The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Members' Lecture

It could seem to the earnest seeker of truth, and – basically, a certain satisfaction is missing within the /illegible abbreviation, then gap] – it could seem to the earnest seeker of truth as if it were possible truth, the realization, to be recorded in a certain way, proclaimed and then given to humanity; and on the other hand, it could seem as if it would be enough for a person to acquire this realization once and for all.

It may be said that from the very beginning of a way of looking at things, nothing seems more plausible than this, and yet it would be a mistake to believe that the one-time possession of a certain number of words could suffice for human striving. If someone who is embodied today, let us say, in one of the previous incarnations, perhaps within the ancient Egyptian culture, had come to high realizations and today would remember those high realizations, so that he would possess that again, could we then say that the realizations attained at that time would already be beneficial in the present embodiment through mere remembrance? We cannot say that. However strange it may seem to say this, given that there is only one truth, we must say that it is absolutely necessary for human development that different forms of truth come to man in different times, because human nature changes over time. It changes in such a way that the powers of cognition also change. Man does not pass from incarnation to incarnation in vain; he progresses from embodiment to embodiment because, as the world changes, he can absorb something new within himself and give the old a new form.

Therefore, it was necessary at all times for people to work their way up to such a higher level of knowledge in the mysteries, so that they were able to judge how the whole earth, with all its physical and spiritual aspects, has changed compared to earlier times, and how human souls change within this earth development. In occult wisdom, this is expressed in the words: There always had to be people who were able to read the signs of the times.

Now, what is particularly necessary to teach people, to proclaim, to recognize this necessity? This all only arises when one is able to fully survey the overall situation of development in any given time. Times change and actually change in shorter periods than is usually assumed. If we consider the development of humanity, we will be able to admit that the interesting periods for the present human being are those that roughly three millennia before the founding of Christianity and after the founding of Christianity, the first and second before and after / gap ]. We ourselves are at the end of the second millennium of the post-Christian era, and the third is approaching.

These six millennia, in which we are placed in such a peculiar way, are of very special importance. What is beneficial for man? What should the soul take particularly to heart? Much is included in the development of mankind during these millennia. Our souls, which have been embodied several times during this time, well, they will have gone through important things during these periods, and these periods are to be characterized to some extent today.

If we go back to the third millennium before the founding of Christianity, it is the time when the little Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, has just begun for people. What is man of this age like? So that we can say: Before that, for a larger number of people, the last remnants of the old, twilight clairvoyance were still [there]. They could see not only the physical world, but also through it into the spiritual world. They could delve into the soul and find what was spiritually at the root of it. They could get there in two ways. Behind the material world they saw the spiritual beings who were guiding and creating, who had not descended into an earthly incarnation. They knew – as we know – that there is earth, air and water, that there are spiritual hierarchies. And on the other hand, when they descended into the physical world of feeling, willing and thinking, they found the spiritual foundations in a second way.

This ceased before the beginning of the third millennium. Then man was increasingly forced to look into the physical world of the senses. In the past, he had directed his mystical gaze into the world of feeling and will; now he said, “I will, I think, I feel,” and could no longer perceive the spiritual realm behind pure human thinking, feeling and willing, from which everything and he himself has its origin.

But the development of the world took such a peculiarly even course; to the deeper view it proves to be permeated with wisdom everywhere. What had been taken from humanity on the one side was given to it on the other, namely, to find the way back into the spiritual world by applying what was given to it in the sensual world in the right way.

How did this happen? What was actually given to man by being pushed out of the spiritual world? - He was given self-awareness. Especially in the most important states in those times, he was without self-awareness; only when he looked into the sensory world did it come to him, but it was completely silent both in those moments when he could see the spiritual through the outer sensory carpet - everyone was then completely raptured, in ecstasy.

This was especially given to the initiates in the northern countries. In ancient times, we find initiation sites in the areas from Britain and Russia to Persia; in the west, the sites of the Druids; and in the east, the trotters. There was the possibility that they would enter into ecstasy, where they were enraptured but felt they were a link to the whole world. They were guided to follow the path of the stellar world, for example. It was not the case that people were banished to the innermost circle of earthly existence; they experienced the great world events. The sun has a different position around our Christmas time. The sun draws a certain part of its strength from earthly existence. What today's people feel only weakly when autumn comes and the vegetation fades, the melancholy of autumn, was intensified in those people to an immensely intense sensation, so that they experienced what the sun experienced, right down to the sun's lowest point.

All this was not only experienced by the soul as a concept, but also as a deep empathy. When this melancholy reached its highest pitch, it was given a substitute, as it were. The soul learned to feel. The outer world of the senses offered nothing joyful, but something like a counter-blow, which came like an elastic ball when it expands after being compressed on one side. The spiritual senses opened up, man was devoted to the spirit of the sun. He saw into, at least sensed, the hierarchies of existence. And when the sun sent more power to the earth again, the human being lived with /gap]. The sun had a certain symbol, and in the temple sites one could experience how the sun works by the shadow that the sun cast there, so that the service of the spirit was one that integrated itself into the service of nature. Man lived with it when the days made it possible for him to turn his gaze back to the world of the senses. He experienced this in jubilant joy until those days when the sun seemed strongest to him.

There were two moments in the course of the year: first, when he was also devoted to the spiritual in ecstasy, and secondly, when he was jubilantly devoted to the external; people were taught this in the Nordic mystery centers. At one point, he no longer felt the germs of the ego; he was poured out into the whole world.

It became less and less possible for people to put themselves in this mood. But something else was given to them. They could now place their I-consciousness more and more in their I, the ecstasy was taken away, the I was strengthened. The moment was prepared for people when the Being was to come who could not come to man in ecstasy, but could enter into the deepest inner being of man. The Christ-entity took on such a form that man could feel in his ego as if he could pour the entity into his ego. In the past, he was outside of himself, outside of the world from which he was taken. Through the appearance of Christ, it should be made possible for man to become aware of his own ego. When I relive what Christ experienced, I experience something divine within me. This could be prepared. It was prepared by the three millennia before the founding of Christianity. There we encounter Abraham. He had the mission [...] to rise with his I first to the deity that wanted to descend. The deity was only fully recognizable after it had descended. This was usually done by selecting, from the whole of humanity, the physical individual who was capable not of seeing God in ecstasy and not of having to delve into the human soul, but who, through his intelligence, was able to see God with some degree of clairvoyance. He had the physical instrument in his brain that, with the help of the physical instrument, he could summarize the external physical conditions and in this combination he understood: there is something underlying the whole world that underlies the human ego. Abraham was the first to recognize the deity as the world-I. This ability was connected to the physical body. In the beginning it was not connected to the physical instrument, but the person had to come to a body-free vision. That was Abraham's special mission. [His era is the third millennium BC.] The knowledge of God was comprehended to the physical level of the brain. In all ancient times, knowledge of God and the spirit was dependent on leaving the physical. With Abraham, a personality first appeared who could attain knowledge of God with the physical brain. He was able to implant this in the development of humanity.

This is expressed in the records in such a low mood that one is amazed and in awe. For example, we are told that Joseph came to dreams. This is supposed to indicate to us that he was an exception to the rule; they were not supposed to have insight through dreamlike clairvoyance. It was present in him as an inherited trait, so it could not be used in a direct line for development and was therefore rejected by his brothers. Such an ability – to see with the physical brain – could only be passed on through physical inheritance, because it was a physical ability.

The people who had this mission must have felt that this physical property was given by God. They showed those who were to find this mission that it was a gift from God by asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He would have sacrificed the whole nation, because all the Hebrew people were to descend from him. By receiving Isaac back, he was given the opportunity to inherit the physical trait. The mission was given to the people as a gift. These things are so deeply presented in the occult documents. If we go back to the first millennium of the Kali Yuga, we find that through which humanity was given the self-awareness for clairvoyance.

But all this had to be increased. The next step was taken in the second millennium of the dark age, in that now, through special developmental processes, the one who had become able to perceive the external God from the mission through the inherited characteristics from external nature - Moses could perceive the ego-God, which man perceives in his own ego, [directly in the elementary events of the world]. The [second millennium of the Dark Age before Christ – the beginning of the Dark Age, the great Kali Yuga 3101 BC, the end of 1899 AD –] is the age of Moses, when the ego-God is perceived in nature.

Third millennium – [the first millennium BC]: The revelation of the same entity, the entity that gave Isaac back and that appeared in the burning bush, now incarnated in human form, is at the end. Prepared for this event to be understood, humanity was to become through those leaders who connect to the name of Solomon. His wisdom in the last millennium should be there so that humanity could understand how this entity incarnated humanly. So that in occult wisdom we call this millennium the Solomonic.

We have outlined these three ages as the first three in the Dark Ages. Then come ages that can only be understood if you know a certain law of human development. Earlier events repeat themselves in a certain way, but you have to know how. Some events repeat themselves like this: 1, 2, 3, then 3, 2, 1. You can only understand them if you know exactly how they repeat themselves. We must not apply any pattern, because it is precisely the fact that the repetition is different that gives rise to the diversity. The repetition of the first three ages was reversed; for those who were able to assess the overall world situation, it was clear that the first age after the founding of Christianity was a repetition of the age of Solomon. It was also a reincarnation of Solomon: the entire spirit that flowed from the wisdom of Solomon dominates the understanding that is gradually developing for the Christ impulse.

In the second millennium, the Moses impulse: the event at Sinai was actually repeated in reverse. When Moses perceived the I-Godhead in the burning bush, it was the perception of the Godhead outside through the elements of nature. The reverse event took place in the second millennium. It consisted of the I-Godhead now announcing itself through a deep insight into the souls. In the mysteries of the Middle Ages, the individualities who were allowed to experience this by descending into the soul lived. A reverse Moses experience: the ego-deity reveals itself to the Christian mystics in their own soul. Now the deity radiates out of the soul. Just as Moses had a kindred spirit, so he also had the other mystics as kindred spirits.

We live in a special age, in which [one] sees the conclusion of the second millennium approaching. In the third millennium, a repetition of the Abrahamic age will be announced, very slowly and gradually, but it will be characterized by the fact that the Abraham event is happening in reverse. What used to be found only in ecstasy was experienced by Abraham as self-awareness. Man will conquer the old clairvoyant abilities in addition to these abilities. Through the mission of Abraham, what was previously found directly has flowed into the brain. Man will have to step out of the immediate circle of his consciousness, preserving this consciousness to a spiritual knowledge with powers that are bound to the physical body.

In a sense, the fact that we are now in an important epoch brings about a decision for the knowledge of the third millennium. The Kali Yuga expired in 1899. Now we are moving towards the development of completely new abilities.

Humanity is moving in two currents. One goes through the mysteries, not the old ones, but the present ones. Through this current, man has to develop the ability to develop clairvoyant insight. Humanity cannot be without this path, because without it no orientation would be possible. Alongside this, there is another current within which humanity is changing in a natural way.

We must realize that these two currents are present. All the souls that are here today were also present in the past. When a soul in ancient Egypt came into existence through birth, it experienced something very specific and had to experience something specific. You cannot relive in a later age what you should have experienced earlier.

You will say: That is something terribly discouraging. What has been missed would be irretrievably lost. Now you come to the realization and yet you can't change it anymore. — This is so because through all previous incarnations, people were actually not in a position to miss anything. Only now is time beginning; in the past, people were guided from the spiritual world. In the ages that preceded the Kali Yuga, the old impulses were still in effect. Now [man] becomes free, he must take [his] own development into his own hands; in the age when it is only possible for man to miss something, it is also ensured that people become aware that they must not miss anything. With each incarnation, the human being becomes increasingly freer. One experiences two to three incarnations in such a time, and only the fifth is so far that it is irretrievably lost. Those who do not come to Theosophy today, without gaining consciousness, will be able to receive it in the next or the second next incarnation. An example that shows how it is true that it is not enough to communicate general truths, but that there is a need for individuals who can assess the overall situation. They know that a new era is now beginning for the benefit and development of humanity. For each time it is necessary to find the particular form of words. We still have to recognize how these abilities of people develop. These abilities, which people will grow into, will be found in the fact that people develop new soul abilities in addition to the old ones, namely ethereal clairvoyance. A certain number of people will walk the earth who, through natural development, will be able to see not only the physical body but also the etheric body. This ability faded with the approach of Kali Yuga. It is beginning again.

Two:} When people have acquired sufficient understanding, they will be able to judge in due time what is real. They will know how to deal with someone who says they see something that penetrates the physical body. We practice Theosophy because we feel a responsibility to make this understandable to people. It could also be that people get stuck in the materialistic swamp, then it would happen that those who see something like that would be regarded as sick people. They will be crushed by the materialistic view.

The prophecy will be wrong if these abilities are ignored. It depends on people how they can receive and understand an event when people will acquire an understanding of the experience that will develop in the first half of our century as a natural human characteristic. The first foundations of initiation will develop naturally. The first to receive this without initiation will show themselves between 1930, -40, -50. This is how progress manifests itself. For those who cannot yet experience this in such an early time, the opportunity arises to attain it in the next 2500 years. During this time, if humanity proves itself worthy, a sufficiently large number will have acquired this ability. It does not matter whether one lives in the life between birth and death or also in the time between death and a new birth. Because this event means something very important. People will experience a renewal of the event of Damascus and more and more will experience it in the next 2500 years. In the beginning, the Christ was physically incarnated, now the abilities of man are rising and he can perceive the Christ with more highly developed abilities. Once Christ was physically incarnated, and since that time the initiate has seen him in his etheric body. When this event occurs, when the illumination of Christ enters our earth, it means not only something for the time between birth and death, but just as Christ descended at that time to the souls that were between death and a new birth, so the event that we call the Christ event of the 20th century extends – he will descend to those who have acquired an understanding of it in the physical world.

If a person passes by without understanding, he does not bring with him the possibility of understanding Christ and he must wait until he can prepare himself in a new incarnation. Understanding must be developed here. Life here is important.

This understanding is, so to speak, the last thing we have to acquire through the brain from the Kali Yuga era. It will be a peculiar moment when the re-appearance of Christ occurs in the 20th century. Little by little, people are losing sight of the external Christian documents. Efforts are being made from all sides to pick apart the documents and to deny Christ altogether. Those who believe that they can preserve the old are short-sighted. With enormous speed, the view that the [truth of the] gospels cannot be determined will spread among so-called enlightened humanity. Those who resist it, who say: “Let [the] human being stop with [theosophy],” are as short-sighted as possible.

When the crisis has reached its peak, the Christ will be there for people. Then there will be no records for them and they will no longer be necessary. How many incredible things there were, so people will become; how many incredible things were seen, so people will know without historical records what Christ is, who will perceive him in clairvoyance. The theosophists will be tested in this age. It will be the case that in the next few decades simply everything will be proclaimed, and the materialists will be unable to believe anything else. /2 blank pages] It must be a sensual perception. Belief in a physical return will become established. Whether they will be ready to believe in the spiritual, or whether they will only believe it when it comes to them in a carnal form? A number of people will embrace the belief in the return of Christ and present themselves as false messiahs to the world.

People must now consciously take their development into their own hands. There have often been false messiahs in the past, and they have all been believed. At that time, it happened without any particular harm to humanity because people did not yet [have] their destiny in their own hands. Now they must learn to distinguish the real from the Maya.

The era in which the Christ will appear as an ethereal being is the time when the first ethereal clairvoyance will show itself and break off shorthand.]

Goethe,³⁵ one of the most inspired spirits in modern times, knew how to depict in a touching way the strength and the power of sounds at Easter—the sound of the Easter bells. When his character Faust, the representative of striving humanity, has reached the outer limit of earthly existence, he seeks death. Goethe, however, also makes clear to us how the sounds of Easter bells, similar to the brightness of Easter itself, can conquer the thought and the impulse of death in Faust's heart.

The inner impulse of the sounds of Easter that Goethe places before us is the same impulse that passed through the entire development of humanity. In the not too distant future, human beings will understand through a renewed absorption in spiritual things how our festivals are intended to connect the human soul with everything that weaves into and lives in the universe. Then people will feel in a new way how their souls expand with joy during these first days of spring and understand the manner in which the sources of spiritual life can liberate us from the material world and from the narrowness of an existence that is tied to material things.

Especially during Easter will the human soul feel most fervently how an unshakable faith is being poured into it, which indicates that there is a well of the eternal, divine existence deep inside every human being. This fountainhead removes us from all constrictions and allows us to be one with the source of universal existence without losing ourselves. We can find a new life in this source at any time, provided we are able to rise to its knowledge through illumination. That which constitutes the true essence of Easter is nothing but an external sign of the Christian Mystery, the most profound experience mankind has ever had. And thus, we feel at this time of the year as if the external festivities and the manifestations of Easter were a symbol of the truths that human beings were able to discover only at the beginning of evolution, as well as a symbol of the knowledge that was available to them exclusively from the depths of the Holy Mysteries. What we call Easter was widely celebrated by ancient peoples, and wherever it was celebrated, it grew out of the Holy Mysteries. And everywhere such celebrations conjured up the notion and the conviction that the life that is lived in the spirit can conquer death, because death resides in the material world. In whatever way the human soul became convinced of this truth in ancient times, the substance of this conviction was ultimately derived from the very core of the Holy Mysteries.

However, the progression of human evolution consists precisely in the fact that the secrets formerly known only to holy places and to the Mystery Centers are now increasingly accessible to all of humanity and will eventually become common knowledge. In today's and tomorrow's festivities we will therefore observe, and attempt to present, how this notion—this feeling—was at first confined to the few in ancient times but has increasingly gained ground in the course of human development and is now known to an ever increasing number of people. Today let us look back into the past so that tomorrow we will be able to describe the feelings people in our time have toward Easter.

Our Christian Easter is only one among humanity's many forms of celebrating Easter, and what the sages of mankind had to say about conquering death through life was a result of the strongest convictions and sprang from the deepest wells of wisdom. These insights were built into the Easter symbols, and we find there elements that are designed to awaken in us an understanding of Easter, of the resurrection feast of the spirit. A beautiful and deep oriental legend tells us the following.

Shakyamuni, the Buddha, was a great oriental teacher who made many oriental regions happy with his deep wisdom. Since this wisdom had sprung from the primeval wells of spiritual existence, it warmed the hearts of humanity and filled them with utter bliss. Shakyamuni preserved for later ages that ancient wisdom of the divine-spiritual worlds that had beatified the hearts of human beings when they were still able to look into the divine world. The Buddha had one great disciple, Kashyapa, who was able to understand his teachings, whereas his other disciples were more or less incapable of grasping the comprehensive wisdom taught by Buddha. He was one of the initiates most profoundly in tune with the teaching of Buddha and one of his most important successors. The legend tells us that when it was time for Kashyapa to die and when, because of his maturity, he was ready to enter the state of Nirvana, he went out to a steep mountain and hid in a cave. There his body remained after his death in an imputrescible state; only the initiates knew about this secret and about the location of Kashyapa's body. However, Buddha himself had once predicted the coming of Maitreya-Buddha, his great successor who was to become the new teacher and leader of humanity and who, when he had reached the zenith of his preordained earthly existence, would seek out the cave of the illumined Kashyapa to touch his imperishable corpse with the right hand. Then from the heavens a fire would stream down in which Kashyapa's body would be transported to the spiritual world.

The very degree by which the oriental legend differs from what we know as the content of the Easter story affords us an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of Easter. Only through a gradual approach can we grasp the primeval wisdom contained in this legend. We could begin by asking why Kashyapa—in contradistinction to the Savior in the Christian report of Easter—does not conquer death after three days; or we might ask why the corpse of the oriental initiate remains in this imperishable state for such a long period of time until it is finally moved upward to the celestial spheres by a miraculous fire.

Today we can only allude to the hidden depths of such things, and only little by little can we get an idea of the wisdom expressed in such profound legends. It is especially important at festivals such as Easter to keep a modest and respectful distance and to gradually raise our consciousness to the heights of wisdom by engaging ourselves in the ritual of celebration. We must not give in to the temptation of wanting to grasp the meaning of these legends quickly with our dry intellect. No, these truths can be approached and ultimately understood only by gradually attuning our perceptive sensibilities and feelings to them. Only after this ripening process can we grasp the great truths with the zeal and full warmth of our sensibilities.

For today's humanity, two closely related truths shine as mighty lights and emblems on the horizon of the spirit—important points of reference for a developing humanity that is striving within the spiritual realm. The first emblem is the burning bramblebush of Moses, and the second is the fire appearing under lightning and thunder at Sinai from which Moses received the pronouncement of the “I am the I am.”³⁶ Who is that spiritual being in the two apparitions announcing himself to Moses?

Anyone who understands the Christian message in a spiritual sense will also understand the words that announce to Moses the Being in the burning bramblebush, and later in the fire on Mt. Sinai—the Being who places the Ten Commandments before his soul. The writer of the Gospel of St. John tells us that Moses prophesied the Coming of Christ Jesus, and the Evangelist John expressly lets him point to those places in the Bible where the force in the burning bramblebush and later in the fire at Sinai announces Himself as the Being who was later to be named “the Christ.” No godhead other than the Christ is intended to be introduced by the words “I am the I am.”

The God who later appeared in the human body and who confronted mankind with the Mystery of Golgotha reigns invisibly after He had announced Himself earlier in the fire element in nature, in the burning bush, and in the lightning fire of Sinai. And you can understand the Old or the New Testament only if you know that the God proclaimed by Moses is the Christ who was supposed to walk among people. That is how the God who is supposed to bring salvation to human beings announces Himself in a way as no being in human form would. He announces Himself in the fiery element of nature, the element in which Christ is living. His divine essence makes itself known in many forms. The same Divine Being that reigns throughout all of antiquity now makes His visible appearance through the Event in Palestine.

Let us look back to the Old Testament and ask ourselves whom the ancient Hebrews actually revered. Who is their God? The members of the Hebrew Mystery Centers knew it; they worshiped the Christ and recognized Him as the speaker of the words, “Tell my people: I am the I am.” But even if nothing of this were known, the very fact that God, within our cycle of humanity, announced Himself in the fire would be sufficiently authentic evidence to the person capable of seeing into the deep mysteries of nature that the God of the burning bramblebush is identical with the God who announced Himself on Mt. Sinai. He came down from spiritual heights in order to fulfill the Mystery of Golgotha through His descent into a human body. For there is a mysterious connection between the fire that ignites the elements of nature out there and the fire that pulsates through our blood in the form of body temperature. We have often emphasized in our Spiritual Science that the human being is a microcosm juxtaposed to the large world, the macrocosm. Therefore, when we perceive things in the right way, the inner processes of a human being must correspond to processes taking place outside in the universe. For every inner-process we must be able to find the corresponding outer process, but to understand the meaning of this requires that we enter deep shafts of Spiritual Science. We are touching here the fringe of a deep mystery, of a truth that answers this question: What in the external macrocosm corresponds to the origin of human thought within us?

Human beings are the only creatures on earth who really think, and through their thoughts they are able to experience a world that extends beyond the earth. The manner in which thoughts flash up in the human being has no parallel in any other creature on earth. What is taking place within us when a thought is ignited, when either the simplest or the most enlightening thought flashes into our minds? To answer this question, let us say that the ego and astral body are simultaneously activated within us when we let our thoughts pass through our souls. Our blood is the physical expression of our ego, and that which in our nervous system is called “life” is the physical expression of our astral body. Not a single thought would flare up in our souls if ego and astral body did not work in concert, thus giving rise to a commensurate, interdependent functioning of the blood and of the nervous system. The future science of human beings will some day be amazed at today's scientific theory, which holds that thoughts originate solely in the nervous system. This belief is incorrect because the process responsible for the origination of thoughts must be seen as a dynamic interaction between blood and nervous system.

A thought flashes up in our soul when our blood, our inner fire, nervous system, and air cooperate in such a way. The origination of the thought inside our soul corresponds to rolling thunder in the cosmos. Likewise, when lightning flashes in the air, and when air and fire interact to produce thunder, this corresponds to the fire of our blood and the activity of our nervous system. This produces what one might metaphorically call an inner thunder that echoes in our thoughts, albeit gently, quietly, and imperceptibly. The lightning in the clouds corresponds to the fire and to the warmth in our blood, whereas the air outside, including all the elements it contains in the universe, corresponds to everything that passes through our nervous system. And just as lightning in its counterplay with the elements produces thunder, so the counterplay of blood and nerves produces the thought that flashes up in the soul. Suppose we looked out into the world that surrounds us, saw lightning flashing up in the air, and heard rolling thunder discharging itself. Then suppose that, as we looked into our soul, we sensed an inner warmth pulsating in our blood and felt the life that passes through our nervous system, a thought would flash up within us to tell us that both the external and the internal event were one.

That is really the truth! Although our thoughts take place within ourselves, the thunder rolling in the sky is not just a physical, material phenomenon. To assert that it was so would be nothing but materialistic mythology. However, individuals able to perceive that spiritual beings weave and radiate through material existence will look up to the sky, see the lightning, hear the thunder, and to them this will be a true and real indication of God's thinking in the fire, of His intention to announce Himself to us. That is the invisible God who weaves and radiates through the universe. His warmth is in the lightning, His nerves in the air, His thoughts in the rolling thunder; and it was He who spoke to Moses in the burning bramblebush and in the lightning fire of Sinai.

The elements fire and air in the macrocosm correspond to blood and nerves in the human microcosm. Thoughts in the human being are what lightning and thunder are in the macrocosm. By analogy, the God whom Moses saw and heard in the burning bush and who spoke to him in the lightning fire of Mt. Sinai appears as the Christ in the blood of Jesus of Nazareth. By thinking like a human being and by being in a human body, Christ's influence as the great model for human evolution extends into the far-distant future. And thus, two poles in the human evolution meet each other: the macrocosmic God on Mt. Sinai who announces Himself in thunder and lightning fire, and the same microcosmic God who is embodied in the human being of Palestine.

The sublime mysteries of humanity have been derived from the most profound wisdom. They are not invented legends, but a truth so profound that we need all the means available to Spiritual Science in order to unveil the mysteries that are woven around this truth. Let us ask what kind of an impulse mankind received through its great model, the Christ-Being, who descended to earth and united Himself with the microcosmic copies of the elements that are present in the human body.

Let us look back one more time to the prophecies of ancient cultures. All of them, back to the very distant past of the post-Atlantean era, probably knew what the course of human development would be. The Mystery Centers everywhere taught what is now proclaimed by Spiritual Science as follows: Human beings consist of four parts: the physical, the etheric, and the astral bodies, and the ego. They can rise to higher stages of development: through individual effort on the part of their ego, when they transform their astral body into spirit self—manas, when they transform their etheric body into life spirit—buddhi, and when they spiritualize the physical body into spirit man—atman. All the members of this physical body must be gradually spiritualized in our life on earth so that everything that makes human beings out of us through the influx of the divine breath is profoundly spiritualized. And because spiritualization of the physical body begins with the spiritualization of the breath—of the odem, the transformed, spiritualized physical body is called atma or atman, from which the German word for breath, atem, derives. The Old Testament tells us that the human being received the breath of life in the beginning of his earthly existence. Likewise, all ancient Schools of Wisdom perceived this breath of life as something that must gradually be spiritualized by the human being, and they saw atman as a deification of the breath—as the great ideal human beings must strive for—so that they will be imbued with the spiritual breath of air.

But there is still more in the human being that has to be spiritualized. If the entire body is to be spiritualized, it is necessary not only that the breath be spiritualized but also that the blood—the expression of the ego that is constantly renewed by the breath—be spiritualized. The blood must be infected by a strong impulse toward the spiritual. Christianity has added to the ancient mysteries the mystery of the blood and of the fire that is enclosed in the human being. The ancient mysteries say that human beings have descended to earth in their present earthly form and physical corporeality from spiritual heights. Having lost their spiritual essence and having wrapped themselves into a physical corporeality, they must return to spirituality by casting off the physical sheath and by ascending to a spiritual existence.

The religions could not teach what one might call the self-induced salvation of the human ego as long as the ego, whose physical expression is in the blood, was not touched by an impulse now present on earth. And thus we are told how the great spiritual beings—the great avatars—descend and incarnate themselves from time to time in human bodies, especially when humanity needs help. These are beings who do not need to descend into a human body to enhance their own development because they have completed their own human development in an earlier cycle of the world. They descend for the sole purpose of helping human beings. For example, when mankind is in need of help, the great god Vishnu descends from time to time into an earthly existence. Krishna, one of the incarnations of Vishnu, speaks of himself and explains clearly what the essence of an avatar is. In the divine poem, the Bhagavad Gita, he himself explains what he is. Here we have the wonderful words that Krishna, in whom Vishnu lives as an avatar, says about himself: “I am the spirit of creation, its beginning, its middle, its end; I am the Sun among the stars, fire among the elements, the great ocean among the waters, the eternal snake among all snakes. I am the basis of everything.”³⁷

No words can proclaim more beautifully and more magnificently the all-embracing, omnipotent divinity. The godhead whom Moses saw in the elements of fire not only weaves and radiates through the macrocosmic world but also can be found inside the human being. That is why the Krishna-Being indwells in anything human as the great ideal to which the human core strives to develop itself from within. And if, as the wisdom of antiquity endeavored to do, the human breath can be spiritualized through the impulse that we absorb through the Mystery of Golgotha, then we have realized the principle of salvation through that which itself lives within us. All avatars saved mankind through the forces they caused to radiate from spiritual heights down onto earth. The avatar Christ, however, saved mankind by means of what He Himself extracted from the strength of mankind, and He showed us how the strength to be saved and to conquer matter through spirit can be found within ourselves.

Now we can see how even such an illuminate as Kashyapa could not yet be fully saved even though he had made his body imperishable. This body of his had to remain in the secret cave until the Maitreya-Buddha came to pick it up. Only when the physical body has been so spiritualized through the ego that the Christ-Impulse can stream into it does one no longer need the wonderful cosmic fire in order to attain salvation; what is needed for salvation is the fire raging in the blood of the inner human being. And that is why we can utilize the light that radiates from the Mystery of Golgotha in order to illuminate such a wonderfully profound legend as the one told about Kashyapa.

At first blush, the world appears to us dark and full of riddles, but we can compare it with a dark room containing many splendid objects that we are unable to see when we first enter. However, when we ignite a light, it illuminates the whole splendor of the objects in the room and everything else represented by these objects. The same can be true for the human being who strives for wisdom. The human being strives at first in the dark; looking in this world first to the past and then to the future, he or she can at first see nothing but darkness. However, once the light coming from Golgotha is ignited, everything from the farthest past to the remotest future becomes illuminated. Since everything material is born out of the spirit, the spirit will again rise from matter. To express this certainty is the meaning of today's celebration of Easter—a festival that is tied to the events of the world. Mankind must realize what it can attain through Spiritual Science: if the human soul, by gaining knowledge of the mysteries of existence, can acquire a lively feeling for the mysteries of the universe on important symbolic occasions such as Easter, then it will also feel something of what it means to live not simply in one's own narrow, personal existence but also in a symbiosis with the light of the stars, the splendor of the sun, and with everything that lives in the universe. The soul will become increasingly more spiritual as it feels extended into the universe.

The spiritual Easter bells echo their sounds through our hearts, indicating that we must pass from a human to a universal life through the resurrection. Hearing these spiritual Easter bells will make us lose any doubt we may have about the spiritual world, and we will then be sure that death in the material world cannot harm us. When we understand these spiritual Easter bells, we will return to the life in the spirit.

• 35. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was Germany's greatest poet. Early in his academic career, Steiner spent several years editing Goethe's scientific writings, and during his lifetime he did not tire of extolling Goethean perception and thinking. The main seat of the Anthroposophic movement in Dornach, Switzerland, is still called the “Goetheanum.” Steiner gave several lecture cycles on Goethe's great poem Faust. These have been published as Faust, der strebende Mensch, Vol. I, and Geisteswissenschaftliche Erläuterungen zu Goethe's “Faust” Vol. II (Rudolf Steiner Verlag: Dornach, 1974).
• 36. Exodus 3:14
• 37. Bhagavad Gita is a religious Hindu poem consisting of dialogues between Prince Arjuna and Krishna, who reveals himself as the avatara (incarnation) of Vishnu. The transcription of the quotation from the “Gita” is probably a contraction of several textual citations on pp. 452, 522, and 529, among others, of Bhagavad-gita AS IT IS. Complete edition (Collier Books: New York, 1974).

Notes A from the estate of Elisabeth Vreede

Through spiritual science, we get to know the human being, and through such knowledge we can develop further. A spiritual being accompanies us when we pass through the gate of death, and it shows us the way into the spiritual world, even in Kamaloka, just as we were supported and guided by our parents and the wider environment during our earthly existence so that we could find our way here. This angelic being gives us spiritual instruction, shows us our mistakes from a previous incarnation, points out how to correct them, and ultimately the person longs to descend back into the physical world to make up for what they previously lacked. We can call this angelic being our spiritual father, the fatherly element of our supersensible being.

But we also have a maternal element in the spiritual world, and that is the essence of all the forces from the spiritual hierarchies that enable us to surround ourselves with the forces - or to draw the forces to us - that we need to transform our shortcomings into abilities of the soul.

With this maternal shell and the paternal element, we have a shell in the spiritual world, a spiritual body, which becomes more pronounced the closer we get to the moment of our birth through our physical parents in the physical world, where we envelop ourselves with the inherited qualities of the physical line of our generation, within which we come into the world.

During the first years of childhood, the paternal and maternal elements work undisturbed in us, the paternal in the structure of our brain and nervous system, the maternal in our heart and blood system until the moment when the ego awakens in us, until we begin to feel like an independent being. Then we come into opposition to our spiritual father, then we no longer want to obey him, then we want to go our own way, then we betray our spiritual leader. And then we no longer follow the maternal element either, which wants to help us to achieve our moral improvement, to arrive at higher insights, but then we start to listen to the inherited qualities of our physical parents, then we follow our lower instincts. In doing so, we cause our spiritual mother suffering, constant gnawing pain; we are her pain child in the truest sense of the word.

From the seventh year onwards, our physical body already begins to decay because we then reject the spiritual healing powers. And even if we continue to grow, there is still decay. When we have reached our youth and conquered a place in the physical world, and usually united with another person with whom we think we complement each other, then we have arrived at the peak of our lives and know nothing of all the spiritual pain that is suffered on our behalf. For our spiritual father and our spiritual mother continue to look down on us and pass on the impulses that are usually not felt, but are never absent.

So we continue to decline and seek opportunities to take with us at death those powers that are supposed to ensure us an eternal existence. If someone does not encounter the Christ Impulse in his further life – if he absorbs nothing of it within himself – he has during his life absorbed only death-bringing forces, and in future incarnations he will be born with disease-causing forces of decay.

How will he be able to resist these forces of decay? Only the power of Christ can give him the incentive to stand up against these forces and show him the way to do so. Before the Christ descended to earth, it was a sad world on earth, and six hundred years before the birth of Christ it was not yet certain that he would descend. The Buddha sensed this, and so he was able to proclaim that the world was like a charnel house, that everything would be suffering, pain, and so on. And it was again the Buddha who showed himself when the Christ Child was to be born, in order to receive the Christ Being, who settled in the astral body of the Luke-Child Jesus, and it was his voice that called: Glory to God in the highest heavens, peace on earth!

He who takes in the power of Christ, which will one day permeate everything, will be born with the ability to take in redemptive powers, through which he will ultimately be able to achieve his goal as a human being.

What has been communicated here in this way is nothing other than the content of the Parzival saga. Where Parzival leaves his father, where he disobeys his mother Herzeleide and follows his own inclinations and enters the world to gain experience, where he participates in Arthur's Round Table, that is what has been explained here before. King Arthur's Round Table represents the forces of decay, and only when one has realized this, when one encounters the fatally wounded Amfortas and becomes aware of what one has failed to do in life, only then is it possible to absorb the redemptive forces symbolized in the Holy Grail cup and to participate in the redemption of the earth.

Recordings B by Alice Kinkel, Second and Third Degree

We have been told in lectures and writings that man has a guide throughout his life who leads and guides him according to his karma. Now we add: This guide does not leave man when he passes through the gate of death. His angel also accompanies him into the spiritual world, so that man also has a guide between death and a new birth.

The relationship between this guardian angel and the person is paternal from birth to death. And the work that the angel does for the person is that it mainly forms our brain and nerves. Until the first years of childhood, our relationship with our angel is also unclouded. But then – from the moment we say “I” – comes the time when we betray the Father more and more!

And a maternal force also works on us, is in us, which forms the other organism, the blood and heart circulation – and which we condemn to suffering and pain with every movement, with every heartbeat.

We absorb destructive forces into ourselves throughout our lives in the physical body and are unable to transform them into forces of life. It is these forces of death that condemn our father and mother within us to suffering and pain. (I am not sure if this is correct.)

Everything that affects us from the outside world are destructive forces.

The path of man now goes so that he must become a disciple of a disciple of Arthur. If he can become a Parzival disciple and unites both together in himself, he will find the right way into the spiritual world.

In the thirty-third year, for example, the time will come for him to recognize what is necessary for his spiritual development and what sacrifices must be made for him by divine spiritual beings from the time of his birth until his death. 1912

Notes C by Amalie Künstler

If we look back to the early days of human development, we see that the human being, with his will and emotional impulses, was not yet in an earthly physical body as an ego-being. He was in a spiritual world as an ego-being. He could only arise as an individual ego-being after the father and mother were there to bring about an earthly body. When that was the case, he entered into earthly embodiments.

From that life in primeval times, where he was completely in the spiritual world, he always has a spiritual leader, a guardian angel, an Angelos, who guides the spiritual self of the person. This is his spiritual father. When a person passes through the portal of death, he is received by this being and guided in the spiritual world so that he can use the powers that have become his from his embodiment in a suitable way to build a suitable physical shell for himself for a new earthly embodiment. It is a relationship like that between a child and a father between the human being and this being.

This paternal power works in the new incarnation in such a way that it has a constructive effect on the brain and nervous system during the first years of childhood [approximately] up to the age of five. From then on, an inner ego power develops more and more in the human being, repelling this spiritual fatherhood. The human being betrays his father by increasingly absorbing what comes to him on the physical plane.

But the human being also has a spiritual mother. While still in the realm between death and birth, she forms a spiritual shell, astral body and etheric body, around the human ego before he enters physical existence. This spiritual mother works during life in the heart and blood system. She builds with spiritual forces on the human being. She herself comes from the worlds of the highest hierarchies. This spiritual mother suffers pain and sorrow through the human being when he enters into physical existence with his ego consciousness and absorbs into his soul the forces from this physical existence that kill and consume his body.

Man is a child of pain for this spiritual mother. She suffers through all the forces of death that man takes up in himself and that displace the forces she wants to give to man. These are the forces that come from heredity. These are the forces of original sin.

At the time of the change of teeth, around the seventh year, the human being has developed his physical form to such an extent that the etheric forces, acting from within, actually only expand the form, puffing it up. However, due to the impact from the physical world, these forces have become Luciferic forces, forces of death. And so, at this point, the dying of the human being actually begins from one side, while the spiritual mother forces always work against these dying forces.

In the middle of life, however, the forces of death have the upper hand. From then on, the human being just plods through life, towards death. He has received the mortal wound that he carries throughout his life because of the betrayal of his spiritual father and the pain and suffering he has inflicted on his spiritual mother.

Only through the Mystery of Golgotha can the strength be found to save man from falling more and more prey to these forces of death in the further course of his incarnations. There, at the Mystery of Golgotha, the new spiritual life force descended upon the earth; the Christ brought the spiritual power of the sun down to earth and gave it to the earth and to humanity at the Mystery of Golgotha.

And man, when he unites with the forces of Golgotha, can receive these new spiritual powers in his physical and etheric bodies. These powers are contained in the Holy Grail.

The resurrection body of Christ is composed of these forces. And this resurrection body of Christ is given for humanity in the times following the Mystery of Golgotha until the end of the development of the earth, like a seed, so to speak, for a renewed earth and humanity.

It is said that this seed is hidden in the Holy Grail, in the vessel into which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood of Christ that flowed from the wounds on the cross. From this vessel, Christ gave the disciples the bread and wine at the Last Supper. And this vessel was lifted up from the earth into the spiritual heights of the ether. This vessel, the Holy Grail, was then carried by angels to Europe. This points to the mission of the European peoples, who were to be the first bearers of the Christ impulse.

All that I have just mentioned is enshrouded in the mystery of the Parzival saga. Parzival is abandoned by his father. His mother, the sorrowful mother, heartache, wants to keep him from the forces of the outside world that belong to heredity. He breaks away from her when he sees the knights and follows them. He comes to the court of King Arthur. This is what lives in the physical culture. Arthur is a historical fact, but spiritually he is to be understood in such a way that he symbolizes the pure physical. Parzival marries the daughter of King Arthur. But then the longing of his soul drives him to the Grail.

Six hundred years before, the descent of the Christ from the spiritual realm of the sun had not yet been fully determined in the spiritual world, however strange that may seem. Hence the sorrow of the Bodhisattva, who had become Buddha, and the instruction to save himself as quickly as possible through reincarnation. For if the Christ did not come, he would have to look upon an Earth world that would increasingly become a field of corpses, where only the forces of death prevail. That is what would have happened without the Christ Impulse. That is why Buddha says: old age is suffering, death is suffering, and so on.

We are now at the beginning of a time when humanity will divide into two parts: those who have taken up the Christ impulse, even if only initially through feeling and sensation, and thereby will have brought fresh life forces to themselves, which will carry them through the gateway of death. For only the mineral physical body falls away at death; the spiritual powers of the physical body remain with the person. He takes them with him into the spiritual world, and out of these human powers, quickened by the Christic forces, the soul then builds in the spiritual world, with full consciousness, the new body for the following incarnation. A body that is more and more a true servant and tool for the work within the physical world. It will be a healthy and powerful body.

But those who have not taken in the new spiritual life forces, who have not overcome the forces of death, who have not transformed them in this life on earth, will also be unhealthy, withered and powerless in their bodies.

Notes by D. Elisabeth Geering-Christ

When the human soul leaves the physical plane after death, it is guided by a spiritual guide, since without one it cannot find its way either into Kamaloka or into the spiritual world afterwards. This spiritual guide has a relationship with the human soul that is similar to that of a father with his child on the physical plane. This spiritual guide is identical with the being referred to in ancient religions as a guardian angel.

In the very earliest years of childhood, the soul continues to have the same relationship with the spiritual guide as it had before re-embodiment on the physical plane. This relationship continues until the moment when the child experiences its first sense of self-awareness and from that moment on is able to remember. Then the soul betrays the spiritual guide by rebelling against the guide and striving to go its own way, as the clairvoyant can observe.

At this point, the peak of physical growth coincides with the beginning of decadence, i.e. the process of dying. The first beginning of this process can already be seen when the teeth change.

Consequently, the spiritual “mother” experiences heartache at the same time, worry about the child's future. Everything related to the brain for the edification of the physical body or nervous system is fully realized under the spiritual guidance of the “father”. Everything related to the blood system, with its seat in the heart, comes from the power of the spiritual mother. Man would fall completely into decadence if he did not seek the healing powers capable of transforming the dead matter into new life by other means. These powers must be sought in the event of Golgotha and were brought to the Occident through the secrets of the Holy Grail and preserved by it. The Parzival legend is nothing more than the imprint of what has just been said.

Titurel is the guardian of the Holy Grail, the spiritual guide of whom was spoken at the beginning. Amfortas, as uncle - our sufferings, which can only be healed by the secret of the Grail. The Grail saga indicates the path we have to follow. We ourselves must become Parzival in all things of existence, bringing the activity of Arthur into our spiritual life. We must become Arthur-Parzival brothers and thus join this Rosicrucian, Grail brotherhood. (That is why Parzival's mother's name was Herzeleide.

Notes by E. von Rudolf Meyer

When a person passes through the gate of death, they must also have a guide there. He is not alone, but precisely as he is here our human spirit, he is after death. He finds there a leader commensurate with his individuality, a guardian angel, whom he also has here in the physical life; and he is with him in the spiritual world all the time, even very soon during the Kamaloka period.

When a person is now ready for a new incarnation, and if he has a strong will to do so, because he is driven to make amends for many things, he draws forces from the astral and ethereal world and descends to the parental couple, thereby attracting whatever inherited qualities are present - that is the concept of original sin.

Just as we can now describe the guardian angel as the paternal element, so the forces from the astral and ethereal world are the maternal element. Much higher spiritual hierarchies work in this element, which the guardian angel also brings with him, than in the paternal element. Thus man passes through birth into existence, and we see how he, as a child, lives entirely in the pure supersensible forces until the time when he begins to slowly unfold his own ego. Then, little by little, the child's own ego rebels more and more against the guardian angel; this betrays the child, the paternal element.

It absorbs more and more of what is around it, what is imprinted on it through education and so on. There is now a constant rebellion against the guardian angel, against the paternal forces.

We now know that the paternal forces build up the physical body, the brain and the nervous system, while the maternal forces build up the blood circulation, the heart and everything connected with it.

The fact that from a certain point onwards the human being is constantly rebelling against the paternal element brings suffering and pain to the maternal element.

It is a faint reflection on the physical plane when a mother has a problem child.

This rebellion continues until the time when man again begins to slowly develop the descending forces in himself. He does not know this outside in life, and if he knew it, he would be close to despair; therefore it is hidden from him by the Guardian of the Threshold. He is again heading towards decay, and we can see how, from the middle of his life onwards, man just plods along and is no longer able to absorb anything small.

From a certain point onwards, the dying forces within a person become like a mortal wound.

What have I actually given you here? Nothing other than the Parzival legend. We see young Parzival entering life, soon to be without a father. His mother is called Heartache, which is the painful spiritual world of the human being. He takes up life, betrays his father, causes his mother heartache and follows the knights, that is, the external forces that come from heredity. And then he comes to the court of King Arthur, that is, he gets to know the outer world. He marries the daughter of King Arthur, that is, he loses himself completely to the outer world.

Then comes the moment when he sees and recognizes all the sins he has committed: he has betrayed the paternal element and caused the mother heartache. This is how he becomes Parzival, a disciple of the Grail, bearing the mortal wound of dying forces.

Through spiritual science, people are now to take on new strength in order to bring stronger forces with them for the next incarnation, forces that are more suited to physical life; for all the illness and weakness of the body that is present now comes from these dying forces from previous incarnations.

If human beings were only exposed to these forces, they would soon live in a world completely doomed to death. Six hundred years before Christ, it was not yet determined even in the spiritual world whether the Christ would really come to earth.

When Buddha taught: “Old age, sickness and death are suffering,” he foresaw a field of corpses on which later humanity would have to live. But then the Christ came and descended in the Jesus of Nazareth, and the individuality of the Buddha reappeared, as we know, not in the flesh, but it outshone the Jesus child of the Gospel of Luke, and the shepherds as a symbol proclaimed to men the revelation from on high: And peace to those of good will.

And then came the Mystery of Golgotha, which planted in the earth the impulse for humanity to absorb new forces and conquer death.

The physical body as such is only Maya. Reality is the spiritual forces that build it up; these are the life forces. The physical body contains the bodies of death. Man can receive these spiritual powers, the life forces, through the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha. Even when the physical body falls away at death, these spiritual powers remain with man, and from these he consciously builds the new body for the next incarnation, which then works in this incarnation and gives the strength to consciously master life on the physical plane.

People should build railways, airships and so on, but with the forces of life, with soul-pure powers. They should not only be Parzival, but also Arthurian knights, also take in the outer environment, but carry out of the spiritual world that which is true life.

This lecture is from the lecture series entitled, Answers to Universal Questions and Life Questions through Anthroposophy. It is lecture 9 of 19 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities throughout Austria and Germany in the years 1908–1909.

As a result of a wish from your chairperson we shall speak today about a theme which sets certain presuppositions to the audience, and is, in a certain sense, aimed at advanced Anthroposophists. We will have the opportunity in the following open lectures to work from the basics of the anthroposophical world view with something which formerly has not been taken into account much, something which perhaps in internal lectures had dared give a solution, and which will at least be partly experienced in an open lecture like this. When we speak about advanced Anthroposophists, don't suppose, my dear friends, it means to have advanced in the spiritual scientific fields, that you have become learned in theory. It doesn't really come to that. What it involves is less of a theoretic world created in the soul, but rather a certain development of our world of impressions, our feeling-world, a certain inclination, we could say, which we gradually acquire when we repeatedly work within anthroposophic circles.

Whoever has worked for many years within these circles, or are inwardly active in such circles, will think back to a time when they had, for the first time, heard something about the anthroposophic occult science of man, and they will remember that some of the first communications not only appeared improbable, but perhaps confused and fantastic—perhaps even worse could be said about them. However, with the passing time you may get used to certain impressions as the anthroposophic world view comes ever closer, and the world of feeling makes it possible to share things which are revealed from Higher Worlds. These revelations become absorbed just like facts on the physical place, taking place in the physical world, they too are taken in. Whatever one can call proof of spiritual statements is not to be sought in the same fields as are the proofs for scientific certainties. With such a line of argument one can't do much. The line of argument which is available for experiences in the anthroposophic world view lies in the complete intimate transformation as experienced within the soul life. Long before we can happily penetrate to perceiving the spiritual worlds through the application of spiritual scientific or occult methods, we can build in ourselves a presentiment, a premonition out of the correctness, from deep legitimacy, that which is shared regarding Higher Worlds. Much of what we can, from an imagination regarding the way we can penetrate the Higher Worlds, how we can with our own spiritual sense organs perceive the Higher Worlds will be brought out in our next lecture: “What is self knowledge?” Today we want to reveal single observations about these Higher Worlds and cultivate the connection between these worlds and our physical world.

You all know by now through anthroposophical work that two other worlds exist beside our own; the so-called astral and devachanic worlds, called, as far as they are known in religion, as the heavenly world, the actual spiritual world. You are familiar with these worlds as areas through which we journey between death and a new birth. You know that after the astral world has been passed through during Kamaloka, you enter the pure spiritual world, Devachan, where you are called again to a new birth, in order to descend again after a certain time into a new earthly life, a life in the physical world.

It's not enough to only imagine the astral and devachanic worlds as distinct areas through which we move between death and a new birth, because these worlds continuously surround us. We live continuously not only in the physical world but also in the astral or soul-world, surrounding us with their beings and truth. We can describe this astral or soul-world as penetrating our physical world just like a sponge is penetrated by water. The only difference between both these worlds as opposed to our physical world is this: our physical world is perceived through the tools of our body, and for us this perception of the Higher Worlds is withdrawn because we haven't developed the organs needed for their perception. As real as they are within our world, just so real their activities play continuously into our world. Much taking place in the physical world can be more easily explained if the spiritual astral and devachanic worlds, behind it all, are made aware regarding beings and realities existing in our surroundings, beings which can't be grasped and understood by our senses. The astral world contains not only realities which play supersensibly into our environment; it contains beings who, if we dare say so, are incorporated in the substance of their world just as we, humans, self conscious beings, are here in the physical world bound to flesh and blood. The distinction of these described beings is namely that they don't possess solid physical bodies which may be seen by our physical eyes. Their major mass is the astral body.

Now we need to immediately make a note when we speak about these beings who have as their lowest member of their organism the astral body, that they are perceptible to whoever has opened their clairvoyant awareness and can also see these beings. They are differentiated substantially from those existing beings on our physical plane which belong to the various kingdoms of nature. We are surrounded by minerals, plants, animals and people. When we determine a single characteristic of all these different kingdoms we conclude that their form is firm, established. When you see a person today, you may well recognize them tomorrow, or even after a year, because their outer form has remained constant. Similarly with the animal, the plant or mineral. This is not at all the situation with the beings which are incorporated on the astral plane. These possess a continuously changing form, a shape which in many of them, from one moment to the next become another, because the form which can be observed in the astral plane is the exact expression of the inner soul experiences and soul activity of these beings.

Just think about yourself, how you may observe your soul in the morning just after you have received a cheerful letter and how the joyful message filled your soul with delight and pleasure and how this feeling lived in the soul. Then think how your soul will express itself in the direct contrary situation, how different the image will be when you receive news of a death in the afternoon, or you are shaken in rage and fear. Consider how your outer expression changes each time as a result of what took place in the soul, then you have an image of what happens on the astral plane. Hence the bewildering scurrying and continuously changing forms of the astral beings. Thus you have to imagine that the clairvoyant awareness, when it is turned away from perceiving the physical plane, is surrounded by the astral image world. Naturally everything that enfolds there can't be depicted; only single sketches can be given.

Life on the astral plane is far richer than on the physical plane. You can imagine light images in the astral world which don't cling to outer objects but flash with a definite form, one moment either light or less luminous, less radiant or misty, changing in every blink of the eye. They are nothing other than expressions for souls, we may call them, which live there on the astral plane. However these light bodies show not mere light and different colour images but also all other physically similar sense impressions, only these are not perceived with outer but with inner spiritual organs of the soul.

There exists a differentiation between the observation of a bright body on the astral plane and a colour or a bright body on the physical plane. In contrast, what meets light there, has an awareness—not a feeling, as if it is beyond that- yet has a sense: “You live in this”.—This is really quite difficult to imagine, because you have to think, that the very moment this clairvoyant awareness rises up in you, you feel something different, as if not only is the space filled with astral truths and beings, but it feels as if it is all growing larger and larger. It stretches your awareness with “This is me”—right over your skin. That is the essential part of clairvoyant consciousness. It senses, as when it spreads itself out into that which is perceived, creeping in, so that it lives within these light bodies and experiences warmth and cold, sensing taste as well.

All these experiences which you know firstly from the sense world and which are integrated in the outer limited body, stream and flash through the realm—and then something else appears. Here in the physical world we have naturally the feeling that all that belongs to a physical being is actually spatially linked to that being. It comes as an extraordinary surprise when some physical being walks into a space and behind him follows another and someone insists the two belong together although no link exists between them. You would insist they are separate beings, because we never consider spatially separate beings as a single being. We would take them as separate beings; because we will never consider separate bodies in the physical world as one being. In the astral world it is throughout applicable that things which in no way connect spatially, comprise one being, and so you have no tool which can help you pin-point a single being when you are within, and has the consciousness, that two quite outstanding members belong to a single being. Confusing it is also, that clairvoyant consciousness is not always the same and that which belong together, can't always be glimpsed again. Yes, it can go further: you could see a single being, which appears to you as a row of separate spheres, here a shining sphere, and far from this a second, then a third, fourth and so on. In conclusion, the astral place basically looks different from here.

Yet there is something which is linked to us and this connection expresses simultaneously all the similarities of the astral world working in us; this is our own astral body. This is the third member of our being, which you experience as having a definite self-contained shape. During our life between birth and death we can definitely see the essential astral body resembling a kind of oval cloud, within which the physical and astral bodies are embedded. A kind of egg shape is this body, the outer boundary existing in a constant surging movement, so that some kind of regularity of form is out of the question. The astral body only appears in a kind of firm, steady form as long as it is contained within the physical body. As long as this is the case, it retains this form. Already at night, when the astral body withdraws, it begins to adapt itself to the soul body. Then you can see how a human being, who lives with evil feelings during the day, appear in quite another form compared with someone who has lived with noble feelings during the day. In general the form of the astral body is steady at night, while the forces of the physical and etheric bodies work very strongly through the night, and the astral body retains its form essentially, but only essentially.

However, when we die, after the end of our physical life, we relinquish our physical body, as well as push away that part of our etheric body which is to be given up, then the astral body takes on a variable form right through the Kamaloka time. This body completely matches its form and image to the soul life, hence a person who has lost a body which had been filled with hateful feelings shows a withered form while a person who died with beautiful feelings, show a sympathetic form as an astral body. It can go so far that people who are totally taken with sensory desires and who can't lift themselves into an exchange towards noble feelings and impulses, after their death for a while really take on the forms of all kinds of grotesque animals—not those living on the physical plane but those who only remind us of animals.

Whoever has had experiences on the astral plane and is able to follow which forms are offered to the clairvoyant consciousness, knows which image speaks nobly and which doesn't contain noble content; they can experience and observe everything from these images. I have already mentioned that these human astral bodies cannot appear in absolute definite inner and outer shape, only within certain boundaries is this the case. Also already in physical life, actually in every part of the body which appear after falling asleep, the astral body matches that which the soul experiences. From here certain images and forms taken up by the astral body can be seen according to what is happening to a person and what he or she is living through.

With regard to some things which the soul may experience, I would like to indicate something to you, namely, how the astral body may be observed. Take for example a person who is a gossip, inquisitive or tend towards temper outbursts or, let's say, similar bad habits. These bad habits will express themselves in a distinct manner through the astral body. If someone is for instance plagued by fury, annoyance and especially if the person is irascible, then we see tuberous formations, thickenings expressed in the astral body. The person becomes polluted. From these thickenings exude evil looking snakelike protuberances, distinguishable in colouring and other substances. Particularly with irascible people this can easily be seen. When a person is talkative, tend to gossip, it appears in the astral body as all kinds of thickenings, which can be characterized by saying the thickenings will exercise pressure in all directions in the astral body. When a person is inquisitive then it shows in the astral body in such a way that folds are created, sections become slack and hang as it were against one another in parts; it shows a general slackness, it seems as if these astral bodies in a certain way participate in the general characteristics of the astral world, matching in form its inner soul experiences.

We discover, on researching the astral world in general, certain beings of which we, who only know the physical, actually can have no inkling. In the physical world these beings appear in quite a different way, than what we have perceived about them before. For example, we find quite extraordinary beings in the group souls of animals. The human being, as he approaches us here, has an individual soul which comes to meet us—a soul for each person, an Ego-Being. The animals don't have the same kind of I or Ego-Being. They have similarly shaped forms, all lions, tigers, all tortoises, which we call a mutual group soul. Just imagine that on the astral plane there is a single I-Being, simultaneously living in the physical animal. All the animals are imbedded in the I-Being, who has a definite personality on the astral plane, and there we can meet this personality, this group soul, just like meeting a person.

An example: take a migration of birds when they all start to move from the northern hemisphere towards the equator. Whoever doesn't consider this extraordinary wise migration superficially, will be amazed how many have what we note as intelligence in such a flight of birds. Various birds come from different regions, one from this, one from another: the danger exists that they land where they need to land. Ordinary physical awareness only sees the massive swarms. The clairvoyant consciousness however, sees the group soul, the action of the personalities who lead and link what is happening. Actually these are such astral personalities who direct and lead. These group souls are the ones we meet as inhabitants of the astral world. The diversity which rules in the group souls of the astral plane, this variegation is endlessly larger. Just to mention aside, the astral plane has space for everything, because there beings interpenetrate; because the law of the impenetrable is only valid on the physical plane. However, there we feel influences, good or bad, when we are penetrated and experience this in our inner life. They could thus go through one another; they can exist in one and the same place. There the law of interpenetration rules.

However, this is only a part of the astral inhabitants, surely one in which we can only fully, in the right sense, understand when we come to grips with it completely. Don't believe that someone already has a concept of a group soul with some or other animal form, how, shall we say, it is observable already in the way it is embedded in the astral world and how this group soul is led into his consciousness. This is not enough. Right here we are reproached vividly by that which is spatially separated but belongs together, so that we, for every animal group soul filled with wisdom and leading the whole, arrive at a counter image, a terrible counter image. Within this exists the animality to which we refer in the astral world, and find, on descending into that part of the astral world where ugliness and adversity rule, where every animal group has a light-form and an ugly form, that which had at one time been separated from the light-form of evil and ugliness, which had been at one time within them, part of them. From this you can see how the old pictures and artworks sprung from a higher knowledge. Today we recognise only that which lives as an individuality. Hence if we want to invoke something higher today, we can only grasp at fantasy. This was not always the case. In the past, most of mankind who worked artistically, had a clairvoyant consciousness or still a remnant of clairvoyance, and they depicted what they actually found in Higher Worlds. Thus they depicted what was known to them in Michael and the Dragon or Saint Georg with the Dragon in a wonderful representation of relationships which the clairvoyant finds as animal forms on the astral plane. The wise lifted them to a higher form, to tower far above the wisdom of people. However the wisdom is acquired through what has been thrown out of the astrality of such beings' ugly side. The ugly side you find in the adverse dragon. When the clairvoyant looks on the living form he sees everything as lively form organised by higher beings who are wise but do not know love. However these expressions of the light soul form can only be acquired through treading the evil qualities underfoot which are in the being's form. Human beings have acquired their current nature through good and bad still being mixed in their karma, while in the animal the moral distinctions of good and bad can't be applied. The concept of light filled being is with an upwards reach while connecting and lifting that which had fallen and had been conquered. Ancient art was mostly produced with meaningful symbols and created through nothing less than with a clairvoyant conscious consideration. They will only be comprehended once we have understood the astral archetypal images.

The plant world also presents something curious on the astral plane. When a clairvoyant considers a plant and how its roots worm their way in the earth and leaves and flower appear, he perceives the plant possessing a physical and ether body. The animal has the astral body in addition. Now the question may surface: do the plants not have any form of an astral body? It would be wrong to hope for this; there is nothing within the plant as there is within the animal. When the plant is looked at with clairvoyant consciousness, the upper part, where the flowers develop, appear as if dipped in an astral cloud, a bright cloud surrounding and wrapping this part of the plant where it blossoms and bears fruit. Thus astrality gradually sinks down over the plant and wraps part of it. The astral body of the plant is embedded in this astrality. What is peculiar is that when the spread of plants cover the earth, it is found that the astral bodies of the plants merge their boundaries and envelop the earth as if by a physical air of plant-astrality. If the plants only had an ether body they would only develop leaves and no flowers because the principle of the ether body is repetition. When a repetition is completed and a conclusion needs to be created, then an astral body must join in.

Likewise the human body may be considered—how the etheric and the astral co-operate. Contemplate how the vertebrae of the spine follow successively. Vertebra upon vertebra they are divided. As long as this happens it is mainly the etheric principle working. At the top, where the bony skull capsule appears, here the astral has the upper hand. The principle of repetition is the principle of the etheric, and the principle of conclusion is that of the astral. The plant would not come to a conclusion in its flower if it's etheric isn't sunk into the astral nature of the plant.

On researching the plant, how it grows through summer and bears fruit in autumn to eventually start wilting, or when the flower starts dying away, the astral withdraws upward from the plant. This is particularly beautiful to observe. While our physical consciousness may experience joy in the blossoms during spring, covering meadow after meadow, yet another joy can be experienced by the clairvoyant. In comparison, when the annual plants die down in autumn, it glows and flashes above it beings, the astral beings withdrawing from the plants, beings which had cared for the plants during summer. Here lies another fact which we discover in poetic images, which are incomprehensible when we can't research this with clairvoyant consciousness. Here we connect to the intimate fields of the astral consciousness. With folk in past times, where clairvoyants with such intimate knowledge were around, these insights existed in autumn. We find in the clairvoyant Indian folk art representations of wonderful phenomena, of a butterfly or a bird flying out of the flower's calyx. Against such an example we see how something of it arises in their art, from a basis of the clairvoyant consciousness since way back; either clairvoyant consciousness of the artist works into it, or inspiration from tradition.

An astral body thus also exists in the plant. An animal has a physical, ether and astral body. The Ego of the animal we find in the group soul. The astral body of the plant we noticed in the beings withdrawing from the wilting plant. Has the plant an Ego? Yes, the same exists for the plants as we called a Group Soul in the animal, only here the extraordinary exists, that the Plant-Ego directs itself towards a single place on earth, namely the centre of the earth. It is as if the earth is being radiated from all sides by the Group Ego of the plant, and therefore the plants grow towards the earth. This Ego however we can't see on the astral plane—here we find the animal group soul. Here we also find every double-being, as we see in the symbol of Michael and the Dragon. We also find what has been depicted, but the plant-Ego will be sought in vain on the astral plane. The actual plant soul, the plant-Ego is only found in the higher, the actual spiritual world, in the greatest, under layers of Devachan, in Rupa-Devachan. Here the plant soul and plant-Ego mingle, their actual centres so intermingled, that they unite in the centre of the earth. Now the question may arise: Surely the physical plane, the astral plane and devachanic plane are within one another, so while the clairvoyant is situated where physical man finds himself, how is one distinguishable from the other? The physical plane is there as long as we can see, hear and taste it and when we develop an inner capability, we can distinguish between the physical and astral worlds. There were such beings entering into our awareness who may not be observable through physical organs, here the astral plane starts. Where then begins the devachanic plane? Now there is the possibility to provide boundaries between the astral and devachanic plane, although they blur into one another; through this is created an outer and inner possibility to recognise the astral from the devachanic plane. The outer possibility is as follows: when you develop a clairvoyant consciousness, you should experience moments in life when you leave the physical worlds to a certain extent. This is already a higher degree of human development when you can so to say simultaneously glance at the physical, then penetrate the astral world, as for example the physical of the animal and the astral body of the animal. This can only be accomplished through specific levels of development, after we have gone through something else, namely that you don't see the physical world when you see the astral world.

This participation of the human being in the development of the astral world from the beginning shows in the following. The human being exists in a certain place. He hears all kinds of things, looks at objects, touches and tastes them. When the human being gradually lives into the astral world, these sensory perceptions start to withdraw further and further away, similar to a sound which moves ever further away until it disappears. Just so it is with sensory perceptions: the human being gradually becomes that which is being touched, not through direct experience but, he or she has a distinct feeling of their body being penetrated as the sensory object senses, stirs into the human body. The same is valid for the world of colour, the world of light: the human being expands, he or she lives into this light world. In this manner the sensory world withdraws from the human being and is replaced by appearances, as mentioned earlier. Next, what has to be observed is what the human being really must go through in the astral world, so to speak the entire perception of tone, of hearing, the world of sound which dissolves tone. This is not available in the astral world for quite a while. The human being must so to speak go through this abyss and live in a soundless world. However it is excellent that through this is found an abundance of impressions in him- or herself, namely a differentiated world of images. When the human being ascends in his development, he or she will meet something which appears as quite new, a spiritual counter-image linked to the world of tone. What is first learnt within the astral world as something new and appears as spiritual hearing. This is of course difficult to describe.

Take for example the following: you see a shining form. Another one approaches, comes closer and merges with it. A third comes, crosses the way and so on. Now, what is appearing before you is not merely seen clairvoyantly, but it evokes in your soul the most diverse feelings. Thus it can happen that these inner feelings tend towards an inclination, then towards reluctance, the most varied feelings appear when you penetrate the being, when you approach or withdraw from them. Thus the acquiring-clairvoyance soul lives into the astral plane cooperation and hence becomes glowing and penetrated by existing or contradictory feelings of a pure spiritual nature. Here spiritual music can be perceived. The moment this happens, you are already in the region of Devachan. Thus Devachan begins its presence from outside, where soundlessness begins to cease, partly a horrific toneless experience on the astral plane. The human being has no idea what it means to live in an endless toneless place where no sound exists but also shows that there is none to be found within. The feeling of hardship in the physical world is trivial compared to feelings in the soul when this impossibility is experienced, that something could sound out of this endless spread out realm. The possibility arises that through cooperation with the Beings and observing their harmony and disharmony, a world of tone is begun. That is Devachan, seen externally through its forms.

The transition from the astral world to Devachan as experienced through the soul can be illustrated in another way. In the physical world we are accompanied in our soul by our character type. One person may pass a picture and experience nothing while another will feel a world filled with bliss as he stands before the image. People pass one another, the one says of the other he could be the right one and sees soul peculiarities that they belong to one another, and experience an enlightening joy. Very soon no more of this will exist in the Higher Worlds. Here the human being demands with inner urgency the experiences of the world of feeling thus not enabling the passing by to have a somewhat cold or sober experience of the astral and devachanic planes, but rather particular experiences demanding dedication, a full penetration, while other experiences are repelled.

Thus if you are not thoroughly prepared it can become dangerous because you experience continuous changes under inwardly disturbing circumstances, inward tearing and as a result undermining your health. Step by step you will realize in which world you find yourself. While you are in the astral world, you will recognise principally two nuances of feeling expressed in a varied manner. The one, which appears most strongly when you enter the astral world directly after death, is the one we call Kamaloka. Here you have, so to speak, not yet freed your feelings from life in the physical and you desire and long for it. Take for example a gourmet, who longs for delicious food. After death and his transition to the astral world he still has desires but no longer the physical organs to satisfy them. Thus he greedily craves for that which only the tongue and palate can provide. As a result he experiences in his soul the most painful sensation, the feeling of deprivation. Deprivation is one of the principal sensations we have when we are in the astral world. Here you become aware, when you have developed your consciousness, not only particular painful feelings of deprivation like in those who have died, but also the feeling of a search for something. The feeling of deprivation will also overtake the clairvoyant when there is no other to balance out the weight. If you enter unprepared or not prepared in the right way for the astral plane, then this applies. Neither rest nor peace will the soul have; anxiety and restlessness shoves the soul from one side to another. To avoid this there is only one possibility: the formation of the opposing nuance of feeling, and in all secret schools this nuance is unanimous: it is renunciation. To prepare yourself for the right existence in the astral world, you need to know that everything, in some way or another, refers to renunciation. When you abstain from the slightest insignificance here, it is totally valid that you are, so to speak, laying a stepping stone in the astral world. The calm observation of the astral world is achieved through your own preparation regarding the feeling world of abstinence. While the feeling of the desire turns the astral world into one of pain and reluctance, the opposite happens through working with renunciation, because the images and beings of the astral world become ever clearer and more distinct to observation and thus you no longer sway between desire and denial. These are the nuances of feelings in the astral plane as long as the foregoing is active in the soul, while you are in the astral plane.

Now new experiences of feeling enter the soul. First of all, at the boundary where the soul crosses into the devachanic world, feelings of bliss and happiness ensue. Even when you enter Devachan in an unworthy manner, through some or other spell or through black magic before death allows this entry, you will soon swim in a sea of happiness in some higher or lower degree. Now you may say it is peculiar that even an unworthy entry of Devachan spoils you with blessedness. Indeed this is the case, but it has certain disadvantages, is the answer. This feeling of outer and inner blissfulness is in the devachanic planes inseparable from something else, namely the loss of self, the power of self consciousness, the inner Ego-force. We will dissolve into it if no other feeling nuance comes to the fore. This feeling is called, in occult science, the feeling of self sacrificing dedication, called the ability to sacrifice.

In the astral plane we find deprivation and renunciation; on the devachanic plane, blessedness and self-sacrifice. It is strange, yet true, that when someone on the devachanic plane doesn't have the feeling:—‘you must dedicate yourself to what surrounds you’—but only wants to enjoy the bliss with the Ego, then he or she will be dissolved by devachanic beings. When he or she however allows the penetrating feeling: ‘I want to offer myself, I will not dissolve into what I've acquired,’—then he or she will be shielded in Devachan from dissolving, passing away. The noblest feeling of love, creative love, must be the second feeling nuance in Devachan. This is something which can be understood in the manner it works in Devachan between death and a new birth. Through the fact that a person coming out of Kamaloka, who lived with deprivation and thus shortened the duration of his sojourn through learning renunciation, upon arrival in Devachan, must immediately begin to work towards his next incarnation. Slowly he builds up the archetypes of his next earthly life. How much better would he create these while experiencing a feeling of blessedness, really entering this bliss, having learnt to add the self sacrificing dedication of his own being to that which surrounds him. In the degree to which he offers himself through his soul, to this degree is the archetype created for his future personality. Should he be unable to do this, then he would either totally pass away or need an enormous length of time until he returns again to an earthly existence. So we see, so to speak, how the soul is formed externally—through transitions from the dumb, radiant astral world into the sounding devachanic world—by finding the boundary; more importantly though is how one lives in this other world within one's soul. Thus we have some indications of the relationships in the Higher Worlds, which one enters through the observation of the ancient Greek words of wisdom: “Know thyself!” Much can still be added, however only a portion of it can be given which is characteristically valid of the Higher Worlds. So we gradually live into that and through the experience, we also start to recognise the working of it into the physical world and hence this world becomes ever more transparent.

Yesterday from a certain standpoint we endeavoured to go deeply into the present social movement. The fact brought to light by the subject of our observations was that, to have any understanding of a movement promoted by mankind, careful distinction must be made between what goes on superficially in ordinary consciousness in the soul, and what on the other hand is working in the depths of the soul in the subconscious regions. We became aware of the three impulses behind the modern proletariat movement—first, the so-called materialistic interpretation of history; then what the proletariat have learnt from their leaders, what they understand as the class struggle that is at the basis of all that happens historically; and then we gave our attention to the theory of surplus value which has worked so incisively on the proletarian soul. These are the things at work today on the surface of their soul life. In its depths something very different is stirring and coming to life. Whereas the modern proletarian surrenders himself to illusion when he says that all that develops historically amply reflects purely economic processes, arising like smoke from the spiritual life, he in really yearning, with all present-day humanity, for definite spiritual knowledge of the world. But so far he is ignorant of this subconscious yearning of his soul for spiritual knowledge. What is going on in the subconscious depths of his life of soul and appears in a different guise on the surface, often just expresses itself in the most uncontrolled instincts.

Similarly, when the modern proletarian utters the word class-struggle, he does not realise that this is only an attempt to disguise what is filling the soul of modern mankind as a deep yearning, namely, the impulse towards freedom of thought. On its way from the subconscious to the conscious, the striving for freedom of thought changes into its opposite. This striving for freedom of thought is the real basis of the very intensive life in the element of authority, in sheer class-consciousness. And true socialism, which is the fundamental aim of our times, is expressed also in its opposite—in the striving to put all surplus value to egoistic uses.

Whoever does not understand this secret of the existing proletarian movement cannot today discover the underlying social impulses. Having had all this before our souls yesterday, we will now consider a few of its relevant truths.

A very different attitude to a world historic movement arises in those who look more deeply into what is happening, from the attitude of those who observe merely what is on the surface. The present social movement is now finding its most radical expression in Bolshevism, which is more a social method, having for its content all that has been absorbed into the will of the most advanced so-called socialism. The student of history as reality rather then theory, endeavours above all to understand how certain streams in the cosmic development of man reveal themselves in their most extreme form. For in an extreme form it is often easier to recognise what, though no less active, is frequently hidden in the less extreme. If we are rightly to understand the historic consequences of Bolshevism, the horrifying deeds of which are already historic fact, we shall, in some measure, have to observe the more recent life of history.

In answer to the question: Who are the Bolshevists?—various names would have to be given today. The names most often repeated are those of Lenin and Trotsky. I will, however, give you a third name which may Perhaps astonish you. But from a certain point of view I can do no less than call Johann Gottlieb Fichte a genuine Bolshevist. I have often spoken to you of him [ Note 01 ] and tried to present his life history from a rather more profound standpoint, and we have also called up before our souls some of his leading thoughts. It cannot be denied that Fichte was one of the most forceful thinkers of recent times and, in the truest sense of the word, an idealist. He stated his views on socialism in a little book entitled Der geschlossene Handelsstaat (The Enclosed Commercial State). If what he there presents as a kind of ideal picture of social conditions is studied in its reality, it can only be said that, if realised, this social ideal set forth in Fichte's book could lead to nothing but Bolshevism. Trotsky is writings sentence for sentence, almost word for word, as far a this can be the case in such widely different things, are reminiscent of Fichte's Der geschlossene Handelsstaat.

Now Fichte is, it is true, a Bolshevist long since dead. This is a reason however to go further into the matter. In Fichte we have, above all, a solitary thinker who reached great heights in in his philosophic ideas. He reflected upon the crying injustices of the social order of his time, and how they could be swept away to give place to juster social conditions. And out of his own innermost soul arose a picture of a communal order that aimed at organising human beings in much the same forceful way as Russian Bolshevism organises them, and as its followers will continue to do. I can imagine that many people today, concerned about the injustices arising within the social order, feel themselves captivated by the very simple conceptions developed by Fichte in his book. I need not dwell upon this; it is enough to think that you have here, described in the cultured language of a philosopher, what Bolshevism is doing. You will then have an idea of Der geschlossene Handelsstaat by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It is just these facts that can prove a justification of the threefold nature of the healthy social organism.

Now what is the aim of this threefold order? In public lectures I have often pointed out how this particular way of thinking socially differs from other ways. I have said that seeing what has partly come into being already, in one or another of the forms of States, seeing what those who are socialistically minded aim at realising, we have the feeling that what people think of already as medieval superstition is nevertheless deeply rooted in their souls. It is as if in the human soul there were a certain hankering after superstition, and when superstition is driven out on the one side, it turns to the other side. Thus, many things existing in social life, as well as the aims of socialistic thinkers, recall the scene in the second part of Goethe is Faust where Wagner is producing Homunculus. Homunculus is supposed to be put together mechanically, out of certain ingredients in accordance with dry intellectual principles. The Alchemists, looked upon as superstitious, considered that this could not be done thus simply, and set this artificial creation of a manikin, of Homunculus, in contrast to the forming of a true human organism. A true human organism cannot be put together out of just so many ingredients; the necessary conditions must be forthcoming in which he can to a certain extent produce himself. It is thought that in scientific spheres alchemistic superstitions have been overcome. But in the social sphere superstition continues to flourish. And it endeavours to sot up an artificial social order consisting in all manner of ingredients out of the human will.

This way of thinking is diametrically opposed to the fundamentals of Spiritual Science represented here. The way of thinking we represent, aims at getting rid of all social superstition, so that in a practical way we can answer the following question: What conditions must be set up, not to enable some cleverly designed, socialistic ideal to be put into practice, but so that human beings in mutual cooperation should bring about the necessary shaping of the social life

One finds, however, that in actual fact this social organism like the natural organism must consist of three relatively independent members. Just as the human head, the chief bearer of the sense-organs, by reason of these organs stands in a special relation to the external world and is centred in itself; just as, too, the rhythmic system, the lungs and the breathing, end then again the digestive system are centred in themselves, as these three work together in relative independence; so it is fundamentally necessary for the social organism to be threefold, its three members being relatively independent. There must work side-by-side the independent spiritual organism, the independent organism of the political state in its narrow sense, and the independent economic life. Each of these bodies should have its own legislation and government, arising out of its own conditions and its own forces. This seems to be abstract, but this threefold order is just the element in which man can be so fused that from the working together of all the members a healthy social organism can result. It cannot be just a question of thinking out what for the social organism is to take. Our thinking, indeed, is not so advanced in the social sphere that a structure can be given straightway to the social organism. One individual by himself could as little bring about such a structure as a man growing up alone on a desert island without any human society could, out of himself, learn to speak. Everything social arises through cooperation, but a cooperation harmoniously regulated on this threefold basis. It is only by keeping in mind the direction leading to a really practical structure, a really practical life, that we understand how a men like Johann Gottlieb Fichte came to think out a social system which, put into practice, would actually be Bolshevism.

For what kind of personality is Fichte? Fichte is a characteristic modern thinker. He cultivated in the most energetic way and in its purest form the thinking that was evolving, as we know, though not always on the same level. (Read up this in my Rätseln der Philosophie; Riddles of Philosophy). It is just in a personality like Fichte that one can see in what direction thinking goes when a man wishes to draw it entirely out of himself, out of his ego. And if one applies this thinking to the social structure there arises the picture given in Fichte's Der geschlossene Handelsstaat. Only with deep insight can it be understood how thinking like Fichte's is not suitable for finding the right social structure. Thinking drawn entirely from the impulse of the ego is not able to find the social structure of the ego, any more than the single man can invent speech. The social structure is far more readily found when men are brought together into such a relation that this structure can be created through their mutual intercourse and cooperation. We must make a halt, so to speak, before certain things relating to the social structure; we must dare to follow the way only so far as we are shown: This is the relation in which men must stand if the social organism is to be realised through their combined efforts—That is thinking in terms of reality and experience! Fichte's thinking is born out of the pure ego and is ultimately, though in a different form, Bolshevistic thinking. It is an anti-social thinking because it is born out of the ego alone; its form does not originate in human association. The community life of the proletariat has accepted this anti-social form on the authority of an individual leader who has become its guiding principle.

The question now arises: How is it that this life in common gives more just in the social sphere than does the inner life of the individual man? Here we must be clear whither the purest form of thinking, as arising in Fichte, actually leads. The ordinary man with no grounding in philosophy, accustomed to reading the newspaper or light literature, and having perhaps some knowledge of science as taught today in the universities—this man coming to Fichte's works cannot cope with them. He feels himself overcome by the thoughts which are so forceful and so abstract in their development. To most people they seem just a web of thoughts. The reason is that it is pure thinking, woven out of the content of the soul alone, apart from all concrete experience. Studying Fichte's Wissenschaftlehre (Theory of Knowledge) you follow it sentence by sentence in the heights of abstraction, often with no idea why, as these thoughts mean nothing to you, you should be concerned with them at all. You can read pages of this and simply experience the following: The ego is asserting itself. To begin with many pages are taken up with en analysis of this. Next we come to—the ego fixes the non-ego, which again takes up a number of pages. Thirdly, the ego establishes itself, its limits being the non-ego, and the non-ego being bounded by the ego.—So it goes on through the Wissenschaftlehre in which only these propositions with far-reaching deductions are set forth. You will say: I am not interested in all this, for ultimately it is just empty abstraction.—Nevertheless when you consider Fichte's life and endeavours, as I described them to you here a little time ago, you come to respect both him and his striving after pure thinking. Whence comes then this remarkable contradiction It arises from the necessity for man to arrive at a certain period of his evolution at this pure thinking, this thinking filled with pure thought. For in more ancient days human thinking was filled only with pictures. Men like Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have thought in thoughts alone, pictureless thoughts. The Greeks could never have thought in this way, nor the Romans, nor could men have thought thus in the middle ages, for in spite of all their abstractions, the thinking of the Scholastics was still quite different. Why then has abstract thinking arisen in modern historical evolution? It is because men have to make great inner effort! And it partakes of this effort when, in Fichte's sense, for example, an endeavour is made to rise to the abstract, and there is a real struggle to attain to such abstraction. This is said by the ordinary, practical men to be of no use because all experience has been eliminated. And that is indeed so. Such abstractions are, however, necessary as a stage in progress. And as soon as there is sufficiently strong impulse within the human life of soul to develop to a stage beyond these abstractions, then the soul rises into the spiritual life. In modern mysticism there is no sound path that does not lead through vigorous thinking. That must first be achieved. After vigorous thinking, the next step is to actual experience of the spiritual. In historical evolution this naturally takes a long time, but it is the path on which mankind has to travel. And this longing holding sway in present-day mankind, to get beyond the abstract to the spiritual life, lies secretly at the basis of the force in the modern proletarian movement. The proletarian fights against the activity of spiritual forces in history, where he considers economic forces alone should prevail. He clings to the most blatant external perception, and regards what he thus perceives as the only historic development. The life of the spirit is for him a mere superstructure, an ideology, a reflection of external economic processes. He pictures it thus because when modern man directs his gaze within, he can no longer discover the old atavistic visions; he sees merely abstractions, abstract thoughts, in which he can find no reality. For that, he would have to take the next step which I have already described. Thus each seeks in the external world that reality for which he inwardly yearns. Being tied, since capitalism arose, to the economic life alone, the proletarian seeks there his reality.

And what will be the next obvious step? The next step will be to see that ultimately no real driving forces lie in the economic order. In exact contrast to this historical materialism, it is out of the inner life that, as historical impulse, the force will develop for pressing forward to the spiritual. What comes to appearance in historical materialism is only the caricature of the yearning in the deep recesses of man is soul.

In the same way the force of each man's individuality is contained in class-consciousness, and this individuality looks within itself for a content it has so far been unable to find. Still finding emptiness there it leans on the class as a whole in order, as man, to feel the strength of a common bond.

Thus, all the impulses holding good. on the surface of the social movement, secretly issue from the sources I have described. Therefore at the time Fichte was working, a time not then ripe for developing Spiritual Science, nothing more could appear than a thinking that awaited the approach of the spiritual world and had no power to serve external reality. For when thinking that really should be concerned with the spiritual world, is applied instead, powerfully, logically and fundamentally, to the external reality of the senses, it does not work upon this reality constructively but destructively. Now I have often spoken to you of the function of evil. I have told you what forces are really active in what we call the evil in man. I have said that, from a plane higher than that of the senses, from the spiritual plane that is nearest to ours, we can with the perception we then have see what is at work in evil. For the forces living in thieves, robbers, murderers, would not then be experienced in their unlawful aspect as here in the sense-world, but on the higher plane they would be metamorohosed, transformed, and thus fully within their rights. That is where evil belongs. Evil is misplaced good. Only because the ahrimanic powers force upon our world something belonging to a quite different world, does what we see as evil arise. And thus arises also destructive thinking, when social ideals are spun out of what is within man, and the pure thinking does not wait to be filled by the spiritual world.

This gives us a glimpse into the difference between all the prevalent ruling abstractions and what is striving for a really practical grasp of the social organism. For in what arises and is cultivated in man's community life, when rightly brought about , there does not live abstract thought. Abstract thought is not experienced when human beings are together. For then hidden, secret Imaginations are experienced. And only when these are actually realised do they give the appropriate form to the social organism. The progress to be made in modern Spiritual Science will be closely connected with the only impulses essential for a sound socialistic ordering of the world. And the deficiencies and defects, all that is unhealthy in the present social organism, consist in what can be the result of experience alone being, in the manner of Fichte, woven out of demands arising merely within man.

When we observe the direction of modern endeavour, to make the State more and more into a uniform State in which everything would be centralised, it becomes clear that this can lead to nothing but a shattering, a disturbance, of the social organism. And the reason for this lies far deeper than is thought by those who consider the modern proletarian movement to exist merely to be concerned with bread or wages. For even if a movement concerned with bread and wages should be necessary or were in actual practice today, what is important is not the endeavour to change the bread situation or its organisation, but the way in which this is striven for. And you arrive at that way through considerations such as today I have once again put forward. Think of the question of surplus value to which we came at the end of yesterday's lecture. Whoever has had experience of the proletarian movement knows what a deep effect this question has made, as it has been planted in the souls of proletarians by certain of the leaders.

Now upon what does this theory of surplus value rest? It rests actually upon what I was describing in yesterday's public lecture in Basle, namely, that there is something false in the relations between employer and employee, of which neither employer nor employee is conscious. The facts of the matter are masked. But although unconsciously, it is working on the soul out of the subconscious depths as fact, it is working as feeling.

Let us observe the main point more closely. The employee stands today in a quite definite relation to the employer, a relation that, as a human being, he finds unworthy, though in a although in a conscious description he might sometimes put it quite differently. In his soul he experiences it as unworthy because it leads to the sale to the employer of his labour power as a commodity. In the secret depths of his soul he feels that nothing human should be for sale. When a man sells his labour power the whole man is sold.

The question could be put differently, and in the usual socialistic way of thinking it is put thus: How is man to be refunded in the right way for his labour power? The socialistic ideals run mostly on the lines of making adequate refund for power expended on manual labour. But the facts are quite otherwise. A human study of folk-economy makes it clear that no form of human labour power can be exchanged for anything else—neither goods nor anything representing goods, such as money, are interchangeable with labour power. Even when transformed into reality it is no real process but only a thing of the imagination that the manual worker should give his work, and then, in exchange, receive money for what he expends in labour power. That is absolutely false and the true process is masked; something quite different happens. In the present social organism the worker brings his labour power to market and the employer, the contractor, buys it with wages. But it is not really thus. In the economic life there can only be exchange of one commodity with another, commodities, that is, in the widest sense; and in reality the whole of economic life consists in the exchange of commodities. What is a commodity, if we think of its reality? A piece of ground is not a commodity; coal, when under the earth is not a commodity. A commodity is the result of human activity alone, something transformed by human activity or something men has moved from one place to another. Under those two headings you find everything that can be brought into the concept ‘commodity’. The nature of a commodity has been the subject of much argument. A close study of economic connections generally shows that in reality only this definition will hold water.

Now in the modern social organism there has been an element of confusion in the circulation and interchange of commodities, which has driven the social organism to its present revolutionary convulsions. It is fantastic today to believe it possible not only to exchange commodities for commodities but also commodities for labour power, as in the matter of wages. It is fantastic too when we believe it possible to exchange commodities, or the money representing them, for what cannot be a commodity—ground, land, for example, that has not been changed by man. For land, as such, is not an object belonging to the economic process. Upon the land things of the economic process are attained by human activity, but land, as such, cannot be counted as belonging to this process. With regard to the significance of the land in the social organism, we see that one man or another has exclusive right to use and work this land. It is this right to land that has a real significance for the social organism. Land itself is not a commodity but commodities come from the land. And here enters the right the possessor has to the land. If you acquire a piece of land by sale, that is, by exchange, what you really acquire is a right, you exchange something for a right, such as is the case for example in buying a patent. There one gets a good idea of the process of fusion that has had such unfortunate results. The fusion of the purely political rights-State with the economic life. For this there can be no cure other than separation. The economic life must be left to the independent management of its own production, circulation, consumption of commodities, in a life of association in which production, consumption, and individual professional interests link men together and place them in proper relation. But in these associations and groups there would be only mutual economic activity, just as the human metabolic system is concerned only with the digestion. Digestion is then taken up from another aide by the independent system of lung and heart, which for its part is connected with the external world. So, too, must be established from a special source what is implanted in the economic life as rights. This means that everything relating to political conditions should have a relatively independent existence alongside the economic life. Those who are observant see what unreality lies in the relation between employer and employee, where their relation is represented as though labour power could really be refunded. Labour power is not immediately but only immediately funded, what appears being a certain apparent right which has become economically powerful, by which, not manifestly but fundamentally, the employer is able to drive the worker to the machine or into the factory. What is here exchanged is in reality not labour power for commodities or for the money representing them, but for something performed. Commodities produced by the worker are bartered for other commodities or money. For the commodities given him by the employer the worker barters the goods he produces. Here, clearly revealed, we have the unreality of goods apparently being bartered for labour power. This is what the modern proletarian secretly feels to be beneath his dignity as a man, and makes him say: You produce an amount of goods of which the employer gives you back only a certain proportion.

The correct relation between contractor or employer and the worker cannot be brought about in the sphere of economic processes, but only in the sphere of the political State as a relation of rights. That is what it really comes to. If on the one side man stands on the ground of economic life, on the other side on the ground of an independent life of rights, then the economic life will be determined by the two sides; on the one hand by the life of rights, on the other hand it will depend on the natural independent factors of human activity.

At Basle, in public lectures, I have pointed out that on a certain piece of ground in order to produce wheat, for example, more labour has to be expended than in other places where the rate of productivity is higher. That is the working of natural causes on which, on the one side, border on the economic life. On the other side, what should be the relation between employee and employee must flow from the life of rights into the economic life.

How people who take a superficial view of things will say; yes, but today that is already the case, for a contract is drawn up.—How does it help if a Trade Union decides about something that is recognisably a false relation? For the decision is made about the relative position between worker and employer in respect to labour power and its earnings. The right relation will come about only when the decision is not concerned about payment but about the way in which employer and employed share in the results produced. Then the worker will see—and more depends on this than is thought at present—that without the production of surplus value no subsistence will be forthcoming. But he must perceive how surplus value arises. He must not be implicated in a false relationship. Then the worker will see that without the creation of surplus value there can be no spiritual culture at all, and no rights State, for all this comes out of surplus value. When the social organism is healthy, however, all this comes into being as a result of its threefold ordering.

One can naturally speak not for merely hours but for weeks on end about all this, and this is what we have already nearly done. And of course we continually come upon fresh details that help to make the matter clearer; for every individual concrete question that will arise makes itself felt, the solution of which will be sought in practical life through the threefold social organism.

The following above all must be kept in mind. In the economic life commodities are exchanged; with this life is closely allied that of the political State that controls the labour power in man's common life, in his life of rights. So that whereas this economic life is, on the one hand, dependent upon natural elements, on the other hand it depends on what is settled by the State, for instance, the hours of work, work in relation to the individual man—to his strength, weakness, age, and so on. There can be no set maximum for working hours, or anything of that kind; in reality there can be merely a higher or lower limit. These are conditions flowing into the economic life from the side of the rights State, just as the natural elements come to meet it from the other side. Once the social organism is put on this healthy basis, the evil will disappear that arises from the connection of wages with the economic life. The fact that wages rise in good times and fall in a crisis will be changed into its opposite. The good and bad times will be influenced by what is paid for labour.

This can be seen especially clearly where ground-rent is concerned, which today largely depends upon the price of the goods produced on the land, upon market prices. The opposite would be healthier, namely, for the rights expressed in ground-rent on their part to influence market prices. Under the threefold order much will be the exact opposite of the existing conditions that have caused the present revolutionary upheavals. The whole of life will run a different course.

Now what is it that above all calls for our attention in the mutual relation of the economic life and the political State, in their narrower sense? Let us take as an example what is sometimes felt to be extremely unpleasant—the payment of taxes. In this connection we have simply to make ourselves clear that taxes must come out of surplus value; while in the common democratic political life we must always bear in mind the living conditions of the political organism, lust as we do those of the economic life when, in buying and selling, we perceive clearly through human needs the realities of the economic conditions. Here, too, the opposite will result to what exists today. I do not say that the legislation with regard to taxes should be altered; there is much today that does not allow of change, for then what is at fault might just be shifted to another quarter. So many things in social life will be regarded differently under the influence of the sound threefold organism. It will be seen that for the social life as such, for the life of men in the social organism, getting money has no significance. Man separates himself from the social organism in money-getting which is a matter of indifference to it. In the functioning of the social organism, what money man gathers in has no significance; he becomes a social being only when he gives out.

It is in his giving-out that a men begins to act in a social way. The point is—and here I am not thinking of indirect taxes but of direct taxes which are a quite different matter that it is in connection with paying-out that the rate of taxation should be settled. Although it could be worked out, naturally I cannot give details here, because for a lecture it would mean going too deeply into the science of economics. Nevertheless some indication of it can be given.

In a healthy economic life of the social organism, separate from the other members, it is clear that for geographical reasons, because of natural conditions, wheat in a certain territory, for instance, must be dearer to produce than elsewhere. And it can be shown that no adjustment will be created through mere Associations. But the matter can be properly adjusted by the Rights-State in such a case and this would arise out of its very nature by those who buy wheat more cheaply, namely, those who pay out less being more highly taxed than those who give out more when buying the wheat.

If the rights in the economic life are well regulated by the Rights-State, if the rights are not merely economic interests brought to realisation, if members of the agricultural Unions have no seat in Parliament but only those are there who consider rights as between man and man, then there will come about a satisfactory ordering of the economic life.

I have shown this in an abstract generalisation but it could be gone into in detail. The tax position is a question to be regulated between the economic life and that of rights. The regulation, however, between these two spheres, on the one hand, and on the other the cultural, spiritual life, is such that it can be established only on mutual trust and understanding. As the payment of taxes must be compulsory even in a healthy social organism, what on the other hand is given to the spiritual life can be a matter of free will alone; for the spiritual life must be built wholly upon the spirit of man and be completely emancipated from anything else. Then it will react on everything else in the deepest, most intensive way.

Such is the outline I can give you of the way in which the healthy social organism must function. This Threefold Order is not an invention, it is simply what can be observed if one recognises the underlying forces active today in human evolution. These forces can be brought into action in the next ten, twenty, thirty years if only various people exert their will in various directions. It is a question of the way. The forces have been observed and have been given a perceptible form. It is in this way we must live in regard to historical life. Freedom, in its quite different relations, will be as little disturbed by this as by the fact that one cannot grasp the moon, for example, however much we wish to do so. Freedom is realised according to the necessities lying in the natural as well as in the historic processes of evolution.

Notes:

1. See The Spirit of Fichte present in our Midst

Today's lecture will be an assortment of various topics I would like to add to what I have already said to you, including reference to our remedies. I would like to begin by saying that processes related to the mineral element that affect the human being can be interpreted similarly to the way done yesterday regarding the plant world. However, the insights we must gain here are more complicated, because as soon as we move on to the mineral world we are no longer dealing with definite, self-contained entities encountering each other, as was the case with plants and the human being; instead we are dealing with a realm in which one object passes directly into the other, so that it is difficult to make distinctions.

In the preparation of remedies—to this you must pay particular attention in our remedies—it is not merely a question of using some substance or other; the process in which the substance lives must be captured in another process. Thus when the effect of some remedy is known to you, it is often a matter of taking the effect you evoke on one side and damming it in from the other. You can see this clearly, for example, with the remedy we prepare from lead and treat in a certain way with honey (you will find this process described in detail elsewhere). You can see how the effect of lead must be held in check in one direction by the effect of the honey. Lead exerts a very strong influence on the formative process proceeding from the ego in the human being. We have spoken of the fact that in the head formation of the human being—or, said better, in the head formation proceeding from the human being—there lies a physical influence, but also an etheric imprint, an astral imprint, and an ego imprint. We said that the ego essentially imprints itself into the system of movement. The effect of lead works especially strongly on this imprint of the ego and takes place in conjunction with the astral imprint.

In the effect of lead we have a force of nature that is extraordinarily well-hidden, and for occult observation it is of exceptionally deep significance to experience this effect of lead. The effects of lead are extraordinarily important for the human being before he prepares to descend into physical life. This is when the effects of lead must be taken into account. Indeed, lead acts not only in the ways we know, but it has effects that are the polar opposite as well.

These polar effects radiate in from the cosmos, whereas those known to us radiate into the cosmos from the earth. This could be represented schematically like this. If this is the surface of the earth, the lead activities known to us radiate outward from the earth (see figure 1, arrows); the polar opposite effects stream in from all sides. They have no center from which they radiate, for they are not central forces but forces operating from the periphery (red). These peripheral forces are especially concerned with the formation of the soul-spiritual in the human being, and their domain must essentially be left when the human being prepares to descend into the earthly sphere. Hence in the earthly sphere lead is induced to unfold its opposite forces, and these are the poisonous ones. Everything connected spatially with the soul-spiritual in the human being, that is everything that can be spoken about in relation to space, is poison in the human organism.

This is a universal mystery to which one cannot pay too much attention. The meaning of the concept of poisoning must be sought here. We have to do with a strong stimulation, a powerful excitation of these ego-imprinting forces in human nature. Everything that arises in lead poisoning tends to destroy the form of the human being in so far as he is an ego. It dehumanizes him. In fact, all the symptoms of lead poisoning terminate in an individual gradually passing into nothingness corporeally. These symptoms include failure of the voice, stupor, and syncope, and attest to the fundamental destruction of the inborn formative force in the human being. Of course a person dies before this point is reached. The human formation is being destroyed from the upper human being, which is the polar opposite of the lower human being. What in greater quantities acts destructively in the upper human being acts in small quantities—in dilutions—constructively in the lower human being.

At this point I would like to interject something. I believe the never-ending conflict between homeopathy and allopathy will not be set right until one is able to enter into a study of man's constitution as given by spiritual science. On the one hand, the rich treasure of experience does not—or at least, should not—allow us to doubt the principle of homeopathy; on the other hand, people who are not in the habit of judging purely by experience but are swayed by all sorts of prejudices and opinions about the human organism cannot easily understand that what can make a person ill in larger doses in smaller doses makes him well. The homeopath is always more of a phenomenalist than the allopathic physician, who is always swayed in his therapeutic rationale by all sorts of prejudices. The facts are not fully revealed by this simpler statement, however. They are discovered only when we say: what makes a person ill when working in large quantities in the lower system will make him well when working in small quantities if its effect can proceed from the upper system and vice versa. This restatement of the homeopathic rule is the means to set right the conflict between homeopathy and allopathy.

Let us return now to the attempt of preparing a remedy from lead and honey. You can see how lead, greatly diluted and acting from below up, works against the destructive force acting on the human form. This is part of lead's effect. However, if one tries to build up this ego-shaping force, one transfers the activity of the ego into the physical organism and, while making the patient healthy bodily, one renders him psychically weak regarding everything that should work from below upward, that should work even organically. This weakening can go so far that one may, on the one hand, restore the individual to his human form, as it were, having been led by certain processes of disease to use the effect of lead because the formative processes are lacking. On the other hand, one may easily undermine the forces proceeding from the ego and astral body—especially those from the ego—when one causes the individual to develop his formative forces again. You could say that one brings about a cure for what the individual has not acquired, or has acquired only incompletely on entering life, but one weakens him regarding what he ought to do organically for himself during life. The effect of the honey when added to the remedy, however, opposes this weakening, that is, it strengthens the forces radiating from the ego. You see, in arriving at such a remedy, it is essentially a question of gaining insight into what is really taking place in the human being.

If we wish to understand the effects of the mineral element in the human being, however, we must look at the general effect of the mineral in the earth. It is necessary first to become acquainted with the significance of salts in the evolution of the earth. The significance of the salts in earthly evolution is that the earth actually produces them. In salt processes we find what the earth brings into being. In developing salts, the earth builds itself up. And when we turn from the salts to the acids—looking, for example, at the acid's element present in the watery earth regions, we have the earthly process corresponding to, though the polar opposite of, the inner digestive process in the human being, that is, the digestive process beyond the stomach.

We need to study all these processes taking place in earthly development, inasmuch as they represent a relation between acids and salts. When we consider the process that develops from bases through acids to salts, which can be observed outwardly today in chemistry, we see that, regarded in this way, the process leading from base to acid to salt coincides with the earth-forming process.

This process is essentially a negative electrical process. To put it more exactly: this process, expressed in its external, spatial aspect—i.e., as a process working its way out of the spiritual into the physical—can be represented schematically as follows. We have here an effect proceeding from the bases through the acids to the salts; it is indicated only in its direction here (see figure 2, red arrows), but it is actually a process of deposition expressed schematically. Now, when we express this process in reverse, passing from the salts through acids to bases, we must always remove these lines of deposition. They would act in a compressing way, and the opposite radiations appear, which radiate out (see figure 2 on right, arrows). Then we have to do with a positive electrical process. If you look at this sketch, I believe you will hardly doubt that it has been drawn by nature herself. Just look once at the anodes and cathodes and you will find this picture sketched by nature herself.

Now, if we approach the metallic process, that is, if we approach the metals themselves, we find in the metals that element by which the earth “unbecomes” (“ent-wird”) most, if I may use this expression, though it has long disappeared from the German language, despite the fact that it corresponds to reality: werden—entwerden—to become—to unbecome. With metals we find the tendency for the earth to disintegrate, to shatter in pieces, rather than the tendency to preserve or consolidate themselves in the earthly kingdom. They actually represent the “unbecoming” or passing away of the earth, and as a result they develop hidden radiating events, concealed even to external observation. You have this radiating effect everywhere. It is very important to observe this wherever we approach the metallic element with our interpretations of nature in an attempt to derive remedies.

It is especially interesting to study individual metals from this viewpoint. Such a study leads us to the viewpoint represented outwardly by this table of the mineral remedies we consider valuable. To arrive at these things it is necessary to gather everything yielded by such a correct interpretation of observations. They will be reliable, because we have prepared only those remedies that have their basis in a comprehensive interpretation of observations. Here we can elaborate on this interpretation, for I am really not concerned with simply repeating this list to you. Any additions that have to be made can be given in a written exposition. At some point this will have to be done. I am less concerned with repeating this list than with guiding your thoughts in the direction that could lead to such a list in the first place.

Let us now study the metals—I would prefer to say: the metallic nature—from this viewpoint. There we find what I have just described as a radiation, and it is present in the most varied forms. It can exist in the emanating form of radiation, destroying the earthly and passing into cosmic space. This is especially the case with the lead-activity. Through this lead-activity the human being has implanted into his organism those forces that would like to disperse him into the world. This dispersing into the world is an aspect of lead-activity, so that we can best regard this effect as a radiating one. Such radiating effects appear in a different way in other metals, for example, magnesium. This can be seen clearly and is the basis for the role magnesium plays in the teeth. Through the human organism this must be brought to the point of a metallic activity. This actually happens, but the radiation must then be able to metamorphose itself again. And when this radiation has metamorphosed, it becomes what I would like to call simply “direction.” The radiation is now only “direction,” what happens, however, is an oscillation, a pendular movement to and from this direction.

We must study such effects in the healthy and sick person. In the healthy person, these radiating effects are present in the radiations of the sense organs, as remnants, you could say, of the life before birth, of prenatal existence. These are always present. What radiates from the sense organs consists basically of after-effects of lead, in which lead itself is no longer present. These radiations occur throughout the entire organism wherever there is sense activity. Nerve activity, that is, the functional activity going on in the nerves, has its basis essentially on a weakening of the sense activity in this direction. This activity is therefore based on a weaker radiation. You can see from this why I said in my book, Riddles of the Soul (Von Seelenrätseln), that it is difficult to describe the actual nerve-sense activity, because I would first have had to introduce everything I have now presented to you.

In this oscillatory process, this pendular movement, in which the radiation is only considered in regard to its direction, we have to do with what functionally underlies all breathing in the human organism, in fact all rhythmic activity. Rhythmic activity is based on setting up such pendular movements, on setting up a movement more consolidated in itself than the movement of radiations. Among the metals or metallic nature, tin, for example, has such a movement. The beneficial effect of tin in fairly high potencies on everything that bears upon the rhythmic system is based on this fact.

This radiating, pendular movement can be modified further, however, and this third modification is of great significance. This third modification maintains its direction and also its pendular motion only latently. On the other hand, it consists of spheres continually forming and dissolving in the direction of the radiation. What has an effect on the metabolism in the human being depends on these forces, and among metals it is iron that develops especially these forces. Hence the iron in the blood works against the effect of metabolism as a third metamorphosis of the radiating activity.

When we are dealing with the first metamorphosis, the effect is especially on everything that organically concerns the ego; when dealing with the second metamorphosis, the effect is organically on everything that concerns the astral body; and with regard to the third metamorphosis, the effect is organically on everything related to the etheric body (see figure 3).

Now let us go further. What develops there as the continuous “radiation of spheres”—if I may call it so—must be continually received because it acts, in a sense, from the upper human being toward the lower. It only goes as far as the etheric. Now it must also be received by the physical by means of a force acting polarically, for something that envelops the spheres from outside must come to meet such a sphere-formation. The sphere must be taken hold of and enveloped (see figure 4).

It can be that the sphere-formation and this enveloping action are approximately balanced. This is naturally the case in a normal person, where everything that works downward from the upper human being is counterbalanced by the effect of the lower human being on the upper. This adjustment takes place especially in the damming-up activity of the heart. When this balance is disturbed, however, the metal that can bring equilibrium is gold, au rum. This restores the balance between this enveloping process and what lies in the middle. One will have to use gold when disturbances of the circulation and breathing occur that do not appear as results of something else; that is, when the causes are not to be found in the rest of the organism, gold will be applied. If, on the other hand, you notice that the causes proceed from a region other than the boundary between the lower and upper human being, you will be led to say, “There are not enough of these enveloping material processes coming from the individual to meet the more etheric-spiritual processes taking place here.” And if the activity you find here lies more toward the inside, in the digestive processes beyond the intestinal wall, you will assist this enveloping process by applying copper.

This leads us to the ways of using copper, which is included among our remedies. It is generally used in connection with a form of malnutrition manifesting outwardly in disturbances of the circulation that are consequences of the malnutrition. If we are dealing with circulatory disturbances that cannot be regarded as results of malnutrition, then we give gold; if circulatory disturbances are connected with malnutrition, we use copper.

Now, there must be counterprocesses also for the other processes of radiation, material counterprocesses to the etheric-spiritual processes. Consider the process that we must now regard as an inner process, which brings about this pendular movement, this oscillation. When it becomes abnormal, when it grows too strong, it can be observed in everything constituting the digestion, in working through the absorbed food by the intestines, and, coming more to the outside, all that is situated on this side. This therefore includes what occurs in sexuality, for example. The sexual processes are radiations from the human being that run their course in this way (see figure 3) like the staff of Mercury. This played a part in establishing the ancient so-called symbols. If what is active here is not to degenerate, it must be opposed by material, formative forces holding it in check and preventing this degeneration. These formative forces are essentially to be found in mercury. We are here pointing to a realm in which it is extremely important to bring together what I said in the last course with what a more inner study now teaches us. If you bring these two things together you will have the whole process before you. This is now something that plays entirely into the astral, arising through such pendular, radiating movements and through the corresponding counter-images. It now passes over entirely into the astral (see figure 3).

We may also be concerned with the actual radiation process that is present in the human organism in the most manifold ways. On the one hand, we find this process in everything that radiates out through the skin, in everything that has this directional radiation in it. We find this process in everything that causes urination, in everything that has an evacuating action in the human being. Just as in the gastrula stage of embryonic development the outside is drawn inward, so in this radiation we have to do with something that acts toward the outside through the skin but that also takes on the opposite direction and works in the processes causing urination and bowel evacuation. Usually we find the polar process expressing itself in an opposite direction, but here we have something that is, in a sense, reversed and yet similar. You see, one must not try to treat things in the world schematically. Errors always arise when we start from theories. It is impossible to start from a theory and not succumb to error. Thus if someone says to himself, “Polarity is at work in the world,” and then proceeds to construct a scheme or formula for polarity, saying that polarity must act in this or that way, he will be able to coordinate certain series of facts but he will have to abandon his formula in the face of other phenomena, where things are different. If only we could gain insight into this terrible tyranny exerted by theorizing in science!

Of course, one must be willing to make theories, for otherwise it would be impossible to coordinate any realm of phenomena. At the same time, however, one must be willing to drop one's theory in the right place and penetrate further to the point where this theory has no more value. Natural science must also pay heed to this. If one wishes to work on the theory of evolution in an outer sense, one must keep to the outer theory, modifying it where necessary. If one wishes to understand the human being from within, one must keep to what anthroposophy has to offer. But neither an anthroposophical nor an anthropological theory can be applied in any other way than by leaving it behind at the right point and passing into the other domain. With what we call anthroposophy, of course, we enter the soul-spiritual domain and return again to outer, sense-perceptible phenomena. You can observe how, in my early writings, I followed this path as a matter of course, and how in my more recent writings I am now trying to embrace the other domain as well. Only fools find devious contradictions in this and so construct their idiotic attacks. Then German journals, run by people who are incapable of judgment, publish idiotic attacks as a serious discussion on anthroposophy.

The point is that we must take into account this process that can be described as a radiation, as I have just done. Then we have to work against this, and we can do so by appealing to the opposite radiation, one active in silver, for example. In this connection we must realize that silver must be applied as an ointment if it is to have an effect on the kind of radiation that expresses itself through the skin; however, it must be injected in some form if it is to deal with the other activity that follows the direction of evacuation in some way. Here you have what I might call a “guideline” for the particular way in which to handle such matters. Basically, just as much depends on the way such things are handled as on the quality of the remedy.

This study has led us to the remedies, and I would like to conclude it with some comments in reply to questions that have been posed. If I have not been able to complete our program this time, I must ask you to excuse this due to the shortness of time. If you pay attention to my method of answering questions, however, I believe you will see from it that I have tried to shape the lectures of the last few days so as to lead to the answers to these questions. To demonstrate this, I will select a characteristic question that someone has posed. It was asked about the widespread popular notion that women during menstruation have a kind of withering effect on flowers nearby, particularly if they touch them. This notion has its basis in reality, though it has not been observed often enough and is therefore frequently overlooked. All you need to do is to take the view of the human being that we have developed here, and you will find the inner cause of this phenomenon. Just consider that what works in the flower and the formation of the blossom strives upward from the earth; in the human being, what corresponds to this blossoming force works from above downward. This is certainly a cosmological-organic polarity. You need only picture that this normal process striving upward in the blossoms of plants is the opposite of the human process working from above downward (see figure 5). There must be a balance, and this is present in the normal human being.

Now picture the forces from above downward intensified, which is what manifests during menstruation. Then you have an intensification of forces in the human being that work against the blossoming forces of plants. So you see how an understanding of the connection of these facts enables you, if you proceed in this way, to understand this remarkable relationship that finds expression in popular views surviving from ancient, instinctive perceptions.

Here is another question: “What can one do for a type of asthma that starts with cramp state and includes among its symptoms a surplus of blood below and a deficiency of blood above?” How do we treat this form of asthma? What is going on in such a case? In such a case, the nerve-sense process has slipped down into the breathing process. This is nothing other than an excessive activity within the breathing process, and clearly this excessive activity is due to the slipping down of the nerve-sense process. You must work against this polarically; you must approach from the other side. You must oppose what has entered from outer nature with forces that have the opposite direction. You call forth such forces when you introduce the acid process through the skin, that is, by giving carbonic acid baths or other acidic baths. These will be especially beneficial in asthmatic diseases of this type. If you keep in mind the other things I have spoken about, you will be led to use many other remedies as well.

Now, a question has been asked about milk injection in cases of excessive mucous discharge. This procedure has indeed caused tremendous astonishment and satisfaction in clinics. From what I have presented in these lectures about milk secretion you will readily see that in a large number of cases this treatment is connected with what I said. You need only recall what we said about the secretion of milk: that it is also a sense-process, but one that has slipped down deeper. I have already described the abnormalities that arise there. Now, directive forces remain, of course, in the secreted product. This is a process in which what has taken place within the organism continues. If you now inject a patient with milk, you can obviously work against a process that depends on fairly similar things. This is a case in which empirical chance has in fact worked in an extraordinarily ingenious way, for this treatment has only been discovered by chance, that is, by experimenting. It is generally of the greatest importance to look into the metamorphosis of a process. If a person cannot gain insight into how processes are metamorphosed, he will be unable to judge the simplest things correctly.

A question has surfaced about the causes of colds, of all those things designated by the somewhat diffuse concept of a “cold.” Here also a sense activity is displaced, pushed down into the breathing activity, but now in a different way from before. The secretions that arise are only reactions to this. This is something that takes place in the organism more toward the surface, something that continually takes place within the organism through the interaction of the nerve-sense activity and the metabolic activity. This is going on inside continually. You should not be surprised that these things are treated by the simplest methods, with poultices and the like, in which a kind of nerve-sense activity is inserted where otherwise it is not present. All poultices and so on push a nerve-sense activity into the organism, an activity that is half-conscious and otherwise would not be there.

I have also been asked how muscle forces are related to bone forces. Their relationship is such that the effects that have come to rest or are dying in bone forces are in full movement in muscle forces. Bones are simply transformed muscles, not in the genetic sense, but from the point of view of the idea. For this reason it is really absurd to look for a genetic connection between bones and muscles, or even between cartilage and bone. Many people have correctly drawn attention to the difficulty of finding a genetic connection here. Bunge, for instance, has pointed to this difficulty in finding a genetic connection between cartilage and bone, but he has not, of course, pointed to the source of this difficulty. It is due to the fact that there is a metamorphosis here. Just picture, however, the time when the whole muscle formation has not yet passed into the organic-visible sphere (see figure 6, red). This is also the case with cartilage formation, only much less so. Picture the time when the muscle and bone formation are still undifferentiated (see figure 6, light). When differentiation proceeds into this state of undifferentiation, these processes are subject at the same time to polarity, and it is naturally extraordinarily difficult to detect this metamorphosis. You can detect an outer, genetic metamorphosis only if, in the differentiation of one tissue from another, polarity does not have an essential effect during the transformation, but the original direction is maintained. When polarity immediately exerts influence on differentiation, quite another structure will naturally result, and this will no longer resemble the first.

We will address some of the other questions in the next lecture. There is however a question which I beg you to recognize as typical for questions which lead to a realm where confusion sets in strongly and where one ought to avoid drawing analogies. The question is whether one could construct something like a spectrum of taste, going from sweet through bitter, sour, chalky, to salty, and then also perhaps a spectrum of smell. There is so little objectivity regarding taste and smell, in fact, that it is especially useless to try to find analogies. Such things are of minor significance in practical application. On leaving the domain of the eye and ear and passing into the domain of taste and smell, we come into a totally different realm. In visual perceptions one has to do with revelations entirely from the etheric world, whereas in the processes of smell and taste one has to do with something involved very powerfully in material processes, in effects of substances, in metabolic processes. Thus in passing over to these sense activities, one can keep to the more robust processes that come to expression in metabolism.

Another question has been posed that deals with a significant principle: “Can a human being, without taking anything, produce out of himself bromine, morphine, iodine, quinine, arsenic, and other remedies?” This is a question that leads to very deep foundations of man's whole organization. One cannot produce the substances, but one can produce the processes. It can be said emphatically that one is, of course, quite unable to produce the substance ‘lead’ in oneself. However it is quite possible to produce the lead process in oneself from out of the etheric and then to let it radiate into the physical body. Here it may be asked whether it is not possible then to dilute a substance homeopathically to such a degree that by this process I try to work into the etheric body, calling forth this process of ‘self-metallization,’ of ‘self-radiation,’ that corresponds to a process of metallic radiation? In a certain sense this is absolutely possible, but it is a matter of advancing to the process of radiation that proceeds from the metallic element.

If you remain stuck in the allopathic way of thinking, you cannot approach these things, of course. You must think of them as follows: The radiating forces of magnesium are present in the process of tooth formation. These are forces that have a significance for the whole human organism, for the teeth are pushed out of the whole human being. You may use magnesium salt, any magnesium salt—magnesium sulphate, let us say—applying it in such a way that you put aside all allopathic approaches and prepare an especially strong dilution. Here we are led to the necessity of using quite high dilutions. You now have a twofold effect: you have first the effect of magnesium that basically stops where the teeth are. In the normal person the magnesium forces do not extend beyond this region. You must intensify them so that they extend their effect further, irradiating the whole human being. One can achieve this especially well by using the salt, magnesium sulphate, for this furthers the magnesium radiation even into the head forces. You allow it to radiate back from there. In fact, this process that proceeds from the etheric—remaining in the etheric by this homeopathizing process—is called forth where one has only the forces but not the substance, where one has proceeded from a totally different substance. You know, of course, that magnesium sulfate has been used empirically here, but one will only be able to use it rationally if this connection is borne in mind. It will then be noticed that one can depend on the sulfate only halfway; one must also depend on the magnesium for the other half, so that anyone who believes another sulfate would do as well will be making a mistake. This is the sort of thing that results if one proceeds from considerations that are supported only by the methods of the outer sense world and a combining intellect.

I would now like to point out briefly that all these matters that have been presented to you must be studied in the following way: In order to get behind the effects that must be observed, one must first select single features; then, however, one must see them again as a whole. With these lectures in particular, I am requiring you to exert yourselves to see things in their interrelationships. And now I would like to suggest how you might do this. I have been asked, for example, about exophthmalic goiter, Graves' disease. You may turn to what I explained in the first lecture on curative eurythmy, where I pointed out that the thyroid gland is a brain that has not attained completion. If you recall this and notice how the forces that act abnormally in Graves' disease tend toward the thyroid gland and, in doing so, produce all the other symptoms associated with Graves' disease, you will find how to work against it by measures that oppose this overly strong tendency of the human being to become a “head.” Here we are led to what is to occupy the next lecture. We are led to see that such conditions can really be opposed beneficially by significant movements, especially by significant movements associated with consonants. And you will achieve results in the initial stage of Graves' disease if you thoroughly apply what we have just spoken about in the curative eurythmy lecture. You see, in connecting all these things you must also look in that direction. We will not bring these studies to a close with these lectures but will continue with them another time. There is still one lecture remaining, however.

In these lectures I should like to bring forward some details about the connections existing between the spiritual life of nations and their destiny in history.

Natural Science is an especially important element in our civilization to-day because of the constitution of our present day souls, and I shall therefore select from the many different points of view from which the theme can be treated, the scientific element, and show that the entire historical development of nations is the deep basis for our present day inclination towards the scientific view. It will be necessary first to give an introduction and treat the theme itself on the basis of to-day's observations.

If we turn our attention to the historical development of nations—and for the moment we will remain within what is historic—we will see that by the side of external political and economic destinies, spiritual endow¬ments, acquisition and accomplishments are forced upon us. You know that to-day two modes of thought oppose each other strongly. I have pointed out these opposing tendencies of thought in an earlier lecture held here in Stuttgart. First there exists the view proceeding more from the Ideal, the supporters of which are of the opinion that a spiritual basis, merely in the form of an abstract idea, prevails in the evolution of a nation. Accord¬ing to this view external events are produced from out of such a spiritual basis. One can say that ideas prevail in history which express themselves from epoch to epoch, but usually one is not clear regarding the shadowy relation between the real spiritual basis and the sequence of ideas which are brought to expression in the course of history.

The other view, which at present exercises great sway, considers that all spiritual phenomena, including Morals, Rights, Science, Art, Religion, etc., are simply a result of material events, or rather, as a great portion of mankind would say to-day, of the economic life. It is thought, in this case, that certain dim forces which are not investi¬gated further, have brought about this or that economic system or method of co-operation in the time sequence of history ; and so, through purely material economic processes, what men regard as Ideas, Morals, Rights, etc., have arisen.

One can produce if desired convincing reasons for the one view as well as for the other. Both are capable of proof in the sense in which ' proofs' are often spoken of to-day. Whether a proof is regarded as decisive for the one or the other view depends on the way one is placed in the world with reference to one's ordinary interests or what one has experienced in life through mode of philosophic thought. Everything in this Wundt characterization is built up, is constructed. Some observations are made about the way in which modern uncivilized tribes show their way of thinking through their language. The hypothesis is continued and the primaeval population of the world is shown to have been like these primitive tribes which have remained in this earlier condition, only perhaps more decadent. From the ideas found here one can see how they have arisen. They are not gained from experience, but their originator who built them up uses the modern concepts of Causality, Cognition, Natural Causes, etc., and then he reflects how these would appear in more primitive conditions. Then he proceeds to carry over to primitive races what he has thus constructed.

There is but little possibility to-day for looking into the soul of another human being. There is absolutely nothing in Wundt's exposition of which one can say, one can recognize that it has arisen from insight into the soul conditions, even those of primitive races to-day. The renowned Wundt merely revolves about his own ideas which he simplifies and applies to the human creatures he is studying.

Because nothing correct exists to-day connecting primaeval races and the races with developed outlook upon the world, we see these things placed historically side by side without regard to the fact that it is, one might say, logically offensive to find highly developed views of the world supported by wonderful intuitions of the Hindus and Chinese placed immediately after such a description of primitive man as given by Wundt. What is so lacking to-day is this power of penetrating feelingly into other modes of thought. We go back with what we are accustomed to think in the 19th or 20th centuries to the 15th and 16th centuries and then to the middle ages. We do not feel allied to them and cannot understand them and so we say they were dark ages and that human civilization came to a certain pause. Then we go back to Greece and here one feels the necessity for close contact while retaining the same ideas one holds regarding the ordinary life of culture to-day. At best, men of fine feeling, like Hermann Grimm, speak differently. He has emphasized the fact that, with our modern ideas, we can only go as far back as the Romans. Generally speaking, we can understand them, we can grasp with modern ideas what transpires with the Romans. If we go back however to the Greeks we see that already Pericles, Alcibiades, even Socrates or Plato, Aeschylus or Sophocles are shadowy beside our modern understanding; there is something foreign about them, if we approach them with modern ideas. They speak to us as if from another world. They speak to us as if history itself starts with them as a fairy-tale world. Hermann Grimm has spoken in this way of facts. But one must add something if we proceed from another point of view, from the view existing in the world through the spirit of Natural Science (this was not the view of Hermann Grimm.) One cannot go back in thought even to the Romans so as to make them appear really objectively before us.

Grimm, who did not have an education in Natural Science but only received what existed as a continuation from the Roman epoch into modern times, is still able to enter into, the spirit of Roman times but not into the Greek. And if the concepts of Rights of the State which are copied from Rome were not known to us, if we possessed nothing of that singular feeling for Art which arose again in the Renaissance and into which Grimm entered deeply, but if instead of all this we lived in purely scientific ideas we should be as little at home in the Roman world or even in the medieval world as Grimm felt himself at home in the Greek world. This is one point that must be added, and the other is that Grimm paid no attention either to the World of the East. With his whole observation of the world he only traces back as far as the Greeks. Consequently he does not attain to what he would have attained according to his own suppositions if he had applied himself to, let us say, the Vedas, to Vedantic philosophy. He would then have said: If the Greeks meet us as shadows, those men whose special conditions have found expression in the Vedas, in Vedanta, meet us not even as shadows but as voices from out of a quite different world, a world which does not resemble ours even in its shadow-images. But this is only valid if we have so taken up the present mode of thought and condition of spirit that we are able to understand these as soul content.

Quite different is it if we adopt the methods which to-day are alone purposeful. Because of a certain entanglement in natural-scientific education, we are to-day imprisoned in a system of ideas which appear to be almost absolute. It is only through Spiritual science that one can to-day enter with one's feelings and one's life into past epochs of time. From the standpoint of Spiritual science the single epochs of human evolution appear absolutely different from each other; indeed, it is only in Spiritual Science that the possibility arises of entering into the spirit of what men in past epochs of historical development possessed as soul-constitution. How does this possibility arise? It is possible in the following way. I have often explained in lectures that Spiritual Science rests on a definite development of our soul powers. The cognition which we apply in Natural Science and in ordinary life and which in recent times we have carried over into History and into Social Science and even into the science of Religion, I have called in my books 'Objective Cognition.' This is namely what every human being who belongs to our modern civilized life is aware of. We observe the external world through the senses and combine sense impressions through the medium of the intellect. We thereby gain serviceable rules for life, a certain survey over life or over the laws of nature. In this consists what one calls objective cognition.

As characteristic of this we acquire a clear distinction between ourselves and the surrounding world. Ignoring for the moment the different theories of knowledge, the different psychological and physiological hypotheses, we know that we face sense-perception as an Ego. Through the intellect, in which we clearly know ourselves to be active, we gain a kind of synthesis of what is given through the senses. We thus distinguish active, intellectual activity from passive perception. We feel ourselves as an Ego in the environment which reveals itself through sense experience. In other words, man distinguishes himself as a thinking, feeling and willing being from the environment which imparts itself to him through sense revelation.

But I have continually pointed out that beyond this method of cognition other methods can be developed and I have shown in my books How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Occult Science how such methods are attained.

The first steps for such cognition—whether one calls it 'higher' or something else does not matter—is Imaginative Cognition. This is distinguished chiefly from objective cognition by its working, not with abstract ideas, but with pictures which are as pregnant and as evident as ordinarily perceived images but which are not transformed into abstract thoughts. In our rela-tion to these pictures, as I have often emphasized, we produce and dominate them just as one does mathematical ideas.

The method of raising oneself to Imaginative Cognition has a quite definite effect on the constitution of the soul. But this result—and I say this with emphasis—lasts only during the time given to Imaginative Cognition. For when the spiritual investigator finds himself once again in ordinary life he makes use of ordinary knowledge, or objective cognition, like anyone else. He is then in the same disposition of soul as another man who is not a spiritual investigator.

During spiritual investigation, within that condition of looking into the spiritual world, the investigator is actually in his imaginative world. But there imaginations are not dreams, they are experienced with as much presence of mind as are mathematical ideas.

With regard to this presence of mind the condition of soul is not changed during imaginative experiences, but with regard to ordinary working experience in the world it is changed. During imaginative experience the feeling is at first that of being one with all that runs its course in our own soul life in time apart from space. Space does not come into question here, only time. I have already explained how, with this entry into imaginative representations, our experiences since birth or since some definite time later stand before us as a tableau arranged in time, a time picture made perceptible. This is difficult for the ordinary intellect to conceive because we are dealing with a picture which is not spatial but must be thought of only in time in which, however, simultaneity is an inherent factor. In ordinary consciousness one has always to do with the single moment. From this one looks back into the past. During this moment the world is seen surrounding us in space and we see ourselves existing in a definite epoch in time distinct from this surrounding world.

In Imaginative Cognition this is different. Here there is no sense in saying: I am living in the definite moment now; for when I behold this picture of life I flow with my life, I am just as much in the time of 10 or 20 years ago as in the present. To a certain degree the Ego is absorbed in the state of 'becoming' which is here perceived. One is united with this perception in time to the state of 'becoming.' It is as if the Ego which usually is experienced in the present moment is spread out over the past. As you can imagine, a transformation of the whole soul life is thus involved during the moments of such experiences. We have to deal with a world of pictures in which we are living. We feel ourselves to a certain extent to be a picture among pictures.

Whoever understands this in the right frame of mind will no longer talk foolishly about the spiritual investigator being subject to some kind of suggestion or hypnosis; for he himself is absolutely clear about the picture and the character of his experience; clear that he is a picture among pictures. But just because of this he knows also that the pictures in his consciousness are just like other ordinary representations, they are copies of a reality; images which he does not yet perceive as reality but the pictures of which he beholds inwardly.

One is in the condition of suggestion or hypnosis only if one has pictures and believes them to be realities like the realities perceptible through the senses. As soon as we are clear regarding the character of our experiences in consciousness, then it is simply a question of an inner possession of the same faculties that one uses in mathematics.

The essential thing that I want especially to emphasize to-day is this merging into what is objective-temporal, into this 'becoming' so that one no longer clings to the 'Now' in time but feels alive in the stream of happenings.

The next stage obtained through exercises, which I have also described in the books named, is that of Inspiration. This is distinguished from the Imagination stage by the picture element almost vanishing. One must first have the pictures in order to obtain correct ideas of Spiritual Science, but one must also be able to extinguish them from consciousness, one must obliterate them arbitrarily. And then the possibility comes for a holding back of something and what is held back is actually a revelation from the spiritual world. In my books named above I speak of inspired ideas of the spiritual world. But even with such experiences one has not yet attained the spiritual world. At first one had pictures, now one has the revelation to a certain extent of the spiritual world, but one stands independent and facing it, recognizing its reality in that one stands outside it.

To-day I should like to consider especially the soul condition when, from out of one's own will, such Inspiration is evolved. The ordinary objective world is then renounced, one knows then what it means to have outside one's body a revelation of the spiritual world. In other words, we can now float in unison not only with time, but with all that is spiritually objective, external to man; we no longer feel the distinction between cosmic existence and Ego existence in the way pertaining to objective cognition, but we experience the Ego and in the Ego the Cosmos in its concrete variety and multiplicity. It is fundamentally the same, at this stage of knowledge whether I say 'I am in the world' or 'The world is in me.' Ordinary methods of expression cease to have validity. Prepositions such as 'in' or 'outside' can only be used when one connects them with another condition. One feels poured out in the whole world not only in the 'becoming' but in everything that appears anew in consciousness as spiritual. One no longer feels this 'outside you' and 'in you.' This is the soul condition which holds us during Inspiration. It is not as if the Ego were submerged, not as if the outpouring of the Ego were identical with a suppression of the Ego, but the Ego in all its activity feels that it has become one with the concrete, manifold varied world it now experiences.

We know ourselves apart from our ideas, our feelings and our will impulses in spite of the fact that these are one with ourselves. So also through Inspiration we feel the manifold nature of the world in spite of knowing that we are really merged together with this world.

In the present epoch of human evolution, these stages of cognition must be evoked by such energies as I have described in my books How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science. They have to be reached consciously. But we can distinguish what constitutes the feeling of the soul in these conditions from what we con-sciously evoke there as content. One can distinguish how one feels in the state of Imagination and Inspiration from what one gains there by working and from what one finally apprehends there.

I do not want to indicate this soul condition through abstract considerations; I would like to describe it concretely. You see, when Goethe learnt to know Herder he, together with Herder, buried himself deep in the work of Spinoza. Whoever knows anything of Herder's biography knows to what an enthusiastic degree Herder admired Spinoza. But if one reads again such a work by Herder as, for instance his 'God,' in which he records his feelings regarding Spinoza's works, one must realize that Herder speaks about Spinoza, from out of Spinoza, but quite differently from Spinoza the philosopher himself. In one point Herder is similar to Spinoza and that is in the soul condition from which he reads Spinoza. Herder's soul was very similar to the soul condition from which Spinoza's Ethics, for example, were written. This condition passed over to Herder and, in a certain way, passed over also to Goethe while he plunged into the study of Spinoza with Herder. But while Herder had a certain satisfaction in this soul condition, Goethe had none. Goethe felt deeply that passing over into the object, that merging together of the Ego into the outer world, so magnificently alluded-to by Spinoza when he speaks in absolute passionless contemplation, as if the Cosmic ALL itself spoke, as if he would forget himself and as if his words were merely the means through which the Cosmos itself were speaking. Goethe could experience what can thus be experienced in objectivity, and in this connexion he felt just as Herder felt: but he was not satisfied. He still felt a longing for something else and it seemed to him that in spite of the depth of feeling acquired, Spinoza's philosophy cannot by any means fill the whole of man's needs. Fundamentally, what Goethe felt in this way towards Spinoza is but another 'nuance' of his feeling towards the northern world. The civilization accessible at Weimar dissatisfied him, and, you know how he was driven south, to Italy through this feeling.

In Italy he at first saw only what the Italians created on the basis of Greek art, but something like a reconstruction of the Greek spirit and method in Art arose in his soul. One can feel deeply what is characteristic of Goethe at this period if one reads what he wrote to his Weimar friends while standing before those works of art which called up before his soul the creative art faculty of the Greeks. 'There is Necessity, there is God' (with reference to Herder's work' God' inspired by Spinoza). Goethe did not find in Spinoza that Necessity he wanted: he found it in what was presented to his soul during his Italian journey. Out of what fashioned itself then there arose in him the possibility of developing his own special outlook on Nature. One knows how he brought to expression his longing for an exposition of Nature in abstract, lyrical words in a 'Prose-Hymn,' before he travelled south. And one sees how what was poured out in abstract lyrical form in this prose hymn 'Nature' became in Italy concrete perception. How for example, the plant nature appeared before his soul as supersensible perceptible pictures and how he then discovered the 'primal plant archetype' among the manifold plant forms. This archetype is an ideal-real form which can only be seen spiritually, but in this spirit form it is real, lying at the base of all individual plants.

We can see how from now on the object of his search is to bring before his soul those archetypes for all nature which are one and many. We can see how his knowledge rests on the transforming pictures, from the single plant's leaf-sequence on to the blossom and the fruit. He wishes to hold fast in pictures what is in process of becoming. From Spinoza's ethics which he read with Herder there streamed something that seemed invisible, resounding from out of another world, a world in which man can immerse himself with his feelings if he attains a passionless contemplation. But with Spinoza this was not perceptible. The longing for vision lived in Goethe's soul and this longing was fulfilled in a certain way when he was stimulated by those pictures appearing like resurrected art creations of the Greeks. And it was also satisfied when he was able to conjure pictorially before his soul the primal archetypes of Nature.

What was it that Goethe thus experienced in sequences? It was that soul feeling—not soul content, not that which one can investigate—but the soul feeling which, on the one hand is Inspiration and on the other hand is Imagination. Neither Goethe nor Herder had the possibility in their time of looking into the spiritual world as can be done to-day through spiritual Science, but as a premonition of this spiritual science the feeling prevalent in them was the feeling which appears in special strength and intensity in Inspiration and Imagination. Herder and Goethe felt themselves in the mood of Inspiration while they read Spinoza and Goethe felt himself in the mood of Imagination when lie formulated an outlook on nature through the Italian works of Art. Out of this Inspiration mood of Spinoza Goethe experienced the longing for the Imaginative mood. What he discovered as the archetype of plant and animal, this was not yet real Imagination, for Goethe did not possess the method of acquiring real imagination. What he possessed was the mood for Imagination. He could kindle the mood in himself, not because lie strove towards real, pure imaginations freely created inwardly, but because he experienced in himself sensible supersensible pictures stimulated by what plants, animals and what the cloud world express. He could find himself in the mood which accompanies Imagination just as in reading Spinoza he found himself in the mood of Inspiration. He recognized the soul condition in which man experiences what he utters in such a way that he uses words so as to allow the secrets of the Cosmos to be uttered, to a certain extent, by the Cosmos itself.

Whoever has really felt the transition in the soul which can take place through reading Spinoza's Ethics as a mathematical treatise, becoming immersed in the ideas as mathematical ideas so as to rise to the Scientia Intuitiva which speaks in Spinoza as consciously as though the world were using him as its mouthpiece,—any one who has felt thus will realize what Goethe and Herder felt in Spinoza. How the one, Herder, was satisfied and how the other lived with longing more in a mood of Inspiration. And we can say that a certain soul mood proceeds from what spiritual scientific investigation offers to-day as methods to attain Imagination and Inspiration. We can follow historically how Goethe, without having Inspiration or Imagination, tends towards these moods.

Now if we go further we can regard Spinoza more exactly. When we study him historically (not as is often done to-day by the historians of philosophy) one is led from Spinoza to know who stimulated him. These were the adherents of Arabism, living in the South-west of Europe, adherents to the Arab-Semitic outlook on the world. He who understands such things will be able to experience once again that which flowed from the Kabbalah into the ideas of Spinoza. One is then led further back beyond Arabism to the East and one learns to know what comes forth in Spinoza is the conception of an ancient view of the world. In the old Eastern world what appears is the same as in Spinoza only not in intellectual form but as ancient Eastern inspiration. This inspiration was not acquired as ours is to-day, but it existed among certain oriental races as a natural gift and went through an especially profound development there.

If we go back to the Egypt from which Moses created his views, to the sources from whence the Greeks created, we find that what came to Egypt from the Asiatic east is developed to a very high degree. The Egyptians before the 8th pre-Christian century lived instinctively in their environment so that they felt themselves one with it, so that what they discerned of their environment they experienced in inner contemplation.

Now let us turn to the Imagination, to what Goethe longed for when he felt the mood of Inspiration. At first he recognized this to a certain degree in the art of Greece. He sensed in vision what Herder felt in concepts, in the world of perceptions as these appeared contemplatively with Spinoza. And what Goethe realized he deepened into a view of outer Nature so that later on he could utter, from out of his spirit, this deep saying:

'He to whom Nature reveals her manifest secret, yearns for Art, Nature's worthiest interpreter.'

In Art, Goethe saw through to the basis of Imagination, and by relying on evolution in Nature he sought that soul mood which a man enters if he become one with this evolution. This conquest of oneself, together with maintaining oneself in Imagination, was revealed to Goethe through the art of the Greeks, and he sought it not only in Art but as the basis for a view of Nature. And if we follow on to further consequences this special element which Goethe thus developed, we attain in a fully conscious manner Imaginative Perception.

If we follow this method of Goethe back to its origins, as we follow Spinoza's method, we are led to the Greeks, and from them further East. From the Greeks we come back to that view of the world which existed in the development of the so-called Chaldees, who again created from out of the Persian world and out of the entire Asiatic world. And just as we look back through the soul mood of Spinoza to ancient Egypt, so we look through the Goethe-Greek view of Art to that view of evolution which obtained in ancient Chaldea. One can follow, even into the details, this opposition of Chaldea and Egypt in Goethe and Spinoza.

We can thus go back in feeling to earlier epochs of time if we do not entangle ourselves in what alone is regarded to-day as absolutely correct and exact. If we attempt to press forward to other kinds of ideas, to Imagination, to Inspiration, if we know the moods of soul pertaining to Imagination and Inspiration, then we can go back in cognition to earlier epochs. Whoever reads Spinoza today merely with the intellect which has been so strongly developed with us, and as if everything previous were fundamentally but childish ideas, he cannot feel how in Spinoza there lived as a mood what was productive intuitively and creatively as the highest blossom in ancient Egyptian civilized life. He cannot feel how the soul mood of the ancient Chaldeans lived on in that which ensouled Goethe as he uttered the words: 'There is Necessity. There is God,' or 'He to whom Nature reveals her manifest secret yearns for Art, Nature's worthiest interpreter.' Whoever bases himself merely on the abstract thought content of to-day, does not come back to the earlier historical epochs. Therefore there results for him that abyss to which I pointed at the beginning of this lecture. Only he can come into ancient epochs of humanity who immerses himself in this basic mood as it appears in Spinoza and Goethe. No Egyptian Myth, least of all the Osiris-Isis Myth, can be really experienced in its import if one does not base oneself in this mood. People may be ever so clever and give ever so many allegorical, symbolical interpretations. This is not the point. It is a question of feeling with one's entire being what was felt in ancient times. One may think this or that about ancient ideas, one may choose clever or foolish symbols, it is not a question of choice but of experiencing a basic mood. Through this we can come to what lived in an earlier epoch. One cannot find what existed in ancient Chaldea by the present means of investigating, but only by being able really to immerse oneself in the mood of Imagination which actually appeared to a certain extent with the Chaldeans as a view of the world. They lived in a 'becoming.'

One understands what contrasts existed between the Chaldeans and Egyptians, for instance, as contemporary races. Trade relation went from Chaldea to Egypt and from Egypt to Chaldea. Their culture was so fashioned that they could write letters to each other. Everything consti-tuting external life stood in regulated interchange.

Their inner soul constitution was however quite different. An Imaginative element lived with the Chaldeans, an Inspirational one with the Egyptians. There was, with the Chaldeans, an external perception, such as reappeared, intensified, in Goethe. With the Egyptians, from what proceeded out of inner being, the soul, there was that which later on appeared at a higher stage from out of the inner being of Spinoza. One can follow this into minute details. I will give an instance and one will see how such details are to be understood on the basis of these general moods.

The Chaldeans had fundamentally a highly developed astronomy. They developed it by means of cleverly devised instruments, but above all by a quite definite kind of perception which was an instinctive Imagination. They came thereby to divide the course of time into Day and Night so that each was regarded as 12 hours long. But how did they divide the days and nights? They made the long summer day into 12 hours and they also made the short summer night into 12 hours. In winter they similarly divided the short day into 12 hours and the long night also into 12 hours, so that the winter hours by day were short and the summer day hours were long. Thus with the Chaldeans the hours in the different seasons had quite different lengths of time. This means that the Chaldeans so lived in the sense of 'becoming' that they carried this 'becoming' into Time. When they lived in the outer world in summer they could not let the hours run as they let them run in winter. In summer the course of time, the 'becoming' was drawn out. This "becoming was inwardly moveable, not rigid as it is with us. Time was elastic with them.

How was it with the Egyptians? The Egyptians reckoned 365 days to the year. Through this they were obliged to add supplementary days at definite times, but they could not decide to depart in any way from their 365 days to the year. In reality the year is longer than 365 days, but this length remained immoveable with them up to the third pre-Christian century, and thereby the perceptible outer world got beyond their control. Through this the Festivals changed. For instance, a festival of early autumn became a festival of late autumn, and so on. Thus the Egyptians so lived into the course of time that they had a conception of time which was not applicable to outer perception. Here we see an important contrast. The Chaldeans lived so intensely in the externally perceptible that they made time elastic. The Egyptians made time so rigid, experiencing what lives subjectively from within, that they could not even correct it through intercalary days in order to make the feasts of the year harmonize with the seasons; and so they let the external festivals fall on the wrong months while the whole external world thus became unsteady. They did not find themselves in the outer world, they remained in their own inner being. That is the mood of Inspiration which we must have in order to come to real cognition. The Egyptians had it as instinctive Inspiration.

As a man knowing the higher worlds one should be as mobile on the one hand as the Chaldeans and on the other hand be able to enter deeply to inner being as the Egyptians could. A rigid system of time was the basis of their whole life, even of their social and historical life. This contrast between the mood of naïve Inspiration and naïve Imagination thus comes to expression in History.

Goethe, as a complete being, re-experienced the experience of Spinoza as a continuation of Orientalism and Egypt. Goethe experienced his longing for a complete adaptation to the external world from out of his inner feeling where everything is invisible, from whence a man looks out into the world and does not recognize things because he judges them according to what the inner being offers, so that the things are beyond his control. While Goethe felt the mood of Egypt, he sought to experience in himself the mood of Chaldea, as that of the other pole. If a man re-create out of his own nature historical moods, one can then see the threads extend from a newer over to an earlier epoch, and one hopes to reunite the different epochs of time through this observation.

This now is essential, that one does not merely designate from documents what happened in this or that epoch, but that one learns as a complete human being to immerse oneself in these epochs, in what was felt and inwardly experienced by men and by races in the different epochs, in what mood of soul they existed. Their external fate was the result of this inner experience, of this peculiar soul constitution.

This is the way that will lead us above such ideas as 'Does the egg come first or the hen?' and can lead us into the deeper regions of reality. It is the way which shows us how each time we observe the reality we must press forward beyond what is given by external objective cognition.

And if it is often emphasized that one must learn from history about our activities to-day and in the future, then attention must be directed to the manner in which we should learn. We should so learn that what we experienced with our soils in past epochs should become living. The abyss of which I have spoken is bridged through this consideration. We are able to look hack into the metamorphosis of the soul constitution of men during the different epochs of time, and ardour and thoughtfulness will flow into our present soul constitution, so that we find the necessary thoughtfulness to build those ideas which are needed for the healing of the social relationships of to-day. But the necessary ardour must be kindled to have the force to attain full consciousness and to express in ideas that Imagination and Inspiration which formerly were developed instinctively.

[ 1 ] The magazine Lucifer, edited by Rudolf Steiner in the service of spiritual science, was enlarged in 1904 through the merger with the Austrian magazine, Gnosis. Thenceforth it bore the double name, Lucifer-Gnosis. In it were published Rudolf Steiner's articles that later appeared as the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, which, with the books, Theosophy and Occult Science, an Outline, belongs to the basic works of the anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit.

A continuation of these articles appeared under the title, The Stages of Higher Knowledge. They were intended, later on, to be formed into a second volume in continuation of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. But an overabundance of work and the heavy demands that lecturing made upon his time gradually prevented Rudolf Steiner from devoting the necessary attention to the magazine, although there was a steady increase in the number of its readers. As a result, its publication had to cease, and the further appearance of the articles on The Stages of Higher Knowledge had to be interrupted.

We have often been asked to make them available again through a new edition. The present books complies with this wish. Since the text suddenly breaks off, the book cannot claim the value of completeness. It was, therefore, justifiable to question the advisability of a new edition. The views presented here, but not brought to a conclusion, have been published many times in other written works of Rudolf Steiner in a different form and under different titles. But for the searcher of the spirit the fact remains that the conquest of spiritual reality is possible only by returning again and again to the spiritual contents once worked over but never sufficiently assimilated, and by experiencing ever anew the path that once has shown the direction into the realm of the spirit. The soul life of the person working meditatively must be kept so mobile that the view afforded him by one path makes him all the more receptive to views from other aspects.

[ 2 ] The articles published here are of historical value. They indicate the starting-point of Rudolf Steiner's esoteric instructions; they show us how he has become the pioneer in this very domain in which, through his indications, man for the first time has been allowed freedom. With a world encompassing outlook, and a high sense of responsibility he had to build a basis and create a spiritual attitude through which man—by finding within himself the solid moral support—might still in this freedom avoid falling prey to temptation and aberration. In order to accomplish such a deed at a decisive turning-point in history, in the midst of opposing forces, relying solely upon one's own self, there was needed the tremendous ethical power that permeates Rudolf Steiner's entire life-work, its goals the welfare of mankind, the rescue of the Western world from the threatening collapse. He laid the foundations for his work in a way that corresponded with the demands of the age. To achieve this required the synthesis of all knowledge.

[ 3 ] If one takes up these articles, written at the beginning of an astonishing life work that continued until March 30, 1925, and that, in the first years of this century, had received an impulse willed by destiny through its connection with theosophical groups fed from oriental sources—the question arises: How is it to be understood that Rudolf Steiner, who pointed the way to freedom also in esoteric life, to full self-reliance, and who let the pupil pledge to his own higher ego the obedience he must otherwise pledge to the teacher—how is it to be understood that Rudolf Steiner still urges in these articles the necessity of a strict reliance of the student upon the teacher, making the student as it were dependent upon the teacher?

[ 4 ] In truth, Rudolf Steiner is only describing the pupil teacher relationship as one of trust. From the very beginning he has avoided and rejected the authoritative element. In ancient times, the initiating priests took full responsibility for initiation of the neophyte into the mysteries of spiritual existence and exerted their will upon him. Thus the pupil was at the same time protected and guided, and was able to escape the dangers that otherwise would have overpowered him. His ego still hovered above his physical sheaths; his consciousness of self had not yet awakened. To awaken it more and more was the task of the progressing mystery training.

By drawing attention to the Cosmic Teacher, Christian initiation lessened the dependency upon the personal teacher, without wholly eliminating it. In the Rosicrucian training this dependency gradually loses its personal character and transforms itself into a relationship of trust. The teacher assists the student, shows him the way he seeks but cannot find unaided. The teacher gives him moral support, points out the dangers of vanity and the trickery of deceptive images that he must learn to distinguish from true spiritual reality. Thus the teacher is a helper ready to withdraw when trust is lacking.

At the turning-point of history at which we stand, the teacher working for the present had to point to the past, present, and future of human spiritual striving and, beginning with the education of the individual, had to erect his work so that it constituted a deed for mankind: a newly gained element of life for posterity. Thus, Rudolf Steiner created a science of initiation in which henceforth every serious, morally striving human being can find the fundament that carries him; he will be able to take hold of the elements that sharpen his power of discrimination while new worlds open up to him. He need not grope uncertainly, having received enough instruction to guide him until he finds the leader in the lands of spirit.

[ 5 ] This was not the case before Rudolf Steiner began his spiritual work. His deed is the science of initiation. Through it is revealed what lay hidden in the Mysteries of the ancient temples: namely, alongside the knowledge of cosmic evolution, the knowledge of the imminent descent of Christ, and what was sealed up in the Church: the redeeming deed of the liberation of mankind through the Christ and the gradual permeation of the ego of the individual with His power. Instead of personal guidance, the requirement now is that the human being find the way to the Ego of Mankind, to the Christ, through the forces of the time spirit. The consciousness of the individual human being is made mature for the acceptance of the higher ego force; self-consciousness is raised to spirit self.

[ 6 ] It is the work of the future. But only by standing on the ground of the past and preparing the future can man work fruitfully for the present. By any other course he strives in the void. Here, too, the laws of metamorphosis govern. The future is created through transformation of the present that is rooted in the past. New elements appear, just as the new spring follows the winter. The power of the sun glows through the earth; all that decays, undergoing transformation, is kindled to new life through grace descending from above.

[ 7 ] Also in the esoteric realm happenings unfold in historical continuity, in accordance with the law of ascending evolution and the flood tide and ebb tide of diminishing and flourishing life until the seemingly sudden moment when the rays of grace break forth, like the miracle of the radiant blossom in the green plant world. Yet without this transformation from form to form carried out by wise powers, and the constant enhancement in all domains of life, the new values, the gifts of the spirit, the fiery tongues of the Word would not descend upon us. Without knowledge of such happenings, the recipients of these gifts would not be in a position to grasp what it is that wants to take place among them. The great new power could not become effective, the future could not be saved.

[ 8 ] The souls striving for spiritual knowledge who approached Rudolf Steiner were the human material willed by destiny and led to him by the age with whom Rudolf Steiner had to work. Out of their needs and requirements he had to form the science of initiation, based on cognition. It was his task to tear men away from the indolence of the age in regard to the spirit, so that they could become a bridge for the demands of the future.

[ 9 ] Most difficult was the awakening of a sense for inner freedom, self-reliance, fully answerable to itself. With scrupulous regard for this goal, Rudolf Steiner desired no other role among men than that of instructor and, when so requested, advisor, awakener to spiritual goals of mankind. He was able to present spiritual facts because his thinking and beholding were permeated with life and unfolded, step by step, with the power of an organism of nature. His spiritual work stands before us—the restored unity of science, art and religion.

You have heard of the spirits that reveal themselves to man: “Will, Wisdom, Form”. I would like to say a few more things about these entities.

You must familiarize yourself with them. Those who only consider the physical part know only a little.

All teachings are based on observations with higher organs that do not belong to the physical body, that belong to the higher bodies and are not yet developed in the ordinary human being either. Familiarize yourself with the fact that higher insights are gained.

The names of the [four] stages of perception [are]:

1. Material recognition: It is the subordinate one, only used for everyday life [recognition].

2. Imaginative cognition – recognizing spiritual beings in images: the images of the dream world, surging up and down, are chaotic and disorderly, without meaning. However, the meaning can be developed in the soul. Imago image, with which man surrounds himself. There is the fabric from which knowledge is composed [...]

Through the reality that one recognizes imaginatively, one can grasp and pass through.

3. Voluntaristic - volitional - cognition: We are no longer dealing with images. All image-knowledge belongs to the astral worlds, all volitional knowledge belongs to the mental world.

Beings that are perceived have the same substance as our human will. Volitional expressions.

4. Intuition: Will particularly developed sensitively. The will stirs. When the will becomes sentient, that is the highest kind of knowledge that man can have on the third plan. The highest plan is intuition; the stages lead up to the three worlds, where we have arrived at the limit of what

concerns man.

Intuition is the world of knowledge of the disciple who has attained the third degree.

The third degree, or swan, is the degree that connects the intercourse of ordinary people with the masters - Lohengrin.

Intuition enables a person to perceive objects within. We must learn to understand the meaning of the name “I”. Through meditation, the distinction of the I from other names becomes clear. Then you distinguish the basics of the royal yoga school.

There is an unspeakable difference between the “I” and other names. There is no thing that would have a name that anyone could attach to it, but there is a name that everyone knows, that only one can say to himself, the meaningful I. The “I” must resound from within the person, then the person enters the realm that is supersensible and the path by which he comes only from within. There, man first enters the realm that has no [gap in the transcript]

That is why, in Jewish secret doctrine, the unspeakable name [Yahweh], which means “I am,” is God, who announces himself in the innermost part of the soul, the first of intuition. If you now learn to recognize all things in the same way, if you also elicit the names of things as you do for yourself, if you crawl into things through self-abandonment, through the dissolution of the self, then you will learn all secrets, then every object will say its own ego, then all things will become eloquent. All illusions of one's own self will then have vanished. All things will then proclaim the words within them. [...]

What I am saying to you now is a symbolization of what has been said in all schools. I speak to you, you hear me through the fact that I am able to make the air vibrate in very specific forms, which are a true reflection of my words and sounds. Now you know that all things in the form of air can be liquefied. Now you think that if someone could solidify the air at the moment I utter something, then my words would fall like snow crystals. That is how man, who looked deeper, rightly imagined the world in the first place. Thus the world soul once spoke the primal words into an infinitely fine substance, into the Akasha matter. Everything here on earth is Akasha matter that has fallen down. The crystal is the condensed word of the Primordial Soul. Everything around us is the word of the Primordial Soul that has become rigid. When man ascends to intuitive knowledge, he hears the words that the Primordial Soul once spoke.

The four steps of knowledge lead to the mental plane. These four steps are taught in all Rosicrucian schools and form the content of the first seven degrees of initiation. Freemasonry also had these seven steps before it descended to the three St. John's degrees.

One comes to an understanding of the higher worlds through feeling and through calm, clear research. Trust is necessary and faith, evoked by intuitive feeling. Man is inclined towards truth and clarity; when the occultist tells him something, he finds that there is something right about it.

First of all, I will give a skeleton of the higher world and will proceed quite logically and elementarily. If you consider human development, you will become aware of the four-fold nature of man as he stands before you.

Firstly: the physical body has something in common with the mineral kingdom. When a person stands before us, they are a mixture of the physical and the higher bodies. The eye is a physical apparatus without sensation, but it is animated, endowed with sensation. Outside in the world, the realm of the inanimate is spread out, and man has taken possession of it.

1. The realm of the inanimate: physical body
2. The realm of the plant-like: etheric body
3. The realm of the animal-like: astral body I Manas Budhi [Atma]

Secondly: the etheric body: You can cut a piece of the mineral kingdom and lay it down, and it will be just the same after a year. It is different with plants: if you cut off a leaf, it will wither after a short time.

Thirdly: the astral body or the sentient body.

These three kingdoms of nature are also in man. Then there is the fourth link, the I. The I holds together the essence of the whole world in the human body. Schiller expressed it quite theosophically in what he describes as Goethe's view of nature: “You seek to know nature, but on a difficult path, by combining all three kingdoms to understand the human being.”

Here we have arrived at the point where man is today. We have what the forces of nature have made of him. The physical body is what the deities have made, it is the cleverest. The physical body is constructed wisely, the other bodies are still imperfect. The astral body commits follies against the heart, it intervenes in the wise construction in an unrhythmic and chaotic way.

The ego is the real baby, it is at the very beginning. Through these imperfections, man must first develop upwards. The European knows how to distinguish between 'good' and 'bad', 'true' and 'false'. As much as the ego has of impeccable truth, so much manas is in the ego. There is no need to vote on anything that is manasic. However much a person achieves, together with everyone else, he must recognize the truth for himself.

Becoming dispassionate. The more dispassionate feeling there is in a person, the more Budhi there is in him. As the I develops, it also becomes as rhythmic as the physical body. Two worlds.

The human being lives in three realms, but a new world is opening up for the human being, into which he must learn to live. Just as the baby “I” has risen above the animal kingdom, so it rises into higher realms. All religions have striven to lead the “I” upwards. As we ascend, we gain an overview.

The old Christian secret doctrine calls the moon beings angels. The asuras are the origin of all kinds of selfishness, otherwise we would not have independence. Selfhood, but also selfishness. The gods of form are the constructive architectural ones. The spirits of form have worked on the physical body. Jehovah is the spirit of form. The moon gods have been particularly active in the etheric body, which is why Helena Petrovna Blavatsky calls Jehovah the moon god. The occultist approaches these beings and says that they did not develop out of nothing.

Supplement from the notes of Alfred Reebstein

The human being, the I, has taken possession of the other realms, formed an extract from them, which it now rules. The physical body is the most perfectly developed in its way; the higher limbs, etheric body and astral body, are much less developed in their way and the I only reach greater perfection in later stages.

The part of man that is completely flawless truth is called: Manas.

Budhi is what is completely independent of sensations and passions. The following are developing simultaneously with the human kingdom:

- Mineral kingdom
- Plant kingdom
- Animal kingdom
- Human kingdom – kingdom of the egos
- Angelic kingdom, lunar Pitris, moon beings, people of the moon
- Archangels, fire spirits, sun beings, people of the sun
- Archai, spirits of time, spirits of personality; Asuras, humans of Saturn
- Spirits of form, Exusiai
- Spirits of movement - activity - Dynamis
- Spirits of wisdom
- [Throne]
- Cherubim
- Seraphim