The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] The soul lives between body and spirit. The impressions coming to it through the body are transitory, enduring only as long as the body opens its organs to the things of the outer world. Only while the rose is in my line of vision can my open eye perceive its color. The presence of the things of the outer world as well as of the bodily organs is necessary in order that an impression, a sensation or a perception can occur. But what I have recognized in my mind as truth concerning the rose does not pass with the present moment, and as regards its truth, it is not in the least dependent on me. It would be true even though I had never stood before the rose. What I know through the spirit is rooted in an element of the soul life through which the soul is linked with a world-content that manifests itself in the soul independent of its bodily basis. The point here is not whether what manifests itself is essentially imperishable, but whether the manifestation occurs for the soul in such a way that its perishable bodily basis plays no part, and only that plays a part in it that is independent of this perishable body. The enduring element in the soul comes under observation at the moment we become aware that the soul has experiences not limited by its perishable factor. Again the important point is not whether these experiences come to consciousness primarily through perishable processes of the bodily organization, but the fact that they contain something that does indeed live in the soul, yet is independent of the transient process of perception. The soul is placed between the present and duration in that it holds the middle place between body and spirit. It also mediates between the present and duration. It preserves the present for remembrance, thus rescuing it from impermanence by taking it up into the duration of its own spiritual being. It also stamps what endures upon the temporal and impermanent by not merely yielding itself up in its own life to the transitory incitements, but by determining things out of its own initiative and embodying its own nature in them in the shape of the actions it performs. By remembrance the soul preserves the yesterday; by action it prepares the tomorrow.

[ 2 ] If my soul could not retain the red of the rose through remembrance, it would always have to perceive it anew to be conscious of it. What can be retained by the soul after an external impression can become a mental image, independent of the external impression. Through this power of forming visualizations the soul makes the outer world so much its own inner world that it can then retain the latter in memory for remembrance and, independent of the impressions acquired, lead a life of its own with it. The soul life thus becomes the enduring effect of the transitory impressions of the external world.

Action also receives permanence when once it is stamped on the outer world. If I cut a twig from a tree, something has taken place through my soul that completely changes the course of events in the outer world. Something quite different would have happened to the branch of the tree had I not interfered by my action. I have called into life a series of effects that, without my existence, would not have been present. What I have done today endures for tomorrow. Through the deed it acquires permanence just as my impressions of yesterday have become permanent for my soul through memory.

[ 3 ] For this fact of creating permanence through action we do not, in our ordinary consciousness form a definite visualization such as we have for memory, or as the result of a perception of an experience made permanent. Is not the ego of a man, however, linked just as much to the alteration in the world resulting from the deed as it is to a memory resulting from an impression? The ego judges new impressions differently depending upon whether or not it has one or another recollection. It has also as an “I” entered into a different relation to the world according to whether or not it has performed one deed or another. Whether, in the relation between the world and my “I,” a certain new quality is present or not depends upon whether or not I have made an impression on another person through my action. I am quite a different person in my relationship to the world after having made an impression on my surroundings.

The fact that what is meant here is not so generally noticed as is the change taking place in the ego through its having acquired a recollection, is solely due to the circumstances that the moment a recollection is formed it unites itself with the soul life that man has always felt to be his own. The external effects of the deed, detached from this soul life, produce consequences that are again something quite different from what the memory retains of this deed. Apart from this, it must be admitted that after a deed has been accomplished, there is something in the world upon which the ego has stamped its character. If we really think out what is here being considered, the question must arise as to whether the results of a deed, on which the “I” has stamped its own nature, retain a tendency to return to the “I” just as an impression preserved in the memory is revived in response to some external inducement. Is it not possible that what has retained the imprint of the ego in the external world waits also to approach the human soul from without, just as memory, in response to a given inducement, approaches it from within? This matter is only put forward here as a question because it certainly might happen that the occasion would never arise on which the consequences of a deed, bearing the impress of the ego, could take effect in the human soul. That these consequences are present as such, and that through their presence they determine the relation of the world to the “I,” is seen at once to be a possibility when we really follow out in thought the matter before us. In the following considerations we shall inquire whether there is anything in human life that, starting from this possibility, points to a reality.

[ 4 ] Let us first consider memory. How does it originate? Evidently in quite a different way from sensation or perception. Without the eye I cannot have the sensation blue, but by means of the eye alone I do not have the remembrance of blue. If the eye is to give me this sensation now, a blue object must stand before it. The body would allow all impressions to sink back again into oblivion were it not for the fact that while the present image is being formed through the act of perception, something is also taking place in the relationship between the outer world and the soul. This activity brings about certain results within man enabling him through processes within himself to form a new image of what, in the first place, was brought about by an image from outside. Anyone who has acquired practice in observing the life of the soul will see the opinion to be quite erroneous that holds that the perception a man has today is the same he recalls tomorrow through memory, it having meanwhile remained somewhere or other within him. No, the perception I now have is a phenomenon that passes away with the “now.” When recollection occurs, a process takes place in me that is the result of something that happened in the relation between the external world and me quite apart from the arousing of the present visualization. The mental image called forth through remembrance is not an old preserved visualization, but a new one. Recollection consists in the fact, not that a visualization can be revived, but that we can present to ourselves again and again what has been perceived. What reappears is something different from the original visualization. This remark is made here because in the domain of spiritual science it is necessary that more accurate conceptions should be formed than is the case in ordinary life, and indeed, also in ordinary science.

I remember; that is, I experience something that is itself no longer present. I unite a past experience with my present life. This is the case with every remembrance. Let us say, for instance, that I meet a man and, because I met him yesterday, recognize him. He would be a complete stranger to me if I were unable to unite the picture that I made yesterday through my perception with my impression of him today. Today's image of him is given me through my perception, that is to say, through my sense organs. Who, then, conjures up yesterday's picture in my soul? It is conjured up by the same being in me that was present during my experience yesterday, and that is also present today. In the previous explanations this being has been called soul. Were it not for this faithful preserver of the past, each external impression would always be new to us. It is certain that the soul imprints upon the body, as though by means of a sign, the process through which something becomes a recollection. Yet it is the soul itself that must make this impression and then perceive what it has made, just as it perceives something external. Thus the soul is the preserver of memory.

[ 5 ] As preserver of the past, the soul continually gathers treasures for the spirit. That I can distinguish between what is correct or incorrect depends on the fact that I, as a man, am a thinking being able to grasp the truth in my spirit. Truth is eternal, and it could always reveal itself to me again in things even if I were to lose sight of the past and each impression were to be a new one to me. The spirit within me, however, is not restricted to the impressions of the present alone. The soul extends the spirit's horizon over the past, and the more the soul is able to bring to the spirit out of the past, the more does it enrich the spirit. The soul thus hands on to the spirit what it has received from the body. The spirit of man, therefore, carries at each moment of its life a twofold possession within itself. Firstly, the eternal laws of the good and the true, and secondly, the remembrance of the experiences of the past. What the human spirit does is accompanied under the influence of these two factors. If we want to understand a human spirit we must, therefore, know two different things about it. Firstly, how much of the eternal has been revealed to it, and secondly, how much treasure from the past lies stored up within it.

[ 6 ] These treasures by no means remain in the spirit in an unchanged shape. The impressions that man acquires from his experiences fade gradually from memory. Not so, however, their fruits. We do not remember all the experiences lived through during childhood while acquiring the arts of reading and writing. Yet we could not read or write had we not had such experiences, and had not their fruits been preserved in the form of abilities. Such is the transmutation that the spirit effects in the treasures of memory. The spirit consigns to its fate whatever can lead to pictures of the separate experiences, and extracts therefrom only the force necessary for enhancing its abilities. Thus not a single experience passes by unutilized. The soul preserves each one as memory, and from each the spirit draws forth all that can enrich its abilities and the whole content of its life. The human spirit grows through assimilated experiences, and although one cannot find past experiences in the spirit as if in a storeroom, one nevertheless finds their effects in the abilities that man has acquired.

[ 7 ] Thus far spirit and soul have been considered only within the period lying between birth and death. We cannot stop there. Anyone wishing to do so would be like the man who would observe the human body only within these same limits. Much can certainly be discovered within these limits, but the human form can never be explained by what lies between birth and death. It cannot build itself up directly out of mere physical substances and forces. It can only descend from a form like its own that arises as the result of what has handed itself on by heredity. The physical materials and forces build up the body during life. The forces of propagation enable another body, a body with a like form, to proceed from it—that is to say, one able to be the bearer of the same life body. Each life body is a repetition of its forebear. Only because it is such does it appear, not in any chance form, but in that passed on to it by heredity. The forces that make possible my human form lay in my forefathers.

The spirit of a man also appears in a definite form, and these forms of spiritual man are the most varied imaginable. In saying this, the word form is naturally used in a spiritual sense. No two human beings have the same spiritual form. Observations should be made in this region in a manner just as quietly and matter-of-factly as they would be made in the physical world. It cannot be said that the differences in man in spiritual respects arise only from the differences in their environment and their upbringing. No, this is by no means the case because two people under similar influences of environment and upbringing develop in quite different ways. We are, therefore, forced to admit that they have entered on their paths of life with quite different dispositions. Here we are brought face to face with an important fact that sheds light on the nature of man when its full bearing is recognized.

Anyone who is set upon directing his outlook exclusively towards the side of material happenings could, indeed, assert that the individual differences of human personalities arise from differences in the constitution of the material germs. In view of the laws of heredity discovered by Gregor Mendel and developed further by others, such a claim can offer much that gives it the appearance of justification even in scientific judgments. Such judgment only shows, however, that these people have no insight into the real relation of man to his experiences. Careful observation shows that external circumstances affect different people in different ways because of something that by no means enters immediately into mutual relations with material development. To the really accurate researcher in this domain it becomes apparent that what proceeds from the material basis can be distinguished from what arises through the mutual interaction between a man and his experiences, although these experiences can only take shape and form through the participation of the soul itself in this mutual interaction. The soul stands there clearly in relation to something within the external world that, by virtue of its very nature, cannot be connected with the material germinal basis.

Men differ from their animal fellow-creatures on earth through their physical form, but regarding this form they are, within certain limits, like one another. There is only one human species. However great may be the differences between races, people, tribes and personalities, as regards the physical body, the resemblance between man and man is greater than between man and any animal species. All that finds expression in the human species is conditioned by the inheritance of descendants from forebears, and the human form is bound to this heredity. As the lion can inherit its physical bodily form from lion forebears only, so can man inherit his physical bodily form only from human forebears.

[ 8 ] The physical similarity of men is apparent to our physical eyes, and the differences of their spiritual forms lie revealed to our unbiased spiritual gaze. There is one fact that shows this clearly—the existence of a man's biography. Were a man merely a member of a species, no biography could exist. A lion or a dove are interesting insofar as they belong to the lion or the dove species. The separate being in all its essentials has been understood when the species has been described. It matters little whether one has to do with father, son or grandson. What they have of interest in them, father, son and grandson have in common. What a man signifies, however, is found only in his individuality, not in his being merely a member of a species. I have not in the least understood the nature of Mr. Smith of Hoboken if I have described his son or his father. I must know his own biography. Anyone who reflects on the nature of biography realizes that regarding the spiritual each man is himself a species.

[ 9 ] To be sure, those people who regard a biography merely as a collection of external incidents in the life of an individual may claim they can write the biography of a dog in the same way they can that of a man. But anyone who depicts in a biography the real individuality of a man grasps the fact that he has in the biography of a single man something that corresponds to the description of a whole species in the animal kingdom. The point is obviously not that we can say something in the nature of a biography about an animal—especially clever ones. The point is that the human biography does not correspond to a biography of an animal, but to the description of the animal species. Of course, there will always be people who will seek to refute this by urging that owners of menageries, for instance, know how single animals of the same species differ individually from one another. The man who judges in this way, however shows only that he is unable to distinguish individual difference from difference that is acquired only through individuality.

[ 10 ] Now if genus or species in the physical sense becomes intelligible only when we understand it as conditioned by heredity, so, too, the spiritual being can be understood only through a similar spiritual heredity. I have received my physical human form because of my descent from human forebears, but whence have I received what finds expression in my biography? As physical man, I repeat the shape of my forbears. What do I repeat as spiritual man? Anyone who claims that what comprises my biography needs no further explanation but must be accepted just as it stands, is also forced to maintain that he has seen an earth-mound somewhere on which lumps of matter have integrated themselves quite unaided into a living man.

[ 11 ] As physical man I spring from other physical men because I have the same shape as the whole human species. The qualities of the species, accordingly, could thus be acquired only within the species. As spiritual man I have my own shape just as I have my own biography. I can have obtained this shape, therefore, from no one but myself. I did not enter the world with undefined, but with defined soul-predispositions, and since the course of my life as it comes to expression in my biography is determined by these predispositions, my work upon myself cannot have begun with my birth. That is to say, I must have existed as spiritual man before my birth. I certainly did not exist in my forebears because as spiritual human beings, they differ from me. My biography is not explainable through theirs. On the contrary, as a spiritual being I must be the repetition of someone through whose biography mine can be explained. The only conceivable alternative at the moment would be that I owe the character of the content of my biography to a spiritual life in which I existed prior to birth or, more correctly, to conception. We should, however, only be allowed to hold this opinion if we are willing to assume that what acts upon the human soul from its physical surroundings is of the same nature as that which affects the soul from a purely spiritual world. Such an assumption contradicts really accurate observation because the effect of its physical environment on the human soul is like the impression made by a new experience on a similar past experience in the same life.

In order to observe these relations correctly, one must acquire a perception of the impressions operating in human life, whose influence upon the predispositions of the soul is like that of standing before a deed that has to be done, and that is related to what has already been experienced in physical life. But the soul does not bring faculties gained in this immediate life to meet these impressions, but predispositions, which receive the impressions in the same way as do the faculties acquired through practice. He who has insight into these matters arrives at the conception of earth-lives that must have preceded this present one. In his thinking he cannot stop at purely spiritual experiences that preceded this present earth-life. The physical form that Schiller bore was inherited from his forebears. In the same way that it was impossible for Schiller's physical form to have grown out of the earth, it was also impossible for his spiritual being to have originated from it. He must have been the repetition of another spiritual being through whose biography his own becomes explicable as his physical human form is explicable through human propagation. In the same way, therefore, that the physical human form is again and again a repetition, a reincarnation of a being of the human species, so too the spiritual man must be a reincarnation of the same spiritual man, since, as spiritual man, each individual is, in fact, his own species.

[ 12 ] The objection might be made that what has been stated here is a mere spinning of thoughts, and external proofs might be demanded as are customary in ordinary natural science. The reply to this is that the re-embodiment of the spiritual man is, naturally, a process that does not belong to the domain of external physical facts, but is one that takes place entirely in the spiritual region. No other of our ordinary powers of intelligence has entrance to this region save that of thinking. A person who will not trust the power of thinking cannot in fact enlighten himself regarding higher spiritual facts. For the one whose spiritual eye is opened, the above trains of thought act with exactly the same force as does an event that takes place before his physical eyes. The individual who ascribes to a so-called “proof,” constructed according to the methods of natural science, greater power to convince than the above observations concerning the significance of biography, may be in the ordinary sense of the word a great scientist, but he is far from the paths of true spiritual research.

[ 13 ] One of the most dangerous assumptions at present consists in trying to explain the spiritual qualities of a man by hereditary transmission from father, mother or other ancestors. Anyone who holds the opinion, for example, that Goethe inherited what constitutes his essential being from his father or mother will at first be hardly accessible to argument because there lies within such a one a deep antipathy to unprejudiced observation. A materialistic spell prevents him from seeing the mutual connections of phenomena in their true light.

[ 14 ] In such observations as the above, the presuppositions are supplied for following man beyond birth and death. Within the boundaries formed by birth and death, man belongs to the worlds of physical body, of soul, and of spirit. The soul forms the intermediate link between body and spirit, inasmuch as it endows the third member of the body, the soul body, with the capacity for sensation, and inasmuch as it permeates the first member of the spirit, the spirit self, as consciousness soul. Thus it takes part and lot during life with the body as well as with the spirit. This comes to expression in its whole existence. How the sentient soul can unfold its capabilities will depend on the organization of the soul body. On the other hand, the extent to which the spirit self can develop itself within the consciousness soul will depend on the life of that soul. The more highly organized the soul body, the more complete the intercourse that the sentient soul can develop with the outer world. The spirit self will become that much richer and more powerful the more the consciousness soul brings nourishment to it. It has been shown that during life this nourishment is supplied to the spirit self through assimilated experiences and the fruits of these experiences. The interaction of the soul and spirit described above can, of course, only take place where soul and spirit are within each other, interpenetrating each other, that is, within the union of spirit self with consciousness soul.

[ 15 ] Let us consider first the interaction of the soul body and the sentient soul. It is evident that the soul body is the most finely elaborated part of the body. Nevertheless, the soul body belongs to it and is dependent upon it. In a certain sense, physical body, ether body and soul body compose a single whole. Hence the soul body is also drawn within the laws of physical heredity that give the body its shape. Since it is the most mobile and volatile form of body, it must also exhibit the most mobile and volatile manifestations of heredity. Therefore, while the difference in the physical body corresponding to races, peoples and tribes is the smallest, and while in general the ether body presents a preponderating likeness and in single individuals a greater divergence, in the soul body the difference is already a considerable one. In it is expressed what is felt to be the external, personal uniqueness of an individual. Thus, it is also the bearer of that part of this personal uniqueness that is passed on from parents, grandparents, and so forth, to their descendants. As has been explained, it is true that the soul as such leads a completely self-contained life of its own in shutting itself up with its inclinations and disinclinations, its feelings and passions. It is nevertheless active as a whole and this whole comes to expression also in the sentient soul. Because the sentient soul interpenetrates and fills up the soul body, the latter forms itself according to the nature of the soul and can in this way, as the bearer of heredity, pass on tendencies, passions and other qualities from forefathers to children.

On this fact rests the statement of Goethe, “From my father I have stature and the serious manner of life; from my mother, a joyous disposition and the love of romance.” Genius, of course, he did not receive from either. In this way we are shown what part of a man's soul qualities he hands over, as it were, to the line of physical heredity. The substances and forces of the physical body are in like manner present in the whole sphere of external physical nature. They are continually being taken up from it and given back to it. In the space of a few years the matter that composes our physical body is entirely renewed. That this matter takes the form of the human body, and that it always renews itself again within this body, depends upon the fact that it is held together by the ether body. The form of the ether body is not determined by events between birth or conception, and death alone, but is dependent on the laws of heredity that extend beyond birth and death. That soul qualities also can be transmitted by heredity—that the process of physical heredity receives an infusion from the soul—is due to the fact that the soul body can be influenced by the sentient soul.

[ 16 ] Now, how does the interaction between soul and spirit proceed? During life, the spirit is bound up with the soul in the way shown above. The soul receives from the spirit the gift of living within the good and the true, and thereby of bringing the spirit itself to expression within its own life, within its tendencies, impulses and passions. From the world of the spirit, the spirit self brings to the “I” the eternal laws of the true and the good. These link themselves through the consciousness soul with the experiences of the soul's own life. These experiences themselves pass away, but their fruits remain. The spirit self receives an abiding impression by having been linked with them. When the human spirit encounters an experience similar to one to which it has already been linked, it sees therein something familiar, and is able to take up an attitude towards it quite different from what would be the case were the spirit facing it for the first time. This is the basis of all learning. The fruits of learning are acquired capacities. The fruits of the transitory life are in this way graven on the eternal spirit. Do we not see these fruits? Whence spring the innate predispositions and talents described above as characteristic of the spiritual man? Surely only from capacities of one kind or another that a man brings with him when he begins his earthly life. In certain respects, these capacities resemble exactly those that we can also acquire for ourselves during life.

Take the case of a genius. It is known that the boy Mozart could write out from memory a long musical work after only one hearing. He was able to do this because he could survey the whole at once. Within certain limits a man is also able during life to increase his capacity of rapid survey, of grasping connections, so that he then possesses new faculties. Indeed, Lessing has said of himself that through a talent for critical observation, he had acquired for himself something that came near to genius. We have either to regard such abilities, founded on innate capacities, with wonder, or to consider them as fruits of experiences that the spirit self has had through the medium of a soul. They have been graven on this spirit self, and since they have not been implanted in this life, they must have been in a former one. The human spirit is its own species. Just as man as a physical being belonging to a species bequeaths his qualities within the species, so does the spirit bequeath its qualities within its species, that is, within itself. In each life, the human spirit appears as a repetition of itself with the fruits of its former experiences in previous lives. This life is consequently the repetition of others and brings with it what the spirit self has, by work, acquired for itself in the previous life. When the spirit self absorbs something that can develop into fruit, it permeates itself with the life spirit. Just as the life body reproduces the form from species to species, so does the life spirit reproduce the soul from personal existence to personal existence.

[ 17 ] Through the preceding considerations the thought that seeks the reason for certain life processes of man in repeated earth lives is raised into the sphere of validity. This idea can receive its full significance only by means of observations that spring from spiritual insight as it is acquired by following the path of knowledge described at the close of this book. Here it was only intended to show that ordinary observation rightly oriented by thinking already leads to this idea. Observation of this kind, it is true, will at first perceive the idea something like a silhouette, and it will not be possible to defend the idea entirely against the objections advanced by observation that is neither accurate nor guided aright by thinking. On the other hand, it is true that anyone who acquires such an idea through ordinary thoughtful observation, makes himself ready for supersensible observation. To a certain extent, he develops something that, of necessity, he must possess prior to this supersensible observation, just as one must have eyes prior to observing through the senses. Anyone who objects that through the formation of such an idea he can readily suggest to himself the supersensible observation proves only that he is incapable of entering into reality by means of free thinking and that it is just he who thus suggests to himself his own objections.

[ 18 ] The experiences of the soul become lasting not only within the boundaries of birth and death, but beyond death. The soul, however, does not stamp its experiences only on the spirit that flashes up within it. It impresses them, as has been shown, on the outer world also through its deeds. What a man did yesterday is today still present in its effects. A picture of the connection between cause and effect is given in the simile of sleep and death. Sleep has often been called the younger brother of death. I get up in the morning. My consecutive activity has been interrupted by the night. Now, under ordinary circumstances it is not possible for me to begin my activity again just as I please. I must connect it with my doings of yesterday if there is to be order and coherence in my life. My actions of yesterday are the conditions predetermining those actions that fall to me today. I have created my destiny of today by what I did yesterday. I have separated myself for awhile from my activity, but this activity belongs to me and draws me again to itself after I have withdrawn myself from it for awhile. My past remains bound up with me; it lives on in my present and will follow me into my future. If the effects of my deeds of yesterday were not to be my destiny of today, I should not have had to awake this morning, but to be newly created out of nothing. In the same way it would be absurd if under ordinary circumstances I were not to occupy a house that I have had built for me.

[ 19 ] The human spirit is no more created anew when it begins its earthly life than a man is newly created every morning. Let us try to make clear to ourselves what happens when entrance into this life takes place. A physical body, receiving its form through the laws of heredity, makes its appearance. This body becomes the bearer of a spirit that repeats a previous life in a new form. Between the two stands the soul that leads a self-contained life of its own. Its inclinations and disinclinations, wishes and desires, minister to it. It presses thought into its service. As sentient soul, it receives the impressions of the outer world and caries them to the spirit in order that the spirit may extract from them the fruits that are permanent. It plays, as it were, the part of intermediary, and its task is fulfilled when it is adequate to this part. The body forms impressions for the sentient soul that transforms them into sensations, retains them in the memory as thought images, and surrenders them to the spirit to hold throughout duration. The soul is really that part of a man through which he belongs to his earthly life. Through his body he belongs to the physical human species; through it he is a member of this species. With his spirit he lives in a higher world. The soul binds the two worlds together for a time.

[ 20 ] The physical world into which the human spirit enters, however, is no strange field of action to it. On it the traces of the spirit's actions are imprinted. Something in this field of action belongs to the spirit. It bears the impress of, and is related to, the spirit's being. Just as the soul formerly transmitted the impressions from the outer world to the spirit in order that they might become enduring in it, so now the soul, as the spirit's organ, has converted the capacities bestowed upon it by the spirit into deeds that are also enduring in their effects. Thus the soul has actually flowed into these actions. In the effects of his actions, a man's soul lives a second independent life. This statement provides us with a motive for examining life in order to see how the processes of destiny enter into it. Something happens to a man. He is probably at first inclined to regard such a happening as something coming into his life by chance, but he can become aware of how he himself is the outcome of such chances. Anyone who studies himself in his fortieth year, and in the search for his soul nature refuses to be content with an unreal, abstract conception of the “I,” may well say to himself, “I am, indeed, nothing more nor less than what I have become through life's experiences, through what has happened to me by reason of destiny up to the present. Would I not be a different man today had I, for example, gone through a set of experiences different from those through which I actually went when I was twenty years of age?” The man will then seek his “I” not only in those impulses of development that come to him from within outwards, but also in what has formatively thrust itself into his life from without. He will recognize his own “I” in what happens to him. If we give ourselves up unreservedly to such a perception, then only one more really intimate observation of life is needed to show us that in what comes to us through certain experiences of destiny there is something that lays hold on the ego from without, just as memory, working from within, lays hold on us in order to make a past experience flash up again. Thus we can make ourselves fitted to perceive in the experiences of destiny, how a former action of the soul finds its way to the ego, just as in memory an earlier experience, if called forth by an external cause, finds its way into the mind as a thought.

It has already been alluded to as a possible subject of consideration that the consequences of a deed may meet the human soul again. Regarding the consequences of some deeds, such a meeting is out of the question in the course of one earth life because that earth life was arranged especially for the carrying out of the deed. Experience lies in its fulfillment. In that case, a definite consequence of that action can no more re-act upon the soul than can someone remember an experience while still in the midst of it. It can only be a question here of the experience of the results of actions that do not meet the ego while it has the same disposition it had during the earth life in which the deed was done. Our gaze can only be directed to the consequences of action from another earth life. If an experience of destiny “befalls” us, and we feel that it is connected with the ego like something that has fashioned itself out of the ego's inner nature, then we can only think we have to do with the consequences of the actions of former earth lives. We see that we are led through an intimate thoughtful comprehension of life to the supposition—paradoxical to ordinary consciousness—that the experiences of destiny of one earth life are connected with the deeds of previous earth lives. This idea again can only receive its full content through supersensible knowledge; lacking this, it remains like a mere silhouette. Once more, however, this thought, this idea, gained by ordinary consciousness, prepares the soul so that it is enabled to behold its truth in actual supersensible observation.

[ 21 ] Only one part of my deed is in the outer world; the other is in myself. Let us make this relation of the ego to the deed clear by a simple example from natural science. Animals that once could see migrated to the caves of Kentucky and, as a result of their life there, lost their power of sight. Existence in darkness deprived the eyes of their function. Consequently today the physical and chemical activity that normally occurs when seeing takes place is no longer carried on in these eyes. The stream of nourishment formerly expended on this activity now flows to other organs. These animals are now able to live only in these caves. They have by their act, by their immigration, created the conditions of their later life. The immigration has become a part of their destiny. A being that once acted has united itself with the results of its action. This is also true of the human spirit. The soul was only able to impart certain capacities to the spirit by performing actions, and these capacities correspond to the actions. Through an action that the soul has performed, there lives in the soul the energetic predisposition to perform another action that is the fruit of the first action. The soul carries this as a necessity within itself until the subsequent action has taken place. One might also say that through an action there has been imprinted upon the soul the necessity of carrying out the consequences of that action.

[ 22 ] By means of its actions the human spirit has really brought about its own destiny. In a new life it finds itself linked to what it did in a former one. It may be asked, “How can that be, when the human spirit on reincarnating finds itself in an entirely different world from the one it left at an earlier time?” This question is based on a superficial notion of the connections of destiny. If I change my scene of action from Europe to America, I also find myself in entirely new surroundings. Nevertheless, my life in America depends entirely on my previous life in Europe. If I have been a mechanic in Europe, my life in America will shape itself in quite a different way from what would have been the case had I been a bank clerk. In the one instance, I should probably be surrounded in America by machinery, in the other, by banking paraphernalia. In each case my previous life decides my environment. It attracts to itself, as it were, out of the whole surrounding world, those things that are related to it. So it is with the spirit self. It inevitably surrounds itself in a new life with what it is related to from previous lives. On that account sleep is an apt image of death because a man during sleep is withdrawn from the field of action in which his destiny awaits him. While we sleep, events in this field of action pursue their course. We have for a certain time no influence on this course of events. Our life on a new day depends, nevertheless, on the effects of the deeds of the previous day. Our personality actually embodies or incarnates itself anew every morning in our world of action. What was separated from us during the night is spread out around us, as it were, during the day. So it is with the actions of former human embodiments or incarnations. They are bound up with a man as his destiny, just as life in the dark Kentucky caves remains bound up with the animals that, by migrating into them, have lost their power of sight. Just as these animals can only live in the surroundings in which they have placed themselves, so the human spirit is able to live only in the surroundings that it has created for itself by its acts. That I find in the morning a certain state of affairs, created by me on the previous day, is brought about by the immediate course of events. That I find surroundings when I reincarnate corresponding to the results of my deeds in a previous life, is brought about by the relationship of my reincarnated spirit with the things in the surrounding world. From this we can form an idea of how the soul is set into the human constitution. The physical body is subject to the laws of heredity. The human spirit, on the contrary, has to incarnate over and over again, and its law consists in its bringing over the fruits of the former lives into the following ones. The soul lives in the present, but this life in the present is not independent of the previous lives because the incarnating spirit brings its destiny with it from its previous incarnations. This destiny determines life. What impressions the soul will be able to have, what wishes it will be able to have gratified, what sorrows and joys shall develop for it, with what men and women it shall come into contact—all this depends upon the nature of the actions in the past incarnations of the spirit. The soul must meet those people again in a subsequent life with whom it was bound up in a previous life because the actions that have taken place between them must have their consequences. When this soul seeks re-embodiment, those other souls that are bound up with it will also strive towards their incarnation at the same time. The life of the soul is, therefore, the result of the self-created destiny of the human spirit. The course of man's life between birth and death is determined in a threefold way. In consequence, he is dependent in a threefold way on factors that lie on the other side of birth and death. The body is subject to the law of heredity; the soul is subject to its self-created destiny. We call this destiny, created by man himself, his karma. The spirit is under the law of re-embodiment, repeated earth lives. One can accordingly also express the relationship between spirit, soul and body in the following way. The spirit is immortal; birth and death reign over the body according of the laws of the physical world; the soul life, which is subject to destiny, mediates the connection of both during an earthly life. All further knowledge about the being of man presupposes acquaintance with the three worlds to which he belongs. These three worlds are dealt with in the following pages.

[ 23 ] Thinking that frankly faces the phenomena of life and is not afraid to follow out to their final consequences the thoughts resulting from a living, vivid contemplation of life can, by pure logic, arrive at the conception of the law of karma and repeated incarnations. Just as it is true that for the seer with the opened spiritual eye, past lives lie like an open book before him as experience, so it is true that the truth of these things can become obvious to the unbiased reason that reflects upon it (See Addendum 7).

Report in the “Dresdner Nachrichten” of December 2, 1909

Christ and spiritual science was the topic of the lecture that Dr. Rudolf Steiner gave on Tuesday to a large audience at Meinholds Sälen. The speaker is a frail, ascetic figure, but has a pleasant, sonorous voice and speaks fluently and quite freely. Spiritual science, he explained, is a science of real spiritual, real life. It wants to open the sources in which the beginnings of the physical world lie, and to give us knowledge of the supersensible spiritual world that lies behind our sensual world. Only in the last ten years has spiritual science slowly and gradually been penetrating people's minds. Some people believe that spiritual science or theosophy has something to do with ancient superstition. But this is not the case. Nor does spiritual science want to replace any other religious beliefs of mankind with a new religion. It serves to understand religious beliefs, it is an instrument with which one can understand the various religious beliefs, but it wants to be science in the most serious sense. Those who stand firmly on the ground of a religious belief are only led deeper into it by spiritual science. Nor is it a matter of introducing an oriental religious belief, such as Buddhism, into our society. Anyone who wanted to undertake such a task would misunderstand the basis of our entire Western culture. This basis is Christianity. Even those who fight Christianity have received their best from it. The speaker then explained the goals and tasks of spiritual science. The aim is to answer the questions of what the soul is, how it relates to the temporary phenomena of human life, and how it is connected to the supersensible world. The sources of knowledge of spiritual science are quite far removed from our present-day thinking and imagination, but we see with open eyes that not only is there more in the world than meets the senses and is grasped by the mind, but there is also a wealth of spiritual facts and entities. Just as one born blind denies our world full of color and light, so does one whose spiritual eye has not yet been opened deny the spiritual world. There is a rebirth of man, after which the spiritual world appears to him. Finally, the speaker addressed the questions: What is the nature of the presentation of spiritual science and how is the evidence for it provided? In a highly poetic form, he presented an imagined conversation between a superior person and a disciple who is to be introduced to the mysteries of spiritual science by that person. “Die and become!” was the watchword. The black cross entwined with red roses was the symbol of the new life. The audience, which was largely recruited from members of the Theosophical Society, listened devoutly and applauded the speaker enthusiastically.

Question & Answer Session [question not recorded in writing]

Rudolf Steiner: The Gospel of John says of Christ that he is the incarnate Logos because he brought the impulse into the world to fully conquer the human ego, to take up this ego into the spiritual world. Man can experience a threefold Christ. The first Christ is the Christ of Intuition. Expressed in mighty images in the Documents, He speaks of that Entity which actualizes the ideal of the individual ego. This Christ is found independently of every document and external tradition when one ascends to Intuition. As spirit, the same as every I, one finds through intuition Christ, the most perfect original I; incarnated at the beginning of our time. A completely new spiritual research has become possible through the fact that the human being can take his I, the Logos, with him into the spiritual world. The event of Golgotha brought the first impulse for the fullest self-knowledge of the human being. Man can behold his own I and therein see an image of the divine. The word of Christ: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58) – when man has grasped the meaning of this word, then he has grasped in himself the Logos, the divine original I. Thus spiritual science finds the Christ, who said yes:

I am with you always.

This Christ is always there: the first Christ, the Christ of intuition. The second Christ is the Pauline Christ. How did the Christ come into the world as knowledge? Who was the first to give him to humanity as knowledge? Paul. He was the one who did not allow himself to be converted through external physical experience, but through a clairvoyant inspiration, through the event of Damascus. To him, Christ revealed himself from the transcendental world. He believed in Christ and proclaimed him with all his strength.

The third Christ is the one of the gospels. There are naive people who take what is written in the Gospels literally. Then there are the clever people who say: the Gospels are for an imperfect stage of human development. And then there is a third type of person who says: the Gospels mean all sorts of things symbolically; they speak of a Christ myth, a Peter myth, and so on – they interpret the Gospels symbolically and allegorically. Finally, there is a fourth level, the spiritual-scientific view of the Gospels, where one starts from what can be known through spiritual research about the events in Palestine. Then, when you read the Gospels, you say: Now you understand them for the first time. And you know what those who wrote them wrote into them. You discover that the Gospels are the most powerful documents of humanity. And you see into a future where, through spiritual science, people will live more and more deeply into the Christ and the mystery of Golgotha.

Cologne, May 11, 1913

Notes from the estate of Elisabeth Vreede First degree

If we look back at the way in which souls celebrated the summer solstice festival before the Mystery of Golgotha – what we now call around St. John's Day – and at how they felt and experienced that time, we arrive at very different feelings from those which the souls of the present experience at this moment of the year. In the past, the souls – and these are, after all, our own souls – lived with nature as a reality. The falling of snowflakes, the whispering of the wind in the forest, the light that flashes from lightning, the rolling of thunder, the patter of rain, all this was the speech of the gods for the souls of that time; and they understood that language and lived the life of the gods. When the sun barely showed itself during the winter around Christmas time, it also became lonely and dark inside them, and with the falling snowflakes they felt how they were cut off from the activities of the gods. And when spring came and everything began to sprout and sprout, the souls themselves came to life again, and it became warm in the souls. And in proportion as the sun sent its rays to the earth, they could again listen to the conversation of the gods; then they felt at one with nature and with everything that spoke from it. But the same souls can no longer hear the same, no longer experience it. The gods are becoming more and more silent, and we see the seasons changing without feeling more connected to them. Why is that?

This is because, after the mystery of Golgotha, everything had to change. That which used to affect people from the outside is now supposed to work within the person themselves. All those forces that once worked directly on people in nature are still working, but now they work on people from within. With our inner soul forces, which are to become stronger through the descent of the I into us, we must find the forces within ourselves that once spoke to us from outside in thunder and lightning, in rain and wind. Now they speak to us in our knowledge, now they bring forth moral strength and wisdom in us, now they warm us inwardly and enable us to understand all people, to speak from person to person and to establish the love that shall bind all souls together, so that humanity will rediscover itself as one great unity, since the whole of humanity lies spread out in each person's heart.

The festivals that people now celebrate with the changing seasons are no longer external festivals, where people cheered or became silent together with nature, but have now become internal celebrations. And the hope arises that one day, in full realization, we will fully experience them. When the young green sprouts up and all spring shoots awaken, then the feeling awakens within us that the slumbering seed of the spirit will awaken in us, and we celebrate Easter in this warming hope. And when we approach the Feast of Pentecost and thus the high point of the year, we expect that this spirit, as the Holy Spirit, as the Spirit of Truth, will come into us and bring us knowledge and wisdom. Those people who set the dates of the holidays in the post-Christian era did so out of the deepest wisdom and intuition.

The Luciferic spirits wanted to give man that which they already had on the old moon, the spirit self or the fifth principle, before man was quite ready with the development of the fourth principle or the I. Thus, man received the fifth principle in an immature state. The true form of the fourth principle is shown to us by Christ, and this is indicated to us in the forty days, or four times a small cycle of ten days, which elapse between the resurrection and the ascension. Only then can the fifth principle come to people in the right way. And that is indicated in the Feast of Pentecost, the Feast of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, which in turn comes ten days later - or as a fifth cycle - after the Ascension.

We know that the Elohim want to give us the powers of the ego on earth, through which we can absorb spiritual wisdom into our minds. However, this can only happen slowly and gradually, and all further development will be available for this purpose. The Luciferic spirits, who had already absorbed the powers of the I in the ancient world and were therefore far ahead of man, now want to give man the fifth principle. They do this by directing attention to the possibilities of the earth that can be fully grasped by the intellect. All arrogant natural science comes from Lucifer's will. He wants to permeate man with the fifth principle, bypassing the fourth. The ego-powers are used to sharpen the intellect for earthly purposes; they lead it further and further away from contact with the gods, who want to impart their wisdom to us, just as it now flows down from the occult world in the theosophical teachings. If we absorb the teachings that are issued from this temple, then the wisdom that they contain will gradually be able to be processed by our minds and the powers of our ego will grow, so that we will increase in inner moral strength, which will bring us true freedom, which is determined from within the human being.

There is nothing in the experience of the “I” itself by the human being that is stimulated by a sensory process. On the other hand, the I incorporates the results of the sensory processes into its own experience and builds the structure of its inner being, the actual “I-human”, from them. This “I-human” thus consists entirely of experiences that originate outside the I and yet persist in the I after the corresponding sensory experiences. They can therefore be transformed into ego experiences. We can gain an idea of how this happens by looking at the experiences of the so-called sense of touch. In this sense, nothing comes from an object in the external world into the ego experiences. The ego, so to speak, radiates its own essence to the point of contact with the external object and then allows this own essence to return in proportion to the touch. The returning own essence forms the content of the tactile perception. Why does the I not immediately recognize the tactile perception as its own content? Because this content has received a counter-impact from the other side, from the outside, and now returns as this impact has shaped it from the outside world. The I-content thus returns with the imprint it has received from the outside. Thus, the I receives a certain peculiarity of the external world in the nature of its own content. The fact that these are truly inner I-experiences, which have only taken on the peculiarity of the external world, can only be determined by judgment. Now, suppose that the I's experience cannot come into contact with the external object. The external object radiates its essence; and the I-experience must recoil from the contact. Then, within the I, an experience similar to the sense of touch arises; only that, through the weaker resistance of the I, something like an influx from the outside occurs in its experience. In fact, the experience of smell can be characterized as such a process. If the impact from outside is so strong that the external radiation digs into the experience of the I, then the influx from outside can happen, and only when the inner experience, so to speak, puts up resistance can it close itself off from the nature of the outside world. But then it has absorbed the current from outside and now carries it within itself as its own inner essence. The sense of taste can be characterized in this way. But if the I does not apply its own original experience to external existence, but instead applies to it the kind of entity that it has itself taken in from outside, then an inner experience can be imprinted from the outside that has itself originally been taken in from the outside. The external world then imprints itself on an inner experience that has itself only been internalized from an external source. This is how the sense of sight presents itself. With it, it is as if the external world were dealing with itself within the experiences of the I. It is as if the external world first sends a part of its essence into the human being and then imprints its own nature on this part. One now further assumes that the external world, with what it has sent into the inner being as a sense organ, completely fills the I-experience, as it were; then the inner being will relive the peculiarity of an external event in the sense perception, although inner experience and external world are juxtaposed. And a radiance from the outer world will then reveal itself as something that is similar to an inner experience. The I will experience the outer and inner as similar. This is the case with the sense of warmth. Now compare the experiences of the sense of warmth with the life process of warming. An impression of warmth must be recognized as something similar to the warmth experienced within and filling the inner self.

With the sense of smell, taste and sight, we can speak of an influx of the outer world into the experiences of the self. Through the sense of warmth, the inner life is filled with the character of the outer world. A sense of the inner life manifests itself in the sense of equilibrium, the sense of one's own movement and the sense of life. Through them, the self experiences its inner physical fulfillment.

Another takes place in the sense of hearing. There the external being not only allows the I-experiences to approach it as in the sense of touch; nor does it dig into them as in the sense of smell, taste and sight, but it allows itself to be irradiated, as it were, by the I-experiences; it allows them to approach it. And only then does it counter them with its own forces. The I must thereby experience something that is like a spreading out into the external world, like a laying of these I-experiences outwards. Such a relationship can be recognized by the sense of hearing. (Those who do not make abstract comparisons will not object that, for example, such a spreading out also takes place with the sense of sight. The perception of sound is of a fundamentally different nature than the perception of sight. Color does not contain the sense of self in the same sense as sound.) This spreading of the sense of self into the environment is even more pronounced in the sense of sound and in the sense of concept.

I. Report in the “Weimarische Zeitung” of April 19, 1903

Second lecture by the Secretary General of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, on: “The Main Theosophical Teachings”. Even more attentive listeners than at the first lecture gathered yesterday evening in the “Erholung” hall to listen to the excellent, convincing and fiery presentation. The following is a brief summary of the interesting topic:

The origin of the theosophical movement lies, as we all know and as the oldest traditions prove, in the earliest ages, as the theosophical activity of the Essenes and Pythagoreans amply confirms. In the so-called mystery schools (secret schools), which already existed in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries of our era, the secrets of human existence were taught at that time. An example of the interest with which the study and development of the wisdom of God was pursued in earlier times is given by Redner, who recounts the event of how an Indian scholar, who gave a theosophical lecture from the point of view of the natural science of the time, was asked by a member of the audience what would remain when all the ethereal, physical components of the human being had dissolved. The speaker suggested that the public was not the place to answer this question, and therefore invited the questioner to join him in solitude, in order to introduce him to the secrets of his own soul life and to explain to him the existence of the divine being in his ego. The explanation of reincarnation and karma is based on the firm conviction that everything in the world is based on karma, on activity. As even Goethe once said so aptly: “Function is existence conceived in activity.” Both our highly developed and our still imperfect organs of animals have never been what they are now from the very beginning. Even today, there are living creatures that lack eyes altogether, for example, that have only the most primitive skin openings connected to the optic nerves, and that have only the very slightest insight into the outside world around them. And yet the time will come for these imperfect creatures, too, when their visual organs have developed to the same extent as in other, more perfect animals. The necessity and the need to gain further insights into the light will, through the continuous interaction and the incessant activity, also make the visual organs of these undeveloped animals the same as those of other animals, when the soul of the animals has lived through and perfected itself through countless generations. Further proof of perpetual activity and development is that there is, for example, a species of fish in America, the newt fish, in which, during the time of their existence, breathing organs in the form of lungs have , which later, due to a lack of water, has become an unavoidable necessity for them, as they originally only spent their lives in the water. The activity of the organs came to their aid, and today these fish can spend part of the waterless summer on land, while as soon as water is available, they live only in it. And just as the natural scientist did not observe and research this development of forces inherent in the body, so too our inherent spirit has come about through the never-ceasing soul activity in our own ego. And if there are still people today who are as spiritually immature as some primitive peoples, who even today devour their fellow human beings, it is precisely because their soul activity has been a slow one that has not developed the spirit to the extent that they would be aware of their actions. And the presence of the soul even in plants was also recognized and discussed by Goethe in conversation with Schiller, in which he confessed that even the most perfectly developed plant had emerged from the primal plant and that, when he looked at every flower and plant, the soul of the same seemed to him to be present, as it were. But the most significant, the most sublime, the immeasurable difference in the soul life of bodies is the individuality of the human being. Every human being, even the most imperfect and insignificant, has his biography, which another being, however perfect, lacks. And in this individuality we find the essence of reincarnation, of re-embodiment, to the explanation of which we may add: That which you think today you will be in later time; what we grasp intellectually today was first seen in an earlier life, to which we now look back. And since a cause also belongs to the spiritual effect, we see the earlier lives in us as the cause of the spiritual effect. The constant perfection of our soul wisdom, the study of the human soul, will give us insight into the astonished questions [of the Belgian Maeterlinck]: How are we to do justice to our tremendous needs? Within our ego lie the spiritual powers; in our causal body we find the cause of individuality, the eternal activity that produces cause and effect. With the principle: the soul was present, it is present and will remain present, we characterize the eternal existence of life. And in this sense, we must agree with the former remarks of the scholar Fichte, who explained to his Jena students: “Break over me, world; fall upon me, rocks; devour me, earth and sea; I stand fearless and undaunted, for I feel the divine immortal power in my ego, in my soul, which lifts me above all the terrors of physical mortality.

Undivided applause from the silently enthralled audience rewarded the speaker, who finally announced that in the last lecture on Monday, any of the attendees who had appeared could ask questions related to the topic, which the speakers intended to answer in all respects, so that part of the evening would might be held within the framework of a discussion.

II. Report in “Germany”, second page, dated April 19, 1903

On Friday evening, Dr. Steiner gave his second lecture on Theosophy in the recreation room, again to a large audience. This time, it was about the main theosophical teachings (reincarnation and karma). The speaker began his lecture with a story about the Indian sage Jaina Walkia, who was firmly convinced of the doctrine of reincarnation and already shared it with others. Man is an organic being with developed limbs and organs, but the latter did not suddenly appear as we see them today, but rather, through their own activity, they have reached this perfection over a long period of development. All this activity can be summarized in the word karma. Just as completely different beings have developed from imperfect animals over the centuries, adapting to their needs, so has the soul life of man been in constant activity and development. It is absolutely correct to assume that the human spirit always experiences re-embodiment and remains still after the organic limbs have died off until a being for it can be found again. Thus, every single human spirit has already lived an infinite number of times, constantly developing and perfecting itself. For example, the spirit of Goethe and Mozart was already present in the boys of youthful age, and it will also return, because it is unthinkable that after the death of the organic body these highly developed individualities should not continue to live; nor can it be assumed that, for example, Goethe's spirit emerged from nothing. Nor should one believe in a different inheritance from generation to generation, because often siblings are fundamentally different in their individuality and even twin brothers, who were under the same organic influence, would be endowed with the most divergent character traits. The spirit or individuality in man has emerged from the primal soul and in the words “from God to God” lies the content of all wisdom. The origin and purpose of all existence is the core that underlies all religious knowledge. Everything that exists has emerged from the primal power and carries the divine essence within itself; from this view arises the individual continuation of the soul, which today is called immortality. Everything that emerges from the primal power and returns to it must continue to exist until the cycle is complete. The aim of all development is, of course, perfection and completion during the journey back to the primal power. The highly developed animal also has a certain knowledge, as does the completely undeveloped human being, only the animals lack the individual essence, the feeling of personal “I”; this is highly peculiar to humans. One can always speak of an animal species as a whole, whereas the concept of a human being always applies only to one individual, since a second person has a different individual disposition. We can indeed form a perception through our transient organs, but knowledge arises from the source of the spirit. Matter does not produce the spirit, but the spirit emerges from the Primordial Spirit — God — in order to return to Him one day. Every human being contains an individual spirit, and when the organic body dies, it leaves behind the further developed spirit, just as a plant decays and leaves behind a viable seed for new development. The Theosophical movement seeks to awaken the consciousness of the divine essence in each individual, and this then allows for the conscious realization and rational comprehension of the individual path of development, the resulting inner spiritual view. From this arises the striving for the complete development of the spirit. Karma, however, means the active development of the individual soul life to perfection. From this arises the proof that the soul cannot perish, but goes through and completes its process of development long before us and long after us. At the end of his lively lecture, the speaker recalled a saying of the Jena philosopher Fichte, who exclaimed: “You mountains fall upon me, you waters engulf me, I am not afraid, for I know that my spirit lives on and is not lost!” Dr. Steiner also said that next Monday, after the lecture, he would be happy to provide any answers to questions addressed to him and to clarify any ambiguities.

Patience, or the ability to wait, is the inexorable demand in all departments of life. Failures are inevitable, and we must not grieve over them. Nature is not concerned over her countless failures, for the beings behind Nature know that the higher spiritual law is bound to bring to pass the things which have been determined. Even so must students of Anthroposophy learn to wait in faith for events which are to mature in the womb of time. And the central point of this faith, its firm foundation, is the symbol of the Cross—as elucidated by a comprehension of the Christ principle. If we have come to know the reality of the Christ principle, we understand that this Christ principle is a force, a living force, and that it has been connected with human life on earth since the time that in the body of Jesus of Nazareth it united itself with one special human being. Since that time it has been with us, working among us, and we may become participators of its working if we endeavour to apply all means at our disposal to its understanding, in such a way that we make it the very life of our own souls.

When, however, we understand the Christ principle in this way, and know it to be in humanity, here on earth, and are able to come to it and draw water of life from the source, we then have the kind of belief which knows how to wait, not alone for everything which has to mature in the womb of time, but also for that which surely and certainly will mature for us human beings, if we but have patience. When within this transitory existence we grasp the Christ principle, there will mature for us—in the womb of the transitory—the intransitory, the eternal, the immortal. Out of the womb of time there is born for us human beings that which is beyond time. If we stand on this firm support, we base upon it, not a blind belief, but a belief permeated by wisdom, truth and knowledge, and we may say: What must, will come; and nothing prevents us from throwing our best energies into what we believe to be inevitable. Belief is the real fruit of the cross; it is that, which always calls out to us: ‘Look at your failures, which seem to imply the death of your creative work; then look from your failures to the cross, and remember that on the cross hung the source of boundless eternal life, which defeats death not only for itself but for all mankind.’ From belief spring courage and perseverance. But courage, perseverance and belief alone are not sufficient; another necessary factor will have to be established more and more the further we progress towards the future, and must form an increasing part of everything that may be achieved for the future of humanity. And this is that we must become capable of never being confused about an idea when once we have recognised its correctness. We may have to admit a thousand times that it cannot be realised immediately, that we must wait in patience and without faltering, though we believe that the Christ-force is working in the unfolding life of humanity in a way which will bring everything to birth at the right moment in the womb of time. We must, notwithstanding this, be able to judge of the rightness, of the indubitable rightness of the contents of our spiritual life. If we can wait for results, the occasions on which we have merely to wait when it is a question of deciding what is true, wise and right, will become fewer and fewer. The cross alone gives vital courage and belief to our right understanding; but the star of the light-bearer, the star of Lucifer, if we surrender ourselves to it, can enlighten us every moment as to the rightness and the indubitableness of the spiritual ideas within us. That is the other centre of force on which we must take a firm stand; we must be capable of acquiring knowledge which goes into the depths of life, which goes behind the outer, material appearances, which sends its rays from the place where there is light, even when to human eyes and understanding all is dark. It was necessary for the progress of humanity that darkness should reign for a time, and the next chapters will show more and more clearly how necessary it was. This necessity is indicated in a profound way in the Gospel of St. John. This darkness was illumined by what we call the Christ principle, the Christ.

A wonderfully beautiful legend tells us that when Lucifer fell from heaven to earth a precious stone fell from his crown. This precious stone—so the legend proceeds—became the vessel from which Christ Jesus took the holy Supper with His disciples; the same vessel received the Christ's blood when it flowed on the Cross, and was brought by angels to the western world, where it is received by those who wish to come to a true understanding of the Christ principle. Out of the stone, which fell from Lucifer's crown, was made the Holy Grail. This precious stone is in a certain respect nothing else—I will just mention it here, as the fact will be laid more plainly before your souls in the course of the next chapters—than the full power of the Ego. In darkness this human Ego had to be prepared for a new and more intelligent beholding if the radiance of Lucifer's star. This Ego had to school itself by means of the Christ principle, it had to ripen by the aid of the stone fallen from Lucifer's crown, that is to say through Anthroposophical wisdom, in order to become capable once more of bearing the light which comes not from without. This light, which only shines in us when we ourselves have the power to do what is requisite for acquiring it, must shine again in the world. Thus people who look at the future with full understanding know that anthroposophical work is work on the human Ego, which will make it into a vessel capable of again receiving the light which lives in a region where today our sight and intellect apprehend merely darkness and night. An old legend tells us that night was the original ruler. This night, however, is what today is filled with darkness. But if we permeate ourselves with the light which rises for us when we understand the light-bearer, the other spirit Lucifer, then will our night be turned into day. Our eyes cannot see if the outer light does not illuminate the objects round us; our intellect fails if asked to penetrate beyond the outer nature of things. The star of Lucifer, however, which comes to us when clairvoyant investigation speaks, throws its light on what only seems to be night and changes it into day. And this also takes from us all deadening and paralysing doubt. Then we understand the cross of the Christ in the star of Lucifer. It may be said to be the mission of anthroposophical spiritual life for the future to give us on the one hand certainty and strength whereby, firmly rooted in spiritual life, we may become recipients of the light of the Light-bearer, and on the other hand to make us lean firmly on the rock of unquestioning conviction that nothing which is due to happen through the interaction of forces which are in the world shall fail to happen. Only through this two-fold certainty shall we be able to accomplish what we have to do in the world; only through this two-fold certainty shall we succeed in transplanting Anthroposophy into life.

Therefore we must clearly recognise that we have not only the task of understanding the star of Lucifer, as it shone throughout human evolution till the precious stone fell out of Lucifer's crown, but that we have to receive this precious stone in its transformed character as the Holy Grail, that we must understand the Cross in the star; we must know that we have to understand the luminous wisdom which shone in the world during primeval ages, and which we deeply revere as the wisdom of pre-Christian times. To this we must indeed look up in full devotion, and add to it that which could be given to the world through the mission of the Cross. Not the least fraction of pre-Christian wisdom, of the light of the East, must be lost to us. We look up to Phosphoros, the Light-bearer; and indeed we revere this Light-bearer as the being through which alone we learn to understand the whole of the deep, inner meaning of the Christ; but side by side with Phosphoros we see Christophoros, the Christ-bearer, and we try to conceive of the mission of Anthroposophy in such a way that it only can be fulfilled if the symbols of these two worlds really ‘unite themselves in love.’ If this is our conception of the mission of Anthroposophy, Lucifer will guide us to the safety of a luminous spiritual life, and the Christ will guide us to the inner warmth of the soul which trusts and believes that that will come about which may be called the birth of the Eternal out of the Temporal.

And we shall further recognise that there is a light of the West, that shines in order to make that which originates in the East more luminous than it is through its own power. A thing becomes luminous through the light by which it is illuminated. Therefore let no one say that any falsification whatever of Eastern wisdom takes place when the light of the West shines on it. It will appear that what is beautiful and sublime seems most beautiful and sublime when illuminated by the noblest light. If we feel this idea and receive it into our souls, letting it fill them, we shall be able to learn in small things, through feeling and realisation, what will come to pass in great matters. We shall say: we stand firmly rooted in our truths and wait patiently for their realisation, however long deferred it may be.

Thus we work from one point of time to another in the firm belief that if we comprehend our mission rightly; we are working for that for which man ought to work, for eternity. For as far as human work is concerned, Eternity is the birth of that which has matured in Time.

The impulses of regeneration given to mankind in this series of lectures, Art as Seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom,¹ will only be understood by those who are able to assimilate the nature of spiritual science fully in such a way that for them the concreteness of the spiritual world, its richness of form and being, has become a self-evident fact. Rudolf Steiner, fully equipped with the most modern scientific methods and with the utmost singleness of thought, has brought the reality of the spiritual world close to his contemporaries and has shown them how the ego of mankind is placed at the focal point of the development of consciousness and how mankind must grasp this ego with full knowledge. One path towards the grasping of the ego in the fullness of life's experience, but also in sun-filled contemplation, is the path of art. It is one of the healthiest and most revealing and most direct; it was the last to leave its source in the temple of mystery wisdom and has not been so quickly buried as has the path of religion by the passion of the church for power or the path of science by the rigidity of thought born out of the materialistic age. For these three paths once more to find each other, for art, science and religion once more to unite and intermingle—it was for this that Rudolf Steiner worked among us. He turned his fullest attention to each of these paths; in their living synthesis he saw the salvation of mankind. They worked together once in the ancient, holy mysteries, bringing into existence and filling with light and nourishment all the cultural epochs of the earth; in the same way they must again be brought together and reunited through the knowledge of their undivided spiritual origin.

Man must now awaken within himself a knowledge of this living and essential union. This he can do in complete freedom through careful investigation and practice, if he does not timidly close his being in the face of superior and as yet unknown powers, if he does not bow before the restraining influence of the church, nor before the authority of dogmatic science. The stages along the path have been revealed to man under the wise and entirely impersonal guidance of one who knows it and who, in conformity with the demands of our time, has not appealed to the human craving for submission and devotion but only to men's capacity for knowledge.

The first stage is study; the basis for understanding what is presented in this series of lectures is the study of spiritual science. The works of Rudolf Steiner can supply this basis for penetrating the mysteries which are the foundation of man's artistic creativity. Their impulses, acting from the super-sensible sphere, must now be led from the dullness of the subconscious into the wakefulness of ego-consciousness. Art is beginning to wither; art, too, has already choked the flow from its living spiritual source. Observation through the senses, imitation of fortuitous situations on the physical plane, over-emphasis of the personality: along these paths art has moved right away from its spiritual origin. To tie the torn threads together again, to recover the original spirit, once more to tread the lost road in freedom and the joy of knowledge with the newly-acquired forces of the awakened personality: this is the task of mankind today. It is hoped that the deep wisdom, the beauty and the strength speaking out of the words of Rudolf Steiner published in this book will be a help to this end!

A renewal of art will never be brought about by dallying with modern decadence or by compromise, but only by a return to the spiritual founts of life. How great is the responsibility of anyone who has drunk at these springs. Surely he cannot see mankind thirsting without pointing out the remedy which could restore health?

The remedy lies in unlocking the wisdom of the mysteries and presenting it to humanity in a form adapted to contemporary demands. The new initiation science must call upon man's power of thought, his sense of art and style, and also the eternal essence of his being, by summoning him to conscious alertness in all these domains.

Through words, pictures and deeds Rudolf Steiner summoned human beings to wakefulness in each of these three spheres. He has created works that give art a new orientation. He has delivered it from rigidity and brought movement into it; he has restored life to what had been strangled. Perhaps his manifold obligations in other domains would never have given him the chance to revive all the realms of art as he did, if the erection of the Goetheanum² had not demanded it of him and if the World War, by curtailing some of his other activities, had not given him the time.

In the Goetheanum, Rudolf Steiner was able to realise his living thoughts about architecture. He could entrust them to wood, the most alive of all building materials. A work of inexpressible beauty came into being, deeply affecting to the beholder by reason of the stirring force which went forth from its forms in their succession of organic developments and from the counterbalancing relations of direction—the proportions of upward movement and downward movement. Number, dimension and weight were triumphant in a triad of sweep, elevation and direction. The building stood as man, and man as building. The genesis of worlds, the genesis and deeds of mankind, the deeds of the gods were all inscribed in it; they were revealed in the waves of colour in the dome, in the organic growth of motifs in columns and architraves, in the luminous creation of the windows. Sculpture and painting passed beyond their own sphere, conquered line and were transformed into movement. Colour created form from within by virtue of its own creative soul quality. In the newly-blossoming art of eurythmy, tone and speech became movement and were made visible through the instrument of the human body. The creative forces of speech thus made visible were reflected back to the other forms of art, reviving them and kindling the fire of spiritual creativity. The inner tone of creativity was able to grasp the physical tone that moulds the air, filling it with spiritual substance and elevating it to higher spheres. Rudolf Steiner called his building the House of Speech. All forms of art, together with science and mystery wisdom, had found a home there. The synthesis of art, science and religion was once more accomplished.

Such a building cannot rise again, unless perchance it shall be granted to the individuals who executed the artistic work to transform what they have learned and experienced into another structure like it.

Otherwise a work that even by this time might have been an immense help for the spiritual development of mankind will sink back as a memory into the past, yet bearing within it a spiritual germ for a new future. The flames on the eve of the New Year 1923 have for the present destroyed a mighty impulse for progress.

The retarding powers have willed it so. They incited the mob against Rudolf Steiner and are still at work trying to blacken his memory. But the resounding clamour is impotent to destroy his spiritual work. For it is rooted too firmly in the soil of spiritual reality and in the needs of contemporary souls.

For the new building,³ the most rigid material has been employed: concrete. Like a fortress it stands, but not withdrawn in defiance. An abode for spiritual striving, it radiates over the landscape, welcoming all who desire to strive for that noblest of treasures, the knowledge of the world and of man.

The new Goetheanum does not claim to compete in form or effect in any way with its predecessor which was destroyed by fire. Nevertheless, its external form strives impressively upwards with a bold and harmonious beauty, a final gift left to us by the deceased master of the impulses of beauty. When he had created this form he laid down hammer, trowel and plumb-line and worked at the word in stillness for a little while before leaving us. The work upon the building is now being carried on by his pupils according to their gifts.

It was the master's last bequest. But they have been restricted by the hard constraint of inadequate funds; at the stubborn behest of financial insufficiency they have had to sacrifice their own intentions and often even specific directions given by the master. Involuntarily the thought arises: How different it might have been had there been sufficient funds to carry out also inside the building what would be required by the force of mystery impulses rooted in esoteric wisdom. Involuntarily again and again the thought forces it way into our minds: When and where, in what country and at what time will it be possible to erect a building to concentrate within itself and to radiate out again these eternal impulses that united every detail of the burnt Goetheanum into one world-embracing whole, bringing to expression in their forces man and the universe, microcosm and macrocosm, thus working with spiritual creativity and soul-fashioning force?

• 1. Art as Seen in. the Light of Mystery Wisdom: In the set of publications, the following eight lectures were published in six numbers: I. ‘Impulses of Transformation for the Artistic Evolution of Mankind’, 29th and 30th December 1914 (in the present volume); II. ‘The Supersensible Origin of the Artistic’, Dornach, 12th September 1920 (in Kunst und Kunsterkenntnis, Bibl. No. 271, GA 1961); III. ‘Human Utterance through Tone and Word’, Dornach, 2nd December 1922 (in Das Wesen des Musikalischen und das Tonerlebnis im Menschen, Bibl. No. 283, GA 1975); IV. ‘Truth, Beauty, and Goodness’, Dornach, 19th January 1923 (in Lebendiges Naturerkennen, Bibl. No. 220, GA 1966); V. ‘The Realisation of Tone in the Human Being’, Stuttgart 7th March 1923 and 8th March 1923 (in Bibl. No. 283, GA 1975); VI. ‘The World of the Hierarchies and the World of Tone’, Dornach, 16th March 1923 (in Bibl. No. 222, GA 1976). Numbers VII, VIII and IX followed later with Rudolf Steiner's GA291/English/RSPC1935, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1983.
• 2. The first Goetheanum, destroyed by fire on New Year's night, 1922–3.
• 3. The second Goetheanum, now the centre of the General Anthroposophical Society.

Instruction session without location or date given

The “Iron Sea” refers to pure, untroubled human nature. The three treacherous companions are doubt, superstition and the illusion of the personal self. By descending into earthly incarnation, man came to doubt his spiritual nature, to have false mental images. That is superstition, for example the idea that he is a being standing alone, not part of the great whole, the illusion of the personal self. These three traitors destroy the originally pure human nature. The fire of passions springs from it.

From the 22nd lesson in Cologne, December 22, 1907.

The Iron Sea, if it had come about, would have made the Earth a transparent, clear planet. Now the three companions have destroyed the casting. Doubt, superstition and belief in the personal self have clouded the casting. In the human etheric body, there are three points - heart, spleen and in the back - that are particularly significant. The one at the back means the Iron Sea in the microcosm. In the case of a person who still has doubts, superstition and belief in the personal self, this point is clouded, traversed by clouds, like a smoky topaz. Our task is to transform it into a radiant, clear one.

Cain, in the center of the earth, still possesses the pure divine Elohim power. Hiram Abiff descends to him and receives the original creator word, written on the golden triangle.

Place and date of these remarks unknown, according to a transcript by Mathilde Scholl, dated Landin, August 31, 1906.

Hiram Abiff could not create the Iron Sea until man had passed through the fire of passion, until he had not completely descended into the earthly fire. Until then, the Sea of Bronze could not become firm. It had to remain billowing, for if one wanted to solidify it in this way, it would have to burst. Passion, having become power, is the destructive principle that leads everything to ruin. But after Hiram Abiff had plunged into the fire, into the embers of the Sea of Bronze, and emerged from it again, bringing with him the Golden Triangle - the higher principles of wisdom, beauty and power (Manas, Budhi, Atma) - he was able to lead the Sea of Bronze to completion. The Iron Sea is the fusion of the lower and higher principles in physical existence, in the mineral round. It could only be fully restored after a complete descent into the mineral world, into the solidification of the physical.

The Iron Sea is the solidification of the astral. The astral was not allowed to solidify as it was before the physical solidified. By passing through the solidified physical, the astral was so purified that it could emerge pure afterwards, and only then was it allowed to solidify. Only then can the word be found that stands on the golden triangle. For only when the astral has been purified can the word arise anew, the etheric body in its new form, expressing the Christ principle.

Man's education is one of freedom. In order for the I to dwell in man and develop his individuality, it was necessary for it to take hold of a part of all the world's forces. That is why the development of egoism was a necessity from the middle of the Lemurian race onwards. Until the development of egoism, man had no kama of his own; all kama was only present cosmically. After the division into two sexes, the Kamic entered into the individual human being; the superfluous Kama was excreted in the moon. Now the development of Kama took place in the individual human being. The more the human being solidified physically, the more concentrated the Kama became in him, because he now increasingly confronted the outside world, increasingly learning to distinguish his ego from the rest of the world. He finally forgot that he was part of the rest of the world and therefore treated his environment as an enemy. (Cain kills his brother Abel.) From then on, he wanted to have everything for himself, to take possession of everything, because he felt the great difference between what he himself was and what did not belong to him, what belonged to his environment. This is how the power of Kama was taken to extremes.

While, on the one hand, man became more and more violent in his greed for possessions, he had to learn, on the other hand, that he cannot possess everything. He had to learn to renounce many things. He had to learn that in this way, as he wanted it - outwardly - he could never take possession of everything, and through death he was shown that even if he can apparently take possession of many things, he must renounce everything again when death tears him away from the physical world. So man learned resignation. Through many lives he had to learn the difference between the transitory and the eternal. He had to learn that all external possessions are impermanent. Then he looked for the imperishable, which he found in the higher worlds. Thus he learned to direct his desire to the imperishable. He learned to renounce external possessions. Now he began to build himself up inwardly. But as long as there was still any desire for his own possessions, he could not bring this work of inner development to completion.

First, the power of the kamasutra had to be pushed to the extreme by entering into mineral solidification, but then, precisely by passing through the mineral-objective world, it had to be purified again and emerge as selfless human love. Thus, cosmic warmth became individual warmth, individual power. This is initially found in devotion. Devotion brings order to unbridled passion. It shapes it into harmony and beauty. Devotion was the missing beam on the Temple of Solomon that was to connect the two columns. It had to be found before the temple could be built. Only after man had attained piety, devotion to the Higher, could humanity be led to perfection. He could only learn this devotion to the Higher by passing through the consciousness of the ego and by solidifying it in the physical world. Piety also leads him to find the Master Word, which leads him to perfection. After he has brought his astral body into harmony through devotion, he has attained the Master Word, the wisdom with which he transforms his etheric body into an eternal one, into the sounding word, which is productive.

Man was given the columns of Boaz (strength, physical body) and Jakin (wisdom, etheric body) and also the means to achieve his own perfection (astral body Kama - the fire).

He had to learn to work with fire: outside in nature with physical fire and inside in man with the soul fire (Kama). Outside, with the help of physical fire, he had to work with the mineral kingdom, shaping it into harmony, into a work of art; in the soul, with the help of the power of Kama, he had to develop first self-awareness and then inner harmony, devotion, enthusiasm (to be in God), to dive completely into passion and then emerge again like Hiram Abiff with the golden triangle, the higher forces. Only after he had transformed passion into devotion within and fire into beauty without, could he connect the columns Jakin and Boas. That is, he could develop himself up to wisdom and strength, to Budhi and Atma, because he had worked through Kama manasically. He attains wisdom by purifying his kama through devotion. In this way, his kama becomes pure human love and, on the other hand, he transforms it into enthusiasm by permeating his manas, the power of knowledge, with the purified kama. Thus, the kama is illuminated by manas, and the warmth of the kama moves into the manasic.

Thus the crossbeam laid across the two columns leads on the one hand to higher wisdom (Budhi) through piety, love, Christ, and on the other hand to creative power (Atma) through knowledge, enthusiasm, Lucifer. Thus the two columns of the temple are connected.

The transformation of the mineral kingdom into an outer temple goes hand in hand with the transformation of the surging astral body into harmonious human love. Thus the iron sea is built in the outer and in the inner. The mineral world will ultimately become an expression of human love. Love within, beauty without: that will become the image of the world.

The following is added to the above notes under the heading “Supplement”:

The three companions of Hiram Abiff are the three lower principles; Hiram Abiff is the I. These three must help him, but they must not become masters. They destroy the iron sea. The three lower principles are initially an obstacle for man in building up the higher, in developing the ego to freedom. Hiram Abiff plunges down into the interior of the earth by throwing himself into the sea of fire. He descends through the kamic fire into the physical. There he is endowed with the three higher principles: the Golden Triangle. But when he comes up again, he is attacked and killed by the three companions. This represents the struggle that the three lower principles wage against the higher ones in man. The I is the East through which the higher principles enter. (Like the sun, they rise in man.) The three companions come from the three other quarters of heaven.

Before he dies, Hiram Abiff writes the Master Key on the Golden Triangle and sinks it into a deep well. He thus points to the time when man will have purified his astral body to such an extent that the iron sea is fixed, that passion rests and his physical and astral body then forms the solid ground on which he can stand in his further development. At the time of Hiram Abiff, just after the emergence of the ego with self-consciousness, when the environment became objective, the Golden Triangle could not yet be erected over the Iron Sea. This could only happen after the complete purification of the astral body.

It may appear peculiar that spiritual science deals with such a topic like the question of women's rights, an urgent question that almost touches the issues of the day. For spiritual science commonly looks for the deepest riddles of the human existence and the world. One takes the view in many circles, which deal with spiritual science, or in such circles, which have heard something of the spirit of this worldview, that spiritual science is said to be something that does not care about the issues of the day, about the interests of the immediate life. One believes—namely the one reproaches that and the other credits it highly for it—that spiritual science should deal only with the big questions of the eternal that it should hover over the everyday events. One regards it as something impractical in the good and in the bad sense. However, if spiritual science should fulfil a task and mission in our time, it must intervene in that which moves the heart, and then it must be able to take a stand on those questions, which influence our everyday thinking and our everyday striving and hope. It must have a say in something that takes place in our time. Why should it not be that today the questions, which come as near to the human soul as the question of women's rights, which should occupy us today, why should it not be that a worldview assesses the big problems of existence? One often criticises spiritual science just for this rightly that it has not found the way to the real life praxis. Nothing would be more wrong, if spiritual science led more and more into an ascetic direction, in a direction hostile to life. On the contrary, it will prove itself establishing a real basis of the life praxis. It must not live in the cloud-cuckoo-land, it must not lose itself in mere abstractions, and it must have something to say to the present human beings.

Just as we have spoken here about the social question, we also want to speak about the question of the women's rights from the great cultural point of view, from the spiritual-scientific point of view. Of course, nobody should imagine that spiritual science speaks about the question of women's rights in the same way as the day-to-day politics or journalism. However, one must not believe that only that is practical which signifies a kind of parish-pump politics.

Somebody has always turned out to be a real practitioner who is able to look out at the immediate present. Who was the practitioner at that time when in the last century the postage stamp was invented and introduced in life which reshaped our whole system of communications, our whole social life since that time? It is somewhat more than fifty years ago. At that time, the idea of this institution whose practical relevance nobody doubts today did not come from a practitioner. The Englishman Hill (Rowland H., 1795-1879) was no postal practitioner. Someone who was a practitioner said these witty words: one cannot believe that this institution can cause such a big reversal in the system of communications; however, if it were the case, the post-office buildings would no longer be sufficient for the transportation of the letters.

Another example. When the first railway should be built from Berlin to Potsdam, the general postmaster Nagler (Karl Ferdinand Friedrich von N., 1770-1846) said, if people absolutely want to pour their money down the drain, they should prefer to do this directly. I let two stagecoaches drive daily, and nobody sits in them.—You know the other thing that happened in the Bavarian Medical Board: there one asked the learnt gentlemen because of unhealthy effects whether it is good for the nervous system if one builds railways. The gentlemen said that it would be impractical to the highest degree, because this would cause serious impairments of the nervous system.

This as an illustration of the relation of the practitioners, if it concerns the questions of the day, to those who look out with a more farsighted look at the future. The latter notorious idealists who are not stuck in that which is usual since time immemorial are the real practitioners. From this point of view, the spiritual-scientific worldview also appears as an engine for the practise of many questions and of ours. Hence, somebody who treats the questions from a higher point of view may accept such a reproach quietly and remember the other examples where people who believe to have the monopoly of practise judged in such a way.

Few people deny that the question of women's rights is one of the biggest questions of our present civilisation, because this has become a fact today. There are opponents of certain views in the question of women's rights, but nobody denies that it exists. Nevertheless, if we look back at times not so long ago, even important people regarded the question of women's rights as something fantastic, as something that had to be suppressed by any available means.

One example: I would like to remind you of the explanations of a significant man, the anatomist Albert (Eduard A., 1841-1900, Bohemian surgeon), who vehemently opposed the licensing of the women to the academic professions 25 years ago. He wanted to prove from the point of view of his anatomical-physiological science that it is impossible that women get licensing to the academic professions that they would be able to fill the medical profession one day. With the big authority of the physical science, one cannot be astonished at all that one gives those credit for a judgement, who were in the know of the human being because of their scientific views. Still recently, the witty pamphlet has appeared here in Germany, On the Physiological Mental Deficiency of the Woman. This pamphlet is due to a man who is, however, by no means a quite unimportant physiologist, Möbius (Paul Julius M., 1853-1907, neurologist), who has said some good things, who has not disgraced himself but his physiological science, while he made various important persons of the world-historical development of the last time like Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche appear as pathological phenomena. He did that so absurdly and radically that one would have to ask with every genius of the spiritual life: where is insanity in him, actually?—Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, they all are treated from the point of view of psychiatry, of the psychological pathology.

If one goes deeper into these matters, they all fall in a category that is characterised by the example of a famous naturalist who wanted to deduce the minor talent of the woman from the lower weight of the female brain some time ago. It is no fable: the man stated that the size of the mind depends on the size of the brain, and that on average women have smaller brains than men have. It really happened that one applied the method of this scholar to him. One weighed his brain after his death, and it came to light that he had just an abnormally small brain, a much smaller brain than those women had whom he had just regarded as inferior because of their lower cerebral weight. It would be somewhat malicious if one tried to examine such a pamphlet once from the psycho-pathological point of view, like this about the physiological mental deficiency of the woman, and if one tried to use the result against the concerning author as against the professor Bischoff (Theodor von B., 1807-1882, physician, biologist).

Thus, you see that the question of women's rights does not exactly testify that those were very judicious who opposed it. The question of women's rights is much more comprehensive than the question of the licensing of the women to the learned professions, than the educational question of the women; the question of women's rights encloses an economic, social, and psychological aspect and still some other matters. However, just the educational question of the women has shown wonderful fruits in the facts. Almost all theoretical judgements have been disproved by the practise in this field.

Bit by bit the women have ground out the licensing of the most professions against the opinions of the men's world, to those of the lawyers, doctors, philologists et cetera. The women took up these professions under substantially more unfavourable conditions than the men. One must only take into consideration, under which unfavourable conditions the women recently have approached the universities. It is easy with the normal pre-educational background; however, the women came with an insufficient preparatory training. They have overcome all difficulties in a large part not only with tremendous diligence but also with comprehensive abilities. They were in no way inferior to the men, concerning sobriety or diligence, or the mental abilities, so that the practise has solved this matter completely differently than some people theoretically imagined twenty to thirty years ago. Various professors, led by their prejudices, denied the women the access to the universities. Today many women with completed professional training know what life is about and they are as judicious and reasonable as the men are.

However, this only lights up the external situation, and it just shows us that we have to look deeper into the human being, into the being of the woman if we want to understand the whole matter. For there is nobody today who is not touched anyhow by the importance of this question. Even if the woman has ground out the licensing to the learned professions, also to numerous other occupations, even if in practice a big part of the question of women's rights is solved: if we want to advance consciously and reasonably, if we want to discuss this question in all directions, we have to look deeper into the human being.

What has one not spoken about the difference between man and woman! You can read it already everywhere in short overviews how differently one assessed the difference between man and woman and how one wanted to form a view about this question from these assessments. A lot has been written about the psychological aspect of the question of women's rights. There is no better book about this aspect, as far as a non-theosophist has written it, than that of a spirited woman who is generally active in the present literature: To Critics of Femininity by Rosa Mayreder (1858-1938, Austrian author, feminist). You can find the judgements somewhere else, let only some of them pass by. There we have a man Lombroso (Cesare L., 1835-1909, Italian physician, criminologist). He characterises the woman in such a way: her feeling of devotion and dependence is in the centre of her mental character. George Egerton (pen name of Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright, 1859-1945, feminist) says that any woman, considering a man impartially, looks at him as a big child and that just from that her domineering nature comes, so that the domineering nature moves into the centre of the woman's soul more and more. A great naturalist, Virchow (Rudolf V., 1821-1902), says that, if one studies the woman externally physiologically, one finds gentleness, mildness, and calmness at the bottom of her being. Havelock Ellis (1859-1939, physician), a good expert of the matter as well, says that the characteristic of the female soul is a choleric temperament, initiative, and bravado. Möbius finds the characteristic of the woman's mind in conservatism. Being conservative is the real life element of the woman's soul. Let us confront that with the judgement of an old, good soul expert, Hippel (Theodor Gottlieb H., 1741-1796, author, On Improving the Status of Women, 1792). He says that the woman is the real revolutionist of humanity. Go to the people, there you find a quite peculiar, but quite popular judgement about the relation between reason, passion, and soul with man and woman. On the other side, have a look at Nietzsche's judgement. He says that the woman preferably has reason, the man soul and passion. Compare this with the popular judgement, it is just the opposite.

We could talk a lot that way and register those judgements on one side, which attribute all passive, all weak qualities to the woman, on the other side those judgements, which just say the opposite. Nevertheless, certainty is lacking if so different judgements are possible.

Also the natural sciences have dealt a lot with the question and they are held in high esteem. However, also the statements of the naturalists contradict themselves concerning the real basic character of the woman. If we go over from the naturalists and psychologists to the history of civilisation and adhere to that which is always said: the man is the actually creative one, the woman is more the companion, the reproducing one, then such a judgement, would be impaired by the fact that one considers too short an interval. One needs only to look around a little bit with those peoples who show old cultural leftovers, or with primitive tribes, and one needs only to pursue the developmental history of humanity, then one sees that there were times and that there are even today such peoples where the woman participates in the male workings most eminently.

Briefly speaking, the assessments fluctuate in every direction. It must appear even more conspicuous to us that the woman of a nation differs from the man of the same nation much less than the woman of this nation from the woman of another nation. We can conclude from this that we are not allowed to say: man and woman, but that beside the gender character possibly something may be that is much more important in the human society than the gender character and that is independent of this gender character. Just if one looks impartially at the human being, one can normally differentiate what is necessarily connected with the relations of the genders and what goes beyond these relations and points to quite different regions. Indeed, a materialistic view of the world and the human being which at first only sees the palpable and obvious, sees the big physiological differences of man and woman, of course. Somebody, who is stuck in this materialistic view, simply overlooks what is much bigger and more drastic than the gender differences; he overlooks the individuality that goes beyond the gender, beyond that which is dependent on the gender. It must be the task of a worldview directed to the spirit to consider the human being correctly.

Before we consider the question of women's rights from this point of view, we want to present something to us of that which the question of women's rights constitutes today. One speaks of a question of women's rights in the general, but also this is an impossible generalisation like the concept of the woman. One should not speak, actually, of the question of women's rights in the general, because this question changes according to the different social classes of humanity. Does the same question of women's rights exist possibly in the lower classes, in the classes of the labourers, as in the educated ones? The lower classes, the real labourers, strive with all available means for getting the women from the factory and from the trade to give them to the family. The higher classes strive for exactly the opposite. They strive for the possibility that the women in the families get the possibility to work in the public life. This is something of the social aspect of the question of women's rights.

Of course, the general social question of women's rights exists besides which demands the same rights for the women in political and cultural respect as the men have them. People have the view today that one speaks, actually, of matters that would have to result from the nature of humanity itself. However, one does not think that the life of humanity changes much faster than at the first glance. A man who dealt from his political point of view also with the question of women's rights, Naumann (Friedrich N., 1860-1919, Protestant pastor and liberal politician), endeavoured once to study the negotiations of the St. Paul's Church of 1848 concerning this matter in which many human rights were discussed. One debated the natural rights of the human beings back and forth. However, he could nowhere find that these rights should be applied to men and women in the same way. This crossed nobody's mind. The question of women's rights came to this direction only in the second half of the 19th century. Hence, it probably seems justified to put the other question: where from does it result that this aspect of the question of women's rights has only been rolled up in our time?—Let us realise this completely.

One shows the question of women's rights from the male and female view in such a way, as if only now the woman must get a significant influence on all areas of life. In certain respects, the arguments reveal a big short-sightedness, because you must ask yourselves, did the women not have any influence in former times? Were they always enslaved beings only? It would be a lack of knowledge if one wanted to argue that way. Let us look at the Renaissance age and consult one of the most common books, Burckhardt's (Jacob B., 1818-1897, Swiss historian of art) book about the Renaissance (The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 1860). There we see which deep influence the women had got, for example, on the whole spiritual life of Italy, how the women stood in the foreground of this spiritual life, how they were equal to the men and played great roles. Finally, would one have spoken about the women's lack of influence in the first half of the 19th century compared with such a personality as Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833, writer) was? She would have been highly surprised that one raises such a subject. She would not have understood at all how one gets around to thinking in such a way.

But many a man who exercises his general voting right today or even debates in the parliament and delivers long speeches is really a mere nobody if one considers the whole cultural process which the above-mentioned woman caused. Who studies the spiritual life of the first half of the 19th century and sees, which influence this woman had on the men of the 19th century is no longer tempted to say that the woman was a being without influence at that time. The matter is simply based on the fact that the views have changed. At that time, one did not believe that one needs a general voting right that one has to debate in the parliaments that one has to study at the university to have great influence on the cultural process. One had other views in any direction. I do not say that with a conservative intention, but as evidence of the fact that the whole question is a product of our present civilisation and can be put only today as it is put, and can be put only in all areas of life today, not only in the field of education, of the higher spiritual education.

Have a look at the relation of man and woman in former times when still other economic conditions existed. Have a look at the farmer and his wife in former centuries. One cannot say that the farm woman had less rights than the farmer, or a lower sphere of activity. She had to care for a certain realm and he for another. The same applied to the craft. What has become, actually, the question of women's rights today in the working classes has originated because during the last centuries, and in particular in the last century our civilisation has become a decidedly male civilisation. The machine age is a product of the male civilisation, and simply the way of this civilisation limits the activity of the woman more than the former economic life limited it. The woman does not fit into the factory, and completely different calamities result from it compared with the conditions when she was occupied in the farmyard, at home or in the old craft as a manager or co-worker.

Also in relation to the learned professions, everything has changed in our whole life, in our view. The whole esteem of the learned professions has become another one. It is not yet long ago that that which one understands today as a learned profession was more or less a kind of a higher craft only. It was a way to be professionally active in the law, medicine, and it would not have crossed anybody's mind before relatively short time to derive a kind of religious worldview from that which medicine, law, natural sciences offered. It is the special science of that which is investigated in the laboratory, which has become bit by bit the domain of the men from which a higher worldview is attained. Against this, once religion and philosophy hovered like a spirit over all matters that were done in the faculties, and a higher education was only to be found in them.

The actually human, that which spoke to the soul, that which spoke about his longing for eternity, that which gave the human being strength and assurance in his life that was common to man and woman. This arose from another spring than from the laboratory or from the physiological investigation. One could come without any university education to the highest heights of philosophical and religious education. One was able to do this any time, also as a woman. Only because the materialistic age has made the so-called positive sciences with their so-called facts the basis of the higher problems, a train of the heart, a longing of the soul had to drive the woman to look herself into the secrets, which the microscope, the telescope, the investigations of physiology and biology reveal to us. As long as one did not think that anything about life and immortality could be decided by the microscope, as long as one knew that this truth must be taken from completely different sources, such a desire for scientific studies could not arise as it is today. We must hold this against ourselves that the direction of our time has produced this drive for the university education, and that generally the question of women's rights is put in the whole way of the civilisation of our time.

However, a movement almost disregarded up to now, the spiritual-scientific view, opposes everything that this new age has brought, that is founded on an only material base. The spiritual-scientific worldview has to solve the vital question and has to co-operate in all cultural currents and cultural attempts of the future. One cannot misjudge this worldview more than believing that it is nothing but the chimera of some daydreamers. It is the result of the spiritual research of those who know the needs and the longing of our time best of all and take it most seriously. Only those who want to know nothing about the needs of our time can keep off this eminently practical world movement intervening in all questions. Spiritual science is nothing that indulges in an infertile criticism, nothing conservative. It considers it as something beneficiary and reckons that materialism has appeared last century.

It was a necessity that the old religious feelings and traditions lost their validity compared with the claims of the natural sciences. Spiritual science understands how it happened that the physiologist and the biologist deny immortality even if he also does not concede it. That had to happen this way. However, humanity will never be able to live without looking up, without knowledge of the real supersensible spiritual things. A short time only one will be able to go on working as it has come about today with the specified science and with that which often comes from this direction as a religious result or non-result. However, the time will come when one feels that the springs of the spirit must be disclosed in life. Spiritual science is the outpost of this struggle for development of the real spiritual springs of humanity. On a much broader base spiritual science is able to tell humanity again about the being of the soul, about that which towers above the transient and passing. On a broader base than it ever was the case in the popular world, spiritual science will announce what gives assurance, strength, courage and perseverance in life what can light up those questions which occupy the everyday life and are to be solved not only from the material side.

It is a peculiar chance—some will understand it—that at the starting point of the theosophical movement a woman stood, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. One experienced the incredible example, just here, that a woman with the most comprehensive sense, with the most urgent power and with mental energy composed writings compared with which really everything that the intellectual culture has otherwise produced is a trifle. Believe nothing of that which you can read about so-called esoteric doctrines, which insights of the spiritual world you read possibly in Isis Unveiled or in the so-called Secret Doctrine by Blavatsky. Believe nothing of that, but consult the book and ask yourselves how many spirits of the present have known anything more powerful about so many matters than Blavatsky did. The two immense volumes of the Secret Doctrine give information about almost all fields of the spiritual life, about ancient cultures, ancient religions, about all possible branches of the natural sciences, about the social life, about astronomy, physiology. May that be wrong, which you read therein, but I ask you who is able to say even wrong things about all these fields proficiently and to show with it that he has familiarised himself emphatically with all that? You need not only consider the correctness, but also the comprehensiveness of the mind which you cannot deny, then you have the example of a woman who has shown not only in any branch of the intellectual culture, but in the whole spiritual life what the female mind can perform concerning a higher worldview. Even if one reads Max Müller's (1823-1900, Orientalist) religious-historical treatises and compares their contents with the comprehensive of the Secret Doctrine, one sees how much the latter towers over the first. Thus, it is a peculiar chance that a woman stands at the starting point of this theosophical movement. One may explain that just from those matters which have also shown us the question of women's rights as a birth from our present spiritual life.

If we look deeper into the spiritual development of the human beings, then that, which can, astonish us otherwise, may appear to us as a necessity in the history of thought. However, to be able to do this in fertile way, we have to go into the human nature briefly. We want to outline the human nature with a few brief strokes.

The spiritual-scientific research, theosophy, regards that which materialism and the everyday worldview know of the human being only as a part of the human being. I can only give you some outlines today, not daydreams, but matters that are as certain as mathematical judgements for the mathematicians. What the usual science knows of the human being is his physical body. This physical body has the same physical and chemical forces, principles, and substances, which one finds outdoors in the so-called lifeless nature. The forces that form the dead stone outdoors and the “life” in the stone are the same in the physical body of the human being.

However, the spiritual-scientific worldview still sees additional members of the human nature, at first the second member that the human being has together with all plants. Modern science already speaks speculating about something that spiritual science aims at, about a particular life principle, because the reasonable scientists have overcome the laws of materialism, which still applied to many people fifteen years ago. Nevertheless, the modern physical research will only extrapolate this second human member speculatively. However, the theosophical spiritual research refers to the testimony of those who have higher intuitive faculties who relate to the usual average human being as a sighted person relates to a blind one. It refers to the testimony of such persons who know this second human member as something real, as something that exists. Someone who knows nothing does not have the right to judge, as little as the blind person has a right to judge about colours.

Any talking of the limits of the human knowledge is nonsense. One should ask, is the human being not able to rise to a higher level of knowledge? May that not be real which one calls spiritual eyes and ears? There have always been human beings who developed certain slumbering abilities and who can thereby see more than others can. Their testimony must apply exactly the same way as the testimony of those who look through the microscope. How many people have seen what the evolution theory teaches? I would like to ask you, how many human beings have seen that about which they talk? How many people, for example, have clear proofs of the development of the human embryo? If they introspected, they would see what a belief controls them. If it is a justified belief, that belief is also justified, which rests on the testimony of the initiates who speak about their spiritual experience.

We speak of the second member of the human being. We find the same in the Christian religion with Paul, who called it spiritual body. We speak about the etheric or life body. A certain sum of chemical and physical forces would never crystallise to life if they were not formed in particular by that which penetrates every living body as a life body or etheric body. The human being has it in common with the whole plant and animal realms. However, a plant does not have impulses, desires, and passions. A plant feels no joy and sorrow, because one cannot speak of any sensation if one sees that a being only reacts to something external. One can speak of sensation only if the external stimulus is reflected inside, if it is there as an internal experience. This part of modern physiology, which speaks of a sensory body of the plant, only shows a tremendous dilettantism in the view of such concepts.

Where the animal life begins, where joy and sorrow, where impulses, desires and passions begin, one speaks of the third member of the human being, of the astral body. The human being has it in common with the whole animal realm. Now there is one thing that reaches within the human being beyond the animal realm and makes him the crown of creation. We realise it best considering it subtly.

There is a name within the German language, which differs from all other names. Everybody can say “table” to a table. However, one name cannot be applied that way. Nobody can say to me “I”, so that it would signify me. “I” can never sound to our ears if it signifies me. One felt this always as something essential. Even in the popular older religions, one found that there is an important point of the soul. Where the soul starts feeling the divine in itself, where it starts saying in this dialogue with itself to itself “I,” speaking with itself in such a way as from the outside cannot be spoken, there the divine being of the soul begins its development in the human being. The god in the human being announces himself there. The old Hebrew secret doctrine had felt this. Therefore, one called this name the inexpressible name of God that means, “I am the I-am.”

According to the Old Testament, the name signifies the announcement of the godhead in the human soul. Therefore, immense emotions and sensations penetrated the crowd when the priest announced this name of the godhead in the soul: Jahveh.

This is the fourth member in the human being where his external nature ends and his divinity begins. We have now seen how the human being is led as it were by external forces up to the “I”, the ego. There he stands, and from there he starts working in himself. This ego works down into the three other parts of the human being. Realise the difference between the human beings from this point of view. Compare a savage to a European average person, to a noble idealist, possibly Schiller (1759-1805, German poet) or Francis of Assisi (1181/1182-1226, Italian Catholic friar and preacher).

If the astral body is the bearer of desire and passion, we have to say, the astral body of the savage is surrounded by the powers of nature; however, the European average person has worked something into his astral body.

He says of certain passions and desires to himself: you are not allowed to follow them.—He has reshaped his astral body. Such a personality like Schiller transformed it even more, even more such a personality that is not related to the passions like Francis of Assisi who was completely purified and who was master of all impulses and desires in his astral body. Thus, you can say that the astral body of someone who worked on himself consists of two parts. One part is given by nature, by divinities; the other part is that which he himself has produced therein. We call this second part, transformed by the ego, the spirit self or manas.

Now there are matters that go deeper into the human nature where the ego works only in the astral body. As long as you tame your vices with the mere principles of morality or law, with logical principles, you work on your astral body. However, there are other cultural means, namely the religious impulses of humanity by which the ego works on itself. What comes from religion is a working engine of the spiritual life, is more than external principles of law and morality. If the ego works because of religious impulses, it works into the etheric body.

Also, if the ego is merged in the consideration of a piece of art and receives an inkling that behind the sensuous existence anything everlasting, anything concealed may be embodied, then the artistic image works not only in the astral body, but the human being improves and purifies the etheric body. If you were able to observe as practical occultist how an opera by Wagner (Richard W., 1813-1883, German composer) works on the different human members, it would persuade you that the vibrations of music deeply penetrate the etheric body.

The etheric body is also the bearer of everything that is more or less remaining in the human nature. You have to realise which difference is between the development of the etheric body and the astral body. Let us remember our own lives. Think about what you have learnt since your eighth year; this is very much. Consider the contents of your soul: principles, ideas et cetera. These are transformations of your astral bodies. Now think how little customs, temperaments, and abilities of most human beings change in general.

If anybody has a bad temper, this became apparent early on and has changed a little. If one was a forgetful child, he is a forgetful person even today. One can use a small example of this disparate development. This development behaves in such a way, as if the changes of the astral body are shown by the minute hand and the changes of the etheric body by the hour hand of the clock. What the human being changes in his etheric body, what the ego has made of the etheric body, one calls buddhi or—if one wants to use an English word—life spirit.

However, there is an even higher development, which the chela experiences, because one becomes another human being in the etheric body. If the usual human being learns, he learns with the astral body. If the student of the esoteric science learns, he becomes another human being. There his habits and his temperament must change. For this makes the difference that allows us to behold into other worlds. His etheric body is gradually transformed there.

It is the most difficult for the human being to learn to work into his physical body. One can also become master of the blood circulation; one can get influence on the nervous system, influence on the respiratory process et cetera. One can also learn that. If the human being is able to work into his physical body and learns to be connected with the universe, then he develops his atman. This is the highest human member, and because it is associated with the development of the respiratory process, one says atman (Sanskrit, German atmen = breathe). Then the spirit man is found in the physical human being.

Thus, we have seven human members, just as the rainbow has seven colours and the scale has seven tones. So the human being consists of the physical body, secondly of the etheric body, thirdly of the astral body, in fourth place of the ego, fifthly of manas, sixthly of buddhi, seventhly of atman. When the human being arrives at the highest level of development, when he makes his physical body, then we have the spirit man.

Concerning our today's question, we have to look closer at this being, at this nature of the human being. There a riddle of the relations between man and woman is solved out of the human nature in a peculiar way. Just esotericism or this intimate consideration of the human nature leads into the physical body, into the etheric body, into the astral body, into the ego and into that which the ego has made.

With every human being—this is a fact—the etheric body is dyadic, and the etheric body of the man as it lives among us presents itself with female qualities, and the etheric body of the woman with male qualities. Plenty of facts in our life are explained if we know that in the man something is of the female nature, and just that which we have discussed as dependent on the etheric body has more female nature with the man and more male nature with the woman. Hence, one can understand that certain traits can appear with the man. In truth, we never have in the physical material human being something else before us than a physical expression of a complete personality. The human soul builds the body as the magnet has two poles. It forms a male part and a female part, once one part as a physical body, the other time as an etheric body. Hence, the woman shows apparently male traits connected with the etheric body: devotion, bravery, and love; the man shows rather female traits sometimes. However, with reference to all traits which are connected more to the physical body the consequence of the gender appears in the external life.

Therefore, it must seem explicable that we have in every human being—if we want to look at him completely—an appearance before us with two parts, an open material one and a concealed one, the spiritual one. Somebody is only an entire human being who is able to connect inside a female nice character with external masculinity. The greatest spirits, in particular the mystics, always felt this in our past cultural life.

This is an important point. The man played a great role, because materialism pushed to the external civilisation. This external civilisation is a male civilisation because it should be a material civilisation. However, we have to be clear to ourselves that also in the world-historical evolution the culture epochs take turns, and that this one-sided male civilisation must find its complement by that which lives in every man. One felt this just in the time of the male civilisation. Hence, the mystics if they spoke about the deepest of their souls also called this soul something female. That is why everywhere you find the comparison of the soul with the woman receptive to the world, and on that, Goethe's saying is based in the Chorus Mysticus (Faust II):

All that is transitory
is only a symbol;
what seems unachievable
here becomes fact;
what's indescribable
here it is done;
the eternally-female
draws us upwards.

It is nonsense to interpret the saying trivially. In the sense of Goethe and of true mysticism one interprets it correctly saying, someone who has known something of noble spiritual culture has also pointed to the female character of the soul. Just from the male culture the saying originated, “the eternally-female draws us upwards.” Thus, one imagined the macrocosm, the universe, as male and the soul as female, which is fertilized by the universal wisdom.

What is this peculiar attitude, the logics, developing in the man for millennia? If we want to look into its depth, we have to see something female, the imagination, which the male principle has to fertilise.

Thus, we see the higher nature of the human being, if we consider what outgrows the gender difference. Man and woman have to regard their physical bodies as tools, which enable them to be active as a totality in the physical world in one or other direction. The more the human beings feel the spiritual in themselves, the more the body becomes the instrument, however, the more they also learn to understand the human being, if they look into the depth of the soul.

Indeed, this gives you no solution of the question of women's rights, but a perspective. You cannot solve this question with trends and ideals! You have to solve it in the reality, creating that soul image, that soul constitution, which makes it possible that man and woman understand each other from the view of the totality of human nature. As long as the human being is prejudiced in the material, a fertile consideration of the question of women's rights is not possible.

Therefore, you must not be surprised that in an age which has born the male culture the spiritual culture, which began in the theosophical movement, should almost be born from a woman. Thus, this theosophical or spiritual-scientific movement will turn out to be eminently practical. It will guide humanity to overcome the gender in itself and to rise to a point of view where spirit-self and atman are which are transpersonal and beyond the genders, the purely human. Theosophy does not speak about the general humanisation, but about the general human, so that it is recognised gradually. Thus, a similar consciousness awakes in the woman gradually as it has awoken in the man during the male culture.

As someone of those who have deeply spoken about the soul said: the eternally female draws us upwards, those will understand spiritual-scientifically who feel the other side of the human being as a woman in themselves. They speak about it in the correct practical sense, about the eternally-male in the female nature, and then true understanding and true mental solution of the question of women's rights is possible. For the external nature is a physiognomy of the soul life. We have nothing else in our external culture than that which the human beings have created what they have transformed in machines out of their impulses, in industrial matters, in the law. As the soul develops, the external institutions develop. However, an age that stuck to the external physiognomy wanted to build barriers between man and woman. An age which does no longer stick to the external, to the material but has the knowledge of the inside beyond the genders, wants to improve and embellish the sexual, without wanting to crawl away to the wasteland, to asceticism or to deny the sexual, and wants to live in that which is beyond the genders. Then one will understand what brings the true solution of the question of women's rights because it offers the true solution of the everlasting human question at the same time. One will no longer say when one speaks of things of the everyday life: the eternally female draws us up, one will also no longer say, the eternally male draws us upwards, one will say with deep understanding: the eternally-human draws us upwards.

At the close of yesterday's exposition we indicated the intention to consider next the cardinal issue within the Christ impulse: the Death on the Cross and its significance. But before turning to a delineation of the death of Christ, and thus to the climax of this study cycle, we must discuss today the true meaning and significance of much that we find in the John Gospel itself, as well as its relation to what the other Gospels offer. In the last few days we have been endeavoring to comprehend the Christ impulse and to establish it as an actual event in human evolution by means of quite a different source: by clairvoyant reading of the akashic record; and in a sense we referred only to those passages in the Gospels which appear to confirm what clairvoyant research justifies us in stating as truths.

Today, in order to follow up our studies, we shall consider the John Gospel itself and characterize this important document of mankind from a certain aspect. We said yesterday that the theological research of our time, in as far as it is affected by materialism, can find no points of contact with this John Gospel, is unable to see its historical value; but regarded with the vision of spiritual science this Gospel proves to be one of the most marvelous documents possessed by the human race. It is not too much to say that not only as a religious document but—to use a profane expression—among all purely literary works in existence it is one of the greatest. Let us now approach it from this literary angle.

From the very first chapters—if rightly understood and if one knows what all lies concealed in the words—this Gospel of St. John shows a rounded beauty of style equal to any in the world, although a superficial study does not reveal this fact. What superficial observation discloses first is that in enumerating the miracles the writer of the John Gospel, whose back-ground we now know, mentions precisely seven up to the Lazarus event proper. (The significance of the number seven will be treated in the following lectures.) What were these seven signs?

1. The sign in connection with the Marriage in Cana in Galilee.

2. The sign given in the healing of the nobleman's son.

3. The sign given in the healing of the man who had lain sick for thirty-eight years by the Pool of Bethesda.

4. The sign given in the Feeding of the Five Thousand.

5. The sign given in the vision of Christ walking on the sea.

6. The sign given in the healing of the man born blind. And finally:

7. The greatest of the signs, the initiation of Lazarus, the transformation of Lazarus into the writer of the John Gospel.

These are the seven signs. But now we must ask ourselves, What about these signs, this question of miracles? If you listened attentively to a number of things that were told you in the foregoing lectures you will remember having heard that the state of human consciousness has kept altering throughout the entire course of evolution. We cast our gaze back to remote times and found that men did not issue from a merely animalistic stage of development, but from a form in which they possessed the power of clairvoyance as a congenital endowment. People of that time were clairvoyant, even though their consciousness still lacked the ability to say “I am”. The capacity for self-consciousness was something they had to acquire gradually, and for this they had to forfeit their old clairvoyance. In the future the time will come again when all men are clairvoyant, but without loss of self-consciousness, of the “I am”. Those are the three stages which humanity has in part passed through, in part still has ahead of it.

In Atlantis men still lived in a sort of dream consciousness, but this was clairvoyant. Then they gradually achieved self-consciousness, outer objective consciousness, in exchange for which, however, they gave up the old gift of dim clairvoyance. And finally, what man will have in the future is clairvoyant consciousness coupled with self-consciousness. Thus man traverses the path from an ancient dim clairvoyance through an opaque objective consciousness, finally ascending to conscious clairvoyance.

But in addition to consciousness, everything else about man has changed as well. The belief that conditions must always have been as they are today is due to nothing but human shortsightedness. Everything has evolved. Nothing has always been as it is today, not even men's relation to each other. You have already gathered from intimations in the last lectures that in older epochs—up to the time when the Christ impulse entered human evolution—the influence of soul upon soul was much stronger. Such was human disposition at that time. A man did not merely hear what was told him in externally audible words: in a certain way he could feel and know something that the other felt and thought vividly, livingly. Love meant something quite different from what it does today, albeit in those times it was largely a matter of blood ties. Nowadays it has taken on more of a psychic character, but it has lost its strength. Nor will it regain this until the Christ impulse shall have entered all human hearts. In olden times active love possessed at the same time a healing property, a powerful balm, for the soul of its recipient.

Coincident with the development of the intellect and of cleverness, qualities that came into being only gradually, these ancient direct influences of soul upon soul dwindled away. The gift of acting upon the other's soul, of causing one's own soul force to stream into it, was unquestionably peculiar to the older peoples; and you must therefore imagine the force that one soul could receive from another as much greater, the influence one soul could exert upon another as much stronger, than is the case today. The external historical documents may report nothing of all this, the tablets and monuments may not mention it; but clairvoyant study of the akashic record nevertheless discloses the fact that in olden times the healing of the sick, for example, was extensively accomplished through a psychic influence passing from the one to the other. And the soul possessed many other powers as well. Though today it sounds like a fairy tale, it is a fact that in those times a man's will, if he so desired and had specially trained himself for the purpose, had the power to act soothingly upon the growth of a plant, to accelerate or retard it. Today but scanty remnants of all this are left.
Human life, then, was very different at that time. No one would have been surprised—given the right mutual relationship—at the passing over of a psychic influence from one person to the other.

It must be kept in mind, however, that two or more are needed if the exercise of a psychic influence of that sort is to take effect. We could imagine the possibility of a man imbued with the power of Christ entering our midst nowadays; but those with the requisite faith in him would be very few in number, so that he would not be able to achieve all that can be accomplished by the influence of one soul upon another. For not only must the influence be exerted: someone must be present who is sufficiently developed to be affected by it. Remembering that formerly those who could receive such influences were more numerous, we should not be surprised to learn that for the healing of the sick there indeed existed the means by which psychic influences could take effect; but also, that influences which today can be transmitted only by mechanical means were at that time applied psychically.

We should keep in mind that the Christ event entered human evolution at a very special point in time. Only the very last remnants, so to say, of those soul currents that flowed from man to man were left as a heritage of the old Atlantean age. Humanity was about to descend ever deeper into matter, and the possibility for such psychic currents to be effective constantly diminished. That was the moment at which the Christ impulse had to enter, the impulse which in its nature could accomplish so very much for those who were still sufficiently receptive.

Those who are really familiar with evolution as it applied to mankind will therefore find it quite natural that the Christ Being, having once entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth in about the thirtieth year of His life, could unfold very special powers in this sheath, for the latter had been developing since time immemorial. We mentioned yesterday that this individuality of Jesus of Nazareth had in one former life been incarnated in ancient Persia, and then, passing through one incarnation after another, had continued to rise in its spiritual development. That is why the Christ could dwell in such a body, and why this body could be sacrificed to Him. This the Evangelists knew well, hence they presented the entire narrative in such a way as to be wholly comprehensible for spiritual research. Only, we must take everything in the Gospels literally—that is, we must first learn to read them. As has been said, the deeper meanings of the miracles we shall learn in due time; but here we can ask, for example, why, precisely in the first of the miracles, it is specially emphasized in dealing with the Marriage in Cana of Galilee that this took place in Cana “of Galilee”. Seek as you will, you can find in old Palestine within the radius then known no second Cana; and in such a case it would seem superfluous to specify the locality. Why, then, does the Evangelist tell us that this miracle occurred in Cana "of Galilee"? Because the important point to be stressed was that something occurred which had to take place in Galilee. It means that nowhere else but in Galilee could Christ have found just those people whose presence was indispensable. As I said, an influence implies not only the one who exerts it, but the others as well—those who are appropriately fitted to receive it. Christ's first appearance would not have been possible within the Jewish community proper, but it was possible in Galilee with its mixture of many different tribes and groups. Just because members of so many peoples from various parts of the world were assembled in one spot, there was far less blood relationship, and above all, far less faith in it, than in Judea, in the narrow circle of the Hebrew people. Galilee was a heterogenous racial mixture.

But what was it to which Christ, in view of His impulse, felt Himself particularly called? We have said that one of His most significant utterances was,

Before Abraham was, was the I am

;

and the other,

I and the Father are one

.

By this He meant: among those who cling to the old forms of life the ego is entrenched in a system of blood relationships. The words I and Father Abraham are one aroused a very special feeling in the true confessor of the Old Testament, a feeling nowadays very difficult to share. What a man calls his own self, circumscribed by birth and death, he sees as transitory. But one who had true faith in the Old Testament, who was influenced by the widespread teachings of that time, asserted—not allegorically, but as a fact: As regards myself I am isolated; but I am a member of a great organism, of a great living whole reaching back to Father Abraham. Just as my finger can remain a living member only as long as it is part of my body, so my memory is contingent upon my feeling myself a member of the great folk organism that goes back to Father Abraham. I am part of the great complex, exactly as my finger is part of my body. Cut off my finger and it ceases to be a finger: it is safe only as long as it is part of my hand, my hand part of my arm, and my arm part of my body; it ceases to have meaning if severed from my hand. And in like manner, I myself have meaning only when I feel myself a member of all the generations through which the blood flows down from Father Abraham. Then I feel sheltered. My individual ego is transient and fleeting, but not so this whole great folk organism way back to Father Abraham. When I sense and feel myself wholly embraced by it I conquer my temporally transient ego: I am sheltered in one great ego, the ego of my people that has come down to me from Father Abraham through the blood of the generations.

That represents the conviction of the Old Testament adherents: all the great events narrated in the Old Testament, everything that today seems miraculous, occurred through the power of the inner experience contained in the words, I and Father Abraham are one. But the time came when men were destined to relinquish this state of consciousness for another, hence it gradually disappeared. That is why Christ could not address those who, on the one hand, had lost the magic power of influencing by means of blood ties, and on the other, still believed only in the common bond with Father Abraham. Clearly, among these Christ could not find the faith necessary for enabling His soul to flow actively into other souls; and for this purpose He had to turn to those who, owing to their mixed blood, no longer clung to this old belief: to the Galileans. That is where His mission had to commence. Even though the old state of consciousness was generally on the wane, still He found in Galilee a medley of peoples that stood at the beginning of the era in which blood became mixed. From all quarters tribes assembled here that had previously been governed solely by the forces of the old blood ties. They were on the point of finding the transition. They vividly retained the feeling that their fathers were still endowed with the old consciousness states, that they possessed the magic powers which act from soul to soul. Among these people Christ could inaugurate His new mission, which consisted in endowing man with an ego consciousness no longer bound to blood relationship; an ego consciousness which could say, It is within myself that I shall find the connection with the spiritual Father Who, instead of letting His blood flow down through the generations, radiates His spiritual force into each individual soul. The ego which is within me, and which is in direct communion with the spiritual Father, was before Abraham was. It is for me, then, to infuse into this ego a force that will be strengthened through my being aware of my connection with the spiritual Father force of the world. I and the Father are one. No longer I and Father Abraham—that is, a physical ancestor.

Such were the people to whom Christ turned, people who had arrived at the point of understanding this, people who, having broken away from the blood ties by intermarriage, needed to find the strong force—not in consanguinity, but in the individual soul: the force that can lead men gradually to express the spiritual in the physical.—Do not ask, Why do we not see things happening today as they happened then? Aside from the fact that he who has the will to see them can see them, we must remember that men have emerged from that state of consciousness and descended into the world of matter; that the period in question represented the boundary line; and that Christ used the last representatives of the previous epoch of human evolution in whom to demonstrate the power of spirit over matter. The signs that were done while the old state of consciousness was still present, but disappearing, were intended as an example and a symbol—a symbol of faith.

Now let us turn to this Marriage in Cana of Galilee itself. If I were to develop in detail all the implications indicated in the John Gospel, in the entire Gospel content, fourteen lectures would certainly not suffice: several years would be needed. But such a literal development of the subject would only serve to confirm what I can suggest in brief elucidations.

The first thing we are told in connection with this first sign is:

There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee

.

Here we must stop to realize that the John Gospel contains not one word that has not a definite meaning. Well, then: why a marriage? Because a marriage brings about on a single occasion what the Christ mission effects with such far-reaching results: it brings people together. And then, a marriage “in Galilee”? It was in Galilee that the ancient blood ties were severed, that mutually alien bloods came to mingle. Now, Christ's task was intimately connected with this mixing of blood, so we are here dealing with intermarriages having the object of creating progeny among people who are no longer related by blood.

What I am now about to say will seem very strange to you. What would people have felt in such a case in very old times when there still prevailed the close or endogamous marriage, as one is inclined to call it in the spiritual-scientific sense? We must realize that the transformation of this close marriage into a distant or exogamous marriage is very much a part of human evolution, and that what I have already said explains what an endogamous marriage means. Among all people of ancient times it was contrary to law to marry outside of the tribe, away from consanguinity. People related by blood, members of the same tribe, intermarried; and this custom of marrying within the tribe, within blood relationship, resulted in the marvel of engendering intense magical force. This can be verified at any time by means of spiritual-scientific research. The descendants of a blood-related tribe possessed, as a consequence of such intermarriage of relatives, magical powers that permitted one soul to act upon another.

Let us imagine that in ancient times we had been asked to attend a wedding, and that the customary drink—in this case, wine—had given out. What would have happened? Provided the right relations existed among the blood-related members of this wedding party, it would have been possible, through the magical power of love arising out of consanguinity, for the water—or whatever was offered later in place of wine—to be sensed as wine as a result of the psychic influence of the people present. Wine is what they would have been drinking if the right magical influence had been exerted by the one person on the rest. Do not tell me this wine would still have been but water! A sensible person would reply to that: For the human being, things are of the nature in which they communicate themselves to his organism: they are what they become for him, not what they look like. I believe that even today many a wine lover would like water if, by means of some influence or other, it appeared to be changed into wine; that is, if it tasted like wine and produced the same effect in his organism. Nothing else is necessary than that a man should take water for wine.—What, then, was required in olden times to render possible such a sign as that of the water in the vessels becoming wine when it was drunk? The magical power deriving from blood relationship, that is what was required. And furthermore, those assembled at the Marriage in Cana of Galilee possessed the psychic capacity for sensing that sort of thing. Only, a transition had to be brought about.

The story continues in the John Gospel:

And the mother of Jesus was there: and both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage.

And since they lacked wine, the mother of Jesus drew attention to this, and said to Him:

They have no wine.

I said that a transition must be effected if such an event is to take place: the psychic force had to be assisted by something. By what, then? Here we come to the utterance which, as it is usually translated, is really a blasphemy; for I believe it will strike any sensitive person as offensive when, to the statement “they have no wine”, Jesus replies: “Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.” From any angle it is impossible to accept that in a document of this sort. Imagine the ideal of love, as the Gospels describe the relations between Jesus of Nazareth and His mother, and then try to imagine Him using the expression, "Woman, what have I to do with thee"! It is not necessary to say more: the rest must be felt. But the point is, these words are not in the text. Examine this passage in the John Gospel and then look up the Greek text. This contains nothing more than the words employed by Jesus of Nazareth in indicating a certain event:

Woman, this passeth over from me unto thee.

What He referred to was that subtle, intimate force which passed from soul to soul, from Him to His mother; and that is what He needed at this moment. Greater signs He was as yet unable to perform: for this the time must gradually ripen. Therefore He says: My time—the time when I shall work through my own force—is not yet come.—For the present, that magnetic psychic union between the soul of Jesus of Nazareth and His mother was still indispensable.

“Woman, this now passeth over from me unto thee.” Otherwise—well, after an utterance like “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” why would she turn to the servants and say, “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it”? She had to possess the old forces of which nowadays people can have no conception; and she knew that He referred to the blood tie between them, to the bond that should then pass over into the others. Then she knew that something like an invisible spiritual force held sway, capable of effectuating something.—And here let me beg you to read the Gospel—really to read it. I ask how anyone can come to terms with the Gospel who believes that something happened at that wedding—I really don't know what—that six ordinary jars stood there “for the purifying of the Jews”, as we are told; and that according to ordinary observation—without reference to anything such as we have just been considering—the water turned into wine. How could such a thing have come about externally?

What is the meaning of this miracle? And what is the belief in it held by him who stands before you—in fact, the only faith anybody can have in a miracle? Can it be that here one substance was transformed into another for the benefit of those present? No ordinary interpretation will get us far.—We must assume that the jars which stood there contained no water, for nothing is said about their being emptied. But it says they were filled, so if they had been emptied and then refilled—assuming the water had really been changed to wine as by a sleight of hand trick—one would really have to believe that the water which had previously been in the jars had been turned into wine. You see, this does not help: nothing squares.

We must understand that the jars must obviously have been empty, because a special significance attached to the filling of them. “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it,” the mother had told the servants. What sort of water did Christ need? He needed water fresh from the sources of nature; and that is why it was necessary to specify that the water had just been drawn. The only water suitable for Christ's purpose was such as had not yet lost the inner forces that are inherent in any element so long as it is united with nature. As has been said, the John Gospel contains not one word that is not fraught with deep meaning. Freshly drawn water had to be used because Christ is the Being Who had but recently approached the earth and become associated with the forces that work in the earth itself. Now, when the living forces of the water work, in turn, with “that which flows from me unto thee”, it becomes possible for the event described in the Gospel to take place. The governor of the feast is called, and he is under the impression that something unusual has occurred. He does not know what this was—it is specifically stated that he had not seen what happened—only the servants had seen it; but under the influence of what has taken place he now takes the water for wine. That is stated clearly and distinctly, so we know that through psychic force even an outer element—that is, the physical component of the human body—was affected.

And what did the mother of Jesus of Nazareth herself have to possess in order that at this moment her faith might be sufficiently great to produce such an effect? She needed just what she did indeed possess: the realization that He Who was called her son had become the Spirit of the Earth. Then her strong force combined with His, with that which acted from Him upon her, developed so mighty an influence as to produce the effect described.

Thus we have shown, through the whole constellation of conditions surrounding this first sign, how the unison of souls which results from blood ties produces an effect even in the physical world. It was the first sign, and the Christ force is shown at its minimum: it still needed the intensification resulting from contact with the mother's psychic forces, as well as the additional strength residing in certain forces of nature that remained intact in the freshly drawn water. The active force of the Christ Being is here shown at its least; but what is stressed as especially important is its influence upon the other soul and its calling forth from it an activity which the latter is fitted to perform. The essential point is that the Christ force had the power to render the other soul capable of exerting influences: it engendered in the wedding guests as well the ability to taste the water as wine.—But every real force increases through its own exercise, and the second time it is called upon it is already greater. Just as any ordinary force increases with exercise, so is especially a spiritual force strengthened when it has once been successfully applied.

The second of the signs, as you know from the John Gospel, is the healing of the nobleman's son. By what means was he healed? Here again the right answer will be found only by reading the Gospel in the right way and by concentrating on the crucial words of the chapter in question. In the fiftieth verse of the fourth chapter, after the nobleman had told Jesus of Nazareth his story of distress, we read:

Jesus saith unto him, Go thy way, thy son liveth.
And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken
unto him, and he went his way.

Again we have two souls in accord, the soul of the Christ and that of the boy's father. And when Christ said, Go thy way, thy son liveth, what effect did this have? It enkindled in the other soul the force to believe all that Christ's words implied. These two forces worked together. Christ's utterance had the power so to kindle the other soul that the nobleman believed. Had he not believed, his son would not have recovered. That is the way one force acts upon another: two are needed. And already here we find a greater measure of the Christ force. At the Marriage in Cana it still required the support of the mother's force in order to function at all. Now it has progressed to the point of being able to impart the kindling word to the nobleman's soul. We behold an intensification of the Christ force.

Passing to the third sign, the healing at the Pool of Bethesda of the man who had lain sick for thirty-eight years, we must again seek the most important words that throw light on the whole subject. They are these:

Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.

Speaking of his being forced to remain prone, the sick man had previously said that he could not move:

Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me.

But Christ spoke to him—and it is important that it was on the Sabbath, a day of general rejoicing and great brotherly love—clothing His injunction in the words, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. This utterance we must take in conjunction with the other equally important one in which He tells him:

Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.

What does that mean? It means that there was a connection between the man's sickness that had persisted for thirty-eight years, and his sin. We need not enquire at the moment whether the sin had been committed in this life or in a former one. The point is that Christ infused into the other's soul the force to accomplish something that reached right down into his psycho-moral nature. Here again we see an intensification of the Christ force. Previously, all that was involved was something intended to produce only a physical effect; but here it is a question of a sickness of which Christ Himself said that it had to do with the man's sin. At this moment Christ was able to intervene in the sick man's very soul. The previous sign still required the presence of the boy's father, but here the Christ force acts directly on the sick man's soul.

A special magic is lent this event by reason of its having been enacted on the Sabbath. Present-day man no longer has any feeling for such things, but the fact that this happened on the Sabbath meant something to a believer in the Old Testament: it was something out of the ordinary; hence the reason why the Jews were so indignant at the sick man was that he carried his bed on the Sabbath. That is an extraordinarily significant detail—people should learn to think when they read the Gospels. They should not consider it a matter of course that the sick man could be cured, that one now walked who for thirty-eight years had not been able to walk. What they should do is ponder a passage such as the following:

The Jews therefore said unto him that was cured, it is the sabbath day: it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed.

What struck them was not that the man had been cured, but that he carried his bed on the Sabbath.

So it was an integral part of the healing of this sick man that the whole scene should play on the hallowed day. Christ Himself harbored the thought, If the Sabbath is indeed to be dedicated to God, the souls of men must enjoy special strength on this day by virtue of the divine force.—And it was by means of this force that He worked upon the man before Him; that is, it was transmitted to the sick man's own soul. Hitherto the latter had not found in his soul the force that would overcome the consequences of his sin, but now he has it as an effect of the Christ force. Another intensification.—As I have said, the essential nature of the miracles will be dealt with later, and for the moment we will pass on.

The fourth sign is the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Again seeking the most significant passage, we must bear in mind that an event of this sort should not be viewed in the light of present-day consciousness. Had those who wrote about Christ at the time the John Gospel was written believed what our materialistic age believes today, their narratives would have been very different, for quite other things would have struck them as important. In this case they were not particularly surprised even at the phenomenon of five thousand being fed from so small a supply; but what is most important and specially emphasized is the following passage:

And Jesus took the loaves; and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down; and likewise of the fishes as much as they would.

Just what is it that Christ Jesus does here? In order to bring about what was to take place He makes use of the souls of His disciples, of those who had been with Him and had by degrees matured to the level of His stature. They are a part of the procedure. They surround Him; and in their souls He can now evoke the power of charity: His force flows forth into that of the disciples. Of the manner in which this event could take place we will speak later, but here we must again observe an increase in the Christ force. At the previous sign He infused His force into the man who had lain sick for thirty-eight years, whereas here it acts upon the force of His disciples' souls. What is active here is the intensification of forces that proceeds from the soul of the master to the souls of the disciples. The force has expanded from the one soul to the souls of others: it has grown.

Already at this point, then, there dwells in the disciples' souls the same principle that dwells in the soul of Christ. Anyone inclined to ask what happens as a result of such an influence should observe the facts, should consider what actually occurred when Christ's powerful force acted not alone but kindled the force in other souls, so that it then worked on. There are none today with such living faith: they may believe theoretically, but not with sufficient strength. But not until they do so will they be able to observe what occurred there. Spiritual research knows very well what occurred.

So we observe a step-by-step increase of the Christ force.—The fifth sign, told in the same chapter, begins:

And when even was now come, his disciples went down unto the sea, and entered into a ship, and went over the sea toward Capernaum. And it was now dark, and Jesus was not come to them. And the sea arose by reason of a great wind that blew. So when they had rowed about five and twenty or thirty furlongs, they see Jesus walking on the sea, and drawing nigh unto the ship: and they were afraid.

Modern publishers of the Gospels assign to this chapter the highly superfluous title, “Jesus walks on the sea”—as though that were stated anywhere in this chapter! Where does it say, “Jesus walks on the sea”? It says, “The disciples saw Jesus walking on the sea.” That is the point. The Gospels must be taken literally. It is simply a case of the Christ force having again increased in strength. So powerful had it become as a natural result of its exercise in the previous deeds that not only could it now act from one soul upon another—not only could the soul of Christ communicate itself, in its force, to other souls—but the Christ could live in His own form before the soul of another who was ripe for it.

The event, then, occurred as follows: Someone who is absent possesses so great a force that it acts upon men at a distance, far away. But the influence of the Christ force is now so powerful that it does more than set free a force in the disciples, as had been the case with those who had sat with Him on the mountain: there the force had merely passed over into the disciples in order that the miracle might be performed. Now, although their physical sight could not reach the Christ, they had the power to see Him, to behold His very form. Christ could become visible at a distance to those with whose souls His own had united. His own form is now sufficiently advanced to be seen spiritually. At the moment when the possibility of physical vision disappeared, there arose in the disciples all the more intensely the ability to see spiritually—and they saw the Christ. But the nature of this seeing at a distance is such that the image of the object in question appears in the immediate vicinity.—Again an increase of the Christ power.

The next sign is the healing of the man born blind; and this narrative, as it appears in the John Gospel, is again particularly distorted. Doubtless you have often read the story:

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did this sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

And then He healed him.

We need only ask, could any Christian attitude interpret the matter as follows? Here is a man born blind; his blindness is not a result of his parents' sin, nor of his own; but he was rendered blind by God in order that Christ might come and perform a miracle for the glory of God. In other words, in order that a miraculous act might be ascribed to God, God had first to make the man blind.

The original passage was simply not read correctly. It does not say at all that “the works of God should be made manifest in him”. If we would understand this miracle we must examine the old usage of the word “God”. You can do this most readily by turning to another chapter in which Christ is positively accused of asserting of himself that He and God were one. How does He reply?

Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are Gods?

What Christ meant by this answer was that in the innermost soul of man there is the potential nucleus of a God: something divine. How often have we not pointed out that the fourth principle of the human being is the potential human capacity for the divine! “Ye are Gods.” That is, something divine dwells in you. It is not the human being but something different, not the person of a man as he lives on earth between birth and death; and it is different also from what man inherits from his parents. Whence derives this element of divinity, this human individuality? It passes through repeated earth lives from incarnation to incarnation: it comes over from an earlier earth life, from a previous incarnation. Hence we read, not the man's parents have sinned, nor has his own personality—the personality one ordinarily addresses as “I”; but in a previous incarnation he created the cause of his blindness in this life. He became blind because out of a former life the works of the God within him revealed themselves in his blindness. Christ Jesus here points clearly and distinctly to karma, the law of cause and effect.

What principle in man had to be worked upon if this kind of sickness was to be healed? Not upon what lives as a transitory ego between birth and death: the forces must penetrate deeper, must enter the ego that continues from one life to another. Again the Christ force has increased. Hitherto we have seen it influencing only what is directly before it; now it acts upon the principle that survives human life between birth and death, that continues from life to life. Christ feels Himself the representative of the I Am. As He pours His force into the I Am—as thus the exalted God of Christ communicates Himself to the God in man—the blind man receives the force enabling him to heal himself from within. Now Christ has penetrated to the innermost being of the soul. His force has acted upon the eternal individuality of the sick man and strengthened it by causing His own force to appear in this individuality, thereby influencing even the consequences of former incarnations.

What intensification still remains for the Christ force to achieve? None but the ability to approach another and awaken in him the capacity for enkindling the Christ impulse in himself, so that his whole being is saturated with it and he becomes another, a Christ-permeated man. And that is what occurred in the Raising of Lazarus, where we find still another increase in the Christ force. It has progressed step by step throughout.

Where else in the world could you find a lyrical document of such glorious composition? No other author has mastered composition on such a plane. Who would not bow down in reverence when reading the marvellous step-wise upbuilding in the narrative of these events! Even contemplating the John Gospel only as an artistic composition we cannot but feel deep reverence. It all grows step by step and rises steadily.

One point remains to be elucidated. We have pointed out a number of isolated features tending to show the intensification in the sequence of signs, of miracles; but the narrative embraces a great deal in between, and we must examine the organization of the whole. Tomorrow it will be our task to show that, in addition to the admirable intensification in the miracles, there is definite purpose in the way all the connecting links are embodied: we realize that these could not possibly have been filled in better than was done by the writer of the John Gospel. Today we have considered its artistic composition and found it unthinkable that a work of art could be more perfectly or beautifully composed than is the John Gospel up to the description of the Raising of Lazarus; but only one who can read aright and knows what is essential senses its great and mighty meaning. It is the mission of anthroposophy to bring this meaning before our souls. But this John Gospel contains more. Our expositions of it will be followed by others imbued with a wisdom loftier than ours; but this wisdom will in turn serve to find fresh truths, just as during the past seven years our wisdom has served to find what cannot be found without anthroposophy.