The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear friends,

We will obtain a deeper view of the total human being if we go a little further into the matters we have been considering. In particular, we should see from such symptoms how important the transition is from health to illness. I therefore would like to speak further about something that lies between certain pathological trends that are developing in human evolution and a kind of natural initiation that constitutes another stream in human evolution. This phenomenon lies midway between the pathological tendencies of human nature and the stream of initiation; it relates as much to one as to the other.

Typical of such a path of development are such personalities as St. Teresa. One can observe much more than I described if one makes a study of some of these individuals. With them there is a kind of appearance of the spiritual world at the threshold of perception. Naturally this is difficult to describe, because the words one has to use to characterize these abnormal conditions do not have such meanings in our everyday speech. What appears at the threshold of perception is the first stage for such people and is called by them “entrance into the first dwelling place of God.” In the first stage this is perceived only as “a presence.” These people experience the presence of some spiritual being, but they have no precise vision of the being. If the experience comes to a definite conclusion, they have a clear feeling that the being was there with them. That is the first experience: an indefinite experience of a presence, of being together with some spiritual being. As long as they are in this stage of development, these people are even annoyed when someone else tells them of a vision, because these people think their own experience is much more inward, much more intimate, more genuine. This has been such a moving experience for them that they have the feeling: human beings are not allowed to see the super-sensible world, but I have been given this vague experience of its reality.

Then these people reach a second stage. They tell of actual, shaped perceptions of the spiritual beings that were present. First they tell of the feeling of being touched, of having spiritual hands laid upon them, even of their forehead being touched or something similar, without yet having any visual experience. Then the condition is raised to vision that is like optical perception. It can be so enhanced that they see Jesus, for instance, standing before them as a real person. That is the usual second stage. It is a peculiar fact that those advancing from the first to the second stage have only the vaguest feeling that earlier they had become angry when others told them of their own experiences in this second stage. Memory does not clearly connect the two stages. These people live very intensely in the respective single stages.

The third stage they experience is remarkable. Their description of it is highly colored in every detail. They tell how when it comes upon them they are seized by tremendous pain. And indeed it is obviously intense, for at these moments they can be heard groaning; other reactions can be observed such as occur with pain originating in the physical and etheric bodies. But the strange thing is that they want this pain. They want it because they regard it as natural that they should have it; they feel that they will only reach the subsequent experience properly if first they suffer this pain.

Then they reach the stage where they transform the pain within themselves. This is extraordinarily interesting, for actually the pain remains exactly the same, but now it is enhanced into a feeling of joy, of bliss. The pain comes, its objective condition is still there, but now the spiritual awareness goes further. If one were suddenly to pull such people out of their spiritual state, they would feel the pain as sick people feel pain—and indeed do so when they return from this highest stage of the experience. At this highest stage they no longer have the feeling that spiritual beings come to them, but that they themselves have risen into the spiritual world. At this stage the pain is transformed—one might say subjectively, but the expression is not quite exact—into a feeling of bliss. Then begins a symbolic objectifying of the pain. When they come out of this experience and have a memory of it (and in most cases there is a very clear memory of it afterward), then they describe how a seraph or a cherub stood beside them, and the seraph or cherub had a sword that he plunged into the their intestines, which caused excruciating pain. When the spiritual being pulled out the sword he pulled the intestines out too, and then there came immediately an experience of profound bliss in the presence of God.

As a rule these three stages follow in succession. We can understand them clearly through our anthroposophical knowledge. After the preparatory condition I have described, the first stage consists of the ego organization drawing the astral body to itself, so that they are united without penetrating the physical and etheric bodies as deeply as they normally would. Something, therefore, is happening for such persons that can never happen in ordinary consciousness: in half-waking or quarter-waking or three-quarters waking condition they have conscious experience in their ego organization and astral body, while at the same time experience in their etheric and physical bodies continues with a certain independence. Thus parallel experiences are there: a spiritual experience in the ego organization and astral body, and at the same time a separate experience of the etheric and physical bodies. This is never the case in normal consciousness: there, all four members of the human being are bound closely together. In normal consciousness there is no such thing as experiences of consciousness running parallel. In this experience I am describing, such people feel themselves, know themselves in the most eminent sense to be entirely united with what they are experiencing. They know this first of all, the inherent being-one-with the happening. When the astral body is drawn to the ego organization and experiences spiritual beings, these people experience them as simply a presence, as something that is there. They experience this as one experiences one's own body. One does not differentiate in the latter experience. One does not feel one's body as something outside: one feels it as part of oneself. That is the first stage: the experience of “a presence.”

Now let us go to the second stage. First, these people have all kinds of feelings of being touched. Naturally these can be confused very easily by ordinary pathology with familiar psychiatric symptoms, but they are not the same. Then they advance to actual visions. This is the stage where the ego organization and astral organization draw the etheric body out to be united with them. So again there is a parallel experience: the ego organization, astral organization, and etheric body are all raised somewhat out of the physical body; at the same time the physical body carries on its processes separately. Something special comes about through this situation. In ordinary life, when we see, we are stimulated by light from without and we receive the stimulus into ourselves. It goes as far as the etheric body, and the etheric body creates the conscious experience. That is how it is, for example, with the eyes. When you see, the external stimulation occurs first in the ego; then it penetrates the astral body and penetrates the etheric body. It is then the etheric body that communicates the whole conscious experience to you by pushing in every direction, in a certain sense, against the physical organization. The conscious experience lies in this pushing. That is the exact process. If presented in a diagram, it would look like the drawing below.

A stimulus is exerted. First it affects the ego, then it goes to the astral body, then to the etheric body; in the etheric body it pushes into the physical body in every direction, to all sides. The physical body pushes back, and the pushing back, the repulsion by the physical body, is your actual eye experience. It is a constant play between the etheric body and the choroid and retina. What the etheric body does in the choroid and in the retina is what appears to ordinary consciousness as optical experience. This happens similarly with every other sense perception. To anyone who understands these things, the entire explanation in today's psychology textbooks, or even in epistemology, is terribly childish.

But now, with such people as I am describing, the etheric body is seized directly in this experience. The experience sits in the ego, astral body, etheric body, and does not push out to the senses, but pushes from within to what is the nerve-sense system—pushes first, actually, into the glandular system, then into the nervous system, and finally from there streams into the senses. So the senses are taken hold of in a way that is just the opposite of the way it happens in ordinary life. Instead of the experience of consciousness being stimulated through the senses, it is colored, intensified, made vivid by the fact that it streams from within to the senses. That is how the feeling of being touched comes about in a sensation of the nerves: by the streaming from within outward. This is then raised to vision. Now you know the whole inner process.

If there is a further development, it proceeds in the following way: the ego organization, astral body, and etheric body take hold of the physical body from quite another direction than would normally be the case. The physical body is accustomed to being taken hold of from without, but now it is taken hold of from within. Now it is taken hold of in the midst of life—the very process that otherwise only happens when the human soul-spiritual entity comes down out of the soul-spiritual world into the physical body, three weeks after conception. This event cannot otherwise happen in ordinary life, because normally the etheric body is connected with the physical body. But in this case the etheric body has been raised out by the ego organization and taken hold of by the astral body. It is like birth, when the human being takes possession of a physical body, but now the procedure is more complicated, possessing this physical body from quite another direction. And that causes pain. For as a matter of fact, all pain—in cases of illness, too—consists of the fact that the body is grasped hold of from some other direction than the usual one. That is what happens at the moment when the third stage is reached.

Now you need not be surprised that this third stage is objectified. It penetrates the physical body and the physical body repels it. A physical body cannot be so seized except in regular initiation; in any other situation the physical body exerts opposition, and this causes pain. It pushes away in pain what it is experiencing. That is the first part of the experience of the third stage. The physical body exerts resistance and the resistance is experienced as pain. And what enters through the pain? The real spiritual world. It comes through the pain. The spiritual world comes from the other direction. Ordinary sense perception and ordinary thinking grasp hold of the physical world. The spiritual world is grasped in the opposite way. The way to it is through pain. The moment the physical body exerts resistance, intense pain is there. But the moment the pain is taken hold of by the spiritual world, the moment the spiritual world enters, the pain is transformed into ecstasy. It is really so. First there is pain in the organism; then the spiritual world penetrates the pain, streams through the pain: a cherub or seraph appears (this is what the imagination presents), the cherub plunges his sword in, draws it out, and draws the intestines out with it. This means that the person becomes independent of the physical body, of the ordinary connection to it. The person has no experience in the lower organs and is led beyond it to an experience of the spiritual world. The physical pain is transformed to bliss. Such people speak of the presence of God, or if they make distinctions, of the presence of the spiritual world.

This last stage is experienced by individuals who are strong enough in their etheric body to endure the entire happening. They have the foundation for it in their karma. For instance, think of St. Teresa. She had an earlier incarnation in which her soul became especially strong. She incarnates as St. Teresa. But before she incarnates in the physical body, she takes possession of her etheric body very forcefully, and this etheric body becomes inwardly stronger than is the case with the usual human being. She has brought it with her into this life, this etheric body that is inwardly strong. Then this strong etheric body leaves the physical body and unites itself firmly with the astral body and ego, which are also especially strong from an earlier incarnation. And that is why illnesses then appear, at least a certain variety of illness: because the etheric body is not staying in the physical organs and providing them with its nourishing, vitalizing forces. With the individuals I am describing, the moment they enter the third stage they become really ill. At the same time their strong etheric body enables them to overcome the illness as it is developing. The illness begins to develop and immediately an automatic therapy arises within them from the strong etheric body. The entire process is a latent illness and healing. This is one of the most interesting phenomena in the realm of human evolution.

Precisely in the case of St. Teresa you see in the final stage of her development a continual status nascendi of illness and the continual cure. This alternation, this wonderful swing of a pendulum between the beginning of illness and the caring of it, is not a natural happening in the physical world, for it is not brought about in the physical world: it takes place in the spiritual world. We know that the etheric body is formed before the earthly incarnation. And it is into that pre-earthly moment that such a person as St. Teresa returns. When the pathological condition starts, when it is in statu nascendi, she “swings” into the world where she was before birth, into the spiritual world. The pendulum swings between the physical body and the spiritual world. Spiritual world—physical world—spiritual world—physical world, but experiencing the physical world as an exact opposite—such as normally human beings only experience when they are just incarnating into it. This inner process of healing, this therapy coming from the cosmos, is so intense that its effect can spread to sick people who are in the neighborhood of such people, if their illness lies somewhat in the same direction. In fact, the most wonderful cures can take place around such a person.

Indeed the influence can extend much further. In the former, better days of the church, these things were used in a careful, esoteric way. Later this degenerated to a superstitious worship of relics and belief in magic. But it is a fact that in better times of religious evolution, vivid biographies of such individuals, including their own imaginative descriptions, were given to the faithful, so that they could live through the experiences of such people in their own imagination. And it could then happen that when thoughtful pastors had the opportunity, they would simply put such a biography into the hands of someone in ordinary life whose illness was going in a certain direction. Perhaps also they strengthened the effect by their own words, and this was able to start curative processes. Directing the sick individual's mind to the life of such a saint could have a therapeutic effect.

You can see that studies that go so deeply into the human being will always lead from health to illness, but also to states of super-sensible experience. If therefore you advise someone in some connection or other to do exercises to gain entrance into the super-sensible world, the exercises must be so oriented that they strengthen the ego organization, astral body, and etheric body. Such a path as I described, given to individuals simply through their karma, will in fact take its course properly. What takes place in initiation itself can be learned by studying these processes, which border so closely on the pathological. Therefore it is not unimportant for physicians to take the time to study the lives of such people. Physicians will find in them what can only be called a paradox: the healthy counterpart of a complex of pathological symptoms that they are accustomed to meet here and there in everyday life. And for physicians, that is the most beneficial thing possible: to see the healthy counterpart of a pathological condition. That, more than anything else, will help physicians to make thoughtful, conscientious decisions about their therapy. Moreover if physicians have some knowledge of the substance that can be used as a remedy because of its affinity to certain etheric forces—forces that automatically become active in the self-healing of these abnormal individuals—they will know how St. Teresa's etheric body developed its forces when her illnesses appeared in statu nascendi. And if physicians learn to know the healing power to be found in the piercing activity of antimony, then they will have learned the right therapy from Nature herself.

I would like to point out that in examining such experiences as these, one encounters a remarkable paradox: one sees illness from another side. One sees illness being treated not by human beings but by spiritual beings. One kind of treatment is the kind human beings evolve: that is, treatment from the aspect of the earth. It consists of restoring the previous condition through some therapy that breaks up the illness. The spiritual beings that have to do with humanity treat illness differently. They weave an illness into the fabric of karma. That is their task—a task that doesn't pile things together as they are piled together here on earth by pathology. Here a seventeen-year-old who is ill is not always cured by forty-five. But with the way karma is formed, an illness in some incarnation, whether it is cured or not, may be woven into the human being's karma three thousand years later. Time is measured quite differently in the spiritual world. But one learns very much from those developments in which, from a spiritual point of view, something can happen in the spiritual world and then can also stream down into the physical world.

Take, for example, such a form of karma as I have been describing. Perhaps it is completely in the ordinary course of evolution in three thousand years. Let me show by this line (see drawing above) that something that happens to a person today is so shaped by spiritual beings that the other part belonging to it, the balance, the compensation, appears in three thousand years' time. That is the normal course. You see, in ordinary life people don't have a true knowledge of time. How do they think of it ordinarily? As a line running from past infinity through the present into the future. That is approximately how time is imagined—and indeed, the line has to be thick—perhaps not even a line, but a thick rope, because it contains everything that is perceived at any given moment in the whole world. That's the way people think of it if they think of it at all—and most people don't think of it at all. From a spiritual point of view time is not like that. And one finds little understanding for spiritual development—which, after all, is present in all physical evolution—when time is thought of in that conventional way. In reality, time is different. The line I drew on the board can be tangled up into a ball (see drawing). The entire line of time is in that ball. Three thousand years are in that ball. Time can be all tangled up; and if it is tangled up for some development or other in evolution, then the tangle can be found in the life of some individual. In the case of St. Teresa, a tangled ball of time was present in her earthly life. We come upon a true mystery—that things that in someone's karma would seem to be widely separate for some reason become entangled.

You see from such an example how a study of the inner spiritual, karmic development must link up with the external pathological and therapeutic inquiry. You can see how the pastoral care of some person by priests, who are basing their view of the person on the karmic connections, the spiritual aspects, can relate to what is seen from a medical view alone. For a comprehension of these things requires not only theoretical knowledge but really living into the things. Physicians must live into them on the pathological, physiological side that opens up for them. Priests must live into them in the theological and karmic views that open up for them. And the harmony will come from their working together out of these two different fields, not from interfering in each other's field in a dilettantish fashion. This must be stressed again and again.

You must still see something else that is connected with these things, particularly in our epoch. You know how distasteful it is to some people to accept the idea of free will even though it is perfectly obvious to an unbiased person. The philosophers deny its reality because their intellect can't make a connection with it. I said just now in regard to sense perceptions that the explanations in physiology and psychology textbooks are absolutely childish to someone who understands these things. But the chatter over free will is far worse. For you must remember: a decision of free will is at every moment an act of the whole human being—the whole human being—no matter how they appear in this impulse: healthy or ill or half ill or abnormally healthy. The whole human being is involved in an impulse of free will—and, all that can be known of the whole human being, all the complications. One only learns to know human nature when one learns to know it with all its complications. And please notice, something that in an abnormal person shows too strong a color in one or another direction is neutralized, harmonized in the ordinary human being. There's a trivial expression, but it's true: A cherub can make friends with you, but the devil can too. And those processes where the devil can squeeze in—we're going to study them too! This is all to be found in the ordinary human being, but opposing forces are neutralized, because they develop equally strongly in every direction. If there's an angel in every human, there's also a devil. But when the angel and the devil are equally strong, they neutralize each other.

Now take a look at these scales (see drawing). There is one spot, one point right here. You can lay weights there or there and then you have put the scales into movement. But this spot always remains still. It has a name: the hypomochlion. It is not affected by what you lay on the scale at the left, or what you lay on the scale at the right. Of course, the scales must be built so that this spot will not need to be disturbed. Now in the human being a similar spiritual hypomochlion is created by the opposing forces. Therefore you can study human nature and you will never be able to call human beings free, for by their very nature they are causally conditioned in all respects.

If you study the nature of human beings from the viewpoint of materialism, you do not come to the idea of freedom. You come to causal conditioning. If you study human beings from a spiritual viewpoint, you come to the determination of the will by God or by spiritual beings; you do not come to free will. You can be a blockhead of a materialist and deny freedom and do research on the natural causality of the will. Or you can be a sophisticated person like Leibnitz and gaze out at a spiritual universe—and you come to determinism. Naturally, as long as you are considering the scale at this left end of the beam, you have to reckon with movement; so long as you are considering the scale at this right end of the beam, again you have to reckon with movement. And it is the same with human beings: whether you consider them from the point of view of nature or from the point of view of spirit, you do not come to freedom. Freedom lies in the middle at the point of balance between them.

That's theory, of course! In practice you have to decide when people come to you with difficult life situations whether you can make them responsible for their actions. Now this becomes a practical question: whether they can or cannot exercise free will. How are you going to decide this? You decide by judging whether their spiritual and physical constitutions are in balance. And in this the physicians and the priests are equally involved. Therefore both physicians and priests must be trained to understand the conditions under which a person is either in balance or not in balance between spirit and nature.

Whether an individual has this sense of responsibility can only be decided out of a deep knowledge of human nature. The problem of freedom in connection with responsibility is one of the deepest problems imaginable.

Let us continue tomorrow. We will see what from one side leads to health and from the other side leads to pathological conditions.

Of course today we can remember that it is a favorable karmic situation that we are together again on the day when the first act of consecration of man could be performed here two years ago. We have a rather strange order in the main points in the development of the spiritual life here, as it were. The act of consecration of man two years ago, the burning of the Goetheanum, the laying of the foundation stone of the Anthroposophical society a year later and now after the second year we have gathered together here in order to look at the Apocalypse in accordance with your needs.

As I mentioned at the, beginning, a study of the Apocalypse is very closely connected with what is contained in the act of consecration of man; and therefore every day that we spend on the Apocalypse is really a memorial festival for what we permitted to live amongst us two years ago in order to bring what wanted to reveal itself from the spiritual world into this life as the present, modern cultic ritual.

With respect to the coincidence of events, it will perhaps be appropriate today that we will have a point in the Apocalypse before us which is very difficult to understand, but which really leads into the whole heart of the Apocalypse and which is connected most closely with the mystery of the act of consecration of man, because it is objectively connected with the being of Christ. It is really only possible to speak about this point in connection with the Apocalypse. For the Apocalypse bears the fundamental Christian character on its forehead to such an extent that there is no doubt that we cannot get anything out of what is connected with this Apocalypse in a natural way which deviates from the Christian viewpoint. And you may be assured that what I will have to say about this point which we want to discuss today arises in a very striking way from the views of the Apocalypticer.

We look around us at the turning point of our era and we find ourselves in the fifth post Atlantean period since the beginning of the 15th century, and in this period we have the beginning of a renewed battle which Michael will have to fight in connection with everything which has to happen in the near future, and we look back from there to the fourth post Atlantean period which immediately preceded our present one.

We know that this fourth post Atlantean age began about the year 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha, that the Mystery of Golgotha fell in this fourth post Atlantean age and that it can be placed approximately in the center of this age, if we take the slight displacements which always occur in world evolution into account. Thus we can make a schematic sketch of what is connected with our spiritual development as follows (drawing). So that we can say, the 5th post Atlantean age is here, and it was preceded by the fourth, third, second, first back to the Atlantean catastrophe, which as we know essentially transformed the shape of the earth's surface, and which gave a new face to our earth, as it were.

Now let's take a look at what this fourth Atlantean epoch is. It was preceded by what I have often called the Lemurian epoch in earth evolution, and then by what we can call the second and the first epochs in earth evolution. These first three epochs up to the Atlantean one are repetitions of the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods of evolution, respectively, whereas the fourth, Atlantean epoch is something new. The first three are definitely repetitions; it's true that they are repetitions on a higher level, but they are repetitions nevertheless.

The fourth or Atlantean epoch is something new. What happened during the Atlantean epoch occurred while the earth had forms which were quite different from the later ones. The earth's crust wasn't nearly as solid in the middle of the Atlantean epoch as it is today. The long geological periods of time which were presumably necessary for these events are illusions. The earth solidified from a relatively fluidic condition during the Atlantean epoch. The human race was quite different during the Atlantean period. It didn't have the present solid skeleton yet in the middle of the Atlantean epoch. As far as their material makeup is concerned men were more or less similar to lower animals. This doesn't apply to their form, for their forms were magnificent, but the substances were soft and cartilaginous and similar to those in jelly fish. Thus we can say that all physical conditions on earth have changed since that time and that the radical transformations which were still possible on the physical plane in the middle of the Atlantean epoch no longer occur.

It was even possible for men to make rapid metamorphoses, since the materials in their physical bodies were soft; so that depending on their inner soul life they became larger or smaller with various shapes; for every emotion immediately became imprinted in the physical body. In the middle of the Atlantean epoch, if someone wanted to grab something that was a little distance away, his will worked into his gelatinous organs so that they became quite long; so the way that shorter and longer range physical events and processes occurred was different then than it is today. There was an image of the real spiritual events in all physical processes, transformations and metamorphoses. This is not the case today. When we look outside today we don't perceive the working of the spirit in the course of the seasons or in other events anymore. When these rapid transformations occurred in the ancient Atlantean period men did not doubt that this world contained divine, spiritual things. Although the Atlantean continent was still quite mobile, it was beginning to get a fairly constant shape. It was enclosed by a kind of woven, dense fluid, and yet one can't call it semi-fluidic. It consisted of a viscous material which could support soft bodies and soft, mobile plants which floated or glided in this substance and were not yet attached to the ground. So the physical conditions were quite different.

One can say that sea and land were not as distinct then as they were later, that is, one passed over into the other. The people who saw the conditions at that time could say that the gods were working harder in the bordering ocean, where what was being transformed became more manifest than in the solid, fluidic land. One saw the gods at work all around Atlantis; no one doubted that these gods were at work; one perceived the spiritual and psychical everywhere, even in a physical way. One saw psychical and spiritual things in the physical world.

The peculiar thing about the earlier, Greek part of the fourth post Atlantean epoch was that one could clearly see the gods working in everything which goes on in the air; this became more indistinct in the centuries just before the fifth post Atlantean period. In ancient Atlantis one saw the gods at work in fluidic solids, and in the fourth post Atlantean age one saw them at work in the aeriform fluids in cloud formations, in the formation of twilight conditions, etc.

We don't find any descriptions of these things that are like definitions, for people's consciousness wasn't as clear yet, but they were there, because I'd like to know how an open-minded person can understand those wonderful paintings of clouds up to the early Renaissance where something spiritual is born out of the clouds in any other way than that one feels that there is a divine, spiritual activity in the aery cloud beings or in the aery, watery beings. You see, at that time men were constituted in such a way that they didn't look at the physical part of cloud formation, but they felt that something was being revealed through the clouds. This is a very beautiful feeling but it is very difficult to reconstruct for modern consciousness. When someone from even as late as the 8th and 9th centuries looked at the morning sky and saw how the twilight or the glimmering cloud formations at twilight stood before his soul, he really felt that the aurora or red dawn was alive; and he had the same feeling at dusk. The same applied to other things.

So that we can say that people saw the spirit in a physical way in ancient Atlantis. After Atlantis came the post Atlantean epoch with its seven ages. A repetition of the physical happenings in Atlantis at a soul level really occurred in the fourth post Atlantean age. The mighty upheavals of which I spoke: 333, 666, which are soul shocks in the evolution of mankind, definitely correspond to physical upheavals in the Atlantean epoch. And the seers in the Græco-Roman period definitely felt that when they saw something like soul revelations in fluidic, aeriform things, there was something in their souls which was a repetition of earlier earth conditions that occurred in the physical world. Only a dim awareness of this was present, for all consciousness was dimmer at that time.

As I recently mentioned in Anthroposophical lectures, the teachers at the school of Chartres and in other schools showed that the soul experiences of this Græco-Latin age were a psychical repetition of more condensed physical experiences and events in the Atlantean epoch.

And now we are in the consciousness age. The direct soul experiences in aeriform fluids have disappeared. One could say that the fifth post Atlantean age began through a kind of a catastrophe, and that this was a preparation for the further development of the consciousness soul of humanity. We're still in the chaos of this development of the consciousness soul to some extent with respect to our outer civilization. But the dawn of the Michael age will bring perception into this chaos.

This perception will consist of something like memories or Fata-Morgana mental formations which will arise in men in an entirely spiritual way—no longer in a physical way as in the Atlantean epoch, or in a psychical way as in the Græco-Roman age, but in a completely spiritual way—and this will begin after the appearance of the etheric Christ. Human thoughts will have a visionary character and will be like inner mirages, but they will be completely conscious in the age of the consciousness soul. Just as one sees a mirage in the desert which is brought about by the warm air, so men's thoughts will be carried by warmth and they will help men to understand aeriform-fiery and aeriform-warm things.

We can say that man perceives divine things in solids and fluids during the Atlantean epoch (of course this is more in outer, physical matter), that in the fourth post Atlantean or Græco-Roman age man perceives spiritual things in wonderful aeriform, fluidic formations, and that now in the fifth post Atlantean age men's consciousness souls will become aware of aeriform, fiery things and aeriform, warm things which will appear more and more. This will permit something to arise before men in mighty pictures which the Greeks experienced in a soul way and the inhabitants of Atlantis experienced in a physical way.

Thus a time is approaching in human evolution when visions which have the clarity of thought will arise concerning past times on earth and thereby concerning the origin of man and everything which is connected with this. The appearance of the Darwinistic view which gave man a lowly origin on the basis of mere inferences precedes the inner perception of evolution, the wonderful Imaginations which will arise from the inner warmth which is connected with man's breathing process; they will arise like concrete, significant, colored visionary thoughts. Man will know what he was when he looks into a kind of a reflection of the Græco-Roman age and then behind this into what existed in Atlantis. This perception that is of considerable interest for us because it will begin soon is something where we look right into the Apocalypticer's heart, because it is so close to us. For this kind of perception which is almost upon us is what he indicates in a picture: a woman clothed with the sun, a dragon under her feet, giving birth to a baby boy.

And in fact the eyes of many human beings will be opened by this Imagination during the course of this century. Much understanding will radiate from this picture, and it is one which shines back into the Græco-Roman age where it was prepared at the soul level and brought into the shape in which it will appear in the near future, and where it took on a great variety of forms. There was Isis with the Horus child, and metamorphoses of this as the Christ-bearer with the Christ child, that lived in a wonderfully profound way precisely in the Græco-Roman age. They have been handed down through traditions.

In the near future men will look back at the way in which people saw such things in the clouds, that is, in aeriform-fluidic things during the fourth post Atlantean age. And they will also look back even further to what lived in physical, Atlantean events. It will be as if this picture of a sun-clad woman who gives birth to a little boy and who has a dragon under her feet was like the eyepiece of a spiritual telescope which points to something physical lying far back in the past which occurred between the earth and the planets and the sun sphere; earthly, physical things were connected much more closely with cosmic things at that time.

For you see, we know that when the ancient Saturn period was repeated, many of the events which were peculiar to ancient Saturn evolution occurred again during earth evolution, albeit in a condensed form. During the repetition of ancient Sun evolution in the second period, the sun separated from the earth with all the beings who belong to the sun, whereas it was still connected with the earth during the repetition of Saturn evolution. During the third, Lemurian period of earth evolution the moon separated also, so that the next earthly-reality is a trinity of earth, sun and moon. You will find a description of the way the planets were added to this in Occult Science. You can also find all the events which I described there which are connected with the return of human souls during the Atlantean period. These are earthly events which are seen from an earthly perspective.

Now let's add something else to this. Someone who grasps the world's secrets since the Mystery of Golgotha with initiation science will look upon the Christ as the sun being who was united with the sun before the Mystery of Golgotha. When the priests in the mysteries wanted to connect themselves with the Christ in pre-Christian times they looked up to the sun. Christ has become an earth spirit since the Mystery of Golgotha. We must look for Christ the sun spirit in earthly life and in earthly activities. Those who wanted to see him and commune with him before the Mystery of Golgotha had to raise themselves up to the sun.

However, this sun spirit which we must look upon as a male being when it came down to earth, is described in a brilliant way in the Apocalypticer s vision, through a vision that stands before us in an almost material form; similar events in earlier ages can also be described in this way, and I have often done so. It stands there as a splendid physical vision in the middle of the Atlantean epoch. After this point in time the wise men in the mysteries looked up to the sun, and they saw the Christ developing and becoming mature in the sun until he could go through the Mystery of Golgotha. However, when they looked back to this point in Atlantean evolution they saw a birth taking place outside in the cosmos in the sun.

For the priests who saw the Christ as a male being in the sun after his birth in the middle of the Atlantean period saw a female being in the sun before that. This is the important change that occurred in the middle of the Atlantean period. Before the middle of the Atlantean epoch one saw a cosmic woman in the sun's spiritual aura, the woman who was clothed with the sun. This woman who was clothed with the sun corresponded to what was happening in the heavens above the earth at that time, and as the Apocalypticer rightly describes it, she gives birth to a little boy, who is the same being that went through the Mystery, although it went through other forms beforehand. A kind of a birth which was really just a complicated metamorphosis took place at that time in the Atlantean period. One could see how the female sun gave birth to something that was male—to her son. Now what does this mean for the earth? Of course in the middle of the Atlantean period one felt much differently about something like the sun existence than one did later.

Today one looks upon the sun as if it were a collection of craters and burning masses; the present-day descriptions of this by physicists are really horrible. But at that time one saw something like what I just described: a real sun-woman with a dragon at her feet, giving birth to a little boy. The ones who saw something like this and understood it said: For the heavens this is the birth of Christ, and for us it is the birth of our ego.

Even though this ego only entered man's inner nature much later; since this point in the middle of Atlantis evolution occurred in such a way that although men were not as conscious of their ego in an elemental way as they are today, they became ever more conscious of it because the mysteries drew their attention to it. The sun enkindled the ego in man. And the sun's action continually enkindled the ego from outside through the birth which had happened along the lines of this Imagination, until the fourth post Atlantean age, when the ego entered into man. People felt this and they felt that man really belongs to the sun; this was a feeling which made a deep impression upon the human soul.

Now that we have become such delicate souls with respect to our inner experiences, we have no idea how stormy and wild soul experiences, were in earlier times. The fact that man's ego was given to him from the cosmos made him feel that his nature had changed completely. Before that he had mainly been dependent upon what was in his astral body. What was in his astrality worked into his soul and spirit, so that during this ancient time man had the idea: He's standing here (drawing), the sun is up there, the ego is not there yet, but the astral works down from the sun. Man has his astral body from the sun, the astral body which is not controlled by the ego and which has somewhat refined emotions but nevertheless animalized ones in it. The man who had become an ego and who had previously had nothing but an astral body bubbling through him had become an entirely different human being. However, all of this came from the sun.

Let's place the picture of the sun as it was at the beginning of the Atlantean period before us in a somewhat schematic way. It was permeated by a lively luster, which bubbled through the lower half of the sun being. Something was born out of this above, and one felt that there was an indistinct face here. Man felt that the emotions that seethed in his own astral body and everything that gave him his spiritual and soul nature originated in the lower part of the sun being. In the next stage men saw the sun like this (drawing). Things develop more clearly here, the face becomes more distinct, the figure begins to look something like a woman, who is to bring man control through the ego. The space down here where the animal elements are wriggling becomes ever smaller. Finally, the time comes when the woman is present in the sun and gives birth to a little boy and now has what was previously further up here under her feet, where the ego-bearing woman in the picture on the sun demonstrates how one controls the dragon—the astral world of the previous epoch—which is now under her feet. The battle of Michael and the dragon began in the sun at that time, and in fact this brought it about—one saw this as a physical phenomenon—that everything which was in the sun slowly moved towards the earth and became an ingredient of the earth. It became an earth content which thereby controlled man in his sub-consciousness, whereas the ego entered ever more into his consciousness.

These cosmic, meteorological things that took place during the Atlantean epoch had their counter image in the Græco-Roman age when Isis with the Horus child became the Virgin with her Jesus boy. This will appear in a vision to those who look back in the next age which is almost upon us.

Man will see the sun-clad woman in this picture, who has the dragon under her feet that was thrown down to the earth by Michael, so that it cannot be found in the heavens anymore. This Imagination will appear in the age which will be followed by the one where the dragon is turned loose and where what I described to you yesterday will begin. It's a fact that deepened and extensive perception of past times on earth, man's origins and of the Christ being will soon arise in this Michael age. For Michael will concern himself with what the Apocalypticer points to and which will begin again in the Michaelic age, he will concern himself again with that draconic beast in human nature and in human evolution which he threw down.

Let's imagine what happens here in a vivid way. One will look back into the Atlantean epoch—the Apocalypticer does it in advance: he has the vision of the sun-clad woman who gives birth to the little Jesus boy and who has the dragon at her feet—, but this becomes fainter and fainter the closer we get to the end of Atlantean evolution. New continents rise out of the ocean at the end of Atlantean evolution the continents which now contain the forces through which the post Atlantean epoch entered into its various aberrations. The beast with the seven heads rises up from the sea. Sevenfold land rises up from the sea and pulls men down through the spiritual elements which evaporate from the earth into their emotions.

The Atlantean catastrophe appears to the Apocalypticer in the form of this seven headed beast which rises from the sea, and it will appear in the future when what the Apocalypticer is pointing to will begin again in the Michaelic age. The Apocalypticer is speaking of very real events which concern us a great deal, in connection with the spiritual life of humanity. And the content of this Imagination is connected with the being of Christ.

An age will soon come when men's souls will again see how the spirit lives in earthly things and therefore the spiritual processes in transubstantiation will also be visible to them. Then the earthly reflection of what has happened in heavenly regions will appear in transubstantiation so that what has occurred since the middle of the Atlantean epoch is a small section of everything which is connected with the being of Christ. One will understand how the kind of metamorphosis which takes place in transubstantiation is possible when one will see that the transubstantiation in what is physical and chemical at the moment—which is only a passing episode—is connected with something that is quite different than things which are apparently material.

Thus we can deepen our remembrance of the first act of consecration of man two years ago, this remembrance of the Christ who shone down from the heavens and really descended from the heavens during the Atlantean epoch, who appeared in the clouds in the Græco-Roman age and walked on earth, and who was understood by men in their visions, who is now walking on earth in an etheric form in our age, and is understood by men through visions and Imaginations. The Christ is present in transubstantiation and will be present for human beings more and more. The ways in which the Christ will gradually live in events during earth evolution are connected with the events that I described today. Let's take this in as a kind of festive idea today in memory of the first act of consecration of man which was celebrated in the Goetheanum two years ago.

[ 1 ] A man reflecting on his own nature soon becomes conscious that there is within him a second and more powerful self than the one bounded by his thoughts, his feelings, and the fully-conscious impulses of his will. He becomes aware that he is subject to that second self, as to a higher power. It is true that at first he will feel it to be a lower entity as compared with the one limited by his intelligent and fully-conscious soul, with its inclinations towards the Good and True. And at first he will strive to overcome that lower entity.

But closer self-examination may reveal something else about this second self. If we often, in the course of our lives, make a kind of survey of our acts and experiences, we make a singular discovery about ourselves. And the older we are, the more significant do we think that discovery. If we ask ourselves what we did or said at a particular period of our lives, it turns out that we have done very many things which are only really understood in later years. Seven or eight, or perhaps twenty years ago, we did certain things, and we know quite well that only now, long afterwards, is our intellect ripe enough to understand what we did or said at that earlier period.

Many people do not make such discoveries about themselves, because they do not look for them. But it is extremely profitable frequently to hold such communion with one's own soul. For directly a man becomes aware that he has done things in former years which he is only now beginning to understand, that formerly his intellect was not ripe enough to understand them,—at that moment, something like the following feeling arises in the soul: The man feels himself protected by a good power, which rules in the depths of his own being; he begins to have more and more confidence in the fact that really, in the highest sense of the word, he is not alone in the world, and that everything which he understands, and is consciously able to do, is after all but a small part of what he has really accomplished in the world.

[ 2 ] If this observation is often made, it is possible to carry out in practical life something which is very easy to see theoretically. It is easy to see that we should not make much progress in life if we had to accomplish everything we have to do, in full consciousness, with our intelligence taking note of every circumstance affecting us. In order to see this theoretically, we have only to reflect as follows: In what period of his life does a human being perform those acts which are really most important as regards his own existence? When does he act most wisely for himself? He does this from about the time of his birth up to that period to which his memory goes back when in later life he survey his earthly existence. If he recalls what he did three, four or five years ago, and then goes farther and farther back, he comes at last to a certain point in childhood, beyond which memory cannot go. What lies beyond it may be told by parents or others, but a man's own recollection only extends to a certain point in the past. That point is the moment at which the individual felt himself to be an ego. In the lives of people whose memory is limited to the normal, there must always be such a point. But previous to it, the human soul has worked in the wisest possible manner on the individual, and never afterwards, when the human being has gained consciousness, can he accomplish such vast and magnificent work on himself as he does when impelled by subconscious motives during the first years of childhood.

For we know that at birth man carries into the physical world what he has brought with him as the result of his former earthly lives. When he is born, his physical brain, for instance, is but a very imperfect instrument. The soul has to work a finer organization into that instrument, in order to make it the agent of everything that the soul is capable of performing. In point of fact, the human soul, before it is fully conscious, works upon the brain so as to make it an instrument for exercising all the abilities, aptitudes and qualities, which appertain to the soul as the result of its former earthly lives. This work on a man's own body is directed from points of view which are wiser than anything he can subsequently do for himself when in possession of full consciousness.

Moreover, man during this period not only elaborates his brain plastically, but has to learn three most important things for his earthly existence. [ 3 ] The first is the equilibrium of his own in space. The man of the present day entirely overlooks the meaning of this statement which touches upon one of the most essential differences between man and animals. An animal is destined from the outset to develop its equilibrium in space in a certain way; one animal is destined to be a climber, another, a swimmer. An animal is organized from the beginning in such a way as to be able to bear itself rightly in space, and this is the case with all animals up to and including the mammals most resembling man. If zoologists would ponder this fact, they would lay less emphasis on the number of bones and. muscles similar in men and animals, for this is of much less account than the fact that the human being is not endowed at birth with the complete equipment for his conditions of equilibrium. He has first to form them out of the sum total of his being. It is significant that man should have to work upon himself in order to make out of a being unable to walk at all, one that can walk erect. It is man himself who gives himself his vertical position, his equilibrium in space. He brings himself into relation with the force of gravitation. It will obviously be easy for anyone taking a superficial view of the matter to question this statement, with apparently good reason. It may be said that the human being is just as much organized for his erect walk as, for instance, a climbing animal is for climbing. But more accurate observation will show that it is the peculiarity of the animal's organization that causes its position in space. In man it is the soul which brings itself into relation with space and controls the organization.

[ 4 ] The second thing which the human being teaches himself is speech. This is by means of the entity which proceeds from one incarnation to another as the same being. Through speech he comes into relation with his fellowmen. This relation makes him the vehicle of that spiritual life which interpenetrates the physical world primarily through man. Emphasis has often been laid, with good reason, on the fact that a human being removed, before he could speak, to a desert island, and kept apart from his fellows, would not learn to talk. On the other hand, what we receive by inheritance, what is implanted in us for use in later years and is subject to the principles of heredity, does not depend on a man's dwelling with his fellows. For instance, his inherited conditions oblige him to change his teeth in the seventh year. If it were possible for him to grow up on a desert island, he would still change his teeth. But he only learns to talk when his soul's inner being, which is carried on from one life to another, is stimulated. The germ, however, for the development of the larynx must be formed during the period in which the human being has not yet acquired his ego-consciousness. Before the time to which his memory goes back, he must plant the germ for developing his larynx, in order that this may become the organ of speech.

[ 5 ] And then there is a third thing, the life within the world of thought. It is not so well known that the human being acquires this of himself, from that part of his inner nature which be carries on from one incarnation to another. The elaboration of the brain is undertaken because the brain is the instrument of thought. At the beginning of life, this organ is still plastic, because the individual has to form it for himself as an instrument of thought, in accordance with the intention of the entity which proceeds from one incarnation to another. The brain immediately after birth is, as it was bound to be, in consonance with the forces inherited from parents and other ancestors. But the individual has to express in his thought what he is as an individual being in conformity with his former earthly lives. Therefore he must re-model the inherited peculiarities of his brain, after birth, when he has become physically independent of his parents and other ancestors.

[ 6 ] We thus see that man accomplishes momentous things during the first years of his life. He is working on himself in the spirit of the highest wisdom. In point of fact, if it were a question of his own cleverness, he would not be able to accomplish what he must accomplish without that cleverness during the first period of his life. Why is all this accomplished in those depths of the soul which lie outside consciousness? This happens because the human soul and entire being are, during the first years of earthly life, in much closer connection with the spiritual worlds of the higher hierarchies than they are later. A clairvoyant who has gone through sufficient spiritual development to be able to witness actual spiritual events, sees something exceedingly significant at the moment when the ego acquires consciousness, i.e., at the earliest point to which the memory of later years goes back. Whereas what we call the child's aura hovers around it during its earliest years like a wonderful human and superhuman power and, being really the higher part of the child, is continued on into the spiritual world, at the moment to which memory goes back, this aura sinks more into the inner being of the child. A human being is able to feel himself a continuous ego as far back as that point of time, because that which was previously in close connection with the higher worlds, then passed into his ego. Henceforward the consciousness is at every point brought into connection with the external world. This is not the case with a very young child, to whom things appear only as a surrounding world -of dreams.

Man works on himself by means of a wisdom which is not within him. That wisdom is mightier and more comprehensive than any conscious wisdom of later years. The higher wisdom becomes obscured in the human soul which, in exchange, receives consciousness.

The higher wisdom works out of the spiritual world deep into the bodily part of man, so that man is able by its means to form his brain out of spirit. It is rightly said that even the wisest may learn from a child, for in the child is working the wisdom which does not pass later into consciousness. Through that wisdom man has something like telephonic connection with the spiritual beings in whose world he lives between death and rebirth. From that world there is something still streaming into the aura of the child, which is, as an individual being, immediately under the guidance of the entire spiritual world to which it belongs. Spiritual forces from that world continue to flow into the child. They cease so to flow at the point of time to which memory goes back. It is these forces which enable the child to bring itself into a definite relation to gravitation. They form the larynx, and so mold the brain that it becomes a living instrument for the expression of thought, feeling, and will.

[ 7 ] What is present in childhood to a supreme degree, so that the individual is then working out of a self which is still in direct connection with higher worlds, continues to some extent even in later years, although the conditions change in the manner indicated above. If at a later stage of life we feel that we did something years before which we are only now able to understand, it is just because we previously let ourselves be guided by higher wisdom, and only after the lapse of years have we attained to an understanding of the reasons for our conduct.

From all this we can feel that, immediately after birth, we had not escaped so very far from the world in which we were before entering upon physical existence, and that we can never really escape from it wholly. Our share in higher spirituality enters our physical life and accompanies us throughout. We often feel that what is within us is not only a higher self which is gradually being evolved, but is something higher which is there already, and is the motive cause of our so often developing beyond ourselves.

[ 8 ] All ideals and artistic creations which man is able to produce, as well as all the natural healing forces in his own body, by means of which he is continually able to adjust the injuries that befall him in life—all these powers do not proceed from ordinary intellect, but from those deeper forces which in our earliest years are at work on our equilibrium in space, on the formation of our larynx, and on the brain. For these same forces are still at work in man in later years. When sickness attacks us, it is often said that external forces cannot help us, but that our organism must develop the healing powers latent within it; by this is meant that there is a profoundly wise activity present in us. Moreover, it is from this same source that proceed the best forces whereby knowledge of the spiritual world, true clairvoyance; is attained.

[ 9 ] The question now suggests itself: why do the higher forces which have been described work upon human nature only during early childhood? [ 10 ] One-half of the answer may be easily given as follows: If those higher forces went on working in the same way, man would be always a child. He would not attain the full ego-consciousness. From within his own being must proceed the motive power which previously worked on him from without. But there is a more important reason which explains still more clearly the mysteries of human life, and that is the following:

It is possible to learn through occult science, that the human body, as it exists at its present stage of evolution, must be regarded as having arrived at its present form under different conditions. It is known to the occultist that this evolution was effected by means of the working of various forces on the sum-total of man's being; certain forces worked on the physical body, others on the etheric, others on the astral body. Human nature has arrived at its present form through the action of those beings whom we call the Luciferic and Ahrimanic. By their means it has, in a certain way, become more imperfect than it need have been if only those forces had been active within it which proceed from the spiritual rulers of the cosmos who desire to evolve man along straight lines. The causes of sorrow, disease, and even of death are to be sought in the fact that, besides the beings who are evolving man in a straight line forwards, there are also the Luciferic and Ahrimanic spirits, who are continually crossing the line of straightforward progressive development.

Man brings with him at birth something which he cannot improve upon later in life. This is so, because the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces have little influence over man during early childhood; they are virtually operative only in what man makes out of himself by his conscious life. [ 11 ] If he were to retain in full force beyond early childhood that more perfect part of his being, he would be unable to endure its influence, because his whole being is weakened by the opposing forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. Man's organism in the physical world is so constituted that it is only as a soft and pliable child that he can endure within him those direct forces of the spiritual world. He would be shattered, if during his later life there were still directly working in him those forces which underlie the faculty of equilibrium in space, and the formation of the larynx and the brain. Those forces are so tremendous that, if they were to continue working, our organism would pine away under the influence of their holiness. Man must only have recourse to such forces for the purpose of developing the power to make conscious connection with the supersensible world.

[ 12 ] But out of this there arises a thought which is of great significance, if rightly understood. It is expressed in the New Testament in the words, ‘Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.’ What then becomes manifest as man's highest ideal, if what has just been said be rightly received? Surely this—the drawing ever nearer and nearer to what we may call a conscious relation to the forces which work in man unknown to him during early childhood, 0niy it must be borne in mind that man would collapse under the power of those forces, if they were at once to operate in his conscious life. For this reason, careful preparation is necessary for the attainment of those faculties which induce the perception of supersensible worlds. The object of such preparation is to qualify man to bear what he is unable to bear in ordinary life.

[ 13 ] The passing of the individual through successive incarnations is of importance for the collective evolution of the human race. The latter has advanced through successive lives in the past, and is still advancing, and parallel with it the earth too is moving forwards in its evolution. The time will come when the earth will have reached the end of its career. Then the earthly planet will fall away as a physical entity from the sum-total of human souls, just as the human body falls away from the spirit at death, when, in order to continue living, the soul enters the spiritual realm which is adapted to it between death and re-birth. When once this is realized, it must appear as man's highest ideal to have progressed far enough at earthly death, to be able to reap all possible benefits which may be obtained from earthly life.

[ 14 ] Now those forces which prevent man from being able to endure the powers working upon him during early childhood come out of the substance of the earth. When these have fallen away from a human being, the latter, if he has attained the aim of his life, must have advanced far enough to be able actually to give himself up, with his whole being, to the powers which at present are only active in man during childhood. Thus the object of evolution through successive earthly lives is gradually to make the whole individual, including therefore the conscious part, into an expression of the powers which are ruling in him under the influence of the spiritual world—though he does not know it—during the first years of his life. The thought which takes possession of the soul after such reflections as these, must fill it with humility, but also with a due consciousness of the dignity of man. The thought is this man is not alone; there is something living within him which is constantly affording him proof that he can rise above himself to something which is already growing beyond him, and which will go on growing from one life to another. This thought can assume more and more definite form; and in that case it affords something supremely soothing and elevating, at the same time filling the soul with corresponding humility and modesty. What is it that man has within him in this way? Surely a higher, divine human being, by whom he is able to feel himself interpenetrated, saying to himself, ‘He is my guide within me.’

[ 15 ] From such a point of view, it is not long before we arrive at the thought that by all the means in our power we should strive to be in harmony with that within our being which is wiser than conscious intelligence. And we shall be referred on from the directly conscious self to an enlarged self, in the presence of whom all false pride and presumption will be extinguished and subdued. This feeling develops into another which opens the way to accurate understanding of the nature of present human imperfection; and the consciousness of this leads to the knowledge that man may become perfect, if once the larger spirituality ruling within him is allowed to bear the same relation to his consciousness which it bore to the unconscious life of the soul in early childhood.

[ 16 ] If it often happens that memory does not extend as far back as the fourth year of a child's life, it may nevertheless be said that the influence of the higher spirit-sphere, in the above sense, lasts through the first three years. At the end of that span of time a child becomes capable of linking its impressions of the outer world to the ideas of its ego. It is true that this coherent ego- conception can only be reckoned as existing as far back as memory extends. Yet we must say that virtually memory extends to the beginning of the fourth year, only it is too weak at the beginning of distinct ego-consciousness to be perceptible. It may be granted that those higher powers which dispose of a human being in the early years of childhood can be operative for three years; therefore man, during the present middle period of the earth, is so organized that he can receive these forces for only three years.

[ 17 ] Supposing a man now stood before us, and that some cosmic powers could cause his ordinary ego to be removed. For this purpose we must assume that it would be possible to remove from the physical, etheric, and astral bodies the ordinary ego which has passed through successive incarnations with the human being. And now suppose that into the three bodies could be introduced an ego which works in connection with spiritual worlds, what would happen to a person thus treated? At the end of three years his body would necessarily be shattered, Something would occur, through cosmic karma, which would prevent the spirit-being which would be in connection with higher worlds, from living more than three years in that body.¹ Only at the end of all his earthly lives will man have that within him which will enable him to live more than three years with that spirit-being. But then, it is true, man will be able to say to himself, ‘Not I, but that Higher One within me, who was always there, is now working in me.’ Till that time comes, he is not able to say this. The most he can say is that he feels that higher being, but has not yet progressed far enough with his real, actual human ego, to be able to bring that higher being to full life within him.

[ 18 ] Supposing then that, at some time in the middle earth-period, a human organism were to come into the world, and later in life be freed from his ego by the action of certain cosmic powers, receiving in exchange the ego which usually only works in man during the first three years of life, and which would be in connection with the spiritual worlds in which man exists between death and rebirth: how long would such a person be able to live in an earthly body? About three years. For at the end of that time, something would arise through cosmic karma, which would destroy that human organism.

[ 19 ] What is here supposed is, indeed, a historical fact. The human organism which stood in the river Jordan at John's baptism when the ego of Jesus of Nazareth left the three bodies, contained, after the baptism, in complete conscious development, that higher Self of humanity which usually works with cosmic wisdom on a child without its knowledge. At the same time, the necessity arose that this Self which was in connection with the higher spirit-world could only live for three years in the appropriate human organism. Events had then to take place which brought the earthly life of that being to a close. [ 20 ] The outer events in the life of Christ Jesus are to be interpreted as absolutely conditioned by the inner causes just set forth, and present themselves as the outward expression of those causes.

[ 21 ] We are now able to see the deeper connection existing between that which is man's guide in life, which streams in upon his childhood like the dawn and is always working below the surface of consciousness as the best part of him, and that which once upon a time entered the whole of human evolution and was able to dwell for three years in a human frame.

[ 22 ] What then is manifested in that ‘higher’ ego, which is connected with the spiritual hierarchies, and which in due time entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth, this entrance being symbolically represented by the sign of the Spirit descending in the form of a dove, and by the words; ‘this is my well-beloved Son, to-day have I begotten him’ (for so stood the words originally)? If we fix our eyes upon this picture, we are contemplating the highest human ideal. For it means that the history of Jesus of Nazareth is a statement of this fact; the Christ can be discerned in every human being. And even if there were no Gospels and no tradition to tell us that once a Christ lived on earth, we should yet learn through knowledge of human nature that the Christ is living in man.

[ 23 ] The recognition of the forces working in human nature during childhood is the recognition of the Christ in man. The question now arises, does this recognition lead to the further perception of the fact that this Christ once really dwelt on earth in a human body? Without bringing forward any documents, this question may be answered in the affirmative. For genuine clairvoyant knowledge of self leads the man of the present day to see that powers are to be discovered in the human soul which emanate from the Christ. These powers are at work during the first three years of childhood without any action being taken by the human being. In later life they may be called into action, if the Christ be sought within the soul by inner meditation. Man was not always able, as he is now, to find the Christ within himself. There were times when no inner meditation could lead him to the Christ. This again we learn from clairvoyant perception. In the interval between that past time when man could not find the Christ in himself, and the present time when he can find him, there took place Christ's earthly life. And that life itself is the source of man's power to find the Christ in himself in the manner that has been pointed out. Thus to clairvoyant perception the earthly life of Christ is proved without any historical records.

[ 24 ] It is just as if the Christ had said; ‘I will be such an ideal for you human beings that, when it is raised to a spiritual level, you will be shown that which is fulfilled in each human body.’ In his early childhood man learns from the spirit how to walk; he is shown by the spirit his way through earthly life. From the spirit he learns to speak, to form truth; in other words, be develops the essence of truth out of sound during the first three years of his life. And the life too, which man lives on earth as an ego-being, obtains its vital organ through what is formed in the first three years of childhood. Thus man learns to walk, to find ‘the way’; he learns to present ‘truth’ through his physical organism; and he learns to bring ‘life’ from the spirit into expression in his body. No more significant interpretation seems possible of the words ‘Except ye become as little children ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ And momentous is that saying in which the ego-being of the Christ comes into expression thus, ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.’ Just as, unknown to a child, the higher spirit-forces are fashioning its organism to become the bodily expression of the way, the truth, and the life, so the spirit of man, through being interpenetrated with the Christ, gradually becomes the conscious vehicle of the way, the truth, and the life. He is thereby making himself, in the course of his earthly development, into that force which bears sway within him as a child, when he is not consciously its vehicle.

[ 25 ] This saying about the way, the truth, and the life, is capable of opening the doors of eternity. It sounds to man out of the depths of his soul, if his self-knowledge is true and real.

[ 26 ] Such reflections as these open up, in a double sense, the vision of the spiritual guidance of the individual and of collective humanity. As human beings we are able, through self-knowledge, to find the Christ within us as the guide Whom, since His life on earth, we can always reach, because He is always in man. Furthermore, if we apply to the historical records what we have apprehended without them, we discover their real nature. They express something which is revealed of itself in the depths of the soul. They are therefore to be accounted as guiding humanity in the same direction as the soul itself is proceeding.

[ 27 ] If we thus understand the suggestion of eternity in the words, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life,’ we cannot feel ourselves justified in asking, ‘Why does a person who has passed through many incarnations always re-enter life as a child?’ For it becomes evident that this apparent imperfection is an ever-recurring reminder of the Highest that is in man. And we cannot be reminded often enough—at any rate each time we enter earthly life is not too often to remind us—of the vast importance of man's connection with that Being Who underlies all earthly existence, untouched by its imperfections.

[ 28 ] It is not well to make many definitions or summaries in spiritual science or theosophy, or indeed in occultism generally. It is better to give a description, and to try and call forth a feeling of what really exists. On this account we have attempted to induce a feeling of what distinguishes the first three years of human life, and of the way in which this is related to the light that streams from the cross on Golgotha. The meaning of this feeling is that an impulse is passing through human evolution, and that through this impulse the Pauline saying, ‘Not I—but the Christ in me,’ will become a fact. We have only to know what man is in reality, in order to be able to proceed from such knowledge to insight into the nature of the Christ. When once, however, we have arrived at the Christ-idea, through true observation of humanity, we know that we discover the Christ in the best way if we first look for Him in ourselves; and if we then return to the Bible records we value them rightly for the first time. And no one prizes the Bible more, or more consciously, than one who has found the Christ in this way. It is possible to imagine a being, let us say, an inhabitant of Mars, descending to earth, without ever having heard of the Christ and His work. Much that has taken place on earth would be incomprehensible to the Martian; much that interests people nowadays would not interest him. But it would interest him to discover the central impulse of earthly evolution, the Christ-idea as it is expressed in human nature itself.

Having grasped this, a man is able for the first time rightly to understand the Bible, for he finds expressed there in a marvelous way what he has previously observed in himself, and he says: It is unnecessary to have been brought up with any special reverence for the Gospels; by means of what I have learned through spiritual science, they need only be presented to me, a fully-conscious human being, to stand revealed before me in all their greatness.

[ 29 ] Indeed, if it is not too much to say that in the course of time people who have learned through spiritual science rightly to appreciate the contents of the Gospels, will value them as guides of the human race more justly than hitherto. It is only through knowledge of human nature itself that humanity will learn to see what is latent in those profound records. It will then be said: If there is to be found in the Gospels that which forms an integral part of human nature, it must have come from the people who wrote these documents on earth, Therefore what genuine reflection brings home to us about our own lives—the more so the older we grow—must hold especially good with regard to those writers. We ourselves have done many things which we only understand years afterwards, and in the writers of the Gospels may be seen people who wrote out of the higher self which works in man during childhood, so that the Gospels are writings emanating from the wisdom which molds human nature. Man is a manifestation of spirit through his body, and the Gospels are such a manifestation in writing.

[ 30 ] On this assumption the idea of inspiration regains its true and loftier meaning. Just as higher forces are at work on the brain during the first three years of childhood, so there were higher forces from spiritual worlds impressed on the souls of the Evangelists, under the influence of which they wrote the Gospels. The spiritual guidance of humanity is expressed in such a fact as this. For the human race must surely be guided, if within it people are writing records under the influence of those same powers that are at work on the molding of man in profound wisdom. And just as the individual says or does things which he only understands at a later period of life, so collective humanity has produced in the Evangelists means of revelation which can only be understood by degrees. The farther humanity progresses, the greater will be the understanding of these records. The human being can feel spiritual guidance within himself; and collective humanity can feel it in those of its members who work as did the writers of the Gospels.

[ 31 ] The idea thus gained of the guidance of humanity may be extended in many directions. Let us suppose that a man finds disciples—a few people who follow him. Such a one will soon become aware, through genuine self-knowledge, that the very fact of his finding disciples gives him the feeling that what he has to say does not originate with himself. The case is rather this—that spiritual powers in higher worlds wish to communicate with the disciples, and find in the teacher the fitting instrument for their manifestation.

[ 32] The thought will suggest itself to such a man: when I was a child I worked on myself by the aid of forces proceeding from the spiritual world, and what I am now able to give, of my best, must also proceed from higher worlds; I may not look upon it as belonging to my ordinary consciousness. Such a man may in fact say: something demonic, something like a ‘daimon’—using the word in the sense of a good spiritual power—is working out of a spiritual world through me on my disciples.

Socrates felt something of this kind. Plato tells us that he spoke of his ‘daimon’ as of the one who led and guided him. Many attempts have been made to explain this ‘daimon’ of Socrates, but it can only be explained by supposing that Socrates was able to feel something like that which results from the above reflections. Then we are able to understand that throughout the three or four centuries during which the Socratic principle was active in Greece, a state of feeling permeated the Greek world, which prepared the way for another great event. The feeling that man, as he now is, is not the whole of what comes through from higher worlds—this feeling went on working. The best of those in whom it was present were those who afterwards best understood the words, ‘Not I, but the Christ in me.’ For they could say to themselves: Socrates used to speak of a being working as a ‘daimon’ from higher worlds; the Christ-ideal makes clear what Socrates meant. Socrates could not as yet speak of Christ, because in his time no one was able to find the Christ-nature within himself.

[ 33 ] Here again we feel something of the spiritual guidance of man, for nothing can be established in the world without preparation. Why was it that Paul found his best disciples in Greece? Because the ground had been prepared there by the teaching of Socrates and the state of feeling that has been described. That is to say, what happens in human evolution may be traced back to events which operated previously, and made people ripe for what was afterwards to be brought to bear upon them. Do we not feel here how far the guiding impulse passing through human evolution extends and how at the right moment it places people where they will best be used to further that evolution? In such facts is manifested the guidance of mankind.

[ 34 missing ]

• 1. The vitality of the human organism is maintained at the transition from childhood to later life, because the organism is capable of change at that period. Later in life, it is no longer susceptible of change, and on this account cannot continue to exist with that other Self.

By taking our start from what was said yesterday, we shall be able to come nearer to the fundamental questions of Christianity and to penetrate into its essential nature. We shall see that only by this means can we see into the heart of what the Christ-Impulse has become for the evolution of humanity and what it will become in the future.

People are always insisting that the answers to the highest questions must not be complicated; the truth must be brought directly to each person in the simplest way. In support of this they argue, for example, that the Apostle John in his last years expressed the quintessence of Christianity in words of truth: ‘Children, love one another.’ No one, however, should conclude that a person who simply pronounces the words, ‘Children, love one another’, knows the essence of Christianity and of all truth for men. Before the Apostle John was entitled to pronounce these words, he had fulfilled various preconditions. We know it was at the end of a long life, in his ninety-fifth year, that he came to this utterance; only by then, in that particular incarnation, had he earned the right to use such words, Indeed, he stands there as a witness that this saying, if it came from any chance individual, would not have the power it had from him. For he had achieved something else, also. Although the critics dispute it, he was the author of the John Gospel, the Apocalypse, and the Epistles of John. Throughout his life he had not always said, ‘Children, love one another!’ He had written a work which belongs to the most difficult productions of man, the Apocalypse, and the John Gospel, which penetrates most intimately and deeply into the human soul. He had gained the right to pronounce such a saying only through a long life and through what he had accomplished. If anyone lives a life such as his, and does what he did, and then says, as he did, ‘Children, love one another!’ there are no grounds for objecting to it. We must, however, be quite clear that although some things can be compressed into a few words, so that these few words signify very much, the same few words may also say nothing. Many a person who pronounces a word of wisdom which in its proper setting would perhaps signify something very deep, believes that by merely uttering it he has said a very great deal.

The writer of the Apocalypse and of the John Gospel, in his greatest age, could speak the words ‘Children, love one another!’ out of the essence of Christianity, but the same words from the mouth of another person may be a mere phrase. We must gather matters for the understanding of Christianity from far a field, so that we may apply them to the simplest truths of daily life.

Yesterday we had to approach the question, so fateful for modern thought: What are we to make of the physical body in relation to the four-fold being of man?

We shall see how the points brought out yesterday in looking at the differing views of the Greeks, the ancient Hebrews and the Buddhists will lead us further towards understanding the nature of Christianity. But if we are to learn more concerning the fate of the physical body, we must first take up a question which is central to the whole Christian cosmic conception; a question which lies at the very core of Christianity: How it is with the Resurrection of Christ? Must we not assume that for the understanding of Christianity it is essential to reach an understanding of the Resurrection?

To see how important this is, we need only recall a passage in the first Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, (I Corinthians 15:14–20):

If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life we who are in Christ have only hope, we are of all men most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
(Quotations from the New Testament are in the Revised Standard Version, 1946.)

We must remember that Christianity, in so far as it has extended over the world, began with Paul. And if we are disposed to take these important words seriously, we cannot simply pass them over by saying that we must leave the question of the Resurrection unexplained. For what is it that Paul says? That the whole of Christianity has no justification, and the whole Christian Faith no meaning, if the Resurrection is not true! That is what is said by Paul, with whom Christianity as a fact of history had its starting-point. And it means that anyone who is willing to give up the Resurrection must give up Christianity as Paul understood it.

And now let us pass over almost two thousand years and ask people of the present day how, according to the requirements of modern culture, they stand with regard to the question of the Resurrection. I shall not now take note of those who simply deny Jesus entirely; it is naturally quite easy for them to be clear regarding the question of the Resurrection. If Jesus never lived, one need not trouble about the Resurrection. Leaving such persons aside, we will turn to those who about the middle or in the last third of the nineteenth century had accepted the current ideas of our time—the time in which we are still living. We will ask them what they think, in conformity with the whole culture of our day, concerning the question of the Resurrection.

We will take a man who has gained great influence over the way of thinking of those who consider themselves best informed—David Friedrich Strauss. In his work on Reimarus, a thinker of the eighteenth century, we read: ‘The Resurrection of Jesus is really a shibboleth, concerning which not only the various conceptions of Christianity, but the various world-philosophies and stages of spiritual evolution, are at variance.’ And in a Swiss journal almost of the same date we read: ‘As soon as I can convince myself of the reality of the Resurrection of Christ, this absolute miracle, I tear down the modern conception of the world. This breach in what I believe to be the inviolable order of Nature would make an irreparable rent in my system, in my whole thought-world.’

Let us ask how many persons of our present time who, according to the modern standpoint, must and do subscribe to these words, would say, ‘If I were obliged to recognise the Resurrection as historical fact, I would tear down my whole system of thought, philosophical or otherwise.’ Let us ask how should the Resurrection, as historical fact, fit in with a modern man's outlook on the world.

Let us recall something indicated in my first public lecture on this subject, that the Gospels are to be taken first and foremost as Initiation writings. The leading events depicted in the Gospels are fundamentally Initiation events—events which had formerly taken place within the secret places of the temples of the Mysteries, when this or that person, who had been deemed worthy, was initiated by the hierophants. Such a person, after he had been prepared for a long time, went through a kind of death and a kind of resurrection. He had also to go through certain situations in life which reappear for us in the Gospels—in the story of the Temptation, the story set on the Mount of Olives, and other similar ones. That is why the accounts of ancient Initiates, which do not aim to be biographies in the usual sense, show such resemblance to the Gospel stories of Christ Jesus. And when we read the history of the greatest initiates, of Apollonius of Tyana, or indeed even of Buddha or Zarathustra, or the life of Osiris or of Orpheus, it often seems that important characteristics of their lives are the same as those narrated of Christ Jesus in the Gospels. But although we must grant that we have to seek in the Initiation ceremonies of the old Mysteries for the prototypes of important events narrated in the Gospels, on the other hand we see quite clearly that the great teachings of the life of Christ Jesus are saturated throughout with individual details which are not intended as a mere repetition of Initiation ceremonies, but make it very plain that what is described is actual fact. Must we not say that we receive a remarkably factual impression when the following is pictured for us in the Gospel of John XX:1–10:

Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran, and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ Peter then came out with the other disciple, and they went towards the tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first; and stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and he went into the tomb; he saw the linen cloths lying, and the napkins, which had been on his head, not lying with the linen cloths but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not know the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples went back to their homes.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ Saying this, she turned and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus.

Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will take him away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew,

‘Rabboni!’ (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her,

‘Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’

Here is a situation described in such detail that if we wish to picture it in imagination there is hardly anything lacking—when, for example, it is said that the one disciple runs faster than the other, or that the napkin which had covered the head was laid aside in another place, and so on. In every detail something is described which would have no meaning if it did not refer to a fact. Attention was drawn on a former occasion to one detail, that Mary did not recognise Christ Jesus, and we asked how was it possible that after three days anyone could fail to recognise in the same form a person previously known. Hence we had to note that Christ appeared to Mary in a changed form, or these words would have no meaning.

Here, therefore, a distinction must be kept in mind. First, we have to understand the Resurrection as a translation into historic fact of the awakening that took place in the holy Mysteries of all times, only with the difference that he who in the Mysteries raised up the individual pupil was the hierophant; while the Gospels indicate that He who raised up Christ is the Being whom we designate as the Father—that the Father Himself raised up the Christ. Here we are shown that what had formerly been carried out on a small scale in the depths of the Mysteries was now and once for all enacted for humanity by Divine Spirits, and that the Being who is designated as the Father acted as hierophant in the raising to life of Christ Jesus. Thus we have here, enhanced to the highest degree, something which formerly had taken place on a small scale in the Mysteries.

That is the first point. The other is that, interwoven with matters which carry us back to the Mysteries, there are descriptions so detailed that even today we can reconstruct from the Gospels the situations even to their minute particulars, as we have just seen in the passage read to you. But this passage includes one detail that calls for particular attention. There must be a meaning in the words, ‘For they did not as yet know the Scripture, that He must rise from the dead. Then the disciples went back to their homes.’ Let us ask: Of what had the disciples been able so far to convince themselves? It is described as clearly as anything can be that the linen wrappings are there, but the body is not there, is no longer in the grave. The disciples had not been able to convince themselves of anything else, and they understood nothing else when they now went home. Otherwise the words have no meaning. The more deeply you enter into the text, the more you must say that the disciples who were standing by the grave were convinced that the linen wrappings were there, but that the body was no longer in the grave. They went home with the thought: ‘Where has the body gone? Who has taken it out of the grave?’

And now, from the conviction that the body is not there, the Gospels lead us slowly to the events through which the disciples were finally convinced of the Resurrection. How were they convinced? Through the fact that, as the Gospels relate, Christ appeared to them by degrees, so that they could say, ‘He is there!’, and this went so far that Thomas, called the Doubter, could lay his finger in the prints of the wounds. In short, we can see from the Gospels that the disciples became convinced of the Resurrection through Christ having come to them after it as the Risen One. The proof for the disciples was that He was there. And if these disciples, who had gradually come to the conviction that Christ was alive, although He had died, had been asked what they actually believed, they would have said: ‘We have proofs that Christ lives.’ But they certainly would not have spoken as Paul spoke later, after he had gone through his experience on the road to Damascus.

Anyone who allows the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles to work upon him will notice the deep underlying difference between the fundamental tone of the Gospels as regards the understanding of the Resurrection, and the Pauline conception of it. Paul, indeed, draws a parallel between his conviction of the Resurrection and that of the Gospels, for in saying ‘Christ is risen’, he indicates that Christ, after He had been crucified, appeared as a living Being to Cephas, to the Twelve, then to five hundred brethren at one time; and last of all to himself, Paul, as to one born out of due time, Christ had appeared from out of the fiery glory of the Spiritual. Christ had appeared to the disciples also; Paul refers to that, and the events lived through with the Risen One were the same for Paul as they had been for the disciples. But what Paul immediately joins to these, as the outcome for him of the event of Damascus, is his wonderful and easily comprehensible theory of the Being of Christ.

What, from the event of Damascus onwards, was the Being of Christ for Paul? The Being of Christ was for him the ‘Second Adam’; and he immediately differentiates between the first Adam and the second Adam, the Christ. He calls the first Adam the progenitor of men on Earth because he sees in him the first man, from whom all other men are descended. For Paul, it is Adam who has bequeathed to human beings the body which they carry about with them as a physical body. All men have inherited their physical body from Adam. This is the body which meets us in external Maya, and is mortal; it is the body inherited from Adam, the corruptible body, the physical body of man that decays in death. With this body men are ‘clothed’. The second Adam, Christ, is regarded by Paul as possessing, in contrast to the first, the incorruptible, the immortal body. Paul then affirms that through Christian evolution men are gradually made ready to put on the second Adam in place of the first Adam; the incorruptible body of the second Adam, Christ, in place of the corruptible body of the first Adam. What Paul seems to require of all who call themselves true Christians is something that violates all the old conceptions of the world. As the first corruptible body is descended from Adam, so must the incorruptible body originate from the second Adam, from Christ. Every Christian could say: ‘Because I am descended from Adam, I have a corruptible body as Adam had; but in that I set myself in the right relationship to Christ, I receive from Him, the second Adam, an incorruptible body.’ For Paul, this view shines out directly from the experience of Damascus. We can perhaps express what Paul wishes to say by means of a simple diagram:

Here we have (x, x ...) a number of people at a given time. Paul would trace them all back to the first Adam, from whom they are all descended and by whom they are given the corruptible body. According to Paul's conception, however, something else is possible. Just as human beings can say, ‘We are related because we are all descended from the one progenitor, Adam,’ so they can say, ‘As without any action of ours, through the relationships of human generation lines can be traced back to Adam, so it is possible for us to cause something else to arise within us; something that could make us different beings. Just as the natural lines lead back to Adam, so it must be possible to represent lines which lead, not to the corruptible body of the fleshly Adam, but to the body that is incorruptible. Through our relationship to Christ, we can—according to the Pauline view—bear this incorruptible body within us, just as through Adam we bear the Corruptible body.’

There is nothing more uncomfortable for the modern consciousness than this idea. For looking at the matter quite soberly, what does it demand from us? It demands something which, for modern thought, is really monstrous. Modern thought has long disputed whether all human beings are descended from one primeval human being, but it may be allowed that all are descended from a single human being who was the first on earth as regards physical consciousness. Paul, however, demands the following. He says: ‘If you desire to be a Christian in the true sense, you must conceive that within you something can arise which can live in you, and from which you can draw spiritual lines to a second Adam, to Christ, to that very Christ who on the third day rose from the grave, just as all men can trace lines back to the physical body of the first Adam.’ So Paul demands that all who call themselves Christians should cause something within them to arise; something leading to that entity which on the third day rose out of the grave in which the body of Christ Jesus had been laid. Anyone who does not grant this cannot come into any relationship with Paul; he cannot say he understands Paul. If man, as regards his corruptible body, is descended from the first Adam, then, by receiving the Being of Christ into his own being, he has the possibility of having a second ancestor. This ancestor, however, is He who, on the third day after His body had been laid in the earth, rose out of the grave.

Let us clearly understand that Paul makes this demand, however displeasing it may be to modern thinkers. From this Pauline statement we will indeed approach the modern thinker; but one ought not to have any other opinion concerning that which meets us so clearly in the Pauline writings; one ought not to twist the meaning of something so clearly expressed by Paul. Certainly it is pleasant to interpret something allegorically and to say it was meant in such and such a way; but all these interpretations make no sense. If we wish to connect a meaning with the Pauline statement we are bound to say—even if modern consciousness regards it as superstition—that, according to Paul, Christ rose from the dead after three days.

Let us go further. An assertion such as this, made by Paul after he had reached the summit of his initiation through the event of Damascus—the assertion concerning the second Adam and His rising from the grave—could be made only by someone whose whole mode of thought and outlook had been derived from Greek thought; by one whose roots were in Greece, even if he were also a Hebrew; by one who in a certain respect had brought all his Hebraism as an offering to the Greek mind. For, if we come closer to all this, what is it that Paul really declares? Looking with inner vision on that which the Greeks loved and valued, the external form of the human body, concerning which they had the tragic feeling that it comes to an end when the individual passes through the gate of death, Paul says: ‘With the Resurrection of Christ, the body has been raised in triumph from the grave.’ If we are to build a bridge between these two world-outlooks, we can best do it in the following way.

The Greek hero said from his Greek feeling: ‘Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the land of shades.’ He said this because he was convinced that the external form of the physical body, so highly cherished by the Greeks, was lost for ever in passing through the gate of death. On this same soil, out of which this tragic mood of intoxication with beauty had grown, Paul appeared, he who first proclaimed the Gospel to the Greeks. We do not deviate from his words if we translate them as follows: ‘That which you value above all, the human bodily form, will no longer be destroyed. Christ is risen as the first of those who are raised from the dead! The Form of the physical body is not lost, but is given back to humanity through the Resurrection of Christ!’ That which the Greeks valued most highly was given back to them with the Resurrection by Paul the Jew, who had been steeped in Greek culture. Only a Greek would so think and speak, but only someone who had become a Greek with all the preconceptions derived from his Jewish ancestry. Only a Jew who had become a Greek could speak in this way; no one else.

But how can we approach these things from the standpoint of Spiritual Science? For we have reached the point of knowing that Paul demands something which thoroughly upsets the calculations of the modern thinker. Let us endeavour from the standpoint of Spiritual Science to get nearer to what Paul demands. Let us collect what we know from Spiritual Science, so as to bring an idea to meet Paul's statement.

When we review the very simplest spiritual-scientific truths, we know that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and Ego. If now you ask someone who has studied Spiritual Science a little, but not very thoroughly, whether he knows the physical body of man, he will be sure to answer: ‘I know it quite well, for I see it when a person stands before me. The other members are supersensible, invisible, and one cannot see them, but the physical human body I know very well.’ Is it really the physical body of man that appears before our eyes when we meet a man with our ordinary vision? I ask you, who without clairvoyant vision has ever seen a physical human body? What is it that people have before them if they see only with physical eyes and physical understanding? A human body, but one consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and Ego. And when a man stands before us, it is as an organised assembly of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and Ego. It would make as little sense to say that a physical body stood before us as it would if, when giving someone a glass of water, we were to say, ‘There is hydrogen in that glass.’ Water consists of hydrogen and oxygen, as man consists of physical, etheric and astral bodies, and Ego. Their assemblage is visible, just as water is, but the hydrogen and oxygen are not. Anyone who said he saw hydrogen in the water would be obviously mistaken. So is anyone who thinks he sees the physical body when he sees a man in the external world. What he normally sees is not a physical human body, but a four-membered being. He sees the physical body only in so far as it is permeated by the other members of the human being. And it is then changed in the same way that hydrogen is changed when it is permeated with oxygen in water. For hydrogen is a gas, and oxygen also; from the two gases united we get a liquid. Why should it be incomprehensible that the man who meets us in the physical world is quite unlike his single members, the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the Ego, just as water is quite unlike hydrogen? And so he is! Hence we cannot rely upon the Maya which appears to us as the physical body. We must think of the physical body in a quite different way if we want to draw nearer to its nature.

The observation of the physical human body, in itself, belongs to the most difficult clairvoyant problems, the hardest of all! Suppose we allow the external world to perform on man the experiment which is similar to the disintegration of water into hydrogen and oxygen. In death this experiment is performed by the great world. We then see how man lays aside his physical body. But does he really lay aside his physical body? The question seems absurd, for what could be clearer than the apparent fact that at death man lays aside his physical body? But what is it that he lays aside? It is something no longer imbued with the physical body's most important possession during life: its Form. Directly after death the Form begins to withdraw from the dead body. We are left with decaying substances, no longer characterised by the Form. The body laid aside is composed of substances and elements which we can trace also in Nature; in the natural order of things they would not produce a human Form. Yet this Form belongs quite essentially to the physical human body. To ordinary clairvoyance it seems evident that at death a person simply discards these material substances, which are then handed over to decay or burning, and that nothing of the physical body is left. The clairvoyant then observes how after death the Ego, astral body, and etheric body remain connected during the person's review of his past life. Then he sees how the etheric body separates itself, how an extract of it remains, while the main portion dissolves in one way or another into the general cosmic ether. It does indeed seem that the person has laid aside his physical body, with its substances and forces, and then, after a few days, the etheric body. When the clairvoyant follows the person further through the Kamaloka period, he sees how an extract of the astral body goes with him during the life between death and a new birth, while the rest of the astral body is given over to the cosmic astrality.

So we see that physical, etheric and astral bodies are laid aside, and that the physical body seems to drain away completely into materials and forces which, through decay or burning or some other form of dissolution, are returned to the elements. But the more clairvoyance is developed in our time, the clearer will it be that the physical forces and substances laid aside are not the whole physical body, for its complete configuration could never derive from them alone. To these substances and forces there belongs something else, best called the ‘Phantom’ of the man. This Phantom is the Form-shape which as a spiritual texture works up the physical substances and forces so that they fill out the Form which we encounter as the man on the physical plane. The sculptor can bring no statue into existence if he merely takes marble or something else, and strikes away wildly so that single pieces spring off just as the substance permits. As the sculptor must have the ‘thought’ which he impresses on the substance, so is a ‘thought’ related to the human body: not in the same way as the thought of the artist, for the material of the human body is not marble or plaster, but as a real thought, the Phantom, in the external world. Just as the thought of the plastic artist is stamped upon his material, so the Phantom of the physical body is stamped upon the substances of the earth which we see given over after death to the grave or the fire. The Phantom belongs to the physical body as its enduring part, a more important part than the external substances. The external substances are merely loaded into the network of the human Form, as one might load apples into a cart. You can see how important the Phantom is. The substances which fall asunder after death are essentially those we meet externally in nature. They are merely caught up by the human Form.

If you think more deeply, can you believe that all the work of the great Divine Spirits though the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods has merely created something which is handed over at death to the elements of the Earth? No—that which was developed during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods is not the physical body that is laid aside at death. It is the Phantom, the Form, of the physical body. We must be quite clear that to understand the physical body is not an easy thing. Above all, this understanding must not be sought for in the world of illusion, the world of Maya. We know that the foundation, the germ, of this Phantom of the physical body was laid down by the Thrones during the Saturn period; during the Sun period the Spirits of Wisdom worked further upon it, the Spirits of Movement during the Moon period, and the Spirits of Form during the Earth period. And it is only in this period that the physical body received the Phantom. We call these Spirits the Spirits of Form, because they really live in the Phantom of the physical body. So in order to understand the physical body, we must go back to the Phantom.

If we look back to the beginning of our Earth-existence, we can say that the hosts from the ranks of the higher Hierarchies who had prepared the physical human body in its own proper Form during the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, up to the Earth period, had from the outset placed this Phantom within the Earth evolution. In fact the Phantom, which cannot be seen with the physical eye, was what was first there of the physical body of man. It is a transparent body of force. What the physical eye sees are the physical substances which a person eats and takes into himself, and they fill out the invisible Phantom. If the physical eye looks upon a physical body, what it sees is the mineral part that fills the physical body, not the physical body itself. But how has this mineral part found its way into the Phantom of man's physical body? To answer this question, let us picture once more the genesis, the first ‘becoming’, of man on Earth.

From Saturn, Sun and Moon there came over that network of forces which in its true form meets us as the invisible Phantom of the physical body. For a higher clairvoyance it appears as Phantom only when we look away from all the external substance that fills it out. This is the Phantom which stands at the starting-point of man's Earth existence, when he was invisible as a physical body. Let us suppose that to this Phantom of the physical body the etheric body is added; will the Phantom then become visible? Certainly not; for the etheric body is invisible for ordinary sight. Thus the physical body as Phantom, plus etheric body, is still invisible to external physical sense. And the astral body even more so; hence the combination of physical body as Phantom with the etheric and astral bodies is still invisible. And when the Ego is added it would certainly become perceptible inwardly, but not externally visible. Thus, as man came over out of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods, he was still visible only to a clairvoyant. How did he become visible? But for the occurrence described in the Bible symbolically, and factually in occult science, as the entry of the Lucifer influence, he would not have become visible. What happened through that influence?

Read what is said in Occult Science. Out of that path of evolution in which his physical, etheric and astral bodies were still invisible, man was thrown down into denser matter, and was compelled under the influence of Lucifer to take this denser matter into himself. If the Lucifer force had not been introduced into our astral body and Ego, this dense materiality would not have become as visible as it has become. Hence we have to represent man as an invisible being, made visible in matter only through forces which entered into him under the influence of Lucifer. Through this influence external substances and forces are drawn into the domain of the Phantom and permeate it. As when we pour a coloured fluid into a transparent glass, so that the glass looks coloured, so we can imagine that the Lucifer influence poured forces into the human Phantom, with the result that man was adapted for taking in on Earth the requisite substances and forces which make his Form visible. Otherwise his physical body would have remained always invisible.

The alchemists always insisted that the human body really consists of the same substance that constitutes the perfectly transparent, crystal-clear ‘Philosopher's Stone’. The physical body is itself entirely transparent, and it is the Lucifer forces in man which have brought him to a non-transparent state and placed him before us so that he is opaque and tangible. Hence you will understand that man has become a being who takes up external substances and forces of the Earth, which are given off again at death, only because Lucifer tempted him, and certain forces were poured into his astral body. It follows that because the Ego entered into connection with the physical, etheric and astral bodies under the influence of Lucifer, man became what he is on earth and otherwise would not have been—the bearer of a visible, earthly organism.

Now let us suppose that at a certain point of time in life the Ego were to go out from a human organism, so that there stood before us physical, etheric and astral bodies, but not the Ego. This is what happened in the case of Jesus of Nazareth in the thirtieth year of His life. The human Ego then left this cohesion of physical, etheric and astral bodies. And into this cohesion the Christ-Being entered at the Baptism in Jordan. We now have the physical, etheric and astral bodies of a man, and the Christ-Being. The Christ-Being had now taken up His abode in a human organism, as otherwise the Ego would have done. What now differentiates this Christ Jesus from all other men on Earth? It is this: that all other men bear within them an Ego that once was overcome by Lucifer's temptation, but Jesus no longer bears an Ego within Him; instead, He bears the Christ-Being. So that from this time, beginning with the Baptism in Jordan, Jesus bears within Himself the residual effects that had come from Lucifer, but with no human Ego to allow any further Luciferic influences to enter his body. A physical body, an etheric body, and astral body—in which the residue of the earlier Luciferic influences was present, but into which no more Luciferic influence could enter—and the Christ-Being: thus was Christ Jesus constituted.

Let us set before us exactly what the Christ is from the Baptism in Jordan until the Mystery of Golgotha: a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body which makes this physical body together with the etheric body visible because it still contains the residue of the Luciferic influence. Because the Christ-Being had the astral body that Jesus of Nazareth had had from birth to his thirtieth year, the physical body was visible as the bearer of the Christ. Thus from the time of the Baptism in Jordan we have before us a physical body which as such would not be visible on the physical plane; an etheric body which as such would not have been perceptible; the astral body which makes the other two bodies visible and so makes the body of Jesus of Nazareth into a visible body; and, within this organism, the Christ-Being.

We will inscribe firmly in our souls this four-fold nature of Christ Jesus, saying to ourselves: Every person who stands before us on the physical plane consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and Ego; and this Ego is such that it always works into the astral body up to the hour of death. The Christ-Jesus-Being, however, stands before us as One who had physical body, etheric body and astral body, but no human Ego, so that during the three years up to his death he was not subject to the influences that normally work upon human beings. The only influence came from the Christ-Being.

You will have noticed in these lectures that we are approaching our goal step by step, but that with each step we are trying to penetrate more deeply into our subject. In the last lecture we spoke of the nature of pain, which may be connected with an illness; we also pointed out how in other cases an illness may run its course—at least in a certain sense—without being accompanied by pain.

We must now consider the nature of pain in somewhat more detail. We must keep before us the fact that pain may become apparent side by side with illness. At our last discussion we already concluded that we may not look upon disease and pain as inseparable. We must be aware that if pain is connected with an illness, there must be something more at stake than mere illness. We have pointed out that the process taking place during the transition from one incarnation to another, whereby events of earlier incarnations are transformed into causes of illness, is influenced on the one side by the luciferic principle, and on the other by the ahrimanic principle.

How do we lay the foundation of illnesses? Why do we acquire a predisposition for illness? What induces us between death and rebirth to prepare forces which will manifest as illness in our next life? We are impelled to this when we see our own weakness in the face of the temptations of Lucifer on the one hand and those of Ahriman on the other. All our greed, egotism, ambition, pride, vanity, all qualities connected with this inflation of our Ego, this desire to be in the limelight, all this is the result of luciferic temptations. In other words, if we fall victims to the forces active within our astral body so that they find expression in our egotistical greeds and passions, we are in that incarnation performing actions to which we are tempted by Lucifer. And during the period between death and rebirth, we see the results of such deeds inspired by Lucifer. We then contract the tendency to incarnate ourselves in conditions where we shall have to suffer an illness which, if it is overcome, will free us still further from the clutches of these luciferic powers. If the luciferic power did not exist, we should not fall into those temptations that lead us to seek for renewed powers.

If there were nothing else in life but the egotistical impulses and passions born of Lucifer, we should never be able to free ourselves from them, not even in successive incarnations, for we should ever again succumb to them. Suppose for instance we had been left to our own devices during Earth Evolution, but still subject to the luciferic influence. We should have the temptations of the luciferic powers in one incarnation and then after death perceive where they had led us. This would bring about an illness, but if nothing else co-operated, the illness would lead to no great improvement during the life in which it is experienced. It leads to an improvement only because other powers, adversaries of Lucifer, add something to the whole process.

When we fall into the power of Lucifer, there immediately intervenes a counteraction by powers antagonistic to the luciferic powers. These exercise an opposing force, whereby the luciferic influence may be actually driven out of us. And it is these forces, opponents of the luciferic powers, which add pain to the process resulting from Lucifer's influence. Thus, if the luciferic powers are evil, we must regard pain as something which is given us by benevolent forces, because through pain we escape from the clutches of these evil powers, and do not succumb to them again. If there were no pain connected with illnesses which result from yielding to the luciferic powers, we should feel that it was not so bad after all to succumb to these powers. And there would be nothing impelling us to escape from the luciferic forces. Pain, which is the consciousness of the astral body in a wrong waking state, is also that which prevents us from ever again falling prey to the luciferic powers in that realm where we have already succumbed. Thus pain becomes our schoolmaster in regard to the temptations of the luciferic powers.

But how can pain become our schoolmaster, if we only feel the pain and are in no way aware of its beneficent force. If this is the case it is the result of our Ego-consciousness. In that consciousness that we have described as lying beneath our Ego-consciousness, and which is not perceived in the normal state, a process is already taking place whereby we realise that we are experiencing pain, and that this is brought about by the beneficial forces to counteract our transgressions. This is a force in our subconscious mind acting truly as karmic fulfilment—as an impulse to fall no more into those deeds, inclinations, and greeds that brought about the illness.

Thus we see how karma acts, how we fall a prey to the luciferic powers, how these powers effect an illness in the following incarnation, and how the beneficent forces add pain to the organic trouble, so that through pain we may educate the subconscious. We may therefore say that in every case where pain makes itself felt, we are dealing with an illness provoked by the luciferic forces. Pain is a sign that the luciferic power lies at its roots. People who go in for classification will now be longing to distinguish these illnesses that are due to purely luciferic influence from those which can be traced to purely ahrimanic influence. For in all theorising it is most convenient to classify—to make formulae—and people delude themselves into believing that they have comprehended much in this way. In reality, however, things do not arrange themselves in such a way that they can be grasped in this convenient manner. In reality they continually intercross and interpenetrate. And it will be easy to understand that during the course of an illness there are phenomena which may be traced in part to Lucifer's influence—to the activities of our astral body—and others which are traced to the ahrimanic influence. Thus no one must believe that if we feel pain, it is traceable only to luciferic influences. Pain reveals that part of our illness is traceable to luciferic influence. But this will become clearer if we ask whence the ahrimanic influence comes.

We should not have fallen a prey to ahrimanic influence if we had not first succumbed to that of Lucifer. Through the luciferic influence there came about the relation of the four elements constituting man—the physical body, etheric body, astral body and the Ego—a relation which would not have existed if only the forces opposed to Lucifer had operated. In that case we should have developed quite differently. Thus the luciferic principle caused disorder in the inner being of man, and the position of man in relation to the external world depends upon what he is himself. Just as we cannot see the world when we have imperfect eyes, so through luciferic influence we are prevented from seeing the external world as it really is. And because of man's incapacity to see the external world as it really is, the ahrimanic influence has been able to insinuate itself into this inaccurate picture. So it is the luciferic influence on man which has made Ahriman's approach possible. Subjected to the ahrimanic influence we can fall a prey not only to egotistical passions, urges, greeds, vanity and pride, and so forth, but now egotism can affect the human organism to such an extent as to develop organs through which we can see the external world distorted and inaccurate. Ahriman has insinuated himself into this inaccurate picture, and under his influence we succumb not only to inner temptations, but also to error. We fall into untruth in our judgement of the external world and our assertions concerning it. Thus Ahriman acts from outside; but we have made it possible for him to reach us.

The ahrimanic and luciferic influences are thus never separated. They always react upon one another, and in a certain sense keep a balance. Lucifer manifests outwards from within, Ahriman acts from without, and our picture of the world is formed between the two. If in one incarnation the inner man gains in strength, if the man is more exposed to the inner influences, then he will succumb more easily to Lucifer, when his pride, his vanity, etc., will come into play. In an incarnation in which man is not through his general karma predisposed to yield to inner influences, he will be more inclined to fall a prey to error and the temptations of Ahriman. This is what actually happens. So that in daily life we at one moment fall a prey more to the temptations of Lucifer, and at another to those of Ahriman. And we oscillate between these two influences which lead us—the one to inner conceit, and the other to illusions about the external world.

Since it is a matter of singular importance, it might here be mentioned that the temptations from both sides must be especially resisted by anyone who is called to a spiritual development, and who wishes to penetrate into the spiritual world, whether by penetrating into that external spirituality which lies behind the phenomena of the external world, or whether by descending mystically into his own inner being. When we penetrate the world which lies behind the physical world, we always find those deceptive images which Ahriman conjures up. When a man tries to descend mystically into his own soul, he is exposed to the temptations of Lucifer in a special degree. When he tries to descend without having previously taken precautions against pride, vanity, and so forth; when he succeeds in living as a Mystic without having given heed to a special moral culture, he is the more liable to fall victim to the temptations of Lucifer, who acts upon the soul from within. If a Mystic has not given careful heed to his moral culture, he will be in great danger when penetrating his inner being, of calling forth even more strongly than before the reactionary forces of Lucifer, and of becoming even more vain and proud than he was formerly. For this reason it is essential first to ensure that through the forming of our character we are able to resist the temptations of vanity, conceit, and pride to which we in any case shall be exposed. We can never do enough towards the acquisition of such qualities as lead to modesty and humility. This is essential for that aspect of our development which we call ‘Mystic.’ On the other hand it is necessary to defend ourselves against the delusions of Ahriman when we attempt to reach the spiritual origin of things, by following the path which leads behind the phenomena of the external world. If we do not form a strong and steadfast character which enables us to fortify ourselves, to acquire a strong inner life, it may well happen that just at the moment when we are succeeding in going out into the spiritual world, we fall into the clutches of Ahriman, who will beguile us by illusion upon illusion, hallucination upon hallucination.

We must understand that these things must be accepted in the spirit and not in the letter. Because the fact is so often emphasised that a higher development desirous of comprehending phenomena of the external world must be accompanied by full consciousness, it happens that again and again somnambulists assure us that they perceive the spiritual world, and do so when fully conscious. The only thing that can be done is to assure them that it would be far better for them, and far wiser if they did not have this full consciousness. For people are mistaken as to the nature of this consciousness, which is merely an image or astral consciousness. If these people were not conscious in a lower degree they would not perceive anything, and what matters is that we should on entering the spiritual world maintain the integrity of our Ego-consciousness. With the Ego-consciousness however is linked our power of judgement and our faculty for acute discrimination. This is what is lacking regarding the forms which they see in the spiritual world. That they should have some consciousness is in no way remarkable, but the consciousness they should have is that which is linked to the culture of our Ego. That is why during our development towards the perception of the higher worlds we are not so keen on reaching these higher worlds as speedily as possible, on seeing a world filled with images and all kinds of forms, of hearing perhaps all kinds of voices. Rather do we emphasise the fact that entrance to the spiritual world can only bring happiness or be of advantage when our consciousness, our faculty of discrimination and discernment, and our power of judgement have been so sharpened that in the higher worlds we shall be subject to no delusion. This can best be achieved through a study of Anthroposophical truths. For this reason we insist that the study of Anthroposophy is the best safeguard against these alleged visions, which by their nature are not capable of being brought to the test of a sound judgement. One schooled in Spiritual Science will not accept everything that comes his way, but will be able to distinguish between reality and mirage. He will also know that any auditory perceptions must be treated with the greatest circumspection, for no such perceptions can correspond to reality unless the hearer has previously passed through the sphere of absolute silence. He who has not first experienced the absolute silence and calm of the spiritual world may be certain that what he perceives are delusions, even though what they convey to him seems most portentous. Only he who has taken the pains to fortify his judgement by trying to comprehend the truths of the spiritual worlds, only he can defend himself against such delusions. The means which external science offers are insufficient. External science does not provide us with the power of judgement sure enough and strong enough for true discernment in the spiritual world. That is why we say that if information concerning the higher worlds is given us by people who have not carefully fortified the power of judgement—and this can be done through the study of Anthroposophy—such information is always questionable, and must in any case first be checked by the methods attained through genuine training. From this we see that Lucifer and Ahriman do not suspend their temptations when we strive for a higher development.

There is but one power before which Lucifer retreats, and that is morality which burns him like the most dreadful of fires. And there is no means by which to oppose Ahriman other than a power of judgement and discernment schooled by Spiritual Science. For Ahriman flees in terror from the wholesome power of judgement acquired upon Earth. In the main there is nothing to which he has a greater aversion than the qualities we gain from a healthy education of our Ego-consciousness. For we shall see that Ahriman belongs to a very different region far removed from that force of sound judgement which we develop in ourselves. The moment Ahriman encounters this, he receives a terrible shock, for this is something completely unknown to him, and he fears it. The more we apply ourselves in our life to develop this wholesome judgement, the more do we work in opposition to Ahriman. This appears particularly in numbers of cases of people brought before one, who recount from dawn to sunset all they have seen in the spiritual worlds. And if one attempts to give to these people some explanation, and to develop their judgement and discernment, Ahriman generally has them so completely in his power, that they can hardly enter into the discussion. It is even more difficult to get them to listen to reason when Ahriman's temptations come to them from the auditory side. There are many more ways of dealing with delusions which appear as images than with those which come acoustically—in voices heard and so forth. Such people have a great aversion to any serious study that would contribute to the development of their Ego-consciousness between birth and death. But it is not they themselves who do not like it; it is the ahrimanic forces that drag them away from it. If one leads those people so far as to develop a wholesome discernment, and they begin to accept instruction, it soon becomes evident that the visions, voices, and hallucinations cease. They were merely ahrimanic chimera, and Ahriman is possessed by fear as soon as he feels that from out of this man there comes forth a wholesome power of judgement.

In fact, the best remedy against the particularly harmful diseases which result in visions and delusory voices induced by Ahriman is to make all efforts to induce the person to acquire a wholesome and rational judgement. In many such cases it is extraordinarily difficult to do this, for the other powers make things very easy for the deluded ones and guide them on. He who attempts to expel this power cannot make things so comfortable, and in consequence finds his task a difficult one; for they maintain that they are being deprived of that which before had led them into the spiritual world. The truth of the matter is that they are being healed and safeguarded against further encroachment by these evil powers.

We now know what the luciferic and ahrimanic forces abhor. Lucifer has an aversion for humility and modesty in man and is repulsed if we have only such an opinion of ourselves as a wholesome judgement entitles us to hold. On the other hand, he is present, like the flies in the dirty room, whenever the qualities of vanity and ambition arise. All this and the illusions which we engender about ourselves, prepare us to receive Ahriman as well. Nothing can defend us against Ahriman unless we really make an effort to think wholesomely, as life between birth and death teaches us to do. And especially we, who stand on the rock of Spiritual Science, have every reason to emphasise again and again and as intensively as possible, the fact that it is not meet for us as earth-beings to disregard that which is to be given us through life upon earth. People who disdain the acquisition of a wholesome judgement and a rational discernment, and who aspire to a spiritual world without making this effort, are really trying to shun earth life. They, being of the opinion that it is really far too trivial an occupation for them to concern themselves with matters that may lead to comprehension of this life, aspire to soar above it. They consider themselves superior and it is just this frame of mind which constitutes a fresh cause of pride. For this reason we see constantly that such people who incline towards sentimental fanaticism—‘Schwärmerei’—towards a shrinking from being touched by the things of this earth and earth life, refusing to learn because they already have the inner knowledge, have nothing in common with a movement such as ours. Such people say ‘Humanity must enter the Spiritual World.’

Certainly—but there is only one healthy path by which we can enter, and that is the morality that must be acquired upon earth, a morality in the highest sense of the word, which will keep us from over-estimation of ourselves, and will make us less subservient to our impulses, greeds and passions, but which on the other hand will be an active, wholesome co-operation with the conditions of earth life, and not a desire to soar above such conditions.

Here we have again drawn from out of the depths of karma something connected with the depths of spiritual life. This may be of great value, but nothing from the spiritual world is of value to the development of man and of his individuality unless it be brought forth from the spiritual world for a wholesome reason, and with morality.

When considering all the discussions of our last lecture and those of to-day we shall ask: Why should not the luciferic influence, just for the very reason that it worked earlier and has been transformed into illness, and then equalised through the pain, why should it not call forth in man, draw after it, as it were, the ahrimanic influence? And why should not that which causes us pain and announces the luciferic influence of a disease, why should not the ahrimanic influence take part in this as a consequence of the luciferic influence? But how does the ahrimanic influence work? How are the temptations of Ahriman turned into causes of illness? How do they manifest in later incarnations?

Whatever is to be traced to ahrimanic influence is indirectly attributable to Lucifer; when, however, the luciferic influence has been so strong as immediately to call forth the ahrimanic influence, then this influence is the more malicious. It anchors itself not only in the transgressions of the astral body, but in those of the etheric body. It manifests itself in a consciousness lying deeper than our pain consciousness, causing damage not necessarily accompanied by pain, damage that renders useless the organ which it attacks.

Let us suppose that in one incarnation an ahrimanic influence had been exercised on a being bringing with it certain consequences. Now the man passes through the period between death and a new birth, and reappears in a new incarnation. Then it will become manifest that some organ has been attacked by Ahriman; in other words, the etheric body has entered this organ more deeply than it should—more deeply than normal. In such a case, precisely because of this defective organ, the man is even more open to temptations of error which are the work of Ahriman upon earth. By means of the organ which owes its defect to ahrimanic influence, and into which the etheric body has too deeply penetrated, the man would, if he were to experience the whole of this process, become even more enmeshed in what Ahriman can effect, namely, ‘Maya.’ Since nothing however produced by the material world as Maya can be carried into the spiritual world, the spiritual world withdraws further from him. For in that world there is to be found only truth and no illusion. The more he becomes entangled in the illusions effected by Ahriman, the more are we impelled to enter even further into the external world of the senses, into the illusions of the physical senses, much further than would be the case without the defective organ.

A counteracting effect comes into play, however, just as we have the effect of pain counteracting the luciferic influence. This counteracting effect will operate in such a way that the moment there is any danger of our being linked too closely with the physical world of the senses, and of our losing the forces which lead us up into the spiritual world, in that moment the organ is destroyed; it will either be paralysed or else rendered too weak to be effective. A process of destruction takes place. Thus if we see an organ approaching destruction, we must realise that we owe this to beneficial forces; the organ is taken from us so that we may find our way back into the spiritual world. When there is no alternative of escape, certain forces do in fact destroy our organs or weaken them so that we may not become too greatly entangled in Maya or illusion and may find our way back into the spiritual world.

Let us take the case of a person who has a disease of the liver, but such as is not accompanied by pain. We are here dealing with the effect of a preceding ahrimanic influence which has resulted in this disorder in the liver. If this organ had not been taken from him, the forces connected with a deeper penetration by the etheric body would have led him too far into Maya.

Sagas and myths have always known of the deepest wisdom, and have expressed it. Of this the liver is a very good example. It is an organ which can most easily be exposed to the danger of driving man into the physical illusory world, and at the same time the liver is the organ which binds us to the earth. This truth is connected with the fact that precisely that being who, according to the legend, gave to man the force which leads him into earthly life and which makes him very active there—namely, Prometheus—should have his liver gnawed by a vulture. A vulture gnaws at his liver, not because this would cause Prometheus any severe pain, for in that case the legend would not correspond with physiological facts! The vulture gnaws at the liver because it does not hurt. By this it is indicated that Prometheus brought about something which could entangle men more deeply in the ahrimanic illusion, if a counteracting effect could not be produced. Occult records are always in accord with the truths which we make known in Spiritual Science.

I have shown you to-day by a simple analysis of facts that it is the beneficial powers which bring pain to us to react against the influence of Lucifer. Let us compare this with the records of the Old Testament. After Lucifer's influence had made itself felt, as is symbolised by the serpent's temptation of Eve, Lucifer's adversaries had to inflict pain to hinder what Lucifer was trying to achieve in men. The powers which opposed Lucifer had then to appear and disclose that thenceforth humanity should know pain. This was done by Jehovah, or Jahveh, when He said: ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’

Usually we do not fully appreciate these sayings of the biblical records until we possess the explanations of Spiritual Science. Later we realise how profound these records are. Before we can speak about the passage: ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,’ we must study karma, for only when the time comes shall we be able to give an explanation. For this reason it is of little use to ask for an explanation of this or that passage from occult records before having attained the required state in one's occult development. It is then not good to ask what is the meaning of this or that. We must be patient and wait until we have reached the required stage. For with explanations alone we shall arrive at nothing.

Thus we see our life affected by the luciferic powers on the one side, and on the other by the powers opposed to Lucifer. Then the ahrimanic powers intrude into our lives, and we must realise that those powers which incapacitate our organs when we fall a prey to ahrimanic influences are to be counted among the beneficent powers, whose adversary is no other than Ahriman. If we set out from all that has been said here, we shall be able to get an insight into the complicated structure of human nature, and we shall arrive at the following conclusion; the luciferic powers are those that have remained behind during the ancient Moon period, and to-day during our Earth evolution they influence human life by means of forces which are really Moon forces, and which can only operate in that cosmic plan which is working in accordance with those forces which oppose Lucifer. These forces are not within our Earth evolution. Thus does Lucifer influence the plans of another being.

We can now go back to an earlier epoch. If on the one side we perceive that on the Moon, beings remained behind in their development, so as to intervene in human life upon Earth, it may seem feasible that also upon the ancient Sun there remained behind beings who played a part upon the Moon analogous to that played by the luciferic powers upon Earth at present. In the present human being we observe what may be described as a conflict—the conflict between the luciferic powers which penetrate into our astral body, and those benevolent powers which can affect us only through our Ego and through our earth achievement. For the powers opposed to Lucifer can only act upon us through our Ego. If we acquire a clear insight into, and a true valuation of ourselves, we do so only with the help of those powers which affect our Ego. For this we must make use of our Ego. Therefore we may say that while our Ego struggles with the luciferic powers, Jahveh, or Jehovah, is fighting within us against Lucifer. That which watches over the ordered cosmic design is fighting against that which rebels against this design and against its exclusiveness. Our innermost being stands in the midst of this strife, between Lucifer and other beings. We ourselves are the battlefield of this struggle, and the fact that we are the battlefield in this fight draws us into karma, but only indirectly, through the fact that this battle is fought against Lucifer. If on the contrary we turn our gaze outward, we are attracted by the influence of the ahrimanic powers. Something is enacted that comes from outside, and here Ahriman enters within us.

We know that upon the ancient Moon dwelt beings who passed that time through their human stage, as we are now passing through it in the course of Earth evolution. In the Akashic Records* and in Occult Science these beings are referred to as Angels, Angeloi and Dhyanis—the name does not matter. Within these beings took place a battle similar to the luciferic battle within our own souls—a battle provoked by those beings who had remained behind upon the Sun. This battle upon the Moon is in no way concerned with our inner Ego for on the Moon we did not yet possess our Ego. It is not concerned with anything in which our Ego takes part. Upon the Moon it took place "within the bosom of the Angels." And so these beings developed in a way which was possible only through the influence of the other beings who had stayed behind during the Sun evolution. These beings who played the same part with regard to the Angeloi that to-day the luciferic beings play with regard to ourselves were the ahrimanic beings which, during the whole of the Sun evolution, remained behind as did the luciferic beings during the Moon evolution. That is why we can only indirectly encounter these beings. It was Ahriman who, as it were, acted as tempter within the breast of the Angeloi, and he was active within them. Because of him the Angeloi had become what they then became, and they have carried over with them what they acquired through Ahriman, as well as the good they then acquired.

The good we have attained through Lucifer is the possibility of discrimination between good and evil, the free faculty of discrimination, and our free will. All this we may attain only through Lucifer. The Angels, however, have carried over into the Earth the fruits of their struggle with the ahrimanic powers, and this has fitted them for their present task as spiritual beings which surround us. Our inner Ego is not concerned with and takes no part in what these beings then experienced, nor in the effects of their experiences. We shall see, however, that we receive indirectly such experiences ourselves, because the ahrimanic influence acts upon us. Through Ahriman, therefore, these beings have attained certain results caused during their Moon existence and these results are introduced into our Earth existence. Let us try to trace in our Earth existence the effect of the ahrimanic battle of that time.

If that ahrimanic battle had not taken place on the ancient Moon, these beings could not have brought into our Earth existence that which once formed part of the ancient Moon existence. For that would have ceased to exist after the ancient Moon had perished. Through the ahrimanic influence, the Angels became entangled in the Moon existence, just as we, through the luciferic influence, become entangled in Earth existence. They received in their innermost nature something of the Moon element and transported it into our Earth existence. Because of this they are in a position to raise up the forces which will prevent our Earth from succumbing entirely to the luciferic influence. In its totality our Earth would have succumbed to Lucifer's influence if the results of the Angels' battle against Ahriman upon the Moon had not been brought into our Earth existence.

What then are the proceedings in the existence of the Earth which we describe as the normal? When our present solar system organised itself in accordance with the goal of our Earth, that which we see as the regular movements of the Earth and of the planets began, and that brought it about that the seasons of the year succeed each other in regular succession, that we have sunshine and rain, that our fruits ripen in the fields, and so on. Those are conditions which repeat themselves over and over again according to the rhythm of the Cosmos which shaped itself for the present existence after the Moon existence descended into the twilight. But within the Earth existence works Lucifer; and we shall see that he works a good deal more than merely in the domain into which we axe able to follow him in man himself, which he nevertheless has made his most important domain. Even if Lucifer were to be found only in the Earth existence, man would nevertheless, through all the conditions which are determined by the regular course of the planets round the Sun, through the changes of summer and winter, rain and sunshine and so on, have fallen into what we may call luciferic temptation. If man were to receive all that could come to him from a well-ordered Cosmos, and everything which the regular rhythmic movements of the solar system could produce, if only those laws prevailed which are adapted to our present Cosmos, man would still fall under the luciferic influence, and would prefer his comfortable life to a life of striving after his cosmic welfare, preferring the regular course to that which he ought to achieve for himself.

Therefore opposing forces had to be created. Forces were necessary which would intervene in the normal cosmic phenomena and bring about events which, on the old Moon, were highly beneficial and normal, but which, when they work on the Earth existence to-day, are abnormal and endanger its regular course. These influences appear in such a way that they correct that which would occur if the rhythm alone existed, giving the tendency to comfortable living, to comfort, to ease and luxury; and we see such forces, for instance, manifesting themselves in violent hailstorms. So when that which otherwise would be produced by the regular forces of the Earth is destroyed, a correction is in these cases brought about which on the whole works beneficially—even although man cannot at first see it—because there is a higher reason at work than can be perceived by man. When the hail drives down into the fields, we may then say: Upon the old Moon these forces which work in the hail were the regular ones, just as to-day are those which bring blessings in the rain and the sunshine; but they rush in, in order to correct that which otherwise would be produced by the luciferic influence. And when the regular course is again re-established, they rush in again to effect further correction. Everything that leads to further progressive evolution belongs to the forces of the earth itself. When the volcano throws out its lava, forces are working in it which are retarded forces brought over from the old Moon in order that they should bring about the correction in the Earth life. We shall find that much that comes from outside finds its justification in the general march of evolution. We shall see later how this is connected with the human Ego-consciousness.

But one point on which we must be clear is that these matters represent only one side of human existence, of Earth existence, and of the cosmic existence in general. If on the one hand we see in the destruction of an organ the beneficent activity of spiritual powers, and if we have found to-day that the whole course of Earth evolution must be rectified by forces springing from the ancient Moon existence, we must now ask how it is that we as Earth men on the other hand must try to rectify the harmful influences of the ancient Moon forces. We already feel that as Earth men we have not the right to wish for volcanic eruptions and earth—quakes, nor may we ourselves destroy organs in order to assist the beneficent effect of the ancient Moon forces. But we can also admit, and justifiably, that should an epidemic break out, it will lead man to seek for the balancing of some imperfection within himself, and we may surmise that man is driven into certain conditions in order to suffer some injury, the conquest of which will draw him nearer to perfection.

What then of hygienic and sanitary measures? Might not someone say: "If epidemics may prove beneficial, is it then not wrong to take measures conducive to health and preventive of disease?" One might arrive at the conclusion that nothing should be done to obviate natural catastrophes and that this conclusion is entirely supported by our lectures of yesterday and today.

We shall see that this is not the case, yet again only on certain conditions. For only now are we rightly prepared to understand in our next discussion how on the one hand beneficial forces may cause injury to an organ, so that we may escape the effect of Maya, and yet, on the other hand, to become conscious of the effect we produce by the use of sanitary and hygienic measures against disease.

We shall see that we have here arrived at a case which so often arises where there is an apparent contradiction, and where we are impelled by the entire force of this contradiction. In such a case we are nearer to the point at which the ahrimanic powers may exert the greatest influence upon us. At no time is the danger of illusion greater than when we have reached such a deadlock. For we now say that the forces which render an organ useless are beneficent forces because they work in opposition to Ahriman; therefore those who take steps against disease are working against humanity, for hygienic measures would limit this beneficial reaction.

We have reached a deadlock, and it is well that we have been led into this contradiction so that we may reflect upon the fact that such are possible, and may even constitute good discipline for our mind. For when we have seen how we can draw ourselves by our own initiative out of this seeming contradiction, then we shall have arrived at a result by which we may fortify ourselves against the illusions of Ahriman.

This lecture is the second of fifteen lectures in the series entitled, The Polarity of Continuity and Change in Human Life. Another name for this lecture is, The Bridge between the Ideal and the Real, Part 2.

A full insight into those relationships which we are now contacting is not possible unless one looks more closely into the nature of man in the period between going to sleep and waking up; that is, the sleeping condition. Of course, diagrammatically, the sleeping condition is well-known to you. That which we call the astral body and Ego separate from the physical and etheric bodies, But if we wish to go more deeply into the nature of sleep; we must remember that it is just in the sleeping condition that a man experiences the reality of what we discussed in our last lecture, when we said that St Augustine sought in his own inner experience to grasp the real true certainty about the world, I told you in yesterday's lecture that in his waking condition, condition, man does not grasp the full reality of his inner being. We must be quite clear that what is described as the astral body and the ego, do not really come to the consciousness of man by day; in his waking condition there only comes to his consciousness a copy, a mirror-picture of his ego and astral body. If man were conscious in the sleeping condition, that is from going to sleep until waking up, or, let us say, if he became conscious through those exercises which you can find described in my various writings—(which are all at your disposal)—, if man could thus become conscious through his sleeping condition, he would experience not a mirror-image, as by day, but the true form of his Ego and Astral body. But we must quite clearly realise that the true form of the Astral body and Ego appear in such a way to the soul of man when he develops Imaginative Consciousness, that in the inner experiences during the sleep condition, he experience in his Ego end Astral body what we cull the third Hierarchy, the Hierarchy of the Angels, Archangels and Archai.

Although throughout the whole of man's working life he stands in intimate connection with what we must designate as the Angels, Archangels and Archai, he does not experience this consciously during the waking condition; and that constitutes the deception in man's waking condition. He remains aware only of an abstract Ego of those shadowy ideas and concepts which fill man's soul, or perhaps of half-dreamy feelings and willings. This is the essential—that throughout the waking condition man does not progress beyond experiencing this shadowy side of his Ego and Astral body; and that he cannot become conscious that all the time there is working into his Ego those Beings of the third Hierarchy to which I have just referred. But if he were really to wake up in his sleep, if I may use that expression, he would not have external nature around him, but would immediately feel in himself the Beings of the Angels, Archangels and the Time-Spirits.

Now because those Beings work in us, my dear friends we have in the constitution of our soul something which we would not have otherwise have had. For instance, if the Hierarchy of the Angels did not work into our and Astral body, we would never feel ourselves to be individuals. Therefore, just because the Hierarchy of the Angels work into our Spiritual, psychic nature, we can feel ourselves to be free persons.

Because the Hierarchy of the Archangels work into us, we can feel ourselves as members of the whole of humanity. We might also say, that because these Arch-Angelic Beings shine into our psychic, Spiritual nature, inspiring it, therefore we really feel ourselves as men.

And because the Beings of the Archai, the Spirits of Time, pulsate in our nature, filling it with their Intuition, therefore we feel ourselves as earthly human beings—that means members not only of the present humanity, but of the whole of earthly humanity, from the very start of earthly evolution to the very end of Earth-life. In that way we can feel ourselves as members of the entire earthly humanity. Of course, we only feel it dimly, because we can only dimly sense the influence of these Time-Spirits within us.

We cannot say that we behold ourselves as personalities; that we can only do when we attain the Imaginative Consciousness. There remains a kind of reflection of this Imaginative Consciousness when we so experience our thinking that, through the free life of thought we feel ourselves as individual beings. Let us once more make quite clear how it is that we feel ourselves as individuals. We feel ourselves as personalities because we can, of our own free will add one thought to another. You would at once cease to feel yourselves as personal beings if you were compelled to add one thought to another just as in the world of external nature one phenomenon is linked on to another. This experience of inner freedom for the developing of a thought, gives us the certainty of feeling ourselves as personalities. This feeling of inner freedom is what comes clearest of all to man's consciousness by day; and it comes to man by day when he is awake, because, from the moment of sleeping until waking he is permeated by his Angel, that Angelic Being belonging to his own Ego.

In the feeling oneself as a human being as a member of all humanity, we are generally speaking, already far more apathetic, we feel ourselves far less strongly and intensely as members of the whole of mankind; and that is because the Arch-Angels, who bring this about, stand further away from us than do our Angels; and that which inserts itself as Personality into the whole human stream of evolution, (and which comes from the Archai) that remains for most human beings something really quite shadowy. On the basis of Anthroposophy we seek to evoke this very feeling, of belonging to the entire earthly humanity, for it becomes clear to us that in the 5th Post Atlantean epoch man experiences things in a certain way; in the 4th in a different way; in the 3rd in a still different way. One thus sees how the mood of soul has altered in the various epochs of time, alterations brought about by the various Beings of the 3rd Hierarchy, the Archai, the Spirits of Time. It is of this that we seek to create a consciousness on the basis of Spiritual Science. This consciousness can alone give man the possibility of feeling himself an historical Being, of feeling conscious: “I am now living as a Personality, in the 20th Century.” The fact does not enter the consciousness of most human beings, that their personality can only be real as Personality, because it has been placed in a definite point of time. How this permeation of the human soul and spirit-being by the Beings of the third Hierarchy, is something of which men would become aware, if he were intensely enough to attain Imaginative Cognition.

In the ordinary path of human evolution, as you know, Imaginative Cognition is not present. From the moment of going to sleep until waking up, the reality of man's ego and astral body is dumped down; and by day, when man is awake, he loses his connection with the Beings of the third Hierarchy. That comes from the fact that especially in our present cycle of time, man, when he is awoke, is given over to an illusion. As we have seen, when he is asleep, man is subject to the deception that his so and Astral body are not then active; but they are not inactive. They are then in living interchange with the Beings of the third Hierarchy. In the waking condition, the state of affairs at the present cycle of tine is, that our physical and etheric bodies, “unjustly” illegally, as we night say, absorb our Spiritual, Psychic nature. They permeate themselves with our spirit and soul. Normally this should not be the case. It should be normal for a man to-day when awake, to feel himself an Ego and Astral body, and to feel his etheric and physical bodies as a kind of shell into which he crawls, to feel then as something which he carries consciously about with him. But man does not feel that today? he feels as if the physical and etheric bodies were himself. But this they are not. We are that Spiritual, psychic being which makes use of the physical and etheric bodies as an instrument; but we cannot raise ourselves above the deception which belongs to the working of our epoch of time. We are, us it were, compelled to identify ourselves with that which in the normal consciousness should be like a hammer which one takes in ones hand and gives blows with it; so should we regard our physical and etheric bodies. But in this epoch we have to identify ourselves with them,—to give ourselves over to the deception that we are these, that it is we ourselves who thus go in a fleshly way through space. But they are not ourselves. That is only because the consciousness of our ego is absorbed unjustly illegally, by the physical and etheric bodies. That simply rests in the fact that in the present cycle of time the Ahrimanic powers are stronger than they should be in the normal evolution of mankind.

They draw down the etheric and astral bodies into the physical and etheric bodies, so to speak, and they bring about in man the deception that the head which he carries is himself, that his hands and his whole body is himself. Wrongfully the physical body absorbs that consciousness, so that it appears as if the physical body brought about our personality. Anyone who thinks that his physical body brings about his personality is subject to the same deception as a person would be, who standing before a mirror, believes it produces him, because it radiates his reflection. To say that this fleshly form we carry round with us is ourselves, is no cleverer than to hold your hand before a mirror and believe that the mirror is producing your hand. Yet the whole of modern Science is subject to that deception, All modern Science believes that what we as individual persons experiences inwardly, is somehow produced by the physical and etheric bodies; whereas all the physical and etheric bodies do, is to radiate back our astral body and ego, forming the mirror-image which, while we are awake, we recognise to be our ego and our thoughts, in other words, our astral body.

That is the Fundamental Truth which we mast realise. With reference to this Fundamental Truth, modern humanity, by reason of the forces working through our present epoch of time, give themselves over to a deception of consciousness which consists, as I have just told you, in the delusion that all that we think, or experience as our thoughts or our feelings, is produced by our body. Mankind is subject naturally to this delusion to-day. With his present consciousness he cannot transcend that deception, just as the Sun when low on the horizon looks bigger than when high up in the heavens. One knows it is a delusion, yet it does seem to be so. At this point of time man help regarding his flash and blood as himself. That is a delusion of consciousness, my dear friends; but man was not always subject to this deception of consciousness; it is essentially a characteristic quality of the humanity of post-Christian tines, after the Mystery of Golgotha. Before the Mystery of Golgotha this delusion did not exist. Before the Mystery of Golgotha there existed another kind of deception, Before Golgotha man did not believe that his consciousness was united with his physical body. Of course, history tells nothing of this, but it is so. It would have been sheer nonsense for a man of the second or third millennium of the pre-Christian era to suppose that his soul was produced by his physical body; in olden times no man felt himself bound to his physical body as the modern man does. In those pre-Christian times man really had a living consciousness of the Beings of the third Hierarchy, and because he knew:—“My soul is not identical with my body,” he also knew that his soul was not bound up with the bone and muscles of his body, but that it was bound up with the Beings of the third Hierarchy,

He was subject to a different delusion, not in his consciousness but in his life. He believed that his soul was bound up with external nature, together with the Beings of the third Hierarchy, just as modern man believes his soul to be bound up with his physical body. Man to-day gives himself over to a delusion in consciousness, he believes that his soul is united with his body. The reason he cannot see the Beings of the Angels, Archangels and Archai, is because his physical body darkens them for him. The man of old, although he had a consciousness that these Beings were there and that his soul was bound up with them, could not see directly but only dimly into the external, sensible nature. A modern man, in the delusion of his consciousness, believes that his soul is bound up with his body; the man of old believed that the Beings of the third Hierarchy were bound up with the external nature which he perceived with his senses. At that time he confused the Divine Beings of the third Hierarchy with the phenomena of nature, and expressed this in his interpretation of natural phenomena. Man to-day places his soul in his flesh and blood, the man of old placed the Beings of the third Hierarchy in external nature. He had no Natural Science such as we have to-day, but he considered the phenomena of nature as brought about by this or the other demon, more or less Divine Spiritual Beings, concerning whom he gave himself to a life of deception, in that he thought of these Spiritual Beings as operative in the phenomena of Nature. It is an important fact, that this change took place in the development of man in pre-Christian times; he gives himself over to a characteristic delusion of life, and after the Mystery of Golgotha to a delusion in his consciousness. The reality, the effective working of Christ Jesus (and of this we shall speak further in the next lecture) should consist in this—of elevating, of raising that delusion in man's consciousness, elevating it, bringing it home to him that he is deceived; and through the “Christus in mir.” “Christ in me,” man should be brought to feel that what lives as astral body and ego, lives in free Spirituality, and is not bound up with his flesh and blood. Of course, this can only be seen on the path of Spiritual Science, but it can already be felt in the words of St Paul: “Nicht ich, aber das Christus in mich,” “Not I, Christ in me.”

From what I have told you, you can already, my dear friends see that there are reasons why man should experience this Duality up to a certain point; experiencing on the one hand the ordering of Nature which consists contains no ideals, which of necessity connects one event with another, an ordering in which merely cause and effect, effect and cause are incorporated, so that one can never think that through what goes on in Nature, any ideal, moral or otherwise, can be realised. On the other hand, man is conscious that he could not develop an existence worthy of man unless he had ideals, unless he could cling to something else than a mere external Ordering of Nature. But with the consciousness accessible to him to-day, he cannot regard his ideals as operative, as effective, in the same way as, let us say, electricity or magnetism or the force of heat,—so, that the ideals are able to enter into Nature, into the ordering of natural phenomena. For that reason the Ordering of Nature and his own ideals appear to him side by side, but he cannot build a bridge from one to the other. He cannot build that bridge my dear friends, because he cannot look into the Cosmos both by day and by night, where the bridge has to be built. If only man could have a normal consciousness by day—that means an Ahriman-free consciousness—so that he could feel: “I as an individual person, am not bound to my physical or etheric bodies any more than when I look into a mirror which reflects me, I am bound to the image before me.” If man could have this consciousness about his ego and astral body, he would regard the ego and astral bodies as reality and not as mere reflected images, and then he could also recognise his ideals as real forces, just as real as electricity and magnetism, only they are not working at the present time, they are acquiring reality in the present incarnation for the next; from this earthly existence they pass over into the next earthly existence.

If man in the waking condition could perceive that his ego and astral body are bound up with the Beings of the third Hierarchy, as I have pointed out,—in other words,—if man could but fully see himself, and not merely feel himself but realise himself as a free personality not bound up with flesh and blood, he would no longer believe that the external nature outside him as presented to his sense-organs is a strong enough reality to oppose the force of his Ideals, He would know that, that which is the Ordering of Nature to-day, will crumble away with all those substances; that there is no such thing as the conservation of matter, but that which in Nature destroys itself, and when that which to-day is Nature no longer exists, then another external sense-reality will appear in its place, and that which to-day constitutes our ideals will become Nature in the next epoch. So we can say, to-day we experience an Ordering of Nature, (see diagram red) we experience an Ordering of our Ideals (yellow). The physicist believes that this Nature is maintained by a conservation of force and a conservation of matter, that the Ordering of Nature persists—, that the same atoms, the same forces play into all future.

[Missing Diagram]

The physicist, if he is sincere, can say none other than this:—“The ideal Ordering was a dream, it must sink and vanish like dreams. At the end of the earth our dream-ideal will no longer be there, it will have been buried.”

Spiritual Science shows that this is a delusion, untrue. We have the Ordering of Nature, (red) but in reality there is no conservation of force or of matter, for that which is the Ordering of matter ceases at a certain definite point of time; and that which to-day constitutes our ideal Order, forms the continuation of the Ordering of Nature.

[A gap in the page ... another missing diagram?]

All that we see round us with our eyes, or that we hear with our ears, all that we perceive around us with all our senses, will, when the earth reaches the Venus-condition, be non-existent; but out of that nothingness the possibility will be given for the Ideals of modern humanity to become the external Ordering of Nature. No conception of the world, my dear friends, which fails to recognise the destruction of what is sensible, can ever have a hope that the Ideal has the power to realise itself, for if what is sensible were eternal, if the conservation of force and matter did exist, them our ideal world would simply be a dream. It is of immense significance that man should at the present time, have this illumination:—that the Ideals of the present constitute the Nature of the future. It is a great delusion to believe that the atoms and forces around us are the eternal. They are not the eternal; they are the temporal. That indeed is the fate of Spiritual Science, it has to contradict and refute a perception held by the present-day universal perception and view of science as an absolute certainty, and which is yet nothing but an Ahrimanic deception.

Now let us go back again to something else, to which I have drawn your attention. Before the Mystery of Golgotha what I have characterised to you as the delusion of man, can be described as a delusion of life; after the Mystery of Golgotha it was a delusion of consciousness. When one knows this, one can understand many things in the development of man. Above all one understands why, before the Mystery of Golgotha, those human beings who had atavistic clairvoyance, could not see things in their true form, but saw the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies as demons. That is why those ancient Mythologies consist essentially in a demonology. The Gods of the ancient Mythologies were seen as Demons, as for the most part they were. And that rests on the fact that a delusion of life was present then. Men had to think of a false Ordering of Nature as a Divine Ordering, just as they have to think to-day of a false Ordering of the body as ordained for mankind.

Then came the Mystery of Golgotha; and man had to take the soul-mood which resulted from the Mystery of Golgotha. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, man in his waking condition stood in a more direct relationship to the Beings of the third Hierarchy than to-day. He saw them. And through their delusion of life they “fantasised” these Beings into Zeus, Apollo, and so on. These are the Beings of the third Hierarchy, but they were poetically altered, as seen under the influence of that delusion of life, as we to-day see everything which refers to man under the influence of our delusion of consciousness.

In spite of all that however, a Divine Spiritual order was spread into humanity. Just think how close man of those ancient epochs felt his human world to be to the Divine Ordering of the Cosmos! There was the human Hierarchy, and then came the Divine Hierarchy. Man did not feel so cut off as to-day, for he continued the world straight up to the Gods! How close the Greek felt his world of the Gods to the world of Man.

Then came the Mystery of Golgotha, and that was then no longer the case! Not through the Mystery of Golgotha, for that was to give compensation for what has been lost. But time itself brought into human evolution that man was to be cut off from this conscious connection with the Divine-Spiritual world of the third Hierarchy; only a memory, an historical memory remained. Then came the time of the first epoch after the Mystery of Golgotha. Men certainly had to think somewhat differently to what they did before the Mystery of Golgotha; but something of that immediate past still worked in them, when men knew that the Divine Spiritual Beings work into the earthly events and arrange and ordain what man does on the Earth. Therefore man of old was convinced that when he founded a State, (if one wishes to use the word “State,” it is incorrect, but we are accustomed to speak like this to-day)—he knew that those social structures were founded under the influence of the third Hierarchy. Man felt that his arrangements on Earth were Divine arrangements. You need merely study Egyptian history, even without clairvoyance to see how fully convinced the Egyptians were that what man does here in his social life was all arranged by the Beings of the third Hierarchy. That was so before the Mystery of Golgotha. After the Mystery of Golgotha the Church established a kind of grade in the clerical dignitaries. Such gradations were arranged; but behind the arrangement of those degrees there was a quite different thought. This can be seen quite clearly in the early Church writers. In Dionysius the Areopagite, you can see it clearly for yourself. There was to be such an arrangement in the administration of the Church that it should be an image of the Divine Ordering! and the relation of the Deacon to the Archdeacon was to be an image of the relation of the Angel to the Archangel, Again the relation of Archdeacon to the Bishop was a copy of the relationship of the Archangel to the Archai. Thus it was endeavoured to make the social structure of the Church a sort of copy of that Theocracy! Above in the Spiritual world there is a sequence of Hierarchies, and down below, in the physical world, there should also stand as a copy of the Spiritual Hierarchies, a sequence in the clerical dignitaries. In the first epoch after the Mystery of Golgotha, that was not conceived juridistically, but theocratically. It was a copy. The clerical Hierarchy was conceived as a copy of the Third Hierarchy, Thus in the first Christian Centuries it was endeavoured to establish such organisations as should cause the position of man on Earth to each other to be a copy of the Hierarchies in the Spiritual world.

Then gradually men lost the consciousness that they still had in their memories. The historic memory of the old theocracy was lost, in which man still knew that the earthly arrangements were a consequence of a copy of the Deeds of the Gods. The consciousness of this was lost, and in the place of the consciousness of the living world of Divine Beings, which were seen by men in olden times, and of which they still knew, there come abstract concepts. And so came the centuries where, in place of the individual Gods,—the Christians called them Angels—they put abstract ideas, a metaphysic of abstract concepts. The Divine Ordering, which should have its copy in the human ordering became theocratic; the application of mere ideas to man's social arrangements produced something which was simply intended to bring some kind of order into human intercourse. As formerly it was thought to create an image of the Divine Cosmos in the human social structure, so in the metaphysical age which followed, it was simply striven to maintain some order by punishing evil and not punishing the good, perhaps even rewarding it,—thus creating an ordering in which the social order could exist. And so, as in the place of living Gods there now appeared abstract, metaphysical concepts, a human Ordering appeared which in a sense so stamped itself on man, that one was preferred before another, not because that was a copy so that order should be maintained on earth; one came to command and the other to obey. Abstractions appeared in the place of the living permeation of the social Ordering.

Essentially the epoch of real metaphysic prevailed throughout the middle ages. The Roman consciousness essentially provided the special element for this metaphysical Ordering, which spread everywhere; one finds memories of this in the very words. For instance the word “Prince” (Fürst), is a memory of the Theocratic Ordering. The Prince, (Fürst), was the first, because some one had to be first, just as in the Divine Hierarchies also, one had to be first. A memory of the metaphysical order of administration is given us in the word Count, “Graf,” which is connected with “grafo;”—to write. In the metaphysical Ordering, everything is registered! the social order was kept by writing documents, by making compacts.

And then came the modern age. This newer age brought disbelief in the abstract concepts, in metaphysics. Men could now only believe in the external sense-phenomena, even in human life. Those traditions which still existed in ancient times of a living consciousness which somehow worked thus into the social structure, was lost. First the Gods, later the metaphysical concepts; these things could no longer exist in modern times; but they must again be won on those paths indicated by Spiritual Science. All consciousness of the Spiritual basis, of a Spiritual structure, was radically obliterated by Industrialism. Therefore Auguste Comte and his teacher Saint-Simon, felt themselves so specially united with the epoch of Industrialism, for they allowed positivistic Science alone to have any value.—That means, only that which can be related to the external sensible natural ordering, permeated by causal necessity.

Therewith, my dear friends, the concept of truth itself has undergone a complete transformation. People to-day have not the right feeling for these things, they do not as yet realise aright the fact, that the very concept of Truth has undergone a history. These modern human beings who knew themselves to be under a theocratic Ordering, had no such idea of Truth as human beings get to-day under the authority of Natural Science. It is extraordinarily difficult to speak of these things. To-day a man may think that, with reference to the world around him, truth consists in the coinciding of an idea with external reality. He gets that thought from Natural Science. Such a concept of Truth simply did not exist in the first Christian Centuries. There was another idea of Truth then, which was essentially connected with the theocratic social order. The concept of truth which lives in all souls to-day really did not exist then. This extraordinary fact, my dear friends, is not realised now. It is more easy to recognise the concept of Truth which lived then, if one approaches the idea of Divine Judgment. Suppose two people are fighting a duel, (I will not touch upon the question of duels, I am simply giving an instance), it cannot be determined from the very start by some calculation that A, will win and B will not,—if that were so the duel would hardly occur; the truth only emerges in the course of the conflict. We ourselves still have this idea of truth at the present day, in the case of war. We should not wage war if we knew from the start, as in an experiment in a chemical laboratory, how the war was going to end. In this the old concept of truth is rooted even to-day, that truth itself can only he revealed in the course of what actually happens, that one can do nothing but watch how the Divine Judgment will fall. That is the old concept of Truth.

Those who think as Auguste Comte or as the Socialists to-day, have completely broken with this idea of Truth. They only recognise a truth as such, where the event in its course can be foreseen. The cry of Auguste Comte: “Know in order to foresee,” is the radical transformation of the concept of Truth in our modern age. But, my dear friends, with the concept which prevails to-day, one can only grasp external nature. Concerning this point, humanity to-day gives way to a colossal delusion. Men believe, for instance, that they can grasp historical life through this idea of Truth, which Auguste Comte and Saint-Simon taught. But it cannot be done, even with the old concept of Truth as divine Judgment, for that stood under the influence of the Delusion of Life. Our modern concept of Truth stands under the influence of our Delusion in Consciousness. There must come the concept of Truth of Anthroposophy; a concept gained in a far more widely embracing way than that in which St Augustine got his concept of Truth; for as I have explained to you, that too was subject to delusion.

This is connected with many things: and a great deal depends on it. It is not enough to speak abstractly on the evolution of the idea of Truth, one must in general, in all its details, know how the Concept of Truth can lead the soul of man along many different paths according to the nature of his idea of Truth. It is an anachronism to speak to-day in the same sense of Nationalism, as was possible in the pre-Christian age; because in the pre-Christian age it was not only a human view—that a Divine Ordering then permeated the human Ordering, it was actually the case. Now, the Divine Ordering no longer permeates it. Hence, wherever to-day man hangs his consciousness on the Ordering of Nature, on that which is merely produced by a sequence of births, on the Principle of nationality, for instance, there he is involved in an anachronism. It is laid on man to-day to find quite other structures of social order than those worked from outside. The man of old could look to his nationality, because he saw it determined by the divine Ordering. But man cannot do this to-day in the same sense without falling into an anachronism, and to-day to honour the Nation itself as something special, is an anachronism, he must consider other social structures. To regard a Nation as something special, would bring about the modern Ahrimanic delusion. “Nations” are relics of the pre-Christian Age, and modern humanity must rise above them through that development which I have indicated. We must see how concretely human beings strive after a special development of the concept of Truth. That is important, even if it is inconvenient to-day, my dear friends. But if we are unprejudiced in trying to grasp reality, we must assimilate many an uncomfortable truth.

You see, man now goes right against what Anthroposophy wills. That world-view which found its special advocate in Auguste Comte, limits itself merely to an external Ordering of Nature. We must press forward again to a Spiritual world, and a bridge must be found between Idealism and Realism. That is what I wont to emphasise in these lectures. But this cannot be done simply by speaking of these things, but by grasping the concrete impulses working in the world. We must look certain facts full in the face, without prejudice. Now there are very curious facts connected with the things we are now considering. Yesterday I spoke of Auguste Comte and Saint-Simon. Both consider positivistic Science as the only thing valid, positivistic Science which simply relates to the sense-life, to a what is in the causal Ordering of Nature. Nevertheless the extraordinary fact is before us, that Auguste Comte turned away from his teacher and guide, Saint-Simon, because gradually Saint-Simon had become too mystical; and the disciples of Auguste Comte gradually turned from him because he himself became altogether mystical in his old age. We are faced with this extraordinary fact,—that Saint-Simon as well as Auguste Comte, on the one side stand directly on the basis of the most Ahrimanic Science, consciously in the epoch of Industrialism, they stand on the soil of this Ahrimanic Science; and yet they become mystics! Extraordinary! That really is an extraordinary fact.

One has to ask the “why” of such a fact, but this can only be explained if without prejudice, one admits that on the other hand man is living towards Spirituality. Unconsciously human beings are striving towards Spirituality. Even such beings as Auguste Comte and Saint-Simon, who only want to grasp external nature, are also striving after Spirituality.

But now in the modern life of man something very peculiar is to be seen. We will take another fact which, without any national Chauvinism (which would not be seemly) we will try to keep in mind. In the views which result as the flower of modern nations, one can find characterised in a certain way what lies under the surface; and, starting from this, I should like to point to another very dominant English philosopher, Bentham, who lived from 1748–1832. Bentham can be taken as characteristic of the thinking of his people, and with a certain justice one must describe the views of Bentham as Utilitarianism even in a deeper sense. A certain basic sentence lies at the bottom of the ideal World-Ordering according to Bentham, This principle is usually called the “maximum of human happiness.” Human happiness consists in this dogma, which Bentham put forward: “The good (that means what should be striven for as an ideal) consists in the greatest happiness of the greatest number of human beings on the Earth.” Let us get that sentence clearly in mind:—“The good consists in the greatest happiness of the greatest number of human beings on the Earth.” That sentence, as a matter of fact, of the maximum of happiness on the Earth, is the root-nerve of the Utilitarian philosophy.

Now one must bear in mind that this sentence was regarded, not by Bentham himself nor by his disciples, but by those who stand on a Spiritual basis, as absolutely Ahrimanic. The occultists of his own Country say: Bentham put forward this purely devilish sentence—they call it devilish because, so say these occultists, if it were correct that good consists in the greatest happiness of the greatest number, evil must then consist in the greatest happiness of the least number.

I am not now saying anything which I myself wish to bring before you as a definition or explanation, but simply quoting what has been said. Thus, on the one hand the English philosophy of Bentham, “The maximum of happiness;” on the other hand that English Spiritualism (Spiritualismus) which says, “Bentham's sentence is purely of the devil, because in that case evil would be the greatest happiness of the least number, and from this there would result that evil and happiness could exist side by side,” to which the Spiritualists would not under any condition agree.

I am only bringing before you here a fact of Spiritual life, significant in the most eminent degree, significant as regards the enormous opposition to be found in a certain sphere of the Earth between Spiritualism and external World-view.

And now again to-day, because I want you to realise that we shall solve these oppositions in tomorrows conditions, I want to put once more at the end, an apercus; you can put three things together:—Goetheism, Comteism, and Benthamism. These three things stand in a certain sense, in a threefold way to the Spiritual striving of man towards the future. The German Goetheism is so fashioned that out of it Spiritualism (Spiritualismus) can result. The French Comteism is so fashioned that Spiritualism can develop alongside it, for in Augusts Comte and Saint-Simon we find an extraordinary mysticism appearing side by side with their positive philosophy. With the English Utilitarianism, as in Bentham, nothing else is possible than the sharpest opposition from the side of Spiritualism against the national philosophy. That is something which lies in the soil of evolution itself. The French nature must so develop that Idealism, Mysticism and Positivism must develop side by side. Whereas in England within the British nature, things must develop more and more so, that, from the side of their Spiritualists, their own “racial nature” must be combated in the sharpest way possible. (That means, of course, what is put forward as the philosophical blossoms of the nation)

With Auguste Comte—I am not giving you theories but simply individual facts—there was such a distinct inclination to Mysticism existing, that, in spite of his application to Positivism and rejection of his teacher Saint-Simon, at the end of his life he very clearly assumes a Trinity. Auguste Comte honours three in his trinity:

1st. The great Fetish.
2nd. The great Medium.
3rd. The great Being.

And he says: the great Fetish is the Mother-bosom of humanity in space. Space itself is the great Medium out of which humanity comes. The great Being, the last person in his trinity, is humanity itself in the abstract, spread out over the Earth. Auguste Comte recognises this Trinity,—which is an extraordinary quickening of Positivism with Mysticism.

Now of this we shall speak further tomorrow.

We were able to close our lecture on the Mission of Anger (illustrated in Prometheus Bound) with the saying of Heraclitus: “Never will you find the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search for them; so all-embracing is the soul's being.” We came to know this depth in the working and interplay of the powers of the soul; and the truth of the saying came home to us especially when we turned our attention to the most deeply inward part of man's being. Man is most spiritual in his Ego, and that was our starting-point.

The Ego complements those other elements of man's being which he has in common with minerals, plants and animals. He has his physical body in common with minerals, plants and animals; his etheric body in common with animals and plants; his astral body in common with animals. Through his Ego he first becomes man in the true sense and is able to progress from stage to stage. It is the Ego that works upon the other members of his being; it cleanses and purifies the instincts, inclinations, desires and passions of the astral body, and will lead the etheric and physical bodies on to ever-higher stages. But if we look at the Ego, we find that this high member of man's being is imprisoned, as it were, between two extremes.

Through his Ego, man is intended to become increasingly a being who has a firm centre in himself. His thoughts, feelings and will-impulses should spring from this centre. The more he has a firm and well-endowed centre in himself, the more will he have to give to the world; the stronger and richer will be his activities and everything that goes out from him. If he is unable to find this central point in himself, he will be in danger of losing himself through a misconceived activity of his Ego. He would lose himself in the world and go ineffectually through life. Or he may lapse into the other extreme. Just as he may lose himself if he fails to strengthen and enrich his Ego, so, if he thinks of nothing but developing his Ego, he may fall into the other extreme of selfish isolation from all human community. Here, on this other side, we find egoism, with its hardening and secluding influence, which can divert the Ego from its proper path. The Ego is confined within these two extremes.

In considering the human soul, we called three of its members the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul. We also came to recognise—surprisingly, perhaps, for many people—that anger acts as a kind of educator of the Sentient Soul. A one-sided view of the lecture on the mission of anger could give scope for many objections. But if we go into the underlying significance of this view of anger, we shall find in it an answer to many important riddles of life.

In what sense is anger an educator of the soul—especially the Sentient Soul—and a forerunner of love? Is it not true that anger tends to make a man lose control of himself and engage in wild, immoral and loveless behaviour? If we are thinking only of wild, unjustified outbursts of anger, we shall get a false idea of what the mission of anger is. It is not through unjustified outbreaks of anger that anger educates the soul, but through its inward action on the soul.

Let us again imagine two teachers faced with children who have done something wrong. One teacher will burst into anger and hastily impose a penalty. The other teacher, though unable to break out into anger, is also incapable of acting rightly, with perfect tranquility, out of his Ego, in the sense described yesterday. How will the behaviour of two such teachers differ? An outburst of anger by one of them involves more than the penalty imposed on the child. Anger agitates the soul and works upon it in such a way as to destroy selfishness. Anger acts like a poison on selfishness, and we find that in time it gradually transforms the powers of the soul and makes it capable of love. On the other hand, if a teacher has not yet attained inner tranquility and yet inflicts a coldly calculated penalty, he will—since anger will not work in him as a counteracting poison—become increasingly a cold egoist.

Anger works inwardly and can be regarded as a regulator for unjustified outbursts of selfishness. Anger must be there or it could not be fought against. In overcoming anger the soul continually improves itself. If a man insists on getting something done that he considers right and loses his temper over it, his anger will dampen the egoistic forces in his soul; it reduces their effective power. Just because anger is overcome and a man frees himself from it and rises above it, his selflessness will be enhanced and the selflessness of his Ego continually strengthened. The scene of this interplay between anger and the Ego is the Sentient Soul. A different interplay between the soul and other experiences takes its course in the Intellectual Soul.

Although the soul has attributes which it must overcome in order to rise above them, it must also develop inwardly certain forces which it should love and cherish, however spontaneously they may arise. They are forces to which the soul may initially yield, so that, when it finally asserts itself, it is not weakened, but strengthened, by the experience. If a man were incapable of anger when called upon to assert himself in action, he would be the weaker for it.

It is just when a man lovingly immerses himself in his own soul that his soul is strengthened and an ascent to higher stages of the Ego comes within reach. The outstanding element that the soul may love within itself, leading not to egoism but to selflessness, is truth. Truth educates the Intellectual Soul. While anger is an attribute of the soul that must be overcome if a man is to rise to higher stages, truth should be loved and valued from the start. An inward cultivation of truth is essential for the progress of the soul.

How is it that devotion to truth leads man upwards from stage to stage? The opposites of truth are falsehood and error. We shall see how man progresses in so far as he overcomes falsehood and error and pursues truth as his great ideal.

A higher truth must be the aim of man's endeavour, while he treats anger as an enemy to be increasingly abolished. He must love truth and feel himself most intimately united with it. Nevertheless, eminent poets and thinkers have rightly claimed that full possession of truth is beyond human reach. Lessing,²¹ for example, says that pure truth is not for men, but only a perpetual striving towards it. He speaks of truth as a distant goddess whom men may approach but never reach. When the nature of truth stirs the soul to strive for it, the soul can be impelled to rise from stage to stage. Since there is this everlasting search for truth, and since truth is so manifold in meaning, all we can reasonably say is that man must set out to grasp truth and to kindle in himself a genuine sense of truth. Hence we cannot speak of a single, all-embracing truth.

In this lecture we will consider the idea of truth in its right sense, and it will become clear that by cultivating a sense of truth in his inner life man will be imbued with a progressive power that leads him to selflessness.

Man strives towards truth; but when people try to form views concerning one thing or another, we find that in the most varied realms of life conflicting opinions are advanced. When we see what different people take for truth, we might think that the striving for truth leads inevitably to the most contradictory views and standpoints. However, if we look impartially at the facts, we shall find guidelines which show how it is that men who are all seeking truth, arrive at such a diversity of opinions.

Let us take an example. The American multimillionaire, Harriman,²² who died recently, was a rarity among millionaires in concerning himself with thoughts of general human interest. His aphorisms, found after his death, include a remarkable statement. He wrote: No man in this world is indispensable. When one goes, another is there to take his place. When I lay down my work, another will come and take it up. The railways will continue running, dividends will be paid; and so, strictly speaking, it is with all men.

This millionaire, accordingly, rose to the point of declaring as a generally valid truth—no man is indispensable!

Let us compare this statement with a remark by a man who worked for many years in Berlin and gained great distinction through his lecture courses on the lives of Michelangelo, Raphael and Goethe—I mean the art-historian Herman Grimm.²³ When Treitschke²⁴ died, Herman Grimm wrote of him roughly as follows: Now Treitschke is gone, and people only now realise what he accomplished. No-one can take his place and continue his work in the same way. A feeling prevails that in the circle where he taught, everything is changed. Note that Herman Grimm did not add the words, so it is with all men.

Here we have two men, the American millionaire and Herman Grimm, who arrive at exactly opposite truths. How does this come about? If we carefully compare the two statements, we shall find a clue. Bear in mind that Harriman says pointedly: When I lay down my work, someone else will continue it. He does not get away from himself. The other thinker, Herman Grimm, leaves himself entirely out of account. He does not speak about himself, or ask what sort of opinions or truths others might gain from him. He merges himself in his subject. Anyone with a feeling for the matter will have no doubt as to which of the two spoke truth. We need only ask—who carried on Goethe's work when he laid it down? We can feel that Harriman's reflections suffer from the fact that he fails to get away from himself. Up to a point we may conclude that it is prejudicial to truth if someone in search of truth cannot get away from himself. Truth is best served when the seeker leaves himself out of the reckoning. Would it be true to say, then, that truth is already something that gives us a view (Ansicht) of things?

A view, in the sense of an opinion, is a thought which reflects the outer world. When we form a thought or reach a decision about something, does it follow that we have a true picture of it?

Suppose you take a photograph of a remarkable tree. Does the photograph give a true picture of the tree? It shows the tree from one side only, not the whole reality of the tree. No-one could form a true image of the tree from this one photograph. How could anyone who has not seen the tree be brought nearer to the truth of it? If the tree were photographed from four sides, he could collate the photographs and arrive finally at a true picture of the tree, not dependent on a particular standpoint.

Now let us apply this example to human beings. A man who leaves himself out of account when forming a view of something is doing much the same as the photographer who goes all round the tree. He eliminates himself by conscious action. When we form an opinion or take a certain view, we must realise that all such opinions depend on our personal standpoint, our habits of mind and our individuality. If we then try to eliminate these influences from our search for truth, we shall be acting as the photographer did in our example. The first condition for acquiring a genuine sense of truth is that we should get away from ourselves and see clearly how much depends on our personal point of view. If the American multimillionaire had got away from himself he would have known that there was a difference between him and other men.

An example from everyday life has shown us, that if a man fails to realise how much his personal standpoint or point of departure influences his views, he will arrive at narrow opinions, not at the truth. This is apparent also on a wider scale. Anyone who looks at the true spiritual evolution of mankind, and compares all the various “truths” that have arisen in the course of time, will find—if he looks deeply enough—that when people pronounce a “truth” they ought first of all to get away from their individual outlooks. It will then become clear that the most varied opinions concerning truth are advanced because men have not recognised to what extent their views are restricted by their personal standpoints.

A less familiar example may lead to a deeper understanding of this matter. If we want to learn more about beauty, we turn to aesthetics, which deals with the forms of beauty. Beauty is something we encounter in the outer world. How can we learn the truth about it? Here again we must free ourselves from the restrictions imposed by our personal characteristics.

Take for example the 19th century German thinker, Solger.²⁵ He wished to investigate the nature of beauty in accordance with his idea of truth. He could not deny that we meet with beauty in the external world; but he was a man with a one-sided theosophical outlook, and this was reflected in his theory of aesthetics. His interest in a beautiful picture was confined to the shining through it of the only kind of spirituality he recognised. For him, an object was beautiful only in so far as the spiritual was manifest through it. Solger was a one-sided theosophist; he sought to explain sense-perceptible phenomena in terms of the super-sensible; but he forgot that sense-perceptible reality has a justified existence on its own account. Unable to escape from his preconceptions, he sought to attain to the spiritual by way of a misconceived theosophy.

Another writer on aesthetics, Robert Zimmermann,²⁶ came to an exactly opposite conclusion. As against Solger's misconceived theosophical aesthetics, Zimmermann based his aesthetics on a misconceived anti-theosophical outlook. His sole concern was with symmetry and anti-symmetry, harmony and discord. He had no interest in going beyond the beautiful to that which manifests through it. So his aesthetics were as one-sided as Solger’s. Every striving for truth can be vitiated if the seeker fails to recognise that he must first endeavour to get away from himself. This can be achieved only gradually; but the primary, inexorable demand is, that if we are to advance towards truth we must leave ourselves out of account and quite forget ourselves. Truth has a unique characteristic: a man can strive for it while remaining entirely within himself and yet—while living in his Ego—he can acquire something which, fundamentally speaking, has nothing to do with the egoistic ego.

Whenever a man tries in life to get his own way in some matter, this is an expression of his egoism. Whenever he wants to force on others something he thinks right and loses his temper over it, that is an expression of his self-seeking. This self-seeking must be subdued before he can attain to truth. Truth is something we experience in our most inward being—and yet it liberates us increasingly from ourselves. Of course, it is essential that nothing save the love of truth should enter into our striving for it. If passions, instincts and desires, from which the Sentient Soul must be cleansed before the Intellectual Soul can strive for truth, come into it, they will prevent a man from getting away from himself and will keep his Ego tied to a fixed viewpoint. In the search for truth, the only passion that must not be discarded is love.

Truth is a lofty goal. This is shown by the fact that truth, in the sense intended here, is recognised today in one limited realm only. It is only in the realm of mathematics that humanity in general has reached the goal of truth, for here men have curbed their passions and desires and kept them out of the way. Why are all men agreed that three times three makes nine and not ten? Because no emotion comes into it, Men would agree on the highest truths if they had gone as far with them as they have with mathematics. The truths of mathematics are grasped in the inmost soul, and because they are grasped in this way, we possess them. We would still possess them if a hundred or a thousand people were to contradict us; we would still know that three times three makes nine because we have grasped this fact inwardly. If the hundred or thousand people who take a different view were to get away from themselves, they would come to the same truth.

What, then, is the way to mutual understanding and unity for mankind? We understand one another in the field of reckoning and counting because here we have met the conditions required. Peace, concord and harmony will prevail among men to the extent that they find truth. That is the essential thing: that we should seek for truth as something to be found only in our own deepest being; and should know that truth ever and again draws men together, because from the innermost depth of every human soul its light shines forth.

So is truth the leader of mankind towards unity and mutual understanding, and also the precursor of justice and love. Truth is a precursor we must cherish, while the other precursor, anger, that we came to know yesterday, must be overcome if we are to be led by it away from selfishness. That is the mission of truth: to become the object of increasing love and care and devotion on our part. Inasmuch as we devote ourselves inwardly to truth, our true self gains in strength and will enable us to cast off self-interest. Anger weakens us; truth strengthens us.

Truth is a stern goddess; she demands to be at the centre of a unique love in our souls. If man fails to get away from himself and his desires and prefers something else to her, she takes immediate revenge. The English poet Coleridge has rightly indicated how a man should stand towards truth. If, he says, a man loves Christianity more than truth, he will soon find that he loves his own Christian sect more than Christianity, and then he will find that he loves himself more than his sect.

Very much is implicit in these words. Above all, they signify that to strive against truth leads to humanly degrading egoism. Love of truth is the only love that sets the Ego free. And directly man gives priority to anything else, he falls inevitably into self-seeking. Herein lies the great and most serious importance of truth for the education of the human soul. Truth conforms to no man, and only by devotion to truth can truth be found. Directly man prefers himself and his own opinions to the truth, he becomes anti-social and alienates himself from the human community. Look at people who make no attempt to love truth for its own sake but parade their own opinions as the truth: they care for nothing but the content of their own souls and are the most intolerant. Those who love truth in terms of their own views and opinions will not suffer anyone to reach truth along a quite different path. They put every obstacle in the way of anyone with different abilities, who comes to opinions unlike their own. Hence the conflicts that so often arise in life. An honest striving for truth leads to human understanding, but the love of truth for the sake of one's own personality leads to intolerance and the destruction of other people's freedom.

Truth is experienced in the Intellectual Soul. It can be sought for and attained through personal effort only by beings capable of thought. Inasmuch as truth is acquired by thinking, we must realise very clearly that there are two kinds of truth. First we have the truth that comes from observing the world of Nature around us and investigating it bit by bit in order to discover its truths, laws and wisdom. When we contemplate the whole range of our experience of the world in this way, we come to the kind of truth that can be called the truth derived from “reflective” thinking—we first observe the world and then think about our findings.

We saw yesterday that the entire realm of Nature is permeated with wisdom, and that wisdom lives in all natural things. In a plant there lives the idea of the plant, and this we can arrive at by reflective thought. Similarly, we can discern the wisdom that lives in the plant. By thus looking out on the world we can infer that the world is born of wisdom, and that through the activity of our thinking we can rediscover the element that enters into the creation of the world. That is the kind of truth to be gained by reflective thought.

There are also other truths. These cannot be gained by reflective thought, but only by going beyond everything that can be learnt from the outer world. In ordinary life we can see at once that when a man constructs a tool or some other instrument, he has to formulate laws that are not part of the outer world. For example, no-one could learn from the outer world how to construct a clock, for the laws of Nature are not so arranged as to provide for the appearance of clocks as a natural product. That is a second kind of truth: we come to it by thinking out something not given to us by observation or experience of the outer world. Hence there are these two kinds of truth, and they must be kept strictly apart, one derived from reflective thought and the other from “creative” thought.

How can a truth of this second kind be verified? The inventor of a clock can easily prove that he had thought it out correctly. He has to show that the clock does what he expects. Anything we think out in advance must prove itself in practice: it must yield results that can be recognised in the external world. The truths of Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy are of this kind. They cannot be found by observing external experience.

For example, no findings in the realm of outer Nature can establish the truth we have often dwelt on in connection with the immortal kernel of man's being: the truth that the human Ego appears again and again on earth in successive incarnations. Anyone who wishes to acquire this truth must raise himself above ordinary experience. He must grasp in his soul a truth that has then to be made real in outer life. A truth of this kind cannot be proved in the same way as truths of the first kind, gained by what we have called reflective thought. It can be proven only by showing how it applies to life and is reflected there. If we look at life with the knowledge that the soul repeatedly returns and ever and again goes through a series of events and experiences between birth and death, we shall find how much satisfaction, how much strength and fruitfulness, these thoughts can bring. Or again, if we ask how the soul of a child can be helped to develop and grow stronger, if we presuppose that an eternally existent soul is here working its way into a new life, then this truth will shine in on us and give proof of its fruitfulness in daily experience. Any other proofs are false. The only way in which a truth of this kind can be confirmed is by giving proof of its validity in daily life. Hence there is a vast difference between these two kinds of truth. Those of the second kind are grasped in the spirit and then verified by observing their influence on outer life.

What then is the educational effect of these two kinds of truth on the human soul? It makes a great difference whether a man devotes himself to truths that come from reflective thought or to those that come from creative thought. If we steep ourselves in the wisdom of Nature and create in ourselves a true reflection of it, we can rightly say that we have in ourselves something of the creative activity from which the life of Nature springs. But here a distinction must be made. The wisdom of Nature is directly creative and gives rise to the reality of Nature in all its fullness, but the truth we derive from thinking about Nature is only a passive image; in our thinking it has lost its power. We may indeed acquire a wide, open-minded picture of natural truth, but the creative, productive element is absent from it. Hence the immediate effect of this picture of truth on the development of the human Ego is desolating. The creative power of the Ego is crippled and devitalised; the Self loses strength and can no longer stand up to the world, if it is concerned only with reflective thoughts. Nothing else does so much to isolate the Ego, to make it withdraw into itself and look with hostility on the world. A man can become a cold egoist if he is intent only on investigating the outer world. Why does he want this knowledge? Does he mean to place it at the service of the Gods?

If a man desires only this kind of truth, he wants it for himself, and he will be on the way to becoming a cold egoist and misogynist in later life. He will become a recluse or will sever himself from mankind in some other way, for he wants to possess the content of the world as his own truth. All forms of seclusion and hostility towards humanity can be found on this path. The soul becomes increasingly dried up and loses its sense of human fellowship. It becomes ever more impoverished, although the truth should enrich it. Whether a man turns into a recluse or a one-sided eccentric makes no difference; in both cases a hardening process will overtake his soul. Hence we see that the more a man confines himself to this kind of reflective thought, the less fruitful his soul will be. Let us try to understand why this is so.

Consider the realms of nature and suppose that we have before us an array of plants. They have been formed by the living wisdom which calls forth their inherent productive power. Now an artist comes along. His soul receives the picture that Nature sets before him. He does not merely think about it; he opens himself to Nature's productive power and lets it work upon him. He creates a work of art which does not embody merely an act of thinking; it is imbued with productive power. Then comes someone who tries to get behind the picture and to extract a thought from it. He ponders over it. In this way its reality is filtered and impoverished. Now try to carry this process further. Once the soul has extracted a thought from the picture, it has finished with it. Nothing more can be done except to formulate thoughts about the thought—an absurd procedure which soon dries up.

It is quite different with creative thinking. Here a man is himself productive. His thoughts take form as realities in outer life; here he is working after the example of Nature herself. That is how it is with a man who goes beyond mere observation and reflective thinking and allows something not to be gained from observation to arise in his soul. All spiritual-scientific truths require a productive disposition in the soul. In the case of these truths all mere reflective thinking is bad and leads to deception. But the truths attainable by creative thought are limited, for man is weak in the face of the creative wisdom of the world. There is no end to the things from which we can derive truths by reflective thought; but creative thought, although the field open to it is restricted, brings about a heightening of productive power; the soul is refreshed and its scope extended. Indeed, the soul becomes more and more inwardly divine, in so far as it reflects in itself an essential element of the divine creative activity in the world.

So we have these two distinct kinds of truth, one reached by creative thought, the other by reflective thought. This latter kind, derived from the investigation of existent things or current experience, will always lead to abstractions; under its influence the soul is deprived of nourishment and tends to dry up. The truth that is not gained from immediate experience is creative; its strength helps man to find a place in the world where he can co-operate in shaping the future.

The past can be approached only by reflective thought, while creative thought opens a way into the future. Man thus becomes a responsible creator of the future. He extends the power of his Ego into the future, in so far as he comes to possess not merely the truths derived from the past by reflective thinking, but also those that are gained by creative thinking and point towards the future.

Herein lies the liberating influence of creative thinking. Anyone who is active in the striving for truth will soon find how he is impoverished by mere reflective thinking. He will come to understand how the devotee of reflective thinking fills his mind with phantom ideas and bloodless abstractions. Such a man may feel like an outcast, condemned to a mere savouring of truth and may come to doubt whether his spirit can play any part in shaping the world. On the other hand, a man who experiences a truth gained by creative thinking will find that it nourishes and warms his soul and gives it new strength for every stage in life. It fills him with joy when he is able to grasp truths of this kind and discovers that in bringing them to bear on the phenomena of life he can say to himself: Now I not only understand what is going on there, but I can explain it in the light of having known something of it previously.

With the aid of spiritual-scientific truths we can now approach man himself. He cannot be understood merely by reflective thinking, but now we can comprehend him better and better, while our feeling of unity with the world and our interest in it are continually enhanced. We experience joy and satisfaction at every confirmation of spiritual-scientific truths that we encounter. This is what makes these truths so satisfying: we have first to grasp them before we can find them corroborated in actual life, and all the while they enrich us inwardly. We are drawn gradually into unity with the phenomena we experience. We get away more and more from ourselves, whereas reflective thinking leads to subtle forms of egoism. In order to find confirmation of truths gained by creative thinking we have to go out from ourselves and look for their application in all realms of life. It is these truths that liberate us from ourselves and imbue us in the highest degree with a sense of truth and a feeling for it.

Feelings of this kind have been alive in every genuine seeker after truth. They were deeply present in the soul of Goethe when he declared: “Only that which is fruitful is true”—a magnificent, luminous saying of far—reaching import. But Goethe was also well aware that men must be closely united with truth if they are to understand one another. Nothing does more to estrange men from one another than a lack of concern for truth and the search for truth. Goethe also said: “A false doctrine cannot be refuted, for it rests on a conviction that the false is true.”²⁷ Obviously there are falsities that can be logically disproved, but that is not what Goethe means. He is convinced that a false viewpoint cannot be refuted by logical conclusions, and that the fruitful application of truth in practical life should be our sole guide-line in our search for truth.

It was because Goethe was so wonderfully united with truth that he was able to sketch the beautiful poetic drama, Pandora, which he began to write in 1807. Though only a fragment, Pandora is a ripe product of his creative genius—so powerful in every line, that anyone who responds to it must feel it to be an example of the purest, grandest art. We see in it how Goethe was able to make a start towards the greatest truths—but then lacked the strength to go further. The task was too arduous for him to carry through; but we have enough of it to get some idea of how deeply he had penetrated into the problems of spiritual education. He had a clear vision of everything that the soul has to overcome in order to rise higher; he understood everything we learnt yesterday about anger and the fettered Prometheus, and have learnt today about that other educator of the soul, the sense of truth.

How closely related these two things are in their effects on the soul can be seen also in the facial expressions they call forth. Let us picture a man under the influence of anger, and another man upon whom truth is acting as an inward light. The first man is frowning—why? In such cases the brow is knitted because an excessive force is working inwardly, like a poison, to hold down a surplus of egoism which would like to destroy everything that exists alongside and separate from the man himself. In the clenched fist of anger we see the wrathful self closed up in itself and refusing to go forth into the outer world. Now compare this with the facial expression of someone who is discovering truth. When he perceives the light of truth, he too may frown, but in his case the wrinkled brow is a means whereby the soul expands, as though it would like to grasp and absorb the whole world with devoted love. Observe, too, the eyes of a man who is trying to overhear the world's secrets. His eyes are shining, as though to encompass everything around him in the outer world. He is released from himself; his hand is not clenched, but held out with a gesture that seeks to absorb the being of the world.

The whole difference between anger and truth is thus expressed in human physiognomy and gesture. Anger thrusts the human being deeper into himself. If he strives for truth, his being expands into the outer world; and the more united he becomes with the outer world, the more he turns away from the truths gained by reflective thinking to those gained by creative thinking. Therefore, Goethe in his Pandora brings into opposition with each other certain characters who can be taken to represent forces at work in the human soul. They are intended to express symbolically the relationships between the characteristics and capacities of the soul.

When you open Pandora, you come upon something remarkable and highly significant at the very start. On the side of Prometheus, the stage is loaded with tools and implements constructed by man. In all these, human energies have been at work, but in a certain sense it is all rough and ready. On the side of Epimetheus, the other Titan, there is a complete contrast. Here everything is perfectly finished; we see not so much what man creates, but a bringing together of what Nature has already produced. It is all the result of reflective thinking. Here we have combination and shaping, a symmetrical ordering of Nature's work. On the side of Prometheus, unsymmetry and roughness; on the side of Epimetheus, elegant and harmonious products of Nature, culminating in a view of a wonderful landscape. What does all this signify? We need only consider the two contrasted characters: Prometheus the creative thinker, Epimetheus the reflective thinker. With Prometheus we find the products mainly of creative thinking. Here, although man's powers are limited and clumsy, he is productive. He cannot yet shape his creations as perfectly as Nature shapes her own; but they are all the outcome of his own powers and tools. He is also deficient in feeling for scenes of natural beauty.

On the side of Epimetheus, the reflective thinker, we see the heritage of the past, brought into symmetrical order by himself. And because he is a reflective thinker, we see in the background a beautiful landscape which gives its own special pleasure to the human eye. Epimetheus now comes forward and discloses his individual character. He explains that he is there to experience the past, and to reflect upon past occurrences and the visible world. But in his speech he reveals the dissatisfaction that this kind of attitude can at times call forth in the soul. He feels hardly any difference between day and night. In brief, the figure of Epimetheus shows us reflective thinking in its most extreme form. Then Prometheus comes forward carrying a torch and emerging from the darkness of night. Among his followers are smiths; they set to work on the man-made objects that are lying around, while Prometheus makes a remarkable statement that will not be misunderstood if we are alive to Goethe's meaning. The smiths extol productivity and welcome the fact that in the course of production many things have to be destroyed. In a one-sided way they extol fire. A man who is an all-round reflective thinker will not praise one thing at the expense of another. He casts his eye over the whole. Prometheus, however, says at once:

In partiality let the active man
Find his pleasure

He extols precisely the fact that to be active entails the acceptance of limitations. In Nature, the right is established when the wrong destroys itself. But to the smiths Prometheus says: Carry on doing whatever can be done. He is the creative man; he emerges with his torch from the darkness of night in order to show how from the depths of his soul the truth gained by his creative thinking comes forth. Unlike Epimetheus, he is far from a dreamlike feeling that night and day are all one. Nor does he experience the world as a dream. For his soul has been at work, and in its own dark night it has grasped the thoughts which now emerge from it. They are no dreams, but truths for which the soul has bled. By this means the soul advances into the world and gains release from itself; but at the same time it incurs the danger of losing itself. This does not yet apply to Prometheus himself, but when a man introduces one-sidedness into the world, the danger appears among his descendants.

Phileros, the son of Prometheus, is already inclined to love and cherish and enjoy the products of creative work, while his father Prometheus is still immersed in the stream of life's creative power. In Phileros we are shown the power of creative thinking developed in a one-sided way. He rushes out into life, not knowing where to search for enjoyment. Prometheus cannot pass on to his son his own fruitfully creative strength, and so Phileros appears incomprehensible to Epimetheus, who out of his own rich experience would like to counsel him on his headlong career.

We are then magnificently shown what mere reflective thinking involves. This is connected with the myth that Zeus, having fettered Prometheus to the rock, imposes Pandora, the all-gifted, on mankind.

Most beautiful and gifted she approached
The amazed watcher, moving with noble grace,
Her gracious look inquiring whether I,
Like to my sterner brother, would repel her,
But all too strongly were my heart-beats stirred,
With sense bemused my charming bride I welcomed.
Towards the mysterious dowry then I turned,
The earthen vessel, tall and shapely, stood
Close-sealed ...

Prometheus had warned his brother against this gift from the gods. But Epimetheus, with his different character, accepts the gift, and when the earthen vessel is opened, all the afflictions that can befall mankind come pouring out. Only one thing is left in the vessel—Hope.

Who, then, is Pandora and what does she signify? Truly a mystery of the soul is concealed in her. The fruits of reflective thinking are dead products, an abstract reflection of the mechanical thoughts forged by Hephaestus. This wisdom is powerless in the face of the universally creative wisdom from which the world has been born. What can this abstract reflection give to mankind?

We have seen how this kind of truth can be sterile and can lay waste the soul, and we can understand how all the afflictions that fall on mankind come pouring out of Pandora's vessel. In Pandora we have to see truth without the powers of creativity, the truth of reflective thinking, a truth which builds up a mechanised thought-picture in the midst of the world's creative life. For the mere reflective thinker only one thing remains. While the creative thinker unites his Ego with the future and gets free from himself, the reflective thinker can look to the future only with hope, for he has no part in shaping it. He can only hope that things will happen. Goethe shows his deep comprehension of the myth by endowing the marriage of Epimetheus and Pandora with two children: Elpore (Hope) and Epimeleia (Care), who safeguards existing things. In fact, man has in his soul two offspring of dead, abstract, mechanically conceived truth. This kind of truth is unfruitful and cannot influence the future; it can only reflect what is already there. It leaves a man with nothing but the hope that what is true will duly come to pass. This is represented by Goethe with splendid realism in the figure of Elpore, who, if someone asks her whether this or that is going to happen, always gives the same answer, yes, yes. If a Promethean man were to stand before the world and speak of the future, he would say: “I hope for nothing. With my own forces I will shape the future.” But a reflective thinker can only reflect on the past and hope for the future; thus Elpore, when asked whether this or that will happen, replies always, yes, yes. We hear it again and again. In this way a daughter of reflective thinking is admirably characterised and her sterility is indicated.

The other daughter of this reflective thinking, Epimeleia, is she who cares for existing things. She sets them all in symmetrical order and can add nothing from her own resources. But all things which fail to develop are increasingly liable to destruction; hence we see how anxiety about them continually mounts, and how through mere reflective thinking a destructive element finds its way into the world. This is wonderfully well indicated by Goethe when he makes Phileros fall in love with Epimeleia. We see him, burnt up with jealousy, pursuing Epimeleia, until she takes refuge from him with the Titan brothers. Strife and dissension come simultaneously on to the scene. Epimeleia complains that the person she loves is the very one to seek her life.

Everything that Goethe goes on to say shows how deeply he had penetrated into the effects of creative thinking and reflective thinking on the soul. The creative thinking of the smiths is set in wonderful contrast to the outlook of the shepherds; whilst the latter take what Nature offers, the former work on the products of Nature and transform them. Therefore Prometheus says of the shepherds: they are seeking peace, but they will not find a peace that satisfies their souls:

Go your ways in peace; but peace
You will not find.

For a wish merely to preserve things as they are leads only to the unproductive side of Nature.

The truths which belong to creative thinking and reflective thinking respectively are thus set before us in the figures of Prometheus and Epimetheus, and in all the characters connected with them. They represent those soul-forces which can spring from an excessive, one-sided predilection for one or other way of striving after truth. And after we have seen how disastrous are the consequences of these extremes, we are shown finally the one and only remedy—the co-operation of the Titan brothers. The drama leads on to an outbreak of fire in a property owned by Epimetheus. Prometheus, who is prepared to demolish a building if it no longer serves its purpose, advises his brother to make all speed to the spot and do all he can to halt the destruction. But Epimetheus no longer cares for that; he is thinking about Pandora and is lost in his recollection of her. Interesting also is a dialogue between the brothers about her:

Prometheus:

Her form sublime, from ancient dark emerging,
Came near me also. To make another like her,
Even Hephaestus would have failed in that.

Epimetheus:

Art thou, too, prating of this fabled birth?
From ancient gods, a mighty race, she springs:
Uranione, Hera's peer, and sister
Of Zeus himself.

Prometheus:

And yet Hephaestus, for her rich adornment,
Made for her head a net of shining gold,
Weaving with subtle hand the finest threads.

In every sentence spoken by Prometheus we see how mechanised, abstract limitations obsess his mind. Then Eos, the Dawn, appears. She is an unlit being who precedes and heralds the sun, but also contains its light within herself already. She does not simply emerge from the darkness of night; she represents a transition to something which has overcome night. Prometheus appears with his torch because he has just come out of the night. The artificial light he carries indicates how his creative work proceeds from the night's darkness. Epimetheus can indeed admire the sunlight and its gifts, but he experiences everything as in a dream. He is an example of pure reflective thinking. The way in which light can escape the attention of a soul absorbed in creative activity is shown by what Prometheus says in the light of day. His people, he says, are called upon not merely to observe the sun and the light, but to be themselves a source of illumination. Now Eos, Aurora, comes forward. She calls upon men to be active everywhere in doing right. Phileros, already having sought death, should unite with the forces which will make it possible for him to rescue himself. The smiths, who are working within the limits of their creative thinking, and the shepherds, who accept things as they are, are now joined by the fishermen. And we see how Eos gives them advice:

Morning of youth, dawning of day,
More beautiful than ever,
From the unfathomed ocean
I bring you now.
Awake, shake off your sleep,
You dwellers in the bay
By cliffs encircled,
You fishermen, arise,
And ply your craft.
With speed spread out your nets
Around the well-known waters,
A splendid catch is certain
When my voice cheers you on.
Swim, you swimmers! Dive, you divers!
Watch, you watchers on the heights!
May the shores and seas together
Swarm with swift abounding life!

Then we are shown in a wonderful way how Phileros is rescued on the surging flood and unites his own strength with the strength of the waves. The active creative power in him is thus united with the creative power in Nature. So the elements of Prometheus and Epimetheus are reconciled.

Thus Goethe offers a solution rich in promise, by showing how knowledge gained from nature by reflective thinking can be fired with productive energy by the creative thinking element. This latter acquires its rightful strength by receiving, in loyalty to truth, what the gods “up there” bestow:

Take note of this:
What is desirable, you feel down here;
What is to be given, they know up there.
You Titans make a great beginning,
But the way to the eternal good, the forever beautiful,
That is the work of the gods; they ensure it.

The union of Prometheus and Epimetheus in the human soul will bring salvation for them and for mankind. The whole drama is intended to indicate that through an all-round grasping of truth the entire human race, and not only individuals, will find satisfaction. Goethe wished to show that an understanding of the real nature of truth will unite humanity and foster love and peace among men. Then Hope, also, is transformed in the soul—Hope who says yes to everything but is powerless to bring anything about. The poem was to have ended with the transformed Elpore, Elpore thraseia, coming forward to tell us that she is no longer a prophetess but is to be incorporated into the human soul, so that human beings would not merely cherish hopes for the future but would have the strength to co-operate in bringing about whatever their own productive power could create. To believe in the transformation wrought by truth upon the soul—that is the whole perfected truth which reconciles Prometheus and Epimetheus.

Naturally, these sketchy indications can bring out only a little of all that can be drawn from the poem. The deep wisdom that called forth this fragment from Goethe will disclose itself first to those who approach it with the support of a spiritual-scientific way of thinking. They can experience a satisfying, redeeming power which flows out from the poem and quickens them.

We must not fail to mention a remarkably beautiful phrase that Goethe included in his Pandora. He says that the divine wisdom which flows into the world must work in harmony with all that we are able to achieve through our own Promethean power of creative thinking. The element that comes to meet us in the world and teaches us what wisdom is, Goethe called the Word. That, which lives in the soul and must unite itself with the reflective thinking of Epimetheus, is the Deed of Prometheus. So the union of the Logos or Word with the Deed gives rise to the ideal that Goethe wished to set before us in his Pandora as the fruit of a life rich in experiences. Towards the end of the poem, Prometheus makes a remarkable statement: “A real man truly celebrates the deed.” This is the truth that remains hidden from the reflective thinking element in the soul.

If we open ourselves to this whole poem, we can come to realise the heroic yearning for development felt by men such as Goethe, and the great modesty which prevents them from supposing that by reaching a certain stage they have done enough and need not try to go further. Goethe was an apprentice of life up to his last day, and always recognised that when a man has been enriched by an experience he must overcome what he has previously held to be true.

When as a young man, Goethe was beginning to work on Faust, and had occasion to introduce some translations from the Bible, he decided that the words “In the beginning was the Word”, should be rendered as “in the beginning was the Deed”. At this same time he wrote a fragment on Prometheus.²⁸ There we see the young Goethe as altogether active and Promethean, confident that simply by developing his own forces, not fructified by cosmic wisdom, he could progress. In his maturity, with a long experience of life behind him, he realised that it was wrong to underestimate the Word, and that Word and Deed must be united. In fact, Goethe revised parts of his Faust while he was writing his Pandora. We can understand how Goethe came by degrees to maturity only if we realise the nature of truth in all its forms.

It will always be good for man if he wrestles his way to realising that truth can be apprehended only by degrees. Or take a genuine, honest, all-round seeker after truth who is called upon to bring forcibly before the world some truth he has discovered. It will be very good if he reminds himself that he has no grounds for pluming himself on this one account. There are no grounds at any time for remaining content with something already known. On the contrary, such knowledge as we have gained from our considerations yesterday and today should lead us to feel that, although the human being must stand firmly on the ground of the truth he has acquired and must be ready to defend it, he must from time to time withdraw into himself, as Goethe did. When he does this, the forces arising from the consciousness of the truth he has gained will endow him with a feeling for the right standards and for the standpoint he should make his own. From the enhanced consciousness of truth we should ever and again withdraw into ourselves and say, with Goethe: Much that we once discovered and took for truth is now only a dream, a dreamlike memory; and what we think today, will not survive when we put it to a deeper test. The words often spoken by Goethe to himself in relation to his own honest search for truth may well be echoed by every man in his solitary hours:

A poor wight am I
Through and through.
My thoughts miss the mark,
My dreams, they are not true.²⁹

If we can feel this, we shall be in the right relationship to our high ideal, Truth.

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• 21. Cf. for example the polemic “Eine Duplik” (1778), part 1.
• 22. Edward Henry Harriman, 1848–1909. North American railway magnate.
• 23. Herman Grimm, 1828–1901, in his essay “Ernst Curtius, Heinrich von Treitschke, Leopold von Ranke”, in: Fragmente, vol 1, Berlin & Stuttgart, 1900, p.246.
• 24. Heinrich von Treitschke, 1834–96. German historian.
• 25. Karl Friedrich Solger, 1780–1819, from 1811 Professor of Philosophy in Berlin. Cf. Erwin. Vier Gespräche über das Schöne und die Kunst, 1815, and Vorlesungen uber Asthetik, ed. Heyse, 1829.
• 26. Robert Zimmermann, 1824–98. Professor in Vienna. Member of the school of Herbart. Cf. his Asthetik, 1858–65.
• 27. The first quotation is from the poem “Vermächtnis”, 1829; the second is from the “Sprüche in Prosa” in vol V, p.402 of Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited with a commentary by Rudolf Steiner, 5 vols, Dornach, 1975.
• 28. Faust 1, 11.1224 and “Prometheus”, a dramatic fragment, 1773.
• 29. From the poem “Sprichtwörtlich”.

Man gains interest in the physical world through perception or estimatio. It's this interest that fetters him to the physical world. One can grow out of this by seeing the spiritual behind things in the sense world. In an earlier stage of consciousness men had imaginatio and no estimatio for physical things, and even earlier they had incantatio or inspiratio. Moderns usually only have estimatio during the day, and they have imaginatio at night. Men are unproductive in daytime; they used to be much more productive. Moderns are only productive during sleep. Consciousness arises when the astral body and ego destroy the physical and etheric bodies during the day. When the astral body and ego become aware of their physical surroundings it's as if the nerves were being torn to pieces.

Corporeal tiredness arises from the destructive, deadly effect of the astral body and ego on the etheric and physical bodies. The streaming of the physical world into man's organism has a poisonous, destructive effect.

At night the ego and astral body take in the forces of the spiritual world and stream them into the physical and etheric bodies. They surround the physical body with pictures that have a healing effect on it. The first thing a man sees when the spiritual world opens before him for the first time is his physical body. This picture of the physical body has a healing effect on him. Likewise the astral body and ego work upon the rest of man in a strengthening, healing way at night through true pictures out of the spiritual world. They stream into the ripped nerve strands and destroyed organism. Thereby forces from the spiritual world stream in at night that eliminate tiredness from the body.

Tiredness mainly arises from interest in things. No tiredness is caused if one looks at something without personal interest. For instance, say someone really likes a tasty food. Thereby he has a personal interest in the food because it stimulates his gums. It has quite a different effect on a man if he knows his connection with the cosmos and that he's at a stage where he has a physical body that needs food. This affects his organism differently than if he only eats food for pleasure. A man must get to know spiritual things through the physical body, and then he loses interest in physical things.

A man should look upon estimatio as the low point in evolution. He must grow out of this into the imaginatio that he had previously. But if he connects himself with the physical world he goes below the lowest point and can no longer ascend. It's very important for a man to learn to occupy himself with things that lie beyond the physical plane, with ideas and concepts that are super-sensible. Exercises are given to this end. The longer and more patiently a pupil practices certain ideas, the more he learns to overcome personal interests and to ascend to imaginatio. Then a man becomes productive instead of just taking in things from outside. He then streams something from within out into the world. One rightly says that man has the sun and moon in him. When he looks at things without personal interest he streams a spiritual light onto them; he becomes a sun who illumines things. They reflect his light. The surroundings that reflect his light become a moon.

Correct ideas have a healing effect on man, and wrong ideas make him sick. One can find a wrong idea behind every disease, if one traces it back. Mankind in general is responsible for this and not individuals. Interest also has a destructive effect when people run from one sensation to the other and always want to be amused. That makes people sick. It's also a hindrance to progress to have a personal interest in higher knowledge. Men become scleroticized thereby. A man must not become indifferent to his surroundings. He must retain his feeling and sympathy for his surroundings. Some say that sympathy can also come from egotism. That may be the case. Many kinds of sympathy only arise because one doesn't want to see other people suffer. That's even a good thing. It's better for a man to help someone out of egotistical sympathy than not to help him at all. But we must learn to develop a sympathy that stands above egoism, that helps neighbors because it's one's duty to help them.

This week something will be given in the communications addressed to members in these columns, which may serve to bring us to a further understanding of the weekly ‘Leading Thoughts’.

The understanding of anthroposophical truth can be furthered if the relation which exists between man and the world is constantly brought before the human soul.

When man turns his attention to the world into which he is born and out of which he dies, he is surrounded in the first place by the fullness of his sense-impressions. He forms thoughts about these sense-impressions.

In bringing the following to his consciousness: ‘I am forming thoughts about what my senses reveal to me as the world’, he has already come to the point where he can contemplate himself. He can say to himself: In my thoughts ‘I’ live. The world gives me the opportunity of experiencing myself in thought. I find myself in the thoughts in which I contemplate the world.

And continuing to reflect in this way, he ceases to be conscious of the world; he becomes conscious of the ‘I’. He ceases to have the world before him; he begins to experience the self.

If the experience be reversed, and the attention directed to the inner life in which the world is mirrored, then those events emerge into consciousness which belong to our life's destiny, and in which our human self has flowed along from the point of time to which our memory goes back. In following up the events of his destiny, a man experiences his own existence.

In bringing this to his consciousness: ‘I with my own self have experienced something that destiny brought to me’, a man has already come to the point where he will contemplate the world. He can say to himself: I was not alone in my fate; the world played a part in my experience. I willed this or that; the world streamed into my will. I find the world in my will when I experience this will in self-contemplation.

Continuing thus to enter into his own being, man ceases to be conscious of the self, he becomes conscious of the world; he ceases to experience himself, he becomes feelingly aware of the world.

I send my thoughts out into the world, there I find myself; I sink into myself, there I find the world. If a man experiences this strongly enough, he is confronted with the great riddles of the World and Man.

For to have the feeling: I have taken endless pains to understand the world through thinking, and after all there is but myself in this thinking—this gives rise to the first great riddle. And to feel that one's own self is formed through destiny, yet to perceive in this process the onward flow of world-happenings—this presents the second riddle.

In the experience of this problem of Man and the World germinates the frame of mind in which man can so confront Anthroposophy that he receives from it in his inner being an impression which rouses his attention.

For Anthroposophy asserts that there is a spiritual experience which does not lose the world when thinking. One can also live in thought. Anthroposophy tells of an inward experience in which one does not lose the sense-world when thinking, but gains the Spirit-world. Instead of penetrating into the ego in which the sense-world is felt to disappear, one penetrates into the Spirit-world in which the ego feels established.

Anthroposophy shows, further, that there is an experience of destiny in which one does not lose the self. In fate, too, one can still feel oneself to be active. Anthroposophy points out, in the impartial, unegoistic observation of human destiny, an experience in which one learns to love the world and not only one's own existence. Instead of staring into the world which carries the ego on the waves of fortune and misfortune, one finds the ego which shapes its own fate voluntarily. Instead of striking against the world, on which the ego is dashed to pieces, one penetrates into the self, which feels itself united with the course of events in the world.

Man's destiny comes to him from the world that is revealed to him by his senses. If then he finds his own activity in the working of his destiny, his real self rises up before him not only out of his inner being but out of the sense-world too.

If a person is able to feel, however faintly, how the spiritual part of the world appears in the self, and how the self proves to be working in the outer world of sense, he has already learned to understand Anthroposophy correctly. For he will then realise that in Anthroposophy it is possible to describe the Spirit-world which the self can comprehend. And this will enable him to understand that in the sense-world the self can also be found—in a different way than by diving within. Anthroposophy finds the self by showing how the sense-world reveals to man not only sense-perceptions but also the after-effects of his life before birth and his former earthly lives.

Man can now gaze on the world perceptible to his senses and say: It contains not only colour, sound, warmth; in it are active the experiences passed through by souls before their present earthly life. And he can look into himself and say: I find there not only my ego but, in addition, a spiritual world is revealed.

In an understanding of this kind, a person who really feels—who is not unmoved by—the great riddles of Man and the World, can meet on a common ground with the Initiate who in accordance with his insight is obliged to speak of the outer world of the senses as manifesting not only sensible perceptions but also the impressions of what human souls have done in their life before birth and in past earthly lives, and who has to say of the world of the inner self that it reveals spiritual events which produce impressions and are as effective as the perceptions of the sense-world.

The would-be active members should consciously make themselves mediators between what the questioning human soul feels as the problems of Man and the Universe, and what the knowledge of the Initiates has to recount, when it draws forth a past world out of the destiny of human beings, and when by strengthening the soul it opens up the perception of a spiritual world.

In this way, through the work of the would-be active members, the Anthroposophical Society may become a true preparatory school for the school of Initiates. It was the intention of the Christmas Assembly to indicate this very forcibly; and one who truly understands what that Assembly meant will continue to point this out until the sufficient understanding of it can bring the Society fresh tasks and possibilities again.

[ 1 ] Silicic acid carries its activities along the paths of metabolism right into those parts of the human organism where the living becomes lifeless. It occurs in the blood, through which the formative forces have to take their course; it occurs also in the hair, i.e. where the forming and shaping process finds its outward conclusion; and we find it in the bones, where the process of formation finishes inwardly. It appears in the urine as a product of excretion.

[ 2 ] It constitutes the physical basis of the ego-organization. For this has a formative action. This ego-organization uses the silicic acid process, right into those regions of the organism in which the shaping, the forming action borders on the outer and the inner (unconscious) world. At the periphery of the organism where the hair contains silicic acid, the human organization connects with the unconscious outer world. In the bones it connects with the unconscious inner world, in which the will is working.

[ 3 ] In the healthy human organism the physical foundation of consciousness must unfold between these two fields of action of silicic acid. The silicic acid has a dual function. Within, it sets a boundary to the mere processes of growth, nutrition etc. Outwardly, it closes off the mere activities of external nature from the interior of the organism, so that the organism within its own domain is not obliged to continue the workings of external nature, but is enabled to unfold its own activities.

[ 4 ] In its youth the human organism is most highly equipped with silicic acid in those localities where tissues with strong formative forces are situated. Thence the silicic acid unfolds its activity towards the two boundary areas, creating between them the space in which the organs of conscious life can form themselves. In the healthy organism, these are primarily the sense-organs. We must, however, bear in mind that the sensory life permeates the whole human organism. The reciprocal relationship of the organs depends upon the fact that the one organ is continually perceiving the activity of the other. In organs which are not sense-organs in the proper meaning of the term, for instance in the liver, spleen, or kidneys, the perception is so slight as to remain beneath the threshold of consciousness in normal waking life. Nevertheless, every organ, besides serving this or that function within the organism, is in addition a sense-organ.

[ 5 ] The whole human organism is in fact permeated with perceptions which mutually influence one another and must be so if all the different processes are to work healthily in it together.

[ 6 ] All this is dependent upon a correct distribution of the activities of silicic acid. We can even go so far as to speak of a special silicic acid organism, permeating the whole organism; this silicic acid organism conditions the mutual sensitivity of the organs on which the healthy life and activity depend; it determines their correct inward and outward relationships, inwardly their relation to the unfolding of the life of soul and spirit, and outwardly in the sense that it provides in each case for the proper conclusion of the activities of external nature.

[ 7 ] This special organism will only work correctly if silicic acid is present in such quantities in the organism that the ego organization is able to make full use of it. Any remaining amounts of silicic acid, the astral organization which lies beneath that of the ego must have the power to excrete, either through the urine or in some other way.

[ 8 ] Excessive quantities of silicic acid, which are neither excreted nor taken hold of by the ego-organization, must be deposited as foreign substances in the body; through the very form-creating tendency whereby—in the right quantity—they serve the ego-organization, they will then interfere with it. Excessive quantities of silicic acid introduced into the organism will thus impair the workings of the gastro-intestinal tract. It is then the task of the digestive tract to dispose of the excessive form-creating tendency. Desiccation will be brought about where the fluid element should predominate. This is most clearly evident when the excessive introduction of silicic acid is followed by psychological disturbance behind which the corresponding organic disturbances are unmistakable. One feels giddy and is unable to stop falling asleep; one feels unable to direct the perceptions of sight and hearing in the proper way; one may even have a feeling as though the impressions of the senses become congested and held up at the point where they should be continued into the nervous system. All this shows how silicic acid pushes out towards the periphery of the body and how, if it arrives there in excessive quantities, it disturbs the normal formative process by introducing an alien tendency. Disturbances occur also at the inner boundary of the form-creating process. One experiences uncontrollability of one's motor-system, and joint-pain. All these conditions may eventuate in processes of inflammation, arising wherever the alien formative activity of silicic acid is too strong.

[ 9 ] This points at the same time to the healing forces which silicic acid can unfold in the human organism. Assume that an organ, not a sense organ in the proper meaning of the term, becomes over-sensitive in its unconscious power of perception with respect to the parts of the organism external to it. We shall then observe a disturbance in the functions of this organ. We shall be able to deal effectively with the morbid condition if we are in a position to eliminate the over-sensitivity by administering silicic acid. It will, however, be necessary so to influence the organic working of the body that the added silicic acid takes effect only in the neighbourhood of the diseased organ, and does not work upon the whole body with a general influence as described above.

[ 10 ] Through the combination of silicic acid with other substances it can be brought about that on its introduction into the organism the silicic acid reaches just that organ where it is needed, whence it will be carried out again as a product of excretion without doing harm to other organs.

[ 11 ] In another case the sensitivity of an organ to the activities of the remaining organs may be unduly lowered. We are then dealing with an accumulation of the silicic acid activity in the neighbourhood of this organ. It will be necessary, therefore, to find a means of influencing the silicic acid activity of the whole organism, so as to deprive the localized action of its power; or again, the removal of the silicic acid may be stimulated by the use of medicines that encourage excretion. The former method is preferable; for an accumulation of silicic acid in one locality generally calls forth a corresponding deficiency in another. The distribution of the localized silicic acid activity over the whole organism may be brought about for instance, by a sulphur therapy. The reader will perceive why this is so if he will refer to the effects of sulphur in the organism in another part of this book.