The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The lectures this week are to be arranged in such a way that each day is devoted to a different subject, so that it can be seen what is to be achieved as a fertilization of the individual subject areas and branches of practical life by spiritual science. Today we shall begin with the subject that is most closely related to spiritual science as it is meant here: the subject of philosophy. What I myself will have to say here is intended as a kind of introduction to the questions that will be dealt with in the course of today.

I would like to start from one of the most interesting and even most significant phenomena of recent philosophical development. It is certainly not always the case that the most significant and interesting phenomena are those that are soon recorded in the usual historical works. And so I would like to start from a phenomenon that has yet to be expressed historically, from the whole meaning of a philosophical work published in 1888 by Ludwig Haller, a government councilor and public prosecutor, entitled “All in All: Metalogic, Metaphysics, Metapsychics». I may all the more base myself on this phenomenon in the life of philosophy, as anyone who has followed my own literary career can see that I myself have remained quite uninfluenced by this phenomenon, because that which constitutes my position on philosophy already contained in my writings that appeared before this “Metalogik, Metaphysik, Metapsychik,” and what I said later is only a proper and consistent elaboration of what was contained in my first writings.

Above all, in the prosecutor and government councilor Ludwig Haller, who wrote nothing but the aforementioned work, we encounter a person for whom what is called philosophy is not just a specialized science—although in a certain respect he is thoroughly qualified to engage with this specialized science—but for whom what he presents comes from direct personal philosophical experience. We are dealing with a personality for whom philosophical endeavor has become the most intimate personal experience. And if we go straight to the most significant thing about Ludwig Haller, then we have to note that he is actually at loggerheads with the whole way of philosophical thinking in modern times. He has obviously been around a lot in all kinds of philosophy and also in those works of literature in which “philosophy of life” bubbles. He has familiarized himself with the philosophical thinking of his time and he has found – this is, as I said, his opinion – that with this philosophical thinking one actually goes around in a kind of unreal circle, that with this philosophical thinking one never comes into a position to delve into reality itself.

Ludwig Haller wants to penetrate into spiritual reality with his philosophy, which he, having evidently outgrown more religious ideas due to his education, calls “the divine” or even “God”. In this “divine” or in “God” he seeks the source of all that which, as the actual essence, also lives in the human soul and of which the human soul must also become aware. But he comes to the conclusion that this soul, by processing the conceptual fabric that is customary in his time, cannot penetrate into this center of its being, where it is one with the divine-spiritual of the world.

Since the thought-weaving of philosophers at the end of the 1980s, when the aforementioned work was published, was still influenced by Kant in many ways and thus Kantian thought lived in this thought-weaving, Ludwig Haller felt compelled above all to deal with Kantianism and all that stems from Kantianism. But precisely in all the thoughts in which something Kantian somehow flows in, he saw the unreal, that which can never be immersed in the reality of the world. And he was actually unhappy about the fact that he, because he wanted to speak philosophically in his time, had to deal with this thinking, which was thoroughly infected by Kantianism, that he had to keep coming back to it, to deal with Kantianism. He found very sharp words, first to characterize Kantianism itself, and then also for the having to deal with Kantianism, which he found so unappealing. I would like to share with you two samples from this assessment of Kantianism, so that you can see what a person for whom philosophy is an innermost personal matter struggles with in our times.

On one occasion, Ludwig Haller speaks of Kantianism in such a way that he says of it: the “pseudo-dialectical, half-true, deeply dishonest character of this misosophy, which tries to steal the weapons from the arsenal of light in order to use them in the service of darkness”. On another occasion, he becomes, I might say, literarily enraged that he repeatedly finds himself compelled to deal with Kantian thought because he must engage with his contemporaries , and he says: “I, who could and would like to talk about God and his glory, see myself condemned again and again to talk about Kant and his wretchedness – I, a dandy's dandy.”

I wanted to point out this phenomenon because it is an imprint of the struggles that a truly philosophically inclined nature had to endure at the end of the 19th century. Today, what is meant by philosophical speech and writing is also taken to mean that it is a matter that, so to speak, hovers a bit above people's heads, and that one is not personally involved in it. That is why the inner tragic phenomena of philosophical life are far too little appreciated in our time. And I believe that this phenomenon, which is one of the most tragic inner philosophical experiences of our age, is actually quite unknown in wider circles.

Those who are truly familiar with the intellectual life of our time know how much of such moods has been lived in people of our age. And actually, if one wants to explain the essence of philosophical thought in our time, one must speak precisely of these phenomena, which are not considered by the philosophical experts, but which are all the more important for the actual human experience.

Now, building on this phenomenon, I would like to characterize another one that is basically also only a subjective, personal philosophical experience, so to speak. The philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, who became better known as Ludwig Haller, dealt with Ludwig Haller. In this discussion, one point is of particular importance. Ludwig Haller, who makes a lot of work for himself, as you saw, he calls himself “a dandy dandy” because of this making-a-lot-of-work-for-himself, with the introduction into the Kantian-infected thought-weaving of his time, of our age - he he feels, namely, by going from concept to concept with his thinking, by abandoning himself to philosophical thinking, which can be clearly seen to permeate his book from cover to cover — he feels that the concepts he is now following with his thinking take on a remarkable inner life. It is as if the concepts in his mind began to lead an independent life. He emphasizes this in the most diverse places in his “Metalogic, Metaphysic, Metapsychic”.

If we want to explore this interesting phenomenon from a psychological perspective, we cannot do other than say the following: Ludwig Haller puts all his energy into the particular nature of contemporary philosophical thinking. But his inner human experience actually wants something different; he cannot come to this other because in the 1880s there was not even a trace of a truly modern spiritual science. What could fill this human inner life with real spiritual science is lacking. But I would like to say that he lives in it in a strangely instinctive, unconscious way. He is unaware of this, but he notices from this strange phenomenon that the world of concepts comes to life for him and leads an independent life.

Anyone who is able to conduct research in the sense of the spiritual science represented here is very familiar with this independent life of concepts. But they can also master it. They can master it in the sense that one can master the transition from one mathematical concept to another mathematical concept in the ordinary process of mathematization. But this mastery must be achieved through inner practice. It is quite natural that one enters into a life that is very far removed from ordinary consciousness when one suddenly notices – something that otherwise only the food in our organism does, that they lead their own life in digestion without our intervention – that the absorbed concepts begin to lead their own inner life. It is not incomprehensible, but very, very understandable, that a philosopher like Eduard von Hartmann, who was indeed brilliant, who also achieved something quite penetrating in some areas, but who had completely outgrown the philosophical thinking of his time, could not do anything special with this experience of Ludwig Haller. And when Eduard von Hartmann writes his critique of Ludwig Haller, one notices that on the one hand he feels quite queasy. What is to become of it, the modern philosopher asks himself, when the concepts to which I devote myself suddenly begin to dance like goblins within me, to embrace each other or the like? That is something terrible, one cannot expose oneself to it! And so, as a true contemporary philosopher, he also offers this criticism in a very significant way by saying that he never noticed anything of this playful, goblin-like activity of concepts that have come to life independently.

We can readily believe Eduard von Hartmann when he says that he felt this inner sultriness when reading Ludwig Haller's “Metalogik, Metaphysik, Metapsychik”. However, as his critique shows, this did not stop him from reading the whole book, and in a sense he even found it very significant. I believe that many others who have been professionally involved with philosophy in the period since 1888 have hardly got beyond the first pages of this book, if they have even seen the title page!

What I am pointing out to you is a very significant phenomenon. And we can only understand it if we follow the philosophical development of the West as I have tried to do in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”. If we go into what I have explained in detail there with reference to the history of philosophy, and what I can only hint at here, we see that in the age of Greek philosophy the whole human soul was different from what it later became and especially from what it is in our time. We see how in Greek philosophizing, what we call thinking, what we call imagining, is linked in a similar way to the conditions of the external world, insofar as it presents itself to man, as for us only the qualities of sensory perception. When we perceive, we ascribe, at least in naive consciousness, the sensual qualities to what we perceive. Certainly, the epistemological discussions since Locke and others think differently, but they need interest us less at this moment; I want to refer only to naive consciousness for the fact that has been brought up. In this naive consciousness, one attributes the sensory qualities red, blue, white, warm, cold, lukewarm, sweet, bitter, etc., to things, and today it is clear that what one thinks and imagines about sensory objects is separated from the objective in the process of becoming conscious, that it is experienced subjectively. But the Greeks attributed their thinking, their ideas, to the object just as we attribute red, blue, sweet, bitter and so on to the object; they had what they experienced in knowing, to an even greater extent, so to speak, in perceiving than we have. They were fully aware that they perceived the conceptual content at the same time as the red, green and so on.

And what emerged in the most logical way in Greek thought, I would say, was basically a peculiarity of the general enquiring consciousness right up to the 13th, 14th, 15th centuries, up to the Galilei-Copernicus period. Anyone who delves into what has come to light in scientific achievements, which, after all, were still one and the same with philosophical research for that time, anyone who delves into the corresponding literature, insofar as it exists, will say that these older researchers and thinkers, when they talk about things, still describe the objective aspects of things, whereas today's researchers think entirely separately from things and ascribe them to the subject.

One can follow, and this pursuit is extraordinarily interesting, how in the age of scholasticism, philosophical life takes the direction of becoming clear about how what we call thinking in concepts may still be thought of as connected to the objective. Before the scholastic age, the connection between what is experienced as an idea and concept in things was self-evident. This connection only became a question, a mystery, when the conceptual and the imaginative were separated from what is called objective perception in human experience. And it was out of this philosophical experience that scholasticism arose, the problem of which should be studied much more thoroughly today than it is studied, the problem of 'realism' and 'nominalism'. Today, these words conjure up completely different ideas than they did in the scholastic era. In the age of scholasticism, a realist was, for example, Ihomas of Agquino, who attributed an objective reality to concepts and ideas, so that he said: Concepts and ideas have something objective in their content, something that does not merely belong to the subject, that is not merely thought. A nominalist was someone who sought reality only in that which lies outside the conceptual, who saw in the concepts only something by which man summarizes what is given to him as perception, so that for the nominalist, the concepts were mere names.

Such a problem always arises in the development of humanity when something is experienced inwardly. In the Middle Ages, people had to undergo this inwardly, that they became more and more familiar with the conceptual life in their own inner being, that they saw what is called the external world only in the perceptible. Hence the question arose for him: How can one justify relating to external perceptions in some way that which one basically has only as a name within oneself, which one grasps only by associating it with external perceptions? A significant skepticism emerges from nominalism.

And basically, what then emerged in Kantian philosophy is nothing other than, I would say, the last consequence of this scholastic problem. It is just that Kant arrived at his formulation of the scholastic problem in a peculiar way: in the age in which Kant, as a young man, was pursuing his philosophical studies, a somewhat diluted Leibnizianism prevailed in the circles in which Kant was pursuing his studies. Leibnizianism, which is something great in its own way, albeit somewhat abstract, and which still has a connection to the spirit of reality, was philosophically sublimated and diluted in Wolffianism, which formed the stage of Kant's youth. During this time, people were already dealing with the demands of mathematizing science, with the demands of science, which is precisely composed of the results of external observation of the world. But out of the old habit that man has something to say when something is being determined about the world, one had established the broad doctrine of reason alongside this empirical science, alongside this science of experience. It was decreed that uncertain judgments can be gained through experience, through empiricism, about everything that is transitory; but these judgments are directed only at the transitory and are uncertain. One cannot know whether what one recognizes through observation and intellectual knowledge about any fact of the transitory world must necessarily be so for all time. We cannot even know that the sun must rise every morning, because we have only the one piece of empirical evidence that it has risen every morning so far. From this we can conclude that it will also rise in the future; but it is just an empirical conclusion. Beyond this empirical science, Wolffianism, and Kant in his youth, were looking for a rational science, in complete harmony with Wolffianism. It is characteristic that one of Wolff's books is called: “Rational Thoughts about God, the World, and the Soul of Man, and about All Things in General.”

So the aim was, on the one hand, to gain empirical knowledge about the world, insofar as it is accessible to experience, and, on the other hand, to gain rational knowledge that extends over everything, which, so to speak, is to be gained from reason alone. And so, alongside, say, revealed theology, a rational, a rational theology was established, alongside empirical psychology a rational psychology, alongside the knowledge of the world gained through experience, a rational geology, and so on. The underlying reason for this search for a particular science of reason was that people said: there is no certainty for scientific research in an external world. But if one wants to have such certainty, it can only be gained by deriving it from reason itself.

However, the whole research of Wolffianism is still based on the fact that a reality has first been placed in this reason, from which man then derives his “truths of reason”, in some transcendent way.

In Kant's work, two things occurred, and anyone who studies Kant with an open mind will be sharply reminded of what emerges in his work from two sides: on the one hand, he had become accustomed to searching for “certain judgments”. For example, he had said to himself: in mathematics we have such judgments that always apply quite necessarily, that cannot come from experience because experience does not give rise to such judgments. We also have such judgments in some areas of scientific thought, which are valid forever, and which can only be gained from the human being itself. There must be certainty in philosophy. That was one side of what Kant wanted. And anyone who does not grasp how firmly Kant stood on the ground: there must be certainty — also in the sense of Wolffian philosophy — does not understand Kant, because he cannot engage with Kant's insistence on the certainty of certain judgments.

But Kant had become disillusioned with Wolffianism, in terms of its content, through his study of Hume, the English philosopher who wanted to be a mere philosopher of experience. And he said to himself, precisely under the influence of Hume: there is no such thing as spinning a reality out of reason; there is actually only experience. — That was the second side.

On the one hand, there must be certainty; but everything that appears in experience, which is the only basis for real knowledge, does not provide certainty. How can we escape from this dilemma? And the very compulsive search to escape from this dilemma is basically the main impulse of Kantian thinking. I have presented this in detail in my writing “Truth and Science” and have further illuminated it in my “Philosophy of Freedom.” Kant's search did not actually lead to the recognition of anything essential, but to the question: How do you achieve absolute certainty?

Kant's problem is not a problem of truth, nor of knowledge, but of certainty. And if you don't grasp it as a problem of certainty, you can't really understand it. Kant seeks the solution by saying: the human soul is certainly not suited to distilling judgments of reality out of reason, but these judgments do come about; they are applied to external experience, as can be seen, for example, in mathematics. We do not merely look at such figures (it is drawn), but we look at them mathematically and say: there are two triangles or, drawn differently, it is a hexagon. We mix what we spin out of reason inwardly with what comes to us through external experience. We impose what we recognize inwardly a priori over what we experience a posteriori.

Thus Kant came to say: Knowledge of truth cannot be gained from reason. But human reason is applied to experience. It imposes its judgment on external experience. It itself makes its judgment on external experience. Because Kant said: There must be certainty in philosophy, one must be able to find certainty, but one does not find it by searching in a Wolffian way, by believing that one can gain a reality in reason and let experience run alongside – because Kant could not could not bring it together, so he said: Man spins out of his reason that which experience then takes up; man makes knowledge himself; the things of experience are therefore certain and certain to the extent that we make them certain out of our minds.

You see, actually the essence of knowledge is dethroned. Actually, knowledge is eliminated. And it is eliminated in such a subtle way that the Kantians still adhere to this subtlety today and do not realize what is actually involved. When someone like Ludwig Haller comes along and feels how Kantian thinking has actually lost touch with reality, how it snaps at certainty in the unreal, then he finds words like the ones I have shared with you. He finds that human ingenuity is being applied to an impossible problem, to a problem that does not shed light on knowledge but shrouds it in fog. That is why Ludwig Haller says, as he feels it: This misosophy tries to steal its weapons from the arsenal of light and use them in the service of darkness.

But on the other hand, one must also recognize how this whole development of modern times was basically necessary. The development of human thinking and human research since Greek times was not a line of development that can only be followed in the way I have just done, but can also be followed in another direction. I also pointed this out in my book 'Riddles of Philosophy'. Today, we have a knowledge of nature that attempts to understand natural phenomena purely in terms of their essence.

It may be said, however, that the very knowledge of nature which today always prides itself on understanding natural phenomena purely, hardly succeeds in understanding natural phenomena purely, that is, in no longer penetrating them with the web of thoughts of that which is only made in the concept, inwardly subjectively. — All kinds of hypotheses are still being put forward about the external course of phenomena, not only justified ones but also unjustified ones.

But one person did emphasize in modern times, and relatively early on, that in terms of observing external natural processes, this modern age must strive towards the pure phenomenon, towards pure phenomenology. And that person was Kant's opposite number, Goethe. He demanded that phenomena and appearances express themselves purely. He emphasized that what takes place in the development of understanding must remain completely separate from what is presented as a description of phenomena and of the phenomenal process itself. And in the most stringent and admirable way, Goethe repeatedly demands this pure phenomenalism.

But the more one strives towards this pure phenomenalism, the more one must strive for a special peculiarity of the conceptual world. And this peculiarity of the conceptual world is also highly achieved. This peculiarity is thoroughly justified for a certain age of human development. Anyone who, since the age of Cartesius, has not limited himself to studying philosophy, but who has an organ for also entering into the good sides of

of scholastic philosophy and medieval philosophy, and who does not see Aristotle and Plato through the spectacles of modern philosophers and historians of philosophy, but can place them before his soul in their original form, he knows that the way in which the world of concepts and ideas lives in the human soul is quite different today than it was in ancient Greece and even in the scholastic Middle Ages. In the scholastic Middle Ages, the soul still felt that, in experiencing the concept, there was something substantial in this concept, just as there is still something substantial in the red and blue that one perceives. Only in recent times has the concept become a complete image. Only in recent times has the concept been completely emptied of its content. Only in recent times has it become possible in the development of humanity and in philosophy to do what I have called pure thinking in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

If one tries to eavesdrop on the problem of freedom, as I attempted in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” one simultaneously becomes acquainted with this modern character of thinking. One becomes acquainted with a thinking that is basically emptied of all external experiential content. It is brought up on this external experiential content, but lives only as subjective fact.

It is just as true to say of this pure thinking, and I made this clear in the new edition of my Philosophy of Freedom, that it takes place in the realm of the will. But the will has been transformed into thinking, as it were. It is the result of the kind of thinking that has stripped away all external experience. This pure thinking is only an image, and is entirely an image. And if one is at all to arrive at a philosophical understanding in our age, one must reach the soil in which this pure thinking is found.

Goethe sensed what lies in this pure thinking. Others can only feel it with him. That is why they always quote a Goethe saying incorrectly, which says something like that the kind God has saved him from “thinking about thinking”. As Goethe meant it, it is already correct. Goethe never “thought about thinking” because, admittedly, one cannot achieve this pure thinking with the thinking that one has become accustomed to. One must look at it as an image. So that one can say: the thinking itself that one wants to recognize, pure thinking, becomes a looking at this pure thinking. Pure thinking can be achieved not dialectically but vividly. One arrives at this point in philosophical development at the problem of freedom, which is why freedom, real freedom, is not possible at all without attaining this pure thinking, which is a mere image.

As long as a reality within us motivates our actions, our actions cannot be free. Therefore no instinctive action, no traditional action, no action under a habit is really free, but only an action that can follow the images that weave in pure thinking. As soon as you follow a reality, you are pushed. If you want to be free, you must include the unreal in your will. When you bump into something, you feel that the object has an effect on you. When you perform an act under an instinct, under an urge, you must feel that there is something pushing, that there is no freedom. But when you stand in front of a mirror, see the image in the mirror, you will be clear about the fact that the mirror image can never give you a slap in the face, that the mirror image can never push you. The image cannot do anything on its own. It is he who must act, who must act when he confronts this image. But since the image does nothing, the act then becomes a free act. Only a thinking that is not rooted in reality, but is pure image, can motivate a free act. That is why the problem of freedom is the problem of modern thinking, of pure thinking. But in this thinking, one is standing in a world of images.

Modern philosophy, everything that lives in this modern philosophy through Kant and the Kantians, comes instinctively, although it usually does not understand this pure thinking, to this pure thinking. When one begins to think in modern times and trains one's thinking in natural science, which claims all authority for itself and would be real natural science, real science of reality, if it stuffed anything else into us than mere images, one must, when one moves one's thinking in this direction, first approach an unreal. In the thinking through whose peculiarities we are passing with our modern philosophical and scientific development, we have no reality; we have only an image of reality. And in looking at this thinking, we come on the one hand to the problem that concerns the newer epistemologists. They would like to build a bridge from what is inwardly experienced to what outwardly exists in being. They do not realize that they are not building a bridge from one reality to another, but from something that lives in images to something that is supposed to be reality.

And on the other hand, we come to the point where conscientious natural philosophers admit to themselves: with this unrealistic thinking, with this thinking that is absorbed in the pictorial character, we cannot immerse ourselves in reality. The point “where matter haunts” cannot be reached. Because one weaves in pictures. Modern philosophy weaves in images, is unaware of it, and seeks reality in these images. Hence the feeling of a “misosophy” in Ludwig Haller, hence the feeling that one cannot enter into reality if one moves in this thinking.

That is the problem of the more recent development of philosophy: that human history must necessarily drift towards a pure comprehension of unreal pictorial thinking. For the sake of the development of freedom, modern humanity had to rise to this unreal pictorial thinking. But one cannot remain in it if one is a fully human being, if one feels reality in all human beings. For one must feel the contradiction between what is pressing and living and weaving in the human being, and what stands before consciousness as a mere environment of unreal images. We are not dealing with a merely logical or formal problem, but with a real one, which has arisen because man has gradually withdrawn his thinking, his imagining, from external reality.

In the external world there remains for him the dark, obscure matter that he cannot grasp. But his thinking has not become a reality, it has become an image. And he must go further in this image. Thinking, which today is a mere image, was still the content of perception for the Greeks. This thinking has moved in the direction from outside in. It proceeds in such a way that man first submerges into the outer world by thinking. Now, with his philosophizing, he has reached the point where he is weaving in the thinking that has been peeled from the outer world. He must continue in this direction. He must seek reality again. Matter has given man in ancient times and up to our age the support for thinking by making thinking real for him. But thinking, because it had to become the basis for the development of human freedom, has passed into the pictorial character. Thus it hovers between external experience and inner experience. It must submerge into this inner experience. It must in turn become reality. Man must plunge with full consciousness into the regions where Eduard von Hartmann and with him all modern philosophers feel so sultry, because thoughts seem to begin to dance like goblins.

When the human being with his thinking goes out of the pictorial character – where, if he weaves and lives in it, because they are only images, he does not need to be so sultry – when he steps out and enters into his own reality, then, through the exercises of spiritual science, he must indeed include the possibility in his inner abilities to move around in this self-life of the conceptual world, as otherwise in mathematical thinking. He must acquire the ability to grasp reality independently in this self-life. Just as we do not feel stifled when things out there in space do not stand still — lest our knowledge be disturbed — but when they move, run, so man must, in the ascent to spiritual explanation, to spiritual revelation, become capable of giving his image-concept a content again.

If one grasps the actual, pressing philosophical life of the present at this point, then one comes away from all the talk that the philosopher cannot understand what the spiritual researcher is saying. He can understand it as soon as he has understood the pictorial character of his thinking, but also as soon as he has understood that thinking has come to this pictorial character because it moves in world history from the outside in, from the direction of the spirit in matter to the contemplation of the pure spiritual world.

In this way, philosophy must be continued by receiving it from spiritual science, from spiritual research, by immersing thinking in what spiritual science, spiritual research, has to say. This is what I wanted to show you, even if only in a sketchy way with a few lines: in what way philosophy is to be fertilized by spiritual science. In the next few days, we will talk about how other branches of human thought and action can be fertilized by this spiritual science.

Closing words on the occasion of the disputation on philosophy

In the course of the disputation, questions arose that naturally required a broad discussion from a technical point of view. Since we cannot discuss everything in one evening, I would just like to make a few methodological suggestions regarding the questions that arose and that, at least in my opinion, were not formulated very clearly. These suggestions point in the direction in which certain solutions to such questions must be sought.

In view of such questions as, for example, that of the “subjectivity of perception”, there is a lot of confusion of ideas in the most recent philosophical development, an accumulation of concepts that tend to obscure and tangle the problems rather than to illuminate them and lead to a certain solution.

For when one wishes to raise questions concerning the relation between object and subject in perceiving in terms of representation and knowledge, it is always a matter of arriving at the questions by means of the most careful analysis of the facts. For often the questions themselves are wrongly formulated from misconceived ideas. And so it is often the case with questions about the “subjectivity of perception”.

The difficulty was indicated by the example of the partially color-blind person, who is assumed to see a, say, green landscape differently than the so-called normal-sighted person. The difficulty lies in this idea of the partially color-blind person: to what extent must one ascribe subjectivity to what the so-called normal-sighted person, I say quite explicitly, the so-called normal-sighted person, sees?

Well, the first thing to do is to present the whole problem in such a way that it appears correct. “Correct” means that the way in which the elements that have to be brought together to form the problem, that this how of bringing together is done in the right way. Just suppose someone says: Yes, the external world, which appears to me, say, in a green landscape with a green tint, gives me cause to reflect on whether the quality “green” is objective, whether I can ascribe it to the world of objectivity, or whether it must be addressed as subjective. In order to even formulate the problem, one must consider such things as, for example, this: Yes, how does it actually behave when I look at something that is white or yellow, for my sake, through green glasses? There we see it tinged green. Is that now to be ascribed to the sphere of objectivity, or must one speak of subjectivity here? We will soon realize that we certainly cannot ascribe this green, which I see through green glasses, to what is out there. We cannot speak of objectivity in relation to the external environment. But it will certainly not be possible to say that this green tint, which I have seen through green glasses, is based on something subjective. It is objectively determined in a perfectly lawful way, without what I am designating here as green actually being green.

You see, by forming this idea, I am putting the problem in a special light, where I have to consider that which certainly does not belong to the external world, but objectively, as having arisen in an objective way; because the glasses do not belong to me, so they certainly cannot be included in the sphere of subjectivity. Such things might even appear to be sophistry. And yet such sophistries are very often what leads one to put the elements that are supposed to lead one to the questions in the appropriate way, to bring them together. For if one sees through such apparent sophistries in the right way, one will see through the whole threadbareness of the everyday concepts of “subject” and “object”, which have gradually been introduced into modern philosophical reflection. And if one gets into the right line of questioning, one will probably be led more and more to the path that I believe in, which I have taken in my writings “Truth and Science” and “Philosophy of Freedom,” where one does not take the starting point from the concepts of “subject” and “object”, but seeks something independently of these concepts that must lie beyond the sphere of subjectivity and objectivity: that is the function of thinking.

The function of thinking! If you look at the matter independently, thinking actually appears to go beyond the subjective and the objective. And with that, you have gained a starting point from which you can then be led in the appropriate way to where the problem of “subjectivity” and “objectivity”, which presents such difficulties, is at stake. For one is led—and you will find this path thoroughly followed in these two books of mine—not to ask: How does an external “objective” world affect some “subjective” world, for which, say, the mediator is the eye? —but one is led to something quite different. One is led to ask: What is the fact of the senses themselves? What essence does one sense show? For example, the constitution of the eye?

One will then find that in the problem one sets oneself in this way, something comes to light that I want to make clear through a comparison, because I have to be brief – it could, of course, be encompassed with the adequate concept in an explanation lasting hours: I can also look through a pair of glasses and still see the world around me as the naive consciousness perceives it, with its color tinglings, with all its sensory qualities. I must only look through colorless transparent glasses; I must not look through glasses that change the outer world itself for me. And I must now find my way into the difference between glasses that change the outer tinting and glasses that are colorless and transparent and avoid any outer tinting. From this comparison – as I said, long-winded considerations could be used instead of the comparison – I will find: if I take the structure of the so-called normal eye, I have given it a structure that proves to be transparent, that can be compared to the transparent-colorless glass. I find nothing in the normal eye that indicates that the external world is qualitatively changed in any way. But I must not conduct this investigation with the ordinary concepts that I have in everyday consciousness, but with the imaginative consciousness that can truly penetrate the structures of the eye.

For the imaginative consciousness, a so-called normal eye is a transparent organ. An eye that is partially colorblind proves to be comparable to colored glasses for the imaginative consciousness, as something that does, however, make a change in the “subject”.

Thus, by conceiving of subjectivity in a higher sense, one comes precisely to regard the sensory apparatus in the broadest sense as that which can be compared to the transparent, which is precisely designed in such a way that it suspends the production of sensory qualities within itself. One learns to recognize as pure fantasy the idea that in this ideationally transparent sensory apparatus – which is precisely arranged in such a way that it cancels out any production of the sense qualities within itself – something could arise that would first evoke sense qualities, that would be there for something other than the sense qualities.

As I said, I only want to point in this direction. And at the same time, I want to point out that ordinary philosophizing should be aimed at saying: the facts of the world, when examined without prejudice, show me results that are simply insoluble for ordinary mind-consciousness; the facts themselves show me that I must go beyond this ordinary mind-consciousness. It is not honest to conclude, let us say, from the fact of partial color blindness that color qualities are subjective. For every such conclusion contains some logical error that can always be somehow demonstrated. It would be honest to say: one simply does not come to any result with ordinary philosophizing if one wants to solve the difficulty that arises from the comparison of partial color blindness with the vision of the so-called normal eye. The usual consciousness has the task, at this point, of presenting the difficulties and saying, “There they are.” And if one were to become truly aware of the scope of logic, of real-logical thinking within consciousness, one would, I might say, find problems lying everywhere and say, There is one more, insoluble for ordinary consciousness, the second, the third --- and would be glad that in many respects ordinary philosophy is nothing more than a hint at problems and a creation of an atmosphere of waiting for these problems to be solved from a higher level of consciousness. It is only the urge to come to terms with ordinary consciousness that spreads a fog over the problems and does not want to admit that one can only raise the problems with it and that one must point out that the human soul must now undergo a development and exercises to solve these problems. The law of specific sensory energies is certainly not something that can be dealt with within ordinary consciousness.

As I said, I only wanted to point out the main point of the discussions on the subject of colors, and to point out that, above all, philosophy and also philosophical physiology, philology and so on, in the present day would need a very conscientious delineation of what they actually bring before ordinary consciousness through their thinking.

This is the one thing I would like to draw attention to, as I said, quite inadequately. It should only point in one particular direction; but more cannot be done in such a short discussion.

The second point I would like to make – again, purely from a methodological point of view – is the problem of categories that arises here. Of course, one could talk for hours about the categorial nature of human thought, but I would like to point out just one thing for now: within the actual table of categories, “subjectivity” and “objectivity” do not appear at all. And the fact that within the actual category table, the actual, the original category table, “subject” and “object” do not occur at all, this in itself constitutes a kind of proof of the essence of categorical thinking: if one takes the categories in the way not as they arise from some sort of proof, but simply, I might say, as they are derived from logic, then, by dint of being posited, they must be applicable to that which is above 'subjective' and 'objective'. That to which the categories are applicable must be supersubjective and superobjective. But the fact that the categories are applied by man himself is a clear proof that in categorical thinking there is not a subjective, but a subjective-objective.

This is the problem that Goethe also thought about so much. And the way he thought, which led him to always seek out the point where subjectivity and objectivity disappear for the human being in human experience, this endeavor actually made him the opposite of Kant.

Of course it is perfectly true that, as has been said, one could also work out of Kant in a positive sense; but one can work out of everything in the world in a positive way, even out of the greatest error! For there is nothing in the world from which one cannot also extract something positive. We have this positivity, this seeking out of the positive, listed among the basic exercises for those who want to attain higher knowledge. I need only remind you: you will find it discussed in the second part of my “Occult Science”. Of course, this should not blind us to the recognition of aberrations. And finally, if we consider the historical, we can say that a great deal has been worked out positively from Kant. There are not only the critical Kant philologists, not only the neo-Kantians of the likes of Liebmann, Volkelt and so on, but there is the very active Marburg School – Cohen, Cassirer, Dilthey and so on – which tried to work out the positive from Kant in a certain sense.

Now, I have shown how little this 'positive elaboration from Kantianism' can lead to a realistic view: in my 'Riddles of Philosophy', where I also briefly discussed these efforts of the Marburg School. So it is also the case with the category problem that it is necessary to present it correctly in its entire inner essence before the soul in order to see how, precisely through the category problem, the question of the “subjective” in contrast to the “objective” cannot be posed as it has been done by more recent philosophy under the influence of Kantianism. This almost epistemological harnessing to subjectivity is something that has introduced countless unjustified ideas into our modern philosophy and caused us to lose ideas that were already there and that, if developed in a correspondingly straight line, could have led to something quite fruitful.

I must repeatedly draw attention to the fact – which I have already done several times – that an extraordinarily talented 19th-century philosopher, Franz Brentano, published the first volume of his “Psychology” in 1874. It is basically an ingenious book. This volume of Brentano's “Psychology” was published in the spring of 1874. He promised the second volume for the fall of the same year. The three following volumes were then to appear shortly thereafter. Brentano had initially calculated this “psychology from an empirical point of view” to consist of five volumes. The first volume was only a preparation. In it, however, there is a highly remarkable passage in which Brentano indicates how he was in fact aiming at the most significant psychological problems. He says: If all modern thinking should lead only to the examination of how representations arise and fade away, how they associate with each other, how memory is formed, and the like, and if one could only come to uncertainty about about the actual psychological questions of Plato and Aristotle, for example, whether the soul remains when its external physical body decays, then one would not have gained much for the needs of man through modern science! Well, from everything else that Brentano suggests in the first volume of his “Psychology from an Empirical Point of View,” one can already see how he wanted to bring the problem through his five volumes to these fundamental questions of Plato and Aristotle.

The strange thing is that the second volume did not appear in the fall. It did not appear the next year either. And in the nineties, Brentano promised once again that he would now set about creating at least a kind of surrogate in a kind of descriptive psychology. So the second volume of “Psychology” was supposed to appear in 1874. Nothing appeared until the nineties; then a second promise appeared, but was not fulfilled! Franz Brentano died in Zurich a few years ago. The promise has not been fulfilled to this day. It has remained with the first volume of “Psychology from an Empirical Point of View.” Why? Because Brentano, in his Privatdozentenschrift, posited the sentence, “Philosophy has to follow the same methods that are applied in natural science,” because Brentano wanted to remain true to this methodological sentence that he had posited at the time, and with which one could not make any progress. Brentano was much too honest a nature to want to make headway by any other means than by the means of the external scientific method. Therefore, he simply remained silent about what came after the first volume.

I have expressed this in my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Mysteries of the Soul). Brentano's pupil Kraus has indeed said that there were all sorts of other reasons why Brentano did not publish the later volumes; but it must be said that if the reasons were only those that Kraus pointed out, then Brentano must have been a real philistine. And he certainly was not that. He was a personality who followed the impulses of his inner being and only those impulses! But there was something in Brentano that at least gave him hope that one could penetrate into the things of the world. And basically every such philosopher – and there are few who have had this hope in a well-founded way in modern times – has turned against Kant, and of course Franz Brentano as well.

There was something in him that justified this hope. And I find that in a concept that, I might say, occasionally emerges from Brentano's philosophy, and which he borrowed in the sense of an older philosophy – of the kind that still drew from reality, as I suggested this morning: it is the concept of intentional inwardness, which he applies to the concepts of cognition and perception.

This concept must be formulated. Then, from there, one will get an approximation of what I just hinted at: to examine the extent to which the human sense organ is a self-extinguishing one, to which one must not ascribe that it could be the producer of sense qualities. And this concept – now not of the real interiority of some process, but of intentional interiority – contains within itself the life of pointing, which then becomes observable for the imaginative conceiving. And this life of pointing, which is given with the concept of intentional inwardness, then brings the possibility of grasping what, since Johannes Müller, the physiologist from the first half of the 19th century, has been so inadequately grasped in the doctrine of “specific sensory energies”. So that one would like to say that the comparison with the transparent, colorless glass is not quite appropriate for the reason that one has to imagine not an inanimate colorlessness, thus a self-abolition, but a living and precisely through its liveliness and thereby standing in a corresponding process within, which allows an objective experience by not taking in the objective, but by grasping out of itself the process of pointing through and in pointing to this objective.

I have found what lies in a renewal of this concept of intentional interiority, in the sense of a modern world view, only in some recent American philosophers who—probably even without knowing the concept I have just mentioned—try to grasp the continuity of human consciousness. Let us say, for example, that in the twenty-ninth year of life a person looks back, with the help of memory, on what he went through in the eighteenth year of life. Then, if we grasp it inwardly, what returns to the person in the twenty-ninth year of life is something similar to what could be described as an intentional innesein. And in relation to this process, this concept appears again in some recent American epistemologists.

It is precisely in such phenomena that one can see how conceptual work is alive in contemporary philosophical endeavor. But this work must become honest in the way I have described, by coming to show clearly that problems exist; but ordinary consciousness, ordinary intellectual activity, can only pose the problems; and now one must move on to the solution of the problems. If one were to develop scientific honesty in this way, it would be the basis for moving on to the imaginative and the other stages of knowledge.

These are only very inadequate, methodological suggestions.

The series of lectures we are having today and tomorrow could perhaps be used to discuss things that are similar; except that they are discussed one time as they should be discussed for members and for those friends who have spent a certain amount of time within a branch to base their world view on the points of view from which we start, while tomorrow, at the public lecture, similar things and similar starting points are to be considered, but in a way that is more suitable for those who, so to speak, come to the movement directly from the outside world, still little acquainted with spiritual science.

Today, we will take as it were the starting point of what is a well-known demand for all those who not only want to advance in spiritual science alone, but perhaps also in the development of their inner being. It is emphasized time and again that for a person's inner development — so that it may lead to his having experiences in the spiritual world — purity and loving aims and intentions are of the utmost importance. We could perhaps say, even if it is somewhat one-sided (for everything one says must be one-sided), that a spiritual researcher, or anyone who wants to ascend into the spiritual worlds and somehow find something of these spiritual worlds for themselves, must above all have a certain soul quality. This quality of the soul must be such that he sympathizes, and indeed strongly sympathizes with what is good, noble, and beautiful, and that he feels a kind of repulsion for what is evil and ugly. The purity of the soul's moral nature is repeatedly called for in relation to the path into the spiritual worlds, and we could well say: For an ascent into the spiritual worlds that is truly in line with our present time, it is absolutely necessary that the soul be completely imbued with true, moral intentions and goals. We shall hear later that it is indeed possible to develop clairvoyant powers without these basic conditions; but to acquire clairvoyant powers without the just characterized basic conditions, always has something dubious.

To understand this, let us now try to understand what we actually mean by the moral nature of man. We are led to speak of the moral nature of man when we consider, on the one hand, the impulses that come to man from the outside world to act, to will or to desire. When man is moved by some natural need, such as hunger or thirst, to perform this or that action, or even to desire or will this or that action, we do not say that such desires or wills are moral actions. Of course, that does not mean that they are immoral. But when a stone falls to the ground, that is not a moral act either, and we do not feel at all inclined to apply morality as a standard. Nor do we feel inclined to speak of morality when a person satisfies the natural demands of his organism by eating and drinking. Nor do we feel compelled to speak of morality when a person sees a beautiful flower or something else beautiful somewhere and, because it makes a beautiful, pleasant impression, is prompted to desire it. Here, too, we do not speak of morality.

When do we actually speak of morality in human nature? But only when it is not such external inducements as hunger and thirst or the sense of well-being that some object arouses in us that are the inducement to do this or that, but when the inducement arises from the innermost core of our being, like a command from within us that is independent of external inducement. We become particularly aware of the difference between this moral and what I am not saying is immoral, but morally indifferent, when we consider how we might do this or that through external inducement, but do not do it because of the inner command, which we call a moral impulse.

Take, for example, the very obvious and trivial case of someone having a powerful tendency to drink too much. Then, if he were able to do so, he would just drink. Or he can also follow an inner voice that has nothing to do with the inclination, but is opposed to this external inducement and says: What this external inducement wants to happen should not be! - Here we see that something can speak in us that contradicts the external inducement. Now, anything that amounts to such a contradiction and inner condemnation of our actions, we call a moral thing. We can only speak of a moral action if we disregard all external impressions, everything we are forced to do by external circumstances, and only look at what speaks from within us. It is precisely this ability to hear something within ourselves that goes beyond external inducement and can even contradict this inducement from outside that makes us human and sets us apart from animals.

We must feel that we have something in morality that is true in itself. This is the essential feature of all moral impulses: that they are true in themselves, and that external circumstances can contribute nothing when any action is to be designated as moral or immoral. When we do seem to designate something as moral in response to external circumstances, we are often indulging in an illusion when we make such a designation. If, for example, we were to say that a person organizes his life in such a way that he does not merely follow hunger and thirst with regard to eating and drinking, but follows the principle that it is necessary to take care of his organism in order to sustain himself in the outside world, so that we can see the external requirements of life as the decisive impulses, then that would be an illusion. Morality can only be established if we can add to the external impulse the internal impulse that it is right and good for man to sustain himself on earth, and not only for the sake of the external task, but for the sake of the internal task that can follow from it. Otherwise it is only an apparent one. The hallmark of what is moral is therefore that the impulse is not caused by the outside world, but arises purely from the powers of our soul. Now, of course, someone might say: But there are also evil voices within us; we often follow impulses that we clearly recognize as inner impulses and that are certainly not ones that we can describe as moral. One could say, however, that we cannot discuss this chapter in detail today because we have set ourselves a different task today: when a person follows such seemingly inner impulses that are bad and evil, he is not truly following himself, but rather he is following impulses whose origin he does not know and which he confuses with those that come from within. We all know the luciferic forces from our spiritual scientific considerations. These do not come from within, but, so to speak, from without, in that the luciferic entities have taken hold in our astral body and not in our I. Thus, if we define morality in this way, we are exposed to numerous contradictions. If we look at this more closely, we find that the characteristic of the moral is that all moral impulses must arise from our innermost core of being. We can then present what we, so to speak, morally like, what arouses our moral approval, and can fill us with delight and enthusiasm, as an ideal, so to speak, for which the human being is so completely at one with himself, so completely at home within himself. And if it is extremely useful and necessary in ordinary life for a person to realize that he is only completely himself when making moral judgments, or judgments that arise in a similar way, then this is an absolute basic requirement for practical occultism. It must be recognized as a principle of the occultist. It is important that all events in his life should follow the pattern of moral impulses, that nothing should happen in the soul when one enters the higher path of knowledge that does not follow the pattern of a real moral impulse.

It is important that the person who wants to become a practical occultist, who wants to follow the path of knowledge, should not undertake anything that he cannot say: If I compare it with what is in the human soul, what I call moral, the two must be similar. The path of knowledge must not deviate at any stage from that which proves similar to the moral behavior of man. The similarity of the path of knowledge to moral impulses even extends to the details. This will be illustrated by a very specific example.

As people are in the present day, morality is something very special. Basically, the Ten Commandments are still the most important of our laws. The Ten Commandments are constructed in a very special way. Of the ten, only three are constructed in such a way that they say: You shall do something. The other seven are constructed in such a way that one says: You shall not! It follows that the world powers see much more necessity in giving people moral laws that say: You shall not do something - than in giving them laws that say: You shall do something. For not doing what is commanded is in the ratio of seven to three to doing what is commanded. We may therefore say: Morality in general must work in human nature in such a way that it particularly takes the standpoint of saying, “Thou shalt not.”

We can compare this ratio of seven to three in the Ten Commandments in more detail. If we look at the seven commandments that say, “You shall not do something”, they all refer to things of the external world, to what one should not do in the physical world; whereas the three commandments that contain the “You shall” actually refer to that which goes beyond the physical world. There it says: You shall believe in one God, you shall not take the name of this God in vain, and so on. From this we see that in relation to the actual spiritual matters of the soul, the commandments are positive; on the other hand, all commandments that relate to actual moral behavior in the outer physical life have a “you shall not”. Even if we believe that the fourth commandment, “Honor your father and your mother, that you may live long on earth,” is positive, we still feel that it is fundamentally very negative, like the other six commandments. It is a kind of transitional commandment that, although it refers to the physical world, nevertheless leads from this physical world up into the spiritual world. We can prove this in minute detail, I might add, for in all ancient peoples the so-called ancestral service of religion was based on the fact that there was something divine in the ancestors, the forefathers. In this respect, the veneration of the ancestors, of whom the immediate ancestors are only a special case, was a kind of transition from the sensual world to the higher world. But this fourth commandment was especially related to the immediate physical world, to the relationship between children and parents. In relation to parents we can fulfill this commandment, we can feel that the fourth commandment is given in a positive way, that it is set up over man to prevent something from happening. In the case of the first commandments, the object to which they point does not yet exist in the physical world.

The structure of the nature of the Ten Commandments points to what constitutes an essential feature of morality in the world of the senses: that moral impulses may contradict what a person would do if he were to follow only the impulses of the physical world. This makes it clear for the path of knowledge, which must be built according to the pattern of moral impulses: We must moralize our entire knowledge on the occult path of knowledge, our otherwise merely theoretical laws of knowledge must become inner moral laws. Thus, what primarily relates to the physical plane must be so organized that it extinguishes what is directly before it, that it says: I extinguish it, just as lower inclinations are extinguished when the moral “Thou shalt not” calls. Indeed, for this reason, every true description of the path of knowledge points out that it is by refining the moral impulses that one most surely lifts the powers of knowledge up into the higher world. This is expressed in all its details. Let us assume we have some kind of plant. What can we initially identify as an external impulse that emanates from it? Let us take the plant's leaf. We can identify as an external impulse that the leaves appear green to us. Thus, for example, rose leaves are green in the physical, sensual world. Now, let us assume that someone who really wanted to attain higher knowledge as a practical occultist was required to educate himself according to the pattern of moral knowledge. Most images would have to arise in such a way that he holds up this green leaf and, in the face of the greenness of the plant, the inner impulse awakens: You shall not be green. It should be possible to look at the green leaf with such vision that the external impulse does not work, that just as the bad inclination disappears before the moral judgment, the green color of the leaf disappears through another, let's say clairvoyant power. In fact, when man develops his clairvoyant powers in the right way, as described in “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”, he learns to look at the green leaf and, just as moral judgments extinguish bad inclinations, so the greenness of the leaf, which applies only to the physical plane, is extinguished. And where green would otherwise appear, we have a light pink or peach-like color in relation to the clairvoyant ability in this case. This color appears when we can remove through our clairvoyant power what is in the Maja, what is on the physical plane. Thus, through the clairvoyant power, we remove what is on the physical plane and trigger what, as a supersensible element, underlies the sensible. We can say that entering the path of knowledge really happens in the same way as a person's moral experience. The confrontation of the supersensible and the sensory world works in just the same way as the moral impulse works on immoral inclinations. If, on the other hand, one were to look at the roses themselves, for example this rose here, which has such a rich red color on the physical plane, one would see a bright, transparent green for this rose, and for the lighter rose a kind of rich green with a slight blue nuance.

Thus we have seen in a single case that occult judgments, which correspond to clairvoyant vision, are built up psychically, like the moral judgments that extinguish what is immoral. From this we can conclude that what we said at our starting point is confirmed. In order to arrive at higher knowledge, we must learn to extinguish all immediate impressions of the physical, external world, to make maya disappear, so that something else takes the place of maya. Now, as is well known, the best way to learn something is to memorize it through things that are similar to what is being learned. No one will practice things that have nothing to do with the subject in question in order to learn. I have never heard that someone became a mathematician by going for a walk, simply because it is not similar. Thus, we can acquire such abilities of the soul that are similar to moral impulses only by practicing on what a person already has in ordinary life. He does not yet have clairvoyance, which is something that must be acquired slowly and laboriously. But man always has the opportunity to reflect in his soul, asking himself: Which things do I find morally good and which morally reprehensible? Most people do not act immorally not because they do not know what is moral, but only because their inclinations, drives, desires or passions contradict their moral knowledge. Then, when we have examined ourselves in this way, we can go back to what we discover in ourselves, such as agreement with what we can call moral. And if we now practise this meditation by asking ourselves: How can we imagine this or that in the world according to our moral judgment? — and create images for ourselves and immerse ourselves in them, we will experience things and emotional habits in our soul that are akin to clairvoyant powers.

So the next thing a person can do to awaken their clairvoyant powers is to become one with morality and action. This is the best training for clairvoyant powers. That is why it is always emphasized that one should actually only come to have clairvoyant powers by improving one's moral character.

If we consider this, we will indeed have to ask ourselves the question: Are there perhaps no other ways to develop clairvoyant vision? We often see people develop high levels of clairvoyant ability who do not make a particularly good moral impression on us, so we cannot assume that they first cultivated their morals, their approval and disapproval, and their enthusiasm for moral judgment. We see that people who have developed clairvoyant powers through all kinds of other things show certain bad qualities that they did not have or hardly had before; for example, they become real liars when they begin to develop clairvoyant powers. Yes, sometimes it becomes a very dangerous thing for a person's character, especially when they develop clairaudience. Clairvoyance is not yet as dangerous as clairaudience. How does that fit in with what has been said? Well, as you may recall, in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds,” it is pointed out everywhere at the crucial points that the path to knowledge of the higher worlds, as it has been characterized today, must be followed. But it is equally certain that there are other paths as well. This path must be studied in the right way, then one will soon see why qualities can arise as they have just been characterized. We must be clear about the fact that we first have within us the spiritual-soul core of our being, which we summarize in its center when we say “I” or “I am”. This spiritual-soul core of our being is embedded in the astral, etheric and physical bodies. Just as the human being lives in the world now, we actually live when we live inwardly, in our I; for all soul activities in the awakened human being are in some way connected with the I, and all appear, as it were, in the background of the I.

I have often given the example of a schoolmate of mine who, even as a young pupil, was a thoroughly materialistic thinker and said: When we think and when we feel, we are only dealing with processes in the brain; we think and feel by virtue of the movements of our brain. Even then he developed quite materialistic theories: How can one speak of the self, of the essence of the being? It is the brain that feels, wills and thinks! – I replied: Yes, but why do you then keep lying and always say: I think, I feel, I will, when you know that your brain does that? – Of course one could say that this is a cheap, trivial objection; but what matters is that it is correct, significant and immediately valid. We live in connection with our ego from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep, and we cannot separate our ego from anything we think, feel or want. Now, what we experience inwardly and what is so linked to our ego is embedded in the astral, etheric and physical bodies. We do not experience these bodies directly in normal life. All kinds of hidden, inexplicable things emerge from the astral body, but what happens in it is unknown to the person, just as what happens in the depths is unknown to someone who only looks at the upper wave of the sea. A person should just observe life and see how little is known about what goes on in the hidden depths of life.

For example, we have a child who, in the seventh year of his life, experienced only once being treated unfairly by his father or mother. This resulted in a certain agitation in the child, but it was not noticed because it apparently disappeared very quickly for the outside world. But it only descended into the astral body; down there it surges and drifts. The child lives on until the age of sixteen or seventeen. He is at school. Something happens, the teacher does this or that. Another child would just have been upset about it, but this child commits suicide! Anyone who looks at this child's life only superficially will talk about all kinds of reasons that led him to commit suicide. Only he who looks at life in its depths, where it surges and drives, in the astral body, will know that one of the most important causes was the experience of injustice in the seventh year. This lives on down there in secret and is only brought to the surface by the incident at school; if that had not happened, the suicide would not have occurred.

What happens just below the threshold of consciousness, when the astral body has experiences in the immediate present, we cannot even be certain about that, much less about how the astral body is structured, formed, composed, what its elements, its beings are. We are embedded in what the spiritual and soul powers, which we know as the hierarchies, have organized for us. Down there in the astral body there are many forces, just as there are many in the depths of the sea that cannot be seen, only the ripples on the surface. And just as the ripples on the surface are related to what is below in the depths of the sea, so is the conscious I related to what is going on in the astral body. Only a diver who can submerge himself in this world of the astral body can do this, and this diver is precisely the clairvoyant.

This applies to an even greater extent to the etheric body; there we have even more hidden depths. And only with the physical body! Although the human being has it in front of him from the outside, he has the least control over it and can only do what the stomach wants. If he had to choose between fighting an upset stomach or immoral tendencies, he would set aside all moral efforts and strive for a healthy stomach. The physical body is subject to laws that man does not have in his conscious ego, but which he acquires from outside in maya. The astral, etheric and physical bodies are permeated with forces from the beings of the higher hierarchies. But this does not prevent these from playing up into the conscious ego, that forces flow from the hidden depths of the human being into the conscious ego, as we saw in the case of the child that really happened. From the age of seven, a force had been released in the astral body through the injustice that had occurred. This force then played itself into consciousness when the teacher took the cloth used to wipe the blackboard and, when the boy, who had since turned sixteen, had given him a slap in the face. He leaves the classroom, happens to find the chemistry room open, goes in and takes poison. With all the means of psychological science, one could prove how the violence of what was down there in the astral body brought this about.

But what is present down there in the human being can also be drawn up into the conscious I through certain behavior. We could pump up forces from the astral body through the conscious I and thereby come into possession of clairvoyant, that is, supersensory powers in consciousness. But in doing so, we are pumping up forces from what the gods have given us. This is indeed something that is often recommended in books that give instructions on how to enter a path of knowledge. It is very often the case that those who write such books also have no idea of the true process, because these things are not done with the conscientiousness with which they must be done. But it is to be understood that the forces that are instilled by higher hierarchies into our astral, etheric and physical bodies belong there. If we pump them up, we withdraw something from our organization; we take away something from what the gods have given us, and we weaken ourselves as a result. The weakening can show itself in such a way that the truthfulness instilled by the gods is damaged. These powers, which previously prevented people from lying, are pumped up to such an extent that they now begin to lie. Here is the great difference between this way of acquiring clairvoyant powers and the one described above, which you find consistently carried out in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”. What is this way based on? Exactly on the fact that nothing is developed on the path of knowledge that is not carried out according to the pattern of purely moral judgment. But this never flows from the astral body, but must be acquired as something that arises in the conscious ego like an inner voice. For we cannot regard as a moral being that which has no consciousness. We speak of morality only in relation to a being that is capable of allowing impulses to arise out of the core of its nature, which is connected with its inner being.

But now, in addition to moral forces, there are also those that lead the soul up into the higher world. If these are not to come from our astral body, then they cannot come from within ourselves at all. They cannot possibly come from within ourselves, because what comes from within ourselves would have to come from the conscious ego. But apart from moral impulses, at most aesthetic judgments, which decide on beauty, and, in a sense, mathematical judgments arise from the conscious ego. But the astral body should not be pumped up; so where can they come from? From the supersensible world, in which we are placed and which has indeed produced our three bodies. But these forces do not have to come from these three bodies themselves. So it is not the detour through the three bodies that must be chosen, but a path that brings us directly into contact with the spiritual realms, with the beings of the hierarchies, so that these forces of the higher world flow directly into us. We must therefore have access to these worlds through which higher forces can flow into our souls. For this it is necessary that all higher knowledge is connected with something other than with ordinary knowledge. With ordinary knowledge one does not enter into the higher worlds. To enter into the higher worlds, a very specific basic mood of the soul is necessary. This is the first thing that even the ancient Greek philosophers emphasized: Someone who can only think well, who only wants to grasp things intellectually, through mere thinking and philosophizing, cannot enter the spiritual worlds. One must start from something else. Before one can confront a thing cognitively, one must confront it in a different way.

All knowledge begins with wonder, and only those who start from a place of wonder are on the path to true knowledge. Nothing that we do not first face in wonder can lead to the path of knowledge at all. Let all pedagogy declaim that one must start from observation; if wonder is not there first, it remains mere intellectual cognition. Wonder is the first thing one must have.

The second thing that allows us to enter the spiritual world is to learn to worship. To worship that which works through the object. Knowledge that is not so connected with the soul that the soul walks the path of knowledge in the sense that it first lives in awe and in worship of that which manifests itself through the object, does not go beyond intellectual knowledge.

The third is to feel in harmony with world events. The spiritual teaching provides many means for this, in particular by carrying the idea of karma within us with all the seriousness of life. It is a long way from being convinced of karma in human life to the point where it becomes a true seriousness of life. If we are truly convinced of karma, then when someone slaps us, we must not say, “I don't like you slapping me!” Instead, we should ask ourselves, “Who actually slapped me? I myself, because in my previous life I did something that caused the other person to give me this slap, and I have not the slightest reason to tell him that he is doing me wrong, but in a sense I have set up an automaton for myself. — Not being in contradiction but in harmony with world events is the third thing. The Gospel itself gives a corresponding teaching: If someone strikes you on the right cheek, then offer the other one as well. If one knows that through karma one has to look for the cause within oneself, if one recognizes how one only lives out what one has brought about through one's own arbitrariness, through one's own guilt, then one comes to know oneself in harmony with the world process. That is the third.

And the fourth is: complete surrender to the process of the world, seeing oneself as if one were actually only a part of it. So that we can list four qualities with which we can relate to the outside world, to the outside of life: first, admiring, marveling; second, venerating; third, knowing ourselves to be in harmony with the world process; fourth, completely surrendering ourselves to this world process.

By developing these qualities, we open our soul, open it so that those forces can flow into it that flow out of the spiritual world in a virginal state, as it were. We inhale these forces like fresh mountain air, after having previously inhaled air that has been consumed by other organisms. Thus we see what a great difference there is between what can be given, as it were, by grace through the higher hierarchies themselves, and what we acquire by pumping up something out of the forces they place in our organization. By such a consideration we learn truly to distinguish between two paths that both lead to real clairvoyance. But one path leads to clairvoyance through the fact that man himself encounters the beings of the higher hierarchies directly.

Man has not always been a moral being. As long as man had only developed the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, one could not speak of moral impulses. We speak of ancient sun-men who appropriated the etheric body, and of moon-men who acquired the astral body. But there was nowhere a realm of morality during these periods of development. The mission on earth is that morality is added to what man can otherwise experience. This is the task for the acquisition of such powers that lead to the spiritual world: man must develop beyond what he has acquired in the course of Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution. From all this it can be seen that, because it can be directly proven by reason, one cannot say that man can entrust himself to the offered paths of knowledge without judgment, to black magic as well as to moral impulses. One must only be willing to test everything through reason. If you try to respond to it correctly through today's description, what has been said will prove to be true, so that if you apply such standards to the description of paths of knowledge, you can really distinguish them without further ado. And it is important that man learn to say to himself: For me, the description of a path of knowledge in which not everything is patterned after a moral impulse is suspect from the outset. A person who does not consider a path that contradicts what one can actually feel as a moral impulse to be suspicious, who cannot feel the necessity of moral impulses, would have to ascribe it to himself if he were to get into danger. Therefore it was not at all unnecessary to include this consideration among the reflections that can be cultivated, because it is indeed right and good that someone who is interested in spiritual science today not only accepts the things that have been researched, but also, to a certain extent, familiarizes themselves with how things are found. Let us assume that someone wants to accept spiritual science but does not want to enter the path of knowledge for this incarnation. It is also useful for him to get an idea of how the knowledge is gained. He can gain an understanding of it, just as a chemist accepts a truth because he is told the experiment by which the knowledge in question is gained, even if he has not done the experiment himself.

Now, in our time, it is especially necessary for those who want to follow the path to higher knowledge to observe the things that have been characterized today; for we live in an age in which man is called upon by higher powers to become more and more independent and self-reliant. In the times that have passed until the Mystery of Golgotha, it was the case that man, without his doing, was in a certain way imbued with clairvoyant powers; this was like an inheritance from primeval times. But since the Mystery of Golgotha, man lives in such a way that he must consciously face things. Therefore, it is necessary that man learn to appropriate that very mood in the soul that is achieved through the four virtues, through the four powers: marveling, admiring, venerating, feeling harmony with the process of the world, and to devote himself to the process of the world, and that he may open himself freely to those influences that may come to him from the higher hierarchies precisely through the development of these virtues.

Now there is a possibility, so to speak, of moving out of the most fundamental soul impulses into such an attitude towards the world as in these four virtues: If we repeatedly and again and again devote ourselves to the thought in our souls that we, as we stand in the world, as we are interwoven in the world of Maja, the great illusion, have sprung from the divine forces with this Maja, this illusion, which always has its origin in the spiritual world. The fact that we live in the world of Maja, of illusion, does not prevent us from surrendering to the spiritual forces in the world of Maja and illusion, from which they have arisen. Maya is like the life in the play of waves on the sea, but it is still raised by the sea and is formed from the substance of the sea. Just as the play of waves comes from the world of the sea, and the foam is a formation from the substance of the sea, so the world of Maya arises from the spiritual underground, so that we can say: Even though we are wrapped up in this world of illusions, we have emerged from the Divine. This is expressed in Western esotericism by the words: Ex deo nascimur – we are born of the Divine.

And a second fundamental feeling is that we must not pump up the forces that the divine powers have placed in our astral, etheric and physical bodies, but that we must devote ourselves directly to the spiritual world, dying to the world. We do this through the four virtues: awe and wonder, reverence, harmony and devotion to the cosmic process. These are the things that bring us ever deeper into the mood that Western esotericism expresses as follows: In Christus morimur — in Christo morimur.

Then we can hope that we are heading towards awakening in the spiritual world, that we are opening up to the forces that are being newly bestowed on us there, as they were once bestowed on the astral body. Through the Holy Spirit we will be awakened again, we will be transported back into the spiritual world, so that man can ascend again into the higher world: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

We should know that any esoteric teaching that is correct for today's world must banish all methods that pump forces from the lower bodies up into the ego that are supposed to lead to higher knowledge; for we are healthy when these forces remain below. It is a false esoteric path when we befog ourselves in this or that way and then consider certain things to be right simply because we have pumped up the forces that would not allow us to think these things are right if they remained in their place. These are serious matters, leading to a true understanding of why, in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” the powers for developing clairvoyant abilities are localized directly in the area of our larynx. They are, in the highest sense, moral faculties, and are also presented in the Buddha's teaching as the eight-fold path. To a certain extent they are moral; in the broader sense they lead man upwards to a thorough moralization of our knowledge as well, to an impregnation of it with that which otherwise is only in our morals.

[ 1 ] A saying by Goethe that delicately explains the relationship between humans and the world is this: “We actually undertake in vain to express the essence of a thing. We become aware of effects, and a complete history of these effects would probably encompass the essence of that thing. We strive in vain to describe the character of a person; on the other hand, if we put together his actions, his deeds, we will be confronted with a picture of his character. Colors are deeds of light, deeds and suffering... Colors and light are in the most exact relationship to each other, but we must think of both as belonging to the whole of nature: for it is the whole of nature that wants to reveal itself to the eye in this way. In the same way, the whole of nature reveals itself to another sense... Thus nature speaks downwards to other senses, to known, unrecognized, unknown senses; thus it speaks to itself and to us through a thousand phenomena. To the attentive, it is never dead or mute.»

[ 2 ] To fully appreciate the significance of this statement, , one need only consider how very differently the world must reveal itself to the lowest forms of life, which have only a kind of sense of touch or feeling spread over the entire surface of their bodies. Light, color and sound cannot be present for them in the same way that they are present for beings that are endowed with eyes and ears. The air vibrations that a shot from a gun causes may also have an effect on them if they are hit by them. An ear is necessary for these air vibrations to be perceived as a bang. And that certain processes, which reveal themselves in the fine substance called ether as light and color, require an eye. In this sense, the philosopher Lotze's statement applies: “Without a light-sensitive eye and a sound-sensitive ear, the whole world would be dark and silent. There would be no light or sound in it, just as a toothache would be impossible without a tooth nerve that can feel pain.»

[ 3 ] The poet Robert Hamerling says in his philosophical book («Atomistik des Willens») about this insight: «If this does not make sense to you, dear reader, and if your your mind bends before this fact like a shy horse, then do not read another line; leave this and all other books that deal with philosophical matters unread; for you lack the necessary ability to take in a fact without prejudice and to hold it in your thoughts.»

[ 4 ] But a conclusion necessarily follows from this fact. Goethe expresses it beautifully: “The eye owes its existence to light. From indifferent animal auxiliary organs, light calls forth an organ that becomes its equal; and so the eye is formed by light for light, so that the inner light may confront the outer.” This means nothing other than that the external processes that man perceives through the eye as light would be there even without the eye; this however creates the sensation of light from them. Man must never say that only that which he perceives exists; he must recognize that of all that exists, he can only perceive that for which he has organs. And with each new organ, the world must reveal new aspects of its nature. The naturalist Tyndall aptly describes this: “The effect of light in the animal kingdom seems to be only a change in chemical composition, as occurs in the leaves of plants. Gradually this effect is localized in individual pigment cells that are more sensitive to light than the surrounding tissue. The eye begins. It is initially able to reveal the differences between light and shadow that are produced by very close objects. Because the interruption of light is almost always followed by contact with the opaque nearby object, it must be concluded that seeing is a kind of anticipated feeling. The adaptation continues (in higher animals). A slight swelling of the skin forms above the pigment cells; a lens begins to form, and through an infinite number of adaptations, the sense of sight achieves a sharpness that ultimately reaches the perfection of the hawk or eagle eye. It is the same with the other senses.“

[ 5 ] How much of what is real is revealed to a being through sensation depends on the organs that have developed in it. Man must never say that only that which he can perceive is real. There may be many things that are real, but which he has no organs to perceive. And a man who declared only that which is ordinarily perceptible to the senses to be real would be like a lower animal that declared the unreality of colors and sounds, since it cannot perceive them.

[ 6 ] Now every man knows of a real world which he cannot perceive with his ordinary senses. That is his own inner world. His feelings, impulses, passions and thoughts are real. They live in him. But no ear can hear them; no eye can see them. They are “dark and silent” for another, as Lotze says in the above quotation, “without a light-sensitive eye and without a sound-sensitive ear, the whole world would be dark and silent.” And this world ceases to be “dark and silent” as soon as there are sensitive eyes and ears. Only such a being can know that the world of colors and sounds arises from this “mute and dark” world, that it experiences this latter world by means of the eye and ear. Only direct experience can decide this.

[ 7 ] Can someone who cannot perceive the real inner world of man as a sensation claim that it is impossible to perceive it? Anyone who recognizes the significance of the facts presented will do so. He will have to say to himself: whether this is possible is for those who have such a perception to decide, not for those who do not. For the eye-gifted, not the eyeless being, can give an account of the reality of the world of colors. This thought must be followed by the following, which Hamerling brilliantly summarizes in what he has to say in this direction: “Our sensory world is the world of effects. The active element in every being produces the idea in others, as a touch on the strings produces the sound. Every being is a harpist on foreign strings and, at the same time, a harp for foreign fingers.»

[ 8 ] Just as external nature transforms the “indifferent animal organs” into the eye, in the sense of Goethe, so man can develop within himself the organs through which feelings, drives, instincts, passions, thoughts, etc. become a world of senses, a world of effects, just as air vibrations become sound perception through the ear, and ether vibrations become color perception through the eye. The paths that the soul must take to develop these senses will be discussed in a later issue of this journal. Here, we will say a few words about the perceptions of these “spiritual senses” themselves.

[ 9 ] It is clear that only a part of a person is visible to the external eye. It is the part that is referred to as the physical body. This physical body consists of the same components as the external natural objects. And the physical and chemical forces that are also active in minerals are active in it. Now every thinking person will admit that the life of the soul can never be explained by these substances and their processes. The natural scientist Du Bois-Reymond expresses himself on this subject as follows: “It may seem, at a superficial glance, that by knowing the material processes in the brain, we could understand certain mental processes and dispositions. I include in this the memory, the flow and association of ideas, the consequences of practice, specific talents and the like. The slightest reflection teaches that this is an illusion. We would only be informed about certain inner conditions of the mental life, which are more or less equivalent to the outer conditions set by the sensory impressions, but not about the origin of the mental life through these conditions. What conceivable connection exists between certain movements of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and on the other hand the original, indefinable, undeniable facts for me: I feel pain, I feel pleasure, I taste sweetness, I smell the scent of roses, I hear the sound of an organ, I see red, and the equally immediate certainty that follows from this: So I am? It is simply inconceivable, forever and ever, that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. atoms should not be indifferent to how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they lie and will move.” – Du Bois-Reymond is certainly wrong with what he concludes from this, but not with the fact itself. (Compare my book “Welt-und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert”, Berlin, Siegfr. Cronbach, second volume, page 78 ff.) - It must be made clear what facts underlie such a statement. The natural scientist uses the external senses for his investigations. He does indeed strengthen their power by means of instruments, and he combines the facts they supply with his understanding, and determines their proportions by calculation; but the basis for everything he determines is external, sensuous observation. Now, this can indeed determine processes in the material world; or where these are too small to be perceived directly, they can be supplemented by hypotheses: but it can never perceive anything spiritual or mental. Du Bois-Reymond is therefore saying nothing other than that where the material process passes over into the mental, external sensory observation ceases. How carbon, oxygen, etc. atoms lie and move can be imagined in such a way because it is similar to perceivable material processes. “I feel pain, I feel pleasure, etc.” can no longer be grasped by the external senses. — A higher faculty of perception must intervene, just as the higher faculty of perception of the eye must intervene when the world of tactile sensations of the lower animal is to be supplemented by the world of color. - And for such a higher faculty of perception, a transition also takes place between physical processes and the “facts that cannot be denied: I feel pain, I feel pleasure, I smell the scent of roses, etc.” as between the movement of a rolling ivory ball and the state of the other, which, as a result of the impact of the first, passes from rest into motion. For this higher perceptive faculty, the physical human body is only the middle part of a larger body, in which the former is enveloped as in a cloud. And just as the physical eye perceives the ether vibrations emitted by the physical body as the colors of this body, so the spiritual eye perceives, through a corresponding mediation, the feelings, drives, passions and ideas, which are just as “undeniable facts” as the movements of carbon, hydrogen, etc. in the brain,

[ 10 ] Through a special process of transformation, which will be described later, the inner world of causes of the human being presents itself to the “spiritual eye” as a world of effects in colors in the same way as the physical processes in the body present themselves to the external eye as color effects. The color effects that can be perceived by the “spiritual eye”, which radiate around the physical human being and envelop him like a cloud (perhaps in the shape of an egg), are called the human aura. It must be considered as much a part of the human being as the physical body. The size of this aura differs from person to person. But on average, one can imagine that the whole person is twice as long and four times as wide as the physical one.

[ 11 ] A wide range of colors now floods this aura. And this flooding is a true reflection of inner human life. The individual colors are as varied as this. But certain permanent characteristics are expressed in the basic colors: talents, habits, character traits.

[ 12 ] The aura is very different according to the various temperaments and dispositions of people; it also varies according to the degree of spiritual development. A person who gives himself completely to his animal instincts has a completely different aura than one who lives much in thought. The aura of a person with a religious disposition differs significantly from that of someone who is absorbed in the trivial events of the day. In addition, all changing moods, inclinations, joys and pains find expression in the aura.

[ 13 ] The auras of different types of people must be compared with each other in order to understand the meaning of the color tones. First, take people who have strongly developed affects. They can be divided into two different types. Those who are driven to these affects primarily by their animal nature, and those in whom the same affects take on a more refined form, where they are, so to speak, strongly influenced by reflection. In the first type of person, brown and brown-red color currents of all shades flow through the aura in certain places. In those with more refined affects, tones of lighter red and green appear in the same places. It can be observed that the green tones become more frequent with increasing intelligence. Very intelligent people who are completely absorbed in satisfying their animal instincts have a lot of green in their aura. However, this green will always have a stronger or weaker touch of brown or brown-red. Unintelligent people show a large part of the aura flooded with brown-red or even dark blood-red currents.

[ 14 ] The aura of calm, thoughtful people is very different from that of such emotional natures. The brownish and reddish tones recede; and various shades of green come to the fore. In thinkers, the aura shows a pleasant green undertone. This is how those people look who can be said to know how to find their way in every situation in life.

[ 15 ] The blue color tones appear in devoted natures. (I would like to expressly note that I am happy to be corrected by other researchers. Observations in this field are, of course, uncertain. And this uncertainty cannot be compared with that which is possible in the physical field, although this is also very great, as researchers know. For comparison with my statements, I would like to draw your attention to the book by C. W. Leadbeater: “Man visible and invisible”, which was published in London in 1902 by the Theosophical Publishing Society. The more a person places his self in the service of a cause, the more significant the blue nuances become. In this respect, too, one encounters two quite different types of people. There are natures of little mental power, passive souls, who, as it were, have nothing to throw into the stream of world events except their “good nature”. Their aura glows in a beautiful blue. This is also the case with many devotional, religious natures. Compassionate souls and those who like to live out their existence in a state of well-being have a similar aura. If such people are also intelligent, green and blue currents alternate, or the blue itself may even take on a greenish nuance. It is the peculiarity of active souls, in contrast to passive ones, that their blue is imbued with bright colors from within. Inventive natures, those who have fruitful thoughts, radiate bright colors from an inner point, as it were. In general, everything that indicates mental activity has more the form of rays that spread from within; while everything that comes from animal life has the form of irregular clouds that flood the aura.

[ 16 ] The color formations show different shades depending on whether the ideas that arise from an active soul are used to serve one's own animal instincts or ideal, objective interests. The inventive mind that uses all its thoughts to satisfy its sensual passions shows dark blue-red nuances; on the other hand, the one who selflessly puts his fertile thoughts into a factual interest shows light red-blue color tones. A life in the spirit, coupled with noble devotion and a capacity for self-sacrifice, reveal pink or light violet colors.

[ 17 ] Not only the basic state of the soul, but also temporary emotions, moods and other inner experiences show their color waves in the aura. A sudden outburst of violent anger produces red waves; offended honor, which is expressed in a sudden outburst, can be seen appearing in dark green clouds. — But the color phenomena do not only occur in irregular cloud formations, but also in certain limited, regularly shaped figures. For example, a sudden attack of fear is shown by the aura from top to bottom by wavy stripes in blue color, which have a reddish shimmer. In a person who is waiting with tension for a certain event, one can see continuous red-blue stripes radiating from the inside outwards through the aura.

[ 18 ] For an accurate spiritual perception, every sensation that a person receives from the outside must be noticed. People who are strongly stimulated by every external impression show a continuous flickering of small reddish spots and flecks in the aura. In people who do not feel vividly, these spots have an orange-yellow or even a beautiful yellow color. So-called “distracted” people show bluish spots of more or less changing shape.

[ 19 ] The following is intended to show to what extent this aura, as characterized here, is a very composite phenomenon. It should also be shown how it is the expression of the whole being of the human being. The explanations given here should be considered as an introduction.

[ 20 ] In the foregoing, the auric cloud within which the physical body of the human being is located has been described in some general terms. — For a more highly developed “spiritual vision,” three types of color phenomena can be distinguished within this “aura” that surrounds and radiates around the human being. First, there are colors that have more or less the character of opacity and dullness. However, when we compare these colors with those that our physical eye sees, they appear lively and transparent in comparison. Within the supersensible world itself, however, they make the space they fill comparatively opaque; they fill it like fog. — A second type of color is that which is, as it were, completely light. They illuminate the space they fill. This space itself becomes a space of light. The third type of colored appearance is quite different from these two. These have a radiant, sparkling, glittering character. They not only illuminate the space they fill, they also shine and radiate through it. There is something active, inherently mobile about these colors. The others have something in them that is at rest, immobile. These, on the other hand, generate themselves out of themselves, as it were, continually. - Through the first two types of color, space is filled as if with a fine liquid that remains calm in it; through the third, it is filled with a constantly fanning life, with never-resting activity.

[ 21 ] These three color types are not located next to each other in the human aura; they are not located in separate parts of space; instead, they partially penetrate each other. At one point in the aura, all three types can be seen mixed together, just as a physical body, for example a bell, can be seen and heard at the same time. This makes the aura an extraordinarily complicated phenomenon. For, as it were, one has to deal with three auras that are located within each other and interpenetrate. (Aura of a higher order is not considered here.) But one can get a clear picture by directing one's attention alternately to one of these three auras. In the supersensible world one does something similar to what one does in the sensible world, for example, when one closes one's eyes to fully enjoy the impression of a piece of music. The “seer” has three kinds of organs for the three color types. And in order to observe one undisturbed by the others, he can open one or the other type of organ to the impressions and close the others. — In the beginning, a “seer” can only have developed one type of organ, that for the first type of color. Such a person can only see one aura; the other two remain invisible to him. Likewise, someone may be able to perceive the first two types, but not the third. — The higher level of the “gift of seeing” then consists in a person being able to observe all three auras and to direct his attention alternately to one or the other for the purpose of study.

[ 22 ] The triple aura is the supersensory visible expression of the human being. For this being is composed of three members: the body, soul and spirit. The body is the transitory part of man; that which is born and dies. The spirit is the immortal part. After the death of the body, it experiences various states and conditions in realms that are not accessible to the external senses, in order to be reborn in a new body after a shorter or longer period of time. (More detailed information on the conditions between death and a new incarnation can be found in the essay “How Karma Works.”) The link between the perishable body and the imperishable spirit is the soul. One has to imagine that the impressions of the sensual external world are first received by the soul and then passed on to the spirit. The ear, for example, as a physical organ, receives an impression through an air vibration. The soul transforms this air vibration into the sensation of sound. Only through this experience does the human being inwardly — as a sensation — experience that which would otherwise be a mute process in the external air. — And within the human being, the spirit again perceives the sensation. In this way, it receives information about the sensuous, earthly world from the soul. The spirit cannot communicate directly with the sensuous world. The soul is its messenger. Through the soul, the immortal spirit of man enters into communication with the earthly world. (Those who seek more precise information about the relationship between spirit, soul and body will find it in my forthcoming book, “Theosophy.”) The soul is thus the actual bearer of what man experiences within himself between birth and death. The spirit preserves these experiences and carries them over from one embodiment to another.

[ 23 ] The soul is influenced by two sides in man. The body influences it to convey the sensual-physical impressions. The spirit influences it from the other side, in order to impress upon it the eternal laws that are its own. The soul is connected, on the one hand, with the body, and on the other with the spirit. Therefore, in the living human being, one has to distinguish between a threefold inner life. The first includes everything that continually flows from the body to the soul; the second are the processes in the soul itself. The third are the influences that the soul experiences from the spirit. A simple example can make it clear how these three forms of human inner life differ. Let us assume that a person has not eaten for a long time. As a result, certain processes take place in the body that are not beneficial to his physical life. This has an effect on the soul as a feeling of hunger.

[ 24 ] This feeling is a process in the soul; but the cause of it lies in the body. - Let us further assume that a person passes a person in need. He supports him. The cause for this lies in the realization of the spirit that man must help others. The soul carries out the action; the spirit gives the order. The soul feels compassion. This compassion is again a process in the soul. The cause for this lies in the spirit. Between these two types of soul experiences there is now a third. It is the one in which neither body nor spirit are directly involved. At first, the immediate stimulus of hunger repeatedly prompts a person to eat. But when he begins to reflect on the connection between hunger and his way of life, he regulates this way of life through thinking. He uses thinking, as it were, to take into account the needs of his sensuality. In this way, he makes his spiritual life independent of the immediate stimuli of sensual corporeality. The more undeveloped a person is, the more he will surrender to sensual stimuli. With higher development, he will increasingly place his inner life at the service of thinking, but in doing so, he will also become increasingly receptive to the influences of spirituality. An undeveloped person who must surrender to every stimulus of his body will be insensitive to the eternal laws of truth and goodness that come from the spirit. He will be completely absorbed in what his body demands of him. The more independent a person becomes of these influences, the more will that which is imperishable, eternally true and eternally good, shine forth in him. And he will ultimately recognize that he is there to place his powers, his abilities, all his actions at the service of the eternal. The first is that which is dependent on the bodily causes; the second is that part of the life of the soul which, to a certain extent, has made itself independent of every external stimulus through reflection, but which still absorbs itself in the satisfaction of the outer life; the third part, finally, is that which places its own life in the service of the eternal. In the undeveloped human being, the first part is predominant; in the more highly developed, the third comes to the fore. The average human being holds the middle between the two.

[ 25 ] These three parts of the human inner life find expression in the triple aura in a way that is visible to the supernatural. The extent to which the soul is dependent on the body, and is influenced by its processes, is expressed in the dull, opaque color phenomena. A person who lives entirely according to his physical nature has this part of the aura particularly vividly developed. — Everything that has become independent of the direct influences of the body through education, through reflection, in short, through external culture, is expressed in the colors that illuminate the space in transparent brightness. And all the true spirituality of man, the selfless devotion to the true and good, in other words the treasures that man collects for eternity, appear in the sparkling, radiant color phenomena of the aura.

[ 26 ] The first aura is a reflection of the influence that the body exerts on the soul of man; the second characterizes the soul's independent life, which has risen above the immediately sensuous, but is not yet dedicated to the service of the eternal; the third reflects the dominion that the eternal spirit has gained over the mortal human being.

[ 27 ] For the “seer”, the degree of a person's development can be judged from the nature of their aura. If he meets an undeveloped person who is completely devoted to the respective sensual impulses, desires and momentary external stimuli, he will see the first aura in the most glaring colors; the second, on the other hand, is only weakly developed. Only sparse color formations can be seen in it; the third, however, is hardly indicated. Here and there a glimmering spark of color appears, indicating that the eternal also lives in this person as a predisposition, but that it will still need a long course of development – through many embodiments – before it will gain an outstanding influence on the outer life of this bearer. The more a person strips off his instinctive nature, the less conspicuous the first part of the aura becomes. The second part grows larger and larger and fills the color body, within which the physical human being lives, more and more completely with its luminous power. And the “servants of the Eternal” show the wondrous third aura, that part which testifies to the extent to which the human being has become a citizen of the spiritual world. For the divine itself radiates through this part of the human aura into the earthly world. People in whom this aura is developed are the flames through which the deity illuminates this world. They have learned to live not for themselves but for the eternal truth and good; they have wrested it from their narrow self, sacrificing themselves on the altar of the great world work.

[ 28 ] Thus, the aura expresses what a person has made of himself in the course of his incarnations.

[ 29 ] All three parts of the aura contain colors of the most diverse nuances. However, the character of these nuances changes with the degree of development of the human being. In the first part of the aura of the undeveloped instinctive human being, one can see all the nuances from red to blue. In him, these nuances have a dull, dirty character. The obtrusive red nuances indicate sensual desires, carnal lusts, and an addiction to the pleasures of the palate and stomach. Green nuances seem to be found primarily in those of a lower nature who tend towards dullness and indifference, who greedily indulge in every pleasure, but who nevertheless shy away from the efforts that would bring them to it. It is not a pleasant sight to see the sluggish street loafers in our big cities loitering around in their dirty green clouds. Certain modern professions, however, breed this kind of aura. A personal sense of self that is rooted entirely in base inclinations, that is, the lowest level of egoism, is manifested in dirty yellow to brown tones. Now it is clear that the animalistic life of the instincts can also take on a pleasing character. There is a purely natural capacity for self-sacrifice, which is found to a high degree in the animal kingdom. In the natural love of a mother, this development of an animalistic instinct finds its most beautiful completion. These selfless natural instincts are expressed in the first aura in shades of light red to pink. Cowardly timidity, nervousness in the face of obvious stimuli is shown by brown-blue or grey-blue colors in the aura.

[ 30 ] The second aura again shows the most diverse color gradations. Brown and orange structures indicate a highly developed sense of self, pride and ambition. Bright yellow reflects clear thinking and intelligence; green is the expression of an understanding of life and the world. Children who are quick to grasp things have a lot of green in this part of their aura. Greenish yellow in the second aura seems to indicate a good memory. Rose-red indicates a benevolent, loving nature; blue is the sign of piety here. The more piety approaches religious fervor, the more the blue turns to violet. Idealism and a serious approach to life in a higher sense are seen as indigo blue.

[ 31 ] The basic colors of the third aura are yellow, green and blue. Yellow appears here when the thinking is filled with high, comprehensive ideas that grasp the individual from the whole of the divine world order. This yellow then has a golden glow when the thinking is intuitive and it is given complete purity of sensual imagining. Green indicates love for all beings; blue is the sign of selfless willingness to sacrifice oneself for all beings. If this willingness to sacrifice oneself increases to the point of strong will, which actively places itself in the service of the world, then the blue lightens to light violet. If pride and the craving for honor still exist in a highly developed person, as the last remnants of personal egoism, then shades of yellow appear alongside those that play towards orange. It should be noted, however, that in this part of the aura the colors are quite different from the shades that a person is accustomed to seeing in the world of the senses. A beauty and sublimity confront the “seer” here, with which nothing in the ordinary world can be compared.

[ 32 ] In the following, it will be shown how the various fundamental components of the human being are expressed through the auras described here.

[ 33 ] The human aura can be understood by observing the human being. As a physical body, the human being is composed of the same substances that are found in the mineral world. And the forces that are active in this world are also active in him. The oxygen that the human being acquires through the breathing process is the same as that found in the air, in the liquid and solid components of the earth. And so it is with the substances that man takes in with his food. These substances and their powers can be studied in man as they are studied in other natural bodies. If we look at man in this way, we recognize him as a member of the mineral world. Furthermore, we can look at man in so far as he is a living being. He shows how the substances and forces of the mineral world build up an organism that takes the form of limbs, that grows and reproduces, whose parts work together in common activity. This way of being has in common with everything that lives. The question arises for anyone who devotes himself to such contemplation: how does a being live? A certain school of modern natural science makes it easy to answer this question. It simply says that the action of mineral substances and forces in a living organism is exactly the same as in inorganic nature, only much more complicated. According to this school, an organism has been understood when the complicated physical and chemical processes that take place within it have been understood. This view denies that there are special causes that transform the mineral substances and forces in the organism into life processes. A lively struggle developed in the nineteenth century against the advocates of a special life force. Clear thinking should have prevented this struggle. For just as no one should dispute that one understands a clock once one has grasped the mechanism of its parts, so too a clear-thinking representative of the life force could not object to the claim that one understands the organism in this sense scientifically if one knows the effectiveness of its substances and forces. But can anyone deny that the clock, which is completely comprehensible in mechanical terms, could not come into being without the clockmaker? Anyone who can really distinguish between the comprehensibility of an organism as a physical fact and the conditions of its origin cannot be in any doubt that the above comprehensibility affects the existence of special causes of life just as little as the existence of the watchmaker is affected by the mechanical comprehensibility of the watch. And just as the mechanic who wants to make the clock understandable does not need to describe the clockmaker, so the purely physical researcher does not need to take into account the special causes of life. But for those who delve deeper into the essence of phenomena, it becomes clear that the entities that make the physical organism appear physically comprehensible are not sufficient for the realization of the physical organism. That is why the perceptive speak of special causes of life. Life is something that is added to the physical effect in the organism and that eludes the senses and the intellect, which only adheres to the sensory facts. Life is the object of a special perception, just as the watchmaker is the object of a special perception. One must observe the organism with the “eyes of the spirit”, then the special causes of life, which elude sensory observation, reveal themselves. Those who observe with the “eyes of the spirit” have therefore called the natural builder of organisms “prana” (power of life). For them, the “life force” cannot be disputed, because for them it is a perception. And everything that is said against these defenders of a life force is only a fight against windmills. It will only be said as long as one misunderstands what they mean. In their sense, prana or the life force should be attributed to man, insofar as he is an organism, as the second link of his being, next to the physical-mineral body.

[ 34 ] In sensation, one has given something that goes beyond mere life. Through life, a being builds its organism. Through sensation, it opens itself to the outside world. It is different when I say: I live, and it is different when I say: I perceive the world of colors around me. In order to become a sentient being, the organism must give its organs properties that go beyond their ability to sustain life and to reproduce life through it. What makes the living organism a sentient organism is what the researcher who sees with “spiritual eyes” calls the sentient body, or, as has become common among theosophists, the astral body. This name “astral”, which means “star-like”, comes from the fact that the supersensory image of it appears in the aura, the luminosity of which has been compared to that of the stars. Here, this part of the human being shall be called the sensory body, as the third limb of the human being. Within this sentient body, the individual life of a person appears. It expresses itself in pleasure and displeasure, joy and pain, in inclinations and aversions, etc. With a certain justification, everything that belongs to this is called the inner life of a being. The starry sky is outside in space, my living organism belongs to the same space. This organism is connected to the starry sky in its sensory organs. I experience the joy and the feeling of admiration for the starry sky within myself. I carry this within me, even when the starry sky has long since withdrawn from my sensory eye. What I confront as myself in relation to the outside world, what leads a life within itself, is the soul. And insofar as this soul appropriates the sensations, insofar as it appropriates processes that are given to it from the outside and transforms them into a life of its own, it may be called the sentient soul. This sentient soul fills the sentient body as it were; it transforms everything that it takes in from the outside into an inner experience. In this way, it forms a whole with the sentient body. This is why, in theosophical writings, it is referred to as the astral body. However, a thorough understanding will have to distinguish between the two. In the aura, the two can also be distinguished in that each color tone of the astral body is subject to two influences. One will depend on how the organs of the human being are formed, the other on how his soul, according to its inner nature, responds to external impressions. A person can have a good or bad eye. The picture he receives of an external object depends on this; he can be more or less sensitive in his soul, and this determines the feeling he experiences in his inner being through this picture.

[ 35 ] Man does not stop at the impressions he receives from the outside world and the feelings he experiences through these impressions. He connects these impressions. In this way, overall images of what he perceives are formed in his soul. A person sees a stone fall; afterwards he sees that a cavity has formed in the ground at the place where the stone fell. He connects the two impressions. He says: the stone has hollowed out the earth. In this connection, thinking is expressed. Within the sentient soul, the thinking, intellectual soul comes to life. Only through it does the soul, through the influences of the outside world, create an image of this outside world that is regulated by itself. The soul continually carries out this regulation of its external impressions. And what it thus produces is a description of what it perceives, determined by its nature. That it is determined by its nature can be seen by comparing such a description with what is described. Two people can have the same object in front of them; their descriptions will be different according to the inner nature of their souls. They combine their impressions in different ways.

[ 36 ] But descriptive thinking also leads man beyond his own life. He acquires something that extends beyond his soul. It is a matter of course for him that his descriptions of things are related to these things themselves. He orients himself in the world by thinking about it. He thereby experiences a certain correspondence between his own life and the order of the facts of the world. The rational soul thereby creates harmony between the soul and the world. In his soul, man seeks truth; and through this truth, not only does the soul express itself, but also the things of the world. What is recognized as truth through thinking has an independent significance, not merely one for the human soul. With my delight in the starry sky, I live alone in myself; the thoughts that I form about the paths of the heavenly bodies have the same significance for the thinking of every other person as for mine. It would be pointless to speak of my delight if I did not exist; but it is not pointless in the same way to speak of my thoughts even without reference to myself. For the truth that I think today was also true yesterday, and will also be true tomorrow, although I am only concerned with it today. If a realization gives me pleasure, this pleasure is only of significance as long as I experience it; the truth of this realization has its significance quite independently of this pleasure. In connection with the truth, the soul grasps something that carries its value within itself. And this value does not disappear with the soul's own experience; nor did it arise with it. There is an essential difference between descriptions in which the intellectual soul merely leaves itself to its combinations, and thoughts in which it submits to the laws of truth. A thought that acquires a significance beyond the inner life by being imbued with these laws of truth can only be regarded as knowledge. When truth shines into the intellectual soul, it becomes the conscious soul. Just as there are three parts to the body: the physical body, the life body and the sentient body, so too there are three parts to the soul: the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the conscious soul.

[ 37 ] The threefold aura is to be understood from these three members of the soul. For through these three members it becomes understandable that the inner life of man suffers influences from two sides. As a sentient soul, this inner life is dependent on the sentient body. The interplay between the sentient soul and the sentient body is expressed in the first of the three auras described. The combining intellectual soul, which lives in itself and in its experiences is completely subject to its nature, is expressed in the second aura; and the consciousness soul receives its supersensible-visible expression in the third, brightest aura.

[ 38 ] In order to fully understand the nature of these auras, it is necessary to consider a fact that, when properly interpreted, opens up an understanding of the human being. — In the course of childhood development, a moment occurs in the life of a human being when he or she feels for the first time as an independent being in relation to the whole other world. For people with a fine sensibility, this is a significant event. The poet Jean Paul tells in his autobiography: “I will never forget the phenomenon in me, which I have never told anyone about, where I stood at the birth of my self-awareness, of which I know the place and time. One morning, as a very young child, I was standing under the front door and looking to the left at the woodpile when, suddenly, the inner vision, I am an I, came to me like a flash of lightning from heaven and has remained shining ever since: that was the first time my I had seen itself and forever. Deceptions of memory are hardly conceivable here, since no foreign narrative could mix with additions to an event that occurred only in the veiled sanctum of man, the novelty of which alone gave it permanence in such everyday circumstances.» — In his self-awareness, man has given what makes him an independent being. Self-awareness must therefore shed light on his entire being. From this starting point, one will therefore only be able to fully understand the meaning of the body and the soul. More about this at the end of this article.

[ 39 ] There is a veiled holy of holies in man, which is designated by his self-consciousness. Anyone who realizes this will see that this word actually expresses the meaning of human existence. Self-consciousness is the ability to know oneself as an “I”. The following fact seems simple, but it contains an infinitely significant meaning: “I” is the only word that anyone can say only to himself. No one else can say it to the person; and he cannot say it to anyone else. Anyone else can use any other word in the same sense as I myself. What makes a person independent, separate from everything else, and with which he can only be with himself: that is what he calls his “I”. — This fact corresponds to a very specific phenomenon in the aura: no healer can see anything in the part of the aura that corresponds to the “I”. The consciousness of the “I” is indicated in the aura by a dark oval, a completely dark area. If one could look at this oval by itself, it would appear completely black. But one cannot do that. For one sees it through what has been called the first and second aura in the two previous essays. That is why it appears blue. The “I” of the completely undeveloped human being appears as a small blue oval. As the human being develops, it grows larger and larger; and in the average person of the present day it is about the same size as the rest of the aura. Within this blue oval, a special radiation now begins to emanate. All the other parts of the aura only reflect in a certain way what comes to the human being from outside. But the radiation mentioned is the expression of what the human being makes of himself. The first aura expresses that which works in man from the animal; the second that which he experiences in himself through the impressions of the world of sense; the third is an expression of the knowledge which he acquires from this world of sense. But that which begins to shine within the dark aura of the self is that which man acquires through his work on himself. No sensory world can give him the strength to do this. It must therefore flow to him from elsewhere. It flows to him from the spirit. The more the spirit flows to the human ego, the more it shines in the aura. And in contrast to the transient phenomena of the sensory world, the spirit is eternal, immortal. That which lives out itself in the other auras is also transient in the human being; that which shines in the aura of the I is the expression of his eternal spirit. It is the permanent in him that reappears in each subsequent embodiment (incarnation). We have recognized the consciousness soul as the third part of the soul. And within the consciousness soul, the “I” awakens. In the “I”, the eternal spirit of the human being awakens again. Like the body and the soul, the spirit is also tripartite. The highest part is the actual spiritual being (called “Atma” in theosophical literature). Just as the physical body is built from the substances and forces of the external physical world, so the spiritual being is built from those of the general spiritual world. He is a part of it, just as the physical body is a part of the physical world. And just as the physical body becomes a physical living being through the physical life force, so the spiritual being becomes a life spirit through the spiritual life force (called Budhi in theosophical literature). — And just as the physical body acquires knowledge of the physical world through the senses, so the spiritual being acquires knowledge of the spiritual world through the spiritual senses, which are called intuition. The sensory body of the physical world is therefore matched by a special sensory spirit in this higher realm. Just as the lower self-life begins with sensation, so does the higher with intuition. This spiritual self-life is therefore called the spirit self (in theosophical literature it is called the “higher manas”).

[ 40 ] Man is therefore composed of the following parts: 1. The physical body, consisting of the physical body, the life body (the life force) and the sentient body; 2. < em>The soul, consisting of the sentient soul, the rational soul, and the consciousness soul, in which the “I” awakens; and 3. The spirit, consisting of the spirit self, the life spirit, and the spiritual human being. The sentient soul fills the sentient body and merges with it to form a whole. This becomes clear when one imagines the following: the fact that an impression of the external world evokes the color “red” is based on an activity of the sentient body. That the soul experiences this “red” within itself is due to the fact that the sentient soul is directly linked to the sentient body, and immediately makes the effect received from the outside its own. In the same way, the consciousness soul and the spirit self merge into a whole through the activity of the “I” itself. (Those who wish to learn more about all this will find information in my recently published book, Theosophy.) — Man's being is therefore rightly divided into the following seven parts (we have put the terms used in theosophical literature in brackets): 1. the physical body (Sthula sharira), 2. the life body (Linga sharira), 3. the sentient body connected with the sentient soul (astral body, Kama rupa), 4. the mind soul (lower Manas, Kama manas), 5. the spirit-filled consciousness soul that gives birth to the “I” (higher higher manas), 6. the life spirit (spiritual body, Budhi), 7. the spirit man (Atma).

[ 41 ] It is clear from the above that the radiant spiritual aura is only very weakly indicated in the undeveloped human being and develops more and more the more perfect the human being becomes. Just as the three auras described correspond to the bearers of the “I”, so the I-aura itself becomes the bearer of the eternal spirit. Through the “I”, the human being becomes an independent, separate being. This develops the content of the spirit within itself; it fulfills itself with it. But this means that the “I” gives itself to the eternal All-Spirit. The stages that the “I” reaches in this devotion to the All-Spirit are expressed by the color nuances of the higher spirit aura. These nuances cannot be compared to physical colors in their radiant brilliance. A description of them cannot be given here.

[ 42 ] For the sake of completeness, a part of the aura that has not yet been discussed should be mentioned. It is the part that corresponds to the life body. It fills approximately the same space as the physical body. The clairvoyant can only observe it if he has the ability to completely imagine away (suggerate away) the physical body. Then the life body (Linga sharira) appears as a complete double image of the physical body in a color that is reminiscent of that of the apricot blossoms. In this life body, a continuous inflow and outflow can be observed. The life force contained in the universe flows in, is consumed by the life process and flows out again.

[ 43 ] This concludes the preliminary indications that can be given here about the human aura. Should anyone take offense at the fact that some of what has been said here seems to be at odds with what is otherwise expressed in theosophical literature, I would ask him to take a closer look. Behind the apparent differences, he will find a deeper harmony. However, it is better if each person describes exactly what he has to say. In this area, only good can come from weighing the statements of the individual observers against each other and mutually supplementing each other. We will not get anywhere by merely repeating the theosophical dogmas. However, the individual must be aware of his great responsibility with regard to his statements. On the other hand, it must be noted that at these heights of observation, errors in the details are quite possible; indeed, they are certainly much more likely here than in scientific observations in the sensory world. The writer of these remarks therefore asks for the appropriate indulgence from all those who have something to say in this field.

Yesterday we were considering the successive moods of soul that have to be attained if human thinking—if what is ordinarily called knowledge—is to enter the realm of reality, and we came to a condition of soul that we named surrender. In other words, a thinking that has risen to the conditions of soul we described before—a thinking, that is, which has become possessed of wonder, and has then learned what we called reverent devotion to the world of reality and finally what we called knowing oneself to be in wisdom-filled harmony with the phenomena of the world—if such a thinking be not able then to rise still further and enter the region we have described as a condition of surrender, it cannot come to reality. Now this surrender is only to be attained by making the resolute endeavour again and again to face for ourselves the inadequacy of mere thought. We have to take pains to stimulate and strengthen within us a mood that may be expressed as follows. It must be as though we were constantly saying to ourselves: I ought not to expect that my thinking can give me knowledge of the truth, I ought rather solely to expect of my thinking that it shall educate me. It is of the utmost importance that we should develop in us this idea, namely, that our thinking educates us. If you will really take this point of view as a practical rule of life you will find that there are many occasions when you are led to quite different conclusions from those that seem at first sight to be inevitable.

I daresay there are not many of you who have made a thorough study of the philosopher Kant. It is not necessary. I only want here to refer to the fact that in Kant's most important and revolutionary work, “The Critique of Pure Reason,” you will always find proofs adduced both for and against a proposition in question. Take, for example, a statement such as the following. “The world once had a beginning in time.” You will find that Kant puts, perhaps on the other side of the same page, the statement: “The world has always existed, from all eternity.” And then he proceeds to adduce valid proofs for both statements, notwithstanding that the one obviously expresses the very opposite of the other. That is to say, Kant proves in the same manner that the world has had a beginning and that it has had no beginning. He calls this method of reasoning “Antinomy” and thinks it is itself an evidence that the human faculty of knowledge has boundaries, seeing that man is forced thereby to arrive at contradictory conclusions. And, of course, he is right, so long as one expects by thinking to come to conformity with some objective reality. So long as we give ourselves up to the belief that by thinking or by the elaboration of concepts or, let us say, by the elaboration in thought of experiences we have in the world, we can come to reality, so long are we indeed in desperate case, if someone comes forward and shows us that a particular statement and its exact opposite can equally well be proved. For if this is so, how are we ever to arrive at Truth? If, however, we have learned that where the situation demands a decisive pronouncement, thinking can come to no conclusion about reality, if we have persistently educated ourselves instead to look upon thinking as a means to become wiser, as a means to take in hand our own self-education in wisdom, then it does not disturb us at all that at one time one thing can be proved and at another time its opposite can be proved. For we very soon make the following discovery. The fact that the elaboration of concepts does not, so to say, expose us in the least to the onset of reality, is the very reason why we are able to work with perfect freedom within the sphere of concepts and ideas and to carry on our own self-education by this means. If we were perpetually being corrected by reality, then the elaboration of concepts would not afford us a means of educating ourselves in this manner in perfect freedom. I would like to ask you to give careful consideration to this fact. Let me repeat it. The elaboration of concepts affords us a means of effective and independent self-education, and it can only do so because we are never disturbed in the free elaboration of concepts by the interference of reality.

What do I mean when I say we are not disturbed? What sort of disturbance could reality make in the free elaboration of concepts? We can picture to ourselves a little what such a disturbance would be like if we contrast—purely hypothetically for the moment, though, as we shall see later, it does not need to remain entirely in the realm of hypothesis—our human thinking with divine thinking. For we can say, can we not, that it is impossible to conceive of divine thinking as having nothing to do with reality. When we try to picture the thinking of the Gods, we can only conceive of it—still speaking for the moment purely hypothetically—as intervening in reality, as influencing reality. And this leads inevitably to the following conclusion. When a human being makes a mistake in his thinking, then it is a mere logical mistake, it is nothing worse. And when, later on, he comes to see that he has made a mistake he can correct it; and he will at the same time have accomplished something for his self-education, he will have grown wiser. But now take the case of divine thinking. When divine thinking thinks correctly, then something happens; and when it thinks falsely, then something is destroyed, something is annihilated. So that if we had a divine thinking, then with every false concept we should call forth a destructive process, first of all in our astral body, then in our etheric body and thence also in our physical body. If we had active divine thinking, if our thinking had something to do with reality, then a false concept would have the result that we should, as it were, stimulate inside us a drying up process in some part or other of our body, a hardening process. You will agree, it would be important to make as few mistakes as possible; for it might not be long before we had made so many mistakes that our body would have become quite dried up and would fall to pieces. We should, in fact, soon find it crumble away if we transformed into reality the mistakes in our thinking. We actually only maintain ourselves in real existence through the fact that our thinking does not work into reality, but that we are protected from the penetration of our thinking into reality. Thus we can make mistake after mistake in our thinking. If later we correct these mistakes we have thereby educated ourselves, we have grown wiser, and we have not at the same time committed devastation with our mistakes. As we strengthen ourselves more and more with the moral force of such a thought as this we learn to know the nature of the “surrender” of which I spoke and we come at last to a point where we do not at critical moments of life, turn to thinking, in the hope to gain knowledge and understanding of external things.

That sounds strange, I know, and at first sight it seems as though it would be quite impossible. How can we refuse to have recourse to thinking? And yet, although it is impossible to take such a line absolutely, we can take it under certain conditions. Constituted as we are as human beings in the world, we cannot on every occasion suspend judgment on the things of the world. We have to judge and form opinions—we shall see in the course of these lectures why that is so—we have to act in life and cannot always wait to penetrate to the depths of reality. We must judge—but we should educate ourselves to exercise caution in accepting as finally true the judgments and opinions we form. We should, as it were, be continually looking over our own shoulder and reminding ourselves that where we are applying our keenest intellect, just there we are treading on very uncertain ground and are perpetually liable to make mistakes. That is a hard saying for cocksure people! They think they will never get anywhere at all if they are to doubt whether the opinion they form on some event is conclusive. Observe a little and you will see that very many people, when some statement is made, think it necessary at once to say: “But what I think is this”—or when they see something, to say: “I don't like that!” or “I like it!” This kind of attitude must be given up by anyone who does not rest content to go through life with easy self-assurance; it must be given up if we want to set the course of our inner life in the direction of reality. What we have to do is to cultivate an attitude of mind which may be characterised in the following words: “Obviously I have, of course, to live my life, and this means I must form judgments and conclusions. I will, therefore, employ my power of judgment in so far as the practice of life makes this necessary, but I will not use it for the recognition of truth. For that I will be for ever looking cautiously over my shoulder, I will always receive with some degree of doubt every judgment that I happen to make.”

But how are we then to arrive at any thought about truth, if not by forming judgments in the ordinary way? We have already indicated yesterday the right attitude of mind, when we said that we ought to let the things speak, let the things themselves tell their secrets. We have to learn to adopt a passive attitude to the things of the world, and let them speak out their own secrets. A great deal of error would be avoided if men would do this. We have a wonderful example in Goethe, who, when he wants to investigate truth, does not allow himself to judge but tries to let the things themselves utter their own secrets. Let us suppose we have two men, one who judges and the other who lets the things tell their own secrets. We will select a very clear and simple example. One man sees a wolf and describes it. He finds that there are other animals besides which look like this wolf, and he arrives in this manner at the general concept “wolf.” And now he can go on to form the following conclusion. He can say to himself: In reality there are many individual wolves; the general concept of “wolf” which I make in my mind, wolf as such, does not exist; only individual wolves exist in the world. Such a man will easily state it as his opinion that we have really only to do with individual wolf beings, and the general concept of wolf which one holds as an idea is not anything real. There you have a striking example of a man who merely judges and forms opinions. This is the kind of conclusion he develops. And how about the man, on the other hand, who lets reality speak for itself? How will he think of that invisible quality of wolf which is to be found in every single wolf and which characterises all wolves alike? He will look at it in this way. He will say to himself: Let me consider a lamb and compare it with a wolf. I am not going to formulate any judgment on the matter, I am simply going to let the facts speak. And now, let us imagine this man has the opportunity to see with his own eyes how the wolf eats up the lamb. He sees the event take place before him. Then he would have to say to himself: “The substance which before was running about as lamb is now inside the wolf, it has been absorbed into the wolf.” It needs no more than the perception of this fact to see how real the wolf nature is! For if we were to rely on what we can follow with our external senses we might easily be led to the conclusion that if a wolf were deprived of all other food and were to eat nothing but lamb he must gradually—for the metabolism that goes on inside him will produce this result—he must gradually come to have in him nothing but lamb substance. As a matter of fact, however, he never becomes a lamb, he remains always a wolf. That shows quite unmistakably, if one judges the matter rightly, that the material part of the wolf has been quite erroneously assumed to constitute “wolf” as such. When we let ourselves be taught by the external world of facts, then it shows us that besides what we have before us as material substance in the wolf there is something else, something we cannot see and that yet is real in the highest degree. And this it is which brings it about that when the wolf eats nothing but lamb he does not become lamb but remains wolf. All of him that is merely perceptible to the senses has come from lambs.

It is difficult sometimes to draw a sharp line of demarcation between judging and letting ourselves be taught by reality. When, however, the difference has once been grasped and when judgment is only employed for the ends of practical life, while for an approach to reality the attitude is taken of allowing ourselves to be taught by the things of the world, then we gradually arrive at a mood of soul which can reveal to us the true meaning of “surrender.” Surrender is a state of mind which does not seek to investigate truth from out of itself, but which looks for truth to come from the revelation that flows out of the things, and can wait until it is ripe to receive the revelation. An inclination to judge or form opinions wants to be continually arriving at truth at every step; surrender, on the other hand, does not set out to force an entrance, as it were, into this or that truth, rather do we seek to educate ourselves and then quietly wait until we attain to that stage of maturity where the truth flows to us from the things of the world, coming to us in revelation and filling our whole being. To work with patience, knowing that patience will bring us further and further in wise self-education—that is the mood of surrender.

And now we must go on to consider the fruits of this surrender. What do we attain when we have gone forward with our thinking from wonder to reverence, thence to feeling oneself in wisdom-filled harmony with reality and finally to the attitude of surrender—what do we attain? We come at last to this. As we go about the world and observe the plants in all their greenness and admire the changing colours of their blossoms, or as we contemplate the sky in its blueness and the stars with their golden brilliance—not forming judgments but letting the things themselves reveal to us what they are—then if we have really succeeded in learning this “surrender,” all things in the world of sense become changed for us, and something is revealed to us in the world of the senses, for which we can find no other word than a word taken from our own soul life.

Suppose this line (a—b) represents the world of the senses as it shows itself to our view. Suppose you are standing here (c) and you behold the world of the senses spread out before you like a veil. This line (a—b) is intended to represent the tones that work upon your ear, the colours and forms that work upon your eye, the smells and tastes that work upon your other organs, the hardness and softness, etc., etc.—in short, the whole world of the senses. In ordinary life we stand in the world of the senses and we apply to it our faculty of judgment. How else do all the sciences arise? Men approach the world of the senses and by many kinds of methods they investigate the laws that prevail there. You will, however, have gathered from all that we have been saying that such a procedure can never lead one into the world of reality, because judgment is not a leader at all; it is only by educating one's thinking, it is only by following the path of wonder and of reverence, etc., that one can ever penetrate to the world of reality. Then the world of the senses changes and becomes something entirely new. And it is important that we should make discovery of this if we would gain any knowledge of the real nature of the sense world.

Let us suppose that a man who has developed this feeling, this attitude of surrender, in a rather high degree, looks out over the fresh bright green of a meadow. At first sight he cannot distinguish the colours of any individual plants; the whole presents a general appearance of fresh green. Such a man, if he has really brought the attitude of surrender to a high degree of development, will perforce feel within him at the sight of the meadow an inner sense of balance; he cannot help being moved to feel this mood of balance—a balance that is not dead but quick with life, we might compare it to a gentle and even flow of water. He cannot help but conjure up this picture before his soul. And it is the same with every taste, every smell and every sense-perception; they inevitably call up in his soul a feeling of inner movement and activity. There is no colour and no tone that does not speak to him; everything says something, and says it in such a way that he feels bound to give answer with inner movement and activity—not with judgment or opinion but with movement, active, living movement. In short, a time comes for such a man when the whole world of the senses flings off, as it were, its disguise and reveals itself to him as something he cannot describe with any other word than will. Everything in the world of the senses is will, strong and powerful currents of will. I want you to mark this particularly. The man who has attained in any high degree to surrender, discovers everywhere in the world of the senses ruling will. Hence it is that a man who has developed in himself even a small measure of this quality of surrender, feels pain if he suddenly sees a person coming towards him wearing some startling new fashion of colour. He cannot help experiencing this inner movement and activity in response to what approaches him from outside; he is sensible of will in everything and he feels united with the whole world through this will. The world of the senses thus becomes, as it were, a sea of infinitely differentiated will. And this means that while other-wise we only feel it as spread out around us, this world of the senses begins to have for us a certain thickness or depth. We begin to look behind the surface of things, we begin to hear behind the surface of things—and what we see and hear is will, flowing will. For the interest of those who have read Schopenhauer I will here remark that Schopenhauer divined this ruling will in a one-sided way in the world of sound; he described music as differentiated workings of will. But the truth is that for the man who has learned surrender, everything in the world of the senses is Ruling Will.

And now when a man has learned to detect everywhere in the world of the senses this ruling will he can go further, he can penetrate to secrets that lie hidden behind the world of the senses and that are otherwise inaccessible to him.

If we would understand aright the nature of the next step we must ask ourselves the question: How is it we gain any knowledge at all of the sense world? The answer is simple: By means of our senses. By means of the ear we acquire knowledge of the world of sound, by means of the eye knowledge of the world of colour and form, and so on. We know the sense world through the medium of our sense organs. A man who confronts this world of the senses in an ordinary everyday manner receives impressions of it and then forms his judgments. The man who has learned surrender receives impressions in the first place through his senses; and then he feels how there streams across to him from the objects active, ruling will; he feels as if he were swimming, together with the objects, in a sea of ruling will. And when a man has come to this point and feels the presence and sway of will in the objects before him, then his own evolution drives him on of itself to the next higher stage. For then, having experienced all the previous stages leading up to surrender—the stages we have called feeling oneself in harmony with the wisdom of the world, and before that reverence, and before that wonder—then, through the penetration of these conditions into the last gained condition of surrender, he learns how to grow together with the objects with his etheric body also, which stands behind the physical body. He grows together with the objects with his physical body, that is with his sense organs, in the active ruling will. When we see, hear, smell, etc., then as men of surrender we feel the ruling will streaming into us through our eyes and ears, we feel ourselves in true correspondence with the objects. But behind the physical eye is the etheric body of the eye, and behind the physical ear is the etheric body of the ear. We are filled through and through with our etheric body. And just as the physical body grows together with the objects of the sense world when man penetrates to the ruling active will, so too can the etheric body. And when this takes place man finds that he has an altogether new way of beholding the world. The world has undergone a still greater change for him than was the case when he penetrated through sense appearance to the ruling will. When our etheric body grows together with the objects of the world, then we have the impression that we cannot let these objects remain as they are in our ideas and in our conceptions and thoughts. They change for us as soon as we come into relation with them. Suppose a man who has already experienced the mood of surrender in his soul is looking at a green leaf, full of sap. He turns the eye of his soul upon the object before him, and at once he finds he cannot leave it as it is, this juicy green leaf; the moment he beholds it he feels that it grows out beyond itself, he feels how it has in it the possibility to become something quite different. You know that a green leaf, as it grows gradually higher and higher up in the plant, turns at last into the coloured flower-leaf or petal. The whole plant is really no more than a transformed leaf. You may learn this from Goethe's researches into nature. So when the student beholds the leaf he sees that it is not yet finished, that it is trying to grow out beyond itself; he sees, in short, more than the green leaf gives him. The green leaf stimulates him to feel within him something of a budding and sprouting life. Thus he grows together—quite literally—with the green leaf, feeling in himself, too, a budding and a sprouting of life. But now suppose he is looking at the dry and withered bark of a tree. If he is to grow together with that he cannot do otherwise than be overcome with a feeling of death. In the withered bark he sees—not more, but less than is there in reality. If anyone looks at the bark from the point of view of external appearance alone he can admire it, it can give him pleasure, in any case he does not see in the dead bark something that shrivels him, piercing him, as it were, in the soul and filling it with thoughts of death.

There is nothing in the whole world that does not, when the etheric body grows together with it, give rise to feelings either of growing, sprouting, becoming, or of decaying and passing away. Everything shows itself in one or other aspect. Suppose, for example, a man who has attained to surrender and has then progressed a further step turns his attention to the human larynx. He will have a strange impression. The larynx will appear to him to be an organ that is quite in the beginning of its evolution and has a great future before it. From what the larynx itself tells, he will feel that it is like a seed, not at all like a fruit or like a withered object, but like a seed. He knows quite clearly from what the larynx itself brings to expression that a time must come in human evolution when the larynx will be completely transformed, when it will be of such a nature that whereas now man only utters the word, he will one day give birth to man. The larynx is the future organ of birth, the future organ of procreation. Now man brings forth the word by means of the larynx, but the larynx is the seed that will in future times develop to bring forth the whole human being—that is, when man is spiritualised. The larynx expresses this quite directly when one lets it tell what it is. Other organs of the human body show us that they have long ago passed their zenith, and we see that they will in future times be no longer present in the human organism.

Such a vision is compelled to behold everywhere on the one hand a growing, a coming into being, and on the other hand a dying away. It sees both as processes going on into the future. Budding, sprouting life—death and decay; those are the two things that we find intermingled with one another all around us when we attain to this union of our etheric body with the world of reality. In connection with this power of vision man has to undergo, when he is a little further on, a very hard test. For with each single being that he meets and that makes itself known to him he will always find that while some parts of the being arouse in him the feeling of budding and sprouting life, other contents or parts give him the feeling of death. Everything that we see behind the world of the senses makes itself known to us as proceeding from one or other of these two fundamental forces. In occultism what we behold in this way is called the world of coming into existence and of passing away. And so, when we confront the world of the senses we are looking into the world of arising and passing away, and what lies behind is Ruling Wisdom.

Behind Will is Wisdom! I say expressly ruling wisdom, for the wisdom man brings into his ideas is as a rule not active at all, but a wisdom that is merely thought. The wisdom man acquires when he looks behind the active will is united with the objects; and in the kingdom of objective things, wherever wisdom rules, it does really rule and the effects of its working find actual expression. When it, so to speak, withdraws from reality, then begins the dying process; where it flows into reality, there you find a coming into existence, there you find budding, sprouting life. We can mark off these worlds in the following way (see diagram 1). We look at the sense world and we see it first as A, and then we look at B which is behind the sense world—the world of ruling wisdom. From out of this world is taken the substance of our own etheric body, what we behold outside us as ruling wisdom—that we behold, too, in our etheric body. And in our physical body we behold, not merely what sense appearance shows, but also ruling will, for everywhere in the sense world we see ruling will.

Yes, the strange thing is that if we have attained to surrender, then when we meet another man and look at him, his colour, whether it be inclined to red or yellow or green, does not seem to us merely red or yellow or green, but we grow together for example, with the rosy-cheekedness of his countenance. We feel the ruling will there, and all that lives and weaves in him, as it were, shoots across to us through the medium of the colour in his cheeks. People who are naturally inclined to observe and note rosy cheeks will say that a rosy-cheeked person is alone healthy. We approach our fellow-man in such a way as to see in him the ruling will. And we may now say, turning to our diagram, that our physical body, which we will denote by this circle here, is taken from the world A, the world of ruling will. Our etheric body, on the other hand, which I will denote with this second circle, is taken from the world of ruling wisdom, the world B. Here you have, then, the connection between the world of ruling wisdom that is spread around us, and our own etheric body—and the world of ruling will that is spread around us, and our own physical body. Now in ordinary life man does not know of these connections, the power to do so is taken from him. The connections are there all the time, but they are, as it were, withheld from man, he can have no influence upon them. How is this?

As a matter of fact there are opportunities in life where our thoughts and whatever we develop in the way of judgments and opinions are not so harmless for our own reality as they are in everyday existence. In the ordinary everyday waking condition, good Gods have seen to it that our thoughts have not too bad an influence on our own reality; they have withheld from us the power our thoughts might otherwise exercise upon our physical body and etheric body; and it would really go very hardly with us in the world if it were not so If thoughts—let me emphasise once more—were to signify in the world of man what the thoughts of the Gods do in reality signify, then man would evoke inside him with every error in thought a slight death process, and little by little he would be quite dried up. And as for an untruth! If with every lie he told man had to burn up the corresponding bit of his brain—as would have to happen if man had power to work into the world of reality—then we should soon see how long his brain lasted! Good Gods have withheld from our soul the power over our etheric body and physical body. But that cannot be so all the time. For were we never to exercise any influence from our soul upon our physical and etheric body then we should quickly come to an end of the forces that are in these bodies, we should have a very short life. For in our soul, as we shall see in the course of these lectures, are contained the forces that must flow ever and again into the physical and etheric body, the forces we need in our etheric body. This inflow of forces takes place at night when we are asleep. In the night there flow to us from the universe, coming to us by way of our ego and astral body, the currents that we need to dispel fatigue. There you have in actual fact the living connection between the worlds of will and of wisdom and the physical and etheric bodies of man. For into these worlds vanish during sleep the astral body and ego. They enter into these worlds and build there centres of attraction for substances which have then to flow out of the world of wisdom into the etheric body and out of the world of will into the physical body. This must go on in the night. For if man were present in his consciousness, this instreaming could not happen rightly. If ordinary man were conscious during sleep, if he were present with all his errors and vices, with all the bad things he has done in the world, then this would create a strange apparatus of attraction in those other worlds for the forces that are to stream in. Then tremendous disturbances would be set up in the physical and etheric bodies by the forces man's ego and astral body would send into them out of the world of ruling wisdom and the world of ruling will.

Therefore have good Gods made provision that we cannot be present when the right forces must stream into our physical and etheric body by night. For the good Gods have dulled the consciousness of man during sleep, that he may not be able to spoil what he undoubtedly would spoil by his thoughts were he conscious. It is on this account that we have to undergo great pain when we are on the path of knowledge and are making the ascent into the higher worlds; if we are in real earnest it must necessarily bring us great pain. You will find in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, a description of how the life of man by night, the sleeping life, is, so to speak, made use of, to help man to rise from the world of external reality into higher worlds. When man begins from out of the world of Imagination to light up his sleep consciousness, when he begins to lighten it with knowledge and experiences, then it is important for him to make sure that he himself gets out of the way and so shuts out of his consciousness all that might cause disturbance to his physical and etheric bodies. It is an absolute necessity, in making the ascent into higher worlds to get to know oneself thoroughly and exactly. When we really know ourselves we cease as rule to love ourselves. Self-love comes to an end when we begin to have self-knowledge; and this self-love—which is always present in a man who has not attained to self-knowledge, for it is an illusion to imagine we do not love ourselves; we love ourselves more than anything else in the world—this self-love must have been overcome if we are to be able to shut ourselves out of our consciousness. We must, in actual fact, come to the point where we say to ourselves: As I am now, I must eliminate myself. We have already gone a long way in this direction in that we have attained to self-surrender. But we must now not love ourselves at all. We must have the possibility at every moment to feel—I must put myself right on one side; for if I do not shut out completely all those things in me that otherwise I quite like to feel in me, errors, trivialities, prejudices sympathies, antipathies—if I do not put these right away then my ascent into higher worlds cannot be made aright.

Because of these errors, disturbing forces will mix with the inflowing stream from higher worlds that has to enter into me to make clairvoyance possible. And these forces will stream into my physical and etheric bodies, and as many as are the errors, etc., so many will be the disturbing processes set up. As long as we are not conscious in sleep, as long as we are not capable of rising into the world of clairvoyance, so long do good Gods protect us and not let these currents from the world of will and the world of wisdom flow into our physical and etheric bodies. But when we carry up our consciousness into the world of clairvoyance, then no Gods are protecting us—for the protection they give consists in the very fact that they take away our consciousness—then we must ourselves lay aside all prejudice, all sympathy, all antipathy, etc. All these things we must put right away from us; for if we have anything left of self-love, or of desires that cling to the personal in us, or if we are still capable of making any judgment on personal grounds, then all such things can work harm to our health—namely, to our physical body and etheric body—when we follow the path of development into higher worlds.

It is exceedingly important that we should be clear about these things. And it is easy to perceive the significance of the fact that in ordinary day life man is deprived of all influence upon his physical and etheric body, his thoughts, in the manner in which he grasps them when he is within these bodies have nothing whatever to do with reality, they are quite ineffective and consequently unable to form any judgment about what is real. By night they would be able to do so. Every false thought would work destructively on the physical and etheric bodies. If we were conscious in the night we should see before us what I have just been describing to you. The world of the senses would appear to us as a sea of ruling will, and behind it would appear the wisdom—the wisdom that builds the world, beating through this will, as it were lashing it up and down into great waves, and with every beat of the waves evoking continually processes of coming into existence and of passing away, processes of birth and of death. That is the true world, into which we have ultimately to look, the world of ruling will and the world of ruling wisdom, and the latter is also the world of perpetual births and perpetual deaths. That is the world that is our world, and it is of immense importance for us to recognise it. For if we once recognise it we begin to discover in very truth a means for attaining to a greater and greater height of surrender; because we feel ourselves interwoven in perpetual births and perpetual deaths, and we know that with every deed we do we connect ourselves in some way with a coming into existence or with a passing away. And “good” will begin to be for us not merely something of which we say: That is good, I like it, it fills me with sympathy. No, we begin to know that the good is something that is creative in the World-All, something that always and everywhere belongs to the world that is arising and coming into being. And of the “bad” we begin to feel how it shows itself everywhere as an outpouring of a process of death and decay. And here we shall have made an important transition to a new world-conception, where one will not be able to think of evil in any other way than as the destroying angel of death, who goes striding through the world, nor of good in any other way than as the creator of continual cosmic births, in great and small. And it is for Spiritual Science to awaken in man a sense of how through this spiritual world-conception he can deepen his whole outlook on life, as he begins to feel that the world of good and the world of bad are not merely as they appear to us in external maya, where we stand before them with our power of judgment and find only that the one is pleasing to us and the other displeasing; no, the world of good is the creative world and the bad is the destroying angel who goes through the world with his scythe. And with every bad thing we do we become a helper of the destroying angel, we ourselves take his scythe and share in the processes of death and decay. The ideas that we receive from a spiritual foundation have a strengthening influence upon our whole outlook on life. This strength is what men should now be receiving that they may carry it into the evolution of the future; for indeed they will need it. Hitherto good Gods have taken care of man but now the time has come in our fifth Post-Atlantean epoch when destiny, and good and evil will more and more be given over into his own hands. Therefore it is necessary to know what good and evil mean, and to recognise them in the world—the one as a creative and the other as a death-dealing principle.

Anyone who has come to a view of how peoples and ages have achieved great and significant things through contemplation of the historical past cannot help but feel bitter when he looks around him today and sees the spiritual goings-on in the world. It looks rather old-fashioned, the lament into which we are breaking out here, we know that. But we give ourselves up to the hope that there is still enough sense for the natural development of peoples and people to find a hearing for these laments. These are not the complaints of the "old", who no longer want to and can no longer understand the "young" because they cannot get out of their historically inherited prejudices, but rather the complaints of a "young" who could never gain the conviction that "greenness", ignorance and lack of education are worth more than a mind schooled in the great examples of the past.

Recently, one of the "young" gave us the wise advice: we could get along after all. Young people leave their French tutors, salon ladies and so on to old people; they should just leave their worn-out waitresses, modest pimps and drunkards to them. We don't quite understand this peace proposal. For we have never had any desire for the used waitresses and so on; so they remain with the "young gentlemen". But when complete immaturity puts forward such aesthetic drivel in order to justify its insane filthy writing as a direction equal to dignified art, then we reject such an insult to the German national spirit. The German nation must never again tolerate people in its midst giving themselves the honorary title of poet who, in their writings and rhymes, deal with things that, when read, produce nothing in us but the suggestion of a disgusting smell.

We wouldn't pay any further attention to the pundits in question, we would simply leave them to one side as the scribbling rabble, if we hadn't recognized an eminent danger in their appearance. In few periods of time has there been such an aversion to thoroughness and depth as there is today. Where there is a need for spiritual contemplation, a serious engagement with problems, modern man turns away. This is probably because liberalism has exerted its "educational and progressive influence" over many decades! When these intellectually inert people, who are indifferent to idealistic interests, are offered such banal fare as, for example, recently in "Modern Poetry" and similar magazines, and with the pretension that this means just as much as those difficult intellectual tasks of a better age, then their self-confidence, which is based on nothing, grows. She thinks her narrow-mindedness is greatness.

In our view, this "modernity" is nothing but the delusional drivel of the immature sex, acting without the aspiration of maturity. These "moderns" despise the old not out of knowledge, for deeper reasons, but out of ignorance. And this ignorance is the fruit of that laziness that has never wanted to learn anything proper.

Only those who have become masters of the old, who have absorbed it and allowed themselves to be saturated by it, have the right to speak of a longing for the new. When a school of thought and artistic movement has lived out its full potential, when it has brought to fruition all the secret seeds slumbering within it, then it steps away from the stage of history of its own accord, then it gives birth to the new from within itself. It is downright outrageous when the green youth take credit for this "greenness", when they claim it as an advantage, as something special. No, dear "young gentlemen", young people have always been green, but never as cheeky as they are today. Twenty-year-old boys have always written poems and the like, but it has never occurred to them to proclaim themselves the bearers of entirely new epochs.

We appreciate youth because we love strength. We also understand the Sturm und Drang that overshoots the mark, but we firmly reject youthful, powerless, rabble-rousing megalomania.

It must fill us with melancholy when we hear judgments about Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Grillparzer from this side. Without even the slightest hint of a sense of spiritual depth, hollowness takes center stage, without any awareness of the fact that it is unconscionable of the most disgusting kind to pass judgment on a product of the mind that one does not understand.

What we would like to shout to the gentlemen of "Modern Poetry", "Society" and the other representatives of the "Green" principle is: learn something! Nothing is more dangerous than judging before one has reached spiritual maturity. Anyone who sits in the critical judgement seat too early in the face of a spiritual phenomenon makes it impossible for them to allow it to have the proper effect on them.

We do not want to go into the details here. For whether Conrad writes a novel in which things are told that are otherwise done in secluded rooms in order to spare the sense of smell, or whether Hermann Bahr writes a "critical article" in which he announces that the "great death" of the ideal has finally begun and the age of dirt has arrived, or whether a third party sings about the eyes "with the black rim", we are basically indifferent. However, we would like to make a different suggestion to the recent proposal made by the "young" to the "old". Keep the used waitresses, we'll even let you keep the modest pimps; but keep all the riff-raff. For we do not wish to use our noses for aesthetic pleasure even when they are pleasant, let alone when they are touched unpleasantly. For we stick to our old aesthetics to the extent that only the higher senses are aesthetic.

We know well what will be said about these lines in the circles concerned: this is written by a person who is still afflicted by the "old" view of art, who still believes in this garbage of aesthetics and so on, a person who lacks any understanding of the spirit of the age. But my dear "young ones", only believe this: if anything is easy to understand, it is you. For the rest of us need only remember what we understood before we learned anything, then we can grasp you. We are not impressed by such shallowness, by such immaturity.

But if one of "our own" should ask us why we have written this, since more serious people should hardly be interested in dealing with such things, we will answer him: we have written with the feelings of a person who, out of sanitary considerations, feels moved to speak a word when unhealthy elements all around threaten to pollute the air of life.

The knights: 5th degree

At a certain moment the black drapes disappeared and bright red drapes appeared on the walls. Then the crown of thorns, which was hung on the black cross on the altar of the East, was replaced by a rosary of seven red roses.

The Grand Master received a red headband instead of the white ZT headband, and the knights took off their black robes and stood in red robes.

The Grand Master wore a black robe with a white

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headband during the first part, and during the middle part, when he taught as a “teaching brother”, he took off all his insignia and stood before us in a simple white, long robe. - No one can remember a change of clothing at the moment the black curtains fell, in Marie Steiner, the only one in the sixth degree. She wore a white dress and her grade insignia. The grades 3-4 had no change when it turned “red.” They all wore aprons.

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The fourth degree had a green border on the apron and three green circles; at the 3rd degree, the border and circles were light blue.

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The first and second degrees wore white aprons, and the first degree had the triangle folded up.

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All degrees 1-4 wore a small trowel (masonry tool) made of golden-yellow metal

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(about life size).

The Spirit Realm. The scene is set in floods of significant colour, reddish deepening into fiery red above, blue merging into dark blue and violet below. In the lower part there is a globe symbolising the earth. The figures that appear seem to blend into a complete whole with the colours. On the left of the stage the group of gnomes as in Scene 2, page 173, in front of them Hilary, and in the immediate foreground the soul-forces.

Felix Balde's Soul:

(Seated at the extreme right of stage, having the form of a penitent, but arrayed in a light violet robe girdled with gold.)

I thank thee, Spirit, wise to govern worlds,
My saviour from my gloomy loneliness;
Thy word awakens unto work and life.
I will make use of what thou giv'st to worlds
About which I can meditate, whilst thou
Dost let mine own become,, insensible.
For then thou bearest to them on thy rays
That which in pictures fashioneth powers for me.

Lucifer:

(Bluish-green glittering under-garment, reddish outer-garment, shaped like a mantle and gleaming brightly, which extends into wing-like outlines; his upper part is not an aura but he wears a mitre of deep red bordered with wings; on his right wing a blue shape having the appearance of a sword; a yellow shape, like the ball of a planet (Venus), is supported by his left wing. He stands somewhat behind and to the right, towering over Felix Balde's soul.)

My servant, such activity as thine
The sun-time needs, in which we find ourselves.
The earth-star now receives a faded light;
It is the time when souls like thine can work
Unto the best advantage on themselves.
On thee I ray forth from my fount of light
The germs that tend to raise self-consciousness.
Go, gather them to make thine ego strong.
In later earth-life they will come to flower.
There shall the blossoms by thy soul be sought;
In its own nature it will take delight
When it can joy in planning its desires.

Felix Balde's Soul:

(Gazing at the group of gnomes. From this moment, the gnomes becoming conscious, keep swaying up and down, slightly raising and lowering themselves, as if the group was breathing from above.)

There far away, bright being disappears;
It floats in shadow-pictures through the deeps;
And, floating, strives to gain some steadying weight.

Hilary's Soul:

(With the figure of a steel-blue-grey elemental spirit modified to resemble a man's; the head less bowed, and the limbs more human.)

The mist of wishes doth reflect the light
Thrown on the realm of spirit by earth's star,
The star for which in this world thou dost form
From soul-material a thinking self.
For thee 'tis but a fleeting web of mist,
But to themselves they seem like solid souls.
On earth they work, by cosmic reason led,
In old fire forces, thirsting after form.

Felix Balde's Soul:
I will that their weight shall not burden me,
Which grievously resists the soaring will.

(The gnomes cease their movement.)

Ahriman:
Thy speech is good. Swift will I seize thy words
That I may keep them for myself unharmed.
Thou canst not yet develop them thyself;
But on the earth they would fill thee with hate.

Strader's Soul:

(Toward the left of the stage; only his head is visible; it is in a yellowish-green aura with red and orange stars. At this moment on Strader's immediate left appears the soul of Capesius. Similarly only his head is to be seen. It is in a blue aura with red and yellow stars.)

I hear a word which sounds and sounds again.
It seems significant, and yet the sound
Doth vanish, and the lust for life doth seize
Its echoed answer. Which road would it take?

The Other Philia:

(Arrayed like a copy of Lucifer, though the radiance is lacking. Instead of the sword she has a kind of #8224, and in place of the planet a red ball like a fruit.) It travels onward in its search for weight

Unto the place where radiant being fades
And misty pictures surge into the deep.
If thou dost keep its meaning in thy realm
I'll bring its power to thee within the mist;
Then thou wilt re-discover it on earth.

Philia:

(Figure like an angel, yellow merging into white, with wings of a bright violet, a lighter shade than Maria has later.—All three soul figures and the Other Philia are near Strader's soul and stand in the centre of the stage.)

The mist-creations I will tend for thee
That they may not when conscious guide thy will;
That will I unto cosmic light entrust
Wherein they form the heat thy nature needs.

Astrid:

(Figure like an angel, robed in bright violet, with blue wings.)

I beam forth clear and wondrous life of stars
To beings, that they may make forms therefrom. They to thine earthly body shall give strength, From knowledge far, but near to heart's intent.

Luna:

(Figure like an angel, robe of blue and red, with orange wings.)

The weighty beings, who with toil create,
In thy sense-body will I later hide;
That thou mayst not in thought turn it to ill
And thus stir up a storm in earthly life.

Strader's Soul:
The three were speaking to me sunshine's words,
They work for me where I can see them work.
Full many figures are they fashioning;
I feel an impulse by soul-power to change
Them with design, and make them one with me.
Awake in me, O royal Solar power
That I may dim thy might by the resistance
Which my desire from the Moon sphere brings.
A golden glow now stirs, I feel its warmth,
And silver sheen, forth-spraying though yet cold;
Awake in me O Mercury again
And wed my severed cosmic self to me.

Well do I feel that once again a part
Is formed from out that picture, which I here
From cosmic spirit forces must create.

Capesius' Soul:
On that far shore of souls I see emerge
A picture that ne'er touched my being yet
Since I escaped the clutch of earthly life,
It rays out grace and soothes with soft appeal.
The warming glow of wisdom streams therefrom,
And clarifying light gives to my soul.
Could I but make this picture one with me
I should attain the end to which I strive.
Yet know I not the power which could avail
To make this picture active in my sphere.

Luna:
That which two earth-lives gave thee thou must feel.
One, many years ago, slid gently by
In earnest effort; later on thou hadst
One by ambition soiled; which must be fed
With strengthening grace descending from the first,
That Jupiter's fire-souls may be revealed
Within the circle of thy spirit-sight.
Then shalt thou feel that wisdom strengthens thee.
Then will the picture, which thou see'st afar
Upon the borders of thy soul's expanse,
Be set at liberty to come to thee.

Capesius' Soul:
I needs must be indebted to the soul
That now prepares for being, since it shows
A warning picture in my soul's expanse.

Astrid:
Thou art indeed but not as yet doth it
Demand a payment in, thy next earth-life.
This picture serves to give thee powers of thought
That thou as man mayst recognize the man
Who shows his earthly future to thee here.

The Other Philia:
The picture may indeed come closer yet
But cannot penetrate thy very self;
And so restrain its longing for thyself,
That thou mayst find thyself on earth again
Ere it can flow into thine inmost self.

Capesius' Soul:
I feel before what I shall owe to it
When I shall will to bring it near to me,
Yet can assert that I am free therefrom.
From Philia's domain I now behold
in picture-sequences the energy
Which I shall gather from its near approach.

Philia:
When Saturn soon his many-coloured light
Shall ray on thee, use well the favour'd hour.
Then through his power in thy soul's vehicle
That which in spirit is akin to thee
Will plant the roots of thought, which will disclose
The meaning of the cyclic life of earth
When thou dost tread again this star thyself.

Capesius' Soul:
Thy counsel shall become my monitor
As soon as Saturn pours his light on me.

Lucifer:
One thing more will I waken in these souls:
The view of worlds whose light will cause them pain,
Ere they can leave this sun-time fortified
With powers for later life upon the earth.
Pain must through doubt mature their fruit in them;
So will I summon up those spheres of soul
Which they have not the strength to look upon.

(The souls of Benedictus and Maria appear in the middle of the region. Benedictus, in dress and in figure, is a microcosmic counterpart of the entire scenic effect. Below, his robe, becoming broader, shades into blue-green; around his head is an aura of red, yellow and blue; the blue blends into the blue-green of the entire robe. Maria on his right is an angelic figure; yellow shading into gold, without feet and with bright violet wings.)

Benedictus' Soul:
Ye do weigh heavy on my cosmic task
With these opaque earth-laden spheres of yours.
If ye will still assert the sense of self
Then wilt ye find that in this spirit-life
Mine own sun-nature will not shine on you.

Maria's Soul:
He was unknown to you, when ye did last
The robes of earthly matter woven, wear;
Yet doth it still bear fruit in your soul-sheath—
The sunshine's word of power, with which he fed
You kindly in far distant times on earth.
Search out your nature's deepest impulses
And ye shall feel him near you then with power.

Felix Balde's Soul:
Words issue out of circles strange to me,
And yet their tones illuminate me not:
And so they are not fully real to me.

Strader's Soul:
On spirit-shores illumination works,
Yet howsoe'er I strive to understand
The sense of these light-forces, they are dumb.

Dame Balde's Soul:

(Figure of a penitent with white coif, like that of a nun; robe yellow-orange, with silver girdle; she appears quite close to Maria; on her right and near Felix Beide.)

Ye souls now summoned up by Lucifer!
The penitent doth hear your voices tone,
But only sunshine's voice doth give him light;
Its super-splendour doth destroy your voice.
The other can behold your starry light,
But starry writing is to him unknown.

Capesius' Soul:
The starry writing! this word wakens thoughts,
And bears them on the waves of soul to me.
Thoughts which in earth-lives in the distant past
Were to my being wondrously revealed.

They lighten still, yet—as they grow, they fade;
Oblivion sheds its gloomy shade around.

The Guardian:

(Enter the Guardian of the Threshold, like an angel, symbolically arrayed, to the side of the souls of Maria and Benedictus.)

Ye souls who now at Lucifer's demand
Have drawn near the bounds of other souls,
In this domain ye are within my power.
The souls whom ye are seeking seek you too.
Within this cosmic age 'tis not ordained
Their beings shall touch yours within their spheres,
Not e'en in thought;—and so do ye beware
Lest to their orbits ye should force your way.
Should ye do this, 'twould harm both them and you.
I should be bound to take away from you
The starry light, and banish you from them
For cosmic ages into other spheres.

Note to the reader:

The text of this lecture is not to be regarded as literally spoken that way. It is rather a more or less extensive summary based on two incomplete transcripts.

In this lecture, I want to give a picture of the theosophical world view that is completely free of any dogmatism, while I want to show its characteristics with the help of some phenomena of our Central European cultural life. It is not a matter of importing any foreign oriental world view but of showing that theosophy is life and must become life. It is no new Gospel, but the renewal of sensations deeply rooted in the human soul.

We have to be interested most of all how geniuses, affiliated to us, are filled with the theosophical world view. Thus Lessing believed in reincarnation. In Herder's writings, we find ideas of reincarnation. We find them with Schiller in his Philosophical Letters (1786), in the Letters from Raphael to Julius (Christian Gottfried Körner in Schiller's Thalia) and in On the Aesthetic Education of the Man in a Series of Letters (1793/94). Novalis also believed in it. In particular, we find a theosophical world view in the later works of Goethe. Indeed, this can surprise at first, but who occupies himself with the study of Goethe, especially with the profound Faust drama, immerses himself more and more into that which I try to explain. What I try to tell now has arisen very easily to me.

Goethe was a theosophist according to his whole nature, to the innermost sense of his life, because he did never accept any limit of his knowledge and work. Goethe was determined by his whole disposition to the world view we represent here. He was convinced that the human being is deeply connected with the world, and that this world is nothing material, but active, creative spirit; his world view was not an uncertain pantheism, but he believed that we can attain a living relation to God.

As a seven-year-old boy he collected the sunbeams and enkindled a little candle; he wanted to enkindle a sacrificial service by the fire of nature. In Poetry and Truth he says: if we oversee the different religions, we find a common core of truth in them. The sages of all times always showed the swing of a pendulum between the higher and lower self,

When Goethe had returned home after his Leipzig study and after a severe illness, he devoted himself to mystic studies. He decided to express what took place in him, the whole urging, in the Faust drama; in the legend in which the Middle Ages wanted to describe the fight between the old and the new world views.

The 16th century did not think that one could progress to redemption by the own soul force; it let Faust perish. However, Goethe did it. After he had represented Faust as a striving human being, in the first version of Faust, he put him on a new basis in the nineties of the 18th century. In his Faust Goethe shows the development of the human being from the lower to the higher soul forces and as we will still see also in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

His view was: only somebody who has passed the stages of development, who has felt attracted to the divine, who has passed doubts, has the full conviction, has gained the confidence and has brought himself from disharmony to harmony. His Faust is a song of human perfection. We need not to seek for the way to perfection in the Bhagavad Gita. We find the big problem also in the Faust. Goethe sets himself the task in his Faust to uncover the secret of evil.

Goethe uses the Prologue in Heaven to show the intention of his drama. The physical world is a reflection of force relations of the super-sensible world. With the words of the Prologue in Heaven Goethe describes the world of devachan, the sounding world. He represents it in the picture of the Pythagorean music of the spheres:

In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres
The sun still sings its glorious song...

Who says there that it concerns a superficial picture only says something superficial.

He also says at the end of the Ariel scene:

Hearken! Hear the onrush of the Horae!
In these sounds we spirits hear
The new day already born.

Goethe always speaks of the sounding of the spiritual world.

Theosophy speaks of three worlds: of the dream world, of the astral or soul world and of the mental or spiritual world. The emergence of the spiritual eye produces immense changes in the dream life first. If the new beholding, the new world becomes accessible, it is very regular. Of course, one must not found any science on what the human being experiences there. The student or chela has to learn to take this consciousness of the astral world along with him from the dream into his day consciousness. Later then he experiences the spiritual world in the dreamless sleep.

The consciousness of the astral world expresses itself in pictures, the consciousness of the spiritual world in spiritual hearing. The Pythagoreans called it the music of the spheres.

Still an important principle of the human being appears in the Prologue: the principle of karma. Who knows that Goethe knew the mystics of the Middle Ages thoroughly, does not speak of external pictures if Goethe says:

The spirit world is not sealed off
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Go, neophyte, and boldly bathe
Your mortal breast in roseate dawn!

Dawn or “aurora” is an expression which is familiar to the mystics. Jacob Böhme's first work was called: Aurora or the Rising of Dawn.

From the start, Faust strives beyond the limits of the physical life. The portrayal of the earth spirit is completely given in technical-mystic terms, a wonderful portrayal of the astral body of the earth, of the imperishable soul cover spiritually created from the fruits of life. The earth spirit is no symbol; Goethe considers him as a real being. He supposed that in the planet planetary beings are and have their bodies, like we have our bodies of flesh. Goethe's creed was: the earth spirit taught him not only to consider but to feel and sense the uniform being of stone, plant, and animal up to the human being. He taught him the brotherliness of everything created up to the human being, the crown of creation. He also expressed his creed as 35-, 36-year-old man in The Secrets. A pilgrim walks to a cloister. He sees a rose cross at the gate. The rose cross is the symbol of the realms of nature; stone, plant, animal = cross, roses = love. Goethe himself says later that each of the twelve personalities represents a great world view or world religion in The Secrets. The aim of the pilgrim was to seek for the true core of the world religions.

In the first part, we see the young Faust being full of sensation and disharmony. With the help of the tempter Faust has to lead his lower self through all mistakes. In Mephistopheles Goethe created the picture of an ancient idea that is included in any profound wisdom. He tried to solve the problem of evil. Evil is the sum of those forces which oppose the progress of human perfection. If truth consists of the further development, any obstacle is a lie. Mephistopheles is called the spoiler, mephiz, the liar tophel in Hebrew. He leads through all kinds of experience of the lower self.

At the end of the first part, Faust stands differently before the earth spirit; he attains the insight that it is possible to really recognise the self. After he has finished the errors, he gets to the spiritual world by purification.

Faust dies at an old age, and there he becomes a mystic. In the conversations with Eckermann (Johann Peter E., 1792–1854) Goethe says: for the initiate will be soon evident that a lot of profound is to be found in this Faust.

The descent to the mothers: in any mysticism the highest psychic is female; cognition is a conception process. The fire on the tripod is the primary matter. The realm of the mothers is the primary source of all things; the spirit comes from there. A moral qualification is necessary to enter the spiritual world devachan in the language of theosophy. The aim of theosophy is to lead the human beings upward. The human being must make himself appropriate and worthy of that. When Faust leads Helena upward for the first time, he breaks out in consuming passion and, hence, Helena disperses.

Faust should fathom the profound secret of the human nature, how body, soul and spirit combine.

Spirit is the eternal; it was before birth and will be after death; soul is the connection between spirit and body; it tends more to the body first then to the spirit in the course of development, and with the latter to the everlasting. The development of the spiritual eye supports that.

In Faust you are now led into the laboratory in which Homunculus is generated; Homunculus becomes wonderfully understandable if he is understood as a soul that has not yet incarnated. Homunculus has to receive a body. Goethe shows the gradual development of the bodily in a magnificent picture at the Classical Walpurgisnight. Proteus is the sage who knows how the physical metamorphoses proceed. Homunculus has to start with the mineral, and then the realm of plants follows. For going through the plant realm Goethe uses the expression “es grünelt so.” [ Note 1 ]

Sexuality appears only on a certain stage. Eros combines with Homunculus: The human being comes into being from the connection of the male aspect of the soul and the female one.

Faust's loss of sight shows: the physical world dies for him; the internal vision rises in him. A magnificent picture of this process: “And as long you do not have this dying and becoming ...” The mystics express it in such a way: “for death is the root of all life.” And: “who does not die, before he dies perishes, before he dies.”

In the final picture of Faust the Chorus mysticus says:

All that is transitory
is only a symbol;
what seems unachievable
here is seen done;
what's indescribable,
here becomes fact:
The eternal-female
shows us the way.

In any mysticism the striving human soul is female. The connection of the soul with the world secret: the spiritual connection is expressed with the mystics as a wedding of the lamb. Goethe expressed this view even deeper in The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

Goethe himself said of the last passages of Faust in the conversations with Eckermann that he wanted to show Faust ascending the Montserrat. In the poem The Secrets it is indicated. Parzival, the traveller through the valley. When Faust lost his eyesight, he got the possibility to quickly develop. There he came to the higher regions, to the devachan, we would say. However, Goethe also needed Catholic ideas. Thus he let Doctor Marianus appear in the “neatest cell.” This indicated: the release from anything sexual, being above man and woman. That is why he also added the female name with masculine ending to him. Now asexuality takes the place of uni-sexuality. He had completely awoken in buddhi. Buddhi, the sixth member, had got the upper hand over all the other members.

Note:

Es grünelt so: the verb “grüneln” is a nonce word: being or becoming something that reminds of green; the translation of this sentence reads: “the air smells fresh and green.”

Today I will simply describe the rounds to you. You will have to be patient because the facts will be manifold. I can therefore only sketch them. It is also extremely difficult to express and describe them in words because they are quite unlike our present circumstances.

I will try to describe what is called the first round. I will simply describe the actual events. If we want to describe the beginning of the first round, we have to imagine that a sphere separates from the dark space of the universe. This sphere has a reddish color for those who can see at such a high level, A reddish sphere separates itself from the darkness of space. This reddish sphere contains within itself all the beings and substances that will later appear on Earth, but in a completely dissolved state, as it were. At first nothing has a form in it. Everything is formless in this red mist, which is thinner than the thinnest ether, if one can imagine it at all. This red sphere therefore represents that which we receive as a drawing of the first Aupa sphere of our seven globes belonging to the earth.

Now I ask you to watch what is called the transition from one sphere to the other. It is not really a transition, but a transformation of the appearance of the sphere, which remains in the same place. The sphere becomes brighter and brighter and at the same time denser and denser, and there are perceptible lines in it that have a certain arrangement, emanating from certain points, like radiant lines. To the seer's open eye, the sphere gradually takes on an orange color. This is what we call the rupa sphere. There are conditions within which it darkens and then brightens again – the pralaya conditions.

Then it becomes denser and glows yellow; it now consists of astral matter, in which lines now go in all directions, forming figures. These are the forces that later compose the mineral kingdom as such. Then there are small pralaya states again. The sphere then enters a state in which it takes on a kind of greenish coloration. This is the first physical state that the whole first round then takes on.

Everything that was previously merely sensuous intimation has now progressed to a certain degree of density. The physical matter in which this earth is located no longer exists on earth at present. It is a kind of etheric air, but you can find a hint of this physical state in all those who know something. I am reminded of a passage in Goethe's “Faust”: “Macht ein wenig Feuerluft.” Fire air is the first physical matter, a fire air that is greenish and contains everything that came later [...] in which the globe presents itself in this state.

Now there is another small pralaya. The sphere now develops in such a way that it takes on a completely different form. In its next state, it can be compared to a mulberry. It separates into smaller spheres and now takes on a coloration that shimmers towards the bluish. The lines are now distributed over individual spheres, and what used to be active throughout the entire sphere – the elementary forces – is now active in the individual small spheres. Increasingly distinct forms appear. Cubic, dodecagonal forms and so on appear and become increasingly clearer.

The next state indicates how and when it begins to fall apart. The whole thing now has a coloration between blue and violet. It turns into violet and goes through the pralaya state like this. In this seventh state, all forms of minerals have emerged. While this formation was emerging, while this type of mulberry was emerging, the matter became thinner and thinner. First it was Arupa matter, then in the last state, fully developed mineral nuclei appear in it, where the Arupa sphere used to be. The entire mineral kingdom is now archetypally present.

And now it passes into a twilight state. So there have been seven successive states, they had the task of bringing the mineral kingdom to the archetypes of the minerals. I would like to emphasize that, in all this turmoil of facts, this is what has always come from the lunar epoch, as the developed entities of the lunar epoch. These are essentially the human souls that have gone through the entire conditions of the lunar epoch and are at the most diverse stages of development. Not all of them have achieved the goal that could be achieved. Some, on the other hand, have progressed further. There were also, if I may say so, 'Mosesses', 'Platons', 'Pythagorasses'. They are not yet able to participate in all the processes I have described so far. These processes are too low. On the other hand, the beings who have not reached the heights must now catch up. They have to participate in the formation of these forms. They have to catch up on the lessons, as it were, that they neglected earlier. That is kaleidoscopically the succession of conditions that I have described. It is as if you were looking into a kaleidoscope, and just as the different successions can be seen there, so it is to be imagined.

The second round of the first state shows up by the fact that we see a reddish ball shimmering again. But this is much more richly structured than the previous one. Above all, we see intertwining vortex systems in the ball that look like the well-known snake rod of Hermes. At first only in very light, bright suggestion. Such structures stand out. And after the sphere has returned to the pralaya state and glows orange, it becomes such that it passes into motion. The snakes, which were at first motionless around the axis, now begin to move around the axis. The formation enters into a state of complete motion within itself. Then there is another state of pralaya, and an astral sphere in a beautiful, bright yellow color emerges. And the formations I have described now appear at a higher level, in that what they used to show only as movement now shows traces of forms everywhere, so that astral cylinders, discs, lines and all kinds of formations of the most diverse shapes have now emerged from the coils, in magnificent beauty. Radial figures emerge that continually push new formations out of themselves. The whole is in great motion. Then there is another pralaya, and the greenish sphere is formed, the fourth sphere, the physical state.

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This is again in a matter that no longer exists today. It is called the state of fire-air, and that is a critical state at the present hour. Then intermediate states are present. These are of a kind of form between the watery and the airy. Everything is in a foggy state of green color. You could only compare the whole structure to a water pond with all kinds of green aquatic plants moving and stirring. The entities that are in there all have the transparent glowing green color. Then another pralaya occurs and what I have described as the mulberry appears again. The state becomes astral. The individual is formed out of itself, whereas before the change only took place in the whole of the sphere. Then another pralaya occurs.

The indigo sphere emerges, and the entire formations now become mere devachan formations, mere mental formations, but of great certainty. The next state is that in which the archetypes of the entire plant kingdom are formed. It has become a violet sphere. The archetypes are formed, the whole disappears from view. A state of twilight sets in. This state now enables the consciousness of the Pitris, who are already a little higher or souls that have come over from the lunar epoch, to participate in the construction of these structures with their powers. We have now completed what we call the second round. Previously, the mineral kingdom had reached the second round. What I previously described as a physical state has now progressed so that it is as if you imagine snow figures in the great ice, but in distinct watery, fog-like formations. The minerals are now in this fog-like state. This is the case while the sphere has a greenish coloration. With that, we have described what was described as the second round, the actual conditions.

And now comes the third round. The state of eclipse occurs. And now I notice that during these pralaya states, which I will describe, with the archetypes of the mineral and the plant, when they pass into the twilight state, something also happens. But even for the seer's eye it is difficult to see anything. There is no complete extinguishing of the sphere. It is important to emphasize this. It is like seeing the moon, which is half illuminated, and yet the other dark side can still be seen. A reddish sphere now appears for the third time. In this sphere, what is called the boundary in occult language occurs. The beings delimit themselves from the outside, they cover themselves with skins. The result is that living beings appear that shed their skin. This is an aupa state. Then a pralaya state occurs. The orange-colored sphere appears. The forms become more distinct. They begin to move. A pralya state occurs again. The whole now becomes an astral sphere, a sphere of stellar color, in which all three types of formations are present. Regular forms of metals, of minerals, the archetypes of plants, take on the astral form again, and the formations, covering themselves with a skin, begin to collide, to become perceptible to each other. They sense each other, they feel that they are there.

Now another pralaya, and the fourth, the physical state occurs. This is again a critical state, which can be compared, in terms of its consistency, with what is seen in egg white. All the structures that have emerged also take on this protein-like matter, from the densest protein to the completely gelatinous protein. The whole has turned green, and the entities that have emerged with the boundary are so far that they show the mucus-like animal formation; in forms from radiating shapes up to ape-like shapes. The Pitris – souls – already have the possibility to initially incarnate in these forms – imperfectly. They are also called water people. These are people who can stand upright despite their swelling, gelatinous matter.

Now the bluish astral state comes again, in which the consistency is not so dense. It can no longer be compared to the mulberry, it can only be compared to the astral. There is just no intelligence in it. A pralaya is formed again, and the indigo sphere comes. All forms become more definite. They become more alive from within. They are thought beings. And then comes the violet sphere. The whole sum of entities has passed into archetypes. They have become germ-shaped and now merge into the archetypes of the animal world that have emerged. And after another pralaya has taken place, when the red sphere dawns again, what we call the fourth round begins. What can later provide the body for the actual human race is gradually being prepared: the archetypes of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. More and more definite forms emerge. The orange state occurs, the astral state. There are already certain entities that resemble the later animals and humans in form. Then there is another pralaya state, and the actual earth, our present earth, appears in what we now call etheric matter, within the fourth round, on which earth, in etheric substance, man is present. He is still an animal-man, but already guided and surrounded by the solar Pitris, the higher intelligences who have come over, who have reached a higher level of development and are also guided by higher intelligences, which are described in Genesis as the Elohim. They were all working to advance man in his development.

He then goes through the second race and condenses. Then comes what we call the third race, and which we have described several times.

The following is the process as it presents itself:

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On the essence of practice
Transcription for Prof. Dr. Hans Wohlbold, Munich, from 1917.

The essence of practice lies in the appropriation of the imaginative activity that can elevate spiritual reality to knowledge. The essential thing is that this imaginative activity is experienced independently of the physical organization. It is a matter of experience to know: now I notice how I am able to think, etc., without the usual conditions of the imagination being tied to the physical body. This point in time occurs in the course of practice. In particular, I advise:

1.) In the evening, a backward imagining of the day's experiences. This is a first step with an imagining that does not bind itself to the usual pursuit of imagining. The imagining becomes freer.

2.) To concentrate in complete calm on a short train of thought. This should be completely manageable, so that one does not mix in unconscious or subconscious reminiscences of images, etc., but really remains in a mental activity with complete awareness. Then one lets the thought-content fall away in consciousness and tries to retain the energy, to remain consciously for a short time without thought-content. In this way one brings the ability to perceive to that calm energy which is necessary to grasp the spiritual, which otherwise, as it were, falls through the meshes of ordinary thinking and thus does not come to consciousness.

I advise doing exercises 1 and 2 in the evening.

In the morning it is good to do a kind of thought-concentration similar to the second one. Pictorial imagination can play a role here, as I have discussed in principle with the rose-cross exercise in the second part of “Occult Science”. In order to gain the necessary calmness of thought concentration, it is good to do the six exercises (as auxiliary exercises) described in the second part of my “Secret Science”.

The purpose of practicing lies partly in the application of stronger soul activity in contrast to the ordinary. Just as in the physical world, at critical points, the quantitative naturally changes into the qualitative, so the increase of the ordinary capacity for knowledge becomes that which can have the spiritual world as its object.

Exercises for Adolf Arenson
given in Stuttgart at the beginning of April 1904
Manuscript archive number 5299, 5300, 5301.

I. Every day, review the experiences of the personality during the day. You consider the most important experiences you had during the day and the way you behaved within them. All this is done with the aim of learning from life. How can I do a better job of something I did today? Such questions are asked. This does not make you dull to pleasure and pain. On the contrary. You become more sensitive. But you don't get stuck worrying and regretting what you've done; you turn it into a resolution to do better in the future. You become your own architect. Just as an architect does not stand and regretfully lament over a house he has built, that it is not better, but rather evaluates the experiences he has with the less good one for a next possible construction, so man does the same with himself. Our personality is lost in regret and worry; through learning it rises. Regret and worry are of no use; we should spend the time we waste on them on our upward development. The whole process should not take more than three to four minutes. You then fall asleep with a manas that has received the strength to develop upwards within itself. If you can add an important resolution for life or even a good thought for fellow human beings, it is particularly good. This gradually transforms you, because you have given the manas, which is free of all personal barriers during sleep, a worthy content that promotes development.

II. In the morning as the first mental work of the day:

a) Elevation to one's own higher self through complete surrender to the formula:

I am the living urge in my covers.
My higher self is pure like the purest crystal.

b) Concentrated devotion to a high thought. The meditation of Bhagavad-Gita, chap. III, Karma Yoga, is best. From the third verse onwards:

3. As I have already told you...

Always just one verse. You stay with one verse for two weeks. After two weeks, you choose the next one and so on. In this meditation, as well as in the previous elevation to the higher self, the field of vision of consciousness must be completely pure. Every other thought must be kept away completely. If one should arise, it must be banished with all one's strength.

c) Devotional mood toward that which is most sacred to one. (The Creative All, God, etc., according to the personality, according to what one has learned to honor and name as the highest.)

For the morning meditation, 8-10 minutes.

Patience and perseverance, absolute earnestness are absolutely necessary. One must get into the mood in which the spirit perceives this meditation as a need as natural as the body's physical needs. And then one waits to be given. It will be given to everyone in due time.

It can be started now on April 16 (not earlier), then again on May 16.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3105/06

Morning meditation - 5 minutes

1. Brighter than the sun
purer than snow
finer than ether
is the Self
the spirit in my heart
That Self is me

2. 5 minutes

Inhalation: seek the way - 1 time (deep, calm)

Breathing retention: Search for the path in contemplation – 3 times.

Exhalation (not in spurts): Search for the path by boldly stepping out of yourself – 2 times.

(3 times)

because:

14 days: Before the eye sees
14 days: Before the ear
14 days: Before
14 days: Before them

3. Devotional surrender to one's own divine ideal. 5 minutes

Ending:
1st month: Self-confidence
2nd month: self-control
3rd month: presence of mind
4th month: energy

In the evening

Review of the day: If there was an experience:
Have I learned enough from it?
If there was an action:
Can't I do it better?
Without regret. Only with the intention of learning from life.
From back to front. From evening to morning.

Without alcohol.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3107

In the morning

I.) Brighter than the sun
purer than the snows
more subtle than the ethers
is the Self
its spirit in my heart
this Self am I
I am this Self.

Full waking consciousness.

II.) Think of the left hand and the heart and at the same time imagine:

Seek the way

Now you stop at the heart and think:

Seek the way of inner contemplation.

Now think of the right hand and fold it over the left, imagining:

Seek the way by boldly stepping out of yourself.

III.) Devotional surrender to that which one regards as a divine ideal.

In the evening

Review of the day.
Without regret.
From evening to morning. Backwards.
You can fall asleep doing this!!

Exercises from a Notebook: Archive number 105, 1906

February 16.

1.) Radiant ---

2.) Inhalation, exhalation, holding the breath.

I am, which is poured through the whole body.

This three times in succession, whereby actually the “I am” should accompany
the whole process.

Inhalation, exhalation, retention of breath
It - whereby it is actually “I” - It is
This again three times

Inhalation, retention of breath, exhalation The inner being

3.) The currents within the body.

Then, after the meditation, a sinking into and letting oneself be affected by the following figures:

What does it mean to disappear into oneself and to arise again from one's disappearance?

How does a point become a circle, and how does a circle become a point?

What is inner, what is outer; what is upper, what is lower; what is matter, what is spirit; what is physical matter, what is ether?

What is astral?

How do the spirits of the sensation affect the wearer of the substance?

Imagine that the lines are clasps made of whalebone, which are in the above position; but in every moment they resist this length through their strength.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3187/88

In the evening

First look back over the life of the day, presenting individual episodes of this life in pictures. Going back from the evening to the morning. This need only take 5-7 minutes. Then, with the feeling, “From the spiritual world my self flows to me,” concentrate on the center of the eyebrows and direct the words to this point:

“I am.

Then, with the feeling, ‘The spiritual world lives soulfully in the silent word,’ concentrate on the larynx and direct the words to this point:

”It thinks”.

Then, with the feeling: “The spiritual world creates its knowledge,” concentrate on the heart, arms and hands and direct the words into this area:

“It feels.”

Then with the feeling: “In me the spiritual world creates its self-awareness,” concentrate on the aura, which is thought of as egg-shaped and surrounding the body; at the same time, direct the words into this area:

"It wills.

The meditation should last 10-15 minutes.

In the morning

The meditation of the Rose Cross, as described in “Occult Science”.

In addition, the 6 subsidiary exercises.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 6860-62 with note:
End of August [1906] Stuttgart.

Immerse yourself completely in the idea of

an impersonal higher self

It is not important that you visualize something prescribed by someone, but that you try to form the best idea of the “higher self” that you can, based on your level of development.

Now treat this idea as if you were placing it in the place inside the head where the pineal gland (Z) is located. Transfer your consciousness there for a while and fill it completely with the above idea of an “impersonal higher self”. So for a while you imagine that your own being is in Z, compressed, and that you are the above idea. Banish everything else from your consciousness.

Once you have done this for a while, slowly guide the above idea from Z in a line to the beginning of the spinal cord, approximately where the brain passes into the spinal cord. Then you continue it from there approximately down the area of the spinal cord to a point called K (kundalini). After imagining that you have imbued the above idea with kundalini power (spiritual) fire, you slowly guide it back up along the spinal cord to a point inside the head: approximately at the point (B) of the small brain (back of the head). Now you imagine (impersonal higher self) from this point in two lines to the two eyes and let it flow out through them, as it were, into infinite space. Then you draw it back in through the eyes and guide it to point B. Do this again by leading the image from B to the two ears, letting it flow through them into infinite space and then back

to B through the ears. Once you have imagined that you have led the “impersonal higher self” through space twice and filled it with its content, then lead the thus enriched idea again from B through the spinal cord to K, imbue it there in the imagination with the spiritual fire and now lead it very slowly (so slowly that the time during which one ascends from K to the point at the throat at laryngeal level takes about 20 minutes) to the throat (at laryngeal level). There one now thinks intensely:

I am not you.

I, the concept of the higher self according to all the paths it takes in the above sense.

You, the ordinary self that one does not identify with at this moment.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3192

Christian Gnostic Meditation

I. Early in the morning, immediately after awakening, when no other impressions have yet passed through the soul, one seeks to free the consciousness completely from all memories of everyday life, one seeks to distract one's attention from all external perceptions. Then, when one has attained this inner silence, one lets live alone in the soul:

The first five verses of the Gospel of John. II. Then, for the first fortnight, one should try to recall one's whole past life in order to get to know oneself completely. After the first fortnight, one should read the whole Gospel of John, so that one lives in one chapter every day for seven days.

So in the first 7 days: 1st chapter from sentence 6 to the end
So in the second 7 days: 2nd chapter
etc.

When you have reached the 13th chapter, you try to experience

foot washing to experience the feeling of how every higher being owes its existence to the lower ones, and must therefore humbly bow down to them.

Flagellation the feeling that one can stand upright facing the scourging of life, i.e. facing all suffering and pain.

Crowning with thorns: the feeling that you have to stand tall, even in the face of all scorn and mockery.

Crucifixion: the feeling that your own body is something alien that you carry and to which you are tied from the outside.

Mystical death: You experience the curtain that still covers the spiritual world, but then also how it tears and you look into the spiritual world.

You learn to see the causes of evil and the evil ones: descending into hell.

Entombment: You feel at one with all beings on earth, with the earth itself. You are immersed in it.

Resurrection: This can only be experienced because the words of ordinary language are insufficient to describe it.

III. Then one calls the figure of Christ Jesus to mind and delves into the following image:

I, in Your Spirit.

In the evening: review of the entire day.

I and III are the same every day; only II changes every 7 days, as described.

After completing cycle II, you start again from the beginning and so on forever. After a long time, you may experience the inner and outer symptoms mentioned in the description of Christian development.

Outwardly one feels as if one's feet are surrounded by water.

Outwardly one feels a burning sensation etc. over the whole skin.

Outwardly one feels pain in the head.

Outwardly the wounds redden during meditation.

Internally, one experiences the vision as if one were personally performing the washing of the feet.

Internally, one sees oneself being scourged.

Internally, one sees oneself wearing the crown of thorns.

Inwardly you see yourself crucified.

Exercise with the Rose Cross Visualization.
Handwritten manuscript archive number 3229

Evening:

1.) Retrospective. Pictorial. Retrospective.

2.) Search You, my soul, to plunge into yourself, sensing you;
At the bottom of you lies your spirit;
In your spirit the spirit of the world is at work.
I am in all this
thinking feeling
living.

(Peace of mind)

In the morning:

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In you, you world letter
I see
The sevenfold workings of the spirit
In seven rose stars
The dark paths of life
In the black wood of the cross
I am in all this.

(Peace of mind)

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3236/37/38

In the morning:

Concentrate on a line that goes through the body, so

The line does not go through the spinal cord, but a little in front of it through the body.

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Then meditate on the following words:

Warming light penetrates into me from above
The gravity of the earth spreads warming light within me
and shapes me,

Then, for a longer period of time, hold the idea

I am

Then do not imagine anything, but wait in empty consciousness for what comes.

In the evening: try to concentrate on your own physical sensations in the following stages:

I am my head
I am my neck
I am my arms
I am my chest wrapping
I am my heart
I am the blood that circulates in me
I am my lungs

Then, concentrate on the breath in the following way:

Concentrate on inhalation and perceive the inhaled air as J

Concentrate on the inhaled air filling the body and perceive it as A

Focus on the exhalation and feel the air leaving the body as O

Do this for seven consecutive breathing cycles;

then focus contemplatively on the inside of the head (point a)

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Feel as if the sound J A O were resounding there; hold this sound for one to two minutes, then imagine nothing but wait in empty consciousness for what comes. Neck: luminous stream along the spine A

Luminous stream from the center of the eyebrows to the neck: J

Luminous stream along the spine: A

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Light flow inside from the spine back to the center of the eyebrows: O

(seven times every 2 minutes (14 minutes)

J A O penetrates into me through me out of me

J A O creates forces in me through me out of me as often as

J A O lives, webend in me through me out of me, possible.

Mood:

J A O as the name of Christ
This is connected with the secret of
how Christ works in man.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 5273

1.) Evening: 4-5 minute review of the day's life (in reverse chronological order).

2.) Evening: The following meditation for 4-5 minutes:

I feel myself in the space of light (thereby imagining the light-filled world around me)

Light weaves my etheric body (imagining my own body consisting of light)

I feel myself in the world of colors (imagining a sea of colors in which you yourself are)

The world of colors of the mind gives me the soul (imagining your own soul).

In light and color, My Self thinks, feels and wills.

3.) In the morning: Imagine a black cross with seven shining stars.

Meditate on this:

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4-5 minutes:

My Self
Thinks, feels and wills
Through light and color 4-5 minutes
I rest quietly
In my higher self
My I In
Christ.

In addition, the six exercises: concentration of thought, etc., as they appear in Occult Science.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3233

I. Day: Evening, 10 minutes:

Summarize a realization in a short sentence.

Transformation into a mathematical or physical symbol.

Breaths:

Inhalation: Consuming the symbol for several minutes through the head.

Holding the breath: Storing the symbol.

Exhalation: Imagine letting the symbol out along with the air you breathe out, without the symbol.

Morning: 15 minutes:

Repeat the same exercise.

Remain with an even inner soul, without external impressions and without memories of life on the physical plane.

Day 2:

Evening:

Summarize a realization into one sentence.

Transform it into a plant symbol.

Breaths:

Inhale: Consume the symbol through the heart.

Holding the breath: Holding the symbol

Exhaling: Imagining that you are holding the symbol within you and letting out air without a symbol.

Morning:

Repeat the exercise and remain as on the first day.

III. Day:

Evening:

Summarize a realization in a short sentence.

Transform it into a symbol from the animal kingdom.

Breaths:

Inhale the symbol through the larynx.

Hold your breath: Hold the symbol.

Exhalation: Imagine that [the] symbol remains inside and empty breath goes out.

Morning: Repeat as on other 'days.

No alcohol. No lentils, beans, peas.

Handwritten Exercise: archive number 5269

Evening:

1.) Retrospective review of the events of the day in reverse chronological order. 4-5 minutes.

2.) First, concentrate on the visualization: I think things and facts.

Hold this visualization for about a minute, excluding other thoughts.

Then concentrate on the visualization:

My thinking flows in time.

Hold this image again for a minute.

After this preparation, concentrate on the following in succession (3-4 minutes):

I follow the flowing thought
I will recognize my will in my thinking
I will find my I in my thinking will
I will live as I in my thinking will
I await the solution of the I from the I.

Then a calm inner frame of mind.

In the morning: visualization of a blue circular area with a red surrounding.

Then transform it into a red circle with a blue surrounding. Transform back into the previous state.

Do this 7 times in a row.

Observe inwardly how, as a result, thinking gradually becomes mobile, free within itself and ultimately elevated to a body-free state.

With the soul thus prepared, concentrate on some simple object and observe how this inner activity is now different from what it would be without this preparation.

The whole thing takes 4-5 minutes.

Do the six exercises as in the second part of “Occult Science”.

The time indications are, of course, based on how you feel.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3230.

In the morning:

I recognize the thought-image
of a being
in my head;
I think the feeling-rhythm
invigorating my being
in my heart;
I feel the willpower strengthening my limbs in my entire body.

At noon:

Let the power of the right eye flow into my left arm and the power of my left arm into my right leg.

Let the power
of the left eye flow
into my right arm
and the power of my right arm
into my left leg.

Before falling asleep:

I will
leave my body
My feelings follow me
My will enters the spiritual realm
power permeates him
He seizes all limbs when awakening

Supplement

End of an exercise with no beginning. Archive number 1704.

Now, with all your strength, as far as your memory reaches, go through your own life in concrete terms and feel responsible for descending into this incarnation; say to yourself that every part of one's destiny has been earned by myself – then realize the distance that exists between the life in such an incarnation, burdened with unbalanced karma, and the life of the purified person – with a completely balanced life account (karma).

Looking up to the idea of a purified Master.

That is what I shall become, that is what I want to become.

Notes on “Light on the Path”. From a notebook from 1906. Archive number 105. It is not known what the individual dates refer to.

II/1 (meditation of 1/11) is about the following:

When the higher self has taken complete possession of the person, when the personality shell has fallen away, then the whole choir of higher spirits can speak through him, just as the sensual world speaks through him before – in order to prepare for this moment, one must develop within oneself the attitude that renounces defending one's own, separate self. One ceases to be a warrior; one becomes an instrument of the Warrior.

The saying does not refer to the higher fact itself, but gives the instruction for developing the attitude through which the higher fact is attained.

On the meditation of 12/1.

Instead of “king”, it should be “kings”, because [one] is dealing with whole hosts of higher spirits; however, one can only speak of one fighter because at this level of being, the many resonate in complete harmony so that their expression appears as one.

From the meditation of 13/1.

Nothing – at least nothing essential – is left behind, but is redeemed in the course of time, i.e. absorbed into the higher. The higher (good) itself absorbs evil in the course of time and transforms it into good through its own power.

First of all, we are dealing with the divine spirit. It could not develop up to certain levels if it did not repel evil from itself and thus first reached a certain height without this evil.

264-17

With the evil in him, he could not have reached a height; but now at this height he is able to retrieve the evil and take it with him on his further journey.

The saint redeems the criminal. God redeems Satan.

Regarding 16.1

Wherever intuitive knowledge is mentioned here, it should be read as 'imaginative' knowledge. Intuitive knowledge is developed through [the] second sentence: unlearning sensitivity.

1. Sensory knowledge: everyday knowledge.

2. imaginative knowledge: spiritual seeing (pictures)

3. intuitive knowledge: spiritual hearing (the inner word).

4. knowledge of God - complete oneness with the absolute.

The realization regarding [name] is quite correct, and the more you attain in this direction, the faster you progress. However, we must give each such thought the right spiritual weight by acting as if we could do everything despite the opposite assumption:

1. I am clear in my feelings that [the person concerned]'s fate is the right one.

2. I am clear in my will that I should nevertheless act as if I could extend [the person concerned'] life into the immeasurable.

Feelings and will must always go in opposite directions. Otherwise, the realization is not spiritual, but abstract.

Except during meditation: reflection.

During meditation: live with the contemplative thought.

Regarding January 19:

When considering such ideas, it is always important to keep the counter-thought in mind: Inner peace should never be bought by turning away from the outside world, but always only after harmonizing with the outside world. This is just the same as with two other pole thoughts, for example; the esotericist never thinks or speaks one or the other without at least subtly striking the corresponding opposite pole in the background. Say, for instance,

God is in me

, then I should at least think subtly:

I am in God

, and thereby the one-sided thought-form is always paralyzed by the corresponding other, as for instance the physical body is paralyzed by the etheric body.

264-18

The forces (r ) act within the body and would immediately dissolve it if the pole forces did not hold it together from the outside. Dynamically, the etheric body is the positive pole and the physical body is the negative pole.

20.

Excessive emphasis on the inner self can easily lead to rigidity in the ahamkara. One can rise very high and still remain in it. That is why all esotericism has an important sentence:

Everything contributes to your immortality,

what is not done for this immortality

is done.

For example: if I devote myself to a teaching, I do raise myself, but not completely. If I build this teaching into a Gothic cathedral or into the soul of another person, or even just into my dealings with people, then what I have planted outside myself becomes part of my eternal body.

164-19

The building plan as such

The master builder dies.

The effects of the cathedral become the building blocks of the eternal soul of the master builder. This is also the basis of the sentence:

Pray and work.

Contemplating the absolute, the relative has lost all power over you. Polarity thought:

You cannot recognize an absolute without shining the light of the absolute into the relative.

A criminal is only recognized in his relativity if one is clear about how the divinity in the criminal reveals itself.

Such a dream can be a very good pointer: Tired swallow - Looking into development (symbolized by the swallow emerging from the reptile) is initially tiring and allows the wings to unfold less than independent progress in dullness. Seen more deeply, however, the former leads safely to the goal. It is precisely the deepest wisdom that appears worthless to people who live only in the moment. Such thoughts play around you and sometimes break through in dreams.

The dream of the 24th is significant. All such dreams are symbols of higher truths. The first part: floating in the vegetable corresponds approximately to the image of man in the 5th round. (There is no longer any mineral present). All visions that have a basis are prophetic to a certain extent, for no highly developed human being can see anything that will not later become part of the experience of all human beings.

Consciousness will only achieve continuity when experiences are present not only in dreams but also in dreamless sleep.

Dream experiences are images analogous to the seen image. Dreamless sleep experiences are always hearing experiences and, if they are to be of any value, articulated hearing experiences, e.g. words.

Sometimes you don't even need to understand the words. Because they can appear in the reminiscence as in a language that is not understood by us.

ad. 25.

All forms are at the same time expressions of the eternal. If we seek the eternal in form, we find it; if we seek it by fleeing from form, we separate ourselves even further.

264-20

ad. 26.

The subtlety of vibrations causes a heightened sensitivity to the outside world. A drunkard is immune to the vibrations of another drunkard. Therefore, at first the drinker becomes unpleasant to the non-drinker. It is the same with everything. Through the subtlety of vibrations, evolution precisely unlocks all impurity, baseness, etc. of the surrounding world, and in this way only an intensification of crucifixion in the material world can be achieved. The capacity for suffering in the world around increases with evolution. Only when one has overcome oneself, i.e., has stepped beyond the subtlety of the vibrations, then comes peace. But then one has not finer, but on the contrary simpler vibrations in oneself. Not refinement, but simplification of the vibrations is what matters.

I. Two undeveloped people.

264-21

The vibrations correspond to each other, and consequently they coincide; one does not perceive the other.

264-22

II. An undeveloped and a developed person.

264-23

Each individual rhombus of the second one perceives those of the first one, but cannot paralyze them.

III. An undeveloped and a more highly developed human being.

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The simple vibrations of the second one do notice the deviations in the first one, but they are strong enough to paralyze them.

ad. 27.

This in particular should be considered in the light of the previous law of simplification. Man becomes greater when he becomes simpler.

ad. 29.

It is important to understand that sensitivity is not the same as sensitivity. It therefore means:

Before the ear is able to hear, it must replace sensitivity with a simplified perception. In sensitivity, the person reacts to the external world. In the perception, the eternal that is absorbed into the person permeates the external world with the simple rhythms of infinity.

ad. 30. All in the sense of I II III.

ad. 3/2.

The masters are not a bulwark against evil, but the guides to the absorption of evil. We should not exclude evil, but absorb it and use it in the sphere of good. The lion's rage is only evil as long as it is used selfishly by the lion; if a ruler could appropriate the lion's rage and use it to build welfare institutions, it would be good. Therefore, evil is to be recognized as non-real. There is no evil. Evil is only a displaced good. Only with this realization is spiritual alchemy possible.

ad. 6.

That is precisely the progress made by Christianity, that the personality is taken along into eternity.

Therefore the Christian principle is correct: You will rise with your transfigured body, i.e. through Christian thinking the personality becomes eternal.

Pentagram and hexagram exercise

as a supplement to the letter to Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden dated November 15, 1908

Memorandum of the esoteric lessons in Berlin, November 29, 1907 and January 7, 1908

Berlin, November 29, 1907. Memory notes by Günther Wagner.

A current flows through the etheric body in the form of a pentagram: from the point of the I in the forehead to the two feet, from there to the antipolaric hands and from one hand to the other through the heart. When the body and limbs are bent, the currents also bend. The various planets are connected with the various parts of the currents as indicated. The planets are to be understood more as principles that actually always work on all globes, only on the individual in an outstanding way.

The principle of Saturn is the physical basis
of the sun: eternal growth, eternal progress
of the moon: holding back, retarding, solidification
of Mars: courage to introduce the aggressive into the life of the senses, the red blood
of Mercury: leading out of the life of the senses
of Jupiter: liberation of the ego
of Venus: rising in love.

The colors correspond to these planets and the principles:

Saturn - Green
Sun - Orange
Moon - Violet
Mars - Red
Mercury - Yellow
Jupiter - Blue
Venus - Indigo ¹

The hexagram corresponds to currents in the astral body, but this is not to be understood as a line figure; the double triangle is only an average. (While the currents in the etheric body form the lines of a pentagram, the hexagram represents the currents in the astral body.

Pentagram and Hexagram Exercise

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On the Pentagram and Hexagram Exercise of the Esoteric Hour, Berlin, November 29, 1907.

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the astral body in a completely different way, not linearly, but two-dimensionally physically.) If the figure is turned on its vertical axis, the real figure emerges, although the horizontal cross-section does not quite correspond to a circle (oval). The horizontal lines thus actually form a surface; the upper one at arm level, the other at knee level.

The downward-pointing triangle has to do with the bodies: the astral body (Moon), etheric body (Sun), physical body (Saturn principle). The other triangle with the higher parts: sentient soul (Mars), intellectual soul (Mercury) and consciousness soul, which is only at the beginning of its development (Jupiter). Accordingly, the colors.

One should meditate on these figures and the meaning of their details in order to become aware of one's own inner life and its relationship to the cosmos. One will then awaken strange feelings within oneself.

Memo notes from the same session by Camilla Wandrey

The principle of Saturn (Oriphiel. Green. Lead): the physical basis, but spiritual.

The principle of the Sun (Michael. Orange. Gold): eternal growth, eternal progress. Individual life.

The principle of the moon (Gabriel. Violet. Silver): Holding. Retarding. Freezing. Appearance in Maya.

The principle of Mars (Samael. Mars. Red. Iron): Courage. The aggressive. Introduction to the sensual life through the red blood. Consciousness.

The principle of Mercury (Raphael. Yellow. Mercury): leading out of the life of the senses. Divine intelligence. Holy Spirit.

The principle of Jupiter (Zachariel. Blue. Tin): Liberation of the ego. Power. Father. The principle of Venus (Anael. Indigo. Copper): The rising in pure love. Love. Son. Transition from God to man. Mediator.

The pentagram

The hexagram

The hexagram corresponds to currents in the astral body. But it is only an average. If the figure were rotated around its vertical axis, the real figure would emerge, the horizontal average of which corresponds approximately to a circle. The upper surface can be experienced at arm level, the lower at knee level.

The downward-pointing triangle is connected to the physical body, Saturn. Moon: astral body. Sun: etheric body. The upward-pointing triangle with the higher parts: Mars (the soul of feeling). Mercury (the soul of mind). Jupiter (the soul of consciousness).

Through intense meditation on these figures, man gains knowledge of himself and his connection with the macrocosm. The pentagram represents the currents of the etheric body and their connection with the planets.

The physical body is connected with all the forces in the universe. It is the center of the irradiation of all the forces of the zodiac.

The etheric body is initially connected to the center of the earth.

The astral body is connected to the center of the moon.

The I is not only a point that has gradually united through the growth of the forehead and the retraction of the etheric body at the upper root of the nose, but there is a second point in front of it. The connecting line to this point changes, the direction of this line points to the center of the sun. The more a person develops, the closer the two points come together. The developing human being must place himself in this second point, that is, outward, and he must learn to look at his body as at anything physical besides him (Tat tvam asi [= That art Thou! Famous formula of the Veda]); this frees the human being from egoism. A vivid reliving of the mystery of Golgotha and the fact that the superfluous, egoistic blood of humanity has flowed there is a help in this.

Meditation should be like sacrificial smoke rising to the gods.

Berlin, January 7, 1908 (continued from November 29, 1907) Memory notes by unknown hand

If we want to profitably observe such an occult figure (the hexagram) as in the previous lesson, it is not enough to stare at it constantly. Rather, we must picture it over and over again in our minds in quiet hours and meditate on the meaning of the individual colors. Only in this way will we gain the advantage and benefit that such occult signs can have when viewed in the right way. For the whole wisdom of the world is given to us in a few such occult figures. And by delving into them, the spiritual connections of the higher worlds will gradually become clear to us.

Let us take two colors from the hexagram that are opposite each other: red and green. These two colors are deliberately placed opposite each other. What might the red color mean, what the green? We find the green color in the plant world outside, covering the earth with its blanket. And what is the relationship between man and plants? We know that man on Saturn led an existence that in some respects corresponds to our present-day minerals. Not that man was ever a mineral! Our present-day mineral kingdom is in fact the youngest of the natural kingdoms. We also know that man on the Sun led a plant-like existence. Today a greenish sap flows in plants. A similar sap flowed through the human being of that time. If, by some magic, astral components were to be pressed into the plant today, it would turn red! The fact that man on the moon acquired the astral body turned the inner sap red – the red blood came from it.

Consider that the plant is chaste, it has no desires, passions: anger, fear, dread. By becoming in some respects worse than the plant, man received something that elevated him above the plant: the waking day consciousness. The plant world of today is asleep. A plant is the reverse of a human being. A plant's roots point towards the center of the earth, where its I is located. The same force that works downwards in the plant works upwards in the human being. The fact that the human being received blood expresses the reception of the I. The expression of the I is the red blood.

If you look at the inner surface of a green leaf with spiritual eyes, it will appear red to you. This red power is, so to speak, spiritual. If you see a red surface against a white background, look at it sharply and then look at the white surface, a green spot will appear. And the same is true the other way round. These colors are called complementary colors. Thus, the inner spiritual connection is also expressed in such a physical phenomenon.

Or let us take two other colors: blue and orange, which are opposite each other. You should know that orange has two aspects: orange and gold.

Where do we find the color blue in nature? When we look up into the boundless distance of the vaulted sky! And where do we find the color gold? In the paintings of the old masters, we see golden backgrounds. These old masters still painted according to a tradition that possessed some knowledge of the phenomena and beings of higher worlds. When we look out into the celestial space with spiritual eyes, it appears in golden depths. That is why we see angelic heads on a golden background in the old paintings, because when you look out (mentally) into the celestial space, it appears to you in golden colors.

Thus we must search for and gather together what is scattered throughout the cosmos, for the building of our soul. Just think how all the foodstuffs needed for the building of our body are scattered over the earth. Imagine that vividly! It is exactly the same in the spiritual realm. From the chaos the soul must also gather together what is suitable for its building up.

When a soul begins to meditate in this way, an organ in the physical body begins to develop: the mucous gland. In the normal average person, the mucous gland is an organ, hardly the size of a cherry stone, located behind the pineal gland. But it contains disproportionately great powers. It regulates the correct build-up of the body in relation to its size. The so-called giants who are shown around have a disease of the mucous gland. In some way, the forces set in motion by them must be allowed to run their course. When the Meditand begins to work on himself, forces are awakened in the mucous gland. From the mucous gland, the organic structure from the chaos of sensations to the astral body takes place. When the mucous gland flows around the pineal gland with golden threads, then the time has come when the transformation of the astral body into the spirit self, into manas, has progressed so far that the etheric body can now be transformed into the buddhi.

Those who meditate on such occult signs in this way will work purposefully on building up their higher bodies. Sometimes, in the briefest of moments, the soul can grow tremendously. One could say that it is not time that is needed for development, but rather profound inner calm.

From the same hour, memory notes by Günther Wagner:

Meditating on the hexagram. Pointed end up red, pointed end down green. Contrasts: complementary colors. Green is the color of plants. Red is the color of human blood.

Human beings have only been able to achieve progress by also accepting desires and passions. That part of the earth's astral body that belongs to the plant world is red. Thus, physically green, spiritually red: the plant. In plants, the red astral forces point downwards towards the center of the earth, while in humans, the same forces have reversed and point upwards.

Green and red: opposites. Likewise blue and orange, or rather in one of the two aspects: golden [addition in a different hand: violet and golden]. These too are complementary colors. In the physical world the sky is blue, in the devachan world it is golden, as can still be seen in old, early medieval paintings. Such are the other opposites.

By contemplating such symbols given to us by the masters, we transform and shape our astral body, especially the aura, around (to the manas). All sorts of scattered outer experiences may point out to us these color relations, and so our spiritual body is formed, shaped, and developed by the assimilation of all sorts of scattered experiences, as our physical body is by the assimilation of all sorts of physical food gathered from the face of the whole earth.

And as our astral body thus orders and organizes itself, it acts specifically on the mucous gland or pituitary body (hypophysis), a small organ, hardly the size of a cherry stone, which is initially involved in the growth of the body. Through such an organization of the astral body, the mucous gland begins to become more and more luminous; it emits rays and gradually envelops the pineal gland lying before it, stimulating it; as a result, the effects on the astral body expand and begin to impress and reorganize it.

• 1. In other contexts, different correspondences are sometimes given, e.g. for eurythmy or on the color sketch “Man in Connection with the Planets”. This should not be understood as a contradiction, but as an expression of different aspects. See, for example, the lecture in Vienna, June 1, 1918.