The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Before we come to the question of human karma, a number of preliminary considerations are necessary. Yesterday we gave a kind of description of the conception of karma, and to-day we shall have to say something about karma and the animal kingdom.

What might be called external evidence of the reality of karmic law will be found in the course of these lectures in places where there will be occasion specially to point out this external evidence. On these occasions also we can acquire the ability to speak about the foundations of the idea of karma to those outside who may raise questions about one thing or another, or who may question the whole idea of karma. But for all this a few preliminary observations are necessary.

What is more natural than to ask how animal life and animal fate are related to what we call the course of human karma? In this we shall find included what are, to mankind, the most important and profound questions of destiny.

The relation of man on the earth to the animal kingdom differs with the various epochs and also with the various peoples. It is certainly not without interest to see that in the case of the peoples who have preserved the best parts of the ancient sacred wisdom of humanity there is a deeply sympathetic and loving treatment of animals. For example, in the Buddhistic world which has preserved important parts of the old conceptions of the world held by mankind in ancient times, we find a very sympathetic treatment of animals, a treatment and a feeling towards the animal kingdom which many people in Europe cannot understand.

You will find it among other peoples too, especially where a nation has preserved some of the old conceptions which came to them as heirlooms in one place or another, you will find a kind of friendship, something approaching a human treatment of animals. An instance is the Arab and his treatment of his horse. On the other hand one may say that in those countries in which there is being prepared the future conception of the world, that is, in the west, there is little understanding of such sympathy with the animal kingdom. It is characteristic too that in the Middle Ages and on into our own times, precisely in those countries where Christianity has spread, the idea has arisen that animals cannot be considered as beings having their own special soul life, but rather as something like automata. It has also been pointed out, perhaps not unjustly, although not always with great understanding, that the idea often advanced by western philosophy that the animals are automata and do not really possess a soul, may have been taken up by the common people who have no sympathy for the animals and often know no bounds in their cruel treatment of them. Indeed, the matter has gone so far that the thoughts of a great philosopher of modern times, Descartes, regarding the animal kingdom, have been thoroughly misunderstood.

Of course, we must clearly understand that the idea of animals as mere automata has never been put forward by the really eminent souls of recent culture, neither did Descartes hold this view, although in many books on philosophy you may read that he did so. It is true he does not ascribe to the animals a soul which is able to develop to where it can prove, for instance, the existence of God out of its own self-consciousness; nevertheless he does say that the animal is permeated and animated by the so-called Spirits of Life, which, though they do not present such a complete individuality as the Ego of man, do nevertheless work as soul in the animal organisation. It is indeed characteristic that one should have been able to misunderstand Descartes so completely, for this shows us that in past centuries there has been the tendency in our western development to ascribe to the animal something merely automatic. We should not have misunderstood this had we gone to work conscientiously, but we have read it into Descartes. It is the peculiarity of western civilisation that it had to be developed out of the elements of materialism; one may even say that the dawn of Christianity took place in such a way that this important impulse in human evolution was first exercised in a materialistic western spirit. The materialism of modern times is only a consequence of this materialistic conception of Christianity, the most spiritual religion in the west. It is the fate of the peoples of the west—if we may say so—that they have to work up from materialistic foundations, and in the conquering of these materialistic views and tendencies they will develop the forces which will lead to the highest spiritual life. It is a consequence of this destiny, this karma, that the peoples of the West have a tendency to consider the animals only as automata. He who cannot penetrate into the working of spiritual life and can only judge by what surrounds him in the external world of the senses would, from the impressions of that world, easily arrive at an idea about the animal kingdom which places the animals at the lowest scale. On the other hand, conceptions of the world which contain elements of the primordial spiritual truths, the ancient wisdom of humanity, preserved a kind of knowledge of what exists spiritually in the animal kingdom; and in spite of all this misunderstanding, in spite of all that has crept into their views of the world and destroyed their purity, they have not been able to forget that spiritual activities and spiritual laws are active in the life and development of the animal kingdom. Thus, if, on the one hand, because of our lack of spiritual conceptions we are compelled to admit ignorance concerning the animal soul nature, we must not on the other hand deceive ourselves by applying directly to the animal kingdom that idea of karma which helps to understand human fate and human karma; for this would be the result of a purely materialistic conception This must not be done.

We have already pointed out that it is necessary to consider the idea of karma with exactitude, and we should go astray if we sought in the animal kingdom for instances of the recoil of an action on the being from which the cause has proceeded. Now we can only comprehend the vast ramifications of karmic law if we go beyond a single human life between birth and death, and follow man through his consecutive reincarnations; then we shall find that the recoil of a cause which we have set in motion in one life can only come into action in a later one. The regular law of karma stretches from life to life, and the effects of causes need not operate—indeed, when we consider karma on the whole, quite certainly do not operate—in the same life between birth and death.

Now from the more elementary teaching of Spiritual Science we already know that in the case of animals we cannot speak of a reincarnation such as takes place with man. In the animal kingdom we find nothing resembling that human individuality which is preserved when a person passes through the gate of death and lives a particular life in the spiritual world during the period from death to re-birth in order then to enter existence again by a new birth. We cannot conceive of animal death in the same way as we conceive of human death, for all that we describe as the fate of the human individuality after a person has passed through the gate of death is not the same in the animal kingdom. And if we were to believe that in an individual animal which we have before us we could look for the reincarnated being of an animal which had previously existed on the earth—as we can do in the case of man—we should be entirely wrong. At the present time, when one is inclined to consider all one finds in the world solely from its external side and not from the inner, the great contrasts and most important differences between man and animal remain unperceived. From a purely materialistic point of view the outward phenomenon of death seems to be the same in man as in the animal. So one may easily believe, when observing the life of an animal between its birth and death, that the several phenomena in the individual life of the animal are comparable with those in the personal life of a man between birth and death. But this would be quite wrong. Therefore to begin with we should show by individual examples the essential differences between animal and man.

These differences between man and animal can only be apprehended by one who makes use of the facts which are revealed to him both by his external senses and by his speculative thought. We find a phenomenon to which attention is also drawn by natural investigators but of which those of the present day can make nothing, namely, the phenomenon that man has really to learn the simplest things. In the course of his history man has had to learn the use of the most primitive instruments, and our children have still to learn the simplest things, and have to spend a certain time in order to learn them. Man has to make efforts to produce even the simplest things, or to manufacture his instruments and tools. When, on the other hand, we observe the animals we are obliged to admit how much easier it is for them in this respect. Think how the beaver builds its complicated dwelling. It does not need to learn; it knows how to do it, because it brings the knowledge with it as an indwelling law, just as we human beings bring with us the power of changing our teeth at about seven years of age. No one needs to learn that. In the same way, such animals as the beavers bring with them the capability to build their houses. If you observe the animal kingdom you will find that the animals bring with them definite capacities by which they can achieve things which human art, great as it is, is far from achieving.

The question may now arise: How does it come about that when a human being is born he is more incapable than, for example, a hen, or a beaver; and that he has first, with much pains, to acquire what these creatures already bring with them? For it is much more important for our world-conception that we should be able to put the right question than that we should acquire masses of knowledge. Facts may be right, but they need not always be essential to our conception of the world. Now, although we shall today go into the causes of these phenomena from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, it would carry us too far if we were to show in detail why this is so. But we may, to begin with, refer to it in a few words.

If with the aid of Spiritual Science we go back into human evolution in the primeval past we shall find that the forces which are at the disposal of the beaver or of any other animal, in order that they should bring such artistic powers into the world, were at one time at the disposal of man. It is not that man in a primordial past missed this endowment of capabilities while the animals took them all to themselves; he also received these powers, indeed in a far greater degree than the animals. For although the latter bring a certain great artistic skill into the world with them, this is, however, limited in extent. Fundamentally at birth man can do nothing at all, and he has first to learn everything which concerns the outer world. This is somewhat strongly expressed, but you will understand what I mean. Now, when a man learns, it is soon shown that he can become many-sided, and that as regards the development of certain artistic capacities, etc., this can be far richer than that of an animal. So man originally brought with him more abundant powers, which he does not bring today. The peculiar phenomenon comes to life, that originally man and animal were similarly endowed; and if we were to go back to the old Saturn evolution, we should find that there was absolutely no difference between human and animal development. All these capabilities were common to both. What then has happened in the meantime that the animal now brings with it into existence all sorts of capacities, while man is really a clumsy being when he comes into the world? How has man behaved in the meantime that he now no longer possesses all he once brought with him? Has he foolishly wasted it in the course of evolution, while the animals have preserved it like thrifty house-keepers? These are questions that may be raised on the basis of actual facts.

Man has not wasted these powers which to-day the animal manifests as external capacities; he has only transformed them, but into something which differs from what the animals possess. They have applied them to external works; beavers build their homes and wasps their nests, but man has transformed and incorporated within himself the same forces which the animals manifest outwardly, and by this means he has brought into being what we call his higher human organisation. In order that man should be able to walk upright, in order that he should have a more perfect brain, and, in general, a more perfect inner organisation, certain forces were necessary, and these are the same forces with which the beaver constructs his dwelling. The beaver builds his home, but man has turned the forces inwards upon himself, to his brain, etc., and so he has nothing left over with which to work outwardly. So if we, at the present time move among the animals with a more perfect constitution, it is due to the fact that we have applied inwardly all the forces that the beaver expends in an outward way. We have our beaver-building within us, and therefore we are no longer able to manifest these forces outwardly in the same way. When we take a comprehensive view of the world, we understand the origin of the various capacities which exist in creation, and how they appear to us to-day.

Why had man to turn towards an inner organisation the special forces which we see manifested in the external achievements of animals? Because only by acquiring this inner organisation could man become the vehicle of what at the present day is the Ego which progresses from incarnation to incarnation. No other organisation could have become this bearer of the Ego, because it depends altogether upon the external shrine whether an Ego individuality is able to be active in the earthly existence or not. It could not do so if the external organisation were not suited to the Ego-individuality. Everything contributed to making this organisation thus suitable, and to this end a particular arrangement had to be made, the essentials of which we already know.

We know that the Moon evolution preceded the Earth evolution. Before that again was the Sun evolution which was preceded by a Saturn evolution. When the ancient Moon evolution came to an end, man was at a stage of development—as regards his external life—which may be described as animal-humanity. At that time this external human organisation had not progressed far enough for it to become the vehicle of an Ego-individuality. It was the Earth evolution of man which had the task of embodying the Ego in this organisation. But this could only come about by regulating our Earth evolution in a very special way. When the old Moon development came to an end, everything dissolved, so to speak, into chaos. Up to a certain time of cosmic dawn, the new cosmos of our Earth evolution came forth. In it was contained everything which, as our solar system, is connected with us and the Earth. From this whole, from this cosmic unity there split off all the other planetary bodies belonging to our special Earth existence. We need not go into the manner in which the other planets, Jupiter, Mars, etc., split off. We have only to point out that at a certain period in our Earth-phase of evolution, our Earth and our Sun separated. While the Sun had already separated and was sending down its activities to the Earth from outside, our Earth was still united with the present Moon, so that the substances and spiritual forces which at the present day belong to the Moon, at that time were still united with the Earth.

Now we have often touched upon the question as to what would have happened if the Sun had not split away from the Earth, and passed over into that condition in which it works on the Earth from outside as it does now. In the beginning when the Earth was still united to the Sun, the conditions were quite different and the whole cosmic system included the ancestors of the human organisation making one unity. It is absurd to look at modern conditions and say: ‘What nonsense those Anthroposophists talk! If that had been so, all beings would have been burnt up!’ But these beings were so organised that at that time they could exist under conditions quite different from those of this epoch. Now if the Sun had remained in union with the Earth, forces very different and much more violent would have remained with the Earth; and the consequence would have been that the whole evolution of the Earth would have progressed with such violence and speed that it would have been impossible for the human organisation to develop as it should. Therefore it was necessary that the Earth should be given a slower tempo, and denser forces placed at its disposal. This could only be brought about by the withdrawal of the violent and stormy forces from the Earth. The forces of the Sun worked less violently when acting from outside after withdrawal from the Earth. Through this, however, something else took place. The Earth was now in a condition in which mankind could again not progress in the right way. The state of the Earth was now too dense, and it exercised a drying and petrifying action on all life. If conditions had remained so, man would have again been unable to develop. This was remedied by a special arrangement. Some time after the exit of the Sun the present Moon left the Earth, and took away the retarding forces which would have brought all life to a slow death. Thus the Earth remained behind between Sun and Moon, selecting exactly the right tempo for the human organisation, and enabling it to take up an Ego, and to be the bearer of the individuality which goes on from incarnation to incarnation. The human organisation as it exists to-day was produced from the cosmos under no other conditions than through this process—first the separation of the Sun and then that of the Moon.

Someone might perhaps say: ‘If I had been the Almighty I would have done it differently; I would very soon have produced such a combination that the human organisation would have been able to progress in the manner it had to progress! Why was it necessary that the Sun had first to go out and then after a time the Moon?’

The person who thinks in this way thinks much too abstractly. He does not reflect that when in the universal order so complex a thing as the human organisation is to be produced, a special arrangement is necessary for each single part. One cannot convert into reality what human thought invents and imagines. Abstractly one can think anything, but in true Spiritual Science one has to learn to think concretely so that one says: The human organisation is not a simple thing; it consists of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. These three parts had first to be brought into a particular equilibrium, so that the several parts should be correctly related to one another. This could only take place through this threefold process: First, the formation of the unitary cosmos—the entire cosmic unity of Earth, Sun and Moon together. Then something had to be done that would work in a retarding way on the human etheric body which would otherwise have consumed all evolution too fiercely—this was accomplished by the withdrawal of the Sun. Then again the Moon had to be withdrawn, because otherwise through the astral body the human organisation would have died. These three processes had to take place because of man's threefold organisation.

Thus we see that man owes his existence and his present qualities to a complicated arrangement in the cosmos. But we also know that the evolutions of all the kingdoms of nature do not by any means proceed at the same rate as the general evolution. From various lectures given in preceding years, we know that on each of the planetary incarnations of the earth, certain beings have always remained behind the general evolution. Then, as evolution proceeds they live in conditions which do not fully correspond to this evolution. We also know that fundamentally all evolution can only proceed in the right way through the remaining behind of these entities. During the old Moon evolution certain beings remained behind as the luciferic beings, and through them much that is evil has resulted; but to them we also owe what makes human existence possible, namely, the possibility of freedom, of the free development of our inner being. Indeed, we may say that in a certain sense the remaining behind of the luciferic beings was a sacrifice. They remained behind so that during the Earth existence they could exercise certain activities; they could bestow on man the qualities which pertain to his dignity and the ordaining of his destiny. We must accustom ourselves to entirely different ideas from those which are customary; for according to the usual ideas one might perhaps say that the luciferic spirits failed to progress and had to remain behind; and we could not excuse their negligence. But it was not a question of the negligence of the luciferic beings; in a certain sense their remaining behind was a sacrifice, in order that they might be able to work on our earthly humanity through what they acquired by this sacrifice.

From the last lecture you already know that not only beings but also substances remained behind and preserved laws which in previous planetary conditions were the right ones, and then carried those laws into the later evolution. Thus phases of evolution belonging to ancient times mingle and interpenetrate with those of modern times. And it is this which brings about such great complexities in life, which offers us degrees of existence [that are] the most diverse. The animal kingdom could never have developed alongside the human kingdom to-day if certain beings had not remained behind at the end of the Saturn period in order, while mankind on the Sun was already developing a stage higher, to form a second kingdom and come forward as the first ancestors of our present animal kingdom. Thus this remaining behind was absolutely necessary as a base for later formations.

Now a comparison may explain why beings and substances had to remain behind. The development of man had to progress by degrees, and it could only do this in the same degree to which man refined himself. Had he always worked with the same forces with which he had worked during the Saturn phase, he would not have progressed, but would have remained behind. For this reason he had to refine his forces. As an illustration, let us suppose we have a glass of water in which some substance is dissolved. Everything in this glass from top to bottom will be of the same colour, the same density, etc. Now let us suppose that the grosser substances settle to the bottom; then the purer water and the finer substances remain above. The water could only be refined by separation of the grosser parts. Something like this was also necessary after the Saturn evolution had run its course, so that such a sediment appeared, and the whole of humanity separated from something, retaining all the finer parts. That which was left formed later the animal kingdom. By means of this separation man was able to refine himself, and rise a stage higher. At each step certain beings have to be separated, in order that man may rise higher and higher.

Thus we have a humanity which has only become possible through man's freeing himself from the beings which live around him in the lower kingdoms. At one time we were bound up with these beings, with all their forces, in the stress of evolution like the denser constituents in the water. We have uplifted ourselves from them and in this way our development has been made possible. Thus we look down upon the three kingdoms of nature around us, and see in them something which had to become a basis for our development. These beings have sunk in order that we might be able to rise. In this manner we look upon the subordinate kingdoms of nature from the proper aspect.

The study of the Earth development will help us to understand the details of this process still more clearly. We must quite understand that all the facts in our earthly development have certain relationships and connections. We have seen that the separation of the Sun and Moon from the Earth really came about in order that during the Earth evolution the human organisation might be able to develop to the extent of becoming an individuality; and in conjunction with this the human organisation was made pure. But through this separation in the universe for man's sake, through this great change in our solar system, the other three kingdoms of nature were also affected—especially the animal kingdom. If we wish to understand the influence exercised upon the animal kingdom through the processes of the separation of the Sun and Moon, this is what we arrive at as a result of spiritual investigation:—

Man was at a certain stage of evolution when the Sun separated. Now had he been obliged to keep to this stage at which he was during the period when the Moon was still united to the Earth, he would not have been able to attain his present organisation; he would have been confronted with a certain wasting and drying up. The Moon forces had first to go out. The possibility of this human organisation we owe only to the circumstance that during the period when the Moon was still part of the Earth, man had preserved an organisation which could still be pliable; for it might have been possible for his organisation to become so set that the exit of the Moon could no longer be of any use. Only the ancestors of humanity were at that pliable stage at which the organisation was still possible. Therefore the Moon had to separate at a particular time. Now what took place up to the time of the exit of the Moon?

The human organisation became grosser and grosser. Man did not, indeed, look like wood—that would be too gross a conception. The organisation at that time in spite of its grossness was still much finer than is our present organisation; but for that period between the exit of the Sun and that of the Moon, the organisation of man was so gross that the more spiritual part of him, which in a certain sense lived alternately within and without the physical body came at length to the crisis that when it wanted to re-enter its physical body it found this so dense, owing to events that had taken place on the earth that it could no longer enter into it as its dwelling. Hence it also came about that the spiritual and soul part of many of our human ancestors departed altogether from the earth, and for a certain time took refuge on other planets belonging to our solar system. Only a small number of the physical bodies could be used and maintain themselves over this time. As I have said, by far the greater number of human souls went out into space, but the onward stream of human evolution was maintained by a small number of those who were more robust and who were able to struggle and conquer. These robust souls carried the evolution over the critical period.

During the whole of this process the human individuality was still not evolved. There was still more of the character of the species soul, and when some souls withdrew they went into the soul groups.

Then came the exit of the Moon which made it possible for the human organisation to be further refined. It could then take up the souls which had previously soared away, and these souls gradually—up to and during the Atlantean Epoch—came down again and entered into the human bodies below. But certain organisms had reproduced themselves during this critical time and they could not become the vehicles of the human soul as they were too gross. Through this it came about that side by side with those organisations which were able to be refined and to become the vehicles of human individuality there had also been propagated organisms which could not, and these were the successors of the organisms which had been abandoned by the human soul during the time when the Sun had already withdrawn and the Moon was still united with the earth.

Thus side by side with man we see a kingdom of organisms actually developing, which, by preserving the Moon character had become incapable of being the vehicles of human individuality.

These organisms are essentially those which have become our present animal kingdom. It may seem curious that the grosser organisms of the present animals have certain capacities whereby they are able to act wisely, as is instanced in the work of the beaver, etc.; but this can be fully explained if we do not think too superficially. It is precisely the organisation of these beings which have not been entered into by human souls, which has developed the external arrangements of the animal structure—a nervous system, etc., that has made it possible for them to place themselves entirely in harmony with the laws of the Earth existence. For those beings which did not evolve the capacity for taking up human souls, remained united with the earth the whole time. The other organisations which later refined themselves, so that they could take in human individualities, certainly were also with them on the earth, but because they had to undergo certain changes later on when the Moon was outside, they lost these capacities, or rather transmuted them in refining themselves, and in having to go through other changes.

Thus we notice that when the Moon had separated, there were upon the earth certain organisations which had simply reproduced in themselves the old conditions such as existed when the Moon was formerly united with the Earth. These organisations had remained gross, had preserved the laws which they had before, and had become so set that when the Moon detached itself, no change took place in them. They simply propagated themselves rigidly further. The other organisations which were to become the vehicles of human individualities could not perpetuate themselves rigidly as the grosser organisations did. They had to change themselves in such a way that those beings which meanwhile had not been united with the Earth, and must now return to it, could now work into them. Here we have the difference between the beings which have preserved the old rigid Moon character and those which have changed themselves. Now, in what did the change consist?

When those souls which had gone away from the earth returned, and once more took possession of bodies, they began to make alterations in the nervous system, the brain, etc. They applied their forces, as it were, to inward construction. There could be no change now in the other beings which had hardened. Different beings now took possession of these latter organisms, beings which had remained behind at a previous stage and which were not sufficiently evolved to operate on the organism from within. They worked rather from the outside as the Group-Souls of the animals. Thus the human soul came into possession of the organisations which were suited to them after the exit of the Moon, and these beings then worked up the organisation into what led to a perfect human structure. Those organisations which remained rigid during the Moon period could no longer be changed, certain souls then took possession of these, such souls as had not on the whole developed far enough to set to work in an individuality, but had remained behind at the Moon stage, developing as far as was then possible. They therefore now took possession of these lower organisations as ‘Group-Souls.’

Thus the difference between man and animal is explained by cosmic events. Through cosmic processes in the Earth's evolution two kinds of organisations have been produced. Had we been obliged to remain with a structure such as that of the beings immediately below mankind we should now be obliged to hover around the earth because our organisation would have been too rigid. We could not, therefore, have come down into them, and although we had become more perfect beings, we should have had to remain where the organisation of the group-souls of the animals are. As, however, our organisations were able to refine themselves, we could enter into them and use them as our dwelling place; that is we could descend into bodily incarnations. The group-souls did not need to do this; they act on these beings from the spiritual world.

Thus in the animal kingdom surrounding us we see something that we also should have been to-day, if our present organisation had not been transformed. Let us now ask how the animals with their more rigid organisations have appeared on the earth. They came down through us. They are the descendants of the bodies which we no longer wished to occupy after the exit of the Moon. We left those bodies behind in order to find others later and we should not have been able to find others later, if we had not forsaken those at that precise time. For only after the exit of the Sun could we continue our progress on the Earth. We left behind us as it were, certain beings, in order that we ourselves might find the possibility of rising higher. In order to rise higher we had to go to other planets and leave the bodies below to go to ruin, and in a certain sense we owe what we are to what remains below. Indeed, what we owe may be described still more minutely. We may ask how it was possible for us to leave the Earth during the critical period, for a being cannot go just where it likes.

During the Earth evolution there came for the first time something we owe to the luciferic spirits. They were our leaders and took us away from the Earth evolution at the critical period. It was as though they said to us: ‘Down below a critical time is now coming and you must leave the Earth.’ We left the Earth under the guidance of the Lucifer spirits, the same beings who brought into our astral body of that time the luciferic principle, the tendency in us to all that we call the possibility of evil; but with it also at the same time came the possibility of freedom. Had they not taken us away from the Earth at that time we should always have been chained to the form that we had then created, and we should now, at the most, only be able to float above that form without ever being able to enter. So they took us away and united their own being with our being.

If we bear this in mind we shall understand that during the time we went away we took in the luciferic influences. Those other organisations which did not share in this destiny whereby we were led to certain regions of the world, remained down below without the luciferic influence. They had to share our earthly fate, but they could not share our heavenly fate. And when we came back to the earth we had the luciferic influence in us—but those other beings had not. Thereby it became possible for us to lead a life in a physical body and yet a life independent of it, so that we might become more and more independent of the physical body. But these other beings which had not the luciferic influence represent what our astral bodies were in the interval between the exit of the Sun and that of the Moon, namely that from which we liberated ourselves. We look upon the animals and say: ‘All that the animals manifest in the way of cruelty, voracity, and all animal vices, besides the skill which they have we should have had within us, if we had not been able to eject them. We owe this liberation of our astral bodies to the circumstance that all the grosser astral bodies have remained behind in the animal kingdom and the earth.’ We may, indeed, say that it is well for us that we no longer have the cruelty of the lion, the slyness of the fox, etc., but that these are withdrawn from us and lead an independent existence outside us.

Thus the animals have the astral body in common with us, and are therefore able to feel pain. But from what has now been said we see that they do not possess the power to evolve through pain and through the conquest of pain, for they have no individuality. The animals are on this account much more to be pitied than us. We have to bear pain, but each pain is for us a means to perfection; through overcoming it we rise higher. We have left behind us the animal as something that already has the capacity to feel pain but does not yet possess the power to raise itself above pain, and to triumph by means of it. That is the fate of the animals. They manifest to us our own former organisation when we were capable of feeling pain, but could not yet, through overcoming the pain, transform it into something beneficial for humanity. Thus in the course of our earthly evolution we have left off our worst to the animals, and they stand around us as tokens of how we ourselves came to our perfection. We should not have got rid of the dregs if we had not left the animals behind. We must learn to consider such facts, not as theories, but rather with a cosmic world feeling. When we look upon the animals we should feel: ‘You animals are outside. When you suffer, you suffer something of which we reap the benefit. We men, however, have the power to overcome suffering while you must endure it. Having received suffering we have passed it on to you, and are taking to ourselves the power to overcome it.’

If we develop this cosmic feeling out of the theory, we then experience a great and all-embracing feeling of sympathy for the animal kingdom. Hence when this universal feeling sprang from the primeval wisdom of humanity, when mankind still possessed the remembrance of the original knowledge which told each one by a dim clairvoyant vision how things once were, there was preserved with it sympathy for the animal kingdom also, and this to a high degree. This sympathy will come again when people accustom themselves to take up Spiritual Science, and when they again see how the karma of humanity is bound up with the world karma. In the so-called dark ages when materialistic thought held sway, one could not have the right perception of this connection. At that time one observed only what was side by side in space, without taking into consideration the fact that whatever is side by side in space has a common origin, and has only separated in the course of evolution. It was natural that one should cease to feel the connection between man and animal; and in those parts of the earth where it has been the mission to hide the spiritual knowledge of this connection, replacing it by a consciousness concerning itself only with outward physical space, man has paid in a strange fashion his debt to the animals. He has eaten them.

These things show us how world conceptions are connected with the human world of perception and feeling. The latter are the consequences of the former and as the conceptions and ideas change, the perceptions and feelings of humanity also change. Man could not do otherwise than evolve. It is due to this that he had to push other beings into the abyss so that he could rise higher himself. He could not give them an individuality which compensates karmically for what the animals have to suffer; he could only give them pain, without being able to give them the karmic compensation. But what he could not give them before, he will give them when he has come to the freedom and selflessness of his individuality. Then he will consciously apprehend the karmic law in this realm and will say ‘It is to the animals that I owe what I have now become. As the animals have fallen from an individual existence to a shadow existence I cannot repay to them what they have sacrificed for me, but I must make this good, so far as is possible, by the treatment I extend to them.’ Therefore with the progress of evolution there will come again through the consciousness of karma a better relationship between man and the animal kingdom than there is now, especially in the west. There will come a treatment of the animals whereby man will again uplift those he has pushed down.

Thus we see that there is a certain relationship, between karma and the animal kingdom, although we cannot, if we wish to avoid the confusion of thought, compare what the animal experiences as its fate, with human karma. But if we consider the whole Earth development, we shall see that we can indeed speak of a relation between the karma of humanity and the animal kingdom.

To speak from the point of view of Anthroposophy today still means, quite understandably, to have great opposition, for Anthroposophy wants to speak about things of life and reality in a way that seems to many in our time to be something quite outlandish. And in particular, when a subject is discussed, such as the one that has been chosen for this evening, the immortality of the soul, then very powerful voices immediately rise up from the more scientifically educated circles of our time, who believe that such things cannot be discussed at all from the point of view of knowledge, because these things must be left to the beliefs, the revelations of human feeling, which is not based on direct knowledge, and because in relation to them man has insurmountable limits to his knowledge.

Now, however, anthroposophy assumes that it can speak about precisely such things of life in the same way that today, with strict methods and with a discipline that is aware of its responsibility, it speaks from the point of view of the natural sciences. It is only a question of anthroposophy having to address itself to forces of knowledge which are certainly present in ordinary life and in ordinary science, but which are present only for the starting points of their development, not for the further steps. And these further steps must be taken in order to penetrate the spiritual realms of life precisely from the point of view of real knowledge, not from that of nebulous mysticism. The starting point must be what I would call a union of intellectual modesty on the one hand and absolute trust in the perfection of the human powers of cognition on the other. By seeking to unite these two soul impulses, anthroposophy is able to explore the so-called supersensible realm with the same certainty as the senses and the natural sciences are used today to penetrate the realm of the sense world, of physical existence, with such great success and certainty.

What should be called intellectual modesty in this context? We know that within our soul life we have started from the childlike state of soul. We can very well compare this childlike state of soul with dreaming, even in a certain respect with sleep. And just as we awaken every morning from ordinary sleep, so we have awakened from our childlike state of soul to that which is our capacity for knowledge for science and for the purposes of practical life. If we now take the standpoint of intellectual modesty, we say to ourselves: Those powers which you had then as a small child, you have perfected through education and through the influence of life and your surroundings, and you have developed to that point of view from which you today gain your knowledge and your impulses for human life. This is not said with full intensity without intellectual modesty. Rather, one says: From the point of view that I have once acquired, I must be able to say yes and no to all sorts of things, if only I apply the correct methods that are common today. I must also be able to decide what is recognizable and what is to be relegated to the realm of mere belief. -- Anthroposophy counters this by asserting that it is perhaps possible to go beyond the powers of the soul that one has acquired as an adult, just as one can go beyond the cognitive abilities of the dreamy soul of a small child. Of course, it depends entirely on whether such a progression really succeeds, and I would like to speak to you this evening about this progression with reference to the field of soul immortality.

On the other hand, however, anthroposophy has full and intense confidence that the powers of cognition attained by each person can be perfected more and more. Thus it ventures on such a path of perfection, and it begins by saying something like the following: Today we have achieved a certain concept of knowledge through the great successes of the natural sciences. But has this concept of knowledge really been taken out of the full depths of life? It is certainly justified for everything that we strive for in its field. But is it taken out of the full depths of life by considering precisely those questions of human existence that are connected firstly with the deepest longings of human life, secondly with everything that man calls the consciousness of his human dignity, thirdly with everything from which he derives the actual meaning of life: the moral impulses?

All this nevertheless leads us to take certain borderline areas and borderline phenomena of life into consideration when it comes to gaining insights into precisely these most intimate needs and questions, especially those of the soul's existence.

Not in order to say anything valid for knowledge from the outset, but to gain a comparative starting point, let me point out something that presents itself as a dark area and yet as an area that challenges many riddles in life. It is the area that man knows well, the area of dreaming as man experiences it while asleep. I would like to emphasize this explicitly: Nothing is to be made out for knowledge by my mentioning dreams and sleep, but only a starting point is to be gained for our present understanding. Let us imagine in front of our soul these manifold and colorful worlds of images that dreams conjure up for us. We can be sure that they come from the same depths of human life from which our 'daytime imaginings usually emerge. But even during waking we are quite aware that in this extraordinarily interesting 'dream world we are dealing at most with a relative reality, which we can only understand if we understand it from the point of view of waking life. After all, one can at first imagine hypothetically that man dreams throughout his whole life, that he has never experienced anything in his consciousness other than the colorful, manifold dream images. Couldn't life nevertheless proceed in the same way as it does today? We could be driven by certain forces of nature or spiritual powers, without having an awake consciousness, to our daily work and - even if it may seem reprehensible to some listeners - perhaps even to scientific activity; we could carry out this activity, as it were, sleepwalking. Within ourselves, however, nothing could take place except that which we know as the dream world; the outer world would then be completely different from that which we have in our inner consciousness.

If you think about it properly, you come to say to yourself: This world of dreams, we never know it when we are in it ourselves. We would regard the dream world as our reality, which we would dream from the beginning to the end of our lives in the manner described above. That we recognize the subordinate reality value of the dream depends on the fact that we go through the life-jolt from sleep to awakening, that we become conscious of it - I am not speaking now in philosophical consideration, but from the standpoint of popular consciousness - through this life-jolt. Through it we switch that which is our human nature, namely that which is of a volitional nature, into our physical body. Anyone who observes closely also knows that everything that is conveyed to us through the senses in waking life is based entirely on the unfolding of real life in the physical body during waking. Through this involvement of our will in the physical body we arrive at the point of view from which we distinguish the subordinate reality value of dreaming from that reality value which the sense world has for our awakening consciousness. We now know that we are in contact with an external reality through the will inserted into our body. Again, I do not want to speak about this in philosophical considerations, but entirely from the standpoint of popular consciousness.

Now the question arises: Could there perhaps be a second awakening, a second life-jolt out of this ordinary day-waking on a higher level, through which we switch on our life forces into a new element, just as we switch on our will when we come out of dreaming into ordinary wakefulness? - Of course, this is only a question, and the answer to it depends entirely on whether we can set out on a path that is, firstly, inwardly safe and, secondly, can be walked by every person through their own efforts. If we were to come to such a second awakening, then through this second awakening we would gain a point of view through which we would recognize the reality value of our waking life, observing it from a higher perspective, as we observe it in dreams from the higher perspective of ordinary consciousness.

In order to bring about a second awakening, anthroposophy turns first of all to soul forces as they are present in ordinary life, but which already indicate through their ordinary nature that they are capable of development. Now even philosophers admit that what we call human memory points to a more spiritual nature of the human soul; that we cannot treat memory in the same way as we treat those soul faculties which are directly bound to the impressions of the outer sense world. Again, let us not adhere to philosophical considerations, but, as we do in ordinary consciousness, to that which plays a role as memory in man. Through memory we can call up images of experiences we went through many years ago. Depending on our disposition, these images may be more vivid or more shadowy, but they are there before us. When we indulge in ordinary sensory observation, that which we imagine must be present; that which memory gives is not present, it may be long gone. Through our imaginative power we conjure up, as it were, from our own inner being something before our soul which was once there, but which is no longer there, which cannot have a present existence. In this way we gain the insight that we are able to drive out of the human inner being forces of cognition which imagine something that does not exist in the present. And the question arises: Can perhaps through a certain further development of the powers of the soul, as we have developed them since our first childhood, that which underlies our power of memory be further developed? Can it be developed in such a way that we not only imagine what is not there at present but was once there during our life on earth, but that we imagine something that is not there at all? Then we would make the leap of life into a higher reality, into a reality from which ordinary earthly life would appear as the dreaming life does to the waking consciousness.

Anthroposophy now makes such an attempt to develop that which underlies the ability to remember, in order to arrive at this second awakening through the inner practice of life. It addresses itself to the human powers of thought. After all, they are the ones who conjure up in our imagination what we have once experienced. And anthroposophical research proceeds in such a way that it does something with thought that is not actually done with thought in the present age. Today's thinking is - and rightly so from certain points of view - more oriented towards surrendering to the outside world. To allow the impressions of the external world to act first on the senses, to process them by counting, measuring, weighing, to combine them with thinking, is passive thinking, a thinking that man considers all the more secure with regard to knowledge, the more passive it is, the more it surrenders to what the external senses and organs say. Indeed, in order not to gain a fantastic knowledge as some philosophers do, anthroposophy turns to thinking in such a way that it seeks to develop this thinking further than it is in ordinary life. To this end, easily comprehensible ideas, which at first are not even considered in terms of what they mean, are placed at the center of ordinary consciousness and the whole life of the soul is concentrated on such ideas. The life of the soul is completely withdrawn from external impressions and external life by seeking more and more to make this life of the soul stronger and stronger on one or a series of manageable ideas. The result is something that lasts shorter for one person and longer for another, depending on their soul disposition. One person needs three months, another many years. If you repeat these exercises in rhythmic succession, after a while you will notice something in your soul life that I would like to compare with something in your outer life: If you strain a muscle again and again, it strengthens and becomes strong. In the same way, one feels the soul's imaginative faculty strengthening by always concentrating on an easily comprehensible idea; and finally one feels how the whole thinking becomes active, how real life, inner life in the true sense, moves into this thinking. One gradually feels the great difference, which is not only a figurative but a real one, between dead and abstract thinking and that towards which we strive and which we want to absorb into an inner life in the thinking element.

I said that one must start from a manageable idea. In what I am going to tell you today about the exercises of the life of the soul, it is a question of following each step with full human prudence, as otherwise only the mathematician follows his steps, or the geometer, who is aware, when he brings one out of the other, how figure follows figure, how number follows number. This consciousness, which the anthroposophical researcher feels like the strict mathematician: to be accountable as a researcher - this consciousness must prevail.

Of course, all self-suggestions, everything somehow subjective must be excluded. But this can never be ruled out if we take up arbitrary ideas from our mental life; they have many echoes of life in them, they often suggest something to us. But if we put together ideas that perhaps have no external meaning for us at all, such as “light - wisdom” - and concentrate again and again on such an idea, whose reality value remains indifferent to us, with the whole life of our soul, then the thinking ability in us strengthens. In this way we come to know - as I said, for one person it takes less time, for another it takes longer - what this means: life in thinking; for a kind of detachment of a higher person from the person we know lives in our physical body does indeed gradually take place. Just as we become aware in our physical body that it is something living when we move our legs, move our hands, so we become aware through such an exercise: It is something real, living, real, life-real, when I move in the strengthened thinking.

One could roughly say: We finally come to experience a higher person in us through these power phenomena, through which one gropes spiritually, as one otherwise gropes physically with one's fingers. In this way we gradually experience how a higher man, who is experienced in this thinking, is torn away from the physical man; and we have arrived at the supersensible experience, at the experience of the supersensible man, in so far as he passes through earthly life between birth and death. By the fact that one has risen to observation in the inner ability to think, one comes to the fact that one overcomes space through this ability to think, overcomes the present in general and comes to an experience in time. Yes, one feels that which one experiences as the second, detached human being, not actually as a spatial human being. This is the physical human being. One finds that one experiences the second in this way as a human being fluctuating only in time. And that which one experiences there is structured into a kind of tableau which, in a relatively short time, allows one to survey life on earth from earliest childhood to the point in time one has just reached.

There is a big difference between the two things: the life tableau and my memories. You could say: I can also put together this earthly life from my memories. I can put together from my memory what I experienced a short or long time ago. And if I make the effort and if I take my time, then I will have an overall memory of my life on earth. And it could be that I am deceiving myself that in such an examination I have something in my life tableau, which is manageable in a short time, which with the help of subconscious soul forces would bring something similar to a conscious memory picture before my mind. - But one gradually realizes that there is a great difference between what one puts together in one's memory and such a tableau of the soul's life, which stands before the soul as a first supersensible knowledge, initially as a self-knowledge. For when you compile your experiences as a memory picture, you actually always see in front of you what has had an effect on you from the outside. You see people, natural events, the external things that are of interest to you.

This life tableau is completely different. There you have much less of an eye on what has come to you from the outside, so to speak, and more of an eye on what has worked from within. If I have gotten to know a person in life, I remember much less through this life tableau how he or she came across to me, but rather what longings were aroused in my own breast in order to find something special about this person. If I have any natural phenomenon in this life tableau, it is not so much the interesting aspects of the natural phenomenon that make themselves felt, but those impulses from my own human life that follow this natural phenomenon with particular sympathy or antipathy. That which stands before my soul in this tableau is myself, how I have behaved in relation to what I have gone through. One could say, if one wants to draw rough comparisons: This memory tableau that I have described, which can only be obtained after such an examination, is as different from an ordinary memory tableau brought about by memory as the impression in the seal is from the impression in the sealing wax. It is like the negative image to the positive image of that which we can put together through the ordinary memory image.

Thus, when we have gone through the first stage of spiritual practice, we have come to a true self-knowledge of our earthly life. For such self-knowledge is there. There are always nuances mixed in. In this memory tableau you see what has brought you forward; then you say to yourself: “There is something that has made you imperfect, that has brought you back. -- One places oneself in this tableau of memory with human worth and human dignity, and through the realization that is first awakened one attains an idea of that which one is actually only now entitled to call the “ether” of the world in relation to external reality and the sensual forces. The ether of the world, which lives only in the temporal and which to a certain extent gives us a piece of what I have now described as the first form of the higher human being detached from the physical.

But one has not been long enough with this first step. If you want more, you must undertake to continue these exercises of the soul. The next soul exercises consist in using a strongly activated inner will to remove the ideas from the consciousness, just as one has used one's will to place such ideas into the consciousness to strengthen the being and to concentrate on them. As I said, there must be complete prudence, as with the mathematician. For it must be said: We are in a certain way taken in with our whole soul-life by the conception which soon moves into the center of consciousness. And especially when thinking has already become so vivid that we have only this idea itself in consciousness, and that not only such ideas are there, but that our own inner experience appears as in powerful pictures in the tableau described - then we are strongly taken in by what we have before the soul in such a picture heightened to vividness. A greater power is necessary to remove such images from the consciousness than is necessary to remove ordinary images from the consciousness. One knows, by the way, what it means to remove ordinary ideas from the consciousness. Try to admit this to yourself honestly.

When the senses are silent, moreover when the sensually perceived is silent, when the combination of thoughts is silent and the ideas and sensations are, as it were, removed from the consciousness, then man falls asleep. If there is no stimulation from the imagination, he does not have the strength to maintain the waking state. But if one has that strength of soul which is necessary for what I have described, then one also has the strength to take away the acquired ideas which come into us in this way through an inner strengthened life, to keep the whole consciousness empty of imagination and yet to remain awake. Just being awake, imagining nothing, that is what must be striven for as a second state: A waking consciousness empty of content! But this contentless waking consciousness, one can become aware of it inwardly, but it does not remain so for long. Once it has been established, however, the second stage of spiritual cognition occurs. Then one not only becomes aware of what has just been described, which lives in the human being, then the spiritual content of our world environment forces its way into this waking, content-free consciousness, into this empty consciousness. And the second human being, who has first detached himself from the physical, corporeal human being, who was conscious of himself in the course of his entire life on earth, will now not only be conscious of himself, but through this higher self-consciousness he will absorb a spiritual world of his surroundings. Again something appears before our soul which seems strange and foreign to the present man, but which is nevertheless contained in what I have called the second stage of man's spiritual knowledge, inspiration. An exact inspiration occurs there; just as everything I have described here must not be confused with what is often called clairvoyance in a nebulous mysticism. If one wishes to use this expression, one may only speak of an exact voyance, which is only based on the development of the soul forces, like mathematical thinking, which has no external reality in itself, but only one that is formed internally, and to which only mathematical thinking must be added when it extends to the sensory world, as in measuring, counting, weighing and so on.

To this, what one has conceived in an inwardly living thinking, which is modeled on the particular mathematical thinking, must be added what I have described to you here. And through this spiritual work one arrives at knowledge in the same way that we arrive at knowledge through measuring, counting and weighing. And that which occurs is a state of soul life which is not known in ordinary consciousness because it is not necessary. I would like to make clear what state of soul life occurs when awake, empty consciousness is reached.

First we think of ourselves in a modern metropolis, with all its noise, its din; we ourselves do not come to rest, we ourselves are absorbed in this noise, in this din. Then we move away from this cosmopolitan city - the din, the noise become quieter and quieter; if we move further away, even quieter. We imagine ourselves in the solitude of the forest. There is a silence that we can describe as zero in relation to the noise of the city. Silence around us, silence within us. But now something else can occur, although it is not observed in ordinary life. We have to use a second comparison. As you know, if someone has a certain amount of wealth, this wealth can be spent little by little; he owns less and less. If he earns nothing extra, if he continues to spend, then he is down to zero. If he has nothing at all and continues to spend, he is in debt; then he has less than zero. Mathematicians call this negative values, minus. Now imagine that: We have descended from the loud roar, the noise of the big city to silence zero and descend further, and it becomes quieter and quieter than silence and silence zero, so that we have less around us than mere silence, that it is quieter, quieter than quiet. This is the state of soul that gradually occurs when we pass through the empty but still awake consciousness. Little by little we feel quite clearly what I would like to call the deep silence of the human soul. This deep silence is not just silence, it is more or less, as you like, than silence. In terms of tranquillity, it goes below tranquillity zero. But then, when this deep silence of the soul is really experienced, everything that is of spiritual essence around us emerges from this deep silence of the soul. And the full inspiration occurs.

Then we are put into the position, when we have experienced this deep silence of the soul, to actually also now hear spiritually that what lives in the spiritual world. And the ordinary sensory world becomes a means for us to hint at what lives in this spiritual world. I would like to speak quite concretely of real spiritual knowledge. Something sounds out of the deep silence of the soul that makes an impression on me: it excites me, it strikes me with a certain liveliness. I say it is something that makes an impression on me, just as the yellow color of a lively soul life makes an impression on me. Then I have something in the sensory world through which I can express what I have experienced in the spiritual world. I describe this knowledge by saying: It has an effect on me like the yellow color of the sense world, or like the tone C or C sharp, like warmth or cold. In short, that which I have experienced in the sense world becomes for me a material, just as what appears to me in the spiritual world can be described in ordinary words. The whole sense world becomes something like a language to express what one experiences in the spiritual world. This is not understood by those who want to make progress too quickly and therefore stop at superficial judgment. The investigator encounters an experience that makes the same impression on him as the sensual color, and therefore he describes what he experiences spiritually through colors, sounds and so on. Just as one should not confuse the word “table” with the real table, so now one should not confuse it with that by which it is described, the spiritual world itself, which sprouts from the deep silence.

Once one has reached this point of view, one comes to extinguish this whole tableau of life, which one first conjured up, within oneself; not only to evoke empty consciousness towards individual ideas, but towards the whole earthly life of man, and indeed precisely in his inner form. One then, so to speak, extinguishes oneself as an earthly human being. But by now having the possibility to experience the deep silence of the human soul after the extinction of the earthly self, which is bound to the physical body of man, one now experiences that which one has become as a spiritual-soul man before one has descended from the spiritual world and has clothed the physical body around oneself. Out of the deep silence of the soul one experiences the spiritual-soul that one was in the pre-earthly existence. And just as one arrived at one's physical surroundings in the physical body, so, by placing oneself in that which one was in the spiritual-soul world, one arrives at recognizing how one was in the pre-earthly existence in the surroundings of spiritual-soul beings, even as a soul-spiritual being, as a similar being. One enters fully into that spiritual world from which one has descended to earthly existence.

You can realize that in ordinary life the eternity of the human soul is only explored in one direction, the immortality of the soul. But this immortality of the soul has another side, for which the older language still had a word, but no longer the modern language. This soul immortality has not only one side, that of immortality, but also that of unbornness, and it is only from unbornness and immortality that the full soul immortality is composed. Thus one does not arrive through metaphysical speculation, but by awakening the soul itself, and out of the deep silence of the soul to that which is eternal in the human soul, was eternal and was spiritually present before man descended to earthly existence, and remains eternal by dwelling in the physical human body between birth and death.

But we can only approach the eternal character step by step, also through anthroposophical spiritual research. As the third stage I must mention something that may cause a slight shudder, perhaps an inner mockery, especially for those who are sitting here with the usual scientific ideas. I can understand this very well, as I can understand all opposing objections to anthroposophy. Something that we already have in ordinary life can be further developed into a higher power of cognition, like the powers of a child into what we have developed in our adult state, and that is the power of love. Loving is something quite different when it is bound to the human body, when it surrenders to the passions that live themselves out in loving, than when, as I have described, after the physical ego, even the earthly ego from birth to death, has been stripped away, when the human being lives himself out of the physical existence into the state in which he faces the purely spiritual. When he thereby develops the powers of love, of complete surrender, then that which he has experienced in the pre-earthly state, which he now fully realizes, is transformed into knowledge. He experiences what it means to experience full consciousness with reality outside his physical body. And when he experiences this surrender to spiritual experience in this way, then his ego is returned to him in a new way. The ego, which in earthly life lives in selfishness and egotism, which is overcome by acquiring such self-knowledge as is acquired when this ego is twice extinguished, thus develops full love on a soul-spiritual level, and something then confronts you which at first appears to you like a complete stranger, like a completely alien personality. If you strive for this, it will happen in the least. One should strive for the love I have described. Then, because one can go completely out of oneself, one is confronted by what one is oneself, but like a foreign personality, and one only then realizes what this self was like in the past life on earth, which one went through before one came to this life on earth; one only then realizes how the ego was present in the earlier stage of existence on earth, when one is able to feel like a second person through increased, strengthened love. One looks back to a certain point in the development of time where the ego as ego had a beginning, where the repeated earth lives had a beginning. But we cannot speak of that now. We can only speak of the fact that we can look back on a series of earth lives, which are passed through to full human life, between which there are always lives in pre-earthly or post-earthly existence between death and a new earthly birth.

This is the one thing one experiences of the eternal and immortal character of the soul when one has made up one's mind to the recognizing view. The other thing, however, which one acquires through the love that has increased to knowledge, is to be able to experience the higher human being outside of his physical body. That which one acquires further is that one sees how this being is without a body, and the realization of how the body becomes a corpse in death, how this body falls away, how the human being enters the after-earthly life. Just as one has a view of the pre-earthly life, of the unborn, one now has a view into immortality, into the after-earthly life. The moral impulses one has acquired as an earthly human being, which one carries through the gate of death, and how one prepares a new earthly existence together with the spiritual world in order to descend to earth as an earthly human being, this now appears before the soul in vivid vividness, which is based on intellectual modesty, but also on a certain trust in the powers of the human soul.

This leads knowledge to that area of life which is so close to the longings and needs of man. We look at those whom we have loved in life, who are close to us through blood ties or soul ties; we look at the gate of death and ask: What will become of the ties that the blood has spun and of the ties that the soul and spirit have woven when a person has passed through the gate of death? If one has this insight, one knows how the outer physical shell of the physical body falls away from what man is as an eternal being, how man rises into the spiritual world with those laws and lives there with the forces which he has already brought down and with which he has lived in his physical life on earth. We then experience how that which we have in common with other people as blood ties, as bonds of friendship, as bonds of love, falls away from our communities just as the physical body of man itself falls away; and we know from the realization that we meet again the souls with whom a bond has connected us, in pure communion of the spiritual world, because the physical obstacles are no longer there. That what men do not demand to know out of a curious instinct, that what was human dignity, the fate of the souls, that becomes in this way a real knowledge.

And still other things become a real knowledge. The reality of the outer physical world eludes the dream because the will is not involved in the physical body. In dreams man takes the world of images for reality; thus we take much for reality before we awaken in the manner described to the deep silence of the soul, to the spiritual life. When we wake up to the waking spiritual life, after we have gone through the second life-jolt and the physical reality experienced awake appears to us as mere dreaming, then many things that were reality to us in the physical-bodily life appear to us in the higher sense, in the sense of the physical-spiritual life, as a dream. Just as the dream reality is captured by the physically tangible reality, so that which we experience in physical life as moral or religious people is now captured by that to which we awaken through the second life pressure. And we become aware of what was actually meant by people like Knebel, Goethe's friend, who said as an old man: “When one has grown old, one finds that in the face of the decisive events of existence everything seems as if it had been prepared long ago. Everything seems to have been planned by man himself, which has had a profound influence on him as a man or as a youth. And all his steps as a youth seem to point to this experience. - This idea continues to develop and becomes true in the process of formation. If one penetrates this idea further with the knowledge that one gains in the way described, one sees that this is indeed the case in life. One experiences something quite decisive. One is led to a person with whom the further course of life is to be walked together. You look at the steps that have led you to this person. They come from the longing to experience precisely what you can experience with this person until you reach the goal that corresponds to a longing of the soul, a test of the soul in the right way. That which lives in man, through which he conjures up his destiny as if out of himself, must be connected to the view of the earthly lives lived through, in which one was a morally such and such a person, did this and that. And one sees that what one does now seems instinctive in this life, like chance; it is fatefully linked to what one was in the previous earthly life.

This seems to be a devastating thought. But just as little as the fact that we have blond or black hair, blue or brown eyes, lean or full hands affects our freedom, dignity and full responsibility as human beings, so little does it affect what we are as free, responsible human beings when we know that it is the soul that configures us, that as free human beings we have to carve out our life's destiny on a fated basis. But life becomes comprehensible when man learns to look at it, imbued with this idea of destiny, which is quite compatible with freedom, that he does not stand in life in such a way that every moment is like chance to him, but that he feels himself placed in the world of natural necessity, as in the world of a real spirituality, in which he stands as a higher man with his moral, fateful powers. In this way, such knowledge leads man from outer life to the immortality of the soul.

One can still object: Yes, individual spiritual researchers can indeed recognize this, but what does it mean for the ordinary person? - It means just as much as an artistically painted picture to someone who has not become a painter. It would be sad if you had to be a painter to understand a work of art. You only need a certain healthy feeling to experience the artistic, and only healthy human judgment to experience what the spiritual researcher describes. Only if one throws the unfortunately so numerous prejudices in one's own way, then one places oneself before the pictures which the anthroposophical spiritual researcher sketches, as one places oneself before a picture in which, instead of seeing a world, one sees nothing but splashes of color placed side by side. This world is also fully comprehensible to those who live a simple, ordinary life from the description of the anthroposophical spiritual researcher, although he is always able to understand it through books such as “How does one attain knowledge of the higher worlds? “ he is always able to go so far on the path of spiritual research without influencing his outer life that he can check what the anthroposophical spiritual researcher tells him, that he can check whether this anthroposophical spiritual researcher is speaking out of fantasy or whether his view is something that has been firmly acquired, just as mathematical judgments, measuring, counting, weighing and so on are themselves firmly acquired.

This is what spiritual science wishes to introduce into the present spiritual life of mankind. It is that which it must believe corresponds to the numerous innermost needs of the soul. For it is so that today many people instinctively, unconsciously, precisely through what one has become through education, out of the natural scientific prerequisites, gain the longing to know something in a similar way, encompassing the experiences, about that which is so close to the soul and of which I have only spoken today as an example of the immortality of the soul and that which is connected with immortality.

But of course this puts something into the world that is like the Copernican world view compared to the one we were used to at that time. But it is so that what appears to be a human “folly” gradually becomes a matter of course. The Copernican world view even had to wait a very long time before it became self-evident. Anthroposophy can wait. But it must say, out of an obligation to culture and civilization, that it is fully understandable to it when ordinary natural science, which considers itself sovereign with its means, has arrived at a doctrine of the soul without a soul through an ordinary pursuit of the life of the soul with the external means of calculating, counting, weighing, and that it finds an ideal in it. Anthroposophy, however, would like to add to that which it does not deny the justification of on the one hand, to a doctrine gained from natural science, through developed full comprehension of the innermost essence of the human soul, what is soul-spiritual in man as eternal life, what is soul-spiritual in the whole world, in the whole cosmos as eternal life, so that man can recognize himself as eternal, intimately connected with the eternal in the cosmos, as immortal in the cosmos. Anthroposophy therefore wishes to give knowledge of the present human life and the human life of the near future, so that it meets a necessity of the time by adding to the present teaching of the soul without soul a teaching of the soul awakened vividly out of the human soul, which then follows from such a teaching again a teaching of the world permeated by soul, permeated by spirit. And this will be needed more and more.

I have often pointed out how the need of modern mankind for a socialization of the social order arises precisely from the antisocial impulses of mankind, which are more prominent in the present than in earlier times. People today are much more antisocial in their emotional life, in general in their soul life, than in earlier times. And one would like to say: In relation to the more elementary, natural development of mankind, the antisocial impulses are increasing. It can also be said that in the course of the last four centuries people have more or less given themselves over to certain antisocial impulses in the wide circle of social life. And the countercurrent against this abandonment to antisocial impulses is the call for socialization. This call for socialization flares up in people's consciousness precisely because strong antisocial impulses awaken in people's subconscious.

Today this can be traced into the most intimate life of the soul. Never, however, has it been so difficult for people to convince themselves of anything that comes to them as an opinion, or even as the evidence of another; never has the stubbornness with regard to standing on opinions been so great as it is at the present time. And when it happens that someone draws attention to the one-sidedness of every human opinion, yes, also to the one-sidedness of everything that is called human truth, when it happens that someone illuminates things from different sides, then he is reproached for expressing one opinion and another. We will not come to healthy socialization, which is based on social understanding of people, if this ability of adaptation of the individual to the other does not also occur for the human soul.

Now, of course, it is deeply, deeply rooted in the historical development that this is the case today with the antisocial instincts. For people have been developing since the middle of the 15th century in the age of the consciousness soul. People should gradually place themselves on the basis of individual consciousness. Therefore, they can reach a social life only in a different way than in earlier ages, where still the group instincts, the group-egos played a much greater role than they play today. Therefore we see discrepancies everywhere today in the social life of people. We see strange non-coherence. Man always has something in him somewhere in the subsoil of his soul through which he understands everything that can reveal itself in any time. Only he is usually not far enough with his head understanding, with his intellect. Then the strange phenomenon can occur - which should be observed especially by those who join a spiritual-scientific movement - that just those who have learned too much in any direction, lag behind in the development. We experience this today in the most sufficient measure. We would be able to make much faster progress today in understanding what is socially necessary if the masses were not held back by those who have learned too much from the old, who live too much in old concepts, who have adapted themselves too stubbornly to the old concepts. On the whole, it can be said that today the broad mass of the proletariat would certainly have understanding for the most advanced impulses, if they were not held back by that leadership which for decades has fitted itself into quite definite rigid concepts and now cannot go any further. The holding back of people by those who have learned too much, just too much of what could be learned in the 19th century, that is something very significant for the psychological understanding of our time. Therefore, one will only slowly and gradually be able to see something, which, however, is very intensively necessary to see.

On what - this must be asked again and again - have the present leading people formed their concepts, their ideas, their feelings, also their social will? They have trained them on the scientific ideas that played such a great, such a decisive role in the 19th century. One must not be deceived about this. Scientific ideas have penetrated everywhere. But scientific ideas, as they have emerged in the last four centuries, are only applicable to the dead, to that which has died, to that which no longer has life. It is not an extraordinariness, but it is deeply rooted in the essence of the matter that the present ideas about the essence of man can only be applied to what is gained from the corpse, to what is gained in general outside the context of life. What scientific conceptions can give about man, that does not lead to man, not to Homo, that leads only to the homunculus. And that is why people, when they begin to think socially today, always think past reality. They think only of that which basically destroys the social organization, which dismantles it, and not of that which brings new fertilizing life to the social organization. Because people have not absorbed any ideas about the living during the last four centuries, they have not learned to supply fruitful life to the healthy organism. It is the tragedy of the present time that we live only from concepts about the dead, and that the social organism demands from us to assert impulses that are valid for life. But we have no concept of the living precisely within that which is today regarded as the formation of mankind. Does anyone today ask about the social organism as if it were a living thing? He does not.

I have already pointed this out to you the other day: Let us imagine that someone raises the question: Why should we always eat? We satisfy ourselves by eating, but we achieve nothing other than that we are hungry again afterwards; so we might as well keep hunger! - It is not true that it would be foolishness if someone thought in this way towards the natural organism; but according to this pattern of foolishness one actually always thinks with reference to the social organism! This has the effect that this social organism must again and again be shaken and trembled by shocks, which, if the misunderstanding of social life lasts very long, must become revolutionary shocks and even revolutions on a large scale. Because in the last centuries people have become entangled in all kinds of social illusions, that is why the terrible revolutionary train has arisen in our time. What can help there? It can only help to see social life as something really alive. What, then, is a revolution? You see, a revolution is nothing more than the sum of all the necessary small revolutions. There are always revolutions. As in the natural human organism, which also undergoes very significant revolutions from one saturation period to another, so there are always revolutions in the social organism. Why? Because it cannot be otherwise than that through the interaction of the individual human faculties, of the spiritual part of man with the economic life, the tendency arises continually for individual men to gain the upper hand over others. This tendency is simply always present in economic life and in spiritual life. In economic life, for example, there is always the tendency to form capital. If this tendency of economic life to form capital were not present, then economic life would have to die out altogether. For it is only through capital that it is possible that the complicated means of production exist in our advanced times.

But the performance of work on these means of production cannot be achieved by anything other than individual human abilities. When capital is formed, small revolutionary foci are naturally always formed. And government must consist in being vigilant against the formation of small revolutionary foci. We must constantly work against revolution, but not by asking: How can we prevent the creation of capital? -but: What must be done with capital when it has developed for a certain time in one place? - It must be transferred from one individuality to another! That is what matters. The way must be found, also for the material goods, which are expressed in the means of production, which, as I said to you the other day, is found to be the most feasible for the most wretched good, which today's mankind regards as the most wretched good. What one produces spiritually, is lost after some time for the family of the producer, it goes over into the 'general public. The material goods must find their transition into the social organism even at the moment when they no longer have any connection with the individual ability of man, so that they are in turn best utilized by other individual abilities. Socialist thinkers today ask quite wrong questions with regard to the social organism. Socialist thinkers today ask: How can private ownership of the means of production, including land, be prevented? That is, how to kill the life of the social organism? We have just seen in the course of the capitalist economic order that private capital in the means of production and in land produces great damage. The simplest question then seems to be this: How do we get rid of that which causes damage, how do we prevent it from arising in the first place? But this is a killing question. A living question is this: What is to be done with private capital so that it does not cause further damage? How can it be appropriately separated from the private capitalist and transferred to another producer when he himself no longer produces in the service of the social organism? The questions already have to be asked from a much deeper understanding than the present mankind even suspects. The present mankind actually lives in its illusions only because it does not draw the consequences of these illusions in reality. All kinds of professors of national economy in all universities of the world teach today many things according to the recipe: Wash my fur, but do not wet it. - This is the basis of these teachings, which aim at socialization. The very old antisocial teachings are still represented only by some old buttons. But that these good professors teach these things is only possible because they do not draw the consequences. The consequences of what these professors teach are drawn by Lenin and Trotsky. There is a continuous connection. And one should actually rise to a completely different thinking towards the social organism. One should not stop at the old habits of thought, but go over to new habits of thought, because the old habits of thought, consistently carried out, must lead to the robbery of the old social order. And this is what people find it so difficult to decide to embrace new habits of thought. This will perhaps not happen until people really think in a spiritual-scientific way, and until the thoughts they get used to in spiritual science will also be the teachers, perhaps better the disciplinarians, for the way they should think socially. It will always remain something half if one merely spreads social teachings today without imbuing them with the actual spiritual-scientific teachings which make thinking and feeling and imagining, above all judging, so flexible as we need it today if we want to fit into the great complication of life which has now necessarily come upon modern mankind.

Is it not necessary to ask: What is this human being who is to be integrated into the social organism, this human organism? Can one actually promise oneself to feel right about the social organism if one does not first feel right about man himself? For man is a member of this social organism. Now natural science, in spite of all its great progress, has led away from the understanding of the real man, not towards it. That is what must be considered.

If one says to people today: Look, the healthy social organism must consist of the three independent members, the spiritual organization, the political state and legal organization and the economic organization, and if one then points out that the natural man also consists of three members, of the nervous-sensory system, of the lung-heart or rhythmic system, and of the metabolic system, then the clever people come and say: Again such a game with analogies! But it is not a question of playing with analogies, it is a question of training the spirit on the one hand in a correct understanding of the natural man, so that with the spirit trained in this way one can also understand the social organism correctly. It is not a question of making conclusions from one to the other, as Schäffle did in the past, and Meray has done again, but of making one's thinking so flexible in relation to the human organism that one can really understand the social organism in its needs.

One of the basic phenomena of the future understanding of man will be precisely this, how man descends from a spiritual life through birth, how he lives in his physical existence between birth and death and lives a social life with society, and then returns to the spiritual world through death. There it is a question of understanding already once this man as such really in his threefoldness. The present anatomist, the present physiologist, has man before him; for him a muscle in the head is the same as a muscle in the arm. He does not divide man into his three parts, he knows nothing about it, this present natural scientist, how man's origin comes from three sources. He does not ask properly, therefore he does not come to a proper answer, for example, what man has from the mother and what from the father. We have often spoken about the matter, today we can again speak about the matter from a certain point of view. You know, when man lives in this ordinary life, he lives in two different states of life or consciousness. While awake, the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the ego interpenetrate each other. In sleep, the physical body and the astral body are in bed; in the spiritual world, the I and the astral body are in bed. In the morning the ego and the astral body again unite with the physical body and the atheric body. Consider the human being who, when he sleeps, lies in bed without the ego and without the astral body. Of course, this is not a human being; but it is something essential of the human being who lives on the physical earth. You can separate very precisely from the whole man that which is there of the man who lives on the physical earth when he sleeps, and which manifests itself in the physical body and etheric body. Let us now first look away from the whole man, let us look at that which lies in bed at night, when the ego and the astral body are gone, and let us ask about the origin of this man, which consists of the physical body and etheric body, which lies in bed at night, let us ask about its next origin: Where does it come from? It is only a piece of man, but where does it come from? - What lies there in bed comes according to its disposition, its powers, not as it is first formed in the full human being, in the adult human being, but according to its dispositions, its powers, it comes from the mother and is already with the mother before any fertilization. That which merely comes in through the woman is that which then lies fully grown in the bed of man when he sleeps. That is not a human being; but it cannot become a human being either, what comes only from the mother.

It is not arbitrary talk when one divides man into these limbs of which one usually speaks, but it points to very real things. When one speaks of the physical body and etheric body, one speaks of what is predisposed in the mother before fertilization, what is always predisposed in the mother. When man from spiritual heights, after he has lived for a while the life between death and new birth, again inclines to the physical life, then he feels, as it were, that in a female personality related to him that disposition is found into which he can pour that which has developed in him since the last life from the rest of the organism to the head. The human embryonic formation therefore starts from the head. The head is that which first develops in a certain perfection in the human embryonic formation. That which acts on this head formation, which actually comes from the cosmos, is already in the ego and in the astral body. And the fact that the ego and the astral body can be together with the physical body and the etheric body comes from fertilization. Fertilization mediates the coexistence between the ego and the astral body, and the physical body and the etheric body. What is the origin of fertilization? Fertilization is first of all concerned with the mere metabolic life of man. It is aimed at giving him a new metabolic and respiratory organism, because the forces of the head organism originate from the previous incarnation. All that, therefore, which brings man, who comes from the previous incarnation, together with the head organism, man owes to his relation to the spiritual world. Everything that, so to speak, enters the human being in embryonic life, when fertilization has taken place, the human being owes to the coexistence with the earth being, with the earthly being.

There you see how complicated that comes about, what the human being actually is. To a certain extent, man's limbs, to which the metabolic system also belongs, are given to him internally, from the earth. That which functions in the human head is given to him from the spiritual world. And that which is breathing and heart system, that is in between.

And now you can ask: What is the essence that we can inherit from our father and mother? In which system of the human being do the forces lie by which we can inherit something from our father and from our mother? - We inherit nothing for our head from our father and mother, because, what works in our head, we bring with us from the previous incarnation. We do not inherit anything for our metabolic system, because that is what the earth gives us after fertilization. We inherit only within the lung-heart system, we inherit only in all the forces that live in breathing and blood circulation; there we inherit. Only one limb, the middle limb of man, the respiratory-circulatory limb, is that which owes its origin to the two sexes. Man is so complicated. He is a tripartite being also according to his physical organism. He has his head, which he can only use for that which is not earthly; he has his limbs with the metabolic system, which he can only use for that which is earthly; and he has that which lies in breathing and circulation, through the relationship of man to man.

I can only indicate to you here what leads to a wide, wide field of knowledge of man. What I have indicated to you looks like a theory. But for our time it is not a theory, but there is something in man today which feels in the sense of what I have just said, There is something developing in the present time which feels in this tripartite sense in man. Today man has complicated feelings in the innermost part of his being, without being fully aware of it. He knows himself through his head as a citizen of an extraterrestrial, he knows himself through his lung-heart system in a relation of man to man. There is something inside the human being that says: When I meet another human being, this meeting is an image of that which was transplanted into me also from human being to human being, namely through father and mother. Through his lung-heart system the human being feels quite placed among people. Through his metabolic system man feels himself as a member of the earth, as belonging to the earth. These three kinds of feelings are already in man today. But the mind does not want to go along. The mind wants everything to be simple, the mind wants that everything can be traced back to some monon. And this is what the people of the present day suffer from. They will no longer suffer from it only when the tripartite feeling in the inner being, which is really already found in man, corresponds to a tripartite social organism, when man finds a mirror image of his being on the outside.

You see, this is the terrible thing that lies in the subconsciousness of people who today belong to the social movement, For three to four centuries the spiritual life and everything that dominates the social coexistence of people has developed in such a way that this spiritual life is a mirror of the material life. Inside, however, the longing pulsates, the outer life should be a mirror of the inner. Today's mankind suffers from this. It wants to form the outer life in such a way that the outer social organism is an image of man, whereas today man is an image of the outer world. And people in the present see past this, they find it complicated, they find it theoretical. They find it easier to put the human being as a whole. Of course, it is more complicated to have to answer someone to the question: What is man? - to answer: Look at the representative of mankind in the middle and above Lucifer and below Ahriman! All three belong together in the unity of man. But the man is just tripartite and differently you do not understand the man.

This is not a theory, but something that is very, very real, that occurs in the human nature. Because man begins to feel tripartite about himself and about the world, he demands in his subconsciousness a tripartite social organism, not only a uniform monistic state organism, which also includes economic life and state life: A spiritual organization for itself, a legal or political or state organization for itself, and an economic organization for itself. Only then will man find himself in this outer world. And the earthquake-like tremors of our time stem from the fact that a culmination, a highest point, has been reached with regard to the non-correspondence of the outer social organism with the human inner being. While people are basically striving to feel the independent threefoldness of the social organism, their leaders, the leaders of the socialists, appear and say: Everything will already result from the economic life, if we let the economic life develop correctly, if we only reverse it a little, so that that which has been below comes above, and that which has been above comes below; then the right thing will already develop.

Nothing right will develop out of economic life alone, but only if one admits the independence of economic life on the one side, and on the second side of political legal life, of security life, and on the other side of the spiritual organization as such. If one really places the spiritual life on itself, then it must form its reality out of itself. Otherwise the chasms will always remain between the human classes. Today one does not even suspect how these abysses have actually opened up. Sometimes one can be confronted with the most justified in the sense of contemporary culture, and one will not understand how that which one who belongs to a class must feel to be completely justified cannot be understood by the other.

Take, to choose an obvious example, a well-painted landscape, a quite artistically painted landscape. The member of the bourgeois class has acquired certain feelings, certain ideas, as to how a well-painted landscape should look. With these feelings, with these ideas, he places himself in front of a landscape picture that is clamped in a frame and admires it. The proletarian may be induced to admire it, too, because he is gradually persuaded that it belongs to "education" to admire such a thing; some who are not proletarians do not understand anything about a landscape painting and admire it because they have been persuaded that it belongs to education. But this even breeds untruthfulness, because if one does not belong to the class where, among those who work physically, some are also bred who are allowed to be physically tired so that they can paint, so that they can think up how to paint, he only remains true if he confronts such a landscape in such a way that he says: What for? Someone paints a piece of forest on a canvas with blots of color, and I see it every day when I walk through the forest, much more beautiful. You can never make a landscape painting as beautiful as it is outside in nature. Why do people, who don't want to look into nature to see the piece of landscape, hang a piece of landscape, which is only a clumsy imitation of nature, in a gold frame in their room? - That would be the true sensation. And this feeling rests on the soul of many people who are not brought up to admire things out of educational backgrounds. Certainly the admiration of a certain class is sincere; but the admiration of by far the greatest mass of people for such a landscape cannot be sincere, because they are not educated with the others.

One must touch on much deeper things in the life of feeling if one is to understand today what abysses lie between human souls. We will not awaken understanding for art - and you can transfer this to other branches of life - until, for example, one will also want to pursue in painting that which one cannot see every day outside in nature, but which must be brought down from the spiritual world. All people will understand this, and something else will come on this detour. The spiritual must be carried down from the spiritual world by people. Trust will again arise from person to person, because through one person this, through another person that must be carried down from the spiritual world. In another way than by carrying things down from the spiritual world, it will not be possible for soul to find itself again socially with soul.

So one must, I would say, speak more deeply into that which today pulsates through time than one usually does. Preachers full of unctuousness, who actually bring only a copy of what the Catholic pulpit orators can do better in their way, now go around a lot and talk about the fact that "inwardly" people should find each other again, after this terrible catastrophe of the last four and a half years has shown how little people are inclined to a harmonious life. Yes, but you can't let people find themselves inwardly by talking, you can only let them find themselves inwardly if you have the will today to really radically go over to other habits of thinking and feeling. The other day someone said that you have to get to know poverty in order to develop a social feeling in yourself. Today it is not enough to have looked at poverty, to have gone to some neighborhood in a big city and seen how ragged the people are, how little they have to eat; that is not enough today. Today it is enough to really know the souls of those who want to work their way up socially. Today it is necessary not only to know poverty, but to know the poor in their souls, in their innermost life. But there is no other way to achieve this than by finding a new way to the human soul, by really learning to penetrate into the innermost being of man. And then one will find that people can henceforth be nothing without finding the mirror of their own being in the social outer organism.

One must be able to lead people on the one hand to the highest heights of spiritual life and on the other hand to be able to really submerge the spirit in economic problems. Today, however, one has to say strange things. On the one hand, one must say: Take the schools away from the state, take the spiritual life away from it, base the spiritual life on itself, let it be administered by itself, then you will compel this spiritual life to lead the struggle continuously from its own strength. Then, however, this spiritual life will also be able to place itself in the right way to the constitutional state and to the economic life, for example, the spiritual life will be straight - I have explained this in my social writing, which will now be finished in the next few days -, then the spiritual life will also be the right administrator of the capital.

On the other hand: Let the economic life be turned in on itself. This is truly not a phrase in relation to concrete questions. If you turn economic life in on itself, if you take it from the state, then above all you must take something very, very concrete from the state, namely money, the administration of the currency. You must return the administration of the currency to economic life. In the various territories where people have worked their way up from the natural economy to the money economy, they have initially kept to a money representative who is something of a hybrid between a commodity and a mere instruction. The very learned people argue about whether money is a mere instruction, whether a banknote is a mere instruction, or 'whether money is a commodity. One can argue about it for a long time, because money is one thing and another. It is one thing because it mediates the economic process; that makes money a commodity. The other is that the state determines by its law the value of the coin in question. But money must be returned entirely to economic life. Then one thing will occur, but only gradually. In order for it to occur, the very thing I am touching on now must become international. This will take a long time, because the leading trading state, England, on which it really depends that we have the gold standard, will not easily let go of the gold standard. So it will take a long time. But the self-sufficient economic organization, to which also the currency is left, the monetary system, will no longer need to place a commodity "gold" between the other goods as a means of exchange. The economic organization does not need that. The economic organization will, however, also have money, but only for the distribution of the exchange of goods. For it will turn out that always that which is the solid, real basis of economic life, that this is the monetary basis also for money. Gold is money only because gold has gradually become a particularly popular commodity among people, because people have agreed to value gold. This looks dilettante when you say it, but it is much more correct than what the non-dilettantes, the scholars of today, say. The value of gold is merely based on the tacit agreement of people about this value of gold. Something else could come to such an estimate. But with the centralization of the three social links, something that actually has a mere apparent value will always come to this estimate in economic life. Gold, after all, has in reality only an apparent value. You cannot eat gold. You can be very rich in gold; if nobody gives you anything for it, you cannot live from gold, of course. This is based only on a tacit agreement among people. You don't need it at all in national traffic. In interstate traffic, it is needed only to bring about certain compensations that cannot otherwise be brought about because the necessary great trust does not exist. But this illusory value attributed to a certain metal will cease when the administration of money is handed over to the economic body and the state no longer has any say in the administration of money. Then the state remains on the ground of mere law, remains on the basis of what can only be agreed between man and man on a democratic basis.

Now, if certain money tokens, money orders are in circulation, the state has a certain gold treasure. What will then be there when truth will have taken the place of appearance through the threefold division? Then everything will be there as a cover for the money, which in truth will not belong to the individual, on which the individual will only work, but which has an equal value for all people who live in the social organism: The means of production will take the place of gold, that by which one can prepare something for the commodity character. By bringing the means of production into flux, as today only the spiritual productions are in flux, the character of the means of production as a monetary basis is gradually brought about.

These things are very difficult, and one must make very complicated national economic assumptions - which I naturally do not presuppose with you - if one wants to prove them scientifically; but they can be proved quite scientifically. But I would rather give you a concrete example of what I mean. You see, I once got to know a strange kind of money myself - I think I have already spoken of it here once. This strange kind of money consisted in Goethe letters and Goethe manuscripts. I got to know a gentleman, no, several, who were actually quite clever as financiers. They began to buy Goethe letters and Goethe manuscripts cheaply in the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties. You didn't have to pay much for them then. Now they had them. Now came the time when everything had already been bought up, when due to circumstances, the description of which would lead too far, Goethe letters and Goethe manuscripts acquired a great value. These letters and manuscripts were sold. That was a strange money, the value of which increased considerably in about thirty to forty years. I was assured even by one of the gentlemen who did that, that no stock exchange papers have fructified so, for a time, as Goethe letters. They were the best paper, and they had actually taken on a money character. One got a great deal for them. Now think what that depended on. It depended on the fact that constellations had occurred that were completely independent of the first coming into being. It's not true that when Goethe wrote his letters, these letters were perhaps worth a great deal to the recipient. Nobody bought them. They were not money at that time. You couldn't buy bread for them. Mr. von Loeper, who bought Goethe letters in the fifties, could buy a lot of bread in 1895 for these Goethe letters. They were like good money. The way in which ordinary money stands inside in the economic organism is also not different than this standing inside was with the Goethe letters. The value of these pieces of paper, on which Goethe's letters were written, was based on a social process, on a social process, on what had happened in connection with Goethe's personality from the fifties to the nineties. One has to know the social organism well if one wants to judge these strange processes, where something that at a certain time does not need to be worth anything special in the economic process becomes valuable.

The usual demand of the social democrats for the socialization of the means of production would naturally lead to the paralysis of the spiritual qualities, the spiritual talents of the people. This is something that is impossible to carry out. But just think, for example - of course, one can think of it in the most varied way -: Whoever has certain talents for some branch of the economy will be able to obtain capital in completely free competition, namely, saved capital, which he collects as a loan. Of course, there can be intermediaries; I reduce the process to the simplest form, so to speak. The person concerned will make certain claims for his intellectual achievement, for his leadership achievement, for his leadership. Once a real contract is concluded between employer and employee - the contract usual today is only a sham - the employee will realize that his interests are best represented if the entrepreneur manages the enterprise well with his individual powers, but without owning it. And this is possible precisely when the entrepreneur originally sets the demand for his intellectual performance on his own initiative and negotiates it with the workers. If this demand cannot be fulfilled, the entrepreneur must go down with his demand. But the demand must be made originally from completely free initiative. If the entrepreneur does not find any customers, he must go down, which goes without saying. But now it must remain so. He now draws from the enterprise nothing more than the agreed share, which, if his work increases, can be increased. But it remains interest. In addition, there is the productivity of the means of production itself, the profit that comes out of the enterprise. These are two quite different things, that which one acquires through one's intellectual effort and that which comes out of the enterprise. It is quite different to work with means of production than to put one's saved capital into means of production. These things are not distinguished today. These things will be distinguished in the healthy social organism.

If I put a certain capital, which I have saved myself, into a factory, that is something completely different than if I use this capital to buy a room. If I use the capital to put it into a factory, then I have worked for the social organism by saving the capital. If I use it to get myself room furnishings, I am making the social organism work for me. These things are distinguished in the healthy social organism. They are not distinguished in today's sick social organism. Of course, I am not saying that no one should buy a furniture. But buying furniture will mean something completely different in the healthy social organism than it means today. Today it can be exploitation; later it will be the use of the room furnishings as means of production, because one will have nothing from the room furnishings if one does not produce something for the social organism with the help of the room furnishings, whatever it may be. The term "means of production" is first put on a sound basis in the healthy social organism.

There you see that one can distinguish exactly between what someone draws as interest and what comes from the self-work of the means of production. As long as one uses the profit of the means of production to enlarge the enterprise, well, it remains so. But at the moment when something is gained from the means of production which is not used to enlarge the enterprise, to expand the enterprise, then the leader is obliged to transfer what is gained to another who can produce again.

There you have a circulation of capital. There you have the transfer to another individuality. Whoever does not consider himself capable of transferring his capital to another individuality, transfers it to a corporation of the spiritual organization, which may not use it itself, which in turn will transfer it to an individual or to a group of people, to an association. There you bring everything that is produced by the means of production into the social flow, into a real social circulation. That which circulates in this way in the social organism, which is in a perpetual circulation, has a permanent value, even though it is always changing. But it has a permanent value because what is worn out must be replaced again. If you read in national economic books today why gold is so well suited for money, you will find all kinds of beautiful properties of gold; first, that it is popular with all people, second, that it is durable, does not wear out, does not oxidize, and so on. All these beautiful properties have this ideal good, which circulates as a means of production. The future cover for the money notes will be, if in the economic organism, not in the state organism the money is created, the money is administered, will circulate, the cover will be the capital goods not accumulating in the private property, it will be the means of production, which can be really fructified in the economic process.

To believe in this, my dear friends, the Central European states and especially Russia will have to bite the bullet first. The Western states will not believe in it for the time being, as long as the reprieve lasts; they will still believe in gold. The Central and Eastern states will have to believe that their now completely derouted currency, their completely ruined currency, will not get back on its feet in any other way than by turning economic life over to itself. No matter how many projects for the improvement of the currency in the Central and Eastern States may arise, they will all be useless and will lead to nothing; only the transfer of the currency from the state to economic life will solve the currency question in these Central and Eastern States. Certainly, the economic organizations in the Central and Eastern States will have to work with gold as long as gold is insisted upon. But this will only be a sham. When trade with the Western states is resumed, the gold treasure will have to be there. But the real prosperity, the real cover for the money will have to lie in what are circulating means of production.

At a very concrete point this threefoldness begins to become an international matter. People so easily believe that this threefolding, of which I am always speaking now, is a mere domestic affair. And that is why I have just argued in the "Appeal" that a healthy negotiation of the Central States with the Western States, if it should ever occur, can only be based on the fact that in the Central States the delegates are elected independently by the economic body, the legal body and the spiritual body. After all, the Western states can be indifferent as to whom they have to negotiate with; they can say: They are all equal to us, that is not important. - But these middle states can only come to a real recovery by themselves, by coming to a real threefolding. For the time being, the Western states can still harbor illusions that they will go beyond the threefold structure. But there will be no other way in the world than for people to convert to this threefold structure in order to live in accordance with the forces of development that want to be realized in the civilized world in the next twenty to thirty years. It could be that just those states in which things are still relatively good, like Switzerland, would make themselves comfortable to take up such a threefold structure before things go haywire. But the others, the central and eastern states, should already realize that they must either continue to destroy or move toward threefolding. We will talk more about this tomorrow.

Also known as The Present Crisis in Man's Development and The Science of the Spirit, Education, and the Practical Life. From: Lectures on Spiritual Essence and Its Working. Lecture 13 of 18 from the volume: Man's Responsibility for World Evolution through His Spiritual Connection with the Planet Earth and with the Stars Above.

The times in which we live are so earnest that at present it is not in any way appropriate to think of personal matters. Allow me, first of all, to express briefly my heartfelt thanks to your esteemed president for her kind words and then to pass on to what I believe I must tell you, for it is a long time since we saw one another in Holland.

The times in which we live and its conditions are much more earnest than most people of the present are consciously aware of.

Here we can speak of these conditions of our times from those standpoints which result from a long study of the spiritual science of Anthroposophy. We know that we live in an epoch whose characteristic peculiarity began to be evident in the 15th century. It was then that it slowly began to develop its peculiarities. Those who are initiated into the spiritual conditions of human evolution and can therefore have an insight into this course of development, know that the second half of the 19th century indicates a specially low point of human evolution in the modern and particularly in European culture. This low point may be characterised as the rise of a particular inthrust of egoism in all branches of civilised humanity, an egoism of a kind that was never there before. This wave of a special course of development then sent its ramifications into the 20th century, and now these ramifications undoubtedly continue to hold mankind under their spell.

In saying that a wave of egoism came over the whole modern civilisation, I do not speak trivially of what one generally defines as egoism, but I speak of egoism in a special sense, into which we shall penetrate a little in the course of this morning's considerations, and in a way that will be evident to those who are initiated in the true mysteries of more recent human evolution.

We already know the members constituting human nature. We know that the soul-members of human nature have been engaged for a long time in a special process of transformation, in a special course of development. We know that when we go back to very ancient times of human evolution we have to do with a particular forming of man's etheric body, during a very old time of development in India; a particular forming of the astral body then began, and a certain intermediate course of development took place during that epoch of European development which began about the year 747 in the south of Europe and which closed in the first thirty years of the 15th century. That time was the beginning of that epoch of human evolution in which we are still living. In the year 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha, began that phase of human evolution in which the so-called intellectual and understanding soul (Verstandes und Gemütsseele) unfolded. Everything that humanity still prizes to-day as Greek culture; developed through the fact that at that very time the intellectual or understanding soul was in an ascending line of development. However, while the wonderful Greek culture was unfolding, that which we call intellectual or understanding soul was in an ascending line of development. It had not yet reached its climax. For such points are always in a certain way times of probation for the evolution of humanity. For the sake of their development, the Greeks had to pass through what one might call the youthful freshness of the intellectual or understanding soul. The Greek culture, so much admired by posterity, came into being out of this youthful freshness of an intellect that was not yet permeated by egoism, out of this youthful freshness of the human understanding. Of the characteristics pertaining to the intellectual soul, the Latin and Roman culture then took over something that was in a descending line of development and decadent. Those who have a deeper comprehension for that which lived in Roman culture know: There the intellect already reaches its culmination; there the intellect rises to a high point. On that account the Romans developed such abstract ideas; on that account the Romans developed something that did not as yet exist in the whole ancient East, that did not even exist, in the sense known in Europe, in the Greek culture: The Romans developed the ideas of jurisprudence, the juridical concepts.

To-day we consider the world very superficially and we translate our thoughts on “Jus”, on jurisprudence, which, in reality are the outcome only of the Roman intellectual soul, into something which we assume to have already existed in the ancient East, for instance in Hammurabi, and so forth. But that is not the case. The Decalogue, the Ten Commandments as well as the contents of other documents of that time, were, after all, something quite different from that which constitutes our modern juridical concepts. These are something abstract, something that is no longer so close to the human soul. Everything that thus constitutes the development of the intellectual soul reached its climax during a period in the civilisation of Europe which has really been studied very little from an external historical standpoint, although it is extraordinarily important and significant for those who wish to study human evolution in the meaning of spiritual science.

That striking year to which we can draw attention as being specially significant for European development is the year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha. The year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha is the middle of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. It is that point of time when a fluctuating knowledge of the universe lived in Europe simultaneously with a fluctuating knowledge of humanity. These had nothing of the penetrating character of the knowledge of the universe that the Greeks still possessed and no proper comprehension of man's inner world.

We find instead that man sways either towards the longing for an extensive knowledge of the universe, or towards the longing for self-knowledge, knowledge of his own self. The human soul of the European peoples indeed passed through a great deal during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Roman life was then entering into its decay; it bequeathed to European humanity nothing but its language; it left behind its more or less fundamental material of culture. The life of humanity thus entered the second half of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, lasting up to the 15^th century, when our present epoch began.

From the preceding epoch, in which most of us in some way passed through one or more earthly lives, we brought over—partly through physical heredity, but particularly through the fact that we ourselves formerly were those incarnated souls—into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch the inheritance of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and we took over this inheritance. This inheritance of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch lives in everything that constitutes our present civilisation.

We worked the intellect, the thinking, into our consciousness soul. That means a great deal. At the beginning of the fifth epoch, the consciousness soul enabling man to really permeate, really grasp his ego, first took hold of his thinking, his life of representations and his intellect. Humanity thus became intelligent and clever, but clever within the consciousness soul; within the evolution of humanity, this implies the finest possible elaboration of EGOISM.

We should not only rebuke this epoch of egoism, we should not only fall upon it with criticism, but in spite of the fact that it brings with it so many temptations and leads man into great soul-dangers and even into external danger, we should recognise this age of egoism as the one in which ego-consciousness comes to the fore with special incisiveness.

Man can thus take into himself a real feeling of freedom. This feeling of freedom is something that none of us possessed in our previous incarnations, in the earlier epochs of human evolution. We had to pass through egoism, that presents so many temptations, in order to reach that longing for freedom which is the prerogative of modern humanity. One of the most important things in Anthroposophy is the knowledge that we had to take in something in order to climb over an important stage in human evolution: the stage leading to the DEVELOPMENT OF FREEDOM. For this very reason we should be aware that this crossing over is connected, with many temptations, with many dangers of humanity, both soul-spiritually and bodily. A knowledge going in the direction of Anthroposophy must enable us to take in fully the feeling of freedom, but at the same time to ennoble it, to permeate it again with a spiritual knowledge of the universe, which—in spite of the now existing mature ego-feeling, mature ego-consciousness—induces mankind to solve tasks that are not only egoistic tasks, but tasks pertaining to the whole evolution of humanity, indeed to the evolution of the whole earth, to the evolution of the whole universe.

In this connection we are now facing a great turning point in the whole civilisation of more recent times. The time of probation has indeed come! Great tasks confront mankind. But the recognition of these tasks is extremely difficult and is rendered still more difficult through the fact that we have just passed through the age of the great egoism.

We say that we sleep from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. That is right. We are then in a state of dulled consciousness. Most of you know sleep only in its negative aspect, that it dulls consciousness. Yet we do not judge the waking state in the same way. The time of being awake, the time from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, was really quite different in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. To-day people believe that they are awake in the same way in which, for instance, the people living about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha were awake. That is not the case. Their whole soul-constitution was different. Man was then awake in a different way. He was much more strongly conscious of his body.

You see, modern man really knows very little indeed of his bodily processes. The Greeks, not the Greeks of a later time, but the Greeks of the pre-Socratic and pre-Platonic times, still knew a great deal of the processes of their own body. For example, the really cultured Greek looked up to the sun. From the sun he received the light. He received at the same time a feeling that he was drawing in something etheric, that the light was being led on into his inner being. And when he was thinking, he said: The light, the sun thinks within me. The Greek of pre-Socratic times still felt this in a living way. He did not think so abstractly about thinking as we do to-day. He thought: The sun thinks within me: it allows its light to be drawn in by me. The light that shines upon the things outside, that makes the things outside visible, is active within me, by reflecting itself, as it were, within its own being, so that thoughts spring up in me. For the Greek, the thoughts within him were the light of the sun. At the same time, they were for him that element which lived in the macrocosm thanks to the influence of divine-spiritual beings. At the same time, they were for him that which really raised him to the Divine, above his ordinary dignity as a human being. He felt himself lifted above the earthly, when he thus experienced the sun's light within him as thinking. And when a particularly cultured Greek ate, he indeed considered his food, in which he took in something that he did not receive directly from the sun, but that came from the earth, as a necessity of life, yet at the same time he felt himself changing into the food, that became he himself, as it passed through his mouth, his oesophagus and digestive organs. He felt that he was one with the food, in the same way in which he felt that he was one with the sunlight. While he was digesting, he felt the earth's gravity. He felt, as it were, similar to the serpent, that he did not as yet highly appreciate, but that he still observed rather timidly—the serpent that twists away from the earth and digests in a particularly visible way, after having swallowed its food. That is how the Greek experienced what went on in his body: whether he experienced what was thinking within him as the sun's bright light, or whether he experienced within himself what chained him to the earth; i.e. the taking in of food. Through the intimate way in which his understanding was connected with his body the Greek felt with particular energy that which also lived within him as physical human being. You may also deduce this from the following:

When we paint human beings to-day in the ordinary way, as numerous painters of the present generation have done year after year, decade after decade in painting portraits, we really lie. We look at people outwardly and believe that then we bring forth something of what we experience. It is not true at all that we can experience something in that way! We could experience it only if we were able to conjure up within us the whole way of identifying ourselves feelingly with the whole of Nature as human beings, as it was the case with the Greeks. First of all, we must learn this anew, along an entirely different path than that of the Greeks.

Since the middle of the 15th century, we have acquired in an abstract-theoretical way a soul-constitution that no longer allows us to really penetrate livingly into our body, but that lives instead in concepts that do not stand visibly before us, because we have conquered thinking for the egoity, for the ego. We should realise this. And we should realise that we must once more take in spirituality from an anthroposophical spiritual science, so that the ego may once more be filled with something, and so that that which really lives within us may once more—but now in a different way—enter our life: that which the Greeks experienced in an immediate, elemental way; but that could not continue.

When the Greek walked, he walked as if led by a necessity of Nature, like the lightning flashing through the clouds, or the rolling thunder! He knew nothing whatever of freedom, but he knew man! Indeed, he knew more about man than we think he did. For instance, he knew how to coin words clearly indicating that man still knew something of the connection between the soul-spiritual and the bodily-physical. The Greek words, or those derived from the Greek, indicate even to-day far more than those based on our therapeutic or pathological conceptions, that are no longer able to understand anything. Hypochondria for instance, means cartilaginosity of the abdomen. It is a name that the Greeks found through their full knowledge of the fact that in hypochondric people the activity of the soul-spiritual gives rise to cartilaginous formations in certain parts of the body. These names mean far more than modern men suppose, and more than can in any way be grasped through modern medicine, with its abstract way of thinking, even though it experiments, dissects, etc. We must first take up again everything that is real, that once more enables us to have an insight into the world! It is the task of a spiritual scientific deepening to reach once more real facts, realities.

You see, during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, in which the human beings passed through what constitutes, as it were, a physical self-knowledge, an insight into the human body, during that time—one might say approximately, during the first third of that time, occurs the greatest event of the earth's evolution: the Mystery of Golgotha.

What is the condition of the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha occurred?—The further we go back, the more we find in ancient times—in the Greek epoch, the Egyptian-Chaldean, the Persian and the ancient Indian epoch—this immediate knowledge of the whole human being. Then, this knowledge of the whole human being disappears. The last remains of that knowledge may be found at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared. Something of that instinctive, ancient knowledge of man still existed at that time. For instance, the personalities described in the Gospels as the Apostles, or the Disciples of the Lord, still possessed something of that old instinctive knowledge, which lived in their souls altogether instinctively, not clearly. Others too possessed such a knowledge. At that time it was to a great extent decadent, but at any rate it still existed. It was dying away, burning out, but enough remained of that ancient knowledge to enable a great number of men of that time to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha accordingly. This is particularly evident when the apostle Paul entered the evolution of the times, the apostle Paul who was initiated by divine powers and to whom the spiritual world became visible.

All this gave rise to conditions of time which still enabled man to understand the Mystery of Golgotha in a certain naive, instinctive way. Many people had already entered a later phase of development. Particularly the cultured Greeks and the cultured Romans had concepts that were already far too abstract in order [to] grasp the Mystery of Golgotha in a really living way. Yet certain people had preserved the last remains of an old clairvoyant knowledge, particularly clairvoyant traditions, and they were still able to grasp that a super-earthly power, the Christ, had connected Himself with an earthly man, Jesus of Nazareth.

The year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha, was, as it were, the year in which last stragglers of those who were still able to have a real understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha could be found in Europe. But these stragglers could not understand it, for instance, through our anthroposophical spiritual science, for this did not, of course, exist at that time. They grasped it through an old knowledge that had remained from the Gnosis, and such like. A certain spiritual knowledge still existed. An ancient human inheritance lived in the human soul and this enabled man to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha.

What has remained of the Mystery of Golgotha? Intellectual traditions!—The Gnosis became theology, a mere logical way of grasping the divine. Theo-Logy: a mere logical way of grasping the divine, no longer a contemplation of the divine!

Since the year 333, the capacity of contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha in a direct way became more and more decadent, until the fateful time of the 9th century, when, in the year 869, the Eighth General Oecumenic Council at Constantinople gave out the dogma that man does not consist of body, soul and spirit, but that it is instead a Christian's duty to acknowledge that man consists only of body and soul, and that the soul possesses a few spiritual qualities. At that time, the trichotomy, as it was called, the only possible knowledge of the human being, according to which man consists of body, soul and spirit, was done away with dogmatically, and a dogma was enforced, according to which a Christian who truly believes must acknowledge that man only consists of body and soul.

Modern philosophers frequently state that their philosophy is based on an unprejudiced knowledge, and they speak on the one hand of the body, and on the other of the soul. They speak of the spirit in a very phraseological manner at the most, for they do not know the spirit. They would only know it, if they recognised the spiritual science of Anthroposophy. The “impartial philosophy” that is now being taught to such an extent—what is it, in reality?—It is the result of the dogma pronounced by the Eighth Oecumenic Council in the year 869.

We must see through this. We must be quite clear that when the modern civilisation arose, and even in the second half of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, it was considered as dangerous to speak of the spirit and to draw attention to it. But at the present time it is necessary that we should draw mankind's attention to the spirit,—the spirit that has been declared to be the devil for a long, long time, within the civilisation of Europe! After the year 333, nothing but traditions remained of the old Christological knowledge—nothing but traditions!

Everything that constitutes art shows us even more clearly that it has remained tradition! Observe, for instance, Cimabue's paintings; there you will see a world that took on a completely different aspect in Giotto's paintings. In Cimabue's paintings lived something that may also be seen in Dante, something that could no longer be experienced by the human beings of a later time! Later on, this living within a spiritual world, that may still be seen in Cimabue, ceased. Later on, it was a hypocrisy to paint a golden background, but for a Cimabue this was quite natural. And now observe a Russian icon; it is not in any way painted after a model, for it is something in which the old traditions are still alive, traditions that come from a clairvoyance still existing at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and enabling man to understand the Mystery of Golgotha.

Then came the time in which the traditions were maintained by using external instruments of power. And then came the 19th century, in which the ordinary soul-activity that brought forth such significant results in natural science and technology, was also applied to theology. But what became of theology through this? Christ-Jesus, the incarnation of a Being that does not belong to the earthly became “the simple man of Nazareth,” looked upon indeed as the most perfect man, but not as the bearer of a super-earthly Being. Theology became naturalistic. The more our modern theologians look upon Jesus of Nazareth as a human being, the less they feel induced to pursue Christological ideas, and the happier they are! Even in theology they do not wish to rise beyond the description of the man, Jesus of Nazareth, they do not wish to rise to an understanding of Christ as a super-earthly Being that dwelt in the man, Jesus of Nazareth.

To-day, those who have an insight into world-events from a spiritual standpoint, must see many things differently from the way in which they are judged by people who only see them outwardly. Central Europe, that is now passing through such a tragic destiny, was able—among other things which cannot be discussed here—to accept Adolf Harnack as a great scientist; the very man who reached the point of saying that God the Son should not be included in the Gospels! They should be read, he says, in such a way as to find in them only the man, Jesus of Nazareth, and this man's teachings concerning God the Father. Harnack's theology was intended to do away with our feelings of reverence for the spirituality of Christ. The theology which Harnack established in Central Europe really signifies the negation of Christianity, the denial of Christianity; it signifies the setting up of a world-conception clearly stating that we do not wish to have anything to do with the spirituality of Christ. It is significant to observe what has thus swept over modern humanity, with the result that the most distorted views now exist concerning the most important ideas of human life.

To-day we know what sleep is, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. Yet we do not, as a rule, observe the other kind of sleep, in which we live from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, when we walk about in our everyday life, steeped in illusions and dreams in regard to its most important facts. Indeed, in these modern times, we do not only sleep when we lie in our bed at night (this is actually the better kind of sleep), but we are also asleep in the sphere of egoism, when we lock ourselves up in our inner being, unwilling to know our human body and, at the same time, unwilling to progress to a spiritual self-knowledge. We sleep another kind of sleep during the time from falling asleep to waking up.

In order to understand this, we must indeed observe the nature of sleep from the moment of falling asleep to that of waking up. What does then take place with the human being? Why does the modern intellect believe that as far as the human constitution is concerned sleep is the same for modern man as it was for the ancient Greeks?—The Greeks were not awake in the same way as we, and the Egyptians even less so, nor did they sleep as we do. This soul-constitution in particular should be studied for every epoch of time.

When, during sleep, the human soul, that is to say, the ego and the astral body, loosens itself from the physical and etheric bodies that remain lying on the bed—where does the soul, that is the ego and the astral body, really dwell while we are asleep?

Superficial explanations that a cloud may be seen hovering over the physical body (which is quite true, as far as an altogether external form of clairvoyance is concerned), do not suffice. This is not sufficient, for we must observe what takes place inwardly. We must observe what the soul really experiences from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. In these modern times, the human soul then passes through experiences that are also lived through by the souls that are not as yet incarnated on the earth. Consider the following: Take a case that came to my notice just now, before I began my lecture: A daughter was born to an anthroposophist; one year ago, this little girl lived in the spiritual world as body and soul, and has since then made the endeavour to descend to the physical world. All those decades, that make us so much older than this little newly born girl, during all those years it lived in the spiritual world. And while we were asleep, we lived from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, in the world in which the little girl dwelt before conception, or birth. That is the world in which we dwell, when we are asleep, and there, the souls that are not yet incarnated pass through many experiences. While we are asleep, we pass with them through the fifth post-Atlantean age and through events resembling their own experiences.

From the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, we live, on the other hand, in a world that we sleep away during our waking life; we live in everything that we inherited from our past earthly existences. We live together with what has remained behind from ancient India, Persia, or Egypt; we live with what we have experienced spiritually here on earth, and this is cramped together egoistically in our inner being. We bring it along with us into our present incarnation. During the day, we live with all these things, and sleep away the present. Indeed, the present contains many things that can only be grasped spiritually. We cramp ourselves egoistically in ideas that come from the past and adhere to them obstinately even in our language, in our speech. Languages contain a great store of ancient crystallized wisdom. Yet we rebel against any kind of influence that may be exercised upon our souls by this ancient store of wisdom. For instance, to-day we use the words “Messer”, knife, or “Schere”, scissors. When we use the word “Schere”, scissors, we do not as a rule think that it comes from a kind of “Scheren”, or shearing, that is announced in every barber's shop! And when we use the word “Messer”, knife, we do not think that it is really based on a moral idea, for it is connected with “Maass”, measure, and “Zumessen”, to mete out, or cut to measure. When a knife was used in ancient times, it was really used to “mete out” a gift for someone. A store of wisdom lies crystallized in the words we use, and this ancient spiritual life that is contained in the words now uttered so thoughtlessly, lives in the depths of our being. Whenever we speak, we really experience the life of ancient epochs.

Spiritually, we pass through ancient epochs of the earth, from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, but we pass through them in a sleeping condition. And from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, we pass through events that are connected with the descent of human souls to their life on earth.

You see, these are realities, these are truths. These realities should be well impressed upon us, if we do not only wish to become acquainted with the forces of decay, but also with the forces of growth and progress. It would be so much better if, before going to sleep in the evening, a greater number of people were to do other things than those which they are accustomed to do! Consider what many people generally do, as last thing, before they go to bed! Yet a modern man should say to himself: I wish to enter the world that contains the forces of growth and progress, it is the world in which I can experience those forces that lead the human souls down to the earth, a world in which I can experience those forces spiritually.

From the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up we experience the forces pertaining to the future. For that reason, we should have a kind of craving for the teachings that speak of a spiritual world and that enable us to be conscious of the experiences of souls that are in a condition (but consciously) resembling that of souls who are asleep here on earth. The impulses for the progress of civilisation, for the healing of civilisation, must come from that world! The spiritual, political and economic impulses that should unfold as healing powers for our civilisation must come from that world! It is necessary, at the present time, that we should once more acquire the possibility of grasping the Mystery of Golgotha, of grasping it in a spiritual way.

What is the essential, or let us say, one of the essential things (for there are, of course, many essential things in it), in the Mystery of Golgotha?—That a God, a super-earthly Being, took up His abode in the man, Jesus of Nazareth. Beings of His kind have one characteristic quality: they cannot die. All those Beings of the higher Hierarchies, described in my “OCCULT SCIENCE”, the Angels, Archangels, etc. up to the highest Beings, the Cherubim, Seraphim, etc. do not die (read the description of their life's course in my books), they do not die as men die. What did Christ take upon Himself, Christ Who came from the higher Hierarchies?—He died within a human body. You see, here we have significant forces that pass over into the evolution of humanity upon the earth, Christ died in a human body; he passed through the experience of death, an experience unknown to the other gods who are connected with the earth. Up to the year 333, it was still possible to grasp this truth to a certain extent. Now we must learn to grasp it anew! We should grasp anew that a super-earthly Being shared with us the experience of death, thus passing over into the development of the earth. Yet at the same time we should have the great modesty of recognising that the experiences of this Being highly surpass what can be experienced through the soul-constitution of a human being.

The Christ descended from worlds where death is unknown. What Beings serve the Christ?—Among those who serve Him, there is not one who could make the same sacrifice, not one who could have come down to the earth, in order to pass through death. Beings that belong to the hierarchy of the Angeloi, right up to the higher Hierarchies, Beings connected with the evolution of the earth, are Christ's servants. We cannot perceive them, if we do not rise to a super-earthly knowledge of the higher Hierarchies. Through a knowledge of the spiritual worlds we should seek that which leads us to Christ. Spiritual science is needed above all in order to attain a new knowledge of Christ. For Christ is here, upon the earth, and He is surrounded by the world of the higher Hierarchies. Man's great temptation in modern times is the modern natural science with its great triumphs and its admission of purely external forces of Nature. Yet behind all these forces of Nature live the spiritual Beings! The assertions of natural science are certainly right, nevertheless the spiritual Beings that serve Christ live behind the forces of Nature, thinking and directing them. Christ lives in everything that constitutes the development of the earth. Super-earthly Beings serve Him—but these super-earthly Beings can only be recognised through spiritual science. Consequently an extremely important task evolves upon spiritual science: the renewal of Christianity.

All this shows you that to-day we cannot pursue spiritual science merely as a personal concern. To-day spiritual science concerns civilised humanity as a whole. Through an inner necessity, spiritual science was from the very beginning pursued in the circle that afterwards obtained the name of “Anthroposophical Society”, in a different way than in the Theosophical Society. The whole constitution of the Theosophical Society had, from the very outset, a sectarian character, something that reckoned with the egoism of modern times. Anthroposophy therefore had the task of taking into account the consciousness of modern times, that which constitutes the external culture of humanity, and of pouring into it the results of a spiritual manner of contemplation. Little differences and strifes are of no importance whatever in the face of such a task. It was essential for me to maintain the purity of a spiritual movement that reckons with the whole science of modern times. Whether this or that person may or may not accept one or the other truth, is of no importance to me. Even though the whole world may abuse spiritual science and criticize it, I do not consider this as essential, for the essential thing is that the spiritual science that I advance should really harmonize fully, with the modern, scientific mentality, with the moral conscience of modern times. For this reason, I had to publish my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” before revealing the truths of Karma. I have often listened with great pain to theosophists who said: If this or that man suffers, if he suffers socially and belongs to a lower class or caste, it is his Karma and he has deserved it. This interpretation of the idea of Karma corresponded to the egoistical requirements of men who lived in the 19th and 20th century. Yet they did not think that we do not only live through our present life on earth, but that we shall also live through a future life. To-day we should not always look back on what we once possessed in past lives on earth, but we should also consider that in future lives on earth we shall be looking back on what we are passing through now—and this will then be an entirely new experience. Freedom fully harmonizes with the idea of Karma ... Everything that appears in the account-book of life is karmically connected.

You see, if I reckon up the debit and credit sides of destiny and strike the balance, I obtain life's balance; but this does not entail that the single items are subjected to the necessity of Nature. Just as the single items of a commercial account book do not depend on diligence, and so forth, and finally enable us to strike a balance, so freedom can very well be connected with the idea of Karma. We should not adopt an easy fatalistic idea when advancing the view of Karma as a fully justified idea. Spiritual science should therefore be in full harmony also with the conscience and the moral attitude of modern humanity. For that reason it was necessary to work more extensively with spiritual science, also during the time in which the catastrophe broke out in regard to everything that has been caused by the egoism of modern humanity, both soul-spiritually and physically.

Would it have been honest and straightforward to continue preaching that spiritual science can help mankind, and yet advance no social ideas at a time when social requirements became as urgent as they are to-day? Would human love not have progressed in the direction of a social knowledge? Shall we content ourselves with declamations on human love? Or should we not rather progress to real social impulses?

The fact that we can only see Christ's ministering spirits, clearly when we look into the spiritual world, is a result and a fundamental knowledge of spiritual science, a result of what I have told you to-day concerning waking and sleeping, concerning sleeping wakefulness and the awakening from sleep through spiritual science. Spiritual science will also enable us to grasp once more the Mystery of Golgotha, in accordance with a modern mentality. And as a result, spiritual science must not restrict itself to some sectarian group, but if must be brought out into the world in the best possible way, according to our capacities and to our place in life! The centre at Dornach was not intended to be a sectarian centre, but one that renders fruitful every branch of science and life, social life and artistic life. Anthroposophy and its spiritual science must become a concern of the great masses of humanity, although its most important things and that which penetrates into the innermost depths of our heart, awakening our inner forces, are pursued within the narrower circles of our Groups. There, in those Groups, we gather forces, in order to develop a certain higher knowledge, which we must first take in there. It is a knowledge that must be developed, for to-day we live in a time in which mankind really does not know what it is seeking; it sleeps away the most important things of life. Nevertheless it is a time in which mankind seeks after a new knowledge of the spirit! Let us feel this deeply, as pioneers, I might say, of a spiritual renewal—as Anthroposophists.

For that reason I so warmly wish that also the Groups in Holland might pursue an earnest, diligent and untiring study of the knowledge that can be obtained in our movement, from out the spiritual worlds. I warmly wish that our Groups should study diligently. These studies should constitute the point of departure for bringing out Anthroposophy into the world—and each one must do this in his own way—so that mankind's longings may be satisfied through a spiritual contemplation directed towards Anthroposophy. For that reason, let us grasp the nature of the longings of modern man. Let us not think that we become materialistic, when we spiritualize matter! And let us clearly realise that mankind would face a great misfortune, if it fails to obtain the true knowledge that is able to avert that misfortune.

The Eighth Oecumenic Council of the year 869 drove away from human knowledge the contemplation of the spirit. Those who have an entirely materialistic mentality seek to prepare the next stage: they also wish to eliminate the soul and to establish the general dogmatic knowledge that man only consists of the body. Certain devilish initiates are now excogitating means of educating the human being materialistically, of preparing him materialistically as a body; they seek to attain their end not by means of psychic influences, but by means of ingredients and substances taken from Nature. They plan an experimental psychology and seek to adopt principles that are not those of the Waldorf School (for the Waldorf School principles are spiritual protests against modern materialism), and they already undertake all manner of experiments in order to test man's capacities. This is but a preliminary stage of what they really aim at. The child is no longer to be educated psychically, but with the aid of external, material means, so that its capacities may develop in a bodily way. Thus man would gradually become an automaton, unless we bear in mind at the right moment that the path that led to the elimination of the spirit must not be continued in the direction of the elimination of the soul as well. We must instead follow the opposite direction of the Eighth Oecumenic Council; we must once more follow the path enabling us to find the spirit anew, and to cultivate in human life, in every sphere of practical human life, only what we can discover through the spirit.

This is what I wish to implant into your souls, what I wish to implant into your hearts, my dear friends, after our long absence. Cultivate spiritual science first of all as a concern of the heart, in the way in which it should be cultivated individually, so that we may progress. Cultivate what you have thus taken in, and then bring it out to humanity in every sphere of life, bring out what you have thus taken in! You will then gradually find the path enabling you, in the present difficult and earnest time of probation, to do the right thing for humanity, according to your place in life.

Anthroposophical comprehension of spirit is not intended to be a merely theoretical world-philosophy, but rather to be the full content and energizing power of life.

And it fulfills its mission only if we so strengthen our anthroposophical apprehension of the world that it becomes fully alive within us.

For in thus uniting our souls with the anthroposophical conception of spirit we have become, in a certain sense, guardians who watch over definite and significant processes in human evolution.

Apart from Anthroposophy, whether men are followers of one system or of another they are as a rule convinced that thoughts and ideas, besides what they are in their own minds, are not also something else in their connection with the outer world. They expect thoughts and ideas, as ideals, to become operative in the world only in proportion as titan, by his deeds in the realm of the senses, succeeds in establishing their value.

The whole anthroposophical attitude presupposes our clear understanding that our thoughts and ideas must find still other means of realization besides the results of our deeds in the outer sense-world.

In the very recognition of this vital necessity lies the demand that the anthroposophist bear his part in watching over the signs of the times. Much is happening in earthly evolution; and upon malt, and particularly upon man in our own time, lies the obligation to gain a genuine under-standing of what occurs in the evolution of the world in which he has been placed.

With regard to a single individual everyone knows that his development must be taken into account, and not the mere outer facts that are about him. Just consider, roughly speaking, the present external facts surrounding human beings who are five years, ten years, twenty, thirty, fifty, or seventy years of age. Vet no one who is reasonable will demand the same attitude towards these things from the five-year-olds, the ten-year-olds, the twenty-year-olds as from men of fifty or seventy. What a man’s reaction to his environment should be can be determined only by taking into consideration his personal development. This is universally admitted in regard to individuals.

But as the individual man is subject to a definite development, having a different kind of powers in childhood, middle life, and old age, just so has general humanity different powers at different periods of its evolution. One is, as it were, sleeping in the midst of the world evolution if one fails to note that humanity, in its essence, is different in the twentieth from what it was in the fifteenth century, or even at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and earlier. Ignoring of this fact—the idea that one may speak of a mail or of general humanity abstractly, without consideration of their continuous evolving—belongs to the greatest errors, defi-ciencies, and aberrations of our time.

Now it may be asked: How is man to arrive at a more exact insight into these things? You know that we have often discussed one important point in regard to this evolution. The Greco-Latin period, from the 8th century B. C. to about the 15th century of our own era, we have to count as the so-called culture period of the Intellectual or Mind Soul; and the time since the 15th century as the culture period of the Consciousness Soul. This is an essential factor in the evolution of humanity precisely as regards our own time. Thus we know that the principal force in human development from the 15th century until the third millennium is the Consciousness Soul.

But in Spiritual Science, in real Spiritual Science one may never stop at generalities and abstract statements; one must seek at all times to grasp concrete facts. Abstractions are useful only when one is curious in a very ordinary sense. If it is intended to make Spiritual Science into life’s content, into a life-force, you must be more serious than curious, and you must not stop at such abstractions as I have just described. That we are living in the period of the Consciousness-Soul, that the development of the Consciousness-Soul is counted upon, is quite correct and extraordinarily important too, but we must not stop at that.

If we wish to attain to a definite view of these things we must first of all consider somewhat more exactly the essential constitution of man. As men we are divided, in the sense of Spiritual Science and counting from above downward, into the ego or 1, the astral body, the etheric body (which I have latterly called also the body of formative forces,) and the physical body. Among these different members of our human nature we live, for the time being, psychically and spiritually, only in the ego or I. The ego is given to us through our earthly evolution and the Spirits of Form who direct it. Everything, really, that enters our consciousness enters it through our ego. If the ego does not so unfold that it can maintain its connection—even though by means of the bodies—with the outer world, then we have as little consciousness as during sleep. The ego connects us with our environment. The astral body was given to us during the Moon-evolution that preceded the present Earth-evolution: our etheric body during the still earlier Sun-evolution; the physical body, in its inception, during the Saturn-evolution.

But when you go through the description of these bodies in Occult Science you will see in what a complicated way the adjustment of these four members was brought about in order to make man what lie is today. Do we not learn from the facts described in Occult Science that in the formation of the three sheaths of the human being spirits from all possible hierarchies took part? Do we not see that what enfolds its as physical body. etheric body, astral body is of a very very complicated nature? But not only did these hierarchies work together in bringing our vehicles into existence—they are still working within them. And no one understands man who believes him to be only a conjunction of flesh, blood, bones. etc., which natural science, physiology, biology, and anatomy describe.

Approaching the truth of this human sheath-being, seeing him in his reality, we perceive that beings from the higher hierarchies are working together wisely, as predetermined, in all that takes place unconsciously in his bodies. You may gather from the rather sketchy outlines which I have given in my Occult Science that this co-operation of individual spirits from the higher hierarchies in fashioning man must be very intricate in its details. But, nevertheless, if you wish to understand man you must come at these things ever more concretely, more in detail.

Now in this field of research it is extremely difficult even to focus the attention upon a concrete question; they are tremendously complicated, these concrete questions. Just suppose someone were to ask: What is the hierarchy of the Seraphim or of the Dynamis doing in the etheric body of man in the year 1918 of the present cycle of human evolution? For one can as easily ask this question as to ask, for instance, whether it is raining at the moment in Lugano. Of course, one can answer neither of these questions by mere thinking or by mere theories, but only by ascertaining the facts. Just as one must find out by a letter or telegram whether or not it is raining in Lugano, so we must inform ourselves through a real penetration of the facts regarding the present task, let us say, of the Spirits of Wisdom or the Thrones in the human etheric body. Such a question is of extraordinary complexity, and we can only persevere in our gradual approach to the spheres where such questions properly arise. And in this field of inquiry care is taken that man’s wings shall not grow up into the sky, and he become arrogant and proud, in his striving for real knowledge!

The nearest vistas, so to speak, which concern us most directly, are those upon which we can form a definite opinion. But these we ought to see clearly if we do not wish to remain asleep in regard to our own place in human evolution.

So I shall speak to you of a question which is not as vague and indefinite as the question: What are the Dynamis or the Thrones doing in our etheric body?—although this also is very concrete. Instead I shall put before you a question which really concerns men of the present day. This is: What are the angels (those active beings closest to man) doing in this present age within the astral body?

When we look into our inner being we see that the astral body lies nearest to our ego, so it is to be hoped that the reply to this question may vitally concern us. The angels are the hierarchy directly above the human hierarchy itself. So we are asking a moderate question, and later we shall see how we can answer the inquiry: What is being done by the angels in the human astral body, right now in the present age of mankind, which is passing through the 20th century, the period which began in the 15th century and will last into the beginning of the 3rd millennium?

Now what can be said as to the means of answering such a question? One can only say that spiritual research, if earnestly pursued, is not a trifling with concepts or words, but really works into the sphere where the spiritual world becomes perceptible. And anything so close to us may certainly be observed, but this question may be answered profitably only in the age of the consciousness-soul itself.

You might easily think that if this question could have come up in earlier ages and an answer been demanded, that this answer would now be at hand. But neither in the age of atavistic clairvoyance, nor in the Greco-Latin period could this question be answered, for the reason that the soul-pictures obtained by atavistic clairvoyance obscured the observation of the angelic activity in our astral body. There was nothing to be seen, just because of these atavistic pictures; and in the Greco-Latin period, thinking was not yet as forceful as it now is ... thinking has been strengthened, particularly through the era of natural science. So the age of the consciousness-soul is the one in which such questions may be consciously and effectively considered.

The productive quality of our Spiritual Science must be shown in that we do not put people off with theories, but are able to offer knowledge that is definitely applicable to life.

What are the angels doing in our astral body? We can convince ourselves of what they are doing only by rising to a certain degree of clairvoyant observation, so that we see what takes place in our astral body. We must attain at least to a certain degree of imaginative cognition if the formulated question is to be answered.

Then it becomes evident that these beings from the hierarchy of the angels—each angelic individual having its responsibility towards one 1w-man being, but also all working together—form pictures in the human astral body. They produce pictures tinder the guidance of the Spirits of Form

Unless we rise to imaginative cognition we do not realize that images are induced continuously in our astral body. They arise, these pictures, and then fade away. Were they not so created there would he in the future no development for man that would express the intention of the Spirits of Form. What the Spirits of Form propose to accomplish with us during and beyond the Earth evolution they must first model, as it were in images, and later their objective reality will appear in a transformed humanity.

Today the Spirits of Form are already creating these images in the astral body through the angels. The angels form pictures in the astral body upon a plane which man may reach by raising his thinking to clairvoyance. And if we can follow up these pictures, then we see that they are constructed according to definite impulses and principles, and in such a way that in the manner of their inception lie certain forces for the future development of mankind. If we watch the angels at their work (however strange this may sound, we can only express it in that way), if we watch, we shall notice that the angels have in their work a very definite intention in regard to future social conditions on earth. They aim to implant in the astral bodies such images as will bring about in the future certain determined social conditions in the united life of humanity.

Men may resist the admission that angels are releasing within them ideals for the future, but it is nevertheless true. And there is a fundamental principle in this picture-forming by the angels: the fundamental rule that in the future no one is to find peace in the enjoyment of good fortune while others beside him are unhappy. There reigns an impulse of the most perfect fraternity—of brotherhood rightly understood—of the most absolute unification of the human race with relation to social conditions in physical life. That is one standpoint, according to which the im-ages are formed by the angels in the human astral body.

But there is a second impulse with reference to which the angels form these images. They have certain objectives, not only in relation to the outer, social life, but also in relation to the soul itself, and to the soul-life of men. Through pictures imprinted upon the astral body they aim to so affect the soul-life that in the future every man shall see in his neighbor a hidden divinity.

Mark well, my dear friends: the angels intend through their work to bring about changes. These will be such that we shall no longer consider man, either in theory or practice, as a highly developed animal—according to his physical qualities alone. Instead we shall approach everyone with the fully developed realization that in every man something appears that takes its rise in fundamental divine sources, revealing itself through flesh and blood. To conceive of man as a manifestation, a revelation from the spiritual world, as earnestly as possible, as strongly as possible, as intelligently as possible—all this is being put into their pictures by the angels.

When this comes true it will have quite definite results. All the free religious instinct that will unfold in humanity will be founded upon the fact that in every man the image of God will he acknowledged in immediate life practice rather than in mere theory. Then there will be no religious coercion; none will be needed, for then every meeting between men will be as a matter of course a religious act, a sacrament, and no one will need any particular church organization upon the physical plane to support his religious life. The church, if it rightly understands itself, can have but one object: to render itself unnecessary upon the physical plane in that all life is being made into an expression of the supersensible.

To pour out upon mankind complete freedom of the religious life underlies the impulses of the angels’ work.

There is also a third intention: to give to humanity the possibility of attaining to the spirit through thought, through thinking to leap across the chasm, and arrive at direct spiritual experience.

Spiritual Science for the spirit, religious freedom for the soul, fraternity for the body—that resounds like cosmic music through the work of the angels in human astral bodies. Man needs only to lift his consciousness to a different level to feel himself removed to this wonderful workshop of angelic activity.

Now the fact is that we are living in the age of the consciousness-soul, and in this age the angels work within the astral body as I have just described. Man is to come gradually to conscious comprehension of these things. This belongs to human development. 1-low then, does one come to say anything like that which I have just told you? Where, so to say, is this activity to be found?

Well, it is still found today in the sleeping man. It is found in the conditions of normal sleep, and it is also found in waking sleep conditions. I have often explained how men, though supposedly awake, sleep their life away in the midst of most important matters. And I can give you the not very cheering assurance that anyone who goes through life consciously finds today many many sleepers. What is happening in the world they permit to happen, without interesting themselves in it, or troubling themselves about it, or taking any part in it. Great world-events often pass by men, as that which takes place in the city passes by sleepers—although the people are apparently awake. Then, however, if such men, though waking, are wholly unaware of something important, we can see in their astral bodies—quite independently of what they do or do not wish to know—how this important work of the angels goes on, of which I have spoken.

Such things often proceed in a manner which must seem to humanity very puzzling, very paradoxical. Many a man is regarded as quite unworthy to enter upon this or that connection with the spiritual world. But in truth such an one is in this incarnation just a fearful sleepyhead, who dozes through everything that goes on around him. Yet in his astral body one of the company of angels is working for the future of mankind. The astral body is nevertheless made use of, and all this may be observed within it.

But the point is that such a thing as this must force its way into the human consciousness. The consciousness-soul must be lifted to recognition of that which may be found only in this way.

Having accepted these assumptions, you will understand when I now call to your attention that this epoch of the consciousness-soul presses forward to a definite event, and that since it is with the consciousness-soul that we have to do, it will depend upon men how this event takes place in human evolution.

You see, it may come a hundred years earlier or later, but it really would have to enter the sphere of human development. And this happening may be thus described: men must come, purely through their consciousness-soul, through their own conscious thinking, to actual sight of the way in which the angels prepare the future of mankind. What spiritual science teaches on this subject must become the practical worldly wisdom of humanity, so practical that men may be firmly convinced, and of their own knowledge, that the angels intend what I have indicated.

Now the human race is so far advanced in its approach to freedom that it depends upon man himself to face this event in full consciousness, or to sleep it away. What would it mean to meet it in full consciousness? This means the following: It is possible today to study spiritual science; it is there; and it is only necessary to study it. It will be an aid if, in addition, various meditations are used, and such practical directions as are given in Knowledge of she Higher Worlds and its Attainment. But all that is really necessary is to study spiritual science, and consciously and rightly understand it. Without the development of clairvoyance any man may study it understandingly who does not himself set up the obstacle of prejudice. And if men study it ever more and more, assimilating its concepts and ideas, then their consciousness will so awaken that, instead of dozing through important events, they will become aware of them.

These events may be more exactly characterized, for just to know what the angel is doing is only a preparation. The main thing is to realize the threefold truth which mankind is to receive through the angelic activity, and which will make its entrance earlier or later, according to man’s receptivity, or at worst—not at all.

First: It will be shown how man, by means of his most immediate interest can comprehend the deeper side of human nature.

Yes, my dear friends, a moment will come, which men should not lose by sleeping, when they will receive from the spiritual world through their angels a stimulating impulse, which will lead them to feel a much deeper interest in every man than we are inclined to feel today. This heightened interest in our fellow man is not to develop subjectively in man’s usual indolent fashion, but suddenly, as with a leap, through the spiritual infusion of a certain secret—what the other man really is. I mean by this something concrete, not a theoretical abstraction: men will learn something that will arouse their continuous interest in each other. This is the first point in this threefold truth, and it will profoundly affect our social life.

The second point in it will be that the Christ-impulse requires, besides all else, complete religious freedom, and that no Christianity is genuine which does not make this freedom possible. This will be shown to each man spiritually, irrefutably by his angel.

And the third is the indisputable insight into the spiritual nature of the world.

This event, as already stated, is to take place in such a way that the consciousness-soul may acquire a definite relation to it. This is imminent in human evolution, for to this end the angel is working through its images in the astral body.

But I now point out to you that this approaching event is dependent upon the human will. Men may leave many things undone, and many are failing today in much that should lead to a conscious experience of this great moment.

There exist, however, as you know, other beings in universal evolution that have an interest in turning man from his course: the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings. The divine evolution of mankind includes the development I have described. If man were left to his own nature he would arrive in time at the perception of what the angel is unfolding in his astral body, but the Luciferic influence tends to force man away from this insight into the work of the angels. The Luciferic beings do this by curbing his will. They try to darken man’s understanding of the exercise of his own free will while making him into a good, even a spiritual being—indeed from the point of view which I am considering. Lucifer desires for man goodness, spirituality—but wishes to make it automatic, without free will. Man is to be raised to clairvoyance, in accordance with good principles, but automatically: he is to act as a spiritual reflection, an image of the divine, but without free will and the possibility of evil.

This is connected with definite evolutionary secrets. The Luciferic beings, as you know, have stood still at different stages of development, and they introduce elements foreign to normal evolution. They are interested in taking such a hold upon man that he may not attain to free will because they have never won this for themselves. Free will can be gained only upon earth, and they want to have nothing to do with the earth. They wish only Saturn, Sun. and Moon development—and to stop at that. These Luciferic beings hate in a sense the free will of man. They act in a highly spiritual way, but automatically—this is most significant—arid they want to lift man to their own spiritual height. They want to make him automatic—spiritual, but automatic. From this arises the danger that if man should become an automatic spiritual being before his consciousness-soul functions fully he might miss in the drowsiness of insensibility the revelation that is to come.

But the Ahrimanic Icings also work against this revelation. They do not strive to render man especially spiritual, but rather to kill in him the consciousness of his own spirituality. They try to induce in hint the belief that he is really only a completely developed animal. Ahriman is in reality the great teacher of materialistic Darwinism. He is also the teacher of all that technical and practical activity which admits the value of nothing beyond the external life of the senses, which desires an extensive technology only in order that man may satisfy, with greater finesse, hunger, thirst, and other animal needs. Working upon the consciousness-soul by all sorts of subtle scientific methods; the Ahrimanic beings strive to obscure, to kill in man the realization that he is an image of Deity.

In earlier ages it would have been useless for the Ahrimanic spirits to try in this way through theories to becloud the truth. Why? In the Greco-Latin period, and even more truly in earlier times, when man still possessed atavistic clairvoyance, the manner of his thinking was unim-portant, for he still had the pictures through which he looked into the spiritual world. Whatever Ahriman might have suggested about his relation to the animals would have had no effect upon his conduct. Thinking became powerful—powerful in its weakness, one might say—only in our own fifth post-Atlantean period. Only since the 15th century has thinking been competent to lead the consciousness-soul into spiritual realms—or, on the other hand, to hinder it from entering the spiritual world. Only now are we living in an age when a theory, a science, by a conscious method may rob man of his divinity, or his experiences of divinity. This is possible only in the period of the consciousness-soul. Therefore the Ahrimanic spirits are striving to spread a teaching that will obscure the divine origin of man.

From the description of these influences, adverse to man’s normal divine evolution, it may be gathered how he must order his life, so that he may not permit to pass unobserved the revelation that is to come. For otherwise a great danger will arise. And against this man must be on the alert. or else instead of this momentous event, which is intended to affect powerfully the future form of Earth-evolution, something may take place which would seriously impair it.

You see, certain spiritual beings, attain their own development through maps, concomitantly with man’s unfolding. The angels who produce their images in the human astral body do not 4o this as a game, but in order that thereby something may be achieved. Vet, since results must be sought within humanity, the whole thing would be rendered futile if man, having acquired the consciousness-soul, should deliberately disregard it. The whole thing would become play! The angels would be only playing a game in the development of man’s astral body! Only by coming to realization within humanity does it become, not a game but a matter of serious import.

From this you may learn that the work of the angels must remain earnest under all circumstances. Consider what might be behind the scenes of existence if men could reduce the angelic activity to play, simply through their drowsy insensibility.

And what if that should nevertheless happen! What if humanity should persist in remaining stolidly unaware of the important spiritual revelation of the future! If, for example, men permit to pass unnoticed the middle part—that relating to religious freedom—and so miss the repe-tition of the Mystery of Golgotha upon the etheric plane, of which I have often spoken, the reappearance of the etheric Christ, and other important things; if men should lose all this, then what should be accomplished through pictures in the astral body would have to be brought about by the angels in another way.

If man, by failing to become alert, should prevent what ought to be done in his astral body, then an effort would be made to reach the same results through sleeping human bodies. That which man would remain densely unaware of in his waking condition would be carried out-by the angels with the help of the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. There, forces would be sought in order to produce effects unattainable when the waking soul is within these bodies, but which may be induced while man, who ought to have been awake to these things, is outside his physical and etheric bodies, with his I and astral body.

That is the great danger for the period of the consciousness-soul. That is what might occur if men should not turn to the spiritual life before the beginning of the third millennium! We are separated from it, as you know, by only a brief time, since the third millennium begins with the year 2000. It might come to pass that what the angels are to gain as the result of their labor they would have to seek in the sleeping bodies of men instead of in waking humanity. They might be forced to withdraw all their work from the astral body and submerge it in the etheric body in order to bring it to realization. But man would have no part in this. It would have to be accomplished during his absence from the etheric body, for if he were present in his waking state he would prevent it.

Now I have given you a general idea of the matter. But what would be the result if the angels should be obliged to carry out such work through man’s physical and etheric bodies during sleep without his conscious cooperation?

Its effect upon human evolution would be undoubtedly threefold. First of all there would be engendered in man’s sleeping bodies, in the absence of his Ego and astral body, something not aroused through his free choice, but which he would find present when he awoke in the morning. It would always be present, and it would be instinct instead of conscious freedom, and therefore detrimental. And certain instinctive knowledge, which is to enter human nature, regarding the mysteries of birth, conception, and the entire sexual life, truly threatens to become harmful tinder the dangerous conditions which I have described: that is, the danger that certain angels would themselves then undergo a change, of which I cannot now speak further, since this change belongs to the deeper mysteries of the science of initiation, of which nothing may be given out at present. It may be said, however, that the effect upon human evolution would be such that certain instincts relating to sexual life would arise, not wholesomely in clear waking consciousness, but in a pernicious, destructive way. These instincts would not be mere personal errors, but would pass over into social life, bringing about conditions—through the effects of this sexual life upon the blood—which would prevent men from developing any sort of brotherhood on earth, but instead would cause them to oppose it. This would all be a matter of instinct.

Thus there is coming a decisive point where one may turn to the right, remaining watchful and alert; or to the left—and sleep! But in this latter case instincts will appear that will be horrible!

What will the natural scientists says if such instincts appear? They will say that they are a normal development, an inevitable stage in human evolution. Man cannot be warned of such dangers by natural science for. from the scientific standpoint, it is equally explicable whether men become angels or devils. In regard to either, science says the same thing: the later is derived from the earlier—the great wisdom of the causal explanation! Natural science will he quite unaware of the event of which I have spoken: for if human beings become half-devils through their sexual instincts, science will look upon it as a necessity of nature. In short, the matter cannot he explained scientifically, although whatever may happen, science will regard it as susceptible of explanation.

Such things are to be comprehended only through spiritual insight, by supersensible cognition.

Such would be the first result of the changes evoked within the angelic activity. The second would bring to mankind an instinctive knowledge of certain remedies—but a destructive knowledge!

In a materialistic sense everything connected with medicine would make an enormous advance. Men would have instinctive insight into the curative power of certain substances and combinations, and by this knowledge would do fearful harm. But the harm would be called useful. That which is unhealthy would be called healthy, for it would be discovered that certain processes would have enjoyable results. Certain methods leading in unwholesome directions would simply be found agreeable.

The knowledge of the healing power of various processes would be increased, but would take a harmful direction, for through certain instincts it would also be discovered what kind of diseases could be brought forth by different substances and agencies. And a man could decide, according to his selfishness and egotism, whether to bring about illness or to refrain from doing so.

The third result would be mail’s acquaintance with definite powers by which, with the slightest stimulus—through the harmonizing of certain vibrations—great mechanical forces could be unleashed in the world. A sort of mental guidance of mechanism, of everything of a mechanical nature, would be developed in this way, and the whole technique be led into a vicious channel, which would, however, inordinately please and serve man’s egoism.

That, my dear friends, is a concrete statement of possible developments, and a conception of life and being which can be rightly appreciated only by those who realize that an unspiritual conception of life cannot clarify the situation. If a pernicious medicine were produced, if a terrible aberration of the sex instincts should develop, or an evil motive power in world-mechanics through the application of spiritual powers to natural forces, all unspiritual world-philosophy would not see through it, nor realize its deviation from the true path … just as little as a sleeper, so long as he sleeps, could see the approach of a thief who is coming to rob him. He sees what has happened only when he awakes in the morning—and what a terrible awakening would await mankind! Yet without this awakening man would continue to pride himself upon the broadening of his medical knowledge, and find such satisfaction in certain sex aberrations that lie would praise these errors as superhuman, as freedom from prejudice, as open-mindedness! Ugliness would be beautiful, and beauty ugly in some connections, and it would not be noticed because all this would be looked upon as a natural development. But it would be a wandering from the path which, within humanity itself, is prescribed for man’s essential nature.

I believe, my dear friends, if any feeling has been gained of the way in which spiritual science presses into our whole attitude of mind and soul, that one may also be possessed of the earnestness necessary for the reception of such truths as have been presented today. We may derive from them—as from all aspects of spiritual science—the recognition of a certain responsibility, a life-obligation. Whatever our circumstances, whatever we may have to do in the world, the important point is to be able to preserve this thought: that our actions must be saturated and irradiated by our anthroposophical consciousness. Then we shall contribute something towards the true progress of mankind.

A man is entirely mistaken if he ever believes that true spiritual science, seriously and rightly understood, could ever divert him from the practical, intensive work of life. True spiritual science brings awakening—awakening to the kind of things that I have pointed out today. My dear friends, if we may use the comparison that seeing into the spiritual world is a further awakening, just as ordinary awakening is an awakening from sleep, we can then, in order to understand the comparison, ask this other question: Can the waking state be harmful to our sleep?

Certainly, if it is not what it should be! If a man’s waking life is wholesome he will have healthy sleep, but if his waking hours are stupid, lazy, comfort-loving, without exertion, then his sleep will be unhealthy. And it is just the same with the waking life to which we are attuning ourselves through spiritual science. If through spiritual science we establish in ourselves a proper relation to the spiritual world, this will guide the interests of the ordinary sense-world in right directions, in the same way that a healthy waking life regulates our sleep.

Anyone who considers the life of our own times must indeed be asleep if he remain unaware of several things. How men have boasted, especially in recent years. of their efficiency! They have brought it about that those who most despise the realm of ideas, the mental, and spiritual, now occupy all the responsible positions. And one could go on declaiming about efficiency in this life so long as mankind has not been actually dragged into the abyss. Just now a few are beginning—in most cases only instinctively—to croak that a new time must conic, that all sorts of new ideals must arise! But it is only croaking. And should these things appear as instincts only, without conscious adaptation to the life of spiritual science, they would lead to the degeneracy of that which ought to be experienced in the waking state, rather than to any advantageous evolutionary transition.

He who appeals to people in familiar phrases may still meet with sonic success, but men will have to endure other words, unaccustomed expressions, in order that out of chaos a social cosmos may again emerge.

If in any age the men who should wake fail to do so, and do not recognize what ought to be done, then nothing authentic happens, but the ghost of the preceding epoch wanders around. In many religious organizations ghosts of the past move about, and our legal systems are still haunted by the ghost of ancient Rome. In the age of the consciousness-soul spiritual science is to free men from this bondage, and lead them to actual observation of a spiritual fact: What does the angel do in our astral body? To theorize about the angels, etc., is at best but a beginning. Progress requires us to speak factually, both in regard to our own period, and in an-swering the question which most immediately concerns us. It does concern us because the images that the angel is evoking in our astral body are to determine our future conditions, which must he brought to actuality through the consciousness-soul.

If we had no consciousness-soul we should not need to trouble ourselves, for other spirits, other hierarchies, would enter and work out what the angel is weaving; but since we are to develop the consciousness-soul no other spirits will step in to bring the angel’s work to realization.

Of course in the Egyptian age different angels performed this work of weaving. But soon other spirits entered, and to man this was darkened by his atavistic-clairvoyant consciousness. Thus men wove—these men, because of what they saw clairvoyantly—a (lark veil over the angels’ pictures. But now man himself is to unveil them. Therefore, he must not miss by sleeping that which will be brought into his conscious life during the period which is to close even before the third millennium. Let us extract from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science not merely all sorts of doctrines, but also resolutions; and these will give us strength to be wakeful. We can accustom ourselves to being wakeful human beings. We can he mindful of many things.

We can begin at once with watchfulness, discovering that not a (lay passes in which some miracle does not take place in our lives. We may also reverse this statement. We may say: If on any given day we call find nothing wonderful in our experience, we have simply overlooked it. Try at night to look over your life. You will find in it some circumstance great or small, of which you may say to yourself: It entered my life most strangely, and was accomplished quite unusually. You will succeed in this if you think comprehensively enough, if you fix your soul’s eye upon the association of events. In ordinary life this is not done because people seldom ask themselves: What, for instance, was prevented by this or that?

We seldom trouble ourselves to consider the things which have been prevented and which, had they occurred, would have entirely altered our lives. Back of these things, which were removed in one way or another, there exists a great deal that may well educate us in wakefulness. How many things might have happened to me today? If I ask myself this question every evening, and then think over single circumstances that might have brought about this or that result, there will attach to such questions reflections that will lead to watchfulness and self-discipline. This is something which, once begun, will take us further and further, until at last we do not try to find out only what was meant by the fact that we, for example, wanted to go out some morning at half-past ten, and that just at the very last moment some man or other came who detained us…

We are annoyed by the delay, but we do not ask what might have happened if we had really gone at the time planned. What was altered thereby?

I have already spoken to you more explicitly of these practices. From observation of the negative in our lives (which, however, bears eloquent witness to the wisdom guiding us), up to observation of the angel weaving and working in our astral body, there is a direct path, a very direct path, and one which we may safely follow.

My dear Friends! The day before yesterday we considered the first part of what we can call the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold. I said that this encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold must be taken with much more than ordinary seriousness. One should be clear about this, for unless a person develops the feelings and empathic findings that accompany the impartations, then most certainly the person cannot achieve the reality of inner awareness. A certain sort of inner awareness certainly can also be held by a person without these unsettling experiences of personal self-knowledge which the passage into the spiritual world is able to give. That which is obtained without this inward unsettling experience, however, is not true inner knowing. Everything we can learn through our senses, and even what we can achieve with ordinary thinking, can at most yield knowledge of things that lie outside the human being; it yields nothing about the human being as such. This is because by his very nature the human being is supersensible. Whatever we can perceive of the human being with our senses, well, that is no more than his outer appearance. Whenever you encounter a human being, my dear friends, you should have the feeling that what you are seeing is no more than a picture of the true being of the person. In actual fact the true being of a person is something extraordinarily comprehensive, and we only gain an impression of what this true human being is once we try to reach some clarity about a number of things that appear simple.

Consider only the fact, my dear brothers and sisters, that certain manifestations of illness in the human being have to be counteracted with what we call poison. This simple, ordinary fact is actually a tremendous puzzle. Why must poison be administered to human beings so that they can be cured of certain illnesses? What is poison? Ask the fascinating shiny black berry of the deadly nightshade, ask the belladonna, such a striking creature, what it actually is, my dear friends!

Looking at the wide variety of many-colored plants that we can use as food without harm, we realize that they are the plants that thrive in ordinary sunlight, with the spirit that lives in sunlight. For just as we have a body that is spirit-infused, just so is all that is physical spirit-infused by sunlight. However, plants that do us no harm when we eat them absorb only the etheric forces. The moment a plant begins to absorb the astral forces that normally hover like a mist above the plants, it becomes poisonous. Belladonna sucks astral forces into its shiny black berries and is therefore poisonous. What does this mean? When we eat belladonna, we take in something that is astral. We bear within us astral nature anyway, since we possess an astral body, so we have within us something that constantly produces poison. And our ego produces even more poison than our astral body.

We can now go on to say that our physical and our etheric body bear within them the processes of building-up. However, if these were the only forces active within us, we would remain permanently unconscious. If the budding, sprouting processes were to gain the upper hand, we would remain unconscious, for we owe our consciousness to the fact that our astral body and our ego-organization carry out breaking-down processes within us. A space for the spirit is created in us by the way the physical and etheric processes are broken down by our astral body and our ego. There would be no spirit in us if breaking-down forces were not constantly at work. When the astral body and the ego are too weak to do the breaking-down sufficiently strongly, excessive growth arises in the physical and etheric bodies. When the astral body and the ego are too weak, we sometimes have to support them by administering poisons from outside, poisons that can break down what the astral body and ego cannot.

What does the physician do in certain cases? He says that in the sick person the spiritual element is too weak. The ego and the astral body are not carrying out the process of breaking-down sufficiently strongly. The physician asks for help from outside so that more breaking-down can take place. He seeks out plants that are more spiritual than others, for poisonous plants are toxic simply because they are more spiritual than others. This alone goes to show what great mysteries lie hidden in human existence and in the human being's relationship with the natural world. Only by approaching the spirit can we bring these mysteries to light.

From what I have said so far you will sense that there is something almost uncanny about getting to know the true mysteries of the spirit, for we discover something that is creative in the spiritual world and yet destructive in the physical world. We cannot grasp the spirit in all its reality until we seek it where it expresses itself through breaking-down, through destruction in the physical world. The moment we approach the threshold to the spiritual world we find ourselves power¬fully confronted by the forces of destruction. Anyone who would prefer not to become familiar with the forces of breaking-down, the forces of destruction, cannot in reality enter the spiritual world.

My dear brothers and sisters, when we look at the physical human being here on the earth, we find that the physical organism, quite by itself, forms a totality, and it is because of this that thinking, feeling, and willing also form a totality. You cannot think without there being a certain amount of willing present. Merely unfolding a thought involves some willing. You cannot will without also thinking. You cannot feel without some thinking. In ordinary consciousness thinking, feeling, and willing are intermingled. When we say we are thinking, it merely means that we are thinking most strongly, while our feeling remains more in the subconscious and our willing entirely so. When we say we are feeling, it means that we are feeling most strongly while thinking and willing are reduced. Every stirring of soul in the human being always involves thinking, feeling, and willing together.

By being bound together like this, each of these three, thinking, feeling, and willing, is weaker than when standing alone. Our thinking is weakened rather than strengthened by willing. Our willing is weakened rather than strengthened by thinking. Our feeling is weakened rather than strengthened by thinking.

Were we to think without any willing for the merest moment within our physical body, were the power of thinking, as it lives in the widths of the world, to fill us for the merest moment without being accompanied by the forces of feeling and willing, in this moment we as physical people would be totally paralyzed. Were we also just for a moment as physical people merely feeling, without it being accompanied by thinking and willing, because feeling is to some extent tremendously lively, we would be knotted up, we would have extreme bouts of cramping. Were we also just for a moment as physical people merely willing, without it being accompanied by thinking, we would be consumed by fiery fevers.

Before we descended through birth, taking on physical-sensory existence in the womb, before that we as people were so constructed that thinking, feeling, and willing each stood separately, each by itself. There, however, our surrounding was the spiritual world. There we could endure this separation. If we would become at all familiar with the actuality of inner knowing, we must develop an intuitive understanding about the experience of being outside the physical world, outside an earthly body, our being split apart in regard to thinking, feeling, and willing.

There is a great meaningful moment when someone steps across the threshold of the spiritual world and meets the souls of deceased people. In this moment, he must be sufficiently prepared, that coming forth from the very depths of his inner being in his heart he says the words, “These are the truly living!” A person says it when really stepping into the spiritual world, “These are the truly living!” For what lives in them above all else is their thinking.

Yes, this thinking begins to live, when we step through the portal of death. Yes, this thinking also lived before we descended into earthly life. There thinking lived! And we behold thinking correctly in physical living on earth only when we say to ourselves, “I have taken clearly to mind, that before me is a corpse.” A corpse without soul, as such, cannot be. It can only be the remnant of a living person. A corpse cannot arise out of itself. In spite of being physically embodied, it does not have any natural physical possibility of intrinsic existence, but rather hearkens back to the living that preceded it.

By unfolding my thinking in myself, I can think just how one thinks as an earthly person, namely as a sort of corpse. All earthly thinking is a corpse, a corpse of the thinking that was so very much alive before we descended into our earth-bound existence. Our physical body is the coffin into which our thinking was laid when we descended into the physical-sensory world.

Without losing the ability for tucking¹ into earthly life, without losing one’s connection to earthly life, to that end a person must be able to say honestly and sincerely, “As a physical, earthly human being you yourself are a coffin for your thinking, for when you descended from the supersensible world to the world of the senses, in this moment thinking died and is now the corpse of living thinking that dwelt in you before you descended to earth-existence.”

Our will also does not live. It will only live when we have passed through the portal of death. Willing is a seed. Thinking is a corpse. Willing is an embryo of what rises up in us when we stride through the portal of death.

What I have just said must be clear to one who delves in the esoteric. If it is, he will have an inkling of the way in which the whole of the person’s soul life will be transformed when he truly does enter into the world of actual inner knowing. He can only enter if he subdues the three beasts I spoke about last time, the beasts that are brought to light in the set of meditation-phrases I gave you. I will present these meditation-phrases to you at the end of the lesson, as I didn't write them on the blackboard last time, and you can all copy them. Just now, however, we will look back upon ourselves in how our willing, our feeling, and our thinking appear in picture-form in imagination, which allows these three beasts to appear when our inner life meets and manifests itself in the world outside, a world with which we are most certainly always inwardly conjoined.

Therefore, any person who now steps forth along the esoteric path must become clear, that when he stands at the beginning, he must make at least a rudimentary attempt to separate thinking, feeling, and willing from one another. Otherwise, the person simply cannot come to the actuality of inner knowing. And the proper protection, which can come into being for a person in the danger of thinking, feeling, and willing disconnected from one another, that specific protection will be granted to a person when he takes up honorably what Anthroposophy has to offer.

Anthroposophy forms thoughts so that the person can become strong for supersensible awareness. Also, just in coming upon supersensible-world communications, if a person even starts to consider them, the person must be strong. Thinking is strong just because we have to exert ourselves in thinking about understanding the supersensible world.

What is the position of those who do not want to reach out to the supersensible world, of those who do not want to know anything about anthroposophical spiritual science? They are in the position of their brain being unable to keep up with their etheric body. The moment such people fill themselves with thoughts that have been presented in Anthroposophy, their etheric body runs out of the head, out of the brain. All that remains is only what the physical organism can think. From a higher point of view one can only pity those who cannot reach out to an anthroposophical understanding of the world.

On the other hand, my dear brothers and sisters, it is certainly so, that however much thinking, feeling, and willing become independent in the currents of anthroposophical awareness, that this in turn also links a person properly with the forces of the world. Therefore, it naturally follows that the person so orients his soul forces, so that with his thinking, with his feeling, and with his willing he finds the way that must be walked, by means of which thinking, feeling, and willing can enter into the spiritual world in the right way.

A further admonition, appended to those that were given in the last lesson, therefore a further admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold deals with how we should position thinking, feeling and willing, so that we can step into the spiritual world in the right way. We must ourselves be clear about the nature of thinking, feeling, and willing in order to understand what the Guardian of the Threshold is saying.

The Guardian of the Threshold will first show how corpse-like our souls are, namely the shimmering-sheen, the semblance-image¹⁷¹ all thinking is that we develop in customary awareness in the physical body. A semblance of the world is this thinking, just as a corpse is the semblance of living, no longer living itself. Within this thinking that we have in customary life in the physical body, within this thinking is not our true self. It manifests itself there just as minimally as does the truly living manifest itself in a corpse. As soon as we have the courage, however, really to say to ourselves, “Yes, thinking that is developed from morning to evening in physical living, this thinking is mere semblance, I will become familiar with it as semblance, I will dive down beneath this appearance.” Then will we become ever clearer and clearer, that the physical body gives us a sort of thinking that is only dead semblance. The etheric body alone begins to give us the sort of thinking that goes out beyond appearance.

Whoever correctly feels that earth-bound thinking is mere semblance, only the corpse of what before being earth-bound is spirited-soulfulness, that person feels himself, by and by, only as ether-being.

Then bit by bit we become aware that in us is the spirit, the spirit that in ordinary awareness hides itself. We can, however, in no other way approach this spirit, unless in the same moment in which the appearance of thinking leaves us, in which the thinking so to say dies off in us, unless in this blink of an eye we begin to honor what now emerges in us as spirited ether-being, as ether-body.

Yes, my dear brothers and sisters, when we look at the plants, the stones, the animals, or even the physical human being, none of this withdraws from us, even if we remain sober and dispassionate and are unable to admire² nature properly. That ceases when a person crosses over into the spiritual world, for then the etheric immediately withdraws itself if a person is unable to admire it, to honor it. In the blink of an eye, when I can say to myself that thinking is mere appearance, when I have the will to dive down into this semblance, just then I must begin to admire, to really honor this ether-being.

To this end the Guardian of the Threshold speaks the words for self-awareness: [The lines were written on the blackboard.]

Look upon your web of thoughts:
World of semblance you experience,
Self-awareness hides from you;
Plunge beneath appearance:
Ether being whirls in you;
Self-awareness, it should honor
Your own spirit’s guiding beings.

This is the earnest admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold in regard to our attitude toward thinking. We must pause at the words honor and guiding beings [These two words were underlined.], as thinking, recognizing itself as mere appearance, must feel itself admiring, honoring. And the person feels, finds with empathy, what he then lives into, experiences as his ether-being, as something that leads outward from the earth into the reaches of the cosmos. Only then does a person know, as we depart from the physical, my dear friends, going over to the finer etheric, leaving the robust, forceful, solid physicality we are accustomed to, only then does a person know how to find the passageway to the finer, more intimate etheric. We must, if we would lead these thoughts over beyond their dead grave-like physical existence, over to where they are finer than in physical existence, over to where they themselves are alive, then we must choose a cadence for such a mantra, a cadence that is trochaic, that begins each line with emphasis, with accent.

We must be clear about something, my dear friends, that what we embody in words the spirit merely descends into, rests, and reverberates initially at the Threshold. The word in our modern civilization has already become so physical, that it is like a corpse. Only when we feel the words embedded in rhythm, just as human being’s stuff of blood and air circulates in rhythm, then we begin to feel the word carrying us over into the spiritual world. Just as we literally feel blood circulating spirit in us, if we make such a strength-filled mantric maxim come alive in us, then we feel its rhythm, and feel carried by its rhythm into the spiritual world, just as we feel our life borne by, carried in the rhythm of our blood.

The admonition about thinking which the Guardian of the Threshold speaks to human beings must be trochaic.

[The word “trochaic” was written beside the first verse of the mantra; the trochaic rhythm was marked at the beginning of all seven lines with a macron and a breve and the verse was spoken with the corresponding emphasis.]

Lōok ŭpon your web of thoughts:
Wōrld ŏf semblance you experience,
Sēlf-ăwareness hides from you;
Plūnge bĕneath dissemblance:
Ēthĕr being whirls in you;
Sēlf-ăwareness, it should honor
Yōur ŏwn spirit’s guiding beings.

Felt this with empathy, again and again allowing the soul to be stirred into activity, forgetting all remnants of earthly life, living only in the words and rhythm, this carries ordinary human thinking up out of the physical world and into the etheric world. Used in addition to all the other meditations you have, my dear brothers and sisters, such a maxim, if you make use of it every now and then, as often as you would, is just what can carry you out of thinking into the spiritual world.

Moving on from a person’s thinking to feeling, the matter is quite different. Thinking is pure semblance, a real corpse, dead. It did live before we descended into the physical world. With feeling it is somewhat different, for we regard feelings just as we regard dreaming, for feelings are no more intensive than dreams. The feeling person dreams, but in dreaming something of real existence certainly lives, there semblance and substance mingle, just as in our approach to feelings.

But we also feel that we certainly do not want to plunge beneath this existence that begins in us with feeling. We like the appearance of thinking, which lives in the physical world, ever present. In this manner we never come to true existence, true reality. We must have the courage to dive down below what appears as existence. We must have the courage to place ourselves fully within feeling, into the inmost parts of our soul, and then, through the semblance in which we have become used to living in our thinking, through this semblance, something of reality will begin to emerge. Then we become aware of world forces surfacing in us that otherwise are around us in the world.

At first, we are told to honor, when we want to ascend from the semblance of thinking to its true reality. Now we are to begin being sensitive in feeling, we are to begin directly being considerate in feeling, for in doing this we come upon the living powers of existence within ourselves.

This is the second, which as an instruction for feeling the Guardian of the Threshold places before us:

Embrace your stream of feelings:
Where semblance and substance mingle,
Aware-self leans toward semblance;
So plunge beneath appearance:
And world soul forces are in you;
Aware-self should consider well
Inherent in soul the powers of life.

This is the second admonition, the admonition concerning the guidance of feelings, the second coming from the earnest Guardian. [The second stanza was now written on the blackboard.]

Embrace your stream of feelings:
Where semblance and substance mingle,
Aware-self leans toward semblance;
So plunge beneath appearance:
And world soul forces are in you;
Aware-self should consider well

Inherent in soul the powers of life.

And if we should go on finding through feeling the passageway out of semblance to substance, then we must go beyond the etheric into the astral. Then we must exert a steady force, as if climbing a mountain that becomes ever steeper. To do this we must point to the simple content of the words in which the progressive force of rhythm unfolds. It must be iambic, entrained in the warning words of the Guardian concerning the experience of feelings. And it is iambic. [Iambic was written beside the second stanza of the mantra and indicated at the beginning of all seven lines with breves and macrons, while the verse was spoken with corresponding emphasis.]

Ĕmbrāce your stream of feelings:
Whĕre sēmblance and substance mingle,
Ăwāre self leans toward semblance;
Sŏ plūnge beneath dissemblance:
Ănd wōrld soul forces are in you;
Ăwāre self should consider well
Ĭnhērent in soul the powers of life.

In this manner should we feel the rhythm, in this manner making the content of the words come alive within us, plunging properly down into feeling and striding properly along the pathway into the spiritual world. For the simple meaning of the words cannot yet do this by itself. We must bring our whole soul nature to a true perception, to a sensing, to a feeling of the rhythm in the mantric maxim.

Embrace your stream of feelings:
Where semblance and substance mingle,
Aware-self leans toward semblance;
So plunge beneath appearance:
And world soul forces are in you;
Aware-self should consider well
Inherent in soul the powers of life.

Still deeper we plunge down out of the apparent sensory shine into real substance, into the world’s true reality, when we descend into willing.

At this point, so that we can move along the right pathway, we must be able to hear the Guardian’s word that he speaks at the Threshold in admonition. The will is the strongest force in human soul life, even here on earth. But we cannot feel it because we only experience willing, so to speak, only as if sleeping. We are awake, really awake only in thinking. We are dreaming in feeling. We are sleeping in willing.

We must ever and again think over, how first we fasten onto a decisi0n and then have it in thoughts, and then we see it again as a completed act. What lies in between, the crossing over in willing, is for customary awareness just as unknown to us as what we experience in spirit between falling asleep and awakening. Just as feeling is submerged in dreams, just so is willing submerged in sleep. But in this willing we put to sleep true existence, the genuine reality of existence. Just as we must increasingly learn to draw up from the depths of sleep whatever we experience there, so must we learn to draw up from the depths of the will what we experience in it.

That is the third admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold, the admonition concerning the will, that we should find the right ways into the spiritual world. Then, when we can really heed this admonition, we become filled with what is spiritual existence in ourselves.

Yes, my dear brothers and sisters, we experience that we have blood in us, that we have satisfaction through eating, that we have semblance of thoughts, that we have dream-like feelings. But in our ordinary awareness we do not experience how spirit streams through us, just as our blood does. When we heed what the Guardian speaks to us as the third admonition, then we can become aware in us of willing, then we can experience how the spirit in us rules. In lifting up a hand or an arm, I have willed. What has happened? Substance has been burned in me. A lively process of burning has drawn to a conclusion in the act of willing. This normally remains unknown. Each time, when through our own body a determination of willing is occurring, a lively process of burning is there. The chemist and physicist even say a burning process. But just as minimally as the human body is a mineral, but rather living and thoroughly beset by spirit, this is no ordinary fire in the human body, but rather living spirit-infused fire. This is no fire such as one sees in an ordinary candle; what is in the person is no combining of carbon with oxygen. Just as the person is ensouled, so are all the processes of nature in him ensouled. Whoever speaks of processes within a person from the standpoint of external processes of nature, such a one talks without knowing the truth of the matter, for no process of external nature settles down inside the person. Something quite else sets to work in the person. Within the skin of a person is no nature. Within the skin of a person is the metamorphosis of nature, the completed spiritualization of nature. Nothing remains in us as it is externally in nature. We could not live for the single blink of an eye if anything of the sort remained as it is externally in nature.

In order to present willing to ourselves, we must grasp a picture. We must use a picture so that a lively imagination illustrating willing will come alive in us. Therefore, place walking in your mind’s eye. Walking is normally quite unremarkable in living. The greatest mysteries actually take place as a person is taking a single step. Now concentrate on this, as one walks, the arms are stirred into moving and fire sprays forth out of the person.

A person will find, if focusing his attention in a lively way on how he flames, he will find the connection to what he as a willing being is in truth. He will become acquainted with himself, if he has the courage to focus in preparation on this imagination, with himself as a fiery flaming willing being. Then we will have grasped the creative might of the world, going beyond our individual existence within the skin, expanding ourselves to world-selves, which we as human beings are, and feeling ourselves in union with the whole world as willing-beings.³ But we have to learn to stay there, becoming willing’s flaming within the world’s fire, fire within fire.

About this the Guardian of the Threshold speaks concerning our willing. And he speaks of the thrust of the will, as the will thrusts us into the full actual reality.

Let reign in you the thrust of will:
It climbs from all apparent being,
With autonomous existence well-equipped;
Turn to this throughout your life:
Filled it is with world-spirit-might;
Your autonomous existence, it should grasp
World-maker-might into spirit-I.

These are the words, inwardly and thoroughly felt, that will guide our willing properly in entering the spiritual world. [The third verse was now written on the blackboard.]

Let reign in you the thrust of will:
It climbs from all apparent being,
With autonomous existence well-equipped;
Turn to this throughout your life:
Filled it is with world-spirit-might;
Your autonomous existence, it should grasp
World-maker-might into spirit-I.

We have to develop honor in ascending from thinking to its reality. We have to develop soul consideration in ascending through to feeling from semblance to existence. Here [in the first stanza] in the next-to-last line there is “honor”. For feeling there is “consider well”. Here [in the third stanza] we similarly now have “grasp”. [The words consider well and grasp were underlined.] Grasping, therefore already close to existence, within existence, appears here in the third stanza for willing.

There is a similar progression that we are made aware of: guiding beings for thinking, powers of life for feeling, world-maker-might for willing. That is the progression. [The words powers of life and world-maker-might were underlined.]

But as I said fire in fire, reality that that is in all, in the reality of this all itself, that is what the Guardian of the Threshold informs us about. We must stand within this more firmly than we did when we descended in thinking from the rough robust semblance through to more intimate reality, where it was trochaic rhythm, macron then breve, stressed then unstressed. In feeling we have to ascend, as if climbing a hill, where it is iambic rhythm, breve then macron, unstressed then stressed. Here in willing we must stand within it differently. There it will be spondaic, macron then another macron, stressed and stressed. [The word spondaic was written beside the third verse of the mantra; the spondaic rhythm was marked at the beginning of all seven lines with two macrons, while the verse was spoken with the corresponding emphasis.]

Lēt reīgn in you the thrust of will:
Īt clīmbs from all apparent being
Wīth aūtonomous existence well-equipped;
Tūrn tō this throughout your life:
Fīlled īt is with world-spirit-might;
Yoūr aūtonomous existence, it should grasp
Wōrld-māker-might into spirit-I.

The stark emphasis on the two first syllables in each line we should feel rhythmically. We should win steadfastness as the Guardian directs to us the third admonition.

And so, my dear brothers and sisters, we should become aware how this word of the Guardian guides us specifically to actual inner knowing. While this Guardian-word has initially made us aware how we have thinking, feeling and willing in us in the images of the three beasts, the Guardian of the Threshold guides us further, about how we can strengthen this thinking, how we can strengthen this feeling, how we can strengthen this willing, so that they grow, rise, and cross over⁴ the animality, get beyond⁵ these three beasts, so that the soul grows wings, as depicted in the prior session’s mantra, in order to cross over into the spiritual world.

Only when you subdue the three,
Will wings of your soul grow,
To soar across the deep abyss
That severs you from fields of knowing,
For which your yearning heart,
Healing-seeking, would hallow itself.

But the Guardian in due course gives us in the last mantra, which I then pass on,⁶ the instruction about what we should do to become stronger, so that we grow wings to awareness.

Take it up, my dear brothers and sisters, take into your meditation what is given in these three mantras. This is what the classes should lead to, these classes that have been established since the Christmas Conference, that the esoteric might flow⁷ through the anthroposophical movement. Take up into your meditation these admonitions of the Guardian of the Threshold. It is not I who speak them; I speak them for the Guardian of the Threshold, who through these words will speak to all of you.⁸ For this school is an institution of spiritual life itself.

Therefore, let us take up these words as those of the Guardian himself. Then they will be for us strengthening and invigorating words, coming to us after the harrowing effect of the last lesson, concerning which in looking ahead they step forth now in strengthening of the soul. A person must first be knocked down and away from what he grasps in the sensory world, in order to remain stout and strong in the spiritual world, in order to gain wings, to be carried across the abyss, which leads into the brilliance which streams out of the abyss, out of the darkness, out of which our humanity is born.

To this end the Guardian speaks the words, in order to lift us up in turn out of this harrowing:

Look upon your web of thoughts:
World of semblance you experience,
Self-awareness hides from you;
Plunge beneath appearance:
Ether being whirls in you;
Self-awareness, it should honor
Your own spirit’s guiding beings.

Embrace your stream of feelings:
Where semblance and substance mingle,
Aware-self leans toward semblance;
So plunge beneath appearance:
And world soul forces are in you;
Aware-self should consider well
Inherent in soul the powers of life.

Let reign in you the thrust of will:
It climbs from all apparent being,
With autonomous existence well-equipped;
Turn to this throughout your life:
Filled it is with world-spirit-might;
Your autonomous existence, it should grasp
World-maker-might into spirit-I.

And as the Guardian spoke this word, he comes himself, infusing rhythm again and again on those words, to teach us in perspective about what we should attain, about what beckons us from the spiritual world across the Threshold.

From the wide expanse of the beings of space
Who in the light experience existence,
From the onward tread of the course of time
Which in creating finds itself expressed,
From the depths of the feeling heart,
Where in one's self the world is born anew:
There sounds in speech filled with soul,
There shines in thoughts filled with spirit,
The from godly healing forces
In world shaping powers
Welling working word of existence-awareness:
O Man, know yourself!

• 1. tüchtig
• 171. Scheingebilde
• 2. verehren, which is stronger than just ehren or bewundern (to honor), but in English to honor is sufficient.
• 3. Wollende
• 4. hinüberwachsen
• 5. hinauskommen
• 6. This seems to be in the conjunctive tense, das ich dann übergeben werde.
• 7. fließe, which again is in the conjunctive tense, it might, can, may, ought to, could, should flow.
• 8. Euch is the second person pleural, no longer capitalized since the 1996 spelling reform except in formal situations, as here.

Let me first extend to you my heartfelt greetings. Friends in Norrköping have expressed the wish that on this occasion I should take a theme concerning that Being who in the realm of spiritual science is above all else near to us—the Christ Being. I have tried to meet this wish by undertaking to speak about the coming to life of the Christ Being in the human soul and the significance of this. We shall thus have the opportunity to speak of the most human and intimate significance of Christianity from the standpoint of spiritual science.

Let us consider the human soul. In the sense of spiritual science we have a short word which, although it does not embrace all that the expression “human soul” signifies for us, points to something which for us men of Earth fills and permeates the soul element to its farthest limits—we have the short word “I”. In so far as we are men of Earth, our ego-being reaches as far as does our soul-nature. You know that by the name “I”, or ego, we denote one of the four most immediate principles of man. We speak, in the first instance, of four members or principles of the human being—the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the ego. And in order to have the starting-point for what we shall be considering in these lectures, we need recall only one thing: we do not regard the laws and the living essence of the physical body of man as explicable in terms of our present earthly environment.

We know that if we want to understand the physical human body we must go back to the three preceding embodiments of our Earth—the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods. In a remote, primordial past, during the Saturn embodiment, the germ of the physical body was already laid down. During the Sun embodiment the foundation of the etheric body was laid down; and during the Moon embodiment that of the astral body. In reality our Earth-evolution, in all its phases and in all its epochs, is none other than that which enables the ego to fulfill its whole being. We can say that just as the physical body had reached a significant stage of its evolution at the end of the Saturn period, the etheric body at the end of the Sun period, and the astral body at the end of the Moon period, so at the end of the Earth period our ego will have reached a significant point in its evolution.

We know that our ego develops through three soul members or principles, through the sentient soul, the intellectual or mind-soul, and the spiritual or consciousness-soul. All the worlds that come within the compass of these three soul members are also concerned with our ego. In the course of our Earth-evolution these three soul members first prepared for themselves the three external bodily members—the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body—through long Earth periods. In successive post-Atlantean epochs of civilization the three soul principles developed further, and in future Earth periods they will again adapt themselves to the astral, etheric and physical bodies, so that the Earth can be prepared to pass over to the Jupiter evolution.

If we take the expression comprehensively enough, we might also speak of man's Earth-evolution as his soul evolution. One could say that when the Earth began, the soul element also began, in conformity with law, to bestir itself in man. At first it began to work on the external sheaths, then it developed its own being, and from then onward it begins again to work on the external sheaths in order that preparation may be made for the Jupiter evolution.

We must keep before our mind's eye what man is meant to become in his soul during the Earth evolution. He is to become what may be designated by the word “personality”. This personality needs in the first place what may be called “free will”. But it needs also, on the other side, the possibility of finding within itself the way to the divine in the world. On the one side free will, the possibility of choosing between the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the evil, the true and the false; on the other side, the laying hold of the divine so that the divine penetrates into the soul and we know ourselves to be inwardly filled with it. Such are the two goals of man's evolution on the Earth; and to aid him in reaching them he has received two religious gifts. One of these gifts is destined to lay down in the human soul those forces which lead to freedom, to the capacity for distinguishing between the true and the false, the beautiful and ugly, the good and bad. And another religious gift had to be given to man during his Earth evolution in order that there might be laid in his soul the seed through which the soul can feel united to the divine within itself.

The first religious gift comes to meet us at the beginning of the Old Testament as the great picture of the Temptation and the Fall.

The second religious gift comes to us from all that the Mystery of Golgotha signifies.

The Temptation and the Fall have to do with the implanting of freedom in man, the gift of being able to distinguish between good and bad, beautiful and ugly, true and false. The Mystery of Golgotha points to the possibility of man's soul finding again the path to the divine, of knowing that the divine can flash up within it and penetrate it. These religious gifts include everything that is most important in the Earth evolution—everything proceeding from the Earth evolution that the soul can experience in its uttermost depths, everything associated most profoundly with the being and becoming of the human soul. How far is there a connection between these two religious gifts and the being and becoming of the human soul—its inner experience?

I do not want to put these matters before you in an abstract way, so I will start from a certain scene in the Mystery of Golgotha as it stands before our eyes in historical tradition and has impressed itself—and should indeed have impressed itself even more—on the hearts and souls of mankind. Let us assume that we have in Christ Jesus that Being of whom we have often spoken in the course of our lectures. Let us assume that in Christ Jesus we have before our spiritual eyes that which must appear to humanity as the most important fact in the whole universe. And then let us set in contrast to this feeling the outcry, the fury, of the enraged multitudes in Jerusalem at the time of the condemnation before the crucifixion. Let us observe that the High Court of Jerusalem held it above all things necessary to question Christ Jesus as to His relationship with the divine, as to whether He claimed to be the Son of God. And let us bear in mind that the High Court held such a claim to be the greatest blasphemy that Christ Jesus could have uttered.

An historical scene is there before us—a scene in which the people cry out and clamor for the death of Christ Jesus. And now let us try to picture to ourselves what this shouting and rage signified historically. Let us ask: What ought these people to have recognized in Christ Jesus? They ought to have recognized that Being who gives meaning and significance to Earth life. They ought to have recognized that Being who had to accomplish the deed without which Earth humanity cannot find the way back to the divine. They ought to have understood that humanity has no significance apart from this Being. Men would have to strike out from the evolution of the Earth the world “man” if they wished to strike out the Christ Event. Now let it come home to us that this multitude condemned and were enraged against the Being who actually makes man Man upon the Earth; who is destined to give to the Earth its goal and purpose. What does this mean? Surely it means that in those who in Jerusalem at that time ranked as the representatives of human knowledge concerning the true being of man, the knowledge of man was obscured. They had no knowledge of what man is, what his mission on the Earth is to be. We are told nothing less than that humanity had reached a point where it had lost itself, where it had condemned that which gives purpose and significance to the Earth-evolution. And out of the cries of the enraged multitude could be heard, not the words of wisdom, but of folly: “We do not wish to be Man; rather do we wish to cast away from us that which gives us any further meaning as Man.”

When we reflect on all this, the relation of man to sin and guilt—in the sense of Pauline Christianity—assumes a different aspect. Man, in the course of his evolution could fall into sin which he was not himself able to wash away; that is what St. Paul means. And in order to make it possible for man to be cleansed of sin and debt, Christ had to come to the Earth. That is St. Paul's view. If this view requires any evidence, it is there in the fury and clamor of those who cried “Crucify Him!” For this implies that the people did not know what they themselves were to be on the Earth; they did not know that it was the aim of their earlier evolution to veil their being with darkness.

Here we come to what may be spoken of as the preparation of the human soul for the Christ Being. Through what it is able to experience within itself, the soul feels, even though it may not be able to express it in words: “Since the very beginning of the Earth I have developed in such a way that through what I possess in my own being I cannot fulfill the aim of my evolution. Where is there anything to which I can cling, which I can take into myself and with it reach my goal?” To feel as if the human being extends far beyond anything that the soul can achieve through its own strength by reason of its evolution on the Earth hitherto—such is the Christian attitude or mood of preparation. And when the soul finds that which it must recognize as essentially bound up with its being—but for the attainment of which it could not find the power within itself—when the soul finds that which bestows this power, it finds the Christ. The soul then develops its connection with the Christ, saying to itself: “At the very beginning of the Earth a certain nature was pre-ordained for me; in the course of Earth-evolution my true nature has been darkened, and when now I look into this darkness I feel that I lack the power to bring my true nature to fulfillment. But I turn my spiritual gaze upon the Christ, who gives me this power.” On the one hand the human soul feels this lack, and on the other hand it feels the approach of Christ and stands as if in a direct personal relationship to Him. The soul seeks Christ and knows that it cannot find Him if He does not give Himself to humanity through human evolution, if He does not approach from outside.

There is a well-known Christian Church Father who was not afraid to speak of the Greek philosophers, Heracleitos, Socrates and Plato, as Christians who lived before the founding of Christianity. Why does he do this? As we know, the doctrines professed today obscure much of what was at first an illuminating Christian teaching. St. Augustine himself said: “All religions have contained something of the truth, and the element of truth in all religions is what is Christian in them, before there was a Christianity in name.” St. Augustine dared to say that. Nowadays many a man would be regarded as a heretic if he were to say something similar within certain Christian congregations.

We shall most readily understand what this Church Father wished to convey, when he called the old Greek philosophers Christians, by endeavoring to enter into the feeling of those souls who in the first Christian centuries tried to determine their personal relationship to the Christ. These souls did not think of Christ as having had no relation to the Earth evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha. The Christ has always been concerned with the evolution of the Earth. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, however, His task, His mission, in the Earth-evolution was changed. It is not Christian to seek Christ in the evolution of the Earth only since the Mystery of Golgotha. True Christians know that Christ has always been connected with the evolution of the Earth.

Let us now turn to the Jewish people. Did the Jews know Christ? I am not asking whether the Jewish people knew the name of Christ or if they were conscious of all I have to say to you; I am asking whether those who really understand Christianity are justified in saying: “Judaism had Christ; Judaism knew Christ.” It is possible to have some person near one and to see his external form without being able to recognize or value truly his essential being, because one has not risen to real knowledge of him. In the true Christian sense, ancient Judaism had Christ, only it did not recognize Him in His true being. Is it Christian to speak in this way? It is indeed Christian, as truly as it is Pauline.

Where was Christ for ancient Judaism? It is said in the Old Testament that when Moses led the Jews out of Egypt into the wilderness, a pillar of cloud went before them by day and a pillar of fire by night. It is said that the Jews passed through the sea, that the sea parted in order that they might pass through, while behind them the Egyptians were drowned, for the sea closed in on them. It is also said that the Jews murmured because they had no water, but at the command of God Moses was able to strike a rock with his staff so that water poured forth for the Jews to drink. Moses led the Jews, he himself being led by God. Who was the God of Moses? We will in the first instance allow Paul to answer. In the First Epistle to the Corinthians (X:1-4), we read: “Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant how that all our fathers were under the cloud” (he means the pillar of fire) “and all passed through the sea and all were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea ... and all drank of the spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ.” Thus who was it, according to Paul, who led the Jews and who spoke with Moses? Who was it who caused water to flow out of the rock and who turned away the sea from the path of the Jews? Only those who wish to declare that Paul was no Christian would dare pronounce it unchristian to see Christ in the guiding God of the Old Testament, in the Lord of Moses.

In the Old Testament there is a passage which must, I think, present great difficulties for all who reflect more deeply. It is a passage to which anyone who does not read the Old Testament thoughtlessly, but who wants to understand its connections, will return again and again. “What may this passage mean?” he asks himself. The passage (Numbers XX:11-12) is as follows: “And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he struck the rock twice; and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also. And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron: ‘Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.’”

Take this passage in its context in the Old Testament. When the people murmured, the Lord commanded Moses to strike the rock with a staff: Moses struck with his staff on the rock, and water flowed out; everything that the Lord commanded took place through Moses and Aaron, and yet, directly after this, we are told the Lord reproved Moses—if it is a reproof—for not having believed in Him. What does it mean? Turn to all the commentaries on this passage and try to understand it with their aid. You will then understand it as one understands a great deal in the Bible—really not at all—for behind this passage a great mystery is hidden. It is this: He who led Moses, who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, He who led the people through the wilderness and caused water to flow out of the rock, He was the Lord, Christ! But the time was not yet come; Moses himself did not recognize Him; Moses thought He was another. This is what is meant by Moses not having believed in Him who had commanded him to strike the rock with his staff.

How did the Lord—Christ—appear to the Jewish people? We are told that by day it was in a pillar of cloud and by night in a pillar of fire—and by His dividing the waters for their safety ... and many other things we can read in the Old Testament. In phenomena of cloud and fire, in the air, in the elemental events of nature He was active, but never once did it occur to the ancient Jews to say to themselves: That which appears in the pillar of cloud and in the pillar of fire, that which worked wonders such as the parting of the waters, appears also in its purest original form in the human soul. Why did this never occur to the ancient Jews? Because, owing to the course taken by human evolution, the soul of man had lost the power to feel its deepest being within itself. Thus the Jewish soul could look into nature; it could allow the glory of the phenomena of the elements to work upon it; everywhere it could divine the existence of its God and Lord; but directly within itself, as the Jewish soul then was, it could not find Him.

There in the Old Testament we have the Christ. There He worked, but men did not recognize Him. How did the Christ work? Do we not see how He worked when we read through the Old Testament? The most significant thing Moses had to impart to his people through the mouth of Jahve was the Ten Commandments. He had received them out of the power of the elements from which Jahve spoke to him. Moses did not descend into the depths of his own soul; he did not ask in lonely meditation: “How does God speak in my own heart?” He went up the mountain and through the power of the elements the divine Will revealed itself to him. Will is the fundamental note of the Old Testament: this is often spoken of as the Law. Will works through the evolution of humanity and is expressed in the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. The God proclaimed his Will to man through the elements. Will holds sway in the Earth evolution. That is really the purport of the Old Testament, and the Old Testament, accordingly, calls for man's submission to this Will.

If we hold all this before our souls, we can sum it up by saying: The will of the Lord was given to men; but men did not know the Lord; they knew not the divine in such a way as to connect it with their own human souls.

Now let us turn from the Jews to the heathen. Did the heathen have Christ? Is it Christian to say of the heathen that they also had Christ? The heathen had their Mysteries. Those initiated in the Mysteries were brought to the point where their souls passed out of their bodies; the tie connecting body and soul was loosened; and when the soul was outside the body, it perceived in the spiritual world the secrets of existence. Much was connected with these Mysteries; much varied knowledge came to the candidates for Initiation in the Mysteries. But when we investigate what was the highest that the disciple of the Mysteries could receive into himself, we find that it consisted in the fact that outside the body he was placed before the Christ. As Moses was placed before Christ, so in the Mysteries was the disciple placed with his soul, outside his body, before Christ.

Christ was there for the heathen also, but for them he was there only in the Mysteries. He revealed Himself to them only when the soul was out of the body. Christ was there for the heathen, even if among them there was as little recognition of this Being as Christ as there was among the Jews of that Being of whom we have just spoken and before whom the disciples of the Mysteries were placed.

The Mysteries were instituted for the heathen. Those who were fit and ready were admitted into the Mysteries. Through these Mysteries Christ worked upon the pagan world. Why did He work thus? Because the soul of man, in its development since the beginning of the Earth, had lost the inherent power to find its true essence through itself. This true being had to reveal itself to the soul of man when the soul was unhampered by the bonds of human nature; when, that is, it was not bound up with the body. Hence Christ had to lead men by means of the fact that as initiates of the Mysteries they were as though divested of their human nature. Christ was there for the heathen too! He was their leader in the Mysteries. For never could man have said: “When I develop my own powers, then I can find the meaning and purport of the Earth.” This meaning was lost, obscured in darkness. The forces of the human soul had been pressed down into regions too deep for the soul of itself, through its own powers, to be able to realize the meaning of the Earth.

When we allow what was given in the pagan Mysteries to the disciples and candidates for Initiation to work upon us, it proves to be Wisdom. To the Jews was given Will, through the Law; to the disciples of the pagan Mysteries was given Wisdom. But if we look at the characteristics of this pagan Wisdom, can we not express it by saying: If he did not leave his body when he was a pupil of the Mysteries, the Earth-man could not, through Wisdom alone, recognize his God as such. As little through Wisdom as through Will could the divinity reveal itself to men. Indeed, we find an injunction that resounds most wonderfully through Greek antiquity, like a powerful demand upon mankind. At the entrance to the shrine of the Mysteries of Apollo stood the words, “Man, know thyself!” What are we told by the fact that these words, “Man, know thyself!” stood at the entrance to the sanctuary, like a summons to mankind? We are told that nowhere outside the sanctuary, where man remains what he has become since the beginning of the Earth, can he fulfill the commandment “Know thyself!” He must become something more than man; he must loosen in the Mysteries the ties which bind the soul to the body, if he is to know himself. These words, standing like a powerful demand before the Apollonian sanctuary, point to the fact that darkness had fallen upon humanity—in other words, that God could be reached through Wisdom as little as he could directly reveal himself as Will.

Even as the individual human soul feels that it cannot bring forth within itself the forces which impart to it the purport of the Earth, so do we see the human soul at such a stage of development among the Jews that even Moses himself, their leader, did not recognize who was leading him. Among the heathen we see that the demand “Know thyself” could be fulfilled only in the Mysteries, because man, as he had developed in the course of the evolution of the Earth, was unable with his connection of body and soul to unfold the power whereby he could know himself. The words “Not through Will and not through Wisdom is God to be known” sound to us from those ages. Through what, then, was God to be known?

We have often characterized the essential nature of the point of time when Christ entered into the evolution of Earth-humanity. Let us now consider exactly what it means when it is said that a certain darkening of the soul of man had set in, that the divine could be revealed neither through Will nor through Wisdom. What is the real meaning of this?

People speak of so many relationships between the human and the divine. They often speak of the relationship between the human and the divine, and of the meaning which the human has within the divine, in such a way that it is impossible to differentiate between the relation of the human to the divine, or of anything else earthly to the divine. Today we find again and again that philosophers want to rise to the divine through pure philosophy. But through pure philosophy one cannot rise to the divine. Certainly by means of it man does come to feel that he is bound up with the universe and to know that the human being must, in some way or other, be bound up with the universe at death; but how and in what manner he is thus connected with the universe he cannot know through pure philosophy. Why not? If you take the whole meaning of what we have considered today, you will be able to say to yourselves: What is at first revealed to the soul of earthly man between birth and death is too weak to perceive anything that transcends the earthly, that leads to the divine-spiritual. In order to make this quite clear to ourselves, let us investigate the meaning of immortality.

In our day many people no longer have any knowledge of the real meaning of human immortality. Many today speak of immortality when they can merely admit that the being of the human soul passes through the gate of death and then finds some place or other in the universal All. But every creature does that. That which is united with the crystal passes over into the universe when the crystal is dissolved; the plant that fades passes into the universe; the animal at death passes over into the universe. For man, it is different. Immortality has a meaning for man only if he can carry his consciousness through the gate of death. Think of an immortal human soul that was unconscious after death; such immortality would have absolutely no meaning. The human soul must carry its consciousness through the gate of death if it is to speak of its immortality. Because of the way in which the soul is united to the body, it cannot find anything in itself of which it can say, “I carry that consciously through death”, for human consciousness is enclosed between birth and death; it reaches only as far as death. The consciousness that belongs at first to the human soul extends only as far as death. Into this consciousness there shines the divine Will, for example in the Ten Commandments. Read in the Book of Job as to whether this illumination could stimulate man's consciousness to such a point that it might say to itself: “I pass as a conscious being through the gate of death.” What a challenge to us there is in the words spoken to Job: “Reject God and die!” We know that he was uncertain whether he would pass with consciousness through the gate of death. And let us set beside this the Greek saying which gives expression to the dread felt by the Greeks in the face of death: “Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the shades.” Here we have from paganism, also, a testimony to the uncertainty felt by man concerning his immortality. And how uncertain many people are even today. All those people who say that man, when he goes through the gate of death, passes into the universal All and is united with some universal being or other, take no heed of what the soul must ascribe to itself if it is to speak of its immortality.

We need only pronounce one word, and we shall recognize the attitude that man must take up with regard to his immortality. The word is Love. All that we have said concerning the word immortality we can now connect with what is denoted by Love. Love is not anything that we appropriate to ourselves through the Will; or anything that we appropriate to ourselves through Wisdom. Love dwells in the realm of the feelings. We must admit to ourselves that the human soul would fall short of its true nature if it were unable to be filled with love. Yes, when we penetrate into the nature of the soul, we realize that our human soul would no longer be a human soul if it could not love. But let us now suppose that on passing through the gate of death we lost our human individuality and were united with some universal divinity. We should then be within this divinity; we should belong to it. Love would have no meaning if we were within the Godhead. If we could not carry our individuality through death, we should in death have to lose love, for in the moment that individuality ceased, love would cease. One being can love another only if the other is separate from himself. If we are to carry our love of God through death, we must carry with us that which kindles love within us—our individuality.

If the meaning of the Earth was to be brought to man, information concerning his immortality had to be given him in such a way that his nature would be thought of as inseparable from love. Neither Will nor Wisdom can give man what he needs; only Love can give it to him. What was it, then, that became darkened in the course of man's evolutionary path on Earth? Take the Jews or take the heathen: their consciousness of anything beyond death had been darkened. Between birth and death—consciousness; beyond death and beyond birth—darkness; of their bodily consciousness nothing more remained. “Know thyself!”—at the entrance of the Greek Mysteries, stood this most holy demand of the sanctuary upon mankind. Man could only answer: “If I remain bound to my body with my soul, as is the way with a man of Earth, I cannot recognize in myself an individuality which could love beyond death. I cannot do it.” The knowledge that man can love as an individuality beyond death—this is what had been lost for man.

Death is not merely the cessation of the physical body. Only a materialist can say that. Suppose that throughout every hour of life in the body man's consciousness were such that he knew what lies beyond death as certainly as he knows today that the sun will rise on the morrow and take its journey across the heavens. Then death would have no sting for him; death would not be what we call death; he would know in the body that death is only a phenomenon leading from one form to another. Paul did not understand by “death” the cessation of the physical body; by “death” he understood the fact that consciousness extends only as far as death, and that man, in so far as he was united with the body in the existence of that period, could, within his body, extend his consciousness only as far as death. Whenever Paul speaks of death, we might add: “Lack of consciousness beyond death.”

What did the Mystery of Golgotha give to man? Was it a series of natural phenomena, a pillar of cloud, a pillar of fire, that stood before humanity with the Mystery of Golgotha? No! A man, Christ Jesus, stood before men. With the Mystery of Golgotha did any event drawn from the mysterious realms of nature take place—did a sea divide so that the people of God could go through? No! A man stood before men; a man who made the lame to walk and the blind to see. By a man were these things done.

The Jew had to look into nature when he wanted to see him whom he called his divine Lord. Now it was a man who could be seen. Of a man it could be said that God dwelt in him. The pagan had to be initiated; his soul had to be withdrawn from his body in order that he might stand before the Being who is the Christ. On the Earth he had been unable to divine the Christ; he could know only that the Christ was outside the Earth. But He who had been outside the Earth came down to Earth, took on a human body.

In Christ Jesus there stood as man before men that Being who had formerly stood in the Mysteries before the soul that was liberated from the body. And what came to pass through this? It was the beginning of the course of events whereby the powers that man had lost ever since the start of the Earth evolution—the powers which assured him of his immortality—were restored to him through the Mystery of Golgotha. The overcoming of death on Golgotha gave birth to the forces which could rekindle in the soul the powers it had lost. And the path of man through Earth evolution will henceforth be this: Inasmuch as he takes the Christ more and more into himself, he will discover within himself the power which can love beyond death, so that he will be able to stand before his God as an immortal individuality. Therefore, only since the Mystery of Golgotha has it become true to say: “Love God above all, and thy neighbor as thyself.”

Will was given from out of the burning thorn-bush; Will was given through the Ten Commandments. Wisdom was given through the Mysteries. But Love was given when God became man in Christ Jesus. And the assurance that we can love beyond death, that by means of the powers won back for our souls a community of Love can be founded between God and man and all men among one another—the guarantee for that proceeds from the Mystery of Golgotha. In the Mystery of Golgotha the human soul has found what it had lost from the primal beginning of the Earth, in that its forces had become ever weaker and weaker.

Three forces in three members of the soul: Will, Wisdom, Love! In this Love the soul experiences its relation to Christ.

I wanted to bring these things before you from a certain aspect. Whatever may have seemed aphoristic in the explanations given today will find its context later on. But I believe we can inscribe deeply in our souls that progress in the knowledge of Christ is a real gain for the human soul, and that when we consider the relationship of the human soul to Christ, it again becomes clear to us how before the Mystery of Golgotha there was a veil, as it were, between the human soul and Christ; how this veil was broken by the Mystery of Golgotha, and how we can say with truth: “Through the Mystery of Golgotha a cosmic Being flowed into Earth-life, a super-earthly Being united Himself with the Earth.”

We shall speak in the following lectures of all that the human soul, with Christ, can experience within itself.

Before we pass on to another case, I would like to say a little more about the boy we were considering yesterday. For in this boy we can really see a whole series of psychic facts demonstrated. Right at the beginning of his stay with us—indeed, he brought it with him—he would speak of a little sprite that he had on the forefinger of his right hand. He has always, quite consistently, called this little sprite “Bebe Assey”. He carries on conversations with it just as one does with one's fellow beings, speaking to it, talking with it and altogether treating it as a real being. And then I must tell you of another idiosyncrasy. The boy will every now and then suddenly undergo a change, something like the changes we read of in the Werewolf stories. For a considerable time, for instance, he thought he was a lion and went about roaring like a lion. Has he changed into any other kind of animal? His favourite animal, anyway, has been a lion. We have here a sign that the boy's astral body is not in good working order. The astral body should by rights dive right down into the physical body. Instead of this, remnants of it have got left behind. For obviously, this “Bebe Assey” is (to begin with) nothing else than a remnant of the boy's own astral body. Then of course it can happen that this piece of astral body, which is left hanging out loose, becomes ensouled by an objective elemental being from the world outside. Subject and object then merge completely in one another.

What is of main importance for us as educators is the fact that, owing to the organism having become hardened, the astral body does not entirely enter it. Supposing you were to draw your astral body out of your physical body, so that you no longer had it pulsating there in its entirety within your physical body, then that astral body of yours would begin to show itself in all possible metamorphoses, it would begin to assume animal-like shapes. For when the astral body loosens itself from the physical and etheric—it may be still quite near to them, it may perhaps be still half or even three-quarters united with them—but so soon as the astral body becomes to any extent independent of the physical and ether bodies, it begins to manifest in animal form.

All these symptoms are particularly characteristic of the boy's condition, and they go to show how very difficult it will be to establish in him the right and proper harmony between the astral and etheric and physical bodies.

Now we will go on to consider another child. Let me give you the history of the case. The mother says that the child was born four weeks late. In the first four months of pregnancy the mother was on the stage and sometimes had to jump a great deal. Later on, she had a fall. At the age of two and a quarter, the child suffered from a digestive disturbance. Not until two years old was he able to stand. Throughout the first four years he was apathetic, but greedy for food. The first sound he uttered was R, which is most unusual. He even cried in R. Up to the fourth year he could only stammer out isolated words. Then he was given speech exercises; he had to speak sentences forwards and backwards. This was done by my advice. At the same time that he was learning to speak, he began to be restless, to make restless movements. He sleeps little, and does not fall asleep at all easily. In the evening he is very excited and tired, and cannot go to sleep. He takes his food greedily.

You would not be able to tell, from looking at the boy, how old he is. He is now six and three-quarters—not far off seven years old. As you see, he is backward in the development of his whole physical organisation. The head is rather too big, though scarcely enough to be noticeable. Taken altogether, the boy is backward. In the first period of life, from birth to change of teeth, the period during which the physical organisation ought to be particularly active—just in this period the physical organisation has in his case been inactive. Let me remind you of what I said about the physical organisation in the first period of life—that it is the inherited organism. So you see, it is an inherited organism that the child has had in the epoch through which he has already lived. The I (ego) organisation is now beginning to come forward, but it lacks the ability to bring about much deviation from the first physical organism. For it is the ether body that is active now, and the boy's ether body has adapted itself extraordinarily closely to the model body of the first seven years. The boy is behind-hand also with the change of teeth; that has not yet begun. So that there too we have to note a retardation of development.

Before going any further let us see that we are quite clear about the objective facts of the case. We find in this boy a relatively very weak astral body and a weak ego organization, which cannot make headway against the inherited organism. And we have also to note that this inherited organism has itself remained small. Now there is room for doubt whether the information given us is correct—for we are not at all obliged to assume that it was correct!—the information namely, that the child was born four weeks late. If this was so, then it was owing to the child's being too small; the child will have remained an embryo longer than usual because it was too small, because at the end of the ten lunar months it was not fully developed.

And now we have to ask ourselves the question: how has it come about that the child is in this condition? The explanation is given to us in the fact that the mother was acting on the stage during the first four months of pregnancy. She was a member of an independent troupe, who worked enthusiastically, and there can be no doubt that she was following her calling with enthusiasm and devotion. This meant that a considerable strain was put upon the astral body of the mother, which actually affected the form of the astral body of the child and turned its activity in a direction where it cannot do much in the way of growth—in the direction, namely, of intellectual capability. And so the process of intellectualisation begins in this boy even before birth, with the configuration that was given to the astral body during the embryonic period. We have then to do with a case of retardation, the causes of which lie right back in the embryonic period.

And now we have to consider how we are to treat a child of this kind who is altogether behind-hand in his development. As you will see for yourselves, the body has remained quite powerless. Throughout his earliest years, the boy was apathetic and developed nothing but the purely animal instincts of the physical organism. He was greedy, and late in learning to speak. And then, as I told you, the very first sound he learned to say was R. (Turning to the boy) Say “Robert runs!” (The boy says it in a deep, growling voice.) He is, you see, completely at home in the sound R. Do not forget that in a symptom like this a whole life can be expressed! Think of the mother during pregnancy. Think how she was continually in movement on the stage. And then try to enter into the being and character of R, which we have described in the Eurythmy lectures as the sound that has to do with turning and you will discern in the boy's speech a continuation of the play-acting of his mother. This one fact is of such overwhelming significance as to throw all others into the background. In this one fact opportunity is given us to acquire an extraordinarily deep insight into connections that need to be grasped and understood if we want to be clear in our minds about the condition of this child.

Let me remind you that what ought to happen during the first years of life is that the metabolism-and-limbs system of man is ordered and regulated by a strong astral body and ego. In this child the astral body is weak, and fails in its task; hence we find in him two symptoms to which we must give careful attention.

I do not know whether all of you were present at the lectures where I explained the true significance of the human brain.¹ I spoke of how the entire human organisation—all that we carry within us—is divided into upbuilding processes and breaking-down processes. With the latter are always connected products of excretion, for these are simply relics or traces that have been left behind by the process of disintegration. Let us look, first, at the boy's head. In the head a process of disintegration, a process of breaking down, is taking place. As you know, the intellectual activity of the soul, the whole thought-and-feeling activity of the soul, in so far as it makes use of the head as its organ of support, originates in a disintegration process. In this boy, the process of disintegration, having to be carried out by a weak astral body, is itself irregular. Waste products are not carried away with regularity, they remain; moreover, they do not harden as much as they should. We have not here to do with an actual case of hydrocephalus, but you see before you a head that holds within it too soft a brain. And now turn your attention to the reflected image of the brain—the content, that is, of the intestines. This too cannot be in order, and will not be. The activity of the intestines cannot ever have been in good order. Irregular brain activity and irregular intestinal activity go parallel with one another, especially in a child. This does not mean that you can set out with the resolve: I will see to it that the intestinal activity becomes regular—and imagine that thereby you will bring order into the activity of the brain. If you want to adjust the latter and bring it also into good harmony, you will have to work with medical knowledge.

Then there is a certain impurity in the relation and behaviour of the soul to the outside world. Try asking the boy to do something which he quite well understands; he will just grin a little, he won't meet what you say with openness and candour.

I shall have more to say afterwards about this case. I would like now only to add, in regard to the speech exercises that were begun with him at four years of age, that whenever speech exercises are done in this way, first forwards and then backwards, they help to regulate the connection of ether body with astral body. The exercises that were given to the boy at that time had this end definitely in view: to induce a harmonious co-operation of astral and ether bodies.

What the child needs is to be brought to feel and perceive his own physical organism. For as he does so, forces of growth will begin at the same time to insinuate themselves, as it were, into this physical organism. We must therefore choose for him exercises in Curative Eurythmy, which bring it about that he “discovers” his own physical organism. E (Eh, as in gate) is particularly helpful here, for in Eh man touches himself in his own organism; also U (as in rune) and O. O is chosen for its regulating influence. U and Eh are chosen for the purpose of helping the child to become aware of himself in himself. In his case, everything that makes for the realisation and apprehension of one's own organism can be of help. What else have we been doing with him besides Curative Eurythmy and Speech exercises? He has painting with the group. He must of course have painting; he is just about reaching school age. Progress with this child may be slow but it will be sure.

(The next child is brought in.)

I got to know this boy on a Journey. A rather difficult child! He is eleven years old. And now let me tell you where the trouble lies. The boy is an only child. Birth is reported to have been normal, although the mother is said to have lived unwisely during pregnancy; it seems she even drank a good deal. Development is said to have taken its course in the first three years without any marked individual feature. We will say more about that later. As a matter of fact, it cannot have been quite as represented, for at three years old the child fell suddenly ill, with high fever, and had convulsions during the night, the attack lasting only a short time. Such attacks became then for a while very frequent, coming on as a rule at night; later they grew much less frequent, occurring on an average once in three months. The attacks have, as you see, the characteristic symptoms of convulsions, that we spoke of earlier. Characteristically also, they began in the fourth year. Before that, the organism had not developed so far as to push back the astral organisation; the point had not been reached when the outside coverings—the walls—of certain organs began to repel the astral organisation. During the convulsions there is complete unconsciousness. This too, we saw, is quite usual. The child has violent spasms of twitching, particularly over the left half of the body; the eyes are also turned to the left. Afterwards he is very exhausted, and vomiting often occurs.

This means, you see, that by the time the child reached the third year, the walls of the organs were beginning to hold back the astral organisation, not allowing it to get through. Hence the convulsions. And with the convulsions—for the reason I explained to you—is associated loss of consciousness. But now in his case the astral organisation does succeed after a time in breaking through the walls of the organs to some extent. The child, unconsciously or semi-consciously, strains every effort to bring this about, and this struggle on his part lasts exactly as long as the attack. Then he has won through; but there is in consequence a certain emptiness in the organism in comparison with the previous condition, and this anomaly finds expression in the violent twitchings and spasms.

Now, as you know, the left half of the body of man is rather weaker than the right. When, the attack being over, the astral body is wanting to get free, it will naturally try to escape in the direction of the weaker part of the organism—that is, it will seek escape to the left. This finds expression also in the fact that the child turns his eyes to the left.

According to the diagnosis of doctors in Jena, the boy had encephalitis—a year ago, in January, was it? At that time, he had severe convulsions following on digestive disturbance and fever. So that here we have, preceded by stomach trouble, a major fit. Two weeks after the child was better again, paralysis of the left arm and leg showed itself—a most characteristic symptom, and easily explained. For, you see, what happens is this. The child goes on wanting to push the astral body through; but each time he puts forth these efforts and succeeds, he becomes aware afterwards of an emptiness behind the place where he succeeded in pushing the astral body through. Then he gets twitchings, and lets his astral body escape—to the left.

A process is taking place here which it is important to observe. Anything that enters into the organisation from without—that is to say, that has not been duly prepared by the organisation itself, but has forced its way in—is poison for the human organism. Suppose the astral organisation has suffered a displacement from right to left, and this displacement is continued—as it may well be, when it is a serious one—into the etheric organism, with the result that the physical organism also becomes involved. Then a slight infiltration of poison is set up towards the left side of the body, and this manifests outwardly in the symptom of paralysis. The child was given massage, and after three months the paralysis showed signs of improvement. The affected part was left a little weak, as one can still observe. (Turning to the boy and holding out an object) Take hold of it like this! As you see, he is clumsy with the left arm.

Since January 1923, the fits have essentially changed in character. They last now only a very short time, coming on as a rule nine hours after falling asleep. Suddenly the child will cry out, wake up, and stand up on his feet. At such moments you can observe also that extreme flatulence is present—a characteristic symptom. At the present time the boy has a fit nearly every week, but there is no longer the disturbance of consciousness. Neither do the twitchings occur. The fits pass and he jumps up all right. In 1924 a puncture was made in the corpus callosum, but with no result. The latest thing we have tried is treatment with calcium lactate.

The child is late in going to sleep and often talks in his sleep, especially if he has had a late meal. Appetite is good.

He has no liking for fruit or vegetables or anything acid, but shows a marked preference for meat. Digestion is at present fairly good; earlier on, he was inclined to be constipated and was also very quickly tired. The boy has a lively fantasy. He is friendly with everyone, but has no special affection for anyone in particular, not even for his parents. He is quick-tempered, and loves animals and plants. And we must not omit to note a trait that is strikingly characteristic of his condition, namely that he is a great chatterbox! That is part of the illness. It is for him a real need; he simply must chatter.

I think the very behaviour of the boy will have revealed to you the facts of his condition; you cannot help seeing them all simply by looking at him. There is however another feature of the case to which I must call your attention.

The child is now at the stage where the second body has already been developed for a long time, for he is eleven years old; but the condition in which we find him suggests that the model organism had itself become decadent, owing to the fact that the mother did not live wisely and carefully during the time of pregnancy, but drank a good deal. The whole manner and condition of the child now, makes it highly probable that the first body, the model body, was exceedingly irregular. And we are strongly inclined to the view that, although no such information has been given us, the birth may have occurred too soon, perhaps early by as much as two weeks—the mother failing to maintain her own organism in a condition that would render it a right and fit home for the embryo, which requires of course plenty of room to develop on all sides. This is frequently the case when alcohol is taken during pregnancy.

It is stated in the report given us that development in the first three years was without any peculiar features or symptoms. What seems to me more probable is that there has not been the readiness or ability to watch for more delicate deviations and irregularities. The astral (and the ego) organisation have been hanging out about the neck or mouth, and it is clear from this that the child must at any rate have felt, comparatively early, a need to speak. He must always have found difficulty in diving down into the ether and physical bodies. A certain nervous excitement, that manifests externally and that tends to hold back the principle of imitation and to allow more play to the inner organic impulses in evolution, must have already been present in the first three years.

And then we have, manifesting especially as the age of three-and-a-half approaches—the age that is halfway through the first seven-year epoch—the reactions that naturally arise when during the first seven years the ego and astral body are unable to work as they should from the direction of the head organisation. These organs here, which were at that time slowly and gradually coming into being—for they are finished and complete at seven years of age—turn out to be stunted in their growth. Why should they be so? The organs are stunted because the child did not finish the embryo period. They would have been more complete and more perfectly shaped if the child had gone through the whole embryo period. As it was, he had no fully developed model. When therefore, at the important age of three-and-a-half, the organs are beginning to take shape, the model comes short, and a condition develops where the astral body wants to penetrate the whole organisation and make its way through the walls of the organs, but is unable to get through; and there follow all the symptoms of which we have spoken. That in such a case the stomach and intestines must also inevitably become disordered ought not to be difficult to understand. For if the astral body does not succeed in bringing about the right streamings from the head to the limbs, then the intestines and the whole digestive organisation must necessarily remain weak. The ego organisation is not properly in them.

Consider now for a moment this weak digestive organisation—that is to say, a digestion that is weak in its forces, not having the ego organisation properly in it. Such a digestive system simply cannot tolerate just the particular kind of food that should find its specific field of activity in the digestive organisation. Imagine you have before you the plant.

Where in man does the root of the plant have its field of activity? In the head organisation; and the foliage in the rhythmic system; and all that develops above in the way of fruit or flower works in the intestines, in the whole digestive organisation. There is however no affinity between such a weakly developed digestive organisation and these upper parts of the plant. On the other hand, the boy's astral body, which is lying freely, as it were, in the whole belly without making its way right into the digestive organisation, has a hankering for meat. (The astral body of man is, you know, by its very nature strongly attracted to meat). We saw also that the boy shows a dislike of anything acid or sour. That again is understandable. Acid substances work with particular force upon the astral body. If the latter has dived down properly into the organism, then it unloads, as it were, upon the physical organism the acid influences it has received. But if it has not entered rightly into the physical organism, then this astral body is left painfully sensitive to the acid influences that reach it.

It is from observations such as these that you can obtain a true picture of how the organism works. When there is an irregularity of the kind I have described, one need not be at all surprised when stomach disorders occur. Stomach disorder is only a symptom of the presence in the metabolism of this irregularity. The illness consists entirely in the irregularity; the symptoms are occasioned by it, and there is naturally always the possibility that the onset of a fit should be preceded by stomach disturbance.

Since January 1923, there has, as I said, been an important change in the character of the fits. These last now only a short time, coming on about nine hours after the boy has fallen asleep. He suddenly starts screaming and crying, and wakes up. There is also extreme flatulence in the bowels. At present a fit occurs about once a week. With such a state of affairs, the outlook seems at first distinctly serious; it has nevertheless hopeful features. For there are signs of recovery, there are signs that a natural betterment is taking place. We have in fact reached a kind of crisis, that is expressing itself inwardly in an explosive manner; it takes its course slowly, but we could not expect anything else.

Why do the fits occur nine hours after falling asleep? Because that is the time when the astral body is beginning to set out on its return journey into the physical body. It still has difficulty in returning, it cannot make its way in; it keeps diving down, and then being driven back again. You can well imagine how all the symptoms follow from this—the starting up and the screaming. When however the astral body is once inside the whole physical organism, it is an easier matter for it to remain there throughout the day. The extreme flatulence arises from the fact that the astral body is not completely membered into the bowels organisation. To the relative independence and detachment of the astral body are due also the characteristic features of the boy's soul life—his continuous chattering, his excitability, his lively fantasy. And now the question is: what are we to do in such a case?

Important before all else is to remove from the astral body—which works powerfully and independently—all possibility of its developing forces that hinder it in the process of adaptation to ether body and physical body. When you have the child standing before you as you did today, you can see at once the first thing that needs to be done—his toy must be taken from him. That toy is a veritable poison for his soul. What he needs above all, is to have his imagination stimulated—as it can be only when he has to handle something that is not already complete and perfect. He must be got to paint as much as possible, but especially also to fashion forms, to carve. He should simply be given a piece of wood, and encouraged to “form” it in the shape of a human being. Here then will be our point of attack, as it were, in the educational sense. We must avoid bringing him in contact with things that are finished and perfect, and have it as our aim that he shall be constantly making things himself. This will bring his limbs into movement. We have not yet hit upon quite the right ways to achieve this; that still needs to be done.

A peculiar feature of this boy's condition is that one cannot say it is some particular organ which does not let the astral body through; the totality of the organs is formed and developed in such a way that they all equally hold back the astral body. Hence the slight tendency to deformity. And since, when the astral body does succeed in diving down, it is by the left side that it manages to escape, the danger is always present that symptoms of paralysis will show themselves on the left side. At his age they do not matter very much—as long as they are slight. They could, however, lead on to a more severe paralysis.

It would be good if along with foods for which he has a liking, the boy could be given sour fruit in exceedingly small quantities. (You will remember, we explained how his very constitution obliges him to have a strong dislike of all acid foods.) If this is done, then, while grabbing at the food he likes, he will take also with it your little dose of acid. All you have to do, before you give him some meat, is to pour on to the plate a small quantity of some dish that contains acid fruit juice. In this way you will find you can accustom him to eating very small helpings of stewed fruit with his meat.

And then it will be important that he should begin—or continue—to receive regular teaching on a right and sensible method, such as the method followed in the Waldorf School—irrespective of whether he makes rapid progress or not. We shall give him Eurythmy exercises, not limiting ourselves to particular sounds, but doing with him whatever brings the limbs especially into movement. In this way we can strengthen the limbs in their efforts to give form to the astral body.

In his present condition the boy himself helps in his own progress.

On the other hand, a child like the one we were considering earlier is extraordinarily difficult to deal with, the reason being that you have there before you a kind of little demon. What you must realise is that while the child remains small in his physical body, his astral body is all the time growing in inverse proportion. It does not adapt itself to the physical organism, but is as big as the latter is small. Now as a matter of fact, the child is, without knowing it, well on the way to become an actor in his astral body. Supposing you decide to appoint, instead of one teacher, a whole staff of teachers to train actors for speaking on the stage, assigning a particular task to each member of the college—then, if you were to develop him in a one-sided way, this squat little fellow could quite well be trained to teach the actors the sound R and related sounds. In spite of his apparent quietness and calm, the child is in reality very excited and agitated. You have before you, as I said, a kind of demonic being. An absolutely real super-sensible being is present in this boy. What you had sitting there in front of you was just a dwarfish little fellow, a mere Tom Thumb. But the actor is present there too all the time in full force, turning all kinds of somersaults etc., while the boy is perhaps sauntering along in an indolent manner.

You have here, you see, to do with a child who is most difficult of access. Whatever you attempt with the physical body meets with no response there, but only from the mercurial astral body—with the exception of Curative Eurythmy and speech exercises. These do contact the physical body and bring the intellect into activity; but it is no good trying to approach the child via the physical body by any other means. Indeed, it is quite possible you may fare like the “sorcerer's apprentice” who split the broomstick which would not behave and then found he had two broomsticks to deal with instead of one. For if you should ever succeed in making some sort of approach via the physical body—apart from Curative Eurythmy and Speech exercises—it may easily happen that through your intervention the constant restlessness is actually aggravated. That, then, will be your main problem in connection with this boy—that you are dealing all the time with an extraordinarily mobile and restless astral body.

How must we proceed, if we want to educate the boy? We must arrange our lessons so as to achieve a reversal of what we very frequently set out to achieve. Very often, as you know, we attach particular importance to making the course of the lesson lead up gradually to a dramatic climax. But for the boy we are considering, this gradual enhancement of interest must then at once be followed by a decline of interest. The dramatic quality must ebb away and subside. And this principle must be observed throughout all the teaching we undertake with him. We must have the patience and perseverance to carry it through. First, we must bring it about that the boy's attention is thoroughly roused. He, of course, has no knowledge at all of what is going on in his astral body; but anything that has the quality of true fantasy and imagination will help you to make your approach to this astral organism. You must invent the most delightful stories, full of vivacity and movement. When you are with this child, you must really become a poet, rich in imagination. And then, having gradually worked your story up to a high pitch of dramatic movement, and having succeeded at last in gaining entrance into the sub-conscious astral organisation—then you must, as it were, reverse and try to tone it all down, try to push back the stream of interest. Perhaps you hold up to ridicule some incident in the story, so that the charm of the thing is a little spoiled. Let us say, you begin to poke fun at the one who is the hero of the story and with whom the child has been enraptured. You could say: This great hero, you know, whenever he sets out to do his valiant deeds, he cannot begin until he has first blown his nose! With some such remark or other, you raise a smile at the person or thing that has aroused such enthusiasm and interest. And you go on in this way, until at last the whole thing evaporates like a soap-bubble. But beware that you do not at the same time spoil the child's enjoyment; you must see to it that the anticlimax, the discovery of how it all vanishes like a soap bubble, is also followed with pleasure and delight. And now while this is taking place, while you are undoing, as it were, the inner process which you yourself first stimulated the child's astral body is all the time gradually adapting itself to the physical body.

If you have the patience to undertake this kind of education with the child—first becoming a poet, and then again turning round on yourself and pulling your poetry to pieces with your irony until no shred of it remains—if you can have the patience to do this, you will manage to bring it about that by his ninth or tenth year the child will begin to grow in quite a natural manner. And that would be a great achievement. The super-fantastic organism that was created long ago during embryonic development would then be changed back again. The symptoms now present would gradually disappear in the course of your treatment. On the other hand, the very least result of all will be obtained by making direct attack on the symptoms themselves. To set about trying to break the child of his R would be as hopeless as it was once with a certain actor in Weimar—although he was no child!—who had a habit of emphasising each single syllable in every word. This actor would never say “Fréunderl” as we say it, but adhered strictly to the principle of giving equal emphasis to both syllables. Thus he used to say “Fréundérl”, “Kópfchén”, “Kíndléin”.² It is impossible to combat symptoms of this kind by direct attack. Any attempt to break our boy of saying and living in R would be utterly futile. It would only leave him empty and lazy and indolent. If, on the other hand, you carry out the measures I have described, the predilection for R will disappear of itself.

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• 1. On 2nd March, 1924.
• 2. Comparable English words would be friendship kitten, darling.

Yesterday I tried to show the methods used by Eastern spirituality for approaching the super-sensible world. I pointed out how anybody who wished to follow this path into the super-sensible more or less dispensed with the bridge linking him with his fellows. He preferred to avoid the communication with other human beings that is established by speaking, thinking and ego-perception. I showed how the attempt was first of all made not to hear and understand through the word what another person wished to say, but actually to live in the words themselves. This process of living-in-the-word was enhanced by forming the words into certain aphorisms. One lived in these and repeated them, so that the soul forces acquired by thus living in the words were further strengthened by repetition.

I showed how in this way a soul-condition was attained that we might call a state of Inspiration, in the sense in which I have used the word. What distinguished the sages of the ancient Eastern world was that they were true to their race; conscious individuality was far less developed with them than it came to be in later stages of human evolution. This meant that their penetration of the spiritual world was a more or less instinctive process. Because the whole thing was instinctive and to some extent the product of a healthy human impulse, it could not in ancient times lead to the pathological disturbances of which we have also spoken. In later times steps were taken by the so-called Mystery centres to guard against such disturbances as I have tried to describe to you. What I said was that those in the West, who wish to come to grips with the spiritual world, must attempt things in a different way.

Mankind has progressed since the days of which I was speaking. Other soul forces have emerged, so that it is not simply a matter of breathing new life into the ancient Eastern way of spiritual development. A reactionary harking back to the spiritual life of prehistoric times or of man's early historical development is impossible. For the Western world, the way of initiation into the super-sensible world is through Imagination. But Imagination must be integrated organically with our spiritual life as a whole. This can come about in the most varied ways: as it did, after all, in the East. There, too, the way was not determined unequivocally in advance. To-day I should like to describe a way of initiation that conforms to the needs of Western civilisation and is particularly well suited to anyone who is immersed in the scientific life of the West.

In my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have described a sure path to the super-sensible. But this book has a fairly general appeal and is not specially suited to the requirements of someone with a definite scientific training. The path of initiation which I wish to describe to-day is specifically designed for the scientist. All my experience tells me that for such a man the way of knowledge must be based on what I have set out in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. I will explain what I mean by this.

This book, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, was not written with the objects in mind that are customary when writing books to-day. Nowadays people write simply in order to inform the reader of the subject-matter of the book, so that he learns what the book contains in accordance with his education, his scientific training or the special knowledge he already possesses. This was not basically my intention in writing The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. For this reason it will not be popular with those who read books only to acquire information. The purpose of the book is to make the reader use his own processes of thought on every page, In a sense the book is only a kind of musical score, to be read with inward thought-activity in order to be able of oneself to advance from one thought to the next. This book constantly expects the reader to co-operate by thinking for himself.

Moreover, what happens to the soul of the reader, when he makes this effort of co-operation in thought, is also to be considered. Anybody who works through this book and brings his thought-activity to bear on it will admit to gaining a measure of self-comprehension in an element of his soul-life where this had been lacking. If he cannot do this, he is not reading The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in the right way. He should feel how he is being lifted out of his usual concepts into thoughts which are independent of his sense-life and in which his whole existence is merged. He should be able to feel how this kind of thinking has freed him from dependence on the bodily state. Anyone who denies experiencing this has fundamentally misunderstood the book. It should be more or less possible to say: “Now I know through what I have achieved in the thought-activity of my soul what true thinking really is.”

The strange thing is that most Western philosophers utterly deny the reality of the very thing that my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity seeks to awaken in the soul of the reader. Countless philosophers have expounded the view that pure thinking does not exist, but is bound to contain traces, however diluted, of sense-perception. A strong impression is left that philosophers who maintain this have never really studied mathematics, or gone into the difference between analytical and empirical mechanics. The degree of specialisation required to-day will alone account for the fact that a great deal of philosophising goes on nowadays without the remotest understanding of mathematical thinking. Philosophy is fundamentally impossible without a grasp of at least the spirit of mathematical thinking. Goethe's attitude to this has been noticed, even though he made no claim himself to any special training in mathematics. Many would deny the existence of the very faculty which I should like readers of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to acquire.

Let us imagine a reader who simply sets about working through The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity within the framework of his ordinary consciousness in the way I have just described. He will not of course be able to claim that he has been transported into a super-sensible world; for I intentionally wrote this book in the way I did so as to present people with a work of pure philosophy. Just consider what advantage it would have been to anthroposophically orientated science if I had written works of spiritual science from the start. They would of course have been disregarded by all trained philosophers as the amateurish efforts of a dilettante. To begin with I had to concentrate on pure philosophy: I had to present the world with something thought out in pure philosophical terms, even though it transcended the normal bounds of philosophy.

However, at some point the transition had to be made from pure philosophy and science to writing about spiritual science. This occurred at a time when I had been asked to write about Goethe's scientific works, and this was followed by an invitation to write one particular chapter in a German biography of Goethe that was about to appear. It was in the late 1890's and the chapter was to be concerned with Goethe's scientific works. I had actually written it and sent it to the publisher when another work of mine came out, called Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age. This book was a link between pure philosophy and philosophy based on Anthroposophy. When this came out, my other manuscript was returned to me. Nothing was enclosed apart from my fee, the idea being that any claim I might make had thus been met. Among the learned pedants there obviously was no interest in anything written—not even a single chapter devoted to the development of Goethe's attitude to natural science—by one who had indulged in such mysticism.

I will now assume that The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity has already been studied with one's ordinary consciousness in the way I have suggested. We are now in the right frame of mind to guide our souls in the direction briefly indicated yesterday—along the first steps of the way leading to Imagination. It is possible to pursue this path in a form consonant with Western life if we simply try to surrender ourselves completely to the world of outer phenomena, so that we absorb them without thinking about them. In ordinary waking life, you will agree, we are constantly perceiving, but in the very act of doing so we are always permeating out perceptions with concepts. Scientific thinking involves a systematic interweaving of perceptions with concepts, building up systems of concepts and so on. In acquiring a capacity for the kind of thinking that gradually results from reading The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, we become capable of such strong inner activity that we are able to perceive without conceptualising.

There is something further we can do to strengthen our soul-forces so that we are enabled to absorb perceptions in the way I have just described: that is, by refraining from elaborating them with concepts in the very act of absorbing them. We can call up symbolic or other kinds of images—visual images, sound images, images of warmth, taste, and so on. If we thus bring our activity of perception into a state of flux, as it were, and infuse it with life and movement, not in the way we follow when forming concepts, but by working on our perceptions in an artistic or symbolising manner, we shall develop much sooner the power of allowing the percepts to permeate us in their pure essence. Simply to train ourselves rigorously in what I have called phenomenalism—that is, in elaborating the phenomena—is an excellent preparation for this kind of cognition. If we have really striven to reach the material boundaries of cognition—if we have not lazily looked beyond the veil of sense for metaphysical explanations in terms of atoms and molecules, but have used concepts to set in order the phenomena and to follow them through to their archetypes—then we have already undergone a training which can enable us to keep all conceptional activity away from the phenomena. And if at the same time we turn the phenomena into symbols and images, we shall acquire such strength of soul as to be able, one might say, to absorb the outer world free from concepts.

Obviously we cannot expect to achieve this all at once. Spiritual research demands far more of us than research in a laboratory or observatory. Above all an intense effort of will is required. For a time we should strive to concentrate on a symbolic picture, and occupy ourselves with the images that arise, leaving them undisturbed by phenomena present in the soul. Otherwise they will disappear as we hurry through life from sensation to sensation and from experience to experience. We should accustom ourselves to contemplating at least one such image—whether of our own creation or suggested by somebody else—for longer and longer periods. We should penetrate to its very core, concentrating on it beyond the possibility of being influenced by mere memory. If we do all this, and keep repeating the process, we can strengthen our soul forces and finally become aware of an inner experience, of which formerly we had not the remotest inkling.

Finally—it is important not to misunderstand what I am going to say—it is possible to form a picture of something experienced only in our inner being, if we recall especially lively dream-pictures, so long as they derive from memories and do not relate directly to anything external, and are thus a sort of reaction stemming from within ourselves. If we experience these images in their fullest depth, we have a very real experience; and the point is reached when we meet within ourselves the spiritual element which actuates the processes of growth. We meet the power of growth itself. Contact is established with a part of our human make-up which we formerly experienced only unconsciously, but which is nevertheless active within us. What do I mean by “experienced unconsciously?”

Now I have told you how from birth until the change of teeth a spiritual soul force works on and through the human being; and after this it more or less detaches itself. Later, between the change of teeth and maturity, it immerses itself, so to speak, in the physical body, awakening the erotic impulse—and much else besides. All this happens unconsciously. But if we consciously use such soul-activities as I have described in order to observe how the qualities of soul and spirit can penetrate our physical make-up, we begin to see how these processes work in a human being, and how from the time of his birth he is given over to the external world. Nowadays this relation to the outer world is regarded as amounting to nothing more than abstract perception or abstract knowledge. This is not so. We are surrounded by a world of colour, sound and warmth and by all kinds of sensory impressions. As our thinking gets to work on them, our whole being receives yet further impressions. When unconscious experiences of childhood come to be experienced consciously, we even find that, while we were absorbing colour and sound impressions unconsciously, they were working spiritually upon us. When, between the change of teeth and maturity, erotic feelings make their first impact, they do not simply grow out of our constitution but come to meet us from the cosmos in rays of colour, sound and warmth.

But warmth, light and sound are not to be understood in a merely physical sense. Through our sensory impressions we are conscious only of what I might call outer sound and outer colour. And when we thus surrender ourselves to nature, we do not encounter the ether-waves, atoms and so on which are imagined by modern physics and physiology. Spiritual forces are at work in the physical world; forces which between birth and death fashion us into the human beings we are.

When once we tread the paths of knowledge which I have described, we become aware of the fact that it is the outer world which forms us. As we become clearly conscious of spirit in the outer world, we are able to experience consciously the living forces at work in our bodies. It is phenomenology itself that reveals to us so clearly the existence of spirit in the outer world. It is the observation of phenomena, and not abstract metaphysics, that brings the spiritual to our notice, if we make a point of observing consciously what we would otherwise tend to do unconsciously; if we notice how through the sense-world spiritual powers enter into our being and work formatively upon it.

Yesterday I pointed out to you that the Eastern sage virtually ignores the significance of speech, thought and ego-perception. His attitude towards these activities is different, for speech, perception of thoughts and ego-perception tend at first to lead us away from the spiritual world into social contact with other human beings. We buy our way into social life, as it were, by exposing our thoughts, our speech and our ego-perception and making them communicable. The Eastern sage lived in the word and resigned himself to the fact that it could not be communicated. He felt the same about his thoughts; he lived in his thinking, and so on. In the West we are more inclined to cast a backward glance at humanity as we follow the path into the super-sensible world.

At this point it is well to remember that man has a certain kind of sensory organisation within him. I have already described the three inner senses through which he becomes aware of his inner being, just as he perceives what goes on around him. We have a sense of balance, which tells us of the space we occupy as human beings and within whose limits our wills can function. We have a sense of movement, which tells us, even in the dark, that we are moving. This knowledge comes from within and is not derived from contact with outside objects that we may touch in passing. We have a “sense of life,” through which we are aware of our general state of health, or, one might say, of our constantly changing inward condition.

It is just in the first seven years of our life that these three inner senses work in conjunction with the will. We are guided by our sense of balance: and a being that, to begin with, cannot move about and later on can only crawl, is transformed into one that can stand upright and walk. When we learn to walk upright, we are coming to grips with the world. This is possible only because of our sense of balance. Similarly, our sense of movement and our sense of life contribute to our development as integrated human beings.

Anybody able to apply laboratory standards of objective observation to the study of man's development—spirit-soul as well as physical—will soon discover how those forces that form the human being and are especially active in the first seven years free themselves and begin to assume a different aspect from the time of the change of teeth. By this time a person is less intimately connected with his inner life than he was as a child. A child is closely bound up inwardly with human equilibrium, movement and processes of life. As emancipation from them gradually occurs, something else is developing. A certain adjustment is taking place to the three senses of smell, taste and touch.

A detailed observation of the way a child comes to grips with life is extraordinarily interesting. This can be seen most obviously, of course, in early life, but anybody trained to do so can see it clearly enough later on as well. I refer to the process of orientation made possible by the senses of smell, of taste and of touch. The child in a manner expels from himself the forces of equilibrium, movement and life and, while he is so doing, draws into him the qualitative senses of smell, taste and touch. Over a fairly long period the former are, so to speak, being breathed out and the latter breathed in; so that the two trinities encounter each other within our organism—the forces of equilibrium, movement and life pushing their way outward from within, while smell, taste and touch, which point us to qualities, are pressing inwards from without. These two trinities of sense interpenetrate each other; and it is through this interpenetration that the human being first comes to realise himself as a true self.

Now we are cut off from outer spirituality by speech and by our faculties of perceiving the thoughts and perceiving the egos of others—and rightly so, for if it were otherwise we could never in this physical life grow into social beings. [See previous lecture.] In precisely the same way, inasmuch as the qualities of smell, taste and touch wax counter to equilibrium, movement and life, we are inwardly cut off from the last three—which would otherwise disclose themselves to us directly. One could say that the sensations of smell, taste and touch form a barricade in front of the sensations of balance, movement and life and prevent our experiencing them.

What is the result of that development towards Imagination of which I spoke? It is this. The oriental stops short at speech in order to live in it; stops at thought in order to live in it; stops at ego-perception in order to live in it; and by these means makes his way outward into the spiritual world. We, as the result of developing Imagination, do something similar when we absorb the external percept without conceptualising it. But the direction we take in doing this is the opposite to the direction taken by an oriental who practises restraint in the matter of speech, thought-perception and ego-perception. He stays still in these. He lives his way into them. The aspirant to Imagination, on the other hand, worms his way inward through smell, taste and perception; he penetrates inward and, ignoring the importunities of his sensations of smell, taste and touch, makes contact with the experiences of equilibrium, movement and life.

It is a great moment when we have penetrated the sensory trinity, as I have called it, of taste, smell and touch, and we stand naked, as it were, before essential movement, equilibrium and life.

Having thus prepared the ground, it is interesting to study what it is that Western mysticism so often has to offer. Most certainly, I am very far from decrying the elements of poetry, beauty and imaginative expression in many mystical writings. Most certainly I admire what, for instance, St. Theresa, Mechthild of Magdeburg and others have to tell us, and indeed Meister Eckhardt and Johannes Tauler; but all this reveals itself also to the true spiritual scientist. It is what arises if one follows an inward path without penetrating through the domain of smell, taste and touch. Read what has been written by individuals who have described with particular clarity what they have experienced in this way. They speak of an inner sense of taste, experienced in connection with the soul-spiritual element in man's inner being. They refer also to smell and touch in a special way. Anybody, for instance, who reads Mechthild of Magdeburg or St. Theresa rightly will see that they follow this inward path, but never penetrate right through smell, taste and touch. They use beautiful poetic imagery for their descriptions, but they are speaking only of how one can smell, taste and touch oneself inwardly.

It is indeed less agreeable to see the true nature of reality with spiritually developed senses than to read the accounts given by a sensual mysticism—the only term for it—which fundamentally gratifies only a refined inward-looking egotism of soul. As I say, much as this mysticism is to be admired—and I do admire it—the true spiritual scientist has to realise that it stops half-way. What is manifest in the splendid poetic imagery of Mechthild of Magdeburg, St. Theresa and others is really only what is smelt, tasted and touched before attaining to true inwardness.

Truth can be unpleasant, perhaps even cruel, at times. But modern man has no business to become rickety in soul through following a vague incomplete mysticism. What is required to-day is to penetrate the true mysteries of man's inner nature with all our intellectual powers—with the same powers that we have disciplined in the cause of science and used to effect in the outer world. There is no mistaking what science is. It is respected for the very method and discipline it demands. It is when we have learnt to be scientific that we appreciate the achievements of a vague mysticism at their true worth but we also discover that they are not what spiritual science has to foster. On the contrary, the task of spiritual science is to reveal clearly the true nature of man's being. This in turn makes possible a sound understanding of the outer world.

Instead of speaking in this way, as the truth demands of me, I could be claiming the support of every vague, woolly mystic, who goes in for mysticism to satisfy the inward appetite of his soul. That is not our concern here, but rather the discovery of powers that can be used for living; spiritual powers that are capable of informing our scientific and social life.

When we have come to grips with the forces that dwell in our senses of balance, life and movement, then we have reached something that is first of all experienced through its transparency as man's essential inward being. The very nature of the thing shows us clearly that we cannot penetrate any deeper. What we do find is quite enough to be going on with, for what we discover is not the stuff of vague mystical dreams but a genuine organology. Above all, we find within ourselves the true nature of balance and movement, and of the stream of life. We find this within ourselves.

When this experience is complete, something unique has taken place. In due course we discover something. An essential prerequisite is, as I have said, to have worked carefully through The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The Philosophy is then left, so to speak, on one side, while we pursue the inward path of contemplation and meditation. We have advanced as far as balance, movement and life. We live in this life, balance and movement. Parallel with our pursuit of the way of contemplation and meditation, but without any other activity on our part, our thinking in connection with The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity has undergone a transformation. We have been able to experience as pure thought what a philosophy such as this has to offer; but now that we have worked upon ourselves in another sphere, our inner soul life; this has turned into something quite different. It has taken on new dimensions and is now much more full of meaning. While on the one hand we have been penetrating our inward being and have deepened our power of Imagination, we have also lifted out of the ordinary level of consciousness the fruits of our thinking on The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Thoughts which formerly had a more or less abstract existence in the realm of pure cerebration have now become significant forces. They are now alive in our consciousness, and what was once pure thinking has become Inspiration. We have developed Imagination; and thinking has been transformed into Inspiration.

What we have attained by these two methods in our progress along this road has to be clearly differentiated. On the one hand we have gained Inspiration from what was, to begin with, pure thought. On the other hand, there is the experience that comes to us through our senses of balance, movement and life. We are now in a position to unite the two forms of experience, the outer and the inner. The fusion of Inspiration and Imagination brings us to Intuition.

What have we accomplished now? I can answer this question by approaching it from the other side. First of all I must draw attention to the steps taken by the Oriental seer, who wishes to advance further after being trained in the mantras and experiencing the living word and language. He now learns to experience not only the rhythms of language but also, and in a sense consciously, the process of breathing. He has, as it were, to undergo an artificial kind of breathing by varying it in all kinds of ways. For him this is one step up; but this is not something to be taken over in its entirety by the West.

What does the Eastern student of yoga attain by consciously regulating his breathing in a variety of ways? He experiences something very remarkable when he breathes in. As he does so, he is brought into contact with a quality of air that is not to be found when we experience air as a purely physical substance, but only when we unite ourselves with the air and so experience it spiritually. A genuine student of yoga, as he breathes in, experiences something that works upon his whole being, an activity that is not completed in this life and does not end with death. The spiritual quality of the outer air enters our being and engenders in us something that goes with us through the gate of death. To experience the breathing process consciously means taking part in something that continues when we have laid aside our bodies. To experience consciously the process of breathing is to experience both the reaction of our inner being to the drawing in of breath and the activities of our soul-spiritual being before birth: or let us say rather that we experience our conception and the factors that contribute to our embryonic development and work on us further within our organism as children. Breathing consciously means realising our own identity on the far side of birth and death. Advancing from the experience of the word and of language to that of breathing means penetrating further into an inspired realisation of the eternal in man. We Westerners have to experience much the same—but in a different sphere.

What in fact is the process of perception? It is only a modification of the breathing process. As we breathe in, the air presses on our diaphragm and on our whole being. Brain fluid is driven up through our spinal column into our brain. This establishes a connection between breathing and cerebral activity. Breathing, in so far as it influences the brain, works upon our sense-activity in the form of perception. Drawing in breath has various sides to it, and one of these is perception.

How is it when we breathe out? Brain fluid descends and exerts pressure on the circulation of the blood. The descent of brain fluid is bound up with the activity of will and also with breathing out. Anybody who really makes a study of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity will discover that when we attain to pure thinking, a fusion of thinking and willing takes place. Pure thinking is fundamentally an expression of will. So it comes about that what we have characterised as pure thinking is related to what the Easterner experiences in the process of breathing out.

Pure thinking is related to breathing out, just as perception is related to breathing in. We have to go through the same process as the yogi, but in a more inward form. Yoga depends on the regulation of breathing, both in and out, and in this way comes into contact with the eternal in man. What should Western man do? He can transform into soul-experience both perception on the one hand and thinking on the other. He can unite in his inner experience perception and thinking, which would otherwise only come quietly together in a formal abstract way, so that he has the same experience inwardly in his soul and spirit as he has physically in breathing in and out. Breathing in and out are physical experiences. When they are harmonised, we experience the eternal.

We experience thought-perception in our everyday lives. As we bring movement into our soul life, we become aware of rhythm, of the swing of the pendulum, of the constant movement to and fro of perception and thinking. Higher realities are experienced in the East by breathing in and out. The Westerner develops a kind of breathing process in his soul and spirit, in place of the physical breathing of yoga, when he develops within himself, through perception, the vital process of transformed in-breathing and, through thinking, that of out-breathing; and fuses concept, thought and perception into a harmonious whole. Gradually, with the beat of this rhythmical breathing process in perception and thinking, his development advances to true spiritual reality in the form of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I indicated as a philosophical fact that reality is the product of the interpenetration of perception and thinking. Since this book was designed to deal with man's soul activity, some indication should also be given of the training that Western man needs if he is to penetrate the spiritual world. The Easterner speaks of the systole and diastole, breathing in and out. In place of these terms Western man should put perception and thinking. Where the Oriental speaks of the development of physical breathing, we in the West say: development of soul-spiritual breathing in the course of cognition through perception and thinking.

All this should perhaps be contrasted with the kind of blind alley reached by Western spiritual development. Let me explain what I mean. In 1841 Michelet, the Berlin philosopher, published Hegel's posthumous works of natural philosophy. Hegel had worked at the end of the eighteenth century, together with Schelling, at laying the foundations of a system of natural philosophy. Schelling, with the enthusiasm of youth, had built his natural philosophy in a remarkable way on what he called intellectual contemplation. But he reached a point where he could make no further progress. His immersion in mysticism produced splendid results in his work, Bruno, or concerning the Divine and Natural Principle in Things, and that fine piece of writing, Human Freedom, or the Origin of Evil. But for all this he could make no progress and began to hold back from expressing himself at all. He kept promising to follow things up with a philosophy that would reveal the true nature of those hidden forces at which his earlier natural philosophy had only hinted.

When Hegel's natural philosophy appeared in 1841, through Michelet, the position was that Schelling's expected and oft-promised philosophical revelations had still not been vouchsafed to the public. He was summoned to Berlin. But what he had to offer contained no spiritual qualities to permeate the natural philosophy he had founded. He had struggled to create an intellectual picture of the world. He stood still at this point, because he was unable to use Imagination to enter the sphere of which I have been speaking to you to-day. So there he was at a dead end.

Hegel, who had a more rational intellect, had taken over Schelling's thoughts and carried them further by applying pure thinking to the observation of nature. That was the origin of Hegel's natural philosophy. So Schelling's promise to explain nature in spiritual terms was never fulfilled, and we got Hegel's natural philosophy which was to be discarded by science in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was not understood and was bound to remain so, for there was no connection between phenomenology, or the true observation of nature, and the ideas contained in Hegel's natural philosophy. It was a strange confrontation: Schelling travelling from Munich to Berlin, where something great was expected of him, and it turned out that he had nothing to say. This was a disappointment for all those who believed that through Hegel's natural philosophy revelations about nature would emerge from pure thinking. The historical fact is that Schelling reached the stage of intellectual contemplation but not that of genuine Imagination; while Hegel showed that if pure thinking does not lead on to Imagination, it cannot lead to Inspiration and to an understanding of nature's secrets. This line of Western development had terminated in a blind alley.

There was nothing—nothing permeated with the spirit—to set against Eastern teaching, which only engendered scepticism in the West. Anyone who has lovingly immersed himself in the true Schelling and Hegel, and has thus been able to see, with love in his heart, the limitations of Western philosophy, should turn his attention to Anthroposophy. He should work to bring about an anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science for the West, so that we come to possess something of spiritual origin to compare with what the East has created through the interaction of systole and diastole.

For us in the West, there is the spiritual-soul rhythm of perception and thinking, through which we can rise to something more than a merely abstract science. It opens the way to a living science, which on that account enables us to live in harmony with truth. After all the misfires of the Kantian, Schellingian and Hegelian philosophies, we have come to the point where we need something that can show, by revealing the way of the spirit, how truth and science are related. The truth that dwells in a spiritualised science would be a healing power in the future development of mankind.

Good morning, gentlemen! Perhaps one or the other of you has thought of something else you would like to ask? Or anything else about what we discussed the other day?

Mr. Müller asks if Dr. Steiner would like to say something about a question he asked the other day: There are quacks who can diagnose people's illnesses from their urine.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, you asked that recently. I just overlooked the question, or I didn't have time to answer it.

Mr. Müller continues as the person asking the question: In the Basel area, there is a man who has

his practice, urine tests, and the remedies he has prescribed have achieved good results. What do you think of that?

Dr. Steiner: Well, regarding the question about urine testing, I have the following to say. Urine testing is not limited to quacks and the like, but it also plays a major role in medicine today, which is recognized as scientific. However, there is a big difference between the way in which today's physicians and the people you are actually talking about – and you were basically talking about non-medical practitioners – treat things, and that is based on the following. Urinalysis has always played an extremely important role in all disease investigations since ancient times. However, you have to bear the following in mind. If you go back to the old medicine that existed until the 18th century – because medicine was only reformed in the 18th century in Italy in the direction of materialism – you will find that both the recognition of diseases and healing were based on completely different principles. Today, this old medicine is completely despised by science. To a certain extent, this is justified, but it is not entirely justified. And one must be aware of the difference between the old medicine and the newer medicine in order to understand what it actually means today. The old medicine knew very well that man is not just this physical body that you see with your eyes and touch with your hands, but is also a supersensible being that permeates the body, as we have always emphasized.

You will find the differences between this old medicine and the newer medicine if you go back very far in human life, namely if you go back to the time before birth. I do not mean the spiritual before birth, but the physical, the body of the human being in the womb. Today, medicine and science in general see the essential thing about a human being as it develops in the womb, the essential thing is how the egg gradually builds up. At first, we are only dealing with the egg that has been fertilized. This is therefore a small cell, only visible under the microscope. This cell then multiplies and takes on a kind of cup shape. And in the third week, this cup shape bulges out on one side. Then, in the sixth or seventh week, the human being becomes similar to a small fish. On one side, the head then develops (see drawing), and the first nerve cords form here. And so it continues. And in this way, observing formation after formation, today science is trying to get closer to understanding the origin of man and also of animals.

But apart from what is present in this way, there is also a thick liquid around the human being in the womb. This thick liquid is present in this way (it is drawn), and only then is the uterus all around it. This thick liquid, with all kinds of thick inclusions, then flows out at birth as the so-called afterbirth. This is considered to be a waste product, something that has no significance, because everything that occurs in a living being today, that is, that occurs in such a way that it comes out, is considered a waste product.

But that is not the case. Here, in the way the cell multiplies and the physical human body forms, the external natural force is at work inside, while in the surrounding fluid, which is then expelled as the afterbirth, the spiritual-soul element is at work. This spiritual-soul substance is first in the vicinity of the small human body; only later does it move into the human body. And one must actually look for the spirit in what is later rejected as the afterbirth. This is, of course, very surprising, but it is extremely important.

Today, there is so much denial of the spiritual that a friend of mine has set himself the task of examining this afterbirth, as it gradually releases the spirit to the actual embryo, the actual physical. One could examine this quite well scientifically; but that fails only because, where one gets human germs - it is not the case in very many cases - the fact that the mother dies or has to be operated on, the present-day natural scientists immediately take away everything that is around, and one does not get a human germ to examine in order to find out. So even the way things are treated today is a hindrance to real science. This materialistic way of thinking, I might say, begins with the examination of the origin of man.

Now you know that a person also secretes while they are alive. The secretions are not particularly popular in the external world, because they do not smell good. Almost all secretions do not smell good. Today, however, all secretions are considered, and quite rightly so, to be something that simply has to be secreted, washed away, and so on.

So the secretions in humans are, first of all, what you have mentioned: urine, perspiration, right, and then there are the coarse secretions, the feces and a few others. After all, what you cut from the nails is also a secretion of the human body. It is just a solid secretion. But some things that are also secretions are not recognized as secretions, but in reality they are secretions.

You see, the eye is often thought of as the noblest organ in the human being. Well, you just have to consider how easily an eye can be removed. It lies almost completely isolated in the eye socket. And what is in the eye as fluid – I have explained this to you – is also a secretion. And that there are secretions in the various organs of hearing, in the ear, that the secretion plays a role there, you can already see from the formation of earwax, which is the outermost secretion. So we are dealing with secretions everywhere in the human being; on the one hand the human being is built up, but on the other hand he dissolves, he secretes.

Now, what follows from this? I told you something the other day that might be instructive for you in this regard. I said: People see the nerves, the whole brain, as something that is just such an organ as the other organs, like the liver or spleen. But that is not true, gentlemen. The brain is a secretion. The whole brain, I told you, is a secretion! And if you want to compare the brain to something, then you should not compare it to the intestines, but to what is inside the intestines. So if you have a piece of intestine, there is the intestinal wall, and there is the intestinal contents (see drawing p. 159, bottom). The thing is that the intestinal wall is so corrugated. In the brain, in the nerve, the wall is missing; it is also there, but it is transparent, it is not visible, and only the contents are there (see drawing, above). You can quite rightly say: What is our brain actually filled with? It is filled with a very special kind of intestinal content! And if you call the intestinal content dirt, you can say that the brain is dirt. That is absolutely scientifically correct. For the activity of thinking does not consist in an activity of the brain, but the activity of thinking consists in the brain being separated out by thinking. The more you go from bottom to top in man, the more man is separation.

Now I have spoken to you about the sensual and the supersensible man, about the man you see and the man who is also in you, whom you do not see. That which you see in a person is what is continually being built up, what comes from what forms the physical human body. That is where he gets the arm stump (see drawing on p. 156), and the leg stump. But the supersensible, the astral body and the ego, are there to separate, they are constantly separating. Only the physical body and the etheric body build up. The astral body and the ego break down again.

When you build a house, you try to build it as quickly as possible and live in it for as long as possible. Little by little, nature also breaks it down. Otherwise, you would still have to see the houses that stood in ancient India today. But you will find few of our houses that stood here three hundred years ago. In the human being, building up and breaking down happens simultaneously. First, there is building up: We eat, absorb things; they come to the liver, where they are transformed. Then the breakdown begins again, the sorting out. And in this building and breaking down, the whole activity of the human being actually consists. If we only built up, we would be dull and stupid. We would be nothing but stupid fellows. We would not even be stupid fellows, but we would be completely spiritless plants if we only built. The fact that we break down, that we, for example, continually excrete in the brain, that we therefore have excretory organs, glands, is what it is that we are not stupid guys, but that we are clever people, with differences of course. But the spiritual is based on breaking down, not on building up. And that is why the secretions are of particular importance.

You see, the thing is this: the same activity that takes place when the afterbirth is secreted takes place during every decomposition. Whenever more and more is destroyed around the structure of the human being, then the spirit is at work. And when the spirit can then work in the human body itself, when the human being is born, then the afterbirth is no longer needed; then it is simply expelled. But it is expelled throughout life. It is expelled in the more or less solid-soft intestinal secretions, it is expelled in the urine, it is expelled in sweat, for example. You can observe the significance of sweat as a secretion when you have a real anxiety dream. Just observe it once when you have a real anxiety dream. If, for example, you dream that someone is chasing you with the intention of killing you or at least beating you up, you run away from him, you run in your dream, run, run, run; you wake up quickly, but not without being completely bathed in sweat. This activity, which is so intensified that you have such frightening images, takes place in the form of sweating attacks. And these sweats are the physical accompaniment of what the anxiety dream is. Or think of a person with a serious lung disease who is not in the last stage, but whose lungs are not in order. The lungs cannot breathe well, causing the lungs to compress: he suffers greatly from anxiety dreams. But he also always sweats when he sleeps. So you have the connection between the perspiration and these mental activities, images that come in dreams. Yes, then, gentlemen, the etheric body is active because the anxiety dream actually arises only at the moment of waking up. You only think that dreaming lasted almost the whole night. The whole dream takes place at the moment of waking up.

It can be proven that dreams play out at the moment of waking up. I once told you a characteristic dream, when many of you were not yet here, from which you can see how, when you wake up, you first have the whole dream flashing through your mind. A student is standing at the door of the lecture hall. Another student comes up to him and jostles him. Now, being jostled is a terrible insult among students! It can only end in a duel; there's no other way. So now, immediately, the moment the other student bumps into him, one of them looks for a second; the other student also has to look for a second – this is a long story that the student dreams – the whole thing is agreed, the negotiations for the seconds, everything; apparently it takes an awfully long time. He dreams of how they go out into the forest, how they line up, how the distance is determined, how they pace off how far away they are. The pistols are loaded – he dreams all this –; how they are then raised, the first shot is fired, and he wakes up! He quickly realizes that, because he has become restless in his sleep, he has tipped over the chair; but it falls while he is waking up. So the chair falling over made the whole dream; at that moment the whole dream shot through his mind. The dream only expands inwardly to the length. In reality, one actually dreams in the moment of waking up. And that is why it is also the case that such sick people have the frightening dreams when they wake up; they sleep, wake up, and in doing so, they start to sweat. That is the etheric body at work. When we wake up early of our own accord, we go back inside with our ego and astral body, which have left the physical body during the night, and that is why we break out in sweat. So when we sweat, it is the etheric body that mainly brings about the fact that we are spiritual beings, because stones and plants do not dream, and therefore are not spiritual beings.

But then there is the secretion of urine. You see, this is not as noticeable as it is with sweat because sweat can do nothing but come out, and then it covers the skin. But if the skin had small sacs where the sweat is secreted inside, and if there were a fine skin to cover it, you would not notice it at all. It could be that you have small sacs inside the skin. The sweat goes in there, and at certain times – you could have fine muscles – you press the skin and the sweat could run off. Just as the sweat is secreted through the etheric body, so is the urine secreted through the astral body. But you don't realize that, for example, when you have more vivid feelings, more urine is secreted than when you have weak feelings, because the urine does not pour out immediately. You see, it's like this: If a person is filled with enthusiasm and remains so, regardless of whether it finds expression in external deeds or whether he is contemplating something, and if he did not have a urinary bladder, then he would have to pass urine continuously, especially when filled with enthusiasm. It would be a very bad arrangement. A person could not go to a museum, because when he sees the pictures there and becomes excited, there would have to be toilets nearby! It just so happens that human nature provides for this secretion. It accumulates in the urinary bladder and can be drained at certain times. But urine is secreted primarily by the astral body, and this fills the human being everywhere; urine comes from everywhere, collects in the kidneys and then goes into the urinary bladder.

And the secretions of the intestines are particularly under the influence of the ego – in animals they are also under the influence of the astral body, but in humans they are under the influence of the ego. And not only the intestines are activated for secretion, but the whole human being is activated. In the whole human being, secretion is constantly taking place. The intestines are only the drainage system. So you can say that it is precisely in the secretion that you can see that the etheric body is active in sweat, the astral body is active in urine, and the ego is active in the secretion of feces.

If you consider this, you will not think of the secretions as something so unimportant. Because let us assume that a person has normal urine. Yes, then the astral body in the person is also active in a normal way. But whether a person is healthy or sick depends on how the astral body is active. Everything in health and illness basically depends on how the astral body is active.

For example, when we eat eggs and the eggs are to be digested, the egg must first go into the mouth, then into the stomach; then it goes into the intestines, and there, as I once said, it is completely destroyed as an egg. The egg white is destroyed. But then, on the way into the liver, the destroyed egg white is rebuilt, and human egg white is formed from animal and vegetable egg white on the way from the intestines to the liver. The human egg white then enters the blood.

If you look at the human organism, here is the diaphragm (see drawing), here is the liver, and here is the heart; they are only separated by the diaphragm. What comes from the intestines into the liver is transformed from animal and vegetable proteins – I will color this yellow – into human proteins (a darker yellow). This is held together in the liver and then passes over into the heart.

The thing is this: when we eat protein, our astral body has to work to properly transform animal and vegetable protein into human protein. If the astral body is lazy, it cannot work properly, and the animal protein is not converted into human protein in the liver, but goes directly into the kidneys and is secreted in the urine. If you now examine the urine – which is what modern scientific medicine does – you will find protein in the urine.

Or imagine, gentlemen, you are eating potatoes. The potato is usually already converted in the mouth, because starch is an important food in general, it is not just there to starch shirts. The potato consists almost entirely of starch. On the way from the mouth to the stomach and into the intestines, the potato is now gradually converted into sugar. The potato starch first becomes dextrin and then sugar. Potatoes are only bad in the mouth; in the intestines they are extremely sweet because they are converted into sugar there. But when the potato starch has been converted into sugar in the intestines, and when the liver has converted potato sugar or any other sugar into human sugar, then it delivers this inner sugar to the entire body, which becomes warmer as a result, which has its inner warmth as a result. But for that to happen, the astral body has to work properly again. If it does not work properly, then the proper transformation into human sugar does not take place, but the animal and especially the vegetable sugar goes directly to the kidneys. The sugar is excreted, and the person becomes diabetic. You can see from the sugar content of the urine that the person is ill.

All of this is something that modern medicine also does and considers to be extremely important. That is the first thing that is done today: the urine is examined for protein and sugar. This immediately provides a clue as to whether the person may have this or that disease.

Or take the following: if we want to have a healthy head, which, after all, is not something entirely unimportant for the physical human being here on earth – people want to have a healthy head because they believe that the head organ in the human being; so they want to have a healthy head. If we want to have a healthy head, then we have to bring up a substance that is constantly being produced in us, namely clover acid, through the chest into the head. A healthy head must have a certain amount of clover acid. We produce the clover acid ourselves, as we also produce the alcohol we need. But for this, the head must work in the right way again, so that the clover acid, oxalic acid, is produced. If it does not work properly and it stays down, we get a head that is anemic, and the clover acid is passed into the urine and goes away.

From this you can see, gentlemen, that even today the most important diseases can be identified by means of the most ordinary chemical examination of urine. But this chemistry that we have today was not available in the past. And there was medicine even then!

Now the matter is this: suppose a person has a fever; I will take a drastic case. What does it mean when a person has a fever? It does not mean that his astral body has become weak and listless, sluggish, but rather that it is in a state of excessive activity, so that it affects the I. Then the I is as if whipped when the astral body is in excessive activity. But the I causes the blood to circulate. And an excessively active astral body, which wants to enter the organs everywhere and cannot, and therefore seethes within itself like a storm-lashed sea, produces fever within itself. Now the person has a fever from his whipped astral body. What will be the further consequence? The blood is rushed through the body too quickly. The Blur is not properly transformed. The blood does not have time to form the organs, but goes as blood from the heart to the kidneys and from there into the urine, and we get a urine that is very dark in color. Those who know how to judge the dark color of urine know that, under all circumstances, whether it is a little darker or very dark, the fever is flooding the human organism.

Suppose the astral body becomes very sluggish, it will no longer work properly. The blood passes very slowly through the body, the pulse becomes barely noticeable. You can feel it at the pulse, how the blood passes slowly everywhere. Everything in the body comes together. The body experiences pain in all sorts of places; the urine turns light yellow or even white. Now, between the urine being dark and the urine being white, there are all kinds of shades, color nuances. If you focus on these color nuances and take the urine and look at it through the light, you can see a wide range of things from the colors of the urine.

The blood is constantly trying to replace what is leaving the organs. As a result, the blood has a constant tendency to solidify. If the blood rushes through the organs too quickly, it cannot give anything to the organs. But it wants to solidify. When it comes out of the kidneys as urine, the urine becomes flaky in such blood. If you look through it again, you will see flaky urine. If the astral body is sluggish and the pulse weak, then you don't have cloudy urine, but rather urine that is almost as clear as water, pure urine.

So not only from the color, but also from this cloudiness or purity of the urine, one can conclude a lot. If the urine, when you look through it, looks like a stormy summer's day, with dark clouds and everything in it showing, where everything is bubbling in the urine, so if it is like a stormy summer's day, then the person has something that causes a strong fever. And if you can judge what is going on, you can draw conclusions about the illness. If the urine, when examined, looks delightfully clear like a bright summer's day when the sun illuminates everything, one can conclude that the person is ill on the other side, that he has a very slight tendency towards all kinds of perishing organs; one organ becomes inactive, another becomes inactive, and so on.

So you see, the thing is this: if you have specialized in the secretions of the urine, you can tell a great deal from it. But that is precisely the difference between today's newer medicine and the old one: the old medicine looked at the urine in the same way that one looks at a summer's day as a bright or storm-lashed summer's day, thus judging more in the rough, but, having trained itself, judged more from the facts. Today's more materialistic medicine chemically analyzes the urine, finding protein, oxalic acid, sugar and so on in it. So the difference is that one did it according to how it presented itself, and the other did it more according to chemistry.

Now, of course, in the early days, when this view was still given a great deal of consideration, people learned it properly and there were no charlatans. Today, most of those who do this are charlatans, although I am not saying that all of them are. A person can train himself so well that he can actually recognize all possible illnesses. But that requires a great deal of experience, and this experience must be applied.

Now the difference is: people today do not give much importance to the mind. The mind is almost about to be abolished. What chemistry offers can be learned by anyone. To examine a substance chemically, that is simply learned in the three, four, five, six years one spends at the university. Basically, any fool can do that, examine the substance chemically. And that is what they are striving for. The mind is to be abolished. Everyone is to be able to do the same. That was not the case in the past. In the past, the mind was highly respected. But you have to have a mind to be able to look at urine. That is the difference: in the past, people were made spiritual by being taught; today they are made into henchmen. The story is this: if you want to work, you need your hands, and your hands should be guided by your mind. Today there is much talk of manual labor and brain work, but the two should not be distinguished. Those who do manual labor should be given the opportunity to educate themselves spiritually so that they can approach the spirit just as much as the so-called intellectual workers. These distinctions can only be made among people by valuing real spiritual work. But today they want to do away with the spirit.

Well, gentlemen, you can see from this that earlier medicine placed more emphasis on looking at things directly. But that had another consequence. I don't know if you know that today's so-called scientific medicine makes rather high noses, well, you can't make them as high as today's doctor makes them, with which he looks down on the old “dirty pharmacy”, because in the past they made the remedies from all sorts of secretions. And they said to themselves: the human being secretes the secretions. If you bring them back into the body in the right way, they want to come out again. But what are they doing there? In this way, for example, they bring a sluggish astral body into regular activity or a sluggish ether body into regular activity.

Now you can say: If you find that a person's astral body has become lethargic, you could give them sweat as a remedy – you could say that. And you could say: Well, that's just the old dirty pharmacy, it really does have something like that! – Yes, the difference is not that great. If you were to look at the products used in remedies today, you would find that they are the same products found in sweat, only they are applied externally, in a mineral combination. The ancients used sweat directly. And in many ways it was more effective than what is only put together later, because, as I have shown you in many cases, nature is much cleverer than man. Man can synthesize in his remedies what nature synthesizes. The ancients did something very remarkable: they valued something that is no longer valued today. The ancients said: when a person really sweats, he actually has a whole sweat blanket around him (see drawing). — Now, that is the first thing. But a person secretes sweat all over his surface. If you could hold on to this sweat that a person secretes and take the person away – imagine what it would be like: here someone is sweating terribly; his body is covered with sweat all over the surface – imagine if I could take this person out and the sweat would remain here: That would be the whole imprint of the human being, the whole person would be there in the sweat! Very interesting, isn't it? So it is that the sweat constantly has the intention of imitating the human form.

The ancients did something else as well. They did not just look at sweat in this way, they also looked at urine in this way. Now, for example, they had a small glass of urine (see illustration on page 170). The ancients now had an even better mental image; and lo and behold: something like a ghost of a human being emerged from this urine! What sweat forms by itself, by being on the surface, emerged from the urine. In fact, in ancient times, if you had a vial of urine, you could see that. Yes, there emerged – I don't know if you know this legend, that the goddess Venus emerged from the sea foam? —a human astral specter arose from the urine. And in a person who was prone to a certain disease, let's say a person who was prone to wasting, this astral specter was thin and scrawny. In a person who, let's say, was prone to morbid fatness, this specter was swelling in all directions. Call it an illusion for my sake; it can be an illusion if you want that someone who sees a light-colored urine sees a different ghost than when he sees dark urine. But he sees it. And as an experienced doctor, he judged the illnesses accordingly.

And it was the same in the days when not only urine but also feces, the intestinal secretions, were examined. In the old days, these were particularly important for determining the diseases. Just imagine, someone had taken the intestinal secretions. You can find out that one person has a lot of sulfur in it, iron in it. Depending on what is in it, you can have more sulfurous intestinal contents. Dogs, for example, have a lot of sulfur in their intestinal contents, which then goes outwards. The more sulfur in it, the whiter and firmer the intestinal contents. The more carbon, carbonaceous matter, the softer and darker the intestinal contents; this is found in cats. Now, from the intestinal contents that come out, from the feces, you can deduce the disease much better than from the urine.

Even with intestinal contents, the ancients, shall we say, had a vision; they just had such visions. This is something very strange! With sweat, they said: When man secretes sweat, he envelops himself in his own ghost. When man secretes urine, there is his ghost in it, rising up. And in the case of intestinal contents, it is completely contained on all sides and has certain colors. And according to these - call it visions or dreams, as you like - but according to these dreams, diseases were often diagnosed in ancient times.

And in an unspecific, sometimes quite foolish way, people like the ones you mention do it by reading old books that are hard to understand today. There are also those who diagnose diseases based on feces; this usually doesn't yield much. But a person can gain a great deal of experience, and something may come of it. Only today's science doesn't pay attention to this because it prefers to examine everything chemically. But, as I said, urine analysis is just as important to today's medical science as it is to unscientific medicine, which is a remnant of ancient times.

If you leaf through old medical books, you will come across expressions that you will not usually understand. All kinds of mystics and people who always say that they have all the wisdom, not only science but also wisdom, will always tell you what they have read in old books. This is not of much value because they do not understand the old books. But if you read them, you will come across an expression. The expression mummy appears again and again. One is told: if the mummy is light, then the person is afflicted with all kinds of diseases that drive him to emaciation and so on; if the mummy is very dark, blackish, then the person is afflicted with fever, with feverish diseases. It is told everywhere what the mummy is like, and the diseases are judged by it.

What then is the mummy? If a person today reads this, they only know that these are the Egyptian mummies. Well, what do they make of it when they read that the mummy is light or dark? They don't even get what is meant. But what did the ancient people who wrote the old medical books mean? They called the form that is in the sweat and the form that emerged from the urine and feces “mummy.” The mummy was the spiritual human being. And the spiritual human being becomes visible through the secretions. And the ancients said: When the child is born, the afterbirth goes away, and the last remnant of the spiritual human being goes away. And if people could examine this today, they would find that when a small child is born, sometimes there is very little afterbirth and thus something supernatural. But there are also some where quite a lot goes away. The latter, where quite a lot goes away – there the spirit leaves at birth – they then become materialists.

And so it is, gentlemen: the spiritual activity in man, the astral and ego activity, has an extraordinary deal to do with the secretion. And when one speaks of the old dirt pharmacy, it just indicates that today one no longer appreciates what was once appreciated. Waste phenomena are no longer appreciated today. In some respects it is good not to value them too much, because all kinds of things happen. I knew someone who wanted to get rid of washing because he said – after hearing that the spirit lives in the secretions – that you should keep what is secreted, so you should also keep the dirt. And the result of that was that he came to value dirt extremely! Yes, gentlemen, all this sometimes seems foolish. But it is not always foolishness. Take horses, for example. Horses have hooves, and the hooves then merge into the soft part of the horse's toe. Dirt collects there. And if you constantly scrape away the dirt on a horse, it can become ill. You have to have an instinct for how long you have to leave the dirt so that the horse can keep up with creating it. So there you can see quite tangibly, I would say, how significant the dirt, the secretion, is. The matter is significant for the spiritual in man; it is also significant for health and illness. Health and illness can be found in the secretion. And the ancients called the spiritual in the secretion the mummy. If you find the word mummy in old writings, you will understand it from now on, because I have told you how the mummy actually comes into being: that it arises precisely from the secretion products.

As you can see, Mr. Müller's question involves a very large science, but one that can only be mastered if one delves into the spiritual. Otherwise, everything that is secreted is simply a product of secretion; no attention is paid to it. But in the secretion, the human being shows what kind of spirit he is. And that this is the case with feces is evident even from a superficial glance. Compare horse feces with cow feces. The cattle feces are larger, spread out. The horse feces are almost small heads, round. You can't help it if you have a sense of beauty – isn't it true, beauty doesn't lie in the fact that you only find odorless things beautiful – if you have a sense of beauty at all, you can't help saying when you see a cow pat: The whole cow! In it she is reflected with her broad appearance, with her casual activity, with her tendency to want to lie down; she is completely within the feces. And the horse, this jumper among animals, always wanting to get away from the earth, wanting to hop and jump out into the world – a horse's dung shows the whole horse! And so it is with the excrement of all animals, you can recognize the whole animal in them. And from this you can see what the ancients understood by mummy and what is simply astral. The supersensible animal, the supersensible human being, lives in the secretions.

With spiritual science, we can master these things. Of course, we must not allow the enemies to say that spiritual science deals with sweat, urine and so on, and that it is therefore actually a dirty science. That is what the enemies would like best!

So, gentlemen, by raising the question, I had to point out to you what is true. But you can also point out at every opportunity that it is not about any particular considerations of what is dirty, but what is spiritual. Because man becomes unconscious when the build-up in him is too strong. Then the growths arise in him when he only builds up. He must break down accordingly. He must break down. Man becomes unconscious, constantly unconscious and absent-minded, when a lump forms in the brain, because then there is only building up. The lump is built up when there is no proper breakdown in the brain. And the brain nerves arise as breakdown products, as spiritual breakdown products. Only when it gets too strong, then the blood comes in too strongly; inflammation develops. And there you have the difference between tumors and inflammations. If you have dark urine, you tend to have inflammations somewhere in the body. If you have light-colored urine, you tend to have tumors. That's one thing. But in this way you can draw conclusions about all diseases from the urine, if you only examine the urine correctly.

So, more on this on Wednesday.