The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we look back on the descriptions given yesterday, we shall be aware that man, living through successive times after death—and we have to use the word “time” in relation to physical conditions—comes first of all to the realm of the Moon Beings, and then passes on to that of the Sun Beings. The Moon Beings still belong to earthly-existence in a certain sense and the experiences a man goes through under their influence in the soul-world are indeed cosmic memories of earthly existence. He has experiences also of his own earthly life, though now in a backwards direction, and these are united with the judgments of the Cosmos, as I called them yesterday. These cosmic judgments are made known to men after death through the Moon Beings. We then come under the influence of these Beings, and it is they who cause the judgments to flow into us, in the same way as those that flow into us, here on Earth, from minerals, plants and animals. So we can say: On entering spiritual-cosmic existence after death, a man gains his first glimpse into such cosmic perceptions as still proceed from Beings once connected with the Earth. We have already had occasion to speak of how these Beings, before taking up their abode in the cosmic stronghold of the Moon, were Teachers of human beings in the ancient Mysteries. Hence, what a man once experienced on Earth, in primeval times, he now experiences when journeying through the soul-world, under the influence of those Beings who have been raised—we might perhaps say—to become inhabitants of the Moon. We can truly speak of them in this way if sufficient consideration is given to what was said in my last lecture. These inhabitants of the Moon, under the leadership of the one-time Teachers of mankind, judge quite differently from the way things are judged by people on Earth. For people on Earth, in their life between birth and death, are now approaching a stage completed by the Moon-dwellers in long past ages.

Reckoning by earthly years, we must say that the inhabitants of the Moon, when on Earth, accomplished quite 15,000 years ago what human beings still have to do. More than 15,000 years have passed since these Moon inhabitants acquired the power of making judgments which bring together the naturalistic and the moral.

We on Earth keep our naturalistic judgments separate, and when giving an opinion about a stone or an animal we leave morality aside. We say: “Nature follows only an amoral necessity.” But this is not true of the world as a whole. Even though we may consider that moral judgments are not applicable to individual animals, or to plants, or to minerals above all, in their separate forms of existence, yet the very fact of their creation, of their being in the world at all, is entirely the result of cosmic moral judgment.

Now these Moon-dwellers already judge in terms of cosmic morality. Therefore, when we have passed through the gate of death and are together with them, we must listen to all the Cosmos has to say about what we have thought, wished, felt, willed and done on Earth. Our entire earthly life is exposed to the light of cosmic judgment, and we learn the value our deeds have for the whole great universe.

From these lessons we develop the impulse to complete, to correct, or in some way to set right, during our next life on Earth, whatever we have done either to help or to hinder the evolution of the world. And so, while thus under the influence of the Moon Beings, we take up the impulses for our future destiny—for our karma, as oriental wisdom has always called it. These impulses are thus absorbed while the human being is still under the influence of dwellers in the Moon, who are able to tell him how much his earthly deeds and thoughts are worth for the Cosmos.

The spiritual Beings of the higher world, in whose neighbourhood a man lives while under the influence of the Moon-dwellers, are those grouped together in my Occult Science as the Hierarchy of Angels, Archangels, Archai. Of the ranks of Beings whose realm a man enters after death, they are the first who do not have to live through a phase of earthly embodiment. On their side, they stand in close connection with the Beings of the still higher Hierarchies. But it is with this Hierarchy of Angels, Archangels and Archai that a man is essentially concerned during his Moon existence after death, while the higher Hierarchies are still beyond his ken.

The judgments of the Angels are especially important for the deeds of individual men, and it is thus from the Angels that a man learns the value his deeds have in the Cosmos as a whole. From the Archangels he learns more about the value of what he has done in connection with the language he speaks, with the people to whom he belongs, and from this source also come impulses which work into his further destiny, his karma. From the Archai he learns what value his actions during a given period on Earth will have for the time when he has to descend once more from spiritual heights into earthly existence.

By means of all that a man can achieve in this way if—and I beg you to bear the following in mind—he has rightly prepared himself for life after death through the impulses he is able to receive on Earth, and particularly (as we shall see later) through his attitude towards the great leaders of mankind, he can then find the way over from the sphere of the Moon-dwellers to the sphere of the Sun-dwellers.

The inhabitants of the Moon we already know as those Beings who once dwelt on Earth and were in close connection with it. In a very, very much earlier age this was true also of the inhabitants of the Sun; they, too, participated in earthly affairs.

On coming to the realm of the Moon-dwellers it is quite clear to a man that he is meeting Beings who once dwelt with him on Earth. And when he enters the realm of the Sun Beings, something like a powerful cosmic memory of a primeval age comes over him—an age which in Occult Science you will find described from another point of view. He is taken possession of by something like a memory of an infinitely ancient time, when the Sun, with its inhabitants, was still one with the Earth. After death, therefore, we make our way through the spiritual Cosmos by growing into, as it were, two spiritual cosmic regions where we meet those Beings with whom, at one time, when we lived on Earth as quite different beings, we were closely associated.

So it is that by going through these experiences between death and a new birth we look back in grand, mighty memories on the evolution of the Earth in the Cosmos. Whereas a man, while here on Earth, goes through only part of human evolution, between death and rebirth he goes through part of cosmic evolution, part of the evolution of the universe. Those Beings who inhabit the Sun are such that in far distant times they had already risen above the experiences possible for earthly beings, and above those possible for the Beings of the Moon.

On reaching the realm of the Sun Beings, a man enters a sphere of the highest wisdom, where he can live only if on Earth he has prepared himself sufficiently for it.

Now I said yesterday that on passing from the soul-world into the land of spirit, or, as we must express it to-day, from the sphere of the Moon-dwellers to that of the Sun-dwellers, a man proceeds more slowly in his journeyings through the Cosmos. Whereas the circling of the Moon takes about a third of his earthly lifetime, the next rounds, the circling of Mars, of Jupiter, and of Saturn—I mentioned yesterday how these rounds are not completed—takes a more leisurely course, twelve times slower than the circling of the Moon.

If now we reckon up the actual time, we arrive at the following result. We must start from the original plan decreed for human beings by the Cosmos. Then we find that a man goes through the Moon period in a third of the time he has spent on Earth. If we allow for the fact that at the beginning of life more time is spent in sleep, and add on the time given to sleep in later life, we find that a man needs approximately thirty years to accomplish the first cycle, that of the Moon. Each of the following cycles takes twelve times as long, or 36o years for each cycle. If we follow a man in his further journeying through the worlds, we find him going through three cycles. He does not reach Saturn, but has to go through the cycles in the way originally decided. He then has to go backwards through the three again. Thus he completes three cycles in an outward direction and, on returning towards his next earthly life, another three backwards, making six in all. We then have the time originally intended for man. I shall still have to speak of how things are different for human beings to-day; but according to the original cosmic decrees, the time was 2,160 years.

What do these 2,160 years signify? You have only to recall that the position of the Sun at the vernal equinox moves forward year by year. In recent centuries it has advanced from the Ram to the Fishes, and approximately in 25,920 years—or close on 26,000 years—the Sun travels round the whole zodiacal circle, and the twelfth part of this is 2,160 years. In 2,160 years the Sun progresses from one sign of the Zodiac to the next. It was originally decreed that a man should return to Earth when the Sun had thus moved on.

When we consider the inner reasons for this number, and compare it with what from I said from another point of view in Occult Science, those who have read the book will remember that the time taken by the Sun to pass from one sign of the Zodiac to the next was given there as the original length of the interval between a man's incarnations. If we look at this from two sides—more outwardly, from the cosmic aspect, as in Occult Science, and then from the side of man's inner life that we are dealing with to-day—the two numbers are identical. Such things should be noticed; and it will be found that whenever in Spiritual Science a correct judgment is made from one point of view, and then another correct judgment from a quite different point of view, the two judgments are inwardly in agreement.

Anyone judging Spiritual Science from the ordinary standpoint of to-day will quite possibly ask: “What is there to support this Spiritual Science of yours? Our natural science rests upon observation, experiment; that is the firm ground from which we start.” But one might just as well say: “As earthly man I stand on firm ground, and a rock, too, has solid ground beneath it—like everything else on Earth. As for you astronomers—it is really fantastic for you to tell us that the Earth is floating freely in celestial space. If you want to be reasonable, you must say that the Earth, like any great mass of rock, is somewhere resting on firm ground.” That is virtually the same as accusing Anthroposophy of having no firm ground to stand on. Naturally, people would appear foolish, even to themselves, were they to say that the Earth has something to rest on, but they do not see how foolish it is not to realise that Spiritual Science, which is carried by its own inner resources, just as the heavenly bodies move by their own impulses, cannot rest on the ground of experiment and explanation. Were they only to be consistent in their judgments, they would see how, in the Spiritual Science intended here, every step is made with the utmost exactitude, and full accountability is taken for every statement concerning the world and the beings of the world.

Thus, after death, a man enters a world which he at first experiences in common with souls who, like himself, have entered the spiritual worlds through the gate of death after an earthly life. A man thus grows familiar with the sphere of disembodied human beings and continues with them the earthly relations experienced spiritually at night.

But we have also seen how a man finds himself in the company of other spiritual Beings, the inhabitants of the Moon who were once dwelling with him on the Earth, and how, afterwards, he ascends to the community on the Sun. These Sun-dwellers also were once inhabitants of the Earth together with human beings, though in times far more remote. Here a man's first meeting is with the Beings who constitute the second Hierarchy, described in my Occult Science as Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes. These are the Beings with whom he has to work in order that he may be able to manifest in his next earthly life the cosmically elaborated karma derived from his earlier lives on Earth.

Having passed through the realm of the Moon-dwellers, a man knows—not with earthly thoughts but with cosmic ones—what in a cosmic sense he has done wrong; he realises the worth for cosmic evolution as a whole of all he has done, thought and felt. But he cannot prepare his new earthly life with cosmic thoughts alone. Therefore in the Moon-sphere he comes to know what he is destined to be in his next earthly existence, though the actual preparations for it cannot be made at that stage. For this, he has to rise to the sphere of the Sun, where live the Beings who, no longer having to concern themselves with earthly existence, are occupied with the affairs of our whole planetary system.

So a man's experience of the Cosmos embraces two spiritual regions, together with the spiritual Beings dwelling in them. It embraces the soul-world of the Moon-dwellers, and the more extensive population of the spirit region. Whereas the Moon-dwellers, because they were closely connected with the Earth in comparatively recent times, have united their interests with the peoples of the Earth, and while the Moon is in a sense only a cosmic colony, occupied with and orientated towards earthly affairs, the Sun-sphere, whose dwellers live under the leadership of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, is a cosmic whole, concerned with the affairs of the entire planetary system—Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and so on, including the Earth and the Moon.

On coming into this vast sphere of the Sun, where our interests are substantially widened, we are able to work with the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes on preparing the spirit-germ of a physical body which can then be born for us from human parents. No parents could ever produce a suitable physical body were it not prepared during long periods through work carried out in co-operation with the highest, most sublime spiritual Beings in the spiritual Cosmos. Our essential work there—a work far greater and more comprehensive than anything achieved during our little life on Earth—is to concern ourselves, together with Beings of a higher degree, with all that takes place among these Beings as spiritual events, just as here there are natural events; with all that takes place in them as art of the spirit, just as here we have the art of nature. All this finally enables us to bring together what has thus been worked upon into a great, spiritual, archetypal picture which is the spirit-germ—as it were the fore-shadowing—of what will later be born on Earth as our physical body.

When a man, having completed the three circles, starts on the return journey, his interest in earthly affairs revives. Then—still many years before birth—he looks down on the successive generations in earthly evolution, at the end of which will stand his father and his mother. As soon as he makes this complete change of direction in the Cosmos, he begins to focus his attention upon the Earth. He watches many preceding generations of his ancestry, one after another, until, centuries later, his parents are born. To them he can send down the potent, far-reaching spirit-germ, diminished in size, of his future physical body, so that this spirit-germ can be united with the physical embryo in the body of the mother.

The spirit-germ is at first majestic and great, like the Cosmos itself. While a man is making his return journey to the physical world, and watching the generations through which his parents descend, and while from the spiritual world he is actively concerned with this sequence of generations, the germ becomes smaller and smaller—until at last it arrives back in the Mars-sphere, the actual sphere of the Sun, and then, passing quickly through the Moon-sphere, it descends to its next life on Earth.

Some time before the man himself descends as a being of soul, he sends down in advance this spirit-germ, so that what he has prepared for his physical body enters the physical world before him. On completing his work for the new earthly life, he is able to enter into a different relation with the cosmos—a relation indeed to the whole cosmic ether. And, as the final act in his descent, he draws from spiritual worlds, out of the whole world-ether, the forces to form his etheric body.

When a man has already sent down the spirit-germ for his physical body—that is, when the spirit-germ has at last descended to the parents at the end of its long journey down from the spiritual world—the man himself, still in the spiritual world, gathers ether around him there, and for a short time becomes a being of Ego, astral body and ether, the ether having been drawn together from the world-ether. It is not until after conception, during the third or fourth week of the embryonic period, that the human being unites himself with the organism that has been formed by combining the spirit-germ with the physical germ, and bestows upon it the etheric body drawn from the world-ether. Man then becomes a being composed of physical body, an etheric body drawn together in the last moments of his cosmic existence, and the astral body and Ego which have gone through the life between death and rebirth.

Thus, after experiencing the purely spiritual, a man descends to yet another existence in the physical world.

From what has been said you will have gathered that while passing through life in the world between death and a new birth, we experience in memory past ages of the Earth's evolution—the evolution of worlds, one might call it. The world-memories thus lived through become a man's deeds, for he does something with these memories, in cooperation with the higher Beings of whom I have already spoken and will speak further. What he carries out, while active in memory and remembering in activity, gives a significant perspective into the past of the Earth and of the world.

The experiences he goes through while in connection with the inhabitants of the Moon conjures up in his soul a time during which he passed through earlier lives on Earth in a similar relation to them as now. He surveys a series of earthly lives resembling those of the present. He then looks further back to a time when, even while on Earth, he was more closely connected with the present dwellers on the Moon; to a time from which he is separated by what geologists call the Ice Age. He looks back to a phase in earthly evolution you will find described in my books as the Atlantean age. But he penetrates still further back to what is called the age of Lemuria, when man is still to be found on Earth, though under quite different conditions. He was not yet so closely bound to the Earth that he trod it with his feet; he lived more as an etheric being in the environment of the Earth, in its atmosphere. This he could do because at that time the atmosphere consisted mainly of a watery solution that has now been distributed between seas and continents, together with solutions of other substances that have since become the solid earth of to-day. Hence he lived more in the Earth's circumference during the age—here again names are unimportant—called the Lemurian, which corresponds to what natural scientists call, with some justification, the oldest period of the Earth.

We then look back to an age when man was still associated with the Sun Beings, with the inhabitants of the Sun, before in the course of cosmic evolution the Sun separated from the Earth. This does not mean looking back to an age when, as described in Occult Science, the Earth itself went through its Sun period—the second age in the evolution of the Earth—but to the recapitulation in earthly existence of that cosmic age. But this recapitulation does come into view. And so a man's knowledge, when supplemented by what he is able to experience between death and a new birth, becomes cosmological knowledge. Earth-evolution advances through repeated stages, in conjunction with the results of human deeds carried out together with higher Beings. The Earth's past, in its connection with the whole planetary system—Sun, Moon, and all the planets dependent on them—becomes apparent in the deeds of men. Out of it a man shapes the part of the future for which he is responsible—his next earthly life. At the same time, however, he is involved in the preparation of future worlds, the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan existences, for into each of these in turn the Earth existence will eventually be transformed.

If we look deeply into such matters, we can understand how ancient cosmic times were part of the world-evolution of the Earth. We look back indeed into an age when the Moon-dwellers of to-day provided the instructors of mankind. Then, together with the latest great instructors, they withdrew into the cosmic stronghold of the Moon.

Over and over again on Earth, however, men were born with the capacity to remain throughout their karmic life in close connection with the experiences of those who now dwell on the Moon. Born again and again in the course of world-evolution, they were like ambassadors of the great community within the Moon. They appeared among the people of the Earth during the first, second and third postAtlantean culture-epochs and in the East they developed a lofty civilisation. These ambassadors of the Moon were called Bodhisattvas. They dwelt on Earth as men, but in them lived on the spiritual teaching that had been given directly by the great Moon teachers on Earth.

Now there are often times in the universe when the inhabitants of the Moon, because they are more nearly connected with the inhabitants of the Sun than with those of the Earth, develop a particularly intimate relation with these Sun-dwellers, so that, indirectly, through the Moon ambassadors—called in the East the Bodhisattvas—the wisdom of the Sun was able to reach men on Earth in the older oriental civilisations. Because of the progress made in the evolution of the Earth, it then became necessary that earthly civilisation should no longer be nourished, as it were, by the Moon Beings only. The whole evolution of the Earth would have had to take a course different from the one prescribed by cosmic wisdom, if only the Moon ambassadors had figured in it. For this reason there came about the great, momentous event we call the Mystery of Golgotha.

Whereas in more ancient times it was the Moon ambassadors who, to a certain extent, brought the Sun wisdom to Earth, it was the Leader of the Sun Beings Himself, foremost in the ranks of Sun Spirits, who, through the Mystery of Golgotha, came down to Earth into the body of the man Jesus. Through this, quite different conditions arose for the evolution of the Earth. The wisdom of the Sun-dwellers was brought into it as impulse by Christ Jesus; and under this impulse the further course of Earth-evolution must therefore proceed.

At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, so much Moon wisdom was still spread over the whole Earth that as Gnosis, as Pistis Sophia—which was old Moon wisdom—it was able to understand the nature of the Christ. Gnosis was essentially an endeavour to grasp His whole spiritual significance. But Gnosis has been entirely rooted out. In the phase of evolution which led to a temporary lack of understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, the first act was the rooting out of the Gnosis—down, almost, to the very writings of its opponents.

Imagine that nothing were left of our present Anthroposophy except what its opponents have written about it, and this will give you some idea of what people know of Gnosis from external sources. Their knowledge is limited to the opinions of its opponents, perhaps to some acquaintance with the Pistis Sophia and so on, which they don't understand. That is all they know of the Gnosis, which is indeed a gift of the Moon, out of the past, to the first centuries of Christianity—particularly the first four centuries, for after that it was no longer understood. It was what could be said out of the old Moon wisdom, out of the Moon Logos, to the Sun Logos who had come to Earth—said, that is, to the Christ. Anyone aware of this can really understand the Gnosis, which has been greatly misjudged, and of which such strange things are said to-day.

It is not possible, however, for matters to remain thus, for the evolution of the Earth must continue. We have to progress from the old wisdom of the Moon to a new Sun wisdom, for which we must learn to have an immediate understanding. To-morrow I shall have to describe how it was essentially the old Moon wisdom—after it had come virtually to an end—which still spoke to human beings through a form of Yoga breathing, through a changed breathing process. It was a striving after the old wisdom of the Moon.

This Yoga cult is no longer suitable for Western people; they must attain to Imagination. For civilisation in general, that is the necessary next step—the endeavour to come to Imagination. But there are all sorts of obstacles, and this means that the evolution of human civilisation can advance only if a new impulse from the spirit is accepted. This depends on intimate human destinies. When Bodhisattvas appeared, they never found people generally hostile. Those ancient times may often appear to us outwardly as gruesome and terrible, but it was always possible to meet with good will when bringing impulses from the spiritual worlds. Hence the Bodhisattvas found men ready to receive the old Moon Logos—the reflection, that is, of the Sun Logos. But it will never again be possible to speak to mankind in that old way.

The old Moon wisdom, the old Moon Logos, however, cannot cease—like everything else, it has to progress. But it will have to be understood through the Sun Word, which, having lost its last legacy in the Gnosis, must be re-discovered. It will be impossible to speak to people in the true language of the Sun until they bring good will to meet it. Until they do so, they will wait in vain for the coming of a successor to the Bodhisattvas of old, for that depends upon whether human beings welcome him with understanding.

To-day there is a deep rift between the humanity of the East and the humanity of the West. And those who do not go deeply enough into these matters cannot see how East and West are divided, and how the East is waiting for the new Bodhisattva to bring them in his own way something of which the West has only the vaguest idea. The nationalistic struggles of to-day have not yet been sufficiently overcome throughout the Earth by the universal consciousness which must flow essentially from the Christ impulse. Men will never discover how to rise to this common humanity, this genuine Christ impulse, and will never be able to understand what a potential Bodhisattva would have to say, until they have developed enough spiritual longing in them to create a bridge for a world-wide understanding between East and West.

I am touching here on a theme we must go further into tomorrow—a theme that will show how different the present time is from the days when man waited expectantly for the coming of a Bodhisattva. Now, before the Bodhisattva can speak to men, he has himself to wait until they are ready to understand the words he will use, for men have now entered the epoch of freedom.

This entry into the epoch of freedom, in relation to our present theme, will be a subject for tomorrow. But all that mankind has to go through, in order to find the innermost impulse in the spiritual world above, is connected with many apparently insignificant cultural systems and symptoms of our civilisation.

Forgive me for intermingling the great with the trivial, but trivial symptoms can sometimes throw light on the great. A few days ago I said that in this region, where Imaginations take so firm a hold on the spirit, we get the disturbance of motor-cars. I added that I was not saying anything against motor-cars, for in Anthroposophy we cannot express reactionary views, and when necessary I am obviously very fond of travelling by car myself. One must take the world as it is. But anything one-sided must always be balanced by its opposite. Thus there is no harm in motoring—provided we take it, and everything of that kind, with a heart attuned to the spiritual world. Then, if other things besides cars come to disturb us, we shall be able to press on by dint of our own strength and freedom, for freedom had to come, and it must lead us back to the Bodhisattva.

Human beings will be able to help themselves, where things are concerned that do us good service mechanically. It can truly be said that men will be able to help themselves in face of what comes upon them in the way of cars, typewriters, and so on.

With gramophones, however, it is different—forgive me for concluding on such an apparently trivial note. With gramophones, art is being thrust down into a machine. When people develop a passion for such a thing—which is really a mechanising of what comes down to us as a shadow of the spiritual—when they show enthusiasm for the kind of thing represented by gramophones, then in this connection they no longer have the power to help themselves. At this point the Gods have to help.

Now the Gods are merciful, and to-day our hope for the future progress of human civilisation must be that the Gods in their mercy will themselves come to the rescue where—as in the case of the gramophone—men's taste has gone astray.

Today I would like to continue the meditation I undertook yesterday by bringing it even closer to the human being himself. You can well imagine that what one is actually trying to depict through such a description is so rich and varied inwardly that any such description, like yesterday's, which covers such wide areas, can only grasp the matter from one point of view, and that a feeling for what is actually intended by such a description can only arise from descriptions from the most diverse points of view.

When we consider the human head formation, the head formation, we must be clear about the fact that this head formation does not only concern the externally observed head, limited downwards by the neck, but also the processes that take place in the human head, the internal organ processes. These are mainly present in the head as head processes, but they continue throughout the organism; so that essentially the head organization is found in the whole human being, but outwardly it reveals itself primarily in the head. The same applies to the chest organization, which essentially comprises breathing and blood circulation. This too extends into both the head organization and the metabolism and limb organization. We can speak of the human being in such a way that we distinguish between its individual organizational elements, but we must be clear about how they interact in the whole person.

If we now consider the organization of the human head, it undergoes quite different metamorphoses than the other parts of the human organism when passing through the spiritual world between death and a new birth. In the head we have an actual reproduction of that cosmic which, as a spirit germ, develops through such activity as I have characterized yesterday and already on the previous days. In the human head we have the complete reproduction, filled with material substance, of the universal whole.

If we could study the human head not with a physically constructed microscope but with our spiritual and soul abilities to enlarge, we would find the whole cosmos reproduced in its physical, etheric, astral and ego structure. We actually carry this entire cosmos within us, and most of it in our head organization. It is also true for this head organization that, between death and a new birth, the human being, in union with higher spiritual beings of the upper hierarchies, works out what will find the continuation of its development within human inheritance, which, so to speak, has been brought to a certain point by the human being himself in union with the beings of the higher hierarchies in the spiritual world, falls into the physical world and continues its development in the mother's organism through conception.

What we see as head formation has actually emerged from the cosmos, so that it itself comes down to earth in an astral state, which it finally reaches through the processing of the human being, and there, before conception, up to the physical state of development, , so that later on that which has now been left behind by the human being itself is clothed with an etheric body, after it has first cast off the germ of the physical body in the spiritual, and can then in turn connect with this spirit germ that has become physical.

But now it is the case that during the waking state, on a small scale, we are constantly continuing what we have accomplished on a large scale, in the universal between death and a new birth in union with divine spiritual entities. This activity, which is carried out here, takes place, so to speak, behind the ordinary human consciousness.

I would like to sketch this out for you. If we look at the human head of a normally functioning person, the following appears to the spiritual view: While we are awake, while the impressions of the external world are constantly approaching the human head through our waking state, everything that lives in the sense perception takes place for the consciousness. I would like to characterize what lives in sensory perception by first drawing the eye (see drawing), the nose, where the olfactory sensations take place, palate, mouth, where the taste experiences take place. This part, marked in red, is intended to schematically represent everything that a person actually experiences in their ordinary consciousness. But in the world of facts that takes place in a person, not only that takes place. You know, of course, that the brain is structured in the most diverse ways. I will only hint at this schematically (blue-green). What is combined and structured here in the brain is an image of the whole universe, the whole universe contracted into a small size and lined with earthly substances. The fact that this brain, in its ego part, its astral and etheric part, is then lined with physical earthly substance means that the earth, with its forces and components, has influence over this part of the human being.

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While our sensory perception is taking place, while the colors flood in and form internally into images, while the auditory impulses vibrate through the human organism and form through the structure of the auditory organ into auditory perceptions, while a similar thing happens with taste, smell and tactile perceptions, while this whole waking experience is maintained by the influence of the external physical-sensory world, it comes to life as a force within the unconscious parts of the human head organization. And while we perceive a color, hear a sound or have a taste perception, we unconsciously work to create an afterimage of, say, Jupiter's position in relation to the sun or to Mars (yellow). We are mapping a cosmic relationship within our own being. Throughout our waking life, something happens that we accomplish behind our ordinary consciousness: the reproduction of cosmic activity. What is accomplished behind our ordinary consciousness is nothing other than the echo of what we go through cosmically between death and a new birth or conception. There we have gone through it on a large scale, in the universal. We have gone through it in the spiritual, unperturbed by the earthly substance. We did not need to take off the earthly substance in fine portions, wrap it around axes in spiral lines and so on. We did everything in a spiritual substance. The spiritual-divine powers of the highest hierarchies accompanied us in our work. What we accomplished in their community, we do here in an unconscious way, by surrendering to the sensory perceptions in our brain, by reproducing what we have done outside in a spiritual way with spiritual beings in an earthly way with earthly substances. Through this activity, we carry our pre-earthly life into our earthly life and into our physical organization.

What we see through colors, hear through sounds, smell through scents, is there for us during our earthly existence. What takes place in the background are thoughts that have an ethereal vitality, which in the materiality of the brain have only their physical expression. The essential thing that matters is what ethereally weaves in the finest substantiality of the brain. There, living thoughts weave into each other. Our thoughts are, after all, only reflex images that are formed in this inner cosmos, where what we receive from outside reflects back and then becomes conscious to us. But what I have just described takes place behind the level of memory. Nothing needs to take place behind an ordinary mirror; but behind the mirror that reflects our abstract ideas back to our consciousness through our brain, an entire world existence is reflected in miniature in every single person. And these living thoughts that we develop are for the third hierarchy, for the hierarchy of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, the same as our abstractly reflecting thoughts are for us. Behind our consciousness, through our humanity, the third hierarchy unfolds its activity. There the essences of the archai, archangeloi and angeloi develop what must and can only be accomplished by placing the human being in the cosmos and on the earth. In the formation of his brain, he not only develops a mirror that reflects his ordinary earthly consciousness, the abstract ideas, but within the head something takes place that the hierarchy of the angels, archangels, and archai has to carry out on earth and through earthly existence. This is an event that is just as much connected with earthly existence as another event.

You can characterize earthly existence in such a way that you say: through the minerals this and that happens; through the plants it happens that they bloom, bear fruit; through the animals, yet another thing happens. Through man, the angeloi, archangeloi and archai pour their activity into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. But this happens indirectly through the subconscious activity of the human head organization.

Our earthly existence is not exhausted by the blossoming of plants and the running around of animals, but continues into a spiritual existence. Beyond plants, beyond animals, beyond man, there is an activity of the angelic world, the spiritual world, the third hierarchy, and this activity is possible through the human mind.

I was able to point out to you yesterday that there is something astral about a plant (see drawing) when it grows out of the earth (green and pink). So we also have an astral form above it, a higher spiritual form (yellow) than is represented in the plant blossom itself. Thus the activity of the human head continues into the spiritual, and if we seek where it continues to, we find the activity of the beings of the third hierarchy in connection with earthly existence.

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This activity also has a very deep significance in cosmic evolution. In the background of one's own human existence on earth, in the background of what man must do without knowing it in his organic activity, the beings of the third hierarchy are his helpers. Man dies in his earthly existence. We have considered dying and sought to understand it. But what dying is for man, that is for the entities of the third hierarchy, submerging in human nature. If they only had this, this submerging in human nature, their consciousness would fade away; they would lose their entity. They must nourish their entity again and again, as it were. The entity of these creatures of the third hierarchy must be nourished from the substance of the world.

Now, as I said before, what is woven behind human consciousness are primarily etheric forms. Even during our earthly existence, there is not such a sharp boundary between the inner human ether and the outer cosmic ether that what is produced by human thoughts, by this human work of the brain behind the conscious thoughts, does not vibrate out into the cosmic ether. Man is actually surrounded around his head by the vibrations that are generated in the cosmic ether through his head activity, which is accomplished in union with the beings of the third hierarchy. And when man passes through the gate of death, then it is as I said yesterday: that the head activity drops away first, also in relation to the etheric. But in reality this means that whatever takes place in the head, even as subconscious matter, first disperses rapidly in the cosmic ether. Everything that is brought about by man in this way takes shape in the World Ether, and the beings of the third hierarchy feed on these shapes. Thus the beings of the third hierarchy, on the one hand, help man in relation to his head organization, and on the other hand, they themselves develop through what is accomplished within this head organization.

The fact that man is interwoven with the evolution of the earth during his earthly existence means that these entities of the third hierarchy also come into contact with earthly existence through him. Otherwise these entities of the third hierarchy would belong to a world from which they could not come into contact with earthly existence at all. But they must draw their spiritual nourishment from earthly existence in the way described. Thus man is included in a cosmic activity mediated by these entities of the third hierarchy. This cosmic activity passes, as it were, through his being. Of the higher entities standing directly above man, these beings of the third hierarchy are the least powerful. They could not transform what vibrates out into the world from man and should become his spiritual nourishment, if it were quite foreign to their nature. That is why it is also the case that what arises through the human head organization as a human effect is mixed as little as possible with what the human being is through his other being. Our thoughts remain logical even when a person accumulates much evil in terms of morality through his life. Thoughts remain cool towards the other human being. They remain cool to such an extent that they can become the aforementioned nourishment for higher beings.

If everything that a person has in his emotions were also to pass over into these living thoughts, which take place behind consciousness, then the angels, archangels and so on would not be able to absorb that either. It would be useless nourishment for them. It does, however, play into our ordinary reflected thoughts, whether we are moral or immoral beings. But if I now express the matter in localized terms, which can only be in the form of a suggestion: what takes place there in the back of our heads, behind ordinary consciousness, that is something that remains, so to speak, innocent, untouched by human moral aberrations. These human moral aberrations only exert an influence on the cosmic ether and on the cosmic astrality to the extent that the soul of the human being is bound to the chest, respiratory and blood circulation systems. In a sense, the head is a pure image of the cosmos. And what happens during life on earth as an image of universal cosmic activity behind the ordinary consciousness, where worlds are continually being formed and destroyed, what goes on there, is present in a certain purity in relation to the rest of human nature. But it is nevertheless the case that if one could, as it were, turn one's eyes around and they would become spiritually seeing, and these eyes, turned around in their cave and having become spiritually clairvoyant, could look back into the interior of the human cranial cavity, they would see stars shining continuously, stars that are in motion in relation to each other, a world of fixed stars. A whole little cosmos would become visible.

The human chest is organized differently from the human head. The place where breathing and blood circulation take place as a rhythmic human being is also influenced by the cosmos, but earthly conditions have a much greater influence there. They change much more what comes in from the cosmos as a replica. When our lungs are active, we could see what is going on inside the lungs as a star, as a planet, as a solar and lunar world, if we could, as it were, turn around and see what is only lined with earthly matter in its etheric-astral existence. But earthly conditions continually interfere with this inner existence. Here the earth itself has a much greater influence. You must bear in mind that only something as fine as what the eyes make of the world of colour, what is made out of the world of sound by the body, plays a direct, immediate role in the organization of the head for the formations that I have just described. This blends in with cosmic activity. And only that which is brought about by the rest of the organism through the breath, through the blood that also functions in the brain, is pushed in. This is precisely the material that fills it. It pushes itself in. But the configuration, the sculpture, this inner sculpture that takes place there, is thoroughly an afterimage of the cosmic. The earth has little influence there.

The chest organism is in a completely different situation. The chest organism takes in the air we breathe and processes it. This is something that is in the immediate vicinity of the earth, that does not enter the human organism in such a fine way as what the eyes make of colors. The air we breathe is coarser than the colored light that enters our organism. Therefore, the coarser inhaled air has a much stronger, more transformative influence on everything that is present in the chest organism as a reproduction of cosmic processes. And just wait until we look at the blood circulation! All human foodstuffs play a role in the blood circulation. They are first absorbed as food, changed by the digestive and nutritional activity, and sent into the circulating blood.

When the blood reaches the head, it is in an extremely refined state, one that the ancient intuitive art of clairvoyance correctly called a phosphoric state. It is an extraordinarily refined state. Here the reproduction of cosmic activity has power over matter, so that matter cannot unfold its own forces. If any salt that enters the brain wants to unfold its own forces, it is drowned out, overgrown by the directions and activities that the reproduction of the cosmos exerts in the even thicker blood circulation that takes place in the chest organs. In the chest organs, what comes from within the person has a much greater influence. There, what replicates the cosmos is changed in a much stronger way. And that is why, when you look at the human chest organization with a spiritual eye, it presents itself as I can roughly characterize it in the following way (see drawing).

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You can see how an image of the cosmos really does light up during inhalation. In the brain you can actually see an entire cosmos at play. This is only interrupted for the brain during sleep. Here, sleep does not interrupt anything, but the matter itself is constantly interrupting itself. Seen with spiritual eyes: the chest organization shows stars, and also shows star movements, but backwards in distortion and becoming quite indistinct towards the front. In a certain respect, man is also an after-image of the cosmos in terms of his chest organization, insofar as there are processes on our earth that depend entirely on the regular course of the year and the months. The plants come out and then pass away again. There is regularity. In the plant forms, those spiral paths that I have described unfold. There is a mineral tendency, which is admittedly spread over long periods of time, but which also occurs in a certain way in cosmic regularity. Certain changes take place in the air currents above the earth, which we can observe, for example, in the metamorphoses of the change in weather that occurs over the course of the year. But everything that is irregular in cloud formation, everything that is actually changing weather, falls into this. The whims of meteorology fall into this. The whims of meteorology fall into the cosmic.

Thus, in the human chest, with respect to what is connected to the back, there is a distorted cosmos, a cosmos that gives the impression as if we took our cosmos, which surrounds us, once at night , one giant tugging on one side, another giant tugging on the other, so that instead of a rounded cosmos we would get an elongated cylinder, somewhat thicker in the middle. Thus, in the mind's eye, the Cosmos appears to be receding, and towards the front it appears to be in confusion. Just as what is happening above the earth's surface is changeable, so the Cosmos appears to be in confusion towards the front. The whole thing is such that the Cosmos sometimes shines, sometimes disappears: it shines with inhalation and disappears with exhalation. Just as a person causes physical processes in himself through breathing, inhaling causes the distorted cosmos to shine, while exhaling causes it to darken.

The Indian yogi sought to relive this shining and darkening of the distorted cosmos through his yoga exercises. And from this he then tried to deduce the real form of the world by what he perceived in this way, by breathing in a lively manner until he had a perception of this inner distorted cosmos, and then by reflecting on it, he was able to explore it. Thus, as chest people, we also experience the cosmos a second time, but in a sense as if in a struggle against chaos. And we experience the cosmos a third time, and in such a way that it actually appears quite indistinct. This is because it is integrated into the human metabolic and limbic systems. It is hardly recognizable to what extent what is astral and, according to the I-being, integrated has emerged from the cosmos. That is why, during the lectures I have given here, I had to call what is incorporated “embryonic,” because it is actually an evolving cosmos. It is only when the human being moves his limbs or when the metabolism is active that what appears to be an evolving cosmos behaves very similarly to that in which it is immersed. When I lift a leg, the spiritual essence of this third human limb, as it were, strikes into the leg movement and into the inner processes that arise in connection with the leg movement.

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Schematically, I have to draw this third thing (see drawing) in such a way that there is no longer any sign of a cosmos like this, as it is clearly present in the human head organization, as it is present in the distortion, weakened in relation to the spiritual light, clouded, both in the arm organization and in the leg organization and in the nutrition organization (red). In fact, everything is still in a state of cosmic nebula. We can study cosmic nebulae out in the far reaches of space. But with spiritual vision we can also study the world nebulae on a small, microcosmic scale when we look at the third part of the human being, the limb-metabolic system, and when we see how this nebulous structure (bluish) is embedded in the stars (yellow), as if they wanted to emerge as a halo of light, but then immediately fade away at the moment of emergence. We can see how this is completely overwhelmed by what emanates from the earth. The chemical affinities, the chemical forces of the earth's substances play a major role in this.

During a person's life on earth, it is much more important how the individual earth substances relate to each other in their chemical forces than how what a person has brought with them from the cosmos relates. Nevertheless, the human being is also related to spiritual worlds through this part of his organization. He is related to spiritual worlds through his chest organization in that a spiritual hierarchy plays into his chest organization just as it does into his head organization. In the case of the head it is the third hierarchy; in the case of the chest organization it is the second hierarchy: the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes. These develop through the earthly human being a cosmic activity in which they make use of what is taking place in the human chest organization. And their activity is such that it is much more spiritual than the activity of the third hierarchy; this third hierarchy can therefore bear what arises in the material image. Therefore, in the human head formation, one really has a material image of the cosmos. Here in the chest organization, there is a distortion for the very reason that the material does not become a faithful replica of the cosmos, so that it can be destroyed again and again, and also dissolved. The cosmic formation is not completed. So there is the earthly, which plays a strong role, and the cosmic, which is not finished in man, remains cosmic, so that a cosmic activity permeates man, insofar as he breathes, insofar as he has a circulation, in which the entities of the second hierarchy work, weaving and floating. And into this, man inserts that living photograph of which I spoke yesterday and in previous lectures, which is an image of his moral and spiritual qualities.

Thus, because man has lungs and the processes of the lungs continue as the breathing processes, because he has a circulation and what is affected by the circulation vibrates into the world ether and even into the world astral, he is enmeshed in the activity of the second hierarchy. His being itself creates cosmic effects, and the beings of the second hierarchy are integrated into what is accomplished cosmically through him. But into this, the further his earthly life progresses, man pushes more and more, the living image of his moral-spiritual qualities, this elemental being, of which I have told you that it is produced by man during his earthly life. Incidentally, every night this elemental being moves out of the person a little, and one can see the activity carried out by the second hierarchy in it. When you are awake, it moves back into the person, and the waking activity further intersperses it with the moral and spiritual evaluations of the person's quality.

The first hierarchy is now connected with the activity that takes place in the metabolic-limb man. The connection is primarily with seraphim, cherubim and thrones. Here man is most physical, most devoted to physical forces. The cosmic plays into him only as a mist. But into this, which is present in him as a faint cosmic activity, which is permeated by a strong, intense material activity in chemistry, in physical action, the activity of the seraphim, cherubim and thrones flames and undulates and pushes into it. For these, through their spirituality, master the strongest material substance, and it will be the entities of this Hierarchy that will one day transform the earthly processes of chemistry, of the physical itself, from the earth form into the form of Jupiter, as I have described in my “Occult Science in Outline”. But into this activity, which actually takes place in the cosmic, is inscribed during earthly life that which has been touched by the will part of the soul, as I have explained in the other lectures, and in which cosmic processes are involved in loose compositions with the actually earthly and the chemical and physical processes that overwhelm the cosmic.

In the limb metabolism system (see drawing), I would say that the earth is in its full possession of the human being. During the earthly course of life, the earthly predominates over the cosmic in this part. In the chest organization, the cosmic balances the earthly. In the head organization, the cosmic predominates. But the head organization can only be connected to the lowest kind of beings of the higher hierarchies. Where the earth predominates, the strongest spiritual beings work in man, because he is more torn from the earth of his being: seraphim, cherubim and thrones.

And when man passes through the 'gate of death', when the physical organism falls away, that which is only a nebulous spiritual being is taken up into the activity of the seraphim, cherubim, thrones and gradually woven into them. But that which was previously formed in the chest organism as the living image of the moral and spiritual man sinks down into this activity. That which was only, I might say, in the current of the middle hierarchy, now enters into the current of the first hierarchy. Thus it acquires greater intensity in the context of the Cosmos, so that man develops his karma as a living elemental being in its middle link. This is then taken over by the current of the first hierarchy. And while man lives through the time between death and a new birth, while he, as I have described to you, frees himself from his karmic image, ascends to the world where he can actually work together with higher beings on the spiritual archetype of the physical organism, while man experiences all this, which he then finds again in this image when he descends, something else is also taking place. While the human being enters the spirit world from the soul world and dwells there, that living image of his self-made destiny is in the meantime being led back by the beings of the highest hierarchy, the seraphim, cherubim and thrones, to the second hierarchy and finally handed over to the third hierarchy, the angels, archangels and archai. On descending again, the human being takes up this image, which he left with the first hierarchy, from the third hierarchy. When he now enters life again, it is incorporated into what takes place between the third hierarchy, the angeloi, archangeloi and archai, and his head organization. Everything that man has produced through his most earthly being and handed over to the cosmos after death, everything that man has developed within himself through having a substance organization dominated by the earth, everything that he must hand over after death to the seraphim , cherubim and thrones, and what he lets flow into the cosmos in this way, he actually receives again in the way in which the angels, archangels and archai work through his head organization in a new life on earth. Man hands over to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones that which he has prepared for himself as his destiny, and receives it again from the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. These carry it over into the activity that he will carry out in a new life on earth. In this way, what he handed over to the first hierarchy when he left his last life on earth is taken up into his new earthly destiny from the hand of the third hierarchy.

So you see that you can only understand the universe as a whole if you place the connection that our senses can survey and our minds can think into the context that arises from real vision. For there not only growing plants appear, not only water in cloud formations, in currents, there not only physical stars appear, there the whole cosmos appears in its living activity, spiritualized by a series of hierarchies, which also exercise a physical activity, an activity that permeates and surges through this physical activity. And events of a kind take place that, while man experiences existence between death and a new birth, his human destiny passes from the hand of the seraphim, cherubim and thrones to that of the angeloi, archangeloi and archai. In this way, each person receives what he or she is destined to experience in a new life. What a person has left to the highest hierarchy, he or she receives back from the hand of the third hierarchy, and together with the third hierarchy, he or she must bring it back into the world balance through balancing deeds during his or her earthly existence.

Yesterday I wanted to show how we must come to an education, steeped in artistic form. I drew attention to how in earlier times the teacher took his start from the artistic, which he did in higher education by treating as arts what today has become entirely abstract and scientific, namely, grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. This was done in such a way that the young human being started by recognizing in his teacher: This man can do something which I cannot do. And through this alone the right relationship was established between the younger and the older generations. For this relationship, my dear friends, can never develop along the path of intellectuality. As soon as one stands consciously on the ground of the intellect or without the ideas inwardly revealed in the intellectual or mind soul, there is no possibility of differentiating between human beings. For human nature is so constituted that when it is a matter of making something clear through the consciousness soul, everyone thinks that the moment he has concepts he is capable of discussing them with anyone. Thus it is, with the intellect. For the intellect neither man's maturity nor his experience comes into consideration; they only do so when it is a question of ability. But when their elders have ability the young quite as a matter of course pay tribute to maturity and experience.

Now, in order to understand these things thoroughly we must consider from a different point of view the course taken by mankind's evolution. Let me tell you what spiritual science has discovered about the course of history, with regard to the intercourse between men.

External documentary history can go back only a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha and what is to be found can never be estimated rightly because spiritual achievements, even in the time of ancient Greece, cannot be grasped by modern concepts. Even for the old Grecian times quite other concepts must be used. Nietzsche felt this. Hence the charm of his brief, unfinished essay on Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, where he deals with philosophy in connection with the general development of Greek culture up to the time of Socrates. In Socrates he saw the first flicker of pure intellectuality; everything philosophical in the tragic age of Greek development proceeded from wide human foundations for which, when expressed in concepts, these were only the language through which to convey what was experienced. In the earliest times philosophy was quite different from what it later became. But I only want to mention this in passing.

I really want to point out that with spiritual Imagination, and especially with Inspiration, we can look back much further into human evolution and, above all, into men's souls. Then we find when we go very far back, some seven or eight thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, that the young had a natural veneration for great age. This was a matter of course. Why? Because what exists today only in earliest youth existed then for the whole evolution of man.

If we look at the human being with less superficiality than is often done today, we find that the whole evolution of the human soul changes at about the change of teeth, during the sixth, seventh or eighth year. Man's soul becomes different, and again it changes at the time of puberty. I have discussed this fully in my book The Education of the Child from the Standpoint of Spiritual Science. On occasion it is noticed that man's soul becomes different in the seventh year and again in the fourteenth or fifteenth. But what people no longer notice is that changes still take place at the beginning of the twenties, at the end of the twenties, in the middle of the thirties, and so on.

Whoever is able to observe the life of soul in a more intimate way knows such transitions in man, that human life runs its course in rhythms. Try to perceive this, let us say, in Goethe. Goethe records how he was cured of certain childlike religious ideas by the Lisbon earthquake, thus about the time when he was changing his teeth, and how puzzling everything was for him. He tells how as a small child he began to reflect: Is there a good God ruling the world, when one sees that countless people have been swept away through these terrible fiery forces in the earth?—Especially in these decisive moments of his life, Goethe was prone to let external events work upon his soul so as to be conscious of its changes. And he says concerning this period of his life that he became a strange kind of pantheist, how he could no longer believe in the ideas imparted by the older people in his home and by his parents. He tells how he took his father's music-stand on which he set out minerals, placing on top a little candle that he lit by holding a burning-glass to catch the first rays of the morning sun. In later life he explained that he had wanted to bring an offering to the great God of Nature by lighting a sacrificial fire, kindled from Nature herself.

Take the first period of Goethe's life, then the following one, and so on till you piece together this whole life out of parts of about the length of his childlike episode, and you will find that with Goethe something always happened during such times fundamentally to change his soul. It is extraordinarily interesting to see that the fact of Schiller's urging Goethe to continue Faust only found fruitful soil in Goethe because at the end of the eighteenth century, he happened to be at a transitional period of this kind. It is interesting too that Goethe re-wrote Faust at the beginning of a following life-period. Goethe began Faust in his youth in such a way that he makes Faust open the book of Nostradamus. There we have the great scene:

“What powers celestial, lo! ascend, descend
Each unto each the golden vessels giving!”

But turn the page and there we find:
“Thou, Spirit of the Earth, to me art nearer.”

Goethe rejects for Faust the great tableau of the macrocosm and allows only the earth-spirit to approach him. And when at the beginning of the nineteenth century he was persuaded by Schiller to revise Faust he wrote the “Prologue in Heaven.” Anyone who observes his own life inwardly will discover that these changes hold good. Nowadays we only notice them when we deliberately train ourselves to look deeply into our own life.

In ancient times, six thousand, seven thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, these changes were so noticeable that they were experienced in the life of soul as the change of teeth or puberty is today. And, indeed, approximately up to the middle of life, up to the thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, life was on the up-grade. But then it began to decline. People experienced the drying-up of life. But while certain products of metabolism become deposited through sluggishness in the organism and the physical organism becomes increasingly heavy and lethargic, it was also felt that up to the greatest age the soul and spirit were on the ascent, how the soul is set free with the drying up of the body. And people in olden days would not have spoken with such ardour of the patriarchs—the word itself only arose later—had they not noticed externally in men: True, he is getting physically old, but he has to thank his physical aging for lighting-up his spirit. He is no longer dependent on the body. The body withers, but the soul becomes free.

In this modern age it is most unusual that such a thing happens, for instance, as occurred at the Berlin University. Two philosophers were there, the one was Zeller—the famous Greek scholar—and the other Michelet. Zeller was seventy years old and thought he ought to be pensioned off. Michelet was ninety and lectured with tremendous vivacity. Eduard von Hartmann told me this himself. Michelet is supposed to have said: “I don't understand why that young man doesn't want to lecture any more.” Michelet was, as I said, ninety years old!

Today people seldom keep their freshness to such a degree. But in those times it was so, especially among those who concerned themselves with spiritual life. What did the young say when they looked at the Patriarchs? They said: It is beautiful to get old. For then one learns something through one's own development that one cannot know before. It was perfectly natural to speak in this way. Just as a little boy with a toy horse wants to be big and get a real horse, so, at that time, there was the desire to get old because it was felt that something is then revealed from within.

Then came the following millennia. It was still experienced up to a considerable age, but no longer as in the old Indian epoch—in the terminology of my Occult Science. At the zenith of Greek culture, man still had living experience of the change occurring in life in the middle of the thirties. Men still knew how to distinguish between body and spirit, and said: At the age of thirty, the physical begins to decline, but then the spiritual begins to blossom forth. This was experienced by the soul and spirit in the immediate presence of men. The original feeling of the Greeks was based upon this, not upon that phantasy of which modern science speaks. To understand the fullness of Greek culture, we should bear in mind that the Greeks were still able in consciousness to come to thirty, five-and-thirty, six-and-thirty years, whereas a more ancient humanity grew in consciousness to a far greater age. Herein consists the evolution of humanity. Man has more and more to experience out of Nature unconsciously what is for a later time; this requires him to experience it consciously for consciously it must again be experienced. Whoever observes himself can recognize the seven-yearly changes; the length of time is not pedantically exact, but approximate. A man who looks back to the period of his forty-ninth, forty-second, thirty-fifth years can recognize quite well: At that time something happened in me by which I learnt something which out of my own nature I could not previously have done, just as I should not have been able to bite with my second teeth before I had them. To experience life concretely is something that has been lost in the course of man's evolution. And today if anyone does not inwardly train himself to observe, these epochs from the thirtieth year onwards are completely blurred. Comparatively speaking, an inner transformation can still be noticed at the beginning of the twenties—even up to the end of the twenties, though it is then rather less noticeable. But with the present human organization man receives something from his natural evolution only up to his twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year, and this limit will recede more and more. In earlier times men were not free in their organization, destined as they were to have these experiences out of their own nature. Freedom has become possible only by the withdrawal of Nature. To the extent Nature ceases freedom becomes possible. Through his own striving, through his own powers, man must arrive at finding the spiritual, whereas formerly, the older he became the more did the spiritual thrive.

Today emphasis is no longer placed on what the old become merely by growing older. Intellectualism is left which, between the eighteenth and nineteenth years, can develop so that from then onwards one can know with the intellect. But as far as intellectuality is concerned, one can at most reach a greater degree of proficiency but make no qualitative progress. If one has fallen a victim to the desire to prove or to refute everything intellectually, one cannot progress. If someone puts forward what is the result of decades of experience but wants to prove it intellectually, an eighteen-year-old could refute him intellectually. For whatever is possible intellectually at sixty is equally possible at nineteen, since intellectuality is a stage during the epoch of the consciousness soul which in the sense of deepening is of no help to progress, but only to proficiency. The young may say: “I am not yet as clever as you are; you can still take me in.” But he will not believe the other to be his superior in the sphere of intellect.

These things must be emphasized to become intelligible. I do not wish to criticize. I am saying this only because it is part of the natural evolution of humanity; we should be clear about the following characteristic of our age, namely, that if man does not strive out of inner activity for development and maintain it consciously, then with mere intellectualism at his twentieth year he will begin to get rusty. He then receives stimuli only from outside, and through these external stimuli keeps himself going. Do you think that if things were not like that people would flock to the cinema? This longing for the cinema, this longing to see everything externally, depends on the human being becoming inwardly inactive, on his no longer wanting inner activity.

The only way to listen to lectures on Spiritual Science, as meant here, is for those present to do their share of the work. But today that is not to people's liking. They flock to lectures or meetings with lantern slides so that they can sit and do as much as possible without thinking. Everything just passes before them. They can remain perfectly passive.

But our system of teaching is ultimately of this character, too, and anyone who on educational grounds objects to the triviality of the modern object lesson is said to be behind the times. But one has to oppose it, for man is not a mere apparatus for observing, an apparatus that wants simply to look at things. Man can live only by inner activity. To listen to Spiritual Science means to invite the human being to co-operate with his soul. People do not want this today. Spiritual Science is an invitation to this inner activity, that is to say, it must lead all studies to the point where there is no more support in external sense-perception because then the inner play of forces must begin to move freely. Not before thinking moves freely in this inner play of forces can Imagination be reached. Thus the basis for all Anthroposophy is inner activity, the challenge to inner activity, the appeal to what can be active when all the senses are silent and only the activity of thinking is astir.

Here there lies something of extraordinary significance. Just suppose you were capable of this. I will not flatter you by saying that you are. I only want to ask you first to assume that you are capable of it, that you can think in such a way that your thoughts are only an inner flow of thoughts. What I called pure thinking in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was certainly not well named when judged by outer cultural conditions. For Eduard von Hartmann said to me: “There is no such thing, one can only think with the aid of external observation.” And all I could say in reply was: “It has only to be tried and people will soon learn to be able to make it a reality.” Thus take it as a hypothesis that you could have thoughts in a flow of pure thought. Then there begins for you the moment when you have led thinking to a point where it need not be called thinking any longer, because in a twinkling—in the twinkling of a thought—it has become something different. This rightly named pure thinking has at the same time become pure will, for it is willing, through and through. If you have advanced so far in your life of soul that you have freed thinking from outer perception, it has become at the same time pure will. You hover with your soul, so to speak, in a pure flight of thought. But this pure flight of thought is a flight of will. Then the exercise or the striving for the exercise of pure thought begins to be not an exercise in thinking only but also an exercise of the will, indeed an exercise of the will that goes right to the center of the human being. For you will make the following remarkable observation. It is only now, for the first time, that you can speak of thinking, as it is in ordinary life, as an activity of the head. Before this you really have no right to speak of thinking as an activity of the head, for you know this only as external fact from physiology, anatomy, and so on. But now you feel inwardly that you are no longer thinking so high up, you begin for the first time to think with the heart. You actually interweave your thought with the breathing process. You actually set going of itself what the Yoga exercises have striven for artificially. You notice that as thinking becomes more and more an activity of the will it wrenches itself free first from the breast and then from the whole human body. It is as though you were to draw forth this thinking from the extremity of your big toe! And if with inner participation you study what has appeared with many imperfections—for I make no claims for my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—if you let it work upon you and feel what this pure thinking is, you will experience that a new man is born within you who can bring out of the spirit an unfolding of the will.

Does man know before this that he has a will? He really has no will, for he is given up to instincts connected with his organic development. He often dreams that he does this or that out of an impulse of the soul, but he really does it because of the good or bad condition of his stomach. But now you know that you have permeated the physical organism with what fills it with consciousness. You do not need to be a clairvoyant for this. All you need do is to be interested in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and let it work upon you. For this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity cannot be read as other books are today. It must really be read so that once you get into the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you have the feeling that it is an organism, one member developing out of another, that you have found your way into something living. People immediately say: Something is going to get into me which will take away my freedom. Something is entering me that I do not want to have.

People who entertain such thoughts are like those who were to say that if the human being at two or three years has to get used to speaking a certain language, he will thereby lose his freedom. The human being ought to be warned against language for he will no longer be free when brought into this chance association of ideas. He ought to be able to speak at will now Chinese, now French, now German. Nobody says this because it would be too absurd, and life itself refutes such nonsense. On the other hand there are people who either hear or see something of Eurythmy and say that it, too, rests upon the chance association of the ideas of individuals. But one should be able to assume that philosophers would say: One must look into this Eurythmy and see if in evoking gestures we may not have the foundations of a higher freedom and find that it is only an unfolding at a higher level of what is in speech.

So one need not be surprised—for really nothing that goes beyond intellectualism is regarded without prejudice today—that people get goose-flesh when one tells them that a certain book must be read quite differently from other books, that it must be read in such a way that from it something is really experienced. What is it that must be experienced? It is the awakening of the will out of the spiritual. In this respect my book was intended as a means of education. The intention was not only to give it content but to make it work educationally. Hence you find in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity an exposition on the art of forming concepts, a description of what takes place in the soul when one does not keep with one's concepts to the impressions from outside, but lives within the free flow of thoughts.

That, my dear friends, is an activity which aims at knowledge in a far deeper sense than the external knowledge of Nature, but it is at the same time artistic, wholly identical with artistic activity. So that the moment pure thinking is experienced as will, man's attitude becomes that of an artist.

And this, my dear friends, is like-wise the attitude we need today in the teacher if he is to guide and lead the young from the time of the change of teeth to puberty, or even beyond puberty. The mood of soul should be so that out of the inner life of soul one comes to a second man, who cannot be known as is the outer physical body, which can be studied physiologically or anatomically, but who must be livingly experienced and may rightly be called, in accordance with the real meaning of the terms, “life body” or “ether body”. This cannot be known through external perception but must be inwardly experienced. To know this second man a kind of artistic activity must be unfolded. Hence there is this mood in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity which most people never discover—everywhere it touches the level of the artistic. Only most people do not discover this because they look for the artistic in the trivial, in the naturalistic and not in free activity. Only out of this free activity can education really be experienced as art, and the teacher can become an artist in education when he finds his way into this mood. Then in our epoch of the consciousness soul all teaching will be so arranged as to create an artistic atmosphere between teacher and pupil. And within this artistic atmosphere there can develop that relation between led and leader which is an inclining towards the leader, because he can do something which he is able to show forth artistically, and one feels that what he can do one would like to be able to do oneself. Thus no opposition is aroused because it is felt that one would destroy oneself by opposing.

Because of the way writing is taught today, it often happens that even as a child—for in the child there is always a being who is cleverer than the teacher—one asks: Why should I be bothered to write? I have no kind of relationship to writing—which is really what the North American Indians felt when they saw European script. They felt the black signs to be witchcraft. The feeling of the child is very similar. But let us awaken in the child what it means to look at black, red, green, yellow, white. Let us call up in him what it is when we surround a point by a circle. Let us call up the great experience contained in the difference there is when we draw two green circles and in each of them three red circles, then two red and in each of them three green, two yellow with three blue ones in them, then two blue containing three yellow circles. We let the children experience in the colors what the colors as such are saying to the human being, for in the world of color lives a whole world. But we also let the children experience what the colors have to say to one another, what green says to red, what blue says to yellow, blue to green and red to blue—here we have the most wonderful relation between the colors. We shall not do this by showing the child symbols or allegories, but we shall do it in an artistic way. Then we shall see how out of this artistic feeling the child gradually puts down figures out of which the letters then develop as writing once developed from picture-script. How foreign to the child today are B, G, or any other sign that has developed through inner necessity to its present form. What is a G, K, or U to a seven-year old? He really has not the slightest kinship with it. it has taken the human being thousands of years to acquire this relationship. The child must acquire an aesthetic relation to it. Everything is exterminated in the child because the written characters are not human; and the child wants to remain human.

In order to understand youth in its relation to the older generation we must go right into the art of education. The cleft between age and youth must be bridged not by hollow phrases but by education that is an art, education which is not afraid to find its support in real spiritual-scientific knowledge. That is why I said a few days ago: Where does this art lead to? It leads to experience of the real spiritual. And where goes what the age has gradually developed in such a way that it believes it must be given as a matter of course to the young? Where does that lead? It does not lead to the Spirit but to that which is devoid of Spirit. It is regarded a sin to bring the Spirit into what goes by the name of knowledge and science.

Science does not leave the human being alone even in earliest childhood. It cannot very well be otherwise. For the teacher is so drilled in systematized botany (and many books are entirely given over to systematized botany) that he believes he is committing a sin if he speaks to the children about botany in a way that is not scientific. But what is found in a botanical textbook cannot mean anything to a child before he is ten, and it is not until he is at least eighteen or nineteen that it can acquire any real significance for him.

Such is the situation. Now I have no intention of creating another intellectual theory about education. The aim is to create an artistic atmosphere between the older and the younger. But when this comes about, something happens which must occur if young people are to grow into the world in a healthy way. What the human being of today grows into can be described quite concretely. Between the ninth and tenth years an undefined feeling lives in the soul of every human being who is not a psychopath. There need not necessarily exist either a clear or unclear concept of this. But it begins to live within the human being from his ninth or tenth year. Up till then what is called the astral body alone is concerned with man's life of soul. But from that time onwards the force of the ego nature first begins to stir. It is not formulated in concepts. But in the life of feeling, deep within the soul, there lives unconsciously a question in the heart of the growing human being. This question takes different forms in different people. But a question arises which put in the form of a concept might be expressed as follows: Up to now the astral body has believed in other human beings; now I need something that somebody says to me so that I may believe in him or in others in my environment. Those who as children have most resisted this are those who need it most. Between the ninth and tenth years the human being, to strengthen his ego, begins to be dependent on an older person in whom he can trust—without this trust needing to be drummed in—in whom he can believe with the help of the artistic atmosphere that has been created. And woe betide it if this question which may still be one for many children up to their sixteenth or seventeenth year and sometimes even to the years I mentioned yesterday, the eighteenth or nineteenth—woe betide it if nothing happens to enable this question of the young to be answered by the old so that the young say: I am grateful that I have learnt from the old what I can learn only from the old; what he can tell me, he alone can tell me, for it will be different if I learn it when I am old.

Through this can be created something in an educational way which, applied in the right way, can be of the greatest significance for the epoch of the consciousness soul, which, in fact, in the earliest times of the Patriarchs, was already alive between young and old. Then, every young person said to himself: The old man with his snow-white hair has experiences which can only come when one is as old as he. Before then the necessary organs are not there. Therefore he must tell his experiences to us. We are dependent on what he relates because he alone can relate it. Certainly I shall one day be as old as he. But I shall not experience what he tells for thirty-five or forty years. The times will have progressed by then and I shall experience something different. But what I want to learn is only to be learnt from him.

Here is something in the spiritual realm which may be compared with feeding at the mother's breast. Just as the infant might say: “I too shall one day give the breast to a child, but now it is my mother who must give it to me”—so it is in the spiritual life. In the foundations of the spirit life of the world it is as though a chain were there, reaching from the past over into the future, which must be received by each generation into itself, must be carried onwards, re-forged, perfected. This chain has been broken in the age of intellectualism. This was generally felt among those growing up about the turn of the nineteenth century. Try to feel that you did experience something of the kind, even if at the time you were not able to express it. Try to sense that by feeling this, you were feeling about it in the right way. And if you sense this you will realize the true significance of the youth movement today, the youth movement which has, and must have, a Janus-head, because it is directed towards experience of the spiritual—an experience of the spiritual which carries thought so far that it becomes will, that it becomes the innermost human impulse.

We have been seeking now for will at its abstract pole where it is thought. In the days to follow we will seek it in the deeper spheres of man's being.

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 flow 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 of 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.

Today, anthroposophy is for many people a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into a realm that serious science should not concern itself with through knowledge. And those who, among the many specialized subjects to which a scientist can currently devote himself, want to accept something similar to what anthroposophy talks about, find, or claim to find, that the way anthroposophy wants to recognize is the opposite of true science. It is still difficult for anthroposophy to seriously engage with contemporary science on a large scale. The representatives of science prefer to be able to categorize this dubious intellectual construct as a form of scientific enthusiasm or a philosophically decorated form of superstition.

But it cannot be said that minds disposed to enthusiasm and superstition find much joy in anthroposophy. Of course, some people of the kind who get an excited heart and nimble legs when there is talk of any kind of “Sophia”, or even of something “occult”, also believe they hear words in anthroposophy that they can think about in their own way. They fail to hear, out of politeness to themselves, that anthroposophy does not particularly value their thoughts. And those who talk about anthroposophy without any intention of engaging with it think they are being witty when they refer to their “hysterical, eye-rolling” followers. But for the real enthusiasts, the whole nature of anthroposophy is not sensational enough; it appears to them to be too much in the guise of thinking, which they prefer to avoid.

It is not easy to respond to this fluctuating image of anthroposophy with a brief description of its intentions. Not only do we have to talk about something that many consider recognizable and scientific, we also have to talk about the other differently.

Almost half a century ago, at the 45th Naturalists' Convention in Leipzig, one of the greatest naturalists of modern times, in his famous Ignorabimus speech, forbade the recognition of nature to enter the territory that Anthroposophy wants to speak about. It might therefore seem as if the spirit of modern natural science was to be renounced. This is not the case. Anthroposophy takes its place most earnestly on the ground of this natural science. It recognizes the blessings that have come from the scientific and intellectual treatment of observation and experiment. It seeks to work in no other spirit than that which is fostered by the modern scientific ethos. It seeks its true co-workers among those who can imbibe this ethos with understanding.

But she also sees the possibility of penetrating into a supersensible realm without having to deny the spirit of modern natural knowledge. The fate of many a thinker of the latest time makes a deep impression on her. I will mention here one of the most important, Franz Brentano, who, although little known to a wider public, has been of profound influence for a narrower circle of students. Brentano wanted to establish a modern psychology. The brilliant scientific results of the 1860s and 1870s, when he made his decision, had a suggestive effect on this excellent thinker. He wanted to work on the science of the soul in the spirit of natural science. One volume of this work appeared in the 1870s. There were to be four or five. However, he was unable to follow up the first one. A sigh in this first volume reveals the reason. Brentano soon found himself limited to dealing only with the everyday details of mental life by what he believed to be the true spirit of natural science. How the representation follows the perception, how attention works, how memory works, etc. – one could believe that one could elucidate these in the sense in which one observed and experimented on nature. And when he was writing his first volume, Brentano still thought he could continue in this spirit and still advance to the questions that seemed to him the essential ones for the science of the soul. What were all the individual investigations for, he exclaimed in despair, if they did not succeed in learning something about the questions that Plato and Aristotle had already considered essential: about the preservation of the spiritual and mental part of man after the decay of the physical body. Brentano was a thoroughly honest thinker. He wanted to continue in the spirit in which he had begun; and in no other way could he reach his highest goal of soul research. He could not do that. The natural scientific orientation of thought, if it honestly remained on its own ground, could not penetrate to these highest goals.

We must grasp this impossibility and, on the basis of this understanding, come to the other way of investigating the soul and spirit if we want to gather fruits equal to those of natural science. Anthroposophy comes to this understanding. It regards the thinking human being who conducts research about nature. He will best achieve his goal if he lets thinking only speak about the facts of nature. If he uses it only to bring these facts into such a context that they say everything about themselves, and he adds nothing of his own. It is right that science sees its ideal precisely in such a relationship to thinking. Goethe had this scientific ideal in mind in its fullest purity. Modern scientific thinking has not yet reached this purity. It leaves scientific ground when it advances beyond the world of phenomena and its forces to atomistic or energetic hypotheses.

But with such a kind of research one does not get to the soul-spiritual. For if you look at the world around you, everything you see must be a being of the senses. You come to nothing that could underlie it. And if you look inward, you see nothing but the external world as it is processed by the soul. This external world is, however, manifoldly transformed within. The impressions have passed through emotional experiences and will impulses. The imagination has transformed them. In this transformation they are incorporated into memory. The prudent person will still recognize what has been taken in from outside even in the transformation. He will not fall into the error of many a mystic, who mistakes for an inner revelation a completely different world, when it is only a reflection of the external world, transformed within.

False mysticism is one danger for anthroposophical spiritual research. It passes off memories that have been transformed as the knowledge of a supersensible being that manifests itself through the human being. From the clear insight into this fact, anthroposophy draws part of its means of knowledge. It does not stop at mere memory. It develops the soul in such a way that the faculty of memory itself is transformed. This is brought about by exercises that work as precisely in the inner activity of the soul as the physicist works externally when he makes his instruments to eavesdrop on nature's secrets. Certain ideas that are not brought in from memory are treated in the same way as remembered ideas. They have to be easily comprehensible ideas that one forms oneself or that one allows another to give one. It is important that nothing of the processes involved in ordinary remembering interfere with the mental activity to which one devotes oneself with such ideas. However, one does live completely in the activity that unfolds during remembering. It is now a matter of continuing such practice until one feels, so to speak, inwardly permeated by a being that makes the thinking power appear to be pulsating with life. In this way, thinking as a real process has been lifted out of the physical body. With ordinary thinking, one lives in the processes of the physical body. With the thinking that one has now attained, one lives in the etheric body. One has elevated into consciousness a process that otherwise takes place unconsciously through the physical body. One's own personal being has moved into the etheric body that has become conscious. We see the consequences. The past life since birth, which otherwise forms a subconscious stream from which the echoes of experiences emerge like waves in memory, either voluntarily or involuntarily, becomes in its entirety an immediate present experience. One feels oneself in it with one's I, as one otherwise feels oneself in one's physical body. Experiences that took place ten years ago are felt to be as much a part of oneself as the hand and the head. One experiences oneself in the etheric or formative body, but as if in a process. In this way one gets to know the ether, which forms spatially but is temporal in nature. One lives in images, but these are not static, they are mobile.

These images then merge with the physical being. One notices that one's consciousness has entered the realm of processes that work on the physical organs as the forces of nutrition, growth and reproduction. But one experiences all this in the same way as one experiences the activity of a sensory organ. One feels compelled to perceive the etheric being not as sharply distinguished from the external world, but as connected with the etheric external world, as one perceives the experience that occurs when the eye sees. Thus the etheric processes within will appear connected to etheric processes in the external world, as the perceptions within are connected to the external objects being looked at when seeing. The only difference is that in the ordinary process of seeing, fleeting thoughts arise for the inner being in the present moment, while in the etheric picture gazing it becomes clear how the etheric world actually works on the human organization inwardly.

But this experience is not like the ordinary life of memory. In the time when one is cognizing in this way, one lives only in pictures; and one sees this quite clearly. It would be an unhealthy element if one were to mistake the experiences for something other than pictures. One would then enter the region of illusion, hallucination, mediumistic imagination. This is a path that must not be taken. The reality that one erroneously senses in “dreaming”, in hallucination and the like, arises from the fact that the soul experience flows down into the physical, and from the physical it is given, as it were, the density of reality. For anthroposophical spiritual research, everything must remain in the realm of conscious life, and this knows that what it experiences is only images, as in memory images.

Reality must enter this world of images through further fully conscious exercises, not through unconscious physical processes. The next stage of practice lies in the development of an ability that one does not love in ordinary life. It is forgetting. First, you imitate memory by allowing images to be present in consciousness; you imitate forgetting by using full willpower to remove these images as if you had never had them. This makes you receptive to the perception of realities that are completely closed to ordinary consciousness. You take them into the etheric body like you absorb oxygen when breathing.

One can call the cognitive experience in images the imagination; the second stage, in which a spiritual-soul reality penetrates into the imagination, can then be called inspiration. Anyone who associates only what is described here with these names cannot possibly take offense at the fact that all kinds of evils have been attributed to the names of enthusiastic mystics.

Inspiration first leads to an understanding of the soul. In imagination, one lives in the soul, but one does not look at it. Only when one has freed oneself from imagination is one's own soul perceived by looking. Everything that lives in it as a thought is felt in the same way as hunger, as consuming one's own being; the will, on the other hand, is felt in the same way as satiety, as building up one's own being. The emotional experiences appear as the rhythmic back and forth between the two forms of feeling. In the will, a world comes to life that is not there for consciousness in ordinary life. If we want to understand it, we must reflect on our relationship to the will in our ordinary lives. We are familiar with the idea that this or that should be done. But we know nothing about the way in which the hand or leg is moved. We only see the movement, the unfolding of the will. What lies in between is as much immersed in darkness for consciousness as the processes from falling asleep to waking up. Into this darkness the spiritual shines. In the act of will, man, as it were, breathes in the spirit; in the activity of imagination, he breathes it out. The perception of being permeated with the spirit produces the feeling of satiation in the act of will; the activity of imagination is felt as a surrender of one's own being, as a consuming.

This opens up the possibility of educating oneself about sleeping and waking. During sleep, the soul sinks into the spirit. It then dwells precisely in the element that withdraws from its consciousness during will activity. It is in the world of the will, but outside the body. It is interwoven with the creative forces of the world. In wakefulness, it lives in the body, but the spirit that guides the will is not conscious of it. Its presence is limited to the sphere of the body. In inspiration, the will activity that is working in the body becomes visible. It is opposed in its nature to the external creative forces of the world. It consumes the body. Physically, there is a consumption, a breakdown of the body in the will. But these are felt precisely as saturation by the spirit. In the imagination, the body is created. Perception works in the same way as will; it destroys the physical. In the imagination that follows perception, the destruction is reversed. This is felt as an exhalation of the spirit.

From the experience of these inner processes of the soul, the path leads to an understanding of birth and death. Through birth, inspiration beholds the soul life that existed in the spiritual element before birth – or conception – as it will exist in the physical. The same applies to the soul life beyond death. In imagination, the personality is traced back to birth; in inspiration, it is pointed beyond. The life of the soul is thus recognized as an imagistic life during the time from birth to death. The external world can be reflected in the human being because he has suspended his soul life at the time of conception. It has poured itself out into the bodily life. New soul life is created in the experience of the external world.

Anthroposophy does not initially lead to life after death, but to life before birth – or conception. The consciousness of Western civilization has lost this focus on the prenatal life of the soul. Therefore, it denies the possibility of grasping immortality through knowledge at all. It would relegate the acceptance of immortality to the sphere of faith. It is right if it merely wants to develop an interest in life after death. But anthroposophy seeks knowledge in this area. It must develop interest in the other direction. Only when one has an overview of what part of the soul was present at the time of conception can one recognize how the soul shapes the body. In this knowledge, however, lies the other in relation to death. If the soul becomes a concrete reality for contemplation, then so does the transformation that the outer world undergoes in the soul through ordinary consciousness. One recognizes the lasting element in human life that has nothing to do with the body and that is led through death to the realm of the spirit.

What has been described as forgetting borders on the soul's capacity for love. It can therefore be brought to such an extent that what is conveyed through the body in love occurs as a pure spiritual experience. Then one perceives not only a uniting and separating of one's own being with the spirit, but a real standing within the spiritual reality. Inspiration becomes intuition. This level of knowledge can be given such a name because it has a similarity in a higher realm to what is called in ordinary life. Only there, intuition is an immediate awareness of a context that applies to the physical world, without logical mediation; intuition in the higher sense is the experience of the spiritual in such a way that what is imagined and inspired acquires objective validity, as if, by determining the weight of an object given to the eye in the image, it acquires objective validity.

In its own essence, the spirit is seen in the soul through intuition. And that is the one that returns in repeated earthly lives. Just as the soul exists only in the image during earthly life and has its reality in the prenatal, the spiritual does not even have an image in earthly life as I. It is only present there as a black circle within a white surface, or like the processes of sleep within life. What one addresses as “I” is a void for the ordinary consciousness. The real ego effects are the after-effects of previous earthly lives. The present ego can only develop its effects in the following earthly lives.

By living in the realization of the relationships between successive earthly lives, one arrives at an understanding of the relationship from spirit to spirit. The universe reveals itself as a spirit universe. The succession of earthly lives is a reflection of this spiritual universe. Therefore, intuition, which can see through this succession, can venture to penetrate to a certain degree into the spiritual essence of the world. In an act of will, the fulfillment of one's own nature with the spirit is seen. In an experience that is not indifferent to our will, but determines it in a fateful way, a spiritual emptiness appears, a longing. This is carried within us as a consequence of previous earthly lives. We build our lives out of such longings. Everything that is not done out of pure thought wells up out of this subconscious life-stream as fate. It is possible to will purely, because the etheric has come out of the etheric to the independent entity in man. As soon as one enters the realm of imagination, freedom is immediately lessened. There, everything proceeds consciously; one lives circumspectly. But one can only form images that lie within the laws of the etheric world. In the field of inspiration, one's soul is integrated into the general world of souls, just as one's physical soul is integrated into the breathing process. One experiences oneself as a part of the whole. And in intuition, everything in life that does not flow from mere thoughts is felt to be a fateful connection of repeated earthly lives. What is realized out of pure thoughts in freedom has only one reality in the one physical life on earth. For the following ones, it only has a meaning in that the person experiences inner satisfaction in accomplishing free actions. This consequence of freedom leaves inner traces that then show their effects in the following lives on earth.

Intuition offers the possibility of penetrating into the spiritual foundations of the universe. One experiences there, for example, the difference between the sun and the moon. One experiences this through observing their effect on human beings. Just as the outer world of the senses lives on in the human being as content for thinking and feeling, etc., so the sun and moon live on in growth and reproduction. The effect of the sun is seen in everything related to growth and will; the effect of the moon in decomposition and thinking. The effect of the sun in the human inner being conditions the ability to remember by exciting the inner being, whereby the outer sensory impressions are reflected. The effect of the moon conditions all devotion and love. It paralyzes and deadens the inner being. In this way, the human being is able to relive the outer world within himself.

Once one has been enabled in this way to recognize the deeper basis of the sun and moon effects, one's view can sharpen for what is sun- and moon-like in the earthly environment. For example, we see in plants both a tendency to break down and to build up. We see the moon-like quality in the solidifying of the substance, and the sun-like quality in the blossoming and sprouting. And we then recognize the relationship to the human organism. A plant that carries a certain salt is recognized for its healing effect on a pathological process in the human organism. Of course, today's medicine will reject such findings. It simply knows nothing of what can be recognized with such inner clarity through supersensible vision, as it is also present in mathematical thinking. For this vision, the human organism is different from that for physical research. And the beings of external nature are also different. One no longer perceives limited organs in the organism. Not lungs, liver, etc., but processes: the lung process, the liver process. And in the same way, one perceives not the plant but its formative process. This also makes it possible to judge the interaction of the one and the other process when they flow into each other through the administration of medication. One penetrates into the intimate relationships of the human being with his natural environment.

Life is brought to the historical assessment of human development through the means of knowledge of anthroposophy. One has tried to recreate the view of the historical process of becoming according to a beautiful scientific idea. This idea is known: that the human germ, before birth, passes through the forms in a shortened development, which are realized in stages in the animal series. Accordingly, it has been thought that a people at a later stage of culture can also be understood as representing a later age of the individual human being, so to speak. One looks at the ancient oriental peoples and sees humanity at the childhood stage in them. In the Greeks and Romans, one sees the youth stage captured. The more recently civilized peoples would then have entered into manhood. This view presents only a vague analogy. Through real observation, something quite different is found. When one reaches a certain age, one's intuitive perception is awakened to intimate soul processes that are, as it were, held back from unfolding in the physical body. It is like the human germ, which passes through the animal series in a rudimentary way, but is prevented from realizing the corresponding form at a certain stage. The body points to earlier stages of development as it grows; the soul does this at the end of life. In the older stages of human development, what is currently shown in the soul's rudiments was actually present in the human body. People were organized differently. At present, a clear parallelism between the physical and the soul-spiritual can be seen in the child and adolescent stages of life. One need only think of sexual maturity with its accompanying psychological phenomena. For a more subtle observation, such a parallelism is also still noticeable up to the end of the twenties. But then the physical processes become, so to speak, too firm to have such mental side effects. The mental and spiritual life emancipates itself from them and continues in dependence on education and the life experiences aroused by the outside world. This was different in earlier epochs of human development. In those times, the human being also developed spiritually and mentally simply by developing physically. The significance of this fact can be seen from the fact that, as a result, the human being not only participated in the ascending physical development with all his or her mental activity, as is the case now, but also in the descending one. Today, at most, he or she participates in the descending physical development only through what arises from it as mental decline. But if we are able to correctly assess the mental and spiritual rudiments just described, we come to the insight that in older epochs, especially in old age, people have attained a state of mind that meant a spiritualization of their entire being. That is why the views about a spiritual foundation of the world all come from older times. But this leads to a historical view according to which humanity records the culture that arises from physical development at ever younger stages. While the Greeks were still able to draw the strength for their spiritual culture from the development of their physical bodies in the first thirty years of their lives, the present-day civilized nations only manage to make use of their physicality until the end of their twenties. But this brings about an understanding of historical life that shows man his place in historical evolution. Great human tasks become apparent from history. One sees the necessity for humanity to deepen spiritually. For the time that began around the fifteenth century only developed what is possible in accordance with the development of the body until the end of the 1920s. These were the great achievements of the Galilean-Copernican age. Humanity would have to become rigid in them if completely different guiding forces of existence did not set in. Scientific life must be fertilized by the study of the supersensible. What man can experience through imagination, inspiration and intuition must be given to an existence that can no longer draw from the development of the physical. From the sense of human development, the emergence of an anthroposophical spiritual science appears as a necessity of the present epoch.

[Concept for the above text, from notebook 496, 1920/1921)

1.) Anthroposophy is seen as a fantastic attempt at knowledge. Taken as superstition.

2.) The enthusiasts take no pleasure in anthroposophy.

3.) It is difficult to speak of its essence in a nutshell.

4.) Du Bois-Reymond forbade to penetrate into the realm of the supersensible in a scientific way.

5.) Not opposed to science.

6.) The usual scientific method cannot penetrate into the life of the soul. Example Franz Brentano.

7.) Impossibility to go beyond the phenomena through external research. Hence the contempt for Oken-Schelling's natural philosophy. The ideas lose their content.

8.) But with such research, one also cannot approach the soul and spirit. The wrong path of false mysticism sees into the interior. But it only finds the reflection of the sensory outside world.

9.) In anthroposophical research, the ability to remember is transformed. Thoughts are absorbed into the etheric world. One detaches oneself from the body. 10.) One then lives in images. With full composure, one expands one's personality through one's experiences since birth. One has thereby become entirely a sensory organ.

11.) One must consciously remain in the soul realm. Slipping back into the body realm gives rise to dreams, hallucinations, etc. One then mistakes the pictorial-experiential for reality.

12.) One notices that one has entered the realm of body formation. One has taken the forces of growth up into consciousness.

13) One must now progress to supersensible perception. This happens through the process of imitation of forgetting.

14) One transforms the imagination into an inner power, which one then perceives just as little as the eye. But this power, which has flowed back into the inner being, opens up the vision of the soul's outer world. The astral aspect comes to the fore. The moments of waking up and falling asleep become representational. An interrelationship becomes visible that can be compared to breathing. Oriental wisdom therefore consciously transformed the breathing process.

15) In a further step, that which sends no impressions into consciousness during sleep is recognized as that which connects with the physical at birth (conception). This also passes through death.

16) You have thus come to an understanding of the interrelationship of your own human being with the outside world, but you have not yet grasped the spiritual outside world itself.

17) This happens through the further development of the method of forgetting. The power is trained in the soul, which otherwise works in dependence on the body as love. One thereby transfers one's own experience into that of another. The spirit reveals itself in its reality. The repeated lives on earth are recognized.

18) Intuition offers the possibility of seeing the inner world without false mysticism. And the outer world in its spiritual background. Just as ordinary soul experiences are an abstract reflection of the sensory outer world, so the material inside of a person is an effect of the spiritual content of the outer world.

19) This makes it possible to deepen medical knowledge. The natures of the natural kingdoms are seen through and their relationship to the organ processes of the human being is revealed.

20) The effects of the sun and moon are recognized. Their relationship to the inner processes of the human organization.

21.) Life is brought into the historical development of humanity.

22.) The artistic experience becomes conscious perception. This opens up a source for the artistic. Goethe spoke with a sense of what is entering the realm of experience. The unconscious is not affected. For one does not symbolize; one does not allegorize. One lives one's way towards artistic perception with insight. Dornacher Bau. Its forms arise from the same source as anthroposophy. — Eurythmy.

23.) Education is stimulated. A real knowledge of human nature is developed. From this arises the art of forming human beings.

24) Social conditions can be understood with a thinking based on anthroposophy. Natural science works with sharply defined contours towards a goal. Such ideas are not suitable for grasping the essence of capital, labor, money, etc. Such ideas can only be thought. They have no inner life. Anthroposophical ideas are alive. They connect with life. They become social sympathies and antipathies; they take hold of feeling and pulsate through will. They are absorbed into social life just as life forces are absorbed into the human organism. But that needs the present.

25) It was intellectualism that made natural science great. It will be supersensible vision that penetrates into life.

[ 1 ] When I observe how a billiard ball, when struck, communicates its motion to another, I remain entirely without influence on the process before me. The direction and velocity of the motion of the second ball is determined by the direction and velocity of the first. As long as I remain a mere spectator, I can say nothing about the motion of the second ball until after it has happened. It is quite different when I begin to reflect on the content of my observations. The purpose of my reflection is to construct concepts of the process. I connect the concept of an elastic ball with certain other concepts of mechanics, and consider the special circumstances which obtain in the instance in question. I try, in other words, to add to the process which takes place without any interference, a second process which takes place in the conceptual sphere. This latter process is dependent on me. This is shown by the fact that I can rest content with the observation, and renounce all search for concepts if I have no need of them. If, therefore, this need is present, then I am not content until I have established a definite connection among the concepts, ball, elasticity, motion, impact, velocity, etc., so that they apply to the observed process in a definite way. As surely as the occurrence of the observed process is independent of me, so surely is the occurrence of the conceptual process dependent on me.

[ 2 ] We shall have to consider later whether this activity of mine really proceeds from my own independent being, or whether those modern physiologists are right who say that we cannot think as we will, but that we must think exactly as the thoughts and thought-connections determine, which happen to be in our minds at any given moment. (Cp. Ziehen, Leitfaden der Physiologischen Psychologie, Jena, 1893, p. 171.) For the present we wish merely to establish the fact that we constantly feel obliged to seek for concepts and connections of concepts, which stand in definite relation to the objects and processes which are given independently of us. Whether this activity is really ours, or whether we are determined to it by an unalterable necessity, is a question which we need not decide at present. What is unquestionable is that the activity appears, in the first instance, to be ours. We know for certain that concepts are not given together with the objects to which they correspond. My being the agent in the conceptual process may be an illusion; but there is no doubt that to immediate observation I appear to be active. Our present question is: what do we gain by supplementing a process with a conceptual counterpart?

[ 3 ] There is a far-reaching difference between the ways in which, for me, the parts of a process are related to one another before, and after, the discovery of the corresponding concepts. Mere observation can trace the parts of a given process as they occur, but their connection remains obscure without the help of concepts. I observe the first billiard ball move towards the second in a certain direction and with a certain velocity. What will happen after the impact I cannot tell in advance. I can once more only watch it happen with my eyes. Suppose some one obstructs my view of the field where the process is happening, at the moment when the impact occurs, then, as mere spectator, I remain ignorant of what goes on. The situation is very different, if prior to the obstructing of my view I have discovered the concepts corresponding to the nexus of events. In that case I can say what occurs, even when I am no longer able to observe. There is nothing in a merely observed process or object to show its relation to other processes or objects. This relation becomes manifest only when observation is combined with thought.

[ 4 ] Observation and thought are the two points of departure for all the spiritual striving of man, in so far as he is conscious of such striving. The workings of common sense, as well as the most complicated scientific researches, rest on these two fundamental pillars of our minds. Philosophers have started from various ultimate antitheses, Idea and Reality, Subject and Object, Appearance and Thing-in-itself, Ego and Non-Ego, Idea and Will, Matter and Mind, Matter and Force, the Conscious and the Unconscious. It is, however, easy to show that all these antitheses are subsequent to that between observation and thought, this being for man the most important.

[ 5 ] Whatever principle we choose to lay down, we must prove that somewhere we have observed it, or we must enunciate it in the form of a clear concept which can be rethought by any other thinker. Every philosopher who sets out to discuss his fundamental principles, must express them in conceptual form and thus use thought. He therefore indirectly admits that his activity presupposes thought. We leave open here the question whether thought or something else is the chief factor in the development of the world. But it is at any rate clear that the philosopher can gain no knowledge of this development without thought. In the occurrence of phenomena thought may play a secondary part, but it is quite certain that it plays a chief part in the construction of a theory about them.

[ 6 ] As regards observation, our need of it is due to our organization. Our thought about a horse and the object “horse” are two things which for us have separate existences. The object is accessible to us only by means of observation. As little as we can construct a concept of a horse by mere staring at the animal, just as little are we able by mere thought to produce the corresponding object.

[ 7 ] In time observation actually precedes thought. For we become familiar with thought itself in the first instance by observation. It was essentially a description of an observation when, at the beginning of this chapter, we gave an account of how thought is kindled by an objective process and transcends the merely given. Whatever enters the circle of our experiences becomes an object of apprehension to us first through observation. All contents of sensations, all perceptions, intuitions, feelings, acts of will, dreams and fancies, images, concepts, ideas, all illusions and hallucinations, are given to us through observation.

[ 8 ] But thought as an object of observation differs essentially from all other objects. The observation of a table, or a tree, occurs in me as soon as those objects appear within the horizon of my field of consciousness. Yet I do not, at the same time, observe my thought about these things. I observe the table, but I carry on a process of thought about the table without, at the same moment, observing this thought-process. I must first take up a standpoint outside of my own activity, if I want to observe my thought about the table, as well as the table. Whereas the observation of things and processes, and the thinking about them, are everyday occurrences making up the continuous current of my life, the observation of the thought-process itself is an exceptional attitude to adopt. This fact must be taken into account, when we come to determine the relations of thought as an object of observation to all other objects. We must be quite clear about the fact that, in observing the thought-processes, we are applying to them a method, which is our normal attitude in the study of all other objects in the world, but which in the ordinary course of that study is usually not applied to thought itself.

[ 9 ] Some one might object that what I have said about thinking applies equally to feeling and to all other mental activities. Thus it is said that when, e.g., I have a feeling of pleasure, the feeling is kindled by the object, but it is this object I observe, not the feeling of pleasure. This objection however is based on an error. Pleasure does not stand at all in the same relation to its object as the concept constructed by thought. I am conscious, in the most positive way, that the concept of a thing is formed through my activity; whereas a feeling of pleasure is produced in me by an object in a way similar to that in which, e.g., a change is caused in an object by a stone which falls on it. For observation, a pleasure is given in exactly the same way as the event which causes it. The same is not true of concepts. I can ask why an event arouses in me a feeling of pleasure. But I certainly cannot ask why an occurrence causes in me a certain number of concepts. The question would be simply meaningless. In thinking about an occurrence, I am not concerned with it as an effect on me. I learn nothing about myself from knowing the concepts which correspond to the observed change caused to a pane of glass by a stone thrown against it. But I do learn something about myself when I know the feeling which a certain occurrence arouses in me. When I say of an object which I perceive “this is a rose,” I say absolutely nothing about myself; but when I say of the same thing that “it causes a feeling of pleasure in me,” I characterize not only the rose, but also myself in my relation to the rose.

[ 10 ] There can, therefore, be no question of putting thought and feeling on a level as objects of observation. And the same could easily be shown of other activities of the human mind. Unlike thought, they must be classed with any other observed objects or events. The peculiar nature of thought lies just in this, that it is an activity which is directed solely on the observed object and not on the thinking subject. This is apparent even from the way in which we express our thoughts about an object, as distinct from our feelings or acts of will. When I see an object and recognize it as a table, I do not as a rule say “I am thinking of a table,” but “this is a table.” On the other hand, I do say “I am pleased with the table.” In the former case, I am not at all interested in stating that I have entered into a relation with the table; whereas, in the second case, it is just this relation which matters. In saying “I am thinking of a table,” I adopt the exceptional point of view characterized above, in which something is made the object of observation which is always present in our mental activity, without being itself normally an observed object.

[ 11 ] The peculiar nature of thought consists just in this, that the thinker forgets his thinking while actually engaged in it. It is not thinking which occupies his attention, but rather the object of thought which he observes.

[ 12 ] The first point, then, to notice about thought is that it is the unobserved element in our ordinary mental life.

[ 13 ] The reason why we do not notice the thinking which goes on in our ordinary mental life is no other than this, that it is our own activity. Whatever I do not myself produce appears in my field of consciousness as an object; I contrast it with myself as something the existence of which is independent of me. It forces itself upon me. I must accept it as the presupposition of my thinking. As long as I think about the object, I am absorbed in it, my attention is turned on it. To be thus absorbed in the object is just to contemplate it by thought. I attend not to my activity, but to its object. In other words whilst I am thinking, I pay no heed to my thinking which is of my own making, but only to the object of my thinking which is not of my making.

[ 14 ] I am, moreover, in exactly the same position when I adopt the exceptional point of view and think of my own thought-processes. I can never observe my present thought, I can only make my past experiences of thought-processes subsequently the objects of fresh thoughts. If I wanted to watch my present thought, I should have to split myself into two persons, one to think, the other to observe this thinking. But this is impossible. I can only accomplish it in two separate acts. The observed thought-processes are never those in which I am actually engaged but others. Whether, for this purpose, I make observations on my own former thoughts, or follow the thought-processes of another person, or finally, as in the example of the motions of the billiard balls, assume an imaginary thought-process, is immaterial.

[ 15 ] There are two things which are incompatible with one another: productive activity and the theoretical contemplation of that activity. This is recognized even in the First Book of Moses. It represents God as creating the world in the first six days, and only after its completion is any contemplation of the world possible: “And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” The same applies to our thinking. It must be there first, if we would observe it.

[ 16 ] The reason why it is impossible to observe the thought-process in its actual occurrence at any given moment, is the same as that which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately than any other process in the world. Just because it is our own creation do we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process, in detail, takes place. What in the other spheres of observation we can discover only indirectly, viz., the relevant objective nexus and the relations of the individual objects, that is known to us immediately in the case of thought. I do not know off-hand why, for perception, thunder follows lightning, but I know immediately, from the content of the two concepts, why my thought connects the concept of thunder with that of lightning. It does not matter for my argument whether my concepts of thunder and lightning are correct. The connection between the concepts I have is clear to me, and that through the very concepts themselves.

[ 17 ] This transparent clearness in the observation of our thought-processes is quite independent of our knowledge of the physiological basis of thought. I am speaking here of thought in the sense in which it is the object of our observation of our own mental activity. For this purpose it is quite irrelevant how one material process in my brain causes or influences another, whilst I am carrying on a process of thought. What I observe, in studying a thought-process, is not which process in my brain connects the concept of thunder with that of lightning, but what is my reason for bringing these two concepts into a definite relation. Introspection shows that, in linking thought with thought, I am guided by their content not by the material processes in the brain. This remark would be quite superfluous in a less materialistic age than ours. Today, however, when there are people who believe that, when we know what matter is, we shall know also how it thinks, it is necessary to affirm the possibility of speaking of thought without trespassing on the domain of brain physiology. Many people today find it difficult to grasp the concept of thought in its purity. Anyone who challenges the account of thought which I have given here, by quoting Cabanis' statement that “the brain secretes thoughts as the liver does gall or the spittle-glands spittle, etc.” simply does not know of what I am talking. He attempts to discover thought by the same method of mere observation which we apply to the other objects that make up the world. But he cannot find it in this way, because, as I have shown, it eludes just this ordinary observation. Whoever cannot transcend Materialism lacks the ability to throw himself into the exceptional attitude I have described, in which he becomes conscious of what in all other mental activity remains unconscious. It is as useless to discuss thought with one who is not willing to adopt this attitude, as it would be to discuss colour with a blind man. Let him not imagine, however, that we regard physiological processes as thought. He fails to explain thought, because he is not even aware that it is there.

[ 18 ] For every one, however, who has the ability to observe thought, and with good will every normal man has this ability, this observation is the most important he can make. For he observes something which he himself produces. He is not confronted by what is to begin with a strange object, but by his own activity. He knows how that which he observes has come to be. He perceives clearly its connections and relations. He gains a firm point from which he can, with well-founded hopes, seek an explanation of the other phenomena of the world.

[ 19 ] The feeling that he had found such a firm foundation, induced the father of modern philosophy, Descartes, to base the whole of human knowledge on the principle “I think, therefore I am.” All other things, all other processes, are independent of me. Whether they be truth, or illusion, or dream, I know not. There is only one thing of which I am absolutely certain, for I myself am the author of its indubitable existence; and that is my thought. Whatever other origin it may have in addition, whether it come from God or from elsewhere, of one thing I am sure, that it exists in the sense that I myself produce it. Descartes had, to begin with, no justification for reading any other meaning into his principle. All he had a right to assert was that, in apprehending myself as thinking, I apprehend myself, within the world-system, in that activity which is most uniquely characteristic of me. What the added words “therefore I am” are intended to mean has been much debated. They can have a meaning on one condition only. The simplest assertion I can make of a thing is, that it is, that it exists. What kind of existence, in detail, it has, can in no case be determined on the spot, as soon as the thing enters within the horizon of my experience. Each object must be studied in its relations to others, before we can determine the sense in which we can speak of its existence. An experienced process may be a complex of percepts, or it may be a dream, an hallucination, etc. In short, I cannot say in what sense it exists. I can never read off the kind of existence from the process itself, for I can discover it only when I consider the process in its relation to other things. But this, again, yields me no knowledge beyond just its relation to other things. My inquiry touches firm ground only when I find an object, the reason of the existence of which I can gather from itself. Such an object I am myself in so far as I think, for I qualify my existence by the determinate and self-contained content of my thought-activity. From here I can go on to ask whether other things exist in the same or in some other sense.

[ 20 ] When thought is made an object of observation, something which usually escapes our attention is added to the other observed contents of the world. But the usual manner of observation, such as is employed also for other objects, is in no way altered. We add to the number of objects of observation, but not to the number of methods. When we are observing other things, there enters among the world-processes—among which I now include observation—one process which is overlooked. There is present something different from every other kind of process, something which is not taken into account. But when I make an object of my own thinking, there is no such neglected element present. For what lurks now in the background is just thought itself over again. The object of observation is qualitatively identical with the activity directed upon it. This is another characteristic feature of thought-processes. When we make them objects of observation, we are not compelled to do so with the help of something qualitatively different, but can remain within the realm of thought.

[ 21 ] When I weave a tissue of thoughts round an independently given object, I transcend my observation, and the question then arises, what right have I to do this? Why do I not passively let the object impress itself on me? How is it possible for my thought to be relevantly related to the object? These are questions which every one must put to himself who reflects on his own thought-processes. But all these questions lapse when we think about thought itself. We then add nothing to our thought that is foreign to it, and therefore have no need to justify any such addition.

[ 22] Schelling says: “To know Nature means to create Nature.” If we take these words of the daring philosopher of Nature literally, we shall have to renounce for ever all hope of gaining knowledge of Nature. For Nature after all exists, and if we have to create it over again, we must know the principles according to which it has originated in the first instance. We should have to borrow from Nature as it exists the conditions of existence for the Nature which we are about to create. But this borrowing, which would have to precede the creating, would be a knowing of Nature, and that even if after the borrowing no creation at all were attempted. The only kind of Nature which it would be possible to create without previous knowledge, would be a Nature different from the existing one.

[ 23 ] What is impossible with Nature, viz., creation prior to knowledge, that we accomplish in the act of thought. Were we to refrain from thinking until we had first gained knowledge of it, we should never think at all. We must resolutely think straight ahead, and then afterwards by introspective analysis gain knowledge of our own processes. Thus we ourselves create the thought-processes which we then make objects of observation. The existence of all other objects is provided for us without any activity on our part.

[ 24 ] My contention that we must think before we can make thought an object of knowledge, might easily be countered by the apparently equally valid contention that we cannot wait with digesting until we have first observed the process of digestion. This objection would be similar to that brought by Pascal against Descartes, when he asserted we might also say “I walk, therefore I am.” Certainly I must digest resolutely and not wait until I have studied the physiological process of digestion. But I could only compare this with the analysis of thought if, after digestion, I set myself, not to analyse it by thought, but to eat and digest it. It is not without reason that, while digestion cannot become the object of digestion, thought can very well become the object of thought.

[ 25 ] This then is indisputable, that in thinking we have got hold of one bit of the world-process which requires our presence if anything is to happen. And that is the very point that matters. The very reason why things seem so puzzling is just that I play no part in their production. They are simply given to me, whereas I know how thought is produced. Hence there can be no more fundamental starting-point than thought from which to regard all world-processes.

[ 26 ] I should like still to mention a widely current error which prevails with regard to thought. It is often said that thought, in its real nature, is never experienced. The thought-processes which connect our perceptions with one another, and weave about them a network of concepts, are not at all the same as those which our analysis afterwards extracts from the objects of perception, in order to make them the object of study. What we have unconsciously woven into things is, so we are told, something widely different from what subsequent analysis recovers out of them.

[ 27 ] Those who hold this view do not see that it is impossible to escape from thought. I cannot get outside thought when I want to observe it. We should never forget that the distinction between thought which goes on unconsciously and thought which is consciously analysed, is a purely external one and irrelevant to our discussion. I do not in any way alter a thing by making it an object of thought. I can well imagine that a being with quite different sense-organs, and with a differently constructed intelligence, would have a very different idea of a horse from mine, but I cannot think that my own thought becomes different because I make it an object of knowledge. I myself observe my own processes. We are not talking here of how my thought-processes appear to an intelligence different from mine, but how they appear to me. In any case, the idea which another mind forms of my thought cannot be truer than the one which I form myself. Only if the thought-processes were not my own, but the activity of a being quite different from me, could I maintain that, notwithstanding my forming a definite idea of these thought-processes, their real nature was beyond my comprehension.

[ 28 ] So far, there is not the slightest reason why I should regard my thought from any other point of view than my own. I contemplate the rest of the world by means of thought. How should I make of my thought an exception?

[ 29 ] I think I have given sufficient reasons for making thought the starting-point for my theory of the world. When Archimedes had discovered the lever, he thought he could lift the whole cosmos out of its hinges, if only he could find a point of support for his instrument. He needed a point which was self-supporting. In thought we have a principle which is self-subsisting. Let us try, therefore, to understand the world starting with thought as our basis. Thought can be grasped by thought. The question is whether by thought we can also grasp something other than thought.

[ 30 ] I have so far spoken of thought without taking any account of its vehicle, the human consciousness. Most present-day philosophers would object that, before there can be thought, there must be consciousness. Hence we ought to start, not from thought, but from consciousness. There is no thought, they say without consciousness. In reply I would urge that, in order to clear up the relation between thought and consciousness, I must think about it. Hence I presuppose thought. One might, it is true, retort that, though a philosopher who wishes to understand thought, naturally makes use of thought, and so far presupposes it, in the ordinary course of life thought arises within consciousness and therefore presupposes that. Were this answer given to the world-creator, when he was about to create thought, it would, without doubt, be to the point. Thought cannot, of course, come into being before consciousness. The philosopher, however, is not concerned with the creation of the world, but with the understanding of it. Hence he is in search of the starting-point, not for creation, but with the understanding of the world. It seems to me very strange that philosophers are reproached for troubling themselves, above all, about the correctness of their principles, instead of turning straight to the objects which they seek to understand. The world-creator had above all to know how to find a vehicle for thought, the philosopher must seek a firm basis for the understanding of what is given. What does it help us to start with consciousness and make it an object of thought, if we have not first inquired how far it is possible at all to gain any knowledge of things by thought?

[ 31 ] We must first consider thought quite impartially without relation to a thinking subject or to an object of thought. For subject and object are both concepts constructed by thought. There is no denying that thought must be understood before anything else can be understood. Whoever denies this, fails to realise that man is not the first link in the chain of creation but the last. Hence, in order to explain the world by means of concepts, we cannot start from the elements of existence which came first in time, but we must begin with those which are nearest and most intimately connected with us. We cannot, with a leap, transport ourselves to the beginning of the world, in order to begin our analysis there, but we must start from the present and see whether we cannot advance from the later to the earlier. As long as Geology fabled fantastic revolutions to account for the present state of the earth, it groped in darkness. It was only when it began to study the processes at present at work on the earth, and from these to argue back to the past, that it gained a firm foundation. As long as Philosophy assumes all sorts of principles, such as atom, motion, matter, will, the unconscious, it will hang in the air. The philosopher can reach his goal only if he adopts that which is last in time as first in his theory. This absolutely last in the world-process is thought.

[ 32 ] There are people who say it is impossible to ascertain with certainty whether thought is right or wrong, and that, so far, our starting-point is a doubtful one. It would be just as intelligent to raise doubts as to whether a tree is in itself right or wrong. Thought is a fact, and it is meaningless to speak of the truth or falsity of a fact. I can, at most, be in doubt as to whether thought is rightly employed, just as I can doubt whether a certain tree supplies wood adapted to the making of this or that useful object. It is just the purpose of this book to show how far the application of thought to the world is right or wrong. I can understand anyone doubting whether, by means of thought, we can gain any knowledge of the world, but it is unintelligible to me how anyone can doubt that thought in itself is right.

Goethe, who had such a penetrating insight into so many things, once said the following remarkable words about the fate of the Bible in more recent times: For many centuries, people did not actually get their hands on the Bible, but only got to know it indirectly. When wider circles began to take an interest in the Bible, people were more inclined to think critically about the Bible and its origin and much less to delve directly into its content and its effect, so that actually, as Goethe says, since the acquaintance with the Bible in wider circles, much less has been spoken out of the spirit of this document than has been spoken about it.

What Goethe felt a hundred years ago has intensified significantly over the course of this century. In research, it has become increasingly rare to immerse oneself in the spirit of this religious scripture without prejudice; instead, critical research is increasingly conducted to determine how the individual parts correspond, when and how each part originated, and what the external history of this work is. People are paying less and less attention to the spiritual content.

At the same time, Goethe remarks that basically the Bible is the book of books; so says Goethe, this so-called pagan. Yes, he says that it is not going too far to say that everything that lives in our attitudes and feelings, in our perceptions and ideas, in our way of thinking today, is based on the Bible. It is particularly noteworthy that even that in our civilization which has seemingly made us independent of the Bible is nevertheless, if you follow things closely, a result of the Bible. It is so easy to believe that modern science since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is merely an opponent of the Bible. But the power of thought, the direction of imagination, even if seemingly contrary to the Bible, are taken from the depths of the Bible.

Copernicus may have explored the heavens in a way that seemingly contradicted the Bible, but he drew the power of thought from the Bible. Yes, the thought forms of modern monism, of materialism, have gained their strength from the Bible. Those social parties that radically oppose biblical faith have also — this is recognized by anyone who understands the psychology of the soul — drawn the strength of thought and feeling from the Bible. This is most the case with so-called biblical criticism, which, after all, most strongly opposes the Bible. They have gone through this in the culture of the Bible. If one follows this intimate historical course of the new time, one could say in view of this:

Your good nature, in foreign veins,
will soon quarrel with you.

Goethe said this with reference to one of his students who, in certain views, opposed Goethe and became his critic. Thus, it is the thoughts that have taken root in people over the centuries in our Western culture that have made our thinking, feeling and willing strong, the thoughts of our ancestors that struggle with the ancestors in the veins of their descendants.

Among the parts of the Bible that have suffered the most from modern thinking is the Gospel of John, which for centuries was considered the most vivid source of Christianity. This is far less appreciated by modern Bible criticism than the first three, so-called synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The Bible critics try, to the best of their ability, to test the books of Scripture for their historical value. They say that if you examine the first three Gospels, which, if you ignore the details, agree, you will find a picture of Christ Jesus that turns out to be credible. If you add the Gospel of John, there are so many contradictions to the first three Gospels that it is impossible to reconcile it with the first three Gospels. The first three Gospels report historical facts that give a vivid picture of the one who walked around in Palestine. The fourth evangelist, they say, cannot be regarded as a presenter of historical truths. He is rather an enthusiast for the personality of Christ Jesus. His aim was to compose a significant hymn to Christ Jesus, to express in lyrical form what he felt to be the truth about this revered personality, and to merely wrap this in historical facts.

Thus, to many, the fourth gospel does not appear as a historical document, but as a teaching in which one can be edified, like a poem, but which is not suitable to say something about the one who was the founder of the Christian religion on earth. As this view became more and more widespread in the course of the nineteenth century, the scholar Bunsen said in the 1850s: If it were really the case that the Gospel of John could not be taken as a historical document, then it would be bad for historical Christianity.

It cannot be denied that in the first three gospels, Jesus is presented even more humanly than the personality that gradually unfolds in its greatness, but that in the fourth gospel, an accomplished being , who has descended from invisible heights, who has nothing more to learn from his surroundings, who is endowed with grace and truth from the very beginning, who himself carries the fullness of the Godhead within himself.

The first three gospels contain beliefs and doctrines. In the fourth gospel, the essence of Christ Jesus apparently speaks mostly of itself, of what he is supposed to be to humanity and his disciples. These are differences that everyone notices. Those who notice them are pushed to the question: How does this fourth gospel relate to the other three gospels? We must realize that these contradictions have actually always been present, but that through the centuries the wisest people have not taken offense at them. Anyone who does not subscribe to the view that only in the nineteenth century did people become wise knows that in the most ancient times the wisest people endeavored to establish a harmony between the Gospels and also thought that they had succeeded.

Every age understands every thing in the way that the age itself is characterized. In other ages, there was not this exclusively materialistic way of thinking, which has even crept into the criticism of religious writings. Another age did not have that preference for the “simple man from Nazareth”. The urge has arisen more and more to push Christ Jesus down to the level of humanity, to say more and more, “In Him there is indeed an ideal figure, but He is still human.” To measure Him against other people has increasingly become the thinking habit of our time. Other ages have not had this urge; throughout centuries of Christian development there was a different ideal, a different aspiration. In an inaccessible distance stood the Christ Being. All human learning, all depth of wisdom, all depth of feeling and sensing sought to lift themselves up to those heights where one could sense something of that Being. It was believed that only the purest, most refined knowledge could approach this Being. The urge of the older times was to lift oneself up in knowledge and feeling in order to sense the height of that being. Thus nothing other than the spirit of the age in which one thinks, feels and searches is reflected in the conception of the Gospels.

We are now once again in an epoch that wants to elevate people to a higher world. But even though it is only at the beginning, this epoch knows its goal precisely and also knows how to pursue it in detail. The aim of Theosophy is to grasp and understand the Gospel of John. It could well be that the Gospel of John will celebrate a kind of resurrection through the means of this research. Through spiritual research, we will come to understand the evangelist again, who so sublimely presents the essence of Christ Jesus. If we first immerse ourselves in the content using the means of spiritual research, this gospel indeed presents itself as the deepest book of humanity. This gospel has been taken as a book of life throughout many centuries. Perhaps it can become a book of life again.

Let us try to consider some of the things that arise for those who seek to understand in this area. It turns out that the Gospel of John is a writing that is in wonderful congruity with the Old Testament. The Gospel of John begins with the beginning of things, as does the Old Testament. There, the gods create heaven and earth from what was chaos at the beginning. The Gospel of John also begins with the words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

Thus both documents refer us to the beginning. In both cases, humanity's gaze is directed towards the same thing. There is a congruence here, but one that nevertheless reveals a remarkable difference. In the Gospel of John, there is something actually new. In the Old Testament, we are transported to the starting point of humanity. In grand and powerful images, the genesis of the world is shown, up to the human being, who appears to us as the companion of other beings in the world of minerals, plants and animals, presented as an external, visible being. His development is traced back to the development of a people, the Jewish people. It is not a particular human becoming that is described, but rather humanity as it arises in the world, and then ascends to a people. A people is described as a whole. Only those who appreciate the guiding thread in the right way understand the Old Testament correctly. The meaning of the Old Testament lived in the soul of every single Jew. The individual human being feels himself as a member of the whole people. When the Jew wanted to express his innermost feelings, he spoke of his common bond with Abraham. When he wanted to speak of his transcendental nature, which extends beyond death, he spoke of his transcendental self going to Abraham's bosom. He did not feel the separate self, but rather the great national self, and that the common blood connected him with the nation, which leads up to the father Abraham. When he looked up to the Highest, he looked up to a Being Who revealed Himself through the blood of the whole people. Not only was the memory of the patriarch Abraham sacred to him, but also the feeling of unity with him. Further up, the beginning of the world was taken up, how one blood flowed in a coherent human whole and how the cosmic order, God Himself, permeates and spiritualizes such a group of people.

Let us contrast this with the Gospel of John. This also takes as its starting point the beginning of our entire development. However, it does not begin where the Old Testament begins, but rather, in a certain way, before that. The Old Testament places the emergence of the material world, of what can be seen, of what is there for the outer senses, at the very beginning. “And God said, ‘Let there be light!’” (Genesis 1:3) The author of the Gospel of John takes us further back, to an even earlier time, to a point when nothing material yet existed, when only the spiritual was there: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God” (John 1:1), which is nothing other than the spiritual, of which all material things are the manifestation. He says: It is true that the visible world began as it is described in the Old Testament. But it was preceded by a spiritual world. All the laws that were lived out in that primeval beginning are expressed not in any individual, but in the common blood that connects him to the whole people. If we go back to the spirit that precedes this sensual beginning of the world, we also come to that in man which is exalted above all sensuality, above all national context and to that which is found in every human being, in every human individuality. If we put ourselves in the place of the Jew for the God principle, we find: He felt united with the father Abraham when he traced back the whole line of blood.

In John, we find a tremendous advance in relation to this view. What does the Christ of John's Gospel say? In what he says, there is tremendous progress compared to the spirit of the Old Testament. If you examine what appears to us as the deepest human essence, then you need not go beyond the individual human being. The individual human being can stand alone, by himself; he finds the Father within himself, that from which he emerged.

I, my innermost being, I and the Father are one. (John 10:30)

This is the meaning of the herald's call, the revelation of the individual human being. How did Christ Jesus relate to the Jews who went up to the Father Abraham? He said exactly: This human ego lives in you; when you find the human “I” or “I am” in yourselves, the power of individuality, then everyone may say: There is something living in me that is out of time.

Before Abraham was, the I AM was.

What can be experienced in the innermost core of a person's being is more eternal than anything that can be experienced in the external world. We no longer go up to Abraham; we go up to that which will be eternal in us.

I and the Father are one.

Every single person finds access to the eternal through themselves. Thus we ascend to the very beginning of that which lives eternally in each individual.

Thus, the Gospel of John is the significant continuation of what is written in the Old Testament. It presents itself as a revelation of what was before the very beginning of what is presented in the Old Testament. To understand what is meant in the Gospel of John, we have to engage with the use of words. What is meant by the Logos, the Word? One scholar says of the beginning of the Gospel of John that it is not found in the other gospels. They simply tell, albeit steeped in miracle stories, what happened externally. It is said that the writer of the fourth gospel, on the other hand, was a philosopher. John must have known Philo. It can be said of him that he expresses similar speculations to those in the Gospel of John. He also says that the Word stands between the Creator of the world and man. From Alexandrian and Greek education, John drew the elements of his writing. From this, John had conceived that he would tell the story in the Gospel in such a way that the Christ is the Word made flesh. This had not occurred to any other evangelist.

Let us read the beginning of the Gospel of Luke with this in mind:

Since many have undertaken to set in order an account of the same words that have been handed down to us, as they were delivered to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word,

Here stands the exact same word or logos. It is said that one wants to retell it to those who have been “servants of the word”. In truth, something else is also there: “as those who have been eyewitnesses and servants of the word know”. — In Luke, there is also a way of speaking that John speaks of the word. He also says that those who know something from the beginning have been eyewitnesses of the word. Among the initiates, it was common at the time to speak of the being that lived in Christ as the Word and to call themselves servants of the Word. The author of the Gospel of John adopted the term “the Word” from the language of the initiates. Only spiritual science can explain what is actually meant by the “Word”. To understand this, we must consider the nature of man in terms of theosophy.

What is known from the external senses is only a part of the human being. Wherever spiritual science or theosophy has been present, there has been exactly the same division of the human being as is taught now. Spiritual science speaks of a second part of the human being, the etheric or life body. It says that the human physical body consists of the same substances as all of nature. But in the human body, these substances are combined in such a way that, if they followed their own laws, the physical body would disintegrate. However, the etheric body prevents this decay. The moment the ether body leaves the physical body, the physical body follows its own laws and decays. The fact that this does not happen during a person's lifetime is due to the fact that the physical body is imbued with the ether or life body.

If we consider that when we look at a person, we are not just looking at their physical and etheric bodies, but also at something that is much closer to them than their physical and etheric bodies, that they are permeated by a sum of pleasure and pain , joy and pain, drives and passions, wishes and desires, we have in it what spiritual science calls the astral body, the third part of the human being, which is much more original than the ether body and the physical body. Just as ice forms out of water, water in a different form, so the ether body and the physical body are a condensed astral body. Spiritual science shows that the etheric and physical bodies are denser astral bodies. The astral body is the cause of the etheric body and the physical body. The human being shares the physical body with all visible beings of nature, with minerals, plants and animals. The etheric body is shared with plants and animals, and the astral body with animals. But there is one thing that human beings have alone that makes them the crown of all beings. Everyone can only say a name to themselves, and that is the name 'I'. No one can pronounce the name 'I' if it is meant to refer to someone else. Everyone can only say this name to themselves. This is where the actual center of a person's nature is revealed; so that spiritual science imagines the human being as having four parts, with the 'I am' as the fourth. This is a power and entity of its own. Jean Paul describes in his biography how the thought first occurred to him: You are an I. He said: “There I looked into the most hidden sanctuary of my soul.” All religions based on spiritual wisdom have sensed this fact. The Hebrew people have also sensed it. Yahweh or Jehovah is nothing other than the “I am”. (Ex 3:14) He is the “I am” and points to the innermost core of human nature. In this ancient Hebrew people, the “I am” or Jehovah was felt to be something that expressed itself in the whole group. They applied this name to that which flowed down through the whole stream of Abraham's blood.

This “I am” – how was it seen? In those places of ancient times, which were called mystery schools, one can say that they were both church and school at the same time. In the mysteries, the mystery students sought to rise to the nature of the “I am”. There they were led from the sensual into the spiritual. A complete renewal of this fourth link of the human being occurred through the appearance of Christ Jesus. The term for this “I am” is the Logos or the Word. From the invisible worlds, the spiritual in the I announced itself, revealed itself in the I, permeated the I.

In terms of their physical body, human beings are an extract of the entire mineral world. This is why we call human beings a microcosm. Their etheric body is an extract of the life forces that live outside in the plant and animal kingdoms. Their astral body is an extract of all the astral forces that live in animals. The I is not related to the surrounding mineral, plant and animal world, but only to the invisible, divine spiritual world. It is an extract of the spiritual, a drop of the substance of the divine. A drop from the ocean of the divine is the I. Thus the Divine penetrates into man and sends its drop into the innermost part of man, and the expression of this Divine is the “I am”. This drop of the divine nature is even older than the astral body. It was in the bosom of the Divine before our astral body came into being.

“In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1), or the “I am”, that innermost power of the human being that represents the eternal. People should become educated so that everyone can find the drop of divinity within themselves if they seek this community within. Man should become educated so that he can find communion with God as an individual individuality within himself.

The knowledge of the Word penetrated into the world, it shone into the darkness of the astral, etheric and physical bodies. Only a few who were not born of the flesh understood it. They could reveal themselves as children of God. But now the eternal, all-embracing aspect of human nature, which was before Abraham, entered in, which every human individuality has. This supersensible power has become flesh in Christ Jesus. Thus, Christ Jesus is the power in the evolution of humanity that wants to lead humanity to the realization of its innermost being, of its “I am”. From this point of view, the Gospel of John and especially that most profound chapter in which so much is said about the “I am” becomes understandable. He says explicitly: “All I say of the ‘I am,’ I do not say of myself” (John 14:10), but He says that when people recognize the power of the “I am,” then they have something higher than all other powers. When you express the “I am,” you speak of the power that also lives in the Light of the world. “I am” lives in everything; it is what permeates the entire being of the earth in all realms. You can only properly explore what the earth gives you as food if you understand the ‘I am.’

I am the bread of life (John 6:48),
I am the vine (John 15:5),
I myself am planted by the Father, and the Father is the vinedresser (John 15:1).

Thus this chapter of John's Gospel presents itself as something that must give people strength and life. These powers are rooted in the Father, the spirit of the world: “I and the Father are one.” (John 10:30)

If we go far back in time, we come to times when blood ties played an increasingly important role. They were the basis of what we call love. Love existed only between those in whose veins related blood flowed. In those days, close marriage prevailed. Later, distant marriage replaced close marriage. At that time, only shared blood brought about love. As humanity developed through later eras, the peoples became more and more mixed. The Jewish people felt even more the togetherness of the common blood. But in those days, when Christianity arose, the time began when the peoples were mixed up. That was also the beginning of the time of a new love that is not based on blood. Christ Jesus said: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:37). “If anyone comes to me and does not hate (leave) his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, he cannot be my disciple.” This saying must be interpreted in such a way that at the beginning of the development of the earth, those who were related loved each other; but at the end of the development of the earth, people will love and recognize each other in soul love. That brotherly love that goes from soul to soul, that comes from the spirit, that is the love that takes its starting point from the power of Christ Jesus, which will gain more and more ground in humanity. Where the same blood flowed, there one felt as a member of a group ego. At the end of human development, one will feel as a member of the whole of humanity. One will then seek the “I am” not in the blood of the tribe or people, but in the spirit and in the truth. The Old Testament worships the God in the foundations of nature; in the New Covenant, God will be worshipped in that which is prior to nature, in the spirit and in truth. Even for those who were intimately connected with the Lord, it was not readily understandable how that other love should take the place of the love of blood. Only the Lord's favorite disciple understood this. The other evangelists still tell the whole line of descent to the father Abraham. But the one who came into the world as the being that was embodied in Christ Jesus, he could say: “Before Abraham was, the I AM was.” (John 8:58) That the favorite disciple had understood. He goes up to the extra-temporal in his presentation. There is no external contradiction between the Gospel of John and the other Gospels. It is only the difference between a subordinate and a higher point of view. We are dealing here with different perspectives. If we know this, then we also understand the old Bible interpreters. They knew that one can describe the truth from different points of view.

We so often find the expression “one” and “we” in today's scientific writings: “one cannot see this,” “we cannot see this,” and so on. These “one”s and “we”s take the standpoint of the blind man who wants to judge what can be seen or not seen. Man can judge only what he knows, but not what he does not know. The higher man rises in the spiritual world, the deeper he also looks into the spiritual world. John's perspective may differ from that of the other evangelists, but not the content.

The task of Theosophy is to reawaken understanding of this neglected gospel and to show people its power. Because this gospel has the greatest power, it will also play the greatest role in the future of humanity. Those who delve into the gospel of John will find something that lifts them above all the doubts of science.

In modern times, the world has divided into two halves: the world of nature and the world of moral life. The law of nature is seen as something special, and the moral law as something special. This dichotomy in particular will not be able to exist in the long term. Man had to seek something deeper, something that encompasses both. He must not feel a dichotomy between inside and outside. He no longer feels this dichotomy if he understands the innermost core of the Gospel of John. We find the origin of the world within ourselves through the development of our innermost self. We come to something that encompasses the laws of nature and our innermost being. What the “I am” reveals to us was there as the original spiritual before the external world. The Logos, the Word was there before the outer world. — Thus there is a reconciliation between the external and the innermost nature of man. Especially the chapter of John's Gospel, where the “I am” is spoken of, will be an invincible conqueror of human nature. Only man has lost the thread of recognizing the purely spiritual in it.

Theosophy will again attempt to understand what was said by the one who gave the Gospel of John to mankind. When the revealed word is understood, all natural laws will be recognized as the revealed word, but the inner moral law will also appear as the revealed word. Whether one calls himself an idealist or not, if one judges the document of the spirit only according to what the senses see, then a materialistic attitude lives in us. This has been felt by deeper minds, and they sensed and longed for a time when humanity would learn to understand such things again, for example, Goethe and also Carlyle, who said: “We see in this day and age how external institutions have turned away from the spirit that originally emerged from the grasp of the spirit (religion), and how the spiritual seeks a refuge in the individual soul, or, where it does not find it, how it seeks it in external organizations and founds sect after sect and so on, in order to seek again ways to the original spirit.

But the future of humanity and of Christianity lies in learning to understand again a document such as the Gospel of John. We can follow different points of view in their relationship to the teachings about the world in the religious scriptures as humanity develops.

The first point of view is that of naive belief. The second is the point of view of clever people. When we arrive at the third point of view, people interpret the document of humanity in a mystical sense; they understand it as allegories, as symbols.

The fourth point of view is where we learn to recognize spiritual facts in their unambiguous nature through theosophy. Then one encounters such a document with the deep reverence that its inner greatness demands. This is how one will understand the Gospel of John in the future. In the future, spiritual science will again point the way to the true understanding of the Gospel of John and to the true form of Christianity.

My dear attendees! If it is beyond doubt that we can learn something essential about the human being by observing humanity in its historical development, then it may well be said that, on the other hand, we can also learn something essential about the human soul by observing the religious life of humanity in human history. And if observations are to be made about the soul of human life, about the various religions, in the context of a cultural endeavor that is referred to as spiritual science – or as theosophy, as our time tends to call it – then it can only be done by considering the process of progress in religious life.

In the spiritual-scientific sense, we speak of a wisdom core of religions and are well aware that the religious element itself, that which can be designated as a religion, must not be confused with the wisdom core in the religions. This is the subject of Theosophy, which penetrates into the spiritual world with the opened eye of the seer.

Religious life unfolds the development of the soul through which we incline towards the spiritual world, the fire of the soul, the soul's perception of the spiritual world. This is what we have in mind. And we also have in mind what is going on in the spiritual world, what it contains. It is therefore the task of theosophy to speak about the content of wisdom. We do not want to speak about the content of the different religions, especially because even in theosophical circles misunderstandings upon misunderstandings have arisen among those who speak of a certain unity in religions.

It has become a catchword for many that the same wisdom and truth are contained indiscriminately in all religions. No attention is paid to the fact that humanity is in a state of constant development, and although human striving always includes a certain core of wisdom, one cannot speak in the abstract of unity in all religions because it is in a state of constant development.

We will start from a saying of Goethe's to further elaborate on this topic. Goethe, who knew how to grasp the essence of things in such a penetrating way, was the one who spoke of the fact that the one principle of action, which underlies the plant leaf, for example, runs through the whole plant as a unified whole. If you follow the plant up to the flower and the fruit, you will find that the leaves are formed everywhere as a unified plant organ. You find this in all the different plant forms.

But Goethe did not claim that it makes no difference whether one speaks of the green leaf or the flower leaf. Step by step, like the rungs of a ladder, the plant develops from leaf to leaf to the height of the flower.

In a similar way, we can speak of the unified core of religions, which runs from the distant past to our times, developing from the preceding to the succeeding, as in the plant from leaf to fruit. This is said by way of introduction to our topic.

If we want to look at development in a unified way, we have to go back to a very distant past to find a starting point. Everywhere we see the human being as a being that is connected to what is hidden behind the world of the senses. Therefore, we can never find the starting point if we base our search on material considerations. According to these, we would have to start from low forms of existence. We do not want to talk about this external doctrine of evolution today. It is not the one that corresponds to the results of spiritual science.

With its means, spiritual science also goes back to the distant past, but it sees not only the material, but also the spiritual and soul. While the natural scientist characterizes from the imperfect ancestral forms of man, the spiritual scientist can recognize — we can only touch on this today so as not to stray too far from our topic — that the further we go back in human development, the more we find that the soul of man shows completely different inner experiences. Man's primeval ancestor was much closer in soul and spirit to the world to which the modern man seeks to rise in his spiritual and religious feelings.

If we want to understand this relationship today, we have to recognize that prehistoric man, before he had clothed himself with the material shell, had developed as a spiritual-soul being from his spiritual-soul ancestors, that before he entered the physical world he was in the spiritual-soul world, and that in a relatively recent time he was closer to the beings from whose womb he sprang than he is at present.

The soul of the normal human being today depends on a physical and sensual environment. If it wants to recognize something, it does so through the intellect; it recognizes what the eyes can see, the ears can hear, and the hands can grasp. This external way of perceiving has only developed out of other forms of knowledge, out of a different kind of perception, out of the dark clairvoyance of primitive man. At this point, I must say something that may seem grotesque to those who have not yet delved deeply into the theosophical tenets; but what will soon become self-evident upon deeper penetration into them, as self-evident as the results of natural science.

We can go back to the area of our Earth where our ancestors lived and which science is also beginning to study, to the land that once existed between present-day Europe, Asia and Africa on the one hand and the American continent on the other, and from which the present-day Atlantic Ocean takes its name, the land of the Atlanteans, of which the Greek philosopher Plato also gives an account. We find that our ancestors lived in a form that was such that no remains could remain that paleontology could explore.

Today, when man reflects on his relationship to the outside world, we find that he lives in two sharply distinct states of consciousness. One fills his soul from morning, when he wakes up, until evening, when he falls asleep, the other from then until the next morning. The sensory impressions of the day gradually sink into the darkness of unconsciousness in the evening. In the morning, it is not at all the case that what is newly created again enables him to use the sense organs and the mind that is connected to the brain organ, but the altered form in which these are present brings with it the unconsciousness of the night and the consciousness of the day.

It was not like that for our Atlantic ancestors. It was quite different for them. When a person fell asleep at night – as I said, I am well aware that this must sound grotesque to material thinking – it was not the colorful, light-filled carpet of the sensory world that was transformed into unconsciousness, but rather the person lived themselves into a world of spiritual and soul perception, in which they had experiences. And just as people today speak of the world of the senses in minerals, plants, animals and their own kind in their environment, so did the Atlanteans speak of a spiritual world that they perceived at night. However, their perception during the day was not the same as it is today. When they woke up, everything was shrouded in mist, with objects showing few sharp contours. At that time, the consciousness of day and night was less distinct. Therefore, the word religion could not have had the same meaning for our Atlantic ancestors as it has today: the connection of the human soul with the invisible world. For them, the spiritual world was perception. The soul knew from experience: there is a spiritual world. It knew: I came from this spiritual world, descended into physical embodiment. Religion was there as an experience.

Now great upheavals occurred, not only those which science describes as the Ice Age, but which religion calls the Flood, although the truth about these events is much less accurately described in the former than in the latter. The face of the earth changed little by little. Europe, Asia and Africa on the one hand, and America on the other, developed.

Today we will only consider the stream of emigration that is of interest to our topic, which moved from west to east, gradually populating Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and creating the post-Atlantic cultures. Through leading personalities, the most valuable part of the Atlantic culture was established, in a completely different form than today's history teaches. Spiritual research shows us how the best was brought by great leaders to the center of Asia, from which the various colonies that underlie the various post-Atlantic cultures emanated.

The first major cultural influence went to northern India. The best of the traditions of those insights into the spiritual world, which were experiences of the Atlanteans, were given to the post-Atlantean population in the way that the individual peoples needed it. It was significant, highly developed people who founded the culture in India. We call these great founders the ancient Rishis, and we speak with tremendous reverence of these holy Indian Rishis.

But now, in order to get an idea of what they taught in times that preceded all Indian writing, we have to have some concept of the mood of this people. We speak of the ancient times of Indian culture. You may know that wonderful works of culture, full of the greatest wisdom and poetry, have been preserved in the Vedas. They are wonderfully beautiful, but they are only a faint echo of what the holy rishis originally taught; for only spiritual science can teach that. We have an echo of it in the Vedas, beautiful enough, but it does not come close to what the first great post-Atlantic teachers of humanity taught. What was the mood of the Indian people, these post-Atlantic people who had moved to India?

Those people who had most clearly preserved the memory of what could be experienced in the Atlantic period with the soul of a different nature had gone to India, the memory that man had reached into the spiritual world and had his real home there. This idea was lost when man was driven out into the physical world. There he had acquired logical thinking, but he had had to give up the old clairvoyance. Only the memory remained; with this in their soul these people looked at the surrounding physical world. The basic feeling was therefore that they had to leave the old clairvoyance. They looked up at the magnificent starry sky, at the sun, at the moon; the old Indian looked at the mountains, the blue vault of heaven, everything that makes up the beauty of the physical world, and at first none of this seemed to him to be a substitute for what the soul had once experienced in the spiritual realm. “Truth,” said the old Indian to himself, ‘exists only in the spiritual world; here in all the glories of the sensual world there is only Maya, only a veil that weaves itself over the spiritual world.’

Then it was natural for him when the Rishis came and told him that if man develops the potential of a spiritual eye or spiritual ear that is present in his soul, he can see into the spiritual world again. This development, which is similar to the appearance of light through an operation for those born blind, this development of the spiritual organs was called yoga development. This is what the holy rishis pointed out. They were the comforters of ancient India. They brought comfort from Maya and illusion.

This was the first religious wisdom in the post-Atlantean era. We must point out one particular point: the ancient holy rishis said: Even if you look at the starry sky, at the sun and moon, at the mountains and forests, everything is spiritual behind them. There are spiritual depths and spiritual beings behind them; only the spiritual eye and spiritual ear can perceive them. In death, man enters this spiritual world; but in the future, as they already taught, something of what is hidden behind all that is material and visible to our eyes will also appear within this material world, and will work as the forces through which all material things on earth can become visible. Beyond what we can tell, beyond the seven Rishis, there was still another entity; in ancient India it was called Vishva Karman. The old Rishis pointed to it by saying: “Look up at the sun, and in the light and rays flowing down, you see the source of all earthly growth.” Just as it is with man, that what you see with your eyes is only his physical body, the expression of an invisible, hidden within him, so in the whole world the physical is the expression of everything superphysical. With the light of the sun, spiritual energy also penetrates the earth. The outer physical garment is the sun of the spiritual, of Vishva Karman. There will come a time - so they said to the intimate disciples - when this central being of the sun will show itself in a completely different form. That was what grew out of the Indian mood.

Let us now turn to the second period of post-Atlantean culture, to ancient Persian culture. What is called historical in this context is only a later echo. In much earlier times, there was already something there that could connect people to the spiritual world. These Persian people had very different needs from the Indian people. The Indian culture was introspective and turned its gaze away from the world of the senses; it had no interest in the achievements of the senses. But it was the mission of the Persian people to conquer these. The first race to take an interest in the external world was the ancient Persian people, on whom the historical one is based. If the Indian culture had remained alone, we might have received wonderful achievements in... /gap; but all that industry and trade have gained for the good of humanity would not have come to us. This was the real mission of the Persians. They were the first to lay hands on the physical earth; the first traces of agriculture appeared.

These people also needed another proclamation. It received the same through that great individuality who is called Zarathustra or Zoroaster. We do not mean the personality that history designates and, in its manner, applies to a series of similar personalities following one another, and relatively late ascribes to the historical Zoroaster. Also... /gap] already names this leader of Persian culture 5000 years before the Trojan War. But we have to look even further back for this second founder of the post-Atlantic culture, who works for it just as the Rishis worked for the first. Only he had to speak quite differently. The Persian people had in their soul an inclination towards the physical world, therefore they were also exposed to its temptations and inclined to consider the external sensual as the only thing, not recognizing that behind it there is also a spiritual.

The ancient Persian people had little of the traditions that the Indian people possessed. Zarathustra also had to speak of the Sun in a similar way to the Rishis, of the Sun behind which is the Vishva Karman; but it had to be done much more vividly. He told them something like this: In that which appears to you as sunlight, there lives something that also lives in you as the excellent, that which you sense in the soul as your own inner being. The sun is the garment of a being of which there is something similar in your own life. — This inner essence of the physical was called the aura, and that which, as spirit, underlies the physical sun, he called the great aura, or Ahura Mazdao, from which the name Ormuzd was then derived. This is the god who lives in the sun and of whom an image lives in the human soul. Zarathustra pointed to him as the helper of man. When man lays hands on the physical world, cultivates it, draws fruit from it and gains nourishment from it, Ormuzd is the helper. He is your helper – this is how Zarathustra characterized the great sun spirit for his followers; and the spirit that deceives people, so to speak, about the fact that there is a spiritual aspect behind this material world, that incites people not to believe in it, he called the enemy of man: Ahriman, that is the opponent of the great sun aura.

In this way, he pointed out that a spiritual underlies all that is sensual. He pointed out that man is placed in the midst of this battle between light and darkness; that man is called to be a servant of the spirit of light by transforming the earth into an image of spiritual wisdom. He pointed to the physical world as something that not only hid but proclaimed the spiritual world. Zarathustra taught: But you must not seek for the spirit that is your helper only behind the world of sense; it is contained in all sense-world and when the time is ripe for it to show itself, to become manifest in a way that man can grasp and visualize, then it will appear. That was his teaching and he proclaimed it with wonderful words. Only a stammering is it, what one of it about so rendered:

I will speak, listen and hear me, you who long for it from far and near; I will speak, because he will be revealed in days to come. No longer shall the false teacher instill deception into the souls of men, the evil one who has confessed bad faith with his mouth. I will speak of that which is highest in the world, that which has taught Vishva Karman, the greatest of mankind. And he who does not want to hear my words will experience evil when in the course of time the spiritual will be proclaimed on earth.

We then come to the later post-Atlantean cultures and proceed to the third post-Atlantean – the Egyptian culture, in the time in which the ancient Egyptian culture flourishes. Today, we can only give a very small excerpt of it in terms of its spiritual and psychological content. For this culture, the question arose religiously: How does the individual soul that dwells in us, that has arisen from the spiritual and psychological home, relate to the spiritual that permeates the world?

In ancient times, man still partially reached into the spiritual world; now, however, man increasingly prefers to gain what external culture brings, and so we see in the third cultural epoch, in the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian on the one hand and in the Egyptian on the other, how a further conquest of the physical world took place. We see how man no longer looked up at the starry sky to say: Maya lives in this one and behind the stars the actual spiritual, the Brahman —, but now people looked carefully at the course of the stars, and a wonderful science arose. In the movement of the stars, in their figures, man recognized an external realization of the intentions of the spiritual beings. Man gained interest in the sensory world in order to experience the divine through it. Now the sensory world had become the physiognomic expression of the divine for him. Thus, with geometry, the earth was also conquered. From the spiritual heights, man penetrated more and more into the sensory world with his knowledge. As a result, he became increasingly estranged from the spiritual world. The consequence was that completely different views had to arise about the connection between man and the spiritual.

The relationship between the human soul and the spiritual world is depicted in the Egyptian religion in the Osirissage. This recounts that Osiris ruled in the world. However, he was too good for his rule to remain on earth, so he was overcome by his hostile brother Typhon and placed in the coffin. His wife Isis could no longer save him and instead raised his son Horus. Osiris ascended into the spiritual world. The legend thus reports: This divine figure once lived on earth as a companion of men, but then had to withdraw into the spiritual world. This world was then given a kind of representative in the child Horus. — The ancient Egyptian was told that when he passed through the gate of death, he would not only be united with Osiris, but his soul itself would become Osirian, itself an Osiris, woven together with him. Man becomes spiritualized, becomes Osirian himself. If man had to say to himself: I belong with my innermost being to the spiritual world —, then he had to say to himself again: veiled is my connection with the spiritual world; but when it is taken from me, the veil, then I will be reunited with the spiritual world; because when the attempt was made with Osiris to put him in a box, he was transported to the spiritual world.

The Egyptian was aware that a Divine-Spiritual being lived in his soul, and that he could only be united with it after death. Only then would he become Osiris himself. The being that will be united with you as Osiris cannot take shape in this world, but it will take shape one day and exist in the physical world.

Thus we see in this third epoch how the prophecy continues. What the Rishis indicated to the Indians as Vishva Karman, what Zarathustra indicated to the Persians as Ahura Mazdao, that saw in Osiris the confessor of the Egyptian religion and predicted that this being would one day appear.

Let us now take a look at the fourth epoch, the Greco-Latin or Greco-Roman epoch. The conquest of the physical world goes even further there. Man has come so far that he is able to form a kind of marriage between what is experienced in the spirit and what becomes an event in the outer physical world. We see this in art, which is something for humanity, which is a reflection of the spiritual in all parts of matter at the same time. In Greek art, we see the spiritual connected to the external material as in a marriage. The greatness of the Greek temple is based on this. It is the direct imprint of what lived in the soul of the people of that time.

We can understand this principle of Greek art by observing the difference between a Greek temple and a Gothic cathedral. What is the difference? A lonely building, with the image of a god, far and wide no people, and yet a complete totality. This is how we find the Greek temple; its architecture speaks to us, and we say: It is the house of the god who dwells within, even when there are no people there. No people are needed in this temple.

With the Gothic church it is quite different. This is not meant as a criticism; each thing is in the right proportion to its purpose. With its pointed arches, its entire composition is only complete when the faithful multitude is inside. That is part of it. Such a comparison can truly symbolize how that marriage in Greek art between matter and spirit has been consummated.

And if we look at the Roman world, we see how the individual personality expresses the learning of the value of the physical world. And we can go even further back, to the Greek polis, to see how the concept of citizenship arose, which actually only comes to full expression in the Roman world and which can only be clearly recognized by going back comparatively to what the ancient Indian felt. While for him what was in the physical world was only a shadow of the real world and reality only existed in union with Brahman, just as for the Egyptian with Osiris - the Roman wanted to stand firmly in this physical world by feeling like a citizen.

An ancient Indian could never have understood a deity dwelling in the physical body, because the physical world was a shadow image of the spiritual one for him. The human personality only became fully understandable in the fourth epoch; therefore the predestined entity could only enter at this time. It was none other than the Christ, of whom the Rishis had spoken as the Vishva Karman, who at that time was only comprehensible in the spiritual world and who, in the epoch in which the physical world was most conquered, was realized here as a human being among humans.

This was prepared by the fact that people were sharply reminded of what constitutes the innermost nature of the person who actualizes such an entity. Hence the words: “If you do not believe Moses and the prophets...” (John 5:46-47, Luke 16:31). And anyone who understands John knows that in the “I am that I am” (Ex 3:14), the “ejeh asher ejeh” of Moses, nothing else should be proclaimed as the Christ, not should be talk not of the God of Yahweh, but of the prediction of the Christ: You shall acknowledge a God who can be grasped in the sensual world, who lives and weaves in everything around you, in lightning and thunder, in plants and minerals, in the whole world around you — If you want something that can be understood by you, how it lives and weaves, then you have to listen to that peculiar sound where the soul speaks to itself: “I am,” then you have to listen to your ego - that is the best expression at the same time for the image of the Godhead. What lives in every human being also lives as the all-pervading God; this also appeared in the greatest human being who walked the earth, the Christ. This divine essence appeared in the fourth cultural epoch.

Thus we see how the wisdom of the religions weaves and strives forward, like the leaf to the petal that holds the fruit, so we see that what the ancient Rishis taught is becoming more and more mature until it appears as the fruit in the man of God who walks the earth; and we see the necessity of progress in it. We see how, in certain respects, Christianity does indeed contain the same as the other religions; how it contains the unified, but again in a different form. Therefore, he is wrong who says that it depends on the same teaching being in it as in the other religions. As long as it depends on the content of the teaching, one can say that. But where the spiritual world-view is proclaimed as a teaching, as the ancient Rishis had to do, as Zarathustra and the leaders of the Egyptian Hermes religion, the leaders of the mysterious mysteries did, we have the same thing that we also prove in the commandments of Christ, yes! But to recognize that which the other religions only spoke of, that this is the Christ; to understand, to grasp a spiritual phenomenon as a personality, to understand the Christ, not just the teaching, that is what makes Christianity different.

When religions speak of the Logos that can be taught, Christianity must speak of the human Logos who has become the bearer of the religion. What previously could only be taught was now lived. The life itself of this teaching is the essence of Christianity. So those religious leaders could say of themselves: “I am the goal and the way.” Those leaders, a Zarathustra, a Moses could have said: “I am the way and the truth” — but only Christ could say: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” (John 14:6)

The wisdom at the core of all religions has become fruit in Christianity and thus seed. As we have now sought the origin of Christianity in the religions, tomorrow we want to talk about the future of Christianity, because it is as true that it contains the fruit of all other religions as it is that it contains the seed for a great development, because although almost two millennia have passed since the appearance of the personality of Christ on earth, we are only at the beginning of Christianity.

Thus we see how, in our age, people have gradually sought a connection with the Divine-Spiritual and look into what all peoples have felt to be the wisdom core of their religion. We recognize why this contains the power and strength that gives people the hope of achieving their goal.

Anyone who looks into the spiritual life of people in this way dares to add to the words of a great poet, Goethe's beautiful words:

Soul of man, how art thou like the water, Fate of man, how art thou like the wind,

evoking the idea that the life of the soul surges up and down like the waves of water whipped by the wind.

But he who contemplates the power that is in the life that flows through men adds: it is true that the wind whips the waves; but it is also true that the wind, the air, is permeated by light, and the light-filled air contains the element that conjures all sprouting life out of the earth. It is true that water, permeated by warmth, is driven up and becomes a cloud and comes down again as rain.

Man's soul is like water. It comes from heaven and rises to heaven. But it is also true that the blessing of prosperity comes from the fact that water, permeated by fire, has a blessing effect, and that in the same way, man's soul can be aglow with that fire of the ego, which feels akin to the light that rules through destiny and is comparable to the wisdom that permeates the world. Then the world of the soul will be filled with the feeling of divine wisdom. Thus the soul is something that may indeed fluctuate up and down, but is certain of its destiny and of its inner strength.

It has often been emphasized here on other occasions that what is called spiritual science or, in more recent times, theosophy, that these are by no means mere theories floating in worlds far away, that theosophy does not merely seek to satisfy curiosity about higher worlds. Theosophy should not be something far-removed from the world, something unworldly. If it wants to fulfill its task, its mission, it must draw the forces and the impulses for its work from the higher worlds, and its work towards its goal and its mission must take place under the authority of these forces. Only then can it help in the further development and salvation of humanity. It would be a rather idle knowledge of the higher worlds if one did not want to apply it in practice, to life. For no one can understand life who does not know the deeper forces on which it is based. These forces do not lie on the surface; they lie hidden in the depths. Just as iron, when first seen as a substance, does not reveal that it contains electricity, which only becomes apparent when it is rubbed, so too these forces must lie dormant in iron and must first be drawn out of it. If we wanted to work on the service of progress for humanity without knowing these hidden realities, then our work could only be superficial. Beneficial work is only possible if we explore the deeper forces and entities.

Of course, we must also recognize the goals of our work. What does man work for? For the future! But nothing lies in the lap of the future that is not already present in the present. Let us look at the plant. It does not yet bear flowers or fruit. It will only produce these in the future. But the forces for these flowers and fruits already lie dormant in the plant. It already contains in an invisible form what will happen in the future. And only because people usually remember how similar plants have borne blossoms and fruits can they say that this plant will bloom in this way and not in another way, and bear fruit in this way and not in another way. But if man could see into the interior of the plant, then he could see the forces at work in the plant that will produce those flowers and those fruits.

There is something that lies in the future and that we cannot know, whose development we cannot foresee, and that is the body of the human being. What will one day be in the physical world already rests today in humanity, just as the flower and fruit already rest in the plant. If we are not able to delve into what lies dormant in the womb of humanity today, we cannot become rulers over the forces that will unfold in the future. Those who want to work on the development of humanity are thereby working on something that has not yet existed, and those who want to grasp that must descend below the surface. The theosophical worldview must take on this task and carry it out in practice.

Nowhere is the eminently practical nature of the theosophical world view more evident than in the field of child education. In the child, we have before us, so to speak, the riddle that lies hidden in the future. And every day we have to solve this riddle anew. For the child of seven is not the same child as he was at six, and he is not the same as the child of fourteen or sixteen. Only when we are in harmony with the deep forces that work in secret, only then can we approach the numerous questions in the field of education that are so burning for humanity today. Real orientation in all these questions will only be possible when the theosophical view dominates people's minds.

Today we want to take a closer look at the mission that Theosophy has in modern culture in relation to educational issues. To do this, it is necessary that we know the whole structure of human nature. We know that, in the sense of spiritual science, man is a complex being. For those who look more deeply, the material body is only part of the human being. This physical body combines the same substances that are present in the natural world. In the human body, they are combined in a highly complex interaction. Science tells us: When we look at a machine, we see the effect of the materials of which it is composed; but when we look at a living being, we see not a mere structure of dead materials, but a body that is permeated by life, which regulates the physical forces and brings them to life.

This life was described by an earlier science as “life force”. But today's materialistic science claims that there is no “life force”, that substances develop life within themselves. In recent times, however, people have been moving away from this point of view. It is seen that one does not get very far with this theory, that one must indeed reckon with some kind of life-force to explain the living. But even in this sense of the newer natural sciences, the theosophical view does not speak when it speaks of the second link in the human being, the etheric or life body. It is not concerned with mere theorizing, it does not speculate, but its way is to develop the higher vision in man himself. Just as other beings are only present in the world for man if he has the organs to perceive these beings, just as he perceives light and color only if he has the eye for it, just as he perceives sounds only perceives sounds only if he possesses the ear for them, so for man the higher beings are only present if he has developed organs within himself to perceive them through the training that has often been mentioned here.

If there were a man who had no eyes but organs to perceive electricity, for example, if such a man could see the forces at work that ignite the light here in the room, that play back and forth outside in the telegraphic lines, how very different the world would appear to such a person! With each new sense, new worlds arise for man, and slumbering within him lie the senses that make the higher worlds perceptible to him. They can be developed. No one can justifiably assert that such worlds cannot exist. It would be the same if he were to say that there are no higher worlds because he cannot see them. It would be the same as if a blind man were to say about color that it does not exist because he cannot perceive it.

But if a person has developed through schooling, then the etheric body is an experience for him; he can then see it. In its size, it is almost the same as the physical body. One often imagines the etheric body as consisting of a finer substance, a kind of mist, but that does not correspond to reality. Rather, it consists of forces and currents of a spiritual nature that interact.

The third link, the astral body, differs from the etheric body in that, while in the latter the forces of growth, reproduction and so on are at work, it is the essence of the astral body to feel and to be conscious. The astral body is the carrier of pleasure and suffering, of desires and passions.

Beyond these three members is what makes man the crown of earthly creation: the self-aware ego, the center of the human being, the innermost power in man. So when we have a fully developed human being before us, we have a structure of four members before us.

But you can only understand how to act as an educator if you understand this structure of the human being correctly, if you know that it does not play the same role in a newly born child as in a child of seven or fourteen years, if you know that the development of these links is different at each age level of the adolescent. Only when you know all this can you solve the puzzle that the child presents to us day after day. And we learn to understand all of this best when we start from the assumption that we see how the human being lives before birth.

Before the child is born, we have enclosed the child's physical body, enclosed in the mother's body. Nothing can reach the child without passing through the mother's body. No ray of light, no external influence reaches the child directly. It rests enclosed in another body; one physical body rests in another. Birth consists of the physical mother's shell being shed. But in this moment, from a spiritual point of view, not the whole human being is born, but only the physical body. The second birth takes place gradually, not in a single moment like the physical one. It essentially takes place when the child changes teeth. At this point, something similar happens in the spiritual realm to what happens in the physical birth.

Up to the age of seven, the child is surrounded by an etheric shell, just as it was surrounded by a physical shell before the physical birth, the womb. And so one could say: up to the age of seven, the child is surrounded by an etheric mother. Just as one cannot get to the child before the physical birth other than through the mother's body, one can no more get to the child's actual etheric body before the age of seven. And just as one must care for the mother before the physical birth if one wants to care for the child, so too, in order to care for and develop the child's etheric body, one must, until the seventh year, keep away everything that could harm it and give it everything that can promote its development. In the seventh year, the etheric covering is pushed back, the etheric body of the human being is born, very similar to the physical birth of the physical body.

And later on there is a third birth, the birth of the astral body. When the human being has shed his etheric cover in the seventh year, he has not yet fully developed his astral body; to the spiritual seer's eye he is still surrounded by an outer astral cover. He is wrapped in this until he reaches sexual maturity; then it is also shed: the actual astral body of the human being is born.

The educator must know all this. He must know about the physical, etheric and astral birth of the human being, because the individual educational epochs are based on this. He must know that just as it would be nonsensical to want to reach the physical child in the mother's body, it is also nonsensical to want to reach something that concerns the etheric body through education up to the age of seven, or something that concerns the astral body until sexual maturity. The limbs of the human being are the carriers of very special soul forces. The physical body is the carrier of the physical sense organs; the etheric body is initially the carrier of the growth and reproduction forces. But that is not all, because all these different bodies are worked on from within by the human ego. This works from the inside. And so the bodies of the human being are particularly related to the soul forces. The ether body is the carrier of memory, of all lasting habits and inclinations, of temperament.

We find concepts of the intellect, images of external objects and so on in the astral body. But when the image is also a symbol, a parable, when it rises to artistic imagination, when it becomes productive in the soul, then the etheric body is the carrier. What we call judgment, criticism, intellectual activity depends on the astral body.

If we know all this, then we will be able to apply it in relation to the emergence of these limbs in the course of the child's development. If we know that the etheric body is enclosed until the seventh year, we also know that until then we must not act on what the properties of this etheric body are. Only when it is released by the second birth may we educate it. There is a saying that can spread light and should be the basic principle for the education of a child up to the age of seven. Aristotle expresses this saying when he says: 'Man is the imitator of animals'. Imitation is what characterizes the child up to the age of seven. The child must see what it is supposed to learn, it must see and hear it. There must be something in its environment that is intended to have an effect on the child. It should not be taught overnight, but rather it should be shown and exemplified what it is supposed to imitate.

Exemplarity and imitation are the two magic words for a child up to seven years of age. What kind of teachings you give them, what principles you have, is not important, only what you do in the presence of the child. That alone is important. The example is what is actually effective. What the child is to acquire must be introduced into the physical world. One should avoid, as far as possible, allowing something into the child that the child should not imitate. A thousand good teachings are of no use to a child of this age; the child should imitate what it experiences with its physical body in the physical world. A little story will show you how far this imitation can go. A child of five years, who had been well-educated until then, suddenly took money from his parents' cash box. They were extremely upset. The child stole and gave the money to another child. The parents could not understand how their child came to steal. The explanation is simple. The child saw how the parents took money from the cash box and simply imitated them.

We can see from this how far we must go to avoid anything we do not want our children to imitate when it is also allowed to adults. Anyone who observes a little sees that children copy writing – like signs, without understanding the meaning. The meaning of what is written can only be conveyed to the child when the etheric body is born; but it can imitate the writing before that. Learning to write should begin by having the child first copy the shapes of the letters. Later, one can then explain to him what he can already do.

Today, far too much emphasis is placed on the fact that meaning should be involved in everything that is taught to the child. But it is far more important to ensure that the child's entire environment is set up in such a way that the external forces surrounding the child have an awakening and life-promoting effect on its etheric body. — In doing so, we recall Goethe's words: The eye is formed by light for light. The animal that is forced to live in dark caves gradually loses its eyesight and becomes blind. Light has a creative and formative effect on the eye. The forces of nature create organs and develop them. A human being is not yet complete when he is born. Every ray of light continues to have a formative effect on the eye. And so everything in the child's environment can have the effect of awakening life or stunting it.

Here spiritual science shines through to the smallest details. For example, it is not unimportant whether the child's surroundings are red or blue. The same color is by no means suitable for a lively, perhaps even nervous, child as for one that is quiet or even apathetic. Blue is the right color for the latter, red for the former. Thus, even clothing can have a beneficial or debilitating effect on the child. In this way, it is influenced right down to the brain and heart, these instruments of the soul. It depends on the child's environment whether these organs dry up or mature into liveliness, whether they develop slowly and sluggishly or whether they are awakened to active life.

Education has to ensure that what is an indicator of inner prosperity is taken into account: pleasure and joy. These are not there for nothing; they should not be suppressed, especially not in childhood. They should not be suppressed, but ennobled. Thus, for example, the body's need for a particular kind of nourishment is indicated by the fact that one has a desire for it. In this way the body indicates that it needs it in order to thrive. Everything that gives pleasure, that arouses interest, has the effect of creating organs. The organs are brought to life by this, and regulated.

But if a child becomes bored, then you kill something, you have a weakening effect on your organs; and that is very bad. Because what has not been developed by the age of seven is lost forever. The whole direction, the growth tendency is indeed given by then. One might try – or rather, one had better not try – to test the truth of these assertions of spiritual science by, for instance, giving one child a lot of eggs to eat and another very few. The latter child will show remarkably healthy instincts for what his body needs as nourishment; the former, on the other hand, will not. This is because an excessive amount of egg white extinguishes healthy nourishment instincts.

So it is in the seventh year that the child's etheric body is born. The body that is the carrier of habits, temperament, memory, is freed. All these qualities must be cultivated in the period up to sexual maturity. This is the epoch in which one approaches the child with the subject matter of learning. For this time, not only what is present in the physical world applies. Imitation is the magic word up to the age of seven; there is now also a guiding principle for the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity: imitation and authority. Just as the child imitated before, so now, to use a saying of Goethe's, it must choose its hero and follow him on his path up to Mount Olympus. If you expound the most beautiful moral principles or pass harsh judgments in front of the child, you will find that such teachings are of no use to the child. However, if you place a personality in the child's environment as an authority, then it has an effect. Not moral principles, but embodied morality should be given to the child. The soul and conscience of the child are not developed by mere teaching, but by the child saying to itself when it sees such a personality: What he does is right. And it learns to look up with reverence to such a personality.

Nothing is more beneficial for later life than reverence cultivated in childhood, nothing more fruitful for the whole of life. When a child hears about someone who is a person to whom everyone looks up with reverence, and then sees this person for the first time and feels a shiver of awe run through his heart, too, then that is a wonderful basis for education. Respect and authority, these words must gain resonance if one wants to have a firm basis for education.

The child can only properly follow principles if it has previously seen them embodied in a person. Only then do the principles become second nature, or rather part of the etheric body. They remain in the memory. Anything missed during this time remains missed for life. To exercise the memory, the child must also absorb a great deal of material; he can then later permeate it with his own judgment; now he must first practice the memory. Later he must have material in order to be able to judge it. It is bad for the developing human being to be called upon to criticize too early. First it must get to know the world, must learn from great historical examples, must feel reverence. One must paint for the child in words and pictures what great personalities have achieved. The pictorial imagination must be cultivated in this period.

In this respect, the current materialistic way of thinking is in a sorry state. One must compare two things. Up to the age of seven, only the physical organs are developed, then the character and temperament; and we have seen how education can have the effect of awakening or stifling life. A child that is healthy in body and soul will always prefer a toy that it has created itself to a finished, beautiful and complicated thing. His rag doll, which has been given eyes, nose and mouth by ink blots, will be a dearer toy to him than the most beautiful doll bought. Why? Because when the child looks at his beloved rag doll, he has to do something, because he has to complement what he has in front of him through his imagination and power of imagination. The imagination must work, otherwise it withers away.

There is a great difference between letting a child develop by putting together artificial structures from individual parts and having something alive in front of you. There will come a time when people will no longer worship the construction kit. Truly, the occultist should not become sentimental, but here is a point where he is tempted to become so. He sees the materialistic way of thinking developing in the tender, childlike growing human being and knows that it comes from having put together dead individual things into a dead whole in the nursery. Just as the building blocks produce a lifeless thing, so the materialistic point of view achieves a lifeless world development. The materialist's brain has atrophied; it cannot be led to the living, cannot be pointed to it.

Therefore, give the child something alive, so that his brain may be awakened to life. Give him the simple toys of the country fair, where, for example, two figures set the blacksmith's hammer in motion, or a picture book in which figures pulled on strings can move. That is much better, that is alive. That is much more beneficial for the child than if he puts together dead things from dead things. There the child sees life, there it seeks the reason for the movement. This is how the child's soul develops. — All the pain in the world is deposited on the soul of the spiritual researcher when he has to see how the wrong things are brought into the child's environment. The spiritual researcher sees the forces in the organs of the developing human being wither and know: they are permanently withered.

In the period after the child's second dentition, what the etheric body is the carrier of begins to develop: a lasting stock of habits. If you want to cultivate calmness, security, simplicity and straightforwardness in the child, a personality with these character traits must walk before him as a living human being until the age of fourteen to sixteen. He must learn to develop these qualities by observing them in others. But the etheric body is also the carrier of all artistic powers. We must realize what should be given to the child artistically during this period. If the child's taste is spoiled during this time by bad pictures and so on, then it remains spoiled. From the age of seven, the child is also receptive to comparison. In this respect, there is the greatest lack of understanding in our time. For example, research is being done into the meaning of children's songs. Meaning should underlie everything. But children's songs, such as “Fly, little beetle, fly!... Your mother is in Pommerland” — that is, in Kinderland — they don't want to have any meaning at all; they are partly symbols, partly they should just give euphony.

The point is that from the age of seven, sound and color are transformed from the sensual into the meaningful. Our materialistic age is not exactly suited to this. It is not inclined to make itself understood allegorically. If, for example, you want to show the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis as a symbol for the emergence of the soul from the body, you yourself must also believe in such a parable as reality. Who really does that today? You may say to yourself half pityingly, the child with his still undeveloped mind cannot yet grasp what I mean, so I will make it clear to him in a symbolic way. But if you delve into the spirit of things, then such a parable is a profound mysterious process; then what the doll and the butterfly show us in a subordinate sphere is the same process that is repeated at a higher level when the soul emerges from the body.

If we realize this, if we feel it vividly, if we take this process not just as a comparison but as a pictorial expression of a higher truth, then the power of this idea flows into the child's soul. Everywhere, in everything, the educator should see a parable for the eternal and pour the power of this parable into the child's soul. Only then will he be able to work fruitfully. And this is not just the affair of some specially gifted or chosen person, but every educator can work in this way, every educator can impart these things from soul to soul and thus awaken productive life in the etheric body of the child.

With the time of sexual maturity, the last cover is then removed. Only now has the time come for the child to awaken to criticism and discernment, only now can abstract teachings be given, not before. And it is wrong to lead a person to their own judgment earlier than this. It is essential for the period between the ages of seven and fourteen that religious ideas also be brought to life. Religious education is just as essential for this period as the right physical environment was for the previous period. The child should not just hear about what is in the worlds beyond, but faith should be implanted in him as a matter of course.

But nothing is worse than calling a person to judgment before the astral body has awakened. First he should learn to worship, then to judge. First he should possess a great deal of memory knowledge before penetrating it with his mind. But to call him to judgment and confession before he can distinguish is the greatest corruption. First he should be imbued with a sense of authority, only then can one appeal to his judgment. It is not there before; it has not yet developed. It only develops in the years before and after sexual maturity. It is therefore grotesque when young people of eighteen appear and give their judgments, and even write thick books in which they want to overturn what has been created over thousands of years. In this respect, much will be able to change through spiritual science. Through right education, judgment can be formed and guided in the right way.

On the whole and in particular, it should be shown how one can become the right educator through a deeper knowledge of the development of the individual members of the human being. If someone says that one cannot know about this, then it must be answered: Just try educating people in this way, in the sense of these three births, and you will find the proofs of the theosophical truths in life and in practice. It is not a matter of formulating theories or principles, but of putting them into practice. The principles are good that prove beneficial in life, that, when applied in life, bear witness to their influence on culture in a beneficial way. What promotes culture, what awakens life, that is true. When the teachings that relate to the supernatural are applied, one will receive the proof of their truth. It will be recognized that Theosophy is something eminently practical, that it is not foreign and far removed from life, but that it is full of life and awakens life, that it gives strength and security to the human being. And what is more important than this in the education of a child? Education should bring down into the visible, into the sensory, what lies hidden in the supersensible. Therein lies the key to what happens in the childhood of the human being. The full significance of the question of education arises when we realize that every human being is a mystery that we as educators must solve by truly delving into their inner being.

Answer to question

Question: A spirit of contradiction in children?

Answer: The best way to counteract and eradicate this is to let the child achieve what it wants to achieve through this spirit of contradiction, so that the child experiences that what has been achieved is wrong and that it is harming itself by doing so. By forbidding, instructing and so on, little is achieved, and in most cases even more contradiction is provoked. The child learns best through its own experience.

Question: How can we explain the influence of colors on children?

Answer: Take the following example: If you look at a white surface with red squares on it, and then after a while look at an empty white surface, you will find that the squares that you previously saw as red now appear green to your eye on the empty white surface. The red that one was looking at has turned into green in the person. Green is now a soothing, calming color. Even the overly lively, nervous child, who has a lot of red in his environment, transforms this red into soothing, calming green.

Question: A spirit of contradiction in children?

Answer: It is so harmful to young people because it leads to impoverishment in later years. People then have no understanding for certain things. One can only judge about what one has experienced oneself. The power of judgment, summoned up too early, puts a stop to the whole broad reality of life. Life becomes impoverished; because only those who know can judge. Hence the rapidly impoverishing writers of our time.

Question: The sexual question: Should we educate children?

Answer: The question that is now so often asked in discussions about whether to explain sexual processes to children is often answered: I do not want to and must not tell the child any untruths. Well, one should not tell the child an untruth, one should tell him the whole truth, but a truth that lies in a completely different area than in the banal description of the physical processes of conception and birth. Our ancestors did not tell their children untruths when they said to them: “Your mother is in Pommerland, fly, little beetle, fly!” Pommerland is the land of children, the land of the soul's home. There is also a spiritual aspect to “flying”. People knew more than people today, they knew about the spiritual processes that take place at the physical birth of a child, they knew that these processes are more important, that birth is not just a physical act. And in this sense, we should also speak to children today when the question of the origin of man arises for them. We should tell them in the most beautiful poetic images about the soul that descends to give birth, we should fill their soul with images full of spiritual beauty and purity, holiness and reverence. We cannot reach high enough, we cannot be poetic enough when we place these images in their souls. And when the time comes when, with sexual maturity, the physical processes of conception and birth also become clear to them, these will appear to children only as what they are, as the inessential. Their soul, filled with high, sacred, awe-inspiring images and ideas, will regard the birth of the body as a more trivial matter.

Dear attendees! Anyone who takes a look at our spiritual life will realize how deeply the mystery associated with the name of Christ Jesus is intertwined with our present education. And it may well be said that all questions touching the present time are the consequence of the Christ or Jesus problem, one of the most significant problems of all. We have even seen that even men of our time who believe they are above what they call the religious prejudices of Christianity are intensively occupied with this problem. For example, there is the fact that interest in this mystery has been shown from more or less monistic sides. The only question that arises is that it has been tried to solve this mystery in the most diverse, the most profound and sometimes also the most superficial way at all times since Christianity has existed.

Since we have to start from a very specific point of view, namely that of spiritual science, let us first visualize the underlying reasons for the particular coloration that our present age gives to this riddle. We must then see – and this is particularly indicative of our present time – that in souls, in hearts, an enormous contradiction is emerging: on the one hand, there is the need, the intense longing to know something about those questions that have occupied the human mind since time immemorial; on the other hand, there is the cleft, the chaos that emerges. While one feels too soft or too weak to really attack this problem in all its depths, there are again experts in this field who deal with it in the most detailed way, expecting some new revelation, some new event in relation to this problem.

The peculiarity of this question is already included in the two names that come to mind: “Christ” and “Jesus”. And if we just take a brief look at what has happened over the centuries, from the time of the evangelists, the first Christians, and across the centuries, we encounter the question: How can man form a conception that the divine essence of Christ can embody itself in a human being, in a human body? How is it possible that the divine nature has accomplished in a human body what is called redemption? In short, we can say that what has occupied humanity so powerfully at all times is the question: How could Christ appear on earth, how did that very union of the two natures, of the God Christ and the man Jesus, come about? But the closer we get to the present, the more and more the question takes on a different form. The question takes on a form - that is the remarkable thing - that is completely adapted to the respective cultural view that humanity has struggled to achieve. When we look at the present, we find the opposite pole, the complete opposite of what was recognized at the very beginning of Christianity in relation to the Christ-question.

One could point to hundreds and hundreds of cases similar to the one I am about to mention. In a Swiss journal of 1861, a man who was close to Christianity says the following: If I were compelled by anything to admit that Christ rose bodily, that the resurrection is at all possible in an evangelical sense, then I would have to admit everything that, not corresponding to my own worldview, would somehow confront me; then I would have to find that my whole worldview has a crack. How many people of the present day, including religious scholars and theologians, would have to make the same confession! If they thought about it, they would come to the conclusion that they would have to confess the same thing.

Let us contrast this confession with what Paul said when he said:

If Christ is not risen, then your works are in vain and so is your faith.

If you look at what Paul says, you have to admit that the most essential thing that permeates him is the fact that the Christ has risen. You have to admit that Christianity loses its meaning altogether if the mystery of the resurrection is removed, if what happened for the development of humanity is removed. Paul regarded the resurrection as the most essential thing, as the fundamental nerve of the Christian world view. And in our time it has come to this - this is deeply significant - that certain people say to themselves, if they had to acknowledge the resurrection, then their whole world view would be split.

It does not exactly touch someone sympathetically, to whom one has not yet plastered over these things, to find the fundamental question of Christianity – because that is what it is – presented to the soul in this form. But theosophy does not have the task of whitewashing things, so to speak, but rather of characterizing them according to their true names. In a sense, time cannot, out of itself, [out of its nature]; the general character of the formation of time is also expressed in the conception of the Christ-question. We see the Christ-question transformed into a Jesus-question in the nineteenth century; we see how, through the progress of science, it is becoming less and less possible for man to see in the man Jesus of Nazareth a divine-spiritual being, as it could be seen in ancient times. As the gospels became more and more accessible through the spread of education, people read deeply into them, and their souls were, as it were, drawn up to something divine. Then a gradual transition took place from the most paradoxical ideas about the Christ Jesus to what many theologians now profess, namely, that one has to assume that Jesus was only an exceptionally outstanding personality in world development, so that what man regards as the highest ideal was present in him to a great extent. One sees in him only a human being, albeit raised to a higher level.

Naturally, all possible shades of opinion are to be found in the conceptions of Christ Jesus. Thus, in the eighteenth century, we are confronted with the fact that people only put into the Christ Jesus problem what they could imagine, what they could think. Thus, to the Enlightenment thinker Reimarus, Christ Jesus appears hardly as anything more than an especially outstanding human being. [In contrast, Lessing had a substantially different spiritual image within himself.] He once said that he wished he could still live to see someone come along who would thoroughly refute what is being spread about Christ Jesus. Everything [at that time] was based on the criticism of the Gospels, especially on the contradictions, and specifically on those that come to light when comparing the different resurrection accounts. The obvious conclusion was that the reporters had passed on something that was not real – but this is by no means a fact.

If witnesses are heard in any matter who give different testimony, this is by no means proof against the fact itself. If we now imagine a world court case and ask: Are these witnesses credible? this is not correct. Rather, another question is the only decisive and important one: Who won the trial? Undoubtedly, Christianity, which was based on the fact of the resurrection, has carried the victory in world history. So the fact is that even if the witnesses testified differently, the trial itself is decided.

Then the time drew nearer and nearer when the matter was so arranged that every possibility of thinking of something superhuman in it disappeared, or, to speak with the spirit of that age: The time is drawing ever nearer when it will be impossible to think and speak of the resurrection in the same way as we originally did. Therefore, in the nineteenth century, the first concern of religious history was to get a picture of the man Jesus from the Gospels. We do not need to discuss here what has been done with the Gospels, how attempts have been made to compile the synoptic material in order to arrive at an approximately uniform overall picture, or how attempts have even been made to exclude altogether the Gospel that has the most supersensible content, the Gospel of John, on the grounds that it is a hymn to the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth. But there were also other researchers in the nineteenth century who said that if the Gospel of John were no longer recognized, then the whole of Christianity would have to be abandoned. One scholar, who is now considered outdated but who was once highly regarded, emphasized the facts of the Gospel of John. But all efforts were aimed at credibly presenting the man Jesus to the soul; however, from the outset, much had to be excluded that was indeed in the Gospels but that could no longer be believed in the nineteenth century. So a lot of facts, such as miracles and so on, were taken away and any possibility of admitting anything non-natural ceased.

It was therefore of particular significance when a theologian of the nineteenth century, Franz Overbeck, who lived in Basel, wrote a very remarkable book entitled “On the Christianity of Today's Theology”. This book is remarkable not only for its content, but it is significant for anyone interested in such things as an expression of the confession of a man who, as a theologian, had to struggle with the fact that he had to stand before his students with such feelings in his soul. Overbeck had to wrestle with this fact until it finally pushed him to express what lived in his soul. Anyone who understands such things will truly see a stormy destiny in following the strange life of the Basel native Overbeck, who basically answered the question, “Can theology today still be called Christian at all if it is also a science?” only with “no”. As a theologian, he sought to prove that theology as a science could not be Christian at all, because any science - according to Overbeck - must do away with and break with much of what is the basic meaning of any religion; the moment a pre-Christian religion came into contact with science, it underwent a process of decomposition, and so it happened with Christianity: science destroys Christianity under all circumstances and must always be an opponent of it.

When this is stated, it may not go deep to the heart, and in a certain respect it may be easily accepted by the layman. But when one is confronted with an era that urges such a significant theologian to make such a confession, one must feel how deeply the corresponding question [about the relationship of Christ to Jesus], the Christ-Jesus problem, actually goes to the root of our current development. And Overbeck says something else, namely, roughly the following: Whatever thoughts and scientific reasons we can muster about the Christian worldview must seem terribly small and inadequate to support the Christian creed. In the early days, Christians lived with the idea that a new world was coming, but soon a different time came, and it was no longer the doctrines of the Church Fathers that fertilized Christianity. At first there was hope for heaven to come to earth, but then finally the feeling that this world could never satisfy the human heart; an ascetic mood became apparent.

Today we see that people place some value on scientific truths – these are self-evident, they conquer the world of the outer senses, and so we see the driving force of religious belief slumbering in people. Who would not want to admit that this is deeply, deeply characteristic of our time? Is it not moving, distressing, that that which gave thousands upon thousands consolation and hope should increasingly lose its power? Let us face a fact: in 1873 an attempt was made in France to count those who were still touched by Christ, and it was found that one-third of the total population still believed in him. Today, it is estimated that only about one-fifth of London's total population is still imbued with Christianity. What does it matter that those who are quickly satisfied with themselves say, “What do we need a new foundation for? The old is enough for us.” Those who think only of themselves and are satisfied with that may speak thus; but those who think of humanity and see how the best truth-seekers can no longer find support will have to admit that the times are serious and that it is understandable when people long for a renewal of the old.

And so it gradually happened that on a theological basis a man named Jesus of Nazareth arose, from whom all the supernatural had been removed. In the nineteenth century, there was also a reaction of a strange kind. One could say: in order to deal with the Christ problem, which had been completely lost sight of in the Jesus problem, people sought to hold on to the Christ nevertheless, to recognize him. But in doing so, he was made into a being who basically lacks true reality. It has led to the Christ being made into a mystical being who does not need to be bound to what the evangelists tell – they tried to hold back the gospels [so to speak]. It would lead to chaos if one wanted to cover all the trends of the last few decades – at any rate, we are dealing with a crisis.

For those who have followed this development, there is something easy to grasp. The combination of mystical insight with all that has been brought to light by gospel research represents the last phase of this development. Something emerged that can be described as the connection between these two currents, and the result was that people even doubted whether a Jesus had lived at all. It is entirely in keeping with the style of our time that, once the mere external, historical yardstick was applied to Jesus, the question arose: Is there anything left at all in the Gospels that provides us with proof that a Jesus lived? — But one has no right to deny that a Jesus existed, because with a certain justification one is led to the conclusion that the existence of Jesus is clearly provable. However, for anyone familiar with today's historical research and aware of the current state of Jesus research, proof of the existence of Jesus cannot be provided because it is possible – if one wants – to challenge the documents of the Gospels. And one would have to be reckless not to admit that this challenge has quite significant reasons.

But what does all this show us? It shows us that we are in a state of crisis in the whole field [of Jesus research]. However, a new world view has also become part of the present education, which initially knows how to plausibly demonstrate that it has different sources of truth than those that have been available so far - I am referring to Theosophy or spiritual science. Even if Theosophy has something to say about Christianity and its origin, it could still be necessary for religion and religious research to deal with what Theosophy says about Jesus Christ. It is therefore important to know that both sides start from some elementary, fundamental events that have happened and cannot be denied.

The thing that our present education must undoubtedly take the greatest umbrage at is the story of the resurrection, that something has occurred that can no longer be understood today, namely that there was a victory of life over death. From a theosophical point of view, something can only be said about this if one considers the most obvious thing, namely the scene of one's own heart and soul. And what does this scene show us? It shows us something that cannot be admitted by the prevailing education; it shows us how the possibility exists for man that an inner miracle takes place at some time in his life. If we can call a miracle that which can be characterized as being in contrast to what is connected to the intellect, then it is a fact that such a miracle can take place in the human soul. And for every soul in which this miracle has taken place, it is inwardly clear that miracles exist.

It is a fact that there is an inner, mystical experience in which something enters the human soul that has no connection with the soul in the natural course of life. To understand this, one must follow the natural course of a person's life. It shows that, alongside all the external facts of life, we are constantly dealing with a deep inner life - we are dealing with the fact that the course of life shows itself in the human soul. Let us take a soul that belongs to the struggling souls in life - not a scientific one. Let us take a human soul that is dealing with the existential issues of life, that experiences inner tragedy, pain and suffering, but also bliss and salvation. Let us take such a human soul that has been living in such moods for years, and let us imagine that someone has not seen this person for ten years. He would make a remarkable discovery, namely that this struggle of the soul expresses itself in changes in the physiognomy, gestures and so on. The spiritual struggle expresses itself in the body. What takes place within a person also works on the transformation of the human exterior.

But what is much more interesting is the following: anyone who struggles in this way senses that when an answer or a solution to certain riddles has occurred, they are in a different state of mind. And the characteristic feature is that when the solution has occurred, the transformation of the physiognomy stops and the expression remains constant. As long as the struggle lasts, furrows form. But this too has an end; it is as if the human body reaches the limit of its elasticity. When the human being reaches this limit, the physical transformation finally ceases. The forces of consciousness transform, the soul forces. First they work on the body, and then, when this is no longer possible, they consciously work their way into themselves. It has been established that these human soul forces work inwardly throughout the whole of human life, and it has been shown that sometimes something of what is working in the depths of the soul also rises up into consciousness, and this shows itself in particularly strange dreams. This means that the dream images reveal something of what is going on in the soul.

Let us take a typical dream from the life of a friend close to me. When he was a young person attending secondary school, he had to do a drawing in the last grade, and because they knew he had talent, they gave him an especially difficult template, and that is precisely why the work progressed rather slowly. The end of school was approaching, and the student realized that it would be impossible for him to finish on time, since only a small part had been drawn. He felt anxious about this, but at the end of school his performance was still enough for the teachers, because they realized that he had only progressed slowly due to his great talent. The man grew older, became a draftsman, and strangely enough, this school experience came back to him in his dreams at certain intervals, and he experienced everything exactly as it had happened once, only the fear that he would not be able to finish was much, much greater in the dream. It happened that the dream came back regularly for days in a row, then it stopped for years and then came back.

The full significance of this dream experience can only be understood by comparing it with life. It turned out that every time this dream experience occurred, this person recognized an increase in his abilities. He could do more in terms of observing forms and expressing them through his hand; he experienced noticeable progress every time. Man works spiritually and mentally like this draftsman, and from time to time his soul work is revealed in 'dream' - in that strange state that exists between consciousness and unconsciousness, in that transition from the subconscious to the conscious. We see this throughout life.

We have an important point in human life, up to which one remembers in the course of life. Everyone must say: I remember up to a certain point in time, but what lies before that point in time is completely unconscious to me, and I only know something about it through the reports of others. This point in time is the one at which we have appropriated the word “I” for ourselves. But what happened before that moment? Let us look at the child, with its clumsy movements and actions. We know that the most important organ in the human being, the brain, is still completely undeveloped when the child comes into existence, and it is only during life on earth, until the child learns to say “I”, that it works on the organs of thought. We are therefore dealing with a spiritual-natural consciousness that is completely independent of the human being, with a supersensible-spiritual activity that represents the starting point of that cerebral activity. The following example characterizes that supersensible, spiritual element in man.

It is common knowledge that Nietzsche ended in madness. In the last period before the outbreak of madness, he wrote “captious” letters to acquaintances, including the Basel theologian Overbeck mentioned earlier. When Overbeck received one of these letters at the end of the 1880s, he knew that he could no longer delay in picking up his friend Nietzsche from Turin, where he was staying. The following now appears important as an example of what I have mentioned: When Nietzsche met Overbeck, he had no attention for what surrounded him; he let himself be done with whatever was wanted and showed absolutely no interest. Only when he heard the name of the personality standing before him, who was the same person who had been his colleague for years, did it flash through him: “That's the psychiatrist I was with back then.” And Nietzsche, to Overbeck's greatest astonishment, began to continue a conversation at the point where it had been interrupted seven years ago. A person who has no attention for the outside world continues a conversation at the point where it was interrupted seven years ago! Overbeck had forgotten that conversation in the meantime, but he remembered it immediately. And it is remarkable: when Nietzsche was brought to Jena and Overbeck visited him in the insane asylum, one could not talk with him about what was going on around him — only about what he had thought, devised, mentally struggled with and experienced years before; only about that could one talk with him.

But what does this show us? It shows us that there is a supersensible body within the physical body. If one builds on facts, then what is at issue here must be recognized as highly important. Man can only enter into connection with the objective external world through his physical organs. Nietzsche's organs were destroyed, and therefore he could no longer do this; only the central spiritual core within the physical body was unaffected. This one example could be multiplied a hundredfold. The existence of this central spiritual core in the physical body cannot be denied, and it is a fact that under certain circumstances man is able to see into the supersensible world. When we place thoughts that are symbolic through the strong will into the center of consciousness in such a way that all attention is focused on them and nothing is distracted, when we only look at them and repeat them over and over again - for a year, and if a year is not enough, then for ten years: a result will eventually emerge. The soul manages to bring everything up from the depths; she looks into everything.

This supersensible state cannot be reached with the help of ordinary tools, but only through intimate soul work. When a person has concentrated all thoughts and worked with them long enough in this way, he finally comes to a point where he says to himself: Yes, I am now experiencing something within me that I am quite sure is something supernatural. But strangely, I cannot think it in the way I usually think things. - Man then feels something that only comes to the consciousness of those who experience it, because in this moment of transcending the resistance of his physical body, the brain is no longer capable of expressing what has been experienced. Man recognizes: That which he was accustomed to feeling in the soul wants to transgress into consciousness. But he senses: the bodily tools were indeed suitable for the natural life up to now, but now I am experiencing something for which my brain is not yet sufficiently developed. Man then perceives the duality of the spiritual-soul being. He then experiences further how that which was initially weak finally begins to work perceptibly and tangibly on the brain, on consciousness, on the body.

I have now described this process of development to you. It is not a matter of something arbitrarily conceived, not a theory, but a fact that every true seeker of the spirit can experience. But what does the seeker of the spirit experience? He experiences what I have termed the “miraculous fact”. Something extra-worldly enters into the soul, to which man had no relationship before. One could describe what enters as a higher human being in the human being, as something that joins the spiritual that was already there before. Now a question might arise: Yes, but only a small circle of people experience something like that, only the spiritual seeker experiences something like that, who undertakes these exercises with the soul. — But what has just been described can be experienced by every soul, albeit in the most diverse shades, in the most diverse gradations, corresponding to the individuality of the person concerned. When we read the descriptions of those people whom we call the Christian mystics, we sense that these mystics did not experience what I have just described, but that something of a different nature has entered into these souls, something other than the existing spiritual - this transformation is called 'resurrection'.

Anyone who immerses themselves in the descriptions of the gospels with the necessary devotion will experience what I have described to a greater or lesser extent. But everyone can experience it - apart from studying the Gospels - feel that there is a feeling in the soul that cannot be found in the natural course of life in the soul. However, the Bible is the easiest way to bring a supersensible spiritual world into the horizon of consciousness. If one admits this miracle fact, then humanity provides a necessary supplement to it, and this arises from Theosophy itself. If we look back at what was said about the central core of spirit, we see that this central core of spirit cannot be traced back to the mere beginning, to the origin of the body, because this central core of spirit is completely independent of the beginning of life, of the brain activity of the human being. Rather, it must be traced back to an earlier human life, so that we must speak of repeated lives on earth. What we have come to know as the central core of the spirit, as supersensible life, asserts itself through death, and with this point of view we stand on the ground of spiritual science.

This view of repeated earthly lives has already been incorporated into our newer culture. Lessing was compelled to speak of the repetition of life out of an inner necessity. He said: “If one considers the entire human development, it appears to one as an all-embracing education of mankind.” It would have seemed senseless to Lessing if a soul that had ended completely [with death] had lived. Lessing thought that the soul takes with it what it possesses in the way of training, [then comes back to earth with it and so on. In this way a unified organism would be created: the soul, which is in a state of development, does not die], but lives on and on, lives forever. The nineteenth century, however, had little interest in elaborating on this fact. But this fact emerges with necessity. When a few decades ago a prize was offered for the best literary work on the subject of 'The Immortality of the Soul', the first prize was awarded to a work entitled 'The Immortality of the Soul on the Basis of Repeated Life on Earth'. This is proof that even then there were people who were drawn to this view of repeated lives on earth.

If we consider the development of humanity, it turns out that only from a certain point in time was it possible for the human soul to experience that inner miracle, that certainty, which [initially] comes to the soul as a question. We can distinguish two great epochs: the old, pre-Christian times, when man had not yet come to the consciousness of his ego, and the time after Christ, when man enters the world with the full maintenance of his self-conscious ego. Just as human descent can be traced back to a primal being, so too must that which can prove to be an inner resurrection for each individual in the soul be traced back to a progenitor for this inner miracle. Just as resurrection takes place for the individual, so it must also have taken place for humanity, and Theosophy shows us clearly: What makes the individual a different person also made the man Jesus of Nazareth a different person.

Just as we live with our central spiritual core, to which no boundary is drawn by death, so the world with its central spiritual core is subject to its own law. Therefore, according to theosophy, the resurrection for the whole of humanity is virtually the same miracle as the inner miracle for the individual. After [Jesus'] physical body was hung on the cross, the spirit [of the Christ] lived on. Let us consider Paul's words in the Gospel, that the Christ died for humanity and was resurrected on the third day, and that he then appeared first to Peter, then to more than five hundred people, and finally to himself. He did not appear to Paul in his original Jesus form, but in a spiritual form, which he had to recognize as the Christ form, which was such that the conviction asserted itself from within: the Christ lives! We cannot speak of the resurrected Christ in any other way than to say that that which lived in him spiritually, independently of the physical body, was not truly dead in death, but continued to be there, to live on.

It would take us too far afield today if I were also to explain to you what happened to the body. The important thing is that Scripture clearly and unambiguously points this out to us: from the moment of the resurrection onwards, we are dealing with the emergence of a new spiritual power that was not present before, with an outpouring of the spirit. And this inward miracle leads back to the resurrection from the dead, to the continuing life of the Christ, who was crucified as Jesus of Nazareth. Christ has made possible a new relationship with the spiritual world for humanity; thus the miracle of the cross is the progenitor of all miracles that take place in human life. In this way, spiritual science shows us a path to Christ; it shows us that the Christ is necessary for humanity. Only a timid mind could sense danger in such a path to Christ, because every path to Christ that is based on truth must and will be welcome (to those seeking the Christ).