The Rudolf Steiner Archive

During the whole course of our lectures, you have seen what our position is in relation to the document called the Gospel of St. John, standing as we do upon the foundation of Spiritual Science. You have seen that it is not a question of gaining out of this document some particular truths about the spiritual world, but of showing that, independent of all human and other documents, it is possible to penetrate into that world, just as anyone wishing to learn mathematics at present does so independent of every original document by means of which, in the course of human evolution, different branches of mathematics have first been communicated. What, for example, do those students know who begin to study elementary geometry, acquiring it by means of their own faculties from geometry itself, what do they know of the geometry of Euclid, of the original document in which this elementary geometry was presented to the world for the first time? If the student has first learned geometry by means of his own faculties, he can judge and appreciate better the nature and meaning of the original documents. This should show us more and more that those truths which deal with this spiritual life can be gained out of the life of the spirit itself. If a person has found these truths for himself and then is directed to the historical documents, he finds in them again what he already knows. In this way he acquires a right and true human valuation of them. We have seen in the course of these lectures, that the Gospel of St. John really loses nothing in value by this method; we have seen that the respect for and appreciation of documents do not become less for anyone standing upon the foundation of Spiritual Science than for those who have stood entirely upon the foundation of such documents. Indeed, we have seen that we find again in the Gospel of St. John the most profound teaching concerning Christianity, a teaching which we can also call the teaching of Universal Wisdom. We have also seen that only when we have grasped this profound meaning of the Christian teaching, can we understand why the Christ had to enter into human evolution just at a definite time at the beginning of our era.

We have seen how humanity developed in the post-Atlantean age. It has been pointed out that the original Indian civilization was the first great post-Atlantean cultural epoch after the Atlantean Flood; that the characteristic of this original Indian civilization was that the souls of men were filled with longing and memory. We have characterized memory and longing by saying that they consisted in the preservation of living traditions from an epoch of human evolution ante-dating the Atlantean Flood. At that time, quite in conformity with their nature and inner being, men existed in a kind of nebulous, clairvoyant state in which they could gaze into the spiritual world, thus becoming acquainted with it through personal experience and knowledge, just as men of the present time are acquainted with the four kingdoms of nature, the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms. We have seen that prior to the Atlantean Flood, there existed as yet no such sharp distinction as we have today between the states of consciousness during the day and the night. At that time, when the human being sank into sleep at night, his inner experiences were not so unconscious and dark as they are now, for when the images of day life submerged, those of the spiritual life emerged, and he was then in the midst of the things of the spirit world. In the morning, when he again dipped down into his physical body, the experiences and realities of the divine-spiritual world sank into darkness, and around him arose the images of present reality, images of the present mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. The sharp distinction between the unconsciousness of the night and day waking-consciousness appeared only after the Atlantean Flood, that is to say, in our post-Atlantean age. Then, in a certain sense, as far as direct perception is concerned, men were cut off from spiritual reality and were more and more placed outside in purely physical reality. All that remained was the memory of the existence of another kingdom, a kingdom of spiritual beings, and united with this memory was the soul's longing to rise again by means of some exceptional condition into the regions out of which it had descended. Those exceptional conditions were only granted to a few chosen people—the initiates—whose inner faculties had been awakened in the Mystery Places enabling them to gaze into the spiritual world; to those others who were not able to do this, these initiates were able to give information about that world and testify to its reality. In the original Indian cultural period, Yoga was the process by which men were able to revert to the ancient nebulous, clairvoyant state of consciousness. When certain exceptional natures were initiated, they became, as a result, the leaders of mankind, witnesses of the spiritual world.

Under the effect of this longing and memory within this original Indian, pre-Vedic civilization, that soul-mood was particularly developed which regarded physical reality as Maya or illusion. These primitive Indian people said that actual reality exists alone in the spiritual world into which we can be reinstated only by means of an exceptional condition, through Yoga. This world of spiritual beings and processes is the true one. What is seen with the eyes, is unreal, is illusion, Maya. That was the first religious fundamental experience of the post-Atlantean age, and Yoga was the first form of initiation of this period. In fact there was yet no comprehension of the true mission of the post-Atlantean age. For it was not the mission of humanity to consider the reality, which we call physical existence, as Maya or illusion and then to flee from it and become foreign to it. Post-Atlantean humanity had another mission, that of conquering more and more the physical reality, of becoming master of the world of physical phenomena. But it is also quite comprehensible that men, now for the first time transferred to this physical plane, should in the beginning consider as Maya or illusion what previously had hardly emerged within the spiritual reality, but what was now all that they were able to perceive. This attitude toward reality could never have continued. This understanding of the physical reality as an illusion could not remain the vital nerve of the post-Atlantean period. And we have seen that postAtlantean humanity, in the different cultural epochs, conquered bit by bit the connection with the physical reality.

In that period of civilization which we designate the ancient Persian—the periods which history knows as the Persian and Zarathustrian periods are the last echoes of what is meant here—in that second period, we saw mankind taking the first step toward growing out of the ancient Indian principle and conquering physical reality. Still nowhere was there a fondness for sinking into the physical reality, also there existed nowhere anything like a study of the physical world. There was, however, more of this in the Persian period than in the ancient Indian period. We get a reverberation of the mood that looks upon physical reality as illusion in what has survived in later epochs of ancient Indian civilization. Yet our present civilization could never have arisen out of that Indian culture. All the wisdom of that period turned its gaze away from the physical world and directed it upward toward spiritual worlds which existed as a memory. The study of physical reality and its elaboration seemed to them futile, therefore the actual Indian principle could never have brought forth a science serviceable to our earthly world; it could never have produced that mastery of the laws of nature which forms the foundation of our present civilization. This could never have sprung from ancient India, for why should one seek to learn to know the forces of a world resting only upon illusion! If this was changed in the Indian cultural period also, it was not because of something flowing out of itself, but was due to subsequent foreign influences.

For the ancient Persian civilization, the external, physical reality exists as a sphere of activity. It was looked upon as the expression of a hostile Deity, but the hope arose that with the aid of the God of Light this substantial field of reality might be penetrated, that it might be changed into something permeated by spiritual powers and good divinities. Thus the adherents of the Persian civilization already sensed somewhat the reality of the physical world. It is true they still considered it the realm of the God of Darkness, but for all that, they always hoped that they might be able to incorporate within it the forces of the good gods.

Humanity then passed over into that period of civilization which found its historical expression in the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldaic-Egyptian culture and we have seen how it happened that the starry heavens were no longer Maya to these people of the third epoch, but something whose written characters could be read. In all that still seemed a Maya to the Indians in the course and splendour of the stars, the Persian saw an expression of the resolutions and purposes of divine-spiritual beings. They gradually accustomed themselves to the idea that outer reality is not illusion but a revelation, a manifestation of divine-spiritual beings. Then in the Egyptian civilization, men began to apply what they read in the stars to the divisions of the earth. Why was it the Egyptians became the masters of Geometry? It was because they believed that through thought, which subdivides the earth, matter can also be controlled, and that matter, which can be grasped by the human spirit, is easily transformed. Thus gradually a later humanity permeated this material world—looked upon at first as only Maya—with the spirit, and this spirit also gradually emerged within the inner soul life of the human being.

We have seen, in fact, that only in the later Atlantean age, humanity had reached the point where it could experience the ego or the “I AM.” For as long as men beheld spiritual images, they knew that they themselves belonged to the spiritual world, that they were themselves images among other images. Then came a comprehension of the spirit within the depths of the human being. Let us now consider, in connection with what we have partially reviewed today, the evolution of the inner nature of men.

As long as the human being of the Atlantean period looked outward with a kind of dream-like, clairvoyant consciousness he did not really give much attention to his own inner nature. The inner world, which is encompassed by the ego or the “I AM,” was not yet delineated in sharp contours. In proportion as the outer spiritual world disappeared, men became conscious of their own inner world of the spirit. In the ancient Indian civilization there still existed in the individual an extraordinary attitude of soul toward his own spiritual life. People said: If we wish to penetrate into the spiritual world, to raise ourselves above illusion, we must lose ourselves in the spiritual world, we must obliterate as much as possible the “I AM” and become absorbed into the All-Spirit, into Brahman. Thus especially in ancient initiation, it was a matter of a loss of personality. An impersonal absorption into the spiritual world is what distinguished the most ancient form of initiation. This was no longer so, for example, in the third epoch of civilization, for right up to that time the human self-consciousness had by degrees been developing stronger and stronger. The human being became continually more and more conscious within the inner part of his ego being. By developing a fondness for the physical matter about him, by deepening his knowledge of it by means of the laws which the human spirit had thought out, but which had not been acquired in any sort of shadowy dream-state, he became gradually more aware of his ego, until this consciousness of personality reached a certain high point in the ancient Egyptian civilization. In this awareness of the personality, there was present something else that appeared at the same time inferior and as though now bound to the physical world and absorbed into it, something that had no possibility of acquiring a connection with that from which the human being had been born.

If we wish to grasp the whole course of events, we must picture to our souls two fundamental soul-moods in human evolution. We must remember how humanity of the Atlantean and ancient Indian periods longed to strip off personality. The Atlanteans were able to accomplish this, and they took it for granted that they would each night strip off their personality and live in the land of the spirit. The Indians could do this, because their principle of initiation led them, by means of their Yoga, into what was impersonal. To repose in the universal divine substance was their desire. In a later branch of the human family, this reposing within the universal was preserved in the consciousness of being united with preceding generations. It remained in the consciousness of the people that they had been born out of a line of ancestry, and an individual human being felt himself united through the blood with generations as far back as his earliest ancestor. This was the mood which grew out of that ancient soul-mood of feeling oneself spiritually sheltered within the divine-spiritual substance. Thus it happened that those human beings who had passed through a normal evolution began in the third cultural epoch to feel themselves as individuals, yet, at the same time, knowing that they were sheltered within the whole, within the divine-spiritual, that they belonged through the blood relationship to the entire line of forefathers, and that God lived for them in the blood flowing down to them through the generations. We have seen how a certain degree of perfection of this mood had been developed within those people who composed the followers of the Old Testament. “I and Father Abraham are one,” means that the individual felt himself preserved within the whole line of descent back to Abraham. That was, in general, what constituted the fundamental mood of all normally developed races of the third cultural period. However, only to the followers of the Old Testament was it predicted that there existed something spiritually more profound than the Divine Fatherhood that ran through the blood of successive generations. We have already called attention to that great moment in human evolution when this was prophesied. When Moses heard the voice calling unto him saying: “When thou wouldst proclaim My Name, say that ‘I AM’ hath said it unto thee!”, then here for the first time sounds forth the knowledge and manifestation of the Logos, of the Christ. Here for the first time, for those who could comprehend, was prophetically proclaimed that in God there existed something that not only had to do with the blood relationship, but that in Him there existed something purely spiritual. What ran through the Old Testament was like a prophecy. Who was it, in fact, who at that time in a prophecy revealed His name to Moses? We must now dwell a little on this question. Here again we have a passage which the commentators of the Gospel consider very superficially, not recognizing the fact that one must examine these records as thoroughly as possible.

Who was it who announced His name prophetically, to Whom the name “I AM” must be given? Who was it? We find the answer, if with earnestness and dignity we properly grasp a certain passage of the Gospel. It is the passage which we find in the 12th Chapter, beginning with the 37th verse. Here Christ-Jesus points to the fulfilment of the words of the Prophet Isaiah, to the prophecy with its reference to the fact that the Jews would not believe in Christ-Jesus. Jesus Himself refers to Isaiah:

He hath blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, that they should not see with their eyes nor understand with their hearts and be converted and I should heal them.

These things said Isaiah when he saw His glory and spake with Him.

Isaiah spake with Him! With Whom did Isaiah speak? Reference is made here to the passage in Isaiah 6: 1 which reads:

In the year that the King of Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up and His train filled the Temple.

Whom did Isaiah see? This is clearly told here in the Gospel of St. John. He saw the Christ! He was always to be seen in the spirit and now you will no longer find it incomprehensible when Spiritual Science points out that He whom Moses saw, who proclaimed the words “I AM” as His name, was the same Being who then appeared upon the earth as the Christ. The actual Spirit of God of antiquity is none other than the Christ. We are now at a point in this religious record which is very difficult to understand, especially for those who do not go at it properly. This passage must be clearly understood, particularly because with the words Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the most extraordinary confusion has arisen. It is a fact that exoterically these words have always been used in the most manifold ways in order that the real esoteric meaning might not be directly evident. When, according to ancient Judaism, the “father” was mentioned, the physical father whose blood flowed down through the generations was meant. When they spoke of Him who revealed Himself spiritually, as Isaiah spoke of the “Lord,” they were referring to the Logos of which the Gospel of St. John speaks. The writer of this Gospel means nothing more nor less than that the One who could always be perceived in the spirit became flesh and dwelt among us!

When it has become clear to us that in a certain sense the Christ was also spoken of in the Old Testament, we shall understand what place the ancient Hebrew peoples have held in our evolution. The ancient Hebrew-principle grew out of the Egyptian civilization. It stands out in bold relief against the background of the Egyptian principle.

Thus we see how the normal course of human evolution progressed as it was described yesterday. The first cultural period of the postAtlantean age is the ancient Indian, the second the ancient Persian, the third the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldaic-Egyptian civilization; then follows the fourth, the Greco-Latin and the fifth which is our own present cultural epoch. Before the fourth epoch began, that people which with its traditions provided the soil for Christianity emerged out of the third epoch like a mysterious branch. When we summarize all that we have been hearing in these lectures, we shall find it much more comprehensible that the appearance of the Christ had to take place in the fourth era.

We have already emphasized the fact that in the fourth epoch the human being had reached the point where he objectified his own spirituality, his own ego and had placed it out in the world. We perceive how gradually he permeated matter with his own spirit, with his ego-spirit. We behold the works of the Greek sculptors, and dramatists and see how they have presented, embodied before the soul, what they call their own soul qualities. Later, in the Roman period, we see how the human being also becomes conscious of what he is, and we see how he established this in the outer world as “Justice” (Jus), although a distorted Jurisprudence disguised it. For the deeper students of Jurisprudence, it is clear that real justice, which considers the human being its subject, first arose in this fourth cultural epoch. At that time the people had become conscious enough of their own personality to feel themselves for the first time as real citizens of the State. Even in the Greek period, the individual felt himself as a member of the whole municipal State. This was more important to an Athenian than to be an individual man. But to say “I am a Roman” or “I am an Athenian” meant two very different things. For to say, “I am a Roman” meant that, as an individual human being, as a citizen of the State, he had an importance, he had a will. Thus it could also be proven that the origin of the concept of a “testament” first became possible in this epoch, for this is a Roman concept. Only at that time did the human being make his will so personal, so individualized, that he wished to be active in it even beyond death. The things which Spiritual Science has to say harmonize even in the details with the actual facts.

The human being gradually reached the point of permeating matter with his spirit and this increased as time went on. The fourth epoch was that in which he thoroughly incorporated into matter what he comprehended with his spirit. In the Egyptian Pyramids you can see how spirit and matter are still wrestling with one another, how what had been grasped by the spirit had not yet fully expressed itself in matter. In the Greek Temple is expressed the complete turning point of the postAtlantean age. For one who understands a little of this, there is no more significant, no more perfect architecture than the Greek which is the purest expression of the inner characteristic of space. The pillars are considered wholly as supports, and what rests upon them is felt as something that must be supported, something that presses down. The supreme, emancipated concept of space is here in the Greek Temple carried to its ultimate conclusions. Few people have subsequently felt the concept of space in this way, yet there have been those who could have felt it, but they felt it pictorially. Let anyone test the space in the Sistine Chapel. Stand at the rear wall which bears the great picture of the Last Judgment, and look up. You will see that the rear wall rises obliquely upward. It inclines thus because the architect felt the concept of space, but did not think it so abstractly as others. Therefore this wall stands there so marvellously at an angle. This means that he no longer experienced the concept of space as did the Greeks. There is an artistic sense which feels the mysterious measure concealed in space. To sense it architecturally does not mean to sense it by means of the eyes, but by means of something else. People easily believe today that right is the same as left, above the same as below, forward the same as backward. If one would only consider the following: There are pictures in which three, four or five angels can be seen floating about. They can be painted in such a way that one would be right in thinking that they are in danger of falling at any moment. They can likewise be painted by someone who has developed the right sense for space, in such a manner that there is no possibility of such a thought arising; they could not fall because they mutually support each other. We then have the dynamic relationships in space pictorially represented before us. The Greeks had it architecturally before them. They experienced the horizontal not alone as line, but as the force of pressure and they experienced the pillar not only as a block of something, but as supporting power. This feeling-with-the-lines-of-space means, “feeling the living Spirit in the act of geometrizing.” That is what Plato meant when he used the tremendous expression, “God geometrizes continually.”

These lines really exist in space and the Greeks built their Temples in accordance with them. What was in reality a Greek Temple? From necessity it was the dwelling-house of their God. It was something quite different from the Church of the present day. The present Church is a place for preaching. The God Himself dwelt within the Greek Temple. The people were only present incidentally when they wished to be with their God. One who understands the forms of the Greek Temple, experiences a mysterious connection with the God dwelling within it. There, in the columns, and in what rests upon them, is to be seen not only what the human being has fashioned in imagination, but something that his God would have thus made, had He wished to create a dwelling place for Himself. This was the climax of the permeation of Matter with Spirit.

Let us now compare a Greek Temple with a Gothic Church. Nothing derogatory of the Gothic is intended, for from another point of view the Gothic Church stands upon a still higher level than the Greek Temple. In a Gothic Church you can see that what is expressed in its form cannot possibly be thought of or felt without the presence of the devotional congregation. In the arched forms of the Gothic there exists something (for one who can experience it) which can only be expressed in the following words: If the devotional congregation were not within, and the hands were not placed together in the form of an arch, the whole would be incomplete. The Gothic Church is not only the dwelling-house of God, but it is at the same time the meeting place for people who are praying to God. Thus, in a certain sense, mankind again over-stepped the zenith of its own evolution. We see how all that degenerated which the Greeks felt in line, column and beam in such a remarkable manner through their sense of space. A column which does not support, but which is there only as a decorative motif, was for the Greek feeling no column at all. Everything in human evolution is in perfect accord. The Greek cultural period was the most beautiful expression of the interpenetration of humanity's consciousness discovered within itself, and of what was felt as the Divine in outer space. The human being had wholly coalesced with the physical sense-world in this epoch.

It is nonsense when modern scholars wish to obscure what was felt in earlier ages. From the Spiritual-Scientific point of view, we look upon the fourth epoch of the post-Atlantean age as an epoch in which the human being harmonized perfectly with his environment. That age—in which he seemed to coalesce with the outer reality—was alone qualified to understand that the Divine is able to appear in an individual man. All earlier epochs would have understood almost anything more easily than this. They would have felt that the Divine was much too exalted and sublime to appear in a physical human form. It was just this physical form against which they desired to guard the Divine. Therefore, “Thou shalt make no image” had to be announced to just that people whose mission it was to grasp the idea of God in His spiritual form. Out of concepts such as these, this people evolved and out of its womb was begotten the idea of the Christ, the idea that spirit was to appear in the flesh. For this mission was the Jewish people chosen and within it, in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Christ Event had to occur.

Thus for the Christian consciousness, the whole of human existence falls into a pre-Christian and a post-Christian period. The God-Man could only be comprehended by the human being at a certain time. Thus we see how the Gospel of St. John connects in full consciousness and in its ideas, with what was—to use a trivial expression—precisely in conformity with the times, with what had its origin directly in the consciousness of the age. Consequently it happened wholly of itself, that the thought imagery, through which the writer of the Gospel tried to grasp the greatest event in cosmic history, seemed to him best expressed in the forms of Greek thought, as it were, like something inwardly related. And gradually the whole Christian feeling grew into these thought forms. We shall see how something like the Gothic had to appear during the progress of evolution, because Christianity was, as it were, called upon to lead evolution again beyond the material. Christianity could arise only at a time when men were not yet so deeply immersed in matter that they were likely to overestimate its worth; when they were not yet plunged so deeply into matter as is the case in our age, but were still able to spiritualize it and to penetrate it.

Thus the birth of Christianity appears as something positively necessary in the whole spiritual course of human events. If we desire to understand what form Christianity should gradually assume, understand what form was prophesied for it by such an individuality as the writer of this Gospel, we must take under consideration, in the next lecture, certain essential and important concepts.

It has been shown that everything must be taken literally, but that first the alphabet must be really understood. It is not without significance that the name of John appears nowhere in the Gospel and that John is always spoken of as the “Disciple whom the Lord loved.” We have seen what mystery lies hidden behind this fact, a mystery of profound significance.

Now we shall consider another expression, one that makes it directly possible for us to make a connection with the subsequent evolutionary periods of Christianity. The manner of speaking of the “Mother of Jesus” in the Gospel, is usually overlooked. If the ordinary, average Christian were asked: who was the Mother of Jesus? he would reply: “The Mother of Jesus was Mary?” And many indeed will believe that there is something in the Gospel of St. John to the effect that the Mother of Jesus was called Mary. But nowhere in this Gospel is there anything to indicate that the Mother of Jesus was called Mary. Wherever reference is made to her, she is quite intentionally called just the Mother of Jesus. The meaning of this we shall learn later. In the chapter on the Marriage in Cana, we read: “and the Mother of Jesus was there;” and further on, it says: “His Mother saith unto the servants.” Nowhere do we find the name “Mary.” And when we meet her again in the Gospel of St. John, when we see the Saviour upon the Cross, we read:

“There stood by the Cross of Jesus, His Mother, and His Mother's sister Mary, the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.”

It is clearly and definitely stated who stood by the Cross. The Mother was there, then her sister who was the wife of Cleophas and who was called Mary, and Mary Magdalene. Whoever thinks about it at all, must say to himself: It is extraordinary that the two sisters are both called Mary? That is not customary in our day. It was also not customary at that time. And since the writer of the Gospel calls the sister, Mary, it is clear that the Mother of Jesus was not called Mary. In the Greek text, it says clearly and distinctly: “Below stood the Mother of Jesus, and His Mother's sister Mary who was the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.” For a proper understanding the question arises: “Who was the Mother of Jesus?” Here we touch upon one of the most important questions in the Gospel of St. John: “Who was the real father of Jesus, and who was His mother?”

Who was the father? Can this question be asked at all? Not only can it be asked according to the Gospel of St. John, but also according to St. Luke. For it would show an extraordinary absence of thought not to see that at the Annunciation it was proclaimed:

The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also, that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.

Even in the Gospel of St. Luke it is pointed out that the father of Jesus is the Holy Spirit. This must be taken literally and those theologians who do not recognize it cannot really read the Gospel. Thus we must ask the great question:—How does all this harmonize with what we have heard in the words, “I and the Father are one,” “I and Father Abraham are one,” “Before Abraham was, was the I AM?” How can we bring into harmony with all this, the undeniable fact that the Evangelist sees the Father-Principle in the Holy Spirit? And what must we think about the Mother-Principle, according to the Gospel of St. John?

In order that you may come tomorrow properly prepared in spirit to formulate these questions, your attention should also be called to the fact that a sort of series of generations is presented in the Gospel of St. Luke; that we are told that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist; that He began to teach in His thirtieth year and that He was the son of “Mary and Joseph, who was the son of Eli,” etc., and there follows the whole line of generations. If we trace this succession, we see that it goes back to Adam. Then follows something extraordinary; here we find the words: “who was the son of God.” Just as the generations are traced back from son to father in the Gospel of St. Luke, so is the succession traced back from Adam to God. Such a passage must be taken very seriously! Now we have gathered together the questions which should lead us tomorrow directly into the very center of the Gospel of St. John.

[ 1 ] It is impossible to know anything of the present and future of human and cosmic evolution in the sense of spiritual science without a knowledge of this evolution in the past. For what presents itself to the perception of the spiritual researcher when he observes the hidden facts of the past contains simultaneously all he can know of the present and future. This book has dealt with the evolution of Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth. It is impossible to understand the Earth evolution, in the sense of spiritual science, if one does not observe the facts of the preceding evolutionary cycles. For the facts of the Moon, Sun, and Saturn evolutions are contained in a certain sense within the conditions that confront the human being at present within the sphere of the earth. The beings and things that participated in the Moon evolution have evolved further. Everything that belongs to the present earth came out of them. For physical-sensory consciousness, however, not everything is perceptible that, having come from the Moon, has become the Earth. A part of what has evolved over from the Moon becomes evident only at a certain stage of supersensible consciousness. When this knowledge is attained, then we perceive that our earth is bound to a supersensible world, containing the part of the Moon existence that has not condensed to the condition of physical sense-perception. This supersensible world contains the uncondensed part of the Moon as it is at present, not as it was at the time of the ancient Moon evolution. Supersensible consciousness, however, is able to obtain a picture of the previous condition. If this supersensible consciousness concentrates upon the perception it can have at the present time, it becomes evident that, quite by itself, it gradually resolves itself into two pictures. One of these presents the shape the Earth had during its Moon evolution; the manner in which the other picture shows itself, however, reveals that it contains a form that is still in its germinal stage and that will only become real in the future in the sense that the earth is now real. Further observation shows that, in a certain sense, the effect of what happens upon the earth streams continually into this future form. In this form we have, therefore, before us what is to be our earth in the future. The effects of earth existence will unite with what happens in the characterized world and out of this will arise the new cosmic being into which the Earth will be transformed, just as the Moon has transformed itself into the Earth. We may call this future form the Jupiter evolution. If we observe this Jupiter stage with supersensible perception, we can see that in the future certain processes must take place, because in the supersensible part of the Earth that originated on the Moon certain beings and things are present that will assume certain forms when, within the earth of the physical senses, this or that will have taken place. In the Jupiter evolution something will, therefore, exist that has already been determined by the Moon evolution, and it will contain new factors that enter into the entire evolution only through terrestrial processes. Because of this, supersensible consciousness may learn something of what will happen during the Jupiter state. The beings and facts perceived within this field of consciousness do not possess the nature of sense images; they do not even appear as delicate, airy structures from which effects might proceed which remind us of sense-impressions. They give us pure spiritual impressions of tone, light, and warmth. The latter do not express themselves through any sort of material embodiment. They can be comprehended only through supersensible consciousness. We may, nevertheless, say that these beings possess a “body.” Yet this body shows itself within their soul nature, which reveals itself as their present being, like a sum of condensed memories which they bear within their soul. We are able to distinguish in their being between what they now experience, and what they have experienced and remember. The latter is contained within them like a bodily nature. They experience it just as the earth man experiences his body. At a stage of supersensible perception higher than the one just described as necessary for the cognition of Moon and Jupiter, supersensible beings and things become visible that are the further developed forms of what was already present during the Sun evolution, but which has attained at present such a high stage of evolution that it does not at all exist for a consciousness that has only attained to the perception of Moon forms. The picture of this world also resolves itself into two pictures during inner meditation. One of these leads to the cognition of the past Sun evolution, the other presents a future form of the Earth; that is to say, the form into which the Earth will have transformed itself when the effects of the Earth and Jupiter processes have streamed into the forms of that world. What we thus observe of this future world may be designated, in the sense of spiritual science, as the Venus evolution. In a similar manner there is, for a still more highly developed supersensible consciousness, a future stage of evolution that may be designated Vulcan evolution. It has a relationship to the Saturn evolution similar to the one the Venus evolution has to the Sun evolution, and the Jupiter evolution has to the Moon evolution. We may, therefore, if we consider the past, present and future of Earth evolution, speak of Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan evolutions.—Just as these all-encompassing relationships of the Earth evolution result for our consciousness, so also there result observations of a nearer future. Every picture of the past corresponds also to one of the future. Yet in speaking of such things something must be emphasized which, of necessity, must be given due consideration. If we wish to recognize such matters we must discard completely the opinion that philosophical reflection, trained merely by external reality, is able to discover anything about them. These things cannot and never should be investigated by such a mode of thinking. If a person were to believe, when he has received communications through spiritual science about the Moon evolution, that through such reflection he might discover how things will appear on Jupiter by combining the relationships of Earth and Moon, he will fall prey to enormous deceptions. Research into these relationships is only to be made when supersensible consciousness has lifted itself to higher observation. Only when what has thus been discovered is communicated can it be understood without supersensible consciousness.

[ 2 ] Concerning the communications about the future, the researcher of the spiritual is in a position different from the position concerning those about the past. The human being cannot, at the outset, confront future events as impartially as he can confront the past. What will occur in the future stirs human feelings and will; the past is endured in quite a different manner. Whoever observes life knows how true this already is for ordinary existence. To what an enormous degree this increases, what forms it assumes in regard to the hidden facts of life only he can know who is cognizant of certain things of the supersensible worlds. This is the reason why the knowledge of these things is fixed within quite definite limits.

[ 3 ] Just as the great cosmic evolution can be presented in the succession of its states from the Saturn to the Vulcan evolution, it is also possible to present smaller time-divisions; those of the Earth evolution, for example. Since that enormous catastrophe that brought the ancient Atlantean civilization to an end there have been successive stages within human evolution that in this book have been designated as the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, and the Greco-Latin epochs of culture. The fifth period is the one in which mankind now stands, the present. This period gradually began during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries A.D., after it had prepared itself since the fourth and fifth centuries. From the fifteenth century onward it emerged quite clearly. The preceding Greco-Latin culture began about the eighth century B.C. At the end of its first third, the Christ event occurred. The condition of the human soul and all the human faculties changed with the transition from the Egypto-Chaldean to the Greco-Latin cultural period. In the former there was not yet present what we now know as logical cogitation, as intellectual comprehension of the world. What the human being now acquires as knowledge through his intellect he received in the form that was fitting for that time: directly through an inner, in a certain respect, supersensible knowledge. He perceived objects, and while perceiving them their concept, their image, needed by the soul, arose in its inner being. With the power of cognition described, not only images of the physical sense world emerge, but from the depths of the soul there arises a certain knowledge of non-sensory facts and beings. This was the remnant of ancient dim clairvoyant consciousness, once the common possession of all mankind. During the Greco-Latin period there arose more and more human beings who lacked such faculties. Instead of these faculties, intellectual reflection upon objects began to appear. Human beings were by degrees removed from a direct, dreamlike perception of the world of soul and spirit and were ever more dependent upon a picture of that world, formed by their intellect and feeling. This state continued in a certain respect throughout the entire fourth post-Atlantean period. Only those individuals who had preserved the ancient soul condition like a heritage could still receive the spiritual world directly into their consciousness. These individuals, however, are stragglers of a more ancient epoch. The kind of knowledge they possessed no longer fitted the new age. For it is a consequence of the laws of evolution that an ancient soul faculty loses its full significance when new faculties appear. Human life then adapts itself to these new faculties, and it is no longer able to exercise the old faculties. There were, however, also individuals who in a quite conscious manner began to develop, besides the acquired powers of intellect and feeling, other higher faculties that again made it possible for them to penetrate into the world of soul and spirit. They had to begin to do this in a manner quite different from what was customary for the pupils of the ancient initiates. The latter did not yet have to consider the soul faculties first developed in the fourth cultural period. In that period the method of spiritual training began that has been described in this book as the present-day method. But it was at that time only in its infancy; it could be properly developed only in the fifth cultural period, actually since the twelfth and thirteenth—chiefly the fifteenth—centuries of our era. Human beings who in this way sought to ascend into the supersensible world were able to experience through their own imagination, inspiration, and intuition something of higher realms of existence. Those who remained satisfied with the developed faculties of intellect and feeling could learn only from tradition, what ancient clairvoyance knew, and which was transmitted from generation to generation by word of mouth, or in writing.

[ 4 ] Something of the real nature of the Christ event could also be known only from tradition by those born after the event, if they had not attained a perception of the supersensible worlds. There were, however, certain initiates who still possessed the natural clairvoyant perception of the supersensible world and who through their development could elevate themselves to a higher world in spite of the fact that they paid no attention to the new powers of intellect and soul. Through such initiates a transition was created from the old method of initiation to the new. Such personalities existed also in subsequent periods. It was the chief characteristic of the fourth cultural epoch that the soul's exclusion from direct intercourse with the world of soul and spirit strengthened the human being in his powers of intellect and feeling. The souls who were incarnated at that time with highly developed powers of intellect and feeling carried over the result of this development into their incarnations in the fifth cultural period. As a compensation for this exclusion from intercourse with the world of soul and spirit the mighty traditions of primeval wisdom were then available to man—and especially those concerning the Christ event—traditions that by the very power of their content gave the souls a confident knowledge of the higher worlds.—But human beings always existed who developed the higher powers of knowledge in addition to the faculties of intellect and feeling. It was their task to experience the facts of the higher world and chiefly the mystery of the Christ event through direct supersensible cognition. From them there flowed into the souls of other men as much as was comprehensible and good for them.—In harmony with the meaning of Earth evolution, the first spreading of Christianity had of necessity to occur just at a time when the powers of supersensible cognition had not been developed in a large portion of mankind. It was because of this that the force of tradition was so powerful at that time. The strongest possible force was needed to lead men, who were themselves unable to behold this world, to a trust in the supersensible world. There were almost always—if we disregard a brief period of exception in the thirteenth century—individuals who were able to elevate themselves to higher worlds through imagination, inspiration, and intuition. These men are the post-Christian successors of the ancient initiates, of the leaders and members of the institutions of mystery wisdom. They had the task of recognizing, by means of their own faculties, what had been comprehensible through ancient mystery wisdom, to which they had to add the knowledge of the essential nature of the Christ event.

[ 5 ] A knowledge thus arose among these new initiates that included everything that was the subject of ancient initiation, but in the center of this knowledge there radiated the higher wisdom of the mysteries of the Christ event. Only in a small degree could such knowledge flow into general life, while the human souls of the fourth period of culture had to consolidate the faculties of intellect and feeling. Thus it was at that time a very “hidden knowledge.” Then the dawn of the new age broke, which is to be designated as the fifth cultural period. Its nature consists in the advance of the evolution of the intellectual faculties, which have unfolded to an exuberant blossoming and will unfold still further in the present and into the future. This prepared itself slowly, beginning with the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in order to accelerate its advance from the sixteenth century onward into the present time. Under these influences, the chief objective of the evolution of the fifth cultural epoch was the fostering of the powers of the intellect, whereas the confident knowledge of former ages, traditional knowledge, lost more and more of its power over the human soul. But in its place there developed what may be called an increasingly stronger influx into human souls of the knowledge gained through modern supersensible consciousness. The “hidden knowledge” flows, although quite unnoticed at the beginning, into the mode of thinking of the men of this period. It is only self-evident that, up to the present, intellectual forces reject this knowledge. But what must happen will happen, in spite of all temporary rejection. The “hidden knowledge,” which from this side takes hold of mankind now and will take hold of it more and more in the future, may be called symbolically “the wisdom of the Grail.” If this symbol, as it is given in legend and myth, is understood in its deeper meaning, we shall find that it is a significant image of the nature of what has been spoken of above as the knowledge of the new initiation, with the Christ mystery at its center. The modern initiates may, therefore, also be called “initiates of the Grail.” The way into the supersensible worlds, the first stages of which have been described in this book, leads to the “science of the Grail.” This knowledge has the peculiarity that research into its facts can be made only if one has acquired the necessary means that have been described in this book. If, however, such research has been made, these facts can then be understood through the soul forces developed in the fifth cultural period. Indeed, it will become more and more evident that these forces, in an ever higher degree, will find satisfaction through this knowledge. We move now in an age in which this knowledge ought to be received more abundantly into general consciousness than was previously the case, and it is from this point of view that this book desires to impart its information. To the degree to which the development of mankind will absorb the knowledge of the Grail, the impulse given through the Christ event can become ever more significant. To the external aspect of Christian development the inner aspect will be joined more and more. What may be known through imagination, inspiration, and intuition about the higher worlds in connection with the Christ mystery will increasingly permeate the thought, feeling, and will-life of humanity. The “concealed knowledge of the Grail” will be revealed; as an inner force it will permeate more and more the manifestations of human life.

[ 6 ] Throughout the fifth cultural period the knowledge of supersensible worlds will flow into human consciousness, and when the sixth period begins, mankind will have been able to re-attain at a higher stage what it has possessed of non-sensory perception at an earlier period in a still dim way. The new possession will, however, have a form quite different from the old. What the soul knew in ancient times of higher worlds was not permeated by its own power of intellect and feeling; that knowledge came as an inspiration. In the future the soul will not merely have inspirations, but it will comprehend them and feel them as being of its own being. If knowledge about this or that being or thing dawns upon the soul, the intellect will then find it justified through its own nature; if a knowledge of a different kind asserts itself—knowledge of a moral law, or a human relationship—the soul will then say to itself: My feeling can only justify itself when I act in accordance with this knowledge. Such a soul state is to be developed by a sufficiently large number of human beings of the sixth cultural period.—What the third, the Egypto-Chaldean cultural period, has bestowed upon human evolution repeats itself, in a certain way, in the fifth period. In the third period the soul still perceived certain facts of the supersensible world, but the perception of this world was disappearing. The intellectual powers were preparing themselves for their evolution, and they were, for the time being, to exclude the human being from the higher world. In the fifth cultural period the supersensible facts, which in the third period were perceived by a hazy clairvoyance, again become manifest. Now they are permeated with the forces of human intellect and personal feeling. They become permeated also with what can be imparted to the soul through the knowledge of the Christ mystery. Hence they assume quite a different form from the one possessed previously. Whereas the impressions received from the supersensible worlds were felt in ancient times as forces giving impulses to the human being from an external spiritual world in which he did not dwell, these impressions will be felt, through the development of the modern age, as proceeding from a world into which the human being grows and in which he participates progressively more and more. No one should believe that the Egypto-Chaldean culture will repeat itself in such a way that the soul will simply receive what existed at that time and has been handed down by tradition. The Christ impulse, rightly understood, works in such a way that the human soul who has received it feels, recognizes, and conducts itself as a member of a spiritual world, outside of which it had previously dwelt.—Whereas in this way the third epoch reappears in the fifth, in order to permeate human souls with what the fourth epoch has brought as something completely new, something similar will be the case with the sixth epoch in regard to the second and the seventh in regard to the first, the ancient Indian epoch. All the marvels of wisdom of ancient India that the great teachers of that time could proclaim will be able to reappear as truth of life of human souls in the seventh cultural epoch.

[ 7 ] The transformations in the things of the earth existing outside the human being occur with a certain relationship to humanity's own evolution. After the seventh cultural period has run its course, the earth will be visited by a catastrophe that may be likened to what occurred between the Atlantean and post-Atlantean ages, and the transformed earth conditions after this catastrophe will again evolve in seven time periods. Human souls who will then be incarnated will experience, at a higher stage, the union with the higher world experienced by the Atlanteans at a lower stage. Only those human beings, however, in whom are incarnated souls that have developed in a manner possible through the influences of the Greco-Latin epoch and the subsequent fifth, sixth, and seventh cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean evolution will be able to cope with the newly formed earth conditions. The inner being of such souls will correspond to what the earth has then become. Other souls will then have to remain behind, whereas previously they would have had the choice of creating the conditions for advancement. Souls who will have created the possibility for themselves, in the transition from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean period, of penetrating supersensible knowledge with the forces of intellect and feeling, will have the maturity for the corresponding conditions following the next great catastrophe. The fifth and sixth periods are, so to speak, decisive. In the seventh, the souls who will have reached the goal of the sixth will develop correspondingly further; the other souls, however, will, under the changed conditions of the environment, find but little opportunity of retrieving what they have neglected. Only at some future time will conditions appear again that will permit this.—Evolution thus advances from age to age. Supersensible cognition not only observes such future changes in which the earth alone takes part, but it is also aware of changes that occur in co-operation with the heavenly bodies in its environment. A time will come when the evolution of the earth and mankind will have advanced so far that the spiritual powers and beings that had to sever themselves from the earth during the Lemurian age, in order to make possible the continued progress of the earth's beings, will be able to unite themselves again with the earth. The moon will then reunite with the earth. This will occur because at that time a sufficiently large number of human souls will possess so much inner strength that they will use these moon forces for the benefit of further evolution. This will occur at a time when, alongside the high level of development that will have been reached by a certain number of human souls, another development will occur that has taken the direction toward evil. The laggard souls will have accumulated in their karma so much error, ugliness, and evil that they will form, for the time being, a special union of evil and aberrant human beings who violently oppose the community of good men.

[ 8 ] The good humanity will through its development acquire the use of the moon forces and thereby so transform the evil part also that, as a special realm of the earth, it may participate in further evolution. Through this work of the good humanity, the earth, united with the moon, will be able, after a certain period of evolution, to reunite also with the sun and with the other planets. Then, after an intermediate stage, which presents itself as a sojourn in a higher world, the Earth will transform itself into Jupiter. Within this state, what is now called the mineral kingdom will no longer exist; the forces of this mineral kingdom will be transformed into plant forces. The plant kingdom, which in contrast to the present plant kingdom will have an entirely new form, appears during the Jupiter state as the lowest kingdom. To this a higher kingdom is added, the transformed animal kingdom; above it there is a human kingdom, which proves to be the progeny of the evil community that arose on the earth; above all these are to be found the descendants of the good community of earth men, a human kingdom of a higher order. A great part of the activity of this latter human kingdom consists in the work of ennobling the fallen souls of the evil community, so that they may still be able to find their way back into the actual human kingdom. The Venus evolution will be one in which the plant kingdom also will have disappeared; the lowest kingdom at that time will be the re-transformed animal kingdom; this will be joined on an ascending scale by three human kingdoms of different degrees of perfection. [ 9 ] During the Venus state the earth remains united with the sun; during the Jupiter state, however, evolution proceeds in such a way that at a certain point of time the sun departs once more from Jupiter and the latter receives its effects from the outside. After a time, the union of sun and Jupiter [Jupiter minus the sun in contradistinction to Jupiter with the sun. (Tr.)] again occurs and the transformation gradually proceeds over into the Venus state. During that state a special cosmic body splits off that contains all the beings who have resisted evolution, a so to speak “irredeemable moon,” which now moves toward an evolution, for the character of which no expression can be found because it is too dissimilar to anything that man can experience on earth. The evolved mankind, however, advances in a completely spiritualized existence to the Vulcan evolution, the description of which does not lie within the scope of this book.

[ 10 ] We see that the highest imaginable ideal of human evolution results from the “knowledge of the Grail”: the spiritualization that man acquires through his own efforts. For this spiritualization appears finally as a result of the harmony that he produces in the fifth and sixth cultural periods of present evolution between the acquired powers of intellect and feeling and the knowledge of the supersensible worlds. What he there produces in the inmost depths of his soul is finally itself to become the outer world. The human spirit elevates itself to the tremendous impressions of its outer world and first divines and afterwards recognizes spiritual beings behind these impressions; man's heart feels the boundless sublimity of the spiritual. The human being can also recognize that his inner experiences of intellect, feeling, and character are the indications of a nascent world of the spirit.

[ 11 ] Whoever believes that human freedom is not compatible with foreknowledge and predestination of the future condition of things, should consider that free human action in the future depends just as little upon the character the predestined things will have as this freedom depends upon his resolve to live in a house a year hence, the plan of which he determines today. He will be as free as it is possible for him to be according to his inner nature, precisely in the house he has built for himself; and he will be as free upon Jupiter and Venus as his inner life permits just within the conditions that will arise there. Freedom will not depend upon what has been predestined by antecedent conditions, but upon what the soul has made of itself.

[ 12 ] Within the Earth evolution is contained what has evolved during the preceding Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions. The earth man finds “wisdom” in the processes that take place in his environment. This wisdom is present as the result of what had happened previously. The Earth is the descendant of the ancient Moon which, with all that belonged to it, formed itself into the “cosmos of wisdom.” The Earth is the beginning of an evolution through which a new force is added to this wisdom. It brings the human being to the point where he feels himself an independent member of the spirit world. This rests on the fact that his ego is fashioned by the Spirits of Form during the Earth evolution, just as upon Saturn the Spirits of Will formed his physical body, upon the Sun the Spirits of Wisdom his life-body, and upon the Moon the Spirits of Motion his astral body. The manifestation of wisdom appears through the co-operation of the Spirits of Will, Wisdom, and Motion. The Earth beings and Earth processes can harmonize in wisdom with the other beings of their world through the work of these three classes of spirits. From the Spirits of Form the human being receives his independent ego. In the future this ego will harmonize with the beings of Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan through the power that is added to wisdom by the Earth evolution. This is the power of love. In earth humanity this power of love must take its beginning, and the “cosmos of wisdom” unfolds itself into a “cosmos of love.” Everything that the ego is able to unfold within itself is to become love. The exalted Sun Being Whom we are able to characterize in the description of the Christ evolution manifests Himself as the all-encompassing “archetype of love.” Thus the seed of love is planted into the innermost core of human nature. And from there it is to flow into the whole of evolution. Just as the previously formed wisdom reveals itself in the forces of the sensory external world of the earth, in the present-day “nature forces,” so in the future love will reveal itself in all phenomena as a new nature force. It is the mystery of all evolution into the future that knowledge and all that the human being does through a true understanding of evolution is a sowing of seed that must ripen as love, and the greater the force of love coming into being, the greater will be the accomplishments of creative force in the future. In what will be created from love will lie the strong forces leading to the above described culminating result of spiritualization. The greater the amount of spiritual cognition that flows into human and earth evolution, the greater will be the number of fertile seeds for the future. Spiritual knowledge is transmuted by its very nature into love. The entire process that has been described, beginning with the Greco-Latin cultural epoch and extending through our present epoch, shows how this transformation is to take place, and also shows that the beginning of development into the future has been made. What has been prepared during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions as wisdom acts in the physical, ether, and astral body of man; there it shows itself as “cosmic wisdom”; in the “ego,” however, it becomes “inner wisdom.” From the Earth stage onward, “wisdom of the external world” becomes inner wisdom of man. Intensified in the inner life, it becomes the seed of love. Wisdom is the pre-condition of love; love is the result of wisdom reborn in the ego.

[ 13 ] Whoever could be misled by the preceding expositions into believing that the described evolution bears a fatalistic stamp, would have misunderstood them. Whoever were to believe that in such an evolution a certain number of men would be condemned to belong to the kingdom of “evil humanity,” fails to perceive how the mutual relationship between outer world and the world of soul and spirit takes shape in this evolution. Both outer world and the world of soul and spirit form, within certain limits, separate evolutionary streams. Through the forces inherent in the sensory stream there arise the forms of the “evil human kingdom.” The necessity for a human soul to incarnate in such a form will only occur if this soul itself has created the conditions for it. The case might also arise that the forms originating from the forces of the sensory could not find human souls originating in the previous age, for these souls might be too good for that type of body. These forms would then have to be ensouled from the cosmos by something quite different from former human souls. Human souls will incarnate in the forms characterized only when they have made themselves ready for such an incarnation. Supersensible cognition is bound to state what it perceives concerning this sphere, namely, that in the future indicated there will exist two human kingdoms, one good and one evil, but it does not abstractly deduce from the present state of human souls a future state appearing as though with the force of self-evident necessity. Evolution of human forms and evolution of soul-destinies must be sought by supersensible cognition on two quite separate paths; any attempt to mix the two in the conception of the world would be a remnant of a materialistic attitude that, if present, would project itself dangerously into the science of the supersensible.

Talking about the beginning and end of the earth seems like a very presumptuous undertaking at first. Only when you consider how infinitely important it is for humans to take a look at the whole place they live in can it become clear how important it is to take a look at the beginning and end of our planet.

Not only must we not forget this, but we must realize that it is not outdated; for all the thinking and feeling of our contemporaries in this field, which we will enter from a spiritual-scientific point of view, has grown out of the so-called scientific facts and only wants to accept scientific knowledge on this basis. Today we will have to discuss many things that one would probably think are not based on the solid ground of facts, which seemingly contradict what is considered scientific fact today.

But spiritual science can never limit itself to staying with what is today called the world of facts – what the human senses perceive around them in the external world or what our scientific methods can be combined through the mind, which is based on [what the senses grasp through the eyes, ears and hands], sensory research.

Spiritual science or, as it is called in the sense of a new current, theosophy, is by no means something that somehow comes into conflict with scientific facts. That would not only be presumptuous, but a nonsensical undertaking if one wanted to put forward any theory that contradicted firmly established, thoroughly researched facts.

But a distinction must be made between what human theory and hypothesis have built out of these facts like a confession; because, in addition to all other religious worldviews, in our time there is a kind of materialistic religion, or, since this is no longer a common word, , a kind of materialistic creed, which only wants to be in harmony and agreement with what the senses see, which only wants to accept what can be seen with the eyes, grasped with the hands, or similarly imagined as real sensual facts in the environment. This could bring Theosophy into conflict.

But [Theosophy] stands on two solid pillars, two insights – hypotheses, you may call them; for the Theosophist they are basic facts, not just convictions.

The one fact is that behind the sensual world there is a spiritual, invisible, supersensory world.

The other fact is that it is possible for man to penetrate into this invisible world through his knowledge and his research.

There are many people today who say: If there is a spiritual world, if there is something transcendental, we cannot explore it. What we know for sure, we know because we can open our eyes to visible things.

Spiritual science, however, says: [Of course] with the abilities of human nature, which such a world view speaks of, which is limited only to the sense world, we cannot penetrate into the supersensible world. But spiritual science, in a much stricter sense than any knowledge based on external facts, holds fast to what we call development. There is much talk of development today — it is also shown how man has developed through many stages to his present form. But when this view has arrived, it wants to stop at a certain point. It assumes that man has developed so far; but this view does not want to know anything about further development. It has a strange inconsistency, which may not be admitted theoretically, but which is expressed step by step in attitudes and feelings, in that one says: Man has developed, but there can be no question of further development.

One could call people with this view the Man- and We-people.

If we put ourselves in the place of popular newspaper articles or other popular writings, in which what appears to be established science flows into the world through a thousand channels, we often find this expression: “one cannot know”, “one cannot recognize” or “we cannot recognize”, etc.

Now, let us ask ourselves this: can a logic that truly understands itself, a thinking that truly understands itself, take such a point of view? Is this not the standpoint from which the blind would view things if the seeing were to tell him about light, radiance and color, and he were to reply: 'All you tell me is mere fantasy, mere imagination; you cannot know this'? Similarly, what our contemporaries — the man and woman in the street — say about a genuine spiritual doctrine of development is no better.

Spiritual science says: There are dormant abilities in every person, spiritual organs that can be developed and through which he can see and perceive more than through his sensory organs. Those others then say: This is fantasy, this is vain dreaming, we cannot know this.

But if you delve deeper into what is to come to humanity through Theosophy [in these times], you will see that in terms of spiritual development for humanity, there is an event that is much [higher and] more brilliant than what someone experiences who is born blind and undergoes an operation and gains their sight. When the man born blind undergoes an operation, he encounters light and color and clarity from the world that was previously shrouded in darkness for him, a world that he only knew through touch. A new world shines before him. If we transfer this to the spiritual life, we have what we call the awakening of the “spiritual eye”, as Goethe calls it. (Goethe says: Through what we know, we must not limit what is there.)

This awakening, this rebirth of man exists; this new world, which he just does not know, it is there. Never may we believe limited by what we know, everything that is here. With each new organ, a new world opens up for man. The development of man beyond the point to which nature has brought him, that is what spiritual science adheres to and where it begins. Theosophy leads us from what we have involuntarily become to what we are to become voluntarily. The sensual eyes have been given to us by nature around us, the spiritual eyes we awaken, acquire ourselves. Just as the sensual eyes perceive sensual light, so the spiritual eyes will take in a spiritual world.

Since Theosophy draws on completely different sources than the combining approach of our contemporaries [of building an event on solid facts], it may initially appear as if there is a bitter contradiction between what science is and what spiritual science has to say; but spiritual science does not deny anything that science says. But with a topic such as today's, where we combine the distant beginning of humanity and the goal of human development in the distant future, the contradiction between spiritual science and natural science will seemingly be there. In reality, spiritual science stands firmly on the ground of scientific facts. Let us first ask: What does science have to say about our topic, and by what means does it seek to recognize the gradual development of our earthly creatures?

Science is limited to sensory perception. It looks at what is around us in the present, as well as at the remains of a more or less distant past.

In the layers of our earth we find not only what our present life promotes and sustains, but also the remains of beings, the remains of beings that belonged to our earth in distant prehistoric times. If we dig into it, or expose it in some other way, the layers of our earth reveal primeval monuments of what took place in prehistoric times on our planet.

We first find the remains of a not-so-distant past in what remains of the graves and dwellings of our ancestors. This allows us to get a picture of these primitive ancestors, of their customs, how they lived, how they cooked, how they hunted.

Furthermore, we find the remains of animals that still exist today but which had a different shape in the past. Finally, we find the remains of animal species that are now extinct. It is easy to see that one layer lies on top of the other: what developed later, always upwards. If we look at all this carefully, we can reconstruct an image of how beings lived and developed on our earth.

Therefore, the natural scientist believes he is justified in saying: When we examine the layers, which, based on their position, are the oldest, it shows that at first no living creatures existed in our form, and then simple living creatures appeared; then increasingly complex ones, right up to humans.

We look back to a distant primeval time of the earth, when the earth was still much warmer, indeed, when it was still in a molten state. We then see how the earth gradually cooled, how the metals hardened, how the solid rock settled; we see how the first simple plants and animals emerged in a way that is unfathomable to science. We see the earth covered with simple plants and animals in the time called the Silurian and Devonian periods, where lower animals such as fish are present first, then amphibians and reptiles.

We then see an age in which the earth is covered over long distances by huge, tree-like plants; we then see how animal creatures lived there that seem adventurous to us today, that are extinct today. Then we see how these creatures become extinct, then how the first mammals arise – such as marsupials – then, relatively late, when the Earth had solidified, how the later mammals gradually arise, how they develop up, how they develop up to the apes; and how then, only very, very late, humans arise.

Natural science can tell us all this, but it has nothing to say about the way in which life develops out of the inanimate. It says: Once life existed, the beings developed ever higher through a constant struggle, [for which they needed and developed organs, and in this way they rose up to become human beings]. This is the confession that is purely limited to sensual facts – an image that would have to present itself from the point of view of natural science, the one who could sit down a chair in space and watch the world come into being over millions of years.

Spiritual science does not contradict this picture. It is important that one can develop a correct picture of the Earth's evolution using such methods. The spiritual researcher knows that there is much that is not right in this picture, because it assumes that higher and higher things have always emerged from the lower material, right up to the spirit. [And so it was initially with the material image that many have gained from the seemingly established facts that the] spirit is nothing more than what arises from material processes for the materialistic mind. Great emphasis must be placed on not overlooking this.

[As I said], this sensory image is not denied by spiritual science. Of course, it can only be recreated in the mind of today's man. Insofar as natural science is based on facts [and uses them to construct the past], it would be nonsense and folly to rebel against natural science. But spiritual science tells us: Behind all sensual existence and all sensual becoming stands spiritual being and spiritual becoming.

We will best understand this if we start from the present-day human being, because what the outer sensual appearance shows in the human being is, for spiritual science, only part of the human being. What presents itself to the senses, to the intellect, is only the human physical body. This physical body of man contains the same substances as all the seemingly lifeless nature around us; forces that live in every mineral being. Only in man are they much more complicated.

For every living being, especially for humans, spiritual science recognizes a second link in the overall being: this is the etheric or life body. If the physical body were left only to physical and chemical laws, it would disintegrate. In itself, the physical body is physically and chemically an impossible mixture. It is only possible because the physical body is permeated at every moment, like a sponge soaked in water, by the etheric body, a body of strength that fights at every moment against the disintegration of the physical body. Death is the moment when the etheric body leaves the physical body. Then the physical body follows the laws of physics and chemistry: it becomes a corpse and disintegrates into its component parts.

Thus, the human being has a second part of his being that he shares with all plants and animals (but no longer with minerals, with seemingly inanimate nature) – the etheric or life body.

Then there is a third part of the human being. Man not only contains what is present under his skin as bones, muscles, nerves and blood, but something lives in man that is much closer to his soul than bones, muscles and blood. What he knows exactly, because it is an experience for him in every moment of waking, is a sum of joy and sorrow, desire and passion. — All that we call soul life, from the lowest desires to the highest ideal — that is his astral body. Man has this in common with animals; no longer with plants.

Then there is a fourth element of the human being, the actual center of the human being, through which he is the crown of earthly creation. One thing is never properly taken into account by our contemporary researchers. There is a name that everyone can only say to themselves; it is the name “I”. Everyone can say “desk” to a desk, “table” to a table. But there is only one thing that everyone can say only to themselves, and that is the little word “I”! This means more than we usually think. None of us can say “I” to another person; it must resound in the innermost part of the soul if it is to express what is really meant by it. Therefore, those who knew the meaning of this word called this “I” the “inexpressible name of God.” They said: When this “I” sounds within man, then the drop of divinity, the spark of divinity in man, announces itself. Then the soul communes with itself. Only the truly divine being has access to this. This has access in the soul by pronouncing the “I am”. Jean Paul remembers the moment when he first became aware of the “I am”. There, he says, he looked “into the veiled holy of holies of his soul”.

These are the four members of the human being: physical body, etheric body, astral body and I. When the naturalist, who believes he can base a belief purely on scientific facts, hears about these four parts of human nature, he may laugh, shake his head or consider the person who comes up with such word combinations and wants to base an insight on them to be a fool. But it would be just a set of words if the material processes of the body were actually to cause feelings, thoughts and the ego. Spiritual science recognizes that the outer body is not the first, but that the first is the ego and the astral body, and that the etheric body and the physical body are nothing but condensations of the spiritual being of man.

For the spiritual researcher, the physical body is to the astral body as ice is to water. If a child comes and shows us a piece of ice and asks what it is – and we say: Dear child, ice is water in a different form!, – at first it may not believe it; but we can make it understandable to it; then it will see it. Thus spiritual science shows that all material being is [transformed] condensed spirit. All that is material has emerged from the spiritual.

If we now look back to the beginning of the earth in terms of spiritual science, we recognize the following: Everything that the hypothetical person would see as a sensual becoming, he would recognize as a condensation of a previous spiritual, as a flowing out of the spirit. In the beginning of the earth's development, we are dealing with nothing but the spiritual. All matter – minerals, plants and animals, the entire world of the senses with all its beings – has developed out of the spiritual.

[Let us consider the state of sleep.] When we look at a sleeping person today, what do we see? First of all, the sleeping person has no inner consciousness. When we fall asleep, our feelings and desires, perceptions and ideas, ideals sink into the darkness. When we wake up, they emerge again [into our field of vision]. Spiritual science explains it this way: When a person sleeps, the physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed; the astral body and the ego are lifted out. Because a person can only interact with the world around them through the instruments of the physical body, the astral body can only have perceptions, it can only experience pleasure and pain when it is within the physical body.

Fichte says: It is not the eyes that see, but the I perceives through them. — In a future state of development of humanity, the astral body will have [organs of perception] of its own, with which it can perceive; the initiate already has them. Then he will perceive the spiritual world as the initiate already does today. The astral body cannot perceive the world around it when a person is asleep. But it would be nonsense to say that the astral body and the human ego are destroyed at night and resurrected anew in the morning. No, the astral person was only in his actual home, the astral world.

For spiritual science, the sleeping human being is a different being than the waking human being. We now ask: What does the astral body and the ego do throughout the night while the person sleeps? Everything in the world, in the cosmos, has its task; so too does the astral body and the ego. Everything is wisely arranged in the cosmos. A being like the human being today could not exist without sleep. If the astral body were always in the physical body, always active in the senses, eyes and ears, the hands, then fatigue would ultimately have a wearing effect.

In the distant past, the astral body lived in the astral world. There it was in harmony with its world. Only in the course of time has it been incorporated into the physical body. There is not yet complete harmony with the physical body. This is expressed through fatigue. During the night, the fatigue must be carried away. We receive strength during sleep through the work of the astral body on the physical body during the night. Natural science says that the human body is refreshed by physical processes. The spiritual researcher does not deny this; but the other thing also happens.

Spiritual research sees the spiritual reasons behind the external facts. For example, let us imagine two people, one of whom slaps the other one in the face. One of the two people watching the scene explains: This person had a particular inner surge of anger [therefore he raised his hand to strike]; that was the cause of the slap. But the other says: You are a dreamer, I saw it: He raised his arm, moved his hand towards the other's face, and that's how he got slapped. Of course, the soul researcher does not deny this event; but he sees that something else was going on. Thus, the spiritual researcher faces the natural scientist.

The actual human being – the I – lives during the night state, albeit unconsciously, in a spiritual existence and works on his physical body. If we trace this image back in the course of the earth's development, it changes continuously. Today's relationship between waking hours and nighttime sleep is not found in all ages. Today we have a ratio between waking and sleeping of two-thirds to one-third. If we go back, we come to times when people slept much more – were outside their physical body for much longer periods of time – and in distant primeval times we find that people slept for the majority of the time and were only in their physical body for a very short time. On the other hand, the activity that the astral body can perform on the physical body is ever more powerful and mighty. At the same time, we see that the physical body is becoming ever simpler and the human spirit is being occupied more and more. If we go back even further, we would find that man has no physical and no etheric body yet, but that he is a purely astral being.

We can imagine it like this: Let us imagine that we have a mass of water and, through some process, cause a part of it to turn into ice. Now we cause [the same process] so that more water turns into ice, and [so on] that this ice becomes more and more complicated. The mass of water is used up more and more, the mass of ice becomes more and more complicated and larger, until finally all the water is used up and we only have an intricate ice formation.

Now imagine that we have not just one but a whole lot of such water balls, of which we treat only a part, as just described. In another, we let the first ice ball fall out of the water mass; because it is separated, no complicated ice ball can form from it. It always remains so simple. At ever further stages, we allow ever more complicated ice balls to fall out, [at the next stage again more]: Thus, in addition to the most complicated ice formations that have emerged from the entire mass of water, we have such formations that fall out of the mother water at an earlier, less complicated stage.

Let us apply this image to the development of our earth and of man, [but bear in mind that] at the beginning of our earth's development there was nothing physical, bodily. The only part of man present was what now slips out during sleep at night. Spiritual science teaches that all other beings on earth (minerals, plants, animals) came into existence later than the spiritual human being. (In the beginning there was nothing but the spiritual human being!)

In the beginning, the entire Earth was like a mulberry (made up of individual berries), composed of spiritual beings. From the astral, the physical first separated like ice balls from water. Some retained the astral [and only formed the physical at a higher level]; for others, what initially separated from the astral substance remained at the first level. The moners [Haeckel's were not there earlier than the spiritual man and] were the first attempt of man to form a physical body of man. Where the first physical rudiments of a physical body fell out of the astral, there the moners formed. But the astral bodies, with the inclusion of the physical, developed higher. Only what fell out of the astral did not advance.

At each level [more complicated beings are formed, and so on; at each level] beings remain who fall away from the spiritual. Let us now look at the entities on different levels that have fallen out and therefore stopped. These fallen out beings have stopped, while the human being, who was the first among all other beings, has separated out everything that was initially in his spirit, so that his complicated physical body was created.

If we look at a preliminary stage of humanity in the not too distant past, we see that the human being still has an awkward body, but also still has the spirituality to develop it to higher levels. But certain bodies remain at this earlier stage; they fall away from spirituality; these are the apes; others ascend, these are today's humans.

If we go back into the past of humanity, we find that the spiritual man is out of the physical body for longer and longer; he transforms the physical body. Thus, the astral man has gradually created today's man, ascending from the lowest form to ever more perfect forms. In the lowest beings, we do not see beings from whom we descend, but backward brothers of man. The other beings, plants and stones, are not the origin of the higher beings either, [but on the contrary, differentiations, retarded products of the same].

The question is therefore wrong: How did the living emerge from the non-living? This gives a completely false picture. We know that coal was formed from plants. There was also life there first. This was transformed into non-life. Once upon a time there were large fern forests and horsetail-like plants on Earth. We find these again in the coal deposits. Everything we now dig up as coal was once a plant. We can see from nature research how the rock kingdom emerged from the plant kingdom.

The spiritual researcher now says: All the mineral kingdom once emerged from the plant kingdom. At that time, the plant kingdom was formed differently and lived under very different conditions than when there was no mineral kingdom. Let us go to the oldest ancestors of the mineral kingdom: granite, which consists of quartz, [feldspar] and mica schist. In the distant past, it was formed from a solidification of the plant kingdom. All that is mineral originated from plant life, all plant life from animal life, all animal life from human life.

In the beginning, only spiritual people were on earth; the animal, plant and mineral separated out of them. What is so often referred to as the first thing to have come into being is the latest to have emerged: the mineral kingdom.

[It is a theosophical principle:] Man is the firstfruits of the earth's development; he contains everything else within him, everything else has emerged from him. All the suggestions of natural science contradict this, but anyone who engages with spiritual science will see the truth. Even where the first mineral, the primeval nebula, occurs, spiritual science says that this primeval nebula is already a creation of the spirit. We must learn to understand everything on earth, starting with human nature.

The future of the earth can only be understood by starting with the human being. [In his own human nature, he is a complicated being.] The physical body of the human being, with the miracle of the brain and the heart, shows us a structure full of wisdom. The smallest piece of the thigh bone is so wisely put together from small beams that the most skillful engineer could not imitate it. This wisdom-filled structure is a condensation of the etheric body, and this in turn is a condensation of the astral body. And this astral body is in turn a creation of the I.

Today, during the night, the astral body is busy working away the fatigue substances from the physical body. In the future, the astral body will become creative again by entering into a relationship with the outside world during the day and getting to know this outside world. In this way it gains knowledge and strength, and these signify increased creativity; with the powers thus acquired, it will continue to work and raise the physical body to levels of higher development. The spirit created the original form of the physical body, it has brought about the physical formation up to the present form and will raise the human form to even higher levels in the future development of the earth.

The spiritual researcher [does not recognize all organs as equal; he does not regard them indifferently, but values them according to different types. He] distinguishes among the physical organs those that are in the process of being regressed, [gradually] dying off, those that have reached their peak in the past, and those that have not yet reached their peak today, that are on the way to developing even more, to perfecting themselves. This is the case with the human heart. The lower organs, which are connected with man's desires and passions, are on the way to dying away; but those which are connected with the higher, with ideal aspirations, are on the way to perfection.

Take the heart, for example, which is a muscle that remains a mystery to anatomists and physiologists. All muscles have a certain structure. Those with voluntary movement, for example the muscles of the hand, have a striated musculature, while those with involuntary movement have longitudinally striated musculature. [The digestive system, with involuntary movement, also has longitudinally striated muscles; only] the heart, which is a muscle with involuntary movement, nevertheless has transversely striated muscles. This makes it a crux for external research.

Spiritual science, however, sheds light on this darkness of material research [by showing that] the heart is on the way to becoming an arbitrary muscle.

In the future, people will regulate their heart and pulse from their soul, with the qualities of their soul. They will gain control over their body. The body will be much more than it is today, the direct expression of the soul's qualities.

We can gain an understanding of this from two facts that already exist in the soul life of man today. The first is what occurs in man when he faces danger. The fear he feels before an event shows itself in the pallor as an influence on the blood, which recedes from the outer parts of his body. What is expressed in the blood is an immediate consequence of the soul process. The other pole of this expression of the soul is found in what we call feelings of shame, where the blood flows to the outer parts of the body, causing the person to blush. These are the two poles of soul feeling.

If we now imagine how the heart develops to ever higher levels of inner formation, until more and more of what takes place in the blood is subject to the will, we have the beginning of what spiritual science presents as the future course of human development. In the future, the human being will discard the organs that point to the past and develop the organs of the future. We look forward to an end of the earth in which man will be spiritualized, so that then, as today his hands are subject to his will, he will have his whole body subject to his will, in a way that today, when we hear about it, seems to border on the miraculous. Today, man already has dominion over many natural forces. He will continue to expand his dominion by gaining control over himself.

At the beginning of the earth, man was a spirit; but his consciousness was a dull, sleeping consciousness. His physical body did not yet exist. Then he separated himself from the astral body. Now the astral body will increasingly dominate the physical body and learn to spiritualize the physical more and more. In the process of higher development, man will again arrive at a spiritual stage, but consciously. In the end, he will stand as the great king of the earth.

The material is a creation of the spiritual, it stands in the middle. Before that, only the spiritual was there and in the future the spiritual will be there again. In the future, the material will recede again, and only what the spirit has drawn out as fruit will remain. Some formations on the human body have already receded. In the beginning, man was completely covered with hair. The hair is already in the process of regressing. Other organs are also in the process of regress.

The eye is formed by the mind. It now perceives the material world. The eye [as an organ] will pass away again; but what the eye has seen, the human mind takes with it as fruit, it incorporates it. Likewise, the ears will pass away as organs; but what man has heard with them, his mind takes with it as fruit. Man has formed his organs for a reason; when all material things cease, he will stand as a spiritual being, more mature, more inward, more perfect. [One day everything physical will be perfected; the earth will crumble into separate parts.] That the earth will one day disintegrate is also taught by physics. But what remains [for the materialist] of [the field of corpses] on earth? If we look at it in a materialistic sense, only the barren nothing remains. In the sense of spiritual science, however, we know that everything seen, heard or felt by these sensory organs will remain as the content of the spiritual man, and with this content the man will ascend to a new cosmic existence in other worlds, still unknown.

We see at the same time the goal of humanity when we consider the beginning and end of the earth's development. This theory is not just gray, but something that pours hope, [trust], strength and confidence into our souls, [inspiring courage and the desire to work. They are distant ideals; yes, but] when man takes up these ideals in his soul, they will help us [and carry us] in the smallest work in everyday life. It is something that makes us eager to work and makes us strong and confident.

We then learn that [we were there as a spirit before our physical matter was there, and that] he creates the form [that he loses], but only enriches himself through the form. [The spirit will emerge victorious again.] What we receive through our eyes and ears, experience in our soul, that will be spiritualized.

[We carry this imprinted spiritual form to ever higher levels of existence.] Those who knew this – [those who looked deeper into the nature of the world] – also knew that man owes his existence to heaven, that he is born out of the world of the stars, that he is more than anything on earth.

We can summarize this with Goethe's words. He felt that man is born out of the great cosmic world, out of which the stars were born. He expresses this in the words he calls “Orphic primal words”:

As on the day that gave you to the world,
The sun stood to greet the planets,
You come and go and go again
According to the law by which You came.
That is how You must be. You cannot escape Yourself,
As the Sibyls and the prophets have said;
And no time and no power dissect
The form that has been shaped, which develops in a living way.

If we now continue our studies of karma, it is necessary for us in the first place to perceive how karma enters into man's development. We must perceive, that is to say, how destiny, interwoven as it is with the free deeds of man, is really shaped and moulded in its physical reflection out of the spiritual world.

To begin with, I shall have to say a few things concerning the human being as he lives on earth. During these lectures we have been studying earthly man in relation to the various members of his being. We have distinguished in him the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the organisation of the Ego. But there is yet another way of perceiving his several members, namely when we direct our gaze upon him, simply as he stands before us in the physical world.

In today's lecture—independently of what we have already been discussing—we shall therefore approach a different distinction of the members of the human being. Then we shall try to build a bridge between what we discuss today and that which is already known to us.

Observing the human being as he stands before us on the earth—simply according to his physical form—we can recognise in this physical form and configuration three clearly distinct members. If they are not generally distinguished, it is only because that which counts as science nowadays looks at the facts in a merely superficial way. It has no feeling for what reveals itself when these things are observed with a perception that is illumined from within. There, to begin with, is the head of man. Even outwardly considered, we can perceive that this human head appears quite different from the remainder of the human form. We need but observe the origin of man out of the embryo. The first thing we can see developing as human embryo is the head organisation. That is practically all that we can see to begin with. The whole human organisation takes its start from the head. All that afterwards flows into man's form and figure and configuration, is, in the embryo, a mere system of appendages. As physical form, man to begin with is head, and head alone. The other organs are there as mere appendages. In the first period of embryo existence, the functions these organs assume in later life—as breathing, circulation, nutrition and so on—are not undertaken as such from within the embryo. The corresponding functions are supplied from without inward, so to speak: provided for by the mother-organism, through organs that afterwards fall away—organs that are no longer attached to the human being later on.

Man, to begin with, is simply a head. He is altogether “head,” and the remaining organs are only appendages. It is no exaggeration to say that man, to begin with, is a head. The remainder is merely an appendage. Then, at a later stage, the organs which to begin with were mere appendages, grow and gain in importance. Therefore, in later life, the head is not strictly distinguished from the rest of the body. But that is only a superficial characterisation of the human being. For in reality, even as physical form, he is a threefold being. All that constitutes his original form—namely the head-remains throughout his earthly life as a more or less individual member. People only fail to recognise the fact,—but it is so.

You will say: Surely one ought not to divide the human being in this way—beheading him, so to speak, chopping his head off from the rest of his body. That such is the anthroposophical practice was only the fond belief of the Professor, who reproached us for dividing man into head-, chest-organs and limb-organs. But it is not so at all. The fact is rather this: that which appears outwardly as the formation of the head is only the main expression of the human head-formation. Man remains “head” throughout his whole earthly life. The most important sense-organs, it is true—the eyes and ears, the organs of smell and organs of taste—are in the actual head. But the sense of warmth, for example, the sense of pressure, the sense of touch, are spread over the whole human being. That is precisely because the three members cannot in fact be separated spatially. They can at most be separated in the sense that the head-formative principle is mainly apparent in the outward form of the head, while in reality it permeates the whole human being. And so it is too, for the other members. The “head” is also there in the big toe throughout man's earthly life, inasmuch as the big toe possesses a sense of touch or a sense of warmth.

Thus we have characterised, to begin with, the one member of the human being as he stands before us in the sense-world. In my books I have also described this one organisation as the system of nerves and senses; for that is to characterise it more inwardly. This, then, is the one member of the human being, the organisation of nerves and senses. The second member is all that lives and finds expression in rhythmical activity. You cannot say of the nerves-and-senses system that it finds expression in rhythmic activity. For if it did, in the perception of the eye, for instance, you would have to perceive one thing at one moment and then another, and a third and a fourth; and then return again to the first, and so on. In other words, there would have to be a rhythm in your sense-perceptions; and it is not so. Observe on the other hand the main features of your chest-organisation. There you will find the rhythm of the breathing, the rhythm of circulation, the rhythm of digestion and so forth ... There, everything is rhythmical.

This rhythm, with the corresponding organs of rhythm, is the second thing to develop in the human being; and it extends once more over the whole human being, though its chief external manifestation is in the organs of the chest. The whole human being is heart, is lung; yet lung and heart are localised, so to speak, in the organs, so-called. It is well known that the whole human being breathes; you breathe at every place in your organism. People speak of a skin-breathing. Only here, once more, the breathing function is mainly concentrated in the activity of the lung.

The third thing in man is the limb-organism. The limbs come to an end in the trunk or chest-organism. In the embryo-stage of existence they appear as mere appendages. They are the latest to develop. They however are the organs mainly concerned in our metabolism. For by their movement—and inasmuch as they do most of the work in the human being—the metabolic process finds its chief stimulus.

Therewith we have characterised the three members that appear to us in the human form. But these three members are intimately connected with the soul-life of man. The life of the human soul falls into Thinking, Feeling and Willing. Thinking finds its corresponding physical organisation chiefly in the organisation of the head. It has its physical organisation, it is true, throughout the human being; but that is only because the head itself, as I said just now, is there throughout the human being.

Feeling is connected with the rhythmic organisation. It is a prejudice—even a superstition on the part of modern science to suppose that the nervous system has anything directly to do with feeling. The nervous system has nothing directly to do with feeling at all. The true organs of feeling are the rhythms of the breathing, of the circulation ... All that the nerves do is to enable us to form the concept that we have our feelings. Feelings, once more, have their own proper organisation in the rhythmic organism. But we should know nothing of our feelings if the nerves did not provide for our having ideas about them. Because the nerves provide us with all the ideas of our own feelings, modern intellectualism conceives the superstitious notion that the nerves themselves are the organs of our feeling. That is not the case.

But when we consciously observe our feelings—such as they arise out of our rhythmic organism—and compare them with the thoughts which are bound to our head, our nerves-and-senses organisation, then, if we have the faculty to observe such things at all, we perceive just the same difference between our thoughts and our feelings as between the thoughts which we have in our day-waking life, and our dreams. Our feelings have no greater intensity in consciousness than dreams. They only have a different form; they only make their appearance in a different way. When you dream, in pictures, your consciousness is living in the pictures of the dream. These pictures, however, in their picture-form, have the same significance as in another form our feelings have. Thus we may say: We have the clearest and most light-filled consciousness in our ideas and thoughts. We have a kind of dream-consciousness in our feelings. We only imagine that we have a clear consciousness of our feelings; in reality we have no clearer consciousness of our feelings than of our dreams. When, on awaking from sleep, we recollect ourselves and form wide-awake ideas about our dreams, we do not by any means catch at the actual dream. The dream is far richer in content than what we afterwards conceive of it. Likewise is the world of feeling infinitely richer than the ideas, the mental pictures of it, which we make present to our conscious mind.

And when we come to our willing—that is completely immersed in sleep. Willing is bound to the limbs—and metabolic and motor organism. All that we really know of our willing are the thoughts. I form the idea: I will pick up this watch.

Think of it quite sincerely, and you will have to admit: You form the idea: “I will take hold of the watch.” Then you take hold of it. As to what takes place, starting from the idea and going right down into the muscles, until at length you have an idea once more (namely, that you are actually taking hold of the watch) following on your original idea—all this that goes on in your bodily nature between the mental picture of the intention and the mental picture of its realisation, remains utterly unconscious. So much so that you can only compare it with the unconsciousness of deep, dreamless sleep.

We do at least dream of our feelings, but of our impulses of will we have no more than we have from our sleep.

You may say: I have nothing at all from sleep. Needless to say, we are not speaking from the physical standpoint; from a physical standpoint it would of course be absurd to say that you had nothing from sleep. But in your soul too, in reality, you have a great deal from your sleep. If you never slept, you would never rise to the Ego-consciousness.

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Here it is necessary to realise the following. When you remember the experiences you have had, you go backward—as along this line (see diagram). Beginning from now, you go backward. You generally imagine that it is so—that you go farther and farther backward along the line. But it is not so at all. In reality you only go back until the last time you awakened from sleep. Before that moment you were sleeping. All that lies in this intervening part of the line (see diagram) is blotted out; then from the last time you fell asleep until the last time but one when you awakened, memory follows once more. So it goes on. In reality, as you look back along the line, you must always interpose the periods of unconsciousness. For a whole third of our life, we must insert unconsciousness. We do not observe this fact. But it is just as though you had a white surface, with a black hole in the centre of it.

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You see the black hole, in spite of the fact that none of the forces are there. Likewise it is when you remember. Although no reminiscences of life are there (for the intervals of sleep), nevertheless you see the black nothingness—that is, the nights you have slept through. Your consciousness impinges on them every time, and that is what really makes you call yourself: “I.” If it went on and on, and nowhere impinged on anything, you would never rise to a consciousness of “I.”

Thus we can certainly say that we have something from sleep. And just as we have something from our sleep in the ordinary sense of earthly life, so do we have something from that sleep which always prevails in our willing. We pass asleep through that which is really going on in us in every act of will. And just as we get our Ego-consciousness from the black void in this case (referring to the diagram), so likewise our Ego is inherent in that which is sleeping in us during the act of will. It is, however, that Ego which goes throughout our former lives on earth.

That is where karma holds sway, my dear friends. Karma holds sway in our willing. Therein are working and wielding all the impulses from our preceding life on earth; only they too, even in waking life, are veiled in sleep.

Once more, therefore: when we conceive man as he stands before us in earthly life, he appears to us in a threefold form: the head-organisation, the rhythmic and the motor-organisation. The three are diagrammatically divided here, but we will always bear in mind that each of the members belongs in its turn to the whole man. Moreover, Thought is bound to the head-organisation, Feeling to the rhythmic organisation, Willing to the motor-organisation. Wide awake consciousness is the condition in which our ideas, our mental presentations, are. Dreaming is the condition in which our feelings are. Deep sleep (even in waking life) is the condition in which our volition is. We are asleep in our impulses of will, even in waking life.

Now we must learn to distinguish two things about the head, that is, about our life of ideation. We must divide the head, so to speak, more intimately. We shall thus be led to distinguish between what we have as momentary ideas or mental pictures in our intercourse with the world and what we have as memory. As you go about in the world, you are constantly forming ideas according to the impressions you receive. But it also remains possible for you subsequently to draw the ideas forth again out of your memory. Moreover, the ideas you form in your intercourse with the world in the given moment are not inherently different from the ideas that are kindled in you when memory comes into play. The difference is that in the one case they come from outside, and in the other from within.

It is indeed a naïve conception to imagine that memory works in this way: that I now confront a thing or event, and form an idea or mental presentation of it; that the idea goes, down into me somewhere or other, as if into some cupboard or chest, and that when I afterwards remember it, I fetch it out again. Why, there are whole philosophies describing how the ideas go down beneath the threshold of consciousness, to be fished out again in the act of recollection. These theories are utterly naïve. There is of course no such chest where the ideas are lying in wait. Nor is there anywhere in us where they are moving about, or whence they might walk out again into our head, when we remember them. All these things are utterly non-existent, nor is there any explanation in their favour. The fact is rather as follows:

You need only think of this. When you want to memorise something, you generally work not merely with the activity of forming ideas. You help yourself by quite other means. I have sometimes seen people in the act of memorising; they formed ideas, they thought as little as possible. They performed outward movements of speech—pretty vehement movements, repeated again and again, like this (with the arms), “und es wallet und woget und brauset und zischt” (a line of Schiller's poem: The Diver). Many people memorise in this way, and in so doing, they think as little as possible. And to add a further stimulus, they sometimes hammer the forehead with their fist. That, too, is not unknown.

The fact is that the ideas we form as we go about the world are evanescent, like dreams. It is not the ideas which have gone down into us, but something quite different that emerges out of our memory. To give you an idea of it, I should have to draw it thus—

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Of course it is only a kind of symbolic diagram. Imagine the human being in the act of sight. He sees something. (I will not describe the process in any greater detail; we might do so, but for the moment we do not need it.) He sees something. It goes in through his eye, through the optic nerve into the organs into which the optic nerve then merges.

We have two clearly distinct members of our brain—the more outer peripheric brain, the grey matter; and beneath it, the white matter. Then the white matter merges into the sense-organs. Here is the grey matter (see the diagram); it is far less evolved than the white. The terms “grey” and “white” are, of course, only approximate. Thus, even crudely, anatomically considered it is so: The objects make an impression on us, passing through the eye and on into the processes that take place in the white matter of the brain. Our ideas or mental presentations, on the other hand, have their organ in the grey matter, which, incidentally, has quite a different cell-structure, and there the ideas are lighting up and vanishing like dreams. There the ideas are flickering up, because beneath this region (compare the diagram once more) the process of the impressions is taking place.

If it depended on the ideas going down into you somewhere, and you then had to fetch them out again in memory, you would remember nothing at all. You would have no memory. It is really like this: In the present moment, let us say, I see something. The impression of it (whatever it may be) goes into me, mediated by the white matter of the brain. The grey matter works in its turn, dreaming of the impressions, making pictures of them. The mental pictures come and go; they are quite evanescent. As to what really remains, we do not conceive it at all in this moment, but it goes down into our organisation, and when we remember, we look within; down there the impression remains permanent.

Thus when you see something blue, an impression goes into you from the blue (below, in the diagram), while here (above, in the diagram) you yourself form an idea, a mental presentation of the blue. The idea is transient. Then, after three days perhaps, you observe in your brain the impression that has remained. Once more you form the idea of blue. This time, however, you do so as you look inward. The first time, when you saw the blue from without, you were stimulated from outside by a blue object. The second time—namely now, when you remember it—you are stimulated from within, because in effect the blueness has reproduced itself within you. In both cases it is the same process, namely a process of perception. Memory too is perception. In effect, our day-waking consciousness consists in ideation, in the forming of ideas; but there—beneath the ideation—certain processes are going on. They too, rise into our consciousness by an act of ideation, namely by our forming of ideas in the act of memory. Underneath this activity of ideation is the perceiving, the pure process of perception. And, underneath this in turn, is Feeling.

Thus we can distinguish more intimately, in our head-organisation or thought-organisation—the perceiving and the activity of ideation. What we have perceived, we can then remember. But it actually remains very largely unconscious; it is only in memory that it rises into consciousness. What really takes place in man is no longer experienced in consciousness by man himself. When he perceives, he experiences in consciousness the idea, the mental presentation of it. The real effect of the perception goes into him. Out of this real effect, he is then able to awaken the memory. But at this place the unconscious already begins.

In reality it is only here, in this region (see the diagram)—where, in our waking-day consciousness we form ideas—it is only here that we ourselves are, as Man. Only here do we really have ourselves as Man. Where we do not reach down with our consciousness (for we do not even reach to the causes of our memories), where we do not reach down, there we do not have ourselves as Man, but are incorporated in the world.

It is just as it is in the physical life—you breathe in; the air you now have in yourself was outside you a short while ago, it was the-air-of-the-world; now it is your air. After a short time you give it back again to the world. You are one with the world. The air is now outside you, now within you. You would not be Man at all, if you were not so united with the world as to have not only that which is within your skin, but that with which you are connected in the whole surrounding atmosphere. And as you are thus connected on the physical side, so it is as to your spiritual part: the moment you get down into the next subconscious region—the region out of which memory arises—you are connected with that which we call the Third Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. Just as you are connected through your breathing with the air, so are you connected with the Third Hierarchy through your head-organisation, namely the lower head-organisation. This, which is only covered over by the outermost lobes of the brain, belongs solely to the earth. What is immediately beneath is connected with the Third Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai.

Now let us go down into the region, psychologically speaking, of feeling: corporeally speaking, of the rhythmic organisation, out of which the dreams of our Feeling life arise. There, less than ever do we have ourselves as Man. There we are connected with what constitutes the Second Hierarchy—spiritual Beings who do not incarnate in any earthly body, for they remain in the spiritual world. But they are continually sending their currents, their impulses, the forces that go out from them., into the rhythmic organisation of man. Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes—they are the Beings whom we bear within our breast.

Just as we bear our own human Ego actually only in the outermost lobes of the brain, so do we bear the Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc. immediately beneath this region; yet still within the organisation of the head. There is the scene of their activities on earth; there are the starting-points of their activity. And in our breast we carry the Second Hierarchy—Exusiai and the rest. In our breast are the starting points of their activity.

And as we now go down into our motor-organism, the organism of movement, in this the Beings of the First Hierarchy are active: Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

The transmuted food-stuffs, the food-stuffs we have eaten, circulate in our limbs. There in our limbs, they undergo a process. It is really a living process of combustion. For if we take only a single step, there arises in us a living process of combustion, a burning-up of that which is, or was, outside us. We ourselves, as Man, are connected with this combustion process. As physical human beings with our limbs and metabolic-organism, we are connected with the lowest. And yet it is precisely through the limb-organisation that we are connected with the highest. With the First Hierarchy—Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones—we are connected by virtue of what imbues us there with spirit.

Now the great question arises (it may sound trivial when I clothe it in earthly words, but I can do no other), the question arises: What are they doing—these Beings of the three successive Hierarchies, who are in us—what are they doing?

The answer is: the Third Hierarchy, Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc.—concern themselves with that which has its physical organisation in the human head, i.e. with our thinking. If they were not concerning themselves with our thinking—with that which is going on in our head—we should have no memory in ordinary earthly life. For it is the Beings of this Hierarchy who preserve in us the impulses which we receive with our perceptions. They are underlying the activity which reveals itself in our memory; they lead us through our earthly life in this first sub-conscious, or unconscious, region.

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Now let us go on to the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—Exusiai, etc. They are the Beings we encounter when we have passed through the gate of death, that is, in the life between death and a new birth. There we encounter the souls of the departed, who lived with us on earth; but we encounter, above all, the spiritual Beings of this Second Hierarchy—the Third Hierarchy together with them, it is true, but the Second Hierarchy are the most important there. With them we work in our time between death and a new birth—we work upon all that we felt in our earthly life, all that we brought about in our organisation. Thus, in union with these Beings of the Second Hierarchy, we elaborate our coming earthly life.

When we stand here on the earth, we have the feeling that the spiritual Beings of the Divine World are above us. When we are in yonder sphere, between death and a new birth, we have the opposite idea—the Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc., who guide us through our earthly life, as above described, live, after our death, on the same level with us—so to speak. And immediately beneath us are the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. With them we work out the forming of our inner karma. All that I told you yesterday of the karma of health and illness—we work it out with these Beings, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. And when, in that time between death and new birth, we look still further down—as it were, looking through the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—then we discover, far below, the Beings of the First Hierarchy, Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones.

As earthly man, we look for the highest Gods above us. As man between death and a new birth, we look for the highest Divinity (attainable for us human beings, to begin with) in the farthest depths beneath us. We, all the time, are working with the Beings of the Second Hierarchy, elaborating our inner karma between death and a new birth: that inner karma which afterwards comes forth, imaged in the health or illness of our next life on earth. While we ourselves are engaged in this work—working alone, and with other human beings, upon the bodies that will come forth in our next life on earth—the Beings of the First Hierarchy are active far below us, and in a strange way. That one beholds. For with respect to their activity—a portion, a small portion of their activity—they are actually involved in a Necessity. They, as the creators of the earthly realm, are obliged to follow and reproduce what the human being has fashioned and done during his life on earth. They are obliged to reproduce it—though in a peculiar way.

Think of a man in his earthly life: in his Willing (which belongs to the First Hierarchy), he accomplishes certain deeds. The deeds are good or evil, wise or foolish. The Beings of the First Hierarchy—Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—are under necessity to form and mould the counter-images thereto in their own sphere.

You see, my dear friends, we live together. Whether the things we do with one another are good or evil; for all that is good, for all that is evil, the Beings of the First Hierarchy must shape the corresponding counterparts. Among the First Hierarchy, all things are judged; yet not only judged, but shaped and fashioned. Thus between death and a new birth, while we ourselves are working at our inner karma with the Second Hierarchy and with other departed souls, meanwhile we behold what Seraphim, and Cherubim and Thrones have experienced through our deeds on earth.

Yes, here upon earth the blue vault of the sky arches over us, with its cloud-forms and sunshine and so forth; and in the night, the star-lit sky. Between death and a new birth the living activity of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones extends like a vault beneath us. And we gaze down upon them—Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—even as we here look up to the clouds, and the blue, and the star-strewn sky. Beneath us, there, we see the Heavens, formed of the activity of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. But what kind of activity? We behold among the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, the activity which results as the just and compensating activity from our own deeds on earth—our own, and the deeds through which we lived with other men. The Gods themselves are obliged to carry out the compensating action, and we behold them as our Heavens, only the Heavens are there beneath us. In the deeds of the Gods we see and recognise the consequences of our earthly deeds—whether this deed or that be good or evil, wise or foolish. And, as we thus look downward, between death and a new birth, we relate ourselves to the mirrored image of our deeds, just as in earthly life we relate ourselves to the vault of heaven above us.

As to our own inner karma, we ourselves bring it into our inner organism. We bring it with us on to the earth as our faculties and talents, our genius and our stupidity. Not so what the Gods are fashioning there beneath us; what they have to experience in consequence of our earthly lives comes to us in our next life on earth as the facts of Destiny which meet us from without. We may truly say, the very thing we pass through asleep carries us in our earthly life into our Fate. But in this is living what the corresponding Gods, those of the First Hierarchy, had to experience in their domain as the consequences of our deeds during the time between our death and a new birth.

One always feels a need to express these things in pictures. Suppose we are standing somewhere or other in the physical world. The sky is overcast; we see the clouded sky. Soon afterwards, fine rain begins to trickle down; the rain is falling. What hitherto was hovering above us, we see it now in the wet fields and the trees, sprinkled with fine rain. So it is when we look back with the eye of the Initiate, from human life on earth into the time we underwent, before we came down to this earth, that is to say, the time we underwent between our last death and our last birth. For there we see the forming of the deeds of the Gods in consequence of our own deeds in our last life on earth. And then we see it, spiritually raining down, so to become our destiny.

Do I meet a human being whose significance for me in this life enters essentially into my destiny? That which takes place in our meeting was lived in advance by the Gods as a result of what he and I had in common in a former earthly life. Am I transplanted during my earthly life into a district—or a vocation—which is important for me? All that approaches me there as outer destiny is the image of what was experienced by Gods—Gods of the First Hierarchy—in consequence of my former life on earth, during the time when I was myself between death and a new birth.

One who thinks abstractly will think: “There are the former lives on earth; the deeds of the former lives work across into the present. Then they were the causes, now they are the effects.” But you cannot think far along these lines; you have little more than words when you enunciate this proposition. But behind what you thus describe as the Law of Karma, are deeds and experiences of the Gods; and only behind all that is the other ...

When we human beings confront our destiny only by way of feeling, then we look up, according to our faith, to the Divine Beings or to some Providence on which we feel the course of our earthly life depends. But the Gods—namely those Gods whom we know as belonging to the First Hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—have, as it were, an inverse religious faith. They feel their Necessity among men on earth—men, whose creators they are. The aberrations human beings suffer, and the progressions they enjoy, must be balanced and compensated by the Gods. Whatever the Gods prepare for us as our destiny in a subsequent life, they have lived it before us.

These truths must be found again through Anthroposophy. Out of a consciousness not fully developed, they were perceived by mankind in a former, instinctive clairvoyance. The Ancient Wisdom did indeed contain such truths. Afterwards only a dim feeling remained of them. In many things that meet us in the spiritual history of mankind, the dim feeling of these things is still in evidence. You need but remember the verse by Angelus Silesius which you will also find quoted in my writings. To a narrow religious creed, it sounds impertinent:

I know that without me God can no moment live; If I come to naught, He needs must give up the Ghost.¹

Angelus Silesius went over to Roman Catholicism; it was as a Catholic that he wrote such verses. He was still aware that the Gods are dependent on the world, even as the world is dependent on them. He knew that the dependence is mutual; and that the Gods must direct their life according to the life of men. But the Divine Life works creatively, and works itself out in turn in the destinies of men. Angelus Silesius, dimly feeling the truth, though he knew it not in its exactitude, exclaimed:

I know that without me God can no moment live; If I come to naught, He needs must give up the Ghost.

The Universe and the Divine depend on one another, and work into one another. Today we have recognised this living interdependence in the example of human destiny or karma.

• 1. From The Cherubinic Wanderer. Book I. 8.

This cleft in human nature of which I have been speaking also finds expression in everyday communal life. You find it in the relationship of two human capacities which even the most casual examination shows as belonging by their very nature to the life of both soul and body. You have on the one hand the faculty of memory, an important factor in soul-life, but bound up with the bodily life; and on the other hand a capacity less noticeable, because men give themselves to it more or less naively and uncritically—I mean the capacity for love. Let me say from the outset that, whether we are speaking about the being of man himself or of his relationship to the world, we must start from the reality and not from any preconceived idea. I have often made use of a somewhat trite illustration of what it means to proceed from ideas instead of from reality. Someone sees a razor and says, “That is a knife, a knife is used for cutting up food!” So he takes the razor for cutting up food, because it is a knife. Scientific conceptions about birth and death as they relate to man and animal are somewhat like this, though people are not generally aware of it, believing the subject to be a very learned one. Sometimes these ideas are even made to cover the plants. The scientists form an idea of what birth is, or what death is, just as one forms an idea of what a knife is, and then go on from that idea, which of course expresses a certain series of facts, to examine human death, animal death and even plant death, all in the same way, without taking into account that what is usually comprised in the idea of death might be something quite different in man from what it is in animals. We must take our start from the reality of the animal and the reality of man, not from some idea we have formed of the phenomenon of death.

We form our ideas about memory in somewhat the same way. It is particularly so when the concept of memory is applied indifferently to both man and animal, with the object of finding similarities between them. Our attention has been drawn, for example, to something that happened in the case of the famous Professor Otto Liebmann. An elephant, on his way to the pond to drink, is in some way offended by a passer-by, who does something to him. The elephant passes on; but when he comes back again, and finds the man still there, he spouts water over him from his trunk—because, so says the theoriser, he has obviously remarked, has stored up in his memory, the injury received.

The outer appearance of the thing is of course, seen from such a theoretical standpoint, very misleading, but not more so than the attempt to cut one's meat at table with a razor. The point is that one must always start from reality and not from ideas acquired from one series of phenomena and then transferred arbitrarily to another series. Usually people completely fail to see how widespread to-day is the error in scientific method I have just described.

The human faculty of memory must be understood entirely out of human nature itself. To do this one needs an opportunity of watching how the memory develops in the course of the development of the individual. Anyone who can make such a study will be able to note that memory expresses itself quite differently in the very little child from the way it expresses itself from the ages of six, seven or eight onwards. In later years memory assumes much more of a soul-character, whereas in the earliest years of a child's life one can clearly see to what a large extent it is bound up with organic conditions, and how it then extricates itself from those conditions. And if you look at the connection between the child's memories and his formation of concepts you will see that his formation of concepts is very dependent upon what he experiences in his environment through sense-perception, through all the twelve varieties of sense-perception that I have distinguished.

It is most fascinating, and at the same time extraordinarily important, to see how the concepts that the child forms depend entirely upon the experiences he undergoes; above all upon the behaviour of those around him. For in the years with which we are here concerned the child is an imitator, an imitator even as regards the concepts he forms. On the other hand, it will easily be seen that the faculty of memory arises more out of the child's inward development, more out of his whole bodily constitution—very little indeed out of the constitution of the senses and therefore of the human head. One can detect an inner connection with the way the child is constituted, whether the formation of his blood, the nourishment of his blood, is more or less normal, or whether it is abnormal. It will be readily remarked that children with a tendency to anæmia have difficulties in remembering; while on the other hand such children form concepts and ideas more easily.

I can only hint at these things, for in the last resort everyone, if he has been given the right lines to go upon, must seek his own confirmation of them in life itself. He will then find that it is from the head-organisation—that is, from the nerve-senses organisation—and thus from experiences arising out of perception, that the child forms concepts; but that the faculty of memory, interwoven as it were with the formation of concepts, develops out of the rest of the organism. And if one pursues this study further, particularly if one tries to discover what lies behind the very individual manner of memory-formation, how it differs in children who tend to a short, squat figure and in those who tend to shoot up, one will find a connection clearly indicated between the phenomena of growth as a whole and formation of the power of memory.

Now I have said on earlier occasions that the formation of the head represents a metamorphosis of the human being's organic structure, apart from the head organisation, in an earlier earth-life. Thus what we carry about in a particular earth-life as our head is the transformed body (apart from the head) of the previous earth-life, but especially the transformed metabolic-limb system; or what to-day is metabolic-limb man is transformed during the life between death and rebirth into the head-formation of the next earthly life. One must of course not think of it in a materialistic way; it has nothing to do with the matter that fills out the body, but with the relationships of forms and forces.

Thus, when we see that the child's faculty of forming concepts, his faculty of thought, depends upon his head-formation, we can also say that his capacity for thought is connected with his earlier life on earth.

On the other hand, what develops in us as the faculty of memory depends primarily on how we are able to maintain in a well-organised condition the metabolic-limb system of this present earth-life. The two things go together: one of them a man brings with him from his previous earth-life, and the other, the faculty of memory, he acquires through organising and maintaining a new organism.

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From this you will understand that ordinary memory, which we have primarily for use between birth and death and which we cultivate in connection with this earth-life, does not suffice to enable us to look back into the life before birth, to look back into our pre-natal life. Hence it is necessary—this is something I constantly emphasise when I am expounding the methodology of the subject—for us to acquire the ability to go behind this memory, to learn to understand clearly that it is something that is of service to us between birth and death, but that we have to develop a higher faculty which traces in a backward direction, entirely in the manner of memory, what has taken shape in us as the power of thought. Anyone who constructs an abstract theory of knowledge substitutes a word for a deed. For example, he says, “Mathematical concepts are a priori,” because they do not have to be acquired through experience, because their certainty does not have to be confirmed by experience; they lie behind experience, a priori. That is a phrase. And to-day this phrase is to be heard over and over again in the mouths of Kantians. This a priori really means that we have experienced these ideas in our previous earth-life; but they are none the less experiences acquired by humanity in the course of its evolution. The simple fact is that humanity is in such a stage of its evolution that most men, civilised men at any rate, bring mathematical concepts with them, and these have only to be awakened.

There is of course an important pedagogic difference between the process of awakening mathematical concepts and that of imparting such thoughts and ideas as have to be acquired through external experience, and in which the faculty of memory plays an essential role. One can also, especially if one has acquired a certain power of insight into the peculiarities of human evolution, distinguish clearly between two types of growing children—those who bring much from their previous earth lives and to whom it is therefore easy to communicate ideas, and others who have less facility in the formation of ideas but are good at noticing the qualities of external things, and therefore easily absorb what they can take in through their own observation. But in this the faculty of memory is at work, for one cannot easily learn about external things in the way in which things have to be taught in school. Of course a child can form a concept, but he cannot learn in such a way as to reproduce what he has learnt unless a clear faculty of memory is there. Here, in short, one can perceive quite exactly the flowing together of two streams in human evolution.

Now what is it exactly that lies behind this! Just think—on the one hand you have the human being shaping his concept-forming faculty through his head-organisation. Why does he do that? You have only to look at the human head-organisation with understanding to say why.

You see, the head-organisation makes its appearance comparatively early in embryonal life, before the essentials of the rest of the organisation are added. Embryology furnishes definite proof of what Anthroposophy has to say about human evolution. But you need not go so far, you need only look at the adult man. Look at his head-organisation. To begin with, it is so fashioned as to be the most perfect part of the human organisation taken as a whole. Well, perhaps this idea is open to dispute; but there is another idea that cannot be gainsaid, if only one looks at it in the right way; that is the idea that we are related to our head in experience quite differently from the way we are related to the rest of our organism. We are aware of the rest of our organism in quite a different way from the way we are aware of our head. The truth is that our head effaces itself in our own soul-life. We have far more organic consciousness of the whole of the rest of our organism than we have of our head. Our head is really the part of us that is obliterated within our organisation.

Moreover this head stands apart from the relationships of the rest of our organism with the world, first of all through the way the brain is organised. I have often called attention to the fact that the brain is so heavy that it would crush everything that lay beneath it were it not swimming in the cerebral fluid, thereby losing the whole of the weight that a body would have that was made of brain fluid and was the same size as the brain; thus the brain loses weight in the ratio of from 1,300 or 1,400 grammes to 20 grammes. But this means that while the human being, in so far as he stands on the earth, has his natural weight, the brain is lifted out of this relationship with gravity in which the human being is involved. But even if you do not stress this inward phenomenon, but confine yourself to what is external, you might well say that in the whole way in which you bear your head, in the way you carry it through the world, it is like a lord or lady sitting in a carriage. The carriage has to move on, but when it does so, the lord or lady sitting in it is carried along without having to make any exertion. Our head is related to the rest of our organism somewhat in this way. Many other things help to bring this about. Our head is, so to speak, lifted out of all our other connections with the world. That is precisely because in our head we have in physical transformation what our soul, together with the rest of our organism, experienced in an earlier earth-life.

If you study the four principal members of the human organisation in the head—physical body, ether body, astral body and ego—it is really only the ego that has a certain independence. The other three members have created images of themselves in the physical formation of the head. Of this, too, I once gave a convincing proof: On this occasion I should like to lead up to it by telling a story, rather than in a theoretical way.

I once told you that many years ago, when circumstances had brought about the foundation of the Giordano Bruno Society, I was present at a lecture on the brain given by a thoroughgoing materialist. As a materialist, of course, he made a sketch of the structure of the brain, and proved that fundamentally this structure was the expression of the life of the soul. One can quite well do that.

Now the president of the society was the headmaster of a grammar-school, not a materialist, but a hide-bound Herbartian. For him there was nothing but the philosophy of Herbart. He said that, as a Herbartian, he could be quite satisfied with the presentation; only he did not take what the lecturer had drawn, from his standpoint of strict materialism, to be the matter of the brain. Thus when the other man had sketched the parts of the brain, the connecting tissues and so on, the Herbartian was quite willing to accept the sketch; it was quite acceptable to the Herbartian, who was no materialist, for, said he, where the other man had written parts of the brain, he needed only to write idea-complexes, and instead of brain fibres he only had to write association fibres. Then he was describing something of a soul-nature—idea-complexes—where the other was describing parts of the brain. And where the other drew brain-fibres, he put association-fibres, those formations that John Stuart Mill had so fantastically imagined as going from idea to idea, entirely without will, automatically, all kinds of formations woven by the soul between the idea-complexes! One can find good examples of that in Herbart also.

Thus both men could find a point of contact in the sketch. Why? Simply because the human brain really is in this respect an extraordinarily good imprint of the soul-spiritual. The soul-spiritual makes a very good imprint of itself on the brain. It certainly has had time during the period between death and new birth to call into existence this configuration, which then so wonderfully expresses its soul-life in the observable plastic formations of the brain.

Let us now pass on to the psychological exposition given by Theodore Ziehen. We find that he also describes the parts of the brain and so on in a materialistic way, and it all seems very plausible. It is also extremely conscientious. One can in fact do that; if one looks at man's intellectual life, the life of ideas, one can find a very exact reproduction of it in the brain. But—with such a psychology one does not get as far as feeling, still less as far as will. If you look at such a psychology as Ziehen's, you will find that feeling is nothing more than a feeling-stress of the idea, and that will is entirely lacking. The fact is that feeling and will are not related in the same way to what has already been formed, already been given shape. Feeling is connected with the human rhythmic system; it is still in full movement, it has its configuration in movement. And will, which is connected above all with the plastic coming-into-existence and fading-away which take place in metabolism, cannot portray itself in reflected images, as is possible with ideas. In short, in the life of ideas, in the faculty of ideation, we have something of soul-life that can express itself plastically, pictorially, in the head. But there we are in the realm of the astral body; for when we form ideas, the entire activity of ideation belongs to the astral body. Thus the astral body creates its image in the human head. It is only the ego that still remains somewhat mobile. The etheric body has its exact imprint in the head, and the physical body most definitely so of all. On the other hand, in the rhythmic system there is no imprint of the astral body as such, but only of the etheric and physical bodies. And in the metabolic system only the physical body has its mirror-image.

To summarise, you can think of the matter in this way. In the head you have physical body, etheric body and astral body, in such a way that they are portrayed in the physical; that in fact their impression can be detected in the physical forms. It is not possible to understand the human head in any other way than by seeing it in these three forms. The ego is still free in relation to the head.

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If we pass on to the rest of the human organisation, to the breathing-system, for instance, we find the physical and etheric bodies have their imprints within it; but the astral body and the ego have no such imprints; they are to a certain extent free. And in the metabolic-limb system we have the physical body as such, and the ego, astral body and etheric body are free. We have not only to recognise the presence of one of these members, but to distinguish whether it is in the free or the bound condition. Of course it is not that an astral body and an etheric body have no basis in the head; they permeate the head too. But they are not free within it, they are imprinted in the head-organisation. On the other hand, the astral body, for example, is quite free throughout the rhythmic system, particularly in the breathing. It acts freely. It does not merely permeate the system, but it is actively present within it.

Now let us put two things together. The one is that we can affirm a connection between the faculty of memory and the organisation outside the head; the other is that we have to look outside the head also for the feeling and willing organisations. You see we are now coupling together the feeling world of the soul and the world of memory. And if you take note of your own experience in relation to these two things, you will discover that there is a very close connection between them.

The way in which we can remember depends essentially on the way we can participate in things, on how far we can enter into them with that part of our organisation which lies outside the head. If we are very much head-men, we shall understand a great deal, but remember little in such a way that we grow together with it. There is a significant connection between the capacity for feeling and the faculty of memory. But at the same time we see that the human organisation apart from the head, in the early stages of its development, becomes more like the head. If you take the embryonal life, then, to begin with, the human being is practically all head; the rest is added. When the child is born—just think how imperfect is the rest of the organisation in comparison with the head! But it is attached to the head. Between birth and death the rest of the organisation becomes more and more like the head-organisation, and shows this notably in the emergence of the second teeth. The first teeth, the so-called milk teeth, are derived more from the head-organisation. It will be easy to demonstrate this anatomically and physiologically when suitable methods are applied. To spiritual scientific investigation it is unquestionable. In the second teeth the entire man plays his part. The teeth which are derived more from the head-organisation are cast out. The rest of the man assists in the formation of the second teeth.

In fact, in the first and second teeth we have a kind of image translated into the physical—an image of the formation of concepts and memory respectively. The milk teeth are formed out of the human organism rather in the way concepts are formed, except that concepts of course are translated into the sphere of the mental life, whereas the second teeth are derived out of the human organism more in the way the faculty of memory is derived. One only has to be capable of recognising these very subtle differences in human nature.

When you grasp such a thing as this, then you will of course see that one can really understand the structure of matter—particularly when it comes to organic life—only if one understands it in its spiritual formation. The thorough-going materialist looks at the material man, studies the material man. And anyone who starts from the reality and not from his materialistic prejudices, will at once see in the child that this human head is formed out of the super-sensible, through a metamorphosis of his previous earthly life, and then he sees that the rest is added out of the world into which the child is now transplanted; the rest is added, but that too is formed out of the spiritual, out of the super-sensible of this world.

It is important to pay attention to such a view. For the point is that we should not speak abstractly of the material world and of the spiritual world, but we should acquire an insight into the way the material world originates in the spiritual world; an insight, so to speak, into the way the spiritual world is imaged in the material world. Only we must not thereby remain in the abstract, but must enter into the concrete. We must be able to acquire an insight into the difference between the head and the rest of the organism. Then in the very forms of the head we shall see a somewhat different derivation from the spiritual world, compared with what we see in the rest of the organism. For the rest of the organism is added to us entirely in the present earth-life, whilst the head organisation, down to its very shape, we bring with us out of our previous earth-life. Whoever reflects upon this will see the folly of such an objection to Anthroposophy as has again recently been made, in a debate which took place in Munich, by Eucken—so highly respected by many people despite his journalistic philistinism. By putting forward the foolish idea that what one can perceive is material, Eucken raised the objection that Anthroposophy is materialistic. Naturally, if one invents such a definition, one can prove what one will; but anyone who does so is certainly ill-acquainted with the accepted method of proof. It is a question of grasping how the material, in its emergence from the spiritual, can be regarded as bearing witness to the spiritual world.

Again—and to-day I can only go as far as this—if you grasp the connection between the birth of memory and the forces of growth, you will thereby recognise an interplay between what we call material and what in later life, from seven to eight years of age onwards, develops as the soul-spiritual life. It really is a fact that what shows itself later in more abstract intellectual form as the faculty of memory is active, to begin with, in growth. It is really the same force. The same method of observation must be applied to this as is applied, let us say, when we speak of latent heat and free heat. Heat which is free, which is released from its latent condition, behaves externally in the physical world like the force which, after having been the source of the phenomena of growth in the earliest years of childhood, then manifests itself in the inner life as the force of memory. What lies behind the phenomena of growth in earliest childhood is the same thing as what later makes its appearance in its own proper form as the faculty of memory.

I developed this more fully in the course of lectures given here in the Goetheanum last autumn.¹ You will see how one can discover along these lines an intimate connection between the soul-spiritual and the bodily-physical, and how therefore we have in the faculty of memory something which on the one hand appears to us as of a soul-spiritual nature, and on the other hand, when it appears in other cosmic connections, manifests as the force of growth.

We find just the opposite when we consider the human capacity for love, which shows itself on the one hand to be entirely bound up with the bodily nature, and which on the other hand we can grasp, exactly like the faculty of memory, as the most soul-like function. So that in fact—this I will explain more fully in later lectures—in memory and love you have capacities in which you can experience the interplay between the spiritual and the bodily, and which you can also associate with the whole relationship between man and the world.

In the case of memory we have already done this, for we have related ideation with previous earth-lives, and the faculty of memory with the present earth-life. In later lectures we shall see that we can experience the same thing as regards the capacity for love. One can show how it is developed in the present earth-life, but passes over through the life between death and rebirth into the next earthly life.

Why are we making a point of this? Because to-day man needs to be able to make the transition from the soul-spiritual to the bodily-physical. In the soul-spiritual we experience morality; within the physical-bodily we experience natural necessity. As things are seen to-day, if one is honest in each sphere one has to admit that there is no bridge between them. And I said yesterday that because there is no such bridge, people make a distinction between what they call real knowledge, based upon natural causality, and the content of pure faith, which is said to be concerned with the world of morality—because natural causality on the one hand, and the life of the soul-spirit on the other, exist side by side without any connection. But the whole point is that in order to recover a fully human consciousness, we need to build a bridge between these two.

Above all we must remember that the moral world cannot exist without postulating freedom; the natural world cannot exist without necessity. Indeed, there could be no science if there were not this necessity. If one phenomenon were not of necessity caused by another in natural continuity, everything would be arbitrary, and there could be no science. An effect could arise from a cause that one could not predict! We get science when we try to see how one thing proceeds from another, that one thing proceeds from another. But if this natural causality is universal, then moral freedom is impossible; there can be no such thing. Nevertheless the consciousness of this moral freedom within the realm of soul and spirit, as a fact of direct experience, is present in every man.

The contradiction between what the human being experiences in the moral constitution of his soul and the causality of nature is not a logical one, but a contradiction in life. This contradiction is always with us as we go through the world; it is part of our life. The fact is that, if we honestly admit what we are faced with, we shall have to say that there must be natural causality, there must be natural necessity, and we as men are ourselves in the midst of it. But our inner soul-spiritual life contradicts it. We are conscious that we can make resolutions, that we can pursue moral ideals which are not given to us by natural necessity. This is a contradiction which is a contradiction of life, and anyone who cannot admit that there are such contradictions simply fails to grasp life in its universality. But in saying this we are saying something very abstract. It is really only our way of expressing what we encounter in life. We go through life feeling ourselves all the time actually at variance with external nature. It seems as if we are powerless, as if we must feel ourselves at variance with ourselves. To-day we can feel the presence of these contradictions in many men in a truly tragic way.

For example, I knew a man who was quite full of the fact that there is necessity in the world in which man himself is involved. Theoretically, of course, one can admit such a necessity and at the same time not trouble much about it with one's entire manhood. Then one goes through the world as a superficial person and one will not be inwardly filled with tragedy. Be that as it may, I knew a man who said, “Everywhere there is necessity and we men are placed within it. There is no doubt about it, science forces us to a recognition of this necessity. But at the same time necessity allows bubbles to arise in us which delude us with hopes of a free soul-life. We have to see through that delusion, we have to look upon it as hot air. This too is a necessity.”

That is man's frightful illusion. That is the foundation of pessimism in human nature. The man who has little idea of how deeply such a thing can work into the human soul will not be able to enter into the feeling that this contradiction in life, which is absolutely real, can undermine the whole soul, and can lead to the view that life in its inmost nature is a misfortune. Confronted by the conflict between scientific certainty and the certitude of faith, it is only thoughtlessness and lack of sensitivity that prevent men from coming to such inner tragedy in their lives. For this tragic attitude towards life is really the one that goes with the plight of soul to which mankind can come to-day.

But whence comes the impotence which results in such a tragic attitude to life! It comes from the fact that civilised humanity has for centuries allowed itself to become entangled in certain abstractions, in intellectualism. The most this intellectualism can say is that natural necessity deludes us by strange methods with a feeling of freedom, but that there is no freedom. It exists only in our ideas. We are powerless in the face of necessity.

Then comes the important question—is that truest? And now you see that the lectures I have been giving for weeks actually all lead up to the question: “Are we really powerless? Are we really so impotent in the face of this contradiction?” Remember how I said that we have in our lives not only an ascending development, but a declining one; that our intellectual life is not bound up with the forces of growth, but with the forces of death, the forces of decay; that in order to develop intelligence we need to die. You will remember how I showed here several weeks ago the significance of the fact that certain elements with specific affinities and valencies—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur—combine to form protein. They do so not by ordinary chemical combination, but on the, contrary by becoming utterly chaotic. You will then see that all these studies are leading up to this—to make it clear to you that what I have told you is not just a theoretical contradiction, but an actual process in human nature. We are not here merely in order, through living, to sense this contradiction, but our inner life is a continual process of destruction of what develops as causality in outer nature. We men really dissolve natural causality within ourselves. What outside is physical process, chemical process, is developed within us in a reverse direction, towards the other side. Of course we shall see this clearly only if we take into consideration the upper and the lower man, if we grasp by means of the upper man what emerges from metabolism by way of contra-mechanisation, contra-physicalisation, contra-chemicalisation. If we try to grasp the contra-materialisation in the human being, then we do not have merely a logical, theoretical contradiction in ourselves, but we have the real process—we have the process of human development, of human becoming, as the thing in us that itself counteracts natural causality, and human life as consisting in a battle against it. And the expression of this struggle, which goes on all the while to dissolve the physical synthesis, the chemical synthesis, to analyse it again—the expression of this analytic life in us is summed up in the awareness: “I am free.” What I have just put before you in a few words—the study of the human process of becoming as a process of combat against natural causality, as a reversal of natural causality—we shall make the subject of forthcoming lectures.

• 1. Grenzen der Naturerkenntnis, 27th Sept. to 2nd Oct., 1920 (Translated as "The Boudaries of Natural Science.)

Like two mighty pillars of the spirit have the annual festivals of Christmas and Easter been placed by the Christian world within the course of the year, itself a symbol of the course of human life. On these spiritual pillars standing before the human soul in its contemplation are inscribed the two great mysteries of mankind's physical existence. We must regard them very differently from the way we regard other events in the course of our physical life.

It is true that a supersensible element reaches into this physical life through our sense observation and our intellectual judgments, through the content of our feeling and will. In certain instances it proclaims itself clearly as supersensible—when, for example, Christian feeling undertakes to symbolize it in the festival of Pentecost. With Christmas and Easter, on the other hand, we must look at two events in earthly life that in external appearance would seem perhaps to be completely physical events; and yet, in contrast to all other physical events, they do not—indeed, they cannot by their very nature—present themselves as simply physical events. We can observe human physical life as we observe nature, perceiving with our senses the external manifestation of the spirit. But we can never observe the two boundary events of human life, not even just their physical occurrence, without confronting through physical perception itself their tremendous riddle, their profound mystery. These are the events of birth and death. In the life of Christ Jesus, and in our thoughts of Christmas and Easter reminding us of it, these two events of man's physical life stand before our soul, addressing the Christian heart.

As we contemplate these two great mysteries in their relation to Christmas and Easter, we find illuminating strength for our thinking, a powerful incentive for our willing, and an uplifting of our whole being. They stand there, these two pillars of the spirit, possessing an eternal value.

In the course of human evolution, however, men's capacities have changed for approaching the sublime conceptions of Christmas and Easter. During the early Christian centuries, when the Event of Golgotha had penetrated and shocked many hearts, men gradually found their way to the thought of a Savior dying on Golgotha. In the Crucified One hanging on the Cross they found the idea of redemption. And they gradually formed the powerful imagination of Christ dying on the Cross. But in later times, especially since our modern age began, Christian feeling has adjusted itself to the materialism rising in human evolution and has turned to the picture of the childlike element entering the world as the newborn Jesus.

One may certainly say that a sensitive person will find European Christianity decidedly materialistic from the way it has concentrated in recent centuries upon the Christmas manger. The desire to fondle the infant Jesus—this is not meant in a bad sense—has become trivial in the course of centuries. And many songs about the Jesus Child that today are still considered beautiful, or—as some people would say—charming, seem to us not serious enough for these grave times.

But the conception of Christmas and the conception of Easter are eternal pillars, eternal monuments of the human heart. One can truly say that this age of new spiritual revelations will cast new light upon Christmas, so that gradually it will be experienced in a glorious, new form. It will be our task to hear the call in present world events for a rejuvenation of many old conceptions, the call for a new revelation of the spirit. It will be our task to understand that a new meaning for Christmas is working its way out of world events for the strengthening and uplifting of the human soul.

The birth and death of a human being, however intently we may observe and analyze them, manifest themselves as events happening on the physical plane but in which a spiritual element prevails. No one who reflects earnestly can possibly deny that they give evidence in the way they occur that man is the citizen of a spiritual world. No physical observation of birth and death will ever find anything in what the senses can perceive and the intellect grasp, other than events in which the spirit is directly manifested in the physical. Only these two earthly events appear in this way to the human heart.

For the event of birth, the Christmas event, the human and Christian heart must develop an ever deeper sense of mystery. One may say that men have seldom looked from a high enough level upon the mysterious nature of birth. Seldom, indeed; but then at such moments its tidings speak to the depths of the human soul.

So it is, for instance, with the images associated with that spiritual genius of fifteenth-century Switzerland, Nikolaus von der Flüe.¹ It is related of him—and he himself told it—that before his birth, before he breathed the outer air, he beheld the physical form that he would have after birth and during the course of his life. Also, he beheld before birth the ceremony of his own christening, with the persons who were present and who were then around him in his early childhood. With the exception of one elderly person whom he did not recognize, he knew all these people because he had seen them before he saw the light of the physical world.

However one may view this story, one cannot but see that it points impressively to the mystery of human birth, which is so magnificently symbolized for world history by the Christmas imagery. The story of von der Flue suggests that there is something connected with our entrance into physical life that only by a very, very thin wall is hidden from our everyday view, a wall so thin that it can be broken through when a karmic situation exists as in the case of Nikolaus von der Flüe. Such moving allusions to the mystery of birth and Christmas still meet us here and there. But one must say that as yet mankind is hardly aware of the fact that birth and death, the two boundary pillars standing there in the physical world, reveal themselves even in their physical appearance as spiritual events that could never occur in the ordinary course of nature, as events in which, on the contrary, divine spiritual Powers actually intervene. This is evident from the fact that both these boundary experiences still remain mysteries, even in their physical manifestation.

The new revelation of the Christ now moves us to contemplate the course of human life—allow me to express it in the following way—as Christ wishes us to contemplate it in the twentieth century. As we try today to grasp the meaning of Christmas, let us recall a saying attributed to Christ Jesus that points truly to the Christmas event: “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” “Except ye become as little children”: this is certainly not encouraging us to strip away all the mystery of the Christmas conception, and to drag it down to the banality of “dear little Jesus,” as many folk songs and other songs have done—the folk songs less than the art songs—during the materialistic development of Christianity. This very saying—“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven”—impels us to look up to mighty impulses flowing through human evolution. And in our own time, all that is happening in the world can surely be no reason for lapsing into trivial ideas of Christmas, when the human heart is filled with pain, when it must look back upon millions of human beings who have met their death in these last years, must think of countless human beings hungering for food. At this time surely nothing is fitting but to contemplate the mighty thoughts in world history that have impelled and inspired humanity. One can be brought to such thoughts by the saying, “Except ye become as little children.” And one can supplement it by these words: “Unless you live your life in the light of this thought, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

When a human being enters this world as a child, he has come directly from the spiritual world. What happens in physical life, the procreation and growth of his physical body, is only a covering for the event that cannot be described otherwise than by saying: man's central being leaves the spiritual world. He is born out of the spirit into the body. When the Rosicrucian says “Ex Deo Nascimur,” he is speaking of the human being entering the physical world. What first en-sheathes him, what makes him a complete physical being here on earth: this is what is referred to by the words “Ex Deo Nascimur.” If one would speak of the kernel of the human being, his innermost core of being, one must say: he comes down from the spirit into this physical world. Through what takes place in the physical world—which he is able to observe from spiritual regions before his conception and birth—he is clothed with a physical body, in order that he may have experiences that are only possible in such a body. But he has come, in his central core of being, out of the spiritual world. And he reveals—to one who wants to see things as they really are in this world, who is not blinded by materialistic illusions—he reveals in his very first years by his very nature that he has come out of the spirit. One's experiences with a child, if one has insight, are of such a character that one feels in him the after-effects of his recent life in the spiritual world.

This is the mystery that is indicated by such stories as the one associated with Nikolaus von der Flüe. A trivial view and one strongly influenced by materialistic thinking asserts in its simplicity that a human being develops his ego gradually in the course of his life from birth to death, that his ego becomes more and more clearly manifest and more and more powerful. This is a naive way of thinking! If one observes the true human ego that comes from the spiritual world into its physical sheath through birth, one speaks quite differently about the entire physical development of the human being. For one knows that as the human being grows physically in his physical body, actually his true ego slowly vanishes into the body, becoming continually less and less manifest. One knows that what develops here in the physical world between birth and death is only a mirrored reflection of spiritual happenings, a dead reflection of a higher life. One is expressing it properly if one says, the entire fullness of a man's being gradually disappears into the body; it becomes more and more invisible. He lives his life here on earth by gradually losing himself in his body. At death he finds himself again in the spirit. That is what one says who knows the facts. Someone ignorant of the facts will declare that a child is incomplete, that his ego gradually develops to greater and greater perfection, growing out of vague subconscious levels of human existence. A knowledge of what the spiritual investigator sees, causes one to speak differently about these things than is done from today's sense-consciousness, enmeshed as it is in external illusions and materialistic feelings.

Thus the human being enters the world as a spiritual being. His bodily nature while he is a child is still undefined; it has as yet laid small claim to his spiritual nature, which is entering into physical existence as if it were falling asleep. This spiritual nature only seems so empty of content to us because we cannot perceive it in ordinary life, just as we cannot perceive the sleeping ego and astral body when they are separated from the physical and etheric bodies. But the fact that we do not perceive a being does not make it less perfect. This is what the human being has to accomplish in regard to his physical body: that he shall bury himself in it more and more deeply, in order to acquire faculties that can only be acquired in this way. His soul and spirit being must lose themselves for a while in physical existence. In order that we may always remember our spiritual origin, in order that we may grow strong in the thought that we have journeyed out of the spirit into the physical world: it is for this reason that the Christmas festival stands there like a mighty pillar of light within the Christian world.

The Christmas imagination must grow ever stronger in the future spiritual evolution of humanity. It will then become powerful again for humanity. Human beings will once more be able to draw strength from it for their physical life; it will remind them in the right way of their spiritual origin. Seldom in our present time does it have so powerful an effect upon human hearts as it will have in the future. For it is a strange fact, but rooted in the very laws of spiritual existence, that what appears in the world to help mankind forward does not appear at once in its ultimate form. It appears first, as it were, tumultuously, as if it were launched prematurely by unlawful spirits of world evolution. We only understand the historical evolution of humanity properly when we realize that truths are not always to be taken up as they first appear. The right moment must also be considered for their entrance into evolution in their true light.

Among various thoughts that have entered into the evolution of modern humanity—inspired, certainly, by the Christ Impulse but appearing at first in premature form—is that of human equality before God and the world, the equality of all men. This is a profoundly Christian conception capable of ever increasing in depth. But it should not have been presented to human hearts in such vague form as it was given by the French Revolution when it first appeared among mankind so tumultuously. We must realize that human life is involved in a process of evolution from birth to death, and that the chief impulses working upon it are distributed in time. Think how it is with the human being as he enters sense-existence: he is filled with the idea of the equality of human nature in all men. We experience the child nature most intensely when we regard the child as permeated through his whole being by this idea. Nothing that creates inequality among men, nothing that organizes men so that they feel different from other men: nothing of all this enters at first into the child's nature. It is all imparted to him in the course of his physical life. Inequality is created by men's physical existence. They come from the spirit equal before God and the world and their fellowmen. This is proclaimed by the mystery of the child.

This mystery is closely related to our understanding of Christmas, which will be made more profound by new Christian revelations. For these will have to do with the new Trinity: the human being, representing all humanity; the forces of Ahriman; and the forces of Lucifer. As one learns how man is placed in world existence in a situation of balance between Ahriman and Lucifer, one comes to understand the real significance of the human being in external physical life.

Most of all, understanding must come about, Christian understanding, for a certain aspect of human life. Someday Christian thought will announce a fact that has already been put forward by some minds since the middle of the nineteenth century—may I say, in stammering accents, but quite distinctly. When one has first grasped the fact that a child enters his earth life with a consciousness of human equality, then one must go on to the fact that as the child becomes a man, unequal powers develop in him—as if from just the fact of being born—powers that are obviously not of this earth. One is then confronting another great mystery of human existence, one that is in direct contrast to the idea of equality. To see into this mystery will help one to form a true picture of mankind—something that already at this present moment in time has become earnestly necessary for the future evolution of the human soul. One faces the startling fact that human beings begin to differ from one another while they are growing out of childhood, by reason of something that obviously is born in them, something in their blood: that is, their various gifts and capacities.

One meets the question of gifts and capacities that create such inequality among men in connection with the thought of Christmas. Future Christmas festivals will point to the origin of this vast difference throughout the world in human capacities, talents, even genius. A person will only attain balance in his life when he has learnt to know the origin of certain capacities that are distinguishing him from other men. The light of Christmas, of the Christmas candles, must provide an explanation for evolving humanity. It must answer the question: Do individuals suffer injustice between birth and death from the way the universe is ordered? What is the truth about capacities and talents?

Dear friends, many things will be seen in a different light when mankind has become permeated by the new Christian feeling. Particularly, it will be understood why an esoteric knowledge of the Old Testament included special insight into the nature of prophecy. Who were those prophets who appear in the Old Testament? They were individuals who had been sanctified by Jahve and authorized by Him to use special spiritual gifts that reached far beyond those of ordinary men. Jahve had first to sanctify those capacities that are born to men through the blood. We know that Jahve influences human beings in the time between their falling asleep and waking; He does not work in their conscious life. Every true believer of the Old Testament said in his heart: The capacities and talents that differentiate men, rising to the level of genius in the case of a prophet, are indeed born with the individual. But they are not used by him beneficently unless he sinks in sleep into the realm where Jahve guides his soul impulses. Jahve, active from the spiritual world, transforms his talents; otherwise they would only be physical, only part of his bodily organism.

We point here to the deep mystery of an Old Testament conception. But this must die away, including the belief in the nature of a prophet. New conceptions must enter the evolution of world history for the salvation of mankind. The talent that the ancient Hebrew believed was sanctified by Jahve during unconscious sleep must now in this modern age be sanctified by the human being himself when he is awake and in a state of clear consciousness. But he can only do this if he knows that all natural gifts, capacities, talents, even genius, are luciferic endowments, that they work luciferically in the world unless they are permeated and sanctified by all that enters the world as the Christ Impulse. One touches upon a tremendously important mystery in the evolution of modern humanity if one grasps this central fact of the new Christmas thoughts. The Christ must be so felt, so understood that a human being can now stand before Him as a New Testament believer and say: In spite of my childhood sense of equality, I have been endowed with various capacities and gifts. But they can only contribute to the salvation of mankind if I dedicate them to the service of Christ Jesus, if I permeate my whole nature with the Christ, so that they may be freed from the grasp of Lucifer.

A heart permeated by the Christ tears away from Lucifer what otherwise works luciferically in human physical existence. This must be the powerful thought that will pervade the future evolution of the human soul. It is the new Christmas thought, the new annunciation of Christ's activity in our souls, transforming the luciferic influence. Lucifer's power in us is not due to our having come out of the spiritual world, but to the fact that we are clothed by a physical body permeated by blood. We have our talents through heredity. Our individual capacities come to us through the luciferic stream of heredity. They must be mastered and put to use during physical life not through inspirations we receive from Jahve during sleep, but through the Christ Impulse that we can feel working within us in our fully conscious life.

“Oh, Christian,” says the new Christianity, “turn your thoughts to Christmas! lay upon the Christmas altar all the differentiation you have received through your blood! sanctify your capacities, gifts, genius as you behold them illuminated by the light coming from the Christmas tree!”

The new revelation of the spirit must speak a new language, and we must not be dull and unheeding as it addresses us in this extremely serious time. If we remain receptive, then we will find the power that mankind must find for the great tasks that will confront us in this very age. We must experience the meaning of Christmas in all its gravity. Today we must realize in clear waking consciousness what the Christ was really saying when He spoke those words, “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” The sense of equality that is natural to a child is not—if we regard him properly—proved false by these words. For the Child Whose birth we commemorate on Christmas Eve reveals ever new thoughts to mankind in the course of our evolution. He now proclaims that we must place all the distinguishing capacities we possess within the light of the Christ who ensouled this Child. All that our different talents achieve must be brought to the altar of this Child.

Perhaps, stirred by the earnestness of this Christmas thought, you will now ask, “How am I to experience the Christ Impulse in my own soul?” This question is often a burden in men's hearts.

Dear friends, what we may call the Christ Impulse does not become rooted in our souls in a moment, suddenly and tempestuously. It has taken root differently at different periods of evolution. In our present time a human being must take up in full, clear waking consciousness the cosmic truths that have been imparted stammeringly by our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. As these truths are made known and as he comes to understand them, they will awaken in him the assurance that a new revelation, the new Christ Impulse for this age, has been brought to him. He will perceive the new Impulse if only he is attentive.

Try—in a truly lively way such as is appropriate for this age—to take into yourselves the spiritual thoughts of the cosmic Powers; try to take them up not merely as a teaching, or a theory, but so that they move your souls to their very depths and warm them, illuminate them, permeate them, so that you carry the thoughts living within you! Try to feel them so intensely that they seem to enter your soul by way of your body and change the body itself. Try to strip away from them all abstractions, all theory. Try to realize that they are true nourishment for the soul; they are not just thoughts, they are spiritual life coming from the spiritual world.

Enter into the most intimate inner union with these truths and you will observe three things. First you will observe that gradually—however they may be expressed—they eradicate from your soul something that usually appears so obviously in human beings in this age of the consciousness soul: self-seeking. When you begin to notice that they kill egotism and disarm self-seeking, then you will have perceived the Christ-permeated character of the thoughts of our anthroposophical spiritual science.

Secondly, observe the moment that untruthfulness approaches you, untruthfulness in any form, either when you yourself are tempted to be careless about the truth or when the falseness approaches you from the outside. If at such a moment you can also observe that immediately there is an impulse moving within you, warning you, pointing to the truth, admonishing you and impelling you to hold fast to the truth, wanting to prevent falsehood from entering your life—in contrast to ordinary present-day life, so much inclined to sham—then you are again experiencing the living Christ Impulse. No one will find it easy to lie, or to be casual about sham and pretence, in the presence of the spiritual thoughts of anthroposophy. A sign pointing the way to a sense for truth—apart from all other aspects of understanding: this you will find in the thoughts of the new revelation of the Christ. When you have reached the point where you do not seek a merely theoretical understanding of spiritual science, as is sought for any other science, but where the thoughts so penetrate you that you say to yourself, “Now that these thoughts are united with my soul, it is as if a Power of conscience stood beside me admonishing me, directing me toward the truth”: then you will have found the second aspect of the Christ Impulse.

In the third place, when you feel that something streams from these thoughts even down into your body, but especially into your soul, working to overcome illness, making you healthy and strong, when you sense the rejuvenating, invigorating power of these thoughts, the adversaries of illness: then you will have experienced the third aspect of the Christ Impulse. This is the goal toward which mankind strives through the new wisdom, in the new spirit: to find in the spirit itself the power to overcome egotism and the falseness of life, to overcome self-seeking through love, the sham of life through truth, illness through health-giving thoughts that put us into immediate accord with the harmonies of the universe, because they flow from the harmonies of the universe.

Not all these things can be attained at the present time, for man carries an ancient heritage around with him! There is a foolish lack of understanding, for instance, when such a backstairs politician as Christian Science twists into a caricature the thought of the healing power of the spirit. Even though, due to our ancient heritage, our thinking is not yet sufficiently powerful to accomplish what we long to accomplish—perhaps from a selfish motive—nevertheless thought does possess healing power. But in regard to such things people's ideas are always distorted. Someone who understands may tell you that certain thoughts give you health, and then he is suddenly stricken with this or that illness. It is indeed due to that ancient heritage that we cannot today be relieved of all illness merely by the power of our thought. But are you able to say what illness you would have had if you had not possessed these thoughts? Can you say that you could have passed your life in your present state of health if you had not had these thoughts? Can you prove that a person who has interested himself in our spiritual science and then has died at forty-five years of age, would without these thoughts not have died at age forty-two or age forty? People think the wrong way around! They concern themselves with what their karma cannot bestow upon them and pay no attention to what their karma does bestow upon them. If—in spite of every contradiction in the external world—you will watch and observe through the power of inner trust that you have gained from an intimate acquaintance with the thoughts of spiritual science, you will perceive the healing power that is penetrating even your physical body, the health-giving, freshening, rejuvenating force that is the third element which Christ the Healer brings with His continuous revelations to the human soul.

We wanted to enter more deeply into the thought of Christmas which is so closely related to the mystery of human birth. We wanted to bring in brief outline what is revealed to us today from the spirit as a continuation of the thought of Christmas. We can feel that it gives strength and support to our lives. We can feel that it places us, no matter what happens, in the midst of the impulses of cosmic evolution. We can feel ourselves united with those divine impulses; we can understand them and draw power for our will from this understanding, and light for our life of thought. Humanity is evolving—it would be wrong to deny it. Our only right course is to go forward with this evolution.

And Christ has declared: “I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” This is not just a phrase, it is truth. Christ has not only revealed Himself in the Gospels; Christ is with us; He reveals Himself continually. We must have ears to hear what He is ever newly revealing in this modern age. Weakness will overcome us if we have no faith in these new revelations; but strength will be ours if we have such faith.

Strength will indeed come to us if we accept the new revelations, even if they speak to us from life's seemingly contradictory suffering and misfortune. We journey as individual souls through repeated earth-lives during which our destiny comes to fulfillment. Even this thought, which enables us to sense the spiritual working behind external physical life, even this we can only accept if we take into ourselves in a truly Christian sense the revelations that follow one another. The Christian in this age, the true Christian, when he stands before the candles on the Christmas tree, should begin to work with the strengthening thoughts that can now come to him from the new cosmic revelations, bringing power to his will and illumination to his thinking. And his feeling should support the power and light of his thought in the course of the Christian year, to help him approach that other thought that points to the mystery of death: the Easter thought, which brings the final experience of human earthly existence before our souls as a spiritual experience. We will feel the Christ more and more livingly as we are able to place our own existence in the right relation to His life. The Rosicrucian of the Middle Ages, uniting his thought with Christianity, declared: Ex Deo Nascimur; in Christo Morimur; Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus. Out of the Divine we have been born, if we think of ourselves as human beings here on earth. In Christ we die. In the Holy Spirit we shall be awakened again. This all pertains to our life, our individual human life. If we look away from our own life to the life of Christ, then we see our life as mirrored reflection. Out of the Divine we are born; in Christ we die; in the Holy Spirit we shall be awakened again. This saying is true of the Christ living in our midst as our first-born Brother. We can so affirm it that we feel it to be the Christ-truth raying forth from Him and reflected in our human nature. Out of the Spirit was He begotten—as it stands in the Gospel of Luke, represented by the symbol of the descending dove—out of the Spirit was He begotten; in the human body He died; in the Divine will He rise again.

We can only perceive eternal truths in the right way if we see them in their contemporary reflection—not in a single, absolute, abstract form—and if we feel ourselves not as abstract humanity but as live, individual human beings whose duty is to think and act in harmony with the time in which we live. Then we will try to understand the Christ, who is with us “always, even to the end of the world,” to understand Him in His contemporary language as He teaches and enlightens and empowers us through the thought of Christmas. We will want to take the Christ into ourselves in His new language. We must become intimately related to Him. Then we will be able to fulfill in ourselves His true mission on this earth and beyond death. In each epoch human beings must take the Christ into themselves in their own way. This has been people's feeling when they have beheld in the right way the two great pillars of the spirit, Christmas and Easter.
That profound German mystic, Angelus Silesius,² expressed it in this way:

“Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born
And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.”

And, contemplating Easter, he wrote:

“The cross of Golgotha must be upraised in thee
Ere from thy sin its power shall make thee free.”

Truly, the Christ must live within us. We are not human beings in some abstract sense, we are human beings of a definite epoch, and the Christ must be born within us in our epoch in accordance with His words. We must endeavor to bring the Christ to birth within us, for our strengthening, for our illumination. As He has remained with us until now, as He will remain with mankind throughout all ages, even to the end of earthly time, so He wills now to be born in our souls. If we try to experience the birth of Christ within us in this epoch, as it becomes a light and a power in our soul—the eternal Light and eternal Power entering into time—then we perceive in the right way the historical birth of Christ in Bethlehem and its image in our own souls.

“Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.”

As He creates the impulse in our hearts today to contemplate His birth—His birth in the course of human events, His birth in our individual souls—so we deepen the thought of Christmas within us. And so let us look toward that “night of consecration” (Weihenacht), which we should feel is bringing a new strength and a new illumination to mankind, to help them to endure the many evils and sorrows they have had to suffer and will still have to suffer.

“My Kingdom,” Christ said, “is not of this world.” It is a saying that challenges us, if we regard His birth in the right way, to find in our own souls the path to His Kingdom where He will give us strength and light for our darkness and helplessness, through the impulses coming from the world of which He Himself spoke, which His appearance at Christmas will always proclaim. “My Kingdom is not of this world.” But He has brought His Kingdom into this world, so that we may always find strength, comfort, confidence, and hope bestowed upon us in all the circumstances of life, if only we will come to Him, taking His words to heart, words such as these:

“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

• 1. Nikolaus von der Flüe: 1417–1487. Urged arbitration as a method for resolving disputes.
• 2. Angelus Silesius: 1624–1677. See Rudolf Steiner, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, GA 7 (Blauvelt, New York, Steinerbooks, 1980).

The Lecture given here a week ago had as its culminating point the fact, well known to the Spiritual investigator, that although in the outside world the very height of materialistic views and opinions prevail—we are nevertheless just entering on an epoch of the de-materialising of thought and of the world of ideas, which, in the course of time, must lead to a spiritualising and permeating of the earth-life as such, by the spirit. That which is to lay hold of and affect the external life on the physical plane must first be grasped by a few and then by an ever-increasing number of persons, grasped and understood Spiritually. Spiritual Science is in this respect to be a beginning, a means whereby men can uplift their souls to that which is today accessible to those who desire to raise themselves to it, and of which the external physical life is not as yet a reflection, though that is what it must become if the earth is not, in a sense, to be swamped in the downfall of materialistic development. The situation of present-day man can be described as follows. His soul is generally speaking really very near to the Spiritual world; but the ideas and especially the feelings produced by a materialistic conception of the world and by a materialistic attitude towards it, have woven a veil before that which is in reality very close to the human soul today. The connection between the physical Earth-existence, in which man with his whole being is involved notwithstanding many assertions to the contrary made in other quarters—the connection between this materialistic earth existence and the Spiritual world can be found by man, if he will endeavour to develop the inner courageous forces necessary for understanding, not only what nature paints to his external senses, but also that which remains invisible. We can unite ourselves with this invisible essence and experience it, if we stir up the inner force of the soul sufficiently to become aware that in this force the soul shares in something super-human and Spiritual. This connection must not be sought just as human connections and relationships are sought, in the rude external sense-existence; for the connection between the human soul and the Spiritual world is to be found in the intimate forces which the human soul develops when it evolves an inner, silent and quiet attention., Man must now train himself to this, for he has become accustomed, in this materialistic age, to pay attention only to what presses on him from without, and which in a sense calls out to his capacities of perception. The spirit that must be experienced within does not call out, we have to wait for it, and we can only approach it by preparing ourselves for its approach. Concerning the things belonging to the external world which present themselves to our senses and press in upon our outer perception, we can say that they come to us, that they speak to us; but we cannot say anything of the kind as regards the way in which the spirit, the spiritual world, draws near to us. The language of modern times—as I have often said—is more or less coined for the use of the external world, and it is therefore difficult to find words conveying a real impression of that part of the spiritual world which stands before the soul. But an attempt can be made to show approximately the difference between that and the physical. We might say that the Spiritual is experienced in the feeling of gratitude which comes whenever one experiences the Spiritual; one feels: I am grateful to it. Take special note of this: we owe gratitude to the spiritual world. In observing the physical world we say: we see spread out before our senses the mineral world, from which proceed the plant world, the animal world, and our own,—the world of man. In the latter we feel ourselves in a sense at the top of an ascending sequence of external kingdoms; but as far as the Spiritual kingdoms are concerned, we feel ourselves at the bottom, while above and beyond us stretch out the kingdoms of the Angels, Archangels, Archai, and so on. We feel the whole time that we are being supported from these kingdoms, continually called to life by them. We owe gratitude to them. We look up to them and say: our lives and the whole content of our souls flows down to us from the will-impregnated thoughts of the Beings belonging to those worlds, and by them we are constantly being formed. This feeling of personal gratitude to the higher kingdoms should become just as alive in us as the feeling—let us say—of the impressions received through physical perception. When these two feelings are equally alive in our souls-one, that: ‘The external sense things react upon us,’ and the other, that: ‘We owe what lives in the very centre of our being to the Higher Hierarchies,’—the soul is then in that state of balance in which it can continually perceive aright the co-operative working of the Spiritual and the physical, which indeed goes on unceasingly, but which cannot be perceived unless the two feelings described above are properly balanced.

In the future from now on, evolution will have to proceed in such a way that through the presence of these two feelings in the human soul additional forces will be super-added, forces which are not able to grow therein in the present materialistic age. It is of course understood that what is here meant refers to something which has greatly altered in the course of the development of mankind. Only at the early primeval stages of man's development was there a connection with the Spiritual world, and that indeed was but dim, and unconscious. At the primeval time of his development man had not only the two states be now has, of sleeping and waking and between these a chaotic dreamy state; there was then a, third state, in which reality was present This was not merely a state of dreaming, for in it man was able, although his consciousness was damped down, to see pictures and to learn by them, for these pictures were true to spiritual reality. Now, as we know, in order that man should develop the full Earth-consciousness, this method of perception had to be withdrawn. If it had persisted, man would never have gained his freedom, he could not have become free if he had not been subjected to all the dangers, arguments and temptations of materialism; but he has to find his way back again to the Spiritual world, and must now be able to grasp it in full Earth consciousness. This is in connection with very far-reaching and complex conceptions, which have altered with all else that has undergone change in the evolution of humanity, in the manner just indicated. In the primal ages it was quite natural to live in constant communion with the souls departed from this physical life; no proof of this was then necessary; for in that state of consciousness in which man perceived the Spiritual world in pictures, he lived in the company of those with whom he was in any way connected by karma and who had passed into the Spiritual world through the portal of death. It was personal knowledge to man that the Dead existed; he knew they were not dead but alive,—living in a different form of existence. A thing need not be proved if one knows it! In those early times there was no need to discuss immortality or to wonder about it, for one had personal experience of the so-called Dead. This communion with the Dead had moreover other and far-reaching results. It was then easier to the Dead themselves to work through men; I do not say this cannot be done now, it can still be done in this way; but I do say it was then easier for the Dead to find means of working through men here on earth, and thus to participate in what goes on here. In those primeval ages the Dead were active in the impulses of will of the people; in all that men understood and did, the Dead took part; thus helping to bring about what took place on earth. Materialism has not only brought in materialistic ideas, that would be its least harmful accomplishment;—it has also brought about a completely different form of union with the Spiritual world. It is now only possible in a much more restricted measure for the so-called Dead to take part in the evolution of the earth through the so-called living; but man will have to get back to this connection with the Dead. This, however, will only be possible when to some extent he learns to understand the language of the Dead, and this language is none other than that of Spiritual Science. It may certainly appear, at first sight, as though Spiritual Science tells us only more or less of Spiritual erudition; of evolving worlds, of the evolution of man, of the different principles composing the nature of man; things in which perhaps some people are not interested, wishing rather for something calculated to set their hearts and feelings aglow. Certainly it is a good thing to want that, but the question is how far the satisfying of that demand will take us. It may seem as though Spiritual Science only teaches how the earth evolved and developed through old Saturn, Sun and Moon, how the different epochs of civilisation developed on the earth and how the different principles of man were added; but while we devote ourselves to these seemingly abstract though in reality quite concrete thoughts, endeavoring to think in such a way that these things really remain in our minds as pictures, we are really learning in a definite way to form certain thoughts and ideas which we could not have brought into our souls in any other way. If we have the right feelings and realise how our ideas have changed since we busied ourselves with the subject of Spiritual Science, the time will come when we shall consider it just as absurd to say that these things do not interest us, as it is for a child to say it has no interest in learning the A.B.C.—but only wishes to learn to speak! What the child must go through in its physical existence in learning to speak, is abstract compared with what the living language can communicate, just as the ideas pertaining to Spiritual Science are abstract compared to the thoughts, ideas and feelings aroused in the soul under the influence of these concepts. Of course this requires patience, and it is also necessary that we should not merely consider what, Spiritual Science has to give in the abstract, but should take whole life into account. That, however, as regards what we are now considering does not suggest itself to the man of the day. In other respects, however, it may appeal to him; for he is accustomed to be more or less satisfied when he has once seen a work of art or a landscape, or has once listened to some scientific explanation. He is very apt to say, if the matter is brought before him a second time: ‘Oh! I know that already—I have seen or heard that before!’ Such is life in the abstract. In other domains, where life is judged according to what is to be found in it,—according to its actuality,—that is not the method of procedure. For one does not often meet a man at dinner who excuses himself from eating because he has eaten the day before. At meals one repeats the same process over and over again. Life is a constant repetition. If the Spiritual is indeed to become real life to us—and unless it does, it cannot bring us into touch with the universal Spiritual world,—we must imitate in our souls the laws of life in the physical world, which world, although now grown torpid, was yet created by spirit. In particular, shall we become aware that a good deal is taking place in our soul, if, with a certain rhythmic regularity we allow such impressions to enter our souls as necessitate a certain freedom of thought, a certain emancipation from the mode of thought usual in the physical world. The salvation—if we may use so sentimental a word—the salvation of the Spiritual development of man depends upon our not giving way as regards Spiritual things to that idle habit common today, of saying, “Oh! I know that already, I have heard that before!” Rather should we take these things as being like life itself, which is ever connected with repetition, with what I might call the return of the same action at the same place. As soon as we are interested in letting our soul be permeated by the life of the spirit, our inner attention increases. It becomes so acute that we are able to grasp inwardly in our soul those important moments in which the connection with the Spiritual world nearest to our heart can best be developed. For instance, the moments of falling asleep and that of awaking are very important for the communion with the Spiritual world. The moment of falling asleep would be less fruitful to most people at the beginning of their Spiritual development, because immediately after one is asleep the consciousness is so dimmed that it cannot take in the Spiritual; but the moment of passing from sleep into the waking state, if we do but accustom ourselves, not simply to let it pass by unobserved but to pay attention to it, may be very fruitful for us, if we try to wake up consciously, yet not allowing the outer world to approach us at once with all its crude brutality. In this respect there is a great deal of good in the folk-customs of olden times, much that is quite right and today but little understood. Simple people who are not yet plastered over, as one might say, with intellectual culture, often say: ‘When you wake, you ought not at once to look at the light’;—that is, you should remain awhile in a state of wakefulness without allowing the brutal impressions of the outer world to press in upon you immediately. If this be observed, it is possible at the moment of waking to see those Dead that are karmically connected with us. That is not the only time when they approach us, but it is then easiest to perceive them. At such a time we can see what takes place between us and the Dead, not only at the moment but beyond it; for our perception of the Spiritual, world is not bound up with time as is the perception of the physical world. This indeed constitutes one of the difficulties attached to the grasping of the Spiritual world in its essence. At the moment of perception something may momentarily reveal itself to us out of the Spiritual world, something extending over a very great space of time; the difficulty is to have the Spiritual presence of mind to grasp this far-reaching something, at the moment;—for that moment may, as indeed is generally the case, pass away in status nascendi. It is forgotten as soon as seen. That constitutes the great difficulty of grasping the Spiritual world. Were it not for this, many, many people, especially at the present day, would already be receiving impressions of the Spiritual world.

There are also other moments in life when—as I might say—it is possible for the Spiritual world to penetrate to us. Each time we develop a thought in such a way that it springs from ourselves, when we take the initiative, when we are confronted with a decision to be made by ourselves even in quite small things, that again is a favourable moment for the approach of the Dead karmically connected with us. (Of course if we simply yield ourselves up, allowing life to take its course, carrying us along with the stream, there is but little likelihood of the real, true, inwardly living Spiritual world working into us.) Such moments need not necessarily be ‘important’ ones, in the sense we attach to the word in external material life, for very often, what is really important as a Spiritual experience, would not seem important to the outer life; -but to one who is able to see into these things, it is extremely clear that such experiences, perhaps outwardly unimportant yet inwardly exceptionally important, are profoundly related to our karma. So it is necessary to notice even very intimate soul-occurrences if one desires to attain an understanding of the Spiritual world. For instance, it may occur that a man sitting in his room or walking in the street may be startled by an unexpected sound, perhaps a crack or a bang. After his fright he may have a moment of musing, during which something important is revealed to him out of the Spiritual world. It is necessary to pay attention to these things; for as a rule a man is only concerned with the fright he had; be only keeps on thinking of the shock he had. That is why it is of such importance to acquire ‘Inner Balance’ in the manner indicated at the end of the book Theosophy and in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. When that has been acquired we are no longer so perplexed after a shock as to think of nothing else, for we shall have the mastery over ourselves, and may be able to call up, though perhaps but very faintly, what we experienced in such apparently unimportant, but really extremely important moments. Such things are of course mere beginnings, and must develop further. When we develop the two capacities:—that of ‘attentiveness at the moment of waking’ and ‘attentiveness at the moment when we are shaken by some outer occurrence,’ we shall be able once more to find the connection with the great Cosmos, which is composed of both substance and spirit, of which we are a member and from which we came forth-came forth indeed for the purpose of becoming free men—but from which we certainly did come forth. In reality, the belief of primeval man was correct; we do not wander about the earth like hermits, as is now believed. What primeval man believed is true: Man is a member of the whole great Cosmic Connection, as each one of our fingers is a member of our whole organism. People no longer possess this feeling today—at least the great majority no longer feel themselves members of the great World-Organism, in so far as they as Spiritual beings are living in a visible world. Yet ordinary scientific reflection might teach a man, even today, that he and his life are part of the whole cosmic ordering in which he as organism is placed. Let us take a very simple example, which only needs a very simple reckoning. We all know that in the Spring, on the 21st March, the sun rises at a definite point in the heavens. This we call the Vernal Point. We know too that this Vernal Point is not the same each year, but that it progresses. We know that now the sun rises in Pisces. Up to the fifteenth century it rose in Aries (Astronomy continues to say ‘in Aries’ which is not correct, but this remark does not apply at the moment.) Thus the Vernal Point progresses; the Sun rises a little further on in the Zodiac every spring, and it is easy to see that in a given time it will have moved through the whole Zodiac; the place of sunrise will have moved through the whole Zodiac. Now the approximate time required for the Sun in its journey through the Zodiac is 25,920 years. Thus, taking the Vernal Point of any given year, it will be further on the year following, and the year after will have progressed again. When 25,920 years have gone by the Vernal Point will be back again at its original place. Thus 25,920 years is an exceptionally important space of time in our Solar System; the sun has accomplished what I might call a cosmic step when at the vernal ascent it returns to the same point. Now Plato, the great Greek philosopher, called these 25,920 years a cosmic year—the great Platonic Cosmic year. Now if one has not gone into all this deeply, what I am about to say will seem only remarkable;—it is indeed remarkable; but at the same time full of profound significance.

In his normal state a man draws eighteen breaths a minute. This varies, because he breathes rather quicker in childhood and more slowly in old age—but of a normal man it is correct to say: he draws eighteen breaths a minute. It is easy to reckon that 18 times 60 make 1,080, which is the number of breaths to the hour: multiply this by 24—the number of hours in the day and you get 25,920 breaths in the day. Thus you see, my dear friends, that the same number regulates the human day as regards a man's breathing as regulates the passage of the Vernal Point through the great cosmic year.

This is a sign which shows that we are not just talking in a general, vague, dimly-mystical way when we say that the Microcosm is an image of the Macrocosm, but that man is really governed in an important activity, upon which each moment of his life depends, by the same number and measure as the course of the sun, in which course he is himself placed.

Now let us take something else.—The patriarchal age, as it is called, is seventy human years. Of course seventy years is not a hard-and-fast rule for the duration of a man's life; a man may live much longer; for man is a free being and sometimes goes beyond such limitations. We will however keep to this, and say that the normal life of man is seventy or seventy-one years, and let us see how many days these contain. Well now, we have 365.25 days in a year;—to begin with, we will multiply this number by 70, and we get 25,567.5; then we multiply by 71 and we get 25,932.75 days. This proves that between the ages of 70 and 71 comes the point of time when a man's life includes exactly 25,920 days—that is, the patriarchal age.—Thus we have defined a human day by saying that it contains 25,920 breaths; and we define the period of a man's life by saying that it reckons 25,920 days.

Now let us investigate something else—which is not so difficult now. We shall easily see that, if we divide the 25,920 years which the sun's vernal point requires to pass through the Zodiac, by 365.25, the result is something like 70 or 71. That means that if we consider the Platonic year as one great year and divide it till we bring out a day, we find the proportion of a day to a Platonic year.—What is that? It is the course of a human life. A man's life is to a Platonic year as a human day to a man's life.

The air is all around us. We breathe it in and breathe it out. According to the law of numbers it is so regulated that when we have breathed in and out 25,920 times, our life is spent. What then is a day of our life? It is comprised in the outgoing and incoming of our ego and astral body, in and out of our physical body and etheric body. So that day after day the ego and astral body go out and return, go out and come in; just like our breathing. Many of our friends will remember that to make this subject clear, in public lectures I have compared the alternation of waking and sleeping to deep breathing. Just as in breathing we breathe the air in and breathe out, so, when we fall asleep and awake, the astral body and ego go out and in. This implies that a being exists, or can be presumed to exist, which breathes in and breathes out just as we do in the eighteenth of a minute,—and the breathing of this being signifies the out-going and in-coming of our astral body and ego. This being is none other than the living being of the earth. As the earth experiences day and night, it breathes; and in the process of its breathing it bears our sleeping and waking on its wings. It is the breathing process of a greater being.—And now let us take the breathing process of a still greater being; of the sun, in its circuit. Just as the earth accomplishes a day by the releasing and drawing in of the ego and astral body into man, so does the Great Being corresponding to the sun bring human beings forth; for the 70 to 71 years are one day, as we have shown: one day of the sun-year, the great Platonic Year. Our collective human life is an out-breathing and in-breathing of this great Being, to whom is appointed the great Platonic Year. You see how it is; we draw one small breath in the 18th of a minute, which regulates our life;—our life is lived on the, earth, the breathing of which comprises day and night: that corresponds with the out-going and in-coming of the ego and astral body into the physical and etheric bodies: and we are ourselves breathed in by the great Being whose life corresponds to the course of the sun, our own life is one breath of this great Being. Now you see that as Microcosms we are actually part of and subject to the same laws, as regards the Universal Beings, as the breath we draw is subject to our own human being. It is governed by number and measure. It is a great and wonderful thing, and in its significance must cut deeply into our very hearts: that number and measure regulate the great cosmos, the Macrocosm, exactly as they regulate us, the Microcosm. This is not merely a figure of speech, it is not merely mystically felt; but the wisdom-filled contemplation of the world teaches us that we, as Microcosms, stand within the Macrocosm. When we make such simple calculations as these—which can of course be arrived at by the most ordinary scientific methods of reckoning—then, if our hearts are sensitive to the secrets of cosmic existence and not mere blocks of wood, the saying ‘we are placed in the Universe’ will cease to be abstract words, for we shall be fully alive to the fact. A knowledge and a feeling will spring up within us the fruits of which will be borne in the impulses of our will, and our whole being live in unison with the great Life, Divine Cosmic Existence. That is the path along which we find to some extent our way into the Spiritual world, which way must be found at the time alluded to in the last lecture, when Christ will walk the earth in His etheric form. I even indicated the very year in which He began to move etherically over the earth;—it must be found! Only people must accustom themselves to realise the connection, the very intimate connection already being established from cosmic existence, which will, when it is felt and realised, bring about a need, an intense longing to seek this union with the Spiritual world. For before very long, people will be compelled to realise at any rate one thing; which is the following:

If a man be deadened by materialism, he may indeed deny the existence of a Spiritual world, but he cannot kill out in himself the forces which are able to seek a connection with the Spiritual world. He may delude himself as to the existence of a Spiritual world, but he cannot kill out those forces in his soul which are intended to bring him in touch with the Spiritual world. This has very significant consequences—which should be taken into account, especially at the present time; forces are there and they work, whether their existence is believed in or not. The materialist does not forbid the spiritually inclined forces in his soul to work, he cannot do so;—and they do work. You may say; Is it then possible for a man to be a materialist and yet to have forces at work within him which are seeking the Spiritual? Yes, that is the case. These forces are at work within him; no matter what he may do they work within him. What effect do they then have? Well, wherever there are forces present, their own original activity can be suppressed,—but they then transform themselves into something else, into different forces. You see, my dear friends, if we do not employ the Spiritually tending forces for gaining understanding of the Spiritual world,—I only say ‘understanding,’ for that is all that is required at first,—these forces will transform themselves into the forces of illusion in human life. Their activity then takes the form of inducing a man to be subject to all kinds of illusion, illusions regarding the external world. It is not without significance that this should be realised in our time, for never have people indulged their imagination as they do today, although they do not care for imagination: as their imagination only works along certain definite lines. If it were desired to give examples of this, of the fanciful weavings of people who entirely desire to be realists, materialists, light could be thrown on all sorts of things, there would be no end to it. We might perhaps begin—were it not heretical—by glancing at what statesmen have prophesied even a few weeks ago as to the probable course of events in the world and at what has occurred since, and we shall see that the capacities of illusion have played no small part for some years. We might investigate many of the departments of life in the same way, and it is quite remarkable to note that everywhere we find these strongly developed capacities of illusion. Indeed they sometimes even lend a childlike—I might almost say a childish character to the opinions and attitude to life of materialistically inclined people. When one sees what is required today to make men understand each other, or to try and make them see what is before their very nose, one can understand what I mean by saying ‘childlike’ or even ‘childish.’ Well, my dear friends, it is even so. When people turn away from the Spiritual world, they must pay for it by becoming subject to illusion, by losing the capacity of forming accurate concepts concerning external physical reality and the course of events therein. They are then compelled to exercise their imagination in another direction, because they refuse to hold by the truth; whether the truth concerns the Spiritual or the physical life, it comes to the same thing, they turn away from it. I once gave you an example which can be applied to this, for it is typical of it: there are plenty of discussions and arguments to be met with as to the Spiritual Science advocated by me. Those persons reasoning against it base their arguments on their own statement that everything given out here is mere fancy. ‘It has all been imagined,’ they say, ‘and such flights of fancy cannot seriously be admitted!’ So these people will not accompany us into the true Spiritual world because they believe it to be imaginary, and they despise such fanciful imaginations. They then proceed to add all kinds of arguments which have just as little likeness to the reality as black to white and they proceed, (this indeed is a typical example) to speak of my family descent and the way in which I did this or that in my life. There they develop a bold imagination!—Here we can see, side by side, the turning away from the Spiritual world, and the capacity for illusion! These people do not notice this, yet they are following an absolute law. A certain amount of force in them tends towards the Spiritual world; a certain amount of force tends to the physical world. If the force tending to the Spiritual world is not used for that purpose, it turns towards the physical world; not in order to study and grasp the truth and actuality there, but to drive people into illusions concerning life. This cannot in each single case be so observed that one can say: ‘Ah! This man has been driven into illusion through having turned away from the Spiritual world.’ Examples of this can certainly be found, but they have to be looked for; they cannot be discovered straight away, because life is complicated, and one person influences another. It is ever the case that a stronger soul influences the weaker, so that even when we find some of that capacity for illusion in one person, it certainly may come from a hatred for, a turning away from, the Spiritual world; yet this dislike may not be in the soul of the person subject to the illusions;—it may have been suggested to him. For in Spiritual domains the danger of infection is infinitely greater than in any physical domain.

In our next lecture we shall consider how this is connected with the general karma of man; how these things—when observed in the light of the important law of the metamorphosis of the soul-forces from the Spiritual into forces of illusion—work in the whole connection of life, and their connection with the conditions of development of our present time and those of the near future. We shall then carry further what we have begun today and connect it with the Christ and the Mystery of the present age, so as to obtain some light on the significance of the Spiritual outlook in general.

My dear Friends,

The things I shall have to explain to-day may be apparently a little far removed from our more concrete studies of Anthroposophy. They are however a necessary foundation for many other perceptions which we need—a foundation on which we shall afterwards have to build in our more intimate considerations.

There is a certain inherent difficulty for our human power of knowledge and understanding when we speak of the physical bodily nature of man on the one hand, and the soul-and-spirit on the other. Man can gain ideas about the physical and bodily with comparative ease, for it is given to him through the senses. It comes out to meet him, as it were, from his environment on all sides, without his having to do very much for it himself—at any rate so far as his consciousness is concerned. But it is very different when we come to speak of the soul-and-spirit. True, if he is open-minded enough, man is distinctly aware of the fact that such a thing exists. Men have always received into their language designations, words and phrases referring to the soul-and-spirit. The very existence of such words and phrases shews after all, for an open-minded consciousness, that something does exist to draw man's attention to the reality of soul-and-spirit.

But the difficulties begin at once when man endeavours to relate the world of things physical and bodily with the world of soul and spirit. Indeed for those who try to grapple with such questions philosophically, shall we say, the search for this relationship gives rise to the greatest imaginable difficulties. They know that the physical and bodily is extended in space. They can even represent it spatially. Man forms his ideas of it comparatively easily. He can use all that space with its three dimensions gives to him, in forming his ideas about things physical and bodily. But the spiritual as such is nowhere to be found in space.

Some people, who imagine they are not materialistically minded—though in reality they are all the more so—try to conceive the things of the soul and spirit in the world of space. Thus they are led to the well-known spiritualistic aberrations. These aberrations are in reality materialistic, for they are an effort to bring the soul and spirit perforce into space.

But quite apart from all that, the fact is that man is conscious of his own soul-and-spirit. He is well aware of how it works, for he is aware that when he resolves to move about in space his thought is translated into movement through his will. The movement is in space, but of the thought no open-minded, unbiased thinking person can assert that it is in space. In this way the greatest difficulties have arisen, especially for philosophic thinking.

People ask: How can the soul-and-spirit in man—to which the Ego itself belongs—work upon the physical and bodily which is in space? How can something essentially unspatial work upon something spatial?

Diverse theories have arisen on this point, but they all of them labour more or less under the difficulty of bringing the soul-and-spirit, which is unspatial, into relation with the physical and bodily, which is spatial. Some people say: In the will, the soul-and-spirit works upon the bodily nature. But in the first place, with ordinary consciousness, no one can say how the thought flows into the will, or how it can be that the will, which is itself a kind of spiritual essence, manifests itself in outer forms of movement, in outer activities.

On the other hand the processes which are called forth by the physical world in our senses—i.e., in the bodily nature—are also processes extended in space. Yet inasmuch as they become an experience in soul and spirit, they are transformed into something non-spatial. Man cannot say out of his ordinary consciousness, how the physical and spatial process which takes place in sense-perception can influence the non-spatial, the soul-and-spirit.

In recent times, it is true, men have sought refuge in the conception, to which I have often referred, of ‘psychophysical parallelism.’ It really amounts to a confession that we can say nothing of the relation of the physical and bodily to the soul-and-spirit. It says, for example: The human being walks, he moves his legs, he changes his position in external space. This is a spatial, a physical-bodily process. Simultaneously, while this is taking place in his body, a process of soul-and-spirit is enacted—a process of thought, feeling and will. All that we know is that when the physical and bodily process takes place in space and time, the process of soul and spirit also takes place. But we have no concrete idea of how the one works upon the other. We have psycho-physical parallelism: a psychical process takes its course simultaneously with the bodily process. But we still do not get behind the secret—whose existence is thus expressed—that the two processes run parallel to one another. We gain no notion of how they work on one another. And so it is invariably, when men try to form a conception of the existence of the soul-and-spirit.

In the 19th Century, when the ideas of men were so thoroughly saturated with materialism, even this question could arise:—Where do the souls sojourn in universal space when they have left the body? There were even men who tried to refute spiritualism by proving that when so and so many men are dying and so and so many are already dead, there can be no room in the whole world of space for all these souls to find a place of abode! This absurd line of thought actually arose more than once during the 19th Century. People said, Man cannot be immortal, for all the spaces of the world would already have been filled with their immortal souls.

All these things indicate what difficulties arise when we seek the relation between the bodily and physical, clearly spread out as it is in space, and the soul and spirit which we cannot in the first place assign to the spatial universe.

Things have gradually come to this pass; our purely intellectualistic thinking has placed the bodily-physical and the soul-and-spirit sharply and crudely side by side. For the modern consciousness they stand side by side, without any intermediary. Nor is there any possibility of finding a relation on the lines along which people think of them to-day. The man of to-day conceives the spatial and physical in such a way that the soul has no conceivable place in it. Again, he is driven to conceive the soul-qualities so sharply separated from the physical and bodily, that the absolutely unspatial soul-and-spirit, as he conceives it, cannot possibly impinge at any point upon the physical. ...

This sharp contrast and division was however only developed in the course of time. We must now begin again from an altogether different angle of approach, which is only made possible once more by taking our start from what anthroposophical spiritual science has to say.

In the first place, anthroposophical science must consider the nature of the will. To begin with, straightforward observation shews undoubtedly that the will of man follows his movements everywhere. Moreover, the movements man accomplishes externally in space when he moves about, and those too which take place within him in the fulfilment of his everyday functions of life, in a word, all the activities of man in the physical world-are in the three dimensions of space. Hence the will must also go everywhere, wherever the three dimensions extend. Of this there can be no doubt.

Thus if we are speaking of the will as of an element of soul-and-spirit, there can be no question but that the will—albeit a thing of soul and spirit—is three-dimensional. It has a three-dimensional configuration.

We cannot but think of it in this way:—When we carry out a movement through our will, the will adapts itself and enters into all the spatial positions which are traced, for example, by the arm and hand. The will goes with it everywhere, wherever the movement of a limb takes place. Thus after all we must speak of the will as of a quality of soul which can assume a three-dimensional configuration.

Now the question is, do all the soul-qualities assume this three-dimensional configuration? Let us pass from the Will to the world of Feeling. To begin with, we can make the same kind of observation. Considering the matter with the ordinary everyday consciousness, man will say to himself, for example: ‘If I am pricked by a needle on the right-hand side of my head, I feel it; if I am pricked on the left-hand side I feel it also.’ In the everyday consciousness he can, therefore, be of opinion that his Feeling is spread out over his whole body. He will then speak of Feeling as having a three-dimensional configuration in the same sense as the Will. But in so doing he gives himself up to an illusion. It is not really so. The fact is, at this point there are certain experiences which every man can have in his own nature, and from these we must take our start today. Our considerations will have to be somewhat subtle, but spiritual science cannot really be understood without subtlety of thought.

Consider for a moment what it is like when you touch your own left hand with your right. You have a perception of yourself thereby. Just as in other cases you perceive an outer object, so do you perceive yourself when you touch your right hand with your left hand-say with the several fingers one by one.

The fact to which I am referring appears still more distinctly when you consider that you have two eyes. To focus an object with both eyes you have to exert your will to some extent. We often do not think of this exertion of the will. It comes out more strongly when you try to focus a very near object. You then endeavour to turn your left eye towards the right and your right eye towards the left. You focus an object by bringing the lines of vision into contact, just as you bring your right and left hands into contact when you touch yourself. From these examples you can see that it is of some importance for man, with respect to his orientation in the world, to bring his left and right into a certain mutual relation. By the contact of the hands or the crossing of the lines of vision we can thus become aware of an underlying fact which is of deep significance. Though the everyday consciousness does not generally go farther than this, it is possible to continue very much farther along this line of study.

Suppose we are pricked by a needle on the right-hand side of our body. We feel the prick. But we cannot really say so simply ‘where’ we feel the prick-meaning by ‘where’ some portion of the surface of our body. For unless the several members of our organism stood in a living mutual relationship to one-another,—unless they were working one upon the other—our human nature, body and soul together, would not be what it is. Even when our body is pricked, let us say, on the right-hand side, there is always a connection established from the right-hand side to the central plane of symmetry. For any feeling or sensation to be brought about, the left half of the body must always enter into relation with the right.

It is comparatively easy to realise—if this be the plane of symmetry, seen from in front—that when the right hand touches the left the mutual feeling of the two hands is brought about in the plane of symmetry. It is comparatively easy to speak of the crossing of the lines of vision from the two eyes. But there is always a connecting line in every case—whenever we are pricked, for example, on the right-hand side;—the left half of the body crosses with the connecting line from the right. Without this process, the sensation would never come about. In all the surging waves of feeling and sensation, the fact that we have a right and a left half of the body—the fact that we are built symmetrically—plays an immense part. We always relate to the left-hand side what happens to us on the right. In a vague groping way something reaches over in us from the left, to cross with what is flowing from the right.

Only so does Feeling come about. Feeling never comes about in space, but only in the plane. Thus the world of Feeling is in reality spread out, not three-dimensionally, but two-dimensionally. Man experiences it only in the plane which as a plane of section would divide him into two symmetrical halves.

The life of Feeling is really like a painting on a canvas—but we are painting it not only from the one side but from both. Imagine that I here erect a canvas, which I paint from right to left and from left to right, and observe the interweaving of what I have painted from the one side and the other. The picture is only in two dimensions. Everything three-dimensional is projected, so to speak, into the two dimensions.

You can arrive at the same idea in a somewhat different way. Suppose you were able to project on to a flat surface shadow-pictures of objects on the right-hand side and on the left. On the flat expanded wall you then have shadows of left- and right-hand objects. So it is with our world of Feeling. It is two-dimensional, not three-dimensional. Man is a painter working from two sides. He does not simply feel his way into space. Through his three-dimensional will he projects on to a plane in shadow-forms, in pictures, the influences of feeling which meet him in the world of space. In his life of feeling, man lives in a picture drawn two-dimensionally through his body-only it is for ever being painted from both sides. Thus if we would seek the transition from Will to Feeling in ourselves—as human beings in the life of soul—we must pass from the three-dimensional into the two-dimensional.

But this will already give you a different spatial relationship of the soul-quality which is expressed in feeling, than if you merely say of the soul-life that it is unspatial. The plane has two dimensions, but it has no ‘space.’ Take any plane in the outer world—the blackboard for example. In reality it is a solid body, it has a certain thickness. But an actual plane, though it is in space, is not in itself spatial. ‘Space’ must always be of three dimensions; and only our Will enters into this three-dimensional space. Feeling does not enter into the three dimensions of space. Feeling is two-dimensional. Nevertheless it has its own relations to space, just as a shadow-picture has. In saying this, I am drawing your attention at the same time to a fact of very great importance, which is not at all easy to penetrate with clear perception, because with his everyday consciousness man has little inclination as a rule to perceive the peculiar nature of his world of Feeling.

The fact is that the world of Feeling is always permeated by the Will. Think only for a moment of this: If you really receive on the right-hand side of your body the prick or sting of which we spoke just now, you do not immediately sever the Feeling from the Will. You will certainly not patiently receive the sting. Quite apart from the fact that you will probably reach out in a very tangible way, striking out pretty intensely with your Will into the three dimensions of space ; inwardly too there will be a defensive movement which does not appear externally but shews itself in all manner of delicate disturbances of the blood and the breathing. The defensive movement which we make, when, stung by a gnat, we reach out with our hand, is only the crudest and most external aspect. Of the finer aspect—the inner defensive movement which we perform in the motion of the blood and breathing and many another inward process—we are generally unaware. Hence we do not distinguish what the Will contributes from the content of Feeling as such.

The real content of Feeling is in fact far too shy, far too elusive. We can only get at it by very careful meditation. If however you can exclude, from the Feeling as such, all that belongs to the Will, then as it were you shrink together from the right and left and you become the plane in the middle. And when you are the central plane, and like a conscious painter you record your inner experiences on this plane, then you begin to understand why the real world of Feeling is so very different from our ordinary, everyday experience.

We can indeed experience this plane-quality, this surface-quality of Feeling. But it needs to be experienced meditatively. We must feel all the shadow-likeness of our feelings as against the robust outer experiences in three-dimensional space. We must first prepare ourselves for this experience, but if we do so we can really have it, and then we gradually come near the truth that Feeling takes its course in two dimensions.

How shall we characterise Thinking? To begin with we must admit with open and unbiased mind how impossible it is to speak of a thought as if it were in space. A thought is really nowhere there in space. Nevertheless the thought must have some relation to space, for undoubtedly the brain—if not the instrument—is at least the foundation of our Thinking. Without the brain we cannot think. Thus our Thinking takes its course in connection with the activity of the brain. If Thinking had nothing to do with space, we should get the following curious result: If you were able to think well as a child of 12, your head having now grown beyond the position in which it was when you were 12 years old, you would have grown out of your Thinking. But that is not the case. As we grow up, we do not leave our Thinking behind. The very fact of growth will serve to indicate that even with our Thinking we are somehow in the world of Space.

The fact is this. Just as we can separate out the world of Feeling—the world of inner experience of our Feelings—by learning gradually to perceive our plane of symmetry, so too we can learn to experience our Thinking meditatively, as something that only has extension upward and downward. Thinking is one-dimensional. It takes its course in man in the line.

In a word, we must say: The Will takes on a three-dimensional configuration, the Feeling a two-dimensional and the Thinking a one-dimensional configuration.

When we make these inner differentiations of space, we do not arrive at the same hard-and-fast transition as the mere intellect. We are led to perceive a gradual transition. The mere intellect says : The physical is three-dimensional, spatially extended. The soul-and-Spirit has no extension at all. From this point of view no relationship can be discovered between them. For it goes without saying, there is no relationship between that which has extension and that which has none. But when once we perceive that the Will has a three-dimensional configuration, then indeed we find that the Will pours itself out everywhere into the three-dimensional world. And again, when once we know that Feeling has a two-dimensional configuration, then we must pass from the three dimensions to the two, and as we do so we are led to something which still has a relationship to space, though it is no longer spatial in itself. For the mere plane—the two-dimensional—is not spatial, but the two dimensions are there in space; they are not entirely apart from space. Lastly, when we pass from Feeling to Thinking we pass from the two dimensions to the one. Thus we still do not go right out of space. We pass over gradually from the spatial to the unspatial.

As I have often said, it is the tragedy of materialism that it fails to understand the material-the material even in its three-dimensional extension. Materialism imagines that it understands the material, substantial world, but that is precisely what it does not understand. Many things of real historic importance emerged in the 19th century, which still present an unsolved riddle to the ordinary consciousness. Think only of the great impression which Schopenhauer's philosophic system, The World as Will and Idea, made on so many thinking people. There is something unreal in the Idea, says Schopenhauer. The Will alone has reality. Why did Schopenhauer arrive at the idea that the world only consists of Will? Because even he was infected with materialism. Into the world in which matter is extended three-dimensionally, only the Will pours itself out. To place the Feelings too into this world, we must look for the relationship which obtains between the three-dimensional object and the two-dimensional image on the screen. Whatever we experience in our Feelings is a shadow-picture of something in which our Will too is living in its three-dimensional configuration. And what we experience in our Thinking consists of one-dimensional configurations. Only when we go right out of the dimensions—that is to say, when we pass to the dimensionless point,—only then do we arrive at our I or Ego. Our Ego has no extension at all. It is purely point-like, ‘punctual.’

So we may say, we pass from the three-dimensional to the two-dimensional, to the one-dimensional and to the ‘punctual.’ So long as we remain within the three-dimensional, there is our Will in the three dimensions. Our Feeling and our Thinking are also there within them, only they are not extended three-dimensionally. If we leave out the third dimension and come down to the two dimensions, we only have the shadow of outward existence, but in the shadow is extended that element of soul-and-spirit which lives in our Feeling. We are already getting more away from space. Then, when we go on to Thinking, we come away from space still more. And lastly when we pass on to the Ego, we go right out of space.

Thus we are led out of space, as it were piece by piece. Now we see that it is meaningless merely to speak of the contrast between the soul-and-spirit, and the physical and bodily. It is meaningless, for if we wish to discover the relation between the soul-and-spirit and the physical and bodily, we must ask: How are things which are extended in three-dimensional space (our own body, for example) related to the soul as a being of Will? How is the bodily and physical in man related to the soul as a being of Feeling? The bodily and physical is related to the soul as a being of Will in such a way that one would say, it is saturated by the Will on all sides, in all dimensions, just like the sponge is saturated by water. Again, the bodily and physical is related to the Feeling, like objects whose shadows are thrown upon the screen. And when we pass from Feeling to the quality of Thought, then we must indeed become strange painters—for we must paint on to a line what is otherwise existing in the two dimensions of the picture.

Ask yourselves the following question. (It will indeed make some demands on your imagination.) Suppose that you are standing face to face with the ‘Last Supper’ by Leonardo da Vinci. You have it before you in the surface. The whole thing is two-dimensional—for we need not take into account the thickness of the colours. The picture which you have before you is essentially two-dimensional.

But now imagine to yourselves a line, drawn through the middle from top to bottom of the picture. This line shall represent a one-dimensional being. Imagine that this one-dimensional being has the peculiar quality that Judas, let us say, is not indifferent to him. He feels Judas in a certain way. He feels him more where Judas inclines his head in that direction, and where Judas turns away he feels him less. Likewise this one-dimensional being feels all the other figures. He senses them differently according as the one figure is in blue and the other in a yellow colour. He feels all that is there, to the left and to the right of him. All that is present in the picture is livingly felt by this one-dimensional being.

Such in reality is our Thinking within us. Our Thinking is a one-dimensional being of this kind, and only partakes in the life of the remainder of our human being inasmuch as it is related to the picture which divides us into the left- and right-hand man. Via this two-dimensional picture, our Thinking stands in relation to the world of Will with its threefold configuration.

If we wish to gain an idea of our being of soul-and-spirit (to begin with without the Ego; only in so far as it is willing, feeling and thinking) we must conceive it not as a mere nebulous cloud. We must regard the soul and spirit, as it were diagramatically. There it appears, to begin with, as a cloud, but that is only the being of Will. It has the constant tendency to become pressed together; thereby it becomes a being of Feeling. First we see a cloud of light. Then we see the cloud of light creating itself in the centre as a plane, whereby it feels itself. And the plane in turn strives to become a line. We must conceive this constant process—cloud, plane and line as an inwardly living form. It constantly tends to be a cloud, and then to squeeze together from the cloud into the plane, and then to elongate into the line. Imagine the plane that becomes a line and then a plane again and then again a cloud in three dimensions. Cloud, plane line; line, plane, cloud, and so on. Only so can you imagine graphically what your soul is in its inner being, its inner nature and essence. An idea that remains at rest will not suffice. No idea that remains at rest within itself can reproduce the essence of the soul. You need an idea with an inner activity of its own. The soul itself, as it conceives itself, plays with the dimension of space. Letting the third dimension vanish, it loses the Will. Letting the second dimension vanish, it loses the Feeling. And the Thinking is only lost when we let the first dimension vanish. Then we arrive at the point, and then only do we pass over to the Ego.

Hence all the difficulty in gaining a knowledge of the soul. People are accustomed only to form spatial ideas. Hence they would like to have spatial ideas—however diluted—of the soul's nature. But in this form they only have the element of Will.

Unless we make our thinking inwardly alive and mobile we can reach no conception of the soul-and-spirit. If we wish to conceive a quality of soul-and-spirit, and our conception is the same in two successive instants, we shall at most have conceived a quality of Will. We must not conceive the soul-and-spirit in the same form in two successive moments. We must become alive and mobile-not by moving from one point in space to another, but rather by passing from one dimension to another. This is difficult for the modern consciousness. Hence even the most well-meaning people—well-meaning for the conception of spiritual things—have tried to escape from Space by transcending the three dimensions. They come to a fourth dimension. They pass from the three-dimensional to the four-dimensional. So long as we remain within the mathematical domain, the thoughts which we arrive at in this way are quite in order. It is all perfectly correct. But it is no longer correct when we relate it to the reality. For the peculiar thing is, that when we think the fourth dimension in its reality, it eliminates the third. Through the fourth dimension the third dimension vanishes. Moreover, through the fifth dimension the second vanishes, and through the sixth the first vanishes, and we arrive at length at the point.

When we pass in reality from the third to the fourth dimension, we come into the Spiritual. We eliminate the dimensions one by one, we do not add them, and in this way we enter more and more into the Spiritual.

Through such ideas we gain a deeper insight too into the human form and figure. For a more artistic way of feeling is it not rather crude how we generally observe a human being, as he places himself with his three dimensions into the world? That after all is not the only thing. Even in ordinary life we have a feeling for the essential symmetry between the left and right halves of the body. And when we thus comprise the human being in his central plane, we are already led beyond the three dimensions. We pass into the plane itself. And only thereafter do we gain a clear conception of the one dimension in which he grows. Artistically we do already make use of this transition, from three to two and on to one dimension. If we cultivated more intensely this artistic perception of the human form, we should find more easily the transition to the soul's life. For you would never be able to feel a being, unsymmetrically formed, as a being of united and harmonious Feeling.

Look at the star-fish. It has not this symmetrical form. It has five rays. Of course you can pass it by without any inner feeling. But if you perceive it feelingly, you could never say that the star-fish has a united feeling-life. The star-fish cannot possibly relate a right-hand to a left-hand side, or grasp a right-hand with a left-hand member. The star-fish must continually relate the one ray to one or two or three, or even to all four remaining rays. What we know as Feeling cannot live in the star-fish at all.

I beg you to follow me along this intimate line of thought. What we know as Feeling comes from the right and from the left, and finds itself at rest in the middle. We go through the world by placing ourselves with our Feeling restfully into the world. The star-fish cannot do so. Whatever the star-fish has, as influence of the world upon itself, it cannot relate it symmetrically to another side. It can only relate it to one, or two, or to the third or fourth ray. But the first influence will always be more powerful. Thus the star-fish has no Feeling-life at rest within itself. When, as it were, it turns its attention to the one side, then by the whole arrangement of its form it will experience: ‘You are raying out in that direction, thither you are sending forth a ray.’ The star-fish has no restfulness in feeling. It has the feeling of shooting forth out of itself. It feels itself as raying forth in the world.

If you develop your feelings in a more intimate way, you will be able to experience this even as you contemplate the star-fish. Observing the end-point of any one ray and relating it to the creature as a whole, in your imagination the star-fish will begin to move in the direction of this ray, as it were a streaming, wandering light. And so it is with all the other animals which are not symmetrically built, which have no real access of symmetry.

If man would only enter into this more intimate way of Feeling—instead of giving himself up entirely to the intellectual, merely because in the course of time he had to become an intellectual being,—then indeed he would find his way far more intimately into the world.

It is so also in a certain sense for the plant world, and for all things that surround us. True self-knowledge takes us ever farther and farther into the inwardness of things.

During the time when the construction of our building is proceeding I think it is a very good thing for us to try to grow more and more into its meaning. We have already made a beginning with the two previous lectures and we will try as far as we can, by means of further study, really to become one with what is to be accomplished here.

In the first place I should like to remind you of what I said when we opened the house dedicated to the work of constructing the glass windows. The lecture referred to the evolution of thought and conception underlying the art of building and I will just briefly recapitulate what I was then only able to indicate.

In regard to the Greek Temple, I said that in a certain sense it formed a unity with the whole countryside—the whole countryside was one with it. The Temple stood there as the ‘dwelling place of the God.’ Nothing need be in the Greek Temple save the spiritual presence of the God and his physical image. The essence of the construction of the Temple was the fact that every man engaged in his daily pursuits on the land knew that within the region where he was carrying on his work he was not merely alone with the earth but united with the spiritual world. And the token for the fact that man, as he lived on the earth, was also united with the spiritual world, was the Temple standing there like an altar in the land.

We then saw evidence of progress in architectural thought, in that the Christian art of building separated off the edifice from the land. Everyday life and the mood of exaltation by which man raised himself to the Spirit were separated from each other. The Church of Christendom is no longer actually one with the land; it serves the Spirit, apart from the countryside, and expresses the fact that when man is to rise to the Spirit he must leave the affairs of daily life, repair for a time to a place set apart and there be united with the spirit. The Church of Christendom, therefore, could no longer be what the buildings of Greece and also of Rome were in their real being. The Church of Christendom was in itself a duality, the house of the community and the house set apart for the altar and the priesthood. Man leaves the affairs of everyday life and enters into the precincts where he feels himself gazing upwards to the Spirit which comes to him from the chancel where the altar stands.

This evolution in architectural thought naturally implies the transformation of the ancient Greek form of building (which was derived purely from static and dynamic factors, the factors of space and gravity) into the form corresponding to the conception of the community being set apart.

Passing to the Gothic Cathedral we have a still later form of architectural conception. We have the striving of the community not only to bear their own personalities into the sanctuary but also their individual work, and this is expressed in the forms of Gothic architecture. We feel as if the work performed in the environment has passed into the architectural forms and rises to the Spirit like a prayer, a folding of the hands.

I also said that a real advance in architectural conception must come to pass again in our times and that this is only possible if the nearness to the Spirit which was achieved to an ever-increasing extent from the period of the Greek conception of architecture onwards to that of Gothic building—if this nearness is gradually transformed into a complete union with the Spirit. This means that buildings which should now be dedicated to life in union with the Spirit must in their very form express inner correspondence with the Spiritual. We can indeed say—if we try not to explain the thing in abstractions but to grasp it with the whole of our feeling and soul—‘All that is embodied in our life of soul through Spiritual Science implies an actual penetration into the form that is created. The Spirit is revealed in freedom, having now descended to mankind.’ Whereas the Greek placed the Temple like an altar in the land, the future and, inasmuch as we are working from out of the future in our building, the present, are placing a true expression of the Spirit in the land as the result of what the Spirit expresses in its forms.

A speech which has a message for man of the present day will arise. But all this requires that we endeavour to understand the Spirit in its forms of expression. In order to understand the Greek Temple, we tried, last time, to grasp the purely physical qualities of space and of gravity. But the Spirit does not only work according to the laws of mechanics and dynamics; it does not only reveal itself in conditions of space and energy. The Spirit is living, hence it must be expressed in our building in a living way, a truly living way. We shall not understand this any better by interpreting the Spirit symbolically, but by beginning to feel that the forms are living, that they are organs of speech flowing from the spiritual world.

Is it possible for forms to speak from the spiritual world? It is indeed possible, in many ways. Let us take a thought that is specially near to us because on the one hand it is the expression of the highest, and on the other, in its Luciferic aspect it is submerged in the lowest—let us take the idea of the Ego, of Selfhood.

The mere utterance of the word “I” or “Self” does not as yet evoke much thought in man. Many epochs will have to run their course in human history before a fully conscious idea can arise in the soul when the word “I” or “Self” is uttered. Nevertheless, Selfhood, Ego-hood, can be felt in form, and above all when we pass from a purely mathematical conception of form to a feeling in form we can acquire a perception of Ego-hood, Selfhood, in the perfect circle. If you realise this you will readily understand what follows from it. If the true, living, sentient human being, confronting a circle, senses the feeling of Ego-hood, Selfhood, arising in his soul, or if when he sees a fragment of a circle he feels that it typifies the independent Self, he is learning to live in forms. And the characteristic of really living feeling is the capacity for living in forms. If you keep this in mind you will easily be able to pass on to other things that follow from it.

The first circle I have drawn here has an unbroken line (1).

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This line however can be varied so that it shows these wavy projections (2).

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But we can go further. Let us picture to ourselves a less simple variation (4). The form moves in one direction and becomes action. If we live in this form we have the feeling that it advances, that it moves. In the forms themselves we find the quality of movement. I have here made a simple sketch of something that will appear in a complicated form in the building, but you will find that there is an absolute correspondence. Passing from the entrance at the West and thence towards the smaller structure (at the East) you will find that all the forms in the interior will evoke the feeling that the whole structure is proceeding from the West onwards to the East. This is expressed in the forms. At the West you will feel in thought that you are within a vehicle that is bearing you to the East. The very essence and meaning of these relief variations is that they do not merely appear as dead, dynamic or mechanical forms; we seem to enter a vehicle that bears us onwards. In a spiritual sense we shall not “rest” in our building; we shall be led onwards.

From this you will realise that the basic character of the forms here is quite different from the forms of the three stages of architectural thought which I have described. Up to our time architectural thought has been concerned with the qualities of lifeless, mechanical rest. Now, however architectural thought becomes the thought of speech, of inner movement, of that which draws us along with it. This is what is new in the whole conception, and the basic form must of course correspond to it. In what way does the basic form correspond to it? Now I have said that the most intimate of all impressions is that of the Self, the Ego, as expressed in the circle or sphere. Why is this? It is because the simple circle or sphere is of all forms the most easily perceptible. It is an absolutely simple matter to recognise a circle. All that is necessary is the most trivial thought that everything is equidistant from the central point. As soon as we picture to ourselves points standing at an equal distance from this centre, we have the sphere, or circle. It is the very easiest process that can be carried out in thought. As form, then, the circle is the simplest of all entities. This is also in accordance with external reality, for the Selfhood in every being, from the simplest cell to the complex human being, is the simplest of all impressions, just like the circle or sphere. Behind all this there is something much deeper and I want you now to follow me in a thought that will lead those who really understand it, to great profundities.

Now the form of an ellipse is more complex than that of the circle. I will draw the form of an ordinary ellipse. It need not be exact but merely have the general character of an ellipse. The simplicity of the thought is no longer there when we pass to the ellipse. Although the ellipse is still spherical, we have no longer the nature of equality as in the case of the circle. Here I must ask those who have studied geometry—although for politeness sake we will assume that you all know a little of geometry though you may have forgotten some of it—to try to understand the following ideas. There is also order and regularity in the ellipse. Just as the circle is related to one point, the ellipse is related to two.

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In the case of the circle there is no such feeling of satisfaction, for the circle is so immediately obvious. The ellipse causes us greater joy because there we have to be inwardly active. The more one is inwardly active, the greater joy one has. What is often so difficult to realise is that man, in his inner being, craves for activity. If he wants to be lazy this is merely an affair of his conscious life. The astral body is not only wiser, but also more industrious and would like always to be active.

Now there is another line consisting, of course, always of two portions. Those who have studied geometry will know that the hyperbola consists of two symmetrical curves.

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Man is thus a mathematician in the substrata of his consciousness and by means of subconscious calculation we create for ourselves regularity of form. We add and subtract, but we can also multiply. Here again we have two points. Multiplying the one by the other we again get a line that looks somewhat like the ellipse but is not the same. This line contains an inner process of multiplication.

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This line has something mysterious about it. The circle is a simple entity, the ellipse already more complicated, the hyperbola still more so, for I do not think that the ordinary person sees only one single line in the two curves. The ordinary intellect believes there are two curves. The ordinary intellect believes there are two lines, but in reality this is not so. The other line is mysterious for another reason, for according to what is produced by multiplication the line is changed into this curious form. It is the curve of multiplication, the curve of Cassini, the lemniscate which plays so important a rôle in occult investigations. The line can develop in such a way that it assumes these forms. There are two lines, you see, but in the inner sense there is really one line, and when we feel it as one line in the astral world we know that this form (o-o) is only a specialisation of this form ( ∞ ). But now think—this form ( ∞ ) disappears into the fourth dimension—then appears again and enters the physical world. It is an unity because it ever and again disappears into the fourth dimension. This multiplication process has really three different forms.

We have therefore a line of addition, a line of subtraction, a line of multiplication. Someone may say that there must then be a line of division, the fourth method of calculation.

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We add and get the ellipse.
We subtract and get the hyperbola.
We multiply and get the curves of Cassini, the Lemniscate.
We divide and get the circle.

Now we have something very remarkable indeed. When we really try to penetrate into the depths of nature they appear before the soul in all their wonder. The circle appears to be an utterly simple entity but it is, nevertheless, full of mystery. The circle can also be understood by taking two points and dividing, and inasmuch as the same result is arrived at, we get the circle. The circle is thus something very remarkable. It is the simplest of all entities and yet it is the product of an occult process of division that is brought into consciousness. It is just the same in the case of the self of man: the ordinary self is the simple entity and the higher self the mysterious entity resting in the depths of being—a self that can only be found when we transcend its limits and pay heed to the world with which it is connected. The circle is the same whether we say that it is the simplest of all forms or that the product of division from two points is always the same. Just as we have the same circle, so we have within ourselves a duality: something that belongs to everyday life and is readily perceptible, and something that we only grasp when we go out to the whole universe, conceiving of this entity as the most complicated product of the great cosmic struggle where Ahriman and Lucifer carry out the division and where our own higher self has to maintain itself as the quotient if it is ever to come to expression.

Portions of the ellipse and of the hyperbola and also of the curves of Cassini will be found everywhere in our building, and your astral bodies will have plenty of opportunity to make these calculations! Here I will only mention one instance: when people go into our building and stand in the gallery where the organ and the singers will stand, their souls will be able to carry out this process of multiplication. The soul may not do so consciously but it will feel this process in the depths of its being, because this is the line of the structure around the organ. This line will be found in many places in the building.

After what I have now told you about the twofold meaning of the circle you will be able to realise that when you enter the building from the West and feel yourselves surrounded by the circular structure, by the cupola above, that here is the image of the human self. But the other smaller space in the East is not at first sight so intelligible. The smaller structure will seem to be full of mystery because, although its form is also circular, it must be conceived of as the result of a process of division and it only outwardly resembles the larger space. There are two circles, but the one corresponds to the life of everyday and the other is connected with the whole cosmos. We bear within us a lower self and a higher self. Both again are one. Thus our building had to be a twofold structure. Its form expresses—not in any symbolical sense but in its very being—the dual nature of man. When the curtain in front of the stage is open we shall perceive an image of man not only as he is in everyday life, but as complete man. The forms themselves express a movement from West to East, the path of the lower to the higher Self. All that I have told you can actually be felt in the forms. The erection of a building of this kind reveals how the spiritual form of nature and the higher spiritual world can be expressed. Nobody who begins to think out all kinds of ingenious interpretations will Understand our building. It can only be understood by a living feeling of the development and being of the forms. For this reason I do not want to describe the building pictorially but to speak of the mode of its development, how spiritual being itself has become form and movement and has flowed into it. Suppose anyone were to look at the interior and begin to speculate thus: ‘Yes, two cupolas, two circular structures—lower Self, higher Self; a lower Self, a higher Self—a unity.’ This may be a neat interpretation but it would be of no more value than if it were said that Maria and Johannes Thomasius in the Mystery Plays are really one being. This is a mere speculation, for it results in an abstraction. The unity lies in the living ‘becoming.’ Naturally the living powers of becoming can bring forth both Maria and Thomasius but only as the result of a differentiation. Even in similarity the true occultist will always seek for diversity, for it would be false occultism to desire always to lead back diversity to unity. Hence the example of the circle. The circle is the simplest of all entities, where all points are equidistant from the centre—but it is also the result of division. In the circle we have something that is a unity in the outer world and complex in the spiritual world.

These are some of the remarks I desired to make. On another occasion I shall speak further on these matters. I shall now speak briefly of other things.

Man, as he enters the world, is really a highly complicated being. When he enters the world—as I have often said—he cannot at first stand upright; lie crawls, and at the very beginning of his existence he does not even crawl. Gradually he learns to control the forces which make him able to stand upright.

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The advance from Gothic architecture to that of Spiritual Science may be described as follows: Gothic architecture contains the prayer: ‘O Father of the Universe, may we be united with Thee, in Thy Spirit.’ Those who know what this prayer contains, who really understand the living development of Spiritual Science, will solve the riddle of the evolution of man. And then, when the forms of architectural thought strive to be united with the Spirit—expressing this striving in their very being—man will feel how he has been permeated with the hidden Spirit and can have around him a building which is a direct expression of the living, inner development of his being.

‘We dwell in the land, but the Spirit is among us.’ This is the Greek thought of architecture.

‘We dwell for a season in the sanctuary and the Spirit comes to us.’ This is the thought behind Christian architecture.

‘We dwell for a season in the sanctuary, but we uplift the soul by raising ourselves to the Spirit.’ This is the thought behind Gothic architecture.

‘We enter with reverence into the Spirit in order that we may become one with the Spirit poured out around us in the forms—the Spirit that moves and is active, because behind the Spirits of Form stand the Spirits of Movement.’ This is the thought behind the new architecture.

Existence thus advances through earthly evolution and it is man's task to understand the inner meaning and purport of this existence. He only advances in the wake of true evolution when he endeavours, in every epoch, to experience what the spiritual world bestows in that epoch.

Why do our souls pass through different, successive incarnations? Not in order that we may repeat the same experiences, nor that we may pass through re-birth, re-naissance, again and again, but in order that we may assimilate, ever and again, the new that pours into our souls from out the spiritual worlds. We are standing at a definite point in the evolution of humanity in the sphere of art and in many other spheres of spiritual life—at a point where the Spirit speaks clearly to us of new riddles. And just as in the time of the Renaissance man was destined primarily to orientate himself to the past in order to work his way through to the new, so it is with our own external knowledge and perception of the universe. All that has been produced by the modern age since the sixteenth century is only the preparation for a living experience of the universe in its forms and movements which now stand before us as riddles.

This, then, is all for to-day. In another lecture I will try to approach questions of a still more intimate character—questions relating to the living soul of nature in connection with colour and the art of painting.

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In connection with the public lectures and public gatherings, it always affords me a satisfaction also to be able to address this Group here in The Hague, and I shall try this evening to say some things that may be to you a more intimate continuation, a supplement, of what I was able to express in the public lectures. (Lectures given in The Hague, Rotterdam, and Delft, Holland, from October 31 to November 6, 1922)

In order to have knowledge of the spiritual world and for the acquirement of an inner life with the spiritual world, it is necessary most of all to see in the right light that which one might call the concealed aspects of human existence. Indeed, the concealed aspects of human existence are the more important aspects for the comprehensive judging and evaluation of human life. This may not be admitted willingly by people who merely think superficially and materially, but it is none the less true. No one can become acquainted with human existence, unless he is able to enter into its concealed aspects.

One could, perhaps, if I may thus express myself, demur against the Gods and say that they have put the most precious thing for man into the concealed aspects of his life; that they have not afforded him what is most precious in the visible aspect of life. If this had been done, man would in a higher sense remain impotent. We acquire spirit-soul strength, which then can permeate our whole being, through the very fact that we must first achieve our genuine human dignity and our human nature, that we must first do something in the realm of our soul and spirit in order to become man at all in the right sense of the word. And in this victory, in this necessity of having first to accomplish something to become man, in this lies that which can fill us with strength, which can permeate with forces the innermost depth of our being.

In order, therefore, to explain more definitely this leading theme which I have introduced today, I will speak to you again from a certain viewpoint about that concealed aspect of human existence which is enveloped in the unconsciousness of sleep. And then I will bring to your attention something of that which lies enveloped in states of existence that remain unconscious during earth life: those states of existence in pre-earthly life and the life after death.

The sleep life takes place in such a way for man that, after the transition through dreams—which have, however, but a very dubious existence and a very dubious significance for human life, if one simply accepts them as they present themselves—he falls into the unconsciousness of sleep, out of which he emerges only on awakening, when he immerses himself with his ego and his astral body in the ether body and physical body; that is, when he makes use of both these principles as a tool in order to perceive his physical environment and then to work within this physical environment through his will. But that which lies beyond birth and death is enveloped in that very part of man's being which becomes unconscious when he falls asleep... And the conditions which the human being experiences there I will describe to you as though they were conscious. They can become conscious only to the imaginative, the inspirative, and the intuitive consciousness. But the difference between this and what every man experiences in the night is only a difference in knowledge. The individual who, as a modern initiate, looks into the sleep life knows how it is, but this does not make the life of sleep into something different for him from what it is for every man, even for the one who passes through it quite unconsciously. Thus our description can be in conformity with reality when we describe that which remains unconscious as though the human being experienced it consciously. And this is what I shall now do.

After the transition through dreams—as I intimated before—man passes, as regards the normal consciousness, into unconsciousness. But the reality of this unconscious state, as it manifests itself to the higher, supersensible knowledge, is that, directly after falling asleep, man enters into a sort of contourless existence. If he should realize his condition consciously, he would feel himself poured out into an etheric realm. He would feel himself outside of his body, not limited, however, but widely diffused; he would sense or observe his body as some object outside of himself. If this condition should become conscious, it would be filled, as regards man's soul nature, with a certain inner anxiety or uneasiness. He feels that he has lost the firm support of the body, as though he stood before an abyss.

What is called the Threshold of the Spiritual World has to exist for the reason that the human being must first prepare himself to have this feeling, the feeling of having lost that support which the physical body affords, and to bear that anxiety in the soul which is caused by his facing something entirely unknown, something indeterminate.

As I stated, this feeling of anxiety does not exist for the ordinary sleeper; it is not in his consciousness, but he does pass through it, nevertheless. That which constitutes anxiety, for instance, in every-day physical existence is expressed in certain processes, even though they be subtle processes of the physical body: when man senses anxiety, certain vascular activities in the physical body are different from what they are when he feels no anxiety. Something occurs objectively besides what the human being feels as anxiety, restlessness, etc., in his consciousness. This objective element of a soul-spirit anxiety man experiences while he enters through the portal of sleep into the sleep state. But with the feeling of anxiety something else is connected: a feeling of deep longing for a Divine-Spiritual Reality that streams and weaves through the cosmos.

If man should experience in full consciousness the first moments after falling asleep—or even hours, perhaps, in the case of many persons—he would be in this state of anxiety and of longing for the Divine. The fact that we feel religiously inclined at all during the waking life depends first of all upon the fact that this feeling of anxiety and this longing for the Divine which we experience in the night have their after-effects upon the mood of the day. Spiritual experiences projected, so to speak, into physical life fill us with the after-effect of that anxiety which impels us to crave to know the Real in the world; they fill us with the after-effect of the longing we bear while asleep, and they express themselves as religious feelings during the waking hours of the day.

But such is the case only during the first stages of sleep. If sleep continues, something peculiar occurs; the soul exists as though split, as though split up into many souls. If the human being should experience this condition consciously—which only the modern initiate can completely behold—he would have the sensation of being many souls and consequently think that he had lost himself. Every one of these soul beings, which really are merely shadowy images of souls, represents something in which he has lost himself. In this state of sleep the human being has a different appearance according as we observe him before or after the Mystery of Golgotha. Namely, the human being requires cosmic aid from without in regard to this condition, if I may so express it, of being split into many soul reflections.

In olden times, preceding the Mystery of Golgotha, the initiates, the old initiates, gave to the people indirectly through their pupils, through the teachers whom they sent out into the world for mankind, certain religious instructions which evoked feelings during their waking life. And these instructions, which were expressed by the people in ritual acts, strengthened their souls so that the human being carried, in turn, a sort of after-effect of this religious mood over into his sleep life.

You can see the reciprocal action between being asleep and being awake! On the one hand the human being, in his longing for the Divine during the first stage of sleep, experiences that which induces him to develop religion during waking life. If this religion is developed during the waking life—and it was developed through the influence of the initiates—it has its effect again upon the second stage of sleep: through the after-effect of this religious mood the soul has then sufficient strength to bear the sensation of being split—at least to exist at all amidst this plurality.

This truly is the difficulty that irreligious people have: they have no such aid during the night in regard to this being split into many souls and thus they carry these experiences over into the waking life without the strength that religion affords. For every experience we have during the night has its aftereffect in the waking life. It has not yet been a very long time since irreligion and non-religiousness began to play so large a, part among mankind as it did during the last century, the 19th century. People still experienced the aftereffect of the influence of what earlier, more sincere, religious times meant to the human being. But, since the irreligious times continue, the ultimate result will be significant: people will carry the after-effect of this splitting of their souls from their sleep state over into their waking life, and this will principally contribute to the fact that they will not have the forces of coherence in their organism to distribute properly the nourishing effect of the food in their organism. And mankind will be afflicted with significant diseases in the near future as a consequence of this irreligion.

We must, indeed, not think that the spirit-soul part of our being has no bearing upon the physical! Its relation is not such that irreligious development will be immediately punished with disease by some kind of demoniacal gods—life does not run its course in such a superficial manner—but there does exist, nevertheless, an intimate relation between our experience in the realm of soul and spirit and our physical constitution. In order to possess health during the waking hours of the day, it is essential that we carry into our sleep life the feeling of our unity with the divine-spiritual Beings, in whose realm of activity we immerse the eternal kernel of our own being. And it is only by a right existence within a spirit-soul world between falling asleep and awakening that we can produce the right and health-bringing forces of a spirit-soul element, so necessary for our waking life.

During this second stage of sleep the human being acquires, not a cosmic consciousness, but a cosmic experience in lieu of the ordinary physical consciousness. As stated before, only the initiate goes through this cosmic experience consciously, but everyone has this experience in the night between falling asleep and waking up. And in this second stage of sleep the human being is in such a state of life that his inner nature carries out imitations of the planetary movements of our solar system. During the days we experience ourselves in our physical body. When we speak of ourselves as physical human beings, we say that inside of us are our lungs, our heart, our stomach, our brain, etc. ... this constitutes our physical inner nature. In the second stage of sleep the movement of Venus, of Mercury, of the sun, and of the moon constitute our inner spirit-soul nature. This whole reciprocal action of the planetary movements of our solar system, we do not bear it directly within us, not the planetary movements themselves; but facsimiles, astral facsimiles of them then constitute our inner organism. To be sure, we are not spread out into the entire planetary cosmos, but we are of extraordinary size, compared with our physical size in the daytime. We do not bear within us the real Venus each time that we are in the state of sleep, but a facsimile of its movement. In the second stage of sleep, between falling asleep and awakening, that which occurs in the spirit-soul part of our being consists of these circulations of the planetary movements in astral substance, just as our blood circulates through our physical organism during the day, stimulated by the movement of breathing. Thus through the night we have circulating within us as our inner life, so to speak, a facsimile of our cosmos.

Before we can experience this circulation of the planetary after-effects we must first experience the splitting of the soul. As I said before, the people of olden times, previous to the Mystery of Golgotha, received instructions from their initiates, in order that they might be able to bear this splitting of the soul and that the soul should find its way within these movements which now constituted its inner life. Since the Mystery of Golgotha something else has taken the place of this old teaching. Namely, something has occurred which the human being can now appropriate inwardly to himself as a feeling, a sentiment, a soul life, and a soul mood, when he really feels himself one with the deed which was accomplished for mankind by the Christ Being through the Mystery of Golgotha here on earth. The individual who truly feels his unity with the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha to the degree that in him are fulfilled the words of St. Paul: “Not I, but the Christ in me”, he has, through this unity with the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha, developed something in his feeling which has its after-effect in sleep, so that he now has the strength to overcome the splitting of his soul and the power to find his way in the labyrinth of the planetary orbits which now constitute his inner self. For we must find our way, even though we are not conscious in our inner being of that which constitutes for the soul the planetary circulation in place of the blood circulation during the day, which now continues in the physical body we have abandoned.

After this experience, we enter the third stage of sleep. In this third stage we have an additional experience—of course, the experiences of the preceding stage always remain and the experiences of the next stage are added thereto—in the third stage is included, what I should like to call the experience of the fixed stars. After experiencing the circulation of the planetary facsimiles we actually experience the formations of the fixed stars, that which in former times, for instance, was called the images of the Zodiac. And this experience is essential to the soul aspect of the human being, because he has to carry the after-effect of this experience with the fixed stars into his waking life in order to have the strength at all to control and vitalize his physical organism at all times through his soul.

It is a fact that, during the night, every human being first experiences an etheric preliminary state of cosmic anxiety and longing for the Divine, then a planetary state, as he feels the facsimiles of the planetary movements in his astral body, and he has the experience of the fixed stars in that he feels—or would feel if he were conscious—that he experiences his own soul-spiritual inner self as a facsimile of the heavens, of the fixed stars.

Now, my dear friends, for the one who has insight into these different stages of sleep, a significant question arises, I might say, every night. The human soul, the astral organism, and the ego being, leave the physical body, their inner self is filled with facsimiles of the planetary movements and of the constellations of the fixed stars. The question arising now is this: “How is it that every morning, after each sleep, the human being returns to his physical body again?”

And it is here where the science of initiation discovers that the human being would actually not return if, on entering the planetary movements and the constellations of the fixed stars, he did not also live his way into the forces of the moon while expanding outward into the facsimiles of cosmic existence. He lives his way into the spiritual forces of the moon, into those cosmic forces which are reflected in the physical moon and in the moon-phases.

While all other planetary and fixed star forces actually draw the human being out of his physical body, it is the lunar forces which again and again return him, when he wakes, to his physical body. The moon is connected in general with all that brings the human being from his spiritual life into the physical life. It, therefore, makes no difference—the physical constellation is not the thing to be considered, although a certain significance attaches thereto—whether we have to do with new moon, full moon, the first or last quarter of the moon; in the spiritual world the moon is always present. It is the lunar forces which lead the human being back into the physical world, into his physical body.

You can see, my dear friends, that, as I briefly describe to you the experience the human being has between falling asleep and awakening, I am, upon the whole, giving you something of a general description of his sojourn in the spiritual world. And this is the state of the matter. Fundamentally, we experience every night a reflection of the life between death and a new birth. If we look into pre-earthly life with the imaginative, the inspirative, and the intuitive consciousness, we see ourselves first of all as spirit-soul human beings in a very early state of pre-earthly existence. We see ourselves possessed of a cosmic consciousness. Our life there is not a reflection of the cosmos, as is our sleep life, but we are actually diffused through the real cosmos. About the middle of our life between death and a new birth we feel ourselves as spirit-soul beings, fully conscious—in fact with a much clearer and more intensive consciousness than we could possibly have anywhere upon the earth—surrounded by divine-spiritual Beings, by the divine-spiritual Hierarchies. And, just as we work with nature's forces here on earth, just as we use external objects of nature as tools, so in the same way does work take place between us and the Beings of the higher spiritual Hierarchies.

And what manner of work is this? This work consists in the fact that the spirit-soul human being, conjointly with an enormous number of sublime spiritual Beings of the cosmos, is weaving the cosmic spirit-germ of his physical human body in the spiritual realm. However peculiar this may seem to you—to weave the physical human body as spiritual germ out of the whole cosmos—it is the greatest, the most significant piece of work conceivable in the cosmos. And not only does the human soul in the state described work at this, but the human soul works at it conjointly with whole hosts of divine-spiritual Beings. For, if you visualize the most complicated thing that can be formed here on earth, you find it primitive and simple in contrast with that mighty fabric of cosmic vastness and grandeur which is woven there and which, compressed and condensed through conception and through birth, becomes permeated with physical earth matter and then becomes the human physical body.

When we refer to a germ here on earth, we think of it as a small germ which afterwards becomes relatively large. But, when we refer to the cosmic spirit-germ in relation to the human body as a product of the spiritual, this germ is of gigantic size. And from that moment on, which I have pointed out to you, when the soul is coming towards its birth, the soul-spiritually magnificent human germ is gradually diminishing. The human being continues to work at it with the aim constantly in view that this will be woven together, pressed together, condensed into the physical human body.

It was really not without reason that the older initiates—through a kind of clairvoyance which, to be sure, is no longer suitable to us, although the more recent science of initiation shows the same fact—that the older initiates called the human body the Temple of the Gods. It is the Temple of the Gods, for it is woven out of the cosmos by the human soul conjointly with divine Beings each time between death and a new birth. Later on—in a manner still to be described—the human being is given his physical form. While the human being is weaving the spirit-germ of his physical body at the stage indicated, he is, as regards his soul being, in a condition, in a mood, that can only be compared with what the modern initiates call intuition. The human being lives with his soul within the activity of Gods. He is wholly diffused in cosmic-divine existence. In this state halfway between death and a new birth he is participating in the life of the Gods.

But then, as the human being proceeds on his way, as he comes closer to conception or birth, a change takes place. In a certain way, his consciousness is then impressed with the fact that the divine-spiritual Beings of the Higher Hierarchies are withdrawing from him. And there appears to him only something like a revelation, like a reflection, as if the Gods had withdrawn and only their nebulous images were still standing before the human soul, and as if a kind of veil were being woven as a nebulous imitation of that which in reality had been woven before. The intuitive consciousness he formerly possessed now changes to a cosmic inspired consciousness. The human being lives no more with the divine-spiritual Beings of the Higher Hierarchies; he lives with their manifestation. But in place of this an inner ego develops more and more within the soul consciousness. During the climax, I might say, of life between death and a new birth, the human being lives entirely with the divine-spiritual Beings of the Higher Hierarchies; the ego has no inner strength; it becomes conscious again of its inner self only when the Gods withdraw and only their manifestation remains. The glory of the Gods, their radiation, enters a kind of inspired consciousness; but, as a recompense, the human being feels himself as a self-existent being. And that which now awakens first in him is, I might say, an eager desire, a kind of craving.

Midway between death and a new birth, the human being works at the spirit-germ of his physical body, so to speak, out of a deep inner satisfaction. Although he realizes that the ultimate goal will be his physical body in his next earthly life, he is not permeated with an eager desire, but only—we might say—with admiration for this physical human body, considered from a universal standpoint. At the moment when the human beings is living no more in divine worlds, but only in the manifestations of divine worlds, the eager desire arises in him to reincarnate upon the earth. Just while the ego consciousness is becoming continually stronger does this eager desire awaken. We withdraw, so to speak, from the divine worlds and come closer to what we shall become as earthly human beings. This eager desire becomes continually stronger, and what we see around us is also undergoing a change. Prior to this, we were living in nothing but Beings, in the divine-spiritual Hierarchies; we knew ourselves to be one with them. When we spoke of our inner self we were really speaking of the cosmos—but the cosmos itself consisted of Beings, Beings in sublime stages of consciousness with whom we were living. Now an outer glory is to be seen, and in this outer glory the first images gradually appear of that which, ultimately, are the physical reflections of the divine-spiritual Beings. This glory emanates from the Being which man knew there beyond as the Sublime Solar Being, and in this glory appears, so to speak, the sun as seen from without, or as seen from the world. Here on earth we look up to the sun. There, while descending to the earth, we at first see the sun from the other side. But the sun emerges, the fixed stars emerge, and behind the fixed stars the planetary movements emerge. And with the emergence of the planetary movements a quite definite kind of forces emerges: the spiritual forces of the moon; they now take control of us. It is these lunar forces which, little by little, carry us back into the earthly life.

Such is actually the aspect of things which the human being beholds on his descent from cosmic worlds to earthly existence: that, after an experience of divine-spiritual Hierarchies, he proceeds to images of them. But these images of Beings gradually become star-images, and the human being enters into something which, I might say, he first sees from behind: he enters that which is manifest from the earth as the cosmos. The details of what the human being there consummates can be discerned, and the modern science of initiation can penetrate quite deeply into what man there experiences.

Just through details in this domain do we begin to become acquainted with life. For no one knows life who is able to see the human being in connection with earthly existence alone. What great value does our connection with the earthly existence have for us then? During the enormously long stretches of time between death and a new birth the earth, at first, really means nothing to us, and that which gleams towards us, as the external, so to speak, is transmuted into entire worlds of Gods, in which we live during these long stretches of time and which appear externally to us again as stars only when we are nearing the earth for another earthly existence.

What the human being at first wove, as the spirit-germ of his physical body, he knows, for the time being, to be one with the whole universe, with the spiritual universe. Later, when he sees only the manifestation of the divine-spiritual worlds, this germ gradually becomes his body, which is now also a facsimile of the cosmos. And out of this—his body—arises the eager desire for an earthly existence, for an ego consciousness in his body.

This body now still contains much which is untouched by the earthly existence, for it is a spirit body. As regards this body, the fact still remains entirely undetermined at a certain stage whether, for instance, the human being will be a male or a female personality in his next earthly existence. For, during this whole time between death and a new birth, up to a very late stage, before we are born upon the earth, there is no meaning in the question of man or woman. The conditions there differ entirely from those that are reflected on earth as man and woman. There are also conditions which occur in the spiritual existence and are reflected on the earth; but that which appears on earth as man and woman acquires significance only relatively late, prior to our descent to earth. When the human being, according to certain former karmic connections, thinks it best to experience his next incarnation on earth as a woman, we can trace in detail how, on his descent to the earth in order to unite with the physical embryo, he chooses that time which is known here on earth as the time of full moon.

We can say, therefore, when we are looking from any region here on earth at the full moon, that we then have the time which the beings choose for their descent to the earth who desire to become women, for then only is this decision made. And the time of new moon is the time which beings choose who wish to become men.

Thus, you see, the human being enters his earthly existence through the portal of the moon. But the force which the male requires in order to enter life on earth is then flowing out into the cosmos; we move toward it as we come in from the cosmos, and this force is radiated by the moon when it is known as new moon for the earth. The force which the female requires is radiated from the moon when it is the full moon; then its illuminated side is turned toward the earth, and its unilluminated side is toward the cosmos—and this force, which the moon can send out into the cosmos from its unilluminated side, the human being requires if he wishes to become a woman.

What I have now been describing to you shows that the ancient concept of astrology, which nowadays has been brought to a complete decadence by the ordinary astrologers, was well grounded. Only, we must be able to achieve an inner view of the connection of things. We must not look merely at the physical constellation in a calculating manner, but must see into the corresponding spiritual element. There it is really possible to enter into details.

As you know, the human being descends from the cosmos in a definite state. From the spiritual cosmos he enters the etheric cosmos. Now I am still speaking of the etheric cosmos alone; the physical aspect of the stars is, in this connections, taken less into consideration, as is, likewise, the physical aspect of the moon. The essential moment when the human being decides to descend to the earth depends, as I have stated, upon the phase of the moon during this descent, and thus it may happen that he exposes himself to a decisive new moon in order to become a man, or to a decisive full moon to become a woman. But then—since the descent is not made so very rapidly, but he remains exposed for some time—if he is descending through the new moon as a man, he may still, for one reason or another, decide to expose himself to the coming full moon. Thus he has made the decision to descend as a male; he has made use to this end of the forces of the new moon; but, during his descent, he still has at his disposal the remainder of the moon's cycle, the phase of the full moon. He then fills himself with lunar forces in such a way that they do not affect his condition as man or woman, but rather the organization of his head, and what is connected with the organization of his head from without, from the cosmos, if that constellation occurs of which I have just spoken. Thus, after the human being has made the decision; “I shall become a man through the time of the new moon”, and continues living in the cosmos, so that he has not passed completely through the lunar influence but is still exposed to the next full moon, then, through the influence of the lunar forces in this condition he will, for instance, have brown eyes and black hair. Thus we may say that the manner in which the human being passes the moon determines not only his sex, but also the color of his eyes and hair. If, for instance, the human being has passed the full moon as a woman and is later exposed to a new moon, the result may be a woman with blue eyes and blond hair.

Grotesque as this may seem, we are absolutely predestined by the manner of our experience through the cosmos, as to the way in which our soul-spirit organism works its way into our physical and our etheric organism. Prior to this time there has been no decision made as to our becoming a blond or a brunette; this is determined only by the lunar forces as we pass them, on our descent from the cosmos into earthly existence.

And just as we pass by the moon, which really guides us into earthly existence, so do we pass by the other planets. It is not immaterial, for example, whether we pass Saturn in one or another way. We may pass by Saturn, for instance, when the constellation is such that the force of Saturn and the force of Leo in the Zodiac co-operate. Because of our passing the region of Saturn just as its force is being increased through Leo in the Zodiac, our soul will—conditioned, of course, by our preceding karma—acquire the strength to meet intelligently the outer contingencies of life so that they do not defeat us over and over again. If, however, Saturn is being dominated more by Capricorn, we shall become weak human beings that do succumb to the outer contingencies of life.

All these experiences we bear within us as we prepare from the cosmos our earthly existence. Of course, we can overcome this through an appropriate training, but not by voicing the opinion of the materialists that all this is nonsense, that we need not pay any attention to it at all. On the contrary, it can be overcome by the fact that we develop these forces, really develop them. And in the future mankind will learn again, not only to insure that a child shall have good milk to drink and good food to eat—although no objection is to be made to this—but mankind will learn again to observe whether this or that person has within him forces of Saturn or Jupiter active under this or that influence.

Let us suppose that we find that a human being has within him, through his karma, forces of Saturn under the most unfavorable influence—of Capricorn or of Aquarius, for instance—so that he is exposed to all life's difficulties. Then, in order to strengthen him we shall search most carefully for other forces within him. For instance, we shall ask ourselves whether he has experienced the passage through the sphere of Jupiter, of Mars, or through any other sphere. And we shall always be able to correct and annul one condition by means of the other.

We shall simply have to learn to think of the human being not only in relation to what he begins to eat and drink in the earthly existence, but we shall have to consider him in relation to what he becomes, because of his having passed through the cosmic worlds between death and a new birth.

When the human being is close to his earthly course of life, then he experiences a sort of loss of his being. You know from my description that he was connected with what he has woven as the spirit-germ of his physical body. Into this spirit-germ he has woven, besides, the experiences during the descent through fixed stars and planets. At a definite stage, actually quite close to conception and birth, this spirit-germ is no longer there. It has, in the meanwhile, descended with its forces as a system of forces to the earth. It has fallen from the human being. It has united itself on the earth independently with the physical substance of heredity which the ancestors, father and mother, afford. What is being woven there in the organism descends to the earth sooner than the human being himself as a spirit-soul being. And then, when the human being realizes that he has actually surrendered to the parents that which he himself had woven in the cosmos, he is able, in the last stage prior to his earthly existence, to take to himself from the etheric world what is essential for his own etheric organism—since there is no longer a necessity to do any more weaving on his physical body, which is essentially complete and has been surrendered to and been made a part of the flow of heredity. Now he draws together his etheric organism; and, together with this latter, he unites with that which he himself has prepared through his parents. He takes possession of his physical body, in which all this cosmic fabric of the spirit-germ is drawn together, and which is interwoven with what the human being himself united with it as he descended through this or that stellar region. It is, indeed, not arbitrarily that he passes through new moon or full moon and causes himself to become man or woman, or to have black or blond hair or blue or brown eyes, but all this is intimately connected with the results of his preceding karma.

This shows you that, whereas the human being in the sleep state experiences as his inner nature merely facsimiles of the planetary world, the world of the fixed stars, he now passes through these worlds in their reality between death and a new birth. He passes through these worlds; they become his inner nature. And it is always the lunar forces which bring us back to the earth. They differ essentially from all other stellar forces in this respect, in that they bring us back to the earth. In the sleep state they bring us back to the earth; they bring us back also after we have experienced all that I have briefly described, in order to enter once more a life course on the earth.

But let us consider once again that which is there outside of the physical body, in the form of astral body and ego organization, between falling asleep and awakening. It is not fabricated from physical bones and physical blood; it is a spirit-soul entity. But our whole moral intrinsic quality is woven into it. Just as we consist, when awake, of bones, blood, and nerves, so does that which leaves us during sleep and returns on awakening consist of the actualized judgments of our moral deeds. If I have accomplished a good deed during the day, its effect is reflected in my sleep body within the spirit-soul substance that leaves me during sleep. My moral quality lives within this. And, when the human being passes through the Portal of Death, he takes with him his whole actualized moral evaluation. It is a fact that, between birth and death in the earthly life, the human being creates within himself a second being. This second human being, who leaves the body every night, is the result of our moral or immoral life, and we take it with us through the Portal of Death. This result, which is merged with our eternal essential being, is not the only element we possess within the spirit-soul substance which passes out of us during the night. Just after death, however, when we are first in the ether body and then in the astral body, we hardly see anything in ourselves but this moral entity of our being. Whether we were good or bad, this is what we behold; we are this. Just as here on earth we are a, human being in whom the skin forces, or the nerve forces, or the blood forces, or the bone forces predominate, so, after death, we are, to our own perception, what we were, morally or immorally.

And now after death we proceed on our way, first through the sphere of the moon, then through the sphere of the fixed stars... until the time arrives when we can begin to work with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies on the spirit-germ of our future physical body. But, if we were to take this moral element up into the highest worlds, where we are to weave our future physical organism in its spirit-germ, this physical organism would turn out to be a monstrosity. For a certain length of time between death and a new birth, the human being must be separated from what constitutes his moral quality. Indeed, he leaves his moral quality behind in the moon sphere.

It is an actual fact that, when leaving the moon sphere, we leave our moral and immoral human being in the moon sphere and enter into the pure sphere of the Gods, where we can weave our physical body.

I must now revert again to the difference between the times prior to the Mystery of Golgotha and those following it, including the present. The older initiates made very clear to their pupils—and through them to all mankind of the civilization of that time—that, in order to be able to find the transition from the world which I called in my book Theosophy the soul-world, and which we really experience in its entirety while still in the moon sphere, into the world which I called the spirit-land, the human being must develop on earth the feelings that enable him to be led upward by the spiritual Sun Being, after having left behind the whole bundle of his moral after-effects in the moon sphere.

All that history relates to us in regard to the first three Christian centuries, and even the fourth century, is fundamentally a falsification; for in those centuries Christianity was quite different from the thing described. It was something quite different for the reason that within it there held sway the conception which came from understanding the ancient science of initiation. From this wisdom of initiation it was known that, in the life after death, the sublime Sun Being led the human being out of the moon sphere, after he had left behind his moral bundle, and, on his return, led him back again into the moon sphere. This gave the human being the strength—which he could not have had through himself—to make this moral being a part of himself, at a certain time before his birth, in order to fulfill his destiny on earth within his soul, and to prevent it from entering his body. For otherwise, the human being would be born a monstrosity and be utterly diseased in his body. This moral bundle had to be taken over again in the moon sphere, during the descent, in order that it should not enter into the body.

Those initiates who were living at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and even in the three or four centuries following thereafter, said to their pupils: Previously the sublime Sun Being was only above in the spiritual worlds. But, as mankind progressed, the ego consciousness has become so bright upon the earth that it becomes all the more obscured in the spiritual world. In other words, the brighter our ego consciousness is by means of the physical body only, here below on the earth, the darker is it above. The human being would no longer come into contact with the Sun Being, he would not find through his own power the transition after death from the moon sphere to the higher spheres, had the Christ not descended and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. The Being whom the human being met formerly after death only in the spiritual world has now descended; He has lived here upon earth ever since the Mystery of Golgotha; and now the human being can establish a relation to Him according to the words of St. Paul: “Not I, but the Christ in me”. In this way the human being takes strength from the earth with him, strength given to him by the Christ here on this earth, which enables him to leave behind in the moon sphere his moral being which he creates within himself and to proceed to higher spheres, there to work on the spirit-germ of his physical body. It also gives him the strength on his descent through the moon sphere to take up his karma again of his own free will, take up the after-effects of his good and evil deeds. In the course of historical evolution, we have become free human beings. But the reason we have become such is that the Christ force we have acquired has enabled us through free inner strength to take over our karma on our descent through the moon sphere. No matter whether we like this or do not like it here on earth, we do this at the stage I have described, if we have become true Christians on earth.

I have been endeavoring, my dear friends, to show you a little of the way in which the modern science of initiation can see into worlds which we might call the concealed aspects of human existence, to show you how really everything pertaining to the human being can be elucidated only as we are able to see into these concealed aspects. And at the same time I tried to show you in connection therewith what the Christ Impulse means to mankind of the present time; for we will have constantly to revert to it. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, we cannot be a whole human being, unless we find the way to this Christ Impulse. Therefore it is necessary that Anthroposophical spiritual science shed light more and more upon the Christ Impulse in the right way. For the manner in which light was shed on the Christ Impulse in the past, when man's consciousness was obscured, would, if continued, deprive a large part of mankind—just think of the Orientals, think of the inhabitants of other continents—of the possibility of embracing Christianity. But that Christianity which is rooted deeply in Anthroposophical spiritual science will actually—if once the essence of spiritual science, as it is here intended, is understood thoroughly—be eagerly grasped particularly by the Orientals, who are endowed with an ancient spirituality, even though it is in decadence.

In this way only can that peace prevail on earth which must proceed from the soul and spirit of men, and which is so indispensable to the earth, as every impartial person feels today. We shall have to be much more convinced of the fact that all present-day thinking concerning outer institutions is really worthless, and that it is very necessary on the other hand, to appeal directly to human souls. But we can appeal to the souls only if we are able to say something to them about the true home of the soul, about the experiences of the human being that lie beyond his physical existence, in those states of consciousness I have been describing to you today. Even if those states of consciousness do not exist during the earth life, their effects do exist. Oh, my dear friends, the one who has insight into life sees in the countenance of every human being a reflection of cosmic destinies which the individual has experienced between death and a new birth!

I have described to you today how destiny—whether one has become a man or a woman—can be understood by means of the cosmos, even how the color of the eyes and hair can be understood only when we can look into cosmic existence. Nothing in this world is comprehensible unless it can be understood by means of the cosmos. The human being will feel himself to be truly a human being only when we can inform him through true spiritual knowledge of his relation with that which is back of the sensuous-physical existence. Even though the human beings on earth are not yet aware of it, mankind unconsciously thirsts for such a knowledge. What is developing convulsively today in all domains, be it the domain of the spiritual, the externally juridical, or the economic life, all is ultimately a result of the spiritual. Only as the human being learns again to know of his relation with extra-physical existence, can all this be transformed from forces of decadence into upward moving forces. For physical existence is meaningless unless seen in connection with super-physical existence. The physical human body becomes significant only then when we can see it, so to speak, as the confluence of all those sovereign forces that are woven between death and a new birth. This is the tragic character of materialistic knowledge of the world that, in the final analysis, it does not know matter itself. We lay the human body upon the dissecting table; we examine it most carefully as to its tissues and its individual physical component parts. This is done in order to acquire a knowledge of matter. But we do not learn to know it in this way, for it is the product of spirit, and only as we are able to trace it back to those stages where it is woven out of spirit do we know it. Human beings will comprehend precisely this physical-material existence only when their souls are led cosmically into the realm of soul and spirit.

If we permeate ourselves with the consciousness that we should comprehend more and more our connection with the spirit-soul realm of the cosmos, we then become true Anthroposophists. And you, my dear friends, will surely not ridicule me when I say that the world is in need today of true Anthroposophists who will bring about an ascent for humanity through that consciousness which results from experiencing the spiritual, even though at first we should only grasp it as a reflection and not ourselves have attained to clairvoyant knowledge. We need not be clairvoyant in order to work beneficently after we possess spiritual knowledge. Just as little as a person needs to know what constitutes meat when he is eating it and it nourishes him, just as little does a person need to be clairvoyant in order to be efficacious through his work and through his whole association with the life of the higher worlds. If we accept spiritual science before we are clairvoyant, it is as though we were consuming it. Fundamentally, clairvoyance adds nothing to what we can become for the world through spiritual knowledge. It satisfies merely our knowledge. This knowledge must, indeed, exist. Of course, there have to be people who examine the composition of meat, but this knowledge is not required in order to eat. Likewise there must be clairvoyant persons today who can investigate the nature of man's connection with the spiritual world; but, in order to bring about that which is essential to mankind, it is necessary that we be healthy human souls. If they are informed of the science of the spirit, they will sense the digestive power of the soul nature; they will appropriate this spiritual science, digest it, and assimilate it into their work. And this is what we need today throughout the civilized world: external human work which is spiritualized through and through in the right and true sense.

Appendix

In connection with this lecture that Rudolf Steiner gave on November 5, 1922, in The Hague, he addressed the members of the Anthroposophical Society in the following words:

“And now, my dear friends, after these explanations permit me to add some remarks to today's lecture which are, to a certain degree, connected with the lecture itself. Pardon me for speaking of my own anxieties. These anxieties of my own, to be brief, have to do with the possibility of being able to go on with the building of the Goetheanum, in Dornach.

My dear friends, the fact is that since the building of the Goetheanum has been begun, and it is in large part completed, it must be continued to completion. What if this could not be done? This is bound up with the very fact that this Goetheanum is a symbol today for that spiritual movement which is to be born into the world through Anthroposophy. If there had never been a circle of friends through whom the beginning of the building of the Goetheanum could be brought to realization, then Anthroposophy would have had to find some other avenue of expression. Today the building of the Goetheanum cannot simply be discontinued without damage. And it is this, my dear friends, that weighs heavily on my soul; for, if the results of what I have said in this regard remain the same as they have thus far, it will not be months, but only weeks for the moment to arrive when we shall come to a complete stoppage in Dornach.

Naturally, I cannot make such a statement without remembering with heartfelt gratitude that in this very country individual friends have made sacrifices in a most devoted manner for what has been accomplished thus far in building the Goetheanum. My thanks for this are profound and heartfelt, and I know that many of our friends have done their utmost in this matter. This I must, naturally, presuppose. But, on the other hand, I cannot do otherwise than to emphasize the fact—without wishing to criticize anything—that the worry weighs heavily on my soul over the fact that we shall not be able to continue with the building of the Goetheanum unless we receive abundant help on the part of a greater number of our friends, and that this Anthroposophical Movement, which has been active these last years at all possible points of the periphery, will tie without a center.

Therefore, my dear friends, I cannot but tell you what is at stake. Anthroposophy as such has spread very much in the world; and I assure you that, even here in Holland, the dear friends present today are only a very small part of the people who are in touch with Anthroposophy. We can judge this by the sale of our literature and we can see how, in many ways, Anthroposophy has become important to many persons.

On the other hand, something different can be observed—we can voice this without malice, even though we may create an impression of malice—we know that, on the other hand, the enemies of truth have made their appearance. And these, my dear friends, are well organized. Among them exist strong international ties. The enemies of Anthroposophical work are as well organized as our Anthroposophical Movement—pardon me for saying this—is badly organized! This is something we have yet to realize.

How is it that we have to say today that, in a few weeks, the Goetheanum may be without any means for its progress toward completion? You may have everything possible on the periphery—Waldorf Schools, etc.—all this is naturally void of power if there is no center. But for this center the right heart is lacking among the membership!

Let it be understood that I am not saying that this or that person is not giving all he has or, perhaps, does not have; it is not in the least my intention to go into such details. But, if our souls possessed the same enthusiasm for Anthroposophy which our opponents of all shades have today for anti-Anthroposophy, we should be very differently established. Then it would not be so difficult to collect the pennies, trivial in comparison with the wealth of the world—in spite of the impoverished world of today—to finish the Goetheanum. But the right heart for this is really lacking, my dear friends; yet we cannot do otherwise than to save this symbol in Dornach from failure. It can be saved from ruin if we can combine a strong enthusiasm with all our longing for Anthroposophical knowledge.

In these remarks I am not referring to any individuals. But, on the whole, the prevalent spirit within our circles is to start things with great apparent enthusiasm. The building of the Goetheanum was begun with enthusiasm. This enthusiasm has vanished, particularly in those who in the beginning displayed great enthusiasm. And these very persons have left this problem of going on to me alone. It has in many instances become characteristic, my dear friends, that people cannot remain enthusiastic; that something flares up—and those who shared in this sudden blaze leave the fire and do not keep feeding it. The warmth of heart dies out. And then come those worries. And, in view of the seriousness of the matter, my dear friends—why should I not call attention in this intimate circle to such a thing? The seriousness of the cause demands it. On the other hand there really exists the necessity to extend spiritual science as such. Be assured, a heavy responsibility rests on the one who is able to state at all that it depends on the conditions of the cosmos, in one way or another, whether a human being becomes a man or a woman, whether he has blue eyes and blond hair or brown eyes and black hair. I mention this only as an example. A statement like this cannot he made carelessly. It requires years of research before one arrives at the point of making such a statement, for one who does this without being conscious of his responsibility will usher disaster into the world. But it is necessary today, on the one hand, to extend this spiritual science; on the other hand, my dear friends, new cares spring up because of the developments in the periphery, when the enthusiasm does not persist, through the very fact that these things are there. New establishments are founded, and they have to be cared for. The worries have to be borne. These two things do not coincide unless the Society, as bearer of the Anthroposophical Movement, is a reality built on firm inner ground. Societies, that are realities built on firm ground, can surely accomplish great things! But it is imperative to observe that along with the need to deepen spiritual science more and more, there moved along, at the same time, an increasingly badly organized Society, a will displaying less and less enthusiasm for making the Society itself an instrument.

And the first thing for which I repeatedly beg our friends, since we are confronted by urgent necessity, is that they shall make the Society into a living, active being in the world.

This is highly essential, my dear friends. It is greatly to be desired that the center in Dornach shall not crumble, but that friends shall be found who will give us help.

There is, for instance, the wonderful possibility of gradually achieving significant results in the field of medicine, of therapeutics through the discoveries of remedies, based on spiritual science. But all this depends on the existence of the center in Dornach. The moment the Dornach center breaks down everything breaks down, and it is this that I want our friends to be conscious of, for it has in many instances disappeared from their consciousness. And I must say, it has really become an extremely heavy burden for me, a crushing burden.

I am saying this for the reason, my dear friends, that you may find the opportunity to think with me about these things in your good heart; for these things have to be thought out.”