Nothing of a sense nature, purely super-sensible Imagination.

If we were to draw a rough diagram of what man would have been like—(see following diagram)—we should have an Imagination picture of what the Spirits of Form created as an Imagination of man. But it would also be permeated with what remained over in man from the creative working of the earlier hierarchies. We should have to show it in our diagram as permeated first of all with what was left in man from the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of inner Movement (2). That would reveal itself to us as what we have described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds with the words “Inspired Knowledge.” For these movements would only be recognisable as Inspiration. This means that we should have first the complete man, consisting of Imagination, and then we should have as well movement—Inspiration. And what the Spirits of Wisdom give would be Intuition. This would be a positive inner content with which all the rest would be in a manner filled out. We must put here (3) Intuition, that is to say, immediate being—Beings. And the whole we would behold as proceeding out of the cosmos and enclosed in an egg-shaped aura which would be the outcome of the working of the Spirits of Will. Such would be the super-sensible nature of man, consisting of contents which would be accessible to super-sensible knowledge alone. Fantastic as it may appear, it is the real Man.

If we may say so symbolically, it is Man in Paradise, who does not consist of the material contents of which man now consists but who has a super-sensible nature throughout.

And what happened through the Luciferic influence. Breaking-up spirit (that is to say, matter), spurted, as it were, into the Imaginations, and the result stands there to-day in the bony system of man. The bony system is the Man of Imagination filled out with matter. Matter does not belong to what is really the higher Man; through the Luciferic influence it has been shot into what would otherwise only be Imagination. We must picture to ourselves—if such a thing were not absurd—that there was a time when one could quite easily pass through a human being, but that then these Imaginations drew together, and, in addition, were afterwards filled out with bony substance. Nowadays we should knock up against bones if we tried to pass through a human being. But man only later became impenetrable.

That which is in man from the Spirits of Movement is filled out with muscle substance, and that which would be perceived as Intuition is filled out with nerve substance. It is only when we get beyond all these that we come to the super-sensible. With the etheric body of man we are already in the super-sensible. The etheric body is to-day only in the smallest degree material; it appears as very fine jets or sprays of the etheric, giving rise to a matter finer than that of which nerves are made, a kind of matter that does not really come into consideration for us here at all.

So you see, man is really a being who has undergone a great coarsening in his nature. For were he as he was originally intended in the purposes of the Gods he would have no bones, but his form would consist in super-sensible “Imagined” bones; he would have no muscles to serve as an apparatus for movement, but he would have super-sensible substance moving within him; whereas now what moves in him has been everywhere interlarded with muscle substance. The super-sensible movement which was given to man by the Spirits of Movement has become physical movement in the muscles, and the intuition given by the Spirits of Wisdom has become in the man of the senses nerve substance. Nerve substance has been, so to say, crammed into the Intuition. And so when you find a drawing of the skeleton in an anatomy book you can think to yourself: It was originally intended to be a pure Imagination and has become so coarsened by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences that it meets us to-day as dense, thick, hard bones that can be broken and fractured. So fast and firm have the Imaginations become! And now do you still say that man cannot find in the physical world any reflection of the world of Imagination! Whoever knows what the skeleton really is may find, when he looks at it, a picture of the world of Imagination. And when you see a picture of the man of muscle you really ought to say to yourself: That is an utterly unnatural picture, it is inwardly untrue. In the first place I see it, whereas I ought to hear it spiritually. For the true state of the matter is this—rhythmic movement has been interlarded, by a super-sensible process, with muscle substance which does not really belong to it at all; what remains ought not to be seen but heard, like the swaying movement of music. You should really hear Inspirations. And what you see pictured there as the man of muscle—are the Inspirations of Man made rigid in matter.

Finally we come to the man of nerves. The man of nerves we ought really neither to see nor to hear, but only to perceive in an altogether spiritual manner. From a cosmic point of view there is a complete distortion in the fact that we have visibly before us what should only be grasped in purest spirituality. It is in reality a spiritual sheath that has been, so to speak, injected with physical matter. We see before us visibly what should only be perceived as an Intuition. The expulsion from Paradise means simply this—that man was originally in the spiritual world, that is to say, in Paradise, and he there consisted of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition—that is, he was in an entirely super-earthly existence. And then, owing to the very conditions he had himself induced under the Luciferic influence, he received into him an inrush of breaking spirit, of matter. Matter is thus something with which we are filled but which does not belong to us. We bear it in us, this matter, and because we bear it in us we must die a physical death. There you have, in point of fact, the cause of physical death, and of much besides. For inasmuch as man has left his spiritual condition he lives here in physical existence only until matter gains the victory over what holds it together. For the nature of matter is such that it is perpetually trying to break up and go to pieces, and the matter in the bones is only held together by the power of Imagination. When the power of the bones gains the upper hand then the bones become incapable of life. It is the same with the muscles and the nerves. So soon as the matter in the bones, muscles and nerves gains the upper hand over Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition and is able to break asunder, in that moment must man lay down his physical body. There you have the connection between physical death and the Luciferic influence. We shall follow it up tomorrow by showing how evil, too, and many other things—illnesses, etc.—have come into the world.

In the course of these lectures we shall study matters which will, so to say, easily enter into the soul of each one, because each one will be able to interest himself in them intensely and directly. But as the whole would not otherwise be comprehensible, we must also make reflections which are necessary for the sake of completeness and of comprehension, and which will be a little more difficult than that which is, so to say, the central theme of our lectures. To-day, for instance, we are confronted with the necessity of glancing into the inner nature of those Beings of whom we have spoken in the two preceding lectures, the normal Folk-spirits.

We have already said what was necessary to characterize them outwardly: that they are Beings who are two stages higher than man, Beings who are working at the transformation of their etheric bodies, who are now at the present time engaged in transforming their etheric bodies into that which is called Life-spirit or Buddhi. Man is spun into the web of this work. In so far as the evolution of these Beings so progresses that man is woven into this evolution, the reflection of this Folk-spirit is expressed in human individuality itself, as the folk-character of the single human individual.

We must now look a little into the inner nature of such a Folk-soul. If we wish to throw light upon the present inner being of man, we find it necessary to picture it as being threefold, as being divided into:

The sentient-soul, which is, as it were, the lowest member of the inner human being,

The Intellectual-soul or Mind-soul, the central member, and

The Spiritual-soul, the highest member of the inner nature of the human being, in which the human ‘I’ is first actually brought to a state of consciousness.

In the spiritual-soul is first to be found that which is called human self-consciousness. Nevertheless the ‘I’ of man is active in all three parts of his inner life, in the sentient-soul as well as in the intellectual-soul or mind-soul, and in the spiritual-soul.

In the sentient-soul the ‘I’ is active in such a way that man is hardly aware of his ego. In the sentient-soul, therefore, he is thus far given up to all his desires and passions. The ‘I’ broods dully in what we call the sentient-soul. It first works itself out and begins to appear in the intellectual-soul or mind-soul, and only becomes quite apparent in the spiritual-soul.

If we wish to examine each of these three members of the human inner being separately, we must look upon them as three modifications, as three parts within the astral body. It certainly is the case, that these modifications, these three members of the astral body, prepare the transformation of the astral body itself, of the etheric body and of the physical body. But these transformations are still not what meets us as the actual human inner being or soul. The soul, the inner part of man; consists of three modifications of the astral body. The three modifications must make use of certain instruments, and these express themselves in such a way, that in the astral body the sentient-soul is a sort of instrument, in the etheric body the intellectual-soul or mind-soul, and in the physical body the spiritual-soul. Thus we can distinguish the human inner being from that which is the human envelope or covering; so that therefore the inner nature of man consists of three modifications of the astral body.

Just as in man the inner part, that in which the ‘I’ works and imprints itself, is represented by these three modifications of the astral body, so in those spiritual Beings whom we designate as Folk-spirits their actual inner part, or that which we may compare to the human inner part, is represented by three members, three modifications of the etheric body. Just as in man we distinguish sentient-soul, intellectual-soul, spiritual-soul, so in the Archangelic Beings, the normal Folk-spirits we must distinguish three modifications in the etheric body. As, however, these three modifications are not in the astral but in the etheric body they are quite different, essentially different from the three modifications in the soul-life of man. Hence also you must think of the form of consciousness, the whole soul-life of these Folk-spirits as being different from the soul-life of man. From an external description, therefore, we now press on as it were into the inner part of the soul of these Folk-spirits. It will not be quite easy but we must endeavor to cross this rubicon.

It will now be a case of starting out from some conception with which you are acquainted, a conception that bears some likeness to the inner life of the Folk-spirits. A man has not many such in his normal life, on the contrary, he has in his own consciousness extremely little of that which lives in the consciousness of the Folk-spirits. You may nevertheless form an idea of it if you will patiently follow with me the following considerations. You have all learnt at school that the three angles of a triangle are 180 deg., and you know that you could never learn that by any sort of external experience. I want you just to think of an iron or a wooden triangle; if now you measure with an instrument what the three angles together amount to, this external experience can never inform you that these three angles make 180 deg., but you will at once be informed, whether you draw these three angles or only imagine them, if you experience from within, that the three angles are 180 deg. You must realize it through the power of your own mind, from within. You need only carry out the following in thought. What I am now drawing is only drawn to represent the thought. In this figure you have strict proof that the three angles together make 180 deg.

If you once clearly visualize this figure in your mind, it will in every case bring this certainty; you may carry out the figure in thought, without externally drawing it. You thus perform an operation in pure thought, by the power of your own inner being; you need not go outside yourself. You may imagine for one moment, that there is no such thing as the so-called world of impressions, or what enters into man through the outer senses. Imagine the external world away, and space as being constructed in thought, then in this space the sum-total of the angles of all triangles will give 180 deg. In order to arrive at geometrical, mathematical knowledge it is not necessary for an outer object to approach your senses, it only needs inner experience, that which takes place in the consciousness itself. I have had to make use of this example, for it is the simplest and most practical, because people already know it, having learnt it at school. I might also give you the example of Hegel's logic, you would then also have a number of inner conceptions, but there you would find much with which you are unacquainted, for Hegel's logic is unknown to most people. By this you may therefore see how a man may arrive at knowledge merely from within, without being brought to this by anything external.

If you think of that which externally in the world is only attainable by mathematical construction, then you have some conception of how the consciousness of the Archangels works. A world such as appears to external man, a world of external colors and tones, they do not perceive at all. A Being of this kind never has these perceptions, it is never possible for him to touch a thing and thus receive impressions. But what he does experience may be thus expressed in words, ‘Something is now approaching me from a world which inspires me. This world has passed through my consciousness and has filled it.’

Now the Archangels are not Beings who can form mathematical concepts only; it is man who is so imperfect that he is only able by means of abstractions such as the truths of mathematics, to conceive of the activity of the Archangels. These truths appear normal to man, as well as to the Folkspirits. From this you may gather that the external physical world which man's senses bring before him, does not affect the Archangels at all. In that form in which the physical world appears to man, in which he receives impressions of it by means of his senses, it does not exist at all to the Archangels. If, therefore, you eliminate from your picture of the world all that is merely physical sensation, if you take away everything which you have received by means of external perceptions, you have then eliminated just what does not concern the Archangels. We shall therefore inquire, ‘What then still remains for the Archangels out of all that can also become human consciousness? What part of it exists for the Folk-spirits?’ Everything you experience in the sentient-soul as ordinary joy or ordinary grief brought about by the external world, all colors, sounds, in fact all sensible perceptions of the outer world,—none of this concerns these Beings at all. Therefore eliminate the whole contents of the human sentient-soul, and tell yourself that all that is in the picture of the world through man's possessing the sentient-soul, is of no importance to the Archangels, they do not work into that. Even one portion of the intellectual-soul is not an element of any significance to the Archangels, in so far as it is stimulated by outer impressions. That too, which is aroused externally, which a man works upon with his intellect and lives through in his feelings, that too, does not concern the Archangels. But in the intellectual-soul of man there are, however, certain things which man experiences in common with the Archangels. We can perceive quite clearly that such things come into the human intellectual-soul or mind-soul when we see how, for instance, what we call our moral ideals come to us. There would be no moral ideals if we were only able to have feelings, to feel joy and sorrow and to think about that which comes to us from the outer world by means of our sense-perceptions; true we might then be able to rejoice over the flowers in the field and also over a beautiful landscape, but our hearts would never be able to glow with enthusiasm for an ideal which cannot shine forth to us out of the external world, which we can inscribe in our soul and then follow with enthusiasm. But we must not only be aglow and feel in the sentient-soul, we must also give thought to the matter. The man who only feels and does not think, may indeed be an enthusiast but never a practical man. We must not absorb ideals into our sentient-soul from outside, but we must let them pour in out of the spiritual world, and work upon them in the intellectual-soul or mind-soul. The artistic, the architectural ideals and so on, are present in the intellectual-soul or mind-soul, and in the spiritual-soul. They are connected with that which a man cannot perceive outwardly, but which glows through and permeates his being inwardly, so that it becomes a part of his life. Observe the life of the peoples from epoch to epoch, how it has run its course, how new conceptions and new world-secrets have from time to time appeared in it. From whence could the Greeks have taken their conceptions of Zeus and Athena if they had only relied upon external perception? All that is contained in the wisdom, in the mythologies, religions, and sciences of the peoples came into them from within. So therefore we must see that one half of our inner life, half of our intellectual-soul or mind-soul and of our spiritual-soul is filled from within, and indeed exactly so far as man permeates himself inwardly with what has just been described. Thus far can the Archangels penetrate into the human inner being, and thus far also does the actual life of the Archangels extend. You must therefore eliminate from the inner life that which is received from outside through the sentient-soul and distinguish it from what is worked upon by the intellectual-soul or mind-soul feelings. Then, however, you still have that which we call our ‘I’. To us the ‘I’ is the highest member of our being; what we carry into our moral consciousness are ideals, moral, aesthetic, ideal thoughts. just as the outlook of man is closed as it were inwards, but can, by means of the senses, open itself outwards to the external world, so he can say that he perceives colors, sounds, cold and warmth, but he also has the consciousness that behind these perceptions of colors, sounds, warmth and cold, there is yet something real, and that is, the beings belonging to the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms. They are behind it all. So that a man can in the manner described think of the world as continued beyond. On this world beyond, however, the outlook is closed to ordinary people. Were this not the case, there could be no materialism. If a man could have a free outlook over the domain extending upward from the intellectual-soul and spiritual-soul, it would then be quite as foolish to doubt the existence of the spiritual world as it would be foolish to-day to doubt the existence of the animal, plant and mineral worlds.

Now remember how in man the ‘I’, his highest member, encloses within itself the sentient, the intellectual and spiritual-souls. With the Archangels it is the case that their soul-life begins by experiencing in the intellectual soul or mind-soul, and then goes up into the ‘I’, which then spreads itself out in a world of higher realms, in a realm of spiritual facts, in which it lives just as man lives in the realm of the animals, plants and minerals; so that we may say, we must indeed perceive that this Archangelic Being may have in his soul-life that which we call the human ‘I’, yet nevertheless we cannot say that the ‘I’ of the Archangels is of the same nature. The ‘I’ of man is not one and the same as the ‘I’ of the Archangels. The Archangel-’I’ is in fact two stages higher, so that the Archangel is through his ‘I’ rooted in a higher world.

Now just as man by means of his sense-perception looks at colors and hears sounds, so does the Archangel look down upon the world which includes the ‘I’ as objective truth, only that around that ‘I’ there is still gathered some of that part of the astral, which we human beings know in ourselves as intellectual-soul or mind-soul. Think of these Beings as gazing into a world which does not extend to the minerals, plants or animals. Think that instead of this, their vision, which is a spiritual one, is directed to their picture of the world, and that they perceive centers therein. These centers are the human egos, around which again is gathered something that appears as a sort of aura. You have then the picture of how the Archangelic Being looks down upon those personalities of the folk belonging to him and which constitute the people. His world consists of an astral field of perception in which there are certain centers; these centers, these central points, are the several human personalities, the several human egos. just therefore as to us, colors and sounds, warmth and cold are within our field of perception, and are for us the important world, so to the Archangelic Beings, to the Folk-spirits, we ourselves with a portion of our inner life are the field of perception, and just as we go into the outer world and work at it and transform it into our instruments, so are we the objects in so far as we belong to this or the other Folk-spirit-belonging to the scene of action of the Archangels or Folk-spirits.

Thus we have an insight, strange as it may sound, into a higher theory of cognition, a higher epistemology of the Archangels. This is completely different from the epistemology of man; what is data for the Archangels is quite different. What is data for man is all that is spread out in space and meets us through our senses, as color, sound, warmth, cold, hardness and softness; what is data for the Archangels is what appears within, in the field of human consciousness. That to them is a number of centers around which the inner experiences of men are woven, in so far as these experiences take place in the intellectual-soul or mind-soul; but their activity is relatively a higher one.

What then differentiates the world of the Archangels or Folk-souls? The world of man is differentiated by the fact that if he takes hold of a thing with his hand, he feels it to be either warm or cold. The Archangel experiences something similar when he meets with human individualities. He meets with some men whose souls have more inner activity, the contents of whose souls are richer,—these make a greater impression upon him. Others he finds to be lethargic, indolent, the contents of whose souls are poor,—these beings are to him as the world impression of warmth and cold are to the human soul. Thus is the Archangel's picture of the world specialized, and he can make use of the several persons and work for them, by weaving out of his own being that which has to guide the whole people.

But there is also another way in which the life of the Archangel is connected with the life of the particular people he is leading. just as a human being has an ascending and a descending period in his life, an ascending time of youth, and a descending time of old age, so does the Archangel experience in the rise and fall of the culture of a people, his youth and his old age.

We must now again look into the inner life of one of these Archangels. You will already have noticed, from what I have related, that what man receives from without, the Archangel receives from within; hence when the individuals belonging to a people appear as centers within him, the Archangel has the feeling that what comes to him thus, does, it is true, arise in his consciousness from within, but it is nevertheless foreign to him. This to him is just like the sudden ideas that flash into our consciousness. He is also affected in just the opposite way by that which in man is youth and old age. Man experiences his youth in feeling the members of his body to be fresh, he feels that they are improving and developing. In old age these members become relaxed, they refuse to work; that is something which a man feels as happening from within him. Now the Archangel feels, it is true, that everything is happening within him, but the rise and decline of a nation nevertheless seems like something foreign to him, as something about which he has the feeling that it is independent of him, with which therefore he has nothing directly to do, but which gives him the occasion to incarnate in some particular people at a certain time. When the possibility of incorporating himself occurs, when there is a people living in the ascending period of its life, in all its upward-striving power, then the Archangel goes down, just as a man goes down when he has lived out his life between death and a new birth. Thus the Archangel goes down into a people and embodies himself in it. In the same way too, does the Archangel feel his death, the necessity of withdrawing from the people in question, when the several perceptions, the centers which he perceives begin to become less productive, less active, when they begin to have fewer contents. Then comes the time when he forsakes that community of people and enters into his Devachan, into his life between death and a new birth, in order at a later opportunity to seek out in another way a community of people. Thus the youthful upward life of a people signifies the youth of its Folk-spirit, he perceives it as being a fresh, flowing element in which he dwells. The descending period of a people's life he perceives as a withering of the centers in his domain of perception.

That gives a sort of insight into the inner being of one of these Folksouls. If we recall all this to mind, we may say, that in certain respects such a Folk-soul is really rather far removed from an individual human life, for in each one of these, what is in the sentient-soul and in the lower part of the intellectual-soul is a domain into which the Folk-spirit, the Archangel does not reach. For a human being it is, however, something very real. A man feels keenly that it belongs to the most inward, the most intimate part of his own life. In a certain respect the Archangel-nature, the one which guides the people, is something which floats above the separate individual human beings. The personal things which a man experiences because he receives perceptions through his senses, are foreign to the Archangel who is guiding the people. But there are intermediaries, and it is important that we should understand that there are such intermediaries. They are the Beings we call Angels, who are between the Archangels and man. You must take this in the strictest sense of the words: Folk-spirits are Archangels, they are Spirits who have finished the transforming of their astral bodies into Spirit-self or Manas, and are now transforming their etheric body or life-body into Life-spirit. Just halfway between these Beings and man are the Angels. These are Beings who are occupied in remodeling their astral body into Spirit-self or Manas, but have not yet concluded their work. At the present time man is at the beginning of this work, the Angels are nearly at the end of it, but have in no wise finished it. Therefore these Beings come into closer contact with that which makes up the daily life of man. We may say that the Angels incline with their whole soul-nature towards what we call the astral body. For this reason they fully understand all the joy and sorrow the human personality may go through. But because on the other hand they extend much higher than the human ‘I’, because they possess a higher ‘I’, because they can take in part of the higher world, the world of their consciousness extends to that domain in which is to be found the sphere of consciousness of the Archangels. They are therefore really the intermediaries between the Archangels and the several human individuals. They on their part receive the commands of the Folk-spirits and convey them into the several souls, and by means of this agency is brought about what a single individual may do, not only for his own progress, his own evolution, but for his whole people.

In the life of a human being these two streams flow side by side. The one stream is that which brings him onward from one incarnation to the next, which is connected with his own concerns, with what he has above all to do so as to fulfill the duty which is to him the strictest, because most especially his own duty. He may not stand still, because he would then be allowing the germs for growth within him to lie fallow, if he did not trouble about them. That, however, is his own private affair, by attending to which he progresses from incarnation to incarnation. But that which he contributes to his own people, which belongs to the concerns of the people of his own particular nation is brought about through the inspiration of the Angels, who carry the commands of the Archangels to the several human beings.

We can therefore easily picture a people spread over a certain portion of the earth, and over this people the folk-aura, the etheric aura, and in this how the forces of the Folk-spirit work, and modify the etheric body of man according to the three types of force. That which is at work in this folk aura is the Archangel; we must think of him as being a higher Being, one standing two stages higher in evolution than man, floating over the whole people, and giving directions as to what this people as a whole has to fulfill. The Archangel knows what must be done during the upward period, during the fresh youth of the people; he knows what are the achievements to be brought about by the transition of this people from youth to old age, so that his impulses should have the right effect.

These great outlines are fashioned by the Archangel; but here, upon this physical plane, the individual human beings must work, here they must take care that these great aims are realized. Between the individual human beings and the Archangels there are the Angels as intermediary beings, they impel the man to the place to which he must go, so that in the feelings of the people should arise that which corresponds to the great ordinances of the Archangels. You will form a correct picture of it, if you take what I have been describing not merely as an allegory, but as representing as nearly as possible the reality.

Now the whole tissue spun by the Archangels is influenced by those whom we call the abnormal* Archangels, the Spirits of Language, as I yesterday described. We have also described how the abnormal¹ Spirits of Personality, the Archai, work. We may now glance at the field in which the Archangel gives his orders, in which he distributes the missions which are to be carried further by the Angels into the separate individuals. The Archangels can, however, also operate into the domain of the abnormal Spirits of Personality, and it may happen that in the mutual co-operation of the Archangels with the abnormal Spirits of Personality,—because the latter are pursuing quite different objects,—that in certain respects the measures taken by the Archangels are crossed. When this occurs, when these abnormal Spirits of Personality come into collision with the measures taken by the Archangels, we can then perceive that within a single nation groups are formed, having special tasks. The action of the Spirits of Personality is externally visible when, within a certain people, groups are formed having special tasks. This may last for several centuries. For instance, in the very country in which we now have specially to work at Anthroposophy, in Germany, you have seen for centuries this play of the Archangel of the Germans in co-operation with the sometimes opposing separate Spirits of Personality. In the division of the collective German people into the smaller peoples, you have an interplay of the abnormal Spirits of Personality with the Archangel.

Such peoples are not so much centralized, they pay more attention to the cultivation of the individualities. This has in certain respects its good side, because in this way a great variety, many different shades of folk character can find their expression.

You may, however, take the other case, in which not the abnormal Spirit of Personality but the normal Spirit of Personality, who expresses himself in the Spirit of the Age becomes, so to speak, more important for a certain epoch than he otherwise is in the ordinary course of things.

Therefore, when we look at a people, we are looking at the Archangel as its first power. Then the Spirit of the Age comes and gives his orders to the Archangel, the latter passes them on to the Angels, and these convey them to the separate individuals. Now because one only sees, as a rule, what is nearest to one, so in this combined action one sees the actions of the Archangel as being the most important. It may, however, occur that the Spirit of the Age has to give out more weighty, more important orders, that he is, so to speak, compelled to take something away from the Archangel, because he must detach a portion of the people in order that the task of the age, the mission of the Spirit of the Age may be fulfilled. In such a case bodies of people separate themselves from the rest. The Spirit of the Age then visibly gains the upper hand over the influence of the Archangel. A case in point occurred when the Dutch people split away from the foundations which it had in common with the German people. Holland and Germany had originally one Archangel in common, and the separation occurred because the Spirit of the Age severed off a portion at a given time, and then passed on to this portion that which has become the important concern of the modern Spirit of the Age. All you may read in Dutch history—for history is in reality only an external expression, a maya, for what is happening inwardly—is only the reflection of an inner event. Thus in this case we can see the splitting of the Dutch people from the collective German people taking place externally; but the inner kernel is, that the Spirit of the Age required an instrument with which to carry out his overseas mission. The whole mission of the Dutch people was a mission of the Spirit of the Age, and it was split off for the purpose of giving him the possibility of carrying out something important at a certain time in history. What is described by historians is only outer maya, which hides the actual facts more than it reveals them.

There are other cases in which you can meet with what is so striking in this connection, namely, that a portion of a people had to sever itself from the common folk; that is the case with the Portuguese people. You may look in vain for other reasons in their case, you will find that it is here solely a question of a victory of the Spirit of the Age over the Archangel. If you go through the several events you will find that the opportunity was here made use of to form a special people,—there were not many such opportunities. The Spanish people and the Portuguese formed one mother folk. The outer reasons perhaps were, that the rivers were only navigable as far as to the Portuguese frontiers; there were no other external reasons. On the other hand there was the inner reason, that those tasks had to be fulfilled which were the specific tasks of the Portuguese, and which were different from the tasks of the combined Spanish people. There we see the Spirits of the Age for a time developing a more intense activity than they usually display. We see the harmony which had prevailed till then replaced by something else. We see the Spirit of the Age, instead of communicating his orders to the Archangel, taking a direct part in the history of the people, and we see how the other Spirits make use of this opportunity to incorporate themselves. When such a people is split off, then the Spirit of the Age for a time, in the first enthusiasm which has permeated the several persons, discharges the functions of the Archangel so much, that hardly anything else appears of the severance than a hurry and bustle within this people. One sees the hurrying and the urging, the activity which comes from the mission of the Spirit of the Age. Then, however, the possibility arises for a normal and an abnormal Archangel to incorporate themselves in the severed part of the people. Thus we see the growth of the Dutch and the Portuguese peoples who then received their own normal and abnormal Archangels. In that which incorporated itself here, in the difference in the temperament of the people expressed in the several personalities, we see the work of those spiritual Beings whom we have named. We see the work of these spiritual Beings in a very wonderful manner and we then recognize that what takes place outwardly in history is only a result of their activity. Gradually the saying, that the external world is maya or illusion, assumes more definite significance.

What happens in external history is only the outer reflection of the spiritual, of the super-sensible Beings, just as the outer man is only the outer reflection of the inner man. That is why I had to say, and it must be emphasized again and again, that the saying ‘The world is maya’ is of the very greatest importance; but it is not sufficient to emphasize it in an abstract way, rather should one be in a position to carry it out in detail.

Now we have seen that yet other Spirits and Hierarchies are active in what we call the world. We have spoken of the normal and abnormal Archangels. The abnormal Archangels have revealed themselves to us as being actually Spirits of Form or Powers, only they are those who have renounced a certain portion of the attributes of their evolution. We may then ask, How is it with the normal Spirits of Form? We perceive the normal Spirits of Form as being four degrees above man. In our next lecture we shall have a little more to say about them. These normal Spirits of Form are Beings four stages higher than man. The Hierarchies we mentioned yesterday do not end with the Spirits of Form, with whom we concluded the ascending line. Above these there are the Spirits of Motion, the Dynamis, or Mights; higher still there are the Beings we call Kyriotetes, Dominions or Spirits of Wisdom. You will find these different spiritual Beings enumerated in my Occult Science, as well as in my writings about the Akashic Record.

Now you can understand that the law of renunciation, of remaining behind, applies also to the higher Spirits, therefore that the Spirits of Motion may also remain behind with certain attributes,—Spirits of Motion, who are five stages higher than man,—that certain Spirits of Motion have so remained in human evolution, as if they were now only Spirits of Form or Powers. These are, as regards certain attributes, really Spirits of Motion, and in respect of other attributes, regarding which they have made renunciation, they are Spirits of Form; so that we have normal Spirits of Form, four stages higher than man, and other Spirits working on the same ground on which are the Spirits of Form, but who are really Spirits of Motion. That is therefore a domain in which the normal and abnormal Spirits of Form, the backward Spirits of Motion, work together, just as we have found a domain in which the normal and abnormal Archangels work together. Through this co-operation, however, something takes place which closely concerns man; by means of it the shaping of what we call the human races takes place, which we must distinguish from the peoples.

If we consider the matter in this way, we shall not have a confused idea of it, but one that is elastic; we must not confuse all this. A nation is not a race, the concept of a nation has nothing to do with that of a race. A race may divide itself into many different nations, races are different communities from nations. We are certainly right in speaking of a German, a Dutch, a Norwegian nation, but we speak of a Germanic race. Now what acts in the idea of a race? The Beings whom we describe as normal Spirits of Form or Powers act therein in combination with those Beings whom we have learnt to know as the abnormal Spirits of Form, but who in reality are Spirits of Motion having the mission of Spirits of Form. That is why mankind is divided into races. That which makes man the same over the whole globe, which makes each man, irrespective of the race to which he belongs, a member of the whole human kingdom, is brought about by the normal Spirits of Form. But that which plays a part over the whole earth and divides the whole of humanity into races, is brought about by the abnormal Spirits of Form, who have denied themselves so that there should not be one humanity only upon the earth but a variety of people.

Thus we arrive at the subsoil, so to say, at the ground of which the separate individual peoples first arise. In this way we succeed in surveying into the field belonging to the Spirits of Form and as abnormal Spirits of Form to bear one humanity, and that the belated Spirits of Motion enter into the field belonging to the Spirits of Form and as abnormal Spirits of Form divide up all humanity upon the globe into the several races. When we look into what these Spirits actually want, when we study the aims and objects of these normal and abnormal Spirits of Form, we shall understand what they wish to bring about with the human races, and how through these a foundation is created for what arises out of them. If we then study a people itself we shall have understood and comprehended it.

• 1. As the constant interchange of name is confusing, the reader is referred to the synopsis. The term abnormal is applied sometimes to the hierarchic rank abandoned, sometimes to the new hierarchy taken on.

Malsch, April 6, 1909

Today we are gathered for the dedication ceremony of our anthroposophical branch in Maisch. Although this “Section” of our Society has been fully at work for a while, we are able only today to officially celebrate its opening.

Many of our anthroposophical friends have come to this celebration from the most diverse regions to which our anthroposophical endeavors have spread. By coming here, they have demonstrated that they wish to unite their anthroposophical feelings and thoughts with those of serious and hardworking people in this group. One might say this group of people in Maisch has been thrown into these remote mountains, but surrounded by all the beautiful, great, and noble forces of nature, they will successfully unfold anthroposophical life. Those of you who were able to look around in the vicinity of this hospitable house in Malsch will have noticed that much has been done for its external appearance, as if the people responsible wished to say externally that the spiritual life by which all of us are inspired shall find special expression in this beautiful spot.

Let us look back at the modest beginnings of our anthroposophical life at the founding of our German Section, into which the Section in Malsch is now being incorporated. At that time we began with but a small group of people of spiritual scientific enthusiasts. Then, as we look at events such as this one today and observe the large number of souls who unite with us in spiritual scientific feelings and sentiments, we can be satisfied with the last few years of our endeavors.

The Stockmeyer family has spared no efforts to help with the unfolding of spiritual life on this beautiful piece of land although the spirits of nature have clearly aided their efforts. Also, this family must find great satisfaction in seeing how many genuine and true friends have hurried to this hospitable place, and I am sure all anthroposophical friends may be justly called genuine and true friends. This is so because anthroposophy must above all be truth in our hearts, and truth is sincerity. Anthroposophy, therefore, must be sincere; and anthroposophical friendship is expressed by your participation in such a dedication festival. Everything must be imbued with sincerity because honesty in friendship unites us with those who have worked so industriously so that here, too, there would arise a working sphere of anthroposophic activity. The hearts of those who have come here will be filled with gratitude for the efforts of the Stockmeyer family, who can be assured of our truly sincere anthroposophical appreciation.

On the other hand, the very success of such a dedication festival with so many souls present shows that Spiritual Science in our time is a powerful magnet for human striving, and on this occasion it may also be fitting to say that we can certainly look beyond the rooms that, surrounded by the spirits of beautiful nature, enclose us today and look at the rest of the world. It is possible to say that life and the endeavors of Spiritual Science today appear as phenomena whose existence results from an inner necessity. Really, it is as if many a page in the book about the life of old cultures, which sustained European and Western humanity for millennia and gave security and strength for life to it, were now beginning to wither and appear cold and lifeless to human hearts. That is why we see today a longing for spiritual scientific truths in so many areas of life. I, for one, having been permitted to speak to you here, sense something like a future force at work because of what has been taking place around me in the last few days.

We are here surrounded by green trees, the budding life of nature, and also by the magnificent sunlight that shines on us benevolently at this dedication since it animates everything and is imbued with spirit. This, then, is a perfect place to relate to you the words of our great harbingers of the new wisdom, the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings.

A few days have passed since I was permitted to speak in the same spirit in a lecture cycle in Rome, and this event symbolized to me what a magnet spiritual striving is. I was to speak to those who harbor a spiritual scientific longing in their hearts, but their longing is still fairly undefined at times. Yet the place where I was to speak looked differently, and it was on ground that actually had been entered only by cardinals in pursuit of spiritual endeavors or by others who work out of the convictions of the most positive and orthodox Catholicism. And so the air of the rooms where normally nothing but the official message from the orthodox center of Rome was proclaimed resounded with the free pronouncements of the spiritual scientific world view.

This shows us that although the free contemporary spirits of these Northern lands feel more attracted to anthroposophy, they can nevertheless look with a certain satisfaction to the souls who long to escape from an old, iron-clad orthodox tradition. It is certainly a good indication of the spirit of the times that it was possible to speak as freely and frankly about anthroposophic truths on territory heretofore reserved for cardinals, and as freely as this would be possible in the North. For what has been said before holds true everywhere: anthroposophy is sincerity; and where souls are in need of it and a call is issued, anthroposophy will follow it. But at no time will anthroposophy deviate in the least from the overall precepts that inspire its pronouncements, just because the consideration for the territory on which these pronouncements are made may make this expedient.

Wherever anthroposophical truth is proclaimed and where the spiritual element that pulsates through us is cultivated, there our message must be delivered in the light of sincerity, even when it is still surrounded by the thoughts of those who hate anthroposophy. However, in the midst of those who hate anthroposophy there are souls who, more or less consciously, long for the light of anthroposophy. And especially a strong contrast such as the one I have experienced during the past fourteen days can show us what a strong magnet anthroposophical life is.

The observation of our immediate present teaches us that this anthroposophical force is now strong enough to justify our joyful and satisfying hope that the small seedling planted today will in the future grow into a mighty tree. As theosophists, we are today in the same position humanity was in during the ancient Atlantean time. And just as life has become different since that time, so it will change again in the future, up to a time following a catastrophe. The wide perspective will now be made to appear before our souls.

Let us call to memory a similar movement in the last third of the Atlantean epoch that started small just like ours. The Atlantean soul life, which in many ways was still clairvoyant, had reached a high point during that time, but it did not yet have the consciousness of self, the strong feeling of the “I.” Instead, Atlanteans had a certain ability of clairvoyance and also certain magical powers, and this enabled them to look into the spiritual world. Those who had progressed to be leaders of this civilization were the ones best able to gaze into the spiritual world in the old ways and to bring forth the most knowledge from the astral realms. This clairvoyance disappeared little by little; in fact, mankind had to lose it completely in order to conquer for itself the consciousness of self in the physical world. But it is certain that clairvoyant knowledge in the last third of the Atlantean era had reached a special climax.

You will remember the technological achievement of the Atlanteans. They flew over the earth in small space vehicles—close to the earth because the atmosphere was saturated with thick fog formations. They propelled their small vehicles through this sea of air and water with energy derived from sprouting plants. The leading creators of this technology can be compared to today's industrial wizards who construct ingenious machines from lifeless forces. And those Atlanteans who could relate the most from the spiritual world can be compared to today's leading scholars and natural scientists.

However, within this Atlantean humanity a segment of people began to evolve who had only minor clairvoyant faculties, but possessed the ability to regard the external world with affection. The first rudimentary beginnings of arithmetic and counting could be observed in these people, but their participation in the great advances of the Atlantean industry—the construction of ever mightier vehicles for this sea of water and air—was very limited. And thus a small, insignificant group of people had developed in this last third of the Atlantean period who, in a certain sense, were despised for their comparative lack of clairvoyant power and their inability to participate in this great industry. However, this group of people prepared the way for seeing and knowing that is prevalent today, the way of seeing and knowing of which the external world today is so proud since it developed it in such a one-sided way.

Those leaders of the Atlantean civilization who had mastered everything that could be known from the vantage point of the Atlantean consciousness, including technology, conceived of a technical idea toward the end of the Atlantean era that has become fully productive in modern times. We can compare it to another measure of progress in our time that will carry over into the next catastrophe. During their golden age, the Atlanteans had vehicles that moved through air that was heavily mixed with water. Later, however, when their culture was already in a state of decline, it also became necessary to navigate the water, and this led the last cultural races of the Atlantean era first to embracing and then to realizing the idea of navigation and the conquest of the seas. This momentous idea in the Atlantean era not only of traversing the air but also of navigating the ocean water was quite a sensational idea that was put into reality by the last Atlantean races. After long experiments to navigate the waters, success came during the time when Atlantean culture was already in its decline.

Those responsible for this tremendous progress were not the ones who could be recruited for the task of transmitting the legacy of the actual spiritual life from the Atlantean era to our time. Rather, this task was reserved for the plain and simple people because they had been the first ones to be endowed with the ability to relate to the physical world. They were the ones whose clairvoyant faculties, though deteriorated the most among the several groups of people, were still adequate for those who were messengers from the spiritual world. These people, despised by the great scholars and inventors, were gathered by an eminent initiate whom we call The Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle. This small group was comprised of people who had least preserved their technical abilities and who were disdained by the leaders and by the great scholars and inventors. Yet it was precisely they whom the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle led from the West to the East, through Europe and into Asia. And it is also this small group of people that made the foundation of the post-Atlantean cultures possible.

The best of what was subsequently developed by the various cultures, the mighty tree of post-Atlantean knowledge and wisdom, emanated from the descendants of the despised simple people from the Atlantean era. Above all, something else emanated from the midst of the descendants of this group of modest people. Let us place the external events side by side with the internal events of our evolution. Let us look at the great sensation of the Atlantean era when the secondary racial group, whose descendants were the Phoenicians, invented navigation. What was accomplished by this invention?

We need only to remember the great events from the beginning of modern times, such as the great voyages of discovery by Columbus and other seafarers, which would have been impossible without navigation and the invention of ships, and we shall see how this sensational invention led to the gradual conquest of the physical plane on earth. PostAtlantean peoples were confined to a small radius of activities, but through the invention of ships the circle defining the earth became rounded out so that we now have a completed configuration of the physical plane. And thus, the sensational invention of the Atlantean world reaches into our time and promotes further progress on the physical plane.

However, the greatest conquest in the Atlantean era emanated from the descendants of that group of plain people gathered around the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle. And when those descendants, through their own development, had prepared the Indian, Persian, Egyptian, GraecoLatin, and our cultures, the earth became capable of yielding the material into which the Christ could be born. Therefore, the greatest spiritual event and deed of the post-Atlantean era had its beginning in the people who belonged to the most despised human beings in the eyes of the leaders of the Atlantean civilization, and this event gave rise to the immense spiritual progress that supports and maintains all spiritual life in our time—weaves through it and makes it productive.

The events in Atlantis are paralleled by those of our time. Seeing that the germinal beginnings of man's ability to do arithmetic and to count were present in Atlantis, we can recognize how these capabilities are today furthered in a marvelous conquest of the physical plane and how they brought about all kinds of technical progress. We also see how the great inventors and discoverers today have reached the culmination, in a sense, in applying those forces that first began to germinate with the small group of despised people in the Atlantean time. And what was then clairvoyant knowledge is today knowledge of nature and of the physical world. There is also a similarity between the spiritual leaders of the Atlantean civilization and today's natural scientists and scholars. On the other hand, a class of plain people exists everywhere—irrespective of positions its members might hold in the world, whose hearts are filled with the mighty magnet that attracts us to spiritual life, just as people in Atlantis were attracted to a life in which the external faculties for the physical plane could be developed.

Despite these similarities, there is also a certain difference between the modern and the ancient situation. In the old days referred to, the last remnants of clairvoyance were still present in people so that they were able to behold the Great Initiate. In a certain way, things today are more difficult for human beings when a call from the spiritual world issues to an equally small group of people, something we designate as the call of the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings. But since people today are placed on the physical plane, these Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings are at first unknown to this small nucleus of human beings that has crystallized itself out of the mass of people. As we can deduce from the facts of the present time, this small group feels in its hearts that there is such a thing as a new spiritual message that is meant to have an effect on the future just as the message in former ages has had an effect on the present. These human beings who today come from all walks of life and whom we can find everywhere are the true theosophists because they carry in their hearts a longing for a spiritual life that is meant to lay the foundation for future cultures. The true theosophists in our time are emerging—just as we now encounter a sensational discovery similar to the one in the Atlantean era.

In ancient times water was conquered through the highest technological progress; the same is true today in the case of air. This conquest will, of course, extend into a later epoch. But just as ships in our times have brought about mastery of the physical plane only, so the air ship that will lead human beings into the atmosphere and beyond will empower the pilots to find only matter—material things. Granted, new realms of the physical plane will be conquered, and this will be beneficial for the external world. However, the inner spiritual life is borne in the hearts of those who feel spiritually fulfilled by the promise of being able in the future to look into the spiritual world while being conscious of self.

Look into life and you will find out there our leaders of civilization, the pillars of external culture, active as inventors and discoverers, as scholars and natural scientists. They look with scorn and contempt on a small group such as the one assembled here today that constitutes itself as a new bearer of culture and that unites its members with others in spiritual scientific associations. The events of the ancient Atlantean era repeat themselves.

However, when the spiritual life touches your hearts with such force that you can compare yourselves with dignity to those who were gathered around the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle, then you will be the bearers of spiritual life in later ages. In addition to offering humanity the external, material, and corporeal realities, such a life would also make possible a renewed immersion in the spiritual world. Although the Great Initiate gathered human beings around Himself in ancient times, today the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings fulfill a similar function and issue their call to you. If you feel your mission from a sense of history, then your hearts will become strong enough to withstand all the ridicule and disdain that the so-called pillars of civilization heap on Spiritual Science from the outside. And if you understand your mission in this spirit, then your thoughts will be strong and any doubt that may reverberate into your souls from the outside will be unable to shake you in your conviction. Your thoughts will be spiritually refined by the very force that can issue from such a knowledge of our mission. Even if we have to review thousands of years and establish far-reaching ideals, it is worth the effort because where such ideals are established, life is transmuted, and where they are absent, life is dead. Ideals transform themselves into the force of a moment even if they have been taken from vast periods of time and may seem to make the person subscribing to them appear somewhat petty and despondent. You will be strong for the most insignificant task if you are capable of extracting your ideal from the loftiest heights. This will make you stand fast when those who govern the world with their erudition talk with disdain and contempt about the little spiritual scientific associations where those people sit who “do not want to go along with contemporary culture.” Oh yes, they do want to go along, and they also know to appreciate the accomplishments of the external, physical world, but they also know that just as a body cannot be without a soul, no external culture can exist without spiritual life.

Just as the despised human beings characterized above gathered around the Great Initiate and after generations made the existence of Christ on earth possible, so the anthroposophical movement must facilitate a comprehensive understanding of Christ. Christ descended to earth in the fourth major era, and those who wish to understand Him completely will be able to do so from the anthroposophical vantage point.

Why do people who have heretofore been nourished by the positive, orthodox religions, come to Spiritual Science as if responding to an undefined longing in their consciousness? Why do they listen to the anthroposphical message when before they listened only to the Vatican? Why? Is it still permissible today to say anthroposophy exists only for those who regard the greatest spiritual fact of our age—the Christ Impulse—with indifference? What do the people coming to us need from us? They want us to tell them who Christ was and what He accomplished! They are coming to us because those who consider themselves to be the privileged bearers of the Christ-name today cannot tell them who Christ was, whereas anthroposophy can. Today's cultural leaders use the denial of Christ to oppose the external tradition emanating from various religions, but they cannot effectively challenge the moribund positive religious movements. Those who do not know what the Great Christ is, those who deny His spirituality will be no match even for the old religious movements. But only the spiritual movements that place themselves in the midst of those who claim an exclusive right to the Christ-name, the movements who know how to express the true essence of the Christ even to those who wish to hear the opposite, only those spiritual movements will attract human beings to their cause who carry the future in their hearts. The ancient religious trends will prove to be stronger than all religious nihilism.

We do not conceive of anthroposophical life in a petty, dogmatic sense, nor do we want to comprehend it with the help of individual tenets or maxims, but rather by recognizing and understanding the mission and the task of our time. We want to embrace anthroposophical life in such a way that the true spirit of our time speaks to us and that the most significant event of our post-Atlantean era can be expressed through the words of anthroposophy. If these words are not just recited but rather put into practice as an expression of the spirit of our time, they will become a dynamic force of life in our souls, and this will make people understand what anthroposophical life is.

When we truly feel this, we will increasingly grow stronger, and the newly gained strength will help us to embrace our ideal firmly. Then we will know how this ideal can be justified, regardless of whether this happens in an environment where an old culture yearns for a new content, or in this environment here, where nature and the magnificent, spirit-endowed sunrays glittering around us encircle what the daily efforts of anthroposophy achieve. We will again learn to recognize the spirit within these sunrays and know that when the sun has set, the spirit indwelling in it will look into our hearts. We will also learn what it means to behold the sun and its spirit at midnight, and in understanding what this spirit is, we will see how it has descended and how it is now united with the highest impulses of our age. It is necessary that humanity understand the Christ-Impulse and that we can say who the Christ was. Such an understanding is now only in the beginning stages, but in direct proportion to its increasing spiritual insights, mankind will gradually understand how the Christ-Impulse has penetrated this worldly edifice.

To feel this way at the dedication of a branch of our movement is especially appropriate when, as is the case here, the members were united in wanting to express a heartfelt desire and name this branch after Francis of Assisi, whose life is enveloped by a deep spiritual mystery.

When Christ descended to the earth, He enveloped Himself with the threefold physical, etheric, and astral bodies of Jesus of Nazareth and lived three years in this sheath as Christ, the Sun-Spirit. With the event of the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ descended to the earth; but aside from what is known to all of you, something else special happened by virtue of the fact that Christ indwelled the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth, particularly the astral and etheric bodies. After Christ cast off the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth, they were still present as spiritual substance in the spiritual world, but multiplied in a great many copies. They did not perish in the world ether or in the astral world, but continued to live as identical images. Just as the seed of a plant, once buried in the ground, reappears in many copies according to the mystery of number, so the copies of Jesus of Nazareth's etheric and astral bodies were present in the spiritual world. And for what purpose were they present, considering the large framework of spiritual economy? They were there to be preserved and to serve the overall progress of the human race.

One of the first individuals to benefit from the blessed fact of these countless copies of Jesus's etheric body being present in the spiritual world was St. Augustine. When he again descended to earth after an earlier incarnation, not just any etheric body was woven into his own, but rather the copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. Augustine had his own astral body and ego, but his etheric body was interwoven with the image of the etheric body of Jesus. He had to work through the culture of his ego and astral body, but when he had made his way to the etheric body, he realized the great truths that we find in his mystical writings.

Many other human beings from the sixth to the ninth centuries had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus woven into their own etheric bodies. Many of these individuals conceived the Christian images that later were to be glorified in the arts in the form of the Madonna or the Christ on the cross. They were the creators of religious images who experienced in themselves what the people living at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha had experienced.

In the period spanning the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries the time had come when a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into the astral bodies of certain reincarnated souls. From the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries many human beings, for example Francis of Assisi and Elisabeth of Thüringen, had the imprint of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into them while their own astral bodies—the source of their knowledge—were formed during reincarnation. This enabled these individuals to proclaim the great truths of Christianity in the form of judgments, logical constructs, and scientific wisdom. But, in addition, they were also able to experience the feeling of carrying the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth within themselves.

Your eyes will be opened if you allow yourselves to experience vicariously all the humility, the devotion, and the Christian love that was part of Francis of Assisi. You will then know how to look at him as a person prone to make mistakes—because he possessed his own ego—and as a great individual because he carried a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth within his own astral body. All the humble feelings, the profound mysticism, and the spiritual soul life of Francis of Assisi become comprehensible if we know this one secret of his life.

Having such knowledge, we can see with our inner eye that the future of this new branch augurs well as it climbs upward under the guiding light of this great individual, for those who, like Francis of Assisi, received the grace and the calling to guide Christian humanity in the West will at all times let their spiritual light radiate into the areas of spiritual activity. And especially if this Francis of Assisi Section works in a genuinely spiritual sense, the unison of thoughts and feelings of this branch will be the reflection of the harmonizing light of Francis of Assisi, which he received as a gift of grace, as we mentioned before, by an infusion of his own astral body with a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Something of this light will radiate into this very branch.

In letting such perspectives roll by our inner eye, we who are assembled today in this modest branch for the purpose of dedicating the new branch will leave the proper feelings behind us when we depart. Let us look up to the light of Francis of Assisi; let us take along with us what can be ignited in us in this moment, and let us remember this branch in the future. In doing so, our feelings and thoughts will hover invisibly over this Francis of Assisi Branch, so that the impulses struggling upward from below may prove to be worthy of the light that shines into our souls from the outside. In such a moment we become conscious of the fact that we are here to work for the true and real measures of progress in our post-Atlantean era. Surely, when the founders of this branch felt the need to name it after Francis of Assisi, their souls must have sensed something of the great progress.

What was the most decisive turning point of our entire evolution? It was the time when the Christ descended to earth. Let us look back six hundred years from that event and then compare the earth to what it was six hundred years after Christ, a period spanning some twelve hundred years. First, let us look at Buddha, who lived six hundred years before Christ. In him we see an individuality of such greatness that words of admiration should be superfluous. Specifically, let us look at the moment where he is led out into life, but not into the life he wanted to live. Consider how he first meets a helpless child and how from this experience he forms the perception that there is suffering in the journey that human beings begin with their birth. And upon seeing a sick person, he says to himself, “Not only is there suffering in this world, but human beings on this plane are also subjected to illness.” He sees an old person who no longer is able to move his limbs and says to himself, “Aging involves suffering.” And when he sees a corpse, the sight of it conjures up in him the perception that death is suffering. Another perception is that to be separated from a loved one creates suffering, as is the case when one is united with someone whom one doesn't love. Finally, not to obtain what one desires is suffering too.

This, then, is the teaching that spread as the teaching of Buddha, some six hundred years before Christ. Let us fix in our minds the moment where Buddha steps out into the world, sees a corpse, and stands face to face with death. It was six hundred years after the event of Golgotha when for the first time one particular image came into being: the image of the cross with the corpse of the Savior hanging on it. Thousands of people were there to look at it. Now when Buddha looked at a corpse, it was to him a personification of all suffering on earth. The believers of the Christian community six hundred years after Christ would look at the corpse and see it as the victory of all spiritual life over death, the claim to bliss. And here we see how a faithful community looked at a dead body six hundred years before Christ, and then six hundred years after the event of Golgotha.

What can the Christ-Event tell us about the other pronouncements of suffering? Is birth suffering, as Buddha expressed it? Looking at Christ on the cross, the part of humanity that really understands Him will say, “Through birth we step into this existence—an existence that was found worthy of harboring the Christ. We are born into a life in which we can unite with Christ.” Likewise, sickness is not suffering if one understands Christ. People will have to learn to understand through the Christ-Impulse what, from a spiritual point of view, creates health. Illnesses will be healed in a spiritual way through the innermost, Christianized life. By dying to the outer world, we become assured that the treasure acquired in connection with the Christ-Impulse is carried into every other life. Through Christ's victory, death appears to us as a bridge that leads to the spiritual world, and we learn to understand the meaning of death for this spiritual world through this Christ-Impulse.

Also, it is no longer possible to say that the separation from the object of one's love creates suffering because the power of Christ will unite us, as one soul to another, with everything we want to love. Moreoever, the power of Christ will tie those together who love each other. The suffering that could arise through the separation of those loving each other is overcome through Christ.

Let us learn to love all people, lest our interpretation of the world be that to be united with what one does not love means suffering. Rather, let us learn to love every creature in its own right, and when our spiritual wells start to flow, our desires will be purified in such a way that we can partake in everything our souls are destined to receive, once the hurdles of the physical world are eliminated. And those spiritual fountainheads can begin to flow through the Christ- Impulse. People who will be content to obtain through the Christ-Spirit what they want will have their desires purified.

The new spiritual life has placed itself next to the old spiritual life through the Christ-Impulse. That is how deep progress in spiritual life ran before and after the Christ-Impulse had surfaced. This is keenly felt by someone who turns to one of the most ardent and joyful admirers and messengers of the Christ-Impulse—Francis of Assisi; his name, therefore, may well be bestowed on an association in which spiritual life is to be cultivated. May this name be a good augury, and may the work in this branch proceed in the true spirit of our time, properly understood, because this is necessary for the programs we have envisioned in our souls.

Let us consecrate this branch of our movement in the spirit expressed by the preceding words and by calling down the benediction we used yesterday when we broke ground for the outer temple. Let us conjure up the same spirit one more time so that it may hold sway and weave in this Francis of Assisi Branch.

May the feelings of those who have come to this dedication ceremony unite with this spirit and also unite in a brotherly way with those who are at work here in serious, anthroposophical endeavors so that spiritual life may germinate in the midst of the trees, forests, and sprouting plants of this sunny piece of nature. It matters little whether the bright sunrays outside indicate what is beautiful or magnificent in nature, whether snow be piled up outside, or whether a thick cloud cover be out there to obscure the external, physical sunlight. In times when nature renews itself or when she wears her somber garb, may the spirit of a higher life always imbue those who will be engaged in spiritual activities, and let us now conjure up this spirit to aid all the human beings in this branch.

With this, let us dedicate, from the bottom of our hearts, the Francis of Assisi Branch and hope that it will continue its work in the spirit in which it began—through the spiritual force of the Masters of Truth and of the Harmony of Feelings that streams into every branch. May it also continue its work through the good spirit with which it has endowed itself by naming itself after the splendid bearer of Christ.

May this branch continue as it began. Good spirits will guide its course as it becomes one of the centers where the kind of life is cultivated of which our time is clearly in need and where the seeds for the requirements of a far-distant future are sown. Let us hope the people who will soon have to work in solitude here emerge strengthened from today's festivities, where so many sincere friends united their feelings with them! Then the spiritual life cultivated in this place will flow back to all people involved and coalesce with the great harmony of anthroposophical life. Thoughts that originate in this place will encounter our thoughts, just as our thoughts will flow here from distant places. This harmony is something like an external garment of spirituality, and spirituality must pass through human evolution like a spiritual breath of air if beneficial forces are to reign over humanity.

May this branch be dedicated in the fullest sense of the word; may it become a field of activity into which we can always place our hopes with the same love and inner satisfaction as is the case in today's dedication ceremony.

In this lecture we shall have to draw attention to several positive results of occult investigation which will enable us to penetrate into the nature of man and will also show us what a complicated being man really is as he exists in the world. Can we think otherwise than that this human being must be a very complicated being, when we reflect how the true ideal of man, that which it is possible for man to become if he really develops all the possibilities contained within him, is fundamentally the content of the religion of the Gods and that all the Spiritual Beings belonging to the various hierarchies whom we know to be connected with human nature really work together with one object, that of building up man out of the whole cosmos, as the purport of that cosmos.

The first thing we remark is that when a human being receives impressions of the outer world, he actually receives into his consciousness only a small portion of what really surges in upon him. When in the physical world, he opens his sense organs and the intellect connected with his brain and nervous system, when he considers the world and tries to explain what comes to him in this way, only a small portion of what surges in upon him, really attains the form of ideas, only a tiny portion really enters the consciousness of man. Light and colour contain much more than what enters man's consciousness. In sound there is much more than what comes into the consciousness of man. External materialistic physics in its childish idea of the world says that behind colour, behind light, etc., there are material processes, vibrations of atoms and so on. This is indeed but a childish conception of the world, for in reality the following comes to light:—

We must investigate human perception with clairvoyant vision, for only by observing the actual process of perception can we understand man's relation to the surrounding world, even though we consider only the physical world. Something quite unique appears when we observe the process of perception clairvoyantly. Let us suppose some object affects our eyes, we perceive light or colour, and thus we have in our consciousness the sensation of light or colour. The remarkable fact one discovers through spiritual investigation is that in the human being there appears not only this light and this colour, but, in consequence of light and colour, there appears what we might call a sort of light-corpse or colour-corpse. Our eyes cause us to have the sensation of light and colour. Thus we might say: The light streams towards us and brings about in us the sensation of light; but looking deeper into our being we discover that while we are conscious of light, our human nature is permeated by something that has to die in us in order that we may have the sensation of light. We can have no perception, no sensation from outside without a sort of corpse being formed as the result of this sensation.

The spiritual investigator has to say: ‘Here I see a human being; I know that he has the sensation of red. But I see that this red which is in his consciousness pours forth something, pervades his whole being with something which in so far as it has entered within his skin and the limits of his etheric body—kills something in him which becomes like the corpse of the colour. Imagine that whenever we confront the physical world and have our sense-organs open, we always receive into us the corpses of all our sensations, as phantoms—but active phantoms. Whenever we perceive the outer world, something dies in us. This is a most remarkable phenomenon. And the spiritual investigator has to ask: What happens here? What is the cause of this very remarkable phenomenon?

One has to consider what it really is that comes to us as light. This light has a great deal behind it. What manifests as light is only the forerunner, as it were, of that which surges in upon us: at any rate there is not behind the light that undulating motion which external physics fancies, but behind the light, behind all sensations, behind all impressions, there is that which we only comprehend when we view the world occultly through Imaginations, through creative images. The moment we perceive all that lives in light, in sound or in warmth, we perceive, behind what reaches our consciousness, creative Imagination, and within this again is revealed Inspiration, and within that, Intuition. That which comes into our consciousness as the sensation of light or sound is but the outermost layer, only the froth, as it were, of what comes to us; but within it there is that which, if it were to enter our consciousness, could become in us Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

In what we perceive, we really only receive one-fourth of that which assails us; the other three-fourths penetrate into us without our being aware of them. When we perceive colour, there presses into us, as it were, below the surface of the sensation of colour,—creative Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition; these sink into us. When we investigate more closely into that which thus enters into us, we find that if Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition were really to enter our organism as they wish to do through sense perception, the result would be, that even during the period of our physical earthly existence between birth and death, they would bring about the same spiritual effect as I mentioned yesterday as a possible result of the temptation of Lucifer. This Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition would so act upon us that we should have the impulse to cast behind us every possibility that exists for our becoming the Ideal Man in the far-distant future, and we should want to spiritualise ourselves as we are now; we should want to become spiritual beings at the stage of perfection we have now reached through our previous life. In a certain sense we should say to ourselves: ‘It will be too great an effort for us to become man, for to reach this goal we should have to tread a difficult path in the future. We shall forego the possibilities yet lying in man, we prefer to become angels with all our imperfections, for then we can rise at once into the spiritual world, we can then spiritualise our being; we shall however, be less perfect than we might be in the cosmos, in view of our possibilities, but still we shall be spiritual, angelic beings.’

Here again, you see from this example the great importance of what is called the threshold of the spiritual world, and how important the Being is, who is called the Guardian of the Threshold. For there he stands, at the point of which I have just spoken. It is he who only allows sensation to enter our consciousness, and does not allow Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition to enter; for if these were to enter they would rouse within us a direct impulse to spiritualise ourselves just as we are, foregoing all the subsequent life of humanity. This has to be veiled from us; the door of our consciousness is closed against this impulse which penetrates our being. And in so far as it penetrates our being without our being able to illuminate it with the light of consciousness, as we are obliged to let it descend into the dark depths of our subconsciousness, there come towards it those Spiritual Beings to whom Lucifer is opposed. These come into our being from the other side and now arises within us the war between Lucifer, who sends in his Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, and the Spiritual Beings to whom Lucifer is opposed. With every sensation, with every perception we should behold this battle, if the threshold of the spiritual world were not closed to our outward perception. But to clairvoyant vision it is not closed.

From this you may see what a great deal really takes place in the inner part of human nature, and the result in us of the battle which takes place there is what I have described as a sort of corpse, a partial corpse. This corpse is the expression of that which has to become entirely material in us, it is like a mineral deposit, which we are unable to spiritualise. If this corpse were not formed through the war between Lucifer and his opponents we should have, instead of this corpse, the result of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition within us and we should rise at once into the spiritual world. The corpse forms the dead weight by which the good Spiritual Beings—the opponents of Lucifer—detain us at first in the physical world, detain us in it so that because of this veiling we should strive towards the true ideal of human nature and the fulfilment of all the possibilities that may be ours. Through this content, this corpse-phantom being formed in us, through our receiving into ourselves, every time we perceive, something which is at the same time a corpse, we kill in us during the act of perception this ever-springing impulse towards spiritualisation. It is while this deposit is forming that what I have often mentioned occurs, and of which it is so important we should recognise the full significance. Just consider! When you look into a mirror you have a sheet of glass before you; this you would see through, if it were not for the mirroring substance spread on it. Through the mirroring substance being upon the sheet of glass everything that is in front of the mirror is rejected. If you were really to stand before your physical body in such a way that you experienced the perceptions which pass into it from Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions, you would then see through the physical body, and your feeling would be such that you would say: ‘I will have nothing to do with this physical body; I will take no notice of it, but I will rise just as I am into the spiritual world.’

The physical body would really stand before you like a pane of glass without any mirroring substance behind it. But the physical body is now permeated with the corpse which resembles the mirroring substance of the mirror and it reflects everything that falls upon it, exactly as in the case of sense perception. It is in this way sense that perceptions originate. The permanent corpse we bear within us is the reflecting substance of our whole body and we thereby see ourselves in the physical world. It is because of this that we are individual physical beings in the physical world. How complicated does the human being now appear to us!

Let us take the other case, in which we not merely perceive, but we think. When we think, it is not a sense perception. Sense perceptions may give rise to thought, but true thought does not consist of sense perceptions, it is a more interior process. When we think, we make no impression in our physical body with the actual thought, but we do upon our etheric body. When we think, all that is in the thought does not enter into us. Were all that is contained in thought to enter into us, we should feel, every time we think, nothing but living, elemental beings pulsing in us; we should feel inwardly alive. I mentioned once at Munich that if a person were to experience thoughts just as they are, he would feel somewhat as if he were in an ant heap. Thoughts would live in him, everything would be alive. We do not perceive this life in our human thought, because again, only what is like the froth of it enters our consciousness and forms those shadow-pictures of thought which appear in us as our thinking. On the other hand, that which permeates thought as living force, sinks into our etheric body. We do not perceive the living beings, the living elemental beings swarming through us, but only an extract, something like a shadow of them; but the other part, the life, does enter into us and as it enters into us pervades us in such a manner that again a battle takes place, this time in our etheric body, between the progressing spirits and Ahriman, the Ahrimanic beings. And what is the outcome of this battle? It is that thoughts do not appear in us as they would do if they were alive. Were they to appear as they actually are, we should feel ourselves within the life of the thought-beings moving hither and thither; but we do not perceive this, and our etheric body, which otherwise would be transparent, is rendered opaque. I might say that it becomes somewhat like a smoke-topaz, which has darker layers in it, while quartz is quite transparent and pure. In the same way our etheric body is filled with a spiritual obscurity and that which thus fills our etheric body is the treasure of our thought.

This treasure of thought arises through thoughts being reflected, as it were, in our etheric body in the way described, but in this case, in ‘time’, they are reflected back as far as to the point of time to which our memory extends in physical life. Memory is rejected thoughts, thoughts reflected in time. But deep down in our etheric body, behind memory, work the good divine Spiritual Beings to whom Ahriman is opposed and there they create, they construct the forces which are able to reanimate what has died in the physical body as the result of the above-described process. Thus whereas in our physical body a corpse is produced (a corpse which has to be produced, because otherwise we should have the impulse to spiritualise ourselves with all the imperfections we possess), something like an invigorating vital force proceeds from the etheric body, so that in the future that which has been killed can once more be regenerated.

We now see for the first time the significance of ‘before’ and ‘afterwards’. If in the immediate present we were fully to experience the Intuitions, Inspirations, etc., which enter into us, we should spiritualise ourselves, but through their being thrown into the future by Ahriman, through their not being used now, but being preserved as germs for the future, they attain at last to their true nature. That which we should misuse at the present time we shall employ in the future, when we have passed the portal of death, to shape a new life for ourselves from out the spiritual world. That which—if we were to use it in the physical world—would lead us to spiritualise ourselves with all our imperfections is the force that leads us after death to apply ourselves again to physical earthly life. In such opposite directions do things work in different worlds!

Such is the case with respect to our thought. And now let us consider feeling, that which we have within us as inner feeling. That which we perceive as inner feeling is, once more, not really what it could be according to its whole inner nature. What we have within us as feeling, what enters our consciousness as feeling, is only the shadow of what really lives within us; for here again, in our feeling Spiritual Beings live. Remembering what I said in the first lecture, you will perceive that in feeling live the Spiritual Beings who are really at the back of the whole of our planetary system, only they do not enter our consciousness. Feeling, as we know it, enters our consciousness; the rest remains outside our consciousness. What does it really mean when we say that the rest remains outside our consciousness? It is really very difficult to find words in ordinary language which exactly describe these things. Just as we must say perception and thought produce within us something that is really like a ‘killing’—but in the case of thought, through counteraction, there is at the same time a sort of impulse towards a future ‘making alive’—so also we have to say that every feeling we have is not really born in us, it does not come fully into existence. If everything that is in us when we feel were to emerge, what is contained in the feeling would lay hold of and give force to that which is behind the feeling in quite a different manner. That which really makes feeling into a living being, into a living being whose life is nourished by the entire planetary system, does not appear directly. Feeling does arise in us but as a shadow of what it really is. The result is that however profoundly a person may enter into his world of feeling, however deep his feeling for humanity, he is really aware of something unsatisfactory in respect of every feeling. He perceives that each feeling might be enhanced, it might come forth with more power. Especially as regards feeling we have something like a secret consciousness that it could reveal to us much more than it does; it hides something that lives in our inner being, something that is in the depths of our soul and that is only half born.

When we pass on to our will, to all that as wish and will can arise within us, the case is the same as with feeling, but to a higher degree; for behind the will is to be found the Spiritual Being, the Causal Being, who really lives in the sun. In the will there lives not merely that which lives in the planets, but that which lives in the sun itself—but hidden. The will is still less entirely born than is feeling. The will would permeate us very, very differently, if all that is contained in it were really to manifest itself in our consciousness. Only the outermost surface of the will, only it's most superficial part is really expressed. The other remains hidden from us. Why does a whole world remain hidden from us in feeling and in will? It is because if that which remains hidden from us were to be seen from the physical plane, we could not bear it. Seen from the physical plane it would have such an appearance that we should want to ward it off, we should want to turn away from it.

That which lives in feeling and in will, and remains unborn, is karma in process of development, evolving karma. Let us suppose, to choose a concrete example, that we have a hostile feeling towards someone. That which comes into our consciousness when we have this hostile feeling is but the ripple on the surface; below, forces are active which extend over the whole of our planetary system. But it is precisely that which remains hidden that says to us: ‘Through thy hostile feeling thou art implanting in thyself something that is imperfect,’ this thou must make good. The moment that were to appear, which dwells below the surface, we should see before us the ‘Imagination’ of what karmically must balance this hostile feeling. In order to avoid the compensation we should unite ourselves with Lucifer and Ahriman, because we should judge what we saw from the standpoint of the physical plane. On the physical plane this is hidden from us; the Guardian of the Threshold hides it from us because we can only judge the things which are unborn in our feelings and in our will when we live in the spiritual world between death and rebirth. There we will what otherwise we never should will; there we will that what corresponds to a hostile feeling shall really be corrected, because there we have a true interest in the contents of divine religion, in the perfect ideal of humanity, which would make of us perfect human beings. From this we know that what has come to pass through a hostile feeling must receive its equivalent compensation. It has to be held over till the future, only after death may that appear which has remained unborn in our feeling and will.

Thus you see I have presented to you four things connected with the human soul. That which remains unborn in our feeling lives in the astral body. That which remains unborn behind our will, lives in the ‘I’. Again, when we receive impressions of the outer world we receive into us at the same time something like a physical corpse, which is really the mirroring-substance of our physical body. We also have within us a deposit, resembling a beclouding of the etheric body. In our astral body we have something which does not come to birth in the period between birth and death; and in our will we also have something which is not born during this period. This fourfold possibility which a human being bears within him, must be aroused in the period between death and re-birth. It lives within us as the kernel of our soul, just as surely as the seed for the following year lives in the plant. Thus we do not only speak of a soul-seed in a general way, but we can even comprehend this soul-seed in its fourfold nature. When we have a feeling which produces an inward uneasiness, when we are not in harmony with life, it is because a certain pressure is exercised upon the conscious part of our feelings by the unborn part of our feelings. How can this pressure be relieved? Now this pressure is something to which every human being is continually exposed; for what I have just described—in so far as it relates to feeling and will, that is, to what is really our soul-life—is that which brings us into inner disharmony. If there were true unison between that part of feeling and will which is born, and that which remains below the threshold of consciousness, if the right relationship, the right harmony existed, we should live in this sense-world as happy and useful human beings. Here lies the real reason for all inner dissatisfaction. If anyone is inwardly dissatisfied, it comes from the pressure of the subconscious part of his feeling and will.

Now, to the explanation I have given, I must add that the nature of man has changed in the course of his evolution. What I have just described applies particularly to the present time, but it was not always thus. In ancient periods of human evolution, let us say in the ancient Persian, Egyptian and Indian ages, it was different. Of course man's perceptions arose in exactly the same manner, and Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions were contained in them; but in ancient times these Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions were not so entirely without effect upon man as they are to-day. They did not kill so completely the inner physical part of man. They did not make such a dense mineral deposit. This was because, in those ancient times under certain conditions when perceptions came from outside, something shot up out of feeling and will to meet it. If, for example, we go back to the Egyptian or the Babylonian civilisation and observe human beings, then we find that they perceived quite differently. Of course they confronted the outer sense-world just as we do, but their bodies were so organised that the Imaginations hidden within the sense-perceptions had not only their destructive effect, but they entered with a certain life-giving power. Because they entered in this living way they produced inwardly the reflection of that which now remains entirely hidden in the Ego and astral body. The Spiritual Beings belonging to the sun and planetary system pressed out from within and reflected as it were that which was animated by the Imagination; so that to the people belonging to the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian civilisations there were certain times when, on turning their gaze to the physical world, they did not only have physical perceptions as we have them, but life-endowed perceptions.

The Egyptian knew that behind his perceptions there was something which expressed itself in Imaginations. Hence he was not so foolish as to suppose that behind the perceptions there were vibrations of material atoms, as our present physicists do, but he knew that there was life behind them and from his inner being there streamed towards him pictures of the animated starry heavens and the living sun.

This was particularly strong during the Persian culture, when, together with the outer perception, something like the inner, spiritual force of the sun shone forth—Ahura Mazdao! If we go back to still more ancient times we find this interaction, this meeting of the inner and the outer expressed very much more strongly. To-day this can no longer be the case; but there can be a substitute, and here we reach a point where from the very nature of the thing we can really understand the task of the anthroposophical conception of the world. A substitute has to be produced. We confront the outer world with our perceptions. We think about it, a part of this outer world remains hidden from us, and this has a deadening and darkening effect upon us, but through Spiritual Science we can restore that which is thus darkened and deadened. It is precisely through the restoration of what otherwise is killed and darkened, that the science originates which portrays evolution through the Saturn, Sun and Moon Periods, as described in my book Occult Science. Every human being possesses this knowledge regarding the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon, only it is in the background of his consciousness. He would prefer not to be an earthly man were he able to see it directly, without the necessary preparation: he would prefer not to have any connections with the earth, and to end with the Moon evolution. All the knowledge we are able to acquire through Spiritual Science illuminates the hidden part of evolution in the past. That which as Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions lives outside and does not consciously enter into us, is really what we have gone through in the past. To gain this knowledge we must pass beyond the veil of sense-perception.

It is somewhat different regarding what is contained in our feeling and will. A person may say (and many have the impulse to say this at the present time): ‘Why should I concern myself with what these odd people think out, or have thought out, regarding a super-sensible world? I do not accept such ideas!’ A person who says this has never formed any idea as to why religions have come into our evolution. The one thing which all religions have in common is that they relate to things we cannot perceive with our senses: a person who accepts religious ideas fills himself with something he cannot perceive with his senses. Ideas which come from what we sensibly perceive, never give such an impulse to our feelings and will as may have an uplifting power after death. In order that the ‘unborn’ part of our feeling and will may continue to be active after death—as indeed it must—we do not use ideas gained through the perception of the senses, or through the intellect attached to the brain. These do not help us at all. The only ideas which give us the impulse and power which we need after death, are the ideas which correspond to that which is not outwardly real, the conceptions which when accepted make us pious and by which we look up to a spiritual world. Religious conceptions are those which cannot work in us as yet, but they become active forces after death. When we acquire religious conceptions we are not merely acquiring knowledge, but something that can become active after our death. For this reason it must be that anyone who does not want to reflect upon active forces of such a nature may laugh about them and in his materialism may reject them, but if he does not acquire ideas regarding what is super-sensible he will have but crippled powers wherewith to develop that which has remained unborn in his feeling and will.

Therefore it must frequently be stated that light is thrown on the past by clairvoyant consciousness. This is recognised at the present time in so far as it exists behind the veil of the sense-world as Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. In former times this consciousness was given to man as a religious belief, in order that he might not lose all uplifting power for the period after death and that he might have something in his soul—like a seed—that could carry on the life of the soul even when he had laid aside the physical body. The time has now come when mankind ought to acquire ideas about the super-sensible worlds through the understanding of Spiritual Science. For this reason it cannot be too often stated that the spiritual investigator alone can investigate these matters in the super-sensible world; but when they have been investigated and then imparted to us, there is something in our inmost soul which is a hidden language of the soul, which can grasp and understand the discoveries made by the spiritual investigator. It is only when the prejudices of the mind and senses hold sway that the super-sensible ideas furnished us by spiritual research are looked upon as nonsense, as foolishness and fantasy—ideas which, when accepted, endow the soul with an uplifting power which enables it to find its way in the cosmos through all the ages to come. It will always be the case that only those who have gone through an esoteric development will be able to investigate the contents of the spiritual world; but to know these contents, to work upon them inwardly in the consciousness, to hold them as ideas and conceptions, to possess the spiritual world as a certainty of the soul's existence is something that humanity will have need of more and more as its necessary spiritual food.

It is this which shows us how, from its very nature, the mission of our Anthroposophical Movement can be understood. In ancient times it still was the case that knowledge was animated from above and the capacity for receiving this knowledge came from below. Hence the ancients still possessed a direct consciousness of the spiritual worlds, but this consciousness gradually became dim and dark. Had this not come to pass, man would not have arrived at the full consciousness of the Ego, He can only attain to full consciousness of his Ego by developing to the highest degree in his physical body, the phantom-corpse of which I have spoken. Our physical body, as a transparent being, must be, as it were, entirely overlaid with ‘mirror-foil’ and only when it is completely overlaid, are we so conscious of ourselves that we can say: ‘I am an I’. But the complete overlaying has only been done slowly and gradually, for it has developed in the course of the evolution of humanity: it was completed in the age in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

The application of the ‘mirror-foil’ was then completed. Before that time the higher and the lower natures of man still met, what was below and what was above in a human being came together. One may say that through the covering of ‘mirror-foil’ being perfected, the higher and the lower were completely forced apart and this only came about when the event of Golgotha drew near.

What had then really taken place? Let us look more closely at what had taken place. Picture to yourselves the consciousness of these ancient people before the Mystery of Golgotha. From outside comes the life-giving force of Imaginations; from within arise pictures of the superhuman spiritual world. What are these pictures which thus arise in the human being? As we know, this was possible in ancient times, owing to the clouded condition of human consciousness. Those who knew these things, those who as Initiates were able to see the human soul and who saw it in this meeting of the life-giving Imagination from without and the vision from within, these did not say, ‘Man alone sees this’; but these ancient Initiates—the ancient Jewish Initiates, for example—said: ‘Jahveh or Jehovah looks upon His world in man. God thinks in man.’ Just as at the present time, in our cycle of evolution, when we have a thought, we may say ‘I think’, those who knew these things in ancient times said, when the pictures from the spirit-worlds appeared to them, ‘The Gods are thinking in us.’ Or as they recognised the unity of Divinity in Monotheism, they said, ‘Jehovah thinks in man; man is the stage whereon the play of divine thoughts is carried out.’ Men felt themselves inflamed by these thoughts; therefore they said, ‘In me the Gods think.’ But the necessity arose in human evolution that this should become more and more impossible and that darkness should spread more and more. The possibility of seeing visions, the thoughts of the Gods in man, ceased. The phantom-like corpse in man became more and more pronounced. The time drew near, when no more thoughts came forth from our human nature to meet the Gods. The Divine Being regarding whom it was said that He thought through man, felt His consciousness becoming dimmer and dimmer—for His consciousness consisted in His thoughts. And the longing arose within this Divine Being to awaken a new form of consciousness. When men acquire a different form of consciousness, they acquire something of the utmost importance. When the Gods create a new form of consciousness, they create with it something essential; something of the most profound moment occurs. The thing of profound importance that now came into being was the Christ. Christ the child of the Godhead, restored to man the power whereby he was conscious of God—restored the consciousness which the previously mentioned Divine Being had felt to be darkened. To accomplish this the Christ had to enter into and become a part of human nature. We must become fully aware of the fact, that in the act of perceiving the sense-world we receive continually into ourselves the content of death; that when we think about this world we are receiving obscuration and darkness into ourselves; and when we feel and will, something remains unborn in us. All these remain below in the depths of our consciousness, and with them there enters into us the content of something dead and something unborn which we can only first make use of after we are dead. But the power to do this would be crippled, if we could not let it sink into the Being whom the Godhead has brought to birth as the principle of a new consciousness, if we could not let it flow into the Christ-Being. When through spiritual science we really recognise the meaning of evolution, we become conscious of the following:—We realise that we send down into the subconscious depths of our being that which dies in us; but the death which we send down more and more into our own being is received by the Christ Who comes to meet us with life-giving power. Christ gives life to that which dies in us, which darkens in us, which remains unborn in us. We allow that to die in us, which must die in order that we may approach the true ideal of humanity with all the possibilities it contains; but the death-content which streams into us we pour into the Christ-Being, for He has pervaded human evolution since the founding of Christianity, and we also realise that what remains unborn in us, our feeling and will, is received by the Christ-substance into Whom it will sink after death. For within us dwells the Christ ever since He passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. Into Christ we let sink the death-content which is present with every perception; into Him we allow the darkening of our power of thought to sink. Into the light, into the spiritual sunlight of Christ we send our darkened thoughts, and when we pass through the portal of death, our unborn feeling sinks within the substance of Christ and so too does our unborn will. When we understand evolution aright we say to this evolution:

IN CHRISTO MORIMUR
We die in Christ.

In this, my last lecture, I should like to continue from where we left off yesterday. We were speaking of what I described as the great ‘Midnight Hour of our spiritual existence between death and rebirth’, that Midnight Hour when our human inner experience is most intense and when that which we may call spiritual companionship, our connection with the outer spiritual world, has reached its lowest ebb, so that in a certain respect during this Midnight Hour of our spiritual existence spiritual darkness surrounds us. We said also that the longing for the outer world again becomes active within us, that this longing arises through the Spirit which works in spiritual worlds, and that it enkindles a new soul-light in us, so that it becomes possible for us to see an external world of a particular kind. The external world we then see is our own past, which has run its course through previous incarnations, and the intervening periods between deaths and re-births: this we then survey as an outer world, through looking back upon what we have received from, and enjoyed in worldly existence, and upon that for which we are indebted to the world. When we thus survey our previous experiences, two things come before us with particular intensity. We have enjoyed certain things and this is shown us by spiritual vision; we have had certain joys and sorrows in life. We can survey these joys and sorrows, but we see what we have experienced in such a way that it is its spiritual value which appears to us; we see it with respect to what it has made of us.

Let us take a concrete example. We look back upon some enjoyment, some satisfaction we have had at some time in our past life. We then feel: this is not something that is past; the time when we enjoyed it does indeed lie behind us, but it is not something that is absolutely past. It is something which continues its activity into all future time and it continues it in such a manner that it still awaits what we are going to make out of it. When we have experienced some enjoyment, some satisfaction, in our soul we feel somewhat as follows when we survey it: ‘This must become a force within thee, a force in thy soul, and thou canst allow this force to act within thee in two ways. In this spiritual existence in which thou art after the Midnight of the World two things are possible; the spiritual world simply gives thee the power to bring about one of these possibilities; thou canst change this past enjoyment, this past inward satisfaction into a capacity, so that through the past enjoyment thou art able to develop a certain power in thy soul, whereby thou canst accomplish something in the world, small or great, that is of value to the world. That is one thing. The other we may express to ourselves thus: ‘I have had the enjoyment, I shall be satisfied with it, I shall take it into my soul and refresh myself through this past enjoyment.’ When we do this with much of what we have enjoyed and has given us pleasure, we produce a power within us through which we gradually degenerate and suffocate spiritually. This is one of the most important things we can learn in the spiritual world, that through enjoyment, through that which has given us pleasure, we have also become debtors to the world. There rises before our spiritual eyes the prospect of our suffocating in the after-effects of these past satisfactions and enjoyments, if we do not decide at the right time to create capacities from them which can produce something of value to life. From this you see once more, spiritual events interact with what takes place on the physical plane.

When a person fills himself more and more with the knowledge of Spiritual Science as outlined in the lecture before the last, this will pass into the instinctive life of his soul and in respect to the pleasures he has upon the physical plane will develop a feeling, like the stimulus of an inner conscience, that he must not give himself up to certain enjoyment, pleasure or joy for its own sake, but he must fill this joy with a feeling of thankfulness to the universe, to the spiritual powers of the universe; for he will know that through every pleasure, through every enjoyment he becomes a debtor to the universe. We arrive most easily and most certainly at the right attitude, in the transformation of those enjoyments and pleasures which are of a spiritual nature. Enjoyments and pleasures which can only be satisfied through the body, or through having a body on the physical plane, confront us in this period between death and rebirth as something that must be transformed if we do not wish to be slowly suffocated in them. We feel the necessity for this transformation, but we also feel that in the first place it will require many incarnations, that we must be in the spiritual world again and again between these incarnations, so that at length we may be able to bring about this transformation.

Then we discover something else in the spiritual world. We find that in our present cycle of humanity we have enjoyments and pleasures on the physical plane in which our soul-spiritual nature is entirely submerged, that the enjoyment or the pleasure, assumes a sub-human, I will not say animal character; for pleasure and enjoyment may assume a sub-human character. We find that with enjoyments such as these, we really prepare infinite pain for certain beings in the spiritual world with whom we only meet when we enter this world. And the sight of the pain we cause these beings is so extremely disturbing, so oppressive, filling our soul with such forces, that we cannot well arrive at the harmonious upbuilding of the things necessary for our next incarnation.

As regards what we experience in a different way, as pain and sorrow, it is seen on the spiritual plane that the pain and sorrow we have borne on the physical plane work on and permeate our soul with such force on the spiritual plane that this force becomes will-power. Our soul thereby becomes stronger, and we are able to transform this strength into moral power which we are able to bring back with us again to the physical plane, in order that we may not only have certain capacities, through which we are able to produce something of value to the world around us, but that we may also have the moral power to develop these capacities into character.

We have experiences such as these and many others, directly after the spiritual Midnight Hour of existence. We feel and experience what our value has become through our previous life; we also feel and experience to what capacities we may attain in the future. And after we have lived for a time longer in the spiritual world, there appears from the twilight of our spiritual environment a clear vision, not only of our own past life, but also of all the human beings with whom we were closely connected in that life; people appear in spiritual relations, with whom we have been connected in some way in former stages of existence. It is not as if we had not been with these human beings before—we are always together with those who have been near us in life, in by far the greater portion of the time between death and rebirth—but now, when we meet them again after the Midnight Hour of our spiritual existence, we see clearly in these human beings what we owe to them or they to us. Our point of view is now not merely: such and such was thy relation to these people at such and such a time—we knew this before—but these people are now for us the expression of the compensation for our previous experiences with them. By the manner in which they come before us, we see by what new experience on the physical plane we may have to repay that for which we are indebted to them, or such like. When we confront the souls of these human beings we see, as it were, the activities which in the future must reproduce the relationships we have had with them in the past. This will be best understood if we take an example which is as concrete as possible, an application of what has already been mentioned in previous lectures.

Let us again suppose that we have lied to some one. Then comes the time, when in the spiritual world the possibility arises of our being tormented by the truth, the opposite to our lie. Our relation to this person to whom we have lied so changes during this time, that as often as we see him (and we see him often enough with our spiritual eyes) he causes the truth, the opposite to the lie we have told, to rise within us and this torments us. Thereby arises from deep down within us a tendency which causes us to say: ‘Thou must meet this person again on the earth below and thou must do something that will compensate the wrong thou hast done in telling the lie; for here in the spiritual world thou canst not compensate what has been brought about through thy lie, here thou canst only see quite clearly the effect of a lie in the cosmos. What has been done upon the earth in this way must be made good again upon the earth. We know that in order to make compensation we need forces which can only develop in us when we again possess an earthly body. From this a tendency arises in our soul to take once more on ourselves an earthly body which will give us the opportunity to perform the actions whereby the imperfections we have caused upon earth may be repaired; otherwise, when we have gone through death once more this person will again appear to call forth the torment of the truth.

Thus you see the whole spiritual technique; how in the spiritual world there is produced within us the impulse karmically to make compensation for various things. These compensations occur also in other connections; but of course I should have to enumerate many thousands of cases if I were to speak of all that comes into consideration in respect of this important subject of karma. For example, let us take the following case: Let us suppose we are in the period after the Midnight Hour of existence in the spiritual world, so that we look back at certain pleasures we have had and say: ‘We can change the effects of these experiences into capacities to which we can give expression when we are re-embodied.’ But the following may also happen. We may observe that when we are changing these past experiences into capacities, in this our present condition, certain elemental beings disturb us (this can happen); these elemental beings do not allow us to acquire these capacities. We may then ask ourselves: ‘What can I do now? If I yield to these elemental beings which approach and will not suffer capacities to arise in me, I shall not be able to develop these capacities. But I must develop them. I know that I shall only be able to give the service due to certain people in my next incarnation if I have these capacities.’ As a rule in such cases we decide to acquire these capacities; but we thereby injure the elemental beings which are around us: in a certain way they feel that they are attacked by us. When we acquire these capacities, they feel that their own life is thereby darkened, as if something were taken away from their wisdom. One of the consequences often springing from this is, that when we are reborn we find that one or more human beings are possessed by these elemental beings and are inspired with particularly hostile intentions towards us.

Think how deeply this enables us to see into human experience, how profoundly it teaches us to comprehend human life and really to acquire the right instinct to comport ourselves correctly on the physical plane. But this does not mean that we should ever say, when on the physical plane: ‘At that time I had to protect myself. I have thereby made this person a sworn enemy; I must now give in to him.’ The case might arise where it would be good to yield, but, on the other hand, it might happen that if we yield, these hostile elemental beings who act through one person or another might, through what they now do on the physical plane, compensate themselves abundantly for the loss they suffered through our self-protection. They might go beyond what was taken away from them, and the consequence of this would be that we should not be able to save ourselves from them, when we again enter the corresponding period in the stream of time between death and rebirth, and they would then give the death blow to certain of our capacities.

The world becomes ever more and more complicated when we get real insight into it; but we cannot wonder at this. I might give you other examples of the karmic connections between life on earth and life between death and rebirth. Let us take the case of a person who through illness dies earlier than another who enters into ‘time’, as it were, after a normal length of human life. His illness brings him to an early death; but he really retains certain forces within him which he would have expended if he had reached the normal length of human life. The man would have used these forces, which remain within him as a reserve of strength, if he had not died early, and when the life after death is examined, the spiritual investigator finds that these forces are added to the man's forces of will and feeling, strengthening them. Such a person is in the position so to use, after the Midnight Hour of existence, what has accrued to him through these forces before the Midnight Hour of existence, that he enters earthly life as a man of stronger will and of much more character than if he had not died so early. It is, however, previous karma that determines this and naturally it would be the greatest folly if a person were to think that he would gain what has just been described by bringing about an early death artificially; he would not gain it thus. What happens when an early death is brought about artificially, you will find described in my book Theosophy, so far as it is necessary to explain it. I also referred there to the case where a person meets with an early death through an accident. When he is torn away from the experiences of the physical plane through an accident, while his forces would have still been sufficient to enable him to reach old age, there remains to him a surplus of force and when the Midnight Hour of existence has passed he can use this to strengthen his intellectual powers. We find through spiritual investigation that great inventors are often people who in former incarnations died through an accident. If we really wish to survey these things with understanding, we have to realise that in the spiritual world the standpoint of life is really quite different from what it can be in the physical world.

It will grow more and more comprehensible to you, that in order to understand the spiritual worlds one has first to acquire the necessary conceptions and ideas, because the spiritual worlds are so very different from the physical world. Hence no one should wonder when something relating to the spiritual worlds is described, that when the ideas of the physical world are directed to this description, it should at first be felt to be unsatisfactory. For example, it is a fact, which is confirmed by spiritual investigation into many cases, that if a person dies a thorough materialist, with a materialistic frame of mind, and leaves others behind who are also materialistically inclined, he at first suffers a certain loss in the spiritual world. When he has passed through the portal of death without spiritual inclinations, and wishes to look back at his loved ones on the earth, he cannot see them directly if in their souls there is no spiritual thought; he has knowledge of them only up to the time when he passed through death. His spiritual eyes cannot see what they are now experiencing below upon the earth, because there is no spiritual life in their souls; for only spiritual experience throws light up into the spiritual worlds. Before such a person can see the matter quite clearly, he has to wait until in the spiritual world itself he has developed the necessary forces with which to see clearly that the souls he has left behind are materialistically inclined because they have succumbed to Ahriman. Were he to experience this immediately after death he would be unable to bear it. He has first to grow into the knowledge that materialistically inclined souls are possessed by Ahriman; then he may begin to have vision of these souls, until they have passed the portal of death and in the spiritual world have liberated themselves from their materialistic tendencies. It is only later that he experiences union with them.

Someone might say: These conditions which you describe as taking place after death are not at all consoling. That, my dear friends, is an idea which is gained on the physical plane; it is not an idea that is filled with the understanding of the spiritual worlds. A person living between death and rebirth, comes to a point where he says: ‘Oh, how impossible, how comfortless it would be directly after death to see those souls who are materialistically inclined!’ How infinitely better it is for these souls to pass first through this period of probation! They would lose themselves, they would be unable to reach what they ought to reach if the matter were not arranged in this way. The point of view becomes entirely different when the things of the world are considered from the spiritual side, and a time will come when it will be necessary for man, while still on the physical plane, to have a correct understanding of the truths of Spiritual Science.

Spiritual Science has come into the world because the evolution of humanity requires that the knowledge of the spiritual world and its conditions should enter more and more into human souls, instinctively at first, then consciously. I will draw your attention to a purely external thing which is very important, in order that you may see how we shall be able more and more to judge the true contents of our life on the physical plane through understanding the laws of spiritual existence. It is something external and as an external thing is extremely important. When we consider nature, the remarkable spectacle is presented to us of a small number of seeds being used in every case to continue the same kind of life, but that an extremely large number of seeds come to nothing. We observe myriads of fish eggs in the ocean, a few only of which become fishes, the rest perish. We look out over the fields and see vast quantities of grains of wheat, only a few of which grow into plants, the rest are ground up into flour for human food and for other purposes. A great deal more has to be produced by nature than really becomes fruit and again seed in the regular course of existence. This is a wise regulation of nature; for in nature order and law exist and demand that what thus deviates from its own deeply founded routine of existence and fruiting, should be so used, that it serves the other continuing stream of existence. The various creatures would not be able to live if all seeds actually bore fruit and attained the development possible to them. Beings have to exist, which are used to form the ground-work from which other beings can grow. It is only in appearance that anything is lost, only in maya; in reality nothing is lost in the works of nature. Spirit rules in nature and the fact that something is apparently lost from the continuous stream of evolution is based upon the wisdom of the spirit, it is a spiritual Law, and we must consider this matter from the standpoint of the spirit; we then soon find that what apparently is turned aside from the straight forward stream of events, has its own well justified place in existence. This is founded in the spirit. Hence it may also be of value on the physical plane, in so far as we here live a spiritual life.

Let us consider a case which concerns us very closely. Public lectures have to be given on the subject of Spiritual Science. These are given to a public that is gathered together simply through advertisement. Something happens here which is somewhat similar to the case of the seeds of corn, a part only of which are used in the straight forward stream of existence. One must not be discouraged when, in such circumstances, one has to bring the stream of spiritual life apparently without choice before many, many people, and when only a few separate themselves and really enter into this spiritual life, become anthroposophists, and join the direct stream. Under these circumstances, it still happens that these scattered seeds come to many who, after a public lecture, go away and say, for example, ‘What mad nonsense the fellow talked!’ Seen with respect to external life, this is like the germs—shall we say—like the fish-germs that come to nothing in the ocean; but from the standpoint of a deeper investigation it is not so. Souls who through their karma come to a lecture and who then go away and say: ‘What foolish nonsense the fellow talked!’—these souls are not yet ready to receive the truth of the spirit; but it is necessary for their souls in their present incarnation to feel the approach of the power contained in Spiritual Science. However much they may scold, it remains a force in their souls for their next incarnation. Thus the germs have not been lost; they find a way. Life with respect to spiritual things is under the same laws, whether we follow the spirit in the order of nature, or in the case which we consider to be our own.

Now let us suppose we wished to carry this over into external material life, and were to say: ‘But this is just what happens in outer life.’ Yes, my dear friends, it is exactly because this is happening, that I say that we are living towards a future when this will appear in ever greater degree. More and more articles will be produced, more and more factories will be built. No one now asks, ‘How many articles are needed?’ as was formerly the case, when the tailors in the town only made a suit when someone ordered it. The need then determined the numbers to be made; but now they are produced for the market; the various wares are piled up as much as possible. Production works entirely according to the principle upon which nature works. Nature is carried into the social order, and this will at first gain the upper hand more and more. But here we are considering the material realm. The spiritual law has no application in external life, simply because it is suited only to the spiritual world; and something very remarkable results. As we are speaking among ourselves we may say these things, but at the present day the world will not agree with us in this. Things are now produced for the market regardless of the amount required, not according to what was explained in my essay on Theosophy and Social Life—all that is produced is piled up in warehouses and governed by the money market, and then the producers wait to see how many are bought. This tendency will grow greater and greater until it destroys itself and when I say the following you will know the reason. One who spiritually observes social life, sees the germ of frightful social abscesses springing up everywhere. That is the great social problem confronting those who understand life; that is the frightful fact which is so depressing and which—even if we could suppress all our enthusiasm for Spiritual Science and the impulse which makes us long for it—yet makes us cry out for the remedy for this world disease that is already so far advanced and which will become ever worse and worse. That which in one field, in one sphere, must work as nature works, is seen by one who seeks to spread abroad spiritual truths to become a cancer when it enters the sphere of culture, as we have just described.

It will only be possible to recognise this and find the remedy, when Spiritual Science lays hold of and fills the hearts and minds of men. When one sees these things, one would fain fill one's words with the most intense fire, so that the attention of as many of our contemporaries as are able to understand them may be attracted to the times we are approaching. We can perceive these things when we make ourselves acquainted with the different points of view that exist in one and another spheres of life. These different points of view confront a person, when experiencing the life between the Midnight Hour of existence and rebirth, for it is from them that he must work creatively on himself.

When he has formed the tendencies for the fulfilment of his karma in respect of his more intimate experiences, others rise before his soul which are not so intimate. He experiences the religious and other societies to which he has belonged in such a way that they reveal to him certain things he must do in his following incarnation in order not to become one-sided. In short, this life flows on in such a way that it still alternates between spiritual companionship and spiritual solitude, but its essential task is that the human being then constructs the archetype for his new earthly life in a purely spiritual form.

Long, long before the human being descends to earthly life he has constructed out of the spiritual world the spiritual etheric archetype, which has within it forces, which we might call spiritual magnetic forces. These draw him down to parents in respect of whom he feels that they give him the hereditary attributes which enable him to enter upon a new earthly life. I have already mentioned that the normal time for this is when we have the feeling that we are uniting with that which withdrew from us as the fruit of our last earthly life. But the human being does not always reach this point. When we do come to this point the course of our life is such that we fully feel the connection between the bodily part and the spiritual part, but often the man enters into life too soon. Most people are prematurely born, spiritually, and this is only compensated for later through experiences with which we feel entirely in harmony.

One thing is of very special importance which I mentioned in the last lecture. When our longing for an outer world has reached its greatest intensity because we have entered most deeply into solitude, then it is that the Spirit, which only lives and moves in spiritual worlds, approaches us and changes our longing into a kind of soul-light. Up to this point we must keep our connection with our ‘I’. We must, as it were, preserve the remembrance: Upon earth thou wast this ‘I’; this ‘I’ has to remain to thee as a memory. That man is able to do this in our age depends upon the fact that Christ brought into the earth's aura the power by which we can maintain our memory up to the Midnight Hour, when we again have this ‘I’. Otherwise this could not at the present time have been brought over from our earthly life. If the Christ-impulse had not entered the earth, an interruption would have occurred, a break, in the middle of the period between death and rebirth which would have made our existence inharmonious. Long before the Midnight Hour we should have forgotten that we were an ‘I’ in our last life; we should have felt connection with the spiritual world, but we should have forgotten ourselves. We have to develop our Ego so powerfully on earth, that we gain this Ego-consciousness ever more and more. This has become necessary since the Mystery of Golgotha. But because on earth we attain to an ever great consciousness of our Ego, we thereby exhaust the forces we have need of after death in order that we should really not forget ourselves up to the Midnight Hour of existence. In order to be able to retain this remembrance, we have to die in Christ. For this the Christ-impulse is necessary. It preserves for us up to the Midnight Hour of existence the possibility of not forgetting our ‘I’.

Then at the Midnight Hour of existence the Spirit approaches us. We have now retained the memory of our ‘I’. If we carry this on into the Midnight Hour of existence, to where the Holy Ghost approaches and gives us the vision and the connection with our own inner world, as if with an outer world—if we have kept this connection, the Spirit can then lead us further to our re-embodiment, which we bring about through having formed our archetype in the spiritual world. In reality, however, things do not take place in such a way that one does only what is necessary, but just as a pendulum never rests, but swings to one side so as to swing again to the other, and as it is right this should be so, so is it also with the spiritual life. The Christ-impulse supplies us with more than barely sufficient force just to make the connection, it gives us sometimes so much, that if the Spirit should not come to us, the Christ-impulse would be able to bear us quickly over. We should not be able to make the connection with our memory, but the Christ-impulse would carry us over. This is of great importance; and as we develop on into the future, it will be increasingly necessary for man that he should receive more than merely a bare amount of the Christ-impulse. Even at the present time, it is necessary that man should experience during his earthly life not merely what is absolutely necessary regarding Christ, but that the Christ-impulse should enter into his soul as a mightier impulse, so that it will sweep him rapidly beyond the Midnight Hour of existence. For the force of the Spirit is strengthened through the impulse of Christ, and we feel the force of the Spirit more strongly throughout the second half of our life between death and rebirth, than would be the case if the Christ-impulse were not there.

The surplus of the Christ-impulse that remains with us, strengthens the impulse of the Spirit. Otherwise the Spirit would only be active for the Spirit, and it would cease working when we were born. As we fill ourselves with the Christ-impulse it strengthens the impulse of the Holy Ghost, and thereby such a spiritual impulse is introduced to our souls that, when we enter earthly incarnation, it is not exhausted in this incarnation as are the other forces we bring with us at birth. I have already mentioned that we transform the forces we bring over from the spiritual world into our inner organisation, but the surplus which we gain in this way through the Christ-impulse strengthening the impulse of the Spirit—this we bring over with us into existence, but it does not need to be transformed during our life on earth. The further we advance into the future, the more necessary will human beings be for the development of the earth, human beings who, because they are filled with the Christ-impulse and the impulse of the Spirit, bring something into earthly life with them when they enter their new incarnation. The Spirit must work with greater power, so that it does not only work up to the time of birth, when everything that is brought from the spiritual world is transformed, so that only the tiny amount of consciousness endures which informs us of our physical environment, and of what can be understood by the intellect connected with the brain. If, as we develop towards the future we did not gradually bring with us as human beings a surplus of spirit, as has just been described, humanity would gradually reach the point where it would have no idea that there was a Spirit, then during earthly life only the unspiritual Spirit, Ahriman, would rule, and humanity would only be able to know of the physical world that is perceived by the senses, and of what is comprehended by the intellect that is connected with the brain. In the onward development of mankind, all these things are even now being experienced to a certain extent, even now humanity is in danger of losing the Holy Ghost.

But it will not lose it. Spiritual Science will be the watcher which will see that humanity does not lose the Holy Ghost, this Spirit which approaches the soul at the Midnight Hour of existence, in order to waken within it the longing to see itself in its past and recognise its value. Spiritual Science will have to speak more and more impressively of the Christ-impulse, so that more and more Spirit shall enter into physical existence through birth, in more and more human beings, and so that in this physical existence there shall be more and more human beings who feel: ‘I have certainly within me forces which have to be transformed into organising forces, but there is something also dawning in my soul which need not be transformed. I have brought with me into this physical world some of the Spirit which appertains only to the spiritual worlds, although I am living in my body.’—This is the Spirit which will enable people to see what is spoken of by Theodora in the Mystery Drama, The Portal of Initiation, namely, the etheric form of Christ. The power of the Spirit which thus enters people's bodies will open spiritual eyes through which to see and understand the spiritual worlds. First, people will have to understand them, and then they will begin with understanding to behold them; vision will come, because the Spirit so lays hold of people's souls that they will be able to bring this Spirit into their bodies, and the Spirit will shine out even in their earthly incarnations; it will dawn first in a few, and then in a larger number. So we may say: Through the Spirit, through the Holy Ghost we are awakened in the great Midnight Hour of existence. So also from another side we may say—when we bear in mind what the Spirit provides for earthly evolution in the future:—the best part of the soul, that by which we are enabled to see into the spiritual worlds, will be awakened more and more by the Holy Ghost even when in the physical body. As man is awakened by the Holy Ghost in the Midnight Hour of existence, so also will he be awakened while living in his physical body on the physical plane. He will waken inwardly through the Spirit rousing him out of the sleep of sense; otherwise through mere sense-perception and through the intellect that is connected with the brain, man would always remain asleep. The Spirit will shine into this human sleep, which as it developed toward the future would otherwise gradually overcome humanity. The spirit in man will shine into this sleep even during physical existence. In the midst of the decline of spiritual life, in the midst of spiritual death, caused by an outlook based merely on sense-perception and a brain-bound intellect, the souls of men will be awakened by the Holy Ghost—even now during physical existence:

PER SPIRITUM SANCTUM REVIVISCIMUS

Mankind is always in need of truths which cannot, in every age, be wholly understood. The assimilation of truths is not significant only for our knowledge; truths themselves contain life-force. By permeating ourselves with truth we permeate our soul-nature with an element drawn from the objective world, just as we must permeate our physical being with air taken from outside in order to live. Deep truths are indeed expressed in great religious revelations, but in such a form that their real inner meaning is often not understood until much, much later.

The New Testament has been written; the New Testament stands there as a record for humanity—but the whole future course of the Earth's evolution will be required for a full understanding of the New Testament to be reached. In the future, men will acquire much knowledge of the external world and of the spiritual world also; and if taken in the right sense it will all contribute to an understanding of the New Testament. The understanding comes about gradually, but the New Testament is written in a simple form so that it can be absorbed and, later, gradually understood. To permeate ourselves with the truth that resides in the New Testament is not without significance, even if we cannot yet understand the truth in its deepest inwardness. Later on, truth becomes cognitional force, but it is already life-force, in so far as it is imbibed in a more or less childlike form. And if the questions we began to consider yesterday are to be understood in the sense in which they are imparted in the New Testament, we need knowledge of greater depth, greater insight into the spiritual world and its mysteries.

If we are to carry further the studies we began yesterday, we must again examine some occult mysteries, for they will be able to guide us to a further understanding of the riddle of guilt and sin, and from this point of view throw light on the relation of Christ to the human soul.

In the course of our anthroposophical work we have often been faced with a point of view which may be put as a question, a question often asked: Why did Christ die in a human body? Here indeed is a fundamental question concerning the Mystery of Golgotha. Why did Christ die, why did the God die, in a human body?

The God died because the evolution of the universe made it necessary that He should be able to enter into humanity; it was necessary that a God of the upper worlds should become the leader of the Earth-evolution. For this reason Christ had to become related to death. Related to death! One could wish that this expression will come to be deeply understood by the soul of man.

As a rule a man encounters death only when he sees another person die, or in other phenomena akin to death which are to be found in the world, or in the certainty that he must himself pass through the gate of death when his present incarnation is over. But that is only the external aspect of death. Death is present in a quite different form in the world in which we live, and attention must be drawn to this. Let us start from a quite ordinary, everyday phenomenon. We breathe the air in and we breathe it out again; but the air undergoes a change. When the air is exhaled it is dead air; as exhaled air it cannot be inhaled again, for exhaled air is deadly. I indicate this only in order that you may understand the meaning of the occult saying: “When the air enters into men, it dies.” The living element in the air does indeed die when it enters into man. That, however, is only one phenomenon. The ray of light which penetrates our eye must likewise die, and we should gain nothing from the rays of light if our eye did not set itself up against the ray of light, as our lungs do against the air. The light that enters into our eye dies in our eye; and through the death of the light in our eye it comes about that we see. We are filled with much that has to die in us in order that we may have our Earth-consciousness. Corporeally we kill the air; we kill also the rays of light which penetrate us, and so we kill in many ways.

When we call spiritual science to our aid, we distinguish four grades of substance—earth, water, air and warmth. We then enter the realm where we speak of warmth-ether, of light-ether. As far up as the light-ether we kill that which penetrates us; we slay it unceasingly in order that we may have our Earth-consciousness. But there is something we cannot kill by our Earth-existence. We know that above the light-ether there is the so-called chemical ether, and then there comes the life-ether. These are the two kinds of ether that we cannot kill. But because of this, they have no special participation in us. If we were able to kill the chemical ether, the waves of the Harmony of the Spheres would sound perpetually into our physical body, and we should perpetually destroy these waves with our physical life. And if we would also kill the life-ether, we should destroy and continuously kill within ourselves the cosmic life that streams down to the Earth. In earthly sound we are given a substitute, but it is not to be compared with what we should hear if the chemical ether were audible to us as physical human beings. For physical sound is a product of the air and is not the spiritual sound; it is only a substitute for the spiritual sound.

When the Luciferic temptation came, the progressive gods were obliged to place man in a sphere where, from the life-ether downwards, death lives in his physical body. But at that time the progressive gods said—and the words are there in the Bible—”Man has come to know the distinction between Good and Evil, but Life he is not to have. Of the Tree of Life he shall not eat.” In occultism, we can continue the sentence, “Of the Tree of Life man shall not eat”, by adding the words, “and the Spirit of Matter he shall not hear.” Of the Tree of Life man shall not eat and the Spirit of Matter he shall not hear! These are the regions which were closed to man. Only through a certain procedure in the old Mysteries were the tones of the Sphere-Music and the Cosmic Life, pulsating through the universe, revealed to those who were to be initiated when it was given them, outside the body, to see the Christ in advance. Hence it is that the old philosophers speak of the Music of the Spheres.

In drawing attention to this, we indicate at the same time those regions from which the Christ came to us at the time of the Baptism by John in the Jordan. Whence did Christ come? He came from those regions which had been closed to man as a result of the Luciferic temptation—from the region of the Music of the Spheres and from the region of Cosmic Life. These regions had to be forgotten by man because of the Luciferic temptation at the beginning of Earth-evolution. At the baptism by John in the Jordan, Christ entered into a human body, and that which permeated this human body was the spiritual essence of the Harmony of the Spheres, the spiritual essence of the Cosmic Life—the element that still belonged to the human soul during the first phase of its time on Earth, but from which the human soul had to be shut out as a result of the Luciferic temptation. In this sense also man is related to spirit. With his soul he really belongs to the region of the Music of the Spheres and to the region of the Word, of the living Cosmic Ether. But he was cast out from those regions. They were to be restored to him in order that he might gradually be permeated again by the spiritual elements from which he had been exiled. So it is that from the standpoint of spiritual science the words of St. John's Gospel touch us so deeply: In the primal beginning, when man was not yet subject to temptation, was the Logos. Man belonged to the Logos ... the Logos was with God, and man was with the Logos, with God. And through the Baptism by John in the Jordan the Logos entered into human evolution—He became Man.

Here we have the all-important connection. Let us leave this truth as it stands there, and approach the question from another side. Life as a whole shows itself to us only from the external side. Otherwise man would know all the time how he absorbs the corpse of the light into his eye when he sees.

What was it that the Christ had to undertake in order that the fulfillment of St. Paul's saying, “Not I, but Christ in me”, might be made possible? It had to be possible that Christ should permeate the nature of man; but the nature of man is filled with what is slain by human nature in Earth-existence, from the light-ether downwards—the light-ether that dies in the human eye. The nature of man is filled with death; but the life-element in the two highest kinds of ether was withdrawn in order that human nature might not be laden with their death also. In order that Christ might dwell in us, He had therefore to become related to death, related to all the death that is spread out in the world, from the light down to the depths of materiality. Christ had to be able to pass into all that we bear within us as the corpse of the light, of the warmth, of the air, and so on. It was only because He was able to become related to death that He could become related to man. And we must feel in our souls that the God had to die so that he might be able to enfill us, we who had acquired death as a result of the Luciferic temptation, so that we might be able to say: “Christ in us.”

Many other things are hidden for man behind sense-existence. He turns his gaze upon the plant-world; he sees how the light of the Sun conjures the plants out of the soil. Science teaches us that light is necessary for the growth of plants, but that is only half the truth. Anyone who looks at the plants with clairvoyant sight sees living spiritual elements rising out of them. The light dips down into the plants and rises again out of them as a living spiritual element. In the animals it is the chemical ether that enters, and this chemical ether is not perceptible to man; if he could be aware of it, it would sound forth spiritually. The animals transform this ether into water-spirits. The plants transform light into air-spirits; animals transform the spirit active in the chemical ether into water-spirits. Finally, the cosmic ether, or life-ether, which man is prevented from killing and without which he could not live at all—he transforms the life-ether into Earth-spirits.

In a course of lectures given in Karlsruhe, From Jesus to Christ, I once spoke of the human “phantom”. This is not the time for drawing the connecting thread between what is to be said here and what was said then about the human “phantom”, but such connecting threads do exist and you will perhaps find them for yourself. Today I have to present the matter from another side.

There is perpetually engendered in man something that is also spiritual—the life in him. This is forever passing out into the world. Man projects an aura around him, an aura of rays whereby he continually enriches the earthly-spiritual element of the Earth. This earthly-spiritual element of the Earth, however, contains all the qualities, moral or otherwise, that man has acquired and bears within himself, for he sends it all out into his earthly environment. This is absolutely true. Clairvoyant sight perceives how man sends out his moral, intellectual and aesthetic aura into the world, and how this aura continues to live as earthly spirit in the spirituality of the Earth. As a comet draws its tail through the Cosmos, so does man draw through the whole of earthly life the spiritual aura which he projects. This spiritual aura is held together, phantom-like, during a man's life, but at the same time it rays out into the world his moral and intellectual properties of soul.

When in our occult studies we go back to the times before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that the men of those days simply radiated this phantom-like entity, which contained their moral qualities, into the external world, into the external spiritual aura of the Earth. But humanity developed in the course of the Earth's existence, and just at the epoch where the Mystery of Golgotha came to pass, a certain stage had been reached in the evolution of this phantom-like entity. In earlier times it was much more evanescent; by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it had become denser, had more form; and into this phantom-like entity there was now mingled, as a fundamental characteristic, the death which man develops in himself by killing the ray of light that enters into his eye, and so on, as I have explained. These Earth-spirit entities which radiate from man are like a stillborn child, because he imparts his death to them. If Christ had not come upon Earth, then, during the sojourn of their souls in earthly bodies, human beings could have continuously rayed out entities with the impress of death upon them. And with this impress of death there would have been bound up the moral qualities of man of which we spoke yesterday; objective guilt and objective sin. They would have lain within it.

Let us suppose that the Christ had not come. What would have happened in the evolution of the Earth? From the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha would otherwise have taken place, men would have spiritually created dense forms to which they had imparted death. And these dense forms would have become the very things that had to pass over to the Jupiter stage with the Earth. Man would have imparted death to the Earth. A dead Earth would have given birth to a dead Jupiter.

It could not have been otherwise, because if the Mystery of Golgotha had not come about, man would not have been able to permeate the radiations he gives out with the essences of the Music of the Spheres and the Cosmic Life. These essences would not have been there; they would not have flowed into the human radiations; but Christ brought them back through the Mystery of Golgotha. And when there is a fulfillment of the words, “Not I, but Christ in me”, when we bring about a relationship to Christ within ourselves, that which rays out from us and would otherwise be dead, is made living. Because we bear death within us, the living Christ has to permeate us, in order that He may give life to the spiritual Earth-being that we leave behind us. Christ the living Logos, permeates and gives life to the objective guilt and sin which detaches itself from us and is not carried further in our Karma, and because He gives it life, a living Earth will evolve into a living Jupiter. This is the outcome of the Mystery of Golgotha.

The soul, if it reflects, can receive Christ in the following way. It can realize that there was once a time when man was within the bosom of the divine Logos. But man had to succumb to the temptation of Lucifer. He took death into himself; into him there passed the germ by which he would have brought a dead Earth to birth as a dead Jupiter. The endowment which, before the temptation, the human soul had been destined to receive for its Earth-existence was left behind. With Christ it entered again into man's Earth-existence.

When man takes Christ into himself, so as to feel permeated with Christ, he is able to say to himself: “The endowment which the gods had allocated to me before the Luciferic temptation, but which owing to the temptation by Lucifer had to remain behind in the Cosmos, enters into my soul with the Christ. The soul becomes whole again for the first time by taking the Christ into itself. Only then am I fully soul; only then am I again all that the gods intended me to be from the very beginning of the Earth.” “Am I really a soul without Christ?” man asks himself, and he feels that it is through Christ that he first becomes the soul that the guiding divine Beings meant him to be. This is the wonderful feeling of “home” that souls can have with Christ; for out of the primal cosmic home of the soul of man the Christ descended, in order to give back to the soul of man that which had to be lost on Earth as a result of the temptation by Lucifer. The Christ leads the soul up again to its primordial home, the home allotted to it by the gods.

That is the bliss and the blessing in the actual experience of Christ in the human soul. It was this that gave such bliss to certain Christian mystics in the Middle Ages. They may have written much which in itself seems to be too strongly colored by the senses, but fundamentally it was spiritual. Such Christian mystics as those who joined Bernard of Clairvaux, and others, felt that the human soul was as a bride who had lost her bridegroom at the primal beginning of the Earth; and when Christ entered into their souls, filling them with life and soul and spirit, they experienced Christ as the soul-bridegroom who united Himself with the soul; the bridegroom who had been lost when the soul forsook her original home in order to follow Lucifer along the path of freedom, the path of differentiation between good and evil.

When the soul of man really lives into Christ, feeling that Christ is the living Being who from the death on Golgotha flowed out into the atmosphere of the Earth and can flow into the soul, it feels itself inwardly vivified through the Christ. The soul feels a transition from death into life.

So long as we have to live out our earthly existence in human bodies—and this will continue far into a remote future—we cannot hear directly the Music of the Spheres or have direct experience of the Cosmic Life. But we can experience the incoming of the Christ, and so we can receive, by proxy as it were, that which would otherwise come to us from the Music of the Spheres and the Cosmic Life.

Pythagoras, an Initiate of the ancient Mysteries, spoke of the Music of the Spheres. He had gone through the process whereby the soul passes out of the body, and he could then be carried away into the spiritual worlds. There he saw the Christ who was later to come to the Earth. Since the Mystery of Golgotha we cannot speak of the Music of the Spheres as did Pythagoras, but we can speak of it in another way. An Initiate might even today speak as Pythagoras did; but the ordinary inhabitant of the Earth in his physical body can speak of the Music of the Spheres and of the Cosmic Life only when he experiences in his soul, “Not I, but Christ in me”, for the Christ within him has lived in the Music of the Spheres and in the Cosmic Life. But we must go through this experience in ourselves; we must really receive the Christ into our souls.

Let us suppose that a man were to fight against this, that he did not wish to receive Christ into his soul. Then he would come to the end of the Earth period, and in the nebulous spirit-structure that had then taken shape out of the Earth-spirits arising in the course of human evolution, he would have all the phantom-like beings which had issued from him in former incarnations. They would all be there. The tendency indicated here would lead to a dead Earth, and this would pass over, dead, to Jupiter. At the end of the Earth period a man might have carried through and completely absolved his Karma; he might have made personal compensation for all his imperfect deeds; he might have become whole in his soul-being, in his ego, but the objective sin and guilt would remain. That is an absolute truth, for we do not live only for ourselves, so that by adjusting our Karma we may become egotistically more nearly perfect; we live for the world, and at the end of the ages the remains of our Earth incarnations will stand there like a mighty tableau if we have not taken into us the living Christ.

When we connect what was said yesterday with what is being said today (and it is really the same, only seen from two sides) we understand how Christ takes upon Himself the guilt and sin of Earth humanity, in so far as these are objective guilt and sin. And if we have inwardly realized this “Not I, but Christ in me”, the Christ in us, then He takes over the objective remains of our incarnations, and they stand there vivified by Christ, irradiated by Christ and permeated by His life. Yes, the remains of our incarnations stand there, and what do they come to, taken as a whole?

Because Christ unites them all—Christ who belongs to all mankind in the present and in the future—the remains of the single incarnations are all compressed together. Every human soul lives in successive incarnations. From each incarnation certain relics or remains are left, as we have described. Further incarnations will leave other remains, and so on, up to the end of the Earth period. If these relics are permeated by Christ, they are compressed together. Compress what is rarefied and you will get density. Spirit also becomes dense, and so our collective Earth-incarnations are united into a spiritual body. This body belongs to us; we need it because we evolve onwards to Jupiter, and it will be the starting-point of our embodiment on Jupiter. At the end of the Earth period we shall stand there with the soul—whatever the particular karma of the soul may be—and we shall stand there before our earthly relics which have been gathered together by Christ, and we shall have to unite with them in order to pass over with them to Jupiter.

We shall rise again in the body, in the earthly body that has condensed out of the separate incarnations. Truly, my dear friends, from a heart profoundly moved I utter these words: “In the body we shall rise again!”

In these days, young people of sixteen and even less are beginning to claim a creed of their own, and to talk of having happily grown beyond such nonsense as the “Resurrection of the Body”. But those who seek to deepen their occult knowledge of the mysteries of the universe strive gradually to rise to an understanding of what has been said to mankind, because—as I explained at the beginning of the lecture—it had first of all to be said, in order that men might grasp it as life-truth and come to understand it later. The resurrection of the body is a reality, but our soul must feel that it will rise again with the earthly relics that have been collected, brought together by Christ, by the spiritual body that is permeated with Christ. This is what our soul must learn to understand. For let us suppose that, because of our not having received into ourselves the living Christ, we could not approach this Earth-body, with its sin and guilt, and unite with it. If we had rejected the Christ, the relics of our various incarnations would be scattered at the end of the Earth period; they would have remained, but they would not have been gathered together by the Christ, who spiritualizes the whole of humanity. We should stand there as souls at the end of the Earth period and we should be bound to the Earth, to that part of the Earth which remains dead in our relics. Certainly our souls would be free in the spirit in an egotistic sense, but we would be unable to approach our bodily relics. Such souls are the booty of Lucifer, for he strives to thwart the true goal of the Earth; he tries to prevent souls from reaching their Earth-goal, to hold them back in the spiritual world. And in the Jupiter period Lucifer will send over what has remained of scattered Earth-relics as a dead content of Jupiter. It will not, as Moon, separate from Jupiter, but will be within Jupiter, and it will be continually thrusting up these Earth-relics. And these Earth-relics will have to be animated as species-souls by the souls above.

And now you will remember what I have told you some years ago: that the human race on Jupiter will divide itself into those souls who have attained their Earth-goal, who will have attained the goal of Jupiter, and into those souls who will form a middle kingdom between the human kingdom and the animal kingdom on Jupiter. These latter will be Luciferic souls—Luciferic, merely spiritual. They will have their body below, and it will be a direct expression of their whole inner being, but they will be able to direct it only from outside. Two races, the good and the bad, will differentiate themselves from one another on Jupiter. This was stated years ago; today we wish to consider it more deeply.

A Venus-existence will follow that of Jupiter, and again there will be an adjustment through the further evolution of the Christ; but it is on Jupiter that man will realize what it means to be perfected only in his own ego, instead of making the whole Earth his concern. That is something he will have to experience through the whole course of the Jupiter cycle, for everything he has not permeated with Christ during his earthly existence may then appear before his spiritual sight.

Let us reflect from this point of view upon the words of Christ with which He sent His disciples out into the world to proclaim His Name, and in His Name to forgive sins. Why to forgive sins in His Name? Because the forgiveness of sins is connected with His Name. Sins can be blotted out and transformed into living life only if Christ can be united with our Earth-relics, if during our Earth-existence He is within us in the sense of the Pauline saying: “Not I, but Christ in me”.

And wherever any religious denomination associates itself in its outer observances with this saying of Christ, in order to bring home to souls, again and again, all that is connected with Christ, we must seek this deeper meaning in it. When, in any religious denomination, one of Christ's servants speaks of the forgiveness of sins, as though by Christ's command, it means that with his words he forms a connection with the forgiveness of sins through Christ, and to the soul in need of comfort he says, in effect: “I have seen that you have developed a living relationship to Christ. You are uniting the objective sin and guilt, and the objective sin and guilt that will enter into your Earth-relics, with everything that Christ is for you. Because I have recognized that you have permeated yourself with Christ—therefore I dare say to you: your sins are forgiven.”

Such words always mean that he who in any religious denomination speaks of the forgiveness of sins is convinced that the person in question has found a connection with Christ, that he wants to bear Christ in his heart and in his soul. Because of this he can properly give comfort when the other person comes to him conscious of guilt. “Christ will forgive you, and I am permitted to say to you that in His Name your sins are forgiven.” Christ is the only forgiver of sins because He is the bearer of sins. He is the Being who gives life to human Earth-relics, and a wonderful link with Him is created when those who want to serve Him can give comfort in the words, “Your sins are forgiven”, to those who show that in their inner being they feel a union with Christ. For it is like a fresh strengthening of the relationship to Christ when the soul realizes: “I have understood my guilt and sins in such a way that it can permissibly be said to me that Christ takes them upon himself, works through them with His being.” If the expression “the forgiveness of sins” is to be an expression of the truth, it must always carry an undertone which reminds the sinner of his bond with Christ, even if he does not form it anew. Between the soul and Christ there must be a bond so intense that the soul cannot be reminded of it often enough. And because the Christ is bound up with the objective sin and guilt of the human soul, the soul can best remind itself in daily life of its relationship to Christ by always remembering, at the moment of the forgiveness of sins, the presence of the Cosmic Christ in the Earth's existence.

Those who join Anthroposophy in the right spirit, and not merely in an external sense, can most assuredly become their own father confessors. Most assuredly through Spiritual Science they can learn to know Christ so intimately, and feel themselves so closely connected with Him, that they can be directly conscious of His spiritual presence. And when they have solemnly vowed themselves to Him as the Cosmic Principle, they can in spirit direct their confusion to Him and in their silent meditation ask from Him the forgiveness of sins. But as long as men have not yet permeated themselves with spiritual science in this deep spiritual sense, we must look with understanding at what the “forgiveness of sins” signifies in the various religious observances of the world. Men will become spiritually freer and freer, and in this greater spiritual freedom their communion with Christ will become more and more a direct experience.

And there must be tolerance! A person who believes that through the deep inward understanding he has of the Spirit of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ, he can hold direct intercourse with the Christ, must look with understanding upon those who need the positive declarations of a confession of faith, and a minister of Christ to give them comfort with words, “Your sins are forgiven”. On the other hand, there should be tolerance on the part of those who see that there are men who can be independent. In earthly life this may be all an ideal, but the anthroposophist may at least look up to such an ideal.

I have spoken to you of spiritual secrets which make it possible for men—even those who have absorbed much anthroposophical teaching—to look still more deeply into the whole nature of our being. I have spoken to you of the overcoming of human egoism, and of those things we must understand before we can have a right understanding of Karma. I have spoken to you of man in so far as he is not only an “I” being, but belongs to the whole Earth-existence and is thereby called to help forward the attainment of the divine aim appointed for the Earth. The Christ did not come into the world and pass through the Mystery of Golgotha in order that He might be something to each one of us in our egoism. It would be terrible if Christ were to be so understood that the words of Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me” served only to encourage a higher egoism. Christ died for the whole of humanity, for the humanity of the Earth. Christ became the central spirit of the Earth, who has to save for the Earth the spiritual-earthly elements that flow out from man.

Nowadays one can read theological works—and those who have read them will bear me out—which assure us that certain theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have at last disposed of the popular medieval belief that Christ came to Earth in order to snatch the Earth from the devil, to snatch the Earth from Lucifer. Within modern theology there is an “enlightened” materialism which will not recognize itself as such but on the contrary imagines itself to be specially enlightened. It says: “In the dark Middle Ages people said that Christ appeared in the world because He had to snatch the Earth away from the devil.” But the true explanation leads us back to this simple, popular belief. For everything on the Earth that is not set free by Christ belongs to Lucifer. All that is human in us, all that is more than what is merely confined in our ego, is ennobled, is made fruitful for the whole of humanity, when it is permeated with Christ.

And now, at the end of our considerations during the last few days, I would not like to conclude without saying those further words to each single one of the souls who are gathered together here:

Hope and confidence in the future of our work can dwell in our hearts, because we have endeavored, from the very beginning, to fill what we had to say with the will of Christ. And this hope and confidence may allow us to say that our teaching is itself what Christ has wished to say to us, in fulfillment of His words: “I am with you always, even to the end of the Earth ages.” We have wished to be mindful only of what comes from Him. And all that He has inspired us with, according to His promise, we want to take into our souls as our spiritual science. It is not because we feel our spiritual science to be imbued with any sort of Christian dogmatism that we regard it as Christian, but because, having Christ within us, we look on it as a revelation of the Christ in ourselves. I am therefore also convinced that the springing up of true spiritual science in those souls who want to receive, with us, our Christ-filled spiritual science will be fruitful for the whole of humanity, and especially for those who welcome these fruits.

Clairvoyant observation shows that much of what is good, spiritually good, in our Movement proceeds from those who have taken our Christian spiritual science into themselves, and then, having passed through the gate of death, send down to us the fruits of this Christian spiritual science. The Christian spiritual science which those souls have taken into themselves and are now sending down to us from the spiritual worlds is already living in us. For they do not keep it in their own karmic stream for the sake of their own perfecting; they can let it stream into those who want to receive it. Comfort and hope arise for our spiritual science when we know that our so-called “dead” are working with us.

In the second lecture we spoke about these things in a certain connection. But today, when we have come to the close of the course, I should like to add a personal word.

While I have been speaking to the Norrköping Branch of our society, I could not be other than conscious always of the spirit of one who was so closely connected with us here. The spirit of Frau Danielsen looks down like a good angel on all that this Branch wants to undertake. Hers also was a Christian spirit in the sense described, and the souls who knew her will never feel themselves separated from her. May that spirit hover as guardian-spirit over this Branch! Most willingly and surely will it do so if the souls who work in this Branch receive it. With these words, spoken from the depths of my heart, I close these lectures, and I hope that we shall continue to work together on the spiritual path we have embraced.

Those who describe the intellectual life of Germany from the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century usually see, alongside the high point of art in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Mozart, Beethoven and others, only an epoch of purely speculative thought in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and a few less important philosophers. It is widely believed that the latter personalities should be recognized merely as workers in the field of thought. It is admitted that they have done extraordinary work in the speculative field, but one is all too easily inclined to say that these thinkers were quite remote from actual occult research, from real spiritual experience. And so it happens that the theosophically striving person expects little profit from delving into their works.

Many who attempt to penetrate the thought-web of these philosophers give up the work after a time, because they find it unproductive. The scientific investigator says to himself: These thinkers have lost the solid ground of experience under their feet; they have built up in the nebulous heights the chimeras of systems, without any regard to positive reality. And for those interested in occultism, they lack the truly spiritual foundations. He comes to the conclusion: They knew nothing of spiritual experiences, of supersensible facts, and merely devised intellectual constructs.

As long as one stops at merely observing the outer aspects of the spiritual development, one will not easily come to a different opinion. But if one penetrates to the underlying currents, then the whole epoch presents itself in a different light. The apparent airy constructs of mere thought can be recognized as the expression of a deeper occult life. And Theosophy can then provide the key to understanding what these sixty to seventy years of spiritual life mean in the development of humanity.

In Germany at this time, there are two sets of facts, one of which represents the surface, but the other must be regarded as a deeper foundation. The whole thing gives the impression of a flowing stream, on the surface of which the waves ripple in the most diverse ways. And what is presented in the usual literary histories is only these rising and falling waves; but what lives in the depths and from which the waves actually draw their nourishment is ignored.

This depth contains a rich and fertile occult life. And this is none other than that which once pulsated in the works of the great German mystics, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius. Like a hidden power, this life was contained in the worlds of thought that Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel found there. The way in which, for example, Jakob Böhme had expressed his great spiritual experiences was no longer at the forefront of the prevailing literary discussion, but the spirit of these experiences continued to live on. One can see how, for example, this spirit lived on in Herder. Public discussion led Herder, like Goethe, to the study of Spinoza. In the work which he called “God,” Herder sought to deepen the conception of God in Spinozism. What he contributed to Spinozism was nothing other than the spirit of German mysticism. One could say that, unconsciously to himself, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius were his guides. It is from such hidden sources that we can explain how, in the “Education of the Human Race”, a rationalist spirit such as Lessing was, could have incorporated ideas about reincarnation. The term “unconscious” is, however, only half accurate, because such ideas and intuitions may not have been on the surface of literary discussion in Germany, but they certainly lived a full life in the most diverse “occult societies” and “fraternities”. But of the above, only Goethe can be considered as having been initiated into the most intimate life of such “fraternities”; the others had only a more superficial connection with them. Much of it found its way into their lives and work as inspiration, without their being fully aware of the real sources.

In this respect, Schiller represents an interesting phenomenon of intellectual development. We cannot understand the real intellectual nerve of his life if we do not delve into his youthful works, which can be found in his writings as “Correspondence between Julius and Raphael”. Some of the material contained in it was written by Schiller while he was still at the Karls School in Stuttgart, while some of it was only written in 1785 and 1786. It contains what Schiller calls the “theosophy of Julius” and by which he refers to the sum of ideas to which he had risen at that time. It is only necessary to cite the most important thoughts from this “theosophy” to characterize the way in which this genius assembled his own edifice of ideas from the rudiments of German mysticism that were accessible to him. Such essential thoughts are, for example, the following: “The universe is a thought of God. After this ideal image of the spirit had passed over into reality and the born world fulfilled the design of its creator – allow me this human conception – so the vocation of all thinking beings is to seek out in this existing whole the first drawing, the rule in the machine, the unity in the composition, the law in the phenomenon, and to transfer the building backwards to its ground plan... The great composition that we call the world now remains strange to me only because it exists, symbolically describing to me the manifold expressions of that being. Everything in and outside of me is only a hieroglyph of a force that is similar to me. The laws of nature are the ciphers that the thinking being puts together to make itself understood to the thinking being – the alphabet by means of which all spirits negotiate with the most perfect spirit and with themselves... A new experience in this realm of truth, gravity, the discovery of blood circulation, the Linnaean system of nature, mean to me originally just what an antique, excavated in the Herculaneum - both only a reflection of a spirit, a new acquaintance with a similar being to me ... There is no longer any wilderness for me in all of nature. Where I discover a body, I sense a spirit. Where I perceive movement, I divine a thought... We have concepts of the wisdom of the supreme being, of his goodness, of his justice – but none of his omnipotence. To describe his omnipotence, we help ourselves with the piecemeal notion of three successions: Nothing, His Will, and Something. It is waste and dark – God calls: Light – and there is Light. If we had a real idea of His active omnipotence, then we would be creators, like He is...

Such were the ideas of Schiller's theosophy when he was in his early twenties. And from this basis he rises to the comprehension of human spiritual life itself, which he places in the context of cosmic forces: “Love, therefore, - the most beautiful phenomenon in the creation of the soul, the almighty magnet in the spiritual world, the source of devotion and the loftiest virtue – love is only the reflection of this one power, an attraction of excellence, based on an instantaneous exchange of personality, a confusion of beings. When I hate, I take something away; when I love, I become richer by what I love. Forgiveness is the recovery of a lost possession—hatred of men is prolonged suicide; selfishness is the greatest poverty of a created being.” From there, Schiller then seeks a God idea that corresponds to his feelings, which he presents in the following sentences: “All perfection in the universe is united in God. God and nature are two forces that are completely equal... It is a truth that, like a fixed axis, runs through all religions and systems - ‘Draw near to God, you who believe’.”

If we compare these statements of the young Schiller with the teachings of the German mystics, we will find that the latter have sharply defined thought contours that appear in his work as the exuberant expression of a more general world of feeling. Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme, Angelus Silesius have as a definite view of their intuitive mind what Schiller has in mind in the vague presentiment of feeling.

What comes to light in such a characteristic way in Schiller is also present in other of his contemporaries. Intellectual history only has to describe it in his case, because in his epoch-making works it has become a driving force for the nation. One can say that in Schiller's time, the spiritual world of facts of German mysticism as intuition, as direct experience of spiritual life, was hidden as if under a veil; but it lived on in the realm of feeling, in intuitive perceptions. People had retained devotion and enthusiasm for that which they no longer directly saw with the “spiritual senses.” We are dealing with an epoch in which spiritual vision was veiled, but in which feeling and intuitive sensing of this world were not.

All this process is now based on a certain lawful necessity. What entered into seclusion as spiritual vision emerged as artistic life in this period of German intellectual life. In occultism, one speaks of successive cycles of involution and evolution. Here we are dealing with such a cycle on a small scale. The art of Germany in the epoch of Schiller and Goethe is nothing more than the evolution of German mysticism in the realm of outer sensuous form. But in the creations of the German poets, the deeper insight recognizes the intuitions of the great mystical age of Germany. The mystical life of the past now takes on an entirely aesthetic, artistic character.

This is clearly expressed in the writing in which Schiller reached the full height of his world view, in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”. The occult dogmatist will perhaps find nothing in these Letters either but the brilliant speculations of a fine artistic mind. In reality, however, they are dominated by the endeavour to give a guide to a different state of consciousness from the ordinary one. They describe one stage on the way to the “higher self”. The state of consciousness that Schiller describes is indeed far removed from the astral or devachanic life of experience; but it does represent something higher than our everyday life. And if we approach it with an open mind, we can very well recognize in what can be called the 'aesthetic state', according to Schiller, a preliminary stage of those higher forms of intuition. Schiller wants to lead people beyond the standpoint of the 'lower self'. This lower self is characterized by two qualities. Firstly, it is necessarily dependent on the influences of the sensual world. Secondly, it is subject to the demands of logical and moral necessity. It is thus unfree in two directions. The sensual world prevails in its drives, instincts, perceptions, passions and so on. In his thinking and in his morality, the necessity of reason prevails. But only the person who has ennobled his feelings, drives, desires, wishes, and so on, so that only the spiritual is expressed in them, and who, on the other hand, has so completely absorbed the necessity of reason in himself that it is the expression of his own being, is free in Schiller's sense. A life led in this way can be characterized as one in which a harmonious balance has been achieved between the lower and higher selves. Man has ennobled his desire nature to such an extent that it is the embodiment of his “higher self”. Schiller sets this high ideal in these “Letters”, and he finds that in artistic creation and in pure aesthetic devotion to a work of art, there is an approach to this ideal. Thus, for him, life in art becomes a genuine means of educating the human being in the development of his “higher self”. For him, the true work of art is a perfect harmony of spirit and sensuality, of higher life and outer form. The sensual is only a means of expression; but the spiritual only becomes a work of art when it has found its expression entirely in the sensual. Thus the creative artist lives in spirit, but he lives in it in a completely sensual way; through him, everything spiritual becomes perceptible through the senses. And the person who immerses himself aesthetically perceives through his external senses; but what he perceives is completely spiritualized sensuality. So we are dealing with a harmony between spirit and sensuality; the sensual appears ennobled to the spirit, the spiritual comes to revelation to the point of sensual vividness. Schiller would also like to make this “aesthetic state” the model for social coexistence. He regards as unfree a social relationship in which people base their mutual relationships only on the desires of the lower self, of egoism. But a state in which mere legislation of reason is called upon to rein in the lower instincts and passions seems no less unfree to him. As an ideal, he posits a social constitution within which the individual feels the 'higher self' of the whole to be so strong as his own being that he acts 'selflessly' out of his innermost urge. The “individual ego” should come to the point where it becomes the expression of the “total ego”. Schiller perceives social action that is driven by such impulses as the action of “beautiful souls”; and such “beautiful souls”, which bring the spirit of the “higher self” to revelation in their everyday nature, are for Schiller also the truly “free souls”. He wants to lead humanity to “truth” through beauty and art. One of his core sayings is: Only through the dawn of the beautiful does man enter the land of knowledge.

Thus, from Schiller's world view, art is assigned a high educational mission in the evolutionary process of humanity. One could say that what Schiller presents here is the aesthetic-artistic mysticism of the earlier period of German intellectual life.

It might now appear that it is difficult to build a bridge from Schiller's aestheticism to another personality of the same period, but who is no less to be understood as coming from an occult undercurrent, namely Johann Gottlieb Fichte. On superficial examination, Fichte will be seen as a mere speculative thinker, as an intellectual. It is true that his domain is that of thought, and that those who want to seek out spiritual heights that lie above the world of thought will not find them with Fichte. Those who want a description of “higher worlds” will look for them in vain with him. Fichte has no experience of an astral or mental world. According to the content of his philosophy, he is concerned only with ideas that belong to the physical world. But the matter presents itself quite differently when one looks at his treatment of the world of thought. This treatment is by no means a merely speculative one. It is one that corresponds entirely to occult experience. Fichte only considers thoughts that relate to the physical world; but he considers these as an occultist would. Therefore, he himself is quite aware of leading a life in higher worlds. One need only see how he expresses himself in the lectures he gave in Berlin in 1813: “Imagine a world of the blind-born, to whom only those things and their relationships are known that exist through the sense of touch. Stand among them and speak to them of colors and the other qualities that are perceived only through the light of sight. Either you speak to them of nothing, and this is fortunate if they say so; for in this way you will soon notice the error and, if you are unable to open their eyes, you will stop talking to no avail... Or, for some reason, they want to give your teaching reason after all: so they can understand it only in terms of what they know through touch: they will want to feel light and colors and the other relationships of visibility, assume they feel it, contrive something within the feeling and lie to themselves about what they call color. Then they misunderstand, distort, and misinterpret.” At another time, Fichte says directly that for him his contemplation of the world is not merely a speculation about that which the ordinary senses give, but that a higher sense, reaching beyond these, is necessary for it: ”The new sense is is the sense for the spirit; for the one who is only spirit and absolutely nothing else, and to whom even the other, the given being, takes on the form of the spirit and is transformed into it, to whom therefore being in its own form has indeed disappeared... This sense has been seen in this way since the beginning of time, and everything great and excellent in the world, which alone makes humanity endure, comes from the visions of this sense. But that this sense should have seen itself in its difference and contrast to the other ordinary sense was not the case. The impressions of the two senses merged, and life disintegrated into these two halves without a unifying bond.” These last words are extremely characteristic of Fichte's place in the world of spiritual life. For the merely external (exoteric) philosophical striving of the West, it is indeed true that the sense of which Fichte speaks “did not see itself”. In all mystical currents of spiritual life that are based on occult experience and esoteric contemplation, it is clearly expressed; but, as already mentioned, the deeper basis for this was unknown in the prevailing literary and scholarly discussions of Fichte's time. In the terminology of contemporary German philosophy, Fichte was indeed the scout and discoverer of this higher meaning. That is why he started from something quite different than other philosophers. As a teacher he demanded of his students, and as a writer of his readers, that they should first of all perform an inner deed of the soul. He did not want to impart knowledge of anything outside of themselves, but he did make the demand that they perform an inner act. And through this inner act they were to ignite the true light of self-awareness within themselves. Like most philosophers of his time, he started from Kant's philosophy. Therefore, he expressed himself in the form of Kant's terminology, just as Schiller did in his mature years. But in terms of the height of inner, spiritual life, he surpassed Kantian philosophy very far, just as Schiller did. If one attempts to translate Fichte's demands on his listeners and readers from the difficult philosophical language into a more popular form, it might be expressed something like this: Every thing and every fact perceived by man imposes its existence on him. It is there without any action on the part of man, as far as his deepest inner being is concerned. The table, the flower, the dog, a light phenomenon and so on are there through something foreign to man; and it is only for man to determine the existence that has come about without him. For Fichte, the situation is different with the “I” of man. It is only there in so far as it attains being itself through its own activity. Therefore the sentence “I am” means something quite different from any other sentence. Fichte demanded that one should become conscious of this self-creative process as the starting point for any spiritual contemplation of the world. In every other realization, man can only be receptive; in the case of the “I” he must be creative. And he can perceive his “I” only by looking at himself as the creator of this “I. Thus Fichte demands a completely different way of looking at the ‘I’ than at all other things. And he is as strict as possible in this demand. He says, ”Most people would be more easily persuaded to consider themselves a piece of lava in the moon than an I...” He who is not yet at peace with himself on this point does not understand fundamental philosophy, and does not need it. Nature, of which he is a machine, will guide him without any effort of his own in all the business he has to carry out. To philosophize requires independence: and this one can only give oneself. - We should not want to see without the eye; but we should not claim that the eye sees either."

This very sharply delineates the boundary between ordinary experience and the occult. Ordinary perception and experience extend no further than the organs of perception that are objectively built into the human being. The occult begins where man begins to build higher organs of perception for himself through the dormant powers within him. Within ordinary experience, man can only feel himself to be a creature. When he begins to feel himself as the creator of his being, he enters the realm of the so-called occult life. The way Fichte characterizes the “I am” is entirely in line with occultism. Even though he remains in the realm of pure thought, his contemplation is not mere speculation, but true inner experience. But for this very reason it is also all too easy to mistake his world view for mere speculation. Those who are driven by curiosity into the higher worlds will not find what they are looking for by delving into Fichte's philosophy. But for those who want to work on themselves, to discover the abilities slumbering in their souls, Fichte can be a good guide. He will realize that what matters is not the content of his teachings or dogmas, but the power that grows in the soul when one devotedly follows Fichte's thought paths. One might compare this thinker to the prophet who did not enter the promised land himself, but led his people to a summit from which they could see its glories. Fichte leads thinking to the summit from which entry into the land of the occult can be made. And the preparation that one acquires through him is as pure as can be imagined. For it completely transcends the realm of sense perception and the realm of that which originates from the desire and covetousness of man (from his astral body). Through Fichte, one learns to live and move in the very pure element of thought. One retains nothing of the physical world in the soul except what has been implanted from higher regions, namely thoughts. And these form a better bridge to spiritual experiences than the training of other psychic abilities. For thought is the same everywhere, whether it occurs in the physical, astral or mental world. Only its content is different in each of these worlds. And the supersensible worlds remain hidden from man only as long as he cannot completely remove sensual content from his thoughts. When the thought becomes free of sensuality, then only one step remains to be taken, and the supersensible world can be entered.

The contemplation of one's own self in Fichte's sense is so significant because, with regard to this “self”, man remains without all thought content if he does not give himself such from within. For all the rest of the world, for all perception, feeling, will and so on, which make up the content of ordinary existence, the outer world fills the human being. He needs - in Fichte's words - basically to be nothing more than the “machine of nature”, which “manages its business without his intervention”. But the “I” remains empty, no outer world fills it with content if it does not come from within. Therefore, the realization “I am” can never be anything other than man's most intimate inner experience. Thus, there is something speaking in this sentence within the soul that can only speak from within. But the way this seemingly empty affirmation of one's own self occurs is how all higher occult experiences take place. They become richer in content and more vital, but they retain the same form. Through the experience of the I, as presented by Fichte, one can get to know the type of all occult experiences, at least in the purely mental sphere. It is therefore correct to say that with the “I am” God begins to speak in man. And it is only because this happens in a purely mental form that so many people do not want to recognize it.

But now, precisely with the keenest minds, which walked in such ways as Fichte, a limit of knowledge had to occur. Pure thinking is namely only an activity of the personality, not of the individuality, which passes through the various personalities in recurring reincarnations. The laws of even the highest logic never change, even if in the stages of re-embodiments the human individuality ascends to the stage of the highest sage. The spiritual perception increases, the perceptive faculty expands when an individuality that was highly developed in one incarnation is re-embodied, but the logic of thought remains the same even for a higher level of consciousness. Therefore, that which goes beyond the individual incarnation can never be grasped by any experience of thought, no matter how subtle, even if it rises to the highest levels. This is the reason why Fichte's way of looking at things, and also that of his contemporaries who followed in his footsteps, could not bring them to a realization of the laws of reincarnation and karma. Although various indications can be found in the works of the thinkers of this epoch, they arise more from a general feeling and are not necessarily and organically connected with their thought-structures. It may be said that the mission of these personalities in the history of thought was to present pure thought experiences as they can take place within an incarnation, excluding everything that reaches beyond this one embodiment of the human being.

The evolution of the human spirit proceeds in such a way that in certain epochs portions of the original esoteric wisdom are transferred into the consciousness of the people. And at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, it fell to the German national consciousness to shape the spiritual life of pure thought in its relationship to the individual personal existence. If we consider what has already been said in connection with Schiller's personality, that at this time art was to be placed at the center of intellectual life, then we will find the emphasis on the personal point of view all the more understandable. Art is, after all, the living out of the spirit in sensuous, physical forms. But the perception of these forms is conditioned by the organization of the individual personality living within the one incarnation. What projects beyond the personality into the supersensible realm will no longer be able to find expression in art directly. Art does reflect the supersensible, but this reflection is only carried over as the fruit of artistic creation and experience by the abiding essence of the soul from one reincarnation to another. That which enters into existence directly as art and aesthetic experience is bound to the personality. Therefore, in the case of a personality from the characterized epoch, a theosophical world view in the most eminent sense also has a thoroughly personal character. This is the case with Friedrich von Hardenberg, who as a poet bears the name Novalis. He was born in 1772 and died as early as 1801. What lived in this soul, which was entirely permeated by theosophical sentiment, is contained in a few poems and a series of poetic-philosophical fragments. From every page of his creations, this attitude flows towards the reader; but everything is such that the highest spirituality is coupled with an immediate sensual passion, with very personal drives and instincts. A truly Pythagorean way of thinking lives in this young nature, which was further nourished by the fact that Novalis worked his way up to become a mining engineer through a thorough mathematical and scientific education. The way in which the human mind develops the laws of pure mathematics out of itself, without the help of any sensory perception, became for him the model for all supersensible knowledge in general. Just as the world is harmoniously structured according to the mathematical laws that the soul finds within itself, so he thought this could be applied to all the ideas underlying the world. That is why man's relationship to mathematics took on an almost devotional, religious character for him. Sayings like the following reveal the peculiarly Pythagorean nature of his disposition: “True mathematics is the actual element of the magician. ... The highest life is mathematics... The true mathematician is an enthusiast per se. Without enthusiasm, there is no mathematics. The life of the gods is mathematics. All divine messengers must be mathematicians. Pure mathematics is religion. One can only attain to mathematics through a theophany. Mathematicians are the only happy people. The mathematician knows everything. He could do it even if he didn't know it... In the East, true mathematics is at home. In Europe, it has degenerated into mere technique. He who does not grasp a mathematical book with reverence and read it as the word of God does not understand it... Miracles as unnatural facts are amathematical – but there is no miracle in this sense, and what is called a miracle is precisely understandable through mathematics, because there is nothing miraculous about mathematics."

In such sayings, Novalis has in mind not merely a glorification of the science of numbers and spatial magnitudes, but the idea that all inner soul experiences should relate to the cosmos as the pure, sensuality-free, mathematical construction of the mind relates to the outer, numerically and spatially ordered harmony of the world. This is beautifully expressed when he says: “Humanity is, as it were, the higher meaning of our planet, the eye that it raises to heaven, the nerve that connects this limb to the upper world.” The identity of the human ego with the essence of the objective world is the leitmotif in all of Novalis's work. Among his “fragments” is the saying: “Among people, one must seek God. In human affairs, in human thoughts and feelings, the spirit of heaven reveals itself most brightly.” And he expresses the unity of the ‘higher self’ in all of humanity in the following way: ”In the I, in the point of freedom, we are all in fact completely identical - only from there does each individual separate. I is the absolute total place, the central point.” In Novalis, the position that the consciousness of the time assigned to art and artistic feeling is particularly evident. For him, art is something through which man grows beyond his narrowly defined “lower self” and through which he relates to the creative forces of the world. In the creative artistic imagination, he sees a reflection of the magical forces of action. Thus he can say: “The artist stands on man as the statue stands on the pedestal.” “Nature will be moral when, out of true love for art, it surrenders to art and does what art wills; art, when, out of true love for nature, it lives for nature and works for nature. Both must do it at the same time, of their own choosing, for their own sake, and of the other's choosing, for the sake of the other... When our intelligence and our world are in harmony, we are equal to God.” Novalis's lyric poems, especially his ‘Hymns to the Night,’ are imbued with such sentiments, as are his unfinished novel ‘Heinrich von Ofterdingen’ and the little work ‘The Apprentices at Sais,’ which is rooted entirely in mystical thinking and feeling.

These few personalities show how German poetry and thought in that period was based on a theosophical-mystical undercurrent. The examples could be multiplied by numerous others. Therefore, it is not even possible to attempt to give a complete picture here, but only to characterize the basic note of this spiritual epoch with a few lines.

It will not be difficult to see, however, that individual mystical and theosophical natures with a spiritual-intuitive mind found the theosophical basic ideas themselves in part in their own way from this whole life. Thus, theosophy shines out beautifully for us from the creations of some personalities of this epoch. Many could be cited where this is the case. Lorenz Oken could be mentioned, who founded a natural philosophy that, on the one hand, points back to Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme through its mystical spirit, and, on the other hand, is a forerunner of the justified parts of Darwinism through ingenious conceptions about evolution and the connection between living beings. Steffens could be cited, who sought in the processes of the development of the earth reflections of a cosmic spiritual life. One could refer to Eckartshausen (1752-1803), who sought to explain the abnormal phenomena of nature and soul life in a theosophical-mystical way. Ennemoser (1787-1854) with his “History of Magic”, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert with his works on dream phenomena and the hidden facts in nature and the spirited explanations of Justinus Kerner, and Karl Gustav Carus are also rooted in the same school of thought. Schelling went from pure Fichteanism more and more to theosophy, and then in his “Philosophy of Mythology” and “Philosophy of Revelation,” which were not published until after his death, traced the developmental history of the human spirit and the connection between religions to their starting point in the mysteries. Hegel's philosophy should also be viewed in theosophical light, and then one would see how wrong it is in the history of philosophy to consider this profound spiritual experience of the soul to be mere speculation. All this requires, if it is to be treated exhaustively, a detailed work. Here, however, only a little-known personality is to be mentioned, who, in the focus of his mind, combined the rays of theosophical world-view and created a structure of ideas that in many respects completely coincides with the thoughts of theosophy that are being revived today. It is J. P. V. Troxler, who lived from 1780 to 1866 and whose works include, in particular, “Glimpses into the Essence of Man”, published in 1812. Troxler objects to the usual division of human nature into soul and body, which he finds misleading because it does not exhaust nature. He initially distinguishes between four elements of human nature: spirit, higher soul, soul (which he considers the lower soul) and body. One need only see this classification in the right light to recognize how close it is to the one commonly found in theosophical books today. The body as he understands it coincides completely with what is now called the physical body. The lower soul, or what he, in contrast to the body, calls the body, is nothing other than the so-called astral body. This is not something that has been inserted into his world of thought, but he himself says that what is subjectively the lower soul should be characterized objectively by resorting to the term astral body used by the ancient researchers. “There is therefore,” he explains, ”necessarily something in man which the sages of ancient times sensed and proclaimed as a σῶμα αστροειδες (Soma astroeides) and οὐρανόν σῶμα (Uranion soma), or as a σχῆμα πνευματικόν (schema pneumatikon), and what is the substrate of the middle sphere of life, the bond of the immortal and the mortal life?” Among the poets and philosophers who were Troxler's contemporaries, theosophy was alive as an undercurrent; but Troxler himself became keenly aware of this theosophy in the intellectual world around him and developed it in an original way. Thus, he comes to many of the ancient wisdom teachings through his own efforts. It is all the more appealing to delve into his thought processes, since he does not directly build on old traditions, but rather creates something like an original theosophy out of the thinking and attitudes of his time.

Dearly beloved! I request that the two lectures of today and tomorrow be regarded as a whole. Although I shall endeavor to present each one as a self-contained whole in a certain sense, that which I shall have the honor of presenting to you can only be fully illuminated when what is given in one lecture is measured against what is given in the other.

If today, from the point of view of the world view from which my presentations are to be given here, we speak about the nature of the human soul and its connection with the supersensible worlds, then, understandably, to someone who judges what is to be said here from the point of view of today's general education, it must at first appear strange, peculiar, perhaps even fantastic. The one who has the point of view of this world view, which starts from a kind of spiritual research, will understand this the best, because how could it not appear strange on the one hand when, compared to today's world views, which think that they stand on the firm ground of today's science, it is explained by this so-called spiritual research that the human soul is a much more comprehensive being than everything that known to man by this soul itself in ordinary life, during the whole course of life between birth and death, because this spiritual research wants to show that this human soul life is not exhausted in all that comes to light between birth and death, but that this human soul being goes its way from birth to death and again from death to birth into new life, as the consequence of the previous ones [earth lives and the cause of later ones].

Man's entire existence can therefore be divided into successive earthly lives, with intermediate stages of spiritual existence in a purely spiritual world. At first this appears quite understandably as nothing more than a fantastic thing, and no one needs to be surprised, not even those who are grounded in spiritual research, that in the broadest circles of those currently educated such a view is taken as nothing more than the fantasy of some strange enthusiasts. And if on the one hand the matter itself appears highly contestable, then to such a contestation will easily be added the other, which is also raised by many, namely the one that says: Even if there really is such a thing as a soul life that is separate from the everyday, particularly separate, man with his ordinary powers of knowledge, which are at his disposal, certainly cannot penetrate to such a solution of the world's riddles, which stand on a ground as it has just been characterized. So if someone who subscribes to the current conventional wisdom says that nothing of the kind can be recognized at all, the other would explain the matter as completely fantastic. And indeed, my esteemed audience, one does not easily come close to the research methods, the research paths, that lead to insights, of which those hinted at concerning the human soul are only a part. Man cannot arrive at such results by external performance, by external experiments, nor by the ordinary method of observation of external science, and anyone who would imagine that spiritual research can resort to methods like those of ordinary science would be labouring under a great delusion. Spiritual science cannot resort to similar proofs as the usual science. Oh, [undoubtedly] all that [to which what is said refers] lies outside the realm of what human souls can observe and what can also be experienced by those powers of human cognition that are bound to the instrument of the brain. This immediately gives rise to the question: Yes, are there any possibilities in the nature of the human soul to gain knowledge that is not conditioned by the senses, that is not through the human brain? Of course, the answer to this question can only be provided by experience, the experience of those who have come to such realizations. But anyone can ask: Is there any possibility at all of speaking of an “super-being” of the human soul that exists separately from the external corporeality of the human brain?

We must take a starting point, my esteemed audience, which I have often taken when I had the honor of speaking to you, from a fact that is intimately connected with all the highest riddles of human life, that imposes itself on man anew every day, that is only not observed because man least wants to observe in life what he experiences as an everyday occurrence. The life riddle that is to be discussed in more detail tomorrow, however, is surprisingly more significant. It is connected with the question of death and immortality. But intimately connected with this life riddle, which touches every human being so deeply, is another, everyday one. This is the life riddle that is contained in the state of change that we experience every day between waking and sleeping. We will not be talking here about the highly interesting scientific hypotheses about the nature of sleep, but rather about what spiritual science has to say in a very elementary way about the nature of the state of transition between waking and sleeping. Spiritual science must first draw attention to the illogicality of the assumption that everything that comes up during the day from morning to evening would disappear in the evening when we plunge into [darkness], into the unconsciousness of sleep. Instincts, desires, passions, sensations, perceptions, [joy and suffering], everything sinks into the unconsciousness of sleep; that it should vanish in the evening and [come again] in the morning, form itself again, that no logical thinking can assume. Therefore, this thinking can look to that, and provisionally regard as a hypothesis, what spiritual science has to say for its part. It says namely that when falling asleep, when man loses control over the outer limbs and movement, when he loses the possibility of feeling, of thinking, man's soul-spiritual being, so says spiritual science, leaves the body at this moment. Outside of the body is [then the human soul-spiritual being] during sleep, and it returns in the morning; when the person [awakens] again, begins his day life, this soul-spiritual being - so says spiritual science - [again] plunges into the [physical] body [and] begins to stir to interact with the physical-sensual outside world.

Of course, my esteemed audience, this must be a hypothesis for anyone who has not yet dealt with spiritual science in more detail; because even if one assumes that the spiritual-soul being withdraws from the body and leads its own existence, man is not able to know anything about this soul-spiritual being; even assuming that it has emerged from the external body, man nevertheless loses the possibility of feeling conscious, active and suffering in what is supposed to be outside. And if there is no possibility to show that what emerges is really present, if there is no possibility to show that a person can experience themselves outside of the body, then there can be no real proof for what spiritual science says. The one who wants to be a spiritual scientist must provide this proof, and it is impossible to look into the spiritual world, it is impossible to gain knowledge in the spiritual world, so that what is submerged in sleep [in the spiritual world] is activated in the human being as his own human soul-being, is enlivened, is raised to consciousness even when it is separated from the body. The spiritual researcher must undergo this as a development of his spiritual-soul nature in order to arrive at a [new] perception. The spiritual researcher must learn to perceive, to communicate with the spiritual-soul being, of which the human being in ordinary life knows nothing, of which he must say: Even if it is my lot to experience it, I do not know it. This implies that something could occur to the spiritual researcher that would be similar to the state of sleep [and] yet radically different. Let us assume that the hypothesis is correct; then one could say: During sleep, the human being leaves his physical body. The conscious life ceases, the [sense] organs fail to function, so the state of sleep is [constituted] by the human soul becoming [apparently] unconscious, sinking into the darkness of sleep, where it does not make use of the tools. The spiritual researcher must be able to bring about this state of the soul through his will, through his will that has been energized. He must actually bring about what otherwise befalls people without will of their own: to suspend all contact with the physical world. The spiritual researcher must artificially induce this. But that is not enough; he would not bring about anything for spiritual knowledge if he only did that; he would induce the state of sleep.

A second thing must still be [the following]: when [the spiritual researcher] has made himself independent of all service to the body through his arbitrariness, he does not fall into unconsciousness, but knows that he is in a new world with the ego, in a world beyond the ordinary world, that is, he must be able to to develop inner life and activity in the I, which otherwise appears paralyzed, feels no inner activity, no inner life; what otherwise appears as something unreal and paralyzed, he must make completely real.

At least in principle, I have to tell you, dear readers, what leads to such a revival; a detailed description of how a person can come to a real inner revival [of his soul] can be found in my writings “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”, “Theosophy” and “[A Way to Self-Knowledge of Man]”. What is said there in detail is given here only in principle. One does not achieve this through external measures, but through intimate inner processes that can be described with the words meditation, concentration of the soul life, contemplation. What does that mean? You get the best idea if you do not initially imagine that it refers to something that is completely foreign and separate from the ordinary soul life. Everything that the spiritual researcher applies to his soul is only a continuation of what he otherwise accomplishes.

Let us take an example. One of the great advances in the spiritual life of humanity is characterized by what Giordano Bruno once did, who, as a world thinker, stood on the ground of the Copernican world view. What has been gained for the developing spiritual life with Giordano Bruno? We can construct it something like this, what was gained there: A large part of the people saw [then], in the time that preceded the Giordano Bruno, up into space, he saw [there] the various stars circling, but he imagined, the naive man of that time, that the whole space would be closed from the ether, from what was called the crystal sky, because one saw the blue sky vault. But how did Giordano Bruno look into space? He looked out into space and realized that every gaze that looks out sees infinity, and where the eye perceives a boundary, there is actually nothing. It is only through the eye, through the whole human perception, that something like a blue hollow sphere is seen. What the eye could see was thus broken through, and through the world view of Giordano Bruno that which the mission of the development of humanity needed up to his time was [broken through]. A new element emerged. [Infinite cosmic space is what the eye sees], embedded in infinite cosmic space, infinite worlds. Man can say to himself: What you see there, just as your gaze falls on the blue vault of heaven, is only an illusion, is only brought about by your interaction with the outside world, is [actually] not there at all in truth. How was such a view gained? This insight was not gained through external observation, of course, because this contradicted such insights, but through a higher energization, [a permeation] of the human cognitive and spiritual life. One had the courage to acquire inner knowledge from the information provided by the senses and thus to break through what the senses offered. Something comprehensive had been explained as appearance [– what the senses offered]. Through the fact that the human soul has developed powers within itself that can enlighten it about reality despite appearances, what is termed meditation, contemplation, [concentration] has become a continuation, as it were, of the limited development of the soul to which the leading spiritual personalities devoted themselves.

How man comes to that arbitrariness of withdrawing attention can be read [in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds?”]. Just as it is possible in ordinary life to withdraw attention from something, so it is possible, through an inner, higher act of the will, to divert all soul attention from all external impressions, so that one artificially enters into the state as one involuntarily enters sleep. But] then you must have already taken care to make your soul life so strong that you do not fall into inactivity and lethargy, and that is achieved by performing the inner soul activity that is necessary for this. And how this is to be done will become most clear to us when we consider that everything a person experiences, thinks and feels is based on the outside world. One need only reflect on how empty the human soul would be if it were to suddenly, in an instant, forget everything that comes from outside. Some soul beings would feel only too empty. But now one can also achieve a certain deepening, internalization [of the soul life] if one takes the ideas gained from external impressions, holds them back, [withdraws and] processes them inwardly. That is already a kind of meditation. It only becomes effective when the spiritual researcher brings to life ideas that do not come from outside, but which he creates out of his soul, even if they are reminiscent of external realities. I would like to emphasize one such concrete idea here, an idea that may at first seem rather foolish to the outer man: Imagine having two water glasses in front of you, one empty and one partially filled; further, imagine imagine that you are pouring water from the half-filled glass into the empty one; try to imagine that the glass does not become emptier as a result of the pouring, but rather fuller and fuller, the more water you pour. A foolish notion in the external world, but such notions are important and essential for something else. To those who would object that this notion is quite foolish, one would have to say: such a notion is not meant to depict anything from the outside, but [this notion is meant] to evoke the soul to action, to stir up an allegorical notion in the soul. What is our attitude to this? This idea can be an emblem for something [very mysterious] and profound in human life; and that is what is included in the word “love”. Wherever we look in human life, we encounter it as something that fertilizes and invigorates. It presents us with riddle upon riddle [the riddle of life at its most profound]. Who would dare to say that they can look into the depths of the soul that are touched when love is mentioned? But one of the qualities of love is wonderfully illustrated by the parable of the two jars, by this impossible idea: the one who gives and gives again and again out of love does not become emptier and emptier, but fuller and fuller, richer and richer. That is a peculiarity of what is expressed there: that the soul is given more and more richly when it gives out of love. We can apply what is given in this symbol; we are not doing anything so incredibly foolish, because we are doing it according to mathematics and geometry.

Let us assume that someone has a medal in front of them, but has no idea what its substantial content is. However, there is one thing they can see: that it is circular. They draw a circle on the medal and imagine it. Everything they can imagine as a circle applies to the medal. So what does he do? He separates the properties of things and considers them individually, separately, and in this way he arrives at his insights. With such a mental image, one cannot go as far as in mathematics. But this symbol is intended to lead to the [independent] inner life of the soul. Now, the point is to, excluding all other ideas, excluding all worries, [regarding what other life experiences are], spend a while devoting oneself entirely to such an idea, to live entirely in it. What is achieved here? What is achieved is that the person who wants to become a soul researcher has united everything in his soul that he would otherwise have fragmented into many sensory perceptions and many will impulses, that he has concentrated everything on a single idea that he has created himself and that he therefore fully comprehends [as a symbol]. An enormous amount of energy of the soul life must be applied when such a concept has no support, no crutch, in the outer soul life. But it is not enough to do such a training only for a short time. Much is necessary, as stated in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Moral conceptions of all kinds [are necessary], they are particularly fruitful for the inner energization, for an inner revival, for a stimulation of the soul life.

The first thing the soul feels is not, for example, immediate supersensible knowledge – it is that it now knows: there is the possibility in you to evoke other forces than those that can be experienced in ordinary life. It is an important and essential moment in life to experience this. This moment cannot be compared to anything else that one experiences in ordinary life in another science, which one can call an expansion of knowledge in the ordinary scientific field; what one experiences there can only be compared to something else in human life, to what the child experiences after it is intimately connected to the physical for the first time, the first years after birth. We see it growing up in such a way that the soul is, as it were, not separated from the body, the spiritual influence expresses itself in physical movement, then we become aware of that [important] moment when it is aware that it is an I, until later it remembers back, while the earlier time disappears. Childhood presents itself as an inner division into a spiritual and a soul life. The physical now presents itself to the soul life as something different; a kind of birth of the soul life takes place, a detachment of the soul life; not only has the child gained something, but it has become different, it has become a different being. In the same sense, one feels one's self growing when that which can be attained through meditation occurs; [one feels something similar to the experience of the child.] In that moment, one feels more and more how something is detaching itself, just as the physicality of the child detaches itself from the soul life. The soul life becomes twofold; one sees something emerging, as when a new human being is born out of the old one, [one becomes a different being, acquires a new self, a new inner soul life awakens]; just as the child, when it begins to become aware of itself as a self, relates to its corporeality quite differently than before, so the person who has experienced this relates to his or her entire soul life. But this is a moment that is essentially different from the moment that has just been discussed in the life of the child; how, that can become clear when you consider that a person is what he has developed as his feeling, thinking and imagining throughout his life; what he now experiences in his soul, he must detach from himself like a new self. What was inward must now become outward; the greater part of it becomes outward, and a new inner, at the same time higher, soul life awakens. Only at this moment do you feel two things; the experiences are well known from the past, but you have never gone through them with such intensity.

The first thing that occurs is: Now you know what self-love is. In that moment, self-love becomes clear. Now you know: you have to separate yourself from what you were so in love with, what you thought was your everything, what you used to call your being; it is as if the ground disappears under your feet. Only now do you feel how you loved yourself, and what you have to tear out when this soul life is shown to you objectively. It must be so for everyday life, because man loves most what he is, however selfless he may think he is. One overlooks the fact that one loves most what one has gradually developed in one's soul life, [what one must snatch from oneself]. It is a difficult task to detach oneself from oneself; and without getting to the point where one, so to speak, tears out from oneself what one loves and values most in oneself, without this fact one cannot recognize the soul as grounded in the soul worlds. One also has a sense of what the expulsion of self-love is in ordinary life; one only gets to know the strength [of selflessness] that this sense now requires at a certain point in the development of meditative, concentrated mental life, which only allows the soul to become aware of itself in its essence.

The second thing is to become aware: What are you now [at your core], now that you have made your core your shell [now that what seemed to be the core is only the shell]? At first, you feel that you are not much at all, that what appears to be a new self is very thin. What is needed now is inner courage to maintain oneself in the face of the feeling of powerlessness, of the bottomlessness of the whole new being. It is basically one of the most important experiences of the spiritual researcher to tear out self-love and overcome the tremendous fear that arises when one recognizes one's own powerlessness of the new self. Now, in ordinary life, what the spiritual researcher achieves is also present in everyone; something new is not given to people at all, it can only be perceived by the soul researcher at the characterized level. There, what he actually is confronts him; only now does self-knowledge occur. Why can't people have it all the time? [Why wasn't it there before?] And here we come to the important discovery that everyone who wants to become a spiritual scientist, who transforms the nature of his soul so that he can see into the supersensible worlds, must make: He comes to the realization that it is good in ordinary life that all this [that self-knowledge] does not occur because man would not be able to bear it. The training must consist of the fact that he [at the moment when he lays aside the soul's cover] is then also able to face himself in such a way that he tears out all self-love, that he has the designated courage to a sufficient degree. The fact that a person does not face this in ordinary [real] life is a form of protection, because [the ordinary person] would not be able to bear [what used to be inside becoming external]. That is why spiritual science speaks of [this moment of] standing before the “Guardians of the Threshold”. By the threshold is meant the one that one must cross if one wants to enter the supersensible world. It is said that ordinary life finds protection through this guardian of the threshold, because only now does the possibility of the soul's relationship with the supersensible worlds begin, only now is the soul ready to look into the supersensible worlds. Only now does the human being begin to become a spiritual researcher.

For there comes a time when the human being, if he has practised such an inner strengthening of his soul life for a sufficient length of time, when he has brought such symbolic images before his soul for long enough [which he knows they serve to strengthen the soul], then his soul has become strong, then he also perceives the fruit of this strengthening, then he becomes aware of that important, significant moment, which he feels like an epiphany. Such images arise [of their own accord] from the indeterminate depths of the soul's life, which seem to show him new worlds. Now the most important and decisive moment for the soul of the spiritual researcher has come. Now he must be able to make a decision that is extremely difficult. Why it is difficult may be seen from a comparison, from the comparison of what happens to a person when new images arise in him without his doing, which do not come from external facts. You know, they are called visions, hallucinations, delusions and the like. The person who is an external scientist will be tempted to say: What the spiritual researcher experiences is nothing more than delusions that arise in an ill soul.

Now, of course, the difference cannot be readily explained, but it can become clear to anyone if they make another comparison. You will also be aware of what happens to a person who has come to such delusions through illness. To talk such delusions out of such a sick person is a futile exercise. Now it becomes clear how much a person is in love with what he has created. As a spiritual researcher, a person must not be in love with his image, and therefore he must uproot self-love; he must know: In all that comes as an image, you live only in it yourself; like shadows of your own being - what the inner nature of the soul's mood is, that is expressed in what surrounds you. That is very difficult, because you can meet people who have come to such experiences through some exercises, through states of illness, which should not be mentioned here, and the like. Oh, such people are blissful in the world that they claim to have gained. They can tell you some strange things, they are completely convinced of this new world. To prevent that from happening is part of spiritual training. Yes, the will must go further; it must not remain merely with knowledge, that does not help in the long run. A glorious new world comes to meet you, but you have to know what it means, that it has arisen from the inner nature of the soul mood. (It takes a strong will to say to yourself: All this is only a reflection of your own being; abstract knowledge is of no use here.) The willpower must be so strong that it is capable of extinguishing this entire [imaginary] ego-world so that it is no longer there. That is the Rubicon that must be crossed. You have created this world for yourself and you have to be able to extinguish this world again. Only someone who has gone through this can talk about it. But when he has managed to extinguish this entire ego-world, then he has made himself objective, and then he has freed his consciousness for the experience of an objective new world. The things come back, similar to forgotten images that lie dormant in the soul life, and yet they are quite different. Only now is the soul, through its powers, transported into a completely new world. It is so strange, what one experiences at this stage of realization; it is as if one has experienced a completely new thing, which has enabled the soul to perceive an objective spiritual world. Now the soul life has become the spiritual eye, the spiritual ear; now it does not perceive itself, one has become objective; now the soul is the spiritual eye and ear, because it no longer sees itself. Just as the outer eye [does not see itself] and knows nothing of itself, and thereby becomes permeable to the outer world, so man must, through the procedures undertaken, have made himself permeable, as it were, to the spiritual world; [then one sees the supersensible world]. When he has made himself permeable through his energy at his root, then he finds what lives within the soul!

Now, one could say that everything the spiritual researcher finds could be autosuggestion, deception. I have already mentioned here what someone told me in another [gap in the transcript]: The soul is a peculiar thing, it often imagines that it is facing a reality. — One would have to object that there is no proof of anything that can be experienced in any world except the experience itself. Only the experience provides the proof. We only need to recall a strange philosophical assertion by Schopenhauer, on which philosophies were founded. When we hear that the world is an idea and that basically everything that comes to man is only an idea, we have to answer that ideas can be clearly distinguished from experience. It is quite a different matter when we form the clearest idea of a piece of hot iron and when we actually touch a hot iron; we will get burned by the latter, but certainly not by the former. There is no proof of reality except that through direct experience. If no one had seen a whale, we could never prove that such an animal really exists. In life itself, reality is indeed guaranteed by this experience. It is the same in the supersensible worlds. Anyone who has progressed to where the spiritual researcher should go, experiences the reality of those worlds into which he has entered. When the Lord said that there are people who can imagine a lemonade so clearly that they believe they can taste it, one must say: Yes, of course, it happens that someone can imagine the taste of a lemonade from the mere idea of it, but has the experience been carried to its conclusion? It is only complete when he has quenched his thirst, and no one has quenched his thirst with the mere idea of taste. The experience must be brought to a conclusion, and this conclusion of experiences is experienced when one has [really] entered into the supersensible worlds with one's soul. Only when one has approached the supersensible worlds in this way is one in principle able to see through the supersensible self-substantial being.

This self-substantial being becomes particularly evident when one looks back on one's own life. But it is very difficult for a person to recognize this own life, because everything that it usually appears to be is actually, one might say, a one-sidedness brought about by life circumstances and by one's own disposition. We meet idealists, materialists; one regards the other as a fool. It is not enough to see through superficial self-knowledge. More profound minds, such as Goethe, for example, have known that fundamentally each of these points of view represents only one-sidedness. Material things must be recognized with material laws; spiritual things with spiritual laws. But Goethe has placed himself in each point of view and he did not come to regard the spiritualist as a fool, because he knew that one can only understand the supersensible life through one's spiritual powers. Some who have not progressed as far as Goethe think that one has to look for the truth in the middle; for someone who knows the truth, it is just as if you had two chairs, and it could happen that you sat down on the floor between the two instead of on one of the chairs. You don't get to the truth by taking the arithmetic mean, but by making each point of view your own, then you find the way to the truth, as Goethe says. But you can only do that when you have a deeper self-knowledge; when you look back on your life, you realize: you have achieved this and that because of your point of view, from which you look at the whole world, and that is how you have become what you are. In this way, life becomes an image, and one comes ever closer to what one could call the removal of the human being, because the human being is usually no more than his point of view. When man removes himself, his own life becomes an image, something that confronts him as previously mentioned in the imagination, and when he now applies his strong willpower to his life, when he suppresses everything he recognizes [through strong willpower ], when the whole of life, when it has first happened, becomes like a forgotten image, then what one is outside of the body between birth and death, what goes beyond death, [what one is outside of the individual life in a purely spiritual world]. One gets to know oneself as a spiritual being that discards the body and lives in a purely spiritual world between death and a new birth, that takes what it has experienced with it into the new life and that now helps build the human body in order to become aware of itself later. In short, through experience one will also get to know the more extensive nature of his soul, which is not limited by the boundaries that delimit our lives; [it is a nature that extends beyond the boundaries of life and goes from life to life.

In this way, this new life takes on an element that is similar to what Copernicus and Giordano Bruno brought.] While in the time of Giordano Bruno man looked up at the stars and assumed a limited world, the latter broke through it and explained it as taken out of the limitation of the soul's life; so spiritual research, in full agreement with natural science, will solve the death riddle [gap in the transcript] by showing that Just as the firmament is not a real boundary, so the boundary set for life from birth to death is not a real one, but is only created by human perception. As if from a spiritual firmament we are enclosed by birth and death; but just as Giordano Bruno broke through the limited [and pointed people to the infinity of space], so spiritual research will do the same in full harmony with science [and point to the infinity of the spirit].

But how does the spiritual researcher relate to those who cannot become spiritual researchers themselves, who can only read and hear what the spiritual researcher can communicate? The objection that only the spiritual researcher can see into the spiritual worlds is not justified. The spiritual researcher is in the same position as the painter in relation to his picture. When two people stand before the picture, one indifferently, the other with a vivid intuitive perception, a whole world can unfold for the latter. But that the picture could come into being, the cause of that is the skill of the painter. He must have overcome what led to the picture being painted, but when the viewer penetrates, what the painter thought becomes present to him. The spiritual researcher must be able to describe in ordinary terms and words what he has brought out of spiritual science. You don't have to be a painter to understand a picture. In the same way, one can sense as truth what the spiritual researcher expresses. Therefore, the results of spiritual research can be recognized even if one is not a spiritual researcher. Thus, what spiritual research reveals can certainly become part of our cultural life. Those who truly engage with the insights of spiritual research can thereby come to a real knowledge of the supersensible world and the human soul. [He can] become aware of the supersensible world with such certainty that he is put in a similar position to Goethe, who was once pushed to make his strange statement, in the face of all the objections that may come from those who, for understandable reasons, regard Theosophy as folly and fantasy. Even in ancient Greek philosophy, the denial of movement was present. These philosophers said: When [an arrow is shot and] the flying arrow is seen in one moment, it [always] rests at the point of rest, in the next moment it is at the point of rest and so on; therefore it is always at the point of rest, therefore it is not moving at all, [so there is no movement]. Goethe said, when this came before his mind's eye, which is credible proof after all:

Enemies may eye each other,
You remain calm, remain silent;
And if they deny you movement,
Go around in front of their noses.

He meant that facts have been proven, which can be proven without gaps by the intellect, but to the contrary. In the same way, one would like to behave when one has gained certainty about the reality of the spiritual world, the human soul itself and its foundation in the supersensible world. Then one would like to remember this saying of Goethe when people come and want to prove without exception from their point of view that there can be no supersensible world, and if it is, it cannot be recognized. Then one would like to hold out to these deniers of spiritual life and of the existence of the human soul in it, when they face the world view of spiritual research with hostility:

Enemy events may occur,
but you remain calm, remain cheerful,
and if they deny the spirit,
do not brood about it any longer.
Yes, in the end even agree with them,
their spirit is in a bad state.

I should like to begin by speaking to you about the conditions and laws underlying human destiny, destiny, which customarily is called karma. This karma, however, will be understood, be clearly seen into only when we begin by acquainting ourselves with the varieties of laws underlying the universe. So today, then, I should like—for it is necessary to speak to you in a rather abstract form about the various underlying universal laws, in order then to crystallize out of this the more special form which can be designated as human destiny—karma.

We speak of cause and effect not only when we wish to comprehend the phenomena of the world, but also when we wish to fix our attention on the phenomena of human life itself. And at present it is quite customary to speak in general terms about cause and effect. Especially is this so in scientific circles. However, directly from this there result the greatest difficulties concerning the actual truth. For the various ways in which cause and effect appear in the world are not at all considered.

We can begin by looking at the so-called lifeless nature which, indeed, confronts us most clearly in the mineral kingdom, in all that we see in the rocky and stony part of the earth, often in such wonderful formations, but also in all that is reduced to powder, and which is then reunited and repacked in the formless rocky strata of the earth. Let us look, my dear friends, first at what thus appears as the lifeless in the world.

When we consider the lifeless—everything lifeless, without exception—we discover that everywhere within this kingdom of the lifeless we can find the causes themselves. Wherever the lifeless exists as effect, we can also seek the causes within this very same kingdom. In fact, we proceed in accordance with the principles of knowledge only when we seek the causes of the processes of the lifeless within its own kingdom.

If you have a crystal before you, however beautifully formed it may be, you should seek the cause of its forms in the kingdom of the lifeless itself. And thus, this lifeless kingdom shows itself as something contained within itself. We are, at first, not able to say where we can find the limits of this lifeless. Under certain conditions they may lie far distant out in the reaches of the universe. But if we are concerned with the effects of something lifeless confronting us, and we wish to find the causes, we must then seek them also within the realm of the lifeless. Through what we have said, however, we have already placed the lifeless alongside something else, and therewith a certain perspective is immediately opened before us.

Consider the human being himself. Consider how he passes through the door of death. Everything which existed and acted in him before this event has left the visible, apprehensible form which remains after the human soul has passed through death's portal; nothing remains but this discarded, deserted form, of which we say that it is lifeless. And just as we speak of the lifeless when we gaze upon the stony structure of the mountains with its crystal forms, so must we speak of the lifeless when we behold this human corpse, bereft of soul and spirit. What from the beginning prevailed in the rest of lifeless nature only now comes into existence for the corpse of the human being.

We were unable to find in the lifeless itself the causes of what occurs in the human form as effects during life before the soul has passed through the door of death. It is true that, when an arm is raised, not only do we seek in vain in the lifeless, physical laws of the human form for the cause of this action, but we shall also seek in vain in the realm of the chemical, in the realm of the physical forces which are present in the human form, for the cause, let us say, of the heart-beat, of the blood circulation, of any of the processes which are not at all under the control of the will.

But, at the moment when the human form has become a corpse, when the soul has stepped through the gateway of death, we observe an effect in the human organism. We perceive, let us say, a change in the color of the skin, the limbs become limp; briefly, everything appears which we are accustomed to behold in a corpse. Where do we seek the cause? In the corpse itself, in the chemical, physical, lifeless forces of the corpse itself.

When now in all its aspects, in all directions, you think out to the end what I have here indicated—I need only indicate it—you will realize that, after the human soul has crossed the threshold of death, the human being has then become, regarding his corpse, like lifeless nature about him. That means that we must now seek the causes for the effects in the same region in which the effects themselves lie. This is very important.

As soon, however, as we behold this special nature of the human corpse, we find something else that is extraordinarily significant. The human being casts off his corpse, as it were, at death. And if then, with that faculty of perception which is capable of it, we observe what the real human being, the soul-spirit human being, has become after he has passed through the door of death, we are compelled to say: Indeed, it is quite true that the corpse is cast off, and that now it has no longer any significance for this actual soul-spirit human being, who has reached the other side of death's door. This corpse has no longer any significance; it is now something discarded.

With lifeless external nature this is quite a different matter. And, indeed, even if we consider the matter only superficially, this difference confronts us. Let us observe a human corpse. It can best be observed where it has had an air-burial. In subterranean caves, which formerly were chiefly used by certain communities as burial places, we find the corpses of men, for example, simply hung up. There they dry out. They go so far in this drying out process and become so completely brittle that it only requires a little tap to cause them to fall into dust.

What we thus find preserved as the lifeless is something quite different from what we find outside in our earthly surroundings as lifeless nature. This lifeless nature fashions itself, it forms itself into crystal shapes. It is in a remarkable state of change. When we disregard what is purely earthly and look at other phenomena which are also lifeless, at water, and air, we then find that an active transformation and metamorphosis takes place in these lifeless elements. Let us now place this before the soul. Let us bear in mind the similarity of the human body in its lifelessness, after the soul has laid it aside, to extra-human lifeless nature.

Let us now proceed further. Let us consider the plant kingdom. Here we enter the sphere of the living. If we study a plant intimately, we shall never find ourselves able to explain the effect appearing in the plant merely as a result of the causes which lie in the plant kingdom itself—that is, in the same kingdom in which the effects appear. Certainly, there is today a science which attempts to do this. However, this science is on the wrong track, for finally it comes to the point of saying: Yes, indeed, it is possible to investigate the physical forces and laws acting in the plant; the chemically active forces and laws can be investigated; but something remains over and above. At this point these people divide into two groups. One group maintains that what remains over is only a sort of aggregation, a sort of form, shape; that what is active are only the physical and chemical laws. The other group says: No! there is something else there besides, which science has not yet investigated; science will, however, eventually discover it. But this will be said for a long time to come. The fact of the matter, however, is something different. For, when we wish to investigate plant nature, we cannot comprehend it, if the entire universe is not called to our aid, if the plant is not beheld in such a way that we say that the forces of plant activity lie in the reaches of the cosmos. Everything that happens in the plant is the effect of the reaches of the universe. The sun must first advance to a certain position in the cosmos in order that some particular effects may appear in the plant kingdom. Different forces must be active from wide spaces of the universe in order that the plant may receive its form, in order that it may receive its inner driving forces.

My dear friends, the truth of the matter is as follows. If we were able to travel, not in the manner of Jules Verne, but actually to travel out to the moon, to the sun, etc., then, unless we should have already acquired other forces of cognition than those we now possess, we would not become any more clever in this search for the causes than we are upon the earth itself. We would not get very far were we to say the following: “Very well, the causes of the effects which appear in the plant kingdom are not in the plant kingdom of the earth itself; so we travel to the sun; we shall find there the causes.” But we do not find them there with ordinary means of cognition. We do find them, however, if we lift ourselves to imaginative knowledge, if we possess quite a different mode of knowledge. In that case we do not need to travel to the sun; we find them here in the earth region itself. Only we shall find it necessary to cross over from an ordinary physical world to an ether world, and we shall find that in the reaches of the world the cosmic ether works everywhere with its forces, and that out of these reaches it works inward. Out of cosmic reaches everywhere the ether forces work into our world.

Thus, we must actually cross over to a second kingdom of the world, if we intend to seek the causes of the effects in the plant kingdom.

Now, the human being participates in the same element as the plant. The same forces which send their influences from the reaches of the ether cosmos down into the plants work also in the human being. He carries within him the ether forces, and we designate the sum of the forces he thus carries the ether body. And I have already told you how this ether body a few days after death becomes larger and larger and finally loses itself, so that the human being remains only in his astral and ego being. Thus, what he has carried within him of an etheric nature becomes larger and larger and finally loses itself in the cosmic reaches.

Let us now compare again what we can see of the human being when he has crossed the threshold of death with what we see in the plant kingdom. We must say that the causative forces of the plant kingdom conn* down to earth out of the reaches of space. We must say in regard to the human ether body that the forces of this ether body go out into these reaches, that is to say, they go to that region whence come the growth forces of the plant when the human being has passed through death's door. Now the matter already becomes clearer. If we merely look at a physical corpse and say that it is lifeless, then a descent into the rest of lifeless nature becomes difficult for us. But, if we look at the living, at the plant kingdom, and become aware that the causative forces for this kingdom come out of the cosmic reaches, then by plunging ourselves imaginatively into the nature of man, we see that, when the human being has crossed the threshold of death, the human ether body goes out into the source whence come the etheric forces of the plant kingdom.

Something else, however, is characteristic. What acts upon the plants as causative forces, acts relatively quickly; for upon the plants which are springing from the ground, which are developing their blossoms and their fruit, the sun of the day before yesterday has but little influence today. The sun of the day before yesterday is not effecting very much as a causative force. The sun must shine today, really shine today. That is important. And you will notice in our subsequent considerations that it is important that we note this fact.

The plants with their ether-causative forces have, it is true, their actual fundamental forces within the realm of the earthly, but they have these in what exists simultaneously in the cosmos and the earth. And when the human ether body dissolves itself, after the human being as a soul-spirit being has passed through the portal of death, this process lasts only a brief time, a few days only. Again, a simultaneous relationship exists, for the days during which this dissolution takes place, measured in the time of cosmic events, are but an insignificant moment.

When the ether body returns to that region whence come the ether forces which manifest as plant growth forces, we have, again, to do with something which shows us that as soon as the human being lives in the ether, his ether activity is not limited to the earth, for it departs from the earth, yet it develops with simultaneousness.

I shall now tabulate the foregoing in the following manner. We can say:

Mineral Kingdom: Simultaneousness of cause and effect in the physical.

Thus, we have essentially to do with simultaneousness of the causes in the physical. You will say: “Yes, but the causes of much that occurs in the physical lie prior in time.” This is in reality not the fact. If effects are to arise in the physical, then the causes must last, must continue to act. If the causes cease, effects no longer occur. We are, therefore, justified in writing this down thus:

Mineral Kingdom: Simultaneousness of the causes in the physical.

When we come to the plant kingdom, however—and in doing so we come to what can be observed in the human being also as something plantlike—we then have to do with simultaneousness in the physical and the super-physical.

Plant Kingdom: Simultaneousness of the causes in the physical and super-physical.

Let us now approach the animal kingdom. In this kingdom we shall seek quite in vain in the animal itself for what appears as effects as long as the animal is living. Even if the animal only crawls in order to seek its food, we shall seek quite in vain for the causes in the chemical and physical processes taking place within the animal body. We shall also seek entirely in vain in the reaches of ether space, where we find the causes for the plant nature,—we shall also seek there in vain for the causes of animal movement and animal sensation. For all that takes place in the animal in regard to what is plantlike in the animal, we find the causes also in ether space. And when the animal dies, its ether body also passes out into the reaches of cosmic ether. But we shall never be able to find within the earthly, within the physical, or the super-physical etheric, the causes of sensation. It is impossible to find them there.

Here it can be said that something occurs wherein the modern view is very much on the wrong track. Indeed, in regard to many phenomena which appear in the animal—the phenomena of sensation, of movement the human being with this modern conception must say to himself: “If I investigate the inner processes of the animal's physical, chemical forces, I cannot find the causes there. But also, in the reaches of the cosmos, in the ether reaches of the universe the causes cannot be found. If I wish to explain the nature of a blossom, then I must go out into the ether universe. I shall be able to explain the blossom's nature from the nature of the ether universe. I shall also be able to explain much in the animal which is plantlike from the nature of the ether cosmos, but I shall never be able to explain what appears in the animal as movement or as sensation.”

If I observe an animal on the 20th of June and consider its sensations, then I shall not be able to find the causes of the sensations on the 20th of June in anything that is in earthly or extra-earthly space. If I go still farther back I shall not find them either. I shall not find them in May, nor in April, nor in any other month.

The modern view feels this. Therefore, this modern view explains what is thus not capable of explanation, or at least a great deal of it, by means of heredity. That is to say, it explains by means of a phrase. It is “inherited.” It originates with the forebears, it is “inherited” by the offspring. Naturally, not everything, because that would, indeed, be too grotesque; nevertheless, a great deal. It is inherited!

What is meant by “inherited?” The concept of heredity leads finally back to the idea that what appears as complicated animal was contained in its mother's ovum. And it has, indeed, been the endeavor of the modern view to observe an ox outwardly in its complicated form and then to say: “Well, the ox sprang from the ovum; in it were the forces which then resulted in the full-grown ox. Therefore, the ovum is an extraordinarily complicated body.”

It would have to be extremely complicated, this ovum of the cow, for, is it not true? everything is contained within it which presses toward all sides, and forms, and fashions, and works, in order that out of the little ovum the complicated ox may emerge!

And however much we may struggle to find a way out—there are, indeed, many theories of evolution, of epigenesis, etc.—whatever way out we try to find, we see that there is nothing else to do than to conclude that this ovum, this little egg, is something extremely complicated. Since everything is led back to the molecule, which is built up of atoms in a complicated way, there are many who represent the first inception of this ovum as a complicated molecule. But, my dear friends, this does not even agree with physical observations.

The question arises: Is this ovum really such a complicated molecule, already such a complicated organism? The peculiarity of the ovum does not at all consist in its complexity, but in the fact that it throws all its substance back into chaos—into a chaotic state. Precisely the ovum is, in the mother-animal, not a complicated structure, but a completely pulverized, disarranged substance. It is not organized at all. It is something that falls back into an absolutely unorganized, powder-like condition. And reproduction would never occur, did not the unorganized, the lifeless matter which tends toward the crystalline, toward the form—did not this matter in the ovum fall back into itself, into chaos. The albumen is not the most complicated body, but rather the simplest, which has nothing determinative in it. And out of this little chaos, which exists there at first as an ovum, no ox could ever come into existence, for this ovum is just a chaos. Why, then, does an ox come forth from it? Because, in the maternal organism, the entire cosmos acts upon this ovum. It is just because it is unconditioned, because it is chaotic, that the entire cosmos can act upon it. And fructification has no other purpose than to cast back the matter of the ovum into chaos, into the indeterminate, into the unconditioned. Thus, nothing else acts but the universe alone. But now, if we look into the mother, we do not find therein the causes. If we look outside into the ether world, there also in the simultaneous occurrences the causes are not to be found. We must go back until we come to the time before the animal was born, if we wish to find the causes for what germinates there as the potential capacities of a being, capable of sensation and movement. We must go back to a time before life has begun. That is, for the capacities of feeling and movement the causal world does not lie in simultaneousness but lies in a time prior to the conception of this being.

The following is the curious fact: If I behold a plant, I must go out into what is simultaneous, and I then find the cause; but I find it in the reaches of the universe. If, however, I wish to find the cause of what acts in the animal as sensation, then I cannot look for it in simultaneousness, but I must look for it in what preceded life; in other words, the stellar constellation must have changed, it must have become different. It is not the stellar constellation in the universe which exists simultaneously with the animal that has its influence upon the actual animal nature, but the constellation of the stars preceding its life.

And now let us look at the human being when he has passed the threshold of death. When this has occurred, he must go back—after he has laid aside his ether body, which spreads out into every part of the reaches of the universe from whence come the growth forces of the plants, the etheric forces—he must go back, as I have described it, to his moment of birth. Then he has experienced in his astral body all that he has gone through in life, but in reverse order. In other words, the human being must not pass into the state of simultaneousness with his astral body after death; he must go back to the state prior to birth. He must go to that region whence come the forces which give the animal the capacity for sensation and the ability of movement. These do not come out of simultaneously existing stellar constellations, they come from the constellations existing prior to birth.

Thus, if we speak of the animal kingdom, we cannot speak of the simultaneousness of the causes in the physical and super-physical, but we must then speak of past super-physical causes passing over to the present effects in the physical.

Animal Kingdom: Past super-physical causes to present effects.

And here, too, we enter again the concept of time. We must, if I may use a trivial expression, go for a walk in time. If we wish to seek the causes of something occurring in the physical world, we go for a walk in this world; we do not need to go outside the physical world. If we wish to seek the causes of something which is really in the living plant kingdom, then we must go quite far away. We must seek in the ether world. And only there where the ether world comes to an end, where—speaking in terms of a fairy tale—the world is fenced, is boarded in, there only do we find the causes of plant growth.

We may go about there as much as we wish, yet we shall not find the cause of the faculty of sensation or movement. We must begin to go for a walk in time, we must tread there the path of time in reverse order. We must leave space and go for a walk in time.

You will note that we can place the human physical body in its lifelessness alongside lifeless outer nature in respect of causation; we can place the human ether body in its life and its expansion after death into the ether spaces alongside the ether life of the plant, which also comes hither out of the reaches of the ether, but, indeed, out of the simultaneous constellations of the super-physical, of the super-earthly. And we are able to place the human astral organism alongside of that which exists outside in the animal nature.

And we then advance from the mineral, to the plant, to the animal kingdom, coming finally to the real human kingdom. You will say: “Well, we have already considered that from the beginning.” Yes, indeed, but not altogether. We have, in the first place, considered the human kingdom in so far as the human being has a physical body; then, in so far as he has an ether body, and then, in so far as he has an astral body. But just note that he would be a crystal—a complicated one, to be sure, but a crystal, nevertheless—if he had only his physical body. If he were to have merely his ether body in addition, he would then be a plant, a beautiful plant perhaps, nevertheless, just a plant. If, again, the human being had in addition an astral body, he would go about on all fours, perhaps have horns and other similar animal characteristics—in short, he would be just an animal. The human being is none of these. The form which he has as an erect walking being he has by virtue of his possessing an ego organism besides the physical, etheric, and astral organisms. And only this being, who also has an ego organism, can we designate as man, as belonging to the human kingdom.

Let us now once more consider what we have already observed. If we wish to seek the causes of plant nature, we must then go out into the reaches of the ether realm, but we are still able to remain in space; only, as has been remarked, space in that case becomes somewhat hypothetical, for we must even resort to the fairy-tale concept, we must go “where the world is boarded up.” It is, however, really a fact that even modern human beings who think in accord with purely natural scientific research are coming to the view that we can actually speak of something like that expressed in the fairy tale “where the world is boarded in.” It is, naturally, a trivial, clumsy expression. But we need only recall how childishly human beings think: There is the sun. It sends forth its rays, sends them farther and farther away. They become, it is true, weaker and weaker. The light goes on and on and on, it goes further and further away, into the endless.

I have explained long ago to those who have already for years heard my lectures that it is nonsense to imagine that the light goes out into the endless. I have always said that the outspreading of light is dependent on its elasticity. If we take a rubber ball and depress it, we can do this only up to a certain point, it then snaps back again. That is to say, the elasticity of the ball has its limits; then the depressed surface springs back into place. This I have said is also true of light. It does not go out into the limitless, but, when a certain limit is reached, it returns.

This fact, that light does not expand out into the boundless, but only to a certain limit and then comes back, has found an advocate, for example, in England in the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge. So it can be seen that today physical science has already come to advocate what is given through spiritual science, and physical science will eventually accept, in all particulars, what is stated by spiritual science.

And thus it is, indeed, possible to speak also of the fact that there outside, if we think sufficiently far out into space, we must allow our thoughts to return and not permit ourselves simply to postulate endless space, which is fantastic—indeed, a fantasy we cannot imagine. Perhaps there may be some among you who will remember that in the description of the course of my life I said how very deep an impression was made on me when, in my study of modern synthetic geometry, I was led to the concept that a straight line may not be considered as having a limitless extension, a never ending extension, but that such a line extending in one direction actually returns from the other. Geometry expresses it somewhat as follows: The point at infinity to the right of a fixed point is the same as the infinitely distant point to the left. It is possible to calculate this. This is not merely analogous to the fact that when we have a circle and start here by following the circumference we return to the same point again, or that, if a semicircle is infinite it is a straight line. That is not the case. That would be an analogy to which those who can think with exactness do not attribute any value. What made an impression on me was not this trivial analogy, but the actual proof in accordance with strict calculation, that the infinitely distant point on the left is the same as the infinitely distant point on the right, and that actually if someone begins to run from here along a straight line continually he will not run to a limitless infinity, but that, if he but continue to run for the proper length of time, he will eventually come toward us again from the opposite direction. This appears grotesque to all physical thought. The moment physical thinking is laid aside, this is actually a reality, because the universe is not endless, but is limited in as far as the physical universe is concerned. Thus, it may be said that we reach the limits of the etheric when we speak of the vegetative and of what is etheric in the human being. But we must go outside of everything that exists in space when we wish to explain the animal and the astral nature in man. There we must go walking in time; there we must go beyond simultaneousness; there we must advance in time.

When we enter time, we cross the boundary of the physical in a twofold way. In describing the animal, we must already proceed in time. We must, however, not continue this mode of thinking abstractly, but continue it in a concrete way. Pay attention for a moment and see how this can be continued concretely.

Human beings think, do they not? that when the sun sends forth its light, this continues on its path endlessly. Sir Oliver Lodge shows, however, that we have already forsaken this mode of thinking about the matter and, instead, that we know that light comes to a boundary and then returns again. The sun receives back its light from all sides, although in another form, in a transformed condition. The sun receives back the light. Let us now employ this mode of thinking on what we have just been considering. We stand, at the outset, in space. Earth-space remains within it. We stride out into the universe. That is not yet enough for us: we stride out into time. Now some one could say: “Very well, we now stride on ever further and further.” No, not at all! We now return again. We must continue this mode of thinking. We return again. We come back again in the same way as we do when we march forth into space, going ever further, reaching finally the boundary, and then return. So here also do we return. That is to say, if we have sought the past super-physical causes in the reaches of time, we must return again into the physical.

What does that mean? It means, we must again descend out of time, out of time descend again upon the earth. If we wish, thus, to seek the causes of the human being, then we must seek them again upon earth. Now we have marched back in time. If, by marching back in time, we come again upon the earth, then of course we come into a previous human life. With the animal, we stride further; it dissipates in regard to time just as our ether body dissipates right out to the boundary of the cosmos. The human being does not dissipate himself out there, for when we retract his path in time we come back to the earth into his previous life. Thus, we must say for the human being: From past physical causes to present effects in the physical.

Mineral Kingdom: Simultaneousness of causes in the physical.

Plant Kingdom: Simultaneousness of the causes in the physical and super-physical.

Animal Kingdom: Past super-physical causes of present effects.

Human Kingdom: Past physical causes of present effects in the physical.

You see, it has required effort today to familiarize ourselves with abstractions in a preparatory way. But that, my dear friends, was necessary. It was necessary, because I wished to show you that there is also a logic for those spheres which we must consider to be the spiritual. Only, this logic does not agree with the clumsy logic which is deduced merely from physical phenomena, and in which human beings are accustomed entirely and only to believe.

If we proceed in a purely logical way and investigate the series of causes, then, in the mere train of thought, we reach the past earth lives. And it is necessary to call attention to the fact that also the mode of thinking itself must become different from the usual mode, if we wish to comprehend the spiritual.

Human beings believe that what reveals itself from the spiritual world cannot be comprehended. It can be comprehended, but we must broaden our logic. It is, indeed, also necessary, if we wish to comprehend a musical or any other work of art, that we bear in ourselves the conditions which meet the matter halfway. If we do not possess these conditions, then we understand nothing concerning them. Then the music passes us by as a noise. Or we may see in some work of art nothing but an incomprehensible shape. Thus, we must also meet what is communicated from the spirit world with a mode of thought commensurate with this world. This, however, becomes evident in mere logical thinking. By investigating the various natures of the causes, we reach, indeed, the possibility of understanding the past earth lives also in logical sequence.

Now there remains the important question, which begins there where we observe the corpse. It has become lifeless. Lifeless nature exists outside in its crystal forms, in its varied shapes. The important question now confronts us: What is the relationship of lifeless nature to the corpse of the human being?

Perhaps you will see, my dear friends, that something is being contributed to a meaning which lies in the direction of the answer to this question, if you take hold of the matter in its second step, if you say: When I behold the plant world surrounding me, then I realize that it carries in itself the forces coming from the reaches of the ether cosmos to which my ether body returns. There outside in the ether reaches, there above are the causative sources of the plants. Thither goes my ether body when it has served its purpose during my life. I go thither where plant life gushes forth from the ether reaches. I go thither—that is, I am related to it. Indeed, I can say: Something exists there above me; my ether body ascends to it; the verduring, sprouting, up-springing plant world comes thither from it. But there is a difference. I give up my ether body; the plants receive the ether in order to grow. They receive the ether in order to live. I yield up the ether body after death. I yield it up as something remaining over. The plants, however, receive this ether body as something that gives them life. They have their beginning in that region which I reach at my end. The plant beginning unites with the human ether body's ending.

May it perhaps be that in relation to the mineral, to the crystals of the most manifold forms, I can ask the following question: Is that which I leave behind as physical corpse, as an end of myself, perhaps also a beginning of the mineral? Do beginning and end perhaps meet?

With this question in mind we intend to close today, my dear friends, and to begin tomorrow, in order to enter thoroughly into the question of human destiny, of so-called karma. Thus, in the next lecture, I shall continue to speak about karma. You will then no longer have to find your way through such a thicket of abstractions, but you will also understand that this was quite necessary for a certain development of thought.

Published in The Golden Blade, 1984. It is also known as, The Michael Impulse and the Mystery of Golgotha. It is the seventh of twelve lectures in the volume The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Intrinsic Secret of the Human Being.

For a true understanding of the nature of the human being we have to recognise his division into three members, each of which is, relatively speaking, self-dependent. We have within the human being the head, the organs of the breast system, and the organs of the limbs. These are of course crude expressions that are only roughly true. Under the name of limbs, for example, we have to include a good part of what is contained in the trunk. Moreover, as you will have gathered from my lectures, as well as from my book, Riddles of the Soul, there is a connection between the head of Man and his life of thought and ideation; the whole rhythmic activity in Man—roughly speaking, the breast system—is connected with the sphere of feeling; and finally the sphere of the will, which represents the essentially spiritual part of Man, goes together with the system and organisation of the limbs. Relatively speaking, these three systems of the human organism are independent one of another. Similarly, the life of ideas, the life of feeling and the life of will are each self-dependent, although at the same time they work together.

Now, as you know, we can best comprehend the difference from a spiritual point of view between these three systems when we observe them in the following way. In ordinary waking life Man is fully awake only in his head system—in all that has to do with the life of thinking and ideas. Everything connected with the life of feeling—that is, from a bodily aspect, with the rhythmic system—is a dream-life. Even in daytime the life of feeling pervades our waking life with a life of dreams. What goes on in the sphere of feeling we know indirectly through ideas, but we can never know it directly through the feelings themselves. The life of will is in still greater darkness; we have no clearer grasp of its real content than we have of the life of sleep.

A recognition of these distinctions allows us to indicate more exactly than is usually done the character and extent of the subconscious states lying below ordinary human consciousness. Subconscious ideas lie beneath the life of feeling; and still more deeply unconscious ideas lie beneath the life of will.

Now it is very important to realise that each one of the three systems contains within it thinking, feeling and willing. In the head system or the system of thought, a life of feeling and a life of will are also present; only they are much less developed than the life of ideas. Similarly, thoughts are present in the sphere of feeling, more feebly than in the sphere of the head and only coming to consciousness in a dreamlike manner.

One thing is usually quite disregarded, my dear friends, in our time of abstract science, and it is this. These subconscious members of the human being are more objective in proportion as they are less subjectively present in consciousness. What do I mean by that? I mean this. In our life of ideas, in our head life, we have processes which take place within us. On the other hand, what we experience through our rhythmic system, the processes that go on in the sphere of our feeling, are by no means our own individual property. They take place within us and yet at the same time they represent objective world-processes. This means that when you feel, you have of course an experience in yourself, but this experience is at the same time something that happens in the world and has significance there. And it is of extraordinary interest to follow up the world-processes that lie behind our life of feeling.

Suppose you experience something that affects you very deeply, Some event that moves you to joy or sorrow. Now you know that the whole of life runs its course in such a way that we can separate it into periods of about seven years in length. Roughly speaking, the first is from birth to the change of teeth, the second to the age of puberty, the third to the beginning of the twenty-first year, and so on. All these boundary lines are of course only approximate. Here then we have one division that shows itself in the course of human life.

The turning-points in the development of the human being which we arrive at by this method are clearly marked in the earlier part of life—change of teeth, and puberty—but later are more or less concealed, although they can be distinctly noted by one who knows what to look for. That which takes place in the soul and spirit of the human being about the twenty-first year of life is, for one who can observe it, just as clearly perceptible as the change at puberty is for external physiology. The division into seven-year periods holds true, in fact, for the whole course of human life.

Now let us go back to the event that makes a strong impression on our life of feeling. Suppose the event happens between the change of teeth and puberty. A very remarkable thing then takes place, which in these days of crude observation is not generally noticed. The impression made upon your feeling is there, and then gradually the vibrations of it die away in your consciousness. But something takes place in the objective world quite apart from what is in your consciousness, quite apart from any share your life of soul has in it. And this process that goes on in the objective world may be compared with the setting up of a vibratory motion. It vibrates out into the world. And the remarkable thing is that it does not go out and out endlessly into the infinite, but when it has spread itself out for a sufficient distance—when its elasticity is, so to speak, used up—it swings back and makes its appearance in the next seven-year period as an impulse that works upon your life of soul from outside. I will not say that such an event always comes back seven years later, for the lapse of time depends on the whole form and character of the individual life, but it falls into the course of the next seven-year period, although very often entirely without your notice.

Yes, my dear friends, we continually undergo experiences which strike in upon our feeling life and are the reaction of the world to an experience we had in the sphere of feeling during the previous seven-year period. An event that stirs and moves our feelings resounds again into our life of soul during the next stage of life. People do not usually remark such things, but anyone who takes a little trouble can learn to observe them, even externally.

Who of you has not at one time had the experience that someone you know well suddenly becomes dejected and out of humour? You have no idea why, but a change has come over him “out of the blue”, as we say. If you follow up the matter and have the eyes of your soul open to observe the particular way in which such a man conducts himself in life, if you can feel what is in between the words he says—or rather, what is within the words—then you will be able to go back to some earlier event that affected him deeply. And during the whole of the interval something has been going on in the world which would not have been going on if the man had not had that moving experience. The whole thing is a process which, besides being experienced by the man himself, takes place also as an absolutely objective experience outside him.

You will readily see how many opportunities there are for such things to go on outside us! They come about through our instrumentality, but they are none the less objective world-processes. These processes become involved in all that is going on among the elemental beings outside us, including such elemental beings as I described to you recently. You will remember how in another connection I brought them together with the breathing and the whole rhythmic system. Now you can see them working together with the rhythmic system indirectly through stimulation of the feelings. When we understand these things rightly, we are led to the inevitable conclusion that Man is continually creating around him as it were a great aura. And into the waves that are thus thrown up, elemental beings plunge; they mix themselves up, as it were, in the whole process and are able to influence the reaction that comes back on to Man—their power to do so, however, depending on the individual human being.

Let us picture the whole process. Something moves you deeply. You ray it out all around you. When it comes back to you, it is not unchanged; in the meantime elemental beings have concerned themselves with it, and when it works back on to you, then, together with the process outside you of which the elemental beings took hold, you receive also the influences and workings of these elemental beings. Man spreads out around him a spiritual atmosphere whereby he comes into contact with elemental beings—he and they mutually affect one another. All destiny that works itself out within the course of life is connected with these beings. For even within this life we have a kind of fulfillment of our destiny. If we have some experience today, then that experience has a significance for our later life. And this in fact is how our destiny is moulded. Elemental beings who feel attracted to us by reason of our nature, work at the shaping of our destiny. There they attain to a feeling of themselves: there they work with us and upon us.

We have here obtained an insight into the interplay between Man and his environment, and can see how spiritual forces are at work in the environment. By following this interplay, we can throw a light on many things that happen to Man in the way of destiny. An insight into these connections is nowhere within the scope of the ‘enlightened’ knowledge of our times; we can find traces of it only in traditions that have survived from earlier times, when Man lived in more elemental stages of consciousness and had more direct connection with reality. These traditions you will find sometimes very beautifully brought to expression in poems of earlier ages, where a destiny that befalls a human being is referred to the intervention of elemental beings. One of the most beautiful that has been preserved is a poem often presented to you in a Eurythmy performance. Here you can see how elemental beings from the Elf King's realm intervene in the destiny of Man. The poem runs thus:

THE ELF KING'S DAUGHTER
Sir Olaf rides from house and hall
Till late, his wedding guests to call.

There elves are dancing on the green,
Elf King's daughter amidst them is seen.

“Welcome Sir Olaf, your hand I'll take,
Come dance and join us for my sake.”

“I shall not dance nor dance I may,
Tomorrow will be my wedding day!”

“Mark well, Sir Olaf, and dance with me—
Two golden spurs I'll give to thee!

A silken sark snow white and fine—
My mother bleached it by moonshine.”

“I shall not dance nor dance I may
Tomorrow will be my wedding day!”

“Mark well, Sir Olaf, and dance with me—
A mountain of gold I'll give to thee!”

“To a mountain of gold I'll not say nay,
But I shall not dance nor dance I may.”

“If you refuse to dance with me
Illness and pest shall follow thee.”

Over his heart she struck amain,
Never he felt such bitter pain.

Pale-faced he sat on his horse so tame—
“Go back”, she cried, “to your worthy dame.”

And when at last he reached his gate
Trembling his mother stood to wait.

“My son, my son, oh tell me true
Why is your face of deathlike hue?”

“Of deathlike hue it needs must be
For Elf King's daughter did I see.”

“My son so dear, and loved so well,
What to your bride I needs must tell?”

“Tell her that to the woods I'm bound—
To exercise my horse and hound.”

At early dawn, at break of day,
Came bride and guests in their wedding array.

They feasted and drank of wine and beer—
“Where is Sir Olaf, my bridegroom dear?”

“Sir Olaf to the woods is bound
To exercise his horse and hound!”

The bride she lifted the cloth so red
There lay Sir Olaf—and he was dead.

There you have the elemental world interweaving in the destiny of Man, at the very moment when his destiny strikes in upon him with the shock of illness and of death. Please note the words exactly. In old poems these things are not presented as they would be in poems of recent times. (Herder took these verses from an old folk-poem). Of the poems produced within present day culture we may well say that about 99 per cent are superfluous. The poems that are derived from an ancient knowledge are always to be distinguished by the fact that they are true to reality. It could not possibly have been said in this poem that she struck him on the head, or on the mouth, or on the nose, but:

Over the heart she struck him amain,
He felt therefrom a grievous pain.

In this connection it has to be an organ of the rhythmic system, hence the heart.

What I want you to note is that here you have an entirely faithful reproduction in poetry of what actually goes on around Man in such an hour of destiny. It is in fact always going on around Man, but it makes itself felt particularly strongly in connection with the phenomenon of this periodic return of experiences in the sphere of feeling. For these always come back to us in a changed form. They enter into our destiny only after they have passed through whatever the elemental beings have found to do with them. Just as we live within the external physical air or among the products of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—in the very same way do we live with the subconscious parts of our nature in spiritual spheres. In particular, with our rhythmic system we live in the spiritual sphere of the elemental beings. And in that sphere is shaped as much of our destiny as can be shaped in the course of life between birth and death.

Only because in our head we are fully awake, do we rise up at all out of this interplay with the elemental beings. In respect of our head life alone we are not involved in the realm of the elemental beings. There in our head we emerge, so to speak, above the surface of the ocean of elemental existence, in which as human beings we perpetually swim. Here then you may see how experiences can come back in the form of destiny even within the ordinary course of life, when they are related to our rhythmic system.

For the limb system, too, there is an interplay with the environment, but it is very much more complicated. Here again the events swing back; but they make a wider circuit and come back only in the next life or in one of the following earth-lives. Thus we can say that what we call our destiny or Karma need not after all be so enigmatic for us, if we look on it as only a further expansion of what can be studied in the return of experiences within a single life. For the experiences do not come back unchanged; they have undergone a very great change in the meantime.

Let me now draw your attention to a particular fact. Wherever I have lectured on education, I have always given emphasis to an important landmark in the course of life that occurs at about the ninth year. It is a turning-point that should be very carefully marked in teaching. Up to that time one's teaching about nature should be entirely of the kind where the description of nature and her processes is connected—by way of fables, legends, and so forth—with the moral life. Only at the ninth year may one begin to describe nature in a simple, elementary manner. Then the child is ripe for it. In Waldorf education the whole arrangement and treatment of subjects is derived directly and entirely from actual observation of the human being, down to the smallest details. I pointed this out in the article I wrote on the educational foundations of the Waldorf School, and I alluded there to this turning-point around the ninth year.

We may characterise this turning-point by saying that the ego-consciousness receives then a new form. The child becomes capable of taking note of external nature in a more objective way. Earlier, he unites whatever he sees in nature with his own being. Now the ego-consciousness unfolds, as you know, in the first seven-year stage of life, from about 2 – 2 ½ years of age. What happens is that it comes back in the second seven-year period, at about the ninth year. This is one of the most striking ‘returns’—this return of the ego-consciousness at about the ninth year of age. It comes back in a more spiritual form, whereas in the second or third year of life it has more of a soul character. This is only one of the events which comes back in a striking manner. The same observation can be made for less significant events.

Indeed, my dear friends, it will become urgently necessary for the future of human evolution to pay attention to these intimate things in the life of Man. An insight into such things must gradually become part of general culture. The culture and education of mankind change from epoch to epoch. We today, for example, are quite unhappy if at ten years old our children cannot read or do sums. The Romans were not so at all; they were unhappy if a child of ten did not yet know the twelve tables of the law. We for our part do not put ourselves to great trouble to make our children acquainted with the terms of the law. Our children's minds would be in a sorry plight if we did! What is thought necessary for people generally to be aware of, changes from age to age; and today we stand at the starting point of a time when the very evolution of the earth and mankind requires that these more intimate connections of Man's life of soul shall be generally recognised. Man will have to come to the point of knowing himself more exactly than has been held to be necessary hitherto. Otherwise these things will work back upon the whole disposition of human life in a most unfavourable way.

Because we do not know that something which stirs us deeply has such an origin, it does not by any means follow that nothing of the kind takes place in our life of soul. The events come back; they exercise their influence upon our life of soul. We cannot account for them. We do not attempt to bring them into our consciousness. The result is that many people today suffer a great deal from conditions of soul which they simply accept, while of course having no idea that they are to be referred to earlier experiences. Whatever concerns our feelings always comes back in some form or other. You will probably remember the typical instance I have often given. If we teach a child to pray—if, that is, we teach him to develop a prayerful mood and feeling, the effect of it will swing back into his life after many years. It swings back in the interval, but then swings out again further, and only later, after a very long time, does the feeling of prayer come back and manifest in a mood of blessing. As I have often said: No-one will be able in old age to bestow blessing upon others, merely from his presence, from the imponderable elements in his nature, if in childhood he has not learned to pray. Prayer turns into the power to bless. That is how things come back in life. And it is becoming imperative that men should understand these things.

The truth is that men's failure to comprehend these things is the cause of their inability to perceive the great significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. What meaning can it have for people who are caught in the toils of present day education when they hear it said: ‘After Christ had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, He united Himself with the life of earthly humanity?’ People are not ready to form any idea of their reciprocal relation to the very realm of life wherein the Christ is to be found. The influence of the Christ Impulse is not very noticeable in the concept-forming activity of our heads. As soon, however, as we look down into the unconscious, as soon as we turn our gaze downwards into the sphere of feeling and into the sphere of willing, then we live, first of all, in the sphere of elemental beings; but this sphere is interwoven for us with the Christ Impulse. By way of our rhythmic system—that is, by way of our feelings—we dive down into the realm with which the Christ has united Himself. There we come to the place where the Christ is truly to be found, quite objectively, not merely through tradition or through subjective mysticism.

Moreover, we are living now in an epoch when the events that come from this place, in the way I have just explained, are coming to have great objective significance for the life of Man. For they are beginning to exercise an unconscious influence on men's decisions, upon all that men do; and this is true, even if they struggle against it. If only we are willing to enter into this matter and understand it, we shall be able to experience the influence consciously and to reckon with it; and then we shall be able to call on the spiritual worlds around us to aid us and to work with us.

An external observation will suffice to show that in this matter we are standing at a turning-point in human evolution. I need only refer you to one fact of which I have often spoken from one or another point of view. If we look at the accustomed treatment of history, we shall see that it has not yet reached an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just recall the history of the world as it is usually set before us. A description is given of the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms, of the ancient Persian and Egyptian kingdoms and of Greece and Rome, and then perhaps mention is made that the Mystery of Golgotha took place, and after that follows an account of the migrations of peoples, and so on. Some historians then carry the story up to the French Revolution or to Poincare; others to the downfall of the Hohenzollerns, and so forth. But in all this fable convenue you will find no mention of the continued working of the Christ Impulse. From the point of view of history as conceived today, it is just as though the Christ Impulse had been simply struck out. It is not there.

It is remarkable how, for example, an historian such as Ranke, who was a Christian and had a true appreciation of the Christ Impulse from a subjective aspect, simply cannot bring the Christ Event into his history. He does not know what to make of it. It plays no part in his conception of history. We may truly say that for Man's knowledge of the spirit, as manifested in history, Christianity is not yet there. It is our anthroposophical spiritual science which for the first time treats history in such a way as to reckon quite positively with the necessity that in the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch the event of Golgotha should break in upon the course of historical evolution. This event is placed at the very centre of our picture of the history of Man. Yes, and we go further. Not only do we receive the event of Golgotha into our picture of the history of Man, we portray cosmic evolution also, so that the Mystery of Golgotha has place within it.

If you will study my Outline of Occult Science, you will find that we do not speak there merely of eclipses of the sun or eclipses of the moon or of explosions or eruptions in the cosmos, but we speak of the Christ Event as a cosmic event. Strange to say, while the so-called historians can find no possible way of including the Christ Event in the progress of Man, the official representatives of religion are infuriated when they hear that some kind of anthroposophical spiritual science has entered the field and speaks of the Christ Event as a cosmic event. When they hear this, they treat it as a terrible outrage. Thus you can see how little readiness there is on the part of the Churches to meet the requirements of our time, for it is essential that the Christ Event should be brought into connection with the great events of the universe.

It must be said that even theologians today often speak of the Christ just as they may speak of any other divine Being. They speak of Him very much as the Hebrews of old or the Jews today speak of their Jahve. I told you a few days ago how one could take Harnack's book, The Essence of Christianity, and substitute for the name of Christ, wherever he uses it, the general name of God, and this without altering the sense, for Harnack has no glimmering of the specific nature of Christianity. His book is page for page a description of the very opposite of the essence of Christianity. It does not treat of Christianity at all; it treats of a general Jahve teaching.

It is important to point out these things, for they are deeply connected with the necessary demands of our time. It is no vague awareness of the presence of an abstract spiritual world that is needed: the evolution of human culture requires that Man should bring into it a consciousness of the actual spiritual world in which we live with all that we feel and will and do, and out of which we raise ourselves only in so far as we think. We emerge from it only with our heads, so to speak. Indeed, an entirely new kind of world-picture is justified when the endeavour is made to permeate all our feeling and willing and doing with the Christ Impulse. Our modern astronomy and our theory of evolution have been able to develop so entirely along the lines of abstract formulae solely because the Christ Impulse has not taken hold of men inwardly, but has remained a tradition. Even where it has taken hold of men subjectively, their inner experiences have not been at the same time objective world experiences—that is, experiences where we feel an interplay between ourselves and all that is happening spiritually around us.

Here and there one sees people beginning to be very keenly aware of the need for a new impulse in the evolution of humanity. But it is with the greatest difficulty that they come to the point of resolving to take hold of the life of the spirit in its actuality. When people speak of the spirit, they always have more or less a desire to keep within the abstract.

Even the consciousness of how we stand in relation to our thoughts must change in a certain way. For, as I have repeatedly pointed out, anthroposophical spiritual science is brought forward at this present time in fulfillment of a definite purpose. It is not the result of a wish to promote enthusiasm for some sort of ideal. It springs from an insight into Man's needs at the present time. And we must again at this point relate the needs of the present day to certain powers of the soul that were present in earlier ages, when Man had a closer connection with his spiritual environment. For in earlier times the conditions of Man's life of soul were quite different.

As I have often explained to you, we cannot look for any further development of Man from sources outside himself. The impulses for the progress of human evolution must in future be called forth from within; they must proceed from our connection with the spiritual world, and we must not blind ourselves to the fact that unless something is added by our own exertion to the experiences of life, these will tend increasingly to become experiences of decline. We find ourselves already in the descending evolution of the earth, and as human beings we must lift ourselves up by our own efforts if we are to transcend the earth-evolution, for we can emerge beyond it only through our connection with the spiritual world. It is our strivings in the direction of knowledge that we shall have to feel as a power within us, enabling humanity to pass over into future stages of evolution, when the Earth dies away, even as we pass on to further stages of evolution when our body dies away and we go through the gate of death.

We pass as individual human beings through the gate of death into the spiritual world; the body dies away beneath us. So will it be one day for mankind as a whole. Mankind will evolve over into the Jupiter existence. The Earth will become a corpse. We are even now in the dying stage of its evolution. The individual human being gets wrinkles and grey hairs. For the geologist who knows how to observe correctly, the Earth bears upon her today the unmistakable signs of old age; she is dying away beneath our feet. The spiritual quest we are engaged upon today is working counter to the ageing of the Earth. Awareness of this fact must permeate our consciousness.

Earlier ages spoke from a different point of view of the close relation between their Mystery knowledge and physical health and healing. This is a truth that must now begin once more to find its way into human consciousness. All striving for knowledge must give rise to the thought: I am doing something to promote the further evolution of the whole of mankind. We shall obviously never come to this consciousness as long as we do not pay attention to the actual process that goes on around us in the way I have described. For until we recognise this, we are bound to regard everything we feel and will and do as our personal affair. We shall have no idea that it is something which takes its course outside us, as well as within.

It will be necessary also for the more exact branches of human knowledge to come to meet this extension of our thought and understanding of the world. And here allow me to refer to something that may perhaps not be fully intelligible to everyone.

The more exact domains of knowledge are by no means yet at their zenith—far from it! For example, you can find today in the exact sciences the most impossible ideas. I will select just one, which may perhaps be generally intelligible. People have usually the following trivial picture: out there somewhere is the sun, and from the sun light goes out in all directions, just as from any other source of light. And you will find that wherever people follow this diffusion of light with mathematical ideas, they will say: You see, the light spreads out and out into the infinite, and then—why then it somehow or other disappears; it gradually weakens and is lost. But this is not so. Everything that spreads out or is diffused in this way reaches a boundary, and from this boundary it swings back again; it returns to its source in a changed form. The sunlight does not go out into the infinite, but swings back on itself—not indeed as light, but as something else. None the less, it does return.

So it is in reality with every form of light. And so it is with every kind of activity. All activities and influences are subject to the law of elasticity. The elasticity in them always has its boundary or limit. And yet ideas such as I have described above are current in our so-called exact sciences; you will find them presented there today. If you were physicists, I would draw your attention to how people reckon with distance traversed and time. They call the velocity, usually denoted by ‘v’, a function of distance and time, and they arrive at the following equation: v = d/t

But, my dear friends, that is absolutely false. The velocity is not a resultant; the velocity is an elementary principle or quality that something, be it material or spiritual, bears within it. And this velocity we analyse; we split it up into distance and time. We abstract the two things out of it—space and time. Space and time, however, are not real things in themselves. Velocities, varying velocities, are real.

This observation I make for the benefit of physicists. They will understand me when I say that their theoretical knowledge of time rests in very shaky foundations. These theories would indeed not hold water if we were in a position to grasp the spiritual in its actuality.

That is the very thing required of us in the present Michael Age. It means that we must take full cognisance of the environment of Man; we must come to know the various elemental and higher beings in our environment as surely as we know of the air and water around us. These are the important things for us; and they must once again become a part of general education and culture, as they were in ancient times. People are not prepared to admit this. They will not admit that in human evolution changes occur as momentous as that which occurred, for example, at the turning-point in the middle of the 15th century. And yet it is quite possible to prove it from detailed facts.

Some Swede or Norwegian has recently written a book in which he gives many quotations from the alchemists. In particular he cites a passage where all manner of things are mentioned—mercury, antimony, and so on. And now our author, whom his book shows to be an excellent modern chemist, says he can make nothing of a certain recipe which is indicated by some alchemist. He cannot do so for the simple reason that, when a present-day chemist speaks of mercury or quicksilver, he means the external metal. But in the book from which he is quoting the words mean something quite different. They do not refer to the external metal at all, but to certain processes within the human organism, and they indicate a knowledge of the inner being of Man. They carry the sense they had for the alchemist. Certainly it is quite possible to read them as if one were reading the description of a laboratory experiment, carried out with retorts and the like—but then one gets no meaning out of it! One is bound to regard it all as nonsense. It has meaning, however, as soon as we know what was meant by the words antimony, mercury, and so forth in those times. They have, it is true, a certain application to the external minerals, but they refer paramountly to inner processes of human nature, for which one had other means of approach than those we have today. The relevant writings from before the 15th century have accordingly to be read with an understanding quite different from the way in which we approach scientific writings of later date.

Such things as these give opportunity to study even externally the far-reaching change that has occurred in Man's life of soul. For a long time now, indeed for hundreds of years, mankind has set no value on these things, but today we are living in an epoch when we must begin to place very great value on them.