The Rudolf Steiner Archive

According to Spiritual Science man, as he stands before us, is divided—from one point of view—into seven parts, of which the physical body perceptible to our senses is only one part of the human being. Man possesses this physical body in common with the whole of the mineral kingdom surrounding us; the forces at work in our physical body are the same as those operating in the whole of so-called inanimate nature.

This physical body is, however, permeated by still higher forces, just as a sponge may be permeated by water. The difference between inanimate and animate bodies is that in inanimate bodies the materials of which they are constituted follow physical, chemical laws only; but in animate bodies the various materials are combined with one another in a very complicated manner, and only under the influence of the etheric body can they be held together in this form, which to-them is unnatural and is forced upon them. The physical materials have the constant tendency to group themselves according to their own nature; this signifies the destruction of the living body and the etheric body fights continually against this destruction.

When the etheric body withdraws from the physical body, the substances of the physical body group themselves in the manner natural to them, and the body becomes a corpse and falls to pieces. The etheric body, therefore, continually combats the destruction of the physical body.

Each organ of the physical body has behind it this etheric body. Man has an etheric heart, an etheric brain, etc., which holds together the corresponding physical organ. One is naturally tempted to picture the etheric body in a material way, somewhat like a thin cloud, but in reality the etheric body consists of a number of currents of force. The clairvoyant sees in the etheric body of man certain currents that are exceedingly important. Thus, for example, there is a stream which rises from the left foot to the forehead (see diagram), to a point which lies between the eyes, about half an inch down within the brain; it then returns to the other foot; from there it passes to the hand on the opposite side; from thence through the heart into the other hand, and from there back to its starting-point. In this way it forms a pentagram of currents of force.

This current is not the only one in the etheric body, there are very many of them. It is to this stream of force that man specially owes his upright position. We do not find this current in animals, they are bound to the earth by their front limbs. In respect of the form and size of the human etheric body we may say that in its upper part it is an exact image of the physical body. The lower parts are different; here they do not coincide with the physical body. There is a great secret underlying the relationship between the etheric and physical bodies, one which throws a strong light upon human nature. The etheric body of a man is female, that of a woman is male. This explains the fact that in each man's nature there is much that is feminine, and in each woman's nature there is much that is masculine. In the animals the etheric body is larger than the physical body. Thus, for example, in the case of the horse the clairvoyant sees that his etheric body projects above his head like a cap.

There is something in man that is much closer to him than his blood, muscles, nerves, etc., namely, his feelings of joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain,—all that he calls his inner being. In Spiritual Science this is called the astral body, and man possesses it in common with the animals only.

A man who is born blind only knows the world around him imperfectly; for him the world of colour and light does not exist. Man is in the same position in respect of the astral world; it exists just as truly, it surrounds and permeates the physical world, but he does not perceive it. When a man's astral senses are opened the astral world becomes visible to him. The significance and importance of this moment in the development of a human being is, however, very much greater than when a man who is born blind recovers his sight through an operation. Every human being knows this astral world, although imperfectly, for his astral body is transposed into it each night.

We repose in the astral world in order to restore the harmony of the astral body, for from the standpoint of Spiritual Science tiredness is only disharmony in the physical and astral bodies. The relationship between the physical and astral bodies may be illustrated in the following way. If we take a sponge, cut it into a thousand small pieces and place them in a glass of water, so that the water is absorbed into these tiny pieces, this represents the waking condition of the average man. If we squeeze out the little sponges and collect the water again in its container, it flows together into one common mass: In the same way the human astral bodies, which during the day were individualised, like the drops of water which were absorbed into the tiny sponges, enter into the common astral substance and are strengthened by it. This we recognize each morning by the fact that our tiredness has gone. Until a person becomes a seer his astral body during the night mingles with the others; but in a seer the conditions are different.

The various plants do not possess an astral body of their own, but the whole world of plants has one astral body in common, namely that of the earth. The earth is a living being and the plants are part of it,—just as the hair belongs to the human body:

The fourth principle of man is the ego. The word “I” can only be uttered by a man with reference to himself; this word can never strike our ear from outside with reference to ourselves. When this “I” sounds in a being, then God is expressing Himself in him. In respect of the ego, the animal, plant and mineral worlds are in a different position. For example, an animal can no more say “I” to itself than a finger on our hand can say “I” to itself. If the finger desired to name its “I,” it would have to point to the “I” of the human being; in the same way the animal would have to point to an ego which belongs to a being living in the astral world. All lions, all elephants, etc., have a group-ego in common; thus there is a lion group-ego, an elephant group-ego, and so on.

If the plants wished to point to their ego they would have to point to a common ego in the centre of the earth, in the lower spiritual world. When an animal is injured it feels pain. In the plant it is different, and the seer is able to say that the plucking of a flower or the cutting of the corn gives to the earth the same pleasant feeling that a cow experiences when her calf draws the milk from her. But when a plant is torn out of the earth by the root this is just as though one were to tear a piece of flesh out of an animal. It is felt in the astral world as pain.

Were we to seek for the ego of the minerals, we should not find it in a being forming a centre in the spirit world, for the ego of the minerals is to be found in the higher spiritual world outspread everywhere as a force of the whole cosmos.

In the Christian occult doctrine the world in which the egos of the animals are found—the astral world—is called the world of the Holy Spirit, and the world which contains the egos of the plants—the lower spiritual world—the world of the Son. When the seer begins to have perceptions in this world, the “Word,” the “Logos” speaks to him. In the same occult teaching the world of the mineral egos—the higher spiritual world—is called the world of the Father Spirit.

Man is involved in a process of continuous development. We have now become acquainted with all four principles of his nature; they are what Pythagoras referred to in his school as the lower quaternary. The savage, the civilised man, the idealist, the saint—all possess these four parts. But the savage is the slave of his passions; the civilized man no longer follows indiscriminately all his passions and desires; the idealist does this still less, and the saint has fully mastered them.

The ego works upon the astral body and separates a portion from it. In the course of human evolution this part grows larger and larger, whereas the inherited portion becomes ever smaller. In Francis of Assisi almost the whole of the astral body was worked upon by the ego and transformed. This transformed part forms the fifth principle of human nature: the Spirit Self.

But the ego can also become master of the etheric or life-body. The part of the etheric body which has been transformed by the ego is called Life Spirit. The etheric body is transformed under the influences of art and religion. The influence of religion is especially strong because it is repeated day after day, and this repetition is the magic power which transforms the etheric body. But the conscious work in occult training acts most strongly upon the etheric body, and meditation and concentration are the means here used.

The relative speed in the transforming of the etheric body and the astral body may be compared to the movement of the hour and minute hands of a clock. If a man succeeds in changing his temperament ever so little, which depends on the conditions of his etheric body, this is of more value to him than the acquisition of many clever theories.

It requires the very greatest strength to change the physical body consciously. The means for this are only given in the occult school. We can only indicate here that the regulation of the breathing forms the beginning of this transformation. The physical body that has been consciously transformed by the ego is called Spirit Man or Atma. The force for the transformation of the astral body flows to us from the world of the Holy Spirit; the force for the transformation of the etheric body flows to us from the world of the Son or the Word; the force for the transformation of the physical body flows to us from the world of the Father Spirit or the Divine Father.

On the Possibility of Experience

Experience arises only through looking at and recognizing (that is, thinking in valid judgments - through understanding) what is given.

Everything that is ever to become the object of my thinking can only do so to the extent that it takes on those forms under which thinking is possible at all. Thus, anything that is not capable of taking on the forms of my thinking could not become the object of my experience at all. Therefore, everything that is ever to become experience must conform to the forms of my thinking.

These forms are therefore the conditions for all possible experience.

An object cannot simply be thought of as being, but must be in a certain way; being in general is substance, the way it is is its accident. Although both are strictly identical, strictly one and the same in reality, thinking separates them here and considers the thing insofar as it is and also insofar as it is somehow and then says that what is cannot perish or arise, only its accidents change. This is quite right, if only we do not think of a persisting thing in itself, because if an object ceases to exist in a certain way and begins to exist in a different way, I used to ascribe being to it and I still do so; it is therefore always being, that is, it persists in its being. To say that the existing ceases to exist is inconsistent and impossible precisely because it is inconsistent, for it means that the existing should not be at a time, which is roughly the same as saying that the beautiful should be ugly at a time.

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The ego is absolute in its form, therefore it cannot be asked about an authority to use the above listed forms, it is simply capable of doing so.

But insofar as it applies the forms, it is absolute identity with itself and everything else is only through the absolute ego, and therefore also the imagined ego.

A genuine theory of science, which is supposed to be a science of the pursuit of truth, must start from the absolute ego and tie in with the sentence: The absolute ego sets (i.e. makes into an entity) a conceived ego (relatively consistent with itself) and a conceived non-ego (relatively different from the ego) and sets both through each other.

The explanation and complete exposition of these propositions is a matter for a general theory of science. However, for the purpose of this essay, this proposition is justified insofar as the ego would be conceived as absolute and at the same time a matter determined by a form. This has been critically established as a fact.

If I now repeat the critical result found here, it is presented in the following sentences:

1. There is an absolute form that confronts us in the ego.

2. There is a matter that confronts us as opposed to the absolute ego.

3. The I determines matter through its forms and forms from its totality formed matter - the absolutely unconditional - as idea.

4. Matter is given to us only by observation of experience and there is no other source of experience than this.

Depending on the diversity of forms in which matter appears, it appears either as truth, as beauty or as goodness. The true, the beautiful and the good therefore lie in forms and only in forms.

Tonight I would like to add a few things to the lectures I have been giving to you in these past few days as a substitute for the scheduled lecturer. I would like to point aphoristically, as it were, to something that may still be able to clarify a principle for the fructification of medical-therapeutic study through spiritual science. Obviously for the reasons already mentioned this morning, I cannot speak too much detail here; that is due not so much to the shortness of time—that too, naturally—but more to the fact that detailed knowledge must be held for a really professional gathering of physicians, again for the reasons I presented this morning.

Nevertheless, I would still like to contribute something in this direction, something that can lead to a general understanding of the nature of medicine so that a kind of social influence can emanate from a spiritual scientific study of medicine, bringing about a certain trust between the public and physicians. The better our understanding of the nature of medicine, the more effectively will medicine be able to work.

This morning I directed your attention to the fact that the life of the human organism consists of the nerve-sense system—the head system—working oppositely to the metabolic-limb system; these two are then balanced by the rhythmic system. All breakdown processes, the completely necessary breakdown processes of the nerve-sense system, are continuously brought into harmony and exchange with the upbuilding processes of the metabolic-limb system. You can imagine (and this can be verified in detail) that because the two systems of the human organism work in a thoroughly opposite way, they also work upon one another. Thus what goes on in the details of the metabolic-limb system, for example, should not be influenced too strongly from the head system, bypassing the rhythmic system; when this happens an activity suitable only to the head system works its way into the metabolic limb system.

If we adequately penetrate what we are concerned with here, we will come to understand how such intrusions of one system upon the other can take place. It will be understood, in other words, how the head system, the nerve-sense system (in which there must also be metabolic processes, as I have explained to you), can occasionally be overcome by metabolic processes that make the head system resemble the metabolic-limb system inwardly and functionally. The reverse can also take place, because the same functional system that is normally active in the head is also active in the metabolic-limb system, though in a subordinate way Occasionally this activity can get the upper hand, can become too intense in the metabolic-limb system, where it should only reach a certain level, having its actual significance in the head.

This is possible, in other words, because the nerve-sense activity that is also present in the metabolic-limb system strongly impregnates the metabolic-limb system with head activity, which thus becomes predominant in the abdomen, for example. Said in a better way, it becomes an activity whose intensity is too great. Then what should normally take place as breakdown processes only in the nerve-sense system will take place in the abdominal organs. Of course it will take on another form in the abdominal system, but it will nevertheless cause mischief there. In fact, by looking in this way into the organization of human nature, we can see in the phenomenon I have just described the development of a serious human illness, namely, typhus abdominalis. The manifestations of typhus may certainly be studied empirically, but they can be understood and placed within the entire human organization only if one is able to penetrate the human being in this way from the standpoint of a rational medicine, if I may use this Goethean designation.

I have also shown you this morning how it is possible to make the transition from the physiological-pathological to the therapeutic by attempting not only to penetrate what goes on in human nature but at the same time to penetrate what goes on in outer nature. Processes take place in outer nature which, if penetrated in the right way, can be introduced into the human organism by administering the appropriate substances. Because outer nature—the plant nature, for example—works in a certain way by virtue of its striving upward, working in an opposite sense to what strives downward in the human being, substances from plants can restrain certain processes that are unfolding improperly among the three systems of the human organism.

It is interesting to explore how what I presented to you this morning about the plant world and its connection with the human being can be penetrated in a similar way in relation to the mineral world. In order to penetrate this matter in relation to the mineral world, however, we must first gain certain anthroposophical understandings of the human being.

The soul-spiritual, the etheric, and the physical are all active in the human being. As we will have been able to discern through the considerations in these lectures, this soul-spiritual element works in such a way that it can be penetrated by full ego-consciousness. If this is the case, the human being is organized in the normal way, as it were. On the other hand, the ego-consciousness may be weakened, may step back in some way. If the soul-spiritual element kicks up some kind of fuss, going its own way without being penetrated in the right way by the ego, then various types of the so-called mental illnesses arise.

Everything that is soul-spiritual in the human being, however, as well as what in anthroposophical terminology is called the astral—that is, the more subconscious, dreamlike, or entirely unconscious soul life—and also what is understood as ego-activity, as the fully conscious soul life, has its physical carrier by means of which it works in a certain way in physical life. We may therefore say that if we study the human being we must direct our gaze not merely to what expresses itself as ego-activity, which is a purely spiritual activity we must rather direct our gaze to the actual, carrier of this ego-activity in the organism. We find that the actual carrier of this ego-activity is essentially anchored in the blood.

I could certainly demonstrate to you in detail how, especially through the particular activity of the blood, through the working together of the metabolic activity in the blood with the rhythmic activity in the blood, the ego works with the rest of the soul element, but to go into this now would lead too far. What should interest us more right now, however, is the bridge from physiology and pathology to therapy. There we find something exceptionally important. We can influence the physical scaffolding, as it were—the physical carrier—of a soul-spiritual element, of the fully conscious ego, let us say, through certain processes that we bring about in it. The physical carrier then withdraws from the ego-activity, as it were, yet continues to perform a function similar to what otherwise takes place only under the influence of the ego-activity.

Drawing 1

Let me refer to a specific case in this connection. Imagine, please—I will sketch this for you—that what is active as ego-activity builds up, through the human blood system, something like a scaffolding, a scaffolding of forces. I will designate the ego-activity itself by these colored lines next to the line of this force-scaffolding, the line that designates the soul-spiritual element of the ego-activity (see drawing, red). If one can now influence the force-organization lying at the basis of the ego-activity in a certain way, it could be possible for this force-organization to become independent, as it were, to tear itself away and as physical activity, as scaffolding of physical force-activity, to separate itself from the soul-spiritual and yet remain like an image of the soul-spiritual activity, though working merely physically. In a certain way we thus incorporate into ourselves a kind of double that works deeply in the subconscious but that work; similarly—though only in space, which means only physically—to the way it normally works when surrendering itself as an unencumbered instrument for the ego-activity.

This can be brought about by introducing too much phosphorus into the human being, by administering to someone a powerful dose of phosphorus. (This does not actually need to be done; in elementary cases one can already see this. It is always possible to find the point designated by Goethe as the one behind which nature reveals its manifest secret, if one follows the appropriate path.) It is possible to separate out the bodily carrier of this ego-activity from the ego-activity itself. Then this ego-activity is carried out in the body as in an image. What would be the result of this? The result would be that, particularly under the influence of the phosphorus forces, the blood activity would proliferate beyond its normal extent, particularly in the bony system. In the bony system a kind of hyperemia would arise. In this way, through this hyperemia, an excessive blood activity in the region of the bone cartilage would run rampant, and the calcification process of the bones would be opposed.

I have described to you what could result from treating someone with too much phosphorus, where the function that phosphorus is normally able to fulfill in the human organism is excessively enhanced. Those forces that are outside in the world, however, anchored in the different minerals, are present in the human being in another form, as it were, in a super-sensible form, and they can be active within the human being. Man is a microcosm in a certain respect. If these forces that are normally anchored in phosphorus outside in nature are active within the human being, as can occur particularly in early childhood, then the illness rickets occurs. By penetrating the connection of the human being with the surrounding world, we have been able to ascertain that the manifestation of rickets in the human organism is a process similar to the one that takes place outside in nature in the manifestation of phosphorus. I am speaking to you aphoristically and obviously in a way in which not all the parts of a sequence of proof are connected; by means of a specific case, which is actually only indicating the direction, we can see how to search in a spiritual scientific way for this connection between the human being and the rest of the world.

Drawing 2

Now, however, it is possible to proceed further. I have shown you earlier today how, with the metabolic-limb system on one side and the nerve-sense system on the other side, the balancing rhythmic system in between, these two systems work together in a way (see drawing). You see, in fact, that what serves as an irregularity in the metabolic-limb system, bringing about illness, is just what induces health in the head system. Thus in the human head system there are always certain functions that stem from phosphorus, though from a very slight quantity of phosphorus that is found in the human brain. We have already become acquainted with this phosphorus-activity from the other side, in the way I have described to you, as something that brings the proper breakdown in the calcification processes in the metabolic-limb organism. These phosphorus processes in the brain, however, must be present wherever there is to be breakdown and where, above all, this breakdown is to be continually active. In other words, because the phosphorus process is present in the brain, we continuously have a kind of manifestation of rickets in the brain in, you could say, a status nascendi.

This is precisely the basis of our brain-activity, that bone continuously wants to be formed, but this bone formation is continuously inhibited once the skull has developed to surround the human brain in the right way. In the human brain—and this reveals itself to human perception—we have a continuous striving toward bone formation, but this bone formation reaches its conclusion at a certain age, at which time this activity of bone formation ceases. We thus have here something that is really conducive to illness but that is balanced from the other side, from the other pole of the organism; we have here a continuous striving toward rickets.

It is interesting that a rhythm such as this one that can be observed in the human being is also present outside in the rest of nature, though appearing in a certain respect as the opposite. If we look at the remarkable significance of phosphorus for the human brain, we have to say to ourselves that as phosphorus is taken in it is worked through up to the head. It undergoes a transformation within the human organism itself. It follows the same direction as the growth in the human being. It incorporates itself into this direction of growth in the human being, thus reducing its own activity to a minimum, as it were, diluting it. By means of this dilution the restrained rickets of the head can become the carrier of just those soul-spiritual processes that must be undertaken by means of the human head's mediation.

It is interesting that if very small doses of phosphorus are administered to the human being in the right way, rather than the somewhat larger, ordinarily perceptible doses of phosphorus, something different is achieved even in the function of phosphorus. If these small doses are administered to the human organism, they work in the same way as phosphorus works in the human brain. They now work in the rest of the organism as small doses able to restrain the rickets process if it has begun in children. Phosphorus in small quantities, in the smallest doses, can therefore serve as a remedy against rickets. In a more comprehensive sense, phosphorus can generally be used as a remedy against everything in which this ego-scaffolding, the physical ego-scaffolding (see Drawing 1, white), which I have sketched under the red, is freed within the organism, as a result of illness, from the actual soul activity: in other words, phosphorus brings back the soul activity, returning the condition to normal.

I would have to present a very complicated exposition about human nature for you to be able to see what actually lies at the basis of the dispute between allopathy and homoeopathy. In certain areas, however, you could say that what homoeopathy reveals becomes perfectly evident, as in these cases I have indicated to you. With certain small doses of phosphorus, or also sulphur (in short, something combustible—I will return to this) rickets as well as other inflammatory conditions can be healed, illnesses that stem from a blood-activity that has been freed from the ego-being.

You see, then, that when we begin to study the human being as suggested by spiritual science, as in this case, the connection of the human being with outer, inorganic nature becomes transparent. What I have just touched on here today can definitely be extended to other inorganic substances. One need only pursue this in detail. It is precisely this attempt to bring about a union of pathology, physiology, and therapy that requires a devoted study of the world within and the world outside of the human being. We may call phosphorus and sulphur combustible substances. If this study is really extended further, combustible substances reveal themselves as working in a way thoroughly akin to what has been described of phosphorus. They work so as to re-insert the emancipated ego-scaffolding into the ego-activity.

Certain salts work in the opposite way, substances now that are not combustible but that dissolve in water and then precipitate out again when the water is cooled. These salts, carbonates and other salts, work in such a way that they call forth a too-intense union of the soul-spiritual, particularly the ego-activity, with the scaffolding; they do not loosen it from the scaffolding but rather impress the soul-spiritual too strongly into it. They can therefore be used as remedies if this connection is for some reason too loose.

We can therefore say that if we understand the actual results of introducing a substance into the organism, how it influences the entire organization, then we can see how to work against a process that is proceeding abnormally and must be countered.

For certain processes, for example the process lying at the basis of pulmonary tuberculosis, it is precisely such salt-like substances (therefore soluble substances) that are particularly effective. What pulmonary tuberculosis is demanding is something to work against a process which, in the human organism, is the opposite of what takes place when a salt dissolves into a solution. What is important here is that broadening one's knowledge about all of human nature leads into the human being's connection with all his outer, worldly environment.

In these thoroughly aphoristic considerations I can only offer examples. What I have just been speaking about could be illustrated by still other examples. We can find such examples everywhere, but let us take an example from a realm that can at the same time lead us into the whole connection of the soul-spiritual with the physical. What is transmitted through the nerve-sense system in human life constitutes the conscious life of the human being from waking to falling asleep. We are thus able to say, more or less, that the head system is the expression for the conscious life of the human being. The metabolic-limb system is not the expression for the conscious life of the human being in the same way. We go through the world with conscious head but with unconscious limbs. These limbs become conscious only when they are touched in some way, when they endure an insult of some sort. We may therefore say that the normal condition for the head system, for the nerve-sense system, is waking consciousness, whereas for the opposite system in the human being it is unconsciousness. It is possible, however, to produce artificially in the human being a kind of consciousness for this other system, for the metabolic-limb system. This happens through massage, for example, which consists of making conscious through outer measures what otherwise remains unconscious. What is important here is that through massage an improvement can be brought about of an inadequate connection between the soul-spiritual and the physical. Take the case of a person who has a tendency to illness because his soul-spiritual element is insufficiently inclined to penetrate his metabolic-limb system. Then the physical aspect of this metabolic-limb system can be supported by massaging it, by lifting it, to a certain degree, from the condition of the spiritual into the condition of consciousness; the effectiveness of the system is thus supported, thereby calling forth a stronger permeation of this system by the soul-spiritual.

If it is understood how this metabolic-limb system works, if it is known, for example, that what pulses in the arms and hands, what pulses there as the soul-spiritual element, continues inwardly and rules the inner metabolism of the human being, then it will also be known what it means to bring about a partial consciousness in the arms and hands through massage. It means that the soul-spiritual element in the metabolic system is enhanced—the metabolic system that works within the human being in a constructive way, bringing about digestion, the taking up of substance.

If one finds, therefore, that a person is suffering inwardly and organically from metabolic disturbances, metabolic disturbances that are responsible for the inability of his nourishment to integrate itself properly in the body or for the results of this nourishment to proceed further into the upbuilding processes, if one finds, therefore, that the metabolism that proceeds inward is not working properly, then it is possible in certain cases to be of some help with arm and hand massage (of course detailed knowledge is necessary to carry this out in the right way). Such assistance consists of supporting the soul-spiritual element in its activity through the degree of consciousness brought about by means of the massage.

If the legs and feet are massaged, something else occurs. The soul-spiritual element that permeates the legs and feet is connected organically with processes of elimination, with breakdown processes. One will be able to offer assistance with a massage of the legs and feet, therefore, if the digestion in the direction of the process of elimination is not being accomplished in the right way.

You can see that if the nature of medicine is illuminated in this way by spiritual science, such insights can be arrived at not simply by chance in an empirical way, should they happen to present themselves empirically; rather it becomes possible to work fully consciously to cultivate the connections among physiology, pathology, and therapy in the most varied domains. I am saying these things to you, as I have mentioned previously, only to illuminate the directions one must pursue here. I know very well how astonishing such things appear because it is not possible, of course, to bring together all the details here.

If we consider an illness like diabetes mellitus, for example, which presents doctors with so many concerns, we must again look to the connection of the soul-spiritual element and particularly the conscious soul-spiritual element, that element permeated with the ego—with the physical carrier of this ego-activity. Something different now takes place from what was described in the first case today. Let us assume that this ego-activity becomes too great within the human organism. It extends itself beyond its proper measure. Then abnormal processes of elimination take place like those we find in the diabetic. In this case we are dealing with an excessive ego-activity in the organic itself, with an excessively deep immersion of the ego into the organic, so that through this deep immersion something is driven outward in a way that manifests particularly in the diabetic.

Let us now shift our gaze again away from what goes on within the human being and direct it to what goes on in the world outside the human being. In this world outside we have plants. This morning we already became aware of how plants in a certain way develop a process from below upward, a process that develops in the human being from above downward. What takes place in diabetes as the hypertrophy of ego-activity in the organism actually proceeds in the direction opposite to that of plant growth. If we are able to discern the right function in the growing plant, then under certain circumstances we can establish a relationship between what works downward in the diabetic and upward in the plant. We must conceive of the plant in such a way, however, that we say: the plant is a being; it is also physical; it grows, it reproduces, and therefore it has an etheric body. For spiritual perception it also has an etheric body, but it does not bring it to the point of inner soul movement; therefore it has no astral body, and also no ego-activity. Nevertheless it grows toward the ego-activity, the astral activity. The same thing that the plant unfolds from below upward the human being unfolds from above downward.

If we understand that we must observe what actually goes on in the plant, seeing how it grows in the opposite direction to which the human being develops his ego, from above downward, then we find how something arises in the plant element that is able to have an inner relationship to this inner ego-activity through the fact that it also has something to do with combustibility. Earlier I drew your attention to combustible substances. Now we see a combustible, volatile substantiality, a substantiality approaching combustion that develops out of the plant in the etheric oils. If we see the etheric oils appearing in certain plants, then we can discover in a study such as the one I have been suggesting, that this formation of etheric oils is the opposite of the activity enacted by the ego-activity pressing itself into the human organism through which a person becomes diabetic. If what is present in the outer world as the opposite is introduced into the human being in the right way, it is then possible to work against diabetes mellitus.

In this case this must be done by adding these etheric oils to baths, for example, or adding the plants themselves from which these oils are developed, allowing the diabetic to bathe in them. In this way the forces that the plant unfolds in the etheric oils work from outside inward against the forces that bring about diabetes. We will be able to help the person afflicted with this illness particularly by means of such baths.

I am only introducing a few individual examples here out of the rich wealth of examples that could be presented: I offered a large number of them this spring in the course for physicians (see Note 1). I am introducing them here only to illustrate the principles involved, but you can see from these examples how medicine can gradually become rational. These are examples through which one really comes to see the process taking place within the human being and the process in outer nature; one comes to see how these two processes either support each other or work against each other and therefore how a process in the human organism can be restrained, how one can work toward healing. If we extend this way of studying into knowledge of the physical human being and its connections with the soul-spiritual human being, we will progress further and further.

You know that in modern medicine, according to the natural scientific view, the problem of heredity plays a tremendous role. This problem, however, is treated in a thoroughly abstract and external way. Through outer science it is possible to make very few connections with what is actually active in human nature. Now I would like to present something to you that can only be arrived at out of a rich anthroposophical investigation. I will present it to you as a result of such an investigation: the human being is, in fact, formed out of the whole rest of the world, which belongs to him as the earthly world and also as the extraterrestrial world. He is formed out of this in various ways. We find, for example, that the female organism is formed out of nature, out of the cosmos, in such a way that there is a predominance in the female organism of those forces that are less bound to the forces of the earth, as it were. In the female organism there is something strongly extraterrestrial. In the male organism forces are primarily developed that are connected with earthly life. In ordinary life this does not come so strongly into consideration, but it must be considered in reproduction. In reproduction what matters is that the forces active in the female organism and contributing to reproduction are actually the transference of what inserts itself as the extraterrestrial element into general human nature. What draws the human being down into the earthly world, however, is inserted into the male organism.

Now let us consider what is actually present in the human being through his earthly environment. The most noticeable thing in man through his earthly environment is the ego-activity. This ego-activity gives the earthly evolution of the human being its full meaning. We must evolve ourselves from other worlds into the earthly world in order to be able to develop the ego-activity fully in our soul-spiritual element. I have already indicated to you how this ego-activity is bound to the scaffolding of forces mediated by the blood. We must therefore say that what is primarily inserted into the blood, working in accordance with the ego-activity, is brought about by the male personality by way of reproduction. What inserts the extraterrestrial into the human being, which must first be penetrated by the ego-activity, stems more from the female side.

Thus we see male and female working together in this way in reproduction, and only through having insight into this are we able to gain correct concepts of heredity. To begin with, the female seed, the female germ, is touched by the male influence, and this female germ has a certain independence in the female organism. We must say that if we have before us a mature female organism, this extraterrestrial aspect works primarily in the rest of the female organism; in the part of the female organism giving rise to the formation of the germ, it is not active, particularly not after conception. Particularly the female germ that has undergone conception has a certain independence so that what it signifies as a transmitter of the ego-activity is transferred independently onto the descendants in a certain way.

If these things are known, they can be applied so that phenomena confronting us in the outer world illustrate what was first gained through spiritual vision. Through spiritual vision it becomes clear that something extraterrestrial is, in fact, anchored in the female organism and that the earthly, which adheres particularly to the blood-activity, is transmitted through the male organism. It becomes evident that through this transmittal the female ovum gains a certain independence, developing separately, as it were, from the rest of the extraterrestrial female organism by means of the fertilization.

A process such as this, which one comes to know soul-spiritually, can then stand in the background when one wishes to explain a remarkable phenomenon such as hemophilia. The curious fact emerges with this illness that there are people who suffer from an inadequate coagulation of the blood, so that the least injury—often even without a verifiable injury—causes them to lose a great deal of blood, tending toward hemorrhage. This illness has a most unusual characteristic: males originating from hemophiliac families do not manifest the symptoms if they are borne by women from non-hemophiliac families; women from hemophiliac families, on the other hand, do not get hemophilia through heredity, but if they have children, the males to whom they give birth will contract hemophilia. This means that hemophilia passes through the woman. This points us to the independence of the germ, about which I have just spoken. It points us to the outer phenomenon that can illustrate what we came to know through spiritual vision.

I have presented something to you in a narrative way which may be recounted as follows. I have shown you how on the one hand it is possible to look into the being of man through spiritual vision, into the concrete being of man, into his upbuilding and breakdown processes, into his processes of health and disease, which are actually in a continuous interaction and between which a balance must be sought. On the other hand, I have shown you how, through spiritual vision, it is possible to find the reciprocal relationship of the human being to his environment and thereby to build a bridge from physiology and pathology to therapy. Finally I wanted to show you with a specific example (I have selected an extreme case, hemophilia and the hereditary conditions connected with it) how, if one looks in the right way at nature in the cases where nature reveals her manifest secret, it is possible everywhere to receive an illustration of what was first known by spiritual scientific means. The objection often raised in this regard therefore has no validity; this objection is that a person who cannot yet see into the spiritual world has no way of finding any proof for what spiritual science maintains. This is not the case. What is important is on the one hand to be able to receive the results of spiritual science without dogmatism and belief in authority, and on the other hand to receive them without previously acquired, prejudiced skepticism. One simply receives them. One doesn't say, “I believe them,” nor does one rashly refuse them; rather one takes them and verifies them in relation to outer reality.

When you apply what may initially appear paradoxical to you, even incredible, drawn down as it is from the spiritual world through super-sensible vision in spiritual investigation, you will see that if you apply it in life, if you ask life, it will be confirmed in the points that matter. You will receive empirical confirmation everywhere for what spiritual investigation discovers. People today who refuse knowledge of the spiritual world with the excuse that they themselves are not able to see into the spiritual world are like the person who sees a shaped piece of iron (this was sketched) and says, “I will shoe my horse with that, for it is a horseshoe.” If one were to say to him, “It would be a mistake to shoe a horse with it, because it is a magnet, it has magnetic forces,” he would reply, “I don't see any magnetic forces—to me it is a horseshoe.” The spiritual is in everything material, and we are living in an age in which this spiritual element must be sought. A person who wishes to investigate matter, who wishes to ask questions without seeking the spirit, is like the one who uses the magnet to shoe his horse, who therefore does not really know how things in the material world are to be used.

Though what I have presented to you today had to be full of gaps and aphoristic in nature, I simply wished to indicate the direction in which medical studies must proceed in the future, for these medical studies are so intimately connected with the social question. Just as the human world can be healed socially only if spiritual knowledge is carried into social judgments, so our medicine can bring health only if spiritual vision is carried into it.

We are not dream-spinners in any realm. We do not by any means want dilettantes in any realm. What is important is serious research, research that has developed the fundamental principle often applied today. If a hypothesis is dangled here or there, it is said that it is merely a comfortable tool fur the grasping of phenomena. Even in mathematics the point has been reached of hatching such hypotheses or directions of thought. Spiritual science is firmly rooted in the principle that nothing should be avoided that may be necessary for the progress of human life, that nothing should he avoided in applying forces in the direction of what is required for this. From the course of human evolution it is clearly perceptible today that the signs of the time are saying to us: it is no longer possible to progress in the old tracks.

What we have here in Dornach has only been able to develop because it is no longer possible to progress in the old tracks; new guidelines are to be sought for here. We are specialized enough. What is important now is to bring together the individual specialties again. Perhaps you will see from this course that the spiritual forces that will bring together these individual specialties must flow from a center. In order to do this, however, one must depart from those comfortable paths that are so frequently sought today. The fruits will lie above all in the direction of the progress of humanity. For this reason, I would have especially liked it if everything that has been said here out of spiritual science could have been said also by specialists. Therefore I was not so pleased at having to substitute for you in an important area; this is how things happened, however, and nothing else could have been done, so we must simply accept what happened.

Most important, however, whether a specialist or a general observer were to present what is necessary here, would be to show that even in this difficult area of medicine progress is possible only through fructification by spiritual investigation. This would have been revealed more clearly if someone could have stepped forward in this area who could speak both out of the tradition of the time, out of everything that the time itself is able to offer medicine, and out of an open sense for spiritual science. Such an individual could have shown that it is possible to stand at the pinnacle of contemporary medical science, of official medical science, and still to be such a good spiritual scientist that he can only believe, can only bear this medicine if it can be illuminated by spiritual science. Whether this became sufficiently evident to you, despite the fact that I had to replace the specialists in medicine, I do not know, but I do hope that there will be other occasions to show, in a way illuminated by outer circumstances, that medicine can work into the future only if the spirit penetrates it, as is intended or at least as is striven for here in this Goetheanum: only if the Goethean spirit is absorbed into medicine.

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Note 1:

Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science and Medicine, twenty lectures given to physicians in Dornach, 1920. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975.

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Dear friends,

You have seen how necessary it is to relate a state of illness in a human being to his or her spiritual life and experience. The understanding that should be brought to illness by the two groups of people who have especially to do with pastoral medicine can really only come from such a point of view. Therefore I would like once more to consider the actual state of illness in connection with a person's spiritual life, this time from a standpoint that I think will throw greatest light upon the nature of illness.

As human beings we alternate between waking and sleeping. You all know in general what can be said from our perspective about these two conditions.

Today let us hold clearly in our minds what really happens in the human being during sleep. The physical body and etheric body are by themselves; the astral body and ego are also by themselves. Turning first to the physical and etheric bodies, we know that by virtue of what these bodies are, certain processes go on that during the person's sleep are independent of the activity of the astral body and ego. In the human organism we find processes going on that are not at all suited to it in the way they must play themselves out. The physical body has to do with physical processes. Physical processes take their course outside in the mineral kingdom; they are suited to the mineral kingdom. They are not at all suited to the constitution of the human physical body. And yet while it is asleep this human body is, so to speak, subject to these physical processes in the same way that the mineral kingdom is. We must be aware of this contradiction in the human being precisely during sleep. During sleep the human being ought to be a world of physically active forces and substances, but this is something that really cannot be. That is why processes that go on in the physical body during sleep—unless they are brought into balance—cause illness.

The general assertion that sleep is healthful is correct in a certain sense, but only under certain conditions. And it must not prevent us from examining the true situation without prejudice. Physical processes in the human physical body can only be healthful when the ego and astral organization are down in the physical body, as is the normal condition during waking life. It is constantly interrupted by the sleep condition. Normally, however, even during sleep the catabolic process is still always going on in the physical body; it must be there so that the soul-life and spiritual life as a whole can really unfold. For the spiritual life is not connected with anabolic processes, only with catabolic processes. During sleep, therefore, there must be just as much of the catabolic processes as a person needs for waking life to unfold the next morning. If too many catabolic processes are there because of some unhealthy sleep condition, a residue of these processes piles up in the human organism, and then we have the inner cause for an illness.

If we extend our investigation to the etheric body, we find that during sleep only the processes can take place in the etheric body that can otherwise take place in the plant kingdom. During daytime consciousness, when the astral body and ego are in the etheric body, these processes are always raised to a higher level. But from the moment of a person's going to sleep to the moment of waking, they take their course in the same way that they do in the plant kingdom. Thus they too are not suited to the human organism; they need to be balanced by the astral body and ego. If they create a residue, this too is cause for illness. So we can say that sleep can show us how causes of illness really originate in the human organism. For they are fundamentally the normal sleep processes; at the same time they are the basis for human soul-spiritual life. And that points to a secret of this world—that whenever one penetrates to reality, one finds it has two sides! On one side, in the sleep condition of the human physical and etheric bodies we find the basis for spiritual development; on the other side, in the very same processes we find the basis for illnesses. Thereby illness is brought into direct connection with human spiritual development. Thus if we study what is active during sleep in the human physical and etheric bodies, we find the fundamental causes of illness.

Now let us consider from this point of view those who during waking life do not go down deeply enough into their physical and etheric bodies—which is what we have found to be the case in the mentally retarded or the psychopath. With such people the soul and spirit enter into processes of illness and live with them. Special value should be laid on this knowledge, that psychopaths and the so-called mentally disturbed are always closely involved in their inner lives with the causes of illness. You see, one has to look at such things carefully.

But now let us go to the outer world. Let us start from the human physical body (Plate VI, left) and consider the outer mineral world that relates to it. During sleep we have processes in the human physical body from which the ego is missing. They go on without really any inner working “motor.” But there is ego out there in the world in all those mineral processes. In them is what we can call world-ego. So we have on the one hand within the processes of the human physical body a condition of non-ego, a sum of processes that are egoless, processes that lack ego. And we have on the other hand in our outer environment a sum of mineral processes and mineral substances that are permeated by ego—that means, by all the hierarchies who are to be identified with ego. Mineral substance has ego.

Therefore let us assume that we observe in some person's physical body a process that should not be there, a sick process. It lacks ego. What can we do if we want to cure this condition? We can search outside in the mineral kingdom for that part of the ego that the person lacks, to cure what is too much asleep, to cure what is still continuing to sleep during waking life. Then we have the right remedy. If you give the substance that has an affinity to the sick organ, the ego-force that the organ lacked is brought into the organ. This is the principle underlying our search in inorganic nature around us for medicinal remedies for the physical body of the sick person. We have to find the corresponding substance that has ego-force; then it has a healing effect. Thus the transition from pathology to therapy rests upon a correct insight into the relation between the processes of the human physical body and the outer mineral world on the one hand, and the relation of the human etheric body to the plant world on the other. If we observe too exuberant a growth in the etheric body, we realize that the etheric body is lacking proper penetration by the astral body. Then we must search in the plant kingdom for the proper corresponding remedy. This is the direction our work must take.

One must recognize the spirit in nature, the spirit that is in the mineral and plant kingdoms of the world. It is the spirit, not the substance, that one must know, because in reality one heals the human being through the spirit that is in the mineral and in the plant. In its nature substance is not truly governed by spirit, but even so it has spirit in it. And those who want to heal without recognizing the spirit in stones and plants can only grope their way through traditional theory. They can try one thing or another and see whether it helps, but they will never know why it helps—because they will never know just where the spirit is in possession of some mineral or how it is in possession of it. To be a healer requires first and foremost a spiritual outlook on the world. And indeed this is the greatest anomaly of our time: that it is medicine itself that has the frightful disease of materialism. Medicine is seriously ill with materialism. It has become blind and is falling asleep, and this is creating harmful soul substances in science. It really needs to be healed. One can indeed say, the sickest entity of our time is not Turkey,¹² as was the case in nineteenth-century Europe, but the medical profession. This is a fact that physicians should know—as well as the theologians, for then perhaps the secret will remain among those to whom it has been entrusted!

Let us look at these things more closely. There are certain persons who are not psychopathic or insane in the sense in which one is justified in using those terms, but who nevertheless illustrate what I have been talking about during the last few days. They descend into their physical and etheric bodies in such a way that they acquire a certain perceptible connection to their sick condition, to sick processes. These are sleepwalkers, whose peculiar state is not make-believe; it has often been described to the general public, and every initiate knows it well. While they are in their somnambulistic condition, they describe their illnesses. They go down into their physical and etheric body. Now the normal human being in waking life has the physical and etheric bodies completely saturated by the astral body and the ego. In the case of these sick individuals, the ego and astral body do not combine with the etheric and physical body in accordance (figuratively speaking) with their exact atomic weight. Some of the ego and astral body is left out; it has not entirely sunk down. But then it is this element that is able to perceive. Only that part of the ego and astral body perceives that has not sunk down into the etheric and physical body. When some of the astral body and ego is superfluous in such a person, then there is this inner perception, and the person can describe his or her own illness.

But now there is another condition—a condition of the opposite kind, in which the normal sleep condition is disturbed. In this case, when the ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric body and things happen in the ego and astral body that do not belong in this soul-spiritual entity (as the things I was just describing did not belong in that physical-etheric body), when too much spirit is experienced by the ego and astral body during sleep (as too much nature was experienced in the opposite condition by the physical-etheric body), then a clairvoyance comes about that borders on a pathological state. The individual carries into sleep a certain power to perceive spiritual things, then afterward carries back memories of spiritual perception into waking consciousness. In particular, these abnormal spiritual perceptions appear in lively dreams. And then, as every initiate knows, we observe that the dreams have the following content.

Suppose the sick person, the physically sick person, is in the former condition I was describing and dips down with the spirit and soul into the physical-etheric body and then experiences the illness in a somnambulistic condition. The sick person experiences a strong catabolic process going on in the physical-etheric body, a kind of reverse process of nature. But now suppose the person is outside the physical body with the astral body and ego. Then the person has experiences of the spiritual aspect of external nature. Suppose the person experiences a sick organ inwardly—sick because it allows some outer process to occur in an unhealthy way. This is experienced in the somnambulistic state, and the inner process is described. If the person is in the opposite condition, the somnambulism works into the ego and astral body when these are farther out of the physical and etheric body. If the spiritual, elemental life of nature comes into dreams, the person experiences what is spiritual in the minerals. And what does the person dream about? The person dreams of the medicinal remedy. Here you have the connection between many aspects of somnambulistic life. The somnambulist alternates between two conditions, as I have described. In one condition dreaming of the illness, in the other condition dreaming of the remedy. And generally speaking, that is the way pathology and therapy were explored in the old mysteries.

In those times there was not so much experimenting as there is today. The sick person was brought into the temple and put into a kind of somnambulistic condition by trained temple priests. This condition was increased to the level at which the sick person could describe the process of the illness. Then the opposite somnambulistic condition was brought about, and the temple priest was told the dream that contained the therapy. This was the manner of inquiry in the oldest mysteries; it led from disease to cure. And so it was that medical science was cultivated in olden times, by seeking knowledge of humanity through the human being itself.

We don't have to go back to those old methods. We have to move forward to methods by which we are able to follow the course of an illness through imaginative experience, and by which we are able to experience the healing process through an intuitive activity that leads not into the human being, but outward. What has formerly been a kind of experimentation in this field will now have to become careful observation. You see the direction in which we are turning. In olden times external physical science was a purely observing science; then it began to experiment and more and more substituted experiment for pure observation. That was right. But medical science did the same thing in imitation, and that was not right. It experimented on human beings with the temple research. We must find the way to change over from experimenting to observing, to an observation of life that is sustained by spiritual knowledge and enriched by scientific research. For whoever really looks at life can catch a view of illness everywhere. In the simplest form of everyday life that has deviated only to the slightest degree from so-called normal, something can be seen that will lead—if considered properly—to a recognition of complicated disease processes. One has only to understand how things relate to one another.

But this shows us that physicians must more and more become really practical individuals—again, the exact opposite of what recent materialistic development has made them. They have gradually become pure scientists. And that makes no sense. A physician should always be able to cope with natural laws in a living way, and not just know them abstractly. With abstract knowledge of them one has not yet even begun to work with them. That's the situation from one side.

Let us look at the other side, the side that the priest must see. We think of the priest's mission as guiding human beings in their approach to the spiritual world, in everything that will help their ego and astral body to find their way in the spiritual world. If it is the physician's task to inquire into the nature of humanity from a spiritual point of view, to explore pathological conditions from a spiritual point of view, then what must the priest look for? The priest has to find what can lead human beings toward the spiritual world; their attitude toward the spiritual world, whether they love the spiritual world, how much they are permeated by the spiritual world—insofar as these things are apparent in normal life. The priest must deal with all the normal or abnormal symptoms that the human soul manifests in this regard in everyday life. For the priest we have to point out the opposite course to that of the physician. We told the physician that if somnambulists are allowed to describe their sick organ, they will also describe the medicinal remedy for it from out of their dreams.

Let us look again at the priests in the ancient mysteries. They were not primarily interested in discovering medicinal remedies, although of course they were intensely interested in healing, for they were first and foremost a friend of humanity. But they did not stop at healing; they were interested in more than that. They were interested in the following: They saw that the somnambulist found his or her own remedy in dreams while in the spiritual world with the ego and astral body. The priests paid particular attention to this soul while it was in the spiritual world, and followed it back again into the body. And what was found? Of course they found themselves again confronting the sick organ. But now, from what they had perceived of that soul while it was out of the body, they knew how the astral body and ego would work in this organ if it were healthy. Upon returning again to the sick organ, they knew what the situation would be under healthy conditions. Now they realized how the astral body and ego out of their divine-spiritual powers take hold normally in the human organism, how they sit normally within it. The priests learned to know them in their healthy normality through the dreams in the spiritual world, and learned how they relate to the physical world when they descend into the physical body. From this, the priests learned to know the inner relation of humanity to the spiritual world.

This knowledge should influence priests as they enact the sacrament in which they are carrying back the spiritual world. For the spiritual world is present in the sacrament through the establishment of the ritual. The ritual unites spirit with physical substance by virtue of deep insight into the relation of spirit to matter. Inspirited physical substance is led back into human beings, and the relation is established in them that unites their astral body and ego within their physical and etheric bodies with the divine-spiritual being of the world. Everything in this relation depends upon the priest's celebrating the sacraments with such an attitude. Everything depends upon our permeating ourselves with such thoughts. For instance, the relation between experience in the body and experience out of the body; secrets of pathology from observing the body when it is left; secrets of therapy from observing abnormal life in the spiritual world as compared to normal perception in the spiritual world. What was established in ancient times in secret temple procedures by prominent somnambulists must now be again established by human beings developing spiritual perception in themselves and observing the connections. In this area, experiment must give way to observation.

Now it is important that the physicians and priests in the anthroposophical movement are already united in their knowledge of such facts as these. That is what really binds us together. We are permeated by a different kind of knowledge from what others have. By contrast, the idea that some sort of union or association or group should be formed is just an abstraction. What really binds us together is the possession of certain knowledge. Those who possess this knowledge obviously belong together, and should feel closely united to one another. Any external association should be an expression of the inner union created by this knowledge.

Our time suffers very much in this respect. For instance, often when I speak today to, say, a youth gathering, even though I fully appreciate their endeavor and even though I myself have the very best intentions, it is extraordinarily difficult to experience their response to the concrete truths that should be filling their souls. It is difficult when I hear them say, “The first thing we must do is to join together!” Well, indeed, everything in these last decades has been “joined together”—ad infinitum! People have gone on and on joining together, but they've never yet got anything real for a result by tacking zeros onto one another indefinitely—00000000 and so on. One empty consciousness to begin with, joined to another empty consciousness, joined to a third consciousness, again empty—that all adds up to nothing. By contrast, you only have to assume a content—a content that is, after all, the basis of all zeroes: one. Then you have something. It doesn't have to be a human being, but it has to be some genuine content. Interestingly enough, this assumes that there is something there to begin with. It doesn't even have to be a human being. It can be real, living knowledge. These are things we should think about in our time. For usually people are much too comfortable to search for the concrete; they are content simply to put abstractions together. Joining together is all right, of course, but it will come of itself if something concrete is there first.

Perhaps this is something that should be understood before anything else by those who work among modern humankind as physicians and priests. Today two conditions can be observed throughout the world. Generally speaking, our ego and astral body do not find properly our physical and etheric bodies, whatever our waking condition may be. Also, truly, for those observing the world as it evolves, materialistic views don't really worry them unduly! Let the monists and the others fight with one another. Nothing is accomplished thereby. But that is certainly not the fundamental evil in the evolution of humanity. If one is observing the evolutionary process, one is not particularly interested to participate in these discussions of worldviews. For actually, whether one thinks this or another thinks that, opinions are frightfully thin little things in the human soul! They're just bubbles in the reality of this world. If one bubble hits another, if one bursts, if another becomes a bit thicker from the bursting of another, none of it matters. What does matter, what should be clearly realized, is that one does not ever becomes a materialist if one is sitting with one's ego and astral body properly in the physical and etheric bodies. In other words, to be a materialist means in a finer sense to be ill. One must fill one's whole being with this knowledge. And it is not surprising in the least that when others, those who are sitting properly inside their physical and etheric bodies, encounter the sick materialists, they turn away to exactly the opposite pole—to all the vague mist of spiritualism.

Here we come to a difficult area, because these things do not take place in those parts of the world that still have a connection with one another; they happen where the world has been thrown into chaos and its pieces lie scattered about. One thing no longer reveals itself as a healing remedy for another, for they are falling away from each other. So long as sick people speak of what is going on in their organs, their dreams will still reveal the corresponding healing remedies in the outer world. But in our present time people who are ill from materialism will not be describing sick inner organs; they have broken free of their organism; they want to describe the external world, as a materialist naturally would. Then they find not remedial dreams but the opposite—false spiritualism, which is certainly not a remedy. On the contrary, it brings on the illness more strongly than ever.

And so we find today in our time—if I may draw an analogy between medical work for individuals and cultural pathology and therapy—we find that spiritualism does not by any means offer a remedy for materialism, but corresponds to the somnambulist's dream revealing his sick organs. Now sometimes a process that properly should have taken hold of a person's inner organism pushes through the organism to the periphery, to the outer world; there is then the pathological condition called a “rash.” This corresponds exactly to what I've been telling you about. One sees with one's own eyes that what had been inside and is now outside is nothing healthy. It is an aberration. The physician should see clearly that materialism is a rash and needs to be regarded as a medical problem.

This will build a bridge to the priest's observation on the other side. The priest sees the symptoms that rise out of sick human souls, out of their need, out of their feelings. Spiritualism is just such a symptom. One comes to realize that in the widest sense sick life wants to sink down into the world, that all the disease in the present world outlook does indeed work itself out fully—insofar as it rests on the will—by working into people and sickening their inner life.

In the present epoch of human evolution it is impossible to see something that could be seen clearly in former times, because people in those days had different characteristics. We cannot see how a false direction of the will, a false worldview, a false view of life—all of which were designated in olden times as sin—cause illness in the organism. For they do not do so immediately in the ordinary way. We are only aware of the connection in the rarest cases, cases that are an intermediate stage between the sin and what can obviously be diagnosed as the resulting illness. These intermediate stages may simply develop into morbid conditions. But in this modern epoch the sin and the real illness are so detached from each other that now they even occur in separate incarnations. In earlier epochs they were able to appear in close connection as cause and effect, but as humanity developed they became separated so that sin appeared in one incarnation, illness in a subsequent one.

Here, then, begins the domain of the priests. Priests may no longer merely continue traditions of olden times, speaking of sin as the cause of illness. But if they have knowledge of repeated earth lives, they can speak of sin from that point of view; then they will again be speaking from the standpoint of truth. Much that priests in the world today say about these things is no longer true; it no longer corresponds to fact. These teachings originated in olden times, and today no one is interested in changing the teachings to accord with what is demanded in our time.

We have to relate ourselves to all this. Then it will be possible to make our study of pastoral medicine fruitful in both directions.

My intention is to give two more lectures for this course: tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. I am announcing this now so that you can make your plans accordingly.

• 12. “The sickest entity ...” This refers to a European expression, “the sick man of Europe,” applied to the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century.

The day before yesterday we spoke of how humanity is confronted by difficult conditions. We will be better able to understand why this is so if we consider our times in terms of the whole of human evolution, and thus bring ourselves up to date regarding many things known and unknown.

You know that one of the most significant pronouncements made as the Christ event approached was, “Change the disposition of your souls, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” These are words of the deepest meaning. They indicate that something of a most essential nature took place in man's entire soul development at that time. When these words were spoken, more than three thousand years had passed since the beginning of Kali Yuga or Age of Darkness. What is the significance of this age? It was the era in which it was normal for man to depend solely upon what was accessible to his senses, and also upon his brain-bound intellect. Only such things as were experienced by these means could be known and understood in the dark age of Kali Yuga.

Kali Yuga was preceded by an age in which man was not dependent only upon his outer senses and intellect, but then he still retained a memory, more or less, of the ancient dream-like condition in which he was able to feel a connection with the spiritual world. It is of this primeval age that we wish to create a picture.

Man could see not only the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, as well as himself, within the physical realm, but he could also, in a condition between waking and sleeping, perceive a divine world. He saw himself as a member of the lowest kingdom in the hierarchical order, and above him he perceived the angels, archangels and so forth. He knew this from his own experience, so that it would have been absurd to deny the existence of the spiritual world, just as it would be absurd today to deny the existence of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. Not only did he possess a knowledge of what streamed toward him from spiritual realms, but he had the capacity to become completely permeated with those forces. Then he was in a state of ecstasy. His sense of ego was submerged, but the spiritual world with its forms flowed into him. Thus, he had not only a knowledge, an experience of the spiritual world, but could, if he were ill, for instance, derive healing and refreshment by means of this ecstatic state.

Oriental wisdom refers to the ages in which man still had a direct connection with the spiritual world as Krita Yuga, Treta Yuga and Dwaparu Yuga. In the latter age, however, it was no longer an actual seeing, but a remembering that took place, in the same way that an old man might remember his youth. Then the doors to the spiritual world closed. Man could no longer have converse with it in his normal state of consciousness, and the time came when only by means of a long and rigorous preparation in the mysteries could he turn again toward the spiritual.

During Kali Yuga, however, something did occasionally penetrate into the physical world from spiritual realms. As a rule, it did not come from the good powers, but was of demoniacal nature. All the strange illnesses described in the Gospels, where people are referred to as possessed, are attributable to demoniacal forces. In them we must recognize the work of evil spirits. This Little Kali Yuga began about the year 3,000 B.C. and is characterized by the fact that the spiritual world has gradually become completely closed to man's normal consciousness, so that all knowledge has had to be drawn from the world of the senses. If this process had continued unabated, all possible connection with the spiritual world would have been lost to him. Up until the time of Kali Yuga man remembered some things that had been retained by tradition, but in time even these connections gradually faded. Even the teacher, the preserver of tradition, could not speak to him about spiritual worlds because man no longer had the capacity to understand. His knowledge gradually became limited to the physical world.

If this process had continued, man would never again have been able to establish a connection with the spiritual world, try though he might, had not something occurred from another direction; that is, the embodiment on the physical plane of that divine Being to whom we refer as the Christ.

Formerly, man had been able to raise himself up to the spiritual beings, but now they had to descend into his realm, appear close to him, before he could recognize them with his ego consciousness. This moment had been foretold by the prophets of ancient times. It was said that man would be able to find his connection with God within, and this by means of his own ego. But when the promised time came it had to be brought forcefully to man's attention that that moment had actually arrived. The one who did this most powerfully was John the Baptist. He announced that the times had changed, that “the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.” Later, this was indicated in a similar way by Jesus Christ, but the most significant sign was given in advance through the many baptisms performed by John in the Jordan, and through his teaching.

Still, by these means alone the change would not have been possible. A number of men would have had to have a much greater experience of the spiritual world so that the conviction could be born in them that a divine being would reveal himself. This was achieved by submerging them in water. When a person is about to drown, the connection of the etheric body to the physical body is loosened, even partly withdrawn. Then he can experience a sign of the new impulse in world evolution. From this comes the powerful admonition: “Alter the disposition of your soul, for the Kingdoms of Heaven are near. The disposition of soul is come upon you through which you will enter a relationship with the descended Christ. The times have been fulfilled.”

Christ Jesus Himself expressed, in the most penetrating thoughts, the fulfillment of the times in the Sermon on the Mount, as it is called. This was by no means a sermon for the masses. The Gospels read, “When Christ saw the multitudes of people, He withdrew from them and revealed Himself to His disciples.” To them He disclosed that man, in ancient times, could become God-imbued during states of ecstasy. While outside his ego, he was blissful and had direct experience with the spiritual world from which he could draw spiritual and health-giving forces. But now—so said Christ Jesus to His disciples—a man can become God-imbued who becomes permeated within himself with the God and Christ impulse, and can unite himself as an ego with this impulse. In the past, he alone could ascend to spiritual spheres who was filled with divine streamings from them. Only he, as possessor of the spirit, could be called blessed. Such a man was a seer in the old sense and he was a rare personality. The majority of the people had become beggars in the spirit. Now, however, those who sought the Kingdom of Heaven could find it through their own egos.

What occurs in such an important epoch in world evolution always affects the whole of humanity. If only a single member of a man's being is affected, the others all respond. All the members of his being—the physical and etheric bodies, the sentient, rational and consciousness souls, the ego, and even the higher soul members—receive new life through the nearness of the Kingdom of Heaven. These teachings are in complete accord with the teachings of primeval wisdom.

In order for an individual to enter the spiritual world in earlier times, the etheric body had to be slightly separated from the physical body, which was thus formed in a special way. Christ Jesus therefore said in regard to the physical body, “Blessed are the beggars, the poor in spirit, for if they develop their ego-ruled bodies in the right way, they will find the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Of the etheric body He said, “Formerly, men could be healed of illnesses of the body and soul by ascending into the spiritual world in a state of ecstasy. Now those who suffer and are filled with the spirit of God can be healed and comforted by finding the source, the comfort, within themselves.”

Of the astral body He said, “In former times those whose astral bodies were beset by wild and tempestuous passions could only be subdued when equanimity, peace and purification streamed to them from divine spiritual beings.” Now men should find the strength within their own egos, through the in-dwelling Christ, to purify the astral body on earth. Thus, the new influence in the astral body had to be presented by saying, “Blessed and God-imbued in their astral bodies are those who foster calmness and equanimity within themselves; all comfort and well-being on earth shall be their reward.”

The fourth beatitude refers to the sentient soul. The ego of him who purifies himself in his sentient soul and seeks a higher development, will become permeated with the Christ. In his heart he will thirst for righteousness; he will become pervaded with godliness and his ego will become sufficient unto itself.

The next member is the rational soul. In the sentient soul the ego is in dull slumber; it only awakens in the rational soul. Because the ego sleeps in the sentient soul, we cannot find in another man the ego that truly makes him a human being. Before an individual has developed the ego within himself, he must allow his sentient soul to grow into higher worlds to be able to perceive something there. But when he has developed himself in his rational soul, he can perceive the person next to him. Where all those members previously referred to are concerned, we must bear in mind what was given them in earlier realms. It is only the rational soul that can fill itself with what flows from man to man.

In the fifth beatitude the sentence structure will have to take on a special form. The subject and the predicate must be alike, since it concerns what the ego develops within itself. The fifth beatitude says, “He who develops compassion and mercy shall find compassion in others.”

The next sentence of the Beatitudes refers to the consciousness soul. Through it the ego comes into being as pure ego and becomes capable of receiving God into itself. If man can elevate himself to such a degree, he can perceive within himself that drop of the divine, his ego; through his purified consciousness soul he can see God. The sixth sentence of the Beatitudes must, therefore, refer to God. The external physical expression for the ego and the consciousness soul is the blood, and where it brings itself most clearly to expression is in the heart, as expression of the purified ego. Christ said, therefore, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Thus, we are shown how in the most intimate sense the heart is the expression of the ego, the divine in man.

Now let us advance to what is higher than the consciousness soul, to manas, buddhi and atman, or spirit self, life spirit and spirit man. Contemporary man may well develop the three members of the soul but not until the distant future will he be able to develop the higher members, spirit self, life spirit and spirit man. These cannot as yet live in themselves in man; for this to occur he must look up to higher beings. His spirit self is not yet in him; only in the future will it suffuse him. Man is not yet sufficiently evolved to take the spirit self completely into himself. In this respect he is still at the beginning of his development and is like a vessel that is gradually receiving it. This is indicated in the seventh sentence of the Beatitudes. At first, the spirit self can only weave into man and fill him with its warmth. Only through the deed of Christ is it brought down to earth as the power of love and harmony. Therefore, Christ says, “Blessed are those who draw the spirit self down into themselves, for they shall become the children of God.” This points man upward to higher worlds.

Further on, mention is made of what will be brought about in the future, but it will encounter in ever-increasing measure the opposition of the present time and be fiercely rejected. It is said in the eighth sentence of the Beatitudes, “God-imbued or blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness sake, For they will be fulfilled in themselves with the Kingdom of Heaven, with life spirit or buddhi.” Connected with this we find references also to the special mission of Christ Himself, in the sentence that reads, “Christ's intimate disciples may consider themselves blessed if they have to suffer persecution for His sake.” This is a faint allusion to spirit man or atman, which will be imparted to us in the distant future.

Thus, in the Sermon on the Mount the great message that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand is proclaimed. In the course of these events the mystery of human evolution was fulfilled in Palestine. Man had reached a degree of maturity in all the members of his being so that he was able with his purified physical forces to receive the Christ impulse directly into himself. So it came to pass that the God-man Christ merged with the human being Jesus of Nazareth and these united forces permeated the earth for three years with their powers. This had to happen so that man would not lose completely his connection with the spiritual world during Kali Yuga.

Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, however, continued until the year 1899. That was a particularly important year in human evolution, for it marked the end of the five thousand year period of Kali Yuga and the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of mankind. Onto the old faculties present during Kali Yuga man would now develop new spiritual faculties. So we approach a period in which new natural capacities and possibilities for gaining access to divine spiritual worlds will awaken in man. Before the first half of the twentieth century has passed, some people will, with full ego consciousness, experience the penetration of the divine spiritual world into the physical sense world in the same way as did Saul during his transformation into Paul before Damascus. This will then become the normal condition for many people.

Christ will not incarnate again in a physical body as he did in Jesus; now nothing would be achieved by it. It was dictated then by profound cosmic-earthly laws of evolution; otherwise, people would not have been able to recognize Him. But now men have evolved further and possess soul powers with which they can penetrate into the etheric. Thus, in future, Christ will become visible to mankind in the etheric and not in a physical body. From the middle of the twentieth century on, and continuing for the next twenty-five hundred years, this will happen more and more often. Enough people will by then have experienced the event at Damascus that it will be taken to be a common occurrence all over the world.

We study spiritual science so that these faculties, which are at first barely perceptible, may not be overlooked and lost to mankind, and that those blessed with this new power of vision may not be considered dreamers and fools, but may instead have the support and understanding of a group of people who in their common purpose may prevent these delicate soul seeds and soul qualities from being roughly trampled to death for lack of understanding. Spiritual science shall indeed prepare the conditions whereby these faculties can flourish and thrive.

Recently, I explained that these new qualities give us an insight into the Land of Shamballa, so that we may learn to know the significance and true nature of Christ, whose second coming indicates a maturing of mankind's cognition.

Generally speaking, the ages of history repeat themselves, but always in a new form. In spiritual science the beginning of Kali Yuga is seen as the closing of the portals of the spiritual world. After the first thousand years had passed there was the first compensation for it. In the individuality of Abraham, after his initiation by Melchisedek, it became possible for a human being to recognize God in the surrounding world through true insight and a proper evaluation of the external world spread out, as it were, like a carpet before his senses. In Abraham we see the first dawning of a knowledge that enables man to comprehend the true essence of an Ego-God, a God related to man's ego nature. Abraham realized that behind the phenomena of the sense world was something that made it possible for the human ego to conceive itself as a drop of the infinite, unfathomable world ego.

A second stage of God revelation was experienced at the time of Moses, when God approached man through the elements. In the burning bush, in the thunder and lightning upon Sinai, He manifested himself to man's senses and appealed to his innermost being. In the third thousand years in which a knowledge of God was breaking through there followed the age of Solomon. God revealed Himself through the symbols of the Temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem.

Thus, the divine revelation proceeded in stages. God first appeared to Abraham as Ego-God, or the Jehovah God, then to Moses in the burning bush, in thunder, and then to Solomon in the symbols of the Temple.

What is representative of a particular age repeats itself later in reverse order. The turning point is the appearance of Christ Jesus in Palestine. What immediately preceded that time is the first to reappear. Consequently, the first thousand years after Christ are again a Solomon epoch; the spirit of Solomon is active in the best men of that time so that the Mystery of Golgotha may be inculcated. In those early centuries after Christ, Solomon's symbols could be interpreted most readily by those who were most deeply affected by the event of Golgotha.

In the second thousand years after Christ we can recognize a repetition of the Moses epoch. What Moses experienced outwardly, now appears in the mysticism of men such as Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and so on. The mystics experienced in their inner beings what Moses experienced outwardly in the burning bush, in the thunder and lightning. They spoke of how the Ego-God revealed Himself to them when they withdrew into themselves. When they perceived within their souls the spark of their egos, then the Ego-God, the One-God Jehovah appeared to them. This was the case with Tauler, who was a great preacher and made powerful revelations. To him came the layman who was called, “The Friend of God, of the Mountain,” of whom it was thought that he wished to become Tauler's pupil. But he soon became his teacher instead, after which Tauler was able to speak of God with such inner force that a number of pupils and listeners were reported to have fallen prostrate, lying as if dead, as he preached. This is reminiscent of the events that occurred when Moses received the Laws on Sinai.

The centuries up to our present time have been filled by this spirit. Now, however, we are entering an era that recalls and revives the age of Abraham, in the sense that men are being led away from the world perceptible to our physical senses. The spirit of Abraham will influence our knowledge so that men will renounce the old mentality that only laid store in the physical world. But in contrast to Abraham, for whom the spirit of God was only to be found in the world of the senses, we shall now grow beyond the sense world and into the spiritual world.

Even though men knew nothing of all this in the past, we may well say that it has not interfered with our development. In the era now approaching, however, we will be placed in circumstances that will require men consciously to take their destiny into their own hands. They must know how Christ will be perceivable in the future. It is truly related that after the event of Golgotha Christ descended to the dead in the spiritual world to bring them the Word of Salvation. The Christ event is active today in the same way. Therefore, it is the same whether a person lives in the physical world here on earth or has already passed through death. If he has gained an understanding for it here on earth, he can still experience the Christ event in the spiritual world, and that will indicate that man has not lived upon this, our earth, without reason. If, however, a person fails to acquire an understanding for the Christ event here on earth, the effects of the event of Golgotha will pass him by without a trace during the period between death and a new birth. He will then have to wait until his next return to the earth, until a new birth in order then to be able to prepare himself.

Man must not believe that Christ will reappear in the flesh, as some false teachings claim, for in that case it would be impossible to believe in the progressive development of man's faculties, and we would have to say that events repeat themselves in the same way. But this is not so. They do repeat themselves, but on ever higher levels.

In the next centuries it will often be proclaimed that Christ will return and again reveal Himself. False messiahs or Christs will appear. But those armed by the above explanations, with a true understanding of Christ's real coming, will reject such manifestations. The knowledgeable ones who can see the history of the last centuries in this light will be neither surprised nor exhalted that such messiahs appear. As an example, this happened just before the Crusades and also in the seventeenth century, when a false messiah. Shabattai Tzevi, appeared in Smyrna. Pilgrims flocked to him even from France and Spain.

At that time such a deceptive belief did not do so much damage. But now, when man with his more advanced faculties should be able to recognize that it is a mistake to believe in Christ's second coming in the flesh, and that it is in accordance with truth that He will reappear in the etheric body—now it is an absolute necessity to distinguish such things plainly. A confusion of these facts will have serious consequences. We cannot believe in an alleged Christ who reappears in the flesh, but only in a Christ who appears in the etheric body. This manifestation will take the form of a natural initiation, just as at present the initiate experiences this event in a special way.

Thus, we are approaching an age in which man will not only feel himself surrounded by a physical sense world, but also, according to the degree of his development, a spiritual world. The leader in this new world of the spirit will be the etheric Christ. No matter what religious community or faith people belong to, once they have recognized these facts in themselves, they will acknowledge and accept the Christ event. The Christians who have the experience of the etheric Christ are perhaps in a more difficult situation than those who belong to other religions, yet they should endeavor to accept this Christ event in just as neutral a way as the others. It will, in fact, be man's task to develop, especially through Christianity, an understanding for the possibility of entering the spiritual world independently of any special religious confession, but simply through the power of good will.

Anthroposophy should help us above all in this. It will lead us into that spiritual land, described in ancient Tibetan writings as a remote fairyland but meant to be the spiritual world, the Land of Shamballa. Not in a dreamy way but in full consciousness should man enter this land under the guidance of Christ. Even now the initiate can and must go often to the Land of Shamballa in order to acquire new forces. In future, other men, too, will enter the Land of Shamballa. They will see its radiant light, as Paul saw above him the light that streamed from Christ. This light will stream toward them, also. The portals of this realm of light will open to them and through them they will enter the holy Land of Shamballa.

Yesterday we discussed the composition of the human body up to the development of the ego, and today we come to the development of the spiritual man. Here we are presented with perspectives for further development, which we cannot overlook and fully comprehend in their ultimate goal in our present consciousness.

The human ego has undergone profound changes over time, changes that are in line with equally profound changes on our earth. It would be a mistake to think that people in earlier times looked exactly the same or were at exactly the same stage of spiritual development as people today. A being that we would hardly call human today populated the early earth. It was only with the end of Atlantis that the human ego had developed to such an extent that one can speak of a conscious ego. We know the place, near present-day Ireland, where the human ego has elevated itself to such an extent that one can speak of a conscious ego, of a consciousness soul.

It was only from this point in time that the physical conditions of the earth had developed to such an extent that one could speak of a separation of air and water. Only these ancient Irish were able to see the sun as we see it.

Before that time, during the Atlantic and Lemurian periods, people lived in a kind of air-water ocean, a mixture of air and water that is best compared to fog, through which the sun shone only as a kind of cold disk, as we see it on very foggy days. There was no sunshine or rain. Our old Germanic saga speaks of that time as of “Nifelheim.”

The soul had not yet developed outwards at that time. It did not see an object as such, it felt it more and actually experienced it only inwardly. If we encountered an unpleasant person at that time, we did not see him as a human being, but experienced a color appearance that touched us unpleasantly. We can best compare this with the feeling of pain; we do not see the pain either, we only feel it.

Even though it was primitive, language was already present at that time and enabled us to express our feelings. Man had intellect, but this intellect was not a reflected consciousness; the human soul had only developed into an intellectual soul.

In ancient Lemuria, the earlier period of our Earth, man had only inner feeling, no language. He had only a sentient soul. The state of our globe was even more fluid than that. Man did not yet have feet for locomotion; he would not have been able to use them in the surrounding elements. His movement was more like swimming; in those days man breathed through gills, just like fish today. He had no lungs, for balancing he used an air bubble.

But even during these periods, man had developed his sentient soul, his intellectual soul and his consciousness soul to the animal. Only then did the ego sprout up within the soul, through a continued transformation, a continued unification of the astral body, which was continuously supplied to man by the cosmic forces of its development.

It was only at the end of the Atlantean period that man could begin to develop consciously. Only now did the work begin from the inside out, whereas before it was only a matter of developing strength from the outside in. We must realize that the three stages discussed earlier do not represent a transformation product, nor an actual development of the human ego, but rather a separation of the sentient, intellectual and conscious soul as parts of the human soul. It is only with consciousness that the animal in the astral body is transformed and transmuted. The result of the consciousness work of the ego on its astral body is the spirit self or manas.

At this stage, man had only moral concepts, logic - in short, pure intellectual work - he had the possibility to transform his ego, but only in relation to his astral body.

Religion and art, the pure joy of beauty, had a stronger effect than moral concepts; they generated the spirit of life or Budhi. Here we see a direct spiritualization of the etheric body, no longer of the astral body.

A chela, a disciple, consciously transforms his body; he wants to transform everything, to spiritualize everything, right down to the life body. He has finished learning when his life body has become a life spirit. Man has his moral concepts under control, he can learn from experience, but he can only think of transforming and spiritualizing those qualities that have their seat in his ether body - temperament, habits, character, memory - in the highly developed stage. But he learns this extremely slowly.

To understand this, let us compare it to our childhood. We learned a great deal very quickly about what we already knew ten years ago, but we changed our character very little. The temperamental impulses that we had as children have, for the most part, remained with us into our old age; even our handwriting has basically remained the same.

The chela's task is to speed up this change, this transformation of the life body, in a word: to become a different person, to redevelop the main forces of the etheric body, so to speak, to get it under the control of consciousness.

This transformation of the physical body into a spiritual body is even more difficult. All the functions of our physical body take place completely unconsciously at our present stage of development. We know, for example, that our pulse rate slows down quite significantly from childhood to adulthood, but this slowing down takes place completely unconsciously. We have no control over it. Everything in our body undergoes a change without our knowledge, without our will.

It is up to progressive development to make these changes in our life functions conscious. Thus it is possible, in particular, for the advanced person to consciously change their breathing and so on. There is a conscious union with the cosmic power that has built our physical body. The Atman or the spiritual person arises. At such a level of development, the chela has long since completed his task. The master has created this level.

But all these changes presuppose the ego, just as lung breathing is only to be seen as an external expression of the emergence of the ego, [...] so the attainment of complete control over one's physical functions is the external expression of the emergence of the spiritual man.

Looking back over what has been said, we see how the structure of the human body is first formed unconsciously through the natural forces, how the development and formation of the ego takes place, and how the conscious ego then, through the active powers of the chela and the master, brings about a conscious purification and transformation of the body, a complete spiritualization. The result is the opening up of new worlds. Twice the feeling of a new birth is repeated. The feeling when the life body is transformed into the life spirit and the physical body into a spiritual life corresponds to the feeling when the child leaves the mother's womb.

All major religions are based on this tripartite division of the spiritual man into Atman, Budhi and Manas. In the Christian religion, Atman corresponds to the Father, Budhi to the Son – Word, Manas to the Holy Spirit.

Today I propose to carry further certain points made in recent lectures concerning the evolution of humanity since the time of Christ.

Looking back, in survey, over the evolution of mankind, we see that the epochs described in anthroposophical spiritual science take their shape from the particular soul constitution of the human beings alive at any given time. This differs greatly from epoch to epoch. Today, however, there is little inclination to look beyond man's present day makeup. Although civilization has developed in a way describable in outer documents, in general mankind is regarded as having always had the same soul nature. This is not true. It has changed; and we know the dates at which it underwent transformations externally plain and distinguishable.

The last of these turning points has often been designated as the fifteenth century after Christ; the one preceding it occurred during the eighth pre-Christian century; and we might in this way go still further back. I have often emphasized how correct the art historian Herman Grimm is when he points out that the full historical comprehension of the people of the present age reaches back no further than the Romans, at which time the ideas now prevalent settled into men's souls. Or approximately the same ideas. They still operate, though at times in a detrimental way—for example, concepts of Roman law no longer in harmony with our society. The very manner in which contemporary man takes part in social life shows a comprehension for something reaching back to the Roman period.

If, on the other hand, we describe the external historical events of ancient Greece like modern events, we do not penetrate into the real soul-nature of the Greeks. Herman Grimm is right in saying that, as usually described, they are mere shadows. Precisely because ordinary consciousness can no longer see what lived in those souls, it is unable to understand the Greeks' social structure.

Still more removed from our soul life is that of the human beings of the Egyptian-Chaldean period prior to the eighth century before Christ; more different still that in ancient Persia, and completely different that of the ancient Indian epoch following the great Atlantean catastrophe.

When with the help of spiritual science we mark the stages in the changing constitution of the human being, it becomes clear that our way of feeling about the human being, our way of speaking of body, soul and spirit, of the ego in man, our sense of an inner connection between the human being and the earth planet, arose in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Gradually, in the course of time, life has become so earth-bound that human beings feel estranged from the cosmos, and see the stars and their movements, even the clouds, as lying outside our earthly dwelling place; therefore of little significance.

Prior to the Graeco-Latin period, people's feelings and indeed their will-impulses were, if I may use the expression, elementary-cosmic. Man did not need a philosophy in order to feel himself a member of the whole universe, especially the visible universe. It was natural for him to feel himself not only a citizen of the earth but also a member of the cosmos, especially during the first epoch, that of ancient India. If we go back to the seventh or eighth millennium of the pre-Christian era, we find that the human being—I cannot say spoke but felt—that the human being felt quite differently than we do today about the ego, the self. To be sure, the human beings of that ancient time did not express themselves as we do, because human speech did not have the same scope as today. But we must express things in our own language, and I shall put it thus: In ancient India man did not speak of the ego in our modern way; it was not, for him, a point comprising all his soul experiences. On the contrary, when he spoke of the ego it was to him self-evident that it had little to do with earth and earth events. In experiencing himself as an ego, man did not feel that he belonged to the earth; but, rather, that he was connected with the heaven of the fixed stars. This was what gave him the sense and security of his deepest self. For it was not felt as a human ego. Man was a human being only through the fact that here on earth he was clothed by a physical body. Through this sheath-for-the-ego he became a citizen of earth. But the ego was regarded as something foreign to the earthly sphere. And if today we were to coin a name for the way the ego was experienced, we would have to say: man felt not a human but a divine ego.

He might have looked outward to the mountains, to the rocks; he might have looked at everything else on earth and said of it all: This is, this exists. Yet at the same time he would have felt the following: If there were no other existence than that of earth's plants, rivers, mountains and rocks, no human being would have an ego. For what guarantees existence to earthly things and beings could never guarantee it to the ego. They are in different categories.

To repeat: Within himself man felt not a human but divine ego: a drop from the ocean of divinity. And when he wanted to speak about his ego (I say this with the previously-made reservations) he felt it as a creation of the fixed stars; the heaven of the fixed stars was the one sphere sharing its reality. Only because the ego has a similar existence is it able to say, “I am.” If it were able to say “I am” merely according to the level of existence of stone or plant or mountain, the ego would have no right to speak so. Only its starlike nature makes it possible for the ego to say, “I am.”

Again, the human beings of this primeval epoch saw how the rivers flowed and the trees were driven by the wind. But if we regarded the human ego which dwells in the physical body and has an impulse to move about on the earth hither and thither—if we regarded this ego as the active force in movement, as wind is the active force in moving trees, or as anything else of earth is an active force, we would be wrong. The ego is not this kind of outer cause of motion.

In ancient times the teacher in the Mysteries spoke to his pupils somewhat like this: You see how the trees sway, how the river water flows, how the ocean churns. But from neither the moving trees, the flowing rivers, nor the heaving ocean could the ego learn to develop those impulses of motion which human beings display when they carry their bodies over the earth. This the ego can never learn from any moving earthly thing. This the ego can learn only because it is related to the planets, to starry motion. Only from Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and so forth, can the ego learn motion. When the ego of its own volition moves upon the earth, it achieves something made possible by its relation to the wheeling world of the stars.

Further, it would have seemed incomprehensible to a man of this ancient epoch if somebody had said: Look how thoughts arise out of your brain! Let us travel backward in time and imagine ourselves with the soul constitution we once had (for we have all passed through lives in ancient India); then confronted by the present-day soul condition, the one which makes people assume that thoughts arise out of the brain. All that modern man believes would appear as complete nonsense. For the ancient human being knew well that thoughts can never spring from brain substance; that it is the sun which calls forth thoughts, and the moon which stills them. It was to the reciprocal action of sun and moon that he ascribed his life of thoughts.

Thus in the first post-Atlantean epoch, the ancient Indian time, the divine ego was seen as belonging to the heaven of the fixed stars, to the planetary movements, to the reciprocal action of sun and moon; and what came to it from the earth as transient, the essence of the ego being cosmic-divine.

In¹ I call the second epoch Ancient Persian. By then the perception of the cosmic ego had grown less vivid; it was subdued. But the people of that age had an intensive experience of the recurrent seasons. (I have recently and repeatedly lectured on the year's course.) Pictorially speaking, the modern human being has become a kind of earthworm, just living from day to day. Indeed he is not even that, for an earthworm comes out of his hole when it rains, while the human being—just lives along. He experiences nothing special; at best some abstract differences: in rain he is uncomfortable without an umbrella, he adjusts himself to snow in winter and sunshine in summer, he goes to the country, and so forth. But he does not live with the course of the year; he lives in a dreadfully superficial way; no longer puts his whole humanness into living.

In the ancient Persian epoch it was different. Man experienced the year's course with his whole being. When the winter solstice arrived he felt: Now the earth soul has united with the earth. The snow which for present-day man is nothing but frozen water was at that time experienced as the garment the earth dons in order to shut itself off from the cosmos and develop an individually-independent life within that cosmos. The human being felt: Now, indeed, the earth soul has so intimately united with the earth, man must turn his soul-nature to what lives in the earth. In other words, the snow cover became transparent for man's soul. Below it he felt the elementary beings which carry the force of plant-seeds through winter into spring.

When spring arrived in ancient Persia, man experienced how the earth breathed out its soul, how it strove to open its soul to the cosmos; and with his feelings and sensations he followed this event. The attachment to the earth developed during the winter he now began to replace with a devotion to the cosmos.

To be sure, man was no longer able to look up to the cosmos as he did during the immediately preceding epoch; no longer able to see in the cosmos all that gave existence, movement and thought to his ego. He said: What in winter unites me with the earth summons me in spring to raise myself into the cosmos. But though he no longer had so intensive a knowledge of his connection with the cosmos as formerly, he felt it as by divination. Just as the ego in the ancient Indian time experienced itself as a cosmic being, so in the ancient Persian time the astral element experienced itself as connected with the course of the year.

Thus man lived with the changing seasons. When in winter his soul perceived the snow blanket below, his mood turned serious; he withdrew into himself; searched (as we express it today) his conscience. When spring returned, he again opened himself to the cosmos with a certain gaiety. At midsummer, the time we now associate with St. John's Day, he surrendered with rapture to the cosmos, not in the clear way of the ancient Indian time, but with the joy of having escaped from the body.

Just as in winter he felt connected with the clever spirits of the earth, so in midsummer he felt connected with the gay spirits dancing and jubilating in the cosmos, and flitting around the earth. I am simply describing what was felt.

Later, during August, and more especially September, the human soul felt it must now return to earth with the forces garnered from the cosmos during its summer withdrawal. With their help it could live more humanly during the winter season.

I repeat: It is a fact that during those ancient times man experienced the year's course with his whole being; considered its spiritual side as his own human concern.

He also felt the importance of training himself, at certain points of the year, in this intensive experience of the seasons; and such training bred impulses for the seasonal festivals. Later on, man would experience them only traditionally, only outwardly. But certain aspects would linger on. For example, the festivals of the summer and winter solstices would keep traces, but merely traces, of ancient, mighty and powerful experiences.

All this is connected with a revolution in the innermost consciousness of man. For ancient India it was quite impossible to speak of a “people,” a “folk.” Today this seems paradoxical; we find it hard to imagine that the feeling for such a thing arose only gradually. To be sure, the conditions of the earth made it necessary, even in the ancient Indian epoch, for inhabitants of the same territory to have closer ties than those living apart. But the concept of a people, the feeling of belonging to a folk, did not exist during the ancient Indian epoch.

Something different prevailed. People had a very vivid feeling for the succession of generations. A boy felt himself the son of his father, the grandson of his grandfather, the great-grandson of his great-grandfather. Of course, things were not dealt with the way we have to describe them with current concepts; but the latter are still appropriate. If we look into the mode of thought of that ancient time, we discover that within a family circle great emphasis was laid on an ability to enumerate one's forebears, grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, right down the line to very remote ancestors. A man felt himself as standing within this succession of generations.

As a consequence, the sense of living in the present was little developed. To human beings of the ancient Indian time, an intimate connection with past generations (retained as a caricature in aristocracy's present-day stress on ancestry) seemed self-evident; they needed no family records. Indeed human consciousness itself, instinctively clairvoyant, made connections with a man's ancestry by remembering not merely his own personal experiences, but—almost as vividly—the experiences of his father and grandfather. Gradually these memories grew dim. But human consciousness would continue to experience them through the blood ties.

Thus in ancient times the capacity for feeling oneself within the generations played a significant role. Parallel to it there arose—though slowly—the folk concept, the sense of being part of a people. In ancient Persia it was not yet very pronounced. When a living consciousness of life within the generations, of blood relationship coursing through the centuries, had gradually faded, consciousness focused, instead, on the contemporary folk relationship.

The folk concept rose to its full significance in the third post-Atlantean or Egypto-Chaldean period. Though, during that epoch, awareness of the year's course was already somewhat deadened, there lived, right into the last millennium of the pre-Christian age, a vivid consciousness of the fact that thoughts permeate and govern the world.

In another connection I have already indicated the following: For a human being of the Egyptian period the idea that thoughts arise in us and then extend over things outside would have seemed comparable to the fancy of a man who, after drinking a glass of water, says his tongue produced the water. He is at liberty to imagine that his tongue produced the water, but in truth he draws the water from the entire water mass of the earth, which is a unity. It is only that an especially foolish person, unaware of the connection between the glassful of water and the earth's water mass, overestimates the abilities of his tongue. The people of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch made no similar mistake. They knew that thoughts do not arise in the head; that thoughts live everywhere; that what the human being draws into the vessel of his head as thought comes from the thought ocean of the world.

In that time, though man no longer experienced the visible cosmos in his divine ego, nor the course of the year in his astral nature, he did experience cosmic thoughts, the Logos, in his etheric body. If a member of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch had spoken our language, he would not, like us, have referred to man's physical body as of prime importance. To him it was the result of what lives as thought in the etheric body; was merely an image of human thought.

During that period the folk concept became more and more definite; the human being more and more an earth citizen. The connection between the starry world and his ego had, in his consciousness during this third post-Atlantean cultural period, dwindled greatly. Though astrology still calculated the connection, it was no longer seen in elemental consciousness. The course of the year, so important for the astral body, was no longer sensed in its immediacy. Yet man was still aware of a cosmic thought element.

He had arrived at the point where he sensed his relation to earthly gravity. Not exhaustively so, for he still had a vivid experience of thinking, but perceptibly.

During the Graeco-Latin period this experience of gravity developed more and more. Now the physical body became paramount. Everything has its deep significance at its proper time, and in all the manifestations of Greek culture we see this full, fresh penetration into the physical body. Especially in Greek art. For the early Greeks their bodies were something to rejoice over; the Greeks were like children with new clothes. They lived in their bodies with youthful exuberance.

In the course of the Graeco-Latin period, and particularly during Roman civilization, this fresh experience of the physical body gave way to something like that of a person in a robe of state who knows that wearing it gives him prestige. (Of course, the feeling was not expressed in words.) A Roman individual felt his physical body as a ceremonial robe bestowed by the world order.

The Greek felt tremendous joy that he had been allotted such a body and, after birth, could put it on; and it is this feeling that gives to Greek art, to Greek tragedy, to the epics of Homer, in their human element, insofar as they are connected with the outer physical appearance of man, their particular poetic fire. We have to look for the inner reasons for all psychological facts. Try to live into the joy that gushes forth from Homer's description of Hector or of Achilles. Feel what immense importance he attached to outer appearance.

With the Romans this joy subsided. Everything became settled; men began to grasp things with ordinary consciousness. It was during the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch that man first became an earth citizen. The conception of ego, astral body and ether body of earlier times withdrew into indefiniteness. The Greeks still had a clear sense for the truth that thought lives in things. (I have discussed this in Raetsel der Philosophie.) [In English: Riddles of Philosophy, e.Ed.] But the perception was gradually superseded by a belief that thought originates in man. In this fashion he grew more and more into his physical body.

Today we do not yet see that this situation began to change in the fifteenth century, at the start of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch; that, since then, we have been gradually growing away from our bodies. We fancy that we feel as the Greeks felt about the human shape, but actually our feeling for it is dull. We have no more than a shadowlike sensation of the “quickfooted Achilles,” and little understanding of how this expression roused Greeks to a direct and striking perception of the hero; so striking that he stood before them in his essential nature. Indeed in all art we have gradually lost the experience of the permeation of the physical body by the soul; whereas in the last pre-Christian centuries the Greek felt how cosmic thought was disappearing and how thought could be taken hold of only by reflecting upon the human being. Presentday man is completely uncertain in regard to the nature of thought; he wavers.

A Greek of the sixth pre-Christian century would have considered it comical if somebody had asked him to solve the scientific problem of the connection of thought with the brain. He would not have seen it as a problem at all. He would have felt as we would feel if, when we picked up a watch, somebody demanded that we speculate philosophically about the connection between watch and hand. Say I investigate the flesh of my hand, then the glass and metal in my watch; then the relation between the flesh of my hand and the glass and metal in my watch; all in order to obtain philosophical insight into the reason why my hand has picked up and holds the watch. Well, if I were to proceed thus, modern consciousness would consider my gropings insane.

Just so it would have appeared insane to Greek consciousness if anyone had attempted, by reference to the nature of thought and the cerebellum, to explain the self-evident fact that man's being uses his brain to lay hold of thoughts. For the Greek this was a direct perception just as, for us, it is a direct perception that the hand takes hold of the watch; we do not consider it necessary to establish a scientific relation between watch and muscle. In the course of time problems arise according to the way things are perceived. For the Greek what we call the connection between thinking and organism was as self-evident as the connection between a watch and the hand that seizes it. He did not speculate about what was obvious. He knew instinctively how to relate his thoughts to himself.

If someone said: Well, there is only a hand; the watch ought to fall down, what really holds it? For the Greek this would have been as absurd as the question: What is it that develops thoughts in the brain? For us the latter has become a problem because we do not know that already we have liberated our thoughts, and are on our way to freeing them from ourselves. Also we do not know how to deal properly with thoughts because, being in the process of growing away from it, we no longer have a firm hold on our physical body.

I should like to use another comparison. We have not only clothes but pockets into which we can put things. This was the situation with the Greeks: their human bodies were something into which they could put thoughts, feelings, will impulses. Today we are uncertain what to do with thoughts, feelings and will impulses. It is as though, in spite of pockets, all our things fell to the ground; or as though, worried about what to do with then, we lugged them about in our hands. In other words, we are ignorant of the nature of our own organism, do not know what to do with our soul life in regard to it, contrive queer ideas with respect to psycho-parallelism, and so forth. I am saying all this to show how we have gradually become estranged from our physical bodies.

This fact is illustrated by the whole course of humanity's evolution. If we again turn our gaze to the ancient Indian time when the human being looked back through the succession of generations to a distant ancestor, we see that he felt no need to search for the gods anywhere but within the generations. Since, for the Hindu, man himself was divine, he remained within human evolution while looking for the divine in his forebears. Indeed the field of his search was precisely mankind's evolution.

There followed the time which culminated in the Egypto-Chaldean culture, when the folk concept rose to prominence and man beheld the divine in the various folk gods, in that which lived in blood relationships, not successively as before, but spatially side by side.

Then came the Greek period when man no longer felt god-imbued, when he became an earth citizen. Now for the first time there arose the necessity to seek the gods above the earth, to look up to the gods. By gazing at the stars, ancient man knew of the gods. But the Greek needed, in addition to the stars, the involvement of his personality in order to behold those gods; and this need kept increasing within mankind.

Today man must more and more develop the faculty of disregarding the physical, disregarding the physical starry sky, disregarding the physical course of the year, disregarding his sensations when confronting objects. For he can no longer behold his thoughts in matter. He must acquire the possibility of discovering the divine-spiritual as something special above and beyond the physical sense world before he can find it again within the sense world.

To emphasize this truth energetically is the task of anthroposophical spiritual science. Thus anthroposophical spiritual science grows out of the entire earthly evolution of mankind. We must always remember that Anthroposophy is not something arbitrarily created and placed as a program into mankind's evolution but, rather, something suited to our epoch, something resulting from the inner necessities of mankind's long history.

The fact that materialism holds sway over our age is, really, only a lagging behind. Man not only became an earth citizen in the Greek sense; today he is already so estranged from his earth citizenship he no longer understands how to handle his soul-spirit being in relation to his body—it is one of the needs of the age for the human being to behold spirit and soul in himself without the physical. Side by side with this deep soul-need, there exists materialism as an Ahrimanic stopping short at something natural in the age of the Greeks and Romans when one could still behold the spiritual in the physical, but not natural today.

Having remained stationary, we can no longer see the spiritual in the physical; we consider only the physical as such. This is materialism. It means that a current hostile to development has entered evolution. Mankind shuns the coining of new concepts; it prefers to continue on with the old. We must overcome this hostility toward development; must open ourselves to it. Then we shall acquire a quite natural relationship to anthroposophical growth of spirit, and pass over from antiquated needs to the truly modern need of mankind: namely, to raise ourselves to the spiritual.

In today's lecture I have tried to gain a viewpoint from which you can see how, for the present age, in the evolution of mankind, Anthroposophy constitutes a real necessity.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, an Outline. Anthroposophic Press, Inc., New York.

[ 1 ] It is not possible to penetrate into the nature of waking consciousness without observing the state through which the human being passes during sleep, and it is impossible to solve the riddle of life without considering death. For a human being in whom there is no feeling for the significance of supersensible knowledge, doubts may arise in regard to such knowledge because of the way in which it carries on its considerations regarding sleep and death. Supersensible knowledge is able to understand the motives that give rise to such a distrust. For it is quite comprehensible when someone says that man is here for an active, purposeful life and his accomplishments are based upon his devotion to it; furthermore, that the occupation with states such as sleep and death can only result from an inclination to idle dreaming and can only lead to empty imaginings. The rejection of what is thus held to be “fantastic” may readily be looked upon as the expression of a healthy soul, and an inclination toward “idle dreaming” of this kind as something unhealthy, characteristic of persons lacking in vital energy and the joy of life, and who are incapable of “real accomplishment.” It is wrong to declare forthwith that such an opinion is false, for it contains a certain kernel of truth. It is a quarter-truth that must be supplemented by the other three-quarters belonging to it, and a person who sees the one-quarter very well, but who has no conception of the other three-quarters, will only be made distrustful by our combating the true one-quarter. It must, in fact, be acknowledged without question that a consideration of what lies concealed in sleep and death is unhealthy if it leads to a weakening, to an estrangement from real life, and we must admit that much that has called itself occult science in the world from time immemorial, and is practiced also today under that name, bears a character unhealthy and hostile to life. But this unsound element does not spring from true supersensible knowledge. On the contrary, the real fact is the following. Just as man cannot always be awake, he also cannot, in regard to the real conditions of life in its widest sense, get along without what the supersensible is able to offer. Life continues during sleep, and the forces that are active and creative during the waking state receive their strength and renewal from what is given to them by sleep. Thus it is with what can be observed in the manifest world. The domain of the world is greater than the field of this observation, and what is known about the visible universe must be supplemented and fructified by what can be known about the invisible. A human being who does not continually draw strength for his weakened forces from sleep must of necessity destroy his life. Likewise, a world concept that is not fructified by a knowledge of the hidden world must lead to desolation. It is similar with death. Living beings succumb to death in order that new life may arise. It is precisely the knowledge of the supersensible that can shed clear light upon the beautiful words of Goethe: “Nature has invented death that she might have abundant life.” Just as there could be no life in the ordinary sense of the word without death, so can there be no true knowledge of the visible world without insight into the supersensible. All knowledge of what is visible must plunge again and again into the invisible in order to evolve. Thus it is evident that the science of the supersensible alone makes the life of revealed knowledge possible. It never weakens life when it appears in its true form. When, having been left to itself, life becomes weak and sickly, supersensible knowledge strengthens it and makes it, ever and again, fresh and healthy.

[ 2 ] When man sinks into sleep, there is a change in the relationship of his members. That part of the sleeping man that lies in bed contains the physical and ether bodies, but not the astral body and not the ego. Because the ether body remains united with the physical body in sleep, the life-activities continue; for, the moment the physical body were left to itself, it would have to crumble to dust. What, however, is extinguished in sleep includes the mental images, pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, the capacity to express a conscious will, and similar facts of existence. The astral body is the bearer of all this. An unbiased point of view can naturally never entertain the thought that in sleep the astral body is destroyed along with all pleasure and pain and the world of ideas and will. It simply exists in an other state. In order that the human ego and astral body not only be filled with joy and sorrow and all the other facts of existence mentioned above, but also have a conscious perception of them, it is necessary that the astral body be united with the physical and ether bodies. In the waking state, all three are united; in the sleeping state, the astral body withdraws from the physical and ether bodies. It assumes a different kind of existence from the one that falls to its lot during its union with the physical and ether bodies. It is the task of supersensible knowledge to consider this other kind of existence in the astral body. Observed from the standpoint of the outer world, the astral body disappears in sleep; supersensible perception must follow its life until it again takes possession of the physical and ether bodies on awakening. Just as in all cases where it is a matter of knowledge of the hidden things and events of the world, so supersensible observation is necessary for the discovery of the facts of the sleeping state in their particular form. If, however, what can be discovered by means of supersensible observation has once been uttered, it is comprehensible to truly unbiased thinking, for the processes of the hidden world reveal themselves in their effects in the manifest world. If it is seen how the revelations of supersensible perception make the sensory processes comprehensible, such a corroboration by means of life itself is the proof that can be required for such things. Anyone not desiring to employ the means for acquiring supersensible perception, indicated later on in this book, can have the following experience. He may at first accept the evidence of supersensible perception and then apply it to the manifest facts of his experience. He may, in this way, find that life has thereby become clear and comprehensible, and the more exact and thorough his observations of ordinary life are, the more readily will he come to this conviction.

[ 3 ] Although the astral body, during sleep, experiences no mental pictures and also no pleasure and pain, it does not remain inactive. On the contrary, it is just in the sleep state that a lively activity is incumbent upon it. It is an activity into which it must again and again enter in rhythmical succession, if it has been for a time active in connection with the physical and ether bodies. Just as the pendulum of a clock, after having swung to the left and returned again to the center, must swing to the right because of the momentum gathered in its left swing, so the astral body and the ego living within it, after having been active for a time in the physical and ether bodies must, as a result of this, unfold a subsequent activity, body-free, in a surrounding world of soul and spirit. For the ordinary conditions of human life, unconsciousness occurs during this body-free condition of the astral body and ego because it presents the antithesis of the state of consciousness developed in the waking state through union with the physical and ether bodies, just as the swing of the pendulum to the right is the antithesis of the swing to the left. The necessity of entering into this state of unconsciousness is experienced by the soul-spirit nature of man as fatigue. But this fatigue is the expression of the fact that the astral body and ego, during sleep, prepare themselves to transform, during the following waking state, what has arisen in the physical and ether bodies through purely organic formative activity when freed from the presence of the spirit and soul elements. This unconscious formative activity and what takes place in the human being during and by means of consciousness are antitheses that must alternate in rhythmic succession.—The physical body can retain the form and stature suitable for man only by means of the human ether body, which in turn receives its proper forces from the astral body. The ether body is the builder, the architect, of the physical body, but it can only build in the right way if it receives the impulse for this purpose from the astral body. In the astral body reside the prototypes according to which the ether body gives form to the physical body. During the waking state, the astral body is not filled with these prototypes of the physical body, or at least only to a certain degree, for, during the waking state, the soul puts its own images in the place of these prototypes. When man directs the senses toward his environment he forms, by means of perception, thought images that are likenesses of the world about him. These likenesses are at first disturbances for the images that stimulate the ether body to maintain the physical body. Were the human being able, through his own activity, to bring to his astral body the images that are required to give the right impulse to the ether body, then there would be no such disturbance. This very disturbance, however, plays an important role in human existence. It expresses itself in the fact that the prototypes for the ether body do not act to the full extent of their power during waking life. The astral body carries on its waking activity within the physical body. In sleep, it works upon the physical body from without.^c3

[ 4 ] Just as the physical body, for example, needs the outer world, which is of like nature to itself, to supply it with the means of subsistence, something similar is also the case with the astral body. Just imagine a physical human body removed from its surrounding world. It would have to perish. This demonstrates that without the whole physical environment it is not possible for the physical body to exist. In fact, the entire earth must be as it is, if human physical bodies are to exist upon it. The whole human body is, in reality, only a part of the earth; indeed, in a wider sense, a part of the whole physical universe. In this respect its relationship is similar, for example, to that of a finger to the entire human body. If the finger is severed from the hand, it can no longer continue to be a finger; it withers. This would also happen to the human body were it removed from the organism of which it is a member, from the life conditions offered it by the earth. If we were to lift it a sufficient number of miles above the earth's surface, it would perish just as the finger perishes that has been severed from the hand. If less consideration has been given to this fact in respect of the physical body and the earth than in respect of the finger and the body, it is simply because the finger cannot stroll about on the body in the way that the human being walks about on the earth, and because in the former case the dependence is more obvious.

[ 5 ] Just as the physical body belongs to the physical world in which it is embedded, so does the astral body belong to its own world; during waking life, however, it is torn out of this world of its own. What happens there may be illustrated by an analogy. Imagine a vessel filled with water. A drop within this whole mass of water is not something isolated. Let us, however, take a little sponge and with it absorb a drop from the whole. Something similar occurs with the human astral body on awaking. During sleep it is in a world like itself; in a certain sense it constitutes something that belongs to this world. On awaking, the physical and ether bodies suck it up; they fill themselves with it. They contain the organs through which the astral body perceives the outer world. But in order that it may acquire this perception, it must separate itself from its own world. From this world it can only receive the prototypes that it needs for the ether body.—Just as the physical body receives its food, for example, from its environment, so during the sleep state the astral body receives the images from the world about it. It lives there actually in the universe, separated from the physical and ether bodies, in the same universe out of which the entire human being is born. The source of the images through which the human being receives his form lies in this universe. During sleep he is harmoniously inserted into it, and during the waking state he lifts himself out of this all-encompassing harmony in order to gain external perception. In sleep, his astral body returns to this cosmic harmony and on awaking again brings back to his bodies sufficient strength from it to enable him to dispense with his dwelling within the cosmic harmony for a certain length of time. The astral body, during sleep, returns to its home and on awaking brings back with it renewed forces into life. These forces that the astral body brings with it on awaking find outer expression in the refreshment that healthy sleep affords. Further descriptions of occult science will show that this home of the astral body is more encompassing than that which belongs to the physical body of the physical environment in the narrower sense. Whereas the human being is physically a part of the earth, his astral body belongs to worlds in which still other cosmic bodies besides our earth are embedded. Therefore he enters, during sleep, into a world to which other worlds than the earth belong, a fact that will only become clear from later descriptions.

[ 6 ] It ought to be superfluous to call attention to a misunderstanding that can easily arise in regard to these facts, but to do so is not out of place in our age in which certain materialistic modes of thought are prevalent. Those who hold such thoughts can naturally say that it is only scientific to investigate the physical conditions of such a thing as sleep. They maintain that although scholars are not yet in agreement concerning the physical causes of sleep, yet one fact is certain: that definite physical processes must be assumed as lying at the foundation of this phenomenon. Oh! if people would only acknowledge the fact that supersensible knowledge in no way contradicts this assertion! It agrees with everything that is said from this point of view just as one agrees that in the physical erection of a house one brick must be laid upon another, and when it is finished, its form and cohesion can be explained by purely mechanical laws. In order that the house may be built at all, however, the thought of the builder is necessary. This thought is not to be discovered when merely the physical laws are investigated.—Thus, just as the thoughts of the builder of the house lie behind the physical laws that make the house comprehensible, so behind what physical science presents in an absolutely correct way lies the spiritual content of which supersensible knowledge speaks. It is true, this comparison is often presented when it is a matter of justification of a spiritual background of the world and it may be considered trivial. But in these things the point is not whether there is a familiarity with certain concepts, but rather whether they are properly evaluated in arguing the question. Opposing theories can have so great an effect on the power of judgment that the possibility of arriving at a proper evaluation is entirely excluded.

[ 7 ] Dreaming is an intermediate state between waking and sleeping. What dream experiences offer to thoughtful consideration is a multi-colored interweaving of a picture world that conceals within it certain rules and laws. This world of dreams seems to display an ebb and flow, often in confused succession. In his dream life, the human being is freed from the law of waking consciousness that fetters him to sense-perception and to the rules governing his power of reason. Yet dreams have certain mysterious laws that are fascinating and alluring to man's prescience, and that are the deeper reason why the beautiful play of fantasy underlying artistic feeling is readily likened to “dreaming.” It is only necessary to call to mind certain characteristic dreams to find this corroborated. Someone dreams, for example, that he drives away a dog that is rushing upon him. He awakens and finds himself in the act of unconsciously throwing off a part of the bedclothes that had pressed upon an unaccustomed part of his body and had, therefore, become burdensome. What does dreaming here make out of the sense-perceptible process? What the senses would perceive in the waking state, the life of sleep allows to remain in complete unconsciousness. It retains, however, something essential, namely the fact that the sleeping person wishes to ward off something. Around this fact sleep weaves a pictorial process. The images, as such, are echoes of waking-day life. The manner in which they are borrowed from it has something arbitrary about it. Every person has the feeling that under the same external provocation, the dream could conjure up different pictures in his soul, but they express symbolically the feeling that the person has something he wishes to ward off. Dreams create symbols; they are symbol-makers. Inner processes, too, can transform themselves into such dream symbols. A person dreams that a fire is crackling near him; in his dream he sees the flames. He awakens and finds that he has been too heavily covered and has become too warm. The feeling of too much warmth is symbolically expressed in the dream picture. Quite dramatic experiences can be enacted in dream. For example, a person dreams that he is standing at an abyss. He sees a child running toward it. In his dream he experiences all the agony of the thought: Oh! if the child would only take heed, would only pay attention and not fall into the abyss! He sees it falling and hears the dull thud of its body below. He awakens and becomes aware that an object hanging on the wall of his room had become loosened and, in falling, has made a dull sound. Dream life expresses this simple occurrence in an event that is enacted in exciting pictures.—For the present we do not need to enter into a consideration of why, in the last example, the moment of the dull thud of the falling object should spread out into a series of events that seem to extend over a certain period of time. We need only keep in mind how the dream transforms into a picture what sense-perception would offer were we awake.

[ 8 ] We see that as soon as the senses cease their activity, something creative asserts itself in man. This is the same creative element that is also present in completely dreamless sleep and there presents the soul state that appears as the antithesis of the soul's waking state. If this dreamless sleep is to take place, the astral body must be withdrawn from the ether and physical bodies. During the dream state, it is separated from the physical body in so far as it no longer has any connection with this body's sense organs, but it still retains a certain connection with the ether body. That the processes of the astral body can be perceived in pictures is due to this connection with the ether body. The moment this connection ceases, the pictures sink down into the darkness of unconsciousness, and we have dreamless sleep. The arbitrary and often absurd character of dream pictures rests upon the fact that the astral body, because of its separation from the sense organs of the physical body, cannot relate its pictures to the proper objects and events of the external environment. This fact becomes especially clear if we consider a dream in which the ego is, as it were, split up; when, for example, a person dreams that, as a pupil, he cannot answer a question put to him by his teacher, while directly afterwards the teacher, himself, answers the question. Because the dreamer cannot make use of the organs of perception of his physical body he is unable to relate the two occurrences to himself, as the same individual. Thus, in order to recognize himself as an enduring ego, he must be equipped with the external organs of perception. Only if a person had acquired the capacity of becoming conscious of his ego otherwise than through these organs of perception, would the enduring ego become perceptible to him outside his physical body. Supersensible consciousness must acquire these capacities, and the means of accomplishing this will be considered later on in this book.

[ 9 ] Even death occurs only because there is a change in the relationship of the members of man's being. What supersensible perception has to say about death can also be observed in its effects in the outer world, and by unbiased reason the communications of supersensible knowledge can be verified on this point also through observation of external life. The expression of the invisible within the visible is, however, less obvious in these facts. It is more difficult fully to feel the importance of what, in the events of external life, corroborates the communications of supersensible knowledge in this realm. Even more than in the case of many things already mentioned in this book it would be quite natural here to declare that these communications are simply figments of the imagination, if no heed is paid to the knowledge of how a clear indication of the supersensible is contained in the sensory.

[ 10 ] In passing over into sleep, the astral body only severs its connection with the ether and physical bodies, the latter remaining bound together; in death, the physical body, however, is severed from the ether body. The physical body is left to its own forces and must, for that reason, disintegrate as a corpse. When death occurs, the ether body enters into a state that it never experienced during the time between birth and death, except under rare conditions that will be spoken of later. It is now united with its astral body, without the presence of the physical body, for the ether body and astral body do not separate immediately after death. For a time they remain together by means of a force whose existence is easily to be understood. If it did not exist, the ether body could not sever itself from the physical body, for it is bound to it. This is seen in sleep when the astral body is unable to tear these two members of the human organism apart. This force begins its activity at death. It severs the ether body from the physical, with the result that the ether body is now united with the astral body. Supersensible observation shows that after death this union varies in different people. Its duration is measured by days. For the present this duration is only mentioned by way of information.—Later the astral body separates from its ether body also and continues on its way bereft of it. During the union of the two bodies man is in a condition that enables him to perceive the experiences of his astral body. As long as the physical body is present, the work of refreshing the worn out organs must begin from the moment the astral body is severed from it. With the severance of the physical body this work ceases. The force that is employed for this work when the human being sleeps remains after death and can now be used to make the astral body's own processes perceptible.

An observation that clings to the externals of life may say that these are statements that are clear to those endowed with supersensible perception, but there is no possibility of anyone else ascertaining the truth about them. This is not a fact. What supersensible perception observes in this realm, removed from ordinary perception, can be comprehended by ordinary thought power after it has once been discovered. This thought power must consider in the right way the relationships of life that are present in the manifested world. Thinking, feeling, and willing stand in such a relationship to each other and to the experiences of man in the outer world, that they remain incomprehensible if the manner of their revealed activity is not considered as the expression of an unrevealed activity. This manifest activity becomes clear to the judgment only when it can be looked upon, in its course within physical human life, as the result of what supersensible knowledge establishes for the non-physical. In regard to this activity we are, without supersensible knowledge, much like a man in a dark room without light. Just as the physical objects around us are perceived only in the light, so will what takes place through the soul-life of man be explicable only by means of supersensible knowledge.

During the union of the human being with his physical body, the outer world enters his consciousness in images; after casting off this body, what the astral body experiences when it is not bound to the outer world by means of physical sense organs becomes perceptible. It has at first no new experiences. Union with the ether body prevents it from experiencing anything new. What it does possess, however, is a memory of the past life. The still present ether body allows this memory to appear as a comprehensive, living picture. This is the first experience of the human being after death. He perceives the life between birth and death in a series of pictures spread out before him. During physical life, memory exists only during the waking state when man is united with his physical body. Memory is present only to the extent allowed by this body. Nothing is lost to the soul that makes an impression upon it during life. Were the physical body a perfect instrument for this, it would be possible at every moment of life to conjure up before the soul the whole of life's past. This hindrance disappears at death. As long as the human being retains the ether body, a certain perfection of memory exists, and it disappears to the degree that the ether body loses the form it had during its sojourn in the physical body, when it resembled the physical body. This is also the reason why the astral body after a time separates from the ether body. It can remain united with the latter only as long as the ether form, which corresponds to the physical body, endures. During life between birth and death, a separation of the ether body from the physical body takes place only in exceptional cases, and then only for a short time. If, for example, a person presses heavily upon one of his limbs, a part of the ether body may separate from the physical. When this occurs we may say that the limb has “gone to sleep.” The peculiar feeling one has at that time comes from the severance of the ether body. (Naturally, here also a materialistic mode of thought may deny the existence of the invisible within the visible and say that all this simply comes from the physical disturbance caused by the pressure.) In such a case, supersensible perception is able to observe how the corresponding part of the ether body passes out of the physical. If a person experiences an unusual shock, or something of the kind, a separation of the ether body from a large part of the physical body may result for a short time. This happens if a person for one reason or another sees himself suddenly near death; if, for example, he is on the verge of drowning, or if, on a mountaineering trip, he is in danger of a precipitous fall. What is told by people who have experienced such things comes very near the truth and may be corroborated by supersensible observation. They state that in such moments their entire life passed before the soul in a great memory-picture. Of the many examples that could be cited here, only one will be referred to because it originates with a person to whose mode of thinking all that has been said here about these experiences must appear as idle fancy. For anyone who takes a few steps in supersensible observation, it is always useful to become acquainted with the statements of those who consider this science as something fantastic. Such statements cannot be so lightly attributed to the prejudice of the observer of the supersensible. (Spiritual scientists may well learn a great deal from those who consider their endeavors nonsense, and they need not be disconcerted if there is no reciprocal “affection” in this respect on the part of the critics. To be sure, for supersensible perception itself there is no need of verification of its results through such experiences. It does not desire to prove anything by these references, but to elucidate its findings.) The eminent criminologist and well known researcher in many other fields of natural science, Moritz Benedict, relates a personal experience in his memoirs. Once, when he was near being drowned while bathing, he saw in memory his whole life before him as though in a single picture.—If others describe differently the pictures experienced under similar circumstances, even in a way that lets them appear to have little to do with the events of their past, this does not contradict what has been said. For the pictures that occur in the quite unusual condition of the separation of the ether body from the physical are often not readily explicable in regard to their relation to life. Proper consideration will always recognize this relationship. Neither is it an objection if someone, for example, once came near drowning and did not have the experience described. It must be remembered that this can only occur when the ether body is actually separated from the physical and at the same time remains united with the astral body. If through the shock a loosening of the ether and astral bodies also takes place, then the experience does not occur, because there exists complete unconsciousness, as in dreamless sleep.

[ 11 ] In the period immediately following death the experiences of the past appear summarized in a memory-picture. After the separation of the ether body and the astral body, the latter is left to itself in its further journey. It is not difficult to see that, within the astral body, everything remains that it has made its own through its own activity during its sojourn in the physical body. To a certain degree, the ego has developed spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man. As far as they are developed, they receive their existence, not from what exists as organs in the bodies, but from the ego. The ego is the very member that needs no external organs for self-perception; it also needs none in order to remain in possession of what it has united with itself. The objection can be made, “Why, then, is there no perception in sleep of this spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man, which have been developed?” There is none, because the ego is fettered to the physical body between birth and death. Even though in sleep the ego, united with the astral body, is outside the physical body, it remains, nevertheless, in close union with the latter, for the activity of the astral body is directed toward this physical body. Thus the ego with its perception is relegated to the external sense world and cannot therefore receive the revelations of the spirit in its direct form. Only at death does the ego receive these revelations because, at death, the ego is freed from its connection with the physical and ether bodies. Another world can flash up for the soul the moment it is withdrawn from the physical world that chains the soul's activity to itself during life. There are reasons why even at this moment all connections between man and the external sense world do not cease. Certain desires remain that maintain this connection. These are desires that the human being creates because he is conscious of his ego, the fourth member of his being. Those desires and wishes arising out of the nature of the three lower bodies can only be active within the external world, and when these bodies are laid aside the desires cease. Hunger is caused by the external body; it is silenced as soon as this outer body is no longer united with the ego. If the ego possessed no other desires than those arising from its own spiritual nature, it could at death draw complete satisfaction from the spiritual world into which it is translated. But life has given it still other desires. It has enkindled in the ego a longing for enjoyments that can only be satisfied through physical organs, although the desires do not have their origin in these organs themselves. Not only do the three bodies demand their satisfaction through the physical world, but the ego itself finds enjoyments within this world for which the spiritual world offers no means of satisfaction. For the ego there are two kinds of desires in life: the desires that have their source in the bodies, and therefore must be satisfied within these bodies, ceasing with the disintegration of these bodies, and the desires that have their source in the spiritual nature of the ego. As long as the ego is within the bodies, these desires also are satisfied by means of bodily organs, for in the manifestations of the bodily organs the hidden spirit is at work, and in all that the senses perceive they receive at the same time something spiritual. This spiritual element exists also after death, although in another form. All spiritual desires of the ego within the sense world exist also when the senses are no longer present. If a third kind of desire were not added to these two, death would signify merely a transition from desires that can be satisfied by means of the senses to those that find their realization in the revelation of the spiritual world. This third type of desire is produced by the ego during Its life in the sense world because it finds pleasure in this world also in so far as there is no spirit manifest in it.—The basest enjoyments can be a manifestation of the spirit. The gratification that the hungry being experiences in taking food is a manifestation of spirit because through the eating of food something is brought about without which, in a certain sense, the spirit could not evolve. The ego can, however, transcend the enjoyment that this fact of necessity offers. It may long for good tasting food, quite apart from the service rendered the spirit by eating. The same is true of other things in the sense world. Desires are created thereby that would never have come into being in the sense world had the human ego not been incorporated in it. But neither do these desires spring from the spiritual nature of the ego. The ego must have sense enjoyments as long as it lives in the body, also in so far as it is spiritual; for the spirit manifests in the sense world and the ego enjoys nothing but spirit when, in this world, it surrenders itself to that medium through which the light of the spirit radiates. It will continue to enjoy this light even when the sense world is no longer the medium through which the rays of the spirit pass. In the spirit world, however, there is no gratification for desires in which the spirit has not already manifested itself in the sense world. When death takes place, the possibility for the gratification of these desires is cut off. The enjoyment of appetizing food can come only through the physical organs that are used for taking in food: the palate, tongue, and so forth. After throwing off the physical body man no longer possesses these organs. But if the ego still has a longing for these pleasures, this longing must remain ungratified. In so far as this enjoyment is in accord with the spirit, it exists only as long as the physical organs are present. If it has been produced by the ego, without serving the spirit, it continues after death as desire, which thirsts in vain for satisfaction. We can only form an idea of what now takes place in the human being if we think of a person suffering from burning thirst in a region in which water is nowhere to be found. This, then, is the state of the ego, in so far as it harbors, after death, the unextinguished desires for the pleasures of the outer world and has no organs with which to satisfy them. Naturally, we must imagine the burning thirst that serves as an analogy for the conditions of the ego after death to be increased immeasurably, and imagine it spread out over all the other still existing desires for which all possibility of satisfaction is lacking. The next task of the ego consists in freeing itself from this bond of attraction to the outer world. In this respect the ego has to bring about a purification and emancipation within itself. All desires that have been created by it within the body and that have no inherent rights within the spiritual world must be rooted out.—Just as an object takes fire and is consumed, so is the world of desires, described above, consumed and destroyed after death. This affords us a glimpse into the world that supersensible knowledge designates as the “consuming fire of the spirit.” All desires of a sensual nature, in which the sensual is not an expression of the spirit, are seized upon by this “fire.” The ideas that supersensible knowledge must give in regard to these processes might be found to be hopeless and awful. It might appear terrifying that a hope, for whose realization sense organs are necessary, must change into hopelessness after death; that a desire, which only the physical world can satisfy, must turn into consuming deprivation. Such a point of view is possible only as long as one does not consider the fact that all wishes and desires, which after death are seized by the “consuming fire,” in a higher sense represent not beneficial but destroying forces in life. By means of such destructive forces, the ego tightens the bond with the sense world more strongly than is necessary in order to absorb from this very sense world what is beneficial to it. This sense world is a manifestation of the spirit hidden behind it. The ego would never be able to enjoy the spirit in the form in which it is able to manifest through bodily senses alone, did it not want to use these senses for the enjoyment of the spiritual within the sense world. Yet the ego deprives itself of the true spiritual reality in the world to the degree that it desires the sense world without the spirit. If the enjoyment of the senses, as an expression of the spirit, signifies an elevation and development of the ego, then an enjoyment that is not an expression of the spirit signifies the impoverishing, the desolation of the ego. If a desire of this kind is satisfied in the sense world, its desolating effect upon the ego nevertheless remains. Before death, however, this destructive effect upon the ego is not apparent. Therefore the satisfaction of such desires can produce similar desires during life, and man is not at all aware that he is enveloping himself, through himself, in a “consuming fire.” After death, what has surrounded him in life becomes visible, and by becoming visible it appears in its healing, beneficial consequences. A person who loves another is certainly not attracted only to that in him which can be experienced through the physical organs. But only of what can thus be experienced may it be said that it is withdrawn from perception at death; just that part of the loved one then becomes visible for the perception of which the physical organs were only the means. Moreover, the only thing that then hinders that part from becoming completely visible is the presence of the desire that can only be satisfied through physical organs. If this desire were not extirpated, the conscious perception of the beloved person could not arise after death. Considered in this way, the picture of frightfulness and despair that might arise in the human being concerning the events after death, as depicted by supersensible knowledge, must change into one of deep satisfaction and consolation.

[ 12 ] The first experiences after death are different in still another respect from those during life. During the time of purification man, as it were, lives his life in reverse order. He passes again through all that he has experienced in life since his birth. He begins with the events that immediately preceded death and experiences everything in reverse order back to childhood. During this process, everything that has not arisen out of the spiritual nature of the ego during life passes spiritually before his eyes, only he experiences all this now inversely. For example, a person who died in his sixtieth year and who in his fortieth year had done someone a bodily or soul injury in an outburst of anger will experience this event again when, in passing through his life's journey in reverse order after death, he reaches the place of his fortieth year. He now experiences, not the satisfaction he had in life from his attack upon the other person, however, but the pain he gave him. From what has been said above, it is at the same time also possible to see that only that part of such an event can be experienced painfully after death that has arisen from passions of the ego having their source only in the outer physical world. In reality, the ego not only damages the other person through the gratification of such a passion, but itself as well; only the damage to itself is not apparent to it during life. After death this whole, damaging world of passion becomes perceptible to the ego, and the ego then feels itself drawn to every being and every thing that has enkindled such a passion, in order that this passion may again be destroyed in the “consuming fire” in the same way it was created. Only when man in his backward journey has reached the point of his birth have all the passions of this kind passed through the fire of purification, and, from then on, nothing hinders him from a complete surrender to the spiritual world. He enters upon a new stage of existence. Just as, at death, he threw off the physical body, then, soon after, the ether body, so now that part of the astral body falls away that can live only in the consciousness of the outer physical world. For supersensible perception there are, thus, three corpses: the physical, the etheric, and the astral corpse. The point of time when the latter is thrown off by man is at the end of the period of purification, which lasts about a third of the time that passed between birth and death. The reason why this is so can only become clear later on, when we shall consider the course of human life from the standpoint of occult science. For supersensible observation, astral corpses are constantly present in the environment of man, which have been discarded by human beings who are passing over from the state of purification into a higher existence, just as for physical perception there are physical corpses in the world in which men dwell.

[ 13 ] After purification an entirely new state of consciousness begins for the ego. While before death the outer perceptions had to flow toward the ego in order that the light of consciousness might fall upon them, now, as it were, a world flows from within of which it acquires consciousness. The ego lives in this world also between birth and death. There, however, this world is clothed in the manifestations of the senses, and only there where the ego, taking no heed of all sense-perceptions, perceives itself in its innermost sanctuary is what otherwise appears veiled by the sense world revealed in its real form. Just as before death the self-perception of the ego takes place in its inner being, so after death and after purification the world of spirit in its plenitude is revealed from within. This revelation, in fact, takes place immediately after the stripping off of the ether body. But, like a darkening cloud, the world of desires, which are still turned toward the outer world, spreads out before it. It is as though dark demoniacal shadows, arising out of the passions “consuming themselves in fire,” intermingled with a blissful world of spiritual experience. Indeed, these passions are now not mere shadows, but actual entities. This becomes at once apparent when the physical organs are removed from the ego and it, therefore, can perceive what is of a spiritual nature. These creatures appear like distortions and caricatures of what the human being previously knew through sense-perception. Supersensible perception says about the world of the purifying fire that it is inhabited by beings whose appearance for the spiritual eye can be horrible and painful, whose pleasure seems to be destruction and whose passion is bent upon a spiritual evil, in comparison with which the evil of the sense world appears insignificant. The passions indicated, which human beings bring into this world, appear to these creatures as food by means of which their power receives constant strengthening. The picture thus drawn of a world imperceptible to the senses can appear less incredible if one for a moment observes a part of the animal world with unprejudiced eyes. For the spiritual gaze, what is a cruel, prowling wolf? What manifests itself in what the senses perceive in it? Nothing but a soul that lives in passions and acts through them. One can call the external form of the wolf an embodiment of these passions, and even if a person had no organs with which to perceive this form, he would still have to acknowledge the existence of the being in question, if its passions showed invisibly in their effects; that is, if a power, invisible to the eye, were prowling around by means of which everything could happen that occurs through the visible wolf. To be sure, the beings of the purifying fire do not exist for sensory, but for supersensible consciousness only; their effects, however, are clearly manifest: they consist in the destruction of the ego when it gives them nourishment. These effects become clearly visible when a well-founded pleasure increases to lack of moderation and excess, for what is perceptible to the senses would also attract the ego only in so far as the pleasure is founded in its own nature. The animal is impelled to desire only by means of that in the outer world for which its three bodies are craving. Man possesses nobler pleasures because a fourth member, the ego, is added to the three bodily members. But if the ego seeks for a gratification that serves to destroy its own nature, not to maintain and further it, then such craving can be neither the effect of its three bodies, nor that of its own nature. It can only be the effect of beings who, in their true form, remain hidden from the senses, beings who can set to work on the higher nature of the ego and arouse in it passions that have no relationship to sense existence, but can only be satisfied through it. Beings exist who are nourished by desires and passions that are worse than any animal passions, because they do not have their being in the sense world, but seize upon the spiritual and drag it down into the realm of the senses. For that reason the forms of such beings are, for supersensible perception, more hideous and gruesome than the forms of the wildest animals, in which only passions are embodied that originate in the sense world. The destructive forces of these beings exceed immeasurably all destructive fury existing in the visible animal world. Supersensible knowledge must, in this way, enlarge the human horizon to include a world of beings that, in a certain respect, stand lower than the visible world of destructive animals.

[ 14 ] When man, after death, has passed through this world, he finds himself confronted by a world that contains the spirit, producing a longing within him that finds its satisfaction only in the spirit. Now too, however, he distinguishes between what belongs to his ego and what forms the environment of this ego, that is, its spiritual outer world. Only, what he experiences of this environment streams toward him in the way the perception of his own ego streams toward him during his sojourn in the body. While in the life between birth and death his environment speaks to him through his bodily organs, after all bodies have been laid aside the language of the new environment penetrates directly into the “innermost sanctuary” of his ego. The entire environment of the human being is filled with beings of like nature with his ego, for only an ego has access to another ego. Just as minerals, plants, and animals surround him in the sense world and compose that world, so after death he is surrounded by a world that is composed of beings of a spiritual nature.—Yet he brings with him into this world something that does not belong to his environment there, namely, what the ego has experienced within the sense world. Immediately after death, and as long as the ether body was still united with the ego, the sum of these experiences appeared in the form of a comprehensive memory picture. The ether body itself is then, to be sure, cast off, but something from this memory picture remains as an imperishable possession of the ego. What has thus been retained appears as an extract, an essence made from all the experiences that the human being has passed through between birth and death. This is life's spiritual yield, its fruit. This yield contains everything of a spiritual character that has been revealed through the senses. Without life in the sense world, however, it could not have come into existence. After death the ego feels this spiritual fruit of the sense world as its own inner world with which it enters a world composed of beings who manifest themselves as only his ego can manifest itself in its innermost depths. Just as the plant seed, which is an extract of the entire plant, develops only when it is inserted into another world—the earth, so what the ego brings with it out of the sense world unfolds like a seed upon which the spiritual environment acts that has now received it. If the science of the supersensible is to describe what occurs in this “land of the spirits,” It can indeed only do so by portraying it in pictures. Still, these pictures appear as absolute reality to supersensible consciousness when it investigates the corresponding occurrences imperceptible to the physical eye. What is to be described here may be illustrated by means of comparisons with the sense world, for although it is wholly of a spiritual nature, it has, in a certain respect, a similarity to the sense world. For example, just as in the world of the senses a color appears when an object impresses the eye, in the “land of the spirits,” when a spiritual being acts upon the ego, an experience is produced similar to one made by a color. But this experience is produced in the way in which, in the life between birth and death, only the perception of the ego can be produced in the soul's inner being. It is not as though the light struck the human inner being from without, but as though another being were acting directly upon the ego, causing it to portray this activity in a colored picture. Thus all beings of the spiritual environment of the ego express themselves in a world of radiating colors. Since their origin is of a different kind, these color experiences of the spirit world are, naturally, of a character somewhat different from the experiences of physical color. The same thing can be said of other impressions that the human being receives from the sense world. The impressions that resemble most those of the sense world are the tones of the spiritual world, and the more the human being becomes familiar with this world, the more will it become for him an inwardly pulsating life that may be likened to tones and their harmonies in sensory reality. These tones, however, are not experienced as something reaching an organ from outside, but as a force streaming through the ego out into the world. The human being feels the tone as he feels his own speaking or singing in the sense world, but he knows that in the spiritual world these tones streaming out from him are at the same time manifestations of other beings poured out into the world through him. A still higher manifestation takes place in the land of spirit beings when the tone becomes “spiritual speech.” Then not only the pulsing life of another spirit being streams through the ego, but a being of this kind imparts its own inner nature to this ego. Without that separation which all companionship must experience in the physical world, two beings live in each other when the ego is thus permeated by “spiritual speech.” The companionship of the ego with other spirit beings after death is really of this kind.

Three realms of the land of spirits appear before supersensible consciousness that may be compared with three regions of the physical sense world. The first region is the “solid land” of the spiritual world, the second, the “region of oceans and rivers,” the third, the “atmospheric region.”—What assumes physical form on earth so that it may be perceived by means of physical organs is perceived in its spiritual nature in the first realm of the land of spirit beings. For example, the force that gives the crystal its form may be perceived there, but what thus appears is the antithesis of the form it assumes in the sense world. The space, which in the physical world is filled with the stone mass, appears to spiritual vision as a kind of cavity. Around this cavity, however, the force is visible that gives form to the stone. The color the stone possesses in the physical world is experienced in the spiritual world as the complementary color. Thus a red stone appears greenish in the spirit land and a green stone, reddish. The other characteristics also appear In their complementary forms. Just as stones, earth masses, and so forth, make up the solid land—the continental regions—of the physical world, so the structures described above compose “the solid land” of the spirit world.—Everything that is life within the sense world is the oceanic region in the spirit world. Life to the physical eye is manifest in its effects in plants, animals, and men. Life to spiritual vision is a flowing entity that permeates the land of spirits like seas and rivers. A still better analogy is that of the circulation of the blood in the body, for whereas oceans and rivers appear irregularly distributed within the physical world, there is a certain regularity, like that of the circulation of the blood, in the distribution of this streaming life of the land of spirit beings. This flowing life is heard simultaneously as a spiritual entoning.—The third realm of the spirit land is its “atmosphere.” What appears in the sense world as sensation exists in the spiritual realm as an all-pervading presence like the earth's air. Here we must imagine a sea of flowing feeling. Sorrow and pain, joy and delight flow through this realm like wind or a raging tempest in the atmosphere of the sense world. Imagine a battle raging upon earth. Not only human forms confront each other there, forms that can be seen with the physical eyes, but feelings stand forth opposing feelings, passions opposing passions. The battlefield is filled with pain as well as with human forms. Everything that is experienced there of the nature of passion, pain, joy of conquest, is present not alone in its effects perceptible to the senses, but the spiritual sense becomes conscious of it as atmospheric processes in the land of spirits. Such an event in the spirit is like a thunder storm in the physical world, and the perception of these events may be likened to the hearing of words in the physical world. Therefore it is said that just as the air surrounds and permeates the earth beings, so do “wafting spiritual words” enclose the beings and processes of the spirit land.

[ 15 ] There are still other perceptions possible in this spiritual world. What may be compared to warmth and light of the physical world is also present. What permeates everything in the spirit land, like warmth permeating earthly things, is the thought world itself, only here, thoughts must be imagined as living, independent entities. What is apprehended as thoughts in the physical world is like the shadow of what exists in the land of spirits as thought beings. If we imagine thought, as it exists in human beings, withdrawn from man and endowed as an active entity with its own inner life, then we have a feeble illustration of what permeates the fourth region of the spirit land. What man perceives as thoughts in his physical world between birth and death is only the manifestation of the thought world as it is able to express itself through the instrumentality of the bodies. But all such thoughts entertained by human beings, which signify an enrichment of the physical world, have their origin in this region. One need not think here merely of the ideas of the great inventors, of the geniuses. It can be seen how every person has sudden ideas that he does not owe merely to the outer world, but with which he transforms this outer world itself. Feelings and passions whose causes lie in the outer world have to be placed in the third region of the spirit land. But everything that can so live in the human soul as to make him a creator, causing him to transform and fructify his surroundings, is perceptible in its primeval, essential form in the fourth sphere of the spiritual world.—What exists in the fifth region may be compared with physical light. It is wisdom revealing itself in its innermost form. Beings belonging to this region shed wisdom upon their environment, just as the sun sheds light upon physical beings. What is illuminated by this wisdom appears in its true significance and meaning for the spiritual world, just as a physical object displays its color when it is shone upon by the light.—There exist still higher regions of the land of the spirits, descriptions of which will be found in a later part of this work.

After death, the ego is immersed in this world, together with the harvest that it brings with it from its life in the sense world. This harvest is still united with that part of the astral body that has not been thrown off at the end of the period of purification. Only that part falls away which after death was inclined with its desires and longings toward physical life. The immersion of the ego in the spiritual world, together with what it has acquired in the sense world, may be compared with the insertion of a seed into the ripening earth. Just as this seed draws substances and forces from its environment in order to develop into a new plant, so, too, unfolding and growth is the very essence of the ego being embedded in the world of spirit.—Within what an organ perceives lies hidden the force by means of which the organ itself is created. The eye perceives the light, but without the light there would be no eye. Beings that pass their lives in darkness develop no organs of sight. In this manner the whole bodily organism of the human being is created out of the hidden forces lying within what is perceived with these bodily members. The physical body is built up by the forces of the physical world, the ether body by those of the life world, and the astral body is formed out of the astral world. When the ego is now transplanted into the spirit land, it encounters those forces that remain hidden to physical perception. In the first region of the spirit land the spiritual beings are perceptible who always surround the human being and who have also fashioned his physical body. Thus in the physical world, man perceives nothing but the manifestations of those spiritual forces that have also formed his own physical body. After death, he is himself in the midst of these formative forces that now appear to him in their own, previously concealed, form. Likewise, in the second region he is in the midst of the forces composing his ether body. In the third region, forces stream toward him out of which his astral body has been organized. The higher regions of the spirit land also now impart to him what composes his form in his life between birth and death.

[ 16 ] These beings of the spirit world now co-operate with what man has brought with him as fruit from the former life and what now becomes a seed. By means of this cooperation man is built up anew as a spiritual being. In sleep the physical and ether bodies continue their existence; the astral body and ego are, to be sure, outside of these two bodies, but still united with them. Whatever influences the astral body and the ego receive in this state from the spiritual world can only serve to restore the forces exhausted during the waking period. When the physical and ether bodies have been laid aside, however, and when, after the period of purification, those parts of the astral body that are still connected with the physical world through their desires are also laid aside, all that streams toward the ego from the spirit world now becomes not only a perfector, but a recreator. After a certain length of time, which will be discussed in later parts of this work, an astral body has formed itself around the ego; the former can again dwell in ether and physical bodies befitting the human being between birth and death. He can again pass through birth and appear in a new earth existence into which the fruit of the previous life has been incorporated. Up to the time of re-forming a new astral body, man is a witness of his own re-creation. Since the powers of the spirit land do not reveal themselves to him by means of outer organs, but from within, like his own ego in self-consciousness, he is able to perceive this revelation as long as his mind is not yet directed to an outwardly perceptible world. The moment, however, the astral body is newly formed, his attention turns outward. The astral body once more requires an external ether and physical body. It therefore turns away from the revelations of the inner world. For this reason an intermediate state now begins, during which man sinks into unconsciousness. Consciousness can only reappear in the physical world when the necessary organs for physical perception have been formed. During this period in which consciousness, illuminated by inner perception, ceases, the new ether body begins to attach itself to the astral body and the human being can then again enter into a physical body. Only an ego that has of itself produced life spirit and spirit man, the hidden, creative forces in the ether and physical bodies, would be able to take part consciously in the attachment of these two members. As long as man is not developed to this point, beings who are further advanced than he in their evolution must direct the attachment of these members. The astral body is led by such beings to certain parents, so that he may be endowed with the proper ether and physical bodies.—Before the attachment of the ether body is completed, something extraordinarily significant occurs for the human being who is re-entering physical existence. He has, in his previous life, created destructive forces that became evident when he experienced his life in reverse order after death. Let us take again the example suggested above. A person had caused someone pain in an outburst of anger in the fortieth year of his previous life. After death, he met this pain of the other person in the form of a force destructive to the development of his own ego. So it is with all such occurrences of his previous life. On re-entering physical life, these hindrances to evolution confront the ego anew. Just as at death a kind of memory picture of the past life arose before the human ego, now a pre-vision of the coming life presents itself. Again he sees a tableau, which this time displays all the hindrances he must remove if his evolution is to make further progress. What he thus sees becomes the starting point of forces that he must carry with him into a new life. The picture of the pain that he has caused another person becomes the force impelling the ego, on re-entering life, to make reparation for this pain. Thus the previous life has a determining effect upon the new life. The actions of this new life are in a certain way caused by those of the previous life. This orderly connection between a former and a later existence must be considered as the law of destiny. It has become the custom to designate this law by the name karma, a term borrowed from oriental wisdom.

[ 17 ] The fashioning of a new corporeal organization is not the only activity that is required of the human being between death and a new birth. While this building up is taking place, man lives outside the physical world. But during this time the earth proceeds in its evolution. Within relatively short periods of time the earth changes its countenance. How did those regions, which at present are occupied by Germany, appear a few millennia ago? When man reappears in a new life, the earth as a rule presents quite a different appearance from the one it had in his previous life. While he was absent from the earth all sorts of changes have occurred. Hidden forces also are at work in this transformation of the face of the earth. Their activities proceed from the same world in which man dwells after death, and he himself must co-operate in this transformation of the earth. He can do so only under the guidance of higher beings, as long as he has not acquired, through the development of life spirit and spirit man, a clear consciousness concerning the relationship between the spirit and its expression in the physical. But he helps to transform the earthly conditions. It can be said that human beings, during the period between death and a new birth, transform the earth in such a way that its conditions harmonize with their own development. If we observe a particular spot on the earth at a definite point of time and observe it again after a long span, finding it in a fully changed condition, the forces that have wrought this change are the forces of the human dead. In this way men have a relationship with the earth also during the period between death and a new birth. Supersensible consciousness sees in all physical existence the manifestation of a hidden spirituality. For physical observation, it is the light of the sun, climatic changes, and similar phenomena that bring about the transformation of the earth. For supersensible observation, the forces of the human dead are active in the rays of light that fall upon the plants from the sun. By observing supersensibly one becomes aware of how human souls hover above the plants, how they change the surface of the earth, and so forth. The attention of the human being is not only turned upon himself and upon the preparation for his own new earth life; indeed, he is called upon to work spiritually upon the outer world, just as he is called upon to work physically in the life between birth and death.

[ 18 ] Not only from the land of spirit beings does human life affect the conditions of the physical world, however, but, vice versa, all activity in physical existence has its effects in the spiritual world. An example will illustrate what happens in this respect. A bond of love exists between mother and child. This love arises out of an attraction between the two that has its roots in the forces of the sense world. But it changes in the course of time; a spiritual bond is formed more and more out of the sensory, and this spiritual link is fashioned not merely for the physical world, but also for the land of spirits. This is also true for other relationships. What has been spun in the physical world through spiritual beings remains in the spiritual world. Friends who have become closely united in life belong together also in the land of spirits and, after laying aside their bodies, they are in much more intimate communion than in physical life. For as spirits they exist for each other through the manifestation of their inner nature in the same way that the higher spiritual beings manifest their existence to one another through their inner nature, as we have described above, and a tie that has been woven between two people brings them together again in a new life. Therefore, in the truest sense of the word, we must speak of people finding each other again after death.

[ 19 ] What has once taken place with a person, during the period from birth to death and then from death to a re-birth, repeats itself. Man returns to earth again and again when the fruit that he has acquired in one physical life has reached maturity in the land of the spirits. Yet, we must not think here of repetition without beginning and end, for the human being passed, at some time, from other forms of existence into those that take place in the manner described, and he will in the future pass on to others. A picture of these transitional stages will be presented when, subsequently, the evolution of the cosmos—in relation to man—is described from the standpoint of supersensible consciousness.

[ 20 ] The processes that occur between death and a new birth are, naturally, still more concealed for outer sensory observation than the spiritual element that underlies manifest existence between birth and death. This sensory observation can see the effects of this part of the concealed world only where they enter into physical existence. The question for sensory observation is, whether the human being who passes through birth into life brings with him something of the processes described by supersensible cognition as taking place between a previous death and birth. if someone finds a snail shell in which no trace of an animal is to be seen, he will nevertheless acknowledge that this snail shell has come into existence through the activity of some animal and will not believe that it has been constructed in its form purely by means of physical forces. Likewise, a person who observes a living human being and finds something that cannot have its origin in this life, can admit with reason that it originates in what the science of the supersensible described, if thereby a clarifying light is thrown upon what is otherwise inexplicable. Thus intelligent sensory observation would be able to find that the invisible causes are comprehensible through their visible effects, and to anyone who observes this physical life entirely without prejudice, the above will appear—with every new observation—more and more convincing. It is only a question of finding the right standpoint for observing the effects in outer life. For example, where are the effects of what supersensible cognition describes as processes of the time of purification? How do the effects of the experiences that man undergoes manifest themselves after this time of purification in the purely spiritual realm, according to the evidence of spiritual research?

[ 21 ] Problems enough force themselves into every earnest and deep consideration of life in this field. We see one person born in need and misery, equipped with only meager ability, and he appears to be predestined to a pitiable existence because of the conditions prevailing at his birth. Another will, from the first moment of his life, be cherished and cared for by solicitous hands and hearts; brilliant capacities unfold in him, he is cut out for a fruitful, satisfactory existence. Two contrasting points of view can be asserted in respect of such problems. The one adheres to what the senses perceive and what the intellect, bound to the senses, can grasp. This point of view sees no problem in the fact that one person is born to good fortune, the other to misfortune. Although such a point of view may not wish to use the word “chance,” still those who hold it are not ready to assume an interrelated web of laws that causes such diversities, and with respect to aptitudes and talents, this way of thinking adheres to what is said to be “inherited” from parents, grandparents, and other ancestors. It will refuse to seek the causes in spiritual events that man himself has experienced before his birth, and through which he has formed his capacities and talents, quite apart from the hereditary descent from his ancestors.—Another point of view will not feel satisfied with such an interpretation. It will hold that even in the outer world nothing occurs at a definite place or in definite surroundings without the necessity of presupposing a reason for the cause of it. Although in many instances these causes have not yet been investigated, yet they exist. An Alpine flower does not grow in the lowlands; there is something in its nature that unites it with the Alpine regions. Likewise, there must be something in a human being that causes him to be born in a definite environment. This is not to be explained by causes that lie merely in the physical world. To a serious thinker this must appear as though a blow dealt another should be explained not by the feelings of the aggressor, but rather by the physical mechanism of his hand.—Those who have this point of view must also be dissatisfied with all explanations of aptitude and talents as mere inheritance. Yet it may be said in this connection that obviously certain aptitudes continue to be inherited in families. During two and a half centuries musical aptitudes were inherited by the members of the Bach family. Eight mathematicians, some of whom in their childhood were destined for quite different professions, have appeared in the Bernoulli family. The “inherited” talents have always impelled them to take up the family profession. Furthermore, it can be shown through exact investigation of the line of ancestry of an individual that, in one way or another, the talents of this individual have appeared in the ancestors and that they present only a summation of inherited tendencies. The one having the second point of view mentioned will certainly not disregard such facts, but they cannot mean the same thing to him as to the other who rests his explanations solely upon the processes of the sense world. The former will point out that it is just as impossible for the inherited traits to sum themselves up into an entire personality as it is for the metal parts of a clock to form themselves into a clock. If the objection is made that the united activity of the parents can bring about the combination of traits and that this, as it were, takes the place of the clock-maker, he will reply, “Just look with impartiality at the completely new element in every child's personality; this cannot come from the parents for the simple reason that it does not exist in them.” ^c4

[ 22 ] Unclear thinking can cause great confusion in this realm. The worst is if those having the first point of view previously stated look on those having the second as opponents of what is based upon “sure facts.” But these latter may not even think of denying the truth or the value of these facts. They also see quite clearly, for example, that a definite spiritual predisposition, even a spiritual direction, is “inherited” in a family, and that certain capacities summarized and combined in one descendant result in a remarkable personality. They are ready to admit that the most illustrious name seldom stands at the beginning, but at the end of a blood relationship. But those holding this view should not be blamed if they are forced to draw conclusions from these findings quite different from those of the persons who merely hold to the facts of the senses. The latter may be countered by saying that the human being certainly displays the attributes of his ancestors, for the soul-spirit element, which enters into physical existence through birth, takes its physical form from what heredity gives it. But by this, nothing else is said than that a being bears the qualities of the medium in which it is immersed. The following is certainly a strange and trivial comparison, but the unprejudiced mind will not deny its justification when it is said that the fact that a human being appears clothed in the traits of his forebears gives no more evidence of the origin of his personal characteristics than the fact that he is wet because he fell into the water gives evidence of his inner nature. It can be said further that if the most illustrious name stands at the end of a blood relationship covering many generations, it shows that the bearer of this name needed this blood relationship in order to form the body required for the development of his entire personality. It is, however, no proof whatsoever of the “inheritance” of the personal element itself; in fact, for a healthy logic, this fact proves just the opposite. If indeed the personal gifts were inherited, they would have to stand at the beginning of this series of generations and be transmitted to the descendants. But the appearance of a great endowment at the end of a human series proves that it is not inherited.

[ 23 ] It is not to be denied that those who speak of spiritual causation in life often add to the confusion. They often speak too much in general, indefinite terms. When it is declared that the inherited attributes are summed up into the personality of a human being, this can certainly be compared with the statement that the metal parts of a clock have assembled themselves. But it must also be admitted that many statements about the spiritual world are similar to the declaration that the metal parts of a clock cannot assemble themselves so that the hands move forward; therefore something spiritual must be present that takes care of the forward movement of the hands. In respect of such an assertion, he builds on a firmer foundation who says, “Oh, I shall not trouble about such ‘mystical beings’ who advance the hands of the clock; I am trying to learn to understand the mechanical relationships that bring about this forward movement of the hands.” For it is not a question of merely knowing that behind such a mechanism as the clock, for example, there stands something spiritual—the clock-maker—but it is of significance only to learn to know the thoughts in the mind of the clock-maker that have preceded the construction of the clock. These thoughts can be found again in the mechanism.

[ 24 ] All mere dreaming and imagining about the supersensible brings only confusion for they are incapable of satisfying the opponents. The latter are right when they say that such general references to supersensible beings are not an aid to the understanding of the facts. These opponents, it is true, may say the same thing about the definite indications of spiritual science. In this case, however, it can be shown how the effects of hidden spiritual causes appear in outer life. The following can be maintained: Suppose that what spiritual research has established by means of observation is true, namely, that man after death has passed through a period of purification and that he has experienced psychically during that time how a definite act, which has been performed in a previous life, is a hindrance to further evolution. While he was experiencing this, the impulse developed in him to rectify the consequences of this act. He brings this impulse with him into a new life, and it then forms the trait of character that places him in a position where this rectification is possible. Consider the totality of such impulses, and you have a reason for the destined environment in which a person is born.—The same may apply to another supposition. Again assume that what spiritual science says is true, namely, that the fruits of a past life are incorporated in the spiritual human seed, and that the land of the spirits in which this seed exists between death and rebirth is the realm in which these fruits ripen in order to appear again in a new life changed into talents and capacities, and to form the personality in such a way that it appears as the effect of what has been gained in a former life.—Anyone who makes these assumptions and, with them, observes life without prejudice will see that through them all facts of the sense world can be acknowledged in their full significance and truth, while at the same time everything becomes comprehensible that must remain forever incomprehensible to the one who, while relying only on physical facts, directs his attitude of mind toward the spiritual world. Above all, every illogical assumption will disappear, for instance the one mentioned above, that because the most important name stands at the end of a blood relationship series, the bearer of that name must have inherited his talents. Life becomes logically comprehensible by means of the supersensible facts communicated by spiritual science.

[ 25 ] The conscientious truth-seeker who, without personal experiences in the supersensible world, wishes to find his way within the facts will, however, still be able to raise an important objection. For it can be asserted that it is inadmissible to assume the existence of any fact whatever simply for the reason that something that otherwise is inexplicable can thereby be explained. Such an objection is surely wholly without meaning for the one who knows the corresponding facts from supersensible experience. In the subsequent chapters of this work, the path will be indicated that can be traveled for the purpose of becoming acquainted, not only with other spiritual facts to be described here, but also with the law of spiritual causation as an individual experience. However, the above objection can, indeed, have significance for the person who is not willing to tread this path, but what can be said in refutation of this objection is also valuable for the one who has decided to take this path. For a person who accepts this in the right way has made the best initial step that can be taken on the path.—It is absolutely true that we should not accept something, the existence of which we do not otherwise know, simply because something, which otherwise remains incomprehensible, can be explained by it. In the case of the spiritual facts mentioned, however, the matter is quite different. If they are accepted, this has not only the intellectual consequence that life becomes comprehensible through them, but by the admission of these assumptions into our thoughts something else is experienced. Imagine the following case. Something happens to a person that arouses in him a feeling of distress. He can take this in two different ways. He can experience distress over the occurrence and yield himself to its disturbing aspects, even perhaps sink into grief. He can, however, take it in another way. He can say, “In reality, I have in a past life developed in myself the force that has confronted me with this event; I have, in fact, brought this thing upon myself,” and he can arouse in himself all the feelings that can result from such a thought. Naturally, the thought must be experienced with the utmost sincerity and all possible force if it is to have such a result for the life of feeling and sensation. Whoever achieves this will have an experience that can best be illustrated by a comparison. Let us suppose that two men get hold of a stick of sealing wax. One makes intellectual observations concerning its “inner nature.” These observations may be very clever; if there is nothing to show this “Inner nature,” one might easily reply that this is pure fantasy. The other, however, rubs the sealing wax with a cloth and then shows that it attracts small particles. There is a tremendous difference between the thoughts that have passed through the head of the first man, arousing his observations, and those of the second man. The thoughts of the first have no actual results; those of the second, however, have aroused a force, that is, something actual, from its concealment.—This is also the case with the thoughts of the human being who imagines that, through a former life, he has implanted into himself the power to encounter an event. This mere thought arouses in him a real force by means of which he can meet the event quite differently from the way he would have met it had he not entertained this thought. The inherent necessity of this event, which otherwise he might have considered merely due to chance, dawns upon him, and he will at once understand that he has had the right thought, for it had the force to disclose to him the facts. If a person repeats such inner processes, they become the means of an inner supply of strength and thus they prove their truth through their fruitfulness, and this truth becomes manifest gradually and powerfully. These processes have a healthy effect in regard to spirit, soul, and body; indeed, in every respect they act beneficially upon life. Man becomes aware that in this way he enters in the right manner into the relationships of life, whereas he is on the wrong path when he considers only the one life between birth and death. His soul becomes stronger because of this knowledge.—Such purely inner proof of spiritual causation can only be produced by each person himself in his own intimate soul life, but everyone can have such proof. Anyone who has not produced this proof cannot, of course, judge its power. Anyone who has produced it can no longer have any doubt about it. It is not surprising that this is so, for it is only natural that what is so intimately connected with man's innermost nature, his personality, can also be satisfactorily proved only by means of the most intimate experience.—The objection cannot be made, however, that each person must deal personally with such matters since they have to do with an inner experience of this kind, and that they cannot be the concern of spiritual science. It is true that each person must have the experience himself, just as each person must himself understand the proof of a mathematical problem. The means by which the experience can be attained, however, holds good for everyone, just as the method of proving a mathematical problem holds good for everyone.

[ 26 ] It should not be denied that—aside from supersensible observations, of course—the proof by means of the forceproducing power of the corresponding thoughts just referred to, is the only one that holds its own if viewed with impartial logic. All other considerations are certainly important, but they all will possess something that offers a point of attack. To be sure, anyone who has acquired a sufficiently unprejudiced point of view will find something in the possibility and actuality of the education of man that has logically effective power of proof for the fact that a spiritual being is struggling for existence within the bodily sheath. He will compare the animal with the human being and say to himself that in the former, its normal characteristics and capacities appear at birth as something definite, which shows clearly how it is predestined by heredity and how it will develop in the outer world. See how the tiny chick from birth carries out vital functions in a definite way. In the human being, however, something enters into relationship with his inner life, through education, that can exist without any connection whatsoever with heredity, and he can make the effects of such outer influences his own. Anyone who teaches knows that forces from the inner being must come to meet such influences. If this is not the case, then all schooling, all education is meaningless. For the unprejudiced educator, there exists a clear-cut boundary between inherited characteristics and those inner human forces that shine through these characteristics originating in former earth lives. True, it is impossible to adduce “weighty” proofs for these things in the same way that certain physical facts may be demonstrated by means of the scales. But then, these things are the intimacies of life, and for the person who has a sense for such things, these impalpable evidences are likewise conclusive, even more conclusive than the obvious reality. That animals can be trained, that is, that they acquire qualities and faculties through education, offers no objection for the one who is able to see the essential thing. Aside from the fact that everywhere in the world transitions are to be found, the results of animal training do not fuse in like manner with the animal's personal nature, as is the case with human beings. It is even emphasized that the abilities the domestic animal acquires through training during its life with man, are inheritable, that is, that they have their effects in the species, not in the individual. Darwin describes how dogs fetch and carry without having learned to do so or having seen it done. Who would assert a similar thing in regard to human education?

[ 27 ] There are thinkers who through their observation pass beyond the opinion that the human being is constructed from without purely through the forces of heredity. They rise to the idea that a spiritual being, an individuality, precedes physical existence and forms it. Many of them do not find it possible to comprehend that there are repeated earth lives, and that in the intervening existence between lives the fruits of the previous ones act cooperatively as formative forces. Let us mention one out of the list of such thinkers. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, son of the great Fichte, in his work Anthropology² cites his observations that bring him to the following comprehensive conclusion:

The parents are not the producers of the child in the fullest sense of the word. They offer the organic substance, and not alone that, but at the same time the median, sensory soul element that expresses itself in temperament, in special soul coloring, in definite specification of impulses, and the like, the general source of which is ‘fantasy’ in that broader sense already proved by us. In all these elements of personality the mixture and peculiar union of the parent souls is unmistakable; there are good reasons, therefore, to explain these as purely a product of procreation; all the more so, if procreation is understood to be an actual soul process. We had to come to this conclusion. But the actual conclusive central point of the personality is lacking just here. For by means of a deeper, more penetrating observation we see that even those characteristics of mind and soul are only vestures and instruments for embracing the real spiritual, ideal aptitudes of man, capable of furthering or retarding them in their development, but in no way capable of bringing them into existence out of themselves.

And we read further:

Each person existed previously in accordance with his spiritual fundamental form, for spiritually considered, no individual resembles another any more than one species of animal resembles another. (see Note #3)³

These thoughts only go so far as to permit a spiritual being to enter the physical corporeality of man. Since, however, this spiritual being's formative forces are not derived from the causes of a former life, each time that a personality comes into existence a spiritual being of this kind would have to emerge out of a divine primal fount. Assuming this to be true, there would be no possibility of explaining the relationship that exists between the aptitudes struggling forth out of the human inner being and what approaches this inner being in the course of life from the outer earthly environment. The human inner being, which in every individual would have to spring from a divine primal source, would have to stand as a complete stranger before what confronts it in earth life. Only then will this not be the case—and so it is indeed—if this human inner nature had already been united with the external world—in other words, if it is not living in this world for the first time. The unbiased educator can clearly make the observation, “I bring something to my pupil from the results of earth life that is indeed foreign to his merely inherited characteristics, yet is something that makes him feel as if he had already been connected with the work in which these results of earth life have their source.” Only repeated earth lives, in connection with the facts in the spiritual realm between these earth lives as presented by spiritual research, can give a satisfactory explanation of the life of present day humanity, considered from every point of view.—The expression, “present day” humanity, was intentionally used here, for spiritual research finds that there was a time when the cycle of earth lives began, and that at that time conditions different from those of the present existed for the spiritual being of man as it entered into the corporeal sheath. In the following chapters we shall go back to this primeval state of the human being. When it will have to be shown, from the results of spiritual science, how this human being has attained his present form in relation to the evolution of the earth, we shall then be able to point out still more exactly how the spiritual essential core of man penetrates into the physical body from supersensible worlds, and how the spiritual law of causation—“human destiny”—is developed.

• c3. The connection between sleep and fatigue is, in most cases, not viewed in a manner demanded by the facts. Sleep is supposed to be a result of fatigue. That this thought is much too simple is shown by the fact that a man, not at all tired, may fall asleep while listening to an uninteresting lecture, or on some similar occasion. Whoever maintains that such an occasion tires the listener, tries to explain by a method that lacks a serious scientific attitude. Unprejudiced observation must lead to the conclusion that waking and sleeping present different relationships of the soul to the body, which must appear in the regular course of life in rhythmical sequence like the right and left swing of a pendulum. The result of such unprejudiced observation is that the filling of the soul with the impressions of the outer world awakes in it the desire, after experiencing this state, to enter another in which it is absorbed in the enjoyment of its own bodily nature. Two soul states alternate: the state of surrender to outer impressions and the state of surrender to one's own bodily nature. In the first state the desire for the second is unconsciously produced; the second state then takes its course in unconsciousness. The expression of the desire for the enjoyment of one's own bodily nature is fatigue. We must then actually say that we feel tired, because we wish to go to sleep, not that we wish to go to sleep because we feel tired. Since the human soul can, through habit, arbitrarily call forth in itself the states that of necessity appear in normal human life, it is possible that, when the soul makes itself insensitive to a given outer impression, it calls forth in itself the desire for enjoyment of its own bodily nature; that is to say, the soul goes to sleep, even though this state is not induced by the inner condition of the human being.
• c4. The statement that, if the personal talents of a human being were subject only to the law of heredity, they would have to show themselves not at the end but at the beginning of a blood relationship, might easily be misunderstood. It might be said that talents cannot show themselves at the beginning, for they must first be developed. But this is not a valid objection. For, if we wish to prove that something is inherited from a forebear, we must show how there is to be found again in the descendant what existed already previously. If it were shown that something was present at the beginning of a blood relationship that would be found again in the further course of its evolution, we might then speak of heredity. We cannot do this, however, if at the end something appears that previously did not exist. The reversal of the above sentence was only to show that in this case the idea of heredity is an impossible one.
• 2. Hermann Fichte, Anthropologie, p. 528. Brockhaus, Leipzig, 1860.
• 3. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Anthropologie

Let me in a few words recall some of the things dealt with in the last lecture. Particularly important for us were the views we were able to form, from immediate observation, concerning the difference between the human life of soul and that of the animals. We realized that the animal soul life may not be distinguished from that of man in such a way as to justify the assertion that man is superior to the animal in respect of certain spiritual attributes. To refute such a view we need only point to how certain achievements, obviously attained only by man struggling to a definite stage of intelligence, are brought about objectively within the animal world in the building of their dwellings and in the whole of their life. So that in what the animal does, in what it produces, in what it creates, we have exactly the same intelligent activity that is shown by man in the tools and products he makes. It might really be said: Into what the animal does there flows, and then congeals, the same intelligence that we find in man. Therefore we may not speak of animal soul and human soul by simply saying that the animal is to a definite extent behind man or man to a definite extent in advance of the animal.

When speaking of the soul—and we describe the soul life as the inner life, in contradistinction to the spirit life seen pre-eminently in formation and development—we referred to the fact that we discover how intimately bound up is the soul life of the animal with its own organization; and what the animal can experience in its soul appears to us as predetermined by its whole structure and the whole arrangement of its organs. Thus it must be said: the animal's life of soul is determined by the fashion of its organization, and in its soul life the animal lives, as it were, within itself. But the essential feature of man's life of soul lies in the human soul being emancipated to a high degree from the immediate organism, and in the fact that—I beg you not to misunderstand me, I mean relatively only—independently of the bodily organization he experiences the spirit as such, in the way we have understood it; in other words, that the human soul is able to surrender itself directly to the spirit.

If we now rise to the consideration of the spirit in man and in animal we shall have to start from the concepts and ideas developed in our consideration of the soul in man and animal; we shall have to concern ourselves rather more deeply with a phenomenon arising out of what was said last time; namely, that in the animal all spiritual achievements immediately connected with its organs and experienced in its soul have been implanted into, and bound up with, what is hereditary in its species. We may also say that there lives itself out in the animal's soul that which belongs to the species, and because this is hereditary the animal comes into existence with the predisposition towards all the activities conditioned by the spirit which can be experienced through its soul nature. Thereby the animal enters existence fully equipped, and bequeaths to its racial descendants its inherited characteristics which we may call an outpouring of the animal spirit. It is different with man who in his life of soul emancipates himself from his bodily organism. But because in the course of nature this is transmitted through lineal descent, he enters existence helpless, to a certain extent, where the functions that should serve him in life are concerned. On the other hand, however, this helplessness is the one thing that enables man to develop in soul and spirit. Thus we find it to be the most important thing for man that, when he enters life through birth, everything determined from without should remain indeterminate. With this we have indicated how we have to consider the relation of the spirit to the bodily nature in animal and man—the soul lying between the spirit and bodily nature. In the way the animal appears to us as member of a species, gradually attaining its instinctive aims in life, we have a direct activity of the spirit in the organic bodily nature. The organic body in which the animal experiences its life of soul is, as it were, the spirit that has entered reality. An immediate relation exists in the animal between spirit and body. And if we look at the animal, study it—whether superficially as a layman, or more thoroughly with all the facilities comparative anatomy and physiology or any other science can offer—we see everywhere in the animal form, in the conditions of animal life, congealed spirit being lived out in this way in the individual animal species. And the external form—the external life in the same way—is for us the direct imprint of what we call the spirit lying behind the animal, so that in the animal we have to look for the closest relation between spirit and bodily nature.

This is quite different when we come to man. And when we have to draw attention to the most important differences between man and animal, it is essential not to look for them too far afield. In considering things in the right way, what is most important lies so near that there is no need for us to enter into all manner of intimate details in the investigation. Observing man, we find something standing between spirit and bodily nature which we need not take into consideration in the animal. This is important. In the animal form and organization the spirit works as it were directly. In man it does not work directly; an intermediate member thrusts itself in, which can be very easily observed in life. As man confronts us when we observe him, this intermediate member which brings about a looser connection between spirit and bodily nature is expressed in what we call the self-conscious ego. I do not want to refer now to the way in which this self-conscious ego takes shape in the body; I wish only to say: In the way man appears to us, in the way he confronts us as a phenomenon of soul, this self-conscious ego stands between his spirit and his bodily nature. Certainly from the point of view of those who believe they are standing on the firm ground of natural science, it is child's play to find objections to the expression “self-conscious ego.” But, at the moment, we are wanting to follow up the way in which this self-conscious ego is inserted between the spirit and the bodily nature.

Here we find above all—we drew attention to this last time—that man is dependent on the life of his environment, of the world outside, in relation to his language, his way of thinking and also to the extent he has developed a consciousness of self. It is a generally recognized fact that man, if shut out from all contact with humanity, if obliged to grow up alone, would never arrive at speaking, nor definite thinking, nor consciousness of self; he would be forced to remain in the state of helplessness in which he was born. Thus we see that in the case of the animal all the activities necessary for animal life, for animal existence, come to it through heredity. And we see human activities arise in such a way that they may not be looked for in the line of heredity any more than, let us say, the original warmth necessary for hatching a hen's egg may be sought within the egg; it has to come to it from without. So we find that the things of which man has need for his development have to be acquired through something within him; whereas in the case of the animal it is imprinted into him by the spirit. Thus there remain open to man certain possibilities of development into which he takes up definite organizing forces through his self-conscious ego. For, naturally, no one will doubt that changes in the organization are bound up with man's gradual acquisition of speech, thinking, consciousness of self, and the activities connected with these; so that tendencies possessed by the animal from the beginning through hereditary activities, are taken up by man from the environment, just as warmth is taken up by the hen's egg that is being hatched; in other words, it is introduced from outside. Thus possibilities of development remain open to man as regards the inter-working of the environment. Naturally Spiritual Science does not adopt the view that man could achieve anything without organs. So we must be clear that everything working into man changes his organization. If we investigate the human organization closely, we see that this organization is actually changed by forces coming from without, which have to reach man by way of his ego. And then we see something else—if we consider man as he takes his place in the world, to become what he is able to become through speech, through his way of thinking and his consciousness of self, we grasp him as it were at one pole, at one end. We must, however, grasp him also at the other end. If we would penetrate him with thought, this is not so easy a matter. But it is in fact necessary to lay hold of man's other end.

Man actually enters the world as a helpless being. It is perfectly easy to see what we are dealing with here, but not so easy to make it the subject of observation. In the course of his life the human being has to do something that the animal is spared. This is done by the human being when he learns to walk, or, rather, learns to stand. Connected with this learning to stand, a great deal in human life lies concealed; namely, the gaining control over what we may call our bodily equilibrium. If we carefully study the design for the animal's organization, the organization of its structure, we find that the animal is so organized that a certain balance is imprinted into it making it possible for it to carry on its life. It is so formed that his body is endowed with a firm balance. It constitutes man's helplessness, from one point of view, and, from another, his advantage over the animal, that he has to make the effort to acquire balance with the help of his ego. There is no question here of comparing man with the animals nearest to him. Where the comparative anatomy of all the individual organs is concerned, it would be childish were Spiritual Science to assume a gulf between man and the animals nearest him. But whereas in the design of the animal organization there lies a predetermined balance, to human beings the possibility is open to acquire this balance after birth; but still more possibilities are open to them. The direction of its movement is laid down for the animal through the predetermined organization imprinted into him—if one may use the word imprinted; whereas for man the possibility is open to develop, within limits, his own sense of movement. Other things too are open to the human being, and we shall come back to the various manifestations of this. It is open to man to be able to imprint life itself into his organization. It is certainly possible to speak of this imprinting of life into the living being. Who with any mind for these questions would fail to notice that the organization of a duck comes to expression in plastic form, or that this is also the case where the elephant is concerned? Who would fail to see how the skeleton, if one looks at it, as distinct from the single animal species, discloses riddle upon riddle; how life is as it were discharged into the form, is caught up into the form, appearing to us as if frozen there? Here, too, man has come in a certain way to pour life into his own form. We need therefore only make the preliminary remark that in studying an animal form with open mind, we are interested far more in the universal, the general, what has to do with species, bestowing little thought on the individual forms. What interests us in man's skeleton is the noblest organ, the structure of his skull, above all, its plastic art. And in every human being this structure is different, because it is open to what lies at the basis of the human ego—to what is individual; whereas in the animal it is what belongs to the species that comes to expression. Thus when we lay hold of man by his other end we find that during certain periods of life he has full scope for imprinting into himself his sense of balance, the sense of his own movement and his whole sense of life. The interesting point here is that at the beginning of human life we are able to watch this working of the spirit in man, this imprinting of the spirit into form and movement; how in the struggle for upright gait, in the struggle to acquire a sense of one's own movement, in the imprint of bodily form, these forces are really active and coming to expression. Then at a certain age, however, the possibility ceases for the further working of the forces which in childhood had free play. At a certain period of life, in regard to the activity we have been describing, these forces close down. But when they are really within the individual man, having finished their work in a particular sphere, they cannot at once vanish; they come to meet us at a later time in life, and at this later time we should be able to show that these forces are there in human life as realities.

Now in fact we find these forces clearly arising in man again in a quite characteristic way for the progress of the spirit. What is accomplished by man in the development of his sense of balance, we find again in his later life, when he applies the same force to the development of his gestures. Gesture is something actually leading us into the deeper parts of the human organization, insofar as the spirit lives in man. And by bringing what is within him to expression in gesture, man has recourse to the same force he applied to the effort of gaining a sense of balance, for the setting up of a certain balanced poise. What man developed manifestly through learning to walk and stand, appears in later life in a finer, deeper, more intimate form when, instead of coming to physical expression, it is expressed more through the soul, in gesture. Hence we feel ourselves really intimately within man when we confront him and can let his gestures, the whole manner in which what is within him is expressed in outer movement, work upon us. In this respect every man is actually more or less of a gifted artist when confronting his fellows. For if we would penetrate to the finer psychological influences passing from man to man, we should see what an infinite amount depends—without it rising into consciousness—upon how gestures taken as a whole play upon a man. This need not enter into the broad light of external consciousness, yet it enters the soul and comes to expression when external consciousness sums up a host of intimate details, played out beneath the surface of consciousness, into everyday words such as “I like him,” “I don't like him”, or “I like her”, “I don't like her”.

We can also see how the forces organizing individual movement work on in later life. This we see when, passing from the gesture expressed in movement, we turn more to where the inner being of man may be found poured into the external form, but still in movement, in mimicry and in the physiognomy. There in fact what begins as individual sense of movement works on further, giving scope to the human being to go on developing out of helplessness, and then keeping this helplessness in check. When we notice how man, in his mien and in the play of his physiognomy, keeps his external self in continuous movement through his inner self, we find how what actually first appears in the organization more as a mere expression of bodily activity, then appears rather as poured into the soul-nature and intensified. What worked more directly in the earlier days of the human being is caught up more within him, in the self-conscious ego, to pour itself then from within outwards into the bodily regions; whereas to begin with self-conscious ego and spirit had, as it were, come to terms.

If we now see that what justifiably interests us in man is the particular form of his skull, we have to say: In this particular form of the skull of man something indeed is also expressed of his innermost being. Everyone knows that, broadly, this is the case, and that in the form of the brow, in the form of the skull, of each human being, we shall always find individual differences in men's inner nature. It goes without saying that we are not speaking here of those spheres of the spiritual life which are emancipated from the soul bound up with the body. There exists, however, as a certain ground work what may be described as an expression of the spirit that has become soul—what is wrongly developed in the sciences called phrenology, craniology, and things of that kind. It is above all essential for us to be clear that the forms coming to expression in the human skull are not general but individual to man, as he confronts us as a moral, intellectual being. When we begin to generalize, we fail to understand the whole connection. From this aspect, all phrenology practiced in this way is mischievous materialism. It should never be counted as science in its legitimate sense, for that it cannot be. What confronts us in the formation of the human skull is individual, different in each man. And the way in which we seek to form an opinion of each man in accordance with these characteristics must also be individual, just as our attitude is individual to each work of art. As there are no universal, fixed rules, as we have to take up our own attitude to each work of art, that is a work of art, if we consider according to universal rules what in an artistic sense lies hidden in man, we shall come to some kind of judgment but a judgment quite different from the ordinary one. And the following will make itself felt—that in observing the human skull we shall see how the spirit works in direct relation to the form, how forces of the spirit, of the ego, from within outwards push against the form of the skull which encases what works from without inwards. Only when we have a feeling for this working from without inwards and from within outwards, can we enter into what meets us in the form of the human skull that envelops the brain.

Thus, direct observation show us how in reality the spirit lives itself out in the animal forms. And since the animal's soul life is immediately bound up with its organization, the instinctive life being an expression of this organization, it will always be possible to see why some particular instinct or impulse must appear in the animal as part of its life of feeling. On the other hand, it may be said of man that in him we also see the spirit working on his organization, but from within; we see, too, however, that what lies at the basis of the self-conscious ego is in opposition to the organization and forces its way into it, at the same time forcing its way into the work of the spirit.

Now let us consider man in a rather different way. In him we see the capacity for speech—which is quite obvious; then a definite way of thinking and a certain consciousness of self as the result of education. These capacities arise through man's contact with the external world. But it is not enough simply to take things on trust; we must realize that something far more profound lies at the basis of speech, of the way of thinking and of the consciousness of self brought about through the environment. What lies at their basis is the fact that man possesses three senses not found in the animal. The word sense has to be taken literally, but let us keep to fact and not to words. In the realm of speech-sound, of concept and of what we call ego being, the animal shows itself quite incapable of taking things in, in the way of human beings. Of all the senses, the animal gets as far as that of tone. For outer perception this is for the animal a kind of zenith. Its sense faculty rises to tone. But beyond that no possibility is offered by its general organization for an understanding of speech-sound, concept or ego being as in other beings. The animal recognizes its own species, the dog the dog, the elephant another elephant, and so on. But no spiritual investigator would ascribe to animals any perception of their own ego being. And materialistic investigation will never succeed in producing any proof of a perception of ego being in the animal organization; thus scientific investigation should not, and spiritual investigation will not, be in doubt about this.—So we see in man that the possibilities of development remain open where perception of the inner nature of sound, the inner nature of concept and idea, and the inner nature of the ego being are concerned. Were the possibility of development in these three activities closed to man, the other forces I named would have no nourishment pouring from within, and would be unable to find expression. Animals have no organs to make it possible for them to develop in these three ways. For all that man shows in life as superiority over the animal ears the imprint of what is within him as capacity for expression—his conception of sound, his conception of concepts, and his conception of the ego, of the ego consciousness. Meanwhile we find in the animal the expression of how the spirit is poured into form; we therefore see in the animal gestures and physiognomy determined by the nature of the species. This all expresses how the spirit can be active while becoming, as it were, congealed directly in the form. In man we find each individual has his characteristic gesture, his own particular physiognomy and facial expression; in this there comes to very clear expression what, on the other hand, he has in the way of capacity for developing speech-sound, concept or idea, and consciousness of self. In reality the capacity for this development pours itself into gesture, physiognomy, facial expression, into the whole way his consciousness of self is manifested. Here we see flowing from within outwards, expressing itself in the human being, what can be experienced only through the direct intercourse of the self-conscious ego with the spirit.

If we experience things in this way, we may say: If we do not approach man with abstract, dry, prosaic concepts but perceive him in a living way, we see how ego being, the being in idea and the being in speech-sound, work directly on external form and movement. It is indeed as if, as crystallographers, we were to study the forming forces of a crystal, then discover that we have in front of us a cube in the rock salt, an octahedron in the sulphur, and in the garnet a rhombododecahedron. Just as there we see how inner forces pour their activities into form, when perceiving man in a living way we see immediately living in his external form all that he actually is, what in his being makes a strong impression on us—what meets us as congealed ego idea, congealed concept or conception, and as congealed sense of sound. We should be able indeed to picture quite vividly this congealed sense of sound that meets us. For that intercourse with the spirit which man cherishes perhaps in the most intimate way, which every man, artist or not, is able to cherish, which works into this being as the finest weavings of his soul, this intercourse is experienced by man in a characteristic way, the whole importance of which for man's life should not be overlooked. We dare not indeed overlook it in its content, in its inner nature—I am not speaking here of word content—in the inner nature of the “how” in the word content, in the inner nature of the character of sound, or the soul in language. Language does not only have the spirit expressed in the content of words; language also possesses a soul. And much more than we think, a language works upon us in the character of its sound. A language with many “ah” sounds works upon us in one way; a language that in the character of its words is more prone to “ee” or “o” in quite another way. For in the timbre of the sound character there is poured out as if in the unconscious, the soul that flows over the whole of mankind. This builds us up, works upon us, and comes to expression in life as a special kind of gesture. For man's speech is a special kind of gesture—not as to the words but insofar as it has soul—in the way man lives in speech with his soul and expresses himself. In all that, indeed, we should be able to mention significant differences.

Everyone knows that, apart from what is said, there belongs to what flashes from man to man in that queer indefinable way the inner quality of the way in which it is said. If we take this into consideration we shall say: We learn an infinite amount of what is deepest in human beings just from the way in which they speak. In ordinary life we have often to disregard this, for higher points of view may drive it into the background. Yet there is something in us that is very alive to the harshness or the pleasing tone of a voice. Those who really observe the soul know that harshness of voice is far more unpleasant in a man than in a woman, for the simple reason that this sphere is closely connected with our organization, and that the pitch of the voice in a man is more intimately related to, far more deeply bound up with, the life of soul than is the case in a woman. It is true but it cannot be proved. It can only be indicated, and if you are observant you will soon see it is so. Anyone able to understand such things, if wanting to give expression to something important, will therefore need to convey in his speech what has just been referred to, and not merely the word content. To give you an example of what I mean, really not from lack of modesty, I should like to refer to the Rosicrucian Mystery play I wrote—“The Portal of Initiation.” In all the most important passages in it, it is clear that what cannot be expressed in the content is brought out in the use of language, in the vowel sounds. You will find that where you get the sound “oo” after “ah,” “ee” cannot follow “ah.” It is of outstanding importance that we bear in mind that this realm is the “gesture” of speech, recognizing how the might of the spirit is working into the organization; and that we pay heed to this direct working of the spirit on the soul that contains the self-conscious ego. And then we look back on how the human soul pours itself into the bodily nature. I am coming now, it is true, to a language that obviously for many of you must be hypothetical; to talk of it may seem bold to some of you and to others even offensive. That, however, is beside the point.

We see how in man the ego being, what the sense of forming ideas can yield and undergo, and what the sense of sound can experience, pour themselves into gesture, physiognomy and facial expression, also, within the limits I have indicated, into the form. So that in man, in that period of his life between birth and death when the ego inserts itself between spirit and bodily nature, we see the direct activity of the spirit. Now let us just consider the following; and because the matter is more or less subtle, I shall speak figuratively. Let us imagine that what man accomplishes with his ego being, his power of conception and his sense of sound, in the way this flows more or less into his balance, individual movement and consciousness of self, and later into freedom of gesture, facial expression and the physiognomy revealing what is within him—let us imagine all this working together out of necessity, so that no conscious ego intervenes between these two, or three, aspects. Let us therefore imagine the ego to be eliminated, allowing the two sides of human nature to work on each other, so that through a sense of sound that does not enter consciousness but lives itself out in the innermost being, there is realized from the outset, in experience, the setting up of a balance that is not promoted by the ego; you would then have something which remains free for man, established without the intervention of the ego. This is what from the very beginning determines balance in the animal. And imagine the conception through which man grasps his laws and the animal species—in other words the whole organization so far as it is individual movement, physiognomy and facial expression, expressed in all animal movement, expressed also in animal instincts, passions and so on—and you have, bound up in the animal through the necessity of natural laws, what man has in his life through the intervention of the ego. We have, too, bound up from the outset with the animal, through the necessity of natural law, what in man is directly expressed only in life. In man the formative force of life works right into his form. But imagine it was no longer kept in reserve for individual life but from the beginning it acquired its form through Nature's activity, and then you have it in accordance with species, and in the way it confronts us plastically in the various animal species.—Thus we see in man a being with a sense world lying between two poles. He has his sense world, the world of perception, sound world, world of taste and world of smell and so on, lying between, on the one side, the way in which, conscious of himself, he finds a relation to his sense of balance in the different spatial directions, in the way he feels his existence in his own body; and on the other side, his sense of sound, his comprehension of concept, and his ego conception. As with inner necessity the inner life stands in relation to the intervening sense, so for the animal the inner life is related as something intervening, which, out of necessity, forms the whole organization. Let the two sides in man come together without the intervention of the ego and you have the direct working of the spiritual into the bodily without the intervention of the soul. In man we have what may be thus described—according to the spiritual and physical side he is an unfolding in space, gestures and so on, which on both sides stands open to the working of the spirit. And with this we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that through it in a certain way a foundation is laid for the whole understanding of man and the human spiritual life altogether, insofar as it plays its part in the history of the spirit. We see that we may not confound what man experiences conceptually with what he experiences when he realizes and develops the concept itself. In a certain relation man is in a quite different situation where the realization of a concept is concerned from his situation in respect of understanding it. The development of a concept is quite a different story from the means of understanding it. In this connection I should like to refer to an actual fact.

In the year 1894 Laurenz Müllner, a great admirer of Galileo, on being appointed Rector of the University of Vienna, gave his inaugural address, and in it he drew attention to a remarkable fact which indeed is very interesting. He pointed out that in Galileo we have a spirit able to grasp the physical laws of mechanics, the laws of oscillation, of the motion of projectiles, of the velocity of falling bodies, of equilibrium, which perhaps—said Professor Müllner—are expressed in the most grandiose way in Michelangelo's wonderful work—the lofty dome of St. Peter's in Rome. This is indeed true and must be admitted by anyone upon whom the work of art in question has made an impression. Thus it might be said—Laurenz Müllner went on: In Galileo's intellect these laws first arise in the form of concepts, which we then see in Rome rising to the heavens in the symmetry and equipoise of the gigantic cupola of St. Peter's. In Galileo man has learned to grasp in concepts what is presented in St. Peter's as the artistic creation of Michelangelo. Added to this we have the actual fact that the day of Galileo's birth and the day of Michelangelo's death fell in the same year. In 1564 Michelangelo died on 18th February and in the same year, almost on the same day—the 15th of February—Galileo was born, Galileo who discovered for mankind the physical laws of mechanics.

That is really an extraordinarily interesting fact. For it goes to prove that man brings about in a direct way the intercourse with the spirit through which he is able to imprint upon things the laws discovered afterwards; he does not accomplish this with his understanding, nor through concepts—not through the intelligence at all. But this points us to something else; namely, that in his organization man is in touch with the spirit before the intelligence has worked upon his soul inwardly. Hence in a certain way it can be said: Man is so constituted that he himself is able to incorporate into his substance what lives in him as outpouring of the spirit, what has worked upon him before he has been able to grasp it with his intelligence. This is so in the creation of any work of art. This fact is of interest because it enables us to see that man in physical life in regard to all that he lives, and all that comes to clear expression in an organ, before understanding the laws of that organ has something within him which carries out these laws plastically, gives them plastic form. So that if we follow up this thought it is quite clear that the sense for these laws of the spirit, expressed, for example, in a work of art, is there—must be there—in the soul before the laws are given bodily form. Hence, at the spiritual end of man, so to speak, we have also the reverse side—if we use the word in its better sense, raising it to the proper spiritual sphere. For then we are definitely shown that through an ennobled and purified instinct man creates what he discovers only later. As animals create instinctively, in the way bees, for example, organize their wonderful bee community, so man creates directly out of the spiritual world, before the spiritual world is reflected into this intelligence.

Thus we see that even in this direction everything points to the meeting of the self-conscious ego with the working of the spirit. Through instinct the animal arrives even in its feeling life at reflecting into its intelligence what it puts into its buildings, and so on. Take, for example, the beaver and what it builds. Among beavers Michelangelos will always be found, but never a Galileo who understood the same laws to which the beaver gives form in its constructions. In man there is something confronting his self-conscious ego, something created by the spirit when it enters the organization.

So in our study of human development, we have seen that between spirit and bodily organization the expression of the self-conscious ego intervenes, that the purified organization of the human being has immediate experience of the spirit, as it is seen in the imaginative creations of the artist; and that a self-conscious being lives in him which can oppose the ordering of the spirit in the body. Thus it is not a question of giving man preference over the animal or not; that would be the wrong way to approach the matter. We have, however, to realize that in the animal the spirit comes into direct contact with the bodily organization, and the soul passes its life in accordance with this bodily organization; whereas in man the living ego which is found in the soul pushes its way between spirit and bodily organization, establishing itself as mediator—thus working there between spirit and bodily organization. Through this the human ego has direct intercourse with what lives in the spiritual world. And it lives out this direct intercourse primarily by strenuous efforts to establish spiritual conditions in its environment which the animal is able to establish only instinctively. We see strongly marked a certain life of rights, a moral life among animals. But we understand the life of rights, the life of the State, and the whole course of world history, only when we see in man the emancipation of the spirit from the bodily nature by the intervention of the ego between spirit and bodily nature, through which the ego enters into immediate intercourse with the spiritual world.

The way in which this ego enters into direct intercourse with the spiritual world constitutes the normal condition of the human being. But as the intervention of a self-conscious ego between spiritual and bodily nature signifies progress beyond animal evolution, it is possible for man to go farther on this path by again developing within him the spirit which he set free from the bodily nature—developing it in the free intercourse experienced. The possibilities for this will be found in the lecture “The Nature of Sleep”, and its full significance appears in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. There we see how in normal human beings the emancipation of the spirit from the bodily nature has arrived at a certain stage, but can be carried further by developing slumbering germinating forces in man, through the unfolding of which he can advance to direct vision into the spiritual world.

We had first to lay a foundation for what we are able to cultivate as actual contemplation of the spiritual world, by seeking the real significance of the human being in this intervention of the ego between spirit and bodily nature. But this again is given us also in an external bodily way, since the self-conscious ego as it confronts us in life does so in the inner being of man, entirely in his physiognomy and in accordance with his gestures. Some of you may remember that I have not only mentioned but have also substantiated that the old saying “Blood is a very special fluid”¹ is founded on deep truth. This is really so, and in what is thus expressed simply as a direct working of the soul on the blood circulation, we can divine something of that working of the self-conscious ego into the bodily nature, into the organization. That is, so to say, the nearest gate for the ego, fertilized by the spirit, to enter the bodily nature and work upon it. We see this on observing how the soul works upon the blood circulation. In the phenomena of blushing and turning pale I have often given you common examples for the direct working of what goes on in the soul and expresses itself physically; for fear and shame are actual processes of the soul. Anyone wanting to deny this would have to be an unconscious materialist, like, for example, William James: for although he wishes to be spiritual he is actually a materialist in wishing to defend the assertion: “Man does not weep because he is sad, he is sad because he weeps.” According to this we should have to imagine that man experiences sadness in his soul because some kind of material influence has an effect on the organism and squeezes out tears: and if man notices this—so says William James—he becomes sad. If we do not recognize how untenable this conclusion is, we shall not be able to understand that in affairs like laughing and weeping, and also in blushing, where a rush of blood takes place from the centre to the periphery, we have to do with material processes directly under the influence of soul and spirit.

If we think this over we shall be able to admit that in man what belongs to the soul does in very truth express itself in the circulation of the blood. What we say here about man; namely, that in the blood, and in the circulation, the self-conscious ego has its life, we cannot directly apply to the animal, because in it a self-conscious ego cannot work into the blood circulation, and—what is essential—because the animal does not open itself directly to the influence of the spiritual world which works into it; rather, from necessity. Whereas in the animal's blood circulation we have before us something in which the soul life of the animal finds immediate expression, in the blood circulation of the human being something is to be seen of the way in which the spirit works on the ego. If some day people will begin to give a little thought to what is here in question; namely, the importance for human life that man should not be organized from the outset to receive a definite imprint, of balance, of individual movement and of the sense of life, but must himself struggle to attain them—when they can discover how true it is that in spatial directions we have to do with realities, whether a spine is in a horizontal or vertical relation to space, or whether the blood circulates in this or that direction—then they will see how essential is the way in which such organizations are inserted into the whole cosmic connection. We should be obliged to see in reality, for example, in the spatial direction of a certain line, something of essential importance. When this is understood we may judge how great is the significance of the position and all the processes in the blood, in the human blood system. Today it is believed that the theory of the blood circulation is complete in itself. It is not so at all. We are only beginning to learn something of the secrets of the blood circulation. And not dogmatically to make bare assertions I will point to the following.

Not more than twenty-five years ago, a scientific investigator in this sphere, the criminologist Moritz Benedict, celebrated for his mathematical qualifications in this direction, was first to draw attention to the important fact—generally ignored today—that the corresponding beats in the right artery and the left are different—an important fact for knowledge of the connections in the human being. And of special importance is something found in this sphere, not by anyone famous but by a very simple man, a Dr. Karl Schmidt. It was published by him in 1892 in the Vienna Medical Weekly in his article “Heartbeat and Pulsation,” in which quite important observations were indicated. Only when these things, still in their infancy, are studied to some degree, will a beginning have been made in knowledge of the connection between the self-conscious ego and the blood circulation, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the connection between the animal spirit working in the animal and the animal blood circulation. Last time, I pointed out that we, indeed, are able to go into details in the sciences of the organs and their individual functions, and are able to give evidence of the different ways the spirit shows itself in man and in animal. In this connection it is quite comprehensible that modern investigations into the relation of man's blood to that of apes say little, because they go only into externals—the purely physical substance, the chemical reactions, and so forth—not into the real question. Were it only a matter of physical substance it would necessarily be quite immaterial whether a wheel was used as a child's toy or for a watch. But it always depends on how a member or an organ is used in the whole of a being or of a thing. It has nothing to do with how man's blood is related to the blood of the ape, or the like, but with how the organs in question are placed in the service of the organization as a whole.

How the actual truth is treated by external investigation is best shown in Goethe's dealings with natural science. In Goethe's days, where the things of Nature are concerned, a rigid materialism was already prevailing, and even the most eminent scientists who wished to maintain the difference between man and animal founded their claims on something purely material. They were of the opinion that this difference was to be seen in the fact that in the upper jawbone of the animal there is an intermediate bone not found in man. They said: What distinguishes man from the animal is that the animal possesses an intermaxillary bone to accommodate the upper incisors, and this bone is not found in man! For Goethe this was inadmissible. His concern was not to find the difference between man and animal in anatomical details, but in the way the spirit in man and the spirit in the animal made use of the organs. (Incidentally I will just refer you to Goethe's “Theory of Metamorphosis” in which may be found information about all the individual human organs.) Thus from the outset Goethe could never reconcile himself to the idea that man's superiority to the animal was to be sought in a material detail. Therefore his one wish was to prove that this assertion was incorrect, that this chasm did not exist; and he set himself to work to find this intermaxillary bone in man. If Goethe had never accomplished anything but this one deed, if he had discovered nothing further than the presence in man of the intermaxillary bone, though no longer in a developed state and not apparent, through this alone for human evolution he would still remain a mighty genius. Said Goethe to himself—and I do not relate this because he did it but because it came to light through his experience: With Herder, and with others who are at pains to understand man spiritually, I have directed attention primarily to how man rises above the animal because the animal is bound up with its organization; but man is emancipated from it and enters into immediate intercourse with the spirit, thus being able to work back upon his organs. Goethe says this, as I have indicated, but in the following words: “Animals are taught by their organs, said the men of old. I add to this: man, too, is taught by his organs; however, he has the advantage of in turn teaching them.” Goethe could not but admit that the organs are the same but formed from different sides. Hence his great joy when at last he found the intermaxillary bone in man. At this point he writes to Herder: “... I have found—neither gold nor silver but something that gives me infinite joy—the ‘os intermaxillary’ in man! With Loder I compared man's skull with that of the animal and got on its track—when, lo! There it was. But I beg you to keep quiet about it, for this affair must be handled with caution. This should, however, make you too rejoice, for it is a kind of keystone to man; it is not lacking, it is there—actually there. I have imagined it in connection with your ‘whole’—how splendidly it will fit in. ...” (Letter of 27th March, 1784.)

The difference between man and animal cannot be found in any particular detail. It has to be found entirely in the way the spirit makes use of things. For through this we behold man's relation to the spirit, how he has emancipated himself from what belongs to the body and is able to enter into direct intercourse with the spirit. Hence the difference in the sensation we experience on contemplating something spiritual from what we experience on contemplating anything physical and material. We seek to use words in quite different ways according to whether we look upon the spiritual or the physical.

Among Goethe's works two poems may be found together. Each contains three remarkable lines:

“In all things the eternal's moving past,
For everything must come to naught at last
If in being it still would stay.”

“Das Ewige regt sich fort in Allen:
Denn Alles muss in Nichts zerfallen,
Wenn es im Sein beharren will.”

Thus ends one poem, and the other begins:

“No being can come to naught at last!
In all the Eternal's moving past.
In being know thyself, then, blessed.”

“Kein Wesen kann zu Nichts zerfallen!
Das Ewige regt sich fort in Allen,
Am Sein erhalte dich beglückt!”

A complete contradiction! How may we explain it? And Goethe has put it so blatantly in two poems next to one another. In truth if we contemplate the spirit in material existence, in our heart we may call forth the feeling: If the spirit would continue in material being, if it were not to break up all form, it would have to crumble into nothingness. The moment we see the spirit in the bodily nature we have to say: We have here to do with the eternal, immortal being, with the spirit with which we can unite in man's emancipated soul. Then we may say:

“No being can come to naught at last,
In all the Eternal's moving past.
In being know thyself, then, blessed.”

if we bear in mind the immortal, the eternal, in a being.

If we see the soul, if we see the spirit in the bodily nature, we have to say: If it lived itself out entirely in the body, if it would hold fast to the body, then it would have to fall into nothingness.

Thus the study of the animal's spirit and the human spirit leads us gradually upwards to a premonition of what in reality may be called the spirit. But before it is wished to find the way in which knowledge about the spirit can be acquired, it is necessary to know the way in which the spirit shines forth in the human soul which it frees from the body in order within it to live a life independent of the bodily organization, a life in its own sphere.

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• 1. A lecture called in English: “The Occult significance of Blood”

[ 1 ] Pain, which may occur somewhere in the organism, is experienced in the astral body and the ego. Both of these—the astral body and the ego, each in its own way are appropriately engaged within the physical and etheric body while man is in the waking state. When sleep takes place, the physical and etheric body carry out the organic activities alone. The astral body and ego are separated from them.

[ 2 ] In sleep the organism returns to the activities which belong to the starting point of its development, namely, to the embryonic periods and early infancy. In waking life those processes predominate which take place at its conclusion—in aging and dying.

[ 3 ] At the starting point of man's development the activity of the etheric body predominates over that of the astral; then, gradually in the course of life, the activity of the latter grows more intense while that of the etheric body retreats. Nor does the etheric body regain, even in sleep, the intensity it had at the beginning of life. It preserves the degree of intensity it has developed in relation to the astral in the course of life.

[ 4] In every age of life, to every organ of the human body a certain intensity of etheric activity is properly assigned and corresponds moreover to a certain intensity of the astral. It depends upon these relationships whether or not the astral body can properly engage itself with the etheric. If through a lowering of etheric activity it is unable to do so, pain ensues, if on the other hand the etheric body becomes active beyond its normal measure, the mutual penetration of astral and etheric activities becomes unusually intense. Pleasure and comfort ensue. We must however bear in mind that pleasure enhanced beyond a certain point passes over into pain, likewise pain into pleasure. If this were not borne in mind what is here said might seem in contradiction with some former explanations.

[ 5 ] An organ becomes ill when its proper etheric activity cannot unfold. Take, for instance, that metabolic action which is continued, from the actual digestive process, into the organism as a whole. If the products of metabolism are transmitted everywhere without residue into the activity and substantial formation of the organism, it is a sign that the etheric body is working appropriately. If, on the other hand, substances are deposited along the paths of metabolism without entering into the general action of the organism, it shows that the etheric body is impaired in its activity. The physical processes normally stimulated by the astral body, processes which serve the organism only when confined to their own sphere, exceed their proper limits and infringe on the etheric sphere of action. Thus processes arise, the existence of which is due to the predominance of the astral body. They are processes which have their proper place when the aging and disintegration of the body sets in.

[ 6 ] The point now is to bring about a proper harmony between the etheric and the astral activity. The etheric body must be strengthened, the astral weakened. This can be done by bringing the physical substances, which the etheric body has to assimilate, into a condition wherein they lend themselves more readily to its influences than they do in the disease. Likewise the ego-organization must be supplied with added strength; for the astral body, with the animal orientation of its activity, is held more in check when the ego-organization is made stronger in its human organizing power.

[ 7 ] The way to penetrate these matters with clear knowledge will be found when we observe the kind of effects which a particular substance unfolds along the paths of metabolism. Take sulphur for example. It is contained in protein. It is indeed fundamental to the whole process which takes place in the absorption of protein food. It passes from the foreign etheric nature, through the inorganic state into the etheric activity of the human organism itself. It is found in the fibrous tissues of the organs, in the brain, in the nails and hair. Thus it finds its way along the paths of metabolism out to the periphery of the organism. In all these ways, sulphur proves to be a substance which plays an essential part in the reception of proteins into the domain of the human etheric body.

[ 8 ] Now the question arises, does sulphur also play a part in the transition from the domain of etheric action to that of astral, and has it anything to do with the ego-organization? It does not combine appreciably with inorganic substances introduced into the organism so as to form salts or acids. Such a combination would provide the basis for a reception of the sulphur processes into the astral body and ego-organization. We see, therefore, that sulphur does not penetrate into these regions. It unfolds its activity in the realm of the physical and etheric body. This is also shown by the fact that an increased supply of sulphur to the organism gives rise to feelings of giddiness, reduction of consciousness. Sleep, too, i.e. the condition of the body when the astral and ego-organization are not working as soul being, grows more intense when the supply of sulphur is increased.

[ 9 ] From all this we can see that sulphur, introduced as a medicament, will make the physical activities of the organism more inclined to submit to the active intervention of the etheric than in the diseased condition.

[ 10 ] With phosphorus the case is different. It is present in the human organism as phosphoric acid and phosphoric salts, in albumens in the fibrous tissues, in the brain and in the bones. Its tendency is towards the inorganic substances, the importance of which is in the realm of the ego-organization. It stimulates the conscious activity of man. Thereby it also conditions sleep, though by an opposite process to sulphur, namely, by previous stimulation of conscious activity, while sulphur favours sleep by enhancing the unconscious activities of the physical and etheric. Phosphorus is present as calcium phosphate in the bones, i.e. in those organs which are subject to the ego-organization, not where it works from within in processes of growth, regulation of metabolism, and the like, but where it uses the outer mechanism of the system for the movements of the body.

[ 11 ] As a medicament, therefore, phosphorus will be effective when the diseased condition is a hypertrophy of the astral domain over the ego-organization and the latter needs to be strengthened in order to repress the astral.

[ 12 ] Consider rickets. The disease is due, as was explained before, to a hypertrophy of etheric-astral activity, it leads to a defective action of the ego-astral activity, it leads to a defective action of the ego-organization. If it is treated first with sulphur in the proper way, the etheric activity is strengthened in relation to the astral, and if after this has been done, a phosphorus treatment is made to follow, the healing effect which has been prepared in the etheric organization is led over to that of the “ego”; and the rickets is confronted from two sides. (We are aware that the efficacy of the treatment of rickets with phosphorus is disputed; but none of the cures hitherto attempted have anything to do with the method described here.)