The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I must ask my audience to be considerate with me today, because I have just arrived after a very tiring journey and probably will not feel able to speak to you adequately until tomorrow.

I want this first lecture to be a kind of introduction to the series I am to deliver here. I had not really intended to speak during this medical conference, because I think the stimulus given by anthroposophical research to medicine and to natural scientific thinking ought to be worked out by those who are specialists in the various domains. Indeed, all that comes from anthroposophical investigation regarding medicine and, for instance, physiology, can be no more than a stimulus that must then be worked out empirically. Only on the basis of this empirical study can there arise valid and convincing judgments of the matters in question—and this is the kind of judgment that is needed in the domain of therapy.

These lectures, however, are given at the special request of our doctors here, and I shall try to deal with those points where anthroposophy can illuminate the realm of medicine. I shall endeavor to show, first of all, that an understanding of the human being in both health and disease can be enriched and deepened through the anthroposophical view.

By way of introduction perhaps you will permit me to speak of the sense in which the anthroposophical approach should be understood today, in our own age. People so readily confuse what is here called anthroposophy with older traditional ideas about humanity. I have no wish to waste words about the value of these old conceptions or to criticize them in any way, but it must be emphasized that the conceptions I am putting forward are founded on a very different basis from that of the various mystical, theosophical, and gnostic ideas that have arisen traditionally in the course of human history. In order to make myself clear, I need mention only the main points of difference between the conceptions that will be presented here and those of earlier times.

Those earlier conceptions arose in human thought at a time when there was no natural science in our sense; mine have been developed in an age when natural science has not only come into being but has reached a certain—albeit provisional—perfection. This must always be remembered if we wish to understand the meaning and significance of our studies, for it applies to everything that may be said and discovered by anthroposophy about the most varied branches of human knowledge and ability.

You all know—and I don't need to enlarge upon it for you—that in those earlier times man had a non-scientific (in our sense) conception of the super-sensible world. Medicine, too, was permeated with super-sensible conceptions, with conceptions of the human being that did not originate, as is the case today, from empirical research. We need go back only to the age shortly before that of Galen, and if we are open-minded enough we shall find everywhere spiritual conceptions of the being of man on which medical thought, too, was based. Permeating these conceptions of the form of the human being, the form of his organs and of human functions, were thoughts about the super-sensible. According to our modern empirical way of thinking, there are no grounds for connecting anything super-sensible with the nature and constitution of the human being, but in those older conceptions the super-sensible was as much a part of human nature as colors, forms, and inorganic forces now seem to us bound up with the objects in the outer world.

Only a person with preconceptions will speak of those earlier ages in the development of medicine as if its ideas were merely childish, compared with those that have evolved today. Nothing could be more inadequate than what history tells us in this connection, and anyone who has the slightest understanding of the historical evolution of humanity, who does not take the point of view that perfection has been reached and that everything earlier is mere foolishness, will realize that even now we have arrived only at relative perfection and that there is no need to look back with a supercilious eye upon what went before. Indeed, this is obvious when we consider the results that were achieved. On the other hand, an individual concerned with any branch of knowledge today must never overlook all that natural science has accomplished for humanity in this age. And when—to use the Goethean expression—a spiritual way of considering the human being in sickness and health wishes to become active today, it must work with and not against natural scientific research.

After what I have said I hope you will not accuse me of wishing to cast aspersions on the concepts of natural science. Indeed, I must emphasize at the beginning that such a thing is out of the question and for a very fundamental reason. When we consider the medical views that were held in an earlier period of civilization, we find that although they were by no means as foolish as many people believe nowadays, they did lack what we have gained through natural science, for the simple reason that man's faculty of cognition was not then adapted to see objects as we see them today by means of our senses and the products of empirical thought. The doctor (or I might just as well say the physiologist or biologist of ancient times) saw in an entirely different way from the way modern man sees. In the times that really come to an end with Galen, medical consciousness had quite another orientation. What Galen saw in his four elements of the human organism, in the black and yellow gall, in the phlegm and in the blood, was utterly different from what the human being sees today.

If we understand Galen's words—as a rule, of course words handed down from ancient times are not understood—then what he describes appears nebulous today. He saw as a reality what to us appears nebulous; in what he called phlegm he did not see the substance we call phlegm. To him phlegm was not only a fluidity permeated with life but a fluidity permeated with soul. He saw this. He saw this as clearly as we see something as red or blue. But precisely because he was able to see something outside the range of modern scientific consciousness, Galen was not able to see many things that are brought to light today by our scientific consciousness.

Suppose, for example, that a man with slightly abnormal vision looks through glasses, and by this means the contours of objects become sharper than they would otherwise appear to him. In the same way, as the result of modern empiricism all that was once seen hazily, but nonetheless permeated by spirit and soul, has disappeared and been replaced by the sharp contours of our modern empirical observation. The sharp contours were not there in ancient times. Healings were performed out of a kind of instinct that was bound up with an intense development of human compassion. A sort of participation in the patient's disease, which could even be painful, arose in the doctor of ancient times, and on the basis of this he set about his cure. The sharp boundaries that we perceive today through our empiricism based in the senses were not seen at all.

Because the advance to this sense-oriented empiricism is rooted in the evolution of man, we cannot merely brush it aside and return to the old. Only if we develop certain atavistic faculties will we perceive nature as the ancients perceived her, in all domains of knowledge, including that of medicine. In our modern civilization, when we grow up equipped with the kind of training given in our lower schools—not to speak of higher education—it is simply impossible to see things as the ancients saw them; moreover, if a person did see things in this way he would be regarded as being if not gravely, at any rate mildly psychopathic, not quite “normal.” Indeed, this would not be altogether unjust, for there is something psychopathic today in all instinctive “clairvoyance,” as it is called. We must be quite clear about this. What we are able to do, however, is to work our way up to a perception of the spiritual by developing inner faculties otherwise latent in the soul, just as in the course of evolution the eye has evolved itself from indefinite vision to sharply contoured vision.

Today, then, it is possible to develop faculties of spiritual perception. I have described this development in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It, and in my other writings. When an individual has developed these faculties, he sees, to begin with, a world not previously visible to him, a world encompassing a kind of spiritual cosmos beyond the cosmos revealed to sense perception today, including the discoveries and calculations of astronomy. To the sense-perceptible cosmos that is permeated by natural law, a spiritual cosmos is added. And when we seek to discover what exists in this spiritual cosmos, we also find the human being. We take hold of a spiritual universe, a universe permeated with soul and spirit, and we see the human being as a member of this universe.

If we pursue ordinary natural science, we begin either with the simplest living being or with the simplest form of life—the cell—and then trace the simple on into the more complex, ascending thus from what most resembles purely physically organized substance to the highly intricate human organism. If we are seriously pursuing spiritual science, we begin at the other end. We descend from a comprehension of the spiritual in the universe, regarding this as complex, and we look at the cell as the simplest thing in the organism. Viewed in the light of spiritual science, the universe is the summit of complexity, and just as we gradually elaborate the elements of our own cognition in order, let us say, to pass from the cell to the human being, so we progressively simplify what the cosmos reveals and then come to the human being. We follow an opposite path—that is to say, we begin at exactly the opposite starting point—but when we pursue spiritual science today in this way, we are not at first led all the way into the regions encompassed by modern material empiricism. I wish to stress this point strongly and hope that there will be no misunderstanding particularly regarding these fundamentals. This is why I must ask you today to forgive these somewhat pedantically formed concepts.

It is quite conceivable that someone might think it useless to adopt the methods of empirical thought in physiology or biology. “What need is there for any specialized branch of science?” he might ask. “One develops spiritual capacities, looks into the spiritual world, arrives at a view of man, of the being of man in health and disease, and then it is possible to found a kind of spiritualized medicine.” This is just the kind of thing many people do, but it leads nowhere. They abuse empirical medicine, but they are abusing something they do not understand in the least. We should not even consider writing off ordinary sense-oriented empirical science as worthless and taking refuge in a spiritualized science brought down from the clouds. That is quite the wrong attitude to adopt.

Spiritual scientific investigation does not lead to the same things that are examined under the microscope. If anyone tries to pretend that with the methods of spiritual science he has found exactly the same things he finds under a microscope, he may safely be summed up as a charlatan. The results of modern empirical investigation are there and must be reckoned with. Those who seriously pursue science also in the sense of spiritual scientific anthroposophy do not simply depart from sense-oriented empiricism; it is necessary to take such empiricism into account. One who might be called an expert in an anthroposophical spiritual science must first concern himself with the phenomena of the world in the sense of ordinary empiricism.

From spiritual science we discover at first certain guidelines for empirical research, certain ruling principles, showing us, for instance, that what exists at a particular place in the organism must be studied also in reference to its position. Many people will say, “Yes, but a cell is a cell, and purely empirical observation must determine the distinguishing feature of this cell—whether it is a liver cell or a brain cell and so on.” This is not the case. Suppose, for example, I walk past a bank at nine o'clock in the morning and see two men sitting there side by side. I look at them and form certain judgments about various things in relation to them. At three o'clock in the afternoon it happens that I again walk past the bank. There are the two men, sitting just as before. The empirical state of affairs is exactly the same in both cases, allowing for very slight differences. But now, think of it: one of the men may have remained sitting there for the whole six hours. The other may have been sent out on quite a journey right after I first passed the bank and may have just returned. This essentially alters the picture and has nothing to do with what I actually perceive with my senses. As far as my senses are concerned, the same state of affairs presents itself at nine o'clock in the morning and three o'clock in the afternoon, but the state of affairs determined by sense observation must be judged in accordance with its constituents.

In this sense our conception of a liver cell must differ essentially from our conception of a cell in the brain or the blood. Only if it were correct to say, for the sake of example, that the basis of everything is a primeval germ cell that has been fertilized and that the whole organism can be explained by a process of simple division and differentiation of this primeval germ cell—only then could we proceed to treat a liver cell exactly the same as a brain cell in accordance with the purely empirical facts. Yes, but now suppose that this is by no means correct, that by virtue of its very position in the organism the relation of a liver cell to forces outside man, outside the bounds of the skin, is not at all the same as the relation of a brain cell to these forces. In that case it will not be correct to look on what is happening merely as a continuation of the process of division and subsequent location in the body. We must rather assume that the relation of the brain cell to the universe outside is quite different from that of the liver cell.

Suppose someone looks at the needle of a compass, finds it pointing from South to North, from North to South, and then decides that the forces that set the needle in the North-South direction lie in the needle itself. He would certainly not be considered a physicist today. A physicist brings the needle of the compass into connection with what is called earthly magnetism. No matter what theories people evolve, it is simply impossible to attribute the direction of the needle to forces lying within the needle itself. It must be brought into relation with the universe.

In studying organic life today, the relationship of the organic to the universe is usually regarded as quite secondary. But suppose it were indeed true that merely on account of their different positions the liver and the brain are actually related quite differently to universal forces outside the human being. In that case we could never arrive at an explanation of the human being by way of pure empiricism. An explanation is possible only if we are able to say what part the whole universe plays in molding the brain and the liver, in the same sense as the earth plays its part in the direction taken by the needle in the compass.

Suppose we are tracing back the stream of heredity. We begin with the ancestors, pass on to the present generation, and then to the offspring, both in the case of animals and of human beings. We take into account what we find—as naturally we must—but we reckon merely with processes observed to lie immediately within the human being. It hardly ever occurs to us to ask whether under certain conditions in the human organism it is possible for universal forces to work in the most varied ways upon the fertilized germ. Nor do we ask: Is it perhaps impossible to explain the formation of the fertilized germ cell if we remain within the confines of the human being himself? Must we not relate this germ cell to the whole universe?

In orthodox science today, the forces that work in from the universe are considered secondary. To a certain limited extent they are taken into consideration, but they are always secondary. And now you may say: “Yes, but modern science leads us to a point where such questions no longer arise. It is antiquated to relate the human organs to the universe!” In the way in which this is often done, it is antiquated, but the fact that generally such questions do not arise today is due entirely to our scientific education. Our education in science confines us to this purely sense-oriented empirical mode of research, and we never come to the point of raising questions such as I have posed hypothetically by way of introduction. But the extent to which man is able to advance in knowledge and action in every sphere of life depends upon raising questions. Where questions never arise, a person is living in a kind of scientific fog. Such an individual is himself dimming his free outlook upon reality, and it is only when things no longer fit into his scheme of thought that he begins to realize the limitations of his conceptions.

I believe that in the domain of modern medicine there may be a feeling that the processes taking place in the human being are not wholly reconcilable with the simple, straightforward theories upon which most cures are based. There is a certain feeling that it must be possible to approach the whole subject from another angle. And I think that what I will have to say in this connection will mean something especially to those who are specialists in their particular branches of science, who have practical experience of the processes of health and disease and have realized that current conceptions and theories are everywhere too limited to grapple with the complexity of the facts.

Let us be quite honest with ourselves in this regard. During the entire nineteenth century a kind of axiom was put forward by nearly every branch of scientific and practical thought. With a persistence that was enough to drive one to despair, it was constantly being said, “Explanations must be as simple as possible.” And that is just what people tried to do. But if facts and processes are complicated, it is prejudging the issue to say that the explanations must be simple. We must accustom ourselves to deal with complexities. Unspeakable harm has been done in the realms of science and art by the insistent demand for simplification. In all her manifestations, small and great, nature is not simple but highly complicated. We can really grapple with nature itself only if we realize from the outset that the most seemingly comprehensive ideas are related to reality in the same way that photographs of a tree, taken from one side only, are related to the tree. I can photograph the tree from every side, and the photographs may be very different under different circumstances. The more photographs I have, the more nearly will my mental image approach the reality of the tree.

The prevalent opinion today is this: such and such a theory is correct. Therefore some other theory—one with which we do not happen to agree—must be wrong. But that is just as if a person were to photograph a tree from one side only. He has his particular photograph. Someone else takes a photograph from another side and says to the first person, “Your photograph is absolutely false; mine, and mine alone, represents the truth.” He claims his particular view to be the correct one. All controversies about materialism, idealism, realism, and the like have really taken this form. The squabbles in such realms are by no means different from the seemingly trivial example I have given as a comparison. At the very outset of our studies I ask you not to take what I have to say as if it were meant to tend in the direction of materialism, idealism, or spiritualism, but merely as an attempt to go straight for reality to the extent to which the capacity of human thought permits. If we wish to master what is real, we can occasionally achieve tremendous results with materialistic conceptions if we are then able to introduce the opposite aspect into our considerations. If it is impossible to keep the various aspects separate, our ideas will appear as if we took many different photographs all on the same piece of film. Indeed, many things are like this today. It is as if photographs from many different aspects had been taken on the same piece of film. Now when the forces lying latent in the soul of man are realized by the methods outlined in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It, we rise above the ordinary standpoint of knowledge—to which the latest phase in biology pays special attention—and reach what I have described as Imaginative cognition or knowing. A still wider standpoint is that of Inspired knowing, and the highest, if I may use this expression, is that of the Intuitive, of real Intuitive knowing. In Imaginative cognition, I receive pictures of reality, knowing very well that they are pictures, but also that they are pictures of reality and not merely dream-pictures. In Imaginative cognition I do not have reality yet, but I have pictures of a reality. At the stage of knowing by Inspiration, these pictures acquire a certain consistency, a viscosity, something lives within them; I know more through the pictures than the pictures alone yielded me. I know by means of the pictures that they are related to a spiritual reality. And in the acts of Intuitive knowing I stand within this spiritual reality itself. This is the ascent through the three stages described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It.

Now these three modes of higher knowledge give us, to begin with, knowledge of spiritual worlds, a knowledge that goes beyond ordinary, sense-oriented factual knowledge. They give knowledge of a spiritual universe and of man as a soul-spiritual being; they do not, in the early stages, reveal to us today's findings of empirical research in the realm of, say, biology. When Imagination, Inspiration, or Intuition is used to gain understanding of the being of man, a different approach is applied.

Take, for instance, the structure of the human brain. Perhaps it does not strike physiologists and doctors as very extraordinary, but to those who call themselves psychologists it is remarkable. Psychologists are a strange phenomenon in our civilization because they have managed to develop a science without subject matter—a psychology without a soul! For the psychologist this structure of the brain is very remarkable. Think for a moment of a psychologist who takes his start purely from empirical science. In recent times it has been impossible to distinguish whether a philosopher knows something or not. Natural scientists, however, are always supposed to know something, and so in modern times certain scientists who dabble in philosophy have been given Chairs of Philosophy. Current opinion has been this: natural scientists must have some knowledge, because although it is quite possible in philosophy to talk around and around a subject, it is not possible in natural science to spout hot air about something that has been observed under a microscope, through a telescope, or by means of x-rays. All these things can be tested and proven, but in philosophy it is not so easy to prove whether or not a man is speaking out of the clouds.

Think of how Theodor Ziehen speaks about the structure of the brain. In this connection I once had a very interesting experience, and perhaps I can make the point more concrete by telling you an anecdote. Many years ago I attended a meeting where an eminent doctor was lecturing about the life of soul in connection with the brain and its structure. The chairman of the meeting was a follower of Herbart, and he, therefore, was not concerned with analyzing the structure of the brain but the conceptual life, as Herbart, the philosopher, had once done. The chairman then said, “Here we have something very remarkable. The physiologist or the doctor makes diagrams and figures of the structure of the brain. If I, as a Herbartian, make drawings of the complicated association of ideas—I mean a picture of the ideas that associate and not of the nerve fibers connecting one nerve cell with another—if I, as a genuine Herbartian who does not concern himself with the brain as a structure, make symbolic diagrams of what I conceive to be the process underlying the linking together of ideas, my drawings look exactly the same as the physiologist's sketches of the physical structure of the brain.”

This comparison is not unjustified. Natural science has taught us more and more about the structure of the brain. It has been proven in ever greater measure that the outer structure of the brain does, indeed, correspond in a marvelous way with the organization of our conceptual life. Everything in the conceptual life can be found again in the structure of the brain. It is as if nature herself—please take this with a grain of salt—had intended to create in the brain a sculptural image of man's conceptual life. Something of the kind strikes us forcibly when we read statements like those of Meynert (which nowadays are already considered rather out of date). Meynert was a materialist but an excellent neurophysiologist and psychiatrist. As a materialist, he offers us a wonderful contribution to what is discovered when the actual human brain is left out of account and we deal only with the way in which mental images unite, separate, etc., and then sketch these symbols. In short, if anything could make a person a materialist it is the structure of the human brain. In any event it must be conceded that if the spirit and soul do indeed exist, they have an expression so perfect in the human brain that one is almost tempted to ask why the spirit and soul in themselves are necessary for the conceptual life, even if people do still long for a soul that can at least think. The brain is such a true mirror-image of the soul-spiritual—why should the brain itself not be able to think?

All these things must of course be taken with the well-known grain of salt. Today I only wish to indicate the tenor of our studies as a whole. The human brain, especially when we undertake detailed research, is well calculated to make us materialists. The mystery that really underlies all this clears up only when we reach the stage of Imaginative knowledge, where pictures arise, pictures of the real spiritual world not previously visible. These pictures actually remind us of the configurations in the human brain formed by the nerve fibers and nerve cells.

What, then, is this Imaginative cognition, which naturally functions entirely in the super-sensible world? If I attempted to give you a symbolic representation of what Imaginative knowledge is, in the way that a mathematician uses figures to illustrate a mathematical problem, I would say the following: imagine that a person living in the world knows more than sense-cognition can tell him because he can rise to pictures that yield a reality, just as the human brain yields the reality of the human soul. In the brain, nature itself has given us as a real Imagination, an Imagination perceptible to the senses, something that is attained in Imaginative knowledge at a higher level.

This, you see, leads us more deeply into the constitution of the human being. As we shall see in the next few days, this marvelous structure of the human brain is not an isolated formation. Through Imagination we behold a world, a super-sensible world, and it is as though a part of this world had become real in a lower world; in the human brain we behold a world of Imagination in concrete fact. I do not believe that anyone can speak adequately about the human brain unless he sees in its structure an Imaginative replica of the life of soul. It is just this that leads us into a dilemma when we take our start from ordinary neurophysiology and try to pass to an understanding of the life of soul. If we confine ourselves to the brain itself, a life of soul over and above this does not seem necessary. The only individuals with a right to speak of a life of soul over and above the structure of the human brain are those who have knowledge of it other than what is acquired by customary methods in this world. For when we come to know this life of soul in the spiritual world, we realize that it has its complete reflection in the structure of the human brain, and that the brain, moreover, can do everything that the super-sensible organ of soul can do by way of conceptual activity. Down to its very function the brain is a mirror-image. With neurophysiology, therefore, no one can prove or disprove materialism. It simply cannot be done. If the human being were merely a being of brain, he would never need to say to himself, “Over and above this brain of mine, I possess a soul.”

In contrast to this—and I shall now describe in an introductory way something that will be developed in the following lectures—let us turn to a different function of the human being, not the conceptual life but the process of breathing, considered functionally. Think of the breathing processes and what comes into human consciousness with regard to them; with these you will not come to something similar in the organism, as you did regarding the conceptual life. When you say to yourselves, “I have an idea that reminds me of another idea I had three years ago, and I link the one to the other,” you may well be able to make diagrams (especially if you take a series of ideas) that bear a great resemblance, for instance, to Meynert's sketches of the structure of the brain. Now this cannot be done when you try to find an expression in the human organism for what is contained in the breathing processes. You can find no adequate expression for the breathing processes in the structures and formations of the physical organs, as you were able to for the conceptual life in the brain. The breathing processes are something for which there is no adequate expression in the human organism, in the same sense as the structure of the brain is an adequate expression for the conceptual life, the perceptual life.

In Imaginative knowledge pictures arise before us, but if we rise to knowledge by Inspiration, reality streams through the pictures from behind, as it were. If, then, we rise to Inspiration and gaze into the super-sensible world in such a way that the Imaginations teem with spiritual reality, we suddenly find ourselves standing in something super-sensible that has its complete analogy in the connection between the breathing processes, the structure of the lungs, the structure of the arachnoidal space, the central canal of the spinal cord, and the penetration of the impulse of the breath into the brain. In short, if you rise to Inspiration, you learn to understand the whole meaning of the breathing process, just as Imaginative knowledge leads to an understanding of the meaning of the structure of the brain. The brain is an: Imagination made concrete; everything connected with breathing is an Inspiration made real, an Inspiration brought down into the world of the senses. One who strives to reach the stage of Inspired knowledge is transplanted into a world of spirit and soul, but this world lies there tangibly before him when he observes the whole breathing process and its significance in the human organism.

Imagination, then, is necessary for an understanding of the structure of the brain; Inspiration is necessary in order to understand the rhythm of breathing and everything connected with it. The relation of the breathing rhythm to the universe is quite different from that of the brain's structure. The outer, sculptural structure of the brain is so completely a mirror-image of the spiritual that it is possible to understand this structure without penetrating deeply into the super-sensible world. Indeed, we need only rise to Imagination, which borders quite closely on ordinary cognition. The breathing process cannot be understood by means of Imagination; here you must have Inspired knowledge, you must rise higher in the super-sensible world.

To understand the metabolic process one must rise still higher in the super-sensible world. The metabolic process is really the most mysterious of all processes in the human being. The following lectures will show that we must think of this metabolic process quite differently from the way in which it is thought of today in empirical physiology. The changes undergone by the substances as they pass from the tongue to the point where they bring about something in the brain cells, for instance, cannot, unfortunately, be followed by means of merely empirical research but only by means of Intuitive knowledge. This Intuitive knowledge leads us beyond the mere perception of the object into the object itself. In the brain, the spirit and soul of man create for themselves a mere image of themselves but otherwise remain outside this image. Spirit and soul permeate the breathing rhythm but constantly withdraw again. In the metabolism, however, the human spirit and soul immerse themselves completely so that as spirit and soul they even disappear. They are not to be found—nor are they to be found by empirical research.

And now think of Theodor Ziehen's subtle descriptions of the structure of the human brain. It is also possible, in fact, to make symbolic pictures of the memory in such a way that their physiological-anatomical counterparts in the brain can be pointed out. But when Ziehen comes to the sentient processes of feeling, there is already a hitch, and that is why he does not speak of feelings as independent entities but only of mental images colored with feeling. And modern physiologists no longer speak about the will at all. Why? Of course they say nothing! When I want to raise my arm—that is to say, to enact an act of will—I have, first of all, the mental image. Something then descends into the region that, according to current opinion, is wholly “unconscious.” Everything that cannot be actually observed in the life of soul, but is nonetheless believed to be there, is thrown into the reservoir of the “unconscious.” And then I observe how I move my hand. Between the intention and the accomplished fact lies the will, which plays right down into the material nature of the physical organism.

This process can be followed in detail by Intuition; the will passes down into the innermost being of the organism. The act of will enters right into the metabolism. There is no act of will performed by physical, earthly man that cannot be traced by Intuitive knowledge to a corresponding metabolic process. Nor is there any process of will that does not find its expression in disintegration or dissolution—call it what you will—within the metabolic processes. The will first removes what exists somewhere in the organism in order that it may unfold its own activity. It is just as if I were to burn up something in my arm before being able to use this limb for the expression of my will. Something must first be done away with, as we shall see in the following lectures. I know that this would be considered a terrible heresy in natural science today, but nevertheless it will reveal itself to us as a truth. Something substantial must be destroyed before the will can come into play. Spirit and soul must establish themselves where substance existed. This is the essence of Intuitive knowledge, and you will never be able to explain the metabolic processes in the human being unless you investigate them by means of this knowledge.

These three processes—the nerve-sense process, the rhythmic processes (processes of breathing and blood circulation), and the metabolic processes—encompass fundamentally every function in the human organism. Man is really objective knowledge, knowledge made real—regardless of whether we merely observe him from outside or dissect him. Take the human head. We understand what is going on in the head when we realize that it yields Imaginative knowledge; the processes in the rhythmic system become clear when we know that it yields knowledge by Inspiration; we understand the metabolic processes when we know what Intuitive knowledge is. Thus the principles of reality interpenetrate in the human being. Take, for example, the specific organs of the will—they can be understood only by Intuitive knowledge.

As long as we apply a uniformly objective mode of cognition to the human being, we shall not realize that, in fact, he is not at all as he is usually assumed to be. Modern physiology knows, of course, that to a great extent the human being is a column of fluid. But now ask yourselves quite honestly whether physiology does in fact reckon with the human being as a column of fluid, or whether it does not proceed merely as if he were a being consisting of sharply contoured solid forms. You will probably have to admit that little account is given to the fact that he is essentially a fluid being and that the solids have merely been inserted into this fluid. But the human being is also an airy, gaseous being, and a being of warmth as well.

The solid part of the human being can well be understood by means of ordinary objective knowledge. Just as in the laboratory I can become familiar with the nature of sulphide of mercury, so by chemical and physical investigation of the human organism I can acquaint myself with all that is solid. It is different with the fluids in the human being. The fluids live in a state of continual integration and disintegration and cannot be observed in the same way as the stomach or heart are observed and then drawn. If I make drawings of these organs as if they were solid objects, a great deal can be said about them, but it is not the same if we really take seriously this watery being of man. In the fluids something is always coming into being and disappearing again. It is as if we were to conceive of the heart as continually coming into being and disappearing, although the process there is not a very rapid one. The watery being of man must be approached with Imagination.

We must also consider what is gaseous, what is aeriform in us. It is known, of course, how the functions that take place in the aeriform are greatly significant in the organism, it is known how to and from everywhere the aeriform substances in the human organism are in movement, how everything connected with the aeriform is in circulation. When one region of the aeriform interacts with another, however, it follows precisely the pattern of Inspiration. Only through Inspiration can the airy part of the human being be understood.

And now let us pass to the warmth realm in the human being. Try to realize that the human being is something very special by virtue of the fact that he is a structure of warmth, that in the most varied parts of his structure warmth and cold are found present in the most manifold ways. Before we can realize how the human being lives with his ego in his own warmth, we must ourselves live into the process. There must be an act of Intuitive knowledge.

Before you are able to know the whole human being, in his totality—not as if he were simply a mass of solid organs with sharp contours—you must penetrate into the human being from many different angles. Just as we are led from Imagination to Inspiration to Intuition as we pass from the brain to the other organic structures, so it is when we study the different aggregate states of matter within the human being. The solid part of the human being, his solid bodily nature, hardly differs at all within the human organism from the state in which substances exist outside the human organism. There is an essential difference, however, in the case of what is fluid and gaseous, and above all in the case of the warmth. This will have to be considered in the next lectures. But it is indeed a fact that only when our study of the human being widens in this way do we come to know the real significance for knowledge of the organs within human nature.

Sense-oriented, empirical physiology hardly enables you to follow the functions of the human organism further than the point where the chyle passes from the intestines into the lymphatic vessels. What follows is merely a matter of conjecture. All ideas about the subsequent processes that take place with the substances we take in from the outside world, for instance the processes in the bloodstream, are really nothing but fantasy on the part of modern physiology. The part played in the organization by the kidneys, for example, can be understood only if we observe the catabolic processes side by side with the anabolic processes, which today are almost invariably regarded as the only processes of significance for the human constitution. A long time ago I said to a friend, “It is just as important to study those organs which are grouped around the germ of the human embryo, and which are later discarded, as to study the development of the human germ itself from conception to birth.” The picture is complete only when we observe the division of the cells and the structure arising from this division, and also trace the catabolic processes that take their course side by side with the anabolic processes. For we do not have this catabolic process around us only in the embryonic period; we bear it within us continually in later life. And we must know in the case of each single organ to what extent it contains anabolic and to what extent catabolic processes. The latter are, as a general rule, bound up with an increase of consciousness. Clear consciousness is dependent on catabolic processes, on the disintegration, the destruction, the removal of matter.

The same must be said about the processes of elimination. The kidneys are organs of elimination. But now the question arises: although from the point of view of sense-oriented empiricism the kidneys are primarily organs of elimination, have they no other significance in the constitution of man beyond this? Do they not, perhaps, play a more important part in building up the human being by virtue of something other than their functions of elimination? If we then follow the functions still further, passing from the kidneys to the liver, for example, we find this interesting phenomenon: the kidneys ultimately excrete outward, the liver inward. And the question arises: How is the relation of the kidney process to the liver process affected by the fact that the kidneys send their products of elimination outward and the liver inward? Is the human being at one time communing with the outer world, as it were, and at another time with himself?

Thus we are led to a gradual penetration of the human organization, but to assist us in this penetration we need to consider matters that are approached in the ways of which I have given only hints today. I will proceed from this point in the next lecture, showing how these things lead to a real understanding of pathology and therapy, and to what extent they may become guiding principles in the empirical research acknowledged today. This does not imply an attack on such research. The only object is to show that guiding principles are necessary for it to attain its true value.

I am not out to attack natural scientific research or scientific medicine in any sense. My aim is simply to show that in this natural scientific medicine there is a mine of opportunity for a much wider knowledge than can be attained by modern methods and above all by the current outlook of the world. We have no wish to scoff at the natural scientific mode of observation but on the contrary to give it a true foundation. When it is founded upon the spirit, then, and only then, will it assume its full significance.

Tomorrow I will speak further on this subject.

Certain dread concerning the destiny of humanity in the future may come over one who enters with feelings into the thoughts which occupied us at the close of our last lecture. A picture of this future of humanity was brought before us which on the one hand was great and powerful, filling one with bliss, showing the future condition of the man who has understood the mission of our present age upon the earth, who has received the Christ-spirit and is thereby able to keep pace with the necessary spiritualization of our earth, a glorious blessed picture of those men who are called in exoteric Christianity the “Redeemed,” and, not quite appropriately, the “Elect.” But the opposite picture had also to be put before you, the picture of the abyss in which is found a humanity which was not in a position to receive the Christ-spirit, which remained in matter, which excluded itself, so to speak, from the spiritualizing process leading into the future; and this portion of humanity which has fallen away from the spiritualized earth, and, in a certain sense apart from it, advances towards a frightful fate. When the beast with the seven heads and ten horns glowers at us from the abyss, the beast led astray by the other frightful being, the two-horned beast, this picture gives rise to fear and horror, and many aright ask: “Is it not hard and unwise on the part of Providence to lead a number of men to such a frightful fate, and in a way, to condemn them to the abyss of evil?” And the question might arise, “Would it not have been more fitting for a wise Providence to have averted this frightful fate from the very beginning?”

In answer to these questions, we might, to begin with, say something abstract, theoretical—and it already signifies a great deal for one who can grasp this theoretical statement is his feeling: It is extremely wise that Providence has taken care that this terrible fate is possible for a number of men. For if it were impossible for man to sink into the abyss of evil, he would not have been able to attain what on the one hand we call love and on the other freedom; since to the occultist freedom is inseparably connected with the idea of love. It would be impossible for man to develop either love or freedom without the possibility of sailing down into the abyss. A man unable, of his own free decision, to choose good or evil, would be a being who would only be led on a leading-string to a good which must be attained of necessity and who had no power to choose the good of his own fully purified will, by the love which springs from freedom. If it were impossible for man to follow in the trail of the monster with the two horns, it would also be impossible for him to follow God out of his own individual love. It was in accordance with a wise Providence to give the possibility of freedom to the humanity which has been developing through our planetary system, and this possibility of freedom could be given on no other condition than that man himself has to make the free choice between good and evil.

But this is only an empty theory, you might say, and man rises but slowly to the point where he not only says this in words and accepts it in moments of speculation as a kind of explanation, but also experiences it in his feeling. Seldom does man now rise to the thought, “I thank thee, O wise Providence, that thou hast made it possible for me to bring thee a love which is not forced but springs up free in my own breast: that thou dost not force use to love thee, but that thou hast given me tine choice of following thee.” Nevertheless, man has to rise to this feeling if he wishes really to feel this theoretical explanation. We can, however, offer additional comfort, or, rather, another quieting assurance, from a clairvoyant observation of the world. For it was stated in our last lecture that at the present day, he alone has au almost unalterable tendency to the abyss who is already entangled in some way in the prongs of the two-horned beast, which leads men to the practice of black magic. Even for such as now fall into the arts of black magic it will still be possible to withdraw in the future. But those who do not come at all into any contact with black magic arts (and this is for the time being the case with most people), these may have nevertheless a certain tendency in the period following the War of All against All, towards final evil, but the possibility in the future of turning back again and following the good will be far greater than the compulsion unconditionally to follow evil.

From these lectures it may be seen that for those who now turn to a spiritual conception of the world, in order to live beyond the great War into the sixth epoch (which is represented by the opening of the seals), there is the possibility to receive the Christ-principle. They will be able to receive the spiritual elements which are laid down in the age signified by the community at Philadelphia, and in the near future they will manifest a strong tendency towards becoming spiritual. Those who turn to-day to a spiritual view receive a powerful disposition to enter upon the upward path. One must not fail to recognize how important it is even at the present time that a number of persons should not turn a deaf ear to the anthroposophical world conception, which is bringing to humanity in a fully conscious manner the first germs of spiritual life, whereas formerly this took place unconsciously. That is the important thing, that this portion of humanity should take with it the first conscious tendencies towards the upward movement.

Through a group of people dedicating themselves to-day to the foundation of a great brotherhood which will live over into the epoch of the seven seals, help will be provided for those others, who to-day still turn a deaf ear to the teachings of Spiritual Science. For the present, we have still to go through many incarnations of the present souls before the great War of All against All, and again up to the decisive point after the great War. And afterwards in the epoch of the seals we also have to go through many changes, and men will often have the opportunity to open their hearts to the spiritual world-conception, which is to-day flowing through the anthroposophical Movement. There will be many opportunities, and you must not imagine that future opportunities will only be such as they are to-day. The way in which we are able to make the spiritual view of the world known to others is still very feeble. Even if a man were now to speak in such a way that his voice were to sound forth directly like the fire of the spirit, that would be feeble as compared with the possibilities which will exist in later and more developed bodies in order to direct our fellow-men to this spiritual movement. When humanity as a whole will have developed higher and higher in future ages, there will be very different means through which the spiritual conception of the world will be able to penetrate into men's hearts, and the most fiery word to-day is small and weak compared with what will work in the future to give all souls the possibility of the spiritual conception of the world—all the souls now living in bodies in which no heart beats for this spiritual conception of the world.

We are at the beginning of the spiritual movement, and it will grow. It will require much obduracy and much hardness to close the heart and mind to the powerful impressions of the future. The souls now living in bodies which have the heart to hear and feel Anthroposophy, are now preparing them-selves to live in bodies in the future in which power will be given them to serve their fellow-creatures, who up to that time had been unable to feel this heart beat within them. We are only preparing for the preparers, as yet nothing more. The spiritual movement is to-day but a very small flame; in the future it will develop into a mighty spiritual fire.

When we bring this other picture before our minds, when we let it enter right into our feelings, then there will live in us a very different feeling and a very different possibility of knowledge concerning this fact. To-day it is what we call black magic into which men can, in a certain way, fall consciously or unconsciously. Those who are now living thoughtlessly, who are quite untouched by the spiritual conception of the world, who live in their comfortable everyday torpor and say, “What does it matter to me what these dreaming Anthroposophists say?” these have the least opportunity of coming into the circle of black magic. In their case they are now only neglecting the opportunity to help their fellow-men in the future in their efforts to attain the spiritual life. For themselves they have not yet lost touch. But those who to-day are beginning in an unjustifiable way to oppose the spiritual life, are really taking up into themselves in the very first beginnings the germs of some-thing one might call black magic. There are very few individuals to-day who have already fallen into black magic in the frightful sense in which this horrible art of humanity must really be spoken of.

You will best understand that this really is so if I give you but a slight indication of the way in which black magic is systematic-ally cultivated; then you will see that you may search high and low among all your acquaintances and you will find no one of whom you could believe that he was already inclining to such arts. All the rest is fundamentally only the purest dilettantism which may be easily got rid of in future ages. It is bad enough that in our day things are sometimes praised with the intention to defraud people—which in a certain sense is also the beginning of the art of black magic. It is also bad that certain ideas are percolating, which—although they do not absolutely belong to the black art—nevertheless mislead people; these are the ideas which rule the world to-day in certain, circles and which can flourish amidst materialistic thought, but which although not without danger, will not be irreparable in the next epochs. Only when a man begins to practise the ABC of black magic is he on the dangerous path to the abyss. The ABC consists in the pupil of a black magician being taught to destroy life quite consciously, and in doing so to cause as much pain as possible and to feel a certain satisfaction in it. When the purpose is to stab or to cut into a living being with the intention of feeling pleasure in that being's pain, that is the ABC of the black arts. We cannot touch upon the further stages, but you will find it horrible enough when you are told that the beginning in black magic is to cut and stab into living flesh, not like the vivisector cuts—this is already bad enough, but the principle of vivisection finds its overthrow in the vivisector himself, because in kamaloca he will himself have to feel the pain he has caused his victims, and for this reason will leave vivisection alone in the future. But he who systematically cuts into flesh, and feels satisfaction in it begins to follow the precipitous path of black magic, and this draws him closer and closer to the being described as the two-horned beast.

This seductive being is of quite a different nature from man. It originates from other world periods; it has acquired the tendencies of other world periods and will feel deep satisfaction when it meets with beings such as those evil ones who have refused to take up inwardly the good which can flow from the earth. This being has been unable to receive anything from the earth; it has seen the earthly evolution come but has said, “I have not progressed with the earth in such a way that I can gain anything from earthly existence.” This being could only have got something from the earth by being able to gain the rulership at a certain moment, namely, when the Christ-principle descended to the earth. If the Christ-principle had then been strangled in the germ, if Christ had been overcome by the adversary, it would have been possible for the whole earth to succumb to the Sorath-principle. This, however, did not take place, and so this being has to be content with those who have not inclined towards the Christ-principle, who have remained embedded in matter; they in the future will form his cohorts.

Now in order to understand these hosts more clearly we must consider two ideas which in a certain sense may serve as a key to certain chapters of the Apocalypse. We must study the ideas of the “first death” and the “second death.” What is the first death and what is the second death of man, or of humanity? We must form a clear picture of the ideas which the writer of the Apocalypse connected with these words. To this end we must once more recall to mind the elementary truths concerning human existence.

Consider a human being of the present day. He lives in such a way that from morning when he awakes until evening when he falls asleep he consists of four principles: the physical body, etheric body, astral body and the “I.” We also know that during his earthly existence man works from his “I” upon the lower principles of his being, and that during the earth existence he must succeed in bringing the astral body under the control of the “I.” We know that the earth will be followed by its next incarnation, Jupiter. When main has reached Jupiter he will appear as a different being. The Jupiter-man will have thoroughly worked from his “I” upon his astral body; and when to-day we say, The earth-man who stands before us in the waking condition has developed physical body, etheric body, astral body and “I,” we must say of the Jupiter-man: he will have developed physical body, etheric body, astral body and “I” but he will have changed his astral body into spirit-self. He will live at a higher stage of consciousness, a stage which may be described as follows: The ancient dim-picture-consciousness of the Moon, which existed also in the first epochs of the earth-consciousness, will again be there with its pictures as clairvoyant consciousness, but it will be furnished with the human “I,” so that with this Jupiter-consciousness man will reflect as logically as he does now with his day-consciousness on the earth.

The Jupiter-man therefore will possess spiritual vision of a certain degree. Part of the soul-world will lie open to him; the will perceive the pleasure and pain of those around him in pictures which will arise in his imaginative consciousness. He will there-fore live under entirely different moral conditions. Now imagine that as a Jupiter-man you have a human soul before you. The pain and pleasure of this soul will arise in pictures before you. The pictures of the pair of the other soul will distress you, and if you do not remove the other's pain it will be impossible for you to feel happy. The pictures of sorrow and suffering would torment the Jupiter-man with his exalted consciousness if he were to do nothing to alleviate this sorrow and thus at the same dine remove his own distressing pictures which are nothing but the expression of the sorrow around him! It will not be possible for one to feel pleasure or pain without others also feeling it.

Thus we see that man gains an entirely new state of consciousness in addition to his present “I”-consciousness. If we wish to understand the importance of this in evolution we must once more turn our attention to man when asleep.

During this condition the physical body and etheric body lie on the bed, and his “I” and astral body are outside. During the night (if we speak somewhat inexactly) he callously abandons his physical and etheric bodies. But through being able to liberate himself during the night from his physical and etheric bodies, through being able to live at night in the spiritual world, it is possible for man during this earthly existence to work transformingly from his “I” upon his astral body. How does he do this?

To describe this clearly let us take man in his waking state. Let us suppose that in addition to his professional work and duties he devotes a short time to higher considerations in order to make the great impulses his own which flow from John's Gospel, from the words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God ...” Let us suppose that he allows to rise within him the great pictures brought before him in John's Gospel, so that he is always filled by the thought: “At the beginning of our era a Being lived in Palestine whom I wish to follow. I will so order my life that everything may be approved by this Being; and I will consider myself as a man who has taken this personality as his ideal.” But we need not intolerantly think that John's Gospel alone may be taken. It is possible in many other ways to immerse oneself in something which can fill the soul with such pictures; and although in a certain way we must describe John's Gospel as the greatest revelation which has originated in humanity, which can exercise the most powerful effect, we may, however, say that others who devote themselves to the Vedanta wisdom or immerse themselves in the Bhagavad Gita or in the Dhammapada, will also have sufficient opportunities in following incarnations to come to the Christ-principle just through what they have thus acquired. Let us suppose that during the day a man fills his mind with pictures and ideas such as these, then his astral body is laid hold of by these thoughts, feelings and pictures, and they form forces in his astral body and produce various effects in it. Then when man withdraws from his physical and etheric bodies at night, these effects remain in the astral body, and he who during the day has been able to immerse himself in the pictures and feelings of John's Gospel has produced something in his astral body which during the night appears in it as a powerful effect. In this way man works to-day during the waking consciousness upon his astral body.

Only the Initiate can become conscious of these effects to-day, but men are gradually developing towards this consciousness. Those who reach the goal of the earth evolution will then have an astral body completely permeated by the “I,” and by the spiritual content which it will have formed. They will have this consciousness as a result, as a fruit of the earth evolution, and will carry it over into the Jupiter evolution. We might say that when the Earth period has thus come to an end man will have gained capacities which are symbolically represented by the building of the New Jerusalem. Man will then already look into that picture-world of Jupiter; the spirit-self will then be fully developed in him. That is the goal of the earth evolution. What, then, is man to gain in the course of his earthly evolution? What is the first goal? The transformation of the astral body. This astral body which to-day is always free of the physical and etheric bodies at night will appear in the future as a transformed portion of the human being. Mau brings into it what he gains on the earth; but this would not be sufficient for the earth evolution. Imagine that man were to come out of the physical body and etheric body every night and were to fill his astral body with what he had acquired during the day, but that the physical and etheric bodies were untouched by it. Man would then still not reach his earthly goal. Something else must take place; it must be possible for man during his earthly evolution to imprint, at least in the etheric body, what he has taken into himself. It is necessary for this etheric body also to receive effects from what man develops in his astral body. Man cannot yet of himself work into this etheric body. Upon Jupiter, when he has trans-formed his astral body, he will be able to work into this etheric body also, but to-day he cannot do this; he still needs helpers, so to speak. Upon Jupiter he will be capable of beginning the real work on the etheric body. Upon Venus he will work upon the physical body; this is the part most difficult to overcome. To-day he still has to leave both the physical and etheric bodies every night and emerge from them. But in order that the etheric body may receive its effects, so that man shall gradually learn to work into it, he needs a helper. And the helper who makes this possible is none other than Christ, while we designate the Being who helps man to work into the physical body as the Father. But man cannot work into his physical body before the helper conies who makes it possible to work into the etheric body. “No man cometh to the Father, but by me.” No one acquires the capacity of working into the physical body who has not gone through the Christ-principle. However, when he has reached the goal of earthly evolution, man will have the capacity—through being able to transform his astral body by his own power—to work upon the etheric body also. This he owes to the living presence of the Christ-principle on the earth. Had Christ not united him-self with the earth as a living being, had he not come into the aura of the earth, that which is developed in the astral body would not be communicated to the etheric body. From this we see that one who shuts himself up by turning away from the Christ-principle deprives himself of the possibility of working into his etheric body in the way that is necessary during earthly evolution.

Thus we shall be able to characterize in another way the two kinds of men which we find at the end of the earth's evolution. We have those who have received the Christ-principle and thus transformed their astral body, and who have gained the help of Christ to transform the etheric body also. And we have the others who did not come to the Christ-principle; who also were unable to change anything in the etheric body, for they could not find the helper, Christ. Now let us look at the future of mankind. The earth spiritualizes itself, that is, man must lose completely something which he now un his physical existence considers as belonging to him. We can form an idea of what will then happen to man if we consider the ordinary course of his life after death. He loses the physical body at death. It is to this physical body that he owes the desires and inclinations which bind him to the ordinary life; and we have described what man experiences after death. Let us take a person who is fond of some particularly dainty food. During life he can enjoy this, but not after death. The desire, however, does not cease, for this is seated, not in the physical body but in the astral body, and as the physical instrument is absent it is impossible to gratify this desire. Such persons look down from kamaloca to the physical world which they have left; they see there all that could give them satisfaction, but they cannot enjoy it because they have no physical instrument for the purpose. Through this they experience a burning thirst. Thus it is with all desires that remain in man after death and are related to the physical world, because they can only be satisfied through physical instruments. This is the case every time after death; each time man sees his physical body fall away, and as something remains in him from this physical body it still urges him to the ordinary world of the physical plane, and until he has weaned himself from this in the spiritual world he lives in the fire of desire. Now imagine the last earthly incarnation before the spiritualization of the earth, the laying aside of the last physical body. Those who are now living on the earth will have progressed so far through the Christ-principle that, in a certain way, it will not be very difficult for than to lay aside the very last physical body; they will, however, be obliged to leave something, for all that can give pleasure from the objects of this earth will have disappeared once and for all from the spiritual earth. Think of the last death possible in our earth evolution, think of the laying aside of the last physical body. It is this last death of the incarnations which in the Apocalypse is called the first death, and those who have received the Christ-principle see this physical body as a sort of husk which falls away. The etheric body has now become important to them for, with the help of Christ, it has become so organized that it is for the time being adapted to the astral body and no longer desires and longs for what is below in the physical world. Only through all that has been brought into the etheric body through the help of Christ do men continue to live on in the spiritualized earth. Harmony has been produced between their astral and etheric bodies by the Christ-principle.

On the other hand there are those who have not received the Christ-principle. These do not possess this harmony. They too must lose the physical body, for there is no such thing in the spiritual earth. Everything physical must first be dissolved. It remains as desires for the physical, as the unpurified spiritual, as the spiritual hardened in matter. An etheric body remains which the Christ has not helped to be adapted to the astral body, but which is suited to the physical body. They are the souls who will feel hot fires of desire for physical sensuality; in the etheric body they will feel unappeasable, burning desire by reason of what they have had in the physical life and which they must now do without. Thus, in the next period, after the physical has melted away, we have men who live in an etheric body which harmonizes with the astral body, and we have others whose etheric body lives in discord because they desire what has fallen away with the physical body.

Then in the further stage of evolution there comes a condition where the spiritualizing of the earth has proceeded so far that there can no longer be even an etheric body. Those whose etheric body completely harmonizes with the astral body lay aside this etheric body without pain, for they remain in their astral body which is filled with the Christ-Being. They feel the laying aside of the etheric body as a necessity in evolution, for they feel within them the capacity to build it up again for them-selves because they have received Christ. Those, however, who in this etheric body desire what belongs to the past cannot retain this etheric body, when all becomes astral. It will be taken from them, it will be torn out of them, and they now perceive this as a second dying, as the “second death.”

This second death passes unnoticed over those who have made their etheric body harmonize with the astral body through the reception of the Christ-principle. The second death has no power over then. But the others feel the second death when they have to pass over into the future astral form. The condition of humanity will then be such that those who have reached the goal of evolution will have entirely permeated their astral body with Christ. They will be ready to pass over to Jupiter. Upon our earth they have made the plan of the Jupiter evolution. This is the plan which is called the New Jerusalem. They live in a new heaven and a new earth, that is, Jupiter. This new Jupiter will be accompanied by a satellite, composed of those who are excluded from the life in the spiritual, who have experienced the second death and are, therefore, unable to attain the Jupiter consciousness.

Thus we have such men as have pressed forward to the Jupiter consciousness, who have attained to spirit-self; and such beings as have thrust away the forces which would have given them this consciousness. They are those who only upon Jupiter have attained to the “I”-consciousness of the earth, who exist there, so to speak, as man now exists on the earth with his four members. But such a man can develop himself only on the earth, the earth alone has the environment, the ground, the air, the clouds, the plants, the minerals which are necessary to man if he wishes to gain what may be gained within the four members. Jupiter will be quite differently formed, it will be a new earth, soil, air, water, everything will be different. It will be impossible for beings who have only gained the earth consciousness to live a normal life; they will be backward beings.

But now comes something more for our comfort. Even on this Jupiter there is still a last possibility, through the strong powers which the advanced will have, to move those fallen beings to turn back and even to convert a number. Only with the Venus incarnation of the earth will conic the last decision, the unalterable decision. When we reflect upon all this, the thought we recently considered will be seen in a new light. It will no longer call forth anxiety and disquietude, but only the determination: “I will do everything necessary to fulfil the earth mission.”

When we consider all this in the right way, a mighty picture of the future of humanity opens up before us and we get some idea of all that was in the illuminated soul of the writer of the Apocalypse who wrote down what we, in a faltering way, can discover from a study of it. Every word of the writer, indeed every turn of expression, is significant. We must only try to understand it clearly. Thus, according to our last lecture, in 666 we are referred to the beast with the two horns, and then a remarkable statement is made, “Here is Wisdom! Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man.” An apparent contradiction, but one of the many contradictions which are to be found in every occult work and exposition. You may be sure of one thing; that an exposition which runs so smoothly that the ordinary human intellect can find no contradiction is certainly not based on an occult foundation. Nothing in world-evolution is so shallow and trivial as that which the human intellect, the ordinary intelligence perceives as free from contradiction. One must penetrate more deeply into the substrata of human contemplation and then the contradictions will disappear. One who observes how a plant grows from root to fruit, how the green leaf changes into the petals, these into the stamens, etc., may say, “Here we have contradictory forms, the flower-leaf contradicts the stem-leaf.” But one who looks more deeply will see the unity, the deeper unity in the contradiction. So it is with what the intellect can see in the world. It is precisely in the deepest wisdom that it sees contradictions. Hence it must not disturb us when here in the Apocalypse we meet with an apparent contradiction: “Let him that hath understanding ponder over the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man.”

We must once more consider by what means it may be possible for a man to be led astray by the two-horned beast. We have pointed out that since the middle of the Atlantean epoch man has slept through the higher spiritual development, so to speak. This sleep still exists at the present time. But it was necessary. If it had not entered in, that which we call the intellect would never have been developed. Man did not possess this before our epoch, he acted from other impulses. His pictures drove him to action, without reflection. He had lost this ancient gift of spiritual vision and in its place he has developed intellect and thereby descended into matter. This has drawn a veil over the spiritual world, but at the same time the intellect has been acquired. This may be a great hindrance to the spiritual development. At the very last it will be nothing else but this misguided intellect, this misguided intelligence, which can prevent man from coming to the Christ-principle; and if those who at last succumb to the two-horned beast could look back upon what has dealt them the worst blow they would say, “The tendency to descend into the abyss only came later, but that which darkened the Christ-principle for me was the intellect.” Let him who has this intellect reflect upon the number of the beast; for only through man having become man, that is to say, through his being gifted with this ego-intellect, can he succumb to the beast 666. For the number of the beast is at the same time the number of a man. And only one possessing intellect can perceive that this is so. It is the number of that man who has let himself be misled by his intellect. Deep truths such as these are concealed in these things.

Thus you see that the writer of the Apocalypse gives you a great deal when you reflect upon the various intimations we have given. He expresses many of the truths known to Spiritual Science. He gives what he promises. He leads man to the vision of what is to come; to the vision of the beings and powers which guide the world. He leads us to the spirit in the first seal, and to the form presented in the last seal. Here we see how the regular form of the New Jerusalem is revealed to him spiritually. The regularity of the New Jerusalem is indicated in the last chapter by its description as a cube. To describe all that is in this last picture would take us too far.

It is now necessary to point out for what purpose the Apocalypse was written. I should indeed have to say a great deal if I were to describe this in detail, but you cm at least take away with you one hint, one which we find at a certain part of the Apocalypse. The writer of the Apocalypse says: A time will come when that high degree of consciousness will actually have developed, when man will see the beings who direct the world, the beings represented by the Lamb and by the appearance of the Son of Man, with the flaming sword. We are referred to this in tones which contain within them that assurance of which we have spoken. The writer of the Apocalypse, who is a great seer, knows that in ancient times men were gifted with a dim clairvoyance. We have described this and have seen how at that time inns were the companions, so to speak, of beings in the spiritual world, and themselves saw the spiritual world. But who has lost this gift of seership? Who? We must now put this forward as an important question. We have seen that fundamentally it was lost by those men who were led to the physical plane, the physical life, when the second half of the Atlantean epoch began. Man looked upon the solid formation of our earth, upon the clearly outlined objects of our earth. The ancient clairvoyance disappeared; he became self-conscious, but the spiritual world was closed to him. The formations which un ancient times filled the air like an ocean of mist, disappeared; the air became clear, the ground distinct. Man descended to the visible earth. This took place comparatively late, it coincided with the attainment of the present intellect, the present self-consciousness of man. Now let us remember what has been said about this earth as well as about the great Event of Golgotha. If some one had observed the earth at that time from a distance with spiritual vision at the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer, he would have perceived that its whole astral aura changed. The earth was then permeated by the Christ-force. Through this event the earth will be able to reunite with the sun. This power will grow. This is the power which preserves our etheric body from the second death. Christ becomes the Earth-spirit more and more, and the true Christian understands the words, “He who eats my bread treads me underfoot”; he considers the body of the earth as the body of Christ. The earth as a planetary body is the body of Christ; of course at present this is only at its beginning. Christ has still to become the Earth-spirit; He will smite himself fully with the earth, and when the earth later unites with the sun, the great Earth-spirit, Christ, will be the Sun-Spirit.

The body of the earth will be the body of Christ; and men must work upon this body. They began this when they entered upon the earth; they have worked upon this earth with their forces. In all traditions one can fund something which is little noticed because little understood. Thus, for example, in the Persian tradition we find that since the time men lost clairvoyant consciousness they have become beings who have pierced the earth. While they live in the phases which they pierce the earth—that is, while they work upon the earth—during this time when they pierce the body of Christ they do not see with clairvoyant consciousness the guiding powers and, above all, they do not see the Christ face to face. But the writer of the Apocalypse refers to the time when not only those who at that time had spiritual vision will see the spiritual, but when humanity will again have come to the stage where it is possible to see the Christ-Being himself. All will see him, including those who have pierced him, these who had to pass through a portion of their evolution in cultivating the earth, in the piercing of the earth, they will see the Christ. For these sayings are such that they lead those who gradually learn to unveil them deep into the imaginative world of the Mysteries, of the Apocalyptic language.

What, then, did the Apocalyptist wish to write, what did he wish to represent? This question will be answered if we briefly refer to the origin of the Apocalypse. Where do we first fund what is written down in the Apocalypse? If you could look back into the Mysteries of ancient Greece, into the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries, if you could go back into the Mysteries of ancient Egypt, Chaldea, Persia and India, you would find the Apocalypse everywhere. It existed, it was there. It was not written down, but lived from one generation of priests to another, through the generations of the Initiators, where the memory was so vivid that one could master such abundant material. Memory even in much later times was far better than ours; we need only remember the singers of the Iliad, how they went about and sang their songs from memory. It is comparatively not long ago, that memory has deteriorated so much. In the Mysteries these truths were not written down, but they lived from generation to generation of the Initiators. Why was the Apocalypse written? It was intended to serve as an instruction for those who brought the pupils into Initiation. At that time the one who was to be initiated was led out of the physical body and remained as if dead. But when he had been led out, the Initiator enabled him to see in his etheric body that which later through the Christ-impulse he would be able to see spiritually in the physical body. Thus the ancient Initiates were the prophets who could point to Christ; and they did so. They were able to do this, because Christ is shown in this Apocalypse as due to appear in the future. The Mystery of Golgotha had never yet taken place where a person in the physical body could set forth the whole drama of Initiation historically. Where then could the possibility of this Event of Golgotha be comprehended? At a certain stage the Initiates had comprehended it outside their body. That which took place on Golgotha had taken place before in another consciousness. There might have been thousands there, and yet the Event of Golgotha could have passed by them unnoticed. What would it have been to them? The death of an ordinary condemned person! It was only possible to understand what took place on Golgotha where the contents of the Mysteries were known. The Initiators could say, You can understand the one whom we have shown you during the three and a half days, whom the prophets announced to you, if you use the means which the Mysteries can give you. The Apocalyptist had received the tradition of the Mysteries orally; he said, “If I am permeated with what can be experienced in the Mysteries, Christ appears to me.” Thus the Apocalypse was nothing new; but its application to the unique Event of Golgotha was something new. The essential thing was that for those who have ears to hear it was possible, with the help of what is in the Apocalypse of John, to penetrate gradually to the true understanding of the Event of Golgotha. This was the intention of the writer of the Apocalypse. He received the Apocalypse from the ancient Mysteries; it is an ancient sacred book of humanity and has only been presented externally to humanity by the disciple whom the Lord loved and to whom he bequeathed the task of announcing his true form. He is to remain until Christ comes; so that those who have a more illuminated consciousness will be able to understand him. He is the great teacher of the true Event of Golgotha. He has given to man the means by which he can really understand the Event of Golgotha. At the beginning of the Apocalypse the writer says (I have tried to translate the first few words in such a way that they convey the true meaning): “This is the revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave unto his servant, to show in brief what must needs come to pass. This is put in symbols and sent through an angel to his servant John, who wrote these things.” He wishes to describe it in brief; what does this mean? It means in other words: “If I were to describe in detail all that will take place from now up to the goal of the earth evolution, I. should have to write a very great deal, but I will show it to you in a short sketch.” This the translators who could not penetrate into the spirit of the Apocalypse have translated as “to show what must shortly come to pass.” They thought that what is described in the Apocalypse was to happen in the near future. But it ought to read: “I will briefly describe what will take place.” The original text fully admits of the true interpretation I have tried to give in the introduction to Seals and Columns.

We have said much in these lectures concerning this ancient sacred record of the human race, much concerning the secrets which the Lord imparted to humanity by the disciple whom he loved. You may have learnt from this that the Apocalypse is a profound book full of wisdom, and have perhaps many tines during these considerations been troubled because much in it is so difficult to understand. Now I should like to say one thing at the close of our studies. All that I have been able to say to you corresponds exactly to the intentions of the writer of the Apocalypse, and was always taught in this way in the schools which have kept to the intention of the writer of the Apocalypse. But it is by no means all that could be said and one can go much deeper into the truths, into the foundations of the Apocalypse. And if we were to penetrate fully into all the depths, what I have been able to say to you would seem only like a first superficial presentation. It cannot be done in any other way, we can at first give only a superficial presentation. One must go through this. One has to begin with the elementary things, and then, when one has gone a little further, greater depths will be found. For below the surface there is a very great deal of which we have been only able to unveil a very little. If you go further along the path which in a certain way you have begun by turning your attention to the exposition of the Apocalypse of John, you will gradually penetrate into the depths of the spiritual life. You will come into depths which cannot possibly be expressed to-day, because they could not be brought into consciousness, because no one has yet ears to hear. The ears must first be prepared to hear, by such explanations as have now been given. Then they will gradually be there, cars able to hear the Word which flows at such profound depths through the Apocalypse. If you have been able to receive a little of what could be imparted, you must be aware that only the most superficial things could be given, and of these only a few observations. May it give you the impulse to penetrate more and more deeply into what can only be surmised through these lectures. If I were to say only what can be said about the surface, I should have to lecture for still many, many weeks. These lectures could only be a stimulus for further study, and those who feel the impulse to penetrate more deeply into the Apocalypse will have received them in the right way.

My address this evening represents a break in our current series; its subject is quite different from yesterday's.¹ This morning I received a letter, and I feel compelled, even obligated, to bring it to the attention of each individual member of the Anthroposophical Society. I will explain my reasons after I read you the letter.

Letter from Heinrich and Gertrud Goesch to Rudolf Steiner

19 August 1915, Dornach

Dear Dr. Steiner:

Alongside the work dedicated to the good within your activity in our spiritual movement, I have noticed certain behaviors that serve evil purposes. On the good side, I am grateful for the esoteric knowledge and teachings you have imparted to us, for the mystery dramas you have given us, for the introduction of eurythmy, and for the art of the Johannesbau. In these contexts, I continue to recognize you as an envoy of the great white lodge and am filled with profound gratitude to you and to anything you do that is devoted to the good.

However, I perceive the way you cultivate relationships between yourself and other members of our spiritual movement as serving evil purposes, and I see this behavior as gravely endangering our movement. The relationships you create between yourself and other members turn the others into merely parts of yourself rather than independent spiritual entities alongside you. You only appear to act as a human being among equals. In actuality, you scorn any truly human connection and presume to intervene in the lives of others in a way that belongs only to the gods and not to any modern human being.

In this way, you create an anti-Christian relationship between yourself and the other members of our spiritual movement. These people have readied themselves to meet great spiritual teachings in our time, but you are making them poorer than the poorest materialists out there, who in spite of their distorted Christianity that has turned into its exact opposite are still able to develop a strong I. If it goes on like this, however, your followers will eventually fall prey to black magic as a result of the constant weakening of their I through how you behave toward them.

There have already been instances of highly respected members substituting a reliance on your word for reliance on the truth; they cut off any criticism of any part of your work, objecting that your critics would be placing themselves above you. They feel that putting oneself above you is such an act of wanton temerity as to be out of the question, and that with their objection the issue is resolved once and for all. The members are not to blame for erroneous ideas like this—you are. In your concern to promulgate ever more of your teachings, you have neglected to cultivate the attitude among your pupils that as Christians, individuals must put themselves not only below any other person, but also above any other; not only are the least of our fellow human beings of irreplaceable value to us in their most profound depths of being, but also the least of us carry responsibility for the most advanced and must oppose their errors. Your own teachings have strengthened me in this conviction. In real life, however, you apply a number of means that work counter to this Christian ideal of human community.

I will now discuss two of these means in detail so that the thrust of my contentions becomes clearer.

It is a fact that you have developed the habit of making promises and not keeping them. No one will maintain that you do not have a sufficiently clear view of the future, or that you are too weak to carry out your original intentions, either of which would constitute a certain justification for failing to keep promises. No, this is a case of deliberately causing disappointment. Since the promises were unsolicited and made at your own initiative, it is also a case of deliberate intervention into someone else's life in order do something that is by rights reserved for destiny. A disappointment that comes to us through karma has a direct and beneficial effect on our development. In contrast, a disappointment deliberately arranged for us by another person is at the very least a heavy blow, and if our confidence in the person delivering the blow is not shaken, it also constitutes a weakening of our I. The difference is the same as the difference between meeting an accidental death in a burning building and death by burning at the stake, premeditated by others.

Because of their trust in you, recipients of such a promise who are waiting for it to be kept get into a state of tension and uncertainty; meanwhile you are able to calmly survey their gradually increasing disappointment. Once the people in question have realized that the promise is not going to be kept, they will not take your word seriously in the future and thus will distance themselves from you, at least to some extent. However, since on the whole they continue to put their trust in you, they will lose all standards for the sanctity of giving one's word, and may perhaps begin to act as you do. As a result, they are dependent on you in a humanly unworthy fashion and will try to affect others in the same way you do.

Alternatively, people may respond in one of the three following ways: First, because of the confidence they have in you, they may assume that there must be a deep occult meaning behind the way you act. They will conclude that there can be profound occult reasons that permit or even obligate someone to make promises without intending to keep them. Occasionally we even meet people whose emotions are so confused that they admire that kind of behavior and take it as a sign of something superhuman. It is evident, however, that nothing in this world can authorize a modern human being to make promises without intending to keep them. Causing disappointment is something reserved for the gods who direct our karma.

This sort of conceptual confusion is all the more dangerous for a student of esotericism because modern spiritual science appeals to our healthy capacity for discernment, which is undermined by things like this. In a most unfortunate fashion, your word displaces the truth; the thought “I must not place myself above him” displaces the realization that you have done something evil. The human dignity of these people crumbles away bit by bit, and they turn into spiritually dependent tools in your hands.

The second possibility for those whose trust has been betrayed is that in order to be able to maintain their confidence in you, the people in question never let themselves become fully conscious of the fact that you never had any intention of keeping the promises you made to them. As a way out, they take your not keeping promises as a new revelation of a being they do not experience as really human and cannot hold responsible as they would a human being. This point of view is in fact already represented within the Society and is leading to your becoming ever more shadowlike as a human being.

The third and final possibility is that some people will choose the radical way out, forgetting the fact that a promise of some kind was ever made. This, too, robs people of a bit of their I. As a result, your coworkers in our spiritual movement will be shadows whose I is weakened, rather than independent individuals. You yourself, however, are the one to blame for all this.

A second example of the evil nature of your behavior is your refusal to accept any criticism of people working in our movement. On occasion, you have implied that any such criticism stems from negative emotions. This is a false assumption. I am not talking about malicious or destructive criticism. Many of our members, out of their sincere sense of responsibility, are capable of constructive criticism, and that is what I am talking about. The only possible reason for avoiding such criticism would be knowing that people in positions of responsibility are unfit for their jobs. In our modern age, people are meant to come together out of their own free will and freely create the kind of hierarchy and order necessary for us to accomplish what we have to do, and a certain amount of constructive mutual criticism is our only guarantee of success. In fact, the only way a true, natural, and appropriate hierarchical order can come about nowadays is if this kind of criticism is allowed to work.

If people who have been criticized do not choose to take action on justified accusations—and in fact they are morally obliged to actively seek criticism—they must give up their positions in the hierarchy so that the truth can triumph. Their superiors should not protect people like that by acting as if everything were going fine. This is what our modern age requires. However, if at any level in the hierarchical order mistakes are not criticized but tolerated and allowed to persist, we are only creating a false hierarchy that is based, not on real human capabilities and relationships, but on fiction—a fiction that is maintained only through further wrongdoing. Once again, the result is a lack of humanity and Christianity in our relationships in general, and once again you are to blame. In the organization of our Society as it has gradually developed under your guidance, the strengths of the members are usurped to the advantage of yourself and perhaps of certain other people prominent in this false hierarchy. Meanwhile, the Society's affairs are being mismanaged.

Personal oversensitivity on the part of those being criticized is something that needs to be eliminated; you might give a lecture about this sometime. As a general rule, especially if it comes at the right moment, criticism can take a stimulating and gratifying form and be free of any personal bitterness, so that its thorns are removed and the recipient can be glad to receive help in resolving the issue. The nervousness and animosity so prevalent among the critics spring in part from the justified feeling that even the most objective criticism will not be heeded, but will be looked at askance and disregarded. A truly superior person has no reason to fear criticism; true superiority can stand the test of even the most pointed criticism. In the event that people attempt to offer criticism out of a sense of responsibility but are not really able to grasp the facts of the case, those people can usually be made to see their misunderstanding sooner or later without any undue waste of time.

At the moment, I am not talking about a case like this one, where the criticism has already developed into a well-founded rejection of an entire self-contained system confronting me. In this case, no amount of postponement would make any difference. If in a specific instance, however, a person I myself recognize as superior—not simply someone who, for some unknown reason, is my superior in a false hierarchy—points out that I do not yet fully understand the case in question, I will gladly defer my criticism until the case can be considered closed. Under your influence, however, the principle at work in our spiritual movement is that any such criticism should be withheld indefinitely—until the facts of the case have been forgotten. And this principle applies not only to certain specific cases, but to all such instances. This is not only wrong and harmful to everyone, it also undermines our discernment, on which so much depends.

Once again, I have to point out the inherent contradiction between spiritual science's appeal to people's healthy power of judgment and the fact that in most instances in our movement, this power of judgment must be subordinated to incomprehensible reasons for measures being taken. You must admit, however, that at this point in time, two thousand years after Christ, people possess certain standards that all individuals can apply and must also allow to be applied to themselves, if they are not to be utterly lost. There are certainly a sufficient number of closed cases that really are subject to our judgment. The mere fact that a person feels compelled to think about a particular case usually suggests that he or she is capable of achieving some clarity in the matter, though not necessarily without help.

As things stand at the moment, our members are constantly expending a considerable portion of their spiritual energy on the useless task of seeking out hidden wisdom-filled motives for the evil behavior of yourself and your highest colleagues, while you stand by, calmly observing this waste of effort. Or, in order not to lose faith in you, these people have to decide to repress these truth-seeking forces in themselves and thus fall prey to partial stupefaction. What happens with these forces then? What a horrible thought to pursue! In any case, you represent a great focal point of forces of which individuals are merely the instruments, to be used as you choose for incomprehensible ends. There is no question in our movement of real interaction taking place between complete human beings, interaction in which each one is allowed to contribute his or her best. You are not a friend to all the members; your whole attitude rejects lively friendly relationships. In truth, for many people, you are the greatest enemy they have ever encountered.

All these things I have described are not only objectively evil, they also directly contradict the teachings you promulgate. It is from you that I learned the reasons that lead me to reject the way you act. As time goes on, you give an ever stronger impression of acting on your connection to the Christ impulse only in your lectures; outside the lectures, you embrace impulses that are quite the opposite. In parts, it already seems to me as if your teaching has been somewhat influenced by what you practice in real life—not the content of your teachings, but their formal structure. In their structure, certain sentences make promises that are then not kept and can only serve the purpose of subjecting the reader to fruitless thought and work. (See “Gedanken wahrend der Zeit des Krieges.”)² If people try to explain this by saying that you, like any other human being, may have changed your mind over the course of time, you reject this as irksome criticism (Preface to Riddles of Philosophy, last paragraph).³ Both these passages, by the way, clearly show a change in style verging on the incomprehensible.

The kind of interpersonal attitude you create not only contradicts your teachings; your behavior also contradicts what you yourself demand of spiritual teachers in the modern age. Such teachers should appeal only to people's consciousness. Their self-chosen obligation toward their students is to never exercise any magical influence on the students' subconscious that the latter have not consented to or cannot control. You, however, are doing this incessantly through the behavior I described and through other occult means. For you, every handshake, every friendly conversation becomes a means of cultivating these false relationships. The bliss that fills the members after meeting with you is not the bliss of the communion of saints, but a merely Luciferic-Ahrimanic one. You, not the members themselves, are to blame for this. You even try to use these handshakes and friendly conversations to pull members back into the fold against their will once they have recognized the falsity of the relationships you try to create. I have perceived with certainty that you exercise undue influence on your followers in this way.

In the modern age, when any uncontrollable influence on the subconscious of others must be avoided, it is not enough to simply give lectures or introduce new spirituality. In addition, the life you lead together with the other members of our movement must be governed by Christian impulses; your relationships with your followers must become like those of Benedictus, so beautifully portrayed in your fourth mystery drama. In fact, now that we have received so much in the way of teachings, developing such relationships is the much more urgent obligation.

When I ask myself how it can possibly be that you whose task it was to proclaim these teachings can act in ways directly counter to them, I can conceive of two possible answers. On the one hand, I can guess at the reasons why the great white lodge might have had to choose a person who is not yet completely Christianized for this task, and in your capacity as teacher I still accept you as the envoy of the lodge. On the other hand, it seems to me that your most profound motivation is by no means actively evil, although what I have had to say might be erroneously interpreted to imply that. No, it is simply a too one-sided interest in renewing these teachings in a way appropriate to our times, and above all a fear of real life. By avoiding and obstructing real life and by creating substitutes for it, however, you allow an evil force to develop. In this, I see the greatest danger to our spiritual movement and to yourself.

Fully Christian occultists can never rest content with simply passing on teachings; they must also enter into a life partnership with their students. True relationships from person to person in the Christian sense require each one of us to be an open book to all others to the extent their individual strength permits. All people should give themselves completely to their fellows to whatever extent the latter can receive them. This should be the basis of any modern hierarchy. Those higher up in the hierarchy must turn to those beneath them with whatever they have to give. What you practice, however, is anti-Christian and just the opposite. Whenever possible you arrange things so that intentions are kept in the dark and events are treated as if they had not happened. It is not enough to confess that like anyone else, you too can have a weak moment. Whenever we meet any other person (a person who in the Christian sense is just as necessary as ourselves), we do so as people who are imperfect in some way and still need to learn. This fact must not only be admitted, it must be constantly confirmed in our actions as human beings. It is truly necessary to seek out this interaction with our fellows, no matter how much an occultist of the old school may dread it. It is not enough to simply protest against blind admiration; we must also seek out objective criticism.

In communities of this sort, spiritual teachers must renounce all the help available to them in pre-Christian times for making students receptive to their teachings. Above all, they must renounce the unapproachable authority of the teacher filled with divine wisdom, who taught students in whom the I had not yet been born. They must also do without the complete isolation of teachers and pupils from all human relationships. The problem I am pointing out here did not exist for pre-Christian initiators. The individual I had not yet been born, and the divine being working through the teachers had the authority to intervene in the destiny of the students in ways otherwise reserved for karma. But as Christians, we must see modern initiates first and foremost as human beings, and our confidence in them depends on them not exercising any superhuman influence on our destiny.

For someone who is directing all his energies toward the renewal of occult teachings for our times, the temptation is great to reject the difficult tasks of Christian community and to artificially make his teaching easier by any of the means appropriate in earlier times. However, these things have become evil in our times, and it would be better nowadays for the teacher to remain invisible except when promulgating the doctrine than it would be for him to relate to his students as you are doing. Maintaining and strengthening the I of each student is much more important than passing on the teachings—after all, the teachings are directed to the individual I. Any restriction of the ego's rights must also result in the teachings taking root within the individual in the wrong way. Any dulling of individual discernment represents a grave danger to those striving for the spirit.

I will admit that in one sense, this kind of right living is infinitely more difficult for you than for others. Christian occultists must take up a challenge that other people will face only in times to come; that is, to both live and be a seer. They are in constant danger of falsely confusing these different planes and the laws that govern them. But they cannot escape this danger by refusing the challenge; for without being able to orient themselves according to the Christ impulse, they would still get these two planes mixed up in unjustified ways. When this happens in a meeting with a pupil, the pupil will be the first to experience the disastrous results, although they will soon revert to the teacher.

The community of the Grail is perhaps the only place where this challenge has been met satisfactorily to any extent. You yourself admit that you are not totally satisfied with what you have been able to tell us about the Grail, and you have clearly described your own difficulties in researching the Grail mysteries, although you call the new initiates “initiates of the Grail.” Perhaps the Grail will grant us salvation in this difficult hour.

Through the events I have described, my wife and I find ourselves in a situation with regard to yourself that makes it impossible for us to encounter you again in the way my wife did for the last time on Sunday, July 25, in the Schreinerei, and I on Thursday, August 5, on the steps leading to the eurythmy room. We were both in possession of this knowledge already at that time, as you were well aware. Nevertheless, you shook our hands and drew us into conversation as if nothing had happened. Healthy tact would have made that kind of thing impossible for any non-clairvoyant, so in your case I have to recognize it as an attempt at impermissible intervention into my inner being. I will refrain from explaining this statement in greater detail at this point because that would lead us too far afield.

It is still possible for me to greet you from a distance with all due respect as the bearer of great teachings, as I attempted to do on that evening. But I cannot submit to exchanging handshakes and friendly conversations with you as if nothing had happened, and especially not since I have clearly seen that these very handshakes and conversations are one of your chief means of exercising impermissible influences on your pupils and since I cannot share the opinion of a certain respected member that these things exist for the purpose of testing one's own strength in the face of outside influences.

To inform you of the need to avoid further personal contact is the purpose of this letter inasmuch as it concerns the two of us personally.

With regard to yourself, my purpose in writing to you about this very serious matter is to see accomplished the little I can do as your fellow human being, namely, to confront you with the fact that a person on the physical plane and using physical means has been able to point out to you the evil in your actions. You would be condemned to a shadowy existence if no one would turn to you like this. I hope that the fact that at least a few people nowadays are capable of recognizing your errors as such, remembering them and taking a stand against them, will be of help to you in the now necessary process of restructuring life in our spiritual movement. There are a few other members whom I can expect to understand the matters under discussion here, and I shall inform them of the contents of this letter.

It is imperative, however, that you begin to thoroughly transform the relationship between yourself and other members of the movement, as I have indicated. The objective purpose of my writing to you is to express this in the hopes that our movement will continue to work in accordance with the intentions of evolution. What would be the consequence if you were to reject this challenge? At least in certain instances, you have already forfeited an activity that must have been assigned to you by the masters of the white lodge—the personal instruction of individuals. For as I have already said, a profound mistrust in your treatment of individual human destinies is all too justified. I can also not imagine how an esoteric lesson could take place under the prevailing circumstances.

If you restricted yourself to disseminating ever more aspects of the teachings but let everything else continue as before, and if not enough members were able to work their way through to the necessary insights, the Society would degenerate into an exoteric association at best. There are already certain signs of this happening, alongside the tendencies to evil and to stupefaction. Either that or, if your followers become aware of their responsibility, they will have to bring about a complete separation between the teacher and what is taught, leaving you to discharge the duties of your holy office as a guilty and tormented Amfortas among hungry and sorrowful disciples.

I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe these insights—which I achieved under the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style, who is under the protection of Christian Rosenkreutz—in the ideal form I had envisioned. The obstacles were still too great for someone only recently released from your spell. But I have decided to send the letter anyway because the moment demands it.

When I wonder about the emotions with which you will receive this letter, the question of whether you will find your way to people with whom you can go through this experience and begin the necessary transformations weighs on me especially heavily. This is an area where, in this Christian age, the occultist as such is bound to fail and must be simply a human among humans, just as Christ Jesus had to experience things on Earth that he could not experience as a God. May you turn to this Spirit for help!

Heinrich Goesch
Gertrud Goesch

I have read you this letter, my friends, because it concerns each and every one of you just as much as it concerns me, and because it seems obvious to me that you must each decide for yourself to what extent you believe its claims correspond to actual practice within our Society. Otherwise people might think that I am afraid of this charge of contributing to the “stupefaction” of our members, and that I do not see you as sufficiently independent to leave it up to each one of you to judge the situation individually as you see fit.

However, you must realize that a letter like this cannot be seen in isolation; it is a symptom of what is going on in our Society. That is why I will take no part in discussing either this letter or anything that will need to be done as a result of it. It is clear that it must be left up to the members to decide what needs to be done and how to go about it, at least to begin with. In particular, I will refrain from saying anything about the passage claiming that promises have not been kept. If assessing this matter is left to individual discretion, each one of you will know how things stand, since each one of you must know what you have been promised and whether the promises were kept. However, I would expect and request the Society as such, or those members living in the neighborhood of the building in Dornach, to take a decided stand on this issue in the very near future.

I myself will not get involved in discussions on the matter at all. There are only a few things I want to tell you, and I ask you to take my remarks as what I have to say in connection with what I have just read, especially because it is obvious from other symptoms, not just from this letter, that many things I have said to members in lectures here in the course of the last few weeks and months have had no effect at all.

First of all, there is one thing I would like to emphasize. My friends, I cannot allow anyone to dictate how I conduct myself with members of the Society. It is up to me, and me alone, to decide how I find it necessary to relate to them. This is not to be taken as any kind of guideline for you; I am simply speaking for myself. I will not allow anyone to prescribe in any way how I should interact with members, inasmuch as this interaction has to do with the sins of omission I am supposed to have committed against them.

There is a very deep and weighty reason why this has to be the way it is. Not only this letter, but also many other things that have come up in the Society intermittently down through the years and with increasing frequency lately, show that many people simply do not make an effort to understand the kind of responsibility carried by someone communicating esoteric truths. It seems that many of our members don't want to try to understand what it sometimes takes to speak even a single sentence of that sort. With all the spiritual preparation it takes to give a lecture, it is simply not possible to sit with different little groups of members until two in the morning every night chatting about all kinds of useless and superfluous stuff. This fact is not sufficiently appreciated, nor are many other things that people seem to require of me and that then get counted as sins of omission. I need my time, and I need it in a totally different way than what people seem to want to understand. If I weren't using it the way I am, you would be hearing the same kind of stupid esoteric views from me that you can hear so much of in the rest of the world. So much for the sins of omission.

I also do not understand how the statement that my dealings with individual members and with groups of members are not Christian enough fits together with the complaint that I am exerting an undue influence over you by means of black magic whenever I take the liberty of shaking hands with one of you or involving you in conversation. I am certainly open to changing this practice if the Society will make its views on the subject known, because it is up to you, of course, whether you want to shake hands or get involved in a friendly conversation with me.

If this opinion becomes prevalent, it should be expressed, and then handshakes can, of course, be avoided in the future. For reasons I expressed earlier, I will not go into this any further, but there is still one thing I must mention because it is so very typical.

There is a passage in this letter that reads as follows: “Through the events I have described, my wife and I find ourselves in a situation with regard to yourself that makes it impossible for us to encounter you again in the way my wife did for the last time on Sunday, July 25, in the Schreinerei, and I on Thursday, August 5, on the steps leading to the eurythmy room. We were both in possession of this knowledge already at that time. Nevertheless, you shook our hands and drew us into conversation as if nothing had happened. Healthy tact would have made that kind of thing impossible for any non-clairvoyant, so in your case I have to recognize it as an attempt at impermissible intervention into my inner being.” Let me just mention that on the Friday before Sunday the 25th, a member of our Society approached me with an inquiry from Mrs. Goesch with regard to her child, who had fallen down and gotten hurt somehow. I responded by saying that if she wished, I could take a look at what was wrong with the child. Shortly thereafter that person returned, bringing Mrs. Goesch and the child to me. On the following Sunday, here in the Schreinerei, I intervened in the inner being of Mrs. Goesch by shaking her hand and asking her how the child was doing.

My encounter with Mr. Goesch on the stairs leading up to the eurythmy room on Thursday, August 5, consisted of my responding to Mr. Goesch, who had asked me whether it was all right for the child (whom I had just seen standing down by the door) to take part in eurythmy exercises again, by saying that of course that was entirely up to the parents, since what the parents wanted was the only thing to consider in whether or not the child should come to eurythmy again. At that point, I also made the mistake of extending my hand to Mr. Goesch. These are the two instances in which I intervened in someone else's inner being by means of black magic.

Let me still comment on one more passage from the end of this letter: “I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe my insights—which I achieved through the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style, who is under the protection of Christian Rosenkreutz—in the ideal form I had envisioned. The obstacles were still too great for someone only recently released from your spell.” I believe you all know who the so-called keeper of the seal is, and all I have to say about this is that the person in question has written a number of letters to both me and my wife in the past few months, including one Mrs. Steiner received only today.⁴ I will not discuss the matter of the “keeper of the seal” any further today; I just want to point out that her letters started coming around Christmas, mysteriously enough.

It may well be that I shall have to say something about this at some point, but I really do not want to do it today. I want you to come to a conclusion without being influenced by me. It is certainly almost impossible to be aware of the mysterious connection between this letter and the “keeper of the seal” and say nothing further about it, but today may not be the right time for that.

However, I do still want to mention that some years ago in fall I announced that due to certain embarrassing symptoms that had appeared within our Society, it seemed necessary to found a society of a more restricted sort.⁵ To begin with, I attempted to invest a number of long-term members close to me with certain offices, on the assumption that these people would become independently active in accordance with their new titles. At that time, I said that if anything came of it, the membership would hear about it by Epiphany. No one heard a thing, which means that the Society for Theosophical Art and Style does not exist. That is a perfectly justified assumption, since no one has heard anything to the contrary, and it is equally safe to assume that an announcement would have been made if my intentions had in fact been realized. The way my plans were received, however, made it impossible for this society to come about. It was simply an experiment.

My friends, I have often said that the Anthroposophical Society has to make sense as a society if it is to make sense at all. After all, other arrangements could be made for lecturing on esoteric teachings. I have also often pointed out that if certain signs and symptoms continue to appear in the Society, finding another form for it will become inevitable because the present form and present arrangements are not serving the purpose. I was trying to avoid certain things prevalent in the Theosophical Society when I founded the Anthroposophical Society, of which I do not want to be a member, since that is crucial to what I have to do for this spiritual movement.

Our Society also often comes under attack from outside, and of course these attacks are also directed at the Society's teacher and lecturer. This should lead our active members to take up the obligation to defend our cause, if they take the idea of our Society as seriously as they should. However, libelous pamphlets of the most despicable sort, containing the most unbelievable calumnies, have been appearing, and I leave it up to each one of you to judge whether everyone who could do something about them has taken the idea of the Society as seriously as would be necessary if the Society is to withstand these attacks from outside.

My friends, it is neither feasible nor possible for those who have an interest in the survival of the Anthroposophical Society to always first come to me to discuss what they ought to do in defense of me and our cause. That has to come to an end. If it does not, it would mean that it is actually true that people here are assigned their positions by me. I have to respect the independence of the members, even if that means, as it unfortunately does in many cases, that I have to deny them something. The fact of the matter is that the way things have been going, I could truly have done much more if I had not had to get involved in a lot of things that actually did not warrant my involvement. At least where the well-being of our Society is concerned, it is an absurdity to want to clear everything with me first. If what I want to do is to be accomplished on behalf of the Society, then please allow me the time to do it. The Society is wrongly conceived of if people are always turning to one individual; it must include taking personal initiative in what needs to be done on behalf of the Society.

For this reason, my friends, today's incident must be seen as an important and even crucial one. That is why I read you this letter, which is basically only an isolated symptom of something flaring up here, there, and everywhere. I will wait patiently to see what you, as members of the Society, will do about it. Meanwhile, I will continue to fulfill my obligations; the program will continue tomorrow as planned. But it goes without saying that how everything goes on after that will depend on the position the Society takes on what it has heard today. This is not something to be taken as an isolated case; it touches on many fundamental issues I have been pointing to for months in many discussions.⁶

When Rudolf Steiner had finished, a discussion took place; no stenographic record was kept. Some people must have spoken up in defense of the point of view expressed in Goesch's letter, because as one participant recollects, Rudolf Steiner left the room together with Marie Steiner, saying “I cannot have anything more to do with a society like this!”⁷ The great majority of those present must have been ashamed of this state of affairs, and on that same evening they composed this expression of confidence:

Dornach
August 21, 1915

Dear Dr. Steiner:

As members of the Anthroposophical Society, we wish to express our righteous indignation and our feeling of shame that someone of mendacious and immoral outlook, as evident in Mr. Heinrich Goesch's letter, has dared to address you in a fashion dictated by the most despicable delusions of grandeur.

We must painfully reproach ourselves for not having understood how to prevent what has happened and for having proved unable thus far to create a circle of people in which the thoughts and feelings expressed in this letter could not have arisen.

We ask your forgiveness as our loved and respected teacher. We also ask that you not retract your confidence in us, or rather, that you trust in us again, because we are firmly resolved to better realize the ideal of the Anthroposophical Society and to be more aware of our responsibility in future.

It is a matter of course that, given the point of view they represent, we no longer wish to consider Miss Alice Sprengel, Mr. Heinrich Goesch, and Mrs. Gertrud Goesch as having a place in our midst.

We ask you, dear Dr. Steiner, to take our signatures as an assurance of our unconditional and constant trust and our sincerest gratitude.

signed by Michael Bauer and over 300 others⁸

This vote of confidence was a spontaneous and purely human expression of the signers' relationship to Rudolf Steiner. The facts of the case are addressed in Rudolf Steiner's own contributions. The professional comments of one Dr. Amann (Basel, September 14, 1915) shed some light on the difficulties the members faced in judging the situation:

Among the members, the prevailing opinion is still that Mr. Goesch is not mentally ill, he is only under a bad influence.

When someone has a fever or is drowsy, that is easy enough for anyone to diagnose. On the other hand, mental illness is extremely difficult for even an expert professional to diagnose except in extreme cases.

From people's comments, it is clear that they cannot understand that Mr. Goesch is mentally ill and that they have misconceptions about this type of illness. They believe the mentally ill are necessarily idiots who cannot write intelligently.

Idiots are feeble-minded; the sluggishness of their brain does not allow them to think at all. Unless some organic illness causes feeble-mindedness as a secondary condition, they are born retarded. Exactly the opposite is true of someone who is mentally ill; here, we are dealing with a melancholy frame of mind and clouded logic. This condition, in turn, must be distinguished from insanity—insane people are dangerous!

People who are mentally ill forfeit none of the quality of their intellect. Their intellectual capacity actually increases, because they are inexhaustible when it comes to intellectual work; in fact, they are intellectually active all day and all night. Their illness lies in the fact that they become obsessed and hypnotized with their own fixed trains of thought and are not susceptible to any criticism from outside. These people suffer in secret under the thoughts that plague them until they have carried them to term and can present them to the public. The urge to be visibly productive and important is constantly present in them.

Rudolf Steiner continued in the same vein on the following evening, August 22, 1915, discussing the case further.

• 1. Lecture of August 20, 1915, Dornach, entitled “Episodische Betrachtungen fiber Raum, Zeit, Bewegung” (“Some Observations on Space, Time, and Movement”), in Der Wert des Denkens far eine den Menschen befriedigende Weltanschauung. Das Verhältnis der Geisteswissenschaft zur Naturwissenschaft (“Thinking's Value for a Humanly Satisfying World View: The Relationship of Spiritual Science to Natural Science”), GA 164, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984). [This lecture has not been published in English—Translator.]
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, “Gedanken wahrend der Zeit des Krieges” (“Thoughts during the Time of War”), essay of July 5, 1915, in Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage: Schriften und Aufsätze 1915–1921 (“On the Threefolding of the Social Organism and on the Current Situation: Essays and Articles 1915–1921”), GA 24, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1982). [Not available in English—Translator.]
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy, GA 18, (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1973).
• 4. See p. 115 in this volume.
• 5. Address in Berlin, December 15, 1911, in Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der ersten Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904 bis 1919 (“On the History and Contents of the First Class of the Esoteric School, 1904–1919”), GA 264, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984). [This volume has not been published in English—Translator.]
• 6. Rudolf Steiner may well have been referring to his description of different types of clairvoyance, and especially the difference between “head clairvoyance” and “gut clairvoyance.” Cf. the lecture series Wege der Geistigen Erkenntniss und der Erneuerung künstlerischer Weltanschauung (“Paths to Spiritual Knowledge and Renewal of Art Philosophy”), GA 161, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1980), and Kunst- und Lebensfragen im Lichte der Geisteswissenschaft (“Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science”), GA 162, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1985). [These volumes have not been published in English—Translator]
• 7. Hilde Boos-Hamburger in Mitteilungen aus der anthroposophischen Arbeit in Deutschland (“News about the Anthroposophical Work in Germany”), Vol 17, no. 1, Easter 1963.
• 8. Michael Bauer, 1871–1929, leader of the Albrecht Diirer Branch in Nurnberg. He was a member of the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society from 1913 until his retirement for health reasons in 1921.

Translated by Luise Boeddinghaus

At present there is a general opinion that there are certain limits to human knowledge, not only temporary knowledge owing to the fact that one had not achieved everything in the time that has already passed, and one would have to leave some things for the future, but in quite a general sense one speaks today of limits of perception, limits to knowledge for humanity. One thinks that man is constituted in such a way that he can only know about certain things, while other things are above his ability to know about them; and that it is mainly the facts of the so-called supersensible world which man is supposed not to be able to perceive and for which he has to be satisfied with what is called a belief, an assumption arising out of obscure feelings and such like. Particularly the endeavours of the past centuries and of the present time, which have yielded the greatest successes in the field of natural science and which have also brought about the greatest practical results, are considered proof by contemporary humanity that one has to come to a halt at that which can be observed by the senses, which can be proved by experiments and so forth, namely the sense perceptible real world. This is, when one speaks of man, only that world which man traverses between birth and death, or conception and death.

Now it cannot be denied that natural science owes its great successes to the fact that it has limited itself to the exploration of every aspect of the sense world and does not in any way draw any conclusions from the sense world to the supersensible world. But on the other hand there is connected with this, as one believes, fully proven acceptance of limits to knowledge altogether, something inwardly immeasurably tragic for the sensitive human being, something tragic which today does not yet come to the consciousness of many people, but which lives in many human souls in vague feelings, in all sorts of subconscious sensations, making them unsure in life, even unsure and unable in outward actions, in relationships to their fellow human beings and so on. For it is gradually felt more and more that the limits at which one wants to stop in this way are not only those of an outward supersensible world, but that with these limits to knowledge, if rightly perceived, there is still something quite different involved. Man gradually feels that his own true being must be of supersensible nature, that his true being which as man gives him his value and dignity must be found in the spiritual, in the not-sensible. If one calls a halt to all knowledge before the supersensible, then one calls a halt before human self-knowledge. Then one renounces insight into the most precious, the most valuable in the human being himself.

But thereby one also undermines one's real inward self-confidence. Whereby does man feel himself to be part of the natural world which today has been so successfully explored? Only because he bears this world of nature within himself in his outer physical body. Everything that exists in our surroundings as natural substances and natural laws we carry within us, at least most of it. Through this we can feel connected with physical nature. We would not feel that we existed in this physical nature if we were not part of it with our own body, or if we could not explore ourselves as physical beings. But in the same way it is with the supersensible, with the as truly felt spiritual inner being of man, even though men do not as yet bring it to full consciousness. If we cannot feel ourselves as belonging to a spiritual world, as beings who take into themselves and bear within themselves the forces and substances of the spiritual, then we cannot accept ourselves as spiritual human beings at all. But then we must lack the self-confidence towards that which after all we feel to be our most precious, our most dignified, that by which we actually are human beings, indeed want to be human beings. This has another side to it. We feel that that which we call our moral impulses, which we call the content of our moral-spiritual forces, does not flow out of natural life, certainly not out of what takes place in muscles and bones. We feel them to be coming from a spiritual world, but we experience uncertainty about this whole spiritual world if we have to call a halt before the supersensible with our perception.

And in this way present day humanity cannot really build a bridge between that which in outer nature is to it a brutal - as I would like to call it—fact, and that which flows to it out of the most intimate spiritual inner life as the content of the moral world order. One does not have the courage to bring to full clarity what it is that the human soul has to contend with here. Natural science has worked thoroughly towards being able to say something, albeit hypothetically, about the present day creatures out of which man is supposed to have developed. One describes, at least hypothetically, how once upon a time our present world is supposed to have developed out of the world mist. Hypotheses are also made about the end of our planetary system or the system altogether to which we belong. One imagines this whole system which exists in time as somehow contracting, constituting itself out of natural substances and natural forces. One imagines physical man then emerging out of a part of these forces at a certain time. Electricity, magnetism, warmth and so on, they can be outwardly observed, there the thinking human being feels safe with the content of his consciousness. But when the need arises in him to think of that which does not come from his physical nature, the moral spiritual impulses as working in the world, when he must think of as working in the world what he brings about out of a spiritual elemental force, what now must also be in the world, when he must have experiences in the world which must not pass away together with that which passes away with the physical—then man has no stand to say to himself out of that which is accepted by the limits to knowledge: these moral forces are just as valid as that which comes out of the brute forces of physical nature.

From this there come to man today not only theoretical doubts but insecurity of the whole soul life, insecurity apparent everywhere even though people deceive themselves about this. For this is the very character of present civilization that one deludes oneself about the deepest questions of civilization. But in the subconscious these questions are nevertheless active, they express themselves—albeit not in theories, but in the whole tenor of soul, in the confidence and capability of the soul life. That is the inner tragedy which can actually be noticed in the depths of every soul, even of the most superficial. And this is where then that arises which can seem paradoxical in the present time, there arises the longing in many people just for supersensible knowledge! One might say in the spiritual realm it is just the same as with hunger and thirst. One doesn't long for food and drink when one is satisfied, but one longs for them when one is hungry. And from an inmost need present humanity longs for the supersensible because it doesn't have it. While on the one hand philosophers and natural scientists today want to prove more and more that there are unsurpassable limits and borders before the supersensible, we see on the other hand an insatiable thirst of already many human souls for supersensible knowledge, and the number of these people will get ever greater.

To come to this supersensible perception there is a point of view, or I could rather say a method of investigation of which I would like to speak to you today. But I do not want to speak to you of a method of investigation of the supersensible which today one often wants to achieve in a very easy way, but I shall speak to you of a method of perception which, although it is an absolutely intimate matter of the human soul, but in this just as scientific, indeed as exact, not only as an outer scientific result, but as the mathematical or geometric results of science itself.

But while one is striving towards such knowledge and just comes to a knowledge of that which is the supersensible in man, one immediately enters something which right from the start causes all kinds of doubts, causes uncertainties right from the start.

When we look outside we soon notice that the natural scientists and philosophers who speak of limits to knowledge are right as concerns the immediate outer perception. So we must look inside. But when we look inside and we remain within the ordinary consciousness, with that which we have in ordinary life and also in the usual science, then in the beginning nothing confronts us either than a kind of thought picture of the outer world again. When one is completely honest in one's striving for self-knowledge and asks oneself: What is there, when instead of looking out into the world you look back into yourself, what is there actually inside you?—Then one will have to realize that one finds the world inside again, albeit in a picture. What one has experienced has imprinted itself onto our life of concepts, of feeling. We experience as it were a thought picture and feeling picture of that which is outside as well. We have only directed our gaze backwards. This gives us at first nothing new, but only in a dimmed down way in picture form that which is outside too. Only as a general feeling man senses that he is present in these weaving thoughts, ideas and sensations as an I, as a self. But that is so general and undefined, that initially he cannot do much with it.

That is why in the Middle Ages, in the times when one approached self-knowledge, knowledge of the human soul, in a more intensive way, one didn't initially pay much attention to that which one can gain by a merely backward directed self-observation during the ordinary consciousness, but one tried to achieve knowledge of the soul in a different way. This different way is actually interesting, and I must start from this different, often much desired way of knowledge of the soul, so that we can understand one another about the knowledge of soul which I actually mean. But I mention beforehand that I only start from this other knowledge of soul in order to explain what I want to bring, but that I don't want to attribute a special value to it. Therefore nobody should believe that because I start from the dream I already give it value for knowledge. However, this dream life is immensely meaningful.

Those who at some stage have sought knowledge of soul through the dream life, will have noticed that in a certain sense the soul life appears much more characteristically in a dream than when one merely looks into oneself and, as one often says, wants to observe oneself. You have observed the dreams and have initially found two types of dream. As you know, the dream conjures up weaving pictures of a fantastic reality which is initially not as abstract as the thoughts we have in our day consciousness.

But the dream creates initially something which appears enigmatical, on the one side by its composition, on the other side by its content.

There are two things which man experiences as pictures in a dream. Initially pictures of experiences which we went through during our life on earth, reminiscences from life. This arises and shows us the one or other thing which we experienced many years ago. But what there asserts itself rises up next to other things in a connection with was not supplied by life. Occurrences which took place ten years ago are tied together with others which took place the other day. The most removed from one another comes together. By putting together fragments of life, dreams create impossible pictures, chaotic pictures. Everything which outer life gave to us by way of occurrences which we experienced is conjured up to us in dream in a chaotic fashion. That is one kind of dream. The other kind is that in which our own bodily condition is conjured up before us in a kind of symbolic image. Who would not have dreamt of suffering from the heat of a boiling hot stove? He has seen the flickering flames; he awakes and has strong palpitations of the heart. Or we dream that we are walking past a fence. We see how one or two poles are damaged and then we wake up with toothache. In the one case, when we dreamt of the boiling hot stove with its heat, it was a picture of our heart which was palpitating strongly. In the other case, when we dreamt of the fence, it was a picture of our row of teeth which somehow gave us pain. And someone who can penetrate more deeply into these things knows that a certain area of dreams is characterised by inner organs being shown to us symbolically in the dream. However, one must be quite knowledgeable about all the facts which come into play, if one wants to recognise in the symbols what actually expresses itself of the inner being of man in them. Then one will find that there is hardly an organ or an inner process which cannot be conjured up for us inwardly by dreams.

Now former psychologists who have worked with dreams have developed a very valid view about the relationship of man to dreams. They said to themselves: that which we bear within us, we can only feel, but we do not see it, we don't have it in front of us like an outer object. But when we have our own heart beat in front of us in the picture of a boiling hot stove, then we have at least a picture in our consciousness that we make for ourselves, that looks like the picture of an outer object. We have to be separated from the outer object if a picture of it is to arise in us. That which one is oneself, even if it is one's own body, one feels, one feels it sometimes painfully when something organic is not in order, but one does not look at it. When one looks at something in picture form one must be outside of it. And so the former psychologists, which still existed in the 19th century, argued: If I am dreaming in symbols about my own body and its processes, I cannot be in my body, for then I would not experience it. Therefore I must be outside my body in such a case. The picture in any case shows me something of an independent soul-spiritual life over against the body. And furthermore they argued: When I dream in any, however hidden way, of reminiscences of life, then the outer natural existence as it is would have to present itself to me. But there something is constantly changing; there the dream conjures up for me the most fantastic relationships. There again I must be inside, for nature as it usually surrounds me would not be able to show me the occurrences which I have experienced with it, nor the occurrences of human life which I have experienced, in quite a different order.

In this way something was put together of which one could say: It was a valid conviction for these former psychologists, that there they caught something of the soul in a condition where it is separated from the physical body. For firstly man cannot be united with his body if the occurrences of the body, even though only in symbols, in the dream appear to be separated. He must then be outside his body. But again, we must also be inside the reminiscences of our experiences, be together with them, when we have the second kind of dream, for nature does not alter the connection in which experiences have occurred. That we must alter ourselves. Therefore we must be outside, outside our body, when we have the first kind of dreams, and in the same way we must be inside our experiences in the second kind. That means we must actually be outside our physical body with our experiences of soul when we dream. In so far that which former psychologists said to themselves is absolutely indisputable, one cannot say anything against it.

But something else has to be said. The dream cannot give me any sure knowledge about the self. It can lead us to the way of how one can come to such a certainty. Because what we are inside during the time between going to sleep and awakening when we are outside the body: that, which the dream is showing us there, that we certainly are not; for those are on the one hand pictures of our bodily interior, even symbols of this bodily interior, thus that again which is taken from our bodily interior. How can we, when sleeping we are outside our body, be the same which we are in the interior of our physical body? So something else must be the case. We must be something outside our body, but that does not assert itself. We are initially not able to lay hold of the actual nature of the soul in the sleeping state. That conceals itself and masks itself at first; it surrounds itself with pictures of its own bodily nature and shows itself in relationship to its own life in arbitrary compositions of its experiences. The former psychologists have rightly deduced that we are outside our body when we dream, but that the dream shows us something about this being which is outside our body, that is not the case, although they believed it. Because it doesn't show us anything except what we have formerly experienced within the body, and our own body in symbols. Therefore if we are something outside our body, then this is masked in the dream, then the dream is wearing a mask in respect of this. If we want to discover our own being, then we must be able to take this mask off the dream, that is off the soul—for the dream is this mask.—Up to here a more intimate view of the dream leads us onto a path. As former psychologists realised that the dream ultimately doesn't show anything besides what it takes out of the sense world, they of course also had their doubts. And just as one could not believe to have certainty by means of an ordinary backward looking self-observation, so one was also not satisfied with that which the observation of the dream world could give one. Over against this there now appears that which I always call the anthroposophical world view or anthroposophical way of investigation. This initially maintains: If the dream shows us that we are something outside our body, then it proves itself to be too weak by itself to show, to reveal its own being. To reveal itself it uses bits and pieces of reminiscences of life, of symbols of its own bodily nature. Therefore we have to strengthen the soul life so that we come to that which in the soul life stands masked before us in the dream. This one can do. One can do it by copying the dream in full consciousness by a systematically exact so-called meditative life as I have described it in my book “Knowledge of Higher Worlds” and other writings. But not copying it by artificially creating dreams, but awakening in the soul in full consciousness that which in dream arises spontaneously from the subconscious. One comes to this by accustoming oneself to proceed in the same way as the dream proceeds spontaneously—to proceed by imagining things which one knows well symbolically in inner meditation. The dream conjures up symbolically for us our own bodily nature.

One now practices—as neither our own inner being nor outer nature give us symbols—strictly systematically to imagine symbolically. In this way concepts are by force of will brought into a symbol by us, just as the dream conjures it up or us spontaneously. It must be created by inner activity, but that means, the dream must be strengthened.

In outer life we give ourselves over to passive observations and perceptions. Then the inner activity is shadowy. Everyone really senses how shadowy the abstract concepts are, how the thoughts are given over to the outer world and then proceed in a shadowy way. Everyone speaks of the shadowy thought compared to concrete reality. But when one now rises to imagine symbolic things, one has to create these symbols.

And when one is a fully conscious human being and no fool, then one knows that one makes them oneself. Then one is by no means a dreamer but a normal waking person, nay even more than a normal waking person. To the dreamer the symbols come spontaneously, to the waking person the conceptual images come through outer stimulation. The waking person who makes alive within himself that which dreams give, who places before the soul symbols with all inner strength and imitates the dream in full consciousness, awakens himself as it were to a higher activity of thinking and imagining and with this to an altogether higher activity of soul than one has in ordinary consciousness. That however must then be really practiced quite systematically.

And likewise the other side of dream can be imitated. We take experiences from our life that can be separated from one another by years. We can combine them in such a way that the one stands next to the other, but now not chaotically as in dream but from a point of view which may perhaps be from fantasy, but which we quite consciously determine, which is not imposed on us by our inner being, but which we ourselves create inwardly. And in this way we gradually educate ourselves to remain in an inner life of soul; to remain strongly in a life of soul which proceeds totally from the inner activity.

Today one usually underestimates what actually happens there with the human being when he does such exercises, because one does not love the inner activity of thinking, because one already finds it very active when one lives in thoughts induced by outer observation. But he who in all seriousness becomes a true imitator of dream in full consciousness, experiences that he strongly intensifies his inner mobility of soul, that he definitely strengthens it. But he is, if he is no fool but a sensible human being, fully conscious that he himself is making all these pictures and life associations, that is, that he is living in illusion. With a dream one first has to wake up in order to realize the illusion of the dream from the point of view of waking life. The dream can only be unmasked from the point of view of waking; the dreamer imagines the content of the dream to be reality, although his feeling for reality is not such a fictitious one. He who becomes an imitator of dream becomes aware of how a living inner being, something active, quickening is awakened in him, but how he has a content which is absolutely self-image, illusion. Therefore he comes to the point of not bothering with that which is present in him as content, but to concentrate on that which works within him, is active within him. In short, that which we usually only have as a general feeling of ego or self becomes a strongly felt inner activity. If one wants to become a spiritual scientist and not a vague mystic, one must remain conscious and exact. But if one persists in this one will also come more and more to experience the nature of the illusionary. One knows: You imagine nothing, but you have an imagination. Through this one will also the possibility one day to develop the capacity of soul with which one truly doesn't imagine anything and is yet as active as one has learnt it in the imitation of dream.

I point you here to an activity of soul which must absolutely be cultivated by the investigator of spirit. One usually believes, and those who judge things superficially often say it: spiritual investigation is something where man gives himself up to his thoughts and fantasies—that is easy, while to do research in the laboratory, the clinic and the observatory is difficult, something where you have to renounce things.—But this is not so. Because that which one has to acquire as such an inner capacity of soul requires at least just as much time, nay sometimes much longer time of inner work than any outwardly acquired scientific ability as is common in natural science today. Those who want to gain knowledge about that which is here called spiritual investigation should not raise the objection: In natural science one must not be a dilettante if one wants to have a say, there one must really understand something.—What the spiritual investigator alleges is usually regarded as though it were gained effortlessly compared to that which in natural science is reached with much trouble. But it is only the path which is different. In natural science outer observations and facts are used to come to a conclusion, while the spiritual scientist must first develop his own inner capacity for observation. He develops it as an imitator of dreams but in such a way that in the meditative activity that which in dream is conjured up is overcome by him. In dream we do not become conscious of an activity, the images of the dream conjure it up for us; but on the first step of supersensible knowledge the illusion is totally perceived. One knows: you don't imagine anything—but one notices the inner strengthened, empowered activity and in the end learns by a lot of practicing how one can call up this activity without first needing an illusionary activity for this, without first having to imitate the dream. So it is in imitation that one develops this capacity of soul. Once the capacity is there, one knows what one can do with it. Because then one is in a state where one has an empty but very much awake consciousness, but also inner activity. After one has discarded the illusion of this activity, one has initially no content. But the state in which one lives just as one gets to the point of developing the capacity of inner activity without initially also having a content, this state demands a strong inner struggle. And actually this struggle which one needs for this is the touchstone and test whether this spiritual investigation is an honest and true one. For at that moment when one just gets ready to live with empty consciousness, with normal waking consciousness without this waking consciousness having a content, at this moment an unspeakable pain, an unlimited privation spreads itself over the whole soul life. All that one can otherwise experience as pain in the world is really insignificant compared with this spiritual soul pain which one experiences at this moment of cognition. And one has to overcome this pain. For it is this pain which is the expression of a force which has its physical counter image in all sorts of forms of deprivations: in hunger, which instructs us to eat, in thirst, which forces us to drink and so on. Now we feel something in the soul which has to come towards us and we feel it as an unspeakable pain. But when we live for a while in this pain, when we feel our inner being itself as one filled with pain, that is, when we are for a while pain, when our own human being is for our consciousness for a while nothing else but a conglomerate of pain, then this consciousness no longer remains empty, then this consciousness fills itself, and it now fills itself not with sense content which we receive through eyes, ears and so on, but it now fills itself with spiritual content. And we receive as the first thing which comes to us as spiritual content in this way our own spiritual being as a unified spiritual organisation—but living in time, not in space—as it extends from birth or conception up to the present moment to which we have lived the earthly life. Just as we can look into a spatial perspective and see objects which are far away again in perspective, so we can learn to look from the present moment of our life into our own past. We don't see the bodily at that moment, we only remember it, but we have to remember it, otherwise we are destroyed in our consciousness. But he who wants to become an investigator or spirit may not become a person inclined to fantasy nor a confused mystic, he must use his consciousness and his good sense just as a mathematician would for a mathematical problem. But just as we normally see objects of space in perspective, so we now look into a time perspective.

Everything that we have experienced in our existence now stands before us in a time tableau, but in a living time tableau. But not only that which we ourselves have experienced now stands before us thus, but also that which shows us how we have come into being, how inner spiritual soul forces have built up our body from birth or conception, how the sculptural forces are which have worked on our body. We see ourselves outwardly. But that which we see there, through which our own soul life stands before our soul, that now also differs qualitatively from the experience of this time tableau.

When one looks back on one's life in the usual way, one experiences the happenings as they come towards one: one experiences for instance how a person has come towards one, how he has approached one, lovingly or with hatred, how he did this or that as he came towards one. One experiences oneself in this memory picture in the way the outer world has come towards one.

In this other memory picture however, which now stands there in real pictures of which one knows that they reflect the own spiritual nature of the human being just as the usual memory pictures reflect the outer nature, in this other memory tableau is reflected to us how we have approached the outer world. There is shown how one was oneself when for instance one approached another personality. How in our soul forces unfolded which found their satisfaction, their delight, their happiness just through that personality. One really looks at oneself how one was as earthly human being. And then one sees how now in the reality both sides in which the dream was masked flow together.

Now the dream becomes a fully conscious reality. It even becomes more than the ordinary consciousness sees. One initially sees the spiritual entity which lives inside the body, which during sleep is independent of it, indeed which is the creator of the body. This one sees. And then one realises, this spiritual entity also contains, but in a spiritual way, metamorphosed, something like the laws of nature but—you are already protesting against it—in a spiritual existence. Into that which one here experiences the moral world is already entering. In this the moral laws are already present in such a way that one now knows: in the same way in which one's own spirituality works, the moral laws are working. There the moral laws begin to stand with equal validity next to the laws of nature.

But with this one only gets as far as the experience of man's own spiritual existence in earthly being. If one wants to go further one has to develop still other capacities in the soul.—The particulars about this you can read up in the above mentioned books, for this can only be achieved by the practicing of many details. Here only the principle shall be described.—Imagine that at a certain time of day you are remembering back to the morning when you got up, or woke up. If you try hard, the course of the day up to this moment can stand before your soul. Now if you don't place the course of the day in such a way before your soul that you start with the morning, then go on to the experiences of the forenoon and so on, but if you place the course of the day backwards before your soul, so that you start at the certain time and now trace it backwards, then you can also say that you get up to the night when you have slept. But there you then don't add anything, there something remains empty, and that which connects again with the backwards imagined happenings is the last experience before going to sleep, and then you can again place the course of the previous day before your soul.

In short, when the human being remembers in this way in ordinary life, there always remain gaps between the conscious experiencing—the gaps which we lived through unconsciously during sleep. Now in order to go further with the exercises which can link up with this backward experiencing, it is necessary to develop a very strong sense of reality. Such a sense of reality is initially not very prevalent among present day people. It is even something which is not all that easy to achieve, because in relation to remembering people usually remain with that which in some way is closely connected with their personality. In their thoughts they do not connect the threads towards the outer world so strongly, that these threads to the outer world connect with their memories. The human being usually has no inclination at all to live in the outer world, in reality in the outer world, with his memories. How much this is the case, of this one can convince oneself in daily life. I have known people who for instance have seen a lady in the morning who had interested them very much, and when one asks them: What colour was the lady's dress?—they don't know it. Therefore it is as though they had not seen the lady at all, for if they had seen her, they would surely also have seen the colour of her dress. How tenuously is one thus connected with the outer world, if in the afternoon one doesn't even know what colour the dress of a person was whom one had seen in the morning! Indeed, I have even known people who had been in a room and who didn't know afterwards whether there were pictures in the room or not.

One can have the most unbelievable experiences in this regard. Therefore he who wants to acquire a sense of reality must first train himself to live fully also in the outer sense reality, so that that which he passes by stands before him as it is out there in the real world. Truly, the investigator of spirit does not become a man of phantasy; he must acquire a sense of reality to the point that it cannot happen to him that he doesn't know in the afternoon what dress the lady was wearing to whom he was speaking in the morning. He must really be able to live with a sense of reality already in the sense world.

Only when one trains oneself to connect that which one remembers of things to the outer world of reality, then one develops the sense which can achieve a fruitful remembering back for such a spirit knowledge. Because for human beings' usual capacity of remembering the memory picture before the last going to sleep can very easily be joined to that after the last awakening. Without any difficulty people simply leave out that which lies between these two pictures as a night-abyss, they tie the picture of the first happening after waking up directly onto the last happening before going to sleep. They usually don't even notice with a lively consciousness that something lies between the two. But if one wants to acquire such a consciousness that one connects that which one has experienced inside with the picture which is there from the outer world, then one must realise that that which one experiences in the morning after waking up is connected with the whole of nature which makes an impression on us, is connected with the rising sun, with all the impressions one has through the rising sun and so on—and that which one has as the last happenings before the last going to sleep is connected with something which in nature doesn't belong together, namely with that which one experienced after the last awakening. There one will notice with the pictures that are standing next to each other: there is something missing!—But by practicing this, by awakening again capacities of soul that don't exist in ordinary life, one gains the strength that as one looks back to where one now has the first picture after the last awakening and wants to proceed to the last picture before the last going to sleep, one now does not see a stretch of darkness in between, but sees that this darkness is beginning to light up spiritually, that something places itself into this darkness.

Just as in the day waking states one only follows that which one has experienced, so there suddenly comes something in between the first experience after the last awakening and the last experience before the last going to sleep of which one now says: you remember something—only something which you haven't known before. It is just the same as in normal remembering, except that one hadn't known anything before of that which now surfaces. Now one begins to remember that which one has previously missed by sleeping through it, even while sleeping through it in dreamless sleep. The empty time which one is conscious of between the last experience before going to sleep and the first after waking up, this is now filling up. And just as our ordinary consciousness is filled with the experiences of natural existence, so our consciousness is now filled with that which surfaces like a remembrance, but of a remembrance of which one now knows that one has experienced it in the unconscious.

Our consciousness is now filled with the soul content which hasn't taken part in the outer experiences but has withdrawn from the outer experiences, has gone asleep. Now one learns to recognise how the sleeping soul is in reality when it doesn't have the strength to bring its experiences which it has during sleep in the spiritual world to consciousness in such a way as man in day waking life brings to consciousness the happenings of physical life. Now one really gets to know the inner being of man as spirit and soul, and at this moment one sees beyond the earthly life. And one will only now be able to connect that, which one sees in the described way like a great but concrete memory tableau of one's earthly life up to this point, to that which one was as a soul-spiritual human being in a purely spiritual world before one descended into this physical world through birth or conception.

And in the same way another experience joins this one. If one develops another capacity together with all this during one's practicing, a capacity which normally is not seen as a capacity of knowledge but which is one too, if one develops that which is love of soul, full devotion to that which meets one, so strongly that this love remains with one even when one now looks at one's own self, that one can love that which appears as something new in the soul with a truly devoted love—then the possibility develops to free oneself in the waking state in full consciousness in one's inner experiencing from the bodily. But at this moment when one has freed oneself from the bodily in one's inner experiencing, one knows how it is with the human being when he lives his life without his body. And in a picture the fact of the passing through the gate of death, of dying, stands before one's soul. If one has once realised what it means to experience oneself free of the body in one's spiritual forces, then one also knows what one is in the spiritual existence after one has left the body and has passed through the gate of death. And one also gets to know the environment which will then be there for man. One learns to know how together with the body when it has been laid aside that falls away which connects us to the sense world. But that remains, which formerly has fashioned us as a human being, the soul-spiritual of man.

In this way one gets to know the experiences which one has had with other people. But that which was within these sense experiences, how soul has found soul, what happened in the relationships with other people, those that were closer to one and those who were more distant, that which happened in space and time—the eternal-spiritual one gets to know, how it rids itself of the earthly form of experiencing.

And more and more the soul now experiences that which was spiritually present within it as relationships to other people. And that which otherwise is only the object of belief, certainty of knowledge. This human beings experience when they themselves have passed through the gate of death. That which the human soul usually longs for as immortality, only enters real human knowledge in this way. But only by recognising the truly eternal in man by exercising our forces to such an extent that we recognise this eternal in our existence in the pre-earthly, spiritual-soul existence, we also gain that for ourselves which gives us certainty about life after death. There is no longer a word for the pre-earthly as something eternal in the human soul in today's civilisation because we only know the one half of eternity, we speak of immortality. Older languages had the other side, the not-yet-being-born, that is, our existence before we entered earthly life. But only both sides—not-yet-being-born and immortality constitute eternity. And it is a fact that man has to pay for his longing for immortality, that it becomes a mere belief if he wants to forgo knowledge of not-yet-being-born, because he will only understand eternity when he recognises both sides of eternity, the not-yet-being-born as well as the immortality of his being in unity. With this then man has advanced to a real taking hold of that which he is, to a real self-knowledge.

I have to emphasise again and again on such occasions that such a spiritual investigation can indeed only be made by someone who has acquired the relevant capacities by exercising or in another way through destiny, but when the results of such an investigation are made known, they can be as plausible to everyone as for instance the results of astronomy. And just as one doesn't have to be a painter in order to experience the beauty of a picture—for if that would be necessary, only the painters would be able to experience it—just as little does one necessarily have to be a spiritual investigator oneself in order to take up the knowledge of spiritual investigation, although one can become one up to a certain degree, because man wants truth and not confusion and error. Just as one can stand before a painting and admire its beauties with one's healthy judgement, so one can experience that which is presented by spiritual investigation, if one does not oneself put obstacles in one's way, such as prejudices and the like. One can understand it when one dedicates oneself to it with one's sense of truthfulness, and the accusation of those who say of the adherents of spiritual science that they only believe blindly is absolutely unjustified. Especially in the present time Anthroposophy will be able to give human souls if by using their sense of truth or by investigation in the indicated way to come to a self-knowledge of the human being, that for which they pine as I have said in the introduction to today's lecture. Even though this demand of the times does not yet come to consciousness in many people, even if it only shows itself undefined or even just in unfitness in life—it is there in that which expresses itself so clearly in the civilization of the present time. Natural science and many philosophical word views speak of insurmountable borders of knowledge. With this the border which leads to man himself is insurmountable. But man cannot in perpetuity do without true self-knowledge.

In tomorrow's lecture I shall continue where I have left off today and depict the ethical-religious life, how it is enriched and made more inward within the human being. With this I shall then tomorrow give the application to the immediate practical life. In today's lecture I wanted first to show how this demand of our time, which as a demand of heart and soul appears in ever more and more people in the present civilisation with its boundaries to knowledge, can be met by a real spiritual knowledge, by a knowledge of that which man wants to know about his own immortality and that which is connected with it, nay must know, because only in this way a true self-knowledge can be achieved, and only with this true self-knowledge a getting hold of oneself and a feeling of self can be connected. Because only through this man will be able to stand before his own soul with its eternal nature, that he acquires knowledge of how he as spiritual-soul being is woven into the spiritual-soul sphere of the world, just as he has his existence in the physical world a physical being. Only when he has acquired a knowledge of himself as spirit amongst spirits, will he also be able to acquire true inner security. Only when the human being knows his worth and dignity in the world, he stands in the world with that consciousness of himself as man, which out of an undefined feeling he can acknowledge as the only right human consciousness. And only because human beings will seek again for such a light of self-knowledge and spiritual knowledge of the world, only through this the hunger of the present time for a true penetrating of the own human nature will be able to be satisfied. For humanity will not be able to manage with all the demands of the progressing civilisation unless it realises: self-knowledge of man cannot be anything else but knowledge of spirit, for man can only feel himself as true man if he recognises himself as spirit amongst spirits, just as he can feel himself in his transient earthly existence as physical being amongst physical beings.

[ 1 ] As I explained in my preceding remarks, it is the beings who completed their human stage of development during the previous incarnation of the earth—the old moon period—who guide human spiritual evolution. Their guidance, however, is obstructed and opposed by beings who did not complete their development during the moon period. Nevertheless, while these “imperfect” beings obstruct the guiding activity of those who completed their development, they also, paradoxically, further it. The resistance they offer to our progress strengthens, solidifies, and lends increased weight and significance to the forces that are called forth by the beings who advance our development. In Christian esotericism, these classes of superhuman beings who have attained the developmental level immediately above our own, both those who advance our development and those who help us by introducing obstacles, are called angels or angeloi. Above them are the beings of the higher hierarchies, the arch-angels, archai, and so on, who also take part in guiding humanity.

In each of these hierarchies we find beings of varying degrees of perfection. At the beginning of the present earth's evolution, for instance, we find angeloi of higher and lower standing. Those of [lower] standing barely attained the minimum level of development when the moon stage of evolution ended and the earth stage began, while those of higher standing had passed far beyond it. Between these two types are to be found angeloi of every possible level of development whose participation in the guidance of human evolution on earth is in accordance with the level they have attained. Thus, the beings who had the guiding role in Egyptian cultural development were those who had reached a higher stage of perfection on the Moon than those who guided humanity during the Greco-Latin age, and these, in turn, were more perfect than the beings who guide us now. Those who were to guide humanity later trained themselves for this task during the Egyptian and the Greek periods. By this means, they were prepared to guide a culture that had progressed further.

[ 2 ] In the time period following the Atlantean catastrophe seven successive cultural epochs may be distinguished: first, the ancient Indian; second, the ancient Persian;^S1 third, the Egypto-Chaldean; and fourth, the Greco-Latin. Our own period, which began around the twelfth century, constitutes the fifth cultural epoch and, although we are still in the middle of it, the first preparations for the sixth epoch are already underway. In other words, these individual periods of evolution overlap and transitions are very gradual. A seventh post-Atlantean epoch will follow the sixth.

Looking more closely at the guidance of humanity, we realize that it was only in the third cultural epoch—the Egypto-Chaldean—that the angels or lower dhyanic beings became to some extent independent guides of human evolution. This was not the case in the ancient Persian period. The angels then did not yet possess this independence and were subordinate to a higher guidance to a greater degree than they were during the Egyptian period. In ancient Persian times, angels still worked according to the impulses of the hierarchy above them. Thus, although everything was already subject to the angels' guidance, they themselves submitted to the direction of the archangels (archangeloi).

In the age of ancient India, on the other hand, during which post-Atlantean life reached unequaled spiritual heights—natural heights—under the guidance of great human teachers, the archangels themselves were still subject to a higher guidance, namely, that of the archai or “primal beginnings.”

[ 3 ] Thus we may say that from the Indian period on, through the ancient Persian and Egypto-Chaldean cultures, certain beings of the higher hierarchies increasingly withdrew from the direct guidance of humanity. Consequently, by the time of the fourth, Greco-Latin post-Atlantean cultural period, human beings had become, in certain respects, entirely independent. To be sure, the superhuman beings described above still guided human evolution, but they held the reins as loosely as possible.

As a result, the spiritual beings guiding humanity benefited as much from our actions as we did ourselves. This explains the entirely “human” character of the Greco-Roman period: human beings were left completely to their own resources. [ 4 ] The characteristics of art and political life in the Greek and Roman epochs grew out of this necessity of human beings to live out their individuality in their own way.

When we consider very early periods of cultural history, we find humanity guided by beings who had reached their human level of development in earlier planetary stages. The fourth, Greco-Latin epoch was intended to test human beings to the greatest extent possible. For this reason, the entire spiritual leadership of humanity had to be arranged in a new way.

In our epoch, the fifth post-Atlantean one, the beings guiding us belong to the same hierarchy that ruled the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans. The beings who were guiding people then are in fact now resuming their activities. As I said above, certain of these beings remained behind in their development, and we can feel their influence now in today's materialistic feelings and perceptions.

[ 5 ] Both the angelic (or lower dhyanic) beings that advance our development, as well as those who try to obstruct it, progressed in their development by guiding the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans through qualities they had themselves acquired in very ancient times. At the same time, through their work of guidance they advanced their own development. Thus, these advancing angeloi are guiding our fifth post-Atlantean epoch with abilities they acquired during the Egypto-Chaldean period. As a result of this progress, they can now develop very special capabilities. Namely, they have qualified themselves to be filled with forces that flow from the most important being of the whole of earthly evolution. The power of Christ works on them.

This power works not only in the physical world through Jesus of Nazareth but also in the spiritual worlds on superhuman beings. Christ exists not only for the earth but also for these higher beings. The beings who guided ancient Egypto-Chaldean culture were not then guided by Christ; they submitted to Christ's guidance only later. This submission was the step in their development that enabled them to guide the fifth post-Atlantean period under Christ's influence. Now they are followers of Christ in the higher worlds.

On the other hand, the angelic beings I have described as obstructing our development were held back in their development precisely because they did not submit to Christ's leadership and continue to work independently. This is why the materialistic trend in our culture will become more and more pronounced. There will be a materialistic stream guided by the Egypto-Chaldean spirits whose development was held back. Most of what is called modern materialistic science is under this influence.

Besides this influence, a second, different stream is also making itself felt. This is geared to helping us find the Christ-principle, as we call it, in all we do. For example, some people today claim that our world consists, in the final analysis, only of atoms. Who instills into human beings the idea that the world consists only of atoms? They get this idea from the superhuman angelic beings whose development was arrested during the Egypto-Chaldean period. [ 6 ] However, the angelic beings who reached their goal in the ancient Egypto-Chaldean cultural period and encountered Christ at that time can instill other ideas in us. They can teach us that substance is permeated with the spirit of Christ right down to the smallest parts of the world. And, however strange it may seem now, a time will come when chemistry and physics will not be taught as they are today under the influence of the Egypto-Chaldean spirits whose development was held back. Instead, scientists will teach that matter is built up piece by piece the way Christ ordered it. People will find Christ even in the laws of chemistry and physics, and a spiritual chemistry and a spiritual physics will develop.

[ 7 ] Undoubtedly this now seems to many people merely a daydream or worse. But yesterday's folly is often tomorrow's wisdom. Careful observers can already discern the factors working toward this end in our cultural development. At the same time, of course, such observers know only too well the scientific or philosophical objections that can be raised—with apparent justification—against this supposed folly.

[ 8 ] On the basis of the assumptions presented here, we can understand the advantages the guiding superhuman beings have over us. Post-Atlantean humanity encountered Christ when the Christ-event entered human history in the fourth post-Atlantean or Greco-Latin epoch. The superhuman guiding beings encountered Christ during the Egypto-Chaldean period and worked their way up toward him. Then, during the Greco-Latin epoch, they had to leave humanity to its fate, in order later to take part in guiding its development again. Today when we practice theosophy [anthroposophy] this means that we acknowledge that the superhuman beings who guided humanity in the past are now continuing their guiding function by submitting themselves to Christ's leadership. The same is also true for other beings.

[ 9 ] In the ancient Persian epoch archangels took part in guiding humanity. They submitted to the leadership of Christ even earlier than the beings of the lower hierarchies. Zarathustra, for example, turned the attention of his followers and his people to the sun, telling them that the great spirit Ahura Mazda, “he who will come down to earth,” lives in the sun.¹ The archangels who guided Zarathustra taught him about the great sun-guide who had not yet come down to earth but had only started on his way so as to later be able to intervene directly in earthly evolution. Similarly, the guiding beings presiding over the great teachers of India taught them about the Christ of the future. It is an error to think that these teachers knew nothing about Christ. They only said he was “above their sphere,” and that they “could not reach him.”

[ 10 ] As in our fifth cultural epoch it is the angels who bring Christ into our spiritual development, so in the sixth cultural epoch we will be guided by the beings who guided the ancient Persian epoch. The spirits of primal beginning, the archai, who guided humanity in ancient India, will, under Christ, guide humanity in the seventh cultural epoch. In Greco-Latin times, Christ came down from spiritual heights and revealed himself in the flesh in the body of Jesus of Nazareth—he descended right into the physical world. When they are ready, human beings will find Christ again in the next higher world. In the future, Christ will no longer be found in the physical world but only in the worlds directly above it.

After all, human beings will not always remain as they are now. We will become more mature and will find Christ in the spiritual world, as Paul did in the event on the road to Damascus, an event that prophetically foreshadows the future. And as the great teachers who led humanity in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch also guide us, so too it will be they who will lead us in the twentieth century to a vision of Christ similar to the one Paul saw. They will show us that Christ works not only on the earth but spiritualizes the entire solar system. Then, in the seventh cultural epoch, the reincarnated holy teachers of India will proclaim Christ as the great spirit, whose presence they first sensed in the unity of Brahman but which received its meaning and content only through Christ.² They will recognize Christ as the spirit they believed to rule above their sphere. Thus, step by step, humanity is led into the spiritual world.

[ 11 ] To speak of Christ as the leader of successive worlds and of the higher hierarchies is the teaching of the science that has unfolded since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries under the sign of the Rose Cross, a science that has increasingly proven essential for humanity.³ Looking at Christ from this perspective, we gain new insights into the being who lived in Palestine and then fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, as the following shows.

[ 12 ] There have been many different views of Christ before today's. For example, certain Christian gnostics of the first centuries claimed that the Christ who lived in Palestine did not have a physical body of flesh at all but had only an apparent “etheric”body that became visible to physical eyes.⁴ Consequently, since for them only an etheric body was present, they said Christ's death on the cross was not a real death but only an apparent one. There were also various disputes among the adherents of Christianity—for example, the famous dispute between the Arians and the Athanasians,⁵ and so on—as well as many different interpretations of the true nature of Christ. Many different views of Christ, indeed, have been held by people right into our own time.

[ 13 ] Spiritual science, however, must see Christ not just as an earthly being but as a cosmic being. In a certain sense, we human beings are also cosmic beings. We live a dual life: a physical life in the physical body from birth until death and a life in the spiritual worlds between death and rebirth. While we are incarnated in the physical body, we are dependent on the earth because the physical body is subject to the living conditions and forces of the earth. We ingest the substances and forces of the earth, and we are also part of the earth's physical organism. But once we have passed through the portal of death, we no longer belong to the forces of the earth.

Yet, it would be wrong to imagine that having passed through the portal of death we do not belong to any forces at all, for after death we are connected with the forces of the solar system and the other galaxies. Between death and rebirth we live in and belong to the cosmos in the same way as between birth and death we live in the earthly realm and belong to the elements of air, water, earth and so on. After death, we enter the realm of cosmic influences; for example, the planets affect us not only with gravity and other physical forces explained by physical astronomy but also with their spiritual forces. Indeed, we are connected with these cosmic spiritual forces after death, each of us in a particular way appropriate to our individuality. Just as a person born in Europe has a different relationship to temperature conditions and so on than a person born in Australia, so each of us similarly has a unique, individual relationship to the forces working on us during life after death. One person may have a closer relationship to the forces of Mars while another is more closely connected to those of Jupiter and yet others may have a closer relationship to the forces of the entire galaxy, and so on. These forces also lead us back to the earth to our new life. Thus, before our rebirth we are connected with the entire starry universe.

[ 14 ] The unique relationship of an individual to the cosmic system determines which forces lead him or her back to earth; they also determine to which parents and to which locality we are brought. The impulse to incarnate in one place or another, in this or that family, in this or that nation, at this or that point in time, is determined by the way the individual is integrated into the cosmos before birth.

[ 15 ] In the past the German language had an expression that poignantly characterized the birth of an individual. When someone was born, people said that he or she had “become young” (“ist jung geworden”). Unconsciously, this expression indicates that following death we are first subject to the forces that made us old in our previous incarnation, but just before our new birth, these are replaced by other forces that make us “young” again. In his drama Faust, Goethe says of someone that he “became young in Nebelland (the land of mist)”; Nebelland is the old name for medieval Germany.⁶

[ 1 ] People who are knowledgeable about these things can “read” the forces that determine a person's path in his or her physical life; on this basis horoscopes are cast. Each of us is assigned a particular horoscope, in which the forces are revealed that have led us into this life. For example, if in a particular horoscope Mars is above Aries, this means that certain Aries forces cannot pass through Mars but are weakened instead.

[ 16 ] Thus, human beings on their way into physical existence can get their bearings through their horoscope. Before ending this discussion—which, after all, seems a daring one in our time—we should note that most of what is presented today in this area is the purest dilettantism and pure superstition. As far as the world at large is concerned, the true science of these things has largely been lost. Therefore, the principles presented here should not be judged according to the claims of modern astrology, which is highly questionable.

[ 17 ] The active forces of the starry world push us into physical incarnation. Clairvoyant perception allows us to see in a person's organization that he or she is indeed the result of the working together of such cosmic forces. I want to illustrate this in a hypothetical form that nevertheless corresponds fully to clairvoyant perceptions.

[ 18 ] If we examined the structure of a person's brain clairvoyantly and could see that certain functions are located in certain places and give rise to certain processes, we would find that each person's brain is different. No two people have the same brain. If we could take a picture of the entire brain with all of its details visible, we would get a different picture for each person. If we photographed a person's brain at the moment of birth and took a picture of the sky directly above his or her birthplace, the two pictures would be alike. The stars in the photograph of the sky would be arranged in the same way as certain parts of the brain in the other picture. Thus, our brain is really a picture of the heavens, and we each have a different picture depending on where and when we were born. This indicates that we are born out of the entire universe.

[ 19 ] This insight gives us an idea of the way the macrocosm manifests in the individual and from this, in turn, we can understand how it manifests in Christ. If we were to think that after the Baptism, the macrocosm lived in Christ in the same way as it does in any other human being, we would have the wrong idea.

[ 20 ] Let us consider for a moment Jesus of Nazareth and his extraordinary life. At the beginning of the Christian era, two boys named Jesus were born. One belonged to the Nathan line of the house of David, the other to the Solomon line of the same house. These two boys were born at approximately—though not exactly—the same time.⁷

[ 1 ] In the Solomon child portrayed in the Gospel of St. Matthew, the individuality who had lived earlier as Zarathustra incarnated. Thus, in the Jesus depicted in the Gospel of St. Matthew, we actually encounter the reincarnated Zarathustra or Zoroaster.⁸ The individuality of Zarathustra grew up in this child just as Matthew describes it, until the boy's twelfth year. Then Zarathustra left his body and entered the body of the other Jesus, the one described by the Gospel of St. Luke. That is why at this moment the child Jesus so suddenly became entirely different from what he had previously been. When his parents found him in the temple in Jerusalem after the spirit of Zarathustra had entered him, they were astonished. This is shown by the fact that they could not understand what he said when they found him for they knew only the Nathan Jesus as he had been before. The Jesus who now stood before them could talk as he did to the scribes in the temple because the spirit of Zarathustra had now entered into him.

The spirit of Zarathustra lived and matured to a still higher perfection in this Jesus, who came from the Nathan line of the house of David, up to his thirtieth year. It should also be noted that impulses from the Buddha streamed out of the spiritual world into the astral body of this youth, in whom the spirit of Zarathustra now lived.

[ 21 ] It is true, as the Eastern tradition teaches, that the Buddha was born as a “bodhisattva” and only reached the rank of buddha on earth in his twenty-ninth year.⁹ [ 22 ] When Gautama Buddha was still a small child, Asita, the great Indian sage, came weeping to the royal palace. As a seer, Asita knew this royal child would become the “Buddha.” He only regretted that, since he was already an old man, he would not live to see the son of Suddhodana become Buddha. This wise man Asita was reborn in the time of Jesus of Nazareth; it is he who is introduced in St. Luke's Gospel as the temple priest and sees the Buddha reveal himself in the Nathan Jesus. And because he saw this he said: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace ... for mine eyes have seen thy salvation” (Luke 2:29-30). Through the astral body of this Jesus boy—the one presented in the Gospel of St. Luke—Asita could see what he had not been able to see in India: the bodhisattva who has become Buddha.¹⁰

[ 23 ] All of this was necessary for the development of the body that was to receive the Baptism by John in the river Jordan. At the moment of the Baptism, the individuality of Zarathustra left behind the threefold body—physical, etheric, and astral—of the Jesus who had grown up in the complicated way that enabled Zarathustra's spirit to dwell in him—for the reborn Zarathustra had had to undergo the two developmental possibilities represented in the two Jesus boys. Thus John the Baptist was brought before the body of Jesus of Nazareth in whom the cosmic individuality of Christ was now working. Other human beings are placed into their earthly existence through cosmic-spiritual laws, but these are then counteracted by those originating in the conditions of the earth's evolution. In the case of Christ Jesus, however, the cosmic spiritual powers alone remained active in him after the Baptism. The laws of the earth's evolution did not influence him at all.

[ 24 ] During the time that Jesus of Nazareth pursued his ministry and journeys as Jesus Christ in Palestine in the last three years of his life—from the age of thirty to thirty-three—the entire cosmic Christ-being continued to work in him. In other words, Christ always stood under the influence of the entire cosmos; he did not take a single step without cosmic forces working in him. The events of these three years in Jesus' life were a continuous realization of his horoscope, for in every moment during those years there occurred what usually happens only at birth. This was possible because the entire body of the Nathan Jesus had remained susceptible to the influence of the totality of the forces of the cosmic-spiritual hierarchies that guide our earth.

Now that we know that the whole spirit of the cosmos penetrated Christ Jesus we may ask, Who was the being who went to Capernaum and all the other places Jesus went? The being who walked the earth in those years certainly looked like any other human being. But the forces working in him were the cosmic forces coming from the sun and the stars; they directed his body. The total essence of the cosmos, to which the earth belongs, determined what Christ Jesus did. This is why the constellations are so often alluded to in the gospel descriptions of Jesus' activities. For example, in the Gospel of St. John the time when Christ finds his first disciple is described as “about the tenth hour” (John 1:39). In this fact the spirit of the entire cosmos expressed itself in a way appropriate to the appointed moment. Such indications are less obvious in other places in the gospels, but people who can read the gospels properly will find them everywhere.

[ 25 ] The miracles of healing the sick must also be understood from this point of view. Let us look at just one passage, the one that reads, “Now when the sun was setting, all those who had any that were sick with various diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on them and healed them” (Luke 5:40). What does this mean? Here the gospel writer points out that this healing was connected with the constellation of the stars, that in those days the necessary constellation was present only after the sun had set. In other words, in those times the healing forces could manifest themselves only after sunset. Christ Jesus is portrayed as the mediator who brings together the sick and the forces of the cosmos that could heal them at precisely that time. These were the same forces that also worked as Christ in Jesus. The healing occurred through Christ's presence, which exposed the sick to the healing cosmic forces. These healing forces could be effective only under the appropriate conditions of space and time, as described above. In other words, the forces of the cosmos worked on the sick through their representative, the Christ.

[ 26 ] However, these forces could work in this way only while Christ was on earth. Only then were the cosmic constellations so connected to the forces in the human organism that certain diseases could be cured when these constellations worked on individuals through Christ Jesus. A repetition of these conditions in cosmic and earthly evolution is just as impossible as a second incarnation of the Christ in a human body. Thus, the life of Christ Jesus was the earthly expression of a particular relationship between the cosmos and human forces. When sick people remained for a while by Christ's side, their nearness to Christ brought them into a relationship to the macrocosm and this had a healing effect on them.

[ 27 ] What I have said so far allows us to understand how the guidance of humanity has been placed under the influence of Christ. Nevertheless, the other forces whose development was held back in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch also continue to work alongside those that are Christ-filled, as we can see in many contemporary interpretations of the gospels. Books are published that take great pains to show that the gospels can be understood astrologically. The greatest opponents of the gospels cite this astrological interpretation, claiming, for example, that the path of the archangel Gabriel from Elizabeth to Mary represents the movement of the sun from the constellation of Virgo to another one.

To a certain extent, this astrological interpretation is correct; however, in our time, ideas of this sort are instilled into people by the beings whose development was arrested during the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. Under their influence there are some who would have us believe that the gospels are merely allegories representing certain cosmic relationships. The truth is, however, that the whole cosmos is expressed in Christ. In other words, we can characterize Christ's life by describing for each of its events the cosmic relationships that, through Christ, entered life on earth.

As soon as we understand all this correctly, we will inevitably and fully accept that Christ lived on earth. The false view mentioned above, however, claims that, because Christ's life is expressed in the gospels through cosmic constellations, it follows necessarily that the gospels are only an allegory of these constellations and that Christ did not really live on earth.

[ 28 ] Allow me to use a comparison to make things clear. Imagine every person at birth as a spherical mirror reflecting everything around it. Were we to trace the outlines of the images in the mirror with a pencil, we could then take the mirror and carry the picture it represents with us wherever we went. Just so, we carry a picture of the cosmos within us when we are born, and this one picture affects and influences us throughout our lives. Of course, we could also leave the mirror clean as it was originally, in which case it would reflect its surroundings wherever we took it, providing us with a complete picture of the world around us. This analogy explains how Christ was in the time between the Baptism in the Jordan and the Mystery of Golgotha. What enters our earthly life only at our birth flowed into Christ Jesus at each moment of his life. After the Mystery of Golgotha, what had streamed into Christ from the cosmos merged with the spiritual substance of the earth, and it has been united with the spirit of the earth ever since.

[ 29 ] When Paul became clairvoyant on his way to Damascus, he was able to perceive that what had previously been in the cosmos had merged with the spirit of the earth. People who can relive this event in their soul can see this for themselves. In the twentieth century, human beings are able for the first time to experience the Christ-event spiritually, as St. Paul did. [ 30 ] Up to this century only those individuals who had gained clairvoyant powers through esoteric schooling were able to have such experiences. Today and in the future, however, as a result of natural human development, advancing soul forces will be able to see Christ in the spiritual sphere of the earth. Beginning with a certain point in the twentieth century, a few people will be able to have such experiences and will be able to relive the incident at Damascus, but thereafter gradually more and more people will be able to do so, and in the distant future it will have become a natural capacity of the human soul to see Christ in this way.

[ 31 ] When Christ entered earthly history, a completely new element was introduced into it. Even the outer events of history bear witness to this. In the first cultural periods after the Atlantean catastrophe, people knew very well that the physical planets, such as Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn, were the expressions or manifestations of spiritual beings. In later ages this view was completely forgotten. People came to see the heavenly bodies as merely material things—to be judged according to their physical conditions. By the Middle Ages, people saw in the stars only what their physical eyes could perceive: the sphere of Venus, the sphere of the sun, of Mars, and so on up to the sphere of the firmament of fixed stars. Beyond that, they believed, there was the eighth sphere which enclosed the others like a solid blue wall around them.

Then Copernicus came and shook to its foundations the established outlook of relying completely and exclusively on what the human senses could perceive.¹¹ According to modern natural science, only people with muddled minds can claim that the world is maya or illusion and that we must look into a spiritual world to see the truth. Scientists believe that true science is based on what our senses tell us, and they record those perceptions. However, the only time when astronomers relied exclusively on their senses was in the days when the astronomy prevailed that modern astronomers oppose!

[ 32 ] Modern astronomy began to develop as a science when Copernicus started to think about what exists in the universe beyond the range of human sensory perception. In fact, it is true of all the sciences that they developed in opposition to sensory appearance. When Copernicus explained that what we see is maya, illusion, and that we should rely on what we cannot see—that was the moment when science as we know it today began.

In other words, the modern sciences did not become “science” until they stopped relying exclusively on sensory perception. Giordano Bruno, as the philosophical interpreter of Copernicus's teachings, proclaimed that the eighth sphere, which had been considered the boundary of space enclosing everything, was not a boundary at all.¹² It was maya, an illusion, and only appeared to be the boundary. In reality, a vast number of worlds had been poured into the universe. Thus what had previously been regarded as the boundary of the universe now became the boundary of the world of human sensory perception. We have to look beyond the sense world. Once we no longer see the world merely as it appears to our senses, then we can perceive infinity.

[ 33 ] Originally, then, humanity had a spiritual view of the cosmos, but in the course of history this was gradually lost. The spiritual world view was replaced by an understanding of the world based exclusively on sensory perception. Then the Christ impulse entered human history. Through this principle humanity was led once again to imbue the materialistic outlook with spirituality. At the moment when Giordano Bruno burst the confines of sensory appearance, the Christ-development had so far advanced in him that the soul force, which had been kindled by the Christ-impulse, could be active within him. This indicates the significance of Christ's involvement in human history and development, which is really still in its early stages.

[ 34 ] What, then, are the goals of spiritual science?

[ 35 ] Spiritual science completes what Bruno and others did for the outer physical sciences by demonstrating that the conventional, sense-based sciences can perceive and understand only maya or illusion. At one time, people looked up to the “eighth sphere” and believed it to be the boundary of the universe. Similarly, modern thinking considers human life bounded by birth and death. Spiritual science extends our view beyond these boundaries.

[ 36 ] Ideas like this one allow us to see human evolution as an uninterrupted chain. And, indeed, what Copernicus and Bruno accomplished for space by overcoming sensory appearance had already been known earlier from the inspirations of the spiritual stream that is continued today by spiritual science or theosophy [anthroposophy]. Modern esotericism, as we may call it, worked in a secret and mysterious way on Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and others.¹³ Thus, people whose outlook is based on the findings of Bruno and Copernicus betray their own traditions when they refuse to accept theosophy [anthroposophy] and insist on looking only at sensory appearance.

Just as Giordano Bruno broke through the blue vault of heaven, so spiritual science breaks through the boundaries of birth and death and proves that the human being comes forth from the macrocosm to live in this physical life and returns again to a macrocosmic existence after death. What is revealed in the individual on a limited scale can be seen on a much larger scale in the representative of the cosmic spirit, in Christ Jesus. The impulse Christ gave to evolution could be given only once. Only once could the entire cosmos be reflected as it was in Christ; the constellation that existed then will not appear again. This constellation had to work through a human body in order to be able to impart its impulse to the earth. Just as this particular constellation will not occur a second time, so Christ will not incarnate again. People claim that Christ will appear again on earth only because they do not know that Christ is the representative of the entire universe and because they cannot find the way to the Christ-idea presented in all its elements by spiritual science.

[ 37 ] Thus, modern spiritual science or theosophy [anthroposophy] has developed a Christ-idea that shows us our kinship with the entire macrocosm in a new way. To really know Christ we need the inspiring forces that are now imparted through the ancient Egyptian and Chaldean superhuman beings who were themselves guided by Christ. We need this new inspiration, which has been prepared by the great esotericists of the Middle Ages since the thirteenth century. This new inspiration must now be brought more and more to the attention of the general public. If we prepare the soul properly for the perception of the spiritual world according to the teachings of spiritual science, we will be able to hear clairaudiently and to see clairvoyantly what is revealed by these ancient Chaldean and Egyptian powers, who have now become spiritual guides under the leadership of the Christ-being. The first Christian centuries up to our own time were only the preparation for what humanity will receive and understand one day.

In the future, people's hearts will be filled with a Christ-idea whose magnitude will surpass anything humanity has known and understood so far. The first impulse that Christ brought and the understanding of him that has lived on until now is even in the best exponents of the Christ-principle only a preparation for a true understanding of Christ. Strangely enough, those who present the Christ-idea in this way in the West will in all probability be accused of not basing themselves on western Christian tradition. After all, this western Christian tradition is utterly inadequate for understanding Christ in the near future.

Western esotericism allows us to see the spiritual guidance of humanity gradually merge with the guidance proceeding from the Christ-impulse. Modern esotericism will gradually flow into people's hearts, and the spiritual guidance of the individual and humanity will more and more be seen consciously in this light.

[ 38 ] Let us recall that the Christ-principle first entered human hearts when Christ ministered in Palestine in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. In those days, people who had gradually resigned themselves to trusting only in the sensory world could receive the impulse appropriate to their understanding. The same impulse then worked through modern esotericism to inspire such great minds as Nicholas of Cusa, Copernicus, and Galileo.¹⁴ That is why Copernicus could assert that sensory appearance cannot teach us the truth about the solar system and that we must look beyond it to find the truth.

At that time, people were not yet mature enough—even a brilliant man like Giordano Bruno was not yet ready—to integrate themselves consciously into the stream of modern esotericism. The spirit of this stream had to work in them without their being conscious of it. Giordano Bruno proclaimed proudly that the human being is actually a macrocosmic being condensed into a monad to enter physical existence; and that this monad expands again when the individual dies. What had been condensed in the body expands into the universe in order to concentrate again at other levels of existence and to expand again, and so on. Bruno expressed great concepts that fully agree with modern esotericism, even though they may sound like stammering to our modern ears.

[ 39 ] We are not necessarily always conscious of the spiritual influences that guide us. For example, such influences led Galileo into the cathedral of Pisa. Thousands of people had seen the old church lamp there, but they did not look at it the way he did. Galileo saw the lamp swing and compared its oscillations with his pulse beats. In this way he discovered that the church lamp swung in a regular rhythm similar to that of his pulse—the “law of the pendulum,” as it is known in modern physics. Anyone familiar with modern physics knows that physics as we know it would not exist if it had not been for Galileo's laws. What was at work in leading Galileo to the swinging lamp in the cathedral—thus giving modern physics its first principles—now works in spiritual science. The powers that guide us spiritually work secretly in this way.

[ 40 ] We are now approaching a time when we have to become conscious of these guiding powers. We will be able to understand better what must happen in the future if we correctly grasp the inspiration coming to us from modern esotericism. From this inspiration we also know that the spiritual beings whom the ancient Egyptians considered to be their teachers—the same beings who ruled as gods—are ruling again, but that they now want to submit to Christ's leadership. People will feel more and more that they can allow pre-Christian elements to be resurrected in glory and style on a higher level. In the present era we need a strengthened consciousness, a high sense of duty and responsibility concerning the understanding of the spiritual world. For this to enter our soul we must understand the mission of spiritual science in the way I have outlined.

• S1. Ancient Persian here does not refer to what is called “Persian” in ordinary history but rather to an ancient Asian prehistoric (Iranian) culture that developed in the region where the Persian Empire flourished later.
• 1. Zarathustra, 660?–583? B.C., Persian religious leader, also known as Zoroaster.
• 2. Brahman, Hindu Godhead or Absolute; the creator god of the Hindu sacred triad (with Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer).
• 3. The Rose Cross is the emblem of the Rosicrucians. Tradition associates the rose with Persia, the cross is the symbol of Christianity. Historically, the Rosicrucian Order is thought to have been founded as a secret society c.1430 by Christian Rosenkreutz. Commonly associated with healing, occultism, alchemy; Steiner counters the “... materialistic caricature of Rosicrucianism ... presented today. The task of the Rosicrucians was to formulate a science by means of which they would be able to let their (universal) wisdom flow gradually into the world.” Rosicrucian Esotericism, (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1978), 6. See also George Adams, The Mysteries of the Rose-Cross, (Sussex, England: New Knowledge Books, 1955).
• 4. Gnosticism arose in the Hellenistic era. Gnostics believed that salvation is attained through knowledge rather than through faith or deeds.
• 5. Arius, c.250–336, Greek ecclesiastic at Alexandria. Taught Neoplatonic doctrine that God is alone, unknowable, and separate from every created being, that Christ is a created being and not God in the fullest sense but a secondary deity, and that in the incarnation the Logos assumed a body but not a human soul. Growing dispute over his teaching led Emperor Constantine to call the Council of Nicaea (325) where Arianism was declared heresy. Saint Athanasius, c.293–373, Greek theologian and prelate in Egypt. Lifelong opponent of Arianism. Attended Council of Nicaea (325) as deacon. Bishop of Alexandria. Advocated homoousian doctrine. Often exiled because of his opposition to Arianism. Wrote doctrinal works. Not author of Athanasian creed, which originated later (5th or 6th century).
• 6. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, leading German poet and playwright. Faust (1808–32), a drama in verse, is Goethe's masterpiece. The lines referred to are in Part Two, Scene 2.
• 7. Nathan and Solomon were both sons of King David, the second king of Israel. The Gospel of St. Luke cites Nathan as a forefather of Mary (Luke 3:31); St. Matthew traces Joseph's lineage to Solomon (Matthew 1:16). For a detailed account of the two Jesus children, see Rudolf Steiner, From Jesus to Christ, (London Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973), lecture 8.
• 8. The Zoroaster mentioned here by Steiner lived in very ancient times, according to the Greeks—already 5000 years before the Trojan war. He is not identical with the Zoroaster or Zarathustra mentioned in ordinary history.
• 9. Buddha, Indian religious leader, founder of Buddhism. Historical name Siddhartha Gautama, c.563–483 B.C. Some Eastern religions believe him one of the last incarnations of the Godhead. Son of a royal family, he renounced luxury and became an ascetic. Bodhisattva, a being that compassionately refrains from entering Nirvana for the salvation of others.
• 10. Steiner describes the human being as comprised of four “bodies”: physical, etheric, astral, and ego. The astral body bears the inner world of desires, pleasure and pain, and the qualitative world of emotions. See Occult Science, 21–28.
• 11. Nicolaus Copernicus, 1473–1543, Polish astronomer. Made astronomical observations of orbits of sun, moon, planets. Gradually abandoned accepted Ptolemaic system of astronomy and worked out heliocentric system in which the earth rotates daily on its axis and, with other planets, revolves around the sun.
• 12. Giordano Bruno, 1548–1600, Italian philosopher. Arrested by the Inquisition and burned at the stake. A critic of Aristotelian logic and champion of Copernican cosmology, which he extended with the notion of the infinite universe.
• 13. See Lecture Two, note 2
• 14. Nicholas Cusanus, 1401–1464, German prelate and philosopher. Bishop and later created cardinal. Wrote treatises for church councils as well as works on mathematics and philosophy. Anticipated Copernicus by his belief in the earth's rotation and revolution around the sun.
  
  Galileo Galilei, 1564–1642, Italian mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. First to use telescope to study the skies. Tried by the Inquisition for supporting the Copernican system.

Today, on the first day of our branch reflections, we want to make a reflection, as is appropriate to the circumstances of the times, that extends to what can fall from our spiritual-scientific endeavor as light on many things that time, questioning, demanding, and should at least fill him with tasks, tasks that are indeed posed in the most eminent sense by the spirit of the time and on whose grasp by each individual perhaps much of the fate of humanity in the near future could depend. Let us start from something that may be obvious to us. You will have noticed that for some time now there has been a change in the mood of the outside world towards our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, a change in mood to the effect that this spiritual science is viewed with growing hostility here and there. Only someone who does not appreciate the history of spiritual movements in the right way can be surprised when such a change of mood, such a change of mood, comes; it will come with even greater intensity. As long as a movement like this one is mainly confined to a certain sectarian activity, as long as it is confined to a few people coming together here or there in different cities, sectionally uniting in front or back houses to pursue this or that sectionally, as long as such emerging movements are viewed with a certain indulgent goodwill which here and there may develop into something else, but that is left at that. There is no need to take such movements seriously; they will disappear by themselves, and the rooms in the front and back buildings where such things are done in a sectarian, more family-like way will be claimed by something else. For many years such an attitude prevailed in the outside world towards our movement, and the hostility that arose was more or less an oasis in comparison with the general mood. But things have changed a little, in that at least one side has increasingly endeavored to cast off the sectarian character of the movement. Although resistance to this sectarianism and to uniting with the general culture of the present arises again and again, even from within the ranks of our own society, an energetic attempt must be made to come together with those who are otherwise striving in the culture of the present, despite all resistance and hostility. It will not be enough just to sit down and read out lectures in a comfortable way and the like – although that can of course be a nice family task – one will be obliged to grapple with what people want here and there, to to tie in with what is wanted here and there, in order to find, precisely through the interrelationship with the perhaps reluctant movements of the outside world, what must be found for the present through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

And a very important task for our friends will be to develop the necessary flexibility of mind that will be needed to truly find this way out of the comfortable, safe, warm, family-like environment. It is necessary, but the necessity is not yet felt everywhere. This leads directly to the question: How will the various impulses of our spiritual movement have to deal in the future with that which is traditional or newly arising, or with the belief that it may be something new? How will that which comes from us have to deal with such movements? How will that develop?

Well, first of all, despite all the apparent approval from this or that side, the resistance will be particularly strong on the part of the official representatives of religious, denominational world views. These religious and confessional representatives of world views, from whose ranks exemplary confessors of our movement will certainly emerge, will nevertheless, in their majority, repeatedly emphasize what they pick up from the inherited good of their views, and will find plenty of support among the masses of people today, who, of course, do not believe in authority themselves, but fall for every kind of authority. In particular, it will be difficult to push through spiritual scientific knowledge against the current mood, which is based on a certain extraordinarily comfortable way in which human souls have become accustomed to finding their relationship to the spiritual world. How many people in the present day actually say: “Ah, there come such spiritual researchers who construct a whole world of hierarchies!” One should ascend through the hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on to a supreme spiritual, to a supreme divine. Such people find all this far too 'intellectual' to go along with, and they point to the simple, as they call it, naive relationship in which, through strong inner experience, the soul can come to God or even to Christ and the like. This is what you hear over and over again from those who think they know better: direct experience of the highest divine! Why should a person need so many hierarchical intermediaries to come to spiritual knowledge? They can find union with the highest divine in their childlike, simple experience.

But now we have to ask ourselves: What happens in the souls of those who, really with a certain honesty, even if this honesty is a comfortable one, characterize their striving in this way: They speak of the divine that they experience. There are people who have definitely experienced a certain change in their emotional life, through which everything they call divine, spiritual, appears to them differently than it did before. Some call it evangelism, others call it something else, but that does not matter. It is the belief that these people have found access to the highest divine in a childlike, naive way. Some people imagine that experiencing the Christ within is quite simple. But what do they really experience?

Now, I assume that the experiences that are meant here are genuine and honest, that people really experience something, that they have really experienced a change in their spiritual life. I start from a very honest conviction. I also start from a certain lack of prejudice towards the traditional confessional beliefs. What these people experience is then at most the next spiritual that a person can experience. And what is this next spiritual? This next spiritual is that being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi, which is assigned to every person for his guidance, which one can call whatever one likes: Christ, the highest God, if one likes! - It does not depend on what one calls it, but on what it really is, which approaches the soul when one has an honest, real experience: It is the Angelos, the Angel, and this Angel one regards only as the highest God. One is too lazy to progress to something else, and the next thing one experiences one designates as one's God and constructs with it — yes, what actually? — the most egotistical religion one can possibly construct! It is not important that all people communicate by giving the thing a single name, because since people do not want to experience anything other than what has been suggested, everyone experiences only their own angel, everyone worships only their own angel. And no matter how many preachers speak of the unified God, of the seemingly monotheistic God, in truth they only speak of the millions of angels that people worship and to whom they give the same name, thus driving people into confusion that these millions of beings are only one being. That is the reality, and at the same time it points to the illusion that one falls prey to when one wants to unite with the most egotistical God in this way. |

There is already an external indication of what I have just mentioned. Try to resort to the learned aids that can also be used on such occasions, and you will be able to learn something strange: Take the most learned things in this field today and try to gain knowledge of the origin of a very common word. You will find a word in particular about which all scholars within the German-speaking area will tell you: the origin of it cannot be fathomed. That is the word God and its adjective divine. Take the German dictionary: the article 'spirit' in the dictionary is also not very satisfactory, but still more satisfactory than the article 'God'. All you can find out is that no one knows where the word God comes from. There are all kinds of hypotheses, but no one knows where it comes from. In the face of such a learned conclusion, will anyone still be able to shrink from the assertion that numerous people who speak of God and the divine do not know what they are talking about? Quite naturally, because they use a word of unknown origin for something, well, for whatever they would like to use it for. Things are more serious than they would like to admit. But one does not want to tackle these things. One does not realize how much one lives in clichés and how happy one feels to be able to live in clichés. That is one thing. But one can also find something else.

If you go for the reality that people experience when they speak of their God today, even transcending the denominational, and experience him in their own inner being, they may call it mystical or theosophical, you can experience over and over again that people say: It all comes down to experiencing God within yourself, to becoming one with God within yourself! What exactly does one become one with in this case? If one investigates the thing with which the human being then becomes one, without realizing it, it is nothing other than one's own soul as it was before it entered into physical existence through conception or birth, as this soul has lived between the last death and this birth. Today, even if he sincerely wants to be religious, man either worships his angel or his own ego as it was before birth or conception. He calls it his God and attributes it to the word of unknown origin; but what he really feels dawning from the unconscious is himself. And the curious thing comes to light for the one who sees through reality, that from all pulpits there is constant talk of predestination, and since one cannot think of this without repeated earth lives, so the truth is spoken of these earth lives, namely of one's own self that goes through them, and at the same time the fact of these repeated earth lives is denied. In truth, nothing is talked about more than what Anthroposophy wants to bring to conscious human knowledge.

Now people find that it is necessary to give the matter a name of unknown origin. They actually talk about something emerging from the subconscious that can be experienced in mystical experiences. They call it being with God. In reality, it is being with oneself, with one's self, as it was before birth. If you call it God and ask people to worship it, you are asking people to worship themselves. Self-idolatry is what is celebrated as religion in many cases today. It is necessary to say this today because it describes the full seriousness of reality. But at the same time it is uncomfortable because it points to the tremendously profound lie that permeates our lives.

This life lie has essentially been led to what I have already mentioned here: that in the year 869 at the Eighth General Ecumenical Council of Constantinople, the spirit was abolished. I mentioned that the philosophical, unprejudiced people who start from the so-called unconditional science, today speak of the fact that man consists of body and soul. In truth, he consists of body, soul and spirit. But in the year 869 it was forbidden to speak of the spirit. And there is nothing that Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages avoided more than speaking of the so-called trichotomy of the spirit. But as soon as one left trichotomy, from which, for example, Dionysius the Areopagite still started, from which copies were still made in the 6th century, all of which still speak of the higher hierarchies, as soon as one took leave of what is so eagerly fought against even in today's world, of the old Gnosis, which of course , which of course must present itself to us in a different form today, but which was an enormously lofty thing for its time. As soon as one took leave of it and took into account the comfort of the intellect, one was also condemned to speak gradually of something that actually leads the soul into a terrible life-lie. No wonder that because spiritual science must tell the truth about these things, it arouses the most violent opposition today. And today, in many cases, people do not really want to listen to what people actually want to express in their hearts. It is truly the case that today, for the most part, people have completely forgotten how to listen with their souls.

Sometimes this comes to the surface in grotesque examples. People no longer care about what is actually being said, but about saying something themselves, regardless of whether it is relevant or not. This is not an isolated phenomenon, it is typical, it happens everywhere at every turn. I could give you a hundred examples of this, and a thousand. This is how it is in the literary field, and this is also how it is on the big world stage.

But what is really driving the present, what is driving the present and has ultimately led to such a catastrophe, is intimately connected with such things, with such a spiritual state of the present. This must be pointed out again and again. Even today there are still people who feel compelled to speak of love for one's neighbor, to speak of the fact that one has to respond to the other with understanding and love. But in reality none of this exists. Instead, the prevailing mood is that which Fritz Mauthner expresses in the case of Boll, with which you are familiar, where he launches a terrible tirade against someone who actually agrees with him completely.

In such matters, what one has to clearly and sharply perceive in the present is expressed characteristically and typically. Only by developing the will to engage with such matters will one find the standpoint necessary to make progress today in some way in the sense of human evolution at a place to which one is placed by one's karma.

Above all, we must recognize the following today: we must really look at what has developed in the human being from the last death to the present birth. We can no longer deceive ourselves, we can no longer have illusions through self-idolization, through self-adoration, by calling that which we actually find within us as our real self, God. One will no longer be able to indulge in such deceptions, but will have to look at what everyone brings with them into their physical existence as a legacy from spiritual worlds through their birth. Where is it actually? Yes, my dear friends, we all bring it with us, we bring an enormous amount of wisdom and spiritual knowledge into our physical existence through our birth. Where is it then? We are all so wise when we are born that we cannot believe how wise we are. But where is this wisdom? On the one hand, it is enchanted in our physical body and its predispositions, with which it has united, and on the other hand in our destiny. It wants to be released from this. And in the present time cycle of humanity it lies that this heritage be released through the free activity of the human being, be brought up as higher I-knowledge of what lies enchanted in ourselves and our destiny. We can, by realizing that the human being of today lives differently than the human being of past cultural epochs, also come to some insight about such things.

Let me remind you of something I have already mentioned here. I said that in the first cultural period of the post-Atlantic epoch, people lived differently than they do today. He experienced spiritually and mentally what was happening physically in him. Just as we as children today experience the change of teeth as a special turning point, and experience sexual maturity as a turning point in our psyche, so until the 1950s, people in the first post-Atlantic cultural period experienced their physical development. Then came the time when this was only experienced until the forties, then until the thirties. Today we only experience these things until the twenties. Until the twenties, the human being today experiences what is going on in him physically; then he is, as it were, emancipated. He can no longer experience by himself what lives in the descending development of life; he must experience it by allowing himself to be spiritually stimulated by the soul. The spiritual science must give the impulse to redeem what lies enchanted in our body or in our destiny. Our present-day education has not even come close to achieving this, let alone penetrating it. It must be recognized that an impulse must be laid in man in his earliest youth so that man may learn to grow older. People today do not understand growing old. At most, they understand that they are getting gray hair or – particularly common today – early baldness or similar signs of aging. But there is not what there can be in people: the expectation, the hopeful expectation for each new year, with the certainty that by getting older, one experiences something every year that cannot be experienced earlier. Every year brings something new, every year brings a new revelation, if one knows how to use it.

Of course, the mood must come over people, through which they say to themselves: Now I am turning twenty years old, the thirty- to forty-year-old has experienced something that I cannot yet experience today. I have to wait, then it will reveal itself to me. Consider seriously in all its aspects what it would mean if education worked in such a way that one could look forward hopefully to the approach of one's life. The opposite mood is cultivated today. People want to be elected to state parliaments and other parliaments at a very early age because they believe that one is ready at the earliest age, that one already has it all. What is more common today than for the youngest badgers to say at every opportunity: “That's my point of view!” — Everyone today already has a point of view at the earliest age. It is completely unknown to people that hope lives expectantly, that life holds secrets that reveal themselves little by little. But it would mean a great deal if this were to be incorporated into our education. Then one would have the will to gradually release that which is enchanted into our body and into our destiny.

However, we will have to see the culture as it has gradually developed in a very special light if we want to educate ourselves about such things. We will have to ask ourselves: How do we actually find the right point of view to gradually release what is enchanted in us? — Yes, we may even have to ask ourselves something else: Why should we redeem what we have within us in the form of enchantment? Is it not much more comfortable to leave it to the flesh and the nerves and the blood down there? It can rest there until we die and enter the other world; it can eke out an existence there. We leave what lies within us in enchantment to the nerves, the muscles, fate. Why should one then release this? One should and must release it for the reason that the spirit is subject to very definite laws on its way. That which is given to us as inheritance from spiritual worlds wants to be released, wants to be freed from its captivity. And that occurs by being taken up into consciousness. What lies in the body and in destiny wants to make its way into our consciousness. It has its true home in our consciousness. It should live in our consciousness, not be enchanted in our nervous or circulatory systems, in our muscles or in our bones. For if it remains in the nerves, muscles, bones or in the vague, merely suffered destiny, then this spiritual element is transformed into something else: into evil forces. It is destined to be brought into life through consciousness. If it remains united with the person outside of consciousness, it will either turn into Luciferic or Ahrimanic forces, and will gradually be handed over to Ahriman or Lucifer.

But for a long time, our Western cultural development has reckoned with Luciferic forces, and now, through a particularly esteemed spiritual current, it is preparing to reckon with Ahrimanic forces and to live with them. Man is indeed to be placed in the midst of life, is to find his place in life: that is how he is educated. Certain impulses, certain perceptions, certain feelings are cultivated. What impulses and feelings were used for in particular? Look around you at what is happening in the world. It is on the decline and will soon mean very little, but for centuries it has meant a great deal: medals, decorations, titles, honors. But what is behind all this? Feelings, sensations that make one strive to develop instincts, desires, Luciferic tendencies in humanity. Think about how much Luciferic in human nature has been striven for, cultivated, in order to put man in the place where one wanted to put him, by taking a detour through this Luciferic. That was the Luciferic period. It is on the wane. There is hardly any need to talk about it today, because what is happening in this area is on the wane. Even if people do not yet realize how much this is the case, they will see it. One speaks of something that is on the wane when one speaks of the actually Luciferic cultural impulses.

But the Ahrimanic ones are looming ominously. An example of this: right now, what is expected to achieve so much for the cultivation of humanity in the future, what is called the gifted test, the testing of human talents, is going through the German and other cultural “forests of scholars” in glorious representation. In the world of scholarship, very particular plants have emerged in recent times: certain psychologists, certain soul experts. They do experimental psychology, they experiment on people in order to explore the soul. Now, in the very latest times, these people have also turned their attention to young people. Because they can no longer cope with the old examination system and the old social order, they are turning on young people and testing their abilities so that, as they say – and this has already been said in prominent places – the right man is put in the right place. Of course, you have to start with the child to test how to find the right one. First of all, one tests the ability to grasp things by conducting all kinds of experiments: how quickly a child guesses this or that, which is some kind of vague stuff into which they are supposed to put meaning. Then one tests the intelligence, one tests the memory. The intelligence, for example, by presenting two words to the child or young person that are as unrelated as possible, say, for example, 'mirror' and 'robber'. And then you instruct a number of young people, whose intelligence you want to test, to combine these words in a meaningful way, to say what they want to put between these words mirror and robber. One person puts in: Even a robber can look at himself when he sees himself in the mirror. — This person is considered the least intelligent. Another thought up: the person who is to be robbed or even killed by the robber has a mirror; from a distance he sees the robber approaching and can save himself. — This is a more intelligent boy or girl.

There are now magazines in which these hair-raising methods of testing intelligence are described; they are developed and analyzed as a special achievement of the present. In this way, memory and intelligence are tested. A statistical approach is taken. The person who has told the most stories, for example, about what can happen between the robber and the mirror, is given two or more marks, as with censorship, and the person who has the most dashes, who has been able to find the most ingenious connections, is the most intelligent. That is the man or woman who is to be promoted in some way at special colleges with all kinds of support, and so on. The characteristic of these things, which are really praised today as a special achievement of humanity – and the most courageous educators devote all their energy to these aptitude tests – is that in this way one does not approach the soul at all, but only tests what ahrimanic rests in his physicality, that in this way one only tests how strongly Ahriman can develop through one or the other young person. What will be introduced into human culture in this way will be the ahrimanic impulses. But today one indulges in such illusions, such deceptions.

But this must be the significant thing in our spiritual development, that its seriousness is recognized. Of course, in small groups you can sit together and, as I said, read lectures in a family-like comfort: That does not hurt, or rather, what comes from outside does not hurt. But as this spiritual science gradually begins to spread, seriousness also begins, and this seriousness can only consist in wholeheartedly engaging with what is to be taken in connection with what is developing around us. It is necessary to understand these things and to understand them as deeply as they can be understood. It is necessary to develop the flexibility of mind that makes it possible to move beyond sectarianism to a worldly grasp of what our spiritual science is supposed to encompass. For various impulses must come from this spiritual science, which are healthy impulses in the face of many things that are emerging in our time in the form of a decadent, a declining one. Above all, those who want to enter this spiritual current need freedom, a spirit of independence.

For us, it is not about believing in authority, but about acquiring free, independent judgment. For nothing that is said in the field of spiritual science can be generalized; everything applies individually, everything applies in the concrete for the particular case. It is indeed a certain comfort that the human mind seeks to generalize things in so many ways, but this cannot be done as soon as one enters spiritual realms. Today it is absolutely necessary, absolutely imperative, to also open oneself to such insights, which do not stop at the merely indefinite, abstract, mystical, but penetrate into reality from the spiritual. One may believe oneself to be a great mystic, untouched by world events, going one's lonely way through the world, experiencing God within. But all this is a thin spiritual life, so thin that it does not approach what is present in the world as reality. Such mystics are not required in the present time. The individual can demand such mysticism because it can lull him into the comfortable belief that he is experiencing something very sublime in his soul. But the present time demands a strong spirituality that penetrates into the immediate reality. It demands not only a discussion of the higher hierarchies, but also such an insight into the nature of the higher hierarchies that one can, starting from this knowledge of the nature of the hierarchies, gain insight into what surrounds us on earth. For now the time is coming when human order can no longer be found except through real insights into the nature of what is developing here on earth, even if it is uncomfortable to recognize it.

Read the cycle I gave in Kristiania long before the war, in preparation for the present time, about the individual souls of nations, about the connection between the structure of the individual nations. There you will see that what is recognized in the higher hierarchies can be taken seriously, that it can be applied to the configuration of the earth. Such knowledge is necessary for the present. For such knowledge must provide the practical basis for what is to be undertaken in the future. What has to be done will have to be recognized, not from the phrase-filled writings and speeches of people who today talk about the European nations on the basis of what they call their observations, but one will really have to penetrate into what lives on earth in the realm of the spiritual.

Of course, today we think that anyone who has experienced something has something to say under all circumstances. Yes, do you think that everyone who lived a dull existence in some village in Provence from 1789 to 1800 had something very clever to say about the French Revolution? He has experienced the event; but that does not mean that he necessarily has anything significant to say about it! Similarly, countless people can travel to America or Italy and, as they say today, judge a country and its people. But what they say is not necessarily very valuable for judging what is needed. This depends on having the opportunity to get into the depths of existence, and for that today it is necessary not to accept or reject materialism on the one hand for my sake, or to accept or reject spiritualism, no, for the researcher of reality, the spiritual researcher in our sense, it must be completely irrelevant whether one takes one's starting point from being a materialist or a spiritualist. We do not necessarily have to despise the materialists under any circumstances, because it does not matter whether one starts from matter or from spirit, if one only goes to the end! He who in true contemplation goes to the end of matter finds the spirit in the material things that happen around us. And he who wants to rely on the spirit and is always saying, “Spirit, spirit, spirit!” must above all see that he finds the way from abstract comprehension of the spirit to concrete comprehension of what happens materially. For that which happens materially is a revelation of the spirit, but one must develop the right faith in the spiritual. The one who does not have the expectant life, that each new year can radiate new secrets into us as we grow older, that person, no matter how much he speaks of God and the spirit, does not really believe in God and the spirit. For he believes that he is mature at twenty-five in all that makes a person capable of judgment. But then the rest of life is useless, worthless for the soul; the Godhead no longer reveals anything else.

One must penetrate with the spirit to the material, comprehend it. The spiritual must be so condensed that it can find the material. If we grasp what is otherwise going on out there in the world in terms of material phenomena only in terms of what is within us, we must say: there is an abyss between the external and what goes on within us. Only spiritual science is called upon to bring the external world closer to us and to bring us closer to the external world in such a way that the two meet. We can do this for the individual and for the evolution of the earth. Such things must be understood. As I stated yesterday, natural science is the least suited to grasp the fact that the head is in retrogression and the extremities are in over-development. It is particularly necessary to grasp these things. How can we grasp them? We grasp them by going beyond ordinary imagining, beyond abstractness, and forming an imaginative vision of our own imagining. You cannot look at your own imagination without at the same time approaching what is happening materially in your head as you imagine. If you have the ordinary imagination of the ordinary consciousness, you do not notice what is going on in your head. You only notice this when you ascend to imaginative thinking; you experience the material process.

And do you know what happens in the head, in the mind, while we develop ordinary consciousness? A process of hunger takes place. The waking life of imagination consists in our head starving. The false ascetics and false mystics have instinctively understood this. Therefore, they have let the whole body starve. But it is not normal for spiritual experiences to occur when the whole body is starving. That is always wrong. The hunger-asceticism that is supposed to lead to mystical raptures is one-sidedness, an unhealthy direction. But normally the equilibrium of our body is so arranged that from morning to evening, from waking up to falling asleep, not the whole body, but the head is in a continuous hunger process. It is always the head that is undernourished. This is something that belongs to the process of degeneration. And through the undernourishment of the head, we are able to make room for the imaginative spiritual life. And he who gets to know the imaginative spiritual life as imagination also gets to know what others only know in somewhat lower regions when they feel the growling of the stomach. He learns to recognize that from morning till evening, until he falls asleep, he has a growling in his stomach. What takes place is what one can call the approach of the spiritual to the material in our own body. One-sided mysticism is a comfortable sinking into the inner self, where one experiences not much more than what one experiences otherwise, only a little more condensed. True spiritual development is such a strengthening, such an invigoration of the spiritual life that, when one applies it to one's own experience, one gets to know oneself more precisely, but now really more precisely. One also gets to know the bodily more precisely because one moves so close to the bodily that one moves up into the spiritual with the bodily, that one bridges the abyss that is otherwise always there between the spiritual and the bodily.

And so one bridges the abyss that exists between the physical and the spiritual, even outside in the life of nations. Take a look at the European nations, at least some of them. You know that the leading beings from the higher hierarchies with regard to nations – you know this from the cycle on the souls of nations – are the beings of the archangelic hierarchy, the archangeloi. But how do they work? Of course, this is only an abstraction, to see any archangel as the conductor of this or that people. We have no more than when we talk about the human soul, which can only be present between birth and death because it develops out of something material, namely in our body. In the same way, the archangel, in guiding a people, is bound to the external material. The bridge between the purely spiritual nature of the archangel and the nature of the people is a material one, even if it is not as clearly defined and sharply contoured as our body. We ask, for example: What about the people who inhabit the Apennine Peninsula, what about the people who used to be Romans and are now Italians of Germanic origin? For basically, the majority of the inhabitants of today are only transformed Germanic peoples, but they get their configuration, their national determination, from something else, from the fact that in their breathing process, into the air of their breathing process, the archangel enters, not in the sense of incarnation, but in the sense of, well, let us say, permeation. And by breathing with the air, the inhabitants of the Italian peninsula are connected with their archangel. And anyone who really wants to study in order to recognize something of what is actually at work there must study the peculiar connection between the inhabitants of this peninsula (and also of the Iberian Peninsula, although to a lesser extent) and breathing, with the air. They must know how the air and the special breathing process are incorporated into the human inner being.

It is different with those who live in present-day France. Here the archangel takes a different approach, working through everything that is fluid in the human being's natural development. The French often drink their national character with their wines, but also with other things that figure in the organism as liquid elements. You see, in this way one does not merely arrive at abstract descriptions of the connection between the spiritual and the physical world. There is a description that only hints at the archangel, and below that teem with peoples, people, and the archangel guides people. Through true spiritual science one can understand the process in all its concreteness.

The inhabitants of Great Britain receive through the solid matter developing in their bodies what the archangel has to give them. They absorb it as the solid components form in their body, with the solid organization. Of course, this is only in one area where it expresses itself radically, but it is nevertheless not just a harsh truth, but a spiritual scientific truth: as the Englishman eats his beefsteak, the archangel works on him. Of course, this cannot be interpreted in a chauvinistic sense, because the individual individuality separates itself from it. Man belongs to this matter only with a part of his being, but insofar as man belongs to the people, it is effective in him. One only learns about the earth by not being afraid to go into these things in the future. Man has an inordinate fear of the truth because, of course, uncomfortable things come out through the truth. But as soon as the truth is taken seriously, it is necessary not to shy away from this discomfort. |

Let us cross over to America. Even outwardly, in its external configuration, it shows how dependent people become on what radiates from the soil! In Italy from the air, in France from the water, in England from what is destined to enter the body as solid ingredients or to become solid in it. In America it is still different.

You will see that spiritual-scientific truths, when measured against reality, find confirmation everywhere. It is just that today we do not seek this confirmation. In earlier years, I once pointed out that the development of the consciousness soul, which particularly emphasizes the egoism of man, is outwardly and materially increased by sugar. At the time, I pointed out how infinitely greater the consumption of sugar is in the British Isles than, for example, among the self-denying Russian people, where the consumption of sugar is infinitely lower. But if one describes how the consciousness soul only comes into being and develops from the 15th century onwards, one only has to look at the history of sugar production: it only begins in the 15th century. Where, then, does our sugar production actually come from? It is only in the 15th century that people begin to depend on sugar. Everything that is really evoked from the spiritual worlds in spiritual science is fully confirmed precisely when it develops so strongly in the spiritual that it can be submerged in the material, where it lives and must therefore be recognized. As soon as one crosses over to America, one finds not only externally that the Europeans who come to America gradually develop different arms and hands: the formation of arms and hands approaches that of the ancient Indians, the ancient Indian people who have been exterminated in America. And this also applies to the configuration of the facial features, even if it occurs only very gradually and only in the third or fourth generation. Of course, we should not imagine that a staid British philistine can suddenly become an Indian in the third or fourth generation, but it only shows in the finer facial features; but it does emerge. We must face these things squarely, for only by doing so will it be possible, through knowledge, to develop true love across the earth. Love can only be developed by truly empathizing with other people. But to do that, it is necessary to get to know them. The folk spirit works on the American people through the undergrounds of the earth, through the magnetic and electrical forces slumbering in the earth. It is the underground that radiates up and that in America provides the medium through which the national spirit directs the people.

And if we go to Central Europe, it is good to let the people think for themselves. But some things can be said: there is actually something very unstable, something very intimate, that is connected with the material expression of the folk spirit, with the material effect of the folk spirit. There it is essentially the effect of warmth on warmth. The differences in warmth that occur between external warmth and internal warmth, the warmth of winter, of spring, of summer, in short, everything that is expressed in the warmth conditions, that is the medium through which the folk spirit in Central Europe works. Everything that affects blood circulation and breathing as a result of warmth conditions is the indirect way in which the folk spirit works here. You can also follow this in the soul. We still have the opportunity - if we are not Fritz Mauthner - to feel something of the after-effect, I would say, of being warmed through, in the element of language. If you are not abandoned by all the good spirits of language, you are able, for example, in German, to feel your way into the language, not just to stop at the abstract element, but to feel your way into the spirit of the language, because warmth is physically related to the soul in warmth. Nothing is more physically akin to the soul than soul warmth and soul coldness are to physical warmth and physical coldness. That which lives in the sentient soul is already much more foreign to the air; that which lives in the intellectual or mind soul is much more foreign to the element of water, and even that which lives in the consciousness soul is foreign to beefsteak, that is, to the earth. And what is expressed in the human soul is terribly foreign to the magnetic and electrical forces that radiate from the underground into the human development of the American character. That is why there is so much in the American national character that appears as if the American is obsessed by what he does, in contrast to the Central European, who must be with the soul in everything he does, and who can therefore also develop mystical warmth, while the American can so easily develop a spiritualist attitude, can be obsessed by some spiritual thing, just as one can become obsessed by something that no longer flows directly into people, like air, water, earth, but only works up from the earth's underworld to form the structures of a people.

In the Russian national character, in what is being prepared in the East – we will continue to talk about such things the day after tomorrow – the folk spirit is at work, but it is only called upon to play a special role through its people in the future. the folk spirit works through the light, and indeed through the light in such a way that it does not work through the light that radiates directly from the sun, but through the light that is first absorbed into the vegetation and into the earth itself and radiates back again. The solar power reflected by the earth, especially by the vegetation, the solar power working from the ground, is what the Russian national spirit uses as its medium to bring about the structure and organization of the nation.

If we look at all these details — I will talk more about this the day after tomorrow — then we will see how the present and the near future need not a general, vague, phrase-like mysticism, but a spiritually so strong spirit-knowledge that it can immerse itself, that it can put itself into the material existence with which one has to live. So that material existence, when it can be contemplated in its kinship with the spirit, is not regarded, as one has done by mistake, as something one would like to get out of like one's skin in order to get to the spirit, but must be regarded precisely as a revelation of the spirit. He does not yet have the right relationship to the spirit who is unable to recognize that which is physical is in truth a manifestation of the spirit. Everything around us is the body of the spirit. And only when one grasps the spirit in such a way that one is able to see nature as the body of the spirit, only then is one capable of attaining true spiritual knowledge. But these are the things that must be striven for as concrete spiritual knowledge. But is it not actually the case with these things, as soon as one approaches them with complete sincerity, that they become uncomfortable for people, these people of the present day, who of course do not love such truths, who would prefer to hear only: People must love each other across the earth! Yes, certainly, but first they must recognize each other. And love must become independent of what meets one in knowledge, but it can only become independent if that meets one in knowledge. For what I have described, including what I have described about the souls of nations, you all know it, your nerves, your muscles, your blood knows it: it is enchanted in it, it must be brought out of it; and if it is not brought out in the near future, it will stir in the nerves, in the muscles, in the blood, and it will go over the earth as disharmony, as an impulse to conflict and war. The only way to prevent this from happening is to ensure that the spirit, which would otherwise transform into its ahrimanic or luciferic counter-image, is released from nerves and muscles and blood and guided into consciousness, because it wants to live here on earth only in consciousness. Only when he lives in consciousness is he established in his true existence and leads people to what they must come to in the future. He must not be left down there in the Ahrimanic and Luciferic realm, because he transforms when he cannot find his place. This ability of the spirit to transform must be recognized, for it is from this recognition that the tasks for the future arise. It is not easy to rise to the level required of humanity for the future, but it is necessary to dig deep with knowledge so that the tasks of the future can be solved. To do this, it is necessary for people to overcome certain inconveniences. And because they do not want to overcome them, they will often become enemies of spiritual development. This will have to be taken into account, especially when spiritual science spreads. The stronger such a thing becomes, and the more you are all called upon to make the transition from comfortable sectarianism to a cosmopolitan view, to work on the plan of the world, to carry this spiritual science out of the front and back parlors to those places where it is believed that the affairs of mankind must be negotiated. That is what I wanted to talk about today; I will continue the day after tomorrow.

Because circumstances will probably arise in the next few weeks that will mean no lectures here in the branch, I will have to give something summarizing today. Something comprehensive that will point to certain time relationships, the observation of which makes it possible to gain a more precise insight into the tasks of the present time. And such an insight into the tasks of the present time is, as can be seen from various things that I have just discussed here, most urgently needed today.

The human being, especially in Central Europe, is actually so attuned today that he either fears or despises knowledge of the spiritual world. Both are, of course, inwardly related. But it is precisely this fear of the spiritual world and this contempt for the knowledge of the spiritual world that are connected with the extraordinarily difficult situation in which Central Europe has come to be, and in which it will continue to be.

Over the years and in recent weeks, I have already hinted at many things that I would like to summarize today. You will have gathered from the observations made here that in the West, among the peoples of the Latin and Anglo-American races, extrasensory knowledge plays a role in everything these peoples undertake in the broadest political sense. Anyone who believes that, for example, Anglo-American politics is not dependent on certain supersensible insights into the development of humanity is under a great illusion. And in the same way, supersensible insights play a part in everything that is striven for in the East, among the peoples of Asia and as far as Russia. In this connection, however, everything that concerns the present Russian regime must be excepted from what is being striven for in Russia. That is certainly foreign and far removed from all supersensible knowledge. These conditions show that we in Central Europe are, as it were, wedged in between world formations that are definitely determined by supersensible knowledge, which is often not of an impeccable nature for the present time. We have spoken of these things. And it has also been pointed out that this must not be the case, that in Central Europe, in a certain stubborn way, people close themselves off from real supersensible insights. For this closing off from supersensible insights would drive this poor Central Europe more and more into hardship and misery, into confusion and chaos.

It may correspond to a present-day note in all parties on the left and right to regard everything supernatural as something childish in the development of humanity. The peoples of Central Europe would suffer greatly if they continued to close their minds to supersensible knowledge, for they would simply be strangled by what is saturated with supersensible knowledge in the West and in the East. It is important to point out that in the broadest circles today, trust in those who have extrasensory knowledge has vanished, that this trust is to be eradicated through the mere worship of what can be mustered as knowledge without extrasensory vision. On the other hand, it is also true that no time is more in need of the most intensive cultivation of trust in those who can communicate something of such supersensible knowledge than our own. Thus we find ourselves in Central Europe in a situation in which we have the most urgent need of something that we also most intensely want to reject. This fact must be faced without bias. For example, we must ask: Where did the Anglo-American world get these insights into the course of human development that have become so pernicious to us in Central Europe? And what are the sources from which the eastern peoples, namely the eastern peoples of Asia, will be able to gain in the future that will be suitable to choke our throats in Europe? Only a clear insight into these things can really bring salvation.

If we follow what is spread as world ideas even among so-called completely enlightened historians and politicians in England and America, we will find that even in these enlightened people, their ideas are influenced by supersensible knowledge about the course of the world. In the Anglo-American world, this knowledge has been gained in a kind of mediumistic way since the middle of the nineteenth century in particular. The path suggested in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', for example, which is the direct path from the development of the human soul forces, is not popular in the Western world. In the Western world, one proceeds as follows: one seeks out certain people who are considered particularly suitable for making inquiries about the spiritual world, people who have more or less mediumistic abilities. Those who do not believe what I am about to explain, or rather the following generations, will have to pay heavily for this unbelief. Mediumistic personalities are sought out. These mediumistic personalities are brought into other states of consciousness, into trance-like states of consciousness, and when one knows the corresponding machinations by which, after the external mind has been shut down, what they carry within themselves in their subconscious is revealed through such mediumistic personalities, then one finds out precisely what was resting in the subconscious of these personalities. And it was particularly in the course of the nineteenth century in the Anglo-American world that the principles were discovered through which the successes could be achieved politically against Europe and Asia. They simply brought personalities who were suited for this into a certain trance, and then they developed the tasks for the Anglo-American world out of this trance. The people of the Anglo-American world are much too clever to do it the way the Central Europeans do, who simply do not believe what is revealed in this way from the depths of existence. With this disbelief, they close themselves off to all those impulses that could help them to advance in the real movement of humanity.

Now the path I have indicated here, which consists of experiencing supersensible developmental impulses of humanity through mediums, is an extremely precarious one. For it is self-evident that the instincts of the Anglo-American race prevail in the bodies of all those who are selected from the Anglo-American population. And the cultural-political impulses that are obtained in this way come out so that they are colored, mixed with what the egoism of the Anglo-American race is. And so these impulses are then effective in the egoistic service of the Anglo-American race. And anyone who can see through what can be seen through in this area knows that the successes of the Anglo-American race against Central Europe have been achieved with the help of what the occultism of the Western world has brought up from spiritual sources in the way I have just indicated. The method that is followed in this is easy to see through. You only need to remember what was said here eight days ago. You only need to remember that the ordinary logical mind, as it is used by us in external sensory observation and to create external sensory science, that this mind extinguishes real supersensible knowledge. For this ordinary logical mind is, after all, bound, bound in the most eminent sense, to the tool of physical corporeality. As soon as you develop up to those powers of cognition that are mentioned in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, you are no longer dependent on the tool of the physical body with these powers of cognition of yours. As soon as you make use of the logic to which one is accustomed in today's everyday life, that logic to which one has become accustomed as a result of today's external natural science, you are placed in the impossibility of getting to know that which actually prevails socially and spiritually in the development of mankind. Therefore, the people of the Anglo-American world, who are well aware of this fact, seek to gain their political principles by excluding the ordinary logical mind. By putting suitable personalities into a trance, the ordinary logical mind is eliminated. The medium speaks from the depths of his soul, without the use of reason. And if what is gained in this way is then clothed in the thought forms of common sense, it can be easily understood and can also be used in practical life. In the Western world, this is done by spiritualistic means for everything observed in the treatment of political and cultural facts, excluding the ordinary mind. Important impulses for the cultural policy of the Western world have been gained in this way and have been effective in recent years.

The opposite approach is taken in the Orient, by the people inhabiting Asia and also by certain elements of the Russian population in the European East. You see, I do not believe that the ideas of the threefold social organism would have been properly received if I had not first explored the human organism itself, the exploration of the human organism of which I have spoken, at least in outline, in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (The Riddle of the Soul). There I showed how the ordinary human natural organism is a threefold one, how this human natural organism is divided into three parts: a nervous and sensory organism, a rhythmic organism and a metabolic organism. Recognizing these three parts of the natural human organism is of immense importance for the current thinking of humanity. And through the recognition that one exercises in this view of the threefold natural human organism, one also comes to recognize the social organism correctly in its threefoldness. Just as we can investigate today that the natural human organism consists of these three parts: the nervous or sensory organism, the rhythmic organism, which is linked to the rhythmic activity of the respiratory and cardiac organization, and the metabolic organism, just as we can investigate it today, it was not investigated in ancient times. But in ancient times there was a certain instinctive, atavistic knowledge of these things. And the Orient, which had come particularly far in terms of the ancient way of looking into the supersensible world and gaining supersensible knowledge, has retained to this day the instincts to apply in life what can be gained from such supersensible knowledge. Therefore, the Oriental still seeks supersensible impulses today, just as the Occidental does; but he seeks supersensible impulses in a different way. The Oriental does not try to eliminate the intellect through mediumistic machinations, as the inhabitant of the Anglo-American world does, but on the contrary, he tries to fertilize the intellect. That is to say, he tries to stimulate the nerve-sense human being from the rhythmic human being. Therefore, in the Orient you will find that those who want to recognize something supersensible are recommended, above all, to train their human respiratory activity, to train the whole rhythmic human being. The Oriental yoga exercises, which are supposed to give these people of the Orient real knowledge, these Oriental yoga exercises are based on training the rhythmic human being in such a way that, through a certain type of breathing, through a certain technique of heart movement, influence is exerted on the human mind, which is otherwise only bound to the physical tool. By devoting himself to certain yoga exercises, the Oriental takes ordinary rhythmic breathing and ordinary heart activity out of their natural course and puts them into such a course that they gain influence over the mind, which would otherwise be directed only to the sense world, and which, through this influence, gains insights into the supersensible world. Thus the Oriental, by the opposite path from the Occidental, also has real knowledge of the supersensible world. These two paths of knowledge also lead to real knowledge. But just as the American and the Englishman, as occultists, for the reasons I have given you, gain knowledge that lies in the sense of the national ego, so the Oriental, by approaching directly the body, which is glowing with racial impulses, through his yoga exercises, gains impulses that are egoistic to the race. We are stuck between the national egoistic impulses of the West and the race egoistic impulses of the East. But insights can be gained in this way. And those who gain insights in the West and in the East in this way simply laugh at the Europeans who believe that they can gain real insights through their sciences or their social considerations. What the Europeans prattle out of their natural science, out of their so-called causal knowledge, and what they then prattle into their social science and social agitation out of their way of thinking, is regarded by Western and Eastern people as just a prattle, which it basically is compared to real knowledge. Because what is contained in our European sciences and in our European impulses for agitation is, compared to the real forces that guide the development of humanity, a mere rambling. And because we live in mere hot air, because we reject everything that is taken from reality, we bring misfortune upon ourselves. As soon as people unconsciously notice that something has been taken from reality, such as the idea of threefolding, they quickly vilify it as something that must not exist. But as long as we want to eliminate everything that is real from the world through ramblings - be it the ramblings of science or the ramblings of political parties - we will not emerge from chaos and confusion, but only drift deeper into chaos and confusion. But we must also be completely clear about the fact that neither the path of the West nor that of the East can be ours. For here in Central Europe it is necessary that the path be followed that is truly modern in the most eminent sense. And that can be no other than the one described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. What is the basis for what is described in this book, in contrast to the West and the East? To understand this, one must, however, gain some insight into the development of humanity. Above all, one must have assimilated a great truth about time, which consists in the fact — as I have often mentioned here — that a turning point for modern humanity occurred in the middle of the fifteenth century. According to our spiritual-scientific historical classification, this is where the fifth post-Atlantic cultural development begins, which differs significantly from everything that has gone before and which lasted from the eighth century BC to the fifteenth century AD. That is when humanity's endeavor to gain all knowledge through a new state of consciousness begins. This struggle of humanity to place itself at the apex of the personality, to fully develop the consciousness soul, goes hand in hand with other facts that I have already mentioned. And there is no other way for us to strive for supersensible knowledge than by taking this fact fully into account.

External science must remain mere idle chatter because it cannot see into the course of earthly evolution as it is connected with the development of humanity. What external natural science talks about are only the ripples that drift to the surface of life. This outer natural science speaks of what is investigated in the physics laboratory, what is observed through the telescope and microscope; it speaks of what is observed in the corpse; it speaks of everything that is dead in evolution. Nowhere does it speak of what is alive in evolution. For there is no test tube for any laboratory, there is no chemical reaction by which one could determine that which can only be determined through the supersensible experience of the human being himself. It is only the human being, the living human being, through whom the great events can be investigated. The great events of earthly existence must not be investigated by turning to the retort in the chemical laboratory. The great events of earthly existence must be investigated by turning to the being where the strong reactions occur, to the human being himself. But if we just present the development of humanity as it is today, we will not get to the most important things; we have to look at them through the millennia, and that is really only possible through supersensible knowledge. And when we look at it through this supersensible knowledge, we find that in everything we call food today, for example, in all the external material substances we can absorb to satisfy our physical needs, what lived in them before the fifteenth century no longer lives in them today. However paradoxical and absurd and insane this may appear to people of the present day, who are so scientific in their own opinion, and who are so full of nonsense in ours, however paradoxical and unreasonable it may appear to people of the present day, it is nevertheless the case that certain forces of almost all foodstuffs and almost everything we take from the physical world to satisfy our bodily needs have changed since the fifteenth century. Before the fifteenth century, in all material things, whether taken directly from nature or cooked, there were forces present that still had an effect on the soul. By eating, man still received certain soul forces from what he consumed. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, the ability to supply people with soul forces through simple eating has been completely lost. Since then, we have truly entered a stage of earthly development in which we can no longer obtain anything from the earth itself and from what it gives physically to satisfy our physical needs. Since that time, only physical processes take place in our metabolism, whereas before, when we digested, our metabolism was still soul-based, just as it is today — forgive the harsh word — in a cow or a snake, for example. It will surprise you that I say just that. But with regard to the external metabolism, the cow, when it digests, is a more material being than man, and so is the snake. When you see a cow lying or standing after it has eaten, or when you watch a snake digesting its food, something is alive in the astral organism of that cow or snake that was also alive in humans in the past, when they were more attuned to the animal, but is no longer alive in humans today. We have been so released by nature on this side that it no longer works in the same way as it used to. You may find it surprising that food has lost its soul-effect for us, but not for the cow; but that is the way it is. Expressions always mean different things to different beings. Precisely for man, because he is organized differently, food means something different than for the cow or for the snake, which of course the materialists do not believe. Precisely for man, because he is organized differently than the cow, the matter is as I have just explained. Therefore, today we have to take into account this more physical way of our metabolism compared to the past. But we also have to learn to take into account all the things that have changed on the other side.

You see, if we were to remain awake throughout our lives, we would be the most foolish beings imaginable in relation to the supersensible world, for we would only ever use our intellect through the instrument of the ordinary physical body. That means that all supersensible insight would have to fade away for us. It is our good fortune that every time we fall asleep, we withdraw our mind from the physical brain and then have that of the supersensible world. Today, however, we do not yet want to develop our consciousness to bring this knowledge of the supersensible world, which we unconsciously gain in our sleep, into the physical organization. But we have to, then we will become different people than we are now. It is indeed the case that while we are becoming more and more physical in our processes during our daily digestive activity, we are already becoming more and more spiritual during our sleep. And it is only a matter of bringing in what we accumulate in spiritual experiences from falling asleep to waking up. We bring this in by not doing it like the Oriental, that is, by not infiltrating our mind from the breathing process, so to speak, but by treating ourselves purely spiritually and mentally as described in 'How to Know Higher Worlds Higher Worlds?” is described, that in this changed outer life – which occurs for us because we treat ourselves in this way – everything that the mind accumulates in the supersensible world from falling asleep to waking up can enter.

I have already mentioned that the influence of the supersensible world cannot be gained in the way that many people do today: they drink so much beer in the evening that they have the necessary heaviness in bed. Yes, it is certainly not possible to dwell in the supersensible world from falling asleep to waking up in such a way that what has been supersensibly experienced can actually enter. Rather, we have to treat this body, which has been different from what it used to be since the mid-fifteenth century, as it were, from the soul, as it is in the sense of the book “How to Know Higher Worlds?” is. Then we first get supersensory attitudes, and then also supersensory knowledge.

What is recommended here as a Central European path to the supersensible world differs quite significantly from the path of Westerners and Orientals. What is recommended here is a training that has simply been demanded by human development since the fifteenth century. What is being done in the West is based only on what has been observed through the experiences that were made with the Native Americans. These Native Americans, who were wiped out during the conquest of America, were, in the opinion of the Europeans, quite uncultured people. Yes, outwardly they were quite uncultured people. But the strange thing was that these American Indians, who were wiped out, had very intense supersensible knowledge, and that they gained this supersensible knowledge through methods that the Anglo-Americans then learned from these Indians and cultivated in a somewhat more cultivated, but thereby also more decadent, way. This is based on a very significant process in the evolution of the earth.

You know that history tells a one-sided story of how things have progressed in the development of culture. History tells of all kinds of cultural migrations from Asia to Europe via Greece, Rome and so on. But it does not tell us that another cultural migration took place, not from Asia to Europe, but from Asia across the Pacific to what is now the West, to America, along the routes that were perfectly possible in ancient times. What was achieved in the way of spirituality in the East was brought to America. And you know – at least those of you who were here when I spoke about it here a year ago – that the whole external history of the so-called discovery of America and of the great human developmental principles is wishy-washy. Because I said at the time: Until the twelfth century, people in Europe were well aware that there was an America in the West. It has only been forgotten. The knowledge was covered up, and the discovery of America is only a belated discovery, a rediscovery of what was once well known. First, the connection between the European and American nature was broken, then it was rediscovered. But it was discovered in such a way that the Americans of the time, the American Indians, were massacred. This kind of cultural expansion was the first step on the path we then continued to follow step by step. Yes, it is indeed the case that when the Europeans came to America, they found an external culture of dirt in the material world among the Indians, but they also found a high spiritual life among these so-called wild people, whom they wiped out. And these wild people spoke at every opportunity of the great spirit that lived with them in all the details of their lives. It was sometimes a great experience for those Europeans who could understand it, to get to know the way these American Indians spoke of the great spirit. How was it that in the course of the evolution of the earth these Indians, who were so degraded in appearance, had preserved the possibility of looking up to this great spirit that permeates and interweaves the world? It was through this that they had preserved the possibility, in spite of their outward physical degradation. They were outwardly and physically ossified. Thus they had retained, like a mighty memory, the knowledge of the great spirit that had come to them from the East, from our East, but by the opposite route across the Pacific Ocean. They had preserved that. They had separated the spiritual knowledge from the knowledge of the soul and the knowledge of the body. They lived, so to speak, completely absorbed in the spirit.

The Europeans had an awful fear of what emerged as knowledge of the spirit from the North American Indians. The Europeans had indeed already ensured that this fear of the spirit would not be dispelled. I have often mentioned to you the memorable Council of Constantinople in the year 869, at which the Catholic Church abolished belief in the spirit, at which the Catholic Church decreed that in future one should not believe in body, soul and spirit, but that one should only believe in body and soul. And this abolition of the knowledge of the spirit has brought about all the chaos in science and knowledge that has befallen Europe. It was therefore no wonder that this European humanity, grown in fear of everything spiritual, was seized with even more terrible fear when it now came face to face with the American Indians and their knowledge of the great spirit. But as I said, that was only the beginning of the road we have continued to follow. We have gradually lost our belief in the soul as a result of the great European Enlightenment, and in today's materialism we believe only in the effectiveness of the body. But from this belief, from this superstition in the effectiveness of the body, there must come forth that which in turn leads to the knowledge of the spiritual, of the supersensible, by the path of which I have just spoken, and which must be neither the path of the Occidentals nor the path of the Orientals, but the specifically Central European one. And from this Central European path, we will also find that which alone can lead out of social hardship and social chaos. No other path can lead us out.

But you also see that this path requires some effort. You have to do something with yourself. You have to have the patience to develop your soul and spirit. For since the middle of the fifteenth century, these soul and spirit forces have no longer developed in such a way that one merely needs to eat and then, from the digestion of the food, inhales that which can infiltrate us with spiritual views. We have to take our development into our own hands, so to speak, if we do not want to remain foolish. But that is the great ideal of materialistic humanity in Europe: to remain foolish, not to become wise, to recognize only that which arises from the digestion of the body. This is basically the true cause of the social damage that has occurred in Europe since the middle of the fifteenth century: the ideals of European materialistic humanity not to take their own soul and spiritual development into their own hands, but to remain as they were born and to develop with the greatest possible exclusion of any spiritual and soul development.

And in doing so, people do not even notice what the historical connections actually are. They do not even notice, for example, how the same impulses that carried the Eighth Ecumenical Council in 869, which abolished the spirit, carry our university science and our social theories of today. People believe themselves enlightened because they see only what is in their consciousness. They do not realize that there would have been no Marx, no Engels, no Lassalle, with their peculiar thinking, if Marx and Engels and Lassalle had not been the disciples of those who were prepared for their views by the Ecumenical Council of 869. Social democracy, in its various parties today, is the faithful discipleship of what prevailed in the Catholic Church. The people just do not realize that. They do not realize that they are often the latecomers of Catholic-Christian impulses. They only believe themselves to be in the impulses of the very latest times. It will be a mighty coming to themselves when one day the parties, especially the left-wing ones of today, realize how Catholic they are in the bad sense. When people's eyes are opened to this, when they wake up to it, oh, it will be a strange realization. That is why they are so careful to ensure that people's eyes do not open to these connections. It is already the case today that anyone who sees through things only has to say what, after all, makes all people of today, from left and right, feel quite uncomfortable. If you understand the context of things, you cannot agree with the left and the right today. Therefore, today more than at any other time, one would like to exclude from public activity all people who understand something of the matter, and one would prefer to have as leaders those who, in their bullishness, are not clouded by any knowledge of the subject. But unbiased thinking about these things must enter into human minds and hearts; otherwise things will not progress. Therefore, it must be admonished again and again to such an unbiased view of the present situation. Above all, this connection must be recognized, which exists between correct social principles and what is known of the supersensible world.

There are three important concepts in the social field. You will find them in my book The Essentials of the Social Question: the concept of the commodity, the concept of human labor, and the concept of capital. In recent times, much has been said about these three concepts by academics and non-academics, by parties and non-partisan people. But hardly anything has been as inadequately based and as pompously proclaimed as the three concepts of commodity, human labor, capital. I do not want to say that sometimes quite accurate feelings about these things have been put into the world. Because the feeling that I have often characterized in my lectures, that has been triggered in the great proletarian mass by considering labor power as a commodity, this feeling is quite justified. Important social impulses must also come from this feeling. But that does not at all prevent the concept, the idea, the real impulse from which the feeling originates, from being fundamentally wrong. For one cannot recognize the concept of the commodity without having at least taken in the first step of supersensible knowledge. However paradoxical it may appear to people today, it is nevertheless true. A commodity is something to which human labor is attached, in which, as it were, the human being has invested himself. The definition of a commodity as you find it in Marx is quite incorrect. This is because Marx only uses the concepts that can be derived from ordinary sensory science. A commodity cannot be understood by anyone who does not have a concept of imaginative knowledge. Therefore, there will be no definition of the commodity until imaginative knowledge is recognized. And I have taken these things into account in my book “The Crux of the Social Question.” No wonder people say they don't understand these things. They have to find their way into the way of thinking that prevails in this book, not into the one that prevails outside of this book in the literature that separates from all reality.

No one can talk about human labor without knowing something about inspired insight. Because today, simply to say: a commodity is stored-up labor power – or: capital is stored-up labor power – is, of course, pure nonsense. I have already mentioned here that labor, the use of labor as such, is not decisive for any economic concept. Someone who plays tennis all day or does something else that has no economic effect at all applies the same labor as someone who chops wood, which has an important economic effect. What matters is not how much labor is put into the human development process, but how what emerges from work as a product is incorporated into the economic life of the nation. No thing derives its value from labor. The moment you make the value of a commodity dependent on labor, you would end up with nothing but absurdities. Therefore, it is important how labor is placed in the national economic process; otherwise, labor is something that is completely independent of all economics, something that is bound to human nature itself. Therefore, one cannot decide on labor from within the economic process itself, but one must decide on labor on the basis of something that is independent of the economic process, on the basis of pure law. You will also find this discussed in the book 'The Core of the Social Question'. In order to know something about these things, it is necessary to look into reality in a completely different way than the scientific drivel of the present day can. These things must be spoken about in all seriousness, because everything that appears in today's world is nothing more than scientific drivel, with tremendous arrogance and self-importance. And scientific drivel, in the face of the demands of the present, is everything that does not want to rise from mere sensual knowledge to supersensible knowledge. The function that labor has in the process of human development can only be found if one has an inkling of inspired knowledge.

And as strange as it sounds, no one can truly understand the function of capital without an idea of intuition, of the highest form of knowledge. The Bible already sensed this when it said that Christianity was to be fought with mammonism. However, this knowledge must, so to speak, be one that works in the opposite direction. One must educate oneself about what is to take the place of ahrimanic capital through supersensible knowledge, not through knowledge bound to sensuality. Thus, the development of a healthy national economy depends on people engaging in healthy supersensible knowledge, otherwise national economic matters will continue to be rambled on about in the future as they are now. In order to recognize something socio-economic, it is necessary today to know the science of initiation. But this science of initiation, of which we are speaking here, is rejected and despised by those who want to work publicly today. Therefore, what can be heard today from the mere sensory view in the form of party opinions sounds to him who sees through things - and this must be said - like the clanging of the sayings of a company of fools. Now you can imagine that since the truth is not pleasant, it is even less pleasant to tell this truth to today's humanity. But this truth must be told to today's humanity. The fact is that today's humanity does not want to hear the truth, but it is absolutely necessary that this truth be told to today's humanity without reservation. For today's humanity, according to its feelings and emotions, definitely wants what this truth implies. But today's humanity is lulled into all that could be called the illusions of life, and it does not want to let go of these illusions of life.

Some time ago, I quoted a man who came from the Latin culture, mentioning that a flare-up of particularly strong truth can often come from declining cultures. Beredetto Croce says in his “Outlines of Aesthetics” – I quoted it to you a fortnight ago – that art cannot possibly be based on the external physical world. Why not? According to Benedetto Croce, because the external physical world is not real and art strives for reality. Such things seem quite incredible to today's humanity. And yet they are true, absolutely true. That which lives in real art is a completely different reality than that which lives in the sensual external appearance. In artistic creation, one strives out of the unreality of physical nature towards the reality that is first sensed in the spirit and can then be found in the spirit through supersensible knowledge. Therefore, it is precisely in supersensible forms, in supersensible artistic creations, that present humanity must be helped, because it wants to find the way back into the supersensible world. But it is only possible to make progress in these matters by developing an inner sense of what is truly true. The instructions in the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' also point to this. We also need to develop an appreciation of how little the ordinary cultural means of our time actually develop this sense of truth. Just think how we have come to a point in the last five to six years where the voice of truth is hardly heard in world affairs. Think of how much untruthful stuff has been spoken in world affairs in the last five to six years and to this day. All this bears witness to the present world's tendency towards untruth. It must be mentioned again and again, right here in the bosom of this society, that acquiring a sense of real truth is eminently necessary. When work began here in the spirit of the anthroposophical movement, there were many people in the bosom of this movement who, from old circumstances, had always liked to retouch the truth. It is precisely in such movements as the anthroposophical one that old faults are cultivated rather than new virtues. Such a glossing over of the truth was something that had developed into a particular inclination. And it was often difficult, especially within this society, to introduce something that simply consists of calling a lie a lie. Whenever people in this Society have said something that is not true, there has always been a tendency to excuse it, to present it in such a way that good intentions might lie behind the untruth, and so on. No, it is essential that we call untruthfulness untruthfulness. You know that it was the turning to the truth that caused this Anthroposophical Society to separate from the old Theosophical Society, which, as you also know, continues to live in the world. Now, with regard to everything that is at work in this Anthroposophical Society, they continue to lie in the Theosophical Society. And it is necessary, because I am also taking into account other contemporary phenomena, that I draw your attention today to the fact that, in the course of time, the Theosophical Society has been lying in a very sophisticated way about the anthroposophical movement, even lying in a book whose preface contains the sentence: “I hope I have reported the truth.” But within this book, for which the authoress hopes to have reported the truth, it says under many another: “It is certain that Steiner's separation was a blessing.” — The separation of the Anthroposophical Society from the Theosophical Society. — “The Occultist” — now you hear the blatant lie — “The Occultist” — that was meant for me — “was also a convinced Pan-German. If we assume for a moment that he had become president of the Theosophical Society, he would have found there much more substantial means and influence in almost all countries of the world. He could have pursued his Pan-German policy more freely and with more authority. And in all likelihood he would have done so."

And what is this lie formed from? From the fact that I not only gave my lectures on anthroposophy in Germany, among Germans, but also went to other countries. I have given lectures from Bergen to Palermo, and I still regard it today as a most beautiful sign of the impulse that could come from this movement for world peace, that as late as May 1914 I was able to give a speech on anthroposophy in Paris, in German, to a public audience, so that each sentence had to be translated. They were not Germans from Paris in this lecture, but all Frenchmen. We had already come so far that in May 1914 our world view could be spoken about throughout Europe. Then the event occurred that took peace and the possibility of life from the world. It is a fact that just before the outbreak of this terrible world catastrophe, in May 1914, in Paris, the Anthroposophical Society was working on something that could have contributed to world peace. And where did all these speeches come from? Not a single one was initiated by us, but was requested by friends in Bergen, Paris, London, the Netherlands, Palermo and so on. They were always requested by the others. The lie is fabricated from this, that they were held to propagate Germanness throughout the world. It is necessary to call a lie a lie. This book, which promises in its preface to report the truth, brings, at least about everything that relates to the Anthroposophical Society and to me, nothing but lies. Now, one might say that I am turning against the others, while here, you see, the following unctuous sentences follow. I ask those who know the facts to compare these sentences with the facts: “What was the attitude of our president towards this colleague, who first sought to reduce her influence in inner circles and then wanted to oust her? Her behavior was always one of great tolerance and perfect courtesy. She saw great intellectual value in him, a rare philosophical development; she appreciated everything that was beautiful and sublime in him, and... did not speak of the rest. She constantly recommended tolerance and patience to her students, which “plus royalistes que le roi” were annoyed by the behavior of the German section. In doing so, she was simply following her principles. “

Please compare this with the truth of what has happened, and you will see the extent to which one can lie. Perhaps it will be said, when people hear what I have said today, that I am attacking. But I would like to point out that I never said anything critical before I was attacked.

These things must also be considered as a cultural-historical phenomenon, which expresses itself in the fact that in a movement that wants to work towards the spirit, lies can also be cultivated to a high degree. It is indeed necessary that we strive for the sense of truth in the most tremendous way today. The whole matter has only been translated into German and even published in German in Basel in order to somehow destroy the anthroposophical movement that will emerge from the Goetheanum in the future. You see, these people are accustomed to introducing nationalistic impulses even into that which they disseminate as spiritual science. Therefore, they cannot imagine anything else but that the other person also has such impulses. Today, it is of no use but to call a lie a lie, even when this lie appears on such ground, where one says in abstracto and theoretically that the search for truth is taking place. Whether the lie appears on confessional or ideological ground today, those lies that can be confronted with facts must be branded as lies, otherwise we will not move forward. For the spirit of lies, the spirit of deception, is the greatest enemy of real spiritual progress. And I hope that I have shown you, especially today, that spiritual progress is the only thing that can truly move the world forward by providing some points of view that I consider to be particularly valuable for the present time.

And so I would like all of you to consider the things that have happened here in context, in such a way that on the one hand there is the social, on the other the spiritual, but that the two belong together intimately. It is precisely the failure to see things in this context that is causing the present disaster.

Eight days ago I said here: Three demands permeate the social life of the present age.

1. The conquest of world power by the Anglo-American powers.
2. The efforts, which today are still quite abstract, that are moving towards a League of Nations.
3. The efforts we call social.

These three currents are the three decisive currents in today's cultural world: the world domination of the Anglo-American powers; the alliance of nations; the striving for a social organization of world affairs. There are three formidable obstacles to these three endeavors: The spirituality of the ancient Indians, the Indian spirituality, stands against that which the Anglo-American world, radiating from England, strives for as a world power. This will be the great contrast: the search for world principles by medial means – the search for world principles by the yoga path in India. This battle will be the greatest spiritual battle that has to be fought out in world history. To see clearly what is present as two poles in the movement of the times is the first task of anyone who wants to be a true spiritual scientist.

In the field of striving for the League of Nations, it must be clearly seen that two impossibilities are involved in this striving today. The one that confronts the modern striving for human unity, for that humanity of which Ferder, Lessing, and Goethe had spoken, the one that confronts this striving of modern humanity for human unity, is precisely national egoism, national chauvinism, in all fields. And now the League of Nations is supposed to become a unity of peoples closed in on themselves. The building of the Tower of Babel shows that the very thing that was done to prevent the League of Nations was to separate nations into their nationalities. And that is supposed to be the means to unite the nations. Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, his utopia, wants to solve the task of uniting the nations by preserving what is implied in the building of the Tower of Babel. It will only promote that which further divides the nations. It will only increase the confusion of the Tower of Babel. Thus, the second movement is full of contradictions; there are two impossibilities in the politics of the League of Nations.

And in the third, the social movement, there is a rejection of the spiritual. Only the economic and the material are taken into account, and it is believed that a spiritual will spring from the material itself. The aim is to establish a paradise on earth, excluding everything that can bring order to paradise, excluding the spirit. There you have the full contradiction in the third striving as well.

There is no other way to overcome these contradictions than to follow the path of the spirit, which works in the sense of human development and not against it. And the anthroposophical movement, in so far as its limited strength permits, should champion these paths. It will not be understood if it does not understand that it champions what is realistic and possible in contrast to what is unrealistic and utopian.

The friends of our spiritual movement who are here in Ulm got together some time ago to cultivate the thoughts, aspirations and impulses of our spiritual movement here as well. We are here, friends from out of town, united with our Ulm friends today to commemorate this event together, which consists in the fact that friends of our movement have also come together in this city of Ulm. They have joined together in a serious time, in difficult times, in a time that speaks to the human soul through significant signs. And so it is appropriate on this occasion today to remember larger contexts, spiritual connections in the development of humanity, into which our spiritual movement will place itself for our time and for the near future. I would like to say: First we want to turn our gaze from what is connected with the very nearest human interests, including those in the spiritual, to the all-encompassing, that all-encompassing with which our movement is connected.

We know, of course, that those personalities of the present day who join together under the sign of our spiritual impulses must feel deeply in their souls and hearts that they want to seek something that another spiritual movement, another spiritual endeavor in the present time, and which is connected with what the soul of man must seek in our time and in the near future if he is to become truly conscious of his humanity. In this seeking, precisely as it is expressed in our movement, we find many opponents. And our opponents are precisely those who believe that they must protect the true interests of the development of humanity from this or that point of view, and protect it from what they consider to be such an aberration of the human spirit as is found in our movement. Thus many people of the present day who are religiously minded or apparently religiously minded believe that our movement is likely to lead away from what they need for real religious deepening.

Now, one could indeed reply to some of those who speak in this way, with a somewhat superficial but no less apt judgment: Has the Christian idea, for example, in the course of the last few centuries, managed to bring humanity to a height that could have mitigated, or I will not even say eliminated, the present terrible catastrophe? But those people who never want to learn from events, who learn nothing even from them, that religious life has been developing in their sense for centuries, even millennia, and now, despite this religious life, this catastrophe has been able to break out over the whole earth. But even if it is obvious to ask, we do not want to move our thoughts in this direction. Today, by way of introduction, we would like to raise another question that is perhaps given very little consideration, but which is in fact connected with very, very profound matters of the present.

Do you know which word is most unknown to contemporary scholars, to philological scholars, in terms of its origin and development? Do you know which word is most often found in even the most learned works when you seek advice, a word for which you cannot determine its origin, what it actually means, or what it means? The word for which you will most often search in vain in the scholarly resources, both in terms of its linguistic and spiritual origin, is the word “God.” No science today can give you any information about the linguistic and spiritual origin of the word God. That is a peculiar fact. For this fact does not merely point to externals, to something that is in this or that series of facts, but it points to something that is deeply, deeply connected with the human mind. People all believe they are saying something when they speak of the divine, when they speak of their turning to God. And with all the means of present-day learning, they do not even know how to somehow indicate the origin of the word God. This indicates that by far the greatest number of people in the present day who speak on religious or other spiritual subjects really do not know what they are talking about. If one would only go deeply enough into what is actually meant by people not knowing what they are talking about when they believe they are talking about what is most intimately connected with the human soul's striving! This is felt, if not clearly conscious, then instinctively by those who feel compelled to come to our spiritual impulses from the various spiritual confusions of the present. That these spiritual impulses, which come precisely from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, are connected with the most urgent needs of our time, has been emphasized by me again and again in the times when the present severe thunderstorm has actually gathered for a long time.

I would like to remind you of a sentence that I have often spoken, as those friends who have been following our movement for years now know. I have often said that over the last three to four centuries, the earth and its various peoples have become one in commercial, industrial, banking and so on. I have pointed out how modern means of transportation and what, through modern means of transportation, has rolled across the whole earth until recently, has poured out over the whole earth a unity of economic, of external economic life, a unity, if we may say so, of physical life on earth. We had a unity of physical life on earth. A check written in New York could be cashed in Tokyo, Berlin, or wherever. In the years leading up to the war, I always added the following demand to this fact: Not only does the human body need a soul, but every body needs a soul and cannot live without one. What has spread across the earth as a physical body in commercial, industrial, or other ways, needs a soul, a soul that offers the possibility that people on earth understand each other spiritually as they understand each other commercially and monetarily. To give the earthly body an earthly soul is something I have often spoken of as desirable.

Now, something like this certainly does not develop in a day; it takes time. And what I am expressing here is not meant as a criticism of the time, but only as a description; it is intended to stir in human souls what the impulses of action, of thinking, of feeling, and of will should be. It is not meant to accuse, but to express what should happen. Therefore it is not meant in the form of a reproach, [when it was said] that people have neglected to form a common earth soul for this earth body in the last decades, in which the common earth body has developed particularly intensively. This earth soul can only be found if people are made to understand what is as common to people in a spiritual sense as the sun is in a physical sense, and what is to be spread among mankind through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

But this has been neglected until now. And in this present catastrophic time, we are experiencing it in the most terrible way, as has never happened before in the history of the development of humanity, which can be traced with documents, that humanity finds itself in a dead end, in a real dead end. And it will only escape from this deadlock if it decides to add to the physical culture of which humanity is so proud, the spiritual culture of the earth soul for our time and for the near future, which belongs to this physical culture.

One may resist these efforts to give the earth a new spirituality as much as one wants, but the truth will have to prevail under all circumstances. Humanity is now living in the midst of a terrible catastrophe. If humanity does not decide to truly adapt to the new spirituality meant here, then these catastrophes will keep recurring in ever new periods, perhaps in very short periods. This catastrophe and all its consequences will never be healed by the means that humanity already knew before this catastrophe broke out. Anyone who still believes this is not thinking in terms of the earthly development of humanity. And this catastrophic time will last as long as it can be bridged, apparently, for a few years in between, until humanity interprets it in the only correct way, namely, that it is a sign that people are turning to the spirit that must permeate purely physical life. Today this may still be a bitter truth for many because it is inconvenient, but it is a truth.

Let us ask ourselves what it is that has actually maintained some connection with the spiritual world to this day, despite the increasingly intense purely materialistic culture of the earth that has been occurring for three to four centuries. Anyone who has experience in this field knows that it is actually only a single fact that is still maintaining the connection with the spiritual world, and that this is a fact of great importance for humanity. A man who had been one of the most important leaders of the barren “Society for Ethical Culture” in recent years once told me one day that he had thought for a long time about how it could be that in our enlightened times, when humanity knows that salvation can only lie in understanding the material world, how it is possible that in these enlightened times there are still churches, churches alongside the various states. And he said he had come up with the reason why there are still churches. He clothed this solution, with which he meant to express a deep secret, in the following words: “The states administer life, the churches administer death; and since people have not yet ceased to think of death as something terrible, the power of the church lies in the fact that it administers death.” It is a truly materialistic way of thinking, because the man wanted to express that when people would finally have given up thinking of death as something terrible in people's lives, when they would have gotten used to letting death come over them like an animal, then the churches would have lost their power.

Now, of course, this saying is complete nonsense, absolutely brilliant nonsense; but looking at the intellectual life of the present day, it is not entirely unfounded. Sometimes, in order to understand itself, to express what it is in intellectual terms, the present day has to say nonsense. In the future, this will be cited as a special characteristic of our time: that the most ingenious people of the present were compelled, when they sought to express the character of the present, that is, the time around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, that they then had to say nonsense. But now, there is something true in this nonsense, namely the truth that for many people of the present time, it is almost the only connecting bridge to the spiritual world, that in a certain respect they either have a fear of death or cannot bear the thought that their loved ones have gone and cannot imagine them as being in a nothingness. Certainly, it should not be denied that these thoughts are still significant enough, that they are still connected with the deepest interests of the human soul. However, neither fear nor any other feeling about death can lead to a real connection with the spiritual world. For this, there must be real, true knowledge of the spiritual world, there must be understanding of the reality of the spiritual world. And this understanding of the reality of the spiritual world is not possible today other than by adding a spiritual-scientific attitude to the natural-scientific attitude.

If people do not know where the word of God actually comes from, what the divine actually is, what do people who speak of the divine today actually do out of need of this or that religious worship? Those people who often believe themselves to be deeply religious, pretending to worship the highest divine, what are they actually doing? It is not unimportant to ask yourself this question in a moment of seriousness. What does this question imply? This question implies: What is the God that most people of the present time speak of, who pretend to be of a religious nature?

Now, people reject it when we speak from the standpoint of spiritual science that there are other beings above us, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and so on, so that we see a hierarchy of spiritual beings, and that the way up to what is the highest divine is long. People of the present day do not want this epistemological modesty. They often express it by saying that they want no mediation between themselves and God; they always want to turn directly and immediately to the Most High God. But it is not a matter of what one believes about such a turning, but of what one really does in one's soul, what one really experiences in one's soul.

Take everything that a preacher of any recognized religious community tells you about the divine today, everything he talks about the divine. What does it refer to if you do not go by his words, but by reality? It refers to two things. Either what he talks about refers not to a higher being than to his angel, who stands as a guiding entity over each and every one of us. He worships this angel; he calls him the highest God. He who knows what words can really mean, he knows that everything that is said about God in modern sermons never refers to any higher God than an angel, or if not to an angel, then to something else. If one investigates the question of where such people get what they feel when they speak of their God, when they preach of their God in their churches, when they often even claim to have an experience of God in their souls, as some people of the present time do – they then call themselves with a certain pride “evangelized people” and the like – where one comes from, one arrives at the following: In their souls, such people feel the impulse of their own being, how this being has developed in a purely spiritual environment between the last death and birth. This spiritual being that has developed in us between the last death and our birth is now in our body, has taken up residence in our body. Much of what we now experience in life comes only from this being, from this prenatal being. Man feels this prenatal being as a spiritual one; it is this prenatal being with which he feels united. Yes, even so-called theosophists of the most varied schools of thought have repeatedly told people, in order to make something spiritually honeyed sound, that it is a matter of man uniting with his God within himself. But what man feels when he supposedly unites with his God is he himself, it is only his spiritual-soul being in the time between the last death and the last birth. And what numerous pastors and priests speak of when they speak of the God they feel in their soul is nothing more than that they sense their own ego, not as it develops here in the physical body, in the physical environment, but as it developed in the spiritual world between death and birth. They sense this, and then they begin to pray. And what do they pray to? To themselves.

This is the one that comes from many spiritual currents of the present so heartbreakingly. If you look at these things in reality, so you have to confess that people have gradually come to worship themselves unconsciously, without them knowing it. And once someone finds out, he expresses it in strange forms, as Friedrich Nietzsche has done. This must be made perfectly clear: either the person who does not want to recognize the hierarchies, the wonderful breadth and greatness of the spiritual world, merely worships his angel - which is also a form of selfish worship - or he worships himself. This is the spiritual form of egoism to which humanity has gradually come under the influence of the materialistic development of modern times. Now you will say: What is he telling us? That is not true! People do not say that they worship themselves, that they only worship their angel! - Of course they do not say it, but they do it; and what they say only happens in order to numb themselves to the fact that it is no less real. What is spoken today is often an anesthetic for humanity, because, of course, people do not want to admit to themselves what it is actually about. Today, people often find it too inconvenient to rise to the spiritual worlds through inner work. They do not want that. They want to penetrate to the spiritual worlds in a much easier way, as simply as one can. Therefore they deceive themselves, therefore they anesthetize themselves. But one cannot deaden one's senses with impunity. The world goes its course. The Divine-Spiritual is at work in the world, even if one does not want to acknowledge it. It is at work and weaving therein. And that is the most profound task of our time: to rediscover the connection with the real spiritual, to bring out of ourselves the spiritualized egoism that we have just described, to overcome it. That is what speaks so powerfully to the heart when one has grasped the actual deeper impulse of spiritual science for the present time. The world – as I pointed out earlier – will, through its mighty signs, force people to seek the spirit again. But there must be a certain core of striving humanity that can find its way into this spiritual striving, which alone can be the right and true and real thing for the present.

You see, the earth has gone through various tasks. It is not only the individual human being who has a task; the whole earth is constantly having its various tasks. In the period immediately following the great Atlantic catastrophe, the people of Indian culture had a different task; a little later, the people of Persian culture had a different task; the people had a different task when the Egyptians and Chaldeans were in charge, and a different task when the Greco-Roman peoples set the tone. This continued until the 15th century. Another task has been assigned to us from the 15th century until today. And this task, which is now assigned to us, is quite different from any other task on Earth. One can characterize this task, which is presently allotted to mankind, which began with the 15th century and which will last into the 4th millennium, by pointing out the most essential thing that is happening on earth during this period.

If we look back to the time before the 15th century from a spiritual scientific point of view, we see that until the 15th century everything that people did was imbued with a certain spirituality. External history tells us nothing about this, because it is a fable convenue that we learn in schools and universities. But if you really study what people have created in their daily lives, you will see that it is imbued with a certain spirituality. The characteristic feature of our epoch is that this spirituality has declined and must gradually be lost altogether if man does not add a new spirituality to the purely external, material culture. Through purely external conditions, the development of the earth is doomed to become purely materialistic. The spirit, which more or less came of itself in earlier epochs of earth evolution, must be added by mankind of its own free inner deed to what presents itself.

If we disregard what people can bring to earthly culture out of their inner freedom, out of their consciousness, and only look at what has arisen by itself in our fifth period, which has lasted since the middle of the 15th century, then it turns out that this is the period in which the Earth is gradually beginning to die for the whole cosmos, for the whole universe. The fifth period is the beginning of the death of the Earth. While all the earlier periods could contribute to the spirit of the universe through what arose from the Earth itself, all the brilliant culture that developed in this fifth period - the telegraph, the telephone, the railroad - has its great significance for the Earth, but no significance outside the Earth. Nothing of what arose in Egyptian or Greek civilization perishes with the earth; but what arises in our time on the soil of purely materialistic culture perishes with the earth when the earth itself becomes a corpse of the cosmos. That which the present material culture creates perishes with the earth. This time had to come. For people must become free. They did not have to be forced to find the spirit; they had to find the spiritual through a free act of consciousness. That is why this present period came, in which everything that we can find externally, of which we can be so proud, is only there for the earth, but is not there for the spiritual world. But that is why it is also the time that leaves it up to man to rise to the spirit, that refers man to his inner being, to his soul, to his heart, to his mind, when they want to become more spiritual, that does not force man to be more spiritual, but that leaves it up to man whether they want to decline with the outer declining culture, or whether they do not want to decline with this culture.

We can either understand a truth such as the one that has just been expressed, that is, what is absolutely necessary for humanity, from spiritual science – and everything that you find in spiritual science literature gives you the building blocks for understanding what I have now summarized. But people are still not very inclined to read the signs of the time.

Consider the following. Anyone who has looked around a little in the fields of human development in recent decades has been able to make very strange observations. If he has asked himself: How are people striving for ideals for the future, for spiritual renewal? - and when he went to really get to know these things, he found active striving, he found spiritual striving, spiritual activity, a sense that things must change on earth in the area that used to be called socialism in the working-class world, in the labor movement. Purely material, but correct ideals for the future, always asking how the world must be transformed, how something new must come, that was one thing.

If you ask in other areas than the field of socialism, our intellectual movement is still a very small group of a few, as people say, quirky, half-crazy people – if you ask among the clever people, among those who have really understood the ideas of the time, you will find the most outrageous intellectual barrenness everywhere in recent decades. Within church theology, the strangest discussions arose: Whether Jesus Christ ever lived at all or not, but in any case that he could not have been some extraterrestrial being; after all, the “simple man from Nazareth” was the only thing that people cared about. And otherwise? Yes, what did they find? In this time, when people have “gotten rid of all belief in authority,” when people only follow the principle: test everything and keep the best, they found the most blind belief in authority in what, as they say, science demands. Blind belief in authority in all fields! Blind faith in authority from the historical branch right into the medical branch. Nobody found it very convenient to somehow know a lot about what health depends on; you let the one who is an authority in this field take care of that. Simply the most terrible belief in authority! Clinging to the remnants and scraps of what had been saved from the past, what had been held on to out of convenience. No striving that would have emerged from the awareness that a renewal of humanity in spiritual terms is necessary!

At the same time, it became apparent to those who were able to observe spiritually that in the east of Europe, I would say under the sign of fire, something of a new spirit was announced through pure natural processes, so that under the most disgraceful external yoke in the east of Europe, a future time developed in the minds of even the dull inhabitants of this part of Europe. It is remarkable how, since the 9th century, the rest of Europe has been pushed back to the east by that which was to remain, which was not to be eaten away by the west, as it then appeared in the outer form of the so-called Russian Empire in the various centuries, inwardly preserving the old and, in the shell of the old, as in a chrysalis, preparing a new one for a later culture! One is tempted to say that mystery cults have been preserved within this Russian people, that this Russian people, which has little understanding of the abstract religious concepts of the West, but which has a deep, profound inner feeling for cultic forms, lives with these, and that these cultic forms bring the human soul to the Divine in a pictorial form. In the East, people feel in their own souls that which the Western religious leader bears the name of: “pontiff”, that is, bridge-maker, bridge-maker to the spiritual. But in the East, as much of the old as was necessary to keep the bridge to the spiritual at least open, untouched by the new, the new materialistic.

And now take today's signs of the times together with this! One would like to say: the most bitter irony of human evolution has been poured out precisely over Eastern Europe, the bitterest irony! The caricature of every higher human aspiration, which has asserted itself in Leninism, in Trotskyism, as the final caricature consequence of purely materialistic socialist ideas, is like a dress that does not fit the body, put on the people of the East. Never before have greater contradictions collided than the soul of the European East and the inhuman Trotskyism or Leninism. This is not said out of any sympathy or antipathy, it is said out of the realization that the greatest contradictions that have ever come together are brewing in the European East through the combination of the greatest contradictions that have ever come together. This should also remind us that the signs of the times speak meaningfully. This should show us that, above all, we must begin to take spiritual science so seriously that we want to enter into reality through it; because with it we can penetrate into the reality of the present.

Rabindranath Tagore gave a remarkable lecture to the Japanese on the spirit of Japan. He speaks as an Oriental, Tagore; but the Oriental is already speaking today in such a way that the European, if he wants to, can understand him a little. But just when one delves into what Tagore said about the spirit of Japan, what he wanted to say to the whole world, then one finds that this Tagore knows with all insightful people of the East: The East preserves an ancient spiritual culture, a spiritual culture that the sages of the East have carefully kept secret, which they have not allowed to come out among ordinary people. But it is a spiritual culture that they have incorporated into the social institutions until very recently. A culture that is spiritual through and through, but whose time is up. Hence the peculiar unnaturalness that confronts us, I might say, throughout the Asian Orient. People are adapting the Western forms of thought and culture to their old spiritual way of feeling. This is basically a terrible thing, because spiritual thinking, especially as developed by the Japanese, is flexible and penetrates reality. If it fraternizes with European-American materialism, then, if European materialism does not want to spiritualize, it will certainly outstrip it. For the European does not have the flexibility of mind that the Japanese have. They have this as a legacy of their ancient spirituality.

Now, as if by some wonderful wisdom, I would like to say, the Russian folk soul had been preserved from everything that leads to abysmal development, to decadence. But now it is to be poisoned by Leninism and Trotskyism. It is to be infected by that which would extinguish the spirit from all earthly culture if it came to power. Of course, that must not be allowed to happen. But if it is not to be allowed to happen, then success, spiritual success, depends on our deciding to regard spiritual science not merely as an abstract theory, not merely as a convenient means of developing a certain inner voluptuousness, a certain mystical ic dreaming in the soul, in which one feels comfortable, through which one pretends that one has nothing to do with the world - one despises this vile world, one feels one is in a spiritual beyond. But this is only selfishness, a higher selfishness, but still only selfishness. One should want nothing to do with such mysticism, such theosophy, but only with that spiritual comprehension of existence that really grasps the spirit, experiences the spirit, but wants to comprehend reality through the spirit.

Now we must recognize the subject as a task, as a serious task for the present time. But these things are sometimes inconvenient. And precisely because they are inconvenient, certain brotherhoods have kept them secret from the masses and guarded them. That time is past. It is time that people strive out of their conscious inner being in free spirituality. The things that have been kept secret for thousands of years must now be communicated to people. One must realize that in the East in old, bygone epochs, a spiritual wisdom already existed, but the time for this spiritual wisdom is past. Another spiritual wisdom must come. In this, people often want to be mistaken. How many people have appeared in our present time of searching and wanted to make things comfortable for the Europeans, because something like our spiritual science is much too difficult for them, because there you have to think; thinking is something so uncomfortable! You have to be spiritually awake; being spiritually awake is something so uncomfortable! So many people were found who wanted to spare the Europeans the trouble of seeking their own path to the spirit and taught them all kinds of oriental wisdom, Zarathustrian wisdom and all sorts of other things. The Europeans felt so comfortable when they did not have to seek the spirit themselves, but when the spirit was brought to them ready-made from ancient India. This was a narcotic, for they did not want to search the universe through the spirit. They wanted to anesthetize themselves by taking hold of an old means of knowledge. That was the mistake made in many fields after the East.

And another mistake has been made. This other mistake is connected with the fact that this more recent time, which is leading the earth to die off in its culture, so to speak, brings with it the unconscious necessity in people to seek their own inner being. The urge to seek and find this inner being is already there. Oh, there are more and more people who are out to search for their own inner being! The search for the inner being even disguises itself, masks itself, in the worship of God, which is either a worship of the angel or of one's own self. The search for the inner being will become ever more lively and lively in modern humanity. The more science and technology people in modern times embrace, the more vividly the counter-thrust of the search for the inner self will come. Today, people often search in the wrong ways, but they search for it. Those who search the least are those who are employed as official organs to search for the spirit; they search for the “limits of knowledge”. They seek to determine what man cannot know of the spiritual world. And so today we have spiritual leaders who, above all, endeavor to tell people how not to penetrate into the spiritual world, and a humanity that seeks but has no real awareness of its seeking.

This is the most striking phenomenon. If you really want to unravel the souls on earth, you will find that people who are laymen, who are in the midst of the trials and struggles of life, are searching for the soul everywhere. Ask about the leaders who should speak down to the people from the pulpits and lecterns in such a way that the search is satisfied. They will tell you that science does not allow you to cross the boundaries of knowledge, that man cannot penetrate into the spiritual world. Kant established the limits of human knowledge for all time, and anyone who does not accept this is a fool. This is the most striking phenomenon of the present time. But the urge is there in the widest circles, even if they are not aware of this urge to search within. Where such an urge exists, in the long run one will not be satisfied with mere limitations, but one will seek for something else.

Just as the East has sent the narcotic of an old culture, a culture that has passed away, the Far West is sending people another narcotic. This is what people will gradually come to realize: Anglo-Americanism is culturally the narcotic of modern times for the spiritual search within the human heart. On the one hand, Anglo-American culture has the task of organizing and spreading material things across the earth, but it combines this task, by virtue of an inner characteristic of the Anglo-American nature, with the task of numbing people through Americanisms in their search for the spiritual in the soul. The more Europe becomes orientalized, the more it will become numbed to spiritual knowledge of the world; the more Europe becomes Anglo-Americanized, the more it will become numbed to the search for the true spirit, the true self within the human soul.

These things are not said here to develop chauvinism, not to talk all sorts of tirades about this or that world mission, but because - in the most modest way - this must be seen through in order to understand the responsible situation of the Central European human being. For since the times of the spiritual deepening through Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, through everything that I have tried to describe in the book “Vom Menschenrätseb as the forgotten sound of German intellectual life, the Central European spirit has been called upon to lead humanity away from these two narcotics: from the narcotic of Orientalism, from the narcotic of Americanism.

To understand how the spiritual tableau is spread across the earth, to understand what is placed on our souls, for this spiritual science is intended to be a guide. Can people out there in the world know today what spiritual impulses can come from Central Europe into the world? Can they know that? Let us ask the question in a different way: Have we proved ourselves worthy of such spiritual seeking as was inspired by Herder and Goethe? My dear friends, meditation is rightly recommended to us in spiritual science. Do you know what a wonderful meditation would be that you could start with even the youngest children? Read Herder and see how he presents every sunrise in the morning as a new creation in a grandiose world picture. And read the countless images that Herder presents in his “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind”. Forgotten, faded away! Just recently, a gentleman who is serious about Central European intellectual life said to me: I have never heard of any of this at Herder's!

Yes, we have a task; we must recognize this task. Listen today to a Chinese like Ku Hung-Ming. Listen to an Indian like Tagore. Do you think that these people have the opportunity to really understand what is going on in Central European intellectual life and what intellectual impulses are at work there? They look and say to themselves: Well, Goethe lived; even a Goethe Society has been founded to cultivate Goetheanism. But what has happened? In recent years, they have been looking for someone to lead this Goethe Society, to stand at the helm of this Goethe Society; the question has not even been raised: should it be a man who works in the spirit of Goetheanism, who could work for spirituality in the sense in which it is to be thought now, a hundred years after Goethe? No, a man who was a former finance minister has been placed at the head of the Goethe Society. The world sees him as the administrator of Goethe's spirituality. No one other than a former finance minister is seen as the administrator of Goethe's spirituality!

It is not enough to call out: Spirit, Spirit, Spirit! We must permeate reality with what we have gained from spiritual insight, but we must also lead this spiritual insight into reality. A task has been assigned to the Central European, and this task has begun. For spiritual science, as it is conceived here, is nothing other than the continuation of that which has emerged around the great turning point of the newer spiritual life, to which I have just pointed. It should have found a counterpart, the purely material socialist striving, which for decades was the only impulsive movement in a spiritual movement! It is never too late, but it must be understood at last, so that it does not decay, that which is precisely our task. It must finally be understood that one cannot get ahead with all the buzzwords, that a new spirit must take hold of humanity. But people today walk past the spirit. Life gives us countless examples of this.

One example among thousands upon thousands could be cited. Recently a remarkable essay by a very clever man appeared in a widely read German newspaper. This witty man gave a book a roasting in the collection “From Nature and the Spiritual World” that had unfortunately been published; he was horribly scathing about this little volume. And when one read this essay, one could not understand why the man was actually scolding. Because in this book, the development of astrology and the horoscope is discussed as a normal, well-behaved, upstanding university professor today, who does not participate in the “superstition” of astrology, would discuss it. And at the end he develops his view by describing Goethe's horoscope, and he actually makes fun of the fact that you can find all sorts of things in this horoscope. So a very good university professor wrote from today's point of view. You couldn't be a more decent university professor than the one who wrote the little book. But Fritz Mauthner rants like a pipe about this book, that someone is spreading superstition. He rants and rants and doesn't know why! A few days later, the author published a correction in which he pointed out: “I am quite in agreement with Fritz Mauthner, he makes fun of astrology and horoscopes, so do I! I only quoted the horoscope to show that you can read anything you want into it. So we are in complete agreement. The “Berliner Tageblatt”, of which Fritz Mauthner was once the theater critic, had nothing to add, because it did not think that Mauthner had misunderstood. Mauthner does not offer a word of clarification either. In short, two people who were absolutely in agreement came into the most furious conflict, and no one knew why. There was not the slightest reason for it.

That is the way it is in general in the present time, that is the characteristic of the present time! People no longer listen to what they have to say to each other; they also usually have very little to say to each other. But what they develop, what they have against each other, arises from something quite different from what they confess. One lives in a completely inexplicable way, in a completely irrational way, because one has become estranged from what reality is and can no longer enter into it.

If you think and feel your way through such things, you will feel the importance, the significance of what spiritual science is, in your soul. Anyone who believes today that spiritual science is something impractical is on the wrong track. In fifty years' time it will no longer be possible to found factories or establish any kind of working community without permeating things with spiritual science, because it alone will find the way to reality. When people understand, really understand, that all the old catchwords lead to dead ends, that we need insight into the spirit that rules the world for the very most material life, then one will understand spiritual science, then one will not want to get into the spiritual world in an egoistic way through the “only bridge of death”, but then one will also draw life from death.

Perhaps someone who has seriously studied spiritual research is allowed to speak of such things in such an intimate circle. I, who have been writing about Goethe for more than thirty years now, have not wanted to write about Goethe in an outwardly philological or philosophical or other scholarly way, but rather, my aim has always been to offer, through my relationship with Goethe, a possibility to express in my books what Goethe now wants to say to humanity in a particular field that is close to me. I did not want to go to the dead Goethe to study him, but through what Goethe left behind, I wanted to find the way to the living Goethe. To the Goethe who speaks to our souls when we know that the dead are alive like us, that they live in the world in which we ourselves live, only that we walk around in the body, but the dead are among us in the spirit.

Do religious communities really believe that they live together with the dead? There is, admittedly, a selfish belief in immortality, and this should not be criticized. But only spiritual science can make fruitful the life of the dead. For it is through spiritual science that men will find the way to those with whom they were karmically connected and who have passed over into the other world and still cling to the world with a thousand and one threads. For in what happens here on earth, not only the impulses of the living work. Man does not cease to work for the world when he has passed through the gate of death.

We are only partially awake. When we perceive and form ideas, we are awake. When we feel, we are dreaming. Our feelings do not live more strongly in our consciousness than our dreams. And our will impulses, we oversleep them. We know how to remember dreams in our imagination, but in our ordinary consciousness we do not even know how our will works when we move our arm. We dream in feeling, we sleep in willing. Because we are sentient beings who feel and will, there is a world of spirit around us that we cannot see into in our ordinary consciousness. We are torn out of this world by perception and thinking. Because we are perceivers and thinkers and enjoy the physical world, we do not know that the dead walk among us. The dead walk among us. Man, when he has developed throughout his life, goes through the gate of death. He remains connected with earthly existence, the threads go down from him into earthly existence. We cannot feel and will without the dead who were karmically connected with us working in our feelings and wills. Spiritual science gives recognition of what looks in as a life not lost to the earth, which one otherwise believes in nothing, in a living way. The spiritual inclinations of the people of the East are also based on this. The peoples of the European center have the task, out of the freedom of the soul, to draw everything that the human being can consciously create out of the freedom of his soul into the fourth millennium. To do this, however, the outer material reality must be spiritually permeated. But it must not be immersed in Wilsonism, which is the opposite of all spirituality. In the East, what is preparing itself as the next culture must be released from those terrible contradictions, from that which does not belong together, which has developed from the grafting of Trotskyism and Leninism onto burgeoning spirituality. This next culture will be called upon each time something happens on earth to ask: What do the dead say about this?

Yes, it is a much more important thing today to know that this is something we are approaching in our development on earth. Today people are clever, they are so clever at twenty! They let themselves be elected to parliament at twenty because today everyone has their own point of view by the time they are twenty, they are fully formed human beings. That life from the age of twenty until we die is not given to us in vain, but that we are constantly growing, that new things are revealed to us, that when we have passed through the gate of death, wisdom continues, life continues, we become wiser, that is something that people must imbibe. And in the future, people will realize that the wisest people to ask about what is happening on earth are the dead.

The consciousness soul - if you read about what that is in my book 'Theosophy' - develops the present, the spirit self develops the nearest culture. The spirit self develops in that the dead will be the advisers of the living on earth. Today this is still considered a fantastic reverie, half madness. It will become a reality. There will come a time when people united on earth to do something worthwhile and meaningful for the evolution of the earth will not only consult the living but also the dead. It is not possible at present to go into detail about how this will take shape politically in the future and how it must be prepared. This can only remain a mystery. But one can already penetrate with the fact that this living consciousness must arise in humanity, that we are with the dead; that man should not only develop egoistic striving for immortality, but that living striving that lives in work, in action.

To become aware that spiritual knowledge would like to place the individual human striving into the all-embracing striving of the earth, I thought was particularly suitable to be considered on this occasion, when our friends have come together here to find the spiritual-scientific answers to certain questions of life. That it is not just about narrow-minded human soul needs, but that today, if we are serious about what spiritual science is, it is about the fate of earthly culture, to This realization is not arrogance, not megalomania; it can be done in all humility, but it must be done because there must be people today who truly understand the seriousness of human endeavor on earth. Immerse yourself in spiritual science, and you will find that however small a branch it may still be, it can make its contribution to what should come about in the development of humanity, what must come about if the earth is to reach its goal!

More than in any other form of learning, however wise, it is often in simple myths and legends that we find deep, profound wisdom and truth. It seems as if an ancient truth from the human breast were speaking to our soul when we hear a very simple but deeply moving Mongolian fairy tale. This fairy tale goes something like this: There is an old woman. This old woman has only one large eye at the top of her head, and no other eyes with which she could see. She goes all over the world, and everything she encounters along the way, she picks up: every stone, every plant, everything, everything; and then she takes what she has picked up to her only eye to look at it, and when she has looked at it, something like a tremendous horror expresses itself on her face. Then she throws the object far away from her. This story goes on to tell us: This old woman once lost her only child, and now she searches the whole world for this only child, believing she will find this child in every stone, in every object she encounters. When she has raised an object to her eye and once again realized that it is not what belongs so deeply to her, disappointment paints itself on her face and she throws the object away.

Now, if we wanted to interpret fairy tales and legends, we could find a deep wisdom in this fairy tale, which is rooted in the most primitive folk minds. We don't want that now. In such fairy tales, one can find many, many interpretations; but it seems to us that this fairy tale expresses a yearning in every human breast. Every human being, when he becomes clear and distinct about his deepest soul values, feels that he must seek something in the whole world, something that is most deeply related to the innermost part of his soul, something that he must believe can manifest itself in every stone, in every being. And every human being feels that what he is actually seeking cannot be seen with the outer eyes and perceived directly. Every human being feels within himself a higher spiritual eye with which he walks through the world, and he senses that what meets the outer senses are only the means of expression for something that lives behind them, and so he walks around in the world like that woman, looking at every object. As long as he only looks at it with his external senses, it gives him something that, when he holds it up to the eye of his longing, deeply disappoints him. And he throws it away, saying to himself: Again, again not what I feel, what must live in all external things. For it is indeed the spirit behind all sensual physical beings that man seeks unalterably and perpetually, the spirit of which he knows that it lives within him, and of which he knows that he must somehow find it behind external objects as well. It is spiritual science that points man to what is behind sensual things and what can truly satisfy his spiritual gaze.

This spiritual science, if we look at things objectively, has, despite its short life, found a fairly wide distribution among the educated of our world in recent decades. Nevertheless, the strangest prejudices are in circulation among many people who only deal with this subject superficially. We always hear: This theosophy wants nothing more than to transplant some oriental worldview into Europe. We hear that it is a sect, that it leads to the most blatant superstition.

Not a single trace of this is true. However, it is true that if a person wants to see what this spiritual science can give them, they have to delve deeper and deeper into it. If it really gives the spiritual, if it satisfies the human longing that has been characterized, then it is more than what mere curiosity can satisfy. It is something that man needs for his life. It makes it clear to man again that in the spirit is the origin, the germ, the source of everything, including the physical, and if that is the case, then with the spirit it gives man strength at the same time, the source of life in general. Those who engage with it more deeply find this to the fullest extent.

Nothing is more fundamental, more significant for this spiritual science than the proposition that the spiritual in us, our thoughts, perceptions, feelings, are facts that have a deep effect and significance for our outer life. If we apply this specifically, if we single out one of these facts, we can say: true, genuine thoughts of the spirit give a person satisfaction, inner harmony. But inner harmony and contentment mean, if the spirit is really power, health in its effect on the physical organism, while doubt, the isolation from the spiritual world, gives man inner insecurity, hopelessness, inability to work. It gnaws at his deepest being. And because thoughts are facts, doubt and hopelessness affect his health in such a way that they weaken it. This is an assertion at first. But anyone who delves deeper will gradually be convinced of its validity.

Nowadays, there are many obstacles for people who want to approach this spiritual science. Anyone who is familiar with this spiritual science is by no means inclined to underestimate the serious obstacles that stand in the way of a person's understanding of spiritual science if he looks at things impartially. Among these manifold obstacles, there is something that is directly related to the greatest advances and most significant achievements of our age: natural science. But not to the facts of natural science! To claim that the humanities, or any kind of pursuit of truth, could come into conflict with the facts of science is madness. Facts are facts. And there can be nothing that somehow comes into conflict with the facts of science.

But when we talk about science today, for most people who lean on this science, it is not just about facts, but rather about a confession, a kind of belief that has been gained from science. And in particular, it has been the last 60s and 70s of the last century that have gradually produced a kind of scientific confession for many. This confession is expressed in the fact that there are many people who say that speaking of spirit, of a divine-spiritual background, is impossible for today's man; childish-fantastic ages spoke of spirit or soul. It is impossible for today's mature humanity to speak of these things, because scientific facts force us to do otherwise. And that which is spreading today as a kind of scientific religion and gaining more and more followers captures the imaginative life of many to such an extent that it is simply true that many who are caught up in this captivity must regard what spiritual science has to say as pure nonsense, as mere reverie.

The humanities scholar must understand what is at stake here. We can certainly experience the following. The humanities scholar comes forward with what he believes he can say based on his faithful observation of the spiritual world, with manifold teachings about what lies beyond the physically perceptible. These things have often been spoken of here, spoken of what we call the higher aspects of human nature, of the fate of man between death and rebirth, of worlds other than the physical. What is said here must seem like fantasy, if not something much worse, to many who today profess some kind of scientific doctrine. And today our consideration is specifically devoted to this fact, to the fact: What must someone who, over the last sixty years, has developed out of what is not directly given by the natural sciences, but what has developed on the basis of them and professes them, what must he think of Theosophy or spiritual science, or what can he easily think of them?

Before we go into the position of these contemporaries, who believe they have a scientific creed, we must characterize the essential point of the points of spiritual science in question. The point of spiritual science is to show in everything that the spirit is the original, matter is the derivative, that is, what appears as the effect of the spirit. So, for the spiritual researcher, substance, matter, sensuality is also spirit, but like spirit in another form. Take a child, for example. It comes to you with a piece of ice. You say to the child: This is water, real water, just in a different form. The child will say: Yes, but this ice is not water! — Then you will say: If you familiarize yourself with the nature of ice, you will understand it. Thus, when someone has matter, something sensory, before them, the spiritual scientist will say: This is spirit in another form. The materialist, on the other hand, will say: But this is matter. And the spiritual researcher will say, just as you would answer the child: You must first familiarize yourself with the extent to which matter appears in another form than spirit.

And this, which has been presented to your soul in a very abstract way, is what spiritual science seeks to explain in detail, for example, to show that what you recognize as a sensual person, see with your eyes, touch with your hands, that this outer material person is nothing more than the result of a spiritual person. Just as ice is water in a different form, so is the physical person a spiritual person in a different form.

Now, of course, when we present something like this in a few strokes today, we have to remind ourselves of what has been said in other lectures. It is difficult for those who have not heard these lectures. This spiritual science shows that if you go further and further back in time from the present, you will find other forms in the course of development, ever simpler and simpler outer physical human forms. These physical bodies of man would appear to you, if you go back far enough, more and more simple, until, if you go back far enough, you would find very simple, primitive human forms. But the further you go back, the more primitive the physical forms become, the more you find an invisible human form linked to this physical form. And if you go back even further into the times when the physical human being became smaller and smaller, the physical body becomes inconspicuous, but the spiritual human being is there, and that is the creator of this physical human form. And if you go back even further, the human form disappears altogether, and you come to the original human being, out of whom the physical one has concentrated. He is a spiritual human being.

Let us visualize how the formation of man happens now, through a comparison. Take a certain amount of water. In this, let a small amount of it freeze into ice. Then there is a small amount of ice in the middle and water all around. Now let more freeze. Then you have a more complicated ice shape. If there is already less water than before, then the water is combined into ice. The more water that freezes into ice, the less water remains. More and more ice should be created until we have almost allowed all the water to freeze into ice, so that what used to be water is now expressed in the hard, tangible form of ice.

This is roughly how we have to imagine the development of man if we stick to the comparison. We can only see the water, we can no longer see the spiritual man. Out of him begins to shine the first primitive, original form of man, which stands at the lowest level of organization. All around is this spiritual man, he condenses. This is how it continues to this day. Our present human being, as he stands before us, has been formed out of the spiritual man into the physical. The spiritual form has become more and more material. Today's human being is the expression, the revelation of the invisible man who has become visible.

Now we take up another train of thought, assuming that we had not allowed just one lump of water to solidify, but a number of them. We would have allowed the first one to solidify, then we would have taken it out. It now remains as it was and shows us the stage of development that existed at a certain phase. Now, if we had allowed a second lump to solidify at a higher level, we would have taken it out. It remains as it is. A third one as well. Finally, we can now present the whole long series of developments, where more and more water freezes into ice, until finally a point is reached where there is only one lump of ice. We have bits of ice that have lost the ability to attach other bits of ice because we have separated them from the water. This is how, in the sense of spiritual science, one imagines the development of man in his relationship to the animal world.

Once upon a time there was a spiritual man; he originally formed primitive bodies for himself. The part that retained and further developed the spiritual man reached up to today's humanity. But where a stage of development broke away, it stopped. Thus, on the first stage, when the spiritual man had developed the primitive form, a small gelatinous ball broke away, remained as that piece of ice and formed today's lowest animals. They lost their spiritual foundation. At a later stage, creatures remained behind that took the form of worms. Later still, others took the form of fish, then amphibians and so on, until finally, in a time that is not long for the spiritual researcher, the ape family emerged from the spirit, so that it could no longer keep up. Man has also progressed beyond this stage.

So you can never say that man derived from any form that now exists. Rather, it is the other way around: the forms outside, which surround you everywhere, these forms present us with developmental epochs that man has overcome because he retained the original spiritual human being within himself, because he did not tear out what had become physical from the spirit. When man looks out into his surroundings, he says to himself: I am the first in our evolutionary series; I was already there at the time when the most primitive animals had not yet appeared. I have gone through all these stages; I see my stages in my surroundings.

This is how the spiritual researcher thinks about the development of man, who, as a spiritual being, descended from the bosom of the Godhead, who has progressed while the animals crumbled away and had to remain at an earlier stage because they lost the source. When we look at any physical being, we see how it is formed out of the spirit.

But the spiritual researcher goes further. He sees in everything around him, not only in living beings, in all matter he sees, as it were, solidified spirit. Atoms are nothing other than solidified spirit. For him, the spiritual is the original, the material the derivative. When we see a stone outside, how should we think of it? That even this stone is condensed spirit.

This view has nothing to do with the extreme view that wanted to deny matter. By tracing all matter back to spirit, one does not deny it, because existence does not depend on not seeing spirit, but on becoming aware of the effect. Of course, the condensed spirits in matter have different properties than the spiritual beings themselves; that much is clear. It is only necessary to think these things through to the end. The confessions that have emerged from natural science since the 1960s are now directed against this basic fact of spiritual science. They only accept the sensual as the original and do not want to recognize the spiritual.

Who does not remember the two other trains of thought that confront one in today's world when what has been said is mentioned! Who does not remember what is emerging today as a monistic theory of evolution, whereby animals related to humans are not understood to have split off, but rather as if only the lower animals had originally existed, so that humans are the composite product of the individual building blocks of animals? It is pointed out: once only simple organisms existed. So now, according to the other theory of evolution, a higher being should have developed up to man. So man would then have simply arisen from the lower animal being in terms of his entire inner meaning.

And who does not remember the other thing that is said? Let us look at an object as it appears to us. What does it consist of? Of the smallest parts of matter, molecules, atoms, they say. And these smallest particles of matter are the only truly real things. All beings have come into being only through the interaction of these [particles of matter]. These two things are so certain for many people today, they are such suggestive concepts that many people cannot associate any sense with other things. They must be given their due. These two lines of thought are connected with the most fruitful lines of development in the nineteenth century.

We do not want to go back very far, but we will recall two fundamental facts of natural science, facts that are related to each other, the two great achievements of Schleiden and Schwann. Schleiden came to the conclusion in his studies of plants that they consist of the smallest parts, the cells, that every plant body is composed of cells, the smallest living organisms, and from there the thought takes hold: one has actually studied the plant when one has studied the nature of the cell, because these are the actual reality. The plant is only a composition of them. When Schwann found the same for the animal kingdom, this view that you can recognize a being by studying the parts of which it is composed, was also decisive for the animal kingdom. The wonders that opened up to microscopic research were admirable. What has been found through it is something great and powerful. But there were other things to come. The great discoveries in the fields of chemistry, physics, and biology came.

I will mention just a few: Darwin made a great impression by showing the transformability of animal and plant life. With tremendous diligence and great scientific rigor, he compiled facts that revealed the relationship between animals and plants, all the way up to humans. We need only recall how, through spectral analysis, man was able to look out into the heavens to find that the substances of the heavenly bodies are the same as those of our earth. The discoveries of Kirchhoff and Bunsen, which revealed the composition of the universe, are rightly called great. But these were also very much facts that bound these human minds to the material.

Those who can still look back a little on the development of intellectual life know how it happened, how, before Schleiden and Schwann, attempts were made to understand the whole plant by applying intellectual powers, and how it then became clear that the primeval organism was present in the cell organism that could still be perceived by the senses. The eye has conquered such wonders that man believed there was nothing more. Through such a thing as spectral analysis, the human mind had to be bound to the material. He had looked into the material events of the universe. It was not surprising that he forgot that there is also spirit in it, so that these conquests at the end of the nineteenth century in particular gave rise to atomism, the view that one only has to go to the smallest material and ever smaller, and find the explanation in the smallest material.

If this had remained a mere theory, it would not have had such a great significance for the spiritual path of humanity. But it could not remain that. With those bold minds of the nineteenth century, who unashamedly accommodated themselves to crass materialism, we see where such material thinking must lead. There we have minds such as Büchner's, Moleschott's and so on. Today they are already much maligned, but that is a half measure, not the whole. People say they have moved beyond them. They abandon the most crass assertions, but stand on the same ground as they did. They do not see that the ground has only been more consistently developed.

Only spiritual science is called upon to overcome this. We need only recall what Carl Vogt said, that thoughts are exudates of the brain, like any other metabolic process. Just as the kidneys exude certain substances, so the movement of the brain particles exudes thoughts. Something like that cannot remain a theory if it is believed. If that is the case, if a person's thoughts and feelings are products of the material movement of the brain parts, then with death, when the materials that make up the human being dissolve, all of the innermost essence of the human being disappears, and there is not the slightest possibility of speaking of spiritual and soul entities that outlast the human being. If the smallest material parts are the essence, then Vogt's way of thinking is consistent: when a person is buried, he disintegrates, and nothing should remain of him. These thinkers drew these conclusions and were basically much more consistent than some who wanted to be idealists at the time and who actually thought materialistically in their hearts. A dispute between Vogt and a Munich scholar who held on to soul and spirit and published articles in a Munich magazine in which he opposed Vogt was characteristic of the way in which the way of thinking was eaten away by materialism at the time. Wagner was the man's name, and Vogt wrote a spirited pamphlet against him. It was easy to refute the man with the spiritual doctrine and the materialistic way of thinking. For how did this Wagner roughly imagine the transition of the soul from parents to children? As if a measure is divided into eighths. That is, to believe in a soul substance, just as if one could weigh it. Something like that was easy to refute. That is what matters; not whether you have a spiritual doctrine, but whether you can really live in the spirit. Those who believed spiritually at the time could not do that. They were so firmly held in the spell of the material achievements of that time that, little by little, everything around us became an expression of the movement of the smallest material parts for people.

In the field of living beings, people were not satisfied with cells; instead, they were made up of atoms. From then on, life was nothing more than a complicated process of movement of the smallest parts. Complicated movement was then the movement in our brain; and that, as this movement presented itself, was human thoughts and feelings. And even those who only studied physics and physiology in this field twenty or thirty years ago experienced something that has now become rarer, what is called the reduction of all experiences to processes of moving atoms. They said: Besides us, there is only matter. What do you call color? It is nothing more than a certain movement of atoms that vibrate. The vibrations reach the eye. One form of vibration, one speed appears to us as red, the other as blue, the third as green. Red, blue and green are nothing more than subjective impressions of what exists outside. And out there are only vibrational processes in the smallest ether particles. If you turn your eye so that what vibrates outside can reach you, you become aware of it as the impression of red, blue or green. If you turn away, then nothing else is present but a vibrating process.

Then the students were tormented with the mechanical theory of heat. That which burns your fingers is nothing more than a subjective impression. Objectively present are the vibrating atoms. Imagine a container with billions of the smallest globules of a gaseous body. They vibrate in confusion, moving, bumping into each other, colliding with the walls and back again. This tremendous, structured form of motion is what manifests itself as a sensation of warmth when we put our hand down. Nothing of what we experience is external to us, but only the motion of the smallest parts. There is no warmth, there is no light, only the motion of the smallest parts. There is no electricity, only the motion of atoms. For those people, atoms had become the only reality, the absolute existence. If we dissect a human being, everything we see is a subjective impression. The human being before us is nothing more than an enormously complicated process of motion. What remains are the atoms, which, when a person dies, merge into other motion processes and form new groups. The eternal, the immortal, became the atom!

Now chemistry had found a number of substances, some 70. These substances were characterized by the fact that they could not initially be broken down into simpler ones. Water can be broken down; oxygen cannot, so it is a simple substance. What was such a simple substance? In their way, they were something eternal; but how eternal? Each element represents the cohesion of the smallest parts. These were jumbled up in the most diverse ways in the universe, here simpler, there more complicated. But the world was always only the jumble of the 72 different “eternal” elements. These were the only reality. At most, the forces were still accepted. For those who think in materialistic terms, the following must apply: an eternal thing is the individual atom. It must have existed since time immemorial and must remain in existence into time immemorial, that is the eternal. The indifferent atom, the unconscious atom, that is the original building block. And if everything is only the jumbled confusion of atoms, it is only logical to regard everything else as appearance and vapor, as something insubstantial that rises like a fog. This is a concept that has great suggestive power. There have always been people who knew what an enormity it is to assert the eternity of matter as the cornerstone of all worldviews. Du Bois-Reymond's “We cannot know” caused a certain stir when it was spoken at a natural science conference. What did he mean by that? He said: Yes, suppose you had got so far as to know, when you entertain a thought, how the atoms in your brain move. Have you grasped why certain atoms move one way and others another? What you experience inwardly: I see red, I smell the scent of roses? — He had taken up a saying of Leibniz: From a certain point of view, the brain is a material composition of atoms. — Let us assume, says Du Bois-Reymond, we could see its composition, let us assume that the brain were so gigantic that you could walk around in it, that you could understand the whole mechanism of the brain. Imagine that someone tries to understand: If there is such a movement, what this person, to whom the brain belongs, actually experiences in his soul during this movement, whether, when the parts move in one way or another, he has this or that sensation! We see movements, we see mechanical processes! We can never perceive the transition from this mechanical process to the inner experiences of the soul.

Du Bois-Reymond went even further. He said: If a person is sleeping and you examine the movements of his brain, the fact is not present in the person: I see red, I smell the scent of roses. You can understand this sleeping person, he said. But as soon as he wakes up, scientific understanding of the mechanism ceases.

This was something where theosophy or spiritual science looked in through the window of the natural world. The spiritual researcher shows that when we sleep, our physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, and outside of them is the astral body with the ego, so that the spiritual and the soul-like human being are lifted out of the physical body. What remains, Du Bois-Reymond finds explainable. However, there is still an error in this: life was overlooked. You see, here you have the first outpost of theosophy, but at the same time something that expresses the desolation of such a scientific view: we will not know, says Du Bois-Reymond. Even if it is true that one cannot understand, there is never any other explanation than that which arises from the movements. This means renouncing any explanation of the mind.

There is another matter. A chemist, Ostwald, spoke at the naturalists' meeting in Lübeck about overcoming materialism from his chemical-physical point of view. He showed that there is no sense in speaking of matter. He made a rough comparison. If someone hits another person with a stick, it does not matter to the stick, because the stick is material. What you feel, he said, is the force that is acting on you. So Ostwald tried to establish the view that everything consists of individual forces. The force that we perceive is what matters.

What were atoms? In the past, they were the smallest parts. For Ostwald, they were a small combination of forces; when they crystallize, they become atoms, matter. There we have the first step away from atomism. A person like Ostwald is not capable of rising to the view that everything is spirit. He said that everything is force, the parts of matter clenched together out of force. That was speculation. But there were innumerable reasons for it. In those days one could remember something that had been said long ago. And it was precisely I who pointed out the following in the sharpest possible way: Goethe, who is as great a naturalist as he is a poet, said: If only people did not look for anything behind appearances! The phenomena themselves are the teaching.

For a view of the world that is held in the spirit of Goethe, the following applies: What we perceive is reality. What are atoms for such a view? What is an atom? Can we associate an idea with it? What we imagine are the properties of things. We perceive things through their properties. Does the atom have such properties? Does it have a color? According to the atomistic view: no. Color, after all, is only produced by motion. Do they smell, do they taste? No! Because this, too, is only produced by motion. Do they show a certain temperature? No. All the properties around us must be denied to the atom. What is the atom for healthy thinking without properties? A fantastic construction, nothing more. Every property is denied to that which lives in the environment. The atom is something imagined as a lump in space, but it is denied all the properties it would have to have. That is the characteristic of the atomistic theory, of this basic tenet of materialism, that this theory is the most fantastic thing one can think of, pure dreaming. What one has recognized as the eternal is invented; it contradicts all healthy thinking.

Materialism attempts to conjure up such a fantastic reality in space. Without realizing it, materialism has built up the most blatant superstition. There is no difference between fetishism, which worships pieces of wood, and materialism, which worships small material lumps. The “savage” at least sees his piece of wood; the materialists imagine billions of little idols that can never appear in experience. Atomism has set up the idolatry of the atom, built on pure fantastic thought. The 72 elements exist for us insofar as they have properties. If we imagine them as consisting of atoms, then this falls prey to the most blatant materialistic superstition. All those jumbled-up atoms, all those chess pieces are inventions, are the fantastic basis of a thought.

Now, as I said, a person like the chemist Ostwald had at least pointed out that it makes no sense to speak of a pure substance, that everything dissolves into energy. We perceive energy, we do not perceive substance at all.

That was the situation in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, things have changed completely. Until then, despite all the efforts to overcome materialism, one had to rely on sound thinking. Now, although this is the surest way to overcome it, it does not help much in our age. Anyone who, like the person speaking to you, has had to think through all the big formulas with which, for example, the red light rays have been calculated – movement of the ether atoms – anyone who has had to watch as everyone believed that the waves of the ether move in such and such a way, and then you perceive red; when, as in a vessel filled with gas, the molecules are thrown back and forth, then this degree of warmth arises, and so on. Anyone who has seen this knows something about the physiology of these things and knows that it can be difficult to achieve anything with healthy reason and real spiritual science. That was the case in the early 1890s. Today it is different.

A saying made by an English thinker, a physicist, and a good one at that, Minister Balfour, is extremely curious. He is an extraordinarily astute physical thinker. He said: If we want to think about what an atom is according to the newer views, what is the atom? He saw in it something that solidified out of flowing electricity, similar to how ice solidifies out of water. Balfour saw something more in the atom than Ostwald did. He saw flowing currents of electricity in which the individual particles of matter arise out of condensed electricity. So atoms are actually condensed electricity. You see, we still do not have a healthy view of the physical as condensed spirit; but we are now at the point where we can hear that the physical is something condensed. Think of the tremendous progress! What was electricity just a short time ago? Atom! The little fetishes had movement and the expression of that was electricity. Now the atom had already become condensed electricity. This is the real thing. That is an interesting turnaround. What was this turnaround based on? It was not based merely on the experience of the spiritual researcher or on sound thinking, but on specific experience. Physics itself, in its progress, had forced people to think in this way. This includes the phenomena observed in glass tubes through which electricity is conducted after they have been pumped dry – Crookes tubes. These phenomena led to the realization that what flows in such a tube is flowing electricity; that electricity flows in space at all. What was previously only a property was now something real.

Of course, it didn't all happen in one go. For the humanities scholar, heat is just as real as electricity, and light as well. Matter comes into being just as much through the solidification of light and heat as through the solidification of electricity. In twenty years, it won't be nonsense to say this. They will speak of what heat and light are, they will no longer claim that these little fetishes of atoms are the original, but solidified properties, solidified perceptions. What is around us is an emanation, a manifestation of the mind. Today this is still nonsense to the physicist, in twenty years it will be a fact.

This is the way to gradually arrive at the realization that all matter is solidified spirit. Physical thinking is moving directly in this direction, which leads to seeing spirit as condensed matter. This direction continues in this way. It then causes materialistic thinking to rack its brains. But it must be said: today, for materialistic thinkers, spirit does not so easily break away from the atomistic way of thinking. People have noticed that when chlorine and copper are mixed, something strange happens. In their view, chlorine is an element consisting of vibrating atoms; and these atoms would be something original. The copper atoms would be something original again. When the compound is formed, the atoms are pushed into each other, and then chlorine copper is formed. But now something strange happens. When chlorine and copper really combine, it happens with a fire effect. Heat occurs. This is something just as real as copper and chlorine. That it is something very real is shown when we want to separate the chlorine copper again. Then we have to reintroduce the heat, the same amount that was taken out.

Certain people who cannot get away from materialistic atomism have considered this. They came up with the following: Now, if we have chlorine on its own and copper on its own, which consists of atoms, then we have to think of these atoms as sacks that are puffed up by heat; and now, when we bring chlorine and copper together so that they combine, the heat is expelled, and now the empty sacks are pressed together in a jumbled fashion. When the bodies are put together, the sacks are squeezed out. When the elements are driven apart, the heat inflates the sacks.

You see, the atom has already disappeared, heat has become something very real. If we don't want to talk about sacks – the materialists did that themselves, we might have used the image of a balloon – then we have to say: if you separate the shells again, they will be filled.

What we see here is that what actually makes up the atom has already melted down to a very small size, to the shell. What gives the atom size is the heat it absorbs. This is extremely interesting. We are not far from a time when the skins will finally have been removed. For why should we not be able to imagine that if heat can puff itself up, it can be dispensed with altogether? Why should it not be conceivable to imagine the atom as frozen heat? We will come to that. Let us consider further. Even more interesting is the next step that science has taken. After the point where the atom had literally dissolved into flowing properties, came what begins with Becquerel's discoveries, which led to the magnificent and powerful discoveries in this very field, to the discoveries about radium. What do we have before us with this? We do not want to decide whether the ideas to which the physicists have been led are correct. It is our responsibility to establish that the physicists were forced to a crossroads by the phenomenon of radium. Radium emits various types of rays, electrical and so on, the effects of which can be seen on a photographic plate. But above all, it emits what is called emanations. These emanations have certain properties, properties that differ from radium itself, but are similar to it again, that dissipate over time, so that the emanation merges into something else. It throws parts of its own substance out of itself. These lose their properties and become something else. Physics has even had to accept that it has been proven that this emanation transforms into helium. Oh, what do we have now! Something flows out of the element radium and has different properties, something flows out and turns into an element again. This led chemists to say: the atom itself decays, decays into something completely different, so that it can turn into a completely new atom, even into a different element!

Imagine what that means! The parts of an element, which are called atoms, should be the most solid. Now, however, the experiment shows that these atoms crumble under our hands and become something completely different. This is something like the realization of the alchemists' dreams, that one substance can be transformed into another! Today, all this is still in its early stages, but already scientists are forced to say to themselves: the atom is not something original, it has come into being and will dissolve again. Long ago, atoms did not exist at all, although people spoke of them as the smallest fetishes. Gradually they came into being and will pass away again, as radium shows by the way it gradually crumbles its atom. Today, the physicist's atom disintegrates at our very hands. We shall no longer be able to speak of the atom in the old way. This is something different from what Ostwald brought. He still relied on conclusions; today the facts already speak; today the world of facts itself destroys the fantastic structure of the “atom”.

This brings us to an important point. Imagine the consequences of the atom being scattered, this firm support. It dissolves not only in thought, but in appearance, in space, in fact. The atom ceases to be before our eyes what it has been presented as. As ice melts again, so does the atom. Today, materialistic thinkers cannot go far enough; they can imagine that electricity accumulates; but the path leads to seeing that the original is the spirit. That is what the first step taken today is towards.

Thus, today, natural science, if it wants to understand itself correctly, stands at the beginning of the way of thinking that leads directly into spiritual science. It cannot help itself. When the mantle falls, the duke falls after it. What has led to the materialistic theory of evolution are thoughts that could not get away from matter. It sees human beings as a composite of animal species. Once we can grasp that what happens outside in the physical world comes from the spirit, then we will also be able to comprehend the way of thinking that was discussed at the beginning, of the spiritual primeval man who has become denser. Comprehension depends on our thinking habits. Physicists will force people to see spirit condensed in all material things. Then, when it is known that the atom is not eternal but has come into being and is changing into spiritual substance, it will also be possible to understand that man comes from spirit and goes to spirit. All this will lead to such a conclusion. What is happening today in the world of natural science must be viewed from within. Those who speak of it cannot yet renounce this tendency of development, which is afflicted by materialistic ideas.

But the facts guarantee that natural science will lead to spiritual science, that both will celebrate reconciliation. Spiritual science is something that must be presented to people in order to proclaim the spirit as the cause of the physical. Spiritual science will be needed when natural science can no longer go forward on its own; then natural science will be ready to merge into spiritual science. The latter is the outpost that establishes what people will need to know when the facts are ripe to unite with the spiritual-scientific facts. By itself, natural science would lead to the incomprehensible. At most, one would see solidified electricity in the atoms. To understand the final consequences, spiritual science is needed.

When we look back over centuries of thinking and feeling, we have to say that a hundred years ago, what we call natural science was just on the way to descending into the coarsest materiality. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the lowest level had been reached. In Vogt's saying that thought is a secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, it had reached the point of extinguishing all spirit and explaining it as subjective appearance. Natural science was on this path; it was not ripe to turn its gaze up to spirit. Where was spiritual science a hundred years ago? It was immersed in abstractions, in concepts that shine deeply into the spirit. But there was one thing it could not do: bring down the great concepts of the spiritual world to the level of direct comprehension of what appeared externally.

Today we have a natural science that has plunged into the material, where the atom itself speaks, a natural science in which the atom disintegrates at our hands. We have spiritual science in theosophy, which descends to the most concrete facts, which shows that something has emerged in the physical body that the astral body, the etheric body, the I, has formed. We have natural science that reaches up to the boundaries of spiritual science, and we have spiritual science that has descended to the boundaries of natural science. That is the course of development.

A hundred years ago, looking at two currents – a natural science that did not reach up to spiritual science, and a philosophy that did not reach down to natural science – Schiller said: Oh, you are called to go one way, but for the time being you must still go separate ways so that each one becomes strong enough to help the other. This has been quickly fulfilled. In a way, natural science is strong through its weakness, in that it overcomes itself through its own facts. It will lead upwards. And spiritual science is strong because it can embrace the material. What Schiller recognized and hoped for seems to be coming true. Hopefully there will soon be many people who, with the one spiritual eye, like the woman in the fairy tale told at the beginning, no longer have to take the external beings and hurl them away because they tell them nothing, but there will be people who take every stone in their hands, lead it to a spiritual eye and recognize it as an expression of the spiritual world, because all matter is from the spirit and proclaims it. For materialism there was only matter; nothing was found there and things were thrown away. Spiritual science united with natural science will give man a spiritual aspect in every material thing. We will grow to love everything again because everything is an expression of the spiritual world.

Natural science is at a crossroads. It must either go to one side and be lost, or to the other, where it will stand united with spiritual science as the one world view; so that the two together lead man up to a way of life in which the spirit permeates life, so that in this union - which is brought about by facts themselves - a great goal for the good of humanity is achieved. We see it before us today. Let us try to visualize more clearly what we see before us by cultivating spiritual science. Then we will see that we are not doing it to satisfy mere curiosity, but to free ourselves inwardly from all doubts and to make us strong and vigorous and healthy for life. That will be the fruit of the union of natural science and spiritual science: health and strength and security in life!

after a eurythmy-dramatic presentation

Today we have preceded the Easter scene in 'Faust' with the scene in which the Earth Spirit appears to Faust. Eight days ago, we were able to tie in many thoughts from 'Faust' that can be meaningful to those who want to approach the laws of the world, the life of the world, in a spiritual scientific way. It is not just to give you explanations of Goethe's 'Faust' that I am taking up Goethe's poetic creation last time on Easter Sunday and this time here. The reason is because the human soul can truly perceive something of the artistic images that confront us in “Faust” that must be called the development of this soul into the spiritual worlds, which one can call becoming familiar with the spiritual worlds. To the extent that we can, so to speak, immerse ourselves in “Faust” from a spiritual scientific point of view, we may indeed tie one or the other reflection to this poetic creation. In essence, Goethe's 'Faust' is the expression of the striving into the spiritual world in Goethe, and thus the expression of how, at an important turning point in modern history, a mind as deep as Goethe's tried to enter the world that we seek through our spiritual deepening.

Last time, we were able to convince ourselves that Goethe lived in a time in which it was really not yet possible to find the way into the spiritual worlds in a clear, I would say unambiguous, way. We were able to convince ourselves that such truths as those of the significance of Lucifer and Ahriman still hovered before Goethe's soul as an unclear realization, one might say, like an unclear sense of the spiritual world, and we were able to convince ourselves that in the figure of Mephistopheles the two figures of Lucifer and Ahriman have been conflated, so that Goethe has before him an unclear figure in Mephistopheles, to whom he cannot get close in an unambiguous spiritual-scientific relationship. And so we can see precisely in this striving of Goethe's, as it is expressed in 'Faust', with what seriousness and with what inner conscientiousness, one might say, with what responsibility before our own soul we should pursue what spiritual-scientific deepening is intended to open up. When a spirit so profound encounters such difficulties in the way of what many, many people today are seeking, there is truly an opportunity to learn a great deal from Goethe's own quest and striving. One would wish that everyone who has delved a little into the results of our spiritual science would again approach this document, Goethe's “Faust”, which is a document from the dawn, not yet from the time after the sunrise of spiritual-scientific endeavors. Last time I said that Goethe needed the maturity of his life to emerge from the state of his soul in his youth. Goethe's soul cannot be satisfied with just seeing in the world what the sensory eyes see and what the mind, bound to the brain, perceives. And what lived and raged in his soul for the deeper spiritual foundations of life, he shaped it in the striving Faust, who is not a likeness of Goethe, but who does present certain aspects of Goethe's striving and Goethe's life in a truly artistic way. And so we have here, in the scene with the Earth Spirit, one of the oldest parts of Goethe's Faust that he wrote down.

Last time I spoke about Goethe's “Faust” in such a way that if I were misunderstood as I often am, one could go and say that I had called “Faust” a defective work of art and would even have said some harsh words about it. And someone who is particularly inventive might say that I have undergone a change in my view of Goethe, for I was of course once an admirer of Goethe and have now proved myself to be someone who criticizes Goethe. Now, I should not need to mention that I venerate Goethe no less than I ever did, that he appears to me as the most magnificent spirit of modern times. But what is venerating devotion to a personality should never lead us to a blind sense of authority, but should always keep us clear-sighted for that which we have recognized as truth.

The various parts of Faust can be said to have been pieced together, not to mention glued, and it can be said that at the time when Goethe wrote the oldest parts of Faust in the 1770s, 18th century, was really incapable of writing the later parts, that he really had to mature first in order to come from his longing for the spiritual world to what one might call his understanding of Christianity. It was only through the maturity of life that Goethe was able to continue Faust, who is searching for the spirit world, in such a way that Faust comes to be preserved in life through the Austrian memory, and that Faust even comes to take the Gospel into his own hands and to begin translating the Gospel of John. When one hears some people today saying that they need no spiritual knowledge to fathom the depths of Christianity, that this spiritual science is unnecessary stuff, because Christianity can be sufficiently understood by what every pastor proclaims from the pulpit, that mere belief must prevail, especially in this Christianity, and one compares such soul mood with what must be said about Goethe, who, as one of the deepest took decades to mature to his understanding of Christianity, then one can get an idea of the tremendous arrogance, the tremendous conceit, that is in people who, conceited and haughty, always speak of the simplicity of their minds, and who dismiss what they do not need — the content of spiritual science, what they do not need according to their view.

In the scene with the Earth Spirit, we see something of what occupied Goethe in his youth, in his thirties, and also in the last twenties of his life. We can see from this earth spirit scene and from what preceded it, the so-called first Faust monologue, how Goethe immersed himself in so-called occult-mystical literature and how he tried to find the spiritual world through meditation and meditative devotion, through what this literature gave him. We see him in the scene that has been presented to us today, in the midst of his search through meditation, which arises from the allusions that he, as it is said here, can gain from an occult-mystical book, from an old mystical book by Nostradamus, as he strives through his meditation, which arises from a mystical book, to rise up into the spiritual worlds.

Let us try to imagine the worlds to which Faust, and thus also Goethe, actually wants to go. When the soul of man has really managed to strengthen its inner power so that the spiritual-soul core of man's being is released from the instrument of the physical body, when the soul, so to speak, with its powers that are not perceptible to it in ordinary everyday life, has slipped from the physical body, what becomes – not the physical body itself in its spatial boundaries, but the physical life, with which the human being is always spiritually connected because a ray or stream goes to this physical life – what becomes for the human soul this physical experience? In the time between death and a new birth, a ray or stream of spiritual life goes back to what we have experienced on earth, as you can see from the illustrations of earlier lectures. So there is always something like a spiritual reaching out, or even more than a spiritual reaching out, back to what is physical experience. What then does this physical experience become for the human soul, which has been freed from the use of the instrument of the physical body? I would like to say: the whole physical experience becomes a soul organ for the person who has emerged from this physical experience. The physical experience becomes, as it were, an eye or an ear; the whole human being becomes a sense organ, a spiritual sense organ, an organ, one might say, of the whole earth, which looks out into space. In order for our eye to see physical objects, we have to be outside of our eye. The eye has to be embedded like a kind of independent organ in the eye socket, which is even closed off by bony walls, so that the eye is a relatively independent organ. In a similar way, the ear is also closed. Again, the whole physical apparatus of the brain is enclosed in the head cavity and closed off from the rest of the human body. The physical experience of the human being must become so closed off that it becomes a kind of sensory organ, a kind of eye or ear through which the human being, who is outside of what his physical experience is, looks out into the vastness of space.

What is experienced there can also be described as follows: one can say that one is now in the world that is presented in the book 'Theosophy' as the soul world. This is the world that one first enters when one has the experience of being outside the body with the soul that has become independent and having one's own physical experience outside of it. In the Vienna Cycle of April 1914, I described how, in the life between death and a new birth, the human being has a spiritual-soul sense organ through his last life on earth to perceive the rest of the world, that is, he perceives the rest of the world through this life on earth. In this world we find our deceased for quite some time after their death, until they advance to another world, which can only be reached by a later state of development of the soul, even for the human initiate. In this world, into which we enter, many things must strike the observer. Only details about this world can be said. From the various lectures, one must gather what characterizes this supersensible world. Above all, what the soul immediately notices is that, having become free from the body and entering into a new world, the soul now sees the stars going out, feels the stars going out. The soul settles into an elementary world, so that it now weaves with the sea of air, itself surges with the warmth surging in the world, radiates out with the light, and since the soul radiates out with the light, it cannot see external objects through the light. That is why the sun and stars fade, and the moon extinguishes its light before the soul. It is not an external looking at, in which one then is, it is a co-experiencing of the elemental world. And at the same time it is a co-experiencing of that which one calls the power of historical happenings, of historical becoming. In this world one can see in process what history really does in human life.

In its further meditative development, the soul can then struggle up to a higher experience. Then, not only its own experience becomes a spiritual-soul sense organ, but the whole earth becomes a sense organ. To put it quite paradoxically, but you will understand me, the human soul must advance to such an experience, of which one can say: The human being is now something in which the whole globe is inserted, as otherwise the eye or ear is inserted into our body, and as we otherwise see with our eyes, hear with our ears, so we perceive the cosmic space with the whole earth and its experiences. There we become aware that what physicists say about the sun and the stars is mere materialistic dreaming. The stars have indeed already gone out, the sun, the moonlight has gone out in the previous world. But now we become aware that where we suspected the sun there is a community of spirits, that everywhere we suspected a star there is a spiritual world. And we become aware, by remembering our life on earth, that the materialistic reverie of which the physicists speak is a fantastic one, because when stars or suns appear to us, it is because somewhere in the spiritual world there is the seat of a spiritual community, just as the earth is the seat of a community of people. But just as little as one would perceive the physical bodies of a distant star, only the human souls, so little can it be said that something up there among the stars could interest us that is not of a spiritual-soul nature. But what we see, we must imagine as the vapors of the earth's atmosphere, which collide with what is coming in, and the physical eye can see nothing of what the star really is, but only the vapor that the earth itself throws out into space. All that we see as the starry sky is nothing but the material, albeit ethereal, material of the earth itself woven together, it is a curtain that the earth draws across what is behind it. But when the soul comes to live itself out in this world, then it perceives that out there are not these fantastic stars, these materialistic-fantastic stars that physicists speak of, but living beings, living communities of beings, floating up and down, weaving back and forth in the outer space of the universe, passing the gifts from top to bottom, and in turn the gifts are passed from bottom to top. If you translate the words into the spiritual:

How everything is woven into the whole,
One thing within the other lives and works!
How heavenly powers ascend and descend
And pass the golden buckets!

— Powers, but now in the sense in which we speak of primal forces -,

With wings that smell of blessing
From heaven through the earth they penetrate,
Harmoniously through all the universe they resound!

But if we imagine all this in spiritual and mental terms, then we have roughly the world in which the soul lives out itself.

Now, what did Faust have of all that has been described here at the time when he is presented to us? He has opened an old book, written by someone who has recorded an ancient observation in signs: this was given by the sign of the macrocosm. But Faust is naturally not in a position to project his soul into worlds where the entities in space develop their great happenings. Faust is not able to reach that level. He only sees the sign that someone who has reached that level has written down, the sign of the macrocosm. But a dream, a presentiment is evoked that this sign means something. So imagine yourself in your soul, that you had never heard of spiritual science, that you had the sign in front of you, but that you had an inkling that someone had once seen something similar that you would also like to see, then you are in Faust's soul. At first you can dream yourself into it, so that your imagination brings to life something through these outer signs, which are essentially the signs of the zodiac, the signs of the elements, the signs of the planets. You can even begin to break out with overflowing feeling into the words:

What a spectacle!

But this strikes back at you, for now you become aware that you have nothing but the sign in the book, nothing but a fantasy...

But alas! only a spectacle!

Even just a spectacle as an inner fantasy! And you are thrown back. The sign has brought you to nothing, on the contrary, it has thrown you back, has brought you the feeling: there is the world of the spirit, before which you stand, but nowhere can you find an entrance.

Where can I grasp you, infinite nature?
Your breasts, where? You, the sources of all life,
On which heaven and earth depend,
Where the withered chest presses –

Nothing but feeling inside the elements, in the light and in the air, as I said, in the subordinate world. And now even more clearly expressed. Faust has pushed his way up into the spiritual world, fallen back into the world that I described earlier as the next supersensible world. This with the air and light life, that expresses itself very well in the words:

You spring up, you water, and must I languish in vain?

He has fallen back completely, back from the spiritual world into the elemental world. But he is not yet able to recognize this either. It helps him that he opens the book and sees the sign of the earth spirit. That is the sign that someone has written who has had this lower world, the elemental world, as his own world. Now he feels at home in it. He has a presentiment of being at home in it.

How differently this sign affects me!

— because he feels something in it, because he has turned away from the appearance of meaning and feels something of the world's inner workings. Now he is actually always speaking of this world:

Already I feel my powers increased,

— that which one experiences when one lives in warmth and light -,

I glow like new wine.

Imagine feeling warmth in your soul when you live and weave in the world as a heat wave!

I feel brave enough to venture out into the world.

It really is like moving in the elements. I told you that life on earth becomes a sense organ, and just as you feel your eyes and ears within you, you now feel your sense organs in the earth.

To bear the earth's sorrow and its joy,
To battle with the storms around me,

when you are a wave in the air.

Clouds gather overhead,
The moon hides its light.

No wonder! I have just described to you how this happens, how stars like the moon go out. The light goes out because it goes with the light itself.

It steams! – Red rays
Twitch around my head

This is now internal perception.

A shuddering blast
From the vaulted roof descends
And seizes me!
I feel it, thou art hovering around me, implored spirit.
Reveal thyself!
Ha! how my heart is torn!
To new feelings
All my senses are awakened!

Do you not notice how life is expressed in the elements here?

I feel my heart completely given to you!
You must, you must! Even if it costs me my life!

And now, out of his meditation, he speaks the spell that is added to the sign of the earth spirit, a meditative, suggestive spell that really does lead him to the sight of the spirit, who is the leader of the spirits in whose realm we enter when we enter the elemental world. But immediately we realize that Faust is not actually ready for this world, and above all cannot feel ready for this world. What will become of him, then, of Faust? He will come to self-knowledge, in the sense that this is the highest knowledge of the world, in that we all experience what can be experienced when we swim and weave and roll and dwell in the elemental world. But Faust cannot recognize what individualizes itself in it.

This spiritual conversation between Faust and the Earth Spirit is so very characteristic of the state of maturity of Goethe at the time when he wrote the scene, as he describes his tremendous striving into the spiritual world.

Spirit: Who calls me?

Faust is already turning away. Of course, it doesn't sound like what we usually hear with our ears, that it sounds to us from afar, but rather so that we live in the sounds. It sounds different from what can be heard on earth, very different. Just as one does not see what one sees through the light, but rather shines with it. It looks different. Faust wanted to become a superhuman. That is, he wanted to enter the spiritual world, but he is seized by horror at this spiritual world. Through this encounter with the earth spirit, it becomes clear to Faust that one must become a different person than one was before as a human being if one wants to enter the spiritual world, that one cannot enter this spiritual world with one's ordinary powers, feelings and passions. Faust must have felt this deeply, how he was first thrown back, falling from the higher spiritual world into the elemental world, and how he is now thrown back in the elemental world in his knowledge, because he has remained only the ego he used to be, because he did not develop into this elementary world, to which the suggestive meditation brought him, which he carried out through the saying attributed to the earth spirit. He was able to see for a moment what kind of beings are within. But the spirit says to him:

Where are you, Faust, whose voice resounded for me,
Who with all his powers penetrated me?

That this voice resounded from the subconscious, I have already pointed out, that this was the Faust whom the outer Faust himself does not even really know.

Is it you, surrounded by my breath,
Trembling in all depths of life...

This “you” now refers to the ordinary Faust, while the striving Faust was the higher human being Faust.

A timid, cringing worm?

But now Faust's defiance awakens. He wants to plunge into the world for which he is not ready:

Shall I yield to you, flame formation?
It is I, I am Faust, I am your equal.

Now he can still hear how the spirits of the elemental world, into which he has transferred himself, live with human history, with what takes place on earth through the races and cultures, and how they live with it. And the secret of the elemental world is expressed by the earth spirit; it never speaks of being, but of becoming, of happening.

Spirit: In the floods of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
Weaving back and forth!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I labor at the whirling loom of time
And weave the living robe of divinity.

Not in space, but in time: read the lectures given in The Hague!

Faust can grasp that this is the spirit that walks through history:

You who wander the wide world,
Busy spirit, how close I feel to you!

You who wander the wide world! You who are the spirit that belongs to the spirits of the age, how close I feel to you! — So he says in his presumptuousness. The spirit now tells him what Faust himself later calls the word of thunder, which strikes his soul like a word of thunder and in turn strikes him back into the ordinary world in which he is because he is not yet mature. He should seek self-knowledge and in the self expanded to the world, the spiritual world. He cannot yet find it, so the word of thunder must sound to him from this earth spirit:

You resemble the spirit that you comprehend,
Not me!

What spirit is it then that Faust comprehends? What spirit does Faust comprehend? He, the image of the deity, who cannot comprehend the earth spirit? How can he then advance in self-knowledge? What kind of human spirit can Faust comprehend? Enter the other Faust, wearing a dressing gown and nightcap: this is the spirit you comprehend! You do comprehend Wagner! You have not progressed any further, for the other part of you lives only in defiance, as a passion! In self-knowledge he comes a little further. That is precisely what is so remarkable about Goethe's Faust, that is the beautiful artistic form of Goethe's Faust, that what is brought onto the stage in real form is always, at bottom, a piece of self-knowledge. Just as Mephistopheles is a piece of self-knowledge, so is Wagner also a piece of Faust's self-knowledge. Wagner is Faust himself. And it would not be wrong to stage “Faust” in such a way that the character of Wagner, dressed in a dressing gown and nightcap, to whom Faust turns away, would be a likeness of Faust himself. Then people would immediately understand why it is precisely this Wagner who comes in. What Wagner says is basically what Faust already understands; he only recites the rest. He just lets it out. He believes he is elevating himself to the highest truths, which he can recite in a phrase-like manner, but which he does not experience inwardly. And now a piece of self-knowledge takes place. Wagner speaks the truth. Basically, Faust has not spoken his innermost experiences, he has recited.

Forgive me! I hear you declaim.

That is one truth: he only declaimed. And it is a piece of self-reflection to realize that you do not approach the spirit of the world in this way, but at most read a Greek tragedy. So many people, when they approach spiritual science, want to declaim about the highest truths, even if it is often a self-declamation about the highest truths. Basically, they want nothing more than to benefit from this spiritual science, to profit from it, to delude themselves with a hazy mist. With regard to today, it can be said that this is often the case in some circles. Some people are very interesting when they talk about their visions. In earlier times, we heard this from the priests; now the actors have learned it even better, so that the priests can learn something from the actors. If Faust were to go only as far as his understanding, he would have to say the words that Wagner speaks, his mirror image. But he goes beyond the limits of his passion, and goes beyond with the Luciferic, not with the genuine, full, human core of the soul, but with the Luciferic core. It is the Lucifer in Faust who now answers what Faust is, but what stands before us as Wagner:

Yes, when the pastor is an actor;
How that may come about in time.

This contempt, this arrogance comes from the Luciferian in Faust, because if Faust were not seized by Lucifer, he would speak as Wagner does when he expresses only what he can honestly admit as the subject of his understanding. The other thing is a dark foreboding in him of something he wants to get to. But this soliloquy – really, it is only a conversation with himself – does get him a little further. You get so much further in life when you encounter yourself in another. You don't like to admit to yourself that you have these or those qualities. But when they confront you in another, you are more willing to study them. In this way, we acquire self-knowledge when a quality presents itself in the form of another, as in Faust by Wagner. Faust has not yet reached the point where he would say to himself, now that Wagner is gone: Yes, that is actually me. — If he had already fully penetrated to himself with his understanding, he would say: I am only a Wagner, the Wagner is only here in my head!

How all hope does not fade from the mind,
That clings forever to stale evidence,
With greedy hand digs for treasures,
And is glad when it finds earthworms!

For up to now he has done nothing else, except seek the spirits in the manner described. It is self-knowledge that confronts Faust in Wagner. Who sent Wagner into him? The Earth Spirit sent him in, the Earth Spirit:

You resemble the spirit you comprehend,
Not me!

And now Faust shall see what spirits he resembles. He does not resemble the Earth Spirit, who is the ruler of the Earth, but he shall see one of the forms within him: there is your Wagner! This Wagner is in you!

But now there is not only Wagner in Faust, but the Luciferic element is opposed to Wagner, that is, opposed to itself. There is another element in him.

If you look at “Faust” in its earlier form, as it was at the beginning, it is the case that Goethe did not finish the following after the earth spirit scene at the time. It continues like this: conversation with Wagner, then with the student, Mephisto... Mephisto enters, of whom Goethe does not quite know whether he is Lucifer or Ahriman. If he had studied spiritual science, Lucifer would appear now. But he has the other one, who is sent to him by the earth spirit. The earth spirit sends him Wagner, sends him Mephisto, we would say Lucifer. Faust is to get to know little by little what is in him. Mephisto is sent by the earth spirit: There you have another one of the spirits that you understand. Try to understand the Lucifer that is in you, and not immediately look at the spirit of the earth!

How unclear Goethe was about the matter can be seen from the fact that a small piece, which was later left out, is in the original writing, in four lines. In 1775 there were four lines after the scene where Mephisto has brought Faust so far that he has led him to Gretchen, and that Faust now wants to force himself on Gretchen. There are four lines that were no longer in the fragment as early as 1790. After Faust, who is actually Lucifer – Goethe just mixes them up – has asked Mephisto to take care of the jewelry for Gretchen, Mephisto says in the old manuscript, after Faust has left:

He acts as if he were a prince's son.
If Lucifer had a dozen princes,
They would surely conjure up something for him;
In the end, he would get a commission.

There it is, Mephisto himself calls himself Lucifer. As I said, the four lines were later omitted. So what was Goethe actually trying to do in his earlier days, when he wanted, one might say, to express himself in his “Faust”? Well, he wanted to show how man should come to self-knowledge. But, one might say, there is an inkling of it in this first scene, which Goethe wrote in his youth, and which you can now read with clarity, where it is described in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold. You foresaw in Faust how the human being, who gradually realizes how different entities are within him, divides himself up, how he divides himself up into Wagner and Lucifer-Mephisto. He gets to know himself bit by bit in his individual parts, he gets to know himself as Wagner, he gets to know himself as Lucifer-Mephisto. But as I said, Goethe first had to mature in order to really see the great significance of the Christ impulse for humanity, as far as that was possible in his time. Therefore, we see how Goethe, in his later years, sought to supplement what he had written earlier about Faust's striving until man encounters himself in his various images, including the image of Lucifer, by having Faust come into contact with what has been incorporated into earthly development through Christ. One could say that the cultic symbols of Christ approach Faust. And so we see in Faust the document that shows us how Goethe himself brought occultism to Christianity, to the Christ impulse, and how we are indeed continuing today to work on the path that Goethe took with regard to its first steps. In Goethe's time one could only get a glimpse. Today, the time has come when it is possible for man, through spiritual science, to truly enter into the realm of spiritual life, into which all of Goethe's striving was directed. Today, Faust must be understood differently than Goethe himself understood him. Yes, the world is progressing, and if we do not fully recognize that the world is progressing, then we are not serious enough about the world. But such experiences, that one splits, that one encounters oneself in one's true form, in a Luciferian form, such experiences do bring one forward, but always only a little way. We must part with the belief that we can see the whole spiritual world if we have only made small advances, such as we can make through meditation. One always advances only a little.

There are two natures in Faust: the Wagner nature and that which now strives forward. When Goethe wanted to point this out in his later years, he did it very beautifully. Goethe felt the need, when Faust had already approached Christianity, to show what the Wagner nature in Faust is. Therefore, he lets Wagner and Faust take the Easter Walk together. It is now the case that, as is naturally dramatic, two people are presented to us, showing what is going on in Faust's soul. The higher man in Faust strives forward, but the Faust-Wagner holds Faust back. A spark of comprehension of the spiritual world has been kindled in Faust, so that he now sees not only the sensual poodle, and there really is something like a soul force in Faust that expresses itself in the conversation with Wagner:

Faust: Do you see the black dog roaming through the seed and stubble?

Now the nature of Wagner awakens in Faust.

Wagner: I saw him long ago, he seemed unimportant to me.
Higher Nature: Look at him closely! What do you think the animal is?
Wagner Nature: A poodle, who in his own way is trying to follow his master.

These are objections that Faust himself actually raises. And now it continues. Faust begins to see the supersensible behind the sensual; he already senses it. So, it is a hunch, brought on by the experiences he has had. A spark of the spiritual world has entered into him. And it is beautiful, one wants to say, how infinitely artistically sincere and honest Goethe is, one just has to understand him. When Faust now feels the Luciferic in himself – as you know, the Luciferic is connected with obstinacy, with inner egoism – he, Faust, now also carries this Luciferic into his being gripped by the Christ impulse. It is a Luciferian trait that the Gospel of John, in that he wants to translate it, does not seem perfect to him at all. For the understanding, the Goethe commentators are a bit curious, who really go along with the poet, because they always go along with the poet, even where he distributes the things he wants to say among his characters. Faust does not yet understand the text of the Gospel at all, otherwise he would stop at “In the beginning was the word”. He falters because he does not yet understand it. The professors present it as if Faust understood it better, but he does not yet understand it. What appears to him now is the power, the deed – so he brings rationalism and intellectualism into the gospel. This now evokes the opposite phenomenon. Whereas he was once pushed down into the sensual world, he is now drawn up into the spiritual world. By fully asserting his limitations, by setting 'sense and power and action', he is pushed up into the spiritual world, because there is already a spark of spiritual power in Faust. Then the spirits come and again as the messenger of the earth spirit... Mephisto, this unclear figure between Lucifer and Ahriman. So you see, one must understand Goethe's struggle to penetrate Faust's spiritual world, and one can learn an infinite amount from it, especially for our present time.

What I particularly wanted to do in the last lecture on Easter Sunday and in this lecture was to show you how it is more difficult for a spirit that wants to delve deeper to penetrate to the Christ impulse than for a spirit that remains in its infinite pride and conceit and does not want what spiritual science can offer it. On the other hand, I also wanted to use Faust to illustrate how powerful the impact of the Christ Impulse has been on the world. There will come a time when we will learn to understand the inner nature of the Christ impulse ever better and better, precisely through what spiritual science has to give. It stands there in the world – I would like to say, as an illustration of the development of humanity on earth, brought about by world history, of what the Christ impulse is – the fact stands that centuries after the Christ impulse entered into the development of humanity on earth, something occurs in this development of humanity that is also not properly understood. But at the moment when one begins to understand it correctly, one is led precisely through this understanding to a deeper feeling for the Christ event. You know, of course, that six hundred years after the Christ impulse entered into the evolution of mankind, a prophet arose in a certain community who initially rejected what had entered into the evolution of mankind through the Christ impulse: Mohammed. Today we must no longer profess the superstition of the 19th century, which, out of rationalism, seeks to explain in a belittling way what must be explained out of spiritual insight. And it must appear ridiculous to anyone who really wants to penetrate into spiritual science when a particularly learned and clever man says of Mohammed: Yes, he claims that the angel who whispered in his ear what he wrote in the Koran approached him in the form of doves! But Mohammed - so the rationalist scholar says - was a mere juggler. He put some grains, which doves like to eat, into his ear, so the doves flew up and took the grains, but flew away again when they had had them! Yes, there have been such explanations, within and outside of Christianity, in the very clever 19th century.

There will come a time when such explanations will really only be laughed at, even though they are fully capable of satisfying materialism. We have to take Muhammad more deeply; we have to be clear that what lived in his soul was really such intercourse with the spiritual world as Goethe sought for his Faust. But what did Muhammad feel? What did he find? Today I can only hint at it, another time I will explain it more precisely. What did Mohammed find? Well, you know, Mohammed first strove for a world for which he had an expression, it is only one word: God. The world becomes a monism, a monistic expression of God. This world has nothing of the essence of Christianity, of course. But Mohammed does look into the spiritual world; he enters the elementary world of which I have spoken today. He promises his believers that they will enter, when they have gone through the gate of death, into this spiritual world. But he can only tell them about the spiritual world that he has come to know. What kind of spiritual world is this? This spiritual world, of which Mohammed tells his believers, is the Luciferian world, which he regards as paradise, the world that is to be aspired to. And when one passes from the abstract to the real, and adds, by way of interpretation, the meaning of Islam's striving in the spiritual world, one recognizes what spiritual science also proclaims. But this spiritual world is the world in which Lucifer rules; reinterpreted, the Luciferian world becomes a paradise, the world that people are just beginning to strive for.

I believe that it must make a deep impression on our souls if we can delve into the essence of historical development in such a way, through a very important phenomenon. It must give us pause when we learn in the progression of religious life how a great prophet emerged with the error that the Luciferic world is paradise. I do not want you to take this in just as abstract truths, I believe it can shake the soul if you let it affect you. But what does the Muslim do to enter his spiritual world? Perhaps we could later have a note handed in at the door from each of our dear friends here who has read the entire Koran. It would be interesting to count the slips of paper of those who have read it. But it is not easy to read the Koran completely, with its endless repetitions, which Westerners find so endlessly boring to read. But among Muslims, there are people who claim to have read it from beginning to end seventy thousand times in their lives. That means: to have brought a word that was given to the soul in such a way that this word has become alive in the soul! Even if we cannot learn anything in terms of content from such a religious community with regard to Christianity, we can still learn that within that community of people, even spiritual error is treated quite differently than what we are called to recognize as spiritual truths. At most, a European might read Faust, then, when he has forgotten it, read it again, and when he has forgotten it again, read it once more. But those who have read Faust a hundred times will also be sought after. It is also understandable within the context of Western education to date. How could anyone read everything that is printed in the West seventy thousand times? It is quite understandable. But we should still acquire something, that it is one thing to simply inform oneself about a content that is meaningful for the soul's life, and something else to live with it, again and again, so that one becomes completely one with it, completely one. It is something that one must first gain an understanding of, something that one cannot even understand according to the thinking habits of our national community. But we should reflect on such things. Not just to tell you something, but to stimulate your reflection, words are spoken as they are in this reflection. To increase our sense of responsibility towards ourselves and towards the world, with regard to what spiritual science can and should be for us.

We live in difficult times in many respects. The very difficult external events that surround us at present are only the outward sign of our very difficult times. It is not good to look at these very difficult times as if they were an illness, as we often call an illness an illness, because an illness is often a healing process, the true illness has preceded the physically apparent illness. So also what is now going through the world as mourning events has been preceded by something pathological, and we are to see into much deeper things than humanity is inclined to see into. Oh, a great pain can be deposited on the soul of the one who looks at the present time with the tasks it has, and with the little understanding that so many people have for these tasks. When one sees how people judge, think, feel and perceive the world today, and how these thoughts, feelings and perceptions lead to external events, and how people learn so little from these external events, then an infinitely meaningful pain is deposited on the soul. It is this feeling of pain that must now often come over the soul. If one can really look back over the past months of trial, to mention only the most recent, and turn one's gaze to what people have learned through these months of trial, to what judgment confronts one in relation to what confronted one eight months ago: it is the same kind of judgment, the same kind of feeling. What made people believe they were right eight months ago, they still think so, they even want the sad events to have occurred in order to prove them right in what they believed was right eight months ago.

I cannot express how infinite the pain is that one feels at the small way in which human souls have changed in recent months according to the assumptions that had to be made for this change, so that our time really would be a time of trial, a time of learning. But of those who stand within spiritual science, one would wish that they absorb much of what can be learned when such considerations as these are undertaken in connection with Faust. Again and again one would like to point out to souls the deep seriousness and the sacred striving for truth that must be connected with our spiritual-scientific view. And in such a movement there must be retribution for everything that does not arise out of deep sincerity and a deep sense of truth. We must really try to overcome everything that can make one say to the one who utters it: Forgive me, I hear you declaiming!

Is it not strange, when we see the stage traditions according to Wagner often on the stage today, and when scholars, when rationalists and intellectuals deride what Wagner is, instead of them knocking on their hearts and seeing themselves in the Wagner. This Wagner sits on the chairs everywhere, in the laboratories, and our scientific literature, our philosophical literature, would contain a deep truth if the majority of the authors chose the pseudonym “Wagner”. For they are written by Wagner, these philosophies of the present.

I am quite sure that many a person who lives in the ranks of spiritual science also has sufficient reason to beat their breasts, to examine themselves in self-knowledge, to see how much of their soul is mere self-promotion and how much arises from absolute honesty, from an absolute sense of truth! With this admonition to your hearts, to the deepest powers of your soul, I close this reflection.