The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the last lecture, my task in connection with our study of Thought, Feeling, Will and Perception, was to impart a few esoteric experiences which the human soul undergoes, when as a spiritual investigator it lives outside the body with the intention of experiencing something concerning the inner nature of man. To-day I shall try to bring forward other experiences from a different aspect, because only when we observe life from different spiritual points of view are we really able to arrive at the true explanation of it.

You will remember, that in the last lectures we tried to describe what the human soul first sees when, from outside the body, it looks back at its own body and on all that is connected with it physically; and then how it afterwards discovers what the astral body and Ego of man experience when they strengthen themselves more and more in the sphere into which they enter when outside the body. Now there is another way of considering the same matter and indeed it is of supreme importance in true, spiritual research, to realise that one only really solves the riddle of existence through spiritual observation, when a matter is considered from various sides. There is another way of leaving the body. I might say that the way I described in the last lecture showed us the soul leaving the body, so that it simply goes out of the body into space and begins to live there outside the body. This process of leaving the body can also take place in the following manner. In order to find the way out of oneself, one may try to begin with, to enter more deeply into oneself; one may try to connect oneself with spiritual experiences through that in the soul which is most similar to them, one may try to connect oneself with these experiences through one's memory. I have often said that because as human souls we are not only able to perceive, to think, to feel and to will, but are also able to store up our thoughts and perceptions as a treasure in the memory, we are thereby really able to change our inner life into something spiritual. In recent public lectures I mentioned that the French philosopher Bergson says that the treasure of memory in the human soul cannot be considered as directly connected with the body, but rather as an interior possession of the soul, as something which the soul develops, something which is purely of the soul and spirit.

In fact, when Imagination begins in the clairvoyant consciousness, when from the darkness of spiritual existence the first impressions emerge, these first impressions are very similar in quality and in their whole nature to the contents of the soul which we bear within us as the treasure of memory. When we begin to perceive with clairvoyant consciousness, the revelations from the spiritual world appear in us like memory pictures, but infinitely more spiritual. We then notice that the treasure of our memory is the first really spiritual thing through which we lift ourselves, to a certain extent, out of our body. But then we have to go further, we have to draw forth from spiritual depths fleeting pictures, such as those memory presents to us, but much more living; pictures which do not belong to our experience like the ideas in memory, but which rise, as it were, behind the memory. This must be borne in mind. Something comes forth from unfamiliar spiritual realms, whereas the treasure of memory comes forth from what we have experienced in physical life.

Now, if we try to turn our spiritual gaze to the experiences of our Ego during the years that have passed since our childhood, back as far as our memory extends, if we try to shut out everything external and live entirely within ourselves, so that we penetrate more and more deeply into our memory and draw forth from its treasures what is not usually present, we gradually approach the point of time to which our remembrance extends. And if we do this often, if we acquire a certain amount of practice in calling forth long-forgotten memories—and this can be done—so that we develop a stronger power of memory; if we call forth more and more of what we have forgotten and thereby strengthen the power which evokes memories, we shall find, that just as in a meadow flowers appear among the green blades of grass, so between the memories appear pictures, imaginations of something we have not known before, something that really emerges like flowers among the grass in a meadow, but which comes forth from entirely different spiritual depths than do our memories which only come forth from our own soul. Then we learn to distinguish between what might be connected in any way with our memories, and what comes forth from spiritual sources and spiritual depths. Thus we gradually become able to develop the power to call forth the spiritual from its depths. We thereby get out of our body in a different way from the one described in the last lecture, where one leaves the body directly, as it were. By the method we have just described we first go backwards through our life. We sink into our inner life. Through strengthening our power of remembrance we accustom ourselves to draw forth spiritual things from the spiritual world in our inner life between our memories, and thus at length we attain to where we push on beyond birth and beyond conception, into the spiritual world in which we lived before we were connected in our present incarnation with physical substance through heredity. Returning rapidly through our life we reach out into the spiritual world far back in ‘time’, before we entered into this incarnation. This is the other way of leaving the body and of entering the spiritual world, a way quite different from the one described in the last lecture. Notice this difference carefully, for in this course of lectures I have to acquaint you with very many subtleties and intimate things regarding spiritual life, and it is difficult to describe these in fitting words. It is only when we try to comprehend these differences that we enter correctly into these matters and acquire certainty in our thought about them.

If a person leaves his body in the manner I have just described, he comes out of it quite differently. When he leaves his body in the manner I described in the last lecture, he feels that he is outside his life in outer space. I described how he diffuses himself over external space and how he looks back at his physical body. He slips out of his body and fills space, as it were. He steps out into ‘space’. But if a man really goes through what we are describing to-day, he steps out of space itself; space ceases to have any meaning for him. He leaves space and is then only in ‘time’. So that on leaving his body in this way, the words: ‘I am outside my body’ cease to have any meaning, for outside signifies a relationship in space. He feels that he does not exist contemporaneously with his body, he feels himself in ‘time’; at that time in which he was before his incarnation, in a ‘before’. And he looks upon his body as existing afterwards. He really exists only within onstreaming, onflowing time. In place of ‘outer’ and ‘inner’, comes a ‘before’ and ‘after’.

Through this way of going forth from his body he is really able to enter into the realms we pass through between death and rebirth: for he goes back in time, he lives back into a life in which he lived before his earth-life. Earthly life appears in such a way that he asks: What is in the future? What appears to us there as coming later? In this way, you have a more exact understanding regarding matters which I have been unable to go into so fully in my public lectures, how for instance we enter concretely into the realms in which we live between death and rebirth.

If in this way the pupil has passed out of his body by returning into the life which he had previously lived in the spirit, he has thereby passed out of space. This way of leaving the body, going from the ‘present’ to the ‘previous’, has a much higher degree of inwardness than the other way, and, to the spiritual investigator, the way we have just described is infinitely more important than the way we described in the last lecture which does not get out of space; for that which concerns the deeper matters of the soul can only really be comprehended when one leaves the body in the manner described to-day. And now I might mention one thing, from which you will see how one has to try to get behind the depths and subtleties of human life.

Here in the physical body we live our physical life; we make use of our senses; we perceive the world; we think about the world; we feel in it; through our actions we try to be of value in this world; we act consciously by means of our body. Thus everyday life goes on; this life goes on, in so far as we belong to the physical plane. Now for every one who truly wishes to establish his worth as a human being there must be a higher life and there always has been a higher life of the soul. Religions which inspired men to a higher life have always existed. In the future, Spiritual Science will inspire mankind to this higher life. What is the aim of this higher life? What is the aim of this life which in Thought, Feeling and Perception transcends what the physical plane has to offer, which, in one person is but dim religious ideas, in another through the clear definitions of Spiritual Science, far transcends what the senses can see, what the intellect which is connected with the brain can think, or what man through his body can accomplish in the world? The human soul tends towards a spiritual life. To feel spiritual life within himself, to know something about the spiritual life which goes beyond physical life—this alone it is which gives man his value. We might say that as long as a human being dwells in the physical body he endeavours to enhance his value, he tries to gain a notion of his true destiny, through a life which he conceives as going beyond the physical world, through a presentiment of feeling, a knowledge of the spiritual world. ‘Look up to the spirit, feel that spiritual forces are weaving through the physical world I’—That is fundamentally the note which religion and the life connected with religion should give to man. Anyone who means to bring up a child seriously will take care not to allow this child to grow up with external, material conceptions alone, but will provide it with ideas regarding a super-sensible world.

Let us now, without wishing to draw attention to the limited and dogmatic side of any religion, describe as religion that which draws man out of this physical world. And with respect to what we have just described as the passing of the human soul beyond birth and conception into a previous spiritual world where it is also out of space, let us ask: Is there between death and rebirth, is there in the world into which we enter in the manner we have explained, is there something there which might be called a religion of that spirit-land? Is there something above, which may be compared to religious life on earth? We have already described in many particulars and shall yet have to describe further what a human being goes through between death and rebirth; but let us now ask, is there such a thing as religion in spiritual life? Is there something concerning which one may say that it bears the same relationship to the experiences in the spirit-land as the references to the super-sensible world bear to the everyday life of the physical plane?

Anyone who passes out of his body in the manner we have described arrives at the knowledge that up above in the spirit-land there is also something like a sort of religious life. And, curiously enough, while one experiences everything around one in the spirit-land, spiritual beings and spiritual events, one has there before one continually the picture of the human ideal; this appears like a mighty spiritual structure, throughout spiritual life, or at least for a great part of this life between death and rebirth. Here on earth, we have as religion everything that transcends man; in the spiritual world, we have the Ideal Man himself as religion. We learn that the various Beings of the various spiritual hierarchies permit their forces to work together in order that man may gradually be produced in the world, in the manner described in my book, Occult Science. The aim of the creative activity of the Gods is the Ideal Man. That Ideal Man does not really come to life in physical man as he is at present, but in the noblest spiritual and soul life that it is possible through the perfect development and training of aptitudes which this physical man has within him. Thus a picture of Ideal Man is ever present to the mind of the Gods. This is the religion of the Gods.

On the far shore of Divine existence there rises before the Gods the temple which presents the image of Divine Being in the form of man, as the highest divine work of art, and the special thing is that while man develops in the spirit-land between death and rebirth, he gradually matures so as to be able to see this temple of humanity, this high ideal of humanity. Whereas here upon earth, we recognise that a life of religion has to be our free act, that we have to draw it forth ourselves and that it is also possible for the materialistic mind to deny religion, the reverse is the case in the spirit-land between death and rebirth. The longer we live within the second half of the time between death and rebirth, the more clearly does it appear before us, so that we cannot disregard it, that this most sublime Ideal Man, the goal of the Gods, is always before us. Here on earth a person may be irreligious, because his soul may disregard the spirit as compared to the body; above, it is impossible for him not to see the aim of the Gods, for it stands clearly before his eyes. Thus in the second half of the life between death and rebirth the ideal of humanity stands, as it were, on the shore of existence, that is to say, on the shore of on-flowing time (consider all these expressions as referring to ‘time’ that is outside space). A religion formed on knowledge cannot exist there; for in the spiritual world we realise what the content of religion is. In this sense no one can be irreligious there. The religious ideal of the spirit-land is ever before one, it stands there of itself, it is the goal of the Gods and when we enter upon the second half of our life between death and rebirth it stands before us as the mightiest, the most glorious Imagination. Although we cannot there develop a religion by knowledge, still, under the guidance of the higher Spiritual Beings who are there active for man, we do develop a sort of religion.

While perception or sight cannot be taught, because things are self-evident; our will, our feeling-will and willing-feeling have to be stimulated in the second half of our life between death and rebirth, in order that we may really strive towards what we see there. Into our willing-feeling, into our feeling-will How a divine will and a divine feeling. In order that we may choose the path towards these in the second half of our life between death and rebirth, we are instructed with respect to our willing-feeling;—all these terms are inappropriate for this entirely different life, but still this expression may be used. It is only when a teacher has first called forth ideas in us, that he then works further upon our feelings; but over there it is the case that when one has passed over the point which we have still to describe, midway between death and rebirth, when one has passed that which in my last Mystery Drama, The Soul's Awakening, I describe as the Midnight Hour, there is at first a certain dullness as regards willing and feeling in respect of that which stands as a glorious temple in the distance of ‘time’. Divine forces then send a glowing warmth through the inner powers of our soul. It is a kind of instruction which speaks directly to our inner being, and which has such an effect that we gradually gain the power really to desire to tread the path towards the ideal we see.

Whereas in physical life we may stand in front of a teacher and he may stand before us, and yet we may really feel that he speaks to our heart from outside, we feel that our spiritual teachers, who belong to the higher hierarchies, when they teach us in the manner I have just described, send their own forces directly into our inner being. Earthly teachers speak to us; in the life between death and rebirth spiritual teachers pour their life into our souls, then they instruct us in spiritual religion. Thus we feel these teachers from the higher hierarchies ever more and more within us, we feel ourselves connected with them more and more inwardly, and thereby our inner life becomes stronger. ‘Thou art accepted ever more and more by the Gods; the Gods live in thee more and more, and they help thee to grow inwardly stronger and stronger I’—That is the fundamental feeling throughout the second half of the life between death and rebirth.

Thus we see that everything in that life is so arranged that our experiences run their course in the depths of the soul itself. Now, while being instructed by the Gods, we arrive at a certain point in our experience between death and rebirth—at a very important point. Far away at the most distant point of time we see the ideal of humanity; but the forces which our divine-spiritual teachers can give us are dependent on what we have made of ourselves in the course of our incarnations, in the course of our previous human life. As we turn towards life from the Midnight of the world, we stand exactly midway between death and rebirth; as we follow our life further and further and see the ideal of humanity in the most distant future, we are at a point whence we have the furthest perspective of this ideal of humanity.

When we reach this point we have to say to ourselves—of course we do not say this, we experience it quite inwardly, but it has to be expressed in the words of ordinary life—we have to say to ourselves: ‘Divine Spiritual Forces have worked on thee, they have entered ever more and more deeply within thy soul, they live in thee; but thou hast now arrived at the point where thou canst not fill thyself any more with these forces, for thou wouldst have to be far more perfect if thou wouldst go beyond this point.’ Here an important decision has to be made. At this moment a severe temptation assails us.

The Gods have meant well by us; they have given us all they could in the meantime; they have made us as strong as was possible according to the measure of the power we have so far acquired in life. The strength given us by the Gods is within us, and a temptation comes which says to us: ‘Thou canst follow these Gods; thou canst now allow all that thou art, to enter, as it were, into the forces the Gods have given thee; thou canst go into the spiritual worlds, for the Gods have given thee a very great deal.’ We might at this point spiritualise ourselves entirely. This is the prospect that confronts us. But we could only do this by turning aside from the path leading to the great ideal of humanity. This means, in other words, that we should force our way into the spiritual worlds taking all our imperfections with us, and there they would change into perfection. This they would really do. We might enter with our imperfections, and because we were permeated with divine forces we should become a spiritual being, but this being would have to renounce the possibilities it now has within it, which it has not realised on its path so far, and which lie in the direction of the great ideal of humanity, these it would have to renounce. Each time, before an earthly incarnation takes place, the temptation comes to remain in the spiritual world, to enter into the Spirit and to develop further with what we already have which is now entirely permeated with Divinity, but to renounce what it is possible for us to become more and more as men, along the path to the distant religious ideal of the divinely spiritual world. The temptation assails us to become irreligious with respect to the spirit-land. This temptation is all the stronger because at no time in the evolution of humanity has Lucifer greater power over man than at this moment, when he whispers ‘Seize the opportunity, thou canst remain in the Spirit; thou canst carry over into the spiritual light all that thou has acquired!’ Lucifer tries by every means to make the soul forget the possibilities it yet has within it, and which stand before it as the distant temple on the far shores of time. As humanity now is, a man would not be able to withstand the temptation of Lucifer at this point, if the Spirits to whom Lucifer is opposed did not now take upon themselves the affairs of man. A fight for the human soul takes place, between Lucifer and the Gods who lead man towards his ideal, the Gods who adhere to the religion of the Gods. The result of this fight is that the archetypal image which the human being has formed from his earthly existence, is thrown out of time into space, it is attracted magnetically by special existence. This is also the moment when that magnetic attraction through the parents is felt, when the human being is transported into the sphere of space; when he becomes connected with space. Through this, all that might instil into him the temptation to remain in the spiritual world is veiled. And this veiling is expressed by his being enveloped by the body. He is surrounded by the body in order that he may not see what Lucifer wishes to put before him. And when he is enveloped by the covering of the body, when he sees the world by means of his bodily senses and his bodily intellect, he does not see what he might otherwise strive after in the spiritual world, if he were misled by the Tempter. He does not see it; he sees this world of Spiritual Beings and spiritual events from outside, as revealed to his senses and to the intellect connected with the brain. When he is in the sense-body, the Spirits who watch over him undertake his development.

Let us now ask: How much goes on in the subconscious depths of our soul between birth and death, how much goes on without our knowing anything about it? If we had to do consciously all that occurs in our lives, we could by no means go through our earthly existence. I have already indicated in my book, The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind, that when a person enters into physical incarnation he himself must work plastically on his brain and nervous system. He works upon it, but he works unconsciously. All this is the outcome of a much greater wisdom than that which a human being can comprehend with the intellect that is bound to the senses. Between birth and death a wisdom rules within us which exists behind the world which we see with our senses and concerning which we think with the intellect that is connected with our brain. This wisdom is in the background; it is hidden from us between birth and death, but it controls, it lives and works within us in the subconscious depths of our soul, and in these subconscious depths of our soul it has to take our affairs in hand, because we have to be withdrawn for a time from the vision of that which would be a temptation for us. All the time we live in our body we should—if the Guardian of the Threshold did not withhold from us the vision into the spiritual world—be tempted step by step to abandon our still undeveloped human possibilities and to follow the upward sweep into the spiritual worlds, taking with us all our imperfections, instead of allowing ourselves to be guided thereto through careful training. We have need of our earthly life so as to be withdrawn during this time from the temptation of Lucifer.

Up to the time mentioned, when we are led forth into space, Lucifer has no power over us and there is always the possibility of progress; but he draws near at the time we have to make the decision. We can make no further progress through our previous life, so we wish to turn aside with all our imperfections and remain in the spiritual world. The Gods of progress, to whom Lucifer is opposed, protect us from this by withdrawing us from the spiritual world, by hiding themselves from us and from the spiritual world, doing that which has to be accomplished in us without our being conscious of it. Thus we stand here as human beings in the world, conscious in our physical body, and say: ‘We give ye thanks, ye Gods! Ye have given us the power to know as much of the world as is good for us; for if we were to see beyond the threshold of the present horizon of our consciousness we should be in danger every moment of not wishing to reach the goal of humanity.’ We have to be transported into the world of space from that bright, higher condition of consciousness in which we live between death and rebirth—when spiritual worlds and spiritual beings surround us, when we are in the spirit, in order that in the world of space that world may be hidden from us which we are unable to endure until we have passed through the period between birth and death. During the time we dwell on earth, through our having been withdrawn from the spiritual world, through this spiritual world not having worked upon us and through material objects alone having surrounded us—we have again received a new impulse towards the distant goal of the ideal of humanity. For the divine Spirits who drive us forward work in us the whole time we live upon earth, during which time we do not see consciously into the spiritual world. They work in such a manner that they are not disturbed by our state of consciousness, they are not disturbed by our being tempted to follow Lucifer. They instil so much power into us, that, when we pass through the portal of death, we are able again to press forward a little further towards the ideal of humanity.

What I have just indicated in these words is another mystery which lies behind human existence. I think it is good for us at this Eastertide to consider those conditions of life which are attained by going out of the body in a more inward way; to consider the relationship between death and rebirth and the life we afterwards pass in the physical body. We then observe life between death and rebirth and become aware of the guidance of the good Spiritual Beings who are helping us onward. We look up to these Divine Beings as to our past life in the spirit, and we understand that our present existence in the body between birth and death has been lent to us by the Gods, in order that without our doing anything towards it, they may be able to take care of us so that we may develop further. While we perceive the world, while we think in the world, feel in it, will in it, while we store up our treasure of memory in order to have a connected existence in physical life;—behind it all, behind our conscious life, Divine Spiritual Beings are active; guiding onward the stream of time. They have sent us forth into space in order that we may there have exactly as much consciousness as they find it good for us to have, for behind this consciousness they wish to guide our destiny further towards the great ideal of humanity, the IDEAL of the religion of the Gods.

When we consider our inner being in this manner, the inner being which under normal conditions of life we are unable consciously to see and investigate, when we try to fill ourselves with the feeling that there is something within us, which, though we cannot perceive it, with the normal powers of human life, is nevertheless our deepest inner-soul nature; when we try to become aware of this soul-nature which is so deeply hidden within us, and then try to realise that the Gods rule in this soul-nature which we ourselves cannot guide, we then get the right feeling regarding the God which rules within us.

The words that have been spoken to-day have been spoken not so much on account of their theoretical content but to the end that this feeling might arise:—a true Easter-feeling. When the soul, looking on that which is revealed to it when it goes out of itself into space, when, filling space, this soul learns and knows ‘Out of the Divine I am born’, it can still further deepen this knowledge through what has been said to-day, for it becomes aware that: ‘With all I know, with all that is accessible to my soul in Perception, Thought, Feeling and Will, I am born out of a deeper soul-being, that soul-being within me which is yet one with the Divinity which flows within the stream of ‘time’, but flows in it with the Divine. We are aware of a knowledge which may be expressed in a much deeper way than the knowledge expressed at the end of the last lecture. As the result of our considerations to-day, the statement, ‘Out of God we are born’, can be made in a much deeper sense, for we are aware that this soul, together with what it knows regarding itself, is born every moment from out the Divine, so that every moment we may fill our deepest, most inward being with this thought:

EX DEO NASCIMUR
Out of God we are born.

The point has often been made in our discussions that anyone who wants to understand life and existence cannot start from the premise that they are simple. I have often drawn attention to the complexity and diversity of the harmonious cosmos, of which human beings are an integral part, even if only for the reason that people are often heard to say that truth—and normally they mean truth concerning the highest things—has to be simple. People like it best if they are told that such truth about the highest things does not really need to be studied, but that we simply possess it without the need to acquire it.

Everyone—I have said this before—is willing to admit that they cannot understand the workings of a watch if they have not learnt how the cogs and the rest of the mechanism functions. Only as far as the great, magnificent and mighty workings of the cosmos are concerned do people wish comprehension without effort. The basic aim of the science of the spirit, however, is to permit us slowly and gradually to make real sense of the meaning of existence and life.

Today I want to add something to the things we have discussed previously, starting with concepts and ideas with which we are already familiar and with which we have often concerned ourselves. To begin with, we have to say from the standpoint of the science of the spirit that outer existence within which we live is maya, the great illusion. But I have emphasized that within a western world conception it cannot be our view that everything which surrounds us is illusion in the sense that it is unreal. Not the world as such which affects our senses, which we grasp with our reason, is maya; in its innermost being this world is true reality. But the way that human beings perceive it, the way it appears to human beings, turns the world into maya, turns it into a great illusion. And when through inner training of the soul we reach a stage at which we find the deeper foundation of the things which are revealed to the senses, which are subject to our reasoning, we will soon recognize the extent to which the outer world is an illusion. For it appears in its true light, as it really is, when we know how to supplement and penetrate it with those aspects which must remain hidden in our initial observation of the world.

It is precisely what makes human beings human, what gives them their dignity and purpose, that the cosmos does not treat them like immature children to whom truth is presented on a platter, but that it is taken for granted that they acquire truth through their own work—their life’s work. In a certain sense the cosmic powers count on our help in gaining truth, they count on our freedom and dignity.

Now the whole of human life as it initially progresses between birth and death is maya, an illusion. It has to be an illusion because when we view the world only as external physical objects and events we ignore the other aspect of the world and of existence in so far as it affects the human being; we ignore the things which human beings experience between death and a new birth.

Of course one might well say that one can understand human life between birth and death simply by observing it. Why is the other side, the life between death and a new birth, necessary? But even that is a false conception for the simple reason that the life between birth and death is a reflection of the life between death and a new birth. The things which we experience in the life preceding our present physical life are reflected in the life between birth and death.

In order to understand this reflection, it is necessary to consider two further things. The first is that we observe certain stages, certain highlights in our life between birth and death and investigate how these are reflections of the life between death and a new birth. At the same time it is necessary to realize that the life between death and a new birth is connected to a much greater extent with the unknown worlds to which we refer in the science of the spirit; with the events which occurred—before the development of our earth—on what we call Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon. These events on Saturn, Sun and Moon are connected much more closely with our existence between death and a new birth than with the life between birth and death. We might even say that the life between death and birth is influenced everywhere and in all its aspects by those foregoing lives which we know as the past planetary lives of Saturn, Sun and Moon. The effect of the latter on our hidden earth life between death and a new birth is in turn reflected in the lift between birth and death. Thus the life between birth and death is a reflection of the events which occur between death and a new birth; they, in turn, are influenced by events on Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon.

We have to examine certain key points, certain stages of our earth life if we want a more detailed understanding of this process.

The first event which belongs to our life on earth is what in human physical existence we describe as conception. This is followed by the embryonic stage. Only then does the birth of the human being, his entry on to the physical plane, occur. Now a peculiar circumstance is revealed to the science of the spirit. There is only one event in the whole of human life, in so far as it is spent in a physical body, which is solely connected with the earth, which is in a sense explicable purely from earth existence. That event is conception. Nothing in human life other than conception is fundamentally connected directly and exclusively with earth existence. I must emphasize the word ‘exclusively’. Conception has no connection with the life of Moon, Sun and Saturn; the causes of the event which occurs with conception originate in earth life.

Because external biology, external science, is concerned in the main only with physical existence, and from its perspective considers everything related to the life of the Moon, Sun and Saturn as folly, this external science can discover the truth in the physical sense of the word only about conception. That is why we find, when we read works such as those by Ernst Haeckel, that they emphasize those aspects which relate the human being to the processes in other organisms, and that those things are dealt with which are in some way connected with conception. Compare what I have just said with external science and you will find it to be true. When physical external science investigates the processes in the human being it usually descends to the level of the most simple cells. Such cells, forms from which human beings too originate (they develop from the fertilized egg), did not exist on Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon. They are to be found only on earth; and on earth the combination of cells takes place which is of such importance to external science.

This particular stage of our life is nothing but the reflection of a real event which takes place before conception and which is connected with human life. In the final period of our life between death and a new birth, but also at the time of physical conception, we are clearly in the spiritual world. Something is continually happening to us on a spiritual level and conception is nothing but a reflection, maya, of this happening. But the event which takes place in the spiritual world is one which occurs between sun and earth in such a manner that the female element is influenced by the sun and the male element is influenced by the earth. Thus the event of conception mirrors the interaction between sun and earth.

This event, which human beings frequently reduce to a level so degrading for mankind, therefore becomes the most significant of mysteries, the reflection of a cosmic event. It is of interest to draw attention to some details here. When a person approaches the time of his renewed entry to earth, a soul-like image of the parents through whom he will enter the earth is formed. How he comes to choose one particular set of parents we can discuss another time; this is connected with karma. But the thing to which I want to draw attention today is that the person progressing towards birth receives an image of the physical world primarily through the mother, he primarily sees the mother. He receives an image of the father—and I would ask you to consider this because it is important—because the mother carries an image of the father in her soul. Thus the father is seen through the image which the mother carries in her soul.

This is, of course, expressed in a somewhat simplified form, but it is essentially correct. These supersensory processes can only be put into words by characterizing them in their essential form. In order to prevent too fixed an image arising in your mind, I might add that if it is important for example that the soul and spiritual inheritance from the father’s side plays a special role, if special soul and spiritual characteristics of the father are to be passed on to the human being approaching birth, a direct image of the father can also be created. But the image of the mother weakens to the degree that the image of the father is directly observed.

The next step of physical existence on earth is the life between conception and birth. This stage too—we call it the embryonic stage—reflects an event which takes place in the spiritual world before the aforementioned process. While birth in physical life obviously follows conception, that of which birth is a reflection precedes the sun-earth process which is mirrored in conception.

The existence of human beings between conception and birth can certainly not be explained from the conditions prevalent on earth. To try and explain it on the basis of physical forces and laws is pure nonsense, because it is the reflection of a process before birth which is essentially influenced by the remains of the sun and the moon from an earlier stage than the earth. It is a process which takes place between the sun and the moon, and thus it is in essence a spiritual one.

The forces which are active here are primarily those in play between the sun and the moon. Outer science has still preserved an awareness of this fact by calculating the embryonic period in lunar months, saying that it occurs over ten lunar months.

In this sense we have to take into account that in our life between death and a new birth we are subject to real influences from the sun and the moon. And that in our subsequent physical life we reflect this process, which is a sun and moon process, between conception and birth.

It should be noted that the term ‘reflect’ is used here in a somewhat different sense from the spatial one. In spatial reflection the object and the image are simultaneously present, but here we have the real process taking place before birth. The reflection occurs later in time. It is thus maya of a spiritual process before birth.

The next thing to take into account is the period between birth and that frequently mentioned important time in human life when we start to unfold our ego-consciousness, when we consciously start to call ourselves ‘I’. This can be described as the real period of childhood. The period of early childhood—we can call it the infant period—is again a reflection of a process which lies even further in the spiritual past. The real process which is mirrored in the period when we start to babble without establishing the link between speech and ego-consciousness is a reflection of a process from before birth which extends even further into the cosmos. Here there is interaction between the sun and all the planets which belong to the sun, between the sun and its orbiting planets with the exception of the moon. The forces which are at play between the sun and its planets affect our life between death and a new birth, and what is created thereby long before our birth is reflected in the life of early childhood.

One can see from this that the child’s life is affected by the reflection of things which are even further removed from physical existence than the moon. This has a deeply significant practical result; it has the result that human beings must not be diverted in this period of their lives from the forces which they receive and need to utilize. Consider the situation. Cosmic forces at play between the sun and its planets affect us before birth. These forces are present in the child which has passed through birth and has entered earth life. They want to emerge from the child. They really are in the child. In this sense the child in its innermost being is a messenger from heaven and these forces want to emerge. In principle we can do no more than allow them the greatest possible opportunity to come out. That is basically all that we should attempt to do on an educational level in the human infant stage: we should not interfere with the forces which are trying to emerge.

Such a view provokes a humble attitude. Whilst people normally believe that they represent a great deal to the child, the real point is that the forces which want to emerge should be interfered with as little as possible. Not that the educating adults mean nothing to the child—they do, because what emerges is a reflection which must be made real by the educator, which must be given substance.

Our task as educators can be shown in the following way. If we have a reflected object we have to fill the image with something which gives it more inward strength than it has purely as an image. Human beings are indeed born as reflections and they have to acquire the substance to make that image real. That is what their development between birth and death is all about. The reflections of the processes which we obtained from the cosmos before birth want to emerge and must be interfered with as little as possible.

Through our action we must give them the substance of reality; we interfere with them by giving them the substance of false reality by attempting to correct them. They are spiritual by nature.

Now you can understand the great significance of the consequences which arise from this. The person who brings up a child needs to have in his own soul, which has its existence alongside the child, supersensory ideas and feelings. For all purely material ideas and feelings which we bring close to the child interfere with his or her development.

The question is often asked how best to bring up a child. As with so many things, it is not a matter of setting up a few principles which we carry around with us to guide our actions. It is important that we start with ourselves, that we make an effort to carry within us a fund of supersensory ideas, that we are permeated by attitudes and feelings which enter the supersensory. For they have a far greater effect than what we can achieve through outer intellectual principles, through intellectual pedagogy. A loving mind which is at home in the supersensory world and thus deepens all feelings, thereby introduces a certain—please do not misunderstand this word—religiousness into the upbringing of the child. Such religiousness consists of loving a being sent from the spiritual world, of raising our love of the child into a spiritual sphere with the feeling that in extending our hands to the child we are giving him or her something as representatives of those forces which are not to be found on earth but in the supersensory sphere.

We can think up all kinds of educational principles but they will bear little fruit for as long as this science proceeds along materialistic lines. Only the things which are the result of the science of the spirit will bear fruit for the true education of the child. And the most important thing is the way in which we develop ourselves. In the outer, material world we may achieve much by what we do. As educators we achieve much more by what we are. This should be well noted and could well serve as a motto for good education.

Then comes the age of boyhood and girlhood, an age when we are still being brought up, but in a different way from the period of infancy. That is the next stage to be considered. It includes the whole period from the time when human beings consciously begin to refer to themselves as ‘I’ up to the point when they are released from education as such, when they freely enter life—the time when as well or badly brought up people they have to enter the whirlpool of life.

This too is a reflection, maya on a physical level, of previous events. The reality again lies between death and a new birth. Here the whole planetary system, from the sun to Saturn—or Neptune if we choose modern astronomy—is at work. The whole of the planetary system works together with the stars in the heavens, and the interaction between the stars and the whole planetary system becomes the forces which are active in us during the time of our upbringing.

So little of the reality of human beings can be explained purely from processes on earth that the only way to comprehend them during their upbringing is if there is a clear understanding that forces are at work in them during their life as a whole which are not on earth, which are not even in the planetary system but which lie outside the planetary sphere and work in harmony with the stars.

When we meet a child which can already call itself T, which we approach, therefore, in a certain sense as human being, we must be quite clear that something lives in him or her which is a reflection of something which is active not only outside our earth but outside our planetary system.

That is why the things which have been said about the early upbringing of the child are true in far greater measure for the following periods of education. Namely, that good education will only come about when it is drawn from the science of the spirit, when the teacher is aware that outside the planetary system a world exists which unfolds in the human being, and when this world is more than theoretical knowledge in the teacher and informs his feelings and attitudes and he himself has experienced the truth of this world beyond the planets. The unsure steps of such a teacher are often better than the ingenious educational principles of a materialistic teacher. Because insecure steps, actions undertaken in ignorance, can be improved in the course of our life. But what we do because of what we are does not correct itself during life.

It would be a good thing if the following were included among the areas which would benefit from metamorphosis and change through spiritual science: an increasing understanding that those who want to become good teachers and educators—and that includes in principle all those who want to become parents—should do so through the assimilation of spiritual ideas in their soul. In order to become a good educator, the bulk of the work has to be undertaken on oneself. And it is more important for a teacher, for instance, to live wholeheartedly in the material to be dealt with in school the next day, before he enters school, than that he possesses the best possible educational principles on how to do this or that. After he has grown to love the subject, grown to live it inwardly in the spirit, he can even stumble in the lesson—although I do not want to recommend that—and he will do a better job than the person who enters school with all sorts of principles straitjacketed into his brain and who knows everything about the most correct way to set about things.

We know that at present in the world things still take place the other way round. Those who want to be teachers today are tested above all for the things which they know, for the content of the knowledge they have assimilated. It is almost true to say that they are tested on the things which they can find in books, on which they can establish a library. The things which can be looked up in a library, if one has been taught how to do so, are the things which are largely examined. In teachers’ examinations the important things ought not to be what the person concerned can easily find if he needs it, factual knowledge ought not to be the most important thing, but instead teachers ought to be examined in how in their attitudes, their feelings, they can establish a link with knowledge of, with feeling for the development of the universe as a whole. Attitudes towards human and cosmic development ought to be the yardstick for whether or not someone is a good teacher. Then, of course, those would fail the examinations who only knew the most facts and those would pass the examinations with flying colours who were good human beings in the spiritual sense.

That is also what will happen in the end. In the end we will have to move in the following direction: human beings who are not good, whose soul does not incline towards the spiritual life, will fail the teachers’ examinations in future however much they know, even if they have all the facts that are required today at their fingertips.

This area in particular, then, will provide the opening that will permit less emphasis to be placed on intellectual knowledge and more on the development of the soul as a whole. Let me repeat: in such a situation our value will not be determined by the influence we wield in the outer material world but by what we do. As educators we are of value above all by what we are.

It is important that we take account of everything which is related to the reality of the process reflected in conception. All of that belongs to the earth. But in so far as it lies before birth it belongs to the interaction of sun and earth, it takes place in the earth’s aura. A significant spiritual event takes place in the earth’s aura preceding human conception which is reflected in conception. What takes place between conception and birth is in reality the interaction between sun and moon, and this is essentially a repetition of events which took place earlier during the Old Moon period of the earth.

In the embryonic period a real event is reflected which is like a repetition of the events which took place on the Old Moon. Similarly the process which occurs between the end of childhood, the point when human beings consciously begin to refer to themselves as ‘I’, and birth is a repetition of the influence of the Old Sun. The things which occur even before that, which are reflected in the period when we are educated, are a repetition of the Old Saturn stage of the earth.

And then, when our education is finished, and we enter the world well or badly brought up, what processes are reflected at that point? Then processes are mirrored which lie even before the Saturn period, which are not part of the visible world at all to the degree that they have no correlation in the outwardly visible stars. The correlations of our experiences up to the end of our educational period are still visible. They are yet related to the outermost stars which can still be seen. But our subsequent experience, our subsequent development belongs to the invisible world. We are released from the visible cosmos when we have truly completed our education.

And then, of course, it is a matter of enriching, or of having already enriched our soul with the truths of the supersensory worlds. That is the only way to find our true path through life. Otherwise we are puppets, guided by forces which are not meant to do so. The person who is free to enter the world after the Saturn stage has been reflected in his development, and has no idea in his soul of a spiritual world, is not in his intended element but is carried along by invisible forces as the puppet is carried along by the forces contained in the strings of the puppet master.

To assimilate what spiritual science can give means becoming human, means not remaining a puppet of the sensory world but achieving the freedom which is the element in which human beings should live and work throughout their lives. Indeed, freedom can only be understood in concepts which do not originate in the sensory world. For nothing that is given us from the sensory world can make us free. This is what I had in mind when I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom where I emphasized how—even without reference to the ideas of spiritual science—the foundation of ethics, of morals has to be seen in terms of moral imagination; that is to say, it has to be discovered on the basis of moral imagination, on the basis of something that is not contained in any sensory world, although of course morals should not be considered as being purely imaginary. The whole chapter on moral imagination is an affirmation that human beings throughout life, in so far as they want to spend it in freedom, have to recognize their connection with something which is not a reflection of the sensory world but which has to arise freely in themselves, which they carry within themselves, which is more majestic than the visible stars, which cannot be gained from the sensory world but only through an inward creative process. That is the intention of the chapter on moral imagination.

These thoughts were again intended to show the numerous contexts within which we stand in life. As the life before birth is preparatory for its reflection, so the reflected image between birth and death is in turn a preparation for the spiritual life which follows between death and a new birth. The more we can take from this life into the life between death and a new birth, the richer the development of that life will be. Even the concepts which we have to learn concerning that life, concerning the truths between death and a new birth, these concepts have to be different to those which we have to learn from physical maya if we want to understand the latter. Some of the concepts which have to be acquired for an understanding of the other side of life as it passes between death and a new birth can be found in the Vienna lecture cycle of 1914, The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and Rebirth. It can sometimes be quite a struggle to formulate, step by step, the concepts and ideas which are required for this different life. And when you read such a lecture cycle in particular, you will notice the struggle to find expressions which adequately reflect these quite different conditions.

At this time in particular, when the deaths of dear members are affecting our anthroposophical life, I want to draw attention to one point. The occurrence of death plays a different role in the life between death and a new birth than does the point of birth in our present life between birth and death. The time of birth is not usually remembered by human beings under the ordinary circumstances of physical life. But the time of death leaves the deepest impression for the whole life between death and a new birth; it is remembered above everything else, it is always present but in a different form than the one seen from this side of life. From this side of life death appears as a disintegration, something of which human beings have fear and dread. From the other side, death appears as the luminous beginning of spiritual experience, as something which spreads sun-like over the whole life between death and a new birth, which warms the soul with joy and which is repeatedly looked back on with deep and warm understanding. That is the moment of death. To describe it in earthly terms: the most joyful, the most rapturous moment between death and a new birth is the point of death as experienced from the other side.

If from a materialistic point of view we have formed the idea that human beings lose consciousness with death, if we have no real conception of the way consciousness develops—I say this particularly today because we are thinking of dear ones who have died recently—if we find great difficulty in imagining the existence of a consciousness beyond death, if we believe that consciousness fades because consciousness appears to fade with death, then we have to understand: this is not true. For consciousness is exceedingly lucid after death, and only because human beings are unused to living in this extremely clear consciousness in the initial period after dying does something similar to a state of sleep occur immediately after death.

But this state of sleep is the opposite of the one which we enter in ordinary life. In ordinary life we sleep because our level of consciousness is reduced. After death we are unconscious in a certain sense because consciousness is too strong, too overLIFE whelming, because we live completely in the consciousness and need to accustom ourselves to this heightened state in the initial days. Then, when we succeed in orientating ourselves sufficiently to feel the emergence of the thought ‘that was you!' from the wealth of world thoughts, at the point when we begin to distinguish our past earth life from the wealth of world thoughts, then we experience in this wealth of consciousness the moment of which it can be said: we awaken. We might be awakened by an event which was particularly significant in our life and which is also of significance for events after our earth life.

Thus it is a matter of growing accustomed to supersensory consciousness, to consciousness which is not built on the foundations and supports of the physical world, but which is sufficient in itself. That is what we call ‘awakening’ after death. One could describe this awakening as a probing by the will which, as you know and also can see from the above-mentioned lecture cycle, develops particularly after death. I spoke there of a feeling-like will and a will-like feeling. When this will-like feeling starts to venture into the supersensory world, when it makes the first probe, then it starts to awaken.

Those are things which, circumstances permitting, we will discuss further.

This lecture is meant as still introductory to our astral “General Meeting Campaign”, and it will have a particular purpose. It is to show that spiritual science—or rather the special way of observing the world, which underlies it—stands in fullest harmony with certain results of the specifically scientific method. It is not quite easy for the anthroposophist (as can be seen particularly in public lectures) to find complete understanding in a totally unprepared public. When spiritual science meets with an unprepared public, the anthroposophist must be aware that with regard to many things, he speaks quite a different language from those who so far have either heard nothing at all, or only superficially, of the knowledge that underlies the movement of spiritual science.

A certain deeper penetration is needed to find the harmony between what is so easily given today in ordinary science, the experiences of physical research, and what is given to us through the knowledge of the spiritual, the higher, the supersensible consciousness. One must gradually grow accustomed to see deeper into this harmony, and then one will find what a beautiful harmony exists between what is maintained by the spiritual researcher and the statements or enumeration of facts that can be brought forward by physical research. One must not, on this account, be too unjust towards those who cannot understand anthroposophists; they lack all the preparation that is definitely required in order to be able to grasp the results of spiritual research. And so in the majority of cases, they cannot help but think something quite different from what is intended—both in the words and in the ideas. Therefore, in wider circles a greater understanding for spiritual science can be achieved only if one speaks quite openly and frankly from the spiritual standpoint, even before an unprepared public.

Among these unprepared people, there will then be a great number who say, “That is all stupidity—fantastic things, puzzled-out nonsense.” But there will always be a few who, from inmost need of their soul, will get an inkling that there is, nevertheless, something behind it. They will go further and gradually familiarize themselves with it. And it is on such patient study that anthroposophy must depend, and at which we can aim. It will be very natural for a large part of those who come to a lecture on spiritual science from pure curiosity to give vent afterwards to the opinion: “That is a sect that only spreads its own particular gibberish!” But when one knows the difficulties, one will also wait patiently for the selection that must arise. Persons among the public will themselves find their way and form a nucleus through whom spiritual science will then gradually flow into our whole life.

A special example shall be given today to show how easy it is for prepared students of spiritual science, who have already grown accustomed to think and live in the conceptions aroused by spiritual science, to come to terms with the apparently most difficult reports given out by physical-sensible research. The learner will gradually become aware that the farther we advance, the more we will realize what a good foundation spiritual research is for universal knowledge. And that will give the seeker the necessary calmness to meet the storms pouring out against spiritual science, because it speaks quite a foreign language. If we have the patience to accustom ourselves to this harmony, we shall gain more and more assurance. Then when people say, “What you tell me does not agree with the most elementary researches of science,” the anthroposophist will answer, “I know that through what spiritual science can give, full harmony can be found with all these facts, although it is perhaps impossible to come to an understanding in a moment.”

We will now let something pass before our souls as a particular chapter, in order further to strengthen the consciousness.

After living for some time with the spiritual conception of the world, students of spiritual science have become accustomed to speaking of physical body, etheric body, and astral body as ideas, which they can then apply as guides when they are seeking to understand external things from a universal standpoint. They must gradually become used to seeing the difference in the physical nature of the objects around them. They look at the stone and do not say, “The stone consists of such and such materials, the human body consists of the same, and therefore, I can treat the human body just like the stone.” For even the plant body is quite different, though it consists of the same physical materials as the stone. It has the etheric body within it, and the plant's physical body would fall to pieces if the etheric body were not to permeate it in every part. Hence, the spiritual scientist says, “The physical body of the plant would dry away unless the etheric body kept it alive and fought against this dissolution. In regarding the plant, we find that it is a combination of the principles of the physical and etheric bodies.”

Now, it has often been emphasized that the most elementary principle of the etheric body is recapitulation. A being, standing solely under its etheric and physical principles, would express in itself the principle of recapitulation. We see evidence of this in the plant in a very marked degree: We see how leaf after leaf develops, since the plant's physical body is permeated by the recapitulation principle of the etheric. A leaf is formed, then a second and a third; leaf is added to leaf in continuous repetition. And even when the plant comes to a certain conclusion above, recapitulation is still there. There is a kind of wreath of leaves forming the calyx of the flower, though they have a different form from the other leaves. Yet, you feel that it is still a recapitulation of the same leaves in altered form. We may therefore say that the green calyx-leaves up above where the plant ends are a kind of recapitulation. And even the flower petals are a recapitulation. It is true that they have a different color, but in essentials, they are still leaves—greatly transformed leaves.

It was in Goethe's great work in the plant-kingdom that he showed how not only the calyx-leaves and flower petals are transformed leaves, but also how one must see in pistils and stamens just such a metamorphosed repetition. However, it is not a mere repetition that meets us in the plant. If the purely elemental etheric principle were alone active, the plant would come to no termination. The etheric body would press through the plant from below upwards, leaf upon leaf would be developed, and there would never be an end. Then, what makes the flower come to a conclusion, makes it end its existence, begin to be fruitful in order to produce another flower? It is the fact that in the same degree as the plant grows upward, there comes to meet it from above, enclosed in itself, the plant's astral body. The plant possesses in itself no astral body of its own, but as it grows upwards, the plant-like astral body meets it from above. It brings to a conclusion what the etheric body would continue in eternal recapitulation; it causes the transformation of the green leaves into the calyx, flower petals, stamens and pistil.

For occult sight, we can say that the plant grows towards its soul-like part, its astral part, which causes the metamorphosis. Now the fact that the plant remains plant and does not go over to voluntary movement and sensation is because the astral body, which meets the plant there above, does not take inner possession of the organs; it touches them only outwards from above. To the degree that the astral body seizes the organs inwardly, the plant goes over to the animal. That is the great difference. If you take a leaf of the plant, you can say: “Even in the leaf of the plant the etheric body and the astral body are working together, but the etheric body has, so to say, the upper hand. The astral body is not in a position to extend its feelers towards the interior; it works from outside.”

If we want to express that from the spiritual standpoint, we can say: “What is within, in the case of the animal, what it experiences inwardly as pleasure and sorrow, joy and pain, impulse, desire, and instinct, is not within in the plant; it sinks down, however, continuously towards the plant from above.” That is entirely something of a soul-nature. And whereas the animal directs its eyes outwards, has its pleasure in the surroundings, directs its perception of taste outwards and regales itself on some approaching enjoyment, i.e., experiences pleasure inwardly, one who can really regard these things spiritually can affirm that the astral being of the plant also feels joy and pain, pleasure and sadness through looking down upon that which it has brought about. It rejoices over the rose color and over all that comes towards it. And when the plants form leaves and flowers, then the plant-soul permeates and tastes all that as it looks down, and there is an exchange between the soul-part sinking down and the plant itself. The plant-world is there for the happiness—and at times also for the pain—of its soul-part. We can really see an exchange of feeling between the plant-covering of the earth and the earth's astrality, which enfolds the plants and represents their soul nature.

That which works on the plants from without seizes the soul-nature of the animal inwardly and first makes it animal. But there is an important difference between the active soul-nature in the astrality of the plant-world and that in the astrality of animal-life. If you test clairvoyantly what works as astrality on the plant-covering, you find in the soul-nature of the plants a certain sum of forces, and these all have a certain peculiarity. When I speak of plant soul-nature and of the earth's astrality that permeates it and in which the soul nature of the plants plays its part, you must be clear that these plant-souls do not live in their astrality as, for instance, physical beings on our earth.

Plant-souls can interpenetrate each other so that they flow along as in a fluid element. But one thing is characteristic of them; namely, they develop certain forces, and all these forces stream to the central point of the planet. A force works in every plant, which goes from above downwards and strives towards the center of the earth. That is what regulates the direction of the plant's growth. If you lengthen their axes, you come to the earth's center, which is the direction given to the plants by the soul-nature coming from above. If we investigate the soul-nature of the plant, we find that its most important characteristic is that it is rayed through by forces, which all strive towards the center of the earth.

It is different when we consider the astrality around our earth, which belongs to the animal nature. The plant-nature as such would not be able to call forth animal life. To produce the animal nature, it is necessary for still other forces to pass through the astral element. Thus, the occult investigator can distinguish purely from the astrality whether some will produce plant or animal growth. That can be distinguished in the astral sphere, for all astrality, showing only forces that strive towards the center of the earth or of some other planet, will give rise to plant growth. If, on the other hand, forces appear, which in fact stand at right angles to these, but which go round the whole planet as continuous circular movements with extraordinary mobility in every direction, then that is a different astrality, which gives rise to animal life. At any point where you set up observations, you find that the earth in every situation and direction and altitude is surrounded by currents, which, if lengthened, would form circles flowing round the earth. This astrality harmonizes quite well with the plant astrality. They interpenetrate each other and yet are inwardly separate, differing through their inner qualities. Thus, on one and the same spot of the earth's surface, both sorts of astrality can positively stream through each other. If a clairvoyant tests a definite portion of space, forces are found that strive only to the earth's center with others interpenetrating them that are only circular, and of which the clairvoyant knows that they give rise to animal life.

When you consider a physical body, no matter whether plant or animal, you have to look at it as a spatial enclosure and have no right to count something else as belonging to it that is separated from it in space. Where there is spatial separation, you must speak of different bodies; it is a single body when there is spatial connection. This is not so in the astral world, and particularly not so in the astrality that can give rise to the animal kingdom. There, it is a fact that astral structures, widely separated, can make up a single whole. Here in some part of space, there can be an astral structure, and in quite another part of space, there can be another enclosed astral structure; yet, in spite of having not the slightest thread of space in common, these two astral structures can make up a single being. Yes—three, four, five such spatially separated structures can be connected. Even the following can happen.

Suppose you have an astral being that has not embodied itself physically anywhere at all, and you then find another that belongs to this one. Now you observe the former and find something going on in it, which you can call intake of food, consumption of something, since certain substances are taken in and others thrust out. And while you perceive this in the one structure, you can perceive in the second being, spatially separated from the first, other processes going on that correspond to what occurred in the first as absorption of food. On the one hand, the being eats—on the other hand, it experiences the taste, and although there is no spatial connection, the process in the one structure entirely corresponds to the process in the other structure. Thus, astral structures quite separated in space can, nevertheless, belong inwardly to one another.

In fact, a hundred widely separated astral structures may be so interdependent that no process can take place in one without a corresponding process in the others. When the beings take physical embodiment, you can still find echoes of this astral peculiarity. You will have heard of the remarkable parallelism shown by twins. This is because they remain related in their astral bodies, although they are separated spatially through their physical embodiment. So that, when something goes on in the astral body of the one, it cannot take place alone but is expressed in the astral part of the other. Even where it is a case of plant astrality, this peculiarity is shown: the interdependence in things quite separated in space. You will perhaps have already heard of this peculiarity in the plant-nature—how the wine in vessels shows a quite remarkable activity when the grape season comes. What causes the grapes to ripen is to be remarked again even in the wine containers.

I wished only to bring forward the fact that in what is manifested, the hidden is always betrayed and can be brought to light with the methods of occult research. You will acknowledge from this that it does not seem at all unnatural that our whole organism is put together astrally out of quite differentiated members.

There are very singular sea-creatures, which you will understand if you remember what we have now described to some extent of the mysteries of the astral world. It is not at all necessary for the astral forces that bring about the intake of nourishment to be connected with those that regulate movement or reproduction. When the clairvoyant investigator examines astral space for such structures as can give rise to animal life, he finds something very remarkable. He finds a certain astral substantiality, of which he must say that if it worked in an animal body through the forces prevailing in it, it would be particularly fitted to transform the physical and make it an organ for taking nourishment. Now somewhere or other, there can be quite different members of astral being through which, when they submerge into a body, not organs of food-intake are formed but organs of movement or perception. You can conceive that, when on the one hand you have an apparatus for taking in food and again an apparatus for moving hands and feet, forces from the astral world are sunk into you, yet these forces can stream together from quite different sides. The one astral mass of forces has given you the one, the other has given you the other, and they find themselves together in your physical body, because your physical body has to be a connected object in space. That depends on the laws of the physical world. The different force-masses that come together there from outside must form a unity. They did not do so right from the beginning.

What we have just gone into as the result of occult research in the astral field can be definitely confirmed in its effect on the physical world. For there are certain creatures that have a remarkable life as marine creatures. We see in them something like a common stem or trunk, a kind of hollow tube. Above this, on the top, there is a formation that has, actually, no other ability than to fill itself with air and empty itself again. This achievement causes the whole structure to stand upright. If this bell-formed part were not there, then the whole thing that hangs on it could not keep itself upright. It is a kind of balance-being which gives equilibrium to the whole. This may not seem to us so very peculiar. But it is peculiar when we realize that the structure, which is up above and gives balance to the whole being, cannot exist without nourishment. It is of an animal nature and must therefore receive nourishment. Yet, it has no instrument at all for taking in food. But in order that this structure can be fed, there are placed on the hollow stem certain outgrowths—genuine polyps, distributed in all sorts of places; they would continually tumble about and not be able to keep in balance if they had not grown on a common stem. They can absorb nourishment from outside and give it to the whole stem, which they permeate. In that way, the air-balance-being is also nourished. Thus, on the one hand, there is a being that can only keep the balance, and on the other hand one that can only provide nourishment for the whole. But now we have a structure that can be very much held up in the matter of food; when the nourishment is taken in, nothing more is there, and the creature must seek other spots where it can find new food. For this, it must have organs of movement. Care has been taken for this, too, for there are still other structures that have grown on this stem and that have other capacities. They cannot keep the balance or provide nourishment, but instead, they possess certain muscular formations. These structures can draw themselves together and so press out the water. This causes a counter-thrust in the water, so that when the water is pressed out, the whole structure must move towards the other side and so be enabled to reach other creatures for food. The “medusae” move forward by pressing out water and in this way causing a counter-thrust. And such medusae, which are genuine movement-creatures, have now also grown on there. So here you have a conglomeration of differing animal formations, one kind that only keeps balance, another that only nourishes, and then other beings that provide movement.

If such a being, however, were no more than this, it would lie out entirely; it could not reproduce itself. But even this is provided for. Again, on other places of the stem, there grow ball-shaped forms that have no other capacity than reproduction. In a hollow space inside these beings, male and female fertilization substances are developed; they mutually fructify each other and beings of their own kind are brought forth. Thus the reproductive process in these beings is delegated to quite distinct formations that have no other capacity at all. In addition, you still find certain outgrowths on this common stem; these are beings in which everything is stunted; they are only there as a protection, so that what lies beneath has a certain protection. They have sacrificed themselves, have surrendered all else and become only protective polyps.

Still to be remarked are certain long threads called “tentacles”, which again are metamorphosed organs. These have none of the faculties of the other structures, but if the creature is attacked by some hostile creature, the “tentacles” repulse the attack; they are defensive organs. And still another kind of organ is there, which one calls “touchers”, “feelers”. These are fine, mobile, and very sensitive organs of feeling and touch—a kind of sense-organ. The sense of feeling, which in a human being is spread over the whole body, exists here in a special member.

Now what does this siphonophore—the name of this creature that you see swimming about in the water—mean to one who can look at things with the sight of an occultist? Here are the most varied structures astrally crowded together, creatures of nourishment, of movement, of reproduction, etc. And since these various good qualities of astral substance wish to incorporate physically, they had to string themselves on a common substantiality. So, here you see a being that predicts the human being to us in an extremely remarkable way!

Imagine that all the organs, appearing here as independent entities, were in an inward contact with each other, had developed together: then you have the human being and the higher animals in a physical respect. Here, through plain facts of the physical world, you see the confirmation of what is shown by occult research: namely, that in the human being, too, the most diverse astral forces stream together. These, we each hold together through our ego, and when they no longer work together as a being, feeling itself a unity, they make an individual strive apart in different directions. It is related in the Gospel, how so and so many demonic beings are in the man, which have streamed together in order to form a unity. And you also remember how in certain abnormal conditions, when there is mental illness, the person loses the inner connection. There are cases of insanity, where people can no longer hold fast to their ego and feel that they are split up into different parts; they confuse themselves with the original partial structures that have streamed together in them.

There is a certain occult principle, which asserts that everything present in the spiritual world ultimately betrays itself somewhere in the world of the senses. So you see what is interconnected in the human astral body embodied physically in such a siphonophore. The hidden world spies through a peep-hole into the physical. If human beings had not been able to delay their incorporation until they could achieve the suitable physical density, then they would be—not physically but spiritually—beings put together out of such a piece-work. Size has nothing at all to do with it. This type of creature—which belongs to the species of hollow creatures, described today by every natural history, and which, in a certain respect, form a kind of fascination for the material-science researcher—becomes inwardly comprehensible when we can understand it out of the occult principles of animal astrality. This is such an example, and you can listen calmly to one who speaks quite a different language and says that physical research contradicts the statements of anthroposophy. For you can reply that, if one patiently allows time to show the agreement, then harmony will certainly be displayed, even in most complicated things. The concept of "evolution" held by most people is a very simple one. Evolution has, however, taken place by no means so simply.

In conclusion, I should like to raise a kind of problem, which shall stand as a task for us to seek to solve from the occult standpoint. We have seen an important occult truth demonstrated externally in a relatively lower animal. Let us now pass to a somewhat higher animal species—the fish—which can give us still more riddles. I will put before you only a few characteristics.

When you observe fish in aquariums, you can again and again be amazed at the wonderful life of the water. But do not imagine that any occult insight will disturb these reflections. When you shed light there with the facts of occult research and see what still other hidden beings swim about just in order to form these creatures as they are, then the understanding will not lessen your wonder but only increase it. Let me, however, take an ordinary fish—it presents us with quite potent riddles. The average fish has, in the first place, remarkable stripes running along the sides, which appear also on the scales in another form. They run along both sides like two lines of longitude. If you were to deaden these two lines, the fish would behave as if it were mad. For then, it would have lost the power of finding the differences of pressure in the water—where the water gives greater support or less; where it is thinner and denser; the fish would no longer be able to move according to the pressure differences in the water. Water differs in density at different places, so that an uneven pressure is exercised. The fish moves at the surface of the water differently from below, and through these lines of longitude, it perceives the different pressures and all the movements produced by the fact that the water is in movement.

But now, through fine organs, which you find described in every natural-history book, the separate points of these lines of longitude are connected with the fish's quite primitive organ of hearing. The way in which the fish is aware of the movements and inner life of the water is just the same as the way in which we humans perceive the pressure of air—only that the conditions of pressure are felt first in the lines of longitude and are then transmitted to the hearing organ. The fish hears that; however, things are still more complicated.

The fish has a swimming-bladder that enables it in the first place to make use of the pressure of the water and to move just in definite conditions of pressure. The pressure on the swimming-bladder gives it the art of swimming, but because the different movements and vibrations touch upon the bladder and affect it like a membrane, this reacts on the hearing organ, and with the help of the hearing organ, the fish orientates itself in all its movements. The swimming-bladder is thus actually a kind of membrane, which is stretched out and which comes into vibrations that the fish hears. Where the fish's head ends towards the back, there are the gills, and these enable the fish to use the air of the water in order to breathe.

If you follow up all these things in the ordinary biological theories on evolution, you always find evolution presented somewhat primitively. The head of the fish is thought to evolve somewhat higher, and then the head of a more highly-organized animal arises; the fins evolve further, and then the organs of movement of the higher animals arise, and so on. But the matter is not so simple when one follows the processes with spiritual observation.

For in order that a spiritual structure that has embodied itself to form the fish may evolve higher, something much more complicated must happen. A great part of the organs must be transformed and turned inside out. The same forces that work in the fish's swimming-bladder conceal in themselves—in a mother-substance, as it were—the forces that the human being has in the lungs. But they are not lost. Tiny pieces remain behind—only turned inside out—everything material vanishes, and they then form our human ear drumskin. The eardrum, spatially considered, stands at a distance in man; it is, in fact, a portion of that membrane, and forces work within it that have functioned in the swimming-bladder of the fish. And further: the gills are transformed into the little bones of the ear, at least in part, so that in the human organ of hearing you have, for instance, transformed gills. Now you see that it is somewhat as if the fish's swimming-bladder, were turned over the gills. In human beings, therefore, you have the eardrum outside, the hearing organs inside. And what is quite outside in the fish—the remarkable lines of longitude through which the fish orientates itself—form in human beings the three semi-circular canals through which we keep our balance. If you destroyed these three semi-circular canals we would become giddy and could no longer keep our balance.

So you do not have just a simple process from natural history, but instead, a marvelous astral work, where things are indeed continually turned inside out. Imagine that you had a glove on this hand with patterns on it that were elastic. If you now reverse it, turn it inside out, it would become a quite tiny picture. So do the organs that were outside become small and tiny, and the organs that were inside will form a broad surface. We understand evolution only when we know that in the most mysterious way, such a reversal takes place in the astral and how, in this way, the progress of the spiritual takes place.

The day before yesterday we considered one the most important occult themes namely getting a glimpse into the Higher Worlds. Yesterday we had an open lecture in which we occupied ourselves with which method and tasks are needed to reach the stage when the slumbering soul's capabilities and powers can be awakened in order to make knowledge of the Higher Worlds possible. The theme to which we will apply ourselves today relates in a particular way to both of these, and stand in a certain relationship to all anthroposophical striving. What is so often expressed theoretically is that anthroposophic occult science can be nothing other than an all-encompassing, universal self-knowledge of mankind, a self-knowledge which leads to the deepest origins, the deepest existence of the individual “I” and how it is enclosed in World Knowledge. Not only, I can say, do you find this expressed often in theosophical literature and elsewhere, but is adhered to; genuine self-knowledge is an accompanying phenomenon which needs to run parallel with all real research into the areas of the Higher Worlds, running parallel with development of all our inner soul forces. The “Know Thyself” ancient human expression means a great deal, even much more so for the Anthroposophist. Today we want to explore that which we call in the occult scientific sense self-knowledge in relation to the most varied stages of human development. We will commence with the most ordinary, everyday self-knowledge and rise up to this self-knowledge which can be called World Knowledge in the anthroposophic sense; and to above all, relate each single element we discuss to what could be called “occult scientific” with constant consideration to the occult side.

Self-knowledge is considered so much more important within the anthroposophic world view because it, when understood correctly, can include the most High within anthroposophic striving, but falsely understood, can become extremely dangerous. Incorrectly understood self-knowledge tends to appear particularly at the beginning of the path of spiritual scientific striving which is pointed out in Anthroposophy, earlier rather than leading towards it. Goethe, with many references to this familiar field, once said that he has a particular distrust in the expression “self-knowledge,” as it means something which the human being represents basically as some kind of false melancholy, self-anaesthesia, caught up in an incorrect channel. This is correct throughout. We always have an opportunity in the occult scientific field to gaze at the complexity of human nature when we remember what we all know: with anthroposophic insight we have human members in the physical body, which comprises the ether and astral body, and what we call the actual Ego- or “I”-carrier (Ich-Träger). When we look at that which we basically call the Self, with all these members linked to human nature, we easily come to the conclusion that self-knowledge is something extraordinarily complex.

To anticipate the simplest, humblest type of self-knowledge, we must remember to differentiate between these four members of human nature—according to the present relationships between these members—the wakeful and dreamless sleeping human being of which we can now say: the sleeping human being's physical and ether bodies are loosened from the astral and I-bearer and the latter two are outside the body. We know at the same time that it is normal in the present human cycle, that the human “I” can only become self aware when using physical organs, and make observations on the physical plane. Thus we speak as it were in a spiritual scientific sense if an I-bearer existing through those conditions called unconscious sleep. We have to say that this I-bearer only develops consciousness and self-consciousness while entering directly into the field of observation and use physical organs, thus taken up into the physical and ether bodies. There we have today's normal human self consciousness before us and need ask: what is the being of this self-consciousness at the lowest level? Better even is to describe the question thus: How does the human being, how do we, come to understand that which lives in the physical body from morning to night, using physical organs—how do we arrive at knowledge of this being, or even of the self? We can easily believe that we need to look within and thus investigate ourselves. Here we discover all possible kinds of self-knowledge which could be cultivated and recommended. For example a person is advised to observe what he or she does, what their characteristics and faults are, they should brood within and search for their worth, how efficient they appear in one or the other activity—that kind of thing. Here already dangers arise in false understanding of self-knowledge and for this reason we must speak about these dangers. We always have it in mind that we should strive to rise towards the Higher Worlds. We also know that this rising up is something which makes a person quite different from what he or she was before, and therefore it is natural that various hindrances are encountered on the way. Through false self-knowledge the ascent becomes just as dangerous as it becomes firstly possible through genuine self-knowledge. This kind of self-knowledge which could rather be called the brooding of the everyday “I,” an awareness of faults, is false and a danger which works backward in fact, because a comprehensive measure for judgement is missing.

When a person, through ordinary consideration of his merits and faults says: “This you have done well, that you have not done well, you must improve,” it appears that he has developed a measure with which to orientate himself. This measure becomes so to speak the yard stick for all which the person will portray in future. In this way a person will never rise above himself and this is exactly what the Anthroposophist always recites to himself: “Don't remain stuck, on the contrary, again and again, step by step, move out of this fixed point”—a saying which should be taken to heart: Everything undertaken with reference to soul development as an advancement on your life path, is good; everything which holds you back at this point is basically a loss for the soul.—No self-knowledge which draws you into being overcome with remorse or drives one to self satisfaction, brings you forward. Only if we want to reach the possibility to have insight into what really matters, must we ask the following question: On what does the human being usually depend?—You can easily consider the following: How would it have been in my imagination, my experiences and feelings if this individuality which has gone from one incarnation to the next and which will repeat future incarnations, how would it have been if this individuality had not, for instance, been born at such and such a date in Vienna, but rather about fifty years earlier in Moscow? What kind of experiences, feelings, imaginations, thoughts and ideas would this individuality develop to create the characteristic keynote of his life? Something quite different! You easily realise with precise imagination when you reflect about it, how you, from morning to evening, going through your ideas and experiences, how much of this depends upon when and where you are situated in the world. Make an attempt to formulate a precise reckoning, drawing from your inner soul everything which is caused from the when-and-where of your birth.

Now throw out all these images from your soul life. Try to ponder what is left over and try to meditate primarily on how many of these images, which from morning to night permeate the soul, have validity and value other than being linked to the place and time in your life between birth and death. As a result you will see how important it is for the “I” to carefully consider the extent of the influences of the where-and-when. This is not realised in what broods within, but realised through proper consideration of the poetic saying: If you want to examine yourself, learn to know about yourself through others—through your surroundings. Thus we are oddly enough directed away from the brooding soul to say: we should, in order to get to know our “I,” encourage a watchful eye, an open sense for the unusual in the world content of the when-and-where into which we were born. The more we endeavour to develop this open perceptive sense towards the outer world surrounding us, so much more closely do we approach, in the spiritually scientific sense, that which at this basic level could be called self-knowledge.

Through taking a clear view and getting to know the entire tenor of our own time, let's try to clarify what, in the most manifold ways at our disposal, is the most unusual in our epoch and in the location in which we live. Highly individualistic is this self-knowledge, which directs us from ourselves towards our surroundings. Learning to know this outer world, we try to enter into the spirit of it and researching what has crystallized in ourselves as a result, we will recognise a mirror image of our Ego or “I.” This is an objective way. Looking into oneself is a danger. The causes why one is like this, or like that, need to be recognised. This can be found in the surroundings, through this we are deflected from ourselves. As a result we acquire the capability to recognise ourselves, as far as we are an “I,” through use of the physical organs and living amongst contemporaries.

The “I” is served by the organs of the ether-body, the life-body—the composition of this fine organism with which the anthroposophic occult scientist is familiar—penetrate the physical body and continuously fight against the physical body's disintegration. Similarly, when it dives down into the physical and etheric bodies in the morning, it works in the present human cycle in both bodies, including the etheric body. Nothing is added into our examination according to place and time, to when-and-where, but something else is added to the consideration. The ether body links to something quite different, which in a certain sense is tied even deeper to our self, something which surpasses birth and death. Here we discover a certain relationship the self brings along, something which had originated earlier and reaches into the future, something it already had, before it had been incorporated into a physical body. Seen from outside in a superficial manner, the ether body presents something extraordinary which we call talents, aptitudes, particular abilities and here we come to a certain connection which is an even more difficult area of self-knowledge. Although this which on a elevated level of higher development is called self-knowledge, even though still at a relatively low level, the human being here also doesn't come far when he or she broods in order to reach clarity: which are my talents and abilities?

Today it would go too far, to take as a basis the being of the human, regarding what I would like to say now. In self-knowledge lurk the worst enemies when we begin to search for clarity regarding talents and abilities through self-centred brooding. Right here we must shift our examination of the environment from the personal to the impersonal. Next we need to link the examination, with reference to the area of the ether body, to our common bond with this or that race. We need ask ourselves to which member of mankind we actually belong. We will occupy ourselves with researching particularities of this group to which we belong through family, race and folk, in comparison with the universal qualities of the whole human race. We get to know what continues through the hereditary stream, what develops from great-grandfather to grandfather and so on, and even what the self has as colouring in this hereditary line, which does not link directly with the when-and-where, but links to deeper basic laws of human existence. We learn to recognise these particularities within the laws and through this we find the right basis to which we can see how we rose from this background. However, everything brooded upon in examining this background is bad (Ubel). Anthroposophy demands an uncomfortable kind of self-knowledge from us compared with cliché filled alternatives, but in any other way we don't reach genuine self-knowledge, because a comparative measure is missing, because brooding on a single aspect fails to provide a measure with which to make a comparison.

Now I want to immediately link up to occult facts. We all know that our human body is surrounded by an aura, embedded in this astral aura, which is visible to the clairvoyant like an oval cloud. As a result of being born at a certain time and a particular place, makes the mass of our aura distinctly particular. Should we have a very limited outlook and actually only experience and will only judge and be led by our own will impulses not visible from our surroundings, being a product of where-and-when, then the clairvoyant will see our aura appearing as if squeezed, pressed together. The aura in this case is not large and not wide around the physical body. The moment we widen our outlook, the very moment we develop our receptive sense, an “open eye” for the observation of our environment, others can actually see how our aura enlarges all around us, how it becomes inclusive in relation to the physical body. We become spiritually larger within, through spreading our horizons in relation to our world of understanding and feelings. For the clairvoyant awareness it becomes gradually more obvious how people, as an echo of their environment, have a small aura. When we start to refine our judgement, making it independent, in order to reach that which distinguishes us from the mere common, then clairvoyant consciousness is able to see the aura spreading, enlarging, as we become refined and more extensive.

Grotesque as it may sound—knowledge of the environment is the first step towards self-knowledge. Knowledge of the family and race is the second step. With someone who tries to become liberated in their feeling and will impulses from aspects instilled by folk, race, family and so on, the clairvoyant will see not only an expanding aura but the aura becoming mobile, displaying vibration in contrast to its earlier immobility. It was mentioned already—not directly but in a certain sense—that what we call these particular colourings and talents inter-relate with the hereditary line.

How can we lift ourselves beyond all that which stems from the defining base, the causes of inner structures of the self? Mankind has not accomplished much by getting to know itself this way. With reference to our talents and abilities as a rule, not much can be done when we build an imagination upon descent and inheritance, we will not get any further. Here only spiritual scientific experience is valid. It involves the following: out of spiritual scientific experience mankind can become independent from his talents and abilities. This healing remedy hardly seems applicable, not at all similar, yet still it is a healing remedy: when we try to develop a warm, heartfelt feeling for something which hardly interests us, for something too bothersome to attempt involving our interested and especially if we make this interest many-sided, then we will lift our individuality out of our inherited abilities.

The first step, knowledge of the environment, will relatively soon be accomplished; the second—this self-education—only slowly transforms talents. Yes, attention must be drawn to the fact that now and then this incarnation must be renounced in order for the transformation of talents to be carried out, yet the way is introduced and it is extraordinarily important that we really try to do this. Clairvoyant vision will soon perceive how the aura becomes agile and vibrates. We will at least see the beginnings of transformation in our own nature. In this gradual resulting self-education there arises quite by itself what can be called impersonal self-knowledge.

Now we come to the third important area. We reach, through self-contemplation, what we express in our astral body—the bearer of desire and pain, of suffering and so on. The astral body is lifted during dreamless sleep out of the physical and etheric bodies. Ordinarily we are not aware of the astral body being separated from the physical and ether bodies. Clairvoyant consciousness can, but not common consciousness. What kind of rule in human nature will now express its characteristics in the astral body? Something is expressed from the self which we call karma, that which is particular to the self or the individuality, not only developed out of the hereditary stream but which continues from one incarnation to another, connected to individual deeds, with personal experiences of the soul, through incarnations. Our experiences through our bodies, and thus results from the law of cause and effect experienced in a purely spiritual way, bring us to the third step in examining self-knowledge.

We can ask: can a person do something in order to attain self-knowledge in this sphere? I could respond by explaining how difficult it is in the present human cycle to actually understand the working of karma. Take an example of how karma pre-determined an individual to undertake a journey, say in 14 days” time. He may take a decision that he has to do something three weeks later, ignoring karma because he knows nothing about his karma. Planning for the three weeks ahead, he organises everything, until he gets news that he needs to take the journey. Now the two directional lines collide. His planning comes in direct opposition with the direction of his karma. We see through this, how karma always attaches something new. This way karma's aim is strengthened and interlinked. It has to be added that a person in his normal development can only with difficulty measure the way to his Self, his “I,” while taking into consideration the karmic links; because he lacks clairvoyant consciousness through higher development and is unable to know what lies within his karma.

Now the question arises: can we reach this point of self-knowledge in a normal life? I must straight away indicate the means which spiritual scientific experience gives us, which makes it possible for us not to overlook what is karmically correct and at a precise moment perform the right thing. It is a totally false conception which one meets from time to time, namely that we are un-free due to karma. Karma does not make us un-free. Exactly by dint of our freedom can we do what karma gives rise to within us, at any given moment. Karma excludes nothing which allows the karmic line to weave and form links this way and that. Can we do something in order to orientate ourselves towards our karma in such a way that our karma isn't counter-acted and as a result create more karmic causes, thus instead of bringing us forwards, only pushes us backwards? There is one thing which helps us align ourselves ever more in the direction of our karmic stream, and this is something we nurture through our world view within anthroposophical circles, something often practiced and discussed. It is actually a mood of soul under the influence of the anthroposophic world view. It is that which we bring ever more into our karma. We must really orientate ourselves within the anthroposophic way: compliant individuals who only talk about it, that a person should become more profound, seek God within, will hardly direct a person any further on his or her path, rather it could bring them further by directing them away from themselves and offering a world view which makes the super-sensible world view possible. Everything that is offered in anthroposophy allows us to see into supersensible events. First of all if we aren't clairvoyant we need to absorb what is presented by clairvoyant research. It is frankly not necessary to be a clairvoyant just as little as if one takes a telescope or microscope in hand. That which the researcher shares in these fields is always understood through unquestionable logic. The human being, we, must so to say make an instrument of ourselves, if we want to research the supersensible regions ourselves; however, insight can become everything without having to make ourselves into an instrument.

When an anthroposophist builds an image for himself of what the Higher Worlds look like, how it approaches behind the sense perceptible realities, it influences his or her entire mood and life of feeling. Once and for all we must speak right into the soul and not allow a comfortable reasoning: it doesn't depend on learning a great deal but rather that one has this or that moral principal. It is actually like this, with anthroposophic spiritual science learning can't be spared and whoever is on the wrong track, say: why bother with theory of Higher Worlds and so on? Decidedly it depends on the anthroposophic way of thinking, a self-evident requirement: just like an oven warms a room when tinder is lit—so it is with people. If you stand and preach to the stove and say: “Lovely stove, your duty is to warm the room”—the room won't become warm. Merely preaching to people regarding their duty to love one another and so on, will come to nothing much. Setting ourselves up as moral preachers has little worth because moral preaching leaves human beings just as they are. When you heat the oven, the room warms up. Giving it heating offers the chance to heat the room. Giving the human being a world view which offers him or her Anthroposophy regarding supersensible facts, what follows is the first ground rule of the Theosophical Society—a general avowal of friendship and brotherhood—which is utterly necessary. The fundamental anthroposophic attitude must be there, but to merely repeat it doesn't help. Your step is sure when you enter into that expression which works for you in the world by including knowledge of the higher worlds and supersensible-world knowledge. Like plants tap into the sun, just so everyone strives for world knowledge, towards a central sun, and all other consequences capitulate by themselves. Thus it is with the anthroposophic way of thinking, revealed out of the spiritual scientific knowledge.

This is what makes it possible for us, in relation to our karma, to live out of ourselves. It deals more with the fact that we arrive at a moment when anthroposophic teaching can transform facts. It is necessary, that if karma is not to remain an abstract concept, that we attempt to bring in these karmic ideas on a trial basis at least, because we can't remain continuously in a state of self-contemplation in our everyday life of complexity and restlessness. It is necessary to consider the question: what is karmic thinking?

Take a radical example: someone has given another—me for instance—a slap in the face. What can be called in this case, “karmic thinking?” I was here in a previous life, and so was he. I had, perhaps in that previous life, given him a reason to justify his present actions; forced him to do it, simultaneously directed him towards it. I don't wish to theorize, I wish to make a hypothesis which should become a life-hypothesis. Will he give me a slap if I think about it? No, he will not do it. I, myself, delivered this slap because I have put him in this place, I have lifted the very hand myself which was raised against me.

Further to this experience the following can be added: when you earnestly focus on examining this karmic idea, pose such a question now and then, in full earnestness and full honesty and you will really see the results. This no other person can prove for you. You must prove it for yourself by doing it. As a result you will notice your inner-life becoming quite different. You experience quite different feelings, will-impulses regarding life and a totally different life shows its consequences: life will reveal itself in quite a transformed way. Whereas you had experienced great pain and disappointment before, now you accept this calmly, having been equilibrated as a result of how you acted and thought about it. Now the following happens, your soul life is flooded by a remarkable peace, a kind of legitimate comprehension of events which is in no way fatalistic.

This is also the direction in which to focus, by gradually exploring the karma-idea and its inherent truth, if you want to bring it to a certain stage of development. The Karma-idea is open to argument. Whoever wants to present reasons may do so. Theoretically nothing can be proven except through a test and here experience needs to be added. Experience provides, when applied intensively, the tool with which to understand karma. As a result you notice a grouping of things—that indeed it is inherent in things—just like you notice, when you have a fantasy image, whether it actually has the reality of a steel bow when grasped. Experience itself must create each combination of life's facts, through which we gradually, according to our own will forces, include these inner will-impulses into our lives. This complex work of our lives is one of the best remedies to achieve the third step which belongs to genuine self-knowledge. Through this you gradually learn to feel how present setbacks originate from an earlier life.

This experience is not as easy as brooding within, because it has to originate and approach from the surroundings. Most importantly we need to move beyond ourselves, even in the highest self-knowledge, which is world-knowledge. Fichte said: “Most people will rather be a piece of lava in the moon than be their ‘I.’”—Thus we learn to know the “I,” in its selective existence, as more than just a point. This “I” we recognise as a selective copy of the whole world. In this sense self-knowledge is, if you will, God-knowledge, not in the pantheistic sense but like a drop of similar substance and wisdom is to an entire sea. How you as a result search for knowledge regarding the essential similarity between the Being and the nature of the entire sea, you are equal in being to the Godhead, who is recognised; yet it will not occur to anyone to explain the drop as the sea. We could recognise substance and the ocean's godly Being from the drop, but no one will be presumptuous and say knowledge of the drop is sufficient; surely everyone will say, for me relevance is in knowledge of the sea and what happens if I sail on it. You particularly learn to recognise the godly when you allow the drop of godliness to enter within, understand it within, but you comprehend that within you is only a drop or spark, nothing more, then you deepen yourself selflessly in the greater supersensible worlds in the highest way possible. Should we want to learn to know ourselves we must totally go out of ourselves and need to research the supersensible worlds in the most profound way.

For the third step, what's been said suffices, regarding reincarnation and karma. For the highest self-knowledge we must reach knowledge of the great cosmic relationships of our earth; because we are part of our earth like a finger is part of the whole organism. The finger doesn't create the illusion that it has an independent existence; cut it off and it is no longer a finger. If it could walk around our organism then it could give, like us, the illusion that it is an independent organism. The human being doesn't think that when he lifts himself for a couple of kilometres above the earth, he is no longer a human being. The human being is a member of the earth organism, the earth is again a member of the cosmos. This we can only see when we understand the basis of cosmic relationships. All thinking about the self without all-embracing world-knowledge, without grasping how the “I” need all aforementioned events, is in vain, without glancing over it we can't reach knowledge, also none of the “I”-Self. We reach knowledge about the daily-“I,” when we search in the area of the when-and-where.

Knowledge, as expressed in the ether body, we find when we consider the inheritance line. Knowledge of the “I” living through the astral body, we find when we experience karma, and the last kind of knowledge, when we acquire world-knowledge; because there it is spread out but is condensed in a few points of the human “I.” World-knowledge is self-knowledge.

When you present to your soul exactly what is described in the essays “out of the Akashic Records,” how the development of the earth is described, which can appear quite strange to the soul, how it finally leads to the present configuration out of necessity, then you have self-knowledge through world-knowledge! Thus self-knowledge goes ever further and further out of us, always towards the impersonal. As with the application of karma in life resulting in the aura turning ever lighter, so through actual knowledge of cosmic relationships the aura becomes stronger and capable of shaping itself out of the original free impulses. Here you discover the answer to the question about freedom and bondage. Because freedom is the product of development, people are able to obtain this increasingly, the more they attain self-knowledge. Then you arrive, through such a practice of self-knowledge as described, at various things in the spiritual scientific fields and through genuine understanding, you can feel yourself enter the anthroposophic spiritual stream. Various things haunt like children's disease in the anthroposophic movement, which needs to fall away once such things are grasped, as they were given as directions to self-knowledge. The impersonal kind of anthroposophic knowledge will become ever more known. It is indeed achieved through that which has been gained from those researchers who not only transformed their souls into instruments of self-knowledge, but have also developed themselves—as had been related even today—and have come to impersonally reveal what the Higher Worlds offer. One of the first basic sayings which has to be conquered is the old, beautiful saying of the wise Greeks: “Whoever wants to attain wisdom dare not take notice of his own opinion.” You will find that whoever has really experienced the spiritual scientific route, will say: Yes, my opinion doesn't provide much; I can give descriptions of experiences, but not regularization principles, not claims of action, and these descriptions should be taken as instructions flowing into the theory of occult science. Opinions and points of view need be given up by the spiritual researcher. He has no point of view because all observations are like images originating from different points of view, which are as varied as people looking at the world from the most diverse angles. On the one side is the image of the materialistic standpoint, then from the other side that of a spiritual or a mechanistic or the easy-life observation. These are all observation angles. To not only recognise them theoretically but to live with every world view in order to create images as to how each observation creates a different side, that is the inner tolerance which is important here. One opinion shouldn't fight another. As a result an inner and from this an outer tolerance develops which we need if we, mankind, want to meet our healing in future.

Particular value must be awarded to insight, that resulting ideas flowing through the anthroposophic world stream come as products of the impersonal. As a result we will arrive at eliminating from the anthroposophic movement that which was there in earlier times and is still there today: authority in the worst sense. Do we call the microscope an authority? It is a necessity, a gateway. So we too, should become gateways, but we must lift ourselves to the impersonal, because only through people can there come into the world, what must come. Belief in authority must be struck from the anthroposophic dictionary and for this very reason mankind attain, while living into this knowledge, an attitude of impartiality, so that they, through the personal can enter into the impersonal way of the world.

Today we shall be concerned with a chapter of Anthroposophy which links on to many things we were able to study in the last Lecture-Course here but in a certain respect is quite independent.¹ Again today we shall be considering matters for those who are more advanced—I do not mean advanced in respect of intellect or knowledge, but in respect of the attitude of soul, the feelings, that are necessary for the assimilation of higher truths which so often seem paradoxical, weird and fantastic to the materialistic mind—truths which must be accepted, not as if they were everyday matters, but as something that is not only possible, but reality.

We shall turn our attention to a certain chapter of occult history. Everybody knows what external history means; everybody knows that history presents the successive happenings and facts of the outer physical world as far as they can be followed with the help of documents, original manuscripts and records, traditions, and so forth. But in Anthroposophy, by means of those spiritual records that are accessible to us, we go still farther back, even in this external history, to the time of the great Atlantean Flood. We observe the successive culture-epochs following it, but we go even farther back into the distant past, to times preceding this great Flood which has been preserved as tradition in the legends of different peoples. All this is history, investigated, it is true, by occult means, but in a certain sense it is still an external, physical—more or less physical—history of facts and events. But there is also an occult history, and you will understand what this means if you think of the following.

Before entering into the bodies of our present civilisation, all your souls lived in bodies of the old Indian, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Roman epochs, and so forth—leaving aside still earlier times. When, through birth, these souls entered into existence on the physical plane they saw and experienced what can be experienced on this plane. These souls beheld the creations of the old Indian culture, the great pyramids built by the Egyptians, the Greek temples, and so on. From this we can picture the flow of events through which man passes in the course of history on the outer physical plane during life between birth and death. The question may now be asked : What, then, is happening when, through the Gate of Death, the soul passes into its life between death and a new birth? The souls now incarnated passed through death in ancient India, ancient Persia, and so on. Have conditions in the life between death and rebirth always been the same through the ages? Is there anything comparable with ‘history’ in that life? Were the experiences different when souls passed through the Gate of Death in the times of ancient India or ancient Persia, and are they again different in our present age? Is there in that life anything like a successive course of happenings? When we speak of the experiences of the periods spent in Kama-Loca and in Devachan until the time of a new incarnation, we describe them as they are today. Many people may imagine that these experiences are similar in all epochs, but this is not so. For just as when souls have passed through the Gate of Birth they have different experiences in the different epochs, so there is also a ‘history’ of what happens between death and rebirth. These happenings in our present age are rightly described as we describe them, but they have not been the same in all the ages. Today we shall consider, briefly, something of the history of that other side of existence, particularly during Post-Atlantean epochs.

For this purpose we do well to think, to begin with, of the old Atlantean epoch. In this Atlantean epoch, life was very different from what it came to be later on. When in the night the soul of the old Atlantean had gone out of the physical and etheric bodies and was living in the spiritual worlds, it was not enveloped in darkness as is the case today. During the night-consciousness the soul was in divine-spiritual worlds—divine-Spiritual Beings were its companions. The alternation between day and night was quite different in the old Atlantean epoch. When the Atlantean awoke in the morning, that is to say, when his astral body and Ego came down again into the physical and etheric bodies, then, in the earlier periods of Atlantis, man did not see external objects with sharp outlines as he does today, but the objects were hazy—as when we go out at night in a thick November fog the lamps seem to be surrounded by an aura instead of emitting clear light. To the early Atlantean, every object on the physical plane was indistinct and indefinite, and only gradually assumed sharp contours in the day-consciousness. When, at night, he rose in his astral body and Ego out of the physical and etheric bodies, he was not in a realm of unconsciousness, but he had definite, even if hazy, experiences of the divine-spiritual worlds. And the figures preserved as the Gods, the names and ideas of Gods such as Wotan, Baldur, Zeus, Apollo, Thor—are not figures of fantasy but Beings who were actually experienced by man in the times of old Atlantis.

Then came the great Flood. The less advanced Atlanteans went from West to East, settling in the lands of Europe. The most advanced of all went towards Asia and founded in Central Asia the great colony of the Manu. The Manu was the lofty Being who was the leader of this handful of the most advanced Atlanteans who went with him to Central Asia and from there called the different cultures to life. It must here be borne in mind that in Asia and Africa, as the result of earlier and later migrations, and through other peoples who were descendants of still earlier epochs, the countries were inhabited, and these pupils of the Manu went out in various directions in order to spread new streams of culture. The first mission went from Central Asia to India. The Manu sent his first pupils to India; he himself, for certain reasons, withdrew into the background. The first pupils of the Manu became the teachers and leaders of the first Post-Atlantean culture—that of the ancient Indian peoples. The first form of Post-Atlantean culture therefore arose under the influence of these Teachers—the holy Rishis. We already know the basic character of this culture. The pupils of the Rishis had a kind of memory of ancient times, of how in Atlantis they themselves had been companions of the Gods. Their real homeland then had been in the spiritual world. Now they were in the physical world. And so in ancient India men had an intense longing for their primeval, spiritual homeland. They felt that they were strangers in the physical world. For them this world was illusion, maya, merely an external expression of the Spiritual. Hence their longing for the Spiritual and their view that the physical world was illusion, deception, maya. They had as yet no love for the physical world; they still longed for the spiritual world. They saw the stars, the rivers, the mountains, but felt no interest in any of these things. What happened between birth and death was regarded as illusion, as maya, for men knew that they lived in their real homeland between death and rebirth. Such was the fundamental mood of the old Indians. But ever and again they received information and tidings of the spiritual worlds through the holy Rishis, who were the pupils of the great Manu.

It is a good thing to try to form definite ideas of the nature of these great Indian Teachers. A feeling of reverent awe arises in those who can envisage in some small measure what took place spiritually between the Rishis and their pupils in Northern India at this starting-point of Post-Atlantean humanity. Without Spiritual Science it is hardly possible for anyone today, when humanity has descended so deeply into the physical plane and has adopted such a materialistic way of thinking, to form a true idea of the kind of knowledge that was brought by the Manu from the West to the East as a heritage of the Atlantean age. For if the Book with the Twelve Chapters, the Book in which the Manu had preserved the ancient traditions of the earth, in which was written down what could be made known of the laws and conditions prevailing in ancient times when humanity lived in the bosom of the Gods—if that Book could be laid before men today it would be utterly incomprehensible to them. Nevertheless it contained the instructions that were given by the Manu to his most intimate pupils and through which the seven holy Rishis prepared themselves for their mission. Some idea of what the holy Rishis were like can be formed in the following way.—Anyone who saw them in life would have seen utterly simple men. And such indeed they were, for a great part of their life. But there were times when the Rishis were anything but ordinary men. They were not learned in the modern sense, but at such times they were the mouthpiece and instrument of higher spiritual Beings. Higher spiritual Beings ensouled the Rishis and then, when they spoke, they were not giving utterance to what they knew, but to the speech of the Spirit who had entered into them, right down into the physical body. Thus the Seven Planetary Regents themselves were present during this first epoch of Post-Atlantean civilisation. The Seven Planetary Spirits of the universe spoke through the mouths of the holy Rishis, who were merely their instruments. And the words spoken had stupendous power; they were magical words, not merely teachings but commands for what men were to do. Revelations from the cosmos itself were spoken forth by the seven holy Rishis. The later Vedic literature is no more than a faint echo of the wisdom that streamed to humanity out of the cosmos itself through the holy Rishis. This was the first Post-Atlantean manifestation and revelation of the Divine. It was only at certain times that the Rishis were inspired by the Planetary Spirits and then they could impart great and mighty things to men. Far greater things were spoken through them to humanity between birth and death in this first Post-Atlantean epoch than in the other world, for all the secrets to which men could no longer look up from the physical world could be made known to them by the Rishis.

Initiates are able to work and teach not only in the physical world, but in alternating states of consciousness they are able, while still maintaining connection with the physical body, to pass over into the spiritual world and to become the teachers of the souls living between death and rebirth. The great teachers give instruction here, in physical life, and also in the life between death and rebirth. The Rishis too were teachers of man in the world beyond death. There they could, it is true, proclaim the same great spiritual truths of which they spoke in the physical world, but they could say nothing of particular value to the Dead about the other side of existence, i.e. about the physical world. There was nothing in this physical world that could be of value for the life after death. The ancient Indian yearned for the life between death and rebirth; he was happy there, and had no inclination whatever for physical life. And so when the ancient Indian passed into the other world, he was not merely a knower in some degree, he was not only able to see, up to a certain level, what was happen ing there, but he was also able to act with skill—for man has to act in the other world too. The souls of the ancient Indians were far better fitted to work in that world than in the physical world. The instruments available in the physical world at that time were simple and primitive, and men were not skilled on the physical plane. But as souls in that other world they were able to work with skill that was a heritage from an earlier epoch. Men's life between death and rebirth was more intense, more active, than it was in the physical world. The spiritual world afforded them deep happiness; everything was light and clear after death.

World-history continued its course and the epoch of ancient Persian culture approached. Man had progressed, inasmuch as he now began to love the physical plane; he wanted to work on the physical plane and felt that his spiritual forces should be applied to the cultivation of the earth. The culture inspired by the Manu had grown dearer to the ancient Persians. Zarathustra now became their great Teacher. The teachings that had flowed from the inspirations of the Rishis were now, in the second Post-Atlantean epoch, transmitted through Zarathustra. The task of this great Teacher was to create a counterweight to existing conditions. Man must come to love the physical plane, the physical earth, to become more conscious of it, to discover the means of promoting culture, to live more and more intensely on the physical plane, not merely regarding it as illusion, maya, but as a revelation of the Divine Powers. Zarathustra said to the people : In the material world there is something that is opposed to the Spiritual; the power of Evil is mingled with matter. But if you unite yourselves with the beings who are servants of the good Spirit, then, in union with them, you will overcome the Evil that is mingled with matter.—There was inevitably the danger, the first glimmering of the danger, that connection with the Spiritual might be lost. Hence as well as narrating the truths of the spiritual world, it was the special task of the teachers to emphasise to the people that the Spiritual reveals itself in the material; and those who had fallen prey to matter owing to an exaggerated belief in it, had to be brought back again to belief in the Spiritual, to the belief that God reveals himself in matter.—That was what Zarathustra had to proclaim, and he spoke with mighty power. In terms of modern language it is no longer possible to convey any adequate idea of the words of fire with which he proclaimed what he himself was still able to behold, because he was the successor of the pupils of the Manu. For example, he still saw in the Sun not merely the external, physical phenomenon, but the spiritual: Beings whose abode is the Sun, for whom the physical Sun is merely their bodily vehicle, and he called these spiritual Beings in their totality: Ahura Mazdao, the great Sun-, Aura-, Ahura Mazdao, or Ormtizd. From this source came the inspiration for all the teachings he was to inculcate into the second Post-Atlantean culture-epoch which was already in danger of falling prey to the attacks of Ahriman. In mighty words Zarathustra spoke to humanity somewhat as follows. I will speak ‘Give heed and hear me, ye who from near and far long for this. Mark well my words! For no longer may the false teacher corrupt the world, he, the Evil One, whose mouth has proclaimed wrong beliefs. I speak of what is greatest in the world, of what He, the Mighty One, has revealed to me. Whoever does not follow my words, as I mean them, woe will befall him at the end of days.’ In words of power such as these, it was proclaimed that He, the all-pervading Spirit, is revealed in what is external, and that the one who believed he could mislead humanity by making men believe that the material alone has reality, must not conquer. And Zarathustra announced that when the time was fulfilled, One would come in human form as the embodiment of all the Powers working and weaving through the world, One Whose coming could at that time be only a prophecy.—Zarathustra called Him by the name of Saoschra. He, the Power Who resides in the Sun, Who could be seen at that time only through external veils—He would come one day in human form. Zarathustra proclaimed the Christ Who was to come in the future.

Zarathustra had two pupils whom he did not instruct for the purpose of sending them out to teach the Persians. They were pupils such as are always to be found with the great Initiates and who prepare in quietude for their missions, refraining, to begin with, from going out into the world to teach.

These two pupils, in later incarnations, were : Hermes, the great Teacher of the Egyptians, and Moses.

The wisdom outpoured in the second Post-Atlantean epoch had necessarily to take the form it did, because humanity had advanced a stage and men had a greater love for the physical plane. But because this was so, experiences between death and rebirth were darkened. Men could still see in the spiritual world, but no longer with the clarity of vision that prevailed in the old Indian epoch. When the souls from Persian bodies passed into Devachan, their experiences were less vivid, less intense, and the more skilful they became in their work on the physical plane, the less skilful were they in their actions in the spiritual world. In the outer world there is an ascending line of progress; in the world after death, however, there is a decline. When the Initiates passed into that other world—it was, of course, a spiritual journey and the Initiates remained united with the physical body—when they passed into that world to be with human souls living between death and rebirth, they could say much about the momentous things which men had formerly seen there but which now were darkened. They could give teachings concerning the higher spiritual realities that had gradually faded from man's vision between death and rebirth, but they could impart nothing as yet about happenings in the physical world. Nor would this have been of any great significance for the other world. If the Initiates had related the doings of men (in the physical world) this would have had no inspiring effect in the life between death and rebirth. To tell of any happenings on the physical plane would have had no value for that other world.

Then came the Egyptian epoch. Men now had an even greater love for the physical plane and had become still more skilful there. They no longer regarded it as maya or illusion. They looked up to the stars and saw in their constellations and movements a script of the Gods. They saw revelations of divine-spiritual Beings in physical manifestation. And they worked upon the earth with knowledge acquired through their human forces.—We need think only of how the Egyptians cultivated the soil.—Man had now brought his spiritual forces from the spiritual into the physical, and the link between these spiritual forces and the physical world became steadily firmer. The first great Teacher of the Egyptians was Hermes, in his new incarnation. We will try to form some idea of the kind of teachings he gave.

For this purpose it will be especially helpful to think about that aspect of the figure of Osiris which can be of interest to us today.—Osiris was the central God of Egypt, the God who was honoured above all other Gods. The Egyptian Gods were worshipped under many names by the people, priests and initiates. The legend of Osiris is known to you. Osiris ruled over mankind. Then his brother Typhon laid him, by cunning, in a casket which he threw into the sea. Isis, the sorrowing spouse, sought for and found the corpse but could not bring Osiris back again into this world. From the other world a ray from Osiris fell upon Isis who then gave birth to Horus, the successor of Osiris on the earth. Osiris remained in the other world. The Egyptians were told: Osiris is a Being who stands close to man. He is one of the last Beings with whom men were in communion when they lived consciously in the spiritual world. Men have descended into the physical world in order that they may develop further here, and then they ascend again, enriched by the experiences gained in the physical world. Osiris is one of those Beings who no longer needed to descend to the physical world, because they had already reached such a height that this was not necessary for them. They had moved to a higher level and were not created to dwell in a physical body—the casket. Such Beings can have only a fleeting contact with the physical world. Osiris can be found only when man passes over into the other life. He is the last Figure you can still experience—so said the Initiates to the Egyptians—if you make yourselves worthy, if you follow the commandments. Then, after death, when you are judged, you will be together with Osiris; you will feel yourselves to be members of Osiris.

Those who aspired to be united with Osiris had therefore to be referred to the life after death. But as the experiences accessible after death had now become still less intense, even when men were united with Osiris they were only able to experience faintly and weakly that which constituted their highest bliss—the union with Osiris. But through the belief implanted in them by the priests, they knew and firmly hoped that they would indeed be united with Osiris, and in solemn moments after death they felt themselves as members of the Osiris-soul. This consciousness of belonging to Osiris gradually faded away. While culture was progressing to higher stages on the physical plane, a decline was taking place in the spiritual world between death and rebirth. Man's vision of the world of Devachan became steadily fainter. And when the Initiates came over into that world, they still could not tell of happenings in the physical world that would have had any special significance for that other world. What happened in the spiritual world was entirely the result of its own prevailing conditions. Happenings in the physical world could be of little interest to the souls of the Dead. What man could do in the physical world was a preparation for the Osiris-experience, but it was a preparation for something that could be experienced only in the deepest spiritual depths of yonder world.

Then came the Greco-Roman age, the fourth Post-Atlantean culture-epoch. The marriage between the human spirit and external matter became closer, more intimate still, and the splendour of Greek culture stems from this marriage between the spiritual capacities of men and external physical life. When we have before us a Greek temple with its wonderful forms—even in aftermath as at Paestum in Southern Italy—we Can see what the human spirit has achieved in the conquest of external matter. In the lines and distribution of forces in the Greek temple, architecture has reached its zenith. The reason why a Greek temple is such a wonder-work of architecture and of art is because everything in it is the expression of the Spiritual. That is why it is so inspiring to contemplate the harmony presented in a Greek temple.

One peculiarity that is discovered by clairvoyant consciousness in connection with a Greek temple must here be made known.—Let us suppose that clairvoyant consciousness has before it the last echoes of a Greek temple built in the Doric style as are the temples at Paestum, and is able to feel the aftermath of what the Greeks felt on the physical plane; let us assume that clairvoyant consciousness, while beholding the physical form of such a creation, experiences all the rapture and enchantment that it is still possible to experience at the sight. Then clairvoyant consciousness will make a certain discovery. When it frees itself from the body and, without using the physical organs, sees in the spiritual world, then the Greek temple, with all its splendour, has vanished. What was so perfect, so great and glorious in the physical world, cannot be carried over into the spiritual world—not even for modern clairvoyant consciousness. At the place in space where the glorious temple stood, there is nothing corresponding with it in the spiritual world. It was so in the case of all the great masterpieces of that wonderful Greco-Latin epoch, and in another connection too.

This was the same epoch when, in Rome, man's consciousness of personality came to its strongest expression in the physical world. The Roman felt himself first and foremost as a personal citizen of the earth, firmly rooted on, this earth. To the same degree to which man felt himself standing firmly on the earth, he felt weak between death and rebirth, feeble and ineffectual in that other world. Life between death and rebirth had faded in intensity even more than before. Above all, what was experienced in its splendour in the physical world could not be carried into yonder world. It is no mere legend passed on from the Greek epoch, that one of the great Heroes, when visited in the nether world of the Shades by an Initiate, said: ‘Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades’—because man felt shadowy and empty between death and rebirth, and longed for the life between birth and death with its beauty and its grandeur. Life had surrendered itself to the most perfect and complete marriage between the human spirit and external form, and at the cost of this marriage, life between death and rebirth had fallen into decline.

In this epoch fell the Event for which preparation had been made by that other Initiate who had been Zarathustra's pupil—namely, Moses. Moses was chosen to proclaim—to begin with in the only form in which this was possible—a God Who could also reveal Himself in the physical world, Who would be actually present in the physical world. Naturally, this revelation was to the effect that the one and only true image of God Who weaves through the world could not, at the time the revelation was given, be apprehended by the senses. And when, at the starting-point of his mission, the ‘EJE ASCHER EJE’ (I am the I am) was proclaimed through Moses, this was the first announcement of the God Who henceforward would not be found only in the other world but Who had passed into this world and was to be experienced here. The Jahve-Being was proclaimed through this second pupil of Zarathustra, and thereby preparation was made for the coming of Christ, for the Mystery of Golgotha.

You know, to some extent, what the Mystery of Golgotha signifies for the physical plane: it is actual proof that life in the spirit is victorious over death. This victory was achieved through the fact that the One Who had been proclaimed by the prophets, the One Who was there at the creation of all the kingdoms of Nature, walked upon the earth. This Archetypal Being of the world, Who is the Spirit of the Sun, is rightly given a Greek name, for He could, and indeed had to, appear in the Greek age, when mankind needed the impulse for re-ascent. And in eternal memory of this, the Being Who incarnated in the sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth was called by the name of CHRIST. This name derives from the epoch when it was necessary that Christ should appear. At the moment when the Jesus of Nazareth-sheath died on Golgotha, something happened that is not a mere legend but can still be confirmed today on the path of spiritual science by one who is adequately prepared. At the moment of the Death on the Cross, at that same moment Christ appeared in the other world among the Dead, among those who were living between death and rebirth. And this appearance of Christ was like a lightning-flash in that other world. It was as though the life in that world which had faded into shadow, was lit up by lightning. Now, for the first time, something could be made known in the world after death that was different from anything of which the earlier Initiates had been able to tell when they passed into that world. Even an Initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries would at most have been able to tell of the beauties of the physical world which the Dead could no longer behold; at most he could have awakened a longing for the physical, but nothing of real importance would have been brought to the Dead by making known to them what was taking place in the world of flesh. The first tidings brought by Christ to the Dead were that in the world between birth and death something had come to pass that has meaning not for this physical world only, but also for the life in the other world. This Event in the physical world was one that works on into the spiritual world itself. Actual examples of this can be found.

When in the physical world we contemplate the most beautiful temple or any one of the loveliest creations of the age of ancient Greece and are enchanted by the sight of it, in that other world it has faded away, is not to be found. If, however, we steep ourselves in the Gospel of St. John or in the Apocalypse, where the happenings connected with the Mystery of Golgotha are made known, we can have wonderful experiences if, with clairvoyant consciousness, we then pass over into the spiritual world. These feelings and experiences do not fade, but they live on, becoming still more glorious, still more comprehensible, in the spiritual world. Everything that is connected with the Event of Golgotha becomes even more sublime in the spiritual world. This is by no means the case with everything. However deep your wonder may be at the sight of the Pyramids, only a faint echo of them can be experienced in yonder world. A Greek temple or a Greek tragedy may enthrall one but nothing goes over into the other world, either for an Initiate or for those who are not initiated. But if you contemplate a picture by Raphael in which the Christian truths are expressed, you carry much of the picture with you into the spiritual world, and things which in the physical world you cannot even glimpse, will dawn upon you there. In yonder world they become a light which lightens the spiritual world anew. And so it was when Christ appeared in the world of the Shades. For the first time, that world was flooded with light. And more and more, through everything that Christianity has brought into the world, the spiritual world will be illuminated.

So culture descends, as it were, from the heights of the Atlantean world to the Greco-Latin world, when in the spiritual world it was in decadence and had sunk most deeply into the material world. That was when the greatest desolation prevailed in the spiritual world. And now, with the appearance of Christ in the underworld, comes the great impulse of Light. Existence between death and rebirth becomes ever brighter, ever clearer. The ascent begins in the history of life in that other world. Christianity is only at its beginning today. More and more it will become evident that man grows in spirituality through what he can experience in this world; and he takes with him into the other world what he experiences here in connection with the Event of Golgotha. Thus in the spiritual world, too, there is an ascent.

And so we may also speak of history in the life between death and rebirth, and when we study this history of the hidden side of the world, we realise the infinite significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, not for the physical world alone but also for all three worlds in which man lives. The Being Who is united with our evolution, Who has created everything that is around us, Who dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth, once said: ‘Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me, for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall you believe my words?’ (John, V, 46.)—clearly indicating thereby that it was He of whom Moses was speaking when he proclaimed the Divine Being Who was announcing Himself as the ‘I am the I am.’ The Being Who was in Jesus of Nazareth accomplished something in our world that has significance not only for the physical plane but, as the most momentous of all events, spread through the three worlds, from the physical right up into the spiritual world. Such is the mighty vista of the Event of Golgotha brought before our souls by occult history.

• 1. The Apocalypse of St. John. 12 lectures. 17–30 June, 1908.

In the first lecture of this course we shall try to give, by way of introduction, an outline of the subject before us. We shall not as yet enter fully into this, but will first give an outline of those things of which we shall speak during the next few days. We have a very extensive theme before us; Universe, Earth, and Man, and I propose to give a brief sketch of all the knowledge we can acquire concerning the visible and invisible worlds.

Our feelings are borne into the farthest distance of the cosmos when, in the deepest and most worthy sense, we make use of the expression “Universe.” “Earth” indicates the field of action upon which humanity is now placed, upon which we are to work and live, and the mission of which we ought to understand. Lastly, the word “Man”—a word we here wish to understand in its occult sense indicates that which the mystics of all ages meant when they made use of the expression, “O man, know thyself!”

We also have a sub-title to our subject. Having set ourselves such a highly important task, this sub-title is in a certain way justified; for when we consider the connection between that wonderful pre-Christian civilization—the Egyptian—and our own, we see how mysterious are the forces permeating human life. Three ages of human effort and research, of human development, morals, and life, rise before us when we consider Egyptian civilization and that of our own day. When we speak of Egyptian civilization in the occult sense we mean the civilization that had its seat in the north-east of Africa, on the banks of the Nile, which lasted for thousands of years and terminated in the eighth century before Christ. We know that this civilization was followed by another which we call the Greco-Latin. This was centred on the one hand in the wonderful Greek race, with their highly cultivated sense of beauty, and on the other hand in the powerful state of Rome. We also know that in this age occurred the mighty event in earthly evolution which we know as the advent of Christ Jesus. Then followed the age in which we are now living.

First the Egyptian age with all that belonged to it—and a great deal belonged to it—then the Greco-Latin age with its great results—the rise of Christianity—and then our present age. These are the three ages which come before our mental eyes when we consider the sub-title of these lectures.

It will be shown that there was an interplay of mysterious forces between the age of civilization first mentioned and our own. It is as if in the Egyptian age certain seeds were sown in the breast of gradually developing humanity, seeds which remained hidden during the Greco-Latin age and have reappeared in a special manner in the present one. Much of that which buds in our souls today, much of that which surrounds us, and of which people speak and dream, has sprung like seed from the ancient Egyptian civilization without our people being aware of it.

You are all more or less acquainted with the telegraphic apparatus. You know that wires connecting the different apparatuses extend from one place to another, and without having any deep knowledge of these things you understand that the force which sets the apparatus in motion has something to do with the force which flows through the wires. You perhaps also know that there is a connection down in the earth, that the ends of the wires are connected with the earth; but this subterranean connection is invisible because it is made by more or less mysterious forces produced by the earth itself. Something similar exists as a deep mystery in the development of man. In history we see threads being spun which lie within the invisible world. By means of history and of occultism we can trace out that which took place in ancient Egypt. We see how the threads of culture stretch from the Greek age, the Roman, the Christian, down into our own age. All these are guided by a kind of connection that takes place above the earth, but there is also a hidden, a subterranean force which works more or less directly from the ancient Egyptian age into our own. Many a remarkable secret is revealed to us when we follow these connections and examine them thoroughly.

To begin with I shall indicate briefly the special facts referred to in the sub-title of our theme. When we look back to ancient Egypt and observe a few of the mighty records there we are struck by the Pyramids, for example, and also the Sphinx—that wonderful and enigmatic figure. Then we let our glance pass on to ancient Greece. Here the Greek temple appears with its unique architecture, we can see and admire what we know from history of this wonderful land; we see its sculptures, those great, ideal, and perfect human forms described as gods: Zeus, Demeter, Pallas Athene, Apollo. Then we turn to the ancient kingdom of the Romans. Something remarkable appears when we thus allow our vision to sweep from the ancient Grecian peninsula to the Italian. Before us appear the figures of ancient Rome, many of which are still preserved; we see forms clothed with the toga, which is indeed more than a mere outer dress. What do we feel with regard to these Roman figures? One might say regarding certain of those belonging to the Roman Republic that one feels as if the ideal forms of the Greeks had descended from their pedestals and had appeared before us as men of flesh and blood. What we are made to see is their inner power; we recognize what lies in this inner power when we compare that which developed in ancient Rome with the feeling, the thought, the content of a figure belonging to the Grecian States—that of a Spartan or an Athenian, for example. We feel what this figure contains. The men belonging to Sparta or Athens felt that they were first of all Spartans or Athenians. Being provided in a certain way and to a certain degree with a common soul, the Spartan or Athenian felt more what we might call the Greek spirit than his own personality; he felt himself more as a Spartan or as an Athenian, than as an individual human citizen; he felt the power that worked so strongly in him proceeded more from the common spirit of the people than from his own personal power. The Roman on the contrary appears to us as being placed somewhat more exactly upon the centre of his own personality. Hence in the Roman kingdom there appears something very special, namely the comprehension of the rights of the citizen. All that lawyers dream regarding the origin of “justice” previous to this is very different from what in times of better research was rightly called “Roman Law.”

In ancient Rome man learned to regard himself as an individual, he stood upon his own two feet, no longer as one belonging to a certain town, but as a Roman citizen; that is to say he felt himself placed upon the centre of his own human nature. With this feeling of individuality the time came when what was spiritual in man descended to earth. Previously it was perceived as hovering, so to speak, above him in spiritual regions. There is something unique in Roman law and in Roman civilization. Let us consider the circumstance that the Greek felt himself primarily as a Spartan or as an Athenian. What was the spirit of Athens or of Sparta? For us Anthroposophists this was no abstraction, but something like a spiritual cloud, which in its turn was the spiritual expression of a spiritual being in which the town of Athens or Sparta was embedded; but this being was not visible upon the physical plane. The Greek looked primarily not to himself, but to something above him, the Roman looked primarily to himself. It was he who first recognized man as the highest creature that can take on fleshly form upon the physical plane. The spirit had come completely down into humanity. This was the time when the Divinity Itself could descend into human evolution and incarnate in Jesus Christ.

The manner in which Egyptian civilization extended into the Greco-Roman age was a very wonderful process. We recall how Moses, when he received in Egypt the commission from higher realms to guide his people to the “One God,” asked God—“What shall I say to my people when they ask who sent me?” And how God answered (and we shall see what deep truth lay hidden in the statement)—“Say to those to whom I send thee, ‘I AM’ hath sent me unto you. Thus ‘I AM’ is the name of an individual God who worked and ruled at that time as the Christ Principle in spiritual heights, and who had not yet descended to the physical plane. To whom did this voice belong which could make itself perceptible to the initiate Moses, saying to him, as it were from spiritual worlds, “I am the ‘I AM’”? It was exactly the same Being (and this is the secret of the ancient Greek Mysteries)—it was the same Being who appeared later in the flesh as the Christ: only afterwards He was visible to those around Him, while previously He could speak only through Initiates from spiritual heights.

Thus we see the Deity—that which was Spiritual—gradually descending after humanity had been prepared, after it had learnt in the Roman age the importance of embodiment in the flesh and its manifestation on the physical plane. We see how a whole series of the results of civilization develop in an exceedingly profound way from out of that which man received as a new gift at that time. We see how the form of the Pyramids and the Temple change to that of the Roman church—another record of inner human creative work. We see how from the sixth century the Cross with the dead Jesus makes its appearance; and how by degrees out of the stream of Christianity a remarkable figure evolves whose mysteries are very deeply veiled. We need only call up this figure before our eyes in the wonderful form given to it by the painter's art in the Sistine Madonna, by Raphael.

Everyone knows this wonderful figure of the Virgin in the centre of the picture, carrying the child in her arms, and we have certainly all experienced a corresponding emotional thrill when confronted by it. I would ask you, however, to note one thing with regard to it which expresses the spiritual striving of humanity at the stage with which we are dealing—the three civilizations mentioned above. It is not for nothing that the artist has surrounded the Madonna with a cloud out of which develop a great number of similar little children, a crowd of angelic forms. Let us now allow our feeling to be completely absorbed by this picture of the Madonna. Anyone whose emotion is sufficiently deep for him to be able to do this will feel and perceive that there is here something very different from what an ordinary profane intellect will see in the picture. Do not these cloud-angels surrounding the Madonna say something to us? Yes, they say something of the greatest significance if we do but consider them deeply enough. When we allow ourselves to sink deeply into this picture, something whispers in our soul, “Here before us is a miracle in the best sense of the word.” We do not think that this child whom the Madonna bears in her arms is born in the ordinary way from the woman. No! These wonderfully delicate angel-forms we see in the clouds seem to be in process of development, and the child in the Madonna's arms seems to be only a more condensed manifestation of them, like something that had crystallized somewhat more than these fleeting angel-forms, which seems as if brought down from the clouds and held fast in her arms. It is thus this child appears to us, and not as if born from the woman. We are directed to a mysterious connection between the child and the virgin mother. If we call up the picture thus before our souls, another virgin mother appears to our mental vision: the ancient Egyptian Isis, with the child Horus, and we may become aware of a mysterious connection between the Christian Madonna and the Egyptian figure on whose temple was written the words, “I AM, which is, and which was, and which is to come my veil no mortal can raise.”

That which we have hinted at as a miracle in the picture of the Madonna is also revealed in the Egyptian myth, for it there describes Horus as not having been born through conception, but tells how a beam of light fell from Osiris upon Isis, a kind of miraculous birth took place, and the child Horus appeared. Here again we see how threads connect one thing with another; what we are here able to investigate is without any earthly connection.

Let us now pass on to where our own age begins. Let us think of the Gothic cathedral with its wondrous construction of pointed arches, let us call to mind what took place there in the Middle Ages, in gatherings where true believers met true priests. Think of the effect of this Gothic cathedral with its many coloured panes of glass through which the sunlight penetrates; think, how many of those who were able to speak of the deeper secrets of the world's evolution could let tones ring forth, whose outward image was the wonderful light split thus into varied colours. Again and again it happened that the priests showed how the common power of the Divine Being was imparted to humanity in separate rays of power, split up like the light which streamed in through the coloured windows. The partition of the light was placed before men's senses, and in their souls was aroused that which lay spiritually at the back of this symbol. In this way the Gothic cathedral pervaded the powers of perception, and of feeling, of the worshippers.

Let us now enter more deeply into what is thus pictured in our minds. Let us first consider the Egyptian Pyramid—a most characteristic form of architecture! We must exert ourselves mentally in order to discover what it has to say to us. By degrees we shall see how in the pyramid the secret of the World, Earth, and Man is expressed; we shall see that there is expressed in it what the Egyptian priest felt according to his form of religion. Later we shall penetrate deeply into all these things; today we will only notice what such a priest felt, and imparted to his people in pictures. The wisdom expressed in the Egyptian form of religion was very profound; it was the direct result of ancient tradition; it was like a memory, and the Egyptian sage in his meeting with Solon could say with truth: “Oh ye Greeks, ye remain children all your lives, and in your childish souls is none of the ancient truth!” He refers here to the age of wisdom in Egypt. From whence came this wisdom?

Our present humanity was preceded, as you know, by another which dwelt upon a continent over which the billows of the Atlantic Ocean now roll. When the great Atlantean flood took place, the knowledge of the Atlanteans was carried towards the East across present-day Europe. The northern myths have remained behind as remembrances of the wisdom of Atlantis. We know that the successors of the Atlanteans carried the wisdom of ancient India and Persia into Asia. We also know that Egyptian wisdom was partly re-animated by Asia, but that it also streamed directly from the West, from Atlantis, towards Africa.

Now what sort of wisdom was it that was referred to by the ancient sage when he spoke of the “ancient truth”? This will be disclosed if for a moment we pause to consider the difference between life today and life in ancient Atlantis. At that time man was gifted with a dim clairvoyance, around him he saw beings who are also around us today, but whom present day man sees no longer. The earth does not contain only plants, minerals, and animals; spiritual beings are also around us, but these are visible only to clairvoyant eyes. In Atlantis at that time man was normally clairvoyant, divine beings were his companions, he lived with them as we now live with human beings. There was not as yet that sharp distinction between day-consciousness and night-consciousness there is now. At the present time when man enters in the morning, with his astral body and ego, into physical life physical objects are around him; and when at night he rises out of his physical body this world becomes dark and dim to him. This is the case today with the normal human being; but in Atlantis it was not so, particularly in its earliest periods. When at night man stepped out of his physical and etheric body darkness did not then spread around him; he entered a world of spiritual beings and he saw these divine spiritual forms just as he now sees fleshly forms. He saw Baldur, Wotan, Zeus, and Apollo—who are not imaginary, fanciful figures, but are the expression of real beings who, at the time of which we are speaking, had not taken on bodies of flesh, but possessed as their densest form transparent etheric bodies. When at night man withdrew from his physical body these were around him as etheric forms; and when in the morning he again drew into his physical body he was in the world of reality which today is for him the only world; he left for a time, one might say, the world of the Gods and dipped down into the world of physical, fleshly existence. There was no strict boundary between his day perception and his night perception, and when in those times the Initiate spoke to ordinary people of these Divine Beings he was not speaking of something that was strange to them. It was the same as when today we speak of men and call them by their names; the Initiate spoke of such Beings as Wotan and Baldur, for they knew them as divine etheric Beings.

The remembrance of that ancient wisdom and of these experiences was carried with them by those who journeyed towards the East; and from them sprang these remembrances which were connected with something else which developed in the peculiar constitution of the Egyptian people—the conviction that an eternal spiritual part dwells in man, and that when his body becomes a corpse it has been forsaken by this divine spiritual part. This conviction is expressed in numerous symbols and teachings which the Egyptian priests gave to the people; it was not merely an abstract truth to them, it was a truth in which they lived, and which they experienced directly.

Let us describe what the Egyptian perceived. He said, “I see here a corpse, the dust of a man who was the bearer of an ego; I know—for I know it from ancient tradition and from the experience of my ancestors—that there is something else, a spiritual part, which passes into other worlds. This could not fulfil its task were it to live solely in that spiritual world. A connecting link must be formed between this spiritual part and the earthly world; we must form a magnetic link for the soul which passes at death into higher realms, in order to arouse in it a feeling of permanence, so that it may return again, and appear once more on this earth.”

We know from the teachings of Spiritual Science that humanity of itself takes care that the soul shall return again and again to new incarnations; we know that when man passes at death into other spheres, during the period in kamaloka (that period during which he weans himself from what is earthly) he is still chained by certain forces to that which is physical. We know that it is these forces which do not allow him to rise at once into the regions of Devachan, and that it is they also which draw him down again to a new incarnation. But we are a people today who live in abstractions, and who represent such things as theories. In ancient Egypt all this lived as tradition. The Egyptian was the reverse of a theorist or mere thinker; he wanted to see with his senses how the soul took its way from the dead body into higher realms, he wanted to have this constructed before him. These thoughts he embodied in the pyramids; the way the soul rises, how it leaves the body, how it is still partly fettered, and how it is led upwards to higher regions. In the architecture of the pyramids we can see the fettering of the soul to what is earthly, we can see how kamaloka with its mysterious forms comes before us, and we can say that, considered externally, it is a symbol of the soul which has left the body and is rising into higher realms.

Let us endeavour to understand these ancient traditions. In the Atlantean age man still saw around him much that is completely hidden from him today. You will recall from previous lectures that in Atlantis the etheric body of man was not so intimately bound up with the physical body as it is now, the etheric head projected far beyond the physical head. In animals this formation has remained to the present day. When a horse is observed clairvoyantly the etheric head may be seen towering upwards as a form of light above the horse's nose and in the case of an elephant a truly remarkable structure can be seen above the trunk. In Atlantean humanity the etheric head was in a somewhat similar position, although not quite so far outside. Later it gradually drew more and more into the physical head, so that now it is about the same size as the latter. On this account the physical head—which was at first only partly governed by the etheric head and still had many forces outside which are today within it—was not yet human to any high degree; it was only in course of development, and still possessed a somewhat lower animal form.

What did the Atlantean see when he looked at a companion during the day? He saw a man with a very receding forehead, very protruding teeth—something that reminded him of an animal but at night when he slept clairvoyant consciousness began, the animal-like form became less distinct, and out of the physical head grew the etheric head, which already had a human form and indeed a very much more beautiful form than we see today. In still more remote times the Atlantean clairvoyant could look back to a period when man's physical form was yet more animal-like though he possessed an etheric body which was entirely human; far more beautiful indeed than the present physical form, which has adapted itself to coarser, denser forces. Now imagine this memory of the Atlantean placed consciously yet symbolically before the people of Egypt. Imagine the Egyptian priest saying to the people: “In Atlantean times your own souls, when you were awake, beheld the human figure with an animal form, but at night there grew out of it an exceedingly beautiful human head.” This memory, presented in sculpture, is the Sphinx. It is only thus that these forms can be understood; we must realize that they are not merely thought-out forms, but realities.

Let us now pass from the Egyptian pyramid to the Greek temple. This temple will only be understood by those who are able to feel that there are forces in space. The Greek possessed this feeling. Anyone studying space from the standpoint of Spiritual Science knows that it is not the absolute void of which our ordinary mathematicians and physicists dream, but that it is differentiated. It is something that is filled with lines, with lines of force in this direction and in that, from above downwards, from right to left, straight and curved lines going in every direction. Space may be felt, it may be penetrated with feeling. He who has such a feeling for space knows why certain old painters could paint the floating angel forms in the pictures of Madonna in a way so wonderfully true to nature; he knows that these angels mutually support each other, just as the planets do in space by their power of attraction. It is quite different when we consider Bocklin's picture “Piety.” Nothing is said here against the excellence of this picture otherwise, but anyone who has preserved the living feeling for space has the sensation that those remarkable angel forms may fall at any moment. The painters of olden times had the perception that belonged to earlier clairvoyance. In modern times this has been lost.

When art still possessed occult traditions these mutually supporting forces which existed in space, which streamed hither and thither, were recognized. They were perceived by those in whose minds the thought of the Greek temple originated. They did not think out these forms, but they perceived the forces streaming through space, and filled them with stone; that which was already there occultly they filled with substance. Hence the Greek temple is a material presentation of actual forces existing in space; a Greek temple is a crystallized space-thought in the purest sense of the word. The result of this was very important; by giving material expression to force forms in space the Greeks gave divine spiritual beings the opportunity of using these material forms. It is no figure of speech but a fact when we say that Gods came down at that time into the Greek temples in order to be among men on the physical plane.

Just as today parents place the physical form, the body of flesh, at the disposal of the child, in order that the spirit can express itself on the physical plane, so something similar took place in the case of the Greek temple. The opportunity was provided for divine spiritual beings to stream down and incarnate in the architectural structure. That is the secret of the Greek temple. God was present in the temple. Those who felt the form of the Greek temple aright felt that there need be no human being anywhere near it, nor in the temple itself, and yet it would not be empty, for God was really present there. The Greek temple is a whole; it is complete in itself, because it has a form which magically draws God into it.

If we now consider a Roman church, especially one with a crypt, we shall see a further development. In the Pyramid we see presented the path the soul takes after death, the outer architectural form for the soul when departing; the Greek temple is the expression of the divine soul which likes to tarry upon the physical plane; the Roman church with its crypt corresponds to the Cross upon which the dead body of Jesus hangs. Humanity at this stage had progressed to an advanced consciousness in spiritual spheres. The bond to what is earthly, the period in kamaloka, is represented by the Pyramids; the victory over the physical form, the victory over death, is expressed in the Cross, and reminds us of the spiritual victory of Christ over death.

Again, a further step is taken to the Gothic Cathedral. Without the pious congregation within, it is incomplete. If we wish to feel it as a whole, then to the pointed arches must be added the folded hands and the upward-streaming feelings they express; not such feelings as are in the crypt, where the memory of the spiritual victory over death is preserved, but victorious feelings, such as the soul perceives who already in the body has felt that it is a victor over death. The soul, victorious over death while in the body, belongs to the Gothic building, which is incomplete if it is not filled with such feelings.

The Greek temple is the body of God; it is complete in itself. The Gothic church is something which requires a congregation; it is not a temple but a “Dom,” a cathedral. The German word “Dom” appears in the English suffix “dom” in the words “kingdom,” “Christendom,” for example. It also lies at the root of the Russian word “Duma.” A dome, or dom, is something in which individual members are gathered together into one congregation. From this we can see how in time human thought and human perception progresses from the Pyramid to the Greek temple, then to the Roman church with its crypt, and afterwards to the Gothic cathedral.

Thus we arrive gradually at our own age, and we shall see how the forces of evolution are at work not only on the surface, but that mysterious occult currents are active also beneath, so that what is taking place today in our civilization appears as a re-embodiment of much that was sown within humanity in ancient Egyptian times.

We will close with a thought which hints at this mysterious connection. What constitutes the materialism of our present civilization? What is the special characteristic of the man who, when he wishes to see something spiritual, has lost the harmony that reconciles faith and knowledge? He sees nothing! He regards the gross, material, physical part of the world; he feels it to be real, that it exists, and he even comes to deny what is spiritual. He believes that man's existence is finished when his corpse lies in the earth; he sees nothing rising up into the spiritual worlds. Can a conception such as this be the outcome of something that was sown at a time when there was a firm faith in the continued life of the soul, such as existed in Egypt? Yes, for it is not in Civilization as in the vegetable kingdom, where like things spring forth again and again from the seed. In civilization one characteristic alternates with another which is apparently dissimilar to it—and yet there may be deeper and more intimate similarities.

The vision of man is confined today to the physical body; he regards this as a reality; he cannot raise himself to that which is spiritual.

The souls who now regard their physical bodies with their eyes, and are unable to rise to what is spiritual, were incarnated among earlier peoples as Greeks, as Romans, and as ancient Egyptians; all that exists in our souls today is the result of what we acquired in previous incarnations.

Imagine your soul back in its Egyptian body. Imagine your soul after death being led up again by way of the Pyramid into higher spheres—but your body held fast as a mummy. This fact had an occult result. The soul had always to look downwards when its mummified body was below; its thoughts were hardened, solidified, they were attracted to the physical world. It was forced to look down from the realms of the spirit upon its embalmed physical body, and in consequence the thought became rooted in it that the physical body had a higher reality than it actually had. Imagine a man, in his soul, looking down at that time upon his mummy. Thought regarding the physical hardened; it passed through repeated incarnations, and now is such that man cannot extricate his thoughts from the physical bodily form.

Materialistic thought is often the result of the embalming of the body.

Thus we see how thoughts and feelings work from one incarnation to another; how civilizations are continued through repeated incarnations, and how they reappear later in entirely different forms. This ought to arouse a faint idea of the countless occult threads which are hidden below the surface.

In this lecture we have indicated briefly the subjects to be dealt with in subsequent lectures. In them our vision shall sweep upwards to the highest regions of those worlds beheld by the Egyptian priests; we shall have to direct our attention to the nature, the goal, and the destiny of man; and we shall understand how such problems as these are solved when we realize that the fruits of one age of civilization reappear in a wonderful and mysterious manner in a subsequent one.

The Reflection of Cosmic Events in the Religious Views of Men.

Yesterday we looked at certain connections in the spiritual relationships of the so-called post-Atlantean time. We saw how the first cultural epoch of this period will repeat itself in the last, the seventh; how the Persian culture will repeat itself in the sixth; and how the Egyptian culture, which will occupy us during the next few days, repeats itself in our own lives and destinies in the fifth period. Of the fourth culture, the Greco-Latin, we were able to say that it occupies an exceptional position in that it experiences no repetition. Thus we could point in a sketchy way to the mysterious connections in the cultures of the post-Atlantean time, which follows after the time of the Atlantis that perished through powerful water-catastrophes. This age that follows Atlantis will perish in turn. At the end of our fifth great epoch, the post-Atlantean, there will be catastrophes that will work in a way similar to those at the close of the Atlantean epoch. Through the War of All Against All, the seventh culture of the fifth epoch will find its conclusion. These are interesting connections that are indicated in certain repetitions, and when we follow them more closely they will throw light into the depths of our soul life.

In order to lay a proper foundation, we must today allow still other repetitions to pass before our mind's eye. We will let our glance rove far into the evolution of our earth, and we will see that these wide horizons must have an intimate interest for us.

But let us begin with an admonition, a warning against a mechanical approach to the repetitions. When in the realm of occultism we speak of such repetitions, saying that the first cultural epoch repeats itself in the seventh, the third in the fifth, etc., it is easy to let a certain gift for combinations get the upper hand, so that we try to apply such schemes or diagrams in other contexts also. It is easy to believe that we can do this, and many books on theosophy actually contain a good deal of rubbish of this sort. Hence there must be a strong warning that such combinations are not controlling, but only perception, spiritual vision, without which we go astray. Such combinations must be warned against. What we can read in the spiritual world may be understood, but not discovered, through logic. It can be discovered only through experience.

If we wish to understand the cultural epochs more clearly, we must achieve a general view of the evolution of the earth as it presents itself to the seer who can direct his spiritual gaze to the events of the most remote past. If we look far back into the evolution of the earth, we can say that our earth has not always appeared as it does today. It did not have the firm mineral base of today; the mineral kingdom was not as it is today; the earth did not bear the same plants and animals, and men were not in such a fleshly body as they have today; men had no bony system. All that was formed later. The farther we look back, the nearer we come to a condition which, if we could have observed it from cosmic distances, we would have seen as a mist, as a fine etheric cloud. This mist was much larger than our present earth, for it extended as far as the outermost planets of our solar system and even farther. It included a far-reaching nebular mass, wherein was contained all that went into the formation of the earth, and also of the planets and even of the sun.

If we could have examined this mass of mist closely, if an observer could have approached it, it would have seemed to be composed entirely of fine etheric points. When we see a swarm of gnats from a distance, it looks to us like a single cloud; close-up, however, we see the single insects. Thus, in the most remote past, the mass of our earth would have appeared, although then it was not material in our sense but was condensed only to an etheric condition. This earth-formation consisted of single ether-points, but something special was connected with these ether-points. Had the human eye been able to see these points, it would not have seen what the clairvoyant would have seen or what he actually sees now when he looks back. Let us make this clear by a comparison. Take the seed of a wild rose, a fully developed seed. What does one see who observes this? He sees a body that is very small, and if he did not know how a rose seed looked he would never imagine that a rose could grow from it. He would never derive this from the mere form of the seed. But a person who was endowed with a certain clairvoyant capacity would experience the following. The seed would gradually disappear from his sight, but to his clairvoyant eye would appear a flower-like form growing spiritually out of the seed. It would stand before his clairvoyant view, a real form, but one that could be seen only in the spirit. This form is the archetype of what later grows out of the seed. We would err if we believed that this form was exactly like the plant that grows from the seed. It is not at all like it. It is a wonderful light-form, containing streams and complicated formations. One could say that what later grows out of the seed is only a shadow of this wonderful spiritual light-form beheld by the clairvoyant.

Holding fast to this picture of how the clairvoyant sees the archetype of the plant, let us now return to the primeval earth and the single etheric points. If now, as in the previous example, the clairvoyant contemplated such an etheric point in the primeval substance, there would arise for him from the point (as from the seed in the previous example) a light-form, a beautiful form, which in reality is not there but rests slumbering in the point. What is this form that the seer perceives, looking back at the primal earth atom? What is it that arises? It is a form that is different from physical man, as different as is the archetype from the physical plant. It is the archetype of the present human form. At that time the human form slumbered spiritually in the etheric point, and the whole earth-evolution was necessary in order that what rested there might develop into present-day man. Many, many things were necessary for this, just as much is also necessary for the seed. This seed must be sunk in the earth, and the sun must send its warming rays, before it can develop itself into a plant. We will gradually understand how these points became men if we make clear to ourselves all that has happened in the meanwhile.

In the primeval past all the planets were connected with our earth. However, we will first consider the sun, moon, and earth because they are of special interest to us. At that time our sun, our moon, and our earth were not separate, but were all together. If we could stir these three bodies together like a broth in a great world-kettle, and if we thought of this as one cosmic body, we would have what the earth in its original condition was—sun plus earth plus moon. Naturally, man could live there only in a spiritual condition. He could live only in this condition because what is in the present sun was then united with the earth. For a long, long time the cosmic body contained our earth, sun, and moon within itself, as well as all the beings and forces connected with them. In those times man was still only present spiritually in the primal human atom. This changed only in a time when something important occurred in world-evolution, when the sun split off and became a separate body, leaving earth and moon behind. After this, what was formerly a unity appears as a duality, as two cosmic bodies, the sun and the earth-plus-moon. Why did this occur?

All that happens has, naturally, a deep meaning, and we understand this when, looking backward, we find that there dwelt on earth at that time not only men but also other beings of a spiritual nature who were connected with them. These were not perceptible to the physical eye but were nevertheless present, as truly present as men and the other physical beings. Thus, for example, there are connected with our earth, living in its environs, beings whom Christian esotericism calls angels, Angeloi. We can best conceive these beings if we reflect that they stand at the stage at which man will be when the earth completes its evolution. Today these beings are already as far along as man will be at the end of his evolution on earth. A still higher stage is occupied by the archangels, Archangeloi, or Spirits of Fire, beings whom we can perceive when we direct our glance to what concerns entire peoples. Such concerns are guided by the beings called archangels or Archangeloi. A still higher type of being is called the Primal Beginnings or Archai or Spirits of Personality. We find these when we look at whole epochs of time and at many peoples, with all their connections and contrasts, contemplating what is usually called the Zeitgeist or Spirit of the Time. When we examine our own time, for example, we find that it is guided by higher beings called Archai or Primal Beginnings. Then there are still higher beings called, in Christian esotericism, Powers or Exusiai or Spirits of Form. Thus there are innumerable beings connected with our earth who are related to man in a sort of ladder of successive stages.

If we begin with the mineral and rise from the mineral to the plant, from the plant to the animal, and then to man, man is the highest physical being, but the others are also there; they are among us and permeate us. In the beginning of things, when the earth emerged from the womb of eternity as a sort of primeval mist, all these beings were bound up with the earth, and the clairvoyant would have seen how other beings pervade this picture at the same time as the human form. These were the beings named above, and beings of still higher types such as the Virtues, Dominions, Thrones, Cherubim, and finally the Seraphim. All of these beings were intimately connected with that powerful etheric dust, but they are at various stages of development. There are those whose sublimity man cannot fathom, but others are closer to him.

Since these beings were at different stages, they could not go through their evolution in the same way as man. A dwelling place had to be created for them. Among these high beings there were some who would have been greatly handicapped had they remained bound to lower beings. Therefore they split off. They took the finest substances out of the mist and built their dwelling in the sun. They created their heaven there, and there they found the proper tempo for their evolution. Had they remained in the inferior substances that they left behind in the earth, they would not have been able to continue their evolution. This would have hindered their development like a lead weight. This shows how material occurrences, such as the split in the cosmic substance, do not proceed from merely physical causes but rather from the forces of beings who need a site for their development. It happens because they must build their cosmic house. We must emphasize that spiritual causes lie at the foundation.

Man remained behind on the earth-plus-moon, and with him higher beings of the lowest hierarchy, such as angels and archangels, as well as beings who stood lower than man. But a single mighty being, who was already ripe enough to migrate to the sun, sacrificed himself and stayed with earth-plus-moon. This was the being who was later named Yahweh or Jehovah. He left the sun and became the leader of affairs on earth-plus-moon. Thus we have two dwelling-places: the sun and earth-plus-moon. On the sun were the most exalted beings, under the leadership of an especially high and sublime being whom the Gnostics attempted to conceive under the name Pleroma. We must picture this being as the regent of the sun. Yahweh is the leader of earth-plus-moon. We must make it especially clear that the noblest loftiest spirits went out with the sun, leaving the earth behind with the moon. The moon was not yet split off; it was still within the earth.

How should one conceive this cosmic event of the separation of the sun from the earth? Above all, one must feel the sun and its inhabitants to be the most august, pure, and sublime element that was formerly connected with the earth, whereas earth-plus-moon was the lower element. At that time its condition was still lower than that of our present earth. The latter stands higher because there came a later period during which the earth unburdened itself of the moon and its grosser substances, in the presence of which man could not have developed further. The earth had to expel the moon.

Just before this, however, was the darkest and most dreadful time for our earth. Everything with a noble evolutionary disposition came under the control of bad forces, so that man could progress further only by eliminating the worst conditions of existence along with the moon.

We must realize that a sublime light-principle, that of the sun, was opposed to the principle of darkness, that of the moon. Had one clairvoyantly observed the sun, which had already withdrawn, one would have seen the beings who wished to inhabit it, but also something else would have been perceived. What had withdrawn itself as the sun would have shown itself not only as a cluster of spiritual beings, nor would it have appeared as something etheric, for that belongs to a coarser realm; it would have appeared as something astral, as a mighty light-aura. What one would have sensed as a light-principle, one would have seen as a shining aura in cosmic space. The earth, through allowing this light to go forth, would suddenly have appeared densified, though not yet coming to a firm mineral consistency. A good and an evil, a bright and a dark principle, stood opposed to each other at that time.

Now let us see how the earth looked before it expelled the moon. It would be entirely wrong to think of it as resembling our present earth. The core of the earth was then a fiery seething mass. This core would have appeared as a nucleus of fire surrounded by powerful water-forces, although these would not have been like our water of today, for they contained the metals in fluid form. In the middle of all this was man, but in entirely different form.

Thus the earth appeared when it expelled the moon. Air was not to be found on the earth; it simply was not there. The beings then existing needed no air; they had an entirely different breathing system. Man had become a sort of fish-amphibian, but he consisted of soft fluid material. What he sucked into himself was not air but what was contained in the water. This is approximately the way the earth looked at that time. We must see that the earth at that time was in a lower condition than at present. It had to be so. Otherwise man could never have been able to find the right tempo and the means for his evolution, if the sun and moon had not separated themselves from the earth. Had the sun remained in the earth, everything would have gone too fast; whereas everything would have gone too slowly with the forces that now work on the moon. As the moon withdrew from the earth amid tremendous catastrophes, there prepared itself slowly what we may call the separation of an air-sheath from the water-element. Air was then entirely different from the air of today, for all kinds of vapors were still contained in it. But the being that was then gradually preparing itself was a sort of sketch of the man of today. We will describe all this more fully later.

We have learned to know man in three relationships. First, as he lived in earth-plus-sun-plus-moon with all the higher beings in a single cosmic body. Here he presented himself to the clairvoyant eye in the way described above. Next we see him under unfavorable conditions on earth-plus-moon. Had he remained in this condition, he would have become a malicious and savage being. When the sun had separated itself, there was the contrast of the sun on one side and moon-plus-earth on the other side. The sun, in all its streaming glory, glittered as a great sun-aura in space. On the other side remained earth-plus-moon with all the sinister forces that drag down the nobler elements in man. A twofoldness arises, which is followed by a threefoldness. The sun remains as it is, but the earth separates itself from the moon. The grosser substances withdraw and man remains behind upon the earth.

Looking at the third period, man feels the forces as a threefold principle. He asks: Whence come these forces? In the first period man was still connected with all the high forces of the sun. The forces that developed in the second period then went out with the moon. Man felt this as a redemption, but he had a memory of the first period in which he was still united with the sun-beings. He learned to know what longing was; he felt himself to be a cast-off son. With the forces that had gone out with sun and moon he could feel himself as a son of the sun and of the moon.

So, our earth evolved from a unity to a duality to a trinity: sun, earth, and moon.

The time when the moon split away, when man first received the possibility of developing himself, is designated as the Lemurian epoch. After great fire-catastrophes had terminated this Lemurian epoch, our earth gradually entered a condition that could produce the relationships prevailing in ancient Atlantis. The first beginnings of land emerged from the water-masses. This was long after the moon broke away, yet it was only because of that breaking-away that the earth was able to evolve as it did.

In Atlantis man was entirely different from today, but he had reached the point where he could move about within the air-sheath as a soft, swimming, floating mass. Only gradually did he develop a bony system. About the middle of Atlantis he had progressed so far as somewhat to resemble our present form.

But in Atlantis man had a clairvoyant consciousness. Our present consciousness developed only in much later times, and if we wish to understand the man of that time we must bear this clairvoyant consciousness in mind. We can understand this best through a comparison with the consciousness of today. Today man perceives the world from morning to evening by means of his senses. Through his sense-activity he continually receives impressions of sight, hearing, etc. But at night this sense-world sinks into an ocean of unconsciousness. For the occultist, this is really not so much a lack of consciousness as a lower grade of consciousness.

At this point we must make it clear that today man has a double consciousness, a bright day-consciousness and a sleep or dream consciousness. This was not at all the case in the first Atlantean times. Let us examine the alternation between waking and sleeping in those early times. During a certain period man dipped down into his physical body, but he did not perceive objects in the same sharp outlines as today. If we picture ourselves walking through a dense fog when the street lamps seem surrounded by a light-aura, we will have a rough idea of the Atlantean's object-consciousness. For the man of that time, everything was surrounded by such a fog; everything was as though enveloped in mist. That was the look of things by day. By night things looked entirely different, although still not the same as today. When the Atlantean went out of his body, he did not sink into unconsciousness but found himself in a world of divine spiritual beings, ego-beings, whom he perceived around him as his companions. As truly as man today does not see these beings at night, so truly did he in those times plunge into an ocean of spirituality, in which he actually perceived the divine beings. By day he was the companion of the lower kingdoms; by night he was the companion of the higher beings. Man lived in a spiritual consciousness, though this was dim; and, though he had no self-consciousness, he dwelt among these divine spiritual beings.

Now let us recapitulate the four epochs in the evolution of our earth. First, let us bring to mind the epoch in which sun and moon were still united with the earth. We must say that the beings of this earth are pure ideal beings, while man is present only as an etheric body, visible only to spiritual eyes. Then we come to the second epoch. We see the sun as a separate body, visible as an aura, and moon-plus-earth as a world of evil. Then we come to a third epoch, where the moon separates itself and on earth there work the forces that are the result of this threeness. Then we come to a fourth epoch. Here man is already a being in the physical world, which seems misty to him, and in sleep he is still the companion of divine beings. This is the epoch that closes with huge water-catastrophes, the time of Atlantis.

Now let us go one step further, to the man of the post-Atlantean time. As stated earlier, he has evolved through many thousands of years. We see him pass through the cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean time; the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean-Babylonian, the Greco-Latin culture, and our fifth culture. What, above all things, had man lost? He had lost something that we can conceive when we bear the description of Atlantis in mind.

Let us try to imagine the sleep-condition of the Atlantean. Man was then still the companion of the gods; he actually perceived a world of the spirit. This he had lost after the Atlantean catastrophe. The darkness of night surrounded him. In recompense there came a brightening of the day-consciousness and the development of the ego. All this man had achieved, but the old gods had vanished from his sight; they were now only memories. In fact, during the first post-Atlantean time all that his soul had experienced was merely a memory, a memory of his earlier inter-course with these divine beings.

We know that souls endure, that they reincarnate. Just as in ancient Atlantean times our souls were already present, were already living in bodies, so were they also present at the separation of moon and sun from the earth, and also in the earliest times of all. Man existed in the etheric dust or points, and the five cultural periods of the post-Atlantean time, in their views of the world, in their religions, are nothing else than memories of the ancient epochs of the earth.

The first period, the primeval Indian, developed a religion that seems like an inner lighting-up, an inner repetition, in ideas and feelings, of the very first period, when sun and moon were still bound up with the earth, when the lofty beings of the sun still dwelt on earth. We may imagine that this had to awaken a sublime view. The spirit who, in the first condition of the earth, in the primeval mist, connected himself with all angels, archangels, high gods, and spiritual beings, was for Indian consciousness summed up as a single high individuality under the name of Brahm or Brahma.¹ This first post-Atlantean culture recapitulated in the spirit what had happened earlier. It is a repetition of the first epoch of the earth, in its inner aspect.

Now let us look at the second cultural period. In the principles of light and darkness we have the religious consciousness of the primeval Persian period. The great initiate saw an opposition between two beings, one of which was personified in the sun and the other in the moon. Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd, the Light-aura, is the being whom the Persians venerated as the highest god. Ahriman is the evil spirit, the representative of all the beings who belonged to earth-plus-moon. The religion of the Persians is a remembrance of the second epoch of the earth.

In the third cultural epoch, man had to say to himself, “In me are the forces of the sun and of the moon; I am a son of the sun and a son of the moon. All the forces of the sun and of the moon appear as my father and my mother.” Thus we have unity in the primeval past as the attitude of the Indian; while the duality that appeared with the separation of the sun is reflected in the religion of the Persians; and in the religious views of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians we find the trinity that appeared in the third epoch, after the separation of sun and moon. Trinity appears in all the religions of the third period, and in Egypt it is exemplified in Osiris, Isis, and Horus.

But what man had experienced in his consciousness in the fourth earth-epoch, the Atlantean, as a companion of the gods, emerges as a memory in the Greco-Latin period. The gods of the Greeks are nothing other than memories of the gods whose companion man was in Atlantis, the gods whom he saw clairvoyantly in etheric forms when he had risen out of his physical body at night. As truly as man today sees outer objects, so truly at that time did he see Zeus, Athena, etc. For him these were real figures. What the Atlantean felt and experienced in his clairvoyant condition reappeared, for the man of the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the pantheon. As the Egyptian time was a memory of the trinity that prevailed in the Lemurian epoch, the experience of Atlantis remained as a memory in the Hellenic hierarchy of gods. In Greece and elsewhere in Europe these were the same gods whom the Atlantean had seen, but under other names. These names were not invented; they are names for the same forms that walked beside man in the Atlantean time when he went out of his physical body.

So we see how the epochs of cosmic events find their symbolical expression in the religious views of the different post-Atlantean cultural periods. What took place during sleep in the Atlantean time lives again in the fourth period.

We are in the fifth post-Atlantean period. What can we remember? In the first period the ancient Indians could conceive the first earth-epoch; in the second period the Persians had the principles of good and evil; the ancient Egyptians could picture the third epoch in its trinity. The period of the Greeks, the old Germans, the Romans, had its Olympus. It remembered the godlike figures of Atlantis. Then came the modern time, the fifth period. What can it remember?

It can remember nothing. This is the reason why in this period, godlessness has been able to make headway in many respects. This is why the fifth period is driven to look toward the future rather than the past. It must look toward the future, when all the gods must arise again. This reunion with the gods was prepared in the time of the bursting-in of the Christ-force, which worked so powerfully that it could again endow man with a godly consciousness. The god-pictures of the fifth period cannot be memories. Only if man looks forward will life again become spiritual. In the fifth post-Atlantean period, consciousness must become apocalyptic.

Yesterday we examined the relations of the single cultures of the Post-Atlantean time. Today we have seen how cosmic events are reflected in the religious views of these cultures.

Our fifth period stands at a central point in the world, hence it must look forward. The Christ must for the first time be fully grasped in this period, for our souls are deeply interwoven in mysterious connections. We shall see how the repetition of the Egyptian time in our fifth period gives us a point of departure, and how we can actually pass over into the future.

• 1. It may occur to the reader that India, even in ancient times, was notable for the multiplicity of its gods rather than for their unity. In this connection the following passage from the Upanishads may be illuminating:
  
  Then Vidagda Sakayla questioned him: “How many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  He answered: “As many as are mentioned in the Hymn to All the Gods, namely three hundred and three, and three thousand and three.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “Thirty-three.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “Six.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “Two.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “One and a half.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “One.”
  (Brih. Upan., ii, 2, iv, 4.)

The fundamental nature and construction of the Universe cannot be conceived in its reality without continual reference to Man. Again and again we must try to find in the Universe outside, what exists in one way or another in Man. We will use these next three lectures for the purpose of obtaining, from just this point of view, a kind of plastically formed picture of the world, which can then lead on to the answer of the question: What is the relation between morality and natural law in Man?

When we study Man (I am here only repeating things that have already been spoken and written of from various standpoints) we find him first of all organised into what we may call higher Man and lower Man; and then we have what forms the connection between the two—the rhythmic Man, equalising or balancing the other two parts.

We have to observe first of all that a complete difference exists in the laws governing the upper and lower parts of man. We can realise this difference when we consider the fact that the ‘upper man’, who is regulated by the head, is in its origin the outcome of entirely different laws, belonging as it does to a different world from the world of the senses.

That part of us which in our last incarnation was a result of forces of the sense world, namely the limb man, has become what it now is, the head man, through a metamorphosis which takes place between death and a new birth—not in relation, of course, to the outer form, but in regard to the forces of formation. What is now the limb man becomes entirely transformed in its forces—transmuted in its super-sensible constitution between death and a new birth, and appears in our new Earth-life incorporated out of the Universe into our constitution. On to this is suspended, as it were, the rest of man—formed out of the world of sense. This fact we can find already proved clearly from Embryology, if we would only think rationally about embryonic facts. And thereby we have in our head organisation a system of laws not belonging to this world at all, save only at its origin—that is, in so far as it was present in a previous incarnation. But all that which has caused the transformation of limb man to head man is active in an entirely different world—the world wherein we live, in the interval between death and a new birth. Here, then, another world penetrates the world of the senses. Another world is manifested in the head organism of Man. In a certain sense the external world is brought into correspondence with this other world, in that the head projects the principal sense-organs outwards. The world that is extended in space and that runs its course in time, is perceived by man through his senses; it penetrates into man through his senses, and so it too belongs in a certain sense to the head organism. In relation to our limb man on the other hand, we are in a state of sleep. I have often spoken of this sleep-state of man in relation to his Will nature, in relation to all that exists in the limb man. We do not know how we move our limbs, how the will causes the movement; we only examine the movement afterwards as an outer phenomenon through our senses. We are asleep in our limb organisation, in the same sense as we are asleep in the Universe between going to sleep and awaking.

So here we have before us an entirely different world. We can say: we have a world which outwardly manifests all that speaks to our senses—all that we perceive through eyes, ears, etc. To this world we belong through that portion of ourselves which we have called the head man. Our connection with the world that lies behind this one is brought about by the limb man, but in it we are unconscious; we sleep into this world, whether we do so in the domain of our Will, or whether we sleep into the Universe between our going to sleep and our waking.

These two worlds are actually so constituted that the one is turned towards us, and the other away from us, as it were; it lies behind the world of sense although we have our origin in it. Man felt in olden times—and the East still feels it—that a reconciliation between the two is possible. As you know, we in the West search for the reconciliation in a different way; but the Easterns, even today, a line (sketch) still attempt to find it in a relatively conscious way, although their methods are already antiquated for the present humanity. The act of eating is symbolised by a line (sketch), for when we take food, the process following takes place in the sphere of sleep (unconsciously). We are not aware of what is really happening when we eat an egg or a cabbage; it takes place in the unconscious like the happenings of sleep. The cabbage and the egg manifest their exterior to our sense-perception. But the eating really belongs to the completely different world. The reconciliation however, is to be found in our breathing.

Although the latter is to a certain extent unconscious, it is not so in so great a degree as our eating. In spite of the fact that our breathing is not so conscious as our hearing and seeing, it is more conscious than the process of digestion for example; and while in the East today, the attempt to make the digestive process a conscious one has, as a rule, ceased (this used to be done in olden times), the breathing process is still in a certain sense brought up into consciousness. (The snake raises the process of digestion into consciousness, but the consciousness of the snake is of course not to be compared with human consciousness). There is a certain training of the breathing, where the inhaling and exhaling are regulated in such a way that the process is transformed into a sense-perception. Thus we find respiration inserted, as it were, between conscious sense-perception and the complete unconsciousness of assimilation and transmutation of physical matter. Man in fact dwells in three worlds; the one sensible to his consciousness, the other of which he remains entirely unconscious, and the third (breathing) acting as a connecting link or mediator between the two.

Now it is a fact that the process of breathing is also a kind of assimilation; at all events, it is a material process, though taking place in a more rarefied manner; it is an intermediate state between actual transmutation of matter assimilation and the process of sense-perception, the completely conscious experience of the external world.

In the state in which we find ourselves between falling asleep and awaking, we experience in the environment which then surrounds us, events which only enter into our every-day consciousness as dreams. Here man steps across into the world which is marked in our sketch, and the dreams reveal through their very nature how Man steps across. Consider for a moment how nearly related are dreams to the process of respiration—the rhythm of breathing—how often you can trace this rhythm in its after-workings when you dream. Man steps across the border, as it were, of the world of consciousness, when he dips ever so slightly into this other world in which he is when he sleeps or when he dreams. There lies also the world of ‘Imaginations’. In ‘Imaginations’ it is for us a fully conscious world, we have conscious perception in that world, which we merely sip, as it were, in our dreams.

We shall now have to consider a correspondence that is found to exist, an absolute correspondence, in respect of Number. I have already often drawn your attention to this correspondence between Man and the world in which he evolves. I have pointed to the fact that Man, in his rhythm of breathing—18 per minute—manifests something that is in remarkable accord with other processes of the Universe. We make 18 respirations per minute, which gives when calculated for the day, 25,920 respirations. And we arrive at the same number when we calculate how many days are contained in a normal life term of 72 years. That also gives about 25,920 days; so that something may be said to exhale our astral body and Ego, on falling asleep and inhale them again upon waking—always in conformity with the same number rhythm.

And again, when we consider how the Sun moves—whether apparently or really, does not matter—advancing a little each year in what we call the precession of the equinoxes, when we consider the number of years it takes the Sun to make this journey round the whole Zodiac, once more we get 25,920 years—the Platonic year.

The fact is, this human life of ours, within the boundaries set by birth and death, is indeed fashioned, down to its most infinitesimal processes—as we have seen in the breathing—in accordance with the laws of the Universe. But in the correspondence we have observed up to now between the Macrocosm and Man the Microcosm, we have made our observations in a realm where the correspondence is obvious and evident. There are however, other very important correspondences. For example, consider the following. I want to lead you through Number to something else I have to bring before you. Take the 18 respirations per minute, making 1,080 per hour and in 24 hours 25,920 respirations; that is, we must multiply: 18 X 60 X 24 in order to arrive at 25,920.

Taking this as the cycle of the precession of the equinoxes, and dividing it by 6o and again by 24, we would naturally get 18 years. And what do these 18 years really mean? Consider—these 25,920 respirations correspond to a human day of 24 hours; in other words, this 24 hour day is the day of the Microcosm. 18 respirations may serve as the unit of rhythm.

And now take the complete circle described by the precession of the equinoxes, and call it, not a Platonic year, but a great Day of the Heavens, a Macrocosmic day. How long would one respiration on this scale have to occupy to correspond with the human respiration? Its duration would have to be 18 years—a respiration made by the Being corresponding to the Macrocosm.

If we take the statements of modern astronomy—we need not interpret them here, we shall speak of their meaning later—we shall find that it is a matter of indifference whether we assume that the motion of the Sun is apparent, or the motion of the Earth; that does not concern us—but let us now take that which the Astronomer of today calls Nutation of the Earth's Axis.

You are aware that the Earth's axis lies obliquely upon the Ecliptic, and that the Astronomers speak of an oscillation of the Earth's axis around this point and they call this ‘Nutation’. The axis completes one revolution around this point in just about 18 years (it is really 18 years, 7 months, but we need not consider the fraction, although it is quite possible to calculate this too with exactitude.) But with these 18 years something else is intimately connected. For it is not merely on the fact of ‘Nutation’—this ‘trembling’, this rotation of the Earth's axis in a double cone around the Earth's centre, and the period of 18 years for its completion—it is not only on this fact that we have to fix our minds, but we find that simultaneously with it another process takes place. The Moon appears each year in a different position because, like the Sun, she ascends and descends from the ecliptic, proceeding in a kind of oscillating motion again and again towards the Equator ecliptic. And every 18 years she appears once more in the same position she occupied 18 years before. You see there is a connection between this Nutation and the path of the Moon. Nutation in truth indicates nothing else than the Moon's path. It is the projection of the motion of the Moon. So that we can in actual reality observe the “breathing” of the Macrocosm. We only need notice the path of the Moon in 18 years or, in other words, the Nutation of the Earth's axis. The Earth dances, and she dances in such a manner as to describe a cone, a double cone, in 18 years, and this dancing is a reflection of the macrocosmic breathing. This takes place just as many times in the macrocosmic year as the 18 human respirations during the microcosmic day of 24 hours.

So we really have one macrocosmic respiration per minute in this Nutation movement. In other words, we look into this breathing of the Macrocosm through this Nutation movement of the Moon, and we have before us what corresponds to respiration in man. And now, what is the purport of all this? The meaning of it is that as we pass from waking to sleep, or only from the wholly conscious to the dream state, we enter another world, and over against the ordinary laws of day, years, etc., and also the Platonic year, we find in this insertion of a Moon rhythm, something that has the same relationship in the Macrocosm, as breathing, the semiconscious process of respiration, has to our full consciousness. We have therefore not only to consider a world which is spread out before us, but another world which projects into, and permeates our own.

Just as we have before us a second part of the human organism, when observing the breathing process, namely the rhythmic man, as opposed to the perceptive or head man, so we have in what appears as the yearly Moon motion, or rather the 18-year motion of the Moon, the identity between one year and one human respiration; we have this second world interpenetrating our own.

There can therefore be no question of having only one world in our environment. We have that world that we can follow as the world of the senses; but then we have a world, whose foundations are laid within the laws of another, and which stands in exactly the same relationship to the world of the senses, as our breathing does to our consciousness; and this other world is revealed to us as soon as we interpret in the right way this Moon movement, this Nutation of the Earth's axis.

These considerations should enable you to realise the impossibility of investigating in a one-sided way the laws manifesting in the world. The modern materialistic thinker is in quest of a single system of natural laws. In this he deludes himself; what he should say is rather as follows. “The world of the senses is certainly a world in which I find myself embedded and to which I belong; it is that world which is explained by natural science in terms of Cause and Effect. But another world interpenetrates this one, and is regulated by different laws. Each world is subject to its own system of laws.” As long as we are of the opinion that one kind of system of laws could suffice for our world, and that all hangs upon the thread of Cause and Effect, so long shall we remain victims of complete illusions.

Only when we can perceive from facts such as the Moon's motion and nutation of the Earth's axis that another world extends into this one—only then are we upon the right path.

And now, you see, these are the things in which the spiritual and material (so-called) touch each other, or let us say the psychical and material. He who can faithfully observe what is contained within his own self will find the following. These things must gradually be brought to the attention of humanity. There are many among you, who have already passed the 18 years and about 7 months period in age. That was an important period. Others will have passed twice that number of years—37 years and 2 months—again an important time. After that we have a third very momentous period 18 years and seven months later, at the age of 55 years and 9 months. Few can notice as yet, not having been trained to do so, the effects and important changes taking place within the individual soul at these times. The nights passed during these periods are the most important nights in the life of the individual. It is here where the Macrocosm completes its 18 respirations, completes one minute—and Man as it were, opens a window facing quite another world. But as I said, man cannot yet watch for these points in his life. Everyone, however, could try to let his mental eye look back over the years he has passed, and if he is over 55 years old to recognise three such important epochs; others two, and most of you at any rate one! In these epochs events take place, which rush up into this world of ours out of quite a different one. Our world opens at these moments to another world.

If we wish to describe this happening more clearly, we can say that our world is at these times penetrated anew by astral streams; they flow in and out. Of course this really happens every year, but we are here concerned with the 18 years, as they correspond to the 18 respirations per minute. In short, our attention is drawn through the cosmic clock to the breathing of the Macrocosm, in which we are embedded. This correspondence with another world, which is manifested through the motion of the Moon, is exceptionally important. Because, you see, the world which at these times projects into our own, is the very world into which we pass during our sleep, when the Ego and the astral body leave our physical and etheric bodies. It must not be thought that the world composing our every-day environment is merely permeated in an abstract way by the astral world; rather should we say, it breathes in the astral world, and we can observe the astral in this breathing process through the Moon's motion or nutation. You will realise that we have here come to something of great significance. If you remember what I said recently, we may put it in the following way. We have, on the one hand, our world as it is generally observed; and we have in addition, the materialistic superstition that, for instance, if we gaze upwards, we see the Sun, a ball of gas, as it is described in books. This is nonsense. The Sun is not a ball of gas; but in that place where the Sun is, there is something less than empty space—a sucking, absorbing body, in fact, while all around it is that which exerts pressure. Consequently in that which comes to us from the Sun we have not to do with anything constituting a product of combustion in the Sun; but all that has been transmitted to the Sun from the Universe is rayed back.

Where the Sun is, is emptier than empty space. This can be said of all parts of the Universe where we find Ether. For this reason it is so difficult for the physicist to speak of Ether, for he thinks that Ether is also matter, though more rarefied than ordinary matter. Materialism is still very busy with this perpetual ‘rarefying’, both the materialism of natural science as well as the materialism of Theosophy. It distinguishes first, dense matter; then etheric matter—more rarefied; then astral matter—still more rarefied; and then there is the ‘mental’ and I do not know what else—always more and more rarefied!

The only difference (in this theory of rarefying) between the two forms of materialism is that the one recognises more degrees of rarefaction than the other. But in the transition from ponderable matter to Ether we have nothing to do with rarefaction. Anyone who believes that in Ether we have to do merely with a ‘rarefying’ process is like a man who says: ‘I have here a purse full of money; I repeatedly take from it and the money becomes less and less. I take away still more till at last none remains.’ Nothing is left—but yet he can go on! The ‘nothing’ can become less still; for if he gets into debt, his money becomes less than nothing. In the same way not only does matter become empty space, but it becomes negative, less than nothing—emptier than emptiness; it assumes a ‘sucking’ nature. Ether is sucking, absorbing. Matter presses. Ether absorbs. The Sun is an absorbing, sucking ball, and wherever Ether is present we have this absorbent force.

Here we step over into the other side, the other aspect of three-dimensional space—we pass from pressure to suction. That which immediately surrounds us in this world, that of which we are constituted as physical man and ether man, is both pressing and sucking or absorbing. We are a combination of both; whereas the Sun possesses the power of suction only, being nothing but ether, nothing but suction. It is the undulating wave of pressure and suction, ponderable matter and ether, that forms in its alternation a living organisation. And the living organism continually breathes in the astral; the breathing expresses itself through the Moon's motion or nutation. And here we begin to divine a second member or principle of the world's construction; the one member—pressure and suction, physical and etheric; the other, the second—astral. The astral is neither physical nor etheric but is continually inhaled and exhaled; and the nutation demonstrates this process.

Now a certain astronomical fact was observed even in the most ancient times. Many thousands of years before the Christian era, the Egyptians knew that after a period of 72 years the fixed stars in their apparent course gain one day on the Sun. It seems to us, does it not, that the fixed stars revolve and the Sun too revolves, but that the latter revolves more slowly, so that after 72 years the stars are appreciably ahead. This is the reason of the movement of the Vernal Point (the Spring Equinoctial point); namely, that the stars go faster. The Spring Equinox moves further and further away, the fixed star has altered its place in relation to the Sun. Briefly, the facts are that if we notice the path of a fixed star and notice the point where the Sun stands over it, we find that at the end of 72 years the star occupies the same position on the 30th December, while the Sun only reaches that point again on the 31st December. The Sun has lost a day. After a lapse of 25,920 years this loss is so great, that the Sun has described a complete revolution and once again is back upon the place we noted. We see therefore that in 72 years the Sun is one day behind the fixed stars. Now these 72 years are approximately the normal life period of Man, and they are composed of 25,920 days.

Thus when we multiply 72 years by 360, and consider the human span of life as one day, we have the human life as one day of the Macrocosm. Man is breathed out, as it were, from the Macrocosm; his life is one day in the macrocosmic year.

So that this revolution, this circle described by the precession of the Equinoxes, indicating the macrocosmic year, as already known to the Egyptians thousands of years ago (for they looked upon this period of 72 years as very important), this apparent revolution of the Vernal point is connected with the life and death of Man in the Universe—with the life and death, that is, of the Macrocosm. And the laws of the life and death of Man are something that we are compelled to follow. We have already found how nutation points to another world; as our sense-perception world points to one world, so nutation points to another, the breathing world. And now through what present-day astronomy calls ‘precession’, we have something we may again call a transition, a transition this time to a state of deep sleep, a transition to still another, a third world. We have thus three worlds, interpenetrating one another, inter-related; but we must not attempt simply to combine these worlds from the point of view of causality. Three worlds, a three-fold world, as Man is a three-fold being; one, the world of sense surrounding us, the world we perceive; a second world whose presence is indicated by the motions of the Moon; and a third which makes itself known to us by the motion of the equinoctial point, or we might say, by the path of the Sun. This third world indeed remains about as unknown to us as the world of our own Will is unknown to our ordinary consciousness.

It is important therefore to search everywhere for correspondences between the human Microcosm and the Macrocosm. And when today the Oriental, if only in a decadent way, seeks to acquire breathing consciousness, as was done in the ancient Oriental wisdom, it is the manifestation of the desire to stray across into this other world which otherwise he could only recognise through what the Moon, so to speak, wills in our world. But in those times when there was still an ancient wisdom coming to man in a different way from that by which we have today to seek wisdom—in those times man also knew how to see this working of inner law in other connections and correspondences.

In the Old Testament the Initiates, who were familiar with these matters, used always a certain image or picture—the picture, namely, of the relation between Moon-light and Sun-light. This we can find also in a certain sense in the Gospels, as I have recently shown you.

We generally speak of the Moon-light being reflected Sunlight. I am speaking now in the sense of physics, and I shall have to show later on that these expressions are really very inaccurate. The Moon-light represented in the Old Testament the Jahve or Jehovah power. This power was conceived as a reflected power, and the Initiates—though not of course the orthodox Rabbis of the Old Testament—knew: The Messiah, the Christ will come, and He will be the direct Sun-light. Jahve is only His advance reflection. Jahve is the Sun-light, but not the direct Sun-light. Of course, here we are speaking not of physical sunlight, but of the spiritual reality.

Christ entered into human evolution, He who had been present previously only in reflection, in an indirect way in the form of Jehovah. And there arose the necessity to think of the Christ, who lived in Jesus, as the result of a different set of laws from those appertaining to ordinary natural science. But if we do not admit this other set of laws, if we believe that the world exists only as the result of cause and effect, then there is no place for That which is the Christ. His place must be prepared for Him by our recognition of three interpenetrating worlds. Then there is created the possibility of being able to say: It may be that in this world of sense everything is related through the law of cause and effect as maintained by natural science, but another world permeates this one, and to this other world belongs everything that has happened in the world that has connection with the Mystery of Golgotha.

In our times, when the desire for an understanding of these matters is becoming more and more manifest, it is important to realise that this understanding must be sought through the recognition of these three interpenetrating worlds, which exist simultaneously and are entirely different one from another. This means that we must seek not for one system of laws only, but for three; and we must seek for them within Man himself.

If you consider well what I have just said, you will see that it will not do to adopt the methods of the Copernican system, and simply draw ellipses intended to show the path of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury and lastly of the Sun. That is not what is wanted at all. What is wanted is rather to look at the laws that are active in the worlds that are physically perceptible and see how these laws are cut across by an altogether different set of laws; and that especially the present Moon, in her motion, presents something that is in no way causally connected with the rest of the Stellar System, such as would be the case were the Moon a member of that System, like the other planets. The Moon however is to be referred to quite another world, which is, as it were, inserted into ours, and which indicates the breathing process of our Universe, as the Sun indicates the interpenetration of our Universe by the Ether.

Before one engages in Astronomy, one must educate oneself in a qualitative sense concerning that which moves in space, concerning the things that are interdependent in space. For one must be quite clear that Sun matter and any other matter—Earth matter for instance—can under no circumstances be brought into a simple relationship; because the matter of the Sun is, in comparison with the matter of the Earth, something absorbing and sucking, while the latter exerts pressure. The motions which express themselves in nutation are motions proceeding from the astral world, and not from anything that can be found in Newton's principles. It is just this Newtonism that has driven us so far into materialism, because it seizes on the uttermost abstractions. It speaks of a force of gravitation. The Sun, it says, attracts the Earth, or the Earth attracts the Moon; a force of attraction exists between these bodies, like some invisible cable. But if really nothing but this force of attraction existed, there would be no cause for the Moon to revolve round the Earth, or the Earth round the Sun; the Moon would simply fall on to the Earth. This would indeed have happened ages ago, if gravitation alone were acting; or the Earth would have fallen into the Sun. It is therefore quite impossible for us to look to gravitation alone for the means of explaining the imagined or actual motions of celestial bodies. So what do they do? Let us see! Here we have a Planet imbued with a constant desire to fall into the Sun—supposing we were to have the law of gravitation alone. But now we will suppose that this planet has at some time or other been given another force, a tangential force. This impetus acts with such and such a power, and the force of gravitation acts at the same time with such and such a power, so that eventually the planet does not fall into the Sun, but has to move along a line resulting from both forces.

You see that Newton's theory finds it necessary to assume some kind of original impetus, some kind of first push in the case of each planet, of each moving celestial body. There must always be some extra-mundane God somewhere, who gives this impetus, who imparts this tangential force. This is always presupposed; and remember, this assumption was made at a time when we had lost all idea of bringing the material and the spiritual into any kind of connection, when we were incapable of conceiving of anything but a perfectly external ‘push’.

Here we have an instance of the inability of materialism to understand matter. I have repeatedly drawn your attention to this of late. It follows, that therefore materialism is also unable to understand the motions of matter, and is compelled to give quite an anthropomorphic explanation of them, picturing God as a being with wholly human attributes, who simply gives the Moon a push and the Earth a push. The Earth and Moon then ‘attract’ each other—and behold, from these two forces, the push and the attraction, we have their movements in the heavens.

It is from ideas of this kind that the Solar system is constructed today. But to get a real understanding of the Universe it is absolutely necessary to look for the connection between that which lives in Man, and that which lives in the Macrocosm. For Man is an actual Microcosm in the Macrocosm. Of this we will speak further tomorrow.

The ideas which we have drawn from various sources concerning man's inclination to the Luciferic nature on the one hand, and to the Ahrimanic on the other hand, have shown us how essential it is for him to find a balance between them. Both tendencies, the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, are false paths and man must find the equilibrium. Now a question may arise which is a difficult problem of knowledge and conscience for modern humanity. The question is this: how does one find this equilibrium, this state of balance, so that one need not succumb to the Luciferic danger or to the Ahrimanic?

The answer to this question must be given in different ways for the differing periods of human evolution; for we must know how in a particular epoch men are drawn more to the one or the other side. We have a general idea of what attracts man to the Luciferic tendency or the Ahrimanic, but we must bring it once more definitely to mind in relation to our own age.

Since the beginning of the Fifth post-Atlantean period, that is, since the fifteenth century, both the intellectual life and the social life among civilised peoples have essentially changed in comparison with earlier times. Intellectual life has increasingly acquired a character where the human being himself is definitely excluded from a world-conception. Man examines nature, and the greatest progress has been made by modern mankind in natural science. But the characteristic element is this, namely, that the actual knowledge of the human being has not only made no advance through the knowledge of nature, but has in a certain sense been cast out of human knowledge. Man has an excellent knowledge of everything else in the world, but he no longer knows himself. He has studied the stages in the animal kingdom, has founded his evolutionary theory on this, and believes that he understands how the different orders have evolved from the most elementary to the more perfect. He then adds man to the sequence, applying to the human being all that he has learnt about the animals. People arrive at nothing new that would explain the being of man, they seek the elements of explanation within the animal world and simply say: Man is just the highest stage. Nothing particular is said about the human being; he is just the highest stage. And this includes all human characteristics and is said with an instinctive obviousness. The result is that there is absolutely no real knowledge of man.

This particular sort of knowledge prevails not only in the various sciences but has already become accepted in the widest circles throughout the world. It has become something that the man of today absorbs with his newspaper reading. And if he does not absorb it with his newspaper, then in some other way, for in fact it is already inoculated into children at school. This character of modern science has more and more become general property and it fills people with ideas and concepts that constitute their general state of mind. Man reaches a certain consciousness of the world but in this consciousness he himself is omitted, That is the one thing.

The other is modern social life. You need only study the social life that obtained in times that preceded the fifteenth century. The world was filled, so to say, with judgments that were derived from an ancient and honoured social wisdom, and were the property of all men in common. One did not judge for oneself what was good or bad. Nor had one any doubt about it, for one grew up in a social order that possessed a common judgment on good and bad, whether it had reference to the people or to religion. Man decided whether he should do this or that out of this common judgment, out of something hovering authoritatively over the social order.

Much of what was at one time far more intensely established in the social order of humanity, we have today merely in our language, and since our language has in many respects become phrases we have it in the phrase. Just recollect in how many cases and to what an extent people are accustomed to use the little word “one”—“one” thinks so, “one” does this, “one” says this, and so on, although in most cases it is merely a phrase and means nothing at all. The little pronoun “one” really has meaning only in the speech which still belongs to a people in which the separate member has not become such a strong individuality as in our time, in which the words of a single person express with a certain right a common judgment.

The contents of the human soul which are gradually being given by the character of modern science and which have led man to forget himself in his world-conception, lead to the Ahrimanising of mankind in our age. And in social life that which leads man out of a life in common, which, for example, in industry has led him from the old interdependent life of the Guilds to the modern free economy, this leads to the Luciferising of man. Yet both are entirely necessary; both had to arise in the evolution of humanity. For in the earlier knowledge which man gained and which formed the constitution of his soul, man himself was always contained. In earlier times one could not gain knowledge of nature, for example, without at the same time gaining knowledge of man. One could not gain knowledge about Mars without at the same time getting to know in what way Mars has significance for human life. One could not gain knowledge about gold without gaining certain facts about man.

All that was human at that time has been thrust out. In this way one came to a pure concept of nature, freed from everything pertaining to man. This concept of nature had then to be the foundation for modern technics.

Modern technics can only furnish the great triumphs of recent times when it contains nothing but what a man can survey with his pure intellect. Look at any machine, look at any organisation of modern technical life, apart from the actual social life, and you will see that everything is organised in such a way as to exclude the human being from what is actually involved. Modern technology had therefore to have recourse to the expedient, although not conscious of it, of using merely the corpse of nature.

When we construct a machine, we break up the material that will form it, just as nature breaks up the human being when it makes a corpse out of the still animated organism. Everywhere in our mechanism we have the corpses of nature's existence. But man is not born from this corpse of nature of which our mechanical world consists, the world we have gradually produced as technics. He is born out of the nature that lives, that is alive even to the mineral kingdom. To this nature we have added in modern technics another nature, a corpse of nature, After the geological strata of the earth have been formed (see diagram, blue, orange) we have, as it were, superimposed a topmost geological stratum (green) over them, which consists of our machines and no longer contains anything of living nature. We work in the dead part of nature inasmuch as we have added modern technics to what was formerly there.

This is something that makes a shattering impression on a man who considers it in its full extent, particularly when he realises how detached modern mankind has made life, not only through external mechanical technics, but through the technical mode of thought.

Consider something like the end of the war which took place between China and Japan towards the close of the nineteenth century. What took place after the conclusion of peace as the necessary settlement? The Chinese Minister wrote an immense sum in millions on a cheque. This cheque was taken to a bank. Some subordinate official accepted it and purely through Banking procedure the cheque was the occasion by which the Japanese envoy in China received the vast sum of millions which the Chinese Minister wrote upon the cheque. Something took place there in a corpse-like—externally of course—one might say, in a shadowy corpse-like manner. Nothing else has been brought about by it except that the credit of millions which the Chinese Empire up to then had had at the Bank of England had passed over to Japan through the writing and delivering of the cheque. What would it have meant if one had wanted by old procedure to pay these millions of war-damages which were simply credited to Japan through a cheque from China? I will even take the mildest form—paying in cash. What would it have meant if the whole of this money, supposing Chinese money to be what it is now, or was a short time ago, had had to be sent over from China to Japan? Thus, where one still has to do with realities the simplest form shows one what modern life has become relatively rapidly in the last third of the nineteenth century. Man's whole mode of thinking has been taken hold of by such things and has familiarised itself quite naturally. Intellectualism, which in fact Ahrimanises humanity, has become a matter of course.

On the other hand, man has had to experience in social life what has been experienced. Just as he could not have come to pure natural science without intellectualism, he would not have come to the consciousness of his freedom without what he has gone through in the social life. Man has been hollowed out through the nature of modern science. He no longer knows anything of himself, he cannot understand the being of man. But on the other hand there has arisen in him the greatest strain and tension, the great demand upon his being to act from his own original impulse, for man is to act as a free being.

If one wants a symbol for what has really come about one can only say this: Man has increasingly lost the fulness of his being and become a total cipher, a blank in his own eyes. For modern natural science contains nothing of man. He has become gradually a total cipher and now in the cipher the impulse of freedom must stream out (see diagram).

That is the discord in modern man. He is to be free, that is, find the impulses of his nature and his actions within himself, but when he tries to penetrate to where these impulses are to arise and understand them, he finds a blank, a cipher, he is inwardly hollowed out. It is necessary for this to have come about, but it is also a necessity for modern humanity to come out beyond it again. For in this freedom lies the Luciferic danger unless one finds the equilibrium, and in the modern scientific life lies the Ahrimanic danger if one does not reach the state of balance.

How does one come to the state of balance? Here we must indicate something that might be called “the Golden Rule” of modern Spiritual Science—that is good. Science had to arise in modern evolution, but it must be widened. It needs a knowledge of the human being, and this can alone be brought through Spiritual Science. It is no knowledge of man to dissect him and take the brain and the liver and the stomach and the heart, for then one only gets what is also to be found in the animal kingdom but in a somewhat other form. All that is of no real value for the knowledge of man as such. Only the knowledge of man gained from Spiritual Science has value. The moment one knows that the human being with his actual ego is rooted in the will, that his will-filled ego represents his actual earthly spirituality and that this in the earthly realm makes use of the metabolism, one has an essential fact from which one can proceed to study the human metabolism and its specification throughout the organism. One comes from the spiritual element to an understanding of the human bodily nature. One must learn to know the rhythmic system and how it is expressed in the shaping of the course of the breath, the course of the blood, and one must break with the superstition that the heart is a pump which somehow drives the blood through the organism like a flood. One must learn that the Spirit is at work in the blood-circulation and that therefore rhythm there lays hold of the metabolism, causes the blood-circulation and then, in the course of human development, in the very embryo, plastically moulds the heart out of the blood-circulation, so that the heart is formed out of the blood-circulation, out of the spiritual. If one then learns to know how in the nerves-senses-system the life of concepts breaks down again the metabolic process, if one recognises the nerve as something that is left behind from the conceptual life, then one sees into the human being in a way in which one cannot penetrate the animal, for in the animal all these things are quite different.

The materialist imagines that here is a nerve (see diagram, red) and this nerve produces something as a picture. No, that is not the reality. In reality the conceptual life proceeds, and while it proceeds it destroys the organic matter, creates, as it were, a groove of waste matter within the nerve (black). That is a deposit created by the life of concepts, something excreted from the organism. And the nerve is the excretory organ for the conceptual life.

In the materialistic age people have used a materialistic comparison—that the brain excretes thoughts as the liver excretes gall. That is nonsense, for the reverse is true. The brain is excreted by the thoughts, separated off continually and continually replaced by the metabolic organism. A modern scientific man will not be able to find anything right in such an idea; he will say that it all refers equally to the animal, the animal has a brain and such and such organs, and so on. This shows. however, an ignorance of himself; anyone who speaks like this of man and animal makes the same mistake as a legislator would make if he had all the razors to be found at all the barbers of a town carried to the restaurants, since he connected with a knife solely the idea of eating and concluded that an instrument formed in a certain way could only have one purpose.

The important point is to recognise that the organ in man does not fulfil the same service as in the animal; moreover the whole mode of observation which I have just employed in its most elementary elements has not at all a similar meaning in the case of the animal. It is precisely the knowledge of what man possesses out of the spiritual as material organs that is so immensely important; this concrete self-knowledge is the essential point. All the idle talk and chatter of the various mysticisms of today which proclaim that man must grasp himself inwardly, all this dreaming is nothing; it leads not to a real self-knowledge but only to an inner pleasant feeling of wellbeing. Man must study with patience and industry how his different organs are plastically formed out of the spirit. Genuine science must be based on the spiritual. One must take man as he stands before us and imitatively model him plastically, as it were, out of the spirit. That is the one thing.

While humanity lives today as it does, letting authoritative sciences issue from the various establishments, there exists in the spiritual worlds a sacred decree; external science must be supplemented by the science of the knowledge of man' It will be disastrous for mankind if it receives only external science, The Mysteries existed in ancient times in order not to let anything harmful approach man, but that is not compatible with the modern spirit. Mankind therefore in its conscious members must care for what was formerly cared for by outside powers. Those personalities who have come to understand something of these things must take care that the different sciences cannot cast their shadows, by confronting the shadows, which would darken humanity, with the light of a real, genuine, concrete self- knowledge of man. Sciences without this self-knowledge are harmful, for they Ahrimanise humanity-, Sciences with the counterpart of human self-knowledge are beneficial, for they lead mankind in reality to what it must reach in the immediate future. There should be no science which in one respect or another is not brought back to the human being. There should be no science which is not followed up right into the inmost being of man, where, if it is thus followed up, it first acquires its true meaning.

Thus, through this actually concrete self-knowledge one arrives at the equilibrium that the sciences have destroyed. Present-day man is for the most part not in the least interested in what sort of being he is in the world. If he wants to be particularly profound he lets himself “prattle” about being some sort of little god or the like—without having any real idea of the god. It is of little interest to him, however, how his individual human form is formed out of the whole universe.

The social life becomes Luciferic if it leads purely to the promotion of freedom inside that which has become nil, blank. Man will not be a nil to himself if he comes to a real self-knowledge, for then he will know how the whole structure of the universe creates an image of itself in what is within his skin, how every human being carries inside his skin a product of the whole world, The impulse of freedom is brought to equilibrium in the social life if we learn what underlies the world as spirit, if we get beyond the merely material view of the world which is characteristic of the development of knowledge during recent centuries.

Man has been lost. The outer world has become empty of man. In external astronomy we observe the sun, the planets, the fixed stars, the comets; they seem to pass through space as some kind of objective bodies. We seek their laws of motion. There is nothing there of man. Read my “Occult Science” and bring before your mind the description given there of world evolution. Directly you read of Old Saturn you are reading nothing described by modern astronomy, but at once you read of what appears as the first rudiments of the human being. In the description of Saturn is contained all that existed as the first rudiments of humanity during the Saturn evolution. With the history of world evolution you follow at the same time the whole of human evolution. Nowhere do you find there a world devoid of man. What you yourselves are is to be found described stage for stage in the evolution of the world itself.

What is the consequence? If you go into what modern science gives you about some sort of ancient mist which then conglomerated into a ball from which our present world is supposed to have arisen, but in which the human being cannot be found, you have nothing human in it at all, it all remains purely intellectual. You find something there that can interest your head, but it does not grip your whole nature. Your whole human being can only he gripped by a knowledge which contains this human being. In fact it is only the indolence of modern man, who, when he takes in something, is not at all accustomed to develop feelings and will-impulse as well. If someone reads this evolution of Saturn, Sun, Moon to the Earth and then further reads the perspective for the future, it is indolence if, in spite of its all being given in pure concepts, he does not feel stimulated in his feelings, if he does not feel; There I stand in the world, there I am together with this whole world, there I know myself to be one with this whole world!

This knowledge of oneself as being one with the world distinguishes the knowledge of the world given through Spiritual Science from the view of the world that obtains today. But let that permeate the men of today in whom it is lacking, let men be filled with the consciousness of belonging to the whole world, then a social spirit can emerge that can lead men forward. Whereas what has arisen and could indeed lead to the claiming of freedom, but gives no feeling of responsibility, this has only brought men to the point of producing the chaos in which we are now living. Luciferising can only be prevented if men recognise their position in the cosmos, if they penetrate not only the physical nature of the cosmos, that which is given to the senses, but the spiritual element as well, feel themselves as spirit in the spirit of the universe. This realisation of man's connection with the spiritual world gives rise to real social feeling, it enables man to fructify the social life on earth.

What the feeling of freedom has produced in man's social life has led above all to Luciferising, though modern men may feel nothing of it. But in the spiritual world in which we are all the time rooted, there stands again a sacred decree which proclaims to man: You must not allow the impulse of freedom to remain without a feeling of the cosmos! Just as the knowledge of man must be added to the external sciences, so must cosmic feeling be added to what has evolved as social life in our time.

These two, knowledge of humanity and feeling with the whole universe, give man equilibrium. And this he can find if in the most modern sense he really grasps the Christ-Mystery, grasps it as Spiritual Science can give it to him. For there we speak of the Christ as a cosmic Being Who has descended to earth out of the infinities of the universe. We learn to feel cosmically and must only seek to give this feeling a content. This we can do only through Anthroposophy, otherwise the Christ-concept too is empty for us. The Christ-concept becomes phrase unless it becomes something through which we understand the cosmos itself, humanly.

Just feel how from a universe that contains the Sun described by modern Astronomy and the spectral-analysis described by modern Physics—feel how from such a universe the Christ could not have descended to earth. One who adheres merely to this description of the cosmos as knowledge, can attach no meaning at all to any true, real Christ-Being. Such a Christ remains empty or becomes such as Harnack imagines. To learn to know and to feel the Christ today as Cosmic Being one needs the history of evolution that looks for man through the Saturn, Sun, Moon periods. There, where the human element is within the cosmos, one finds also the knowledge which permits the Christ to come forth from the cosmos. And if one learns to know how man's material part, what lies within his skin, is created out of the spiritual, then one learns to know him in such a way that one learns to know the Mystery of Golgotha, the incarnating of the Cosmic Christ in the individual man. Such a human being as modern science—from mathematics to psychology—can describe would find it impossible to imagine that the Christ had in any way incorporated in him. In order to understand this one must come to real self-knowledge. There is no Christianity today which can be accepted by the modern mind except through the self-knowledge and the cosmic knowledge of man which are given by Spiritual Science.

The nature of these connections can be discovered throughout our anthroposophical literature, and they should be compared with what is essential in our time for the progress of mankind. What people have received up to now in various ways from education and custom, they like to have on the one hand as a sort of shadowy abstract knowledge for Sunday, but would then prefer to regard the rest of life as quite apart from this knowledge—not basing their life on it. Any deeper need of the soul is met by the Sunday pulpit, any external requirements, by the State. Both are accepted traditionally and no thought is given as to where one must come if this traditional acquiescence were to continue.

I have constantly and from very many aspects pointed out the gravity of our time. Today I wished to indicate how the whole course of scientific life must not be pursued further unless every science is illumined by self-knowledge, and how social development must not be tolerated unless a cosmic feeling is introduced, a conception of the universe in which the human being is present in the conception itself. It is characteristic of Anthroposophy that when we study it we perceive the whole universe in the single human being and when we contemplate the world we find that everywhere it contains man.

Such things are no doubt reminiscent of Inspirations and Imaginations which humanity has had in the past, but they are not renewals of an external kind, they are drawn forth from the consciousness to which mankind is actually summoned today out of the spiritual world itself. What man sees around him in this physical world does not simply happen of itself. Man is standing within the spiritual world just as he stands as physical organism within the physical world. And something is happening, something is going on in this spiritual world in which he stands. According to what man is has he a meaning for the events of the spiritual worlds.

Let us suppose that someone only considers what goes on around him in the physical world; at most he pays a certain heed to a traditional faith which, however, has no relation to the world and only talks abstractions, and that this man now engages in traditional science, He can pursue this science, empty as it is of man, he can fill his soul with it as millions and millions today cram themselves with it more or less consciously. In this way, however, men stand likewise in a world of the Spirit, for cramming ourselves full with this science is of significance too for the spiritual world. What significance has it for the spiritual world? If that goes on in the same way then Ahriman reaps his reward. For he is the spirit who slinks eagerly round modern educational establishments and would like to keep them as they are; for that serves his interests. The Ahrimanic being, this cold ossified, bald-pated Ahriman—to speak figuratively—slinks round our modern educational centres and would like them to remain as they are. He will certainly lend his assistance if it is a matter of destroying something like this Goetheanum.

On the other hand, in the social life in which men establish their earthly claims without a feeling of the cosmos, and inasmuch as they only speak of these earthly claims without being penetrated, inflamed and inspired with the cosmic consciousness—here actually the Luciferic beings come into their own. There we see how Lucifer lives. I cannot here use the picture, which is a picture but yet is born actually from genuine Ahrimanic concepts, the picture of the ossified, slinking, bald-pated Ahriman, who slinks round educational institutes and wants to preserve them as they are. This picture would not apply to the nature of Lucifer. But another picture would apply: Let opinions be expressed out of mere egoism, with no feeling of the cosmos, even with good will and well-meant social intentions, then the true nature of Lucifer breaks out from what is being expressed. With the social demands that are promoted in the world without cosmic feeling, man spits out of himself what then becomes the beautiful Lucifer. He lives in men themselves, in their stomachs, ruined through the social mis-instincts—understood spiritually—in their ruined lungs, there lives the Luciferic source. It wrests itself free, man spits it out of his whole being and hence our spiritual atmosphere is filled with this Luciferic nature—filled with social instincts that do not feel the connection of man with the cosmos. The bald Ahriman, lanky, skeleton-like, haggard, slinking round our abstract culture on the one hand, on the other hand that which extricates itself slimily out of man himself and assumes the semblance of beauty by which man is deluded, these are pictures—but they are the realities of our time. And only through self-knowledge and only through a feeling of the connection of man with the cosmos does man find the balance between the ossified and the semblance of beauty, between the bony Being and the slimy Being, between that which slinks round him and that which wants to extricate itself out of him. And this equilibrium must be found. The fruit of the culture, the civilisation of modern times, is, in fact, nothing else than what one could call the marriage between the bony and the slimy. Man is living his life in such a way that civilisation is entering on the Spengler-prophesied downfall. As a matter of fact, Spengler could only describe the world in the way he does, for he has before him the world that has arisen out of the marriage of the bony with the one covered with slime. But man must find the equilibrium.

The times are grave, for man must become man. He must learn how to get rid of the bony as well as the slimy and become man, become man in such a way that the intellect is permeated by the heart and the heart warmed through by the intellect. Then he will find the equilibrium. And then in fact man will neither sink into—speaking spiritually—slimy mysticism nor bald-pated science, but will open himself to what is man, what I perhaps may call, after having characterised it, the Anthroposophical. That stands in the middle, the truly human, the Anthroposophical, it stands really in the midst between these two opposites into which civilisation has gradually come. The Anthropos is in truth when he really manifests his being, neither the ossified nor the slimy; he is the one who holds the balance between the intellect and the heart. That must be sought for.

What must be grasped today out of the very depth of human and cosmic existence, you will understand when you think over the two pictures which I have set before you, purely as pictures. They are meant as pictures, but as pictures that point to true realities.

We will speak further of this.

If an Oriental sage of ancient times—we must return to very ancient times of Oriental culture if we are to consider what I wish to say here—one who had been initiated into the mysteries of the ancient East, were to turn his gaze on modern Western civilization, he might say to its representatives, “You are really living entirely in fear; your whole mood of soul is governed by fear. Everything you do, but also everything you feel, is saturated with fear and its reverberations in the most important moments of life. Since fear is closely related to hatred, hatred plays a great role in your entire civilization.”

Let us make this quite clear. I mean that a sage of the ancient Eastern civilization would speak in this way if he stood again today among Western people with the same standard of education, the same mood of soul, as those of his ancient time. He would make it plain that in his time and his country, civilization was founded on a completely different basis.He would probably say, “In my day, fear played no part in civilized life. Whenever we were to promulgate a world conception, allowing action and social life to spring from it, the main thing was joy—joy that could be enhanced to the point of a complete giving of oneself to the world, that then could be enhanced to love.” This is how he would experience it, and he would indicate as a result (if he were rightly understood) what were from his point of view the most important ingredients, the most important impulses, of modern civilization. If we knew how to listen to him in the right way, we would gain much that we really need to know in order to find a starting point for trying to get a grip on modern life. Actually, an echo of the ancient civilization still prevails in Asia, though strong European influences have been absorbed into its religious, aesthetic, scientific, and social life. This ancient civilization is in decline, and when the ancient Oriental sage says, “Love was the fundamental force of the ancient Oriental civilization,” then certainly it must be admitted that but little of this love can be traced directly in the present. One who is able to discern it, however, can see even now, in the phenomena of decline of the Asiatic culture, the penetration of this primeval element of joy, of delight in the world and love for the world.

In those ancient times there was in the Orient little of what afterward has been required of man since the thought resounded that found its most radical expression in the Greek saying, “Know thyself!” This “Know thyself” actually entered human historical life only in the ancient Greek culture. The ancient Eastern world conception, comprehensive and light-filled, was not yet permeated by this kind of human knowledge; it was in no way oriented toward directing man's gaze into his own being.

In this respect the human being is dependent on the conditions prevailing in his environment. The ancient Oriental culture was founded under a different effect of sunlight on the earth, and its earthly conditions were also different from those of the later Western culture. In the ancient East, man's inner gaze was captured, one could say, by all that surrounds the human being as the world, and he had a special Inducement for giving over his entire inner being to the world. It was cosmic knowledge that blossomed in the ancient Oriental wisdom and in the view of the world that owed its origin to this wisdom. Even in the mysteries themselves—you can infer this from all you have been hearing for many years—in all that lived in the mysteries of the East there was no actual adherence to the challenge, “Know thyself!” On the contrary—“Turn your gaze outward toward the world and try to let that approach you which is hidden in the depths of cosmic phenomena!”—that is how the challenge of the ancient Oriental culture would have been expressed.

The teachers and pupils of the mysteries were compelled, however, to turn their gaze to the inner being of man when the Asiatic civilization began to spread westward. As soon, indeed, as mystery colonies were founded in Egypt and in North Africa, but particularly when the mysteries began to develop their colonies still further to the West—a special center was ancient Ireland—then the teachers and pupils of the mysteries coming over from Asia were faced, simply by virtue of the geographical conditions of the Western world and its entirely different elemental configuration, with the necessity of cultivating self-knowledge and a true inner vision. Simply because these mystery pupils, when still in Asia, had acquired knowledge of the outer world—knowledge of the spiritual facts and beings lying behind the outer world—simply through this, they were now able to penetrate deeply into all that actually exists in man's innermost being. In Asia all this could not have been observed at all. The inward-turning gaze would have been paralyzed, so to speak. By means of all that was brought from the East to the Western mystery colonies, however, man's gaze having long been directed outward so as to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, was now enabled to penetrate into man's inner being. It was actually only the strongest souls who could endure what they perceived. Man's inner being actually first came to the consciousness of humanity in these mystery colonies transported from the Orient and founded in Western regions.

One can indeed realize what an impression was produced by this self-knowledge on the teachers and pupils of the Oriental mysteries if we repeat a saying that was addressed to the pupils over and over again by the teachers who had already cultivated that vision of man's inner being, a saying that was to make clear to them in what kind of mood of soul this self-knowledge was actually to be approached. The saying to which I am referring is frequently quoted. In its full weight it was uttered only in the more ancient mystery colonies of Egypt, North Africa, and Ireland as a preparation for the pupil and as a reminder for every initiate regarding the experiences of man's inner being. The saying runs thus, “No one who is not initiated in the sacred mysteries should discover the secrets of man's inner being; to utter these secrets in the presence of a non-initiate is forbidden; the mouth uttering these secrets lays the burden of sin upon itself, and the ear burdens itself with sin when it hearkens to those secrets.”

Time and again this saying was uttered from the inner experience that an individual, prepared by Oriental wisdom, was able to attain when he penetrated, by virtue of the earthly conditions of the West, to knowledge of the human being. Tradition has preserved this saying, and today it is still repeated—without any understanding of its innermost nature—in the secret orders and secret societies of the West that outwardly still have a great influence. It is repeated only from tradition, however. It is not uttered with the necessary weight, for those who say it do not really know what it signifies. Even in our time, however, this saying is used as a kind of motto in the secret orders of the West: “There are secrets concerning man's inner being that can be transmitted to people only within the secret societies, for otherwise the mouth uttering them is sinful, and the ear hearing them is likewise sinful.”

One must say that, as time has evolved, many people—not in Central Europe but in Western lands—learn in their secret societies what has been handed down as tradition from the researches of the ancient wisdom. It is received without understanding, although as an impulse it actually often flows into action. In more recent centuries, actually since the middle of the fifteenth century, the human constitution has become such as to make it impossible to see these things in their original form; they could be absorbed only intellectually. One could receive concepts about them, but one could not attain a true experience of them. Individual shad only some intimations of it. Many people could penetrate into this realm of experience through such intimations.

Such people have sometimes adopted strange forms of outer life, as, for instance, Bulwer Lytton, who wrote Zanoni.¹ What he became in his later life can be grasped only if one knows how he received, to begin with, the tradition of self-knowledge, but how, by virtue of his particular, individual constitution, he was also able to penetrate into certain mysteries. He thereby became estranged from the natural ways of life. Precisely in him it is possible to see what a man's attitude toward life becomes when he admits into his inner experience this “foreign” spiritual world, not merely into his concepts but into his whole mood of soul. Many facts must then be judged by other than conventional standards.

It appeared, of course, quite outlandish when Bulwer traveled about, speaking of his inner experiences with a certain emphasis, while a young woman who accompanied him played a harp-like instrument, for he always needed to have this harp-music in between the passages of his talk. Here and there he appeared in gatherings where everything else went on in a completely formal, conventional way. He would enter in his rather eccentric garb and sit down, with his harp-maiden seated in front of his knees. He would speak a few sentences; then the harp-maiden would play; then he would continue his talk, and the maiden would play again. Something coquettish, in a higher sense of the word—one cannot help characterizing it in this way at first—was thus introduced into the ordinary world where pedantic human convention has made such increasing inroads, particularly since the middle of the fifteenth century.

Humanity has little idea of the degree of conventionalism into which it has grown; people have less and less idea of it simply because it comes to seem natural. One sees something as reasonable only insofar as it is in line with what is “done.” Things in life, however, are all interconnected, and the dryness and indolence of modern times, the relationship human beings now have to one another, belongs to the intellectual development of the last few centuries. The two things belong together. A man such as Bulwer Lytton, of course, did not fit into such a development; one can quite well picture to oneself people of more ancient times traveling about in the world accompanied by a younger person with some pleasant music. The disparity between one attitude of soul and another need only be seen in the right light; then such a thing can be understood. With Bulwer Lytton, however, something lit up in him that no longer could exist directly in the modern intellectual age but only as tradition.

One must, however, recover the knowledge of the human being that lived in the mystery colonies of which I have spoken. The ordinary human being today is aware of the world around him by means of his outer, physical sense impressions. What he sees, he orders and arranges with his intellect. Then he looks also into his own inner being .Basically this is the world that man surveys and out of which he acts. The sense impressions received from outside, the mental images developed from these sense impressions, these mental images as they penetrate within, becoming trans-formed by impulses of feeling and of will, together with everything that is reflected back into consciousness as memories—here we have what forms the content of the soul, the content of life in which modern man weaves and out of which he acts. At most modern man is led by a kind of false mysticism to ask, “What is actually within my inner being? What does self-knowledge yield?” In raising such questions he wishes to find the answer in his ordinary consciousness. This ordinary consciousness, however, only emerges from what actually originated in outer sense impressions and has been transformed by feeling and will. One finds only the reflections, the mirror-images, of outer life when looking in to one's inner being with ordinary consciousness; and although the outer impressions are transformed by feeling and will,man still does not know how feeling and will actually work. For this reason he often fails to recognize what he sees in his inner being as a transformed mirror-image of the outer world and takes it, perhaps, as a special message from the divine, eternal world. This is not the case, however. What appears to the ordinary consciousness of modern man as self-knowledge is only the transformed outer world, which is reflected out of man's inner being into his consciousness.

If man really wished to look into his inner being, he would be obliged—I have often used this image—to break the inner mirror. Our inner being is indeed like a mirror.We gaze on the outer world. Here are the outer sense impressions. We link mental images to them. These mental images are then reflected by our inner being. By looking into our inner being we arrive only at this mirror (see drawing below, red). We see what is reflected in this memory mirror (red arrows). We are just as unable to gaze into man's inner being with ordinary consciousness as we are to look behind a mirror without breaking it. This, however, is precisely what was brought about in the preparatory stage of the ancient path of Oriental wisdom: the teachers and pupils of the mystery centers that came to the West could penetrate directly through the memories into the inner being of man.Out of what they discovered they afterward spoke those words that actually were meant to convey that one had to be well prepared—above all in those ancient times—if one wished to direct one's gaze to the inner being of man.

What, then, does one behold within the human being? There, one sees how something of the power of perceiving and thinking, which is developed in front of the memory-mirror, penetrates below this memory-mirror. Thoughts penetrate below this memory-mirror and work into the human etheric body, into that part of the etheric body that forms the basis of growth but is also the origin of the forces of will. In looking out into the sunlit-space and surveying all that we receive through our sense impressions, there radiates into our inner being something that on the one hand becomes memory images but that also trickles through the memory-mirror, permeating it just as the processes of growth, nutrition, and so on permeate us.

The thought-forces first permeate the etheric body, and the etheric body, permeated in this way by the thought-forces, works in quite a special way on the physical body. Thereupon a complete transformation arises of the material existence that is within the physical body of man. In the outer world, matter is nowhere completely destroyed. This is why modern philosophy and science speak of the conservation of matter, but this law of the conservation of matter is valid only for the outer world. Within the human being,matter is completely dissolved into nothingness. The very essence of matter is fully destroyed. It is precisely upon this fact that our human nature is based: upon being able to throw back matter into chaos, to destroy matter utterly,within that sphere that lies deeper than memory.

This is what was pointed out to the mystery pupils who were led from the East into the mystery colonies of the West, especially Ireland. “In your inner being, below the capacity for memory, you bear within you something that works destructively, and without it you could not have developed your thinking, for you must develop thinking by permeating the etheric body with thought-forces. An etheric body that is permeated with thought-forces, however, works on the physical body in such a way as to throw its matter back into chaos and to destroy it.” If, therefore, a person ventures into this inner being of man with the same attitude with which he penetrates as far as memory, he enters a realm where the being of man wants to destroy, to extinguish, what is there. For the purpose of developing the human, thought-filled “I” or ego, we all bear within us,below the memory-mirror, a fury of destruction, a fury of dissolution, in relation to matter. There is no self-knowledge that does not point with the greatest intensity toward this inner human fact.

For this reason, whoever has had to learn of the presence of this source of destruction² in the inner being of man must take an interest in the evolution of the spirit. With all intensity he must be able to say to himself: spirit must exist and, for the sake of the continuance of the spirit, matter should be extinguished.

It is only after humanity has been spoken to for many years about the interests connected with spiritual scientific investigation that attention can be drawn to what actually exists within the human being. Today we must do so, however, for otherwise man would consider himself to be something different from what he really is within Western civilization. Within Western civilization man is the sheath for a source of destruction, and actually the forces of decline can be trans-formed into forces of ascent only if man becomes conscious of this, that he is the sheath for a source of destruction.

What would happen if man were not to be led by spiritual science out of this consciousness? Already in the evolution of our time we can see what would happen. What is isolated, separated, as it were, in the human being, and should work only within him, at the single spot within where matter is thrown back into chaos, now breaks out and penetrates outer human instincts. That is what will happen to Western civilization, yes, and to the civilization of the whole earth. This is shown by all the destructive forces appearing today—in Eastern Europe, for instance. It is a fury of destruction thrust out of the inner being of man into the outer world, and in the future man will be able to find his bearings regarding what actually flows into his instincts only when a true knowledge of the human being once again prevails, when we become aware once more of the human source of destruction within, which must be there, however, for the sake of the evolution of human thinking. This strength of thinking that man must have in order that he may have a world conception in keeping with our time, this strength of thinking which must be there in front of the memory-mirror, brings about the continuation of thinking into the etheric body, and the etheric body thus permeated by thinking works destructively upon the physical body. This source of destruction within modern Western man is a fact, and knowledge merely draws attention to it. If the source of destruction is there without man being able to bring it to consciousness, it is much worse than if man takes full cognizance of this source of destruction and from this stand-point enters into the evolution of modern civilization.

When the pupils of these mystery colonies, of which I have spoken, first heard of these secrets, their immediate response was fear. This fear they learned to know thoroughly. They became thoroughly acquainted with the sensation that a penetration into man's inner being—not frivolously in the sense of a nebulous mysticism but undertaken in all sincerity—must instill fear. This fear felt by the ancient mystery pupils of the West was overcome only by disclosing to them the whole significance of the facts. Then they were able to conquer through consciousness what had to arise in them as fear.

When the age of intellectualism set in, this same fear became unconscious, and as unconscious fear it is still active. Under all kinds of masks it works into outer life. It is suited to the modern age, however, to penetrate into man's inner being. “Know thyself” has become a rightful demand. It was by a deliberate calling forth of fear, followed by an overcoming of this fear, that the mystery pupils were directed to self-knowlege in the right way.

The age of intellectualism dulled the sight of what lay in man's inner being, but it was unable to do away with the fear. It thus came about that man was and still is under the influence of this unconscious fear to the degree of saying, “There is nothing at all in the human being that transcends birth and death.” He is afraid of penetrating deeper than this life of memory, this ordinary life of thought, which maintains its legitimacy, after all, only between birth and death. He is afraid to look down into what is actually eternal in the human soul, and from this fear he postulates the doctrine that there is nothing at all outside this life between birth and death. Modern materialism has arisen out of fear, without having the least intimation of this. The modern materialistic world conception is a product of fear and anxiety.

This fear thus lives on in the outer actions of human beings, in the social structure, in the course of history since the middle of the fifteenth century, and especially in the nineteenth century materialistic world conception. Why did these people become materialists, that is, why would they admit only the outer, that which is given in material existence? Because they were afraid to descend into the depths of the human being.

This is what the ancient Oriental sage would have wished to express from his knowledge by saying, “You modern Westerners live entirely steeped in fear. You establish your social order upon fear; you create your arts out of fear; your materialistic world conception has been born from fear. You and the successors of those who in my time established the ancient Oriental world conception, although they have come into decadence now—you and these people of Asia will never understand one another, because with the Asiatic people, after all, everything sprang ultimately from love; with you everything originates in fear mixed with hate.”

This certainly sounds radical, so I prefer to try to bring the facts before you as an utterance from the lips of an ancient Oriental sage. It will perhaps be believed that such a one could speak in this way were he to return, whereas a modern person might be considered foolish if he put these things so radically! From such a radical characterization of these things, however, we can learn what we really must learn today for the healthy progress of civilization. Humanity will have to know again that rational thinking, which is the highest attainment of modern times, could not have come into existence if the life of ideas did not arise from a source of destruction. This source must be recognized, so that it may be kept safely within and not pass over into outer instincts and thence become a social impulse.

One can really penetrate deeply into the connections of modern life by looking at things in this way. The world that manifests as a source of destruction lies within, beyond the memory-mirror. The life of modern man, however, takes its course between the memory-mirror and the outer sense perceptions. Just as little as the human being, when he looks into his inner being, is able to see beyond the memory-mirror, so far is he from being able to penetrate through all that is spread out before him as sense perception; he cannot see beyond it. He adds to it a material, atomistic world,which is indeed a fantastic world, because he cannot penetrate through the sensory mental images.

Man is no stranger, however, to this world beyond the outer, sensory mental images. Every night between falling asleep and awakening he penetrates this world. When you sleep, you dwell within this world. What you experience there beyond the sensory mental images is not the atomistic world conjectured by the visionaries of natural science. What lies beyond the sphere of the senses was actually experienced by the ancient Oriental sage in his mysteries. One can experience it, however, only when one has devotion for the world, when one has the desire and the urge to surrender oneself entirely to the world. Love must hold sway in cognition if one wishes to penetrate beyond the sense impression. It was this love in cognition that prevailed especially in the ancient Oriental civilization.

Why must one have this devotion? One must have this devotion because, if one sought to enter the world beyond the senses with one's ordinary human I, one would be harmed. The I, as experienced in ordinary life, must be given up if one wishes to penetrate into the world beyond the senses. How does this I originate? This I is formed by the human being's capacity to plunge into the chaos of destruction. This I must be forged and hardened in that world lying within man as a source of destruction. With this I one cannot live beyond the sphere of the outer sense world. Let us picture to ourselves the source of destruction in whole human organism. What I am portraying is to be understood intensively, not extensively, but I would like to sketch it for you. Here is the source of destruction, here the human sheath. If what is inside were to spread out over the whole world, what would then live in the world through man? Evil! Evil is nothing but the chaos thrust outside, the chaos that is necessary in man's inner being. In this chaos,which must be within man, this necessary source of evil in man, the human I, the human egoity, must be forged. This human egoity cannot live beyond the sphere of the human senses in the outer world. That is why the I-consciousness disappears in sleep, and when it figures in dreams it often appears as though estranged or weakened.

The I, which is actually forged in the source of evil, cannot pass beyond the sphere of the sense phenomena. Hence to the perception of the ancient Oriental sage it was clear that one can go further only through devotion, through love, through a surrender of the I—and that on penetrating fully into this further region one is no longer in a world of Vana, of the weaving in the habitual, but rather in the world of Nirvana, where this habitual existence is dispersed.

This interpretation of Nirvana, of the sublimest surrender of the I, as it exists in sleep, as it existed in fully conscious cognition for the pupils of the ancient Oriental civilization—it is this Nirvana that would be alluded to by an ancient Oriental such as the one I introduced to you hypothetically. He would say, “With you, since you had to cultivate the egoity, everything is founded on fear. With us, who had to suppress the ego, everything was founded on love. With you, there speaks the I that desires to assert itself. With us, Nirvana spoke, while the I flowed out lovingly into the entire world.”

One can formulate these matters in concepts, and they are then preserved in a certain way, but for humanity they live as sensations, as feelings, fluctuating and permeating human existence. Such feelings and sensations constitute what lives today on the one hand in the Orient and on the other in the West. In the West, human beings have a blood, they have a lymph, that is saturated by egoity forged in the inner source of evil. In the Orient, human beings have a blood, a lymph, in which lives an echo of the longing for Nirvana.

Both in the East and in the West these things escape the crude intellectual concepts of our time. Intellectual understanding strives somehow to draw the blood from the living organism, put it on a slide, place it under a microscope, look at it, and then form ideas about it. The ideas thus arrived at are infinitely crude, even from the point of view of ordinary experience. This is all that can be said. Do you believe that this method touches the subtly graded distinctions between the people who sit here next to one another? The microscope naturally gives only crude concepts about the blood, about the lymph. Subtle shades of difference are to be found even among people who have come from the same milieu. These nuances, however, naturally exist much more intensely between human beings of the East and those of the West, although only a crude picture of them can be gained by the modern intellect.

All this thus lives in the bodies of the human being from Asia, Europe, and America, and in their relation to one another in outer social life. With the crude intellect that has been applied in the last few centuries to the investigation of outer nature, we shall not be able to tackle the demands of modern social life; above all we shall not be able to find the balance between East and West, though this balance must be found.

In the late autumn of this year (1921) people will be going to the Washington Conference,³ and discussions will take place there about matters that were summed up by General Smuts,⁴ England's Minister of South Africa, with, I would say, an instinctive genius. The evolution of modern humanity, he said, is characterized by the fact that the starting point for cultural interests, which has hitherto been in the regions bordering the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, is now moving to the Pacific. The culture of the regions situated around the North Sea has gradually spread throughout the West and will become a world culture. The center of gravity of this world culture will be transferred from the North Sea to the Pacific.

Humanity stands face to face with this change. People still talk, however, in such a way that their speech emerges out of the old, crude concepts, and nothing essential is reached—although it must be reached if we are really to move forward. The signs of the times stand with menacing significance before us, and they say to us: until now only a limited trust has been needed between human beings, who in fact were all secretly afraid of one another. This fear was masked under all sorts of other feelings. Now, however, we need an attitude of soul that will be able to embrace a world culture. We need a trust that will be able to bring into balance the contrasts of East and West. Here a significant perspective opens up, which we need. People today believe that economic problems can be handled quite on their own account—the future position of Japan in the Pacific, or how to provide all the trading peoples on earth with free access to the Chinese market, and so on. These problems, however,will not be settled at any conference until people become aware that all economic activities and relations presuppose the trust of one human being in another. In the future this trust can be attained only in a spiritual way. Outer culture will be in need of spiritual deepening. I wished today to look from a different viewpoint at matters we have discussed often before. Tomorrow we shall speak further in this way.

• 1 . Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, 1803–1873.
• 2 . “Source of destruction,” Zerstoerungsherd; -herd suggests a furnace or oven as well as a source.
• 3 . Washington Conference, a disarmament conference held from November 1921 to February 1922.
• 4 . Jan Christiaan Smuts, 1870–1950.