The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From our studies here you know that since the 15th century mankind has been living in the Age of Consciousness¹ when it is essential for any individual who wishes to keep pace with evolution to be enlightened about certain facts. Otherwise he cannot possibly find his bearings amid the conditions of social life today. His intercourse with other people and the different relationships developing in life, especially between human beings of different ages, the old with the young and the young with the old, bring him experiences that remain incomprehensible if he cannot grasp what spiritual-scientific knowledge contributes to every aspect of man's existence on this Earth.

We will study in greater detail a fact already well known to us, namely, that the four members of man's being discernible in the ordinary way—physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego—are directly connected with each other during the hours of waking life only. The physical body is closely linked with the etheric body on the one side and, on the other, the astral body and ego are separated during sleep from the former two members.

When we are looking at a human being he stands there before us in his physical body which has received its stamp from the etheric body. It is certainly correct to say this, for everything whereby one human being is revealed to another is due, not to the physical body alone but to the activity of the etheric body or body of formative forces within the physical body. It is therefore the living content of the physical and etheric bodies that reveals one human being to another on Earth. But what is determined in the depths of the ego, and is astir in the astral body, eludes outer observation and even for the individual himself passes into obscurity between the moments of going to sleep and waking.

This division of his being which happens to man at least once a day in the ordinary course is of fundamental significance for his whole life. Our senses and intelligence make it evident that from birth to death his physical body and etheric body undergo evolution.

From what comes to expression in the child, to begin with in his instinctive, imitative life and later in the life unfolding under the authority of his elders—from all this the human being evolves to a stage of greater self-dependence. Thus the different stages of growth, stages in the outer formation of the physical body, in what comes to expression in speaking, in thinking, in whatever is revealed through the physical body—although in reality it is all an expression of the life of soul—in all this a process of evolution is in evidence from birth to death.

The other evolutionary process—that of the ego and astral body between birth and death—does not become manifest in the same way. When a human being descends into life on Earth, many of the forces that were active in him in the spiritual world are still at work within him. During the stage of early growth, during the very obvious process of the child's bodily development, forces which in their full strength and true character work in pre-earthly life on the soul, through the soul and in the spirit of the human being, are still active. They are present in a weakening phase during childhood but they operate in the process of growth, in everything that develops gradually as a bodily expression of the soul. And deeply hidden in the bodily nature there are also corporeal expressions of the soul, for example the elaboration of the brain into the perfected organ of thinking, the elaboration of the vascular system underlying feeling, and so forth.

But these echoes of the forces of the pre-earthly life become progressively weaker and eventually reach their lowest ebb, the point at which, in respect of these pre-earthly forces, the human being comes to a standstill for the rest of his life. True, this lowest point is not reached until the 'twenties of earthly life; but then it is unmistakable. The soul is then affected more strongly by the forces stemming from the developed physical body; the individual is no longer subject to such an extent to the echoings of the pre-earthly life but is now more under the influence of the capacities acquired by the physical body and of what in turn works back upon the soul from the physical body.

But if we were to observe with equal clarity the evolution of the ego and astral body we should reach definite conclusions about this process, just as in the case of the evolution of the physical and the etheric bodies from birth to death. We should say: In childhood the human being has an astral body and an ego in which changes are obvious during the years of his earthly life. We must of course also consider the changes that take place in the spirit and soul of the human being which emerge from the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. If as well as observation of a human being during his waking hours the ego and astral body could be observed from the moment of going to sleep to the moment of waking, two biographies of the individual would be available, both of equal importance in the life as a totality. Indeed the evolution taking place during the life of sleep is actually more important than that connected with the waking life for certain forces in the human being, but observation of the ego and the astral body is beyond the power of ordinary perception.

We will now consider a particularly important factor in the evolution of the ego and the astral body. This factor is due to the rôle played in human life by speaking, by speech in general—not this or that particular language.

The whole man in waking life participates in the act of speaking. The physical body participates in the vibration of the vocal chords, in the activity of the whole speech-apparatus; the etheric body also participates in the process, so too do the astral body and the ego. But by comparison the physical body and the ego do not participate to anything like the same extent in speech activity as a whole. The members essentially involved are the etheric and astral bodies.

The statement that the etheric body is more deeply involved than the physical body in the act of speaking may cause surprise. But after all, man's ordinary senses cannot perceive what goes on in the etheric body, nor does modern science tell him anything. Hence in the ordinary way he perceives only what the physical body is doing in acts of speaking, whereas the far more varied, far more strongly formative activity of the etheric body in acts of speaking—activity which then continues in the astral body—eludes sense-perception as usually understood. But if the rôle of speech is to be understood, the paramount importance of what takes place here in the etheric body and in the astral body must be realized.

Now consider this: because in speaking the main part is played by the etheric and astral bodies, speech has two sides. To begin with, the etheric body in conjunction with the physical body bring about outwardly perceptible, audible speech. But when we speak, something always streams back into our soul. We feel and live with it inwardly. In order to become aware of the content of our soul, however, the person to whom we are speaking is dependent upon the physical sounds. We, as the speaker, are inwardly united in our astral body with what we impart to our speech. But because in sleep the astral body is drawn out of our physical and etheric bodies, we carry something from our speech over with us into sleep, something of vital importance.

It is an actual fact that the element of soul we instil into our words from morning to evening continues to vibrate and pulsate from the moment of going to sleep until the moment of waking. We are unconscious of it but let me assure you that everything spoken during the day echoes on—admittedly in reverse order—during sleep. Not that the words actually sound again as they sound through our mouth during the day; it is rather the undulation of feeling in the words that resounds, the will-impulses that have flowed into them, the gaiety or sadness, the joy or pain expressed and revealed in the flow of the speech.

But these echoes during sleep are not vague or indefinite; what the soul experiences echoes in the very sequences of the sounds in that unconscious state through which a man passes in the ordinary way between going to sleep and waking.

Until the seventh year of life whatever echoes in the child's soul during sleep is to a very great extent dependent upon his human environment. The life of feeling, willing and thinking brought to expression in words by the father, mother and other people in the environment and heard by the child—all this echoes in his soul from the time he goes to sleep until he wakes; his soul is given up to what has been laid into the words by the hearts and souls of those around him. During sleep the thoughts and will-impulses which the child experiences through the speech of older people are, however, connected much more intimately with the actual sounds.

In short, the child's whole being is given over to what he experiences from his environment. This state of things is already less pronounced in the second period of life, from the seventh to the fourteenth year, although it is still undeniably present. At puberty, however, at about the fourteenth year, something very definite begins: what echoes from speech into the sleeping soul tries by its very nature to establish relationship with the spiritual world.

It is a very remarkable process. Until the seventh year of life, during sleep too, the child will still be in full accord with whatever he has heard from those around him; to a certain extent this is also the case from his seventh to his fourteenth year, only during that period he is in closer contact with the actual soul-life of those in his environment, whereas until his seventh year he is concerned more with the external aspect of life. But after the fourteenth year, after the onset of puberty, it begins to be necessary for the soul during sleep to bring the echoes of speech into relation with Beings of the spiritual world. This is a remarkable fact. In everyday life man is not conscious of it but in sleep it becomes necessary for the life of soul to let what is spoken on Earth echo in such a way that the Archangeloi in their world may take pleasure in these echoes of speech.

It may be said with truth that it is necessary for the human being to establish relations with the Archangeloi through the components of speech which remain with him during sleep as echoes of earthly speech. The words spoken during the daytime echo in a remarkable way: the vowel-sounds are inwardly deepened, the consonants achieve the objectivity of mobile forms. This is an actual experience. And souls during sleep would feel unhappy if these echoes did not harmonize with the sounds ringing out from the other side, from the speech of the Archangeloi. There can indeed be harmony between the echoes of speech resounding in man's sleep and the speech of the Archangeloi resounding out of the astral world from every direction of the universe.

In his ego and his astral body the human being develops in such a way that from about the fourteenth year onwards, between going to sleep and waking, he has to cultivate intercourse—if I may so express it—with Angeloi and Archangeloi; during this intercourse it behoves him to establish understanding with these Beings. This is a deep secret of human life.

Now a characteristic of our epoch is that it produces more and more individuals who achieve no such understanding in the sleeping state, who take with them into sleep something from speech which actually hinders their souls from understanding the speech of the Archangeloi, and the Archangeloi find no pleasure in the echoes of speech during the sleeping life of these individuals.

The epoch has begun—one is obliged to use earthly terms in speaking of these things which it is naturally difficult to express in ordinary language—when the Beings of the spiritual world can no longer come to any real understanding with sleeping human souls, when misunderstandings keep occurring between what the Beings of the spiritual Hierarchies say and what echoes in the souls of men during the hours of sleep. Discrepancies, disharmonies creep in.

This is the aspect which in our epoch presents itself from the other side of life. A tormenting condition of misunderstanding, of a complete lack of understanding between human souls and spiritual Beings has insinuated itself into the state of sleep. And the question as to the reason for this condition must weigh heavily upon those who have knowledge today of a fact of spiritual life such as this.

Now the words which we draw from the range of our native language may, while we are learning them in childhood, develop in such a way that they apply to the physical world alone. This has been increasingly the case in the age of materialism. Words are available but these words only express something that is physical. Just consider how things were in earlier times: a human being became so intimate with the language that there were many words which, through their content, transported him into spiritual worlds. It must certainly be admitted that true idealism has become feeble in our time, particularly in those who absorb modern intellectualistic culture.

It makes a great difference whether ideals are or are not embodied in the language used. Today we find that individuals who are supposed to be students certainly have a feeling for words which refer to external, solidly material things but that when it is a matter of rising to the level of pure thoughts reflecting the spiritual, they immediately stop thinking and the threads of their thought are broken. It is precisely in those who are considered well-educated according to modern standards that this most often happens when they are called upon to assimilate the idealistic concepts of pure thinking. The words seem to be no more than semblance. It is indeed a fact that in our days children grow up with a language whose words have no wings to carry them away from earthly conditions.

In the first phase of life, until the seventh year, the child is still able, during sleep, to experience the spiritual through the echoes of the speech emanating from his human environment. If materialism causes this environment to repudiate the spiritual, it is repudiating itself for it consists of both soul and Spirit. But during the first phase of life the human being is still able during sleep to experience the spiritual.

This continues during the second phase of life, from the seventh to the fourteenth year. But if eventually there is no longer any idealistic, spiritual significance in the words used around the young human being—as may well happen in this materialistic age when religious ideas too have lost their strong spiritual influence upon the souls of men—then, after the fourteenth year, with the onset of puberty the young person enters a phase of the life of soul which chains him during sleep to the physical. The soul is not released from the physical during sleep. The echoes of the words coerce the soul and confine it to the physical. The resonance of the mineral world vibrates from all directions into what the human being experiences between going to sleep and waking; so too does resonance of the physical content of the plant world. This brings discord into the echoes of speech; the soul cannot then elaborate what the genius of speech otherwise imparts to the language and which can bring about understanding between the human soul and the Beings of the higher Hierarchies.

And then a peculiar condition sets in. The soul experiences something but cannot express it, because it is not experienced consciously. What the soul experiences may be characterized approximately in the following way.—After the age of puberty, when the human being passes in sleep into the spiritual world, the world of the Archangeloi opens out before him; he senses it but no threads of thought pass from that world into his soul, or from his soul into that world. And on waking he comes back into the physical body having suffered this tragic deprivation.

Since the last third of the 19th century this state of things has been present for a large part of humanity. And in the unconscious, behind that of which man is conscious, there lies in many souls today something that causes them to say unconsciously to themselves on waking: We have been born into a world which does not allow us to enter rightly during sleep into spiritual existence.—Souls who experience this condition may well say: As children we have been received into a human world which has denied us spiritual reality in the words that are used. All this is astir in the feelings with which in many ways nowadays, youth faces the old. This is the spiritual aspect of the feelings manifesting through the Youth Movement.

What is the attitude of the young human being to the old today? He cannot express it because as a result of what he inherits in the course of his education, his consciousness is repressed rather than set free by those who are old. He cannot express it, but he feels it. In the dim obscurity of his life of soul he feels: As a child I have to accommodate myself to what has been handed over to me by older generations. I have to be educated by these older generations, yet they make it impossible for me to come to an understanding with the spiritual world when this is necessary. To the same extent as materialism increases in every sphere of life—in the spheres of knowledge, of art and of religion—to that extent the young will be unable to understand the old, because they confront the old with the feeling that the latter have denied them idealism in speech and the intimation in words that points to a spiritual life. The materialism of civilization is the cause of the cleavage between the young and the old. And the real source of the lack of understanding lies in the fact that the corruption of speech by materialism brings about an unhealthy condition of the soul-life of young people during sleep.

Certain phenomena of modern culture can never be understood today if the spiritual side of life is ignored, for we are living in the epoch of consciousness and must therefore be alive to the spirit that moulds the human being and promotes his development. Understanding between youth and age will not be possible until the words in our languages again acquire the wings they have lost, the wings which raise the words out of the sphere of crass materiality into the world of conscious ideals.

In the year 1859 the people of Middle Europe were commemorating the centenary of Schiller's birth. In a certain sense, however, it was the very year of the death of true idealism. And what the young today see in Schiller they often disdain because what is taught them is not the true Schiller but only a superficial hotch-potch of words; it does not present what actually lived in Schiller, because the words no longer have the wings which in his days lifted men into the realm of ideals. And when Schiller is introduced to youth today with words that bear the current prosaic, philistine meanings, this is far more likely to become a burden in the soul than a liberating force.

What the soul needs cannot be restored to it in any external way nor by the nebulous, so-called idealisms which are only shams, cropping up here and there out of current materialism—maybe with good intentions but springing fundamentally from false thinking. The soul can be given what it needs only if, through genuine spiritual knowledge, vitality is restored to language and it is able once again to lead to the genius of speech.

Language as it is today does not really amount to more than a medium of understanding on the physical plane. As regards declamation and recitation we have even come to the point where the actual prose-content is considered all-important. We find that speech is being divested of everything that promotes descriptive power, rhythm, measure, melody, dramatic effect—that is to say, everything that leads it back into the realm of the soul, where the Imaginative element lifts it into the spiritual world. And so we find that in language a further concession has been made to materialism.

Language as it exists today among all civilized peoples, fetters the soul during sleep to the purely physical murmurings of the mineral world, to the rustlings of the purely physical content of the plant world, and no longer enables the clear speech of the Angeloi and the resounding trumpet-tones of the world of the Archangeloi, with their deep significance, to be audible to the soul.

From the age of puberty onwards the human being today ought to bring with him into sleep something from speech that has prepared his brain during waking hours in such a way that in his everyday life he understands the ideal content of what is expressed by the words. He ought to be able to bring with him—for the speech of the Archangeloi can be heard by his soul during the hours of sleep—something that enables his circulating blood to experience, to some degree at least, the spiritual depths of cosmic happenings. And if today he cannot acquire spiritual knowledge, if our school-education is not spiritually deepened, he brings with him instead the rumbling sounds of the physical mineral world; he also brings with him in his blood the rustling, thudding sounds of the physical part of the plant world.

As a result, for the purposes of conventional speech he is dependent upon this mineralized brain, made disharmonious by sleep, and upon the blood-system with the sounds of hissing and rustling surging through it, and thus he is confined through speech to life in the earthly sphere alone, whereas in other circumstances the words could have borne him above merely earthly experience to experience in a higher realm.

How could individuals who have received the materialistic education of today still affirm from the depths of their souls: ‘Thought is my boundless realm and my winged instrument is the word?’² For men of culture today thought is by no means a ‘boundless realm’ but a strictly circumscribed realm, embracing only the material objects to be seen in the environment. And the word is no ‘winged instrument’ but an instrument by means of which we stammer from mouth to ear utterances of a vague soul-life, but in such a way that there is little super-sensible significance in what is said. And whereas through a spiritual world-conception speech could be an ocean into which a man's inner being sinks and which could then lift his soul to greater and greater heights, it becomes instead the means of chaining him to the Earth, chaining him to rigidly limited conditions of earthly existence.

Today this state of things takes effect in the destiny of the whole human race. We see how modern civilization is based upon the differences among men all over the Earth as expressed in their languages. Attempts are made to create new cultural divisions according to language. But because of what language has become it is evident at once that these cultural divisions and ideal are concerned with purely material life, that they form as it were the covering spread in the guise of civilization over the peoples of the Earth, in order to shut them off from the spiritual world. Everywhere today we see this wall of materialism being built around man's life of soul, and it is this that inculcates the materialism of mental attitudes, of thinking and of feeling, into external life as well. It is this that gradually causes man to forget that within the human race conditions are determined from the super-sensible spheres, but when humanity is divided into nations, races and so forth, men are more and more strongly imbued with a blind belief that they must persist in a purely materialistic existence.

And so we see entering into earthly life in the form of civilization and culture, the element of materialism which has laid hold of the spheres of knowledge, of art, of religion. In the national groups that have come into being on the Earth we can recognize how the forces from the cosmic expanse which once worked creatively and formatively in life on Earth, no longer do so; the forces now in Operation issue from the depths of the Earth itself. We see man, as a member of a nation or people too, uniting more and more closely with the purely material side of earthly existence.

If people could resolve to pay attention to what in many ways sounds paradoxical in our times, namely that the human ego and astral body also have a biography, the individual phases of which become manifest from the time of going to sleep until the time of waking, just as the external physical life in its evolution from birth to death becomes manifest during waking hours, they would perceive the source of a great deal in our modern civilization that must not be allowed to continue ! But if we stop short at the findings of purely external sense-observation, we shall fail to perceive the most important, indeed the all-important things that must be done in order to change the present decline into an ascent leading into the future.

If this view of life is to have practical effects, a spiritual knowledge of man's existence is essential, and for this the world-view of Spiritual Science is necessary. This world-view must therefore permeate the whole of education, in such a way that instead of acquiring a store of words from which all wings have been removed, the child absorbs and is guided by the spirit and receives, together with the words, the power that raises him into the spiritual worlds in which man's being is rooted. In physical life we can deny the spirit. With the spiritual part of our being which must lay aside the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, we cannot deny the spirit. And if from the physical side of existence we repudiate the spirit, then we wake up each morning as grown men who no longer understand life; and this lack of understanding is imparted to all our thinking, feeling and willing. The coming generation is growing up in such a way that its members inevitably feel that the heritage transmitted by their forefathers is deserving of reproach because this heritage thrusts them into an abyss where they cannot be materialistic but where they needs must be spiritual when living in the ego and astral body.

The older languages of mankind were so constituted that their inner content could be taken into the spiritual world and lead to understanding with the spiritual Beings with whom man needs must associate when he is free of the body. The evolution of language to its present condition has reached a point where, when man should rightly associate with spiritual Beings, he inevitably remains spiritually deaf and dumb and is able to absorb only that which drags him down, namely, the physical element of the mineral and plant kingdoms.

And so in order to understand life today—if I may use trivial words—we must look behind the scenes of this life. But that is possible only through genuine Spiritual Science.

• 1. Or, the Age of the Consciousness Soul, sometimes ‘Spiritual Soul’.
• 2. The saying of ‘Poetry’ from Schiller's lyrical play, ‘Homage to the Arts.’

Notes from the lecture

Last year, I had the pleasure of giving a few lectures here on the subject of theosophy, and it gives me great satisfaction that, during my travels through Rome this spring, I am able to give three lectures here with the permission of our esteemed Princess. These three lectures are intended to shed light on what is called in the theosophical sense “spiritual knowledge of the world”, from a somewhat more inward perspective than was the case in last year's introductory course, and, I believe, rightly so.

Theosophy, or, as it could also be called, “spiritual science”, is something that is still widely misunderstood in our time from various sides, especially from those who are based on a particular religious belief. Now, spiritual science is in no way opposed to this or that religious belief. In relation to religions, it can only have the sole and exclusive task of leading to a deeper understanding of religious truths. So that one may well say: Not the slightest thing can be taken away from anyone in the world in the way of their religious convictions through spiritual scientific knowledge. It is so often misunderstood that spiritual science is fundamentally based on a completely different ground than any religious creed. It is based on purely spiritual science.

This brings us to another form of resistance that is often encountered by spiritual science today, and which is expressed in the claim that it is unscientific, fantastic and dreamy. However, anyone who has studied the spiritual scientific movement of the present day will soon realize that spiritual science touches on a completely different field from that of external science. While the latter deals with the things of the outer, sensual world, which can be grasped with the physical senses and the mind, it is the task of spiritual science to explore the realm of the spirit that lies behind the sensual world and is closed to our normal consciousness. The way of thinking, the ideas and concepts with which the exact science approaches the world of the senses and spiritual science approaches the spiritual world are exactly the same. There are only two reasons why spiritual science differs in principle from the other sciences. Firstly, because it is comprehensible to every human soul in that it considers things that every human heart must actually ask about at every hour of the day. The subjects of spiritual science are universally human, and there is hardly a question in the human soul to which spiritual science has no answer. In a thousand and one cases, people need the comfort that spiritual science has to offer them, and they need the hope and confidence that spiritual science gives them for this life and for the future.

The other reason is that, while the other sciences require the 'acquisition of prerequisites, spiritual science knows how to speak to everyone in a way that is understandable if they just make an effort to understand its language. And when it is said so often that it is difficult to understand, it is only because people approach it with prejudices and self-made obstacles. The difficulty lies not in its language, but in our way of thinking.

These three lectures will now be given: today on the nature of man himself, tomorrow on the nature of the higher worlds and their connection with ours, and the day after tomorrow on the course of human evolution and on the intervention of the high great personalities who are involved in our spiritual life.

The essence of man can only be grasped if one is able to grasp it from the spirit. Just as the human being is built from the sensual world in terms of his outer, bodily form, so he is formed and built up as a spiritual and soul being from the supersensible world. Thus, only a science that looks to the regions of the spiritual world can penetrate to the true nature of man, and we must agree from the outset on how to arrive at such knowledge of higher worlds.

This can only be briefly hinted at here as an introduction. With the senses and mind that man relies on for his external life, we never really come close to the spiritual world, no closer than a blind person comes close to light and color. But just as a world of light and color breaks into the soul of a person who was born blind and has been successfully operated on, it is also possible for the spiritual organ of perception, the spiritual senses, to open and for the person to experience the great moment that, on a higher level, means the same as the moment just characterized for the blind person. It is possible that soul and spiritual powers, which lie dormant in the ordinary consciousness, are awakened and that spiritual powers, which represent a spiritual eye or a spiritual ear, are brought out. At the moment of awakening of the higher senses, a world of spiritual facts and spiritual entities breaks into our soul, just as light and color appear to the newly sighted man born blind. We call such people, who are able to see the spiritual worlds and to explain the reasons for our existence from them, “awakened” or “initiated” people. They can then communicate to others what they have recognized, and if they have understood their task aright, they will express it in such a way that everyone's reason and intellect can understand it. For an understanding of spiritual science or theosophy does not itself involve spiritual research, but only an experience of it.

It will be briefly indicated how these higher abilities are acquired in man. One has first to learn to artificially induce a certain moment that occurs naturally every day. It is the moment of falling asleep, when man passes into a special state of consciousness. What happens at the moment of falling asleep? We notice how all our passions, desires and perceptions, which flood up and down in us throughout the day, gradually come to silence, external impressions cease and sleep sets in for normal people. Now we know nothing more about ourselves and perceive nothing more of the environment. So in this moment, when we separate ourselves from the external world, unconsciousness sets in. Now, anyone who wants to gradually come to initiation, that is, to be initiated into the higher mysteries, must learn to artificially induce this moment of the disappearance of external impressions. He must be able to evoke a state within himself that is the same as the lack of impressions when sleeping, where neither color nor warmth nor sound is perceived by the soul and it feels neither suffering nor joy about anything in the external world.

But the disciple must not only be able to induce this state completely consciously, but he must also be just as conscious as he is during ordinary daily life, even though his soul is empty of all external impressions. Into this emptiness of soul he must now fill certain ideas and feelings, which do not come from outside, but are awakened within the soul itself. Through strong will and out of its own power, the soul must be able to evoke certain feelings, sensations, and volitional impulses that must be stronger than anything that can come from outside. This state is that of meditation. If the meditant were to develop only these two abilities within himself, he would soon experience something internally like an earthquake-like tremor; to avoid this, he must learn to maintain the greatest calmness of soul. He must be able to experience the strong inner impulses during meditation with a soul as smooth as the sea in complete calm.

These are the three conditions for the person to be initiated: firstly, emptiness of the soul from all external impressions; secondly, richness of the soul in inner perceptions; thirdly, complete calmness of the soul. Those who have the stamina to train themselves in this way will experience a great, powerful moment, perhaps after just a few months, perhaps only after years. The spiritual senses will open to him and he will exclaim: Oh, there is something quite different in our world than I have known so far. Until now I only saw what my mind could combine, but now I see that there are spiritual facts and spiritual beings in the same world and that there are worlds that can be described as hidden worlds.

From this sublime moment on, the disciple becomes a researcher in the spiritual worlds and is then able to recognize for himself what is to be outlined here with regard to the nature of man. Today we will speak of the following states and experiences of the soul, which must interest everyone deeply and which we can describe as the state between waking and sleeping and what is called life and death. We have already hinted at the external state of waking and sleeping and now we want to go into the inner state in more detail. It would be absurd if we, with our ordinary minds, were to try to present it as logical that the actual inner being of a person disappears when they fall asleep, as soon as external impressions cease, and then, so to speak, rises again in the morning. This cannot be the case, and only someone who wanted to indulge in absurd ideas could believe that the inner man perishes in the evening and rises again in the morning.

But is that the inner, real man, what we see with our physical eyes lying in bed as a sleeping body? No one would want to claim that. Now, the one who follows the transition from waking to sleeping with ordinary consciousness can, of course, notice nothing other than that the physical body gradually enters into a motionless state. But the one who has developed his spiritual eye through the means just characterized perceives how the inner, spiritual, actual human being rises out of the physical body. Just as the outer sight of the one falling asleep is different for the seer than for the normal person, who is only able to perceive with the physical eye, so too is the state of sleep itself fundamentally different for the two. While the man without clairvoyance falls into unconsciousness, the seer remains conscious when falling asleep, for he has sensory organs developed in his soul body, which rises from the resting physical, for perceiving the spiritual world.

We will now try to characterize this spiritual world, in which the person who has become clairvoyant rises, in brief lines. The perceptions he has are initially limited to the time when his physical body is asleep. However, with constant practice, he will be able to switch off the physical senses at any time of the day, as soon as he wants, and see spiritually without leaving his body. A big difference is immediately noticeable when we look at this bouquet of roses with seer's eyes, for example. Suddenly we can no longer say: the bouquet of roses is in front of me, I am here and it is there, as we can say in our normal waking state. In the spiritual world, the difference in space, the here and there, completely loses its meaning, and we are no longer in front of the bouquet of roses with our consciousness, but inside it. In the spiritual world, the spiritual consciousness feels itself in the entity, in the fact; the clairvoyant person pours himself out into the object he perceives. His inner being, as it were, penetrates the skin of our physical body and becomes one with all that he sees around him in the spiritual world. What is it that pours out into the environment at night and what feels tied up during the day within the boundaries of the physical body? It is what we summarize in the little word “I”, of which the person in normal daytime consciousness says: It lives in my body. The clairvoyant consciousness feels this “I” poured out into the entire outer world that it can reach. We may ask: Where is it then? — There is only one answer to this: Fundamentally, the seer's I is everywhere it perceives.

This path into the spiritual world is the same as that taken by everyone who is not clairvoyant when they fall asleep, except that they are unconscious when they do so. Thus each of us lives alternately, while awake, in the physical body, our microcosm constrained, and asleep, expanded into the vastness and united with the great world around us, the macrocosm.

Why, we might ask, must we fall into unconsciousness? The reason for this is that today's human being is not yet mature enough to do so, and his ego could not bear to consciously flow out into the universe. We can get a rough idea of the process by using a visual image: let us imagine a large pool of water into which we drop a small drop of a colored liquid. We see how the drop dissolves in the surrounding water and becomes less and less visible as it spreads. The human being experiences something similar in his ego, which, like a droplet, has to expand into the whole spiritual world. Today's human being could not bear to dissolve consciously in this way and must pay for this admission to his spiritual home with unconsciousness. What would happen to him if he were to expand into the spiritual world in full consciousness without occult preparation? We can best visualize this if we think of the ego as having only as much strength as is needed for limited perception on the physical plane. By extending itself beyond the bodily limits, it loses strength, like the drop loses consistency, and its perceptions would fade more and more the more it extends, until it would finally have the horrible feeling of floating over a bottomless abyss in deepest darkness. We have to think of the ego not only as a force, but also as a feeling and sensing being, and can therefore form a vague idea of the impression of being lost in nothingness. Therefore, one of the most important preparations for anyone who wants to penetrate to the clear-sighted consciousness is to acquire fearlessness. It is an essential part of the spiritual researcher's training that many opportunities be brought about for him to test his equanimity and steadfastness. A man who has not had thousands upon thousands of opportunities to face those events that would otherwise terrify and horrify him, and to say with a calm soul: “I am facing the most terrible danger, but I know that my situation will not be made any safer by my fear, but it will by taking bold action,” is not yet sufficiently prepared. In the old mysteries, of course, it happened that the person to be initiated was consciously led into the macrocosm, even if his ego did not yet have full strength, but the initiator always had to be with him in order to be able to help him in time. This kind of clairvoyance, as achieved in the old secret schools of Europe, is called ecstasy. For our present stage of development this method is no longer suitable, and in its place another has come which we shall now speak of. It is the Rosicrucian method.

As has just been said, in the old mysteries the disciple was under the supervision of his teacher, who had to prevent the emerging self from completely dissolving and falling into unconsciousness. This ecstatic absorption was achieved by the strictly regulated cultivation of certain feelings, which one also has in everyday life. The ancient method was to link these feelings to those that people still have today, albeit to a much lesser extent, when the seasons change. When, for example, the pupil stepped out into the fresh spring landscape and saw the young grass and the first flowers sprouting from the melting snow, when he saw the resurrection from hibernation all around him, when he felt the and the dry, leafless trees sprouted new buds under the awakening touch of the warm sunlight, then he had to feel this resurrecting life within himself and surrender to it with all his soul in deepest meditation.

Through constant repetition, he was then able to intensify this feeling to an unimaginable degree. You must, the initiator told him, be able to ignite this joy and this confidence and this zest for life in you with such power and such vibrancy that the earth itself would feel it if it had consciousness.

Likewise, the student had to learn to feel the melancholy in autumn, he had to let the dying off all around him take effect on him, he had to feel how forests and meadows lose their leafy decorations and life withdraws into the lap of the earth. With her, he had to be able to grieve for her children. Likewise, he had to experience the other seasons and especially the winter and summer solstice within himself.

This may appear to be only hidden everyday life, and yet it is not so, for the esotericist of ancient and modern times has to create these feelings in complete silence of soul, excluding all external impressions in his deepest inner being. Those who had learned to feel in this way experienced after prolonged practice - and this is still the case today - what was called in the ancient mysteries: The vision of the sun at midnight. The earth became transparent and through the fading physical form one saw the spiritual that lay beneath it; instead of the physical sun, one beheld the great spiritual sun, that primal powerful entity of which the physical sun was only the material body.

At this overwhelming sight, however, the disciple's ego ran the risk of sinking into unconsciousness, and his guru, his teacher, had to be ready to help him. Today, the guru would no longer be able to exert power over the disciple as he did back then, because the relationship between teacher and disciple has changed and, despite all good intentions and willing submission, today's human nature would no longer be able to suppress the rebellious forces within it, despite all good intentions and willing submission, despite all good intentions and willing submission.

Besides the path of ecstasy, there was also the so-called mystical path to initiation. This consisted of the meditant living more and more into his own inner being. He then experienced within himself what the ecstatic experienced on the outside. But this path also had its great dangers. While the ecstatic person was threatened by the powerlessness of the dissolving ego, the mystic's ego contracted into itself to unimagined strength, and selfishness swelled within him to monstrous proportions. “I want to be everything, I want to have everything” was the irrepressible desire that possessed the ego.

How did one achieve this immersion in oneself? Let us think of waking up. What happens then? The self, which was widely extended in the macrocosm, contracts and sinks into the physical shells. If it were not for the outside world, which sets a limit to the shrinking with its impressions, one would actually descend into one's own inner self. So what is there to learn? One has to learn to wake up without letting external impressions affect one. As a result, the ego can concentrate unhindered in the innermost part of the human being. The experiences that it then has in the face of egoistic desires that increase without limit are what all mystics call “temptation”. In order not to succumb to this danger, virtue and love, humility and devotion must therefore be developed to a high degree beforehand. Thus armed, the meditant can calmly enter this path. With the great mystics, the ego was no longer able to want at all; they were no longer able to be themselves at all, they were able to surrender themselves unreservedly to Christ and to let him think, feel, act and want within them. Paul therefore says: It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.

'In other ancient mysteries, for example the Egyptian ones, we find the same method. However, the guru was always present at the initiation to protect the aspirant from the egoistic forces from outside.

The changed conditions of our present epoch make a new path necessary. Man has become more independent and must be offered the necessary means to enter the path to the inner and higher worlds without direct intervention by the teacher. The Rose Cross initiation, as it is practiced today, combines both methods, and this training, which leads to clairvoyance in the spiritual worlds, eliminates the aforementioned dangers to which the old ecstatic and mystic was exposed.

Tomorrow we will go into this in more detail and describe how the Rosicrucian disciple builds spiritual organs of perception into his soul body for exploring the spiritual foundations of the universe.

Last Saturday, we’ve looked into remote worlds. Today, we would also like to immerse ourselves a little into spiritual worlds, yet in a slightly different way. When I call lectures, like the ones I am giving today and gave last week, suitable for those who have progressed, what I mean is not so much progress in intellectual comprehension. I refer to a different kind of understanding that we gain by immersing ourselves more and more into the spiritual worlds, and developing habitual feelings and emotions that will enable us to believe that things, like those we shall talk about today, exist in the world around us.

The occupation with Theosophy brings the human being to a point where he will gain a feeling for the spiritual world. Spiritual worlds and spiritual facts are around us, as was often emphasized. By following our path through the world, we are not only walking through physical air, but we are constantly also walking through spiritual beings and facts. The first things that someone ascends to in whom the gift of clairvoyance slowly dawns, are those spiritual worlds that are somehow connected to tangible things—to what a human being is able to perceive with his ordinary senses. Everything that the senses perceive is related to the spiritual worlds. We know that underlying our whole animal world, as it physically exists, is an array of animal group-souls. These live on the astral plane, and one who obtains clairvoyance on the astral plane, will meet these group-souls there as self-contained personalities, just like the human being here on the physical plane meets physical personalities. They really are distinct personalities. Simply said, one can meet group-souls on the astral plane, just like people here. However, in some ways, those group-souls are different from human beings. As strange as it may sound, they are wiser than human beings; their deeds are the wise arrangements of animal burrows and also include everything related to the necessities of animal life.

A further type of being the clairvoyant meets on the Devachan plane is connected to plants. The plant-Egos are on the Devachan plane. And in the higher areas of Devachan, that we call Arupa,¹ are the group-Egos of the minerals. For all these entities there are connections, as it were, on the physical plane. The astral and Devachan plane are all around us, as are all the group-Egos, who have tangible revelations and manifestations in the physical world also.

Someone who, as a seer, gets to know these worlds—the Devachan and the Arupa—also gets to know other quite different entities whose physicality is not so openly expressed in the physical world, but they also intervene in fate in a certain way, even if not as tangibly as the others. On the astral plane we find very strange-seeming beings. They reveal themselves initially only through their influences—we only perceive their effects. Many such beings are teeming around where, for example, somnambulism occurs in mediumistic personalities, in all states of diminished consciousness, and especially during quite ordinary full-moon nights. But we only perceive their effects. It is a strange feeling to observe such beings clairvoyantly. To use a rough comparison, it seems as if they would stretch out their hands from far away to here, as if you were in Cannstatt² and had such long hands that you could work with them in Stuttgart. Then you would see those hands here in Stuttgart. You would see the effect of their work, but if you wanted to see the people themselves, you would have to go to Cannstatt.

Of course, no such physical beings exist, but there are astral beings like that. We discover their effects here on Earth. But if we wish to get to know them as self-contained personalities, then we have to visit them in their proper home which is the Moon. There on the Moon, these beings even possess a corporeality, albeit such a very fine one that would not be visible even under a microscope. They do not become very tall, but they are well known to the clairvoyant. They will not get taller than, say, a 7-year-old child. A peculiarity of them is that they possess a terribly roaring voice. Their roars are not individual ones, but an expression of the climatic conditions on the Moon. Depending on whether it is a full Moon or a new Moon, the Moon-beings either roar or keep silent as they extend their activities into the Earth. As said, it is precisely the human being who is dependent on these beings. Especially for human life, these beings are of great importance. One learns to know their effects by practising a little of what is called occult anatomy.³ We have often looked at the human being—today we want to examine him by probing into his juices.

There are three juices that we wish to focus on today. The first one is the chyle, or nutritive juice. Food gets from the stomach into the digestive tract and then is absorbed through the intestinal walls by the human organism.

A second juice flows through the lymphatic vessels, that criss-cross the whole body. This juice has a similarity to the white blood corpuscles in the blood. In a way, the lymphatic vessels accompany the blood vessels; they are partly destined to pick up the chyme and lead it to where it can enter into the blood. The protein substances and fats are prepared in the lymph vessels for passing into the blood. Substances that are being absorbed directly by the blood do not pass through the lymph vessels first. Therefore we have a transitional juice, in between the chyle and the blood, flowing through our body.

The third juice is the blood itself, which streams through the blood vessels and is consistently renewed by the breathing process, by provision of oxygen, and so on. These juices represent three states of liquids that a human being contains. Chyle is sort of the rawest liquid, the lymph is finer, and the blood is the most refined human liquid.

Now you are aware that the blood is the outer material expression of the Ego, that the Ego, so to speak, lives and pulsates in the blood. When the blood runs through the body, it is not only the material matter, but also the Ego that runs through all parts of the body. Of the three juices, the blood is the only one that is so intimately connected with one’s own spiritual nature. Man is most likely to become master of his blood. Today, only very few are so far advanced that their Ego has become master of their blood, but man will gain more and more influence over it.

The Ego has less influence over the lymph. Spirit also pulsates through the lymph. Precisely with the lymph, you have a juice in which the beings, described earlier as Moon-beings, exert their influences. The lymph is pulsating up and down within you, and within it the effect of the Moon-beings is pulsating within your body. There you can see what you have locked in your body.

Another type of being, that also exerts an influence on the lymph, has its home on Mars. The Mars beings, as they can be perceived by clairvoyance, are very peculiar beings as well. They have a certain type of speech, very soft speech, that easily and supplely expresses what these beings wish to express. When you come across such Martian beings, they appear to have an expression of their inner being, of their soul, on their face. A malicious Mars being will have a mean facial expression. But when the Mars being is a good one, it will carry the expression of that goodness as beauty on its face. Their soul being is visible at the surface of their corporeality.

These are beings a clairvoyant meets when advancing to Moon and Mars. He will learn to know their deeds by way of assessing the composition of the lymph and by gauging whether the speed of its flow is faster or slower. This is because underneath each soul experience, the lymph has a different kind of its own nature. This temperament, or character, is associated with the composition of the lymph. Only someone who gets acquainted with these Mars- and Moon-beings will be able to realise, through the spiritual foundation of the lymph, what really is happening within a human being.

In the same region where the group-souls of plants reside, in Devachan, other beings are found by the clairvoyant, beings that also exert influence on the Earth and on whom the fate of mankind depends. Their real home is on Venus, where they can be found in the Devachan area. Their effects and deeds are expressed by deeply affecting the chyle. Whether you eat one thing or another determines whether good or bad entities from Venus will gain influence on you. There are beings that are good, gentle and mild who have developed to a high degree a religiousness like that which appears in Christianity here on Earth. But there are also beings of bad character, predatory beings who destroy everything. Between those two radical extremes, beings at all possible stages are present on Venus, expressing their activities in the human digestive juice.

Now you can imagine how another heavenly body and its beings play into the human body and into the whole human existence. Remember how humanity is distributed all over the Earth. People live in a region where certain foods are grown, elsewhere completely different foods are grown. Depending on what food a person consumes, certain beings will assert themselves in that person. This is the reason for the diversity of human character. A clairvoyant sees quite different influences from these beings in people who eat different things than others do. Now you can comprehend why, from a spiritual viewpoint that pays attention to human nature, value is placed on eating certain foods. Any recommendation made by occultists, in regard to food products, has been researched in relation to those beings. That which occultism is able to offer in regard to practical life depends upon such complicated issues.

There are further beings that also exert their strange effects on our Earth, however, they are not as hands-on as the group-souls. These are entities that the clairvoyant sees when ascending to the Saturn existence. Their workings can be found in the higher Devachan and have a deeply intervening influence on human beings. With this we enter a chapter where we are no longer concerned with the juices, but with much more subtle things. To a clairvoyant investigating them, those beings will appear to be very strange in themselves, because they are endowed with a magnificent power of invention. They really are in every moment of their lives, inventors. However, they do not need to think about their inventions. They look, and by looking at things the thoughts appear to them that things should be different, and they immediately remodel them. Thus, they are beings that are engaged in continuous revolutionary activity. Everything they see will be changed by them at once in the most inspired way. Their sensory perception and spiritual invention are instantaneous. They do not want to have anything to do with thinking, logic, and such things. They are reformers and revolutionaries as far as the sense-impression is concerned, where they change everything immediately.

These beings also exert their influence on our Earth. They creep into our inner being through our sensory perceptions. The spiritual effects of those Saturn entities creep into a human being with everything he perceives through his senses—with colour, sound, smell, taste, and feelings of warmth. They walk through the world and exert their influence in abundance on whatever you perceive with your senses. How dry and sober, indeed, how ridiculous seems what an ordinary anatomist examines materialistically! Because with a flash of lightning, the effects of those beings are penetrating the eye. It is not unimportant to know such things for practical life. Actually, a person who doesn’t know this, doesn’t know the most important thing about life. The worst—and under certain circumstances also the best because they are the strongest—are the influences of the Saturn beings in so far as they make themselves known through the sense of smell.

Through the smells, their influences are continuously penetrating us. There are smells through which downright infernal effects of these beings penetrate into us. If a human being knows such things, he gains an understanding of what he is doing to his fellow human beings when he forces them to breathe in all sorts of horrible perfumes. For example, through Patchouli, he gives the saturnalian spirits of the worst kind access to humans. Influencing his fellow beings through smells belongs to the worst kinds of black magic.

I could tell you about long periods of history where intrigues were played at certain Courts by people, knowledgeable about the effects, who used scents for the purposes of gaining influence and power. For long periods of time, intriguers existed who more or less consciously ruled in this way. Such magic tools have often played an important role in history. An example from more recent history might be of interest: A Minister at a small European Court wrote his memoirs about his time there.⁴ He did not know anything about all these things, but in his naive way, he tells very nicely how such things played out at a certain small Court, at which at the time a sensational catastrophe had happened. There was a female personality, who understood all the arts of influencing people through scents. When the minister appeared before the Queen⁵ in question, all sorts of perfumes would waft towards him, and so he knew he had to leave because she understood something about the use of scents. Through this experience, he realised that a game was being played. He didn’t know about occultism. Whoever reads such chapters as an occultist looks deeply into this and sees how human beings are influenced.

You may now want to think a bit about how occultism is related to true knowledge of reality. People will have to shine a light more and more often from an occult perspective onto the immediate human life. It would be bad for humanity if such a pseudoscience continued to be practised, which attempts to find the truth by way of cutting and slicing. Only the most distorted truth can be found through anatomy. Precisely such knowledge will never be of practical value and, unless it is arrested by spiritual insights, will bring disaster to mankind. Currently, we are standing in a high tide of materialism. In legislation, it sneaks in everywhere and has enormous effects. Church and religion are intolerant like never before. How intolerant is the materialistic medicine today! They are not going to burn their opponents, but they will do something different. They want to save themselves from the bad reputation that burning would bring. Therefore, they make sure that people are unable to do things for which they would have been burned in the past. Today, the adversaries are not even able to sin. Burning was certainly something terrible, but before that at least people were able to do what they were burned for!

People don’t understand this because they do not have the attention span to follow one train of thought to the next. It is important for people to once again obtain healthy thinking through spiritual knowledge. Here is another example: I told you that fat and proteins go through the lymph vessels and that sugar goes directly into the blood. The ego, as it lives in our time, is the carrier of the pure power of deduction, of egoism, because in our European culture it focuses primarily solely on utility. Whoever can observe life will be able to derive from this the large role that sugar plays in the life of a human being. Precisely where egoism is most active, namely in its sophisticated forms—where it appears as scientific criticism that occurs purely rationally—you will also see, everywhere, in a mysterious relationship, diabetes! But you should not think that the individual who gets diabetes should be looked at from this perspective. The individual doesn’t really live as an individual. And you should understand that you cannot simply help an individual. Imagine a person who lives in a marshy area; he can only become healthy once he leaves the marshy area. One must take into account that the human being lives within his environment.

This is why, above all, we must realise that we have to become selfless because Theosophy is there for all humanity. It is very important to understand this thoroughly. Only when more and more people decide to devote their efforts to the whole of humanity, will there be an atmosphere in which the individual will be set free. If an individual innocently becomes diabetic, this is not an instance of the general knowledge that has been correctly presented by Theosophy. Diabetes is connected with the increased prevalence of egoism.

You can cast a probing glance across two different regions of Europe. Look towards Russia and the farmers, where the Ego-feeling exists only in germinal form—and look to England, where a strong Ego-feeling holds sway. This is not meant to be a criticism. It is only meant to establish facts. And now have a look at the sugar consumption; how much more sugar is consumed in England than in Russia. Now, one or another can say, “So, what should we do? Do we have to recommend to someone to eat less sugar, because it is the right thing to do, and so that he becomes selfless?” The truth is not that convenient. Man would like it best to have firm rules for every situation—a kind of fixed marching route. There are people who, due to their psychic and spiritual constitution, tend to lose themselves easily in a pious form of devotion. This is something good. It helps them reach the highest bliss of knowledge. But this must have a counter pole—such people need to eat a lot of sugar. So that they stand firm on Earth, one has to give them lots of sugar. In contrast, there are others who are always out to assert themselves; they are the opposite of a devotional nature. To those, one could recommend to practise asceticism when it comes to sugar consumption. Thus we can see that we have to gain from Theosophy the ability to take all sides into consideration, and not rashly judge something based on an abstraction.

From today’s explanations, once again you have learned about other kinds of beings who are intimately connected with our lives. You may feel a bit timid about all these worlds we have discussed today. Perhaps you think it would be better not to know anything about them. But consider how not knowing would be like the ostrich hiding his head in the sand, because these things exist! And because you will never be able to free yourself by closing your eyes, but only through getting to know things. If you arrange your life in such a way that, starting from the I, you gain more and more control of your bodies, then you will drive all these beings out of your lives. Realisation and truth are the means to becoming free, and it is true, what is stated in a religious scripture: “You will realise the truth⁶ and the truth will set you free.”

• 1. The Arupa mental plane: the upper or higher spiritual world.
• 2. Bad Cannstatt - nowadays a municipal district of Stuttgart.
• 3. Refer to An Occult Physiology, (Prague) 1911, GA 128.
• 4. Presented in more detail in The Influence of Spiritual Beings upon Man, GA 102, Lecture 1.
• 5. Draga Maschin, Queen of Serbia, was killed together with her husband, Alexander I, in 1903.
• 6. The Gospel of John, 8:32.

As you know, when the human being goes through the portal of death, he first lays aside his physical body; then he is in possession of what we call the ego. Besides this he has his astral body, and at the beginning, although only for a short time, the etheric body also. This brief period during which the human being still has an etheric body is devoted to a retrospective view of his last earth life, which appears before his soul like a panorama. This period ends when the etheric body is, one might say, pushed upward into cosmic space, just as the physical body is pushed downward towards the earth.

The human being is then left with his astral body. In this astral body we still find the after-effects of the etheric body, that is to say, all that this astral body has experienced by being linked in the last earth life with the etheric body, and also with the physical body. As you know, considerable time elapses before the astral body is also stripped off.

I have already drawn attention in our literature to the fact that one cannot simply speak sweepingly of dissolution of the etheric and the astral bodies, but that this dissolution is in reality a releasing into the cosmos of those forces which the human being has within himself. The etheric body bears within itself, as it were, the imprints of all that the human being has gone through in life. This is an aggregate of what I would call form structures. This aggregate of form structures, becoming ever more widely diffused, actually stamps itself upon the cosmos; what has thus happened in our life and what has imprinted itself upon the etheric body actually continues to work within the cosmos as forces. We commit to the cosmos the nature and mode of our behavior towards the etheric body. Our life is not without moment for the entire universe. It is precisely through the knowledge of anthroposophical spiritual science that the human being acquires a strong feeling of responsibility, because he is compelled to realize how that which he incorporates into his etheric body by means of his intellectual life, his feeling life, his will, that is, by means of his morality, is imparted to the whole cosmos. In the cosmos is contained, if I may put it that way, the conduct of those human beings who have lived in former times. That which through our conduct in life contributes to the configuration of the etheric body, detaches itself in a certain way only to be gathered up into the whole great universe. In reality we participate in the making of the world! And we must develop this sense of responsibility that makes us feel ourselves as participants in the creation of the world.

That which we continue to bear as our astral body must not be looked upon as something merely to be dispersed later on, merely to be dissolved in the cosmos. This is not the case. The astral body also imparts itself to the universe, though to be sure, to the spirit-soul part of the universe.

And when the ego has freed itself from this astral body, after the transition through the soul world has been accomplished, then what we have incorporated into our astral body is to be found outside in the universe,—only now the ego and the astral body take separate paths. The astral body, divided from the ego, now goes its own way, and in a similar manner the ego takes its own course. We cannot, however, speak of the destruction of the astral body; on the contrary, this astral body continues to evolve. Through its interrelationship with the universe, it continues to evolve simply as a result of our having implanted into it the effects of certain moral impulses; and with the form it has acquired as the result of these moral impulses, it imparts itself to the cosmos,—it inserts itself, so to speak, into the spirit-soul part of the universe with which it enters into reciprocal activity. Indeed one can even put it this way (although half figurative, it, nevertheless, corresponds to the facts): the astral body expands more and more, but it reaches a certain limit in this expansion; and when it can expand no further, it begins to contract. And the speed or slowness with which it expands or contracts depends essentially upon what has been incorporated into it in the course of life. One can thus say that the astral body imparts itself to the universe; if I may use the expression, it strikes against the outer limits of our spiritual-soul cosmos and is thrown back again.

The ego follows its path in a world very different from that of the astral body. As I expressed it in yesterday's lecture,¹ the ego develops a certain kind of inward craving. And it is chiefly this craving that makes the ego feel attracted to just this particular returning astral body, which however has now become something different. Indeed there takes place a kind of union between the metamorphosed, transformed astral body and the ego. It thus comes about that when the human being approaches the time for his return to earth, he acquires certain inclinations, I might say, in divers directions.

I have indicated how the astral body expands into the universe, then returns, and how the ego in a certain way finds it again. We can follow this up in the outer human form, if we look at the being of man in its totality.

For we must imagine that the human being, as he appears when he is born on earth, is really formed from two directions. I have described to you just now how the astral body expands into the universe and how it returns again; this astral body, so to speak, now meets the ego. Figuratively speaking, it approaches in the form of a hollow sphere,—a sort of hollow sphere that grows ever smaller and smaller. Thus it approaches the ego. It has kinship with the planetary system. The ego on its way between death and a new birth develops quite another kind of longing. Although it has a longing for the astral body, it develops an even greater longing for a certain spot on earth, for a certain people, a certain family. On the other hand there is a drawing together of what comes from without as the transformed astral body, and the ego after having completed the period between death and a new birth with its strong inclination toward the earthly realm, toward a people, a family, and so forth. If we look at the human being after birth with special reference to the outer surface of his body, we can see just what is subject to the forces of the metamorphosed astral body. What is organized from without, from the skin inwards, including the sense organs, is built for us from out of the cosmos. But what is brought forth organically through the ego's feeling itself linked with the earth, feeling itself drawn toward the earth, creates the organization from within outwards, which is counter to the other organization; it creates rather the bone-muscle organization, and so forth, the part which radiates from within, so to speak, against what radiates inward from the skin and the senses. So far as the outer periphery of our body is concerned, we are organized by the macrocosm, but what streams through our ego, what grows from within outward against the skin-sense formation, is organized by the earth.

Thus the human being is really born out of the universe. And his sojourn in the maternal body provides only the opportunity for these two forces, one a macrocosmic and the other an earthly force, to unite. But man is definitely a being who does not spring from one point alone, from the germ. He is rather the fusion of the extra-earthly forces, which are held together by his metamorphosed astral body, and that force which, bearing the influence of the earth, grows counter to these extra-earthly forces. What we call our mental faculty, our intellect, our power of forming mental pictures, is deeply akin and intimately connected with what comes to us from the cosmos. Our power of forming mental pictures points in fact to our previous earth life. We acquire this power of forming mental pictures by virtue of the fact that what we have woven into our astral body in our previous earth life has expanded into the cosmos, has come back again, and now chooses our head, so to speak, as its chief organ, our head which has been formed from without as a skin-sense organ. The rest of the skin-sense organization is, so to speak, only an appendage of the head. Our will organization, however, expresses itself in what is related to the earth forces, because the human ego on approaching birth feels attracted to a particular spot on earth. So we can say that when we are reborn, we receive our mind from the heavens; our will from the earth. Between the two lies feeling, which is given to us neither by heaven nor by earth, but is based on a kind of continuous swinging back and forth between earth and heaven, and which has its outward organ chiefly in the rhythmic system of man, the breathing system, the blood circulation, and so forth. It stands in the middle between the head organization proper, which is essentially the product of the macrocosm acting upon the great circuit of the former astral body, and our will organization, which comes to us from the earth. Between these two stands our rhythmic system, stands our feeling life, which can develop on the foundation of this rhythmic system and which, I might say, we also bring to outer visible expression between heaven and earth. Our head points more to our extra-earthly origin; our will is intimately related to what is ours from the earth. Between the two stands our feeling life and, from a physical point of view, our circulation, our breathing life.

No thorough and comprehensive view of man can be taken one-sidedly either from the soul aspect or from the physical aspect, for these two, the soul and the physical nature in such a total view, must interpenetrate one another.

Furthermore, because we are connected with the entire macrocosm, bearing within us just in our head organization something formed by the macrocosm, we can see that we are directed back to our past through our intellect; only, with our ordinary consciousness we do not discover how we are thus referred to our former earth lives.

In the ancient oriental striving for wisdom, the pupils of the initiates tried to establish a connection between their rhythmic life and their head life. For the epoch in which the ancient oriental wisdom flourished, it was natural to seek a higher stage of human development by making breathing a conscious process, and thereby also the process of circulation; breathing in accordance with definite rules raised the breathing process as well as the circulation to consciousness. The old Oriental could do that because his soul and spirit were not yet so intensely linked to the body as they are in the man of today. If, applying a sort of anachronism, anyone were simply to practice this old oriental method today, without attaining to higher knowledge, he would, more or less, ruin his human body; for it would be interfering too much with the health of the physical body, now that the human being is so much more intimately connected with his body than was once the case, for instance, at the time when the ancient Indian sought after wisdom.

But what did a student acquire by going through these exercises in ancient India? He made the breathing process into something conscious, that is, he inhaled consciously. Through these exercises he gradually acquired the possibility of following the process that takes place when the pressure of inhalation causes the brain fluid to oscillate toward the brain through the spinal canal, and to strike, as it were, against the brain. It is this impact of the brain fluid against the solid parts of the brain (this brain fluid, which rushes upward during inhalation, falling again during exhalation), it is this impact that causes mental pictures to arise. The production of mental pictures is something much more complicated than is imagined today, when everything is thought out materialistically. Today it is thought—or at least it was until recently, for today people are no longer interested in thinking in clear concepts—it is thought that some kind of evolution, some nerves underlie the forming of mental pictures. This is nonsense. The real fact is that there is actually a constant striking of the brain fluid against the nerve system taking place which starts off those processes underlying the forces of the nervous system. The ancient Indian student of wisdom raised this activity to consciousness. What did he learn by following this whole process consciously? He learned from it how the underlying processes which had formed his brain really point back to former earth lives. Through his present rhythmic system he experienced, so to speak, his former earth life; this past earth life became a certainty to him. For such a student of wisdom it was simply self-evident that he had had a previous earth life. He could perceive it, you understand, by raising his breathing process to consciousness. Today this must be accomplished in another way. It cannot be brought about today by meditation that arises from a special way of shaping the breathing process; for this method must not be used by the modern human being. Quite the contrary, meditation today should proceed from a quiet dwelling on mental pictures: thus it starts out from the opposite side, and thereby takes into consideration the fact that modern man is much more closely united with his physical body. But by dwelling quietly on a mental picture, we learn to know this nuance of the rhythmic system from the other side, from the spirit-soul side. We come to know the process from the other side; in such a way, however, that we do not penetrate deeper into our body, as did the ancient Indian,—indeed we must not do so, because we have already penetrated into it deeply enough; but by freeing ourselves from the corporeal nature, we trace out the whole cosmos in the realm of spirit and soul, and the cosmos teaches us how the former earth life is connected with this life.

You can see, my dear friends, the statements made in Anthroposophy are not abstract and fanatical, but are founded upon a penetrating knowledge of the human organization as seen from within; they are not based on an external examination of the organism as a corpse,—or, even if not as a corpse, still from without—but upon a knowledge of it coming from within, from intimate contact with both aspects, the reciprocal action between the rhythmic and nerve-sense systems on the one hand and on the other between the rhythmic and metabolic systems (for the rhythmic system also has an impact upon the metabolism). And by coming to know from the other side this interweaving of the rhythmic with the metabolic processes, we become certain that the germ of the next earth life lies buried within us, for the metabolism in its spiritual aspect contains the germ of the next earth life. Even though it is the lowest part of the human organism for this earth life, from the spiritual aspect it contains the germ of the next earth life. Thus we rise to a consideration of the human being as a whole.

You see, in this respect those people especially who are living within the realm of western civilization are often really like a blind man confronting color. Perhaps what I am about to say is far from the thoughts of many of you, but I should like to call your attention to the following: All that we conceive as mathematics, all that comes into play in linear or angular forms, in the vertical or the horizontal, as well as all that we measure, all that we conceive mathematically, we develop really out of our inner being; it is the foundation of our inner life. The moment we learn to perceive what underlies our inner being, we no longer speak in the Kantian fashion, simply pouring that which springs up within the inner being of man into some kind of unintelligible expression. Mathematics is said to be “knowledge a priori.” A priori! Now, that is a word for you, is it not? It means “there from the very beginning,” a priori. But if one learns to see inwardly, then one knows whence this curious mathematical knowledge springs. The astral body has gone through the mathematics of the whole universe, and all this has condensed again. We simply let that rise out of the soul which we have experienced in a former incarnation, which has then passed through the whole cosmos, only to emerge once more in the purity of mathematical-geometrical lines.

You thus see that in this a priori conception of the world is expressed analogous to the blind man's conception of color, Otherwise one would have to say that what is called in the Kantian sense “a priori” arises out of our former incarnations and appears in this incarnation in a metamorphosed form, after having gone through the entire macrocosm.

I have been speaking to you here, my dear friends, about the laws underlying the whole human being which reveal themselves when we consider life as it passes through repeated incarnations. Our modern age is very reluctant in giving heed to such things. That is why our present world conception remains external. I should like to make this clear to you by an illustration.

Let us assume that we are now examining—according to the prevailing method—a people belonging to a certain locality on earth. Now what do we do today as historians? We say: there lives the present generation; another preceded it; this generation was in turn preceded by one still further back. We thus go back to former centuries, back to the Middle Ages, and, I might say, we follow the blood streams down through the generations, follow all that is transmitted down through external heredity, and come to the conclusion that what lives in the present people can be traced back to the earlier phases of development of this people.

Thus is history regarded today. If a typical historian wishes to follow German, French, or English history as far back as possible, he does so by going back through the chain of ancestors according to their physically inheritable characteristics. What a present-day generation of a certain people manifests in life is supposed to be understood from what former generations of this people have experienced, that is, from what can be inherited physically; this is the way people talk. This is, however, nothing but materialistic thinking applied to history. For if you consider what anthroposophical spiritual science offers you, not as a mere theory, but as something to carry over into your view of life, then you must not be content to speculate upon the repetition of earth lives, to consider as something isolated the fact that your soul has gone through previous earth lives, and will go through others in the future, but you must also consider with this in mind what takes place all over the earth. For if we look at one or another generation living today, we can certainly trace it back to former generations through the blood—through external, physically inheritable characteristics; these former generations may have lived in the same part of the earth or, if we consider the streams of migrations, they may be traced back to ancestors who at an earlier age lived in another part of the earth; but in doing all this we remain entirely in the realm of the physical-material.

There is, however, more to it. In this present age we have before us a generation of people who, in regard to what concerns its physical bodily nature, descends from its ancestors; but the souls that dwell in the individual human beings need not at all be related to these ancestors. In fact the soul has not co-experienced with them on earth what has happened in the course of the many generations, and what outwardly represents the destiny of these ancestors; this the soul has experienced in the spirit-soul world during life between death and a new birth.

We look back upon our grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather. Well, we were then not yet born; our soul was still in the spiritual world. Our body has inherited from all of them, but our soul—nothing! It has lived in an entirely different world during all this time; in its own experiences it need have nothing to do with what our body has inherited from our forefathers. And if research into these things is made in the realm of the spirit, the results often appear paradoxical to outer observance. In general one must clearly realize that speculation or philosophizing on the true facts of life usually gives rise to absurdity. Spiritual perception alone reveals the truth. And a spiritual researcher is often himself astonished at his own results. Indeed he finds in the very surprise awakened by his results a sort of verification of them; for, if he found only what he had already anticipated in his thoughts, he might not feel so strong a confirmation. Just the fact that things are, for the most part, different from what one imagines, usually makes it possible to see that, by being devoted to true spiritual research, one is working not in a subjective, but in an objective realm.

From this source, you will see, something comes to light relating to the historical in humanity. I have pointed to it before, and what I have said will not in any sense be corrected here, but only amplified, for we are moving in a very complicated realm. We have said on an earlier occasion, and this is in a certain respect perfectly true, that we have for instance among the peoples of Europe numerous personalities who as souls previously lived in the south during the first Christian centuries, and now live more in the north—they are, to be sure, incarnated in Europe, but more in the north, This is entirely true, but it does not apply to the majority of the population. In regard to this, we must seek elsewhere in order to learn the actual facts. In the case of the majority, chiefly of the present western, but also of the middle, European peoples, and even part of the Russian population, spiritual scientific research leads us back to those times at which the conquistadors subdued the aborigines of America. These original Americans, these American Indians had strange inner soul qualities. As a rule we fail to do justice to such things, if we, egotistically boasting of our “higher culture,” regard all this as mere barbarism; we fail to do justice, if we do not take into account the entirely different characteristics of those people who were conquered and exterminated after the discovery of America; if we do not regard them as having special qualities of their own, but merely look down upon them from the bird's-eye view of a higher culture. These early inhabitants of America, the American Indians had, for instance, remarkable pantheistic feelings. They worshipped the “Great Spirit” who pervaded all being. Their souls were permeated by the belief in this all-pervading Great Spirit. Through all that was bound up with this belief in the feeling-life of these people, these souls were predestined to go through a relatively short existence between death and a new birth. But the relationship that had developed, on the one hand, between them and their whole environment, their native land, and on the other between them and the destiny they suffered in being exterminated was decisive for their life between death and a new birth. And from this it has happened that the majority—no matter how paradoxical it may sound, it is simply a fact—that the majority of the western, the middle, and even a part of the eastern Europeans (not all, but a great part of them) have souls that once dwelt in the bodies of the old American Indians, although they certainly descend from physical forbears in the Middle Ages as far as their blood is concerned. Although this may sound paradoxical, it is, nevertheless, true in regard to the majority of the European population. This feeling, once experienced for the Great Spirit, reacted with that which admittedly lies in the external historical development of lineal descent, and which we take up with the first feelings of love in childhood, especially when we practice this out of our inner being through imitation. What we thus take up is to a great extent something absorbed from without. It enters into reciprocal activity with what arises in the soul from former incarnations. And European life is not understood rightly if it is considered only one-sidedly from a point of view lacking in reality, that is, according to inherited characteristics. It can be understood only when we know whence come the souls who have united themselves with these inherited characteristics in order to bring about a reciprocal activity. And what has now become reality in European history was formed only as a result of this cooperation between what the souls are through their former earth lives and what they have received in this life through inheritance; also through education, but education in its broadest sense.

These peoples have been extensively intermingled with souls who lived in the south during the first centuries of Christianity and who then also reincarnated in this western and eastern Europe; but all that has taken place in social life, and especially what is taking place more and more now in these catastrophic days, hints at the fact that the reality of this European life is a complicated one. And the spiritual researcher finds that it is made especially complicated because the reincarnated American-Indian souls unite with what appears as inherited characteristics in the various nationalities.

We must contrast this with another European population, which we find in the first Christian centuries, at the time of the migrations of peoples—speaking in terms of outer history. I refer to that European population of the past which as barbarians absorbed Christianity as it advanced from the south, transforming it into something entirely different from what in the first centuries had developed as Christianity in the Greek and Roman world. These souls who belonged to the time of the migrations of the peoples and also those of the following centuries were so constituted that, in addition to their original tendencies, they showed themselves deeply impressed by Christianity as it made its way northward from the south. We must clearly realize that this population of Europe which absorbed Christianity at the time of the folk migrations brought to the surface very special qualities. There was in this people a notably strong tendency to form the physical organism in a way that made the ego-consciousness appear with a special vigor. And the ego-consciousness that thus manifested itself was united with the selflessness of Christianity. As a result the soul was shaped in a special manner. These then were souls who, so to speak, absorbed Christianity a few centuries after it had come into existence. Although the souls who have incarnated in the majority of the European population of today have learned about Christianity in an external way through education, as well as through what can be inherited as feelings, they had not in their former lives in America, as Indians, absorbed anything of Christianity. We can easily understand the relation of the present day European population to Christianity once we have discovered that these souls for the most part have experienced nothing of Christianity in their former incarnations; that Christianity with them is merely a matter of education, of a tradition handed down through generations,—a tradition perpetuated by education.

But there is yet another aspect: those souls who came to know Christianity in Europe, that is, in its early development, incarnated, as the present times approached, more toward the east, more toward Asia. So that in fact those souls who were once somewhat permeated with Christianity now swing in the other direction, and absorb what has remained in the Orient of the old oriental traditions and which has fallen there into decadence. The Japanese, if studied in a spiritual-scientific way, are often typical reincarnations of souls who once lived in Europe at the time of the migrations.

What is more, we can develop an understanding for prominent personalities if we know such facts. Try to understand the strange personality of Rabindranath Tagore from this point of view.‘ What was educated into him of Orientalism, especially of Indian tradition, comes to him through heredity. Thus what is given to him through heredity, through education, comes to him from outside. This is for the most part decadent, and for this reason has such an “artful” character. For in a certain way, what one hears from Rabindranath Tagore is formulated in an extremely “artful” fashion. But at the same time the European feels something in Tagore that glows warmly through all that is presented in such an artful manner. And that comes from the fact that this soul lived in a former incarnation among a people who had accepted Christianity.

You can see that it is no less abstract to observe the external world from a merely materialistic viewpoint than it is to develop some other unreal life conception. What do we know of present day humanity if we know only about its blood relationship, about its blood descent, if we are not able to take into consideration what the souls have brought with them from a former incarnation? This element, you can see, merges with the external elements of heredity and education into a single totality.

Those souls who dwelt in Middle Europe at the time of the folk migrations were predestined through the entire configuration of their souls, and, above all, through their inward permeation with Christianity, to remain longer than usual in the spirit world between death and a new birth, in order to experience this realm more intensely.

When the spiritual researcher investigates the present, he is led back to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, or shortly before or shortly after the event. In Asia, the population had absorbed nothing of this Mystery of Golgotha. Oriental wisdom, nevertheless, that wisdom which blossomed in the oriental character as a result of devotion, laid the foundation for whatever understanding was brought to Christianity in its earliest times. The Mystery of Golgotha stands there for us as a unique fact. When viewed from the various epochs, it can be understood in the most varied ways. The people of the first centuries of Greek and Roman development approached this Mystery by applying to it the wisdom coming to them from the Orient. From oriental wisdom they received the concepts through which they understood the incarnation of Christ in the man, Jesus of Nazareth.

The people, however, who lived in Asia before, at the time of, and even after the Mystery of Golgotha, were still endowed with a far more active creative force than can be found in the present-day Orient, although it had already at that time become somewhat tenuous. These people, who then dwelt in Asia, at least a large part of them, are incarnated today in the greater part of the American population. As a result of their specially developed oriental culture, just this part of humanity had to spend a long time in the life between death and a new birth; they are thus in reality old souls. They are being born in America in bodies in which, if I may say so, they do not feel very comfortable, and which they, therefore, prefer to consider more from the outside than from the inside. That is why we find in America today a special predilection for an external view of life. Thus the curious paradox reveals itself: those souls who lived in the Orient, who had not yet accepted Christianity, but who had a fine spiritual culture, live now in American bodies. A part of these, I should say, shows in an isolated phenomenon how these things really work. The Oriental had an inclination toward the spiritual in the world. As these souls appear again today in America, they develop a special predilection for the spiritual world, but this has now become abstract, has no more the inward, living quality. In times gone by, in previous incarnations, all experiences dealing with the spirit world were connected with a neglect of the physical world, with a disregard for things physical. Among the adherents of Christian Science this appears in a decadent form; the existence of matter is denied, they do not wish to look at matter. One feels that these people, in a certain way, continue to pay homage to the old, but once living spirituality, which has now become more deadened, more corpse-like, has now taken on a spiritually corpse-like form. But this applies only to a distinguishable few among the population. In general, one can see in the American point of view how the souls do not sit quite solidly within their bodies, how they consequently try to apprehend the body from without, how even the science of psychology in America takes on a character in which there is no true concept of the ego. Because the soul was once accustomed to feel itself in the super-earthly, this embodiment of the ego, as it now takes place in the west, is not carried out as it should be. From this it comes about that one thought is not properly linked to another. This then is called the “psychology of association.” In it the human being becomes a sort of plaything, tossed about by the thoughts as they associate with one another. And here, curiously enough, something crops up that could be expressed by a phrase often used disparagingly by certain people in referring to our doctrine of repeated earth lives; they speak of the “transmigration of the soul.” But we must not use the phrase: “transmigration of the soul” when referring to repeated earth lives, unless we do, indeed, intend to speak disparagingly. For in speaking of repeated earth lives, we are dealing with an evolution, with a development of the soul, not with what we are accused of teaching, But in another sense we can speak of soul-transmigrations, for in fact the souls who inhabit one part of the earth during a certain period, do not remain on the same spot on earth in the next epoch, but are at a different place. Hence we find the souls who were incarnated in the south during the first Christian centuries now incarnated in western, middle, and eastern Europe, more toward the north; but this population is now interspersed with other souls who were incarnated in American Indian bodies. Over in Asia we find the souls who lived in Europe at the time of the folk migrations, or even before and afterward; and in America are to be found those souls who lived in Asia at the very time the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

We are now undoubtedly facing an era in which people will develop a longing to penetrate full reality. Today there still exists a strong opposition to this penetration of full reality, not only in the theoretical realm, but also in the realm of outer life. Only consider how I have had to characterize again and again from the most various angles this illness of intellectualism, which has appeared in the last years. Often even in public lectures I have had to point in sharp terms to this deception of a large part of humanity by intellectualism. In this we also find something hinted at, but in an already quite abstract form, which has of course appeared gradually in social thinking as the outcome of materialism. Slowly in the course of the nineteenth century the principle of nationality arose, this emphasizing of the nationality, this wish to live only in the nationality. This represents the antithesis of the soul-spirit nature; for this soul-spirit nature does not trouble itself with nationality. Many of the souls who today live in Europe were formerly incarnated in America. The souls who today live chiefly in Japanese bodies should not point to their ancestors, as far as their souls are concerned, but to the time of the folk migrations in Europe. Yes, indeed, the Americans should not pride themselves on their forebears, their European blood ancestry. Rather they should point to the fact that they once lived in Asia at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and there went through a culture which was not yet permeated by Christianity; thus they are also those who accept Christianity through external tradition and external education. There is still a strong opposition from this quarter to a soul-spiritual conception of the world.

It is not only in science that we find materialism, but throughout all external civilization. And what politicians want to make of Europe today, this new map of Europe, is entirely created out of materialistic feeling, out of materialistic impulses. Humanity will only awaken, when it adds to these nationalistic impulses—which are materialistic, based solely on an observation of the external continuity of the generations—the social-historical consideration of life in its true reality. We shall then see the souls, as well, who live in present day bodies. These souls have only as an outer sheath what is transmitted through successive generations by means of physical heredity or what is handed down to them through tradition as spiritual culture and merely accepted as such through education.

In the depths of human souls, the longing is already prevalent to go beyond what a purely materialistic conception can provide. Of course, the results of true spiritual research, when compared with the customary thinking of today, often seem paradoxical. But anyone who wishes to look deeply into life, especially into present-day life, (which is indeed full of hardships) will see, for instance, that many a thing becomes understandable when he is willing to listen to what the spiritual researcher says out of his exact, conscientious research. People are accustomed to attach some value to what is communicated to them by astronomical observatories or the like. If somewhere an astronomical discovery has been made, people do not say they accept it upon authority. They are not conscious that they do indeed accept it upon authority—although in connection with sound human reasoning which considers that what is given out to the rest of the world by an observatory is not senseless; that things are organized in a sensible way, so that there is no reason for people to doubt the truth of what is communicated to them. The fabric of life is such that we need not say that we accept something merely on authority. But we should also think the same way when occasional spiritual researchers appear, as do occasional astronomers, and announce the results of their spiritual research; for we shall find these results verified everywhere in life if we are willing to apply sound common sense.

Anthroposophical spiritual science would certainly remain theoretical and abstract in reference to life, if it did not permeate each separate branch of human life. You must not imagine that history, for example, ought to be influenced by spiritual science in such a way that we now develop only—although somewhat more profoundly—the history of epochs, of generations or the like; that is not the intention. But spiritual research should be combined with the outer facts of the pragmatic or other view of history, and from this should spring a vision of the complete reality.

However great the longing may be in the unconscious depths of human life for such a vision of life, one corresponding with reality, there exists nonetheless just as strongly, and indeed in the more conscious part of human life, the opposition to our views. And in order to give the appearance of justification, these opponents of ours seek out all ways and means. They do not shrink from any sort of defamation. I showed you yesterday in an example how untruthfully these opponents proceed, how they simply lie, stating the objective untruth. [*Bern, December 13, 1920, public lecture: The Results of Spiritual Science and Their Relationships to Art and Religion. (In this lecture reference is made to the falsity of certain statements made by theologians in Basel concerning the plastic group at the Goetheanum.)] Quite apart from the fact that these are attacks on anthroposophical spiritual science—which does not concern us much—what human qualities are thus revealed to us!

All the more, my dear friends, must we draw strength from sources which, in spite of all this, give us a picture of the world needed by humanity at present, and which will need it even more in the near future, especially that part of it which is still in its prime today. It will no longer be able to live with the old picture of the world! We should draw strength from such a vision of the world as it broadens the historical outlook, and speaks of the origin of souls, not merely of the origin of bodies. And in addition, we should acquire the strength to stand up for Anthroposophy, wherever we can. Anthroposophy, my dear friends, will need people who stand up for it. What appears today as opposition to our work will not diminish and will not assume pleasanter forms in the future. On the contrary, this opposition will embrace worse and worse forms. Whoever is conscious of what Anthroposophy signifies will be able through this very awareness really to find the basis from which he, in his position in life, can work in an adequate way. For what is done through Anthroposophy is really not for any personal ends; it is done for the good of humanity. And we must not let ourselves be disheartened by the fact that our opponents are going to become stronger and stronger and ever more vicious—by the fact that already today many unsavory methods are employed. The meanness of our opponents will continue to increase. If, for this reason, we lose courage, we do not really understand what Anthroposophy means for the future development of mankind.

With these last words it was my wish to draw your attention to something which ought to be considered within our Movement. I have purposely connected these last words with the important study we have undertaken today concerning the progress of the souls through repeated earth lives, and the way our human organization is being built up from two directions, from the great universe and from the earth. What external science knows about these things is indeed very little. This external science has limited itself to the consideration of what is, after all, only the final picture of the really active forces—ectoderm, endoderm, and so forth—without knowing what macrocosmic significance the ectoderm has, what telluric significance the endoderm has, how these, again, are connected with mental image and will. Having no regard for these far-reaching interrelationships, a materialistic method of perception really considers only externalities, only facts which are external to the last degree. And the same applies in the historical field, where the eye is fixed on what, I might say, streams through the blood of the generations, and is to be observed through tradition in the course of the linear continuity of historical development in any territory you might name. Whereas the fact is that the full reality can be understood, if we ask ourselves not only what blood flows in a person's veins, but whence comes the soul which only uses this blood. We must strive after a total consideration of humanity, after a true vision of reality; for this is what is demanded by the world and will be demanded more and more. Anthroposophy is ready to give this.

This is what I wished to say to you today. Let us hope that we shall soon see each other again so that we can continue such studies, which can lead up to an understanding of the present and of the future, to an understanding of human nature and of the universe in so far as man is born out of it.

• 1. Bern, December 13, 1920; The Results of Spiritual Science and Their Relationships to Art and Religion

In the last few hours we talked about various myths and legends and characterized how in these myths and legends of different peoples that comes to light, which we have also come to know through the theosophical world view, that which we refer to as the appearance of the astral and spiritual world. We have also spoken of various signs and symbols, and we have repeatedly emphasized that there is nothing in these various signs and symbols that could be speculated upon, philosophized about, or reflected upon in any way, that could be interpreted one way or another, but that they must be said to be real renderings of processes in the higher worlds. Now, I always ask you to bear in mind that we have signs, fairy tales and legends from the broad currents of spiritual development on earth that express nothing other than what the seer, who is familiar with supersensible phenomena, can experience in the higher worlds. I need only refer to the simple sign of the so-called Swastika, the hooked cross, the sign that you all know and about which you have so many more or less ingenious explanations. Most of the explanations are nonsense, however ingenious they may be. Someone can be very clever, think a lot, and yet say something tremendously stupid if he does not know what it is all about. This swastika is nothing more than the reproduction of what are called astral sense organs - they are also called lotus flowers - which begin to stir when a person does certain exercises; they begin to stir when he undergoes a certain development. I have said time and again that one should think of a flower just as little as one thinks of wings when hearing the word lung. That is a word; and you have given no more in the Lotus Flowers than a pictorial description of what develops in the seer when he gradually brings the astral sense organs out of his astral organism. If we take this principle of explanation to heart, we will never be tempted to apply any speculation or the like to what we find in religious and other documents. Rather, we will endeavor to consult the real secret science or occult wisdom to let it tell us what one or the other means in each case. Much about Persian and Germanic mythology has already become clear to us in the last Monday lectures.

Today I would like to point out to you some things that you can find in a document much closer to you, in the Bible. I would like to draw your attention to the Bible today for the very reason that you can see how, from the point of view of spiritual science, the Bible coincides with the most diverse legends and myths of the peoples in many ways, and how deeply we can also look into the biblical document if we simply ask occult wisdom for information about it. Today we will place something from the beginning chapters of the Bible before our soul.

You know that it tells of the creation of the earth, of the world in general, in connection with man. You will find the most diverse explanations precisely about this so-called Genesis, about the secrets hidden behind the first, the introductory chapters of the Bible. We should preferably remember that when man first became an earth dweller in his present form, the conditions on our earth were quite different from those later on, which today's man knows. We know that after the earth had gone through earlier stages of development - a Saturn state, a sun and a moon state - that it then emerged again, initially in connection with the sun and moon. What looks at us today as the sun or the moon was once one body with our Earth. We know that the sun then separated with all its entities, that the moon then separated, also with certain substances and entities, and that our Earth remained behind in a period of time that we are accustomed to calling the Lemurian period. At that time, the Earth consisted of fiery liquid substances, which were basically the same as today's substances. The Earth was a fiery, fiery nebulous world body in which all the metals and minerals that are solid today were dissolved, and in which such beings as are on Earth today could not live. On the other hand, beings of a completely different nature and character could live there, and at that time man already belonged to them, whose existence was always connected with the development of our planet.

Now let us take a look at man himself. If you were to imagine man in his early stages, that is, at the time when the sun and moon had just separated from the earth, as he is today, listening with his ears and seeing with his eyes, you would be imagining him quite wrongly. Rather, you have to imagine that man in the early stages of the earth had a very different consciousness from that of today's man. Our present day consciousness, which perceives through the instruments of the outer senses, was not yet there. What kinds of consciousness do we know besides the day consciousness? You know the consciousness that for most people today is an unconscious one, the consciousness in deep sleep. You know that besides man, the plants living around man also have this consciousness. Plants have this consciousness all the time, whereas humans only have it when they are asleep. Today's human being, when looking at the plant, must therefore say to himself: the plant represents the consciousness that he himself has when he sleeps. One could say that when he sleeps, the human being is also a plant-like being. The plant has only a physical body and an etheric body. Man also has a physical body and an etheric body, and these lie in bed. Now comes the difference: the human being who lies in bed has an astral body with the I that belongs to him; these are in a certain way separate from the physical body and etheric body; but a single astral body belongs to the physical and etheric bodies that lie in bed. However, no individual astral body belongs to the individual plant, but the whole earth has an astral body, and you have to look at the individual plants as embedded in, as incorporated into, this common astral body of the earth. It is absolutely true that if you harm the individual plant or do anything to the individual plant, it does not feel it, but feels the earth as a whole in the common astral body. I have already pointed out that the seer knows: When you pick a flower, when you take the seeds of the plants in the fall or even mow the grain, then it is as if you take the milk from the cow for my sake, or when the calf sucks the milk from the cow. It is a feeling of well-being for the earth's astral body. A feeling of pain only occurs if you uproot the plant; then it is similar to tearing a piece of flesh out of the body of the individual animal. You must also be aware that there is a state of being similar to that of sleeping and waking for the earth, not for the individual plant. The individual plant is only aware of the state of consciousness that you have when you lie in bed with your etheric body and physical body. Between these two states of sleeping and waking, there is another state of consciousness that is little known to modern man; it is the state of dream-filled sleep, so to speak, as the last memory, like an atavism, an heirloom, where the consciousness of sleep is filled with the most diverse symbolic images that we have often described. Most of the animal world has such consciousness. Anyone who is familiar with these conditions can tell you that most of the animal world has a kind of dream consciousness; and it is complete nonsense to raise the question of whether animals have a similar sense of self as humans have. You describe to people exactly how a human being has to go through the time between death and a new birth, and then someone comes along and asks: couldn't a person go through this time on a completely different planet? Or someone asks: could this or that be? “Could be” can mean anything in the world. It is never about what could be, but about what is. This must be borne in mind above all. Some people today fall for it when, for example, a plant's love life is attributed to it. The craziest humbug is done with such things; and when the matter is called “science,” anything goes that would not otherwise be considered.

We have a kind of pictorial consciousness as a third state of consciousness, which is only present in a shadowy form in dreams, and this consciousness is present with increasing distinctness at the beginning of man's existence on earth. When man began his career as an inhabitant of the earth, he had no eyes to see with, nor could he have used his ears as he does today to perceive the outside world with his senses, although everything was present in the layout. The human being of that time did not experience physical forms and colors as they are experienced today through the senses; his consciousness was one of: image consciousness, through which primarily spiritual states were perceived. Certainly, there could also be objects similar to this rose in a person's environment. When a person approached these objects, he did not perceive the red color, not these shapes, not these green leaves, none of it in that way. But when he approached the object, an image arose in him that showed him a red shape at this point, where there is now green, and a greenish-bluish shape where there is now red; it appeared in colors that do not actually occur in the physical world, but which only expressed that it was a shape that was emotionally and spiritually pleasing to the person. When a person approached a well-disposed creature from the animal world, for example, certain colors arose before him that expressed the sympathy that the animal felt for him. If he approached an animal that wanted to eat him, it was expressed in a different color pattern. The friendship between two beings was expressed through colors and shapes. Now imagine that at that time, man himself was not at all able to see his own physicality, because that also belongs to everything for which one needs sensory instruments to perceive oneself. Man could see his soul itself, he saw the colors flowing out of him. What the seer sees today, he could see in an original, dull, dusky clairvoyant consciousness. But there was no question of his being able to see his own bodily forms; these were completely closed to him.

Let us now imagine this moment vividly. Man comes down from the bosom of the Godhead to plunge into the earth, which has just broken away from the sun and moon. Man comes down there. He does not have the slightest ability to see the sun and moon and the earth itself as physical bodies. But the moment has come for him when the ego, which dwells in all of you today, which used to be united with the divine substance, descended into the three bodies. Since the existence of the Earth, there was the physical body, since the existence of the Sun, the etheric body, and since the existence of the Moon, the astral body. The astral body, the etheric body and the physical body had come over from the Moon. When the Earth was Saturn, the I was in the sphere of Divinity. Even when the Earth was a sun and a moon, the I was in the sphere of divinity. Now let us clearly imagine the state of the Earth that has just come into being. We have the human being consisting of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body, and, one might say, a hollow in the astral body, a constriction. Into this cavity the I literally drips in and first connects with the astral body, and in this astral body it acquires a consciousness of images, as I have just described. Thus man has become a four-part being. The I has united with that which had prepared itself through the three stages of Saturn, Sun and Moon, when the I of man was up in the bosom of the Godhead. During the Saturn, Sun and Moon states of the Earth, the I, which now dwells in all of you, was united with the Godhead above, and below, your bodies were formed in preparation: your physical body on Saturn, your etheric body on the Sun and your astral body on the moon. That was preparing itself below. One could say that the Godhead looked down and saw how the bodies were preparing themselves for it, so that when the Godhead lowered these drops of egoity, they would be ripe to receive the egoity. What dwells in you today dwelled in the Godhead then and looked down on the three bodies. If at that time your soul, your ego, could have felt its existence as it does today, they would have sensed it by calling their home the “heavens.” For they were “in the heavens”; they had only a dull, dim consciousness, but they were in the heavens.

And now the important moment had arrived when the uniformly continuing earlier state was divided into two. At the beginning of their existence on earth, there was a state for human beings in which they were still in the heavens as actual consciousnesses, as I-ness. Then the I dripped down into the bodies. Thus was created the difference between where human beings used to be and where they are now: heaven and earth. That is the experience of your ego as it descends. What does it say at the beginning of Genesis?

In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.

While still in the bosom of the Godhead, your ego had been unable to see anything. Now, on earth, it is destined to see for the first time, although at first with a dull awareness of images. Before that, it had not yet seen anything; it first had to become familiar with the astral body in order to learn to see.

And the earth was waste and confusion.

This is again a subjective experience of your soul. What she experienced is described. The earth itself was still “desolate and confused,” and everything was liquid, because the earth was in a fiery, liquid state.

And the spirit of the deity

which you had just left,

brooded over the waters.

You see, what is described in Genesis, are the real experiences of your self. And what has now struck into the whole? Now comes the moment when the self begins to see astral, it became aware that there are other beings all around. From the darkness, the astral light sprouts on all sides.

And God said: Let there be light! And there was light.

This does not refer to physical light, but to astral light. Here too, facts are described that the human

ego experienced. And God saw the light, that it was beautiful, and God separated the light from the darkness.

What does that mean? You will learn more about this in the course of the lectures, that wherever an astral body is present, fatigue must occur. The life of an astral body cannot proceed otherwise than that fatigue occurs. Therefore, there must also be a compensation for the fatigue. A being that tires must undergo conditions in which this fatigue is made good again. Do not imagine anything external, but only the experiences of the ego. The ego is lowered into the astral body, it becomes tired by unfolding its image consciousness. It must then return to a state in which it can compensate for the fatigue. We have two states of consciousness into which the ego comes: one state in which the ego lives in images, in which spiritual experiences present themselves in images, and another in which everything plunges back into the darkness from which the ego is born, and where fatigue is carried away, but also where the state of light that surrounds the ego is interrupted. The Godhead had divided the life of the ego into two parts, one where there was light and the other where there was darkness. Imagine the life of the light beings on earth like this.

And God divided the light from the darkness and called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.

This has nothing to do with the orbit of the sun or the moon, it has only to do with the spiritual difference between the astral illumination of consciousness and the dark state where there is no illumination. You must fully bear in mind that these are descriptions of inner facts, experiences of the I. Imagine very vividly how the sleeping person lies in bed according to his physical and etheric bodies, outside of the physical and etheric bodies are the astral body and the I. This was the case all the time in the initial state of the earth. The astral body was never completely within the physical and etheric bodies as it is today, not at all, but only in such a way that it filled part of the etheric body. It was more or less as it is with modern man when he is asleep, when the astral body has left the physical body but has not yet completely left the etheric body. You must imagine that the I, which has just come down from the bosom of the Godhead, belonged to a physical body and an etheric body with its astral body, but does not yet completely permeate them. The modern-day scientist would say that such a life is not possible at all. But it was possible, under different laws.

Let us imagine how it was by means of an image. Let us again imagine our Earth, but now flooded in a fire nebula, this fire nebula in perpetual motion, the astral bodies with the I's as spiritual beings floating above. Imagine that you would all suddenly fall asleep now. Then your astral bodies would come out. Only the physical bodies are inert; when the astral bodies come out, the physical bodies retain their shape. At that time, when the earth was in the fire mist, it was different, everything was in lively motion. It was similar to when you stand today at a mountain valley and see the masses of fog moving back and forth and taking on the most diverse shapes. Now your physical body remains inert in its fixed form. Then everything was in motion. The physical body of that time dissolved and reassembled. All this was caused by the forces that emanated from above. Thus, the existence of that time was different from today. When the earth was still liquid, all forms were dependent on the spiritual forces, to which you yourself belonged. Imagine what happened down there. The solid gradually prepared itself. From a completely liquid-watery state, these solid bodies gradually prepared themselves. More and more rigid forms settled. Just as in the mountains the moving mists take on solid forms and crystallize, so the first human forms gradually emerged from the swirling fire mist.

And God said, “Let there be a vault in the midst of the waters, and let the waters be separated from the waters.”

If you can visualize it correctly, you have the process that I have just described.

And God made the division of the waters, and divided the waters which were under the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse. And what was above he called heaven. This was the second day.

There is profound wisdom in this again. What are the two “extensions”? These refer to the two parts of human nature, which are always mixed together: man's lower nature and man's spiritual nature. The spiritual nature, which finds expression in what is inclined towards the sun, and the lower nature, which is inclined towards the center of the earth. These are the two natures that all religious documents describe as being dominated by two very different powers, by heavenly powers and by powers of the underworld. God separated the heavenly expanse from the earth expanse. What was not yet visible on the moon became visible here on earth. An immensely deep wisdom, which corresponds to a complete truth, is also expressed in this. On the old moon, individual human figures did not yet walk around as they do on earth now; that did not exist on the moon. The human ancestors, the ancestral bodies of human beings on the old moon, consisted of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. They only had an extension, an extension to the planet, not to the heavens. They were animal-like, no I yet dwelled in them. The animal has remained at this earlier stage of development. This can still be clearly seen today in the way it cannot raise its face to the sun, how it does not have free working organs in its front limbs to realize intentions and ideas of the spirit. The animal is like a beam standing on four pillars. Man has brought this beam out of the horizontal position into the vertical. Through the upward-facing countenance, he is not only a citizen of the earth, but a citizen of the world. The two front supports, the two front limbs, have become tools of the spirit. This is expressed in the separation of the part of the human form that belongs to the earth from the part that belongs to the universe.

And God made an expanse between the lower waters and the upper waters.

This diversity of the human form is meant by this; it is again an experience of the original human being.

Now the part of the human form that was to serve the ego had to have a center, a center. And this it did. The first center of this still soft human body came about through the fact that all the currents converged in the upward-facing part. The most diverse currents pass through it, which you have to imagine as the beginning of nerve and blood currents. They all gathered at the top in mighty tongues of fire, which used to dart out of the human being at the top of the head - but when the body was still completely soft. That organ, which man had then and of which the last remainder is the pineal gland, was the first organ with which man began to perceive physically. If he came near something dangerous for him, this organ perceived it and through it man felt that he was not allowed to go there. Through this organ he found his way. You should not imagine this organ as an original eye – such an idea gives rise to all kinds of errors – but you should imagine that it was a kind of heat organ, by means of which man, even at great distances, could distinguish cold and warm conditions, and those that were harmful or beneficial to him. At the same time, this organ was connected to the organs we call the lymph organs, which are related to the currents in the human body that are connected to the white blood cells. The well-being or distress of a person, who still had mainly white blood cells, depended on what this organ perceived. This was therefore a center in which everything that was present as a formation in the expanse of the heavens was collected.

And God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land become visible! And it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called the Sea. And God saw that it was good.

Here you see a reference to another confluence of currents; these are in the lower currents, in the earthly nature of man. They relate to human reproduction, to procreation. But procreation in these ancient times – and this is very important – was completely covered by the most absolute unconsciousness. This is a profound secret of the evolution of the world. One could say that it is the original divine commandment that the deity gave to the earthly beings: You shall not know how you reproduce on earth. The entire act of reproduction was shrouded in profound unconsciousness. During the times when consciousness emerged on earth, no reproduction took place. So you can imagine that man's nature in this respect consisted in his starting out from a complete innocence or unconsciousness about this process on earth. So what did man know at the beginning of his existence on earth? He only knew his spiritual descent, he knew that he had descended as an ego from the bosom of the Godhead. Where he came from in a physical sense, where his bodies came from, was completely closed to him, he knew nothing about it, it was covered by a complete state of innocence. Let us imagine exactly what happened at that time.

People came into being in the way we have just described. People who had developed their physical body, their etheric and astral body on the moon, now received their ego. These people were completely innocent about everything that was going on in the physical world. They could not see that either; they did not see their own physical body. They saw spiritual conditions; they knew that they descended from the divinity. But there were other entities, not human beings, but entities, which had remained behind on the old moon, which could not become gods. What had reached a higher level on the moon now had its setting on the sun, where the Elohim are, who dwell on the sun as man dwells on earth. Now there was a parallel development of beings on the sun and on the earth. After the sun and the moon had come out of the earth, the earth was placed between the sun on one side and the moon on the other. The highest being that developed on Earth was a being with a physical body, etheric body, astral body and I: man. On the Sun, the highest being had a physical body but in a completely different form than the human one - etheric body, astral body, I, spirit self (Manas), life spirit (Budhi), spirit man (Atma), and in addition an eighth part, beyond Atma. Thus higher beings who had already developed an eighth limb are the Elohim, the sun spirits, who, when the earth and the sun had separated, took a different path. Human beings had taken the earthly path. The sun spirits had already developed their Atma on the moon; they went to the sun to develop there at a higher level. But now there were beings on the old moon who could not go with the sun because they had remained behind. Of course, they were much more highly developed than humans. They had something that humans had yet to achieve. They already had the consciousness through which one sees external physical objects. They could already use tools that humans could not yet use. Humans still had blind eyes and deaf ears. His eyes and ears were only developed in the beginning; they were to become seeing and hearing later. But lower animals of that time had retained forms from the moon that they could use in a certain way earlier than humans could use their bodies. And in that, those beings who had come over from the moon were actually embodied on earth first, and who were not yet ready to go with the sun, but who were further along than humans. They embodied themselves in forms that have long since disappeared, in beings that enabled them to see into the physical environment. These beings, who were between humans and gods, inspired and spiritualized such lower forms, for the higher human bodies were still too clumsy, just as a child is much clumsier than a young chicken when it is born. These lower beings were dragons or serpents, which at that time were provisionally inhabited by these beings between the gods and men. These beings were closely related to that which belongs to the earth in man; they had nothing of what lived in man from the part directed to the sun. But they had something the people who still lived in dull image-consciousness: They could already perceive the physical objects that were on the earth. Man lived in complete innocence about the physical process of sexuality; that was shrouded in darkness for him. These beings saw him as the gods saw him, and so they could approach man and say: You can become like the gods, you need only do one thing, you need only extend your desire into the lower regions; as soon as your desire extends into the lowest regions, you will see as the gods see; if you do that, you will see your own form.

In a sense, humanity's state of innocence was thereby taken away. That is one side of it. The other side is the freedom that man has gained as a result. [Gap in the transcription.] Entities that were between the inhabitants of the sun and the inhabitants of the earth, who could not gain the right to the sun, wanted to open people's eyes; they approached people as seducers and said:

Your eyes will be opened, and you will know good and evil.

You will see what is around you, and you will get to know the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.

Thus the religious documents are literally true. We just have to learn to understand them literally again. Today's reflection will have shown you that one must not speculate about these things. One must ask the real secret science, then light comes in a wonderful way into the religious documents.

We ventured on rather unusual ground in our last lecture when we turned our attention to certain beings who definitely exist amongst us. They are spiritual beings who in a certain way fall out of the regular course of evolution, and it is just this fact that gives them their significance. We were considering the elemental beings whose existence is naturally viewed by the enlightened mind of today as the utmost superstition, but who will play a significant rôle in a not very far distant time of our spiritual evolution, precisely through the position they occupy in the cosmos. We have seen how such elemental beings come into existence as a sort of irregularly severed parts of group souls. We need only remember what was said at the end of the lecture and we shall have placed the nature of such elemental creatures before our spiritual eyes. We were considering one of the last formed species of these elementary beings. We pointed to the fact that each animal form—or to put it differently—a totality of similarly formed animals is represented by a group soul. We have said that these group souls play the same rôle in the astral world as our human soul—in so far as it is I-endowed—in the physical world. The human ego is really a group ego which has descended from the astral plane to the physical plane, and thus becomes an individual ego. The animal egos are still normally on the astral plane, and what is here on the physical plane as the separate animal possesses only physical body, etheric body, and astral body. The ego is in the astral world, similarly formed animals being members of their group ego. We can realize from this fact how birth and death in human life have not the same significance in the life of the animal. For when an individual animal dies, the group soul or group ego remains alive. It is just the same as if—assuming that it were possible—a man lost a hand and was capable of replacing it. His ego would not say: ‘I have died through the loss of my hand’; it would feel that it had renewed a limb. So the group ego of the lions renews a limb when a lion dies and is replaced by another. Thus we can understand that birth and death have not at all the significance for the animal group souls as they have for the human being of the present cycle of evolution. The group soul of the animals knows changes, metamorphoses; knows, so to speak, the severing of the members which then extend into the physical world, the loss of these members and their renewal.

We have said, however, that there are certain animal forms which go too far in the process of severing, which are no longer in a position to send back to the astral plane what they bring down to the physical plane. When an animal dies what falls away must be entirely exhausted in the surrounding world, while the soul and spirit nature of the animal must stream back into the group soul, to be ex-tended afresh and grow to a new individual entity. There are in fact certain animal forms which cannot send everything back into the group soul; and these parts which re-main over, which are cut loose, torn loose from the group soul, then lead an isolated life as elemental beings. Our evolution has gone through the most varied stages and at each stage such elemental beings have been separated off, so you can well imagine that we have a fairly large number of such elementals around us in what we call the super-sensible world.

When, for instance, the enlightened person says that people talk of elemental beings and call them Sylphs, Lemures, but that such things do not exist—then you must reply that he does not see these things because he has not troubled to develop the organs of cognition which would enable him to recognize them. But just ask the bees, or rather, the soul of the beehive. They could not close themselves to the existence of Sylphs or Lemures! For the elemental beings which are denoted by these names are to be found at quite definite places, namely, where there is a certain contact of the animal kingdom with the plant kingdom. This has not a general application, however; they are to be found only at spots where the contact takes place under certain circumstances. When the ox eats grass there is a contact between the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom, but that is a common-place, normal proceeding; it lies in the regular course of evolution. The contact that occurs between the bee and the blossom stands on quite a different page of cosmic evolution. Bees and blossoms are much farther apart in organization and they come together again in a special way—moreover a quite remarkable force is unfolded in their contact. The peculiar auric sheath which always arises when a bee or similar insect sucks at a flower belongs to the “interesting” observations of the spiritual-super-sensible worlds—if one may use the expression, but we have so few appropriate expressions for these subtle things. The peculiar, unique experience which the little bee has when it sucks at the flower is present not only in the masticators or in the bee's body, but the exchange of taste between bee and blossom spreads out a sort of tiny etheric aura. Every time that the bee sucks there is this aura, and always when something like this arises in the super-sensible world the beings which need it arrive at the spot. They are attracted by it, for there they find their food—to express it crudely again.

I said on another occasion that we should not be concerned with the question: Whence come all the beings of which we have spoken? Wherever the opportunity is given for definite beings, then they are always there. If a person sends out wrong, evil feelings, these live around him and attract beings which are there waiting, just as some physical being waits for food. I once compared this with the fact that there are no flies in a clean room; if there are all sorts of food-remains in the room, then there are flies. So it is with the super-sensible beings: one need only provide them with the means of nourishment. The bee which sucks at the blossom spreads a little etheric aura and then such beings approach, especially when a whole swarm of bees settles on a tree and then moves away with the sensation of taste in the body. Then the whole swarm is ensheathed in this etheric aura and also entirely interpenetrated by the spiritual beings which one calls Sylphs or Lemures. In border-regions where different kingdoms come in touch with one another these beings are present and they really play a role. In fact they are not only to be found where this fine etheric aura arises, they not only approach to satisfy themselves, but they are hungry and they bring the hunger to expression by guiding the particular creatures to the particular places. In a certain way they are little guides.

So we see that beings who, we may say, have severed their connection with other worlds to which they were formerly united, have taken in exchange a strange role. They are beings which can well be used in other worlds. At any rate, when they are so used a kind of organization is established, they come under higher beings.

It was said at the beginning of today's lecture that at a by no means very distant time it will be fully necessary for humanity to know of these things. In a not very distant future, science will take an extraordinary course. Science will become increasingly materialistic, will confine itself simply to a description of external facts of the physical senses. Science will confine itself to the crudely material, although a strange transitional state still prevails today. A time of sheer undiluted materialism in science lies not very far behind us. This crude materialism is at the most still seen as a possibility by people of a purely amateur outlook, though few thinkers trouble to set something else in its place. We see a whole number of abstract theories appear in which a timid reference is made to the super-sensible, the superbodily. The course of events, however, and the power of external physical facts will utterly overthrow these strange, fantastic theories which are set up by those who are dissatisfied today with physical science. And one day the learned will find themselves in a peculiar situation as regards these theories. All that they have spun out about All-Being and All-Ensouledness of this or that world, all their speculations will be overthrown and men will have nothing more in the hand than sheer sense-perceptible facts in the fields of geology, biology, astronomy, and so forth. The theories set up today will be very short-lived, and to the one who is able to look into the special course of science, an absolute desolation of the purely physical horizon is presented.

Then, however, the time will also have come when a fairly great number of representatives of humanity will be ripe to acknowledge the super-sensible worlds of which the spiritual-science world-conception speaks today. Such a phenomenon as that of the bee-life in connection with what can be known of the super-sensible worlds offers a wonderful answer to the great riddle of existence. These things are of great importance from yet another side. It will become increasingly indispensable to grasp the nature of the group souls, and such knowledge will play a great role even in the purely external evolution of humanity. If we go back thousands and thousands of years we find man himself as a being still belonging to a group soul. Human evolution on our Earth is from the group soul nature to the individual soul. Man advances through the gradual descent of his ego-endowed soul into physical conditions, there having the opportunity of becoming individual. We can observe different stages in the evolution of mankind and see how the group soul gradually becomes individual.

Let us go back to the time of the first third of the Atlantean culture epoch. There the life of man was quite different; in the bodies in which we were incorporated at that time our souls had quite different experiences. There is one experience which plays a role in man's life today—whether as individual or member of social group—that has undergone a great change since that time, namely, the alternation of waking and sleeping.

In ancient Atlantean times you would not have experienced the same alternation of waking and sleeping as exists today. What is then the characteristic difference in comparison with present humanity?

When the physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, the astral body with the ego lifts itself out and what one calls the modern consciousness sinks into an indefinite darkness. In the morning when the astral body and the ego draw again into the other members they make use of the physical organs and consciousness lights up. This condition of daily waking in consciousness, nightly sleeping in unconsciousness, did not exist formerly. When it was daytime and man dipped down into his physical body, as far as was the case then, he by no means saw physical beings and objects in definite boundaries as he does today. He saw everything with vague outlines just as you do when you go along the streets on a foggy evening and see the lamps surrounded with a misty aura. That was the way the human being of that time saw everything.

If that was the day condition, what was the night condition? When the human being passed out of the physical and etheric bodies during the night, no absolute unconsciousness came over him, it was only a different kind of consciousness. At that time man was still aware of the spiritual processes and spiritual beings around him, not clearly and exactly as in true clairvoyance, but with a last relic of ancient clairvoyant sight. Man lived by day in a world of hazy, nebulous outlines, in the night he lived among spiritual beings who were around him as we have the various objects around us today. There was thus no sharp division between day and night, and what is contained in saga and myths is not some folk-fantasy but memories of the experiences which early man had in the super-sensible world in his then state of consciousness. Wotan or Zeus or other super-sensible spiritual divinities who were known to various peoples are not fabrications of fantasy as is asserted at the council-board of erudition. Such assertions can only be made by someone who knows nothing of the nature of folk-fantasy. It does not in the least occur to early peoples to personify in that way. Those were experiences in ancient times. Wotan and Thor were beings with whom man went about as today he goes about with his fellow-men, and myths and sagas are memories of the ages of ancient clairvoyance.

We must be clear, however, that something else was united with this living into the spiritual super-sensible worlds. In these worlds man felt himself not as an individual being but as a sort of limb of spiritual beings. He belonged to higher spiritual beings as our hands belong to us. The faint feeling of individuality which man possessed at that time he acquired when he dipped down into his physical body and emancipated himself from the “dance” of the divine spiritual beings. That was the beginning of his feeling of individuality. At that time man was absolutely clear about his group soul, he felt himself immersed in the group soul when he left his physical body and entered the super-sensible consciousness. That was an ancient time when the human being had a vivid consciousness of belonging to a group soul, a group ego.

Let us look at a second stage of human evolution—we will omit intermediate stages—, the stage referred to in the history of the Patriarchs of the Old Testament. What really underlies this we have already related. We have given the reason why the Patriarchs Adam, Noah, and so on, had such a long life time. It was because the memory of early mankind was quite different from that of contemporary man. The memory of modern man has in fact become individual, too. He remembers what he has experienced since birth—many actually from a much later point of time. This was not the case in ancient times. At that time what the father had experienced between birth and death, what had been experienced by the grandfather, the great-grandfather, were as much an object of memory as a man's own experiences. Strange as it seems to the modern man there was a time when memory went beyond the individual and back through the whole blood relationship. The external sign for the existence of such a memory is precisely such names as Noah, Adam, and so on. These names do not denote single individuals between birth and death. Today a name is given to the one individual whose memory is enclosed between birth and death. Formerly the giving of a name went as far as the memory reached back into the generations, as far as the blood flowed through the generations.

“Adam” is merely a name that lasted as long as the memory lasted. One who does not know that the giving of names in former times was quite different from what it is today will not be able to understand the nature of these things at all. A fundamental consciousness mediating quite differently existed in ancient times. Imagine that the ancestor had had two children, each of these two again, the next generation again two, and so forth. In all of them the memory reached up to the ancestor and they felt themselves one in the memory which meets up above, so to speak, in a common point. The people of the Old Testament expressed this by saying—and this applies to each single adherent of the Old Testament—“I and Father Abraham are one.” Each individual felt himself hidden in the consciousness of the group-soul, in the “Father Abraham.”

The consciousness with which the Christ has endowed mankind surpasses that. The ego through its consciousness is connected directly with the spiritual world, and this comes to expression in: “Before Abraham was, was the I—or the I am.” Here the impulse to stimulate the “I am” comes fully into the separate individual.

So we see a second stage of the evolution of mankind: the group-soul age which finds its external expression in the blood relationship of the generations. A people which has particularly developed this lays very special value on continually emphasizing: As folk we have a folk-groupsoul in common.—That was particularly the case for the people of the Old Testament, and the conservatives among them strongly opposed therefore the emphasis of the “I am” of the individual ego. Whoever reads St. John's Gospel can grasp with spiritual hands, so to speak, that that is true. One need only read the story of the conversation of Jesus with the woman of Samaria at the well. Here it is expressly pointed out that Christ Jesus goes to those also who are not related by blood. Read how remarkably it is indicated: “For the Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans.” One who can experience this gradually, meditatively, will see how humanity has advanced from the group soul to the individual soul.

History has become an entirely external matter, very much a “fable convenue,” for it is written from documents. Suppose that something had to be written today from documents and the most important documents are lost! Then whatever documents are accidentally available are thrown together and reports are made. For matters of spiritual reality one needs no documents; they are inscribed in the Akashic Record which is a faithful record and effaces nothing. It is difficult, however, to read in the Akashic Record because the external documents are even a hindrance to the reader of spiritual “scripts.” But we can see how the advance from group soul to individual soul has taken place in times lying very near to our own.

One who observes history from a spiritual aspect will have to recognize a most important period of time in the early Middle Ages. Previously man was still enclosed in various groups if only externally. To a much greater extent than is dreamt of by modern man, people at the beginning of the Middle Ages still received their significance and value even as regards their work, from relationship and other connections. It was a natural consequence for the son to do what the father did. Then came the time of the great inventions and discoveries. The world began to demand more from the purely personal proficiency, and man was increasingly torn out of the old connections. We can see the expression of this throughout the Middle Ages when cities of the same type were founded over the whole of Europe. We can still distinguish today the cities built on this type from those built on other foundations.

In the middle of the Middle Ages there was again an advance from the group soul to the individual soul. If we look into the future we must say: More and more man emancipates himself from the old group soul element and individualizes himself. If you could look back to earlier phases of man's evolution you would see how those cultures were cast in the same mold—as, for instance, Egypt and Rome. This is only in a very slight degree true of today. Humanity has now descended to the point where not only manners and customs are individual but even opinions and faiths as well. There are people among us already who look on it as a lofty ideal for everyone to have his own religion. The idea floats before quite a number that a time must come when there are as many religions and truths as persons.

This will not be the course of human evolution. It would take this course if men were to continue to follow the impulse coming today from materialism. That would lead to disharmony, to the splitting of humanity into separate individuals. Mankind, however, will only not take this course if such a spiritual movement as Spiritual Science is accepted. What will enter then? The great truth, the great law, will be realized that the most individual truths, those that are found in the most inward way, are at the same time those that hold good for all.

I have already commented on the fact that today there is really general agreement upon the truths of mathematics alone, for these are the most trivial of all. No one can say that he finds mathematical truths through external experience; we find them through inwardly realizing them. If one wants to show that the three angles of a triangle make 180°, then one draws a line through the apex which is parallel to the base and lays the three angles together fan-wise; then angle a = d, b = e, c = itself, and so the three angles are equal to a straight line, that is, 180°. Anyone who has once grasped this knows that it must be so, once and for all, just as one knows that 3 x 3 = 9 after it has once been grasped. I do not think one would expect to discover that by induction.

These most trivial of all truths, the arithmetical, geometrical, are found inwardly, and yet people do not dispute about them. They are in absolute agreement about them because man is far enough advanced to grasp them. Agreement of opinion prevails only as long as pure truth is not clouded by passions, sympathy and antipathy. A time will come, though it is still far distant, when mankind will be laid hold of increasingly by the knowledge of the inner world of truth. Then in spite of all individualism, in spite of truth being found by everyone for himself inwardly, harmony will prevail. If mathematical truths were not so simple and obvious then the passions aroused in acknowledging them would lead to many difficulties. For if covetousness entered in then perhaps many housewives would determine that 2 x 2 = 5 and not 4. These things are only so obvious and simple that they can no longer be clouded by sympathy and antipathy. Continually wider regions will be grasped by this form of truth and more peace can come to mankind if truth is grasped in this manner. The human being has grown out of the group soul condition and emancipates himself from it increasingly. If we look at groups instead of the souls, we have family connections, connections of tribe and nation, and finally connected races. The race corresponds to a group soul. All these group connections of early humanity are what man outgrows and the more we advance the more the race conception loses its meaning.

We stand today at a transitional point; race will gradually disappear entirely and something else will take its place. Those who will again grasp spiritual truth as it has been described will be led together of their own free will. Those will be the connections of a later age. The human beings of earlier times were born into connections, born into the tribe, the race. Later we shall live in the connections and associations which men create for themselves, uniting in groups with those of similar ideas while retaining their complete freedom and individuality. To realize this is necessary for a right understanding of something like the Anthroposophical Society. The Anthroposophical Society is intended to be a first example of such a voluntary association, although we may be well aware that it has not yet reached very far. The attempt had to be made to create a group in which men find themselves together without the differentiation of the ancient group soul's nature and there will be many such associations in the future. Then we shall no longer have to speak of racial connections but of intellectual-ethical-moral aspects with regard to the associations that are formed. The individuals voluntarily allow their feelings to stream together and this again causes the forming of something which goes beyond the merely emancipated man. An emancipated human being possesses his individual soul which is never lost when it has once been attained. But when men find themselves together in voluntary associations they group themselves round centres. The feelings streaming in this way to a centre once more give beings the opportunity of working as a kind of group soul, though in quite a different sense from the early group souls. All the earlier group souls were beings who made man unfree. These new beings, however, are compatible with man's complete freedom and individuality. Indeed, in a certain respect we may say that they support their existence on human harmony; it will lie in the souls of men themselves whether or not they give as many as possible of such higher souls the opportunity of descending to man. The more that men are divided, the fewer lofty souls will descend into the human sphere. The more that associations are formed where feelings of fellowship are developed with complete freedom, the more lofty beings will descend and the more rapidly the earthly planet will be spiritualized.

So we see that if man is to acquire any idea of future evolution, he must have a thorough understanding of the character of the group soul element. For otherwise, if his individual soul keeps itself aloof too long on the earth, and does not find the link of companionship, it could come about that it lets the chance of union go by. It would then itself become a sort of elemental being, and the elemental beings originating from man would be of quite an evil nature. Whereas those which have arisen from the earlier kingdoms are very useful for our orderly course of nature, the human elemental beings will by no means possess this quality.

We have seen that such severed beings arise in certain border regions, and they arise also on the boundary made by the transition from the group soul nature to the independent group associations where the connections are of an aesthetic, moral, intellectual character. Wherever such connections arise, group beings are there.

If you could observe certain spots, as, for instance, springs where underneath there is stone overgrown with moss, thus forming a kind of partition between plant and stone, and then water trickles over it—that too is essential—then you would see that what are called Nymphs and Undines are very real, an actuality. Again, where metals come in contact with the rest of the earthy realm there lie whole bundles of the beings we call Gnomes. A fourth species are the Salamanders which form, so to say, the youngest generation in the ranks of elemental beings. They nevertheless exist in large numbers. To a great extent they owe their existence to a process of separating off from animal group souls. These beings too seek opportunities for finding nourishment, and they find it in particular where not quite normal relations sometimes exist between the human and the animal kingdoms. Those who know something about these things are aware that elemental beings—and definitely good beings—develop through the intimate relationship of the rider and his steed. Through the warm connection of certain men with animal groups, feelings, thoughts and impulses arise which provide good nourishment for these elemental beings of a Salamander nature. That can be particularly observed in the united life of the shepherd and his flock, in the case of herdsmen in general who live in close connection with their animals. Certain Salamander-like elemental beings can find their nourishment in the feelings which develop through this intimacy between man and beast, and they remain where this food is to be found. They are quite shrewd too, full of a natural wisdom. Faculties develop in the shepherd through which these elemental beings can whisper to him what they know, and many of the recipes or prescriptions coming from such sources have originated in this way. A man among such conditions may well be surrounded as if by fine spiritual beings who furnish him with a knowledge of which our modern intellectuals have not the slightest idea. All these things are founded on good grounds and can definitely be observed through the methods which occult wisdom can perfect.

I should like to conclude by pointing to yet another phenomenon which can show you how certain things which are explained quite abstractly today have often sprung from a deep wisdom. I have already spoken of Atlantean times and how when men left their bodies in the night, they lived among the spiritual beings whom they called the Gods. These men were descending deeper into a physical corporeality; but the beings whom they revered as the Gods, that is, Zeus, Wotan, are on another path of evolution. They do not descend as far as the physical body, they do not touch the physical world. But even there we find certain transitional states. Man has come into existence through his whole soul and spirit being having hardened to his physical body. In the case of man the group souls in their entirety have come down to the physical plane, and man's physical body became an imprint of the group soul. Let us suppose a being like Zeus—who is a positive reality—has just slightly contacted the physical plane, just projected into it a very little. That is rather as if you dip a ball into water and it is wet underneath. In the same way certain beings in Atlantean times have only been grazed by the physical world. Physical eyes do not see what remains in the spiritual world as astral-etheric. Only the part which projects into the physical world is visible. From such projections arose symbolism in mythology. If Zeus has the eagle as symbol that is because his eagle-nature is the little projection where a being of the higher worlds touched the physical world. A great part of the bird world is severed portions of such evolving beings of the super-sensible world. As with the ravens of Wotan and the eagle of Zeus so is it everywhere where symbolism goes back to occult facts. Much will become clearer to you if you take into account like this the nature and activity and evolution of the group souls in the most varied fields.

In our spiritual-scientific endeavors, it is important to acquaint ourselves gradually from the most diverse points of view with what we are supposed to understand. One can say that, particularly in regard to spiritual-scientific subjects, the world expects an uncomplicated, facile approach towards conviction; however, this is not easily provided. For as far as spiritual-scientific facts are concerned, it is actually necessary to attain our conviction in a gradually evolving manner. To begin with, this conviction is still weak. One becomes acquainted with the same things from ever changing new viewpoints; thus, conviction increasingly gains in strength. This is the one premise from which I should like to start today. The other will relate to various matters that I have discussed here for weeks; it will relate to what has been said concerning the differentiation of humanity throughout the civilized world.⁸⁴ Let me indicate briefly a few of the most salient facts that are of some importance to our considerations in the next three days.

I have pointed out in what sense the Orient is the source of humanity's essential spiritual life. I then indicated that in the central areas, in Greece, Middle Europe and the Roman Empire—what must be discussed covers vast periods of time—there primarily exists the predisposition for developing the legal, political concepts. The West is notably predisposed to contribute economic concepts to the totality of human civilization. It has already been mentioned that when we look across to the Orient, we find that the life of its civilization is basically decadent today. In order to evaluate properly what the Orient really signifies for the whole of human civilization, we have to turn back to more ancient periods of time. Among the historically accessible documents which are proof of the Orient's essential nature, the Vedas, the Vedanta philosophy, stand out above all; they and others are in turn evidence, however, of what was present in the Orient in still more ancient epochs. They indicate how a cultural life was born out of a primeval, wholly spiritual disposition of Oriental humanity. Subsequently, for the Orient too, ensued the times of obscuration of this spiritual life. Yet, a person who is able to contemplate in the right way what is happening in the Orient at present—although it is a mere caricature of what was formerly there—even today will still note the aftereffect of the ancient spiritual life in the decadent phenomena.

During a somewhat later period, the essentially legalistic, political thinking developed throughout the central regions of the earth. It evolved in ancient Greece and Rome, later on in the regions spread over Europe from the Middle Ages onward. The Orient originally possessed no actual political thinking, particularly not what we today define as juridical thinking. This is not in contradiction to the existence of codes of law such as Hammurabi's and others. For if you study the contents of these codes, you recognize from the whole tone and attitude that you are dealing with something quite different from the mode of thinking defined in the Occident as juridical. It is only in recent times that an actually economic form of thinking has developed in the West. As I have already explained, even science as it is practiced now is assuming those forms that really belong to the economic life.

As far as the Oriental spiritual life is concerned, it is interesting to observe how everything that the Occident has possessed up to now is basically also a legacy of the Oriental spiritual life, although in metamorphosed forms. Some time ago, I pointed out here how considerably this spiritual life of the Orient has been transformed in Europe. We are confronted by the fact that the capacities that held sway in the Orient have yielded up a perception of the immortal human soul, but in such a manner that this immortality was intrinsically bound up with prenatal existence before birth. The soul perception of the Oriental mind had a view, above all else, of preexistent life, of the soul's life between birth and death preceding this earthly existence. Everything else followed in consequence of this in a manner of speaking. From this view resulted the mighty relationships, only dimly glimpsed by the Westerner to this day, that one might call the karmic relationships, which subsequently left a reflection, albeit only a faint one, in the Greek concept of destiny. What is it, really, that passed over, that flowed across into the Occidental version of those concepts, even those with which an attempt was made to understand the Mystery of Golgotha? It was something that was strongly tinged by legalistic thinking. There is a radical contrast between contemplating the path of the soul in the sense of the Oriental world conception as descending from a spiritual world into the physical realm, noting how the karmic relationships are viewed there from wide perspectives, and considering the juridical idea of holding court over the soul that, in the Occident, has invaded these Oriental concepts. We need only recall Michelangelo's magnificent painting in the Vatican, in the Sistine Chapel, where the World Judge, like a cosmic magistrate, adjudicates upon good and evil men. This is the Oriental world view translated into Occidental legalism; this is in no way the original Eastern world conception. This legalistic thinking lies entirely outside Oriental perception. Indeed, the more advanced the concept of the spirit became in Central Europe, the more it culminated in the Roman legalistic element.

Hence, in the central regions, we are dealing primarily with the element predisposed for the juridical and political thinking. Civilization is, however, not only differentiated over the earth in this manner but in yet another way. If we study the accomplishments of the East, if we consider the special nuance of Oriental soul life, in particular where it is at its greatest, we find that this soul life is most eminently atavistic and instinctive, notwithstanding the fact that its fruits are primarily cultural; and all of mankind has continued to sustain itself on them. This spiritual life emerges out of unconscious imaginations that are, however, already muted by a certain ray of consciousness. Nevertheless, it contains much that is unconscious and instinctive.

The spiritual life produced by humanity up until now is indeed brought forth in a way that points to the highest spheres of which the human soul can partake, but the lofty heights of these spheres were reached in a sort of instinctive flight. It does not suffice to retrace the concepts or images produced by the Orient. Rather, it is necessary to focus on the singular kind of spiritual and soul life, by means of which, especially in its flowering time, the Oriental arrived at these conceptions. To be sure, we only gain an idea of this distinctive soul quality that I have already characterized by relating it with the life of the metabolism, if we want to have a feeling for the whole original soul structure contained in the Vedas and other texts. We simply must not overlook the fact that the Orient has reached its decadence today; for example, we should in no way confuse the mystic, nebulous manner which, despite his greatness, distinguishes Rabindranath Tagore,⁸⁵ from the true essence of Oriental soul life. For, although Rabindranath Tagore possesses what has been handed down to this day of the ancient Eastern soul life, he permeates it with all manner of modern, Western European affectations and is, above all, an affected individual.

Spiritual science must indeed lay hold of these matters, step by step, and in such a way that we do not merely accept some rigidly set up concepts, but really envision the unique soul nuance involved here. Thus, we find in the Orient an instinctive cultural life, permeated through and through with the trend for the legalistic and political soul life developing in the central regions. There, we come to the development of the half instinctive, the half conscious. It is most interesting to examine how a purely juridical thinking is produced from the souls of people, say, like Fichte, Goethe, Schelling or Hegel. It is purely juridical, but it is partly instinctive, partly a fully conscious thinking; something that is, for example, the special charm of Hegel's mode of thinking. A completely conscious element only appears in the Western soul, where consciousness develops out of the instincts themselves. The conscious element is still instinctive in the Western soul, but instinctively the conscious emerges in Western economic thinking. Here, for the first time, mankind is called upon to attain to a conscious penetration of even public, social affairs.

Now we come across something quite strange. One might actually recommend that those to whom it matters for one reason or another should now try to understand the configuration of civilized humanity's thinking by becoming acquainted with the attempts of the English thinkers to arrive at a mode of social thinking, say, the attempts of Spencer, Bentham, particularly Huxley, and so on. These thinkers are indeed all rooted in the same atmosphere of thought in which Darwin was rooted; they all really think as Darwin thought, except that they try, as does Huxley, to develop a social view out of their scientific way of thinking. A strange feeling pervades us when we delve into the attempts by Huxley⁸⁶ to achieve a social thinking, for instance, about the state, about the legal aspects of human relationships. It gives one a strange feeling. Let us suppose the following: Someone wishes to acquire a sense, a feeling for what I have here in mind, and to that end reads Hegel's book on natural rights,⁸⁷ on political sciences, Fichte's philosophy of rights,⁸⁸ or something else by a minor Middle European mind; afterwards, he reads, possibly, Huxley's attempts to advance from scientific to political thinking. He would experience something like the following. He would say to himself, "I read Hegel and Fichte; the concepts here are fully developed, they have strong contours and are precisely drawn. Now I read Huxley or Spencer, and I find the concepts primitive; it as though one had just begun to contemplate these questions. Confronted by such things, it does not do to say, “Well, the one was perfect, the other imperfect.” This does not suffice at all when one confronts realities.

Let me present to you a parallel taken from an entirely different realm. It can happen that one lectures on some spiritual-scientific subject, say, the former embodiment of the earth, the Moon embodiment. A variety of facts are set forth. Someone reads or listens to this lecture who is clairvoyant in a quite atavistic manner. It could be an individual who is outwardly illogical, who in practical life is unable to put five words together in logical sequence, who is inept in everything and therefore of no use in ordinary life. Such a person listens to what is being related about the configuration of some Moon era. Now, this same person who is quite dull and blundering in outer life and unable to count up to five properly, yet who is atavistically clairvoyant, can take in what he has heard, enlarge upon it, develop it further and discover additional facts not mentioned earlier. The things that such a person then adds can be infused with extraordinarily penetrating logic, a logic that arouses admiration, while, in everyday life, this person is clumsy and illogical. This is entirely possible, for if someone is atavistically clairvoyant, it is not his ego that joins his images together in a logical manner, although he can discover the images by himself. The images are joined by various spiritual beings dwelling within him. We become acquainted with their logic, not his.

This is why we cannot simply say that one view is on a higher, the other on a lower level; in every case we have to go into the specific character of the matter. This is true here too. The views of Fichte, Hegel and other less illustrious minds are half instinctive, only partly fully conscious ones. What arises, on the other hand, in the West as primitive economic thinking is indeed fully conscious. The concepts such as those thought out by Huxley, Spencer and others are impertinently conscious, but conceived in a primitive way. What had appeared in former times in instinctive or half instinctive form emerges here consciously but in quite an elementary way. I shall illustrate this by means of a concrete example.

Huxley tells himself that if we observe nature—he naturally looks at it from the Darwinian standpoint—we find the struggle for survival. Every creature fights ruthlessly for self-preservation, and the whole animal kingdom's struggle is waged so that the naturally strong survive by annihilating the weak. This theory has penetrated into Huxley's flesh and blood. This, however, cannot be continued on into humanity. Freedom such as we must seek in human social life is nonexistent in nature, for there can be no freedom—thinks Huxley—in a realm where every creature must either assert itself ruthlessly or perish. There can be no equality where the fittest must always eliminate the less fit. Now Huxley turns from the natural realm to the social sphere and is compelled to conclude that, indeed, this is true, but in the social realm goodness should prevail, freedom should reign. Something should come to pass that as yet cannot be found in nature.

It is again the great chasm that I have characterized from so many points of view. Once, Huxley very aptly calls man “the splendid rebel,” who, in order to establish a human kingdom, rebels against all that prevails in nature. Something therefore ensues here that is not yet found in nature. Now again, Huxley actually thinks along scientific lines. He is compelled to search for natural forces in man that constitute the social life and rebel against nature herself. He looks in man for something concrete that serves as the basis for the human social community. The other forces of the kingdoms of nature cannot establish this social community; in nature, the struggle for survival holds sway, and there is nothing that could hold humanity together in a social structure. Nonetheless, as far as Huxley is concerned, there is nothing but this natural cohesion. Hence, this “splendid rebel” must in turn have natural forces which, although they are forces of nature, rebel against the natural forces in general. Now, Huxley finds two natural forces that are at the same time the basic forces of the social life. The first one is actually worked out wrongly, for it is not yet capable of establishing a social life, only family egoism. It is what Huxley calls the family attraction, something that is active within blood relationships. The second force he lists that could form a sort of natural foundation for the social life is something that he calls “the human instinct for mimicry,” the human talent for imitation.

Now, there is something that appears in the human being in the sense referred to by Huxley, namely, the faculty of imitation. It means that one person follows what the other does. This is the reason the individual pursues not merely his own directions, but society as a whole, the social life, runs along the same lines, as it were, because one person imitates the other. This is as far as Huxley goes. It is very interesting, because you know that in describing the human being we list the following: The element of imitation from the first to the seventh year; from the seventh to the fourteenth year, the element of authority; the one of independent judgment from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year. All three, of course, participate in the social development. Huxley, however, stops short at the first; he is only laboring to emerge from the primitive level. He has taken hold of nothing but the force that is active in the human being only until his seventh year. We are confronted with nothing less than the fact that if the social community as envisioned by Huxley were actually to exist, it would have to consist entirely of children; human beings would have to remain children perpetually. Thus, in envisioning the social life, Western society has, in fact, only advanced to the stage applicable to children. The social science striven for in full consciousness has progressed no further than this That is most interesting.

Here, you can detect the primitive aspect in connection with a particular element. The West works its way out of the scientific-economic thinking and attains something in a conscious manner that has been reached in the central regions in a half conscious, half instinctive way on a higher level. We can actually follow up these things in detail and they can thus become most interesting. All matters brought to light by spiritual science can invariably be followed up by means of details. It only requires a sufficiently large number of people to develop enough diligence to pursue all details of spiritual-scientific matters.

Is it not actually rubbed into us in this instance that something else must be present that cooperates in the social development of existence? For, certainly, social structures cannot be established in which only forces of imitation hold sway. Otherwise, they could only contain children; human beings would have to remain children forever, if the social life would originate only through mutual imitation. In order to arrive at something that can throw light on the primitive attempts, and can also bring together East, Middle and West, we must proceed from initiation science. This means that we have to link the train of thought that we tried to connect with the above to what initiation science can offer to humanity, so that mankind may be capable of developing a social life truly structured in conformity with the Spirit.

People fail to observe how the environment of the human being is pervaded with quite clearly differentiated forces. Modern science has reached the point where it states that we are surrounded by air, for we inhale and exhale it; but there is something that is even more obvious in our life than “the air around us,” something that people fail to notice. Take the following simple fact that no one today takes into consideration, yet is something that could be understood by anybody. An animal kingdom is spread out around our human kingdom. This animal kingdom includes creatures of every imaginable form. Let us picture to ourselves this whole manifold animal kingdom around us. In the case of a table, everybody knows that there are forces present that gave this table its shape. In regard to the animal kingdom surrounding us, we ought, naturally, to assume the same, namely, that just as air is present, so, in the environment, the forces are contained that bestow form upon the creatures of the animal kingdom. We all dwell within the same realm. The dog, the horse, the oxen and donkey do not move about in a different world from the one which we also inhabit. And the forces that bestow the donkey shape on the donkey affect us human beings too; yet—forgive me for speaking so bluntly—we do not acquire the form of a donkey. There are also elephants in our environment, but we do not assume the shape of elephants. Yet all the forces fashioning these shapes surround us everywhere. Why is it that we do not take on the forms of, say, a donkey or an elephant? We possess other forces that counteract them. We would indeed acquire these shapes if we did not have these other opposing forces. It is a fact that if we as human beings confront a donkey, our etheric body constantly has the tendency to assume the shape of a donkey. We restrain our etheric body from doing so only because we have a physical body possessing a solid form. Again, if we face an elephant, our etheric body endeavors to assume the elephant shape and is prevented from doing so only because of the physical body's solid shape. Whether it be elephant, stag-beetle or dirt-beetle, the etheric body tries to assume the shapes of any and all creatures. Potentially, all the forms are present in our etheric body, and we comprehend these forms only when we retrace them inwardly, as it were. Our physical body merely prevents us from turning into all these shapes. Therefore, we can say that we carry the entire animal kingdom within our etheric body. We are human only in our physical body. In our etheric body, we bear with us the whole animal kingdom.

Again, there flows all around us the same complex of forces that creates the plant forms. Just as our etheric body is predisposed to assume all animal shapes, our astral body is inclined to reproduce all the plant forms. Here it is already more pleasant to make comparisons, for, while the etheric body is imbued with the tendency to become a donkey when it sees one, the astral body wishes merely to become the thistle on which the donkey feeds. But this astral body is definately ensouled with the tendency to accommodate itself to those forces that find their external expression in the plant forms. Thus we may say that the astral body reacts to the complex of forces that shapes the plant kingdom.

The mineral kingdom is again a force complex that develops the various shapes of this specific realm. This acts within our ego. It is quite evident in the case of the ego, for you only think in terms of the mineral realm. After all, it has been reiterated time and again that the intellect can only grasp the inanimate. Hence, what is contained in the human ego understands the lifeless. Consequently, our ego dwells in the complex of forces that creates the mineral kingdom. The physical body, as such, lives in none of these realms; it has, as you know, a realm of its own. In my Occult Science, an Outline, the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms are dealt with separately; this signifies that the physical body possesses a domain of its own. The animal kingdom, on the other hand, is actually found in the etheric body; as far as this viewpoint is concerned, the plant kingdom is found in the astral body, and the mineral kingdom in the ego. From my various books, however, you are familiar with something else. You know that during earthly life these various bodies are worked upon. I have described how the ego, the astral body, the etheric body and even the physical body are worked on. I initially outlined it there, I might say, from the human, the humanistic intention. Now let us try to depict it from another point of view.

Take the mineral concepts that the human being acquires. He experiences the external world, after all, by experiencing it in mineral concepts and forms. Only enlightened minds like Goethe work their way up to the pictorial forms, to the morphology of plants, to metamorphosis. Here, the shapes are transformed. The ordinary view, still prevailing today, on the other hand, only dwells in the solid, mineral forms. If, now, the ego works on these forms and develops them, what is the result? Then, the result is the conscious cultural life, one of the domains of the threefold social organism. The ego creates the cultural life while working inwardly upon itself. All cultural life is, in fact, inner formative development of the ego. What the ego acquires from the mineral realm and in turn transforms into art, religion, science, and so forth, that is the cultural sphere, the transformed mineral kingdom, the spiritual realm.

What results from the tendency of the astral body, residing in the subconscious depths of most human beings, to assume every plant form possible? When you transform this tendency indwelling the astral body, when it radiates up into consciousness in half instinctive, half conscious form, what comes about then? The domain of rights, of the state, comes about.

Now, if you comprehend what holds sway in the relationships between human beings, namely, what is now, within external life, transformed from man's experiences of animality in the ether body, then you arrive at the third domain of the threefold social organism. Were we to stop at the etheric body as it comes to us from birth, we would only have the tendency in this etheric body to turn now into a donkey, now into an oxen, now into a cow, now into a Butterfly. We would reproduce the entire animal kingdom. As human beings we do not merely do this, however, we also transform the ether body. We accomplish this within the social life by living together with others. When we face a donkey, our etheric body wishes to become a donkey. When we confront another human being, we certainly cannot say without uttering a real insult that now, too, we wish to turn into a donkey. This is not possible, at least not in ordinary life; here we must change in another way. I should like to say that, here, the transformation becomes visible; here, those forces come into play that are effective in the economic life. These are the forces that assert themselves when a human being confronts his fellowman in brotherliness. In this way, in the brotherly confrontation, those forces are active that represent the work on the etheric body; thus, through the work on this body, the third realm, the economic sphere, comes into being.

Animal Kingdom: Etheric Body Economic Realm
Plant Kingdom: Astral Body Realm of Rights, of State
Mineral Kingdom: Ego
60; Cultural, Spiritual Realm

Thus, just as man is connected on the one side with the animal kingdom through his etheric body, he is related on the other side in the external environment with the economic sphere of the social organism. We could say that if man is viewed inwardly, spiritually, from the physical body towards the etheric, we find the animal kingdom within man. Outwardly, in his surroundings, we find the economic life.

When we penetrate into the human being and search out what he represents by virtue of his astral body, we find the plant kingdom. Outwardly, in the social configuration, the life of rights corresponds to the plant kingdom. Again, penetrating the human being, we discover the mineral kingdom corresponding to the ego. Outside, in the environment, corresponding to the mineral kingdom, we have the cultural life. Thus, through his constitution, man is linked to the three kingdoms of nature. By working on his whole being, he becomes a social being.

You see that we can never arrive at a comprehension of the social life if we are not in a position to ascend to the etheric body, astral body and ego. For we do not understand man's relationship to the social order if we don't ascend like that. If one proceeds merely from natural science, one stops short at the “human instinct for mimicry,” the faculty of imitation; one cannot progress. In thoughts, one makes the whole world puerile, for it is the child that still retains most of the natural forces. If one wishes to advance further, one needs the insight into initiation science. We need the insight into the fact that the human being is bound up with his etheric body through the animal kingdom, with the astral body through the plant world, and with the ego through the mineral realm. We need to know that owing to his observation of the mineral world man attains to his cultural life; that due to the transformation of the deep instincts harbored by him and owing to his kinship with the surrounding plant world he attains to the life of rights, of the state. We realize that these deep instincts correspond to the sphere of rights and the state. This is why, at first, the life of the state contains so much of the instinctive element if it is not infused with the cultural element of jurisprudence. Finally, we have the economic sphere which basically represents the metamorphosis of those inner experiences gained in the etheric body.

Now, these experiences are not brought to the surface from within by the science of initiation, for Huxley is not motivated in any sense by initiation science to explore the connection between man and the economic life. He observes the exterior, the conditions economically present outside. The whole complex of relations between the economic sphere, the etheric body and the animal kingdom is unclear to him. He looks at what is outwardly present. Consequently, he can certainly not advance beyond the most primitive, elementary level, the faculty of imitation.

From this we realize that if people would wish to continue extracting social thinking from modern science, they would remain caught up in absurdities and something quite dreadful would have to ensue. Over the whole earth, a social life would have to arise that would bring about the most primitive conditions; it would lead humanity back to a puerile social life. Gradually, untruth and lying would become a matter of course simply because people could not do otherwise even if they wanted to. They would be thirty, forty, fifty or even older, yet they would have to behave like children, if, with their consciousness, they only wanted to comprehend what is derived from science. People would only be able to develop the instincts of imitation. Even today we frequently have the feeling that only these instincts of imitation are being developed. We watch the appearance, somewhere, of yet another reform movement of a radical nature. It really only contains the instincts of imitation derived from some university philistine. Much of what, today, looks most illustrious when given the polish derived from the customary falsehoods would appear very different in the light of initiation science. Modern comprehension of the world, however, is limited to what can be seen in the light of the concept of imitation unless one is willing to advance from ordinary, official science to the science of initiation, the science that draws its substance from the inner impulses of existence.

Thus I have tried to show you how the aspects that are lacking in the present, the very. aspects through which it becomes evident where the present age must remain stuck because of its inability to penetrate reality, can be fructified and illuminated by the science of initiation.

• 84 . See Lecture VII of this volume.
• 85 . See Note #54
• 86 . Thomas Huxley: 1825–1895.
• 87 . Friedrich Hegel: Grundlinien einer Philosophie des Rechts, 1821.
• 88 . Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Grundlage des Naturrechts, 1796.

From many studies on the subject of the forming of human destiny or karma you will have realised that human life is not viewed in its entirety if sleep is left out of consideration. When a man reflects about himself with the ordinary consciousness of to-day, he looks back only upon the days because the nights are passed in unconsciousness. In the case of normal sleepers, therefore—as nowadays there are no Seven Sleepers—a third of life is disregarded. But for experience of the super-sensible and of man's participation in the spiritual world, it is this very third of life that is of essential importance. When a person has reached a definite age he looks back over the days he remembers, as far back as his memory goes. The nights are between the days but in his recollection the nights are left entirely out of consideration. A true retrospect is really not possible for a man of modern times because his observation of life is far too superficial. But if he were capable of carrying out such a retrospect, then precisely through what he does not see in the ordinary way he would have an indication of karma. Observation of the life of sleep gives significant hints of individual karma. Attention must above all be paid to the essential difference between the two moments of waking and going to sleep.

Ordinary consciousness can feel this difference instinctively, but Initiation-Science alone can throw light upon it. The difference between the moment of waking and the moment of going to sleep is particularly evident to people who are sick or ailing. They notice more readily than do those in good health that the moment of going to sleep is often accompanied by at least a slight feeling of pleasure. The moment of waking, on the other hand, has something slightly unpleasant about it; waking is accompanied by happiness only if the attention of the person concerned is at once turned to the outer world and when his consciousness of the outer world drowns what is rising up from within him. For many people the moments both of waking and of going to sleep are shrouded in a certain dimness. At the moment of going to sleep a man has the feeling that he is somehow dragging the past day's experiences along with him, that these become more and more nebulous and that he then abandons them. The moment of waking is accompanied by a slight feeling of oppression, a feeling of lifting oneself out of certain depths, bringing from them something that is carried over into the day and is got rid of only during the course of it. The result is that a certain feeling of unpleasantness may be associated with the experience of waking. An unpleasant sensation of taste may intensify into an equally unpleasant sensation of a stupefied head. People do not as a rule distinguish between these delicate experiences but they are unmistakeable indications of a great deal in human life. For what is really taking place? We describe quite correctly and from a certain standpoint very exactly what is taking place if we say: during sleep the physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed and the ego and astral body pass out into the spiritual world, returning into the physical and etheric bodies in the morning on waking. But how does this process take place? In order to make progress in our study of karma we will envisage the whole process which, to begin with, it is justifiable to describe in a rather abstract way.

This emergence of the ego and astral body from the physical and etheric bodies can be sketched like this. Let us suppose this figure to be the human being and here are the physical body and the etheric body. In the evening, when sleep begins, the ego and astral body move outwards. We will draw quite diagrammatically how the two members widen out, expand, but describe a kind of circle. In the morning, on waking, the ego and the astral body pass into the physical body again through the limbs, actually by way of the fingers and toes. The fact is that a circle is described and this statement must be taken more literally than is usually imagined. In reality, when a normal human being wakes in the morning, the picture seen by clairvoyance is not of the whole astral body and the whole ego being immediately within the physical and etheric bodies; on the contrary, ego and astral body pass only slowly and by degrees into the physical body from morning onwards until towards midday and afternoon. You will say that if this were really the case we should feel our ego and astral body moving only gradually from the tips of the fingers and toes towards the head. To very exact clairvoyant observation this is actually the case, only the person concerned does not inwardly feel it to be so, for the reason that the way in which these higher principles work is different from any kind of physical activity. You see, if a locomotive is propelling a carriage, it pushes forwards from the spot where it is at the moment. And if a railway line is, say 30 metres long and the engine is pushing forward, as long is needed for the first metre, then so long for the second, and so on, at a certain point there may be no effect from the engine if it has not yet reached thus far. But with spiritual conditions it is different; spiritual conditions are effective at other places as well as where they happen to be centred. So the waking hours of the day are used for the purpose of bringing our ego and astral body slowly into our physical and etheric bodies from the tips of our fingers and toes. But the ego and astral body begin to be active from the very beginning, from the moment of waking, so that one has the feeling of being completely filled by them. To clairvoyant sight, however, it is clear that an actual revolution takes place through the day; the complementary revolution takes place during the night. But a revolution also takes place—one that is less dependent upon time—when you have an afternoon nap. Here again the ego and astral body leave the physical and etheric bodies and the process adapts itself to your need of sleep. Sleep is a prophet and knows when you will wake although you yourself do not; your astral body under all circumstances knows it. It knows when you will wake even if as the result of some disturbance you sleep for a shorter time than you intend, even if before going to sleep you say that you want to sleep for only half-an-hour but you lie asleep for three hours instead. The astral body knows exactly how long you will sleep. It is an accurate prophet because the inner, spiritual circumstances are, in fact, different from the external circumstances experienced at the time.

You will certainly have realised that there is a very great difference between the process of going to sleep and that of waking. When we wake we have just been in the spiritual world and when we go to sleep we pass out of the physical world and into the spiritual world. A stream bears us along in the spiritual world between sleeping and waking and we also have experiences then—experiences which are, however, wrapt in unconsciousness. We have experiences during sleep which are, in fact, similar to those of the daytime, only they are of much greater intensity.

If you observe the soul's waking life you will find there, in the first place, the thought-experiences evoked by the various impressions made by life. But memories of the earthly life already past are always intermingled with these experiences. Try for once to consider how in every situation memories mingle with the momentary impressions made by life. In fact, if close attention is paid, one can get a picture of how, at different moments, life is a veritable hodge-podge, a mingling of memories and instantaneous impressions. There are two quite different factors: the thoughts which rise up from within and the thoughts which enter via the senses. These are quite different currents of the inner life and during sleep they are also in evidence. The stream of what is present (impressions of the daily life) on going to sleep continues during the night and perpetually flowing towards this is what we experience on waking.

These two currents stream towards each other: the one stream, experienced particularly on going to sleep, is the one already mentioned, the one that is experienced consciously, vividly and powerfully during the first decades after death when life is lived through again in reverse order. As I put it to you rather drastically: if you give someone a box on the ear, then, in living through the event after death you do not experience the anger which you consciously felt on Earth when giving the blow, or maybe the satisfaction at being able to express the anger. Instead, you undergo what the other person experienced, his physical pain and also his moral suffering. This is what you would experience, but in a picture, not yet in reality, if you could consciously continue your life when it is already becoming dim at the approach of sleep. If you were to pass into sleep with full, clear consciousness, you would live through the day's experiences in reverse, but in pictures. Whereas during the first decades after death it is all experienced as reality.

What I have described applies, approximately, to life by day in the waking state, when we are given up to outer life merely with our thoughts. But there is also the other current and this has something stupendous in it. We experience it on waking, as I have explained, but there is an element of heaviness in it which is carried into the day and is only gradually overcome; later in the day we become free of it. When this second stream is fully perceptible to Initiation vision it is seen to be a repository of the whole karmic past which passes before the human being every time he sleeps. Whereas a person can experience something of the karma that is taking shape for the future, when he wakes from sleep he has in the feeling I have described a faint, admittedly a very faint, glimpse of his present karma. The moment of waking brings a faint indication of what an individual bears within him from his past earthly lives. This is of course taken into what the astral body and the ego radiate when from the tips of the fingers and toes they spread through the body. A very burdensome karma, a karma that is difficult to bear, radiates unhealthy material deposits into the head, whereas a good karma radiates health-bringing deposits. And it is here that the spiritual and the natural make contact. The good in a man's karma radiates the healthy states of the organism into the head in the morning and clarifies it; healthy elements radiate upwards from good karma. From bad karma, from the residue of whatever guilt has been incurred, unhealthy deposits in the human organism are reduced to a kind of vapour which rises up into the head. The head then feels dull and heavy. The weaving of karma right into the physical can be perceived from the condition prevailing on waking in the morning. Karma takes shape through the alternating effects of sleeping and waking life. Now just as the karma that takes shape from what we have done every day of our life until its end, signifies in sleep during the night what the momentarily formed thoughts signify during the day, so does that mighty spectacle encountered when we have slept from evening to morning signify the cosmic memories of our past karma. Just as we have personal memories when we wake, from going to sleep until waking we have our karmic memories, if our consciousness extends so far. Memories of the different lives through which we have passed on Earth come to meet us. Soon after going to sleep there can be revealed to one who is able to understand such experiences through Initiation wisdom and Initiation insight, the last Earth-life, the last Earth-life but one and so on, right back to lives which become indefinite because the individual himself was then still living in the universal All, with a dreamlike, plant-like consciousness. Thus sleep is actually the window through which man looks at his karma. He becomes familiar with his karma and works at its further shaping during sleep through the deeds and thoughts which fill his waking life. This is the first weaving of karma: it takes place during sleep. We have already considered a second weaving that takes place during the first decades after death.

We shall acquire a more serious conception of life when the significance of sleep has been grasped in this way, when we realise that we sink into sleep every night because it is then that we work at the formation of our karma, and because it is during sleep that our karma from previous earthly lives finds the way whereby it can play a part in our daily life. From the night, karma gradually enters into our daily life and we bring something quite definite with us into the day. An individual who can recollect clearly how at one point in his life a particularly significant event occurred to him, will, if he has a more intimate, finely developed faculty of introspection, easily perceive that if, let us say, this event took place in the afternoon, ever since morning an inner restlessness was impelling him towards it. Most people who can perceive something of the sort will have had the feeling that from the morning onwards they had been moving towards an event that was to be significant in their life. Such an event—if it was a really fateful although entirely unexpected event—affected all the preceding hours of the day. On days when something important is to happen to us we do not wake up exactly as we do on days that take their usual course—only we do not notice it. Those who used to lead the life of peasants on the land—such people knew about these things and did not like to be torn suddenly out of sleep, because when there is no gradual transition into the waking life of day one is wrested away from such intimate experiences. Peasants say that on waking one should never look at the window at once but away from it, so that while the light is still dim one can become aware of what is emerging from sleep. The peasant will not at once look at the window nor does he like to be startled into waking suddenly; he likes to be wakened naturally, at the same time every morning by the church bell, so that he can prepare himself for this through the whole period of sleep. Then the day dawns, the church bell sounds into his life and then, in the early morning he has inklings of his destiny, of events of destiny, not those resulting from acts of free will. This is what he likes to happen and unlike people claiming to be highly civilised he would hate to be wakened by an alarum clock, for that drives one with dead certainty away from everything spiritual—much more forcibly, of course, than the window looked at immediately on waking. But our modern culture has introduced materialism into all the circumstances of life and will continue to do so. There is a great deal in modern life which makes it impossible for men to perceive the spirit living and weaving in the world. The more aware they become of that indefinite, half mystical influence which can radiate from sleep, the more clearly is their attention directed to their karma.

And now you will understand why I was able to say that we readily dream of individuals whom we meet in life and to whom we at once feel drawn or the reverse, quite independently of whatever outer impression they make. What is happening in such cases? These are individuals with whom we were together in earlier lives on Earth. Let us say that in the afternoon of 14th June, 1924, we have had the experience of meeting someone we perhaps dislike. We now carry into sleep the experience that gave rise to the feeling of dislike. But there, in sleep, the karma is revealed; this person stands before us as he was in the last earthly life or in the last but one, and so on; we meet him as he was in his earlier life. We encounter everything we experienced in connection with this individual who has now appeared and who simply reminded us of something—we meet him as a bodily figure, but in a spiritual way. No wonder that we begin to dream of him; with ordinary consciousness we cannot do otherwise. But if we come across an individual for the first time, however beautiful or ugly his features may be or however strongly he interests us, in our sleep we never meet him, for he was never with us in earlier lives on Earth. No wonder we cannot dream of him! You see how transparent such things become when he facts are examined spiritually.

Now what transpires between sleeping and waking in the forming of karma may follow a normal, perfectly normal course. Then a man will experience how his destiny takes shape as the fulfilment of what he brought upon himself in earlier earthly fives. Or he will experience the ultimate karmic value of what he thinks or does in this present fife. It will as a rule live itself out in what he thinks or does. But something quite different may come about.

Suppose a man who is living on the Earth today achieved in deed or thought something of real importance in an earlier life. The karmic result of this does not lie in the physical body or in the etheric body which are inherited from the parents, but it lies in the astral body and ego—the members which are outside the physical and etheric bodies during sleep at night. But suppose that this karmic load has such strength that it cannot wait until the age of life when the astral body may be weak, for in old age muscles and bones have already become brittle. Let us take seventy years—the patriarchal age—to be the normal length of a man's life on Earth. In these seventy years man's astral body and ego also undergo development. The astral body of a child can work strongly and forcefully upon the whole physical and etheric organism; it can hammer, as it were, upon muscles and bones. In old age this is no longer possible, for the astral body then becomes relatively weak. The strength of the ego increases but it withdraws into the weaker astral body and hence works with less power. The astral body, however, is particularly responsible here, for in old age it is no longer able to hammer effectively upon muscles and bones. Now imagine that someone is living at the present time, in the twentieth century, having lived before in the fourteenth or eleventh century. During his life in the eleventh century he performed a really significant act, one that made very strong impressions on the astral body. The ensuing result remains in the astral body and when the man comes again in the twentieth century it wants to be finally fulfilled and from this astral body to give the necessary stimulus. When the result of the experience in the eleventh century is of such significance that it cannot make use of a feeble, aged astral body hardly capable of performing important deeds, then it must use an astral body in the early years of life. And if the event has been so important as to eclipse all other events of life, a great deal must be compressed into the period while the astral body is still youthful. What does this mean? It means that the individual concerned will have a short life in the twentieth-century incarnation. Here you see how the length of life is determined by the consequences of former earthly thoughts and deeds being anchored in the astral body.

We now go further. Think, for instance, of an astral body that is positively inflated as the result of important deeds—particularly evil deeds—in an earlier incarnation; such deeds inflate the astral body and it makes a strong impact upon the physical and etheric bodies. This strong impact is not healthy; only a certain normal relation of the astral body to the physical and etheric bodies is healthy. The strong impact which can, for instance, be caused by bad karma, batters the organs, softens them and causes disease. Now comes the second incarnation. Such action or thinking in the eleventh century can inflate the astral body, thereby condemning the individual to death at an early age. But he may fall ill in any case, apart from this violent impact; he may have a severe illness and die from it. That is the physical aspect. For when we see what is going on in the person's physical body, we say: he is ill and the illness ends in death; he falls ill at the age of twenty-five and dies at thirty in consequence of the illness.

Is this also the spiritual aspect? Is this also what would be said by Initiation Science? No! Initiation Science would say the opposite. For it is precisely the earlier significant action or thought that brings about the death in the next earthly life; the deed in the eleventh century brings about the death in the twentieth century. And the death sends the illness on in advance ... a man becomes ill so that he may die at the right moment. The consequence of the later death, which is a karmic necessity, is, as you now realise, the illness which is sent in advance. That is the spiritual aspect. When one rises from the physical world to the spiritual world everything is in fact reversed; it takes the opposite course and we see how the illness is karmically brought into man. That is the karmic aspect of illness. This karmic aspect of illness can be an extremely important factor for diagnosis. It need not immediately be discussed with the patient but it may certainly be important. If you bear in mind that what is contained in karma has its own definite place, you will certainly discover it.

Now if the significant incident, action or thought affecting another human being or some particular matter occurred in an immediately preceding incarnation, let us say in the eleventh century, when we are asleep we encounter what took place in that century before anything dating from a still earlier incarnation, let us say in the second century B.C. Thus we gradually encounter what has happened to us in earlier earthly lives. But if one begins here (pointing to the sketch) then what is encountered first is what has made the way from here to here. The karma comes to meet us; but this means that what is above here has come from what is below, perhaps from the heart; something that is low down in the organism and was affected in the previous incarnation comes, however, from the head. In the case of illness, therefore, when we see how far back the influential events lie, karma can indicate to us that an affection, let us say, of the legs, comes from incarnations in the relatively near past, whereas a symptom of illness in the head comes from incarnations in the relatively far distant past. Thus the transition from the spiritual into the physical can also be indicated by karma.

What results from this is extremely important for therapy. For where must we seek the remedy for illness affecting the head and for illness affecting the legs? The remedy for illness affecting the head will be found in what existed far, far back in the evolutionary process of Nature, in what is reminiscent of very early Nature-processes, for instance, mushrooms, which in their present imperfect form recapitulate an earlier plant formation, or in algae and lichens, or, in the case of the fully developed plant, in the root, since that is the part that has remained at the earliest stage. Illness in the lower body and more towards its periphery will have to be healed with what appeared at a later stage in the evolution of Nature, namely, blossoms, flowering plants or also with later formations in the mineral kingdom. Whatever is a late development in man must be healed with what is also a late development in Nature. In the head, too, there are, of course, organs which are comparatively late formations. When the Earth was still recapitulating the Moon-evolution and Sun-evolution, man existed without his present eyes, in general without sense-organs, although the first rudiments of them were already present during the Saturn-evolution. As they are today, mirroring the outer world inwardly, they are a relatively late product of evolution, appearing at the same time, for instance, as siliceous substance in its present form on the Earth. Silica as it is today is a late product in the evolution of the world of Nature, although its rudiments were laid in the far, far past.

Hence when silicic acid is correctly administered as a remedy it acts upon everything belonging to the nerves-and-senses system, especially the senses, through the whole organism. In their present form the senses developed in an age when rocks containing silica also appeared in their present form. In the first incarnation which can still be called an incarnation, when with our whole bodily make-up we were a more integral part of Nature, we lived, simply in accordance with our karma, an existence shared with different forms of plant and animal life, the successors of which are here to-day. The mushrooms and the roots of plants are unlike what they were in that early epoch but in a certain way what is present to-day in the mushrooms, lichens, algae and roots of plants is reminiscent of the conditions prevailing in our first definite incarnation. In the blossoms and flowering plants of today and in minerals at a corresponding stage ... (a gap in the transcript here). I bring this before you only to show how a true observation of karma leads to stages in the evolution of Nature. And from the relation of Nature to Man we can recognise how to heal. Every branch of life must ultimately be widened in such a way that it gradually becomes spiritual knowledge. Everything else is so much groping and fumbling, an existence in spiritual darkness, and it is this that has brought mankind into the present situation. If men are to emerge from it again they must grasp the reason for it in clear consciousness, that is to say, knowledge of the physical must be widened to knowledge of the spiritual. And nothing can lead more positively to realisation of the spiritual than the study of karma.

When we picture how the forming of karma proceeds from sleep, how again it passes into and through sleep, how the normal forming of karma impels a man to action, makes his action again subject to karma and how he thus lives out the ordinary karma of life—from all this we see how karma works. When again we see how the life of an individual is shortened and he dies at an early age, indicating that karma has inflated his astral body and must make strong demands upon it as the result of past deeds, thus contributing to illness—everywhere the working of karma is in evidence. Or let us suppose a man has an accident and is ill as a result; then, under certain circumstances, such an accident—which is possibly, but not necessarily, determined by karma—can continue to be a factor in the further course of karma through the following lives on Earth. Illness may also be the beginning of karma and then it will be found that such illnesses make going to sleep an unwelcome and difficult process. But when illnesses are the beginning of karma they have something consoling about them.

In the case of many illnesses the following must be said: illnesses that are a fulfilment of karma, that make waking unpleasant, point to previous experiences; illnesses that are an augury of future karma and make going to sleep an unwelcome and difficult process are the beginning of good karma. For there will be compensation for what is suffered in such an illness. We have the pain now and afterwards the compensation for the pain, the uplifting, joyous experience. A great deal in life looks different when viewed from the spiritual and not from the physical standpoint. It is sometimes a thoroughly painful physical experience not to be able to sleep, but true observation of the spiritual aspect can be comforting. And if we do not value the momentary physical effect above the spiritual life we can actually say: Thank goodness that I so often have difficulty in going to sleep, for that is a sign that I shall experience much that will be uplifting in my future earthly life; a great deal from my present life will pass into the next one.

Sleeplessness can sometimes be a good comforter and if it were not karmically beneficial in its spiritual aspect, it would be much more harmful than it actually is. Many people tell one such legends about their long bouts of sleeplessness that from the medical point of view one might well ask how comes it that they are still alive! Normal sleep is essential for normal life. People tell one for how long they have not slept; one can only wonder that they are still alive for they really ought to be dead and yet they are not! But in such circumstances the vivifying spiritual element contained in the ego penetrates into life as compensation. To a brief survey of life it is obvious that really restful sleep after hard struggles and hard work is also at times desirable. But to lie in complete restfulness without sleeping and to pass the night quietly and fully awake is nevertheless the more desirable because when it is done of set purpose a person then becomes more and more aware of the Eternal. But the will must be in operation; the condition must not, in essentials at least, be due to physiological causes. Nevertheless there is karmic consolation for difficulty in going to sleep and in sleeplessness, for this really points to future karma, points to the future in certain respects.

One of the repeated objections to the search for spiritual knowledge, in the last third of the nineteenth century, is this: when a man has passed through the gates of death he will see the nature of the spiritual life as lived without the physical body, but while here in the physical body attention must be paid to earthly life; here man should live as if the earth were his sole sphere of activity. A deeper study of Spiritual Science shows us increasingly what a superficial grasp of spiritual life is contained in such a statement. It teaches us that things are not really as though life in a physical body before death were entirely separate from life in the spiritual world after death, as if the one did not contact the other. We shall best come to a common understanding for study, if we consider what we already know of the connection of the spiritual life with physical life. Let us begin by reminding ourselves of what we have learnt from Spiritual Science about the alternating life of man between sleeping and waking. We speak of this rightly when we say: The Ego and astral body are outside the physical body during sleep. This is a sufficient answer for the immediate demand for knowledge, but only one aspect of the full truth; it is as though we were to say: the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, and is not there in the interval. We know that for the earth this is not the case; we know that during the time the sun is not shining for us it is shining elsewhere, giving its light to other inhabitants of the earth when it is dark for us. It is much the same with the life of the Ego and astral body in. relation to that of the physical and etheric bodies, if we take a wide view of it. True, the Ego and astral body are outside the physical body during sleep, but only partially they are outside the blood and nerve-systems. When we all asleep the sun of our Ego and astral body sets in this way for the blood and nerve-systems; yet from the Ego and astral body outside, the forces radiate while we are sleeping into those organs not connected with the blood and nerves. Our body lives in two spheres. We live in one while awake, when we are ensouled by our Ego and astral body; and in the other when we sleep, in the sphere from which the radiations and force of our Ego and astral body pour into the activities of our body-with the exception of the functions connected with the blood and nerves. Actually during sleep we are in the spiritual world with our Ego and astral body—as it were inserted into it—and just those forces of the astral body and Ego of which man is unconscious in normal human life, stream into his bodily organs when he is asleep. Thus we see the enormous significance of sleep for healthy human life on earth. I will make this clear by a little diagram. Let us take (a) for the sphere of the spiritual world, and (b) our body on earth. I will then shade the part connected with the blood and nerves; the other contains the organs apart from the system of blood and nerves. This cannot really be so sharply divided, for in a certain sense the nerve and blood systems are themselves organs with activities of their own like the other organs; but in so far as they are instruments for the conscious soul-life they may be considered as ensouled and inspired by the Ego and astral body.

This same Ego and astral body are taken into the sphere of spiritual life during the night and they thence radiate their forces into the other organs of the body. Thus we may say: There is in our physical body something that is strengthened and revived by what our soul in its sleeping condition draws into itself from the spiritual world and with which it is permeated by the spiritual world. The sun of our Ego and astral body sets for the nerves and blood, in so far as the Ego is connected with the blood, and the latter is not merely bodily life. It sets for the blood and nerves when the human being sleeps, and shines into the other organs functioning in our body. From this fact we can easily understand that sleep is an important Healer, and that unhealthy sleep may be regarded as one of the most deep-seated causes of illness, especially in relation to certain inner functions of our bodily life. Spiritual Science shows us that the way in which our Ego and astral body leave the blood and nerve-systems during sleep and enter spiritual life, is a matter of great consequence. Such things as I am about to discuss can apparently be refuted easily by so-called external experience, but the Spiritual Scientist must become accustomed to the fact that these refutations are only apparent, and that what is actually derived from the observations of inward processes is true. If the outer facts seem contradictory, we must search and see in how far they are illusion. I will now give a concrete instance, verified by Spiritual Science, which has an important bearing on this point.

Human life changes with respect to many things, but certain fundamental facts of life remain constant for long periods. In the Middle Ages there existed a certain fear, the so-called fear of spirits, of all sorts of elemental beings and ghosts; this we now call mediaeval superstition. In our day the object has changed, but not the fear; for just as the people of the Middle Ages were afraid of ghosts-—those of the present time are afraid of bacilli and similar things. It might be said that ghosts are more respectable and more to be feared than bacilli. The change has come about through the fact that formerly people were of a more spiritual disposition; they were afraid of the elemental spirit-beings; while now as the disposition is more materialistic, the spirits must be of a physical nature. This corresponds better with the age of materialism. What I wanted to say, however, is that Occult Science reveals the fact that bacilli are nourished in the human body if they are to thrive. Human beings do cultivate them. Of course everyone in the present time will say that it would be silly to breed bacilli. This is not a question of principle of any kind, but of looking at things from the right standpoint. It cannot be denied that, as Spiritual Science teaches, an Ego and astral body which have been fed on materialistic ideas alone, and have rejected all spiritual conceptions and wished to have nothing to do with them, when they leave the body during sleep, send into the bodily organs forces from the spiritual spheres which are just what the bacilli need. Nothing better can be done for the rearing of bacilli than to carry crude material ideas into sleep-life; thereby calling forth Ahrimanic forces which stream into the body and become the cultivators of bacilli.

To form a proper judgment of all this, we must understand clearly that the moment we turn to the study of spiritual life, we immediately have to consider what is called human fellowship. For a common co-operation in fellowship is effectual in a far greater measure when working at spiritual matters than when only concerned with the physical plane. We might say that in order to have no harmful bacilli in our bodies, it is best to apply the remedy of falling asleep with spiritual thoughts in our minds. Perhaps that might become a remedy, if it were to be medically proved, so that the most materialistic people in times to come would allow spiritual thoughts to be prescribed for them; and something contributing to spiritual life might be hoped for in this way. But the matter is not so simple, for the importance of communal life really begins when we touch spiritual matters, and there we can say: it is perhaps of no advantage to the individual to cherish spiritual ideas if all those around him are breeding bacilli by their materialistic thinking; here the one breeds for the other. This is an important fact and we must bear it in mind. Therefore I must again emphasize what I have already told you, that Spiritual Science can only be fruitful in its service to humanity when it does not merely serve the individual. It is not enough for the individual to accept it; Spiritual Science must patiently wait until it can become a factor in civilization, until it grips the heart and soul of the many; then we shall see what it can do for man.

There is, however, something which affects the Ahrimanic beings in the bacilli just as strongly. I say Ahrimanic beings, for I can easily show you the difference between Ahrimanic and other beings—and even externally it can be easily seen. Around us we see Nature with her many creatures; all that lives outside in Nature draws its life from the good, wise and progressive beings. Everything having its existence in other organisms and preferring to thrive therein belongs to the creatures of a Luciferic or Ahrimanic order. All parasites are of Luciferic or Ahrimanic origin; if we remember this we can easily distinguish the differences in the nature-kingdoms. There is something, as I said, very helpful for Ahrimanic creatures when they infest the human body. Suppose we are living at the time of an epidemic or plague. Naturally at such a time we must look after others, and a strong human fellowship or co-operation comes into being, for the karmic conditions may actually be such that the one who in his individual life seems least likely to have the illness, falls a prey to it. Nevertheless—we must not be deceived by appearances—what I am going to say is generally true. If we are living among the sick or dying and have to absorb these pictures that are around us and then fall asleep with these pictures in our minds and if nothing is linked with them but selfish fear, the imaginations arising from these pictures in the soul during sleep become filled with this selfish fear, and that enables injurious forces to enter the human body. Imaginations of fear are really the fostering forces for the Ahrimanic enemies of man. When a noble disposition is present, so that egotistic fear retires and loving help for others prevails, and we pass into the sleep life, not with fearful imaginations but with the effects produced by loving help, this means destruction for the Ahrimanic enemies of humanity. It is quite true that by the encouragement of such an attitude we could put an end to epidemics, if we regulated our conduct accordingly.

Here I may indicate how some day (but it cannot be yet) the results of knowledge of spiritual life will be seen in the social life of humanity: human souls will become strong through spiritual knowledge, and those whose disposition is to accept spiritual Knowledge will work healingly on material life on earth.

Hence we see how unjustifiable the objection is, that while living on earth we need not bother about spiritual life. A great deal depends upon the kind of spiritual life we take with us into sleep while here on earth, for by it we mold our souls into good or bad instruments for the sending forth of forces from the spiritual world into those organs of the body which are not used as instruments by the soul in the day consciousness, but which function physically and chemically beneath the threshold of consciousness. Those functions which do not belong to the activity of nerves and blood in the human being but are simply of an organic nature-physical and chemical activity—those are not life functions such as obtain in the plant and mineral kingdoms, but functions into which the forces of the spiritual world flow during sleep. Therefore we see the importance of being able to carry spiritual knowledge into sleep life, and we realize the attitude of mind it creates. If there still is doubt as to the inter-working of the spiritual and physical worlds, we may, among other things, make the following remarks.

Let us imagine that some sort of climatic change were to corrupt the whole ground of the earth, so that nothing good for food could grow on it; we should then discover how important the earth's mineral and plant kingdoms are for man. If the earth were to decay under our feet, we should realize how much we need the lower kingdoms of earth, that human life may be sustained. What the ground and fruits are for our physical life that we are, as living beings with the activities of our souls, for those who have passed through the gates of death. It is a fact that the dead living in their sphere have need of a ground from which they may gather fruits. The following illustration will give an idea of this: Let us think of a crowd of people asleep, all filled with conceptions belonging to earthly life alone, materialistic ideas. This ground which they form for the dead, is just as sterile for them as waste, corrupt ground would be to us. The dead feel this as a region in which they starve.

Every spiritual conception which we take into our soul and carry into sleep helps, while we sleep, to create part of the ground needed by the dead, even as the mineral and plant kingdoms are needed by us. In a certain sense souls filled with spiritual ideas during sleep, form the fruitful spiritual basis for the nourishing of the dead; and we take away the nutriment which the dead need and which must be gathered on our earth, if we allow our souls to become desolate, i.e., empty of spiritual ideas—and conceptions. Here we see still more clearly the importance of cosmic spiritual knowledge, and its fruitfulness for the spiritual world itself. Just as our sleeping souls provide the ground from which the dead draw their sustenance, so, if we knowingly cause spiritual concepts to pass through our souls that helps the dead in their power of perception. For this reason I have advised those who have been bereaved to read to their dead. If we call them to mind, and read in thought something from Spiritual Science, or cause any other spiritual thoughts quietly to pass through our souls, our dead will perceive these. They observe them and are nourished by the unconscious after-effects of the spiritual ideas. Their own consciousness is refreshed or revived by means of what has been read to them. Here again we see constant intercourse between the physical and spiritual worlds. It may easily be suggested that the dead are in the spiritual world and that this method of reading can be of no use to them. Yes! They are in the spiritual world, but the concepts of Spiritual Science have to be formed on earth, and nowhere can they be conceived except in the minds of men on earth: the dead are indeed in a spiritual world and precisely there can these conceptions reach them and sustain them, and we enhance their consciousness if from earth we send these to them. As the most intimate connections exist between the dead and those amongst whom they have lived, the best persons to read to them are those who were friends and helpers before they died, or who have been closely related to them. If you cultivate such thoughts about the connections of the physical with the spiritual world, you will actually experience a new disposition, which truly in the greatest sense of the word must be called the religious disposition of the future. From such spiritual-scientific studies as have just been given, a disposition will be developed which in the highest sense deserves to be called religious, for he who thus acknowledges the spiritual world will build upon the foundations of the Divine Wisdom streaming through the Cosmos.

It is tremendously important that we should acquire this feeling of the ruling Wisdom in the Cosmos and that we should fill ourselves with it. When humanity is permeated by this feeling, it will, with a deep genuine confidence in the wise ruling Wisdom of the Universe, accept its destiny and all the strokes of destiny which are so hard to bear. When we observe the spiritual worlds in which the dead live, we can often see how much easier it is for the dead when the friends they left behind on earth are permeated with this ruling Wisdom of the Universe. Weeping over the dead is, of course, quite natural; but if we cannot put an end to our weeping it looks as though we doubted the ruling Wisdom of the Universe; and he who can look into spiritual worlds knows, that those who long for their dead to be here and not in the spiritual world, are doing the greatest harm to them. We very much help the dead in their life after death if we accept our destiny, and think of the dead as having been taken from us at the right moment by a good ruling Wisdom, because they were needed for other spheres of existence beyond earth. In the future much will depend on people helping more (not less) in all that touches the sorrows of humanity, having a clear knowledge that destiny is ever at work, and that if through Karma even death has befallen those who belong to them, this had to be. This must not prevent us, as long as a person is living, from doing all that is possible to help him when he is ill if he is amenable to treatment, but as human beings, we may not presume to go beyond what is allotted to us as such. We must be sure that the ruling Wisdom of the Universe is wiser than we are. This is all commonplace and trivial, but it is too little spoken of to-day. Great happiness would come to both the living and dead, if this knowledge were more generally circulated; if it could enter as a conviction into men's souls, if they could think of the dead as living, as having experienced a transformation of life, and not think of them as having been taken from them.

If we only observed a little of this connection between the physical and spiritual worlds, we should see the manifold ways in which the one world is intimately linked with the other, and that the affairs of the physical world only become clear when observed in the light of the spiritual world. If with reference to anything that happens to us in the physical world we could but succeed in finding the spiritual causes of some stroke of fate or misfortune, we should look beyond it, and understand that what seems supremely sad may be understood at the fount of Cosmic Wisdom. We must emphasize this over and over again. It does not alter the fact that much suffering may come to us; but it does alter our attitude to it, we do not sink under it and shut ourselves egotistically in our sorrow, or withdraw from the world's life, which we certainly ought not to do. Many other things are similarly linked together and precisely these significant incidents teach us the falsity of the saying that we need not trouble about the spiritual life during our physical life on earth. For the bringing of spiritual ideas, feelings and convictions into physical earth-life is of great importance. Let me now add some examples to what I have told you to-day. Examples will show us clearly the truth of what I have been saying.

A person well-known to some of the members of our Society died before attaining middle age. If a person dies early in life, about the beginning of the thirties, it is often asked: What is the meaning of this? Why should a person be cut off from earth life in the first third of his physical life on earth? When we traced this person back, to describe what she was as an individual, we came to an earlier incarnation about the third or fourth century after Christ, in which she had acquired certain forces, of which we may say that, civilization being as it was at that time, these and similar soul-capacities did not really belong to that period. The time had not arrived when the talents then acquired by the soul of this individual could be used. She was born again in a new life, became one of our members and died before the first half of her life, the ascending part, had been completed. In this case we could immediately see, on studying the whole connection of the physical with the spiritual, that this person was one of the most important and significant workers with us in all our Cosmic work.

Materialism is rampant in our times, it puts its stamp on earth-life more than we realize. In our day particularly, materialism is so strong that those beings of the higher Hierarchies whose task it is to carry on the progress of Cosmic evolution actually cannot rescue all the souls who have to-day become materialistic. These must not be left behind, they must be saved; yet their salvation can only be accomplished by the death of certain souls at an early age, who take with them into the spiritual world the forces which would otherwise have been used in the course of their earth-life, and which they then transmute so that they may help the beings of the higher Hierarchies who are working for the redemption of the materialistically-minded souls. Persons who have thus died early in life, are a wonderful help to the higher beings. Now in the case of the soul to which I am referring, something special resulted. She brought with her into her latest incarnation the powers which could not be fully used in her earlier life, poured them as it were into her body, which became weak and ill because of the penetration of these forces. The soul was too powerful for the body; it really contained very great powers. This person died at the above mentioned early age, and, with the forces which instead of being weakened by age remained at their youthful strength, she passed through the gates of death into the spiritual world, still possessing the fund of strength which would have served a long life in that incarnation, and filled to overflowing with earthly force would have so poured itself into the body, as to bring the same into relationship with the external world. Instead she was able to take up spiritual ideas enthusiastically and thus to bring a great supply into the spiritual world. When we trace this individual, who was dear to a large number of our friends, we may learn a great deal from her. What we see in her is, that at a definite time (in this case about the Third or Fourth Century A.D.) certain forces appeared on the path of human evolution which could not be brought to fulfillment then, and that the work to be done through these forces must be taken up later—we have to look back to what belongs to an earlier period and is preserved by certain individuals for a later life. Now when we look for this individual during her life after death we observe direct results—we see that the powers which have lain dormant for a time, reserved for a coming period, now burst forth and are preparing for humanity's future. Thus we see how a later life must be linked with an earlier one, when talking of human evolution. We could not know certain things, of which it may be said that what had existed in the third and fourth epochs had to be revived in the fifth post Atlantean times, unless we could see into the spiritual worlds and say: ‘There we see an individuality who, by means of a short life on earth, acquired faculties which shine forth like a revival of something that has been lost to human life.’ A great inflow of strength comes to the spiritual investigator on observing such individuals in their life after death.

If the time of physical life on earth were ever so bad, if ever so many enemies were to arise against Spiritual Science, and if danger threatened on all sides, it would certainly be a sad and desperate outlook; but there is one thing which may always be a comfort for the future of Anthroposophy, that is, that in those who have died, in such a way as the person above mentioned, we have the best helpers for our earth, the most powerful fellow-workers. This is a case in which a short life on earth served for the gathering of strength with which to take possession of certain fruitful forces requisite for a later period on the path of human evolution. The wise ruling Cosmic powers far surpass in Wisdom all that we, with our merely earthly wisdom, can comprehend. Naturally such fruits of a shortened earth-life can only result when life is shortened in a purely natural way. In anthroposophical circles it should not be necessary to mention that such results do not occur in cases of suicides, and would be quite impossible.

Now, having said all this, I shall give you another concrete example in reference to a member who has not long since passed from our midst, who had a very long illness, which was connected in a remarkable way with his condition of soul, a lively intellectual person, a renowned poet in his earth life and as we can clearly see, a much more important individual than we had deemed while observing his life on earth. After a life lived in sickness of body and long years of suffering, how strangely the fruits of his suffering on earth, after a relatively short period, reveal themselves in the spiritual world; though only in their beginning. That I may make you understand what I want to say, I should like to lead up to the right concept by means of a comparison.

With deep feeling we can admire nature—a scene in nature or a group of people-but we do not on that account lose anything when a clever artist comes along and depicts the scene as his own soul sees it. We then find in the picture created by the artist something which he has placed alongside nature. We know that we have gained by having looked at Nature through another's soul as well, if we can observe nature side by side with it. Why do I say this? To make use of an illustration: we can go into the spiritual world, we can observe things there; yet it is of great importance to observe something else besides. The person to whom I am referring, who died after a life of much suffering on earth, had during his long illness formed for himself a world of Cosmic imaginations, as it were lifting them up out of a sick body gradually approaching death. In the measure in which the body became more sick and incapacitated, there arose from it this world of Cosmic imaginations. That person then passed through the gates of death, and his imaginations are beginning to shine out in wondrous beauty so that in the spiritual world they can be perceived as a wonderful spiritual work of art, as if created out of the Cosmos. They had their origin in the sick body, and were carried from the sick body into the spiritual world; and for those who are able to see the spiritual worlds in other ways they provide a far richer gain in spiritual knowledge than can be acquired by direct spiritual observation; as in a work of art one sees the world as another soul sees it, side by side with what one sees oneself. The above-mentioned person absorbed spiritual conceptions with great devotion, and was even able to put into his poems much of that which comes to the human soul when it grasps the Mystery of Golgotha in a truly Anthroposophical way, when we allow ourselves to be permeated with the thought of the Christ Whom we have learnt to know through Anthroposophy. For we then so recognize Him in our nature, that we really live according to the Pauline saying ‘Not I, but Christ in me contemplates the Universe.’

These truly Rosicrucian Christian thoughts flowed into the later poems of this personality. While his conscious earth-life was occupied with such poetry and creating these poems, his subconscious powers were molding this world of Cosmic imaginations which really consumed the body by the strength of their inner life, but which so worked that to this person in the spiritual world is probably allotted a task about which I will not speak further now. In any case it must be said that behind this conscious life lies another which passes through the gates of death and so manifests that we know it had already been prepared during earth-life through the disposition which is the result of Spiritual Science, and which has turned into beautiful tableaux of Cosmic imaginations which radiate toward the exploring spiritual investigator, and explain much that perhaps would not otherwise have been so easy to discover, but which will continue to work in the tasks which will be allotted to such an individual.

We must regard such results of Spiritual Science with awe and deep reverence. For if in past times the religious sense of the soul had to be aroused through feeling, in the times in which we now live spirituality must be kindled more and more in man through the inter-working of the physical and spiritual worlds, we must become more and more concrete in our spiritual life. In the future, humanity cannot be prevented from seeking the spiritual in a concrete way, and from thinking about how a human individual continues to work on after death with the forces which, as in this case, were prepared before he had passed through the gates of death.

What depths will be found in human life, how noble will be the feelings with which one human being confronts another I They will in the true sense of the word be moral, and filled with the Divine essence which will then be weaving and working in human life, when the thoughts which speak of the dead in as concrete a way as we now speak of the living, find a home in the hearts of men.

We must think of all this, that we may gain in our hearts and souls a proper sense of the mission and work of Anthroposophy in the future.

I should like you to ponder over the things I have said in the last part of this lecture, regarding them as really springing from that attitude towards Spiritual Science which can only speak of such matters in sacred modesty and with deep reverence, and with this feeling I should like to leave in your souls what I have said.

Tomorrow I shall tell you of other facts, for the stimulation of Spiritual Science in your hearts.

What was said yesterday about so-called poisonous substances indicated strongly how all the impulses of life are graded in relation to one another. For instance, some substance is said to be poisonous, and yet the higher nature of the human being is intimately related to this poison; indeed, the higher nature of man cannot exist without the effects of poisons. We are touching here on a most important area of knowledge, one with many ramifications and without which it is impossible to understand a good many secrets of life and existence.

Looking at the human physical body, we have to admit that if it were not filled with those higher components of existence, the etheric body, the astral body and the ego, it could not be the physical body as we know it. The moment man steps through the portal of death, leaving behind his physical body—that is, the moment the higher components withdraw from the physical body—it begins to obey laws other than those which governed it while those components were present there. The physical body disintegrates; after death it obeys the physical and chemical forces and laws of the earth.

The physical body of man as we know it cannot be constructed in accordance with earthly laws, for it is these very laws which destroy it. The body can only be what it is because there work within it those parts of man that are not of the earth: his higher components of soul and spirit. There is nothing in the whole realm of physical and chemical laws which could justify the presence of such a thing as the human physical body on the earth.

Measured by the physical laws of the earth, the human body is an impossible creation. It is prevented from disintegrating by the higher components of man's being. It follows, therefore, that the moment these higher components—the ego, the astral body and the etheric body—desert the human body, it becomes a corpse.

You know from many earlier lectures that the diagram of the human being we have often given is quite correct as such, but that in reality it is not as simple as some would like. To begin with, we divide the human being into physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. I have pointed out on other occasions that this in itself implies a further complication. The physical body, of course, is what it is—the physical body. But the etheric body, as such, is something super-sensible, invisible, something that cannot be perceived by the senses. It lives in the human being as something that cannot be perceived by the senses. But it has, in a sense, its physical counterpart because it imprints itself on the physical body. The physical body contains not only the physical body itself, but also an imprint of the etheric body. The etheric body projects itself onto the physical body; so we can speak of an etheric projection onto the physical body.

It is the same in the case of the astral body. We can speak of the astral projection onto the physical body. You know some of the details already. You know that the ego projection onto the physical body may be sought in certain features of the blood circulation, where the ego projects itself onto the blood. In a similar way the other higher components project themselves onto the physical body. So the physical body in its physical aspect is in itself a complicated system, for it is fourfold. And just as the most important aspect cannot exist in the physical body if the ego and the astral body are not in it—for it then becomes a corpse—so is it also in the case of these projections, for they are all present in the physical substance. Without the ego there can be no human blood, without the astral body there can be no human nervous system as a whole. These things exist in us as a counterpart of man's higher components.

When the ego has been, shall we say, ‘lifted out’ of the physical body, when it has passed through the portal of death, the physical body has no real life any longer, but becomes a corpse. In a similar way, under certain conditions, these projections cannot live in a proper way either.

For instance the ego projection—that is, a certain quality of the blood—cannot be present in a proper way in the human organism if the ego is not properly fostered. To turn the physical body into a corpse it is, of course, necessary for the ego to depart entirely from the physical body. But the blood can go a quarter of the way towards becoming a corpse if you prevent it from being permeated with what ought to live in the ego, so that it can work in the right manner of soul and spirit on the blood. You will gather from this that is possible to bring disorder into man's soul in such a way that the right influences cannot be brought to bear on the blood nature, the blood substance. That is then the point when the blood can change into a poisonous substance—not entirely, for in that case the person would die, but in part. The human physical body is abandoned to destruction if the ego departs from it, and in a similar way the blood is brought into a state of ill health—even if this is not necessarily noticeable—if the ego is not fostered and interwoven with the right care.

So when is the ego not fostered and interwoven with the right care? This is the case under certain quite definite circumstances. Let us look for the moment at the post-Atlantean period. We see that as human evolution proceeds, certain definite capacities, certain definite impulses are developed in each succeeding cultural epoch. It is impossible to imagine people living in the ancient Indian period having a condition of soul development similar to ours. From epoch to epoch, as human beings pass through succeeding incarnations on earth, different impulses are needed for the human soul.

Let me draw you a diagram. Imagine this to be the main, the actual physical body, the one that has to be filled with all the higher components of human nature in order to be a physical body at all.

Of all these higher components, I shall deal solely with the ego, though I could deal with all three. The shading here indicates that the physical body is permeated by the ego. So, in a certain way, the other projections also have to be permeated. Here let me indicate the projection of the etheric body, which is for the most part anchored in the human being's glandular system; for this, too, has to be permeated and interwoven. Thirdly, let me indicate what is anchored chiefly in the nervous system. This, again, in a certain way, must be interwoven with the workings of the ego. And the ego body itself—this, too, has to be interwoven in the proper way.

As I said just now, as man passes through succeeding periods of evolution he has to step into different developmental impulses with each period. He has to absorb whatever the contemporary age requires him to take in. In the first post-Atlantean period, ancient India, impulses of soul and spirit had to be absorbed which enabled the etheric body to be developed; in the next period, ancient Persia, the astral body was developed; in the period of Egypt and Chaldea it was the turn of the sentient soul; in the Greco-Latin period, the intellectual or mind soul; and today, the consciousness soul.

Whether the human being absorbs in the right way whatever is suitable for the age in which he is living will depend on whether he has properly entered into all these bodily principles—just as the physical body is permeated by the higher components of his being—so that they absorb what the age requires. Suppose an individual during the fifth post-Atlantean period were to resist absorbing anything of what ought to be absorbed during this period; suppose he were to reject everything which could cultivate his soul in the manner required by the fifth post-Atlantean period. What would be the consequence?

His bodily nature cannot revert to an earlier state if he belongs to that part of mankind which is called upon at present to absorb the impulses of the fifth post-Atlantean period. Not everyone is called upon at the same time, but at present all the white races are called upon to absorb the culture of the fifth post-Atlantean period. Now suppose an individual were to resist this. A certain member of his bodily nature—above all, the blood—would remain void of all that could be taken in, were he not to put up this resistance. This member of his bodily nature would then lack what ought to permeate its substance and its forces. This substance and the forces living in it—though not to a degree comparable to bodily death brought about by the departure of the ego—would then become sick in its life forces, which become degraded so that man bears them as a poison within him. Thus to remain behind in evolution means that man impregnates his being with a kind of formative phantom which is poisonous. On the other hand, if he were to absorb what his cultural impulses require him to absorb, the state of his soul would be such that he could dissolve this poisonous phantom he bears within him. By failing to do so, he allows this phantom to coagulate and become a part of his body.

This is the source of all the sicknesses of civilization, the cultural decadence, all the emptiness of soul, the states of hypochondria, the eccentricities, the dissatisfactions, the crankinesses and so on, and also of all those instincts which attack culture, which are aggressive and antagonistic towards cultural impulses. Either the individual accepts the culture of his age, and fits in with it, or he develops the corresponding poison which deposits itself within him and can only be dissolved if he does accept the culture. But if the poison is allowed to become deposited, it leads to the development of instincts which are opposed to the culture of the age. The working of a poison is also always an aggressive instinct. In the languages of Central Europe this can be felt quite clearly: many dialects do not say that a person is angry but that he is poisonous. This expresses a deep sense for something that is indeed the case. Someone who is irrascible is described in Austria, for instance, as ‘gachgiftig’ which means that he is quick to grow poisonous, quick to anger. Human beings acquire poison, sometimes in a very concentrated form, if they refuse to accept what could dissolve such poison. Nowadays, untold people refuse to accept spiritual life in the form fitting for today, which we have been endeavouring to describe for such a long time, more recently even in public.

In such people, the lotus flower here [on the forehead] reveals very clearly what occurs in these cases, for the effects reach right into the realm of warmth, and such people leap up like flames against anything in the world around them which happens to reveal something that could bring healing to our times. Certainly, Mephistopheles—that is, the devil—is abroad amongst us; but the development of even a small beginning—tiny flames stirring—starts when we refuse to accept something that is fitting for our time, so that we do not dissolve the poison but make it into a partial corpse and allow it to coagulate in our organism as a phantom of formative forces.

If you think this through properly, you will discover the cause of many dissatisfactions in life. For those who bear such a poisonous phantom within them are unhappy indeed. We would call these people nervous, or neurasthenic; but it can also make them cruel, quarrelsome, monists, materialists, for these characteristics are the result, more often than we might think, of physiological causes brought about by the poison being deposited in the human organism instead of being assimilated.

You will see from all this that there belongs to the overall balance of the world in which we are embedded a kind of unstable equilibrium between what is good and right on the one hand, and its opposite, the effects of poisons, on the other. If it is to be possible for what is good and right to come about, then it must also be possible to err from what is right, for poisons to have their effect.

If we now apply this to the wider situation, we see that it must be possible today for people to attain to some degree of spiritual life, to develop within themselves impulses for a free, inner spiritual life. To make it possible for the individual to attain to a life of the spirit, the opposite must also exist, namely a corresponding possibility to err along the path of grey or black magic. Without the one, the other is not possible. Just as you, as a human being, cannot maintain yourself without the firm foundation of the earth beneath your feet, so it is not possible for the illumination of spiritual life to be pursued without the resistance which must be permitted to exist and which is inevitable for the higher realms of life.

We have already mentioned the highly contradictory and yet no less important fact that the question: To whom do we owe the Mystery of Golgotha? could elicit the reply: To Judas. For it could be argued that if Judas had not betrayed Christ Jesus, the Mystery of Golgotha would not have taken place, so therefore we ought to be grateful to Judas, since Christianity—that is, the Mystery of Golgotha—stems from him. However, to be grateful to Judas and perhaps recognize him as the founder of Christianity is going too far! Wherever we strive to enter higher realms we have to reckon with living, not dead truth, and the living truth bears within it its own counter-image, just as in physical existence life bears death within it.

This is something I wanted to place in your soul today, for on this basis much can be understood. There has to exist the possibility for what is spiritual, but also for the deposition of the poison which is its polar opposite. And if it can be deposited then it can also be used—it can be utilized in every realm.

Many questions could be asked about this, but today we shall deal with only one: How can we find our way through the maze? Is there not a very great danger that anything we approach in the world might contain the polar opposite, namely the poison, or at least that somebody or other might seek to make something poisonous out of it? Of course there is always this possibility. Everything that is potentially very good can also be perverted and become the opposite. This must be the case in order that human evolution can take its course in freedom in accordance with the present cultural age. Indeed, the very best evolutionary impulses in our age are those most likely to be turned into their opposite.

This is valid for social life as well as for the human organism. In lectures given here last year, we saw that in the present age, to start with only germinally, the capacity is beginning to develop which will enable us to create a life of Imaginations—to develop thoughts which rise up freely—though so far this possibility is denied by materialists. However, it lies in the very nature of our present age that a life of Imagination must develop little by little. What is the counter-image of a life of Imagination? The counter-image of Imaginative life is fabrication, the creation of fabrications about reality and a corresponding thoughtlessness in alleging this or that. I have often described it in these lectures as an inattentiveness to truth, to what is actual and real. The most wonderful thing with which mankind is presented in the fifth post-Atlantean period is the gradual ascent from mere onesided intellectual life into Imaginative life, which is the first step into the spiritual world. This can err and become untruthfulness, the fabrication of untruths in relation to reality. I am not, of course, referring to poetry, which is entirely justified, but to fabrication with regard to what is real.

Another element which must come into being during the present age—we have discussed this here, too—is a form of thinking that is particularly conscientious and aware of its responsibility. When you see what anthroposophical spiritual science has to offer, you cannot but admit that, to understand what is said, sharply delineated thoughts are needed, thoughts which are imbued with the will to pursue reality in an objective way. Clear thinking is certainly necessary if our teachings—if I may call them that—are to be understood. Above all, what is needed are not fleeting thoughts, but a certain quietness of thought. We must work towards achieving this kind of thinking. We must strive unremittingly to force ourselves to think thoughts with clear contours and not wallow in sympathies and antipathies when alleging something to ourselves and others. We must seek for the foundation, the basis, of what we maintain—otherwise we shall never penetrate in the right way into the realm of spiritual science. We must demand this of ourselves. We shall fulfil our task if we demand this of ourselves. If we are asked what we can do in these difficult times, our answer must be based on what I have just said. We must be fully aware of the fact that at the present time every human being who longs for the evolution of the earth to proceed in a healthy way must seek conscientiously and honestly for objectivity of thinking, in the manner described. This is the task of the human soul today.

It is just because this is so that the corresponding poison can develop, which is a state of being utterly devoid of clarity of thought, devoid of thought that unites with reality and fabricates nothing, but seeks to depict solely what is. During the course of the nineteenth century the yearning for objectivity deserted us increasingly. And the absence of conscience in what we have been describing here as the truth has reached a certain climax in the twentieth century in comparison to all that went before. The effect is at its worst when people entirely fail to notice it; yet, in this very aspect, it is characteristic of our time.

Let me give you a few examples to show you what I mean. Let me place these examples before you sine ira—without sympathies or antipathies. Here is a man whom I know very well, someone who could be called a truly kind and nice person. He holds a position in public life and would certainly not allow himself to stray, even minutely, from the upright attitudes expected of those in public positions. Yet a short time ago this man found it possible to say something quite typical. At the end of an essay he wrote: ‘Finally we cannot avoid at least a brief discussion of ...’ [Gap in report]

It is understandable that such things should be said today, and I have quoted it precisely because the person who said it was such a serious man with truly upright attitudes. Yet when you look more closely, you discover that it is as utterly dishonest as anything can possibly be; for how can you say anything more dishonest than: ‘I shall join in singing “Now thank we all our God” and “A safe stronghold our God is still” ’ and so on, in a mood that makes these hymns into prayers, if you hold opinions such as those expressed by this man. Frankly, he is eulogizing untruthfulness. You may find such eulogies to untruthfulness wherever you look these days, yet they are given, I am bound to say, in good faith. They are the poison that corresponds to what must develop as a spiritual life of Imagination. The best among us, especially, are prone, more or less unconsciously, to harbouring the effects of this poison. Of course, once you realize that something of this kind pulsating through society is no different from a drop of poison administered to the human organism, then you are in a position to judge all these things correctly. And once you do realize it, you cannot but feel bound to strive for something in life which I have now described a number of times. You will feel bound to be alert to the facts, you will want your observation of life to be sound, for without this there is no way forward today. The karma that is being fulfilled at the moment, the karma about which I have spoken before, is not the karma of a single nation; it is the karma of the whole of European and American humanity in the nineteenth century; it is the karma of untruthfulness, the insidious poison of untruthfulness.

This untruthfulness may be experienced particularly strongly in movements of a more elevated variety. During the course of my life I have come across a great deal of untruthfulness, but I must say I have never met lies as grandiose as those promulgated among certain people who proclaim the principle: There is no religion higher than Truth. I could say that such intense mendacity is only found where there is at the same time a profound consciousness of striving for only the truth and nothing but the truth! The greatest watchfulness is needed when striving for the ultimate. For we must realize that, while in earlier cultural epochs the possibilities of erring were different, today the greatest danger is an aberration into untruthfulness brought about by a failure to take reality into account in a living way—a failure to take reality into account! The man I mentioned, who wrote such lies, would rather have his tongue cut out than consciously speak an untruth. Yet it is through such upright people that these things work, seeping into the social organism and turning into social poison. Obviously, since they must needs exist amongst us, they can also err in the opposite direction. Other human beings can take them into their awareness and use them for all kinds of mischief—to put it mildly.

Some of you might remember how strange it seemed to people when I first made some fairly radical statements about these things a few years ago, in a public lecture in Munich. I said at that time: During the course of human evolution, impulses for both good and evil develop on the physical plane. What causes these impulses to develop? They come into being when certain forces, which actually belong to the higher, spiritual world, are misused down here in the physical world. If thieves were to use their thieving instincts, and murderers their murderous instincts, and liars their lying instincts to develop higher forces, instead of enjoying them here on the physical plane, they would develop quite considerable higher forces. Their mistake is only that they develop their powers on the wrong plane. Evil, I said, is good that has been transposed down from another plane. Of course, if we know this it does not make a thief or a murderer or a liar any better. But we must understand these things, otherwise we cannot fathom what is going on, falling unconscious victim to these dangers.

It is not surprising that many people today simply do not realize that it is becoming mankind's task to be concerned with spiritual matters. Therefore they fail to take up this task, abandoning themselves instead to materialistic instincts. In doing so, they develop within themselves those poisons which ought to be dissolved by the spiritual element. What is the consequence? In those who deny the spirit, the poisons develop into forces which cause them to become veritable liars; whether conscious or unconscious is merely a question of degree. Yet these very forces could be used to achieve a reasonable comprehension of spiritual knowledge.

Consider how important it is for us to understand this and how, in understanding it, we can come to comprehend one of the central aspects of the karma of our time, if we add to it what I said yesterday: that a single instance cannot be detached from mankind as a whole, for mankind is a totality. As a counter-image of spiritual endeavour it is essential for a violent evil to exist. And one of man's tasks today is to recognize the true nature of this evil, in order to be able properly to recognize and oppose it when he comes upon it in life.

In speaking about these things we come to realize the relationship between the greater aspects of the karma of our time and something that is living in our time which is everywhere in the world bringing about very, very much that is terrible. Superficially, we see how falsehood throbs through the world in mighty waves which devour much more than one might think. For falsehood is monstrously vigorous. But as we have seen today, falsehood is nothing other than the corresponding counter-image for spiritual endeavour which ought to exist but does not. The divine, spiritual wisdom of the universe has given to the human being the possibility of spiritual endeavour. We have within us the poison which we can dissolve. Indeed, we must dissolve it, for otherwise it will become a kind of partial corpse within us.

Let me give you examples of such things from daily life. These will at the same time serve the pursuit of our aim to better understand certain things which meet us at every turn today and which are connected with life and with all the evil and suffering of the present time. For one of the things we are striving for in these talks, in so far as we have been permitted to give them, is an understanding of the painful events of today. I bring these things forward in order to show you in a structured way how these impulses work. The examples I give are intended to characterize the facts, not any particular person or persons.

Hanging around here in Switzerland is a man who many years ago was a lawyer in Berlin, a pettifogger who was forced to seek his fortune abroad because of all the mischief he had concocted. He has been hanging around abroad for years, and now that war has broken out has written a book, J'accuse, which has caused a furore throughout the countries of the periphery. This whole J'accuse affair can be said to be one of the saddest symptoms of our time, because it is so very characteristic. J'accuse is a fat book, and certain people who ought to know maintain that there is not a log cabin in distant Norway that does not house a copy. It is, in other words, one of the most widely disseminated books. In Berlin last spring I read an article about it written by quite a well-known person. He says J'accuse was recommended to him by someone whom he greatly admires. From the way he describes his friend, we gather who he must mean, namely, someone who counts for a good deal in Holland. Yet this person was quite unable to assess even the gutter-press style of the book. It is possible to be thought a great man and yet be incompetent to form a judgement in such matters.

Now quite recently the author—known, and yet unknown—of J'accuse has gone into print once more in L'Humanité with the following thoughts. As I have said, I am not concerned with the person himself, but want to characterize something that is typical of our time:

In the Reichstag in Berlin a social democrat gives a speech in which he unfolds his views about various happenings in the period leading up to the outbreak of war. It does not matter whether we agree with him or not; what I am concerned with is the form such things take. In his speech, this member of the Reichstag refers to a remark made by Sir Edward Grey on 30 July 1914 to the effect that if the Austrians would content themselves with marching as far as Belgrade, occupying the city and awaiting the outcome of a possible European congress on the relationship between Austria and Serbia, then it might still be possible to preserve peace. This remark by Sir Edward Grey is well-documented, for he made it to the German ambassador and also wrote it to the English ambassador in St Petersburg. The matter is so well-documented that there can be no doubt that Sir Edward Grey did make this remark. Nevertheless, by bringing it up again in the Reichstag, this member has aroused the anger of the author of J'accuse. So what does the author of J'accuse do? He writes an utterly slanderous article in L'Humanité in which he accuses the member of the Reichstag of mendaciousness, false citation, and so on. Yet the matter is very well-documented, and the member of the Reichstag did not say anything which is not vouched for in books, or in the letter sent by Sir Edward Grey to the English ambassador in St Petersburg. So how can the author of J'accuse make the claim of mendaciousness? He did it by saying: What the member of the Reichstag was saying cannot refer to a remark made by Sir Edward Grey on 30 July; it must refer to one made by Sasonov on 31 December. But Sasonov's remark, not Grey's, was as I shall now quote. In other words, the member of the Reichstag quoted Sasonov wrongly, for Sasonov's remark went as follows, and in addition he claims that Sasonov's remark was made by Sir Edward Grey.

The fact is that the member of the Reichstag refers to a remark by Grey. The author of J'accuse wants to counter him and says: What he is saying refers not to a remark by Grey but to one by Sasonov, which he misquotes; Sasonov said the following ...; in other words what he said in the Reichstag in Berlin is doubly false, for firstly the quotation is false, and secondly he claims that the remark was made in London, when in fact it was made in St Petersburg. Ergo, the member of the Reichstag is a liar.

The whole of J'accuse is of this calibre; all the argumentation is like this. You see how narrow, how confused and how unscrupulous must be the thinking of a person who is capable of writing such things. And what does he achieve? The countless people who read L'Humanité and what the author—known, and yet unknown—of J'accuse has to say, will, of course, not check the facts for themselves. They believe what they see before their eyes. So by this means he proves not only that the member of the Reichstag has lied, but also—and the author of J'accuse is indeed capable of allowing this to be seen as proof—that the Central Powers never replied to the proposals made by the periphery. The author of J'accuse states that the member of the Reichstag is saying that the Central Powers did react to the proposals made by the periphery. And yet, he says, look what Sasonov said, for it is Sasonov whom he is quoting! The Central Powers never replied, so you see how they managed the affair; they did not even reply to these important proposals.

Now what the member of the Reichstag said did indeed refer to a proposal made by Grey and telegraphed by him to his ambassador, who then passed it on to Sasonov. Sasonov turned Grey's whole proposal, which was not at all bad, upside down. The author of J'accuse demands that this proposal, turned into its opposite by Sasonov, should have been taken into account, even though Sasanov did not take it into account. However, it can be proved that Grey sent a telegram to his ambassador in St Petersburg and that this was presented to Sasonov, who took no account of it. At the same time Grey sent his proposal to Berlin and from Berlin it was sent on to Vienna. It can indeed be proved that negotiations were carried on between Vienna and Berlin in order to persuade Austria to make a halt in Belgrade and await European negotiations. This is documented in a letter telegraphed by the King of England to Prince Heinrich. In other words, the Central Powers did indeed consider Grey's proposals. But Sasonov did not consider them! Even so, the author of J'accuse concludes that the Central Powers did not reply and have thus made themselves guilty of these terrible events.

This whole matter is not insignificant, for in yesterday's lamentable document the same sentence may be seen. Here we have an extraordinary—let me say—kinship, family relationship, between a terrible document of world history and an individual who has been hanging around for years because his own homeland became too hot to hold him and who now writes all kinds of rubbish under the bombastic title J'accuse. By a German—rubbish that is protected by such further excesses as the latest achievement of L'Humanité.

It is not surprising if people then defend themselves in the way the German member of the Reichstag has done, having been accused by the author of J'accuse of being a slanderer, a hypocrite and a liar. He drew the following comparison: You send your maid on an errand to Mr Miller at Number 35, Long Lane. When she returns after having taken much longer than the expected two hours she says: I couldn't find Mr Miller. I went to No 85, Short Street. Mr Miller the carpenter doesn't live there, but Mrs Smith the washerwoman does. This, said the member of the Reichstag, is just about the level of connection between what the author of J'accuse says and what really happened.

The author of J'accuse is, of course, a particularly nasty example. It is this manner of treating reality which is today the obverse, the corresponding counter-image of spiritual endeavour, flowing as it does through the veins of society in place of what we should all be striving for: spiritual knowledge, spiritual knowledge with which to fill our being. We can find such things everywhere, in manifold variations. I have given you just one example—dishonesty, as it appears in an individual whom I know very well. Everywhere we shall see how such things appear as the counter-image of what is necessary in our time. Spiritual knowing is necessary for those who want to recognize anything worthwhile today; all other knowing lags behind what should be evolving. Therefore, if an attitude of mind disposed towards peace is to come about among the nations of Europe, feelings about these nations will have to develop which are imbued with the spirit, feelings which can come into being if nations are seen in the way they are shown in the lecture cycle about the folk spirits which I gave long before the war in Christiania. We must resolve to approach the spirit of a nation in this way. Only then can our human spirit become active in a manner which will enable us to form a valid judgement which encompasses a whole group, such as a nation. Just think how judgements could be formed about nations if sufficient spiritual preparation had been undertaken first of all! Yet all that we have seen going astray so drastically in one direction or another lives not only in the worst; it also lives in the best of us. In describing this it is not my intention to apportion blame. I am simply describing a lack which exists because there is no will to create the spiritual foundation on which judgements could be formed about the interrelationships of nations. Judgements are formed on the basis of sympathies and antipathies rather than true insights.

A typical example of this may be found in a famous novel written quite recently. A perfectly honest attempt is made in this context to describe a certain nation—in this case the German nation—through the various characters who represent it. Yet the way it is done is defective because a lack of spirituality prevents the author from achieving a judgement based on reality. There would be no reason for me to mention a genuine novel here, for in a true work of art such a question would not arise. But a novel that is tendentious in its descriptions can certainly be quoted in this connection. Let me clarify further what I mean: In a really good novel you will never hear the voice of the author himself, for the characters will express what is typical for their nation, their standing, their class and so on. Thus if John Smith or Adrian Swallowtail says something about the Germans, or the French, or the English, there is no cause to object. But this is not the case in the novel in question. Here, the author keeps stepping out in front of the curtain and giving his opinion, so that when he describes a person he gives his own opinion about the Germans, or whatever. You can see this straightaway in the description of a relative of the hero:

‘He was a fine talker, well, though a little heavily, built, and was of the type which passes in Germany for classic beauty; he had a large brow that expressed nothing, large regular features, and a curled beard—a Jupiter of the banks of the Rhine.’

You will agree that this is not likely to lead to an objective judgement, even if it could be true in isolated cases. A German chamber orchestra is described as follows:

‘They played neither very accurately nor in good time, but they never went off the rails, and followed faithfully the marked changes of tone. They had that musical facility which is easily satisfied, that mediocre perfection which is so plentiful in the race which is said to be the most musical in the world.’

Now the hero's uncle is described:

‘He was a partner in a great commercial house which did business in Africa and the Far East. He was the exact type of one of those Germans of the new style, whose affectation it is scoffingly to repudiate the old idealism of the race, and, intoxicated by conquest, to maintain a cult of strength and success which shows that they are not accustomed to seeing them on their side. But it is as difficult at once to change the age-old nature of a people, the despised idealism springs up again in him at every turn in language, manners, and moral habits, and the quotations from Goethe to fit the smallest incidents of domestic life, and he was a singular compound of conscience and self-interest. There was in him a curious effort to reconcile the honest principles of the old German bourgeoisie with the cynicism of these new commercial condottieri—a compound which for ever gave out a repulsive flavour of hypocrisy, for ever striving to make of German strength, avarice, and self-interest the symbols of all right, justice and truth.’

Of the hero it is said:

‘... he lacked that easy Germanic idealism, which does not wish to see, and does not see, what would be displeasing to its sight, for fear of disturbing the very proper tranquility of its judgment and the pleasantness of its existence.’

Here is another example of the author peeping out through the curtains and giving his own opinion:

‘Especially since the German victories they had been striving to make a compromise, a revolting intrigue between their new power and their old principles. The old idealism had not been renounced. There should have been a new effort of freedom of which they were incapable. They were content with a forgery, with making it subservient to German interests. Like the serene and subtle Schwabian, Hegel, who had waited until after Leipzig and Waterloo to assimilate the cause of his philosophy with the Prussian State ...’

This gentleman has a strange view of the history of philosophy. Those of us with a real understanding of what went on know that the principles of Hegel's philosophy on the phenomenology of consciousness were written down in Jena in 1806 to the thundering of canon as Napoleon approached. Yet in the novel it is said with a certain ‘sense for the truth’ that Hegel waited for the Battle of Leipzig in order to adapt to the Prussian State.

‘... their interests having changed, their principles had changed, too. When they were defeated, they said that Germany's ideal was humanity. Now that they had defeated others, they said that Germany was the ideal of humanity.’

What a fine sentence!

‘When other countries were more powerful, they said, with Lessing, that “patriotism is a heroic weakness which it is well to be without,” and they called themselves “citizens of the world”. Now that they were in the ascendant, they could not enough despise the Utopias “à la Francaise”. Universal peace, fraternity, pacific progress, the rights of man, natural equality: they said that the strongest people had absolute rights against the others, and that the others, being weaker, had no rights against themselves.’

As you can see, once the war had started, these sentences could have formed the basis for many a leading article in the countries of the periphery. Yet they were written long before the war.

‘It was the living God and the Incarnate Idea, the progress of which is accomplished by war, violence, and oppression. Force had become holy now that it was on their side. Force had become the only idealism and the only intelligence.’

Now there is a sentence missing in my notes. You know it is not easy to bring things across the border just now, and I have the book in Berlin.

Let me quote a few more passages in which the author peeps through the curtains:

‘The Germans are very mildly induigent to physical imperfections: they cannot see them; they are even able to embellish them, by virtue of an easy imagination which finds unexpected qualities in the face of their desire to make them like the most illustrious examples of human beauty. Old Euler would not have needed much urging to make him declare that his granddaughter had the nose of the Ludovisi Juno.’

It should be added that this nose and face are described as being especially ugly.

About Schumann it is said:

‘But that was just it: his example made Christopher understand that the worst falsity in German art came into it not when the artists tried to express something which they had not felt, but rather when they tried to express the feelings which they did in fact feel—feelings which were false.’

Then we are reminded with a certain amount of pleasure of something said by Madame de Staël:

‘ “They have submitted doughtily. They find philosophic reasons for explaining the least philosophic theory in the world: respect for power and the chastening emotion of fear which changes that respect into admiration.” ’

The author of the novel adds that his hero ‘found that feeling’, namely that they have submitted doughtily, that they have respect and fear:

‘... everywhere in Germany, from the highest to the lowest—from the William Tell of Schiller, that limited little bourgeois with muscles like a porter, who, as the free Jew Borne says, “to reconcile honour and fear passes before the pillar of dear Herr Gessler, with his eyes down, so as to be able to say that he did not see the hat; did not disobey”—to the aged and respectable Professor Weisse, a man of seventy, and one of the most honoured men of learning in the town, who, when he saw a Herr Lieutenant coming, would make haste to give him the path, and would step down into the road. Christopher's blood boiled whenever he saw one of these small acts of daily servility. They hurt him as much as though he had demeaned himself. The arrogant manners of the officers whom he met in the street, their haughty insolence, made him speechless with anger. He never would make way for them. Whenever he passed them he returned their arrogant stare. More than once he was very near causing a scene. He seemed to be looking for trouble. However, he was the first to understand the futility of such bravado; but he had moments of aberration; the perpetual constraint which he imposed on himself, and the accumulation of force in him that had no outlet, made him furious. Then he was ready to go any length, and he had a feeling that if he stayed a year longer in the place he would be lost. He loathed the brutal militarism which he felt weighing down upon him, the sabres clanking on the pavement, the piles of arms, the guns placed outside the barracks, their muzzles gaping down on the town, ready to fire.’

All this is interesting for a number of reasons. You know that I am not mentioning these things for personal reasons or in order to characterize somebody. Once the novel had been written and had caused a considerable sensation there were, of course, individuals who praised it as the greatest work of art of all time. This always happens. The opinion expressed by an esteemed Austrian critic is rather nice—I mean ‘esteemed’ in inverted commas: ‘This novel is the most important event since 1871, which could bring France and Germany closer together again.’

You see how much truth lies hidden in these things! Yet we are dealing here with a man who is highly praised today, and I have no intention of raising even the slightest objection to his outward activities during wartime. However, what is said in this ‘world famous’ novel provides plenty of material for slogans and leading articles in the periphery. What I have read aloud to you today may indeed be admired—with all due respect to the hacks of the periphery—at any time in those leading articles. These things were written long before the war, as that Austrian critic said ‘to bring France and Germany closer together’, and may be found in Romain Rolland's novel John Christopher.

Here you have an example of somebody who excludes the spirit, who does not want the spirit, and therefore fails to see what is essential in the events and situations of the present time. What can someone who writes such things possibly really know about the German character? We have a right to speak in this way because the subjective judgements of the author are here dressed up in the guise of an inferior novel. It is my personal opinion that this novel is one of the worst. As you have seen from the opinion of the critic from Vienna, it is held to be one of the best. Internationally, too, the critics have hailed it as one of the best. If we did not hold the opinion—which is not all that unjustified nowadays—that anything the critics praise must of necessity be rubbish, we might even have a certain respect for something they tell us is the foremost and greatest achievement of our time. From the viewpoint of cultural history, however, this is a good example for us of how impossible it is for people today to draw near to the task set for mankind by the fifth post-Atlantean period. For this reason alone, karma will have to fulfil itself. It is our task, however, to think about these things impartially. Above all we should not accept or parrot without criticism what is said out there in the materialistic world, but should strive instead to form our own judgement about these things.

What I have read aloud to you today was written many years ago, but now it provides marvellous slogans for the leading articles perpetrated by the journalists of the Entente. Its tenor is terribly anti-German, but that is not the point, for any point of view has its validity. It is, however, a strange distortion of the truth to praise a book as something new when it was in fact written years ago, even though the final volumes have only recently been published. Other strange things happen in this way, for instance in connection with quotations which keep appearing and are said to stem from Nietzsche or Treitschke and others. In the case of Treitschke you can search his works in vain for the passages, and in Nietzsche's case the passages have the opposite meaning to that claimed today by the journalists of the Entente.

I used to be acquainted with Nietzsche's publisher and discussed a number of matters with him. At that time the man who translated the whole of Nietzsche into French wrote to that publisher every few days from Paris. Nietzsche was a god to him. Today he abuses him mightily. You can have the strangest experiences in such connections. You will search the works of Treitschke and Nietzsche in vain for anything that could have been said in that book, for when they are quoted the texts are taken out of context, and furthermore they are also mutilated; the beginning of a sentence is quoted, the middle is torn out, and then the end is quoted. Only by doing this can they quote these writers.

But they can quote Romain Rolland unabridged. I have read to you only a few short passages from his novel. There is no need for you to judge it by these passages, though they could be augmented by countless others. You could, however, judge it on the basis of the ending, which shows that the whole novel is riddled with the attitudes revealed in the quoted passages. None of this is intended as a condemnation of the person himself. However, it is essential to illuminate clearly the poison seeping into our lives today.