The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In a series of lectures the fact has now been brought home to us that behind all that we call Maya or the great illusion, there is the Spiritual. Let us once again ask ourselves in what way it has been made evident that the spiritual is to be discerned behind everything perceptible to our senses and our physically limited view.

In order to describe this spiritual essence we were obliged in the last lecture to sweep the nearest external phenomena away from our field of vision and pierce through to such qualities of the reality as those described as the willingness to sacrifice, and the virtue of bestowal or renunciation, in fact, to those virtues with which we can only become acquainted by looking into our own souls, and which we can only fully comprehend by means of our own souls. Now if we are really to attribute such virtues as these to what we have to think of as the reality—we might almost say the ‘true’—behind the world of illusion, we must admit that in this world of true existence, in this world of reality, there lives that which fundamentally, as regards its qualities, can only be compared with the qualities we primarily perceive in our souls. For instance if we have to characterise that which is outwardly expressed in the phenomena of heat, presenting it in its true character of sacrificial service, as the flowing sacrifice in the world, it means precisely that we must reduce the elements of heat back to the spiritual, to the incorporeal, doing away, as it were, with the outer veil of existence, showing that which in the external world is similar to what we recognise as the spiritual in ourselves.

Now before we carry these observations further, another idea is necessary. That is the following. Does all that we have in this world of Maya or illusion really vanish into a sort of nothingness? Is everything around us in this world of sense, the world of our external comprehension which to us appears as the real or part of the real—is all this actually nothing?

It would indeed be quite a good comparison if we were to say that the world of truth, the world of reality, is at first concealed, as the inner forces of a lake or even of the ocean are concealed in the body of water, and that the world of Maya might be compared with the rippling play of the waves on the surface. That would be a good comparison; for it shows exactly that there is in the depths of the ocean something that causes the movement of the waves above, something that is the substantiality of the water and the configuration of its force. So that whether we select this example or any other is a matter of indifference, we may very well put the question:--Is there in the wide realms of our Maya or illusion, anything that is real? In this lecture we shall follow the same system as in the last. We shall slowly approach what we wish to bring before our mind, by starting with the inner experience of our soul; and indeed, as we have moved forward spiritually through the Saturn, Sun and Moon-existence, and have now approached that of the earth, we shall start from more intimate, we might almost say more common soul-experience than those referred to in our last lecture. We then started from the hidden depths of the soul-life, from what arises in the astral body. There we felt longing arising within it, and we saw how the longing works in the nature of man, actually leading the life of the soul to find satisfaction only in the advance of that world of ideas which we have been able to grasp as the inner movement of that life. We thus found the way from the microcosmic soul to that cosmic creating which we ascribed to the Spirits of Movement. To-day we shall begin with a still more intimate experience of the soul, one indeed to which attention was already drawn in ancient Greece, which in its reality is even to-day of profound significance. It is indicated in the words: all philosophy, and all striving for a certain kind of human knowledge, must come from Wonder. This is really the case. Any man who has devoted a little reflection and thought to the whole sequence in experience in his own soul, as to how he was brought to any particular learning, will come to know that a sound way to learning is always to start from wonder, from astonishment at something. This wonder, this astonishment, from which every form of learning must proceed, belongs precisely to those experiences of the soul which we described as bringing sublimity and life into anything, however dry. What kind of learning would it be which found a place in our soul, without proceeding from wonder! It would truly be a learning swamped in prosiness and pedantry. That process in the soul which leads from wonder to the bliss we feel when our riddles are solved, which first arises from wonder, in that alone constitutes the sublimity and vital power of the process of acquiring knowledge. We should be able actually to feel the dryness and withering of any knowledge not originating in these two movements of the mind. Sound knowledge is framed in wonder and the bliss of solved riddles: Any other kind of knowledge may be acquired externally and established by man through any kind of reasoning. But a knowledge not framed by these two feelings, does not spring from the soul of man in real earnest. All the fragrance of knowledge created by the atmosphere of vital power, proceeds from these two, from wonder and the bliss of is satisfaction.

But what is the origin of wonder itself? Why is it that wonder, astonishment at anything external, arises in our souls? It arises, because, when we first meet with a being, a thing or a fact, it appears strange to us. This strangeness is the first element leading to wonder and astonishment. But we do not feel this for everything that is strange to us; but only for that to which we feel ourselves in a sense related, so related that we say: ‘In this being or thing there is something that is not as yet in me, but which may fill me.’ So that we can feel related to a thing yet strange, which at first we must grasp through wonder and astonishment, our inner ‘wondering’ is our perception of the quality of an outer ‘wonder’ to which a man at first as far as his own perception goes, considers himself in no wise related. That however depends on himself, or at least it need only do so. And he should not adopt a challenging attitude towards what appears to him as ‘a wonder’ unless he can in a certain way make claim to explain it because it is related to him. Why else should people who start from purely materialistic or purely intellectual concepts deny what others designate as a ‘wonder’, when they have no direct proof that a fabrication, a falsehood, is brought forward? Even philosophers to-day are obliged to admit that it can never be proved by any of the phenomena known to man, that the Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth did not rise again. Proof can be brought against this assertion; but what is the manner of these proofs? Logically they are not tenable! Even enlightened philosophers now admit that. For all the reasons brought against it from the materialistic side—as for instance, the statement that no man has yet been seen to have risen like Christ—all these reasons are on the same level as the argument of a man who had never seen anything but fish and therefore wished to prove the non-existence of birds. It is impossible logically to prove by the existence of one class of beings, that others do not exist. Just as little is it possible through the experience a man may have on the physical plane to disprove, what must at first be described as a ‘miracle’, anything connected with the event of Golgotha. But if something is communicated to a person, which although it may be true, he must call a miracle and he says that he cannot understand it, he does not thereby contradict what we have said about the idea of wondering; for his attitude shows clearly that this fundamental basis of all knowledge is already established in him. He demands that what he has been told should find an echo in himself. He wishes it to become its own property intellectually and as he believes that he cannot have that, and it is not related to him, he challenges it. Even if we ourselves arrive at the concept of the miraculous, we should see that astonishment or marvel, upon which is based all the ancient Greek philosophy, is aroused by a man finding himself confronted with something strange to him, but to which at the same time he recognises a relationship. Let us try to create a connecting link between this idea and those brought before our minds in the last lecture.

We have said that a particular advance in evolution was brought about through the willingness of certain Beings to sacrifice, and their sacrifices being rejected and thrown back, and we learnt to recognise in the rejected sacrifice one of the principle factors in the ancient Moon-evolution. One of the most vital points in that evolution is the fact that during that period sacrifice was to be offered by certain Beings to Entities even more exalted, and that it was renounced by them; so that, as it were, the smoke of the sacrifice offered by the ancient Moon-Beings pressed through to the Higher Entities but was not accepted by them; and that this was sent back as substance into the Beings who had desired to offer it up. We also saw that much of the peculiar character of the Beings belonging to ancient Moon was caused by their feeling within them what they had wished to send up to the Higher Entities as sacrificial substance. We saw, indeed that this, which aspired, but was unable to ascend to the Higher Entities, remained behind within the Beings themselves—thereby was developed in certain Beings—in the Beings of the rejected, the force of Longing. We have still, in all that we sacrifice in our own souls as longing, a legacy from the bygone events on ancient Moon when those Beings found their sacrifice rejected. In a spiritual sense the whole character of the ancient Moon-evolution, its whole spiritual atmosphere, may be described in many respects by saying that Beings were present there who desired to offer sacrifice, but found that this sacrifice was not accepted because the Higher Entities resigned it. The peculiar feature of the spiritual atmosphere of ancient Moon was; the rejected sacrifice. And the rejection of the sacrifice offered by Cain, which symbolically represents one of the starting points of the evolution of earthly humanity, appears as a kind of recapitulation of this peculiar feature of the ancient Moon evolution taking place in the soul of Cain, who sees that his sacrifice is not accepted. This is something which reveals to us a pain, which gives birth to Longing, just as was the case with the Beings belonging to the old Moon-existence. We saw in the last lecture, that between this rejected sacrifice and the longing arising in these beings through its rejection, an adjustment was produced through the appearances on the old Moon of the Spirits of Movement. They created a possible way by which the longing arising in the Entities of the rejected sacrifice, could in a sense be satisfied. You must picture the position very clearly in your minds. You have the exalted Beings to whom sacrifice is about to be made; the substance offered in sacrifice to them rejected; and the longing thereby arising within the Beings who desired to offer and now feel: ‘Had I been able to accomplish my sacrifice, the best part of my own being would be living in those exalted ones; but now lam shut out from them, I am here while they are yonder!’ The Spirits of Movement, however, and this can be taken almost literally, bring the Beings in whom the rejected sacrifice is as a longing after the Higher Beings, into such a condition that they can approach them from many different sides. That which remains in them as the sacrifice which could not be offered, can at any rate now be adjusted, through the wealth of impressions received from the Higher Beings, who are as it were, encircled by the substance of the rejected sacrifice. So is adjusted what could not be harmonised, because of the rejection of the sacrifice, inasmuch as a relation is established between these beings and the Higher Entities which conveyed the impression of a presented sacrifice. We can form a clear idea of what this implies, if we think symbolically of the more exalted Entities united as a Sun, and then, in one position, as a planet, the less exalted gathered together. Now suppose that the Beings of the lesser planet wished to make sacrifice to the greater planet—to the Sun [Editor's Note: The Sun was once a planet]—and that the Sun refused to accept it and threw it back; the substance of the sacrifice must remain in the Beings whose sacrifice was not accepted. Then in their loneliness, their isolation fills their Being with longing. Now the Spirits of Movement bring them into the periphery of the more exalted Entities; this makes it first possible for them, hi place of the direct upward flow of their sacrificial substance, to set that substance itself in motion and thereby to bring it into connection with the Higher Entities. This is exactly like a man who cannot be contented within himself by means of a single great satisfaction, but experiences a number of partial satisfactions; the result of these different experiences being to set all his feelings in motion. This was gone into more minutely in the last lecture. We saw that as the Beings were unable to feel an inner connection with the Higher Beings through the sacrifice, impressions came to them outside in the place of this, by which we saw that they were still able to obtain a certain satisfaction.

But it is an undeniable fact that that which was to have been offered up would have continued its existence within the Higher Entities in a different fashion from its state within the lower Beings. The actual conditions necessary to that existence are in those Higher Beings. It became necessary, therefore, for different conditions of existence to arise in the lower Beings. This again can be symbolically expressed. If a planet were able to pour all its contents into the Sun and these were not rejected, the essence of that planet would find different conditions of existence within the Sun from those it would have met with in the planet outside if the Sun had thrown it back: an estrangement of what we must call the contents of the sacrifice takes place, it is alienated from its origin.

Now bear in mind the thought that certain Beings are compelled to retain within them something which they would gladly have offered up in sacrifice, and concerning which they both feel and perceive that it could only attain its real meaning, if it could be offered up.

If you can picture the feelings of such Beings, you will have an idea of what may be called: ‘The exclusion of a certain number of Cosmic Beings from their actual meaning, their great Cosmic purpose.’ Certain Beings have within them something, which, speaking symbolically, could only fulfil its purpose elsewhere. The consequence of this is that the ‘displacement’—if we may once more speak symbolically—of the rejected incense, of the rejected sacrificial substance, excludes it at first from the rest of the Cosmic process.

If you grasp these thoughts with your feeling—not with your reason, for that does not extend to matters such as these—you will perceive that this represents something like a rending away from the universal Cosmic process. To the Beings who rejected the sacrifice it is only something they put away from them; to the other Beings, those within whom the sacrificial substance is retained, this is a something on which an alien character is imprinted from the outset. Thus there are Beings in whose substance this alien stamp is imprinted from the beginning. If we can present these things to our soul through inner feeling, we are reminded of something in which an alien character is inherent from the beginning:—that is Death! Death is none other than that which necessarily enters the universe with the rejection of the sacrificial substance of those Beings who then had to retain it within themselves. Thus we advance from Resignation, from Renunciation—which we encounter at the third stage of evolution; to that which comes into existence through the renunciation by the Higher Entities of Death.

In its true significance death is neither more nor less than the attribute of the inner contents of certain Beings, contents which are shut out and not in their proper place. Even when death comes to a man in a concrete form it is fundamentally the same thing. For when we look at a corpse left behind in the world of Maya, we know that it consists of nothing but matter which at the moment of death, was shut out from the Ego, astral body, and etheric body, alienated from that within which alone it had a meaning. The physical body without the etheric body, astral body, and Ego has no meaning, it is purposeless; at that moment it is excluded from its purpose. That which we can no longer perceive when a man dies, is then for us in the macrocosm. On account of the Cosmic Beings who belong to higher spheres having rejected what was to have been brought to them in sacrifice, the rejected sacrificial substance within the Beings to whom it was thrown back lapses into death, for death signifies the exclusion of any Cosmic substance or Cosmic Being from its actual purpose.

We have now come to a spiritual characteristic of what we call the fourth element in the Universe. If (1) fire represents the purest sacrifice—and where-ever we encounter fire or heat, behind it there is its spiritual counterpart: Sacrifice—if (2) behind all the air spread out around our earth there really lies the virtue of giving, a really flowing virtue; if (3) we may describe flowing water or the element of fluidity as spiritual resignation or renunciation, so must we describe the element of Earth, (4) which alone can be the bearer of death—for death would not exist without it—as that which was severed from its purpose by renunciation. Now we have something in a concrete form, showing how the solid was formed from the fluidic. For this too reflects a spiritual process, in a certain sense. Suppose ice forms in a pond; the water then becomes solid. The real reason of this is that the water in becoming ice is cut off from its purpose. This gives us the process of solidification, the spiritual process of the Earth's becoming; for as far as the distinguishing marks of the four elements are concerned, ice too is earth, and fluid alone is water. Earth is the element in which death appears and may be experienced.

We began by putting the question as to whether anything real could be found in our world of illusion and Maya, whether there is anything in it corresponding to a reality. I want you to hold clearly to the idea we have just been considering. At the beginning of this course I told you that the concepts to be considered were somewhat complicated. It will therefore be necessary that we should not only try to understand them, but also to meditate upon them; for only then will they be clear to us. Now let us take this conception of the relation of death to the earth; for it presents a truly remarkable aspect. Whereas concerning all our other concepts we could say that there was nothing real in all the world of Maya around us, but that the reality must be looked for in the spiritual behind it—we have now ascertained that within the world of Maya there is that, which, precisely because it is divided from its purpose, because it ought to be in the spiritual world may be called death. Thus something is cut off in Maya, which actually ought not to be there. In the whole wide realm of Maya or the great illusion, we have nothing but deception and illusion before us. Yet there is something there which corresponds to a reality, because it is cut off from its true meaning in the spiritual; and as soon as it enters Maya it encounters annihilation and death. That declares to us nothing less significant than the great occult truth: ‘In the whole world of Maya one thing only shows itself in its reality—Death!’ All other phenomena must be traced back to their reality; all other phenomena entering into Maya have reality behind them; death is the single reality in Maya for it consists in the fact that something was cut off from reality and taken into Maya. That is why death is the one and only reality in Maya. And now if we turn from the universal Maya to the great principles of the world, a very important and essential consequence of this statement presents itself to occult science from yet another side, that in our world of Maya, Death is the only reality. We can begin by considering the beings of the other kingdoms surrounding us. We may ask: do minerals die? To the occultist there could be no sense in saying that minerals die. It would he just the same as saying that our fingernails die when we cut them. The finger-nail is nothing which s complete being has claim to existence; but it is part of us, and when we/cut it off we separate it from ourselves, tear it away from the life it has in connection with us. In reality it dies only when we ourselves die. In the same sense, according to occult science, the minerals do not die. They are merely members of one great organism, just as a finger-nail is a member of our own, and although a mineral may appear to perish, it is in reality only severed from this great organism, just as the piece of finger-nail is severed from our organism when we trim it off. The destruction of a mineral is no death for the mineral has no life in itself, but only in the great organism of which it is a member. The plant as such is not independent; it is a member—not of one great organism, like the mineral—but of the whole organism of the earth. To occult observation there would be no sense in speaking of individual plant-organisms, only of the organism of the earth of which the plants everywhere form part. And when we put them to death it is just as when we cut away one of our finger-nails. We cannot say that the finger-nail has died. Just as little can we say that of the plants; for they belong to a great organism that is identical with the whole earth, and that is an organism which falls asleep in spring, sending forth the plants as its organ towards the Sun; and in Autumn it takes them back into itself when it gathers their seeds into itself. There is no sense in considering the plants as independent, for the whole earth organism does not die when its separate plants fade—just as we ourselves do not die when our hair goes grey, although we cannot restore it its natural colour even if we dye it.

We are, however, in a different position from the plants. But the earth may in this respect be compared to a man who could restore his grey hair to its natural colour. The earth does not die; what is observed in the fading of the plants is a process that takes place on the surface. So we can never say that the plants really die. And even of the animals we cannot actually say that they die, as we die. For in reality a separate animal does not exist; what really exists is its group-soul, which is in the super-sensible world. The reality of the animals is only to be found on the astral plane as group-soul, and the individual animal is condensed out of that. The death of an animal means the casting off a member of the group-soul, which replaces it by another.

Thus what we encounter at death in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms is only apparent death, only in the world of Maya is that ‘death’. In reality man alone dies, for he has developed his individuality so far that it descends into his physical body, in which during the earth-existence he must become real. In reality death has only meaning for the Earth-existence of man.

If we grasp this we must say: Man alone can truly experience death. Thus for man there is, as we learn through occult research, a real overcoming of death, a real victory over death. For every other being death is only apparent, and does not in reality exist. If again we were to ascend higher—from man to the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies—we should find that they do not know death in the human sense; so that in reality actual death, that is death on the physical plane, comes only to those beings who have to acquire something on that plane. Now man has to acquire his ego-consciousness there. Without death he could never find it. Neither with respect to the beings below man in rank, nor to those higher than man, is there any meaning in speaking of actual death. But on the other hand as regards the Being whom we call the ‘Christ-Being’ it must clearly be impossible to obliterate his most significant earth deed. For indeed we have seen that the most essential event to be considered in connection with the Christ-Being is the Mystery of Golgotha; that is, the conquest of death by life. But where can this conquest of death alone be accomplished? Can it be accomplished in the higher worlds? No! For even as regards the lower beings referred to as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—as they have their beings in the higher, super-sensible worlds—we cannot speak of death. And in the course of our studies this winter we shall further show that neither among the Higher Beings can there be a question of death; only of change, metamorphosis, transformation. Only with regard to man can we speak of the incision into life that we call ‘death.’ Man can only experience this death on the physical plane. If man had never descended to the physical plane, he would know nothing of death; for no being who has not trodden the physical plane knows anything about death. In other worlds there is no such thing as that which we call death, nothing but transformation, metamorphosis. Would Christ undergo death He must descend to the physical plane! There alone could He experience it.

Thus we see that even in the historical development of man, the realities of the higher worlds play their part in Maya, in a remarkable way. Whereas concerning every other historical event we can only interpret it correctly by saying: ‘This historical event took place here on the physical plane, but the cause of it is up above in the spiritual world, we must look for that’; we cannot say of the event of Golgotha, ‘this event is here below on the physical plane and something corresponding to it exists in the higher worlds’. Christ Himself belongs to the higher worlds and came down to the physical plane. But there is no prototype above of what was accomplished on Golgotha, such as we must look for with respect to other historical events. That was enacted on the physical plane alone! Among the many proofs of this fact which occult science is able to provide, is the following: That the event of Damascus will, in the course of the next three thousand years, as we have often said, be renewed for an ample multitude of mankind. This means, that capacities will be developed in man which will enable him to perceive the Christ as an etheric figure of the astral plane, as Paul saw Him on the road to Damascus. The event on of man gradually becoming able to perceive the Christ by means of the higher faculties which will be developed in the next three thousand years, has its beginnings in the 20th century. From now on these capacities will gradually spread, and in the course of that span of time a vast number of persons will know, by personal vision into the higher worlds, that Christ is a reality; that He lives; they will learn to know Him in the life He lives now. And not only will they know the nature of His present life, but they will also be convinced just as Paul was—that He died, and rose again. But the foundation for this cannot be laid in the higher worlds: it must be laid on the physical plane. Thus if anyone comes to have an understanding of these things, if even at the present time he understands that the development of Christ Himself is progressing—and that at the same time certain human capacities are also developing, if his understanding of modern Anthroposophy has taught him this, then there is nothing to prevent him, when he has passed through the portal of death, from taking part in this event when it actually appears as a first shining forth of Christ in the world of man. So that a man who prepares himself in his physical body to-day for this event, may be able to experience it in the intermediate life, between death and re-birth. But those who do not prepare for it, who acquire no understanding in this incarnation, will, in the life immediately following this—the life between death and re-birth--know nothing of what is taking place with respect to the Christ for the next three thousand years from our present century. They will have to wait until they are again incarnated and then make necessary preparations on the earth. The death at Golgotha, which is enacted on earth as the origin of all the subsequent Christ development can only be understood in the physical body. Of all the facts important to our higher life, this alone is comprehensible in the physical body. It is then further developed and perfected in the higher worlds, but we must first have understood it while in the physical body. Just as the Mystery of Golgotha could never have taken place in the higher worlds and has no prototype there, but is an event which—since it includes death--is confined to the physical plane, so, too must the comprehension of it be acquired on this plane. Indeed, it is one of the tasks of man on earth to acquire this understanding first in some one of his incarnations.

So that we must say: we have found pre-eminently on the physical plane something which displays an undeniable reality, a direct truth. What then is real on the physical plane? On the physical plane so that we can stand by it, we have a reality, death—death in the world of man, not in the other kingdoms of nature. When we wish to study the historical events that occur in the course of the earth's development, we must look for a spiritual prototype for each one of them—but not for the Mystery of Golgotha! There we have something which in itself directly belongs to the world of Reality!

Now it is extremely interesting that another aspect of what has just been said, can also be seen. It is really remarkably significant to observe that this event of Golgotha as a real event is to-day denied, and that people say—speaking of external history—that it cannot be proved by any historical connection. Among vital historical facts there is hardly one so difficult to prove on external realistic, historical grounds, as the Mystery of Golgotha. Just think how easy it is in comparison with this to work on historical ground if we wish to prove the existence of a Socrates, a Plato, or any of the Greek heroes, in so far as they were of significance to the progress of man in the external world, and how up to a certain point it is perfectly justifiable to say that ‘no history can assert that there ever was a Jesus of Nazareth!’ This statement cannot be contradicted historically! This cannot be dealt with like other historical facts. It is very remarkable that this Event, which occurred on the external physical plane, has this in common with all super-sensible facts: they cannot be ‘proved’. Much the same people who deny the existence of a super-sensible world lack the capacity for grasping this fact, which is not super-sensible. Its existence can be surmised by its effects. But, these people think that effects such as these might also appear, even without the real event having occurred in history; and they attribute these effects to sociological relations. To one who knows the inner course of the world's development, the idea that effects such as these produced by Christianity could be brought about without having a power behind them, is just as wise as it would be to say cabbages could grow in a field without having been sown there I Indeed we might go yet further, and admit that it was not possible for those who took part in the final shaping of the Gospels to prove, the historical event of the Mystery of Golgotha—as historical event—on historical grounds! For it took place leaving hardly any trace perceptible to outer observation. Do you know how those who took part in the later compiling of the Gospels convinced themselves as to these events, with the exception of the writer of the John-Gospel, who was an immediate contemporary? They could not above all convince themselves by historical documents, for they had nothing but oral traditions and the Mystery-Books, as is set forth in Christianity as a Mystical Fact. They were able to convince themselves of the actual existence of Christ Jesus by the constellations, for they were then still very learned as to the connection between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. They knew how to set up a map of the heavens for that point of the world's history (as can still be done to-day); and they concluded: if the stars were in such and such a position, then He whom they call the Christ must have lived on earth at that time. In this very way the writers of the Gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke convinced themselves of the historical happenings; they obtained the rest clairvoyantly. But first they convinced themselves in the same way as we can make sure to-day that any particular event will happen on the earth; by the position of the constellations in the Macrocosm. Anyone who knows anything of this cannot but believe in them. It is a fruitless task to prove the inaccuracy of what is brought against the historical status of the Gospels. Rather should we, as anthroposophists, understand that we must take a very different stand: one which is only possible through an insight into occult science.

With reference to this I should just like to mention a point I already endeavoured to establish elsewhere. That is, that the realities of which Anthroposophy speaks cannot be injured by any objections, however correct these may be in themselves; no matter how correctly people may argue from the knowledge they themselves may possess. Anthroposophy cannot be contradicted. In the lecture I gave here, entitled: ‘How can Theosophy be established?’ I made use of the example of the little boy in a village whose duty it was to fetch rolls for the family breakfast. Now in that village each roll cost two kreuzers and he was always given ten kreuzers. The baker gave him a number of rolls, and being no great arithmetician, he did not trouble to count them, but brought them home. But a foster-son entered the family and was sent for the rolls instead of the other boy. This lad was a good reckoner and he said to himself: ‘I have been given ten kreuzers, each roll costs two kreuzers, therefore I must bring home five rolls’; off he went, bringing back six rolls. He said to himself: ‘This must be wrong, I ought not to have so many, and as my reckoning is correct, tomorrow I must only bring back five rolls’. The next day he took the ten kreuzers, and again he received six rolls. The reckoning was correct—only it did not correspond with the reality; for that was a different matter. The reality was that it was the custom in that place to give six rolls instead of five to anyone who spent ten kreuzers. The boy's argument was quite correct; but did not accord with reality.

In like manner the cleverest thought-out objections to Anthroposophy may all agree with each other, yet need have nothing to do with the reality; for ‘reality’ may be based on very different foundations. The example quoted is quite practical, and serves to explain, even scientifically, what is correctly calculated, and what is actual fact.

We have tried to trace the world of Maya back to the realities and in doing so we have shewn that all Fire is sacrifice, everything of the nature of Air is the generous flowing virtue of giving, and Fluid the results of renunciation and resignation. To these three truths we have to-day added the fact that the true essence of the earth or solid matter is death, like the cutting off of any substance from its cosmic purpose. Because this has occurred death itself has entered the world of Maya or illusion as a reality. Even the Gods themselves could not taste death at all without descent into the physical world in order to comprehend death in the physical world, the world of Maya, or illusion. This is what I wished to add to-day to the concepts we have already formed. But once more let it be said that if we wish to arrive at a clear understanding of these concepts which are so necessary, and if we are thoroughly to enter into the various ideas in St. Mark's Gospel, the only possible way of doing so is by careful meditation and by bringing these things again and again before the soul. The Gospel of St. Mark can only be understood if based on the greatest and most significant cosmic conceptions.

Thus the fact has now been brought home to us in a series of lectures that behind all that we call Maya or the great illusion, there is the Spiritual. Let us once again ask ourselves in what way it has been made evident that the spiritual is to be discerned behind everything perceptible to our senses and our physically limited grasp of the world.

In order to describe this spiritual element we were obliged in the course of the last lectures to sweep the nearest external phenomena away from our field of vision and pierce through to such qualities of reality as those described as the willingness to sacrifice, and the virtue of bestowal or renunciation, in fact, to those virtues with which we can only become acquainted by looking into our own souls, and which we can only fully comprehend by means of our own souls. Now if we are really to attribute such virtues as these to what we have to think of as the reality—we might almost say the “true”—behind the world of illusion, we must admit that in this world of true existence, in this world of reality, there lives that which fundamentally, as regards its qualities, can only be compared with the qualities we primarily perceive in our souls. For instance if we have to characterise that which is outwardly expressed in the phenomena of heat, presenting it in its true character of sacrificial service, as the flowing sacrifice in the world, it means precisely that we must reduce the element of heat back to the spiritual, to the incorporeal, doing away, as it were, with the outer veil of existence, showing that which in the external world is similar to what we recognise as the spiritual in ourselves.

Now before we carry these observations further, another idea is necessary. That is the following. Does all that we have in this world of Maya or illusion really vanish into a sort of nothingness? Is everything around us in this world of sense, the world of our external comprehension which to us appears as the real or part of the real—is all this actually nothing?

It would indeed be quite a good comparison if we were to say that the world of truth, the world of reality, is at first concealed, as the inner forces of a lake or even of the ocean are concealed in the body of water, and that the world of Maya might be compared with the rippling play of the waves on the surface. That would be a good comparison; for it shows exactly that there is in the depths of the ocean something that causes the rippling of the waves above, something that is the substantiality of the water and the configuration of its force. So that whether we select this example or any other is a matter of indifference, we may very well put the question:—Is there in the wide realms of our Maya or illusion, anything that is real? To-day we shall follow the same system as in the last lectures. We shall slowly approach what we wish to bring before our mind, by starting with inner experiences of our soul; and indeed, as we have moved forward spiritually through the Saturn-, Sun- and Moon-existence, and have now approached that of the Earth, we shall start from more intimate, we might almost say more common soul-experiences than those referred to in our last lecture. We then started from the hidden depths of the soul-life, from what arises in what we call the “astral body.” There we felt longing arising within it, and we saw how the longing works in the nature of man, actually leading the life of the soul to find satisfaction only in meeting that picture-world which we have been able to grasp as the inner movement of that life. We thus found the way from the microcosmic soul to that cosmic creating which we ascribed to the Spirits of Movement. To-day we shall begin with a still more intimate experience of the soul, one indeed to which attention was already drawn in ancient Greece, which in its reality is even to-day of profound significance. It is indicated in the words: all philosophy, and all striving for a certain kind of human knowledge, proceeds from Wonder. This is really the case. Any man who has devoted a little reflection and thought to the whole process in experience in his own soul, as to how he was brought to any particular learning, will come to know that a sound way to learning is always to start from wonder, from amazement at something. This wonder, this amazement, from which every form of learning must proceed belongs precisely to those experiences of the soul which we described as bringing sublimity and life into anything, however dry. What kind of learning would it be which found a place in our soul, without proceeding from wonder! It would truly be a learning swamped in prosiness and pedantry. That process in the soul which leads from wonder to the bliss we feel when our riddles are solved, which has raised itself above wonder, that alone constitutes the sublimity and vital power of the process of acquiring knowledge. We really ought to be able to feel the dryness and withering of any knowledge not originating in these two movements of the mind. Sound knowledge is framed in wonder and the bliss of solved riddles; any other kind of knowledge may be acquired externally and established by man through some kind of reasoning. But a knowledge not framed by these two feelings, does not spring from the soul of man in real earnest. All the fragrance of knowledge that is created by the atmosphere of the life element in knowledge, proceeds from these two, from wonder and the bliss of its satisfaction. But what is the origin of wonder itself? Why is it that wonder, amazement at anything external, arises in our souls? It arises, because, when we first meet with a being, a thing or a fact, it appears strange to us. This strangeness is the first element leading to wonder and amazement. But we do not feel this for everything that is strange to us; but only for that to which we feel ourselves in a sense related, so related that we say: “In this being or thing there is something that is not as yet in me, but which may pass over into me.” So that we can feel related to a thing yet strange, which at first we must grasp through wonder and astonishment, our inner “wondering” is our perception of the quality of an outer “wonder” to which a man at first as far as his own perception goes, considers himself in no wise related. That, however, depends on himself; or at least it need only do so. And he would not adopt a challenging attitude towards what appears to him as “a wonder” unless he were in a certain way to demand that it should disclose itself to him because it is related to him. Why else should people who start from purely materialistic or purely intellectual concepts deny what others designate as a “wonder,” when they have no direct proof that a fabrication, a falsehood, is brought forward? Even philosophers to-day are obliged to admit that it can never be proved by any of the phenomena known to man, that the Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth did not rise again. Proof can be brought against this assertion; but what is the manner of these proofs? Logically they are not tenable! Even enlightened philosophers now admit that. For all the reasons brought against it from the materialistic side—as for instance, the statement that no man has yet been seen to have risen like Christ—all these reasons are on the same level as the argument of a man who had never seen anything but fish and therefore wished to prove the non-existence of birds. It is impossible logically to prove by the existence of one class of beings, that others do not exist. Just as little is it possible through the experiences one may have of men on the physical plane to deduce something—which in the first place is described as a “miracle,” concerning the event of Golgotha. But if something is communicated to a person, which although it may be true, he must call a miracle and he says that he cannot understand it, he does not thereby contradict what we have said about the idea of wondering; for his attitude shows clearly that this starting point of all knowledge is already established for him. He demands, in fact, that what he has been told should find an echo in himself. He wishes it to become its own property intellectually and as he believes that he cannot have that, and it is not related to him, he challenges it. Even if we ourselves arrive at the concept of the miraculous, we should see that amazement or marvel, upon which is based all philosophy in the sense of ancient Greece, is aroused by a man finding himself confronted with something strange to him, but to which at the same time he recognises a relationship. Let us try to create a connecting link between these ideas and those brought before our minds in the last lecture.

We have shown that a particular advance in evolution was brought about through the willingness of certain Beings to sacrifice, but that their sacrifices were rejected and thrown back, and we learnt to recognise in the rejected sacrifice one of the principal factors in the ancient Moon-evolution. One of the most important points in that evolution is the fact that during that period sacrifice was to be offered by certain Beings to Beings even more exalted, and that it was renounced by them; so that, as it were, the smoke of the sacrifice offered by the ancient Moon-Beings pressed up to the higher Beings but was not accepted by them; and that this was sent back as substance into the Beings who had desired to offer it up. We also saw that much of the peculiar character of the Beings belonging to ancient Moon consisted in their feeling within themselves what they had wished to send up to the higher Beings as sacrificial substance. We saw, indeed, that this, which aspired, but was unable to ascend to the higher Beings, remained behind within the Beings themselves—and that thereby was developed in certain Beings, in the Beings of the rejected, the force of Longing. We have still, in all that we experience in our own souls as longing, a legacy from the bygone events on ancient Moon when those Beings found their sacrifice rejected. In a spiritual sense the whole character of the ancient Moon-evolution, its whole spiritual atmosphere, may be described in many respects by saying that Beings were present there who desired to offer sacrifice, but found that this sacrifice was not accepted because the higher Beings resigned it. The peculiar feature of the spiritual atmosphere of ancient Moon was: the rejected sacrifice. And the rejection of the sacrifice offered by Cain, which symbolically represents one of the starting points of the evolution of earthly humanity, appears as a kind of recapitulation of this peculiar feature of the ancient Moon evolution taking place in the soul of Cain, who sees that his sacrifice is not accepted. This is something which reveals to us a sorrow, a pain which gives birth to longing, just as was the case with the beings belonging to the old Moon-existence. We saw in the last lecture, that between this rejected sacrifice and the longing arising in these beings through its rejection, an adjustment was produced through the appearance on the old Moon of the Spirits of Movement. They created a possible way by which the longing arising in the Beings of the rejected sacrifice, could in a sense be satisfied. You must picture the position very clearly in your minds. You have the exalted Beings to whom sacrifice is about to be made; the substance offered in sacrifice to them rejected; and the longing thereby arising within the Beings who desired to offer and now feel: “Had I been able to accomplish my sacrifice, the best part of my own being would be living in those exalted ones; but now I am shut out from them, I am here while they are yonder!” The Spirits of Movement, however, and this can be taken almost literally, bring the Beings in whom the rejected sacrifice glows as a longing for the higher Beings, into such positions that they can approach them from many different sides. That which remains in them as the sacrifice which could not be offered, can at any rate now be adjusted, through the wealth of impressions received from the higher Beings, who are as it were, encircled by the Beings of the rejected sacrifice. So is adjusted what could not be harmonised, because of the rejection of the sacrifice, inasmuch as in the position of these Beings to the higher Beings a relation is established between them which conveys the impression of a presented sacrifice. We can form a clear idea of what this implies, if we think symbolically of the more exalted Beings united as a Sun, and then, in one position, as a planet, the less exalted gathered together. Now suppose that the Beings of the lesser planet wished to make sacrifice to the greater planet—to the Sun, and that the Sun refused to accept it; the substance of the sacrifice must remain in the Beings whose sacrifice was not accepted. Then in their loneliness, their isolation fills their being with longing. Now the Spirits of Movement bring them into the periphery of the more exalted Beings; this makes it first possible for them, in place of the direct upward flow of their sacrificial substance, to set that substance itself in motion and thereby to bring it into connection with the higher Beings. This is exactly like a man who cannot be contented within himself by means of a single great satisfaction, but experiences a number of partial satisfactions; the result of these different experiences being to set all his feelings in motion. This was gone into more minutely in the last lecture. We saw that as the Beings were unable to feel an inner connection with the higher Beings through the sacrifice, impressions came to them outside in the place of this, by which we saw that they were still able to obtain a certain satisfaction.

But it is an undeniable fact that that which was to have been offered up would have continued its existence within the higher Beings in a different fashion from its state within the lower Beings. The actual conditions necessary to that existence are in those higher Beings. It became necessary, therefore, for different conditions of existence to arise in the lower Beings. This again can be symbolically expressed. If the whole substance of a planet could flow into the Sun and it were not rejected, the Beings of that planet would find different conditions of existence within the Sun from those they would have met with in the planet outside if the Sun throws them back: an estrangement of what we must call the “contents of the sacrifice” takes place, it is alienated from its origin.

Now bear in mind the thought that certain Beings are compelled to retain within them something which they would gladly have offered up in sacrifice, and concerning which they both feel and perceive that it could only attain its real meaning, if it could be offered up.

If you can picture the feelings of such Beings, you will have an idea of what may be called: “The exclusion of a certain number of Cosmic Beings from their actual meaning, their great cosmic purpose.” Certain Beings have within them something, which, speaking symbolically, could only fulfil its purpose elsewhere. The consequence of this is that the “displacement”—if we may once more speak symbolically—of the rejected incense, of the rejected sacrificial substance, excludes it at first from the rest of the cosmic process.

If you grasp these thoughts with your feeling—not with your reason, for that does not extend to matters such as these—you will perceive that this represents something like a rending away from the universal cosmic process. To the Beings who rejected the sacrifice it is only something they put away from them; to the other Beings, those within whom the sacrificial substance is retained, this is a something on which an alien character is imprinted. Thus there are Beings in whose substance this estrangement from its origin is imprinted. If we can present these things to our soul through inner feelings, we are reminded of something in which an alien character is inherent: that is Death! Death is none other than that which necessarily enters the universe with the rejection of the sacrificial substance of those Beings who then had to retain it within themselves. Thus we advance from the resignation, the renunciation of what has been rejected by the higher Beings—which we encounter at the third stage of evolution—to Death.

In its true significance death is neither more nor less than the nature of essential contents, contents which are shut out and not in their proper place. Even when death comes to a man in concrete form it is fundamentally the same thing. For when we look at the corpse left behind in the world of Maya, we know that it consists of nothing but matter which at the moment of death was shut out from the Ego, astral body, and etheric body, alienated from that within which alone it had a meaning. The physical human body without the etheric body, astral body, and Ego has no meaning, it is purposeless; at that moment it is excluded from its purpose. That which we can no longer perceive when a man dies, is then for us in the macrocosm. On account of the Cosmic Beings who belong to higher spheres having rejected what was to have been brought to them in sacrifice, the rejected sacrificial substance within the Beings to whom it was thrown back lapses into death, for death signifies the exclusion of any cosmic substance or cosmic being from its actual purpose.

We have now come to a spiritual characteristic of what we call the fourth element in the Universe. If fire represents the purest sacrifice—and wherever we encounter fire or heat, behind it there is its spiritual counterpart: Sacrifice—if behind all the air spread out around our earth there really lies the virtue of giving, a really flowing virtue; if we may describe flowing water or the element of fluidity as spiritual resignation or renunciation, so must we describe the element of Earth, which alone can be the bearer of death—for death would not exist without it—as that which has been severed from its purpose by renunciation. Now we have something in a concrete form, showing how the solid is formed from the fluidic. For this too reflects a spiritual process, in a certain sense. Suppose ice forms in a pond; the water then becomes solid. The real reason of this is that the water in becoming ice is cut off from its purpose. This gives us the spiritual process of solidification, the spiritual process of the Earth's becoming; for as far as the distinguishing marks of the four elements are concerned, ice too is earth, and fluid alone is water. Earth is the element in which death appears and may be experienced.

We began by putting the question as to whether anything real could be found in our world of illusion and Maya, whether there is anything in it corresponding to a reality. I want you to hold clearly to the idea we have just been considering. At the beginning of this course I told you that the concepts to be considered were somewhat complicated. It will therefore be necessary that we should not only try to understand them, but also to meditate upon them; for only then will they be clear to us. Now let us take this conception of death, that is, of the earthly; for it presents a truly remarkable aspect. Whereas concerning all our other concepts we could say that there was nothing real in all the world of Maya around us, but that the reality must be looked for in the spiritual behind it—we have now ascertained that within the world of Maya there is that, which, precisely because it is divided from its purpose, because it ought to be in the spiritual world, may be called death. Thus something is cut off in Maya, which actually ought not to be there. In the whole wide realm of Maya, or the great illusion, we have nothing but deception and illusion before us. Yet there is something there which corresponds to a reality, because it is cut off from its true meaning in the spiritual; and as soon as it enters Maya it encounters annihilation and death. That declares to us nothing less significant than the great occult truth: “In the whole world of Maya one thing only shows itself in its reality—Death! All other phenomena must be traced back to their reality; all other phenomena entering into Maya have reality behind them; death is the single reality in Maya for it consists in the fact that something was cut off from reality and taken into Maya, That is why death is the one and only reality in Maya. And now if we turn from the universal Maya to the great principles of the world, a very important and essential consequence of this statement, that in our world of Maya, Death is the only reality, presents itself to occult science.

We can approach what I want to say from yet another side. We can begin by considering the beings of the other kingdoms surrounding us. We may ask: do minerals die? To the occultist there could be no sense in saying that minerals die. It would be just the same as saying that our finger-nails die when we cut them. The finger-nail is nothing which as complete being has claim to existence; but it is part of us, and when we cut it off we separate it from ourselves, tear it away from the life it has in connection with us. In reality it dies only when we ourselves die. In the same sense, according to occult science, the minerals do not die. They are merely members of one great organism, just as a finger-nail is a member of our own, and although a mineral may appear to perish, it is in reality only severed from this great organism, just as the piece of finger-nail is severed from our organism when we cut it off. The destruction of a mineral is no death; for the mineral has no life in itself, but only in the great organism of which it is a member. The plant as such is not independent; it is a member—not of one great organism, like the mineral—but of the whole organism of the earth. To occult observation there would be no sense in speaking of individual plant-organisms, only of the organism of the earth of which the plants everywhere form part. And when we bring them to their “death” it is just as when we cut away one of our finger-nails. We cannot say that the fingernail has died. Just as little can we say that of the plants; for they belong to a great organism that is identical with the whole earth, an organism which falls asleep in spring, sending forth the plants as its organs towards the Sun; and in autumn it takes them back into itself when it gathers their seeds into itself. There is no sense in considering the plants as independent, for the whole earth organism does not die when its separate plants fade—just as we ourselves do not die when our hair goes grey, although we cannot restore its colour by natural means.

We are, however, in a different position from the plants. But the earth may in this respect be compared to a man who could restore his grey hair to its natural colour. The earth does not die; what is observed in the fading of the plants is a process that takes place on the surface. So we can never say that the plants really die. And even of the animals we cannot actually say that they die, as we die. For in reality a separate animal does not exist; what really exists is its group-soul, which is in the super-sensible world. The reality of the animals is only to be found on the astral plane as group-soul, and the individual animal is condensed out of that. The death of an animal means the casting off a member of the group-soul, which replaces it by another.

Thus what we encounter at death in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms is only apparent death, only in the world of Maya is that “death.” In reality man alone dies, for he has developed his individuality so far that it descends into his physical body, in which during the earth-existence he must become real. In reality death has only meaning for the Earth-existence of man.

If we grasp this we must say: Man alone can truly experience death. Thus for man there is, as we learn through occult research, a real overcoming of death, a real victory over death. For every other being death is only apparent, and does not in reality exist. If again we were to ascend higher—from man to the Beings of the Hierarchies—we should find that they do not know death in the human sense; so that in reality actual death, that is death on the physical plane, comes only to those beings who have to acquire something on that plane. Now man has to acquire his ego-consciousness there. Without death he could never find it. Neither with respect to the beings below man in rank, nor to those higher than man is there any meaning in speaking of actual death. But on the other hand as regards the Being whom we call the “Christ-Being it must clearly be impossible to obliterate his most significant earth deed. For indeed we have seen that the most essential event to be considered in connection with the Christ-Being is the Mystery of Golgotha; that is, the conquest of death by life. But where can this conquest of death alone be accomplished? Can it be accomplished in the higher worlds? No! For even as regards the lower beings referred to as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—as they have their true being in the higher, super-sensible worlds—we cannot speak of death. And in the course of our studies this winter we shall further show that neither among the Higher Beings can there be a question of death; only of change, metamorphosis, transformation. Only with regard to man can we speak of the incision into life that we call “death.” Man can only experience this death on the physical plane. If man had never descended to the physical plane, he would know nothing of death; for no being who has not trodden the physical plane knows anything of death. In other worlds there is no such thing as that which we call death, nothing but transformation, metamorphosis. Would Christ undergo death He must descend to the physical plane! There alone could He experience it.

Thus we see that even in the historical development of man, the reality of the higher worlds plays its part in Maya, in a remarkable way. Whereas concerning every other historical event we can only interpret it correctly by saying: “This historical event took place here on the physical plane, but the cause of it is up above in the spiritual world, we must look for it there”; we cannot say of the event of Golgotha, “this event is here below on the physical plane and something corresponding to it exists in the higher worlds.” Christ Himself belongs to the higher worlds and came down to the physical plane. But there is no prototype above of what was accomplished on Golgotha, such as we must look for with respect to other historical events. That was enacted on the physical plane alone! Among the many proofs of this fact which occult science is able to provide, is the following: That the event of Damascus will, in the course of the next three thousand years, as we have often said, be renewed for a sufficiently great number of mankind. This means, that capacities will be developed in man which will enable him to perceive the Christ as an etheric figure on the astral plane, as Paul saw Him on the road to Damascus. The event of man's gradually becoming able to perceive the Christ by means of the higher faculties which will be developed in the next three thousand years, has its beginnings in our twentieth century. From now on these capacities will gradually arise, and in the course of that span of time a vast number of persons will know, by personal vision into the higher worlds, that Christ is a reality; that He lives; they will learn to know Him in the life He lives now. And not only will they know the nature of His present life, but they will also be convinced just as Paul was—that He died, and rose again. But the foundation for this cannot be laid in the higher worlds: it must be laid on the physical plane. Thus if anyone comes to have an understanding of these things, if even at the present time he understands that the development of Christ Himself is progressing—and that at the same time certain human capacities are also developing, if his understanding of modern Anthroposophy has taught him this, then there is nothing to prevent him, when he has passed through the portal of death, from taking part in this event when it actually appears as a first shining forth of Christ in the world of man. So that a man who prepares himself in his physical body to-day for this event, maybe able to experience it in the intermediate life, between death and re-birth. But those who do not prepare for it, who acquire no understanding in this incarnation, will, in the life immediately following this—the life between death and re-birth—know nothing of what is taking place with respect to the Christ for the next three thousand years from our present century. They will have to wait until they are again incarnated and then make necessary preparations on the earth. The death at Golgotha, which is enacted on earth as the origin of all the subsequent Christ development can only be understood in the physical body. Of all the facts important to our higher life, this alone is comprehensible in the physical body. It is then further developed and perfected in the higher worlds, but we must first have understood it while in the physical body. Just as the Mystery of Golgotha could never have taken place in the higher worlds and has no prototype there, but is an event which—since it includes death—is confined to the physical plane, so, too must the comprehension of it be acquired on this plane. Indeed, it is one of the tasks of man on earth to acquire this understanding in some one of his incarnations.

So that we must say: we have found pre-eminently on the physical plane something which displays an undeniable reality, a direct truth. What then is real on the physical plane On the physical plane, so that we can recognise it as real, we have a reality, death—death in the world of man, not in the other kingdoms of nature. When we wish to study the historical events that occur in the course of the earth's development, we must look for a spiritual prototype for each one of them—but not for the Mystery of Golgotha! There we have something which in itself directly belongs to the world of Reality!

Now it is extremely interesting that another aspect of what has just been said, can also be seen. It is really remarkably significant to observe that this event of Golgotha as a real event is to-day denied, and that people say—speaking of external history—that it cannot be proved by any historical connection. Among vital historical facts there is hardly one so difficult to prove on external realistic, historical grounds, as the Mystery of Golgotha. Just think how easy it is in comparison with this to work on historical ground if we wish to prove the existence of a Socrates, a Plato, or any of the Greek heroes, in so far as they were of significance to the progress of man in the external world, and how up to a certain point it is perfectly justifiable to say that “no history can assert that there ever was a Jesus of Nazareth!” This statement cannot be contradicted historically! This cannot be dealt with like other historical facts. It is very remarkable that this Event, which occurred on the external physical plane has this in common with all super-sensible facts: they cannot be “proved.” Much the same people who deny the existence of a super-sensible world lack the capacity for grasping this fact, which is not super-sensible. Its existence can be surmised by its effects. But, these people think that effects such as these might also appear, even without the real event having occurred in history; and they attribute these effects to sociological relations. To one who knows the inner course of the world's development, the idea that effects such as those produced by Christianity could be brought about without having a power behind them, is just as wise as it would be to say cabbages could grow in a field without having been sown there! Indeed we might go yet further, and admit that it was not possible for those who took part in the final shaping of the Gospels to prove the historical event of the Mystery of Golgotha—as historical event—on historical grounds! For it went by leaving hardly any trace perceptible to outer observation. Do you know how those who took part in the later compiling of the Gospels convinced themselves as to these events, with the exception of the writer of the John-Gospel, who was an immediate contemporary? They could not above all convince themselves by historical documents, for they had nothing but oral traditions and the Mystery-Books (as is set forth in Christianity as Mystical Fact). They were able to convince themselves of the actual existence of Christ Jesus by the star-constellation, for they were then still very learned as to the connection between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. They knew how to set up a map of the heavens for that point of the world's history (as can still be done to-day); and they concluded: if the stars were in such and such a position, then He whom they call the Christ must have lived on earth at that time. In this very way the writers of the Gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke convinced themselves of the historical event; they obtained the rest clairvoyantly. But first they convinced themselves in the same way as we can make sure to-day that any particular event can happen on the earth; through the constellations in the Macrocosm. Anyone who knows anything of this cannot but believe in them. It is a fruitless task to prove the inaccuracy of what is brought against the historical status of the Gospels. Rather should we, as anthroposophists, understand that we must take a very different stand: one which is only possible through an insight into occult science.

With reference to this I should just like to mention a point I already endeavoured to establish elsewhere. That is, that the realities of which Anthroposophy speaks cannot be injured by any objections, however correct these may be in themselves. No matter how correctly people may argue from the knowledge they themselves may possess, that does not disprove Anthroposophy. In the lecture I gave entitled: “How can Theosophy be established?” I made use of the example of the little boy in a village whose duty it was to fetch rolls for the family breakfast. Now in that village each roll cost two kreuzers and he was always given ten kreuzers. The baker gave him a number of rolls, and being no great arithmetician, he did not trouble to count them, but brought them home. But a foster-son entered the family and was sent for the rolls instead of the other boy. This lad was a good reckoner and he said to himself: “I have been given ten kreuzers, each roll costs two kreuzers, therefore I must bring home five rolls;” off he went, bringing back six rolls. He said to himself: “This must be wrong, I ought not to have so many, and as my reckoning is correct, tomorrow I must only bring back five rolls.” The next day he took the ten kreuzers, and again he received six rolls. The reckoning was correct—only it did not correspond with the reality; for that was a different matter. The reality was that it was the custom in that place to give six rolls instead of five to anyone who spent ten kreuzers. The boy's argument was quite correct; but did not accord with reality.

In like manner the cleverest thought-out objections to Anthroposophy may all agree with each other, yet need have nothing to do with the reality; for “reality” may be based on very different foundations. The example quoted is quite practical, and serves to explain, even scientifically, what is correctly calculated, and what is actual fact.

We have tried to trace the world of Maya back to reality and in doing so we have shown that all Fire is sacrifice, everything of the nature of Air is the generous flowing virtue of giving, and Fluid the result of renunciation and resignation. To these three truths we have to-day added the fact that the true nature of the Earth or solid matter is death, the cutting off of any substance from its cosmic purpose. Because this severing has entered, death itself enters the world of Maya or illusion as a reality. Even the Gods themselves could not taste death at all without descent into the physical world in order to comprehend death in the physical world, the world of Maya, or illusion. This is what I wished to add to-day to the concepts we have already formed. But once more let it be said that if we wish to arrive at a clear understanding of these concepts which are so necessary, and if we are thoroughly to enter into the various ideas in St. Mark's Gospel, the only possible way of doing so is by careful meditation and by bringing these things again and again before the soul. The Gospel of St. Mark can only be understood if based on the greatest and most significant cosmic conceptions.

Yesterday we were considering the successive moods of soul that have to be attained if human thinking—if what is ordinarily called knowledge—is to enter the realm of reality, and we came to a condition of soul that we named surrender. In other words, a thinking that has risen to the conditions of soul we described before—a thinking, that is, which has become possessed of wonder, and has then learned what we called reverent devotion to the world of reality and finally what we called knowing oneself to be in wisdom-filled harmony with the phenomena of the world—if such a thinking be not able then to rise still further and enter the region we have described as a condition of surrender, it cannot come to reality. Now this surrender is only to be attained by making the resolute endeavour again and again to face for ourselves the inadequacy of mere thought. We have to take pains to stimulate and strengthen within us a mood that may be expressed as follows. It must be as though we were constantly saying to ourselves: I ought not to expect that my thinking can give me knowledge of the truth, I ought rather solely to expect of my thinking that it shall educate me. It is of the utmost importance that we should develop in us this idea, namely, that our thinking educates us. If you will really take this point of view as a practical rule of life you will find that there are many occasions when you are led to quite different conclusions from those that seem at first sight to be inevitable.

I daresay there are not many of you who have made a thorough study of the philosopher Kant. It is not necessary. I only want here to refer to the fact that in Kant's most important and revolutionary work, “The Critique of Pure Reason,” you will always find proofs adduced both for and against a proposition in question. Take, for example, a statement such as the following. “The world once had a beginning in time.” You will find that Kant puts, perhaps on the other side of the same page, the statement: “The world has always existed, from all eternity.” And then he proceeds to adduce valid proofs for both statements, notwithstanding that the one obviously expresses the very opposite of the other. That is to say, Kant proves in the same manner that the world has had a beginning and that it has had no beginning. He calls this method of reasoning “Antinomy” and thinks it is itself an evidence that the human faculty of knowledge has boundaries, seeing that man is forced thereby to arrive at contradictory conclusions. And, of course, he is right, so long as one expects by thinking to come to conformity with some objective reality. So long as we give ourselves up to the belief that by thinking or by the elaboration of concepts or, let us say, by the elaboration in thought of experiences we have in the world, we can come to reality, so long are we indeed in desperate case, if someone comes forward and shows us that a particular statement and its exact opposite can equally well be proved. For if this is so, how are we ever to arrive at Truth? If, however, we have learned that where the situation demands a decisive pronouncement, thinking can come to no conclusion about reality, if we have persistently educated ourselves instead to look upon thinking as a means to become wiser, as a means to take in hand our own self-education in wisdom, then it does not disturb us at all that at one time one thing can be proved and at another time its opposite can be proved. For we very soon make the following discovery. The fact that the elaboration of concepts does not, so to say, expose us in the least to the onset of reality, is the very reason why we are able to work with perfect freedom within the sphere of concepts and ideas and to carry on our own self-education by this means. If we were perpetually being corrected by reality, then the elaboration of concepts would not afford us a means of educating ourselves in this manner in perfect freedom. I would like to ask you to give careful consideration to this fact. Let me repeat it. The elaboration of concepts affords us a means of effective and independent self-education, and it can only do so because we are never disturbed in the free elaboration of concepts by the interference of reality.

What do I mean when I say we are not disturbed? What sort of disturbance could reality make in the free elaboration of concepts? We can picture to ourselves a little what such a disturbance would be like if we contrast—purely hypothetically for the moment, though, as we shall see later, it does not need to remain entirely in the realm of hypothesis—our human thinking with divine thinking. For we can say, can we not, that it is impossible to conceive of divine thinking as having nothing to do with reality. When we try to picture the thinking of the Gods, we can only conceive of it—still speaking for the moment purely hypothetically—as intervening in reality, as influencing reality. And this leads inevitably to the following conclusion. When a human being makes a mistake in his thinking, then it is a mere logical mistake, it is nothing worse. And when, later on, he comes to see that he has made a mistake he can correct it; and he will at the same time have accomplished something for his self-education, he will have grown wiser. But now take the case of divine thinking. When divine thinking thinks correctly, then something happens; and when it thinks falsely, then something is destroyed, something is annihilated. So that if we had a divine thinking, then with every false concept we should call forth a destructive process, first of all in our astral body, then in our etheric body and thence also in our physical body. If we had active divine thinking, if our thinking had something to do with reality, then a false concept would have the result that we should, as it were, stimulate inside us a drying up process in some part or other of our body, a hardening process. You will agree, it would be important to make as few mistakes as possible; for it might not be long before we had made so many mistakes that our body would have become quite dried up and would fall to pieces. We should, in fact, soon find it crumble away if we transformed into reality the mistakes in our thinking. We actually only maintain ourselves in real existence through the fact that our thinking does not work into reality, but that we are protected from the penetration of our thinking into reality. Thus we can make mistake after mistake in our thinking. If later we correct these mistakes we have thereby educated ourselves, we have grown wiser, and we have not at the same time committed devastation with our mistakes. As we strengthen ourselves more and more with the moral force of such a thought as this we learn to know the nature of the “surrender” of which I spoke and we come at last to a point where we do not at critical moments of life, turn to thinking, in the hope to gain knowledge and understanding of external things.

That sounds strange, I know, and at first sight it seems as though it would be quite impossible. How can we refuse to have recourse to thinking? And yet, although it is impossible to take such a line absolutely, we can take it under certain conditions. Constituted as we are as human beings in the world, we cannot on every occasion suspend judgment on the things of the world. We have to judge and form opinions—we shall see in the course of these lectures why that is so—we have to act in life and cannot always wait to penetrate to the depths of reality. We must judge—but we should educate ourselves to exercise caution in accepting as finally true the judgments and opinions we form. We should, as it were, be continually looking over our own shoulder and reminding ourselves that where we are applying our keenest intellect, just there we are treading on very uncertain ground and are perpetually liable to make mistakes. That is a hard saying for cocksure people! They think they will never get anywhere at all if they are to doubt whether the opinion they form on some event is conclusive. Observe a little and you will see that very many people, when some statement is made, think it necessary at once to say: “But what I think is this”—or when they see something, to say: “I don't like that!” or “I like it!” This kind of attitude must be given up by anyone who does not rest content to go through life with easy self-assurance; it must be given up if we want to set the course of our inner life in the direction of reality. What we have to do is to cultivate an attitude of mind which may be characterised in the following words: “Obviously I have, of course, to live my life, and this means I must form judgments and conclusions. I will, therefore, employ my power of judgment in so far as the practice of life makes this necessary, but I will not use it for the recognition of truth. For that I will be for ever looking cautiously over my shoulder, I will always receive with some degree of doubt every judgment that I happen to make.”

But how are we then to arrive at any thought about truth, if not by forming judgments in the ordinary way? We have already indicated yesterday the right attitude of mind, when we said that we ought to let the things speak, let the things themselves tell their secrets. We have to learn to adopt a passive attitude to the things of the world, and let them speak out their own secrets. A great deal of error would be avoided if men would do this. We have a wonderful example in Goethe, who, when he wants to investigate truth, does not allow himself to judge but tries to let the things themselves utter their own secrets. Let us suppose we have two men, one who judges and the other who lets the things tell their own secrets. We will select a very clear and simple example. One man sees a wolf and describes it. He finds that there are other animals besides which look like this wolf, and he arrives in this manner at the general concept “wolf.” And now he can go on to form the following conclusion. He can say to himself: In reality there are many individual wolves; the general concept of “wolf” which I make in my mind, wolf as such, does not exist; only individual wolves exist in the world. Such a man will easily state it as his opinion that we have really only to do with individual wolf beings, and the general concept of wolf which one holds as an idea is not anything real. There you have a striking example of a man who merely judges and forms opinions. This is the kind of conclusion he develops. And how about the man, on the other hand, who lets reality speak for itself? How will he think of that invisible quality of wolf which is to be found in every single wolf and which characterises all wolves alike? He will look at it in this way. He will say to himself: Let me consider a lamb and compare it with a wolf. I am not going to formulate any judgment on the matter, I am simply going to let the facts speak. And now, let us imagine this man has the opportunity to see with his own eyes how the wolf eats up the lamb. He sees the event take place before him. Then he would have to say to himself: “The substance which before was running about as lamb is now inside the wolf, it has been absorbed into the wolf.” It needs no more than the perception of this fact to see how real the wolf nature is! For if we were to rely on what we can follow with our external senses we might easily be led to the conclusion that if a wolf were deprived of all other food and were to eat nothing but lamb he must gradually—for the metabolism that goes on inside him will produce this result—he must gradually come to have in him nothing but lamb substance. As a matter of fact, however, he never becomes a lamb, he remains always a wolf. That shows quite unmistakably, if one judges the matter rightly, that the material part of the wolf has been quite erroneously assumed to constitute “wolf” as such. When we let ourselves be taught by the external world of facts, then it shows us that besides what we have before us as material substance in the wolf there is something else, something we cannot see and that yet is real in the highest degree. And this it is which brings it about that when the wolf eats nothing but lamb he does not become lamb but remains wolf. All of him that is merely perceptible to the senses has come from lambs.

It is difficult sometimes to draw a sharp line of demarcation between judging and letting ourselves be taught by reality. When, however, the difference has once been grasped and when judgment is only employed for the ends of practical life, while for an approach to reality the attitude is taken of allowing ourselves to be taught by the things of the world, then we gradually arrive at a mood of soul which can reveal to us the true meaning of “surrender.” Surrender is a state of mind which does not seek to investigate truth from out of itself, but which looks for truth to come from the revelation that flows out of the things, and can wait until it is ripe to receive the revelation. An inclination to judge or form opinions wants to be continually arriving at truth at every step; surrender, on the other hand, does not set out to force an entrance, as it were, into this or that truth, rather do we seek to educate ourselves and then quietly wait until we attain to that stage of maturity where the truth flows to us from the things of the world, coming to us in revelation and filling our whole being. To work with patience, knowing that patience will bring us further and further in wise self-education—that is the mood of surrender.

And now we must go on to consider the fruits of this surrender. What do we attain when we have gone forward with our thinking from wonder to reverence, thence to feeling oneself in wisdom-filled harmony with reality and finally to the attitude of surrender—what do we attain? We come at last to this. As we go about the world and observe the plants in all their greenness and admire the changing colours of their blossoms, or as we contemplate the sky in its blueness and the stars with their golden brilliance—not forming judgments but letting the things themselves reveal to us what they are—then if we have really succeeded in learning this “surrender,” all things in the world of sense become changed for us, and something is revealed to us in the world of the senses, for which we can find no other word than a word taken from our own soul life.

Suppose this line (a—b) represents the world of the senses as it shows itself to our view. Suppose you are standing here (c) and you behold the world of the senses spread out before you like a veil. This line (a—b) is intended to represent the tones that work upon your ear, the colours and forms that work upon your eye, the smells and tastes that work upon your other organs, the hardness and softness, etc., etc.—in short, the whole world of the senses. In ordinary life we stand in the world of the senses and we apply to it our faculty of judgment. How else do all the sciences arise? Men approach the world of the senses and by many kinds of methods they investigate the laws that prevail there. You will, however, have gathered from all that we have been saying that such a procedure can never lead one into the world of reality, because judgment is not a leader at all; it is only by educating one's thinking, it is only by following the path of wonder and of reverence, etc., that one can ever penetrate to the world of reality. Then the world of the senses changes and becomes something entirely new. And it is important that we should make discovery of this if we would gain any knowledge of the real nature of the sense world.

Let us suppose that a man who has developed this feeling, this attitude of surrender, in a rather high degree, looks out over the fresh bright green of a meadow. At first sight he cannot distinguish the colours of any individual plants; the whole presents a general appearance of fresh green. Such a man, if he has really brought the attitude of surrender to a high degree of development, will perforce feel within him at the sight of the meadow an inner sense of balance; he cannot help being moved to feel this mood of balance—a balance that is not dead but quick with life, we might compare it to a gentle and even flow of water. He cannot help but conjure up this picture before his soul. And it is the same with every taste, every smell and every sense-perception; they inevitably call up in his soul a feeling of inner movement and activity. There is no colour and no tone that does not speak to him; everything says something, and says it in such a way that he feels bound to give answer with inner movement and activity—not with judgment or opinion but with movement, active, living movement. In short, a time comes for such a man when the whole world of the senses flings off, as it were, its disguise and reveals itself to him as something he cannot describe with any other word than will. Everything in the world of the senses is will, strong and powerful currents of will. I want you to mark this particularly. The man who has attained in any high degree to surrender, discovers everywhere in the world of the senses ruling will. Hence it is that a man who has developed in himself even a small measure of this quality of surrender, feels pain if he suddenly sees a person coming towards him wearing some startling new fashion of colour. He cannot help experiencing this inner movement and activity in response to what approaches him from outside; he is sensible of will in everything and he feels united with the whole world through this will. The world of the senses thus becomes, as it were, a sea of infinitely differentiated will. And this means that while other-wise we only feel it as spread out around us, this world of the senses begins to have for us a certain thickness or depth. We begin to look behind the surface of things, we begin to hear behind the surface of things—and what we see and hear is will, flowing will. For the interest of those who have read Schopenhauer I will here remark that Schopenhauer divined this ruling will in a one-sided way in the world of sound; he described music as differentiated workings of will. But the truth is that for the man who has learned surrender, everything in the world of the senses is Ruling Will.

And now when a man has learned to detect everywhere in the world of the senses this ruling will he can go further, he can penetrate to secrets that lie hidden behind the world of the senses and that are otherwise inaccessible to him.

If we would understand aright the nature of the next step we must ask ourselves the question: How is it we gain any knowledge at all of the sense world? The answer is simple: By means of our senses. By means of the ear we acquire knowledge of the world of sound, by means of the eye knowledge of the world of colour and form, and so on. We know the sense world through the medium of our sense organs. A man who confronts this world of the senses in an ordinary everyday manner receives impressions of it and then forms his judgments. The man who has learned surrender receives impressions in the first place through his senses; and then he feels how there streams across to him from the objects active, ruling will; he feels as if he were swimming, together with the objects, in a sea of ruling will. And when a man has come to this point and feels the presence and sway of will in the objects before him, then his own evolution drives him on of itself to the next higher stage. For then, having experienced all the previous stages leading up to surrender—the stages we have called feeling oneself in harmony with the wisdom of the world, and before that reverence, and before that wonder—then, through the penetration of these conditions into the last gained condition of surrender, he learns how to grow together with the objects with his etheric body also, which stands behind the physical body. He grows together with the objects with his physical body, that is with his sense organs, in the active ruling will. When we see, hear, smell, etc., then as men of surrender we feel the ruling will streaming into us through our eyes and ears, we feel ourselves in true correspondence with the objects. But behind the physical eye is the etheric body of the eye, and behind the physical ear is the etheric body of the ear. We are filled through and through with our etheric body. And just as the physical body grows together with the objects of the sense world when man penetrates to the ruling active will, so too can the etheric body. And when this takes place man finds that he has an altogether new way of beholding the world. The world has undergone a still greater change for him than was the case when he penetrated through sense appearance to the ruling will. When our etheric body grows together with the objects of the world, then we have the impression that we cannot let these objects remain as they are in our ideas and in our conceptions and thoughts. They change for us as soon as we come into relation with them. Suppose a man who has already experienced the mood of surrender in his soul is looking at a green leaf, full of sap. He turns the eye of his soul upon the object before him, and at once he finds he cannot leave it as it is, this juicy green leaf; the moment he beholds it he feels that it grows out beyond itself, he feels how it has in it the possibility to become something quite different. You know that a green leaf, as it grows gradually higher and higher up in the plant, turns at last into the coloured flower-leaf or petal. The whole plant is really no more than a transformed leaf. You may learn this from Goethe's researches into nature. So when the student beholds the leaf he sees that it is not yet finished, that it is trying to grow out beyond itself; he sees, in short, more than the green leaf gives him. The green leaf stimulates him to feel within him something of a budding and sprouting life. Thus he grows together—quite literally—with the green leaf, feeling in himself, too, a budding and a sprouting of life. But now suppose he is looking at the dry and withered bark of a tree. If he is to grow together with that he cannot do otherwise than be overcome with a feeling of death. In the withered bark he sees—not more, but less than is there in reality. If anyone looks at the bark from the point of view of external appearance alone he can admire it, it can give him pleasure, in any case he does not see in the dead bark something that shrivels him, piercing him, as it were, in the soul and filling it with thoughts of death.

There is nothing in the whole world that does not, when the etheric body grows together with it, give rise to feelings either of growing, sprouting, becoming, or of decaying and passing away. Everything shows itself in one or other aspect. Suppose, for example, a man who has attained to surrender and has then progressed a further step turns his attention to the human larynx. He will have a strange impression. The larynx will appear to him to be an organ that is quite in the beginning of its evolution and has a great future before it. From what the larynx itself tells, he will feel that it is like a seed, not at all like a fruit or like a withered object, but like a seed. He knows quite clearly from what the larynx itself brings to expression that a time must come in human evolution when the larynx will be completely transformed, when it will be of such a nature that whereas now man only utters the word, he will one day give birth to man. The larynx is the future organ of birth, the future organ of procreation. Now man brings forth the word by means of the larynx, but the larynx is the seed that will in future times develop to bring forth the whole human being—that is, when man is spiritualised. The larynx expresses this quite directly when one lets it tell what it is. Other organs of the human body show us that they have long ago passed their zenith, and we see that they will in future times be no longer present in the human organism.

Such a vision is compelled to behold everywhere on the one hand a growing, a coming into being, and on the other hand a dying away. It sees both as processes going on into the future. Budding, sprouting life—death and decay; those are the two things that we find intermingled with one another all around us when we attain to this union of our etheric body with the world of reality. In connection with this power of vision man has to undergo, when he is a little further on, a very hard test. For with each single being that he meets and that makes itself known to him he will always find that while some parts of the being arouse in him the feeling of budding and sprouting life, other contents or parts give him the feeling of death. Everything that we see behind the world of the senses makes itself known to us as proceeding from one or other of these two fundamental forces. In occultism what we behold in this way is called the world of coming into existence and of passing away. And so, when we confront the world of the senses we are looking into the world of arising and passing away, and what lies behind is Ruling Wisdom.

Behind Will is Wisdom! I say expressly ruling wisdom, for the wisdom man brings into his ideas is as a rule not active at all, but a wisdom that is merely thought. The wisdom man acquires when he looks behind the active will is united with the objects; and in the kingdom of objective things, wherever wisdom rules, it does really rule and the effects of its working find actual expression. When it, so to speak, withdraws from reality, then begins the dying process; where it flows into reality, there you find a coming into existence, there you find budding, sprouting life. We can mark off these worlds in the following way (see diagram 1). We look at the sense world and we see it first as A, and then we look at B which is behind the sense world—the world of ruling wisdom. From out of this world is taken the substance of our own etheric body, what we behold outside us as ruling wisdom—that we behold, too, in our etheric body. And in our physical body we behold, not merely what sense appearance shows, but also ruling will, for everywhere in the sense world we see ruling will.

Yes, the strange thing is that if we have attained to surrender, then when we meet another man and look at him, his colour, whether it be inclined to red or yellow or green, does not seem to us merely red or yellow or green, but we grow together for example, with the rosy-cheekedness of his countenance. We feel the ruling will there, and all that lives and weaves in him, as it were, shoots across to us through the medium of the colour in his cheeks. People who are naturally inclined to observe and note rosy cheeks will say that a rosy-cheeked person is alone healthy. We approach our fellow-man in such a way as to see in him the ruling will. And we may now say, turning to our diagram, that our physical body, which we will denote by this circle here, is taken from the world A, the world of ruling will. Our etheric body, on the other hand, which I will denote with this second circle, is taken from the world of ruling wisdom, the world B. Here you have, then, the connection between the world of ruling wisdom that is spread around us, and our own etheric body—and the world of ruling will that is spread around us, and our own physical body. Now in ordinary life man does not know of these connections, the power to do so is taken from him. The connections are there all the time, but they are, as it were, withheld from man, he can have no influence upon them. How is this?

As a matter of fact there are opportunities in life where our thoughts and whatever we develop in the way of judgments and opinions are not so harmless for our own reality as they are in everyday existence. In the ordinary everyday waking condition, good Gods have seen to it that our thoughts have not too bad an influence on our own reality; they have withheld from us the power our thoughts might otherwise exercise upon our physical body and etheric body; and it would really go very hardly with us in the world if it were not so If thoughts—let me emphasise once more—were to signify in the world of man what the thoughts of the Gods do in reality signify, then man would evoke inside him with every error in thought a slight death process, and little by little he would be quite dried up. And as for an untruth! If with every lie he told man had to burn up the corresponding bit of his brain—as would have to happen if man had power to work into the world of reality—then we should soon see how long his brain lasted! Good Gods have withheld from our soul the power over our etheric body and physical body. But that cannot be so all the time. For were we never to exercise any influence from our soul upon our physical and etheric body then we should quickly come to an end of the forces that are in these bodies, we should have a very short life. For in our soul, as we shall see in the course of these lectures, are contained the forces that must flow ever and again into the physical and etheric body, the forces we need in our etheric body. This inflow of forces takes place at night when we are asleep. In the night there flow to us from the universe, coming to us by way of our ego and astral body, the currents that we need to dispel fatigue. There you have in actual fact the living connection between the worlds of will and of wisdom and the physical and etheric bodies of man. For into these worlds vanish during sleep the astral body and ego. They enter into these worlds and build there centres of attraction for substances which have then to flow out of the world of wisdom into the etheric body and out of the world of will into the physical body. This must go on in the night. For if man were present in his consciousness, this instreaming could not happen rightly. If ordinary man were conscious during sleep, if he were present with all his errors and vices, with all the bad things he has done in the world, then this would create a strange apparatus of attraction in those other worlds for the forces that are to stream in. Then tremendous disturbances would be set up in the physical and etheric bodies by the forces man's ego and astral body would send into them out of the world of ruling wisdom and the world of ruling will.

Therefore have good Gods made provision that we cannot be present when the right forces must stream into our physical and etheric body by night. For the good Gods have dulled the consciousness of man during sleep, that he may not be able to spoil what he undoubtedly would spoil by his thoughts were he conscious. It is on this account that we have to undergo great pain when we are on the path of knowledge and are making the ascent into the higher worlds; if we are in real earnest it must necessarily bring us great pain. You will find in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, a description of how the life of man by night, the sleeping life, is, so to speak, made use of, to help man to rise from the world of external reality into higher worlds. When man begins from out of the world of Imagination to light up his sleep consciousness, when he begins to lighten it with knowledge and experiences, then it is important for him to make sure that he himself gets out of the way and so shuts out of his consciousness all that might cause disturbance to his physical and etheric bodies. It is an absolute necessity, in making the ascent into higher worlds to get to know oneself thoroughly and exactly. When we really know ourselves we cease as rule to love ourselves. Self-love comes to an end when we begin to have self-knowledge; and this self-love—which is always present in a man who has not attained to self-knowledge, for it is an illusion to imagine we do not love ourselves; we love ourselves more than anything else in the world—this self-love must have been overcome if we are to be able to shut ourselves out of our consciousness. We must, in actual fact, come to the point where we say to ourselves: As I am now, I must eliminate myself. We have already gone a long way in this direction in that we have attained to self-surrender. But we must now not love ourselves at all. We must have the possibility at every moment to feel—I must put myself right on one side; for if I do not shut out completely all those things in me that otherwise I quite like to feel in me, errors, trivialities, prejudices sympathies, antipathies—if I do not put these right away then my ascent into higher worlds cannot be made aright.

Because of these errors, disturbing forces will mix with the inflowing stream from higher worlds that has to enter into me to make clairvoyance possible. And these forces will stream into my physical and etheric bodies, and as many as are the errors, etc., so many will be the disturbing processes set up. As long as we are not conscious in sleep, as long as we are not capable of rising into the world of clairvoyance, so long do good Gods protect us and not let these currents from the world of will and the world of wisdom flow into our physical and etheric bodies. But when we carry up our consciousness into the world of clairvoyance, then no Gods are protecting us—for the protection they give consists in the very fact that they take away our consciousness—then we must ourselves lay aside all prejudice, all sympathy, all antipathy, etc. All these things we must put right away from us; for if we have anything left of self-love, or of desires that cling to the personal in us, or if we are still capable of making any judgment on personal grounds, then all such things can work harm to our health—namely, to our physical body and etheric body—when we follow the path of development into higher worlds.

It is exceedingly important that we should be clear about these things. And it is easy to perceive the significance of the fact that in ordinary day life man is deprived of all influence upon his physical and etheric body, his thoughts, in the manner in which he grasps them when he is within these bodies have nothing whatever to do with reality, they are quite ineffective and consequently unable to form any judgment about what is real. By night they would be able to do so. Every false thought would work destructively on the physical and etheric bodies. If we were conscious in the night we should see before us what I have just been describing to you. The world of the senses would appear to us as a sea of ruling will, and behind it would appear the wisdom—the wisdom that builds the world, beating through this will, as it were lashing it up and down into great waves, and with every beat of the waves evoking continually processes of coming into existence and of passing away, processes of birth and of death. That is the true world, into which we have ultimately to look, the world of ruling will and the world of ruling wisdom, and the latter is also the world of perpetual births and perpetual deaths. That is the world that is our world, and it is of immense importance for us to recognise it. For if we once recognise it we begin to discover in very truth a means for attaining to a greater and greater height of surrender; because we feel ourselves interwoven in perpetual births and perpetual deaths, and we know that with every deed we do we connect ourselves in some way with a coming into existence or with a passing away. And “good” will begin to be for us not merely something of which we say: That is good, I like it, it fills me with sympathy. No, we begin to know that the good is something that is creative in the World-All, something that always and everywhere belongs to the world that is arising and coming into being. And of the “bad” we begin to feel how it shows itself everywhere as an outpouring of a process of death and decay. And here we shall have made an important transition to a new world-conception, where one will not be able to think of evil in any other way than as the destroying angel of death, who goes striding through the world, nor of good in any other way than as the creator of continual cosmic births, in great and small. And it is for Spiritual Science to awaken in man a sense of how through this spiritual world-conception he can deepen his whole outlook on life, as he begins to feel that the world of good and the world of bad are not merely as they appear to us in external maya, where we stand before them with our power of judgment and find only that the one is pleasing to us and the other displeasing; no, the world of good is the creative world and the bad is the destroying angel who goes through the world with his scythe. And with every bad thing we do we become a helper of the destroying angel, we ourselves take his scythe and share in the processes of death and decay. The ideas that we receive from a spiritual foundation have a strengthening influence upon our whole outlook on life. This strength is what men should now be receiving that they may carry it into the evolution of the future; for indeed they will need it. Hitherto good Gods have taken care of man but now the time has come in our fifth Post-Atlantean epoch when destiny, and good and evil will more and more be given over into his own hands. Therefore it is necessary to know what good and evil mean, and to recognise them in the world—the one as a creative and the other as a death-dealing principle.

In the development of the individual human being as well as of the whole of humanity, we must always look for something that is not too simple, not too straightforward, otherwise we cannot really understand the complicated processes of life as they occur before our eyes every day. Even in the individual human being, we must be clear that, so to speak, two developmental currents converge. You will recall that we distinguish individual periods in the life of an individual human being (this is explained in the little booklet 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'), for example, the period from physical birth until about the 7th year, year, into the time of the change of teeth, then from the 7th to about the 14th year, then again from about the 14th to the 21st year, so these are periods that run from seven to seven years approximately. This division of human life into such individual periods is fairly regular in the first half of a normal life. This division, this structuring into seven-year periods, becomes irregular in the second, descending half of life. This is because, in the first half of our lives, we are actually living out those laws and facts that have been a kind of repetition of the regular course of human development since time immemorial, whereas in the second half of our lives we are not yet living out something that has already happened in the outer world, but rather something that will only happen in the future. Therefore, in the future, the second half of a person's life will become much more regular than it is today, more and more regular. But that is only said to point out that such a regular development takes place in human life. We know that it expresses itself in such a way that we can say: Up to the age of seven, the human being is still in an etheric, in an etheric shell. In relation to his etheric body, he is only born at the age of seven, so to speak. In relation to his astral body, he is born around the age of fourteen, and so on. What we are indicating here is actually one current of human development; it is the more external developmental current. Besides this developmental stream, there is also an inner stream, which to a certain extent runs independently of the outer stream. The inner stream includes everything that we actually have in the deeper processes, causes and effects of our karma, which continues from incarnation to incarnation.

When we say that a person develops in a very definite way up to the age of seven, fourteen, or twenty-one, then we must realize that this applies more or less, and indeed on average, to all people. We can consider these rules, which are given for example in the small writing mentioned, to be correct for all people. These rules are correct for the education of a person in our time who has few talents and abilities, but they are also correct for geniuses, for all people, because they are a law according to which the human being develops. What lies in this line of development therefore applies more or less to all people, but it is not unimportant what these people have gone through in their previous embodiments. One person has experienced many clever, beautiful, and good things. His abilities are shaped by this, his destiny is shaped by this; the actual inner core of the person is shaped by this, and this is now individual for each person. What runs alongside the outer one like an inner developmental current is, so to speak, what constitutes the particular shade of a person's nature. As a result, it may happen that, although the general division into seven-year periods applies to all human beings, the secrets of development are different for different people. Someone may come into the world with great, developed abilities. In that case, although he will also have to wait until his seventh year for the complete formation of the form of his physical body, and until his fourteenth year for the complete development of his etheric body, yet what works within is quite different from that in someone with fewer abilities.

Thus two lines of development run parallel to each other, and from this we can now also see how, so to speak, certain conflicting states of mind can arise in a person. In terms of outer development, one cannot think otherwise than that, in line with spiritual science, up to the age of 14, let us say, the abilities of the etheric body develop. At the age of 14 or 15, his astral body is actually released and born. It may then be that we are dealing with an individuality, that is, with someone who comes from previous embodiments and who has strong, great inner soul abilities. We are thus assuming the case of a person who, through his karma, through his earlier development in previous lives, has strong inner abilities. In order to live out these abilities in the world, one needs the forces, the organs of each human shell. Now, let us assume that we neglect to educate the person who has such abilities so that he can live them out through the astral body in particular. We neglect the development of his astral body in the right time. What will happen then? In order to understand what will happen, let us imagine something specific.

Let us assume that we have such a child. It grows up. We take care to ensure that it develops regularly up to the age of seven, we make sure that it eats and drinks well, that it becomes chubby. This is taken care of quite well. The child looks well-fed. We continue to ensure that the child is well-fed from the age of seven, but now we begin to disregard the rules by which the education of the child from the age of seven should reasonably be governed. We now begin to disregard these rules and make the mistake, for example, of succumbing to materialistic prejudices and saying that we want to see to it that the child comes to intellectual judgment as early as possible, that he learns to have his own judgment as early as possible. This is the case today because of our materialistic way of thinking. I have often given this example.

While between the ages of seven and fourteen particular attention should be paid to developing memory, the focus is on teaching arithmetic. Whereas in the past children were taught 2 × 2 = 4 and similar facts before they had understood the concepts, today we say that children should not be taught anything that they merely learn by rote; they should only be taught things about which they can form an opinion. They work with red and white balls. Instead of accustoming the child to authority, which should be the source of truth for the child between the ages of 7 and 14, they teach the child to become precocious in judgment. While the child of this age should feel: “I must believe what the revered authority says,” the child is made to feel – the fact that the child needs to have parents and teachers whom it looks up to with heartfelt reverence and from whom it accepts truth out of a sense of self-evident authority is neglected.

Let us assume that we disregard this, that the word authority must be sacred for the period between the ages of seven and fourteen. If we disregard such important laws between the ages of seven and fourteen, then from the age of fourteen or fifteen a properly developing astral body cannot arise out of an inadequately developed etheric body. And now let us assume that we are dealing with a person who has brought special powers with him from previous lives, good and strong abilities, but for which he needs an astral body that can be ignited by high ideals. It depends, for example, on the astral body that one can flare up with righteous anger when one sees an injustice in one's surroundings, long before one can judge it in independent, clear thinking. Such qualities of a healthy astral body would have to be present, according to the nature of the person concerned, because he needs them so that what lives in him after his previous incarnations can come out. Now let us assume that we have neglected the principles that must be observed in order for the astral body to be born capable of devotion and enthusiasm at the age of 14 or 15. Then, despite significant talents, great abilities brought from earlier, the possibility of developing these talents is still lacking because the astral body does not allow these talents to emerge. It does not have those forces, those currents, which the I, which passes from embodiment to embodiment, must use to unfold its abilities. Now we have an I that could develop high abilities; but the organs of the astral body, through which this I could express its abilities, are crippled. The developmental current that regulates the progress of the sheaths has not come into its own.

Anyone who observes life, especially in our terribly materialistic time, will find that the case I have just described is actually true of life countless times. Countless times in life it happens that someone who can see through life – trained in occult development can see through it – sees with a bleeding heart: There is something in the individuality that cannot get out because the other developmental current has not been properly taken care of by the corresponding point in time. Then, at the very point in time when the non-existent organs would be needed, the characteristic phenomena arise, which are referred to as “youthful insanity” or “dementia praecox”. All kinds of evil, bad passions arise, aberrations of the most terrible kind. Where do these aberrations come from? They do not come simply from the fact that the person in question also has tendencies that incline towards evil, but from the fact that in the present incarnation he does not have the organs to develop his good tendencies. It may be a blessing for him that these inclinations of the ego destroy, tear apart the cover, in order to create a better possibility for his development in a following embodiment. However strange this may appear, it must be taken into account, because often the development is considered far too straightforward, even by people who come to spiritual science.

Inner evolution and outer possibilities for development must coincide. This is the case for the individual human being, and it is also true for the development of an entire era. I have given you only a radical example to make it easier for you to understand what exists in many cases. It will not always appear in this radical way, but it does appear quite often in our time in the form of discontented moods, hopelessness, and not knowing what to do with oneself, especially in the period from the 14th to the 21st year. Then it remains and cannot be remedied in life. Then it remains as an inner mood of hopelessness, aimlessness, pessimism and dissatisfaction. And in this milder form it would occur more and more frequently if humanity were not to be led onto a different path by a spiritual, spiritual-scientific world view, in that materialistic thinking has made itself felt more and more in the deepest thoughts and feelings of human beings.

When one hears what has just been said, then, as a spiritual researcher, one must say: spiritual science, if one has understood just a little of it, must appear to one as something that one does not pursue as a hobby because one likes it, because one finds subjective satisfaction, bliss through it, but rather, when one has approached its deeper sides a little, one must pursue spiritual science as a duty, as a duty towards all humanity. — For those worldviews that are prevailing today lead to an ever-decreasing understanding of life. One will understand non-life ever better. And in order to understand non-life more and more, materialism was necessary for a time. Out of a mere understanding of life, one would never have been able to build steamships, railways, tunnels. Nor could one have hoped to lead our external, physical science as far as it is today, and to make further progress in this field.

People had to be led in such a way that they absorbed, as it were, into their souls such world views that could correctly express all types of cultures as special directions of the conception of existence.

No one may say: Was it not unjust that people had to absorb materialistic views over the past centuries? No, one cannot say that. It is the same souls that, after having had to endure the influence of materialism, will in future be led to spiritual life again in other incarnations.

But everything must happen in its time, at the right time. You only have to consider that certain things can be very good, quite excellent, if they are done by day. If the same things are to be done by night, then they are just bad. There is a time for everything, and so it is also in the great development of humanity, in the development of humanity. What was good in past centuries would be a terrible sin against humanity if it were to be maintained for the next centuries. Today we have arrived at the point in time when, in place of materialistic thinking, thinking and looking must come that lead into life in the spirit itself. What has been done in the past according to materialism must be followed by a spiritual world view, and people must be found who will do something to bring this spiritual world view into the human race and its history. They should know: If what one might call a spiritual world view does not arise at this time to complement the materialistic world view, then humanity will miss out on the right moment. But there are many other ways in which we could miss out on the most important things in our time. And we understand how it is that we can miss the most important things in our time when we now consider these two developmental trends, which were previously indicated for the individual, in the context of humanity as a whole.

The human being goes from incarnation to incarnation, from embodiment to embodiment. But he does not go from one embodiment to another in vain. Why does man always descend from spiritual heights to earth again and again? Why is not one incarnation on earth sufficient? The reason for this is that the earth itself changes over long periods of time, in relation to everything that is physical on it, and in relation to everything that is spiritual and soul-like on it. Compare the outward appearance of the earth, what has grown here, and what was here already 2000 to 3000 years ago. Compare the soil as it looked around Pforzheim then with how it looks today. Even ordinary natural science can provide information about what the soil looked like here 2000 years ago. But also compare what a person learned in his childhood and youth then with what he learns today, and you will have to say to yourself: The physical and spiritual life on earth is changing. The earth was quite different 2000 to 3000 years ago and has always been and will always be changing. The earth is constantly changing. And every time we descend to the earth, we encounter new conditions, we can learn new things, experience new things and live new things, combine them with our being and carry new experiences up into the spiritual world. Therefore, because we are to absorb the experiences of the earth in successive periods, we are born in successive lives on earth. We tune in to what external life can give us in the course of successive periods and what we are to learn within this life on earth. These must be in harmony.

Let us take the example of any soul that would live today. He has already lived in the time of ancient Egypt, in the time of ancient India. All the souls sitting here today have lived on earth countless times, have lived here in different circumstances and are living again today because what they learned and experienced at the time is no longer there on earth today, and new things can be experienced and learned today. Let us assume that a person, for example, in ancient Egypt, did not apply his incarnations correctly, did not extract what could be extracted on Earth at that time. Let us assume that people, as they were still isolated in ancient Egypt according to the karma of the Earth and the individual karma, had failed to unite with their soul that which could be experienced in ancient Egypt. That would not have prevented them from dying in ancient Egypt at the appropriate time. But it would have prevented them from bringing with them, when they were born the next time, what they then needed to be fully-fledged human beings. They cannot acquire this so easily in the following incarnations. But in order to avoid having stunted souls, one needs in a later incarnation what one was able to acquire in the previous incarnation from the earth conditions at that time in terms of abilities and powers. There are things that, if you have missed them, you can no longer catch up on. Perhaps you will say: Now he is painting a pretty picture for us! We cannot know whether we have missed out on something incredibly important in previous embodiments. That would be a truly bleak prospect, because we may have missed out on something terrible in previous incarnations, and then nothing would help us now! What good does it do us, for example, if we now want to turn to spiritual science as much as we can and use our current incarnation as well as possible? We may not even be able to do it, precisely because we missed something very important in our previous incarnations!

So it seems as if this truth that I have just expressed could cast a terrible perspective into your soul, making you feel desolate. Because if you can no longer make up for what you have once missed, then I have to say that no matter how hard I work on my soul, it will no longer help, because I can no longer make up for what I have missed, which I could only have poured into this soul, perhaps in ancient Indian or Egyptian times.

This bleak prospect would only apply if the conclusion drawn from it were the right one. But it is not the right conclusion, because the matter is different. It is absolutely true that what our soul would not have acquired in the ancient Egyptian, Indian, Persian, Greek times, it could no longer make up for today, that would be impossible. The only thing is that at present, in our time, there are the first incarnations of man at all in which one can consciously, through one's own fault, miss something in this direction. And that will continue for some time. And now there can also be an explanation for why spiritual science is only now beginning to come into the world: because only now are people beginning to have the opportunity to miss out on something. Now these truths must begin to reach people, because now people are beginning to have incarnations in which, if they are not properly applied, it would be more difficult to make up for what has been missed in later earthly conditions. And now it is also the case that people, if they only want to, can access the spiritual scientific explanation of reincarnation and karma and other spiritual scientific truths, so that they do not need to burden themselves with this guilt. Spiritual science will do everything in the coming centuries and millennia to ensure that people have the opportunity to use these incarnations in the right way and do not need to take on this guilt. It does not matter so much for a single incarnation, but if in our age, which has just begun and will last 2000 to 3000 years, two to three incarnations are used in such a way that one has not extracted the right thing from what one can gain on earth, then one will have missed something important in the following times. That is why spiritual science is now emerging and telling people how important it is to use their incarnations in the right way.

Now we ask ourselves: But why could not people in earlier times make these mistakes? The reason is that man has developed from incarnation to incarnation in such a way that in the distant past he himself was a comrade of the spiritual worlds. What our abilities are today, especially the limitation of our senses to the physical world, was not always there. In earlier times, man had a dim clairvoyance; he could see into the spiritual worlds. And this clairvoyance was always stronger the further back we go. In those times, man knew: I come from the spiritual world. And he not only had this abstract knowledge, but he also knew what it looks like in that world, he knew the laws of the spiritual world. He fulfilled these laws as if by instinct; instinctively. Because they were still connected to the spiritual world, our souls essentially used their incarnations properly. Because people were still connected to the divine spiritual worlds, the knowledge continued to work in them and they instinctively did the right thing under the influence of the old knowledge. It is only in our time that we live in an age where, so to speak, the gates to the spiritual world are closed, where man between birth and death is completely dependent on perceiving only in this sensual-physical world.

This age, in which the old clairvoyance has disappeared, through which people received knowledge as if from heaven, this age began – we can state the date fairly accurately – 3101 years before the Christ walked on earth. In former times there were such ages in which men, even if they did not have today's strong self-confidence, could still see into the spiritual worlds, even further back, they could see clearly into the spiritual worlds. We come to an age before the year 3101 in which men had a rather clouded but still knowledge of the spiritual world. This epoch is called Dvapara Yuga. This Dvapara Yuga or iron epoch extends over the older Egyptian-Babylonian-Chaldean and Persian times. Then still further back, in even older times, we find an even deeper insight into the spiritual world among people in the Treta Yuga or silver epoch. And then we come up to just after the Atlantic catastrophe, when those people who were incarnated at that time were still able to see into the spiritual worlds in such a way that they felt they were companions of those beings that you can only recognize today in the state between death and a new birth. That is then the Krita Yuga, which begins there.

In the year 3101 BC, the age begins in which, little by little, all possibilities for people to look into the spiritual world through external natural, normal forces gradually cease. In this age - from 3101 BC to the present day - there were only old inherited remnants of dull, dim clairvoyance in some people. In this age, one could only regularly ascend into the spiritual worlds through real esoteric training. But the normal abilities of the human being developed in such a way that they only extended to the external physical world. This age is called, in an oriental expression, the Kali Yuga, the dark age, because man no longer sees into the spiritual world through his natural abilities. The Kali Yuga is therefore this age, which began around 3101 BC, and which has led people more and more to the physical plane.

The most important events that take place on the spiritual plane are not usually noticed by people because they are not sufficiently aware of them. Important things are happening in our age. The most important thing is that the Kali Yuga expired in 1899. That is to say, the age of human development has expired that was intended to lead human abilities to the observation and perception of the physical plane. And now, since 1899, an age is beginning in which, over a period of about 2500 years, other abilities will slowly be developed in human souls as normal abilities. We are already living in an age in which other abilities are being developed. Kali Yuga has come to an end, and people are living towards an age in which — without them being able to do anything for or against it — certain new abilities will develop naturally in the soul, different from those that developed during Kali Yuga.

What are these abilities? Under the influence of the Kali Yuga, those powers of man became stronger and stronger that make man an inventor, a discoverer, a processor of the physical forces of the physical plane. This is, of course, continuing, because the abilities that have once been acquired are, of course, not lost again. So one should not say that the ability to work with natural forces now ceases. But other abilities are added. In addition to what the human being acquired during the Kali Yuga, there is a special ability to see naturally in the etheric plane. This means that the age is now beginning when certain clairvoyant abilities will awaken as normal abilities in human souls, first in a few, then in more and more human souls. We must therefore distinguish these from those acquired by those who apply the methods of spiritual training to themselves, although these are much higher abilities. In every age, their abilities will go beyond what is intended as normal for humanity. But now an age is beginning in which the ability to see not only the physical, but also that which underlies the physical as the etheric, will be awakened as a normal one. That is to say, there will come souls with such abilities, and in a time that is already here, that has already begun, only they will come more and more frequently. Now, for the time being, they are still quite rare on earth. But these abilities will begin to spread more and more among people. They will be clearly evident in the years 1930 to 1940. This will be an important epoch, for then people's new abilities will be seen to emerge. Whereas today a person only sees the physical body, then he will also gain the ability to see some essential parts of the etheric body at first, but then more and more of it. This will happen. The way humanity is developing in the near future is such that there will be people, and more and more of them, finally a large number of people – actually it is intended for all of humanity – who will not only see the physical body of the human being, but this physical body as if enclosed in an etheric, as if with etheric rays and an etheric aura. That is one thing they will see. The other thing is that it will be quite strange to them: there will be images in front of them, and all kinds of things will show up in these images. At first people will not notice what it is all about, then they will think it is pathological, but then more and more people will notice that such an image is an event that takes place in two to four days and that is reflected ethereally beforehand. These abilities will already develop in the first half of our century.

There are two possibilities. One is that people today will stop at what they have acquired from the Kali Yuga through their thinking, feeling and perceiving. Those who, with their world view, their philosophy, their thinking and perceiving, stop at what they have learned up to now will very soon be finished with their judgments of fellow human beings who see such things. They will say that they are fools who are beginning to go mad, who see all kinds of deceptive things that do not exist. But there will be other people who will have heard from spiritual science that these are realities. And this will be emphasized again and again in the coming decades and centuries. They will have heard that there is such a thing as reality, and they will find the right relationship to these newly emerging abilities.

What do we do by doing spiritual science? So we are not doing something that satisfies our curiosity and is therefore our favorite pastime, but we are doing something that prepares people for what must and will come. And this, what will come, that one would simply not be able to understand when spiritual science would not exist. Mankind would lose what is to be won. And that could very well be if it should happen that spiritual science would be completely forbidden on Earth, if it could happen that all those who work for spiritual science would perhaps be starved, perhaps pushed out of their positions and left to starve. Then humanity would completely lose the opportunity to understand what will come as a natural development. If that should happen, human development would become barren and wither. It would have to continue without this impact and would wither and become barren. That is what makes spiritual science a responsible duty.

If we look at it this way, we can also ask: in what way, for example, will the effect just described become apparent? Well, the souls that are sitting here now will be embodied again in an age in which the soul abilities just described will already have been present in human souls for a long time. What will that bring about? With those abilities something else will come. It will come about that the person will be able to look back into the present incarnation. A natural ability will arise with those abilities that have just been described – belonging to them – a memory not only of the life between death and birth, but of the previous life, as a natural quality. But now it will be a matter of developing something in the present or following incarnation that can be remembered. What we do for the day, for what will have long since perished by the time we are born again, will not initially be something that can be remembered. What can be remembered will only be what has taken place in the central power of our inner being, in our I. One cannot then remember what happened as everyday occurrences. That which remains from the present incarnation until the following one must already be grasped and felt in the I. But it is true that most people do not yet have the inclination to penetrate so deeply into their inner being that they feel themselves to be an I. For, as Fichte said, most people still consider themselves to be a piece of cinders in the moon rather than an ego! But if we do not cultivate this ego, if we do not learn to recognize it through spiritual science, if we do not learn to feel it, then it is not there at all as inner soul-good. First we must create that which we are then to remember in the next incarnation.

In this way, spiritual science, by teaching man to know, creates the elements of the world that find their best expression in his I, and as facts creates that which he is to remember in his next incarnation. If a person does not apply what is offered to him in the right way, then in the next incarnation he has the ability to remember, but nothing can occur to him as the object of his memory, because he has not created anything to remember.

It is one of the greatest torments that a person can have: to have an ability and to possess nothing with which to exercise it. One will want to look back into earlier incarnations, because one will have the ability to do so, but find no object within oneself that one can bring into this power of remembrance. There will be a terrible thirst to look back into earlier incarnations. But it will be like an inner torment, an inner desire to look back, and one will see nothing because one has created nothing that one could see. So we work out in the present incarnation what is to be created as a fact, as an object for remembrance, for we attain the ability of remembering the past through the natural course of human development.

Here we have two currents again. An outer one: people acquire abilities; and an inner one: people must do what they can apply these abilities to. Everywhere we find these two currents. But the most important thing that acts as a force, as an impulse, is that people, by living their way up into this time, by getting the new ability to see the ethereal, will have a great, a greatest experience in connection with this in the course of the first half of the 20th century.

Back then, when the Kali Yuga had lasted about 3100 years, people had arrived at a state where they had to say to themselves: We can no longer look up into the spiritual realms of heaven. The gates are closed to the spiritual world. But then came first the Baptist John, then came the Christ, and they showed men that on the physical plane, through a corresponding inner development, that which is the central power of the soul, which is I, can be awakened and that through this the spiritual can be understood. The God descended as the Christ to the physical plane because human abilities had become such that they could only understand things on the physical plane. The Christ made this sacrifice to descend to the physical plane because the gods, who had not descended to it, were no longer comprehensible to people who had now developed the ability to stand only on the physical plane.

Now, however, abilities are developing again to see the supernatural, to see the ethereal. As a result, around the period from 1930 to 1940, a number of people who will be the first pioneers of this ethereal clairvoyance will see what the Christ is in this our time. Christ only lived on our Earth once in a physical body. However, our Earth has changed since that time. If someone became clairvoyant in the time before Christ's birth and looked into the world of spiritual beings and phenomena that directly surround our Earth, they did not find anything that they found after the event of Golgotha had taken place, when the Christ descended to Earth. One personality knew this exactly. There was a personality who knew from his teaching: When people become clairvoyant, they see something not yet on earth, but which will be in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth in the future, once the Christ has descended from the sun. This personality said to himself: We will experience on earth the great moment when the Christ will appear spiritually to people who are becoming clairvoyant, because he will then have descended to earth and will also be spiritually visible in its atmosphere. This personality knew this, but he had not yet reached the point where he could gain the faith from the events in Palestine that this expected being, the Christ, had already existed in Jesus of Nazareth. He could not recognize the Christ Jesus, he did not recognize him. Then the time came, when the event of Golgotha had long since passed, in which this personality became clairvoyant: Then she saw the Christ in the etheric body. Now she could see something in the earthly environment! Now this personality knew that the Christ was there. The physical reality, the physical vision did not convince him, this person, but the clairvoyant perception of the Christ in the etheric body did convince him. This personality was Paul. He was the first to see the Christ clairvoyantly in his etheric body at the event of Damascus, as He has been seen ever since the event of Golgotha by those who elevate themselves to clairvoyance.

This is even the most important event that is granted to the clairvoyantly trained today: that he sees the Christ in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. Because this ability will now occur in a larger number of people during that period, this number of people will then have the direct vision of the Christ, of the Christ in his etheric body, through natural vision, with which people will then deal as with a physical personality. The Christ will not descend to a physical body a second time, but people will ascend through their abilities into the etheric, in which He is now revealing Himself. The Christ will have come to them again in the realm of their expanded experience.

This is the return of the Christ, beginning approximately in the years 1930 to 1940 of our era. This event could pass unnoticed by people if they do not prepare to understand this great event. Humanity has to prepare itself spiritually for this future event. It should not pass unnoticed by humanity. If it were to pass unnoticed, humanity would become desolate and wither.

What I have now expressed will be proclaimed in the next two decades from this and that place, expressed in this or that form, because it is an extremely important truth, a truth that should prepare people for the most important events of our time. The times are fulfilled again, that the most significant is to happen. But in our time a materialism of most terrible kind lives, and it can happen that even those who hear and receive these teachings are tempted by the materialistic attitude and seduced by the materialistic attitude to the belief that Christ only appears again when he appears in a fleshly body. That would be a materialistic belief, only those can believe that who in truth have not risen to the contemplation that the spiritual is more real than the physical. Now, materialism could lead people into this temptation, to confuse the return of Christ in the real etheric body, visible to the higher developed abilities of people, with a carnal physical return. But if that were to happen, it would be another great misfortune for humanity. But there are enough individuals in our time, enough personalities, who will use this and who, either by falling victim to an illusion, to self-deception, or by falling victim to their own evil instincts, will present themselves as false Christs, as Christs in the flesh.

False Christs will appear in this age, in which humanity is to see the true Christ in the etheric body. But anthroposophists are called upon to be able to distinguish between the spiritual and the material and to be firmly armed against all assertions, wherever they may come from, that a Christ would come in the flesh. Anthroposophists are called upon to recognize that this would be materialism, the worst tempter, which could arise at one of the most important events in the development of humanity, at the event that we call the return of Christ, and at which it will have to be proven whether people have already come so far as not just to speak of the spirit, but to be able to recognize the nature of the spirit as something higher than the nature of matter.

It remains to be seen whether people will be ready to recognize the Christ in all His significance, precisely because He shows Himself to them as a spiritual being. This will be the greatest test for people, that the greatest impulse on our earth will show itself to them and say: You can only recognize me if you not only talk about the spiritual, but know that the spiritual is more real, more real, more valuable than the merely carnal material. - That is part of what we are to take into our feelings in order to be able to meet the coming decades, which we are heading for, in the appropriate way. This event will be important not only for those who will still be in the physical body, but also for those souls who will already be between death and a new birth. For that will be just as important for the so-called dead as death on Golgotha was not only important for the contemporary people in the physical body, but also for the souls who were in Kamaloka or Devachan. Symbolically speaking, it was said that the Christ also descended to those who were in the other world: “descended to hell”. The great test of spirituality in our century will be important for those on the physical plane, as well as for those on the spiritual plane, the so-called dead.

If you recollect what was to a certain extent the climax and principal goal of our last lecture, you will be able to place before your souls how completely different the human entity was as regards his innermost self before the Mystery of Golgotha from what it was after that event. I did not try to put general characteristics before you, but examples from spiritual science, examples that showed us souls of olden times and souls belonging to modern times, characteristic examples by means of which we can see how certain souls of former times appear again, transformed and metamorphosed. The reason for such a great change will become evident only from the study of the whole course of these lectures. But at present one thing only may be pointed out by way of introduction, which has often been referred to in our lectures when they touched on similar subjects, namely, that the full consciousness of the human ego, which it is the mission of the earth planet to develop and bring to expression, actually made its appearance only through the Mystery of Golgotha.

It is not perhaps quite accurate, though not far wrong, to say that if we go very far back in evolution, human souls were not yet truly individualized; they were still entangled in the group-soul nature. This was particularly the case with the more prominent among them, so we may say that such natures as Hector or Empedocles were typical group-soul representatives of their entire human community. Hector grew out of the soul of Troy. He stands as an image of the group soul of the Trojan people in a particular form, specialized but nevertheless just as rooted in the group soul as Empedocles. When they were reincarnated in the post-Christian era, they had to face the necessity of experiencing the ego-consciousness. This passing over from the group-soul nature to the experience of the individual soul causes a mighty leap forward. It causes souls so firmly embedded in the group-soul nature as Hector to appear like Hamlet, i.e. wavering and uncertain, as though incapable of dealing with life. On the other hand it causes a soul like that of Empedocles, when it reappears in post-Christian times as the soul of the Faust of the sixteenth century, to become a kind of adventurer who is brought into various situations from which he was only with difficulty able to extricate himself, and who is misunderstood by his contemporaries and even by posterity.

Indeed, it has often been emphasized that in developments such as those here referred to, all that has taken place since the Mystery of Golgotha is not particularly meaningful. As yet everything is only at the beginning; only during the future evolution of the earth will the great impulses that may be ascribed to Christianity make themselves felt. Over and over again we must emphasize the fact that Christianity is only at the beginning of its great development. If we wish to play a part in this great development, we must enter with understanding into the ever increasing progress of the revelations and impulses which originated with the founding of Christianity. Above all we are required to learn something in the immediate future; for it does not take much clairvoyance to see clearly that if we wish for something definite to enable us to make a good beginning in the direction of an advanced and progressive understanding of Christianity, we must learn to read the Bible in quite a new way. There are at present many hindrances in the way, partly because of the fact that in wide circles biblical study is still carried on in a sugary and sentimental manner. The Bible is not made use of as a book of knowledge, but as a book of common use for all kinds of personal situations. If anyone has need of it for his own personal encouragement, he will bury himself in one or the other chapter of the Bible and allow it to work on him. This seldom results in anything more than a personal relationship to the Bible. On the other hand, the scholarship of the last decades, indeed that of virtually the whole nineteenth century, increased the difficulty of really understanding the Bible by tearing it apart, declaring that the New Testament is composed of all kinds of different things that were later combined, and that the Old Testament also was composed of many different parts which must have been brought together at different times. According to this view, the Bible is made up of mere fragments which may easily produce the impression of an aggregate, presumably stitched together in the course of time. This kind of scholarship has become popular; very many people, for example, hold that the Old Testament is combined out of many single parts. This opinion disturbs the serious reading of the Bible that must come in the near future. When such a serious way of reading the Bible is adopted, all that is to be said about its secrets from the anthroposophical viewpoint will be much better understood.

For example, we must learn to take as a whole the Old Testament from the beginning up to the point where the ordinary editions of the Bible end. We must not let ourselves be led astray by all that may be said against the unity of the Old Testament. Then, if we do not merely read it in a one-sided way seeking for personal edification, and do not read one part or another from any particular point of view, but allow the Old Testament, just as it is, to influence us as a whole, combining our consideration of the contents with all that must come into the world precisely from our anthroposophical development of the last few years—if we unite all this with a certain artistic spiritual feeling so that we gradually come to see the artistic sequence, how the threads interweave and are disentangled, not as if it had been composed in an external kind of way, but with deep artistry, then we shall gradually perceive what a mighty, inwardly spiritual dramatic power lies in the whole structure and composition of the Old Testament. Only then do we appreciate the glorious tableau as a uniform whole, and we shall no longer believe that one piece in the middle comes from one source and one from another. We shall then perceive the unitary spirit of the Bible. We shall see how from the first day of creation the continuity of progress is under the control of this unitary spirit from the time of the patriarchs through the time of the judges, and through that of the great Jewish prophets and kings until the whole soars to a wonderful dramatic culmination in the book of the Maccabees,¹ in the sons of Mattathias, the brothers of Judas who fought against the king of Antioch. In the whole there lives an inner dramatic force that reaches a certain culminating point at the end. We shall then feel that it is not a mere phrase when we say that a man who is equipped with the occult method of observation is seized by a peculiar feeling when he comes to the end of the Old Testament and has in front of him the seven sons of the Maccabean mother and the five sons of Mattathias. Five sons of Mattathias, with the seven sons of the Maccabean mother making the remarkable number twelve, a number we notice everywhere when we are led into the secrets of evolution.

The number twelve appears at the end of the Old Testament as the culminating point of the whole dramatic presentation. First this feeling comes upon us when the seven sons of the Maccabees die a martyr's death, how one by one they rise up and one by one are martyred. Observe the inner dramatic power shown here, how the first victim only hints at what comes to full expression in the seventh in his belief in the immortality of the soul, how he hurls these words at the king, “You reprobate, you refuse to hear anything about the Awakener of my soul.” (II Maccabees, Chap. 7.) If we allow the dramatic crescendo of power from son to son to affect us, we shall see what forces are contained in the Bible. If we compare the sugary sentimental method of study prevalent hitherto with this dramatic, artistic penetration, the Bible is of itself able to arouse religious ardor. Here, through the Bible, art becomes religion. And then we begin to notice very remarkable things. Most of you may perhaps remember, for it happened in this very place, that when I gave here the course on St. Luke's Gospel the whole magnificent figure of Christ Jesus sprang forth from the fusion of the two souls, the souls of the two Jesus children. The soul of the one was none other than the soul of Zarathustra, the founder of Zoroastrianism. You may still have before your spiritual eyes the fact that in the Jesus boy described in the Gospel of St. Matthew is the reincarnated Zarathustra.

What kind of fact do we have here? We have the founder of Zoroastrianism, the great initiate of antiquity, of the primeval Persian civilization, who passed through human evolution up to a certain point and appeared again among the ancient Hebrew people. Through the soul of Zarathustra, we have a transition from the ancient Persian to the element of the ancient Hebrew people. Yes indeed, the external, that which takes place in the history of the world and in human life, is really only the manifestation, the externalization of inner spiritual processes and of inner spiritual forces. What external history relates can therefore be studied by considering it as an expression of the inward and spiritual, of the facts which move in the spiritual realm. Let us place before our souls the fact that Zarathustra passed over from Persia into the old Hebrew element. Now let us consider the Old Testament—we really only need to study the headings of the chapters. That the matter stands with Zarathustra as I then related is the result of clairvoyant research: it results if we follow his soul backward in time. Now let us contrast this result not only with the way the Bible represents it, but also with the results of external investigation.

The ancient Hebrew people founded their kingdom in Palestine. That original kingdom was divided. First it passed into Assyrian captivity, then into the Babylonian. The ancient Hebrew people were subjugated by the Persians. What does all this mean? World historical facts do indeed have a meaning; they correspond with inner processes, spiritual soul-processes. Why did all this take place? Why were the ancient Hebrew people guided in such a way that they passed over into the Chaldean, into the Assyrian-Babylonian element, and were set free again by Alexander the Great?² To put it briefly, it is because this was merely the external transition of Zarathustra from the Persian to the Jewish element. The Jews brought him to themselves. They were guided to him, even being subjugated by the Persian element, because Zarathustra wanted to come to them. External history is a wonderful counterpart of these processes, and anyone who observes these things from the point of view of spiritual science knows that external history was only the body for the transition of the Zarathustra element from the old Persian element, which at first actually included the old Hebrew element. Then, when the latter had been sufficiently permeated by the Persian element, it was lifted out of it again by Alexander the Great. What then remained was the milieu necessary for Zarathustra; it had passed over from one people to another.

When we glance over this whole age—we can naturally emphasize only a few single points—we see it reaching its apex in the old Hebrew history, through the period of the kings, the prophets, the Babylonian captivity, and the Persian conquest up to the time of the Maccabees. If then we really wish to understand the Gospel of St. Mark, which is ushered in by one of the prophetic sayings of Isaiah, we cannot fail to be struck by the element of the Jewish prophets. Starting from Elijah, who reincarnated as John the Baptist, we could say that these prophets appear to us in their wonderful grandeur. Let us leave out of consideration for the moment Elijah and his reincarnation as the Baptist, and consider the names of the intervening prophets. Here we must say that what we have obtained from spiritual science allows us to observe these Jewish prophets in a very special way. When we speak of the great spiritual leaders of the earth in ancient times, to whom do we refer? To the initiates, the initiated ones. We know that these initiates attained their spiritual height precisely because they went through the various stages of consecration. They raised themselves stage by stage by means of cognition to spiritual vision, and thus to union with the true spiritual impulses in the world. In this way they were able to embody in the life of the physical plane the impulses they themselves received in the spiritual world. When we meet with an initiate of the Persian, Indian, or Egyptian people our first question is, “How did he ascend the ladder of initiation within his own national environment? How did he become a leader, and thus a spiritual guide of his people?”

This question is everywhere justifiable, except when we come to the prophets. At the present time, there is certainly a sort of theosophical tendency to mix everything together and speak about the prophets in the same way as we speak of other initiates. But nothing can be known by doing this. Let us take the Bible (and recent historical research shows that the Bible is a true and not an untrue document); consider the prophets from Isaiah to Malachi, through Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and study what it relates of these figures. You will find that you cannot bring these prophets into the general scheme of initiation. Where does the Bible relate that the Jewish prophets went through the same kind of initiation as other initiates belonging to different peoples? It is said they appeared when the voice of God stirred in their souls, enabling them to see in a different way from ordinary men, making it possible for them to make indications as to the future course of the destiny of their people and the future course of the world's history. Such indications were wrung from the souls of the prophets with elemental force. It is not related of them, in the same way as it is related of other prophets, how they went through their initiation. The spiritual vision of the Jewish prophets seems, so to speak, to spring from their own genius, and this they relate to their own people and to humanity. It was in this same way that they avowed their prophesies and acknowledged their prophetic gifts. Just consider how a prophet, when he has something to announce, always makes a point of proclaiming that God has communicated through some mediator what is to happen—or else that it came to him like a direct elemental truth. This gives rise to the question, leaving Elijah and his reincarnation as the Baptist out of consideration, “What position do these Jewish prophetic figures occupy, who externally are placed side by side with the initiates of other nations?” If you investigate the souls of these prophets in the light of spiritual science or occultism, you come to something very remarkable. If you make the effort to compare what history and religious tradition relate with what I am about to communicate to you as the result of my spiritual investigation, you will be able to verify this.

We find that the souls of the Hebrew prophets are reincarnations of initiates who had lived in other nations, and who had attained certain stages of initiation. When we trace backward one of these prophets, we arrive at some other people and find an initiated soul who remained a long time with this people. This soul then went through the portal of death and was reincarnated in the Jewish people. If we wish to find the earlier incarnations of the souls of Jeremiah, Isaiah, Daniel, and so on, we must seek them among other peoples. Trivially speaking, it is as though there were a gradual assembling of the initiates of other peoples among the Jewish people, where these initiates appear in the form of prophets. This is why these prophets appear in such a way that their gift of prophecy appears to proceed elementally from out of their own inner being. It is a memory of what they acquired here or there as initiates. All this emerges, but not always in the harmonious form it had in earlier incarnations, for a soul that had been incarnated in a Persian or Egyptian body would first have to accustom itself to the bodily nature of the Jewish people. Something of what was certainly in this soul could not come forth in this incarnation. For it is not always the case that what a man has formerly acquired reappears in him as he progresses from incarnation to incarnation. Indeed, through the difficulties caused by the bodily nature, it may come forth in an inharmonious way, in a chaotic manner.

Thus we see that the Jewish prophets gave their people many spiritual impulses, which are often disarrayed, but nonetheless grandiose recollections of former incarnations. That is the peculiarity to be observed in the Jewish prophets. Why is this? It is because in fact the whole evolution of humanity had to go through this passageway, so that what was achieved in its parts over the whole world should be brought together in one focal point, to be born again from out of the blood of the people of the Old Testament. So we find in the history of the old Hebrew people, as in that of no other, something that may be found also in tribes but not in peoples that had already become nations—a state of homogenity, the emphasizing of the descent of the blood through the generations. All that belongs to the world-historical mission of the Old Testament people depends upon the continuity of the stream of blood through the generations. Hence anyone who had a full right to belong to the Jewish people was always called a “son of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” meaning a son of that element that first appeared in the blood of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It was in the blood that flowed through this people that the elements of initiation of other peoples were to reincarnate. Like rays of light coming from different sides, streaming in and uniting in the center, the incarnating rays of the various peoples were collected together as in one central point in the blood of the old Hebrew people. The psychical element of human evolution had once to pass through that experience. It is extremely important to keep these occult facts in mind, for only thus can we understand how such a Gospel as that of St. Mark is from its beginning based upon the element of the Old Testament.

But now what occurs at this gathering, as we might call it, of the initiation elements of the various peoples in this one center? We have yet to see why it took place. But if we now take the whole dramatic progress of the Old Testament into consideration, we shall see how the thought of immortality is gradually developed in the Old Testament through the taking up of the initiation elements of the different peoples and how it appears at its very summit precisely in the sons of the Maccabees. But we must now allow this to influence our souls in its full original significance, enabling us to envision the consciousness man then had of his connection with the spiritual world. I wish to draw your attention to one thing. Try to follow up the passages in the Old Testament where reference is made to the divine element shining into human life. How often it is related, for example in the Book of Tobit (Tobit, Chapter 5), when something or other is about to happen—as when Tobit sends his son to carry out some business or other—the archangel Raphael appears to him in an apparently human form.³ In another passage other beings of the higher hierarchies appear. Here we have the divine spiritual element playing into the world of man in such a way that man sees the divine spiritual element as something external, met with in the outer world. In the Book of Tobit, Raphael confronts the person he has to lead in just the same way as one man encounters another when he approaches him externally. We shall often see if we study the Old Testament that connections with the spiritual world are regulated in this manner, and very many passages in the Old Testament refer to something of this kind. But as we proceed, we observe a great dramatic progression, finally reaching the culminating point of that progression in the martyrdom of the seven sons of the Maccabees who speak out of their souls of a uniting, a reawakening of their souls in the divine element. The inner certainty of soul about their own inner immortality meets us in the sons of the Maccabees and also in Judas and his brothers who were to defend their people against the king of Antioch. There is an increased inner understanding of the divine spiritual element, and the dramatic progress becomes ever greater as we follow the Old Testament from the appearance of God to Moses in the burning bush, in which we see God approaching man externally, to the inner certitude springing up in the souls of the sons of the Maccabees, who are convinced that if they die here they will be reawakened in the kingdom of their God through what lives within them.

This shows a mighty progression, revealing an inner unity in the Old Testament. Nothing is said at the beginning of the Old Testament concerning the consciousness of being accepted by God, of being taken away from the earth and being part of the Divinity. Nor are we told whether this member of the human soul that is taken up by God and embodied in the divine world is really raised. But the whole progress was so guided that the consciousness develops more and more, so that the human soul through its very essence grows into the spiritual element. From a state of passivity toward the God Yahweh or Jehovah, there gradually comes into being an active inner consciousness of the soul about its own nature. This increases page by page all through the Old Testament, though it was only by slow degrees that during its progress the thought of immortality was born. Strange to say, the same progress may also be observed in the succession of the prophets. Just observe how the stories and predictions of each successive prophet become more and more spiritual; here again we find the dramatic element of a wonderful intensification. The further we go back into the past, the more do the stories told relate to the external. The more we advance in time, the more we discover the inner force, the inner certainty and feeling of unity with the divine spiritual, referred to also by the prophets. Thus there is a continual enhancement until the Old Testament leads on to the beginning of the story of the New Testament, and the Gospel of St. Mark is directly linked with all this.

For at the very beginning, the Gospel tells us that it intends to interpret the event of Christ Jesus entirely in the sense of the old prophets, so that it is possible to understand the appearance of Christ Jesus by keeping before us the words of Malachi and Isaiah respectively, “Behold I send my messenger before you who is to prepare the way. Hear how there is a cry in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths level.’ ” Thus there is a prevailing tone running through the history of the Old Testament pointing to the appearance of Christ Jesus. It is further related in St. Mark's Gospel—indeed we may distinctly hear it in the words if we so desire. In the same way that the ancient prophets spoke, so essentially does the Baptist speak. How comprehensive and grandiose is this figure of the Baptist if we interpret him in the way the ancient prophets spoke of a divine messenger, of one who in the solitude would show the path that Christ Jesus had to pursue in cosmic evolution. Mark's Gospel then goes on to say, “Thus does John the Baptist appear in the solitude and proclaim baptism for the recognition of human sinfulness.” For in this way should the words rightly be translated. So it is said, “Direct your gaze to the old prophetic nature, which has now entered into a new relation with the Divinity and experienced a new belief in immortality. And then behold the figure of the Baptist, how he appeared and spoke of the kind of development through which we may recognize the sinfulness of man.” Thus is the Baptist directly referred to as a great figure.

But how about the wonderful figure of Christ Jesus Himself? Nowhere else in the world is He presented in so simple and at the same time so grand and dramatic an ascending gradation as in Mark's Gospel. Direct your spiritual gaze at this in the right way. What are we told at the beginning of the Gospel? We are particularly told to turn our attention to the figure of the Baptist. You can understand him only when you take into account the Jewish prophets, whose voice has become alive in him. The whole Jewish nation went up to be baptized by him. This means that there were many among them who recognized that the old prophets spoke through John the Baptist. That is stated at the beginning of the Gospel. We see John standing before us, we hear the voice of the old prophets coming to life in him, and we see the people going out to him and recognizing him as a prophet come to life again. Let us confine ourselves for the moment to the Mark Gospel. Now the figure of Christ Jesus Himself appears. Let us now also leave out of account the so-called baptism in the Jordan, and what happens after that, including the temptation, and fix our attention on the dramatic intensification we meet with in the Mark Gospel.

After the Baptist is introduced to us, and we are shown how the people regard him and his mission, Christ Jesus is Himself introduced. But in what manner? At first we are told only that He is there, that He is recognized not only by men, but He is also recognized by beings other than man. That is the point to be borne in mind. Around Him are those who wish to be healed from their demonic possession, those in whom demons are active. Around Him stand men in whom not merely human souls are living, but who are possessed by super-sensible spirits who work through them. And in a significant passage we are told that these spirits recognize Christ Jesus. Of the Baptist we are told that men recognized him and went out to be baptized by him. But Christ is recognized by the super-sensible spirits, so that He has to command them not to speak of Him. Beings from the super-sensible world recognize Him, so it is said; that being is entering who is not only recognized by men, but His appearance is recognized and considered dangerous by super-sensible beings. That is the glorious climax confronting us directly in the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. On the one side is John the Baptist, recognized and honored by men; and on the other He who is recognized and feared by super-sensible beings—who nevertheless have something to do with the earth—so that they realize that now they must leave. Nowhere else is such an upward dramatic progression presented with such simplicity.

If we keep this in sight, we feel certain things as necessary which usually simply pass unobserved by human souls. Let me draw your attention to a particular passage which, because of the greatness and simplicity of Mark's Gospel, may best be observed in this Gospel. Recall the passage in which the choosing of the Twelve is spoken of at the beginning of the Gospel, and how, when the naming is referred to, it is said that He called two of His apostles the “sons of thunder” (Mark 3:17). That is a fact that must not pass unnoticed; we must pay attention to it if we wish to understand the Gospel. Why does He call them “sons of thunder?” Because He wishes to implant into them an element that is not of the earth so that they may become His servants. This element comes from outside the earth because this is the Gospel that comes from the world of angels and archangels. It is something new; it is no longer enough to speak of man. He speaks now of a heavenly super-sensible element, the ego, and it is necessary to emphasize this. He calls them sons of thunder to show that those who are His followers are related to the celestial element. The nearest world connected with our own is the elemental world, through which what plays into our world can first be explained. Christ gives names to His disciples which indicate that our world borders on a super-sensible one. He gives them names in accordance with the characteristics of the elemental world. It is just the same as when He calls Peter the “rock-man” (Mark 3:16). This again refers to the super-sensible. Thus through the whole Gospel the entrance of the angelic as an impulse from the spiritual world is proclaimed.

In order to understand this we only need to read correctly, and assume that the Gospel is at the same time a book from which the deepest wisdom can be drawn. All the progress that has been made consists in this: souls are becoming individualized. They are connected with the super-sensible world not only indirectly through their group-soul nature, but they are also connected with it through the element of the individual soul. He who so stands before humanity that He is recognized by the beings of earth and is also recognized by super-sensible beings needs the best element of human nature to enable Him to sink something of the super-sensible into the souls of those who are to serve Him. He requires such men as have themselves made the furthest progress in their souls according to the old way. It is extremely interesting to follow the soul-development of those whom Christ Jesus gathered around Him; the Twelve whom He particularly called to be His own, who, in all their simplicity, as we might say, passed in the grandest way through the development which, as I tried to show you yesterday, is gained by human souls in widely varied incarnations.

A man must first become accustomed to being a specific individuality. This he cannot easily do when he is transferred from the element of the nation in which his soul had taken root into a condition of being dependent upon himself alone. The Twelve were deeply rooted in a nationality which had constituted itself in the grandest form. They stood there as if they were naked souls, simple souls, when Christ found them again. There had been a quite abnormal interval between their incarnations. The gaze of Christ Jesus could rest upon the Twelve, the reincarnated souls of those who had been the seven sons of the Maccabean and the five sons of Mattathias, Judas and his brothers; it was of these that the apostolate was formed. They were thrown into the element of fishermen and simple folk. But at a time when the Jewish element had reached its culminating point they had been permeated by the consciousness that this element was then at the peak of its strength, but strength only—whereas, when the group formed itself around Christ, this element appeared in individualized form. We might conceive that someone who was a complete unbeliever might look upon the appearance of the seven and the five at the end of the Old Testament, and their reappearance at the beginning of the New Testament, as nothing but an artistic progression. If we take it as a purely artistic composition, we may be moved by its simplicity and the artistic greatness of the Bible, quite apart from the fact that the Twelve are the five sons of Mattathias and the seven sons of the Maccabean mother. And we must learn to take the Bible also as a work of art. Then only shall we develop a feeling for the artistic element in it, and acquire a feeling for the realities from which it springs.

Now perhaps your attention may be called to something else. Among the five sons of Mattathias is one who is already called Judas in the Old Testament. He was the one who at that time fought more bravely than all the others for his own people. In his whole soul he was dedicated to his people, and it was he who was successful in forming an alliance with the Romans against King Antiochus of Syria (I Maccabees, Chap. 8). This Judas is the same who later had to undergo the test of the betrayal, because he who was most intimately bound up with the old specifically Hebrew element, could not at once find the transition into the Christian element, needing the severe testing of the betrayal. Again, if we look at the purely artistic aspect, how wonderfully do the two figures stand out: the grand figure of the Judas in the last chapters of the Old Testament and the Judas of the New Testament. It is remarkable that in this symptomatic process, the Judas of the Old Testament concluded an alliance with the Romans, prefiguring all that happened later, namely the path that Christianity took through the Roman Empire, so that it could enter into the world. If I could add to this something that can also be known but that cannot be given in a lecture to an audience as large as this, you would see that it was precisely through a later reincarnation of Judas that the fusion of the Roman with the Christian element occurred. The reincarnated Judas was the first who, as we might say, had the great success of spreading Romanized Christianity in the world. The treaty concluded by the Judas of the Old Testament with the Romans was the prophetic foreshadowing of what was later accomplished by another man, who is recognized by occultists as the reincarnation of that Judas who had to go through the severe soul-testing of the betrayal. What through his later influence appears as Christianity within Romanism and Romanism within Christianity is like a renewal of the alliance concluded between the Old Testament Judas and the Romans, but transferred into the spiritual.

When we have such things as these before us, we gradually come to the conclusion that, considered spiritually and leaving everything else aside, human evolution is itself the greatest work of art that has ever existed; only we must have the vision to see it. Ought it therefore to be regarded as so unreasonable to look at the human soul in this way? I think if we contemplate one or the other of these dramas with their clear raveling and unraveling, while lacking the capacity for perceiving its structure, we shall see nothing but a sequence of events following one after another. External history is written somewhat in this way. Seen thus, human evolution does not appear as a work of art; nothing emerges but a succession of events. But mankind is now at a turning point when it must interpret the inner progressive shaping of events, their raveling and unraveling in the evolution of humanity. Then it will appear that the evolution of humanity clearly and distinctly shows how individual figures appear at definite times and give impulses while entangling or unraveling the plot. We only learn to understand how man is inserted into human evolution when we come to know the course of history in this way. But because it is all raised from the condition of a mere joining together to that of an organism, and then to more than an organism, everything must really be put in its proper place and the distinctions made that in other domains are taken for granted. It would not occur to any astronomer to equate the sun to the other planets. He would as a matter of course keep it separate and single it out as a separate entity within the planetary system. In the same way, a man who sees into human evolution places a “sun” as a matter of course among the great leaders of humanity. Just as it would be utter nonsense to speak of the sun of our planetary system as being on a par with Venus, Jupiter, or Mars, so it would be nonsense to speak of Christ in the same way as the Boddhisattvas or other leaders of humanity. This should be so obvious that the very idea of a reincarnation of Christ would be ridiculous, and such an assertion could not be made if things were simply looked at as they are. But it is necessary really to go into the questions and grasp them in their proper form, and not to accept the dogma of any sectarian belief. When we speak of Christology in a true cosmological sense, it is not necessary to show a preference for the Christian above any other religion. That would be the same as if some religion in its sacred writings stated that the sun was the same as the other planets, and then someone came along and said, “No, we must place the sun higher than the other planets, and some people opposed this by saying, “But this is favoritism toward the sun!” This is not favoritism, it is only recognizing the truth.

So it is also in the case of Christianity. It is simply a question of recognizing the truth, a truth that every religion on the earth today could accept if it chose to do so. If other religions are in earnest in their tolerance for all other religious creeds and do not use that tolerance as a pretense, they will not object that the West has not adopted a national god, but a God in whom no nationality plays a part, a God who is a cosmic being. The Indians speak of their national gods. As a matter of course their ideas differ from those of people who have not adopted a Germanic national god, but accept as a God a Being who was, to be sure, never incarnated in their own land, but in a distant land and in a different nation. We might perhaps speak of a Western-Christian principle in opposition to an Indian-Eastern one, if we wished to put Wotan above Krishna. But that is not the case with Christ. From the beginning He belonged to no nation but stood for the truth of the most beautiful of the spiritual scientific principles, “to recognize the truth without distinction of color, race, nationality, etc.”

We must acquire the capacity to look at these things objectively. Only when we recognize the Gospels by recognizing what underlies them shall we truly understand them. From what has been said today about the Mark Gospel in its sublime simplicity and its dramatic crescendo from the person of John the Baptist to that of Christ Jesus, we can see what this Gospel actually contains.

• 1. The two books of the Maccabees are to be found in the Apocrypha, but not in the King James Version of the Bible. The heroic deeds of Judas Maccabaeus are recorded in Book 1, and the story of the martyrdom of the sons of the widow in Book 2.
• 2. The Israelites in Babylon were of course allowed by Cyrus to go home after his conquest of that city, and his Persian successors followed the same policy (II Chron. 36:22, Ezra 1. See also the rest of the book of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Haggai, especially for the rebuilding of the temple). However, if the paragraph is taken as a whole, it seems evident that Steiner was thinking of the general dispersion of the Jews in the Hellenistic world in the centuries following the conquests of Alexander, a dispersion that in the end provided a suitable milieu for the reborn Zarathustra. As far as is known to history, Alexander himself did not play any significant part in the liberation of the Jews. (Editorial note.)
• 3. The reference is to the wonderful journey by Tobias, the son of Tobit, who goes to a far land to bring back a wife after he has freed her from a demon. He does this with the aid of Raphael who also shows him how to cure his father of blindness.

Address by Rudolf Steiner at the General Assembly of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, Berlin, December 15, 1911 (morning)

Foreword by Marie Steiner to the private reproduction published by her in 1947 and entitled “A Future Impulse Given by Rudolf Steiner and What Came of It Initially”:

In view of the gravity of the times and the little that remains of our lives, it seems an urgent duty to salvage what can still be saved from Dr. Steiner's impulses and words. This includes some of the things he only spoke about in intimate circles in serious conversation at certain turning points in events about the further tasks and work goals of the movement he inaugurated. Transcripts are available, but not complete and comprehensive. Even if they contain gaps and perhaps some finer nuances are not captured in them, one can still well feel how varied the language is, corresponding to the assigned task, in each case vividly contoured and firm, or dissolving, letting a light shine through the language, which still has to be half-veiled because words are not enough. It covers it like a soft shroud, but through which the impulses can work that point to the future. He repeatedly placed in our souls the guiding forces for later action, seeds of the future that could unfold after surviving the sleep of the soul; all too often they were buried by the hustle and bustle of everyday life or swept away by the whirlwind of events. Among the souls that had been blessed with such seeds of the future, there were certainly some from which they would one day arise to new life and struggle; but there were also some that would be like the stony ground of the gospel parable, offering no nourishment to them at first. Not only nature, but also souls are subject to organic laws. Some of the spiritual influences that fall on them harden or corrupt them, while others prove to be full of germinating power and transform themselves into new forms of existence. The passage through death and the submergence into chaos, with its whirling, churning forces, guarantees the later resurrection of the spiritual impact through metamorphoses to higher levels of existence. In microcosm as in macrocosm, in earthly as in planetary existence, the law of transformation to new forms of existence prevails. By following this path and, depending on race and nationality, picturing and explaining it, religions have always climbed higher levels of knowledge, spanning the globe and, in keeping with the times, shining a light into the hidden depths. When a certain high point of this development had been reached and at the same time the danger of philosophical abstraction had arisen, when the old images and signs were no longer sufficient to capture the newly pulsating life, the Christian impact occurred, bringing the great turning point. But when it emerged from the darkness of the catacombs into the outer world, the danger of its consolidation into dogmas also began, and the driving living forces sought new paths. They found them in the secret societies that did not want to bow to the authority of the princes of the church and the decisions of the councils; now they were persecuted as heretics themselves. Their content, veiled from the outside world, was expressed in signs and symbols. They gave art a new slant, which first appeared in Gothic architecture; organic growth of the plant - to which stones were added. The new life also flowed into the names; these contained what the soul was to absorb as guiding forces in order to develop healthily before it achieved independence. But the education of humanity to independence, into which the newly awakened ego power had to pour, first demanded the passage through abstract intellectualism, which separated the souls from their spiritual source for a time, so that, passing through the cold of isolation, grasping the higher ego, they would be able to find themselves in the spirit. Knowledge of nature, divorced from spirit, no longer gives the soul the power to rise up. In order for this to be experienced and recognized, spirits had to break worlds. We now stand in the midst of shattered worlds; a new search for the solution to the riddle of fate has begun. Rudolf Steiner's life's work can provide answers to this searching and questioning. He mastered the scope of today's exact science; he can also reveal to us the spirit that is hidden behind it and was once shrouded in the old names. Through him we are able to divine the impelling forces that lie behind the names. Lifelines had been handed to us for the inevitably approaching shipwreck, but we were not mature enough to grasp and use them. The souls were not awake enough, were still caught up in the old ideas. The attempts made in social terms met with the strongest resistance from the outside world. We can be seized by a tremendous pain when we see how little we were able to make the teaching fruitful and be suitable instruments for the fire spirit of the helper sent in times of need. Standing on the ruins of shattered worlds, we must now try to bring the preserved and insufficiently fiery word to consciousness through the remaining traces of writing; by individual work, raising it to the human ego. Rudolf Steiner tried to lead us to freedom not only through the paths of philosophy and science, but also through education within the esoteric life, which would gradually transform the old relationship of dependency on the teacher into the impulse of freedom and responsibility before the spirit. Souls that feel anchored in the spirit must be tested. Such a self-sought test always precipitates karma; what would still prefer to remain hidden from itself must also come to light. Such tests often caused the failure of experiments by spiritual powers, brought about for profound cosmic reasons, which aimed to raise human development to a higher level. This was the case with the French Revolution, and also before the world wars of our century.

Rudolf Steiner first spoke of such future tasks to a very small circle of his students and tried to direct their souls to the significance of those distant tasks that must arise from human will freed from selfishness. He repeated these words before a larger circle at the General Assembly on December 15, 1911. This did not take place during the proceedings of the General Assembly itself; he declared that it was happening outside of its program. He began this address in a particularly solemn and impressive manner. This is perhaps the reason why the first part of the address is only noted down and not reproduced in his words. He emphasized that the content of this lecture was completely independent of everything that had been given before. It was, so to speak, a direct communication from the spiritual world. It is like a call that is brought to humanity, and then they wait to see what echo comes back to them. As a rule, such a call is made three times. If the call goes unheard the third time, it is taken back to the spiritual world for a long time. This call has already been made to humanity once, but unfortunately it found no echo. This is the second time. These are purely spiritual matters. With each unsuccessful time, the conditions and circumstances become more difficult. Continuing with what is preserved as a set of keywords in the postscript, he said:

My dear friends!

It is my duty at this moment to carry an intention from the inner circle of those who already know about it out into your wider circle. And before that happens, let me say a few words in advance. It should be emphasized, however, that what is said now has no connection with what has preceded in this General Assembly, or what otherwise somehow relates to the previous negotiations - which does not preclude, if there is a tendency to do so, to take it into account in later negotiations.

If we look around the world today, we will have to say: The present world is actually full of ideals. And if we ask ourselves, “Is the representation of these ideals on the part of those who believe in them and place themselves at the service of these ideals sincere and honest?” we will have to answer “Yes, that is the case!” in very many cases. It is the case precisely with that faith and devotion of which individuals are capable. If we now ask: “How much is usually demanded when such a representation of ideals is brought into being by someone or something, be it an individual or a society?” then, based on our observations of life, we will have to answer: “In most cases, everything is demanded, so to speak; but above all, it is demanded that the ideal that has been set up receive absolute, unconditional recognition.” And it is almost always the case that the very basis for the creation of such an ideal is the demand for the most absolute assent. And usually the failure of such assent is expressed in some disparaging criticism of the non-assenter.

These words are intended to characterize how the principle of the integration of people has emerged in a completely natural way in the course of human development, and no doubt is to be cast on the justification of such a principle at this moment. But here an opportunity is to be presented to you to add something to all that has been striven for in the world within the framework of the organization of people, societies, associations and so on, something that actually cannot be expressed in words, since what can be said can never be decisive for the correctness of such a thing. According to what a person is able to think, he can, at the moment when he expresses what he has thought, be forced by the very act of expression to fall into contradiction with reality. At this very moment, many things must be said that do not agree with much of what is valid in the world. So it must be said: It is possible that the confession of a thing can no longer be true when this confession is uttered. I would like to give a simple example from which you can see that there may be a danger of simply becoming untrue by uttering a thing. And I would like the simple, straightforward example I give to be understood in accordance with the Rosicrucian principles since the 13th century.

Let us assume that someone expresses their state of the immediate present by saying, “I am silent.” This is something that absolutely cannot be true, that they are not speaking the truth. But then, my dear friends, I ask you to realize that there is the possibility of negating this thing itself by literally confessing it. For from what is expressed here by the simple example of “I am silent”, you can conclude that it is applicable to countless things in the world and can happen again and again.

But what follows from such a fact? It follows that when people want to join together in any way to represent this or that, they are in an extraordinarily difficult position, that people cannot join together with the most precious thing they have, except when the reasons why they join together are such that they do not belong to the world of the senses but to the supersensible world. And when we understand what we have been able to assimilate over time from all that has been brought forth from modern occultism, we will realize that it is an absolute necessity for the near future to advocate certain things of this occultism, to carry them before the world. Therefore, in contrast to all the principles of societies and all the organizations that have been possible up to now, an attempt must be made with something completely new, with something that is born entirely out of the spirit of the occultism that is so often spoken of in our circle. But this can only be done by turning our attention for a change to something positive, something that already exists in the world as a reality and can be cultivated as such. But in our sense, realities are only those things that primarily belong to the supersensible world. For the whole sensual world presents itself to us as an image of the supersensible world. Therefore, an attempt will be made that is such as it must be made from the supersensible world: the attempt not to found a community of people, but to endow it.

I have emphasized the difference between founding and establishing on another occasion; it was many years ago. It was not understood at the time and since then hardly anyone has thought about this difference. Therefore, those spiritual powers that are represented by the symbol of the Rose Cross have so far ignored the fact that this difference has been carried out into the world.

But recently, and this time in an energetic way, an attempt must be made to see if it is possible to achieve success even with a community that is not founded but established. If this success is not achieved, well, then it has failed again for a while. Therefore, it shall be proclaimed to you at this moment that among those people who will find each other in the appropriate way, a way of working is to be founded that, through the manner of the foundation, has as its direct starting point the individuality that we have been designating as Christian Rosenkreutz since ancient times in the West. What can be said about this foundation today remains preliminary. For what has been founded so far relates only to one part of this foundation, which is to enter the world in a comprehensive sense when the opportunities arise. What has been founded so far relates to one department, to one branch of this foundation, namely to the artistic representation of Rosicrucian occultism.

The first point I have to communicate to you is that under the direct patronage of that individuality, whom we refer to by the name he gave to the outer world during his two incarnations, that under the patronage of this individuality, a working method is to be brought into being as a foundation. This method will initially be characterized by the fact that for some time, for the time being, it will bear the provisional name: “Society for Theosophical Art and Art”. This name is not the final one; a definitive name will take its place when the first preparations for launching this foundation into the world can be made in an appropriate manner. However, that which is to comprise the “theosophical art” is still completely in its infancy, because it is only now that the preparations for it are being made that could lead to an understanding of what is meant by it. But what can be grasped by the concept of the theosophical art has already begun in many ways through our attempts at the performances in Munich, and above all has made a significant start through the attempt at our site in Stuttgart and a further significant start in relation to the understanding of such a thing precisely through the establishment of the Johannes-Bauverein. All this is something that has been started. In this respect there is something that, having been tried out to a certain extent, may be sanctioned.

It is a matter of awakening a purely spiritual task within the working group, a task that will be exhausted in a spiritual way of working and in what results from such a spiritual way of working. And it is a matter of no one being able to become a member of this working group from any other point of view than solely through the fact that he has any will to use his powers for the positive side of the matter. You may say: I am speaking in many words that may not be fully understood. That must be the case with something like what it is about here, because the matter must be grasped in its direct life.

Now, what has already been achieved within this foundation is actually the fact that, according to purely occult principles, an initially very small, tiny circle has been created, which should see its obligation as being to contribute to what this is all about. This tiny group is initially designed to make a start on this foundation, in order to, in a sense, separate what our spiritual movement is from myself and give it its own, self-established existence, a self-established existence!

So that initially this small group comes before you with the sanction that it has received its task as such, by virtue of its own recognition of our spiritual current, and that it sees in a certain sense the principle of the sovereignty of spiritual striving, the principle of federalism and the independence of all spiritual striving as an absolute necessity for the spiritual future, and to carry it into humanity in the way he considers appropriate. Therefore, within the foundation itself, I will only be considered the interpreter, first of all, of the principles that, as such, only exist in the spiritual world, and of what is to be said in this way about the intentions that underlie the matter.

In contrast, a curator is initially appointed for the external care of this foundation. And since the offices that will be created first are associated with nothing more than duties, no honors, no dignities, it is impossible that any rivalries or other misunderstandings can arise immediately with the correct understanding of the matter. It will therefore be a matter of the foundation itself initially recognizing Fräulein von Sivers as curator. This recognition is no

different from that which is interpreted from within the foundation itself; there are no appointments, only interpretations: Fräulein von Sivers is interpreted as curator of the foundation. And it will be her task in the near future to do whatever can be done in the spirit of this foundation to recruit a corresponding circle of members for it - not in an external sense, but only in such a way that she will attract to herself those who have the sincere will to participate in this way of working.

In a broader sense, a number of side branches will be created within this one branch of our foundation. And individual personalities who have proven themselves within our spiritual movement will be appointed as leading personalities of these side branches, insofar as they already exist. This too is an interpretation for the time being, in the sense that the office of leadership of such an individual side branch is transferred to a personality. It is interpreted that there will be an archdeacon for each of these individual sub-branches. We will have a sub-branch for general art. It has been publicly announced that Fräulein von Eckardtstein has been appointed archdeacon for general art in a small circle – and this was done in express recognition of what this personality has done for this general theosophical art over the last few years. Furthermore, it was provisionally announced that the curator Fräulein von Sivers would be archdeacon for literature. It was also announced that our friend Dr. Felix Peipers would be archdeacon for architectural art; our friend Mr. Adolf Arenson would be archdeacon for musical art; and our friend Mr. Hermann Linde would be archdeacon for painting.

The work in question is essentially inward-looking, and for the first time what is to be presented to the world is work done in absolute freedom, particularly by these individual personalities. It will be necessary for those who belong to this way of working to come together in a certain way; this coming together will have to take place in a very different way than has been the case so far with any kind of organization. And we will need a supervisor of this union. To supervise this union, the position of conservator is created, which is initially given to Miss Sophie Stinde. The way in which the union is to take place will be linked to this union itself. All this still requires work in the near future; it will still have to be done. But in order for the type of union, in other words the principle of the organization, to take place, to be able to enter the world, we necessarily have a seal curator. Miss Sprengel has been appointed as the seal curator, while Dr. Carl Unger will be the secretary.

This is, for the time being, the small, tiny circle involved. Do not regard it as something that immodestly wants to step into the world and say, “There I am,” but regard it as something that wants to be nothing more than a germ around which the matter itself can organize itself. It will initially organize itself in such a way that by the coming Epiphany a number of members of this community will have been identified; that is, by then a number of members will have received the message that they are initially being asked to get their connection ready. So that for the very beginning the greatest possible freedom in this respect is to be secured by the fact that the will to become a member can come from no one other than the person concerned who wants to become a member. And the fact that he is a member is brought about by the fact that he is first recognized as such a member. This only applies to the very near future, only for the time until the next Epiphany, January 6, 1912.

So in this matter we have something before us that, through its very nature, betrays itself as something that flows out of the spiritual world. It will continue to present itself as flowing out of the spiritual world in that membership will always be based solely on the representation and recognition of spiritual interests and on the exclusion of everything, absolutely everything personal.

There is a deviation here from older occult principles, which is made in this proclamation, and this deviation consists precisely in the fact of this proclamation. Therefore, no use will be made of that claim, which might exist with a person if he were to say, by referring this to the present: “I am silent.” The matter is indeed proclaimed; and in full awareness that it is proclaimed, this should happen. But the moment someone shows that they do not understand today's proclamation in any way, it goes without saying that it cannot be suggested to them in any way to belong to such a way of working - I am not saying to a society or the like. Because there can be nothing other than the absolutely free will to belong to such a circle, to such a way of working. But you will see that if such a thing should come about - if, that is, our time, with its peculiarities, should allow such a thing to come about - then work can really be done in the sense of recognizing the spiritual principle; the principle that not only all nature and all history, but also all human activity entering the world, is based on the spiritual, supersensible world. And you will see that it will be impossible for any decent person to belong to such a community if he does not agree with this community as such. If you think that what has been said is rather strange, then please accept it as having been said with full

is that everything that belongs to the laws, to the eternal laws of existence, is observed. And it is also part of the eternal laws of existence that the principles of becoming are taken into account. My dear friends, you can sin against the spirit of what is supposed to happen here if you now go out into the

go out into the outside world and say, “This or that has been established.” Not only has nothing been established at all, but the fact is that it will not be possible to give a definition of what is to be done at any given hour, because everything is supposed to be in a state of continuous becoming. And what is actually to happen as a result of what has been said today cannot be described now, no definition or description can be given now, and anything that would be said about it would be untrue at this moment. For what is to happen is based not on words, but on people, and not even on people, but on what these people will do. It will be in a living river, a living becoming. And so today, too, nothing more is established as a principle than the one principle that consists of: recognition of the spiritual world as the fundamental reality.

All further principles are to be created in the process of development. Just as a tree in the next moment is no longer what it was before, but has begun to grow anew, so this matter is to be like a living tree. Never should that which this matter is to become be in any way compromised by that which it is. If someone were to define what has been designated as a beginning, as this or that reason, this or that thing out there in the world, then he would immediately succumb to the same untruth that lies in the expression “I am silent” when it refers to the state in which he is and uses the words “I am silent”. So anyone who uses these or those words in any way to characterize the matter is saying something that is not right in all circumstances. So first of all it is only important - because everything will be in the process of becoming - that the personalities who want something like this come together. It is only important that those personalities who want something like this come together. Then the matter will continue! From all that has been said, you can see that the matter will then continue. It will differ in its deepest principle from that of the Theosophical Society. For not a single one of the characteristics that have been expressed today can apply to the Theosophical Society.

I had to speak about this matter for the simple reason that those things which are organically connected with this foundation have already come before the public of our Theosophical Society, and because through this foundation – in the sense of intentions which truly do not lie in the physical world and which truly have nothing to do with Ahriman - an ideal-spiritual counterweight must be created against everything that is connected with a foundation in the outer world. Only in this respect can a relationship be seen with what is already there, so that this branch of our foundation, the branch for theosophical art, should achieve something that is a counterweight to what is linked to Ahriman on the physical plane.

It is hoped that an excellent example will be set by the existence of this branch of our foundation - and the other branch will serve in a corresponding way - because what is to figure as art within the theosophical movement, if we use that expression today, must actually flow into our culture from spiritual worlds. It must be the case that spiritual life is the basis of everything we do. It will be impossible to confuse this spiritual movement with any movements that come from the outside world and also call themselves a “theosophical movement” and want to participate. It is essential that the spiritual is the basis of everything we do. This was indeed attempted at the festival in Munich, in the building of the Lodge in Stuttgart – within the limits of what is possible under present conditions – but everywhere it was attempted in such a way that the spiritual moment was the determining factor. That is the conditio sine qua non, the condition without which nothing should happen (gap in the transcripts).

Those who have already gained some insight into what is at stake will understand me in this regard. These words are said less because of the content than because of the guidelines that were to be given.

Postscript by Marie Steiner to the reproduction she edited:

When no further nominations were announced after the end of the year and the next Epiphany, a member of the audience asked Rudolf Steiner when this would happen. He replied: “The fact that this has not happened would also be an answer.

The year 1912/13 was overburdened by the disputes with Annie Besant, her proclamation of the new Messiah and her “Star of the East” now also active in Germany.

The followers of the Western spiritual movement inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner demanded that the president make a precise statement in the disputes that were taking place, in accordance with the agreements reached in Munich and Budapest, instead of her evasion, her hiding and acting behind her back. This demand was taken up by the “Bund”, which was founded around 1912 with members from many countries, and in 1913 the Anthroposophical Society was founded after the expulsion of the German section by the president of the Theosophical Society.

Meanwhile, the nomination of the intimate circle had led to further work in some areas: in the Johannesbau Association, in the completion of the Stuttgart Society House, and in the so-called Art and People's Rooms in Munich and Berlin, an initiative started by Miss Sophie Stinde. The most outstanding spiritual publication was the Soul Calendar, the result of a collaboration between Dr. Steiner and Fräulein von Eckardtstein; the wonderfully transparent nuances of the language here really do allow spirit and soul to flow into each other and become one with nature. Many other things sought a quiet unfolding into the future. But the world war came, and with it the associated upheavals, which deeply affected the external circumstances of life and the mutual relationships of the members belonging to the most diverse nations in Dornach.

They tried to overcome the surging of the blood as best they could, but every now and then there were shocks and derailments.

The most exciting crisis for Dornach was that of the summer of 1915. Dr. Gösch, a typical pathologist and representative of psychoanalysis, came to the fore. He persuaded himself that the Seal-keeper had opened his eyes to promises that Dr. Steiner made and did not keep. He set this out in a brochure using psychoanalytical methods. At the same time, he wrote a letter to Dr. Steiner in which he developed his theories on the basis of the “revelations” made to him by the Keeper of the Seal. The Keeper of the Seal could not have understood the task assigned to her by this name other than in a very personal sense. She felt that she was the inspirer of the spiritual teaching given by Dr. Steiner to humanity. Since she had also played the role of Theodora in Rudolf Steiner's mystery dramas in Munich, she drew from this the conclusion that the marriage vows given to her were symbolically given and that she had been waiting for their fulfillment for “seven years”. Her many accusatory letters, revolving around this point, gave Dr. Gösch the opportunity to compile a psychoanalytical treatise in the Freudian sense to elucidate her case. He himself had been given Freudian treatment for a long time due to his morbid nervous condition, which had deeply infected his being. His open letter of accusation has now given rise to numerous, strictly and precisely conducted negotiations within the Society, through which the membership should gain clarity about this case. Transcripts of these are available and also provided the basis for the book published as a special edition of the journal “Anthroposophie” in Stuttgart: “Anthroposophie und Psychoanalyse”.

We shall mention here only what relates to the case of Sprengel – alias Proserpina – alias Theodora – alias Siegelbewahrer (Keeper of the Seals), and which in her case took on such a mystically personal form as megalomania. Of course, even before the war she had already shown symptoms of self-arrogance. This unfortunate megalomania put paid to the possibility of further nominations to the circle of eight personalities. One stone had been lost through egoistic arrogance and a descent into mysticism.

The Keeper of the Seal broke the seal in the most ordinary human sense. The necessity of involving women as active collaborators in the cultural tasks of the future is undeniable and will have to be achieved despite the failure of these efforts in individual cases. This is what happened to us with the Keeper of the Seal.

Dr. Steiner expressed himself about this case in a speech during the so-called crisis of 1915 in the following way:

The circle of nominees, as an inner esoteric matter, was shattered; outside the world war raged; in Dornach, despite the external circumstances, the practical work continued no less intensively. With the conscription of so many artists and helpers, the burden of the work fell heavily on the women. Only a few men had been able to stay behind, including Hermann Linde. But the women stood their ground. From early morning, the hammering and chiseling could be heard in the construction of the precious wood, which grew out of the concrete substructure, up to the vaulting domes. The organically moving forms grew out of the outer and inner walls, warmed and undulated by the human hand that furrowed them. In the interior, the columns rose with their bases and capitals, their architraves, at the end of which the two domes joined together, thus separating and connecting the symbolism of the soul's experience from that of the cosmos at the same time.

The painters and their helpers were grouped around Hermann Linde. Dr. Steiner had designed the motifs for the painting of the domes, and we have these images in the reproductions by Alinari. With diligence and zeal, new grounding possibilities were tried out, through which the effect of the plant colors could unfold into radiant luminosity; a group of helpers eagerly ground the plants from which the new colors for the dome painting were to be created. The programs designed for the weekly eurythmy performances provided an opportunity to develop personal imagination and to train in the templates designed by Dr. Steiner for this purpose.

In Germany, the field of work assigned to the circle-bursting seal keeper had very soon found a more than adequate replacement in the person of Miss Bertha Meyer. During the months we spent in Germany during the war, she was often able to come from Bremen to Berlin to perfect her knowledge of the art of jewelry, in which she had a technical command, through the advice of Dr. Steiner. The extensive gem collection of a member who had returned from the Orient provided a happy opportunity for new inspiration. Stones were selected from it whose luminosity and inner substance were to be particularly emphasized by a setting corresponding to their nature and material. It was a strange experience to let your hand glide through their abundance and to feel the penetration of their powers into your own etheric body through the cool trickling of the stones. This grasp into the coolness of the stone kingdom and the almost exciting glow of the metal melting in the fire, especially of gold, brought the elementary nature of the forces of nature forcefully to consciousness.

The seals sketched by Dr. Steiner for the mystery plays provided the basis for the spiritual study of this predestined keeper of the seals, who left us so many exemplary works of art. Death snatched her from us at the moment when a place for her work, a 'Kleinodienschule', could have been established in Dornach. The formative forces of eurythmy, which is carried and moved by the etheric impulses, and of the musical art that seeks new paths in connection with it, also tested themselves through these seals. They now wanted to go beyond the inner experience of major and minor, beyond the fifth, to catch a glimpse of the original forces in the tone to which they owe their existence, thus feeling their way towards the lost word.

The new architectural style created by Dr. Steiner, which had absorbed the movement of the plant kingdom and did not close itself off from the outside world but opened itself wide to it, had to remain true to this principle in the treatment of his glass windows as well. A flood of colors had to stream into the room; their basic tone, differentiated according to the rainbow but each kept uniform, brought the floating and weaving of the intersecting light colors into the room. The delicacy of the nuances was intensified by the different densities of the glass that resulted from the grinding and etching of the motifs into the glass material; their spiritual content related to the path of initiation of the human being into the future. While the motifs of the large and small dome traced the macrocosmic and microcosmic path of human development to its self-fulfillment.

The art of black and white in a newly defined line by Dr. Steiner developed alongside that of penetrating into the world of creative colors. And all these artistic possibilities, arising from the most diverse elements, came to life in the art of the spoken word, of speech formation, which allowed the original forces of the lost “word” to be sensed and grasped to a certain extent. Through the little that has been achieved in this way, through rigorous work, something of what Dr. Steiner had described as the task of the spiritual movement he had inaugurated could be realized: to allow the forgotten spiritual current surrounding Goethe and Schiller to flow again into culture in a new and living way.

We have lived in the abundance of the impulses we have received. He himself was snatched from us by death in 1925. With death, he had to pay for the immeasurable wealth of his gifts. We have been invigorated and sustained by his inspiring spiritual power. Through suffering and trial, through stupefaction and moral obscurity, we must now seek the paths to inner freedom and independence, for which he wanted to awaken an understanding in us. May we be granted to find it.

For his present life on Earth man is beholden partly to the external world, including in the wider sense not only the several kingdoms of Nature immediately around him but also the influences coming from the stars and the cosmic expanse. But this is only one part of the world to which he is beholden for his present earthly life. He is beholden above all to his previous lives on Earth, the results and effects of which he brings with him inwardly. As you know from anthroposophical literature, man is a fourfold being. Every time he goes to sleep his astral body and ‘I’ separate from his physical and etheric bodies. Of these members only the physical and etheric bodies owe their character and composition to the external world lying visibly—or also, as etheric world, invisibly—around man. On the other hand, everything that he bears within him in his astral body and Ego in his present earthly existence, he owes entirely to what he experienced in the past, in earlier lives on Earth.

In the outer physical world there are two portals, two gates, through which the life of man, taken in its entirety, reaches out beyond this world. We will begin to-day by considering this cosmic aspect and conclude with a study very directly concerned with human life. For inhabitants of the Earth, these two gates are the Moon and the Sun.

The fact is that modern science knows very little indeed about the heavenly bodies—actually only what can be determined by calculation or observed by means of instruments. Just think what an inhabitant of Mars would know about the Earth if, from Mars or from some other star, he were to acquire his knowledge by employing the same methods as those employed by the inhabitants of the Earth! He would know no more than that the Earth is a luminous body radiating into cosmic space the light it reflects from the Sun. He might form all kinds of hypotheses, just as men do about Mars—as to whether beings do or do not exist on the Earth. But an inhabitant of the Earth knows that beings of his own rank and beings of other kingdoms share his dwelling-place; and those whose knowledge is derived from the inner, spiritual destinies of earthly humanity, will be able to reach a deeper understanding of the significance of the other heavenly bodies, for example, of the Sun and the Moon.

Let us think about what may be said of this physical, psychic and spiritual aspect of Moon existence. I must here remind you of many things to be found in the book Occult Science—an Outline, and in several of the printed lecture-courses. From this literature you know that the Moon was once united with the Earth. It is accepted by orthodox modern science, at any rate by its most important representatives, that the physical Moon once separated from the Earth and, if I may put it so, chose its own position in cosmic space.

But Spiritual Science discloses that not only did the physical Moon separate from the Earth but that certain Beings went with it, Beings who had once inhabited the Earth together with men. They were of a much higher spiritual rank than man in his physical embodiment; but they were in close intercourse with men, although this intercourse was altogether different from the relationships between human beings to-day.

Anyone who devotes even cursory study to the early history of the Earth and its spiritual achievements will feel deep reverence for the different civilisations. Certainly, our forefathers—that is to say, we ourselves in earlier incarnations—were not as ‘clever’ in the modern sense as we imagine ourselves to be to-day, but in point of fact they knew a great deal more. Knowledge, after all, is not acquired through cleverness only. Cleverness comes from intellect, and intellect is only one of the human faculties, although nowadays it is prized, especially by science, more highly than all the others. Yet when we see how the world has developed in a moral and social respect in this enlightened twentieth century, there is really no cause to be so very proud of our intellectual culture—which has come into being only in the course of time. Even if with no other aid than external history we go back and consider, for example, what originates from the ancient East, we cannot but feel great reverence. The same may apply even to certain achievements of so-called ‘uncivilised’ peoples, but we will think now only of ancient India and Persia, of the wonderful wisdom contained in the Vedas, in Vedanta or Yoga philosophy. If we let these things work upon us, not superficially but with all their deep intensity we shall feel an ever-increasing reverence for what past ages created—not through cleverness as we know it, but in a quite different way.

Spiritual Science makes it clear that what has been preserved in documentary records is only the residue of a wonderful, primeval wisdom of mankind. It was expressed in a much more poetic, artistic language than is used for our modern knowledge, but it was nevertheless wonderful wisdom, imparted to men by Beings at a stage of evolution far higher than that of humanity on Earth. Intellectual thinking takes place, after all, through the instrumentality of the physical body, and these Beings had no physical body. This accounts for the fact that they conveyed their primordial wisdom to mankind in an essentially poetic, artistic form.

These Beings did not remain with the Earth; the majority of them to-day actually inhabit the Moon in the heavens. What modern science can discover has to do only with the external properties of the Moon. The Moon is in truth the home of lofty spiritual Beings whose task once was to inspire earthly humanity with the primeval wisdom. They then withdrew to establish this Moon colony in the Cosmos. It is clear from what I have said about these Beings who now inhabit the Moon that our own human past is connected with them. In earlier lives we were their terrestrial companions. And our connection with them is immediately evident if we look beyond what external knowledge and external life can give to man. When we contemplate all the factors by which our existence is determined, which are not, however, dependent upon our intellect but transcend the intellect and are related to our deeper nature, we realise that these Moon Beings, although they no longer have their habitation on the Earth, are still deeply and inwardly connected with our very existence. For before descending to the Earth and receiving a physical body from our forefathers, we were in the spiritual world, in pre-earthly life; and there, even to-day, we are in close contact with these Beings who were our companions in Earth existence long ages ago. When we come down from the spiritual worlds into earthly existence, we pass through the Moon sphere, through the Moon existence. Once upon a time, when these Moon Beings were on the Earth, they had a profound effect upon mankind, and it is still so to-day, inasmuch as they impress into the descending Ego and astral body what is then carried over into the physical body on Earth.

Nobody can himself decide to be a man of talent, or a genius, or even a good man. Yet there are men of talent and genius and some who are innately good. These are qualities which the intellect cannot produce; they are connected with man's inmost nature, a great part of which comes with him when he passes from pre-earthly existence through birth into earthly life. To impress into his Ego and astral body what then makes its way into his nerves and blood as genius or talent or the will to do good or evil—this is the task of the Moon Beings during the time when in a man's pre-earthly existence he is passing through the Moon sphere. It is not only when, in poetic mood, lovers go walking in the moonlight that the Moon has an effect upon what is living and weaving in the deeper part of man's nature below the level of consciousness; this Moon influence is active in everything that rises from a level below that of the conscious intellect and makes man what he really is in earthly life. And so to-day these Moon Beings are still connected with our past, inasmuch as it is they who after our earlier incarnations give us in pre-earthly existence the stamp of individuality.

If we look back over our life to the point where it runs out beyond the earthly realm into the spiritual, whence our particular faculties, our temperament, our inmost, essential character, are derived, we find in the Moon the one gate which leads from the physical into the spiritual world. It is the gate through which the past makes its way into our life and gives us individuality.

The other gate is the Sun. We do not owe our individuality to the Sun. The Sun shines alike on the good and on the evil, on men of genius and on fools. As far as earthly life is concerned the Sun has no direct connection with our individuality. In one instance only has the Sun established connection with earthly individuality and this was possible because at a certain point of time in the Earth's evolution, a sublime Sun Being, the Christ, did not remain on the Sun but came down from the Sun to the Earth and became a Being of the Earth in the body of a man, thus uniting His own cosmic destiny with the destiny of earthly humanity. The other Sun Beings who remained in the Sun sphere have no access to the single human individuality but only to what is common to all mankind. Something of this remained in the Christ and is an infinite blessing for earthly humanity: what had remained in Him was and is that His power knows no differentiation among men. Christ is not the Christ of this or that nation, of this or that rank or class. He is the Christ for all men, without distinction of class, race or nation. Nor is He the Christ of particular individualities, inasmuch as His help is available alike to the genius and the fool. The Christ Impulse has access to the individuality of man, but to become effective it must take effect in the inmost depths of human nature. It is not the forces of the intellect but the deepest forces of the heart and soul which can receive the Christ Impulse; but once received this Impulse works not for the benefit of the individual-human but of the universal-human. This is because Christ is a Sun Being.

Looking back into the past we feel ourselves connected with the Moon existence and realise that we bear within us something not derived from the present but from the cosmic past—not merely from the earthly past. In our present Earth existence we unite this fragment of the past with the present. We do not, in the ordinary way, pay much attention to what is contained in this fragment of the past; but in point of fact we should not be of much account as human beings if it were not there within us. What we acquire at the time of descending from pre-earthly into earthly existence has something automatic about it—the automatic element in our physical and etheric bodies. What makes us into particular human individuals is inwardly connected with our past and thus with the Moon existence. But just as we are connected with the past through our Moon existence, so are we connected with our future through the Sun existence. We were ready for the Moon forces, especially in relation to the Beings who have withdrawn to the Moon, even in earlier times; for the Sun which works to-day as an impulse in the sphere of the universal-human only, we shall not be ready until a very distant future, when evolution has reached a much more advanced stage. The Sun to-day can reach only to our external being; not until distant future ages will it be able to reach our individuality, the inmost core of our being. When the Earth is no longer Earth, when it has passed into quite another metamorphosis, then and then only shall we be ready for the Sun existence. Man is so proud of his intellect—but the intellect in present humanity is purely a product of the Earth, since it is tied to the brain, and the brain—despite current belief—is the most physical structure in the human organism.

The Sun is perpetually wresting us away from this bondage to the earthly, for the Sun does not in reality work upon our brain ... if it did, we should produce much cleverer thoughts! From the physical aspect the Sun's influence is exerted on the heart, and what streams out from the heart is Sun-activity. Through the brain men are essentially egotistic, through the heart they become free from egoism and rise to the level of the universal-human. Thus through the Sun we are more than we should be if we were left to our own resources in our present Earth existence. Let me put it like this: if we can really find our way to the Christ, He enables us, because He is a Sun Being, to be more than we could otherwise be.

The Sun stands in the heavens personifying the future, whereas the Moon personifies the past. The Sun is the other gate into the spiritual world, the gate leading to the future. Just as we are impelled into earthly existence by the Moon Beings and Moon forces, so, through death, we are impelled out of it by the Sun forces. These Sun forces are connected with that part of our nature of which we are not yet master, which the gods have given us so that we may not wilt in earthly life but reach out beyond our own limitations. And so Moon and Sun are in truth the two gates in the universe into the spiritual life. The Moon is inhabited by Beings with whom we were once connected in the way I have indicated. The Sun is inhabited by Beings with whom—with the exception of the Christ—we shall be united only in our future cosmic existence. The Christ will lead us to those who were once His companions on the Sun. But this, as far as man is concerned, belongs to the future.

We have said that the influences of the Moon work upon us from the spiritual world; the same is true of the influences working from the Sun upon our physical and etheric bodies. Think, for example, of the temperaments. There are forces in the temperaments which play into the physical body, but more particularly into the etheric body. This is regulated by the interplay of Sun and Moon. A man with a strong vein of melancholy in his temperament is strongly influenced by the Moon. Similarly, a man with a markedly sanguine vein in his temperament is strongly influenced by the Sun. A man in whom the quality of Sun and Moon are in balance and neutralised, will be a phlegmatic type. When the physical element as such plays into a man and comes to expression in the life of soul, as in the temperaments, the Sun and Moon forces are in play in the whole of his being. But to begin with, man is aware of these forces only when they confront him in their external, physical manifestation, when the Moon—and similarly the Sun—announces its presence through the orb that is outwardly visible. Yet forces far transcending the physical are taking effect; we must always speak of the Sun and Moon as spiritual realities. And that is easy enough to realise.

Think of a human body. This body to-day no longer has within it the same substances as it had ten years ago. You are perpetually casting off these physical substances and replacing them by new. What endures is the spiritual form of man, the configuration of inner forces. Suppose you had been sitting in this room ten years ago; you do not bring with you now the flesh and blood that were within you then as material substance. The physical is involved in a perpetual stream from within outwards; it is being cast off all the time. Although this is a known fact it is not always remembered. It is a fact in the Cosmos too. People think that the Moon which shines down upon the Earth to-day is the same Moon which shone upon Caesar or Alcibiades or Buddha. Spiritually, yes, it is the same Moon, but not in respect of physical substance. As for the Sun, the physicists and astrophysicists calculate how long it will be before it disintegrates in cosmic space. They know that it will disintegrate but they reckon in terms of millions of years. The same kind of results would be obtained if such calculations were applied to the human being. The calculations are absolutely correct and cannot be faulted—only they are not true! They are dead correct, but just think of this—if you examined a human heart today, then five days later and then again after a further five days, you could calculate from the minute changes what it was like three hundred years ago and what it will be like three hundred years hence. In the same way geology can calculate what the Earth looked like twenty million years ago and what it will look like twenty million years hence. The calculations may be perfectly correct, but the Earth was not in existence twenty million years ago and will not be in existence twenty million years from now. The calculations themselves are correct but they are not true! Not even for the shortest periods does the Cosmos differ from man in this respect. Although mineral substances last essentially longer in that form than the configuration of substance in living bodies, yet even the purely physical part of mineral substances is transient. As I have said, the Moon in the sky to-day is in its physical composition no longer the same Moon which shone upon Caesar or Alcibiades or the Emperor Augustus, for its substance has changed, just as the substance of a man's physical body has changed. What endures out there in the Cosmos is the spiritual element, just as in the case of a human being what endures from birth to death is the spiritual entity, not the physical substance.

We shall therefore only be viewing the world rightly when we say of man that what endures between birth and death is his soul; what endures out yonder in the celestial bodies is a multiplicity of Beings. And when speaking of Moon and Sun we ought to be conscious that if we are to speak truly we must speak of Beings of the Moon and Beings of the Sun. The Beings of the Moon are connected with our past; the Beings of the Sun will be connected with our future, but even now they work into our present existence.

A sound basis for the study of human karma and destiny can be established only when man is given his real place within the Cosmos.

Try as we will, we can never alter the past. For this reason, in the Moon forces as they work into and lay hold of our human nature there is an element of immutable necessity. Everything that comes to us from the Moon has this character. In whatever comes from the Sun and points to the future, there is something in which our will, our freedom, can be a factor. So that we can say: when man again apprehends the Divine in the Cosmos, and instead of vague, sentimental generalisations is able to speak with precision and definition about the Divine as revealed in the several heavenly bodies, a special kind of language will take shape within him when he contemplates the heavenly bodies with heart-knowledge and true human understanding.

Now suppose a human being were standing in front of us and looking at his hands or his arms, his head, his chest, his legs, his feet, we were to ask in each case, ‘what is that?,’ and were told in reply, ‘that is something human.’ When no distinctions are made but everything is labelled with the generalisation ‘human,’ we are without bearings or direction. The same is true if we gaze out into the Cosmos, contemplate the Sun and Moon and the stars and speak of the Divine as a generalisation. We must acquire a definite, concretely real view of the Divine. And this we do when we recognise, for example, the deep connection of the Moon with our own past, indeed with the past of the whole Earth. Then, when we look at the Moon in the heavens, we can say: “Thou cosmic offspring of Necessity, when I contemplate that within me over which my will has no sway, I feel inwardly united with thee.” Our knowledge of the Moon then becomes feeling, for we realise that every experience arising perceptibly out of inner necessity is connected with the Moon.

If in the same way we contemplate the inmost nature of the Sun, not merely making calculations or observing it through instruments, we shall feel its kinship with everything that lives in us as freedom, with everything that we ourselves can achieve for the benefit of the future.

Such experiences would enable us to find a link with the instinctive wisdom of primeval humanity. For we cannot rightly understand what radiates with such poetic beauty from ancient civilisations unless we can still feel, when we gaze at the Moon, that there we are glimpsing the past with its element of necessity and when we gaze at the Sun that there we are glimpsing the freedom belonging to the future.

Necessity and freedom interweave in our destiny. In terms of the terrestrial and human we speak of Necessity and Freedom; in terms of the heavenly and cosmic we speak of Moon existence and Sun existence.

Now let us try to discover how the forces of the Sun and Moon work in the web of our destiny. We meet some human being. As a rule the fact that we have met him is enough in itself; we accept life as it comes without being very observant or giving it much thought. But deeper scrutiny of individual human life reveals that when two persons meet, their paths have been guided in a remarkable way. Think of two individuals, one aged twenty-five and the other aged twenty, who meet; they can look back over the course of their lives hitherto and it will be evident to each of them that every single happening in the life of the one, say the twenty-year-old, had impelled him from quite a different part of the world to this meeting, at this particular place, with the other. The same will be true of the twenty-five-year-old. In the forming of destiny very much depends upon the fact that human beings, starting from different parts of the world, meet as though guided by an iron necessity directly to the meeting-point. No thought is given to the wonders that can be revealed by studies of this kind but human life is infinitely enriched by insight into such situations and impoverished without it. If we begin to think about our relationship to some human being whom we seem to have met quite by accident, we shall have to say to ourselves that we had been looking for him, seeking for him, ever since we were born into this earthly existence ... and as a matter of fact, even before then. But I do not want to go into that at the moment. We need only remind ourselves that we should not have come across this individual if at some earlier point in earthly life we had taken only a slightly different direction to the left or to the right and had not gone the way we did. As I said, people do not give any thought to these matters. But it is sheer arrogance to believe that something to which one pays no attention is non-existent. It is a fact and will eventually reveal itself to observation. There is, however, a significant difference between what takes place before the actual meeting of two individuals and what takes place from that moment onwards. Before they met in earthly life, they had influenced each other without having any knowledge of the other's existence. After the meeting the mutual influence continues, but now they know each other. And this again is the beginning of something extremely significant.

Naturally, we also meet many individuals in life for whom we have not been seeking. I will not say that we meet a great many people of whom we might think that it would have been better not to have done so! I am not suggesting any such thing ... but at all events we do meet many individuals of whom we cannot say that we have deliberately set out to find them.

If what I have now been saying is viewed in the light of Spiritual Science, it becomes clear that what has been in operation between two human beings before they actually meet in earthly life is determined by the Moon, whereas everything that takes place between them after their meeting is determined by the Sun. Hence what occurs between two human beings before they become acquainted can only be regarded as the outcome of iron necessity and what happens afterwards as the expression of freedom, of mutually free relationship and behaviour. It is indeed true that when we get to know a human being our soul subconsciously looks back and forward: back to the spiritual Moon, forward to the spiritual Sun. And with this is connected the weaving of our karma, our destiny.

Very few people today have faculties for perceiving these things. But it is precisely because these faculties are beginning to develop that so much in our age is in a state of ferment. The faculties are already present in numbers of human beings, only they are unaware of it and ascribe the effects to all kinds of other causes. In reality these faculties of perception are striving to function so that when human beings become acquainted with one another they may realise how much is due to iron necessity, to the forces of the Moon, and how their relationship will go forward in the light of the Sun, in the light of freedom. To experience destiny in this way is itself part of the cosmic destiny of humanity today and on into the future. When we meet a human being in the world we can distinguish quite clearly between two kinds of relationship. In the case of one individual the relationship proceeds from the will, in the case of another, it proceeds more or less from the intellect, or even from the aesthetic sense.

Think of the subtle differences in the relationships between human beings even in childhood or youth. We may love an individual or perhaps we hate him. If our feelings do not reach this intensity, we shall feel sympathy or antipathy; our feelings in this case do not go very deep—we just pass him by or let him pass us by. It cannot be denied that this was how we felt about most of our teachers at school; and we should count ourselves fortunate if it was not so.

But a quite different kind of relationship is possible, even in childhood. It is when we are so inwardly affected by what we see a person do, that we say: we must do it too! The relationship between us makes us choose him as a hero, as one we must follow on the path to Olympus. In short, some human beings have an effect upon our intellect, or at best upon our aesthetic sympathy or antipathy; and others have a direct effect upon our will.

Or think of the other side of life. External circumstances may bring us into very close contact with certain individuals—yet we simply cannot dream about them. We may meet others only once, yet we never seem to be free of them, we are always dreaming about them. If a more intimate association is not vouchsafed to us in this present earthly life, this will have to be reserved for other incarnations. However that may be, our relationship to a human being is deeper if, as soon as we meet him, we begin to dream about him.

There is also a sort of waking dreaming, which in the case of most people to-day lacks clear definition. But as you know, there are also initiated human beings who experience life very differently. If we meet an individual who makes an impression upon our will, he will also have an effect upon our ‘inner speech:’ he will not only speak when he is face to face with us; he will also speak out of us. If we are initiated into the secret of cosmic existence we shall know that there is a double relationship between individuals when they meet: we may meet one person to whom we shall listen, and then go on our way; we need never listen to him any more. Others we may meet to whom we shall listen, but when we go away from them they still seem to be speaking—but out of our own inner being: they are there and they really do seem to speak in this way.

What happens in the case of an Initiate is as I have just described: he actually carries within him, in the very quality of his voice, those who have made this impression on him. In those who are not initiated this also takes place, but only in the realm of feeling; it is there all the same, but subconsciously. Let us suppose that we meet an individual and then come across other people who know him as well and will remark what a splendid fellow he is. This means that they have thought about the man and have formed a judgement based on the intellect. But we do not call everyone we meet a splendid fellow or a cad, as the case may be; there are individuals who have an effect upon our will—which as I have said, leads a kind of sleeping existence within us during our waking life. The effect is that we feel we simply must follow or oppose them. In one who is not initiated, these individuals, even if they do not speak within him, live in his will. What then exactly is the difference between these two kinds of relationship?

When we meet other human beings who have no effect upon our will, but of whom we do no more than form a judgement, then there is no strong karmic connection between us; we have had little to do with them in earlier earthly lives. Individuals who affect our very will, so that they seem to be always with us, whose form is so strongly impressed upon us that they are always in our thoughts, so that we dream of them even in our waking life—these are the individuals with whom we have had a great deal to do in our past earthly lives, with whom we are as it were cosmically connected through the gate of the Moon; whereas in our present life we are connected through the Sun with everything that lives in us without any element of the necessity belonging to Moon existence.

Thus is destiny woven. On the one side man has his isolated ‘head-existence’ which has considerable independence. Even physically this head-existence raises itself all the time above the general conditions of man's cosmic existence, and in the following way—the brain weighs on average 1,500 grammes, and with this weight it would crush all the underlying blood vessels. Just think of it—a weight of 1,500 grammes pressing on those delicate blood vessels! But this does not happen. Why not? Simply because the brain is embedded in the cerebral fluid. If you have learnt any physics, you will know that a body in water loses as much of its weight as the weight of the volume of water it displaces—this is the so-called principle of Archimedes. The actual weight of the brain is therefore about 20 grammes, because the brain floats in the cerebral fluid. Hence the brain in the body presses with a weight of only 20 grammes—certainly not with its actual weight of 1,500 grammes. The brain is isolated and has its own existence.

As we go about the world, the brain is like a man sitting in his motor-car. The man himself does not move; the car moves and he sits still. And our brain as the bearer of intellect has an isolated existence. That is why the intellect is so independent of our individuality. If each of us had our own separate and distinct intellect this would augur badly for any mutual understanding! We are able to understand one another only because we all possess the same principle of intellect, although naturally there are differences of degree. But intellect is a universal principle. Human beings can understand one another through the intellect which is independent of their individual qualities. Whatever appears in human destiny as something belonging to the immediate Present—such as the meeting of two people—works upon the intellect and impulses of feeling associated with the intellect. In these cases we speak of someone as a ‘splendid fellow’ in whom we have no further interest than that he has had an effect upon our intellect. Everything that is not part of our karma has an effect upon the intellect; everything that is part of our karma and links us with other human beings as a result of experiences once shared with the individuals we now meet—all this works through those depths of human nature which lie in the will. And so it is true that the will is working even before we actually meet a human being with whom we are karmically connected. The will is not always illumined by the intellect. Just think how much in the working of the will is shrouded in darkness! The karma which leads two human beings together is shrouded in the deepest obscurity of all; they become dimly aware that karma is working from the way in which their wills are involved. The moment they come face to face the intellect begins to work; and what is then woven by the intellect can become the basis for future karma. But in essentials—not wholly, but in essentials—it would be true to say that for two human beings who are karmically connected, their karma has worked itself out when the meeting has taken place. Only what they may do after that as a continuation of what lives in the unconscious—that and that alone becomes part of the stream of future karma. But a great deal is then woven into their destiny which has an effect only on the intellect and its sympathies and antipathies. Past and Future, Moon existence and Sun existence are here intermingled. The thread of karma that reaches into the past is interwoven with the thread that reaches into the future.

We can actually gaze into cosmic existence. For if we watch the Sun rising in the morning and look at the Moon at night, we can glimpse in their mutual relationships a picture of how Necessity and Freedom are interwoven in our own destiny. And if, with a concrete idea of the mingling of Necessity and Freedom in human destiny, we again contemplate the Sun and the Moon, they will begin to unveil their spirituality to us. Then we shall not speak like the unwitting physicists who when they look at the Moon merely say that it reflects the light of the Sun ... but when we see this light of the Moon which is the same as the light of the Sun, we shall rather speak of the weaving of cosmic destiny.

Thus contemplation of our own human destiny leads to a conception of cosmic destiny. Then and only then are we able in the real sense to knit our human existence with cosmic existence. Man must learn to feel himself a living member of the Cosmos. Just as a finger is a finger only while it is actually part of a human body—if it is amputated it is no longer really a finger—so man himself has real being only inasmuch as he is part of the Cosmos. But man is arrogant, and the finger would probably be humbler if it had the same kind of consciousness. ... Yet perhaps it would no longer be humble if it could at any moment tear itself free and move around the body... although it would have to remain in the sphere of a human being in order to remain a finger at all! And man, as earthly man, must remain in the Earth-sphere if he is to be man. He is a quite different being, he is a being of eternity when he is outside the Earth-sphere, either in pre-earthly or post-earthly existence. But again, we can gain knowledge of these spheres of existence only when we recognise that we ourselves are members of the Universe. This recognition will never be achieved by fanciful speculation about our connection with the Universe, but only when, as we have tried to do to-day, we learn gradually to feel its concrete reality. Then we feel that our destiny is in very truth an image of the world of stars, of the Sun-nature and the Moon-nature. We learn to look out into the Universe and read the scroll of our human life from the life of the great Universe. Again, we learn to look into our own soul and to understand the world through it. For nobody understands the Moon who does not understand the element of Necessity in human destiny; nobody understands the Sun who does not understand the element of Freedom in human nature. Such are the interconnections of Necessity and Freedom.

At the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum we tried to give the impulses which would help us to make these facts of true esoteric perception still more effective in the years to come. And I hope that our Members will become more and more conscious of what took place at Christmas. I would like particularly to draw your attention to the fact that every Member can now receive the News Sheet. Through this News Sheet and many other developments in the Anthroposophical Society, the whole Society should in future be able to share in that quickening life which can flow from Anthroposophy. The isolation which has hitherto existed between the Groups must as far as possible come to an end. The Anthroposophical Society can become a real whole only when those who are members of a Group in New Zealand know what is going on in a Group in Berne, and members of a Berne Group know what is going on in New Zealand or New York or Vienna. This should now be possible. And one of the many things we are doing, or at least that we want to do in connection with the Christmas Meeting is to make this News Sheet a medium for all anthroposophical work in the world. It will be necessary to pay some attention to the News Sheet, and then everyone will realise what he can do to promote its aims.

While I am speaking here the third number of the News Sheet is being issued in Dornach; in it I have shown how every Member can co-operate in making it a genuine reflection of anthroposophical achievements. Only because I believe that to this end it is necessary for Anthroposophy to be cultivated more intensively within the Society—I do not mean in the sense of more content, but with greater intensity, greater enthusiasm, greater love—only for these reasons, although in the ordinary way I should have every right at my age, to retire, I have decided, after having given up the personal leadership of the Society in 1912, to begin again and to imagine that I have regained my youth and am capable of the work. I want this to be understood as a desire to stimulate interest for a more active life in the Anthroposophical Society. My hope—and anyone who was not at Dornach can read about it in the Goetheanum Weekly and the News Sheet—is that whatever of spiritual value was achieved at the Christmas Meeting shall in some way reach every individual Member. Thereby the aim of bringing true esoteric life into the Society will be achieved. The High School for Spiritual Science was founded at Christmas with the aim that esoteric life shall again flow into the Anthroposophical Society.

I hope that the words I have spoken to you to-day will have expressed the desire that this esoteric life may again unfold among us in the way that will be made clearer and clearer to you. This aim can become reality through what can go out in future from Dornach as the centre where the General Anthroposophical Society was founded at Christmas. May the Members of this Berne Group be able to contribute effectively to what we should like to achieve in Dornach for the whole Movement, to the extent that our forces permit.

On the last occasion, during our Waldorf School Conference, I spoke to you about karmic connections in the evolution of humanity, and to-day I want to say something more on the same subject. I shall begin with matters of which you already have some knowledge and then pass on to others less familiar to you.

When the human being passes through the gate of death, his ether-body dissolves away into the Cosmos when the physical body has been laid aside at the moment of death itself. To-day we shall not be studying this first stage after death, when the ether-body is dissolving, but the stage which follows. This can best be understood by thinking, to begin with, of the earthly life between birth and death. This earthly life runs its course in two sharply different conditions: waking and sleeping. You know from Anthroposophy that during the waking state the four members—physical body, ether-body, astral body and Ego—interpenetrate, mutually stimulating and sustaining their several functions. But in sleep the physical body and etheric body remain in the bed, leading temporarily a plant-like existence, while the astral body and Ego-organisation live independently in the spiritual world, separated from the physical and etheric bodies. We know from ordinary experience that when we are recollecting our earthly life, our remembrances are falsified in a certain sense. For when we look back with ordinary consciousness over our life, this retrospect seems to be a continuous, onward flowing stream, one event proceeding from another consecutively, and as a rule we ignore the fact that the stream of our memories is continually interrupted by the nights. In remembrance, therefore, there is a sequence of day-night-day-night; a period of clear consciousness passes over into one of darkness and this again into one of light. With the exception of dreams which arise from sleep, the part of earthly life which is spent in sleep remains, for the most part, unconscious. Generally speaking, this constitutes a third of the earthly life—if a man is not an abnormally long sleeper. Even taking into consideration the many more hours a child spends in sleep, it will be found that sleep occupies about a third of the time of life on the Earth.

We may ask: What are the Ego-organisation and astral body doing during the period of sleep? They are, it is true, in the spiritual world. But they have no awareness in that world and with the exception of dreams they remain unconscious. Moreover if the human being—constituted as he is on Earth with his ordinary consciousness—were always to have awareness during sleep he would go astray in one direction or another. A man of a more Ahrimanic disposition would go about during the day as if in a swoon, as if his consciousness had suffered a kind of paralysis; a man of a more Luciferic disposition would go about in a state of confused consciousness, with his thoughts and feelings in a perpetual jumble. Generally speaking, the human being is protected by the power known as the “Guardian of the Threshold” from becoming aware of the spiritual world around him during sleep.

When a man has passed through the gate of death, however, and after the first few days has laid aside the etheric body, he starts an existence which flows backwards, beginning with the day of death, passing then to the day before that, and so on through the whole of his life, in the direction from death to birth. But he lives backwards through the nights—the periods of sleep—not through the days. Hence the time during which his life is lived through in this backward order amounts to about one third of the span of his earthly life. If a man dies at the age of sixty, this backward ‘journey’ lasts about twenty years, that is to say, this other life is passed through three times as quickly as the life on Earth. Between death and a new birth we review the nights during which—unconsciously of course—pictures were produced which are in a sense negative images of the earthly life.

If man were not protected by the Guardian of the Threshold his experiences every night would be unendurable and bring about the consequences to which I have referred. If, for instance, he had done someone a wrong, he would feel during sleep as if he were transposed into the other man, experiencing what this other man had felt as a result of the wrong done to him. For the reason given there is no such experience during sleep. But after death, during the period referred to, it comes with very great intensity. We live backwards through our earthly life and through all the compensatory experiences for what we have done or failed to do. How comes it that we are able to live through these compensatory experiences?

In order to answer this question, attention must be called to a cosmic event. During the course of the Earth's evolution, the Moon—which was originally part of the Earth—separated and emerged from the Earth to lead an independent physical existence. Some time after the physical substances of the Moon separated from the Earth, the ancient primeval Teachers of humanity departed to the Moon. While they were on the Earth, these primeval Teachers had not incarnated in physical bodies, but only in etheric bodies. Hence the nature of their influence upon human beings was imaginative, inspirational. And all the wonderful teachings which were given in a more poetic form and contained in legends and sagas, originated in a majestic, primeval wisdom imparted by these ancient Teachers on the Earth. But the essential nature of these Teachers enabled them to withdraw to the Moon which has since been their habitation.

When the human being passes through the gate of death, he moves in very truth through the Cosmos; his being expands and expands. He passes first into the Moon sphere and encounters these great primeval Teachers as they now are. They preserve as it were a naively instinctive, innocent state of the human race. Before men succumbed to the possibility of doing evil, these primeval Teachers were present on the Earth. They take into themselves what is inscribed by us into the Akashic Chronicle during the nights we live through during our existence on Earth. They permeate it with their own being and thus make it possible for us, during the first third of our life after death when we are living through the events of earthly existence in backward order, to experience it all with greater intensity than we experienced it on Earth. Events in earthly life jolt us, impel and drive us, but those whose spiritual vision is able to witness what a dead man lives through in these first decades after his death know well that through the magical power of the great Teachers who have established their colony on the Moon, the experiences of yonder life have an intensity infinitely greater and more vivid than those of earthly life. We actually undergo all this. Suppose you once gave someone a box on the ears: after death you do not experience the feeling of satisfaction or perhaps of anger or malice occasioned in you by your action, but you are then within the other man, you experience the pain and the shock that were caused to him. You feel exactly what your action made him feel. The experience of living through such events with a dead man is deeply moving—one cannot say ‘shattering.’

Let me give you an example here. Most of you will remember that among the characters in my Mystery Plays, I have depicted that of Strader. As in the case of most of the characters in the Plays, the figure of Strader is drawn from actual life. There was a man whose life was almost exactly similar to that of Strader as depicted in the Plays. You can well imagine that I was very much interested in this personality during his physical life on Earth. He died in the year 1912, and my interest in his experiences after death began from then onwards. He had ultimately become a writer on the subject of rationalistic theology, and everything he had experienced on the Earth became infinitely more intense as he himself was experiencing the effect of his books and his rationalism. After I had shared for some time in what he was experiencing, I found it impossible to continue the character of Strader in the Plays and he dies because my interest in his earthly life was no longer there; it was eliminated by the intensity of interest in what he was experiencing after death.

An incident connected with this was that certain friends interested themselves in the writings left by the original of Strader and wanted to bring them to me. I simply could not take any interest in the matter and had to ignore it, for the simple reason that interest in the dead is so much stronger and eliminates everything else. By this I merely want to indicate that the experiences of a man after death while living through his life in backward order are much more intense than they were during his earthly existence. Earthly life is almost like a dream as compared with this other experience. It is an experience in negative, an experience of the consequences in the other person of what we have done and left undone. Hence it should not be described as altogether terrible. But at any rate a man must come to realise which of his deeds, his thoughts, his feelings, were just and which were not.

You can imagine that it is in this state of existence that the first seed of karma is formed. For when the human being realises what actually happens between death and a new birth, his judgement differs from judgement as it is on Earth.—I may already have mentioned that many years ago I met a lady who had listened to a conversation that had taken place in her presence on the subject of repeated earthly lives. She said that one life was enough for her, that she had no desire at all for any others, and she protested vehemently against the possibility of having to return again and again. I was obliged to say to her at the time: ‘Yes, it may be that this is your opinion here on Earth; but that is not the point. What matters is the judgement that is made between death and a new birth.’ As long as she was with us, she realised this, but on her travels afterwards she sent me a postcard saying that after all she did not admit that there are many earthly lives!

When the human being is undergoing these intensified experiences after death, he makes a resolve that may be expressed as follows: Owing to this and that, you have become imperfect, you are an inferior human being; and you must make compensation! Thereby the plan of karma is laid down. And such resolutions in the spiritual world between death and a new birth are realities. Just as here on Earth it is a reality that you burn yourself if you put your finger into a flame, so it is a reality in the spiritual world when you form a resolution. And you do most assuredly form it!

All these experiences are lived through in the Moon sphere. Passing through the following spheres of Mercury and Venus, man gradually approaches the Sun sphere. The Mercury sphere and the Venus sphere form the transition into the Sun sphere. But entry into the Sun sphere would not be possible if the whole burden of the evil laid upon the soul in the Moon sphere had still to be taken in tow. The Cosmos therefore provides that when the human being leaves the Moon sphere, the evil in him stays behind; it waits until he returns and is again passing through the Moon sphere. But as the human being is one with his deeds, he leaves much of himself behind. If I have done evil on the Earth, this simply makes me an inferior being; in passing through the Moon sphere I lose part of myself, leave it behind. A man who had been an out-and-out villain, who had never once done anything good—but after all, nobody like this really exists—such a man would be left behind in his entirety in the Moon sphere. But, as I say, nobody like this exists ... human beings do make progress.

With less or more qualities or defects, the human being passes, at first, into the Mercury sphere. Here too, between death and a new birth, he undergoes particular experiences which are a preparation for his existence in the Sun sphere. In physical life on Earth, a man becomes ill in one way or another. In soul and spirit he must be completely healthy when he passes into the Sun sphere. Hence in the Mercury sphere the human being is freed from all the effects that illnesses have produced upon the soul. Therefore it is the case that true medicine can only be mastered when one is able to perceive how the dead are freed from illnesses in the Mercury sphere. This can teach us what must be done for human beings on the Earth to free them from illnesses. And so, in the times of the Mysteries and of instinctive clairvoyance, medicine was regarded as a revelation from the Mercury sphere through the Mysteries. Just think: What is a God to modern man? A God is a Being who can never be seen on the Earth. This was not so in the days of instinctive clairvoyance. Mercury had his Mysteries. As you can read in the book, Occult Science, there were Mercury Mysteries. Indeed the Arch-High-Priest of the Mercury Mysteries was Mercury himself. This was brought about through a man being born whose spirit was then released by a super-human process in order to seek embodiment in another way. The body was there, and this body was used by the God Mercury in order to come to the Earth, that is to say, to reveal himself in the Mysteries. The Gods themselves were the teachers in the ancient Mysteries. The same applies to all the Gods of Greece; they were all on the Earth in this sense. The God Mercury taught men the art of medicine of which Hippocrates, later on, still preserved a tradition.

Then the human being enters into the Venus sphere where he becomes wholly aware of his incompleteness. But in the Venus sphere all that is incomplete in him is prepared for the Sun existence in which the longest period is spent. Man lives twice through the Sun sphere, but we need now speak only of the one period. He spends the longest period in the Sun existence where, to begin with, he is in the company of those souls with whom he has some kind of karmic connection and who are now, like himself, in the spiritual world. But he is also in the company of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, and so on. What happens here? Inasmuch as the human being is fully conscious of his incompleteness, he works together with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies at the model and prototype of his next Earth existence. During the first half of the Sun existence he works more at the prototype of his future physical corporeality, and during the second half more at the prototype of his moral nature as it will be in his next Earth existence. This work that proceeds during the Sun existence is by no means as uniform as it seems when one has to describe it, but it is infinitely richer, more splendid and more mighty than anything that a man can experience on the Earth. On the Earth, man does not experience what is actually enclosed within his skin, but what is around him. During the Sun existence it is the exact opposite, for then man experiences everything that is within the Cosmos. Just as here on Earth we say: this is my stomach, so in yonder sphere we say: out there is my Venus. And as we say here: this is my heart, over yonder, we say: this is my Sun. The Beings of the universe become our organs. We ourselves are as the universe. While man is on Earth—I refer of course to a spiritual conception of man—he is merely filled by earthly substance. This inner world of the human being is in very truth more all-embracing, more splendid than the Cosmos outside man on the Earth. On the Earth, man is not conscious of all that is concealed within his being. But it is much greater, much more majestic than anything he sees on Earth. And what thus lies concealed within him, is revealed to him during the Sun existence. Out of what is then his world, he forms and shapes his physical and moral nature for his next life on Earth. He also works at his karma. After having learnt during the first decades after death how he has to work, he proceeds to labour at his karma. The final touch, as it were, is not given until the evil he has done is encountered again during the second passage through the Moon sphere, and to the model and prototype is added the force which impels him into the karma of a new earthly life.

In order to have more precise insight into how karma is formed, we must think of the following.—Stars—what are they, in reality? Scientists speak of the stars as if they were orbs of burning gas or the like. It is by no means so! Suppose you were on the planet Venus. The Earth would then appear to you more or less as Venus appears to you now, and you would describe the Earth as you now describe Venus; you would estimate that on the Earth—which is the theatre of man's existence—there are so and so many souls. But wherever a star shines, there are souls! There are souls on the Moon: the souls of the great primeval Teachers, intermingled in a sense with the souls of the Angeloi. On Mercury there are the souls of the Archangeloi, among whom we live when we pass through the sphere of the Archangeloi. The God Mercury is an Archangelic Being. On Venus are the Archai. And upon the Sun are the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, in whose company man forms his karma. We must see in the shining stars the outer signs of colonies of Spirits in the Cosmos. Wherever a star is seen in the heavens, there—in that direction—is a colony of Spirits.

When the human being has lived through the Sun existence, he enters into the Mars sphere, the Jupiter sphere, the Saturn sphere. He has already, in the Sun sphere, begun to work at his karma. But as well as this—in order that he shall find the load of evil that belongs to him when, later on, he goes back through the Moon sphere, and in order that karma may be prepared in such a way that it can be fulfilled on Earth—he needs to live with the Spirits indwelling Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Moreover when highly characteristic human destinies are being worked out, it is the case that the final stage of the development of karmic connections takes place in the Mars sphere, the Jupiter sphere or the Saturn sphere. Karma can, of course, be worked out when the human being comes again into the Venus sphere, and also into the Mercury sphere. Between death and a new birth man works at his karma, together with the Beings of the planetary systems. And it is exceedingly interesting to investigate this.

Today the time has come to speak more openly, with greater freedom and frankness, of many spiritual facts. The Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum was held in order to introduce this esoteric character which should now imbue the whole Anthroposophical Society. Therefore, when I was able to speak to you on the last occasion, I began to explain all kinds of karmic connections. Let it not be thought that one is delving with clumsy fingers into the life of man when attempts are made to speak of interesting human phenomena from the point of view of their karmic connections. For thereby the world becomes for the first time transparent, full of light—not poorer but richer, more splendid in content.

I should like to speak today about an individual who was incarnated about the second century A.D. in Rome, as it then was, and who with great sensitiveness of perception had witnessed the willing martyrdom suffered by the Christians in their efforts to promulgate their cause in the Roman Empire. This individual had also witnessed the terrible injustices and the many forms of depravity and corruption which were so rife in the Roman Empire at that time. Numberless manifestations of Good and Evil were witnessed and experienced by this individual. With the methods of spiritual research which enable such happenings to be recognised, we find this individual drawn into the tumultuous happenings which at that time, during the second half of the second century A.D., were experienced in the Roman Empire in connection with the spread of Christianity. There is something extremely moving about this individual when the eye of spirit is directed upon him in the way I explained last time with reference to other individuals in their repeated earthly lives.

In this individual who lived to a very great age and who had witnessed so much Good in deeds of supreme sacrifice in the sphere of germinating Christianity, and so much that was evil and bad in Roman life at that time, there arose a kind of realisation which was also a question: Where is the balance, the mean? Is there only the wholly Good and the wholly Evil in the world?

With the consciousness of Imagination and Inspiration one can follow quite clearly how this individual was subsequently reborn in the eleventh century, as a woman. The experiences undergone in the life as a woman levelled out the hard, steel-like angularity of soul which had developed during the Roman incarnation when he had reached a great age. This trait was softened and mellowed and became a faculty of inner, thoughtful contemplation of Good and Evil. This individual then came again to the Earth in the eighteenth century and was born as the German poet, Friedrich Schiller.

And now study Schiller's life and see how it develops, striving to find a middle condition, a balance, a mean. Schiller needed Goethe before he could get rid of all that had remained in him from the conviction that there is only Good, there is only Evil. Read Schiller's dramas, and you will understand them if you think of his earlier incarnation.

What circumstances lie behind Schiller's life and outlook? The experiences he had undergone in the Roman incarnation continued to be alive within him, but he had subsequently incarnated as a woman in the Middle Ages. And then, in his life between death and a new birth, it was in the Saturn sphere that the most significant development of his karma took place.

Initiation-knowledge, of the degree that can be attained only in advanced age, is necessary in order to understand the essential nature of the Saturn sphere. The question may be asked: How is it possible to acquire knowledge of life on the stars and the like? I have told you that when the human being reaches Imaginative consciousness, he beholds his whole life in a great tableau. But he also beholds it divided into epochs. When Inspiration is attained, and the emptied consciousness wipes out this tableau, something shines out of every such epoch. Instead of beholding his own life between birth and the seventh year, a man beholds, at this place in the life-tableau, the happenings of the Moon existence—he can look into these happenings. In the tableau of the second epoch which lies between the change of teeth and puberty, the Mercury existence shines through all the happenings. The events of the school period, seen as they are backwards in this tableau, lead into the Mercury existence. How aptly and truly were the functions assigned to the several planets in the days of instinctive wisdom on the Earth! Statistics reveal that the human being is most healthy, not in the years between birth and the change of teeth, nor after puberty, but during the school period as it is called (between the ages of seven and fourteen), because that is the time when Mercury works most strongly into the human being in his Earth existence. In the tableau arising from the epoch stretching between puberty and about the twenty-first or twenty-second years, the processes and Beings belonging to Venus are seen. Again it was genius that ascribed to Venus the initial stages of the sex life. The Sun existence shines through the epoch lying between the ages of twenty-one and forty-two, the Mars existence through the epoch lying between the years forty-two and forty-nine; the Jupiter existence through the epoch from forty-nine to fifty-six; and the Saturn existence through the epoch from fifty-six to sixty-three. Truth to tell, even an Initiate cannot see the circumstances of life between death and a new birth in which Saturn plays a part, until he has passed the sixty-third year of his life. Before then it is possible to learn about this existence in many different ways; but in actual vision it is possible to behold these happenings and their connections only when one has passed the sixty-third year of life. So you will realise why it is that I am only now speaking of matters connected with the Saturn existence.

As I said, Schiller developed his karma above all in the sphere of Saturn. To behold this Saturn existence in the way I have indicated, causes great amazement, because it is so different from anything one can experience on the Earth. In the consciousness of the Beings on Saturn there is only Past; there is no Present at all. But the Past is revealed in great majesty. Let me try to make a comparison with something that might happen on the Earth—it does not happen, but hypothetically it is possible. Imagine that you have no idea what you look like, you know only that you exist. You act, you do something—you do not see this at the time, you see it only when it has become the Past. You walk: you do not see your own steps or the movements you make; but immediately afterwards these movements change into a snowman—and you draw the whole movement after you when you look round and see what you have been doing! Such is the life of these strange Spirits upon Saturn. They are never aware of what they do out of an immediate resolve of the Present, but they perceive it only when it has become the Past. This is a difficult conception for the ordinary consciousness, but it is so nevertheless. Individualities like that of Schiller, who are also forming their karma, live in similar conditions of existence. Such individuals develop a wonderful vision of the Past. And so the soul of Schiller, before he was born in the year 1790, lived in the spiritual world with a majestic vision in retrospect of all the Past that was connected with his own karma. And then, on the Earth, this changed into the reaction: the vision of the Past is now transformed into enthusiasm for ideals of the Future. Schiller's ideals of the Future arose from his activity in connection with his karma during his Saturn existence.

And now let us take another life. During an incarnation in Greece, a certain individual had had a great deal to do with Greek plastic art and also with the Platonic philosophy. As a young man he was filled with enthusiasm for plastic art which he was able to view with the eye of spirit, and his colossal artistic powers were able to translate into art what he perceived spiritually. After other incarnations had been lived through, we find this individuality developing his karma in the Jupiter sphere. The Jupiter Beings differ from the Saturn Beings. The Jupiter Beings are unlike the men of Earth. When a man of Earth wants to grow wise, he must undergo inner development, he must struggle, battle inwardly and overcome; through periods that are filled with active development the human being on Earth struggles to acquire an unpretentious form of wisdom. Not so the Jupiter Beings. They are not ‘born’ as earthly beings are born, they form themselves out of the Cosmos. Just as you can see a cloud taking shape, so do the Jupiter Beings form themselves in the etheric and astral worlds, out of the Cosmos. Neither do they die. They interpenetrate one another, do not, as it were compete with each other for space. These Beings are, so to speak, wisdom that has become real and actual. Wisdom is innate in them; they cannot be other than wise. Just as we have circulating blood, so have the Jupiter Beings wisdom. It is their very nature. Among them too, karma can be shaped. The individuality of whom we are speaking, who lived through one of his most important earthly lives in ancient Greece, passed through the Jupiter sphere, came into contact with the wisdom of the Jupiter sphere where his karma was shaped, and was born again in the eighteenth century as Goethe. Such is the origin of the wonderful combination of Greek culture and wisdom that is present in Goethe.

When history is studied in this way, when we try to glean from the Mysteries and from secrets of the Cosmos what is happening on the Earth, I do not think that the Earth's history loses significance thereby. Prosaic professors may always be insisting that it is much more to the point to depict Goethe as the man he actually was in life, than to waft him away into a higher sphere! In richer epochs of evolution, when instinctive clairvoyance still survived, men spoke, openly as well, of how life in the heavens is revealed through human acts and human existence. In this respect we must get away from that abstract mentality which makes us think we are mere worms looking upwards from the Earth, believing only what the astronomers and astro-physicists have to say about the stars. In our civilisation and culture, with all their heavy trials, it is urgently necessary to understand the battle that is being waged between men who strive for the Spirit in order to comprehend spiritual law in the Cosmos, and men who have no desire for such knowledge, who limit themselves to the Earth, not only in the sphere of natural science but also in what is called ‘cultural’ or ‘spiritual’ history at the universities where documents alone are studied—for documents too are records only of happenings in the physical, material world. A decision will most certainly have to be taken in the course of Earth-evolution. Either degeneration of the spiritual life will intensify, and an illness of which I have been speaking for years—even in public lectures—will become more and more widespread. Very little is said about it as yet in medical literature, but it will none the less exist in life—its name is Dementia professoralia (Academic dementia)—or the human being will have to unfold enthusiasm for knowledge of the Supersensible. And this will also lead him to realisation of the connection between the Cosmos and the life of man.

I want to give you a third and rather more complex example. In an earlier life on Earth, a certain individuality was incarnated in India, when India was already in decline, and in that incarnation assimilated much knowledge of a kind accessible to one with extremely poor physical sight. Such details must be studied, for, as I have often said, it is details which lead to perception of the real connections. This individuality lived through various other incarnations which were, however, less important than the characteristics developed in him in India, where his extremely poor sight allowed him to see the lotus flowers and all the blossoms only with blurred outlines. His whole vision was clouded, lacking in clarity. His knowledge of life was of the kind that is inevitable when sight is blurred and the deeper qualities of things unprobed. The karma of this individuality was developed in a complicated way. He unfolded in the Mars sphere, to begin with, qualities that made him into a regular squabbler in the spiritual world! He also worked a great deal at his karma in the Mercury sphere, developing qualities of wit, of satire. And, in the background of all this, picture to yourselves a non-European world. The individual in question tends to be reborn in Europe. He passes through the Mars sphere—battle; through the Mercury sphere—critical, subtle thinking and perception. Having developed still other characteristic qualities in the Venus sphere—it is a particularly complex karma—and with the tendency to evade the physical, while at the same time strongly permeated with spirituality, this individual in the nineteenth century becomes Heinrich Heine.

Just try to realise the understanding that arises of every verse written by Heine, of the very language, words and form, when we know: this is, in reality, a product of the Mars sphere, the Venus sphere, the Mercury sphere. All of it really originates in the Cosmos. Karma is formed and fashioned in the Cosmos; it is lived out upon Earth.

And so, looking backwards upon the life-tableau of man, we perceive the Moon sphere, the Mercury sphere; from the 21st to the 42nd years the Sun sphere, then the Mars sphere, the Jupiter sphere, the Saturn sphere. (I cannot now go into the still later periods; there too one sees something, but I cannot enter into it now). We see that all these spheres have something to do with karma. Ordinary consciousness does not know that man has within him the workings of the Mercury sphere, Moon sphere, and so on. Yet karma is brought into being by what is thus within man; he is impelled by these forces to live out his karma in his own particular way. Heinrich Heine unfolded and developed his karma in the Venus sphere, the Mercury sphere, the Mars sphere; and it is these same beings of the Venus sphere, Mercury sphere, Mars sphere which work through his earthly bodily nature in order to help him to fulfil his karma. And so, by virtue of his karma, the whole being of man stands within the Cosmos, gives expression to the Cosmos here on Earth—in one case in this way, in another in that.

These things must be studied with a free and wide outlook. When I say to you that Goethe, in the Jupiter sphere, transformed what he had absorbed in ancient Greece into deep, instinctive wisdom, which comes out in all his creations because living beings are at work—this will have a different result in another case. At the time when the culture of ancient Mexico had fallen deeply into decline, though the echoes of the Mysteries and their cults still persisted, there lived a certain individual. He came into close contact with the magic arts, the decadent manifestations of the Mystery epoch in ancient Mexico, and he understood the sense in which such beings as Quetzalkoatl, Tetzkatlipoca, Taotl, had been living realities. Orthodox books on cultural history as a rule mention hardly anything more than the names of these Beings. Nevertheless there was a time when men had living conceptions of all these Gods, of Quetzalkoatl, Tetzkatlipoca, Taotl; they had actual connection with super-sensible Beings. These matters were understood by the individual to whom I am referring; and comparatively quickly, without an intermediate incarnation, he was born again in the nineteenth century as the occultist Eliphas Lévi, having passed through the Jupiter sphere in his life between death and a new birth. In ancient Mexico he had been connected with such things as sorcery, magic arts, and the like, and had absorbed an outworn, decadent kind of knowledge. A peculiar, primitive form of wisdom—an inferior wisdom—was in this case transformed in the Jupiter sphere into the kind of content we find in the books of Eliphas Lévi. Whereas the Jupiter sphere produced in Goethe, as the fruit of the earlier incarnation, a mellow, Olympic fire, and great wisdom, Eliphas Lévi dabbles with a kind of charlatanism in all sorts of magical formulae and the like.

The earthly life is, of course, the decisive factor in what the stars are able to make of our karma. But the stars, that is to say the Beings who live where the stars indicate their existence, the stars transform into karma those things which, here on Earth, become elements in the constitution of karma.

It is in this way that we shall try more and more to deepen Anthroposophy. And if a great deal seems paradoxical and strange—as it certainly will—we must not mind it. In the paradoxical and the strange lies the truth. Man's life is based upon foundations that are deeper and more complex than is usually believed. In order to understand it, our thoughts must not be fettered to the Earth but take wings out into the expanses of the Cosmos. On the Earth man gazes at matter and too easily forgets the Spirit. The opposite is the case as soon as only a little Imaginative knowledge leads us to the realms of the heavens. There quite certainly we forget matter and begin gradually to behold the Spirits, as did the simple Shepherds in an ancient, primitive time, and as was the case on into the Middle Ages when, instead of inscribing external signs on maps of the heavens, men drew figures and forms, because they actually beheld these figures in Imaginative knowledge.

Anthroposophy deepens our inner perceptions too, as I have repeatedly said. Just think of it! If we make the attempt with the kind of knowledge I have described, we begin to gaze upon the destiny of a single human being with holy awe. For what is it that works in the destiny of each human being? In very truth it is star-wisdom—all-embracing star-wisdom! Nothing can enable us to behold the working of the Gods in the universe with deeper or truer feelings than to behold it in the destiny of a man. A world-justice flows through Eternity in the existence, the deeds, the thinking, of the Gods weaving behind the being of man.

That is what I wanted to say to you today concerning karma.

During his earthly existence, the human being alternates in the states of consciousness, which we have already considered from many points of view during these days, between the states of complete waking, sleeping and dreaming. And I have just tried to explain the full significance of dreaming during the short lecture cycle at the delegates' meeting. Today, let us first ask ourselves the question: Is it part of the essential nature of man as an earthly being to live in these three states of consciousness?

We must be clear about the fact that within earthly existence, only man lives in these three states of consciousness. The animal lives in a fundamentally different cycle. The animal does not have the deep dreamless sleep that man has for the longest time between falling asleep and waking up. On the other hand, the animal does not have the complete wakefulness that man has between waking up and falling asleep. The animal waking state is actually somewhat similar to human dreaming. Only the conscious experiences of higher animals are more definite, more saturated, I might say, than the fleeting human dreams. But on the other hand, the animal is never unconscious to the same high degree as man is in deep sleep.

The animal therefore does not differ to the same extent from its surroundings as does man. The animal does not have an external world and an internal world in the way that man has them. If we translate into human language, the animal actually reckons, what lives as a dull consciousness in the higher animals, with its entire inner being to the outside world.

When an animal sees a plant, it does not initially have the feeling that there is a plant outside and that it is a closed being inside, but rather a strong inner experience of the plant, an immediate sympathy or antipathy. In a sense, the animal feels within itself what the plant expresses. That in our present age people are so little able to observe what does not reveal itself in a very crude way, this circumstance alone it is, which prevents them from simply seeing from the behavior, from the behavior of the animal, that it is as I have said.

Only man has this sharp, clear distinction between his inner world and the outer world. Why does man acknowledge an outer world? How does man come to speak of an inner world and an outer world at all? He comes to it through the fact that he is always outside his physical and etheric bodies with his I and with his astral body in the state of sleep, that he, so to speak, leaves his physical and etheric bodies to themselves in sleep and is with those things that are the outer world. During our state of sleep, we share the fate of external things. Just as tables and benches, trees and clouds are outside our physical and etheric bodies when we are awake, and we therefore call them the external world, so our own astral body and our own ego belong to the external world during sleep. And when we belong to the external world with our ego and our astral body during sleep, something happens.

To understand what is happening, let us first consider what actually happens when we face the world in a normal waking state. The objects around us are external to us. And gradually, human scientific thinking has come to recognize only that which can be measured, weighed and counted as certain for these physical things of the outside world. The content of our physical science is, after all, determined by weight, by measure, by number.

We calculate with the calculation operations that once applied to earthly things, we weigh the things, we measure them. And what we determine by weight, measure and number, that is actually given by the physical. We would not describe a body as physical if we could not somehow prove its reality with the scales. But that which, for example, colors are, that which sounds are, that which even sensations of warmth and cold are, that which is the actual sensory perceptions, that weaves so over the heavy, measurable, countable things. When we want to define any physical thing, what constitutes its actual physical essence is precisely what can be weighed and counted, and what the physicist actually only wants to deal with. Regarding color, sound and so on, he says: Yes, something is happening out there that also has to do with weighing or counting. — He himself says of the color phenomena: There are vibrations out there that make an impression on people, and people describe this impression as color when the eye determines it, as sound when the ear determines it, and so on. - Actually, one could say: the physicist today does not know what to do with all these things - sound, color, warmth and cold. He regards them simply as properties of what can be determined with the scales, with the measuring stick or by calculation. In a sense, colors adhere to the physical, sound breaks away from the physical, and warmth or cold undulate out of the physical. We say: that which has a weight, that asked for the blush, or it:st red.

When a person is in the state between falling asleep and waking up, it is different with the I and with the astral body. In this state, things are not there at all in terms of measure, number and weight. According to earthly measure, number and weight, things are not there. When we are asleep, we do not have things around us that can be weighed, strange as it may seem, nor do we have things around us that can be counted or measured directly. You could not apply a yardstick as I and as an astral body in a state of sleep. But what is there, if I may express it in this way, are the free-floating, free-weaving sensations. Only that in his present state of development, man does not have the ability to perceive the free-floating blush, the waves of the free-weaving sound, and so on.

If you want to draw a schematic picture of the matter, you could do it like this. [Here he begins to draw on the board] You could say: Here on earth we have tangible solid things, and the red, the yellow, that is, what the senses perceive in the physical world, adheres to these tangible solid things, so to speak. When we are asleep, yellow is a free-floating being, red is a free-floating being, not attached to such conditions of heaviness, but freely weaving and floating. It is the same with sound: it is not the bell that sounds, but the sound that weaves.

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And it is true that when we walk around in our physical world and see something, we pick it up; only then it is a thing, otherwise it could also be an optical illusion. Weight must be added. That is why one is so inclined to regard something that appears in the physical without it being perceived as heavy, such as the colors of the rainbow, as an optical illusion. If you open a physics book today, you will find that it explains that what you see is an optical illusion. What is actually real is the raindrop. And so you draw lines into it that actually mean nothing at all for what is there, but which you imagine through space; you then call them rays. But the rays are not there at all. Then one says: the eye projects that outwards. This projection is something that is used in physics today in a very strange way. So I take up the idea: we see a red object. To convince ourselves that it is not an optical illusion, we pick it up and it is heavy: this is how we verify its reality.

The one who now becomes aware in the I and in the astral body outside the physical and etheric body also finally comes to the conclusion that something like this is already there in this free-floating and free-weaving colored, sounding; but it is different. In a freely floating colored shape, there is a tendency to move out into the vastness of the world; it has an opposite gravity. These things on earth want to go down to the center of the earth [drawing, downward arrows], while those [upward arrows] want to go out freely into space.

And there is also something similar to a measure. You see it when you have, let's say, a small reddish cloud [plate 4], and this small reddish cloud is surrounded by a mighty yellow structure. Then you measure, but not with the scale, but qualitatively you measure with the red, with the stronger shining the weaker shining yellow. And just as the measuring rod tells you: that is five meters, so here the red tells you: if I were to spread out, I would enter the yellow five times. I have to expand, I have to become more powerful, then I will also become yellow. — So the measurements are made here.

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It is even more difficult to explain counting here, because in earthly counting we usually only count peas or apples that lie next to each other indifferently. And we always have the feeling that when we make two out of one, the one is actually quite indifferent to the fact that there is another two next to it. In human life it is already different; there it is sometimes the case that one is dependent on the two. But that also goes into the spiritual. But in actual physical mathematics, the units are always indifferent to what is associated with them. That is not the case here.

If there is a one of a certain kind somewhere, it requires any, say, three or five others, depending on the case [drawing, red dots and rings]. This always has an inner relationship to the others, there the number is a reality. And when consciousness begins to perceive what it is like to be out there with the ego and the astral body, then one also comes to determine something like measure, number and weight, but in an opposite way.

And then, when seeing and hearing out there are no longer a mere swimming and groping of red and yellow and sounds, but when one begins to perceive things in such an orderly way in there too, then the perception of the spiritual entities that actualize and realize themselves in these free-floating sensory perceptions begins. Then we enter into the positive spiritual world, into the life and activity of spiritual beings. Just as we enter into the life and activity of earthly things here on earth by determining them with the scales, with the measuring rod, with our calculations, so we enter into the comprehension of spiritual entities by acquiring the merely qualitative, opposite heaviness, that is, by wanting to expand with ease in space, measuring color by color and so on. These spiritual essences now also permeate everything that is outside in the realms of nature.

With the waking consciousness, the human being sees only the outer side of minerals, plants, and animals. But in what lives as spiritual in all these beings of the nature kingdoms, there the human being is when he sleeps. And when he then goes back into himself when he wakes up, then his I and his astral body retain, so to speak, the inclination, the affinity to external things and cause the person to recognize an external world. If the human being had an organization that was not designed for sleep, he would not recognize an external world. Of course it is not a matter of someone suffering from insomnia. For I am not saying that a person does not sleep, but that a person does not have an organization that is designed for sleeping. It is a matter of being attuned to something. That is why a person who suffers from insomnia becomes ill, because it is not suited to his nature. But that is just how things are: precisely because man dwells in sleep with what is in the outer world, with what he then calls his outer world when awake, he also comes to an outer world, to a view of the outer world.

This relationship of man to sleep gives the earthly concept of truth. How? Well, we call it truth when we can correctly recreate an external event within us, when we can correctly experience an external event within us. But for this we need the mechanism of sleep. We would have no concept of truth at all if we did not have the mechanism of sleep. So that we can say: we owe truth to the state of sleep. In order to devote ourselves to the truth of things, we must also spend a certain amount of time with them in our existence. Things only tell us about themselves when we are with them in our souls during sleep.

The dream state is different. As I explained to you in the short series during the delegates' meeting, the dream is related to memory, to the inner life of the soul, to that which lives primarily in memory. When the dream is a free-floating world of sound and color, we are still half outside of our body. When we completely submerge, the same forces that we unfold in the dream, weaving and living, become forces of memory. In this way we no longer differ from the outer world. Our inner life coincides with the outer world, we live so intensely in the outer world with our sympathies and antipathies that we do not perceive things as sympathetic or antipathetic, but the sympathies and antipathies themselves show themselves pictorially.

If we did not have the ability to dream and the continuation of this dream power within us, we would have no beauty. The fact that we have any predispositions for beauty at all is based on our ability to dream. For the prosaic existence, we have to say: we owe it to the power of dreaming that we have memory; for the artistic existence of man, we owe beauty to the power of dreaming. So: 'the state of dreaming is connected with beauty'. The way we perceive beauty and create beauty is very similar to the weaving force of dreaming.

We behave similarly when experiencing beauty and when creating beauty – only with the application of our physical body – as we behave outside of our physical body, or half-connected to our physical body, when dreaming. There is only a small gap between dreaming and living in beauty. And only because in today's materialistic time people are so coarse that they do not notice this gap, there is so little awareness of the full significance of beauty. In order to experience this free floating and weaving, one must necessarily devote oneself to it in dreams. Whereas when one surrenders to freedom, to the inner exercise of will, and thus lives after the jolt, one no longer has the sensation that it is the same as dreaming, because it is just the same, only with the application of the powers of the physical body.

People today will think long and hard about what was meant in older times when one said “chaos” [the word “chaos” is written on the blackboard]. There are many different definitions of chaos. In reality, chaos can only be characterized by saying: When a person enters a state of consciousness in which the experience of heaviness, of earthly measure, just ceases, and things begin to feel half light, but do not yet want to reach out into the world , but still maintain themselves horizontally, in balance, when the fixed boundaries dissolve, when the floating indeterminacy of the world is still seen with the physical body, but already with the soul-constitution of dreaming, then one sees chaos. And the dream is merely the shadowy approach of chaos to man.

In Greece, people still had the feeling that you can't really make the physical world beautiful. The physical world is just a necessity of nature, it is what it is. You can only make that beautiful which is chaotic. If you transform chaos into cosmos, then beauty arises. That is why chaos and cosmos are interchangeable terms. You cannot create the cosmos – which actually means the beautiful world – from earthly things, but only from chaos, by shaping chaos. And what you do with earthly things is merely an imitation in the substance of the shaped chaos.

This is the case with all artistic endeavors. In Greece, where mystery cults still had a certain influence, people still had a very vivid idea of this relationship between chaos and the cosmos.

But if you travel around in all these worlds - in the world in which man is unconscious when he is in a state of sleep, in the world in which man is half-conscious when he is in a state of dreaming - if you travel around everywhere: you will not find goodness. These beings that are in there have been predestined with wisdom from the very beginning of their lives. In them, you find ruling, weaving wisdom; in them, you find beauty. But there is no point in our, as terrestrial human beings, trying to get to know these entities and speak of goodness in them. We can only speak of goodness when there is a difference between the inner and outer world, so that the good of the spiritual world can or cannot follow.

Just as the sleeping state is truth, the dreaming state is beauty, so the waking state is goodness, assigned to the good [it is written on the board]. |

Sleeping state: truth
Dreaming state: beauty
Waking state: goodness

But that does not contradict what I have said in recent days, that when one leaves the earthly and comes out into the cosmos, one is led to drop even earthly concepts in order to speak of the moral order of the world. For the moral order of the world is just as predetermined, just as necessarily predetermined in the spiritual as causality is here on earth. It is just that there it is spiritual: the predetermination, the being-determined-in-oneself. So there is no contradiction.

But we must be clear about human nature: if we want to have the idea of truth, then we must turn to the state of sleep; if we want to have the idea of beauty, then we must turn to the state of dreaming; if we want to have the idea of kindness, then we must turn to the state of waking.

Thus, when a person is awake, he is not destined for his physical and etheric organism according to truth, but rather destined for goodness. So we must come to the idea of goodness all the more.

Now I ask you: What does contemporary science strive for when it wants to explain the human being? It does not want to ascend by explaining to the awake person the path from truth through beauty to goodness; it wants to explain everything according to an external causal necessity, which only corresponds to the idea of truth. One does not come to that which lives and weaves in man in an awakened state, but only to that which the sleeping person is at most. Therefore, if you read anthropological works today and do so with an awakened eye, awake to the soul peculiarities and forces of the world, then you get the following impression. You say to yourself: That is all very nice, what we are told by today's science about man. But what is this human being like, of whom science tells us? He is constantly lying in bed. He cannot walk. He cannot move. Movement, for example, is not explained at all. He is constantly lying in bed.

The human being that science explains can only be explained as a person lying in bed. There is no other way. Science only explains the sleeping human being. If you want to get him moving, you have to do it mechanically. That is why it is also a scientific mechanism. You have to introduce a machine into this sleeping human being that will get this lump up and moving when it is time to get up and put it back into bed in the evening.

This science, however, tells us nothing about the human being who walks around in the world, who lives and breathes, who is awake. For what sets him in motion is contained in the idea of kindness, not in the idea of truth, which we gain from external things. This is something that is given very little consideration. When a modern physiologist or anatomist describes the human being, one has the feeling that one would like to say: Wake up, wake up, you are asleep, you are asleep! — People get used to this state of sleep under the influence of this world view. And what I have always had to characterize: that people actually oversleep everything, that is because they are obsessed with science. Today, because the popular magazines report on everything everywhere, even the uneducated are obsessed with science. There have never been so many obsessed people as there are today, obsessed with science. It is quite peculiar how one has to speak when describing the real conditions of the present day. One has to use completely different tones than those that are currently in use.

And so it is when a human being is placed in an environment by the materialists. When materialism was at its height, people wrote books such as one that sounded in a certain chapter, which states: Man is actually nothing in himself. He is the result of the oxygen in the air, he is the result of the degree of cold or heat under which he is. He is actually - so ends this materialistic description - a result of every draft of air.

If you go along with such a description and imagine the person to be what the materialistic scientist describes, then it is in fact a highly neurasthenic person. The materialists have never described any other people. If they did not realize that they were actually describing people asleep, when they wanted to move on but had fallen out of step, they never described people as anything other than highly neurasthenic individuals who, due to their neurasthenia, are bound to die the very next day and who cannot live at all. For this epoch of science has never grasped the living human being.

There lie the great tasks which must lead men out of the conditions of the present back to such conditions under which the further life of world history is possible. What is needed is an advance in spirituality. The other pole must be found to what has been attained. What exactly has been attained in the course of the 19th century, which was glorious for the materialistic world view? What has been achieved?

In a wonderful way – it can be said quite sincerely and honestly – it has been possible to determine the external world in terms of measurement, number and weight as an earthly world. In this respect, the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century have achieved something magnificent and tremendous. But the sensations, the colors, the sounds, they are all fluttering around in the indefinite. Physicists have completely stopped talking about colors and sounds; they talk about air vibrations and ether vibrations, which are neither colors nor sounds. Air vibrations are not sounds, but at most the medium through which sounds propagate. And there is no grasp of what the sensory qualities are. We must first come to that again. Actually, today we see only what can be determined by means of scales, measures, calculations. The rest has eluded us.

And if the theory of relativity also introduces the magnificent disorder described to you yesterday into what can be measured, weighed, counted, then everything becomes fragmented, everything diverges. But after all, this theory of relativity itself fails at certain limits. Not with regard to concepts – one does not escape the theory of relativity with earthly concepts; I have already discussed this elsewhere – but with reality one always escapes the concepts of relativity. For that which can be measured, counted, weighed enters into quite definite relationships with regard to measure, number and weight in the outer, sensory reality.

Once upon a time in Stuttgart, a physicist or a group of physicists took umbrage at the way the theory of relativity was treated by anthroposophists. Then, in a discussion, he demonstrated a simple experiment that it is actually immaterial whether I hold the matchbox and stroke the match: it will burn; or whether I hold the match and stroke the matchbox: it will also burn. It is relative.

Certainly, here it is still relative. And in relation to everything that is related to a Newtonian space, or to an Euclidean space, it is all relative. But as soon as that reality comes into consideration, which appears as heaviness, as weight, then it is no longer as easy as Einstein imagined, because then real conditions arise. Here one must really speak in paradoxes again. Relativity can be asserted if one confuses the whole of reality with mathematics and geometry and mechanics. But if one enters into the true reality, then that no longer works. After all, it is not just relative whether one eats the roast veal or whether the roast veal eats one! You can travel back and forth with the matchbox, but you have to eat the roast veal, you can't let the roast veal eat you. There are things that set limits to these relativity concepts. These things are such that if they are now told outwardly, one will say: There is not the slightest understanding for this serious theory. But the logic is already as I say it: it is no different, I cannot do it differently.

So it is a matter of seeing how, by taking into account weight – that is, what actually makes physical bodies – how, in reality, I might say, colors, sounds and so on cannot be accommodated anywhere. But with this tendency, something extraordinarily important is lost. Namely, the artistic element is lost. As we become more and more and more and more physical, the artistic element leaves us. No one today will find any trace of art in what the physics books describe. There is nothing left of art, everything must come out. It is indeed dreadful to study a physics book today if you still have any sense of beauty. Because everything that beauty is woven from, color and sound, is outlawed, and only recognized when it adheres to the heavy things, precisely because of that, art is no longer important to people. Today it is no longer important to anyone. And the more physical people become, the less artistic they become! Just think about it: we have a great physics. There is truly no need to rebuke opponents who say, in the field of anthroposophy, that we have great physics. But physics thrives on the denial of the artistic. It thrives on the denial of the artistic in each individual, because it has arrived at a way of treating the world in which the artist no longer cares about the physicist.

I don't think, for example, that the musician today attaches much importance to studying the physical theories of acoustics. It's too boring for him, he doesn't care. The painter also doesn't like to study the terrible color theory that is contained in physics. He usually turns, if he cares about colors at all, to Goethe's color theory. But that is wrong, according to physicists. Physicists turn a blind eye and say: Well, it's not so important whether the painter has a correct or a false theory of colors. It just so happens that under today's physical world view, art must perish. Now we have to ask ourselves the question: Why was there art in older times?

If we go back to very ancient times, to the times when people still had an original clairvoyance, it was the case that people did not notice so much of measure, number and weight in earthly things. They did not care so much about measure, number and weight, they were more devoted to the colors, the sounds of earthly things.

Just think that chemistry has only been calculating with weight since Lavoisier; that is a little more than a hundred years! Weight was only applied to a world view at the end of the 18th century. The consciousness that everything must be determined according to earthly measure, number and weight was simply not present in the older humanity. One was devoted to the color carpet of the world, the weaving and undulation of sound; one was devoted not to the vibrations of the air, but to the undulations and weaving of sound. One lived in it, even by living in the physical world.

But what possibilities did one have by living in this sensual perception free of heaviness? It gave one the possibility, for example, when one approached a person, not to see the person at all as one sees him today, but one looked at the person as a result of the whole universe. Man was more a confluence of the cosmos. He was more of a microcosm than what stands within his skin on this small patch of earth, where man stands. Man was thought of more as an image of the world. The colors flowed together from all sides, giving man his colors. The harmony of the world was there, resonating through man, giving man his form.

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And humanity today can hardly understand the way in which the ancient mystery teachers spoke to their students. Because if someone today wants to explain the human heart, they take an embryo and see how the blood vessels expand, and how a tube initially forms and then the heart gradually takes shape. No, the ancient mystery teachers didn't talk to their students like that! That wouldn't have seemed much more important to them than knitting a sock, because after all, the process looks very similar. On the contrary, they emphasized something else as being tremendously important. They said: The human heart is a result of the gold that lives everywhere in the light and that streams in from the universe and actually forms the human heart. They had the ideas: The light weaves through the universe, and the light carries the gold [see drawing]. The gold is everywhere in the light, the gold weaves and lives in the light. And when a person is in their earthly life, then their heart – you know, after seven years it changes – is not built from the cucumbers and lettuce and roast veal that a person has eaten in the meantime, but these old teachers knew: it is built from the gold of the light. And the cucumbers and the salad are only the stimulus for the heart to build itself up out of the light-woven gold of the whole universe.

Yes, people spoke differently, and one must become aware of this contrast, for one must learn again to speak in this way, only on a different level of consciousness. For example, what once existed in the field of painting, which then disappeared, where one still painted from the universe because one did not yet have the gravity, that has left its last trace - let us say, for example, with Cimabue and especially with the icon painting of the Russians. The icon is still painted from the external world, from the macrocosm; in a sense, it is a section of the macrocosm. But then one arrived at a dead end. One could not go further because this view simply no longer exists for humanity. If one had wanted to paint the icon with an inner part, not just out of tradition and prayer, then one should have known how to treat gold. The treatment of gold in the picture was one of the greatest secrets of ancient painting. To bring out what is human in the background of gold, that was ancient painting.

There is an enormous gulf between Cimabue and Giotto. For Giotto had already begun to do what Raphael would later take to a particularly high level. Cimabue still had tradition, but Giotto was already becoming a naturalist. He realized that tradition was no longer coming to life in the soul. Now you have to take the physical human being; now you no longer have the universe. You can no longer paint out of gold, you have to paint out of the flesh.

This has finally come to the point that, after all, painting has passed over to what it had in many ways in the 19th century. The icons, they have no heaviness at all, the icons have “shone in” from the world; they have no heaviness. You just can't paint them anymore today, but if you painted them in their original form, they would have no weight at all.

Giotto was the first to paint things in such a way that they had weight. From this it became that everything that is painted also has weight in the picture, and one then paints it from the outside; so that the colors relate to what is painted, as the physicist explains that the color arises on the surface through some special wave vibration. Art, in the end, also reckoned with weight. Giotto began it in an aesthetic-artistic way, and Raphael then brought it to the highest level.

So that one can say: The universe has departed from man, and the heavy man became that which one could only see. And because the feelings of the old days were still there, the flesh became as little heavy as possible, but it became heavy. And so the Madonna was created as the opposite of the icon: the icon, which has no weight, the Madonna, which has weight, even if she is beautiful. Beauty has been preserved. But icons cannot be painted at all, because man does not experience them. And it is an untruth when people today believe that they experience icons. That is why the icon culture was immersed in a certain sentimental untruth. This is a dead end in art, it becomes schematic, it becomes traditional.

Raphael's painting, painting that is actually based on what Giotto did with Cimabue, this painting can only remain art as long as the old splendor of beauty still shines on it. To a certain extent, it was the sunny Renaissance painters who still felt something of the gold weaving in the light and at least gave their pictures the radiance with which the gold weaving in the light made them shine from the outside.

But that came to an end. And that is how naturalism came about. And so today, in terms of art, humanity is caught between two stools on the ground, between the icon and the Madonna, and is dependent on discovering what pure weaving color and pure weaving sound is, with their opposite weight, opposite to measurability, to weighable countability. We must learn to paint from color. Even if we approach this today tentatively and poorly, it is our task to paint from color, to experience color itself, detached from the heaviness of experiencing color itself. In these things, one must be able to proceed consciously, also artistically consciously.

And if you look at what has been achieved in the simple attempts at our programs, you will see that, even if it is only a beginning, a start has been made to free colors from heaviness, to experience color as an element in itself, to make colors speak. If we succeed, then, in contrast to the unartistic physical world view that allows all art to evaporate, an art is created from the free elements of color and sound that is free from heaviness.

Yes, we are also sitting between two chairs, between the icon and the Madonna, but we have to get up. Physical science will not help us here. I have told you: one must always remain lying down if one applies only physical science to the human being. But now we must get up! For that we really need spiritual science. This contains the element of life that carries us from heaviness to the weightless color, to the reality of color, from the very bondage in musical naturalism to the free musical art and so on.

In all areas, we see how it is about a rousing, about an awakening of humanity. That is it, that we should take up this impulse to awaken, to look out, to see what is and what is not, and everywhere the challenges lie to move forward. That is why I really had to conclude with just such reflections, as I have brought to you, both at the delegates' meeting and now in these days, before this summer break, which is due to the English trip. These things are already getting to the nerve of our time. And it is necessary that one lets the other shine into our movement, as I have tried to hint at.

I have described how the modern philosopher has come to admit: What does this intellectualism lead to? Building a giant machine that you place in the center of the earth to blast the earth out into all the spaces of the universe! He admitted that this is the case. The others do not admit it to themselves!

And so I have tried in the most diverse places – for example, when I showed you yesterday how the concepts that were still there thirty or forty years ago are now being dissolved by the theory of relativity, simply melting away like snow in the sun – I have tried to show you how everywhere you look there are calls to really strive towards anthroposophy. For, as the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann says: If the world is as we have to imagine it – that is, as he imagines it in the 19th century – then we must actually, because we cannot endure it in it, blow it up into space, and it is only a matter of our being so far that we can carry it out. We must long for the time when we can blast the world into all the expanses of the universe. Before that happens, relativists will have ensured that people no longer have any concepts! Space, time, movement dissolve, then one can already fall into such despair that under certain conditions one already sees the greatest satisfaction in this blasting out into the whole universe. But you just have to familiarize yourself with what lies as certain impulses in our time.

That is what has caused the last lectures to be held in the way they have been: where external culture shines into our ranks. They were also an invitation to open our eyes. And I tried to shape these lectures in such a way that they show what it means: the Anthroposophical Society should make every effort to get out of sectarianism, to get beyond sectarianism.

My dear friends, I am sorry to have to say goodbye to you for a few weeks with these words, but I would like you to use this time to reflect on how to get out of this sectarianism! Otherwise, the situation will arise that the Anthroposophical Society will get more and more into sectarianism. And there are strong tendencies not to throw off the sectarianism, but to sail right into the sectarian nature.

How it is possible to avoid sectarianism is something that must occupy our feelings. And I wanted to touch on this point very briefly because it is extremely necessary to do so. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that, in these last lectures, I have tried to speak in such a way that, so to speak, we look out into the world everywhere, that there is no spinning into a sect, but a life in the world with open eyes, with a practical mind, an inner connection with the world. This is entirely compatible with the utmost immersion in the spiritual. That is why I told you that today a person must even know that there may be an Indian today, Rãmanãthan, who looks at European culture and says to the Europeans: Let yourselves be taught about the Jesus of India, because you understand nothing about Jesus Christ. We only understood the matter when we started reading the New Testament.

If we allow ourselves to become ensnared in such sectarianism, as there were strong tendencies towards during the delegates' meeting, then we will not achieve the great task of anthroposophy in the present, and this must be achieved, because 'it is a human task.

Having said this, I would like to take leave of you for a few weeks and we will announce the next events in due course. In the next few weeks, lectures and eurythmy performances will take place at various locations in England.

So we want to prepare ourselves for a summer break in such a way that during this summer break we let our hearts be particularly alert to the right feeling of how we should feel so that the development of humanity can continue in the right way.

Conditions

[ 1 ] There slumber in every human being faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds. Mystics, Gnostics, Theosophists—all speak of a world of soul and spirit which for them is just as real as the world we see with our physical eyes and touch with our physical hands. At every moment the listener may say to himself: that, of which they speak, I too can learn, if I develop within myself certain powers which today still slumber within me. There remains only one question—how to set to work to develop such faculties. For this purpose, they only can give advice who already possess such powers. As long as the human race has existed there has always been a method of training, in the course of which individuals possessing these higher faculties gave instruction to others who were in search of them. Such a training is called occult (esoteric) training, and the instruction received therefrom is called occult (esoteric) teaching, or spiritual science. This designation naturally awakens misunderstanding. The one who hears it may very easily be misled into the belief that this training is the concern of a special, privileged class, withholding its knowledge arbitrarily from its fellow-creatures. He may even think that nothing of real importance lies behind such knowledge, for if it were a true knowledge—he is tempted to think—there would be no need of making a secret of it; it might be publicly imparted and its advantages made accessible to all. [ 2 ] Those who have been initiated into the nature of this higher knowledge are not in the least surprised that the uninitiated should so think, for the secret of initiation can only be understood by those who have to a certain degree experienced this initiation into the higher knowledge of existence. The question may be raised: how, then, under these circumstances, are the uninitiated to develop any human interest in this so-called esoteric knowledge? How and why are they to seek for something of whose nature they can form no idea? Such a question is based upon an entirely erroneous conception of the real nature of esoteric knowledge. There is, in truth, no difference between esoteric knowledge and all the rest of man's knowledge and proficiency. This esoteric knowledge is no more of a secret for the average human being than writing is a secret for those who have never learned it. And just as all can learn to write who choose the correct method, so, too, can all who seek the right way become esoteric students and even teachers. In one respect only do the conditions here differ from those that apply to external knowledge and proficiency. The possibility of acquiring the art of writing may be withheld from someone through poverty, or through the conditions of civilization into which he is born; but for the attainment of knowledge and proficiency in the higher worlds, there is no obstacle for those who earnestly seek them.

[ 3 ] Many believe that they must seek, at one place or another, the masters of higher knowledge in order to receive enlightenment. Now in the first place, whoever strives earnestly after higher knowledge will shun no exertion and fear no obstacle in his search for an initiate who can lead him to the higher knowledge of the world. On the other hand, everyone may be certain that initiation will find him under all circumstances if he gives proof of an earnest and worthy endeavor to attain this knowledge. It is a natural law among all initiates to withhold from no man the knowledge that is due him but there is an equally natural law which lays down that no word of esoteric knowledge shall be imparted to anyone not qualified to receive it. And the more strictly he observes these laws, the more perfect is an initiate. The bond of union embracing all initiates is spiritual and not external, but the two laws here mentioned form, as it were, strong clasps by which the component parts of this bond are held together. You may live in intimate friendship with an initiate, and yet a gap severs you from his essential self, so long as you have not become an initiate yourself. You may enjoy in the fullest sense the heart, the love of an initiate, yet he will only confide his knowledge to you when you are ripe for it. You may flatter him; you may torture him; nothing can induce him to betray anything to you as long as you, at the present stage of your evolution, are not competent to receive it into your soul in the right way.

[ 4 ] The methods by which a student is prepared for the reception of higher knowledge are minutely prescribed. The direction he is to take is traced with unfading, everlasting letters in the worlds of the spirit where the initiates guard the higher secrets. In ancient times, anterior to our history, the temples of the spirit were also outwardly visible; today, because our life has become so unspiritual, they are not to be found in the world visible to external sight; yet they are present spiritually everywhere, and all who seek may find them.

[ 5 ] Only within his own soul can a man find the means to unseal the lips of an initiate. He must develop within himself certain faculties to a definite degree, and then the highest treasures of the spirit can become his own.

[ 6 ] He must begin with a certain fundamental attitude of soul. In spiritual science this fundamental attitude is called the path of veneration, of devotion to truth and knowledge. Without this attitude no one can become a student. The disposition shown in their childhood by subsequent students of higher knowledge is well known to the experienced in these matters. There are children who look up with religious awe to those whom they venerate. For such people they have a respect which forbids them, even in the deepest recess of their heart, to harbor any thought of criticism or opposition. Such children grow up into young men and women who feel happy when they are able to look up to anything that fills them with veneration. From the ranks of such children are recruited many students of higher knowledge. Have you ever paused outside the door of some venerated person, and have you, on this your first visit, felt a religious awe as you pressed on the handle to enter the room which for you is a holy place? If so, a feeling has been manifested within you which may be the germ of your future adherence to the path of knowledge. It is a blessing for every human being in process of development to have such feelings upon which to build. Only it must not be thought that this disposition leads to submissiveness and slavery. What was once a childlike veneration for persons becomes, later, a veneration for truth and knowledge. Experience teaches that they can best hold their heads erect who have learnt to venerate where veneration is due; and veneration is always fitting when it flows from the depths of the heart.

[ 7 ] If we do not develop within ourselves this deeply rooted feeling that there is something higher than ourselves, we shall never find the strength to evolve to something higher. The initiate has only acquired the strength to lift his head to the heights of knowledge by guiding his heart to the depths of veneration and devotion. The heights of the spirit can only be climbed by passing through the portals of humility. You can only acquire right knowledge when you have learnt to esteem it. Man has certainly the right to turn his eyes to the light, but he must first acquire this right. There are laws in the spiritual life, as in the physical life. Rub a glass rod with an appropriate material and it will become electric, that is, it will receive the power of attracting small bodies. This is in keeping with a law of nature. It is known to all who have learnt a little physics. Similarly, acquaintance with the first principles of spiritual science shows that every feeling of true devotion harbored in the soul develops a power which may, sooner or later, lead further on the path of knowledge.

[ 8 ] The student who is gifted with this feeling, or who is fortunate enough to have had it inculcated in a suitable education, brings a great deal along with him when, later in life, he seeks admittance to higher knowledge. Failing such preparation, he will encounter difficulties at the very first step, unless he undertakes, by rigorous self-education, to create within himself this inner life of devotion. In our time it is especially important that full attention be paid to this point. Our civilization tends more toward critical judgment and condemnation than toward devotion and selfless veneration. Our children already criticize far more than they worship. But every criticism, every adverse judgment passed, disperses the powers of the soul for the attainment of higher knowledge in the same measure that all veneration and reverence develops them. In this we do not wish to say anything against our civilization. There is no question here of leveling criticism against it. To this critical faculty, this self-conscious human judgment, this “test all things and hold fast what is best,” we owe the greatness of our civilization. Man could never have attained to the science, the industry, the commerce, the rights relationships of our time, had he not applied to all things the standard of his critical judgment. But what we have thereby gained in external culture we have had to pay for with a corresponding loss of higher knowledge of spiritual life. It must be emphasized that higher knowledge is not concerned with the veneration of persons but the veneration of truth and knowledge.

[ 9 ] Now, the one thing that everyone must acknowledge is the difficulty for those involved in the external civilization of our time to advance to the knowledge of the higher worlds. They can only do so if they work energetically at themselves. At a time when the conditions of material life were simpler, the attainment of spiritual knowledge was also easier. Objects of veneration and worship stood out in clearer relief from the ordinary things of the world. In an epoch of criticism ideals are lowered; other feelings take the place of veneration, respect, adoration, and wonder. Our own age thrusts these feelings further and further into the background, so that they can only be conveyed to man through his every-day life in a very small degree. Whoever seeks higher knowledge must create it for himself. He must instill it into his soul. It cannot be done by study; it can only be done through life. Whoever, therefore, wishes to become a student of higher knowledge must assiduously cultivate this inner life of devotion. Everywhere in his environment and his experiences he must seek motives of admiration and homage. If I meet a man and blame him for his shortcomings, I rob myself of power to attain higher knowledge; but if I try to enter lovingly into his merits, I gather such power. The student must continually be intent upon following this advice. The spiritually experienced know how much they owe to the circumstance that in face of all things they ever again turn to the good, and withhold adverse judgement. But this must not remain an external rule of life; rather it must take possession of our innermost soul. Man has it in his power to perfect himself and, in time, completely to transform himself. But this transformation must take place in his innermost self, in his thought-life. It is not enough that I show respect only in my outward bearing; I must have this respect in my thoughts. The student must begin by absorbing this devotion into this thought-life. He must be wary of thoughts of disrespect, of adverse criticism, existing in his consciousness, and he must endeavor straightaway to cultivate thoughts of devotion.

[ 10 ] Every moment that we set ourselves to discover in our consciousness whatever there remains in it of adverse, disparaging and critical judgement of the world and of life; every such moment brings us nearer to higher knowledge. And we rise rapidly when we fill our consciousness in such moments with thoughts evoking in us admiration, respect and veneration for the world and for life. It is well known to those experienced in these matters that in every such moment powers are awakened which otherwise remain dormant. In this way the spiritual eyes of man are opened. He begins to see things around him which he could not have seen before. He begins to understand that hitherto he had only seen a part of the world around him. A human being standing before him now presents a new and different aspect. Of course, this rule of life alone will not yet enable him to see, for instance, what is described as the human aura, because for this still higher training is necessary. But he can rise to this higher training if he has previously undergone a rigorous training in devotion. (In the last chapter of his book Theosophy, the author describes fully the Path of Knowledge; here it is intended to give some practical details.)

[ 11 ] Noiseless and unnoticed by the outer world is the treading of the Path of Knowledge. No change need be noticed in the student. He performs his duties as hitherto; he attends to his business as before. The transformation goes on only in the inner part of the soul hidden from outward sight. At first his entire inner life is flooded by this basic feeling of devotion for everything which is truly venerable. His entire soul-life finds in this fundamental feeling its pivot. Just as the sun's rays vivify everything living, so does reverence in the student vivify all feelings of the soul.

[ 12 ] It is not easy, at first, to believe that feelings like reverence and respect have anything to do with cognition. This is due to the fact that we are inclined to set cognition aside as a faculty by itself—one that stands in no relation to what otherwise occurs in the soul. In so thinking we do not bear in mind that it is the soul which exercises the faculty of cognition; and feelings are for the soul what food is for the body. If we give the body stones in place of bread, its activity will cease. It is the same with the soul. Veneration, homage, devotion are like nutriment making it healthy and strong, especially strong for the activity of cognition. Disrespect, antipathy, underestimation of what deserves recognition, all exert a paralyzing and withering effect on this faculty of cognition. For the spiritually experienced this fact is visible in the aura. A soul which harbors feelings of reverence and devotion produces a change in its aura. Certain spiritual colorings, as they may be called, yellow-red and brown-red in tone, vanish and are replaced by blue-red tints. Thereby the cognitional faculty is ripened; it receives intelligence of facts in its environment of which it had hitherto no idea. Reverence awakens in the soul a sympathetic power through which we attract qualities in the beings around us, which would otherwise remain concealed.

[ 13 ] The power obtained through devotion can be rendered still more effective when the life of feeling is enriched by yet another quality. This consists in giving oneself up less and less to impressions of the outer world, and to develop instead a vivid inner life. A person who darts from one impression of the outer world to another, who constantly seeks distraction, cannot find the way to higher knowledge. The student must not blunt himself to the outer world, but while lending himself to its impressions, he should be directed by his rich inner life. When passing through a beautiful mountain district, the traveler with depth of soul and wealth of feeling has different experiences from one who is poor in feeling. Only what we experience within ourselves unlocks for us the beauties of the outer world. One person sails across the ocean, and only a few inward experiences pass through his soul; another will hear the eternal language of the cosmic spirit; for him are unveiled the mysterious riddles of existence. We must learn to remain in touch with our own feelings and ideas if we wish to develop any intimate relationship with the outer world. The outer world with all its phenomena is filled with splendor, but we must have experienced the divine within ourselves before we can hope to discover it in our environment.

The student is told to set apart moments in his daily life in which to withdraw into himself, quietly and alone. He is not to occupy himself at such moments with the affairs of his own ego. This would result in the contrary of what is intended. He should rather let his experiences and the messages from the outer world re-echo within his own completely silent self. At such silent moments every flower, every animal, every action will unveil to him secrets undreamt of. And thus he will prepare himself to receive quite new impressions of the outer world through quite different eyes. The desire to enjoy impression after impression merely blunts the faculty of cognition; the latter, however, is nurtured and cultivated if the enjoyment once experienced is allowed to reveal its message. Thus the student must accustom himself not merely to let the enjoyment reverberate, as it were, but rather to renounce any further enjoyment, and work upon the past experience. The peril here is very great. Instead of working inwardly, it is very easy to fall into the opposite habit of trying to exploit the enjoyment. Let no one underestimate the fact that immense sources of error here confront the student. He must pass through a host of tempters of his soul. They would all harden his ego and imprison it within itself. He should rather open it wide to all the world. It is necessary that he should seek enjoyment, for only through enjoyment can the outer world reach him. If he blunts himself to enjoyment he is like a plant which cannot any longer draw nourishment from its environment. Yet if he stops short at the enjoyment he shuts himself up within himself. He will only be something to himself and nothing to the world. However much he may live within himself, however intensely he may cultivate his ego—the world will reject him. To the world he is dead. The student of higher knowledge considers enjoyment only as a means of ennobling himself for the world. Enjoyment is to him like a scout informing him about the world; but once instructed by enjoyment, he passes on to work. He does not learn in order to accumulate learning as his own treasure, but in order that he may devote his learning to the service of the world.

[ 15 ] In all spiritual science there is a fundamental principle which cannot be transgressed without sacrificing success, and it should be impressed on the student in every form of esoteric training. It runs as follows: All knowledge pursued merely for the enrichment of personal learning and the accumulation of personal treasure leads you away from the path; but all knowledge pursued for growth to ripeness within the process of human ennoblement and cosmic development brings you a step forward. This law must be strictly observed, and no student is genuine until he has adopted it as a guide for his whole life. This truth can be expressed in the following short sentence: Every idea which does not become your ideal slays a force in your soul; every idea which becomes your ideal creates within you life-forces.

Inner Tranquility

[ 15 ] At the very beginning of his course, the student is directed to the path of veneration and the development of the inner life. Spiritual science now also gives him practical rules by observing which he may tread that path and develop that inner life. These practical rules have no arbitrary origin. They rest upon ancient experience and ancient wisdom, and are given out in the same manner, wheresoever the ways to higher knowledge are indicated. All true teachers of the spiritual life are in agreement as to the substance of these rules, even though they do not always clothe them in the same words. This difference, which is of a minor character and is more apparent than real, is due to circumstances which need not be dwelt upon here.

[ 16 ] No teacher of the spiritual life wishes to establish a mastery over other persons by means of such rules. He would not tamper with anyone's independence. Indeed, none respect and cherish human independence more than the spiritually experienced. It was stated in the preceding pages that the bond of union embracing all initiates is spiritual, and that two laws form, as it were, clasps by which the component parts of this bond are held together. Whenever the initiate leaves his enclosed spiritual sphere and steps forth before the world, he must immediately take a third law into account. It is this: Adapt each one of your actions, and frame each one of your words in such a way that you infringe upon no one's free-will.

[ 17 ] The recognition that all true teachers of the spiritual life are permeated through and through with this principle will convince all who follow the practical rules proffered to them that they need sacrifice none of their independence.

[ 18 ] One of the first of these rules can be expressed somewhat in the following words of our language: Provide for yourself moments of inner tranquility, and in these moments learn to distinguish between the essential and the non-essential. It is said advisedly: “expressed in the words of our language.” Originally all rules and teachings of spiritual science were expressed in a symbolical sign-language, some understanding of which must be acquired before its whole meaning and scope can be realized. This understanding is dependent on the first steps toward higher knowledge, and these steps result from the exact observation of such rules as are here given. For all who earnestly will, the path stands open to tread.

[ 19 ] Simple, in truth, is the above rule concerning moments of inner tranquility; equally simple is its observation. But it only achieves its purpose when it is observed in as earnest and strict a manner as it is, in itself, simple. How this rule is to be observed will, therefore, be explained without digression.

[ 20 ] The student must set aside a small part of his daily life in which to concern himself with something quite different from the objects of his daily occupation. The way, also, in which he occupies himself at such a time must differ entirely from the way in which he performs the rest of his daily duties. But this does not mean that what he does in the time thus set apart has no connection with his daily work. On the contrary, he will soon find that just these secluded moments, when sought in the right way, give him full power to perform his daily task[s]. Nor must it be supposed that the observance of this rule will really encroach upon the time needed for the performance of his duties. Should anyone really have no more time at his disposal, five minutes a day will suffice. It all depends on the manner in which these five minutes are spent.

[ 21 ] During these periods the student should wrest himself entirely free from his work-a-day life. His thoughts and feelings should take on a different coloring. His joys and sorrows, his cares, experiences and actions must pass in review before his soul; and he must adopt such a position that he may regard all his sundry experiences from a higher point of view.

We need only bear in mind how, in ordinary life, we regard the experiences and actions of others quite differently from our own. This cannot be otherwise, for we are interwoven with our own actions and experiences, whereas those of others we only contemplate. Our aim in these moments of seclusion must be so to contemplate and judge our own actions and experiences as though they applied not to ourselves but to some other person. Suppose, for example, a heavy misfortune befalls us. How different would be our attitude toward a similar misfortune had it befallen our neighbor. This attitude cannot be blamed as unjustifiable; it is part of human nature, and applies equally to exceptional circumstances and to the daily affairs of life. The student must seek the power of confronting himself, at certain times, as a stranger. He must stand before himself with the inner tranquility of a judge. When this is attained, our own experiences present themselves in a new light. As long as we are interwoven with them and stand, as it were, within them, we cling to the non-essential just as much as to the essential. If we attain the calm inner survey, the essential is severed from the non-essential. Sorrow and joy, every thought, every resolve, appear different when we confront ourselves in this way. It is as though we had spent the whole day in a place where we beheld the smallest objects at the same close range as the largest, and in the evening climbed a neighboring hill and surveyed the whole scene at a glance. Then the various parts appear related to each other in different proportions from those they bore when seen from within. This exercise will not and need not succeed with present occurrences of destiny, but it should be attempted by the student in connection with the events of destiny already experienced in the past. The value of such inner tranquil self-contemplation depends far less on what is actually contemplated than on our finding within ourselves the power which such inner tranquility develops.

[ 22 ] For every human being bears a higher man within himself besides what we may call the work-a-day man. This higher man remains hidden until he is awakened. And each human being can himself alone awaken this higher being within himself. As long as this higher being is not awakened, the higher faculties slumbering in every human being, and leading to supersensible knowledge, will remain concealed. [ 23 ] The student must resolve to persevere in the strict and earnest observation of the rule here given, so long as he does not feel within himself the fruits of this inner tranquility. To all who thus persevere the day will come when spiritual light will envelop them, and a new world will be revealed to an organ of sight of whose presence within them they were never aware.

[ 24 ] And no change need take place in the outward life of the student in consequence of this new rule. He performs his duties and, at first, feels the same joys, sorrows, and experiences as before. In no way can it estrange him from life; he can rather devote himself the more thoroughly to this life for the remainder of the day, having gained a higher life in the moments set apart. Little by little this higher life will make its influence felt on his ordinary life. The tranquility of the moments set apart will also affect everyday existence. In his whole being he will grow calmer; he will attain firm assurance in all his actions, and cease to be put out of countenance by all manner of incidents. By thus advancing he will gradually become more and more his own guide, and allow himself less and less to be led by circumstances and external influences. He will soon discover how great a source of strength is available to him in these moments thus set apart. He will begin no longer to get angry at things which formerly annoyed him; countless things he formerly feared cease to alarm him. He acquires a new outlook on life. Formerly he may have approached some occupation in a fainthearted way. He would say: “Oh, I lack the power to do this as well as I could wish.” Now this thought does not occur to him, but rather a quite different thought. Henceforth he says to himself: “I will summon all my strength to do my work as well as I possibly can.” And he suppresses the thought which makes him faint-hearted; for he knows that this very thought might be the cause of a worse performance on his part, and that in any case it cannot contribute to the improvement of his work. And thus thought after thought, each fraught with advantage to his whole life, flows into the student's outlook. They take the place of those that had a hampering, weakening effect. He begins to steer his own ship on a secure course through the waves of life, whereas it was formerly battered to and fro by these waves.

[ 25 ] This calm and serenity react on the whole being. They assist the growth of the inner man, and, with the inner man, those faculties also grow which lead to higher knowledge. For it is by his progress in this direction that the student gradually reaches the point where he himself determines the manner in which the impressions of the outer world shall affect him. Thus he may hear a word spoken with the object of wounding or vexing him. Formerly it would indeed have wounded or vexed him, but now that he treads the path to higher knowledge, he is able—before the word has found its way to his inner self—to take from it the sting which gives it the power to wound or vex. Take another example. We easily become impatient when we are kept waiting, but—if we tread the path to higher knowledge—we so steep ourselves in our moments of calm with the feeling of the uselessness of impatience that henceforth, on every occasion of impatience, this feeling is immediately present within us. The impatience that was about to make itself felt vanishes, and an interval which would otherwise have been wasted in expressions of impatience will be filled by useful observations, which can be made while waiting.

[ 26 ] Now, the scope and significance of these facts must be realized. We must bear in mind that the higher man within us is in constant development. But only the state of calm and serenity here described renders an orderly development possible. The waves of outward life constrain the inner man from all sides if, instead of mastering this outward life, it masters him. Such a man is like a plant which tries to expand in a cleft in the rock and is stunted in growth until new space is given it. No outward forces can supply space to the inner man. It can only be supplied by the inner calm which man himself gives to his soul. Outward circumstances can only alter the course of his outward life; they can never awaken the inner spiritual man. The student must himself give birth to a new and higher man within himself.

[ 27 ] This higher man now becomes the inner ruler who directs the circumstances of the outer man with sure guidance. As long as the outer man has the upper hand and control, this inner man is his slave and therefore cannot unfold his powers. If it depends on something other than myself whether I should get angry or not, I am not master of myself, or, to put it better, I have not yet found the ruler within myself. I must develop the faculty of letting the impressions of the outer world approach me only in the way in which I myself determine; then only do I become in the real sense a student. And only in as far as the student earnestly seeks this power can he reach the goal. It is of no importance how far anyone can go in a given time; the point is that he should earnestly seek. Many have striven for years without noticing any appreciable progress; but many of those who did not despair, but remained unshaken, have then quite suddenly achieved the inner victory.

[ 28 ] No doubt a great effort is required in many stations of life to provide these moments of inner calm; but the greater the effort needed, the more important is the achievement. In spiritual science everything depends upon energy, inward truthfulness, and uncompromising sincerity with which we confront our own selves, with all our deeds and actions, as a complete stranger.

[ 29 ] But only one side of the student's inner activity is characterized by this birth of his own higher being. Something else is needed in addition. Even if he confronts himself as a stranger it is only himself that he contemplates; he looks on those experiences and actions with which he is connected through his particular station of life. He must now disengage himself from it and rise beyond to a purely human level, which no longer has anything to do with his own special situation. He must pass on to the contemplation of those things which would concern him as a human being, even if he lived under quite different circumstances and in quite a different situation. In this way something begins to live within him which ranges above the purely personal. His gaze is directed to worlds higher than those with which every-day life connects him. And thus he begins to feel and realize, as an inner experience, that he belongs to those higher worlds. These are worlds concerning which his senses and his daily occupation can tell him nothing. Thus he now shifts the central point of his being to the inner part of his nature. He listens to the voices within him which speak to him in his moments of tranquility; he cultivates an intercourse with the spiritual world. He is removed from the every-day world. Its noise is silenced. All around him there is silence. He puts away everything that reminds him of such impressions from without. Calm inward contemplation and converse with the purely spiritual world fill his soul.—Such tranquil contemplation must become a natural necessity in the life of the student. He is now plunged in a world of thought. He must develop a living feeling for this silent thought-activity. He must learn to love what the spirit pours into him. He will soon cease to feel that this thought-world is less real than the every-day things which surround him. He begins to deal with his thoughts as with things in space, and the moment approaches when he begins to feel that which reveals itself in the silent inward thought-work to be much higher, much more real, than the things in space. He discovers that something living expresses itself in this thought-world. He sees that his thoughts do not merely harbor shadow-pictures, but that through them hidden beings speak to him. Out of the silence, speech becomes audible to him. Formerly sound only reached him through his ear; now it resounds through his soul. An inner language, an inner word is revealed to him. This moment, when first experienced, is one of greatest rapture for the student. An inner light is shed over the whole external world, and a second life begins for him. Through his being there pours a divine stream from a world of divine rapture.

[ 30 ] This life of the soul in thought, which gradually widens into a life in spiritual being, is called by Gnosis, and by Spiritual Science, Meditation (contemplative reflection). This meditation is the means to supersensible knowledge. But the student in such moments must not merely indulge in feelings; he must not have indefinite sensations in his soul. That would only hinder him from reaching true spiritual knowledge. His thoughts must be clear, sharp and definite, and he will be helped in this if he does not cling blindly to the thoughts that rise within him. Rather must he permeate himself with the lofty thoughts by which men already advanced and possessed of the spirit were inspired at such moments. He should start with the writings which themselves had their origin in just such revelation during meditation. In the mystic, gnostic and spiritual scientific literature of today the student will find such writings, and in them the material for his meditation. The seekers of the spirit have themselves set down in such writings the thoughts of the divine science which the Spirit has directed his messengers to proclaim to the world.

[ 31 ] Through such meditation a complete transformation takes place in the student. He begins to form quite new conceptions of reality. All things acquire a fresh value for him. It cannot be repeated too often that this transformation does not alienate him from the world. He will in no way be estranged from his daily tasks and duties, for he comes to realize that the most insignificant action he has to accomplish, the most insignificant experience which offers itself to him, stands in connection with cosmic beings and cosmic events. When once this connection is revealed to him in his moments of contemplation, he comes to his daily activities with a new, fuller power. For now he knows that his labor and his suffering are given and endured for the sake of a great, spiritual, cosmic whole. Not weariness, but strength to live springs from meditation.

[ 32 ] With firm step the student passes through life. No matter what it may bring him, he goes forward erect. In the past he knew not why he labored and suffered, but now he knows. It is obvious that such meditation leads more surely to the goal if conducted under the direction of experienced persons who know of themselves how everything may best be done; and their advice and guidance should be sought. Truly, no one loses his freedom thereby. What would otherwise be mere uncertain groping in the dark becomes under this direction purposeful work. All who apply to those possessing knowledge and experience in these matters will never apply in vain, only they must realize that what they seek is the advice of a friend, not the domination of a would-be ruler. It will always be found that they who really know are the most modest of men, and that nothing is further from their nature than what is called the lust for power.

[ 33 ] When, by means of meditation, a man rises to union with the spirit, he brings to life the eternal in him, which is limited by neither birth nor death. The existence of this eternal being can only be doubted by those who have not themselves experienced it. Thus meditation is the way which also leads man to the knowledge, to the contemplation of his eternal, indestructible, essential being; and it is only through meditation that man can attain to such knowledge. Gnosis and Spiritual Science tell of the eternal nature of this being and of its reincarnation. The question is often asked: Why does a man know nothing of his experiences beyond the borders of life and death? Not thus should we ask, but rather: How can we attain such knowledge? In right meditation the path is opened. This alone can revive the memory of experiences beyond the border of life and death. Everyone can attain this knowledge; in each one of us lies the faculty of recognizing and contemplating for ourselves what genuine Mysticism, Spiritual Science, Anthroposophy, and Gnosis teach. Only the right means must be chosen. Only a being with ears and eyes can apprehend sounds and colors; nor can the eye perceive if the light which makes things visible is wanting. Spiritual Science gives the means of developing the spiritual ears and eyes, and of kindling the spiritual light; and this method of spiritual training: (1) Preparation; this develops the spiritual senses. (2) Enlightenment; this kindles the spiritual light. (3) Initiation; this establishes intercourse with the higher spiritual beings.