The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Good morning, gentlemen!

Has anything occurred to you that you would like to ask me? (An article was read from the “Schweizerische Bienenzeitung” of February–March 1923 entitled “Do Bees perceive colours invisible to Man?”)

DR. STEINER.

I will say a few words on this subject. You see, these experiments made by Forel and Kühn show so plainly how thoughtlessly experiments are carried out today. One can naturally not imagine anything more absurd than such an interpretation of these experiments as is given here. Think for a moment that I might do as follows: I might take a substance—there are such substances—specially sensitive to ultra-violet rays, i.e., to colours lying beyond the blue and violet; for instance I take barium platino-cyanide. I exclude all the other colours, let us say, I exclude red, orange, yellow, green, blue—then the indigo would come in and the violet—these also I exclude (Diagram missing.) (Diagram missing.) Now I make a screen; I shut these off in the spectrum; then I have here the so-called ultra-violet rays which are invisible to man. If I now add this substance, this barium platino-cyanide (which is a white powder) then it begins to shine, In a darkened room we see nothing; now we let in these rays, screening them as they come in, allowing therefore, only the ultra-violet rays to enter, which become visible when I introduce barium platino-cyanide. Then one sees it. Then it lights up. Thus, according to this article, I must state that barium platino-cyanide is able to see with some kind of eyes because it shows an activity. But very much the same thing happens if one experiments with ants. Suppose that instead of barium platino-cyanide I take ants; then I exclude the light. The ants run towards the sugar; in the same way barium platino-cyanide lights up. I then say (according to this article) that the ants see the ultra-violet rays. But they need to see them just as little as the barium platino-cyanide needs to see in order to shine. All one can really say is, that given a certain substance it produces an effect on the ants. More than that one cannot assert. The scientists concerned are as thoughtless as it is possible to be and make statements that are pure phantasy.

The only thing one can say is this,—that through the sense-organs (once more, according to this article this is proved by the fact that no effect is produced if the eyes of the ants are varnished) that through the sense-organs an impression was made on these insects. It is characteristic that the scientist applies to ants and wasps what he has observed with bees—and vice versa. This only shows how thoughtlessly these experiments were carried out.

Now, one can add the following: you see, when one proceeds further [drawing on the black-board.] to the so-called ultra-violet rays—here you have red-orange, yellow, green, blue—then indigo would come in, and the violet—the ultra-violet rays. On the other side, the infra-red rays.

We have here the ultra-violet rays (on the right hand side) and these have the peculiarity (so he himself expresses it in the article) that they produce strong chemical reactions. Whatever is introduced here (into the sphere of the ultra-violet light) is strongly affected chemically, with the result that if I now put an ant here it will at once experience a strong chemical reaction. It feels this; that is true. It feels this effect above all in the eyes. When the ant is brought into the sphere of the ultra-violet rays it feels this, just as barium platino-cyanide reacts when brought into the same sphere of chemical activity. If I completely darken a room and have only the ultra-violet rays there, then the ant would notice at once that something was happening. For instance, if one had ants' eggs or larvae they would be completely changed, they would be destroyed the moment this powerful chemical working occurred. This is why the ants rescue their eggs.

What this article is really concerned with is effects of a chemical nature.

The statement I made recently is quite correct. I said the bees have a sense which is intermediate between smell and taste; thus these things are sensed by the bees, and it is similar in the case of ants. So little are these gentlemen aware of the real question that they do not know, for example, that when man himself perceives colours, even in perceiving the ultra-violet rays, slight chemical changes take place in his eyes. Man's perception of colour tends to be of a chemical nature.

All that has been investigated here is the reaction to the inner chemical change that takes place in the bees when they are in the ultra-violet light.

Now all that is within the sphere of black, white, yellow, grey (and grey is only a somewhat darker white), or blue-grey, in all these colours there is no ultra-violet. Thus all these colours are freely perceptible to the bees. The chemical effects which the bees sense so strongly when they come to the ultra-violet are not present in these colours. But when the bee leaves the sphere of black, white, yellow and blue-grey and comes into this other sphere it feels in the ultra-violet rays something alien to it. There the bee can do nothing. It is thus so important to note that the bee has a sense between taste and smell.

We men make a great distinction between smell and taste. The latter is primarily a chemical sense; it is entirely based on chemistry. The bee has something which is intermediate between taste and smell. This does not contradict the fact that the bee is able to distinguish colour when the front of the hive is painted in one way or another; for you must consider that as all colours differ in their chemical effects, so they can also be perceived in relation to their warmth or coldness.

If, for example, you cover a surface with red paint and the bee approaches it, it experiences warmth. How should the bee not know that this is different from coming, for instance, into the sphere of blue! Near the blue surface the bee senses coldness. The bee senses the warmth of red and the cold of blue, and then it can naturally distinguish between them. But one is not therefore justified in concluding that the bee sees with its eyes in the way man does. This of course is utter nonsense. But so it is with many other things that people think.

I have previously told you what all such experiments amount to. I once told you there is a certain plant, called the “Venus fly-trap” which immediately contracts its leaves when they are touched. Just as you make a fist of your hand when you are going to be touched—that is, when somebody means to give you a blow—so the Venus fly-trap waits for the insect and then shuts itself up. Then people say: this plant, the Venus fly-trap, has a soul like men have. It is aware of the arrival of the insect and shuts itself up.

Yes, gentlemen, but I always say: I know of a certain arrangement so constituted that when an animal approaches it and touches something inside it, then it immediately shuts up and the animal is caught. This is a mouse-trap! If one ascribes a soul to the Venus fly-trap, one must equally ascribe one to the mouse-trap! If one ascribes sight to the bees because they do something or other in ultra-violet light, then one ought to ascribe sight to barium platino-cyanide as well!

If people only took the trouble to think they would discover many quite remarkable things, for barium platino-cyanide consists of barium. This is a white metal belonging to the class of alkaline metals. Now it is interesting that such metals play a certain part in the life of man. As human beings we could not have the right working in our bodies of the albumen we take in if we had not such metals in our pancreas. They must be there. In barium we have something connected with our feeling comfortable in our digestive process. Platinum is an especially valuable metal, as you know; a metal that is also especially hard and heavy—it is a precious metal. All these metals have the property that they are, once more connected with feeling, with “sensing.”

Now remind yourselves of another thing. Cyanide is also there. This is a certain kind of cyanic acid, of prussic acid. I told you before that man always develops a little prussic acid in the working of his muscles. This substance thus resembles what man is constantly producing in his body. You can gather from this that man is particularly susceptible in his body—not in his eyes—to what happens in ultra-violet light—i.e., to the chemical components of light. We can judge for ourselves if we only pay attention to these things.

But it is only Spiritual Science that can enable one to observe such matters as the fact that where barium platino-cyanide is affected a kind of feeling arises. This applies to the bees in the highest degree. The bees sense colours with especial intensity, but they only see the colours dimly shining on the appearance of a self-luminous organism.

For this reason I say, that generally speaking, twilight surrounds the bees. But when the new Queen appears, she shines for the other bees as the glow-worms shine for us when June is here. This is so, only as regards the three small frontal eyes; the other eyes, the larger ones, have already some perception of light, but as in twilight. When it is in darkness the creature senses the presence of just those colours that work chemically, such as ultra-violet, or of one that does not work chemically at all—i.e., the infra-red.

At the end of this article in the bee journal, it is stated that further information as to the infra-red rays will be given later. Certainly, when the bees come to the infra-red, they will behave quite differently, for then there are no longer any chemical effects.

As to the facts, the experiments are correct, but one must be clear that one cannot draw conclusions such as Forel and Kühn have actually done. To do so is a totally thoughtless way of following up the experiments. Then people say: “this has been proved beyond contradiction.” Naturally, but only for those who ascribe a soul to the mouse-trap! But for others who know how far one can go, how far one is able to think in such a way that things are rightly followed up, these proofs are by no means beyond contradiction.

In ordinary life we are not in the habit of following things up accurately. When people experience some small matter or another, then, as the saying is, a gnat can become an elephant. And so it is with our scientists. When they get hold of something they don't stop their thinking, but carry it on, and apply it to what is immediately before them. This results in fantastic nonsense; a gnat becomes an elephant. When modern science makes such statements this is due to its authority, for what is thus brought forward meets, as a rule, with no contradiction, because all the periodicals are in the hands of scientific authorities. But in the long run, one will not be able to make much use of this nonsense.

if you go over the whole ground of bee-keeping, I believe you will find that just the very best bee-keepers do not trouble themselves very much about the discoveries of Forel and Kühn; for bee-keepers must work practically, and then instinctively one does what is necessary. Of course, it is best if one has the right instincts. I seem to have noticed that the bee-keeper sometimes likes to settle down on a Sunday evening, when it is snowing perhaps, and to read some such article, because naturally, it interests him, but he cannot make much out of it because in an article of this kind there is nothing he can get hold of.

But surely, gentlemen, you have other interesting things to ask me about?

HERR MÜLLER:

I should like to add something about the Queen. We have already described how she lays her eggs. Then we have the unfertilised Queens; for instance, in bad weather, and then only drones are hatched which have no value. Also, when a Queen dies and there is no young brood, then one of the worker bees is bred to be a Queen. It also lays eggs but only unfertilised eggs, from which only inferior drones come out.

-1. Then I should like to add something about swarming. At the time of the first swarm there is as yet no new Queen there. She is still asleep in her cell and cannot yet provide new brood. Only the older bees leave the hive with the Queen. I can take her out and put the whole swarm back in the hive.

0. As to the sight of the bees, I should like to say that when we are at work in the bee-house and there is too much light there (for the bee-master himself there is always too little light), then the bees are terribly agitated.

As to stinging when the bees are swarming, it is well known with us that the first swarm is rather ticklish; this is much less the case with casts. We hold the opinion that young bees do not sting, that they do not use their stings.

2. There are certain districts where people do not harvest the honey before August 8, which is held to be a Holy day. August 8 is a honey day.

3. It can happen that the swarm goes out and the Queen settles somewhere, and it seems that is an end of it, but it is not so—not altogether so.

DR. STEINER:

With regard to what I said, everything pointed to the fact that the old Queen leaves the hive when the new Queen shows herself and appears to the bees like a glow-worm. When the swarm goes out and the old Queen has been captured, then one can return all the bees into the hive, as you say, and they will go on working quietly. That does not mean that one cannot therefore say that the bees were first driven out by the strong effect of the light of the new Queen on their tiny eyes. This cannot be done away with. You must proceed quite logically here. I will give you an example from life. Imagine for a moment, that all of you here were employed somewhere, and you discover one day that you must all go on strike because something is wrong with the management. Let us suppose you all decide to go on strike. So you swarm out, gentlemen.

Then a certain time passes and you find yourselves unable to procure the necessities of life. You reach the hunger-stage, and are obliged to go back to your work. I cannot now say that therefore you had originally no reason to run away! You must consider that if you take the old Queen out of the swarm and bring it back into the hive, then naturally, the bees must endure the new Queen after all, for the old Queen is no longer there. They must bite into the sour apple! What I said is therefore not wrong; it is a question of seeing these things in the right light.

Then you spoke about the first swarm, when the new Queen is not yet there, when you cannot yet speak of her. Well, have you ever seen a first swarm when even the egg of the Queen is not there?

HERR MÜLLER:

Nine days before the young Queen has crept out.

DR. STEINER:

To begin with the young Queen is within her cell, as an egg. After sixteen days she is a full-grown Queen; then she creeps out. Nine days before this she is already there in the egg. The strange thing is that the egg shines brightest of all. Gradually it shines less and less, but the young Queen still shines for some time; she shines strongest of all in the larval state. Thus, it is quite comprehensible that you may have several swarms made up of the most sensitive of the bees which go out. It is to be explained by the fact that nothing happens before the young Queen is there. For what is the young Queen? She is already there when only the egg is there.

As to an unfecundated Queen, when the Queen is not fertilised then no worker-bees come out but only drones, and as Herr Müller said, very bad drones at that. This is true. The brood of an unfertilised Queen is useless because there are no worker-bees. One must see to it that the Queen can make her nuptial flight under the influence of the Sun.

You see, gentlemen, once more, what a great part is played by the chemical element. For what takes place on this flight is an effect on the sexual nature of the bee. But the sexual nature is entirely of a chemical character. When the Queen flies so high then naturally the impregnation is not brought about by the light, but by the chemical working of the light. Just in this instance you can see how delicately sensitive the bee is to the chemical element.

You said further that while at work in the bee-house, as a man one naturally needs light, and this makes the bees restless.

Try to form a vivid picture of the bee receiving chemical reactions from the light which it feels terribly strongly. When you, as a human being, approach and let the light in, suddenly making it light everywhere, this affects the bee as a strong gust of air affects you; it is just as if you opened the window and a strong draught were to blow in. The bee senses the light, it does not feel that it becomes light all round it, but it senses the light as a concussion, it is quite shattered by it. One could almost say, (though I have not actually seen the bee-keeper letting in too much light) the bees become terribly nervous, inwardly restless. They are thrown into these chemical workings of the light and begin to fly hither and thither almost like little swallows. They dance up and down as a sign of how restless they feel within. The bees would not behave in such a highly nervous way if they could see the light; they would then try to hide away, to creep into a corner where the light could not thus affect them.

Naturally, in all these matters, we must realise how perfectly clear we need to be as to effects that everywhere exist, and must not be compared with the effects things have upon men. Otherwise we anthropomorphise everything, and cannot but conclude that because man sees in a certain way, the animals also must do the same. One cannot make such statements straightaway.

Maybe you have observed the following. If one notices such things, one can often become aware of them. Imagine you are in a kitchen where the stove is nice and warm. The cat likes to sit on the warm stove; it curls itself up and falls asleep, has its eyes shut. Well, if there is a mouse somewhere under the cupboard, which the cat cannot possibly see with its eyes, it may happen that the cat suddenly springs down without opening its eyes, pounces with absolute certainty on the mouse, and before you have time to think the thing out to the end, the cat returns with the mouse already in its mouth.

Now naturally, you gentlemen, will not say the cat saw the mouse, for it had its eyes shut, it was asleep. Some people say the cat has a very fine sense of hearing, and by means of this very sensitive hearing the cat is aware of the mouse. Well, apart from this, that one must now state that the cat hears best when it is asleep, which is a rather doubtful statement, because sight and hearing are those senses which play so great a part in waking life, whereas the sense of smell for example, plays an extremely important part in sleep. It works chemically. Within the nose, and the whole brain something chemical is happening. Moreover, when you hear something, can you pounce upon it with absolute certainty? This is not at all the case; hearing is not at all such that it leads one to orientate oneself quickly. Hence, it is not the hearing of the cat that is in question here. But what is very strongly present in the cat is a terribly fine sense of smell, which it has within its bristly beard. This terribly fine sense of smell is there because in each bristle there is a little channel, and within each bristle (see diagram 9) is a substance, and this substance is chemically affected by the presence of the mouse. When there is no mouse near, this substance has a certain chemical quality, but if there is a mouse anywhere in the neighbourhood of the cat, even some distance away, then the cat is aware of the mouse through the chemical reaction in its whiskers.

I told you once that there are people who, though living on the third floor, are aware of some substance in the cellar, and can sometimes be made ill by it—for example, by buckwheat.

People could easily convince themselves with what certainly the sense of smell works, for otherwise there could he no police dogs. These dogs work very little by sight, but much with their sense of smell. In the animal kingdom precision and sureness cannot be ascribed to the eyes, but to chemical activity; under the influence of ultra-violet rays this activity is strongest of all.

If you wished to be especially gracious to a police dog you would do well if, for instance, you went with him and constantly held a dark lantern in front of him so that you kept him always in the ultra-violet rays. The police dog would then be even more certain in finding things, for in its “smelling hairs” (for the dog also has smelling hairs) the chemical reactions would be still more certain.

All that can be known about the animal points to the fact that the moment we enter the animal kingdom, one must not look for such conscious senses as those of man, but must descend into the senses of smell and taste—into the “chemical senses.”

You indicated, Herr Müller, that young bees do not sting. This is easily accounted for, for young bees have not yet the organ of the sting as they have not fully developed their whole inner organisation. This comes only as they grow older. There is nothing especially remarkable in this, and it does not contradict what I have said.

(Herr Müller asked about artificial feeding. He takes for this four parts of water, five of sugar, and then adds thyme, camomile-tea and a pinch of salt. What is the effect of this?)

DR. STEINER:

We are especially able to give you information in this matter, because our own remedies are partly based on the same principles as those that have been used instinctively here. Not all our remedies, but a certain number of them, are founded on similar principles.

You see, when you feed the bees on sugar, this is certainly nonsense, for the natural food of the bees is not sugar but nectar or honey, and pollen.

HERR MÜLLER:

For example, one has to empty even the half-filled combs of honey that come from the woods, because otherwise the bees get dysentery; also when the bees have at times only 4–6 lbs., left over, this is not sufficient.

DR. STEINER:

Bees are not accustomed to feed on sugar but on nectar and honey. This is in accordance with their whole nature. The remarkable thing here is that in winter the bee changes whatever food it happens to get into a kind of honey. All food is changed by the creature that partakes of it. Thus, in winter the bee is able, in its delicate digestive processes, to transform the food it takes into a kind of honey.

You can well imagine that this is a proceeding demanding much stronger forces than when you feed the bees on honey. They do not then need to expend the same amount of strength as when they must change sugar into honey. What kind of bees then will those be which within themselves can transform sugar into honey? They will only be the strongest bees, of which one can make good use. One cannot get weak bees to change sugar into honey; hence, they are more or less useless.

Now I said just now that we can well understand why you take for example, camomile tea, because you thereby spare the bee something which it has otherwise to do in its own body. If you dilute the sugar with camomile tea, then you take that part of the plant which prepares the nectar. For the substance of the camomile tea has not only camomile in it, for every plant also contains potential honey (the camomile contains this process in a greater degree, and can for this reason not be used as a honey plant). Suppose you have a plant, with a great deal of so-called starch in it. The starch has a constant tendency to change into sugar. The camomile sap already works on the starch of the plant in such a way that it directs the sugar-sap of the plant towards the formation of nectar.

If you give the bees camomile tea you support them in their inner honey-process. You make the sugar already like honey, when, you dilute it with camomile tea. We do the same with our remedies. When one takes some kind of metal, one cannot give it to a human being just as it is, because it would disappear in the course of digestion. You must dilute it with something so that it can be more readily absorbed, and so it is with the camomile tea which you add to the sugar. Salt must be added for the reason that salt especially makes otherwise indigestible things, digestible.

Man instinctively puts salt into his soup, because salt has the property of spreading rapidly through the body, and makes food digestible.

Yesterday we described the various stages by which pupils of the Eastern and the Christian occult schools came to higher knowledge. Today I will try to describe, in a similar way, the stages of Rosicrucian training.

You must not imagine that the Rosicrucian training contradicts the other two. It has existed since the fourteenth century, and it had to be introduced because mankind then needed a different form of training. Among the Initiates it was foreseen that a time would come when because of the gradual increase of knowledge men would be confused in matters of religious faith. Therefore a form of instruction had to be created for those who felt within themselves the discord between faith and knowledge. In the Middle Ages the most learned men were also those of the greatest faith and piety; and for a long time afterwards those who had made headway in scientific knowledge could not conceive of any contradictions between knowledge and faith. We are usually told that faith was shaken by the ideas of Copernicus, but that is quite wrong: after all, Copernicus dedicated his book to the Pope! It is only in quite recent times that this conflict has gradually developed. The Masters of Wisdom saw that this was bound to happen and that a new path would have to be found for those whose faith had been destroyed. For persons much occupied with science, the necessary path towards Initiation is the Rosicrucian, for the Rosicrucian method shows that the highest knowledge of mundane things is thoroughly compatible with the highest knowledge of spiritual truths. It is precisely through the Rosicrucian path that those who have been led away from Christian belief by what they take to be science can learn to understand Christianity truly for the first time. By this method anyone can come to a deeper grasp of the truth of Christianity. Truth is one, but it can be reached along different paths, just as at the foot of a mountain there are various paths, but they all meet at the summit.

The essence of Rosicrucian training may be described in two words: true self-knowledge. The Rosicrucian pupil has to distinguish two things, not merely theoretically but practically, so that they become part of his everyday life. There are two forms of self-knowledge—the lower form, called by the Rosicrucian pupil “self-mirroring”, which should serve to overcome the lower self, and the higher form of self-knowledge which is born out of self-renunciation.

What is the lower form of self-knowledge? It consists in the recognition of our everyday self, of what we are and of what we bear within us: in other words, an examination of our own soul-life. But we must make it quite clear to ourselves that by this means we cannot reach the higher self. When we look into ourselves we see only what we are, and that is just what we have to grow out of in order to surmount the ordinary self. But how is this to be done? Most people are convinced that their characteristics are the best, and anyone who lacks these characteristics is uncongenial to them. Once a person has outgrown this idea, not only in theory but in feeling, he will be on the way to true self-knowledge.

You can get out of the habit of self-admiration by a particular method which can be practised whenever you have five minutes for it. You must start from the principle that all characteristics are one-sided; you must learn to recognise in what respects yours are one-sided and then try to balance them. This principle may not amount to much in theory, but in practice it is highly effective. If you are industrious, you must ask yourself whether your activity may not be wrongly applied. Quickness, too, is one-sided; it needs to be supplemented by careful deliberation. Every quality has its polar opposite; you should cultivate its opposite and then try to harmonise the two extremes. For example, make haste slowly; be quick and yet deliberate; deliberate and yet not slow. Then the pupil will begin to grow beyond himself. All this is not part of meditation, but must be acquired alongside it.

It is by attention to small details that this harmony can be achieved. If your tendency is not to let anyone finish what he is saying, you must keep a watch on yourself and make up your mind that for six weeks you will keep silent, as far as possible, when someone else is talking. Then you must accustom yourself to speak neither too loudly nor too softly. Things such as this, which are generally not thought of, contribute essentially to inner self-development, and the more attention you pay to quite insignificant characteristics, the better it will be. If you try not only to acquire certain moral, intellectual or emotional qualities, but to get rid of some external habit, this will be particularly effective. It is a question not so much of investigating your inner self as of endeavouring to perfect the qualities which you have not yet fully developed, and to complement those you already have by cultivating their polar counterparts. Self-knowledge is one of the hardest things to acquire, and it is precisely those who think they know themselves best who are most likely to be deceived: they think too much about themselves. You should get out of the habit of fixing your attention on yourself and constantly using the word “I”—“I think, I believe, I consider this right”. Above all you must get rid of the notion that your opinion is worth more than that of other people. Suppose, for instance, that someone is very clever. If he displays his cleverness in the company of people who are not so clever, his behaviour will be very ill-timed; he will be doing it only to please his own egoism. He ought to adapt his response to the needs and capacities of others. Agitators are particularly apt to offend against this rule.

In addition to all this you must cultivate patience, in the occult sense of the word. Most people who want to achieve something cannot wait; they imagine they are already fit to receive anything. This patience derives from strict self-training, and it, too, is related to the lower form of self-knowledge.

Higher self-knowledge begins only when we can say that our higher self is not in our ordinary “I”. It is in the whole great world outside, in the sun and the moon, in a stone or an animal: everywhere can be found the same essential being that is in us. If a man says: “I wish to cultivate my higher self and to withdraw from the world; I want to know nothing about anything material,” he entirely fails to understand that the higher self is everywhere outside, and that his own higher self is only a small part of the Great Self outside. Certain methods of so-called “spiritual” healers make this mistake, which can be very serious. They instil into patients the idea that matter has no real existence and so there can be no illnesses. This notion is based on a false self-knowledge, and, as I have said, it can be very dangerous. This healing method calls itself Christian, but in fact it is anti-Christian.

Christianity is an outlook which sees in everything a revelation of the Divine. Everything material becomes an illusion unless we look on it as an expression of the Divine. If we disown the external world, we are disowning the Divine; if we reject the material realm, in which God has revealed himself, we are rejecting the Divine. The important thing is not to gaze into ourselves, but to seek to know the Great Self which shines down into us. The lower self says: “Standing here I am cold.” The higher Self says: “I am also the cold, for as part of the one Self I live in the cold and make myself cold.” Again the lower self says: “I am here in the eye which beholds the sun.” The higher Self says: “I am in the sun and in the sun's rays I look into your eyes.”

Really to go out of yourself is to renounce yourself. Hence the Rosicrucian training aims at drawing the lower self out of man. In the early days of Theosophy the gravest mistake was made when people were told to look away from the external world and to gaze into themselves. That is a great illusion, for then we find only the lower self, the fourth principle, which imagines itself to be divine but is not so at all. We must come out of ourselves if we are to know the Divine. “Know thyself” means also “Overcome thyself”.

The Rosicrucian training leads its pupils through the following stages, and these go hand in hand with the six exercises already mentioned:⁴⁴ control of thought; initiative in action; tranquillity; lack of prejudice, or positiveness; faith; and inner balance. The training itself consists of the following:

1. Study. Without study, a modern European cannot get to know himself. He must try, first of all, to reproduce in himself the thoughts of the whole of humanity. He must learn to think in harmony with the world-order. He must say to himself: “If others have thought this, it must be a possible human thought; I will test whether one can live with it.” He need not swear to it as a dogma, but by studying it he must get to know what it is. The pupil must learn about the evolution of sun and planets, of the earth and humanity. Thoughts of this kind, given to us for study, purify the spirit. By following the strict lines of these thoughts, we come to form strictly logical thoughts ourselves. This kind of study, again, purifies our thoughts, and so we learn to think with strict logic. If, for instance, we are reading a difficult book, the most important thing is not to comprehend its whole content, but to enter into the author's line of thought and learn to think with him. Hence the pupil should find no book too difficult; if he does, it means only that he is too easy-going to think.

The best books are those we have to take up again and again, books we cannot understand immediately but have to study sentence by sentence. It does not matter so much what we study as how we study. If we study the great truths, for instance the planetary laws, we develop an important line of thought, and this is what really matters. If we say that we want more moral teaching and nothing about planetary systems, we show great egoism. True wisdom engenders a moral life.

2. Imagination or Imaginative Knowledge is the second thing we have to attain. What is it and how do we achieve it? As we go through the world we must observe it in the light of Goethe's saying: “Everything transitory is but a symbol.”⁴⁵ Goethe was a Rosicrucian and he can lead us into the life of the soul. Everything must become for us a symbol in manifold respects. Suppose, for instance, we are walking past a meadow saffron: in form and colour it is a symbol of mourning. Another flower, the convolvulus, is a symbol of helplessness; another flower, with its splash of red, is a sign of gaiety, and so on. A bird with bright colours may be a symbol of coquetry. The symbols may actually be expressed in the names: weeping willow, forget-me-not, and so on. The more we reflect in this way, so that external things become symbolic pictures of moral qualities, the more easily shall we attain to Imaginative Knowledge. We can see similar likenesses in human beings. For instance, we can study people's temperament from their gait—look at the slow, heavy step of the melancholic, the light, springy step of the sanguine type.

After some time spent on these exercises we can pass to exercises of real Imagination. Take, for example, a living plant, look at it carefully, sink yourself into it, then draw forth the inner feeling of your soul and lay it as it were in the plant, as is described in the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.⁴⁶ All this stimulates the Imagination, and by this means the pupil acquires astral vision. After a time he will notice a little flame proceeding from the plant: that is the astral counterpart of its growth. Again, the pupil takes a seed and visualises the whole plant, as it will later on be in reality. These are exercises of the Imagination; by their means one comes to see things surrounded by their astral element.

3. The third stage is called learning the occult script. There is in fact such a script, through which one can penetrate more deeply into things. An example will show you more exactly what I mean. With the close of the old Indian civilisation a new civilisation began. The symbol for such an evolutionary stage is the vortex. These vortices exist everywhere in the world. They occur in the nebulae—the Orion nebula, for instance. There, too, an old world is dying and a new one being born. When the Indian civilisation was coming into being, the Sun was in the sign of Cancer; during the Persian civilisation in Gemini; during the Egyptian civilisation in Taurus; during the Graeco-Roman civilisation in Aries. Since the astronomical sign for Cancer is ♋, this was the sign for the rise of the Indian civilisation.

Another example is the letter M. Every letter of the alphabet can be traced back to an occult origin. Thus M is the symbol of wisdom; it derives from the shape of the upper lip. It is also the sign for the waves of the seas; hence wisdom may be symbolised by water. These signs indicate sounds which correspond with real things, and in the Rosicrucian training such studies are cultivated.

4. A rhythmical element is brought into breathing. It plays a less important part than it does in Eastern training, but it belongs to the Rosicrucian training and a Rosicrucian knows that through meditation the air he breathes out is purified.

5. The correspondence between Microcosm and Macrocosm is emphasised. This means the connection between the great world and the small, or between man and the world outside him.

Man has emerged by gradual stages and his various members have been formed in the course of evolution. Now it is impossible for certain organs to arise in a being which has, for example, no astral body, and therefore they could not come into existence on the Sun, even in a preliminary form. The liver is an instance of this: it cannot exist without the etheric body, but it is actually created by the astral body. Similarly, no being can have warm blood unless it first appeared at a time when the Ego was at least in course of preparation. True, the higher animals are warm-blooded, but they split off from man when the development of his Ego was already on the way. Hence we can say that the liver is closely related to the astral body, and warm blood to the Ego. In fact every one of man's organs, even the smallest, has its specific relationship to one member of his being. If the pupil concentrates his attention on himself objectively, as though on something outside himself—if for instance he concentrates on the point at the root of the nose and connects with it a particular saying given by his occult teacher, he will be guided to that which corresponds to this point and he will come to know it. If he concentrates on this point under definite guidance, he will come to know the nature of the Ego. Another, much later exercise is directed towards the inner part of the eye; through this one learns to know the inner nature of light and of the sun. The nature of the astral can be learnt by concentrating on the liver, with the aid of certain specific words.

This is true self-development, when the pupil is taken out of himself by means of each organ on which he concentrates his attention. This method has become specially important in recent times because humanity has become deeply involved in matter. In this way one penetrates through the material to its creative cause.

6. Dwelling in, or sinking oneself into, the Macrocosm. This is the same form of spiritual contemplation that we described as Dhyanam. The pupil sinks himself into the organ he is contemplating—for example, the inner part of the eye. After concentrating on it for a while, he drops the mental picture of the external organ and thinks only of that to which the eye leads him—the light. In this way he comes to the creator of the organ and so out into the Macrocosm. He then feels his body increasingly growing larger and larger until it is as large as the Earth; indeed even bigger than the Earth, until all things are in it. And then he lives in all things.

7. The seventh stage corresponds to the Eastern Samadhi. It is called divine blessedness, because now the pupil ceases to think of this last concept, but he retains the power to think. The content of his thought falls away, but the activity of thought remains. And thus he comes to rest in the divine-spiritual world.

These stages of Rosicrucian training are more inward, and call for a subtle cultivation of the higher life of the soul. The widespread superficiality of our material epoch is a powerful obstacle to the necessary deepening of the whole inner life; it must be overcome. This form of training is particularly well suited to Europeans. Anyone who is in earnest can carry it out. But Goethe's saying, “It is indeed easy, but even the easy is hard”,⁴⁷ applies here.

We have gone into the various methods of training, and I will end these lectures by showing you something of the relationship between man and the whole Earth, so that you will see how man is related to everything that happens on Earth.

I have described the evolution of man and shown you how he can acquire a true inner being of his own. In the course of evolution the whole of humanity will attain to everything that the individual can achieve through occult training. But what will be happening to the Earth while mankind is developing in this way? There is a great difference between the Earth seen by the occultist and the Earth known to the ordinary geologist or scientist. He looks on it as merely a sort of great lifeless ball, with an interior not very unlike its exterior, except that at most the interior substances are fluid. But it is not easy to understand how such a lifeless ball could have produced all the different kinds of beings on it.

We know that on this Earth of ours various phenomena occur which deeply affect the fate of many people; but present-day science looks on this as a purely external relationship. Thus the fate of hundreds and thousands may be affected by an earthquake or a volcano. Does the human will have any influence on this, or is it all a matter of chance? Are there dead laws which act with blind fury, or is there some connection between these events and the will of man? What is really happening when a man is killed by an earthquake? What does the occultist say about the interior of the Earth?

The occult science of all epochs says the following about the interior of the Earth. We must think of the Earth as consisting of a series of layers, not completely separated from one another like the skins of an onion, but merging into one another gradually.

1. The topmost layer, the mineral mass, is related to the interior as an eggshell is to the egg. This topmost layer is called the Mineral Earth.

2. Under it is a second layer, called the Fluid Earth; it consists of a substance to which there is nothing comparable on Earth. It is not really like any of the fluids we know, for these all have a mineral quality. This layer has specific characteristics: its substance begins to display certain spiritual qualities, which consist in the fact that as soon as it is brought into contact with something living, it strives to expel and destroy this life. The occultist is able to investigate this layer by pure concentration.

3. The “Air-Earth”. This is a substance which annuls feelings: for instance, if it is brought into contact with any pain, the pain is converted into pleasure, and vice versa. The original form of a feeling is, so to speak extinguished, rather as the second layer extinguishes life.

4. The “Water-Earth”, or the “Form-Earth”. It produces in the material realm the effects that occur spiritually in Devachan. There, we have the negative pictures of physical things. In the “Form-Earth” a cube of salt, for example, would be destroyed, but its negative would arise. The form is as it were changed into its opposite; all its qualities pass out into its surroundings. The actual space occupied by the object is left empty.

5. The “Fruit-Earth”. This substance is full of exuberant energy. Every little part of it grows out at once like sponge; it gets larger and larger and is held in place only by the upper layers. It is the underlying life which serves the forms of the layers above it.

6. The “Fire-Earth”. Its substance is essentially feeling and will. It is sensitive to pain and would cry out if it were trodden on. It consists, as it were, entirely of passions.

7. The “Earth-mirror” or “Earth-reflector”. This layer gets its name from the fact that its substance, if one concentrates on it, changes all the characteristics of the Earth into their opposites. If the seer disregards everything lying above it and gazes down directly into this layer, and if then, for example, he places something green before him, the green appears as red; every colour appears as its complementary opposite. A polaric reflection arises, a reversal of the original. Sorrow would be changed by this substance into joy.

8. The “Divisive” layer. If with developed power one concentrates on it, something very remarkable appears. For example, a plant held in the midst of this layer appears to be multiplied, and so with everything else. But the essential thing is that this layer disrupts the moral qualities also. Through the power it radiates to the Earth's surface, it is responsible for the fact that strife and disharmony exist there. In order to overcome this disruptive force, men must work together in harmony.

That is precisely why this layer was laid down in the Earth—so that men should be enabled to develop harmony for themselves. The substance of everything evil is prepared and organised there. Quarrelsome people are so constituted that this layer has a particular influence on them. This has been known to everyone who has written out of a true knowledge of occultism. Dante⁴⁸ in his Divine Comedy calls this layer the Cain-layer. It was here that the strife between the brothers Cain and Abel had its source. The substance of this layer is responsible for evil having come into the world.

9. The “Earth-core”. This is the substance through whose influence black magic arises in the world. The power of spiritual evil comes from this source.

You will see that man is related to all the layers, for they are continually radiating out their forces. Humanity lives under the influence of these layers and has to overcome their powers. When human beings have learnt to radiate life on Earth and have trained their breathing so that it promotes life, they will overcome the “Fire-Earth”. When spiritually they overcome pain through serenity, they overcome the “Air-Earth”. When concord reigns, the “Divisive” layer is conquered. When white magic triumphs, no evil remains on Earth. Human evolution thus implies a transformation of the Earth's interior. In the beginning the nature of the Earth's body was such as to hold subsequent developments in check. In the end, when human powers have transformed the Earth, it will be a spiritualised Earth. In this way man imparts his own being to the Earth.

Now there are occasions when the very substance of the passions of the Fire-Earth begins to rebel. Aroused by men's passions, it penetrates through the Fruit-Earth, forces its way through the channels in the upper layers and even flows up into and violently shakes the solid Earth: the result is an earthquake. If this passion from the Fire-Earth thrusts up some of the Earth's substance, a volcano erupts. All this is closely connected with man. In Lemurian times, the upper layer was still very soft and the Fire-layer was near the surface. Human passions and the “passion-substance” of this layer are related; when men give rein to evil passions they strengthen its passions, and that is what happened at the end of Lemurian times. Through their passions the Lemurians made the Fire-Earth rebellious, and in this way they brought the whole Lemurian continent to destruction. No other cause for this destruction could be found except in what they had themselves drawn forth from the Earth. Today the layers are thicker and firmer, but there is still this connection between human passions and the passion-layer in the interior of the Earth; and it is still an accumulation of evil passions and forces that gives rise to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

How man's destiny and will are related to happenings in the Earth can be seen from two examples which have been occultly investigated. It has been found that persons who have been killed in an earthquake appear in their next incarnation as men of high spiritual quality and faith. They had progressed far enough to be convinced by that final stroke of the transitoriness of earthly things. The effect of this in Devachan was that they learnt a lesson for their next lives: that matter is perishable but spirit prevails. They did not all come to realise that, but many of them are now living as people who belong to some spiritual-theosophical movement.

In the other example, the births which occurred during a time of frequent earthquakes were investigated. It was found that all those born at about the time of an earthquake, though not exactly in its area, were, surprisingly enough, men of a very materialistic cast of mind. The earthquakes were not the cause of this; rather it was these strongly materialistic souls, ripe for birth, who worked their way down into the physical world by means of their astral will and let loose the forces of the Fire-Earth layer, which proceeded to shake the Earth at the time of their birth.

Man transforms his dwelling-place and himself at the same time, and when he spiritualises himself, he spiritualises the Earth also. One day, at a later planetary stage, he will have ennobled the Earth by his own creative power. Every moment when we think and feel, we are working on the great structure of the Earth. The Leaders of mankind have insight into such relationships and seek to impart to men the forces which will work in the true direction of evolution. One of the latest of these impulses is the Theosophical Movement. Its purpose is to develop harmony and balance in the very depths of the human soul. Anyone who puts the assertion of his own opinion higher than love and peace has not thoroughly understood the idea of Theosophy. The spirit of love must penetrate even into the opinions a man holds. In the course of occult development he must unavoidably learn this, or he will get no further. He must renounce entirely his own opinions and must wish to be solely an instrument of the objective truth which comes from the spiritual world and flows through the world as the one great Truth. The more a man renounces himself and sets his own opinions aside, becoming instead a channel for the great Truth, the more does he manifest the true spirit of Theosophy.

All this is extraordinarily difficult today. But theosophical teaching is itself a promoter of peace. When we come together so that we may live within this teaching, it gives rise to peace. But if we introduce something from outside, we bring dissension in, and that should really be an impossibility. So the theosophical conception of the world must pass over into feeling—into something I would call a spiritual atmosphere—in which Theosophy lives. You must have a will to understand; then Theosophy will hover like a unifying spirit over our gatherings, and from there will spread its influence out through the world.

• 44. See Lecture Twelve.
• 45. Goethe's Faust, Part II, Act V, Chorus Mysticus.
• 46. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. How is it achieved? Appeared as articles in Lucifer-Gnosis, June 1904 to September 1905; first published in book form,. 1909. Collected Edition, Dornach, 1961. Sixth English edition, 1969. Revised by C.D. and D.S.O.
• 47. Spoken by Mephistopheles in Faust, Part II, Act I, The Emperor's Palace.
• 48. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321. The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto 32.

THE Festival of Christmas which we shall soon be celebrating acquires new life when a deeper, more spiritual conception of the world is brought to bear upon it. In a spiritual sense the Christmas Festival is a Festival of the Sun, and as such we shall think of it to-day. To begin with, let us listen to the beautiful apostrophe to the sun which Goethe puts into the mouth of Faust:—

Life's pulses newly-quickened now awaken,
Softly to greet the ethereal twilight leaping;
Thou Earth through this night too hast stood unshaken,
And at my feet fresh breathest from thy sleeping.
Thou girdest me about with gladness, priming
My soul to stern resolve and strenuous keeping,
Onward to strive, to highest life still climbing.—
Unfolded lies the world in twilight-shimmer;
With thousand throated song the woods are chiming;
The dales, where through the mist-wreaths wind, lie dimmer,
Yet heavenly radiance plumbs the deeps unnumbered,
And bough and twig, new-quickened, bud and glimmer
Forth from the fragrant depths where sunk they slumbered,
Whilst hue on hue against the gloom still heightens,
Where bloom and blade with quivering pearls are cumbered.
A very Paradise about me lightens!

Look up!—The giant peaks that rise supernal
Herald the solemn hour; for them first brightens
The early radiance of the light eternal,
Upon us valley-dwellers later showered.

Now are the green-sunk, Alpine meadows vernal
With radiance new and new distinctness dowered,
And stepwise downward hath the splendour thriven.
He sallies forth, and I mine overpowered
And aching eyes to turn away am driven.

Thus when a yearning hope, from fear and wonder
Up to the highest wish in trust hath striven,
The portals of fulfilment yawn asunder.
Then bursts from yonder depths whose days ne'er dwindle
Excess of flame—we stand as smit with thunder.
The torch of life it was we sought to kindle,
A sea of fire-and what a fire!—hath penned us.
Is't Love? Is't Hate? that yonder glowing spindle
In bliss and bale alternating tremendous
About us twines, till we the dazed beholders
To veil our gaze in Earth's fresh mantle wend us.

Nay then, the sun shall bide behind my shoulders!
The cataract, that through the gorge doth thunder,
I'll watch with growing rapture, 'mid the boulders
From plunge to plunge down-rolling, rent asunder
In thousand thousand streams, aloft that shower
Foam upon hissing foam, the depths from under.
Yet blossoms from this storm a radiant flower;
The painted rainbow bends its changeful being,
Now lost in air, now limned with clearest power,
Shedding this fragrant coolness round us fleeing.
Its rays an image of man's efforts render;
Think, and more clearly wilt thou grasp it, seeing
Life in the many-hued, reflected splendour.

(Translation by Latham)

Goethe lets these words be spoken by Faust, the representative of humanity, as he gazes at the radiant morning sun. But the Festival of which we are now to speak has to do with a Sun belonging to a far deeper realm of being than the sun which rises anew every morning. And it is this deeper Sun that will be the guiding moth in our thoughts to-day.

And now we will listen to words in which the deepest import of the Christmas Mystery is mirrored. In all ages these words resounded in the ears of those who were pupils of the Mysteries—before they were allowed to participate in the Mysteries themselves:—

Die Sonne schaue
Um mitternächtige Stunde.
Mit Steinen baue
Im lebenlose Grunde.
So finde im Niedergang
Und in des Todes Nacht
Der Schöpfung neuen Anfang,
Des Morgens junge Macht.

Die Höhen lass offenbaren
Der Götter ewiges Wort,
Die Tiefen sollen bewahren
Den friedensvollen Hort.
Im Dunkel lebend
Erschaffe eine Sonne.
Im Stoffe webend
Erkenne Geisteswonne.

Behold the Sun
At tire midnight hour;
Build with stones in the lifeless ground,
Thus in decay and in the night of Death
Find the Creation's new beginning,
Young morning's strength;
Glory in the heights the eternal Word of Gods;
Shelter in the depths the Powers of Peace.
In darkness dwelling, create a Sun.
In matter weaving, know the joy of Spirit!

Many to whom the Christmas Tree with its candles is a familiar sight to-day, believe that it is a very ancient institution—but this is not the case. The Christmas Tree is a very recent European custom, dating no further back than about a hundred years or so. Although, however, the Christmas Tree is a recent custom, the Christmas Festival is very ancient. It was celebrated in the earliest Mysteries of all religions, not as a festival of the outer sun but as one which awakens in men an inkling of the very wellsprings of existence. It was celebrated every year by the highest Initiates in the Mysteries, at the time of the year when the sun sends least power to the earth, bestows least warmth. But it was also celebrated by those who might not yet participate in the whole festival, who might witness only the outer, pictorial expression of the highest Mysteries. This imagery has been preserved through the ages, varying in form according to the several creeds.

The Christmas Festival is the Festival of the Holy Night, celebrated in the Mysteries by those who were ready for the awakening of the higher Self within them, or, as we should say in our time, those who have brought the Christ to birth within them.

Only those who have no inkling of the fact that as well as the chemical and physical forces, spiritual forces are also at work and that the workings of both kinds of forces take effect at definite times and seasons in cosmic life, can imagine that the moment of the awakening of the higher Self in man is of no importance. In the Greater Mysteries man beheld the forces working through all existence; he saw the world around him filled with spirit, with spiritual Beings; he beheld the world of spirit around him, radiant with light and colour. There can be no more sublime experience than this and in due time it will come to everyone. Although for some it may be only after many incarnations, nevertheless the moment will come for all men when Christ will be resurrected within them and new vision, new hearing will awaken. In preparation for the awakening, the pupils in the Mysteries were first taught of the cosmic significance of this awakening and only then was the sacred Act itself performed. It took place at the time when darkness on the earth is greatest, when the external sun gives out least light and warmth—at Christmas time—because those who are cognisant of the spiritual facts know that at this time of the year, forces that are favourable for such an awakening stream through cosmic space. During his preparation the pupil was told that one who would be a true knower must have knowledge not only of what has been happening on the earth for thousands and thousands of years but must also be able to survey the whole course of the evolution of humanity, realising that the great festivals have their own, essential place within that evolution and must be dedicated to contemplation of the eternal truths. The pupil's gaze was directed to the time when our earth was not as it is now, when there was no sun, no moon out yonder in the heavens, but both were still united with the earth, when earth, sun and moon formed one body. Even then man was already in existence, but he had no body; he was still a spiritual being. No sunlight fell from outside upon these spiritual beings, for the sunlight was within the earth itself. This was not the sunlight that shines from outside upon objects and beings to-day, but it was inner sunlight that glowed within all beings of the earth. Then came the time when the sun separated from the earth, when its light shone down upon the earth from the universe outside. The sun had withdrawn from the earth and inner darkness came upon man. This was the beginning of his evolution towards that future when the inner light will again be radiant within him. Man must learn to know the things of the earth with his outer senses; he evolves to the stage where the higher Man, Spirit-Man, again glows and shines within him. From light, through darkness, to light—such is the path of the evolution of mankind.

The pupils of the Mysteries were prepared by these constantly inculcated teachings. Then they were led to the actual awakening. This was the moment when, as chosen ones, they experienced the spiritual Light within them; their eyes of spirit were opened. This sacred moment came when the outer light was weakest, when the outer sun was shining with least strength. On that day the pupils were called together and the inner Light revealed itself to them. To those who were not yet ready to participate in this sacred enactment, it was presented as a picture which made them realise: For you too the great moment will come; to-day you see a picture only; later on, what you now see as a picture will be an actual experience. Thus it was in the lesser Mysteries. Pictures were presented of what the candidate for initiation was subsequently to experience as reality. To-day we shall hear of the enactments in the lesser Mysteries. Everywhere it was the same: in the Egyptian Mysteries, in the Eleusinian Mysteries, in the Mysteries of Asia Minor, of Babylon and Chaldea, as well as in the Mithras-cult and in the Indian Mysteries of Brahman. Everywhere the same experiences were undergone by the pupils of these Mysteries at the midnight hour of the Holy Night.

Early on the previous evening the pupils gathered together. In quiet contemplation they were to be made aware of the meaning and import of this momentous happening. Silently and in darkness they sat together. When the midnight hour drew near they had been for long hours in the darkened chamber, steeped in the contemplation of eternal truths. Then, towards midnight, mysterious tones, now louder, now gentler, resounded through the space around them. Hearing these tones, the pupils knew: This is the Music of the Spheres. Then a faint light began to glimmer from an illumined disc. Those who gazed at it knew that this disc represented the earth. The illumined disc became darker and darker—until finally it was quite black. At the same time the surrounding space grew brighter. Again the pupils knew: the black disc represents the earth; the sun, which otherwise radiates light to the earth, is hidden; the earth can see the sun no longer. Then, ring upon ring, rainbow colours appeared around the earth-disc and those who saw it knew: This is the radiant Iris. At midnight, in the place of the black earth-disc, a violet-reddish orb gradually became visible, on which a word was inscribed, varying according to the peoples whose members were permitted to experience this Mystery. With us, the word would be Christos. Those who gazed at it knew: It is the sun which appears at the midnight hour, when the world around lies at rest in deep darkness. The pupils were now told that they had experienced what was known in the Mysteries as "seeing the sun at midnight."

He who is truly initiated experiences the sun at midnight, for in him the material is obliterated: the sun of the Spirit alone lives within him, dispelling with its light the darkness of matter. The most holy of all moments in the evolution of man is that in which he experiences the truth that he lives in eternal light, freed from the darkness. In the Mysteries, this moment was represented pictorially, year by year, at the midnight hour of the Holy Night. The picture imaged forth the truth that as well as the physical sun there is a Spiritual Sun which, like the physical sun, must be born out of the darkness. In order that the pupils might realise this even more intensely, after they had experienced the rising of the spiritual Sun, of the Christos, they were taken into a cave in which there seemed to be nothing but stone, nothing but dead, lifeless matter. But springing out of the stones they saw ears of corn as tokens of life, indicating symbolically that out of apparent death, life arises, that life is born from the dead stone. Then it was said to them: Just as from this day onwards the power of the sun awakens anew after it seemed to have died, so does new life forever spring from the dying.

The same truth is indicated in the Gospel of St. John in the words: "He must increase, but I must decrease!" John, the herald of the coming Christ, of the spiritual Light, he whose festival day in the course of the year falls at midsummer—this John must ‘decrease’ and in this decreasing there grows the power of the coming spiritual Light, increasing in strength in the measure in which John ‘decreases.’ Thus is the new life, prepared in the seed-grain which must wither and decay in order that the new plant may come into being. The pupils of the Mysteries were to realise that within death, life is resting, that out of the decaying and the dying the new flowers and fruits of spring arise in splendour, that the earth teems with the powers of birth. They were to learn that at this point of time something is happening in the innermost being of the earth: the overcoming of death by life, by the life that is present in death. This was portrayed to them in the picture of the Light gradually conquering the darkness; this is what they experienced as they saw the Light beginning to shine in the darkness. In the rocky cave they beheld the Light that rays forth in strength and glory from what is seemingly dead. Thus were the pupils led on to believe in the power of life, in what may be called man's highest Ideal. Thus did they learn to look upwards to this supreme Ideal of humanity, to the time when the earth shall have completed its evolution, when the Light will shine forth in all mankind. The physical earth itself will then fall into dust, but the spiritual essence will remain with all human beings who have been made inwardly radiant by the spiritual Light. And the earth and humanity will then waken into a higher existence, into a new phase of existence.

When Christianity came into being it bore this Ideal within it. Man felt that the Christos would arise in him as the representative of the spiritual re-birth, as the great Ideal of all humanity and moreover that the birth takes place in the Holy Night, at the time when the darkness is greatest, as a sign and token that out of the darkness of matter a higher Man can be born in the human soul.

Before men spoke of the Christos, they spoke in the ancient Mysteries of a ‘Sun Hero’ who embodied the same Ideal which, in Christianity, was embodied in the Christos. Just as the sun completes its orbit in the course of the year, as its warmth seems to withdraw from the earth and then again streams forth, as in its seeming death it holds life and pours it forth anew, so it was with the Sun Hero, who through the power of his spiritual life had gained the victory over death, night and darkness. In the Mysteries there were seven degrees of Initiation. First, the degree of the Ravens who might approach only as far as the portal of the temple of Initiation. They were the channels between the outer world of material life and the inner world of the spiritual life; they did not belong entirely to the material world but neither, as yet, to the spiritual world. We find these ‘Ravens’ again and again; everywhere they are the messengers who pass hither and thither between the two worlds, bringing tidings. We find them too, in our German sagas and myths: the Ravens of Wotan, the Ravens who fly around the Kyffhäuser. At the second degree the disciple was led from the portal into the interior of the temple. There he was made ready for the third degree, the degree of the Warrior who went out to make known before the world the occult truths imparted to him in the temple. The fourth degree, that of the Lion, was reached by one whose consciousness was no longer confined within the bounds of individuality, but extended over a whole tribal stock. For this reason Christ was called "the Lion of the stem of David." To the fifth degree belonged a man whose still wider consciousness embraced a whole people. He was an Initiate of the fifth degree. He no longer bore a name of his own but was called by the name of his people. Thus men spoke of the ‘Persian,’ of the ‘Israelite.’ We understand now why Nathaniel was called a ‘true Israelite’; it was because he had reached the fifth degree of Initiation. The sixth degree was that of the Sun Hero. We must understand the meaning of this appellation. Then we shall realise what awe and reverence surged through the soul of a pupil of the Mysteries who knew of the existence of a Sun Hero. He was able in the Holy Night to participate in the festival of the birth of a Sun Hero.

Everything in the cosmos takes its rhythmic course: the stars, as well as the sun, follow a regular rhythm. Were the sun to abandon this rhythm even for a moment, an upheaval of untold magnitude would take place in the universe. Rhythm holds sway in the whole of nature, up to the level of man. Then, and only then is there a change. The rhythm which through the course of the year holds sway in the forces of growth, of propagation and so forth, ceases when we come to man. For man is to have his roots in freedom; and the more highly civilised he is, the more does this rhythm decline. As the light disappears at Christmas-time, so has rhythm apparently departed from the life of man: chaos prevails. But man must give birth again to rhythm out of his innermost being, his own initiative. By the exercise of his own will he must so order his life that it flows in rhythm, immutable and sure; his life must take its course with the regularity of the sun. Just as a change of the sun's orbit is inconceivable, it is equally inconceivable that the rhythm of such a life can be broken. The Sun Hero was regarded as the embodiment of this inalterable rhythm; through the power of the higher Man within him, he was able to direct the rhythm of the course of his own life. And this Sun Hero, this higher Man, was born in the Holy Night. In this sense, Christ Jesus is a Sun Hero and was conceived as such in the first centuries of Christendom. Hence the festival of His birth was instituted at the time of the year when, since ancient days, the festival of the birth of the Sun Hero had been celebrated. Hence, too, all that was associated with the history of the life of Christ Jesus; the Mass at midnight celebrated by the early Christians in the depths of caves was in remembrance of the festival of the sun. In this Mass an ocean of light streamed forth at midnight out of the darkness as a remembrance of the rising of the spiritual Sun in the Mysteries. Hence the birth of Christ in the cave—again a remembrance of the cave of rock out of which life was born—life symbolised by the ears of corn. As earthly life was born out of the dead stone, so out of the depths was born the Highest—Christ Jesus. Associated with the festival of His nativity was the legend of the three Priest-Sages, the Three Kings. They bring to the Child: gold, the symbol of the outer, wisdom-filled man; myrrh, the symbol of the victory of life over death; and frankincense the symbol of the cosmic ether in which the Spirit lives.

And so in the whole content of the Christmas Festival we feel something echoing from primeval ages. It has come over to us in the imagery belonging to Christianity. The symbols of Christianity are reflections of the most ancient symbols used by man. The lighted Christmas Tree is one of them. For us it is a symbol of the Tree of Paradise, representing all-embracing material nature. Spiritual Nature is represented by the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life.

There is a legend which gives expression to the true meaning of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Seth stands before the Gate of Paradise, craving entry. The Cherubim guarding the entrance with a fiery sword, allow him to pass. This is a sign of Initiation. In Paradise, Seth finds the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge firmly intertwined. The Archangel Michael who stands in the presence of God, allows him to take three grains of seed from this intertwined Tree. The Tree stands there as a prophetic indication of the future of mankind. When the whole of mankind has attained Initiation and found knowledge, then only the Tree of Life will remain, there will be no more death. But in the meantime only he who is an Initiate may take from this Tree the three grains of seed -the three seeds which symbolise the three higher members of man's being. When Adam died, Seth placed these three grains of seed in his mouth and out of them grew a flaming bush. From the wood cut from this bush, new sprouts, new leaves burst ever and again. But within the flaming ring around the bush there was written: "I am He who was, who is, who is to be"—in other words, that which passes through all incarnations, the power of ever-evolving man who descends out of the light into the darkness and out of the darkness ascends into the light.

The staff with which Moses performed his miracles is cut from the wood of the bush; the door of Solomon's Temple is made of it; the wood is carried to the waters of the pool of Bethesda and from it the pool receives the healing properties of which we are told. And from this same wood the Cross of Christ Jesus is made, the wood of the Cross which is a symbol of life that passes into death and yet has within it the power to bring forth new life. The great symbol of worlds stands before us here: Life the conqueror of Death. The wood of this Cross has grown out of the three grains of seed of the Tree of Paradise.

The Rose Cross is also a symbol of the death of the lower nature and the resurrection of the higher. Goethe expressed the same thought in the words:

"As long as thou best it not,
This Dying and Becoming,
Thou'rt but a dreary guest
Upon the dark earth."

The Tree of Paradise and the wood of the Cross are connected in a most wonderful way. Even though the Cross is always an Easter symbol, it deepens our conception of the Christmas Mystery too. We feel how in this night of Christ's Nativity, new, upwelling life streams towards us, This thought is indicated in the fresh roses adorning this Tree; they say to us: the Tree of the Holy Night has not yet become the wood of the Cross but the power to become that wood is beginning to arise in it. The Roses, growing out of the green, are a symbol of the Eternal which springs from the Temporal.

The square is the symbol of the fourfold nature of man; physical body, ether-body, astral body and ego.

The triangle is the symbol for Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Man.

Above the triangle is the symbol for Tarok. Those who were initiated into the Egyptian Mysteries knew how to interpret this sign. They knew too, how to read the Book of Thoth, consisting of 78 leaves on which were inscribed all happenings in the world from the beginning to the end, from Alpha to Omega and which could be read if the signs were rightly put together. These pictures gave expression to the life that dies and then springs again to new life. Whoever could combine the right numbers with the right pictures, were able to read the Book. This wisdom of numbers and of pictures had been taught from time immemorial. In the Middle Ages it was still in the fore ground although little of it survives to-day.

Above this symbol is the Tao—the sign that is a reminder of the conception of the Divine held by our early forefathers; it comes from the word: TAO. Before Europe, Asia and Africa were scenes of human civilisation, these early forefathers of ours lived on the continent of Atlantis which was finally submerged by mighty floods. In the Germanic sagas of Nifelheim or Nebelheim, the memory of Atlantis still lives. For Atlantis was not surrounded by pure air. Vast cloud-masses moved over the land, like those to be seen to-day clustering around the peaks of high mountains. The sun and moon did not shine clearly in the heavens—they were surrounded by rainbows—by the sacred Iris. At that time man understood the language of nature. To-day he no longer understands what speaks to him in the rippling of waves, in the noise of winds, in the rustling of leaves, in the rolling of thunder—but in old Atlantis he understood it. He felt it all as a reality. And within these voices of clouds and waters and leaves and winds a sound rang forth: TAO—That am I. The man of Atlantis heard and understood it, feeling that Tao pervaded the whole universe.

Finally, the cosmic symbol of Man is the pentagram, hanging at the top of the tree. Of the deepest meaning of the pentagram we may not now speak. But it is the star of humanity, of evolving humanity; it is the star that all wise men follow, as did the Priest-Sages of old. It symbolises the very essence and meaning of earth-existence. It comes to birth in the Holy Night because the greatest Light shines forth from the deepest Darkness. Man is living on towards a state where the Light is to be born in him, where words full of significance will be replaced by others equally significant, where it will no longer be said: ‘The Darkness comprehendeth not the Light,’ but when the truth will ring out from cosmic space: The Darkness gives way before the Light that shines in the Star of Humanity—and now the Darkness comprehendeth the Light!

This should resound and the spiritual Light ray forth from the Christmas Festival. We will celebrate this Christmas Festival as the Festival of the supreme Ideal of mankind, for then it will bring to birth in our souls the joyful confidence: I too shall experience the birth of the higher Man within me! In me too the birth of the Saviour, the birth of the Christos will take place!

Positions of the symbols on the Christmas Tree

Yesterday, I indicated in a certain context what it is that party opinions here on the physical plane actually represent. Since life today is actually ruled by party programs of all different shadings, it is essential to become more aware of their nature. I also mentioned that in this abstract age certain people are inclined at least to profess the maxim: All the phenomena that can be perceived with the senses or comprehended with ordinary reasoning are Maya. Yet, when it becomes a matter of comprehensively applying to life such a general, abstract truth, which people claim to embrace, the vital link connecting most persons' souls to life's realities today tears apart, as it were. Party opinion, too, must be regarded as a reflection of something that is of supersensory nature, having its reality in the spiritual world. It only has its image here in the physical world, just as natural phenomena, for example, even the most complex ones, must be acknowledged as such in regard to physical man. I already explained yesterday that party opinions are formed because a group of people flock to a more or less clearly defined abstract party program. A number of demands are raised; they are supposed to be fulfilled by one or another means; people do one thing or another—mostly, they talk about this or that—to help such programs, such party views, to become reality. Groups of people gathering under the flag of an abstract idea which they hope can be realized, that is what constitutes a party.

One who examines all this more closely, particularly from the spiritual-scientific standpoint, is not so much concerned with the nature of the programs, because he first has to examine this aspect in its context with the world. His primary concern is with the external phenomenon of people forming into groups.

I said yesterday that when ascending from the physical plane into the higher worlds beyond the threshold, no abstractions exist, no abstract demands exist as posed in party programs. Instead, as soon as one has crossed the threshold, having passed the Guardian of the Threshold without lingering there as so many are inclined to do, one finds that only beings exist beyond the threshold. It is not possible to follow a program; one can only follow one or another being. One cannot group around an abstract idea, only around this or that being. While mankind is in great need of such knowledge, it is precisely this insight that men are vehemently rebelling against. At present, to gather under the umbrella of an abstract idea and to yearn for the realization of abstract programs is dear to people's hearts. To understand that abstract programs can only exist in the physical world and that something that can be grasped in abstract ideas can only be subject to the physical realm is something that people do not wish to comprehend, for it would be troublesome. I draw a line here, denoting the threshold (see drawing). Here are the party groups (blue circles) and here, their programs (X). This illustrates how people gather under party programs. Yet, since these programs correspond to certain beings in the supersensory world (orange), all those adhering to a party view link themselves with certain beings of the higher world. What is merely an image in the physical world corresponds to groupings around a being in the super-sensible world (red circles).

It must be emphasized that this knowledge is an absolute necessity for a prosperous development in the future, because instinct must be replaced increasingly by awareness, if humanity is to progress in its evolution. A remnant of an old instinctive group mentality causes men today to congregate under the umbrella of party programs. They believe that by what they do in such groupings, by massing together and professing to the corresponding program, by actions or mostly words done or spoken for the sake of realizing this, program, all possible avenues have been explored. People claim to belong to a certain party, a socialist, a liberal party, a women's movement, or a party of a spiritualistic nature, and so on. If I were to enumerate just a small segment of all the parties existing today, my lecture this evening would become much too drawn out. Because people nurture the belief that the nature of their activities here on the physical plane is fulfilled by what they do and say within a party, they unconsciously follow a being in the supersensory world whom they do not wish to know. Just because men do not know something does not make it any less real. Even if neither the liberal professing to liberal party views nor the one belonging to a women's rights group knows that he follows certain supersensory beings, this does not mean that he is not actually doing so. In reality, he is part of their entourage. Thereby, he counteracts the whole spirit of progressive evolution in our age, for that spirit demands the transformation of all instinctive, unconscious and subconscious elements into fully conscious intentions, into conscious action, word and thought.

Of course, we are also familiar with older groupings of people, groups with racial connections; and we know, too, of other groups, leading even today an ephemeral, shadowy, but nevertheless noisy and deluded existence—the groupings into nations. We know them well! If you recall the lecture cycle on the nature of folk souls which I gave in Kristiania in 1910,⁸ you will find that one cannot remain on the physical plane if one wishes to examine carefully these relationships of races and nations. It becomes necessary to ascend into the higher worlds. We outlined in those lectures how such groups of people are held together and guided by beings from the hierarchy of archangels. We saw also that in such groupings into nations, super-sensible entities are present among human beings.

If we now picture in our minds the difference between the relationship of racial and national groups of people to their super-sensible beings, and the relationship of parties to their super-sensible beings, we find that the former are able instinctively to manifest and transform into reality the impulses given them by the beings belonging to them in the higher world. In this case, it is fully justified that instinctive observance of the impulses of these super-sensible beings holds sway. Mankind had to struggle to rise above this instinctive obedience to super-sensible beings. It goes without saying that humanity could not consciously follow the folk spirits, the archangels, from the beginning, but instinctive forces instead had to permeate this allegiance. In a sense, human beings could only be educated gradually to a conscious state.

The farther back one traces mankind's evolutionary history, the more one discovers that ancient people had a clearly defined, albeit instinctive, awareness in following such super-sensible beings as a group, a nation or a race. Certainly, during the middle epoch preceding our present age, Such awareness was partially lost. More and more, men had to forgo their knowledge of the super-sensible worlds, but the farther we go into ancient history, the more we find that men instinctively interpreted their sense of belonging together as a race by the fact that they recognized a spiritual, super-sensible entity as their leader. In former times, even if a human leader was recognized by groups of men, the greatest part of his followers clearly sensed that the folk spirit was embodied in him. They felt that what they beheld as the external human form was in a sense possessed by their super-sensible leader. One may view this any way one likes, one may even consider it an old superstition. Those, however, who think differently about so-called superstitions need only wait and see whether, by the year 3000, our zoology, chemistry and botany may not also be viewed as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century superstition by those whose mentality is on par with those who speak of these other matters today as old superstitions.

Now, what is the difference between the way these groups stand in regard to their spiritual guidance, and the Position party opinions find themselves in with respect to their spiritual counterpart? The ancients did not have party programs that were derived by outlining abstract ideas. It would have ill behooved a Ghengis Khan or a Timur Khan, and others like them, to present their people with something like an abstract party program such as the present Ghengis Khan, who is called Lenin today, interposes between himself and his cohorts. There is a significant contrast. The great khans of the former Mongols were without programs, but those possessing insight perceived in them the living incarnations of super-sensible beings. The great khans of the present, Lenin and Trotsky,⁹ carry within their souls an abstract party program, not an awareness of being heralds of a higher being. This makes a considerable difference because it indicates that the yes-men below the leaders in the party affairs have only abstract ideas in their minds and consciously deny to themselves that they are part of the fellowship of a higher spiritual being.

Only a few groups of men do not function on that level. I introduced one of them, the Jesuits, to you yesterday. The Jesuits do not get involved in childish nonsense such as party programs. Read the series of lectures I delivered in Karlsruhe, From Jesus to Christ,¹⁰ a series that has somehow come into the hands of the local clergy. There, you can read about the exercises a Jesuit must subject himself to before he can properly assume his post. The Jesuit is not charged with any party program, no demands are dressed up for him in abstract formulations. He is shown through exercises how to follow his spiritual leader; he is trained to know himself to be in the entourage of a super-sensible being. This is also the case in a few other more or less secret modern groups. It also holds true for those involved in the major political activities of the West, political activities which are literally, step by step, turning out just as these exponents of certain Western occult politics have envisioned them for a long time. What really matters, however, is that we pay heed to the spirit of progress in our age, that an awareness is regained of the link between man and the spiritual world and of the relationship between all that man does here on earth and events and living beings of that realm. We should seek out those beings in the spiritual world who participate in the constitution and guidance of our world so that we can know into whose following we enter through our various actions. Today one cannot do anything that benefits the actual progress of mankind if, apart from becoming aware of the connection to the spiritual world regarding egotistic inner soul needs, one does not become fully aware that through one's outward actions, expressed for example in party opinions and the like, a connection with the higher worlds is created as well. Spiritual science should not merely reassure our souls, so to speak, concerning the narrowly confined affairs of our individual personality; it is supposed to produce impulses for shaping all of life. This was the recurrent theme of my recent lectures. Humanity has arrived at abstraction and must find its way out of it. We are deeply enmeshed in abstraction, particularly in regard to the so-called practical sides of life, especially in party functions. We must shed this abstract nature if the recent European debacle is not to become a total catastrophe. In all areas, it is a matter of looking in the right direction.

We must above all consider something I mentioned before my trip to Stuttgart to a number of you sitting here. It is something that I would like to repeat today for the sake of the numerous foreign guests who are present, and also because every opportunity must be seized to lend a voice to those ideas that have to pervade human souls in our age. Yesterday I said that what is practiced as spiritual science must be a completely different form of knowledge from the one customarily called knowledge. It must be knowledge that is action. One must be conscious of the fact that in that one strives after spiritual knowledge, one has to do with realities, not mere logical schemes. I also said that people today are used to saying: This person is an advocate of materialism; materialism is wrong; hence, he must be refuted. One believes that something has been proven by refutation. I cited examples of how such concepts of right and wrong must yield to the much more real concepts of healthy and sick in the realm of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. “Healthy” and “sick” indicate actual conditions in human life. We do not merely recognize right or wrong knowledge, we recognize healthy and sick knowledge. By shedding the proclivity for abstraction we enter deeply into the sphere of concrete reality.

We must consider all this from a still higher perspective. We know from the many books on anthroposophy that man is composed of a soul-spiritual part (blue) and a physical part (red), as illustrated in my sketch. We know that certain theoretical materialists of the nineteenth century felt that it was entirely unnecessary to speak of soul and spirit elements because they had nothing to do with human knowledge. They held that what dwells as thinking, feeling, and willing in the so-called human soul is merely the result of the physical nervous system and the brain. You know that we must differentiate between this theoretical materialism and the practical materialism which, to this day, still holds sway in a particularly crass form. It differs entirely from theoretical materialism which reached its peak in the nineteenth century. A person who is only used to the ideas prevalent today will disagree with the sort of materialism which maintains that human thoughts, feelings and impulses of will are merely the product of the nervous system and the brain. He feels that this opinion must be refuted. Once he has done so he believes that he has proven that man does not merely consist of a physical body with a nervous system and brain, but that he also has a soul and spirit. Spiritual science, however, cannot be content merely with this refutation, for it is not only a science bent on a logical course, but one dealing with realities. All that lives in the physical world is a replica of the world of soul and spirit, but not only in the sense of a picture one paints upon a wall. The physical world in all its activities and expressions of life is also a reflection of the higher world.

In the case of the human being, we observe that man descends from the soul-spiritual world through conception and birth into the physical realm. The configuration of forces that he brings along from the world of soul and spirit goes to work on the physical body which is taken over from the hereditary stream. This body with its entire configuration is developed by the descending soul and spirit forces. Not only is it developed in regard to its outer form but also in that of its inner functions. Consequently, everything surrounding you in the external sense world can be thought about very well simply with the brain. For, in regard to its faculties, this brain is also an image of soul and spirit. One who only confines himself to the absorption of what the outer sense world or modern science offers thinks only with the brain; he is merely matter that thinks. No objection can be made about this; he is just thinking-matter. Today, the time has come to transcend the state of being merely thinking-matter. One can accomplish this by thinking thoughts that have not been acquired from the sense world, such as anthroposophically oriented thoughts. Those who wish to adhere exclusively to the sense world consider these anthroposophical thoughts to be crazy, unreal and fantastic. This is because the moment they are called upon to think these thoughts they have to make a strenuous effort. They have to break free in their thinking, but they wish to think these thoughts with their brain. Yet, with the brain, one can only think the external physical thoughts, thoughts about the physical realm. One can think about atoms and molecules quite well with this brain in the feebleminded manner I outlined yesterday. By means of this brain, however, it is not possible to think the thoughts presented in such a book as Occult Science, an Outline.¹¹ Thus, anthroposophy is regarded as sheer fantasy. A considerable effort of will must be made to free the soul-spiritual. Then, one can think those thoughts and no longer finds them absurd or fantastic, but in full harmony with life.

In the course of the last centuries, however, since the middle of the fifteenth century, mankind reached a point where, in a sense, it increasingly sank down into itself. It permitted the soul-spiritual aspects to fall asleep and allowed itself to become immersed in the substantiality of the corporeal element. People were content to think merely with the physical brain, to set the brain on an automatic course, just as the brain of the professor, sitting at his lectern, functions automatically. The brain automaton above is followed below by the brain automata of the students. Whole groupings of human beings switched over to this merely automatic materialistic functioning of the brain, namely, physical thinking. They sank deeper and deeper into the corporeality, and did not activate themselves from within to quicken the comprehension for what is derived from the super-sensible world. This has been the growing trend among the people of the so-called civilized world since the middle of the fifteenth century. And by the middle of the nineteenth century, just that particular segment of humanity which is called intellectual in the civilized parts of Europe and America had turned into physical thinkers.

Now, when Buechner, Moleschott or the weighty Vogt¹² appeared on the scene and began to think a little, unaware of the fact that behind their own thinking was something that should have given them a jolt, they observed their contemporaries and, interpreting them quite correctly, concluded: Individualism, spiritualism—wrong; it is the brain that thinks! Indeed, it was only brains that were thinking; materialism was quite correct. This is just the secret; the theoretical materialists of the nineteenth century stated nothing wrong; on the contrary, they were right. It would even have been an insult for colleague X to have claimed that colleague Y was endowed with soul and spirit, because in all truth X could only say concerning Y that a brain was thinking automatically. Nineteenth century materialism was therefore basically correct, for it referred to a certain stage of human evolution characterized by the fact that human beings have become body-bound and that their thinking, along with feeling and willing, arises out of materiality. Then even mystics came along who had steeped themselves in their inner being, but these mystics actually only observed the inner seething of substance within the skin until it became flames and flared up into consciousness.

Spiritual science would be in the wrong if it were now to take a merely logical standpoint. It may not say that materialism is incorrect and needs to be refuted. Such refutation is the favorite pastime of our age of abstraction. Spiritual science must do things by its knowledge. Hence, first of all, the mere refutation of materialism does not hold true for people who have become body-bound. Secondly, nothing is accomplished by merely disproving materialism. Instead, it is a matter of motivating people to shake themselves free of the Bonds of materiality and to nurture and cultivate thoughts that follow the course of super-sensible results of research. Materialism is not to be disproved, it is to be overcome! Human beings must once again become soul-spiritual by awakening their own soul-spiritual being. It must be through action that real materialism is overcome; not through some sort of erroneous refutation. The sad fact is not that materialism is a mistaken world-view, but that it has become right for the recent cultural development. It therefore cannot be a matter of contradicting a false world-view. Rather, it is a matter of giving human beings the means whereby they may perform soul deeds that overcome the body-bound condition of humanity so that they Break free of materiality. The knowledge referred to here must be action, not mere logic. This is the issue.

However, people have a hard time comprehending the difference between mere bantering in negations or affirmations while remaining in the sphere of abstract concepts, and the element of action that flows directly from the well-spring of the spirit. Just try to clarify to yourselves that it is one thing merely to refute materialism logically because you are of the opinion that it is wrong, and quite another to facilitate the healing process through spirituality by overcoming the quite real materialism which has gripped mankind as a disease. This difference must be recognized, for what matters today is that spiritual deeds are accomplished and carried into social life as well. There is a fundamental difference between self-satisfaction in a theoretical worldview and the active involvement in knowledge that turns into action.

Attention must be focused on this matter so that we become aware of the difference between anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and other similar endeavors; for this spiritual science must be comprehended as something that actually relates to the tangible forces of ascent and decline in social life.

If we turn our attention to Eastern Europe we can see how the Russian character, concerning which Western and Central Europeans hardly form any proper concepts, is being infiltrated by something that Europeans can very well understand even though they abhor the Leninism and Trotskyism that are spreading out over Russia. There are many people who believe that this Leninism and Trotskyism have something in common with what is to arise eventually in the East. Far from it! These movements only have something in common with the decline of the East and its further ruin. They are purely destructive forces and what is to arise in the East must develop in opposition to these forces of annihilation. Let me illustrate this. Here, in the East, we have something fundamental (see sketch, green) which is given little attention today. During the past few years, Bolshevism, Leninism and Trotskyism have spread over the East as destructive forces (white). What I have indicated here in green is trying to surface. Leninism and Trotskyism are merely the continuation of the old czarism and, as I have mentioned before, Lenin is the new czar, only in different attire, but basically the same thing. Czarism becomes Leninism, although as czarism it dies in Leninism. In the East, elements opposing czarism have for centuries tried to work their way to the surface. These elements only misunderstand their own existence if they make concessions, in any form, to Leninism and Trotskyism. This is happening all the way into Asia. People have yet to realize the magnitude of the coming upheavals; this is only a lull between the last catastrophe and the next one. The souls sleeping during this respite will have a rude awakening one day; they will rub their eyes and pull off their sleeping caps when the catastrophe continues on its course. Yet, what will work its way to the surface despite all this is the village community. Only a person who understands the nature of the individual village communities comprehends what is trying to emerge in the East as a social constitution. The village community is the only reality in the East. All the rest is but an institution that is perishing.

It will be the task of people in the West to understand the means by which this aggregate of the village community can be organized. Indeed, it is only by the threefold social organism that the crumbling web of Western opinions in single human individualities can also be organized.¹³ On the one hand, the threefold social organism must incorporate the individual members of the Eastern village communities. On the other hand, it must save from ruin the crumbling Western organisms that are becoming individualized and which, as aggregates, are Splitting up into their separate components.

In regard to the immediate future, the so-called civilized world faces only two options: Bolshevism on one side, and the threefold social order on the other. He who does not recognize that only these two alternatives exist in the near future understands nothing of the course of events on a grand scale. Yet a real comprehension of these matters can only be attained by trying to apply the inner training, acquired by man through spiritual science, to the observation and the management of public social conditions.

Nowadays, one is always truly sorry when one sees people squander their spiritual potential in antiquated party programs. It is sad to see that people are so unwilling to understand that something truly new is needed in order to overcome the last remnant of the old, the ultrareactionism and conservatism, namely, Bolshevism. It will certainly not be overcome through the programs devised by today's statesmen from Middle and Western Europe. For these programs contain nothing of the element that must indwell any impulse of the future; nothing of the new spirit lives in them. Yet, this new spirit is needed. And if this new spirit is not present in the great political and cultural endeavors, then these efforts only serve to let mankind slide into further catastrophes. Likewise, if this new spirit is not contained in the party views, humanity will slip down into more calamities.

It is this that must now be considered and thought over in all sorts of forms. One is asked the following question again and again, “Well, the threefold social order is fine, but how will this or that turn out when this order has actually been introduced into the social organism?” The grocer, for instance, wonders how he will sell his wares when the threefold order comes into being, and so on. Only a while back, here in this auditorium, the question was raised how ownership of a sewing machine would be affected by the threefold social organism. If one is incapable of tackling the questions on the grand scale and is unable to realize that if they enter generally into the social life, the details will arrange themselves accordingly and assume their proper shape; if one is not in a Position to handle the major questions on a grand scale, one will never reach the summit of this age, which is a time of hard trials for mankind. For this reason, it is necessary today to be able to envisage a spiritual metamorphosis of the old cherished notions. In this connection, it is probably still so that if one were to examine the essay books of Middle European students at the end of a school term to see what sort of essays they had written, one would find among a large number of them the following essay title: “Each one must choose his hero in whose footsteps he works his way up to Olympus.”¹⁴ Young ladies of private schools, middle and high school students write beautiful essays on this theme. In real life, however, people run after abstract party programs. But even something poetic like the above, which certainly has its justification in the context of the poetic work from which it was taken, must also be read here in a spiritual metamorphosis. We must discover the way of looking into the spiritual world that leads to the spiritual beings under whom we gather together.

What was introduced as a conservative or a liberal program in earlier years and is seen today as a social-democratic or an agrarian program is all so much chitchat. It is all abstract formulation, as are the programs of all women's clubs and vegetarian organizations, etc. The really important thing is that one knows how the world process pulsates through the world's course and that one has an answer for what holds sway in the super-sensible sphere above when, for example, a certain group of people gathers together under some program for women's rights and so forth. Today, everything must be raised with the necessary earnestness to the vantage point of the spiritual, super-sensible world, for only by viewing the higher world together with the sense world is it possible to find what it is that can truly bring about progress for us in our age of great affliction and bitter trials.

• 8 . Rudolf Steiner: The Mission of the Folk-Souls, GA 121 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1970).
• 9 . Lenin: 1870–1924, founder and leader of Bolshevism; Trotski: 1879–1940, Lenin's closest associate.
• 10. Rudolf Steiner: From Jesus to Christ, GA 131 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973).
• 11. Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, an Outline, GA 13 (Spring Valley, Anthroposophic Press, 1972).
• 12. Ludwig Buechner: 1824–1899, doctor of medicine; Jacob Moleschott: 1822–1893, physiologist; Carl Vogt: 1817–1895, zoologist.
• 13. Rudolf Steiner: Towards Social Renewal, GA 23 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977).
• 14. Words by Pylades in Goethe's play, “Iphigenie auf Taurus.”

The last lectures here described a path which, if followed in the right way, leads to a perception of the Universe and its organisation. As you have seen, this path compels a continuous search for the harmony existing between the process taking place in Man and the processes observed in the Universe. Tomorrow and the day after I shall have to treat our subject in such a way that the friends who have come to attend the General Meeting may be able to receive something from the two lectures at which they are present. To-morrow I shall go over again some of what has been said in order then to connect with it something fresh.

In perusing my Occult Science—an Outline, you will have seen that in the description it gives of the evolution of the known Universe a point is made of keeping everywhere in view the relationship of that evolution to the evolution of Man himself. Beginning with the Saturn period which was followed by the Sun and Moon periods preceding the Earth period, you will remember that the Saturn period was characterised by the laying of the first foundations of the human senses. And along this line of thought the book proceeds. Everywhere universal conditions are considered in a way that at the same time also describes the evolution of Man. In short, Man is not considered as standing in the Universe as modern science sees him—the outer Universe on the one hand, and Man on the other—two entities that do not rightly belong to each other. Here, on the contrary, the two are regarded as merged into each other, and the evolution of both is followed together. This conception must, of necessity, be applied also to the present attributes, forces and motions of the Universe. We cannot consider first the Universe abstractly in its purely spatial aspect, as is done in the Galileo-Copernican system, and then Man as existing beside it; we must allow both to merge into one another in our study.

This is only possible, when we have acquired an understanding of Man himself. I have already shown you how little modern natural science is in a position really to explain Man. What does science do, for instance, in that sphere where it is greatest, judging by modern methods of thought? It states in a grand manner that Man has evolved physically from other lower forms. It then shows how, during the embryonic period, Man passes again rapidly through these forms in recapitulation. This means that Man is looked upon as the highest of the animals. Science contemplates the animal kingdom and then builds up Man from what is found there; in other words, it examines everything non-human, and then says: ‘Here we come to a standstill; here Man begins’. Natural science does not feel called upon to study Man as Man, and consequently any real understanding of his nature is out of the question.

It is in truth very necessary today for people who claim to be experts in this domain of nature, to examine Goethe's investigations in natural science, particularly his Theory of Colours. Here a very different method of investigation is used from that to which we today are accustomed. At the very commencement mention is made of subjective, and of physiological colours, and the phenomena of the living experience of the human eye in connection with its environment are then carefully investigated. It is shown, for example, how these experiences or impressions do not merely last as long as the eye is exposed to its surroundings, but that an after-effect remains. You all know a very simple phenomenon connected with this. You gaze at a red surface, and then quickly turning to a white surface you will see the red in the green after-colour. This shows that the eye is, in a certain sense, still under the influence of the original impression. There is here no need to examine into the reason why the second colour seen should be green, we will only keep to the more general fact that the eye retains the after-effect of its experience.

We have here to do with an experience on the periphery of the human body, for the eye is on the periphery. When we contemplate this experience, we find that for a certain limited time the eye retains the after-effect of the impression; after that the experience ceases, and the eye can then expose itself to new impressions without interference from the last one.

Let us now consider quite objectively a phenomenon connected not with any single localised organ of the human organism, but with the whole human being. Provided our observations are unprejudiced, we cannot fail to recognise that this experience made by the whole human being is related to the experience with the localised eye. We expose ourselves to an impression, to an experience, with our whole being. In so doing, we absorb this experience just as the eye absorbs the impression of the colour to which it is exposed; and we find that after the lapse of months, or even years, the after-effect comes forth in the form of a thought-picture. The whole phenomenon is somewhat different, but you will not fail to recognise the relation of this memory picture to that after-picture of an experience which the eye retains for a short limited time.

This is the kind of question that man must face, for he can only gain some knowledge of the world when he learns to ask questions in the correct way. Let us therefore ask ourselves: What is the connection between these two phenomena—between the after-picture of the eye and the memory picture that rises up within us in relation with a certain experience? As soon as we put our question in this form and require a definite answer, we realise that the whole method of the present-day natural-scientific thought completely fails to supply the answer; and it fails because of its ignorance of one great fact—the fact of the universal significance of metamorphosis. This metamorphosis is something that is not completed in Man within the limits of one life, but only plays itself out in consecutive lives on Earth.

You will remember that in order to gain a true insight into the nature of Man, we divided him into three parts: head, rhythmic man and limbs. We may, for the present purpose, consider the last two as one, and we then have the head-organisation on the one hand and all that makes up the remaining parts on the other. As we try to comprehend this head-organisation, we must be able to understand how it is related to the whole evolution of Man. The head is a later metamorphosis, a transformation, of the rest of Man, considered in terms of its forces. Were you to imagine yourself without your head—and of course also without whatever is present in the rest of the organism but really belongs to the head—you would, in the first place, think of the remaining portion of your organism as substantial. But here we are not concerned with substance; it is the inter-relation of the forces of this substance which undergoes a complete transformation in the period between death and a new birth and becomes in the next incarnation the head-organisation. In other words, that which you now include in the lower part (the rhythmic man and the limbs) is an earlier metamorphosis of what is going to be head-organisation. But if you wish to understand how this metamorphosis proceeds, you will have to consider the following.

Take any one organ—liver or kidney—of your lower man, and compare it with your head-organisation. You will at once become aware of a fundamental, essential difference; namely, that all the activities of the lower parts of the body as distinct from the upper or head, are directed inwards, as instanced by the kidneys, whose whole activity is exercised interiorly. The activity of the kidneys is an activity of secretion. In comparing this organ with a characteristic organ of the head—the eye, for instance—you find the construction of the latter to be the exact opposite. It is directed entirely outwards, and the results of the changing impressions are transmitted inwardly to the reason, to the head. In any particular organ of the head you have the polar opposite of an organ belonging to the other part of the body. We might depict this fact diagrammatically.

Take the drawing on the left as the first metamorphosis, and the drawing on the right as the second; then you will have to imagine the first as the first life, and the second as the second life, and between the two is the life between death and a new birth. We have first an inner organ which is directed inward. Owing to the transformation taking place between two physical lives, the whole position and direction of this organ is entirely reversed—it now opens outwards. So that an organ which develops its activity inwardly in one incarnation, develops it outwardly in the succeeding life. You can now imagine that something has happened between the two incarnations that may be compared with putting on a glove, taking it off and turning it inside out; upon wearing the glove again, the surface which was previously turned inward comes outside, and vice versa. Thus it must be noted that this metamorphosis does not merely transform the organs, but turns them inside out; inner becomes outer. We can now say that the organs of the body (taking ‘body’ as the opposite to ‘head’) have been transformed. So that one or other of our abdominal organs, for instance, has now become our eyes in this incarnation. It has been reversed in its active forces, has become an eye, and has attained the ability to generate after-effects following upon impressions from without. Now this faculty must owe its origin to something.

Let us consider the eye and the mission of its life-activity, in an unbiased way. These after-effects only prove to us that the eye is a living thing. They prove that the eye, for a little while, retains impressions; and why? I will use as a simile something simpler. Suppose you touch silk; your organ of touch retains an after-effect of the smoothness of silk. If later on you again touch silk, you recognise it by what the first impression left behind with you. It is the same with the eye. The after-effect is somehow connected with recognition. The inner life which produces this after-effect, plays a part in the recognition. But the outer object, when recognised, remains outside. If I see any one of you now, and tomorrow meet you again and recognise you, you are physically present before me.

Now compare this with the inner organ of which the eye is a transformation in respect to its activity and forces. In this organ must reside something which in a certain sense corresponds to the eye's capacity for retaining pictures of impressions, something akin to the inner life of the eye; but it must be directed inward. And this must also have some connection with recognition. But to recognise an experience means to remember it. So when we look for the fundamental metamorphosis of the eye's activity in a former life, we must enquire into the activity of that organ which acts for the memory.

It is impossible to explain these things in simple language such as is often desired at the present day, but we can direct our thoughts along a certain line which, if followed up, will lead us to this conception—namely that all our sense-organs which are directed outward have their correspondences in the inner organs, and that these latter are also the organs of memory. With the eye we see that which recurs as an impression from the outer world, while with those organs within the human body which correspond to the previous metamorphosis of the eye, we remember the pictures transmitted through the eye. We hear sound with the ear, and with the inner organ corresponding to the ear we remember that sound. Thereby the whole man as he directs or opens his organs inward, becomes an organ of memory. We confront the outer world, taking it into ourselves in the form of impressions. Materialistic natural science claims that we receive an impression, for instance, with the aid of the eye. The impression is transmitted to the optic nerve. But here the activity apparently ceases; as regards the process of cognition, the whole remaining organism is like the fifth wheel of a wagon! But this is far from being the truth. All that we perceive passes over into the rest of the organism. The nerves have no direct relation with memory. On the contrary the entire human body, the whole man, becomes a memory instrument, only specialised according to the particular organ that directs its activity inwards. Materialism is experiencing a tragic paradox—it fails to comprehend matter, because it sticks fast to its abstractions! It becomes more and more abstract, the spiritual is more and more filtered away; therefore it cannot penetrate to the essence of material phenomena, for it does not recognise the spiritual within the material. For instance materialism does not realise that our internal organs have very much more to do with our memory than has the brain, which merely prepares the idea or images so that they can be absorbed by the other organs of the whole body. In this connection our science is a perpetuation of a one-sided asceticism, which consists in unwillingness to understand the spirituality of the material world and a desire to overcome it. Our science has learnt sufficient asceticism to deprive itself of the capacity for understanding the world, when it claims that the eyes and other sense-organs receive the various impressions, pass them on to the nervous system and then to something else, which remains undefined. But this undefined “something” is the entire remaining organism! Here it is that memories originate through the transmutation of the organs.

This was very well known in the days when no spurious asceticism oppressed human perception. Therefore we find that the ancients, when speaking of ‘hypochondria’ for example, did not speak of it in the same way as does modern man and even the psycho-analyst when he maintains that hypochondria is merely psychic, is something rooted in the soul. No, hypochondria means a hardening of the abdominal and lower parts. The ancients knew well enough that this hardening of the abdominal system has as its result what we call hypochondria, and the English language which gives evidence of a less advanced stage than other European tongues, still contains a remnant of memory of this correspondence between the material and the spiritual. I can, at the moment, only remind you of one instance of this. In English, depression is called “spleen”. The word is the same as the name of the physical organ that has very much to do with this depression. For this condition of soul cannot be explained out of the nervous system, the explanation for it is to be found in the spleen. We might find a good many such correspondences, for the genius of language has preserved much; and even if words have become somewhat transformed for the purpose of applying them to the soul, yet they point to an insight Man once possessed in ancient times and that stood him in good stead.

To repeat—you, as entire Man, observe the surrounding world, and this world reacts upon your organs, which adapt themselves to these experiences according to their nature. In a medical school, when anatomy is being studied, the liver is just called liver, be it the liver of a man of 50 or of 25, of a musician or of one who understands as much of music as a cow does of Sunday after regaling itself upon grass for a week! It is simply liver. The fact is that a great difference exists between the liver of a musician and that of a non-musician, for the liver is very closely connected with all that may be summed up as the musical conceptions that live and resound in Man. It is of no use to look at the liver with the eye of an ascetic and see it as an inferior organ; for that apparently humble organ is the seat of all that lives in and expresses itself through the beautiful sequence of melody; it is closely concerned e.g. with the act of listening to a symphony. We must clearly understand that the liver also possesses etheric organs; it is these latter which, in the first place, have to do with music. But the outer physical liver is, in a certain sense, an externalisation of the etheric liver, and its form is like the form of the latter. In this way you see, you prepare your organs; and if it depended entirely upon yourself, the instruments of your senses, would, in the next incarnation, be a replica of the experiences you had made in the world in the present incarnation. But this is true only in measure, for in the interval between death and a new birth Beings of the higher Hierarchies come to our aid, and they do not always decide that injuries produced upon our organs by lack of knowledge or of self-control should be carried by us as our fate. We receive help between death and re-birth, and are therefore, in respect of this portion of our constitution, not dependent upon ourselves alone.

From all this you will see that a relation really exists between the head organisation and the rest of the body with its organs. The body becomes head, and we lose the head at death in so far as its formative forces are concerned. Therefore it is so essentially bony in its structure and is preserved longer on Earth than the rest of the organism, which fact is only the outer sign that it is lost to us for our following re-incarnation, in respect to all that we have to experience between death and re-birth. The ancient atavistic wisdom perceived these things plainly, and especially when that great relation between Man and Macrocosm was investigated, which we find expressed in the ancient description of the movements of the heavenly bodies. The genius of language has also here preserved a great deal. As I pointed out yesterday, physical Man adheres internally to the day-cycle. He demands breakfast every day, and not only on Sunday. Breakfast, dinner and supper are required every day, and not only breakfast on Sunday, dinner on Wednesday and supper on Saturday. Man is bound to the 24 hour cycle in respect to his metabolism—or the transmutation of matter from the outer world. This day-cycle in the interior of Man corresponds to the daily motion of the Earth upon its axis. These things were closely perceived by the ancient wisdom. Man did not feel that he was a creature apart from the Earth, for he knew that he conformed to its motions; he knew also the nature of that to which he conformed. Those who have an understanding for ancient works of art—though the examples still preserved today offer but little opportunity for studying these things—will be aware of a living sense, on the part of the ancients, of the connection of Man the Microcosm with the Macrocosm. It is proved by the position certain figures take up in their pictures, and the positions that certain others are beginning to assume etc.; in these, cosmic movements are constantly imitated.

But we shall find something of even greater significance in another consideration.

In almost all the peoples inhabiting this Earth, you find a recognised distinction or comparison existing between the week and the day. You have, on the one hand, the cycle of the transmutation of substances—or metabolism, which expresses itself in the taking of meals at regular intervals.. Man has however never reckoned according to this cycle alone; he has added to the day-cycle a week-cycle. He first distinguished this rising and setting of the Sun—corresponding to a day; then he added Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, a cycle seven times that of the other, after which he came back once again to Sunday. (In a certain sense, after completing seven such cycles, we return also again to the starting-point.) We experience this in the contrast between day and week. But Man wished to express a great deal more by this contrast. He wished first to show the connection of the daily cycle with the motion of the Sun.

But there is a cycle seven times as great, which, whilst returning again to the Sun, includes all the planets—Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. This is the weekly cycle. This was intended to signify that, having one cycle corresponding to a day, and one seven times greater that included the planets, not only does the Earth revolve upon its axis (or the Sun go round), but the whole system has in itself also a movement. The movement can be seen in various other examples. If you take the course of the year's cycle, then you have in the year, as you know, 52 weeks, so that 7 weeks is about the seventh part—in point of number—of the year. This means, we imagine the week-cycle extended or stretched over the year, taking the beginning and end of the year as corresponding to the beginning and end of the week. And this necessitates the thought that all phenomena resulting from the weekly cycle must take place at a different speed from those events having their origin in the daily cycle.

And where are we to look for the origin of the feeling which impels us to reckon, now with the day-cycle, and now with the week-cycle? It arises from the sensation within us of the contrast between the human head-development, and that of the rest of the organism. We see the human head-organisation represented by a process to which I have already drawn your attention—the formation within about a year's cycle of the first teeth.

If you consider the first and second dentition you will see that the second takes place after a cycle that is seven times as long as the cycle of the first dentition. We may say that as the one year-cycle in respect to the first dentition stands to the cycle of human evolution that works up to the second dentition, so does the day stand to the week. The ancients felt this to be true, because they rightly understood another thing. They understood that the first dentition was primarily the result of heredity. You only need look at the embryo to realise that its development proceeds out of the head organisation; it annexes, as it were, the remainder of the organism later. You will then understand that the idea of the ancients was quite correct when they saw a connection of the formation of the first teeth with the head and of the second teeth with the whole human organism. And today we must arrive at the same result if we consider these phenomena objectively. The first teeth are connected with the forces of the human head, the second with the forces that work from out of the rest of the organism and penetrate into the head.

Through looking at the matter in this way, we have indicated an important difference between the head and the rest of the human body. The difference is one which can, in the first place, be considered as connected with time, for that which takes place in the human head has a seven times greater rapidity than that which takes place in the rest of the human organism. Let us translate this into rational language. Let us say, today you have eaten your usual number of meals in the proper sequence. Your organism demands a repetition of them tomorrow. Not so the head. This acts according to another measure of time; it must wait seven days before the food taken into the rest of the organism has proceeded far enough to enable the head to assimilate it. Supposing this to be Sunday, your head would have to wait until next Sunday before it would be in a position to benefit by the fruit of to-day's Sunday dinner. In the head organisation, a repetition takes place after a period of seven days, of what has been accomplished seven days before in the organism. All this the ancients knew intuitively and expressed by saying: a week is necessary to transmute what is physical and bodily into soul and spirit.

You will now see that metamorphosis also brings about a repetition in the succeeding incarnation in ‘single’ time of that which previously required a seven times longer period to accomplish. We are thus concerned with a metamorphosis which is spatial through the fact that our remaining organism—our body—is not merely transformed, but turned inside out, and is at the same time temporal, in that our head organisation has remained behind to the extent of a period seven times as long.

It will be clear to you now that this human organisation is not, after all, quite so simple as our modern, comfort-loving science would like to believe. We must make up our mind to regard Man's organisation as much more complicated; for if we do not understand Man rightly, we are also prevented from realising the cosmic movements in which he takes part. The descriptions of the Universe circulated since the beginning of modern times are mere abstractions, for they are described without a knowledge of Man.

This is the reform that is necessary, above all, in Astronomy—a reform demanding the re-inclusion of Man in the scheme of things, when cosmic movements are being studied. Such studies will then naturally be somewhat more difficult.

Goethe felt intuitively the metamorphosis of the skull from the vertebrae, when, in a Venetian Jewish burial ground, he found a sheep's skull which had fallen apart into its various small sections; these enabled him to study the transformation of the vertebrae, and he then pursued his discovery in detail. Modern science has also touched upon this line of research. You will find some interesting observations relating to the matter, and some hypotheses built up upon it, by the comparative anatomist Karl Gegenbaur; but in reality Gegenbaur created obstacles for the Goethean intuitional research, for he failed to find sufficient reason to declare himself in favour of the parallel between the vertebrae and the single sections of the skull. Why did he fail? Because so long as people think only of a transformation and disregard the reversal inside out, so long will they gain only an approximate idea of the similarity of the two kinds of bones. For in reality the bones of the skull result from those forces which act upon Man between death and rebirth, and they are therefore bound to be essentially different in appearance from merely transformed bone. They are turned inside out; it is this reversal which is the important point.

Imagine we have here (diagram) the upper or head-man. All influences or impressions proceed inward from without. Here below would be the rest of the human body. Here everything works from within outwards, but so as to remain within the organism. Let me put it in another way. With his head man stands in relation to his outer environment, while with his lower organism he is related to the processes taking place within himself. The abstract mystic says: “Look within to find the reality of the outer world.” But this is merely abstract thought, it does not accord with the actual path. The reality of the outer world is not found through inner contemplation of all that acts upon us from outside; we must go deeper and consider ourselves as a duality, and allow the world to take form in quite a different part of our being. That is why abstract mysticism yields so little fruit, and why it is necessary to think here too of an inner process.

I do not expect any of you to allow your dinner to stand before you untouched, depending upon the attractive appearance of it to appease your hunger! Life could not be supported in this way. No! We must induce that process which runs its course in the 24-hour cycle, and which, if we consider the whole man, including the upper or head organisation, only finishes its course after seven days. But that which is assimilated spiritually—for it has really to be assimilated and not merely contemplated!—also requires for this process a period seven times as long. Therefore it becomes necessary first intellectually to assimilate all we absorb. But to see it reborn again within us, we must wait seven years. Only then has it developed into that which it was intended to be. That is why after the founding of the Anthroposophical Society in 1901 we had to wait patiently, seven, and even fourteen years for the result!

I spoke yesterday about how man's etheric and astral bodies develop. Today I want to indicate how during different epochs man attained knowledge of this kind. A description of how higher knowledge is attained provides insight into man's being from various aspects and also into his relation to the world. It is by no means necessary that everyone should be able to repeat these practices, but a description of how higher knowledge was arrived at in the past and how it is arrived at now will throw light on matters of vital importance for every individual.

The paths by which in very remote times men acquired supersensible knowledge were very different from those appropriate today. I have often drawn attention to the fact that in ancient times man possessed a faculty of instinctive clairvoyance. This clairvoyance went through many different phases to become what may be described as modern man's consciousness of the world, a consciousness out of which a higher one can be developed. In my books Occult Science—an Outline and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment and other writings is described how man at present, when he understands his own times, can attain higher knowledge. Today I want to describe these things from a certain aspect with reference to what was said yesterday.

When we look back to the spiritual strivings of man in a very distant past we find among others the one practiced in the Orient within the culture known later as the Ancient Indian civilization. Many people nowadays are returning to what was practiced then because they cannot rouse themselves to the realization that, in order to penetrate into supersensible worlds, every epoch must follow its own appropriate path.

On previous occasions I have mentioned that, from the masses of human beings who lived during the period described in my Occult Sciences as the Ancient Indian epoch, certain individuals developed, in a manner suited to that age, inner forces which led them upwards into supersensible worlds. One of the methods followed is known as the path of Yoga; I have spoken about this path on other occasions.

The path of Yoga can best be understood if we first consider the people in general from among whom the Yogi emerged—that is to say, the one who sets out to attain higher knowledge by this path. In those remote ages of mankind's evolution, human consciousness in general was very different from what it is today. In the present age we look out into the world and through our senses perceive colors, sounds and so on. We seek for laws of nature prevailing in the physical world and we are conscious that if we attempt to experience a spirit-soul content in the external world then we add something to it in our imagination. It was different in the remote past for then, as we know, man saw more in the external world than ordinary man sees today. In lightning and thunder, in every star, in the beings of the different kingdoms of nature, the men of those times beheld spirit and soul. They perceived spiritual beings, even if of a lower kind, in all solid matter, in everything fluid or aeriform. Today's intellectual outlook declares that these men of old, through their fantasy, dreamed all kinds of spiritual and psychical qualities into the world around them. This is known as animism.

We little understand the nature of man, especially that of man in ancient times, if we believe that the spiritual beings manifesting in lightning and thunder, in springs and rivers, in wind and weather, were dream-creations woven into nature by fantasy. This was by no means the case. Just as we perceive red or blue and hear C sharp or G, so those men of old beheld realities of spirit and soul in external objects. For them it was as natural to see spirit-soul entities as it is for us to see colors and so on. However, there was another aspect to this way of experiencing the world; namely, that man in those days had no clear consciousness of self.

The clear self-consciousness which permeates the normal human being today did not yet exist. Though he did not express it, man did not, as it were, distinguish himself from the external world. He felt as my hand would feel were it conscious: that it is not independent, but an integral part of the organism. Men felt themselves to be members of the whole universe. They had no definite consciousness of their own being as separate from the surrounding world. Suppose a man of that time was walking along a river bank. If someone today walks along a river bank downstream he, as modern, clever man, feels his legs stepping out in that direction and this has nothing whatever to do with the river. In general, the man of old did not feel like that. When he walked along a river downstream, as was natural for him to do, he was conscious of the spiritual beings connected with the water of the river flowing in that direction. Just as a swimmer today feels himself carried along by the water—that is, by something material—so the man of old felt himself guided downstream by something spiritual. That is only an example chosen at random. In all his experiences of the external world man felt himself to be supported and impelled by Gods of wind, river, and all surrounding nature. He felt the elements of nature within himself. Today this feeling of being at one with nature is lost. In its place man has acquired a strong feeling of his independence, of his individual `I'.

The Yogi rose above the level of the masses whose experiences were as described. He carried out certain exercises of which I shall speak. These exercises were good and suitable for the nature of humanity in ancient times; they have later fallen into decadence and have mainly been used for harmful ends. I have often referred to these Yoga breathing exercises. Therefore, what I am now describing was a method for the attainment of higher worlds that was suitable and right only for man in a very ancient oriental civilization.

In ordinary life breathing functions unconsciously. We breathe in, hold the breath and exhale; this becomes a conscious process only if in some way we are not in good health. In ordinary life breathing remains for the most part in unconscious process. But during certain periods of his exercises the Yogi transformed his breathing into a conscious inner experience. This he did by timing the inhaling, holding and exhaling of the breath differently and so altered the whole rhythm of the normal breathing. In this way the breathing process became conscious. The Yogi projected himself, as it were, into his breathing. He felt himself one with the indrawn breath, with the spreading of the breath through the body and with the exhaled breath. In this way he was drawn with his whole soul into the breath.

In order to understand what is achieved by this let us look at what happens when we breathe: When we inhale, the breath is driven into the organism, up through the spinal cord, into the brain; from there it spreads out into the system of nerves and senses. Therefore, when we think, we by no means depend only on our senses and nervous system as instruments of thinking. The breathing process pulsates and beats through them with its perpetual rhythm. We never think without this whole process taking place, of which we are normally unaware because the breathing remains unconscious.

The Yogi, by altering the rhythm of the breath, drew it consciously into the process of nerves and senses. Because the altered breathing caused the air to billow and whirl through the brain and nerve-sense-system the result was an inner experience of their function when combined with the air. As a consequence, he also experienced a soul element in his thinking within the rhythm of breathing.

Something extraordinary happened to the Yogi by this means. The process of thinking, which he had hardly felt as a function of the head at all, streamed into his whole organism. He did not merely think but felt the thought as a little live creature that ran through the whole process of breathing which he had artificially induced.

Thus, the Yogi did not feel thinking to be merely a shadowy, logical process, he rather felt how thinking followed the breath. When he inhaled he felt he was taking something from the external world into himself which he then let flow with the breath into his thinking. With his thoughts he took hold, as it were, of that which he had inhaled with the air and spread through his whole organism. The result of this was that there arose in the Yogi an enhanced feeling of his own T, an intensified feeling of self. He felt his thinking pervading his whole being. This made him aware of his thinking particularly in the rhythmic air-current within him.

This had a very definite effect upon the Yogi. When man today is aware of himself within the physical world he quite rightly does not pay attention to his thinking as such. His senses inform him about the external world and when he looks back upon himself he perceives at least a portion of his own being. This gives him a picture of how man is placed within the world between birth and death. The Yogi radiated the ensouled thoughts into the breath. This soul-filled thinking pulsated through his inner being with the result that there arose in him an enhanced feeling of selfhood. But in this experience, he did not feel himself living between birth and death in the physical world surrounded by nature. He felt carried back in memory to the time before he descended to the earth; that is, to the time when he was a spiritual-soul being in a spiritual-soul world.

In normal consciousness today, man can reawaken experiences of the past. He may, for instance, have a vivid recollection of some event that took place ten years ago in a wood perhaps; he distinctly remembers all the details, the whole mood and setting. In just the same way did the Yogi, through his changed breathing, feel himself drawn back into the wood and atmosphere, into the whole setting of a spiritual-soul world in which he had been as a spiritual-soul being. There he felt quite differently about the world than he felt in his normal consciousness. The result of the changed relationship of the now awakened selfhood to the whole universe, gave rise to the wonderful poems of which the Bhagavad Gita is a beautiful example.

In the Bhagavad Gita we read wonderful descriptions of how the human soul, immersed in the phenomena of nature, partakes of every secret, steeping itself in the mysteries of the world. These descriptions are all reproductions of memories, called up by means of Yoga breathing, of the soul—when it was as yet only soul—and lived within a spiritual universe. In order to read the ancient writings such as the Bhagavad Gita with understanding one must be conscious of what speaks through them. The soul, with enhanced feeling of selfhood, is transported into its past in the spiritual world and is relating what Krishna and other ancient initiates had experienced there through their heightened self-consciousness.

Thus, it can be said that those sages of old rose to a higher level of consciousness than that of the masses of people. The initiates strictly isolated the “self' from the external world. This came about, not for any egoistical reason, but as a result of the changed process of breathing in which the soul, as it were, dove down into the rhythm of the inner air current. By this method a path into the spiritual world was sought in ancient times.

Later this path underwent modifications. In very ancient times the Yogi felt how in the transformed breathing his thoughts were submerged in the currents of breath, running through them like little snakes. He felt himself to be part of a weaving cosmic life and this feeling expressed itself in certain words and sayings. It was noticeable that one spoke differently when these experiences were revealed through speech. What I have described was gradually felt less intensely within the breath; it no longer remained within the breathing process itself. Rather were the words breathed out and formed of themselves rhythmic speech. Thus, the changed breathing led, through the words carried by the breath, to the creation of mantras; whereas, formerly, the process and experience of breathing was the most essential, now these poetic sayings assumed primary importance. They passed over into tradition, into the historical consciousness of man and subsequently gave birth later to rhythm, meter, and so on, in poetry.

The basic laws of speech which are to be seen, for instance, in the pentameter¹ and hexameter² as used in ancient Greece, point back to what had once long before been an experience of the breathing process. An experience which transported man from the world in which he was living between birth and death into a world of spirit and soul.

This is not the path modern man should seek into the spiritual world. He must rise into higher worlds, not by the detour of the breath, but along the more inward path of thinking itself. The right path for man today is to transform, in meditation and concentration, the otherwise merely logical connection between thoughts into something of a musical nature. Meditation today is to begin always with an experience in thought, an experience of the transition from one thought into another, from one mental picture into another.

While the Yogi in Ancient India passed from one kind of breathing into another, man today must attempt to project himself into a living experience of, for example, the color red. Thus, he remains within the realm of thought. He must then do the same with blue and experience the rhythm: red- blue; blue-red; red-blue and so on, which is a thought- rhythm. But it is not a rhythm which can be found in a logical thought sequence; it is a thinking that is much more alive.

If one perseveres for a sufficiently long time with exercises of this kind—the Yogi, too, was obliged to carry out his exercises for a very long time—and really experiences the inner qualitative change, and the swing and rhythm of: red- blue; blue-red; light-dark; dark-light—in short, if indications such as those given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds are followed, the exact opposite is achieved to that of the Yogi in ancient times. He blended thinking with breathing, thus turning the two processes into one. The aim today is to dissolve the last connection between the two, which, in any case, is unconscious. The process by which, in ordinary consciousness, we think, and form concepts of our natural environment is not only connected with nerves and senses: a stream of breath is always flowing through this process. While we think, the breath continually pulsates through the nerves and senses.

All modern exercises in meditation aim at entirely separating thinking from breathing. Thinking is not on this account torn out of rhythm, because as thinking becomes separated from the inner rhythm of breath it is gradually linked to an external rhythm. By setting thinking free from the breath we let it stream, as it were, into the rhythm of the external world. The Yogi turned back into his own rhythm. Today man must return to the rhythm of the external world. In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you will find that one of the first exercises shows how to contemplate the germination and growth of a plant. This meditation works toward separating thinking from the breath and to let it dive down into the growth forces of the plant itself.

Thinking must pass over into the rhythm pervading the external world. The moment thinking really becomes free of the bodily functions, the moment it has torn itself away from breathing and gradually united with the external rhythm, it dives down—not into the physical qualities of things—but into the spiritual within individual objects.

We look at a plant: it is green and its blossoms are red. This our eyes tell us, and our intellect confirms the fact. This is the reaction of ordinary consciousness. We develop a different consciousness when we separate thinking from breathing and connect it with what exists outside. This thinking yearns to vibrate with the plant as it grows and unfolds its blossoms. This thinking follows how in a rose, for example, green passes over into red. Thinking vibrates within the spiritual which lies at the foundation of each single object in the external world.

This is how modern meditation differs from the Yoga exercises practiced in very ancient times. There are naturally many intermediate stages; I chose these two extremes. The Yogi sank down, as it were, into his own breathing process; he sank into his own self. This caused him to experience this self as if in memory; he remembered what he had been before he came down to earth. We, on the other hand, pass out of the physical body with our soul and unite ourselves with what lives spiritually in the rhythms of the external world. In this way we behold directly what we were before we descended to the earth. This is the consequence of gradually entering into the external rhythm.

To illustrate the difference, I will draw it schematically: Let this be the Yogi (first drawing, white lines). He developed a strong feeling of his `I' (red). This enabled him to remember what he was, within a soul-spiritual environment, before he descended to earth (blue). He went back on the stream of memory.

Let this be the modern man who has attained supersensible knowledge (second drawing, white lines). He develops a process that enables him to go out of his body (blue) and live within the rhythm of the external world and behold directly, as an external object (red), what he was before he descended to earth.

Thus, knowledge of one's existence before birth was in ancient times in the nature of memory, whereas at the present time a rightly developed cognition of pre-birth existence is a direct beholding of what one was (red). That is the difference.

That was one of the methods by which the Yogi attained insight into the spiritual world. Another was by adopting certain positions of the body. One exercise was to hold the arms outstretched for a long time; or he took up a certain position by crossing his legs and sitting on them and so on. What was attained by this?

He attained the possibility to perceive what can be perceived with those senses which today are not even recognized as senses. We know that man has not just five senses but twelve. I have often spoken about this—for example, apart from the usual five he has a sense of balance through which he perceives the equilibrium of his body so that he does not fall to the right or left, or backwards or forwards. Just as we perceive colors, so we must perceive our own balance or we should slip and fall in all directions. Someone who is intoxicated or feels faint loses his balance just because he fails to perceive his equilibrium. In order to make himself conscious of this sense of balance, the Yogi adopted certain bodily postures. This developed in him a strong, subtle sense of direction. We speak of above and below, of right and left, of back and front as if they were all the same. The Yogi became intensely conscious of their differences by keeping his body for lengthy periods in certain postures. In this way he developed a subtle awareness of the other senses of which I have spoken. When these are experienced they are found to have a much more spiritual character than the five familiar senses. Through them the Yogi attained perception of the directions of space.

This faculty must be regained but along a different path. For reasons which I will explain more fully on another occasion the old Yoga exercises are unsuitable today. However, we can attain an experience of the qualitative differences within the directions of space by undertaking such exercises in thinking as I have described. They separate thinking from breathing and bring it into the rhythm of the external world. We then experience, for instance, what it signifies that the spine of animals lies in the horizontal direction whereas in man it is vertical. It is well known that the magnetic needle always points north-south. Therefore, on earth the north-south direction means something special, for the manifestation of magnetic forces, since the magnetic needle, which is otherwise neutral, reacts to it. Thus, the north-south direction has a special quality. By penetrating into the external rhythm with our thoughts we learn to recognize what it means when the spine is horizontal or vertical. We remain in the realm of thought and learn through thinking itself. The Indian Yogi learned it, too, but by crossing his legs and sitting on them and by keeping his arms raised for a long time. Thus, he learned from the bodily postures the significance of the invisible directions of space. Space is not haphazard but organized in such a way that the various directions have different values.

The exercises that have been described which lead man into higher worlds are mainly exercises in the realm of thought. There are exercises of an opposite kind; among them are the various methods employed in asceticism. One such method is the suppression of the normal function of the physical body through inflicting pain and all kinds of deprivations. It is practically impossible for modern man to form an adequate idea of the extremes to which such exercises were carried by ascetics in former times. Modern man prefers to be as firmly as possible within his physical body. But whenever the ascetic suppressed some function of the body by means of physical pain, his spirit-soul nature drew out of his organism.

In normal life the soul and spirit of man are connected with the physical organism between birth and death in accordance with the human organization as a whole. When the bodily functions are suppressed, through ascetic practices, something occurs which is similar to when today someone sustains an injury. When one knows how modern man generally reacts to some slight hurt then it is clear that there is a great difference between that and what the ascetic endured just to make his soul organism free. The ascetic experienced the spiritual world with the soul organism that had been driven out through such practices. Nearly all of the earlier great religious revelations originated in this way.

Those concerned with modern religious life make light of these things. They declare the great religious revelations to be poetic fiction, maintaining that whatever insight man acquires should not cause pain. The seekers of religious truths in former times did not take this view. They were quite clear about the fact that when man is completely bound up with his organism, as of necessity he must be for his earthly tasks—the gain was not to portray unworldliness as an ideal—then he cannot have spiritual experiences. The ascetics in former times sought spiritual experiences by suppressing bodily life and even inflicting pain. Whenever pain drove out spirit and soul from a bodily member that part which was driven out experienced the spiritual world. The great religions have not been attained without pain but rather through great suffering.

These fruits of human strivings are today accepted through faith. Faith and knowledge are neatly separated. Knowledge of the external world, in the form of natural science, is acquired through the head. As the head has a thick skull, this causes no pain, especially as this knowledge consists of extremely abstract concepts. On the other hand, those concepts handed down as venerable traditions are accepted simply through faith. It must be said though, that basically, knowledge and faith have in common the fact that today one is willing to accept only knowledge that can be acquired painlessly, and faith does not hurt any more than science, though its knowledge was originally attained through great pain and suffering.

Despite all that has been said, the way of the ascetic cannot be the way for present-day man. On some other occasion we will consider the reason. In our time it is perfectly possible, through inner self-discipline and training of the will, to take in hand one's development which is otherwise left to education and the experiences of life. One's personality can be strengthened by training the will. One can, for example, say to oneself: Within five years I shall acquire a new habit and during that time I shall concentrate my whole will power upon achieving it. When the will is trained in this way, for the sake of inner perfection, then one loosens, without ascetic practices, the soul-spiritual from the bodily nature. The first discovery, when such training of the will is undertaken for the sake of self-improvement, is that a continuous effort is needed. Every day something must be achieved inwardly. Often it is only a slight accomplishment, but it must be pursued with iron determination and unwavering will. It is often the case that if, for example, such an exercise as concentration each morning upon a certain thought is recommended, people will embark upon it with burning enthusiasm. But it does not last, the will slackens and the exercise becomes mechanical because the strong energy which is increasingly required is not forthcoming. The first resistance to be overcome is one's own lethargy; then comes the other resistance, which is of an objective nature, and it is as if one had to fight one's way through a dense thicket. After that, one reaches the experience that hurts because thinking, which has gradually become strong and alive, has found its way into the rhythm of the external world and begins to perceive the direction of space—in fact, perceive what is alive. One discovers that higher knowledge is attainable only through pain.

I can well picture people today who want to embark upon the path leading to higher worlds. They make a start and the first delicate spiritual cognition appears. This causes pain, so they say they are ill; when something causes pain one must be ill. However, the attainment of higher knowledge will often be accompanied by great pain, yet one is not ill. No doubt it is more comfortable to seek a cure than continue the path. Attempts must be made to overcome this pain of the soul which becomes ever greater as one advances. While it is easier to have something prescribed than continue the exercises, no higher knowledge is attained that way. Provided the body is robust and fit for dealing with external life, as is normally the case at the present time, this immersion in pain and suffering becomes purely an inner soul path in which the body does not participate. When man allows knowledge to approach him in this way, then the pain he endures signifies that he is attaining those regions of spiritual life out of which the great religions were born. The great religious truths which fill our soul with awe, conveying as they do those lofty regions in which, for example, our immortality is rooted, cannot be reached without painful inner experiences.

Once attained, these truths can be passed on to the general consciousness of mankind. Nowadays they are opposed simply because people sense that they are not as easy to attain as they would like. I spoke yesterday about how the changed astral body unites, within the heart, with the ether body. I also explained how all our actions, even those we cause others to carry out, are inscribed there. Just think how oppressive such a thought would be to many people. The great truths do indeed demand an inner courage of soul which enables it to say to itself: If you could experience these things you must be prepared to attain knowledge of them through deprivation and suffering. I am not saying this to discourage anyone, but because it is the truth. It may be discouraging for many, but what good would it do to tell people that they can enter higher worlds in perfect comfort when it is not the case. The attainment of higher worlds demands the overcoming of suffering.

I have tried today, my dear friends, to describe to you how it is possible to advance to man's true being. The human soul and spirit lie deeply hidden within him and must be attained. Even if someone does not set out himself on that conquest he must know about what lies hidden within him. He must know about such things as those described yesterday and how they run their course. This knowledge is a demand of our age. These things can be discovered only along such paths as those I have indicated again today by describing how they were trodden in former times and how they must be trodden now.

Tomorrow we shall link together the considerations of yesterday and those of today and in so doing penetrate further into the spiritual world.

• 1. Pentameter: in prosody, a line scanning in five feet.
• 2. Hexameter: Greek measure of six—in poetry, line scanning in six feet.

This lecture is the 7th of 9 lectures in the series entitled: The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution.

The paths by which in very remote times men acquired super-sensible knowledge were very different from those appropriate today. I have often drawn attention to the fact that in ancient times man possessed a faculty of instinctive clairvoyance. This clairvoyance went through many different phases to become what may be described as modern man's consciousness of the world, a consciousness out of which a higher one can be developed. In my books Occult Science: An Outline and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved? and other writings is described how man at present, when he understands his own times, can attain higher knowledge.

When we look back to the spiritual strivings of man in a very distant past we find among others the one practised in the Orient within the culture known later as the Ancient Indian civilization. Many people nowadays are returning to what was practised then because they cannot rouse themselves to the realization that, in order to penetrate in to super-sensible worlds, every epoch must follow its own appropriate path.

On previous occasions I have mentioned that, from the masses of human beings who lived during the period described in my Occult Science as the Ancient Indian epoch, certain individuals developed, in a manner suited to that age, inner forces which led them upwards into super-sensible worlds. One of the methods followed is known as the path of yoga; I have spoken about this path on other occasions.

The path of yoga can best be understood if we first consider the people in general from among whom the yogi emerged—that is to say, the one who sets out to attain higher knowledge by this path. In those remote ages of mankind's evolution, human consciousness in general was very different from what it is today. In the present age we look out into the world and through our senses perceive colours, sounds and so on. We seek for laws of nature prevailing in the physical world and we are conscious that if we attempt to experience a spirit-soul content in the external world then we add something to it in our imagination. It was different in the remote past for then, as we know, man saw more in the external world than ordinary man sees today. In lightning and thunder, in every star, in the beings of the different kingdoms of nature, the men of those times beheld spirit and soul. They perceived spiritual beings even if of a lower kind, in all solid matter, in everything fluid or aeriform. Today's intellectual outlook declares that these men of old, through their fantasy, dreamed all kinds of spiritual and psychical qualities into the world around them. This is known as animism.

We little understand the nature of man, especially that of man in ancient times, if we believe that the spiritual beings manifesting in lightning and thunder, in springs and rivers, in wind and weather, were dream-creations woven into nature by fantasy. This was by no means the case. Just as we perceive red or blue and hear C sharp or G, so those men of old beheld realities of spirit and soul in external objects. For them it was as natural to see spirit-soul entities as it is for us to see colours and so on. However, there was another aspect to this way of experiencing the world, namely, that man in those days had no clear consciousness of self.

The clear self-consciousness which permeates the normal human being today did not yet exist. Though he did not express it, man did not, as it were, distinguish himself from the external world. He felt as my hand would feel were it conscious: that it is not independent, but an integral part of the organism. Men felt themselves to be members of the whole universe. They had no definite consciousness of their own being as separate from the surrounding world. Suppose a man of that time was walking along a river bank. If someone today walks along a river bank downstream he, as modern, clever man, feels his legs stepping out in that direction and this has nothing whatever to do with the river. In general, the man of old did not feel like that. When he walked along a river downstream, as was natural for him to do, he was conscious of the spiritual beings connected with the water of the river flowing in that direction. Just as a swimmer today feels himself carried along by the water—that is, by something material—so the man of old felt himself guided downstream by something spiritual. That is only an example chosen at random. In all his experiences of the external world man felt himself to be supported and impelled by gods of wind, river and all surrounding nature. He felt the elements of nature within himself. Today this feeling of being at one with nature is lost. In its place man has acquired a strong feeling of his independence, of his individual ‘I’.

The yogi rose above the level of the masses whose experiences were as described. He carried out certain exercises of which I shall speak. These exercises were good and suitable for the nature of humanity in ancient times; they have later fallen into decadence and have mainly been used for harmful ends. I have often referred to these yoga breathing exercises. Therefore, what I am now describing was a method for the attainment of higher worlds that was suitable and right only for man in a very ancient oriental civilization.In ordinary life breathing functions unconsciously. We breathe in, hold the breath and exhale; this becomes a conscious process only if in some way we are not in good health. In ordinary life, breathing remains for the most part an unconscious process. But during certain periods of his exercises the yogi transformed his breathing into a conscious inner experience. This he did by timing the inhaling, holding and exhaling of the breath differently, and so altered the whole rhythm of the normal breathing. In this way the breathing process became conscious. The yogi projected himself, as it were, into his breathing. He felt himself one with the indrawn breath, with the spreading of the breath through the body and with the exhaled I breath. In this way he was drawn with his whole soul into the breath.

In order to understand what is achieved by this let us look at what happens when we breathe. When we inhale, the breath is driven into the organism, up through the spinal cord, into the brain; from there it spreads out into the system of nerves and senses. Therefore, when we think, we by no means depend only on our senses and nervous system as instruments of thinking. The breathing process pulsates and beats through them with its perpetual rhythm. We never think without this whole process taking place, of which we are normally unaware because the breathing remains unconscious.

The yogi, by altering the rhythm of the breath, drew it consciously into the process of nerves and senses. Because the altered breathing caused the air to billow and whirl through the brain and nerve-sense system, the result was an inner experience of their function when combined with the air. As a consequence, he also experienced a soul element in his thinking within the rhythm of breathing.

Something extraordinary happened to the yogi by this means. The process of thinking, which he had hardly felt as a function of the head at all, streamed into his whole organism. He did not merely think, but felt the thought as a little live creature that ran through the whole process of breathing, which he had artificially induced.

Thus, the yogi did not feel thinking to be merely a shadowy, logical process; he rather felt how thinking followed the breath. When he inhaled he felt he was taking something from the external world into himself which he then let flow with the breath into his thinking. With his thoughts he took hold, as it were, of that which he had inhaled with the air and spread through his whole organism. The result of this was that there arose in the yogi an enhanced feeling of his own ‘I’, an intensified feeling of self. He felt his thinking pervading his whole being. This made him aware of his thinking particularly in the rhythmic air-current within him.

This had a very definite effect upon the yogi. When man today is aware of himself within the physical world he quite rightly does not pay attention to his thinking as such. His senses inform him about the external world and when he looks back upon himself he perceives at least a portion of his own being. This gives him a picture of how man is placed within the world between birth and death. The yogi radiated the ensouled thoughts into the breath. This soul-filled thinking pulsated through his inner being with the result that there arose in him an enhanced feeling of selfhood. But in this experience he did not feel himself living between birth and death in the physical world surrounded by nature. He felt carried back in memory to the time before he descended to the earth, that is, to the time when he was a spiritual-soul being in a spiritual-soul world.

In normal consciousness today man can reawaken experiences of the past. He may, for instance, have a vivid recollection of some event that took place ten years ago in a wood perhaps; he distinctly remembers all the details, the whole mood and setting. In just the same way did the yogi, through his changed breathing, feel himself drawn back into the wood and atmosphere, into the whole setting of a spiritual-soul world in which he had been as a spiritual-soul being. There he felt quite differently about the world than he felt in his normal consciousness. The result of the changed relationship of the now awakened selfhood to the whole universe gave rise to the wonderful poems of which the Bhagavadgita is a beautiful example.

In the Bhagavadgita we read wonderful descriptions of how the human soul, immersed in the phenomena of nature, partakes of every secret, steeping itself in the mysteries of the world. These descriptions are all reproductions of memories, called up by means of yoga breathing, of the soul—when it was as yet only soul—and lived within a spiritual universe. In order to read the ancient writings such as the Bhagavadgita with understanding one must be conscious of what speaks through them. The soul, with enhanced feeling of selfhood, is transported into its past in the spiritual world and is relating what Krishna and other ancient initiates had experienced there through their heightened self-consciousness.

Thus, it can be said that those sages of old rose to a higher level of consciousness than that of the masses of people. The initiates strictly isolated the ‘self’ from the external world. This came about, not for any egotistical reason, but as a result of the changed process of breathing in which the soul, as it were, dived down into the rhythm of the inner air current. By this method a path into the spiritual world was sought in ancient times.

Later this path underwent modifications. In very ancient times the yogi felt how in the transformed breathing his thoughts were submerged in the currents of breath, running through them like little snakes. He felt himself to be part of a weaving cosmic life and this feeling expressed itself in certain words and sayings. It was noticeable that one spoke differently when these experiences were revealed through speech. What I have described was gradually felt less intensely within the breath; it no longer remained within the breathing process itself. Rather were the words breathed out, and formed of themselves rhythmic speech. Thus the changed breathing led, through the words carried by the breath, to the creation of mantras; whereas, formerly, the process and experience of breathing was the most essential, now these poetic sayings assumed primary importance. They passed over into tradition, into the historical consciousness of man and subsequently gave birth later to rhythm, metre, and so on, in poetry.

The basic laws of speech, which are to be seen, for instance, in the pentameter and hexameter as used in ancient Greece, point back to what had once long before been an experience of the breathing process—an experience which transported man from the world in which he was living between birth and death into a world of spirit and soul.

This is not the path modern man should seek into the spiritual world. He must rise into higher worlds, not by the detour of the breath, but along the more inward path of thinking itself. The right path for man today is to transform, in meditation and concentration, the otherwise merely logical connection between thoughts into something of a musical nature. Meditation today is to begin always with an experience in thought, an experience of the transition from one thought into another, from one mental picture into another. While the yogi in ancient India passed from one kind of breathing into another, man today must attempt to project himself into a living experience of, for example, the colour red. Thus he remains within the realm of thought. He must then do the same with blue and experience the rhythm: red-blue, blue-red, red-blue and so on, which is a thought-rhythm. But it is not a rhythm that can be found in a logical thought sequence; it is a thinking that is much more alive.

If one perseveres for a sufficiently long time with exercises of this kind (the yogi, too, was obliged to carry out his exercises for a very long time) and really experience the inner qualitative change, and the swing and rhythm of red-blue, blue-red, light-dark, dark-light—in short, if indications such as those given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds are followed—the exact opposite is achieved to that of the yogi in ancient times. He blended thinking with breathing, thus turning the two processes into one. The aim today is to dissolve the last connection between the two, which, in any case, is unconscious. The process by which, in ordinary consciousness, we think and form concepts of our natural environment is not only connected with nerves and senses; a stream of breath is always flowing through this process. While we think, the breath continually pulsates through the nerves and senses.

All modern exercises in meditation aim at entirely separating thinking from breathing. Thinking is not on this account torn out of rhythm, because as thinking becomes separated from the inner rhythm of breath it is gradually linked to an external rhythm. By setting thinking free from the breath we let it stream, as it were, into the rhythm of the external world. The yogi turned back into his own rhythm. Today man must return to the rhythm of the external world. In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you will find that one of the first exercises shows how to contemplate the germination and growth of a plant. This meditation works towards separating thinking from the breath and letting it dive down into the growth forces of the plant itself.

Thinking must pass over into the rhythm pervading the external world. The moment thinking really becomes free of the bodily functions, the moment it has torn itself away from breathing and gradually united with the external rhythm, it dives down not into the physical qualities of things but into the spiritual within individual objects.

We look at a plant: it is green and its blossoms are red. This our eyes tell us and our intellect confirms the fact. This is the reaction of ordinary consciousness. We develop a different consciousness when we separate thinking from breathing and connect it with what exists outside. This thinking yearns to vibrate with the plant as it grows and unfolds its blossoms. This thinking follows how in a rose, for example, green passes over into red. Thinking vibrates within the spiritual, which lies at the foundation of each single object in the external world.

This is how modern meditation differs from the yoga exercises practised in very ancient times. There are naturally many intermediate stages; I chose these two extremes. The yogi sank down, as it were, into his own breathing process; he sank into his own self. This caused him to experience this self as if in memory; he remembered what he had been before he came down to earth. We, on the other hand, pass out of the physical body with our soul and unite ourselves with what lives spiritually in the rhythms of the external world. In this way we behold directly what we were before we descended to the earth. This is the consequence of gradually entering into the external rhythm.

To illustrate the difference I will draw it schematically. Let this be the yogi (first drawing, white lines). He developed a strong feeling of his ‘I’ (red). This enabled him to remember what he was, within a soul-spiritual environment, before he descended to earth (blue). He went back on the stream of memory.

Let this be the modern man who has attained super-sensible knowledge (second drawing, white lines). He develops a process that enables him to go out of his body (blue) and live within the rhythm of the external world and behold directly, as an external object (red), what he was before he descended to earth.

Thus, knowledge of one's existence before birth was in ancient times in the nature of memory, whereas at the present time a rightly developed cognition of pre-birth existence is a direct beholding of what one was (red). That is the difference.

That was one of the methods by which the yogi attained insight into the spiritual world. Another was by adopting certain positions of the body. One exercise was to hold the arms outstretched for a long time; or he took up a certain position by crossing his legs and sitting on them and so on. What was attained by this?

He attained the possibility to perceive what can be perceived with those senses, which today are not even recognized as senses. We know that man has not just five senses but twelve. I have often spoken about this—for example, apart from the usual five he has a sense of balance through which he perceives the equilibrium of his body so that he does not fall to the right or left, or backwards or forwards. Just as we perceive colours, so we must perceive our own balance or we should slip and fall in all directions. Someone who is intoxicated or feels faint loses his balance just because he fails to perceive his equilibrium. In order to make himself conscious of this sense of balance, the yogi adopted certain bodily postures. This developed in him a strong, subtle sense of direction. We speak of above and below, of right and left, of back and front as if they were all the same. The yogi became intensely conscious of their differences by keeping his body for lengthy periods in certain postures. In this way he developed a subtle awareness of the other senses of which I have spoken. When these are experienced they are found to have a much more spiritual character than the five familiar senses. Through them the yogi attained perception of the directions of space.

This faculty must be regained but along a different path. For reasons, which I will explain more fully on another occasion, the old yoga exercises are unsuitable today. However, we can attain an experience of the qualitative differences within the directions of space by undertaking such exercises in thinking as I have described. They separate thinking from breathing and bring it into the rhythm of the external world. We then experience, for instance, what it signifies that the spine of animals lies in the horizontal direction whereas in man it is vertical. It is well known that the magnetic needle always points north-south. Therefore, on earth the north-south direction means something special, for the manifestation of magnetic forces, since the magnetic needle, which is otherwise neutral, reacts to it. Thus, the north-south direction has a special quality. By penetrating into the external rhythm with our thoughts we learn to recognize what it means when the spine is horizontal or vertical. We remain in the realm of thought and learn through thinking itself. The Indian yogi learned it, too, but by crossing his legs and sitting on them and by keeping his arms raised for a long time. Thus, he learned from the bodily postures the significance of the invisible directions of space. Space is not haphazard, but organized in such a way that the various directions have different values.

The exercises that have been described, which lead man into higher worlds are mainly exercises in the realm of thought. There are exercises of an opposite kind; among them are the various methods employed in asceticism. One such method is the suppression of the normal function of the physical body through inflicting pain and all kinds of deprivations. It is practically impossible for modern man to form an adequate idea of the extremes to which such exercises were carried by ascetics in former times. Modern man prefers to be as firmly as possible within his physical body. But whenever the ascetic suppressed some function of the body by means of physical pain, his spirit-soul nature drew out of his organism.

In normal life the soul and spirit of man are connected with the physical organism between birth and death in accordance with the human organization as a whole. When the bodily functions are suppressed, through ascetic practices, something occurs which is similar to when someone today sustains an injury. When one knows how modern man generally reacts to some slight hurt, then it is clear that there is a great difference between that and what the ascetic endured just to make his soul organism free. The ascetic experienced the spiritual world with the soul organism that had been driven out through such practices. Nearly all of the earlier great religious revelations originated in this way.

Those concerned with modern religious life make light of these things. They declare the great religious revelations to be poetic fiction, maintaining that whatever insight man acquires should not cause pain. The seekers of religious truths in former times did not take this view. They were quite clear about the fact that when man is completely bound up with his organism, as of necessity he must be for his earthly tasks—the aim was not to portray unworldliness as an ideal—then he cannot have spiritual experiences. The ascetics in former times sought spiritual experiences by suppressing bodily life and even inflicting pain. Whenever pain drove out spirit and soul from a bodily member, that part which was driven out experienced the spiritual world. The great religions have not been attained without pain but rather through great suffering.

These fruits of human strivings are today accepted through faith. Faith and knowledge are neatly separated. Knowledge of the external world, in the form of natural science, is acquired through the head. As the head has a thick skull, this causes no pain, especially as this knowledge consists of extremely abstract concepts. On the other hand, those concepts handed down as venerable traditions are accepted simply through faith. It must be said though, that basically, knowledge and faith have in common the fact that today one is willing to accept only knowledge that can be acquired painlessly, and faith does not hurt any more than science, though its knowledge was originally attained through great pain and suffering.

Despite all that has been said, the way of the ascetic cannot be the way for present-day man. In our time it is perfectly possible, through inner self-discipline and training of the will, to take in hand one's development which is otherwise left to education and the experiences of life. One's personality can be strengthened by training the will. One can, for example, say to oneself: Within five years I shall acquire a new habit and during that time I shall concentrate my whole will-power upon achieving it. When the will is trained in this way, for the sake of inner perfection, then one loosens, without ascetic practices, the soul-spiritual from the bodily nature. The first discovery, when such training of the will is undertaken for the sake of self-improvement, is that a continuous effort is needed. Every day something must be achieved inwardly. Often it is only a slight accomplishment but it must be pursued with iron determination and unwavering will. It is often the case that if, for example, such an exercise as concentration each morning upon a certain thought is recommended, people will embark upon it with burning enthusiasm. But it does not last, the will slackens and the exercise becomes mechanical because the strong energy, which is increasingly required, is not forthcoming. The first resistance to be overcome is one's own lethargy; then comes the other resistance, which is of an objective nature, and it is as if one had to fight one's way through a dense thicket. After that, one reaches the experience that hurts because thinking, which has gradually become strong and alive, has found its way into the rhythm of the external world and begins to perceive the direction of space—in fact, perceive what is alive. One discovers that higher knowledge is attainable only through pain.

I can well picture people today who want to embark upon the path leading to higher worlds. They make a start and the first delicate spiritual cognition appears. This causes pain so they say they are ill; when something causes pain one must be ill. However, the attainment of higher knowledge will often be accompanied by great pain, yet one is not ill. No doubt it is more comfortable to seek a cure than continue the path. Attempts must be made to overcome this pain of the soul, which becomes ever greater as one advances. While it is easier to have something prescribed than continue the exercises, no higher knowledge is attained that way. Provided the body is robust and fit for dealing with external life, as is normally the case at the present time, this immersion in pain and suffering becomes purely an inner soul path in which the body does not participate. When man allows knowledge to approach him in this way, then the pain he endures signifies that he is attaining those regions of spiritual life out of which the great religions were born. The great religious truths which fill our soul with awe, conveying as they do those lofty regions in which, for example, our immortality is rooted, cannot be reached without painful inner experiences. The great truths do indeed demand an inner courage of soul which enables it to say to itself: If you could experience these things you must be prepared to attain knowledge of them through deprivation and suffering. I am not saying this to discourage anyone, but because it is the truth. It may be discouraging for many, but what good would it do to tell people that they can enter higher worlds in perfect comfort when it is not the case. The attainment of higher worlds demands the overcoming of suffering.

I have tried today, my dear friends, to describe to you how it is possible to advance to man's true being. The human soul and spirit lie deeply hidden within him and must be attained. Even if someone does not set out himself on that conquest he must know about what lies hidden within him. He must know about such things as those described yesterday and how they run their course.¹ This knowledge is a demand of our age. These things can be discovered only along such paths as those I have indicated again today by describing how they were trodden in former times and how they must be trodden now.

• 1. See lecture given on 26 May, 1922 in The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution

Easter is felt by large numbers of human beings as a festival connected on the one hand with the deepest and most intimate feelings of the human soul, and on the other hand with cosmic mysteries and cosmic riddles of existence. Indeed we cannot but observe the connection of Easter with the secrets and riddles of the Universe when we bear in mind the fact that Easter is a movable festival, the date of which has to be reckoned year by year from that constellation of the stars which we shall shortly consider more in detail. At the same time we must observe how many customs and sacred ceremonies have been associated with the Easter Festival for centuries—customs and ceremonies which lie very near to the heart of large numbers of humanity. These things will show us the immense values which mankind has gradually laid into the Easter Festival in the course of historic evolution.

In the first centuries of Christianity—not at its immediate foundation but in the course of the first centuries—Easter became a most important festival connected with the fundamental thought and impulse of Christianity, I mean, with that impulse which arises for the true Christian from the fact of the Resurrection of Christ.

Easter is the festival of the Resurrection. Yet at the same time it leads us back into pre-Christian times. It leads us to the festivals which were held about the time of the Spring Equinox (which still plays a part in our calculation, at least, of the date of Easter). It points to those old festivals which were connected with the reawakening of Nature—with the springing of life that grows forth once more from the Earth.

Here we already find ourselves within the very subject of these lectures; for here already we must touch upon the connection of Easter with the evolution of the Mysteries in the history of mankind.

Easter as a Christian festival is a festival of Resurrection. The corresponding Heathen festival, taking place about the same time of the year as our Easter, was a kind of Resurrection festival of Nature—the coming forth again of what was asleep in Nature throughout the winter time. But we must emphasise most strongly at this point that the Christian Easter is by no means coincident as to its inner essence and meaning with the Heathen festivals of the Spring Equinox. On the contrary, if we do want to relate it to the old Pagan times, we must connect the Christian Easter with certain festivals which, proceeding from the ancient Mysteries, were enacted at the Autumn season. This is a remarkable fact in the determination of the Easter Festival, which by its very content is obviously connected with certain of the ancient Mysteries. Easter above all can remind us of the deep and radical misunderstandings that have arisen, in the course of evolution, in the world-conceptions of mankind with regard to matters of the greatest significance. Nothing less has happened than that the Easter Festival has been confused with an altogether different one, and has thus been removed from Autumn and turned into a festival of Springtime.

We have here touched something of infinite significance in human evolution. Consider the content of this Easter Festival. What is it in its essence? It is this: Christ Jesus, the Being who stands at the centre of the Christian consciousness, passes through death. Good Friday is held in memory of this fact. Christ Jesus lies in the grave. It is a time that takes its course in three days, representing the union of Christ with Earth-existence. This time is celebrated in Christendom as a festival of mourning—the time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Easter Sunday is the day when the central Being of Christianity rises out of the grave; it is the day of remembrance of this. Such is the essential content of the Easter Festival: the Death, the lying in the Grave and the Resurrection of Christ Jesus.

Now let us look at the corresponding ancient Heathen festival in any one of its forms. Only then shall we be able to penetrate into the connection between the Easter Festival and the Mysteries. In many places and among many people, we come across ancient Heathen festivals whose external structure—and the structure of the ceremonies which were enacted in them—is decidedly similar to the Easter-content of Christianity.

From the manifold festivals of ancient time, we may select for an example the Adonis festival. Through long, long periods of pre-Christian antiquity this festival was celebrated among certain peoples of Asia Minor. A sacred image was the central point of the festival. It was an image of Adonis—Adonis as the spiritual representative of all that is the springing and thriving force of youth in man, of all that appears as beauty in the human being.

True it is that in many respects the ancient peoples confused the substance of the image with what the image represented. The ancient religions often thus present the character of fetish worship. Many human beings saw in the image the actual and present God—the God of beauty, of the youthful strength of man, of the unfolding germinating forces which reveal in outward glory all the inner worth and inner greatness that man contains, or can contain, within him.

With songs and acts of ritual representing the deepest human grief and mourning, this image of the God was lowered into the waves of the sea, where it had to remain for three days. Or if the sea were not near it was lowered into a lake. Or again, an artificial pond was constructed near the sacred place of the Mysteries, so that the image of the God could be submerged and left for three days. During the three days the whole community associated with this cult remained in an atmosphere of deepest earnestness and stillness. After three days the image was withdrawn from the water. The songs of grief and mourning were transformed into songs of joy, hymns to the resurrected God, to the God who had come to life once more.

This was an outward ceremony which deeply stirred the hearts of large circles of mankind. And this ceremony indicated, in an outward act of ritual, what took place in the Holy of Holies of the Mysteries with every human being who was about to reach initiation. For within the Mysteries in those ancient times every human being who was to receive initiation was led into a special chamber. The walls were black, the whole space was dark and gloomy, empty save for a coffin, or something not unlike a coffin. Beside the coffin those who accompanied the candidate for Initiation broke forth into songs of mourning, songs of death. The candidate was treated like one who is about to die. He was given to understand that when he was now laid in the coffin, he would have to undergo what the human being undergoes in the first three days after death.

On the third day there appeared at a certain place, within sight of the one who lay in the coffin, a twig or a branch to represent springing, thriving life. And now the songs of mourning were transferred into hymns of joy and praise. With consciousness transformed, the man arose out of his grave. A new language, a new writing, was communicated to him; it was the language and writing of spiritual Beings. Henceforth he was allowed to see the world—for now indeed he could see it—from the standpoint of the Spirit.

What was thus enacted in the hidden depths of the Mysteries with the candidates for Initiation was comparable to the sacred cults or rituals enacted in the outer world. The content of the sacred ritual, pictorial as it was, was none the less similar in structure to what took place with chosen human beings in the Mysteries. Indeed the cult—and we may take the special cult of Adonis as representative—the cult was explained at the proper season to all those who partook in it. It was enacted in the Autumn, and those who took part in it were instructed somewhat as follows: “Behold, it is the Autumn season! The Earth is losing her adornment of plants and green foliage. All things are fading and falling. In place of the green and springing life that began to cover the Earth in Springtime, snow will soon come to envelop, or drought to lay waste, the Earth. Nature is dying, but while all things are dying around you, you are to experience that in the human being which is only half like the death you see around you in all Nature. Man also has to die. For him, too, there comes the Autumn season. And when man's life draws to a close, it is right for the hearts and minds of those who remain behind to be filled with sorrow and deep mourning. And that the full earnestness of the passage through death may come before your souls, that you may not experience it only when death approaches you yourselves, but may be mindful of it ever and again—it is enacted before you Autumn by Autumn how the divine Being who is the representative of the beauty, youth and greatness of man, dies and undertakes the same journey as all the things of Nature. Nevertheless, just when Nature is laid waste and bare, when all things in Nature are on the way to death, you also are to remember another thing. Remember how man passes through the gate of death! All that he experienced here in this earthly life was like the things that die in Autumn-time. For in this earthly realm he experiences only what is transient. But when he has passed from the Earth and lives on out into the far spaces of the Cosmic Ether, then will he behold himself growing ever greater and greater, till the whole Universe becomes his own. For three days he will live outward and outward into the wide spaces of the Universe. And then, while here on Earth the earthly eye is turned to the image of death—for the earthly eye is turned to all that dies, to all things transient—yonder in the Spirit after three days the immortal soul of man awakens. Yonder the soul arises, arises to be born again for Spirit-land, three days after passing through the gate of death.”

Deep and penetrating was the inner transformation when these things were enacted in the candidate's own person during the Initiation ceremony, in the hidden depths of the Mysteries. The profound impression, the immense and sudden jerk which the life of a man underwent in this ancient form of initiation, awakened inner forces of the soul within him. (As we shall presently see, in modern times it cannot be done in this way but must be done in quite another way.) The inner forces of the soul, the powers of seership were awakened in him. He knew that he stood henceforward no longer in the world of the senses but in the spiritual world.

I may perhaps sum up in the following words the instruction that was given, once more at the right and proper time, to the pupils in the ancient Mysteries. They were told: That which is enacted in the Mysteries is an image of what takes place in spiritual worlds, in the Cosmos. Sacred cult is itself an image of what is enacted in the sacred Mysteries. For everyone who was admitted to the Mysteries was fully clear that events which the Mysteries concealed within the earthly realm—events enacted there upon the human being—were true images of what man experiences in the wide spaces of the astral-spiritual Cosmos in other forms of existence than in this earthly life. And those who in ancient times were not admitted to the Mysteries—since according to their stage in life they could not yet be chosen to receive the vision of the spiritual world directly—were instructed in the corresponding truths through the sacred cult or ritual, that is to say, through a picture of what was enacted in the Mysteries.

Such, then, was the purport of the Mystery which we have learned to know in this example of the Adonis festival. Autumn, when earthly things were fading away, becoming waste and bare, Autumn, expressing so radically the transitory nature of all earthly things, the dying process and the fact of death—this Autumn time was to call forth in man the certainty, or at least the pictured vision, of how the death that overcomes all Nature in the Autumn, overcomes man too, nay even overcomes the representative of all beauty, youthfulness and greatness in the human soul, portrayed in the God Adonis. Even the God Adonis dies, and is dissolved in the earthly prototype of the cosmic Ether—in the Water. But even as he rises again out of the Water, even as he can be drawn forth from the Water, so is the soul of man drawn forth from the Waters of the world, that is to say, from the cosmic Ether, approximately three days after the human being here upon Earth passes through the gate of death.

It was the secret of death itself which those ancient Mysteries sought to represent in the corresponding Autumn festival. They made it visible in picture form, in that the first half of the sacred ritual coincided with the dying and the death in Nature, while on the other hand the very opposite was shown to be the essential truth for man himself. Such was the meaning and intention of the Mysteries: the human being shall turn his gaze to the death of Nature, in order to become aware how he himself dies in the outward semblance, while in his inner being he is resurrected—resurrected, to begin with, for the spiritual world. To unveil the truth about death was the meaning and purpose of this ancient Pagan festival which was connected so closely with the Mysteries.

Then in the further course of human evolution the great Event took place. What had been undergone at a certain level by the candidate for initiation in the Mysteries—the Death and Resurrection of the soul—took place even as to the body with Christ Jesus. For how does the Mystery of Golgotha appear to one who is acquainted with the Mysteries! He gazes back into the ancient Mysteries. He sees how the candidate for Initiation was led, in his soul, through death to the Resurrection of the soul; that is to say, to the awakening of a higher consciousness in the soul. The soul died, to rise again in a higher consciousness. We must above all hold fast to this, that the body did not die, but the soul died, in order to be awakened to a higher consciousness.

What the soul of every candidate for Initiation underwent, Christ Jesus underwent even in the body. That is to say, He underwent it on a different level. For Christ was no earthly man. He was a Sun-Being dwelling in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Hence what the candidate for Initiation in the ancient Mysteries had undergone in his soul, could be undergone in the entire human nature by Christ Jesus upon Golgotha.

Those who still had knowledge of the ancient Mysteries and of the above Initiation-rite—it was they who understood most deeply what had happened upon Golgotha. Indeed to this day, it is they who understood it most deeply. For they could say to themselves: For thousands and thousands of years, human beings have been led through the death and resurrection of their souls into the secrets of the spiritual world. The soul was kept separate from the body during the act of Initiation. The soul was led through death, to life eternal. What was thus experienced in the soul by a number of chosen human beings, was undergone even in the body by a Being who descended from the Sun at the Baptism by John in Jordan, and took possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The act of Initiation that had been repeated again and again through long, long years, now became a historic fact.

The essential thing was that man should know: because it was a Sun-Being who took possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth, therefore what was accomplished for the Initiates only with respect to the soul and the soul's experience, could be accomplished now even into the bodily existence by this Being. In spite of the death of the body, in spite of the dissolving of the body of Jesus of Nazareth in the mortal Earth, there could be a Resurrection of the Christ. For the Christ rises higher than the soul of the initiate could rise. The candidate for Initiation could not carry the body into those deep regions of the sub-sensible into which Christ Jesus carried it. Hence, too, the candidate for Initiation could not rise so high in resurrection as the Christ. Yet it remains true that but for this difference in respect of cosmic greatness, the ancient rite of Initiation appeared as a historic fact at the sacred place of Golgotha.

Yet even in the first centuries of Christianity there were only few who knew that a Being of the Sun, a cosmic Being, had lived in Jesus of Nazareth, that the Earth had really been fertilised by the descent from the Sun of a Being whom until then man upon Earth had only been able to behold within the Sun, by the methods cultivated at the places of Initiation. This was the essential point in Christianity, inasmuch as it was also accepted by those who had real knowledge of the ancient Mysteries. They could say: The Christ to whom we lifted ourselves up through our initiation, the Christ whom we could reach by our ascent to the Sun in the ancient Mysteries, has descended into a mortal body, into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. He has come down to Earth.

It was indeed a festival mood, nay, a mood of sublime holiness which filled the hearts and souls of those who, living in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, had some understanding of this Mystery. Gradually, and by processes which we shall yet have to trace, what had thus been an immediate and living content of their consciousness became a memory, a festival in memory of the historic event on Golgotha. But while this “memory” was taking shape, the consciousness of who the Christ was as a Being of the Sun, became lost ever more and more. Those who had knowledge of the ancient Mysteries could not fail to know about the Being of the Christ. For they knew that the real Initiates, being made independent of the physical body and passing in their souls through death, rising into the Sun-sphere and there visiting the Christ, had received from Him—from Christ within the Sun—the impulse for the resurrection of their souls. They knew the nature of the Christ because they had raised themselves to Him. With their knowledge of this Initiation rite, the ancient Initiates knew from what took place on Golgotha that the same Being who formerly had to be sought for in the Sun, had now visited mankind on Earth. Why was it so? The sacred rite that had been enacted with the candidates for Initiation in the ancient Mysteries in order that they might reach up to the Christ within the Sun, could no longer be enacted in this way. For in the course of time, human nature had undergone a change. By the very evolution of the human being, the ancient ceremony of Initiation had become impossible. It would no longer have been possible through that ancient Initiation ceremony to visit the Christ in the Sun. It was then that He descended to enact on Earth a sacred deed to which human beings might henceforth turn their gaze.

What is contained within this secret is one of the very holiest things that can possibly be uttered on this Earth.

For how did it really appear to the human beings in the centuries following the Mystery of Golgotha?

From an ancient Initiation sanctuary man upon Earth looked upward to the Sun-existence and became aware, through his Initiation, of Christ within the Sun. Man looked out into Space in order to approach the Christ. And how did the evolution of mankind go forward in the succeeding periods? I must now represent Time itself: the Earth in one year, the Earth in a second year, in a third year, and so on in the course of Time. Spatially, the Earth is of course always present but here I have represented the course of Time. The Mystery of Golgotha has taken place. A human being living, let us say, in the eighth century A.D., instead of looking upward to the Sun from a sacred place of the Mysteries so as to reach the Christ, looks backward through the course of Time—back to the Mystery of Golgotha. At the turning-point of Time—at the beginning of the Christian era—he beholds the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus he can find the Christ within an earthly action, within an event on Earth. He finds the Christ within the Mystery of Golgotha.

Through the Mystery of Golgotha, what had formerly been a vision in Space, became henceforward a vision in Time. That was the significance of what had taken place.

We must however especially contemplate what took place during Initiation in the ancient Mysteries. It was a picture of the death of man and of his resurrection in the life beyond. Then we must consider the structure of the sacred cults, the festival of Adonis, for instance. For this in turn was a picture of what took place within the Mysteries. When we contemplate all this, these things—the three united into one—come before us in a sublime and transcendent aspect concentrated in the one historic action upon Golgotha.

Outwardly upon the scene of history there appears what was hitherto accomplished in the deep and inner Holy of Holies of the Mysteries. For all human beings there now exists what existed hitherto only for the Initiates. Men no longer need an image that is immersed and symbolically resurrected from the sea. Henceforth they shall have the thought—the memory—of what took place in all reality on Golgotha. The outward symbol, relating to a process that was experienced in Space, is now to be replaced by the inward thought and memory, without any picture to the senses—the memory of the historic event of Golgotha, experienced purely in the soul.

Strange is the course of human evolution as we perceive it in the succeeding centuries. Man's penetration into spiritual things becomes ever less and less. The spiritual content of the Mystery of Golgotha cannot find its way into the minds of men. Evolution tends now to develop the sense for material things. Men lose the inner understanding of the heart, which once told them that just where outer Nature reveals her transitoriness and appears as a dying existence, the life of the Spirit can be seen, and with it they lose their understanding for that outer festival which can most truly be felt when Autumn comes with its fading, dying process, inasmuch as the death of the Earthly and Natural corresponds to the Resurrection of the Spiritual.

Thus it becomes possible no longer for Autumn to be the time of the Resurrection Festival. Autumn loses its power to turn man's thought from the transitoriness of Nature to the eternity of the Spirit. Man now needs the support of material things, needs the support of what does not die in Nature, but springs forth again in Nature. He needs to connect his Resurrection Festival with that which is resurrected in outer Nature—the force of the seed which was laid into the Earth in Autumn-time. He takes the material as a symbol for the Spiritual because he is no longer able to receive inspiration for a true perception of the Spiritual itself. Autumn no longer has the power to make manifest through the inner power of the human soul the Eternity of the Spirit, over against what is transient in the world of Nature. Man needs the support of external Nature, of the external Resurrection in Nature. He needs to see how the plants spring out of the Earth, how the Sun increases in strength, how light and warmth increase in strength once more. He needs the Resurrection in Nature in order to celebrate the thought of the Resurrection.

At the same time he loses that immediate inner relationship which he had with the Adonis Festival, and which he can also have with the Mystery of Golgotha. The inner experience which could arise at the earthly death of man, loses its power. In that inner experience the human soul was aware how the man who in the earthly sense passes through the gate of death, undergoes in three days what can indeed fill the soul with solemnity and earnestness. Then, however, the soul must become inwardly joyful, inasmuch as out of this very death the human soul arises after three days to spiritual immortality.

The power that lay in the Adonis Festival was lost. To begin with, it was intended for humanity that this power should arise with still greater intensity. Man had gazed upon the death of the God, the death of all that is beautiful in mankind—of all that is great and filled with the strength of youth. This God was immersed in the ocean on the day of Mourning, on the day of Chara (Charfreitag is Good Friday; Chara means mourning). They fell into a solemn, earnest mood. This was the feeling they first wanted to unfold in view of the transitoriness of Nature. But then this very feeling of the transitoriness of Nature had to be transformed by the soul into a feeling of the super-sensible resurrection of the human soul after three days. When the God—or image of the God—was lifted out again, the true believer beheld the image of the human soul a few days after death. “What happens to the dead man in the Spirit, behold! it stands before thy soul in the image of the resurrected God of youthful strength and beauty!”

This truth, deeply united with the whole destiny of man, was really awakened in the human spirit year by year in the Autumn season. In that ancient time men could not have thought it possible to take their start from external Nature. That which was perceptible in the Spirit was represented in the symbolic action of the sacred cult. But the time came when this picture of ancient times had to be blotted out in order that the memory, unassisted by any image—the inward memory, experienced purely within the soul, the memory of the Mystery of Golgotha in which the same truth is contained—should take the place of the picture. To begin with, humanity had not the power for it to be so. For the Spirit descended into the very depths of the soul of man. To this day it has remained so; man needs the support of external Nature. But external Nature provides no symbol—no perfect symbol—of the destinies of man in death. Thus the thought of death itself was able to live on, but the thought of the Resurrection disappeared more and more. Though the Resurrection is still referred to as an article of faith, the fact of the Resurrection is not a really living experience in the humanity of modern times. It must become alive again through the anthroposophical conception reawakening the sense of man to the true Resurrection thought.

The Michael thought, as was said at the proper season, must lie near to the anthroposophical heart and mind as the thought of the Herald of Christ. The Christmas thought too, must be made ever deeper in the heart of the anthroposophist. And the Easter thought must become especially sacred and joyful. For Anthroposophy has to add to the thought of Death, the thought of the Resurrection. Anthroposophy itself must become like an inner festival of Resurrection for the human soul. It must bring an Easter mood into man's world-conception. This will indeed be possible if it is understood how the thought of the ancient Mysteries can live on in the true Easter thought. And this will still be possible if there arises a true conception of the body, soul and spirit of man, and of the destinies of body, soul and spirit, in the physical world, the soul-world and the spiritual world of Heaven.

We should not underestimate the significance it once held for mankind to focus the whole attention during the year on a festival-time. Although in our time the celebration of religious festivals is largely a matter of habit, it was not always so. There were times when people united their consciousness with the course of the year; when, let us say, at the beginning of the year, they felt themselves standing within the course of time in such a way that they said to themselves: “There is such and such a degree of cold or warmth now; there are certain relationships among the other weather conditions, certain relationships also between the growth or non-growth in plants or animals.”—People experienced along with Nature the gradual changes and metamorphoses she went through. But they shared this experience with Nature in such a way—when their consciousness was united with the natural phenomena—that they oriented this consciousness toward a specific festival. Let us say, at the beginning of the year, through the various feeling perceptions associated with the passing of winter, the consciousness was directed toward the Easter time, or in the fall, with the fading away of life, toward Christmas. Then men's souls were filled with feelings which found expression in the way they related themselves to what the festivals meant to them.

Thus people partook in the course of the year, and this participation meant for the most part permeating with spirit not only what they saw and heard around them but what they experienced with their whole human being. They experienced the course of the year as an organic life process, just as in the human being when he is a child we relate the utterances of the childish soul with the awkward movements of a child, or its imperfect way of speaking. As we connect specific soul-experiences with the change of teeth, other soul experiences with the later bodily changes, so men once saw the ruling and weaving of the spiritual in the successive changes of outer nature, in growth and decline, or in a waxing followed by a waning.

Now all this cannot help affecting the whole way man feels himself as earthly man in the universe. Thus we can say that in that period at the beginning of our reckoning of time, when the remembrance of the Event of Golgotha began to be celebrated which later became the Easter festival—in that period in which the Easter festival was livingly felt and perceived, when man still took part in the turning of the year as I have just described it—then it was in essence so, that people felt their own lives surrendered, given over to the outer spiritual-physical world. Their feeling told them that in order to make their lives complete, they had need of the vision of the Entombment and the Resurrection, of that sublime image of the Mystery of Golgotha.

But it is from filling the consciousness in such a way that inspirations arise for men. People are not always conscious of these inspirations, but it is a secret of human evolution that from these religious attitudes toward the phenomena of the world, inspirations for the whole of life proceed.

First of all, we must understand clearly that during a certain epoch, during the Middle Ages, the people who oriented the spiritual life were priests, and those priests were concerned above all with the ordering of the festivals. They set the tone for the celebration of the festivals. The priesthood was that group of men who presented the festivals before the rest of mankind, before the laity, and who gave the festivals their content. In so doing the priests themselves felt this content very deeply; and the entire soul-condition that resulted from the inspiring effect of the festivals was expressed in the rest of the soul-life.

The Middle Ages would not have produced what is called Scholasticism—the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus and the other Scholastics—if this philosophy, this world conception, with all its social consequences, had not been inspired by the most important thought of the Church, by the Easter thought. In the vision of the descending Christ, Who lives for a time in man on Earth and then goes through the Resurrection, that soul impulse was given which led to the particular relation between faith and science, between knowledge and revelation which was agreed upon by the Scholastics. That out of man himself, only knowledge of the sensible world can be acquired, whereas everything connected with the super-sensible world has to be gained through revelation—this was determined basically by the way the Easter thought followed upon the Christmas thought.

And if, in turn, the idea-world of natural science today is totally the product of Scholasticism, as I have often explained to you, we must then say: “Although the natural science of the present is not aware of it, its knowledge is essentially a direct imprint of the Easter thought which prevailed in the early Middle Ages and then became paralyzed in the later Middle Ages and in modern times.” Notice the way natural science applies in its ideas what is so popular today and indeed dominates our culture: it devotes its ideas entirely to dead nature; it considers itself incapable of rising above dead nature. This is a result of that inspiration which was stimulated by viewing the Laying in the Grave.

As long as people were able to add the Resurrection to the Entombment as something to which they looked up, they then added also the revelation concerning the super-sensible to mere outer sense-knowledge. But as it became more and more common to view the Resurrection as an inexplicable and therefore unjustifiable miracle, revelation—that is, the super-sensible world—came to be repudiated. The present-day natural scientific view is inspired solely by the conception of Good Friday and lacks any conception of Easter Sunday.

We need to recognize this inner connection: The inspired element is always that which is experienced within all the festival moods in relation to Nature. We must come to know the connection between this inspiring element and all that comes to expression in human life. When we once gain an insight into the intimate connection that exists between this living-oneself-into the course of the year and what men think, feel, and will, then we shall also recognize how significant it would be if we were to succeed, for example, in making the Michael festival in autumn a reality; if we were really to succeed, out of spiritual foundations, out of esoteric foundations, in making the autumn Michael festival something that would pass over into men's consciousness and again work inspiringly.

If the Easter thought were to receive its coloration through the fact that to the Easter thought “He has been laid in the grave and is arisen” the other thought is added, the human thought, “He is arisen and may be laid in the grave without perishing”—If this Michael thought could become living, what tremendous significance just such an event could have for men's whole perceiving (Empfindung), and feeling and willing—and how this could “live itself into” the whole social structure of mankind!

My dear friends, all that people are hoping for from a renewal of the social life will not come about from all the discussions and all the institutions based on what is externally sensible. It will be able to come about only when a mighty inspiration-thought goes through mankind, when an inspiration-thought takes hold of mankind through which the moral-spiritual element will once again be felt and perceived along with the natural-sensible element.

People today are like earthworms, I might say, looking for sunlight under the ground, while to find the sunlight they need to come forth above the surface of the earth. Nothing in reality will be accomplished by all of today's organizations and plans for reform; something can be achieved only by the mighty impact of a thought-impulse drawn out of the spirit. For it must be clear to us that the Easter thought itself can only attain its new “nuance” through being complemented by the Michael thought.

Let us consider this Michael thought somewhat more closely. If we look at the Easter thought, we have to consider that Easter occurs at the time of the bursting and sprouting life of spring. At this time the Earth is breathing out her soul-forces, in order that these soul-forces may be permeated again by the astral element surrounding the Earth, the extra-earthly, cosmic element. The Earth is breathing out her soul. What does this mean?

It means that certain elemental beings which are just as much in the periphery of the Earth as the air is or as the forces of growth are—that these unite their own being with the out-breathed Earth soul in those regions in which it is spring. These beings float and merge with the out-breathed Earth soul. They become dis-individualized; they lose their individuality and rise in the general earthly soul element. We see countless elemental beings in spring just around Easter time in the final stage of the individual life which was theirs during the winter. We see them merging into the general earth soul element and rising like a sort of cloud (red, yellow, with green). I might say that during the wintertime these elemental beings are within the soul element of the Earth, where they had become individualized; before this Easter time they had a certain individuality, flying and floating about as individual beings. During Easter time we see them come together in a general cloud (red), and form a common mass within the Earth soul (green). But by so doing these elemental beings lose their consciousness to a certain degree and enter into a sort of sleeping condition. Certain animals sleep in the winter; these elemental beings sleep in summer. This sleep is deepest during St. John's time, when they are completely asleep. Then they begin once more to individualize, and when the Earth breathes in again at Michaelmas, at the end of September, we can see them already as separate beings again.

Man needs these elemental beings... This is not in his consciousness, but man needs them nonetheless, in order to unite them with himself, so that he can prepare his future. And man could unite these elemental beings with himself, if at a certain festival time—it would have to be at the end of September—he could perceive with a special inner soul-filled liveliness how Nature herself changes toward the autumn; if he could perceive how the animal and plant life recedes, how certain animals begin to seek their shelters against the winter; how the plant leaves get their autumn coloring; how all Nature fades and withers.

It is true that spring is fair, and it is a fine capacity of the human soul to perceive the beauty of the spring, the growing, sprouting, burgeoning life. But to be able to perceive also when the leaves fade and take on their fall coloring, when the animals creep away—to be able to feel how in the sensible which is dying away, the gleaming, shining, soul-spiritual element arises—to be able to perceive how with the yellowing of the leaves there is a descent of the springing and sprouting life, but how the sensible becomes yellow in order that the spiritual can live in the yellowing as such—to be able to perceive how in the falling of the leaves the ascent of the spirit takes place, how the spiritual is the counter-manifestation of the fading sense-perceptible; this should as a perceptive feeling for the spirit—ensoul the human being in autumn! Then he would prepare himself in the right way precisely for Christmastide.

Man should become permeated, out of anthroposophical spiritual science, by the truth that it is precisely the spiritual life of man on Earth which depends on the declining physical life. Whenever we think, the physical matter in our nerves is destroyed; the thought struggles up out of the matter as it perishes. To feel the becoming of the thought in one's self, the gleaming up of the idea in the human soul, in the whole human organism of man to be akin to the yellowing leaves, the withering foliage, the drying and shriveling of the plant world in Nature; to feel the kinship of man's spiritual “being-ness” with Nature's spiritual “being-ness”—this can give man that impulse which strengthens his will, that impulse which points man to the permeation of his will with spirituality.

In so doing, however, in permeating his will with spirituality, the human being becomes an associate of the Michael activity on earth. And when man lives with Nature in this way as autumn approaches and brings this living-with-Nature to expression in an appropriate festival content, then he will be able truly to perceive the completing (Erganzung) of the Easter mood. But by means of this, something else will become clear to him.—You see, what man thinks, feels, and wills today is really inspired by the Easter mood, which is actually one-sided. This Easter mood is essentially a result of the sprouting, burgeoning life, which causes everything to merge as in a pantheistic unity. Man is surrendered to the unity of Nature, and to the unity of the world generally. This is also the structure of our spiritual life today. Man wants everything to revert to a unity, to a monon; he is either a devotee of universal spirit or universal nature; and he is accordingly either a spiritualistic Monist or a materialistic Monist. Everything is included in an indefinite unity. This is essentially the spring mood.

But when we look into the autumn mood, with the rising and becoming free of the spiritual, and the dropping away and withering of the sensible (red), then we have a view of the spiritual as such, and the sensible as such.

The sprouting plant in the spring has the spiritual within its sprouting and growing; the spiritual is mingled with the sensible; we have essentially a unity. The withering plant lets the leaf fall, and the spirit rises; we have the spirit, the invisible, super-sensible spirit, and the material falling out of it. I would say that it is just as if we had in a container, first, a uniform fluid in which something is dissolved, and then by some process we should cause this to separate from the fluid and fall to the bottom as sediment. We have now separated the two which were united, which had formed a unity.

The spring tends to weave everything together, to blend everything into a vague, undifferentiated unity. The view of the autumn, if we only look at it in the right way, if we contrast it in the right way with the view of the spring, calls attention to the way the spiritual works on the one side and the physical-material on the other. The Easter thought loses nothing of value if the Michaelmas thought is added to it. We have on the one side the Easter thought, where everything appears—I might say—as a pantheistic mixture, a unity. Then we have what is differentiated; but the differentiation does not occur in any irregular, chaotic fashion. We have regularity throughout.

Think of the cyclic course: joining together, intermingling, unifying; an intermediate state when the differentiating takes place; the complete differentiation; then again the merging of what was differentiated within the uniform, and so forth. There you see always besides these two conditions yet a third: you see the rhythm between the differentiated and the undifferentiated, in a certain way, between the in-breathing of what was differentiated-out and the out-breathing again, an intermediate condition. You see a rhythm: a physical-material, a spiritual, a working-in-each-other of the physical-material and the spiritual: a soul element.

But the important thing is this: not to stop with the common human fancy that everything must be led back to a unity; thereby everything, whether the unity is a spiritual or a material one, is led back to the indefiniteness of the cosmic night. In the night all cows are gray; in spiritual Monism all ideas are gray; in material Monism they are likewise gray. These are only distinctions of perceiving; they are of no concern for a higher view. What matters is this: that we as human beings can so unite ourselves with the cosmic course that we are in a position to follow the living transition from the unity into the trinity, the return from trinity into unity. When, by complementing the Easter thought with the Michael thought in this way we have become able to perceive rightly the primordial trinity in all existence, then we shall take it into our whole attitude of soul. Then we shall be in a position to understand that actually all life depends upon the activity and the interworking of primordial trinities. And when we have the Michael festival inspiring such a view in the same way that the one-sided Easter festival inspired the view now existing, then we shall have an inspiration, a Nature/Spirit impulse, to introduce threefoldness, the impulse of threefoldness into all the observing and forming of life. And it depends finally and only upon the introduction of this impulse, whether the destructive forces in human evolution can be transformed once more into ascending forces.

One might say that when we spoke of the threefold impulse it was in a certain sense a test of whether the Michael thought is already strong enough so that it can be felt how such an impulse flows directly out of the forces that shape the time. It was a test of the human soul, of whether the Michael thought is strong enough as yet in a large number of people. Well, the test yielded a negative result. The Michael thought is not strong enough in even a small number of people for it to be perceived truly in all its time-shaping power and forcefulness. And it will indeed hardly be possible, for the sake of new forces of ascent, to unite human souls with the original formative cosmic forces in the way that is necessary, unless such an inspiring force as can permeate a Michael festival—unless, that is to say, a new formative impulse—can come forth from the depths of the esoteric life.

If instead of the passive members of the Anthroposophical Society, even only a few active members could be found, then it would become possible to set up further deliberations to consider such a thought. It is essential to the Anthroposophical Society that while stimuli within the Society should of course be carried out, the members should actually attach primary value, I might say, to participating in what is coming to pass. They may perhaps focus the contemplative forces of their souls on what is taking place, but the activity of their own souls does not become united with what is passing through the time as an impulse. Hence, with the present state of the Anthroposophical Movement, there can of course be no question of considering as part of its activity anything like what has just now been spoken of as an esoteric impulse. But it must be understood how mankind's evolution really moves, that the great sustaining forces of humanity's world-evolution come not from what is propounded in superficial words, but from entirely different quarters.

This has always been known in ancient times from primeval elementary clairvoyance. In ancient times it was not the custom for the young people to learn, for example, that there are so and so many chemical elements; then another is discovered and there are then 75, then 76; another is discovered and there are 77. One cannot anticipate how many may still be discovered. Accidentally, one is added to 75, to 76, and so on. In what is adduced here as number, there is no inner reality. And so it is everywhere. Who is interested today in anything that would bring to revelation, let us say, that a systematic threefoldness or trinity prevails in plants! Order after order is discovered, species after species; and they are counted just as though one were counting a chance pile of sticks or stones. But the working of number in the world rests on a real quality of being, and this quality must be fathomed. Only think how short a time lies behind us since knowledge of substance was led back to the trinity of the salty, the mercurial, and the phosphoric; how in this a trinity of archetypal forces was seen; how everything that appeared as individual had to be fitted into one or another of the three archetypal forces.

And it is different again when we look back into still earlier times in which it was easier for people to come to something like this because of the very situation of their culture; for the Oriental cultures lay nearer to the Torrid Zone, where such things were more readily accessible to the ancient elementary clairvoyance. Today, however, it is possible to come to these things in the Temperate Zone through free, exact clairvoyance.... Yet people want to go back to the ancient cultures! In those days people did not distinguish spring, summer, autumn, winter. To distinguish spring, summer, autumn, winter leads us to a mere succession because it contains the “four.” It would have been quite impossible for the ancient Indian culture, for example, to think of something like the course of the year as ruled by the four, because this contains nothing of the archetypal forms underlying all activity.

When I wrote my book, Theosophy, it was impossible simply to list in succession physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego, although we can summarize it this way once the matter is before us, once it is inwardly understood. I had therefore to arrange them according to the number three: physical body, ether body, astral body, forming the first trinity. Then comes the trinity interwoven with it: sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul; then the trinity interwoven with this: spirit self, life spirit, spirit man—three times three interwoven with one another in such a way as to become seven.

Only when we look at the present stage of mankind's evolution does the four appear, which is really a secondary number. If we want to see the inwardly active principle, if we want to see the formative process, we must see forming and shaping as associated with threefoldness, with trinity.

Hence, the ancient Indian view was of a year divided into a hot season, which would approximate our months of April, May, June, July; a wet season, comprising approximately our months, August, September, October, November; and a cold season, which would include our months, December, January, February, March. The boundaries do not need to be rigidly fixed according to the months but are only approximate; they can be thought of as shifting. But the course of the year was thought of according to the principle of the “three.”

And thus man's whole state of soul would be imbued with the predisposition to observe this primal trinity in all weaving and working, and hence to interweave it also into all human creating and shaping. We can even say that it is only possible to have true ideas of the free spiritual life, the life of rights, the social-economic life, when we perceive in the depths this triple pulse of cosmic activity, which must also permeate human activity.

Any reference to this sort of thing today is regarded as some sort of superstition, whereas it is considered great wisdom simply to count “one” and again “one,” “two,” “three,” and so on. But Nature does not take such a course. If we look, however, only at a realm in which everything is woven together, as is the case with Nature in springtime—which of course we must look at if we want to observe the interweaving of things—then we can never restore the pulse of three.

But when anyone follows the whole course of the year, when he sees how the “three” is organized, how the spiritual and the physical-material life are present as a duality, and the rhythmic interweaving of the two as the third, then he perceives this three-in-one, one-in-three, and learns to know how the human being can place himself in this cosmic activity: three to one, one to three.

It would become the whole disposition of the human soul to permeate the cosmos, to unite itself with cosmic worlds, if once the Michael thought could awaken as a festival thought in such a way that we were to place a Michael festival in the second half of September alongside the Easter festival; if to the thought of the resurrection of the God after death could be added the thought, produced by the Michael force, of the resurrection of man from death, so that man through the Resurrection of Christ would find the force to die in Christ. This means, taking the risen Christ into one's soul during earthly life, so as to be able to die in Him—that is, to be able to die, not at death but when one is living.

Such an inner consciousness as this would result from the inspiring element that would come from a Michael service. We can realize full well how far removed from any such idea is our materialistic time, which is also a time grown narrow-minded and pedantic. Of course, nothing can be expected of us, so long as it remains dead and abstract. But if with the same enthusiasm with which festivals were once introduced in the world when people had the force to form festivals,—if such a thing happens again, then it will work inspiringly. Indeed it will work inspiringly for our whole spiritual and our whole social life. Then that which we need will be present in life: not abstract spirit on one hand and spirit-void nature on the other, but Nature permeated with spirit, and spirit forming and shaping naturally. For these are one, and they will once again weave religion, science, and art into oneness, because they will understand how to conceive the trinity in religion, science, and art in the sense of the Michael thought, so that these three can then be united in the right way in the Easter thought, in the anthroposophical shaping and forming. This can work religiously, artistically, cognitionally, and can also differentiate religiously, cognitionally. Then the anthroposophical impulse would consist in perceiving in the Easter season the unity of science, religion, and art; and then at Michaelmas perceiving how the three—who have one mother, the Easter mother—how the three become “sisters” and stand side by side, but mutually complement one another. Then the Michael thought which should become living as a festival in the course of the year, would be able to work inspiringly on all domains of human life.

With such things as these, which belong to the truly esoteric, we should permeate ourselves, at least in our cognition, to begin with. If then the time could come when there are actively working personalities, such a thing could actually become an impulse which singly and alone would be able, in the present condition of humanity, to replace the descending forces with ascending ones.

The essential purpose of the lectures I have been giving here for some weeks past was to show how through his spiritual life man partakes in what we may call the world of the Stars, just as through his physical life on Earth he partakes in earthly existence, earthly happenings. In the light of the outlook acquired through Anthroposophy we distinguish in man the forces that lie in his physical body and in his etheric or formative-forces body, and those that lie in his Ego and his astral body. You know, of course, that these two sides of his being are separated whenever he sleeps. And now we will think for a short time of a man while he is asleep. On the one side the physical body and the etheric body lie there in a state of unconsciousness; but the Ego and the astral body are also without consciousness.

We may now ask: Are these two unconscious sides of human nature also related during sleep?—We know indeed that in the waking state, where the ordinary consciousness of modern man functions, the two sides are related through thinking, through feeling and through willing. We must therefore picture to ourselves that when the Ego and astral body plunge down, as it were, into the etheric body and the physical body, thinking, feeling, and willing arise from this union.

Now when man is asleep, thinking, feeling, and willing cease. But when we consider his physical body we shall have to say: All the forces which, according to our human observation belong to Earth-existence are active in this physical body. This physical body can be weighed; put it on scales and it will prove to have a certain weight. We can investigate how material processes take their course within it—or at least we can imagine hypothetically that this is possible. We should find in it material processes that are a continuation of those processes to be found outside in Earth-existence; these continue within man's physical body in the process of nutrition. In his physical body we should also find what is achieved through the breathing process. It is only what proceeds from the head-organization of man, all that belongs to the system of senses and nerves, that is either dimmed or plunged in complete darkness during sleep.

If we then pass on to consider the etheric body which permeates the physical, it is by no means so easy to understand how this etheric body works during sleep. Anyone, however, who is already versed to a certain extent in what Spiritual Science has to say about man will realize without difficulty how through his etheric body the human being lives, even while asleep, amid all the conditions of the ether-world and all the etheric forces surrounding existence on Earth. So that we can say: Within the physical body of man while he is asleep, everything that belongs to Earth-existence is active. So too in the etheric body all that belongs to the ether-world enveloping and permeating the Earth is active.

But matters become more difficult when we turn our attention—naturally our soul's attention—to what is now (during sleep) outside the physical and etheric bodies, namely, to the Ego and astral body of man. We cannot possibly accept the idea that this has anything to do with the physical Earth, or with what surrounds and permeates the Earth as ether. As to what takes place during sleep, I indicated it to you in a more descriptive way in the lectures given here a short time ago, and I will outline it today from a different point of view. We can in reality only understand what goes on in the Ego and astral body of man when with the help of Spiritual Science we penetrate into what takes place on and around the Earth over and above the physical and etheric forces and activities.

To begin with, we turn our gaze upon the plant-world. Speaking in the general sense and leaving out of account evergreen trees and the like—we see the plant-world sprouting out of the Earth in spring. We see the plants becoming richer and richer in color, more luxuriant, and then in autumn fading away again. In a certain sense we see them disappear from the Earth when the Earth is covered with snow.

But that is only one aspect of the unfolding of the plant-world. Physical knowledge tells us that this unfolding of the plant-world in spring and its fading towards autumn is connected with the Sun, also that, for example, the green coloring of the plants can be produced only under the influence of sunlight. Physical knowledge, therefore, shows us what comes about in the realm of physical effects; but it does not show us that while all the budding, the blossoming and withering of the plants is going on, spiritual events are also taking place. In reality, just as in the physical human organism there is for example the circulation of the blood, just as etheric processes express themselves in the physical organism as vascular action and so forth, and just as this physical organism is permeated by the soul and spirit, so also the processes of sprouting, greening, blossoming and fading of the plants which we regard as physical processes, are everywhere permeated by workings of the cosmic world of soul and spirit.

Now when we look into the countenance of a man and his glance falls on us, when we see his expression, maybe the flushing of the face, then indeed the eyes of our soul are looking right through the physical to the soul and spirit. Indeed, it cannot be otherwise in our life among our fellow-men. In like manner we must accustom ourselves also to see spirit-and-soul in the physiognomy—if I may call it so—and changing coloring of the plant-world on our Earth.

If we are only willing to recognize the physical, we say that the Sun's warmth and light work upon the plants, forming in them the saps, the chlorophyll and so forth. But if we contemplate all this with spiritual insight, if we take the same attitude to this plant-physiognomy of the Earth as we are accustomed to take to the human physiognomy, then something unveils itself to us that I should like to express with a particular word, because this word actually conveys the reality.

The Sun, of which we say, outwardly speaking, that it sends its light to the Earth, is not merely a radiant globe of gas but infinitely more than that. It sends its rays down to the Earth but whenever we look at the Sun it is the outer side of the rays that we see. The rays have, however, an inner side. If someone were able to look through the Sun's light, to regard the light only as an outer husk and look through to the soul of it, he would behold the Soul-Power, the Soul-Being of the Sun. With ordinary human consciousness we see the Sun as we should see a man who was made of papier-maché. An effigy in which there is nothing but the form, the lifeless form, is of course something different from the human being we actually see before us. In the case of the living human being, we see through this outer form and perceive soul-and-spirit. For ordinary consciousness the Sun is changed as it were into a papier-maché cast. We do not see through its outer husk that is woven of Light.

But if we were able to see through this, we should see the soul-and-spirit essence of the Sun. We can be conscious of its activity just as we are conscious of the physical papier-maché husk of the Sun. From the standpoint of physical knowledge we say: ‘The Sun shines upon the Earth; it sparkles upon the stones, upon the soil. The light is thrown back and thereby we see everything that is mineral. The rays of the Sun penetrate into the plants, making them green, making them bud.’—All that is external. If we see the soul-and-spirit essence of the Sun, we cannot merely say: ‘The sunlight sparkles on the minerals, is reflected, enabling us to see the minerals,’ or, ‘The light and heat of the Sun penetrate into the plants, making them verdant’—but we shall have to say, meaning now the countless spiritual Beings who people the Sun and who constitute its soul and spirit: ‘The Sun dreams and its dreams envelop the Earth and fashion the plants.’

If you picture the surface of the Earth with the physical plants growing from it, coming to blossom, you have there the working of the physical rays of the Sun. But above it is the weaving life of the dream-world of the Sun—a world of pure Imaginations. And one can say: When the mantle of snow melts in the spring, the Sun regains its power, then the Sun-Imaginations weave anew around the Earth. These Imaginations of the Sun are Imaginative forces, playing in upon the world of plants. Now although it is true that this Imaginative world—this Imaginative atmosphere surrounding the Earth—is very specially active from spring until autumn in any given region of the Earth, nevertheless this dreamlike character of the Sun's activity is also present in a certain way during the time of winter. Only during winter the dreams are, as it were, dull and brooding, whereas in summer they are mobile, creative, formative. Now it is in this element in which the Sun-Imaginations unfold that the Ego and astral body of man live and weave when they are outside the physical and etheric bodies.

You will realize from what I have said that sleep in summer is actually quite a different matter from sleep in winter, although in the present state of evolution, man's life and consciousness are so dull and lacking in vitality that these things go unperceived. In earlier times men distinguished very definitely through their feelings between winter-sleep and summer-sleep, and they knew too what meaning winter-sleep and summer-sleep had for them. In those ancient times men knew that of summer-sleep they could say: During the summer the Earth is enveloped by picture-thoughts. And they expressed this by saying: The Upper Gods come down during the summer and hover around the Earth; during the winter the Lower Gods ascend out of the Earth and hover around it.—This Imaginative world, differently constituted in winter and in summer, was conceived as the weaving of the Upper and the Lower Gods. But in those olden times it was also known that man himself, with his Ego and his astral body, lives in this world of weaving Imaginations.

Now the very truths of which I have here spoken, show us, if we ponder them in the light of Spiritual Science, in what connection man stands, even during his earthly existence, with the extra-earthly Universe. You see, in summer—when it is summer in any region of the Earth—the human being during his sleep is always woven around by a sharply contoured world of Cosmic Imaginations. The result is that during the time of summer he is, so to speak, pressed near to the Earth with his soul and spirit. During the time of winter it is different. During winter the contours, the meshes, of the Cosmic Imaginations widen out, as it were. During the summer we live with our Ego and astral body while we are asleep within very clearly defined Imaginations, within manifold figures and forms. During winter the figures around the Earth are wide-meshed and the consequence of this is that whenever autumn begins, that which lives in our Ego and astral body is borne far out into the Universe by night. During summer and its heat, that which lives in our Ego and astral body remains more, so to speak, in the psycho-spiritual atmosphere of the human world. During winter this same content is borne out into the far distances of the Universe. Indeed without speaking figuratively, since one is saying something that is quite real, one can say: that which man cultivates in himself, in his soul, and which through his Ego and astral body he can draw out from his physical and etheric bodies between the times of going to sleep and waking—that stores itself up during the summer and streams out during winter into the wide expanse of the Cosmos.

Now we cannot conceive that we men shut ourselves away, as it were, in earthly existence and that the wide Universe knows nothing of us. It is far from being so. True, at the time of Midsummer man can conceal himself from the Spirits of the Universe, and he may also succeed in harboring reprehensible feelings of evil. The dense net of Imaginations does not let these feelings through; they still remain. And at Christmastime the Gods look in upon the Earth and everything that lives in man's nature is revealed and goes forth with his Ego and astral being. Using a picture which truly represents the facts, we may say: In winter the windows of the Earth open and the Angels and Archangels behold what men actually are on the Earth.

We on Earth have gradually accustomed ourselves in modern civilization to express all that we allow to pass as knowledge in humdrum, dry, unpoetic phrases. The higher Beings are ever poets, therefore we never give a true impression of their nature if we describe it in barren physical words; we must resort to words such as I have just now used: at Christmastime the Earth's windows open and through these windows the Angels and Archangels behold what men's deeds have been the whole year through. The Beings of the higher Hierarchies are poets and artists even in their thinking. The logic we are generally at pains to apply is only an outcome of the Earth's gravity—by which I do not at all imply that it is not highly useful on Earth.

It is what lives in the minds and hearts of men as I have just pictured it, that is of essential interest to these higher Beings; the Angels who look in through the Christmas windows are not interested in the speculations of professors; they overlook them. Nor, to begin with, are they much concerned with a man's thoughts. It is what goes on in his feelings, in his heart, that in its cosmic aspect is connected with the Sun's yearly course. So it is not so much whether we are foolish or clever on Earth that comes before the gaze of the Divine-Spiritual Beings at the time of Christmas, but simply whether we are good or evil men, whether we feel for others or are egoists. That is what is communicated to the cosmic worlds through the course of the yearly seasons.

You may believe that our thoughts remain near the Earth, because I have said that the Angels and Archangels are not concerned with them when they look in through the Christmas windows. They are not concerned with our thoughts because, if I may use a rather prosaic figure of speech, they receive the richer coinage, the more valuable coinage that is minted by the soul-and-spirit of man. And this more valuable coinage is minted by the heart, the feelings, by what a man is worth because of what his heart and feeling contain. For the Cosmos, our thoughts are only the small change, the lesser coinage, and this lesser coinage is spied out by subordinate spiritual beings every night. Whether we are foolish or clever is spied out for the Cosmos every night—not indeed for the very far regions of the Cosmos but only for the regions around the Earth—spied out by beings who are closest to the Earth in its environment and therefore the most subordinate in rank. The daily revolution of the Sun takes place in order to impart to the Cosmos the worth of our thoughts. Thus far do our thoughts extend; they belong merely to the environment of the Earth. The yearly revolution of the Sun takes place in order to carry our heart-nature, our feeling-nature, farther out into the cosmic worlds.

Our will-nature cannot be carried in this way out into the Cosmos, for the cycle of the day is strictly regulated. It runs its course in twenty-four hours. The yearly course of the Sun is strictly regulated too. We perceive the regularity of the daily cycle in the strictly logical sequences of our thoughts. The regularity of the yearly cycle—we perceive the after-effect of this in our heart and soul, in that there are certain feelings which say to one thing that a man does: it is good, and to another: it is bad.

But there is a third faculty in man, namely, the will. True, the will is bound up with feeling, and feeling cannot but say that certain actions are morally good, and others morally not good. But the will can do what is morally good and also what is morally not good. Here, then, there is no strict regularity. The relation of our will to our nature as human beings is not strictly regulated in the sense that thinking and feeling are regulated. We cannot call a bad action good, or a good action bad, nor can we call a logical thought illogical, an illogical thought logical. This is due to the fact that our thoughts stand under the influence of the daily revolution of the Sun, our feelings under the influence of its yearly revolution. The will, however, is left in the hands of humanity itself on Earth. And now a man might say: ‘The most that happens to me is that if I think illogically, my illogical thoughts are carried out every night into the Cosmos and do mischief there—but what does that matter to me? I am not here to bring order into the Cosmos.’—Here on Earth, where his life is lived in illusion, a man might in certain circumstances speak like this, but between death and a new birth he would never do so. For between death and a new birth he himself is in the worlds in which he may have caused mischief through his foolish thoughts; and he must live through all the harm that he has done. So, too, between death and a new birth, he is in those worlds into which his feelings have flowed. But here again he might say on Earth: ‘What lives in my feelings evaporates into the Cosmos; but I leave it to the Gods to deal with any harm that may have been caused there through me. My will, however, is not bound on Earth by any regulation.’—

The materialist who considers that man's life is limited to the time between birth and death, can never conceive that his will has any cosmic significance; neither can he conceive that human thoughts or feelings have any meaning for the Cosmos. But even one who knows quite well that thoughts have a cosmic significance as the result of the daily revolution of the Sun, and feelings through the yearly revolution—even he, when he sees what is accomplished on the Earth by the good or evil will-impulses of man, must turn away from the Cosmos and to human nature itself in order to see how what works in man's will goes out into the Cosmos. For what works in man's will must be borne out into the Cosmos by man himself, and he bears it out when he passes through the gate of death. Therefore it is not through the daily or the yearly cycles but through the gate of death that man carries forth the good or the evil he has brought about here on Earth through his will.

It is a strange relationship that man has to the Cosmos in his life of soul. We say of our thoughts: ‘We have thoughts but they are not subject to our arbitrary will; we must conform to the laws of the Universe when we think, otherwise we shall come into conflict with everything that goes on in the world.’—If a little child is standing in front of me, and I think: That is an old man—I may flatter myself that I have determined the thought, but I am certainly out of touch with the world. Thus in respect of our thoughts we are by no means independent, so little independent that our thoughts are carried out into the Cosmos by the daily cycle of the Sun. Nor are we independent in our life of feelings, for they are carried out through the yearly cycle of the Sun. Thus even during earthly life, that which lives in our head through our thoughts and, through our feelings in our breast, does not live only within us but also partakes in a cosmic existence. That alone which lives in our will we keep with us until our death. Then, when we have laid aside the body, when we have no longer anything to do with earthly forces, we bear it forth with us through the gate of death.

Man passes through the gate of death laden with what has come out of his acts of will. Just as here on Earth he has around him all that lives in minerals, plants, animals and in physical humanity, all that lives in clouds, streams, mountains, stars, in so far as they are externally visible through the light—just as he has all this around him during his existence between birth and death, so he has a world around him when he has laid aside the physical and etheric bodies and has passed through the gate of death. In truth he has around him the very world into which his thoughts have entered every night, into which his feelings have entered with the fulfilment of every yearly cycle ... “That thou hast thought; that thou hast felt.” ... It now seems to him as though the Beings of the Hierarchies were bearing his thoughts and his feelings towards him. They have perceived it all, as I have indicated. His mental life and his feeling-life now stream towards him.

In earthly existence the Sun gives light from morning to evening; it goes down and night sets in. When we have passed through the gate of death, our wisdom rays out towards us as day; through our accumulated acts of folly, the spiritual lights grow dark and dim around us and it becomes night. Here on Earth we have day and night; when we have passed through the gate of death, we have as day and night the results of our wisdom and our foolishness. And what man experiences here on this Earth as spring, summer, autumn and winter in the yearly cycle, as changing temperatures and other sentient experiences, of all this he becomes aware—when he has passed through the gate of death—also as a kind of cycle, although of much longer duration. He experiences the warmth-giving, life-giving quality (life-giving, that is to say, for his spiritual Self) of his good feelings, of his sympathy with goodness; he experiences as icy cold his sympathy with evil, with the immoral. Just as here on Earth we live through the heat of summer and the cold of winter, so do we live after death warmed by our good feelings, chilled by our evil feelings; and we bear the effects of our will through these spiritual years and days. After death we are the product of our moral nature on Earth. And we have an environment that is permeated by our follies and our wisdom, by our sympathies and antipathies for the good.

So that we can say: Just as here on Earth we have the summer air around us giving warmth and life, and as we have the cold and frosty winter air around us, so, after death, we are surrounded by an atmosphere of soul-and-spirit that is warm and life-giving in so far as it is produced through our good feelings, and chilling in so far as it is produced through our evil feelings. Here on Earth, in certain regions at least, the summer and winter temperatures are the same for all of us. In the time after death, each human being has his own atmosphere, engendered by himself. And the most moving experiences after death are connected with the fact that one man lives in icy cold and the other, close beside him, in life-giving warmth.

Such are the experiences that may be undergone after death. And as I described in my book Theosophy, one of the main experiences passed through in the soul-world, is that those human beings who have harbored evil feelings here on Earth, must undergo their hard experiences in the sight of those who developed and harbored good feelings.

It can indeed be said: All that remains concealed to begin with in the inner being of man, discloses itself when he has passed through the gate of death. Sleep too acquires a cosmic significance, likewise our life during wintertime. We sleep every night in order that we may prepare for ourselves the light in which we must live after death. We go through our winter experiences in order to prepare the soul-spiritual warmth into which we enter after death. And into this atmosphere of the spiritual world which we have ourselves prepared we bear the effects of our deeds.

Here on Earth we live, through our physical body, as beings subject to earthly gravity. Through our breathing we live in the surrounding air, and far away we see the stars. When we have passed through the gate of death we are in the world of spirit-and-soul, far removed from the Earth; we are beyond the stars, we see the stars from the other side, look back to the world of stars. Our very being lives in the cosmic thoughts and cosmic forces. We look back upon the stars, no longer seeing them shine, but seeing instead the Hierarchies, the Spiritual Beings who have merely their reflection in the stars.

Thus man on Earth can gain more and more knowledge of what the nature of his life will be when he passes through the gate of death. There are people who say: ‘Why do I need to know all this? I shall surely see it all after death!’—That attitude is just as if a man were to doubt the value of eyesight. For as the Earth's evolution takes its course, man enters more and more into a life in which he must acquire the power to partake in these after-death experiences by grasping them, to begin with in thought, here on the Earth. To shut out knowledge of the spiritual worlds while we are on the Earth is to blind ourselves in soul and spirit after death. A man will enter the spiritual world as a cripple when he passes through the gate of death, if here, in this world, he disdains to learn about the world of spirit, for humanity is evolving towards freedom—towards free spiritual activity. This fact should become clearer and clearer to mankind and should make men realize the urgent necessity of gaining knowledge about the spiritual world.