The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Man in his earthly existence varies in his conditions of consciousness; he varies in the conditions of full wakefulness, of sleep, and of dreaming.

Let us first put the question to ourselves: is it an essential part of man to live as earthly being in these three conditions of consciousness?

We must clearly realize that of earthly beings only man lives in these three conditions. Animals live in an essentially different alternation. They do not have that deep, dreamless sleep which man has for the greater part of the time between falling asleep and awaking. On the other hand, animals do not have the complete wakefulness of man between awaking and going to sleep. Animal “wakefulness” is somewhat like human dream; but the experiences of the higher animals are more definite. On the other hand, animals are never so deeply unconscious as man is in deep sleep.

Therefore animals do not differentiate themselves from their surroundings so much as man. They have not got an outer and an inner world, as man has. The higher animals, (Dr. Steiner means by higher animals, the warm-blooded vertebrates, birds and mammals. – Ed.) subconsciously, feel themselves, with their whole inner being, like a part of the surrounding world.

When an animal sees a plant, his first feeling is not: that is outwardly a plant, and I am inwardly a separate being—but the animal gets a strong inner experience from the plant, a direct sympathy or antipathy. It feels as it were, the plant's nature inwardly. The circumstance that people of our time are not able to observe anything that is not obvious, prevents them from seeing in the impulses and behaviour of animals that it is as I have said.

Only man has the clear and sharp differentiation between his inner world and the outer world. Why does he recognize an outer world? How does he come at all to speak of an inner and an outer world? Because every time he sleeps, his ego and his astral body are outside his physical and etheric body: he abandons, so to speak, his physical and etheric bodies and is among those things which are outer world. During sleep we share the fate of outer things. As tables and benches, trees and clouds are during wakefulness outside our physical and etheric bodies and are therefore described as outer world, so, during sleep, our own astral bodies and our ego belong to the outer world. And here something happens.

In order to realize what happens here, let us first start from what happens when we face the world in a perfectly normal condition of wakefulness. There are the various objects outside us. And the scientific thought of man has gradually brought it to the point of recognizing such physical things as belonging certainly to the outer world as can be weighted, measured and counted. The content of our physical science without doubt is determined according to weight, dimension and number.

We reckon with the calculations which apply to earthly things, we weigh and measure them, and what we ascertain by weighing, measuring and counting really constitutes the physical. We would not describe a body as physical unless we could somehow put it to the proof by means of scales. But those things like colours, and sounds, the feeling even of warmth and cold, the real objects of sense-perceptions, these weave themselves about the things that are heavy, and measurable and countable. If we want to define any physical object, what constitutes its real physical nature is the part that can be weighed or counted, and with this alone the physicist really wants to be concerned. Of colour, sound and so on he says: Well, something occurs from outside with which weighing or counting is concerned—he says even of colour-phenomena: there are oscillating movements which make an impression on man from outside, and he describes this impression, when it concerns the eye, as colour, when it concerns the ear, as sound, and so on. One could really say that the modern physicist cannot make head or tail of all these things—sound, colour, warmth and cold. He regards them just as properties of something which can be ascertained with the scales or the measuring rod or arithmetic. Colours cling, as it were, to the physical; sound is wrung from the physical; warmth and cold surge up out of the physical. One says: that which has eight has redness, or, it is red.

You see, when a man is in the state between going to sleep and waking up, his ego and his astral body are in a different condition. Then the things of dimension, number and weight are not there at all, at any rate not according to earthly dimension, number and weight. When we sleep there are no things around us which can be weighed, however odd it appears, nor are there things around us which can be counted or measured. As an ego and an astral body one could not use a measuring rod in the state of sleep.

But what is there are—if I may so express it—the free-floating, free-moving sense-perceptions. Only in the present state of his development man is not capable of perceiving the free-floating redness, the waves of free-moving sound and so on.

If we wish to draw the thing diagrammatically, we could do it like this. We could say: Here on earth we have solid weighable things (red) and to these are attached, as it were, the redness, the yellow, in other words, what the senses perceive in these things. When we sleep, the yellow is free and floating, and also the redness not clinging to such weight-conditions, but floating and weaving freely. It is the same with sound. It is not eh bell which rings, but the ringing floats in the air.

When we go about in our physical world and see something or other, we pick it up; only then is it really a thing, otherwise it might be an optical illusion. Weight must come in. Therefore, unless we feel its weight, we are apt to consider something that appears in the physical, as an optical illusion, like the colours of the rainbow.

If you open a book on Physics today you will see the explanation given—the rainbow is an optical illusion. Physicists look upon the raindrop as the reality; and then they draw lines which really have no meaning for what is there, but they seemingly imagine them there in space. They are then called rays. But the rays are not there at all, but one is told the eye projects them. Remarkable use indeed is made of this projection in modern Physics. Thus I assume we see a red object. In order to convince ourselves that it is no optical illusion, we lift it up—and it is heavy; thereby it guarantees its reality.

He who now becomes conscious in the ego and the astral body, outside the physical and etheric bodies, comes in the end to the conclusion that there is something like this in this free-floating, free-moving colour and sound; but it is different. In this free-floating coloured substance there is a tendency to scatter to the uttermost parts of the Earth. It has a contrary weight. (See Diagram 1) These things of the earth want to go down there to the earth's center (downward arrow); these (upward arrow) want to escape into universal space.

And there is something there similar to a measurement. You get it, for instance, if you have, let us say, a small reddish cloud, and this small reddish cloud is hemmed in by a mighty yellow structure; you then measure, not with a measuring-rule, but qualitatively, the stronger-shining red with the weaker-shining yellow. And as the measuring-rule tells you: that is five yards, the red tells you here: (see Diagram 1): if I were to spread myself out, I should go into the yellow five times. I must expand myself. I must become bigger, then I, too, should become yellow. Thus are measurements made in this case.

If it still more difficult to be clear about counting, because after all in earthly counting we mostly count only peas or apples, which lie side by side indifferently, and we always have the feeling that I we place as second one by the one, this one doesn't mind a bit that another one lies next to it. In human life it is of course different. There is sometimes the case that the one is directed to the other. But this is already verging on the spiritual.

In physical mathematics it is a matter of indifference to divisions what is added to them. But here it is not the case. When a one is of a definite kind, it demands—let us say—some three or five others, according to its kind. It has always an inner relationship to the others. Here number is a reality. And if a consciousness of it begins, as is the case when you are out there with your ego and your astral body, you also get to the point of ascertaining something like dimension, number and weight, but of an opposite kind.

And then, when sight and hearing out there are no longer a mere chaotic mingling of red and yellow and sounds, but you begin to feel things are ordered, then arises the perception of the spiritual beings, who realize themselves in these free-floating sense-experiences. Then we enter the positive spiritual world, and the life and doings of the spiritual beings. As here on earth we enter the life and doings of earthly things, ascertaining them with the scales and the rod and our calculations, so, by adapting ourselves to the purely qualitative, opposite weight-condition, i.e. by wanting to expand imponderably into the world-spaces and by measuring colour by colour, etc.—we come to the understanding of spiritual beings. Such spiritual beings also permeate all the realms of nature.

Man with his waking consciousness sees only the outside of minerals and plants and animal; but in sleep he is with all that is spiritual in all these beings of nature's realms. And when on awakening he returns again to himself, his ego and his astral body keep as it were the inclination and affinity towards the outward things and cause him to recognize an outer world. If man had an organization which was not designed for sleep, he could not recognize an outer world.

It is not a question of insomnia, for I did not way, “if a man does not sleep,” but “if man had an organization which was not designed for sleep.” The point is the being designed for something. Therefore, of course, man becomes ill if he suffers from insomnia, because his nature is not suited to it. But things are so arranged that man attains an outer world and to a vision of it, just because in sleep he passes the time in the outer world with the things he calls, when awake, the outer world.

And you see, this relationship of man to sleep gives the earthly concept of truth. How? Well, we call it truth when we can correctly reproduce inwardly something external, when we can accurately experience inwardly something external. But for this we require the arrangement of sleep. Without it we should have no concept of truth, so that we have to thank the state of sleep for truth. In order to surrender ourselves to the truth of things, we must pass our existence for a certain time with those tings. The things tell us something about themselves only because during sleep they are appreciated by us through our soul's presence with them.

It is different in the case of the dream-state. The dream is related, of course, with the memory, with the inner soul-life, with what preferably lives in the memory; when the dream is free-floating sound-colour world, it means we are still half outside our body. If we go completely down, the same forces which we unfold as moving and living in dream become forces of memory. Then we no longer differentiate ourselves in the same way from the outer world. Our inner being coincides with it. Then we live in it with our sympathies and antipathies so strong that we do not feel things as sympathetic or antipathetic, but that the sympathies and antipathies themselves show themselves pictorially.

If we had not the possibility of dreaming, nor the continuation of this dream-force in our inner life, we should have no beauty. That we have a disposition for beauty is due to the fact that we are able to dream. For prosaic existence we have to say: we have to thank the power of dreaming that we have a memory. For the art life of man we have to thank the power of dreaming that there is beauty. The manner in which we feel or create beauty is namely very similar to the weaving, creating power of dreaming.

We behave in the experience of beauty and to the creation of it—through the help of our physical body—as we behave outside our physical body or half bound to it, when we dream. There is really only a slight jump from dreaming to living in beauty. And only because in these materialistic times people are of such coarse temperament that they do not notice this jump, is so little consciousness to be found of the whole significance of beauty. Man must necessarily give himself up in dream in order to experience this free movement and life, whereas when one gives oneself up to freedom, to apparent inner compulsion, that is, if one experiences this jump one has no longer the feeling that it is the same as dreaming, that it is the same except that use is made of the powers of the physical body. This generation will long ponder what “chaos” meant in former times. There are most diverse definitions of “chaos.” Actually it can only be characterized by saying: when man reaches a state of consciousness in which the experience of weight, of earthly dimension just ceases, and things begin to become less heavy, but as yet with no tendency to escape into the universe, but maintain themselves still—let us say—horizontally, in equilibrium, when the fixed boundaries get blurred, when the swaying indefiniteness of the world is seen with the physical body still, but already also with the soul-constitution of dreaming, then you see chaos. And the dream is merely the shadowy approach of chaos towards man.

In Greece one still had the feeling that one cannot really make the physical world beautiful; it is half a necessity of nature; it is as it is. One cannot set up the Cosmos—which means the beautiful world—out of earthly things, but only out of chaos, by shaping the chaos. And what one makes with earthly things is merely an imitation in matter of the molded chaos.

This is always the case in Art; and in Greece, where the mystery-cults still had a certain influence, one had a very vivid image of this relation of chaos to Cosmos.

But when one looks round in all these worlds—the unconsciousness of sleep, the half-consciousness of dream—one does not find the Good. The beings who are in these worlds are predestined with all wisdom from the very beginning to run their life's course there. One finds in them controlling, constructive wisdom. One finds in them beauty. But there is no sense in speaking of goodness among these beings when as earth-man it is a question of our meeting them. We can only speak of goodness when there is a distinction between inner and outer world, so that the good can follow the spiritual world or not. As the state of sleep is apportioned to truth, the dream-state to beauty, so is the condition of wakefulness apportioned to goodness, to the Good.

This does not contradict what I have been saying during these days, that when one leaves earthly things and emerges into the Cosmos, one is induced to abandon also earthly concepts so as to speak of the moral world-order. For the moral world-order is necessarily as much foreordained in the spiritual world as causality is on this earth. Only there the predestination,—that which is appointed,—is spiritual; there is no contradiction.

But as regards human nature we must be clear: if we want to have the idea of truth, we must turn to the state of sleep; if we want to have the idea of beauty, we must turn to the state of dreaming, and if we want to have the idea of goodness, we must turn to the state of waking consciousness.

Man has thus, when awake, no vocation to his physical and etheric organization as regards truth, but as regards goodness. In this state we must most certainly arrive at the idea of goodness.

What does modern science achieve when it attempts to explain man? It refuses to rise from truth, through beauty to goodness; it wants to explain everything in accordance with an external causal necessity which corresponds only to the idea of truth. And here one entirely fails to reach that element in man which weaves and lives when he is awake. One reaches at the most only what man is when asleep. Therefore if you read anthropologists today with an alert eye, alert for the psychic peculiarities and forces of the world, you get the following impression. You say to yourself: Yes, that is all very nice, what we are told about man by modern science. But what sort of a fellow is this man really, about whom science tells us? He lies the whole time in bed ... he cannot apparently walk ... he cannot move. Movement, for example, is not in the least explained. He lies the whole time in bed.

It cannot be otherwise. Science explains man only when asleep. If you want to set him in motion, it would have to be done mechanically; wherefore, also, it is a scientific mechanism. One has to insert machinery into this sleeping man, to set this dummy in motion when he is to et up, and to put him to bed again in the evening.

Thus this science tells us absolutely nothing about the man who wanders about the world, who lives and moves and is awake; for what sets him in motion is contained in the idea of goodness, not in the idea of truth, which we gain chiefly from external things.

Now this is something which is not much thought about: one has the feeling, when a physiologist or anatomist of today describes man, that one would like to say: Wake u-p. Wake up! You are asleep, you are asleep! These people accustom themselves, under the influence of this way of looking at things, to the state of sleep. And as I have always said, people sleep through all sorts of things just because they are obsessed by science. Today, because the popular papers circulate everything everywhere, even the uneducated are also obsessed by science. There never were so many obsessed minds as today. It is remarkable with what words one must describe the real relationships of the present day. One must lapse into quite different epithets from those which are in common use today.

It is the same when the materialists try to place man in his surroundings. At the time of materialistic high-tide, people wrote books like one, for example, which stated in a certain chapter: Man is really of himself nothing. He is the product of the oxygen in the air, the product of the cold or warm temperature in which he is. He is really—so ends this materialistic description pathetically—a product of every air-current.

If one investigates such a description and imagines the man as he really is, as pictured thus by the materialist, he turns out to be a neurasthenic in the highest degree. The materialists have never described any other kind of man; if they did not notice that they described man when he is asleep, if they overdid their part and wanted to go further, they have never described him as anything but an extreme neurasthenic, who would die next day of his neurasthenia, who could not live at all, for this age of science has never grasped the idea of a living man.

Here lie the great tasks which must lead man out of present-day circumstances into such conditions in which the further life of world-history is alone possible. What is needed is a penetration into spirituality. The opposite pole must be found to that which has been attained. What was achieved during the nineteenth century7, so glorious for materialistic philosophy? What has been achieved?

In a wonderful way—we can say it sincerely and honestly—it succeeded in defining the outer world according to dimension, number and weight. In this, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries achieved an extraordinary and mighty work. But finer feelings of the senses, colours, sounds, flutter about as it were in the indefinite. Physicists have entirely ceased to talk about colours and sounds. They talk of airwaves and ether waves. But those are after all not colours or sounds. Air-waves surely are not sounds, but at most the medium by which sounds are continued. There is no grasp of sense-qualities. We have to return to that. In fact one sees today only what can be determined by scales and measuring-rod and arithmetic. All else has escaped one.

And now when the theory of Relativity introduces a grand disorder into the measurable, the weighable, and the countable, everything is split asunder and falls to pieces. But ultimately this theory of Relativity founders at certain points. Not with regard to concepts: one does not get away from the theory of Relativity with earthly concepts, as I have had occasion to explain already in another place, but with reality one always gets away form the Relativity-concepts, for what can be measured or counted or weighed enters through measure, number and weight into quite definite relationships in outer sensible reality.

It is a question of seeing how colours, sounds, etc., are broken in Reality through consideration of weight, i.e. of that which really makes physical bodies. But with this tendency something extraordinarily important is overlooked. We forget namely Art. As we get more and more physical, Art departs further from us. No one will find a trace of Art in the books on Physics today. Nothing remains of Art—it must all go. It is ghastly studying a book on Physics at all today if one has an atom of feeling for beauty. Art is overlooked by man just because everything out of which colour and sound weave beauty, is, and is only recognized when it is attached to a weighty object. And the more physical people become, the more inartistic they become. Just think. We have a wonderful Physics; but it lives in denying Art; for it has reached the point of treating the world in such a manner that the artist takes no more heed of the physicist.

I do not think, for example that the musician lays much value on studying the physical theories of Acoustics. It is too wearisome, he doesn't bother. The painter will also not study this awful colour-theory which Physics contains. As a rule, if he bothers at all about colours, he turns still to Goethe's colour-theory. But that is false in the physicist's eyes. The physicists shut one eye and say: Well, well, it doesn't matter very much if a painter has a true or a false theory of colour.

It is a fact that Art must collapse under the physical philosophy of today. Now we must put the question to ourselves: Why did Art exist in older times?

If you go back to quite ancient times in which man still had an original clairvoyance, we find that they took less notice of dimension, number and weight in earthly things. They were not so important to them. They devoted themselves more to the colours and sounds of earthly things.

Remember that even Chemistry calculates in terms of weight only since Lavoisier; something more than a hundred years. Weight was first use din a world-philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century. Ancient mankind simply was not conscious that everything had to be defined according to earthly measure, number and weight. Man gave his heart and mind to the coloured carpet of the world, to the weaving the welling of sounds, not to the atmospheric vibrations.

But what was the possibility that came from living in this—I might say—imponderable sensible perception? By it one had the possibility, when for instance, one approached a man, of seeing him not as we se him today, but one regarded him as a product of the whole universe. Man was more a confluence of the Cosmos. He was more a microcosm than the thing inside his skin that stands where man stands, on this tiny spot of earth. He thought of man more as an image of the world. Then, colours flowed together, as it were, from all sides, and gave man colours. There was world-harmony, and man in tune with it, receiving his shape from it.

Moreover, mankind today can scarcely understand anything of the way in which ancient mystery-teachers spoke to their pupils. For when a man today wants to explain the human heart, he takes an embryo and sees how the blood-vessels expand, a utricle or bag appears and the heart is gradually formed. Well, that is not what the ancient mystery-teachers told their pupils. That would have appeared to them no more important than knitting a stocking, because after all the process looks much the same. On the contrary they emphasized something else as of paramount importance. They said: the human heart is a product of gold, which lives everywhere in light, and which streams in from the universe and shapes the human heart. You have had the representation. Light quivers through the universe, and the light carries gold. Everywhere in light there is gold. Gold lives and moves in light. And when man lives on earth—you know already that it changes after seven years—his heart is not composed of the cucumber and the salad and the roast veal the man has in the meantime eaten, but these old teachers knew that the heart is built of light's gold, and the cucumbers and the salad are only the stimulus for the gold weaving in the light to build up the heart out of the whole universe.

Yes, those people talked differently and you must be aware of this difference, for one must relearn to talk thus, only on another plane of consciousness. In painting, what once was there, but then disappeared, when one still painted by cosmic inspiration, because weight did not yet exist,—this painting has left its last trace in, let me say, Cimabue, and the Russian Icon-painting. The Icon was still painted out of the macrocosm, the whole outer world. It was so to speak a slice out of the macrocosm. But then one began in a blind alley, one could not get further, for the simple reason that this world-philosophy no longer existed among mankind. If one had wanted to paint the Icon with inner sympathy, not merely by tradition and prayer, one would have to have known how to handle gold. The treatment of gold on the picture was one of the greatest secrets of ancient painting. It consisted in bringing out the human figure from the gold background.

There is a vast abyss between Cimabue and Giotto. Giotto began what Raphael later brought to perfection. Cimabue had it still from tradition. Giotto became already half a naturalist. He noticed that tradition was no longer alive inwardly in the soul. Now one must take the physical man, now one has no longer the universe. One can paint no longer out of the gold; one is compelled to paint from the flesh.

This has gone so far that painting has practically reverted to what it had so much of in the nineteenth century. Icons have no weight at all; they were snowed in out of the world; they are weightless. The only thing is, one cannot paint them any more today. But if they were to e painted in their original form, they would have no weight at all.

Giotto was the first to begin painting objects so that they have weight. From which it arose that everything one paints has weight, even in the picture, and then one paints it from the outside, so that the colours have a relation to what is painted, as the physicist explains it, that the colour appears there on the surface by means of some special wave-vibration. Art has finally also had to be reckoned with weight, which Giotto began in an aesthetic-artistic way and Raphael brought to its highest point.

Thus we may say: there the universal slipped out of man, and heavy man became what one can now see. But because the feelings of the ancient times were still there, the flesh became, so to speak, heavy only to a minimum degree, but still it became heavy. And then arose the Madonna as counter to the Icon—the Icon which ahs no weight, the Madonna which has weight, even if she is beautiful—beauty has survived. But Icons are no longer paintable at all, because man does not feel them. If men today think they can feel Icons, it is an untruth. Therefore also the Icon-cult was steeped in a certain sentimental untruth. It is a blind-alley in Art. It becomes dependent on a scheme, on tradition.

Raphael's painting, built as it is on Giotto's development fro Cimabue, can remain Art only so long as the light of beauty streams upon it. To a certain extent it was the sunny Renaissance painters who still sensed something of the gold weaving in the light, and at least gave their pictures the luster of gold, making it irradiate them from outside.

But that came to an end. And thus naturalism came into being, and in Art mankind sits between two stools on the ground, between the Icon and the Madonna and is called upon to discover what pure vibrating colour and pure vibrating sound are, with their opposite weight, opposed to measurableness, and ponderable countability. We must learn to paint out of colour itself. However elementary and bad and tentative, it is our job to paint out of colour, to experience colour itself; freed from weight, to experience colour itself. In these things one must be able to proceed consciously, even with artistic consciousness.

And if you look at the simple attempts of our programs, you will see that there a beginning is made, if only a beginning, to release colours from weight, to experience colour as an element per se, to cause colours to speak.

If that succeeds, then, as against the inartistic physical world-philosophy which lets all Art die out, an Art will be created out of the free element of colour, of sound, which once more is free from weight.

We also sit between two stools, between the Icon and the Madonna, but we must get up. Physical Science does not help us to do it. I have told you, one must stay on the ground if one applies only physical science of man. But we have to get up now; and for this we need Spiritual Science. That contains the life-element which carries us from weight to imponderable colour, to the reality of colour, fro bondage even in musical naturalism to free musical Art.

We see how in all provinces it is a question of making an effort, of mankind waking up. It is this we ought to take up—this impulse to awake, to look round and see what is and what is not, and to advance ever onwards wherever the summons calls.

These things already touch the nerve of our time.

I have described how the modern philosopher comes to admit to himself: where does this intellectualism lead? To build a gigantic machine, and place it in the centre of the earth, in order to blow up the earth into all corners of the universe—he admitted it is so. The others do not admit it!

And so I have tried in different places to show how the ideas of only thirty or forty years ago are dissolved through the theory of Relativity—simply melted away like snow in the sun—so I have tried to show you how the summons is to be found everywhere really to strive towards Anthroposophy. For the philosopher, Eduard von Hartmann says: if the world really is as we imagine it—i.e. as he imagined it in the sense of the nineteenth century—then we really must blow it up into space, because we cannot endure any longer on it; and it is only a question of progressing far enough till we are able to do it. We must sigh for this future time when we can blow the world into universal space.

But the Relativists, before that, will see to it that mankind has no concepts left. Space, Time, Movement are abolished. Even apart from this, one can reach such profound despair, that in certain circumstances one sees the highest satisfaction in that explosion into the whole universe.

One must, however, make oneself clearly acquainted with the meaning of certain impulses in our time.

What I said yesterday about the path of the human intellect toward the future, rests upon definite facts that can be brought to light through spiritual-scientific knowledge. Today we shall deal with some of these facts. You must be conscious in a practical way, I might say, of the following.

When a man confronts you, he is that being we speak about in spiritual science. That is to say, above everything we must always be aware that he is a four-membered being, as you know from my book Theosophy. We have before us the ego, the astral body, ether body, and physical body. The fact that every time a person stands before us we are confronted by these four members of the human entity, brings it about that ordinary human perception does not know what it faces in man. Ordinarily one thinks: “What I see before me, filling space, is the physical body.” But what is physical in it we would not see as we usually see it if it were to confront us merely as physical body. We see it as it usually is today only because it is permeated by the ether body, the astral body, and ego. Strange as it may sound, that which is the physical body proper is a corpse, even during our lifetime. When we are confronted by a human corpse we are actually confronted by the physical body. In the corpse we have physical man not permeated by ether and astral body and ego. It is forsaken by them and shows its true nature. You do not visualize yourself properly if you believe you carry what you consider to be the physical body of man with you through space. A more correct view would be if you thought of yourself as a corpse with your ego, astral and etheric bodies carrying this corpse through space.

A consciousness of the true nature of man's being becomes more and more important for our age. For the conditions existing in the present cycle of mankind's evolution were not the same in earlier periods. What I am now relating cannot be ascertained by outer physical science, but spiritual-scientific cognition does observe these facts. As you know, the fourth post Atlantean age begins in the eighth century B.C.; further back we come to the Egypto-Chaldean period. At that time human bodies had a constitution different from that of today. Those you find now in the museum as mummies had a much more delicate constitution than present-day human bodies. They were much more permeated by the plant element; they were not so completely corpse as is the modern human body. As physical bodies they were akin to plant nature, whereas the present-day physical body, since the Greco-Latin age, is akin to the mineral world. If through some cosmic miracle the bodies of that ancient population were to be bestowed upon us, we would all be ill. We would carry proliferating growths in our body. Many a disease consists in the fact that the human body atavistically returns to conditions that were the normal ones in the Egypto-Chaldean age. Today we find tumorous formations in the body which are caused by the fact that a part of this or that person's body develops the tendency to become what the whole body was for the ancient Egypto-Chaldean population.

This is closely connected with human evolution. We as modern men carry a corpse in our body. The ancient Egyptian carried as his body something of a plant-like nature. The result was that his knowledge was different from ours, his intelligence acted differently. What do we know through our science that we are so proud of? Only that which is dead. Science shows that life cannot be grasped with ordinary intelligence. To be sure, certain research scientists believe that if they continue with their chemical experiments the moment will come when they will be able, through complicated combinations of atoms, molecules, and their interactions, to know the processes of life. This moment will never come. On the chemico-physical path one will only be able to grasp the minerally dead; that is to say, one will only grasp that aspect of the living which is a corpse.

Yet, what in man is intelligent and gains knowledge is nevertheless this physical body, this corpse. What then does this corpse do as we carry it about? It achieves most in a knowledge of mathematics and geometry. Everything is transparent there. The further we move from the mathematical-geometrical the more un-transparent do matters become. The reason for this is that the human corpse is the real knower today; the dead can only recognize the dead. Today what the ether body is, the astral body, the ego, does not think in man; it remains in obscurity. If the ether body would be able to know in the same way that the physical body knows the dead, it would know the life of the plant world. This was the peculiar thing with the Egyptian, that with his plant-like, living body he had knowledge of the plant world in a way quite different from ours. Much instinctive knowledge of the plant world can be traced back to what was embodied in Egyptian culture through their instinctively knowing consciousness. Even what is known today in botany about substances for medicinal use comes often from traditions originating in ancient Egyptian wisdom. You know how a number of so-called lodges, not founded on genuine fundamentals, call themselves Egyptian lodges. That is because they refer back to Egypt if they want to impart certain knowledge—which, however, is no longer very valuable. In these circles there still live certain traditions stemming from the wisdom which could be had through the Egyptian body. One can say, as humanity gradually progresses into the Greco-Latin period the living, human plant-body gradually died out. We carry an extremely dead body in us; especially is this true for the head. The science of the initiates perceives the human head as a corpse, as something continually dying. More and more will humanity become conscious of the fact that its vehicle for knowledge is a corpse; that it therefore knows only what is dead.

For this reason, the further we go into the future the more intensively will we feel a longing to know what is living. But the living will not be known through ordinary intelligence bound to the corpse. Much will be needed to make it possible for man again to penetrate the world in a living way. We must know today what it is that man has lost. When he passed over from the Atlantean to the post Atlantean age there was much he could not do that he can do today. Since a certain time in your childhood you are able to say “I” in referring to yourself. You may say it without any great respect. But in former ages of mankind's evolution this “I” was not referred to with so little respect. There were times, prior to the Egyptian age, when a name for “I” was used which, when pronounced, stupefied a person. Pronouncing it, therefore, was avoided. If people right after the Atlantean epoch had experienced the pronouncing of the name for “I”—at that time it was only known to the initiates—the whole congregation would have fainted, so powerful was the effect of uttering this name for “I.” An echo of this fact lingered with the ancient Hebrews who spoke of the unutterable name of the Deity in the soul; a word which only the initiates were permitted to speak, or that was expressed before the congregation in a kind of eurythmy.

The ineffable name of God had its origin in what I have just told you. Gradually this fact was lost, and the deep effect of such practices diminished. In the first post-Atlantean epoch a deep effect in the ego; in the second epoch a deep effect in the astral body; in the third epoch a deep effect in the ether body, but the effect was bearable—an effect which, as I stated yesterday, brought men into connection with the cosmos. Today we can say “I”—we can say anything—without its having a deep effect upon us, because we grasp the world with our corpse. That is to say, we grasp what is dead, what is mineral in the world. But we must arouse ourselves to rise again to those regions in which we can take hold of the living. Whereas the Greco-Latin period created more and more dead knowledge for the corpse, in our time intelligence follows the path I mentioned yesterday. We must, therefore, resist mere intelligence; we must add something to it. It is in the nature of our time that we have to retrace the path of development, so that in the fifth post-Atlantean period we learn to know the plant, in the sixth period the animal, and in the seventh the truly human. Thus, it will be our present task to pass beyond a knowledge of the mineral and learn to know the plant element.

Now after realizing this, ask yourself who is the person who exemplifies this search for plant knowledge. It is Goethe. Contrary to the preoccupation of all outer science with what is dead, he occupied himself with the life, the growth, the metamorphosis of plants. Thus, he was the man of the fifth post-Atlantean period in its elementary beginnings. In his small treatise of the year 1790, An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants, you will see how Goethe tries to comprehend the plant from leaf to leaf as something developing, unfolding, not as something completed, dead. That is the beginning of the knowledge that should be sought in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

In Goetheanism we have the keynote for this. Science will have to wake up in the Goethean sense, will have to pass from the dead to the living. This is what is meant when I say again and again that we must acquire the ability to leave behind the dead, abstract concepts and arrive at those that are living and concrete. What I said two days ago and yesterday is basically the way to these living, concrete concepts.

It will not be possible to enter into these concepts and ideas if we are not ready to develop our general world view and concept of life as a unity. Through the special con-figuration of our culture we are forced to let the various currents of our world view run side by side in a disorganized fashion. Just think how man's religious view of the world and his scientific view often run parallel, completely disconnected. He builds no bridge between the two; in-deed, he is afraid of doing so. We must make it clear that this state of affairs cannot continue.

I have drawn your attention to the egotistical way man forms his world view at the present time. I have described how men today are chiefly interested in the life of the soul after death. This interest springs from pure egotism. I have said we must pass on to interest in the life of the soul from birth onward, seeing it as a continuation of the life prior to birth. If we were to observe the child's growth into the world as a continuation of his pre-natal existence, with the same concern we feel for his soul after death, our thinking about the world would be much less egotistical than it is today. But this egotism in our world view is connected with many other things.

Here I come to a point where men today must become ever more clear about underlying facts. In the period of time culminating in our age the egotistic element was chiefly developed. The ego has permeated man's viewing of the world; it has also permeated his will. We must not deceive ourselves about that. The religious denominations in particular have become egotistical. This you can see even in externalities. Just consider how modern preachers have to reckon with people's egotism. The more they make promises concerning the life of the soul after death the more they reach their goal. People today have little interest in other spiritual questions; in, for instance, that creative flow of life which shows itself so wonderfully after birth in the soul that previously was in the spiritual world.

A result of this lack of interest is the way man thinks about the Divine in the various religious denominations. The fact that we visualize a God as The Highest has no special meaning. Here it is essential that we free ourselves from deception. What do most people mean today if they say “God?“ What kind of being do people refer to when they speak of God? It is an Angel; nothing else but their own Angel whom they call God. People have just a bare intimation that a protective spirit guides their life; they look up to him and call him their God. This is the egotism of the churches, that they do not pass beyond the Angel with their concept of God. A narrowing of interests is caused by egotism; and this narrowing of interests is to be clearly seen in public life.

Do people today ask about the general destiny of man-kind? Oh! it is often very sad if one wants to speak to people about human destiny. No one has any idea of the degree of change that has taken place in this respect in a comparatively short time. Today we may say to people: The military conflict that has spread over the earth during the last four or five years will be followed by the mightiest spiritual battle, which will cover the earth in a form never experienced before. Its origin lies in the fact of the Occident naming as illusion or ideology what the Orient calls reality, and the Orient feeling as reality what the Occident calls ideology. We may draw people's attention to this weighty matter and it does not even dawn on them that if something similar had been said only a hundred years ago it would have so taken hold of people's souls that they would never have gotten over it.

This change in humanity, this growing indifference to the great questions of destiny, is the most striking phenomenon. Everything bounces off mankind, so to say. The most comprehensive, incisive facts are accepted like a sensation. People are not deeply shaken by them. The reason for this is the clever, ever increasing egotism that constricts men's interests. We may have whatever fine democracies where men meet in parliaments, but concern for the fate of man-kind does not permeate them, because the people who are elected to these parliaments do not feel the urgency to know mankind's destiny. Egotistical interests hold sway. Every-one has his own egotistical interest. Similarities in outer interests such as often arise from one's profession, lead people to form groups. When the groups are large enough, majorities arise. In this way a concern not for human destinies but only for egotism, multiplied by the number of persons involved, becomes active in parliaments and men's proposals.

Because of the way egotism lives in people now, even their religious professions are under its influence. They will have their necessary renewal if people's interests broaden; that is, if men will again look beyond their personal destiny to the destiny of mankind; if they will be deeply moved when one tells them that in the West a culture develops that is different from that of the East, and that the culture of the Middle is again different from that of both East and West. Or if one tells them that in the West the great goals of mankind are sought, when they are sought, through the use of mediums who are put into a trance and are thereby consciously brought into a sub-earthly relationship to the spiritual worlds, out of which they speak of great historical aims. We could tell this repeatedly to Europeans, yet they will not believe that in English-American countries there really exist societies in which the attempt is made to find out through questions cleverly put to mediums what the great goals of mankind are. People likewise do not believe that the Oriental obtains knowledge about the destiny of mankind not through mediums but on the mystical path. In the beautiful speeches of Rabindranath Tagore, easily available today, you can read what the Oriental thinks on a grand scale about the goals of mankind. These speeches are read as one reads the feature articles of any hack journalist; because today people distinguish little between a journalistic hack and persons of great spirituality like Rabindranath Tagore. They are not aware, I might say, that different racial substances can live side by side. What is valid for Middle Europe I have put forward in public lectures for many years. It was not received as it should have been.

With this I only wish to point out that one may become aware of something that reaches beyond the egotistical fate of a man and is connected with the destiny of groups of men, so that we can make specific differentiations across the face of the earth. If one lifts his view toward comprehending human destiny in mankind as a whole, if one concerns himself intensely with what thus passes beyond personal destiny, then one tunes his soul to comprehending a higher reality than the Angel; actually, that of the Archangel. Thoughts concerning the significance of an Archangel do not arise in one's soul if one remains in the regions concerned with egotistical man. Preachers may talk ever so much about the Divine; if they only preach within the confines of egotistical man they speak merely of the Angel. Calling it by a different name is just an untruth; it does not put the matter straight. Only if one begins to be interested in man's destiny as a unity over the whole earth does his soul begin to elevate itself to the Archangel.

Now let us pass on to something else. Let us feel what I have indicated in these lectures about the successive impulses of mankind's evolution. You will find that most of our leading citizens were educated in the classical schools—Gymnasium—during the years when the soul is pliable and flexible. These classical schools were not born out of the culture of our age but of the Greco-Latin age. If those Greeks and Romans had done what we did, they would have established Egypto-Chaldean classical schools. They didn't do that; they took the subjects for their teaching from immediate life. We take them from the previous period and educate people accordingly. This is very significant, but we haven't recognized it. Had we done so a note would have sounded within the feminist movement that did not resound, and that is: Men, if their intelligence is to be specially trained, are sent into antiquated schools. There their brains become hardened. Women have the good fortune of not being admitted into the classical schools. We want to develop our intelligence in an original way; we want to show what can be developed in the present age if we are not made dull in our youth by Greco-Latin classical education.

These words did not resound, but in their place: Men have crept into and hidden under the Greco-Latin classical education, let us women do the same. Let us also become students of the classical schools.

So little has understanding spread for what is necessary! We must realize that in our present time we are not educated for our age but for the Greco-Latin culture. This is inserted into our lives. We must sense it. We must sense what, as Greco-Latin culture, acts in the leading people of today, in the so-called intellectuals. This is one aspect of what we carry within us in our spiritual education. We read no newspaper that does not contain Greco-Latin education; because, although writing in our national idiom, we actually write in the Greco-Latin form.

And in regard to our concept of rights we live in Romanism, again something antiquated. To be sure, the old national rights battle at times against Roman law, but they do not prevail. We must feel how a time that has passed lives in what man calls right and wrong in public life.

Only in economic life do we live in the present. This is a significant statement. Perhaps I may say in passing that many women use the concepts of the present in their cooking, in managing their households. In doing so they actually are the people of the present age; everything else that is carried into the present is antiquated. I do not present this matter of their cooking as something particularly desirable, but the other aspect is much less desirable, namely, that the souls of women also want to go back from the present to antiquated cultures. In looking upon our cultural surroundings we have not only what acts in space but also the effects of bygone eras. If we acquire a feeling for this, not only the past affects us but the future as well. It is our task to let the future work into us. Because, if there did not live in every person, however slightly aware of it, a kind of rebellion against the Hellenism of education and the Romanism of rights, if the future were not to ray in upon us, we would be pathetic creatures, really very pathetic creatures.

Besides space we must also consider time in our culture; that is to say, what as history reaches over into our present from the past and from the future. We, as people of the present, must realize that past and future play into our souls. Just as America, England, Asia, China, India—the East and the West as two opposites—have their effect upon us as Europeans, so do we carry Greece, Rome, and the future in us. If we are willing to focus our attention on the future by becoming aware of how what is past and what is coming into being live in our souls, then another attitude arises in us concerning human destiny, an attitude that transcends egotism and is different from what is aroused by a merely spatial consideration. Only if we develop this soul attitude is it possible for us to form concepts about the sphere of the Time Spirits, the Archai. That is to say, we come to the third rank of divine beings in the order of the Hierarchies.

It is good if man by such means places before himself these three Hierarchies in concepts and ideas, because the Spirits of Form who come next are much harder to comprehend. But it suffices for modern man if he attempts to penetrate beyond egotism into the sphere of the unegotistic, doing this repeatedly, and occupying himself with what I have just explained. I must emphasize again, that especially the training of teachers should make use of these facts. A teacher should not be permitted to instruct and educate without having acquired an idea of the egotism that strives toward the closest God, the Angel; without also having acquired a concept of the unegotistic, destiny-determining powers who are side by side in space above the earth, the Archangel beings; and without having acquired a concept of how past and future reach over into our culture, the Roman life of rights, the Greek spiritual substance, and the undefined rebel of the future, which saves us.

Mankind at present has little inclination to enter into these matters. Some time ago I repeatedly emphasized that it is one of our social tasks to derive from the present our educational subjects to be used during the time spent today in classical schools. To do as the Greeks themselves did, namely, take the subjects for education from present-day life.

Shortly after the time, and in the same place where I had spoken about the social importance of this problem (I do not wish to imply a causal connection, but the matter has symptomatic meaning) there appeared in all the news-papers in that place a number of advertisements propagandizing the modern classical schools. I had delivered lectures characterizing classical education in the way I have done here. The advertisements declared what the German nation owes to the classical education of its youth, for “strengthening the national consciousness,” “the national power,” and so on. This was a few weeks before the Treaty of Versailles. These advertisements were signed by a variety of local figures from the schools and the department of education. What has to be brought out today as to the factual basis of mankind's evolution, is rejected. People let it bounce off; it does not touch the depths of the soul. For this reason, it is so difficult to be active in the social sphere. One will never be able to take hold of the social question with the superficialities employed today. It is a deeply significant question that cannot be grasped if one will not look deeply into the nature of man and the world. Because this is so it should be evident how important are certain proposals offered by the threefold social order.

We must acquire an organ for what is necessary for our age, and it is difficult to acquire this organ in the spiritual sphere. For an education that has gradually been taken over by the State has deprived man of active striving; it has made him into a devoted member of the State structure. How do the majority of people live? Up to the sixth year of age man may live unhindered because the State does not yet consider him sanitary enough. The State would not like to devote itself to the tasks that have to be carried out in the first childhood years. Man is still left to the powers outside the State. But then it lays claim to him and he is trained to fit the pattern of the State; he ceases to be a person and bears the stamp of the State. He strives to fit this pattern because it is instilled in him. He not only gets his keep from the State while he works but beyond the working age up to his death, in the form of a pension. It is the ideal of many people today to have a position that entitles them to a pension. The soul too becomes entitled to a pension, even beyond death, without any effort on its part, because it receives eternal bliss through the activity of the church. The church sees to that. Now it is very uncomfortable to hear that salvation lies in free spiritual striving which must be independent of the State. The State must only serve civil rights, where there will be no claim to a pension. This is reason enough for many to reject it, as we have occasion to notice again and again.

Concerning the most intimate spiritual life, the religious life, the world of the future will demand of man that he work for his immortality; that he let his soul be active so that it may receive into itself, through activity, the Divine, the Christ-impulse.

In the course of my life I have received many letters from church people who state that anthroposophy is fundamentally a fine thing, but it contradicts the simple Christian faith; that Christ has redeemed the soul, that one can attain salvation in Christ without any effort on one's part. People cannot let go of the “simple belief in the attainment of salvation through Christ.” They believe themselves to be especially pious if they say or write something like that. But they are egotistical, extremely egotistical. They want to be passive in their souls and let it be the concern of the Divine to transport the soul, nicely pensioned, through the portal of death.

Matters are not so easy in that world conception in which, in future, the religious element must be created. Here one must understand that the presence of the Divine in the soul must be worked for. One will no longer be able just to surrender passively to the churches, which promise to carry the souls into the beyond. (The involvement of money for such service, a scandal in the past, has now fallen into disuse, but secretly it still plays a role in this process, also in obtaining special blessings.) But the transition to inner activity is what is needed for mankind, something it doesn't yet cherish very much.

In order to gain a feeling for what is necessary in this regard we must keep in mind, first, the metamorphosis of humanity since the time of ancient Egypt when the body was more of a plant-like nature. Should there be a relapse into that state in the present age, man would become sick and develop tumors and such things. Secondly, the fact that we carry our body as a corpse which can think, can under-stand. In this way we gain a feeling for what mankind needs, which is, to advance in the solving of social problems in the way this has to be done in the present time. We must no longer allow ourselves to consider such a matter as the social question as being utterly simple.

You see, this is what is so difficult at present: That people would like to be enlightened on the most important aspects of life by a few abstract statements. If a book like The Threefold Social Order contains more than a few abstract statements, if it contains the results of an observation of life, then people say they do not understand it. They consider it confusing. But this is the misfortune at present, that people do not wish to enter into what precisely they ought to enter into. For abstract sentences, completely lucid, refer to what is dead; the social element, however, ought to be alive. Here we must employ flexible ideas, flexible sentences, flexible forms. Therefore, it is necessary that we not only reflect upon the transformation of single institutions, but that we really adjust ourselves to a genuine transformation in our thinking and learning, down to their innermost structure.

This is what I would like to leave with you today when I have to leave again for a few weeks. We must feel ourselves influenced by the working together of our anthroposophical and our social movement. I should like you to comprehend more and more why it is that the anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit must flow into the souls of men if anything is to be achieved in the social field. And I would bring close to your hearts what I have said repeatedly in various ways: It is of utmost importance to acknowledge that what we can acquire of anthroposophical knowledge is the true guide-line now for all action and striving; that we must have the courage to will to prevail with anthroposophy. The worst thing is that people in these days have so little courage for willing to prevail with what is needed. They permit their best will-forces to break down; though it is so necessary they do not will to carry through.

Learn to represent anthroposophy with courage. Receive graciously the people who show an interest in looking at this building which represents our spiritual striving. Rejoice in every single individual who shows even a little understanding. Meet with him. But do not take it to heart if your efforts are fruitless, and people meet our activities with evil intention, or, what is more frequent, with lack of understanding. Just resist it suitably. It is courage that is needed to bring our efforts through to good results. Let us think of ourselves as the handful of people whose destiny it is to know and to communicate to the world what it so sorely needs today. Let the people ridicule us and say that it is presumption to believe all this. It is true nevertheless. Saying to oneself, “It is true nevertheless,”—saying it so earnestly that it fills one's whole soul, this needs the inner courage we must have. May it permeate us as anthroposophical substance. Then we shall do what we have to do, everyone at the place where he is. This I wanted to say to you today.

We are longing for the day when our activity through this building brings us closer to the outside world; our activity which in any case is very difficult. This building is the only one that takes into account the great destinies of mankind even in its forms, and it is very gratifying to see that attention is being paid to it. Something else, however, is necessary for favorable progress in social problems, and that is, that this building through its very forms, which are stronger than other modern architectural forms, should aid in the strengthening of humanity's spiritual powers; making men more amenable to what one wishes them to know, so that they may rise not only to the nature of the Angel, but to the Archangel, and to the Spirit of the Time.

With these words I take leave of you for a few weeks. I hope to be able then to continue these considerations, and that during this time we shall come into an intensive activity for our building itself. Because, my dear friends, we are justified in emphasizing on every hand that readiness for work, that joy in work is needed for all men. This will not come if people are not moved by great purposes. I believe that if people can be convinced that through the three-folding of the social organism they can attain an existence worthy of man, they will begin to work again. Otherwise they will continue to strike. For in the field of physical labor people need an impulse that takes hold of them in their inmost souls.

But we must show that our work has been fruitful in attaining at least one objective, and this radiates into the world. Only then can we give the impulse to mankind to overcome spiritually what is dead in our time. Let us think this over, my dear friends, until the time when we are together again and can speak further about these questions.

If you continue reading the Gospel of Mark from the verses we endeavoured to explain in the last lecture, you come to a remarkable passage similar in every way to what we are told in the other Gospels, but the full meaning of which can be best studied in the Gospel of Mark. This passage tells how Jesus Christ, after He had received baptism in Jordan and passed through the experiences met with in the wilderness, went into the synagogue and taught. The passage is generally translated as follows:—“And they were astonished at his doctrine: for He taught them as one that had authority and not as the scribes.” What more does this sentence mean to the man of to-day, however much he may believe the Bible, than the somewhat abstract statement: “He taught with authority and not as the scribes?” If we take the Greek text we find for the words “For he taught with authority”—“He taught as an Exusiai” and not as the “scribes.”

If we enter deeply into the meaning of this important passage, it leads us a step further towards what may be called the secrets of the mission of Christ Jesus. For I have already remarked that the Gospels as well as other writings that spring from inspired sources are not to be understood so simply as people think, but that we must bring to the understanding of them everything in the way of thoughts and ideas concerning the spiritual world that we have been able, to acquire in the course of many years. Only such thoughts can show us what is meant in the Gospel where it say:—For he taught those who sat in the synagogue as an “Exusiai,” as a Power, and not as those who are hero called “scribes.”

If such a sentence is to be understood we must recall the knowledge we have acquired in recent years concerning the super-sensible worlds. We have learnt during this period that man as he lives in this world is the lowest member of a hierarchical order; it is here we must place him. He is a part of the super-sensible world, a world where, in the first place, we find Beings called in Christian esotericism, Angeloi or Angels; these are the Beings standing next above man. Above them come the Archangeloi or Archangels, then the Archai or Spirits of Personality. Above these again are the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes, and still higher are the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. We have thus a Hierarchical order of nine kinds of Beings one above the other, the lowest of which is man. Now we ought to understand how these many different spiritual or super-sensible Beings intervene in our lives.

Angels are those who, as messengers of super-sensible realms, stand nearest to man as he is on earth; they constantly influence what may be called the fate of individuals on our physical plane. As soon as we mention Archangels on the other hand, we speak of Spiritual Beings whose activities cover a wider span. We can also call them “Folk-Spirits,” for they order and guide the concerns of whole nations or groups of peoples.

When a “Folk-Spirit” is spoken of to-day people generally mean so many thousands of people who are guided by this spirit merely because they live within the same territory. But when a “Folk-Spirit” is spoken of in spiritual science, we mean the individuality of the people, not such or such a number of people, but a real individuality, just as we speak of the “individuality” of separate men. And when speaking of the spiritual guidance of the individuality of a people this guide or leader is called an Archangel. In speaking of these exalted Beings we speak of real super-sensible entities having their own spheres of activity. The Archai (called also Spirits of Personality or first Beginnings) are spoken of in spiritual science as being again different from “Folk-Spirits.” We speak, for instance, of a French or an English or a German “Folk-Spirit,” and in doing so speak of something allotted to different parts of the earth. But there is something that unites all men, at least all western humanity, something in which these people feel at one. This, in contradistinction to the separate “Folk-Spirits,” we call the “Spirit of the Age or Time-Spirit” (Zeitgeist), there is a different “Time-Spirit” or Zeitgeist for the time of the Reformation from that of pre-Reformation times, and again a different one for our own day. The Beings we call “Time-Spirits” or Zeitgeists have therefore to be ranked above the separate “Folk-Spirits”; in fact the name Archai is given to these leaders of succeeding epochs, but all the same they are “Time-Spirits.”

When we rise still higher we come to the Exusiai, here we have to do with a quite different kind of super-sensible Being. In order to form an idea of how the Beings of the higher Hierarchies differ from the three just mentioned—the Angels, Archangels, Archai—think how similar members of one group of people is to another. As regards their external physical constitution—as regards what they eat and drink for instance—we cannot say they differ very much in anything outside the realm of the soul and spirit. Even in respect of succeeding epochs of time we must allow that the spiritual guides of humanity are connected only with the things of soul and spirit. But man does not consist only of soul and spirit, these influence mainly his astral body, but within his Being are also denser parts, and these, as regards the activities of the Archai, Archangels and Angels, do not differ much from each other. Creative influences are however at work on these denser members of man's Being, and this creative activity of Hierarchical Beings beginning with the “Exusiai,” continues upwards.

We have to thank the “Time-Spirits” Zeitgeister or Archai, and the “Folk-Spirit” or Archangels, for ideas connected with time and for speech, but human nature is influenced also by other things, by what lives in light and air and in the climate of particular districts. The humanity that flourishes at the Equator is different from that which flourishes at the North Pole. We do not perhaps quite agree with a well-known German professor of philosophy who states in a widely read book that “Important civilisations must develop in the temperate zone, for all those great Beings who have introduced important civilisations would have frozen at the North Pole and been burnt up at the South Pole!” We can say however, food, etc., is different in different climates, and this affects people differently. External conditions are by no means unimportant to the character of a people, whether this people dwells, for instance, among mountains or on wide plains. We observe how the forces of nature influence the whole constitution of man, and as students of spiritual science we know that the forces of nature are nothing else than the result of the activities of Beings of a spiritual nature. For we hold that super-sensible spiritual Beings are active in all the forces of nature and make use of these to influence man. We therefore distinguish between the activities of Archai and of Exusiai by saying:—Angels, Archangel and Archai do not influence man by making use of the forces of nature, but they make use of that which affects his spiritual nature, his speech, and the ideas that connect him with epochs of time. The activity of these Beings does not extend to the lower members of his organism, neither to the etheric nor yet the physical body. In the Exusiai, on the other hand, we have to recognise those higher Beings affecting mankind who work through the forces of nature, who are the bringers to man of the different kinds of air and light, of the various ways in which foodstuffs are produced within the different kingdoms of nature. It is they who control these kingdoms of nature.

What comes to us in thunder and lightning, in rain and sunshine, how one kind of food grows in one region, other kinds in other regions—in short, the whole distribution and organisation of earthly condition we ascribe to spiritual Beings that have to be sought among the higher Hierarchies. So that when we look up to the nature of the Exusiai we do not see the result of their activities in any such invisible way as in the case of the “Time-Spirits” for instance; but we see in them that which works on us in light, and that also works on the plant creation as light.

Let us now consider what was given to man as “culture,” what he had to learn in order to progress. Every man receives in his own age what this age has produced, but he also receives to a certain extent what former ages have produced. This can, however, only be preserved historically, can only be the result of historical teaching and learning. This is derived from the lowest of the Hierarchies, and reaches as far as to the “Time-Spirit.” What comes to man on the other hand from the kingdoms of nature, cannot be preserved in records or traditions. Yet those who are able to penetrate to super-sensible worlds pass beyond the sphere of Archangels to still higher revelations. Such revelations are perceived as carrying more weight than what comes from the realms of the Zeitgeists, they affect mankind in a quite special way.

Every clear thinking man should occasionally turn back and seriously ask himself—“Which has the greatest effect on my soul, that which I have learnt from the traditions of different peoples and ‘Time-Spirit’ since history began, or a lovely sunrise; that is, than the revelations of spiritual worlds presented to me by nature itself?”

Such a man feels that the grandeur and beauty of a sunrise reveals infinitely more to his soul than all the sciences, learning, and art of the ages. What nature reveals can be felt by anyone who having visited the Art Galleries of Italy and seen what have been preserved to us of the works of Michelangelo, of Leonardo da Vinci, or Raphael, and having allowed the power of these to act on him has then climbed one of the mountains of Switzerland, and viewed the marvellous spectacles provided by nature. He might then ask:—Who is the greater painter, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, or those Powers who paint the sunrise as seen from the Rigi? And he would be obliged to answer:—However much we may admire what man has achieved, what is here presented to us as the divine revelation of Spiritual Powers appears to us infinitely the greater!

When the great spiritual leaders of men appear whom we call Initiates, who speak not according to tradition but in an original way, their revelations resemble the revelations of nature itself. But what we feel in a sunrise would never have the same effect on us if it were something merely repeated. Compared with what we have received as the communications of Moses and Zarathustra, when these were traditional and had been handed down as the external culture which the “Time-Spirits” and “Folk-Spirits” had preserved and then passed on—compared with this what nature has to give is infinitely greater. For the revelations of Moses and of Zarathustra only worked as powerfully as nature's revelations when they sprang directly from the experiences of super-sensible worlds.

The grandeur of the original revelations made to man is seen in their power to affect him in the same way as the revelations of nature itself. But this only begins where, as lowest among the Hierarchies controlling nature, we divine something of the Exusiai.

What then was felt by those who sat in the synagogues when the Christ appeared among them?

We are told by the “Grammarians” that until then they had experienced those things which the “Time-Spirits,” “Folk-Spirits” and others had communicated to them. People had got accustomed to this; but now One had appeared who did not teach as those others, but so that His words were a revelation of the super-sensible Powers in nature itself, or of the Powers working in thunder and lightning.

Therefore when we know how the greatness of the Hierarchies increases as they ascend, we can understand such a saying in the Gospels and accept it in the full depth of its meaning. This is how we must feel about these words in the Gospel according to Mark, and even in such human endeavours as have come down to us in the works of art of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. Anyone with a feeling for the super-sensible quality lying behind these is aware—even in what remains—of all they originally presented to us. So that it is in all great works of art, in all great works of genius. Something continues to affect us in these like an echo of those others (the Hierarchies); and if we are able to see what Raphael, for instance, put into his pictures, or if we are able to pour fresh life into the works of Zarathustra, we can hear in them something of what streams down to us from the realms of the Exusiai. But in what was taught by the scribe in the Synagogue, that is, by those who accepted what originated from the “Folk-Spirits” and ”Time-Spirits,” nothing could be heard that agreed in any way with the revelations of nature.

We are justified therefore in saying, a sentence like this shows that men began at that time to have a feeling, a presentiment, that something entirely new was speaking to them; that through this man who had appeared among them something made itself felt that was like a power of nature, like one of those super-sensible powers that stand behind nature. Men began gradually to divine what it was that had entered into Jesus of Nazareth, and was symbolised in the baptism in Jordan. In reality, they were not far from the truth when they said in the synagogue: we feel when He speaks as though one of the Exusiai spoke—not only an Archai, or Archangel, or Angel.

It is only through what spiritual science has given us that we can fill once more with living sap these modern translations of the Gospels that have become so thin and meaningless; only then are we able to learn how very much goes to a true understanding of what is contained in the Gospels. It will take many generations to fathom, even approximately, all the depths of which our present age is only beginning to have some perception.

What the writer of the Gospel according to Mark desired especially to point out was really a further development of the teaching of Paul, who was one of the first to grasp the nature and Being of Christ through direct super-sensible knowledge.

Men had now to understand what Paul taught to all, what it was that all men could receive into them through the revelation of Damascus. Although this event is described in the Bible as a sudden illumination, yet those who know the truth regarding such occurrences know that it can happen at any moment to one who desires to rise to spiritual realms; and that through what such a man experiences he becomes a changed Being. With regard to Paul we are amply told how he became an entirely different man through the revelation made to him on the way to Damascus.

Even a superficial study of the letters of St. Paul will prove to anyone that he saw in the Event of Christ and in the Event of Golgotha the central point of our whole human evolution; that he associated this directly with that other event spoken of in the Bible as “the first creation,” the first Adam, so that he might have spoken somewhat as follows:—

What we describe as the true man, the spiritual man (of whom in this world of Maya only a Maya exists) came down in ancient Lemurian times to this world of illusion and to all he had to experience in the flesh in successive incarnations. He became man, as this was understood in Lemurian and Atlantean times, and up to the time of Christ. Then came the Event of Golgotha. All this was firmly fixed in the mind of Paul after the vision of Damascus. He realised that in the Event of Golgotha something was given which is comparable with the descent of man into the flesh. With this was given an impulse by which he could gradually overcome those forms of earthly existence which had entered into him through “Adam.” Hence Paul calls the humanity that began with Christ, the “new Adam,” the “Adam” that everyone can put on through union with the Christ.

We have therefore to see in the man of Lemurian times, and on into pre-Christian humanity, a slow and gradual descent of man into matter (whether he be called Adam or not). Then came the power and impulse that enabled him to rise again; so that along with all he acquired in earthly life man was able to return to his original spiritual state, that state in which he was before he descended into matter. Unless we misunderstand the true meaning of evolution we must now ask “Could man not have been spared this descent? Why had he to enter a fleshly body and pass through many incarnations, only then to rise again to what he had been before? Such questions can only spring from a complete misunderstanding of the spiritual nature of evolution. For man takes with him all the fruits and experiences of his earthly evolution, and is enriched with the results of his incarnations. These are results—contents, which he did not have previously. Picture to yourselves a man entering into his first incarnation: in it he learns certain things; he learns more in the second incarnation, and so on through all his subsequent incarnations. The course of these is a descending one; he is entangled more and more in the physical world. Then he begins to rise again, and is able to rise so far that he can receive within him the Christ-Impulse. One day he will again enter the spiritual world, but will have taken with him all he had gained on earth.

Paul saw in the Christ the true central point of the whole earthly evolution of man; he saw what gave man the impulse to rise to super-sensible worlds enriched by all the experiences he had gained on earth.

How, from this standpoint, did Paul regard the sacrifice on Golgotha, the actual crucifixion? It is not easy to bring these facts, these most essential facts of human evolution clearly before modern minds, in the sense in which Paul saw them. For this sense is also that of the writer of the Gospel of Mark. Before we can do this we must make ourselves familiar with the thought, that in man, as he comes before us to-day, we are concerned with a microcosm, a small world, and we must study everything that this idea brings with it.

As man comes before us to-day in the course of his evolution between birth and death in one re-incarnation, two parts of his development are presented which differ greatly from each other; only this difference is not noticed as a rule. I have frequently spoken about these fundamentally different parts of man's life (for our whole spiritually scientific endeavour has a more systematic construction than is often supposed), one of these parts or periods is that between birth and the moment to which at the present time memory extends. If we trace our life backwards, a point is finally reached beyond which all memory ceases. Although you were present, and have perhaps been told by parents or relatives of things you did, and so have knowledge of them, you have no recollection of them, memory does not reach beyond a certain point. Under favourable circumstances this lies round about the third year. Up to this period the child is specially active and impressionable. How much he has learnt during this period, during his first, second and third years! But of how things impressed him he has not the least recollection.

Then follows the time through which the thread of conscious memory extends smoothly.

These two parts of his development should be carefully considered, for they are of very great importance when man is studied as a whole. Human evolution must be followed carefully, and without the prejudices of modern science. The facts of modern science certainly confirm what I have to say; but if we are not to wander far from the truth we must not follow the prejudice of science. Observing human evolution closely we say:—Man's life among his fellows as a social being can only be lived in accordance with conditions regulated by memory, which begins as a rule about his third year. Of all that concerns this we can say: it is under the direction of our conscious life; all the things we consciously accept as laws according to which we guide our impulses, etc., and that we feel to be worthy, all this is contained in memory. Of what lies before we are unconscious so far as ego consciousness is concerned.

The threads of memory which belong to our conscious life do not reach to this period. There are therefore certain years of our conscious life during which the surrounding world works on us quite differently from how it does later. The difference is a most radical one. Were we able to observe a child before the period to which at a later age its memory extended, we should see that it then feels itself to he much more within general macrocosmic spiritual life; it is not yet separated from this, is not yet isolated within itself, but reckons that it belongs rather to the whole surrounding universe. It does not express itself as others; it does not say:—“I will,” but “Johnnie wills.” It only learns later to speak of itself as an ego; modern psychologists criticise such facts adversely, but this in no way denies the truth, but only their own powers of insight.

In its early years a child still feels within the whole surrounding world, feels that it is a part of this world. Memory first begins when it separates itself as an individual from the world around it. We can therefore say, the laws a man accepts, and which form the content of his consciousness, belong to the second part of his consciousness, to the second part of his evolution, the part we have just described. A quite different relationship to his environment belongs to the first part, he then feels far more a part of, far more within, the environing world. What I wish to say can only he clearly understood if you imagine hypothetically that the consciousness which gives man this direct contact with the surrounding universe in the first years of childhood, were able to continue. In that case his life would be entirely different, he would not feel so isolated, but would feel in later life that he was a part of the whole macrocosm, that he was within the great world. At present he loses this. He has no later connection with that world, he feels cut off from it. If he is a man belonging to ordinary life this feeling of isolation only comes to him in an abstract way. For instance, it enters his consciousness for the most part when egoism increases, when he shuts himself up, as it were, more and more within his own skin. Opinions limiting his life to what is contained within his skin are but half baked opinions, in fact nonsense, for the moment man exhales breath, the breath he had drawn in is now outside of him. So that even as regards our in-breathing and out-breathing we are continually in touch with our whole environment. The way man regards his own being is an absolute illusion, but his consciousness is such that he must live in this illusion. He cannot help himself. For we are really neither suited, nor are we ripe enough, to experience our own Karma at the present day. If, for example, someone wishes to close the window, we are apt, because we regard ourselves as separate beings, to feel injured and annoyed. But if we believed in Karma we would feel that we belonged to the whole macrocosm, and would know as a fact that it was really we who had closed the window, for we are interwoven with the whole cosmos. It is absolute nonsense to think we are enclosed within our skins. But the feeling of being one with the macrocosm is only retained by the child in its early years, it is lost from the point of time to which later its memory extends.

Things were not always thus. In former times, which do not lie so very far behind us, man was still able to a certain extent to carry this consciousness of his early years on into later times. This was in the days of the ancient clairvoyance. With it was associated a quite different kind of thinking as well as a different way of expressing facts. This is something belonging to human evolution that it would be well the student of spiritual science should understand.

When a man is born among us at the present day, what is he? He is in the first place the son of his father and of his mother. And if in communal life he has not got a certificate of birth or baptism showing the standing of his father and mother by which he can be identified nothing is known of him, and his existence is ignored. According to the ideas of the present day, a man is the physical son of his father and of his mother.

This is not how men thought at a time not so very long ago. But because the scientists and investigators of to-day do not know that in former times men thought differently, that their words and their relation-ships to each other were different from what they are now, they have therefore arrived at interpretations of ancient communications that are also quite different. We are told for instance, in these ancient communications of a Greek singer, Orpheus. I select him because he belongs to an age immediately preceding that of Christianity. It was Orpheus who inaugurated the Grecian Mysteries. The Greek age falls within the fourth period of post-Atlantean civilisations, so that in a way the Greeks were prepared by Orpheus for what they were to receive later through the Christ Event.

What would a modern man say if confronted by a person like Orpheus? He would say:—He is the son of such and such a father and mother, modern science might perhaps even look for “inherited attributes” in him. There exists to-day a large volume treating of all the inherited characteristics of the Goethe family, and would present Goethe as the sum of these inherited attributes. People did not think in this way at the time of Orpheus, they did not then regard external man and his attributes as what was most essential. The most essential thing in Orpheus was the power by which he became the inaugurator, the true leader, of pre-Christian civilisation in Greece. They recognised quite clearly that his physical brain and nervous system were not what was most important in him. They considered this to be far more the fact that he bore within him an element that had its direct source in super-sensible worlds, that through it, all he experienced in these worlds came in touch, by means of his personality, with a physical sensible element, and could then express itself in the various stages provided by a physical personality. The Greeks saw in Orpheus not the man of flesh descended from father and mother, even perhaps from grandfather and grandmother, this was not to them the main thing, it was only his shell, his outer presentment. For them the essential thing in him was what had descended from a super-sensible source, and had entered into a sensible being on the physical plane.

When the Greeks confronted Orpheus they hardly considered his descent from father and mother, what mattered to them was the fact that his soul qualities, the qualities through which he had become what he was, sprang from a super-sensible source that till then had never had any connection with the physical plane, and that through what this man was, a super-sensible element was able to work within his personality and be united with it.

Because the Greeks saw, as what was most essential in Orpheus, a pure super-sensible element, they said of him:—“He is descended from a Muse.” He was the son of the Muse Calliope; he was not the son of any mere earthly mother, but of a super-sensible element that had never had connection with sensible things. Had he been the son of Calliope alone, he could only have given information concerning super-sensible worlds. But because of the age in which he lived he was ordained to give expression also to that which would be of service to his age physically. He was not only an instrument for the voice of the Muse Calliope, as the Rischis at an earlier day had been the vocal instruments of certain super-sensible forces, but he was able to express super-sensible things so vividly in his own life that the physical world was influenced by him. Because Orpheus had a Thracean river God for his father, what he taught waS closely associated on the other side with nature, with the climate of Greece, and with all that external nature gave to the river god, Oiagros.

We gather therefore that the soul-nature of Orpheus was considered the most important part of him. It was in respect of their souls men were described long ago, not as became customary later when people were described by saying: he is the son of so and so, and was born in such a town, but they were described according to their spiritual values.

It is extraordinarily interesting to note how intimately the fate of a man like Orpheus was felt; a man who was descended on one side from a muse and on the other from a river god. He had within him not merely super-sensible qualities as the prophets had, but to these he had added sensible qualities. He was therefore exposed to all the influences exercised on man by the physical sensible world.

You are well aware that the nature of man is composed of several members. The lowest of these is the physical body, then comes the etheric body (concerning which I told you that it comprises the opposite sex), then the astral body and the ego. A man like Orpheus was still able to look on one side into the spiritual world because he was descended from a Muse (you now know what that means), but on the other side the capacities by which he could live in the spiritual world were undermined owing to the life he led on the physical plane, and because of his descent from his father, the Thracian river god. Through this his purely spiritual life was undermined. In the case of all the earlier leaders of mankind in the second and third periods of post-Atlantean culture, by whom only a verbal teaching concerning the spiritual world had been imparted, conditions were such that they were conscious of their own etheric body as something separated from their physical body. When in the civilisations of ancient Greece, and also in those of the Celts, a man was empowered to perceive what he had to communicate to his fellow-men, these revelationscame to him because his etheric body extended beyond his physical body. It became in this case the hearer of forces which entered into the man. If the person giving out these revelations was a man and his etheric body therefore female, he perceived what he had to communicate from the spiritual world in a female form.

Now it had to be shown that where Orpheus came into purely spiritual relationship with Spiritual Powers, he was exposed, owing to his being the son of the Thracian river god, to the risk of not being able to retain the revelations that came to him through his etheric body. The more he entered into the life of the physical world and expressed what he was as a son of Thrace, the more he lost his clairvoyant powers. This is shown in the fact that Eurydice, she through whom he revealed himself, his soul-bride, was removed from him, and was taken to the underworld. This occurred through the bite of an adder. He could only receive her hack again by passing through an initiation. This he now did. Whenever we are told of anyone “going into the underworld,” it means an initiation, so he had to pass through an initiation before receiving his bride back again. But already he was too closely interwoven with the physical world. He certainly did attain powers by which he was able to penetrate to the underworld, but on his return, as he again beheld the light of the sun, Eurydice disappeared from his sight. Why? Because when he beheld the light of day he did something he should not have done—he looked back. That means, he overstepped a law strictly laid on him by the God of the underworld. What law is this? It is, that physical man as he lives on the physical plane to-day must not look back beyond that moment of time I have already described, within which lie the macrocosmic experiences of childhood, and which, when extended into later states of consciousness, gave him the ancient form of clairvoyance. “Thou shalt not desire to unravel the secrets of childhood,” said the God of the underworld, “nor remember how the threshold was crossed.” If he did this he lost the faculty of clairvoyance. Something infinitely fine and intimate in Orpheus is shown us by this loss of Eurydice, one result of which is the sacrifice of man to the physical world. With a nature that is still rooted in the spiritual world, he is directed to what he has to become on the physical plane. Through this nature all the powers of the physical plane rush in on him, and he loses “Eurydice” his own innocent soul, which must be lost to modern humanity. The forces among which he is then placed lacerate him. This in a certain sense is regarded as the sacrifice of Orpheus.

What did Orpheus experience as he lived on from the third to the fourth period of post-Atlantean culture? He experienced in the first place that stage of consciousness which the child leaves behind—he experienced connection with the Macrocosm. This does not pass over into his conscious life. Therefore, as we see him, he is swallowed up, slain by life on the physical plane, which really begins at the point of time of which we have been speaking.

Consider now the man of the physical plane, who is normally only able to carry his memory back to a certain point of time, before which lie the first three years of childhood.

The thread of memory so entangles Orpheus with the physical plane that with his true nature he could not abide in it, but is torn to pieces. Thus it is with the spirit of man to-day; we see how profoundly the human spirit is entangled in matter. This is the spirit which, according to the Christianity of St. Paul, is called the “Son of Man.” You get this conception of the “Son of Man” who is in man from the point of time to which memory extends, along with all that he has gained through culture. Keep this man before you, and then think what he might have been through union with the Macrocosm, if there had entered into him all that streamed towards him from the Macrocosm in the early years of childhood. In these early years what comes can only form a foundation, for the evolved human ego is not yet present. But if it entered into an evolved human ego there would then take place what occurred for the first time through the baptism in Jordan at the moment when “the Spirit from above” descended upon Jesus of Nazareth. The three innocent stages of childhood's development would blend with all the rest of the human being. The consequence would be as this innocent life of childhood sought to develop on the physical earth, that it could do so only for three years (as is always the case):—it would meet its end on Golgotha. This means it cannot mingle with what man becomes at the moment when he achieves his egohood, at the point of time to which later his memory extends.

If you ponder this; if you ponder what it would mean if all the connections with the Macrocosm were to meet in one man; if everything that approached him in a vague, uncertain way in his early childhood streamed into him, but could not really dawn in him because the evolved ego was not present, were you to carry this thought further and picture it dawning within a later consciousness, something would be formed in man, something would enter into him, which did not spring from a human source, but from the vast world-depths out of which we are born You would then have the interpretation of the words uttered in connection with the descent of the dove:—“This is my well beloved Son; this day have I begotten Him!” This means: Now is the Christ—incarnated—“begotten” in Jesus of Nazareth. Christ was actually born in Jesus of Nazareth at the moment of baptism in Jordan. He then stood at the summit of that consciousness, which otherwise man only enjoys in the early years of childhood, but He was aware at the same time of this union with the whole cosmos. A child would also have this feeling of union if it were aware of what it felt during those three early years. In this case other words heard at that time would acquire a different meaning:—“I and the Father (the cosmic Father) are one!”

When you allow all this to affect your souls you will be conscious of something within you that is like an echo of what Paul felt, the earliest initial element of that which came to him in the revelation of Damascus, and experienced in the beautiful words:—“Unless ye become as little children ye cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” This saying has manifold meanings, among others this—Paul said, “Not I, but Christ in me!” This means a being having the macrocosmic consciousness a child would have were it to experience the consciousness of its three early years along with that of a later day. In the normal man of to-day these two kinds of consciousness are separate, they must be separate, for they are not compatible. Neither were they in Jesus Christ. For after these three years death had necessarily to follow under such circumstances as occurred in Palestine. It was not by chance these occurred as they did, but because two factors lived in one Being: the “Son of God”—which man is from the time of his birth until the development of his ego-consciousness, and the “Son of Man” which he is after this ego-consciousness has been acquired. Through the union of the “Son of God” and the “Son of Man” all those events came to pass which later led to the Events of Palestine.

During this Winter we have prepared the ground in various ways in order to understand with greater exactitude than has hitherto been possible man's life between birth and death in the physical world on the one side and on the other between death and rebirth in the spiritual world. And there will be still more to say about this subject in the coming months.

Efforts will be needed to draw together a number of details that will contribute towards a thorough understanding of this subject and throw new light upon many topics we have already studied from a different point of view. Today, then, I will ask you to think, above all, of the course of man's physical life—about which something has also been said in my book The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy—and of how it progresses in cycles: one from birth until about the seventh year, or until the change of teeth; a second cycle from the change of teeth until puberty at about the fourteenth year; then a third cycle, and so on in periods of seven years. Even to ordinary observation it will be clear that this systematic arrangement into periods of seven years is well founded, but on the other hand it will also be evident that in the actual life of the human being other facts of incisive significance cut across these seven-year periods. We ourselves have repeatedly considered a crucial occurrence in a man's life which eludes this division into cyclic periods. It is the point of time back to which a man's memory extends in later life, the moment when he begins to feel and know himself as an ‘I’, when Ego-consciousness dawns in him. This experience does not by any means occur at exactly the same point of time, but in most cases it may be said that Ego-consciousness flashes up in the human being at some point between birth and the seventh year. And something similar can be said to hold good in the later period of a man's life. Although with less abruptness than the sudden flashing-up of Ego-consciousness, there are other occurrences which as it were invalidate the regular seven-year cycle. We shall, however, always discover that whatever comes in this way into the life of man and cuts across the cyclic periods, occurs much more irregularly than the experiences connected with the actual seven-year cycles. You will hardly find two human beings whose memories go back to exactly the same point of time, that is to say who experienced the flashing up of consciousness of ‘I’ at the same age. Nor does the change of teeth occur at precisely the same age in different individuals. But why this is so in the latter case, we shall still have to consider.

When we study the cyclic periods already referred to and mentioned in my little book, Education of the Child, we shall notice that they begin in connection with the most physical, the most external member of man's being and are then concerned with the other, more inward members of his constitution. From birth until the seventh year development is connected primarily with the physical body, then for seven years with the etheric body, then for seven years with the astral body, the sentient soul, and so on. The evolutionary factors pass over more and more decisively from the external to the inner nature of man. That is essentially characteristic of the seven-year periods.

What, then, is there to be said about occurrences which cut across these seven-year periods? The flashing-up of ‘I’-consciousness during the first cycle is an emphatically inner event. For the sake of clarity, here let us consider something that seems to be in contrast with this flashing-up of Ego-consciousness. If we observe human life with discernment we shall find that the cessation of growth may be compared with some happening which cuts across the seven-year cycles of evolution. We will therefore think about the cessation of growth which after all occurs comparatively late in life, and study its implications.

The first seven-year period ends with the change of teeth. The appearance of the second teeth is, as it were, the final act of what may be called the formative principle. The last contribution made by the forces that give the human being his form is when they drive out the second teeth. That is the culmination of the formative process, for the principle which builds up the human form is no longer in action. With the seventh year the formative principle ceases to be active. What comes about later on is only an expansion of what has already been established as form. After the seventh year there is no more remodelling of the brain. All that happens is growth of what is already established as basic form. Therefore we can say that the principle of form unfolds its activity specifically in the first seven years of the life of a human being. The principle of form stems from the Spirits of Form; thus these Spirits of Form are active in the human being during the first seven years of his life. It can therefore be said that when the human being enters into life through birth, his actual form is not complete. What happens is that the Spirits of Form continue their active intervention during the first seven years of life; the human being has then reached the point when his form merely needs to grow. The basis for the form has been established by the seventh year, and the second teeth are what the formative principle still produces out of the human being. The formative principle has now come to its conclusion. Were its activity to continue, the second teeth would inevitably make their appearance later than is now the case.

Here we may ask: When these Spirits of Form have worked on the human being until the seventh year of his life, does everything they do for him come to an end?

The answer is ‘No’, for the human being goes on growing and the basic principles of his form develop still further. If nothing else intervened, growth would be able to continue without interruption. If we think only of the principles of form that are active in the human being until the seventh year there is no more reason in the case of man than in that of other beings why these forms should not continue to grow if nothing were to intervene. But something does intervene. When the human being stops growing, certain principles of form still have an effect upon him. They have already been drawing near to him but now they unite in the fullest sense with his organism, lay hold of it, but in such a way that they now act as a hindrance, and further growth is prevented. The formative principles that are active until the seventh year of life allow the human being a certain elasticity. But at that point other formative principles approach him; their nature is such that they capture and confine what is elastic in the demarcated form, thus preventing any further growth. That is why growth stops at some point. When growth stops, this means that formative forces approaching from outside are at work. Whenever formative principles are active, whenever forms grow larger, provision must be made for the stoppage of growth by the appearance of counter-formative principles which oppose the first category as its polar antithesis. When man's form has developed until about the seventh year of life (indicated in the shaded portion of the diagram) this form can continue to grow.

The formative principles have been at work until the seventh year; these principles work from within. Then different formative principles work in opposition from outside, so that the human being can grow only to the limit indicated by the line b–b. It is really as if until the seventh year of his life the human being were given an elastic garment which he can constantly stretch and enlarge. But at a specific point of time he is given one that is not elastic; he is obliged to put it on, and thenceforth cannot grow beyond its limits.

We can therefore say that in the human being a confrontation takes place between two kinds of formative principles, one working from within and the other from without. The formative principles belonging to the first category come from the Spirits of Form, from those Spirits of Form who have passed through a perfectly normal process of evolution in the Cosmos. The formative principles working from without are not of the same kind. They come from Spirits of Form whose development has been retarded and who have acquired a Luciferic character. They are the factor which works in the purely spiritual domain, whereas the forces working in the material sphere have had a normal development; having evolved through the stages of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, they then pass to the Earth in the regular way and shape the human form from within. The ‘irregular’ Spirits of Form take what is presented to them and hold back its further development. Thus the process of growth in the human being is brought to a halt by these backward Spirits of Form. The Beings of the higher Hierarchies have the most varied tasks, among them the one that has been characterised today.

We have now been able to consider many different aspects of the work of the ‘regular’ Hierarchies and also of the work of the backward spiritual Beings belonging to the different Hierarchies. In the book Occult Science—an Outline¹ you can read how the human being reached the stage where through the Spirits of Form he could be endowed with the germinal foundation for the ‘I’, the Ego. We know that man received the germ of his physical body from the Thrones, of his etheric body from the Spirits of Wisdom, of his astral body from the Spirits of Movement, and the germinal foundation for the ‘I’ from the Spirits of Form. Bearing this in mind we can say that man, in his outer stature, has been organised by the regular Spirits of Form into an Ego-bearing being and that this comes into manifestation in the first seven-year cycle of his life. But then the backward Spirits of Form who are the opponents of the regular Spirits of Form, put a stop to his growth. This is actually the antithesis of the first, most deeply inward experience in the human being, namely, the kindling of the consciousness of ‘I’—the Ego. This happens in the early years of life, in the innermost realm of being. The outermost manifestation, the form, is checked at a later age, as a final act. Thus we perceive two evolutionary—but antithetical—processes in the human being. Of the one I have said that it comes from without and moves inward, taking hold of the sentient soul and so on, in the twenty-first year of life. Then there is another evolution proceeding from within outwards until the growth of the physical form is checked. The one evolution, the regular evolution, proceeds from the spiritual to the corporeal, from within outwards and is of interest especially for education. The other evolution—which is a much less regular and also more individual process—proceeds from without inwards and, when the human being has reached a certain age, it comes to expression in the completion of the outermost principle—the physical body.

It is very important that teachers should have knowledge of these two antithetical lines of evolution. Hence in the book The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy it was right to call attention to the first process of evolution which proceeds from within outwards, because it is only there that education is possible. On the other line of evolution—from without inwards—which is the line of individual development, it is impossible to make any actual impression. This is something of which account can be taken but which cannot be halted; neither can much be achieved in the way of education. And to be able to distinguish between where education is possible and where it is not, is of fundamental importance.

Just as the cessation of growth is caused by the backward Spirits of Form, the first actual manifestation of the ‘I’ in the human being during early childhood is the work of the backward Spirits of Will (Thrones). Between these two extremes there are other happenings which are to be attributed to backward Spirits of Wisdom and backward Spirits of Movement.

No adequate characterisation of man's life as a whole, including the existence between death and the new birth, is possible unless we take account of all the factors which have an effect upon him, and recognise that even in everyday life the influences of Luciferic beings take effect in many different ways. This influence is evident in other spheres as well. And as our endeavour in these lectures is to acquire a really fundamental understanding of man's life as a whole, we will not hesitate to think about matters which seem to be somewhat remote.

Attention shall first of all be drawn to a phenomenon from which it is evident that on the physical plane too, between birth and death, man's life has undergone essential changes in the course of evolution. If we realise this, it will, become evident that the life between death and rebirth has also changed. Those who think intellectually, but superficially, about life today may readily believe that, in essentials, things were always the same as they are at present. By no means was it so! And in certain cases we need go back only a few hundred years to find that conditions were very different. Thus at the present time there is something that has a very great influence upon man's life of soul between birth and death but that simply did not exist in its present form only a few centuries ago. It is what we today mean by the expression ‘public opinion’. Even as recently as the thirteenth century it would have been nonsense to speak of public opinion as we do today. A great deal is said nowadays against belief in authority, although in actual fact it exists in a much more oppressive form in our time than it did in these earlier, often despised centuries. In earlier centuries there were, of course, defects, but there was no blind belief in authority such as exists at present. This blindness of belief in authority is usually revealed by the fact that the authority in question cannot be specified. A person today will readily be floored when he is told that science has proved this or that. In earlier centuries, however, people attached more weight to authorities whom they encountered physically. Reference to an intangible ‘something’ is implied when it is said: ‘There is scientific proof of it.’ Such a saying urges belief in authority when confronted with something incomprehensible. Such belief did not exist in earlier centuries. People belonging to our civilisation usually concern themselves very little with matters about which the simplest, most, primitive human being in earlier centuries endeavoured to have some knowledge—matters relating, for example, to health and illness. Why, it is asked today, should anyone need to know about health and illness? The doctors know about these matters and the problems concerned can be left to them. This is also an example of what comes into the category of intangible but sovereign authority. But countless other influences make their way into life; from earliest youth the human being becomes dependent upon them and his trends of judgement and feeling force themselves into our life! These living currents swirling around among human beings are usually referred to as ‘public opinion’—and prompted the saying from philosophers: ‘Public opinions are mostly private errors.’ To realise this, however, is not as important as it is to be aware that public opinions exert tremendous power upon the life of an individual. It would be a complete misconception of history to speak about the influence of public opinion upon the life of an individual living in the thirteenth century. In those days there were single personalities who admittedly exerted a great deal of authority either in affairs of Government or in practical life, and in these spheres it was obeyed. But at this time there was nothing resembling what impersonal public opinion has become today. Anyone who is unwilling to believe this on the basis of the occult facts should study the history of Florence during those centuries and in later times too—when the government of the city passed into the control of the Medici. The tremendous power of individual authorities will then be apparent, but there was no such thing as public opinion. It first arose in an epoch preceding our own by four or five centuries and one can speak of its actual beginning. Such things must be regarded as realities, for a world of swirling thoughts does indeed exist.

What is the origin of this public opinion which we often accept as something that cannot be verified? What is public opinion in reality? You may remember that I have spoken of certain spiritual Beings belonging to the Hierarchy immediately above man—Beings who participate in various ways in the guidance and leadership of humanity. In my little book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity, you will find a great deal on the subject of spiritual Beings belonging to the higher Hierarchies. Now we know that the mightiest incision in the evolution of humanity was made by the Mystery of Golgotha. In that event there came to pass something that was most wonderfully expressed in the esoteric teaching of St. Paul. Paul spoke in simple language but the actual way in which he spoke was rooted in profound esotericism. It was not possible for him always to give out openly what he, as an Initiate, knew; for in the first place he wanted to speak to a wider circle of people and, secondly, it was not possible in his day to give out everything he knew in the way of which he would have been capable. Nevertheless his very presentation was based upon profound esoteric knowledge. We find, for example, that there is a deeply significant truth in the distinction he makes between the ‘first Adam’ and the ‘higher Adam’—the Christ. According to Paul, the various generations of human beings are to be traced back to Adam, that is to say, the bodies of men descend from Adam. Hence it can be said that the physical increase of humanity over the Earth during the different periods, leads back finally to the physical body of Adam—Adam and Eve, naturally. We can then ask: What lies at the basis of the physical evolution of mankind from Adam onwards? Naturally, the evolution of souls! The physical bodies which have descended from Adam are the habitations of living souls. These souls had descended from cosmic worlds and had brought with them to the Earth a certain spiritual heritage, a spiritual endowment. But in the course of time this spiritual endowment had undergone decline. Individuals who lived, say, six or seven thousand years before the founding of Christianity had within them much stronger, more extensive spiritual forces than those who lived a mere thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha. The spiritual heritage which once came to the Earth with human beings had gradually withered away in the soul. Now the life between death and rebirth is of particular significance for this spiritual heritage. If we go back to the epoch long before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that after death men had an active, inwardly illumined life of soul; but then this life of soul became dimmer and dimmer, darker and darker. An ever-fading life of soul came with human beings when they passed through death. This was particularly the case among the Greeks although they were the most advanced peoples then on the Earth, and their sages had every reason to say, in view of the stage reached in evolution: ‘Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades.’ We know that this saying was true when applied to the Greeks who lived a fully satisfying life on the physical plane; but as soon as they had passed through the gate of death their life became dim and shadowy.

In the fullest sense it is true that the spiritual life which men had brought with them to the Earth and which manifested after death as a somewhat dim clairvoyant consciousness, had become even dimmer. And especially in the fourth Atlantean epoch, the Graeco-Latin epoch, during which the Mystery of Golgotha took place, the spiritual life had reached the stage of its greatest darkness.

The all-important purpose of the Baptism by John the Baptist was that some of those who sought to be baptised should be made conscious of the conditions just described. The individuals baptised by John were completely submerged in the water. As a result, the etheric body of these individuals was liberated from them and for a short time, while under the water, they became clairvoyant. John was able to reveal to them that there had been such deterioration in the life of soul in the course of time that a human being now possessed very little of the spiritual treasure that he had once been able to take with him through the gate of death and that could give him clairvoyant consciousness. A man whom John baptised in this way became aware that a revitalisation of the life of soul was essential, that something new must radiate into human souls in order that after death there might be a life in the real sense. This new impulse streamed into the souls of men through the Mystery of Golgotha. You need only read my lecture-course entitled From Jesus to Christ and you will realise that a rich and abundant spiritual life streams from the Mystery of Golgotha into the souls of individuals who develop a relationship to that Mystery.

Hence Paul could say: just as the physical bodies of men descend from Adam, so will the content of their souls in greater and greater measure ‘descend’ from the Christ who is the second Adam, the spiritual Adam. It is a profound truth that Paul uttered here, clothed in his simple words. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, men would have become progressively empty in soul and would either have developed a longing only to live outside the physical body or to live on Earth with no other wishes or desires than for a purely physical life, and so would have become more and more materialistic. Because all development is a slow and gradual process there are still some peoples on the Earth who have not yet wholly lost the original spiritual treasure, who still retain some measure of it in spite of having failed to establish any relationship to the Mystery of Golgotha. Individuals belonging to the most advanced peoples, however, can become conscious after death only to the extent to which they have learnt ‘to die in Christ’, as the second line of the Rosicrucian formula expresses it. And so in actual fact the Mystery of Golgotha has acted as illumination in men's souls.

With this clearly in mind we shall understand the gist of a question relating to man's evolution. It is the question: How came it that understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha enabled the content of man's soul to be carried into the sphere of his ‘I’, his Ego? How did this soul-content differ from what existed before the Mystery of Golgotha as an ancient heritage? The difference is that, before the Mystery of Golgotha, in respect of the content of their souls men were far less independent. They were under the direct guidance of the Beings we know as the Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on. Before the Mystery of Golgotha men were under the leadership of the Beings of the nearest higher Hierarchies to a far greater extent than was the case after that event. Indeed the progress of these Beings themselves—Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai—consists in the fact that they have learnt to lead human beings in a way that respects their independence. Men were intended to live on the Earth in a state of greater and greater independence. The leading spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies have recognised this and therein consists their progress.

But it is possible for these Spirits too to remain behind in their evolution. Not all the Spirits who participated in the leadership of humanity have acquired through the Mystery of Golgotha the power to guide and lead men while ensuring their freedom. Among these Beings of the higher Hierarchies there are some who remained backward and have become Luciferic spirits. What we call ‘public opinion’ is an example of the way in which some of them are active. Public opinion is not created by human beings alone but also by a certain category of Luciferic spirits of the lowest rank—retarded Angeloi and Archangeloi. These spirits are only beginning their Luciferic career and have not yet risen very high in the ranks of the Luciferic spirits, but they are definitely Luciferic in character. With the eye of seership one can perceive how certain spirits of the higher Hierarchies did not keep pace with evolution after the Mystery of Golgotha, how they adhere rigidly to the old kind of leadership and therefore cannot make any direct approach to men. Those who have kept pace with evolution can make regular and direct contact with men; the other spirits are incapable of this and they manifest their activity in the muddled, turbulent thinking that comes to expression as public opinion. The function of public opinion is intelligible only when it is realised that this is how it has made its way into human life.

Thus we have among us beings who abandon the regular course of evolution and become Luciferic in character. It is important that this should be known. The work of the Luciferic beings of whom we have already spoken and who now have great power, also began on a small scale. Indeed this is true in the case of the whole host of Luciferic beings. Admittedly, on the Old Moon there was no public opinion as we know it but something that can be compared with it—a kind of guidance of men. Some among this host of Luciferic spirits of whom we have spoken are powerful and important beings, for example backward Spirits of Form who surge in upon the human being with such violence that they stop his growth. The others are merely the recruits; nevertheless this is the beginning of the career of the Luciferic spirits, a career which later on will assume a quite different dimension because the spirits become more and more powerful. Public opinion, which under the guidance and direction of certain Luciferic spirits of the lowest order, influences human beings because they absorb it between birth and death, must necessarily have its counterweight during the life between death and rebirth. That is to say, because a human being in his life between birth and death has been caught up into the current of public opinion described, he must experience the counterweight in his life between death and rebirth. Otherwise the following would ensue.

The backward spirits who are responsible for the creation of public opinion have no significance or power whatever in man's life between death and rebirth. They have relinquished all possibility of working in that sphere because they are active here, on the physical plane, in a spiritual way—indeed in a way that is only possible in the form of public opinion. A man can take no iota of anything like public opinion with him into the spiritual world and whatever element of it he might want to accompany him into the life after death would be entirely out of place. It must be said, although it will seem strange to many people, that life in Kamaloka becomes very difficult for one who clings to public opinion or has been caught in the coils of his own judgement very early in life. This applies particularly to persons who believe that within the world of public opinion there can still be independent judgement—which is an utter impossibility. For such people Kamaloka is admittedly difficult. But when the period of Kamaloka is over, public opinion has no weight or significance whatever, and after death it is irrelevant whether people adhered to nuances of it, such as liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary. This has no significance whatever in the different groupings of human beings and moreover exists on Earth solely for the purpose of hindering men from making progress towards illumination of consciousness after death. The beings behind public opinion resolved to forgo the progress made possible by the Mystery of Golgotha. But the Mystery of Golgotha will become of greater and greater importance for the Earth's evolution. We must clearly understand that the future of the Earth's evolution cannot be assured simply by rectifying phenomena such as public opinion and the like which are inevitable in the course of evolution. Men can, however, become better in their own inner nature, therefore the process of evolution must take root more and more deeply in their inner life. In the future, men will be still more exposed to the pressure of public opinion, but inwardly they will have developed greater strength. This is possible only through Spiritual Science. But if man is gradually to become a match for those spirits who are now exerting their influence in public opinion as recruits of the Luciferic beings, this will be possible only if, between death and rebirth too, he undergoes something that strengthens him inwardly, strengthens the principle in him that is independent of life on Earth. Whereas through the influence of public opinion he becomes more and more dependent upon earthly life, in the life between death and rebirth he must receive into his very self something that in the next life on Earth will make him ever freer from the influence of public opinion.

Connected with this is the fact that at the time when public opinion began to assume importance, the Buddha-realm was established in the Mars sphere—as we heard in the lecture at Christmas. Consequently between death and rebirth man passes through this Buddha-realm on Mars. Christian Rosenkreutz had entrusted to Buddha a special mission in the Mars sphere. And what would be futile on Earth, namely the desire to flee from the conditions of terrestrial existence—this is an experience which man must undergo between death and rebirth during his passage through the Mars sphere. Among other things he strips off the incubus of public opinion which takes effect only on Earth. Many, even more overbearing influences will come in the future and it will be more than ever necessary to undergo the experience that is possible for man as a pupil of Buddha in the Mars sphere. Here on Earth, men can now be pupils of the Buddha in the orthodox sense only if they refuse to participate in the progress made by the most advanced people on Earth. But between death and rebirth Buddha unfolds what has developed from the teaching he gave on Earth, which was that man should free himself from the need for further incarnations. This has been developed into a doctrine that is inapplicable to the Earth, where life must progress from incarnation to incarnation. Thus the doctrine preached by Buddha on Earth contained the seed of what man must acquire in the disembodied state of existence. In this advanced form, Buddha's teaching is right for the period between death and rebirth. The Buddha himself appeared in the astral body of the Jesus-Child of St. Luke's Gospel² and Christ Himself leads men between death and rebirth through the Mars sphere, enabling them there to receive the Buddha's advanced teaching. Thus in the Mars sphere men can be emancipated from the tendency to uniformity resulting from the effects of public opinion which are detrimental for their further progress on Earth. Whereas in earlier times Mars was said to be the planet of warlike traits, it is now the Buddha's task gradually to transform these warlike traits in such a way that they become the foundation of the sense for freedom and independence needed in the present age. Whereas nowadays men have the tendency to surrender their sense of freedom and succumb to the fetters of public opinion, on Mars between death and rebirth they will strive to throw off these fetters and not bring them again into the life on Earth when they return to new incarnations.

It seems to me that here we have something that characterises most wonderfully how wisdom holds sway in the world, how everything that progresses or remains backward is manipulated in such a way that the final outcome is harmony in the evolution of worlds. Man cannot achieve progress by keeping as it were to the middle line, although there are many who realise the uselessness of adopting a one-sided standpoint. Admittedly, we come across idealists, materialists and other ‘-ists’ who swear by their own standpoint, but truly great individuals such as Goethe do no such thing. They try to grasp material conditions by means of material thinking. When men of less eminence imagine that they have understood this, they say: truth lies in the middle, between two different standpoints. But that would be the same as if someone in practical life wanted to sit between two chairs! The truth cannot be found by a one-sided adoption of this or that standpoint but by applying the modes of knowledge appropriate either for materialism or idealism, The world does not progress by undeviating adherence to a middle course: a middle course is appropriate when the opposing sides are also present and are recognised as forces. If something has to be weighed, the two scalepans are needed as well as the beam. Thus there must be a counterbalance to public opinion; and this is provided by Buddha's teaching in the Mars sphere—which would not be necessary if public opinion had never existed. Life needs antithesis; life progresses in and through polarity. Somebody might think that as the North and South Poles are antitheses, it would be better if neither existed! They are not, of course, antithetic in the sense implied by a certain Professor of whom it was said that because he had written his books in such haste he could not think about their contents and stated that civilisation could develop only in the middle zone of the Earth because at the North Pole people would freeze through cold and at the South Pole melt through heat! In another connection, of course, North and South Poles are genuine opposites and are necessary because progress is not achieved by adopting a neutral course but by the maintenance and harmonising of opposites. Thus what develops on Earth had to undergo a process that lies below the level of progress. Public opinion is of less value than the judgements which an individual can reach on a path of progress. Public opinion is sub-human and it is this sub-human influence that is counteracted by the Buddha-stream through which man passes between death and rebirth. Both influences are necessary and it is extremely important to bear this in mind in connection with evolution.

It can therefore be said with truth: yes, there are indeed backward spirits, but everything that remains behind on the one side and on the other outstrips the evolutionary process, is manipulated by the wisdom of the Universe in such a way that harmony is the final result. The backward spirits are utilised to constitute the opposite pole to the spirits who have progressed to further stages.

If we look at life in this way it will be clear to us that in the future course of Earth evolution the human being will bring into life more and more qualities which will have greater weight and influence than the purely physical qualities. And it will be increasingly apparent that qualities other than the purely physical will have to be taken into account. Physical qualities will be evident, which—although they become manifest only gradually—can be traced back to infancy; but there will be other qualities to which this does not apply and which show themselves in a marked form only comparatively late in life. A characteristic feature of evolution in the future will be the existence of an increasing number of individuals about whom it will inevitably be asked: What can have happened to that individual at a certain age in his life? He has completely changed; it is as though he has become a different being! Qualities that were completely absent in earlier life, that appear only when a certain age has been reached, will reveal themselves. This will happen in the case of souls who are the most highly developed and in whom a certain break in their life becomes evident. For the fact that an individual was a pupil of Buddha in the life between death and rebirth reveals itself only at a certain age. This would apply to persons of whom it can be said: Up to a particular point in their lives their individual qualities were in evidence; but then entirely new trends appeared and they were able to understand matters altogether different from those for which they had previously shown understanding. These will be individuals who in the future will be the vehicles of true spiritual progress although they may simply be regarded as late developers, manifesting these qualities only late in life. In truth, however, the reason why these individuals display these qualities only in later life is that in previous incarnations on the Earth they had established the causes which enabled them to experience the spiritual life in the Mars sphere with particular intensity and so to acquire qualities which enabled them to bring a new impulse into the evolution of humanity. True spiritual culture will more and more be in the hands of individuals of this kind, who in their youth showed little aptitude for the spiritual standpoint they adopt in later life.

We now see that this is the reason why a certain fact has always been stressed in the Rosicrucian line of thought of which we ourselves have heard in the past, although it could not then be substantiated because our studies were not as advanced as they now are. Representatives of the Rosicrucian principle of Initiation in the West have always emphasised that it is impossible to discover in their childhood those who are to become leading figures, because these are individuals who give evidence of that fundamental change in later life of which I have spoken. When a seer speaks of Buddha today, he knows that Buddha has faithfully adhered to what his teaching promised; he has continued to work for that in human nature which has no direct urge for physical embodiment and therefore does not appear at the beginning of life in a physical body but only when the physical body has undergone a certain development, when a certain stage towards spirituality has been reached. Then, at a later stage of life the gift of the Buddha to man becomes an effective influence.

All this must be borne in mind if we are to understand the whole process of man's development. What it signifies for each individual in his life between birth and death—of this we shall hear later.

• 1. See pp. 180 onwards in the Rudolf Steiner Press 1963 edition.
• 2. See the lecture-course, The Gospel of St. Luke given by Dr. Steiner in Basle, September 1909, particularly lectures four to nine.

When approaching the mystery of death, one must always bear in mind, as was emphasized again yesterday, that in order to characterize the spiritual worlds, it is necessary to change the meaning of our ordinary words, which are tailored for the physical world. For the dead, the so-called dead, enter the spiritual world, and as we have already repeatedly indicated, it is fundamentally different in the spiritual world than in the physical world.

Not only according to spiritual scientific insights, but also in accordance with ordinary physical reason, it can be thought that when entering the spiritual world through the gate of death, the first thing for the dead person is: the loosening of the physical body from what is within this physical body his other human existence. This is, of course, a very trivial truth. Today, we want to look at the processes that come into play when describing the gate of death and the further pursuit of the path between death and a new birth, in terms of the inner experiences of the dead person, in the sense in which this can be explored in spiritual science.

For the person who remains behind here in physical life, it is indeed the case that he has the sensation that what is enclosed in the physical body shell leaves the one or ones remaining behind, that the dead person goes away into another world. The first perception that the dead person has – as I said, according to what can be researched for spiritual science – is that he, in turn, is abandoned by the inhabitants of the earth and also by his physical body, by that which was the tool for his perception, for his thinking and feeling and his ability to will between birth and death. So these, who were around him, who were connected with him, go away from him: that is his first perception. This perception is initially linked to the processes that we have often described: that the earth itself, in a sense, moves away, so that it takes away the physical shell of the body of the one passing through the gateway of death. It is absolutely as if the dead person, so to speak, were to feel that he is lagging behind a movement that he did not actually perceive here on earth, that he is lagging behind the earth's own movement; the earth is leaving him and with the earth everything that surrounded him on earth. And now he is incorporated into a completely different world, but one through which he now perceives something that was previously completely hidden from him, through which he perceives that what was given to him as a physical shell is bound to the earth, and also to the movements of the earth. He has a feeling, although that is a rather inaccurate expression, that he can no longer follow the path that the earth and its spirits take; so they leave him. He remains in a certain greater state of rest, he integrates himself, as it were, into a quieter world.

For the dead person, many things are now based on this perception of being abandoned, namely also by the physical shell of the body, by everything that one has experienced with people between birth and death, everything that one has learned from people. During his life on earth, the possession of his physical body was something he took for granted. Therefore, what he now perceives is something completely new, and we will see how different these perceptions are depending on whether one dies a so-called natural death from illness or old age or a violent death, for example, the kind of 'death that many thousands now have to die.'

This realization that one is being abandoned by that which was naturally one's own, gives rise to something completely new in the life of the soul. It means that something arises in the life of the soul that one could not have become acquainted with while dwelling in the body. The first thing that arises in the life of the soul is, I would say, the opposite feeling towards life. Here on earth one has the feeling that life is given from outside, that one lives through the life forces that are given to one from the outside of the earth. Now, so to speak, the earth leaves with what it has given one, and immediately, through this leaving, the feeling arises that the power of enlivenment is now bubbling up from within. So the first thing is the perception of being enlivened. It is the transition to a certain activity, whereas before you remained in passivity: You are invigorating that which you now are. You are within yourself. What you previously called the world has gone away from you. That in which you now live, but by completely filling it, that generates in itself the power of invigoration, that is invigorated. And in concrete terms, this results in what I have often called the panorama of life, the flooding life in all that one has experienced between birth and death. The images of this life arise before the soul. It rises, as it were, from the point where one is, like a powerful, self-generating “dream, the whole of one's past life between birth and death. But this image needs strength so that it is not a dream. It would be like a dream flowing by if one had not gained the power of animation by having attained this consciousness: one's own physical shell detaches itself from the spiritual-soul. The dream comes to life. What would otherwise be only a world of dark, floating dream images is animated from the same point; it becomes a living world, a living panorama of life. One is oneself the source of the animation of what thus emerges as a dream. This is the direct experience after death.

All this happens while the person is hardly aware that he has emerged from his previous consciousness, but only feels that something has stirred within him, as if from the center of his being, spreading out and escaping that life to which he has so far passively surrendered. What one did not know between birth and death: that thoughts, which otherwise merely undulated like a dream of the ego, are alive, one now knows that. And one now lives one's self out of the formerly alien life into this inner life. One experiences what it means that what was previously more externally connected to one, now seizes the innermost. What was previously not life, but an image of life, seizes the imagination, the thinking. And while one is finding one's way into this conception, gradually a further one arises. This is this, which one could call: a living into a sounding through of the panorama of life with the universe. I have already described these things more generally. But one must always look at them more closely in order to penetrate the secrets of the world.

At first, one's innermost life dream comes to life, so to speak, and becomes a living universe, a living cosmos. Then, as it were, it is filled with what one can call: the music of the spheres of the universe resonates through this life dream. One experiences how what one was oneself between birth and death as a part of the cosmos is now absorbed by the cosmos, how this integrates with that which is now not earthly. For one has gone through the earthly between birth and death. And then the next thing is that one feels how intimately the cosmos permeates what one was as a part. One has the feeling of an inner light coming on and illuminating what one was. But all this streams and resounds, so to speak, into the panorama of life. Then the etheric body detaches itself – because these processes all happen while the person is connected to the etheric body – and what is called the detachment of the etheric body occurs.

Now this experience, this perception of the panorama of life, this clothing of the panorama of life with the sounding and luminous substances of the cosmos, is similar to the way the physical body integrates into the human being when one enters into existence through birth. Just as the human substance given to one by the earth, so to speak, integrates into the human soul, so the cosmic, the universal, integrates after passing through the gate of death. This experience, which has been described, is necessary. And when one really follows the spiritual side of life between death and a new birth, then one notices the significance for this whole life between death and a new birth of this first experience after passing through the gate of death. Here in physical life on earth — we must be quite clear about this, I have emphasized it often — we have our sense of self-consciousness because we live in the physical body. I emphasize: the sense of self, not the self. Our self is assigned to us by the Spirits of Form, that is something else. But we have our sense of self because we are immersed in the physical body. We only have to be quite clear about the nature of this sense of self in the waking state. The best way to understand it is to imagine you are moving through a room. At first you feel nothing; now you are touching something. The outside world touches you, but you become aware of yourself. You become aware of the impact that the outside world has on you, you become aware of the outside world, you feel yourself touching the outside world.

In fact, we have our sense of self in the physical world by bumping into the outside world everywhere. Of course, not only with the sense of touch, but when we open our eyes, we also bump into the outside world; when sounds reach our ears, we become aware of it when our hearing bumps into the sounds.

But we also become aware of ourselves by emerging from the spiritual world every morning and immersing ourselves in the physical world. This immersion in our physical body, that is, this collision of our ego and astral body with the etheric body and physical body, that is what creates our sense of self. This is why there is usually a lack of self-awareness in the dream world: because we need this collision with the physical body and the etheric body to have self-awareness.

For a clear, distinct, waking self-awareness, we need this collision. Now, the outer physical body has been taken from the one who has passed through the gate of death. In the same way as between birth and death, he cannot produce self-awareness. Without consciousness of self, he would have to tread the path between death and a new birth if this consciousness of self were not now generated by another path. This other path is that everything we now experience directly in the etheric body after we have passed through the gate of death remains in existence all the time between death and a new birth.

In this respect, too, the experience in the spiritual world between death and a new birth is the opposite of the physical experience here between birth and death. Here in the physical world, no one can consciously remember the moment of their birth; remembrance only sets in later. Man does not remember his birth, it is, so to speak, too far in the past for the memory process to go backwards. But what the person experiences inwardly from the other side of death remains throughout life between 'death and a new birth for the soul. The experience of death remains just as surely as the experience of birth disappears when the person enters the physical world. The physical person does not look back on his birth in the physical world, but he looks back on death in the whole time between death and a new birth. This looking back, this encounter with the experience of death, is what creates the sense of self between death and a new birth, and we owe it to that.

The sight of death is only from the side of physical experience, if at all, something terrible. Only there it has horror and terror, if one sees it from this side. But the dead see it from the other side. And seen from this side, there is really nothing terrible about the fact that the moment of death remains, so to speak, for the whole of life between death and a new birth. For even if it is annihilation, seen from this physical side of life, it is the most glorious, the greatest, the most beautiful, the most sublime, which can be seen continually from the other side of life. There he constantly testifies to the victory of spirit over matter, to the self-creative power of spirit. In this intuitive perception of the self-creative power of spirit, the consciousness of self exists in the spiritual worlds.

In the spiritual worlds, one has this self-awareness precisely because one is constantly creating oneself inwardly, never appealing to an existing being, but always creating oneself, and in this self-creation, one touches back to the moment of death. So we can also indicate how the sense of self-awareness is generated in the time between death and rebirth. The birth of self-awareness is of great significance in this experience in the first period after death. And of course, this first experience is also different depending on whether the person, let us say, reaches an advanced age, then passes through the gate of death in a natural way, or is perhaps carried off in the tenderest childhood or in the prime of life. And of quite particular significance in relation to the difference in this area is approximately — not pedantically exact, of course — the age of thirty-five. What now takes place in a thousand different ways, that young people in the prime of their lives pass through the portal of death: tomorrow it will show us how this is further modified by death approaching them from outside. But if a person does pass through the portal of death young, then the view of this described tableau of life with its invigorating events is already different than if one passes through the portal of death after the age of thirty-five.

You can say, although it is of course difficult to find the right words for these circumstances, that someone who dies at a young age has the feeling that the dream image of their life appears and they bring it to life from the center of their life. But as you pour your own vitalizing powers over this tableau of life, something still stands behind this tableau of life like a remnant from the world from which you have stepped out by going through birth.

When a child dies, the tableau of life is extremely short. If, for example, a six-year-old child dies, the tableau of life is still not very substantial. But behind this tableau, so to speak, entering from behind and casting a shadow over it, there is still much of what was lived through in the spiritual world before birth, or, as one also said in the German language in the past – Goethe used the expression – before one “came into the world”. A beautiful expression that has now been lost. And when a child dies who has not yet any memory of the past, for whom the time has not yet come when one remembers back, then such a tableau of life does not actually exist for him, in which he feels himself in it so directly as a human being feels himself in it when he dies later; but what he had around him before birth emerges through the whole tableau of life, only a little modified. One could say that this glimpse of certain remnants of the spiritual world that one has experienced before birth is only lost after death, when one has passed the age of thirty-five.

One should never – and this is said in parenthesis – be tempted, I emphasize this expressly, to indulge in the not-at-all-harmless thought of what might be better for a person: to die before the age of thirty-five, or to die after the age of thirty-five and to live through what we will describe. These thoughts should not be pursued, they should not be entertained, but they should be considered: when one passes through the gate of death, one should, in the strictest sense of the word, leave it solely and entirely to karma.

But it is important to understand these things. If one dies after the age of thirty-five, there is no possibility of seeing anything of the remainder of the spiritual life preceding birth. That is obscured. But the tableau of life still appears. One has a strong feeling that one is creating it from within, that one is weaving it oneself, as it were; but this web is brought to life. In this way, dying before the age of thirty-five and dying after the age of thirty-five differ quite significantly in terms of the tableau of life. The life tableau before the age of thirty-five has much more the character of something that comes to you from outside, as if from a spiritual world, and you only push towards it what you yourself have experienced. The tableau of life after thirty-five years is such that at first more of an emptiness, a darkness, comes towards you from the outside, and you bring what you have acquired in life towards this darkness. But it is no less vividly ignited by this. Our inner experience is modified by the fact that one moment it is like the approach of a mirage that we approach, while the other moment we carry our world into the world of the cosmos. All this has great significance for life, as we shall see tomorrow. This karmic process, whereby our physical body is snatched from us at a certain age of physical life, has a great significance for the nature of life after death. But this is intimately connected with our entire karma.

Then comes the time when we feel: Now you are actually out of the earthly. If you want to be very rough, you could say that as soon as you pass through the gate of death, you have the feeling that the earthly body is leaving you. The friends, the people you were with, are leaving you. The experiences you had with them are leaving you. You are alone with yourself for a while, alone with what you have experienced. Of course, everything you have experienced with people is included in the dream of your life; you look at it as what people have engraved in you, but in such a way that you live within yourself during the day and bring the dream of your life to life within yourself. You get the impression that the earth is also leaving you, but that you are still living in the same sphere as the earth, in the sphere that still belongs to the earth. And the laying down of the etheric body is actually also experienced in such a way that one has the feeling: now you are not only out of the earth and its substance, but also out of what is the most immediate environment of the earth, out of the light; you are also out of what, on earth, as dense substantiality, makes the music of the spheres inaudible. You are – this is perhaps the last impression, which is very significant, which is then something lasting – you are no longer in the habit of having external light illuminate you and your surroundings, so to speak. I note, as if to interject, that the most foolish idea is held by those who believe that if one were to fly away from the Earth toward the Sun, one would fly continually through light. This fantastic notion is currently held by materialistic physicists. The belief that the sun spreads light in the way it is described in physics, that light passes through space and falls on the earth, is one of the worst superstitions. After death, one realizes this by realizing, when one is free of the etheric body, that only in the area that belongs to the earth, that is what we have as sunlight here in physical life. One has the perception: Now this light no longer disturbs you. Now it is the inner generation of the light that spreads out in the first sounding through. The inner light can now become effective because the outer light no longer disturbs the inner.

And now, with the shedding of the etheric body, the entry into that world begins, which is so often called the world of kamala. We will call it the soul world, because after the inner life-giving power has first emerged, one then experiences something like an inner resounding of what one is, since one is now alone with oneself. And after the inner illumination, what appears to be an inner warming occurs. Here on earth, one is warmed by receiving warmth from outside and feels dependent on it in the physical body. And now the inner warming occurs, and this warming is such that one now feels again: You are now able, in the element in which you live, to evoke in yourself the sensation that you also had earlier, but in the form: warmth affects you. — This permeates the tableau of life with warmth. As a result, one enters a completely new element. One has the feeling that the etheric body is now leaving one. And that is precisely the entrance into the world that in my book “Theosophy” was called the world of the blaze of desire, because the warmth that arises from within is at the same time desire, generating, flowing desire, feeling of the element of will. And into this, there already mingles that which remains with us for a certain length of time: the experience of the soul world, which I have often described. We can only describe these things more precisely bit by bit, as a reliving of life. One proceeds from the experience of death back towards birth. And now one relives from the other side everything that one has gone through in physical life. But you do not experience it in the same way as you experienced it here in the physical world, but you experience it in a moral way. If, let us say, at some point between birth and death you have harmed someone, you felt at the time what you did, but not the suffering that the other person felt. Now you experience the same thing again, but not what you yourself experienced in terms of anger or antipathy, but rather how the other person experienced it. You extend your own experience, if I may put it this way, to the effects of his actions that occurred between birth and death. You live yourself into all the effects of the actions.

This is, in a sense, the basis of life between death and a new birth: that one gradually immerses oneself in what one has done between birth and death during the experience in the soul world, that one gradually submerges oneself in it. Just as one gradually lived into nature here from childhood, learning to perceive nature and understand nature, so in the time after death one lives into the effects of one's own deeds, into the effect of one's own thoughts and words, in short, into the entire world of effects; one pours oneself into the world of effects. Of course, spiritual beings gradually emerge from this background: the beings of the higher hierarchies, the beings of the elemental world. Just as we do not merely experience nature here, but animals, plants and minerals emerge from the soil of nature, so within this reliving, where we live into the effects of our deeds - for that is actually the basic soil of our world - the spiritual beings in the spiritual world emerge. And there, as in the physical world, physical beings come to meet us among the spiritual beings of the elemental realms and the higher hierarchies, the souls that have been connected to us, the souls that have already died and are in the spiritual world, or the souls that are still embodied in the physical body, with whom we have had contact here. With all this, this basic ground of the after-mortal being, this dissolving into the world of one's own deeds, comes to life.

And in a certain way, it can be perceived that there is a difference between perceiving a soul that is still on earth and a soul that has already passed through the gate of death. The dead person naturally knows whether he is dealing with one soul or the other. When he is dealing with a soul that still dwells in the earthly body, then the dead person has the feeling that this soul is approaching him more from the outside, that the image, the imagination, forms itself. With a soul that already belongs to the disembodied, there is a much more active experience. You have the feeling that the soul is approaching you, but that you have to form the image for this soul. The dead person comes to you with his being, you have to form his image yourself; the person who is still alive brings you his image when you look down on him.

And so now, in a certain way, one experiences with moral emphasis what one can call one's deeds, that is, the effects of what one has done, thought, wanted. There one plunges in, there one lives oneself into it. And one plunges in in a very specific way, namely in such a way that one experiences, for example, that one has hurt someone, and now one experiences what the other has experienced through the injury! This is really your own experience of what the other person experienced here in the physical world. You go through it. And by going through it, the strength arises in you, as if by inner, elementary necessity: You have to make up for that, you have to make amends for that! It is really the case that you can use the comparison: A mosquito flies towards you, you close your eyes. You carry out an activity under an impression. After death you experience the effect of something you have done; then you respond by generating the strength to make amends, that is, to compensate for what you have done to the other person. This means that by reliving this experience in your soul, you take upon yourself the strength to make amends for what you have done to this person. This creates the desire to be with him in earthly life in order to balance out what was done to him. During this reliving, all the forces for karma are created, for balancing karma. One takes them on.

So already in these first years or decades after passing through the gate of death, one creates the living out of karma. And as true as there is a growing power in the germ, which only later realizes itself in the blossom, it is as true that already now, in the time after passing through the gate of death, the power exists in the dead as root power, which then remains for the whole life between death and a new birth, and which realizes itself in the new earth life or in later earth lives as karmic compensation for what one has done. Thus the will is generated, which then becomes unconscious will for karma.

And now we can take a closer look at something that is important for the understanding of this picture of life between death and a new birth. We can see this if we cast our eyes once more on the reciprocal action between the conditions of earthly life here, which are well known to us in their outer appearance and on which we have reflected many a time, and their inner secrets, when we look at the reciprocal action between the waking life of the day and the sleeping life of the night.

Today, we want to look at this waking and sleeping again from a certain point of view. From an external point of view, sleep consists of our I and astral body being outside the physical and etheric bodies. The life of sleep initially remains unconscious if it is not interspersed with a certain type of dream life. However, this does not mean inactivity. On the contrary, this life in sleep is a soul life that is much more active within than the waking soul life, even though it remains unconscious during normal life on earth. The waking life of the soul is only so intense because the activity of the ego and the astral body experiences resistance from the aetheric body and the physical body. In this mutual pushing and shoving between the ego and the astral body on the one hand, and the physical and etheric bodies on the other, something develops that resembles continuous pushes and counter-pushes. This is what appears to us as an alert day-life, while in normal life on earth we are not yet able to bring the continuous but intense activity of the night-life to consciousness. This does not push against the physical and etheric bodies, so it does not become conscious. But in itself the day-life is weaker; it only becomes conscious through the fact that it continually beats against the etheric body and physical body. This beating is perceived, while the more intense activity of the life during sleep goes into the indefinite, cannot beat against anything and thus remains unconscious.

But what is a person actually doing during this 'dream life'? When dreams occur in normal life, these dreams are not the actual activity during sleep, but are actually a visualization of the activity through the memories of ordinary life. The images of dream life arise because life spreads its tapestry over the actual inner activity; and in this way many things are perceived in 'dream life'. There the I and the astral body are in a living activity; when this touches the etheric body and the human being touches the etheric body, the dream arises. But the dream uses the physical life memories from the etheric body to make visible the invisible activity of the ego and the astral body. Therefore, one can only understand the dream if one takes these images in terms of their character sequence, that is, if one learns to understand these images. “Dreams must first be read in the right way, the right art of interpretation must first be added. Then, however, they point to this most significant reality, which is carried out by the ego and the astral body during sleep. This activity, then, which the human being carries out, is revealed to serious and dignified spiritual research.

What exactly is this activity that takes place from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up? It consists of reliving the experiences of the day in a much more intense way, so that one becomes, as it were, one's own judge of the day's experiences. It is a trite expression, but deeply true: during the day, one lives into the normal consciousness, letting the events that take place around one wash over one. But at night, in the astral body, one takes the events of the day much more seriously, much more meaningfully, both intellectually and emotionally. One weighs them, examines them in terms of their cosmic value. One concerns oneself with what they mean in the context of the whole world. An immense inner thoroughness in the contemplation of life is poured out upon the activity from falling asleep to waking up; only in normal life it remains unconscious. All this, what man goes through every night like a reliving of the day's life, has a great significance as preparation for life after passing through the gate of death.

Consider, then, with the means of ordinary physical consideration, this continuous life between birth and death. Of course, one only says that one remembers back to a certain point in time in this life. In truth, one does not remember the whole life back, but one remembers in the evening what goes on until the morning. Then the memory breaks off. Then comes the previous 'day', and then the night, which one does not remember. So one remembers back, but it is, as it were, chain link on chain link, a white and a black link. One does not remember the night in the life between birth and death. The strange thing is that in this time when you are in the realm of the soul, you remember the way you relived your daytime experiences night after night during the nights. Here in physical life you remember your days; in the realm of the soul you remember the same, but you remember how you worked through and lived through the days in the nights. You retrace your nights. In this way you can see the whole nature of the experiences in the soul realm.

If you realize this in detail, it is like this: you met a person on a certain day of your life, you experienced something with him. You relive it not only with him during the day, but also at night, and in the following nights; then it is a kind of reminiscence. You experience it inwardly in the ego and astral body. Everything you have experienced here in your waking consciousness, you experience again in your night consciousness. And the way you have experienced it in your night consciousness gives you the handle for how you need it in the soul world. You relive your nights. This is a very significant truth of spiritual research, and one can always remember through such a thing the fact that spiritual research is not as many believe. Many believe that once one has entered the spiritual world, then the spiritual researcher suddenly knows the whole spiritual world and is informed about everything. This belief is just as naive as it is naive to believe that someone who has walked across one part of the earth knows the whole earth. He knows parts of the earth quite well, but he knows nothing about other parts of the earth. Equally, someone who knows the spiritual world at some point does not need to know everything about the spiritual world. That is the subject of a slow research. That is why it is so difficult to talk about spiritual science, because you keep running into this prejudice. When lectures on spiritual science are given, people demand in the question and answer session that information be given about all things. Such questions are to be judged in the same way as if, for example, someone had become acquainted with a certain number of minerals or plants and one would then ask him about the secrets of the animal world and say: He knows one thing, so he must know the other too!

It is quite the case that all the details of the spiritual world must first be worked out. And above all, one must be able to wait until one thing or another arises. Now you have been able to see that in my “Occult Science” and “Theosophy” I have spoken about the approximate length of the so-called Kamalokalebens, the life in the soul world. From a certain point of view, one can say that, as it has happened. But now the spiritual researcher comes to a certain context that can really be compared to traveling from country to country. One comes from one place to another, and so one comes here from one area to another. Thus, the spiritual researcher can come to a different point of view; and this point of view answers the question: What does the activity of the ego and the astral body during the night involve? The experiences of the night can be seen as a reprocessing of the day's experiences. The question may arise: How does life turn out in the soul world when we know that the nights are lived through in the soul world? I have stated that life in the soul world makes up about a third of the last life on earth. If you live through the nights, how long will life in the soul world last? Well, you sleep through about a third of your life here on earth; some people sleep more, others less, but you sleep through about a third of your life on earth.

So are the tremendously significant impressions one can have regarding the truth of spiritual science. Because that is how it is in spiritual science: something is given to you from a certain point of view, from which you look into the spiritual world. A truth arises. One could doubt this truth. Now one starts from a different point of view and comes to the same truth, as is the case now with the experience of the Nights. This is the result of the truth. This is an important criterion, this inner agreement. And you will find this everywhere in spiritual science, where it is seriously and worthily pursued: that the same thing is sought from different points of view, and that the same truth emerges from these different points of view. Once people develop a feeling for the truth value inherent in this way of approaching spiritual truth and then finding this spiritual truth, they will also sense how much more true it is than anything that can be investigated in the physical world. The important thing is that we have a memory here in physical life for what we have experienced in our waking consciousness, and that we have a memory in the time when we pass through the soul world for what is further worked on during the nights on the basis of what the waking consciousness experiences.

In order to approach the meaningful truths that we will discuss tomorrow with the right attitude, let us recall something that I have already mentioned here in a different context with reference to the great events of our time: When a person passes through the portal of death in such a way that their life is, as it were, torn away from the outside, especially if they die at a young age, then after they have passed through the portal of death, after a short time, the separation of the etheric body also occurs. But this etheric body would have the power to supply the rest of life with external life forces. Normally, the person receives the powers of the etheric body that can supply them with life forces into old age. If life is suddenly interrupted, then these powers remain. These powers are also present in the discarded etheric body. And just as nothing of the forces is lost in the physical world, but only transformed, so these forces are not lost either, but remain present. Apply this specifically, then you will say to yourself: When a person dies in his youth, in his prime, he leaves the world what he still has of vital forces in his ether body, which he could have used up himself. Imagine it even more concretely. Suppose a person, let us say in the twenty-fifth year of life, is struck by a bullet: he leaves to the world in terms of etheric forces of life that which he would have been able to use up from the twenty-sixth year of life onwards for the rest of a long life. That remains, that is a gift that the dead leave to the spiritual atmosphere of life in which we find ourselves. We remain surrounded by these forces. And in these forces lie the sacrificial attitudes with which the departed person permeated his etheric forces. That remains. And future generations have no idea how they actually live in the forces left by their ancestors in this way, how they are surrounded by them, and how our spiritual life air is imbued with them. They pay no attention to what is left behind by the departed in such a time, when so many etheric bodies that can still be used in life are given back to the spiritual atmosphere of the earth in a relatively short period of time. We will continue from there tomorrow.

We will now direct our attention to what can be revealed to us from such profound connections, through which we can see into the spiritual world, and no longer see the spirit in a merely abstract, trivial way, even hazily in the world of the senses, but see the spiritual essence in a concrete way. In addition to the fates of those who have passed through the gate of death, we see beings of the higher hierarchies and of the elemental world. But we also see what remains inwardly connected to the earth: that which is left in the etheric bodies. What the souls who meet their death in the great fields of battle leave behind in the way of unused etheric forces will have a definite effect. These will combine with the understanding that the children of the earth will show for the future. And looking at this, we say what we have often said at the end of our meditation:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
Will grow spiritual fruit
Guiding souls, spiritually aware
Their minds into the spiritual realm.

Let us now continue to try to elaborate on the things we have discussed in recent times. I told you more or less in general terms how the spiritual and soul life of man actually relates to the sensory and physical life. Now today I will elaborate on this further. I have already pointed out to you that if you want to know something about these things, you cannot say: Yes, the intellect that I have once and for all must decide everything, and what it cannot decide does not exist. One must always bear in mind that one has also undergone a development in ordinary life. Just imagine what it would be like if we had remained at the level of a three-year-old child! We would look at the world quite differently. A three-year-old child sees the world quite differently than an adult. The three-year-old child can be taught all kinds of things. After all, in terms of life, he is still asleep. The three-year-old child cannot even speak properly; he can be taught language. In any case, the three-year-old child is modest and not snooty. It is willing to be taught. It would probably not be so modest if it were not half asleep and said: Why should one learn? We already know everything! But today's man says: We already know everything; and since we cannot understand the spiritual soul with our minds, there is no such thing as a spiritual soul.

Now, if I were to say as a three-year-old child: I don't want to learn anything more; if I say: Dad, Mom, and a few other things, like apples and so on, that's enough – that would be a child's point of view. But once you have acquired the common sense of an ordinary person, you can really develop something within yourself. And if you now further develop the ordinary powers of cognition that you have, then it comes about that you undergo just such a leap, I would say, as the one from a small child to an adult human being. All this depends, of course, on gaining insight and on incorporating it into the whole process of human development. Today, people cannot help but be snobbish in this regard and say: I already know everything, and what I don't know is none of my business. Today, people cannot help but say this because they have been educated from elementary school on to ascribe everything to reason, and to say of the other: Well, yes, one can believe in that, but one cannot recognize it.

You see, you just have to be very clear about the fact that there really is such an awakening from ordinary everyday life to real knowledge, just as there is an awakening from sleeping and dreaming to ordinary life. You just have to realize that you can only really know something about the world when you see through what is happening from a higher point of view, just as you have to see through the dream from a waking point of view. One only realizes that a dream is not reality, that a dream is something that depends on waking life, when one can wake up. I told you the other day that if one could never wake up, one would consider what one dreams to be the only reality.

But now let us see what a dream actually is. You see, gentlemen, people have thought an awful lot about dreams. But actually, everything that is said about dreams is basically just drivel. It really is drivel, because people can say: well, if the brain just vibrates a little, then the person is dreaming. Yes, but why does the brain only vibrate a little? — Well, what is said about dreams is actually a kind of proof. But if you are clear about the fact that the human being not only has this physical body, which you can see and touch in life, but that he also has the other aspects of his nature that I have drawn to your attention, that the human being also has an etheric body, an astral body and an ego, and if you then say to yourself: this very ego and this astral body are outside the physical body and the etheric body when you are asleep, then you can first of all explain to yourself why a person does not walk when they are asleep. They do not walk because the ego is not inside the physical body. You can also explain to yourself why a small child does not walk. Because the ego has not yet awakened in a small child. So you can explain to yourself why a person walks: he walks because the I slips into his physical body. You can also explain to yourself why a person does not think when asleep. He does not think because the astral body is not within his physical body.

Doesn't that show you that you have to distinguish, so to speak, between the physical body and the etheric body, which are in bed, and the I and the astral body, which are outside during sleep.

Now imagine what it is like when you wake up or fall asleep. When you fall asleep, it is the case that the I and the astral body are just going out. So there is also a state where they are half inside, half on their way out. Only later does the state come when the I and the astral body are completely outside. So there is also such a state where they are still half inside and already half outside. That is when you dream.

Otherwise, you only believe that you are dreaming during the night. Actually, you only dream when you are falling asleep and when you are waking up. And what do you dream about then? Yes, you see, gentlemen, people believe that you dream because you use your brain when you are awake – so today's scholars say – but when you are asleep you only use your spinal cord. That's what people think.

But these people are not able to observe at all! Take a real dream, for example. Take the dream of a fire. You dream of a whole fire; you dream of all kinds of things. And you wake up – someone yells outside: “Fire!” In reality, you perceived nothing else – you didn't know anything about fire and so on – so you heard this “Feurio!” half and half because your ear was open. Because you are accustomed to it, you associate this with fire, but it is half and half obscure. And what you dream about fire can be something completely different than what you see. For example, you may dream that the fire is coming from a volcanic eruption. You may dream something completely different. And when you dream about something that happened many years ago, you will know how confused the dream is. Perhaps as a small boy you had a small quarrel with someone. Now, years later, you dream about this quarrel. But you dream about it as if you had been beaten to death, or as if you had beaten the other person to death. The dream confuses everything. And you can perceive this confusion everywhere in the dream.

Now, when we dream while falling asleep, the story remains confused. When we dream while waking up, it corrects itself because we really see what is there. We dreamt that someone is murdering us. He puts a ball in our mouth; afterwards he comes and works on us with some instrument – we wake up and unfortunately have a corner of the bedspread in our mouth.

You see, the dream takes a small cause, adds a lot to it and confuses the story. For example, if the air is bad in the room where you sleep, you will experience what is known as the Alpdrücken. But you do not say to yourself in the dream: “The air is bad there, I can't get a good night's sleep there,” but you get the impression that an evil spirit is sitting on your chest and pressing down on you. You all know the legend of the Trut. This is based on the fact that one has got bad air into the lungs. The nightmare is based on this.

What, then, is dreaming based on?

Well, gentlemen, now let us take the waking dream. It is the case that the ego and the astral body are just slipping in and are not yet completely inside. These are the dreams of which we know the most. When you are completely inside your physical body, you look out of your eyes. But when you are not completely inside, you do not look out of your eyes. You have to imagine that when you enter your physical body, you turn around, as it were, and look out of your eyes. But if you are still half outside, you pass through your eyes, slipping through your eyes, and you see everything indistinctly. You then attach all kinds of confused fantasies to them. But when we enter our body during the night's sleep, we have nothing but these confused fantasies. And how do we sort them out? We can't sort them out. Only our body sorts them out for us. Otherwise, we would see the fire-breathing volcano Vesuvius every time we heard the word 'Feu' (fire) outside. Our eyes are so wonderfully constructed that we can only see the right thing through them. That is to say, we would only devote ourselves to all kinds of fantastic things throughout our lives if we were our body for the whole of life. It is the body that makes it possible for us to see life properly.

So you see, when we look at ourselves outside of our body, we are actually inside our ego and our soul; we are fantasists who have all kinds of confused ideas in our minds, and all we need to do is realign ourselves in our body every morning when we wake up. It is thanks to our body that we see things in order. Actually, we are fantasists in our earthly lives. The dream shows us how we really are in our earthly lives.

If you then come to really understand things, in the sense that you have awakened in a certain way with regard to your knowledge, you see even more clearly: in his life on earth, man is what he dreams. He is actually a fantasist, and he must always allow the body to correct him. And when he is completely asleep, he is actually quite unconscious. He cannot perceive anything of the world at all. Only when he has a piece of his body does he perceive the world fantastically.

But just when you know that, you say to yourself: What is the dream then actually? What does the dream actually show us? The dream shows us that we actually know nothing about our body; because if we knew something, we could also see properly what is outside. We could recreate the eyes in our thoughts and in our spirit. But we cannot do that; we are dependent on our body giving us the power of the eyes. So the dream shows us how little we know about our body.

But now you remember that I said the other day that we have to make this body ourselves. Inheritance is nothing. What is present when a person begins his existence on earth is, as I have explained to you, matter ground down to dust. First the soul-spiritual must enter into it. Man must first build up all his matter himself. When he understands the dream, he knows that he cannot do that. And when one comes to understand the dream, one learns something else.

Think about how difficult it is to put yourself back in the first years of your childhood. Suddenly you remember an event that you know your mother didn't tell you about, but that you saw for yourself. For one person it falls in the third year, for another in the fourth year, and so on. Yes, gentlemen, before that you were really asleep, really asleep. But when you look at a three-year-old child who can actually still sleep properly – because you don't remember it, just as you don't remember ordinary sleep – when you look at this three-year-old child in relation to life, you can do something that you can't do later.

I have already told you that the brain continues to develop until the permanent teeth have come through, until the seventh year. Look at the brain of a child who has just been born and the brain of a seven-year-old child. Something has happened to this seven-year-old child, something has worked on this brain. The brain itself cannot do anything. The brain is like a dynamo. A dynamo develops magnetism, and the whole factory movement depends on it. But the electric current must flow through it, otherwise the dynamo stands still. The brain stands still if the current of soul-life does not flow through it. In childhood the current of soul-life flows through the brain with much greater power, for the child works out the whole brain until the second change of teeth, and most of all in the very earliest years of life. That is why I told you that Jean Paul, who was a very clever man, said: A person learns much more in his first three years than in his three years at university. It is much more artful than what one ever has to work on externally later.

We say to ourselves: Yes, we had that; we have lost that. Just when we became conscious, we lost this inner soul work. We no longer have that. And the one who comes to this realization notices that he can do it less and less. When you later gain the gift of looking back on life, it makes you feel quite dizzy about what has happened. Because when you were a fourteen-year-old boy, you might still have been able to do some of the things you did in abundance when you were a three-year-old child or even just when you were born. You could do the most when you were a three-year-old child; at fourteen you could do a lot less of it. When you turn thirty, you can still digest enough, but you can no longer work out anything. When you turn fifty or sixty, you have become a real donkey when it comes to the work of working out the human body. You only realize how big an ass you become in the course of your life! It is necessary to realize that you lose some of your wisdom during the twenty to thirty years of your lifetime. If you go through the period of thirty to forty years, you lose a lot more. And afterwards, you are already a terrible donkey in relation to everything you have to process internally.

But when you start to realize this, when you acquire the ability to look back on your life, you are actually filled with respect for what a clever being you were as a very young child. You were once terribly ugly; but you can change everything if you were an ugly fellow. At fifteen, you can no longer make yourself beautiful. As a small child, you can do just that. All small children can do that.

So it is important to realize what kind of donkey you have become in the course of your life. That is an important side of life. You don't become immodest, but a terribly modest person. You realize when you see it correctly: when you were a little child, you actually sat on the donkey and drove the donkey yourself. Now that you have become an old man, you have turned into a donkey yourself. — You see, you have to put it so drastically, otherwise nothing comes of it.

In this way you also arrive at the meaning of the dream. You will have experienced it yourself; in a dream you can even think that you are the Emperor of China or something else. There are many other dreams. You can dream anything. But what does the dream show us? You just have to follow the dream to see how it changes in the course of your life.

Infant dreams are quite wonderful. Infant dreams still show you that the child still has the powers within itself to shape its body. They are truly cosmic. The child dreams of what it has experienced before descending to earth, because these powers are still within it. It needs them to develop its brain. When you have this wonderfully designed brain, which is located in the upper skull (see drawing on page 152), then it has the eye, but here are the nerves that are needed to see. All this must be worked out in detail. It must be worked out in detail. Yes, gentlemen, you cannot work that out with earthly knowledge. With earthly knowledge you can work out machines here and there; but with earthly knowledge you cannot work out the brain. In the dreams of small children you can still see exactly: in their dreams they work out how their brain functions. Later on, dreams also become very strange if a person does not lead an orderly life; they become increasingly disorderly. And the fact that the dream is confused actually stems from the fact that one knows so little about one's physical body because one is not inside it.

So that is the reason why we know so little about our physical body: because we have lost, transformed into foolishness, what we have received as wisdom when we descended into earthly life. When you wake up and say to yourself, “Well, if you believe everything you've dreamt now – that you're the emperor of China – then of course you're an ass.” But we ourselves can't do anything other than develop ass-like behavior because we don't have the body. Not being inside, we can't help but be confused by the dream. We have completely lost the ability that we had as small children to build up our body properly. It has to come to us from outside. When we wake up, it comes to us from outside. But when we come back down to earth, it doesn't come to us from outside. Then we encounter destroyed matter in the egg from outside. We have to build it up piece by piece.

Yes, gentlemen, we have to learn all this between two earth lives. Between two earth lives we have to learn what the dreaming human being cannot do. You see, there are enemies and opponents of anthroposophy who say: Oh, they are just people who want to dream; they make all kinds of fantastic things up about the world. Yes, but anthroposophy consists precisely in the fact that we no longer rely on dreams, because dreams show that we cannot do what we can do when we enter into earthly life, when we enter with this dark, unconscious knowledge that we have as a small child. There we are clear about the fact that we have acquired this in a world that is not the world on earth, because in the world on earth we can only educate ourselves to become fantasists with regard to our actual self. However beautiful this world is, we can only educate ourselves to become fantasists with regard to our actual selves. We have to acquire our relationship to our body, our whole relationship to our body, in another world.

Now I want to tell you that the one who sees through the whole thing and thus also sees how becoming an ass advances further and further knows: it is easy to lose this knowledge. Well, it is not much different than when someone takes an exam. When someone takes an exam, it often takes two years to pass it. But they forget it quickly, terribly quickly. This is also the case with the knowledge we need to build our body: we can forget it quickly. Only here the “quick” is somewhat different than with an exam or a test. The “quick” is our whole life on earth. When we have died, we have forgotten approximately what we brought down into physical life at our birth. Our lifetime is approximately the forgetting time.

Now imagine that one of you has an experience of which he is aware: you are growing up as a child; you first remember something that happened, let's say, when I was four years old. Suppose he has already turned sixty and he remembers an event from when he was just four years old. Now it took him fifty-six years after those four years to forget, to forget inwardly. For fifty-six years, the forgetting became stronger and stronger. For fifty-six years, he became more and more of an ass. So how much more time did he need to forget what he still had until the age of four? Well, it took him so much more time than 4 in 56 contains: he needed fourteen times his first childhood to forget. When he reaches the age of sixty, it takes him fourteen times as long again to regain in the spiritual world what he has forgotten there. So he needs 60 times 14 years, 840 years. Then, in the spiritual world, he has acquired the ability to have something similar to what the small child had in its first four years, in order to build up. That means that after 840 years he can come to earth again.

You can only calculate this with full responsibility, as I have written it on the board for you now, if you are really clear about it, if you can examine what lies in dreams, how dreams distance you more and more from the spiritual world.

And you see, if someone walks around and at a certain time cannot enter his physical body at all, then he is a medium. If someone enters his physical body at the right time and uses it again, well, then he is a normal person. But if a person goes around in this state all the time, without the ego having entered the physical body – you can even walk around as a sleepwalker; you can even speak as a sleepwalker, or when you are lying in bed – then you need not be surprised; because if you, let us say, throw a ball, and everything is flat, it will roll on by itself. So under certain circumstances, when a person is not quite healthy, when everything goes easily for him, when his body is not quite firm, the activity that is otherwise conscious can still have an effect. But then the person is an automaton. A sleepwalker is not a human being, but an automaton. And one who speaks from sleep does not speak humanly either. Just try it: when someone speaks from sleep, you can hear the most stupid things, because he becomes an automaton and his ego and soul are not in his body.

But if this is only half the case, if a person is only half an automaton – the inward movement happens from behind, so that the person moves in from the back of the brain to the front – if a person only moves in halfway, then he can close his eyes, and then, because the optic nerves are at the back (on the right), he perceives something, but it is fantastic. And then he can also talk you into all kinds of fantasies, because, right, he doesn't see, but he gets images there. The sense of hearing is located there (center). And the sense of language is located there (left). He can talk you into anything there. The mediums speak from there, but they are not in the world. Therefore, nothing that the mediums say can be trusted, because they are half inside their physical body. Nothing at all is to be given to it. What the media say is just what man in his - I must use the expression again and again - in his donkey-like behavior perceives.

Yes, gentlemen, but I have also heard of mediums who say really wonderful things. That is also true, the mediums also say wonderful things; but that is no wonder at all. Because, you see, when, for example, a strong earthquake strikes somewhere, the animals are the first to leave; the people stay and are destroyed by the earthquake. Animals are prophetic from the very beginning because the intellect is everywhere; they have not yet choked the intellect into themselves. So the medium is something that descends to the animal. It can do wonderful things, it can even say verses that are more beautiful than Goethe's verses — well, because it descends to the animal intellect.

For someone who is to attain knowledge in the anthroposophical way, the opposite is the case. He must not only enter halfway, as in his dreams, but he must know everything as the other person knows it, and in addition, what one can know when one wakes up a second time. When one wakes up a second time, one gets an idea of what it is like. You say to yourself: Yes, if you have spent a little time getting to know people during your life on earth, it will help you after death. Then it will be easier for you after death to get to know the human body again. But what you have to get to know between death and a new birth is the inside of the human body. And here you must be clear about one thing: getting to know the world is a lot of work. Students sweat profusely when they have to get to know the external world, when they have to learn to calculate how the stars revolve and so on; when they have to learn to calculate what the Earth looked like when there were no present-day crabs and so on. There is a lot to learn. But, gentlemen, what has to be learned on earth about what lies outside of man is nothing compared to what has to be learned within man.

Now you will say: Yes, but you do learn inwardly from the human being when the human being is dead; you learn everything from the human being. You cut up the human being and you learn from the corpse what the human being looks like internally. — But there is a big difference. With all the knowledge you gain from the corpse, you can never create a living human being. Of course, in order to create a living human being, conception is necessary. But at the moment of conception, the human being who has only just learned in the spiritual world between death and a new birth is also involved. One can only acquire knowledge on earth about that which is dead. One cannot acquire knowledge about that which is alive, or even about that which feels and thinks.

And I would not have dared to write these figures down for you if it had not been for the higher knowledge that one can see how man during his life on earth moves further and further away from the spiritual world. When he grows old, he has gone furthest away. When he is still a child – let us assume that he dies at the age of sixteen – yes, then it is different when he remembers back to the age of four. He may die at the age of sixteen, remembering back twelve years, that is three times four, and if he has reached the age of sixteen, he actually only needs forty-eight years to reappear. It is true that you can do that in the calculation!

But now we come across something very strange, gentlemen. This is this: you know, since ancient times, the patriarchal age has always been counted as about 72 years. When a person has reached the age of 72, the years beyond that are actually considered a gift. Isn't that right, that is the patriarchal age, 72 years. Now let us assume that such a patriarch was an excellent person, as there were some in ancient times. We, who are so inattentive today, remember very little from our childhood. But these people remembered things from the age of three or two. And then they had 70 years to forget their childhood wisdom, their extrasensory wisdom. That includes 35 times 2. So they go through a period in the spiritual world when they are 72 years old, remembering much further back than they can now, which is 35 times 72 years, or over 2000 years.

You see, gentlemen, if you observe the sun in spring, it rises in the constellation of Pisces. Once upon a time, it rose in the constellation of Aries. The calendar still shows Aries as the point of sunrise. But that is not correct. The sun rose in the constellation of Aries until the 15th century. Then it was correctly stated that the sun rises in the constellation of Aries. And since then, astronomers have become lazy and they continue to do so, even though the sun no longer rises in the constellation of Aries, but in the constellation of Pisces.

Let's assume that the constellation of Pisces has a certain size. There are twelve such constellations. When the sun rises next year, as I said, it will be somewhere in the constellation of Pisces on March 21. And when you observe it next year, it will have moved a little further, no longer coming up in the same place, and last year it was a little further back, also not coming up in the same place as this year. The sun takes a certain amount of time to pass through the constellation. At first it was at the very beginning of Pisces, and later, in the future, it will be at the end of Pisces. Then it will have advanced so far that it will no longer come out at Pisces, but at Aquarius. So now it passes through the constellation of Pisces, then later through the constellation of Aquarius, and even later through the constellation of Capricorn, and so on. For the sun to pass through such a constellation takes about as long as it takes a person, on average, when they have become very old, to come back.

This means a great deal that the sun advances once from one constellation to another. I have explained in my “Occult Science” that this is connected with the way the sun behaves when man returns. And we may therefore assume that knowledge shows us that when a person dies now, he receives what he has to learn to rebuild his body from the effects of Pisces. And then he comes again when he can no longer learn from Pisces, but must learn from Aquarius. And then he comes again when he must learn from Capricorn. Then again from Sagittarius. And then again he comes when he must learn from Scorpio. And then again, when he has to learn from Libra; then Virgo, then Leo, then Cancer, then Gemini, then Taurus, then Aries. Then he comes back to the beginning. But of course he has learned a lot by then. He has gone around once in 25,815 years and has gone through about twelve earth lives, eleven to twelve earth lives. Someone might say: Yes, you are telling us that a person always learns what he needs on earth from a different constellation, a constellation that looks quite different. If you look up at the constellation of Pisces, it looks quite different from Aquarius or Capricorn and so on.

Yes, but, gentlemen, imagine you were there, say, 800, 1000, 1500, 2000 years ago. It was quite different on Earth then. You would have led a completely different life. Perhaps you would have been some small, contented farmer, fattening up a paunch and becoming a very contented fellow. Now you are in the industrial labor movement. That is what you learned from the fish. Back then, when you would have fattened up your tummy and been a contented farmer, you would have learned that from the ram. So man learns what he goes through on earth precisely from the constellations.

You see, now we are getting to the point where we can say that people gradually come around. So if you had been there in 825 AD, for example, in the 9th century, you would have been that little farmer with the big belly; now you have returned under the influence of Pisces. But if you go around, you will arrive at Pisces again after 25,815 years. But now you have learned so much that you no longer need to become what you were before, but you are now at a much higher level as a human being. You have to realize that after 25,815 years, when we want to go back to Earth, we will no longer have to go down to Earth like that, because we have learned everything in a corresponding constellation.

And you see, this is where what I have already pointed out to you comes into consideration. Those who have learned geology in a very scholarly way today tell you: 25 million years ago, it was like this on Earth. Now, how do people come to the conclusion that 25 million years ago the Earth was a hot liquid body? I have also spoken to you about similar things, but not about such long periods of time. How do people come to this conclusion?

They examine Niagara Falls, for example. The waterfall rushes down. Now they take the stone over which it has rolled and calculate how much of it is washed away in a year, and then they calculate how much of the stone has been washed away in a year, when the water was not yet bottled but was still present as vapor. And from that they get these 25 million years.

It's just like when I examine a person's heart. Today is April 9. Let's examine the heart today, then again in a month, it will have changed a little bit; then again in a month, it will have changed a little bit again. And from these small changes, we calculate and come up with what the heart was like 300 years ago. But it hadn't existed yet. The calculation is correct. That is often the case with scientific calculations: the calculation is correct, but the things were not yet there. And so it is with what the earth looked like 25 million years ago. The calculation is exactly right, but the earth was not yet there. And so one then also calculates what the earth will be like after 25 million years. One just calculates in the other direction. But the earth will no longer exist then. Just as with the heart, which gets a little worse and worse every day, you can calculate what it will be like in 300 years, except that you will no longer be there as a physical person in 300 years. The calculations are quite correct. That is precisely the dazzling, the deceptive thing, that the calculations are terribly correct; but the human being does not last as long as the calculations indicate. When you reappear after 25,815 years, the Earth will have disintegrated in the meantime, and you will have had to find your way into the Earth in your successive lives anyway. The Earth is no longer there; you are freed from the Earth. You have ascended to a higher life.

And so, if you really get to the bottom of it, you can scientifically penetrate the time when old legends still tell that man goes through a series of earthly lives, but then no longer needs to return to earth. Then he must have learned so much that he can now endure it without a physical body. But then man must gradually have come to no longer have such crazy dreams as today, and must no longer have distanced himself so far from the spiritual world.

But you have come up with a very important result, gentlemen. You have to say to yourself: those people who resist becoming acquainted with the spiritual world do not want to let knowledge approach humanity. They want man to remain an ass on earth and not be able to return. Because he has already acquired something about man on earth, and something living at that, not just knowledge attached to dead matter, he is increasingly able to see through consciously after death what he has to go through.

Then, when a person, as certain dark forces want, because he must become a donkey on earth, should also remain a donkey, then these dark forces tempt him to lose his spiritual existence altogether. They persuade him to believe in eternal bliss. But just as they persuade him to believe in bliss, they take away from him what is allotted to him. That is how one has to talk; it is something terrible!

Therefore, anthroposophy must show man how he really is according to knowledge, so that he may gradually become able to enter the spiritual world again. You see, that is it, that anthroposophy is already a great human task and has a great social significance. Because all understanding will indeed go away. And because the intellect only wants to remain within, because human wisdom serves up what comes from the corpse, that is actually how it came about – not from something else – that humanity lives in such darkness and has no idea what to do. For example, in order to get out of the eternal congress image and so on, in order to get to something again, you have to really wake people up. But people hate to wake up. Because, when people sit down at meeting tables, it is not just about sitting down together, but about talking about something sensible; whereas people today are such that they do not even admit that they first have to wake up, have to make something of their minds flexible, so that they can also get a feeling for the social question again. Therefore, everything else is basically just a sticking plaster. But what is necessary is that people really come to an understanding of their inner being already on this earth, that they are prepared for what they have to do in the spiritual world. That is already so.

It does not occur to anthroposophy to convert individuals. Individuals cannot achieve anything, but many people can; and anthroposophy only wants to help many people acquire the right knowledge. Then it will be possible to bring about better times on this earth.

I wanted to tell you this too, gentlemen. Now I have to go to Zurich, St. Gallen and Winterthur. When I come back, I will continue with these lectures. Perhaps you can think of some questions you would like to ask.

[What we are dealing with today has been called the question of all questions. What could touch man more deeply, if the question is only framed broadly enough – touch him more deeply, from a certain point of view – than reflecting on his origin, on his descent, because] everyone probably has an inkling that this question includes much of what alone can enlighten man about his true nature, about his destiny and about the nature of his life in general.

Now, however, from the point of view from which we are to speak to you today about human descent, it is difficult to make ourselves understood even to our contemporaries, if they are not already somehow prepared for it through spiritual science, because compared to what is being put forward from many sides today about the descent or origin of man, what we have to say in this our meditation will seem as if it were spoken in a completely, completely different language; and given the great interest that is shown in this question today, and given the public suggestion — we may perhaps call it that — which is not true science, but many of the catchwords that have been taken from this science and which today dominate many minds, with all this, much of what is presented today will perhaps seem to some even more than what was already said in the last three lectures [of this series] much more like a mere reverie, like a fantasy. When two such fundamentally different things confront each other as what a world view that is more materialistically colored — the word does not need to be pressed — has to say about the origin of man and what spiritual science, as we are considering it here, has to present, when two such different things confront each other, then, then, above all, one must first of all bring one thing to mind. Anyone who has familiarized themselves with the concepts and ideas that dominate our popular literature when the origin of man is discussed and it is claimed that this origin of man is spoken of in the way it must be according to scientific facts; [if you are confronted with this] when you have read your way into popular [or, for that matter, more or less scientific literature, one must still bear in mind that the concepts and ideas that someone adopts are not always based entirely on real contemplation, on real observation, but on authority, which is adopted in a, one might say, mysterious, mystical way – and this word is used in the worst sense – [by what is once popular], by what once has prestige.

And it must be realized that it is extremely difficult for those who have become accustomed to thinking in the direction that confronts them to bring the ideas they have once accepted into any kind of acceptable relationship with ideas of a different nature [that are put forward, for example, from the perspective of spiritual science]. Therefore, anyone who speaks about this question from the point of view of spiritual science today has no illusions about the fact that he could easily be understood by all those who have surrendered their habitual ways of thinking, by what is commonly accepted and seemingly based on the solid facts of science. That would certainly be an illusion. Nevertheless, from this spiritual-scientific point of view, what is to be said must be said, especially today, for little by little these ideas will find their way into the minds of all those who can free themselves from the [thought habits] just mentioned. This should be stated in advance so that it is not believed that the humanities scholar only indulges in such illusions, that he can conquer those who live in strict scientific ideas in flight, or that it cannot happen, [that one confronts such ideas], and say from their point of view, that what he has presented is pure nonsense, [pure folly]. As a rule, he is able to present the arguments put forward by the opponents of the former very easily himself. The deception then mostly lies with those who approach it from a spiritual scientific point of view and believe that its arguments could contain anything new for him.

Thus, we may well consider this subject [from the standpoint of spiritual science] without prejudice, given this assumption. Monistic thinking takes the easy way out by posing the question in materialistic terms, using a curious logic... Our natural science, which has been equipped with such admirable progress in the course of the 19th century – and no one but the humanities scholar can marvel at this progress in natural science – our natural science has, among many other things, also broadened the human view of the sum of living beings that live around us today and that lived on this earth in earlier epochs of the earth's development. We find their remains more or less preserved in the layers of our earth, where we once found creatures that were little like us. And a kind of religion, a kind of belief, that has been built on this scientific fact, has concluded from the contemplation, from the appropriate contemplation of what the world shows around us today, if we look at the layers of the earth to search for pre-worldly beings. This confession has turned it into a kind of theory of evolution that contains an extraordinary amount of interesting, important and also correct information.

But we can characterize the logical error that this theory of evolution makes with a few words – and we must characterize it [in this way] – and it is precisely when we start from this point that we will gather the material for thought in order to present that [being] to our minds, which can be said from the point of view of spiritual science. Science shows us [today] the perfect being alongside imperfect life. If we examine the layers of our earth, science shows us a series of [apparently] imperfect living creatures [to seemingly perfect beings], so that we can say: It is obvious to the human eye that one living creature is imperfect and the other is perfect.

Now, due to circumstances and facts [that we do not want to explain here], a remarkable logical conclusion has been drawn from this.

Let us consider this conclusion in its simplest, logical, sober form: the perfect has arisen from the imperfect. By making a comparison, we can make this conclusion clear to ourselves and then ask ourselves whether it is possible. Let us assume that we see two people next to each other, one with a genius for hard work, who has developed great diligence in life and has achieved something respectable. If we take another person next to him, we see a different person who has few abilities, who was also lazy and lethargic and has achieved nothing of note. Now we hear that these two are related. How they are related is something we should think about first, because that is the question in relation to the so-called developmental problem. When we look at the beings around us, we see that humans, with their various organs, are similar to lower forms of life, so-called imperfect ones. We see that humans have a slightly different structure, but basically the same bones as lower creatures. We could cite numerous other reasons that could lead us to the conclusion that we must assume a relationship. But what this relationship is like has not been established by facts, but inferred. No one should entertain the belief that the origin of the higher from the lower has been established; it has been inferred.

So if we know that they [the two people standing opposite each other] are related, [if we] can determine that from something, can we then conclude that [the one who has the genius and who was hardworking and achieved something decent comes] from [the other who was lazy and careless and did not improve]? Anyone who reflects a little will be able to realize how unnatural such a conclusion would be, and how easily he could be set right in his thinking if it were shown to him that the one as well as the other person descended from the same parents, that the one has only developed upward to his industriousness, but the other has declined, has developed downward. It is extremely trivial, [what I see], and it could seem as if an admirable theory that prevails in the world today should be refuted [by an /illegible/ triviality].

Unfortunately, however, [if we look closely] this logical blunder is [made] because it is known that the higher organism is related, [and it is] concluded that the higher one descends from the lower one – [by thinking that one could say that the more highly developed human descends from the lower, lazy human].

Now let us expand this little reflection to include, say, different peoples living side by side, a lower-developed people and a higher-developed people. Today, we have become accustomed to thinking that a higher-developed people with significant spiritual education [and cultural achievements] has developed from a state in which a lower-developed people finds itself today. Exactly the same conclusion as one would draw if one were to place these two people next to each other today. It is possible that one could be corrected if one were to research the facts, just as spiritual science is able to show that it is not the case that the spiritually higher educated people descend from the lower, but that] on the contrary, there is a common descent [of the two], that one that is spiritually more highly developed has developed in one direction and the other in the direction of decline. So that when we examine the ancestry, we are led up to a common primal people, not to the one that lives next to the other today, but to a common one. Since both live side by side, [they descend equally from the primal people]. Only one has developed upwards, the other downwards [in a certain respect].

Let us look at this in a little more detail, [so that our minds can form certain concrete ideas in the process]. You all know that when the European immigrants first moved to the American continent, they encountered an indigenous people [there], a people who are believed [in natural historical thinking] to represent earlier stages of the present peoples. From a European point of view, they were certainly at a low level of civilization back then, but if you take such an absolute point of view, you can go very wrong in your judgment. Let's imagine a scene to illustrate this. The Europeans have not always managed things so well. They have not always chosen the best means to exterminate the free man. One of the last chiefs [of the free people] who came from the areas from which [the Native Americans] were expelled in North America [was one of the last] to face a European conqueror, a leader of a European culture. The inhabitants of America had been deprived of their lands, including the tribe to which that Indian chief belonged. [The scene took place not so long ago.] The people had been promised land for what was taken from them, and it had not been kept.

The leader of the “redskins” stood opposite the leader of the Europeans. We have preserved a speech that the leader of the Native Americans addressed to the Europeans who had defeated his tribe and had not given them any land. I cannot even give you a literal translation of this speech, only the gist of it, what it contains. This is roughly what the chief said to the European: “Yes, you Europeans, you promised us other land for the land whose soil is covered by the corpses of our free brothers, you did not give us other land. That is because the pale man believes in different things than the free man. The pale man has strange magic tools, where little magic creatures are on them, he looks into them and sees what is right for him, he sees what is true and what is false. - The chief once saw the books and thought the letters were such magic creatures, [magic spirits that cause the Europeans to take such measures]. The free man does not believe in such spirits; the free man does not read what is written in such books of spells; the free man goes out and hears how the water rushes and how the trees rustle in the forest and he understands that. Because the Great Spirit speaks to him through the rushing of the water and the rustling of the trees. He always speaks the truth, and because you do not know the Great Spirit, who speaks the truth in the rushing of the water and the rustling of the trees, that is why you behave in this way. The pale man can never understand the free man, otherwise he would not trample with his weapons on the earth, which covers the bones of our brothers and which will one day take revenge on the pale ones!

What interests us about this strange speech by the free man, however, is the reference to the Great Spirit, whom he suspected everywhere. In the rustling of the trees, [in the trickling of the springs], even in thunder and lightning, [in all natural phenomena] the [divine] great spirit spoke to him. What is remarkable about this “savage” population is [this monotheistic religion], this remoteness from all superstition in their fundamental religious belief, which shines through the many superstitions that were present. You really don't need to go very far with your logic before you can see that those who were conquered by the Europeans, from whom the Europeans do not descend, but both [the European and the American population] descend from a common people, who must have had a wonderful natural religion. That will be a hypothesis if one stands on the standpoint of the sense-physical facts; that is a certainty if one [researches spiritually with the methods that we will talk about in the next lectures, especially in the second-next one, which is about initiation]. The American population, which had declined in certain respects, had lost its original purity and developed in another direction [towards a lower level]; the European, from his point of view, developed in the opposite direction. This gives us a concept of development that shows us very, very different perspectives than the simple concept of development that people are so keen to present to us as the only possible one. We see how this development is not at all simple, how we must assume earlier states of existence from which today's emerged, how that which today lives as imperfect in the imperfect appears to be a branch-off that develops towards imperfection. If we could go back in time to the distant past, we would find peoples who are the ancestors of the European [population] as well as those of the conquered American Indians. The path of development went so that a straight development [direction] led to the present-day developed population. But those who did not keep up, who did not absorb what could have led to perfection, came to a decline. The others are not descended from them, but descended from a common ancestor, others have progressed. [They are not merely /uncertain reading] lagging behind on a different point of view, but] because they lagged behind, they now show a state that was never present in ancient times. Because [they were] unable to develop further, [they] regressed.

We can now extend this concept to all living things. If we extend it in this way, we go back to the mammals that are closer to humans. Any simple theory of evolution would assume that the higher mammals were the ancestors of man. Today, this notion of man's very brutal descent from apes has been somewhat dropped, but the line of thought is still based on what appears to be different. If we imagine the relationship between humans and higher apes using this concept, we will say: Today's apes may descend from that original being that existed in the distant past and to which humans have evolved, but they have remained at [an older point of view], and therefore, in their present state, [in their present form] do not represent the ancestors of mankind, but the degenerate creation [that has wanted to hold on to an old form; that has corrupted itself]. Therefore, when today's man looks at this ape, he sees it with the mind, [then] it appears to him as a caricature of his own being, not at all as an ancestor, [and anyone with such feelings experiences it] as a kind of embarrassment... [illegible] when the original characteristics of man are corrupted.

[And so, step by step, we descend from higher to much lower creatures. In the remote past, we come to ancestors of man, whom we must not seek in creatures similar to present-day humans – the further back we go, the more dissimilar they become to the creatures that exist today. They are quite differently shaped]; from those ancestors of man, as a retarded and therefore declining entity, the lower mammals and other lower creatures descend. If we go back to the simplest creatures, [those that live today, consisting of one cell, from which one would also like to derive man,] then we would have to say that, yes, these creatures are undoubtedly related to man. But in the distant past, when man had an ancestor [from whom even these simple single-celled organisms descended, man looked quite different, his ancestor was a completely different being: The simplest organisms are the ones that are furthest behind and therefore the furthest from the original form of [the human being]. This is because they branched off earliest and, since humans have perfected themselves, have undergone a decline, [taken a direction of decline, and are the ones that are furthest from the original form].

Now let us look at this original form of man himself from the point of view of spiritual science. [There we have to take a look at the essence of man, as we have already frequently done.] We cannot look at [man] from the point of view of spiritual science in the simple way that we look at the physical body in material science.

[In what material science regards as the only thing, the human body, only one limb of the human being is based – this is only briefly hinted at – which has the same forces and materials as the seemingly inanimate matter – but science sees this body only be composed of these substances and forces in such an implicit way that these substances and forces could not maintain their form, as the material maintains its form], if the human physical body were not permeated and imbued with the second part of its being, the etheric or life body. This etheric or life body is for the spiritual scientist - [as already shown here last week] - a reality, a higher reality than the physical body, for it is the shaper and creator of the physical body. This etheric body or life body, which is a constant fighter against the dissolution of the physical body, because the moment the etheric body separates from the physical body, death occurs, and the physical body becomes a corpse. This etheric or life body is shared by humans and all other living beings, plants and animals. The third [link is called the astral body in spiritual science for good reasons]. The astral body is the carrier of lust and suffering, of joy and pain, of all instincts, drives, passions, ideas and feelings, of all that lives in the human being. This astral body is the third link of the human being. It has more in common only with the animal world, no longer with the plant world. [Then we already mentioned eight days ago] the fourth link of the human being, through which man is the crown of earthly creation, that which we could say is designated in the German language by the only name that differs from all other names, the name of our ego. The ego name, when you think about it, indicates the essence of the [ego]. [But first turn to] Fichte, [who said]:

Most people would much rather consider themselves a
piece of lava in the moon than an ego.

This ego can only be called from within itself. The name 'I' can never reach my ear if it denotes my own self; that can only be designated by the name 'I' from within. This has been discovered and recognized by those who study spiritual science: here is the actual sanctuary, the innermost link of human nature, to which nothing else of earthly things has access, but where human divine essence penetrates to one. [Man's divine essence announces itself in the ego.] By letting the little word “I” sound to itself, the soul speaks to itself what [religion] refers to as the God in man. This fourth link [of the human essence] is no longer shared by man with other beings, but is for himself and is thus the crown of earthly creation. ... /Illegible words]

[Thus, we initially have the human being as a tetrad before us, and anyone who speaks from a so-called monistic point of view would therefore not only want to accuse this spiritual-scientific view of dualism, which has been used to is done with it, but] then he should also reproach the dualism of the person who says that water consists of oxygen and hydrogen. If it is a mistake to look for light in its primary colors, only the one who does not think of dissecting the thing into its individual parts, or who claims of the individual that it is the comprehensive one, is a monist.]

Only he is a monist who does not think of dissecting the thing into its own members or of claiming that a single member is the whole. Then the word monism becomes a buzzword that does not take into account the facts. [But after all, people work with buzzwords today, not with facts.]

Now we can only understand the origin and descent of man if we consider the relationships between these elements of human beings in the present-day individual. We must distinguish between the two essentially different states in which we encounter man, waking and sleeping. These are two fundamentally different states. It was a remarkable fact when Du Bois-Reymond, [the naturalist], said [and it has already been pointed out in the first of these lectures] at the Leipzig Naturalists' Assembly: 'If one were to examine everything that goes on in the human physical body, all these [complicated movements and] processes, one could indeed investigate how hydrogen and oxygen and carbon and nitrogen [move in such a way, but one could examine all this], but one would never be able to explain the simplest fact of consciousness from these movements: “I feel red”, “I smell the scent of roses”. And likewise, even if someone were to see all the movements with the most wonderful instruments, he would only see movement, but not the soul processes, “I see red and feel the scent of roses”.

It is the worst materialistic superstition, and basically very interesting, that even on scientific ground it has been pointed out [although he has made significant blunders] that the fact of consciousness of the simplest sensation can never be explained from the facts of the physical body. We can understand the sleeping person, but never the waking one. Why? When a person sleeps, all these facts seem to sink into an indeterminate abyss, and because that is missing, we can understand what remains. Du Bois-Reymond, who is himself a materialist, rightly found the fact of life inexplicable.

To make this clear, let us consider the difference between the waking and the sleeping human being. In the waking body, we have the astral human being connected to the physical and etheric bodies. In the sleeping person, on the other hand, we have separated the astral body, detached it from the physical body [and from the etheric body. The difference between being awake and sleeping is that the astral body is separated from the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, but is connected to the physical and etheric bodies when we are awake.]

However, if you imagine purely in material and spatial terms that a kind of material cloud [as the astral body] emerges from the physical body, you still have a rather materialistic idea.

The human being, as he is today in his development, is just not able to perceive his physical organs [during sleep]; when the astral body reconnects with the physical body in the morning upon waking, [he can then perceive the physical surroundings through the eyes and ears]. What perceives is not your physical body, but the I with the astral body, which moves into its physical body in the morning. Physical organs are the instruments of this I equipped with a physical body. Therefore, no one would think of saying, “my brain feels a color, sees a friend,” but rather, everyone correctly says, “I see a friend,” “I perceive a color,” and so on.

When we consider the fact that today, when we are asleep, the human being, his I and his astral body are outside the physical and etheric body, then those who ask – [then we have to ask ourselves]: Where is the I [with the astral body] then? That is also somewhere in another world, in a world that belongs to the supersensible worlds. What does that mean? Where is this supersensible world? Those who oppose spiritual science imagine that spiritual science imagines this supersensible world to be in a beyond. Here it is, all around us!

And how does spiritual science imagine this supersensible world? Not any differently than [one has to imagine] colors and light for the blind. Imagine that you have a congenitally blind person below you. That which is around you, colors and light, is also around him, but he does not see it. For him, the world is what he can feel; for him, the world is [as for you, the world is the world of light and colors]. But if we could operate on this man born blind at this moment, so that he would see, out of the darkness that was around him, the lights and colors would light up, [and the world that was not there for him before. Why is it there now? We see that he has now formed it out of the physical.]

There are as many worlds in infinity as a being has organs to perceive them. [We will see in later lectures that] man, as he once had the disposition in primeval times to the eyes, which at that time could not yet see, but became seeing in the course of development, that all men have the disposition to what is called in spiritual science with Goethe, “the spiritual ears, the spiritual eyes”. Spiritual eyes and ears are present in man as a predisposition and can be developed. This is the purpose of spiritual science, that it gives people the methods to be able to enter the state that is related to the blind-born, [who can be] operated on, [to the world of colors and light, and] of course someone who knows nothing about it should not decide anything about such a world, [but] the only thing that can be said is that this is there, what can be perceived. And it is not only people of the future who can perceive these higher worlds that are around us, but these methods can be applied to people of the present.

People of the present know as a fact, as a primal form, that one can relate to the [higher] worlds as the blind are born [to the world of colors and light]. By awakening the spiritual ears and eyes, new worlds can arise that are around us. In this world and in no other is the human ego and the astral body when they are separated at night from the physical and etheric bodies. As long as a person's spiritual ears and eyes are not awakened, he cannot see [in this spiritual world], so consciousness fades away. But then, when spiritual eyes and ears are awakened, he can see.

But never can [may] perception decide on existence. [Otherwise a blind man could say to a seeing man who says he sees color and light: You are a fool, I see nothing at all]. Existence does not coincide with truth.

Now we ask ourselves the further question: What does this astral body do during the night and what is its business? [Is it unemployed?] This astral body is indeed busy during the night. When you work from morning till evening or let impressions of the outside world affect you through your senses, then something is going on [continually within you], and that is the fatigue, the wearing down of the forces of the physical body. Why is a healthy sleep so healthy? Because the astral body works [during the night on the removal of fatigue, of worn-out substances], on the restoration of the worn-out forces. What the astral body has done, you feel [in the morning as] a refreshment [even if you do not know how it works].

So this astral body works throughout the night, but how is it able to work in the physical body? It is able to do so because it is now not within but outside the physical body. An astral human body that is outside the physical body can work on that body. The one that is in the body has to make use of the organs of the physical body [to perceive the physical environment] and cannot restore [the worn physical body] from within it. Therefore, for all beings that have their astral body within them during wakefulness, it is necessary that the waking state alternates with the sleeping state.

When death occurs, what happens then? What does not happen during our entire life. Then not only the astral separates from the physical, but also the etheric body from the physical. [When you have the sleeping body in front of you, the physical and etheric bodies are in perfect connection in bed, the astral body is lifted out.] If you have the corpse in front of you, then the etheric body has been lifted out. Therefore, the physical and chemical substances now follow their own laws, [the body can no longer hold together] - and here we have set out the fact of death and the fact of sleeping and waking. Only when we know these are we able to understand the primitive conditions of man, then we can take a look at the origin of man.

Let us now take up our concept again. [I cannot talk about all the details today, but only give a sketch of human origin]. Let us go back to a distant past. We find a human ancestor.

But what did he look like? Quite different from today's man. Everything, absolutely everything in humanity has developed, including the conditions of sleeping and waking. They have only become what they are today, were quite different in times gone by. Spiritual science indicates that the distribution of sleep and waking as it is today only occurred relatively late [in the development of the earth]; the rule of sleep was quite different in the distant past. Man slept much longer, [was in an unconscious state, that is,] his astral body was much longer outside the physical body than it is today. And because it had the opportunity to be out longer and the waking state was shorter, this astral body had little to do with mending [the physical body]. The fatigue was not so great.

Today the night state is filled with mending [the physical body]. We only see something in our dreams, like fragments from the unconscious state. In ancient times of the distant past, not all of the work of the [astral body] had to be used to repair the physical body. Therefore, [even if it was dull and dim], this [astral] body [with the ego] was clairvoyant to a certain extent. In a way, this astral body, which was not so intimately connected to the physical and etheric bodies, could see into its surroundings. It saw what was around it in the spiritual world. However, what was it like, [looking into the world here? What is left behind?] There is dreaming. But dreaming is something that is only a very weak, [corrupted] echo of an [ancient], dim clairvoyance of all humanity, just as we have certain organs in us that used to have their function, [for example, certain] muscles near the ear. [Those beings in the animal kingdom that have remained at this level still have these muscles to move their ears.] Such organs, [which today have no function but which had a function in earlier stages of development], are called atavisms. One such atavism is dreaming. In the distant past, in the distant past of humanity, it was not what it is today, but something that brought man into real contact with his surroundings. As strange as it may seem to materialistic thinkers, I would like to give you an [unreadable] and describe a little [how it was] back then. In those ancient times, when man was in that half-asleep state, he could not perceive man in the way that he [could perceive the external natures, but he perceived] what lived in the soul of [other] people. When he – [the other] – was awake and thinking bad thoughts, then he [perceived this evil feeling, it] rose [like a kind of luminous body] for the consciousness at that time as a process of perception, a color image for the state of mind of the other.

In this way, people perceived the spiritual in their environment. [Of course, for materialistic thinkers this is something quite foolish. But the reasons that can be given against it are well known to the spiritual researchers themselves. So: Man was predisposed to be able to perceive in dreams. But it does not matter what one dreams; if a dream reflects reality, then it is real perception. [But if it is perceived in a dream, it is not yet bad. ... We have to imagine these ancient dreams as a much more vital state, showing a spiritual world around man that also exists today, but which he can no longer see because he has lost the ancient clairvoyance, but will learn to see again in the future.

Now we have described this person from the distant past. His astral body was essentially [more powerful], more substantial, more alive than it is now. Man has acquired this [external sensory] perception through his prolonged dwelling in the physical body. [But there is an original state of man in which the astral body was more outside the physical and etheric bodies than it is today.]

Let us realize what the astral body can still do in the physical body under certain circumstances, even today. It cannot do much today, but it can do something. When you feel a sense of shame in your soul and you blush, the blushing is a purely physical process, and what is it the result of? Of a process in the astral body.

The impression that caused the feeling of shame – [a reality of the imagination, an emotional reality] – has caused a feeling in the astral body [and] this feeling [has driven the blood to the surface, causing the blush of shame to appear here]. You can see how the blood could be set in motion by processes in the astral body through one process or another. [Today, there is very little that the astral body can do, but in the past it had great power.] In ancient times, the relationship between the astral body and the physical body was quite different. Not only could the astral body control the physical body in the minor way in which it [illegible] encountered the blood, but it had the ability to transform this physical body itself in terms of its form. At that time, when the astral body was still outside, [he had] not only the task of [removing the physical substances of] fatigue, but [illegible] that clairvoyant ability could [re-form the physical body].

Today [man] has a different forehead. [Certain animals still have that forehead formation and [illegible] formation corrupted. Man] has pushed it forward through forces that were in this astral body. [We can visualize what pushed this human forehead forward.] It was only when man learned to walk upright and move upright that he learned to imagine and feel the starry sky, that which is above, in a certain way. The animal, with its eyes directed downwards or straight ahead, does not have these impressions. When [humans] began to measure the space between the stars, namely at the time when humans had clairvoyant vision, [what was absorbed there] pushed the forehead forward, causing the brain to develop into the kind of convolutions that humans have today in terms of their abilities. This astral body is the creator of our forebrain and helped create [the anterior brain] [in adaptation to the external world]. Thus we can literally see how the astral body helped create the physical body.

Just as the astral body today transforms only a pale face into a red face [when shame is driven into the face], so in ancient times it shaped [the brain] out of this [primordial form] [into its present form]. Those beings in our line of ancestors who acquired this ability ascend to humans. Those who did not acquire this ability do not ascend to humanity, but condense. [Thus] an earlier stage of development ossified, corrupted, [and shows itself to us in a corrupted state]. Man must never be derived from today's ape, which has never been able to let these powers of the astral body take effect on it. But now we ask, if we go back even further, then we come to an even looser connection [to the physical and ether body]. There is less and less of it [the physical and etheric body], therefore the astral body [in the etheric body] is more and more powerful [and more and more powerful] and more and more able to transform the physical body. [At that time, man was gelatinous, like the animal, which is even more gelatinous today.] When man was in a soft state, the astral body could work on him in a powerful way.

[And] so we can go further and further back, to the state where the entire astral body was outside [the physical body], [where the physical body] related to the ether body as [ the body of the snail to the physical house [of the snail] relates, where the astral body /illegible] it, as it were, switches and reworks it, like the snail on the house - the snail does not live in the fabric of the house. [So it belongs to the physical and etheric bodies, but it does not yet live in them; it works on them from the outside; and we find] states, if we go back even further, [where even] the etheric body is not yet in this intimate connection with this physical body, the etheric body is still outside the physical body, and here we come to realize that the members of human nature, [which today in the waking human being are inwardly linked together], in ancient times have joined together. They certainly have a common origin, but despite the fact that they originate from the unified primal being and the unity they form in man is a remarkable one, [they are multi-faceted]. And if we ascribe to the astral body the ability to transform the physical body, what qualities can we ascribe to the [originally] free etheric body? ... /illegible]

[The further we go back in this respect to the original properties of this body, the better we get to know the mysterious workings in development]; if we can ascribe to the astral body the [shaping and reshaping, the] transformation [and reworking of the physical body], then we must ascribe to the ether body the material creation of the physical body. What is our physical body around us today, how did it come into being? We can visualize this with an image.

[The] humanities scholar [is not able to present everything with [illegible] through images. Today, what is tangible can be presented to everyone with the help of an image, which is something that arouses more associations from a physical-materialistic point of view.

By means of comparison, we can realize how the physical body of man came into being. Today, people believe so easily that what they know as physical contains the origin of the living, but this is again [such a] habit of thought, in truth it is not so. If you [once] deal with the prejudices that today [are said to come from science but do not come from it] ... /gap] If you examine how things are, [and we then only learn the method of how to examine], then you can make clear to yourself by the following comparison how the physical body comes into being.

Take coal, it is a mineral substance today. But long ago it was plants. What is now coal was once present as [graphite-containing] plants [in mighty forests]; the organic has transformed into the inorganic, the plant has become stone, the living has become physical. If you are able to do spiritual scientific research, you can see how all stones were originally living beings. We can investigate and prove that stones, rock crystal, were plants in primeval times, just like stone coal. Just as the mineral part of us originally came to life, so too was the human physical body once separated from the etheric body. As you see today] the many coral animals that build the coral reef, the physical, [you see how they grow out of it], see how the living creatures work this physical reef out of their own body. So in a time of man [ancestor] only this etheric body was present, [the astral body, and the] physical body is out of the etheric body [through a process] like ice from the water; the etheric body is a condensation, in condensed, other form, and there we come back to the original state of humanity.

Where only the etheric body existed, there was no physical human being at all. How did the physical human being begin? There was the astral and the etheric human being, who preceded the [physical] human being. The first physical human being was a small physical inclusion, like when chalk balls split off from [an animal, you see the animal and then a small chalk ball], or [you have] a container of water here: first [a small grain of ice forms], then it increases in size [little by little].

So man's entire physical nature was not there at all. It formed in the first place [as a small, tiny thing] within the spiritual, etheric [and astral], and] what now detached itself from the etheric and astral and back, was doomed, it began to develop in a descending direction, [and became the lowest living creatures]. But what was seized by the forces of the etheric and astral bodies developed higher. [Something detached itself from the animal], step by step, until [the stage was reached where] today's man was present; he left beings everywhere in his wake, as a result of the [developmental] steps he has taken. The simplest being that one sees today, which is said to be the progenitor [of humanity], is only a side branch [of human development].

But man [as a spiritual being], as an astral being, precedes all living beings. He is the firstborn as a spiritual being. [The other beings, the imperfect beings, descend] from him [as a spiritual being], who [from the very beginning] has all the potential for the highest perfection [within himself]. So man was there as a spiritual being before he was there as a physical [being]. [So where do we come from? From the world that man does not see]; man does not see the world in which the astral, etheric bodies are at home. In there is the world from which man really comes. Therefore, what is the highest link in man originally comes from him in a mysterious way, [the astral body, the etheric body and] as the last link, the physical body. Man descends from the Divine-Spiritual, [from the spiritual man descends. Only] then do we consider the appearance and descent of man in the right light, when [we] truly [elevate ourselves to spiritual-scientific contemplation. These spiritual-scientific insights can be explained in detail in the course of winter. What now appears as a program will become clear in its details. That will become clear... The physical is born out of the spiritual. The spiritual is something that permeates everything. This has always been felt above all by those who, through their good disposition and insight, had no materialistic mind and no materialistic habits of thought. From the laws that permeate and resound through the whole world as spiritual, from such laws, man appears to spiritual researchers as originating. Thus spiritual research is based on no other point of view than Goethe's, which we have recognized as a genuine spiritual researcher and which he has expressed in the most diverse forms, including in that wonderful series of poems entitled “God and the World” [is entitled], in which there is a beautiful poem, ‘Orphic Primal Words’, of which today we are particularly interested in the first stanza, because it shows us how Goethe was aware of the facts we have been talking about today. He wants to show us how that which is spiritual in man, which comes from higher laws [than from physical laws, which are explained by external sensory facts], cannot be fragmented by the powers of the temporal, cannot be fragmented by the forces of the sensual. [This is what he wants to express when he] connects an ancient, sacred idea to [his own dismemberment]: I and spiritual people are not bound to the physical laws of the body, which they themselves have produced, built, transformed, they are eternal and unchanging in their essence, in that they transform and remodel that which they themselves [as the ego and astral body] have produced.

As on the day when you were given to the world
the sun stood in greeting of the planets
You are as ever present and eternal
[according to the law by which you came into being].
You must be so, you cannot escape it,
So said the Sibyls and the seers of old.
And no power and no time dismember
The molded form that lives and develops.

In the physical, the etheric, and the astral body dwells the actual I, and together with its sheaths forms the four limbs, the Pythagorean quadrilateral.

The physical body is the oldest, the etheric body the second, the astral body the youngest. The ego is formed in the present. At the beginning of our earth epoch the physical body was not a chaos, but beautifully and harmoniously built in itself, the human being could not do anything to it; from the outside in it was built by the formers, the creating entities. It was the same with the etheric body and also with the astral body. Only with the fourth stage the ego comes and works independently. It has no influence on the etheric and the physical body, but on the astral body. How? There was a time when man had no influence on the astral body, there were only urges, desires, passions. In the later stage of development he took them in hand and regulated them. As soon as the creative powers do not hold the physical body, it disappears in the general physical, likewise the etheric body [in the general world ether]. The creating gods take back these bodies. It is different with the astral body. What man works into it remains and comes back again. That is his karma. Karma or the astral worked is from man himself. What the I works into the astral body is manas. As much manas is in man as he works into his astral body. The astral body is what man has not yet worked out; manas what he has worked out. An outline, organization he works into it, which later becomes the chakrams. When man has worked through the whole astral body, he is completely filled with manas. Then he can begin to work on his etheric body as well. Likewise from within he works into what is called the budhi. Everything that he has in the astral body, he works with into the etheric body, this is his imprint. What man works into the etheric body remains. It remains with him just like his karma. When he dies, his etheric body does not dissolve in the general world ether, but as much as he has worked into it, so much remains. When he is incarnated again, he comes back into the same etheric body. Such a man is a chela.

The ordinary man goes to Devachan and then, when his time comes, he descends through the astral, where he finds his karmic attainments, into the physical. But the chela, who has made his etheric body alive, does not need to go to Devachan, but only to the next realm, the astral, and returns to the earth in his same etheric body.

In the Mysteries the development of the chela is somewhat accelerated. In the ancient Mysteries the physical body was brought into a kind of resting state, which lasted three days. So that everything that the astral body worked into it would not be disturbed by the physical body, the disciple was put into a lethargic state for three days. Today, on the contrary, the astral body is made so strong that it overcomes what works its way up from the physical body. But this is possible only since the appearance of Christ, by the fact that he appeared on the earth and poured out a lot of magnetic power. This is the mystical fact. Paul received the first initiation in this way on the way to Damascus by direct action of the astral.

Man can also get power and authority over his physical body; every blood globule he will be able to direct; then he works Atma into the physical body. In the same form, in the same physical body - not substance - then the master is reborn. He dies and is reborn in the same way in physiognomy. A point occurs, that is the significant thing, where man retains his physical body. It is only on the seventh planet that man receives the form that remains with him for future times. Mastery is therefore a tremendous responsibility and danger.

If we now assume, as we have done above, that the formative forces for the organs of life and the predispositions for the sense organs lie in the lower spiritual world, then a distinction arises for the formative forces of the organs of life prevailing in this world between those that presuppose an internalized substance and those that shape their organs for the absorption of the substance from outside. It is easy to see that the latter are a prerequisite for the former. For if matter itself did not possess the potential to become internalized, it could not become active within itself. Thus, forces must prevail in matter that enable it to evoke counter-effects from what is external to it. The above description has shown that matter can produce such counter-effects in itself. The reversed senses of life, of self-movement and of equilibrium carry within them the hidden possibility of acting in such a way that, in order to produce internal formations, they are active as substance itself, without using the internal formative principles as such. They act, after all, not only within, but also outside their measure. If we now imagine these three inverted sensory activities as being so effective that they do not encounter any internally formed organ, but remain in the character of their effectiveness, then they reach a boundary where they must return into themselves. At this boundary, therefore, the material would throw itself back into itself; it would be inhibited in itself. At this boundary, what could be called materiality in materiality would be given. And this points to the possibility of how the organs that need inner substance arise out of a world in which the material-outer becomes material-inner. In this world, the first rudiments would have to lie both for those organs of the life process that are supplied by internalized substance and for those that need external substance. And the forces that bring the external substance to the interior should already have the potential for this internalization. Just as the forces in the organs of life themselves point to a world of other forces, from which the organs of life are first formed, so the internal flow of matter in the organs of life points to potentialities from an even higher world, from which they are formed. We are led to point to an outer world which, through the contrast between the sense of life, the sense of self-movement and the sense of equilibrium, can spark an inner world within itself. This world, however, can be called the “higher spiritual world”. What would be sought in it? Not forces that shape organs of life in the first place, but those that implant in their structures the potential to become organs of life. These forces, however, are to be thought of as the opposites of the sense of equilibrium, the sense of self-movement and the sense of life. If these forces are stopped before they reach the limit of their effectiveness, through inner formative processes in organs that are already being formed, then they shape the sense organs of hearing, of sound and of concept out of such organ predispositions. What happens when they reach the limit of that activity which lies in their own character? If the sense of life that is turned inwards did not encounter something in the organ of concepts that it only has to reshape, then it would obviously lead the conceptual experience back into itself. And in its reflection, it would immediately encounter itself. It would be the same as in a sensory experience, but it would have an independent existence without an underlying sensory organ. The same could be said for the sense of balance and equilibrium when reversed. In the higher spiritual world, we would thus find sense experiences that are at rest in themselves and which prove to be related to those sense experiences to which the human being in the physical world is closest with his ego, the experiences of the sense of concept, sound and hearing. But those experiences are as if there were not, as it were, a human ego standing before them and taking them in, but as if there were a being behind them that creates them in its own activity.

[ 1 ] In sleep man is given up to the Cosmos. He carries out into the Cosmos that which he possesses as a result of former lives on Earth, when he descends from the world of soul-and-spirit into the earthly world. During his waking life he withdraws this content of his human being from the Cosmos.

[ 2 ] In this rhythmic giving-himself-up to the Cosmos and withdrawing from it, man's life between birth and death takes its course.

[ 3 ] While he withdraws it from the Cosmos, the soul-spiritual being of man is at the same time received by the system of nerves and senses. With the physical and life-processes that take place in the nerves-and-senses system, the soul-and-spirit of man combines in waking life, so that they work together unitedly. In this united action, sense-perception, the forming of memory-pictures and the play of fancy are contained. All these activities are bound to the physical body. The conceptions, the thinking experience—in which man becomes conscious of what is taking place half-consciously in perception, fancy and memory—are bound to the thinking system.

[ 4 ] In this thinking Organisation properly speaking, there also lies the region by which man experiences his self-consciousness. The thinking Organisation is an Organisation of the stars. If it lived and expressed itself as such alone, man would bear within him not a consciousness of self but a consciousness of the Gods. The thinking Organisation is, however, lifted out of the Cosmos of the stars and transplanted into the realm of earthly processes. Man becomes a self-conscious being in that he experiences the world of stars within the earthly realm.

[ 5 ] Here, therefore, we have the region of the inner life of man where the Divine-Spiritual world, united with the human being, sets him free in order that he may become Man in the fullest sense.

[ 6 ] But directly beneath the thinking organisation—namely, where sense-perception, the play of fancy and the forming of memory, take place—the Divine-Spiritual world lives on within the life of man. We may say: it is in the unfolding of memory that the Divine-Spiritual lives in the waking state of man. For the other two activities, sense-perception and the play of fancy, are only modifications of the process that goes on in the forming of memory-pictures. In sense-perception we have the forming of a memory-content at the moment of its origin; in the content of fancy there lights up in the soul that of the content of memory which is preserved within the soul's existence.

[ 7 ] Sleep carries over the soul-spiritual being of man into the cosmic world. With the activity of his astral body and his Ego, the sleeping man is steeped in the Divine-Spiritual Cosmos. He is not only outside the physical but outside the world of stars. But he is within the Divine-Spiritual Beings in whom his own existence has its origin.

[ 8 ] In the present moment of cosmic evolution these Divine Spiritual Beings work in such a way as to impress the moral content of the Universe into the astral body and Ego of man during sleep. All the World-processes in sleeping man are really moral processes, and cannot be spoken of as even remotely like the activities of Nature.

[ 9 ] In their after-effects, man carries these processes over from sleeping into waking. But the after-effects remain asleep. For man is awake in that part of his life only which inclines to the sphere of Thought. What actually takes place in his sphere of Will is wrapped in darkness even in the waking state, as the whole life of the soul is wrapped in darkness during sleep. But in this sleeping life of the Will, the Divine-Spiritual works on in the waking life of man. Morally, man is as good or as bad as he can be according to the nearness with which he approaches the Divine-Spiritual Beings when asleep. And he comes nearer to them, or remains farther away from them, according to the moral quality of his former lives on Earth.

[ 10 ] From the depths of the waking being of the soul's existence, that which was able to implant itself in the soul's existence, in community with the Divine-Spiritual world during sleep, sounds forth. This is the voice of conscience.

[ 11 ] We see how the very things which a materialistic view of the world is most inclined to explain merely from the natural side, are found to lie on the moral side of things when seen by spiritual knowledge.

[ 12 ] In Memory the Divine-Spiritual being works directly within the waking man. In Conscience the same Divine-Spiritual being works in the waking man indirectly—as an after-effect.

[ 13 ] The forming of memory takes place in the Organisation of nerves and senses. The forming of conscience takes place—albeit as a pure process of soul and spirit—in the metabolic and limbs-system.

[ 14 ] Between the two there lies the rhythmic Organisation, whose activity is polarised in two directions. In the breathing rhythm it is in intimate relation to sense-perception and to thought. In the breathing of the lung the process is at its coarsest. Thence it grows finer and finer, till, as a highly refined breathing process, it becomes sense-perception and thought.

Sense-perception is still very near to breathing; it is only a breathing through the sense-organs, not through the lungs. Thought, ideation, is farther removed from the lung-breathing, and is upheld by the Thinking system of man. And that which reveals itself in the play of fancy is already very close to the rhythm of blood-circulation. It is a very inward breathing, that comes into connection with the system of metabolism and the limbs. Psychologically, too, the activity of fancy reaches down into the sphere of Will, just as the circulatory system reaches down into the system of metabolism and the limbs.

[ 15 ] In the activity of fancy, the thinking system comes close up to the system of the Will. [ 16 ] The human being dives down into that sphere of his waking life which is asleep—the sphere of Will. Hence, in human beings who are especially developed in this direction, the contents of the soul appear like dreams in the waking state. Such a human Organisation was present in Goethe. Goethe once said that Schiller must interpret to him his own poetic dreams.

[ 17 ] In Schiller himself, a different human system was at work. He lived on the strength of what he brought with him from former lives on Earth. He had a strong life of the Will, and had to seek actively for the corresponding wealth of fancy.

[ 18 ] The Ahrimanic Power, in its world-intentions, counts upon those human beings who are especially developed in the sphere of fancy—whose perception of sense-reality quite naturally transforms into the pictures of fancy. With the help of such human beings, the Ahrimanic Power hopes to be able to cut off the evolution of mankind from the past, and carry it on in the direction of its own, Ahrimanic intentions.

[ 19 ] The Luciferic Power reckons on those human beings who, while naturally more developed in the sphere of Will, are inspired by an inner love for the ideal world-conception to transform their vision of sense-reality actively into pictures of creative fancy. Through such human beings the Luciferic Power would like to keep human evolution entirely within the impulses of the past. It would thus be able to preserve mankind from diving down into the sphere where the Ahrimanic Power must be overcome.

[ 20 ] In this our earthly existence, we stand between two opposite poles. Above us spread the stars. From thence there radiate the forces which are connected with all things calculable and regular in Earth-existence. The regular alternation of day and night, the seasons, the longer cosmic periods, are the earthly reflection of the real process in the stars.

[ 21 ] The other pole radiates out from the interior of the Earth. Irregular activities are at work in it. Wind and weather, thunder and lightning, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, are a reflection of this process of the inner Earth.

[ 22 ] Man himself is an image of this existence of the Stars and Earth. In his Thinking system lives the order of the Stars; in the Willing system of his limbs the chaos of the Earth. In the Rhythmic system he experiences in consciousness his own earthly being, in free balance and interplay between the two.

(March, 1925)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (with regard to the foregoing study on Memory and Conscience)

[ 23 ] 174. Man is organised in spirit and in body from two different sides. First, from the physical-etheric Cosmos. Whatever radiates from the Divine-Spiritual Being into this organisation in man's nature, lives in it as the force of sense-perception, of the faculty of memory and of the play of fancy.

[ 24 ] 175. Secondly, man is organised out of his own past lives on Earth. This Organisation is purely of the soul and spirit, and lives in him through the astral body and the Ego. Whatever enters of the life of Divine-Spiritual Beings into this human nature—its influence lights up in a man as the voice of conscience and all that is akin to this.

[ 25 ] 176. In his rhythmic Organisation man has the constant union of the Divine-Spiritual impulses from the two sides. In life and experience of rhythm the force of memory is carried into the Willing life, and the might of conscience into the life in Ideas.