The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Translation by Latham)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positions of the symbols on the Christmas Tree

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.

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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

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

In today's lecture, my task will be to contribute something to the understanding of what lies in the artistic impulses that carry the building idea of Dornach, in order to then develop this building idea in more detail in the next of these lectures. It will be necessary for me to say something about these artistic impulses, so to speak, because strong misunderstandings have spread about them.

The point is, and this is clear from what I said here eight days ago about the development of the Dornach building from our entire anthroposophical movement, that the Dornach building should in no way create something that could be called the carrying of abstract spirituality into what is actually artistic. The Dornach building should be created entirely by artistic forces. And this building should mark the beginning of a development towards this goal, so that what works in spiritual science as a spiritual being can also flow out, stream out into artistic forms, into artistic designs and so on. This is something that had to be fought for against certain tendencies that very easily run in the opposite direction, especially in such a movement as anthroposophy.

It is very easy for all kinds of mystifying elements to enter into such a movement. These elements push towards the abstract through a false mystification, and which actually – because the artistic element must express itself in the shaping and forming of the external – bypass this artistic element and strive towards the symbolic, towards the allegorical. They want to keep the spirit in its abstract form, so to speak, and see in the outwardly shaped and formed only a symbolic illustration of the spiritual.

This leads to a killing, a paralysis of everything truly artistic. In this direction, due to the penetration of false mysticism from the theosophical into the anthroposophical movement, one has had to experience all sorts of things. For example, a play like “Hamlet”, which is an artistic creation, was interpreted allegorically and mystically, so that one figure was understood as the spiritual self, the other as the astral body, and so on. There is endless allegorizing among those who would like to profess such a spiritual movement, and I once had to experience the following, for example: When I tried to discuss the well-known painting 'Melancholy' by Dürer in such a way that I traced everything that lives in this painting back to the chiaroscuro and showed how Dürer wanted to penetrate the secrets of the chiaroscuro, of the chiaroscuro, to contrast the light with the dark, the darkness with the light, in the most varied of ways, a voice was heard from the audience saying, “Yes, but can't we understand this picture on an even deeper level?” The deep interpretation was obviously sought in the fact that one wanted to extract from the artistically captured chiaroscuro an abstract-allegorical interpretation of what is depicted in the picture, which Dürer has already forbidden by placing the polyhedron in the picture to suggest how important it was to him to express the chiaroscuro variety that becomes visible when you compare differently directed surfaces, differently positioned surfaces of a polyhedron or the different surface layers of a sphere with any spreading light. That it is infinitely deeper to look into this working and weaving of light and darkness and to spread one's own spirit over this weaving of light and darkness, that for the one who feels artistically, it can be infinitely deeper than the abstract-intellectual allegorical interpretation of such images, such an interrupter had no understanding.

And so what is present in this building had to be seen as an initial, weak attempt, in many respects fought for in the face of those aspirations that strive towards allegory and symbolism. These can be seen sufficiently when one enters some particularly solemnly decorated rooms where Anthroposophical spiritual science is practised and sees that attempts are being made to begin with colours and all kinds of paintings and drawings, but that these attempts ultimately leads to nothing other than offending every artistic feeling by painting a hideous rose cross, when what matters is only the allegory of showing some symbolism in seven roses painted in a certain way on a cross. I must mention this so that, if anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is also to show its artistic fertility to the world, it is known that what is attempted artistically must not be confused with all the abominations that easily arise from symbolizing and allegorizing, especially on such mystical ground as I have indicated.

It is absolutely essential that the true spiritual scientist should realize through direct insight what the essence of the ideal consists in, so that he can find the transition from the ideal to what must be expressed in prose words, even though these prose words are only an inadequate means of revelation for the rich revelation of the spiritual world itself, and that this necessary prose presentation, which must also take on certain forms if it is to do justice to the spiritual world, is sharply contrasted with the actual artistic presentation, including that of the supersensible vision, which has nothing of symbolizing or allegorizing in it.

That is why I had to point out in the lecture I gave to you on declamation and recitation that it is nonsense to fantasize and allegorize all sorts of things into my mystery dramas that are actually anthroposophical theory. The point of the dramas is to be understood artistically; and I myself, if I may make this personal comment, suffer the most unspeakable pain when someone presents me with abstract concepts that are supposed to “explain” these mystery dramas. These mystery dramas have been seen and experienced down to the last word, down to the tone of voice, as they stand, and the one who introduces allegorization does not understand them. He cannot really bring out the measure of super-sensibility that lies in them, for he only imprints the intellectual concepts into what should actually be experienced in the artistic sense. And so it is with everything else that is to arise artistically from those impulses from which spiritual science itself arises.

I would like to say it clearly, although it may sound a little pedantic: no art can of course arise from spiritual science itself, as it is communicated in words; only allegory and symbolization can arise from it. But from those spiritual impulses that stand behind spiritual science, that drive spiritual science itself out of themselves like a branch, from those, as another branch from the same origin, artistic creation also arises. Therefore, those who understand spiritual science in the abstract and then want to translate it into art will never be able to create anything other than straw-like allegories or lifeless symbols.

It has been said many times that symbols and allegories can be found in this building. If you look at the building properly, you won't be able to find a single symbol or allegory in it. Everything is meant to be – although some things have been left in initial attempts – in such a way that it has flowed into the form, the design, the color. And because misunderstandings can easily arise in this regard, I would like to discuss a few artistic matters with you today, so that, as I said, I can get to the actual building idea next time and characterize it in very specific terms.

I would like to assume that, when we once had to perform that scene from the second part of Goethe's “Faust” in the carpentry workshop, in which the Kabirs appear, I tried to create the three Kabirs plastically from the supersensible vision that arises when one tries to penetrate the mysteries of Samothrace. So I tried to visualize these Kabirs in order to be able to bring them on stage. Now these three Kabirs were there in three dimensions. Then a personage who was very close to our movement wanted to give some other people an idea of these Kabirs, who could not see them here, or who wanted to have a souvenir of the way in which the Kabirs were vividly reconstructed here, and the question arose as to whether these Kabir sculptures should be photographed.

For someone who has a feeling for sculpture, however, every photograph of a sculpture is a killing of the actual sculptural work of art. And so I decided to simply reproduce these Kabir statues in a drawing, in chiaroscuro, that is, using a different technique. So from the outset they were conceived two-dimensionally on the surface, and so it was possible to photograph them and disseminate them through photography. So you see: if you really stand on the soil of those life forces that pulsate in spiritual science, then above all you acquire a truly artistic feeling for the artistic means you use, and you acquire emotionally, not intellectually, what lives in existence.

Let me mention the following example, which leads us more into the intimacies of the artistic empathy of the world process, which we then try to shape. Let us assume that one wanted to create a kind of sculptural representation of humanity, as I attempted in my sculptural group, which includes a figure similar to Christ (Figs. 94-98). If you want to create a sculpture of this representative of humanity, you would be led to feel quite differently about what is present in the formation of the head than about what is present in the rest of the human being's form, which lives outside the head.

In sculpting, you feel what appears as a huge difference in the human being. In sculpting, where one is dealing with the shaping of surfaces, one feels that a formative impulse must be at work in the head, which, as it were, pushes inwards, draws away from the outside, but which shapes from within; and one feels that in the rest of the human being, one encounters that which is shaped in precisely the opposite sense. It is not so important to say that one thing happens from within and the other from without – that would lead to an abstract, intellectual description again – but rather it is important to have the opposite feelings when developing any form out of the depths of the world process develops some form that can only be shaped from the inside out, or when one takes out a form that can only be shaped from the outside in, in which one can see, as it were, how the external world forces concentrate and shape from the outside in.

If one continues in this feeling and sensing, then one comes to understand how, through having different feelings for the head than for the rest of the organism, one experiences something as a sculptor that is neither gravity nor vertically acting buoyancy nor even spreading force. Pure spreading force is what we feel in the light. Gravity alone is what we feel in our own weight and experience in particular in the aging of the human being, if one can take a look at this aging in true introspection. Of these two forces, gravity and buoyancy, one senses a kind of interaction in such a way that, I would say, the buoyancy forces, those forces that tear the plastic away from the earthly, can be felt more in the head, and the forces that work upwards from the earth's gravity and, as it were, drive the body upwards, these are felt more in the shaping, in the plastic formation of the rest of the body.

But, my dear attendees, when one has really felt this, and – especially when one has metamorphosed this feeling into artistic creation – when one really lives not in an abstract idea, but in this feeling and endeavors to bring into the material that which one feels there, then one feels a strong difference... [gap in the shorthand]. For example, in sculpture there is something to be sensed, such as the balance of two forces, of which the sculptor himself need know nothing. Even someone who knows about such forces as spreading force, gravity and buoyancy force, completely forgets it in sculpting; it is none of his business there, he lives purely in feeling the spreading of the forces of the surface, in feeling how the surface expands in space, or in shaping the surface itself. If you have not appropriated anything abstractly conceptual – that is, if you can completely shed the cloak of the ideal when you immerse yourself in artistic creation – then, in a sense, you become a different person emotionally when you immerse yourself in artistic creation; then you also acquire a feeling for the diversity of artistic means of expression.

And when one moves from working with sculpture to working with painting, one comes to say to oneself: All that one has to say about sculpture in terms of the way in which forces acting vertically and in the direction of propagation interact, of heavy elements and light elements, all that one has to have put aside when dealing with color and its nuances in painting. Because there it is about creating not out of the line, not out of the form, but out of the color, so that one completely stops feeling differently towards the head than towards the rest of the organism, as the sculptor does. In painting, one feels that difference disappear that arose for the sculptor between the head and what is not the head in a human being. This completely balances out and becomes something completely different, an inner intensity that cannot be represented by a contrast of lines, but can only be represented by penetrating into the intensity of the color nuances, so that it is not possible to go into detail, for example, on what still stands out very strongly in sculpture.

And if you want to overcome it, you can only do so if you push the sculpture to a certain degree of consciousness, as I did with my central group for this building. But if you move on to painting, it is a matter of thoroughly rejecting any thinking in lines and moving on to the feeling that creates purely from color. And however strange it may seem to someone who speaks of a spiritualization of art in a falsely abstract sense, it must still be said: for someone who thinks in terms of painting, the most important thing is that there is a certain color nuance at a certain point on a certain surface and that, when one moves from this color nuance to another point on the surface, other color nuances are there. It is about creating from color.

In this creative process, however, the artist is supported by what I would call the experience of color, the experience of blue, the experience of yellow, the experience of red. What the artist has, in experiencing yellow and red as if they were attacking him, and experiencing blue as if he had to chase after it with his soul, as if he had to expand himself, is what transforms into creativity within him and what then gives him the opportunity to transform the sensation into what is to become a work of art. If, for example, one is faced with the task of painting any surface, then it is a matter of nuancing between so-called light, warm colors and dark, cold colors. If one has the color experience, one can create out of this color experience, just as the musician creates out of the sound experience. Then it is a matter of the form arising out of the color itself, so that one does not draw and then smear color into the spaces created by the drawing spaces that arise through drawing, smearing the color in, but rather it is a matter of starting from the color experience and allowing the line experience, the form, to arise from the color experience. That is why I said at one point in the first of my mystery dramas - that is, I had a character say it, to whom I put it in the mouth - that the form must be “the color's work”.

Fundamentally, we must be aware that all drawing and all thinking in drawing is actually a lie compared to painting. For example, when I see the blue sky, with the sea-green of the surface of the sea below, I have the blue of the sky above, the green of the sea below, and the line of the horizon simply arises from seeing, from the experience of color. And I am actually lying when I draw a horizon line that is not actually there (Fig. 114). This must now be thoroughly examined, otherwise one will not be able to enter into that world, which can be experienced through all the means of artistic expression, through the colors and their nuances, as well as through the concepts and ideas, if these concepts and ideas are really rooted in the spiritual and are not abstracted from ordinary human consciousness.

You see, here it is not so much a matter of expressing spiritual science in all kinds of forms, but rather of gaining impulses for artistic observation, which are just as necessary in the course of human development as spiritual science itself. But they are required as something special. It is the case that on the one hand there is the spiritual-scientific stream and on the other hand there is the artistic stream, which in a certain way must now also take on new forms. Therefore, I say to everyone who stands before this group, which is to become the central group here: One can feel something in the central figure like the Christ-figure, but it must be felt, it must not be thought that the name Christ is there. It will certainly not be written on the outside, but it does not even have to be thought, rather, the intuitive experience must take place within us, which draws our attention to how we must look at the matter, so that we develop reverence, develop high regard, develop the intuitive perception of the depths of the human being. So there should be nothing but feeling, nothing but experiencing in feeling, the same feelings that we experience, for example, when we immerse ourselves spiritually in the figure of Christ. But everything we experience spiritually when we immerse ourselves in the figure of Christ through spiritual science must not be carried over into what is formed plastically or pictorially. What is formed plastically or pictorially must be born out of form, out of line, out of surface. And this life in form, in line, in surface, in color, in word itself, is what later develops such forms, such painting, as it is to appear here in this building before you.

What I have said now has little to do with the building itself, but only with the artistic attitude and artistic feeling that underlies the entire building idea of Dornach. It should always be borne in mind that it is at the beginning of the development of that architectural style, that artistic language of form, which can be expected to flourish in a special way in the future. Because I would not rebuild this building in the same way a second time. Not because I consider the artistic attitude on which it is based to be misguided – that is not the case – but because everything that is alive is also constantly evolving, so that a second time all those mistakes would be avoided and everything that could be said in terms of impulses for perfection could be taken into account. But I see all this myself and take it much more seriously than those who often call themselves critics of the building. I know the mistakes very well today and know what could be avoided if the building were to be rebuilt, and what could be brought into it if it were to be rebuilt. And it is necessary that all the details of the building idea from Dornach be taken up in this way.

To take one detail, I would like to mention the small dome (Fig. 57). Later, at the end of this hour, we will raise the curtain and you can then take a look at the small dome. Above all, I would like this small dome to be understood in such a way that nothing abstract is fantasized into it. For in this small dome, in which I myself am essentially involved – this is of course not to say anything special about the also in turn initial and in many respects perhaps amateurish in the painting of this small dome – an attempt has been made to paint really out of color, out of the color experience. In fact, this color experience should be understood in such a way that one sees, above all, the color nuance at a particular point. It could not be a matter of, for example, at a certain point where, let us say, the blue was to be emphasized, where the blue was experienced according to its position near the opening, further away from the center, contrasting with the color effects in the center, of thinking of a fist (Fig. 70) and paint it there because one feels a kinship of the nature of the fist with the blue color, but it could only be a matter of developing the color experience of the blue at this point and then letting the form, the shape, the essence arise out of the color. It had to become what it is there out of necessity.

From this you can see that it is not important to the person who originally gave rise to the idea of forming a figure out of the color experience of blue at this point, which then leads the feeling back to the sixteenth century, reminiscent of the Faust figure, but rather that it is important to him to give birth to form and essence out of the living color. And if, in the end, interpretations are attributed to the works, then one must be aware that these are interpretations from the outside, that they may help one or another subjectivity to experience this or that; but I myself prefer it if you completely forget, when facing this small dome, that there is something Faustian, something Apollonian ( Fig. 76) or of any doppelgänger (Fig. 84) and the like, and that you first surrender to the pure color experience from which the whole is born, and that you are initially just as indifferent to whether there is a Faust crouching there or some other figure, just as the person who wanted to create from the color was indifferent to whether this figure emerged. It just came out because the world lives in color.

But one must not take the starting point from the linear or symbolic boundaries of the being; rather, one must take the starting point from painting from the color experience, from moving in color, so that the color and especially the color harmonization and disharmonization come to life as such. One will then see that one narrows one's view of the world if one tries to translate the intellectually abstract world view — even one that arises as spiritual science — simply symbolically, allegorically into color or into form. Rather, one will see that when one immerses oneself in color, the whole richness of the life of color overflows one and that in this immersion in the world of color one has, that one still discovers a new world. While with every allegory you only bring the world you already have into the colorful world, if you start from the colored experience itself, you discover a new world that is as creative in itself as the world you have in mind when you summarize the external natural fact in abstractions or in natural laws.

In this description – because everything artistic, when it is discussed, must be described – I had to show you how an attempt has been made here in this building, not to secretly incorporate anything into the plastic forms, into the color nuances, but to experience the secrets of these worlds ourselves, which give us the means to express them artistically. And when one experiences the secrets of these worlds, then one gradually frees oneself from all straw-like allegorizing and straw-like symbolizing. In painting, for example, one learns to overcome the line, even in the representation of the copperplate engraving or the woodcut, and to allow form to arise purely out of the contrast between light and dark. It is out of such experiences, not out of abstract thought, that the building idea of Dornach has come into being, out of what can be experienced in colour, in form, in surface, what can be felt as that which strives upwards, freeing itself from burdens, as that which works downwards, bearing burdens, bringing them to life within itself.

All this is here in architecture, sculpture, painting, even in the window panes - the nature of which I will also discuss next time - felt, experienced, not thought; because all abstract thinking is the death of art. The life of art is born only out of form, out of color, out of the burdened, out of the carrying, out of the rounded, out of the angular – I now mean “rounded” and “angular” as a verb. And when one can live in the round, in the angular, in the burden, in the carrying, in the arching, in the covering and opening, in the plastically rounding, in the surface giving, in the expressing the interior in the exterior through the special surface treatment, when one can experience what arises like beings in the waves from the surface of the sea, when one experiences from the living colors, then the forms are formed in such a way that they are a creation of the color. Then there is truly no allegorization, no symbolization; then, alongside that world of abstraction or the merely non-sensuous spiritual, a completely new world arises, a world that Goethe called the sensuous-suprasensible world. This world is not, however, killed by the merely intellectual, and it is brought to life when one knows how to set the spirit within oneself in motion, not by going so far in the contemplation of the external that the sensual contemplation leads to the linking of thoughts, but in such a way that one sees the supersensible directly in the external, in the sensual. When the inner life, which in Expressionism always seeks to give rise to thought, is restrained to such an extent that it does not reach thought, but remains in the mere experience of the formative, of that which permeates the surface with the intensity of color and when the world is experienced in this way, as it can only be experienced in the element of sensation, not in the element of thought, then this experience can truly provide the stimulus for a new art.

On the basis of what I said yesterday it is possible to speak in greater detail of certain events in the course of the Earth’s evolution which have brought about its present form. As you will remember, I said that with clairvoyant consciousness a relationship can be established with the metallic substances in the Earth, with the essentially living quality inherent in the Earth by virtue of the veins of the different metals running through it. This relationship which can be established with the ‘metallity’ in the Earth enables one to look back over the Earth’s history.

It is particularly interesting to look back at what happened in the process of evolution in the times preceding the Atlantean epoch, during the period I have rather loosely called the Lemurian age and also in the epoch immediately before that, when the Earth was recapitulating the Sun-stage. It is interesting to look back at these happenings for they give one an impression of the great mutability of everything connected with the Earth’s existence.

We are accustomed today to regard the Earth as having always existed in the form in which it appears to us today. We inhabit a continent, we are surrounded by plants, by animals, by birds of the air. We are aware that we ourselves are living in a kind of atmospheric ocean surrounding the Earth, that we take oxygen out of this atmosphere into ourselves but that our relation to nitrogen has also a certain part to play. In general we simply think of the air around us as consisting of oxygen and nitrogen. Then we turn to look at the seas and oceans—further details need not be mentioned—and finally we have a picture of the planet we inhabit in the Universe. But the Earth has not always been as it is today; it has undergone tremendous changes, and if we go back to the epochs I have just mentioned—perhaps only to the Lemurian epoch or a little earlier—we shall find an Earth very different from that of today.

Let us begin by thinking of our present atmosphere which we regard as being devoid of life. Even this atmosphere proves to be quite different from anything to be found in early periods of the Earth’s evolution. Still further in the past something resembling the solid core of the Earth as we know it today is in evidence, surrounded by an atmosphere. But in those days there was nothing at all like the air we breathe today. In this air oxygen and nitrogen play the most prominent part, carbon and hydrogen a subsidiary role, sulphur and phosphorus a role of less importance still.

But it is really not possible to speak of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulphur and the rest in those early times, simply because what the chemists call by these names today did not exist. If a spirit-being of those times were to have met a modern chemist who spoke to him about carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and the rest, he would have retorted that nothing of the kind exists. We can justifiably speak of carbon, oxygen or nitrogen today but this could not have been done in those early times. Oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, as we speak of them today, became possible only when the Earth had reached a certain density and had developed forces such as it contains today. Neither oxygen, nitrogen, potassium, sodium nor any of the so-called fighter metals existed in those olden times. On the other hand, in the Earth’s environment that is filled today by our atmosphere there was something a little like albumen in consistency, a very fine fluid halfway between our present water and air. The Earth at that time was entirely surrounded by an albuminous atmosphere. The albumen we know in eggs today is very much coarser, but a comparison is possible.

When at a later time the Earth became denser, what we today call carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and so forth, were differentiated out of this atmosphere around the Earth. But it would be erroneous to say that the then albuminous atmosphere was composed of these elements which were not specific ingredients of it. Nowadays we think that everything is composite; but that is nonsense. Certain substances of a higher kind are not always composed of what comes to light when they are analysed. Carbon does not appear as carbon nor oxygen as oxygen in the higher kind of substance of which I am now speaking. As I said, it can be described as extremely fluid albumen. All this substance which surrounded the Earth in that age was permeated with the inpouring cosmic ether which imbued it with life; in addition, it was differentiated in a curious way. For instance, in one fairly wide area a man would have suffocated had he been present there, in another he could have been greatly invigorated. Chemical elements in the modern sense did not then exist but certain formations remind one of the effects of the chemical elements we know. The whole sphere teemed with gleaming reflections of light, with sparkling, luminous rays. And it was warmed through and through by the cosmic ether.

Such were the properties of the Earth-atmosphere—if I may use the modern expression—in that early epoch. The primeval mountains of which I spoke yesterday were the first formations to emerge from out of the Cosmos. The quartz to be found in those mountains, with its beautiful structure and relative transparency, was as it were poured into the Earth from the Cosmos. When a seer endowed with Imaginative vision observes those primeval rocks which, are the hardest substances on the Earth, they become the eyes through which he gazes out into the Universe—the same Universe which implanted these eyes into the Earth. It must be remembered that the quartz and silicious substances which permeated the whole atmosphere and were gradually deposited as primeval mountains were not as hard as they are today. They hardened into the state we know owing to the conditions that prevailed in later times. In the form in which they emerged from the Universe their consistency was scarcely more solid than wax.

A quartz crystal to be seen on mountains today is so hard that, as I said yesterday, if you were to hit your head against it, your skull—not the quartz—would crack. But in the far distant past, because of the all-pervading life, this primeval stone was as pliable as wax when it emerged from tire Cosmos. These drops of wax were transparent and their consistency can be pictured only by thinking of them in connection with the sense of touch. If one could have touched them, they would have felt like wax.

Silica came from the Cosmos into the Earth with a consistency similar to that of wax, and then it hardened. I described yesterday how pictures of the Cosmos arise in clairvoyant contemplation of this hard, rock-like substance. These pictures represent a more spiritual aspect of the phenomenon that was once concretely perceptible as a kind of plant-form in portions of this transparent, wax-like silica emerging from the Cosmos. Any observer of Nature will know that in the mineral kingdom today records of an earlier age are still to be found. When you look closely at certain stones you will see something like a plant-form within them. But in that distant past a quite usual phenomenon was that pictures were projected from the Cosmos into the albuminous atmosphere within the wax-like substance, where the pictures were not only seen but were reproduced, photographed, as it were, within this substance.

And then there was a noteworthy development: the fluid albumen filled these pictures and they became still denser and harder; and finally they were no longer merely pictures. The silicious element fell away from them, dispersed into the atmosphere, and in the earliest Lemurian age there appeared gigantic, floating plant-formations which remind one of the algae of today. They were not rooted in the soil—indeed there was as yet no soil in which they could have taken root; they floated in the fluid albumen, drawing their own substance from it, permeating themselves with it. And not only so—they lit up, glimmered and then faded out; reappeared and again vanished. Their mutability was so great that this was possible.

Try to picture this vividly. It is a panorama very different from anything to be seen in our environment today. If a modern man could project himself into that far-off time, set up a little observation-hut and look out on that ancient world, the spectacle before him would be something like this: he would see a gigantic plant-formation somewhat like present-day algae or palms. It would not appear to grow out of the Earth in springtime and die away in the autumn, but it would shoot up—in springtime, it is true, but the spring was then much shorter—and reach an enormous size; then it would vanish again in the fluid albuminous element. A clairvoyant observer would see the verdure appearing and then fading away. He would not speak of plants which cover the Earth but of plants appearing out of the Cosmos like airy clouds, condensing and then dissolving—it was a process of ‘greening’, taking place in the albuminous atmosphere. Of the period which would correspond more or less to our summer, an observer would say that it was the time when the environment of the Earth became ‘green’. But he would look upwards to the greening rather than downwards. In this way we can picture how the silicious element in the Earth’s atmosphere penetrates into the Earth and draws to itself the plant-force from the Cosmos, in other words, how the plant kingdom comes down to the Earth from the Cosmos. In the period of which I am speaking, however, we must say of the plant world: it is something that comes into being and passes away again in the atmosphere.

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And there is still something else to be said. If a human being of today, having established relationship with the metallic substance of the Earth, were to project himself into those past times, he would feel as if all this belonged to him, as if he himself had something to do with the process of greening and fading then taking place in the atmosphere. Now if you think back to your own childhood, this is simply a memory of a short span of time; on the other hand, if you recall a pain suffered in your childhood, this is something that really belongs to you. Similarly, in the cosmic memory of the past kindled through the metallity of the Earth, this process of greening and fading in the far past seems to be something that belongs to you. At that time man was already connected with the Earth which was surrounded by this watery-albuminous atmosphere; but he was then still wholly spiritual. It is correct to say, and it must also be realised, that these plant formations to be seen in the atmosphere at that time were something thrown off, ‘excreted’ by man. Man cast them out of his being which was still one with the whole Earth.

Now this same conception applies in the case of something quite different. Everything that I have so far described is the result of the fact that the silica had already, at an even earlier time, been precipitated in the atmosphere as the wax-like substance of which I have spoken. But apart from this there was the albuminous atmosphere upon which the infinitely diverse forces of the Cosmos were working, those forces which modern science sees fit to ignore. Hence our modern knowledge is no real knowledge at all, because a great many happenings on Earth simply would not take place if they were not brought about by cosmic forces and influences. Since the modern scientists do not speak of or do not recognise these cosmic forces, there is no reality in what they say. They take no account of what is essentially quick with life. Even in the tiniest particle looked at through a microscope, cosmic forces, not only earthly forces, are working. And if these cosmic forces are not taken into account, there can be no reality.

Thus cosmic forces were working in that remote time upon this fluid albumen in the Earth’s environment in such a way that it curdled or congealed. Albumen, congealed as a result of the working of cosmic forces, was everywhere to be seen in the sphere surrounding the Earth. But the forms assumed by this congealed albumen were not merely cloud-masses but living entities. These entities were in reality animals consisting of the congealed albumen which had solidified into a gelatinous state, into substance similar to gristle as it is today. Animal creatures of this kind were present in the fluid albuminous atmosphere. The forms of our present reptiles, lizards and the like, resemble, on a small scale, the forms of those earlier animals, but the latter were not so solid; they existed as gelatinous masses and were inherently mobile. At one moment their limbs were extended, at another withdrawn—comparable with what a snail does with its feelers today.

Now while all this was taking place, something else was being deposited into the Earth from the Cosmos. Another substance was being added to the silica; it is what you find today as the chalky constituents of the Earth. If you go—not necessarily into the oldest mountains but only into the Jura mountains, you will find limestone rock. It came to the Earth at a later stage than the silica but it too came from the Cosmos. Thus chalk is to be found as a second substance in the Earth.

This chalk deposit oozes constantly inwards and the actual effect is that in its core the Earth becomes denser and denser. Then in certain regions the silica combines with the chalk. But this chalk retains the cosmic forces and is altogether different from the crude substance which chemists consider it to be. Everywhere the chalk contains relatively latent formative forces.

Now in an epoch rather later than the period I described to you, when the greening became manifest and then faded away, we find that within this albuminous atmosphere there is a constant rising and falling of the chalk; chalk mist is followed by chalk rain. There was a period in the history of the Earth when what we know today as water-vapour and falling rain was a chalky substance, rising and falling. Then comes a strange development: the chalk is particularly attracted to the gelatinous, gristly masses; it permeates them, impregnates them with itself. And thanks to the Earth-forces which, as I told you, it contains, it dissolves the whole gelatinous mass which has formed as congealed albumen. The chalk takes from the heavens what the heavens have formed in the albuminous substance and carries it nearer to the Earth. And out of this the animals with calcareous bones came into being.

This is what develops in the later Lemurian epoch.

We must therefore think of plants in their earliest form as pure gifts from heaven and the animals, and all animal-like formations, we must regard as something which after the heavens had presented the Earth with chalk, the Earth has taken—literally filched—from the heavens and made into an earthly product.

Such things naturally seem paradoxical because they touch upon a reality of which modern man usually has no conception; nevertheless they are absolutely true. Now it corresponds with reality today if memory enables someone to say: ‘When I was nine years old I gave a friend many a sound thrashing.’ One may or may not feel gratified by such a memory, or it may pain one; but it does arise within one. Similarly, in human consciousness expanded through relationship with the metals into an Earth consciousness, this realisation arises: In the process of forming your whole being on Earth out of the heavens, during the descent you separated, cast off the plants from yourself. You also cast off the animal nature; your desire, to begin with, was that in the form of gelatinous coagulation or gristle it should be a product secreted by you. But then you were obliged to realise that pre-existent Earth-forces took this task over from you and reshaped the animal form into different structures which are products of the Earth. In this way, as it were in a cosmic memory, these happenings seem to be actual experiences of our own, just as the other incident I mentioned is an experience belonging to a brief earthly life. As man, we feel ourselves bound up with these happenings.

But all this is connected with many other processes—I am speaking briefly of only the most important ones. Many other things were happening. For example, during the period when what I have been describing was taking place, the whole atmosphere was also filled with sulphur in a highly rarefied state. This rarefied sulphur united with other substances and from this union there arose the ‘parents’ as it were of what is present in the ores today as pyrites, as galena, as native sulphide of zinc and so forth. All these substances developed at that time in an earlier form, in a soft, still wax-like consistency, and the body of the Earth was permeated with them. Then, when these metallic ores emerged from the universal albuminous substance and formed the solid crust of the Earth, there was really nothing much else for the metals to do, unless man made some use of them, than to reflect about the past. And indeed we find that they do conjure up for the inner vision, everything that has happened in the Earth’s history. A man in whom these things are cosmic, or at least terrestrial experience, will say to himself: Through having cast away from yourself the primeval plant-form—which has since developed into the later plant-formations—through having cast away from yourself the complicated processes of animal evolution, you have also rid yourself of everything that previously stood in the way of your having a will in your own being as man.

It was necessary for man to get rid of all this, just as today he must secrete sweat. In no other way could he cease to be a being in whom only gods willed, but become an individual with his own will, perhaps not yet free will, but nevertheless a will of his own. All this was necessary for the preparation of man’s earthly nature.

In the course of further development, during which there were many other happenings, everything changed. Naturally, when the metallic ores had separated and were now in the Earth, the whole atmosphere also changed. It became far less sulphurous. Oxygen gradually gained predominance over the sulphur whereas in ancient times sulphur was a very significant factor in the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this changed environment man was able to cast away other elements from himself and these are the successors of the earlier plants and animals. The later plant-forms now gradually developing were rooted in substance that was still very soft. Out of the earlier reptilian and lizard-like creatures, animals with a more complicated structure developed, the impressions of which modern geology can still discover. Nothing at all of the earliest animal creatures of which I have spoken can be found. It was not until the later epoch, when—for a second time as it were—man cast out more complicated structures, that the conditions I have been describing were present: cloud-masses continually forming and dissolving, viridescence (greening) appearing and then fading away, soft animal-like structures which, however, were real animals; at times they contracted and had a life of their own, and soon again lost identity in the general life of the Earth. All these developments resulted in greater solidification.

Among animals of this kind was one which at that time looked more or less like this (diagram): it had a very large eye-like organ surrounded by a sort of aura; adjoining this organ a kind of snout protruded further forwards; the body was lizard-like, with powerful fins. Such structures were already more solid in themselves. It would be equally correct to speak either of wings or fins in the case of these animals for they were not marine creatures—there was as yet no sea. There was only the soft Earth and the still soft elements in the surrounding atmosphere from which only the sulphur had been partially separated. In this atmosphere such animals flew or swam—it was something between flying and swimming.

If, starting from the present day, someone were to go back through time into the period between the Lemurian and Atlantean epochs, he would confront a strange spectacle: huge flying lizards with a kind of lantern-like formation on the head, radiating light and warmth; and down below, a soft, marshy Earth but with something very familiar about it because it would seem to a visitor of today to be emitting an odour, an odour between that of decaying substance and of green plants. The mud of this soft Earth would emit an odour partly seductive and partly extremely pleasant. And in it, moving about like creatures of the swamp, there would be these other animals, already with more limbs, rather like the lower species of mammals today but with powerful formations below—more powerful, naturally, than the webbed feet of ducks—by means of which they propelled themselves through the swamps.

Man was obliged to undergo this whole process in order that autonomous feeling might be prepared in him for his earthly existence.

Thus we have a primary plant-animal creation consisting of the products secreted by man and which made it possible for him to become a being on Earth possessed of will. If all these products had remained in him, they would have taken possession of his will which would have become a wholly physical manifestation. As a result of what he had cast off, the physical element had been eliminated and his will became a quality of the soul. Similarly, as a result of the second creation man’s feeling acquired the character of soul. Plants and mammals somewhat similar to those we know did not appear until the middle or later period of Atlantis. It was then that the Earth acquired a structure definitely resembling that of today. The substances known to modern chemists as carbon, oxygen, the heavy metals, and so on, had gradually developed, and it was possible for the third casting-off process to take place. Man separated from himself the plants and animals to be found in his environment today. And the fact that this environment came into existence around him has enabled him to live on Earth as a thinking being.

In those early times humanity was not split up as men are today, into single individuals; there was one universal humanity, still of the nature of spirit-and-soul, descending into the ether. For this universal humanity came out of the Cosmos together with the ether streaming thence to the Earth. The happenings I have described in the book Occult Science, then took place. Humanity came to the Earth, then departed to other planets and subsequently returned during the Atlantean epoch. This went on concurrently with other events; for whenever it was a matter of anything being cast off, humanity could not remain with the Earth but was obliged to depart from it in order that certain inner forces, now more of the nature of soul, might be strengthened. Humanity then came down again to the Earth. These happenings add details to what you can read in Occult Science. Man in truth belongs to the Cosmos, and it is he who prepares his earthly environment by casting off from himself the kingdoms of Nature and despatching them into the domain of the Earth where they form part of his environment. By sending these products of separation down to the Earth man was gradually able to equip himself with the faculties of thinking, feeling and willing. It was only in the course of time that he evolved into what he is today, an organic-physical being and able during his existence on Earth between birth and death to think and feel and will. He is connected with entities who, in order to further the evolution of humanity, have in the course of time separated from the human realm and in this separation have been metamorphosed into their present forms.

It is clear from what has been said that we do not speak in an abstract way about tire relationship that can be established with the metallic substances of the Earth. When relationship has been established with the metals with their memory of the Earth’s history, one can speak of what is remembered and discover for oneself what I have been describing to you today.

If we now go back to still earlier times, we shall find that everything is even more transient, even more evanescent. Think of the grandeur and majesty of the vista I described to you: those mobile, wax-like silica formations in which pictures of the plant-world appear, fill themselves with the soft albuminous substance and produce in the Earth’s environment the phenomena of ‘greening’ and fading. Think of all this and you will say to yourselves: In contrast to the plants growing out of the Earth today with their firmly formed roots and leaves or to our present trees with their strong trunks, this is as ephemeral as a cloud. How fleeting these earlier forms are if compared with an oak of today— the oak itself does not pride itself on its natural characteristic, it is usually the people living around such trees who are guilty of pride, for they mistake their frequent weakness for the hardiness of the oak! Compare this quality of our present oaks with those ancient, ethereal plant-formations, appearing and passing away like shadowy mists in the atmosphere, condensing and then vanishing away. Or to take cruder examples, compare a thick-skinned hippopotamus or elephant or a similar animal with those earlier creatures which emerged from the universal albumen, were laid hold of by the chalk and becoming rather more solid as a result developed the rudiments of bones and were drawn down into the animality of the Earth—I use this expression more as an adjective. Compare the Earth’s present density, shall I say the ‘elephantine’ density of the Earth today with the conditions that once existed, and you will no longer be able to doubt that the further back you go into the past the more fleeting and evanescent are the phenomena.

In even more remote times we come to conditions where there are only surging and weaving colour-formations, appearing and disappearing. And if you turn to the descriptions of Old Sun, or of Old Saturn given in the book Occult Science ¹ you will find that this is understandable when it is realised that these conditions belong to a far, far distant past. At that stage the evanescent plant-formations fill themselves with the albuminous substance and begin to look like clouds. At still earlier stages we can speak only of colour-formations such as I described in connection with Old Sun or Old Saturn.

If therefore we go back from physical conditions with the ‘elephantine’ quality they have today, through finer physical conditions, we finally reach the spiritual. In this way, by paying attention to actual realities we come to realise that everything belonging to the Earth has its origin in the spiritual. This is a matter of actual vision. And I think it is also a beautiful idea to be able to say to oneself: If you penetrate into the interior of the Earth and let the hard metals tell you their memories, they will say to you: Once upon a time we were so widely diffused over the cosmic expanse that we were not physical substances at all, but were simply colour, weaving, hovering, undulating in the spiritual Cosmos. The memories of the metals of the Earth go back to a condition when each metal was a cosmic colour permeating the others, when the Cosmos was a kind of spectrum, a rainbow which differentiated and only then became physical.

And it is at this point that the merely theoretical impression communicated to us by the metals of the Earth becomes a moral impression. For every metal says to us: I come from the cosmic expanse far away from the Earth, I come from the spheres of Heaven and have been compressed, enchanted into the interior of the Earth. But I await my redemption, for in time to come my essential being will again pervade the Universe.—When we learn to understand the speech of the metals in this way, gold tells us of the Sun, lead of Saturn, copper of Venus. And then these metals say to us: There was a time when we stretched far out into the Universe—copper to Venus, lead to Saturn—but now we have been enchanted into the Earth. We shall stretch far out again when the Earth’s mission is fulfilled through man having achieved on the Earth what can be achieved there and only there. We accepted this enchantment in order that man might become a free being on the Earth. When freedom has been won for man, release from our enchantment can also begin.

This release has been in process of preparation for a long time already. It is only a matter of understanding it and of understanding how the Earth, together with man, will evolve on into the future.

• 1. pp. 115-37 in the 1962/63 edition.