The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear attendees!

If today we are to speak about the value and significance of truth for the development of the human soul, then the old question may well arise for some: What is truth anyway? Can one speak in any way in general about what truth actually is? And if one cannot answer this question, how can one then possibly determine anything about the value and significance of truth for the human soul? Nevertheless, it is by no means the case that one cannot distinguish between approaching the truth and moving away from the truth. What Lessing really meant to express in his famous saying about truth is truly valid: If God were to extend to me his right and his left hand and in his right hand held the pure, full truth; but in his left hand held the eternal striving for truth, then I would say: Father, give me what you have in your left hand, the eternal striving for truth; for the pure, full truth is, after all, only for you.

It is true that man can only have an eternal striving for the pure, full truth; but it would be a mistake if, because of this, one were to fall back into the misunderstanding that one cannot distinguish between that which corresponds more and that which corresponds less to the ideal of truth.

Let us visualize, not so much through theoretical discussion as through an example, how there is indeed a tangible difference, so to speak, between what can be called truth and what can be said to have removed man from the truth. It is not at all true in general that everyone can have their own point of view regarding the truth, that one cannot distinguish whether what someone claims from their point of view comes closer to the truth or moves further away from it. In this context, we may recall the saying of a recently deceased American multi-millionaire, who, among other things, in addition to his occupation, which was certainly more lucrative in terms of his millions, was concerned with arriving at the truth about certain things through thought. In his aphorisms, he made a remarkable statement about the value of human beings: no person in the world is irreplaceable; indeed, one cannot even speak of a special value of the individual. If I – so he said – now lay down my work, numerous others will be found to take it up where I left it. If I withdraw from what I have been doing, I will easily be replaced, and when I die – so roughly he said – the railways will run just as before, the dividends will be earned just as before. In short, nothing special in the world will have changed with the departure of a person. And then he adds – and this is important –: It is the same with every human being.

Let us compare this so-called truth, which the multi-millionaire has expressed from his point of view, about the value and significance of man in the world, with a similar saying by the witty German art historian Herman Grimm, who said this at the time. When Treitschke died, Grimm said about his work and significance: When a man like Treitschke has passed away, only then do we realize what he actually meant to all those who had contact with him. Treitschke was one of those people – as Grimm says – who, when they stop working, cannot find a successor for their work. He makes one realize that individuals are irreplaceable in their value and significance.

They are different, these two statements about the value and significance of a person: one from the American millionaire, the other from the spirited German art historian Herman Grimm. I would like to add: Grimm did not add what the American millionaire added: That is how it is with every human being! Two points of view, one could say, if one wanted to judge lightly, to the effect that the truth can take on a special form for each person. Two points of view, one could say, about the value and significance of the human being.

Now, which is the truer? If you examine the two statements a little, you will notice a huge difference between the two. You just have to examine them according to certain characteristics that are not usually examined today. How does the millionaire take his point of view? Merely in terms of his own personality. He considers what would become of the work he has done up to a certain point in time; he judges entirely from himself and comes to the conclusion that the work he is giving up could be taken up by someone else at any moment, and therefore it must be the same for everyone. A very personal point of view confronts us here, which looks only at itself in order to arrive at the truth about the value and significance of the human being. And Herman Grimm, he does not judge anything about himself in this case, but about another personality. He judges in such a way that he completely disregards himself and is, so to speak, overwhelmed by something that is outside of him as a being. And that is precisely how he comes to judge the case, not making a general judgment from this individual case, but simply accepting the case as it is. We need only consider the difference in the two points of view to see what is characteristic in each case. In the one case, the value and significance of the human being is judged quite subjectively, quite personally, quite from one's own ego; in the other case, the ego is not involved at all. And if we really consider both statements, who could fail to feel that the one who judges impersonally, who disregards himself, allows himself to be overwhelmed, as it were, by the objective, has more to say about the value and significance of a human being than the one who judges quite subjectively, quite personally! This must be the natural feeling of everyone. Such a comparison shows that we must never say: point of view is just a point of view; but that there is a way of approaching the truth, of actually arriving at it in certain respects, if we try to fathom the truth by taking an impersonal approach. Or do we not feel that in certain respects, as Herman Grimm says, each person is irreplaceable? Not only great people are irreplaceable. Can the point of view of the American millionaire apply when one considers how irreplaceable a mother is for many a child, for example? Can one say that something can step into this gap to replace her? Oh, one will feel it as soon as one takes the point of view that there is a coming closer to the truth, even if there can only be an eternal striving for the pure, full truth.

So it is precisely with those things that have such value for the human soul that it is important to examine them sometimes in a very intimate and profound way. And with what we have gained from the simple example of personal and impersonal judgment, we have already gained a great deal precisely for the characterization of truth.

In the lecture on the mission of anger, we started from the assumption that what is actually the nature of the human soul, what we can call its soul nature in contrast to the human body, consists of three parts: the sentient soul, which is, so to speak, the lowest of the human soul members, the mind or emotional soul, which forms the second link of the human being within, and the consciousness soul, which is the third link. And we have already characterized that this sentient soul is the link in the human being within which we find desire, instincts, passions and so on. We have, after all, examined a part of this sentient soul ourselves by pointing to the element of anger and its effect on the sentient soul, and we have seen how the I is present in this sentient soul in a dull way, as it is still overwhelmed by the passions, drives, instincts, and so on.

If we ascend to the next higher level of the human soul, to the soul of mind or feeling, then the I becomes clearer and more luminous, and the I becomes a power in the human being that can perceive and understand itself. How does the soul of mind or feeling actually free itself from the sentient soul? The human being stands in relation to the external world. This external world makes its impressions on the human being; it gives him the rich world of color and light, of sounds, of warmth and cold, in short, everything we perceive through our senses. When we bring our soul into relationship with the outer world through its organs, then, in our sentient soul, joy and delight, suffering and pain, and so on, arise in relation to what we perceive outside in the world of color, in the world permeated by sound, in the world of taste and smell, and so on, through our perceptions. Everything that is connected to our perceptions in our sentient soul, our desires and instincts, makes up the lowest of the soul's members, so to speak, and in this lives, still unaware of itself, the human I, this center of the human being. But in this lowest limb of the soul also live the affects, the passions, the drives and desires. Man lets himself be easily carried away by them; his ego is not yet master over anger, annoyance, vexation; it lets itself be carried away by lust and suffering, by drives and desires, is submerged in them, is not the conductor, the actor in relation to these drives and desires. We can say that the I lives down there, brooding in the surging sea of the sentient soul; but what we call the mind or feeling soul cannot be distinguished from this surging sea of the sentient soul, that which we call the mind or feeling soul, unless the human being delves so deeply into himself that he connects in his inner life with what he has experienced in the outer world. We receive direct impressions from this outer world. We carry these away from our interaction with the outer world. Then we are alone with ourselves. There we weigh one joy against another, there we brood over our pain, we try to get over it or to delve even deeper into it. There we expand within ourselves what we have received from outside impressions. What the soul builds up within itself could not be worked through by it if the I did not do something with what has been received, if the I did not work in this soul. Stimuli from outside can come without the ego; man only has to face the outside world, the world has an effect on him. Like in a mirror, the outer world gives rise to pleasure and suffering, desires and instincts and so on in the sentient soul; but it is only when we turn away from this outer world and collect ourselves, when we process our instincts and desires, when we form a whole in our imaginations, that we say: We work our way through the ego from the sentient soul to the mind soul, then we internalize ourselves within our self, then we process what we have received from the outside. And this inner work is the content of the mind or emotional soul. And only then, when we are able to relate what we have built up to the outside world, when we have formed a realm of inner experiences through our inner life, when we have developed a sum of pleasure and joy in our soul that we call ' beautiful', for example, and then apply all this to the outer world; when we come to recognize something in the outer world as good, beautiful, true through the concepts we have formed, then we say we attain knowledge of the outer world. There we work our way up to grasping the outer world, up to the knowing, cognizing human being: there we develop the consciousness soul. This is initially the highest level of the human soul. Thus the sentient soul leads us from the outside in, we live in ourselves through the mind or emotional soul, and we find the way again to grasp the world through knowledge and understanding through our consciousness soul.

Within the sentient soul, we have encountered the element of anger, and in that anger we have found one of the preparers for the development of the I and the soul. A person who is not yet mature enough to form an opinion about what is true, just, and good will, by falling into righteous anger at the sight of some lie, some injustice, some evil, take a stand on this external world. Anger will, so to speak, indicate to him: This is not in accordance with you, [this is a discordance, an obstacle] and in his inner being awakens that which is called the ego, which opposes the outside world. Where we are inflamed with anger at something we cannot admit, there is the awakening of the ego. [And [the anger] develops this in the transition and ascent into the intellectual and emotional soul through constant internalization out of the developmental soul.] So if anger is something that a person must overcome in order to develop, we can almost say of anger: It has its value in that it can be overcome; if anger has only attained its full significance for a person when the has been transformed into love and gentleness, we can say that the most important thing for the mind or soul is that it presents itself to us as the element that, in the best sense, brings the two sides of the ego mentioned yesterday to development. If the human ego is to develop in an appropriate way, it must happen in such a way that, on the one hand, it becomes fuller and fuller. Only by developing a rich life of ideas and thoughts, a rich life of feelings, emotions and will within himself [and thereby strengthening his ego forces within himself], only in this way will he be able to embrace much of the world on the one hand – and on the other hand, the ego will be able to become a strong starting point for working outwards. The more his individuality develops, the more — we may say — a person is worth in the world as a human being. But we have already pointed out that this I is a two-edged sword, that on the other hand this I, by only aspiring to become richer and fuller in itself, can close itself within itself; that precisely by wanting to live only in itself, it closes the door to the outside world and thereby becomes impoverished. If, on the one hand, a person is to become as independent and strong as possible, then he must avoid impoverishing himself by closing himself off from the outside world by also cultivating the second aspect of the self, selflessness, the merging with the outside world.

Where is the element in human development that, by its very nature, does justice to these two sides of the I? There is nothing else that does justice to both sides of the I as much as truth does. Truth is something that, if it is to appear to us in its highest form, we can only find in the innermost part of our I. Only that which we have recognized as such through our I itself can be considered truth for us. Thus, the truth for the ego must be found in the innermost part of the human ego. We can say: Through the self, the truth for the human being is found. When the human being understands this character of truth, then he will say: It is precisely through the work for the truth that the ego becomes stronger in its selfhood in its inner strength; for truth is only achieved when the ego has to make an effort, because truth can only be found in the depths of the ego.

Hence the peculiarity of truth: we need nothing more than the work of our own ego if the truth is to have any value for us. Admittedly, in the case of present-day man, there are hardly any truths other than the simplest ones that take on such a form for him that the ego can really decide through itself. These are the simplest arithmetical truths. Once we have decided for ourselves that three times three is nine and not ten, then this decision, made in the innermost sanctuary of our ego, is enough to know that this is true. And even if millions of people were to say that three times three is ten, we would still decide for three times three is nine. This is valid for mathematical truths because they are clear and, so to speak, present themselves to us directly in their simplicity. Therefore, when we overcome this simplicity through the passions that assert themselves in the sentient soul, by the I working its way up into the rational soul, it must overcome the other affects in the same way as it overcomes anger. For only by casting out the instincts, desires, drives and passions that are in the soul can what a person experiences in the soul become truth. Where people disagree about the truth, where not everyone finds the same truths in their soul, it is precisely the urges, the desires, the passions that prevent them, so to speak, from truly seeing the circumstances of the truth transparently and brightly and clearly. The passions cannot have a say in simple mathematical truths. If, for example, passions were to arise regarding the transparency of mathematical truths, then many a housewife would certainly desire that if she takes three times three marks to market, it would make ten marks; for the passions speak in favor of this, but the simplicity and transparency of the mathematical truths do not allow the passions and desires to arise. In this case – in any matter at all, where we have managed to silence the passions and desires, we also clearly see the circumstances of the truth. In all the things in which we have not yet succeeded in silencing the passions and desires, we are not yet capable of deciding on the truth in earnest. But when we have succeeded in deciding on a truth, then the ego is in its inmost being the judge of the truth. Thus, the ego must feel itself in its power when it decides on the truth, when it acquires truth.

And again: once we have acquired the truth about something, we may say: this truth, although acquired in the most personal way, is the most impersonal of all; for we can find the same truth in all souls. When we have found a truth, it will take on the same form in millions of people who have also found it. Thus we will be able to communicate with the whole world about the truth. Thus truth is the most personal and thus it is the most impersonal. It leads most deeply into us, because there it must be decided, and it leads out again, because it applies independently of our arbitrariness. Truth is therefore the element in the life of the soul that has the most important mission in relation to this life of the soul. On the one hand, it educates the self to independence – for the self is the judge of truth – and on the other hand, it educates the self to selflessness, in that truth brings together this self with everything in our environment where truth is to be spoken at all. The two sides of the double-edged sword are best educated by the truth, and so the ego becomes strong to be led up from the surging activity of the sentient soul, where it still broods dull; so it becomes strong enough to be led up into the soul of mind or emotion, and at the same time it is prepared to be led up into the consciousness soul, where it comes out again to grasp the environment, to grasp the world selflessly. Thus we have characterized truth as the most important and essential element in the development of the I, in the work of the I on the three soul-members, the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. This is why truth is such a powerful educator of the ego, because it works on both sides. We just have to take it seriously. Only those who truly strive for the truth in their own selves, and only strive for the truth, who allow only the truth to determine their inner world of ideas, may hope that this truth will fulfill this implied mission for them. A great English poet rightly says of truth, hinting at its brittleness, hinting at the high demands it makes of us: “To him who prefers anything to truth, this goddess does not surrender.” Those who place their Christianity above truth will soon realize that they are placing their particular denomination above Christianity. But those who place their particular denomination above Christianity will soon realize that they are placing their sect above their denomination. And those who place their sect above their denomination will soon realize that they are placing their personal whims above even the teachings of their sect. So says the poet Coleridge. Truth reveals itself only to him who is in turn ready to surrender himself entirely to it. But now we meet this truth within ourselves in a twofold form. The I asserts its two sides, which we have characterized, quite well in relation to this truth. If we want to characterize these two sides of the I, then we must present to our soul the way in which truth presents itself to the I from the world.

We look into the world. World phenomena present themselves to our senses, that is, to our sentient soul. Those who want to form concepts, ideas, and images about the world but do not want to believe that this world is built from concepts, ideas, and images may as well admit that it is possible to scoop water out of a glass that contains no water. However nonsensical it would be to claim this, it is nevertheless true that we can draw from a world in which there are no ideas or concepts and create in our minds what we then have in our souls: ideas and concepts of the world. A world that was not built according to ideas, that was not steeped in wisdom, could never evoke a reflection in the human soul that represents concepts and ideas of this world as an inner experience. For what would our concepts and ideas be, through which the laws of the world are to be experienced in us, what would all science be, if the world were not built according to ideas? All science would be fantasy, reverie; for science is a sum of ideas and concepts. If there were no ideas and concepts, in other words, if there were no wisdom in the world, if the world were not interwoven and permeated by wisdom, then our wisdom would be folly; for it would be pure fantasy, pure error. We would imagine something in our soul as a picture of the world that is constructed quite arbitrarily. It only makes sense to create an image of the world with the help of concepts and ideas if one assumes that these concepts and ideas are present in the world and that the things themselves that present themselves to our senses arise and grow out of the wisdom of the world, out of the wisdom that flows and streams through the world. So we say to ourselves: Behind this world, which we perceive through our senses, which we feel and desire through our sentient soul, behind this world is wisdom. And we seek to approach this wisdom by working our way up in our soul to that which our mind-soul inwardly reveals as truth. Wisdom is there in the world; wisdom works its way out in our own soul as we ascend to the mind and consciousness soul. But when we relate to this wisdom in the world, we have to say: Oh, this wisdom is built into the world, incorporated into it. We human beings stand, so to speak, as belated observers in relation to this world and explore the wisdom that is implanted in it. [A large part of our striving in the acquisition of knowledge consists of appropriating what pulses and lives through the world as wisdom.] If we allow the wisdom that flows through the world to shine in us as truth, then we are truly the ones who come afterwards. And if we look at the development of humanity, [it shows us how, with all his doings and inventions, man falls short of the wisdom already achieved by the environment with its wisdom]. So we can say: A closer look at human development soon shows us how man, so to speak, stands behind the wisdom of the world with his truth. One can see this by taking a look at the historical development of humanity. In the school books, one can read how people gradually came to produce what we call paper from certain substances. Through human wisdom, people have learned to produce paper. Just as man makes paper out of certain substances, so the paper of the wasp's nest is made – for the wasp's nest consists of paper. The wasp's nest shows the art of making paper, which has been present in nature as wisdom for countless centuries and which man, in his historical development, has found afterwards. In this way, man is truly a thinker of what has been thought outside. A large part of our striving in the acquisition of knowledge consists in reflecting on the wisdom of the world, in appropriating within ourselves what pulses and lives through the world as wisdom. By relating to the world in such a way that we allow its wisdom to shine in us, we feel, precisely in the innermost essence of our I, that we are strengthening ourselves, that we are relating to the world with the substance that is outside as spiritual substance. We grow stronger as the wisdom of the world shines in our I as truth. This truth, which reflects the wisdom of the world, corresponds perfectly to one side of our ego, namely the side that we can call the selfless side. After all, everything we think about the world is there without our ego, it has been there long before we could think it. In grasping the wisdom of the world, we experience something that is outside of our ego. We pour our I out into the world, so to speak: we are completely world, we are completely given to the world, completely selfless, by reviving the wisdom of the world in ourselves. In this way we make ourselves selfless by completely giving ourselves, objectively giving ourselves, to the wisdom of the world, which, as the light of truth, is to shine in ourselves. That is one side of the truth.

The other side of the truth comes to us when we consider human labor. When we consider all the human ideas that we realize in the smallest and largest of things, whether it is an everyday idea or the idea of an inventor who invents a machine, for example, we have the resounding, productive, creative work of man in mind. First we have the idea, then we have what is the external expression of this idea or the consequence of the idea. We see what arises in us, what has not yet been thought in the world, springing from our I. We see our innermost being emerge in our everyday activities, in the activities that we can describe as the realization of the great ideas of the inventors. First there is the thought, we do not reflect on the thought, the sensory phenomenon is not there first, the thought is there first, in which the sensory phenomenon comes to us through our own action, we are the forethinkers and we are the ones who, after our forethought, enter the world creatively ; there we feel our I growing stronger on the other side; there we feel how the essence of our I has flowed out, feel that which we can call our selfhood; through which we become capable of seeing realized that which the I first experiences outside in the surrounding of our existence. There we feel that side of the I where we do not merge into something that exists without the I, but on the contrary, there we feel our inner activity, our selfhood. [Our I is in our deeds, our works, just as it has also worked first in our thoughts.] As a forward thinker, the I is truly cultivating its selfhood; as a backward thinker, the I is truly cultivating its selflessness. And in these two components of the entire inner life, the truth within our work and striving in the world confronts us as reflected truth and as thought-out truth.

Now we ask ourselves: Is there a mediation between these two sides? Just as life approaches the human being, so do the two sides of his ego approach each other, but still keeping the components of truth apart. Truth is indeed the great educator of both sides, but the way the ego appropriates this truth introduces a division. Is there anything where the two sides of truth confront us in the world? [But if there are such truths that existed before, before the ego, and the ego grasps them independently of the external world, then realizes them in the world, that is a truth that we can recognize as one of selfhood and at the same time of selflessness.] If there are such truths that, on the one hand, can be conceived before all sensual reality and yet are realized, not in machines and daily activities; but if we enact the truth independently of the external world and then see it realized in this external world; if the truth that presents itself to us as pre-thought can at the same time show itself to be formed entirely according to the pattern of the postulated truth: Such a truth would be one that particularly cultivates both sides of the self. Do such truths exist? It is precisely such truths that Theosophy or spiritual science seeks to provide for modern humanity.

Let us try to make this clear with an example. It has already been stated that it is the task of Theosophy to present the proposition: that which is soul-spiritual arises only out of that which is soul-spiritual, just as Redi, in another field, first presented the proposition: that which is alive arises only out of that which is alive. We have seen that this proposition follows from what we call the realization of the repeated lives of man on earth. The way in which spiritual research reveals that the innermost core of man's being re-embodies itself is not brought about by logical conclusions, but is an immediate realization of the clairvoyant consciousness. Just as a person with physical eyes sees color and light, so a person who has developed the inner, hidden powers of the human soul perceives the essence of the human being, which we can call the immortal, that lives in the human being and presents itself to the clairvoyant consciousness, that comes from previous embodiments and that goes to future embodiments. So, through supersensible knowledge, we have the concept of the re-embodiment of the human essence. So the spiritual researcher comes and says: Through my research I have established that the human being undergoes re-embodiments; he describes the re-embodiment, he conceptualizes it in the same way that modern natural science conceptualizes the sensory perception and intellectual acquisitions. With these concepts he presents himself to people. Such knowledge cannot be found through outer perception; it must be found through supersensible vision, through the development of those organs that we call the spiritual eyes and ears. But when it is found, it can be conceptualized, thought of, and given forms that we call the forms of truth. So, we have a truth before us that expresses itself in a way that is not possible through outer perception. We have a preconceived idea in contrast to external perception. Just as the thought, as the idea of the machine lives in the mind of the inventor, without him seeing it externally, so the thought of re-embodiment lives as a result of research in the spiritual world, it lives in the mind of the spiritual researcher, but then the message goes out into the world, then we can we can look at the outside world and say: We see how [for example, a child] from the first day of a human being [gradually] develops from the vague, blurred facial features into distinct forms, [into a fixed physiognomy], which slumbers in a dark background of existence. There we see the definite forms developing. And we say to ourselves: According to what the spiritual researcher tells us, we can easily understand this. What has been brought over from previous embodiments is the core of the human being, [who lives anew in the child and comes from a previous life], who works out what was indeterminate into definite forms. We look at the whole development and say: When we look at life and test life, then this life itself in its appearances shows us the truth of what the spiritual researcher says; and only bias can cloud a person's view to such an extent that he would not find the truth in the external sensory appearance of what the spiritual researcher brings down as a preconceived idea from the higher worlds. Thus the spiritual researcher brings his truths down from the higher worlds, and holds them up to external perception. What confronts us in the external world offers us the evidence for the truths from the higher worlds, in that we then understand the external world. We penetrate beneath things with what we bring to them as truths. Thus what has been thought out agrees with the outer world, as the inventor's idea agrees with the finished machine. Thus what is otherwise separate is united in the truths that Theosophy presents. There we have, as it were, nothing behind us. The theosophical truth is not found like the idea of an inventor — created out of nothing in a certain sense —, it is found through observation in the spiritual world. But it can be applied to the external sensual world. This theosophical truth is both a pre-thought and a post-thought. Therefore, it affects the human soul in a completely different way than all the other truths that we encounter. (By absorbing this truth, man unleashes his ego.

By immersing himself in the wisdom of the world, man loses his self, and his I becomes one that, so to speak, flows out more and more; it becomes impoverished of inner strength. By thinking ahead in his daily activities, by demanding that what has been thought ahead be translated into external reality, he wants to imprint his ego on the external world, he wants to see more and more in his surroundings what his self wills; he wants to imprint his self on his surroundings. In this way, he is completely absorbed in his selfhood, and has created an interest in making this I, quite apart from the environment, as strong as possible. We can see two possibilities for the education of the I. One is that the I becomes a completely reflective one, where it is completely devoted to the outer world, where it is more and more devoted to the outer world, where it does not grow stronger in its power. The other is where the self is not merely filled with ideas from the outside world, but should be filled by the will. In the first case, the self can become desolate in the will. We can experience that such people, who absorb objective truth in the most conscientious way, are weak in will. On the other hand, we can observe that those people who only want to impress their will on their environment become closed off from what is going on in the outside world, from what should awaken their interest in the wisdom-filled content of the world. Thus we see, so to speak, the thinking I developed in those people who develop in the first way, and the willing I in those who develop in the second way. But we can achieve harmonious interaction between the thinking I and the willing I by allowing spiritual-scientific truths to take effect in us. Then the two beneficent powers in the I will awaken. On the one hand, the I will let all the content of the world into itself, out of which it is born, and will enrich itself inwardly through what is poured out into the whole world as its spiritual content. On the other hand, it will gather itself together within itself in order to become strong within itself. Thus the ego will not be impoverished in either direction, but will become strong and healthy in both. And this is the health-giving quality of theosophical truth: on the one hand, it is as fully realized as the reflective truth, and on the other hand, it has the same effect as the reflective truth. Therefore, it is healing because on the one hand it pours into us all the beauty of the world and on the other hand makes our ego so flourishing and fruitful because it enables what grows in the ego to find its reflection in the outer phenomena. Through the theosophical truth, we develop our ego so much because it is the truth that is both premeditated and reflected. That is the healthy aspect of the theosophical truth. While we would see in a person who is only a reflective person, who only wants to comprehend the wisdom of the world, that he can, under certain circumstances, paralyze himself more and more in terms of willpower and that his inner weakness , that he becomes inwardly ill from lack of such power, we would see on the other hand that he who only wants to realize his will becomes inwardly impoverished because he has no connection with the world. On the other hand, we see harmony prevailing in all respects in the theosophist. The thought becomes more concentrated as it is seized by the confidence of realization. In short, by permeating itself with the theosophical truth, the ego becomes a point of passage for wisdom. There the will is enlightened and on the other side becomes the true center by having the premeditated truth with the postmeditated truth in relation to the world. Humanity will gradually recognize that the will, which can appear so dry and so sober to the one who merely wants it implemented in external reality, warms up to living feelings because it meets with the wisdom of the world; and again, that this wisdom, which can seem so dry to us when we merely reflect on the world, can seem individual to us when it meets with the living will in the ego. Wisdom and will must meet in the ego. This is the healthy, life-affirming truth that we not only produce mind-soul - or emotional soul - but mind-permeated mind-soul and mind-permeated emotional soul in the higher soul members, in the mind-soul, through the nature of the I, these two sides of approaching the truth.

Above all, in more recent times, no one has felt this so deeply as the person we have spoken about here many times before, who was as close to spiritual science as possible, who created the greatest poetic works, as Goethe. And a work by the later, older Goethe should serve as an illustration to what has been said today. Oh, Goethe knew clearly and distinctly that the way in which man confronts the truth depends on how he has developed in his own self. That truth is merely something objectively compelling was never Goethe's thought. That truth enlightens man all the more the more receptive he is, that was his fundamental conviction, which is little understood today. People come and say: Oh, we have long since gone beyond a certain way of grasping the truth. Science has led us to the point where we cannot help doubting that there is something spiritual in a living being. [Science has thoroughly driven out of us the belief that something spiritual is to be sought behind every material thing. It has driven out our belief in something like an etheric body or a life force, because science is close to showing how living substance can be composed of external chemical components. Don't you hear everywhere that we are told: We cannot recognize such fantasies as those presented by Theosophy, because our ideal is to produce protein, that is, something living, from dead matter in the laboratory. May a counter-question be asked here? After all the development of man, can what he expects about the composition of a living being decide anything? Can that decide anything for his beliefs about the spirit of the world? If you want to think about it, you can find external proof that nothing is decided about the belief in the spirit through something like the expectation that protein could one day be produced chemically in a laboratory. The one does not force the other at all, this can be proved historically. Ask what else people have believed in the past, for example, in earlier centuries, in the Middle Ages, they not only believed that they would succeed in synthesizing protein from carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and so on, they believed something quite different. Imagine the sentences in Goethe's Faust, where Wagner stands before the preparation of the homunculus; the ability to do this was a belief that existed in the Middle Ages. People believed that they could create something that was a small human being from external substances through the various processes they performed in the laboratory. However, this belief that they could create a human being from external substances did not cause these people to deny the spirit. Therefore, the denial of the spirit today does not arise from the compulsion of objective facts, but from the inability [to grasp the spirit] to rise within one's own soul to the kind of thinking that sees the conditions for professing the spirit. One must also consider such things, then one will understand what it meant that only the one who can work in the substance of the soul as the external naturalist works in the external substance can grasp the life of the soul.

And Goethe was one who could see deeply into the ideas we have presented today. Above all, he was aware of the contrast between reflective and pre-reflective truth. And he beautifully expressed this contrast in a wonderful little poem, his “Pandora”.

This “Pandora” was written in 1807; a lot of nonsense has been written about it. People said: This is a Goethean late work, in which Goethe presents all kinds of concepts in symbols. In a Goethe edition, by a much-praised German scholar, you can read the words: Well, what does that tell us, other than that we can form a concept of ourselves, that man represents what he thinks of himself? Goethe would have thanked himself for presenting to the world what he had “formed of himself.” Goethe himself may have once expressed himself in a manner that was not polite but clear about people's judgment of his late works.

Anyone who takes [Pandora] in hand [and lets it sink in], attentively and without prejudice, will recognize one of them. Oh, there are not many works in which the content is evaluated in such a wonderful way, in keeping with the style. It is the one in this work that can be called the light artistic hand. Read “Pandora” and, if you imbue it with your sense of style, you will admire the ease with which everything is shaped to suit the person and situation in question, whether in the verse structure or in the diction. One person speaks in this verse form, the other in a different, more lightly flowing style. Everything is easy in this “Pandora”. It is precisely in this that the greatness of Goethe having to leave this work a fragment is revealed. Even with a Goethe, such a powerful artistic accomplishment as that evident in “Pandora” is only possible for moments. Even for Goethe it was only sufficient for the beginning of Pandora; but then he lost his way, for he was too small to continue the work in the greatness that inspired him as an artist when he created the beginning. But that should not deter us from recognizing the greatness that is present in Pandora.

Goethe was very clear about people who say: Yes, what Goethe wrote in his youth, one can go along with, it is all full of poetic originality; but what Goethe allegorized in his old age, no reasonable person can understand. This was already the case during Goethe's lifetime – not with regard to Faust, but to his other works of later years – Goethe himself by no means held the first part of “Faust”, which is so admired, in the highest esteem. He knew what he had put into it in order to develop ever higher and higher; he knew within himself how much his later works stood above his earlier ones. And so he says something impolite, but clearly:

They praise Faust
And what else
In my works roars
In their favor.
The old Mick and Mack
Is very pleased;
The pack of rags and bones thinks
It would no longer be!

This judgment is justified in the face of the philistine critics of Goethe, who make Goethe into what they themselves are – at least something good comes of it! In recent times, our audience has been inundated with such interpreters of Goethe. [Let us take a closer look at the work in terms of our topic today:] “Pandora” contains on a large scale the problem of the reflective and the forward-thinking human being – [Epimetheus belongs to the former, Prometheus to the latter]. Zeus wanted to take away the existence of evolving humanity. Under Zeus's rule, humanity would have been doomed. Prometheus confronts Zeus. According to the legend, he brings man fire, language and writing. He is thus the one who gives people the opportunity to emerge from the state in which they used to be, where the ego brooded dull down in the sentient soul. Man was to develop his I more and more. It is a correct observation that everything to do with fire, for example, is somehow connected with human forethought. Travelers described how, in areas where they had made a fire, the monkeys, for example, came and warmed themselves, but it never occurred to the monkeys to stoke the fire themselves; that is, these animals of the highest species are not able to envision the future. These higher animals, which are closest to humans, certainly felt the pleasant warmth of the fire; they may also have felt some kind of thought in a dull form, but they still did not think the thought through to the point of maintaining the fire by adding wood, much less to think of further practical applications. It is precisely because man has mastered the element of fire that he has been enabled to make his ego the starting point of thinking ahead, [and thereby gradually to lead his ego to a higher level in ever-increasing measure].

Thus, in his “Pandora”, Goethe presents us with the two brothers, Epimetheus and Prometheus. There stands the one brother: Epimetheus. His name already indicates that he is the contemplative; he is devoted to that which is imprinted on the world as wisdom, those thoughts that can shine as truth in the human soul. He is not prepared to think ahead; in his soul he dreams the truth dream of the world, which is an afterthought conceived behind the wisdom of the world as truth. Such is Epimetheus. Prometheus, on the other hand, is devoted to the other one-sidedness; he wants nothing to do with the reflection of wisdom. He only wants to know about that which arises in the soul of man himself, in order to realize it.

The true celebration of the real man is the deed

— that is Prometheus' saying. [He is a man of action, and this is how he appears before us as a forward thinker.] Thus we see the two opposites: Epimetheus, the thinker, and Prometheus, the forward thinker. Goethe expresses this in his “Pandora” already in the scenery. On the one side, we have Prometheus' dwelling. We see that everything that has been built there has been created by human labor. Although it is rough, we see that it does not bear the character of nature anywhere, does not depict anything outside in nature; we do not see a copy of a natural beauty, it is rough and crude, but as a human work it stands before us. In contrast, what is on the side of Epimetheus as his residence, comes to us as a scene that is composed of the beautiful creations of nature, of parts of nature, and continues into a wonderful landscape. We see in it the reflection on nature and the act of settling in such a way that one lives according to what is exemplified outside. Epimetheus and Prometheus appear to us as complete opposites in their striving for truth.

In the Greek saga, we are told that Zeus wanted to take revenge for the act of Prometheus. [Through Hephaistos, Zeus had an image of a woman made in an artful, artistically beautiful way] – Pandora – [which he brought to life]. She was to bring people gifts from the world of Zeus. [After her descent to earth, Prometheus rejects the divine being, but Epimetheus takes her in and makes the beautiful goddess his wife.] The saga tells how Pandora, the woman created by the gods, opens the box [that Zeus gave her] and how the goods that actually make people miserable fly out. Only one good remains in it: hope. Thus we see that in the saga, Pandora also has something to do with that which belongs to the human race of the past. From the future, thinking humanity has only hope from Pandora. What else it has, what people can use to get by, has been handed down from the past.

This Pandora also appears in Goethe as the wife of Epimetheus. But we see very clearly that Goethe takes what is an external action and elevates it into a spiritual world. We see the reflective soul of Epimetheus and see it connected with Pandora, that is to say, in this soul of Epimetheus lives that which is spread out in the world as wisdom, which is reflected upon as in a dream. The characterization of Epimetheus, who dreams wisdom, which is nothing other than Pandora herself when personified, is wonderful. He feels unsatisfied and weak, and then, in the further course of the drama, Goethe has Prometheus, the brother, confront Epimetheus. There Epimetheus raves about the [beloved, but also vanished, divine] Pandora, about the all-gifted Pandora. Goethe shows us that through this figure, worldly wisdom is illuminated to him, but worldly wisdom as it is grasped by man in reflection. What is this reflected truth like? It is abstract, uncreative, unproductive. Imagine that we could combine in our soul all knowledge about the entire world; but this knowledge would be unproductive if it were only reflected. Just as the wife of Epimetheus, just as Pandora, is endowed with the wisdom of the world but is unproductive. Prometheus, who has no sense for this Pandora, confronts Epimetheus; while Epimetheus raves about Pandora's magnificent hair, about how beautifully her foot moves – Prometheus says: Oh, I know how it is made. [I know how Pandora was made by Hephaestus, the blacksmith, and how she was brought to life by Zeus. He thinks only of the origin of the goddess, not of the beauty of what has come into being, what has been created, and so Pandora, who is otherwise unproductive, gives him the impetus for productivity. And this is what can come out of it as a reaction in him.] In Pandora's case, it is something mechanically put together, something that cannot be put into practice; something against which he asserts his saying:

The true man's true celebration is the deed!

Now Goethe shows how Elpore and Epimeleia, Hope and Foresight, have sprung from the marriage between Epimetheus and Pandora. [In her departure, Pandora took one of her daughters, Elpore, with her to the gods and left Epimeleia, chosen by Epimetheus, with her father.] These two daughters show different sides of Epimetheus's nature, [especially the latter in particular]. Hope, [Elpore], is what reflection alone can defend in relation to the future. The one who is a forward-thinking person sees what he has thought come into being in reality; the one who is a reflective person can say: I expect this or that to happen in the future; because what should happen does not come from himself. On the other hand, there is Epimeleia, the other daughter, who protects the past.

Prometheus also has a scion, Phileros; the one who descends from this I-human Prometheus is the actual caretaker of human I-ness. But already in the son we see the full one-sidedness of mere self-seeking. He no longer wants to create. He no longer wants to create. He cannot endure in a useful, different, thinking activity. This does not endure, because one-sided striving for the self is not complemented by wisdom. In Prometheus, this striving for the self is still present in such a way that it permeates the whole being of Prometheus. In the son, it manifests itself in such a way that it shows its harmful side at the same time. The son is not only the creator, but also the enjoyer of what is there. In this way, he causes conflict. In his blind rage, he even wounds the one who protects what exists, [his beloved] Epimeleia, the daughter of Epimetheus, in a fight.

Thus the powers of the human soul, the reflective and the thinking powers, confront each other in this Goethean drama. [And so these powers fight each other. But nothing is achieved by this; for the soul powers only increase and strengthen each other through harmonious interaction. Only in this way can truth fulfill its mission in the human being.

Goethe shows us how, ultimately, it is through the interaction of the two currents that true human salvation comes about. And Goethe also shows us how what he has depicted here is, for him, a mature result of development. Goethe looked back to the time when he had only developed the Promethean nature in himself one-sidedly. In 1774, the Goethe who was certainly already endowed with all the makings of Goethe, but still immaturely youthful, expressed this one-sided Promethean truth as his conviction in his 'Prometheus' at that time, and it flows towards us there. And if today we find a certain self-satisfaction in pointing to this youthful “Prometheus” as if it gave us the whole of Goethe, then we have to say: this is only a one-sided expression of Goethe himself. Goethe did not stop at thinking ahead; he added the thinking of his mature knowledge, his reflection. No, not only the premeditation, not only that which rejects all wisdom, not only the pre-thinking that rejects all reflection, but the confluence of both alone can establish the mission of truth.

That Goethe in his youth stood on a one-sided point of view, we can still gather from something else. He does not remember the words in the first part of “Faust” where Faust sets out to translate the Bible. There we see how Faust approaches the Bible and wants to replace the correct word “In the beginning was the word” with another: “In the beginning was the deed.” This is what he wants to contribute to the Bible more as a youthful person; that was not Goethe's final opinion. People should stop seeing the whole of Goethe in this. In his youth, Goethe probably cultivated this Promethean point of view, but later he clearly showed how he had progressed beyond it, how he later knew that in addition to the aforementioned deed, in order to develop people healthily, the word, that is to say the reflection of the wisdom imprinted by the world's spirits, must occur. Therefore, in his “Pandora”, Goethe adds from his totality, broadening his youthful point of view:

From heaven,
Senkert's word and deed blessedly descend,
a gift descends, undreamt of before.

That is, he means, unimagined by himself in the past, when he still believed that he had to correct the Gospel of John at this point, to replace the passage “In the beginning was the word” with “In the beginning was the deed”. For Goethe, the deed becomes the word, which expresses the character of what was previously conceived. The word becomes the other, the illuminating wisdom of the world. This is why Goethe says in “Pandora”:

What you below feel is our wish;
What you can give, we know.
You Titans make great beginnings; but
To lead to the eternal good, the eternal beautiful
Is the work of the gods; let it be.

Thus Goethe complements his youthful Prometheus point of view in the right, harmonious way with the point of view of Epimetheus, showing us what attitude and loyalty to true philosophy should be. In this way, Goethe's example shows us the mission of truth within our own human hearts.

Today you have recognized the truth as an educator of the human being. You have seen that truth is something most personal and at the same time something impersonal; something that makes the human being an I-human being, and something that in turn brings the I together with all other beings. You have seen that the ego is so strong on its two sides that it still expresses its selfless character in the Epimetheus-like element of truth and its selfish character in the Prometheus-like element on the other side; and you have seen that it is possible to bring about harmony between the two in spiritual-scientific truth, which encompasses the two, leading the will up to wisdom, leading wisdom down and allowing it to be seen as light, to illuminate the will itself.

Thus we see that truth, although it yields to the strong human ego at an intermediate stage, nevertheless fulfills the great mission in its perfection of shaping the ego ever higher and higher. Truth has this mission, to be the greatest educator of the human ego, at the same time leading to strong inwardness in thinking ahead and to strong selflessness in reflecting.

Thus, truth is the power that has the strongest mission, that leads the ego from level to level, making the soul more and more perfect. And we see this from the point of view that Goethe himself took towards truth, not ignoring any earlier stage, adding the necessary Epimetheus element to the Prometheus element. And Goethe is a true model of a person striving for truth precisely where we eavesdrop on him so intimately, where we readily admit: precisely because we see that he has become more and more mature, we can emulate him; he is great because he shows us the hopeful paths in the pursuit of truth. And then we feel this striving in us in such a way that it fills us with healthy strength, making us stronger and more unselfish. We feel that, in contrast to this, the sentence falls silent that wants to say that truth depends solely on the point of view.

But then again we turn to Goethe and let another mood come over us. In all seriousness of striving for truth, we must never abandon that other healing element that tells us: When you believe you have reached some level of truth, have recognized something, it is also able to tell you on the other side: You must also have already decided; you must tell yourself about no truth that it could be completely infallible, you must strive to let it appear before your soul in an even more truthful form, even with regard to that which you have already recognized as truth. When we feel earnest and dignity in our striving for truth, we also feel a serious, dignified humor, which on the other hand so beautifully corrects what pride could instill in us as a sense of truth. We then also feel the other thing that Goethe always said when he was in danger of holding on to the one truth too tightly: Oh, the thought that has been considered could only be an illusion, the thought that has been considered could be something that does not prove feasible. Yes, let us also feel that as a corrective to our arrogance of truth, as a strain on our seriousness, our dignity in the pursuit of truth! Let us feel the Goethe word

Quite and truly
I am a poor wretch.
My dreams are not true,
And my thoughts go awry.

If we can feel this, then we will be able to cope with our lofty ideal of truth.

In connection with the ancient occult sentence, I would like to show how the entire doctrine of the round is still connected in a very specific way with the thoughts we expressed last time. First of all, I would like to emphasize the following: Every great religious teacher, even if he is not a religious teacher but has only participated in the work of humanity, starts from the guiding principles. And one of the guiding principles is: the human being corresponds to the processes in the great world, the macrocosm.

Now I ask you to consider that when we look at the development within the rounds, when we look at the seven rounds, we have a kind of descending development during the first three rounds, because the whole earth and also the human being move away from the deity, as it were. Man was close to the deity in the beginning, in a childlike, innocent state. During earthly development, he gains experience and reaches his lowest point during the fourth round, in order to ascend again in the following three rounds, in the fifth, sixth, and seventh round. The question is always asked whether there is a purpose to moving away from the deity and then approaching it again. I would like to talk about this in a later lecture, if there is a purpose.

Let us consider the first stage, then all the middle stages and then the last stages of the gap in the transcript]). During the first three stages, man is formed from the outside, so to speak. Man is built up in such a way that by the fourth round he is ready to have his entire physical body built. This physical body is built around the self. The self is inside, and the physical body is around it. It took the first three and a half of the fourth round to build the body around the self. Think about what man was before. He was a purely active being before. He was a being that was not designed to receive impressions from the outside, but a being that was completely dependent on itself, however strange that may sound. When man, in the course of his earthly development, wanted an object, he made it himself. He was active. This is still the case today at the higher levels of existence. Today, initiation happens in such a way that the person concerned first learns to form the so-called “Mayavi-Rupa body”. This is not a body that is formed around us, but when the self escapes from the body, it must be able to form the mayavi-rupa body. You have to be able to form it yourself, while the other body is formed around us, whereby we remain passive. This passivity comes into consideration for the human being when the body is not formed by us. This is what everyone first has to do in the descent. He did not do this himself, but they were formed for him.

The student must learn to do what has been done to him himself. We form the mayavi-rupa body ourselves. We put it around us. The student first learns to form this body. In the second half, the self works its way out again and gradually learns to form this body. The substance of the devachan provides the substance for the mayavi-rupa body. When a person sleeps, the self leaves the body. But the mayavi-rupa body is not formed. The substance is there. It is called the mental body when it occurs in the devachan. In the case where it is thoroughly organized, it is called the mayavi-rupa body.

The situation is as follows: we have built up the three bodies during the first three stages and during half of the fourth stage. Then the self feels trapped in these bodies. It is passive, but becomes more and more active. If you want to prepare yourself for this point of activity in a dignified way, you have to recognize that you are now passive and that you have to become more and more active.

Being trapped in your body means being passive. This is the meaning of the Buddhist teachings. For Buddha, suffering does not mean feeling pain, but being passive. Being born and dying is being passive. You can only be sick in the body. The mind cannot be sick. The astral body and the Mayavi-Rupa body can still be sick. Being separated from what is loved, being united with what is unloved, is being passive. You can only desire what you cannot attain if you are in the body.

So you can see that Buddhism is not a religion that understands suffering in its deepest sense, but rather that suffering is a vehicle. It does not recognize pain or suffering as the essence of the world. There is a prohibition in Buddhism that shows how far Buddhism is from regarding suffering and life as suffering. One commandment says: If a monk murders or incites murder, or if he publicly preaches that dying is better than living, he is unworthy to be a Buddhist monk. A murderer, or one who incites murder, who preaches that suffering is not worth living, is not worthy of being a Buddhist monk. Strive to be active, says Buddha. Buddha also took this out of esoteric Buddhism, to make man an image of the whole evolution.

The first stage is when the first wave of evolution is formed, when the thought is there before existence begins. In the first state lies the thought of how existence should be, which is about to realize the sentence: Man should put himself in the state in which the deity was when it says: It should become light.

The second state is that the whole will is born. First there was the thought, then the release of the thought, then the sinking into [space].

The third is what is called: the voice resounds. Not only is the thought let out, but the thought begins to sound. The fourth stage is where not only voice is there, but where real action begins, where action begins. [Fifth:] After action comes life; the middle state [sixth]. And when that is achieved, it goes up again. [Seventh: the upward striving.]

After the seventh round is the transition to nirvana, after the sixth [gap in the transcript]. [Looking back at the entire previous illusion.] You should strive for this cosmic development. This is your path, your eight-part path. So you should live like the cosmos. It is important that you cultivate right thinking; then, secondly, right resolve; and thirdly, right speech; fourthly, right action; fifthly, right livelihood; sixthly, right effort; seventhly, right mindfulness; eighthly, right concentration. There you have the whole cosmic evolution, which the disciple should endeavor to emulate in his path. The eightfold path is a repetition of cosmic development.

When the Buddha was about to found a religion, he said to himself: “I must make cosmic truths the goal of aspiration.” How does a person become a founder of a religion? By making cosmic truths into precepts. The founder reads in the cosmos what he sees. Therefore he says: “I and the Father are one.” What he gives is the same as what is written in the stars. This thought, this harmony gives Buddhism a deeper character. I doubt that the Sinhalese recognizes this. But it does not matter. The Buddhists recognize the legitimacy of the esoteric. The Buddhist strives for the eightfold path. He does everything to fulfill it.

The priest, the monk who leads the religious community knows it, and it is not customary to communicate everything to the outside world. It is the same as in Catholicism. Catholicism is a religion of sacrifice. The priest knows. He knows the esoteric. The believer only does the prescriptions. It can also be a high priest or an administrator without being an esoteric. This is more consciously a Dominican and Franciscan order, and therefore also structured in certain ways. What can you bring in?

A moral code is approved by a seemingly subordinate monk. He has written a book. The bishop has approved it and put his name to it. This book is now used in all schools. Who has the real spiritual influence? It depends on the right person writing the book, someone who feels called to do so. The bishop does not write a book himself. Why doesn't the monk become a bishop? He wants no distraction, no external position, he wants to devote himself to the inner life.

And the Pope, he knows esotericism. It may happen that there is no one. Leo was an esoteric, Pius IX was not. The present one is probably quite harmless.

The correspondence of the eightfold path with the cosmic law - when it is carried out, evolution is perceived. When man makes himself a microcosm, he also perceives the macrocosm. This is not just a penance, it is an expansion of the being of the whole person. The reproduction of the human being brings him together with the macrocosm.

Now something else: we have described the state where man is furthest removed from the divine. That is the state where one sees the other from the outside. When one sees the other from the outside, then the self is always closed off by a shell. This looking is called “looking in tamas, in darkness.” So one sees, in complete passivity around oneself, “in tamas.”

When we begin to feel with each other, then we perceive something of the self of the other through feeling. Also, through desire, we seek to spread our self beyond ourselves. By desiring a plate of broad beans, I am already reaching beyond myself. This reaching beyond oneself in mere feeling and desire, which concerns only the astral body, is called “life in rajas.

And the next higher state is when one goes out not only with feelings and perceptions, but with thoughts. There the barriers really fall even in life when one goes out in thought. We become calm through thoughts. It stops being deceived by desires. When I rise to the thought, I am no longer deceived by desires. I think according to the higher meaning. That is the “life in Sattva”. This is the state that can be achieved through thinking.

Then there is the state of intuition. These are the ones in which wisdom guides us through the world, in wisdom. This is the higher state. This is the Durga state. “Living in the Durga state” is the state of life that the chela strives for: to have a divine mission for all his actions. Man usually always asks himself: Is it good or evil? Various such logical impulses have been employed. But he who is to become a disciple must no longer act according to logical and moral impulses, but he must also ask himself whether there is a divine mission for him. Imagine a monk. There are many right actions. Suppose he is supposed to write a book, no one can blame him if he does not write a book. He writes the book because he is carrying out the divine order to write the book. That is acting in the Durga state. There is an inner urge to do so.

[ 1 ] The mystic sought within himself for forces, for beings which remain unknown to man so long as he is limited by the ordinary conception of life. The mystic formulates the great question about his own spiritual forces, which go beyond lower nature, and their laws. With his ordinary materialistic, logical conception of life, man creates gods for himself, or if he gains insight into this creation he disowns them. The mystic perceives that he creates gods; he perceives why he creates them; he can, so to speak, see beyond the natural laws of the creation of gods. It is the same with him as it would be with a plant if it suddenly acquired knowledge and learned to know the laws governing its own growth and development. The plant develops in innocent unconsciousness. If it knew its own laws it would have to acquire an entirely new relationship to itself. The plant which has acquired knowledge would have before it as an ideal what the poet experiences when he sings about it, what the botanist thinks when he investigates its laws. The same is true of the mystic with respect to his laws and the forces working within him. As one who knows, he must create beyond himself a divine element. This was the attitude of the initiates toward what the people had created beyond nature. This was their attitude toward the popular world of gods and myths. They wished to perceive the laws of this world of gods and myths. Where the people had a divinity, a myth, there they sought a higher truth. Let us consider an example: The Athenians were compelled by the Cretan King Minos to deliver to him seven boys and seven girls every eight years. These were thrown as food to the Minotaur, a fearful monster. When for the third time the sad consignment was to leave for Crete, the king's son, Theseus, traveled with them. When he arrived in Crete, King Minos' own daughter, Ariadne, took his part. The Minotaur lived in a labyrinth, a maze from which, once one had wandered into it, he could not find his way out again. Theseus wished to free his homeland from the disgraceful tribute. He had to enter the labyrinth, into which the monster's prey was usually thrown. He wished to slay the Minotaur. He undertook this task; he overcame the fearful foe and again reached freedom with the aid of a ball Of thread which Ariadne had given him. The mystic had to recognize how the creative spirit of man comes to form such a tale. As the botanist contemplates the growth of a plant to discover its laws, so the mystic wished to contemplate the creating spirit. He sought truth, wisdom, where the people had set up a myth. Sallustius discloses the attitude of a mystic-sage toward such a myth: “The universe itself can be called a myth, since bodies and material objects are apparent in it, while souls and minds are concealed. Furthermore, to wish to teach all men the truth about the gods causes the foolish to despise, because they cannot learn, and the good to be slothful, whereas to conceal the truth by myths prevents the former from despising philosophy and compels the latter to study it.”⁵⁴

[ 2 ] The mystic was conscious that by seeking the truth contained in a myth, he was adding something to what was present in the consciousness of the people. It was clear to him that he was placing himself above this consciousness of the people just as a botanist places himself above the growing plant. He said something quite different from what was present in the mythological consciousness, but he looked upon what he said as a deeper truth which was symbolically expressed in the myth. Man confronts the material world as if it were a monstrous enemy. To it he sacrifices the fruits of his personality. It devours them. It does so until the conqueror (Theseus) awakens in man. His cognition spins for him the thread by which he finds his way when he enters the maze of the material world to slay his foe. The mystery of human cognition itself is expressed in this conquering of the material world. The mystic knows this mystery. It indicates a force in the human personality. Ordinary consciousness is unaware of this force. But the latter works within it nevertheless. It engenders the myth which has the same structure as the mystical truth. This truth is symbolized in the myth. What then are myths? They are a creation of the spirit, of the unconsciously creative soul. The soul is governed by entirely definite laws. It must work in a definite direction in order to create beyond itself. On the mythological level it does this in pictures, but these pictures are built up according to the laws of the soul. We could also say that when the soul progresses beyond the plane of mythological consciousness to the deeper truths, these bear the same stamp as the myths did before, because one and the same force is active in their creation. The Neoplatonic philosopher, Plotinus (204–269 A. D.), referring to the Egyptian priest-sages, speaks thus about this relationship between the way of thinking common to pictorial myths and higher cognition:

[ 3 ] “The wise of Egypt—whether in precise knowledge or by a prompting of nature—indicated the truth where, in their effort toward philosophical statement, they left aside the writing, forms that take in the details of words and sentences—those characters that represent sounds and convey the propositions of reasoning—and drew pictures instead, engraving in the temple-inscriptions a separate image for every separate item: thus they exhibited the thought-content in which the Supreme goes forth. For each manifestation of knowledge and wisdom is a distinct image, an object in itself, an immediate unity, not an aggregate of discursive argument and detailed discussion. Later from this wisdom in unity there appears, in another form of existence, an image, already less compact, which announces the original in an outward stage and seeks the causes by which things are such that the wonder arises how a created world can be so excellent.”⁵⁵

[ 4 ] Whoever wishes to become acquainted with the relationship between mysticism and mythological tales, must see how mythology is dealt with by the world conception of those whose wisdom accords with the method of thinking of the Mysteries. Such accord exists to the fullest extent in Plato. His interpretation of myths and his use of them in his exposition, may be taken as a standard. In the Phaedrus, a dialogue about the soul, the myth of Boreas is introduced. This divine being, which was seen in the rushing wind, once glimpsed the beautiful Orithea, daughter of the Greek King Erechtheus, as she was picking flowers with her playmates. He was seized with a passion for her, abducted her and took her to his cave. In this dialogue Plato causes Socrates to reject a purely rational explanation of this myth. According to such an explanation an external, natural fact is supposed to be related symbolically in the tale. A gale is supposed to have seized the king's daughter and flung her down from the cliff. “Such explanations,” says Socrates, “are very subtle and may be very entertaining ... But when one has once begun to give a rational explanation to one of these mythological figures, one must go on and look at all the others with the same scepticism and reduce them one after another to the rules of probability ... This sort of explanation would be the business of a life. If anyone disbelieves in these mythological figures, and, with a rustic kind of wisdom, undertakes to explain each in accordance with probability, he will need a great deal of leisure. But I have no leisure for such inquiries ... So I dismiss these matters and, accepting the customary belief about them as I was saying just now, I investigate not these things, but myself, to know whether I am a monster of a more complicated structure and more savage than Typhon, or a gentler and simpler creature, whose nature partakes of divinity.”⁵⁶ From this we see that a rationalistic, intellectual interpretation of myths was unacceptable to Plato. This must be considered together with the manner in which he himself makes use of myths to express his meaning through them. Where he speaks of the life of the soul, where he leaves the paths of the transitory and seeks out the eternal in the soul, where, therefore, the ideas supported by material perception and intellectual thought are no longer present, there Plato makes use of the myth. The Phaedrus speaks of the eternal in the soul. Here the soul is represented as a team of two many-winged horses with a charioteer. One of the horses is patient and wise, the other stubborn and wild. When the team encounters an obstruction in its path, the stubborn horse makes use of this to hinder the intentions of the good one and thwart the charioteer. When the team arrives at the point where it should follow the gods over the heavens, the bad horse brings it into a state of confusion. Whether the bad horse is overcome by the good and the team is able to enter the supersensible realm beyond the obstruction, depends on the power of the bad horse. So it happens that the soul is never able to raise itself unhindered to the realm of the divine. Some souls raise themselves to this vision of eternity in a greater degree than others. The soul which has seen the beyond remains safe until the next traverse; the soul which—because of the wild horse—has seen nothing, must make the attempt on a new traverse. By these traverses are meant the various incarnations of the soul. One traverse denotes the life of the soul in one personality. The wild horse represents the lower nature, the wise horse the higher nature, and the charioteer the soul longing for its apotheosis. Plato makes use of the myth to show the path of the eternal soul through various stages. Similarly, in other writings of Plato, myth or symbolical narrative is used to show the inner being of man, the part not perceptible to the senses.

[ 5 ] Here Plato is in full accord with the manner of expression by myth and parable used by others. In ancient Indian literature we find a parable attributed to Buddha. A man much attached to life, who on no account wishes to die, who seeks for sensual pleasure, is pursued by four serpents. He hears a voice which commands him to feed and bathe the four serpents from time to time. The man runs away for fear of the evil serpents. Again he hears a voice. This draws his attention to five murderers who are coming after him. Again the man runs away. A voice draws his attention to a sixth murderer who wishes to strike off his head with a drawn sword. Again the man flees. He comes to a deserted village. He hears a voice which tells him that thieves will shortly plunder the village. As he continues to flee he comes to a great expanse of water. He does not feel safe on this shore; he makes a basket for himself out of straw, sticks and leaves; in this he reaches the further shore. Now he is safe; he is a Brahmin. The sense of this parable is that man must pass through the most varied conditions to attain to the divine. In the four serpents may be seen the four elements, fire, water, earth and air. In the five murderers may be seen the five senses. The deserted village is the soul which has fled from the impressions of the senses, but is not yet safe when alone with itself. If the soul inwardly takes hold of its lower nature only, it must perish. Man must fashion a boat for himself which will carry him over the waters of the transitory from one shore, material nature, to the other, the eternal and divine.

[ 6 ] Let us consider the Egyptian mystery of Osiris in this light. Gradually Osiris had become one of the most important Egyptian divinities. His representation supplanted other representations of gods in certain parts of the country. A significant series of myths formed itself around the figures of Osiris and his consort Isis. Osiris was the son of the sun god; Typhon-Set was his brother and Isis his sister. Osiris married his sister. With her he reigned over Egypt. The evil brother, Typhon, plotted the destruction of Osiris. He caused a casket to be made of the exact size of Osiris. At a banquet the casket was offered as a gift to anyone who exactly fitted into it. No one succeeded in this but Osiris. He laid himself in it. Then Typhon and his accomplices hurled themselves upon Osiris, closed the casket and threw it into the river. When Isis received the dreadful news she was desperate and wandered everywhere searching for the corpse of her husband. When she had found him, Typhon again gained power over him. He tore him into fourteen pieces, which were scattered far apart in different districts. Various tombs of Osiris were shown in Egypt. Here and there in many places pieces of the god were said to have been laid to rest. Osiris himself ascended from the nether world and conquered Typhon; a ray from Osiris then fell upon Isis, who bore him the son Harpokrates or Horus.

[ 7 ] Now let us compare this myth with the way the world was understood by the Greek philosopher Empedocles (490–430 B. C.). He assumes that the single archetypal being was torn into the four elements, fire, water, earth and air—into the multiplicity of existence. He sets in opposition to each other two powers which affect growth and decay within the world of existence: love and strife. Empedocles says of the elements:

[ 8 ] “There are these alone; but, running through one another, They become men and the tribes of beasts. At one time all are brought together into one order by Love; At another, each is carried in different directions by the repulsion of Strife.”⁵⁷

[ 9 ] Then from Empedocles' standpoint what are the things of the world? They are the elements, variously mixed. They could come into existence only through the tearing apart of the archetypal One into the four entities. This archetypal One is diffused into the elements of the world. All the things that meet us partake of the diffused divinity, but this divinity is hidden within them. It first had to die, so that the things could come into existence. And what are these things? They are mixtures of portions of the god, influenced in their structure by love and hate. Empedocles says this distinctly:

[ 10 ] “This is manifest in the mass of mortal limbs. At one time all the limbs that are the body's portion Are brought together by Love in blooming life's high season; At another, severed by cruel Strife, They wander each alone by the breakers of life's sea. It is the same with plants, with fish that live in waters, With beasts living on hills, with seabirds sailing on wings.”⁵⁸

[ 11 ] Empedocles must take the view that the sage rediscovers the divine archetypal unity which is spellbound in the world, interwoven with love and hate. But if man is to find the divine he himself must become divine, for Empedocles takes his stand on the basis that only equals can recognize each other. His conviction of the laws of cognition is expressed in Goethe's saying, [ 12 ] “If the eye were not of the nature of the sun how could we see the light? If God's own power did not live within us how could we strive for the divine?”

[ 13 ] In the myth of Osiris the mystic is able to find these thoughts about the world and man, which transcend the experience of the senses. The divine creative force is diffused in the world. It appears as the four elements. The god (Osiris) has been slain. Man, with his cognition, which is of a divine nature, is to wake him again; he is to find him again as Horus (Son of God, Logos, Wisdom) in the antithesis of Strife (Typhon) and Love (Isis). Empedocles expresses his basic conviction in Greek form with ideas reminiscent of the myths. Aphrodite is Love; Neikos, Strife. They bind and release the elements.

[ 14 ] Such an exposition of the content of a myth must not be confused with a merely symbolical or allegorical interpretation. This is not intended here. The pictures comprising the content of a myth are not invented symbols for abstract truths, but real soul experiences of the initiate. He experiences the pictures with spiritual organs of perception as a normal man experiences the representations of material things with his eyes and ears. Just as the representation is of little value by itself if it is not activated by perception of the external object, so the mythological picture is of little value without its activation through real occurrences in the spiritual world. It is only with respect to the material world that man at first stands outside the activating things; on the other hand, he can experience the mythological pictures only when he stands within the corresponding spiritual events. To be able to stand within the latter, in the opinion of the ancient mystics, he must have passed through initiation. There the spiritual events which he sees are illustrated as it were, by the mythological pictures. Whoever is unable to take mythology as such an illustration of true spiritual events, has not yet advanced to a comprehension of mythology. For the spiritual events themselves are supersensible, and pictures whose content is reminiscent of the material world are not in themselves spiritual, but are merely an illustration of the spiritual. Whoever lives only in pictures, lives in a dream; he lives in spiritual perception only when he has reached the point of experiencing the spiritual in the picture, just as in the material world one experiences the rose through the representation of the rose. This is also the reason why the pictures presented by myths cannot have only a single meaning. Because of their illustrative character the same myths can express various spiritual facts. It is, therefore, no contradiction when interpreters of myths apply them now to one spiritual fact and again to a different one.

[ 15 ] From this point of view a thread can be found running through the manifold Greek myths. Let us consider the legend of Hercules. The twelve labors imposed on Hercules are seen in a higher light when one reflects that before the last and most difficult one he was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. At the command of King Eurystheus of Mycenae he was to fetch Cerberus, the hound of hell, from the nether world, and take him back there again. To be able to undertake a journey into the nether world, Hercules had to be an initiate. The Mysteries led man through the death of the transitory and thus into the nether world; through initiation they wished to save the eternal element in him from destruction. As a mystic he could overcome death. Hercules overcame the dangers of the nether world as a mystic. This justifies the interpretation of his other deeds as stages of the inner development of the soul. He overcame the Nemean lion and brought him to Mycenae. This means that he became master of the purely physical force in man; he tamed it. Next he slew the nine-headed Hydra. He overcame it with firebrands, dipping his arrows in its gall so that they would never miss their mark. This means that he overcame lower knowledge, the knowledge of the senses, through the fire of the spirit, and out of what he had gained from this lower knowledge he drew the strength to see the lower world in the light belonging to the spiritual eye. Hercules caught the doe of Artemis. The latter is the goddess of the chase. Hercules hunted down what the free nature of the human soul can offer. The other labors can be interpreted in a similar way. We cannot follow them in every detail here; our intention is only to show how the general sense of the myth itself points to inner development

[ 16 ] A similar interpretation is possible for the voyage of the Argonauts. Phrixus and his sister Helle, children of a Boeotian king, suffered greatly at the hands of their stepmother. The gods sent a ram with a golden fleece to them, which carried them away through the air. As they crossed the straits between Europe and Asia, Helle was drowned. Hence the straits are called the Hellespont. Phrixus reached the king of Colchis on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. He sacrificed the ram to the gods and presented the fleece to the King Aetes. The latter had it hung in a grove and guarded by a frightful dragon. The Greek hero, Jason, together with the other heroes, Hercules, Theseus and Orpheus, undertook to fetch the fleece from Colchis. Jason was charged with difficult tasks before he could reach the treasure of Aetes. But Medea, the daughter of the king, who was versed in magic, helped him. He tamed two fire-breathing bulls; he ploughed a field and sowed dragons' teeth, so that armed men grew out of the earth. On the advice of Medea he threw a stone among the men, whereupon they murdered one another. By means of a magic potion from Medea, Jason put the dragon to sleep; then he was able to obtain the fleece. With this he embarked upon the return journey to Greece. Medea accompanied him as his wife. The king pursued the fugitives. To delay him, Medea slew her little brother Absyrtus, scattering his limbs upon the sea. Aetes was delayed in gathering them up. Hence the couple were able to reach Jason's home with the fleece. Here every single fact demands a deeper explanation. The fleece is something belonging to man, something of infinite value to him; in ancient times it was separated from him and its recapture involves the overcoming of terrible powers. So it is with the eternal in the human soul. It belongs to man. But he finds himself separated from it. His lower nature separates him from it. Only when he overcomes this lower nature, puts the latter to sleep, can he regain it. This is possible when his own consciousness (Medea) comes to his aid with its magic force. Medea becomes for Jason what Diotima, as the teacher of love, was for Socrates. Human wisdom possesses the magic force to reach the divine after overcoming the transitory. Out of the lower nature can come only a lower human element, the armed men, which is overcome by the force of the spiritual element, the advice of Medea. Even when man has found his eternal element, the Recce, he is not yet safe. He must sacrifice a part of his consciousness (Absyrtus). This is demanded by the material world, which we can conceive of only as manifold (torn to pieces). We could penetrate still more deeply into the description of the spiritual events lying behind these pictures, but here we intend only to indicate the principle of myth formation.

[ 17 ] Of particular interest in relation to such an interpretation is the saga of Prometheus. Prometheus and Epimetheus were the sons of the Titan, Japetos. The Titans were the children of the oldest generation of the gods, of Uranos (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth). Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, dethroned his father and seized the rulership of the world. For this, together with the remaining Titans, he was overpowered by his son Zeus. And Zeus became supreme among the gods. In the battle with the Titans, Prometheus stood at the side of Zeus. On his advice Zeus banished the Titans into the nether world. But the Titans' attitude of mind continued to live in Prometheus. He was only half a friend to Zeus. When Zeus wished to destroy men for their presumption, Prometheus took their part, teaching them the art of numbers and writing, as well as other things leading to culture, especially the use of fire. Because of this Zeus was angry with Prometheus. Hephaestus, the son of Zeus, was commissioned to fashion the image of a woman of great beauty, which the gods adorned with all kinds of gifts. This woman was known as Pandora, the all-gifted. Hermes, the messenger of the gods, brought her to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus. She brought him a casket as a gift from the gods. Epimetheus accepted the gift, despite the fact that Prometheus had advised him on no account to accept a gift from the gods. When the casket was opened, out flew all kinds of human plagues. Hope alone remained inside, and that only because Pandora quickly closed the lid. Therefore Hope has remained as the doubtful gift of the gods.—At the command of Zeus, Prometheus was chained to a rock in the Caucasus because of his relationship with men. An eagle constantly fed upon his liver, which continually renewed itself. Prometheus had to pass his days in tortured solitude until one of the gods voluntarily sacrificed himself, that is, dedicated himself to death. The tortured one bore his suffering steadfastly. He had learned that Zeus would be dethroned by the son of a mortal woman if he did not marry her. Zeus was anxious to know this secret; he sent the messenger of the gods, Hermes, to Prometheus to discover something about it. Prometheus denied him any information. The legend of Hercules is linked with that of Prometheus. During his travels Hercules also came to the Caucasus. He killed the eagle which was consuming the liver of Prometheus. The centaur, Chiron, who could not die, although suffering from an incurable wound, sacrificed himself for Prometheus. Then the latter was reconciled with the gods.

[ 18 ] The Titans are the force of will streaming from the original cosmic spirit (Uranos) in the form of nature (Kronos). Here we must not think of merely abstract forces of will, but of real beings of will. Prometheus belongs among the latter. This characterizes his being. But he is not entirely a Titan. In a certain sense he sides with Zeus, the spirit who assumed the rulership of the world after the unbridled nature-force (Kronos) had been tamed. Prometheus, therefore, represents those worlds which have given man that forward-striving, which is a force half of nature, half of spirit—the will. On the one side the will is directed toward good, on the other side toward evil. Its destiny is formed according to whether it inclines toward the spiritual or the transitory. This destiny is the destiny of man himself. Man is chained to the transitory. The eagle gnaws at him. He must endure it. He can only attain the heights when he seeks his destiny in solitude. He has a secret. Its content is that the divine (Zeus) must marry a mortal, human consciousness itself, which is bound to the physical body, in order to bring forth a son, human wisdom (the Logos), who will redeem the god. Through this, consciousness becomes immortal. Man may not betray this secret until a mystic (Hercules) approaches him and removes the power which continually threatens him with death. A being, half animal, half human—a centaur—must sacrifice himself to redeem man. The centaur is man himself, the half animal, half spiritual man. He must die so that the purely spiritual man may be redeemed. What Prometheus, the human will, despises, is taken by Epimetheus, the intellect, shrewdness. But the gifts offered to Epimetheus are only troubles and plagues. For the intellect clings to nothingness, to the transitory. And only one thing remains—the hope that out of the transitory, one day the eternal may be born.

[ 19 ] The thread running through the legends of the Argonauts, Hercules and Prometheus, also holds good for the poem of the Odyssey by Homer. The use of this method of interpretation in studying the latter work, may appear forced. But upon a closer examination of everything that has to be considered, even the most hardened doubter must lose his misgivings about such an interpretation. Above all, it must surprise us to find it related of Odysseus also that he descended to the nether world. Whatever we may think of the author of the Odyssey in other respects, it is impossible to credit him with causing a mortal being to descend to the nether world without bringing him into relationship with all that the journey to the nether world signified in the Greek world conception. It signified the overcoming of the transitory and the awakening of the eternal in the soul. That Odysseus achieved this must, therefore, be admitted. With this his experiences, like those of Hercules, gain a deeper meaning. They become a description of something which does not belong to the material world, a description of the soul's path of development. In addition, the Odyssey is not related as one would expect of a sequence of external facts. The hero makes voyages on magic ships. Actual geographical distances are treated in a most arbitrary way. Material reality is simply irrelevant. This becomes comprehensible if the actual events are related only in order to illustrate spiritual development. Furthermore, the author himself states in his introduction to the work, that it deals with the search for the soul: [ 20 ] “Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had reached the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own soul and the return of his comrades.”⁵⁹

[ 21 ] Here we have a man seeking for the soul, the divine element, and his wanderings in search of this divine element are related. He comes to the land of the Cyclops. These are ungainly giants with one eye in their foreheads. Polyphemus, the most terrible of them, devours several of his companions. Odysseus saves himself by blinding the Cyclops. Here we are dealing with the first stage of life's pilgrimage. Physical power, the lower nature, must be overcome. Whoever does not deprive it of its strength, whoever does not blind it, will be devoured by it.—Odysseus then reaches the island of the witch Circe. She transforms some of his companions into grunting swine. She also is conquered by him. Circe represents the lower spiritual force which clings to the transitory. Through abuse of this force she can thrust humanity only deeper into its animal nature. Odysseus must overcome her. Then he can descend into the nether world. He becomes a mystic. Now he is exposed to the dangers which beset a mystic on his ascent from the lower to the higher stages of initiation. He reaches the Sirens who lure passing travelers to their death with sounds of enchanting sweetness. These are the images produced by the lower fantasy, the first things to be followed by anyone who has freed himself from the material world. He has come as far as free creative activity, but not as far as the initiated spirit. He chases after illusory images and must free himself from their power. Odysseus must traverse the awesome passage between Scylla and Charybdis. In his early stages the mystic wavers between spirit and sensuality. He is still unable to grasp the full content of the spirit, but sensuality has already lost its earlier value. All Odysseus' companions perish in a shipwreck; he alone saves himself and finds the nymph Calypso, who receives him in friendship and cares for him for seven years. At last, at the command of Zeus, she releases him to return to his home. The mystic has reached a stage at which all who are striving with him, fail, except Odysseus, who alone is worthy. In peace this worthy one enjoys gradual initiation for a period defined by the mystically symbolical number seven. Before Odysseus reaches his home, however, he comes to the island of the Phaeacians. Here he is hospitably received. The king's daughter is interested in him and King Alcinous himself entertains him and does him honor. Once again Odysseus encounters the world and its pleasures, and the spirit which cling to the world (Nausicaä) awakens in him. However, he finds the way home to the divine. At first nothing good awaits him at home. His wife, Penelope, is surrounded by numerous suitors. To each she promises marriage when she has finished a certain piece of weaving. She avoids keeping her promise by unraveling at night what she has woven during the day. The suitors must be overcome by Odysseus so that he may be reunited with his wife in peace. The goddess Athene transforms him into a beggar so that he will not be recognized at once upon entering his house. Then he overcomes the suitors. Odysseus seeks his own deeper consciousness, the divine forces of the soul. He wishes to be united with them. Before the mystic finds them he must overcome everything which lays claim to this consciousness in the form of a suitor. This crowd of suitors comes from the world of lower reality, of transitory nature. The logic applicable to this world is a weaving which continually unravels itself after it has been spun. Wisdom (the goddess Athene) is the sure guide to the deepest forces of the soul. She transforms man into a beggar, i.e. she divests him of all that is derived from the transitory.

[ 22 ] The Eleusinian Festivals, celebrated in Greece in honor of Demeter and Dionysus, appear steeped in Mystery wisdom. A sacred road led from Athens to Eleusis. It was marked with secret signs which could bring the soul into a mood of deep reverence. In Eleusis were secret temple buildings which were served by priestly families. Dignity and the wisdom with which this dignity was connected, were inherited in these priest families from generation to generation. (Information concerning these places of worship may be found in the book, Ergänzungen zu den letzten Untersuchungen auf der Acropolis in Athen by Karl Bötticher, Philologus, Suppl. Vol. 3 Section 3.) The wisdom making it possible for services to be enacted there, was the Greek Mystery wisdom. The festivals, celebrated twice yearly, displayed the great cosmic drama of the destiny of the divine in the world and the destiny of the human soul. The Minor Mysteries were celebrated in February, the Major Mysteries in September. Initiations were connected with the festivals. The symbolical presentation of the drama of man and the cosmos formed the concluding act of the initiations undertaken there. The Eleusinian temples were erected in honor of the goddess Demeter. She is a daughter of Kronos. She bore a daughter, Persephone, to Zeus, before his marriage to Hera. Once while Persephone was playing, she was kidnaped by Pluto, the god of the nether world. Demeter, lamenting, hastened to search for her all over the earth. In Eleusis the daughters of Keleus, a local ruler, found Demeter sitting on a rock. Taking the form of an old woman she entered the service of Keleus' family as nurse to the son of the ruler's wife. She wished to endow this son with immortality. Therefore she hid him every night in the fire. When the mother once observed this, she wept and lamented. Henceforth the bestowal of immortality was impossible. Demeter left the house. Keleus built a temple. Demeter's sorrow for Persephone was limitless. She caused famine to spread over the earth. To avoid disaster the gods were obliged to placate her. Pluto was persuaded by Zeus to allow Persephone to return to the upper world. Before this, however, the god of the nether world gave her a pomegranate to eat. Because of this she was compelled to return to the nether world again and again at regular intervals. From then on she spent one third of the year in the nether world and two thirds in the upper world. Demeter was reconciled; she returned to Olympus. But in Eleusis, the place of her anguish, she founded the service of the festivals to commemorate her fate for ever.

[ 23 ] The meaning of the Demeter-Persephone myth is not difficult to recognize. It is the soul which alternates between the lower and the upper world. The eternity of the soul and its eternal transformation through birth and death, is represented pictorially. The soul is descended from Demeter, the immortal. But it is carried off by the transitory and becomes destined to share in the fate of the transitory. It has eaten the fruit in the nether world; the human soul is satiated with the transitory and therefore cannot dwell continually in the divine heights. It must always return to the realm of the transitory. Demeter represents that being from which human consciousness has sprung; but this consciousness must be thought of as having been able to come into existence through the spiritual forces of the earth. Thus Demeter is the archetypal being of the earth, and her gift to the earth in the form of the forces in the seeds and the produce of the fields, only indicates a still deeper aspect of her being. This being wishes to endow humanity with immortality. Demeter hides her nursling in the fire at night. But man cannot endure the pure power of fire (the spirit). Demeter must desist. She can only found the temple service through which man may participate in the divine insofar as he is able to do so.

[ 24 ] The Eleusinian Festivals were an eloquent acknowledgment of belief in the eternity of the human soul. This acknowledgment found pictorial expression in the myth about Persephone. Dionysus was celebrated in Eleusis, together with Demeter and Persephone. As in Demeter was worshiped the divine creatrix of the eternal in man, so in Dionysus was worshiped the divine element, ever changing in the whole world. The god who had been diffused into the world and had been torn to pieces in order to be re-born spiritually, had to be celebrated together with Demeter. (A splendid presentation of the spirit of the Eleusinian Mysteries is to be found in the book, Sanctuaires d'Orient by Édouard Schuré. Paris, 1898.)

• 54. Sallust the Platonist, De Diis et mundo, Concerning Gods and the Universe, Par. III. Translated by A. D. Nock, Cambridge University Press, 1926.
• 55. Plotinus, 5th Ennead, The Divine Mind, 8th Tractate, On Intellectual Beauty, 6. Plotinus (204–269 A.D.) was born of Roman parents in Egypt. Studied under Ammonius Saccas at Alexandria, attempted to go to the East to study philosophy there, but finally reached Rome where he established himself as a teacher of philosophy. He attracted a circle of distinguished pupils, including the Emperor Gallienus and his wife. Not long before his death, Plotinus collected his writings and arranged them in a series of 6 Enneads, later edited by his famous pupil, Porphyry. The Enneads “are the most authoritative exposition of Neoplatonism.”
• 56. Plato, Phaedrus, 229 D, E, 230 A.
• 57. Empedocles, Fragment 26.
• 58. Empedocles, Fragment 20.
• 59. Homer, Odyssey, Book I, 1–5.

There is nothing in the study of myths that leads so deeply into theosophical thinking as the Nordic saga poetry. If the European can think his way into it, he can find his way from there and penetrate ever deeper into the esoteric realms. An understanding of these sagas of Nordic myth can only be attained in advanced stages of life. The Nordic myths were essentially the subject of the Nordic mysteries. A distinction is made between Western European and Northern European mysteries. In Scandinavia and Russia there were the Drottenmysterien, in England and the West the Druid mysteries. Both mysteries have disappeared. “Druid means ‘oak’. The priest or sage in the Nordic world was called ”the oak.”

The replacement of the Nordic belief in gods is communicated to us in a beautiful mystery. In the conquest of the oak by Boniface, we see Christianity's struggle with the Druid mystery. The basic tenor of the Nordic mysteries is tragic. There is something tragic about all the myths of Central Europe and the North. The Twilight of the Gods represents the downfall of the Nordic world of gods. After their downfall, a new sun god, a new Baldur, is to assert himself. In the other, non-Nordic mysteries, there is always a hopeful and confident element.

What was experienced in advance in the mysteries was to be fulfilled. The Apocalypse predicts a future in which Christianity is to be fulfilled. In the Nordic myth, something different had been predicted. There, the downfall of the Nordic gods was experienced through Christianity. It is from this point of view that the new mystery must be understood, through the four stages.

The first step is that of the first Nordic sub-race of the fifth root race. In Central Europe, Christianity was spread among the fifth sub-race of the fifth root race. Four sub-races preceded this. The secret of the four sub-races is that they show how Christianity was to replace what preceded it in the fifth sub-race.

We now go back into a dark past, to the first sub-race of the fifth root race on Nordic soil. There were the Drotten initiations in the north at that time. In primitive temples, half nature, half building, a sacred tent was erected, in which two deities were depicted as ruling the world: Hu and Ceridwen. Hu is Osiris, Ceridwen is Isis, the human being is Horus. There were three degrees of initiation: first, [Eubaten]; second, bards; third, druids. Those who were initiated into the three degrees underwent a transformation such that, by awakening their higher abilities, they became the god Baldur. The mystic had to say to himself: “You must become the resurrected Baldur, who was killed by the god Loki.” Then the initiation mead was handed to him and the initiation ring was given. The mead is analogous to the Indian Soma drink.

In the Nordic initiation, the initiate was first made aware of the development of the Earth and the conditions that preceded it on the earlier planets. On Earth, we should learn until we go beyond the possibility of error. Our life will then be transformed into a kind of rhythm, in relation to only very bright mental activity.

Logical thinking has only gradually emerged from a developmental process. Later, a general human sense of morality will develop as logical thinking is developing now.

What is error on one planet is disease on the next. What remains error on Earth today will be disease on the next planet, to the same extent that the beings capable of error have been left behind. We would not have the harmonious organism today if this harmony had not been developed out of the chaos of the moon. We owe the wonderful organization of our body to the development of the moon. The illnesses that still exist in our time are what remained behind from the error present on the moon. This is what did not reach perfection in the development of the moon. That was the view of the Druid mysteries. For what was left behind, a plant was taken as the descendant of the moon's development. Our plants grow out of the mineral earth. The whole moon was a living being. The plants developed on this living being. There was no actual mineral kingdom, but only a stone plant kingdom and an animal kingdom that lies somewhere between today's plant and animal kingdoms.

Mistletoe was the symbol of what was left of the moon. It draws its nourishment from the living. It is the symbol of all entities and products that hold back or harm the earth. Loki, who still ruled on earth from the moon, had brought to earth what should have found its actual phase of development on the moon.

Baldur is the god of the sun, the bringer of all life, the active powers of the sun. Loki is his necessary opponent. Baldur was frightened by heavy dreams that were to come true afterwards. All creatures take an oath not to harm Baldur, except the mistletoe; no one can kill him, only the harmful in the development of the earth. That is why mistletoe is thrown from Hödur to Baldur. Hödur is the blind, mechanical necessity which must make use of what has been left behind earlier in order to overcome Baldur. That was one part of the mystery. The other part was that blind, mechanical necessity was overcome by the introduction of harmony through the Christ experience. In Christ a new Baldur must arise.

There was a society of twelve great initiates. A thirteenth was their leader. He was not yet ahead of the twelve others at that time. These initiates were called Sige or Sig. When he reached a certain age, he was able to surrender his individuality to a higher individuality, to receive a higher individuality within himself. This is one of the highest mysteries - in the case of Christ Jesus, the descent of the dove. Sig's individuality was replaced by the individuality of Odin or Wotan. This is the same one who had already lived as a great initiate at the time of the Atlanteans. During the downfall of the Atlantean race, what was then tropical Europe gradually became a cold, foggy realm. The remains of the Atlanteans emerged from the ice land. The emergence of Wotan is presented in such a way that initially the ice masses are there. From this, what comes across from the Atlantean world saves itself. The cow Audhumbla licks the ice masses.

Wotan goes through two incarnations, through Buri and Bör. Then he becomes Wotan because of the chela individuality of the chela Sig. Everything that was in the chela Sig becomes what is associated with the name Sig. In the first sub-race, it is Wotan, who is confronted by Hönir or Wile and Loki or We.

Wotan had to undergo a difficult test after he had incarnated. For nine days after he had been wounded on the side where the heart is located, he had to hang on the gallows. Then Mimir came and taught him the runic writing - a model of the Christ fact. Then came his resurrection. This was the initiation of the first sub-race of the fifth root race.

Wotan now presented the origin of mankind in the mystery itself. First our earth was created, but without the minerals and plants. Everything was contained in a great individuality, the giant Ymir. He was overcome by Wotan, Wile and We. From him - the Adam Kadmon - the whole earth was created. From his skullcap they made the vault of heaven and so on. It was the macrocosmic man. From him the gods form the earthly structures. Dwarves also emerge from the giant's body and live inside the earth.

From the plant people the three gods find, from Ask and Embla - from ash and elm - they shaped the physical man. The three gods build the shells of the people:

Wotan or Odin - Sthula sharira
Wile or Hönir - Linga sharira
We or Loki - Kama/Karana sharira

Wotan-Odin gave the spirit, Hönir-Wile gave life and the lawfulness, Loki-We gave warmth and color, the Kama.

This is how the human shells of the gods were constructed. The dwarf is the little human being who is actually the spiritual being. This was the spark that came to fertilize the human being from the middle of the Lemurian period, which will develop into Manas, Buddhi and Atma. The human ego must first develop in the depths, otherwise it would be immediately transformed into a rigid mineral by the sunlight.

The initiation for the second sub-race was as follows: Wotan is said to have the potion of wisdom, and the second sub-race is said to develop slowly up to the same stage. The wisdom is formed by the giant Suttung. He guards the potion of wisdom. The giant's daughter is Gunnlöd. Wotan cannot get to the potion of wisdom. Therefore, he transforms himself into a snake and enters the sanctuary of Gunnlöd. There he remains for three days. The snake is the self, endowed with wisdom.

What happened in the Lemurian period is now repeating itself. The three gods find the dwarf Andwari as Hreidmar's son, Pike and Otter. Otter has the shape of an otter. He is slain by Loki. The father is to receive the hide of the Otter, decorated inside and out with gold. This signifies the permeation of man with the gold of wisdom. Before that, the sthula sharira, the linga sharira and the karana sharira have been formed. Loki kills what was on earth before, the otter, and brings in wisdom, the gold.

Besides the other gold, there was also a golden ring. Before he came into our present earthly development, man was in completely different circumstances. At that time he did not receive the impressions through the gates of the senses. The ring signifies being locked up in the sensations of the senses, which make the self into a special being – the Nibelungen ring.

In the third sub-race, Wotan and those who belonged to him were initiated once more. He had brought the Cup of Wisdom into the home of the gods. There the potion or cup of wisdom was guarded by Mimir. He had the wisdom that led us forward. At the transition from the Lemurian race, man had only one eye through which he was not yet closed off from the outside world. With it he could perceive what was useful or harmful to him. When man closed himself through the ring of sensuality, this eye receded. The gift he now received had to be bought by a sacrifice. Wotan had to buy the new gift by sacrificing the cyclopean eye - not one of the other two eyes.

The Wälsungs and their descendants from Wotan, Sigmund, Sigurd, Siegfried, that is the race of the initiates within the fourth sub-race. In Siegfried the last of the initiations takes place. He conquers the dragon, that is, the lower nature. He now becomes invulnerable to everything lower. He purifies himself through catharsis, through the consciousness of the higher. He must pass through the fire of passion. In this way he acquires Brunhilde. He remains vulnerable only at the point where one carries the cross. It was said that the next initiate would not be vulnerable there.

In the old Norse mythology, King Atli – Atlanti – emerges from the Atlantean era. He is the great Atlantean initiate. He only shies away from the representative of the Christian initiate, the Pope.

All festivals have a living meaning in Theosophy, which is also recovered for the materialistic worldview. People today have become accustomed to the conventional. Yet we can recognize that ancient wisdom has called the Theosophical worldview.

Our ancestors were endowed with different gifts; there was still a living connection with the sources of existence from which we ourselves come and to which we return. Easter had taken on a new form through Christianity. It is the most venerable festival among all peoples. But Easter is not only a festival since the times of Christianity; it existed much earlier. The goal that was striven for could be attained in the mysteries; that which was to come to consciousness was composed in the resurrection of faith. Empedocles describes it with the words: “When you leave the body and swing yourself to the free ether - to the resurrection faith - you will be an immortal spirit, having escaped death.

[That which passes through all of humanity as a collective consciousness and is expressed in its greatest representatives is summarized in the Christian belief in resurrection.

This is most strikingly and mysteriously found in the Easter faith in the mysterious places [of the mysteries. Where the sun gains power, victory over all obstacles of nature, there I must lead you. We are led to the ancient pyramids of the Egyptians, to the places of the Rishis. There has not been a single great spirit who did not believe in resurrection. Plato, Pythagoras, Giordano Bruno, Nicholas of Cusa drew from this belief in resurrection, and it gave them strength. The victory of the spirit over matter in the lowlands of the body? That is the belief from the cult of sacrifice of ancient mysteries. The soul conquers the body. In spring, the sun gains new strength, then it achieves victory over all obstacles in nature. The ancient Indian Rishis did not instruct, but they made new people. Only those who, through outstanding qualities, testified to the spirit in the outside world, were admitted to Easter. Man had to practise virtue, develop his intellectual powers and clarity of mind. He had to become so pure, so virtuous that one could say he had spiritualized himself to such an extent. Those who were found good by the priests were admitted to Easter, which is the festival of the knowledge and transformation of man's nature. It was to be made clear to them what happened to mystics.

We look at the body of man, only a part of it can be perceived with eyes. But we still have the etheric body, which is not quite like the physical body. When we look at the physical body, the space is filled with the second body, the etheric body, and the third, the astral body, [which surrounds and penetrates the physical body like a swirl of mist]. They both surround the physical body, and within it dwells the fourth, the [the ego of the] human being.

Let us consider the human being. He has only to do with his self-knowledge and his astral body, but this can be purified. - When we look at an undeveloped person, his etheric and astral body expresses the lower suffering, it rages through him. In a person who is aware of their moral duty, compassion for people arises; in this case, the colors green, bluish, violet, and reddish appear. Green is the color of thinking activity. Bluish violet is a sign of devotion and all [similar] feelings. The red coloration indicates desire. Orange-yellow means ambition.

The clairvoyant can recognize the level that a person has reached. When the undeveloped person begins to purify his thoughts, red hues appear. Through many incarnations, a person becomes astral within himself, he cultivates and refines himself. When a person is the creator of his astral body, he has triumphed over death. If a person is not yet the master of his astral body, then the physical and astral bodies dissolve in the cosmic mist. At death, the soul is dissolved again into the universe. The etheric body also dissolves. Why do the bodies dissolve? Because man has not yet power over his bodies. What a person has worked on in his astral body is eternal. What he has experienced in terms of purification during his physical existence, he takes with him, and in the new embodiment he brings these experiences with him again. The etheric body is the carrier of life; during life in the physical, the physical body is the ruler. Man cannot easily become the ruler over the life principle. Man knows nothing about the laws that take place in the body - blood, kidneys. All these processes are contingent on life. All physical processes affect the etheric body. Only when a person is liberated from the bodies does he begin the path of life.

For the chela, it is different: when one has undergone a transformation through the mysteries, one's etheric body does not disappear. The chela learns to work on his etheric body. He who begins to work on his etheric body, who has experienced initiation, will gain mastery over his etheric body. Man must work on his etheric body just as he worked on his physical body and his astral body before. When the disciple experiences the “die and become” in the secret schools, he has gained control over his astral body. The chela will conquer death because he has submitted to the mysteries. The chela is made insensitive to his physical body - it no longer exercises control over the chela; the body has then become soft and pliable.

It is a symbol that the mystic receives a new name because he belongs to the higher worlds. Thus the mystic appeared before his fellow human beings as a messenger, and what now appeared to him was an image of what surged within him.

The chela heard the music of the spheres with the vibrations of the universe; it was his own perception. He had experienced immortality. For three days the chela had to work on himself, then he could step before men as a messenger, a prophet. Then he had experienced within himself the mysterious life, the great word of the Logos, the spiritual sounding, ringing and vibrating of the universe: “When you leave the body and swing yourself to the free ether, you will be an immortal spirit, having escaped death!” Empedocles.

During the three days, such mystics had lived in the coffin of the living spirit of immortality. They had conquered death because they had animated their etheric body. It is not for nothing that one speaks of solar heroes, they are those who control their etheric body. Solar heroes exist in all religions. The sun that we see is only a part of the whole sun. One speaks of the sun as the “sounding” one, which sends us life; it is the victory over darkness, the victory over matter. When the chela has become a solar hero, he says, “I have seen the sun shine at midnight.” He sees the sun through the solid matter of the earth. This is not just to be understood figuratively; the sun is a role model for the hero who has learned to control his etheric body.

Goethe's “Faust” I, Prologue in Heaven: “The sun resounds in the brother spheres in the old way of song contest.” And in “Faust” II: “Listen, listen to the storm of the hours, the new day is already being born for the ears of the spirit.” Everywhere where initiation has taken place, one speaks of “sounding.

The word that Christianity gives us: “Blessed are those who believe, even if they do not see,” is intended to emphasize the way in which man has experienced initiation. Aristides, after experiencing initiation, says, “I feel the approach of the Godhead, my hand has touched it.” - Sophocles: “The truth of immortality is recognized only by those who are initiated.” Those who had not yet been able to be initiated hoped for the future life. It would be unthinkable for a slave to endure the hardships of his lot if he could not say to himself: Today I am a slave, but in the next life I will be a king.

Initiation is granted to all people; a character is formed from this awareness. Such a person is also called a “poor person” because he no longer possesses life; the kingdom of God had been absorbed into his inner being. Blessed are those who believe, even if they do not see. This saying will become clear to us when we recognize in the Easter Mystery a point in time that had not yet arrived before the appearance of Christ. That is what happened in Damascus: Saul became Paul. Who would have experienced that before Christ-Jesus was there! No one could have experienced it – unless they had gone to the mystery schools. All the teachings taught the same thing. But that is not what is important, what matters is that Christ was on earth.

[Krishna,] Hermes, Moses, Zarathustra, Buddha and all the other [honorable teachers] could say of themselves, “I am the way and the truth.” But Christ could say, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

Therefore, no teaching was left behind. What is significant is that Christ lived. He had truly appeared. What permeated the mystic when he had conquered death had become flesh. The Logos had become flesh and had lived among us. The word, which otherwise only sounded to the initiate, had become flesh. Until now, only the priests had experienced it in the mystery temples. What was to become clear to all people later. That Christ lives had to take place in the world.

Outside in the world, on the historical stage, something has happened that took place in the depths of the mysteries and cults; what the individual was only allowed to see became an event that took place before everyone's eyes. The initiate knew the word that was spoken.

What took place as a historical event had previously been prophetically indicated. The prophetic coincided with what had taken place; it was now a proof of immortality, it was not just faith. The cross, which earlier only the disciple had seen, was now erected before everyone's eyes. Faith arose in Saul without him entering the mystery schools. What the mystery school student had to gain through training arose in him.

The Simplon and St. Gotthard tunnels would not have been possible if a Leibniz and a Newton had not lived before.

All limit the belief of mystical facts – now the divinity incarnated itself. So the life of Christ Jesus had to take place as a fact if such an event, which was to convert Paul, could take place. – That is why I called my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”.

That is the vision of the Paschal Mystery – it is not just that one speaks of the “humble man of Nazareth”, but it comes down to the fact that Christ Jesus lived, that he appeared in the flesh. It is the same as what lay at the basis of all people before humanity descended into density. That was the Fall of Man at the time the world was founded. Then the Word underlies what was there before the world was, and what will be there when all outer wisdom has perished. Paul first utters the word . Fichte says, “Fall upon me, all of you, rocks, and destroy me... for I am stronger than you when I fulfill my destiny.”

That was the experience in the mystery schools: the initiate penetrated through sensuality, he experienced that the Logos was there before the world was founded. He beheld the sounding Logos, he beheld life, he had attained the free ether. What he absorbed in the mysteries, what penetrated him, was the Word, which was there before the world was founded. (The whole world is based on the Word, the divine Logos. This Word was there before the world was.) When the initiate was made holy through to immortality, then the Word lived in him.

“My Father has loved me before the foundation of the world...”, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Composition of the Sun and the Moon. Astral body – lunar body.

The Easter faith should give us the strength to live towards the great Easter festival, which is born out of the deepest wisdom. These are events that defeat the dark existence and have content for all who are imbued by them. When the human being is illuminated by the light of the Easter faith, the victory over the darkness becomes tangible. The Easter festival is the victory of the light over the darkness.

The sun gains new strength in spring, reviving in man, victory over the lunar body.

Eight days ago, I took the liberty of presenting the results of the theological research into the life of Jesus in outline, and we saw that this research, based on the study of historical monuments, petered out into the unknown, leading us to a period of time that was very distant and later than the assumed lifetime of the founder of Christianity. Thus it has been shown to us that historical, physical research based on literal scholarship is incapable of shedding light on the facts surrounding the founding of Christianity.

Today I would like to present the results of occult research to you as a supplement to this, even in outline, and I note that these results are facts for those who are able to examine them, but that they can only be examined with specially trained abilities, abilities that not everyone has, and that can therefore easily be doubted. What is to be said about this is not taught only today. What I have to say has been taught in the occult schools of all times since the founding of Christianity and most vividly in the first centuries of Christianity. The teachers have spoken not literally, but faithfully in the sense in which we want to look at the testimony of the Gospel of John from the occult point of view. The learned theologian Bunsen has already said that Christianity stands and falls with the Gospel of John. And we have seen that literal scholarship has first excluded the Gospel of John and does not want to accept it.

What I have to say has already been taught in the schools of the first Christian centuries from the same point of view, on the basis of the so-called occult or secret methods. We should not be surprised if those who want to prove the truth of Christianity from the scriptures, from what has remained, if they want to prove this truth historically, cannot arrive at any real result, just as, on the other hand, even today the occultist is not able to put down in writing the most important thing he has to say. It is the same today. Not the evangelists, nor their successors, were able to communicate the most important thing. But in the occult schools the methods had been preserved by which these truths could be found; they were partially continued, reproduced. These truths have been partially 'shown' to the students of the occult schools. I say 'shown', not 'taught'. Anyone who wants to talk about such truths must have seen them as fact.

Even in the schools of Origen in Asia, three stages of ascent to occult knowledge were recognized. These were designated by the three words: purification, enlightenment and initiation. Those who had attained the first stage of discipleship, the stage of purification, could see how historical events unfolded. They had what is known as the historical explanation of Christianity. Those who had progressed further, who had reached the stage of enlightenment, could see what Origen called the wisdom explanations, which are based on the dissemination of moral truth. And those who had reached the stage of initiation could achieve what is known as the typical foundation of Christianity.

Once we have recognized this, we can find all of this in the scriptures. Anyone who has climbed the step of purification, who is no longer able to speak from his point of view, from his personal opinion, who completely withdraws what he wants, what his personal opinion is, and merely makes himself the mouthpiece of the one who speaks to him in the astral world, is able to see the course of history even without external historical monuments. This is the so-called seeing in the astral world, a seeing that is quite different from seeing with physical eyes. In this astral world, we receive images of all events as reflections, not in reality. These images of the astral world of the past are essentially different from the images of the physical world. They have life and act themselves, they are mobile, so that in this way one sees history unfolding in the astral world in active action. Those who have reached the level of purification see, as it were, only the mirror images of the true inner events. Only those who have reached the second stage, the stage of enlightenment, see further. They see the thoughts of the people, of which they were inspired after seeing them in the image. And if someone rises to the stage of initiation, then he sees an even higher world, then he recognizes the intentions that prevail in the history through the incarnation of the great individualities themselves.

These are the three steps that the initiate has to climb, and of which one can also get a kind of historical reflection by reading what Gregorios Thaumaturgos says about his teacher Origines. What he says is a description written with a higher enthusiasm for what Origines taught him. What they have written can be taken as the words of one of those Christian writers of the third century, such as Clement of Alexandria, who says: “I know well that the writing of my memoirs is weak compared to the grace that I was honored to hear; but it will be a memory for him whom the Thyrsus met.” Every occultist knows how to interpret the term “Thyrsus”. Every occultist knows the instrument; every occultist knows that the truth was handed down orally from person to person, and that the deepest things were not recorded in the scriptures. This may become completely clear to you when I say that the ultimate truths were not written down in what they wrote; so of course they cannot be found in them.

I have entitled my book “Christianity as Mystical Fact”. The title was not chosen at random. Every word is important. It is not merely the mystical content that is to be expounded. Rather, the aim is to show that the facts of the Gospel of John are indeed mystical facts, but that they are therefore also historical facts. Christianity is not to be shown as mystical, as a mystical concept, but as a fact that can be explained mystically, but is historically real. Those who were struck by the thyrsus can be led to the archetypes of what the books tell. Here we are tying in with something that I said last time in relation to the historical-critical research of the gospels. I said that the critics have accepted that the Gospel of Mark, although written much later, was not written by contemporaries. At the same time, I said that the writer of the Gospel of Mark does not describe the places where the events took place, and that the events and localities seem to be completely indifferent to him. I also said that what Mark links as facts is a kind of poetic composition, so that the chronological sequence cannot be decisive either. Therefore, the criticism admits of two things: that we cannot infer anything from the sequence of events and nothing from localities and places.

When Mark says “the mountain”, it is as if there had been only one mountain. This shows us how we have to seek the occult from the historical, and how reality relates to the shadow images. We can never test the shadow image against reality, but nor must the shadow image contradict reality.

It is also a requirement of occult research that we never present anything that contradicts historical-critical research. But this judgment ceases when we consider what lies behind the Gospel of Mark. “Mountains,” Mark speaks, and Matthew speaks similarly in the Sermon on the Mount. Only he who, as Clement of Alexandria says, can go back to the archetypes, can penetrate to the typical explanation, only he is capable of finding the archetypes, that is, the spaceless and timeless.

The gospels are all written in or with a certain secret language. They are written in such a way that they can be understood by the most simple-minded people, but there is no degree of understanding, however high, that could not find ever deeper and deeper truths in them. Those who know what a mundane word actually means in the secret language can unravel the secret meaning of the Gospels. If you just read what is at the beginning of what we call the Sermon on the Mount, you will find that it says something very general: He sat down on a mountain and opened his mouth and spoke to his disciples. He did not speak to the people, he went away with the disciples and spoke to them. The initiate understands this immediately because he knows that the words “going up the mountain” have a certain meaning. It means going into the interior of a sanctuary, where secret teachings are received, so that nothing more is said with these lines than: Jesus saw that something had to be taught to the people; so he led the disciples into a temple and explained to them what was to be handed down to the people. In ancient traditions, every disciple learned what these words have meant since time immemorial. You can go through the religious books of all times and you will always find the meaning of these words “to go up the mountain”. It is necessary to really understand this language in order to learn the occult.

Today, I would like to share with you some of the Secret Doctrine from the point of view that can introduce and lead us to an understanding of the Gospel of John. The scholars have taken great pains to understand the Gospel of John. But there are many points that cannot be understood by pure word research. Just as little as one can understand what “going up the mountain” means, one will not be able to understand other expressions. You can go through entire volumes of learned researchers and you will find that only one, Betke, came very close to the meaning, but only close. He would have to know the secret language. But the fact that someone came close to it shows that the secret meaning lies in the words.

One point I would still like to touch on is where the wedding at Cana is described. You remember the words:

On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. But Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding. And since there was a lack of wine, the mother says to him, “They have no wine.” Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come. His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it. [John 2:1-5]

It is noteworthy that the mother of Jesus' name is not mentioned. And what constitutes the crux of the matter is that Jesus says, “Woman, what do I have to do with you?” And the following words: “My hour has not yet come.” Take another passage in John where it is said who witnessed the crucifixion. If you compare this with the other gospels, you will find that they describe it quite differently. If you only read it in the gospel of John, you can hardly make sense of it. The same applies to the passage about the distribution of the robe:

So the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments and made four parts, to every soldier a part; but also his coat. But the robe was seamless, woven in one piece from the top down. So they said to one another, “Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to decide whose it will be,” that the scripture might be fulfilled which says, “They divided my garments among them and cast lots for my robe.” [John 19:24].

Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. [John 19:25]

It is not said of the mother of Jesus that her name was Mary, just as it was not said at the wedding at Cana. It is said that the sister of the mother of Jesus was called Mary. If one wanted to go by the wording here, then two sisters must have been standing at the cross, both named Mary.

When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.

Read it in John. A disciple is always mentioned: ‘a disciple whom he loved’. [...]

Then saith he to the] mother, Woman, behold thy son! Then saith he to the] he, behold thy mother! And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.

We are told that the disciple whom Jesus loved stood at the cross, that He made him His mother's son, and that this son took the mother to be his. This, of course, can only be the same mother spoken of at Cana of Galilee. This has caused the interpreters the greatest difficulties, and we must ask ourselves: What is actually behind this? What can be said about it? We can only grasp the Gospels correctly if we know what the mother of a spirit-afflicted personality is in the secret language. We must be clear about who Jesus is talking about when he speaks of his mother, and we must understand this speech in the sense that we learn in occult schools.

The one who comes into this world as an initiate – whether he be on the level of Buddha or higher, like Jesus, the Christ – does not derive his origin from this world. What lives in him comes from another world. He is the messenger of another world. He is born out of this world only in his physical and temporal existence, at a certain place. He who has entered the world as an initiate has the highest degree of what is called tolerance. You will never find even a trace of what could be called intolerance in an initiate. When an initiate goes somewhere to proclaim a teaching, he will practice the principle of tolerance to the highest degree. He will not offend anyone's feelings. The initiate knows that the truth has existed among all peoples. He knows that the truth is present everywhere in some form or other. He knows that the world is progressing, and he regards himself as an instrument of the world spirit, which is beyond physical reality and has the task of advancing the world a little further. He does not lead people by spreading a doctrine that hurts them, but he associates above all with those who long for liberation from old bonds. He does not associate with scribes and Sadducees, but with those who are sinners in the sense of these scribes, but who long for something that is yet to come.

Those He comes to are completely entwined with their people and their time. Jesus came to the Jews, although He was not born of this people, and had to work among them. He had to create something higher out of the substance of the people, which would flourish in the world. His followers came from three groups. The first group were those who were attached to Judaism, to the laws that he had not come to abolish but to fulfill with complete tolerance. This was the people in whom he planted his teaching like a mustard seed, so that it would flourish. The second group, where he spread his teaching with complete love and tolerance. This was the group that believed in him because of his personal power and influence. These were the ones who were close to him, who knew what he meant to them. And there was still a third group. These were the ones who believed because of the deeds he did, although they were not particularly close to him, but who were captivated by his appearance, and therefore, at the moment when this appearance was dragged down – after the crucifixion – they could no longer believe until they had proof.

He had spoken to these three groups. In the language of the secret lore, they must have a very definite designation. He calls the time and the people into which the initiate is born his “mother”. He thus calls the Jewish people 'mother'. When Jesus spoke of 'the mother of Galilee', he meant the Jewish people: to them he showed the water of the Old Testament and the wine of the New. The souls in whom a teaching is laid are represented by female personalities. Those who were close to him are represented by Mary, the wife of Clopas. These were attached to Jesus because of their personal relationship. The third group were people who needed proof. Now we know that Jesus entrusted the mission of taking care of the Jewish-Christian people to another. Now we know why he says to the mother, Jewish Christianity: This is your son! This is the one who has to carry Christian progress, this is the disciple whom he loves. And now we know that the disciple took on the task. This refers to the words: And from that hour he took the mother with him. That is, he was the one who was to develop Christianity out of Judaism.

One word remains unclear: “the disciple whom Jesus loved”. We need to recognize who the disciple is here. The word means that Jesus initiated the person himself. This shows that the master is this disciple's friend and loves him.

You can find a more detailed explanation of the miracle of Lazarus in my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”. I can only give a hint here of what this miracle of Lazarus is. The one who knows how the initiations were carried out, knows how the three-day procedure of the burial took place, he knows that after three days there was the resurrection, he reads in the raising of Lazarus the story of initiation, he reads in the individual words the exact description of an initiation. Nothing else happened there than that the Christ, the Master, initiated Lazarus, that is, He allowed his lower personality to die and resurrected his higher personality after three days. Read also the words: “I am the resurrection and the life.” If you understand how to read these words correctly according to the spirit that gives life, you will find that Lazarus was a resurrected person in the sense of Christ. You will also find the expression “Jesus loved Lazarus so much” where the miracle of Lazarus is told.

But how is it that the miracle of Lazarus is only found in the Gospel of John? How is it that such great significance is attached to this miracle of Lazarus in the Gospel of John? And how is it that the disciple whom Jesus loved appears only after the miracle of Lazarus? Read the Gospel of John from this point of view and you will not be able to understand it, but you will believe it when someone who knows it tells you that this miracle of Lazarus performed by the disciple whom Jesus loved is an avowal of something that John himself experienced. At that time he became the awakened disciple whom Jesus loves. This self-confession is appreciated by those who know the style of such presentations from ancient times, when they were not written down but proclaimed over and over again from the pulpits. You don't often find such self-confessions that this or that person was dear to someone. That is why the miracle is only told in the Gospel of John, precisely because it is a self-confession. This is also the reason why the deepest things are told in the Gospel of John, namely the life of Jesus himself. This is also the reason why the one who originally lived it – not the writer – knew it best. Let us read the Gospel of John in a typical way, and decipher the deeper meaning in it.

It is not surprising that the Christian church fathers, the scholars of the first centuries, never tired of interpreting the Gospel of John; they wanted to understand precisely this Gospel of John. If one knows that the disciple whom Jesus loved has taken the mother with him, then one also understands the beginning:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [John 1:1]

But this is only clear to the occult researcher; but for him it is quite clear. As is well known, where the German translation has the 'word', the expression 'logos' is found. In the beginning was the logos. So what is the logos? The concept of the logos, as it is meant here, is difficult to understand. It has an ancient origin. Now it is true that the Gospel of John, as it is presented to us, has a strong nuance of Greek writing. But if you examine it closely, you will see on the other hand that the writer of the Gospel of John has kept what it originally was, namely a book written by the disciple whom the Master loved, a book that was supposed to show that this disciple took the mother of Jesus to his home. To understand this, you have to be familiar with the deeper Jewish teachings. You won't find these deeper Jewish teachings among the Pharisees and Sadducees. You are more likely to find them among the Sadducees. But you will find them among a great personality in Alexandria. But you will also find the teachings of the Logos there. However, this word did not originate in Alexandria either. You can follow this word throughout the ages. I would just like to give a few examples of what the people of that time associated with the word logos. As the word is presented to us, it is only a Greekized Hebrew term. Because Plato adopted the logos in his teaching, it was said that he was an Attic-speaking Moses. We should not be surprised that we have preserved the teaching of logos in a somewhat Greek form.

Go to the ancient teachings of the Indians and you will come to the original law. This is all that belongs to the Vedas. “Veda means nothing other than ‘sacred knowledge,’ and knowledge in all these ancient times means something that comes from God Himself. However, the significance of this discussion would take us too far afield. The most important part of the Vedas is the Rig-Veda. 'Rig' means 'word', and the teachings of the Rig-Veda were presented in such a way that the great teachers received them from God himself. It is the knowledge, and this knowledge was written down in the Rig-Veda. It is the knowledge that was revealed to the Rishis. Even with the ancient Indians, the word was already understood not only as the spoken word, but also as that by which the word is made. Just as the word is created by sound, so the universe was also formed by the word.

When we come to Persia, we find there the sacred book of the Persians, the I cannot go into detail now, but it should actually be Avesta-Zend. 'Zend' is the word. It is exactly the same as in Indian. The word of creation became the word by which the Persian magician received the secret of creation.

And if you go to Babylonia, you will again find that there is a book – “book” is roughly the same as word, the teachings were passed down orally in those days – Oanes, which revealed to the old priests everything they needed for their religious and secular culture. If you go back to all these peoples and their religions, you will find the concept of the word. You will find that the concept of the Logos is present in you, just as it is present in later, secret Jewish teachings. But you will find that in all these ancient peoples who use the concept of Logos before Judaism, this word Logos has something much more alive, and that in Judaism it becomes something abstract. The Persian imagined that the word was proclaimed to the magician by living beings, by angels, devas. They are the bearers of the word. It is the devas who, in the case of the Indians, carry the word into the earthly world. In this case, the messenger is still being considered. It is the living word that is spoken by God and brought down to men by divine messengers, by devas or angels. It is similar with the Babylonians. Everything that interposes itself between God Himself and man is justified by a special mission in world history, which has full justification in the Jewish creed.

The Jewish confession erases the intimate relationship with all the intermediaries that stand between God and man. God becomes the otherworldly Jehovah, of whom no one is allowed to form an image, and the only thing that man is allowed to know about him is the law that he has given. This is the Logos, which can only become an idea in man; this is the completely abstract, shadowy Logos. This fact exists. From Judaism, with its conception of the doctrine of Logos and the doctrine of the law, the disciple whom Jesus loved had to proclaim the truth: that this Jesus, who lived among his disciples, was himself the messenger, the Son of God. In other words, just as devas, angels and so forth were once the bearers of the Word, so it has now become the case that Jesus, having become Christ, was the Word made flesh. It was difficult at that time to make this understandable, because in the following period the connection between man and God through the intermediate link had been lost: the Logos had become flesh, the Logos was God Himself.

We see that by the third century a sect had formed that was a staunch opponent of the Gospel of John. They called themselves Alogoi; they wanted nothing to do with it. These Alogoi already existed in the second century, and the Gospel of John had many opponents at that time. How did it come about that the understanding of the Gospel of John was lost? We can only understand this if we realize how man in earlier times related to his gods. Brahma and the other gods were nothing other than that which lives in the world and with the world; they were precisely that which manifests itself in every single thing and, above all, in every single human being. Man may be a weak creature, but man is developing higher and higher, and the God who is in the word is being expressed more and more.

This is not pantheism, nor a vague concept of God, nor a denial of God, but a concept as exalted as it can be. It is still preserved in one term, in 'pontifex maximus', the bridge-maker, the priest. And why is that? Because he had to be a more developed person, one whose inner self was already one step [higher] than the others, a person who had reached a higher level of development. Those who know how to research can historically prove that the ancient gods of the Greeks were originally humans, people who lived originally and were imagined to have worked their way up to a higher level of divinity. It was the same with the Persians. They also had beings like the devas and angels, which were gradually different, but which led one step further – up.

Man too could become divine. He could reach the stage where the Word was revealed in his own breast; for him who could develop so far, there was a union of the Logos within his own breast with the Logos outside. He could ascend with the consciousness of the Logos. He could achieve the incarnation of the Logos Himself. That was a concept that the people of that time could understand. They could understand that through further development, the consciousness of the inner word could be obtained, the word through which all things are made, which was with God originally, which was the life of men as well as the life of the whole world - and this word became the light of man. It shone within man, and those who received it were called “children of God.

So you see that in the Gospel of John it is suggested that the Logos can become conscious in man and that those who can become aware of this state are called sons of God. That is why he said elsewhere: You are gods – and he thus explains why he calls himself a son of God. If we keep this in mind, John had two things to give: firstly, that the ancient consciousness that man has a divine consciousness within him can come to a head, can become an experience, and secondly, that the one who lived in Palestine was the revelation of the same Logos who lives in every human being in general and who came among people as Logos. From him one had to grasp that he became the Logos at this excellent place and at the excellent time.

They only understood the Logos, but they no longer knew how to connect with him. And because they no longer knew how to connect with the human being, it became difficult for them to understand the Logos who became flesh. Therefore, the Greek point of view, which develops the deification of man in his own higher service, and that of Alexandrian Christianity, had to be mediated. The starting point had to be taken from there. These two things had to be linked. The Logos, which can only reveal itself as law, had to be mediated with the original concept of Logos. If you hold on to that, you will understand that two currents were necessary in original Christianity.

One was the current that had not yet been alienated from the original concept of Logos consciousness, which holds that the development of man leads straight up to divinity and that the Logos can be grasped. This stood alongside the other current, which saw the Logos in the blue distance, which could only see the Logos as a revelation from outside and which therefore found it difficult to understand that the Logos had become man. For these two movements, other terms had to be created so that the Logos was “in essence” Jesus as a human being with the Logos as God. Only in this way could an understanding be brought about. These two movements existed side by side. It can be said that one movement understood the Gospel of John, while the other understood it less. They also held on to it, but interpreted it differently. “To those he gave power to become the sons of God” – this was not understood. But this was what Arius had to defend at the Council of Nicaea. He defended the essential unity of the Logos with Jesus and the germ of God in man. The other current made the word of the incarnate God a dogma and part of the Trinity doctrine, which became something quite different from its original meaning. This current sought to present the revelation in such a light that only the church could represent it, since it went beyond all human understanding. At the Council of Nicaea, the Gospel of John was wrongly accepted against the Arian view.

Since the Middle Ages, scholasticism has taught thinking that is free from all sensual experience, but also thinking that is unselfish, devoted, and faithful to an existing word, and not to assert selfish criticism and the selfish mind. This is something that the Christian thinker has accepted for centuries, a good training, a school of devoted thinking. Those who today, without knowing it, speak disparagingly and contemptuously of scholasticism do not understand this. Those who know scholasticism know what has been achieved here in terms of selfless thinking, where the person does not say, “I, I have found this, I am called to find a conviction here at all costs,” but where he says, “What am I, who is it and what is it when I think that the teaching was given by the spirit?” There, all selfish intellect was sacrificed for the knowledge of a teaching that selflessly surrendered to the truth. The realization that our race is ancient, that people have always thought, and that we have not been waited for, nor for what we will bring forth, must lead us to this.

If we learn to research the writings of the Fathers, we will mature and come to recognize the true figure more and more. The movement of the Theosophical Society, which seeks to promote research into the Gospel of John, wants a humble search for the truth everywhere.

But I would like to say that anyone who has had the good fortune to go a little deeper knows that in the science of our time – be it philosophy, natural science, medicine, theology and so on – the one who has absorbed it no longer believes, “I am called to decide.” If we have become humble, then we read the book of John's gospel again, then we will find that some things are copied differently by the writer, but it was thought through from a materialistic and also a higher point of view and found that we do not find the meaning on our plan. This is not the case, as if I wanted to say something rhetorically nicely, but I speak this under full responsibility in the sense of those who have taken up today's science, and then, after they have done so, have delved into this book of wisdom, into this book of truth. There they found something: when they set about studying this book, they found that the truth flowed towards them in a high form and that all their learning of the present time can only serve to let the glory of this truth flow into them. But that is not all. In addition, those who have such experiences have a new realization: whenever they return to the Gospel of John, they are strengthened and invigorated each time. When they come back from the Gospel of John, they get the feeling that the truth contained in it is infinite, that it is something of infinite depth. And they say to themselves: Here I am a beginner, even the most advanced of our days are beginners here. They have experienced being beginners. This gives a revelation concept, not in the sense of the Middle Ages, but one that is the gateway to truth, the gate to truth, as Jesus said, a source of truth. The Gospel of John is one of the guides. To make this a principle and to put it into practice in the broadest circles is the task of the Gospel of John and the Johannine Society. Anyone who knows what is to be found here, what is to be learned here, may wholeheartedly join this Johannine Society and this study of the Gospel of John.

Anyone who wants to know the origin of the Catholic Mass must trace it back historically to the mysteries. Mysteries are places of worship in which higher knowledge is not only taught and acquired, but in which the phenomena in question are also demonstrated. The mysteries have taken on a particularly popular form in the currents of worship that came from Persia and Egypt. It is from these that the mass has emerged.

Anyone who wanted to gain knowledge of higher worlds before the appearance of Christ had to be accepted as a student in a secret school. He first had to learn how the world and man came into being. He was introduced to an examination of the origin of the world and the significance of man within the world. He was taught how the divine world spirit has taken shape everywhere. Minerals, plants, animals and so on were seen as formations of the world spirit. Man is a confluence of all that is in the world. Paracelsus once said: All entities of the world are letters, and man is the word in which all these are found. Man is the microcosm in the macrocosm.

The disciple was taught how the Divine Being splits into many details, only to be reunited in man. The disciple was allowed to experience this splitting of the Divine and the return to man.

Man has brought low desires, passions and instincts into the world. The lower animal forms are decadent products of man. Everything that is expressed in animals by lower passions has been brought into the world by man. An original state of the world was as we now see it realized in the mineral world. The gem has no desire, no craving, no wish; the gem is chaste and undemanding. If you imagine the other entities with the same chaste and undemanding nature, you have the ideal of the secret disciple. He had to awaken in him the feeling: You must become again as pure, desireless creation, which has emerged so chaste from the hand of the Creator. He sacrificed everything lower - that was the “catharsis”, the purification of instincts, desires, passions - this corresponds to the “sacrifice” or “oblatio” in the Mass, the second part of the Mass.

The first part is the proclamation or the “Gospel”, where the message of the dissolution of the world spirit in nature is imparted, the intellectual insight into how the world has come into being. This is followed by the second part, the sacrifice. The secret disciple had to have the will to retrace the path to the original chaste form of creation. When he was ready for this, he was admitted to the actual mysteries. In the Egyptian mysteries, he then had to spend three days alone in a locked room and was placed in a state of consciousness in which he could have higher types of perception. He now experienced the descent of the god into the world and the distribution in the world of souls or the astral world, after he himself was ready to sacrifice himself in a similar way.

He first experienced an image that was clear to him through a sure realization: This was once you, in the time when you were still without drives and passions, when you were still without desire. He saw his own image in the distant past, a human image on a higher level. The second was that he saw how this human image on a higher level gave rise to a male human image, whose face shone like the sun. This was Osiris. He saw the emergence of Osiris from the primeval man, surrounded by a radiant aura. From the second image, the present form was then created after a second entity had been separated - Isis - and Horus, the present human being, was born. Now he was an awakened soul.

In the present human being, when he lies asleep, one has first the physical body, then the etheric body and further on the actual aura that lifts out of the sleeping person. The person is in his aura; he has then left his physical body. In the depths of the temple mysteries, the secret disciple consciously experienced the described states in the astral body. He was then a “transformed, a ”consecrated one. He who is transformed in this way perceives the light phenomena of the lower beings.

This process was the third step of the mysteries, the ‹transformation› of man into his astral form. Then the secret student had realized: Just as you have seen the Osiris, you were once like that too; you were astral and then became physical; a second time you should plan to become embodied. By free decision the soul should return to the physical body. When he came out of the mysteries again, he should consciously carry the physical body with him. Now he also received a new name. He felt that this was his eternal name. Each of us has such a name, which he carries in all his incarnations. The initiate carried this eternal name. He had voluntarily incarnated in his body. The human being now speaks “I” to his own body. But the initiate knew that he is not the same as his body. He carries his body on his back. Such a one is crucified in his body; he is the one crucified in matter. Now he steps out and consciously does all the things he used to do unconsciously. This union with the body was called 'communion', the fourth process in the mysteries. He who is thus transformed and reunited with his body is a true initiate.

Now Christ appeared on earth. This appearance of Christ on earth meant that what had previously taken place in the mysteries now took place before the world in physical space. In the past, individuals had gone through the mysteries. All this had now become a historical event, a real historical event in the sacrificial death of Christ Jesus. Now Christ Jesus has established a memorial in remembrance of these mysteries. Those who joined Christ no longer needed to look. To look means to “look into a mystery”. Those who were to come to inner knowledge no longer had to learn to look through the mysteries. They could remain with the external sign. This external sign has a deeper meaning.

The three highest members of the human being are Atma, Budhi and Manas. In the past, when one spoke of “man”, one spoke of Atma, Budhi and Manas. At that time everyone believed that each life was only one in a long series among many, and that it was a life earned. Man was steeped in this. At the same time, there was something about the personal life that man basically looked beyond. He did not attach great value to it.

The task of the first two millennia after Christ was to educate humanity for the higher self through KamaManas. The personal life should be taken seriously and with grandeur. Man spends about two millennia in Devachan. During this period, all of humanity will pass through an incarnation in which value is placed on the personal.

Christ went with Peter, James and John to the mountain - that is, to the sanctuary. This was the introduction to devachanic vision. There they saw Moses and Elijah beside Jesus. 'El' - in 'Elijah' - means 'the way', Moses is called 'the truth' - the moral truth - and Jesus is 'life'. Jesus says to his disciples: 'Elijah has appeared again. John was this Elijah. He told them further: But do not tell until I reappear. They should not speak of the doctrine of reincarnation until he would come back in a new world cycle. For two millennia, the world should get to know the value of the personal. That which runs through from one incarnation of man to another is the finer matter of man, the water, the spiritual. This is also referred to in: “The Spirit of God brooded over the waters,” the waters - the people. The impersonal man is symbolized by the water.

Wine is the symbol for the personal man. Christ transforms the water into wine. He transformed an impersonal religion into a religion of the personality. Just as water turns into wine, so does the impersonal nature of man turn into the personal. He who can grasp the teaching of reincarnation and wants to rise above personality must abstain from wine. He who enjoys wine will never arrive at an understanding of what is impersonal in man.

The lower body should be ennobled and glorified, which is why Christianity should live without the doctrine of reincarnation for two millennia. Christ had appeared to sanctify the personality. As a sign that Christ had taken upon himself the entire sacrifice that used to take place in the mysteries, Christ instituted the sacrifice of the Mass. In it, the mystery act was repeated in an outward sign.

The external action of the Mass is as follows: the priest goes to the altar with the altar boy. First there is a preparatory act, the 'relay prayer' and the 'Kyrie Eleison'. The deeper Mass consists of four parts: 'Gospel', 'Sacrifice' - Oblatio, 'Transformation' and 'Communion'.

During the “Gospel”, a passage from the Gospels is read. This takes place on the right side of the altar. The actual altar is built so that it faces east. The priest stands on the north side. Here he reads the message. This refers to the fact that the human being in the first root race, the polaric one, was also in the north, from where he descended more and more into matter.

The second part of the mass is the 'oblatio' or 'sacrifice'. The priest sacrifices what represents the higher man, just as man used to sacrifice himself. The chalice is the outer symbol for the human heart. What we have in our hearts represents something future; it is less developed now, but contains the spiritual. When man no longer thinks in matter but in the spiritual, then the heart will be the organ of thought. Today the heart is still personal. The wine in the chalice represents the personal. The wafer signifies the brain. Bread and wine are now transformed into the higher nature, into Christ Himself.

The sacrifice brings about the transformation of man. This act is spoken softly so that only the priest himself can hear it. This is an allegorical indication that the truly divine in man is something that he only speaks to himself. Every human being can only say “I” to himself. This is why the Jewish secret doctrine could only let the name be pronounced with particular shyness, the name Yahweh, which is the actual “I” within. That is why the words in the offertory are spoken half in silence and half murmured. That is why the third part, the consecration, is the sacrifice of the Mass.

All this shows that something in the external nature stands as a symbol for what the divinity itself is. In the coarser matter and in the finer matter, the divinity is represented. The bread and the wine, body and blood. At the moment when the consciousness is fully awakened that we are dealing with transformed matter, then on the altar we have in the host a matter such as it is in our brain, and in the wine a matter such as it is in our heart - in the blood.

The priest breaks the host in a certain way, into a certain number of pieces, namely nine:

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1. Corporatio = embodiment
2. Nativitas = birth
3. Circumeisio = circumcision
4. Apparitio = appearance
5. Passio = suffering
6. Mors = death
8. Gloria = glory
9. Regnum = kingdom

These nine parts represent the transformed human being, who participates in the higher. These are the nine parts of the human being. The parts that the human being experiences within his personality are 1 to 7, and 8 and 9 extend beyond the personality, which is why they are placed next to it.

Thus, in communion, man unites with his seven-part nature and strives for 8 and 9: 'Gloria' and 'Regnum'. This is accompanied by the Lord's Prayer. First, the Paternoster refers to the existing God of heaven, then to “Thy name”, the name of God, the Logos, who became flesh in Christ, and then to “Thy kingdom”. The whole thing is a parable for the existing world. Man should understand his communion with the existing world. Only the human being who came out of the mysteries understood the world. This is expressed in the Paternoster.

On particularly festive occasions, the procession also includes the 'Sanctissimum', that is the consecrated monstrance containing the Holy Body. At the top of the monstrance is a sun-like rounding with rays, the rounding rests in a half-moon shaped cover. This is also how Osiris and Isis were depicted. The union of Isis and Osiris is represented by the words 'Sanctissimum' above the altar, a symbol of the time when the sun still enveloped the moon.

No priest who is not ordained or authorized to wear the stole may read the sacrifice of the Mass. The stole is the actual priestly garment. The priest first wears a skirt, then the “alba, a shirt-like garment with a belt, then a symbolic garment, then the stole, which is crossed over the chest, and over that the casul.

The stole is the actual insignia of priestly dignity. Therefore, when he wears the stole, he feels like a servant of the church. He is no longer allowed to proclaim his own opinion. He keeps his personal opinion to himself; he says to himself that it could be wrong, and he proclaims what has been believed for thousands of years.

The new era led everything spiritual into the material in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. People learned to judge the world according to material conditions. After Galileo and Copernicus, all attention was drawn down to the physical plane. Everything was conditioned by karma. As a later religion, Protestantism no longer had any understanding for the sacrifice of the Mass. When we see and hear the Mass celebrated with full understanding, we have before us the last reflection of the consecration performed in the ancient Egyptian pyramids.

The physical man emerged from the solar man Osiris; he shall become the solar man again. He has unconsciously descended from the height of the sun; consciously he shall ascend to it again. Solar heroes are those who walk with such certainty on their spiritual path as the sun on its orbit. These solar heroes have reached the sixth degree of initiation. The degrees of initiation for the Persians were: first a raven, second a secret, third a warrior, fourth a lion, fifth a Persian, sixth a solar hero - solar runner -, seventh a father.

Allow me to begin today's lecture with a personal recollection. As a quite young man, I once had a slight experience of the kind which seem unimportant and yet can yield pleasant memories again and again in later life.

I was attending a course of university lectures on the history of literature.⁴⁹ The lecturer began by considering the character of cultural life in the time of Lessing, with the intention of going on to discuss various literary developments during the later eighteenth century and part of the nineteenth. His opening words were deeply impressive. In order to characterise the chief innovation which appeared in the cultural life of Lessing's time, he said: “Artistic consciousness acquired an aesthetic conscience.” His lecture showed that what he meant by this statement—we need not now ask whether it was justified—was roughly as follows:

All the artistic considerations and intentions connected with the endeavours of Lessing and his contemporaries were imbued with a deeply earnest wish to make something more of art than a mere appendage to life or a mere pleasure among others. Art was to become a necessary element in every form of human existence worthy of the name. To raise art up to the level of a serious human concern, worthy to be heard in the concert of voices which speak of the great and fruitful activities of mankind—such was the aim of the pioneer thinkers of that period. That is what the lecturer wanted to say when he emphasised that an aesthetic conscience had found its way into the artistic and literary life of those times.

Why was this statement important for a soul seeking to grasp the riddles of existence, as reflected in one or another human mind? Because a conception of art was to be ennobled and given expression in a way that left no doubt as to its importance for the whole character and destiny of human life. The serious nature and significance of artistic work were intended to be placed beyond discussion, and it is indeed true that the experiences denoted by the word “conscience” are such that all the situations to which they apply are ennobled. In other words, when “conscience” is spoken of, the human soul recognises that the word refers to a most valuable element in its own life, and that to be without this element would indicate a serious deficiency.

How often has the significance of conscience been brought out by the words, no matter whether they are taken literally or metaphorically: “When conscience speaks in the human soul, it is the voice of God that speaks.” And one could scarcely find anyone, however unprepared to reflect on higher spiritual concerns, who has not formed some idea of what conscience is. Everyone feels vaguely that whatever conscience may be, it is experienced as a voice in the individual's breast which determines with irresistible power what is good and what is bad; what man must do in order to gain his own approval and what he must leave undone if he is not to despise himself. Hence we can say: Conscience appears to every individual as something holy in the human breast, and that to form some kind of opinion about it is relatively easy.

Things are different, however, if we glance briefly at man's history and his spiritual life. Anyone who is trying to look more deeply into a spiritual situation of this kind will surely wish to consult those in whom a knowledge of such matters may be presupposed—the philosophers. But in this case, as in so many others of wide human concern, he will find that the explanations of conscience given by various philosophers are very different, or so it seems, though a more or less obscure kernel is similar in all of them. But that is not the worst of it. If anyone were to take the trouble to inquire what the philosophers of ancient and modern times mean by conscience, he would be met with all sorts of very fine phrases and also by many that are hard to understand, but he would find nothing of which he could say beyond question that it reflected his feeling: that is conscience.

Of course it would lead us too far if I were to give you an anthology of the various explanations of conscience that have been given over the centuries by the philosophical leaders of mankind. But we may note that from about the first third of the Middle Ages and on through mediaeval philosophy, whenever conscience was spoken of, it was always said to be a power in the human soul which was capable of immediately declaring what a man should do and what he should leave undone. However, these mediaeval philosophers say also that underneath this power of the soul there is something else, something of finer quality than conscience itself. A personality often mentioned here, Meister Eckhart,⁵⁰ tells of a tiny spark that underlies conscience; an eternal element in the soul which, if it is heeded, declares with unmistakable power the laws of good and evil.

In modern times, we encounter once more the most varied accounts of conscience, including some which make a peculiar impression, for they clearly fail to recognise the serious nature of the divine inner voice that we call conscience. There are philosophers who say that conscience is something that a man acquires when, by extending continually his experience of life, he learns what is useful, harmful, satisfying and so on for himself. The sum of these experiences gives rise to a judgment which says: “Do this—don't do that.”

There are other philosophers who speak of conscience in terms of the highest praise. One of these is the great German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who pointed above all to the human ego not the transient personal ego but the eternal essence in man—as the fundamental principle of all human thought and being. At the same time, he held that the highest experience for the human ego was the experience of conscience,⁵¹ when a man hears the inward judgment: “This you must do, for it would go against your conscience not to do it.” The majesty and nobility of this judgment, he believed, could not be surpassed. And if Fichte was the philosopher who laid the strongest emphasis on the power and significance of the human ego, it is characteristic of him that he ranked conscience as the ego's most significant impulse.

The further we move on into modern times, and the more materialistic thinking becomes, the more do we find conscience deprived of its majesty—not in the human heart, but in the thinking of philosophers who are more or less imbued with materialism. One example will be enough to illustrate this trend.

In the second half of the 19th century, there lived a philosopher who for nobility of soul, harmonious human feelings and generous breadth of mind must rank with the finest personalities. I mean Bartholomew Carnieri:⁵² he is seldom mentioned now. If you go through his writings, you find that in spite of his fine qualities, he was deeply imbued with the materialistic thinking of his time. What, he asks, are we to make of conscience? Fundamentally, he says, it is no more than the sum of habits and judgments instilled in us during early youth and strengthened by the experience of life. These influences, of which we are no longer fully conscious, are the source of the inner voice which says: “This you must do—this you must not do,”

Thus the origin of conscience is traced back to external influences and habits, and even these are confined to a very narrow range. Some even more materialistically-minded philosophers of the 19th century have gone further still. Paul Ree,⁵³ for example, who at one time had great influence on Nietzsche, wrote on the origin of conscience. His book is interesting as a symptom of the outlook of our times. His ideas—allowing for some inevitable distortion of details in any brief sketch of them—are roughly as follows. Man, says Paul Ree, has developed in respect of all his faculties, and therefore in respect of conscience. Originally he had no trace of what we call conscience. It is gross prejudice to hold that conscience is eternal. A voice telling us what to do and what not to do did not exist originally, according to Ree. But in human nature there was something else which did develop—something we can call an instinct for revenge. This was the most primitive of all impulses. If anyone suffered at the hands of another, the instinct for revenge drove him to pay back the injury in kind. By degrees, as social life became more complicated, the carrying out of vengeance was handed over to the ruling authorities. So people came to believe that any deed which injured another person had by necessity to be followed by something that had previously been called vengeance. Certain deeds which had bad results had to be requited by other deeds. In the course of time, this conviction gave rise to an association of certain feelings with particular actions, or even with the temptation to commit them. The original urge for revenge was forgotten, but a feeling became ingrained in the human soul that a harmful action must be paid for. So now, when a man believes he is hearing an “inner voice”, this is in fact nothing but the voice of vengeance, changed into an inward form. Here we have an extreme example of this kind of interpretation—extreme in the sense that conscience is portrayed as a complete illusion.

On the other hand, we must admit that it is going much too far to assert, as some people do, that conscience has existed as long as human beings have been living on the earth; in other words, that conscience is in some sense eternal. Since mistakes are made both by those who think more spiritually about it, and by those who regard conscience as a pure illusion, it is very difficult to reach any agreement on the subject, although it belongs to our everyday inner life, and indeed to a sacred part of it.

A glance over the philosophers will show that in earlier times even the best of them thought of conscience differently from the way in which we are bound to think of it today. For when we say that conscience is a voice speaking out of a divine impulse in the breast of the simplest man, saying, “This you must do—that you must leave undone” this is somewhat different from the teaching we find in Socrates⁵⁴ and in his successor, Plato.⁵⁵ They both insist that virtue can be learnt. Socrates, indeed, says that if a man forms clear ideas as to what he should and should not do, then gradually, through this knowledge of what virtue is, he can learn to act virtuously.

Now one could easily object, from a modern standpoint, that things would go badly if we had to wait until we had learnt what is right and what is wrong before we could act virtuously. Conscience speaks with elemental power in the human soul and is heard by the individual as saying “This you must do, and that you must leave alone”, long before we learn to form ideas concerning good and evil and thus begin to formulate moral precepts. Moreover, conscience brings a certain tranquillity to the soul on occasions when a man can say to himself: “You have done something you can approve of.” It would be bad—many people might say—if we had to learn a lot about the nature and character of virtue in order to arrive at an agreed estimation of our behaviour. Hence we can say that the philosopher to whom we look up as a martyr of philosophy, whose death crowned and ennobled his philosophical work—I mean Socrates—sets before us a concept of virtue which hardly tallies with our view of conscience today: and even with later Greek thinkers we always find the assertion that perfect virtue is something that can be learnt, a doctrine not in keeping with the primitive, elemental, power of conscience.

How is it, then, that so pre-eminent and powerful a person as Socrates is not aware of the idea of conscience that we have today, although we feel whenever we approach him, as Plato describes him, that the purest morality and the highest degree of virtue speak through his words? The reason is, that the ideas, concepts and inward experiences which feel today as though they were innate, were in fact acquired laboriously by the human soul in the course of time. When we trace the spiritual life of humanity back into the past, we find that our idea of conscience and our feeling for it were not present in the same way in ancient times, and therefore not among the Greeks. Conscience, in fact, was born. But nothing about the birth of conscience can be learnt by the easy methods of external experience and scholarship, as Paul Ree, for example, tried to do. We have to go more deeply into the matter if we are to gain enlightenment for the human soul.

Now our task in these lectures has been precisely to illuminate the constitution of the soul, with the aid of the light that comes from raising the soul to higher levels of knowledge. The whole life of the soul has been described, as it reveals itself to the inner eye of the seer: the eye which does not gain knowledge of the sense-world only, but looks behind the veil of the sense-world into the region where the primary sources, the spiritual foundations of the sense-world are to be found. And it has repeatedly been shown—for example in the lecture, “What is Mysticism?”—that the consciousness of the seer opens the way into deeper regions of the soul, over and above the soul-life we experience in everyday life. We believe that even in ordinary life we come to know something of this deeper level when we look into ourselves and encounter the experiences of thinking, feeling and willing. But it was pointed out also, that in ordinary waking consciousness the soul reveals only the outer aspect of the spiritual. Just as we have to penetrate behind the veil that is spread over the sense-world if we are to discover the underlying causes of these appearances as they are revealed behind everything we see and hear and our brain apprehends, so we must look behind our thinking, feeling and willing, and thus behind our ordinary inner life, if we are to get to know the spiritual background of our own lives.

From these starting-points, we set out to throw light on the life of the human soul in its many interwoven branches. We saw that it must be conceived as made up of three members which must be distinguished but not—please note—treated as quite separate from one another. We named these three members the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul, and we saw how the ego is the unifying point which holds the three members together, plays on them as though on the strings of an instrument, causing them to sound together in the most varied ways, harmonious or dissonant. This activity of the ego developed by gradual stages, and we shall understand how our present-day consciousness and soul-life have evolved from primeval times if we glance at what man can become in the future, or even today, if from within the consciousness soul he develops a higher, clairvoyant form of consciousness.

The consciousness soul in its ordinary condition enables us to grasp the external world perceived through our senses. If anyone wishes to penetrate behind the veil of the sense-world, he must raise his soul-life to a higher level. Then he makes the great discovery that something like an awakening of the soul can occur—something comparable to the outcome of a successful operation on a man blind from birth, when a hitherto unknown world of light and colour breaks in upon him. So it is with someone who by appropriate methods raises his soul to a higher level of development. A moment comes when those elements in our environment which we normally ignored, although they are swarming around us all the time, enter into our soul-life as a wealth of beings and activities because we have acquired a new organ of perception for them.

When someone achieves by training, a conscious seership of this kind, his ego is completely present throughout. This means that he moves among spiritual facts and beings, on which our sense-world is based, just as he finds his way among chairs and tables in the physical world: and he now takes up into a higher sphere of soul-life the ego which had led him through his experiences of sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul.

Let us now turn back from this clairvoyant consciousness, which is illuminated and set aglow by the ego, to the ordinary life of the soul. The ego is alive in the most varied ways in the three soul-members. If we have a man whose life is given over to the desires, passions and instinctive urges that arise from his sentient soul, we can say that his ego is hardly at all active; it is like a feeble flame in the midst of the surging waves of the sentient soul and has little power against them. In the intellectual soul the ego gains some freedom and independence.

Here man comes to himself and so to some awareness of his ego, for the intellectual soul can develop only in so far as man reflects upon and elaborates, in inner tranquillity, the experiences that have come to him through the sentient soul. The ego becomes more and more radiant and at last achieves full clarity in the consciousness soul. Then a man can say to himself: “I have grasped myself—I have attained real self-consciousness.” This degree of clarity can be activated by the ego only when it has reached the stage of working in the consciousness soul, after progressing from the sentient soul through the intellectual soul.

If, however, a human being can further rise in his ego to clairvoyant consciousness beyond the consciousness soul, comparable to yet higher soul-principles, we can well understand that the seer, looking back over the course of human evolution, should say to us: just as the ego rises in this way to higher states of soul, so did it enter the sentient soul from a subordinate condition. We have seen how the soul-members sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul—are related to the members of his bodily organisation—physical body, etheric and astral or sentient body. Hence you will find it understandable that as spiritual science indicates—the ego, before rising to the sentient soul, was active in the sentient body, and earlier still in the etheric and physical bodies. In those times the ego still guided man from outside. It held sway in the darkness of bodily life; man was not yet able to say “I” regarding himself, to find the central point of his own being within himself. What are we to think of this ego which held sway in the primeval past and built up man's exterior bodily organisation? Are we to regard it as less perfect, compared with the ego we bear within our souls today?

We look on our ego as the real inner focus of our being: it endows us with inner life, and is capable, through schooling, of endless progress in the future. We see in it the epitome of our human nature and the guarantor of our human dignity. Now when we were not yet aware of this ego, while it was working on us from out of the dark spiritual powers of the world, was it then less perfect, by comparison with what it is now? Only a quite abstract way of thinking could say so.

Consider our physical body; we look on it as having been formed out of the spiritual world in the primordial past as a dwelling for the human soul. Only a materialistic mind could believe that this human body had not been born originally from the spirit. Seen merely from an external point of view, the physical body must appear a miracle of perfection. What do all our intellectual ability and technical skill amount to, compared with the wisdom manifest in the structure of the human heart? Or take the engineering technique that goes into the building of bridges, and so forth—what is it compared with the construction of the human thigh-bone, with its wonderful crisscross of support members, as seen through the microscope. It would be sheer boundless arrogance for man to suppose that he has attained in the slightest degree to the wisdom inherent in the formation of the external physical body. And consider our soul-life, taking into account only our instincts, desires and passions—how do they function? Are we not doing all we can to undermine inwardly the wisdom-filled organisation of our body? Indeed, if we consider without prejudice the marvel of our physical organisation, we have to admit that our bodily structure is far wiser than anything we can show in our inner life, although we may hope that our inner life will advance from its present imperfection towards increasing perfection. We can hardly come to any other conclusion, even without clairvoyance, if we simply look impartially at the observable facts.

Is not this wise activity, which has built up the human body as a dwelling-place for the ego, bound to have something in common with the nature of the ego itself? Must we not think of this formative power as having the character of an immeasurably more advanced ego? We must say: Something related to our ego has worked during primordial times at building a structure which the ego could come to inhabit. Anyone who refuses to believe this may imagine something different, but then he must also suppose that an ordinary house, built for human habitation, has not been designed by a human mind but has been put together merely by the action of natural forces. One assumption is as true as the other. Thus we look back to a primordial past where a spiritual power endowed with an ego-nature of unlimited perfection worked upon our bodily sheaths. In those times our own ego was hidden in subconscious depths, thence it worked its way up to its present state of consciousness.

If we look at this evolution from the far-distant past, when the ego was hidden within its sheaths as though in the darkness of a mother's womb, we find that although the ego had no knowledge of itself, it was all the closer to those spiritual beings who worked on our bodily vehicles and were related to the human ego, but of incomparably greater perfection. Clairvoyant insight thus looks back to a far-distant past when man had not yet acquired ego-consciousness, for he was embedded in spiritual life itself, and when his soul-life, too, was different, for it was much closer to the soul-forces from which the ego has emerged. In those times, also, we find in man a primal clairvoyant consciousness which functioned dimly and dreamily, for it was not illumined by the light of an ego; and it was from this mode of consciousness that the ego first came forth. The faculty that man in the future will acquire with his ego was present in the primeval past without the ego. Clairvoyant consciousness entails that spiritual beings and spiritual facts are seen in the environment, and this applies to early man, although his clairvoyance was dreamlike and he beheld the spiritual world as though in a dream. Since he was not yet shone through by an ego, he was not obliged to remain within himself when he wished to behold the spiritual. He beheld the spiritual around him and looked on himself as part of the spiritual world; and whatever he did was imbued, for him, with a spiritual character. When he thought of something, he could not have said to himself, “I am thinking”, as a man might do today; his thought stood before his clairvoyant vision. And to experience a feeling he had no need to look into himself; his feeling radiated from him and united him with his whole spiritual environment.

Such was the soul-life of man in primordial times. From out of his dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness he had to develop inwardly in order to come to himself, and in himself to that centre of his being which today is still imperfect but will advance ever more nearly towards perfection in the future, when man with his ego will step forth into the spiritual world.

Now if light is thrown on those primordial times by means of clairvoyance in the way already described, what does the seer tell us concerning the human consciousness of those times when a man had, for example, committed an evil deed? His deed did not present itself to him as something he could inwardly assess. He beheld it, with all its harmfulness and shamefulness, as a ghostly vision confronting his soul. And when a feeling concerning his evil deed arose in his soul, the shamefulness of it came before him as a spiritual reality, so that he was as though surrounded by a vision of the evil he had wrought.

Then, in the course of time, this dreamlike clairvoyance faded and man's ego came increasingly to the fore. In so far as man found this central point of his being within himself, the old clairvoyance was extinguished and self-consciousness established itself more and more clearly. The vision he had previously had of his bad and good deeds was transposed into his inner life, and deeds once clairvoyantly beheld were mirrored in his soul.

Now what sort of forms were beheld in dreamy clairvoyance as the counterpart of man's evil deed? They were pictures whereby the spiritual powers around him showed how he had disturbed and disrupted the cosmic order, and they were intended to have a salutary effect. It was a counteraction by the Gods, who wished to raise him up and, by showing him the effect of his deed, to enable him to eliminate its harmful consequences. This was indeed a terrifying experience for him, but it was fundamentally beneficial, coming as it did from the cosmic background out of which man himself had emerged. When the time came for man to find in himself his ego-centre, the external vision was transferred to his soul in the form of a reflected picture. When the ego first makes its appearance in the sentient soul, it is weak and frail, and man first has to work slowly upon himself in order that his ego may gradually advance towards perfection. Now what would have happened if, when the external clairvoyant vision of the effects of his misdeeds had disappeared, it had not been replaced by an inward counterpart of its beneficial influence? With his still frail ego, he would have been torn to and fro in his sentient soul by his passions, as though in a surging boundless sea. What, then, was it that was transferred at this historic moment from the external world to the inner life of the soul? If it was the great cosmic Spirit that had brought the harmful effects of a man's deed before his clairvoyant consciousness as a healing influence, showing him what he had to make good, so, later on, it was the same cosmic Spirit that powerfully revealed itself in his inner life at a time when his ego was still weak. Having previously spoken to man through a clairvoyant vision, the cosmic Spirit withdrew into man's inner life and imparted to him what had to be said about correcting the distortion caused in the world-order. Man's ego is still weak, and the cosmic Spirit keeps a perpetual, unsleeping watch over it and passes judgment where the ego could not yet judge. Behind the weak ego stands something like a reflection of the powerful cosmic Spirit which had formerly shown to man through clairvoyant vision the consequences of his deeds. And this reflection is now experienced by him as conscience watching over him.

So we see how true it is when conscience is naively described as the voice of God in man. At the same time we see how spiritual science points to the moment when external vision became inward experience and conscience was born.

What I have now been saying can be drawn purely from the spiritual world. No external history is required; the facts I have described are seen by the inward eye. Anyone who can see them will experience them as incontestable truths, but a certain necessity of the times may lead us to ask: Could external history perhaps reveal something that would confirm, in this case, the facts seen by inner vision?

The findings of clairvoyant consciousness can always be tested by external evidence, and there is no need to fear that the evidence will contradict them. That could seem to happen only if the testing were inexact. But we will give one example that can show how external facts confirm the statements here derived from clairvoyant insight.

It is not so very long since the time when the birth of conscience can be seen to occur. If we look back to the fifth and sixth centuries BC, we encounter in ancient Greece the great dramatic poet Aeschylus,⁵⁶ and in his work we find a theme which is especially remarkable for the reason that the same subject was treated by a late Greek poet in a quite different way.

Aeschylus shows us how Agamemnon, on returning from Troy, is killed by his wife, Klytemnestra, when he arrives home. Agamemnon is avenged by his son Orestes, who, acting on the advice of the gods, kills his mother. What, then, is the consequence for Orestes of this deed? Aeschylus shows how the burden of matricide calls forth in Orestes a mode of seeing which was no longer normal in those times. The enormity of his crime caused the old clairvoyance to awake in him, like an inheritance from the past. Orestes could say: “Apollo, the god himself, told me it was a just act for me to avenge my father upon my mother. Everything I have done speaks in my favour. But the blood of my mother is working on!” And in the second part of the Orestean trilogy we are powerfully shown how the old clairvoyance awakens in Orestes and how the avenging goddesses, the Erinyes—or Furies, as they were later called by the Romans—approach.

Orestes sees before him, in dreamlike clairvoyance, the effect of his act of matricide in its external form. Apollo had approved the deed; but there is something higher. Aeschylus wished to indicate that a still higher cosmic ordinance obtains, and this he could do only by making Orestes become clairvoyant at that moment, for he had not yet gone far enough to dramatise what today we call an inner voice. If we study his work, we feel that he was at the stage when something like conscience ought to emerge from the whole content of the human soul, but he never quite reached that point. He confronts Orestes with dreamlike, clairvoyant pictures that have not yet been transformed into conscience. Yet we can see how he is on the verge of recognising conscience. Every word that he gives to Klytemnestra, for example, makes one feel unmistakably that he ought to indicate the idea of conscience in its present-day sense; but he never quite gets that far. In that century, the great poet could only show how bad deeds rose up before the human soul in earlier times.

Now we will pass over Sophocles and come to Euripides,⁵⁷ who described the same situation only a generation later. Scholars have rightly pointed out—though spiritual science alone can show this in its true light—that in Euripides the dream-pictures experienced by Orestes are no more than shadowy images of the inward promptings of conscience—somewhat as in Shakespeare. Here we have palpable evidence of the stages whereby the idea of conscience was taken hold of by the art of poetry. We see how Aeschylus, great poet as he was, cannot yet speak of conscience itself, while his successor, Euripides, does speak of it. With this development in mind, we can see why human thinking in general could work its way only slowly towards a true conception of conscience. The force now active in conscience was active also in ancient times; the pictures showing the effects of a man's deeds rose before his clairvoyant sight. The only difference is that this force became internalised; but before it could be inwardly experienced, the whole process of human development, which led gradually to the concept of conscience, had to take its course.

Thus we see in conscience a faculty which comes to the fore by degrees and has to be acquired by man's own endeavours. Where, then, should we look for this most intense activity of conscience? At that point where the human ego was beginning to make itself known and was still weak, that is something which can be shown in human development. In ancient Greece it had already advanced to the stage of the intellectual soul. But if we look further back to Egypt and Chaldea outer history knows nothing of this, but Plato and Aristotle were clairvoyantly aware of it—we find that even the highest culture of those times was achieved without the presence of an inwardly independent ego. The difference between the knowledge that was nurtured and put to use by the sanctuaries of Egypt and Chaldea and our modern science is that our science is grasped by the consciousness soul, whereas in pre-Hellenic times it all depended on inspirations from the sentient soul. In ancient Greece the ego progressed from the sentient soul into the intellectual soul. Today we are living in the epoch of the consciousness soul, which means that a real ego-consciousness arises for the first time. Anyone who studies the evolution of mankind, and in particular the transition from eastern to western culture, can see how human progress has been marked by ever-increasing feelings of freedom and independence. Whereas man had formerly felt himself entirely dependent on the Gods and the inspirations that came from them, in the West, culture first came to spring from the inner life.

This is especially evident, for example, in the way Aeschylus strives to bring about a consciousness of the ego in the human soul. We see him standing on the frontier between East and West, with one eye on the East and the other on the West, gathering from the human soul the elements that will come together to form the concept of conscience. He strives to give this new form of conscience a dramatic embodiment, but is not yet quite able to do so. Comparisons are apt to be confusing; we must not only compare, but also distinguish. The point is, that in the West everything was designed to raise the ego from the sentient soul to the consciousness soul. In the East the ego was veiled in obscurity and had no freedom. In the West, by contrast, the ego works its way up into the consciousness soul. If the old dreamlike clairvoyance is extinguished, everything else tends to awaken the ego and to evoke conscience as guardian of the ego as a divine inner voice. Aeschylus was the corner-stone between the worlds of East and West.

In the Eastern World men had retained a living awareness of their origin in the divine cosmic Spirit, and this made it possible for them to gain understanding of the event which took place a few hundred years after endeavours had been made by many—or Aeschylus for example—to find something that spoke as the voice of God within themselves. For this event brought to mankind the impulse which from all spiritual standpoints must be seen as the greatest impulse ever to enter into the evolution of the earth and man—the impulse we call the Christ-Impulse.

It was the Christ-impulse that first made it possible for humanity to realise that God, the Creator of things and of the external sheaths of man, can be recognised in our inward life. Only by understanding the divine humanity of Christ Jesus were men enabled to understand that the voice of God could be heard within the soul. In order that men should be able to find something of the divine nature in their own inner life, it was necessary for Christ to enter into the evolution of humanity as an external historical-event. If the Christ, a Divine Being, had not been present in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, if he had not shown once and for all that God can be discerned in our inner life, because he had once been present in a human body; if he had not appeared as the conqueror of death through the Mystery of Golgotha, men would never have been able to comprehend the indwelling of Divinity in the human soul.

If anyone claims that this indwelling could be discerned even if there had been no historical Christ Jesus, he could equally well say that we should have eyes even if there were no sun. As against this one-sided view of some philosophers that, since without eyes we could not see the light, the origin of light must be traced to the eyes, we must always set Goethe's aphorism: The eye is created by light for light.⁵⁸ If there were no sun to fill space with light, no eyes would ever have developed in the human organism. The eyes are created by light, and without the sun there would be no eyes. No eye is capable of perceiving the sun without having first received from the sun the power to do so. In the same way, there could be no power to grasp and recognise the Christ-nature if the Christ-Impulse had not entered into external history. What the sun out there in the cosmos does for human sight, so the historical Christ-Jesus makes possible what we call the entry of the divine nature into our inner life.

The elements necessary for understanding this were present in the stream of thought that came over from the East; they needed only to be raised to a higher level. It was in the West that souls were ripe to grasp and accept this impulse—the West, where experiences which had belonged to the outer world were transferred to the inner life most intensively, and in the form of conscience watched over a generally weak ego. In this way souls were strengthened, and prepared to hear the voice of conscience now saying within them: The Divinity who appeared in the East to those able to look clairvoyantly into the world—this Divinity now lives in us!

However, what was thus being prepared could not have become conscious experience if the inward Divinity had not spoken in advance in the dawning of conscience. So we see that external understanding for the Divinity of Christ Jesus was born in the East, and the emergence of conscience came to meet it from the West. For example, we find that conscience is more and more often spoken of in the Roman world, at the beginning of the Christian era, and the further westward we go, the clearer is the evidence for the recognised existence of conscience or for its presence in embryonic form.

Thus East and West played into each other's hands. We see the sun of the Christ-nature rising in the East, while in the West the development of conscience is preparing the way for understanding the Christ. Hence the victorious advance of Christianity is towards the West, not the East. In the East we see the spread of a religion which represents the final consequence—though on the highest level—of the eastern outlook: Buddhism takes hold of the eastern world. Christianity takes hold of the western world, because Christianity had first created the organ for receiving it. Here we see Christianity brought into relation with the deepened element in western culture: the concept of conscience embodied in Christianity.

Not through the study of external history, but only through an inward contemplation of the facts, shall we come to knowledge of these developments. What I am saying today will be met with disbelief by many people. But a demand of the times is that we should recognise the spirit in external phenomena. This, however, is possible only if we are at least able initially to discern the spirit where it speaks to us in the form of a clear message. Popular consciousness says: When conscience speaks, it is God speaking in the soul. The highest spiritual consciousness says that when conscience speaks, it is truly the cosmic Spirit speaking. And spiritual science brings out the connection between conscience and the greatest event in the evolution of mankind, the Christ-Event. Hence it is not surprising that conscience has thereby been ennobled and raised to a higher sphere. When we hear that something has been done for reasons of conscience, we feel that conscience is regarded as one of the most important possessions of mankind.

Thus we can see how natural and right it is for the human heart to speak of conscience as “God in man”. And when Goethe says that the highest experience for man is when “God-Nature reveals itself to him”, we must realise that God can reveal himself in the spirit to man only if Nature is seen in the light of its spiritual background. This has been provided for in human evolution, on the one hand by the light of Christ, shining from outside, and on the other by the divine light within us: the light of conscience. Hence a philosopher such as Fichte, who studies human character, is justified in saying that conscience is the highest voice in our inward life. On this account, also, we are aware that our dignity as human beings is inseparable from conscience. We are human beings because we have an ego-consciousness; and the conscience we have at our side is also at the side of our ego. Thus we look on conscience as a most sacred individual possession, inviolable by the external world, whose voice enables us to determine our direction and our goal. When conscience speaks, no other voice may intrude.

So it is that on one side conscience ensures our connection with the primordial power of the world and on the other guarantees the fact that in our inmost self we have something like a drop flowing from the Godhead. And man can know: When conscience speaks in him, it is a God speaking.

• 49. Held by his teacher and friend Karl Julius Schröer, 1825–1900. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner's remarks in the lecture of 29th October 1914 in Berlin, in: Aus schicksaltragender Zeit, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. (GA 64)
• 50. See notes 14 and 13.
• 51. See J.G. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, 1800, Book 3: Glaube.
• 52. Bartholomew Carnieri, 1821–1909. Cf. his characterisation of conscience in the introduction to Der moderne Mensch. Versuch einer Lebensführung, Stuttgart, 1904.
• 53. Paul Ree, 1849–1901. Die Entstehung des Gewissens, Berlin, 1885.
• 54. Socrates, 470–399 B.C.
• 55. Plato, 427–347 B.C.
• 56. Aeschylus, 525–456 B.C., in his Oresteia trilogy.
• 57. >Euripides, c. 480–406 B.C., deals with this subject in Electra and in Orestes.<
• 58. See note 4.

All the knowledge that is brought to people in theosophical literature naturally comes from one source. To the question “How do you get it?”, the answer must be: Yoga is the path to higher knowledge, and to participation in the higher worlds in general. “Yoga” means union with the divine source of existence, with the spiritual sources of the world. The one who practises yoga is called a yogi, that is a person who seeks to develop within himself the abilities and powers to penetrate into the spiritual worlds.

There is a great difference between the man who has grasped the idea of Yoga and he who seeks to acquire knowledge today. The latter seeks to bring as much of the outer world as possible into his own mind. The yogi, on the other hand, seeks out all the sources of knowledge that come from spiritual life itself. He starts from the fact that there is development, that man's development, as it is now, is a stage, and that there are forces and abilities slumbering within him that still have to come out, and that if we bring them out, we can truly enter into higher worlds. If you want to become a yogi, you must acquire an unconditional belief in the upward development of the human being, not a blind faith, but the active belief that you can move upwards, that you can develop forces that have not yet been expressed. But this cannot happen overnight. Yoga is a path that consists in many ways of renunciation, and it must be sought with patience and perseverance. It is very difficult for people in today's cultural life to achieve yoga. That is why the theosophical movement was necessary. When Subba Rao was asked how long it takes to achieve initiation, he said: “It can take seventy incarnations, sometimes only seven, for some it takes seventy years, for some seven years, and there may be people who achieve it in seven days, and some even in seven hours.

Of course, it depends on the level of maturity of a person. A person may be further along than he or she realizes. Internally, a person can already be empowered to exercise his or her will and mind in the spiritual world. It may be that someone in a previous incarnation was much further along than he has come today. Perhaps in this incarnation, due to the conditions of the physical body, what was already within him could not come out; now the previously attained powers must be brought out through the powers of the present life. For example, someone might have been a wise priest with magical abilities. This would now have to be brought out in the later incarnation through the powers of that incarnation. Perhaps the brain development in the later incarnation is not so far advanced as to make this possible. It could also be that other forces are missing, perhaps love and kindness; then the earlier forces cannot be brought out again. That is why it takes less time for one person and more time for another to reach initiation. It is a matter of exploring what is already within us by creating the most intimate inner life possible.

The concept of yoga must be removed more and more from everything external and tumultuous, and it must be realized that yoga will happen in the seclusion of the innermost life. Above all, it should be kept in mind that higher spiritual qualities should never be developed without strengthening the character at the same time. Imagine a yellow and a blue liquid mixed together, then a green liquid would result. Just as the yellow and blue liquids, when mixed, produce a green one, so the spiritual and physical powers of man are united. When the spiritual nature is extracted, the physical nature remains behind, so to speak, as a sediment. Much depends on the two natures being mixed [correctly]. It is because the higher nature is connected with the lower nature that man is a particular man. In yoga training, the higher nature is drawn out, and all those qualities that are bad in man come to the fore if absolute character development does not go hand in hand with it. If you aspire to yoga, you have to be prepared for the strangest things to happen in your life. These are the temptations of Saint Anthony. If you seriously begin with yoga exercises, then you have to be prepared for all sorts of things to come out of the lower nature. Some people who were truthful before start lying, cheating, becoming unreliable in character. This happens when the strictest sense of yoga training is not required of students to constantly strengthen their character. Opportunities for wrongdoing then arise as if by magic. That is why all genuine yoga schools first look at the development of morality. Annie Besant repeatedly says to Westerners: spiritual training without moral elevation of character can only lead to wrong paths.

Yoga consists of raising certain things that a person otherwise does unconsciously into consciousness. A person usually performs the breathing process unconsciously; the yogi raises it from the subconscious into consciousness. The yoga training that places the greatest emphasis on the breathing process from the outset, the Hatha Yoga training, only leads to a certain point of development; then it breaks off. It does not go further than the realization of the astral. From the very beginning, one should not follow the Hatha Yoga path, but the Raja Yoga path. This path regards a process such as the breathing process as part of a larger whole. It also involves bringing the things that we previously performed unconsciously into consciousness. We pay no attention to a large part of our thought processes. We have to learn to follow our inner thought process with attention. We can do this by bringing about complete calm within us in relation to the outside world. Then we have to bring thoughts into this calm ourselves and focus our attention on a particular

thought. It is best to devote ourselves to thoughts that contain a force. This conscious immersion in a thought is called meditation. What matters is to live intimately with a thought. You can meditate with a specific valuable thought content. You have to rest completely on it in all silence. You could also do it with an everyday thought, for example with the thought “table” and realize what that is. Most people do not realize what a table is, namely that a weight mass is distributed over several legs. You can search to understand the concept of the table in a contemplative way.

Look at certain pictures by great painters [...]. With some, you feel satisfied when you see floating figures, but with others you feel no satisfaction at all. With some pictures, you feel that the painter literally lived within the figures, while with others you feel that he only saw the figures from the outside.

A European man of culture will find it very difficult to immerse himself in such a concept for a long time. But the real yogi must immerse himself more and more in the concept. As we live inwards, forces develop in our soul that were not there before. When we rest in a concept with the soul, then these forces come out. You have to have the reins in your hand and look at your soul life in such a way that you always have the reins in your hand. A good preparation for this is this quiet resting in thought. The thoughts of life call the inner soul to the most diverse affects. You have to learn not to be led by the soul forces, but to lead them. You have to learn to strengthen your inner self more and more so that you can hold back an outburst of anger, so that you can hold back hatred. We have to get all our affects and passions under control so that nothing gets out of hand with us. We have to achieve complete mastery and restraint of our inner self. This is achieved through quiet devotion to the thought.

To meditate, it is necessary: first, to fix a thought in itself; second, to identify with the thought; third, to remain within it for a while. You have to enter into a thought, for example, the concept of the table, and identify the will with it. Then Samadhi occurs, which is immersion in the object.

The regulation of the breathing process is connected with such training of thought. If this alone is tackled from the beginning, it is Hatha Yoga. If it forms part of the other training, it is Raja Yoga. The yogi must observe certain times for breathing, and then he enters into a rhythmic life. The seven degrees of the Persian initiation are based on this: Ravens, Occult, Strugglers, Lions, Persians, Sun-runners, Fathers. Those who had come so far as to make their lives completely rhythmic were called Sun-runners. In this way, the human being integrates himself into the whole rhythm of nature. The sun returns to the same point every year. Everything happens rhythmically with it. Everything in life is based on rhythms. If a person wants to achieve something, he must bring rhythm into his life. The plants and animals are connected to the seasons in a very specific way. In the human being, everything is initially subject to the arbitrariness of the astral body, and this makes his life unrhythmic. This brings disorder into his life. He must now make it rhythmic again.

If I meditate every day at a certain hour, for example at seven o'clock in the morning, I bring rhythm into my life. But if I meditate at ten o'clock or at some other time instead of at seven o'clock, then the rhythm is disturbed. Even if a person decides to say a prayer every day at seven o'clock in the morning, again at noon and before going to bed, then these are three fixed points that bring rhythm into our lives. Part of the rhythmization of life is also the rhythmization of the breathing process. This is connected with very deep things that exist between man and the universe. Plants and humans belong together in a certain way. The human being inhales oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide; the plant does it the other way around. Throughout evolution, there is a connection between the nature of plants and that of human beings. The plant grows rhythmically according to natural laws. It is still completely chaste because it does not yet have the astral life within it. On the one hand, it is higher than the human being, but on the other hand, it is lower. As an ideal, it stands before man. Man must become similar to it by rhythmizing the breathing process. When one inhales and holds the breath longer, one develops carbonic acid in oneself, and thus approaches the nature of plants.

When the yogi gradually begins to consciously live in what he had previously done unconsciously, then new worlds open up around him. He then experiences new worlds. If we were asleep, we would not hear the most glorious music. So, at first, man is a sleeper in relation to the spiritual worlds. And just as waking up is like waking up to melodies, there is a waking up in the spiritual world through the breathing process. When you consciously enter into the breathing process, imaginative knowledge begins. Ordinary seeing is material knowledge. Imaginative knowledge consists in our ability to evoke images that are not mere visions, but that are grounded in the very basis of existence. Even when you look at the ordinary world, you basically only have images. Everything in the external world is an image. The images of the external world correspond to material knowledge. The images that arise through the yoga process are stimulated internally, stimulated in the right way.

What matters in this whole world, which then arises in us, is that it is inwardly true. That is the difficulty in the yoga training. As long as a person has personal desires, he cannot easily distinguish truth from untruth in this world. Hence the need to become selfless. In the Pythagorean schools, people were made to understand: You can only learn about life after death when you are completely indifferent to whether you live after death or not. All personal aspiration is eliminated in relation to this one question. When personal desire is eliminated, where imagination is needed, then truth is expressed in imagination.

The third stage is the stage of rational will. Here you also learn how the truth is made, the will by which something is willed. The fourth stage is the stage of intuition. The yoga training is about reining in everything that is in us: desire, urge, craving and passion. As long as we do not control this, truth makes us illusory. Above all, absolute inner calm, patience, endurance and steadfastness are required in the practice of yoga.

Certain character traits are essential. We must never lose our harmony with our surroundings, otherwise our progress will be at an end. If the smartest person fell asleep and then woke up on Mars, he would be unable to use his abilities on Mars. He would be considered insane there. All madness is a lack of harmony with the environment; then you can't get ahead if that happens. Not a drunken person should you become, as Plato says, but a sober person, and in no way neglect your everyday duties. This is absolutely necessary for the practice of yoga.

Then it is important to develop humility. Only under the influence of the highest humility can one speak correctly of the experiences in the higher worlds. A very high degree of humility must go hand in hand with the yoga training. The oriental disciple can easily gain a sense of respect and appreciation for the teacher. In this case, it is very important. The deepest trust in the teacher is necessary for the yoga training because one must have a fixed point. In a sense, the yoga student leaves the whole rest of the world. His relationship to the world changes. All things then take on a new meaning.

He becomes alien to his surroundings. He must transform all things. A certain spiritual alchemy takes place with him. He must now do everything out of an inner sense of duty. He treats everything from a new point of view. The way he relates to things changes completely. In a sense, the person becomes estranged from his surroundings. If he does not develop full strength of character, he can easily lose touch with his environment.

The fixed point for the yoga student was always the teacher, who was a point of reference for him, whom he calls his guru, whom he regards as the embodiment of the deity in man. In reality, divine beings do exist in higher human natures. It seems obvious to the Oriental that a higher being lives in the guru. This is not the case in the West. If someone seeks a yoga training in the West, then he will also find the opportunity to reach his goal in the West.

The greatest evil in yoga training would be impatience. But you overcome that when you recognize reincarnation and karma as realities. We must live with the feeling that we actually see this present life between birth and death as one among many.

In a transcript by Anna Rebmann, the following table is attached: