The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If Theosophy were to assert that it has in the last few decades brought any new thing into the world, it could easily and very effectively be contradicted. For it is easy to believe that any particular truth or achievement in a special branch of human knowledge, in man's conception of the world or in his world of thought, might enrich the advancing ages, but not that which concerns his innermost and deepest being—the source and origin of all human wisdom—could appear at any particular time. This in itself could not be believed; hence it is only natural that the belief that Theosophy could bring in or want to bring in anything completely new, must call forth a certain distrust against the movement itself.

But ever since Theosophy set out to obtain an influence upon modern civilisation, it has always described itself as possessing the old primeval wisdom, which man has ever sought and endeavoured to acquire in many different forms in the various ages. It is the task of the Theosophical Movement to look for these forms in the various religions and world-conceptions through which the peoples, throughout the ages, have striven to press through to the source of truth. Theosophy has brought to light the fact that in the various ages, even in the most primeval times, that wisdom by which man sought to attain his goal, has always in its really most profound essence been one and the same. That is a truth, Theosophy teaches us to be modest concerning the acquirements of our own times.

The well-known statement, which, in its lack of humility, boasts of the progress made in the 19th century, is felt to be particularly limited when we observe life in a deeper sense, extending through hundreds of thousands of years. But I do not wish to lead you back to those primeval ages.

I should like to ask you, by means of the example of a great personality of modern times, how he tried to carry out the wisdom-teaching inscribed in the Greek Temples; “Know thyself!” He, who made this saying his own, was really in complete harmony with the teaching and views of Theosophy. This personality is none other than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He certainly belongs not only to the German nation, but to many other civilized men of the present age and belongs indeed more or less to us all. Goethe is a spirit who affects us in a very special way. No matter to what part of his life we turn in study, we find, not only the great Poet very pre-eminently there, but, if we go more deeply into the subject, we soon discover in him the Wise One, to whose wisdom we turn back again after long years, always to discover something new.

We find that Goethe was one of those spirits who had within him an inexhaustible fund of greatness. And if we have learned to add to our own small stock of wisdom, by turning back to Goethe again and again, we are constantly astonished anew and stand in admiration before that which before was hidden from us, because there was in ourselves no responsive echo of the realm which expressed itself through him. No matter how polished a man may be, no matter how much wisdom he may have discovered in Goethe, if after some years he turns to him again, he will convince himself anew that there is still an infinite fund of what is beautiful and good in the works of Goethe. This experience may come in particular to those who believe profoundly in the evolution of the human soul. It has often been said that in his “Faust,” Goethe produced a sort of Gospel. If this be so, then, besides his Gospel, Goethe also produced a sort of secret Revelation, a sort of Apocalypse. This Apocalypse is concealed within his works, it forms the conclusion to his “Unterhaltung deutscher Ausgewanderten,” and is read only by few. I am always being asked where in Goethe's works this “Märchen” is to be found! Yet it is in all the editions and forms, as I have just said, the conclusion to the above. In this fairy tale, Goethe created a work of art of eternal beauty. The direct, symbolical impression of the work of art will not be interfered with, if I now try to give an interpretation of this fairy tale; Goethe put into this tale his most intimate thoughts and conceptions.

In the latter years of his life he said to Eckermann: “My dear friend, I will tell you something that may be of use to you, when you are going over my works. They will never become popular; there will be single individuals who will understand what I want to say, but there can be no question of popularity for my writings.” This referred principally to be the second part of “Faust,” and what he meant was that a man who enjoyed “Faust” might have a direct artistic impression, but that one who could get at the secrets concealed in “Faust” would see what was hidden behind the imagery. But I am not speaking of the second part of “Faust,” but of the “Fairy Tale of the Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily,” in which Goethe spoke in an even more intimate way than in the former. I shall try to disclose in the course of this lecture the Mysteries concealed in these remarkable pictures, and to explain why Goethe made use of these symbolical images to express his most intimate thoughts. Anyone who is capable of understanding the Fairy Tale knows that Goethe was a Theosophist and a mystic. Goethe was acquainted with that wisdom and conception of the world which we try to give forth in a popular way in Theosophy; and the Fairy Tale itself is a proof of this; only, at the time when Goethe was writing, the endeavour had not yet been made to clothe the highest truths in words and to give them forth in open lectures by the power of reason; these most intimate human psychic truths were not then spoken of openly. Those who gave a hint of them put them into symbolical form, and expressed them by symbols. This was an old custom, dating from the middle ages, when it was thought that it would be impossible to put the highest insight into the abstract form, but that a sort of experience or initiation was necessary. This made it impossible for people to speak of these truths, who believed that a particular sort of mood, a sort of special soul-atmosphere was needed in order to understand such truths; they could not be grasped merely by the intellect. A certain mood was necessary, a certain disposition of the soul, which I will call a psychic atmosphere. The language of reason seemed to them to be too arid, too dry and cold to express the highest truths. Besides which they still retained a sort of conviction that those who were to learn these truths should first make themselves worthy of them. This conviction brought it to pass, that in the olden times, down to the 3rd century A.D.—the truth about the human soul and the human spirit was not given out publicly as it is now, but those who wished to attain to such knowledge had first to be prepared to receive that which was to be given to them in the Sanctuaries of the Mysteries. Therein all that had been preserved of the secrets of nature and of the laws of cycles, was given out as something which, to put it concisely, could not be learned and recognised as dry truths, but which the students had to recognise as living truths and learn to live them. It was not then a question of thinking wisdom, but of living it; not merely a question of permeating wisdom with the glow of the intellect, but of making it the mainspring of life, so that a man is transformed thereby. A certain shyness must possess a man before the Holy of Holies; he had to understand that truth is divine, that it is permeated by the Divine Cosmic Blood, which draws into the personality, so that the divine world lives anew within. The recognition of all this was included in the word “development.” This had to be made quite clear to the Mystic, and this it was which he was to attain through the stages of purification, on the way to the Mysteries, he was to acquire the holy shyness before the Truth, and to be drawn away from the longing for the things of the senses, from the sorrows and joys of life, from all that surrounds us in ever-day life. The Light of the Spirit, which is necessary to us when we withdraw from the profane life, we shall receive when we give up the other. When we are worthy to receive the Light of the Spirit, we shall have become different people; we shall then love with real, earnest sympathy and devotion, that which we are wont to look upon as a shadowy existence, a life in the abstract. We then live the Spiritual life which to the ordinary man is mere thought. But the Mystic learns to sacrifice the Self that clings to the everyday life, he learns not only to penetrate the truth with his thought but has to live it through and through, to conceive it within him as Divine Truth, as Theosophy. Goethe has expressed this conviction in his “West-Ostlichen Divan:”—

So lang dud as nicht hast,
Dies ‘stirb im Werde’,
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunkeln Erde—

This it is that the Mystics of all ages have striven for,—to let the lower nature die out, and to allow that which dwells in the Spirit to spring forth; the extinction of sense reality, that man may ascend to the Kingdom of “Divine Purposes.” “To die in order to become.” If we do not possess this power we do not know of the forces that vibrate into our world, and we are but a “trüber Gast” (gloomy guest) on our Earth. Goethe gave expression to this in his “West-Ostlichen Divan,” and this he tries to represent in all the different parts of the “Fairy Tale” of the “Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily!” The transition of man from one stage of existence to a higher one. That was the riddle he wanted to solve, the riddle as to how a man who lives in the everyday world,—and who can only see with his eyes, and hear with his ears,—can lay hold of this “dying and becoming!”

This was the question for the Mystics of all ages; and this great question was always called “Spiritual Alchemy.” The transmutation of man from the every-day soul to the Spirit-soul, one to whom the things of the Spirit are just as real as the things of this Earth, such as tables and chairs and so on, are to the ordinary man. When the alchemical transmutation had taken place in a man, he was then considered worthy to have the highest truths communicated to him, he was then led into the Holy of Holies. He was then initiated, and supplied with the teachings which instructed him as to the purposes of nature, those purposes which run through the plan of the world. It is an initiation of this kind which is described by Goethe, the initiation into the Mysteries, of one who has been made worthy to receive them.

There are two proofs of this—in the first place Goethe himself took a great deal of trouble to become acquainted with the secret which may be called the Secret of Alchemy. Between the studies he made at Leipzig and Strassburg he had already discovered that Alchemy had a Spiritual side, and knew that ordinary Alchemy was nothing but a reflection of the Spiritual, and all that is known of Alchemy consisted only in the symbolical expressions of realities. That is to say, he referred to that Alchemy which is concerned with the forces of the inner life.

Alchemists have also left indications of how this could be worked. As they were only able to describe the transmutation of the human forces by means of symbols, they therefore spoke of one substance being transmuted into another. All they related concerning the transmutation of matter, referred to what the human soul-life developed within itself at a higher stage, when it became transmuted spiritually. All that the great Spirits have disclosed about the Spiritual Realms to those men who are still bound to the life of every day, was taken by them as referring to the transmutation of substances and metals in the retorts, and they took great trouble to try and discover by what mysterious methods the transmutation of substances could be brought about.

Goethe, in one part of his “Faust,” shows us what he himself understood as to such things. In the first part of “Faust,” in the walk in front of the garden, he points clearly to the false, wrong and petty material conceptions that are held as to Alchemy. He makes fun of those who strive with such feverish efforts to discover these secrets, and who pour forth the lower substances, according to numberless receipts, in company of the Adepts.

“There a Red Lion, with the Lily wedded,
“A wooer bold, within the tepid bath,
“From bridal-bower to bridal-bower was speeded
“Racked by the naked fire's flaming wrath.”

The union with the Lily, which is made fun of by Goethe is what he wished to illustrate in his Fairy Tale, of the Green Serpent and the beautiful Lily.

The highest transmutation which man can accomplish is illustrated by Goethe in the symbol of the Lily. It is of like significance with what we call the Highest freedom. When a man follows the primal and eternal laws, in accordance with which we have to complete the primal and eternal circuit of our existence, and if he also recognises the primal and eternal evolution of his freedom, he will then find himself at a certain stage of his development which is accomplished by a disposition of the soul, which may be described by the symbol of the Lily. The highest forces of the soul, the highest state of consciousness, in which a man may be free because he will then not misuse his freedom, and will never create a disturbance in the circle of freedom,—this state of soul, which was communicated to the Mystics in the Mysteries, in which they were collectively transmuted,—this was from all time described as the “Lily.”

That which Spinoza expresses at the end of his “Ethics,” (dry and mathematical as he was in his other writings)—when he says that man ascended into the higher spheres of existence and penetrated them by means of the laws of nature,—this state of mind may also be described as the Lily, Spinoza describes it as the realm of Divine Love in the human soul, the realm in which man does nothing under compulsion, but in which everything belonging to the domain of human development takes place in freedom, devotion and utter Love, where everything arbitrary is transmuted by that Spiritual Alchemy in which every activity flows into the stream of freedom.

Goethe has described that Love as the highest state of Freedom, as the being free from all desires and wishes of our every-day life. He says, “Self-seeking and Self-will are not permanent, they are driven out by the Ego. Here we must be good.” The Divine Love, which is referred to by Spinoza, and which he wishes to attain through Spiritual Alchemy,—that it is with which man should unite himself, that it is with which man should unite his will. Human will active at every stage, is that which in all ages was known as the “Lion,” the creature in which the Will is most strongly developed, and that is why the Mystics have always called the will of man: the “Lion.” In the Persian Mysteries there were seven Initiations; there were the following: first the Raven, then the Occultist, then the Fighter; at the fourth grade the student was already able to look back at his life from the other side, and had really become Man, hence the Persians called one who had overcome the Lion stage a Persian. That was the fifth stage, and a man who had got so far that his actions flowed quickly along, just as the Sun runs its course in the Heavens above, was called a Sun-runner. But he who accomplished all his actions out of absolute and ceaseless love, was looked upon by the Persians as belonging to the grade of the “Father.” At the fourth grade, a man stood at the parting of the ways; he had then, besides his physical body, his etheric double, and that body which is subject to the laws of passions and desires, wishes and instincts; he was now organized for a higher life. These three bodies form, according to Theosophy, the lower part of man. From these the lower man is born. When a man was initiated into this grade and could see this connection the Persians called him a “Lion.” He then stands at the parting of the ways, and that which compelled him to act according to the laws of nature is transmuted into a free gift of Love. When he reaches the eighth stage of Initiation, when he has evolved himself into a free man, one who can allow himself to do, out of free love, what he was formerly driven to do by his own nature, this connection between the Lion and the free loving being, is described in Alchemy as “the mystery of human development.” This is the mystery Goethe represented in his Fairy Tale. First of all he shows us how this man of will stands there, drawn down to the physical world from higher spheres, from spheres of which he himself knows nothing. Goethe is conscious of the fact that man, in so far as his spiritual nature is concerned, comes originally from higher spheres; that he was led into this which Goethe represents as the world of matter, the world of sense-existence, this is the Land on the bank of the River.

But in the Tale of the green Serpent and the beautiful Lily, there are two Lands, one on this side of the River, and the other beyond. The unknown Ferryman conducts the man across from the far side into the Land of the sense-world;—and between the Land of spiritual existence and the sense-world there flows the River, the water which divides them. By water, Goethe describes that which the Mystics of all ages have symbolized as water. Even in Genesis the same meaning is applied to this word as we find in Goethe. In the New Testament too we find this expression in the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. “He who is not born again of water and the Spirit, cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” Goethe understood perfectly what was signified by the expression “born again of water.” And we can see in what sense he understood it by his “song of the Spirit.”

Seele des Menschen	Soul of humanity
Nie gleichat du dem Wasser!	How like to the water!
Schicksal des Menschen	Fate of humanity
Wie gleichst du dem Wind!	How like to the wind!

The world of humanity, the world of longing and wishes, the world of passions and desires, is a land inserted between our Spirit and our senses. Our senses know neither good nor evil, they cannot err. Anyone who goes into this question, knows that when we study the laws of nature, we cannot speak of good or evil. When we study nature in the animal world, we find that there are objectionable animals and useful ones, but we cannot speak of good and evil ones. Only when man plunges into the water—into the soul-world—does he become capable of good and evil. This world which is inserted between the Spiritual and the world of senses, is the River over which the Spirit passes from the unknown spheres. The innermost of man came across the River of passions and desires—and when he goes through further development he becomes like the Will-o'-the-wisp.

Thus man is subject to the laws within him, after he has crossed the River, and before he has received the Divine Spark which will take him across to the other world. He is therefore put ashore by the Ferryman who brings men across the River from the far bank to the near one. Nobody can be guided over by the Ferryman but all can be brought over by him. We feel ourselves being brought over without any action of our own, by the forces lying beneath our consciousness, which go ahead of our actions. By means of these forces we feel ourselves placed in the world of sense,—on the hither side; the Ferryman who brought us across from the Land of the Spirit, has put us into this world and cannot take us back to that country again to which we must however return, the Land of the beautiful Lily. The Will-o'-the-wisps wanted to pay the Ferryman his fare with gold, but he demanded fruits of the Earth, which they did not possess; they had nothing but gold, and he would not be paid with that. Gold coins, said he, were injurious to the River, it cannot bear such gold; which signifies that man can purchase wisdom with the fruits of the Earth. This is a profound wisdom; gold signifies the force of wisdom dwelling in man, and this is his guide through life. This force of Wisdom makes itself felt when a man is placed among the things of sense, as the forces of knowledge and reason. But this wisdom is not the wisdom which furthers his development. When it forms part of a man's nature, it makes him self-seeking and egotistical. If this force of reason and this knowledge were to join forces with what flows in the River, their passions would throw up huge waves; for whenever man does not place his wisdom at the service of selflessness, but simply throws it into the River, when he cultivates (frohmen) his passions, the River throws up great waves. Hence it is impossible to satisfy the River with gold; with that wisdom. So the Ferryman throws back the wisdom which has not yet passed through the stage of selflessness. He throws it back into the chasm, where reigns the profoundest darkness, and there it is buried. We shall hear why this is so.

The Ferryman demanded three cabbages, three artichokes, and three onions.—Thus he demands the fruits of the Earth. Now by what means can man attain his development? By ennobling the lower desire-forces of his nature, so that he purifies the sense-nature within him and casts this purified nature into the River, and thereby .................. this it is which Schiller refers to in his letters on the aesthetic education of man. He alone understands freedom who has set his own nature free;—when the outer sense-nature is so ennobled that it seeks for the good and the beautiful because it is no longer misled by passion, when we no longer throw our wisdom into the River, but reward our passions with the fruits of the Earth so that our sense-nature itself is taken up by them, just as the fruits of the Earth would be accepted by the River, we have then attained the first grade of initiation as expressed in the words, “Ye must know that I cannot be paid except with the fruits of the Earth.” Then the Will-o'-the-wisps proceed further on this side of the River, that means that man tries to follow his own way of life further.

On this side of the River he meets with the green Serpent, the symbol of human endeavours, of human knowledge. This Serpent had previously had a wonderful experience—the Ferryman had ferried over the piece of gold and concealed it in a cleft of the Earth, and here the Serpent had found it. The wisdom that brings men forward is still a hidden treasure, concealed in the mysteries, hence if a man wishes to find wisdom he must seek it far from all human self-seeking. When a man had made himself worthy to receive it, it will be found in its proper place;—the Serpent, the symbol of human striving after knowledge, permeates itself with the gold; this “self” is entirely permeated with wisdom, and becomes luminous. Then the Serpent desired from the Will-o'-the-wisps that which is a cause of pride to the self-seeking man, when he throws about him and pricks himself with,—this human knowledge which when used in the service of egoism is objectionable and worthless, will be attained when man crawls humbly on the ground as does the Serpent, and strives to recognize the reality piece by piece. If a man stands there, proud and stuck-up, he will never attain it, he can only receive it when like the Serpent, he goes horizontally on the ground and lives in humility,—then the gold of wisdom is in its place. Then the man may venture to permeate himself with wisdom—that too is why the Will-o'-the-wisps call the Serpent their relation, and say “We really are related on the side of light.” Indeed they are related, the wisdom that serves the self is related to the wisdom which serves humility; the Serpent is related to the Will-o'-the-wisps.

Now the tale relates further that the Serpent had been under the Earth in the clefts of the rock, and there had met something resembling human forms—the Serpent had reached a temple; this is none other than a symbol of the Mystery Temples of all ages,—this concealed Temple which was in the clefts below the Earth is the symbol of the Sanctuaries of Initiation. In this Temple the Serpent found the three great priests of Initiation; these priests were gifted with the highest forces of human nature, which theosophy calls Atma, Buddhi, Manas. They are called by Goethe the King of Beauty, the King of Wisdom, and the King of Strength or Will;—with these three basic forces of the soul, into which the human soul must be initiated, the Mystic had to be united in the Temple of the Mysteries—and Goethe represents the Serpent, all luminous within, because it had taken in the gold of wisdom, humility.

The old man with the lamp is another figure—what does he represent? He has a lamp which has the peculiarity of only shining when another light is there. Because the Serpent is luminous and illuminates the inner Hall of the Mystery Temple with its own radiating light,—Goethe expresses these thoughts in another passage in the words “If the eye were not sensitive to the Sun it could not perceive the light.” Here he expresses in poetic words what he expressed in the fairy tale in pictures; what we in Anthroposophy call “occult knowledge” is expressed by the old man with the lamp,—the light of occult knowledge cannot shine to anyone who had not prepared himself to receive it.

It appears to no one who has not worked his way up to that higher stage of development at which his higher self, his selfless nature shines forth from within, bringing light to meet light,—the highest wisdom is called occult, because it only appears when a man brings his own light to meet it. When those two lights, the intuitive light from above, and the light that comes from the personal, shine into one another, they then give that which man experiences in his transmutation as Spiritual Alchemy—then the space around him become light, he then learns to recognise the highest Spiritual forces, the gifts of the three Kings; Wisdom, Beauty, and Strength,—the gift of the golden King is Wisdom, that of the silver King is Beauty or Piety, the gift of the bronze King is Strength or force of Will. Man can only understand his innermost forces, he can only understand himself when he meets with the light of the lamp which can only shine when there is already a light. Then the three Kings appear in their radiance, and at the same time the significance of the fourth King becomes apparent—the King who is composed of the metals of the three others;—he is the symbol of the lower nature, in which the noble forces of Wisdom, Beauty, and Strength work together as disorderly and inharmonious chaos. These three forces that live in a highly developed soul are also to be found in lower natures, though there they are chaotic and inharmonious. This fourth King is the Kingdom of the present world;—the Chaotic mixture of Wisdom, Beauty, and Strength,—the soul-forces which can only attain the highest when they work together harmoniously,—affect one another in a chaotic way in the present age. The old man said of the fourth King “Er wird sich setzen” (here he will sit down)—The Chaotic mixture will have disappeared when that which Goethe so ardently longed for shall have come to pass, that is, that the Temple shall no longer be hidden, but shall be raised to the full light of day, when it shall have ascended from the depths, and all men will be able to serve in the Temple of Initiation, which will be a bridge across which all men may pass to and fro. That will be a time when all men will have made themselves worthy of being influenced by the highest wisdom, piety, and strength and will. The Temple will then have fulfilled its task. It will have raised itself above the river of passions, and the forces of passion will have become so pure and noble that the highest Spiritual can uplift itself in the Temple, in the clear light of day, above the stream of passions and desires. To this end it is necessary that mankind should be filled with the “Stirb und werde” (dying and becoming) which Goethe so distinctly outlined in his “West-Ostlichen Divan.” Goethe was frequently asked for the solution of the riddle and he replied “The solution of the riddle lies in the fairy tale itself, and not in one word alone.” There is a passage during the conversation in the Temple which we take to be the solution of the riddle. The solution is not a thing which can be expressed in words, but in an inner resolve; that was indicated by Goethe in the fairy tale. The Serpent said “I will sacrifice myself, I will purify myself through selflessness.” It is precisely this which must be taken as the profoundest solution of the riddle, it is an act, and not a doctrine. Till now one could only pass across the River in two ways. The one was when at noon the green Serpent laid itself across the River and formed a bridge, so that at the mid-day hour it was possible to go across the River. This means that at the present age there are moments in a man's life when the Sun is at noon for him, when he is ripe to yield himself to the highest Spiritual light; but he is always drawn away again and again from these noon-tide moments of life, into the lower world full of passions. In such noon-tide moments the elect of the Spirit can pass across from the shore of the sense-life to the shore of the Spirit.

But there is yet another way to pass over the River, and that is in the evening, when the shadow of the great giant is thrown across the River,—that too can form a bridge, but only in the hour of twilight. What is this shadow of the great giant? Goethe went into this question more deeply with his intimate and trusted friends; with them he spoke about the forces symbolized by him in the “Fairy Tale.” On one occasion when Schiller was planning a journey to Frankfort, Goethe wrote to him: “I am very glad you did not come here, to the West, for the shadow of the giant might have got hold of you unawares.” The meaning of the giant is moreover clearly expressed in the “Fairy Tale” itself, the giant who is weak, can do nothing of himself; but his shadow can form a bridge across to the far side. This giant is the crude mechanical forces of nature. Its shadow is sometimes able, when the light is no longer strong, to conduct the men of crude passions across the River. These are the people who, when their clear day consciousness is extinguished, pass over into the Land of the Spirit in trance, somnambulism, psychic vision, or some of the many similar conditions of the soul. Thus the clear day consciousness was also extinguished in the wild delirious acts by which at that time men tried to push their way into this realm of Freedom.

They wanted to penetrate into the realm of the beautiful Lily—But the shadow of the giant can alone reach across. Man is only able to overcome his passions in the twilight of his consciousness, when he is in an almost unconscious state, and not when living in clear consciousness. These are the two ways of reaching the opposite bank: First, in the holy moments of the noon-day hour, by the Serpent; and secondly, in the twilight of the consciousness—by the shadow of the giant.

But this one thing must be striven after:—the Serpent must sacrifice itself completely. Not only should it lead men over the River of passions at the noon-day hour, but at all hours of the day it should be ready to form the bridge from one side to the other; so that not only a few may be able to wander across, but that all men should be able to cross backwards and forwards at any time. The Serpent made this resolution, and so did Goethe; Goethe points to an age of selflessness, when man will not put his forces at the service of his lower self but at the service of unselfishness.

There are a few other thoughts connected with these basic thoughts about the Fairy Tale. I cannot go into them all today, and will only touch upon a few. We find the wife of the old man with the lamp, she is connected with the representatives of human occult knowledge. She keeps the house of the old man. To her come the Will-o'-the-wisps, they have licked off all the gold from the walls, and had at once given away all the gold which enriched them, so that the living “Mops,” who ate up the gold, had to suffer death. The old man is the force of reason, which brings forth that which is useful. It is only when occult force unites with this which forwards material civilization, when the highest is united with the lowest in the world, that the world itself can follow its proper course of development. Man should not be led away from everyday life, but should purify the everyday civilization. In the world man is surrounded in his dwellings by that which hangs as gold upon the walls. All that is around him is the gold. On the one hand he is a man of knowledge and on the other a useful man. Thus he has around him the two-fold experience of the human race; all the collective experience of humanity has been collected together in human science. Those who strive after this, seek what is written in the scriptures. They lick off the historical wisdom, as it were.

This it is which surrounds man in his strivings; this it is with which man must entirely permeate himself. But it can not be of use to that which is alive. The living Mops swallowed the gold and died of it. That wisdom which only rules as the dead wisdom of books, and which has not been made alive by the Spirit, kills everything living. But, when it is once again united with the origin of Wisdom, with the beautiful Lily, then it wakes to life again. That is why the old man gives the dead Mops to his wife, that she may carry it to the beautiful Lily. The Lamp has one great peculiarity, everything dead was made alive through it; and what was alive was purified by it. This transmutation is brought about in man by occult knowledge. Besides this, the old woman is begged by the Will-o'-the-Wisps to pay their debts to the Ferryman. These three fruits represent the human sense for usefulness in material civilization, which is to pay tribute to the passions. For from whence should the actual driving forces of nature come, if not from the technique, from the cultivation of material nature? It is an interesting fact that the shadow of the giant as it comes up from the River, takes one of the fruits of the Earth away with it, so that the old woman only has two left. Now she required three for the Ferryman and so had to renounce the River. Something then happens, something full of significance. She has to plunge her hands into the River, whereby she turns so black that she scarcely remains visible. She is still there, but she is almost imperceptible. That shows us the connection between external civilization and the world of the passions. Material civilization must be placed at the service of the Astral, of the soul. As long as the nature of man is not sufficiently ennobled to offer itself as tribute to the River of the passions, so long does technique remain in debt to the River of man (the soul of man). As long as human endeavours are devoted to human passions, man works invisibly at something of which he cannot perceive the final aim. It is invisible, yet it is there; it can be felt, but is not externally perceptible. Everything man does on the road to the great goal, until he pays his debts to the River or the Soul,—all that he has to throw into the River of passions becomes invisible, like the hand of the wife of the old man with the Lamp. As long as the sense-nature is not fully purified, as long as it is not consumed, as it were, by the fire of the passion it cannot shine, and remains invisible; that is what excites the old lady so much that she can no longer reflect any light of her own. This might be gone into more fully, in greater detail; every single word is fraught with meaning. But it would lead us too far to go into all that to-day.

So let us hurry on to the great procession in which we encounter a youth, who tried to capture the beautiful Lily too early, and in so doing crippled all his life forces. Goethe says (in another place): “A man who strives for freedom without having first liberated his own inner self, falls more deeply than before into the bonds of necessity. If he does not set himself free, he will be killed.” A man who has prepared himself, who has been purified in the Mysteries, and the Temple of the Mysteries, so that he may unite himself in a proper way with the Lily, he alone will escape death. One who has died to the lower to be born again in a higher sense, can grasp the Lily. The present time is represented by the crippled youth, who wanted to attain the highest by violence. He complains to all whom he meets that he cannot secure the Lily. He must now make himself ripe enough to do so, and to this aim those forces must be combined which are symbolized by those who took part in the procession. It consisted of the old man with the Lamp, the Will-o'-the-Wisps and the beautiful Lily herself. The procession thus included all the different beautiful forces, and it was led down into the clefts of the Earth to the Temple of Initiation. That too, is a profound feature of the enigmatical Fairy Tale, in that it allows the Will-o'-the-Wisps to open the door of the Temple. The self-seeking wisdom is not without object, it is a necessary stage of transition. Human egoism can be overcome if it is nourished by wisdom and permeated with the gold of true knowledge. This wisdom can then be used to open the Temple. Those who unconsciously serve wisdom in an external sense, will be led to the real sanctuaries of wisdom. Those learned men who only bury themselves in books are nevertheless our guides. Goethe does not undervalue science. He knew that science herself uncloses the Temple of Wisdom; he knew that everything must be proved and accepted by science, and that without her we cannot penetrate the Temple of the highest Wisdom. Goethe himself sought this wisdom everywhere. He only considered himself worthy of recognizing the highest revelation in Spiritual life, in Art, after he had gone through the study of Science. He sought wisdom everywhere, in physics, biology, etc.,—And so, he admits the Will-o'-the-Wisps into the Temple, they who resting on themselves alone occupy a false position towards the others, towards the others who enter through experience and observations, like the Serpent. They cause the Temple to be opened and the procession passes in. Now follows what Goethe intended to apply to the whole of mankind; the whole Temple moves up and ascends through the cleft in the Earth. The Temple can now be set up over the River of the Soul, over the River of passions and desires, because the Serpent sacrificed itself. The Self of man has become selfless, the Serpent is transformed into precious stone, which forms the piles of the bridge. And now men can more freely go to and fro from the world of sense to the world of the Spiritual.

The union between sense and spirit is brought about by man, when he becomes selfless, by a sacrifice of himself, such as was made by the Serpent, which offered itself as a bridge over the River of passions. Thus the Temple ascended from the clefts of the Earth and is now accessible to all who cross the bridge, to those who drive over as well as to those who go on foot. In the Temple itself we meet once more with the three Kings; and the youth who had been made pure by having recognized the three soul-forces, is now presented to them. The golden King goes up to him and says “Feed my Sheep,”—in this Goethe gave expression to a thought which was very deeply engraved in his soul, that of uniting beauty with piety. It is the commandment given in the Bible. He applied these words to the youth in the same sense as when in Rome he stood before the statue of a God, and said “Here is necessity (notwendigkeit) it could not be different from what it is, this is a God. I feel that the Greeks worked according to the same Divine Laws that I am seeking.” It is a personal note of Goethe's when he causes the silver King to appear as Beauty and Piety: And then the King of Strength comes to the youth and says “The sword in the left hand, and the right hand free,”—the sword was not to serve for attack but for defence. Harmony was to be brought about, not conflict. After this event the youth was initiated into the three soul-forces; the fourth King has nothing more to say, he subsides into himself. The Temple has risen from its concealment into the clear light of day. Within the Temple there was raised a small silver Temple, which is none other than the transformed hut of the Ferryman. It is a remarkable feature that Goethe transformed the hut of the Ferryman,—he who carries us over into the land of the Spirit,—into pure molten silver so that it becomes a small altar, a small Temple, a Holy of Holies. This hut which represents the holiest in man, the deepest core of his being which he has preserved as a recollection of the land from which he came and to which the Ferryman cannot take him back, represents something which existed before our evolution. It is the memory that we are descended from the Spirit,—the memory of this stands as a Holy of Holies within the Temple.—The giant,—the crude force of nature, which lives in nature without the Spirit, and could not work through itself alone, but only as a shadow,—has been given a remarkable mission. Now this giant stands upright, and now only does he show the time. This is a profound thought—when man has laid aside everything belonging to his lower nature and has become entirely spiritualised, then the lower forces of nature will no longer spring up around him in their original elemental power,—in the form of storms, as they now do—the mechanical crude force of nature will then only perform mechanical service; man will always require these mechanical nature-forces, but they will no longer have power over him, he will use them in his service. His work will be the hour-hand of Spiritual culture, it will be the hour-hand pointing to the regular mechanical necessity, and will go regularly as the course of a clock. The giant himself will then no longer be necessary. We must not interpret the Fairy Tale pedantically, by interpreting every word, but we must feel our way into what Goethe wanted to say, and which he painted in such beautiful pictures. Goethe in his Fairy Tale brought out what Schiller expressed in his Aesthetic Letters;—the union of Necessity with Freedom. What Schiller tried to express in these letters Goethe could not grasp in abstract thought, but gave in the form of a Fairy Tale. “When I want to express these thoughts in all their living force I require pictures and pictures and pictures, such as the ancient priests of Initiation made use of in the Mysteries.” He did not teach his pupils by means of abstract thoughts, but by bringing the whole drama of Dionysos before them, by showing them the great course of the evolution of man, of the resurrection of Dionysos; and he also showed that which went on invisibly in the drama of “Dionysos and Osiris.”

Thus Goethe wished to express what lived in him in the form of drama and pictures, so we will not interpret the Fairy Tale in the ordinary way, but as theosophy would teach us to do, as representing the uniting of the lower nature of man with the higher; the union of the physical with the etheric body; the life-force and the passions and desires, with the higher nature of man:—the three purely Spiritual soul forces Atma, Buddhi, Manas, which we represented as the three Kings. This is the course of the evolution of man up to the time when every man will be himself an Initiate. This is what Goethe tried to express in a truly theosophical fashion. Just as those priests of Initiation expressed their wisdom in the form of pictures, so Goethe expressed in pictures in his Apocalypse that which represents the evolution of humanity,—that which will some day become the highest act of man—the transformation of the lower nature into the higher and the transmutation of the lower metals, the lower soul-forces into the gold of wisdom. The transmutation of that which dwells alone in the pure noble metal of wisdom is represented by the King who is embodied in the gold. Goethe wished to express this human alchemy, this Spiritual transmutation, in a somewhat different manner from what he had concealed occultly in the second part of “Faust.” Goethe was in the true sense of the word a Theosophist. He understood what it means that all the transitory things we see with our senses, are nothing but symbols, but he also understood that what man is trying to do is impossible to describe, but can be accomplished by an act, and that the “Unzulängliche” is that which lives among us on this side of the River, and we must experience it if the purpose of human evolution is to be fulfilled. Goethe also expressed this to this end in the “Chorus Mysticus” and included it in the second part of “Faust.” The highest soul-force in man is symbolically represented as the beautiful Lily, and the male principle—the force of Will unites with her. He expresses this in the beautiful and expressive words with which the second part of “Faust” concludes. These final verses are a mystical creed. We can only understand them completely when we see our own intimate life come to life again in the story of the green Serpent and the beautiful Lily.

Even before the close of the 18th century, when Goethe passed on to his work on the second part of “Faust,” his nature had already been transmuted and he had attained the vision of a higher world.

It is of profound significance if we are able to understand the words written by Goethe in his testament, the second part of “Faust,” when he had completed his course on the Earth. After his death, this second part was found in his writing table, closed and sealed. He put this book as a gospel into the world, as a testament. And this testament closes with his mystical creed:

Alles Vergängliche ist nur sin Gleichnis
Das Unzulängliche hier wird's Ereignis.
Das Unbeschreibliche, hier ist's getan,
Das ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan.

One translation is as follows:

All things transitory
But as symbols sent,
Earth's insufficiency
Here grows to event.
The indescribable, here it is done.
The Woman Soul leads us upward, and on.

Our present age, inartistic as it is, shows little awareness of the fact that recitation stands midway between speaking, or reading, which are not artistic, and artistically developed singing. In many circles there is a feeling that really anyone can recite – and this, of course, is not unconnected with the fact that in these same circles everyone flatters himself that he can also write poetry. It would not so easily enter anyone's head that someone could be a musician, or a painter, without having previously undergone any sort of artistic training. When we consider current views on the art of recitation, we are obliged to admit that, just as in people's ideas about the real nature of poetry, there is also a certain lack of clarity as to the nature of the art of recitation. As to how this art of recitation must use its instrument – the human voice in connection with the human organism – even for this there is no clear understanding. This is undoubtedly connected with the fundamental absence, in our present age, of any earnest feeling for the true nature of poetry. There is no doubt that poetry stands in a relationship with the whole being of man quite different to that of ordinary prose, of whatever kind this may be; everything that man must recognize as that higher world to which he belongs with the soul and spiritual parts of his being poetry must also stand in a certain connection with all this. Along with the lack of clarity which gradually invaded ideas concerning man's relationship with the super-sensible world, there also came about another partial lack of clarity, concerning man's relationship with that world which is expressed in the art of poetry. I should like to draw attention to two facts – things which resound to us from ancient times, though from quite different peoples, with quite differently evolved characters.

One fact, though one which today is passed over so lightly, is something to which Homer, the great writer of Greek epic, draws our attention at the beginning of both his poems: namely, that what he wished to convey to the world as his poetry did not come from himself.

‘Sing, O Muse, of the anger of Peleus' son Achilles ...’

It is not Homer, but the Muse who is singing. Our age can no longer take this seriously – for the understanding that lies hidden behind the opening of the Homeric poem had, in fact, already been extinguished by the eighteenth century, with its intellectual conceptions. When Klopstock began his Messiah, he did indeed look at the beginning of the Homeric poems; but in this respect he lived entirely in abstract ideas, intellectualistic ideas, and these could only lead him to say: the Greeks still believed in gods, in the Muses – modern man can replace this only by his own immortal soul. Thus, Klopstock begins with the words:

‘Sing, immortal soul, of sinful man's redemption.’

Now this opening of the Messiah, for anyone who can see into these things, is a document of the very greatest significance. And in the nineteenth century, too, all feeling had been completely lost for what Homer meant to convey – that when I reveal myself in poetry, it is really something higher that is revealed in me: my “I” withdraws, my ego withdraws, so that other powers make use of my speech-organism; divine-spiritual powers make use of this speech-organism in order to reveal themselves. One must, therefore, regard what Homer placed at the opening of his two poetic creations as something worthy of more serious consideration than is usually accorded to such things today.

It is remarkable how something similar, and yet quite different, resounds to us from a certain period in the development of Central Europe, a period to which the Nibelungenlied points – although it was not written down until a later date. This begins in a manner similar to, yet quite different from Homer:

‘To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told’

“In olden maeren” – what are maeren, for those who still have a living feeling and perception for such things? I cannot go into all this in detail, but I need only allude to the real meaning of this expression, maer – Nachtmar (nightmare): for this same expression is used to describe certain dreams which are caused by being oppressed, as it were, by an Alp – by a nightmare. In this nightmare, this Alp, we have the last atavistic traces of what is indicated in the Nibelungenlied, when it says: “To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told…”; something is here related which does not come out of normal day-time ego-consciousness, but from a kind of perception which proceeds in the manner of the consciousness we possess in an especially vivid dream such as the nightmare, the maeren. Here again our attention is directed not to ordinary consciousness, but to something which is revealed, through ordinary consciousness, from super-sensible spheres. Homer says: “Sing, O Muse, of the anger of Peleus' son Achilles ...”; and the Nibelungenlied says: “To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told.” What is referred to in the first instance? To that which is, in reality, brought forth by the Muse, when she makes use of the human organism, begins to speak through the human organism, to vibrate musically; our attention is directed to something musical which permeates the human being, and which speaks from greater depths than are reached by his ordinary consciousness. And when the Nibelungenlied says: “To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told …” – it is something which permeates human consciousness as a perception similar to seeing, as something like visual perception, to which we are referred. The Nibelungenlied indicates something plastic and formative, something imaginative; in the Homeric epic we are given something musical. Both, however, from different sides, show us what wells up in poetry from the profounder depths of human nature, something which takes hold of the human being and finds utterance through him. One must have a feeling for this, if one is to experience the way in which true declamation gives expression in poetry, and takes hold of the human instrument of speech – though, as we shall see later, this involves the entire human organism.

The manner, the whole way in which a human being is built up is an outcome of the forces of the spiritual world. And again, the whole manner in which a human being is able to bring his organism into movement when he declaims or recites poetry – this, too, must be the result of a spiritual force holding sway in the human organism. One must learn to trace this working of the spirit in the human organism when the art of poetry is expressed through recitation or declamation. Declamation then becomes what the human organism can be, when it is tuned in the most various ways. In order to gain a practical, artistic realization of these things in some detail, we would now like to show you what must live in declamation when something more of the nature of folk-poetry, or folk-song, is taken into consideration; we shall then proceed to something which is more definitely art – poetry. We hope to show you how fundamentally different the effect of declamation must be, depending on whether it sounds forth from those depths of human nature from which earnestness, or tragedy, resound; or whether it comes from those surface realms of the human organization from which gaiety, satire and humour emanate. Only when we have learned to apprehend these things quite concretely today will I permit myself to give certain intimations of the connection between poetry and recitation and declamation. From these, we will then show how there results an exact method of educating oneself in artistic recitation and declamation.

We will ask Frau Dr. Steiner to declaim a poem of Goethe: a folk-poem in its whole tone and mood – Goethe's “Heidenröslein”.

HEIDENRÖSLEIN

Sah ein Knab' ein Röslein stehn,

Röslein auf der Heiden,

War so jung und morgenschön,

Lief er schnell, es nah zu sehn,

Sah's mit vielen Freuden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

Röslein auf der Heiden.

Knabe sprach: Ich breche dich

Röslein auf der Heiden,

Röslein sprach: Ich steche dich,

Dass du ewig denkst an mich,

Und ich will's nicht leiden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

Röslein auf der Heiden.

Und der wilde Knabe brach

's Röslein auf der Heiden;

Röslein wehrte sich und stach,

Half ihm doch kein Weh und Ach,

Musst' es eben leiden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

Röslein auf der Heiden.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

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[Comparable in English in many respects is:

MY HEART'S IN THE HIGHLANDS

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;

My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;

Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;

My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go. –

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North;

The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth:

Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,

The hills of the Highlandsfor ever I love. –

Farewell to the mountains high cover'd with snow;

Farewell to the straths and green valleys below:

Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;

Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods. –

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;

My heart's in the Highlandsa-chasing the deer:

Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;

My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go. –

Robert Burns (1759-1796.]

We will now ask Frau Dr. Steiner to recite to us “Erlkönigstochter”, which gives opportunity for a quite special style in the rendering of folk-poems.

Herr Oluf reitet spät und weit,

Zu bieten auf seine Hochzeitleut':

Da tanzten die Elfen auf grünen Land,

Erlkönigs Tochter reicht ihm die Hand.

‘Willkommen, Herr Oluf, was eilst von hier?

Tritt her in den Reihen und tanz mit mir.’ –

‘Ich darf nicht tanzen, nicht tanzen ich mag,

Frühmorgen ist mein Hochzeittag.’ –

‘Hör’ an, Herr Oluf, tritt tanzen mit mir,

Zwei güldne Sporen schenk' ich dir;

Ein Hemd von Seide, so weiss und fein,

Meine Mutter bleicht's im Mondenschein.’ –

‘Ich darf nicht tanzen, nicht tanzen ich mag,

Frühmorgen ist mein Hochzeittag.’ –

‘Hör’ an, Herr Oluf, tritt tanzen mit mir,

Einen Haufen Goldes schenk' ich dir.’ –

‘Einen Haufen Goldes nahm’ ich wohl;

Doch tanzen ich nicht darf, noch soll.’

‘Und willt, Herr Oluf, nicht tanzen mit mir,

Soll Seuch' und Krankheit folgen dir.’ –

Sie tät einen Schlag ihm auf sein Herz,

Noch nimmer fühlt er solchen Schmerz.

Sie hob ihn bleichend auf sein Pferd:

‘Reit heim zu deinem Bräutlein wert.’

Und als er kam vor Hauses Tiir,

Seine Mutter zitternd stand dafür.

‘Hör’ an, mein Sohn, sag’ an mir gleich,

Wie ist dein' Farbe blass und bleich?’ –

‘Und sollt’ sie nicht sein blass und bleich?

Ich traf in Erlenkönigs Reich.’ –

‘Hört an, mein Sohn, so lieb und traut,

Was soll ich nun sagen deiner Braut?’ –

‘Sagt ihr, ich sei im Wald zur Stund’,

Zu proben da mein Pferd und Hund.’ –

Frühmorgen als es Tag kaum war,

Da kam die Braut mit der Hochzeitschar.

Sie schenkten Met, sie schenkten Wein.

‘Wo ist Herr Oluf, der Bräutigam mein?’ –

‘Herr Oluf, er ritt in Wald zur Stund’,

Er probt allda sein Pferd und Hund.’ –

Die Braut hub auf den Scharlach rot,

Da lag Herr Oluf, und er war tot.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803).

[Comparable in style in English is:

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has wither'd from the Lake,

And no birds sing.

O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel's granary is full,

And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever dew;

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful – a faery's child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She look'd at me as she did love,

And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long;

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

A faery's song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna dew,

And sure in language strange she said –

‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her elf in grot,

And there she wept and sigh'd full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep

And there I dream'd – Ah! woe betide!

The latest dream I ever dream'd

On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

Who cried – ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid darning gaped wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge has wither'd from the lake,

And no birds sing.

John Keats (1795-1821).]

Now we will present Goethe's two poems “Olympos” and “Charon”, where we shall find an opportunity to demonstrate recitation or declamation as the case may be. In the Poem “Olympos”, which is drawn more from the pictorial element, we have the art of declamation; while the more metrical “Charon” is drawn more from the musical element.

OLYMPOS

Der Olympos, der Kissavos,

Die zwei Berge haderten;

Da entgegnend sprach Olympos

Also zu dem Kissavos:

‘Nicht erhebe dich, Kissave,

Turken – du Getretener.

Bin ich doch der Greis Olympos,

Den die ganze Welt vernahm.

Zwei und sechzig Gipfel zähl ich

Und zweitausend Quellen klar,

Jeder Brunn hat seinen Wimpel,

Seinen Kämpfer jeder Zweig.

Auf den höchsten Gipfel hat sich

Mir ein Adler aufgesetzt,

Fasst in seinen mächt'gen Klauen

Eines Helden blutend Haupt.’

‘Sage, Haupt! wie ist's ergangen?

Fielest du verbrecherisch?’ –

Speise, Vogel, meine Jugend,

Meine Mannheit speise nur!

Ellenlänger wächst dein Flügel,

Deine Klauen spannenlang.

Bei Louron, in Xeromeron

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The objection might easily be raised to an address such as this to-day that symbolic and allegoric meanings are forced out of something which a poet has created in the free play of his imaginative fancy. The day before yesterday we set ourselves the task to explore the deeper meaning of Goethe's ‘Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,’ as it was then presented to our eyes. It will always happen that such an analysis or explanation of a work of fantasy will be turned down with the remark: ‘Oh, all sorts of symbols and meanings with profound applications are looked for in the figures of the work.’ Therefore I want to say at once that what I shall say to-day has nothing whatever to do with the symbolic and allegoric interpretations often made by Theosophists about legends or poetic works. And because I know that again and again the objection has been made to similar explanations which I have given: ‘We are not going to be caught by such symbolic meanings of poetic figures,’ I cannot stress the fact sufficiently that what is to be said here must be taken in no other sense than the following. We have before us a poetic work, a work of comprehensive imaginative power or fantasy, that goes to the depths of things: ‘The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.’ We may well be allowed the question, whether we may approach the work from any particular point of view, and attempt to find the basic idea, the true content of this so poetic a product.

We see the plant before us. Man goes to it and examines the laws, the inner regularity, by which the plant grows and flourishes, by which it unfolds its nature bit by bit. Has the botanist, or even someone who is no botanist, but arranges the growth of the plant in his imagination, the right to do it? Can one object: the plant knows nothing of the laws you are discovering, the laws of its growth and development! This objection against the botanist or the lyric poet who expresses the sensations derived from the plant in his poetry would have the same weight as the objection one could bring against such an explanation of Goethe's story. I do not want things to be taken as if I were to say to you: There we have a Snake, which means this or that, there we have a Golden, a Silver, and a Brazen King, who stand for this or that. I do not intend to expound the story in this symbolic, allegoric sense, but more in such a way that as the plant grows according to laws of which it is itself unconscious, and as the botanist has the right to discover these laws of its growth, one must also say to oneself that it does not follow that the poet Goethe was consciously aware of the explanations which I shall give you. For it is as true that we must consider the inevitability, and the true ideal content of the story as it is that we discover the laws of the plant's growth; that the plant grows in accordance with the same inevitability which originated it, though it is itself unconscious of it.

So I ask you to take what I shall say as if it presented the sense and the spirit of Goethe's methods of thought and idea-conception and as if he who, as it were, feels himself called upon to put before you the ideal philosophy of Goethe, were justified—that you might find a way to it—in expounding the product of Goethe's invention, in emphasizing the figures, and in pointing out their correlation—just as the botanist demonstrates that the plant grows in accordance with laws he has discovered.

Goethe's psychology or soul-philosophy, namely, what he considers determinative for the nature of the soul, is illustrated in his beautiful Fairy Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; and if we are to understand each other in what I have to say it will be a good thing if, in a preliminary study, we make the spirit of his soul-world clear. It has been already pointed out in the previous address that the world-conception represented here starts from the view that human knowledge is not to be looked upon as something stationary once for all. The view is widely held that man is as he is to-day, and being what he is he can give unequivocal judgment on all things; he observes the world with his sense-organs, takes in its phenomena, combines them with his reason, which is bound to his senses, and the result is an absolute knowledge of the world which must be valid for all. On the other side—but only in a certain way—stands the spiritual scientific world-conception which is represented here. This starts from the premise that what is to become our knowledge is continually dependent on our organs and our capacity for knowledge and that we ourselves are, as men, capable of development; that we can work on ourselves, and raise higher such capabilities as we have on a given level of existence. It holds that we can educate them, and they can be developed still further, even as man has developed himself from an imperfect state to his present position, and that we must come to a deeper penetration of things, and a more correct view of the world by rising to higher standards. To put it more clearly, if also more trivially: if we leave out altogether a development of humanity and look only at people as they are around us; and then turn our eyes on those men whom one reckons as belonging to primitive races in the history of civilization, and if we ask ourselves what they can know of the laws of the world around us and compare it with what an average European with some ideas of science can know of the world, we shall see there is a great difference between the two. Take, for instance, an African negro's picture of the world and that, let us say, of an European monist, who has a sense of reality through having absorbed a number of the scientific ideas of the present age: the two are entirely dissimilar.

But on the other hand Spiritual Science is far from depreciating the world-picture of the man who takes his stand on pure materialism, and from declaring it invalid. It is more true to say that in these things it is considered that in every case a man's world-picture corresponds to a stage in human evolution, and that man is able to increase the capabilities in him and to discover by means of the increase other new things.

It lies thus in the purview of Spiritual Science that man reaches ever higher knowledge by developing himself, and what he experiences in the process is objective world-content, which he did not see before because he was not capable of seeing it. Spiritual Science is therefore different from other one-sided world-conceptions, whether spiritualistic, or materialistic, because it does not recognize an absolute, unchangeable truth, but only a wisdom and truth belonging to a given stage of evolution. Thus it adheres to Goethe's saying: ‘Man has really always only his own truth, and it is always the same.’ It is always the same because what we instil into ourselves through our power of learning, viz., the objective, is the same.

Now how does man succeed in developing the capabilities and powers that lie in him? One may say that Spiritual Science is as old as human thought. It always took the view that man has before him the ideal of a certain knowledge-perfection, the object of his aspiration. The principle contained in this was always called the ‘principle of initiation.’ This initiation means nothing other than increasing the powers of man to ever higher stages of knowledge, and thereby attaining deeper insight into the nature of the world around him. Goethe stood completely and all his life long, one may say, on this principle of development towards knowledge, this principle of initiation; which is shown us most particularly in his Fairy Tale.

We shall understand each other most easily if we proceed from the view which is held most often and most widely to-day, and which is to a certain extent in opposition to the initiation-principle.

To-day one can hear in the widest circles those people who think about such things and believe themselves to have an opinion on them representing, more or less consciously, the point of view that in what concerns truth and objective reality only physical observation, or objects of physical observation can be decisive in formulating ideas. You will constantly hear it: that alone can be Science which is based on the objective foundation of observation, and by this one understands so frequently is meant only the observation of the senses and the application of the human reason and capacity to formulate thoughts to these sense-observations. Every one of you knows that the capacity to formulate ideas and concepts is a capacity of the human soul among other capacities and every one of you also knows that these other capacities of the soul are our feeling and our will. Thus, even with this comparative superficial review, we may say: man is not merely an ideating, but also a feeling and willing being. Now those who think they must put forward the purely scientific point of view will always repeat: in science, only the power of thought may enter, never human feeling, never what we know as will-impulses, for otherwise that which is objective would become clouded, and that which the power of thought might achieve by being kept impersonal, would only be prejudiced.

It is correct enough that when a man introduces his feeling, his sympathy or antipathy, into the object of a scientific enquiry, he finds it repulsive or attractive, sympathetic or antipathetic. And where should we be if he were to consider his desire as a source of knowledge, so that he could say about a thing, I want it or I do not want it? Whether it displeases or pleases you, whether you desire it or not, is entirely the same to the thing. As true as it is that he who believes himself able to stand on the firm ground of science can confine himself only to externals, so true it is that the thing itself compels you to say it is red, and that the impression you get concerning the nature of a stone is the correct one. But it does not lie in the nature of the thing that it appears to you ugly or beautiful, that you desire it or not. That it appears to you red has an objective reason; that you do not desire it has no objective reason.

In a certain respect modern psychology has got beyond the point of view just described. It is not my task here to speak for or against that tendency of modern psychology which says: ‘When we consider psychic phenomena and the soul-life, we must not confine ourselves only to intellectualism, we must regard man not merely in what concerns the power of conception, we must also consider the influences of the world of feeling and will.’ Perhaps some of you know that this belongs to Wundt's system of philosophy, which takes the will to be the origin of soul-activity. In a way that is in some respects fundamental, whether one agrees with it or not, the Russian psychologist Losski has pointed out the control of the will in human soul-life, in his last book called ‘Intuitivism.’ I could say much to you if I wanted to show how concerned the theory of the soul is to overcome the one-sidedness of intellectualism, and if further, I wanted to show you that the other powers also play a part in human soul-power.

If you carry the thought a step further, you will be able to say that this shows how impossible the demand is that the power of formulating ideas, limited as it is to observation, may lead to objective results in science. When science itself shows its impossibility, shows that everywhere Will plays a part, on what grounds would you then establish the purely objective observation of anything? Because you prefer to recognize only matter as objective, subject as you are to the tricks played by the will and your habits of thought, and because you have not the habit of thought and feeling to recognize also the spiritual element in things, therefore you omit the latter altogether in your theories. It is not a question, if we want to understand the world, of what kind of abstract ideals we set before us, but of what we can accomplish in our souls.

Goethe belongs to those people who reject the principle most categorically that knowledge is produced only through the thinking capacity, the one-sided capacity to form ideas. The prominent and significant principle expressed more or less clearly in Goethe's nature is that he considers that all the powers of the human soul must function if man is to unravel the riddles of the world.

Now we must not be one-sided and unjust. It is quite correct, when the objection is raised that feeling and will are qualities subjected to the personal characteristics of a man, and when it is asked where we should come to if not only what the eyes see and the microscope shows, but also what feeling and will dictate were considered as attributes of things! All the same that is just what we have to say in order to understand someone who, like Goethe, stands for the principle of initiation and development, namely, that, given the average feeling and will in man to-day, they cannot be applied to the acquirement of knowledge, that, in fact they would lead only to an absolute disharmony in their knowledge. One man wants this, the other that, according to the subjective needs of feeling and will. But the man who stands on the ground of initiation is also quite clear that of the powers of the human soul—thinking, representation, feeling, will—the capacity to construct thoughts and to think has advanced furthest, and is most inclined and adapted to exclude the personal element and to attain objectivity. For that soul-power which is expressed in intellectualism is now so advanced that when men rely upon it, they quarrel least, and agree most in what they say. Feeling and will have not had the chance of being developed to this point. We can also justifiably find differences when we examine the region of ideas and their representation. There are regions of the idea-life which give us completely objective truths, which men have recognized as such, quite apart from external experience, and these truths are the same if a million people differ in their opinions about them. If you have experienced in yourself the reasons for it, you are able to assert the truth even if a million people think otherwise. For instance, everyone can find such truths confirmed as those dealing with numbers and space dimension. Everyone can understand that 3 x 3 = 9, and it is so, even if a million people contradict it. Why is this the case? Because regarding such truths such as mathematical truths, most people have succeeded in suppressing their preference and their aversion, their sympathy and their antipathy, in short, the personal factor, and letting the matter speak for itself. This exclusion of the personal in the case of thought and the capacity to formulate ideas has always been called the ‘purification’ of the human soul, and considered the first stage on the way to initiation, or, as one might also say, on the way to higher knowledge.

The man who is versed in these things says to himself: It is not only with regard to feeling and the will that people are not yet so far that nothing personal enters into it, and that they can verify objectivity, but also with regard to thought the majority are not yet so far as to be able to give themselves up purely to what the things, the ideas of the things themselves say to him, as everyone can in mathematics. But there are methods of purifying thought to such a point that we no longer think personally, but let the thoughts in us think, as we let mathematical thought do. Thus, when we have cleansed thought from the influences of personality, we speak of purification or catharsis, as it was called in the old Eleusinian mysteries. Hence man must reach the point of purifying his thinking, which then enables him to comprehend things with objective thought.

Now, just as this is possible, so is it also possible to eliminate all the personal factor from feeling, so that the appeal of things to the feelings has no longer any say, to the Personal, or to Sympathy and Antipathy; nothing but the nature of the thing is evoked, in so far as it cannot speak to mere concept capacity. Experiences in our souls which have their roots or origin in our feelings, and which therefore lead to inner knowledge, and lead deeper into the nature of a thing, speaking however to other sides of the soul than mere intellectualism, can be purified of the personal element as well as thought, so that feeling can transmit the same objectivity as thought can. This cleansing or development of the feelings is called in all esoteric doctrine ‘enlightenment.’ Every man capable of development, and striving after it in no casual way, (that lies in intention of the personality) must take pains to be stirred only by what lies in the nature of the thing. When he has reached the point where the thing rouses in him neither sympathy nor antipathy, where he allows only the nature of things to speak, so that he says: whatever sympathies or antipathies I have are immaterial and are not to be taken into consideration, then it lies in the nature of the thing that the thought and action of the man assume this or that direction—then it is a declaration of the innermost nature of the thing. In esoteric doctrine this development of the will has been called ‘consummation.’

If a man takes his stand on the ground of spiritual science, he says to himself: ‘If I have a thing in front of me, there is in it a spiritual element, and I can so stimulate my mode of conception, that the essence of the thing is represented objectively through my concepts and ideas. Hence there is present in me the same thing that works externally, and I have recognized the essence of the thing through my mode of conception. But what I have recognized is only a part of the essence.’ There exists in things something which can speak not to thought at all, but only to feeling, and indeed only to purified feeling or to feeling which has become objective. The man who has not yet developed in himself by this cultivation of the feelings such a part of the essence, cannot recognize the essence along these lines. But for the man who says to himself that feeling as well as the capacity to think can provide a basis of knowledge (not the feeling as it is, but as it can become by means of well-founded methods of the teaching of cognition) for such a man it becomes gradually clear that there are things deeper than thought possibilities, things which speak to one's soul and the feelings. There are also things which reach even down to the will.

Now Goethe was particularly convinced that this really is the case, and that man really has in him these possibilities of development. He stood firmly on the ground of the principle of initiation, and he has shown us the initiation of man through the development of his soul and the development of the three powers of will, feeling and thought by representing them in his Fairy Tale.

The Golden King represents the initiation for the thought-capacity, the Silver King represents the initiation with knowledge capacity of objective feeling, and the Brazen King the initiation for knowledge capacity of the will. Goethe has emphasized that man must overcome certain things if he wishes to receive these three gifts. The Youth in the story represents man in his struggle for the highest. As Schiller in his Æsthetic Letters depicts man's aspiration towards complete humanity, so Goethe depicts in the Youth man's aspiration for the highest, wanting straight away to reach the Beautiful Lily, and attaining then inner human perfection, given him by the three Kings.

How that happens is pointed out in the course of the story. You remember that in the subterranean Temple, into which the Snake looks because of the earth's power of crystallization, one King was in each of the four corners. In the first was the Golden, in the second the Silver, in the third the Brazen King. In the fourth was the King who was a mixture of the other three metals, in whom, therefore, the three composite parts were so welded that one could not distinguish them. In this fourth King, Goethe depicts for us the representative of that stage of human development in which will, thought and feeling are mixed together. In other words he stands for that human soul which is governed by will, thought and feeling, because it is itself not master of these three capacities. On the other hand in the Youth, after he receives the three gifts from the three Kings separately, so that they are no longer chaotically mixed, that stage of knowledge is represented which does not allow itself to be ruled by thought, feeling and will, but which, on the contrary, rules over them. Man is ruled by them as long as they flow chaotically and intermingled in him, as long as they are not pure and independent in his soul. Until man has reached this separation, he is not capable of being effective through his three knowledge-capacities. When he has reached this point, however, he is no longer the subject of Chaos, but on the contrary himself controls his thought, his feeling and his will, when each is as pure and unalloyed as the metal of the respective Kings: his mode of Conception, pure as the Golden King (for nothing is mixed in him); his mode of Feeling, where nothing is added or mixed, but pure as the Silver King; and so too the Will, pure as the brass of the Brazen King; Concepts and Feelings no longer govern him, for he stands, in his nature, free; he is capable, in a word, of comprehension by means of thought, of feeling and will as required, making use of each separately. He can grasp according to necessity and the nature of things either by means of thinking, feeling or willing. Then he has advanced so far that the whole pure knowledge-capacity which we see in thought, feeling and will, leads him to a deeper insight, and he really steeps himself in the current of events, in the inner nature of things. Of course only experience can teach that this is possible.

Now it will not be difficult to agree, after what I said just now, that if Goethe makes the Youth represent striving mankind, we may see in the Beautiful Lily another soul-condition, namely, that soul-condition which man attains when the beings lying in things spring forth in the soul, and he thereby raises his existence by blending the things in himself with the nature of things in the external world. What man experiences in his soul by growing out of himself, by becoming master of the powers of the soul, victor over the chaos in his soul; what man then experiences, that inner blessedness, that unity with things; their awakening in him, is shown us by Goethe in his representation of the union with the Beautiful Lily. Beauty here is not merely aesthetic beauty, but a quality of man brought to a certain stage of perfection. So that we shall also now find it easy to understand why Goethe makes the Youth proceed in his effort to reach the Beautiful Lily, in such a way that all his powers at first disappear. Why is this?

We understand Goethe's presentation of such a scene if we hold fast to a thought he once expressed: ‘Everything which gives us mastery over ourselves without liberating us, leads us into error.’ Man must first be free, he must reach the point of being master of his inner soul-powers, and then he can attain union with the highest soul-condition, with the Beautiful Lily. But if he sets out to attain it unprepared, with still immature powers, they are lost and his soul is shrivelled. Hence Goethe points out that the Youth seeks this liberation which will make him captain of his soul. The moment his soul-powers are no longer chaotic, but are purified, cleansed and ordered, he is ready to reach that condition of soul which is symbolized by his union with the Beautiful Lily.

So we see that Goethe constructs these figures in free creative fantasy, and if we look upon them as representing soul-powers, we see that they permeate and work in his whole soul. If we look upon them like this, if we are as sensitive to these figures as in a way Goethe was—Goethe who unlike a second-rate didactic poet was not content to say what this or that soul-quality meant, but used it to express what he felt himself, then we shall realize what is expressed in these poetic figures. And therefore the various figures stand in the same personal relationship to each other as the soul-powers of a man stand to each other.

It cannot be clearly enough insisted upon that there is no question of the characters meaning this or that. That is certainly not the case. Rather is it that Goethe felt this or that in this or that soul-activity and transformed his feelings in connection with one or the other soul-activity into one or the other figures.

Thus he created the sequence of the story's events, which is still more important than the figures themselves. We see the Will-o'-the-Wisps and the Green Snake, and that the former cross over from the other side of the river and reveal quite peculiar qualities. They absorb the gold greedily, even lick it from the walls of the Old Man's room, and then throw it about prodigally. The same gold which in the Will-o'-the-Wisps is a sign of worthlessness, as we are also shown by the fact that the Ferryman has to refuse it—otherwise the river would surge up¹—the Ferryman may take only fruits in payment—this gold—what effect does it have in the body of the Green Snake? The Snake, after taking it, becomes internally luminous! And the plants and other things round her are also lit up because she takes into herself what in the case of the Will-o'-the-Wisps is a symbol of worthlessness.

But a certain importance is ascribed even to them. You know that the Old Man at the critical moment calls upon the Will-o'-the-Wisps to open the Temple gates, so that the whole train can enter in. Precisely the same thing which happens here in the case of the Green Snake, is to be found in the human soul, a thing we came across particularly clearly two days ago in the conversation between Goethe and Schiller. We saw that Schiller, as he spoke with Goethe about the way in which nature should be regarded, was still of the opinion that the drawing with a few strokes by Goethe of the proto-plant was an idea, an abstraction, which one receives when one omits the differentiating features and puts together the common ones. And we saw that Goethe thereupon said that if that was an idea, then he saw his ideas with his eyes. At this moment there were two quite different realities in opposition. Schiller trained himself completely to take Goethe's way of looking at things; so that it shows no lack of honour to Schiller if he is taken as an example of that human soul which moves in abstractions, and preferably in those ideas of things which are comprehended by the mere reason. That is a particular inclination of the soul, which, if a man wishes to attain a higher development, can, in certain circumstances, play a very dangerous part.

There are people whose inclination lies in the direction of the abstract. Now when they combine this abstraction with something they come across as soul-power, this is, as a rule, the concept of unproductivity. These people are sometimes very acute, they can draw fine distinctions, and connect this or that concept wonderfully. But you also often find with such a soul-condition, that the spiritual influences, inspirations, are excluded. This soul-condition, characterized by unproductivity and abstraction, is represented to us in the Will-o'-the-Wisps. They take up the gold wherever they find it; they lack any inventive faculty, are unproductive and can grasp no ‘ideas.’ These ideas are alien to them. They have not the will unselfishly to yield themselves up to things, or to stick to facts or to use concepts only as far as they are interpreters of facts. All they care about is to stuff their reasons full of concepts, and then scatter them about prodigally. They are like a man who goes to libraries, collects wisdom there, and takes it in and then gives it out again correspondingly. These Will-o'-the-Wisps are typical of that soul-capacity which is never able to grasp a single literary thought, or feeling, but which can nevertheless grasp in beautiful forms what creative spirits have produced in literature. I do not mean to say anything against this kind of soul. If a man did not have it nor cultivated it when he was insufficiently endowed with it, he would lack something which must be present when it comes to the real capacity for knowledge. In his picture of the Will-o'-the-Wisps, in the whole circumstances in which they appear and act, Goethe shows the manner in which such a soul-type functions, in relation to other soul-types, how it harms and benefits. In truth, if someone wanted to climb to higher stages of knowledge and had not this faculty of soul, there would not be the means to open the Temple for him. Goethe shows the advantages equally with the drawbacks of this soul-condition. What he gives us in the Will-o'-the-Wisps represents a soul-element. The moment it wants to lead an independent life in one direction or another, it becomes harmful. This abstraction leads to a critical faculty which makes men learn everything indeed, but incapable of further development, because the productive element is missing in them. But Goethe also clearly shows how far there is value in what the Will-o'-the-Wisps represent. What they contain can become something valuable; in the Snake the Will-o'-the-Wisps' gold turns to something valuable in so far as she illumines the objects round about her.

What lives in the Will-o'-the-Wisps, when worked out in another way, will become extremely fruitful in the human soul. When man strives so to regard his experiences of concepts and ideas and ideal creations not as something abstract in themselves, but as capable of leading to and interpreting the realities round him, so that he thinks as selflessly and willingly of his observations as of the abstract quality of the concepts, then he is as regards this soul-power in the same position as the Green Snake: then he can produce light and wisdom out of the purely abstract concepts. Then he is not brought to be in the vertical line which loses all connection and relation to the horizontal plane. The Will-o'-the-Wisps are the Snake's relatives, but of the vertical line. The gold-pieces fall through the rocks, are absorbed by the Snake which thereby becomes inwardly luminous. He who approaches the things themselves with these concepts absorbs wisdom.

Goethe gives us also an example of how one is to work on the conceptions (Begriffe). He has the conception of the proto-plant. Primarily it is an abstract conception, which, were it worked out in the abstract, would become an empty picture, killing all life, as the gold, thrown down by the Will-o'-the-Wisps, killed the Pug-dog. But just think what Goethe does with the conception of the proto-plant. If we follow him on his Italian journey, we see that this conception is only the ‘leit-motif’ going from plant to plant, from being to being. He takes the conception, goes from it over to the plant, and sees how this is made in one or another shape, taking on quite different shapes, in lower or higher places, and so on. Now he follows from step to step how the spiritual reality or form creeps into every physical form. He himself creeps about like the Snake in the crevices of the earth. Thus for Goethe the conception-world is nothing else but that which can be spun into objective reality. The Snake for him is the representative of that soul-power which does not struggle upward selfishly to higher regions of existence in an attempt to raise itself above everything, but which continually and patiently lets the conception be verified by observation, patiently goes from experience to experience. When man not merely theorizes, not merely lives in the conceptions, but applies them to life and experience, then he is as far as this soul-power is concerned, in the position of the Snake. This is so in a very wide sense. He who takes philosophy not as a theory, but as what it is meant to be, he who regards the conceptions of spiritual science as exercises for life, knows that just such conceptions, even the highest, are meant to be applied in such a way that they merge into life and are verified by daily experience. The man who has learnt a few conceptions but is incapable of applying them to life is like a man who has learned a cooking-book by heart, but cannot cook. As the gold is a means to throw light on things, so Goethe illuminates the things round him by means of his ideas.

This is the instructive and grand thing about Goethe's attitude to Science, and his every effort, that his ideas and conceptions have reality and have the effect of lighting up all objects round him. The day before yesterday special importance was laid on the universality in Goethe which gives the reason why we never have the feeling: that is Goethe's ‘meaning.’ He stands there, and when we see him, we find only that we understand things better which before were not so clear. For this reason he was capable of becoming the point of agreement between two hostile brethren, as we saw the day before yesterday.

If we wanted to discuss every feature in this fairy tale and characterize every figure in it, I should have to speak not for three hours but for three weeks on it. So I can give you only the deeper principles contained in the story. But every feature shows us something of Goethe's method of thought and his opinion of the world.

Those soul-powers which are represented in the Will-o'-the-Wisps, in the Green Snake and in the Kings, are on one side of the River. On the other side lives the Beautiful Lily, the ideal of perfect knowledge and perfect life and work. We heard from the Ferryman that he can bring the people (gestalten, forms) from the other side to this, but can take no one back again. Let us apply this to our whole soul-mood or soul-condition and our improvement.

We find ourselves on earth as beings with souls. These or the other soul-capacities work upon us as talents, as more or less developed soul-powers. They are in us; but we have also something else in us. In us human beings if we take ourselves properly there is the feeling, the knowledge that the powers of our soul, which finally interpret the nature of things to us, are closely related to the elemental spirits (grundgeister) of the world, with the Creative, Spiritual forces. The longing for these creative forces is the longing for the Beautiful Lily. Thus we know that everything derived on one hand from the Beautiful Lily, strives on the other to return to her. Unknown forces unmastered by us have brought us from the world on the other side over the river-boundary to this side. But these forces, characterized by the Ferryman, and working in the depths of unconscious nature, cannot take us back again, for otherwise man would return, without his work and co-operation, to the kingdom of the divine, precisely as he came over. The forces which as unconscious nature-forces have brought us over into the kingdom of struggling humanity, may not lead us back again. For this other forces are required; and Goethe is aware of it. But he wants to show also how man must set about being able to re-unite with the Beautiful Lily. There are two ways. One leads over the Green Snake; we can cross by it and gradually find the kingdom of the spirit. The other way goes across the Giant's shadow. We are shown that the Giant, otherwise without strength, stretches out his hand at dusk, and its shadow falls across the River. The second road leads over this shadow. Whoever wishes therefore to cross by clear daylight to the kingdom of the spirit must use the way provided by the Snake; and whoever wishes to cross at dusk can use the way leading across the Giant's shadow. Those are the two ways to reach a spiritual picture of the world. The man who aspires to the spiritual world—not with human concepts and ideas, not with those forces which are symbolized by the worthless gold (as spirits of bare sophistry) and the Will-o'-the-Wisps—but by proceeding patiently and selflessly from experience to experience, succeeds in reaching the other bank in full sunlight.

Goethe knows that real research does not stop at material things, but must lead over beyond the boundary; beyond the river which separates us from the spiritual. But there is another way, a way for undeveloped people, who do not want to take the road of knowledge, but a way represented by the Giant. He himself is powerless, only his shadow has a certain strength. Now what is powerless in a true sense? Take all the conditions possible to man when his consciousness is reduced, as in hypnotism, somnambulism and even dream-conditions; everything by which the clear consciousness of day is subdued, whereby man is subject to lower soul-power than in clear consciousness, belongs to this second way. Here the soul, by surrendering its ordinary daily functional power of the soul, is led into the real kingdom of the spirit. The soul, however, does not itself become capable of crossing into the spiritual kingdom, but remains unconscious and is carried across like the Shadow into the kingdom of spirit. Goethe includes in the forces represented by the Giant's shadow everything which functions unconsciously and from habit, without the soul-powers which are active during clear consciousness taking part. Schiller, who was initiated into Goethe's meaning, once, at the time of the great upheavals in Western Europe, wrote to Goethe: ‘I rejoice that you have not been roughly caught in the shadow of the giant.’ What did he mean? He meant that had Goethe travelled further West, he would have been caught in the revolutionary forces of the West.

Then we see that the objects of man's quest, the height of knowledge, is represented in the ‘Temple.’ The Temple represents a higher stage of man's evolution. Goethe nowadays would say that if the Temple is something hidden, it is under the narrow crevices of the earth. Such an aspiring soul-force as is represented in the Snake can feel the shape of the Temple only dimly. By absorbing the ideal, the gold, she can illumine this shape, but fundamentally the Temple can be there to-day only as a subterranean secret. But though Goethe leaves the Temple as something subterranean for external culture, he points out that to a further-developed man this secret must be unlocked. In this he indicates the current of Spiritual Science which to-day has already caught up wide masses of people, which in a comprehensive sense seeks to make popular the content of Spiritual Science, of the principle of initiation, and of the Temple's secret. The Youth is therefore to be regarded in this truly free Goethean sense as the representative of aspiring mankind. Therefore the Temple is to rise beyond the River, so that not only a few individuals who seek illumination can cross and re-cross, but so that all people can cross the River by the bridge. Goethe, in the Temple of Initiation above the earth puts before us a future state, which will have arrived when man can go from the kingdom of the senses into the kingdom of the spiritual, and from the kingdom of the spiritual into the kingdom of the senses.

How is this attained in the Fairy Tale? Because the real secret of it is fulfilled. The solution of the story is to be found in the story itself, says Schiller, but he has also pointed out that the word that solves it is inserted in a very remarkable way. You remember the Old Man with the Lamp, which illuminates only where there is already light? Now, who is this Old Man, and what is the Lamp? What is its curious light? The Old Man stands above the situation. His lamp has the peculiar quality of changing things, wood into silver, stone into gold. It has also the quality of shining only where there is already a receptivity, a definite kind of light. As the Old Man enters the subterranean Temple he is asked how many secrets he knows. ‘Three,’ he replies. To the Silver King's question, ‘Which is the most important,’ he answers: ‘The open one.’ And when the Brazen King asks whether he would tell it them also, he says: ‘As soon as I know the fourth.’ Whereupon the Snake whispers something in his ear and he says at once:

‘The Time is at Hand.’

The solution of the riddle is what the Snake whispered in the Old Man's ear, and we have to find out what that is. It would lead us too far to say at length what the three secrets mean. I shall only hint at it. There are three Kingdoms which in evolution are so to speak stationary: the mineral, the vegetable and the animal Kingdoms, which are completed, as compared with progressive man, who is still developing. The inner development of man is so vehement and important that it cannot be confused with the development of the other three nature kingdoms. What the secret of the Old Man contains is the fact that one Kingdom of nature has arrived at the present point of a full-stop, and this is what explains the laws of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. But now comes the fourth kingdom, that of man, the secret which is to be revealed in the human soul. The secret which the Old Man must first discover, is of this kind. And how must he discover it? He knows of what it consists, but the Snake has to tell him first. This indicates to ns that man has still to go through something special, if he wants to attain the goal of evolution as the three other kingdoms have done. What this is the Snake whispers to the Old Man. She tells how a certain soul-power must be developed, if a higher stage is to be reached; she says that she has the will to sacrifice herself for this, and she does in fact sacrifice herself. Hitherto she has made a bridge when here and there someone wished to cross; but now she will become a permanent bridge, by falling in pieces, so that man will have a lasting connection between this side and that, between the spiritual and the physical. That the Snake has the will to sacrifice herself must be taken as the condition of revealing the fourth secret. The moment the Old Man hears that the Snake will sacrifice herself, he can even say: ‘The time is at hand!’ It is that soul-power which adheres to the external. And the way to be trodden is not to make this soul-force and inner science the ultimate end but self-surrender. That really is a secret, even if it is called an ‘open secret,’ that is, when any who will can know it. What is regarded in a wide circle as end in itself—everything we can learn in natural science, in political science of civilization, in history, in mathematics and all other sciences can never be an absolute end. We can never come to a true insight into the depths of the world, if we consider them as ends in themselves. Only if we are at all times ready to absorb them and regard them as means, which we offer as a bridge to let us cross over, do we come to real knowledge. We bar ourselves off from the higher, true knowledge unless we are also ready to sacrifice ourselves. Man will get an idea of what initiation is only when he ceases to carve for himself a world-conception out of external-physical concepts. He must be all feeling, with all-attuned soul, such a soul as Goethe describes in his ‘Westöstlichen Divan’ as the highest acquisition of man:

‘And so long thou hast not this, Death and Birth!
Thou art but a sorry guest, on this dark Earth.’

Death and Birth! Learn to know what life can offer, go through with it, but surpass, transcend yourself. Let it become a bridge for you, and you will wake up in a higher life and be one with the essence of things, when you no longer live in the illusion that, cut off from the higher ego, you can exhaust the essence of things. When Goethe speaks of the sacrifice of the idea and the soul-material, in order to acquire new life in higher spheres, and of the deepest inner love, he likes to think of the words of the mystic Jacob Böhme, who knows from experience this self-surrender of the Snake. Perhaps Jacob Böhme has pointed out just this to him and made it so clear to him that a man can live, even in the physical body, in a world which otherwise he would tread only after death, in the world of the eternal, the spiritual. Jacob Böhme knew also that it depends on the man, whether he can, in the higher sense, slide over into the spiritual world. He shows it in the saying: ‘Who dies not before he dies, is ruined when he dies.’ A significant saying! Man, who does not die before he dies, that is, who does not develop in himself the eternal, the inner kernel of being, will not be in a position, when he dies, to find again the spiritual kernel in himself. The eternal is in us. We must develop it in the body, so that we may find it outside the body. ‘Who dies not before he dies, is ruined when he dies.’ So it is also with the other sentence: ‘And so death is the root of all life.’

Thus we see that the things of the soul can only illumine a place where light already is: the Lamp of the Old Man can only shine where there is already light. Once more our attention is directed to those special soul-powers, of devotion and religious self-surrender, which for hundreds and thousands of years have brought the message of spiritual worlds to those who could not seek the light by way of Science or otherwise. The light of the different religious revelations is represented in the Old Man, who has this light. But to him who does not bring an inner light to meet the sense of religion, the Lamp of Religion gives no light. It can shine only where light already is and meets it. It is the Lamp which has transfigured man, which has led all mortality across to a life of soul.

And then we see that the two Kingdoms are united through the Snake's sacrifice. After it goes, so to say, through incidents symbolic of what man has to go through in his higher development in an esoteric sense, we see how the Temple of Knowledge is brought by means of all the three human soul-powers across the river, how it rises and each soul-power performs its service. This is meant to show that the soul-powers must be in harmony, since we are told: the single personality can achieve nothing; but when all work together at a favourable moment, when the strong and the weak co-operate in the right relationship, then the soul can acquire the ability to reach the highest state, the union with the Beautiful Lily. Then the Temple moves out of the hidden crevices up to the surface for all who strive in truth after knowledge and wisdom. The Youth is endowed with the knowledge-powers of thought by the Golden King: ‘Know and recognize the highest.’ He is endowed with the knowledge-powers of feeling by the Silver King, which Goethe expresses beautifully with the words: ‘Tend the sheep!’

In feeling are rooted art and religion, and for Goethe both were a unity—already at the time when he wrote on his Italian journey concerning Italy's works of art: ‘There is necessity, there is God!’

But there is also the doing—when man does not apply it to the struggle for existence, but when he makes it into a weapon for gaining beauty and wisdom. This is contained in the words spoken by the Brazen King to the Youth: ‘The Sword in the left hand, the right free!’ There is a whole world in these words. The right hand free to work the self out of human nature.

And what happens with the Fourth King, in whom all three elements are mingled together? This mixed King melts into a grotesque figure. The Will-o'-the-Wisps come and lick what gold there is off him: man's soul-powers here still want to examine what sort of stages of human development, now overcome, there once were.

Let us take yet another feature: namely, when the Giant comes staggering in and then stands there like a statue, pointing to the hours: when man has brought his life into harmony, then the subordinate has a meaning for what is intended to be methodical order. It ought to express itself like a habit. The unconscious itself will then receive a valuable meaning. Hence the Giant is depicted like a clock.

The Old Man with the Lamp is married to the Old Woman. This Old Woman represents to us nothing else but the healthy, understanding human soul-power, which does not penetrate into high regions of spiritual abstractions, but which handles everything healthily and practically, as, for instance, in religion, represented by the Old Man with the Lamp. She is the one to bring the Ferryman his pay: three heads of cabbage, three onions and three artichokes. Such a stage of development has not passed beyond the contemporary. That she is so treated by the Will-o'-the-Wisps is no doubt a reflected picture of how abstract minds look down with a certain amount of scorn on people who take things in directly by instinct or intuition.

Every point, every turn of this story is of deep significance, and if we enter into one more explanation, it must be of an esoteric kind, and you will find that one can really only give the method of explanation. Bury yourselves in the story, and you will discover that a whole world is to be found there, very much more than it has been possible to indicate to-day.

I should like to show you in two examples how much Goethe's spiritual world-view runs through his whole life, how in things of spiritual knowledge he stands in agreement in extreme old age with what he had written earlier.

While Goethe wrote ‘Faust’ he adopted a certain attitude which harks back to a symbol of a deeper evolution-path of nature. When Faust speaks of his father, who was an alchemist, and had taken over the old doctrines credulously, but had misunderstood them, he says that his father also made

‘... a Lion red, a wooer daring, Within the Lily's tepid bath espoused.’

Faust I, Scene II, p. 32.

That is what Faust says, without knowing its significance. But such a saying can become a ladder leading to high stages of development. In the Fairy Tale Goethe shows in the Youth the human being striving for the highest bride, and that with which he is to be united he calls the Beautiful Lily. You notice this Lily is to be found already in the first parts of ‘Faust.’

And, again, the very nerve of Goethe's philosophy which found expression in his Fairy Tale, is to be found also in ‘Faust:’ in Part II, in the Mystic Chorus, where Faust confronts the entry into the spiritual world, where Goethe sets down his avowal of a spiritual world-conception in monumental words. He shows there how the ascent on the road of knowledge follows in three successive stages, namely, the purification of the thought, the illumination of feeling and the working out of will. What man attains through the purification of the thought leads him to recognize the spiritual behind everything. The physical becomes a symbol of the spiritual. He goes deeper still, in order to grasp what is unattainable to thought. He then reaches a state at which he no longer regards things by means of thought, but is directed into the thing itself, where the essence of it, and what one cannot describe become accomplished fact. And that which one cannot describe, that which, as you will hear in the course of the winter addresses, must be thought of in another way, that whereby one must advance to the secrets of the will, he labels simply ‘the indescribable.’ When man has completed the threefold road through thought, feeling and will, he is united with what is called ‘eternal womanhood’ in the Chorus Mysticus, the goal of the human soul's development, the ‘Beautiful Lily’ of the Fairy Tale.

Thus we see that Goethe utters his deepest conviction, his secret revelation there also, where he brings his great confessional poem to an end, after rising up through thought and feeling and will to union with the Beautiful Lily, up to that state which finds its expression in the passage of the Chorus Mysticus, which expresses the same thing as Goethe's philosophy and spiritual science, as well as the Fairy Tale:

‘All things transitory
But as symbols are sent:
Earth's insufficiency
Here grows to Event:
The Indescribable,
Here it is done:
The Woman-Soul leadeth us
Upward and on!’

• 1. and the waves rear up like horses—aufbäumen. Ed.

One idea Goethe had for his ‘Faust’ was that at the end of Part II, Act 3, Mephistopheles, who in this Act had worn the mask of Phorkyas, should step in front of the curtain, take off the mask, descend from the Kothurni and deliver a kind of Epilogue. The idea, as the now meaningless stage instruction tells us, was that this Epilogue was to indicate the manner in which the final figure of Faust was to be taken. The words Mephistopheles was to speak as Commentator are not in ‘Faust,’ but they have been preserved on a single sheet among Goethe's literary remains. Through the mouth of Mephistopheles Goethe seeks to tell the public in a not unhumorous way what attitude to adopt towards his Faust. These words are worthy of notice, and in a certain respect to-day's study is to be conducted in their spirit. They refer to Euphorion who was born in some spirit fashion, and jumps and hops about immediately after his birth and utters ‘a tender word.’ In this way these words refer to him:

‘Enough, ye see him, though it is much worse
Than on the British stage, where a small child
Grows step by step to take heroic shape.
Here it is madder still: for, scarce conceived,
He's also born:
He leaps and dances, speaks a tender word.
If many criticize,
There are who think this is not to be taken
So straight and crudely, that there's more behind.
One scents the Mysteries, perhaps withal
Mystifications, Indian and may be
Egyptian; for the man is right who knows
How to squeeze all together, brew it well
And twist and turn in etymology.

We say it also, and the true disciple
Of the newer symbolism will agree.’

Thus all such explanations as rest on a basis of old traditions are to be straightway excluded. On the contrary, an explanation is demanded drawn from the depths of spirit-life. Therefore also Mephistopheles says: ‘We say it also, and the true disciple of the newer symbolism will agree.’ If you read carefully Part II of ‘Faust,’ you will know that Goethe is rich in word-construction in this poem, and that we must not therefore cavil at what appears to be ungrammatical. Here in this sentence is clearly expressed that the man who understands Faust rightly in Goethe's sense, also sees that deeper things lie behind. But everything that rests on study or might lead to a merely symbolic explanation is discouraged. The demand is that the explanation of Faust is to depend on the faithful discipleship which is aware of the spiritual experience which we may call ‘experience in the sense of the new Spiritual Science.’ ‘The true disciple of the newer symbolism’ is the commentator of Faust in Goethe's sense. Thus it is to be done by drawing direct from spirit-life; and Goethe no doubt here betrays that he has put something into it which made it possible for him to get away from old symbols and to coin new and independent symbols out of direct spirit-life. If we want to compare the presentation of the spiritual world in the two parts of ‘Faust,’ we might say that Part I presents to a large extent the fruits of knowledge—the outer influences on one who has dim ideas of the spiritual world, and who tries to enter it through reading all kinds of things and conducting all kinds of experiments. Part I contains this studied view of the supernatural world.

Part II contains experience, living experience, and if you understand rightly, you know that it can derive only from a personality which has learnt to know the reality of the spiritual, supernatural worlds behind the physical world. Truly, Goethe was consistent in his presentation, although some things in Part II are so dissimilar from Part I. What he had learnt in Part I, he experienced in Part II, he has seen it. He was in the spiritual, supernatural world: he indicates this, too, clearly enough, where in Part I he makes Faust say:

‘What says the Sage, now first I recognize:
“The Spirit-world no closures fasten;
Thy sense is shut, thy heart is dead:
Disciple, up! untiring, hasten
To bathe thy breast in morning-red!”‘

Scene I, p. 15.

Goethe can point—from personal knowledge—to what he sees who ‘bathes his breast in morning-red,’ in order to await the rising of the spiritual sun. We find in the whole of Part I—no doubt you realize it from yesterday's discourse—an energetic upward-striving of Faust the student, to this dawn, but we also find clearly indicated that the path is nowhere traversed in a satisfactory way. Now how does Part II begin? Is the advice of the wise man, ‘to bathe the breast in morning-red,’ carried out in one respect?

We find Faust ‘bedded on flowery turf, fatigued, restless, endeavouring to sleep,’ surrounded by spiritual beings. We find him withdrawn from all physical vision, veiled in sleep. Beings from the spiritual world are busy with his spirit, which is withdrawn from the physical world. Marvellously and forcefully we are told what direction Faust's soul takes in order to grow into the spiritual world. Then we are shown how his soul really does grow into that world which is described as the spiritual world in the ‘Prologue in Heaven,’ in Part I. Goethe says from deep experience what was always told the pupil in the School of Pythagoras, that he who enters the spiritual world is met by the secret music of the universe:

‘The sun-orb sings, in emulation,
'Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round:
His path predestined through Creation
He ends with step of thunder-sound.’

This must be the music from the worlds of the spiritual life, if they are to be depicted as they are. What is said here of the ‘music of the spheres’ is not a poetic image, nor a metaphor, but a truth, and Goethe remains consistent to it, in that Faust, withdrawn from the physical world, now proceeds to grow, like an initiate, into that world from which this music comes. Therefore, in the scene where at the beginning of Part II Faust is withdrawn into the spiritual world, it is written again:

‘Hearken! Hark!—The Hours careering
Sounding loud to spirit-hearing.
See the new-born day appearing!
Rocky portals jarring shatter,
PhSbus' wheels in rolling clatter,
With a crash the Light draws near!
Pealing rays and trumpet-blazes—
Eye is blinded, ear amazes:
The Unheard can no one hear!’

Faust II, Act I.

Would that those people who think that they can understand a poem only if they can say ‘Such things must be taken as the poet's images, created by right of poetic licence’—would that they would cease to call these things realistic. The physical sun makes no sound! It is the spiritual sun behind the physical which sounds in the ears of him who is entering the spiritual life. They are spiritual, not physical sounds. In this passage, again, we hear the sounds of thousands of years harmonizing. Unconsciously he who can follow the course of the human spirit through thousands of years will be reminded in this passage of some great words spoken thousands of years ago; words spoken by one who through his initiation knew that what appears to us as the physical sun is the expression of the sun-spirit and the sun-soul, as the physical human body is the expression of the human spirit and the human soul. He looked up to the spiritual sun and called it ‘Ahura Mazdao,’ ‘The great sun-aura.’ We are reminded of Zarathustra, who, looking thus at the sun, and feeling the world full of spirit, spoke the great and powerful words:

‘I want to speak! Listen to me, all ye who from far or near, desire to listen: Mark well, for He will be revealed. No more shall the False Teacher destroy the world—he who has professed evil faiths with his tongue. I shall speak of what is the highest in the world, what He, the Great, Ahura Mazdao, has taught me. Whosoever will not hear His Words, as I speak them, will suffer misery when the Earth-Cycle is fulfilled!’

Before the spiritual sun rises in the soul, the learner must bathe in the dawn which precedes it. Hence the words of the Wise Man: ‘Disciple, up! untiring hasten to bathe thy breast in morning-red!’ Does Faust, the disciple, do this?

After the spiritual beings which surrounded him had been busy with him while his soul was for a time withdrawn from his body, he awakes as a changed man. The soul has entered the body, so that he has a dim idea, or he bathes in the morning-red, of the rising sun of the spirit:

‘Life's pulses now with fresher force awaken
To greet the mild ethereal twilight o'er me;
This night, thou, Earth! hast also stood unshaken,
And now thou breathest new-refreshed before me,
And now beginnest, all thy gladness granting,
A vigorous resolution to restore me,
To see the highest life for which I'm panting.—
The world unfolded lies in twilight glimmer,
A thousand voices in the grove are chanting;
Vale in, vale out, the misty streaks grow dimmer;
The deeps with heavenly light are penetrated;
The boughs, refreshed, lift up their leafy shimmer
From gulfs of air where sleepily they waited;
Colour on colour from the background cleareth,
Where flower and leaf with trembling pearls are freighted,
And all around a Paradise appeareth.’

Faust II, Act I.

Faust now feels also that he has awakened in that world, into which he has been translated during his unconsciousness, and he bathes his earthly breast in the morning-red. But it is only the beginning of the journey. He feels that he is at the gate of initiation, and thereupon he cannot yet bear the direct vision of the spiritual sun:

‘But if there burst from those eternal spaces
A flood of flame, we stand confounded ever;
For Life's pure torch we sought the shining traces,
And seas of fire—and what a fire!—surprise us.’

Wherefore he sees at first the world of the spiritual—but still, as we shall see in a moment, as a symbol.

‘Behind me, therefore, let the sun be glowing!
The cataract, between the crags deep-riven,
I thus behold with rapture ever-growing.
From plunge to plunge in thousand streams't is given,
And yet a thousand, to the valleys shaded
While foam and spray in air are whirled and driven.
Yet how superb, across the tumult braided,
The painted rainbow's changeful life is bending,
Now clearly drawn, dissolving now and faded,
And evermore the showers of dew descending!
Of human striving there's no symbol fuller:
Consider, and 't is easy comprehending—
Life is not light, but the refracted colour.’

Faust II, Act I.

This is Faust bathing his earthly breast in the morning-red, in order to prepare himself to look straight at the spiritual sun, which rises at initiation.

Now Faust is to go into the great world with the gifts he has received as one approaching illumination. It might be thought remarkable that Faust is now transplanted to the Imperial Court, when he is in the midst of all kinds of masques and revels. All the same, these masques and pranks contain deep truths and are everywhere significant. It is not possible to enter upon this significance to-day. It will be in any case the task of this study to bring out only a few moments from the whole content of Part II of ‘Faust’ Many lectures would have to be given, if we wanted to throw light on everything. We shall say only this about the general idea of these Masque scenes: For a man who surveys human life with an enlightened eye, certain words will have a different meaning from what they have in ordinary external life. Such a man, steeping himself in the whole great course of human evolution, knows that such words as ‘Folk spirit’ (Volksgeist), ‘Time-spirit’ (Zeitgeist), are not mere abstractions. He sees in the spiritual world the true and real beings corresponding to what one ordinarily calls abstractly ‘Folk spirit and Time-spirit.’¹ Thus, since he has the vision, it is made clear to Faust as he enters the great world where decisions affecting the world are made from a Court, that in all these happenings there are supernatural powers at work. Outside in the physical world one can observe only individual people and the laws they have. In the spiritual world there are beings behind all that. Whereas people are under the impression that what they do is prompted by their own souls, and that they make their own resolutions, human acts and human thoughts are really pervaded and permeated by beings from the supernatural world—national spirits, time-spirits, and so on. People think they are free to make resolves, to think and to form ideas, but they are guided by spiritual beings behind the physical world. What men call their understanding, by which they believe they can control the course of time, is the expression of spiritual beings behind. Thus, the whole Masque, which is to have some meaning, becomes for Faust the expression of the fact that one can realize how in the course of world-events a part is played by powers originating in those beings which Faust met already in Part I, originating, in short, in Mephistopheles. Man is surrounded by such spiritual beings, towering above him. Thus Mephistopheles appears at the turn of the modern age as that being which prompts the human intellect to the discovery of paper money. And Goethe presents the whole affair with a certain humour: how the same spirit, the same intellect which in man is bound to the physical instrument of the brain, when inspired by the related spirit which lets nothing count but the physical, gives rise to such phenomena as can control the world—phenomena however which have an importance only for the physical world. In this way the deeper sense of development is indicated precisely in this Masque and mummery. But we are soon led out of the world which lies before us, where we are shown the part played by supernatural powers, and into the really spiritual world.

After it has been made rich, the Court wishes to be amused by the presentation of figures from ancient history. Paris and Helena are to be conjured up from the past. Mephistopheles, who belongs to those powers of the spiritual world which inspired the discovery of paper money, cannot penetrate to the worlds which give rise to the whole deeper development of men. Faust carries in him the soul and spirit which can penetrate these spiritual worlds. For he is the disciple who has bathed the earthly breast in the morning-red, and we are shown how Faust has already experienced something which can be looked upon as the first stage of clairvoyance—the stage completed by the clairvoyant when he has put his soul through the appropriate exercises. There are certain exercises which the student has to perform, in meditation, concentration, and so on, which are set him in occult-scientific symbols, in which he steeps himself, whereby the soul, withdrawing from the physical and etheric body, is transfigured in the night, as it at first becomes clairvoyant in the spiritual world. What is it that the student experiences here, when he has received the effect of those exercises?

The first stage of clairvoyance is something which can bring people to a condition of great confusion. We shall see best why this is if we look at what are sometimes called the ‘dangers of initiation.’

Living in the physical world of the senses, one sees the objects round one in sharp contours, outlined in space, and the human soul makes halt at or attaches itself to these firm outlines, which one finds everywhere, filling the soul when it gives itself to sense-phenomena. Now just imagine for a moment all these objects round you becoming misty, losing their contours, merging into each other, becoming like cloud-pictures. It is something like this in the world into which the clairvoyant enters after the first exercises have taken effect. For he arrives at what is behind the whole sense-world, what lies behind all matter, what gives rise to the sense-world. He arrives at the stage where the spiritual world first approaches him. If you think how, in the mountains, crystals form themselves out of their mother-substances into their shapes and lines, so is it, roughly, when the clairvoyant human being comes into the spiritual world. At first it all appears confusing if the student is not sufficiently prepared. But the figures of the physical world grow out of this chaotic world, like the crystal shapes out of their mother-substance. At first the spiritual world is experienced like the mother-substances of the physical world. Into this realm man enters by the gates of death. The images, indeed, will take on other, fixed shapes, when the clairvoyant is further developed, shapes which are interwoven with those outlines which exist in the spiritual world, and which resound with what we have called in the spiritual sense, the music of the spheres. The clairvoyant experiences this after a time, but at first it is all confusing. Still, into this realm enters man.

Now if the images of Helena and Paris are to be brought up, it must be from this world. Faust alone, who has bathed the earthly breast in the morning-red, and found the entrance to the spiritual world, can step into this world, Mephistopheles cannot. He can achieve only what the world of reason can achieve. He can go as far as the key that opens the spiritual realm. But Faust has the confidence and certainty that he will find there what he seeks: the everlasting, the permanent residue when the physical form of man is dissolved at death into its elements.

Now it is wonderful how we are told the way in which Faust is to descend into the spiritual realm. The introduction already shows us that the man who depicts it is well acquainted with the facts—as well as with the perceptions and feeling which come over anyone who really knows these things and does not merely play at them. It all stood in grand manner before Goethe's soul—all that exists of this world of feeling when the seed for initiation, described yesterday, was opened by a particular event.

He read a passage in Plutarch, where is described how the city of Engyium seeks an alliance with Carthage. Nicias, the friend of the Romans, is to be arrested. But he poses as a man possessed. The pro-Carthaginians want to seize him, but they hear these words from his mouth: ‘The Mothers, the Mothers press hard on me!’ That was a cry which in old times one heard only from a man who was in a condition of clairvoyance and withdrawn from the physical world. Nicias could be regarded either as a fool, as one possessed, or as a clairvoyant. But how could this be known? Because he said what those who had some knowledge of the spiritual world recognized. At the utterance of: ‘It is the Mothers who press hard on me!’ the citizens realize that he is not possessed, but inspired; that he can say something as a real witness which can be learnt in the spiritual world—and so he remains unmolested.

On reading this scene, there is released in Goethe's soul something which had been sown as the kernel of initiation already during his Frankfort period. He knew what it meant to penetrate into the spiritual world. Hence also the words put into the mouth of Faust, when Mephistopheles speaks of the ‘Mothers,’ Faust shudders. He knows what it means—that lie touches on a holy but forbidden kingdom, forbidden, that is, for him who is not sufficiently prepared. Mephistopheles, indeed knows also of this realm, that he may not enter it unprepared. Hence the words: ‘Unwilling I reveal a loftier mystery.’ Still, Faust must descend into this kingdom in order to bring to pass what has to be brought to pass—into this kingdom where one sees what is otherwise firm and solid in transfigurations of eternal being. Here the spiritual sense catches sight behind the physical forms of the sense-world of what penetrates into this sense-world to maintain in it its sharp outlines. And then Mephistopheles says, describing this realm as it appears to all who step into it:

‘Escape from the Created
To shapeless forms in liberated spaces!
Enjoy what long ere this was dissipated!
There whirls the press like clouds on clouds unfolding.’

One cannot depict more vividly a real experience of a man truly initiated. The things ‘long ere this dissipated’ will be found in this world, when it is presented thus. ‘To shapeless forms of liberated spheres,’ i.e., into that realm where the forms of the sense-world are no more, where they do not exist, which is ‘liberated’ from them—there where ‘what long ere this was dissipated’ does exist—into this realm Faust is to betake himself. And when one reads ‘There whirls the press, like clouds on clouds unfolding,’ one recognizes again something which is characteristic in the highest degree. Let us think of the entry into the supernatural world as a gate. Before one enters, the soul has to be prepared by means of worthy symbols. One of these is taken from the appearance of the rising sun, and completes the image of bathing the earthly breast in the morning-red: the sun making a particular triangle round itself. The soul goes through this symbol and experiences its after-effects when it has passed through the gate, when it is within, in the spiritual world. Hence these effects: ‘There whirls the press, like clouds on clouds unfolding.’ Every word would be a living proof of what this scene is meant to be: Faust's penetration to the first stages of the supernatural world, which you find called the ‘imaginative world.’ When Goethe presented this, he was not obliged to compound a picture of the spiritual world from old Indian or Egyptian descriptions; he was able to put down quite realistically what he himself had experienced; and this he did.

Now Faust brings up the ‘glowing tripod,’ round which the Mothers sit, the sources of existence in the spiritual world. With its help Faust is able to conjure up Paris and Helena before men, and to present pictures from the spiritual world. It would lead too far to explain in detail the important symbol of the glowing tripod. We are concerned to show how a kind of initiation is really depicted in Part II of ‘Faust.’ But we see how carefully and correctly Goethe proceeds by the fact that he shows us the way into the spiritual world which he only who is worthy can tread slowly and with resignation. He shows us that Faust is not even yet worthy enough. Only he is worthy to enter the spiritual world who has put off everything that is connected with narrow personality so that no wishes or desires, arising from it, any longer exist. This is apparently to say little, but in truth it is saying a great deal. For usually between what is sought and what is to be achieved by the cancellation of all personal wishes and desires, there lies not only one human life, but many. Goethe shows with the certainty of knowledge that Faust is not yet worthy. Desire awakes in him; he wants to embrace Helena from a personal desire. Whereupon the whole thing collapses—it vanishes. He has committed a sin against the spiritual world. He cannot hold her. He must penetrate further into the spiritual world. And so we see him in the course of Part II going further on his way. We see him after being ‘paralysed by Helena’ again in another state of consciousness, withdrawn from the physical body and fallen into sleep; and how something happens around him which as it were clambers from the sense-world into the supersense-world. What this is shows us nothing other than that Faust, once again withdrawn from the physical world, experiences something which can only with full consciousness be experienced in the supersense-world. What he has now to go through is the complete growth of man. He must go through those mighty events which take place behind the scenes of the stage of the physical world, so that he really can behold what he wants to behold. Helena must be brought back again into the physical world, she must be reincarnated into a new body. When he brings back the merely imaginative image from the spiritual world the whole thing breaks down. He must go deeper. We see him now overcoming a second stage. In this state in which he is put we now see how the consciousness gradually lives upward from the sense-world into the supersense-world. This is done in a poetically masterly way. It is not a case of marvelling at the reality of it, for that is explained simply by the fact that Goethe depicts Part II of ‘Faust’ from his own experience. But the way is masterly in which Goethe represents the secret of Helena's becoming mortal, it is also poetic.

Whoever is acquainted with the elementary truths of Spiritual Science, knows that man, in assuming life on our earth, brings with him an eternal, spiritual part from quite other realms, that this spiritual part is combined below with the physical hereditary line, taken from the physical-sense-world and bequeathed finally by father and mother. On the whole—taking the various parts of man altogether without entering more precisely upon human nature—we may say that in man are combined something eternal and something earthly. The eternal part, going on from life to life, which descends from the spiritual world to be embodied in a physical form—this we call ‘spirit.’ And in order that this spirit can combine with physical matter, there must be an intermediate part, and this in terms of Spiritual Science is the soul. Thus spirit, soul and body are combined in the formation of a human being.

Now Faust with his increased consciousness is to experience how these parts of human nature combine. The spirit descends from spiritual spheres, gradually surrounds itself with the soul which is derived from the psychic world, and then draws the physical covering round itself in accordance with the laws of the physical world. If one knows the principle which attaches itself as ‘soul’ around the spirit, and often called by us the ‘astral body,’ if one knows what is between spirit and body, one has that intermediate member, which as it were binds together spirit and body.

The spirit Faust finds in the realm of the Mothers. He knows already where to look for it, whence it comes, when it betakes itself into a new embodiment. But he has yet to learn how the tie is formed, when the spirit comes into the physical world. And now we are shown in that remarkable scene, how, starting from the sense-world and touching the boundary of the supersense-world, the ‘Homunculus’ is produced in Wagner's laboratory. Mephistopheles himself has a hand in it, and we are told in spirited words that only the conditions of his creation are provided by Wagner. Thus this remarkable figure, the Homunculus comes into being, assisted as it were by the spiritual world. Much thought has been spent on this Homunculus. But thinking and speculating on such things lead nowhere. The problem who he is can be solved only by real creation out of Spiritual Science. To those who spoke of him in the Middle Ages he was no other than a definite form of the astral body.

This scene is not to be pictured in the sphere of sense—but in such a way that it must be thought of as quite removed into the spiritual world. You must follow all the events in Faust's condition of consciousness. The way in which the Homunculus is described in the subsequent scenes shows him to be really the representative of the astral body.

‘He has no lack of qualities ideal
But far too much of palpable and real.’

That is the characteristic of the astral body, and he says of himself:

‘Since I exist, then I must active be.’

an astral figure, which cannot stay still, compelled to live in continuous activity. He must be taken away to those spheres, where he can actually combine spirit and body.

And now we see the creation of man, which Faust experiences, represented to us in the ‘Classical Walpurgis-Night.’ There we are shown the sum of all the powers and beings which are active behind the physical-sense-world, and spirits from the physical world are continually being interspersed, which have trained their souls so far that they have grown together with the spiritual world, and that they are at the same time conscious in the spiritual world. The two great philosophers Anaxagoras and Thales are figures of this kind. The Homunculus wishes to find out from them how one can come to be, how one can proceed to a physical form, when one is spiritual. All the figures which we see in this ‘Classical Walpurgis-Night’ are there to assist—figures of the realization of the astral body which is ready to enter the material, physical world. If one could follow it all exactly, every detail would be a proof of its meaning. The Homunculus seeks information from Proteus and Nereus as to how he can enter the physical world. He is shown how he can wrap himself in the elements of matter, and how the spiritual qualities are in him—viz., how the soul gradually betakes itself into the physical-sense elements—through that which has played its part in the realms of nature kingdoms. We are shown how the soul has to traverse again the states of the mineral, the plant and the animal realms, in order to rise to human shape:

‘On the broad ocean's breast must thou begin!’

that is, in the mineral realm; then you must go through the plant realm. Goethe, indeed, invents an expression for it, which does not otherwise exist. He makes the Homunculus say: ‘Es grunelt so:’²

‘Here breathes and blows a tender air;
And I delight me in the fragrance rare.’

It is pointed out to him what road he has to take till a physical body is formed by degrees round him. Finally comes the moment of love. Eros will complete the whole. Thales gives the advice:

‘Yield to the wish so wisely stated,
And at the source be thou created!
Be ready for the rapid plan!
There, by eternal canons wending,
Through thousand, myriad forms ascending,
Thou shalt attain, in time, to Man.’

Then, when the Homunculus has entered upon the physical world, he loses his qualities, the ego becomes his master!

‘But struggle not to higher orders:
Once Man, within the human borders,
Then all is at an end with thee.’

So says Proteus—i.e., at an end with the astral body which has not yet penetrated into the human realm.

Goethe's whole theory of nature, with its relationship between all life, and its metamorphosic development from the incomplete to the complete appears here in the picture. The spirit can at first be only like a seed in the world. It must pour itself into matter, into the elements, and dive below in them, in order to assume from them a higher form. The Homunculus is shattered on Galatea's shell-chariot. He dissolves into the elements. It is a marvellous presentation of the moment when the astral body has enwrapped itself in a body of physical matter—and can now live as man.

These are experiences Faust goes through while he is in another state of consciousness, a condition outside the body. He is becoming gradually ready to behold the secrets lying behind physical-material existence. And now he is able to behold the spirit of Helena, from the realm of things ‘long ere this dissipated’ appearing in bodily shape before him. We have in Act 3 of Part II the re-embodiment of Helena. Goethe represents the idea of re-incarnation cryptically—as he had to in his day; how spirit, soul and body unite from the three realms, to form a human being—and before us stands the re-incarnated Helena.

We must of course remember that, since he is a poet, Goethe presents in pictorial form the experience of the clairvoyant consciousness. Wherefore we must not rush in with heavy-fisted criticism and ask: ‘Is Helena now really re-incarnated?’ We must keep in mind that a poet is speaking of what he has himself experienced in spiritual worlds.

In this way Faust, after having conquered a new stage of life, is able to experience harmony with what is ‘long ere this dissipated,’ the union with Helena. We see now how a being springs from the union of the human soul with the spiritual when the soul has raised itself up into higher worlds; a child of the spirit, subject not to the laws of the sense-world, but to the laws of the spiritual world: Euphorion. We shall understand what springs from the union of the raised spirit with the sense-world if we remember the previously-quoted passage from the proposed Epilogue of Mephistopheles-Phorkyas at the end of Act III, and if we realize that Goethe has in ‘Euphorion’ put in traits which belong to Byron, whom he much honoured. In doing so he may, after all, apply the laws of the spiritual world to it, since he is concerned with events in the spiritual world. And so Euphorion, though scarce conceived, may be already born and at once jump about and stir himself and say spirited things. Once more we see how strictly and conscientiously Goethe takes the entry into the spiritual world. In his aspiration for supernatural worlds, Faust is far beyond his present experiences. But even so he is not free from those powers from which he must liberate himself, if his soul is to unite completely with the spiritual world. He is not free from what Mephistopheles mixes into these spiritual experiences. Faust is what one calls a mystic, who—in the Helena-Euphorion scene—lives and moves completely in the spiritual world. But because he has not yet scaled the necessary step which makes him capable of being absorbed entirely by the spiritual world, so, once more, what he can experience in it escapes him: viz., Helena and Euphorion. What he had brought by his experience from the spiritual world eludes him yet again. He has become capable of living in the spiritual world, of experiencing Euphorion, the child of the spirit, who springs from the marriage between the human soul and the world-spirit—but it escapes him again and vanishes. Now there sounds from the depths a remarkable call. He is now like a mystic, stumbling for a time, one who has had a glimpse into the spiritual world and knows what it is like, but could not remain, and sees himself suddenly cast out again into the material world: he feels his soul to be the mother of what was born from the spiritual world, but what he has born sinks again into the spiritual world, and it is as if it were to call out to the soul itself:

‘Leave me here, in the gloomy Void,
Mother, not thus alone!’

as if the human soul had to follow into the realm which has once more disappeared. Faust retains nothing more than Helena's robe and veil. The man who goes deeper into the meaning of such things, knows what Goethe meant with the ‘robe and veil;’ it is so exactly what remains when one has once peeped into the spiritual world and has then had to withdraw. There remains with one what is nothing else but the abstraction, the ideas, which stretch from epoch to epoch—nothing else but robe and veil of spiritual powers which endure from age to age.

So the mystic is again thrust out for a time and confined to his thoughts, like the intelligent historian, with everywhere robe and veil which carry him from age to age. These ideas are not unfruitful; for him who is limited to the sense-world, they are very much of a necessity. For him, who has already a feeling and an experience of the spiritual world, they contain another importance. They stand out dry and abstract for the man who in any case is an abstractionist, but the man who has once been touched by the spiritual world—even if he grasps only these abstract ideas—is carried by them through the world into quite another age, in which he can again experience something of the effect of the powers throughout the great world.

Faust is transplanted again into the world he once before experienced at the Court. He sees again how the beings, in whose deeds man is only embedded, play the chief part. He sees again how supernatural threads are spun, and how the same power which he knows as Mephistopheles helps to spin them. So his life passes once more from the sense-world into the super-sense—he learns how powers worm themselves into our sense-world which we see out there in the world of nature, how Mephistopheles leads, as it were, the spirits behind the forces of nature on to the battlefield: ‘Hill-folk,’ he calls them. The powers behind the material world are represented as if the hills themselves bring their people into the war. But here is a life that stands on a subordinate plane. This participation of a world that lies below the realm of man, though directed by spiritual forces, is here plainly depicted. There follows, grandly shown, the description of the part played by the historical forces, which are real forces for the spiritual spectator. Out of the old armouries and storerooms where lie the old helmets, come those beings of whom the abstractionist would say they are ‘historical ideas’—of whom, however, he who can look into it knows that they live in the spiritual world. And we see how Faust in his higher state of consciousness is led to the great powers in history, we see these powers of history arise and being led into the field. Faust's consciousness is to be raised still higher. The whole world must appear to him spiritualized—all the events we see around us, which the ordinary abstractionist describes only with his understanding, for being limited to a physical brain, he imagines he has done everything when he describes the externals. But all this is connected, and is guided and directed by supernatural beings and forces.

When man's life is carried in this way to spiritual heights, he discovers the whole might of that which is to drag him down again into the material world. He gets to know in a remarkable manner him whom he has not quite got to know before. So it is now with Faust. He stands now at an important point in his inner development: he has to complete the journey: Mephistopheles is involved in everything he has seen up to now. He can be free from Mephistopheles—from those spiritual forces which bind man to the sense-world, and try to prevent his liberation—only when he accosts Mephistopheles as the Tempter. There where the world with its realms, nature and history with its spirituality confront Faust, he experiences something in which the man who understands these things can without difficulty recognize from what depths Goethe spoke. The ‘Tempter,’ who would drag man down when he has risen a certain way into the spiritual world, comes to man and tries to give him false feelings and sensations concerning what he sees in the supernatural world. The approach of the Tempter to man is presented in the grand manner. He is the same who came to the Christ and promised him all the kingdoms of the world and their glories.

Something like this happens to the man who has entered into the spiritual world. He is promised by the Tempter the world with all its glories.

What does this mean? Nothing else than that he may not believe that anything of this world could still belong to his narrow egoism. That all personality with its egoistic wishes and desires must be thrust away, that the ‘Tempter’ must be overcome, Goethe points out through Mephistopheles in such a way that it may be a touchstone for us of what his meaning is:

‘Yet now, with sober season to address thee,
Did nothing on our outside shell impress thee?
From this exceeding height thou saw'st unfurled
The glory of the Kingdoms of the World.’

(Matt. 4.)

One might say that Goethe points out with these words, more than clearly enough for those who refuse to understand, what he really intends, in order to represent also this important stage in the spiritual growth of man. Then Faust succeeds in so far overcoming the egoism of persona! wish and desire, that he dedicates all his activity to that piece of land with which he has been enfeoffed. He does not desire possession of this land—he does not desire fame—nothing of all that—he wants only to devote himself to work for other people:

‘Stand on free soil among a people free!’

We must take these words to mean that personal egoism gradually departs from the human soul. For no one who has not overcome this personal egoism, can really reach the last stage, which Goethe still wants to depict. So he shows Faust at the point where the garments of human personal egoism fall away like scales, where Faust gives himself absolutely to the spiritual, where in fact all the frippery of fame and external honours in the world are nothing more to him. But one thing Faust has not even yet overcome. And again we see from a spiritual point of view deep, deep into Goethe's heart, as he now describes what happens next.

Faust has become a selfless man up to a point. He has learnt what it means to say: ‘The act is all, the glory is nothing.’ He has learnt to say: ‘I desire to be active. My activity must flow out into the world—I will have nothing as reward for this activity!’ But in one small incident it is revealed that his egoism has not completely disappeared. On his wide territories there stands an old cottage on rising ground, in which lives an old couple, Philemon and Baucis. In all things Faust's egoism has disappeared, except with regard to this cottage. Here there is a last remnant of egoism which speaks in his soul. What he could do with this rising ground! He could stand up there and survey at a glance the fruits of his labour—and rejoice at what he had accomplished! That is a last bit of egoism, the enjoyment in a physical survey. Gratification in a commanding material view, that remains to him still. He must get beyond. Nothing of desire and comfort, i.e., of direct surrender to the outer world, with which egoism is connected, may remain in his soul. And once more we see Faust in touch with spiritual forces. In the ‘Midnight’ scene, enter four Grey Women. They come up near to him. Three of them, Want, Guilt and Necessity cannot do anything to him, but now something emerges which belongs to the experiences of the Way of Initiation. Along the Way of Initiation there is a secret connection between all that a man's egoism can make him do and that attitude of soul which is expressed by the word ‘Care.’ In that man who is far enough to look selflessly into the spiritual world, there is no care. Care is the companion of egoisms. And as little as some can perhaps believe that when Care is present, egoism has not disappeared, so true is it that on the long, self-denying path into the spiritual world, egoism must completely vanish. If man steps into the spiritual world and brings with him into it any trace of egoism, Care comes and reveals itself as a disturbing power. Here we have something of the dangers of initiation. In the material world, the kindly powers of the spiritual world take care to see that the power of Care cannot thus come near human beings. But the moment they grow together with the spiritual world, and learn to know powers which are at play there, such things as Care become disturbing forces. Some things may have been overcome by means of the keys which lead into the spiritual world, but Care slips through all key-holes. To be sure, if man is far enough, and faces Care bravely, Care becomes a power that can remove from him this last remnant of egoism. Faust goes blind. Why? He goes blind because the power of the last bit of egoism remaining in him is cancelled by the power of Care. The last possibility of personal enjoyment is removed. It gets darker and darker all round. Now his soul feels the last remnant of egoism when he has ordered the cottage to be pulled down, from whose site the selfish pleasure of satisfaction in his work could have been derived.

‘But in my inmost spirit all is light!’

Now Faust's soul belongs to that world over which Care and all the disturbing elements which vex the body have no power, and he experiences what those about to be initiated into the spiritual world experience. He takes part as an outside observer, in events which he does not experience in the physical world, his own death and burial. He looks down from the spiritual world upon the physical world and upon all that happens to him as if it were another. The events concern now only those powers which are in the physical world.

It would take us far to explain how Goethe now makes the ‘Lemures’ appear, which consist only of sinews and bones, so that they have no soul; they represent man at the stage before he has received a soul. But Faust himself is carried into the spiritual world. We see Mephistopheles fighting a last battle for Faust's soul—a significant and remarkable battle. If one were to divide this battle up into its details one would see what a deep knowledge of the spiritual world Goethe had.

There lies the dying Faust. Mephistopheles fights for the soul. He knows that this soul can leave the body at several places. Here there is much to be learnt by those who read in one or other handbook how the soul leaves the body. Goethe is further. He knows that it is not always the same place, but that the soul's departure from the body in death depends entirely on the state of development of the person. He knows that the soul, while in the body, receives a shape corresponding to the body only because of the elastic power of love. Mephistopheles believes Faust's soul to be ready for the Kingdom of darkness. In that case it could have only the shape he describes as a ‘hideous worm.’ When a soul has given itself to its own powers, it can have only a shape expressing its virtues or vices. If Faust's soul were ripe for the Kingdom of darkness, its shape would have been as Mephistopheles thought. But now it is developed and is carried away, because its virtues are such as correspond to the spiritual world and spiritual worlds take possession of it.

Next we meet those people who are, so to speak, the connecting units between the physical and the spiritual world, who stand as initiates in the physical world and range with their spirit into the spiritual world: supernatural men of experience and observers—so they are introduced to us. Goethe tells in his poem that he has inscribed as ‘Symbolum’ how two voices resound out of the spiritual world:

‘Still call from beyond
The voices of spirits,
The voices of masters:
To exercise fail not
The powers of goodness.’

Here also Goethe is consistent with his knowledge. He represents the spirits which are not incarnate in the material world. But first he represents those to whom the name ‘Masters’ is often applied, who are incarnate in the material world. He represents them in the garb which was the handiest in his day, as ‘Pater Ecstaticus,’ ‘Pater Seraphicus,’ and ‘Pater Profundus.’ Concerning this he said to Eckermann: ‘In any case you will allow that the ending, where the rescued soul rises to heaven, was very difficult to do, and that I might have easily lost myself in vagueness with such supernatural, scarcely guessable things, unless I gave my poetic intentions a delimiting form and firmness by means of the sharply-outlined, ecclesiastical figures and ideas.’

Whoever heard here the lectures on ‘Christian Initiation’ will recognize again to what extent Goethe was initiated into those things.

Thus Faust's soul rises through the regions, through which those souls have passed which have grown accustomed to the spiritual world and are active in it, and assist in bringing other souls into it. And then we see how Goethe lays down, so to speak, his ‘credo’—that ‘credo’ which marks him as a member of that spiritual-scientific stream, which has also so often been spoken of here, especially in the lecture ‘Where and how does one find the Spirit’³ in which an example was given of how man ‘lives’ himself into the spiritual world. There was mentioned the ‘black Cross with the red roses.’ Powers are awakened in the soul when man yields himself to this ‘Cross of roses,’ which represents in the black cross the sinking down of the sense world and in the red roses the blossoming up of the spiritual world. It represents what the abstract words say:

‘And until thou this thing hast,
This death and birth,
Thou art but a sorry guest
On the dark earth.’

What man attains through spiritual understanding, through the power of the red roses, Goethe was well aware, and he confesses it: the red roses fall down from the spiritual world, as the immortal part of Faust is taken up. And so we see how Goethe really shows us the path of the human soul into the spiritual world.

Some things could be presented only sketchily. For there is something peculiar about this ‘Faust’ of Goethe: it becomes deeper and even deeper, the more one grows into it, and only then one learns what Goethe can become for humanity. One learns to recognize what he will one day become, if Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy will illuminate Goethe's esoteric poetry, where he speaks of the spiritual world from his own experiences. Goethe depicts realistically what he knows to be facts of the spiritual world. This second Part of Faust is a realistic Poem—closed of course to those who do not know that the spiritual worlds are realities.⁴ What we have are not ‘symbols,’ but only a poetic clothing up of quite realistic, albeit supernatural events, such as the soul experiences when it becomes one with the world that is its original home; when it feels itself possessed, not of knowledge which is only an abstraction, a growing together with sense observation or abstract understanding, but of knowledge which is a real fact of the spiritual world. Certainly one will for a long time yet be far from an understanding of Goethe's ‘Faust;’ for one will first have to learn the language of ‘Faust’ if one wants to get inside it. One can take up commentary after commentary: not only once are the words explained by otherwise quite clever people. As Wagner sees the ‘Homunculus’ sprouting in the retort, he says—(you can read in commentaries what his words are supposed to mean):

‘'Twill be! the mass is working clearer!
Conviction⁵ gathers, truer, nearer!’

I say it as wrongly as all those since Goethe have said, who make it mean that Wagner has the conviction that the Homunculus will come into being: ‘The conviction in Wagner is working clearer!’ And the explainers of ‘Faust’ imagine they can ladle out the whole of its depth with such trivialities! Certainly our age, which has also another word coined by Goethe in its mouth, viz. ‘superman,’ without grasping its deeper meaning, could not explain these words otherwise. Their true meaning, however, is this: that which is conceived in the physical world is a ‘conception’ (‘Zeugung ‘); that which is conceived here in the astral world is a ‘super-conception,’ (Uberzeugung—conviction). One has first to learn how to read Goethe, when like all great minds, he makes his own words. Then one will be able to measure the whole earnestness, out of which the Faust arose. Then one will, above all, not commit the triviality of understanding the final words of Faust to mean by ‘eternal-feminine,’ something which has to do with the feminine in the sense-world.

The ‘eternal-feminine’ is that power in the soul which lets itself be fertilized by the spiritual world, and thereby grows together in its clairvoyant and magical deeds with the spiritual world. What can be fertilized there is this ‘eternal-feminine’ in every human being, which draws him up to the spheres of the eternal; and Goethe has depicted in Faust this course of growth of the eternal feminine into spiritual worlds.

Look round in the physical world: we really see everything properly for the first time, when we see in it, not the true reality, but a symbol of eternity. This eternity is experienced by the soul when it passes the gates into the spiritual world. There it experiences what can be explained in matter-of-fact sense terms, if they are used in a quite special way. On this point Goethe has also expressed himself—and as a great warning for all who of set opinion insist in abstractions concerning something or other. In two successive poems Goethe has expressed, like a great exhortation to mankind, that when someone speaks of a thing in the spiritual world, he can express it in diametrically opposite views. In the first poem he says:

‘The eternal must persist through all:
For into nothing all must fall
If it insists in being.’

While he here gives utterance to the thought of his ‘eternal flux’ philosophy, he says immediately afterwards in the next poem:

‘No being can to nothing fall,
Eternity persists in all,
Rejoice in that thou art.’

While the opposite thoughts of the sense-world are used as the contrasted reflexions of the super-sense world, the latter cannot be described in terms of the former. Material words are always insufficient when used in a special sense.

So we see how Goethe, while representing the ‘indescribable’ from the most diverse sides, causes it to be done before the eyes of the spirit. What is ‘unattainable’ for the material world is within the reach of spiritual vision, if the soul schools itself in that part which can be developed by means of the powers which Spiritual Science can give it. It is not for nothing that Goethe makes that work in which he has exposed the most exquisite and richest of his experiences, ring forth in a ‘Chorus Mysticus,’ which of course must contain nothing trivial. For in this Chorus Mysticus he points out to us how that which is indescribable in material words is done, when the language of imagery is used: how the soul, by means of the eternal womanhood in it is drawn into the spiritual world.

‘All things transitory
But as symbols are sent:
Earth's insufficiency
There grows to Event:
The Indescribable,
Here it is done:
The Woman-Soul⁶ leadeth us
Upward and on!’

In such words could Goethe speak of the way to the spiritual world. In such words could he speak of the powers of the soul, which when developed, lead mankind step by step into the spiritual world.

• 1. See Cycle XIII, Mission of the Folk-Souls, by R. Steiner.
• 2. Dictionary: grows green. – Ed.
• 3. 15th October, 1908, Berlin.
• 4. See Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Scientific Elucidation of Goethe's Faust, Vols. I and II, in course of translation (1933).
• 5. Uberzeugung.
• 6. Ewig-Weibliche; the Eternal Feminine.

[ 1 ] The question concerning life's value is a counterpart to the question concerning its purpose or destination (cp. pp. 40 ff.). In this connection we meet with two contrasting views, and between them all imaginable attempts at compromise. One view says: The world is the best possible, and to live and be active in it is a blessing of untold value. Everything exists harmoniously and is full of purpose; it is worthy of admiration. Even what is apparently bad and evil may be seen to be good from a higher point of view, for it represents a beneficial contrast to the good; we are more able to appreciate the good when it is contrasted with evil. Moreover, evil is not genuinely real: it is only that we see as evil a lesser degree of good. Evil is the absence of good; it has no significance in itself.

[ 2 ] The other view maintains: Life is full of misery and want, everywhere displeasure outweighs pleasure, pain outweighs joy. Existence is a burden, and under all circumstances non-existence would be preferable to existence.

[ 3 ] The main representatives of the former view, i.e., optimism, are Shaftesbury and Leibniz; ⁵⁶ those of the latter, i.e., pessimism, are Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann.⁵⁷

[ 4 ] Leibniz says the world is the best of all possible worlds. A better one is impossible. For God is good and wise. A good God would want to create the best possible world; a wise God would know which is the best possible; He is able to distinguish it from all other possible inferior ones. Only a bad or unwise God could create a world inferior to the best possible.

[ 5 ] Starting from this viewpoint, one will easily be able to indicate the direction human conduct should take in order to contribute its share to the best of all worlds. All that man has to do is to find out God's decisions and to act in accordance with them. When he knows what God's intentions are with regard to the world and mankind, then he will also do what is right. And he will feel happy to add his share to the rest of the good in the world. Therefore, from the optimistic standpoint life is worth living. This view cannot but stimulate us to cooperative participation.

[ 6 ] Schopenhauer presents matters differently. He thinks of the world's foundation not as an all-wise and all-kind Being, but as blind urge or will. Eternal striving, ceaseless craving for satisfaction which yet can never be attained, in his view is the fundamental essence of all will. For if an aim one has striven for is attained, then immediately another need arises, and so on. Satisfaction can always be only for an infinitely short time. All the rest of the content of our life is unsatisfied urge, that is, dissatisfaction and suffering. If at last the blind urge is dulled, then all content is gone from our lives; an infinite boredom pervades our existence. Therefore, the relative best one can do is to stifle all wishes and needs within one, and exterminate one's will. Schopenhauer's pessimism leads to complete inactivity; his moral aim is universal laziness.

[ 7 ] By a very different argument Hartmann attempts to establish pessimism and use it as a foundation for ethics. In keeping with a favorite trend of our time, he tries to base his world view on experience. By observation of life he wishes to find out whether pleasure or displeasure is the more plentiful in the world. He passes in review before the tribunal of reason whatever appears to men to be worth while in life, in order to show that on closer inspection all so-called satisfaction turns out to be nothing but illusion. It is illusion when we believe that in health, youth, freedom, sufficient income, love (sexual enjoyment), pity, friendship and family life, honor, reputation, glory, power, religious edification, pursuit of science and of art, hope of a life hereafter, participation in the furtherance of culture,—we have sources of happiness and satisfaction. Soberly considered, every enjoyment brings much more evil and misery than pleasure into the world. The displeasure of a hangover is always greater than the pleasure of intoxication. Displeasure far outweighs pleasure in the world. No person, even the relatively happiest, if asked, would want to live through the misery of life a second time. Since Hartmann does not deny the presence of an ideal factor (wisdom) in the world, but even grants it equal significance with blind urge (will), he can attribute the creation of the world to his primordial Being only if he lets the pain in the world serve a wise world purpose. He sees the pain in the world as nothing but God's pain, for the life of the world as a whole is identical with the life of God. The aim of an all-wise Being, however, could only be release from suffering, and since all existence is suffering, release from existence. The purpose of the world's creation is to transform existence into nonexistence, which is so much better. The world process is nothing but a continual battle against God's pain, which at last will end with the annihilation of all existence. The moral life of men must therefore be participation in the annihilation of existence. God has created the world in order to rid Himself of His infinite pain through it. The world “in a certain sense is to be regarded as an itching eruption on the absolute,” through which the unconscious healing power of the absolute rids itself of an inward disease, “or even as a painful drawing-plaster which the all-one Being applies to Himself in order first to divert an inner pain outward, and then to remove it altogether.” Human beings are parts of the world. In them God suffers. He has created them in order to split up His infinite pain. The pain each one of us suffers is but a drop in the infinite ocean of God's pain.⁵⁸

[ 8 ] Man must recognize to the full that to pursue individual satisfaction (egoism) is folly, that he ought to follow solely his task and through selfless devotion dedicate himself to the world-process of redeeming God. In contrast to Schopenhauer's pessimism, that of von Hartmann leads us to devoted activity for a lofty task.

[ 9 ] But is the above really based on experience?

[ 10 ] To strive after satisfaction means that the life activities go beyond the life content of the being in question. A being is hungry, that is, it strives for satiety when for their continuation, its organic functions demand to be supplied with new life content in the form of nourishment. The striving for honor consists in the person not regarding what he does as worth while unless he receives appreciation from others. Striving for knowledge arises when a person finds that something is missing in the world that he sees, hears, etc., as long as he has not understood it. The fulfillment of striving produces pleasure in the striving individual; non-fulfillment produces displeasure. Here it is important to observe that pleasure or displeasure depend only upon the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of striving. The striving itself can by no means be regarded as displeasure. Therefore, if it so happens that in the moment a striving is fulfilled, immediately a new one arises, I should not say that the pleasure has produced displeasure in me, because in all circumstances an enjoyment produces desire for its repetition, or for a new pleasure. Here I can speak of displeasure only when this desire runs up against the impossibility of its fulfillment. Even when an experienced enjoyment produces in me the demand for the experience of a greater or more refined pleasure, I can speak of a displeasure being produced by the previous pleasure only at the moment when the means of experiencing the greater or more refined pleasure fail me. Only when displeasure follows enjoyment as a natural law, for example when woman's sexual enjoyment is followed by the suffering of childbirth and the nursing of children, is it possible to regard the enjoyment as the source of pain. If striving as such called forth displeasure, then the removal of striving would be accompanied by pleasure. But the opposite is the case. When the content of our life lacks striving, boredom is the result, and this is connected with displeasure. And as the striving naturally may last a long time before it attains fulfillment, and as it is satisfied with the hope of fulfillment meanwhile, it must be acknowledged that displeasure has nothing to do with striving as such, but depends solely on its non-fulfillment. Schopenhauer, then, is wrong in any case in regarding desire or striving (the will) as such, to be a source of pain.

[ 11 ] In reality, even the opposite is correct. Striving (desire), as such, gives pleasure. Who does not know the enjoyment caused by the hope of a remote but intensely desired aim? This joy is the companion of all labor, the fruits of which will be ours only in the future. This pleasure is quite independent of the attainment of the aim. Then when the aim is attained, to the pleasure of striving is added that of the fulfillment as something new. Should someone now say: To the displeasure of a non-fulfilled aim is added that of disappointed hope, and in the end this makes the displeasure of non-fulfillment greater than the awaited pleasure of fulfillment, then the answer would be: Even the opposite could be the case; the recollection of past enjoyment, at the time when the desire was still not satisfied, will just as often act as consolation for the displeasure of non-fulfillment. In the moment of shattered hopes, one who exclaims, I have done what I could! proves this assertion. The blessed feeling of having tried one's best is overlooked by those who say of every unsatisfied desire that not only has the pleasure of fulfillment not arisen, but also the enjoyment of desiring has been destroyed.

[ 12 ] The fulfillment of a desire calls forth pleasure and its non-fulfillment, displeasure. From this must not be concluded that pleasure means satisfaction of a desire, displeasure means its non-satisfaction. Both pleasure and dis pleasure may also appear in a being where they are not the result of desire. Illness is displeasure for which there has been no desire. One who maintains that illness is an unsatisfied desire for health, makes the mistake of regarding the obvious but unconscious wish, not to be ill, as a positive desire. When someone receives a legacy from a rich relative of whose existence he had no notion, this event gives him pleasure without any preceding desire.

[ 13 ] Therefore, one who sets out to investigate whether the balance is on the side of pleasure or of displeasure, must bring into the account the pleasure of desiring, the pleasure of the fulfillment of desire, and those pleasures which come to us without any striving on our part. On the debit side of our account-sheet would have to be entered the displeasure of boredom, the displeasure of unfulfilled striving, and, lastly, displeasures that come without being preceded by any desire. To the last kind belongs also the displeasure caused by work which is not self-chosen but is forced upon us.

[ 14 ] Now the question arises: What is the right means of estimating the balance between debit and credit? Eduard von Hartmann is of the opinion that reason is able to establish this. However he also says: “Pain and pleasure exist only insofar as they are felt.”⁵⁹ From this statement it would follow that there is no other yardstick for pleasure than the subjective one of feeling. I must feel whether the sum of my feelings of displeasure, compared with my feelings of pleasure, leaves me with a balance of joy or of pain. But disregarding this, Hartmann maintains that:

“Even if the life-value of every being can be estimated only according to its own subjective measure, this is not to say that every being is able to calculate, from all that influences its life, the correct algebraic sum or, in other words, that its final judgment of its own life, in regard to its subjective experiences, is correct.”

This, however, only means that rational judgment is still made to estimate the value of feeling. [One who wants to calculate whether the sum total of pleasure or of displeasure is the greater, overlooks that he is calculating something which is never experienced. Feeling does not calculate, and what matters for a real estimation of life is true experience, not the result of an imagined calculation.]

[ 15 ] One whose view more or less inclines in the direction of thinkers like Eduard von Hartmann may believe that in order to arrive at a correct valuation of life he must clear out of the way those factors which falsify our judgment about the balance of pleasure or displeasure. There are two ways in which he can do this. One way is by showing that our desires (urges, will) act disturbingly in our sober judgment of our feeling-values. While, for example, we should tell ourselves that sexual enjoyment is a source of evil, the fact that the sexual instinct is very strong in us misleads us into anticipating a pleasure far greater than in fact occurs. We want to enjoy, and therefore will not admit to ourselves that we suffer through the enjoyment. Another way is to subject feelings to criticism, and attempt to prove that the objects to which feelings attach themselves are revealed as illusions by the insight of reason, then are destroyed the moment our continually growing intelligence recognizes the illusion.

[ 16 ] He can reason out the situation in the following way. If an ambitious person wants to make clear to himself whether, up to the moment of making this calculation, pleasure or displeasure has occupied the greater part of his life, he must free himself from two sources of error before passing judgment. As he is ambitious, this fundamental feature of his character will make him see the pleasures of recognition of his achievements as larger, and the hurts suffered through being slighted as smaller than they are. At the time he suffered from being slighted he felt it just because he was ambitious, but in recollection this appears in a milder light, whereas the pleasures of recognition to which he is so very susceptible leave a deeper impression. Now it is of real benefit for an ambitious person that this is so. The deception diminishes his feeling of displeasure in the moment of self-observation. Nevertheless, his judgment will be misled. The sufferings, over which a veil is drawn, he really did experience in all their intensity, and therefore he really gives them a wrong valuation on his balance-sheet of life. In order to come to a correct judgment, an ambitious person would have to get rid of his ambition during the time he is making his calculation. He would have to consider his life up to that point without placing distorting glasses before his mind's eye. Otherwise he is like a merchant who, in making up his books, also enters his own business zeal on the income side.

[ 17 ] He could go even further. He could say: The ambitious man must also make clear to himself that the recognition he pursues is something valueless. Through his own effort, or with the help of others, he must come to see that for a sensible person recognition by others counts little, since one can always be sure that

“In all matters which are not vital questions of evolution or are already finally settled by science, the majority is wrong and the minority right.” “Whoever makes ambition his lodestar, puts the happiness of his life at the mercy of an unreliable judgment.” ⁶⁰

If the ambitious person admits all this to himself, he will have to recognize as illusion, not only everything his ambition caused him to regard as reality, but also the feelings attached to the illusions. For this reason it could then be said: From the balance sheet of life-values must also be erased those feelings of pleasure that have been produced by illusions; what then remains represents, free of all illusions, the totality of pleasure in life, and this, in contrast to the totality of displeasure, is so small that life is no joy and non-existence is preferable to existence.

[ 18 ] While it is quite obvious that the deception caused by the interference of ambition leads to a false result when making up the account of pleasure, what is said about the recognition of the illusory character of the objects of pleasure must nonetheless be challenged. To eliminate from the balance-sheet all pleasurable feelings connected with actual or supposed illusions would positively falsify it. For the ambitious person did genuinely enjoy being appreciated by the multitude, quite irrespective of whether later he or someone else recognizes this appreciation as illusion. The pleasure already enjoyed is not diminished in the least by such recognition. The elimination of all such “illusory” feelings from life's balance-sheet, far from making our judgment about feelings more correct, actually eliminates from life feelings which were genuinely present.

[ 19 ] And why should these feelings be eliminated? One possessing them derives pleasure from them; one who has overcome them, gains through the experiences of self conquest (not through the vain emotion, What a noble fellow I am! but through the objective sources of pleasure which lie in the self-conquest) a pleasure which is indeed spiritualized, but no less significant for that. If feelings are erased from the balance-sheet because they attached themselves to objects which later are revealed as illusions, then life's value is made dependent not on the quantity, but on the quality of pleasure, and this, in turn, on the value of the objects which cause the pleasure. If I set out to determine the value of life by the quantity of pleasure or displeasure it brings, then I have no right to presuppose something else by which to determine first the qualitative value of pleasure. If I say I will compare the amount of pleasure with the amount of displeasure and see which is greater, then I must also bring into the account all pleasure and displeasure in their actual quantities, regardless whether they are based on illusions or not. To ascribe to a pleasure which rests on illusion a lesser value for life than to one which can be justified by reason, is to make the value of life dependent on factors other than pleasure.

[ 20 ] Someone estimating pleasure as less valuable when it is attached to a worthless object, is like a merchant who enters in his accounts the considerable profit of a toy-factory at a quarter of the actual amount because the factory produces playthings for children.

[ 21 ] When it is only a matter of weighing pleasure against displeasure, the illusory character of the objects of some pleasures must be left out of the picture altogether.

[ 22 ] The rational consideration of the quantities of pleasure and displeasure produced by life, which Hartmann recommends, has led us as far as knowing how to set up the account, that is, to knowing what we have to put down on each side of our balance sheet. But how are we to make the actual calculation? Is reason also capable of determining the balance?

[ 23 ] The merchant has made a mistake in his account if the calculated balance does not agree with the profit which has demonstrably been enjoyed from the business or which can still be expected. The philosopher, too, will undoubtedly have made a mistake in his judgment if the calculated surplus of pleasure or, as the case may be, of displeasure, cannot be proved by actual sentiments.

[ 24 ] For the moment I shall not go into the account of those pessimists who base their world view on rational estimation; but a person who is to decide whether or not to carry on the business of life will first demand proof that the calculated surplus of displeasure exists.

[ 25 ] Here we touch the point where reason is not in a position to determine on its own the surplus of pleasure or of displeasure, but where it must point to this surplus in life in the form of perception. For reality is attainable for man not through concept alone, but through the inter-penetration, mediated by thinking, of concept and perception (and a feeling is a perception) (cp. pp. 35 ff.). A merchant, too, will give up his business only when the loss of income, calculated by his accountant, is confirmed by the facts. If this is not the case, he will let the accountant go through the books once more. And in regard to life, man will do exactly the same. If the philosopher wants to show him that displeasure is far greater than pleasure, and if he has not felt it to be so, he will reply: You have gone astray in your brooding; think things through once more. But if there comes a time in a business when such losses are really present that no credit any longer suffices to meet the claims, then the result will be bankruptcy, even though the merchant may have avoided keeping himself informed about his affairs by means of accounts. Similarly, if there comes a time when the quantity of displeasure a man suffers is so great that no hope (credit) of future pleasure could carry him through the pain, then this would lead to bankruptcy of life's business.

[ 26 ] However, the number of suicides is relatively small in proportion to the number of those who bravely live on. Very few people give up the business of life because of the displeasure involved. What follows from this? Either that it is not correct to say that the amount of displeasure is greater than the amount of pleasure, or that we do not make our continuation of life at all dependent upon the amount of pleasure or displeasure we feel.

[ 27 ] The pessimist, Eduard von Hartmann, in a quite extraordinary manner reaches the conclusion that life is valueless because it contains more pain than pleasure, and yet he maintains the necessity of carrying it through. This necessity lies in the fact that the world purpose mentioned above (p. 43) can be achieved only through the ceaseless, devoted labor of human beings. So long as men still pursue their egoistic desires they are useless for such selfless labor. Not until they have convinced themselves through experience and reason that the enjoyments of life pursued out of egoism are unattainable, do they devote themselves to their real task. In this way the pessimistic conviction is supposed to be a source of selflessness. An education based on pessimism is meant to exterminate egoism by convincing men of its hopelessness.

[ 28 ] This means that this view considers striving for pleasure to be fundamentally inherent in human nature. Only through insight into the impossibility of its fulfillment does this striving abdicate in favor of higher tasks of humanity.

[ 29 ] Of such a moral world view, which, from recognition of pessimism, hopes to achieve devotion to non-egoistical aims in life, it cannot be said that it really overcomes egoism in the true sense of the word. Moral ideas are supposed to be strong enough to take hold of the will only when man has recognized that selfish striving after pleasure cannot lead to any satisfaction. Man, whose selfishness desires the grapes of pleasure, finds them sour because he cannot reach them; he turns his back on them and devotes himself to an unselfish life. According to the opinion of pessimists, moral ideals are not strong enough to overcome egoism, but they establish their rulership on the ground which recognition of the hopelessness of egoism has first cleared for them.

[ 30 ] If in accordance with their natural disposition human beings strove after pleasure which they could not possibly attain, then annihilation of existence and redemption through non-existence would be the only rational goal. And if one accepts the view that the real bearer of the pain of the world is God, it follows that the task of men consists in helping to bring about the salvation of God. To commit suicide does not advance, but hinders, the accomplishment of this aim. God must have created men wisely for the sole purpose of bringing about His salvation through their action. Otherwise creation would be purposeless. And such a view of the world envisages extra human purposes. Every one of us has to perform his own definite task in the general work of salvation. If he withdraws from the task by suicide, another has to do the work which was intended for him. Someone else must bear the agony of existence in his place. And since in every being it is, fundamentally, God who is the ultimate bearer of all pain, it follows that the suicide does not in the least diminish the quantity of God's pain, but rather imposes upon God the additional difficulty of creating a substitute to take over the task.

[ 31 ] All this presupposes that pleasure is the standard of life's value. Now life manifests itself through a number of cravings (needs). If the value of life depended on whether it brought more pleasure than displeasure, a craving which brought a surplus of displeasure to its owner, would have to be called valueless. Let us examine craving and pleasure, in order to see whether or not craving can be measured by pleasure. And lest we give rise to the suspicion that life does not begin for us below the level of the “aristocratic intellect,” we shall begin our examination with a “purely animal” need: hunger.

[ 32 ] Hunger arises when our organs are unable to continue their proper function without a fresh supply of substance. What a hungry man aims at, in the first place, is to have his hunger stilled. As soon as the supply of nourishment has reached the point where hunger ceases, everything that the food-instinct craves has been attained. The enjoyment connected with satiety consists, to begin with, in the removal of the pain which is caused by hunger. Also to the mere food-instinct a further need is added. Man does not merely desire to overcome the disturbance in the functioning of his organs by the consumption of food, or to get rid of the pain of hunger: he seeks to accompany this with pleasurable sensations of taste. When he feels hungry and is within half an hour of an enjoyable meal, he may even avoid spoiling his enjoyment of the better food by refusing inferior food which might satisfy his hunger sooner. He needs hunger in order to obtain the full enjoyment from his meal. In this way hunger becomes a cause of pleasure for him at the same time. If all the hunger in the world could be satisfied, then the total amount of enjoyment due to the need for nourishment would come about. To this would have to be added the special pleasure which gourmets attain by cultivating the sensitiveness of their taste-nerves beyond the usual measure.

[ 33 ] This amount of enjoyment would have the greatest value possible if no aspect of this kind of enjoyment remained unsatisfied, and if with the enjoyment a certain amount of displeasure did not have to be accepted into the bargain.

[ 34 ] The view of modern natural science is that nature produces more life than it can sustain, that is, nature produces more hunger than it is able to satisfy. The surplus of life produced must perish in pain in the struggle for existence. It is granted that at every moment of the world process, the needs of life are greater than the corresponding available means of satisfaction, and the enjoyment of life is thereby impaired. But the individual enjoyments actually present are not in the least reduced thereby. Wherever a desire is satisfied, there the corresponding amount of pleasure is also present, even though in the creature itself which desires, or in its fellow-creatures, a large number of unsatisfied cravings exist. What is thereby diminished is not the quantity, but the value of the enjoyment of life. If only a part of the needs of a living creature find satisfaction, the creature experiences enjoyment accordingly. This has a lesser value the smaller it is in proportion to the total demands of life in the sphere of the desire in question. We might represent this value as a fraction, of which the numerator is the enjoyment actually experienced and the denominator is the sum total of needs. This fraction has the value 1 when the numerator and the denominator are equal, i.e., when all needs are fully satisfied. The fraction becomes greater than 1 when a creature experiences more pleasure than its desires demand. It becomes smaller than 1 when the amount of enjoyment falls short of the sum total of desires. But the fraction can never be nought so long as the numerator has any value at all, however small. If a man were to make up a final account before his death, and thought of the amount of enjoyment connected with a particular craving (e.g. hunger) as being distributed over the whole of his life with all the demands made by this craving, then the value of the pleasure experienced might perhaps be very small, but it could never be nil. If the quantity of enjoyment remains constant, then with every increase in the needs of the living being the value of the pleasure diminishes. The same is true for the totality of life in nature. The greater the number of living beings in proportion to those able to fully satisfy their cravings, the smaller is the average pleasure-value of life. The shares in life enjoyment, made out to us in the form of instincts, become less valuable in proportion as we cannot expect to cash them at their full face value. If I get enough to eat for three days and then have to go hungry for three days, the enjoyment during the three days when I do eat is not thereby diminished. But I have to think of it as distributed over six days, and this reduces its value for my food instinct by half. The same applies to the quantity of pleasure in relation to the degree of my need. If I am hungry enough for two sandwiches and can have only one, the enjoyment gained from it has only half the value it would have had if after I had eaten it my hunger had been stilled. This is how the value of a pleasure is determined in life. It is measured by the needs of life. Our desire is the yardstick; pleasure is what is measured. The enjoyment of eating has a value only because hunger is present, and it attains a value of a specific degree through the proportion it bears to the degree of the hunger present.

[ 35 ] Unfulfilled demands of our life throw their shadow even upon desires which have been satisfied, and impair the value of enjoyable hours. But one can also speak of the present value of a feeling of pleasure. This value is the more insignificant, the less the pleasure is in proportion to the duration and intensity of our desire.

[ 36 ] An amount of pleasure reaches its full value for us when its duration and degree exactly coincide with our desire. An amount of pleasure which is smaller than our desire diminishes the value of pleasure; a greater amount produces a surplus which has not been demanded and which is felt as pleasure only so long as we are able to increase our desire during the enjoyment. If we are not able to increase our demand in order to keep pace with the increasing pleasure, then the pleasure turns into displeasure. The thing that otherwise would satisfy us now assails us without our wanting it, and we suffer under it. This is proof that pleasure has value for us only so long as we can measure it by our desires. An excess of pleasurable feeling turns into pain. This may be observed especially in people whose desire for a particular kind of pleasure is very small. In people whose desire for food is dulled, eating readily produces nausea. This too shows that the desire is the yardstick for measuring the value of pleasure.

[ 37 ] Here pessimism could say: The unsatisfied craving for food brings not only the displeasure of lost enjoyment, but also positive pain, torment and misery into the world. In this he can point to the untold misery of people who starve, and to the amount of displeasure such people suffer indirectly through lack of food. And if he wants to extend the assertion to the rest of nature, he can point to the torment of animals that starve to death at certain times of the year. The pessimist maintains that these evils far outweigh the amount of enjoyment which the food-instinct brings into the world.

[ 38 ] There is no doubt that one can compare pleasure and displeasure, and can determine the surplus of the one or the other, as is done in the case of profit and loss. But when the pessimist believes that there is a surplus on the side of displeasure and that from this one can conclude that life is valueless, he already makes a mistake, insofar as he makes a calculation that is not made in actual life.

[ 39 ] Our desire, in each instance, is directed to a definite object. The value of the pleasure of satisfaction will, as we have seen, be the greater, the greater the amount of pleasure, in relation to the degree of our desire. [We disregard here the instance where excessive increase in pleasure turns it into displeasure.] But upon the degree of our desire also depends how great is the amount of displeasure we are willing to accept in order to achieve the pleasure. We compare the quantity of displeasure not with the quantity of pleasure, but with the intensity of our desire. If someone finds great pleasure in eating, by reason of his enjoyment in better times he will find it easier to bear a period of hunger than will someone for whom eating is no enjoyment. A woman who desires a child compares the joy of possessing the child, not with the amount of displeasure due to pregnancy, childbirth, cares of nursing, etc., but with her desire to have the child.

[ 40 ] We never want a certain quantity of pleasure in the abstract, but a concrete satisfaction in a quite definite way. When we want a pleasure which must be satisfied by a particular object or a particular sensation, it will not satisfy us if we are offered some other object or some other sensation, even though they give the same amount of pleasure. One desirous of food cannot substitute the pleasure this would give him by a pleasure equally great but produced by a walk. Only if our desire were, quite generally, for a certain quantity of pleasure, would it have to die away at once if this pleasure were unattainable except at the price of an even greater quantity of displeasure. But because we aim toward a particular kind of satisfaction, we experience the pleasure of realization even when we have to bear a much greater displeasure along with it. The instincts of living creatures tend in definite directions and aim at definite goals, and for this reason we cannot set down as an equivalent factor in our calculations the amount of displeasure that must be endured on the way to the goal. Provided the desire is sufficiently intense to still be present in some degree after having overcome the displeasure—however great that may be—then the pleasure of satisfaction can still be tasted to the full. The desire, therefore, does not measure the pain directly against the pleasure achieved, but indirectly by relating its own intensity to that of the displeasure. The question is not whether the pleasure to be gained is greater than the displeasure, but whether the desire for the goal is greater than the opposition of the displeasure involved. If the opposition is greater than the desire, then the desire yields to the inevitable, weakens, and strives no further. Since our demand is always for some quite specific kind of satisfaction, the pleasure connected with it acquires significance for us in such a way that once we have achieved satisfaction, we need take the quantity of displeasure into account only insofar as it has reduced the intensity of our desire. If I am passionately fond of beautiful views, I never calculate the amount of pleasure the view from the mountain-top gives me as compared directly with the displeasure of the toilsome ascent and descent, but I reflect whether, after having overcome all difficulties, my desire for the view will still be sufficiently intense. Consideration of pleasure and pain can lead to a result only indirectly in relation to the intensity of the desire. Therefore the question is not at all whether there is a surplus of pleasure or of displeasure, but whether the desire for the pleasure is strong enough to overcome the displeasure.

[ 41 ] A proof of the correctness of this view is the fact that we put a higher value on pleasure when it must be purchased at the price of great displeasure, than when it simply falls into our lap like a gift from heaven. When sufferings and misery have toned down our desire and yet our aim is attained, then the pleasure, in proportion to the remaining quantity of desire, is all the greater. And as I have shown (p. 44), this proportion represents the value of the pleasure. A further proof is given in the fact that all living beings (including man) seek satisfaction for their cravings as long as they are able to bear the opposing pain and agony. The struggle for existence is but a consequence of this fact. All existing life strives for fulfillment, and only that part gives up the fight in which the desire has been suffocated by the power of the assailing difficulties. Each living being seeks food until lack of food destroys its life. Man, too, lays hands on himself only when he believes (rightly or wrongly) that he is not able to attain the aims in life which to him are worth while. As long as he still believes in the possibility of attaining what in his view is worth striving for, he will fight against all suffering and pain. Philosophy would first have to convince man that the element of will has sense only when the pleasure is greater than the displeasure, for it is man's nature to strive to attain the objects of his desire if he is able to bear the necessary displeasure involved, be it ever so great. The above mentioned philosophy would be mistaken, because it would make the human will dependent on a factor (surplus of pleasure over displeasure) which is fundamentally foreign to man's nature. The actual yardstick for measuring will is desire, and the latter persists as long as it can. One can compare the calculation that is made in actual life,—not the one an abstract philosophy makes concerned the question of pleasure and pain connected with the satisfaction of a desire—with the following. If when buying a certain quantity of apples, I am forced to take twice as many bad ones as good ones because the seller wants to clear his stock, then I shall not hesitate for one moment to accept the bad apples as well if the few good ones are worth so much to me that, in addition to their purchase price, I am also prepared to bear the expense of disposing of the bad ones. This example illustrates the relation between the amounts of pleasure and displeasure that arise through an instinct. I determine the value of the good apples not by subtracting the sum of the good ones from that of the bad ones, but by whether the good ones retain any value for me despite the presence of the bad ones.

[ 42 ] Just as I leave the bad apples out of account in my enjoyment of the good ones, so I give myself up to the satisfaction of a desire after having shaken off the unavoidable pain.

[ 43 ] Even if pessimism were correct in its assertion that there is more displeasure than pleasure in the world. this would have no influence on the will, since living beings would still strive after what pleasure remains. The empirical proof that pain outweighs joy, if such proof could be given, would certainly be effective for showing the futility of the school of philosophy that sees the value of life in a surplus of pleasure (Eudaemonism).⁶¹ It would not, however, be suitable for showing that will in general is irrational, for will does not seek a surplus of pleasure, but seeks the amount of pleasure that remains after removing the displeasure. And this always appears as a goal worth striving for.

[ 44 ] Attempts have been made to refute pessimism by asserting that it is impossible by calculation to determine the surplus of pleasure or of displeasure in the world. The possibility of any calculation depends on the comparability of the things to be calculated in respect to their quantity. Every displeasure and every pleasure has a definite quantity (intensity and duration). Further, we can compare pleasurable feelings of different kinds with one another, at least approximately, with regard to their quantity. We know whether we derive more pleasure from a good cigar or from a good joke. No objection can be raised against the comparability of different kinds of pleasures and displeasure in respect to their quantity. The investigator who sets himself the task of determining the surplus of pleasure or displeasure in the world, starts from presuppositions which are undeniably legitimate. One may declare the conclusions of pessimism to be mistaken, but one cannot doubt that quantities of pleasure and displeasure can be scientifically estimated, and the balance of pleasure determined thereby. But it is incorrect to maintain that the result of this calculation has any consequence for the human will. The cases in which we really make the value of our activity dependent on whether pleasure or displeasure shows a surplus, are those in which the objects toward which our activity is directed are indifferent to us. When it is only a question of whether after my work I am to amuse myself by a game or by light conversation, and if I am completely indifferent what I do for this purpose, I then ask myself: What gives me the greatest surplus of pleasure? And I definitely refrain from an activity if the scales incline toward the side of displeasure. When buying a toy for a child we would consider what will give him the greatest pleasure. In all other cases we are not determined exclusively by considerations of the balance of pleasure.

[ 45 ] Therefore, when pessimistic philosophers of ethics believe that by showing displeasure to be present in greater quantity than pleasure, they are preparing the way for selfless devotion toward cultural work, they do not realize that by its very nature the human will is not influenced by this knowledge. Human striving directs itself to the measure of possible satisfaction after all difficulties have been overcome. Hope of this satisfaction is the very foundation of human activity. The work of each individual and of the totality of cultural work springs from this hope. Pessimistic ethics believes that it must present the pursuit of happiness as an impossibility for man, in order that he may devote himself to his proper moral tasks. But these moral tasks are nothing but the concrete natural and spiritual cravings, and their satisfaction is striven for, despite the displeasure involved. The pursuit of happiness, which the pessimist wants to exterminate, does not exist at all. Rather, the tasks which man has to fulfill he fulfills because from the depth of his being he wills to fulfill them when he has truly recognized their nature. Pessimistic ethics maintains that man can devote himself to what he recognizes as his life's task, only when he has given up the pursuit of pleasure. But there are no ethics that can invent life-tasks other than the realization of the satisfactions demanded by man's desires, and the fulfillment of his moral ideals. No ethics can take from him the pleasure he has in the fulfillment of what he desires. When the pessimist says: Do not strive after pleasure, for you can never attain it, strive for what you recognize to be your task, then the answer is: It is inherent in human nature to do just this, and it is the invention of a philosophy gone astray when it is maintained that man strives only for happiness. He strives for the satisfaction of what his being demands, and its fulfillment is his pleasure; he has in mind the concrete objects of this striving, not some abstract “happiness.” When pessimistic ethics demands: Strive not after pleasure, but after the attainment of what you recognize to be your life's task, it lays its finger on the very thing that, through his own nature, man wants. He does not need to be turned inside out by philosophy, he does not need to discard his human nature before he can be moral. Morality lies in striving for an aim that has been recognized as justified; it lies in human nature to pursue it so long as the displeasure connected with it does not extinguish the desire for it altogether. And this is the nature of all real will. Ethics does not depend on the extermination of all striving after pleasure in order that bloodless abstract ideas can set up their control where they are not opposed by a strong longing for enjoyment of life; ethics depends rather on that strength will has when it is carried by ideal intuitions; it achieves its aim even though the path be full of thorns.

[ 46 ] Moral ideals spring from the moral imagination of man. Their attainment depends upon whether his desire for them is strong enough to overcome pain and suffering. They are his intuitions, the driving forces spanned by his spirit; he wills them, because their attainment is his highest pleasure. He needs no ethics first to forbid him to strive for pleasure and then to prescribe to him what he ought to strive for. Of himself, he will strive for moral ideals when his moral imagination is active enough to impart to him intuitions that give strength to his will and enable him to carry them through, despite the obstacles present in his own organization, to which necessary displeasure also belongs.

[ 47 ] If a man strives for sublimely great ideals, it is because they are the content of his own nature and their realization will bring him a joy compared with which the pleasure, derived from the satisfaction of their ordinary cravings by those who lack ideals, is of little significance. Idealists revel spiritually in translating their ideals into reality.

[ 48 ] Anyone who wants to exterminate the pleasure in the fulfillment of human desires will first have to make man a slave who acts, not because he wants to, but only because he ought to. For the attainment of what has been willed gives pleasure. What we call goodness is not what a man ought but what he wills to do when he unfolds the fullness of his true human nature. Anyone who does not acknowledge this must first drive out of man all that man himself wills, and then prescribe to him from outside what content he is to give his will.

[ 49 ] Man values the fulfillment of a desire because the desire springs from his own nature. Achievement has its value because it has been willed. If one denies value to the aims of man's own will, then worth while aims must be taken from something that man does not will.

[ 50 ] Ethics based on pessimism arises from a disregard for moral imagination. Only someone who considers the individual human ego incapable of giving a content to its striving would see the totality of will as a longing for pleasure. A man without imagination creates no moral ideas. They must be given to him. Physical nature sees to it that he strives to satisfy his lower desires. But to the development of the whole man belong also desires that arise from the spirit. Only if one takes the view that man has no such spiritual desires can one maintain that he should receive them from outside. And then it would also be justifiable to say that it is man's duty to do what he does not will. All ethics which demand of man that he should suppress his will in order to fulfill tasks that he does not will, reckon not with the whole man, but with one in whom the faculty of spiritual desire is lacking. For a man who is harmoniously developed, the so-called ideas of what is “right” are not outside but within the sphere of his own nature. Moral action does not consist in extermination of one-sided self-will, but in the full development of human nature. One considering moral ideals to be attainable only if man exterminates his own will, does not know that these ideals are willed by man just as much as the satisfaction of so-called animal instincts.

[ 51 ] It cannot be denied that the views outlined here can easily be misunderstood. Immature persons without moral imagination like to look upon the instincts of their undeveloped natures as the full content of humanity, and to reject all moral ideas which they have not produced, in order that they may “live themselves out” without restriction. But it is obvious that what holds good for a fully developed human being does not apply to one who is only half-developed. One who still has to be brought by education to the point where his moral nature breaks through the shell of his lower passions, cannot lay claim to what applies to a man who is mature. Here there is no intention to outline what an undeveloped man requires to be taught, but rather to show what human nature includes when it has come to full maturity. For this is also to prove the possibility of freedom, which manifests itself, not in actions done under constraint of body or soul, but in actions sustained by spiritual intuitions.

[ 52 ] The fully mature man gives himself his value. He neither strives for pleasure, which is given to him as a gift of grace either from nature or from the Creator, nor does he merely fulfill what he recognizes as abstract duty after he has divested himself of the desire for pleasure. He does what he wants to do, that is, he acts in accordance with his ethical intuitions, and in the attainment of what he wants he feels the true enjoyment of life. He determines life's value by the ratio between what he attains and what he attempts. Ethics which puts “you ought” in the place of “I will,” mere duty in the place of inclination, determines man's value by the ratio between what duty demands of him and what he fulfills. It applies a standard to man that is not applicable to his nature.—The view developed here refers man back to himself. It recognizes as the true value of life only what each individual himself regards as such according to what he desires. This view accepts neither a value of life not recognized by the individual, nor a purpose of life which has not sprung from the individual. In the individual who is capable of true self knowledge it recognizes someone who is his own master and the assessor of his own value.

[ 53 ] Addition to the Revised Edition, 1918: What is presented in this chapter can be misunderstood if one clings to the apparent objection that the will is simply the irrational factor in man and that this must be proved to him because then he will realize that his ethical striving must consist in working toward ultimate emancipation from the will. An apparent objection of this kind was brought against me by a competent critic who stated that it is the business of the philosopher to make good what the thoughtlessness of animals and most men fail to do, namely, to strike a proper balance in life's account. But in making this objection he does not recognize the real issue: If freedom is to be attained, then the will in human nature must be carried by intuitive thinking; at the same time it is true that an impulse of will may also be determined by factors other than intuition, but morality and its worth can be found only in the free realization of intuitions flowing from the nature of true manhood. Ethical individualism is well able to present morality in its full dignity, for it is not of the opinion that the truly moral is brought about by conforming to an external rule, but is only what comes about through man when he develops his moral will as a member of his total being, so that to do what is immoral appears to him as a stunting and crippling of his nature.

• 56. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646–1716). For data on their lives and philosophical ideas, consult any standard encyclopedia.
• 57. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung The World as Will and Representation, Four Books, publ. 1819 by Brockhaus, Leipzig. (English translation by Haldane & Kemp, 1883) Ref. Book I, par. 1, Ger. ed. Biographical data and translations of Schopenhauer's works, as well as extensive commentaries on his ideas have been published in English translation. Consult any standard encyclopedia for details. Rudolf Steiner edited a collected edition of the writings of Schopenhauer, 12 vols. with introduction by Steiner, publ. 1894.
• 58. See von Hartmann's Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins. The Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, p. 866 f. of the German edition.
• 59. See von Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten, Philosophy of the Unconscious, 7th German ed., Vol. II, p. 290.
• 60. Hartmann, op. cit. supra. Vol. II, p. 332.
• 61. Eudaemonism, derived from a Greek word which indicates the condition of being under the protection of a benign spirit, or a “good genius.” In ethics, this name is applied to those theories of morality according to which the main good of man is to be found in some form of happiness. Eudaemonia was one of the keywords in the ethical teachings of Aristotle.

[ 1 ] A saying by Goethe that delicately explains the relationship between humans and the world is this: “We actually undertake in vain to express the essence of a thing. We become aware of effects, and a complete history of these effects would probably encompass the essence of that thing. We strive in vain to describe the character of a person; on the other hand, if we put together his actions, his deeds, we will be confronted with a picture of his character. Colors are deeds of light, deeds and suffering... Colors and light are in the most exact relationship to each other, but we must think of both as belonging to the whole of nature: for it is the whole of nature that wants to reveal itself to the eye in this way. In the same way, the whole of nature reveals itself to another sense... Thus nature speaks downwards to other senses, to known, unrecognized, unknown senses; thus it speaks to itself and to us through a thousand phenomena. To the attentive, it is never dead or mute.»

[ 2 ] To fully appreciate the significance of this statement, , one need only consider how very differently the world must reveal itself to the lowest forms of life, which have only a kind of sense of touch or feeling spread over the entire surface of their bodies. Light, color and sound cannot be present for them in the same way that they are present for beings that are endowed with eyes and ears. The air vibrations that a shot from a gun causes may also have an effect on them if they are hit by them. An ear is necessary for these air vibrations to be perceived as a bang. And that certain processes, which reveal themselves in the fine substance called ether as light and color, require an eye. In this sense, the philosopher Lotze's statement applies: “Without a light-sensitive eye and a sound-sensitive ear, the whole world would be dark and silent. There would be no light or sound in it, just as a toothache would be impossible without a tooth nerve that can feel pain.»

[ 3 ] The poet Robert Hamerling says in his philosophical book («Atomistik des Willens») about this insight: «If this does not make sense to you, dear reader, and if your your mind bends before this fact like a shy horse, then do not read another line; leave this and all other books that deal with philosophical matters unread; for you lack the necessary ability to take in a fact without prejudice and to hold it in your thoughts.»

[ 4 ] But a conclusion necessarily follows from this fact. Goethe expresses it beautifully: “The eye owes its existence to light. From indifferent animal auxiliary organs, light calls forth an organ that becomes its equal; and so the eye is formed by light for light, so that the inner light may confront the outer.” This means nothing other than that the external processes that man perceives through the eye as light would be there even without the eye; this however creates the sensation of light from them. Man must never say that only that which he perceives exists; he must recognize that of all that exists, he can only perceive that for which he has organs. And with each new organ, the world must reveal new aspects of its nature. The naturalist Tyndall aptly describes this: “The effect of light in the animal kingdom seems to be only a change in chemical composition, as occurs in the leaves of plants. Gradually this effect is localized in individual pigment cells that are more sensitive to light than the surrounding tissue. The eye begins. It is initially able to reveal the differences between light and shadow that are produced by very close objects. Because the interruption of light is almost always followed by contact with the opaque nearby object, it must be concluded that seeing is a kind of anticipated feeling. The adaptation continues (in higher animals). A slight swelling of the skin forms above the pigment cells; a lens begins to form, and through an infinite number of adaptations, the sense of sight achieves a sharpness that ultimately reaches the perfection of the hawk or eagle eye. It is the same with the other senses.“

[ 5 ] How much of what is real is revealed to a being through sensation depends on the organs that have developed in it. Man must never say that only that which he can perceive is real. There may be many things that are real, but which he has no organs to perceive. And a man who declared only that which is ordinarily perceptible to the senses to be real would be like a lower animal that declared the unreality of colors and sounds, since it cannot perceive them.

[ 6 ] Now every man knows of a real world which he cannot perceive with his ordinary senses. That is his own inner world. His feelings, impulses, passions and thoughts are real. They live in him. But no ear can hear them; no eye can see them. They are “dark and silent” for another, as Lotze says in the above quotation, “without a light-sensitive eye and without a sound-sensitive ear, the whole world would be dark and silent.” And this world ceases to be “dark and silent” as soon as there are sensitive eyes and ears. Only such a being can know that the world of colors and sounds arises from this “mute and dark” world, that it experiences this latter world by means of the eye and ear. Only direct experience can decide this.

[ 7 ] Can someone who cannot perceive the real inner world of man as a sensation claim that it is impossible to perceive it? Anyone who recognizes the significance of the facts presented will do so. He will have to say to himself: whether this is possible is for those who have such a perception to decide, not for those who do not. For the eye-gifted, not the eyeless being, can give an account of the reality of the world of colors. This thought must be followed by the following, which Hamerling brilliantly summarizes in what he has to say in this direction: “Our sensory world is the world of effects. The active element in every being produces the idea in others, as a touch on the strings produces the sound. Every being is a harpist on foreign strings and, at the same time, a harp for foreign fingers.»

[ 8 ] Just as external nature transforms the “indifferent animal organs” into the eye, in the sense of Goethe, so man can develop within himself the organs through which feelings, drives, instincts, passions, thoughts, etc. become a world of senses, a world of effects, just as air vibrations become sound perception through the ear, and ether vibrations become color perception through the eye. The paths that the soul must take to develop these senses will be discussed in a later issue of this journal. Here, we will say a few words about the perceptions of these “spiritual senses” themselves.

[ 9 ] It is clear that only a part of a person is visible to the external eye. It is the part that is referred to as the physical body. This physical body consists of the same components as the external natural objects. And the physical and chemical forces that are also active in minerals are active in it. Now every thinking person will admit that the life of the soul can never be explained by these substances and their processes. The natural scientist Du Bois-Reymond expresses himself on this subject as follows: “It may seem, at a superficial glance, that by knowing the material processes in the brain, we could understand certain mental processes and dispositions. I include in this the memory, the flow and association of ideas, the consequences of practice, specific talents and the like. The slightest reflection teaches that this is an illusion. We would only be informed about certain inner conditions of the mental life, which are more or less equivalent to the outer conditions set by the sensory impressions, but not about the origin of the mental life through these conditions. What conceivable connection exists between certain movements of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and on the other hand the original, indefinable, undeniable facts for me: I feel pain, I feel pleasure, I taste sweetness, I smell the scent of roses, I hear the sound of an organ, I see red, and the equally immediate certainty that follows from this: So I am? It is simply inconceivable, forever and ever, that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. atoms should not be indifferent to how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they lie and will move.” – Du Bois-Reymond is certainly wrong with what he concludes from this, but not with the fact itself. (Compare my book “Welt-und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert”, Berlin, Siegfr. Cronbach, second volume, page 78 ff.) - It must be made clear what facts underlie such a statement. The natural scientist uses the external senses for his investigations. He does indeed strengthen their power by means of instruments, and he combines the facts they supply with his understanding, and determines their proportions by calculation; but the basis for everything he determines is external, sensuous observation. Now, this can indeed determine processes in the material world; or where these are too small to be perceived directly, they can be supplemented by hypotheses: but it can never perceive anything spiritual or mental. Du Bois-Reymond is therefore saying nothing other than that where the material process passes over into the mental, external sensory observation ceases. How carbon, oxygen, etc. atoms lie and move can be imagined in such a way because it is similar to perceivable material processes. “I feel pain, I feel pleasure, etc.” can no longer be grasped by the external senses. — A higher faculty of perception must intervene, just as the higher faculty of perception of the eye must intervene when the world of tactile sensations of the lower animal is to be supplemented by the world of color. - And for such a higher faculty of perception, a transition also takes place between physical processes and the “facts that cannot be denied: I feel pain, I feel pleasure, I smell the scent of roses, etc.” as between the movement of a rolling ivory ball and the state of the other, which, as a result of the impact of the first, passes from rest into motion. For this higher perceptive faculty, the physical human body is only the middle part of a larger body, in which the former is enveloped as in a cloud. And just as the physical eye perceives the ether vibrations emitted by the physical body as the colors of this body, so the spiritual eye perceives, through a corresponding mediation, the feelings, drives, passions and ideas, which are just as “undeniable facts” as the movements of carbon, hydrogen, etc. in the brain,

[ 10 ] Through a special process of transformation, which will be described later, the inner world of causes of the human being presents itself to the “spiritual eye” as a world of effects in colors in the same way as the physical processes in the body present themselves to the external eye as color effects. The color effects that can be perceived by the “spiritual eye”, which radiate around the physical human being and envelop him like a cloud (perhaps in the shape of an egg), are called the human aura. It must be considered as much a part of the human being as the physical body. The size of this aura differs from person to person. But on average, one can imagine that the whole person is twice as long and four times as wide as the physical one.

[ 11 ] A wide range of colors now floods this aura. And this flooding is a true reflection of inner human life. The individual colors are as varied as this. But certain permanent characteristics are expressed in the basic colors: talents, habits, character traits.

[ 12 ] The aura is very different according to the various temperaments and dispositions of people; it also varies according to the degree of spiritual development. A person who gives himself completely to his animal instincts has a completely different aura than one who lives much in thought. The aura of a person with a religious disposition differs significantly from that of someone who is absorbed in the trivial events of the day. In addition, all changing moods, inclinations, joys and pains find expression in the aura.

[ 13 ] The auras of different types of people must be compared with each other in order to understand the meaning of the color tones. First, take people who have strongly developed affects. They can be divided into two different types. Those who are driven to these affects primarily by their animal nature, and those in whom the same affects take on a more refined form, where they are, so to speak, strongly influenced by reflection. In the first type of person, brown and brown-red color currents of all shades flow through the aura in certain places. In those with more refined affects, tones of lighter red and green appear in the same places. It can be observed that the green tones become more frequent with increasing intelligence. Very intelligent people who are completely absorbed in satisfying their animal instincts have a lot of green in their aura. However, this green will always have a stronger or weaker touch of brown or brown-red. Unintelligent people show a large part of the aura flooded with brown-red or even dark blood-red currents.

[ 14 ] The aura of calm, thoughtful people is very different from that of such emotional natures. The brownish and reddish tones recede; and various shades of green come to the fore. In thinkers, the aura shows a pleasant green undertone. This is how those people look who can be said to know how to find their way in every situation in life.

[ 15 ] The blue color tones appear in devoted natures. (I would like to expressly note that I am happy to be corrected by other researchers. Observations in this field are, of course, uncertain. And this uncertainty cannot be compared with that which is possible in the physical field, although this is also very great, as researchers know. For comparison with my statements, I would like to draw your attention to the book by C. W. Leadbeater: “Man visible and invisible”, which was published in London in 1902 by the Theosophical Publishing Society. The more a person places his self in the service of a cause, the more significant the blue nuances become. In this respect, too, one encounters two quite different types of people. There are natures of little mental power, passive souls, who, as it were, have nothing to throw into the stream of world events except their “good nature”. Their aura glows in a beautiful blue. This is also the case with many devotional, religious natures. Compassionate souls and those who like to live out their existence in a state of well-being have a similar aura. If such people are also intelligent, green and blue currents alternate, or the blue itself may even take on a greenish nuance. It is the peculiarity of active souls, in contrast to passive ones, that their blue is imbued with bright colors from within. Inventive natures, those who have fruitful thoughts, radiate bright colors from an inner point, as it were. In general, everything that indicates mental activity has more the form of rays that spread from within; while everything that comes from animal life has the form of irregular clouds that flood the aura.

[ 16 ] The color formations show different shades depending on whether the ideas that arise from an active soul are used to serve one's own animal instincts or ideal, objective interests. The inventive mind that uses all its thoughts to satisfy its sensual passions shows dark blue-red nuances; on the other hand, the one who selflessly puts his fertile thoughts into a factual interest shows light red-blue color tones. A life in the spirit, coupled with noble devotion and a capacity for self-sacrifice, reveal pink or light violet colors.

[ 17 ] Not only the basic state of the soul, but also temporary emotions, moods and other inner experiences show their color waves in the aura. A sudden outburst of violent anger produces red waves; offended honor, which is expressed in a sudden outburst, can be seen appearing in dark green clouds. — But the color phenomena do not only occur in irregular cloud formations, but also in certain limited, regularly shaped figures. For example, a sudden attack of fear is shown by the aura from top to bottom by wavy stripes in blue color, which have a reddish shimmer. In a person who is waiting with tension for a certain event, one can see continuous red-blue stripes radiating from the inside outwards through the aura.

[ 18 ] For an accurate spiritual perception, every sensation that a person receives from the outside must be noticed. People who are strongly stimulated by every external impression show a continuous flickering of small reddish spots and flecks in the aura. In people who do not feel vividly, these spots have an orange-yellow or even a beautiful yellow color. So-called “distracted” people show bluish spots of more or less changing shape.

[ 19 ] The following is intended to show to what extent this aura, as characterized here, is a very composite phenomenon. It should also be shown how it is the expression of the whole being of the human being. The explanations given here should be considered as an introduction.

[ 20 ] In the foregoing, the auric cloud within which the physical body of the human being is located has been described in some general terms. — For a more highly developed “spiritual vision,” three types of color phenomena can be distinguished within this “aura” that surrounds and radiates around the human being. First, there are colors that have more or less the character of opacity and dullness. However, when we compare these colors with those that our physical eye sees, they appear lively and transparent in comparison. Within the supersensible world itself, however, they make the space they fill comparatively opaque; they fill it like fog. — A second type of color is that which is, as it were, completely light. They illuminate the space they fill. This space itself becomes a space of light. The third type of colored appearance is quite different from these two. These have a radiant, sparkling, glittering character. They not only illuminate the space they fill, they also shine and radiate through it. There is something active, inherently mobile about these colors. The others have something in them that is at rest, immobile. These, on the other hand, generate themselves out of themselves, as it were, continually. - Through the first two types of color, space is filled as if with a fine liquid that remains calm in it; through the third, it is filled with a constantly fanning life, with never-resting activity.

[ 21 ] These three color types are not located next to each other in the human aura; they are not located in separate parts of space; instead, they partially penetrate each other. At one point in the aura, all three types can be seen mixed together, just as a physical body, for example a bell, can be seen and heard at the same time. This makes the aura an extraordinarily complicated phenomenon. For, as it were, one has to deal with three auras that are located within each other and interpenetrate. (Aura of a higher order is not considered here.) But one can get a clear picture by directing one's attention alternately to one of these three auras. In the supersensible world one does something similar to what one does in the sensible world, for example, when one closes one's eyes to fully enjoy the impression of a piece of music. The “seer” has three kinds of organs for the three color types. And in order to observe one undisturbed by the others, he can open one or the other type of organ to the impressions and close the others. — In the beginning, a “seer” can only have developed one type of organ, that for the first type of color. Such a person can only see one aura; the other two remain invisible to him. Likewise, someone may be able to perceive the first two types, but not the third. — The higher level of the “gift of seeing” then consists in a person being able to observe all three auras and to direct his attention alternately to one or the other for the purpose of study.

[ 22 ] The triple aura is the supersensory visible expression of the human being. For this being is composed of three members: the body, soul and spirit. The body is the transitory part of man; that which is born and dies. The spirit is the immortal part. After the death of the body, it experiences various states and conditions in realms that are not accessible to the external senses, in order to be reborn in a new body after a shorter or longer period of time. (More detailed information on the conditions between death and a new incarnation can be found in the essay “How Karma Works.”) The link between the perishable body and the imperishable spirit is the soul. One has to imagine that the impressions of the sensual external world are first received by the soul and then passed on to the spirit. The ear, for example, as a physical organ, receives an impression through an air vibration. The soul transforms this air vibration into the sensation of sound. Only through this experience does the human being inwardly — as a sensation — experience that which would otherwise be a mute process in the external air. — And within the human being, the spirit again perceives the sensation. In this way, it receives information about the sensuous, earthly world from the soul. The spirit cannot communicate directly with the sensuous world. The soul is its messenger. Through the soul, the immortal spirit of man enters into communication with the earthly world. (Those who seek more precise information about the relationship between spirit, soul and body will find it in my forthcoming book, “Theosophy.”) The soul is thus the actual bearer of what man experiences within himself between birth and death. The spirit preserves these experiences and carries them over from one embodiment to another.

[ 23 ] The soul is influenced by two sides in man. The body influences it to convey the sensual-physical impressions. The spirit influences it from the other side, in order to impress upon it the eternal laws that are its own. The soul is connected, on the one hand, with the body, and on the other with the spirit. Therefore, in the living human being, one has to distinguish between a threefold inner life. The first includes everything that continually flows from the body to the soul; the second are the processes in the soul itself. The third are the influences that the soul experiences from the spirit. A simple example can make it clear how these three forms of human inner life differ. Let us assume that a person has not eaten for a long time. As a result, certain processes take place in the body that are not beneficial to his physical life. This has an effect on the soul as a feeling of hunger.

[ 24 ] This feeling is a process in the soul; but the cause of it lies in the body. - Let us further assume that a person passes a person in need. He supports him. The cause for this lies in the realization of the spirit that man must help others. The soul carries out the action; the spirit gives the order. The soul feels compassion. This compassion is again a process in the soul. The cause for this lies in the spirit. Between these two types of soul experiences there is now a third. It is the one in which neither body nor spirit are directly involved. At first, the immediate stimulus of hunger repeatedly prompts a person to eat. But when he begins to reflect on the connection between hunger and his way of life, he regulates this way of life through thinking. He uses thinking, as it were, to take into account the needs of his sensuality. In this way, he makes his spiritual life independent of the immediate stimuli of sensual corporeality. The more undeveloped a person is, the more he will surrender to sensual stimuli. With higher development, he will increasingly place his inner life at the service of thinking, but in doing so, he will also become increasingly receptive to the influences of spirituality. An undeveloped person who must surrender to every stimulus of his body will be insensitive to the eternal laws of truth and goodness that come from the spirit. He will be completely absorbed in what his body demands of him. The more independent a person becomes of these influences, the more will that which is imperishable, eternally true and eternally good, shine forth in him. And he will ultimately recognize that he is there to place his powers, his abilities, all his actions at the service of the eternal. The first is that which is dependent on the bodily causes; the second is that part of the life of the soul which, to a certain extent, has made itself independent of every external stimulus through reflection, but which still absorbs itself in the satisfaction of the outer life; the third part, finally, is that which places its own life in the service of the eternal. In the undeveloped human being, the first part is predominant; in the more highly developed, the third comes to the fore. The average human being holds the middle between the two.

[ 25 ] These three parts of the human inner life find expression in the triple aura in a way that is visible to the supernatural. The extent to which the soul is dependent on the body, and is influenced by its processes, is expressed in the dull, opaque color phenomena. A person who lives entirely according to his physical nature has this part of the aura particularly vividly developed. — Everything that has become independent of the direct influences of the body through education, through reflection, in short, through external culture, is expressed in the colors that illuminate the space in transparent brightness. And all the true spirituality of man, the selfless devotion to the true and good, in other words the treasures that man collects for eternity, appear in the sparkling, radiant color phenomena of the aura.

[ 26 ] The first aura is a reflection of the influence that the body exerts on the soul of man; the second characterizes the soul's independent life, which has risen above the immediately sensuous, but is not yet dedicated to the service of the eternal; the third reflects the dominion that the eternal spirit has gained over the mortal human being.

[ 27 ] For the “seer”, the degree of a person's development can be judged from the nature of their aura. If he meets an undeveloped person who is completely devoted to the respective sensual impulses, desires and momentary external stimuli, he will see the first aura in the most glaring colors; the second, on the other hand, is only weakly developed. Only sparse color formations can be seen in it; the third, however, is hardly indicated. Here and there a glimmering spark of color appears, indicating that the eternal also lives in this person as a predisposition, but that it will still need a long course of development – through many embodiments – before it will gain an outstanding influence on the outer life of this bearer. The more a person strips off his instinctive nature, the less conspicuous the first part of the aura becomes. The second part grows larger and larger and fills the color body, within which the physical human being lives, more and more completely with its luminous power. And the “servants of the Eternal” show the wondrous third aura, that part which testifies to the extent to which the human being has become a citizen of the spiritual world. For the divine itself radiates through this part of the human aura into the earthly world. People in whom this aura is developed are the flames through which the deity illuminates this world. They have learned to live not for themselves but for the eternal truth and good; they have wrested it from their narrow self, sacrificing themselves on the altar of the great world work.

[ 28 ] Thus, the aura expresses what a person has made of himself in the course of his incarnations.

[ 29 ] All three parts of the aura contain colors of the most diverse nuances. However, the character of these nuances changes with the degree of development of the human being. In the first part of the aura of the undeveloped instinctive human being, one can see all the nuances from red to blue. In him, these nuances have a dull, dirty character. The obtrusive red nuances indicate sensual desires, carnal lusts, and an addiction to the pleasures of the palate and stomach. Green nuances seem to be found primarily in those of a lower nature who tend towards dullness and indifference, who greedily indulge in every pleasure, but who nevertheless shy away from the efforts that would bring them to it. It is not a pleasant sight to see the sluggish street loafers in our big cities loitering around in their dirty green clouds. Certain modern professions, however, breed this kind of aura. A personal sense of self that is rooted entirely in base inclinations, that is, the lowest level of egoism, is manifested in dirty yellow to brown tones. Now it is clear that the animalistic life of the instincts can also take on a pleasing character. There is a purely natural capacity for self-sacrifice, which is found to a high degree in the animal kingdom. In the natural love of a mother, this development of an animalistic instinct finds its most beautiful completion. These selfless natural instincts are expressed in the first aura in shades of light red to pink. Cowardly timidity, nervousness in the face of obvious stimuli is shown by brown-blue or grey-blue colors in the aura.

[ 30 ] The second aura again shows the most diverse color gradations. Brown and orange structures indicate a highly developed sense of self, pride and ambition. Bright yellow reflects clear thinking and intelligence; green is the expression of an understanding of life and the world. Children who are quick to grasp things have a lot of green in this part of their aura. Greenish yellow in the second aura seems to indicate a good memory. Rose-red indicates a benevolent, loving nature; blue is the sign of piety here. The more piety approaches religious fervor, the more the blue turns to violet. Idealism and a serious approach to life in a higher sense are seen as indigo blue.

[ 31 ] The basic colors of the third aura are yellow, green and blue. Yellow appears here when the thinking is filled with high, comprehensive ideas that grasp the individual from the whole of the divine world order. This yellow then has a golden glow when the thinking is intuitive and it is given complete purity of sensual imagining. Green indicates love for all beings; blue is the sign of selfless willingness to sacrifice oneself for all beings. If this willingness to sacrifice oneself increases to the point of strong will, which actively places itself in the service of the world, then the blue lightens to light violet. If pride and the craving for honor still exist in a highly developed person, as the last remnants of personal egoism, then shades of yellow appear alongside those that play towards orange. It should be noted, however, that in this part of the aura the colors are quite different from the shades that a person is accustomed to seeing in the world of the senses. A beauty and sublimity confront the “seer” here, with which nothing in the ordinary world can be compared.

[ 32 ] In the following, it will be shown how the various fundamental components of the human being are expressed through the auras described here.

[ 33 ] The human aura can be understood by observing the human being. As a physical body, the human being is composed of the same substances that are found in the mineral world. And the forces that are active in this world are also active in him. The oxygen that the human being acquires through the breathing process is the same as that found in the air, in the liquid and solid components of the earth. And so it is with the substances that man takes in with his food. These substances and their powers can be studied in man as they are studied in other natural bodies. If we look at man in this way, we recognize him as a member of the mineral world. Furthermore, we can look at man in so far as he is a living being. He shows how the substances and forces of the mineral world build up an organism that takes the form of limbs, that grows and reproduces, whose parts work together in common activity. This way of being has in common with everything that lives. The question arises for anyone who devotes himself to such contemplation: how does a being live? A certain school of modern natural science makes it easy to answer this question. It simply says that the action of mineral substances and forces in a living organism is exactly the same as in inorganic nature, only much more complicated. According to this school, an organism has been understood when the complicated physical and chemical processes that take place within it have been understood. This view denies that there are special causes that transform the mineral substances and forces in the organism into life processes. A lively struggle developed in the nineteenth century against the advocates of a special life force. Clear thinking should have prevented this struggle. For just as no one should dispute that one understands a clock once one has grasped the mechanism of its parts, so too a clear-thinking representative of the life force could not object to the claim that one understands the organism in this sense scientifically if one knows the effectiveness of its substances and forces. But can anyone deny that the clock, which is completely comprehensible in mechanical terms, could not come into being without the clockmaker? Anyone who can really distinguish between the comprehensibility of an organism as a physical fact and the conditions of its origin cannot be in any doubt that the above comprehensibility affects the existence of special causes of life just as little as the existence of the watchmaker is affected by the mechanical comprehensibility of the watch. And just as the mechanic who wants to make the clock understandable does not need to describe the clockmaker, so the purely physical researcher does not need to take into account the special causes of life. But for those who delve deeper into the essence of phenomena, it becomes clear that the entities that make the physical organism appear physically comprehensible are not sufficient for the realization of the physical organism. That is why the perceptive speak of special causes of life. Life is something that is added to the physical effect in the organism and that eludes the senses and the intellect, which only adheres to the sensory facts. Life is the object of a special perception, just as the watchmaker is the object of a special perception. One must observe the organism with the “eyes of the spirit”, then the special causes of life, which elude sensory observation, reveal themselves. Those who observe with the “eyes of the spirit” have therefore called the natural builder of organisms “prana” (power of life). For them, the “life force” cannot be disputed, because for them it is a perception. And everything that is said against these defenders of a life force is only a fight against windmills. It will only be said as long as one misunderstands what they mean. In their sense, prana or the life force should be attributed to man, insofar as he is an organism, as the second link of his being, next to the physical-mineral body.

[ 34 ] In sensation, one has given something that goes beyond mere life. Through life, a being builds its organism. Through sensation, it opens itself to the outside world. It is different when I say: I live, and it is different when I say: I perceive the world of colors around me. In order to become a sentient being, the organism must give its organs properties that go beyond their ability to sustain life and to reproduce life through it. What makes the living organism a sentient organism is what the researcher who sees with “spiritual eyes” calls the sentient body, or, as has become common among theosophists, the astral body. This name “astral”, which means “star-like”, comes from the fact that the supersensory image of it appears in the aura, the luminosity of which has been compared to that of the stars. Here, this part of the human being shall be called the sensory body, as the third limb of the human being. Within this sentient body, the individual life of a person appears. It expresses itself in pleasure and displeasure, joy and pain, in inclinations and aversions, etc. With a certain justification, everything that belongs to this is called the inner life of a being. The starry sky is outside in space, my living organism belongs to the same space. This organism is connected to the starry sky in its sensory organs. I experience the joy and the feeling of admiration for the starry sky within myself. I carry this within me, even when the starry sky has long since withdrawn from my sensory eye. What I confront as myself in relation to the outside world, what leads a life within itself, is the soul. And insofar as this soul appropriates the sensations, insofar as it appropriates processes that are given to it from the outside and transforms them into a life of its own, it may be called the sentient soul. This sentient soul fills the sentient body as it were; it transforms everything that it takes in from the outside into an inner experience. In this way, it forms a whole with the sentient body. This is why, in theosophical writings, it is referred to as the astral body. However, a thorough understanding will have to distinguish between the two. In the aura, the two can also be distinguished in that each color tone of the astral body is subject to two influences. One will depend on how the organs of the human being are formed, the other on how his soul, according to its inner nature, responds to external impressions. A person can have a good or bad eye. The picture he receives of an external object depends on this; he can be more or less sensitive in his soul, and this determines the feeling he experiences in his inner being through this picture.

[ 35 ] Man does not stop at the impressions he receives from the outside world and the feelings he experiences through these impressions. He connects these impressions. In this way, overall images of what he perceives are formed in his soul. A person sees a stone fall; afterwards he sees that a cavity has formed in the ground at the place where the stone fell. He connects the two impressions. He says: the stone has hollowed out the earth. In this connection, thinking is expressed. Within the sentient soul, the thinking, intellectual soul comes to life. Only through it does the soul, through the influences of the outside world, create an image of this outside world that is regulated by itself. The soul continually carries out this regulation of its external impressions. And what it thus produces is a description of what it perceives, determined by its nature. That it is determined by its nature can be seen by comparing such a description with what is described. Two people can have the same object in front of them; their descriptions will be different according to the inner nature of their souls. They combine their impressions in different ways.

[ 36 ] But descriptive thinking also leads man beyond his own life. He acquires something that extends beyond his soul. It is a matter of course for him that his descriptions of things are related to these things themselves. He orients himself in the world by thinking about it. He thereby experiences a certain correspondence between his own life and the order of the facts of the world. The rational soul thereby creates harmony between the soul and the world. In his soul, man seeks truth; and through this truth, not only does the soul express itself, but also the things of the world. What is recognized as truth through thinking has an independent significance, not merely one for the human soul. With my delight in the starry sky, I live alone in myself; the thoughts that I form about the paths of the heavenly bodies have the same significance for the thinking of every other person as for mine. It would be pointless to speak of my delight if I did not exist; but it is not pointless in the same way to speak of my thoughts even without reference to myself. For the truth that I think today was also true yesterday, and will also be true tomorrow, although I am only concerned with it today. If a realization gives me pleasure, this pleasure is only of significance as long as I experience it; the truth of this realization has its significance quite independently of this pleasure. In connection with the truth, the soul grasps something that carries its value within itself. And this value does not disappear with the soul's own experience; nor did it arise with it. There is an essential difference between descriptions in which the intellectual soul merely leaves itself to its combinations, and thoughts in which it submits to the laws of truth. A thought that acquires a significance beyond the inner life by being imbued with these laws of truth can only be regarded as knowledge. When truth shines into the intellectual soul, it becomes the conscious soul. Just as there are three parts to the body: the physical body, the life body and the sentient body, so too there are three parts to the soul: the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the conscious soul.

[ 37 ] The threefold aura is to be understood from these three members of the soul. For through these three members it becomes understandable that the inner life of man suffers influences from two sides. As a sentient soul, this inner life is dependent on the sentient body. The interplay between the sentient soul and the sentient body is expressed in the first of the three auras described. The combining intellectual soul, which lives in itself and in its experiences is completely subject to its nature, is expressed in the second aura; and the consciousness soul receives its supersensible-visible expression in the third, brightest aura.

[ 38 ] In order to fully understand the nature of these auras, it is necessary to consider a fact that, when properly interpreted, opens up an understanding of the human being. — In the course of childhood development, a moment occurs in the life of a human being when he or she feels for the first time as an independent being in relation to the whole other world. For people with a fine sensibility, this is a significant event. The poet Jean Paul tells in his autobiography: “I will never forget the phenomenon in me, which I have never told anyone about, where I stood at the birth of my self-awareness, of which I know the place and time. One morning, as a very young child, I was standing under the front door and looking to the left at the woodpile when, suddenly, the inner vision, I am an I, came to me like a flash of lightning from heaven and has remained shining ever since: that was the first time my I had seen itself and forever. Deceptions of memory are hardly conceivable here, since no foreign narrative could mix with additions to an event that occurred only in the veiled sanctum of man, the novelty of which alone gave it permanence in such everyday circumstances.» — In his self-awareness, man has given what makes him an independent being. Self-awareness must therefore shed light on his entire being. From this starting point, one will therefore only be able to fully understand the meaning of the body and the soul. More about this at the end of this article.

[ 39 ] There is a veiled holy of holies in man, which is designated by his self-consciousness. Anyone who realizes this will see that this word actually expresses the meaning of human existence. Self-consciousness is the ability to know oneself as an “I”. The following fact seems simple, but it contains an infinitely significant meaning: “I” is the only word that anyone can say only to himself. No one else can say it to the person; and he cannot say it to anyone else. Anyone else can use any other word in the same sense as I myself. What makes a person independent, separate from everything else, and with which he can only be with himself: that is what he calls his “I”. — This fact corresponds to a very specific phenomenon in the aura: no healer can see anything in the part of the aura that corresponds to the “I”. The consciousness of the “I” is indicated in the aura by a dark oval, a completely dark area. If one could look at this oval by itself, it would appear completely black. But one cannot do that. For one sees it through what has been called the first and second aura in the two previous essays. That is why it appears blue. The “I” of the completely undeveloped human being appears as a small blue oval. As the human being develops, it grows larger and larger; and in the average person of the present day it is about the same size as the rest of the aura. Within this blue oval, a special radiation now begins to emanate. All the other parts of the aura only reflect in a certain way what comes to the human being from outside. But the radiation mentioned is the expression of what the human being makes of himself. The first aura expresses that which works in man from the animal; the second that which he experiences in himself through the impressions of the world of sense; the third is an expression of the knowledge which he acquires from this world of sense. But that which begins to shine within the dark aura of the self is that which man acquires through his work on himself. No sensory world can give him the strength to do this. It must therefore flow to him from elsewhere. It flows to him from the spirit. The more the spirit flows to the human ego, the more it shines in the aura. And in contrast to the transient phenomena of the sensory world, the spirit is eternal, immortal. That which lives out itself in the other auras is also transient in the human being; that which shines in the aura of the I is the expression of his eternal spirit. It is the permanent in him that reappears in each subsequent embodiment (incarnation). We have recognized the consciousness soul as the third part of the soul. And within the consciousness soul, the “I” awakens. In the “I”, the eternal spirit of the human being awakens again. Like the body and the soul, the spirit is also tripartite. The highest part is the actual spiritual being (called “Atma” in theosophical literature). Just as the physical body is built from the substances and forces of the external physical world, so the spiritual being is built from those of the general spiritual world. He is a part of it, just as the physical body is a part of the physical world. And just as the physical body becomes a physical living being through the physical life force, so the spiritual being becomes a life spirit through the spiritual life force (called Budhi in theosophical literature). — And just as the physical body acquires knowledge of the physical world through the senses, so the spiritual being acquires knowledge of the spiritual world through the spiritual senses, which are called intuition. The sensory body of the physical world is therefore matched by a special sensory spirit in this higher realm. Just as the lower self-life begins with sensation, so does the higher with intuition. This spiritual self-life is therefore called the spirit self (in theosophical literature it is called the “higher manas”).

[ 40 ] Man is therefore composed of the following parts: 1. The physical body, consisting of the physical body, the life body (the life force) and the sentient body; 2. < em>The soul, consisting of the sentient soul, the rational soul, and the consciousness soul, in which the “I” awakens; and 3. The spirit, consisting of the spirit self, the life spirit, and the spiritual human being. The sentient soul fills the sentient body and merges with it to form a whole. This becomes clear when one imagines the following: the fact that an impression of the external world evokes the color “red” is based on an activity of the sentient body. That the soul experiences this “red” within itself is due to the fact that the sentient soul is directly linked to the sentient body, and immediately makes the effect received from the outside its own. In the same way, the consciousness soul and the spirit self merge into a whole through the activity of the “I” itself. (Those who wish to learn more about all this will find information in my recently published book, Theosophy.) — Man's being is therefore rightly divided into the following seven parts (we have put the terms used in theosophical literature in brackets): 1. the physical body (Sthula sharira), 2. the life body (Linga sharira), 3. the sentient body connected with the sentient soul (astral body, Kama rupa), 4. the mind soul (lower Manas, Kama manas), 5. the spirit-filled consciousness soul that gives birth to the “I” (higher higher manas), 6. the life spirit (spiritual body, Budhi), 7. the spirit man (Atma).

[ 41 ] It is clear from the above that the radiant spiritual aura is only very weakly indicated in the undeveloped human being and develops more and more the more perfect the human being becomes. Just as the three auras described correspond to the bearers of the “I”, so the I-aura itself becomes the bearer of the eternal spirit. Through the “I”, the human being becomes an independent, separate being. This develops the content of the spirit within itself; it fulfills itself with it. But this means that the “I” gives itself to the eternal All-Spirit. The stages that the “I” reaches in this devotion to the All-Spirit are expressed by the color nuances of the higher spirit aura. These nuances cannot be compared to physical colors in their radiant brilliance. A description of them cannot be given here.

[ 42 ] For the sake of completeness, a part of the aura that has not yet been discussed should be mentioned. It is the part that corresponds to the life body. It fills approximately the same space as the physical body. The clairvoyant can only observe it if he has the ability to completely imagine away (suggerate away) the physical body. Then the life body (Linga sharira) appears as a complete double image of the physical body in a color that is reminiscent of that of the apricot blossoms. In this life body, a continuous inflow and outflow can be observed. The life force contained in the universe flows in, is consumed by the life process and flows out again.

[ 43 ] This concludes the preliminary indications that can be given here about the human aura. Should anyone take offense at the fact that some of what has been said here seems to be at odds with what is otherwise expressed in theosophical literature, I would ask him to take a closer look. Behind the apparent differences, he will find a deeper harmony. However, it is better if each person describes exactly what he has to say. In this area, only good can come from weighing the statements of the individual observers against each other and mutually supplementing each other. We will not get anywhere by merely repeating the theosophical dogmas. However, the individual must be aware of his great responsibility with regard to his statements. On the other hand, it must be noted that at these heights of observation, errors in the details are quite possible; indeed, they are certainly much more likely here than in scientific observations in the sensory world. The writer of these remarks therefore asks for the appropriate indulgence from all those who have something to say in this field.

Preliminary note: During the first three-week “Anthroposophical College Course” (September 26 to October 16, 1920 in Dornach), at which 30 representatives of various disciplines gave lectures in addition to Rudolf Steiner, Three evenings of conversation also took place, on October 4, 6 and 15, 1920. During these so-called “Conversations on Spiritual Science,” questions on any topic could be asked, to which Rudolf Steiner then responded in more or less detail. The stenographers did not record the conversation evenings in their entirety, and there are gaps in some of them.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I imagine that today, in a kind of conversation, we will discuss all kinds of questions and the like that arise in one or other of the honored listeners in connection with what has been developed here in recent days as anthroposophy. Although, as I have endeavored to arrange, you will be offered a hundred lectures during these three weeks, it is not possible to do more than touch on individual topics in outline. What can be given to you here can only be suggestions at first, but these suggestions may perhaps show that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here is no less well founded

Asa is more firmly grounded than that which is taken from the external life of today's strict science, yes, that it absorbs all the methodical discipline of this science and also perceives that which stands as a great demand of the time, the demand for further development. This demand for further development arises from the fact that those impulses of scientific life, in particular, which have produced great things in the past epoch, are now in the process of dying out and would have to lead to the decline of our civilization if a new impetus were not to come.

The suggestions that have now been made for such a new impact can certainly be expanded in a variety of directions in the context of a discussion such as the one taking place today, and I would now like to ask you to contribute to this expansion. Please ask questions, express your wishes and in general put forward anything you wish to say. The questions can best be put in writing, and I ask you to make good use of this opportunity.

Mr. Conrad: The question I have to ask relates to a therapeutic area. In his lectures, Dr. Steiner pointed to certain illnesses that are currently occurring very frequently. There are certain mental disorders in this regard for which I would be grateful for an answer about the deeper causes. These are mainly speech disorders. I would like to point out that I am not motivated by personal interests, but am only asking to the extent that pedagogical interests are involved. Teachers have often asked me what to do about speech disorders. However, since this question touches on the field of therapy, I do not want to encourage questions that only concern illnesses. I would be very grateful for an answer because this question seems to be very pressing at the moment.

Rudolf Steiner: Perhaps we can start by answering this question. When something specific like this comes up, we must of course bear in mind that such specific disturbances in the human organism can have the most diverse causes and that it is extremely difficult to talk about these things in general if we want to get to the real cause. In all such matters, my esteemed audience, it is actually a matter of using spiritual science to enable one to assess the individual case in the right way. And here I would like to say something that perhaps has a much more general significance than this question requires.

You see, we live in an age of abstraction, in an age when people love to reduce the manifold world, the multiform world, to a few formulas, when people love to establish abstract laws that encompass vast areas of existence. They can only do so in an abstract way, ignoring the individual. Spiritual science will have to bring about a significant change in this direction in particular. It will indulge less in simplifying the manifold existence and will bring insights about the concrete spiritual. But by approaching the concrete spiritual, one's soul is stimulated in such a way that the ability to observe and judge is strengthened and invigorated. This will become apparent in people's general social interaction. A large part of the social question today actually lies in the fact that we no longer have any inclination to really get to know the person we pass by, because our inner being does not have the kind of stimuli that enable us to properly grasp the individual, the particular. Here spiritual science will achieve something different. Spiritual science will enrich our inner life again, enabling it to grasp the particular. And so our powers of observation and discrimination and all that will be particularly developed. Therefore, we will have less desire for abstract generalizations, but more desire for the particular, the individual. In a sense, we will adhere more to the exemplary than to the abstract. And especially when dealing with something like physical disorders, with speech disorders, one must say: almost every single case is different – it is of course a slight exaggeration, but still generally valid – almost every single case is different, and at least one must distinguish typical ones.

We must be clear about the fact that some of the things that cause speech disorders are, of course, organically determined, that is, in a certain way, based on the inadequate development of this or that organ. But a whole series of such disorders in the present day are due to the fact that the human being's spiritual and soul forces are not being developed in the right way. And it may even be said that if a proper development of the spiritual and mental abilities of the human being can be achieved through education in childhood, at a time when the human organism is still pliable, then organic disorders can also be overcome to a certain extent; they can be overcome more easily than at a later age, when the body is more solidified. Our entire education system has gradually become more and more abstract. Our pedagogy does not suffer from bad principles. In general, if we look at the abstract treatment of pedagogical principles, we can see that we had great and significant achievements in the 19th century. And if you look at today's abstract way of applying how to do this or that in school, you have to say that 19th-century pedagogy really means something quite tremendous. But the art of responding to the individual child, of noticing the particular development of the individual child, is something that has been lost in modern times through the rush towards intellectuality and abstraction. To a certain extent, we are no longer able to strengthen the child's soul and spirit in the right way through abstract education. Do not think that when such a demand is made, it is only to point to a one-sided, unworldly education of soul and spirit – oh no. It may seem paradoxical today, but it is actually the case that materialism has had the tragic fate of being unable to cope with material phenomena. The best example of this is that we have such psychological theories as psycho-physical parallelism. On the one hand, we have human corporeality, which is only known from the point of view of anatomy, which only learns from the corpse; on the other hand, we have theories about the soul and spirit that are imagined up or even only live in words , and then one reflects on how this soul-spiritual, which bears no resemblance to the physical body, how this soul-spiritual is to affect the physical body. Spiritual science will lead precisely to the fact that one will be able to deal with the physical in a concrete way, that one will know such things as those which I already hinted at yesterday in the lecture and whose importance I would like to mention again here: From birth until the second set of teeth has come through, something is at work in us as human beings that we can call a sum of equilibrium forces that organize us thoroughly, and something that is mobile forces, that are life forces. This is particularly strong in our organism within this human age. What is at work in the human being is what really, I would say, pushes out the second teeth, what finds its conclusion in the pushing out of the second teeth, what, for its effectiveness in the organism, comes to a certain degree - it continues, of course - but comes to a certain degree to a conclusion with the appearance of the second teeth. It then transforms into what we can call mathematical, geometric thinking, what we can call thinking about the equilibrium conditions in space, thinking about the conditions of movement in space, what we can call finding oneself in the conditions of life in space and in time. We study what emerges from this, what passes, as it were, from a state of latency into a state of freedom, when it has just been released. There it is, as spiritual soul, as a very concrete spiritual soul, as we see it growing up in the child, when the change of teeth begins and continues into the later years of life. And now we look at this and see: what is spiritual and soul-like has an organizing effect in the body during the first seven years of life. And again, we study the connection between the spiritual and soul-like and the physical organization when we consider what the human being can then experience - albeit consciously only in inspiration - that is, what he experiences with ordinary consciousness, but still unconsciously, in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. It is more of an immersion into physical corporeality, where in its course, first of all, as the most important phenomenon – but there are others as well – it awakens the love instinct, where it marks the end, for example, with the change of voice in the male sex, and with somewhat broader effects in the female sex. What we recognize when we observe the development of the emotional world, and when we observe, for example, something like the development of the sense of music, especially at the time when the emotional world is developing, we study this again as the connection between the soul and spiritual life and the physical organization from the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth year.

In short, spiritual science does not ask the abstract question: How does the soul affect the body?, but rather it studies the concrete soul, it knows that one must look at the concrete soul at certain ages and how it affects the body in other ages. Thus it transforms the abstract and therefore so unsatisfactory method of treatment of today's psychology and physiology into very concrete methods. And in the further course, one then comes to the point where one can not only determine in general through spiritual science: in the first seven years of life, equilibrium, movement, and life force are at work; but one can also specialize in how this spiritual force expresses itself in the organs, how it works in the lungs, heart, liver, and so on; one has the opportunity to really look into the human body in a living way. In this way, the knowledge of the material turns out to be quite different from what materialism can [recognize]. The peculiar thing about materialism is that it devotes itself to a false, namely an abstract, a deducted spirituality. The peculiar thing about spiritual science is that it is precisely able to assess the material in the right way. Of course, it also goes in the right way to the spiritual on the other side. More and more clearly should we fight the opinion, which starts from nebulous mystics, that spiritual science is something that deals with phantasms in general talk. No, spiritual science deals precisely with the concrete and wants to provide a view of how the spiritual and soul life works down into the individual organs. For it is only by getting to know the workings of the spiritual in a concrete way in the material existence that one recognizes the material existence. But through such a concrete penetration into the human organism, one gradually acquires — through a kind of imagination, inspiration and so on — an ability, I would say a gift, to really see the individual and then to be able to judge where any particular fault lies, for example, when speech disorders are present. At a certain childlike age, it will be possible to influence the development of the speech organs through special speech exercises. The important thing is to be able to observe what physical disorders may be present at the right age. And although all kinds of obstacles are present simply due to external circumstances – after all, today only that which is officially certified in this direction is recognized and allowed to be practiced in any way – although all kinds of obstacles are present, we can still say that, for example, some beautiful results have been achieved in the case of speech disorders simply by rhythmic speech exercises were carried out, that the particular defect was recognized, and that the person with the defective speech organism was then allowed to recite things in this or that speech rhythm, always repeating them, and that he was then instructed to place himself in the rhythmic process of these or those tones, feeling them particularly. In this direction one can achieve very significant improvements or at least relief from such disorders. But something else is also possible. For example, in the case of speech disorders, one can work particularly on regulating the respiratory process, a regulation of the respiratory process that must, however, be completely individual. This regulation of the breathing process can be achieved by letting the person you are treating develop a feeling between the internal repetition, or perhaps just thinking, but broad thinking, slow thinking of certain word connections [and the breathing process]. The peculiar thing is that if you form such word connections in the right way, then, by surrendering to such a rhythm of thought or inner rhythm of words, you convey a feeling to the person being treated: With this word and its course, its slow or fast course, you notice it in your breathing, it changes in this or that way, and you follow that. In a certain way, you make him aware of what arises as a parallel phenomenon to breathing for speech. You make him aware of it. And when he can then tell you something about it, you try to help him further, so that once he has become aware of the breathing process, he gradually reaches the point where he can consciously snap into it himself, I would even say in word contexts that he forms during this breathing process, which he can now consciously follow in a certain way, in an appropriate manner.

So you have to think of it this way: by first giving rhythms, which, depending on how the matter lies, are to be thought inwardly, murmured, whispered or recited aloud, you cause the person in question to notice a change in breathing. Now he knows that the breath changes in this way. And now he is, in a sense, forbidden from using the very word or thought material that has been given to him. He is made aware that he is now forming something similar within himself, and then he comes up with the idea of consciously paralleling this entire inner process of thinking or speaking or inwardly hearing words with the breathing process, so that a certain breathing always snaps into an inner imagining or inner hearing of words. In this way, a great deal of what I would call a poor association between the processes that are more mental, more soul-like, in speaking, and those processes that take place in the organism as more material, as physical processes, is balanced out. All of this has a particularly favorable effect when applied in the right childhood period. And it can be said that if our teachers were better psychologists, if they really had a concrete knowledge of the human body from the spirit, they would be able to work with speech disorders in a completely different way, especially in a pedagogical way.

Now, what I have mentioned can also be developed into a certain therapy, and it can also be used to achieve many favorable results for later stages of life. But it seems to me to be of particular importance – and here we could already point to certain successes that have been achieved in this direction – that such things can be cured by a particularly rational application of the principle of imitation. But then one must have a much more intimate, I might say subjective-objective knowledge of the whole human organism and its parts.

You see, people speak to each other in life; but they are hardly aware of the, I would say imponderable, effects that are exerted from person to person when speaking. But these effects are there nevertheless. We have become so abstract today that we actually only listen to the other person's intellectual content. Very few people today have a sense of what is actually meant when a person with a little more psychic-organic compassion feels, after speaking to another, how he consciously carries the other person's speech to a high degree in his own speech organism. Very few people today have any sense of what is experienced in this respect when one has to speak in succession with four, five or six people, one of whom is coughing, the second hoarse, the third shouting, the fourth speaking quite unintelligibly, and so on, because one's own organism is also involved; it vibrates along with everything, it experiences it all. And if you develop this feeling of experiencing speech, you certainly acquire a strong feeling, I might say, for defense mechanisms too. The peculiar thing is that it is precisely in the case of such things, which are so closely connected with the subjectivity of the human being as speech disorders, that one then finds out how one has to speak to someone who suffers from speech disorders, how one has to speak to him so that he can achieve something through imitation. I have met stutterers; if you have been able to empathize with their stuttering and then spoken to them rhythmically by name, then you could get them to really achieve something like forgetting their stuttering, by running after what is spoken to them, so to speak. However, you then have to be able to develop human compassion to the point where it is organic. In therapy, an enormous amount depends on the ability to make the patient forget the subjective experience associated with some objective process. And in particular, for example, a real remedy for speech disorders is, if the time between the ages of seven and fourteen is used correctly, by lovingly encouraging those with speech disorders to engage in the kind of imitation just described. It is often the case that one experiences that stutterers sometimes cannot pronounce three words properly without stumbling, cannot say three words

properly one after the other. If you give them a poem to recite that they can become completely absorbed in, that they can love, and if you stand behind it as it were as an attentive listener, then they can say whole long series of verses without stuttering. Creating such opportunities for them to do something like this is something that is a particularly good therapeutic tool from a psychological point of view. It is a bad thing to point out such defects to people, no matter what the reason. I had a poet friend who always lost his temper when someone tactless pointed out his stammering. When someone tactfully asked him, “Doctor, do you always stammer like that?” he replied, “No, only when I am confronted with someone who is thoroughly unpleasant to me.” Of course, I would have had to stutter terribly now if I had really wanted to imitate the way this answer was given.

But then, little by little, one will recognize what a significant remedy can be found in eurythmy for such and similar defects in the human organism. Eurythmy can be studied from two sides, as it were. I always draw attention to this in the introductions to the performances. I show how the speech organism and its movement tendencies can be perceived through sensory and supersensory observation of the human being today, and how these are then transferred to the whole human organism. However, the reverse approach is no less important. For, as has been very well presented to you today from a different point of view by Dr. Treichler, in the development of speech, a primeval eurythmy of human beings undoubtedly and most certainly plays a very significant role. Things do not have the sound within them, as it were, in the sense that the bim-bam theory asserts, but there is a relationship between all things, between the whole macrocosm and the human organization, this microcosm, and basically everything that happens externally in the world can also be reproduced in a certain way in movement by the human organization. And so, basically, we constantly tend to recreate all phenomena through our own organism. We do this not only with the physical organism, but also with the etheric organism. The etheric organism is in a state of perpetual eurythmy. Primitive man was much more mobile than he is today. You know, this development from mobility to stillness is still reflected in the fact that in certain circles it is considered a sign of education to behave as phlegmatically as possible when speaking and to accompany one's speech with as few gestures as possible. It is “considered” a mark of certain speakers that they always keep their hands in their trouser pockets, so that they do not make any gestures with their arms, because it is considered an expression of particularly good speech delivery when one stands still like a block. But what is caricatured here only corresponds to humanity's progression from mobility to stillness. We have to recognize a transition from a gestural language, from a kind of eurythmy, to phonetic language at the very bottom of human development in primeval times. That which has come to rest in the organism has specialized in the organs of speech, and has naturally first actually developed the organs of speech. Just as the eye is formed by light, so the speech organ is formed by a language that is initially soundless. And if we are aware of all these connections, we will gradually be able to use eurythmy particularly well by introducing it properly into the didactic process, in order to counteract anything that could interfere with speech. And in this direction, if there is even a little leisure time, it will be a very appealing task to develop our current, more artistic and pedagogically trained eurythmy more and more towards the therapeutic side and to create a kind of eurythmy therapy that will then extend in particular to such therapeutic demands as the one we have been talking about here. I am not sure whether what I have said is already exhaustive, but I wanted to address it briefly. Of course, as questions accumulate, the level of detail in the answers will have to decrease.

A participant asks how the movement of eurythmy is meant in relation to the ether body, and whether, according to spiritual scientific research, it has the same form as the body. Is the ether body localized at the larynx?

Did the Hungarians, who were recently observed by Dr. Steiner playing cards in a Hungarian border town, themselves fall under the tables or only their etheric bodies? Was this a process that could only be observed in the etheric body?

Rudolf Steiner: Please understand me correctly. Eurythmy is such that it can be performed in the physical body and through the physical body, which otherwise only the etheric body of the human being can perform. The fact that a person as a eurythmist performs the movements studied in the ether body with his physical body does not mean that the person who stands there doing eurythmy when he has some horrible thought is not carrying out this horrible thought with his ether body. He can perform the most beautiful movements with his outer, physical body, and then the etheric body, following his emotions, may dance in a rather caricature-like manner. But those people I characterized the other day as being at the Hungarian border playing cards were, of course, characterized entirely on the basis of their physical behavior. I only said that one could study these passions in the soul and spirit, the passions that led them to do such things above and below the table, and that one could study these passions in the soul and spirit.

I would like to say the following. It is generally the case, when you look at a person at rest, that the etheric body is calm and only slightly larger than the physical body. But this is only because, schematically speaking, the physical body has a dilating effect on the etheric body of the human being in all directions. If the etheric body were not held in its form by the physical body, if it were not banished from the physical body, then it would be a very mobile being. The etheric body has the inherent possibility of moving in all directions, and in addition, in an awakened state, it is under the constant influence of the mobile astral, which follows everything of a spiritual nature. The etheric body in itself is therefore something thoroughly mobile. As a painter, for example, one has the difficulty when one wants to paint something ethereal, that one must paint, I would say, as if one could paint lightning. One must translate the moving into stillness. So at the moment when you step out of the physical world, at that moment the concept of distance also ceases to apply, along with all the things that actually only relate to resting space; all that ceases, and a completely different kind of imagining begins. A form of imagining begins that can actually only be characterized by saying that it relates to the ordinary imagining of spatial things as a suction effect relates to a pressure effect. One is drawn into the matter instead of touching it and so on. This is how it is with the relationship between the etheric body and the physical body.

A participant (also speaking for others): Dear attendees, prompted by discussions with many friends, I would like to ask a few questions that may express some of what has been going through many minds and hearts over the past week. We have heard that young students in particular can hear and learn many things here that need to be carried out into our people to build a new culture. Now, in the midst of all the problems that are being discussed here, the question of the fate of our German people often arises. How must our youth place themselves in the context of the fate of our German people if they want to fulfill their inner duties in the right way and of their own free will? Just as Fichte brought forth great and powerful thoughts a hundred years ago, so too are we receiving powerful thoughts today, the realization of which we long for. In wide circles, at least in those circles that are close to the threefold order, the view prevails today that this threefold order will also be realized without intensive work, that it can thus come about all by itself, so to speak, even if people contribute nothing to it.

Now I would like to raise the question: What will actually be the fate of our nation if this fatalistic attitude prevails in our circles – which is, of course, very easily explained from our overall cultural development – and if it is not replaced by the courageous will that is wanted from here? Today one often hears that it is possible that Bolshevism will spread even further, that it is possible that anarchic conditions in Germany will continue to spread. How should we position ourselves in the face of these questions, when this fatalistic element, which I have tried to describe, is confronted with the courageous, forward-storming will?

A second question: we are talking here about anthroposophy, about human wisdom. Now the question has been repeatedly asked in recent days: what would the whole world view actually look like if one did not start from the point of view of the anthroposophist, but if one started from the point of view of some other consciousness? We know from Dr. Steiner's lectures, but also from other lectures, that the three lower realms, that is, the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, are actually the brothers of man who have remained behind. How would this now present itself if we were to relate man again to the higher hierarchy, for example to the angelic beings? Is it conceivable that what is presented from a human point of view today as anthroposophy might be presented from the point of view of a higher consciousness, that is, from the point of view of an angelic consciousness - one could perhaps speak of an angeloisophy in this context - and how would the problems appear from this point of view? I ask this question because it has repeatedly come up in our conversations in recent days.

A third question: From the previous remarks by Dr. Steiner, it is clear that eurythmy is extremely important from a therapeutic point of view. Now I would like to point out that if we observe certain things today, things that appear to be trivial, we can see how absolutely necessary eurythmy is from a different point of view. Even in certain children's toys, we can see how certain forces appropriate to the present time want to come out, push towards manifestation. [There follows a reference to diabolo games and toys that were introduced by French and American soldiers in particular.] Do such toys not show certain forces that pull downwards? Is there not something in them that expresses forces that are polar to human nature, perhaps a hint of the devilish? And so I wanted to raise the question: Is it not possible that the harmful aspects of these or other materialistic games given to children today could be overcome through eurythmy? Just yesterday in children's eurythmy we had a living example of how children can respond to eurythmy in an ingenious way and then reject everything that is contained in such games.

Rudolf Steiner: I will try to answer the questions briefly, although each one would require a lecture in itself. However, I would ask you to bear in mind that if one says something in a brief answer to a question, it is of course easy for some inaccuracies or misunderstandings to arise.

First of all, the question of the fate of the German people: it is true that today an enormous sense of fatalism is emerging within broad sections of the German people. This fatalistic mood can be observed on a large scale and in detail. And this fatalistic mood was also, I might say tragically there when we began in April of last year in Stuttgart to seek understanding for the threefold social organism and for the upliftment of what lies in such a terrible way, that comes from this understanding. But on the other hand, it must be said that we have arrived at a very special point in the development of humanity. I must frankly admit that when I was invited by the Anthroposophical student group in Stuttgart to give a lecture for the students of the Technical University in their assembly hall, I was still under the impression of Spengler's book “The Decline of the West”. Yes, my dear audience, we have come to the point where today we can prove the decline in a strictly methodical way. Now, Spengler's book is by no means a talentless book. On the contrary, in many respects it is extraordinarily ingenious. What is presented there testifies to nothing other than this: if only the forces of which Spengler is aware were to be effective in the future – he is not aware of anthroposophy, but, as can be seen from some of his writing, he would probably turn red with rage just hearing about it — if only what Spengler knows remains effective, then the downfall of Western civilization would be absolutely certain well into the second millennium. Just let everything that has developed in humanity be effective — the downfall is certain. Just as a human being ages when he has reached a certain number of years and is heading towards death, so this culture is heading towards death. What people like Spengler do not know is what has developed in the successive cultural periods, which you will find described in my “Occult Science”.

In the first cultural period — I have called it the primeval Indian period — there was a primeval culture based on the wisdom of the time. Some of this has already been characterized in these lectures. From this there was an inheritance in the next age, in the ancient Persian, in the Zarathustra culture; from there, in turn, diluted into that age, what can be called the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, the third period, which closes approximately in the 8th century BC before the Mystery of Golgotha. Then very little goes into the fourth period, where Plato still lets his teaching and his writings be steeped in ancient mystery wisdom, but where naturalism and intellectualism already begin with Aristotle. During this period, in which human original wisdom is already beginning to decline, Christianity is founded. The Mystery of Golgotha is still understood with the last original wisdom. But as this ancient wisdom itself fades, it finally becomes modern theology, which either degenerates into a material dogmatism and church belief or into a description of Jesus as a simple man from Nazareth, in whom the Christ, the Christ-being, has been completely lost. But of course a new understanding of Christianity itself must come. The origin of Christianity extends into this fourth period, and from the point of view of Primordial Wisdom, it extends a little into our fifth period. The fifth period is the one in which Primordial Wisdom disappears, is paralyzed, and in which man must find a new spirituality from within himself. All talk about this spirituality coming from outside is in vain for the future. In the future, the gods must speak through the human soul. Today, the question is not addressed to any other power of the soul than to our will alone. That is to say, today it is a matter for all mankind to thoroughly overcome fatalism and consciously absorb spirituality into the will. This mission has already fallen to the German people to a very considerable extent. Anyone who studies this in more detail, by looking at the great figures of the German people, will notice how this people in particular has the mission to reshape its world, I would say its social world, out of its will, despite all the hardship and all the terrible things that are now unfolding within this people. Only for the time being there is no awareness of the actual facts and the great world-historical context.

I would like to do as I sometimes like to do, not just give my own opinion, but refer to the opinion of someone else, Herman Grimm, who certainly cannot be said to have been a Bolshevik or anything of the sort. As early as the 1880s, Herman Grimm wrote that the greatness of the German people is not based on its princes or its governments, but on its intellectual giants. But it may also be said that this is precisely what has been most misunderstood and most forgotten. Today there is a significant fact that one must only properly observe. Take the general intellectual life, untouched by a real spiritual upsurge. Study it as it lives itself out in popular literature, be it in Berlin, Vienna or elsewhere – I am not just talking about after the war here, but long before the war. study how it is lived out in Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen and so on, study it in popular literature, especially in newspaper literature, which can be said to represent the opinions of a very large number of people. Yes, especially during the war, it turned out that sometimes people also remembered that there was a Goethe, that there was a Schiller, that there was a Fichte – yes, even Fichte's sayings were quoted. But the fact of the matter is this: anyone today who has a feeling, a real receptivity for the inner structure, for the direction, for the whole signature of intellectual life, knows that what was written in the 20th century in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig was more similar to what was written in Paris, Chicago, New York, and London than to what a Herder, a Goethe, or a Fichte felt vibrating through their souls.

This fact is widely misunderstood. What Central Europe's greatness is actually based on has been forgotten. Once we describe figures like Frederick the Great according to the truth, not according to legend, then some of it will melt away in the face of the real intellectual greatness in Central Europe. And this must come. We must learn again, not just to quote the words of Fichte, not just to quote the words of Goethe, but to be able to live again in what lived at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. And we must become aware that only through the individual shaping of the peoples differentiated across the earth can something of what is to be achieved be achieved – not, however, by some unified culture emanating from some side, which is a Western culture, and one that is justified only for the West, has flooded Central Europe, not through the fault of the West alone, but above all because Central Europe allowed itself to be flooded and accepted everything. And this awareness of what is at stake is what must be spread today by those who mean well.

Dear attendees, I knew an Austrian poet; I met him when he was already very old: his name is Fercher von Steinwand. He wrote many important works that unfortunately have remained unknown.

I will just add what I wrote in my booklet [1895] about Nietzsche, a fighter against his time. Right at the beginning, I quoted a saying of Nietzsche that actually deserves to be better known: the saying that Nietzsche wrote down when he served in the Franco-Prussian War, albeit as a military hospital attendant. There he wrote [about the terrible, dangerous consequences of the victorious war and called it a delusion that German culture had also triumphed; this delusion posed the danger of transforming victory into complete defeat,] yes, into the extirpation of the German spirit in favor of the German Reich. In recent decades, when people spoke of the extirpation of the spirit, they understood little of this, if they spoke of the will to let this spirit flow in again.

And when all this is taken into account, it is necessary to recall what Fichte felt and what he expressed so magnificently in his “Addresses to the German Nation”: that the gods serve the will of men, that they work through the will of self-aware men.

And after Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and others, it is precisely this German nation that should be aware that the will must arise, but that will must be imbued with spirituality. What strange mental wanderings this German nation has gone through. There are many things that can be recalled that are only rarely presented in external history.

I advise everyone to buy the Reclam booklet by Wilhelm von Humboldt: “Ideas for an Attempt to Determine the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State”. You will see how much of it is already contained in the middle part of the threefold social organism, the legal, state part. Of course, the threefolded social organism is not in it, but what can be said about the state itself is there. In this writing, Wilhelm von Humboldt attempts to protect the individual against the state, against the increasing power of the state in the intellectual and economic realms. Wilhelm von Humboldt was Prussian Minister of Education from 1809 to 1819 – one almost dare not say this in view of what happened afterwards.

And so many more examples could be given. What is necessary, above all, is that those who feel this question before their soul really let history come to life in them. My dear audience, as an Austrian, one has a very special feeling for this when one gets to know the school history books of northern Central Europe. In 1889, I came from Vienna to Weimar to work on the publication of Goethe's works at the Weimar Goethe-Schiller Archive. And since I had previously been involved in education and teaching, I was also given the friendly task of guiding the director of the Goethe-Schiller Archive's boys a little. They were then in high school, and it was only then that I got to know their history books a little – I hadn't taken that into account before – starting with the creation of the world and going up to the development of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and only then the actual world history. Several textbooks presented it this way, one being roughly the same as the other. But is it not always a mere radicalism when speaking in this way, but sometimes it is also the right love for the German nation. And the right love, if it can really come through spiritual-scientific stimulation, will in turn give rise to a culture of the will from mere fatalism, and that is what matters. Unless we grasp this either/or, either destruction or ascent through our own will, we will not escape destruction. Of course, ascent will not come, but something quite different. Well, I could say a lot more about this topic, but perhaps that's enough for now. We'll see each other more often.

Regarding the question: What would our world view look like from the standpoint of a different consciousness, for example, an angelic consciousness?

Well, in a certain sense, spiritual science describes completely different forms of consciousness, such forms of consciousness that people had in the earlier stages of development, or such forms of consciousness that one can ascend to through inspiration or imagination. So, in a certain sense, one learns through spiritual science to recognize what the world view of another consciousness is. But as far as the question of an angelic consciousness is concerned, ladies and gentlemen, it is very important that we do not choose more abstract questions than are necessary for a certain, I would say elasticity, of our conceptual ability. Because, you see, we do not have our consciousness to satisfy ourselves with all kinds of sensational news from the most diverse worlds, but so that we can go through our overall human development through its development. And the angels have their consciousness precisely so that they can undergo angelic development. And if someone were to ask what the world would look like with a different consciousness, it would be like someone asking me how a person would eat if they had a beak instead of a mouth. It is a textbook example of moving out of concreteness and into abstraction. Anthroposophy is supposed to achieve precisely that, to remain within the realm of experience and to extend it only

extended only to the spiritual world, that one is always ready to broaden one's experience, but not that one constructs all kinds of questions out of pure abstractness. It is not at all necessary for us to speculate in any way about angelic consciousness or mammalian consciousness or the like, but it is necessary for us to simply abandon ourselves to experience. It gives us the input into our consciousness that we need for our orientation and for our further development in the world. And that is what we have to learn from anthroposophy: to remain within the sphere that concerns us as human beings, because that is where we make appropriate progress.

This is connected with the question I heard here just now, which is asked incredibly often: what is the ultimate goal of human development in the first place?

What is the ultimate purpose of human life, or rather of life?

You see, it is precisely in relation to such questions that spiritual science must be approached not in an abstract but in a concrete way. If you had no possibility of getting a timetable for the journey to Rome here in Dornach, but only as far as Lugano, and you knew that you could get a further timetable in Lugano to go on to Florence, and from there on to Rome, one would do well not to refrain from the journey or to speculate about how I have to organize the journey from here to Rome, but to travel first to Lugano, and then see how things go from there. It is the same with human life, especially if one knows that there are repeated earthly lives. If I now tell you something about the goal of all human life here with the abilities that one can have in this one earth life, then it could indeed be something more perfect next time and then one could answer more completely how one gets the timetable to Rome. So one has to take into account what is immediately given in the concrete, and one must know that human life is in a state of perpetual development. So one cannot ask about its ultimate purpose, but only about the direction of development in which one is moving. If you really look into it, there is truly a lot to be done for the physical, soul and spiritual life. And this path to Lugano is not quite close – I now mean the path in the development of humanity – and how that will continue, we want to leave that to the more fully developed abilities of the future. In short, it is a matter of remaining in the concrete, bit by bit, and of getting rid of the abstractness that also gives birth to such questions. Now, something else is needed here about eurythmy:

Can eurythmy, when used correctly, bring important achievements for our folk culture to light?

Yes, dear readers. From some of the comments I have already made about eurythmy, you will be able to see that eurythmy can have a great pedagogical-didactic significance. If you are convinced of this, and if you are not not only believe it but also recognize that it can even help to alleviate disturbances in life through appropriate eurythmic didactics, then there is much more that can be brought into the right channels in social life through healthy eurythmy. But of course one thing needs to be noted in this regard. You see, we should be able to take this eurythmy into children's play. The esteemed questioner spoke of children's toys and asked whether eurythmy could not be used for a lot of things. And it was also asked whether eurythmy can have a healing effect on children aged five to seven who suffer from epilepsy.

It can certainly do so if it is applied in the right way. Admittedly, we are only just beginning with eurythmy. But the continuation of this beginning does not always depend only on the intellectual momentum. For example, we had intended to build a kind of eurythmeum in Stuttgart to begin with, because of course the Waldorf School is there, and later here in the building itself. You really need opportunities if these things are to be developed bit by bit. You cannot pursue these things without practising them, without having the necessary premises and also the necessary connection with the rest of human culture; you cannot pursue these things out of the blue. It would have been terribly expensive to build a eurythmy in Stuttgart and we only had a small sum of money together. Perhaps I may say the following about this. In the first year, through the dedicated work of our Waldorf teachers, which cannot be sufficiently recognized, we really achieved everything possible for the Waldorf School in the first year. Although, in spiritual and psychological terms, everything that could be expected has been achieved – it is fair to say this without being immodest – this year began with extraordinary worries for those who were sincere about the Waldorf School. It is a fact that the Waldorf School had to be enlarged because a large number of children came from outside; the number of children has more than doubled compared to the previous year. We were facing a very considerable deficit, and the fund that we had for a eurythmy school was first eaten up by the Waldorf School. It is only natural that the Waldorf School should take this on, but it means that we cannot build a eurythmy school. What lets us down is people's lack of understanding. Nowadays people are willing to understand anything, except for work that comes out of the truly concrete soul and spiritual life. I do not want to be polemical here, but I could tell you many things that would show you the dilettantism and the philosophical emptiness that is added to it today, as it performs a few somersaults before all possible reactionary powers in the world. We do not easily find the understanding of those who could do something on the material side to help things move forward. And anyone who wants the didactic, pedagogical, and especially the folk-pedagogical side of eurythmy and other aspects of a spiritual-scientific art of education to be further developed must ensure that understanding of what is actually intended is drawn into as many minds and as many souls as possible, with what is asserted here as anthroposophical spiritual science.

Question: It is often mentioned in spiritual science that those or those of the higher hierarchies have gone through their stage of humanity in these or other circumstances. What does stage of humanity mean in this sense, that is, the goal of human development? Is the goal set as the development of the I, of freedom, which freedom is denied to the higher hierarchies? So what is the stage of humanity?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, I don't know who has denied the higher hierarchies the freedom in its special form of education. What is meant when I speak, for example, in 'Occult Science' or in the other writings of the human stage of other beings, is essentially characterized by degrees, by the different states of consciousness. In spiritual science, the term “stage of human development” is to be understood as follows:

Today, within human development in the broadest sense, we live in a state of consciousness when we are awake, which we can call object consciousness. This state of consciousness can be described as Dr. Stein described it to you in his lectures, according to his activity in imagination, concept, judgment. One can also add perception and the special kind of emotional effect, the volitional emotion, volitional impulses and so on. Then present-day humanity also still knows, but only in reminiscences, in chaotic images, the dream state, but this points back, it is an atavistic remnant of an earlier state of consciousness, of an ego-less image consciousness; this is therefore an underhuman consciousness. And it is preceded by two other states of consciousness, so that we can say: the present state of consciousness is the fourth in the series. It will be followed by a fifth, which we can anticipate today through imagination, inspiration and so on. We can also characterize this progression as future states of the sixth and seventh states of consciousness. The fourth, however, the one we have today, is in the narrower sense the state of consciousness of humanity as it is today. So when we speak of the human stage, we mean beings with object consciousness. Beings who do not perceive through such senses as human beings do, who have a special education, perhaps through very different senses, but who, in their inner being, depend on imagining and grasping and then, in a more or less subconscious activity, connecting perception with ideas and concepts. The higher, fifth state of consciousness would thus be one in which one consciously differentiates between the inner, spiritual realm, which one first grasps in pure thinking, as has been attempted in the Philosophy of Freedom, and then has perception as such as a phenomenon of development in its own right, into which one no longer mixes concepts and ideas, so that, as in the process of inhalation, in inhaling and exhaling, an inner interaction between perception and concept consciously takes place. That would be the next higher state of consciousness.

When we speak of other beings and say that they were at the human stage of development at different times, we mean that they had a perception of the external world in the past – regardless of which senses were involved – which they connected in a more or less conscious way with the inner soul life, so that at that time they were not yet at a stage that humanity will reach in the future, the stage of a separate experience of perception, of the spiritual soul realm, and a conscious synthesis. That is what needs to be said about this question.

Dear attendees, it is now 10 a.m., I think I will collect the questions that have yet to be asked and save them, and we can meet again in the next few days. I think we will be able to discuss the matters on the other notes better and with more focus if we don't rush through it in a few minutes, but instead come together again to answer these questions. I also think you will agree to this, after we have spent two hours having this conversation. So we will conclude today and continue in some way soon.

Dearly beloved! Although the great riddles concerning fate and death must always inspire people to reflection, this is especially the case in our fateful days, when the question of fate and the riddle of death are awakened directly or indirectly in so many souls by the immediate events of the day. In the lectures I have been permitted to give on this subject from the standpoint of spiritual science, I have often pointed out that in our time, in view of all the indications of our time, questions such as those concerning fate and the nature of death must gradually change from an old way of looking at and feeling to a truly scientific way of looking at and perceiving them.

Just as two or three hundred years ago a wave of human development brought the newer scientific view, we perceive how it lies in the impulses of the time in the present, that spiritual science, science about the questions of spiritual life, is moving into the cultural development of humanity from our time on. But now it must be emphasized that precisely when spiritual questions and spiritual enigmas are to be examined in the light of science, scientific research and work must take on a completely different character than scientific work and research into the external life and facts of nature.

And that, honored attendees, is what still arouses the harshest prejudices in so many circles, one might say, in general today, against what spiritual science has to say. Not only do the general prejudices exist, which assert themselves against every new cultural movement, which have asserted themselves even in the widest circles when the dawn of the new natural science appeared, but there is something quite special about it, that in a much higher degree humanity will have to relearn with regard to spiritual science, as it has to in relation to natural science. And although it was inconceivable to mankind only a few centuries ago that contrary to all appearances of the senses, it should be assumed that the earth does not stand still and that the sun does not stand still, but that the sun stands still and the earth moves around it, it is even more fundamentally inconceivable to these people, given their present state of development, to assume that the life of the spirit, the results of spiritual science, in the most eminent sense, must fundamentally contradict all that the outer senses present, and that the very nature of research to assume, according to their present course of development, that the life of the spirit, the results of spiritual science in the most eminent sense, must fundamentally contradict all that the outer sense appears to offer, and that the very nature of research into spiritual realms must take a different form from that of outer scientific research.

Let us try to recall the most elementary, most primitive character of external scientific research and observation! It consists in the fact that man first directs his senses and also his mind, insofar as it is bound to the brain, to the external world, receives impressions of the external world and forms ideas, thoughts, concepts about this external world. In these ideas, thoughts and concepts that he forms, he then has to experience within himself what are usually called the laws of nature. Two things can be pointed out in this external research if one wants to emphasize the difference between this research and what spiritual science wants.

On the one hand, it can be said that this research is based on what is real, spread out before it externally; and from this external reality, the human spirit progresses, the human view of the soul progresses to what it wants, to what it wants to achieve, so that science of this external nature is, so to speak, a consequence, a consequence of the experience of external real reality in this field. The other thing that is obvious to anyone who takes a little time to consider the soul's attitude to this outer research is that in this research, in this progression from looking at the outer world to the concepts, ideas and notions we form, we we make for ourselves, we proceed, as it were, from the fully-juicy reality, from the reality full of content, to that which is then, in our thoughts, images, concepts, in a sense, ethereal, thin compared to the full-bodied nature of external reality. We feel it: when we face reality with our senses, we stand in the full life of it. By forming knowledge and insight about external reality, we distance ourselves from this fully tangible reality. It has often been emphasized: we move away to a kind of gray inner experience, to a thin “ethereal”.

Now the spiritual researcher has to take the opposite path to that of the researcher in external nature in the way described. The researcher of external nature has this nature before him and he finally arrives at the content of his knowledge, his science, which lives in his soul. The spiritual researcher must start from what lives in the soul, and everything that can be called knowledge, science, inner imagination, inner experience in thoughts and concepts, which is the result and consequence of external research, is the preparation for the spiritual researcher. The spiritual researcher cannot start from something that is given to him externally; he must start from the inner, powerful experience, and that which is otherwise the content of science is only the preparation for that which the spiritual researcher can bring to life in his soul when he turns his gaze away, turns his attention away from all outer sense perceptions, from all that the intellect can think under the influence of outer reality.

The preparation for his research lies in what the spiritual researcher experiences here, when he excludes external reality and directs his gaze purely to inner thoughts and imaginative experiences, when he turns his attention entirely to his inner being. What happens in his inner being is what it is all about. What is going on in his mind, the extent of his inner experiences, can all be characterized by saying: The path of the spiritual researcher is through the concentration of thought. But this concentration of thought must be imagined as something quite different from what is called concentrated thinking in ordinary life. Not that it is something different, it is basically only an intensification of what we otherwise also call attention in our external life; but it is an unlimited intensification of this attention.

The point is that one takes up images, which initially need have nothing to do with an external reality, that one takes up symbolic images, ideas, not in order to reflect on these ideas as such in terms of their content, but in order to concentrate all the soul's inner forces, which would otherwise be scattered over external reality, onto one inner point, the point that one has steered into the center of the soul's life with an image. Then one is completely within oneself; but one is not calm within oneself. Then one is inwardly actively experiencing. Whoever continues such an inner concentration of thoughts for a sufficient length of time – a sufficient length of time does not mean a few hours, but weeks, years, in repeated inner activity – whoever continues this for a sufficient length of time, walks a path in his soul that ultimately leads him to experience a reality. Just as in ordinary observation one starts from reality and progresses to soul experience, so in spiritual research one starts from concentrated inner experiences and arrives at a new spiritual reality. This new spiritual reality cannot be made inward. What can be made inward is merely preparation for spiritual observation. This spiritual reality must approach man at the end of the path of preparation. While knowledge is otherwise acquired as a result of looking at external reality, in spiritual research reality is attained on the basis of inwardly working, inwardly active knowledge. No one can somehow inwardly do in the spirit what he then comes to. What he can do in the spirit is go the way that leads there.

What I am characterizing here is felt, for example, by a mind like that of the one I spoke of yesterday, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in terms of what he could already know, intuit, of the knowledge of real spiritual science. He spoke beautiful words in this regard:

The natural man is not able to rise to the supernatural by his own power, he must be raised to it by the power of the supernatural itself.

That is to say, the human being must approach the supernatural, and this supernatural must accept him. That is what it is about. From the ethereal, from the thin of the inner soul experience, we start and arrive at the full content of spiritual reality.

Of course, dear attendees, the objections that can be made from a time-consciousness against such spiritual scientific research are natural, I would say self-evident; in particular, the objection is self-evident that will be raised again and again that what the spiritual researcher experiences cannot have any general objective value, but that they are subjective experiences, that if a person wants knowledge, he must, in principle, define the limits of the cognitive faculty and admit that the supersensible is based on subjective experiences. This objection is very justified because it really applies to the beginning of the path, because the beginning of the path, as long as it is this preparation, involves inner struggles, inner battles, inner soul tragedy that are subjective, that basically only concern the person going through them. But it is quite another matter when one finally arrives at something that one does not evoke from one's own inner being, but which one encounters and which one accepts. Just as one can ascend a mountain by many different routes to reach the summit, but it is only from the summit that one can see all sides, so it is with the spiritual researcher: as long as the spiritual researcher is on his way, things only concern him personally; But when he has confronted spiritual reality, then he stands before an objective, before a real, which is supersensibly so full of content for the spiritual researcher, as the sensible is full of content for the outer observation.

But now there is one thing that must be taken into account as particularly characteristic when the spiritual researcher goes through the path just characterized. Let us recall once more what this path consists of: it consists in the fact that, with distraction of attention from all external sense world, with the most intense attention, increased to the unlimited, one only lives in perceptions and concepts that one's own soul can awaken in itself. In this way, one gradually enters into an inner life that has been intensified and concentrated in this way. Now the strange thing is: the more one succeeds in driving this inner concentration to a certain point, the more one comes to experience inner tension, in which one says to oneself: “You are now completely absorbed in what you have set out to do, you have forgotten your entire physicality and environment, you live only in your concentrated thoughts, the more you notice from a certain level on - because before this the inner thought life becomes stronger and stronger - you notice that this inner thought life undergoes an extinguishing in itself, it becomes less and less intense. And a peculiar experience occurs, which could be described as follows: It is as if the thought on which one has concentrated takes one with it with all one's soul forces and dissipates into the general ether of the world. This is the result of this tense, heightened, one might say technically conducted, increase in inner concentration and attention.

If you want to use an image, you could say that you have to take your inner concentration of thought so far for the purpose of spiritual research that the thought first becomes stronger and stronger and then, as it unfolds its life in the soul, it increases to such an extent that it dies and you, so to speak, die with it in your soul feeling. Thought must first die in the soul, if man is to be transported into the spiritual world.

When one has attained a certain level of spiritual research activity, one has, as it were, achieved what could be called an inner spiritual feeling and sensing in the world. The spiritual researcher knows at this moment, when the thought begins to die, that he is now entering a sphere of experience, of inwardly strong experience, where the thought ceases, but where the life forces are experienced in a concentrated way. The spiritual researcher knows that at this moment, with what he experiences inwardly, he is not within the confines of his brain; he knows this through the direct experience. He knows: You are now experiencing yourself outside of your body. And in this experience, which becomes intense, consciousness dies, so to speak. And in this dying, an inner experience occurs, an inner experience that is extraordinarily significant, that is shattering when it is experienced for the first time. The experience that occurs is this: that one gets a feeling: living in the spiritual world is something completely different than living in the outer physical world.

And here it is necessary to emphasize that it is so difficult to disseminate correct concepts about the spiritual world because most people, according to the currently prevailing conception, actually have to imagine this world differently than it is. While one faces the physical-sensual world in such a way that one can say: It is out there, you look at it, you take it in through your senses and your mind, is it with the spiritual world and everything that is of such a nature that it stands before you, so to speak, all thinking fades and something else occurs. It happens that you feel as if you have been taken in by a world, that you feel towards this world as you would feel towards the plant, the stone outside, at the moment when you could recognize them: you are now being taken up by the knowledge, the imagination of a human being. Just as our thoughts, streaming in from the outside world, feel accepted by us, so the person who, in true spiritual research, with his whole being, feels the imagination within him dying, is absorbed in the New, feels accepted by a world. That is what matters.

The way we grasp our thoughts and accept them and then have them within us is how we experience the destiny of thoughts, so to speak. We ourselves become thoughts, we can say, and feel as if we were a thought and were grasped by supersensible beings, as otherwise our thoughts are grasped by us, and as if we were now resting in these supersensible beings. We are within these beings. When we come to this stage, we realize that an invisible world is above us, but that we cannot experience it as some imagine it; rather, it must be experienced in such a way that everything [thought-like] ceases and we enter into a supersensible world. For a moment it is as it would be for someone who strained his face and hearing harder and harder, and with increased face and hearing, became blind and deaf. So one becomes, as it were, blind and deaf to the presentation of thoughts, because one feels: You are now accepted by the spiritual world. Not: one experiences, but one feels, one is being experienced. It must be emphasized again and again: the ascent into the spiritual world has a character opposite to that of penetrating into the outer, sensual world.

It is not about penetrating into a ghostly world, but about an experience in a different sense than the ordinary experience. That is what it is about. So you are inside, - that is all you know at this stage - so you are inside a spiritual world. So you know: spiritual beings hover over this sensual world, as it were, and you can be taken up by them, as your thought is taken up by you. But one feels as if one were blind and deaf, for thinking, knowledge, has died. Ordinary science must first die before one can penetrate into the spiritual world. One feels as if one were blind and deaf, but groping in the spiritual world. The life forces that one feels within are strained, and one feels groping.

But one does know what it means to be outside one's body. The fact that one is aware of this brings about a change in the entire human experience. And this change can best be characterized by drawing attention to something that has often been pointed out from this place, namely the changing consciousness of the human being – for every normal person probably within 24 hours – the changing consciousness of sleeping and waking. By going through what has been described, the spiritual researcher learns to recognize through direct inner experience that the human being's actual inner being can be experienced in and of itself, above all physical aspects. He learns to recognize – by experiencing the strength that in himself, he learns to recognize that he can live through the experiences that would otherwise remain completely unconscious in sleep, that are unconsciously experienced in the human soul, with the power that he has thus gained.

Not that the spiritual researcher does not need sleep; he does need it. But he can artificially induce states in which he is able to experience as otherwise only happens to a person from falling asleep to waking up. For the spiritual researcher knows, by experiencing the following: You are outside your body, you develop an activity that is not dependent on the brain and nervous system, and he comes to understand through actual experience what is experienced from falling asleep to waking up. He comes to recognize that in fact the human being's actual spiritual-soul entity is outside of the body, that when a person falls asleep, he leaves his body with his spiritual-soul entity and when he wakes up, the spiritual-soul entity once again enters the body.

But now the spiritual researcher, by means of experiential knowledge, can recognize what is actually outside the body during sleep. He can also see from this spiritual-soul that has been illuminated, from this spiritual-soul that is, as it were, revealed before the spiritual eyes, he can recognize why the soul is unconscious from falling asleep to waking up, why darkness and gloom spread around it. From the moment of falling asleep until waking up, something lives in the soul that, as already mentioned, can be perceived by the spiritual researcher. It can be called the desire, ever present in the soul during the entire physical experience between birth and death, to return to the physical body. This life of desire always fills the soul in the ordinary experience between falling asleep and waking up. The soul always wants to return to its body and, through this will, feels itself with this will, and this experience, this development of this desire, clouds what would otherwise be there in the spiritual-soul experience between falling asleep and waking up. And only when the soul submerges into the physical body, when this desire is fulfilled, can it develop its supersensible activity and then it stimulates the physical body so that it becomes a mirror of external expression.

In that the spiritual researcher learns to recognize what can actually be experienced in the soul, in the soul free of the body, he perceives directly that which otherwise extinguishes in sleep. But with the power he has gained, he is able to illuminate and clarify the soul's spiritual content. But if man wants to achieve this illumination and clarification, then something else must occur in the spiritual researcher that characterizes him. For we have seen that basically the intensity of thinking fades, basically man feels mentally blind and deaf and only as if groping in the spiritual world. What must be added in order for him to enter into spiritual vision and hearing again lies in another sphere. Something must be developed that is the second element of spiritual research, which otherwise remains dormant in life. And to realize what must be developed, one can direct one's spiritual gaze to the following.

Consider what is usually called fate. How do we stand in its current? We stand in it in such a way that - well, as we often say - the events of fate approach us by chance and are experienced by us. We feel separated in our inwardness from what befalls us as experiences of fate. In order to fulfill the second element, the spiritual researcher must take a completely different approach to these fateful experiences than the ordinary person does. To understand this, just look back at what you experienced in your youth, at the vicissitudes of fate, and then look at yourself today, at what you actually are in relation to your true self. You can realize that you would not be what you are, would not be in every detail, if you had not already experienced this or that stroke of fate, good or bad, in this ordinary life. That you take this or that approach at a certain moment, that you relate to it in this or that way, depends on the fact that you have experienced this or that in your destiny. If you really ask without prejudice, what are you actually? Then you have to say to yourself: you are the result of your destiny. The content of the soul, what you can do or want, is the result of your destiny.

What lies in these thoughts can now be used, as it were, for another soul exercise. The first soul exercise has made us strong in concentrated thinking; the second is one that relates to the feeling will, to the inner soul impulses, to what one actually is as an I. And one can call what the spiritual researcher has to go through as a second exercise, initially, meditation on the vicissitudes, well, let's say initially of one's own destiny. Not in theory, but in real inner experience, one realizes how one has actually become what one is now, by going through this or that, one grows into one's destiny, one grows together with it. You grow out of your ordinary self, which believes in coincidence, you weave yourself into the stream of destiny, become estranged from your own inner self, merge into destiny and know yourself flowing with destiny.

When this inner meditation bears fruit, then something very special occurs in the mind of the spiritual researcher. Namely, the spiritual researcher can notice when he has gone through this path of concentrated thinking, through the dying away of thinking, the feeling into higher, supersensible entities - which, as it were, absorb him, as we absorb a thought. When the spiritual researcher has gone through all this, then he experiences within himself, or rather observes within himself, something like an inner protest, like an inner opposition to what he himself has done with his entire spiritual research journey. And this protest can be expressed in such a way that one says: the spiritual researcher, through his concentrated thinking, arrives at a point where he feels that he has dissolved with his soul life. And he struggles against this dissolving. This inner protest, which is again a harrowing experience, lessens, stops, is overcome when the exercise of taking hold of fate is done, when one becomes immersed in fate. And just as one can say that the thought dies in concentrated thinking when it has reached its highest energy, so one can say: one perceives by entering into the stream of fate, one perceives how the will itself, which is otherwise within the human being, is grasped by the stream of fate. While we usually see the external world of fate as something standing opposite us and our will as something within us, we experience our own will in what we encounter as fate. We learn to see in our will that through which we shape ourselves in life. Our will is awakened and gradually pours over our entire destiny. When one has undergone such an exercise for a long time, one experiences to the full what the second element of spiritual research development is. The second element is the awakening of the sleeping will in our destiny. We wake up ourselves outside of us in the stream of our destiny, we enter with what we are into what we otherwise call the external.

By going out of ourselves in this way, new soul forces arise in us. This can be characterized by saying that whereas we used to kill our thinking life by concentrated thinking and then felt blind and deaf in the spiritual life, only groping our way as we entered the supersensible worlds, we now begin to live in these worlds as a self, we begin to feel a strong, higher consciousness in higher beings. We now feel not only accepted as a thought would feel accepted in us, remaining unconscious in us, but we enter a world, into supersensible entities, become like their thoughts, but in such a way that we are living thought-beings in them, developing self-awareness in them.

And with this higher consciousness, something occurs that may now be called an expansion of the soul's power, which is already present in ordinary life, but which in ordinary life extends only to the ordinary experiences of memory. We remember what we have experienced in ordinary life from a certain point in time after our birth; we can recall these experiences in our soul, we can also say to ourselves: If we could not remember, we would not be what we are. We owe our memory to what we appear to be. We must be able to look back on our lives. This ability to look back on our lives is expanded and intensified by the meditation on fate, but it must be taken so far that we really feel in our deeds our fate as we otherwise feel in our body. Then a new power of the soul arises for us outside of our body, which goes back behind our birth. We now, as we do through the memory of the events since a certain point after the birth, envisage events that lie before birth, that we have lived through in a spiritual life that preceded our birth, and we know that, as we make ourselves what we are in ordinary life, through what we have already gone through in this life, that we have made ourselves out of the spiritual world, through those prenatal experiences, into the whole man of destiny and temperament that we are.

In other words, through meditation on destiny, we expand our soul power into the power of remembering a life that we have experienced outside the body. And with this experience, which we have had outside of the body, we simultaneously gain insight into the entire nature of this life outside of the body that we have undergone before birth. It is simply one of the experiences that this expanded memory has that it sees through why it has sought out this earthly existence through birth. It has sought it out because it must incorporate this soul life as an effect of earlier earthly experiences into this one, and it arises as an immediate inner experience, which from the marked point of development is experienced in the same way as color is for the sensual person, it arises what can be called : the realization of repeated earthly lives, that realization of the complete life of a person that allows him to be portrayed as undergoing repeated earthly lives and, between death and rebirth, lives in the spiritual world over and over again, in which the experiences on earth are processed.

It cannot be said that this spiritual experience, of which this is spoken, this spiritual science, has not always been dormant in the best minds of human development; our time only seems to be called upon to highlight what has been dormant in the best minds as real knowledge. If you want to be a truly enlightened person, you can look to a man like Lessing, admire him and say: Well, he has achieved extraordinary things, but even at the end of his life, like his spiritual testament, he also wrote “The Education of the Human Race”, and in this ‘Education of the Human Race’ he also put forward the hypothesis that man not only lives on the physical earth once, but goes through this life in repeated earthly lives. There he has grown old, one can say, there he has already become weak. Of course, one can feel very enlightened in such an assessment; but as natural as such an assessment may still be in our time, it is no different from the progress of humanity than the judgment that was held before Copernicus: the earth stands still, the sun moves around it and must move, and that was brought to Copernicus as a prejudice.

The prejudice that is repeatedly asserted against the idea of repeated earthly lives is no different than this prejudice, which lay dormant in people for a long, long time. And just as scientific progress has defeated all prejudices against it, so will spiritual scientific progress defeat all prejudices that are asserted against it. Lessing will be proved right with his work when he says: Should this hypothesis of repeated lives on earth - for spiritual science it is no longer a hypothesis, but something that can be experienced in the sense of today's discussions - should it therefore, because it is found at the bottom of the knowledge of the oldest of the primitive peoples, because it has arisen in the human mind before it was darkened and distracted by the sophistry of school, should it therefore be rejected, because it is opposed to the repeated lives on earth today? - should it be less valuable than another because it is found at the bottom of the knowledge of the oldest of the primitive peoples, because it has arisen in the human mind before it was darkened and distracted by the sophistry of school? One will recognize that what Lessing said - really what I yesterday called brave [science] - that this can really be raised to the rank of genuine science.

Then, when what has been hinted at here is truly grasped by people, then people will think differently about the fateful question than they do today. Then they will take what fate brings as intimately related to their being, then they will know that they are placed into the higher spiritual world by fate as conscious beings. With fate, people will grow together in their entire world view; fate will be seen as something that is there to lend a higher self to man, just as our body gives us the ordinary self of everyday life that we need to be a personality.

And then, when the human being has grown together with his destiny, little by little it will no longer seem incomprehensible to him what spiritual science has to say about death and its riddles. It is not without reason that the experience attained by the spiritual researcher, when on the one hand he grasps concentrated thinking and feels it dying away and when on the other hand he finds the awakening of that which what otherwise only lives in the human being in the whole stream of fate — the experience he undergoes has not been called in vain in the true mystical worldviews: approaching the gate of death.

For in fact, what the spiritual researcher experiences, even if not as direct reality, is in the image of experiencing death. When the spiritual researcher, by means of his two elementary preparatory experiences, is able to clarify and illuminate the spiritual and soul life within himself, he experiences it in such a way that he has to say to himself: 'You have left your physical body, you are looking at this physical body, you know what it means to live outside the body'. What the spiritual researcher experiences in his mind's eye when he approaches the gate of death in recognition is what every human being experiences when he passes through the gate of death: the body takes itself away from the soul and spirit, as it were. And through this experience, what is otherwise always present in the soul and spirit is extinguished.

For the spiritual researcher recognizes: When the human being is outside of his body from the moment he falls asleep until he wakes up, he still has a craving for his body. He recognizes at the same time, by approaching the gate of death in the sense indicated, how through the actual experience of passing through the gate of death, how through this actual experience of death, through this dissolution, through this acceptance of the body, this desire for the body is gradually eradicated in the soul. And as it is extinguished, it is as if a mist permeating the body were to leave the body and it were to become light. Man is truly absorbed into the sphere of the beings that are otherwise supersensible and invisible; man is accepted as thoughts are by man, and dying means being accepted by the spiritual beings.

But this moment of death, as it is experienced when the person looks back on the taking away of the body, is an experience that has a consequence. Just as the spiritual researcher experiences an expansion of his memory as he grows into his destiny, so the human being in general experiences an expansion of his memory when he passes through the gate of death, looking back on the life he has lived in the body. What presents itself at the moment of death triggers certain soul forces within him when he is accepted by the higher beings that embrace him.

And now something special occurs. To understand this, we have to draw attention to something. How do we have this self-awareness in our ordinary lives, this kind of consciousness, whereby we address ourselves as I? From the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, we do not address ourselves as I; we have to submerge into our spatial body in order to address ourselves as I. Basically, it is the case that every morning, when we submerge into our body and use our eyes, ears and other senses, we first become aware that we are an I. It is in our spatial body that we attain self-awareness. The spiritual researcher can observe this in himself by going outside of his body and going through all the struggles of deadening and suppressing the desire for the body; he knows what higher powers of remembrance he must use to be a self, how he must grow together with his destiny. What he experiences is otherwise experienced through the sight of leaving the body.

And another power comes into play: we can no longer enter a body. But what happens now is the memory that we were in the body. That is the significant thing. We would not come to an ego [consciousness] in the time between death and a new birth if we were merely thoughts of the higher beings, so to speak; only because we can always look back into our past earthly life, because we have a time body instead of the space body in the ordinary life after death, only because of this do we have self-awareness. In perpetually looking back at our temporal life, we remember this temporal life and thereby ignite our self-awareness. While in ordinary life our self-consciousness is kindled in the spatial body, after death it is kindled by what we call the heightened memory of what we were in the time between birth and death. Instead of space, time enters into the circumstances described after death. Thus we see how death, by its very nature, has an awakening power for the supersensible being of man, how what we experience in death gives us the ability to develop self-awareness after death. Just as thought dies in us and our self must be kindled by merging with fate, so man will kindle his self-awareness after death by looking back on his life on earth.

In this way, we gain a very real idea of what is otherwise called the soul and spiritual inner life in man; in this way, we come to a feeling for the living, soul and spiritual core of the human being, the core of the being that Johann Gottlieb Fichte, as far as he could in his time, felt as [I shared from him yesterday]. In addition to yesterday's passage, today I would like to add the other one where he, in his writing on the destiny of the scholar, talks about how the soul feels when it is truly able to grasp its spiritual-soul essence, grounded in the eternal super-sensible. There Fichte says: “And if you all, rocks and mountains, that you have piled up, fall down on me...” /gap in the text].

The task of spiritual science is to elevate to the level of scientific knowledge that which has been sensed by the best minds. Now one can say: Of course, not everyone in our time can go through such experiences that lead them to an immediate grasp of the spiritual world, as described. But that is not at all necessary. These inner experiences are necessary so that what can be said about the spiritual world is brought up out of the abyss into which it would otherwise be sunk. These powers are necessary for the bringing up; but when what has been said about the connection between human destiny and death is formed into ideas and brought into the language of human conceptions, then these soul experiences not be necessary, but one recognizes approximately what has been brought to light by the spiritual researcher, so through the inner ability to perceive the truth as correct, as one perceives mathematical judgments when they are formulated and presented to us. For it must be said again and again: Every human being, without exception, is called upon to go through what has been described today in order to see the spiritual world directly and to recognize the human being in his or her eternity. But not every human being needs to do so. Every human being, however, can truly recognize and correctly understand what spiritual research says, provided they do not throw obstacles and prejudices in their own way. It is not contradicted by the fact that today the majority of people still say of the results of spiritual research: It is a vain fantasy, pure nonsense, the brainchild of a few thinkers. The human being does not decide on the basis of reasons in reality, does not prove in reality, but the human being decides according to habitual thinking. And today's thinking habits are the result of that thinking, that imagining, which had the very purpose of penetrating into the outer, sensual reality, which became accustomed to adhering to this outer sensuality.

It is natural today that the majority of people, precisely because they have risen to this natural thinking, cannot approach the law of development. But as natural as this is, the time is coming when the bow of materialistic thinking will be so taut on one side that it will have to break on the other. And everywhere there are signs that humanity is about to grasp spiritual scientific thinking in the same enthusiastic way that it has embraced natural scientific thinking. Today, all kinds of objections are still being raised against spiritual scientific thinking; but I would like to say that the best minds in human development have also had the right feeling about this. And Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whom I tried to present yesterday as an exemplary guiding genius, has, as far as he could in his time, refuted an objection that is so easily raised against the presentation and consideration of the spiritual world, with the following words. He says: “The doctrine of a spirit, by no means arbitrarily assumed, in whose higher power we all live, which unintelligent people believe to have been sufficiently struck when they call it mysticism, this is by no means enthusiasm; for it goes to the root of the matter, and indeed to the most intimate spirit, which is to animate all action. It would only become enthusiasm if it were added that this view emerges from a mysterious source of light that is granted only to a few chosen ones. In which approach the actual mysticism consists. If this pretense is pride in sensual [gap in the text]."

As I said, Fichte did not yet have spiritual science, but he had the seeds, and by developing these seeds, spiritual science comes into being – through a science that does not appeal to mere passive external observation, but to the inwardly active powers of the soul, through a science that wants to be experienced science. But that which this spiritual science wants to bring to humanity should also be a real force for the future and progress of humanity, a truly real force. Through spiritual science, fate and death will be placed in the context of life as belonging to the whole human experience. Just as we look at the processes of external nature and see how what the human being is in this external nature is formed at the highest peak of these processes, so humanity will gradually come to understand, precisely through spiritual science, that what the human being is in his innermost spiritual-soul core of being, what he is in that through which he is connected to the eternal, that this rests in the forces that otherwise confront us externally incomprehensibly in fate and in the riddle of death.

And then one looks at this spiritual-soul core of the human being as at a real one; one sees the outer life not as the cause, but as the creature of this real spiritual-soul core within the human being. One sees how what connects the human being to the eternal forms his bodily exterior, shapes everything one sees in the outer life. And then, through spiritual science, those riddles of life that are otherwise so difficult to solve do not appear as riddles, but as something that sustains life, that gives strength in the blissful moments of life, but also comfort in the bitter moments of life. Therefore, because this is so, I do not want to shrink back at this moment from stating, as it were, a special result of spiritual research, which may interest us particularly now.

We see people dying in the prime of their lives; we see the outer body detach itself from the person – compressed into a short moment in time – how the outer body detaches itself from the soul, which we must assume would otherwise have had years of strength to prevail over this physical life. And as we contemplate the essence of the human being as revealed to us by this spiritual-scientific portrayal, we ask ourselves: What is it like for a person who lays down his physical body in the prime of life, that is, in the spiritual world, where the experience of self comes about through memory? What does this early death mean for the core of a human being who would still have had the strength to permeate physical life for many years? How does fate present itself here? I believe that we can best come to terms with this if we compare those who sacrifice themselves for their fatherland - which current events demand - with those who sacrifice their body, with an ascetic who also sacrifices the physical in a certain way.

I have often pointed out here that spiritual science, when it is properly understood, is not an enemy of life, does not lead away from life, but precisely because it grasps the full reality, is life-promoting, that the spiritual researcher, precisely because he points to the spiritual world, wants to say: In these spiritual sources lie powers which enrich life, which would be poorer without them and without the directing of thoughts to them. Spiritual research does not lead a person to despise the life of the body, but to spiritualize it, to control the body. In this way, however, it is also able to indicate the wrongness of a false asceticism, the asceticism that believes it is living its way up into the spiritual through the killing or paralysis of the body, which is caused by certain powers of the spiritual and soul. Of course, one attains all kinds of things by mortifying or paralyzing the body, just as everything that happens in the world has consequences. One attains many things; but what does one attain through such asceticism? True spiritual experience seeks to penetrate into the spiritual worlds; false asceticism impoverishes life by only developing what is already present in the spiritual and soul core of our being, because it does not ascend to new powers, but kills and paralyzes the body through already existing powers. What does one attain through this? One attains a certain strengthening of inner powers, the possibility of experiencing the soul-spiritual core of one's being in a richer, more meaningful way. But one attains this in and through the body, even if one attains it by killing and paralyzing the body, but precisely by overcoming these bodily powers in the body. But as a result, what the in a sense wrong ascetic attains, refers to his personal, individual life, that when he goes through the gate of death, he then has a stronger soul-spiritual core, that he uses all the powers he has acquired to look in a personal, individual way at what his life on earth was. He acquires a heightened sense of self-awareness for his own personality, and, as it were, cultivates a supersensible egoism through his asceticism.

On the other hand, let us consider - I cannot help but say that I would like to draw attention to the objective results of spiritual research without any sympathy or antipathy - let us consider the person who is not an ascetic but who sacrifices his body, sacrifices for his country and people, sacrifices in the prime of youth and carries within him a spiritual-soul core that could live in the body for a long time; he experiences, through all the circumstances surrounding his death, namely through the circumstances that make his death a conscious death of the victim, a strengthening of these inner forces that lead to self-awareness . But now, after death, these strengthened powers are not merely strengthened when looking back at one's own body, they are not merely a strengthening of personal self-awareness, but rather a strengthening of the powers that are less inclined to be bound to bodily life; the strengthened powers are, as it were, diverted from bodily life. The self-awareness that is strengthened in the ascetic more in relation to the supersensible-egoistic, is strengthened in the person sacrificing himself on the battlefield for a great cause in such a way that the volitional impulses, the flowing impulses of feeling, are strengthened. Everything that is less selfish is strengthened. And so it happens that those forces that such a person brings through the gate of death have strengthened the selfless in him, and these remain with the national community for which the person in question sacrificed himself, or with the cause for which the person in question sacrificed himself. The ascetic basically spends the strengthened powers he has acquired on himself; the one who sacrifices himself in the prime of youth on the battlefield or for the greater good spends what fate demands of him for the sake of humanity, for the human community.

This is also something that gives us answers to the riddles of fate and death in a specific case, and this is what spiritual science will bring in general: it will create a worldview in the consciousness of human beings that comes to terms with the events between which the human soul, emerging from the dark mysteries of the world, must now walk. Certainly, everything that man can experience about the riddle of death and fate, he experiences in his entire life. All live in the spiritual, in the supersensible world, when they go through the gate of death; but as everything happens and would happen in nature outside, even if man knew nothing about it, it is still necessary for human progress that what happens outside in nature is taken into knowledge; because that brings man forward. Processes, objective realities, facts are all that the spiritual researcher explores, but what takes place in the spiritual world must become knowledge. And just as nature entered into progress in a moment of development, so spiritual knowledge must enter into cultural development from our time onwards.

When man assimilates into his knowledge that which exists without him, he advances his race. It can be said that anyone who has a sense for such spiritual knowledge will naturally do their part to promote progress in the sense of this spiritual science. I said with the first words of our reflection today that what is happening in the East and West makes it particularly important for us to ask about the riddle of fate and death. And if we look at it in such a way that we can say this about the connection between fate and death with the sacrificial life of the one who sacrifices himself, then we can say: We live in a time in which a large number of spiritual-mental cores of being, which could still awaken life, could promote physical life, go up into the spiritual world. There they will be.

In physical science, one speaks of the conservation of forces, of the fact that no force is lost; through spiritual science, one will increasingly speak of the conservation of spiritual forces, of their not being lost. These powers are there, these powers belong to the world's effectiveness. Not only the souls of those who go through the gate of death in a sacrificial death live on in the supersensible world, but what lives on as a sum of special powers is what has gone out of the bodies as soul nuclei and what could still have lived in these bodies. And when we spoke yesterday of the survival of the leader-geniuses, not only through tradition but in a real sense, as if these leader-geniuses radiated something into the descendants of their people that lives in the ranks of this people when this people is called upon to act, we can also say the same of all these spiritual and soul-like cores of being that had to prematurely complete their lives under the demands of the time.

Doesn't it seem to us as if the events of the immediate present, as if this most terrible struggle that humanity has experienced, is not the beginning of something completely new? I believe that anyone who feels the power and violence of what is currently happening will have to say to themselves: It is the introduction of something that must come as something completely new, in which those who will not have been forced to leave life and experience for the physical world, who will enter the future without having attained death and without the pain of being wounded, will participate. But this time that is to come will also be marked by all the forces that have passed into the spiritual world in the way just described. One will have to say: Whatever may come, the forces that have ascended from the physical world into the supersensible world without being exhausted will speak in the souls of the survivors and those born later in such a way that they will appear as challenges.

In a sense, one will have to say: Those who look up to these forces will demand a completely new life, and those who look at the signs of the times, at what can be said from the feelings of spiritual research about the signs of the times, if one considers this properly, will say: What is required of the living and dead, is that the materialistic, purely naturalistic view of the world is joined by a living grasp of the spirit and the spirit permeating human deeds, and that what goes up to the spiritual world in the form of unspent human cores will understand these forces, what is happening below. Only when that which is happening below feels the duty to cultivate the spirit, only that will be understood by those who, so to speak, have newly fertilized the field in which the survivors have to work with their blood, have newly revived it through their death.

And I mean more than an image when I say: spiritual science will [in the future be a confrontation] with these sacrificed forces, will be able to be felt as an obligation towards the sacrifices that are now being made and that will only have meaning if they usher in a new age. Therefore, it is as if all those who now pass into the other world through sacrificial death speak the word in a very special way, as a warning to humanity about a spiritual awakening, which Robert Prutz once spoke to Jacob Grimm, perhaps on much lesser occasions, with reference to [gap in text] relations /gap in the text] – now it is as if it were sounding as a reminder of those forces that have prematurely passed into the spiritual world through sacrificial death and are allowed to sound to urge on the fulfillment of duties with regard to spiritual life, [gap in the text].

It is for the coming generation,
It is for the dawn of the future.
It is for freedom and for the right,
It is for life and for death.

Yes, what can be achieved in the present through spiritual science is what counts for the future dawn, and what can be explored through spiritual science about the riddle of fate and death is what counts. It is not just about the life that can be perceived by the senses, it is about life and death and the life that emerges from death, and about death, which itself awakens life.

In the introductory lectures of this year's winter cycle, we have already often pointed out the sources of man's supersensible knowledge, the knowledge of which – and also of its relationship to the world in which we live – this entire lecture cycle is intended to deal with. It was pointed out how these sources of supersensible knowledge lie in the human soul, in every human soul itself, in it as dormant forces and abilities, which can be brought forth through appropriate means in intimate inner experience, so that the human being can become able to look into the spiritual worlds. The development of these abilities lying dormant in the soul is to be sketched out this evening. Further explanations of what is to be presented today will then arise in the next lectures.

If the aim is to make it clear how the soul's dormant powers of supersensory knowledge can be brought out, then one can always point to an occurrence, to a fact that happens to every human being in the course of twenty-four hours: to the alternation of sleep and waking. Man usually passes by those riddles of life that play into his life daily as something familiar, and the rare and, because of its rarity, oppressive will in most cases easily evoke a longing to be solved as a riddle. Such oppressive riddles of life will be discussed here in the next lecture. Today, however, we will start from a mystery that eludes man in its mysteriousness only because he is so accustomed to the phenomenon in question, namely the alternation of sleep and waking.

In order to sustain our lives, we must pass from a state of consciousness into one of unconsciousness every day. What happens when we pass into the unconscious state of sleep? The senses lose their capacity to perceive, the organic limbs lose their capacity to move, and thinking, which is bound to the activity of the brain when it is engaged in the external world, ceases. As we fall asleep, we feel all the activities and all the awareness that fill our day subside. It would be a logical impossibility for anyone who judges impartially to think that what surges up and down in our soul from morning to evening in our conscious state as our ideas, our feelings, sensations, affects, passions, yes, as our ideals and ideas, actually passes into “nothingness” each time we fall asleep and then arises again the next morning. Only logical prejudice can deny that man's spiritual and soul essence is also present while he is in the unconsciousness of sleep.

If we assume hypothetically for the moment – and the following lectures are intended to justify this assumption – that while man is in the unconsciousness of sleep, he has, as it were, withdrawn with his actual spiritual-soul core from his physical body and the forces animating this physical body, and that he then lives in a spiritual world , it is not far-fetched to assume that the reason for this lies within the person themselves: that when a person's spiritual and soul essence is withdrawn from their body, they cannot perceive their surroundings in the same way that they perceive them when they use their eyes, their other sensory organs and their brain in the physical world. It is not far-fetched, I say, to think that man's spiritual-soul powers are initially dependent on using the 'ordinary life of the senses and the brain' in order to have a world around them, and that when man, as in sleep, divests himself of the possibility of perceiving through these instruments, they are too low, too weak to really see, really feel and think what they could then perceive.

Such a supposition could only prove to be correct if there really were the possibility of actually drawing forth from their hiddenness the forces which one suspects as weak, for instance if one were able to condense and concentrate within oneself the soul forces which, as it were, are 'thin' in ordinary normal life concentrate them within oneself, so that what a person experiences in sleep would not have to occur when they stop using their senses or their brain, but that there could also be a state similar to sleep, and yet in a certain respect completely opposite to it. This state would have to be similar to sleep in that the person would not be forced, as when falling asleep, but would voluntarily, through his inner powers, through his will, cause himself to withdraw from the senses or from the brain , so that he could be completely awake but not see his surroundings through his eyes, nor perceive anything through the other senses, but bring his eyes and other senses to complete silence. In other words, he would have to be able to completely suppress all sensory activity through his will, and he would have to be able to suppress ordinary thinking, the kind of thinking that is activated in everyday life through ideas about the external physical world. Furthermore, if man could suppress by his own will what otherwise brings him to perceive, he would now be able, in his spiritual and soul essence, not to reach the unconsciousness of sleep, but to concentrate forces that are otherwise weak and thin, so that he can also properly act without his body, outside of his body.

The question arises as to whether what has just been said can be realized in some way. Of course, this can only be answered by the facts that the person evokes in himself, namely simply by the fact that he is able to apply means to his soul through which what has just been characterized occurs. Through the application of such means to the soul, one comes to supersensible knowledge. The path to supersensible knowledge is not one that leads through external means, that requires all sorts of machinations merely existing in the external world, but it is an intimate path of the soul, and everything that has to be done for it takes place in the depths of the life of the soul itself.

Now, if we want to ascend into the worlds that are to explain to us the outer world in which we live, if we therefore want to ascend into the supersensible worlds, there are three stages that we must pass through. A more detailed account of these three stages can be found in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Here, however, they will only be briefly outlined. When describing these three stages, I ask you not to be put off by the words. Some of the words are used today in everyday language for something quite different from what is meant here, and some of them do not sound good in the thinking habits of the present day because they are used for all kinds of things that are recognized imprecisely or unclearly, or even for those that are rightly rejected. This sometimes causes a kind of emotional emphasis when these words are heard. But it is easy to see that this must be so to a certain extent for the things to be discussed here, because our language is there for the external world. Therefore, the words for the designations must be borrowed from the external world and can therefore never fit exactly for what lies outside the external sense world for which language is created.

The first step of higher, supersensible knowledge is imagination, imaginative knowledge. To avoid the misunderstanding that has just been mentioned, I would ask you to understand by imagination only what I will characterize in a moment. The second stage of supersensible knowledge is inspiration, and the third stage is what, when the word is used as we shall characterize it later and not as it is often used inaccurately in ordinary life, can be called true intuition. Outer sense and intellectual knowledge, which we apply in ordinary life and also in the science of the outer world, is related to these three stages of supersensible knowledge as a kind of preliminary stage, so that, when the stages of supersensible knowledge are added, one can speak of four stages of human knowledge.

Now there are many means, and many means must also be applied when it is a matter of rising from ordinary sense and intellectual knowledge to the first stage of supersensible knowledge, imagination, and I will, because there is not would not have time, I will emphasize with all concreteness how the soul must, as it were, use one of the means – you will find others in “How to Know Higher Worlds” – to awaken the slumbering supersensible cognitive abilities in it. One of the means is the so-called meditation.

If we ask ourselves: What is meditation in the spiritual-scientific sense? — we must say: This meditation is the devotion to an idea, to a thought-feeling or to a volitional content in such an intense way and in such a way that it does not happen in ordinary life, but it is suitable for concentrating and condensing forces that are otherwise present in our soul life, as it were, in a diluted form. In this process, it is good, although the opposite is also possible, not to use concepts for such an understanding of the soul that one otherwise gains in ordinary life or in ordinary science. These concepts can certainly be used, but they are not as good to use. The most useful concepts for meditation are allegorical, symbolic concepts. I will develop such a symbolic concept here, which has already been presented to some of the listeners in other contexts. At first it may seem grotesque, paradoxical, that someone would be expected to let what is now being discussed take effect in his soul, but we will characterize later why it should happen. Let us assume that someone forms the idea that he has two glasses in front of him, an empty glass and one partially filled with water. Now he pours the water out of the full glass into the empty one and imagines that, by pouring the water out of the full glass into the empty one, the full glass does not become emptier and emptier, as it does in the external world, but fuller and fuller. This is indeed a paradoxical idea at first, but this idea is meant to be an allegory, and the spiritual researcher should be aware that it is an allegory. It is meant to symbolize, as it were, the nature and essence of human love for our soul. With human love and with everything that falls under the idea of love, it is certainly the case that this source of love is so infinitely deep and so infinitely rich that when we see the fact of love in the world, we must humbly admit at all times: This mystery of love in its true essence is most certainly unfathomable for every soul. And the more we have this sense of unfathomability, the better it is for the content and intensity of our lives. But there is one quality of real love that we can clearly know and emphasize: that is the quality that is symbolically represented to us by the image we have just spoken of.

The person who gives love and acts of love to another person never becomes poorer or emptier through what he does out of love, but always fuller and fuller, richer and richer in his soul life. This quality of love, emphasized, we have before us, as it were, when we imagine the image of two glasses and the pouring of water from one into the other.

We do something similar to what is done in another area of knowledge, and in doing so we arrive at important results for the external sense world. Let us assume that we have a circular plate made of some substance unknown to us. When we look at this circular plate, we can say that what it is as a substance, how the materials are welded together, is initially unfathomable to us. But there is one thing we can do if we want to know something about this disk: we can draw a circle in front of us. Then we have emphasized something about this disk, namely that it is circular, and this emphasized fact is absolutely certain, however little we know about the disk in general. If we think mathematically, we also do it in such a way – and all mathematics is symbolism in this respect – that we highlight some aspects symbolically. This process of creating images that are perceived by the senses and then held fast by the soul is the preparation for imaginative knowledge for soul-spiritual deeds and for soul-spiritual experiences.

If someone were to say: Then the spiritual researcher sets out to bring images and symbols to life in his soul that do not correspond to any truth at all, so he sets out from the outset to think untruth and to bring untruth to life in his soul – then the answer would have to be: But of course the true spiritual researcher is aware that what he brings to life in his soul as symbols does not correspond to any external reality! If for a single moment he could mistake a symbol for some kind of reality, then he would no longer be a human being on the way to supersensible knowledge, but on the way to illusion. These symbols are not meant to represent outer realities, but to live in our soul, to connect and blend with our soul life and to concentrate our soul life on them.

If we are now able to focus so strongly on such a symbol that we use all the power of our soul to let only this symbol live in our soul and to put aside everything that could penetrate us from external impressions, and to put aside all other thoughts , so that we bring only and alone such an image to the center of our consciousness, then such an image is better than an immediate impression of an external reality, because such an impression always draws us back to the external reality with our soul forces, distracting us from ourselves, as it were. But when we have formed a pictorial, arbitrary idea with full awareness that we have something purely constructed, to which we now surrender, it is something that retains reality only insofar as it is borrowed from it. Whatever images we form, we have taken the components for them from external reality. These images are presented in colors, shapes, etc., they are borrowed from external reality, but they do not refer to external reality. This is because it does not happen in external reality that a glass becomes fuller when you pour out the contents.

Such an exercise has the consequence that the soul must concentrate its powers in a completely different way than if it takes what it has otherwise experienced to help it. If the one who wants to go the way into the supersensible worlds has patience and perseverance to practice such concentrations of his soul life again and again, he will be able to have a very definite inner experience. Having this experience is the first step towards imaginative knowledge. He will experience that he has thereby inwardly changed his soul life, and that after some time he can become aware of how such images, such pictures, arise from his soul itself, without him first bringing them about, and arise in such a way that they present themselves to him with all the appearance of reality, as images otherwise only present themselves when we have made external perceptions and formed ideas from them.

In our ordinary external life, our soul's images arise as reflections of external reality, as it were. Through the exercises mentioned, however, images arise from the depths of our soul life, which are only pictures at first, of course. But this is where the elevation of the soul life lies: the soul now feels inwardly strong and can enter a state that is similar to, yet opposite of, the state of sleep. During sleep we abstract from all outer perceptions and also from brain-bound thinking, but we fall into unconsciousness. In imaginative cognition we also abstract from all outer perceptions and from all brain-bound thinking, because we suppress all that. But despite this, the soul does not become empty, does not become unconscious, but images arise from its depths, images that become richer and richer, more and more extensive, and then present themselves to the soul like a new world. This is the world of which it has already been indicated in these lectures that it can be confused by the layman, who is not familiar with such things, and its value can be mistaken for the world of morbid illusions, hallucinations, delusions and the like. But only someone who is ignorant of the facts in this matter, and judges only from the morbid life of the soul, can make such a mistake; for there is an enormous difference between the morbid, even the slightest morbid, representations of this kind, and those that have been rightly won by methodical soul-education.

Anyone who has learned even a little about what are called pathological soul phenomena, hallucinations, illusions or delusions, knows one thing: that those persons who are afflicted by such ideas ultimately believe in the reality of them so firmly that the faith they themselves have in the experiences of the external sense world is nothing in comparison. That is the characteristic of delusions and illusions, that those who are afflicted by them also develop an overwhelming belief in them. There is nothing more difficult than to talk a person out of their delusions – they don't even have to reach the degree of hallucinations, just ordinary delusions, paradoxical ideas. If, for example, a person begins to develop the morbid idea that other people are persecuting him, it is extremely difficult to get rid of this idea by mere persuasion, and it may happen that he constructs the most marvelous logical thought-constructions to prove how right all these delusions are. Man can become obsessed by these ideas, and he firmly believes in the objective reality of such conceptions.

If you now only take into account some of what is said in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, you will see that while man brings himself to let such images and imaginations take effect in his soul, at the same time everything is done through the right schooling of the spirit to ensure that, to the same extent as this world of images blossoms in the soul, the belief in them as in an objective reality is expelled from the soul, so that at no moment can the person training spiritually ever arrive at the idea that what arises in him as imaginations is an objective reality. All schooling of the spirit is wrong that does not at the same time evoke in the soul the clarity: What occasionally enters as marvels such as new worlds, has no objective reality in the way it comes over you. Everything is initially there only to inwardly revitalize the soul, to make it richer in itself and, if we want to use the paradoxical expression, more inwardly real, more fulfilled by the real. And that is the best, indeed the only true attainment of the disciple, that he knows: the imaginations that arise are nothing other than a reflection of his own being.

If the spiritual disciple is able to overcome all belief in the reality, in the objectivity of these imaginations of his, in the same moment when he receives them, then the spiritual training is the right one. Generally speaking, it is difficult for many people to accept the one with the other, because by applying the appropriate exercises in his soul, the human being is, so to speak, endowed with a new world, a world of sometimes magnificent ideas. But for many people this is an extraordinary satisfaction, an extraordinary pleasure, something that fills them with deep sympathy. And anyone who tried to make them believe, even in the slightest, that all this is not an objective reality but only a reflection of their own nature, that it is only their own nature expressing itself more meaningfully than before, would be regarded by them as an enemy, as a blasphemer of the most beautiful hopes of the soul. But it must be understood that such imaginations, as they first appear, are not at all suitable for giving real knowledge of the higher worlds, but that they are only a bridge for the soul. For now a completely different task begins for the soul, the task that gradually leads from imagination to inspiration. A struggle begins, as it were, between the soul and what appears as its imaginations. If I am to characterize how this struggle is waged, I must use a simile from ordinary life.

We experience time and again in ordinary life that we do not have all the contents of our soul in our consciousness. Imagine what it would be like if you suddenly had in your consciousness everything you had ever imagined! You could remember ideas that you might have had decades ago. These rest in the depths of your soul and are called up at some opportunity. That means that in ordinary life one has the possibility to forget and to bring the forgotten out of the soul again. One also has the possibility to bring out of consciousness what the consciousness experiences as ideas and to separate it from our conscious life so that it is somewhere in our soul independently of it. The content of consciousness can thus be lowered somewhere, so that it is then out of consciousness.

We must succeed in doing the same thing – even if it is different in this area – with all our imaginations when we become spiritual researchers. We must be able to extinguish every imagination that arises from our soul at will, we must be able to extinguish it at will and bring it into a state where it is thrown out of our consciousness in the same way as a forgotten idea is thrown out of our consciousness, which we can later retrieve. This is necessary. In the whole realm of our imaginations, we must be masters of every single one of them, and we must be able to make each one of them independent of us.

A conscientious spiritual researcher who undertakes such spiritual research and then conscientiously communicates it to the world, does this often and often, again and again, that he repeatedly pushes down what arises before his soul as an image, which has emerged, again and again, making it unconscious, erasing it. Then it comes again, and now not only through arbitrariness, but through something quite different: through an inner power of which we only become aware at this very moment if we are at the appropriate level. And not all imaginations come up, but we have the clear consciousness that there are imaginations that remain down there in an unknown, that cannot be brought up again, or if they do come up again, they show themselves as such, which we reject.

The images change when they come back to us; they are then also something completely different. They reach us in the same way that perceptions of things in the physical world reach us externally. For the same reasons that we, if we have common sense, can distinguish externally between something dreamed and something non-existent and something real and present, we can recognize in its reality and in its spiritual essence what emerges again as imagination.

The question was once asked, when such things were being discussed: How can a person be sure when his imaginations come back to him, which he first threw out of his subjectivity and handed over to objectivity, only to have them returned to him, how can he be convinced that they represent realities or unreality? We know that there are suggestions and imaginations that are so strong that they overwhelm a person, so that he perceives as reality what is not there at all. A vivid example was given: if someone is so sensitive that, without drinking lemonade, he has the taste of lemonade in his mouth just at the mere thought of it, that is an example of something being there that is not really there. So one can also be subject to a similar deception with what the reborn imaginations are.

Such an objection can always be made. It can also be maintained in a mere dialectic, in a mere play on words, but not in the face of reality. For anyone who develops his soul in the way described comes to the same possibility of distinguishing truth and error as one distinguishes truth and error in the external world, where one has nothing but a healthy soul to distinguish truth and error. Everyone can form a concept of this if they think, for example, of Schopenhauer's philosophy with the sentence: “The world around me is my idea.

I do not underestimate Schopenhauer's philosophy, otherwise I would not have published it myself and written an introduction to it. But great minds often make the simplest mistakes. For the sentence “The world is my imagination” is actually refuted by pointing out a completely trivial fact: if he imagines a piece of steel at 900 degrees Celsius and thinks of his fingers touching it, he will not get burned. He will never get burned by such an imagination, no matter how saturated it is. But if the real steel is in front of him, he will get burned. Thus, not through concepts or philosophies, but through experience, he will be able to distinguish reality from imagination. But there is no other distinction. And there is no other distinction in the supersensible realm either, except that through schooling one has acquired the right way of being with supersensible reality.

Therefore, it is necessary for our consciousness to know that When imaginations first arise, they have been created by our soul itself, and so they are only a reflection of our own nature. A person can have the most beautiful imaginations — at first he does best to interpret them in such a way that he says to himself: What hidden state of mind, what hidden passion, what belief or superstition is there in me that these or those images arise before my soul? If he sees nothing in the pictures but the reflection of himself, then he has acquired the right state of consciousness for walking the paths up into the supersensible world. He must then be able to be a fighter against himself, drawing on the inner strength of his soul. He must be able to uproot what he is often most tempted to believe in, what he loves most, what for many people could already mean bliss, and let it descend into a sphere of forgotten ideas. When he has so unselfishly torn from himself what his soul had first created and given it over to the world outside of himself, it comes back to him again as inspiration. Then he is able to live with those entities, real beings and facts of the supersensible world to which such imaginations belong.

At first, such imaginations appear quite familiar to us because we can explore how they are formed not differently than we ourselves are in our soul, how they are only a mirror image of the soul. One can always prove from the world of imaginations that these imaginations are so and so, depending on who we are and on our state of mind. But when they return, it is indeed different. The same images do not return, but different ones do, new ones that we have not been confronted with at all before, and which announce themselves as reality just as external realities announce themselves as such to us. Only one has a completely different feeling about them.

We face the things of the external world in such a way that we stand outside them. A table we look at is outside of us. It is there, and we cannot enter into things. When we have prepared ourselves in the way described, we immediately have the inner experience of consciousness when we encounter the facts and things of the higher worlds: we could only come to them by giving them something that we have first brought forth from the depths of our soul. It is truly the case that, as when an object lies before me and I want to grasp it: as I have to stretch out my hand and become aware of its reality, so too, through that which I first achieve through the method described, I have to separate what then confronts me as imagination from my own ego, and plunge it into oblivion. But in doing so, I extend my own being into a world that I can then grasp.

In the world, one experiences many refutations of what has just been said. But however much one looks around, however much one wants to familiarize oneself with these refutations, one thing always comes to mind: the people who refute what has just been said have not yet understood it. This is evident from the way they speak about it. And anyone who has understood it would never dream of wanting to refute it. Thus one encounters very frequently this supposed refutation, namely, that one hears it said: But these supersensible perceptions that you then have and that you take for impressions from beings that are supposed to inspire you, do not differ after all from quite ordinary illusions or hallucinations! They differ tremendously in that the true spiritual researcher has a different relationship to them, a relationship that allows him to maintain his common sense in relation to these things just as he does in relation to the things of the external world. Therefore, persons who are most unfit to become real investigators of the spirit are those who are superstitious or gullible, those who are termed visionaries in common parlance.

Those who readily accept a truth will certainly not be able to conduct proper spiritual research. Imagination and faith are the greatest enemies of genuine spiritual research, although what imagination is in art, for example, and what faith in reality is, can ultimately be the most wonderful gifts of spiritual research. For what can be investigated in the spiritual can be transformed into imagination and become a work of art. Likewise, when it is said that what spiritual researchers proclaim is something that only appeals to faith, the sentence must apply: the spiritual researcher certainly believes what he knows. But he would truly be a fool if he did not believe what he knows; yet he believes nothing but what he knows.

It has just been said that we have to tear what we have acquired out of our souls, so to speak, that we have to stretch out spiritual organs through them and get back the spiritual reality through them. As we become more and more immersed in such a soul life, we also grow more and more together with the beings and things of the spiritual world. Then there occurs what happens in our consciousness in such a way that we do not communicate with these beings as one person communicates with another through external organs, but through what speaks directly from being to being, what is directly perceived by the beings, in that our soul is directly with the being that perceives it, so that it is, so to speak, not outside of it but in it. Then intuition sets in, which is actually only the conclusion of supersensible knowledge, that supersensible knowledge that does not lead us into a blurred, nebulous spiritual life, but into a concrete, essence-shaped, reality-filled life. There is no other way to truly come together with the spirit and its existence than to merge with it, as it has now been described. But anything with which we do not merge can never be accepted as proof of the spirit, for there is no other proof than to find one's own experience coinciding with the experience of the spirit. Whoever wants to experience a spiritual being must bring his soul so far that he can let his own experience coincide with the experience of this spiritual being.

The entire process of spiritual experience, as it has been described, can make it clear – it would be of no use to obscure the facts, for they must be stated openly – that man can most easily can recognize pure spirits, if I may use the expression, through imaginative knowledge. These are spirits that only have a spiritual body and no other covering than a soul or spirit. Spiritual entities that do not come into embodiment and do not express themselves in outer natural phenomena can be recognized at the level of imagination, when we do not yet have the ability to penetrate to inspiration. This happens in such a way that the imaginations which we have sunk down into oblivion come back to us in a modified form, and we then recognize them as images for spiritual entities, which are as spiritual as our spiritual-soul life conceived without a body.

On the other hand, one must ascend to inspiration if one wants to recognize entities that are connected, for example, with the elements of nature, with the glow in nature, with the warmth in nature, and so on. In short, to recognize the powers and entities that lie behind the sensory world, which express themselves in the external world and can only be recognized there in their external expressions. This is only possible through inspiration. For this, what we have in our soul must be torn out more intensely, so that it dives down, than in the case of beings who have a mere spiritual existence. And the strongest powers of vision must be applied if one wants to recognize those creative powers, which the outer mind consciousness only addresses as the materialistic forces of nature, but which in truth are creative entities.

If we want to recognize these creative entities that lie hidden behind all external existence, then we must be able to tear our inner soul life out of us as strongly as it is the case when we have just ascended to intuition. That means that to recognize through supersensible knowledge the preceding incarnation of a human being in a concrete case is one of the most difficult tasks, for in a human being as he appears to us in the sense world, we are also dealing with something that manifests itself in natural and bodily effects.

Behind these physical effects lies something like creative powers. But for the spiritual seer, this is hidden behind the physical exterior just as the spiritual beings that are present in lightning and thunder and behind all nature are hidden behind them; and one is hardly easier to find than the other. Therefore, it will be found time and again that people who develop intuition tell all kinds of real illusions from past incarnations. Therefore, it is good to pay as little attention to them as possible. The true spiritual researcher knows that this is one of the most difficult things that even the most developed soul can do at any given moment.

What has been said so far relates to the investigation of the supersensible, of spiritual life and activity. By preparing his soul in the manner described, the soul itself becomes a tool for penetrating into the supersensible worlds. But for the spiritual researcher who wishes to communicate spiritual knowledge of the world, the most significant task is yet to come. For this insight into the spiritual worlds is mostly misunderstood and misjudged by people who do not know it in the right way. And this also belongs to the correct assessment of the paths of supersensible knowledge, that the human being is able to form an opinion about what real spiritual knowledge is and what is either nonsense, charlatanry or self-deception.

It must be said again and again: to research in the spiritual world, to seek out supersensible facts and entities, the soul must educate itself to do so. But when a spiritual researcher who has penetrated into the supersensible worlds in the right way describes his observations correctly, using concepts that correspond to a healthy human understanding and a right feeling for truth, then what the spiritual researcher describes can be understood in the right way by every person who does not allow himself to be prejudiced. The prepared soul is needed to investigate supersensible facts and beings, but never to comprehend them. This is, so to speak, the secret of the presentation of spiritual things: that they can be presented in such a way that every soul can understand them, after they have been investigated by the supersensible powers of knowledge.

Now there is a peculiarity: the human soul needs the results of spiritual research to understand the things we will talk about, for example, in the next lecture on 'Life's Questions and the Riddle of Death'. The human soul thirsts to have ideas and concepts about what goes beyond death, ideas and concepts to truly grasp the essence of the soul. And anyone who wanted to refuse to understand the nature of the soul could well suppress for a while what may be called the yearning of the soul for the solution of the riddles of the world. But then it becomes all the more apparent that we may well deny the soul spiritual nourishment, but we cannot suppress the hunger that arises and can drive the soul not only into despair but also into unhealthiness. Man needs, so to speak, for his welfare and for his safety in life, the results of spiritual research, and to make the soul happy in the right way with the results of spiritual research, for this it is only necessary to have common sense. The natural sense of truth is enough to grasp what the spiritual researcher imparts. As long as it is not investigated, it cannot be said. But when it has been investigated and formulated aright, it can be understood.

The truth of this can best be seen from the fact that the spiritual researcher himself has gained nothing for the happiness of his soul, for everything that he needs for his soul in general, from his “vision”. He has a new world. But this new world is of no use to him as long as he has not developed it to the point where it can be used to judge the soul life that we lead in everyday life, and which longs for the solution of the riddles of the world. What the spiritual researcher can get out of his research is of no use to him, quite unlike the other person to whom it is related and who grasps it with a natural sense of truth and common sense. But as regards what the soul needs for its life, the spiritual researcher has nothing through his research, but only and alone through what then comes out of the research and can be communicated to everyone. The spiritual researcher can only be of use to humanity as a whole if he is able to express the results of his research in such concepts and ideas that they can be grasped by the ideas of an age, provided that the latter are sufficiently unprejudiced and unbiased. This unprejudiced attitude is certainly still largely lacking in the present day because people believe that other ideas, for example those of natural science, contradict the results of spiritual science. But if one looks more closely at the results of spiritual scientific research, one will see everywhere that this is not the case.

But still another thing stands between the spiritual researcher and his audience. Precisely what the spiritual researcher is, in that he can see into the spiritual world, is actually widely misunderstood. People make serious mistakes about the spiritual researcher as such precisely when they want to approach or long for spiritual research. In order not to speak at too great length, I will merely remark that the greatest error, especially among well-meaning people, is that the spiritual researcher, because he has prepared his soul to see into the spiritual world, is regarded as a kind of “higher animal”, as being somewhat ahead of other people. But by such a view, the one who wants to come to supersensible knowledge, blocks the way to it the most. It very often happens that out of a certain goodwill, the view is formed that the spiritual researcher, because he can see into the spiritual world, is therefore superior to other people, is worth more than they are, that it is something particularly desirable for the human soul and its value to be able to see into the spiritual world. That in our time this striving occurs in the widest circles, stems from a fact that can be briefly characterized in the following way.

In earlier times we also find communications from spiritual research that were given to people. But mostly only the results were communicated. The methods were not spoken about as, for example, one can speak about them today, or as it can be spread in a public book today, as it is in «How to Know Higher Worlds?» or in my «Occult Science in Outline». For certain reasons, the methods were only spoken of to a few individuals whose certain qualities were quite certain. This was right for older times because there was feeling and sense and also a sense of truth for a larger audience, in order to allow the results to affect the soul and also to make the soul happy, but not enough to overcome the difficulties for the soul to enter the spiritual world.

Today, souls live differently. Today there is the possibility of a completely different way of thinking. Let us just compare how people today can think quite differently, not only through the advanced natural sciences, but also through the ever-advancing education that people learn to think quite differently than was the case in the past. As a result, the age has acquired the ability to judge things better. Therefore, things can be communicated. But this is only just beginning. Therefore, it is inevitable that errors will arise.

It is such an error to regard the spiritual researcher as something special. But man is never, by increasing his knowledge, as it has been described, something that stands out above humanity, which cannot have such knowledge. Just as the chemist is no different from the other people because he knows chemistry, so the spiritual researcher is no different from the other people. It is not through such things that the value of a person is determined, but it is determined within certain narrower limits by intellectuality, by the power of healthy thinking. One person is worth more if he can think well than another who can think badly. And in the most comprehensive sense, a person's value is determined by his morality, by the fact that he performs moral acts and has a moral state of mind. He is not ahead by virtue of a particular training of the soul, but solely by virtue of his intellectual and moral qualities.

For this reason the bad habit, which obscures the paths to supersensible knowledge, should be completely eradicated in those who wish to approach such knowledge: that one considers the spiritual researcher, who is able to see into the spiritual world, to be a special authority because he can do so, and regards him as something special. This gives rise to a belief in authority and a blind following, which are bad enough in other fields, but are most disastrous in the field of spiritual scientific research, for experience shows the following for the practice of spiritual research.

Those who, in the ordinary course of life, have acquired sound, straightforward, logical thinking, just as other people do in the ordinary course of life, also carry this logical, healthy thinking into the supersensible world and are thus able to judge what is real, what is right and what is true, and they alone can then pass on correct judgments to their fellow world from what they recognize. It is not by looking into the supersensible world that one forms correct judgments, but by going into it with correct intellect, with good logic. No matter how much a fool can see in the spiritual world, who sees a whole heap of all possible spiritual things, because he has in some way trained his soul for it, will also tell nothing but nonsense about what it is like in the spiritual world. Whether one comes to the truth depends on one's ability to judge. Therefore, even if a person with good sense is unable to see into the spiritual world, he is always able to judge whether what someone is saying, no matter how much he has “seen” it in the spiritual world, is nonsense or whether it has substance. If someone shows that he cannot think well, that he cannot connect things properly, then, instead of listening to the spiritual researcher, he should rather stand guard over his common sense, for then he will always know whether something comes from a wise or a foolish mind.

Even more important in this regard is the moral state of the soul. Anyone who approaches the spiritual world with bad passions, bad feelings and emotions, but especially with vanity and ambition, will see what is presented to him only in a distorted and untrue way. He will see the worst aspects of the spiritual, and these will present themselves to him in such a way that they do not tell him the truth, but create illusions. The spiritual seer's moral state determines what he can see in the spiritual world. To that extent, spiritual vision itself is not suitable for making people some kind of authority. Rather, we have to pay attention to the way in which spiritual research is prepared, and we must know that we will cause the greatest harm if we do not keep watch with our common sense and only look at what can be objectively judged.

This is the way to judge supersensible knowledge on the part of those who long for such knowledge for the salvation and happiness of their soul. If man relates to the spiritual researcher in this way, then truly this relationship of the world to the spiritual researcher is no different than the relationship of the world to other sciences. Just as not everyone can go to the observatory or the laboratory to conduct research there, so too, although a certain deepening into the spiritual world is always possible today, relatively few can see into it. But this is not necessary either, because the fruits of spiritual knowledge can be understood by unbiased comprehension when they are communicated. This can become the right relationship between the spiritual researcher and his audience, and this is also always the right one in the coexistence of people.

The more we succeed in not taking the spiritual researcher as an authority, but rather relying on our common sense, examining everything, and the more we measure everything the spiritual researcher says against how we see it when we compare it to life, when we apply our common sense in other words, the more we do that, the more we stand on healthy ground. We may well say that spiritual science, insofar as the world needs it, is accessible to every human being today, because it is comprehensible, even if one cannot see into the spiritual worlds. We are already at the point today where it is actually no longer denied to any soul to go the way into the spiritual world. Our age demands that people become more and more convinced that the path into the supersensible worlds can also be taken. This is the right thing to do, in contrast to what leads people to a blind belief in authority. But only what is right has value for the happiness and salvation of the soul.

These are a few suggestions regarding the paths to supersensible knowledge, to that knowledge that really leads us into a spiritual world that lies behind our sensory world and that also enables us to comprehend this spiritual world. The spiritual researcher himself has something of the spiritual world for his personality, for his being, only when he can not only see but can also grasp what he has seen. For everything seen is still of no value if it is not grasped. But when it is grasped, grasped by the characterized common sense and the natural sense of truth, then it digs itself into our soul, connects with it, and our soul feels directly what is in it, as the soul, when it comes before a picture, directly feels what is in the picture, even if it cannot make this picture itself. Just as it is not necessary to be a painter to benefit from a picture, it is equally unnecessary to penetrate into a knowledge that is also necessary for the soul to the highest degree, for example, of immortality or of the passage through repeated lives on earth, or to penetrate this knowledge sufficiently to be able to form these cognitions oneself in spiritual vision — although it would be good if more and more people were to penetrate into spiritual vision. But this is conquered by time, and more and more people will also do so because the necessary, insuperable need will arise to live one's way into the supersensible world. Souls will be more and more compelled to become seers, so to speak, to really grow together with the spiritual world.

But this gives - be it understood self-seeing, be it understood seeing of the other - the possession of supersensible truths, of supersensible knowledge, that our soul knows how we recognize through outer science, how all the outer substances that are present in the whole universe, so that we are embedded in the same that is spread throughout the whole universe. In this way, through spirit-comprehending research, he also learns to recognize that in everything that surges up and down in his consciousness or subconscious, he is connected to a world of spiritual beings that are truly more real than the substances with which the body is connected.

Thus, little by little, man feels the fruits of spiritual research in the peace of his soul, and also feels the power to work and be active in the spiritual universe, in the God- and spirit-imbued universe. But that is what makes man know what he is and have the necessary knowledge for him: that he lives and feels connected to and knows that he lives, resting and active, thinking, feeling and willing in the spirit-imbued universe. And that is what the soul cannot do without, what it seeks when it does not have it for a certain period of time. The soul needs this if it is not to become desolate within itself and, through this desolation, become incapable of working with humanity, so that it would not only despair of the divine but also fall into decadence. But the consciousness of belonging together with the supersensible worlds underlies what instinctively felt in Goethe when he says:

Were the eye not sun-like,
The sun could never behold it;
Were not in us the power of the Godhead,
How could we be enraptured by the Divine?

Well, the eye is solar! The same power that is in the sun is in the eye. Thus, as the ancient philosophers said, like can be recognized by like. There is a divine in man, the whole world is imbued with divinity: thus, the inner divine can grasp the outer divine. But Goethe also recognized that the opposite of this is a truth.

Schopenhauer, although he makes the whole world an appearance of will, is unable to see that what is within us is not only necessary for the knowledge of the external world around us, but that, conversely, the external world is also necessary for the existence of the internal world. According to Schopenhauer, the sun only exists because we have an eye. This is how the peculiar philosophy arose that regards the world as soundless, as cold, and so on, and that all this only begins when the human organs enter the world. But Goethe knew the right thing: that not only do we see things by having eyes, we hear sounds by having ears, but that an eye can only arise because the sun is there. From a once eyeless entity, man has become a seeing being because light fills space and brings forth the eye from an organism that did not yet have an eye. The power of the sun created the eye through the light it spread. So it is not important that we carry the divine within us and, for example, in Fexerbach's sense, we only project the divine that we have first created within us into the world, but we must know that we would not have this “sense of God” within us at all if the divine-spiritual did not fill the world and create a spiritual organ in us, just as the outer sun created the outer eye.

Therefore we can say: The consciousness of the belonging together of soul and world, which gives the soul strength and power and lets it rest and be active in the spiritual universe, is composed of two things, two things of which we can characterize one with the beautiful Goethean saying:

If the eye were not itself the sun,
The sun could it never see;
Were not in us the power of God himself,
How could we be delighted with the Divine?

But it is entirely in the Goethean sense when we, complementing this one-sided truth with the other, which only makes it the full truth, add the other saying, which may be:

If the world were not endowed with the sun,
How could the eyes of beings flourish?
If existence were not God's revelation,
How could people come to be filled with God?

Dear attendees! The remarks that I will be presenting here today require a certain premise if they are to appear justified in the present – I would like to say – in our scientific age. This premise is the examination of what must currently be recognized as scientifically possible. I took the liberty of discussing in my last lecture, which I had the honor of giving here a few months ago, what needs to be said in this regard, what Anthroposophy asserts about its relationship to the scientific world view of the present day, how it is not in opposition to it at all, but fully recognizes its significance, and how it, in turn, goes further than this science. And since I may well assume that a large part of today's honored audience was also present at the time, it seems to me neither possible nor necessary to repeat what was said then. I will simply take it for granted and build on it what Anthroposophy now has to say through its research, through its knowledge of the relationship between man and the spiritual world.

When we speak as human beings of the difficulties we face when enigmatic questions arise about the spiritual world, when we speak of such difficulties, these difficulties cannot relate to the existence of a spiritual world as such, to which the human being feels connected in his earthly existence. For man needs only to reflect on himself, and he lives in a spiritual world. Through his spirit, he is cognitively related to the things around him, to the actions he performs himself. And even the most ardent materialist does not deny this relationship of man to the spiritual world, insofar as man is always aware of his spirit in the waking state. The difficulty only begins when man looks at the nature of this spirit, in that he can actually see his human dignity, his true human value, only through it. Man must indeed say to himself: I have the spirit. As I said, even the worst materialist does not deny that. At most, he believes that what man experiences as spirit within himself is a product, a creature of material existence. And precisely because man feels himself to be a spirit, because he senses his value and dignity in this spiritual realm, he must ask: What is this essence of the spirit, how is it grounded perhaps in an all-encompassing spiritual world that does not belong to the transitory, but which is permanent in the face of the transitory? With this, I would like to point out to you, dear listeners, the inner soul difficulties that man feels himself confronted with every day and every hour when he looks at the essence of his own spirituality. These difficulties, people do not always bring them to their full awareness in the full sense of the word. But they live in the depths of the soul, whether one explores them or not, they live in these depths of the soul, flow up into the conscious soul existence, make up the happiness and suffering of the innermost human being, make up the innermost destiny of the human being, form the soul mood and soul condition. In this way, the human being finds his way into the world and becomes useful to his fellow human beings and the world to the extent that he can educate himself, even if unconsciously and naively, about the nature of the spirit. And from many subsoils, the riddle questions in this regard arise, and I could cite many things that live in the soul consciously or more or less unconsciously.

I would like to highlight two examples from all that is present in the soul, two examples that perhaps do not even belong to the most common ones, but which can show precisely what corners of his soul life a person encounters when he wants to educate himself about the spirit. Every day, when we pass from the waking state to the sleeping state, we see how our inner spiritual activity, our inner spiritual activity, how that paralyzes itself, dawns down into an indefinite darkness, how the time of sleep occurs, in relation to which we cannot say what it actually is with our inner spiritual-soul activity and activity. Then we feel – one may well say – the powerlessness of that which is our spirituality. We live in this spirituality from waking up to falling asleep; we actually feel truly human when we live in this spirituality, but we see it fade away, dim, and are powerless in the face of this everyday disappears from us, from that which is truly human in us, and without us always feeling it – as I said – from the unconscious experience of this powerlessness comes that which gives us insecurity about the nature and destiny of our mind. And that is one side.

The other is, I would say, the polar opposite. We experience it again more or less unconsciously — unconsciously in most people — when we pass from the sleeping state to the waking state, at most with the transition through more or less chaotic dreams, but we know from healthy reason that they have only an illusory value compared to what we call in ordinary life the reality of existence. With this transition through the dream life, we take possession of our physical body with our spiritual self. When we wake up, we grasp our senses, how the outside world is reflected in our senses in its colors, sounds, and so on, and we experience this inwardly. We inwardly experience how we grasp our willpower and thereby become active human beings. However, as I already hinted at in the last lecture from a different point of view, what darkness are we actually looking down into when we have only a simple willpower, when we decide to raise our arm and move our hand? We have this thought, and then we see how this thought is carried out in the movement of the hand, in the raised arm. But how the thought flows down into the organism, what complicated processes are involved before the hand is moved, all this disappears from our consciousness. When we wake up, we take hold of our body with our spirit, but what this spirit experiences down there is shrouded in complete darkness even during the waking state, so that in this waking state, too, we have only an indeterminate relationship to our spirituality and its relation to the outer world – to the outer world that we ourselves are through our body – which presents us with a mystery. On the one hand, we feel the powerlessness of the spirit; on the other hand, we feel it sinking into our own inner darkness when we wake up. From such experiences, man forms the riddle questions about the nature of spirituality, and then two opponents of the soul life stand before this spiritual world, to which man strives with his knowledge, with his will, two enemies, one of whom clouds this spiritual world for him, the other threatens to take it from him. One enemy strikes precisely those who, even in our present existence, still live more or less naively in the face of our scientific worldviews, accepting many traditional ideas into their worldview without examination, often as the worst illusions about the supersensible, about the spiritual, because they feel that they cannot truly live in mental health without such ideas about the spiritual. Then they give themselves over to that which comes from the one enemy of the soul life: superstition. All kinds of soul-forms stream out of the human life of will and place themselves before the human spirit, wanting to tell it what underlies the external world as spiritual reality. Those who have not become acquainted with the scientific conscientiousness and methodology of the present time very easily succumb to such ideas, but they also experience a sad consequence of superstition in the human soul. If we understand the world in such a way that we accept what flows into our consciousness through our will as decisive for the supersensible, then we go to recognize the outer world. We find obstacles at every turn when trying to orient ourselves in the external world. We believe that this or that must apply in the sense world because we accept it through our superstition. External nature does not confirm what we assume in our superstitious experience at every turn. This leads us to a certain reorientation towards this external world. The world appears to us differently than we imagine it. We become unsure of ourselves, and because we become unsure of ourselves, we lose the ability to develop strong impulses for our actions. We become unfit for our own actions, we become unfit for interaction with other people.

That, dear attendees, is the one enemy that arises in the human soul when faced with the riddles of the spiritual world. The other enemy appears primarily to those souls who enter into the modern way of scientific life. They learn to recognize how to develop their thinking in a conscientious, methodical, one might say exact, way in order to follow sense phenomena to their external laws and to permeate them with ideas through which they become understandable. But it is very often the case, especially when one is conscientiously immersed in the external world in this way, that one notices how our thinking becomes, I might say, thin through this scientific path, how it only gradually becomes appropriate to what the sensory world is, and how, in its thinness, it cannot find its way up from the sensory to the supersensible realm, precisely because of its conscientiousness. And then precisely those who enter deeply into the scientific sphere are assailed by doubt, the other enemy of the human soul life. Doubt is certainly something that is connected with the development and education of the intellect. But when doubt presents itself to the human intellect, then it sinks down into the soul, it sinks down into the mind. Those who, on the basis of the deeper insights that anthroposophy can provide, now recognize the connection between the life of the soul and the physical experience of the human being, know how what takes place in the soul pours into the body and how that which — one must put it this way — rushes from doubt into the , how it first causes a certain wasting disease of the soul life in the person, how this wasting disease can weaken us — I would say — to the marrow, to the limbs, to the muscles, that we can become unfit for our soul, for our spiritual and for our physical activity precisely because of doubt. Precisely because this is experienced by modern man from one side or the other, perhaps the worst doubters feel particularly compelled to seek information about the spiritual, about the supersensible, to which they do not want to turn out of traditional belief, like the first type of person, who surrender to superstition. Since they want to turn to the supersensible realm through knowledge, scientific minds are led to study the abnormal spiritual life, the spiritual life of attuned people, mediums, people who have all kinds of hallucinations. It is seen that something else is going on in the abnormal life than in the normal human life of knowledge and will, and it is believed that something can be drawn from this abnormal life, which comes from mediumship or from visions, about human abilities and their connection with another world into the realm of ordinary consciousness.

Those who are familiar with anthroposophy know that all these outlets are from the pathological realm, from a diseased soul life. The soul life of a medium is diseased because their physical life must be attuned down at the moment when they are acting as a medium. This detuning makes it impossible for the person acting as a medium to grasp what his soul is directly experiencing. It is impossible to verify — even for an external observer, who may have a sound mind when observing the medium — it is impossible to realize what kind of relationship the person, the medium, has to another world if one is not immersed in this experience. The medium is, after all, singled out and, with his healthy human understanding, distracted from what he is experiencing in his mediumistic states. Whenever a person has hallucinations, we can always show how these have their roots in a diseased area of the human body and how what arises in the soul as other experiences can only be there because of this diseased part of the human organization. Thus we have no possibility of finding the transition we are seeking from the healthy human soul life to a knowledge of the supersensible, of the spiritual realm. For wherever we turn to the sick soul life, we lack control at every step. And so most of our contemporaries feel compelled to cling to time-honored, traditional ideas when it comes to the supersensible, to the spiritual, to that which has developed from earlier epochs of humanity into our time as the content of creeds and worldviews.

One then tends towards these world-view contents, which go right into our philosophies – people do not even realize how this is the case even in the philosophies that are considered to be unprejudiced by some great thinkers, but they are not – one holds, as they say, with the belief in that which they cannot achieve with knowledge, with insight. And today we have already come so far as to construct all kinds of artificial concepts to justify faith as something that must stand independently in the face of knowledge, in the face of knowledge, which is only supposed to be directed towards our sensual or the like, while faith alone may be directed towards the supersensible. But this supersensible realm is taken from what has been handed down traditionally and has an effect on people with the strength with which it often does so today, through its venerable age. But if we look impartially at what people believe and what they hold in terms of worldviews that have been handed down historically, we can trace this in real history — not just in the history that is recognized today, but in a history that is steeped in psychology and the study of the soul. There one sees that what one wants to believe today, what one accepts as an idea in its effect on the world of feeling, that in older epochs of humanity this was once entirely derived from insights that the individual human being gained out of his need for knowledge, on paths that were to lead him into the supersensible. Everything that is justified as religious belief today can in fact be traced back to ancient knowledge.

At some point, an individual or that person's community found their way, through special inner spiritual paths, into the supersensible world, received ideas from this supersensible world, grasped them with their ordinary consciousness and passed them on to their fellow human beings. Their fellow human beings recognized that through such paths of knowledge one could discover something about the supersensible world. Such earlier paths of knowledge may be primitive compared to what is needed today for us humans in such paths of knowledge. But it is not acceptable for the truly unbiased person to overlook the fact that one cannot help but notice how the beliefs of today go back to such old paths of knowledge, whose source of knowledge has only been forgotten. And if you explore them, sometimes through external history, through some kind of document, then you feel disturbed because you no longer devote yourself to such sources of knowledge; you say: That is good for an earlier civilization and culture. Yes, but – my dear audience – today we believe what comes from these sources of knowledge, we have only somehow changed it in terms, but its true content goes back to such sources.

My dear attendees, anthroposophy, as I understand it, offers people a path of knowledge into the supersensible world, and we will have more to say about this anthroposophical path of knowledge, as it is appropriate for today's people. But we will be able to communicate more easily today if we look at older paths of knowledge, which I mentioned in my last lecture, and the results of which are available to the naive and often also to the learned person today when it comes to the supersensible.

I would like to characterize two of the old paths of knowledge here before you. There is also the possibility of characterizing countless other such paths of knowledge, but I want to pick out two because they are particularly characteristic, and because to a large extent people have forgotten how much of what people today take in as beliefs comes precisely from these sources.

I would like to mention first – as I said, just so that we are all on the same page, not because I would like to recommend such a path of knowledge to anyone, but because it is by understanding the old that we can ascend to the knowledge of the new – I would like to mention first the path that is well known, the path that was taken in ancient India to gain knowledge of a different world from the one that usually surrounds people.

I would first like to characterize what is called the ancient yoga system of knowledge, which was once sacred in the Orient but has now degenerated. The yoga system of knowledge leads, I would say, to its kind of erudition, to its kind of knowledge of another world. What were the essential elements of this yoga system? I would like to mention the characteristic that is questionable today when it is practiced – at the time it was not questionable, but the way it is practiced today is questionable – because it is no longer appropriate for today's human nature, because human nature has changed since the times when the yoga practice was performed. What could be done in ancient times without harming human nature, and was done in ancient times, say, by the Indians, cannot be done today, especially by Westerners, without harming their body and mind. But let us agree on this. The essential and purely essential thing, among other things, in the practice of yoga is a modified breathing in addition to the ordinary everyday breathing of a person.

How does this everyday breathing process take place? More or less unconsciously. Only when we are somehow affected by illness do we become aware of our breathing. Otherwise, inhaling, holding our breath, and exhaling take place to a great extent unconsciously. And it is precisely on this unconsciousness of inhaling, holding our breath, and exhaling that the unbiased matter-of-factness of our life is based. Those who believed in ancient Orient that they could become yoga scholars trained for certain periods of time to regulate their breathing differently than nature itself regulates human breathing. They created a different rhythm for inhaling, holding and exhaling. What did they achieve by doing this? He achieved the ability to breathe more or less consciously, while otherwise breathing unconsciously, to experience breathing as a fully conscious process. This happens to me when I breathe in, this happens to me throughout my entire organism during the flow of inhalation, this happens to me during the retention of breath, this during exhalation. In particular, the yogi focused his attention on what now resulted from this altered breathing process, raised into consciousness, for his thinking. For his thinking, what resulted then? Well, we can characterize it physiologically in the modern sense, what happened there. That which unconsciously takes place in the breathing process, what is it in relation to the human head organization, to the thought organization? We breathe in, the respiratory impulse goes into our organism, works up through the spinal cord channel to our brain, to the tool of our thinking, which performs a certain activity out of the nerve-sense life, so that something flows through this activity from the respiratory current. In reality, we are not only dealing with the activity of our nervous sensory life in our thought life, but this nervous sensory life is permeated and permeated by the rhythmic life of the respiratory current. But we know nothing of this. The yogi, who aspired to higher knowledge, brought himself to consciousness of this permeation of the physical part of his thought activity with the respiratory current. What did he attain there? We can only grasp what he attained there by comparing what the yogi experienced in his consciousness with regard to thinking, when we compare that with what his whole environment, the rest of humanity, experienced.

Yes, my dear audience, in the course of historical development, humanity has changed more than we realize today in terms of the life of the soul. What today, I might say, makes up our whole consciousness was quite different in ancient times. Today we see the external world by absorbing the colors through the sense of our eyes in a, I might say, pure way; we hear the external world through the sense of the ear, absorbing the sounds in a certain purity, and it is the same with the other sensations. It was not like that in ancient times. We misunderstand the senses of early humanity if we say that they fantasized their way into the world, as animism would have it. It was not like that. Early humans naturally experienced what was in the outer world as a living spiritual soul striving up within them. And by looking at lightning and thunder, at the hurrying clouds, at the streaming wind, springs, plants and animals, they saw everything that surrounded people in the outer world. They saw not only a colorful, warm, cold or otherwise sensually shaped world, as we do today. No, they saw a world in which every spring was permeated by the spiritual soul, in every breath of wind that played around them, in the stars, in the sun and moon they felt how the spiritual soul expressed itself. It was just as natural for people to see this spiritual soul as it is natural for us to see colors and hear sounds. That was the usual experience of the people around the yogi. The yogi, however, wanted to experience a different world than the one they usually experienced. That is why he undertook the exercises I have just described. And by driving the conscious flow of breath through his thinking through these exercises, I would say, he made something completely different out of his thinking.

Indeed, the person who immersed himself in this way, seeing a spiritual soul in every spring, in every breath of wind, in everything that is nature, did not have the strong ego, the strong self-confidence that the present man has. strong sense of self that the present-day man has. He could not feel the strong spiritual element in his own self. In a sense, his being merged with the outer world, which was a spiritual element for him, just as his inner being was a spiritual element for him. When the yogi, breathing in this way, transformed his thinking, then his experience was that he attained an insight similar to our own, but by this path of knowledge; he made his thinking strong, he led it into the abstract. In this way he perceived the spirituality of his own self. And he felt this self rooted in another world, in a world that is eternal.

And all the wonderful things that were said in older times about the spiritual world were said from the experience that man, in the way described, came to the self, to the I, that he felt his I as his eternal spirituality connected to the universal spirituality of the world. And if you read the most beautiful chapters in the wonderful poetry of the Bhagavad Gita, you will read how it is described in such a wonderful way how man comes to his self and to the experience of the spiritual world, and you will feel transported to the special spiritual path of those ancient times. Much of what has been revealed to man in this way about the human self, about human spirituality and its relationship to world spirituality, lives in many of today's traditional creeds, in today's traditional world views, and even in the philosophies that one believes one can approach without prejudice. People do not realize how much of what they have adopted in their belief in authority comes from the experiences of the ancient yogi.

Those who today want to educate themselves about the meaning of today's yoga systems usually come to something wrong and believe that by applying such a method they can still achieve something special today. This is not the case. People will harm themselves, both mentally and physically, if they want to resurrect on their path of knowledge that which was appropriate for an ancient humanity. But even with regard to that which is necessary for today's human being to attain higher knowledge — and which we want to discuss later, also in order to communicate about it — such a characteristic of old, no longer useful paths of knowledge cannot serve us. I would like to say that, on the other hand, the opposite reveals itself to us as an example when we look at an older path of knowledge, the one that was walked in asceticism, a path of knowledge that we can no longer walk today.

We cannot have the yoga path. We cannot follow the yoga path because the person who lives in his breathing in the way described, and then lives in the thinking that is permeated by breathing, becomes so highly sensitive that he can no longer endure the robust external world to any great extent. Because of this sensitivity, he must withdraw from the outer world, he must surrender to a certain solitude, even hermitage. But it was precisely in the views of the ancients that they sought wisdom about higher worlds precisely from those who did not experience as they did, but who isolated themselves, so to speak, in the corner, in order to strive in this solitude into the higher world, in order to explore that which is supersensible in human nature, in order to be able to proclaim it to others. Today, the healthy person cannot relate to human natures that seek solitude and hermitage in this way. Modern life makes such tough demands that we have to find our way into it in its liveliness, and the modern person can only have trust in the one who does not need to withdraw from life, but who places himself in life as much as anyone else. Therefore, we cannot use the yoga path. It would not inspire trust in those who understand themselves within modern cultural development.

The same applies to the old ascetic path. What does the ascetic do in the old sense of the word? He downgrades his bodily functions, he paralyzes them to a certain extent. His physical organism should be less active in those periods when he should be open to higher knowledge than he would be if he were to devote himself externally to a robust life. Through this attunement of bodily functions, the person striving for a higher life experiences and realizes that, yes, for the life we lead outwardly, this body we carry is suitable and appropriate, and we may not really wish for a different body, and so there is no need for the bodily functions to be slowed down. But if we want to look into the spiritual world, then this body, which is constituted for the sensual world, is an obstacle. If we degrade it, make it less active than it is in ordinary life, then we remove the obstacle and the supersensible world flows into our consciousness. This is simply what the ancients experienced: the body is an obstacle to the knowledge of higher worlds. On the other hand, it was the case that by attuning the physical body to pain and suffering in order to come into contact with the spiritual world, the ascetic entered into an inner experience that took him away from the robust outer world into solitude, into hermitage. From there he was able to explore many things that then sank deep into the human soul when the soul wanted to know: How am I connected to the spiritual worlds, how do I find the happiness of my mind?

But then again, the people who could say such things — and this goes right back to our present-day religious beliefs and world views, without people being aware of it —, then again the people had to tune down the functions of their physicality in relation to the robust outer life, they had to develop a hypersensitivity to this life, to loneliness, to hermitage. The old path of asceticism, which has also been corrupted today, is not suitable for modern man. Through such asceticism, man first of all makes himself alien to reality, in which we must fully place ourselves today, but he also makes himself unfit for his actions, he makes himself unfit for working for the benefit of his fellow human beings. But we can still look at the two paths by which people once struggled to gain an insight into the supersensible worlds.

How a person today can raise themselves in the supersensible world, my dear listeners, is something that I described in my last lecture here, at least in principle. You can find it described in full detail in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science” and in other books of mine. But there you will see that today's man can no longer follow the path of, say, a reorganization of his breathing, the path of conscious breathing, in order to change his thought life in the sense that ordinary views of man become the wonderful world view of the Bhagavad Gita. I would say that for his path of knowledge, for his path of thought, man started from something that was still entirely appropriate for those ancient times, something that was intimately connected with his bodily functions.

All that I described to you in the previous lecture, and what I describe in my books, are processes that are not carried out in breathing, that are not carried out in this way in the body, but that are carried out in the life of thought itself, in the inner life of the soul, through a special training in meditation, through a special training in the concentration of thought, in contemplation. Today's exercises, which are intended to lead to the higher world, are done through practices that are carried out in the regulation of thinking itself. The ancient Indian yogi regulated his breathing; we regulate our ordinary thinking directly, we bring a different rhythm, a different inner lawfulness into meditation and concentration in thinking. We do not approach a transformation of our thinking indirectly through breathing, we go straight to the thinking. Of course, I cannot repeat all the exercises that you can read about in the books mentioned, “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and “Occult Science”; I can only hint at the principles in this way.

But what do we achieve by doing such exercises, which address human thoughts so intimately? Through them we come to see through what we have today as our ordinary thinking, through birth and upbringing, in its abstractness, in its deadness, if I may express it so. We arrive at essentially enlivening thinking, whereas the ancient Indian yogi — I might say — started from a certain liveliness of thinking, from which he went away to abstract thinking, to the thinking that we have as a matter of course in life. There he experienced the self. Now, we have this self through birth and upbringing; we have to, by grasping thinking, not breathing, enliven this thinking. But in doing so, we come to perceive ordinary thinking precisely as the abstract, as the dead, and to move on to a living thinking through inner exercises.

This is the significant transformation that the modern seeker of knowledge who wants to penetrate into the higher worlds, into the world of the spiritual, must undergo. This is the method that the modern seeker of knowledge must go through, which leads from abstract, from inanimate, from dead thinking to inwardly living thinking.

And now I would like to give you a characterization of modern forms of consciousness, where we arrive when we acquire this living thinking. I will point out something that is close to every person today. If we have any connection at all with today's worldviews, we realize how a so-called higher animal is constituted, how its functions, its bodily processes work. We form an inner image of this higher animal in our thoughts. In doing so, we visualize the nature of this animal. But then we may turn to the human being. We form an inner picture of the human being again, using all the material that science provides us with today. Later it will be even more complete, but in principle no different, as long as thinking is applied only in the abstract, as it is today in the study of natural laws — we form an image of the human being, of the structure of the bones, the structure of the muscles, the structure of the other organs, of the interweaving and interflowing of the inner bodily processes. Then we compare this picture with the picture we have of higher animals and we find a certain relationship. Depending on whether we think more or less materialistically, we imagine that man then emerges physically from the higher animal. If we think more idealistically or spiritually, we imagine this relationship differently. But we look at it by forming the idea of the higher animal on the one hand and the idea of man on the other and comparing them, we form something through this comparison, which is then to become our world view of our environment. But now let us ask ourselves a question that may interest us. What is the difference between thinking, with which one compares the concept of the higher animal with the concept of man, as one can outwardly compare a higher animal with a lower animal, the lower animal with a plant. Let us ask ourselves the question: What is the difference between this dead abstract thinking and that living thinking that one acquires through the modern exercises of knowledge for the supersensible world?

If we form an idea with our ordinary thinking about the higher animal, about its inner structure, about its processes, about the intermingling of its life processes, then, I would say, we have inwardly visualized the being of this higher animal through a thought. But the thought lives, and this thought changes inwardly, if it lives, without us having to look at it. It forms the thought of the human being out of itself, it undergoes this metamorphosis inwardly. With dead thinking, we can only form the thought of the higher animal, then go over with our thinking to the human being, to the human being whom we experience outwardly, find human thought, but with animal thought we never come to human thought. Simply by allowing the thought to come to life in us, through which the human thought then arises from the animal thought, we arrive at a different, a spiritual relationship to the world.

I would like to illustrate it in the following way. Consider a magnetic needle. You can point it in many different directions. Only one direction is the excellent one, the direction that points from the magnetic north pole to the magnetic south pole. This one line is the excellent one. Wherever you point the magnetic needle, you do not have such an excellent direction. By its own natural law, this magnetic needle belongs in the north-south direction. Thus, through the living thought, the whole space is differentiated. In living thinking, we do not have the space of indifferent juxtaposition, the calculative space, but we experience the space in which something else becomes the vertical line that goes from the earth to the stars; the horizontal line that is the tangent of the ground on which we stand. Space is experienced inwardly by the living thought.

Then we turn to the higher animal, we find its backbone line horizontal, and where this line goes into the vertical, are the exceptions that show that what I say is right. We see the vertical direction in the human being, we feel that this line is different from the one the animal maintains with its backbone, and we feel this line, in which the human being now places himself, and many other things that we have to change when we move from animal thought to human thought. We feel that a different being is emerging, and by seizing the animal thought, we have to keep the form flexible and know: if we enter into a different spatial direction, we come to a different being. We allow one thought to arise from the other in our inner experience.

Consider, my dear audience, how alive our soul life becomes, how spiritualized our soul life becomes, while we juxtapose one with the other with the dead abstract thought, how we stand before the world, how we now become similar to the interweaving, the growth and becoming of external things with our inner experience, how we immerse ourselves in the outer world, no longer merely standing beside it.

This is the first step for modern man. To bring abstract, dead thinking to life, and in so doing, to live in the spirituality of the world. But all of you – my dear audience – can raise a significant objection as I describe this living thinking. You can object that there have been all kinds of thinkers, natural philosophers Oken, Schelling, who have had such living thinking in a certain sense; they have known how to grasp the thought of an external object in a certain imaginative way and have understood how to transform it in order to find something that then coincides with another thing of its own accord. And modern humanity has indeed recognized how much fantasy there is in Schelling and Oken precisely because of this thinking. But there is something that anthroposophy must add to what the most recent ancient times did not have. When such thinkers as those mentioned describe what actually takes place in their spiritual life, one does not find what anthroposophical research and experience must point to.

The person who, as I have described it, forms thoughts about the things of the external world, who is himself alive, cannot take a step with this living thought without feeling pain inwardly, in a certain way suffering. And now, when this living thought is felt as suffering, as pain – not initially in the physical sense, for it can only be transmitted in that direction – now something begins that can be felt as reality. Anyone who comes to realize that higher knowledge in the modern sense can only be attained by going through suffering and pain will always tell you something about their ordinary life as well: they will say, “What I have experienced as happiness, as joy, as good fortune, I am grateful to my destiny for. What I have had in the way of suffering, pain, disappointment and privation in my ordinary life, I owe to the little knowledge that I have gained. And the fact that I have gained such knowledge through the ordinary pains and disappointments that life has given me means that I have undergone preliminary training for that which must be experienced when the living thought, as living spirituality, fills the soul, is therefore also alive in the soul, and therefore also drives the soul to suffering and pain.

What is achieved by this? Through this our whole human nature becomes an organ of perception – the expression sounds paradoxical – but now not an organ of perception that, like the eye and ear, perceives the outer world, but it becomes an organ of perception that spiritually perceives itself within and also looks into the spiritual world, into the world to which the living thought gives its thought-content, and now truly experiences this living world. One can understand why we have to go through pain and suffering. It is now the case – esteemed attendees – that even in such a perfect structure as the eye, some processes, changes take place due to the light acting on it. These changes that take place, if we had a fine sense for it, we would have a sensation of pain, and this sensation of pain would only change into the sensation of color. And in the earliest times of human development, this was what man had. Sensory perception arose out of pain, man became robust against it, became neutral, today he experiences the sensory perception directly; that which underlies the pain withdraws from perception. But if we are to live our way up into the spiritual world, we must force our way through suffering and pain, and only when we have overcome these, when we have turned suffering, pain to our advantage, can we glimpse into the spiritual world, which is opened up to us on the one hand through the living thought. And then, after we have transformed our whole organism into a sense organ by bringing thought to life and overcoming the suffering, we see ourselves, as a modern human being, facing the spiritual world with understanding, with science.

We can now seek spiritual knowledge for ourselves, and we do not need to withdraw from life into a hermitage. We can immerse ourselves in life, our outer physicality does not lead us to asceticism, our outer physicality remains as it is, and can therefore robustly face the external world and fulfill all the demands that today's life places on modern people. In this way we can create an understanding of the spiritual world by remaining in this world, in which modern man must one day remain. But when we create such insights, then man certainly approaches us in a different way than he approaches us when we merely look at him with our sensory eyes. Usually we perceive only the external physicality of this human form. But the person who has struggled to the mobile, living thoughts does not just see this outer, sensual human form; he sees something spiritual and soul-like in this human form, an auric, a spiritual and soul-like aura. The word “aura” is to be understood only in this sense, not in any superstitious sense. One beholds the auric in which the human form is embedded, but one does not only recognize in this aura that which stands externally in front of one, but one looks at that which the person already was in his spiritual-soul before he descended from a spiritual-soul world. One gets to know the person through their auric being, which reveals itself through the kind of contemplation that I have characterized as a spiritual-soul being, and one learns to look back into the spiritual-soul world, into one's preexistence, into the life that one had before one entered one's earthly life. And one does not just learn in such abstractness that the person truly lived in a spiritual-soul world before his birth, one also gets to know the concrete of this spiritual-soul human being, that is, our self, as we get to know the outer world through sensory perception.

I can characterize this in the following way. While we are here between birth and death, we look out into the outer world, we look up into the cosmos, admire the stars, admire the glory of the sun and moon; we look at the kingdoms of nature, we see more and more of the wonderful laws that live in all of this through our science. But by looking out there and looking back at ourselves in an unbiased way, at what is within us, we have to say to ourselves: Dark is what the human being sees between birth and death in the ordinary consciousness when he looks into his inner being. We have to say: what lives in there as our organism – certainly, some of it, but only in its deadness, shows anatomy, physiology – but anthroposophy shows that the human being has a world in there in a completely different sense than ordinary science shows us. When we really get to know what is inside us, we will say to ourselves: Yes, the air we breathe and its inner laws are wonderful, but what goes on in our own lungs as laws is more wonderful than this air circle with all its secrets. The sun is wonderful out there with all the effects that emanate from it, which express themselves in light and warmth, but more wonderful than the light, than the currents of warmth, more wonderful than all that is what lives inside the human organism, in the structure of our heart. And so, when we look at the human interior in terms of the bodily organization, we can say to ourselves: great and powerful is the world of external knowledge; greater and more powerful is that which lives in us as a microcosm.

That, my dear audience, is something that one learns to recognize more and more. You can see this from my “Secret Science” and from other of my books. But what is shrouded for the ordinary consciousness between birth and death today ceases to be shrouded when we look at the spiritual and soul nature of the human being before he descended into the physical world. What was man's world while he was a spiritual being in a spiritual world? Not the external world of space, which we otherwise survey, but precisely this human inner world. What is human inner being for the earth is the outer world for our spiritual being.

Just as we have the sun, moon and stars, the three kingdoms of nature around us here, so we have the secrets of the lungs and heart in front of us in the spiritual world, from which we descended. We have the human interior as an external world before us, and there we acquire the ability that is exercised by us human beings to integrate with this physical body. We see the inner laws as an outer world before we descend from the pre-existent life into earthly life; this is the outer world of the spiritual and soul that we experience before conception. And only when we enter the physical body does the outer world appear around us, and the world of the human inner self disappears. What is revealed to us by the one aura is out there.

The other aura that we acquire reveals to us what lives in human actions. Here in the physical world, we look at these actions with our ordinary human consciousness, we see how this or that action is done from childhood on, we see an encounter between people, we see how this encounter shapes the destiny for the whole of the following life, how these people now form a community; as one often says, this appears out of the ordinary consciousness, as a coincidence.

If we acquire the consciousness that leads to the auric, which I have characterized, then it is like the world is for the blind person who has undergone an operation. He used to be unable to perceive colors or lights, but now he can perceive them. Previously, what a person undertook as steps in their life was seen as a matter of chance. But now, after the spiritual eye has been opened, we look at the first steps that a child takes, at the endless sympathies and antipathies, and see how the child develops its life steps more and more. Sympathies and antipathies that arise in him guide the child in the following steps, which become decisive in human life, and we realize how the goal was already present in the sympathies and antipathies that were present in the first childlike steps. In other words, we look at the shaping of human destiny, and in a completely natural, elementary way we become aware when our spiritual eye is opened – just as we realize when we look at an adult that they were a child – we can know that this destiny, which course of life, that people's lives on earth are lived through in repetitions, that the whole of life is cause and effect of other lives between death and a new birth, and that what is fateful carries over from one life to the next.

One might think that this sense of destiny takes away our freedom as human beings. But we do not impair our freedom any more than we impair our freedom by building a house this year and wanting to move into it the next. We only become free by creating such foundations for our lives. Nor do we take away our freedom by building a house for ourselves in this life for the next.

So, my dear attendees, the spiritual world, the relationship of the human being to this spiritual world, is revealed by anthroposophy reopening the paths by which individual people can ascend into the spiritual world and proclaim the results to their fellow human beings. We need a method that can be trusted in the same way as the natural sciences are trusted. In the books mentioned above, I have described how everyone can become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent, and how people can develop such views of the supersensible and spiritual that give them their true value and true human dignity. But people do not necessarily have to become spiritual researchers. Just as one does not need to become an astronomer in order to include astronomical findings in one's knowledge, or a botanist in order to include the necessary botanical findings in one's education, one also does not need to become a spiritual scientist in order to include the findings of spiritual science.

I would like to use another comparison that I have used often, I believe here as well. A person who wants to judge a painted picture in terms of beauty and artistic value does not need to be a painter himself. Man's organization is directed towards truth and beauty. Even someone who is not a spiritual researcher and whose mind is not oriented towards illusions and error can test what the spiritual researcher says with his common sense. And even the spiritual researcher must first test what is revealed to him through his own common sense, just as the other person must do, because the higher vision provides him with a higher world, but not its reality. Just as we first test the dream through common sense, so we must first test the reality of what we see in higher worlds through our common sense. The one who acquires exact clairvoyance — not the old mystical clairvoyance — the one who acquires this modern clairvoyance, finds his way into the spiritual world by means of paths that are entirely appropriate for today's human being, and what he explores there can be thoroughly examined with common sense in the manner indicated.

But what does our civilization gain from this, ladies and gentlemen? Well, what is gained is not unimportant. What is gained can certainly be used. Do we have spirituality today? We have thoughts about the spirit and we live in these thoughts and ideas. But if we look back to older times, it was different. Yes, my dear audience, it was different. We do not want to conjure up old times again, nor do we want to overestimate them. We know that humanity must always move forward; we do not want to bring up in a reactionary way what belongs to a bygone era. But when we look at the ancient epochs from which many unconscious beliefs have come down to us, we see that in those ancient times there were insights through which the spirit was grasped not only in thoughts, but through which the spirit entered the whole human being in a living way. One can say of a person of those times, not only: He has thoughts about the spirit, he has ideas about the spirit, but through his thoughts and ideas the living spirit moves into the human being. Such epochs have existed, and such epochs have actually given the right power and the right impulses for the development of humanity, where it was known that the spirit lives among us, the divinity lives among us. Only then did spiritual knowledge deepen into true religious devotion. If such times can arise again, not in the old form but in the modern form, then the human being acquires a true religious inwardness, an appropriate piety, through deepening their knowledge of anthroposophy. But through this, the modern being gains the knowledge that a time will come when not only, as is the case today, thoughts and ideas live in dryness, but also in the spirituality. Spirituality will move through the living thought. And through the suffering-overcoming conception of reality, the living thought, the living reality, the spirit itself in its liveliness will move into the human being. We must long for such a time because we need it, in which we say to ourselves again: Not only do we exist in the world, we as human beings with our outwardly random actions, but because we human beings ourselves are spiritual , we recognize our relationship to the eternal spirit, we recognize how other spiritual beings are at work beside us, a spiritual world, just like the sensual one, how the spirits not only live in our thoughts, but how they are our fellow travelers in earthly life.

That – dear attendees – when we perceive the spiritual world as the world of our fellow creatures, not as mere abstract theoretical thoughts, then we enter the world that today's humanity, and even more so the humanity of the near future, needs , in order to become more life-affirming, to achieve inner devotion, to achieve fruitful insights, to achieve actions, to achieve impulses for activity, which today's humanity longs for – longs for more than it usually believes.

Today we look into our social life, we see how people long for new impulses to come. But we also see what impulses of doom are indulging themselves. There must be something wrong, and that is what is wrong, that we have lost the living spirit. It is only with this living spirit, which does not merely enter into our scientific, abstract thoughts but permeates our entire human being, that we will solve the great difficult social questions of the present, as far as they can be solved in any age.

Anthroposophy, which is so often rejected, seeks to be nothing other than the spiritual activity, the spiritual life that leads people to recognize and actively embrace this living spirituality, this spiritual co-creation, so that mankind, imbued with this knowledge, with a will, with enthusiasm that comes from this spiritual life, can fully grasp the present and live into the future, as is necessary for the further welfare and development of humanity. Much of this is already sensed by humanity today, but it lives in the unconscious depths of human souls. Anthroposophy seeks to advance to a full understanding of what humanity needs for its inner realization and for its social goals in the present and especially in the future.