The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eight days ago, we followed man through the various stages of the so-called spirit land, the Devachan. We saw how man's destiny unfolds in the spirit realm, in the Devachan, between two embodiments. We have seen that, depending on the degree of their development, human beings are able to soar ever higher and higher or ever longer and longer into the realms of this land of causes, in order to bring abilities into this earthly world from this land of causes for ever higher and higher development. The actual causes lie in his work and creativity in this spiritual realm. For those whose minds are open and awakened, in order to observe the spiritual conditions that always surround us, which I have described to you, during their embodiment, the three parts of the human being whose destiny we have come to know, always lie open before the mind's eye. These three parts of the human being, of which I have spoken as gradually enveloping themselves, as it were, leaving the earthly, the carnal shell – the one in so-called Kamaloka, the place of desires, of wishes ; the second in Devachan or the spiritual realm; and the third in the uppermost region of Devachan, where the deepest self is able to develop and unfold, in order to then return with increased power. These three parts of man are his so-called astral body, the body that encompasses all his desires, wishes and passions, everything that man has in common with the animal, everything that forms the mediation, so to speak, between his own spiritual nature and the sensual nature, everything that he lays aside in the land of purification, of cleansing, in Kamaloka.

And then he ascends to the land of the actual spirit, to the land of the spirits or to the Devachan, in order to discard his second body there as well, the body of the world of ideas, of the higher human abilities, which still chains him to the human and inhibits him, in order to then, as it were, be freed of the body, depending on the state of development, to linger for a longer or shorter time in the actual disembodied state of mind. We call that body of man, who rises up to these uppermost regions of the spiritual realm, who spreads his wings to unfold, we call this body the cause-bearer or causal body. This causal body, which we preserve between two incarnations, which we bring with us again and again, this body, which forms the cause of what we have brought upon ourselves, which carries us from one incarnation to the next, that is the one that lives in the uppermost region of Devachan. The other is the one who is in the second region of Devachan, who then immerses himself in the realm of desires, and that is the astral body, in order to then move into the carnal body. Every human being has these three bodies within them.

I have already spoken about the so-called aura. I have already said that the human being visible to physical eyes is enveloped in a cloud of light, in an oval shape that presents the most diverse light phenomena to those who are receptive to it. The egg is smaller and larger depending on the degree of development. It is small in the one who is still at the lowest level of spiritual development. In this case the aura is only a faint glow of light that spreads around the body, but it grows larger and larger the more incarnations the person has undergone and the higher and later the person's stage of development. Then this aura shows the most diverse light and color phenomena. This aura is threefold, and the view for this aura can also be threefold.

There are people with so-called “psychic vision” who are only able to see what is happening in the astral realm. They see only that as a light phenomenon, which can also be perceived in animals. They see what lives in a person in terms of desires, cravings and passions in the form of light phenomena. A person can also rise above this realm. Then the body of representation becomes visible to him, the higher spiritual possibilities of development as a second, finer substance, as an aura that radiates through and permeates the first.

And finally, there is that which spreads out as an even more ethereal substance within this second aura. This is present in a very weakly developed state in people at the lowest levels, but it is developed more and more highly and appears in a wonderful way in the high spiritual beings of our culture. This is what carries over from incarnation to incarnation, the causal body. It is also present in undeveloped people, but only small, like a small halo above their heads. The more a person develops, the more it expands and becomes, as it were, a sun. And the more it illuminates and glows through the being, the better one can see these three bodies distinctly, when one's spiritual vision is opened.

One can direct one's eyes only to the astral world, one can subtract what belongs to the lower and higher spheres and direct one's gaze only to the astral aura. Then one sees only the instincts, desires and passions as color phenomena in front of oneself. If you then focus your attention on the body of representation, you see the mental body. And if you look at the eternal, at the body of causes, you see the most luminous aura of the human being. This bearer of causes is only visible to those whose spiritual eye is awakened in the highest regions of the spiritual world.

This cause carrier, seen externally in its light appearance, shows us the most diverse sights in the most diverse people. If you look at an undeveloped person, be it a negro in Africa, or even an undeveloped person in our areas, a person who has not yet formed many thoughts, is not able to live much in the imagination, knows nothing of higher ideas or spiritual interests, who only lives in his animal instincts, in satisfying his hunger and his physical well-being, then, if we disregard all other auras and only look at the causal aura, it appears to us as a more or less dark oval. This indicates that the causal body is still underdeveloped, that the real self still has a long way to go before it develops. These are the people who show nothing but a few greenish or dirty indigo stripes in their brown ovals. These few stripes are the only indication of the causal or cause body. This is the sight that fills those who can observe the aura with sorrow, because it shows those who can observe how much we still have to do with undeveloped people. We can see how rays of light emerge in them when we transmit spiritual culture to them.

But even the lower mental body, the body of imagination of the undeveloped person, still shows the brownish form and a few developed greenish areas, which alternate with reddish areas or with areas that play into the bluish. These greenish and bluish parts become more and more frequent the more ideas are formed in the person concerned. And then, when we examine such a person for his astral body, we are suddenly confronted with appearances of almost terrible effect in the glaringly bright colors; we are confronted with blood-red clouds that fill almost the entire astral body, billowing about in confusion. Only at the upper or lower layer of the oval we see a greenish or indigo base, and that alternates with the brownish colorings, but also alternates with all kinds of formations, which differ according to the different temperaments. In the angry people we see red flashes flash through the astral body, in others we see bluish-gray clouds.

This is the aura of an undeveloped person. Then we have to look at the aura of a person at a higher level, that is, a person who has received a good education here in our area. In such a person, the causal body appears as a form that is already more endowed with colors, as a form that is permeated by beautiful colors. In this case, it is the green colors, green-yellow and yellow color nuances. These are the nuances that the European has. Only when these colors expand a little further does the lower spiritual body appear. And when we look at the astral body of a person, it generally appears to be somewhat similar in design to the astral body of an undeveloped person. Only the colors have different nuances. The undeveloped person has blackish colors; the more developed the person is, the brighter the colors. They are illuminated from within, they attract the gaze and have a sympathetic effect on the gaze.

And if we go to the highly developed spiritual person, to the one who has developed higher spiritual abilities within himself, who has already devoted himself to a spiritual life through many incarnations, then the astral body also appears in completely different transformations. It no longer appears interspersed with cloud-like formations, but radiates from within on a blue background. The cause body has a more or less light or dark blue coloration, and the eternal man radiates into this. The purer and nobler he develops in the spiritual, the more he shows the coloration of the spiritual. We see a beautiful golden-yellow radiance from the inside out, merging into radiance verging on rose-red, and these merge into beautiful bluish-violet radiance. The causal body is permeated by radiance, expanding more and more, taking on larger and larger dimensions. The adept rests in the midst of this causal body, which fades from golden yellow rays within to violet rays without, so that he is surrounded by this flood of light, enclosed by it, so that he can become so great that he can often exceed his human form ten, twenty, thirty times in length from top to bottom.

These are the causes of great leaders and guides of people. And if you then look for the body of the imagination of lower people, you will still find forms there, but you will find that they have become luminous, sparkling, radiant from within. We may well conclude that this is because what such people want and feel is shaped by the spirit, by spiritual abilities. These are the faculties that reveal themselves to the spiritual eye when it observes its surroundings. It sees what is transient and what is permanent.

All the bodies that I have mentioned, especially the astral body, which appears flooded in reddish shades, are completely lost in Kamaloka and Devachan. In the lower parts of Devachan and the astral plane, the finer parts dissolve. Man loses what he contains of lower sensual values. The astral body can completely dissolve in Kamaloka and only passes with the causal body, the spiritual body, to Devachan.

In the fourth region of Kamaloka, what we call human selfishness and human egoism is completely absorbed by matter. Whatever still chains itself to the world is lost in the fourth region. Man feels the worthlessness of base selfishness and begins to realize that he must stretch his wings, that he must comprehend what does not concern him. And when he arrives in the spiritual realm, his feelings, emotions and perceptions, which can be summarized by the word selfishness, have disappeared. He has reached the stage where he can experience, “That is you!” and “I am Brahma”. He can hand over the lower spiritual bodies to dissolution and take his self over into the higher realms of the spiritual realm, where it can fully unfold. Here everything appears to a person in its true form. Here he appears as what he is, as what has embodied itself.

The bluish oval appears as the actual body of the person, and within the bluish oval shines that which we must call the actual essence of the person. A person cannot yet have this body. It is woven from the three finest substances of the spirit world, and these show up in their pure bluish color. I emphasize that this pure bluish color can only be observed if one completely disregards what else the person has and only looks at the spiritual. So he appears only in his bluish oval, permeated by his essence.

This is what the Platonic philosophy called the so-called luminous man, the sparkling, the shining one. This is the same thing that the initiate Paul called the so-called spiritual body. This means nothing other than what we find here in the highest regions of Devachan. This fine blue body is woven from the finest fabrics of the spirit land, of Devachan. That which radiates and sparkles in it does not come from any of the worlds we have mentioned so far. What sparkles in this body comes from even higher worlds.

If you take the earthly world, the astral world and the spiritual world, the Devachan, you have the three worlds within which a person incarnates in the world. He always returns to develop new abilities there, which he then applies in the earthly world. These are the three worlds that Paul speaks of: the spiritual world, the soul world and the body world. Everything is woven into the physical body from these three. When we come into the physical world, we spread the physical covering around us. We take substances from physical matter, from the physical world. We live in some world with those substances taken from that world, so that when we descend from the spiritual realm, we first surround our real self with the body that is woven from the lower parts of the spiritual realm; this then descends into the astral world and forms the astral body. This finally attracts the physical materiality, and then the person is embodied again.

But what expands within the actual blue spiritual body, within this sparkling structure, is not from these three worlds. The real self does not come from these three worlds. What is wrapped around it as a blue oval is the uppermost, the finest, which is taken only from the spiritual realm. But that which is embodied, the self, comes from even higher realms. It comes from the actual divine home of man, from the regions which the theosophist calls the Budhi region and the Nirvana region. Man comes from these two regions.

The human being's essence rests in this spiritual body, which was present before man began to incarnate and which will again be present in other worlds when man ceases to incarnate. This is the actual, eternal, heavenly, divine essence of man. It is what Giordano Bruno called the eternal monad, which passes eternally through all embodiments, the heavenly self of man. This now participates in the manner indicated in what is gradually emerging. At first it radiates in a beautiful golden-yellow color, then it expands more and more, and in the outermost parts it takes on a violet-reddish color, depending on the various character traits that the person has acquired, because all of these exert their effects on the self. In a person who has developed the qualities of pride or ambition in his previous incarnations, we see how this golden, radiant part of the person takes on an orange-reddish coloration. This shows the effect that pride has had on the self. And in another way, other qualities show the influences that must be balanced. This is what has descended from even higher worlds to incarnate in our earthly world. This is what comes from Budhi and Nirvana; this is what we call Atma-Budhi, which is composed of the highest essence, which comes from the divine Being itself.

Last time I spoke about the fact that gradually, as a person passes through many incarnations, he ascends to the three higher regions of the spirit land, that is, each person will have to spend a more or less long time between two incarnations in the first higher region. Even the undeveloped savage experiences a glimpse of his Self in the spiritual realm, and his stay in this realm is getting longer and longer. And when the qualities of compassion, the higher spiritual qualities, are developed, then he ascends to the second region between two embodiments. And when he then returns to our earth, he has become what we call an emissary. Then he has become someone who can speak about the intentions of the world, then he is someone who, between two incarnations, has participated in the unveiling of the impulses of life, then he knows why the animal, the plant, and the human being develop. Then he can talk about the Earth, where it came from and what will happen to it in the future, then he can speak from experience about what theosophical wisdom reveals to us. When he has become a so-called initiate – that is, in the embodiment – then he knows from his own experience the nature of higher life and is able to recognize good. Then, in the next incarnation, he ascends to the highest region of the spiritual realm, where those who have the causes of world events clearly in view, even when embodied in the earthly world, reside.

And then the region is reached into which the structure of the higher worlds, the world of Budhi and the world of Nirvana, shines. Just as Budhi shines into our spiritual world, so the highest of things shines into it, the germs of the human self shine into it. These germs are there and enter the third world to envelop themselves in the substance of the third region. You may ask whether a seer, when he enters the third region of the spiritual world, can also see human beings in the state of germination. Yes, he can, because in this region that which belongs to prehistoric times has long since ceased to exist. The state of affairs is laid bare as if it were happening now, the state in which human souls have now begun to fulfill their development.

What Jacob Böhme expressed has come to pass with this man: if someone were to say to me, “Were you there when what you have told us about the beginning of earthly existence came about?” I could say, “Yes, I was there.” For in him the sense had long been opened that he could say that he had been there at the beginning, that he had really participated in the creation of the world.

What I have now related shows you that we are dealing with three worlds: the spiritual world, the astral world and the earthly or physical world. But this also shows that there are still higher worlds, which are the actual home of the human self. These three worlds are themselves created, formed, they have emerged from a spiritual essence. The sense world has a different origin in the spirit, and the astral world around us has its origin in the spirit. But as we develop more and more in the spiritual, we can investigate the causes of things. We can investigate what underlies the astral as spirit, and we can observe in the highest region of Devachan. But as long as what shines in the budhi does not shine in, we cannot speak of anything that belongs to what we call the deepest truths of world existence. We cannot speak, and we have no power to speak about the cause of evil, about the cause of imperfection, as long as we dwell in these three worlds. Within this world, we have evil alongside good, imperfection alongside perfection. It belongs to this world. It is grounded in this world that evil is added to good and imperfection to perfection. Answering this question requires that one recognize the meaning of existence. There is a meaning of existence, of life and of all becoming. One cannot recognize this if one remains only within the three worlds. And there is the question: Why is good mixed with evil and the perfect with the imperfect within the three worlds?

These three worlds are created from nirvana and budhi, and when we can see beyond that, in nirvana and budhi, then we see how evil, as it were, lies in the divine world order, from which good springs. Ultimately, all evil dissolves into good. According to the sayings of all great minds, good is the actual origin of the world. The world originates in the good. But how it does so, we cannot recognize in the three worlds. If we look beyond our three-worlds circle – I developed this in the first lessons – at the boundary of these three worlds, as it were from Budhi, some mysterious writing becomes perceptible. The Akasha writing appears. This is what is also communicated to us from the external world that does not belong to our three worlds. It contains the destiny of every single person and of all humanity. In this writing, the deeds of people are recorded, and the things that people themselves have entered in the book of guilt through their lives are recorded. Why man can become guilty in the succession of incarnations, that only becomes known at the sight of what has shone forth from the other spheres, when it is possible to read what is recorded in the akasha cloth. In it is written the law of karma.

This law can only be fully understood if one knows how all evil and imperfection dissolves into good, how even evil only contributes to the increase of good. When the highest self shines forth in man, then the great law of world justice is revealed, then the meaning of existence, the meaning of the world, is revealed to him. The world has its meaning from outside the three worlds, and man fathoms this meaning of the world when he rises above the three worlds of Devachan. It requires modesty. When man has found his innermost nature, when he has found in himself the living spirit that comes from the other worlds, when the shining spark has lit up in him, then the source of the shining spark is also revealed to him, and with it the reason for his existence. Then Budhi flows together with that which is above him, with that which is the meaning of the corporeal world. Then man begins to know what is one of the highest secrets of existence, why man is incarnated in this or that body.

With higher vision, we can easily see why a person forms a spiritual body around themselves and why they wrap themselves in an astral body. But now the mystery of earthly incarnation begins: why a person is born into this family, this country, this people. We know very specific human germs. That which is guided by entities of the highest order begins, by entities whose entity rests entirely in Budhi and Nirvana, by the entities we call Lipika, which govern the physical existence of the world, which determine the self to be born in this or that family. This is something that is connected to the deepest meaning of existence. Only when man has risen to the point of fathoming this meaning, do the scales that conceal the answer to the question “How is it that man is born in this body and carries this or that suffering, this or that imperfection through this or that body?” also disappear.

Man is equipped for a certain fate through his physical existence. This is one of the great questions of existence, which is connected to the whole meaning of existence, which is revealed when one knows the decrees of Lipika, the lords of fate. Christian esotericism has understood how to express this in a very beautiful way. Incidentally, you can find this secret in every religion. You just have to know how to read it. The Christian religion has also expressed the veiledness of this secret. You know the beings that live in the spiritual realm: angels or messengers. They have their task within Devachan, within their spiritual realm. The fact that they have their task here, not beyond Budhi or Nirvana, means that their views are bound to what is going on within the actual spiritual realm. But within the spiritual realm, the mystery of why this self dwells in this physical body and that in that is not revealed. That is why the Christian religion expresses it with the words: “The angels veil their faces from the mystery of the Incarnation and only say, ‘Holy, holy, holy’.”

This is just one example of how much can be found in the esotericism of the great religious beliefs if one only knows how to read them. Thus we have followed man through the three worlds and have reached the boundary where the destiny of these three worlds is written in monumental letters: that is the Akasha Chronicle. What shines from this Akasha Chronicle into these three worlds from the outside, as it were, appears to us when we are within these three worlds, in much the same way as when we look out into the starry sky and see, as it were, a heavenly writing in the constellations. Man comes to decipher this writing when he is able to work his way up to the highest regions of Devachan.

The initiates are able to read this Akashic writing and then, when man is able to read more or less of this Akashic writing, then he becomes a participant in the destiny of humanity, then he becomes one of the spiritual leaders of humanity, directing the forces for centuries to come, sending spiritual currents that do not come from the three worlds, but are sent into these three worlds from even higher worlds.

What a person experiences in the third spiritual world, what is known as the “bliss of Devachan”, what lives and flashes in us when we spend the interim between two embodiments in Devachan, that is the subject of the next few hours. I would like to explain why Devachan is called the “land of delights”, why it is called the heavenly region. This will be the subject of our next meditation.

I would like to add that from the boundary of this highest realm of Devachan, exalted masters of Budhi and Nirvana send great impulses to humanity, sending that which has an effect for centuries and making them the greatest guides in human history. They give the impulses, they create out of the mysterious, or according to Christian esotericism, out of that which causes the angels to veil their faces. They are the Messiahs, the greatest of all human leaders. They are named after the kingdom from which they come, from Budhi Buddha. Therefore, those who can teach what flows in from Budhi are called Christ. Buddha, Christ, they are the ones who send the truths from the higher regions into our three worlds. Such a one knows the world. He knows what lies beyond the three worlds. There lies that which we call the secret of evil. This is revealed at the boundary of devachan. There one comes to know the meaning of the world, what I have called the “Worv”. That is what gives the secret its sound. That is why Christ is called: the incarnate Word. That is why it is said: All things are made by the Word. That is why it is said in the Gospel: All things are made by the Word.

This is the sixth step, where the intentions and tendencies of humanity are determined. This is because the one who sends the great and high impulses into human history from this realm, because he knows and must know the secret that lies above the secret of good and evil, can be said to know more than the angels. This is also expressed by Christian esotericism: “Christ makes the angels his messengers.” Those who understand the depths of the Christian religion become theosophists, and true theosophists will not want to contribute to anything other than to the deepening of the core of truth in the great religions of humanity.

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.

We have often turned our gaze back to the views of older times, and we want to do so again today, with the aim of gaining some insights into history and the development of humanity. If we go back thousands of years in human development, for example to the times that we, in our terminology, refer to as the ancient Indian cultural period, we find that people's way of looking at things was quite different then than it is in our time, even if we take a period that is very far removed from that time. If we go back to those older times, we know that people simply did not see nature as we see it today. They perceived spiritual beings directly in everything, in the individual elements of the earth's surface, in mountains and rivers, but also in everything that immediately surrounds the earth, in clouds, in light, and so on. It would have been inconceivable for a person of those ancient times to speak of nature as we do. For he would have felt as we would feel if we were to sit opposite a collection of corpses and then say that we were among human beings. What presents itself to man as nature today, millennia before our era, man would have felt only as the corpse of nature. For in everything that surrounded him, he perceived the spiritual and soul-like.

We know that when today's humanity hears from poetry or from the messages of myths and legends how it was once believed that spiritual-soul qualities can be found in the source, in the flowing river, in the interior of the mountains, and so on, it believes that the ancients let their imagination run wild and that they were inventing. Well, that is a naive point of view. The ancients did not make things up at all, but they perceived the spiritual and soul just as one perceives colors, as one perceives the movements of tree leaves, and so on. They perceived the spiritual and soul directly, and they would have thought of what we call nature today as merely the corpse of nature. But in a certain sense, some individuals among these ancients strove to gain a different way of looking at things than that which was the general one.

You know, today, when people strive to gain a different view from the usual one, and when they are at all capable of doing so, they become 'studied people', they receive concepts that go beyond what they otherwise see only externally. Then they absorb science, as it is called, into themselves. This science did not exist in the times of which we are now speaking. But there were individuals who aspired to go beyond the general observation, beyond what one knew in everyday life. They just did not study as it is done today. They did certain exercises. These exercises were not like those we speak of today in anthroposophy, but they were exercises that were more closely tied to the human organism in those older times. For example, there were exercises through which the breathing process was trained to do something other than what it is by nature. So they did not sit in laboratories and do experiments, but they did, so to speak, experiments on themselves. They regulated their breathing. For example, they inhaled, held back their breath and tried to experience what happened inside the organism when the breath was altered in this way. These breathing exercises should not be copied today. But they were once a means by which people believed they could come to higher knowledge than they could come to if they simply observed nature with their ordinary perceptions, if they saw external natural things as we see them, but also saw the spiritual and soul-like in all natural things.

When people devoted themselves to such exercises, the nature of which, although in a weakened form, has been preserved in what is described today as yoga exercises from the Orient, when they thus changed their breathing in relation to ordinary breathing, then the spiritual-soul aspect disappeared from the view of the surroundings, and it was precisely through such breathing that nature became for these people as we ourselves see it today. So, in order to see nature as we see it today, such people first had to do exercises in those ancient times. Otherwise, spiritual-soul entities would have leapt out of all the beings around them for them to see. They drove away these spiritual-soul entities by changing their breathing process.

Thus they — if I use the term that is current today for those who aspire so high above the general contemplation — as “learned men” no longer aspired to have nature around them as ensouled and spiritualized, but to have it around them in such a way that they perceived it as a kind of corpse. One could also say that these people felt, as they looked out into nature, as if they were in a surging, billowing, soul-spiritual universe, but they felt within it as a person of the present day would feel when dreaming in vivid images and could hardly wake up from these dreams. That is how they felt. But what did these individuals — let us call them the scholars of that ancient time — achieve when, through such special exercises, they distinguished themselves from this living surging and killed it in contemplation, so that they really felt that they now had a dead, corpse-like thing around them? What did they strive for as a result?

They strove for a stronger sense of self. They strove for something through which they experienced themselves, through which they felt themselves. Today's man says every moment: “I am”. “I” is a word that he uses very frequently from morning till night, because it is natural to him, it is self-evident to him. For these ancient people, it was not a matter of course in their ordinary daily experience to pronounce the “I” or even the “I am”. They had to acquire this. To do so, they first had to do such exercises. And by doing these exercises, they came to such an inner experience that they could say with a certain truth: “I am”. Only by doing this did they come to the awareness of their own being.

So what we take for granted only became an experience for these people when they made an effort in an inner breathing process. They first had to, so to speak, kill the environment for contemplation, to awaken themselves. This is how they came to the conviction that they themselves are, that they could say “I am” to themselves. But with this “I am” they were given something that we take for granted again today. They were given the inner development of the intellectual. Through this they developed the possibility of having an inner, secluded thinking.

If we go back to times when the old oriental views set the tone for civilization, it was the case that people felt a souled nature in their everyday lives, but had a very weak sense of self, almost no sense of self at all, did not at all summarize this sense of self in the conviction “I am,” but that individual people who were trained by the mystery schools were led to experience this “I am.” But then they did not experience this “I am” in the way we take it for granted today, but in the moment when they were brought to it through their breathing process, to be able to say “I am” at all out of inner conviction, out of inner experience, they experienced something that even today's man does not really experience at first.

Think back to your childhood: you can only think back to a certain point, then it stops. You were once a baby, but you have no memory of what you experienced as a baby. Your ability to remember ends at some point. You were certainly already there, crawling around on the ground, being caressed by your mother or father. You may have wriggled and moved your hands, but you do not know in your ordinary consciousness what you experienced inwardly at that time. Nevertheless, it was a more active, more intense soul life than later on. For this more intense soul life, for example, has shaped your brain plastically, has permeated your rest of the body and shaped it plastically. There was an intense soul life present, and the old Indian felt transported into this soul life at the same moment that he said to himself, “I am”.

Imagine very vividly what that was like. He did not feel in the present moment when he said to himself “I am”; he felt transported back to his babyhood, he felt the way he felt in his babyhood, and from there he spoke to his whole later life. He did not have the feeling that he now But this was only drawn into this inner being after it had previously lived in the spiritual-soul world. That is, by first transporting himself back to his babyhood through his breathing process, this old Indian yogi became aware of the time before his existence on earth. It seemed to him like a memory. Just as if a person today remembers something that he experienced ten years ago, it was like the occurrence of a memory in the moment when the “I am” shot through the soul, when in this ancient Indian time a person strengthened himself inwardly by breathing exercises and killed the outside world around him, but made it alive, which was not his outside world now, but what the outside world was before man descended into the physical world.

In those days, if I may use a modern expression, which of course sounds infinitely philistine when I use it for those ancient times, one was really lifted out of one's present earthly existence and into the spiritual-soul existence through the study of yoga. One owed one's elevation into the spiritual-soul worlds to one's studies at that time. One had a somewhat different consciousness than we have today. But precisely when one was a yogi in the former sense, one could think – the other people could not think, the other people could only dream – but one thought into the supersensible world, from which one had descended into earthly existence.

This is also a characteristic of the time of the earth's development, which, if we characterize it somewhat roughly, preceded, for example, the Greco-Roman conceptions in the fourth post-Atlantean period. There, the “I am” had already penetrated more into people in their ordinary everyday consciousness. Admittedly, the verb in language at that time still contained the I; it was not yet as separate as it is in our language, but nevertheless there was already a distinct I-experience. This distinct I-experience was now a natural, self-evident fact of the inner life. But in contrast to this, outer nature was already more or less dead. The Greeks, after all, still had the ability to experience the two aspects side by side, and without any special training. They still clearly experienced the spiritual and soul-like in the source, in the river, in the mountain, in the tree, albeit weaker than people of older times. But at the same time, they could also perceive the dead in nature and have a sense of self. This gives the Greeks their special character. The Greek did not yet have the same view of the world as we do. He could develop concepts and ideas about the world like ours, but at the same time he could take those views seriously that were still given in images. He lived differently than we do today. For example, we go to the theater to be entertained. In ancient Greece, people only went to the theater for entertainment in the time of Euripides, if I may put it this way – hardly in the time of Sophocles, and certainly not in the time of Aeschylus or in even older times. In those times, people went to dramatic performances for different reasons. They had a clear sense that spiritual and soulful beings live in everything, in trees and bushes, in springs and rivers. When you experience these spiritual and soulful beings, you have moments in life when you have no strong sense of self. But if you develop this strong sense of self, which the ancients still had to seek through yoga training, and which the Greeks no longer needed to seek through yoga training, then everything around you becomes dead, then you only see, so to speak, the corpse of nature. But in doing so, you consume yourself. They said to themselves: Life consumes the human being. The Greeks felt that merely looking at dead nature was a kind of mental and physical illness. In ancient Greek times, people felt very strongly that the life of the day made them ill, that they needed something to restore their health: and that was tragedy. In order to become healthy, because one felt that one was consuming oneself, that one was making oneself ill in a certain sense, one needed, if one wanted to remain fully human at all, a healing, therefore one went to tragedy. And tragedy was still performed in Askhylos' time in such a way that one perceived the person who created the tragedy, who shaped it, as the physician who, in a certain sense, made the consumed person healthy again. The feelings that were aroused – fear and compassion for the heroes who appeared on stage – had the effect of a medicine. They penetrated the human being, and by overcoming these feelings of fear and compassion, they created a crisis in him, just as a crisis is created in a pneunomia, for example. And by overcoming the crisis, one becomes healthy. So the plays were performed to make people who felt used up as people well again. That was the feeling that was attached to tragedy, to the play, in the older Greek era. And this was because people said to themselves: When you feel your ego, the world is divested of its gods. The play presents the god again, because it was essentially a presentation of the divine world and of fate, which even the gods must endure, thus a presentation of what asserts itself behind the world as spiritual. That was what was presented in the tragedy.

Thus, for the Greeks, art was still a kind of healing process. And in that the first Christians lived according to what was given in the embodiment of Christ in Jesus and what can be contemplated and felt in the Gospels – the death of Christ Jesus, to suffering and crucifixion, to resurrection, to ascension – they felt, to a certain extent, an inner tragedy. That is why they also called Christ, and he was increasingly called the physician, the savior, the great physician of the world. In ancient times, the Greeks sensed this healing quality in his tragedy. Humanity should gradually come to experience and feel the historical, the historically healing in the sight, in the emotional experience of the mystery of Golgotha, the great tragedy of Golgotha.

In ancient Greece, especially in the time before Aeschylus, when what had previously been celebrated only in the darkness of the mysteries had already become more public, people turned to tragedy. What did people see in this older tragedy? The god Dionysus appeared, it was the god Dionysus who worked his way out of the forces of the earth, out of the spiritual earth. The god Dionysus, because he worked his way out of the spiritual forces and up to the surface of the earth, shared in the suffering of the earth. He felt, as a god, in his soul, not in the way it was in the Mystery of Golgotha, also in his body, what it meant to live among beings that go through death. He did not experience death in himself, but he learned to look at it. One sensed that there is the god Dionysus, suffering deeply among human beings because he had to witness all that human beings suffer. There was only one being on the stage, the god Dionysus, the suffering Dionysus, and around him a chorus that spoke and recited so that people could hear what was going on in the mind of the god Dionysus. For that was the very first form of the drama, of the tragedy, that the only really acting person who appeared was the god Dionysus, and around him the choir, which recited what was going on in Dionysus' soul. Only gradually did several persons develop out of the one person who represented the god Dionysus in the older times, and then the later drama out of the one play. Thus the god Dionysus was experienced in the image. And later, as an historical fact in the evolution of humanity, the suffering and dying God, the Christ, was experienced in reality. Once as an historical fact, this was to take place before humanity so that all people could feel what had otherwise been experienced in Greece in the drama. But as humanity lived towards this great historical drama, the drama, which was so sacred in the old grienzeit that one felt in it the saviour, the miracle-working human medicine, was, more and more, I would say, thrown down from its pedestal and became entertainment, as it is already the case with Euripides.

Humanity lived contrary to the times in which it needed something other than being shown in pictures the spiritual and soul world, after nature had been de-animated for viewing. Humanity needed the historical mystery of Golgotha. The ancient yoga student of the Indian times had taken in the breath, held back the breath, so to speak, in his own body, in order to feel in this breathing: In you lives the divine I-impulse. - The human being experienced God in himself through the breathing process as a yoga student. Later times came. Man no longer experienced the divine impulse in himself through the breathing process. But he had learned to think, and he said: Through the breath the soul came into man. - The old yoga student went through that. The later human being said: #SE211-056 he became a soul. The older yoga student experienced it, the later human being said it. And by saying this in ancient Hebrew, one already experienced in a certain sense abstractly what one had previously experienced concretely. But one did not look in ancient Hebrew either, but in ancient Greek. One always takes place in one part of the earth, the other in another part of the earth. One no longer experienced the God within oneself as the old YOGA student did, but one experienced in the image the existence of God in man. And this experience in the image of the existence of God in man was certainly present in the older Greek drama. But this drama now became a world-historical event. This drama became the Mystery of Golgotha. But now the image was also abandoned. The image became a mere image, just as the breathing process was merely described in thoughts. The whole human soul became different.

Man saw the external world dead, and that was the elementary, the natural thing for him, that he saw the external world dead. He saw it without a god. He saw himself as an external world, as a physical external world, deified. But he had the consolation that once in this deified world the real God had come down, the Christ, and had lived in a human being, and through the resurrection as the Christ impulse had passed into the whole of earthly evolution. And so man could now develop a certain view in the following way. He could say to himself: I see the world, but it is a corpse. He did not say it to himself, of course, because it remained in the unconscious; man does not know that he sees the world as a corpse. But gradually the corpse formed in his view on the cross, the dead Christ Jesus. And if you look at the crucifix, at the dead Christ Jesus, then you have nature. You have the image of nature, of that nature in which man is crucified. And if you look at the one who rose from the grave, who was then experienced by the disciples and by Paul as the Christ living in the world, then you have what was seen in all of nature in older times. Of course, in a multitude, in many spiritual beings, in gnomes and nymphs, in sylphs and salamanders, in all possible other entities of the earth hierarchies, one saw the divine-spiritual; one saw nature spiritualized and ensouled. But now, through the burgeoning of intellectualism, there arose the urge to summarize what is scattered in nature. It was summarized in the dead Christ Jesus on the cross. But in Christ Jesus one sees everything that was lost in external nature. One sees all spirituality by looking at the fact that the Christ, the Spirit of God, rose from this body, having conquered death, and that every human soul can now partake of His essence. Man has lost the ability to see the Divine-Spiritual in the sphere of nature. Man has gained the ability to recognize this Divine-Spiritual in Christ in view of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Such is evolution. What mankind has lost, it has been given back to it in Christ. In what it has lost, it has gained selfishness, the possibility of feeling itself. If nature had not become dead to human contemplation, man would never have come to the experience of “I am”. He has come to the experience “I am”; he could feel himself, inwardly experience himself, but he needed a spiritual outer world. That became the Christ. But the “I am”, the egoity, is built on the corpse of nature.

Paul sensed this. Let us imagine Paul's perception for a moment. All around, the corpse of what people had once seen in ancient times. They saw nature as the body of the divine, the soul-spiritual. Just as we see our fingers, so did these people see mountains. It did not occur to them to think of the mountains as inanimate nature, any more than it occurs to us to think of the finger as an inanimate limb; rather, they said: There is a spiritual-soul element that is the earth; it has limbs, and the mountain is such a limb. — But nature became dead. Man experienced the “I am” within. But he would only stand there as a hermit on the de-spiritualized, de-souled earth if he could not look to the Christ. But this Christ, he must not look at him merely from the outside, so that he remains external; he must now take him up into the I. He must be able to say, by rising above the everyday “I am”: Not I, but the Christ in me. If we were to schematically depict what was there, we could say: Man once sensed nature (green) around him, but this nature everywhere ensouled and spiritualized (red). This was in an older period of human history.

In later times, man also felt nature, but he felt the possibility of perceiving his own “I am” (yellow) in the face of nature, which had now become soulless. But for this he needed the image of the God present in man, and he felt this in the God Dionysus, who was presented to him in Greek drama.

In even later times, human beings again felt the soulless nature (green) within themselves, the “I am” (yellow). But the drama becomes fact. On Golgotha, the cross rises. But at the same time, what man had originally lost arises within him and radiates (red) from his own inner being: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

What did the man of ancient times say? He could not say it, but he experienced it: Not I, but the Divine-Spiritual around me, in me, everywhere. Man has lost this “Divine-Spiritual everywhere, around me, in me”; he has found it again in himself and in a conscious sense he now says the same thing that he originally experienced unconsciously: Not I, but the Christ in me.

The primal fact, unconsciously experienced in the time before man experienced his ego, becomes a conscious fact, an experience of Christ in the human heart, in the human soul.

Do you not see, when you draw such a trivial diagram, the form that the reality must take in ideas? Do you not see the whole world filled with the spirit of Christ, which arises from within the human being, and draws from the cosmos into the human being? And when you realize what significance sunlight has for human beings, how human beings cannot live physically without sunlight, how light surrounds us everywhere, then you will also be able to understand when I tell you that in those older times of which I have spoken today, human beings certainly felt themselves to be light in the light. They felt they belonged to the light. He did not say 'I am', he perceived the sunbeams that fell on the earth, and he did not distinguish himself from the sunbeams. Where he perceived the light, he also perceived himself, because that is where he felt himself. When the light arrived, he felt himself on the waves of light, on the waves of the sun, the sun.

With Christ, this became effective in his own inner being. It is the sun that enters one's own inner being and becomes effective in one's own inner being. Of course, this comparison of Christ with light is mentioned many times in the Bible, but when anthroposophy wants to draw attention to the fact that one is dealing with a reality, today most people rebel who have “divinity” listed as their faculty in the university directories. They actually reject knowledge of these things. And it is a deeply significant fact that there was once such a theologian in Basel who was also a friend of Nietzsche: Overbeck, who wrote the book on the Christianity of today's theology. With this book, he actually wanted to state as a theologian that one still has Christianity, that at that time, in the 1870s, there was still this Christianity, but that much had already become unchristian, and that in any case, theology was no longer Christian. This is what Professor Overbeck, of the Faculty of Theology at Basel, wanted to prove with his book on the Christianity of today's theology. He was highly successful. And anyone who takes the book seriously will come to the conclusion that there may still be some Christianity today, but modern theology has certainly become unchristian. And there may still be some Christianity today, but when theologians begin to talk about Christ, their words are no longer Christian. These things are just not usually taken seriously enough. But they should be taken seriously, because if they were taken seriously, then one would not only see the necessity of today's anthroposophical work, but one would also see the full significance of anthroposophy. And above all, people would be aware of their responsibility towards contemporary humanity with regard to something like anthroposophical knowledge. For this anthroposophical knowledge should actually underlie all knowledge today. All knowledge, especially social knowledge, should be derived from this anthroposophical knowledge. For by learning that the light of Christ lives in them - Christ in me - by fully experiencing this, they learn to see themselves as something other than what one gets when one sees man only as a corpse of nature. But it is from this view that man belongs to nature that has become a corpse that our antisocial, unsocial present has emerged. And a real view, which in turn can make people brothers and sisters and bring real moral impulses into humanity, can only come about if man penetrates to an understanding of the word: Not I, but the Christ in me — when the Christ is found as an effective force precisely in the dealings from person to person. Without this realization we make no progress. We need this realization, and this realization must be found. If we advance as far as it, then we will also advance beyond it, and our social life will be thoroughly imbued with the Christ.

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

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!

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.

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.

The object of the lectures I gave here immediately before Christmas was to indicate man's connection with the whole Cosmos and especially with the forces of spirit-and-soul pervading the Cosmos. Today I shall again be dealing with the subject-matter of those lectures but in a way that will constitute an entirely independent study.

The life of man, as far as it consists of experiences of outer Nature as well as of the inner life of soul and spirit, lies between two poles; and many of the thoughts which necessarily come to man about his connection with the world are influenced by the realization that these two polar opposites exist.

On the one side, man's life of thinking and feeling is confronted by what is called ‘natural necessity.’ He feels himself dependent upon adamantine laws which he finds everywhere in the world outside him and which also penetrate through him, inasmuch as his physical and also his etheric organisms are part and parcel of this outer world. On the other hand, he is deeply sensible—it is a feeling that is bound to arise in every healthy-minded person—that his dignity as man would not be fully attained if freedom were not an integral element in his life between birth and death. Necessity and freedom are the polar opposites in his life.

You are aware that in the age of natural science—the subject with which I am dealing in another course of lectures¹ here there is a strong tendency to extend the sway of necessity that is everywhere in evidence in external Nature, to whatever originates in the human being himself, and many representative scientists have come to regard freedom as an impossibility, an illusion that exists only in the human soul, because when a man is faced with having to make a decision, reasons for and reasons against it work upon him. These reasons themselves are, however, under the sway of necessity; hence—so say these scientists—it is really not the man who makes the decision but whatever reasons are the more numerous and the weightier. They triumph over the other less numerous and less weighty reasons, which also affect him. Man is therefore carried along helplessly by the victors in the struggle between impulses that work upon him of necessity. Many representatives of this way of thinking have said that a man believes himself to be free only because the polarically opposite reasons for and against any decision he may be called upon to make, present such complications in their totality that he does not notice how he is being tossed hither and thither; one category of reasons finally triumphs; one scale in a delicately poised balance is weighed down and he is carried along in accordance with it.

Against this argument there is not only the ethical consideration that the dignity of man would not be maintained in a world where he was merely a plaything of conflicting yes-and-no impulses, but there is also this fact, that the feeling of freedom in the human will is so strong that an unbiased person has no sort of doubt that if he can be misled as to its existence, he can equally well be misled by the most elementary sense-perceptions. If the elementary experience of freedom in the sphere of feeling could prove to be deceptive, so too could the experience of red, for instance, or of C or C sharp and so on. Many representatives of modern natural scientific thought place such a high value upon theory that they allow the theory of a natural necessity which is absolute, has no exceptions and embraces human actions and human will, to tempt them into disregarding altogether an experience such as the sense of freedom!

But this problem of necessity and freedom, with all the phenomena associated with it in the life of soul—and these phenomena are very varied and numerous—is a problem linked with much more profound aspects of universal existence than are accessible to natural science or to the everyday experience of the human soul. For at a time when man's outlook was quite different from what it is today, this disquieting, perplexing problem was already a concern of his soul.

You will have gathered from the other course of lectures now being given here that the natural scientific thinking of the modern age is by no means so very old. When we go back to earlier times we find views of the world that were as one-sidedly spiritual as they have become one-sidedly naturalistic today. The farther back we go, the less of what is called ‘necessity’ do we find in man's thinking. Even in early Greek thought there was nothing of what we today call necessity, for the Greek idea of necessity had an essentially different meaning. But if we go still farther back we find, instead of necessity, the working of forces, and these, in their whole compass, were ascribed to a divine-spiritual Providence. Expressing myself rather colloquially, I would say that to a modern scientific thinker, the Nature-forces do everything; whereas the thinker of olden times conceived of everything being done by spiritual forces working with purposes and aims as man himself does, only with purposes far more comprehensive than those of man could ever be. Yet even with this view of the world, entirely spiritual as it was, man turned his attention to the way in which his will was subject to divine-spiritual forces; and just as today, when his thinking is in line with natural science he feels himself subject to the forces and laws of Nature, so in those ancient times he felt himself subject to divine-spiritual forces and laws. And for many who in those days were determinists in this sense, human freedom, although it is a direct experience of the soul, was no more valid than it is for our modern naturalists. These modern naturalists believe that necessity works through the actions of men; the men of olden times thought that divine-spiritual forces, in accordance with their purposes, work through human actions.

It is only necessary to recognize that the problem of freedom and necessity exists in these two completely opposite worlds of thought to realize that quite certainly no examination of the surface-aspect of conditions and happenings can lead to any solution of this problem which penetrates so deeply into all life and into all evolution.

We must look more deeply into the process of world-evolution—world-evolution as the course of Nature on the one side and as the unfolding of spirit on the other—before it is possible to grasp the whole meaning and implications of a problem as vital as this; insight can indeed only come from anthroposophical thinking.

The course of Nature is usually studied in an extremely restricted way. Isolated happenings and processes of a highly specialized kind are studied in the laboratories, brought within the range of telescopes or subjected to experiment. This means that observation of the course of Nature and of world-evolution is confined within very narrow limits. And those who study the domain of soul and spirit imitate the scientists and naturalists. They fight shy of taking into account the whole man when they are considering his life of soul. Instead of this they specialize in order to accentuate some particular thought or sentient experience with important bearings, and hope in this way eventually to build up a psychology, just as efforts are made to build up a body of knowledge of the physical world out of single observations and experiments conducted in chemical and physical laboratories, in clinics and so forth.

Yet in reality these studies never lead to any comprehensive understanding either of the physical world or of the world of soul-and-spirit. As little as it is the intention here to disparage the justification of these specialized investigations—for they are justified from points of view often referred to in my lectures—as strongly it must be emphasized that unless the world itself, unless Nature herself reveals to man somewhere or other what results from the interworking of the details, he will never be able to build up from his single observations and experiments a picture of the structure of the world that is confirmed by the actual happenings. Liver cells and minute activities of the liver, brain-cells and minute cerebral processes can be investigated and greater and greater specialization may take place in these domains; but these investigations, because they lead to particularization and not to the whole, will give no help towards forming a view of the human organism in its totality, unless from the very beginning a man has a comprehensive, intuitive idea of this totality to help him in forming the separate investigations into a unified whole. In like manner, as long as chemistry, astro-chemistry, physics, astro-physics, biology, restrict themselves to the investigation of isolated details, they will never be able to give a picture of how the different forces and laws in our world-environment work together to form a whole, unless man develops the faculty of perceiving in Nature outside something similar to what can be seen as the totality of the human organism, in which all the separate processes of liver, kidneys, hearts, brain, and so forth, are included. In other words, we must be able to point to something in the universe in which all the forces we behold in our environment work together to form a self-contained whole.

Now it may be that certain processes in the human liver and human brain will not for a long time to come be detected with enough accuracy to be accepted by biology. But at all events, as long as men have been able to look at other men, they have always said: The processes of liver, stomach, heart, etc. work together within the boundary of the skin to form a whole. Without being obliged to look at each and all of the separate details, we have before us the sum-total of the chemical, physical and biological processes belonging to man's nature.

Is it possible also to have before us as a complete whole the sum-total of the forces and laws of Nature that are at work around us? In a certain way it is possible. But in order not to be misunderstood I must emphasize the fact that such totalities are always relative. For instance, we can group together the processes of the outer ear and then have a relative whole. But we can also group together the processes in that part of the organ of hearing which continues on to the brain and then we have another relative whole; taking the two groups together, we have another, greater whole, which in turn belongs to the head, and this again to the whole organism. And it will be just the same when we try to comprehend in one complete picture the laws and forces that come primarily into consideration for man.

A first complete whole of this kind is the cycle of day and night. Paradoxical as this seems at first hearing, in this cycle of day and night a number of natural laws around us are gathered together into one whole. During the course of a day and night, processes are going on in our environment and penetrating through us which, if separated out, prove to be physical and chemical processes of every possible different kind. We can say: The cycle of the day is a time-organism, a time-organism embracing a number of natural processes which can be studied individually.

A greater ‘totality’ is the course of the year. If we review all the changes which affect the earth and mankind during the course of the year in the sphere surrounding us—in the atmosphere, for example—we shall find that all the processes taking place in the plants and also in the minerals from one Spring to the next, form in their time-sequence an organic whole, although otherwise they reveal themselves to us and also to different scientific investigations as separate phenomena. They form a whole, just as the processes taking place in the liver, kidneys, spleen and so forth form a whole in the human organism. The course of the year is actually an organic whole—the expression is not quite exact but words of some kind have to be used—the year is an organic sum-total of occurrences and facts which it is customary in natural science to investigate singly.

Speaking in what sounds a rather trivial way, but you will realize that the meaning is very profound, we might say: if man is to avoid having to surrounding Nature the very abstract relationship he adopts to descriptions of chemical and physical experiments, or to what is often taught today in botany and zoology, the time-organisms of the course of the day and the course of the year must become realities for him—realities of cosmic existence. He will then find in them a certain kinship with his own constitution.

Let us begin by thinking of the cycle of the year. Reviewing it as we did in the lecture before Christmas, we find a whole series of processes in the sprouting, growing plants which first produce leaves and, later on, blossoms. An incalculable number of natural processes reveal themselves from the life in the root, on into the life in the green leaves and in the colored petals. And we have an altogether different kind of process before us when we see, in Autumn, the fading, withering and dying of outer Nature.

The cosmic happenings around us form an organic unity. In Summer we see how the Earth opens out all her organs to the Cosmos and how her life and activities rise towards the cosmic expanse. This applies not only to the plant world but to the animal world too in a certain sense—especially to the lower animals. Think of all the activity in the insect world during the Summer, how this activity seems to rise up from the Earth and is given over to the Cosmos, especially to the forces coming from the Sun. During Autumn and Winter we see how everything that from the time of Spring onwards reached out towards the cosmic expanse, falls back again into the earthly realm, how the Earth as it were gradually increases her hold upon all growing life, brings it to the stage of apparent death, or at least to a state of sleep—how the Earth closes all her organs against the influences of the Cosmos. Here we have two contrasting processes in the course of the year, embracing countless details but nevertheless representing a complete whole.

If with the eyes of the soul we contemplate this yearly cycle, which can be regarded as a complete whole because from a certain point it simply repeats itself, recurring in approximately the same way, we find in it nothing else than Nature-necessity. And in our own earthly lives we human beings follow this Nature-necessity. If our lives followed it entirely we should be completely under its domination. Now it is certainly true that those forces of Nature which come especially into consideration for us as Earth-dwellers are present in the course of the year; for the Earth does not change so quickly that the minute changes taking place from year to year make themselves noticeable during a man's life, however old he may live to be.—So by living each year through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, we partake with our own bodies in Nature-necessity.

It is important to think in this way, for it is only actual experience that gives knowledge; no theory ever does so. Every theory starts from some special domain and then proceeds to generalize. True knowledge can only be acquired when we start from life and from experience. We must not therefore consider the laws of gravity by themselves, or the laws of plant life, or the laws of animal instinct, or the laws of mental coercion, because if we do, we think only of their details, generalize them, and then arrive at entirely false conclusions. We must have in mind where the Nature-forces are revealed in their cooperation and mutual interaction—and that is in the cyclic course of the year.

Now even supervisial study shows that man is relatively free in his relation to the course of the year, but Anthroposophy shows this even more clearly. In Anthroposophy we turn our attention to the two alternating conditions in which every human being lives during the 24 hours of the day, namely, the sleeping state and the waking state. We know that during the waking state the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the Ego-organism form a relative unity in the human being. In the sleeping state the physical and etheric bodies remain behind in the bed, closely interwoven, and the Ego and the astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies.

If with the means provided by anthroposophical research—of which you will have read in our literature—we study the physical and etheric bodies of man during sleep and during waking life, the following comes to light. When the Ego and the astral body are outside the physical and etheric organism during sleep, a kind of life begins in the latter which is to be found in external Nature in the mineral and plant kingdoms only. And the reason why the physical and etheric organisms of man do not gradually pass over into a sum-total of plant or mineral processes is simply due to the fact that the Ego and astral body are within them for certain periods. If the return of the Ego and astral body were too long delayed, the physical and etheric bodies would pass over into a mineral and vegetative form of life. As it is, a tendency to become vegetative and mineralized commences in man after he falls asleep, and this tendency has the upper hand during sleeping life.

If with the insight afforded by anthroposophical research, we contemplate the human being while he is asleep, we see in him—of course with the inevitable variations—a faithful copy of what the Earth is throughout Spring and Summer. Mineral and vegetative life begins to bud in him, although naturally in quite a different way from what happens in the green plants which grow out of the Earth. Nevertheless, with one variation, what goes on during sleep in the physical and etheric organism of man is a faithful image of the period of Spring and Summer on the Earth. In this respect, the organism of man of the present epoch is in tune with external Nature. His physical eyes can survey it. He beholds its sprouting, budding life. As soon as he attains to Inspiration and Imagination, a picture of Summer is revealed to him when physical man is asleep. In sleep, Spring and Summer are there for the physical and etheric bodies of man. A budding, sprouting life begins. And when we wake, when the Ego and astral body returns, all this budding life in the physical and etheric bodies withdraws and for the eye of seership, life in the physical and etheric organism begins to be very similar to the life of the Earth during Autumn and Winter. When we follow the human being through one complete period of sleeping and waking life, we have before us in miniature an actual microcosmic reflection of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. If we follow man's physical and etheric organism through a period of 24 hours, contemplating it in the light of Spiritual Science, we pass, in the microcosmic sense, through the course of a year. Accordingly, if we consider only that part of man which remains behind in the bed when he is asleep or moves around when he is awake during the day, we can say that the course of the year is completed microcosmically in him.

But now let us consider the other part of man's being which releases itself in sleep—the Ego and astral body. If again we use the kinds of knowledge available in spiritual investigation, namely Inspiration and Intuition, we shall find that the Ego and astral body are given over while man is asleep to spiritual Powers within which they will not, in the normal condition, be able to live consciously until a later epoch of the Earth's existence. From the time of going to sleep until the time of waking, the Ego and astral body are withdrawn from the world just as the Earth is withdrawn from the Cosmos during Winter. During sleep, Ego and astral body are actually in their Winter period. So that in the being of man during sleep there is an intermingling of conditions which are only present at one and the same time on opposite hemispheres of the Earth's surface; for during sleep man's physical and etheric bodies have their Summer and his Ego and astral body their Winter.

During waking life, conditions are reversed. The physical and etheric organism is then in its Winter period. The Ego and astral body are given over to what can stream from the Cosmos to man in his waking state. So when the Ego and astral body come down into the physical and etheric organism, they (i.e. Ego and astral body) have their Summer period. Once more we have the two seasons side by side, but now Winter in the physical and etheric organism, Summer in the Ego and astral body.

On the Earth, Summer and Winter cannot be intermingled. But in man, the microcosm, Summer and Winter intermingle all the time. When man is asleep his physical Summer mingles with spiritual Winter; when he is awake his physical Winter mingles with spiritual Summer. In external Nature, Summer and Winter are separated in the course of the year. In man, Summer and Winter mingle all the time from two different directions. In external Nature on Earth, Winter and Summer follow one another in time. In the human being, Winter and Summer are simultaneous, only they interchange, so that at one time there is Spirit-Summer together with Body-Winter (waking life), and at another, Spirit-Winter together with Body-Summer (sleeping life).

Thus the laws and forces in external Nature around us cannot neutralize each other in any one region of the Earth, because they work in sequence, the one after the other in time; but in man they do neutralize each other. The course of Nature is such that just as through two opposing forces a state of rest can be brought about, so can an untold number of natural laws neutralize and cancel out each other. This happens in the human being with respect to all laws of external Nature, inasmuch as he sleeps and wakes in the regular way. The two conditions which appear as Nature-necessity only when they succeed each other in time, are coincident and consequently neutralized in man—and it is this that makes him a free being.

Freedom can never be understood until it is realized how the Summer and Winter forces of man's spiritual life can neutralize the Summer and Winter forces of his outer physical and etheric nature.

External Nature presents to us pictures which we must not see in ourselves, either in the waking or in the sleeping state. On no account must this happen. On the contrary, we must say that these pictures of the course and order of Nature lose their validity within the constitution of man, and we must turn our gaze elsewhere. For when the course of Nature within the human being no longer disturbs us, it becomes possible for the first time to gaze at man's spiritual, moral and psychic make-up. And then we begin to have an ethical and moral relationship to him, just as we have a corresponding relationship to Nature.

When we contemplate our own being with the aid of knowledge acquired in this way, we find, telescoped into one another, conditions which in the external world are spread across the stream of time. And there are many other things of which the same could be said. If we contemplate our inner being and understand it rightly in the sense I have indicated today, we bring it into a relationship with the course of time different from the one to which we are accustomed today.

The purely external mode of scientific observation does not reach the stage where the investigator can say: In the being of man you must hear sounding together what can only be heard as separate tones in the flow of Time.—But if you develop spiritual hearing, the tones of Summer and Winter can be heard ringing simultaneously in man, and they are the same tones that we hear in the outer world when we enter into the flow of Time itself. Time becomes Space. The whole surrounding universe also resounds to us in Time: expanded widely in Space, there ring forth what resounds from our own being as from a centre, gathered as it were, in a single point.

This is the moment, my dear friends, when scientific study and contemplation becomes artistic study and contemplation: when art and science no longer stand in stark contrast as they do in our naturalistic age, but when they are interrelated in the way sensed by Goethe when he said that art reveal; those secrets of Nature without which we can never fully understand her. From a certain point onwards it is imperative that we should understand the form and structure of the world as artistic creation. And once we have taken the path from the purely scientific conception of the world to artistic understanding, we shall also be ready to take the third step, which leads to a deepening of religious experience.

When we have found the physical forces and the forces of soul-and-spirit working together in the inner centre of our being, we can also behold them in the Cosmos. Human willing rises to the level of artistic creative power and finally achieves a relationship to the world that is not merely passive knowledge but positive, active surrender. Man no longer looks at the world abstractly, with the forces of his head, but his vision becomes more and more an activity of his whole being. Living together with the course of cosmic existence becomes a happening different in character from his connection with the facts and events of everyday life. It becomes a ritual, a cult, and the cosmic ritual comes into being in which man can have his place at every moment of his life. Every earthly cult and ritual is a symbolic image of this cosmic cult and ritual—which is higher and more sublime than all earthly cults.

If what has been said today has been thoroughly grasped, it will be possible to study the relationship of the anthroposophical outlook to any particular religious cult. And this will be done during the next few days, when we shall consider the relationship between Anthroposophy and different forms of cult.

• 1. The Birth of Natural Science in World-History and Its Subsequent Development. Course of 9 lectures given at Dornach from 24th December, 1922 to 6th January, 1923.