The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the lectures which it has been my lot to deliver, I have often drawn attention to an observation which might be made in real life, and which shows the necessity of seeking everywhere below the surface of life's appearances, instead of stopping at first impressions. It runs somewhat as follows.—A man is walking along a river bank and, while still some way off, is seen to pitch headlong into the water. We approach and draw him out of the stream, only to find him dead; we notice a boulder at the point where he fell and conclude at first sight as a matter of course that he stumbled over the stone, fell into the river and was drowned. This conclusion might easily be accepted and handed down to posterity—but all the same it could be very wide of the mark. Closer inspection might reveal that the man had been struck by a heart-attack at the very moment of his coming up to the stone, and was already dead when he fell into the water. If the first conclusion had prevailed and no one had made it his business to find out what actually occurred, a false judgment would have found its way into history—the apparently logical conclusion that the man had met his death through falling into the water. Conclusions of this kind, implying to a greater or lesser degree a reversal of the truth, are quite customary in the world—customary even in scholarship and science, as I have often remarked.

For those who dedicate themselves heart and soul to our spiritual-scientific movement, it is necessary not only to learn from life, but incessantly to make the effort to learn the truth from life, to find out how it is that not only men but also the world of facts may quite naturally transmit untruth and deception. To learn from life must become the motto of all our efforts; otherwise the goals we want to reach through our Building¹ as well as in many other ways will be hard of attainment. Our aim is to play a vital part in the genesis of a world-era; a growth which may well be compared with the beginning of that era which sprang from a still more ancient existence of mankind—let us say the time to which Homer's epics refer. In fact, the entire configuration, artistic nature and spiritual essence of our Building attempts something similar to what was attempted during the happenings of that transitional period from a former age to a later one, as recounted by Homer. It is our wish to learn from life, and, what is more, to learn the truth from life.

There are so very many opportunities to learn from life, if we wee willing. Have we not had such an opportunity even in the last day or two? Are we not justified in making a start with such symptoms, particularly with one that has so deeply moved us? Consider for a moment!² On Wednesday evening last, many of our number either passed by the crossroads or were in the neighbourhood, saw the wagon overturned and lying there, came up to the lecture and were quite naturally, quite as a matter of course, aware of nothing more than that a cart had fallen over. For hours, that was the sole impression—but what was the truth of the matter? The truth was that an eloquent karma in the life of a human being was enacted; that this life so full of promise was in that moment karmically rounded off, having been required back in the worlds by the Spiritual Powers. For at certain times these Powers need uncompleted human lives, whose unexpended forces might have been applied to the physical plane, but have to be conserved for the spiritual worlds for the good of evolution. I would like to put it this way. For one who has saturated himself with spiritual science, it is a plainly evident fact that this particular human life may be regarded as one which the gods require for themselves; that the cart was guided to the spot in order that this karma might be worked out, and overturned in order to consummate the karma of this human life. The way in which this was brought home to us was heartrending, and rightly so. But we must also be capable of submerging ourselves in the ruling wisdom, even when it manifests, unnoticed at first, in something miraculous. From such an event we should learn to look more profoundly into the reality. And how indeed could we raise our thoughts more fittingly to that human life with which we are concerned, and how commemorate more solemnly its departure from earth, than by forthwith allowing ourselves to be instructed by the grave teaching of destiny which has come to us in these days.

Yet it is a human trait to forget only too promptly the lessons which life insistently offers us! It is on this account that we have to call to our aid the practice of meditation, the exercise of concentrated thinking, in order to essay any comprehension of the world at all adequate to spiritual science; we must strive continually towards this. And I would like to interpose this matter now, among the other considerations relative to our Building, because it will serve as an illustration for what is to follow concerning art. For let us not hold the implications of our Building to be less than a demand of history itself—down to its very details.

In order to recognise a fact of this kind in full earnest, it must be our concern to acquire the possibility, through spiritual science, of reforming our concepts and ideas, of winning through to better, loftier, more serious, more penetrating and profound concepts and ideas concerning life, than any we could acquire without spiritual science.

From this standpoint let us ask the downright question What then is history, and what is it that men so often understand by history? Is not what is so often regarded as history nothing more at bottom than the tale of the man who is walking along a river's bank, died from a heart attack, falls into the water, and of whom it is told that he died through drowning? Is not history very often derived from reports of this kind? Certainly, many historical accounts have no firmer foundation. Suppose someone had passed by the cross-roads between 8 and 9 o'clock last Wednesday evening and had had no opportunity of hearing anything about the shattering event which had taken place there: he could have known nothing, only that a cart had been overturned, and that is how he would report it. Many historical accounts are of this kind. The most important things lying beneath the fragments of information remain entirely concealed; they withdraw completely from what is customarily termed history. Sometimes possibly one can go further and say that external reports and documents actually hinder our recognition of the true course of history. That is more particularly so if—as happens in nearly every epoch—the documents present the matter one-sidedly and if there are no documents giving the other side, or if these are lost. You may call this an hypothesis but it is no hypothesis, for what is taught as history at the present time rests for the most part upon such documents as conceal rather than reveal the truth.

The question might occur at this point: How is any approach to the genesis of historical events to be won? In all sorts of ways spiritual science has shown us how, for it does not look to external documents but seeks to discern the impulses which play in from the spiritual worlds. Hence it naturally cannot describe the outward course of events as external history does, It recognises inward impulses everywhere. Moreover, the spiritual investigator must be bold enough, when tracing these impulses on the surface, to hold fast to them in the face of outer traditions. Courage with regard to the truth is essential, if we would take up our stand on the ground of spiritual science, The transition can be made by attempting to approach the secrets of historical “coming into being” otherwise than is usually done.

Consider all the extant 13th and 14th century documents about Italy, from which history is so fondly composed. The tableau, the picture, obtained by thus assembling history out of such documents brings one far less close to the truth one can get by studying Dante and Giotto, and allowing what they created out of their souls to work upon one. Consider also what remains of Scholasticism, of its thoughts, and try to reflect upon, to reproduce in yourself, what Dante, Giotto and Scholasticism severally created—you will get a truer picture of that epoch than is to be had from a collection of external documents. Or someone may set himself the task of studying the rebellion of the Protestant spirit of the North or of Mid-Europe against the Catholicism of the South. What can you not find in documents! Yet it is not a question of isolated facts, but of uniting one's whole soul with the active, ruling, weaving impulses at work. You come to know this rising up of the Protestant spirit against the Catholic spirit through a study of Rembrandt and the peculiar nature of his painting. Much could be brought forward in this way.

And so it comes about that historical documents are often more of a hindrance than a help. Perhaps the type of history bookworm who subsists upon documentary evidence would be elated by a pile of material on Homer's life, or Shakespeare's. From a certain point of view, however, one could say: Thank God there is no such evidence! We must only be wary not to exaggerate a truth of this kind, not to press it too far. We must indeed be grateful to history for leaving us no documents about Homer or Shakespeare. Yet something might here be maintained which is one-sidedly true—one sided, but true, for a one sided truth is nevertheless a truth. Someone might exclaim: How we must long for the time when no external documents about Goethe are available.

Indeed, with Goethe it is often not merely disturbing, but an actual hindrance, to know what he did, not only from day to day but sometimes even from hour to hour. How wonderful it would be to picture for oneself the experience undergone by the soul of a man who at a particular time of life spoke the fateful words:

“ I've studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,
And even, alas! Theology,
From end to end, with labour keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before.”

“Faust”, Part I,
(Tr. Bayard Taylor)

If one wished to find the answer oneself in the case of such men, one might well yearn for the time when all the Leweses, and so on, whatever their names may be, no longer tell us what Goethe did the livelong day in which this or that verse was set down. And what a hindrance in following the flight of Goethe's soul up to the time in which he inscribed these words:

“The sun-orb singe, in emulation
‘Mid brother spheres, his ancient round. . .”

What a hindrance it is that we are able to refer to the many volumes of his notebooks and correspondence, and to read how Goethe spent this period. This view is fully justified from one angle, but not from every angle; for although it is fully justified in the case of Homer, Shakespeare, and so on, it is one sided with regard to Goethe, since Goethe's own works include his “Truth and Poetry” (“Dichtung und Wahrheit”). An inherent trait of this personality is that something about it should be known, since Goethe felt constrained to make this personal confession in “Truth and Poetry”. Hence the time will never come when the poet of “Faust” will appear to humanity in the same light as the poet of the “Iliad” or the “Odyssey”. So we see that a truth brought home to us from one side only can never be given a general application; it bears solely on a particular, quite individual case.

Yet the matter must he grasped still more profoundly. Spiritual science tries to do this. By pointing out certain symptoms, I have repeatedly endeavoured to show that modern culture aspires towards spiritual science. In my Rätsel der Philosophie³ I have tried to show how this is particularly true of philosophy. In the second volume you will notice that the development of philosophy presses on towards what I have sketched in the concluding chapter as “Prospect of an Anthroposophy”. That is the direction taken by the whole book. Of course this could not have been done without some support from our Anthroposophical Society, for the outer world will probably make little of the inner structure of the book as yet.

I said that Goethe must be regarded differently from Homer. On the same grounds I would like to add: Do we then not come to know Homer? Could we get to know him by any better means than through his poems, although he lived not only hundreds but even thousands of years ago? Do we not get to know him far better in that way than we ever could from any documents? Yes, Homer's age was able to bring forth such works, through which the soul of Homer is laid bare. Countless examples could be given. I will mention one only one, however, which is connected with the deepest impulses of that turning-point during the Homeric age, much as we ourselves hope and long for in the change from the materialistic to the anthroposophical culture.

We know that in the first book of the Iliad we are told of the contrast between Agamemnon and Achilles: the voices of these two in front of Troy are vividly portrayed. We know further that the second book begins by telling us that the Greeks feel they have stood before Troy quite long enough, and are yearning to return to their homeland. We know, too, that Homer describes the events as if the Gods were constantly intervening as guiding divine-spiritual powers. The intervention of Zeus is described at the beginning of this second book. The Gods, like the Greeks below, are sleeping peacefully; so peacefully, indeed, that Herman. Grimm, in his witty way, suggests that the very snoring of the heroes, of the Gods and of the Greeks below, is plainly audible. Then the story continues:

Now all other gods and chariot-driving men slept all night long, only Zeus was not holden of sweet sleep; rather was he pondering in his heart how he should do honour to Achilles and destroy many beside the Achaians' ships And this design seemed to his mind the best, to wit, to send a baneful dream upon Agamemnon son of Atreus. So he spake, and uttered to him winged words: ‘Come now, thou baneful Dream, go to the Achaians' fleet ships, enter into the hut of Agamemnon son of Atreus, and tell him every word plainly as A charge thee Bid him call to arms the flowing-haired Achaians with al' speed, for that now he may take the wide-wayed city of the Trojans. For the immortals that dwell in the halls of Olympus are no longer divided in counsel, since Hera hath turned the minds of all by her beseeching, and over the Trojans sorrows hang.’

So spake he, and the Dream went his way when he had heard the charge. With speed he came to the Achaeans' fleet ships, and went to Agamemnon son of Atreus, and found him sleeping in his hut, and ambrosial slumber poured over him. So he stood over his head in seeming like unto the son of Neleus, even Nestor, whom most of all the elders Agamemnon honoured.”⁴

Zeus, then, sends the Dream down from Olympus to Agamemnon. He gives the Dream a commission, The Dream descends to Agamemnon, approaching him in the guise of Nestor, who we have just learned, is one of the heroes in the camp of the allies.

“In his likeness spake to him the heavenly Dream: ‘Sleepest thou, son of wise Atreus tamer of horses? To sleep all night through beseemth not one that is a counsellor, to whom peoples are entrusted and so many cares belong. But now hearken straightway to me, for I am a messenger to thee from Zeus, who though he be afar yet hath great care for thee and pity. He biddeth thee call to arms the flowing-haired Achaians with all speed, for that now thou mayest take the wide-wayed city of the Trojans. For the immortals that dwell in the halls of Olympus are no longer divided in counsel, since Hera hath turned the minds of all by her beseeching, and over the Trojans sorrows hang by the will of Zeus. But do thou keep this in thy heart, nor let forgetfulness come upon thee when honeyed sleep shall leave thee.’ ”

This, then, is what takes place. Zeus, the presiding genius in the events, sends a Dream to Agamemnon in order that he should bestir himself to fresh action. The Dream appears in the likeness of Nestor, a man who is one of the band of heroes among whom Agamemnon is numbered. The figure of Nestor, whose physical appearance is well-known to Agamemnon, confronts him and tells him in the Dream what he should do. We are further told that Agamemnon convenes the elders before he calls an assembly of the people. And to the elders he recounts the Dream just as it had appeared to him:

“Hearken, my friends. A dream from heaven came to me in my sleep through the ambrosial night, and chiefly to goodly Nestor was very like in shape and bulk and stature. And it stood over my head and charged me saying: ‘Sleepest thou, son of wise Atreus tamer of horses?’ ”

(Atreus' son then tells the elders what the Dream had said. None of the elders stands up excepting Nestor alone, the real Nestor, who utters the words:)

“My friends, captains and rulers of the Argives, had any other of the Achaians told us this dream we might deem it a false thing, and rather turn away there from; but now he hath seen it who of all Achaians avoweth himself far greatest. So come, let us call to arms as we may the sons of the Achaians ...”

Do we not gaze unfathomably deep into Homer's soul, when we know—are able to know, to perceive, by means of spiritual science—that he can recount an episode of this kind? Have we not described how what we experience in the spiritual world clothes itself in pictures, and how we have first to interpret the pictures, how we should not permit ourselves to be misled by them? Homer spoke at a time when the present clairvoyance did not yet exist; at a time, rather, when the old form of clairvoyance had just been lost. And in Agamemnon he wanted to portray a man who is still able to experience the old atavistic clairvoyance in certain episodes of life. As a military commander he is still led to his decisions through the old clairvoyance, through dreams. We know what Homer knows and believes and how he regards the men he writes about; and suddenly, in pondering on what is described in this passage, we see that the human soul stands here at the turning-point of an era.

Yet that is not all. We do not only behold in Agamemnon, through Homer, a human soul into which clairvoyance still plays atavistically, nor do we only recognise the pertinent description of this clairvoyance; but the whole situation lies before us in a wonderfully magical light. Homer is humorous enough to show us expressly that it is Nestor who appeared to Agamemnon; the same Nestor who is subsequently present and himself holds forth, Now Nestor has spoken in favour of carrying out the Dream's instructions. The people assemble; but Agamemnon addresses them quite differently from what is implied in the Dream, saying that it is a woeful business, this lingering before Troy: “Let us flee with our ships to our dear native land”, he exclaims. So that the people, seized by the utmost eagerness, hasten to the ships for the journey home. Thus it rests finally with the persuasive arts of Odysseus to effect their about-turn and the beginning of the siege of Troy in real earnest. Here, in fact, we gaze into Homer's soul and discern in Agamemnon a lifelike portrayal of the transition from a man who is still led by the ancient clairvoyance to a man who decides everything out of his own conclusions. And so with an overwhelming sense of humour he shows us how Agamemnon speaks to the elders while under the influence of the Dream, and later how he speaks to the crowd, having bade farewell to the spiritual world and being subject now, to external impressions alone. Homer's way of depicting how Agamemnon outgrows the bygone age and is placed on his own feet, on the spearhead of his own ego, is wonderful indeed. And he further implies that from henceforward everything must undergo a like transition, so that men will act in accordance with what the reason brings to pass, with what we term the Intellectual or Mind Soul, which must be ascribed pre-eminently to the ancient Greeks. Because Agamemnon is only just entering the new era and behaves in a quite erratic and contradictory way, first in accordance with his clairvoyant dream and then out of his own ego, Homer has to call in Odysseus, a man who reaches his decisions solely under the influence of the Intellectual Soul. Wonderful is the way in which two epochs come up against each Other here, and wonderfully apposite is Homers picture of it!

Now I would ask you: Do we know Homer from a certain aspect when we know such a trait? Certainly we know him. And that is how we must come to know him if we want rightly to understand world-history—an impossible task if nothing but external documents were available. Many other traits could be brought forward, out of which the figure of Homer would emerge and stand truly before us. We can come close to him in this way, as we never could with a personality built up only from historical documents. Just think what is really known of ancient Greek history! Yet through traits of this kind we can approach Homer so closely that we get to know him to the very tip of his nose, one might say! At one time there were men who approached Homer in this way, until a crude type of philology came in and spoilt the picture. Thus does one know Socrates, as Plato and Xenophon depict him; so also Plato himself, Aristotle, Phidias. Their personalities can be rounded off in a spiritual sense. And if we thus hold these figures before our mind, a picture arises of Hellenism on the physical plane. To be sure, one must call in the aid of spiritual science. As the sun sheds its light over the landscape, so does spiritual science illumine for us the figure of Homer as he lived, and equally of Aeschylus, Socrates, Plato, Phidias.

Try for a moment to visualise Lycurgus, Solon or Alcibiades as a part of Greek history. How do they present themselves? As nothing but spectres. Whoever has any understanding of an Individuality in the true sense must recognise that in the framework of history they are just like spectres, for the features that history sets itself to portray are so abstract as to have a wholly spectral quality. Nor are the figures of later ages which have been deduced from external documents any less spectral in character.

I am saying all this in the hope that gradually—yes, even in things that people treat as so fixed and stable that the shocks of the present time are treated as mere foolishness—spiritual science in the hearts of our friends may acquire the strength and courage to bring home an understanding that a new impulse is trying to find its way into human evolution. But for this we shall need all our resources; one might say that we shall need the will to penetrate into the true connections that go to make up the world, and the power of judgment to perceive that the true connections do not lie merely on the surface. In this regard it is of surpassing importance that we should learn from life itself. For very often—to a far greater extent than one might at first suppose—error finds its way into the world through a superficial reliance on the external pattern of facts, which really can do nothing but conceal the truth, as we saw in the cases described. In the field of philosophy particularly, it is my hope that precisely through the mode of presentation in the second volume of the “Rätsel der Philosophie” many will find it possible to recognise the connection between the philosophic foundations of a world-conception, as presented in the “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” and the “Outline of Occult Science”. If on the one hand we are looking for a presentation of the spiritual worlds as this offers itself to clairvoyant knowledge, then on the other hand there must be added to the reception of this knowledge a penetration of the soul with the impulses which arise from the conviction, that man does not confront the truth directly in the world, but must first wrest the truth from it. The truth is accessible only to the man who strives, works, penetrates into things with his own powers; not to the man who is ready to accept the first appearances of things, which are only half real. Such a fact is easily uttered in this abstract form, but the soul is inclined over and over again to back away from accepting the deeper implications of what is said.

I believe many of those who have tried to enter into spiritual science with all the means now at their disposal will understand how in our Building, for example, the attempt has been made through the concord of the columns with their motifs and, with everything expressed in the forms, to enable the soul to grow beyond what is immediately before it. For a receptive person, beginning to experience what lies in the forms of the Building, the form itself would immediately disappear, and, through the language of the form, a way would open out into the spiritual, into the wide realms of space. Then the Building would have achieved its end. But in order to find this way, much has still to be learnt from life.

Is it not a remarkable Karma for all of us, gathered here for the purpose of our Building, to experience through a shattering event the relationship between Karma and apparently external accident? If we call to our aid all the anthroposophical endeavours now at our disposal, we can readily understand that human lives which are prematurely torn away—which have not undergone the cares and manifold coarsenings of life and pass on still undisturbed—are forces within the spiritual world which have a relationship to the whole of human life; which are there in order to work upon human life. I have often said that the earth is not merely a vale of woe to which man is banished from the higher worlds by way of punishment. The earth is here as a training-ground for human souls. If, however, a life lasts but a short while, if it has but a short time of training, then forces are left over which would otherwise have been used up in flowing down from the spiritual world and maintaining the physical body. Through spiritual science we do not become convinced only of the eternality of the soul and of its journey through the spiritual world, but we learn also to recognise what is permanent in the effect of a spiritual force by means of which a man is torn from the physical body like the boy who was torn from our midst on the physical plane. And we honour, we celebrate, his physical departure in a worthy manner if, in the manner indicated and in many other ways, we really learn, learn very much, from our recent experience, Through Anthroposophy, one learns to feel and to perceive from life itself.

• 1. The First Goetheanum, later destroyed by fire.
• 2. Note by translator: A seven-year old boy was smothered by an overturned horse-drawn removal van, quite unnoticed since darkness had already set in. The boy, who was in the habit of running an errand for his mother at this hour, normally went another way.
• 3. Riddles of Philosophy
• 4. The Iliad, Book II. (Macmillan, 1949)

The most important thing we must do here is to read the Apocalypse in the way it should be read today. Already for the reason that we must become fully conscious of what is guiding spiritual life today, since spiritual development is now taking place under the sign of the consciousness soul. Hence it will be a matter of orienting ourselves to what the Apocalypticer tells us and of absorbing it in a fully conscious way.

The communications of the Apocalypticer have meant nothing to ordinary priests so far, and at most they meant something to the highest initiates, although there have been ever fewer of them in recent times. Priests must now become aware of the real contents of the Apocalypse.

We pointed to the seven churches from a particular point of view, for the world is very complex and one can look at things from many different viewpoints; so that we can describe the community in Ephesus in the way that we did yesterday. We then find that the Christianity there developed out of certain heathen conditions.

However, we can also point out that much of the basic structure of the first post Atlantean epoch was contained in these impulses—in fact, to an even greater extent than it was contained in the later phases of Indian civilization. So that in a way one can look upon the Christianity which developed in Ephesus as a Christian continuation of the first world view and view of life after the Atlantean epoch, whereas the original Persian culture lived more in the second community—Smyrna—and passed over into Christianity.

Then again, Pergamos is described as a community which cultivated the third post Atlantean culture. If we let the message to Pergamos work upon us, we find a more or less clear reference to the words of Hermes, which lived in this cultural milieu.

Then in Thyatira we are referred to the fourth post Atlantean culture, in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place. If we let this important message work upon us, we are constantly reminded of the direct way in which the message of the Mystery of Golgotha worked.

And then comes the church in Sardis, which we discussed yesterday. I showed you that this church in Sardis was somewhat astrologically oriented, and that it was oriented towards astronomical work. Therewith this community bears a lot of the past in it—which of course every community does from a historical viewpoint. But precisely this community in Sardis also bears a lot of the future in it.

And now take what we're trying to bring into our spiritual view of the present. We are living in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. If one looks at Sardis' past one sees that there was still something germinal there which hadn't been taken to completion at the time when John wrote the Apocalypse. The whole tone of this fifth epistle is different. It points to the future. The future to which he pointed at that time, which is as it were germinally contained in Sardis is our future; it is the time in which we're living.

So the development of the successive post Atlantean periods is hidden in the developing Christian churches, and the same thing is indicated from another side in the seven seals.

We have another indication, as it were, of what the secret of the seven churches is in the seven seals. We will describe the other meaning of the seven seals later, but when the fourth seal is opened, it corresponds to a secret of the fourth post Atlantean epoch, for a pale horse appears, and there is talk about the death which has come into the world. This touches upon one of the most important secrets of the Apocalypse—at least, it is very important for our time. In a way, death really entered into humanity during the fourth Post Atlantean epoch. You should make this clear to yourselves. One finds out what human nature is if one contemplates something like this; one can really get to know it quite well.

If we go back to the first, second and third post Atlantean epochs we find that the way man felt about himself, and his whole frame of mind was different in these early times than it became later. Man had a distinct inner feeling that he was growing into his earthly abode. Even though this consciousness had dimmed considerably by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, men had a distinct memory in their ordinary consciousness that they had lived up in the spiritual world before their life on earth. In the first, second and third post Atlantean epochs, everyone knew that they had been a spiritual being before they had become a child. One doesn't find this, in external documents very much, but the fact is that people, took the continuation of their stay upon earth backwards into the spiritual world for granted. Human beings only began to feel that their life on earth was closed off by the two portals of conception or birth and death in the fourth post Atlantean epoch, which coincided with the Mystery of Golgotha.

This consciousness or attitude of soul first arose in the fourth post Atlantean epoch, so that this consciousness of being strictly enclosed by the boundaries of earthly life developed from about the eighth century before Christ up to the 15th century after the Mystery of Golgotha. A new consciousness is being prepared in the present epoch, but we're only at the beginning of it. Only about five centuries have elapsed since then, and this corresponds to about the third pre-Christian century with respect to the preparation of the fourth post Atlantean consciousness. The consciousness which they had then was quite different from the one they had when the fourth post Atlantean consciousness was fully developed. Likewise, most men today are not wearing the clothes of the new consciousness yet, but they are still wearing the consciousness of the fourth post Atlantean epoch. Our whole civilization tends to create this situation.

Just think of how much has been carried over from the fourth post Atlantean epoch and of how much people are living in the fourth post Atlantean epoch in a matter of fact or coquettish way. The fourth post Atlantean epoch is still working on in our entire high school education. Scholars who use Latin are still back in the fourth post Atlantean epoch. People in public life still think in the way that they thought in the fourth post Atlantean epoch. We haven't arrived at full humanity with respect to the development of our consciousness soul, as it were, in the fifth post Atlantean epoch. And this is why men of the present still think that their earth life is closed off by the two portals of birth and death.

The consciousness soul is being developed, but this development only becomes evident in people who have a special talent for it. I have met quite a few talented people like this during my lifetime; but one usually doesn't notice them. There is an awareness that a man with this fifth post Atlantean consciousness doesn't completely fit into the period between birth and death, that death plays into earthly life, that one really dies a little bit every day, that we're dying continuously all the time and that death exists. Some people are very much afraid of death, because they feel that it is undermining their ability to be human on earth. On the other hand, I have also known people who loved death because it always accompanied them, and they were really longing for it.

This is something which will arise evermore during the fifth post Atlantean epoch, namely, people will see death walking alongside them. To put it even more concretely: men will perceive an intimate fire process in themselves which is connected with the development of the consciousness soul. They will experience this development of waking consciousness like a kind of fire process which consumes them, especially at the moments when they pass over from sleeping to waking consciousness. The consciousness soul is a very spiritual thing, and spiritual things always consume material ones. The consciousness soul consumes material and etheric things in human beings through a kind of intimate fire process or transformation process.

This is something which men will perceive more and more in the course of this fifth post Atlantean epoch. Except that you shouldn't think that it's like a burning candle flame; one shouldn't think of it in such a physical way. Rather he will incorporate this proximity of death into his moral soul.

The situation with most people today is as follows. If you see how the good resolves and firm intentions which they have disappear in the next moment, hour, day or month, then in accordance with the prevailing, materialistic world view, one considers this to be something which simply occurs. But one will gradually begin to feel differently about this. One will begin to feel that a good intention which one was too weak to carry out weakens one's life and reduces one's moral value, and one will see that one becomes morally lighter and less significant in the universe thereby.

People today generally feel that what is present here is a weakness in their soul, and not something which works on in the universe. But this will change. Likewise, there will be certain intellectual qualities which people will increasingly feel are weakening them, as if a fire in their soul were consuming them. These phenomena are already here, and some of them exist on a large scale. But they are not being felt in an honest way.

There is a way to find one's way into the spiritual world where one goes step by step and where one also takes what is given in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and in other books into account; thereby one arrives at a harmony between spirit, soul and body. But through the way in which most people cultivate a spiritual life today without these exercises, namely, through the way in which people in various confessions pursue a religious life, the latter is active in them in such a manner that it reduces their moral value and makes them lighter.

These are things which people are becoming aware of more and more. People in this fifth post Atlantean epoch are changing a great deal. For it is a significant change if one feels that one's whole manhood is strengthened or weakened by what one is in one's soul. It's quite a change if one feels that destiny is not only a matter of circumstances which work upon one and which are present around one outside, but that it is something which makes one morally lighter or heavier. It's not as if one's physical body were protected against this, for one feels that one becomes lighter or heavier as a whole human being.

You see, this is the consciousness which is being prepared, and one can see externally and empirically that it is being prepared. The time is beginning today when the priesthood will have to think of these things, when the faithful are standing before them. For it's a question of dealing with what is rising in men's consciousness in such a way that a man is comforted and strengthened. These things are not fully conscious yet, and they are coming up together with all kinds of unrest, nervousness and disharmonious emotional contents.

You priests will find that it's becoming increasingly impossible to treat individual people in accordance with the general ideas which you have formed. Don't be offended by this, but in a certain sense clichés have been the decisive thing in the past and in many respects they still are today. If you ask what a priest did with someone who came to him with some kind of delusive ideas, one will hear that he tried to make him feel aware that he was a sinner, and that he did the same with a second case, and so on. Thus everything is pervaded by clichés.

I once went to three burials in one day, and I noticed that the same priest began each burial with the statement, “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so much higher are my thoughts than your thoughts.” Here we have another cliché, which was relatively justified in the fourth post Atlantean epoch. Like the other things that I mentioned, this has reached over into the fifth and it rules our thinking, whereas a finer observation shows that all things must be transformed in our cultural epoch. Priests must begin to be able to look into the hearts of other human beings again.

Very few people can do this today. Human beings know terribly little about other human beings today. For you see, if one reads the passage about the white raiment which people who have fulfilled the task of the fifth cultural epoch will have to wear, and if one does this with a certain reverence—because one can't really read the Apocalypse without reverence—one gets the impression that here it's a question of looking deeply into the special kind of consciousness which each human being has with the eye of a priest. It's a question of their becoming acquainted with the people who appear before them in the fifth post Atlantean age. We are being admonished to become acquainted with each human being in his soul garment, and not just in the clothes which he wears through what he is in the outer world. This admonishment of the Apocalypticer is addressed to our present time through this letter.

Today's priests must penetrate the souls of human beings as they momentarily disregard all the external things into which men are placed. Priests must really begin to look at human beings in the way I described, namely, in the way one must look at them if one wants to investigate their karma. The day before yesterday I said that if one wants to investigate someone's karma one has to immerse oneself in his soul and in the qualities which can come to expression in any profession and basically in any capacity, and one shouldn't look at people from the viewpoint of their vocation, social ties, and ability or non-ability. For one has to look at what a human being was in his past earth life. Now priests don't have to go quite that far, but they must begin to see through external things and to look at man's inner life and his purely human side, and at what gives each inner human being an individual constitution. It's really the case that if we read up to this Book of Revelation we feel that what is written in it is like a direct exhortation to present-day humanity. And if we read on we can get an even deeper impression.

Just consider the following. We're going through the fifth post Atlantean epoch; during this fifth post Atlantean age man is changing his consciousness in such a way that he sees through the work and activity of death itself. He will understand it. He will not learn to see through it in such a way that he knows how much longer he has to live; but he will see the working of death itself; he will have it as a constant companion. Of course he will have to have a soul content which will make this standing next to him of death seem natural, and this is something which will have to be created in the various spheres of life. If one's soul forces are constantly alert one will be able to have death next to one as a good friend and a constant companion.

You should realize that when you look out into your environment today, you are still seeing things like a man of the fourth post Atlantean epoch. You're basically looking at life which has death in it in every plant and rock, but you don't see the death, because you still don't see it in yourself. People will soon begin to see death all the time. This is what one will increasingly have to say to present-day men. People's whole perception will change as they see death more and more.

If one sees death one sees many things which are completely hidden in the phenomena. We see nature in a rather stable way today because we don't look into certain fine, intimate things in nature at all. We walk through the countryside, and we see signs which say that there is a lot of foot and mouth disease in this area. However, in reality something happened in the more intimate things above such a place—if one can see it—which can be compared with an ocean which is roiled by a storm or with a volcanic eruption. This is what will approach mankind in the sixth post Atlantean epoch.

Today people can observe the eruption of a Vesuvius or a great earthquake by means of a seismograph, but because they don't see death yet they don't see the tensions in the etheric which become manifest in all kinds of things, such as when a significant genius lives somewhere or is born there. People can see the tremendous working and weaving of the spirit behind the planets and stars and their configurations just as little; the latter are just an external manifestation of the former.

People will see all of this in a certain way during the sixth post Atlantean epoch. The sun and the stars and planets in their present form will have fallen down from the heavens. One will see the working and weaving of spirit where the materially abstract stars shine today. Thus the way that men see themselves will change a great deal in the course of the fifth post Atlantean age and the way they see the whole world around them will change greatly in the course of the sixth. For example, don't think that an initiate sees the world like a non-initiate does. Something similar applies to successive stages of consciousness. Human beings see the world differently in successive epochs.

The fact that we are living at a time when man and the way the world looks are being transformed is indicated in a number of ways but also by the fact that there is a relative uniformity in the description of the first four letters. The first letter is unsealed and a horse appears, a white horse. The second letter is unsealed and a red horse appears, but it's a horse. The third letter is unsealed and a black horse appears, but it's a horse. The fourth letter is unsealed and a pale horse appears, but again it is a horse.

The fifth letter is unsealed and no horse appears; there is no mention of horses anymore. The decisive thing here is indicated in an entirely different way. If we go on reading the letters, we find that a very important transformation which is occurring during our age is pointed to in this way.

We can only say that we must prepare ourselves to become the new, transformed community of Sardis. This new and transformed community in Sardis must realize that it's rather trivial to know plants, animals and rocks, for one only really knows these things if one finds the activities of the stars and planets in every stone and in every plant. The stars must fall down from heaven in a spiritual way. One can already begin to perceive this.

I would just like to give a particular example of this. People accept the outer forms of such things. One doesn't pay much attention to the way in which something like this is present in the whole spiritual evolution of mankind. Each person can only do something at the place where he stands. Before I went on my last trip to England, the following thing happened. You may know that when I'm here I give the people who are working on our building one or two hours a week during their working time, where I talk to them about scientific and spiritual things. I let the workers give me the themes, and they really like to do this. The workers like it if they can choose the themes. Now they wanted to know about things which are possible in present-day spiritual life. This is one of the things which priests should really understand.

When I walked into the classroom before I went on my trip to England, a worker had a prepared question: Why is it that only certain rocks and plants have an odor? Where does the fragrance of flowers come from? Now these workers were educated by the lectures which have been given for years to such an extent that they're not particularly interested in chemical explanations, where one tells them that one has this or that substance which is giving off this or that aroma, along the lines of explanations which tell one that destitution comes from poverty. The workers want real explanations.

Now you see, I had to tell them the following. I will briefly repeat what I explained to them for about an hour. Things which smell refer us to our sense organs; we perceive the aroma through our organ of smell. But let's ask ourselves whether we have developed our organ of smell to the point where we can compete with a police dog. You will have to admit that we can't. On the contrary, you will have to admit that man has a rather crude organ of smell and that one runs into more sensitive organs of smell if one goes down to certain lower forms in nature.

One can see this from the following. Take a dog, which has this sensitive organ of smell, so that it can become a police, dog. You will see that it has a receded forehead which follows the olfactory nerves that bear smells into its system. All of this is puffed up into a forehead in us; our intellectual apparatus and especially our ability to recognize things is a transformed organ of smell. This explains why we find more sensitive organs of perception when we descend to lower creatures.

Now spiritual science teaches us that the fragrant flowers of a large number of plants are really organs of smell; they're vegetable organs of smell which are extraordinarily sensitive. And what do they smell? They smell the omnipresent, world's aroma. The worldly smell which is emitted by Venus is different from the ones which are given off by Mars or Saturn. For instance, violet smells are the aromatic echo of the cosmic smell which violets perceive. Such pleasant smelling plants perceive the elements of the world's smell which come from Venus, Mercury and Mars. Stinky asafetida smells Saturn odors and reproduces them.

Here one has to explain to people how the stars fall down, because they want to know this; for the things of the world are basically nothing else than what they give out or radiate down. If one wants to talk about things in a realistic way, one has to say that the stars are really falling down already, because they are in the plants. Plants are aromatic and they are also olfactory organs. This morning I let the workers give me some more questions. One of the questions was: If what was said about smells is correct and plants are sensitive organs of smell, where do plant colors come from?

I had to explain that although plant aromas come from the planets, plant colors come from the power of the sun. I gave an example to make this seem plausible. However, one of the workers wasn't entirely satisfied with this answer, and he said: this doesn't explain why rocks have colors; I can understand why plants have colors, for if there's a plant growing in the cellar where there's no sunlight, it has a form which has an aroma, because the world's aroma passes through the walls of the cellar; but the sun doesn't shine through the walls and so plants remain pale or even white; but how do rocks become colored? Then I had explain[ed] that we have the course of the day, with a revolution with respect to the sun in hours, and we have the course of the year which brings about the seasons during which the sun goes up towards the zenith and back down again; but we also have something else. I had to explain the Platonic year, and I explained that although the sun is now in Pisces at the vernal equinox it was previously in Aries, Taurus and Gemini, and that it takes 25.920 years for it to go all the way around. So that the sun is connected with the course of a day, the course of a year and the course of a world year; and whereas plants get their colors from the sun in the course of a year, rocks get their colors in the course of a world year.

The power which the sun develops in its movement through a Platonic year lives in the colors of green emeralds, wine yellow topaz and red rubies. And so you see that if one begins to speak about the spiritual world people are no longer satisfied if one explains their questions about earthly things with the trivialities which come out of our laboratories and dissecting rooms. They want to know things, and they feel very satisfied if they know them in a Sardisian way or in a way where one brings in the stars and planets and their activities. After all, by placing Sardis into the present time, one is doing the same thing that the Apocalypse is doing.

You see, this is an example, but on the other hand, one has to begin to carry this sensing of the stars and their beings into the present People will have to begin to see that the Christ is a sun being again. But this is what they fight most of all. But if I tell you such things, namely, if I tell you that our modern, fifth post Atlantean epoch must be the resurrected Sardis, in the way that this is concisely and wonderfully described in the fifth community and in the fifth seal, when these things are unsealed, if I say this to you, you will feel that one of our tasks is to develop this particular understanding of the Apocalypse today, namely, to be able to understand the tasks which are demanding our heartfelt attention every day. It doesn't do any good to merely interpret the Apocalypse today. We must put the Apocalypse into practice in everything we do, otherwise we might just as well forget about it. A desire to interpret it in order to satisfy one's curiosity doesn't have much value.

Thus I have tried to show you the second thing which belongs to a reading of the Apocalypse. Yesterday I tried to indicate the formal aspect to you; today I tried to indicate that it takes will power to read it. But this is only natural. For apocalypses have always arisen through inspirations of the will, and here we touch upon a really apocalyptic point, because it is an apocalyptic point which is full of life.

We already have people today who are being trained in an apocalyptic way; but they are being apocalyptically trained so that they receive their training of the will in a way which is oriented specifically towards the Roman catholic church; these are the Jesuits. There is something very apocalyptic about the Jesuits' training and exercises. The Jesuits' exercises involve a training of the will, which always underlies the perception of apocalyptic things. Hence anyone who takes a real priesthood in the sense of a Christian renewal seriously today has to keep this training of the Jesuits in mind.

He must understand the Apocalypse so that he can find the right impulse for his will in it, whereas although the impulse for the will which was given by Ignatius of Loyola was wonderful, it was very one-sided, and it has become Ahrimanically hardened today. For Ignatius of Loyola is a good example of how wrongly we can look at the world if we don't gain knowledge of it in a spiritual scientific way.

People ascribe the present development of the Jesuits to Ignatius of Loyola. But it no longer has anything to do with him. Ignatius of Loyola reincarnated a long time ago, and of course he has separated himself from the movement completely, for he lived as Emanuel Swedenborg; and so the Jesuitic movement has become completely Ahrimanic since then. It is no longer connected with Ignatius and it is active in an Ahrimanic way. Here you have a kind of shadowy counter image of what you must train yourself to do, when you take apocalyptic things into your ego in the way I mentioned, so that your ego becomes' a sum of active forces which are also apocalyptic.

Ladies and gentlemen present!

In the last two lectures I took the liberty of presenting Heraclitus as the representative of the deepest knowledge, the deepest wisdom, as it was at home in ancient Greece up to the fifth and sixth centuries. And I tried to present what has been handed down to us from him, that wisdom which Aristotle says is not something to be absorbed intellectually, and that within the circle in which this wisdom was cultivated, people allowed themselves to be initiated, that they participated in this experience with their own personal involvement. The purpose of this contemplation of Heraclitus was to show how far a single personality, such as Heraclitus, can come, and how, on the other hand, the teachings of such a personality lead into the deepest spiritual life, against the background of which Heraclitus also had his views.

Now I would like to add, as it were to supplement and confirm what I have said, some sayings, some doctrines of Heraclitus which show us quite clearly how directly from these views - as I took the liberty of developing last time - the whole essence of Heraclitus' world view flowed from the relationships of the external world to human consciousness itself.

I have shown that the essence of the Mysteries consisted first of all in the fact that all the views which the great masses had of the origin and nature of the external world are submerged in that view of man which the man of everyday life takes of his ego; that everything appears in a higher light, that man no longer seeks the light outside in space,

but within himself, that therefore the highest knowledge is no longer external knowledge of the world, but his own self-knowledge, that this "know thyself", which runs through Greek wisdom, is not something secondary, but the foundation stone of all Greek wisdom. Knowledge of God can be found in self-knowledge: That, after all, is the essence of the mystery teachings. If we are ultimately led back to our own self, to the soul as that which we find when we look within ourselves; if it is true that - as in the image of Sais - we find nothing but the human self, then this human self, which [man] believes to be enclosed in his bodily life between birth and death, is not a finite self, but this seemingly finite self, this enclosed self expands into the whole universe, so that it ultimately becomes nothing other than the self.

This is the deeper meaning underlying the mysteries. The cosmologies, the doctrines of the origin of the world, represent nothing other than the human being who is able to develop to the highest rungs of consciousness. If the self really is the ultimate being of the world, then one must say that this self has actually been present in what is called world creation, world development. That which constitutes the human being is not merely a reflection of the real, as is assumed in the theory of knowledge. It is assumed that the being of the world is complete and that the human being is nothing other than a mere mirror image. This [mirror image] ceases immediately when this self no longer appears as an individual being, but as a primordial being that has always been present in the whole process. It [is] therefore what man himself is.

Any external fact appears to the senses in a very specific way. Man's belief clings to sense knowledge. This [splits into individual events, into the individual beings] in space and in time. Now man takes this whole event out of time and immerses it in the fire of his consciousness. Only then does it become what it is in its

nature, so that the process of cognition is not merely something that runs alongside the world process, but something that is within it, that is there before it. Cognition is therefore not a repetition of the world process, but a deepening back into the primordial being of the world, into that which actually underlies the world. So whoever is convinced that he is not merely absorbing, but rather pouring out his own essence, connecting with the essence outside, recognizes himself in the world [...]. But man can only achieve this if he climbs up the various rungs [of spiritual development]. That Heraclitus saw in knowledge nothing other than the highest flowering that the world can bring forth, that he did not regard it as something that could also remain absent, emerges from what has come down to us from him. Knowledge appears to us [normally] as something that has been added to the whole world process by chance. That is not how it appears to Heraclitus. For him, the cognizing human being was the truly existing human being; and when we understand this, Heraclitus' worldview will become completely clear to us.

Until Pfleiderer, his worldview was not clearly recognized because man himself is in a constant state of flux. Pfleiderer could not think otherwise than that Heraclitus was caught up in a contradiction. He regarded the rising and falling, the coming and going, which Heraclitus imagined under the image of fire, as the eternal flow of things. The human ego, the human soul, is woven into the cosmic world process. And yet, says Pfleiderer, it is as if Heraclitus assumed an eternal soul. On the one hand we have the highest world principle, the primordial being, which completely excludes individuality, and on the other hand we have the human being, who nevertheless has a certain immortality. On the one hand we have the great world process in the continuous coming and going, and on the other hand the individual self, which is enclosed between birth and death, but can expand into the divine. The mystic, the initiate, differed from the ordinary person precisely in that the

observation of the world and the observation of one's own self was a contradiction for the latter and not for him. The essence of the Mysteries consisted precisely in the fact that through life within the Mystery world this contradiction ceased to be a contradiction. People were supposed to experience something that made the deep disharmony of the world disappear. The initiation, the participation in the Mysteries, was precisely the way to make the contradiction that clings to the ordinary view of things disappear. Thus for the mystics, for those who allowed themselves to be initiated, the ultimate goal was this: to no longer view in this way that which brings the greatest fear to ordinary people, because it apparently makes the physical sense world, the up and down world, the eternally coming events and deeds disappear as if into nothingness, this phenomenon of death. That was the goal of the mystic. The myst should be brought to the point of learning to understand this most terrible event not as that terrible event, but as a symbol of the deepest realization. So what was the most terrible, the most horrible thing for the ordinary person, he should see as an experience. That is why the god of death, Hades, was also the god of life, Dionysus. Death as a symbol, not as a fact, should be presented to the mystics. This is what hovers over all of Heraclitus' sayings, and they can only be understood from this point of view.

When Heraclitus says: corpses are to be regarded as ordinary things, nothing is to be given to the corpse - this takes you much deeper into the Heraclitean view. In Greek there is a certain temptation to compare the human body with the burial mound, because such a comparison can be brought about by a simple play on words. Som" means "body" and "sema" means "burial mound". This play on words was not only used by Heraclitus, but by all those who had anything to do with Greek wisdom. This word leads us much deeper into the matter. Heraclitus is thoroughly imbued with the view, which runs through the whole of Greek mysticism, that what the wise man calls "soul" rests in the body like the body in the burial mound. With an almost sublime word he says that the gods live that which for the ordinary being is death. The immortals live the death of mortals.

Here, in a saying of Heraclitus, we have another form of ordinary understanding, of ordinary Greek wisdom, which consists in seeing death as a symbol, not as a fact, because all the individual things of the external world lose the meaning they have for the everyday man, submerge into the spiritual world and become something completely different there. The things in their ordinary meaning are killed, die under the hand of the recognizing human being. They appear in their infinite, eternal meaning. That which the ordinary man calls life, that which for him is the most fruitful, the real, ceases to be the real. Thus that which the ordinary man calls life, that which the man calls sensuous reality, can be nothing other than that which first gains life and first causes the sensuous to die. That is why death becomes a symbol for this higher view. Now for Heraclitus another view is connected with this, with which he, I would like to say, at the same time also shows in himself what is the basic conviction of all mysticism, namely that of the infinity of knowledge. Those who cling to the ordinary wisdom of the day usually come to the conclusion that we cannot go beyond the sensual. We cannot penetrate into the fundamental being, into the "thing in itself", says [Kant]. Only a single real look into Heraclitus' basic view can show us that Heraclitus was much further along on this point than the followers of Kant's philosophy around the year 1900. Heraclitus is convinced that he who is really able to walk the path will achieve a deep inner experience as a result, which we also find again in the German mystics and especially in Tauler, that if we penetrate into the very essence of the soul, if we immerse ourselves completely in it, we will come to no limits. There are no limits to knowledge. The external things are closed.

We can only penetrate them according to our senses. However, at a certain depth of our self-knowledge, we can step out to even greater depths. There are no limits to knowledge, because self-knowledge cannot stand still. A God who knew everything, who knew everything, would be an obstacle for the mystic. Therefore, there cannot be an all-knowing and all-wise God. For the mystics, there must be something unfinished, there must be the possibility of becoming even more divine and ever more divine, of ascending to ever higher levels of perfection, of deepening more and more.

In this way, Heraclitus expands the world in the direction of self-knowledge to an infinite depth. This saves Heraclitus from any accusation that he said: "I know everything." - For he was also convinced of the impossibility of ever reaching a limit. This shows that Heraclitus also had the true, great, genuine humility that is the consequence of true, genuine self-knowledge, which can never be something perfect and complete. Thus we see that [there is] never despair of knowledge on the path that constitutes the fundamental nature of all mystical contemplation, but the true, genuine confidence that ever new, ever deeper knowledge can be achieved through continuous deepening. This is what underlies Heraclitus' worldview. And this conviction that comes over a person when he realizes this through continuous deepening into his inner being is what Heraclitus describes by saying that the soul strives more and more to come out of the wet into the dry. The wiser a soul is, the more it moves away from the wet, the drier it is. Wisdom passes through it like lightning.

This shows that Heraclitus had arrived at the point where all external views of the world are remelted in the fire of knowledge, where they begin a higher life. Now what initially appears to us as a contradiction dissolves into a higher harmony. The contradiction that exists [on the one hand] between the cosmological worldview, which sees the world before us in

steady coming and going, in a great world harmony, and [on the other hand] the [individual] human being, which is clamped between birth and death, and which then forms an encroachment into the world of man, is resolved by the fact that the [individual] being is only a truth for the lower levels of cognition and that this ceases for the higher [cognition]. [It also ceases] within the temporal life between birth and death, [when] the light of the eternal [shines] into the temporal life, so that it appears as one and the same with the temporal. When [in this way] individual human life appears as equivalent, as synonymous [with the eternal], then the contradiction ceases. This happens because Heraclitus, on the one hand, has a great harmony and, on the other, dissolves the individual entities as if into an immortal entity, as if into an eternal entity. To recognize is to live, and to live is to overcome a contradiction that exists from the beginning. Whoever believes that he can resolve a contradiction by spintizing the intellect will not get beyond the contradiction, will not be able to grasp the essence of mystical views. The mystic knows that there must first be a contradiction and that life consists in overcoming the contradiction in one's own life. This is what Heraclitus wanted to say with his various scattered sayings. But if we have a background in the Mysteries, we can combine these sayings and then get a coherent world view that shows us how this personality shines far into modern times, and that we can gain a great deal if we immerse ourselves in the philosophy of this wonderful personality, if we raise ourselves up by it.

Now a few words about the Greek mystery teaching after we have gone through Heraclitus, because I have to deal with the Orphic teaching together with the Pythagorean school, which spread at about the same time as the Orphic teaching had reached its height. This Orphic teaching also developed a mysticism, and this appears to us next to the

mysticism of the Pythagoreans like a light next to another light. [We have the Orphics on the one side and the Pythagoreans on the other. We get to know the confluence of these two currents about two hundred years later in the Platonic world views. In this, the two currents flow together.

There suddenly appears to us a higher balance between Pythagorean and Orphic mysticism. Greek mysticism had the goal of transforming the most terrible event, death as a fact [into a] symbol for knowledge that continues to deepen. This was only possible if the mystics were introduced step by step, on the higher levels of knowledge. They were led very slowly. The Pythagoreans also practiced slow guidance. It had to be this way because it was not a matter of logical penetration, but of a lively passage through the individual stages of knowledge.

When we look at the content of [their] worldview, the Orphics appear to us to be on a higher level of scientific development than what is contained in the Greek belief in the gods. When we consider the cosmogony of the Orphics, it initially appears to us as a description of external processes. It appears to us as nothing more than mythology translated into scientific language.

So in the profound Orphic world view we have given a world view which first of all regards time as that which existed in the beginning. So it was time from which everything has its origin. From time sprang the ether and chaos. The ether is roughly what we know from Heraclitus as fire. Chaos is the entire abundance and diversity of the material world.

From the connection of chaos with the ether, i.e. the most unlimited and [the] most solid, becoming thus arises with chaos. Becoming presented under an image is the direct outflow of the most rigid. It presents itself as giving birth, as bringing forth. It arises from the fluid. Becoming from the

limited and unlimited. From the egg, Chaos first gave birth to a male-female being. This brought forth from itself a mere female. And from these two emerged the first of what we encounter in Greek mythology as Uranos and Gaea. Uranos and Gaea are swallowed up by [Kronos], so that Zeus in turn absorbs all the earlier world entities that I have just mentioned, [...] and revives them through himself.

We can only translate this world-creation process into inner processes of consciousness. Thus, with this description of external facts, we have what should initially be held against the mystic. We must realize that for the mystic, time, Kronos, [...] has become a vivid experience as an existing emptiness, as that which is not yet, but which can produce everything from itself.

Unfulfilled time appears as the most congruent image of becoming. For consciousness, this can be translated into a state of consciousness with nothing other than memory, so that under Kronos we have to imagine nothing other than the eternal world memory. If we now translate the individual beings, not the state of consciousness of the individual beings, but if we imagine the humanly overcome being, then we attain a state of consciousness that exists only in memory, that things are behind and next to each other and can only be held in [coming] and going within time by connecting the individual with the other individual to the eternal world memory.

From this eternal world memory arises an eternal separation into the most solid and the most rigid.

Within the memory, no distinction can be made between the ether and chaos. This only happens when it becomes possible to distinguish between the material and the spiritual from the eternal. These two stand opposite each other in such a way that the spirit creates its own dualism. It is a matter of allowing consciousness to separate for itself. This creates the material and the spiritual, and

Through this, man first gains the possibility of recognizing something of the very lowest level of the world. The world is in an eternal becoming, and this is nothing other than the eternal transition from coming into being to passing away, from being to non-being. This eternal emergence of that which is not perceptible to the senses into a sensuous existence is the interplay between spirit and matter.

The highest spirits have made this interplay an integral part of the basic teachings. Let us stop here for a moment with Goethe. He is known to have written something about the metamorphosis of plants and animals. He was of the opinion that the beings of the animal and plant kingdoms come into being through the fact that everything is in a state of eternal transformation. Goethe came to this conclusion because he believed that there is a constant interplay between spirit and matter.

Goethe looks at a seed, a small material grain, it seems, a piece of formless matter, which is nothing more than matter, enclosed between certain boundaries. But is that the truth? The same thing that we have before us today as a small material particle will be before us in a very short time as a fully developed plant, with leaves and flowers. The fully developed plant and the small seed are in reality the same thing, one and the same at two different times. They are different in substance, but one and the same.

What is one and the same? The small seed is the same as the large plant. The whole plant is contained in spiritual form in the seed. The spirit has withdrawn into seclusion. This same spirit, which is sensualized in the plant, was already present. The spirit reveals itself in sensual existence and is later present in the plant.

In our world of the senses there is a continuous multiplicity of the spirit, which hides itself, withdraws into a point of matter and then spreads out again and becomes visible, so that what it previously kept invisible, it presents visibly before us. But only by distinguishing between the two entities of spirit

and matter are we able to penetrate this interplay. Seed and plant would fall apart. We would never be able to say that they are one and the same. We would not understand this. The one who cannot perceive soulfully will say: They have nothing to do with each other. The other will say: The whole plant already lies within the seed as the multiplying spirit, which is once in sensual existence and then withdraws again. Only by peeling apart the whole of reality into spirit and matter and following the interplay are we able to understand the interplay.

Then we have arrived at the state that presents itself to the physicians as a state of becoming and giving birth. This is nothing other than the mystery of the presence of the spirit in the real world. We can imagine this under the symbol of the egg, the thing that can bring forth another thing that is spiritually completely equal to it, but sensually different. Thus the whole manifold world no longer presents itself as it appears to the sensual imagination, but as it appears to the spiritual eye before the soul.

Now we have seen that what penetrates upwards is in the seed, then rises upwards, becomes a plant and has thus assumed sensual existence. If we have a plant before us, then the plant is still something that conceals the spirit, that has more spirit than it shows. A higher being, an animal, shows still more spirit; and even in man a great variety of spirit comes to a directly sensuous existence. But the whole essence of the spirit can only be perceived through spiritual work in self-knowledge, so that that which rests in the seed ultimately stands before self-knowledge in its true unveiled form as its own spiritual entity, and the consciousness that contemplates itself, the soul that faces itself, recognizes nothing other than in a revelatory way that which is generally hidden. The spirit that is in the seed is the same spirit that self-consciously confronts the other being, the male-female being that emerges in the multiplicity of the world.

Comprehending this being is a goal of the mystical worldview. It is to be grasped in such a way that the entire consciousness of the person stepping before it becomes spiritualized, that it becomes spirit, will, that it does not merely enter into the person, but presents itself to us illuminated in the outside world. This is what presents itself to the mystic, who now gives birth to the whole world of his own accord. So it is like Zeus, who represents the highest state of consciousness, who has devoured everything and himself.

So the whole cosmogony was nothing more for the mystic than a point of support for understanding the progress and deepening of man. Yes, but the concept is nothing but its own realization. Yes, there was the conviction that knowledge is not something that is added to the world, but that it is precisely the essence itself. The mystical experiences were to be brought to a higher level, for the mystic says that the spirit is present but not yet sensually present, like the spiritual in the seed, which has not yet spread into the plant, but has already been present as such. This is why all the Greek mystics say that the primordial being should not be sought in the past.

The cosmogony is not constructed in such a way that the primordial being stands there as creator, but appears as something in Greek mysticism that is finally climbed as a stage of cognition, so that the process of cognition within Greek mysticism is not a kind of communion, not a connection of man with the eternal world being, but an actual bringing forth. I emphasize: an actual bringing forth, so that for the Greek mystic the most perfect indeed appears as a sensual creation of the world. Sensual creation and spiritual perfection could coincide for the mystic.

The other side of the mystical world view, which did not seek to penetrate to the primordial being, but endeavored to recognize the world by delving into our inner world, emerges in the Pythagorean. One school endeavored to plant the seed in moist soil. The Pythagoreans did

not plant the seed in the soil, but invented a method of discovering the spiritual plant in the seed itself, without sinking the seed into the soil before bringing it to development. In what way? By bringing the seed [spiritually] to development. In what way they [...] wanted to discover the spirit in the seed, we will look at that next time.

Answer to the question:

The question of "where from" is an inherited question for humans. We ask because we see becoming in the process of becoming. We see the thing becoming more perfect. There can be no doubt that the sensual plant is more perfect than the seed. The later is contained in the earlier, only not in reality, but in a spiritual way. The word "beginning" is something future in the doctrines of the origin of the world. A final reflection of the approach of a perfect kingdom is present in early Christianity. It is the same as the kingdom of Zeus. There can be no cause without a corresponding effect. If we ask: Is the one there earlier than the other, it is only because we consider the one earlier. I add the force that is needed to write with a pencil because I feel it; and this expenditure of force is projected out into the world. I also find forces in the outside world. You humanize the outside world. I really put myself into things, I am really in them. The act that you carry out in your head is the initial force of the world. The "before and after" loses its meaning. The seed can look back to the plant that brought it into existence. Its own cause is already present as its own cause, but not in a sensual but in a spiritual way. Every thing is its own cause and does not have a cause. The effect produces itself. We call it force because it is sensual, dull striving. If we want

to imagine the power in the seed, that is already the plant.

If God were to divide his work into time, he would also have to strive for perfection. Only when he is elevated above time and space is everything there at the same time, then he is perfect. All opposites have a point where they meet. "To whom time is like eternity and eternity like time, he is freed from all conflict" [according to Jakob Böhme]. Eternity broken down into individual moments is time. Time summarized is eternity. The circle is limited, the straight line is unlimited, infinite. The Orphics did not arrive at the concept of numbers like the Pythagoreans.

Why did Plato give his views in conversations? He could not have presented it any other way. If you take Plato's "Phaidon" and follow it properly, you will find that it is a conversation between a Socratic initiate and a Pythagorean. The method of the Mysteries led to expression through conversation.

I have often mentioned the fact that we can derive the right impulses from spiritual science only if we make the effort to progress ever further in a positive, concrete understanding of the spiritual beings about whom spiritual science wishes to instruct us. I have emphasized here before that we must of course realize first that human beings consist of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and so on, and we need to know how these various members are related to one another. But if we are intent upon deriving the right impulses from spiritual science it is not enough to rest content with these abstractions. We need to become thoroughly familiarized with the interrelationships in the cosmos whereby these members of the human entelechy are incorporated into the entire cosmic process.

Our physical bodies incorporate us into the physical world and set us down on the physical plane. They make us resemble our parents and other forbears in the ongoing stream of heredity. They bring this about through the fact that they bear within themselves certain preconditions of similarity to our ancestors. And much else is also responsible for the incorporation of our physical bodies into the physical world. We concerned ourselves yesterday to some extent with an awareness of how human beings who gradually advance to what is known as clairvoyant perception free themselves from their dependence upon their physical bodies as tools for relating to the world.

The next step is then that the etheric rather than the physical body serves as the direct means of interrelationship with the world; imaginative perception takes the place of the mental images and other knowledge acquired with the use of our physical bodies, i.e., with the sense organs and the brain. I tried yesterday to describe in a more pictorial way how changed the soul feels when it progresses from using the physical body to making use of the etheric body.

It is true, of course, that we are always making use of our etheric bodies, except when we are sleeping, but we use them in the sense that they carry on their activity within our physical bodies, so that both the physical and etheric bodies are made use of during our life on the physical plane. But we come to know what the particular characteristics of the etheric body are when it is lifted out of its connection with the physical body and put to use as our sole perceptive instrument. We know that this condition comes about naturally immediately after death, when we have laid the physical body aside. Then, for a short time, we make use of the etheric body, until that too is laid aside.

We have therefore to distinguish the first condition after death, in which we dissolve our bond with the physical body, from the second condition that soon follows it, and brings about the dissolution of our bond with the etheric body.

I have been saying that the physical body binds us to everything that comes to us on the physical plane. What, then, does the etheric body bind us to? It binds us to everything that relates us to the cosmos, to the extraterrestrial, to everything that lives in us that cannot be ascribed directly to any connection with the physical realm. If, for example, a person is born with a physically defective ear, he won't be able to become a musician. But physical defects are due to physical heredity. This is a radical case that illustrates our dependence upon the ongoing heredity process. But we must turn our attention from the capacities to which our physical bodies predispose us to those occasioned by the etheric. These show up more distinctly in particular predispositions of the soul. Only a poor observer can miss the fact of the great differences of soul manifested by individuals. Dull-witted materialists are sometimes little interested in subtle differences of soul; they want to investigate the external form element alone. But alert observers of life are perfectly aware that nobody resembles any other person as far as his individuality is concerned.

People who have entertained theosophical concepts for awhile are satisfied to explain these individual differences by saying that everyone has lived through repeated earth lives and demonstrates in his individual characteristics what he has brought with him from the past. This is right, of course, but it does not suffice for true understanding. Just imagine, for example, a person being born with a sensitive musical ear, but with no opportunity to get a musical education. In such a case his musical ear would go undeveloped. One cannot, of course, be musically educated if one lacks a musical ear, but external opportunity, a person's milieu, must also permit it. There are people who are always satisfied to fall back on the same one-sided explanation of facts, saying that our higher ego, our higher self, takes care of everything. The higher self is actually the world! This may be true, but it is by no means enough to explain everything in the universe. It is true that karma is the cause of our individual predispositions, that our individual differences come from the way we develop in the course of our incarnations. But it is not enough to know that we pass through various earth lives and develop ourselves as individuals; we need to know what enables us to make actual use in life of the capacities developed by us as individuals.

Let us turn our attention to the life between death and a new birth. You are familiar with the content of the published lecture cycle entitled Life between Death and Rebirth, and can gather from it that the various factors preparing us for rebirth, for a new incarnation in a physical body, must be brought together during that life.¹ But it has to be possible in the spiritual world for human beings to find there what they need in order to develop their individual capacities. We can conceive of having had an incarnation during which we laid the foundation for certain developments in the following earth life, but finding no possibility between death and rebirth of bringing to development the potentialities implanted in us for the following incarnation. A plant seed may be full of potential, but unless it is planted in favorable soil it is impossible for its potential to develop. Similarly, we may be ever so full of promise as individuals, but if we are unable to find in the spiritual world factors that nourish us as suitable soil does a plant seed, then the life-conditions needed for the unfolding of the capacities we have developed for a future incarnation cannot be provided.

This can make us aware that the world contains deep hidden secrets that can be discovered if we train the light of spiritual science on the actual facts. A few catchy theories or sayings, such as that we have various incarnations and so on, each as our individuality dictates, from one to the next, are not enough; they do not reach down to what we experience as the riddles of life. The need, as I have reiterated these last few days, is always to find the right perspective. We will encounter much in life that will strike us as profound riddles that need some degree of solution if we are not to feel ourselves helpless strugglers who, though we may see the riddles life presents, cannot cope with them.

There is a riddle I want to bring up here because it deals with the spiritual investigator's connection with the question of what conditions contribute to the development of individuality. I'll characterize it later on. I refer to the riddles we encounter in life with respect to the varying ages at which people die. Let's say one person lives to a great old age, while someone else dies very young. People die, of course, at all the various ages. We can state this thoughtlessly; there is particularly little inclination to be sensitive to a riddle so frequently encountered. But the fact is that the most commonplace matters pose the greatest riddles.

A contemplation of the relationship of the etheric body to the world as a whole brings us closer to this riddle. Everyone knows as a fact of experience that our physical bodies age; we grow older and older physically. And everyone understands what is involved in aging. But where our etheric bodies are concerned the opposite is true: we grow younger, ever younger. When we are very old, our physical bodies are old, but our etheric bodies have grown young. Some of you have already heard of this in my lectures, but I want to discuss it today in a different context. We have to develop our etheric bodies during an incarnation in such a way that when we have come to its close, our astral bodies will be so embedded in these etheric bodies that they feel themselves prepared for their appropriate entrance into the next life. It is really true that when an individual is old and gray and wrinkled, his etheric body burgeons with fresh life, for his astral body must accustom itself at this point to live in an etheric body already teeming with germinal potential. The way the astral body is to permeate and work in the physical body of a child in the following incarnation must already find some degree of expression in its connection with the etheric body grown young.

It is remarkable how the genius of language can reveal some secret or other. As I've mentioned on other occasions, you will find a beautiful passage in Goethe's Faust where the term “growing young” is used in place of “being born,” “growing young” rather than “growing old.” In other words, we start to grow young when we are born.

This is based, of course, on the conception of the soul pre-existing birth. But the forces it will need to enable it to work through the body into which the child is born must have been acquired while the etheric body is growing young in the aging physical body of the previous earth life.

Materialists find special corroboration of their materialistic theories in the fact that even geniuses—or at least those who are regarded as such—sometimes become senile in their old age, and Kant is cited as a particularly relished case. But people who subscribe to this way of thinking do not grasp the fact that the soul can manifest here on the physical plane only through the agency of the physical organs. Kant's brain became unable to serve as the tool of the soul forces he had evolved, and this is why he appeared feebleminded in old age, even though the soul that was preparing to organize the physical body of his next incarnation was actually already living in him. But in the previous earth life this soul was unable to make a suitable instrument of the physical body it inhabited.

If you apply what I have just been saying, you will see that it makes a tremendous, an enormous difference whether an individual dies in extreme old age or as a youngster, perhaps even in childhood. For the etheric body of someone who dies in youth has not yet grown young. If we are speaking of physical human beings we can say that they are growing old, but in speaking of the etheric body we would have to say that it “grows young.” That would be the proper expression for it. The etheric body grows young but it has not yet grown entirely young in those who die at an early age. I once tried to suggest this by saying that when a person dies in childhood or in youth his etheric body has not actually been used up. This etheric body would have lasted him a lifetime; he could have reached sixty years or more with it if he hadn't died young. But the force inherent in such an etheric body remains in existence, just as forces in the physical world do; they are not lost. However, we need to make a closer study of the special, unique attributes of this etheric body.

When a person can live to what is considered a normal old age—say seventy or eighty—his etheric body has grown very young. The whole fruit of his life experience lodges in this young etheric body, is imprinted on and expressed in it, and the astral body then takes possession of it. That happens in the following way. Let us picture the physical body abandoned by the etheric body. So long as the etheric body remains in the physical body, it cannot develop the forces it has acquired in life because it is imprisoned in the physical body. Picture how, in our previous earth life, we acquired this or that capacity. This is to say, we acquired it with the physical body of that incarnation. What we have added to it in the present incarnation has not yet had time to develop organs for its use; we must first create these in our current incarnation for the life to follow. But all this is lodged in the etheric body, which is more elastic, more fluid than the physical. No use can be made of it, however, as long as the etheric body remains bound to the physical body. But when the physical body has fallen away, the etheric body is freed. And now this etheric body brings forth all the fruits of the life we have lived through up to our death. That is also the reason why it presents the whole life-panorama that spreads out before us for a few days, the tableau of finished earth life, so that we may learn and acquire from this panorama everything that can be extracted from our past experiences. And that takes place during the few days during which we have the tableau before us.

Every morning, on awakening, when our astral body enters our physical and etheric bodies, it has to adapt itself to what has evolved out of the physical and etheric bodies of the past incarnation, and there it encounters what we have made of ourselves. The astral body never enters the etheric body in a way that allows it to make use of what the etheric body has developed in the present incarnation. But after death it does so. It is related to the etheric body in a way that lets it feel and perceive and sense the fruits gathered from the life just ended. And when, a few days later, the astral body separates from the etheric, the entire product of that life is contained in the astral body as the result of the astral body's having drawn it out of the etheric body during the days it has spent there. The astral body needs to spend only those few days in the liberated etheric body to live through everything that an incarnation has brought forth. But it takes a long time so to shape what it has thus experienced that a new earth life can be fashioned from it.

It requires a great deal, as you see, to fashion a new life. And if it were left to human wisdom to achieve this fashioning all by itself, the result would certainly be most inadequate. Try to picture yourselves having to shape your entire physical instrument with the content of your consciousness. You would first have to have a thorough understanding of it. But every glance into external science makes it clear how little insight into our physical make-up we possess. But between death and rebirth we possess it sufficiently to be able to fashion our physical body, right down into its most delicate details, in a way that qualifies it to make use of the capacities evolved in the previous incarnation.

If someone were to ask you how a convolution of the brain could be arranged to conform with the capacities acquired in the previous incarnation and you had to decide whether it should be turned or twisted thus or so, you wouldn't be able to say, if you were examined on the subject, that twisting in some particular direction would correspond to a person's having been an orator in his past incarnation, and that that particular twist would produce the right working out in this life of the acquired capacity. How could you conceivably answer out of the consciousness you possess on the physical plane? But we have to answer that question in the life between death and rebirth, for we must endow the new etheric body with the requisite capacity delicately to chisel out our organs. A single word suffices to describe what is needed, but I wanted to evoke a sense of what this word encompasses: wisdom is required, a wisdom human beings really need to have.

Even though Kant grew feebleminded in old age, his soul—which is to say, his astral body as it lived in his newly constituted etheric body—his soul was wise, for it was already in possession of wisdom. But his ego was unable to raise it to a conscious level with the brain. His soul contained the wisdom that was to emerge between death and rebirth and make its contribution to Kant's future incarnation. Kant lived into old age. The older a person grows, physically speaking, the more pronounced is this moment of wisdom.

But in the case of those who die young the situation is different, for the etheric body has not grown young, and there is consequently less earth-acquired wisdom stored up in it. It is earth-acquired wisdom that is involved here. Something else takes its place. Those who die early have old etheric bodies that have not had time to grow young, and these are all the more teeming with will. Direct will-force in all its immediacy, the love element, creative love-force, permeates them. That is the difference between the etheric bodies of the old and young. The former bear more the character of wisdom, the latter of will. The etheric body of a person who dies young streams out love, warm love, a warm etheric love-element, while that of an older person streams out an aura filled with light and wisdom.

We can answer the question that interests us here by asking spiritual science what would happen if, for some reason, everyone were to grow very old, living on to eighty or ninety, if not a single person died young. What would the result be?

In that case, all the etheric bodies deserted by their souls would be imbued with loving wisdom. People living on the earth in the continuity of history would find it possible to learn a great deal during their physical earth lives, for their physical bodies would be wisely fashioned. They would be born somewhat undifferentiated, each similar to all the rest, but they could learn a great deal on the physical plane. They would be delicately and wisely built, and could learn a great deal, since such learning would be connected with an extremely mobile constitution. Due to their extraordinarily sensitive, mechanistically-wisely constituted physical organisms, these people would be in a state of labile balance that could easily shift. A person would learn a great deal, but be terribly nervous, as the current “nervous” age would express it. It would be a humanity tending to fidget and to have a precarious balance, very gifted for learning on the physical plane, but nevertheless very restless and fidgety. We had better say fidgety rather than nervous; why not put it in a way that feels right? In earlier times, even a couple of centuries ago, throughout Europe a person who had strong nerves and could stand a lot was referred to as “nervy” or “nervous.” But nowadays the tone is not set by the same people, so the meaning of the word got turned into the exact opposite.

Now the soul-differentiations we bring with us into an incarnation from the spiritual world would not exist in human development if everybody grew old, if no one were to die young. There would be no talents, no being born with special gifts. People would come into the world more or less like each other, more or less undifferentiated. They would differ from one another and learn different things only as a result of experiencing different conditions on the physical plane, and would be rather similarly adaptable to whatever circumstances they encountered. Special individual needs would be taken care of by karma through the agency of heredity. Beyond this, what we know as predispositions to special soul-qualities would be lacking. People would simply not possess inner differences.

But everything in the world has to be founded on balance, as I've often said, and in these matters too there can be no one-sidedness. Human life must accordingly be built, on the one hand, on the possibility of pouring into the physical body what an individual has stored up as wisdom in the etheric body's growing younger for use in a future incarnation. On the other hand, the will impulses of those who die young are needed. I have shown at hand of many examples how children who die very young have not expended their etheric bodies. Right here at the Goetheanum we ourselves live in the aura of an etheric body out of which those forces that provide artistic stimulus are derived. I explained how a child belonging to the Goetheanum community left his etheric body at his death, and that this etheric body has created an aura that is incorporated into our building. Those able to perceive the nature of the impulses that come from this etheric body find support in them for the artistic impulses to be lived out here.

But this is in general the situation with the etheric bodies of those who die young. They go back; they haven't as yet grown so young as entirely to have worn down the will element; instead, will and creative love-forces accompany them into the spiritual world. And now a continuous interchange has to take place between those etheric bodies that have grown wholly young and those less young. Continuous mutual support is exchanged in the spiritual world between what ascends from the earth in the etheric bodies of the very aged and the etheric bodies of young people, or, indeed, of those in the in-between years. When very young children die, those referred to in Faust as “the midnight-born,” their etheric bodies are very old, quite hoary in fact, but they are endowed with strong will- forces. Etheric bodies of this kind are able to work powerfully on the long-lived etheric bodies of those who grow physically old.

Just think what a brilliant idea it was that made Goethe have the centenarian Faust go to heaven surrounded by the etheric bodies of very young boys, the “midnight-born,” hinting thereby that an exchange of the kind described has to take place!

This interchange is always going on. We can therefore say that there exist in the spiritual world the etheric bodies of human beings who have grown physically old, and various things are taking place in them (see drawing, mauve); then, in red, the etheric bodies of deceased young people, with various things taking place in them as well; and an interchange between them, a process of mutual exchange. And what we encounter in the life between death and rebirth is the result of the situations that develop in this exchange between the etheric bodies of those who died young and those who died old. This interchange is essential; without it, the evolution of humanity on earth could not proceed properly.

The beings who direct this interchange are to be found in the realm of the angel hierarchy, so that we really have to recognize such an interchange between the two kinds of etheric bodies in the spiritual world in which we are immersed. The two kinds of activity coalesce, like two merging rivers. But they are then given proper direction and regulation by angelic beings; that is one of the tasks with which angels are charged. When, therefore, persons are able to come into the world with special talents, this is due not only to the possibility that between death and rebirth wisdom of a materialistic nature that is a fruit of the earth has been imprinted into physical bodies, but that something not as yet fully developed on earth, the product of the etheric bodies of those who died young, has brought about effects present as forces that can be interwoven in the process of fashioning human talents.

You see how spiritual science can bring about a living feeling for things when we really immerse ourselves in its secrets. We learn from spiritual science to lift ourselves in spirit to a contemplation of the mystery of death in an older person. For then we tell ourselves that people grow old in order that human evolution may go forward in the right way for as long as physical bodies are needed as vehicles. We have a premonition, whenever an older person dies, of the fruits that human evolution on earth will bear as a result. And when we give ourselves up to a contemplation of what the future holds, we realize that there has to be a continuous development of talents in mankind's progressive evolution. This person must be gifted in this direction, another in that, with capabilities ranging all the way to the genius level. That could not be the case if nobody were fated to die young. And as we look up to people of special genius, we can attribute their gifts to the fact that some individuals have to die young. To contemplate the mystery of death in the case of young human beings is to realize that early death too is part of the wise design, for it gives rise to seed-forces of soul-endowment needed by the human race for its further progress.

If we can lift ourselves above a personal reaction to death to a contemplation of what is needed by mankind as a whole, we encounter the wisdom involved in the deaths of both young and old. It is important to realize that a truly genuine and earnest study of spiritual science does not remain mere theory, but that a proper grasp of theories leads to attitudes and feelings that enable us to achieve greater harmony in our lives than we could achieve if we didn't have it. We need spiritual science to develop the deeper insight that can lead to a perception of the consonance that lies behind life's otherwise unbearable dissonances.

We learn, too, to understand the sacrifices that we have to make in life and the things that pain us, if we know that the entire universe can be rightly maintained only by developments that cannot help but cause us sorrow. We simply have to make the effort to sense that the many hundreds of geniuses: Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Michelangelo, Raphael, and so on, are essential to mankind's progressive evolution, and would not have existed as such had the ground not been prepared by people dying young. This has nothing to do with the individual. Those who die young and thus sacrifice their etheric bodies in their youth provide the entire cosmos with a fruitful soil for the growth and maturing of human soul-capacities.

We become united with the universe when, instead of taking an abstract approach to spiritual science, it becomes for us a seeking out of impulses that flow into us as soul-warmth, reconciling us with the world, moving us to our depths as they show us that, though we human beings have to undergo painful experiences, we suffer them for the sake of harmony in the entire universe.

It is not always easy to withdraw our attention from individual life to focus on the life of the whole world. But the fact that achieving this goal is difficult is also the reason why it strengthens us. And as we develop a feeling for community from our suffering, that sense of the totality of the cosmic order becomes ever more intense and lays ever more profound hold on our innermost souls. And we prepare ourselves in doing this to become participants in the universal order of a kind the gods make use of.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Life between Death and Rebirth, (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1987).

When we study the human soul in its development within the physical body between birth and death, we are struck by the fact that in order to have a full and complete earthly existence, the soul must make two attributes or faculties its own.

On the one hand: memory. Just imagine what it would be like if memory were not one of our faculties in earthly existence! And think how different our life of soul would be if we could neither look back over the course of the past day nor recall from unfathomed depths what we have experienced since a certain moment of time after our birth. The cohesion of experience is necessary if there is to be true Ego-consciousness. I have called attention to this fact on many occasions. You all know that memory begins to function at a certain point of time during our earthly life and that experiences occurring before this point of time are sunk in oblivion. We can therefore say that from a certain point of time in our physical earthly life, our life of soul enters into relationship with our bodily life and this enables us, in the present, to remember the experiences through which we have passed.

One of the tasks of earthly life is to unfold the faculty of memory. During our long evolution as beings of the Old Moon incarnation of the Earth, we did not possess memory in the form in which we know it to-day. Memory has only been able to develop since the Earth-organism with its mineral forces has been incorporated in our being. Memory is essentially an outcome of the interaction between the human soul and the physical body. In the spiritual world, memory, as developed in the physical life, has only been needed since the beginning of the Earth-period. Until the time of the Earth-period it was not needed, for the reason that in the power of the dreamy clairvoyance possessed by man during the Old Moon period, he possessed a different faculty—a faculty which was able to take the place of our memory to-day. Suppose that every time you experienced something, the experience was inscribed somewhere in a place remaining accessible to you, and that it was so with every subsequent experience. Under such conditions you would merely have to look at the spot where the experience was inscribed. You would be able to look outwards, because the experiences would be preserved in the outer world. So indeed it was in the time of the Old Moon. All that was experienced in that old dreamlike, clairvoyant consciousness, was engraved, as it were, in a certain delicate ether-substance. All that the Moon-humanity experienced through this dreamy, clairvoyant consciousness was written into the cosmic substance; and the activity of the human soul which might be compared with memory to-day was that the dreamy clairvoyant gaze was directed to the ‘engraving’ in the delicate ether-substance. The Moon-man saw his own experiences in the traces left by them, just as we now see the objects of the outer world. He only needed to look round upon what he had experienced in his dreamlike imaginative life and he found it inscribed in the cosmic substance. This was quite a different mode of ‘living-together’ with the world from that of to-day. Suppose everything that now becomes a thought in your minds were to flash after you like a comet's tail so that you could re-think it. If this were so, you would have transferred into your present life of thought conditions that actually obtained during the period of the old dreamlike consciousness. This condition had necessarily to come to an end because man was to become individual, an individuality. But this is only possible when the experiences through which his soul passes remain his own inner possession, are not immediately inscribed into the cosmic substance but only into his own, delicate ether-substantiality. So long as man lives on the Earth, his etheric body lives and moves within him in his hours of waking consciousness. To this movement, the form of the physical body sets the boundary. It cannot pass beyond the boundary set by the skin. And so through the whole of the life between birth and death, the fine ether-substantiality—within which thoughts, ideas, experiences of feeling and of will circulate—remains rolled up as it were within the confines of the physical body. When the physical body is laid aside at death, the scroll unrolls and is now given over to the cosmic substance. So that after death we begin to look back upon what was engraved in our individual ether-substance which now, after death, is given over to the cosmic ether.

As with memory, which evolves because a force of resistance is offered by the physical body, so too is it with regard to something else of importance for our earthly existence.

Habits are something else which we have to acquire during earthly existence. Neither memory in its present form, nor the capacity to acquire habits were ours during the Old Moon period of existence.¹ If we observe the development of the human being from childhood onwards, we can see how habits are acquired by the constant repetition of actions. Through instructions given during our upbringing, actions steadily repeated become habitual. We are first led to do something which by constant repetition becomes a habit and the habit, once formed, becomes more and more an automatic action of the soul.

The development of habits in the right way during earthly existence is necessary to the unfolding of Ego-consciousness. For what had we in the place of habits during the Old Moon period of evolution? At that time, whenever anything had to be carried out by us or through us, we came under the direct influence of the higher Beings of the spiritual world. We were impelled to action by impulses sent into us from the Beings of the spiritual world. We needed no ‘habits,’ for what we had to do, the Beings of the higher world did, in a certain sense, through us. We were more intimately part of the whole ‘organism’ of the Hierarchies than is the case now, in the Earth period.

But it would never have been possible for us to develop the force of freedom had we remained in this condition where our every action involved an impulse from higher spiritual Beings. The foundations of freedom (free spiritual activity) could only be laid within us by our having been emancipated from the sphere of the Beings of the spiritual worlds and thus—having arrived at the stage of being able to form a habit by the steady repetition of some act—it finally comes from our own being. It is so indeed: the attainment of the possibility of freedom for man is intimately connected with the acquisition of habits.

When we enter physical existence through birth, we come from a world in which, during the Earth period itself, we are living in conditions somewhat similar to those obtaining during the Old Moon period. In the spiritual world, before entering through birth into earthly existence, we live under the strong influence of higher spiritual impulses. In that world there are exalted spiritual Beings who guide us to what we have to do in order so to prepare our earthly existence that it may take its course in accordance with karma. With the entrance into the physical body we are reft away from that world in which there are no habits but only the continuous and unceasing impulses of lofty spiritual Beings. Having entered physical existence, an echo still remains within us of this life in the spiritual world. This echo is expressed in the fact that as children, up to the time of our seventh year, we are governed less by habit than by the power of imitation. We imitate what is done, what goes on around us. This is an echo of our life in the spiritual world. In the spiritual world we had to receive the impulse for every single activity. Therefore it is that as children we react to our immediate impulses, and imitate. Independent activity of the life of soul begins only in the course of time, just as we gradually unfold the capacity to live according to habit. Memory and habit are important constituents of our life of soul, being metamorphoses, transformations of forces of quite a different nature in the spiritual world. Memory is a metamorphosis of the enduring traces of imaginative, dreamlike experiences. Habits arise because we are torn away from the impulses of the higher spiritual Beings.

When we study these things and meditate upon them, we arrive at a concept that is necessary for understanding the very different nature of the world lying beyond the Threshold. Again and again it must be emphasised that the world beyond the Threshold is altogether different from the world this side of the Threshold. Even when we employ words used in connection with the physical world to characterise the spiritual world from any particular point of view, we must constantly remind ourselves that true and adequate ideas of the spiritual world can only be acquired by gradually accustoming ourselves to shaping these ideas of the spiritual world quite differently from those which apply to the physical world. At the same time, however, the study of such things as memory and habit, will help us to unfold insight into the nature of our physical existence.

It is sheer folly to imagine that physical existence is something to be despised. I have pointed out this mistake from many different points of view. Physical existence has its task in human evolution as a whole, just as all other phases of evolution have theirs. It is to our eternal gain that in the course of the evolution of the soul we have a physical body and by means of this physical body pass through certain earthly experiences under the influence of memory and habit. Gradually, by means of repeated earth-lives, we become firmly possessed of these earthly acquisitions. Between death and re-birth, however, we must continually return to the conditions of the Old Moon period of existence. We must surrender as it were the power of memory, as indeed we do directly after death, and give over to the cosmic substance that which we have engraved within our being during earthly existence. And again we must surrender ourselves to the impulses of the higher spiritual Beings in order that by following their impulses we may transform them, in the physical body, into habits.

Here, however, we have reached a point where I will again draw attention to something which on account of its importance can never be over-emphasised.

Memory and habit are acquired during earthly life. Let us first consider memory. Memory may appear to be an acquisition of earthly existence. You know, moreover, that however weak a man's memory may be, it is always possible to develop it. Suppose for a moment that nothing else were to be done in the way of developing the memory than what is absolutely natural, under the influence of the earthly, physical organism which is permeated with mineral substance. If this were the case, memory would unfold in quite a different way. As it is, we do more—as you know, we do much more. It would perhaps be more correct to say that much more is done with us in this matter of training the memory. For one thing we are made to learn by heart, to memorise. At a certain age in our upbringing we are told to learn by heart. There is a difference between acquiring the natural faculty of memory and being set down to do something, else in addition. If we read a poem many times, or if it is often repeated aloud to us, at last we remember it, we know it by heart. Modern methods of education, however, are not content with this. Children are set to work to memorise a poem and are sometimes punished for failing to have committed it to memory when bidden to do so. This is very characteristic of the present phase of evolution.

I must beg you not to misunderstand me. It must not be said that I am denouncing memorising or have demanded its abolition. I am demanding no such thing. Our times are such that certain things must necessarily be memorised, precisely because this present phase of evolution corresponds to a definite phase in the development of the faculty of memory.

But what is it that really happens in the soul when memorising is called to the assistance of the naturally unfolding faculty of memory? It is a case of summoning Lucifer to our aid! It is indeed a Luciferic force which is thus summoned to the aid of memory.

Once more I must beg you not to exclaim: ‘Lucifer! But we must guard against him. From now on our children shall never be allowed to learn by heart!’ Some people have the mistaken idea that they must persistently guard themselves against Lucifer and Ahriman and do everything possible to hold them at a safe distance. But as a matter of fact it is precisely when they are thus on guard that they make it easy for them to approach them!

The Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces have to be reckoned with in cosmic evolution. They must necessarily be part and parcel of world-evolution. The only question is that they shall be kept in their proper place. Consider the special case already mentioned: Why is it that the Luciferic power must be summoned to the aid of memory? In very ancient times of evolution, memory was powerful to an extent undreamed of by men to-day. We, in our day, need a considerable length of time in which to learn a long poem by heart. The ancient Greeks did not need nearly such a long time. Numbers of them knew the poems of Homer from beginning to end. But these ancient Greeks did not memorise in the way we do to-day when we learn something by heart. In those times the power of memory was quite differently constituted.

Now what was really happening in that fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation? The Græco-Latin age was to a certain extent a recapitulation of the Atlantean epoch itself which has been described in my writings dealing with Atlantis. What had come over from the Old Moon period of evolution as a force enabling man to draw his dreamlike, imaginative experiences after him like the tail of a comet—this force, instead of working outside as a channel of communication with an outer universe, passed into the inner being of man. As a result of this transference from the outer to the inner life, memory in the Atlanteans was like a flashing-up of something which the world at that time gave of itself. In the days of Atlantis there was no need for man to make any great efforts to develop his memory, for it was like an influx into the inner being of a force operating in communication with the outer world. In the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation there was a recapitulation of this state of things. In the inner being there was a recapitulation of the operation of a force which in earlier times had worked in constant interplay with the world, without any activity on the part of man himself. Inasmuch as man has passed now into the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, he must make greater and greater efforts to come into real possession of the power of memory. Because memory has to contribute to man's progress towards individuality and freedom, the power which came spontaneously in the Atlantean age and in its recapitulation, the fourth Post-Atlantean era, has now to be acquired. When something corresponding to an earlier power has to be acquired in a later age, when, for example, memory is helped by means of a force which was formerly there by nature, we always have to do with a Luciferic activity. You see, the memory we now cultivate artificially but which in Greek times was a natural endowment, now becomes Luciferic. This conception of the Luciferic activity helps us to realise the part played by Lucifer in the evolution of mankind. To some extent limits were still set to his working in Greek and Latin times, for he was then still in his right place. Nowadays this is no longer the case. If memory is to be developed in our age, man has to enter into a pact with Lucifer. By dint of his own self-activity man must now do for his memory what was done without any participation on his part during the Græco-Latin era. But for this reason, what happened then without man's participation becomes a Luciferic deed in our age.

The moment, however, a Luciferic activity sets in, the other side of the balance begins to operate: the Ahrimanic impulse. While on the one side we memorise, calling Lucifer to our aid in this respect, on the other side we make more and more use of the Ahrimanic support to memory, namely, we write things down. I have often said that it was a true conception in the Middle Ages which made men speak of printing as one of the ‘black arts.’

This external method of assisting memory is wholly of an Ahrimanic nature. Again, I do not say that it is right to flee from everything that is Ahrimanic, although in this respect it may perhaps be said that precisely among us too much is done in the direction of summoning Ahriman. There is a tendency to have an exaggerated affection for him!

Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman

Man's task is, however, to cultivate the position of balance and not to believe that he can simply escape from the clutches of Lucifer and Ahriman. Calmly and courageously he must admit to himself that both Beings are necessary for world-evolution, that in his own development he needs both Lucifer and Ahriman in his active life, but that the balance must be maintained in every sphere of life.

Our activities, therefore, must be such that the balance is maintained between Lucifer and Ahriman. It was for this reason too that Lucifer and Ahriman had necessarily to play a part in earthly evolution. At the beginning of the Old Testament there is a significant picture of the influx of the Luciferic forces into world-evolution. Luciferic forces enter earthly evolution by way of the woman, and man is beguiled by way of the woman. This biblical picture symbolises the influx of the Luciferic element which occurred in the age of old Lemuria.

Then, during the subsequent Atlantean age, there came the entrance of the Ahrimanic element into earthly evolution. Just as during the fourth Post-Atlantean period human knowledge had to come to an understanding of the Luciferic symbol, so now, during our fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, as I have said before, it was necessary to place before the soul in an adequate but yet sufficiently indicative form—the opposite symbol. The figure of Faust has Ahriman at his side, as Eve has Lucifer. Lucifer approaches the woman, Eve; Ahriman approaches the man, Faust. And just as the man, Adam, was indirectly beguiled through Eve, so here, the woman, Gretchen, is deceived through the man, Faust. The seduction of Gretchen is the result of deception, because Ahriman is at work. Ahriman is the ‘Lying Spirit’ in contrast to Lucifer who is the ‘Tempter.’ This, then, is how they may be described: Lucifer, the Tempter; Ahriman, the Lying Spirit.

Much exists in the world for the express purpose of guarding mankind from temptation by Lucifer: rules of conduct, maxims, moral precepts, instituted customs and so forth. But there is less to help man to protect himself in the right way from falling prey to the Ahrimanic impulse—namely, untruthfulness.

All that is Luciferic in man has to do with the emotions, the passions. On the other hand, the Ahrimanic influence which asserts itself in human evolution has to do with lying, with untruthfulness. And in our age man must be armed not only against the attacks of Lucifer. It is high time for him to forge his armour against the attacks of Ahriman.

One of the motifs in Faust is that man is overcome by Ahriman, to the point of misunderstanding the word. Goethe shows us in this poem how Faust goes through different Ahrimanic dangers. True, the figure of Mephistopheles is a mixture and often a confusion of both Lucifer and Ahriman. But on the whole, as I have just now shown, Goethe is right to have chosen the figure of Ahriman and not that of Lucifer for his drama. Much of Ahriman is to be found in both the first and the second parts of Faust, up to the point where he plays in the misinterpretation of words. At the end of the second part Faust confuses ‘Ditch’ and ‘Grave.’ The Ahrimanic impulse plays even into the misinterpretation of words. Goethe indicates this with extraordinary subtlety, interweaving it most effectively into the play, instinctively rather than consciously realising the nature of the Ahrimanic impulse in what is untrue and distorted. This is a point of great significance.

Now just as memory and habit are metamorphoses of different kinds of activity in the spiritual world, so too, other spiritual faculties we may gain are in their turn metamorphoses of something acquired in physical existence. Let us consider something which first appears in physical existence. Memory and habit have been described as transformations, metamorphoses of the spiritual experiences of earlier times. But what emerges for the first time in the physical world is the relation of our ideas with the facts in the external world. The facts and objects are around us and we make images of them in our conceptions and ideas. The agreement of the images in our thought with the facts or objects or events, we then call physical truth.

When we speak of physical truth, this implies that our conceptions fit the facts of the physical plane. In order that this truth-relationship may arise, it is absolutely necessary to live in a physical body and perceive things in the outer world through the physical body. It would be nonsense to imagine that such a relationship to truth could have existed during the epoch of the Old Moon evolution. It is an acquisition of earthly life. It is only because we live in a physical body that this agreement between ideas and external facts can arise at all. But here Ahriman's field of action is opened up for him. In what sense is it thus opened up before him?

From what has been said we can perceive the interplay between the spiritual and the physical world. Ahriman has his own good task in the spiritual world and must, furthermore, send forces from there into the physical world. But he must not enter the physical world! The fact that this realm is denied him makes it possible for ideas we acquire in the physical body to fit the facts in the outer world. If Ahriman introduces into earthly life activities in which he was engaged during the Old Moon period of evolution, he upsets the agreement of our ideas with the outside facts. He should, if I may be allowed to use the expression, ‘keep his fingers off’ the realm in which man makes his ideas harmonise with the outside facts. But this is precisely what Ahriman does not do. If he did, there would be no lying in the world!

I do not know whether it is necessary to prove that lying undoubtedly does go on in the world! But whenever there is lying, it is a proof that Ahriman is at work in the physical world in an unjustified way. This particular activity of Ahriman in the world is something which man has to overcome. It is, of course, easy to say: Although there is much beauty in the world, there is also much that is the reverse of beautiful. A perfect God would have succeeded in so creating human beings that they would never have taken to lying. A perfect God would have said to Ahriman: In the physical world it is not for you to interfere.—God, however, has not succeeded in warding off Ahriman from the world; therefore He is not so perfect after all.—So it might be said. And, as a matter of fact, there is not only Ahriman to reckon with—Ahriman, who feels a certain satisfaction on account of the evil that is in the world. There are also philosophers whose pessimism is derived from observation of the bad characteristics of humanity. There were pessimists among philosophers in the nineteenth century but there were also those who voiced not merely pessimism but out-and-out woe! That too is a view of the world which actually exists and of which Julius Banzen is a typical representative.

Why, then, has Ahriman been allowed access to the physical world! On previous occasions I have shown how deeply he has entered, taking as an example an occurrence where a pre-arranged programme, strictly adhered to, was witnessed, not by a lay audience, but by thirty Law students and young barristers, men, that is to say, who were being trained to be judges of the actions of human beings. Everything happened according to the scheduled programme. But when, after the event, these thirty young lawyers were asked what had actually happened, twenty-six of them gave an absolutely incorrect account and the remaining four only a very approximately correct one. You can see from this example what kind of relationship actually exists between the ideas in people's mind and the outer physical facts. Thirty people can be present when a certain procedure has been carried through according to a pre-arranged programme and twenty-six of them afterwards give a false account of it. In such a case we see Ahriman at work literally before our eyes. But now, suppose Ahriman were not there at all! If he were not there we should be like innocent lambs, for the impulse would continually be never to form concepts which did not tally with the facts. We should only express what we actually observed as fact—but we should do this of necessity. It would be impossible for us to do anything else and there would be no question of free spiritual activity. In order to be able to speak the truth as free beings, the possibility to he must also be in us. In other words, we must acquire the power to conquer Ahriman within us at every moment.
Ahriman must be there ‘enticing, working, creating, as the devil.’ Ahriman must be there, but the trouble is that men follow him so closely and do not recognise him as the devil who entices, works and creates, and who must be overcome.

To pull long faces and say: ‘That is certainly Ahrimanic. I cannot allow myself to have any, dealings with it,’ means nothing more or less in many cases than a comfortable surrender to Lucifer without freedom. The whole point is that we shall learn to recognise the impulses which must be overcome, wherever they exist. We need Ahriman on the one side and Lucifer on the other in order to set up the balance between them.

• 1. See An Outline Of Occult Science. Rudolf Steiner.

In yesterday’s introduction I wanted to show the importance of the teacher’s understanding of the human being and of the school as organic unit. Everything else really depends on this understanding. Today I shall touch on several issues that may then be further developed.

If we wish to have a correct picture of the human being, what really matters is that we rid ourselves of all the prejudices in the current scientific world conceptions. Most people today—even those who are not materialists—are convinced that the processes in logical thinking are carried out by the soul, an inner organism, and that the brain is used as a kind of mechanism for carrying out these processes. All logical functions and processes, they say, are cerebral. The attempt is then made to explain these processes in three stages—the forming of mental images, judgments, and conclusions. It is true, is it not, that we must apply these processes in our lessons, that we must teach and practice them?

We have been so conditioned to this way of thinking that all logic is a function of the head that we have lost sight of the real, the actual nature of logic. When we draw people’s attention to the truth of the matter they demand proofs. The proof, however, lies in unprejudiced observation, in discovering the development of logic in the human being. Of the three stages—mental images, judgments, conclusions—only in the first is the head involved. We ought to be conscious of this: The head is concerned only with the forming of mental images, of ideas, and not with judgments or conclusions.

You may react by saying that spiritual science is gradually dismissing the head and diminishing its functions. But this is in accordance with the truth in its most profound meaning. The head really does not do all that much for us during our life between birth and death. True, in its outer appearance, its physical form, it is certainly the most perfect part of our body. But it is so because it is a copy of our spiritual organism between death and rebirth. It is, as it were, a seal, an impress of what we were before birth, before conception. Everything that was spirit and soul impressed itself on the head, so that it represents the picture of our prenatal life.

It is really only the etheric body—besides the physical—that is fully active in the head. The astral body and the I fill the head, but they merely reflect their activity in it; they are active for their own sake and the head merely reflects this. In the shape of the head we have a picture of the supersensible world. I indicated as much during last year’s lectures when I drew your attention to the fact that we are really carrying our heads as special entities on the top of our bodies. I compared the body to a coach or horse and the head to the passenger or rider. The head is indeed separated from the world outside. It sits, like a parasite, on the body; it even behaves like a parasite. We really must get away from the materialistic view of the head that attaches too much importance to it. We need our head as a reflecting apparatus, no more. We must learn to see the head as a picture of our prenatal spirit and soul organism.

The forming of mental images and ideas is indeed connected to the head. But not our judgments. These are actually connected to arms and hands. It is true—we judge with our arms and hands. Mental images, ideas we form in our heads. But the processes leading to judgments are carried out by the mechanism of arms and hands. The mental images of a judgment do, as its reflection, take place in the head.

You can develop a feeling for this distinction and then recognize its important didactic truth. You can tell yourselves that the task of our middle organism is to mediate the world of feelings. The rhythmical organism is essentially the basis for the mediation of feelings. Judgments are, you will agree, deeply related to feelings, even the most abstract of judgments. When we say “Carl is a good boy,” this is a judgment, and we have the feeling of confirmation. The feeling of confirmation or negation—any feeling actually that expresses the relation between predicate and subject—plays a major role in judgments. It is only because our judgments are already strongly anchored in our subconscious that we are not aware of our feelings’ participation in them.

There takes place for us as human beings, inasmuch as we judge, a phenomenon that we must understand. The arms, although in harmony with the rhythmic organism, are at the same time liberated from it. In this physical connection of the rhythmical organism with the liberated organism of the arms, we can see a physical, sense-perceptible expression of the relation between feelings and judgments.

In considering conclusions, the drawing of conclusions, we must understand the connection to legs and feet. Our contemporary psychologists will, of course, ridicule the idea that it is not the head that draws conclusions but the legs and feet. But it is true. Were we, as human beings, not oriented toward our legs and feet, we could never arrive at conclusions. What this means is that we form ideas and mental images with the etheric body, supported by the head organism; we make our judgments—in an elementary, original way—with our astral body, supported by our arms and hands; and we draw conclusions in our legs and feet—because we do this with our ego, and the ego, the I, is supported by legs and feet.

As you can thus see, the whole of the human being participates in logic. It is important to understand this participation. Our conventional scientists and psychologists understand but little of the nature of the human being because they don’t know that the total human being is employed in the process of logic. They believe that only the head participates in it. We must now understand the way in which the human being, as a being of legs and feet, is placed on the earth—a way quite different from that of the human head being. We can illustrate this difference in a drawing.

By imagining the outline of the human being we may arrive at the following concept. Let us assume that the person in the diagram is lifting a weight by hand, in our case a heavy object weighing one kilogram. The object is lifted by hand. Let us now ignore the person and, instead, tie the object (A) to a rope, pass the rope over a pulley, and tie another object of either identical or heavier weight to the other end (B). If B happens to be heavier, it will draw the original weight (A) up. We have here constructed a mechanical device the achievement of which is identical to that of hand and arm. I can replace hand and arm with a mechanical device—the result is the same. I unfold my will and, in so doing, I accomplish something that can equally be achieved by some mechanical device, as shown in the illustration.

What you can see in this diagram is a happening that is quite objective. The employment of my will does not alter the outer picture. With my will I am fully placed into the objective world. I impart myself into the objective world; unfolding my will, I no longer differentiate myself from it.

What I have demonstrated can be observed especially clearly when I take a few steps or use my legs for something else. What the will accomplishes during the use of my legs and feet is a process that is quite objective, something that takes place in the world outside. As seen from without, there is no difference between a mechanical process and my own personal effort of will. All my will does is to direct the course of events. This is most strongly the case when I employ functions that are connected with my legs and feet. I am then really outside myself, I flow together with the objective world, I become part of it.

The same cannot be said of the head. The functions of the head tear me away from the world. What I call seeing and hearing, what ultimately leads to the forming of ideas and mental images, cannot in this objective way impart itself to the world outside. My head is not part of that world; it is a foreign body on earth, a copy of what I was before I descended to earth.

Head and legs are extreme opposites and, between them, in the center—because there the will is already active, but in conjunction with feelings—between them we have the organization of arms and hands. I ask you to keep in your mind this picture of the human being—through the head, as it were, separated from the earth, having brought the head from the spiritual world as a witness, the proof of belonging to the spiritual world. One imparts oneself into the physical world by adapting the organs of will and the feelings to the outer laws, to environment and institutions. There is no sharp boundary between outer events and the accomplishments of the will. But a sharp boundary is always drawn between outer events and the ideas and mental pictures mediated to us through the head.

This distinction can give us an even better understanding of the human being. The head develops first in the embryo. It is utter nonsense to regard it as being merely inherited. Its spherical shape tells you that it is truly a copy of the cosmos, whose forces are active in it. What we inherit enters the organism of our arms and legs. There we are our parents’ children. They relate us to the terrestrial forces. But our heads have no access to the earth’s forces, not even to fertilization. The head is organized by the cosmos. Any hereditary likeness is caused by the fact that it develops with the help of the other organism, is nourished by the blood that is affected by the other organism. But it is the cosmos that gives the head its shape, that makes it autonomous and individual. Above all, the work of the cosmos—inasmuch as it is connected to the head—can be seen in those things that are part of the nerve-sense organism. We bring our nerve-sense organism with us from the cosmos, allowing it to impart itself into the other organism.

This knowledge is important because it helps us to avoid subscribing to the nonsensical idea that we are the more spiritual the more we ignore the physical and to avoid talking in abstractions about spirit and soul. We become truly spiritual when we learn to see the connection between the physical/corporeal and the soul and spirit, when we understand that our head is a product of the cosmos, is organized by it, makes us part of it. The organism of our legs is inherited; there we are our parents’ and grandparents’ descendants.

This knowledge, being true, will affect our feelings, while all the current concepts—be they about spirit or matter—are abstract, in no way related to reality. They leave us cold, cannot stir our feelings. I would therefore like to ask you to take to your hearts, to ponder deeply, and to develop for your educational work the fact that there is really no difference whether the human being is regarded as a physical/corporeal being or as a being of spirit and soul. Once we have learned to observe spirit and soul in the correct way we shall see them as creative elements from which flows the physical/corporeal. We shall recognize spirit and soul in their creative activity. And if, as artists, we reflect on this activity in the right way, we shall gradually lose sight of the material altogether as it becomes spirit all by itself. The physical/corporeal transforms into spirit in our correct imagination.

When one stands firmly on the ground of spiritual science, of anthroposophy, it no longer matters if one is a materialist or a spiritualist. It really doesn’t matter. The harm done by materialism is not the study of material phenomena. If this study were performed thoroughly, the phenomena would transform into spirit and all the materialistic concepts would be recognized as absurdities. The harm done is the feeble-mindedness that results when we do not complete thought processes, when we do not concentrate enough on what the senses perceive. We thus lose sight of reality. If we were to pursue thoughts about the material world to the end, we would arrive at the picture, the idea of the spirit.

As for spirit and soul, as long as we enter their reality when we reflect on them, they will not remain as the abstractions we are given by our current sciences but will assume form, will become visible. Abstract understanding becomes an artistic experience that will ultimately result in our seeing spirit and soul as material, tangible reality.

Be one a materialist or a spiritualist both perspectives will lead to the same result, provided the thought process is completed. Again, it is not the spirit that is the problem in spiritualism but rather this uncompleted thought process that so easily turns the spiritualist into an idiot, a nebulous mystic, a person who causes confusion and who can only vaguely come to grips with reality.

There is yet another essential and important task for you. Equipped with a sound understanding of the nature of the child, you must develop an eye for distinguishing the child with a predominant cosmic organism from the one with a predominant terrestrial/physical organism. The former will have a plastically formed head, the latter a plastically structured trunk and, especially, limbs.

What now matters is to find the appropriate treatment for each. In the more earthly child, the hereditary forces are playing a major role; they permeate the entire metabolic limb system in an extraordinarily strong way. Even when the child does not appear to be melancholic, there is, nonetheless, alongside the apparent temperament a nuance of melancholy. This is due to the child’s earth nature, the “earthiness” in the child’s being.

When we notice this trait in a child, we shall do well to try to interest him or her in music that passes from the minor to the major mood, from the melancholic strains of the minor to the major. The earthly child especially can be spiritualized by the movements demanded by music and eurythmy. A child with a distinct sanguine temperament and delicate melancholic features can easily be helped by painting. And even if such a child appears to have but little talent for music or eurythmy, we should still try our best to develop the disposition for it that is certainly there.

A child with a distinctly pronounced head organism will benefit from subjects such as history, geography, and the history of literature. But care must be taken not to remain in the contemplative element but, as I already pointed out yesterday in another context, to evoke moods, feelings, tension, curiosity that are again relaxed, satisfied, and so on.

Again, it is a matter of habitually seeing the harmony between spirit and body. The ancient Greeks had this knowledge, but it got lost. They really always saw in the effects of a work of art on human beings something they then also applied to the physical. They spoke of the crisis in an illness, of catharsis, and they spoke in the same way of the effects of a work of art and of education. The Greeks observed the processes that I described yesterday, and it is up to us to rediscover them, to learn to unite soul and spirit with the physical/corporeal in our thinking.

It is thus important that we use all our own temperamental energies, in order to teach history with a strong personal accent. Objectivity is something the children can develop later in life. To worry about objectivity, when we tell them about Brutus and Caesar, at the expense of expressing the feeling engendered in us during the dramatic presentation of their differences, their polarities—this would be bad teaching. As teachers, we must be involved. We do not need to wax passionate, to roar and rage, but we do need to express at least a delicate nuance of sympathy or antipathy toward Caesar and Brutus in our characterization. The children must be stimulated to participate.

History, geography, geology, and so on must be taught with real feeling. The latter subject is especially interesting—to feel deeply about the rocks beneath the earth. Goethe’s essay on the granite can here be of great help. I strongly recommend it to you. Read it with feeling, in order to see how a person could humanly relate—not merely in thinking, but in his whole being—to the primal father, the age-old, holy granite. This approach must, of course, then be extended to other subjects.

If we cultivate these responses in ourselves, we shall also make it possible for the children to experience and participate in them. This is naturally a more difficult approach, as it takes greater effort. But our teaching will be alive, a living experience. Believe me, everything we mediate to the children via feelings allows their inner life to grow, while an education that consists of mere thoughts and ideas is devoid of life, remains dead. Ideas and thoughts are no more than mirror images. With them we merely address the head, whose value lies in its connection with the past, its time in the spiritual world. When we give the children images and ideas that are made living through our strong feelings, we make a connection to what is significant for the earth, to the elements contained in the blood.

Let me give you an example. It is absolutely necessary for us to develop the appropriate feeling for the hostile, destructive forces in an airless space. The more graphically we show this—after the air has been pumped out—the more dramatically we can describe this terrible airless space, the more we shall achieve. In earlier times people referred to it as horror vacui. They experienced this horror streaming from it; their language contained it, and we must learn to discover this feeling again. We must learn to see a connection between an airless space and a thin, dried up person. Shakespeare indicated this in Julius Caesar:

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

It is the well-padded whom we trust, rather than the lean, skinny, bald-headed person with cold intellect. We must feel this relation of a lean person or a spider to airless space. Then we shall be able to pass on to the children, through imponderables, the cosmic feeling that must be an integral part of the human being.

Again and again, when speaking of education, we must emphasize the necessity of connecting the totality of the human being to the objective world, because it is only then that we can bring a healthy element also to those aspects in education that are so harmfully influenced by materialistic thoughts. We cannot, my dear friends, be as outspoken as Herr Abderhalden who—after having been invited to a eurythmy performance where in my introduction I also mentioned the hygienic and other aspects of physical education—said: “As a physiologist I cannot see anything in physical education that is physiologically justified. On the contrary, physical education is, in my opinion, the most harmful activity imaginable; it has no educational value whatsoever. It is a barbarity.”

We cannot afford to be so direct. We would be attacked from every side, as happens today. It is so, isn’t it, when you really think about it, that all the exercises and activities of physical education, wherein the worst of materialistic concepts are applied to the physical body, have become idols, fetishes—be they systems concentrating on the strongly physical, the superphysical, or the subphysical; be it the Swedish method or the German. What the systems and methods have in common is the belief that the human being is no more than a physical organism—a belief resulting from the very worst ideas developed by the age of materialism, not in accord with the thoughts I have outlined.

The exercises are generally based on an assumption describing the ideal posture for the human being—the correct curvature of the spine, the form of the chest, the manner of moving the arms and hands. What we actually get from the exercises is certainly not a human being but merely the picture these people have made themselves of the human being. No wonder there are so many diagrams in the manuals. This picture of the human being lends itself to being modeled in a papier-mâché figure. Everything that is said of the human being in Swedish gymnastics can be found in such a papier-mâché doll. The living human being can then be used like a sack and made to imitate the lifeless dolls. The real human being is ignored, is lost sight of in such practices. All we have are papier-mâché figures.

In spite of the fact that they have become so popular and influential, these practices must be seen as infamous, really quite reprehensible, because of this exclusion of the real human being. The human being is theoretically excluded in the sciences; in modern gymnastics the human being is practically excluded, reduced to a papier-mâché figure. Such practices should never find their way into education. In good physical education, the students should only carry out movements and assume postures that they can also actually experience within. And they do experience them.

Let’s take a look at the breathing processes. We must know that we must bring the children to the point where the breathing- in bears a faint resemblance to tasting some favorite food. This experience should not go so far as to the actual perception of taste but merely to a faint resemblance of it; the freshness of the world ought to be experienced when breathing in. We should try to get the child to ask: “What is the intrinsic color of the air I am breathing in?” We shall indeed discover that as soon as breathing is correctly experienced, the child will have the feeling that “it is greenish, really actually green.” When we have brought a child to the point of experiencing inbreathing as greenish we have accomplished something. Then we shall also always notice something else: that the child will ask for a specific posture when breathing in. The inner experience stipulates the correct corresponding posture, and the right exercises will follow from it.

The same procedure will lead to the experience of the corresponding feeling in breathing out. As soon as the children, when breathing out, can feel that they really are fine, efficient boys and girls, as soon as they experience themselves as such, feel their strength, ask to apply their strength to the world outside, then they will also experience, in a way that is healthy and appropriate to their age, the corresponding abdominal movement, the movement of the limbs and the bearing of the head and arms. This rich feeling during breathing out will induce the children to move correctly.

Here the human being is employed. We can see the human being before us, no longer allowed to be a sack, imitating a papier-mâché figure. We are moving in accordance with the soul that then pulls the physical body after it. We adapt the physical movements to the children’s needs, to their inner, soul and spirit experience.

In the same way, we should encourage the inner experience the children’s physical nature asks for in other areas—in the movements of arms and legs, in running, and so forth. We can thus really connect physical education directly to eurythmy, as it should be connected. Eurythmy makes soul and spirit directly visible, ensouls and spiritualizes everything that moves in us. It makes use of everything human beings have developed for themselves during their evolution.

But—also—the physical can be spiritually experienced. We can experience our breathing and metabolism if we advance far enough in our efforts. It is possible to do this—to advance to the point that we can experience ourselves, including our physical organism. And then, what the children are—on a higher level, I would say—confronting in eurythmy can pass into physical education. It is certainly possible to connect the two activities, to build a bridge from the one to the other. But this kind of physical education should be based on the development of movements not from the mere experience of the physical/corporeal but rather from the experience of soul and spirit, by letting the children adapt the physical/corporeal to their experiences.

Of course, in order to achieve this we ourselves must learn a great deal. We must first work with these ideas before we apply them to both ourselves and especially before we apply them to our teaching. They don’t easily impress themselves on our memory. We are not unlike a mathematician who cannot remember formulae or theorems but who, at a given moment, is able to redevelop them. Our situation is the same. We must develop these ideas about the total human being—spirit, soul, and body—and we must always make them livingly present. Doing so will stand us in good stead. By working out of the totality of the human being we can have a stimulating effect on the children.

Again and again you will find that when you have spent long hours in preparing a lesson, when you have grappled with a subject and then enter the classroom, the children will learn differently than they would when taught by a “superior” lecturer or instructor who spent as little time as possible in preparation. I actually know people who on their way to school quickly read up the required material. Indeed, our education and teaching are deeply affected by the way we grapple not only with the immediate subject matter but also with all the other things connected to skills and methods. These things, too, should be worked and grappled with.

There are spiritual connections in life. If we have first heard a song in our mind, in the spirit, it will have a greater effect on the children when we teach it to them. These things are related. The spiritual world works in the physical. This activity, this work of the spiritual world, must be applied especially to education and didactics. If, for example, during the preparation for a religion lesson, the teacher experiences a naturally pious mood, the lesson will have a profound effect on the children. When such a mood is absent, the lesson will be of little value to them.

In the short time available to us for this therapeutic portion of our meeting, it will naturally only be possible to speak in a general way about specific therapeutic measures. On the other hand, it is always questionable whether one should speak in detail about specifics, especially in medicine, if one is not speaking to a purely professional audience, as was the case when I gave a series of lectures in the spring (see Note 1). For the future development of humanity, it will indeed be necessary that the widest circles are familiar with the guiding principles of healing in order that a trusting relationship, well-grounded in facts, may develop between physician and patient. Though it will be necessary for such an understanding of the guidelines for medicine and social hygiene to be sought in the widest circles, it will nevertheless remain undesirable for an excessively dilettantish and lay judgment to intervene in medical matters; due to the state of medicine in modern times, this happens far too frequently today.

It must be firmly stressed that I have absolutely no intention of encouraging any kind of quackery. Within our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science we must instead strive to bring spiritual scientific knowledge into a true medical art based on a methodical study of medical science. We therefore will not align ourselves with those who, out of an unlimited ignorance concerning what they are actually speaking about, attack nearly everything they call academic medicine and the like. We should certainly not align ourselves with these people.

Something else must also be considered in discussing matters like those that will be raised today. Though in a certain sense this has been the case for a long time, something has permeated medicine particularly in modern times; this aspect has asserted itself in our time with all the vehemence with which matters tend to assert themselves in our chaotic social order: this is the formation of partisan groups even within the medical field. And these parties struggling among themselves are no better than political parties. In general it is quite clear that this cannot support the development of medicine. The battle between the allopaths and the homoeopaths, between the so-called academic physicians and those using natural remedies and so on, has generated a great deal of confusion in the understanding of medicine that is required in the wider circles of humanity. I needed to make these introductory remarks today so that what I have to say will not be placed on false ground.

I have already directed your attention to how, on the one hand, the soul-spiritual stands within the human process of organization; this then proliferates, as it were, in the physical processes of illness so that the soul-spiritual cannot work separately from the physical organ, as it should, thus wreaking havoc in it. When this happens we are faced with all those illnesses that tend toward new formations in the organism .

By contrast, we are also concerned with illnesses in which the soul-spiritual develops in such a way that it does not take sufficient hold of the physical organism, whereupon certain parts of the physical organism are abandoned, not to processes taken hold of by the human organization but to subordinate processes of natural existence. In this way organs “physicalize”—if I may use such a word—to an excessive degree rather than permeating themselves soul-spiritually. The soul-spiritual then flows out without being encompassed in the right way by the ego-consciousness, and as a result all the forms of illness arise that we designate inaccurately as mental illnesses (see Note 2).

This view must be modified, however, the moment one proceeds from a sound physiology to a sound pathology and therapy; it must he modified by being developed still more precisely. It must incorporate the view of the nature of the human being that has been presented here repeatedly, though in very different connections from those we require today: this is the view of the threefold nature of the human organism.

On the one hand we have to do with a threefold nature of the soul being: in forming mental images, in feeling, and in will impulses. This threefold nature of the soul being, however, corresponds very precisely with a threefolding of the physical-bodily being: a kind of head system or nerve-sense system, a rhythmic system, and a metabolic-limb system. I must stress particularly that this constitution of the human organism must not be understood merely intellectually but through inner perception. A person would be unable to comprehend how matters actually stood if he remained with an external picture, if he understood the head system as something that simply ends at the neck, the circulatory or rhythmic system as being encompassed by the trunk, while the digestive system encompasses the limb system, the sexual system.

What is important here is that while the nerve-sense system is located primarily in the head, it nevertheless extends over the entire remaining organism as such. We may thus say that when we speak here with an anthroposophical purpose about the nerve-sense system, it is the system of functions in the human organism (for we are concerned here not with spatial limitations but functional limitations) that is located essentially in the head; nevertheless the head activity extends over the entire human being so that in a certain sense the whole human being is head. The same is true for the other systems. It was thus mere foolishness when a superficial professor of medicine, who did not intend really to study these matters but only wished to discredit them to the world, spoke about the “belly-system” in order to ridicule what is actually referred to by the metabolic system. He has merely shown his total lack of understanding for how the threefold constitution of the human being is functional, and not defined by spatial limitations.

When an individual really understands this constitution of the human being—about which many lectures could be given to describe it in full detail—he reaches the point of being able to perceive clearly the distinctions between the head system, and therefore the nerve-sense system, on the one hand, the metabolic-limb system on the other hand, and the mediating system, the rhythmic system, whose essential role is to bring about the balance between the two other systems.

If we thus wish to encompass the entire nature of the human being, we must consider the following. The actual conceptual and perceptual activity of the human being has as its basis—one cannot even say as its tool, but as its physical basis—everything that takes place physically in the nerve-sense system. It is not the case, as is suggested by modern psychology and physiology, that those processes connected primarily with the feeling and willing systems also take place in the nerve-sense system. Such an opinion does not hold up before a more precise study of the issue. You will find such a precise study, at least suggested in its outlines, in my book, Riddles of the Soul (see Note 3).

Much detailed work must still be done in this regard, however. Then what spiritual science has to say with certainty from its side will be elaborated from the other side, from the physical-empirical side. It will become clear that man's feeling is not connected in a primary way with the nerve-sense system but with the rhythmic system, that just as the nerve-sense system corresponds to mentally active perception, so the rhythmic system corresponds to feeling. Only through the interaction of the rhythmic system with the nerve-sense system, by the roundabout route of the rhythm in the cerebral fluid, pulsating against the nerve-sense system, is the nerve-sense system engaged as the carrier of the conceptual life. Then, if we raise our feelings to mental images, the dull, dreamlike life of feelings is perceived and pictured by us in an inner way. Just as the life of feeling is directly connected with the rhythmic system and is indirectly mediated by it, so the life of will is connected directly with the metabolic system. This connection in turn acts in a secondary way, since metabolism takes place also in the brain, of course, so that the metabolic system in its functions presses against the nerve-sense system. In this way we are able to bring forth the mental images of our will impulses, which otherwise would unfold in a dull sleep-life within our organism.

Thus you can see that in the human organism we have three different systems that carry the soul life in different ways. These systems do not simply differ from one another; they actually oppose each other (as I said, I can only sketch these matters today) so that on one side we have the nerve-sense system and on the other side all that constitutes the functions of the metabolic system, the metabolic-limb system (see drawing). Regarding the connection of the metabolism with the limbs, you can arrive at appropriate images if you simply consider the influence of the moving limbs on the metabolism. This influence is much greater than is ordinarily assumed in outer consciousness.

These two systems, however, the nerve-sense system and the metabolic-limb system, are in opposition, are polar opposites in a certain way. This polar opposition must be studied carefully in order to arrive at a sound pathology and therapy, particularly a pathology that could lead organically over into therapy; it must be studied carefully in all its countless individual details. If one enters into the detailed effects, it becomes evident that what I suggested yesterday is truly the case.

Within everything connected with the head system or nerve-sense system, we have breakdown processes, so that while our conceptual activity takes place in the waking state, when we perceive and form mental images, this activity is not bound up with growth and upbuilding processes but with breakdown processes, processes of elimination. This can be grasped if one looks in a sound way at what empirical-physiological science has already presented concerning this. There is already empirical evidence or to express it better, empirical corroboration—for what spiritual science provides through its perception. You need only pursue what certain inspired physiologists are able to present about the physical processes in the nervous system, which unfold as parallel phenomena to perceiving and forming mental images. You will see then that this assertion is certainly well supported, the assertion that when we think, when we think and perceive wakefully, we have to do with processes of elimination and breakdown, not with upbuilding processes. By contrast, where the will processes are mediated for the human being in the metabolic-limb system we are concerned with upbuilding processes.

All individual functions in the human being definitely interact with one another, however. If we look at the matter correctly, we must say that the upbuilding processes from below work up into the breakdown processes, and that the breakdown processes from above work down into the upbuilding processes. Then if you pursue this logically you have the rhythmic processes as a balancing system, as functions introducing the balance between the upbuilding processes and the breakdown processes, rhythmic processes that press breakdown into build-up and build-up into breakdown.

If we do not study the matter purely outwardly, we see that in the so-called blood circulation of the heart, in the aeration of the human body, we have everywhere special processes, as it were, that are somehow interrupted. I cannot go further now into this interruption, which has its purpose, but everywhere we have a specialization of this rhythmic curve that I have sketched here (see drawing). The course of breathing is a special aspect of this curve, the process that you draw if you follow the course of the blood from the heart upward toward the head or respectively toward the lungs and down to the rest of the body. Thus you have a specialization of these processes. In short, if you enliven what is suggested here, you penetrate into the functional tissue of the human organism, not in the dead way that is customary but in a living way. To do so you must enliven your own mental images. A mobile image of the human organism can thus be pictured. The human organism cannot be encompassed with static, abstract mental images, as modern physiology and pathology would like to encompass it today; it must instead be grasped with mental images in movement, with mental images that can really penetrate into the working of something that has inner movement, that is in no way merely a mechanical interaction of organs situated at rest in relation to one another.

We thus can see that within the human organism there is basically a continuous interaction between the breakdown processes, the deadening processes, and the upbuilding processes, the growth or proliferative processes. The human organization cannot be grasped without this activity.

What is actually present there, however? Let's look at the matter more precisely. If the breakdown process of the nerve-sense organization works into the metabolic-limb system through rhythm, something is present there that works against the metabolic-limb system, something that is a poison for this metabolic-limb system. The reverse is also the case, that what is present in the upbuilding system, working into the head system in rhythm, is a poison for the head system. And since, as I have indicated, the systems are spread out over the entire organism, a poisoning and unpoisoning are continuously taking place everywhere in the human organism, and this is brought into balance by the rhythmic processes.

We are therefore unable to regard such a natural process as taking its course one-sidedly, in the way that one normally pictures things, so that healthy processes are simply designated as normal. Rather we look into two processes working against one another, where one is a process that is thoroughly illness-engendering for the other. We simply cannot live in the physical organism at all without continuously exposing our metabolic-limb system to the causes of illness from the head system and exposing the head system to the causes of illness from the metabolic system. A scale that is not balanced properly is thrown out of balance by entirely natural laws so that the beam does not rest on the horizontal; similarly life, because it is in constant movement within itself, does not simply exist in a state of balanced rest but rather exists in a state of balance that can deviate in both directions toward irregularities.

Healing, then, means simply that if the head system, for example, is working in a way too strongly poisonous on the metabolic system, its poisoning effect is relieved, its poisonous effect is taken away. If, on the other hand, the metabolic-limb system is working in a way too strongly poisonous on the head system, which means working over abundantly: then its poisonous effect must also be removed.

It is possible to arrive at a comprehensive view of this realm, however, only if one now extends what can be observed in the human being to the observation of all nature, if one is able to grasp all nature in a spiritual scientific sense. If you look at the plant-forming process, for example, you can see clearly and macroscopically the upward striving of plant-forming processes, a striving away from the center of the earth. You may make a stimulating study of this metamorphosing formative striving of the plants, at least in a rudimentary way, on the basis of the guidelines offered in Goethe's Metamorphosis of the Plants. In Goethe's Metamorphosis of the Plants there is a sketchy rendering of the first composition, the first elements that are to be studied about the nature of the plant in this direction, but the direction of such a study must be developed further. The initial guidelines must be pursued, for then we may obtain a living view of everything involved in plant growth: when rooting in the soil the plant's upward-striving develops in a negative direction in the root; the plant begins to grow, then grows upward, overcoming the force of attraction of the earth prevailing in the root; then it wrestles through other forces in order to come ultimately to blossom, fruit, and seed formation. A great deal takes place upon this path.

On this path, for example, an opposing force once again intervenes. The opposing force that intervenes can be well observed if you study, simply to take an example, the common birch, betula alba. Pursue very precisely the process that takes place from the root formation through the trunk formation, particularly the bark formation. Consider how, on the basis of everything that works together in the trunk and bark formation, there develops what later comes into manifestation in the leaf formation. This can be studied particularly well in a spiritual scientific way if the still-brownish young birch leaves are studied in the spring.

If this is studied vividly, one also receives a view of forces self-metamorphosing, forces that are active there within the plant. One receives a view of how, on the one hand, there is a formative force active in the process of plant formation that works from below upward. On the other hand it is also possible to behold the force that retards, which in the root still, works strongly as the force of gravity but which, as the plant wrestles itself free from the earthly substance out into the air, is able to work together in another way with the upward-striving force. We then reach an interesting stage, a stage very helpful in understanding how in plant formation during this upward-striving process certain salts, potassium salts, are deposited in the birch bark; this is simply the result of the interaction of the forces working downward with the forces working upward, tending toward protein-formation, you could say, toward what I would like to designate as the albuminizing force formation.

In this way it is possible to penetrate into the plant-forming process. I can only indicate this here. By looking at how the potassium salts are deposited in the birch bark, how something wrestles itself free from this force drawing downward (a process somewhat comparable to what happens when a salt precipitates out of a solution), coming to the process that takes place when the solution rids itself of the salt, we come to see, to grasp in a living way, the process of protein formation, the process I would designate as the albuminizing process. We thus have a path to study what outwardly surrounds the human being, to study it vividly.

Then when we look back at the human being, we can see how, fundamentally speaking, the human being has the same form of forces in him—if we consider the breakdown process working from above downward—that work from below upward in the plant. We can see that in what is active in the forces working downward from the head system toward the metabolic-limb system there is something like an inverted plant element active within us. We can see that in fact those forces that we see sent upward in plant growth work in a downward direction in the human being. If the human being inappropriately holds back this process of plant formation active within him, so that he doesn't permeate the bodily life in the right way with what is active in the head—the astral, the ego-being—and if this then penetrates the bodily nature, this penetration expressing itself within the body, then something is held up there, something that should proceed into the human organism. We thus have to do with a pathological phenomenon like that which confronts us, for example, in cases of rheumatism or gouty conditions. If we study what is brought about in the human organism when this breakdown process is dammed up in a certain way, we discover its effects in the process of rheumatism, in the process of gout-formation, and so on.

Let us now shift our gaze again from within the organism to a process of plant formation like the one we have in the betula alba. From this we can arrive at the following. We look on the one hand into what takes place in salt formation and on the other hand into protein formation. We find, if we understand this process of protein formation in the right way, that the opposite process is within it and is held up there. We find held up in the organism that process which should take place in a way similar to the correct process of albuminizing in the leaves of the birch. We are thus able to come to the relationship between those processes that take place in the birch leaves, for example, and the processes within the organism if we process what is in the birch leaves into remedies. We can then give these remedies to the human being, by means of which we can bring about a healing, because the remedy correctly opposes this damming-up process that occurs in rheumatism and gout. In this way we look both at what is taking place outside in nature and at what takes place within the organism, and then we arrive at an idea of how we should guide the healing forces.

On the other hand we can see instances when the breakdown processes proceed in such a way that the organism cannot restrain them so that they pour themselves downward, and the rhythmic system does not press them back in the right way; they thus reach the periphery of the body pressing outward, as it were, toward the skin. Then we get inflammatory conditions on the outer portion of the human being, we get skin eruptions and the like. If we now look hack again to our plant, to the betula alba, we find the opposing process in the disposition of the potassium salts in the birch bark: we thus become able to see how we can fight against the process of skin eruption, which is an excessive function of exudation within the human being, by preparing a remedy from the birch bark.

We are therefore able to study how plant processes, how mineral processes, are active, and we grasp the connections between what is outside in nature and what is active within the human being. In other words, medical empiricism, therapeutic empiricism, ascends to what Goethe calls in his sense—not now in the intellectual sense but in his sense the rational stage of science. We arrive at a science as therapy, which is able really to penetrate into the connections.

These things are not so simple, for one must study things in detail, at least in accordance with certain types, at first in accordance with secret types of the human personality and in accordance with secrets of natural existence. It should not be assumed that if the process has been studied in an example such as the betula alba, an overview has already been reached of what needs to be considered. In each different plant-forming process—for example in the horse chestnut or whatever—these formative processes will manifest themselves in an essentially different way. What has been indicated here should not in any way lead to a generalized twaddle but to a very serious and extensive study.

Now I wish to direct my words particularly to the students here. If this study is undertaken in a rational way, it need not drive you into a panic regarding the extent of study necessary, for if everything now present as examination-ballast falls away—to speak in Paracelsus' terms—and is replaced by something active, leading in this way to a rational view of a therapeutic pathology and a pathological therapy, students will have to study not more but less. And because this study will permeate you with life, it will bring forth a much greater enthusiasm than what leads you to the human being today, yielding only the ability to see organs. Such organs are by no means at rest and can be understood only if they are grasped in their living function and in their interaction with other organs, can be understood only if this organization is studied and if one strives to enter completely into the functional element. We need an outer natural science that is also striving to reach the functional element.

It is absolutely necessary to study in parallel the inner process in the human being, that peculiar process taking place as poisoning and poisoning effects that have fallen out of balance, and those processes that take place in the natural order. And because the outer relates itself in a polar way to the inner, the outer processes must be used in a certain way polarically. By this means we can be guided into pathology, or, said better, into a therapeutic pathology and a pathological therapy.

I have only been able to suggest here what is necessary to direct the steps needed to heal medical study, and was only able to suggest how spiritual science wishes to work into this medical study. This evening I will give you a few more examples, to show you how intuitively looking together at the outer workings of nature and the workings of the inner organism can lead to therapy and to knowledge of pathology. At that time I would like to go into particular substances.

During the brief time available to me here, I have only been able to indicate the principle, as it were, concerning the example of betula alba, and this evening I will give some further indications, but in every instance I will try to hold myself to indicating only what can add to a general understanding of the human being. Proceeding from this, the physician must move into further specialization. He must enter into the specifics. To deal with specifics always requires an individual evaluation, and here it is only necessary, out of the laymen's understanding of medical directions, of medical principles, for an understanding to grow of what the physician has to undertake within the outer world.

If you consider rightly the course that an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wishes to pursue in medicine—and I will speak more about this tonight—you will really be able to say that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not wish to encourage quackery and dilettantism; rather it wishes above all to work toward a healing of science, toward a true, serious science that will itself engender social effects.

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Note 1:

Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science and Medicine, twenty lectures given to physicians in Dornach, 1920. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975.

Note 2:

In German, the illnesses, are called Geisteskrankheiten, diseases of the spirit as opposed to those of the body. As Steiner is speaking here of the role of the spirit in bodily-phenomena, it may be helpful to keep in mind the thought of spiritual illnesses, though in the translation we have chosen the more commonly used English equivalent, mental illnesses.

Note 3:

Rudolf Steiner, Von Seelenraetseln, 1917. Excerpts of this are published in English under the title, The Case for Anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1970.

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Today I intend to discuss matters related to the vowel element in eurythmy. We need only to recall—as it is known to us through spiritual science—that vowels express more that which lives inwardly in man as feelings, emotions and so on. Consonants describe more that which is outwardly objective. When we remain within the realm of speech, these two statements are valid: vowels, more expression, revelation of the inwardness of feeling; we reveal ourselves to an extent in the vowel, that is to say, we reveal what we feel towards an object. Through the movements which the tongue, the lips and the palate perform, the consonants conform themselves more plastically to the outward forms of objects—as they are spiritually experienced, naturally—and attempt to reconstruct them. And so basically all consonants are more reproductions of the outward form-nature of things. However, one can actually only speak of vowels and consonants in this manner when one has an earlier stage of human evolution in mind in which in fact the evolution of speech was given and in which—since the individual sounds were always to a degree connected with movements of the body—the movement of the whole body and of the limbs as well was self-evident. This connection has been loosened, however, in the course of man's development. Speech was removed more to the interior and the possibilities of movement, of expression through movement, ceased. Today in normal life we speak largely without accompanying our speech with the corresponding movements. In eurythmy we bring back what attended the vowels and consonants as movements and thus bring the body into movement again. Now we must realize that when we pronounce vowels we omit the movement and make the vowel inward, that previously joined in the outward movement to an extent. We take something away from it on its path to the interior. We take the movement away. Thus we restore to the vowel in outer movement what we have taken away from it on its inward-going path. In the case of the vowel, matters are such that the outward movement is of exceptional importance in the search for the transferal of the effect of the vowel, eurythmically expressed, onto the whole man. That is what we must take into account here.

In speaking of vowels today, we will speak purely of the meaning of that which is eurythmically vocalized in movement. Here it is very important that one develops a feeling for what flows into the movement. That one develops a perceptive consciousness which tells one whether that which is happening in the respective human limb is a stretching, a rounding, or such. One must decidedly acquire a specific consciousness for this. In what pertains to vowels it is extremely important that one feels the movement made or the position taken up. That is what is important. Starting from here, we will transpose each of the vowels from the eurythmic into the therapeutic.

Practically demonstrated (Mrs. Baumann): a distinct “I” made by stretching both arms. This stretching should be carried out in such a way that one then returns (to the rest position; the ed.) and performs the same movement somewhat lower, returns again, and does it with both (arms) horizontal. Now we go back and, if you had the right forward at first, now, as you go lower, you must take the right to the back, and now to the front, now a bit back again, and then somewhat deeper. Now I don't want to trouble you further with that, but if one wanted to carry it out, one could make it more complicated by taking more positions; one would then start with the “I”, return, do it a little further on, go hack, a bit further on, and so forth, so that one has as many “I”-positions as possible, carried out from above to below, always returning (to the rest position; the ed.). When these movements are performed, they are an expression for the human being as a person. The entire individual person is thereby expressed.

Now we could notice for example that some child, for that matter a grown up person, cannot express himself properly as a person. He is somehow inhibited in the expression of himself as a complete individuality. He might be a dreamer in a certain sense or something similar. Or, if we think of a physical abnormality—in the case of a child, for example, that he doesn't learn to walk properly, he walks clumsily—or if in the case of an adult we notice that it would be desirable for hygienic or therapeutic reasons that the person learn to walk better, this particular exercise would be very good for this. When grown-ups step out too little in their stride, when they don't reach out properly with their steps, it always means that the circulation suffers under it. The circulation of the blood suffers under an insufficiently outreaching gait. So when people walk in this way (lightly tripping; the ed.), that has a consequence that the circulation becomes in some fashion slower than it should be in that person. Then one must attempt to have this person learn to step out again, and by having him do this exercise, one will be certain to attain one's goal. Then the person will have greater and more penetrating results in learning to walk properly. Thus one can say that in essence this modified “I”-exercise furthers those people who—I will express it somewhat radically—cannot walk properly. It can be summed up approximately so: for people who cannot walk properly.

You can extend the exercise further, and, with the addition of a sort of resumée of what Mrs. Baumann has done, it will be that much more effective Now try to do the whole exercise without bringing the arms back (to the rest position; the ed.) so that you reach the last position only by turning: turning in a plane, quick, quicker and quicker. The “I”-exercise as it was first demonstrated and described can be intensified in this way and will benefit those people who cannot walk properly. It will then be extraordinarily easy to bring them to walk properly. One can admonish them to walk properly and their efforts to walk in a different manner will bring suitable results as well.

Now Mrs. Baumann will demonstrate an “U”-exercise for us. The arms quite high up, and back to the starting position, now a bit lower, back again, a little lower, now horizontal, back again, now below, back again, and again below; that is the principle of it. And now do it straightaway so that you start above maintaining the “U” as you move downwards; and now do it increasingly quickly so that at last you reach quite a speed.

Please keep this in mind as the manner in which to execute the “U”-exercise. If I were to summarize again in the same fashion as earlier, I would call this the movement for children or adults who cannot stand. In the case of “I” we had those who cannot walk, with “U”, we have those who cannot stand.

Now not being able to stand is to have weak feet and to become very easily tired when standing. It would also mean, for example, that one could not stand long enough on tiptoe properly, or that one could not stand on one's heels long enough without immediately becoming clumsy. Standing on tiptoe or on the heels are no eurythmic exercises, but they should be practised by people who have weak legs, who tire easily while standing or who can't stand properly at all. To be unable to stand properly is to be easily tired in walking as well. That is a technical difference: to walk awkwardly and to tire in walking are two different things. When the person is tired by walking, one has to do with the “U”-exercise. When the person walks clumsily or when as a result of his whole constitution it would be desirable for him to learn to step out with his feet, that can be technically expressed as being unable to walk. However, to be tired by walking would be technically expressed as not being able to stand. And for such people the “U”-exercise is especially appropriate. This is interrelated with matters with which we must deal once we have come a bit further.

Now please do the “O”-movement: quite high up and back (to the rest position; the ed.) and now somewhat lower, back again, lower still, and so on. Now do it so that you make the “O”-movement above; feel distinctly the rounding of the arms within the movement as you glide down. When you glide down with the “O”-movement it must remain an “O”. Now increasingly faster.

You would see this exercise complete in its most brilliant application if you had here in front of you a really corpulent person. If a child or grown-up becomes unnaturally fat, then this is the exercise to be applied. By making the “O” so often and by extending it to this barrel-shaped body at the end—then it is really a barrel that one describes outside oneself—that which forms the opposite pole to those dynamic tendencies at work in making a person obese is in fact carried out. One can apply it very well hygienically and therapeutically, and you will be convinced that a tendency to become thinner actually appears when you have such people carry out this movement, especially when they practise other things as well which we have as yet to discuss. But at the same time it is of special significance in this exercise that you have the person practise only so long as he can without sweating heavily and becoming too warm. If one wishes to attain the desired effect, one must try to conduct the exercise so that the person can always rest in between.

Now Mrs. Baumann will make an “E”-movement, quite high above. It is a proper “E”-movement only when this hand lies on the other so that they touch. Now return (to the rest position; the ed.), then somewhat lower, the right hand over the left arm, and then, so that it is really effective, we will do it so that it lies increasingly further back and now again from above to below; then the “E” must be done so that it penetrates thoroughly. And now, in bringing it down, you must move (the crossing) further back, so far that you split the shoulder seam at the back. Now this is the exercise that will be especially advantageous for weaklings, that is to say, for thin people rather than fat people, for those people in whom the weakness comes distinctly from within, but is organically conditioned. It must be organically caused.

Another exercise which can be considered parallel to this should be applied with some caution as it affects the soul
more closely. It is the following: make an “E” to the rear as well as you can and as far up as you can. That really hurts. It is a movement that is in itself a bit painful and that is indeed the purpose. It should be practised with those children or adults in whom there are psychological grounds for becoming thin, such as being worn down and so on. Since one must in principle be careful in approaching from the outside with healing by such spiritual means, this too must of course be applied with caution. That means that one must inspire a child who has failed or who shows signs of depression so that he takes heart when one will have him do these exercises. If one concerns oneself with the child otherwise by comforting him and caring for his soul, then one can have him do these exercises as well.

You can see that in the case of all these things it is to a degree a matter of extending what comes to expression in artistic eurythmy in a certain manner. This is especially true in respect to the vowels.

Now it is very important that we make the following clear to ourselves. You know that the vowel element can be developed in this fashion, and that it is in essence the expression of the inward. One must only grasp through feeling and contemplation that which takes place. One must bear in mind that the person concerned, the person who carries out these things in order to be healed, must feel them; in “E” he feels that one arm covers the other. In the case of “O” however, something more comes into consideration. In “O” one should feel not only the closing of the circle, but the bending as well. One should feel that one is building a circle. One should feel the circle that runs through it. And in order to make the “O” particularly effective one should make the person doing it aware as well that he should feel as though he himself or someone else were to draw a line along his breastbone, thus by means of feeling, closing the whole to the rear in spirit; as if one were to experience something like having a line drawn on the breastbone by oneself or someone else.

Now we want to make an “A”: we return (to the rest position; the ed.), now we make an “A” somewhat lower, return again, make an “A” horizontally, back, make an “A” somewhat lowered, back, an “A” very deep, back, then to the rear; that you need to do only once, but return first (to the rest positon; the ed.). And now make the “A” above and without changing the angle bring it down, and, again without the feeling that you change the angle, to the back.

This exercise can he really effective only if one has it clone frequently. And when one has it repeated frequently, it is the exercise to be used with people who are greedy, in whom the animal nature comes particularly strongly to the fore. So if you have in school a child who is in every way a proper little animal, and in whom the condition has an organic cause, when you have him do this exercise, you will see that it has for him a very particular significance.

In the case of these exercises you can observe once again that if they are to be introduced into the school it will be necessary to organize the children into groups especially for them. You will soon become convinced that the children do these exercises much less gladly than the other eurythmic exercises. While they are eager to do the others, one will most likely have to persuade them to do these, as they will react at first as children often react to taking medicine: with resistance. They won't be particularly happy about it, but that is of no especial harm in the exercises having to do with “O”, “U”, “E”, and “A”; in the case of “I” it is somewhat harmful when the child doesn't enjoy it. One must try to reach the stage where the children delight in the “I”-exercise as we have clone it. In the case of the others, “U”, “O”, “E”, and “A”, it is not especially damaging if they carry out the exercise on authority, and knowing that it is their duty to do it. With “I” it is important that the children have pleasure in doing it as it affects the whole individual, as I have said
already.

You will profit further by coming to terms with the following: the “I” reveals man as a person, the “U” reveals man as man, the “O” reveals man as soul, the “E” fixes the ego in the etheric body, it permeates the etheric body, strongly with the ego. And the “A” counteracts the animal nature in man.

Now we will follow the various workings further. If you have a person with irregular breathing, who is in some fashion burdened clown by his breathing and such like, you will be able to bring this person to normal breathing by applying the vowels. You will be able to achieve in particular the distinct articulation of the consonants by means of these exercises, as that is greatly facilitated through the practice of the vowels. When you notice that certain children cannot manage to form certain consonants with the lips or the tongue—for the palatal sounds (Gaumenlaute) it is less applicable, although for the labial and lingual sounds exceptionally good—it will be of great help to the children with difficulties in this respect, when one tries to have them do such exercises as early as possible.

You will also notice that when people tend to chronic headaches, to migrane-like conditions, these can be appreciably alleviated through the practice of the vowels. So in the cases of chronic headaches and chronic migrane symptoms, as well as when people are foggy-headed, these things will be particularly applicable. Similarly, if you employ the exercises which we have done today for children who cannot pay attention, who are sleepy, you will awaken them in a certain sense to a state of awareness. That is a hygienic-didactic angle of a certain significance. It will be observed that sleepy-headed adults can definitely be awakened in this way as well. And then one will notice that when a person's digestion is too weak or too slow, that by means of these exercises this slow digestion and all that is known to be connected with it, can be changed for the better.

In certain forms of hygienic eurythmy it would be good to have the movements—which are carried out with the arms only in artistic eurythmy—done with the legs as well where possible, only somewhat less forcefully, as I am about to describe. Now you will ask how one can make an “I”, for example, with the legs? It's very easy. One must only stretch out the leg and feel the stretching in it. The “U” would be simply to stand with full awareness on both legs, so that one has a distinct stretching feeling in both. “O” with legs must be learned, however. One should really accustom the people with whom one finds it necessary to do the “O”-exercise ih the manner that I have described, to do the “O” with the legs as well. That consists in pointing the toes somewhat, but only very slightly, to the outside and then trying to stand in this manner and hold one's position. One must thereby stand on tiptoe, however, and bend outward, remain so standing a moment and then return to the normal position; then build it up again and so on.

It is necessary to take into account the relationship existing between the possibilities of organically determined inner movement in the middle man and the lower man. This is such that movement done for the lower man should be carried out at only one-third the strength. Thus when you have someone carry out the “O” movement as we have seen it, you must have the feeling that what is done later for the legs and feet requires only one-third of the time and thus only a third of the energy expended. It will be especially effective, however, when you place this in the middle, so that you have, let us say, A and then A again, with B, the foot movement, in the middle (see the table); it will be particularly effective to have them together.

 one-third one-third one-third A B A Arm Foot Arm 

It will also be especially effective to do the same in connection with the “E”-exercise for the feet, by really crossing the feet.

But one must stand on tiptoe and lay one leg over the other so that they touch. Again, one-third, and placed, if possible, in the middle. That is something which it would be particularly good to have done by children, and by adults as well, who are weaklings. They will naturally be hardly capable of doing it, but that is exactly why they must learn to do it. In precisely these matters one sees that that which it is most important for various people to learn is that which they are most incapable of doing. They must learn it because it is necessary to the recovery of their health.

“A” (with the legs; the ed.) is also necessary; I have already demonstrated it to you yesterday. It consists in assuming this spread position while standing insofar as it is possible on tiptoe. That should also be introduced into the A-movement and it will be particularly effective there.

Now one can also intensify all the exercises that we have just described by carrying them out in walking. And you will achieve a great deal for a weak child, for example, when you teach him to do the “E”-motion as we have just done it in walking; he should walk in such a manner that he always touches each leg alternately. In taking a step forward he crosses over first with one leg, then with the other, so that he always crosses one leg over the other, so that he places one leg at the hack and touches it with the other in front. Naturally he won't move ahead very well, but it is good to have this movement carried out while walking. You will say that complicated movements appear as a result; but it is good when complicated movements appear.

Now I want to bring it to your attention that what we have said about the vowel element should be sharply distinguished to begin with from what we will practice tomorrow in respect to the consonants. The consonantal element is such that it generally expresses the external, as we have already said. In speech as well the consonant is so formed that a reconstruction, an imitation of the outer form comes into being through the formative motions of lips and tongue. Now the consonants have, as we will see tomorrow, very special sorts of movements and it lies within these forms of movement to make the consonant inward again in a certain manner by giving it eurythmic form. It is internalized. That which it loses in the outward-going path of speech is restored to it. And, whether one is contemplating them in eurythmy as art or performing them for personal reasons, in the case of consonants it is particularly important to have, not a feeling in the way one does with a vowel, a feeling of stretching, of bending, or of widening and so on, but to imagine oneself simultaneously in the form that one carries out while making the consonants, as though one were to observe oneself.

Here you can see most clearly that one must admonish the artistic eurythmists not to mix the two things; the artistic eurythmists would not do well to observe themselves constantly as they would rob themselves of their ability to work unselfconsciously. On the contrary, when you have a child or a grown-up carry out something having to do with consonants, it is important that they photograph themselves inwardly in their thought as it were; then in this inward photographing of oneself lies that which is effective; the person must really see himself inwardly in the position that he is carrying out and it must be performed in such a manner that the person has an inner picture of what he does.

If you would be so good (Miss Wolfram) as to show us an “M” as a consonant, first with the right hand, now with the left, but taking it backwards, now taking the right hand back, and “M” with the left hand and now with both hands, that can be multiplied in various ways, of course. Now an “M”—we will start with this example; to begin with, what is it as speech? In speech “M” is an extraordinarily important sound. You will experience its importance in speech, and in speech physiology as well, if you contrast it with the “S”. Perhaps Mrs. Baumann will make a graceful “S” for us now, right, left, and now with both hands.

Now to begin with it appears that you have the feeling, or should have the feeling when the “S” is done that you encounter something within you—it is the etheric body namely (at this point Dr. Steiner made the corresponding movement; the ed.); so that you have a snake-like line. This serpentine may approach a straight line in the case of a particularly sharply pronounced “S” and can even be represented as a straight Iine. By contrast, when you look at the “M” that was just performed, you should have the feeling—even when the organic form is carried out inwardly—that it is really not the same thing. And so the “M” is that which counters the “S”-direction when laid against it and that is in essence the great polarity between an “S” and an “M”; they are two polar sounds. “S” is the truly Ahrimanic sound, if I may speak anthroposophically, and the “M” is that which mitigates the properties of the Ahrimanic, makes it mild; if I may express it so, it takes its Ahrimanic strength from it. So when we have a combination of sounds directly including “S” and “M”, for example “Samen” (seed) or “Summe” (sum), we have in this combination of sounds first the strong Ahrimanic being in “S”, whose sting is then taken from it by the “M”.

Perhaps you will make a “H” for us (Miss Wolfram). When you really look at the “H”, when you feel yourself really within this “H”, then, you will say to yourself: there is something in this “H” which reveals itself as unequivocally Luciferic. It is the Luciferic in the “H”, then, which comes to expression here. And now try to observe yourself—here the feeling is less important than the contemplation of it—try to observe yourself, when Mrs. Baumann does it for us now, how it is when one does the “H” and allows it to go over immediately into an “M”. Make the “H” first and let it carry over by and by into an “M”. Now take a look at it. In this movement you have the whole perception of the mitigation of the Luciferic, of its sting being taken from it, brought to expression. The movement is truly as if one would arrest Lucifer. And, one can also hear it if you simply think about it—today's civilized man can actually no longer reflect properly on these things. If someone wants to agree to something Luciferic, but immediately diminishes the actual Luciferic element, the eagerness of his assent, then he says, “Hm, hm”. There you have the “H” and the “M” placed really very close to one another and you have the whole charm of the diminished Luciferic directly within it.

From this you can see that as soon as one turns to the consonantal element, one must immediately turn to the observation of the form as well. That is the essential thing and tomorrow we will speak about it further.

In our last exposition we discussed the possibility of seeing what connection there is, on the one hand, in the Kingdom of Nature with the moral or the soul, and on the other hand, to see, in the soul, that which pertains to Nature. On this point modern humanity faces a disquieting riddle. I have frequently stated in public lectures that when man applies natural laws to the universe, and looks into past times, he says to himself: Everything surrounding me has come out of the past, out of some nebular condition, and thus out of something purely material, which then was somehow differentiated and transformed, giving rise to the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the human Kingdoms; a condition however which would somehow, even if in another form than in the beginning, also obtain at the end of the universe. But then what is born in us as morality, as our ideals, will be faded and forgotten and there will be the great graveyard of the physical and in this final condition of the physical that which has arisen in man like foam-bubbles of psychic development will have no meaning, just because it is only a kind of foam-bubble. The only reality then would be that which has developed physically out of the primeval mists into the marked distinctions of the various beings, only to return to the universal state of cinders. Such a view of things, to which one must come if one acknowledges honestly the modern outlook on nature, such a view can never build a bridge between the physical and the moral or psychic.

Therefore this philosophy, if it is not to be completely materialistic, seeing physical events as the only thing in the world, requires as it were, a second world—created out of the abstract. This second world, if one recognizes the first as given only to science, would be given only to faith. This faith, again indulges in the thought: Surely everything moral that arises in the human soul must have its compensation in the world; there must be something which rewards good and punishes evil, and so on. However philosophically you look at it, the result is the same. And in our time there are certainly people who acknowledge both views, in spite of the fact that they exist side by side without a bridge between them. There are people who believe everything the purely natural scientific view has to say, who subscribe to the Kant-Laplace theory of primeval mist, and everything in favour of a final cindery, slaggy condition of our evolution; and at the same time they acknowledge some religious view of things—that good works somehow find their reward, and evildoers are punished, and so on. This fact, that today there are many people whose souls are influenced by both the one and the other arises because in our time there is no little real activity of the soul, for, if there were, the same soul could not simply assume on the one hand a world-order which excludes the reality of the moral, and on the other acknowledge some power which rewards good and punishes evil.

Compare with this bridgeless and lazy thought of so many modern people—these moral and physical points of view—what I explained to you here last time as a product of Spiritual Science. I pointed out to you that we see around us, first of all, the world of light-phenomena, that we therefore see in the outer world everything which is apparent to us through what we call light. I pointed out to you how dying world-thoughts are to be seen in everything that surrounds us in the form of light: world-thoughts which one in the untold past were thought-worlds of definite beings, thought-worlds from which world-beings in their time drew their world-secrets. We meet these thoughts as light today, they are, as it were, the corpses of thought, world-though that is dying. This meets us as light. You know (to know it we need only open my Occult Science at the right place) that if we look back into the far distant past, man was not the same as we know him today; there was only a sort of sense-machine during the Saturn epoch, for instance. You know also that at that time the universe was inhabited, as it is also now. But these other beings occupied the position within the universe which man holds today. We know that those spirits which we call the Archai or Primeval Powers, stood during the old Saturn epoch on the plane of humanity; they were not like the human beings of today, but they were on a corresponding footing; during the old Sun epoch Archangels stood on the human plane, and so on. We look back therefore into the past and say: as we now go through the world as thinking men, these also went as thinking beings with human character through that world. That which lived then in them has become external world-thought; and that which lived then in them as thought, so that it would be visible from outside as their light-aura, that appears in the realities of light. So that in the realities of light we have to see dying thought-worlds. Now darkness interplays with these light-realities, and opposite to the light there lives in the darkness what psychically and spiritually can be called the will, or with a more oriental application, love. If we look out into the world therefore, we see on one side the light-world, if I may so call it; but we should not see this light-world, which was after all always transparent to the senses, unless the darkness was perceptible in it. And in darkness we have to seek on the first plane of the psychic that which lives in us as will. Just as the outer world can be regarded as a clash of darkness and light, so our own inner selves, in so far as they expand in space, can be regarded as light and darkness. Except that for our own consciousness light is thought, imagination; the darkness in us is will which becomes goodness, love and so on.

You see, we get here a philosophy of the world in which the soul contains not only what is psychic, and nature contains not only what is natural. We get here a philosophy in which nature is the result of former moral events, where light is “the dying world of thought.” Therefore we can also say: when we carry our thoughts in us, in so far as they live in us as thoughts, they are produced from our past. But we continually penetrate our thoughts with the will, out of the rest of our organism. For precisely what we call purest thought is the remains of our ancient past, penetrated by the will. So that even pure thought is penetrated by the will—as I have clearly expressed in the new edition of my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. But what we carry in us goes on into distant futures, and then what now is laid in us as the first seed, will shine in external phenomena. There will then be beings who look out into the world as we do now, and they will say: Nature shines round about us; why? Because men acted in a certain way on earth. For what we see now around us is the consequence of seed borne by former dwellers on earth. We stand here now and survey Nature. We can stand like dry, barren, abstract creatures, as the physicists do, and analyze light and its phenomena: we will then analyze them, being inwardly as cold as laboratory-workers; in the course of it some very beautiful, very intelligent things will be found, but we do not stand face to face with the outer world as complete human beings. We do that only when we can feel the message of the dawn's red, of the blue sky and of the green plant, when we can experience the sound of plashing waves. For “light” does not refer only to what is apparent to the eye, but I use the expression for all sense-perceptions. What do we see in all we observe around us? We see a world which certainly can uplift our soul, and in a sense is revealed to our soul as the world that we must have in order to be able to look with our sense on to a physical world. We do not stand there as complete beings if our attitude is that of a dry physicist. We are complete beings only if we say to ourselves: there the light and the sounds are the last presentation of what in long ages past beings formulated in their souls: we have to thank them. Our view then is not that of dry physicists, but of gratitude to those beings who so many millions years ago, let us say during the old Saturn time, lived as human beings as we do today, and who felt and experienced in such a way that we have today the wonderful world around us. That is an important result of a philosophy, steeped in reality, which leads to our realization of this. You realized it with the necessary intensity, you fill yourself with this necessity for feeling gratitude towards our far distant predecessors because it is they who have created for us our surroundings. Not only are you filled with this thought, but you must make up your minds to say: We must regulate our thoughts and feelings, according to a moral ideal which floats before us, so that those beings who come after us may look upon a world for which they can be as thankful to us as we can be to our far-off predecessors who now literally surround us as spirits of light.

A complete philosophy leads, you see, to this world-feeling or this cosmic concept. A philosophy that is not complete leads indeed to all kinds of ideas or conceptions and theories of the world, but it does not satisfy the complete man, for it leaves his feeling empty. The first has its practical side, though man today scarcely realizes it. The man who takes the world today seriously, and who knows that he may not let it head for collapse, should look at the school and university of the future, which people do not enter at eight o'clock in the morning with a certain feeling of slackness and indifferent, and leave at eleven or twelve or one o'clock in the same mood, or at most with a slight pride that they are so and so much wiser ... let us assume they are! But we can envisage a future in which those people who leave at eleven or twelve or one o'clock step out from their places of learning with feelings towards the world that reach out into the universal: because side by side with their cleverness there is planted in their souls the feeling of gratitude towards the far-off past in which beings have worked to form our surrounding Nature as it is; and a great feeling of responsibility towards the world to b e, because our moral impulses will later become shining worlds.

Of course it remains a question of faith, if you want to tell these people that the primeval mist is real and the future state of slag or cinders is real, and in between there are beings creating moral illusions which rise in them as foam. Faith does not lay down the last, though to be honest, it should. It is not essentially different for a man to say: There is a kind of compensation, for Nature itself is so arranged that a compensation takes place; my thoughts will become shining light. The moral organization of the world is revealed. What at one period is moral organization, is at another physical organization; and what at one time is physical organization was once moral organization. All moral things are therefore destined to emerge into physical things. Does the man who looks at Nature spiritually need still another proof that the world is morally organized? No; in Nature itself, spiritually seen, lies the justification of the moral order. One rises to this image when one regards man in his complete manhood.

Let us start from a phenomenon we all experience every day. We know that the phenomenon of sleeping and waking means that man is released in his ego and his astral body from the physical and etheric body. What does this mean in reference to the Cosmos? Let us imagine it in a diagram. Imagine physical and etheric body, astral body and ego bound together during wakefulness and separated during sleep: What now is—I might call it—the cosmic difference between the two?

Now if you consider the state of sleep, you experience light. And by experiencing light, you experience the dying world of past thoughts; and in doing so, you have a tendency to become aware of the spiritual as it stretches out into the future. That man today has only a dim perception of it doesn't alter the fact. What is for the moment essential is that we are in this state susceptible to the light.

Now if we dip down into the body we become inwardly psychic—by which I mean that we are souls and not scales—we become psychically sensitive to darkness in contradistinction to light. This contradistinction is not merely a negative one, but we become aware of something else: as in sleep we were receptive of light, so in wakefulness we are sensible of weight. I said we are not scales, we are not sensible of weight in the sense that we weigh our bodies; but by diving down into our bodies we become inwardly and psychically sensible of weight. Do not be surprised if this at first seems somewhat vague. The ordinary consciousness is, for real psychic experience, as dormant in wakefulness as in sleep. In sleep man today does not consciously notice how he lives in light. Awake he does not notice how he lives in weight. But it is so. The fundamental experience of man in sleep is the life in light. In sleep he is not psychically sensible of weight, of the fact of weight; weight is, as it were, taken away form him. He lives in imponderable light; he knows nothing of weight; he learns to recognize this only inwardly, above all subconsciously. But it reveals itself at once to the imagination; he learns to recognize weight by diving down into his body.

For spiritual-scientific research this is shown in the following manner. When you have risen to the stage of knowledge known as Imagination, you can observe the etheric body of a plant. In doing so you will feel inwardly that his etheric plant-body draws you continually upward, it is without weight. On the other hand when you look at the etheric body of a man, it has weight, even for the imaginative picture. You simply have the feeling it is heavy. And from this point you come to realize that the etheric body of man, for instance, is something which transfers the weight to the soul within. But it is a super-sensible primeval phenomenon. Asleep, the soul lives in light, and therefore in lightness. Awake, it lives in weight. The body is heavy; this force transfers itself to the soul: the soul lives in weight. This means something which is now carried over into the consciousness. Think of the moment of waking: what is it? When asleep—you lie in bed, you do not move, the will is crippled. It is true, vision is also crippled, but only because the will is. Vision is crippled because the will is not in your own body, and does not make use of the senses. The main fact is the crippling of the will. What makes the will active? This: that the soul feels weight through the body. This combined life with the soul produces in earthly man the fact of the will. And the will ceases in man himself when he is in the light.

Thus you have the two cosmic forces, light and weight, as the great antitheses in the Cosmos. In fact, light and weight are cosmic antitheses. Think of the planets: weight draws towards the central point, light goes out from it into the whole universe. One imagines light only as quiescent: in reality it is directed outwards from the planet. Whoever thinks of weight as a force of attraction, with Newton, really things very materialistically; or he imagines some sort of demon or something sitting in the middle of the earth and pulling the stone with an invisible string. One speaks of a force of attraction which no one can every prove except in imagination. Now people are not able to realize it actually, but they speak of it, with Newton as the force of attraction. In western civilization the time will come when whatever exists must be somehow represented materially. Thus, someone could say to these people: Well, you want to represent the force of attraction as an invisible string, but then you will have to represent light at best as a kind of swinging away, as a shooting off. One could then represent light as a force of dispersion. It is enough for him who prefers to remain nearer reality, if he can simply realize the opposition, the cosmic opposition of light and weight.

And now, many things that concern man are based on what I have been saying. If we have considered the daily event of going to sleep and awaking, we say: In going to sleep, man passes out from the field of weight, into the field of light. By living in the field of light, when he has lived long enough without weight, he gets again a strong longing to feel weight around him, and he returns once more to weight—he awakes. It is a continuous oscillation between life in light and life in weight, between going to sleep and awakening. If a man has developed his powers of perception sufficiently, he will be able to feel this sort of rising from weight into light, and the feeling of being possessed again by weight on awaking, as a personal experience.

Now, think of something else: think of this: between birth and death man is bound to the earth, because his soul, having lived a time in light always hungers again for weight, and returns to the condition of weight. When a condition has been set up—we shall speak further of this—in which this hunger for weight no longer exists, man will follow light more and more. He does this up to a certain point, and when he has arrived at the outermost periphery of the universe, he has exhausted that which gave him weight in his lifetime; then begins a new longing for weight and he begins his path over again, back to a new incarnation. So that in that interval also between death and a new birth, at the midnight hour of existence, there arises a kind of hunger for weight. This is man's longing to return to a new earth-life. Now while he is returning to earth he has to go through the spheres of the other adjacent heavenly bodies. Their effect on him is various and the result of these influences he brings with him into the physical life. So you see the question is important: What influence have the stars in the spheres through which he travels? For according to his passage through his stellar sphere, his longing for earth-weight is variously formed. Not the earth alone radiates, as it were, a certain weight which is the object of man's longing, but also the other heavenly bodies, through whose sphere he travels, as he moves towards a new life, influence him with their weights. So that man, while returning, can get into different situations, which justify one in saying this: Man while returning to earth longs once more to live in the earth-weight. But first he passes through the sphere of Jupiter, who also radiates a weight of such a kind as to add something joyful to the longing for the earth's weight. Thus the longing takes on a joyful mood. Man passes through the sphere of Mars. Mar's weight influences him also, and implants activity in his soul, which is joyfully longing for the earth's weight, so that he may use forcefully the next life from birth to death. The soul has reached the stage of possessing in its subconscious depths the impulse clearly to long for the earth's weight, and to use earthly incarnation forcefully, so that the joyful longing is expressed with intensity. Man passes also through the sphere of Venus. With this joy and strength and longing is mingled a loving understanding of life's tasks.

You note, we are speaking of several different weights, issuing from the heavenly bodies, and are connecting them with the living contents of the soul. We are seeking, again, in looking out into universal space, to assess what is spread out in physical space in moral terms. Knowing that will lies in weight, and that light is the opposite of will, we may say that Mars radiates light, as do Jupiter and Venus also, and that in the forces of weight lies at the same time modification through light. We know, in light are dying world-thoughts, in the forces of weight lie worlds to come through the seeds of will. All this streams through the souls moving in space. We are looking at the world physically, and, at the same time, morally.

The physical and moral do not exist side by side, but in his limitations, man is disposed to say: here, on one side, is the physical, there on the other, the moral. No, they are only different aspects, in itself the thing is one. The world which develops towards light, develops at the same time towards a compensating revelation. Moral world-order reveals itself out of the natural world-order. You must be clear that such a view of the universe is not reached through a philosophical interpretation, but that one grows into it by learning gradually through Spiritual Science to spiritualize physical concepts: for thus it takes on a moral quality of its own accord. And if you learn to look through the physical world into the world in which the physical has ceased to be and the spiritual exists, you will find the moral element is present.

It would be possible even now to explain quite “learnedly” what I have just said. You have this line, which is not an ellipse, because it is more rounded, here. (See Diagram 2)

[Dr. Steiner was here describing on the blackboard the three variations of the curve of Cassini. One of them is similar to an ellipse, the second to a figure of eight (Lemniskate) the third is composed of two separated parts. –Ed.] An ellipse would be like this: but that is only a special form of this line, this line could also, if we altered the mathematical equation, take this form. It is then the same line as the other: one time I go round like this and close here ... under certain conditions I do not go up here to the top like this—but round here—and return again, closing at the base. But the same line has still another shape. If I begin here, I must apparently close here also; now I must leave the level, the space, must cross here and return here. Now I must leave space again, continuing here, and closing at the base. The line is only modified somewhat; these are not two lines, but only one; it has also only one mathematical equation; it is a simple line, only I have gone out of space. If I continue this demonstration another possibility arises: I can simply take this line (Lemniskate) (figure 8), but I can also represent it so that half of it lies in space; by coming round here—I must leave space and finish it off so: here is the other half, but outside ordinary space, not inside. It is also there. And if one developed this method of perception which mathematicians, if they would, could certainly do today, one would come to the other conception—of leaving space and returning into it. That is something which corresponds to reality. For every time you undertake something, you think: before you will it, you go out of space, and when you move your you return again. In between, you are outside of space: then you are on the other side. This conception must be thoroughly developed—from the other side of space. Then you arrive at the conception of what is truly super-sensible, and above all at the conception of the moral element in its reality. Today it is so difficult, because people will divide everything they want to experience according to dimension, weight and number, whereas in fact the reality leaves space at every point, I might say, and returns again to it. There are people who imagine a solar system with comets in it. They say: the comet appears, traverses a huge ellipse, and after a long time returns. In the case of many comets that is not true. It is like this: comets appear, go out, disintegrate there, cease to be, but form themselves again on the other side and return again, describe in fact lines which do not return at all. Why? Because comets leave space and return at quite another place. This is certainly possible in the Cosmos, that comets somehow disintegrate out of space and return again at a totally different place.

I must point out that Spiritual Science could deal with the most learned scientific concepts if it had the chance or possibility of permeating with spirit that which is today carried on without spirit, particularly in the so-called exact sciences. Unfortunately this possibility does not exist; things especially like Mathematics, etc., are pursued today for the most part in the most materialistic way. And therefore Spiritual Science is called upon to make itself known to educated laymen, there were many with pretensions to learning to reproach it. Spiritual Science can deal with the highest scientific conceptions, and this with full exactitude, because it is conscious of its responsibility. Among all its other tasks, Spiritual Science has the task of purging our mental atmosphere from those mists of untruthfulness which obtain not only in outward life, but which can be shown to exist in the very heart of every science. And, again, there emerges from these depths, something which has such a devastating effect on the social life. We must summon up the courage to illumine these things with the right light. But for this it is necessary to cultivate an enthusiasm for an outlook on life which really does combine the moral and physical world-orders, in which the light-giving sun can be regarded not only as the concentration of crumbling thought-worlds, but also as that which springs forth from the depths of the earth as the preparation for what lives on into the future, seedlike, permeating the world in accordance with Will.

I want to talk to you more in-depth about the previous topic of the day before yesterday, about inner or esoteric development and super-sensible knowledge. It will be quite necessary to treat what we examined then as a prerequisite because we want to build further upon what has touched our soul at that time. You will have understood from what was discussed, that the development of the human being is not something that should be taken as a joke; it is not something that should be taken lightly. Though on the other hand, one has to emphasise repeatedly, that one should not talk about the dangers of occult development in an ordinary, trivial way either. The dangers are great, but the way they are usually talked about is not correct, we have to become very clear about this. Let us just try to imagine more precisely what happens to someone who has developed himself through some kind of exercise, let’s say, by way of the type of exercises mentioned in the last lecture, and let’s compare him with someone who is not involved in such training and follows, just like everyone else, his daily routine. We will arrive at a conscious understanding, if we begin, for example, with what we know about the ordinary state of sleep.

From the previous lecture¹ you’ve learnt what the human astral body actually does at night in the normal state of sleep. While a human being is asleep, the physical body and the etheric body lie in bed—but the so-called “astral body” together with the ego rises out of these and leaves them behind. And when the astral body is not in the physical body, and does not use its tools, the sense organs, to observe and reflect upon the external world, and is not kept busy by the movements and work of the physical body, then the astral body can take on a completely different task. It removes the exhaustion of both.² The removal of this exhaustion is its task. A clairvoyant can see how the astral body throughout the whole night works from the outside on the physical and etheric body to restore them so that in the morning the human being feels the renewal of his strength and feels refreshed. For this reason, sleep is such a good doctor, and if someone doesn’t get healthy and sufficient sleep he loses a lot. Many, many things that seem to be sicknesses, are only disturbances in the physical and etheric body. These disturbances remain if the astral body is unable to remove them. It is, however, able to remove these disturbances when it is not in the physical body as in the awake state, but when it is outside of the body.

Where does the astral body get its strength and abilities, that it uses to 'repair' the physical body? In my last public lecture, I have already compared the exit of the astral body out of the physical and the etheric body, to an amount of water contained in a glass. If you have about 1000 drops of water in this glass which form a body of water, then this is different from taking a thousand small sponges and sponging up every drop of water separately—and so you will have individualised each drop separately. In the same way, this happens with the astral body during the night. If all of you were to fall asleep here now, the same thing would happen as when you were to squeeze out the sponges and create one body of water. Your astral body would raise up and would join with the others. By connecting in this way, human beings come into contact with those harmonic magnificent occurrences in the universe. Our souls return in the night to the harmony of the spheres and from these the astral body with the ego—and this is the soul—acquire the strength needed for the restoration of the physical body.

What will happen to a human being who obtains an occult teacher and undergoes occult training? He is given certain tasks. One can only talk about these roughly. He receives tasks to meditate, concentrate, and so on. What is the purpose of the task assigned to the student by the teacher? The purpose is to slowly enable the astral body to see when it is outside of the physical body at night. The astral body of an ordinary human being is, when outside, unconscious within the astral world, as you would be unconscious in the physical world if you had no sense organs. Without sense organs, the world does not exist for you. The moment a human being receives the instructions to awaken the dormant forces of his soul, his astral body receives spiritual or psychic sense organs, those organs that are called Lotus flowers. These are not flowers any more than the lobes of the lungs³ are wings. Everyone knows that a hawk has wings that look quite different from the lobes of the lungs.

Lotus flowers are organs, that perform a kind of circling motion. One such organ is located underneath the forehead, one centimetre under where the eyebrows meet, in the brain. Focusing intensely on this point and simultaneously speaking a particular word, triggers a kind of flash, an appearance of light, visible to a clairvoyant from the outside. The sense organ begins to carry out a circling motion. It is said that the wheel is turning, it comes to life.

A normal average person does not have such an organ at this location, or there is at most a subtle hint of it. Through the training, the flashing appears when the astral body is outside of the physical one. The impression one gains as a clairvoyant, observing from the outside, is that of a turning wheel. This wheel is called a “swastika”. This sign, like other real symbols, cannot be explained by speculation. They weren’t randomly invented but can really be seen on the spiritual or astral plane. The swastika is a symbol of this sense organ, and all witty explanations in the theosophical literature are nonsense. One must not provide allegorical or symbolic explanations in theosophy. This would be what one must give up first: all speculation. One has to give up all this pondering about how things could be. It is only important to enter into reality itself. Located close to the larynx is the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower, an organ on which human development depends very much. Close to the heart is the twelve-petalled, and further down the ten-petalled Lotus, and so on.

These organs develop through the exercises that the teacher assigns to the student, in the same way as the sense organs of the physical body develop by practice, for example through the influence of light and sound. You can see one as a physical and the other as a spiritual process of exactly the same duration. You must not believe that any riotous processes, magic, or some such things, could lead someone to develop these sense organs. It is only intimate processes, learning by thinking thoughts that have the strength in them to develop such organs. Hereby it is consistently important that the human being learns what these thoughts are, and that he focuses on a particular bodily organ, for example at a point in his brain located one centimetre below the middle of the eyebrows. If a human being now focuses on this point whilst using a specific combination of words, he will awaken certain abilities inside his astral body. It is all systematically and, one could say, technically determined.

Some people don’t find this very relevant for them at all. Repeatedly, one hears phrases that are an absurdity for a true occultist: “I do not need a teacher; I have to find my teacher inside of myself”. Now, in such talks, the greatest egoism can be found—and it is nonsense. If someone would look at geometry from this perspective, what would be the result? Everyone is able to discover all the laws of geometry by way of inner development: he might need many thousand years to discover them, but he is able to find them. But is it really necessary, to discover geometry anew?

Should one not just connect to what mankind in century-long work has discovered, build upon it, and create something useful for humanity that has provided us with so much knowledge? Humanity is entitled to this. What could we spare humanity from, if we would feel devoted love towards the teachers of early mankind! In the same way, we are also not attempting to search for the sake of our own inner development, but as workers performing a great service to mankind. There were always human beings who were pioneers. They are the ones from whom we have to learn, and if we are worried about submitting to their authority then that is loveless nonsense. Working in the spirit of the teachers of mankind, to seek out those who can lead us, is an immediate and absolute necessity for occult teachers and students alike. Those things that the teachers tell us, and that were tested and known for centuries, tease the sense organs out of the astral body.

If someone gives occult advice—a real teacher won’t do this—then it can easily happen that they instruct the student on how he can gain perceptions in the astral world. It can then be perceived that the student begins to work on his astral body and starts to tease out the sense organs but begins to display worse habits and characteristics than prior to becoming an occult student. People were wondering about the fact that in the early times of theosophy many people made incomprehensible mistakes in regard to their character. Even a slight development of the astral body, instigated by the elementary teachings of theosophy, when these became first known publicly, triggered quite curious phenomena. For example, a student, who was a cashier, took off with the money, and another still did quite different things; also, people who were previously very peace-loving became quarrelsome. This is because even with a bit of occult development flowing from the theosophical concepts, if not followed up properly the bad sides of a character issue forth. However, none should be frightened because of this. Attention should simply be paid to such things as they need to be taken seriously. Using our strength of character, we just want to aim at not falling for such temptations. It will be different once a student is approached by real systematic occult training. Then work on the astral body is more extensive, and it becomes quite necessary to offer a substitute source of energy to replenish the physical and etheric bodies.

How can that be replenished which is taken from the physical and etheric bodies? To achieve this, it will be necessary to develop quite specific characteristics in a human being. In human nature and essence, it is possible to develop traits that allow the physical and etheric body to be maintained so they don’t depend on too extensive restoration. Imagine that you do something during the day that contributes to strengthening and restoring the physical and etheric body so that these will be resonating by way of their own purpose and rhythm in harmony with the great universe. Only then will you be able to use the forces for the astral body itself. This must be done, it doesn’t need to be done right away, but the time will come when it must happen. When the teacher says: “You have to concentrate the thinking”—what is meant by that is not only ordinary thinking. When told: “You have to sit down, think any ordinary thought and do not allow any other thoughts to come in, focus on the thought as intensely as possible whilst rejecting all other thoughts—this will require the human being to make a certain inner conquest—and this inner conquest is what counts. The subject is not meant to be interesting and fascinating. For example, it would be easy to focus on Napoleon, but it would be difficult to focus on a matchstick uninterruptedly for an extended period of time. This is the very essence. You will soon notice, how after some time you will reach a certain inner strength and surety. One can already feel, based on an inner experience, whether it has been effective.

Next, one must take the initiative and perform actions that one otherwise would most certainly not have done. It could be something completely unimportant. The importance of an activity is irrelevant, but it must be your own action, derived from your own original initiative. A man I told this to informed me after some time that every day in his office he would take seven steps forwards and seven steps backwards whilst imagining “Evolution and Involution”. Excellent! Not the importance of an action, but that the initiative is uniquely one’s own, is what counts.

I’ve talked to other friends about this and, to give them an example, I mentioned that one could water flowers if one had never done this before. And what did I have to deal with then? When I visited those friends, they were all busy watering flowers! That was the completely wrong thing to do because they weren’t supposed to perform “my” action, but to perform an action that they may not have invented but which is their very own, except for the invention. If this is done over an extended period, you will see its inner effect. It will harmonise and balance everything in the physical and etheric body, so that both resonate by themselves and do not require a lot of restoration work, thus enabling the astral body to withdraw a part of their strength.

Next, the human being must control himself in regard to desire and pain. In ordinary life, he is subjected to the slavery of his feelings. He laughs when someone shares something funny with him, he cries about any sad event. A student, however, has to exercise self-control, he must not allow himself to be dominated, but he himself must control lust and pain. Many think this would make them insensitive, but the opposite is the case. We thus overcome desire and pain, namely, what is egoistical desire and egoistical pain. We must find the way to sort of crawl or put ourselves into other beings, to become empathetic. None should shrink back from this exercise because of a concern about becoming insensitive—everyone will become more sensitive.

The fourth exercise is one I like best to explain by way of a legend. This legend is out of the life of Jesus Christ. Like many others it can’t be found in the Bible, it is Persian.⁴ When the apostles once walked with Jesus Christ across the countryside, they saw the half-decayed carcass of a dead dog lying around. “What nasty carrion”, the apostles said and turned away in disgust. Jesus Christ alone stopped, looked at the carcass, and after a while said: “What beautiful teeth this animal had.”—He noticed in the ugly, decaying carcass still the beautiful teeth. This gives us a hint that we should adopt and must adopt the habit to discover in all ugliness the grain of beauty, in bad the good, and in error the truth. This positive attitude must be practiced for some time, it will lead to inner harmony and inner rhythm.

The fifth exercise is, that the human being should be reasonably unbiased towards everything new that he encounters in the world. It could also be said that one is not allowed to use anything he is used to from the past to influence the future. The words: “I don’t believe this”, must completely disappear from the mind. If someone comes to you and tells you that the church tower has become crooked overnight, you’ll have to find a corner in your heart where you believe it is possible for anything to really happen. This does not mean that you should become uncritical; you should simply consider nothing to be impossible. Whoever can do this, is able to exert influence very effectively on the physical and the etheric body, so they will fall into a rhythm that feeds the astral body during the night with what has been gained for it through meditation and concentration. Because this will lead human beings gradually to the true theosophy, allowing them to gain insight everywhere into why things happen the way they do, and not in a different way. Whoever knows the mechanism of sleep, also knows why such exercises need to be practised.

Once a human being has taken steps on the occult path for some time under appropriate guidance, many things become to him visible, tangible, and able to be experienced that he would otherwise have missed. Don’t believe that the dangers that one encounters are otherwise not there in life. One just doesn’t see them in advance but goes through life without seeing them. One only learns to see what is around us in the spiritual world when one can enter into the higher planes. What man, for example, must encounter and will always encounter at a higher level, what he must cope with, and what he must prepare himself for, is the “Guardian of the Threshold”. Human beings have usually quite strange ideas about him.

What is this “Guardian of the Threshold”?—Today, we want to turn our attention to this experience by skipping many other things. You have to be clear about what a human being normally does during his whole lifetime. Let’s take the “Kamaloka life” in its true sense, the life after death, where the human being still has a certain inclination to the physical-sensory existence, and compare this life with what happens immediately prior to the beginning of the Kamaloka life. A great tableau of memories will be laid out in front of the soul of one who has just departed the physical body. Then the Kamaloka life begins.

This is very strange. For a start, it has the characteristic that the human being relives his life. In fact, he will live his whole previous life backward, by going back through the events, which happened prior to his death until his birth. In this way, one relives all events backward and will be finished with it once one reaches the own birth. One returns to every point that one has lived through. Let’s say, you’ve reached age sixty, and when you were forty years old you slapped someone in the face. When you reach this point in your backward memory experience, you will be drawn towards that human being and you will be marked, so to speak, with something strange: You will suffer the pain you have inflicted. Whilst throughout your life you might have harbored feelings of revenge, now you are feeling what the person felt, on whom you have taken or intended to take revenge. By way of backward experience, you re-live the emotions and feelings you have spread. Everything you will experience there offers you much that obstructs your further development in the history of mankind. Without the implanted mark of pain, you would get further more easily, because this inhibiting marking stays with you as a force. By absorbing those forces in the Kamaloka backward, you will, in the next life again be led by karma to where you will be able to use them to pay off the debt, to put things right, for compensation. Thus, longing develops to redeem where you have failed, and you will be attracted to do this when the human being again lives with you. This is how Karma plays out.

Another example: Four vigilante⁵ Century in Westphalia and survived until the 19^th Century. judges have sentenced someone to death and executed the judgment. Why did this happen? When the life of these four men was traced back, it turned out that in a former life the condemned man was a kind of chief who had sentenced those four men to death. The train of events that brought those five men together actually was created in the Kamaloka life. In this way, a human being always has the opportunity during his Kamaloka life, to accept those forces as inhibiting markings that will lead him again into life to pay off his debts.

After a human being has crossed through Devachan and should again return to the physical life, you will find the converse picture of what happens immediately after death. Now you will have a kind of premonition, a kind of preview of the life you are about to experience. Of course, what someone perceives at that time he will forget unless he is trained in the occult. There are verifiable cases, that human beings were so shocked by the preview that they did not want to enter into this life. It turned out that indeed the etheric body did not completely enter the physical body. In such cases, the etheric body of the head protruded quite a bit outside and caused a very specific kind of idiocy.

Now don’t think that karma plays out in such a way that we would be able to immediately pay off all the debts we have incurred in a previous incarnation, in the next one. It is not that simple. Sometimes one will have to go through many, many incarnations. If you would be able to look back for a moment and see everything, all the marks in your astral body that need to be redeemed, prior to your rising to certain heights of occultism, you would see your whole debt account.

What now confronts the student and must confront him in a symbolic and comprehensible form is what we still have to redeem, what still holds us back: the unredeemed karma. This is the Guardian of the Threshold.

It could also confront us in quite an abnormal way. I am aware of a case, where someone was incarnated at the end of the 18th century with quite an extraordinary greed to undertake certain deeds on the physical plane so that he had to experience a strange fate after death. He died; after a very long time, he left the remainder of his astral body. Usually, the astral body falls off after about a third of the time spent on earth, and remains back as an astral corpse, until it dissolves. Such astral corpses are consistently circling around us and exert a negative influence on people. He was unable to stay for longer in the spiritual world but experienced early, the urge to go down into the physical world again. Now he incurred a misfortune that very rarely happens. It is actually possible, that when a human being returns to physical existence, he finds his astral corpse is still around. This then is very bad for him because his current astral body will be penetrated by his earlier astral body, which is a horrible fate. He now has it consistently next to himself as a “doppelgänger”, and this is the abnormal form of the Guardian of the Threshold, which could occur in special exceptional circumstances.

For one, however, who is on the way to occult development, it is necessary that he, at a particular point in time, sees his ordinary astral body with all the marks of its unresolved karma, and he must try, through existing means, to balance out this unreleased karma. This is the true encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold. All of this has not been told to spook you, but to give you an idea of what is meant by “self-knowledge”, in the true sense of the word. Self-knowledge is two-fold: first, it is the recognition of what the true self must do. Second, it is the knowledge of the higher self. But their knowledge is something quite different. You can read in the Bible: Adam knew his wife.⁶—This is an expression for “fertilisation”. “Know yourself” means: fertilise yourself with the wisdom inside of you, look at the soul as a feminine organ and fertilise yourself. If you want to gain self-knowledge, search inside of you, where you will be able to recognise all your mistakes. If you want to reach knowledge of the higher self, search outside of you, because there knowledge of the world is knowledge of the self. Everything is in the sun because everything is sun. We have to let go of ourselves. I have been told: “You tell us about development and such things, but we want to achieve an uplifting of the soul, of the feelings.” One who speaks like that is his own enemy. Not by gawking into ourselves, but by learning to know the world in all its parts, bit by bit, will we become selfless and able to find self-knowledge and knowledge of God.

There is no phrase worse than that one: “One only has to look within oneself”.—There you will only find the lower self. One should search outside with love and one will discover. I have known people who said: “What do I need? I don’t need anything because I am Atman.” But even if they repeatedly say “Atman, I am Atman” they will not be able to become conscious of it, because they don’t know more about Atman than that it is a five-letter word. This looking within oneself only leads to shutting oneself off. We are nothing but a limb (part) of this world. The finger is only a finger as long as it is part of the organism; if you lose it, it will no longer be a finger.

The finger doesn’t separate itself from the organism, but the human being is so “smart” to believe he could separate himself from Earth, despite the fact that you only have to transport him a few kilometres above Earth, and he will perish. The human being belongs to the sun, according to his etheric and astral body, to a whole world of sun(s). It is the biggest mistake to want to find the self within oneself. Letting go of oneself by immersing oneself in all the details of the world is the right thing. One who fertilises himself with love and humility, will find divine salvation, whilst someone who searches for God inside of himself hardens.

You will see that there is much to learn when one wants to really get to know the esoteric way. It is important to have the right idea about such things. You don’t need to think about this from morning to night, just as it is unnecessary to repeat your own name all the time. It is sufficient to know the thought. There are thoughts without which an esotericist can’t be an esotericist. If he has those thoughts, as in his daily life he has his drives and motives, then these thoughts represent steps for him, that will lead him upwards to the super-sensible plane of knowledge, they will assist him in penetrating into the wisdom of the worlds, knowingly advancing to love.

• 1. Vienna, 6 November 1907. No transcript is available of this lecture.
• 2. Translator’s Note: the physical and the etheric body.
• 3. Translator’s Note: Lobes of the lungs are called “Lungenflügel” in German i.e., wings of the lungs.
• 4. J.W.v.Goethe, Notes and Treatises for the Better Understanding of the West-Easterly Divan, section: General—Lord Jesus, who wanders through the World (Nisami).
• 5. Judges of a Vehmic Court, a form of Court without fixed laws and norms, which occurred in isolation in the 13^th 5
• 6. 1 Moses, Chapter 4, 1, Luther Translation.