The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Man stands in the world as thinking, contemplative being on the one hand, and as a doer, a being of action, on the other; with his feelings he lives within both these spheres. With his feeling he responds, on the one side, to what is presented to his observation; on the other side, feeling enters into his actions, his deeds. We need only consider how a man may be satisfied or dissatisfied with the success or lack of success of our deeds, how in truth all action is accompanied by impulses of feeling, and we shall see that feeling links the two poles of our being: the pole of thinking and the pole of deed, of action. Only through the fact that we are thinking beings are we Man in the truest sense. Consider too, how everything that gives us the consciousness of our essential manhood is connected with the fact that we can inwardly picture the world around us; we live in this world and can contemplate it. To imagine that we cannot contemplate the world would entail forfeiting our essential manhood. As doers, as men of action, we have our place in social life and fundamentally speaking, everything we accomplish between birth and death has a certain significance in this social life.

In so far as we are contemplative beings, thought operates in us; in so far as we are doers, that is to say, social beings, will operates in us. It is not the case in human nature, nor is it ever so, that things can simply be thought of intellectually side by side with one another; the truth is that whatever is an active factor in life can be characterized from one aspect or another; the forces of the world interpenetrate, flow into each other. Mentally, we can picture ourselves as beings of thought, also as beings of will. But even when we are entirely engrossed in contemplation, when the outer world is completely stilled, the will is continually active. And again, when we are performing deeds, thought is active in us. It is inconceivable that anything should proceed from us in the way of actions or deeds—which may also take effect in the realm of social life—without our identifying ourselves in thought with what thus takes place. In everything that is of the nature of will, the element of thought is contained; and in everything that is of the nature of thought, will is present. It is essential to be quite clear about what is involved here if we seriously want to build the bridge between the moral-spiritual world-order and natural-physical world-order.

Imagine that you are living for a time purely in reflection as usually understood, that you are engaging in no kind of outward activity at all, but are wholly engrossed in thought. You must realize, however, that in this life of thought, will is also active; will is then at work in your inner being, raying out its forces into the realm of thought. When we picture the thinking human being in this way, when we realize that the will is radiating all the time into his thoughts, something will certainly strike us concerning life and its realities. If we review all the thoughts we have formulated, we shall find in every case that they are linked with something in our environment, something that we ourselves have experienced. Between birth and death we have, in a certain respect, no thoughts other than those brought to us by life. If our life has been rich in experiences we have a rich thought-content; if our life experiences have been meagre, we have a meagre thought-content. The thought-content represents our inner destiny—to a certain extent. But within this life of thought there is something that is inherently our own; what is inherently our own is how we connect thoughts with one another and dissociate them again, how we elaborate them inwardly, how we arrive at judgments and draw conclusions, how we orientate ourselves in the life of thought—all this is inherently our own. The will in our life of thought is our own.

If we study this life of thought in careful self-examination we shall certainly realize that thoughts, as far as their actual content is concerned, come to us from outside, but that it is we ourselves who elaborate these thoughts.—Fundamentally speaking, therefore, in respect of our world of thought we are entirely dependent upon the experiences brought to us by our birth, by our destiny. But through the will, which rays out from the depths of the soul, we carry into what thus comes to us from the outer world, something that is inherently our own. For the fulfillment of what self-knowledge demands of us it is highly important to keep separate in our minds how, on the one side, the thought content comes to us from the surrounding world and how, on the other, the force of the will, coming from within our being, rays into the world of thought.

How, in reality, do we become inwardly more and more spiritual?—Not by taking in as many thoughts as possible from the surrounding world, for these thoughts merely reproduce in pictures this outer world, which is a physical, material world. Constantly to be running in pursuit of sensations does not make us more spiritual. We become more spiritual through the inner, will-permeated work we carry out in our thoughts. This is why meditation, too, consists in not indulging in haphazard thoughts but in holding certain easily envisaged thoughts in the very centre of our consciousness, drawing them there with a strong effort of will. And the greater the strength and intensity of this inner radiation of will into the sphere of thinking, the more spiritual we become. When we take in thoughts from the outer material world—and between birth and death we can take in only such thoughts—we become, as you can easily realize, unfree; for we are given over to the concatenations of things and events in the external world; as far as the actual content of the thoughts is concerned, we are obliged to think as the external world prescribes; only when we elaborate the thoughts do we become free in the real sense.

Now it is possible to attain complete freedom of our inner life if we increasingly efface and exclude the actual thought content, in so far as this comes from outside, and kindle into greater activity the element of will which streams through our thoughts when we form judgments, draw conclusions and the like. Thereby, however, our thinking becomes what I have called in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: purethinking. We think, but in our thinking there is nothing but will. I have laid particular emphasis on this in the new edition of the book (1918). What is thus within us lies in the sphere of thinking. But pure thinking may equally be called pure will. Thus from the realm of thinking we reach the realm of will, when we become inwardly free; our thinking attains such maturity that it is entirely irradiated by will; it no longer takes anything in from outside, but its very life is of the nature of will. By progressively strengthening the impulse of will in our thinking we prepare ourselves for what I have called in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, "Moral Imagination." Moral Imagination rises to the Moral Intuitions which then pervade and illuminate our will that has now become thought, or our thinking that has now become will. In this way we raise ourselves above the sway of the ‘necessity’ prevailing in the material world, permeate ourselves with the force that is inherently our own, and prepare for Moral Intuition. And everything that can stream into man from the spiritual world has its foundation, primarily, in these Moral Intuitions. Therefore freedom dawns when we enable the will to become an ever mightier and mightier force in our thinking.

Now let us consider the human being from the opposite pole, that of the will. When does the will present itself with particular clarity through what we do?—When we sneeze, let us say, we are also doing something, but we cannot, surely, ascribe to ourselves any definite impulse of will when we sneeze! When we speak, we are doing something in which will is undoubtedly contained. But think how, in speaking, deliberate intent and absence of intent, volition and absence of volition, intermingle. You have to learn to speak, and in such a way that you are no longer obliged to formulate each single word by dint of an effort of will; an element of instinct enters into speech. In ordinary life at least, it is so, and it is emphatically so in the case of those who do not strive for spirituality. Garrulous people, who are always opening their mouths in order to say something or other in which very little thought is contained, give others an opportunity of noticing—they themselves, of course, do not notice—how much there is in speech that is instinctive and involuntary. But the more we go out beyond our organic life and pass over to activity that is liberated, as it were, from organic processes, the more do we carry thoughts into our actions and deeds. Sneezing is still entirely a matter of organic life; speaking is largely connected with organic life; walking really very little; what we do with the hands, also very little. And so we come by degrees to actions which are more and more emancipated from our organic life. We accompany such actions with our thoughts, although we do not know how the will streams into these thoughts. If we are not somnambulists and do not go about in this condition, our actions will always be accompanied by our thoughts. We carry our thoughts into our actions, and the more our actions evolve towards perfection, the more are our thoughts being carried into them.

Our inner life is constantly deepened when we send will—our own inherent force—into our thinking, when we permeate our thinking with will. We bring will into thinking and thereby attain freedom. As we gradually perfect our actions we finally succeed in sending thoughts into these actions; we irradiate our actions—which proceed from our will—with thoughts. On the one side (inwards) we live a life of thought; we permeate this with the will and thus find freedom. On the other side (outwards) our actions stream forth from our will, and we permeate them with our thoughts. (Diagram IX)

But by what means do our actions evolve to greater perfection? To use an invariably controversial expression—How do we achieve greater perfection in our actions? We achieve this by developing in ourselves the force which can only be designated by the words: devotion to the outer world.—The more our devotion to the outer world grows and intensifies, the more does this outer world stir us to action. But it is just through unfolding devotion to the outer world that we succeed in permeating our actions with thoughts. What, in reality, is devotion to the outer world? Devotion to the outer world, which pervades our actions with thoughts, is nothing else than love.

Just as we attain freedom by irradiating the life of thought with will, so do we attain love by permeating the life of will with thoughts. We unfold love in our actions by letting thoughts radiate into the realm of the will; we develop freedom in our thinking by letting what is of the nature of will radiate into our thoughts. And because, as man, we are a unified whole, when we reach the point where we find freedom in the life of thought and love in the life of will, there will be freedom in our actions and love in our thinking. Each irradiates the other: action filled with thought is wrought in love; thinking that is permeated with will gives rise to actions and deeds that are truly free.

Thus you see how in the human being the two great ideals, freedom and love, grow together. Freedom and love are also that which man, standing in the world, can bring to realization in himself in such a way that, through him, the one unites with the other for the good of the world.

We must now ask: How is the ideal, the highest ideal, to be attained in the will-permeated life of thought?—Now if the life of thought were something that represented material processes, the will could never penetrate fully into the realm of the thoughts and increasingly take root there. The will would at most be able to ray into these material processes as an organizing force. Will can take real effect only if the life of thought is something that has no outer, physical reality. What, then, must it be?

You will be able to envisage what it must be if you take a picture as a starting-point. If you have here a mirror and here an object, the object is reflected in the mirror; if you then go behind the mirror, you find nothing. In other words, you have a picture—nothing more. Our thoughts are pictures in this same sense. (Diagram X) How is this to be explained?—In a previous lecture I said that the life of thought as such is in truth not a reality of the immediate moment. The life of thought rays in from our existence before birth, or rather, before conception. The life of thought has its reality between death and a new birth. And just as here the object stands before the mirror and what it presents is a picture—only that and nothing more—so what we unfold as the life of thought is lived through in the real sense between death and a new birth, and merely rays into our life since birth. As thinking beings, we have within us a mirror-reality only. Because this is so, the other reality which, as you know, rays up from the metabolic process, can permeate the mirror-pictures of the life of thought. If, as is very rarely the case today, we make sincere endeavors to develop unbiased thinking, it will be clear to us that the life of thought consists of mirror-pictures if we turn to thinking in its purest form—in mathematics. Mathematical thinking streams up entirely from our inner being, but it has a mirror-existence only. Through mathematics the make-up of external objects can, it is true, be analyzed and determined; but the mathematical thoughts in themselves are only thoughts, they exist merely as pictures. They have not been acquired from any outer reality.

Abstract thinkers such as Kant also employ an abstract expression. They say: mathematical concepts are a priori.—A priori, apriority, means "from what is before." But why are mathematical concepts a priori? Because they stream in from the existence preceding birth, or rather, preceding conception. It is this that constitutes their ‘apriority.’ And the reason why they appear real to our consciousness is because they are irradiated by the will. This is what makes them real. Just think how abstract modern thinking has become when it uses abstract words for something which, in its reality, is not understood! Men such as Kant had a dim inkling that we bring mathematics with us from our existence before birth, and therefore they called the findings of mathematics ‘a priori.’ But the term ‘a priori’ really tells us nothing, for it points to no reality, it points to something merely formal.

In regard to the life of thought, which with its mirror-existence must be irradiated by the will in order to become reality, ancient traditions speak of Semblance. (Diagram XI, Schein.)

Let us now consider the other pole of man's nature, where the thoughts stream down towards the sphere of will, where deeds are performed in love. Here our consciousness is, so to speak, held at bay, it rebounds from reality. We cannot look into that realm of darkness—a realm of darkness for our consciousness—where the will unfolds whenever we raise an arm or turn the head, unless we take super-sensible conceptions to our aid. We move an arm; but the complicated process in operation there remains just as hidden from ordinary consciousness as what takes place in deep sleep, in dreamless sleep. We perceive our arm; we perceive how our hand grasps some object. This is because we permeate the action with thoughts. But the thoughts themselves that are in our consciousness are still only semblance. We live in what is real, but it does not ray into our ordinary consciousness. Ancient traditions spoke here of Power (Gewalt), because the reality in which we are living is indeed permeated by thought, but thought has nevertheless rebounded from it in a certain sense, during the life between birth and death. (Diagram XI.)

Between these two poles lies the balancing factor that unites the two—unites the will that rays towards the head with the thoughts which, as they flow into deeds wrought with love, are, so to say, felt with the heart. This means of union is the life of feeling, which is able to direct itself towards the will as well as towards the thoughts. In our ordinary consciousness we live in an element by means of which we grasp, on the one side, what comes to expression in our will-permeated thought with its predisposition to freedom, while on the other side, we try to ensure that what passes over into our deeds is filled more and more with thoughts. And what forms the bridge connecting both has since ancient times been called Wisdom. (Diagram XI.)

In his fairy-tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Goethe has given indications of these ancient traditions in the figures of the Golden King, the Silver King, and the Brazen King. We have already shown from other points of view how these three elements must come to life again, but in an entirely different form—these three elements to which ancient instinctive knowledge pointed and which can come to life again only if man acquires the knowledge yielded by Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

But what is it that is actually taking place as man unfolds his life of thought?—Reality is becoming semblance! It is very important to be clear about this. We carry about with us our head, which with its hard skull and tendency to ossification, presents, even outwardly, a picture of what is dead, in contrast to the rest of the living organism. Between birth and death we bear in our head that which, from an earlier time when it was reality, comes into us as semblance, and from the rest of our organism we pervade this semblance with the element issuing from our metabolic processes, we permeate it with the real element of the will. There we have within us a seed, a germinating entity which, first and foremost, is part of our manhood, but also means something in the cosmos. Think of it—a man is born in a particular year; before then he was in the spiritual world. When he passes out of the spiritual world, thought which there is reality, becomes semblance, and he leads over into this semblance the forces of his will which come from an entirely different direction, rising up from parts of his organism other than the head. That is how the past, dying away into semblance, is kindled again to become reality of the future.

Let us understand this rightly. What happens when man rises to pure thinking, to thinking that is irradiated by will?—On the foundation of the past that has dissolved into semblance, through fructification by the will which rises up from his egohood, there unfolds within him a new reality leading into the future. He is the bearer of the seed into the future. The thoughts of the past, as realities, are as it were the mother-soil; into this mother-soil is laid that which comes from the individual egohood, and the seed is sent on into the future for future life.

On the other side, man evolves by permeating his deeds and actions, his will-nature, with thoughts; deeds are performed in love. Such deeds detach themselves from him. Our deeds do not remain confined to ourselves. They become world-happenings; and if they are permeated by love, then love goes with them. As far as the cosmos is concerned, an egotistical action is different from an action permeated by love. When, out of semblance, through fructification by the will, we unfold that which proceeds from our inmost being, then what streams forth into the world from our head encounters our thought-permeated deeds. Just as when a plant unfolds it contains in its blossom the seed to which the light of the sun, the air outside, and so on, must come, to which something must be brought from the cosmos in order that it may grow, so what is unfolded through freedom must find an element in which to grow through the love that lives in our deeds.

Thus does man stand within the great process of world-evolution, and what takes place inside the boundary of his skin and flows out beyond his skin in the form of deeds, has significance not only for him but for the world, the universe. He has his place in the arena of cosmic happenings, world-happenings. In that what was reality in earlier times becomes semblance in man, reality is ever and again dissolved, and in that his semblance is quickened again by the will, new reality arises. Here we have—as if spiritually we could put our very finger upon it—what has also been spoken of from other points of view.—There is no eternal conservation of matter! Matter is transformed into semblance and semblance is transformed to reality by the will. The law of the conservation of matter and energy affirmed by physics is a delusion, because account is taken of the natural world only. The truth is that matter is continually passing away in that it is transformed into semblance; and a new creation takes place in that through Man, who stands before us as the supreme achievement of the cosmos, semblance is again transformed into Being (Sein.)

We can also see this if we look at the other pole—only there it is not so easy to perceive. The processes which finally lead to freedom can certainly be grasped by unbiased thinking. But to see rightly in the case of this other pole needs a certain degree of spiritual-scientific development. For here, to begin with, ordinary consciousness rebounds when confronted by what ancient traditions called Power. What is living itself out as Power, as Force, is indeed permeated by thoughts; but the ordinary consciousness does not perceive that just as more and more will, a greater and greater faculty of judgment, comes into the world of thought, so, when we bring thoughts into the will-nature, when we overcome the element of Power more and more completely, we also pervade what is merely Power with the light of thought. At the one pole of man's being we see the overcoming of matter; at the other pole, the new birth of matter.

As I have indicated briefly in my book, Riddles of the Soul, man is a threefold being: as nerve-and-sense man he is the bearer of the life of thought, of perception; as rhythmic being (breathing, circulating blood), he is the bearer of the life of feeling; as metabolic being, he is the bearer of the life of will. But how, then, does the metabolic process operate in man when will is ever more and more unfolded in love? It operates in that, as man performs such deeds, matter is continually overcome.—And what is it that unfolds in man when, as a free being, he finds his way into pure thinking, which is, however, really of the nature of will?—Matter is born!—We behold the coming-into-being of matter! We bear in ourselves that which brings matter to birth: our head; and we bear in ourselves that which destroys matter, where we can see how matter is destroyed: our limb-and-metabolic organism.

This is the way in which to study the whole man. We see how what consciousness conceives of in abstractions is an actual factor in the process of World-Becoming; and we see how that which is contained in this process of World-Becoming and to which the ordinary consciousness clings so firmly that it can do no other than conceive it to be reality—we see how this is dissolved away to nullity. It is reality for the ordinary consciousness, and when it obviously does not tally with outer realities, then recourse has to be taken to the atoms, which are considered to be firmly fixed realities. And because man cannot free himself in his thoughts from these firmly fixed realities, one lets them mingle with each other, now in this way, now in that. At one time they mingle to form hydrogen, at another, oxygen; they are merely differently grouped. This is simply because people are incapable of any other belief than that what has once been firmly fixed in thought must also be as firmly fixed in reality.

It is nothing else than feebleness of thought into which one lapses when he accepts the existence of fixed, ever-enduring atoms. What reveals itself to us through thinking that is in accordance with reality is that matter is continually dissolved away to nullity and continually rebuilt out of nullity. It is only because whenever matter dies away, new matter comes into being, that people speak of the conservation of matter. They fall into the same error into which they would fall, let us say, if a number of documents were carried into a house, copied there, but the originals burned and the copies brought out again, and then they were to believe that what was carried in had been carried out—that it is the same thing. The reality is that the old documents have been burned and new ones written. It is the same with what comes into being in the world, and it is important for our knowledge to advance to this point. For in that realm of man's being, where matter dies away into semblance and new matter arises, there lies the possibility of freedom, and there lies the possibility of love. And freedom and love belong together, as I have already indicated in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

Those who on the basis of some particular conception of the world speak of the imperishability of matter, annul freedom on the one side and the full development of love on the other. For only through the fact that in man the past dies away, becomes semblance, and the future is a new creation in the condition of a seed, does there arise in us the feeling of love—devotion to something to which we are not coerced by the past—and freedom—action that is not predetermined. Freedom and love are, in reality, comprehensible only to a spiritual-scientific conception of the world, not to any other. Those who are conversant with the picture of the world that has appeared in the course of the last few centuries will be able to assess the difficulties that will have to be overcome before the habits of thought prevailing in modern humanity can be induced to give way to this unbiased, spiritual-scientific thinking. For in the picture of the world existing in natural science there are really no points from which we can go forward to a true understanding of freedom and love.

How the natural-scientific picture of the world on the one side, and on the other, the ancient, traditional picture of the world, are related to a truly progressive, spiritual-scientific development of humanity—of this we will speak on some other occasion.

It is my intention now to bring several viewpoints to you regarding the relationship between human beings and the cosmic world on the one side and the spiritual development of human beings on the other. Our considerations will be supplementary to what we have already allowed to pass over our souls many times. Today I want to add a kind of introduction to our considerations of the next hours, which could appear to some as remotely relevant, the necessity of which will become clear in the next hour. I would like to remind you that in central European-German thought development, during the first half of the 19th century, besides events to which we have just referred, an additional, remarkable event took place. I have recently referred to the contrast which arises when considering Schiller's aesthetic letters on the one hand and Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily on the other. Today I wish to point to a similar contrast, which appeared in the development of thought in the first half of the 19th century with Hegel on the one side and Schopenhauer on the other. With Goethe and Schiller we are dealing with two personalities who, at a certain time in their life, being surrounded by the constant contrasts of the central European thought development - a development of thought striving for equilibrium—managed to bring about an equilibrium in their deep friendship, whereas previously they had been repelled by one another.

Two other personality also represented polar opposites but with them it is impossible to say some kind of equilibrium was established: Hegel on the one side and Schopenhauer on the other. You only have to consider what I put forward in my “Riddles of Philosophy” to see the deep opposition between Schopenhauer and Hegel. It appears relevant that Schopenhauer really spared no swearwords in what he held as the truth in his characterization of his opponent Hegel. In many of Schopenhauer's work there is the wildest scolding of Hegel, Hegelianism and everything related to it. Hegel had less reason to scold Schopenhauer, because, before Hegel died, Schopenhauer would actually have remained without influence, not being established amongst remarkable philosophers. The contrast between these two personalities can be characterised by indicating how Hegel regarded the foundation of the world and the world development and everything pertaining to it, as consisting of real thought elements. Hegel firmly believed that thoughts were the foundation of everything. Hegel's philosophy fell into three parts: Firstly in logic, not subjective human logic but the system of thought that must form the foundation of the world. Secondly Hegel had his philosophy of nature, but nature for him was nothing other than an idea, not even an idea with a difference, but the idea which implies it exists out-of-itself. So also nature is an idea, but the idea in a different form, in a form which is sense-perceptible to people, ideas by contrast. The idea which reverts back to itself, this was to him the human being's spirit which had developed out of the simplest human-spiritual activities into the world's history and up to the beginning of the human subjective spirit in religion, art and science. When one wants to study Hegel's philosophy thus, you need to allow yourself entry into the development of world thoughts, just like Hegel let these world thoughts explain themselves.

Schopenhauer is the opposite. For Hegel thoughts, world thoughts were creative, actual reality in things; for Schopenhauer every thought was merely subjective, and as a subjective image only something unreal. For him the only real thing was will. Just as Hegel followed with human thought into everything mineral, animal or vegetative, for Schopenhauer it was all about “the will of nature”. So one can say Hegel is the thought philosopher and Schopenhauer the will philosopher.

In this way these two personalities stood opposite one another. So, what do we actually have here as thoughts on the one hand and will on the other? We would best introduce this polar opposite in the following lecture by allowing it to be brought before our souls when we observe human beings. We will for a moment divert our gaze from Hegelian philosophy and look at the reality of humanity. We already know: in people we predominantly have an intellectual, meaning a thought element, followed by a will element. The thought element is preferably assigned to the human head, the will element preferably to the human limb organism. With this we have already referred to the intellectual element as actually being that which permeated our bodies from a prenatal existence out of the spiritual worlds, flowing from us between death and a new birth, as well as out of the prenatal life and its remnants of an earlier earth life pouring into the essence of this earth life. The will element is however, I would like to say, the youth in contrast to the thought element in humanity; it goes through the portal of death and then enters the world between death and a new birth, gets converted, metamorphosed and builds the intellectual element in the next life. Essentially, we have in our soul organisation our intellectual as predominant, thought elements reaching back to antiquity; our will element reaching into the future. With this we have considered the polar opposites between thought and will.

Naturally we should never, in considering reality, schematize these things. It would be naturally schematized if one could say: every thought element directs us to earlier time and all will elements direct us towards our time past. It is not so, yet it is striking, I say, that which in people as the thought element reaches to earlier times while the will element goes into later times. Added to this human organisation it is striking that the backward aim in the thought element is a type of will element and included into the organisation becomes the will element, which rings right out through death and into the future, as a thought element. You may, when you enter with understanding into reality, never schematize, never merely list one idea beneath another, because you must be clear that in reality everything can be observed which at sometime or other appears striking, the remaining elements of reality existing within, and that above all, what may be in the background can at another point become a striking reality and then something else falls into the background.

When philosophers come to consider this or that from their particular point of view, you have your one-sided philosophers. Now that which I've characterized for you as thought elements in people, are not only in people bound to their head organization, but thoughts really spread out in the cosmos. The entire cosmos is threaded through with cosmic thoughts. Because Hegel was the stronger spirit, who, I want to say, felt the results of many past earthly lives, he directed his attention in particular to cosmic thoughts.

Schopenhauer experienced less events of his previous earth lives, thus directed his attention more towards cosmic will. Just as will and thought live in people, so will and thought live in the cosmos. What do thoughts mean for the cosmos as observed by Hegel in particular, and what does will mean for the cosmos in the way Schopenhauer observed it? Hegel didn't consider the kind of thoughts which took form within human beings. The entire world was for him basically only a revelation of thoughts. In fact, he had cosmic thought in mind. Observing the extraordinary formation of Hegel's spirit, one can say: this spirit shaping of Hegel refers to the West. Only Hegel manages to lift everything to an element of thought—everything pertaining to the West, for example materialistic developmental directives and materialistic thoughts in Western physics. One finds with Darwin a developmental teaching just as one finds a developmental teaching with Hegel. With Darwin it is a materialistic developmental philosophy, in which everything happens as if only mighty nature substances are involved and act creatively; with Hegel we see how everything which is in development is permeated through with thought, like thoughts in particular configurations, in their concrete expression—they are the actual development.

Henceforth we can say: in the West the world is approached from the standpoint of thought, but materialistic thought. Hegel idealized thought and as a result arrived at cosmic thought.

Hegel argued in his philosophy about thought but actually meant cosmic thought. Hegel said when we look into the outside world, be it observing a star in its orbit, an animal, plant or mineral, we actually see thoughts everywhere, only this kind of thought in the outer world is actually in a different form as in the thought-form being observed. One can't say in fact that Hegel was attempting to maintain these teachings of world thoughts as esoteric. They remained esoteric because Hegel's work is seldom read, but it wasn't his intention to keep the teaching of cosmic content of the world as esoteric. However, it is extraordinarily interesting that when it comes to western secret societies - this teaching relates in a certain way to the deepest esoteric teachings - that the world is actually created out of thoughts. One could say what Hegel so naively observed in the world, what western secret societies considered their observations, is what the Anglo-American peoples held as content of their secret teachings, while they had no intention of popularizing their secret teachings. As grotesquely as one might take it, one can say Hegel's philosophy is to a certain extent the basic nerve of the teachings of the West.

You see, here we have an important problem. You could really, when you become knowledgeable about all the esoteric teachings of Anglo-American secret societies, content-wise hardly find anything but Hegelian philosophy. However there is a difference which doesn't lie in the content, it lies in the handling. It is connected to this, that Hegel saw the things in a manner of a revelation, and the western secret societies keep a watchful eye over what Hegel presents to the world so it would not become generally known and remain as an esoteric secret teaching.

What actually lies at the basis of this? This is a very important question. If one has some kind of content which has originated out of the spirit and one considers it at a secret possession, then one gives it power, because when this content becomes popularised, it no longer has this power. Now I ask you to really for once focus completely: Any content containing knowledge becomes a force of power when held secret. To this is added that those who want to retain certain teachings as secrets, become quite unpleasant when these things are popularized. It is almost a universal law that whatever popularizes, gives insight. Power is given to that which is kept secret.

I have spoken to you over the last few years about various powers which emerged from the West. That these emerged out of the West did not come from knowledge which had been unknown in Central Europe, but this wisdom was treated in a different manner. Just imagine what kind of tragedy it predicted! It could even have seriously warded off events in world history from the power of western secret societies, if single individuals could have been studied in Central Europe, if this wasn't merely done in Central Europe but that it was thoroughly stated: In the (eighteen) eighties—I have mentioned this—Eduard von Hartmann openly printed that only two philosophers in the Central European faculties had been read by Hegel. Hegel was excessively discussed and lectures were held about him, but only two philosophy professors could be proved to have been shaped by Hegel. For those who have any kind of receptivity for such things could experience the following: when they read some volume of Hegel's out of some library they could only really state that the volume was not very well-thumbed! Sometimes one page to the next—I know this from experience—was most difficult to pry apart because the volume was still so new. And “Editions” Hegel has only experienced recently.

Now I haven't established this as the basis for the facts I've particularly stipulated in the foregoing, but I want to show how this idealism living within Hegel nonetheless points towards the West, because on the one hand it appears again in the clumsy materialistic thoughts of Darwinism, of Spencerism and so on, and on the other in the esotericism of secret societies.

Now let's consider Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is, I might say, the admirer of the will. That he has cosmic will in mind appears everywhere in Schopenhauer's work, in particular in the delightful treatise “Regarding the Will in Nature” where everything which exists and lives in nature is taken from a basis of will, expressed in the elemental power of nature.

Towards what does the entire soul constitution of Schopenhauer point if Hegel's soul state points to the West? You can see this in Schopenhauer himself because you soon find, in your studies, his deep leaning towards the Orient. It rose from his mood, it's not clear how. This preference of Schopenhauer's for Nirvana and for all that is oriental, this inclination towards everything Indian is irrational like his entire will philosophy; it arose to some extent from his subjective inclination. However in this lies a certain necessity. What Schopenhauer presented as a philosophy is a philosophy of will. This philosophy, as it belongs in Central Europe, he presented dialectically in thoughts; he rationalized about will but he actually spoke about will through the medium of thought. While he spoke thus about will, actually cosmic will materialized, entered deeply into his soul and rose in his consciousness as a preference for the East. He enthused about everything Indian. Just as we saw how Hegel pointed more to the West, so we see how Schopenhauer pointed towards the East. In the East however we don't find anything which is an element of will and what Schopenhauer really felt as the actual element of the East, was materialised and pressed into thinking and thus intellectualized. The entire form of the representation of cosmic will, which lies at the basis of eastern soul-life, does not appear as originating from the intellect, it is partly a poetic, partly a section derived directly from the observation of the relevant representation. Schopenhauer took what the oriental image form wanted to convey and intellectualized it in the Central European way; however that which he refers to, the cosmic will, this was after all the element at which he was pointing; from this he had formulated his soul orientation. This element is what lived in the world view of the Orient. When the oriental world view is permeated with love in particular, this element of love becomes nothing other than some aspect of cosmic will, and is not just raised from the intellect. So we may say: here the will is spiritualized. Like thoughts are materialised in the West, so in the East will becomes spiritualized.

In Central European elements we see within idealized cosmic thought, within materialized cosmic will, treated through the medium of thought, these two worlds creating an interplay; with reference to Hegelianism we have in western secret societies something similar to a deep relationship between Hegelian cosmic thought systems in the West, and if we penetrate this, in the subjectivity of Schopenhauer's penetration with the Orient, it brings to expression Schopenhauer's relationship with eastern esotericism.

It is quite extraordinary when you allow Schopenhauer's philosophy to work on you, the thought-element appears somewhat flat; Schopenhauer's philosophy is really not deep, but it has at the same time something intoxicating, something wilful which throbs within. Schopenhauer becomes most attractive and charming when shallow thoughts are penetrated with his will element - then traces of the warmth of will are found to some extent in his sentences. As a result he basically has become a shallow salon philosopher of his age. As the thought provoking age, which the first half of the nineteenth century was, passed and people suffered from thought deprivation, the time came for Schopenhauer to become the salon philosopher. Not much effort was needed to think, while the thrill of thought throbbing with will was allowed its influence particularly when something like “Parerga and Paralipomena” (“Appendices and Omissions”—philosophical reflections published 1851) came through, where these thrilling thoughts could work their craftiness.

Thus we have two opposing poles in the Hegel-Schopenhauer antitheses in the central regions of our civilization's development; the one a particular shaping from the West, and the other a particular formation from the East. In Central Europe they stood up to the time they balanced out, imperiously side by side, being incomparable to the alliance between Schiller and Goethe which was harmonious, as opposed to Hegel and Schopenhauer in their disharmonious relationship. Schopenhauer then became outside lecturer at the Berlin University at the same time as Hegel represented his own philosophy. Schopenhauer could hardly find an audience, his auditorium remained empty. Probably, when Hegel was idly asked about the Schopenhauer type philosophy - which he could manage because he was at the time an impressive, respected philosopher—then he merely shrugged his shoulders. When anybody spoke from the basis of this will element and stressed it in particular like (Friedrich) Schleiermacher, then compared with Hegel it still indicated something, Hegel would become uncomfortable. Therefore when Schleiermacher wanted to explain Christianity from this thoughtless element and said: Christianity cannot be understood through the thought element when one includes worldwide thoughts, to some extent the divine thoughts, grasped differently than through feeling oneself dependant on God, through which one develops a feeling of dependency on the universe - to this Hegel replied: Then the dog is the best Christian, because it has the best knowledge of the feeling of dependency! Obviously Hegel gave Schopenhauer a piece of his mind as he gave Schleiermacher, when he took the trouble. Hegel had to forever connect and convince everyone who didn't change towards understanding the reality of thought. For Schopenhauer these thoughts were nothing more than foam rising from the breaking of waves of cosmic will. Schopenhauer, who certainly from the characterised position had more occasion, insulted Hegel like a washerwoman in his work.

Within life's riddles, contributing to the centre of civilization, we thus see the contradictions which do not come to a harmonious closure. Both however, Schopenhauer as much as Hegel, felt a lack of what really constituted the understanding of mankind. Hegel lived in cosmic thought, and this was exactly that which made him so unpopular—because in daily life people are not going to soar up to cosmic thoughts. They have a particular feeling which they eagerly enter for comfort—a feeling which says: why should we split our heads with cosmic thoughts? That is done for us by the gods, or God. Being an Evangelist one says: a God does this, why should we especially bother with it? In particular that which appeared in the publications on thought was extraordinarily impersonal. History, for instance, which we discover through Hegel, has something thoroughly impersonal. Thus we have actually from the beginning of earth evolution right to the end of earth development, self enfolding thoughts.

Should you want to schematically draw this Hegelian historical philosophy, here thoughts would rise up (a drawing is made), rise up, distort each other mutually and thus go through the historic development and in this web of thoughts people are spun in and are swept away by the thoughts. Thus actually for Hegel the historical development of these coalescing, corrupt thoughts harness people as automatons, out of these webs of world historic thought this thought system had to develop. For Schopenhauer of course thoughts were nothing more than froth. He directed his gaze to cosmic will, or in other words, to this sea of cosmic will. The human being is actually only a reservoir where merely a little of this cosmic will is collected. The Schopenhauer philosophy contains nothing of this developmental reasoning or progressive thinking, but is the unclear, irrational, the unreasonable element of will which flows from it. Within the human beings rises up, reflects in him as if it was reason but which he or she actually continually develops as foolishness. For Hegel the world is the revelation of reason. For Schopenhauer—what does the world mean to him? It is a remarkable thing, if one wants to answer the question: What is the world to Schopenhauer? It struck me particularly clearly once in a sentence of Eduard von Harman, where Schopenhauer was considered and discussed because Eduard von Hartman had Hegel on the one side and Schopenhauer on the other, Schopenhauer's side being predominant. I want to with this article, which was a purely philosophic article of Eduard von Harman, indicate, that for him the solution to the world riddle has to be expressed as follows: “The world is God's big foolishness.”—I had written this because I believe it's the truth. The editor of the newspaper, which appeared in Austria, answered me that this had to be deleted because the entire edition would be confiscated if this was printed in an Austrian newspaper; he simply couldn't write that the world was God's stupidity. Now, I didn't insist further but wrote to the editor of these “German Words”: Delete the “God's foolishness” but just remember another case: When I edited the German Weekly (Deutsche Wochenschrift) you didn't write about the world as God's foolishness, but that the Austrian school system is a stupidity of the teaching administration and I allowed it. - For sure, that weekly newspaper was confiscated at the time. I wanted to remind the man at least, that something similar had happened to him as was happening to me, only me with the loving God, and with him the Austrian the minister of education, Baron von Gautsch.

When one looks back over the most important world riddles, it is clear how Hegel and Schopenhauer represent two opposing poles, and they appear actually in their greatness, in their admirable, dignified greatness. I know for certain that some people find it extraordinary that a Hegel admirer like me can likewise produce such a draft, because some people can't imagine that when something in contrast to them is great, humour can also be retained about it, because people imagine one must unconditionally show a long face when one confesses to experiencing something great in a well known person.

Thus two opposite poles present themselves, but in this case not like with Schiller and Goethe which came to a harmonious equilibrium. We could find some solution to this disharmony if we consider that for Hegel the human being was evolving within a web spun with concepts of world history and for Schopenhauer the human being actually was nothing other than a little lamb, a small container where a portion of world-will had been poured in, basically only an extract of the cosmic world will. Both failed to perceive the actual individuality and personality of human beings. They also could not perceive what the actual being was which they sensed in the cosmos.

Hegel looked into the cosmos and saw this web of concepts within history, Schopenhauer looked into the cosmos and didn't see this web of concepts—that was only a mirror image for him—but he saw it as a sea of ruling will, to some extent tapped into these vessels in which human beings swam in this irrational, unreasonable sea of will (drawing is made). Human beings were only being fooled by what reflected in their unreasonable will as actual reason, imagination and thought. Yet these two elements are present in the cosmos. What Hegel saw was already in the cosmos. Cosmic thoughts exist. Hegel and the West viewed the cosmos and perceived world thoughts. Schopenhauer and the East looked at the cosmos and saw world will. Both are within. A useful cosmic world view could c0me into existence if the paradox could have been entered, resulting in Schopenhauer's scolding bringing him so far as to him leaving his skin behind, and despite Hegel's soul remaining in Hegel, that Schopenhauer entered Hegel so that Schopenhauer was actually inside Hegel. Then he would have seen the world-thoughts and world-will fusing! This is the deed which is within the world: world thoughts and world will. They exist in very different forms.

What is revealed to us through actual spiritual scientific research in relation to this cosmology? It tells us: when we look into the world and allow world thoughts to work on us, what do we see? We see, by letting world thoughts work on us, thoughts of the dim and distant past, everything which worked in the past up to the present moment. Thus we see, through our world-thought perception, that which is dying away when we look into the world. From this comes the hardened, the dead part of natural laws and we can practically only use mathematics to deal with what is dead when we consider nature's laws. However within that which speaks to our senses, which delights us in the light, what we hear in sound, what warms us and everything touching our senses, works out of world will. It is this, which rises out of the dead element of world thoughts and what basically gestures outwards to the future. Something chaotic, undifferentiated exists in the world thoughts, yet lives presently in world moments as a germ which progresses into the future. Submitting ourselves to the world's thought elements, we experience that which originated from the most horrible past, spilling into the present. However, in the human head is something different. In the human head thoughts are separated from outer world thoughts, and are bound into the human personality in an individual will element, which in this way may first only be looked at as that small reservoir, the little lamb of poured cosmic will-element. However, what one has intellectually, point backwards. We have basically developed this germ from a former life on earth. Will was involved there. Now it has become thought, is bound to our head organization, resurrected like a living copy of the cosmos in our head organization. We connect this to will, we rejuvenate it in our will. By rejuvenating it in will, we send it over to our next life on earth, our next earth incarnation.

This world image must actually be drawn differently. We must draw it in such a way that the outer cosmic aspect of olden times is particularly rich in thought elements, but becomes ever more thinned out as we approach the present, allowing the thoughts, as they are in the cosmos, to gradually die out. The thought element we must consequently draw quite fine.

The further we go back, so the thoughts outweigh the Akashic images; the more we go forward, the ever denser the will element becomes. We should, if we want to look through this development, look at a light filled thought element in the most horrible time past, and on the most unreasonable element of will of the future.

But it doesn't remain like this, because we drag in thoughts which have been retained in our head. These thoughts are sent into the future. While cosmic thoughts die out more and more, germinate on human thoughts, from their point of origin they push through into the future as the cosmic element of will.

Thus we are the guardians of cosmic thoughts, thus the human being draws cosmic thought out of himself or herself into the world outside. Along the detour through the human being cosmic thoughts are propagated from ancient times into the future. The human being belongs to that which is the cosmos. However he doesn't belong like the materialist will think, that the human being is something which has developed out of the cosmos and is a piece of the cosmos, but that the human being also belongs to the creative element of the cosmos. He or she carries thoughts out of the past, into the future.

You see, here the human being enters into the tangible. If you really want to understand the human being you enter into what Schopenhauer and Hegel approached so one-sidedly. From this you realise that philosophic elements, being combined on a higher level, need to be threefold, just as the human being is to be understood in the cosmos.

Tomorrow we will consider the relationship between the human being and the cosmos in a concrete manner. I wanted to give you an introduction today, as promised; the necessity of it will be recognised in further lectures.

Should anyone wish to understand the age in which he is actually living, he must do so out of wider cosmic connections. The pettiness of this age lies in man refusing, out of these wider connections, to enlighten himself about the impulses, the forces, working into the present time. And to understand what is working anywhere nowadays it will become increasingly necessary to hark back to the conditions through which mankind's development passed at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha—this Mystery of Golgotha—we have presented it from the most various points of view, and have seen how deeply and with what significance it has taken hold of the whole course of evolution, the whole evolution of man. We know how differently men perceived and experienced before and after the Mystery of Golgotha. Naturally one condition did not pass over immediately into the other. But when we make a retrospective survey, we discover what has been stated from so many points of view. Today, so that a certain basis may be made for our further studies, there is one thing to which I should particularly like to point.

If we consider the mood, the condition of man's soul, before the Mystery of Golgotha, we can say in general that in the culture of mankind, the mankind from whom the present cultural life has arisen, a certain capacity existed in the soul to look into the secrets of the cosmic, spiritual world. Before the Mystery of Golgotha it went without saying that men did not look up to the starry heavens in the way they do today. We know how men now look at the stars and say: other planets are connected with our earth and with it revolve around the sun, and there are innumerable other fixed stars also having their planets. And if men notice what kind of thoughts they are harboring in these reflections they have to own that they are thinking of a great world machinery. Present day man has very little idea that anything beyond the forces of this great world machinery is ruling and working; but for man before the Mystery of Golgotha this was more or less self-evident. It was particularly natural for him to regard the Sun, for example, quite differently from the way in which the modern physicist regards it—roughly speaking, simply as a kind of glowing ball in universal space. Before the Mystery of Golgotha men knew that the Sun thus spoken of in physics is only one element of the whole Sun, at the basis of which lies what is of the soul and what is of the spirit. And the Spiritual lying at the Sun's basis the wise men of Greece called the universal good of the world, the goodness of the world, the unity, the good seething through the universe. That was to him the spirit of the Sun. To this Greek sage it would have seemed crass superstition to think as the modern physicist thinks—that there outside in universal space a mere glowing ball is floating. To him this glowing, floating ball was the manifestation of unified goodness, the active centre of the world. With this central good that is of a spiritual nature there was united what was of a soul nature called by the Greeks Helios. Then, third, there came the physical expression of the Good and of Helios, the physical Sun. Thus, where the Sun is, the man of that day saw what was threefold. And with this three foldness then seen in the Sun, the men who were thinking at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, prepared as the were by their knowledge of this Mystery of Golgotha, and also of the ancient mysteries—united the threefold Sun-mystery of the sages with the Christ Mystery, with the Mystery of Golgotha itself. For those who knew, veneration of the Sun was one with veneration of the Christ; for them the Sun-wisdom was united with the Christ-wisdom.

To feel all this in accordance with nature, to experience it as a matter of course, it was necessary to have the constitution of soul existing at that time. But this constitution of soul vanished. It was already vanishing by the eight pre-Christian century, beginning in the year 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha—747 the actual date of the Foundation of Rome. At the time of the Foundation of Rome the old possibility was vanishing of seeing the spiritual outside in the Cosmos, and as Rome enters history, what we may call the ‘prosaic element' comes into human evolution. The Greeks, for instance, preserved in the whole of their world-conception the power of seeing the other two Suns behind the Sun—the soul and the spirit of the Sun—and only because the Mystery of Golgotha did not descend purely into the wisdom and perception of Greece, but into the wisdom and perception of Rome, has it happened that knowledge of the connection of Christ with the spiritual Sun has been cut off. Thus the Christian gathers and Teachers of the Church have had particularly to concern themselves with shrouding the Mystery of the Sun, making mankind forget this mystery, not allowing it to become known. Throughout the further course of the development of Christianity (as it is called) a veil was destined to be spread over the deep, the significant and all-embracing wisdom of Christ's connection with Sun-Mystery.¹

Should we wish to define the task of the Church, the Church that owed its origin to Christianity having come down into all that was Roman, we should have to say that this Christian Church, colored as it was by Rome, had the particular task of shrouding as far as possible the Christ-Mystery, as far as possible keeping people in ignorance of it. The organisation the Church experienced through Romanism was especially suited to keep men as far as possible from knowledge of the Christ-Mystery. By this, the Church has become an institution for holding back the mystery of Christ, an institution for admitting the world as little as it could to the Christ-Mystery. This is something that today must become ever clearer to mankind, for the age must begin that is in the position to work with other concepts than those of Rome. Roman concepts are precisely those that have the hard outlines, the hard form of the corpse. The concepts that are developed to grasp, for example, the truth about man, as I drew him on the blackboard for you a week ago, in what I might call his normal aura, the concepts necessary for man's true reality to be grasped again and through that the reality of the world, these concepts must be flexible, they should not have sharp outlines. For reality is not rigid, it is something that is becoming. And should we want to understand reality with our concepts and ideas, we have with these to pursue the flow, the becoming of reality.

When this fluidity of the concept is ignored there arises what to the undoing of mankind can be observed today in countless places. Take a phenomenon that forces itself on the attention of any observer of the world who is wide awake and in earnest. It is as follows: you will allow it to be true that we have among us in the world men of learning in the most various spheres. These learned ones are the champions, the keepers of knowledge. Although modern man is not a believer in authority, in spite of having rid the world of such superstition, he takes on trust everything upheld in the various spheres by the learned. And these among themselves, always believe their brethren concerning a matter outside their own sphere. Men today do not willingly see into these connections for should they do so they would be shocked at the disconnected and chaotic nature of our culture. We have, however, experienced the following, for example. Let us suppose some learned man—and we can always pick one out of the various spheres has for his particular sphere, let us say, Egyptology—I will take something exotic, so let it be Egyptology. So, we will agree that his profession is to instruct other men, unable to avail themselves of the sources of such knowledge, concerning the particular qualities of the Egyptian people. He gives these men instruction also concerning the relations of the Egyptians to other peoples of antiquity. It is the part of these men to take all this on trust for the instructor is an authority on Egyptology. Now something most unfortunate is a feature of our age—a great number of these learned men who represent such special subjects have not remained silent. It would have been better had they kept silence but this they have not done; for instance, they have today applied their way of thinking, their thought structure, under the impression of these events to their own people and its relation to other peoples. Here we have a good opportunity of seeing what nonsense is talked. Now from this we have to draw our conclusions, and conclusions founded on reality in thought. We may say that quite a number who are authorities in the domain of Egyptology, and are thought to hold incontestable concepts in regard to the particular qualities of the Egyptian people and their relations to other peoples, now, suddenly at the present time, are talking utter nonsense about their own people and the relation of these to other folk: Do you really believe that they are talking, have talked, more intelligently about the Egyptians and their relations to other peoples? When Balfour speaks today about the relation of his people to the rest of the world, or when Houston Stewart Chamberlain is continually uttering rubbish about the connections between men, one can gather without much reflection that they are simply talking nonsense—pure nonsense: And now Chamberlain has written The Foundation of Culture in the Nineteenth Century, and a number of other books for which there has not been the opportunity to verify the history. In these he will naturally have talked exactly the same nonsense.

Already now the time of testing has come, the time of trial, when we have at last to see that it is not a matter simply of delivering judgment that only has limited value by being right in a certain sphere—that is true of almost every judgment, the most false is right in some particular—but what matters is to seek for that flexible, fluid judgment that presses on to the reality, and only through spiritual science can that be found.

How remarkable it is what conflict today comes to the surface between sound thinking and the thinking of the times. Recently we have heard of a religious discussion that has taken place in what was St. Petersburg. A religious discussion right in the midst of Bolshevism: About a religion and its development there spoke Socialists, Priests of the Greek Church, and it goes without saying, all kinds of bourgeois folk who naturally were not the most intelligent of the speakers. And from the discussion that was carried on there—which was of course tinged with modern colour, but throughout had recourse to the most rigid and ancient concepts—from this discussion, as it appears, it was possible to learn much. For instance, one Priest brought forward something of the greatest interest. He felt himself obliged, it seems, to speak as he was accustomed to address his flock. Now formerly he had naturally told his flock that everything in the world—including Czarism, of course and indeed everything—was from God. And what can this good Priest do now? Naturally he still has somehow to follow the same theme that he used in speaking to his flock—no longer now his flock—for he has no wish to take on new concepts. So he says: The world is from God, all comes from God. As we now have Soviet rule that is from God too. Bolshevism is certainly sent man by God. Since everything is from God, Bolshevism as well must come from Him.—What else was he to say? I am quite sure that the deduction could be pressed further; why should it not be made beautifully plausible that the devil is from God? Naturally the devil is appointed by God—according to the same deduction. This is how things are—by getting deeper light on what is necessity, it is natural that one should meet on all sides with the strongest opposition. But no one can go to sleep who has undertaken to play a part in the remodeling of man's powers of conception.

Now concepts worked out by materialism—concepts that pass current as being incontestable belong to all that must be most thoroughly overcome. Nothing meets us with more persistence from the so-called authority of science than what is known as the law of the conservation of energy and of matter, of force and of substance. That has grown very near to man's heart. It is true, is it not, that the world conception that has become entirely mechanistic and physical, wants to be deaf in face of the actual presence of the spirit. As it refuses to recognise the spirit it cannot ascribe to it either duration or eternity so it ascribes eternity to its little idol, the atom, or anyhow to some matter or force. But the truth is, my dear friends, that of all that is extended around you as what you can look upon with your senses, what surrounds you in the world as matter and forces—of all this in accordance with normal laws there will be nothing left by the time of the Venus age. We know that after the Earth evolution there follows that of Jupiter, after the Jupiter evolution that of Venus, and then that of Vulcan. As man finds himself again in different incarnations, so the earth finds itself as Jupiter, from the Jupiter evolution as Venus and then again as Vulcan. What today from any experiment in physics is found as matter and the structure of matter, will not be there after the Venus existence. There is no conservation of matter and force, the matter and force of which physicists speak, beyond the existence of Venus. The whole law of the conservation of matter and of force is pure superstition, and is something by which all concepts in physics are governed. Something is concealed, however, when the world is spoken of as consisting of indestructible matter that is continuously being submitted to different grouping, different arrangement. And what is thus concealed is the answer to the question: what then remains of all that is so widely spread out before our senses when this is no longer there—when the Venus age has come or when it is already half way through its term? What then remains? Where is there anything? What is still there?

Now, my dear friends, direct your gaze outside into the vast circumference that you can see. Look at everything, look at the whole of the kingdoms of mineral, plant, animal and man; look at all you can see in the way of stars, light-phenomena; see what happens in air and water; look wherever you like, include everything that can possibly be included in your external sense perceptions—then ask yourselves: Where is anything in which there will remain a vestige of our present existence? And the answer is: In no animal, in no plant, in no mineral, not in any air, or any water—nowhere but in man: Of what you see today man himself alone contains anything that in accordance with law continues beyond the Venus existence—Nowhere else can you seek anything permanent, anything that can be referred to by the concept of eternity—nowhere save in man. That is to say, if we are looking for the seeds of the real future of the world where have we to seek? We must seek them in man. We cannot look for them in any other creation or any other kingdom. But before the Mystery of Golgotha, men of old naturally in spirit—saw through the kingdoms the cosmic All. If we take the representative, the Sun, they saw a glowing ball, but through the glowing ball they saw Helios and the Good. Nevertheless this glowing sphere of the Sun will not exist beyond the Venus age; it will then disappear. And everything through which man, in ancient times, saw in a veiled way, the constituents of some spiritual existence will also disappear. And of all that is here now there will remain for the future only what is planted seedwise into man.

What then has actually happened? Before the Mystery of Golgotha men used to look out into the wide Cosmos; they saw stars upon stars, they saw Sun and Moon, air and water, the various kingdoms. But they did not see them in the same way as modern man, for they saw them all with the divine spiritual being behind. And behind all that, they saw the Christ who had not then descended to earth. In those olden times Christ was seen to be united with the cosmos; he was seen outside the earth. There is nothing in which Christ was thus seen that will last beyond the Venus age. Everything through which the spiritual and also Christ in the cosmos were revealed to man before the Mystery of Golgotha will last only to the Venus existence. Before the Mystery of Golgotha men lived with the heavens, but these heavens are so physical that they too will vanish with the Venus existence. What will last longer than that has its seed in man alone. The Christ had to come to man out of the cosmos if He wished to tread with man the path to eternity. Because all that I have described to you is so, Christ descended from the cosmos in order henceforth to be with what as seed in man, will last on into eternity.

That is the great cosmic event that must be understood. Before the Mystery of Golgotha men could worship the God, the Christ, in the cosmos. Since the Mystery of Golgotha the time has come when the seed for the eternal future of the world is increasingly only in man; and the men who were to come after had to have a Christ who is not outside in the cosmos which will disintegrate, but be united with man, united with the human organisation, with the human kingdom. It is literally true that what are there for the senses in the whole wide circumference as stars, as heavenly bodies, will pass away.² But the word will remain, the Logos, who has appeared in the Christ and is united with the eternal essential being of man. And this is literally true, as things in the real occult, religious primal record are literal truth.

That is also the reason why a double name has to be given—I have already given indications of this—the double name Christ-Jesus. It must not be forgotten that on the one hand we must recognise the Christ who belongs to the cosmos beyond the earth, the spiritual being who before the mystery of Golgotha was not bound up with man on earth. Then He descended and united Himself with human nature—with the Jesus. In the twofold name Christ-Jesus there lies what it is necessary to understand. In the Christ we have to see the cosmic, the spiritual; in Jesus we must see that through which this cosmic, spiritual being entered historic evolution, binding Himself to mankind in such a way that He can now live on with the seed of man into eternity.

And as the centuries flowed on it was the task of the Church to conceal, to misrepresent, this mystery of Christ which was connected with the ancient mysteries. Just try really to study what during all those early centuries was passed through by man, try to see clearly how it was with the individual man who really wanted to seek Christ-Jesus, who really wanted to find the path to Him—it was a long path of martyrdom. Christ-Jesus had always to be sought in defiance of convention—as even today he must be sought against the stream of those conventions that still persist.

One cannot, however, come near the Christ-Mystery if one does not connect it with the mystery of nature. For you see what we have placed before our souls, namely, the necessity for the descent of Christ from cosmic heights to the seed in man, the mystery of Christ becoming Jesus, can be understood only when the study of nature, the study of the world, cosmology, the knowledge of man's becoming, and of the divine in man—when all these form a unity. In a certain sphere it is sought to prevent natural science becoming at the same time spiritual science, or spiritual science becoming natural science. That is what most theologians try to do, and, in another domain, what most modern physicists try to do—to erect a barrier between physical science, on the one side, spiritual science on the other. On no account must anything be said about Christ-Jesus that is connected at the same time with the evolution of the earth; nor anything be said about earth-evolution, that is, about its details, that is connected with the great spiritual mystery.

Touching on these things, one actually touches on what is of most importance, of supreme importance in the life of modern man. For confused chatter about all kinds of spiritual things, that has indeed been brought to one's attention by our friends, brought to one's attention ad nauseam—this sort of confused chatter profits no one. I am referring to how constantly people come to one saying: Just listen: So and so has been speaking quite theosophically—or anthroposophically he has said such and such a thing: This facile looking around for support in the present confusion is not what we are meant to be striving for: we should stand on the firm ground that spiritual science will surely give us. The time is too grave for further compromise, particularly in this sphere. For to build the bridge between the knowledge of nature, that is, the knowledge of anything perceived, and the knowledge to which belong sin and redemption, in short, the religious truths—to set up a bridge between these two domains can be done only when man finds the courage really to penetrate to the spiritual. And what is more, should he not have this same courage he will never be able to discover reason where the truths of life are concerned. For penetrating spiritual reality we need above all the possibility of being able to in some measure look back to the threefold Sun-Mystery of olden days, to look back, however, in the new way suitable for present-day mankind. Precisely in the same way as the sun is a trinity so also is man. But it is important that we should really study this threefold man, and this study is of the utmost importance at the present time. Today I should like to give you diagrammatically something of a preparatory nature that can guide you to the path that must really be sought for the understanding of threefold man. Tomorrow and the day after we shall bring this important subject to a close.

Just imagine the following. What I am now sketching is only meant as a diagram. (see diagram 1). Imagine you had a figure that was merely a picture, an image, having no meaning in itself, in fact an image. I shall draw it like this—in a simple circle (see blue in diagram 1) a circular surface, that is, a form that is the image of something else, but through being an image has entirely consumed that something, of which it is the image. It sounds strange when I say the following but just consider it. In our cupola, in the small cupola, four ladies are working. Let us suppose these four ladies—two on either side—paint their own portraits, and that this has a particular sequel. Imagine these four ladies painting their own pictures in the small cupola, portraying themselves there, imagine that this self-portraiture has a quite definite sequel—the ladies disappear, pass over into their image and cease to exist. Having completed their work they no longer are there. Through the coming into existence of their images they are no longer there. Behind what I have here sketched, picture to yourselves a figure like that, a figure that has originated through being made by something of which it is the image but this something being absorbed, sucked up by the existence of the image. Now what is thus absorbed is not alone in the world. Picture to yourselves that we have not finished with these four ladies. Very good; these four ladies have disappeared—they have painted their own portraits and disappeared but the pictures are still there. And they are not alone there in the cosmos, the cosmos is still there with its forces besides. The ladies have vanished and have been as it were sucked up by the pictures; but by the pictures being there substance is assembled again out of the cosmos and the ladies are built up anew, as children new, it is true, but new; they gradually grow up again, grow up near by. And so, by the side of this figure, its original image blossoms anew (see yellow in diagram). I must make a little addition to the drawing, put it by the side—this is the archetypal image. It is the archetype, the prototype, but there is a very loose connection between the image and its prototype, a very loose connection indeed. The one has almost nothing to do with the other. The image has definitely hardened and has almost lost all connection with its prototype.

And now imagine a second figure. I will sketch the second figure so that I make it also as an image (see violet in centre diagram), only the first is inside the second. Thus I boldly draw the second over the first. This is again an image of the same kind. Again an image resembling another that I will draw here also (see red in diagram); but these have now to be more closely connected. Therefore, as the matter stands, I cannot use the same comparison as I did earlier with the four ladies, but now when I want to make a comparison with regard to this picture and its image I must say: The four ladies are there: they are painting in the small cupola, and as they paint something actually—goes out from them, is sucked out. They are, however, only half sucked out, and finally they are—no I will say something else that will not call up an inartistic comparison—from one the left half of the body is sucked up while the right projects out of the picture; from the other the right side is sucked out, the left still projecting. Thus they are partly sucked out and partly still jut out. That is the second.

Now picture a third that again embraces the first and also the second (see green in diagram.) This, however, is to a great extent connected with its image, not yet separated from it. So that if I want to keep strictly to the comparison I have to say: The ladies are painting, but they are still there as ladies, and everything I have before me as a whole is the ladies and their images—that is there (see orange in diagram) and the greatest part is also present in the prototype.

So you have here drawn diagrammatically, first above, an image grown hard, crystallized, that has as little as possible to do with its prototype; the latter being by the side of it, newly arising. That is indeed your head, the most material and the hardest part of human nature. Its prototype has just nothing to do with it, arises afresh. And when you reach twenty-eight years of age, your head becomes so that out of itself nothing is forthcoming, nothing is to be developed. In the constitution of man the greatest materialist is the head.

A second figure is breast and breathing and everything belonging to these. I could almost use the second as a model. That is rather more connected, spirit and matter depending more upon each other; here it is more permeated with spirit. All that is lung and breathing process is for the earth already more spiritual.

And what remains, the limb system in connection with all that has to do with sex, there spiritual and physical are one, there they are still together. This belongs to the third diagram. And you have threefold man.

Today I have been able to draw this only diagrammatically on the board. This majestic and profound mystery, at the same time wonderful and fearful, is connected with the Mystery of the threefold Sun. This again is connected with all the truths that we need, as we need the bread of life, for everything that must be put in place of what is chaos, what has reached a blind alley, and has led to the present human catastrophe.

We shall speak of this further tomorrow.

• 1. Compare The Threefold Sun and the Risen Christ 24.IV.22
  
  Compare An Occult Psychology Lecture. I 17.VIII.18.
• 2. See Whitsuntide lecture Dornach 6-9-24 page 7.

Today I would like to speak about an aspect of Anthroposophy which closely concerns the being of man.

It is obvious that our contact with the world between waking and sleeping is, to begin with, through our senses. We perceive different aspects of the world around us through our various senses. By means of a certain inner soul activity we build up a picture of the world on the basis of our impressions. With this I merely want to indicate how anyone may observe the course and content of his waking state. However, our existence within the world embraces not only the waking state but also that of sleep. While we sleep we are, with our soul being and our `I', outside of our body in a realm which is unknown to ordinary consciousness.

What I have just said is applicable to present-day man in the way his soul life has developed since the 15th Century. I have often indicated the extraordinary importance of this particular period in mankind's evolution.

The question arises: What is our relationship, in our sleeping state, to that realm which is closed at least to our ordinary consciousness? There are difficulties in describing this relationship, especially at this point in mankind's evolution, unless we bear in mind that man has evolved and has gone through a great many different stages. At present, in our so-called civilized age we find, when we consider man's soul life, that he must exert himself considerably when forming concepts and mental pictures. We are often thoughtless when we regard earlier periods of human life which did not have such systems of education as we now find necessary. We are superficial in the way we look at that culture which arose, in ancient times, over in the East, although the human beings were not undergoing education from childhood as is the case nowadays.

In present-day Europe it is practically impossible to imagine how differently education was regarded in the ancient Orient. Yet things were created of an exalted nature, uplifting to heart and mind. One need only think of the Oriental writings such as the Vedas and all that is contained in the wisdom of the Orient. Today everything originating in mental activity is evaluated on the basis of the circumstances of a person's upbringing and education and on what, as a result, he further accomplishes in life. The necessity to be educated and well informed is, in the first place, because each individual today must be able to form his own thoughts about life. Without this ability he would be lost in the modern world. Man has actually not yet come very far in the art of formulating thoughts. It is essential, particularly in the system of education, that progress is made in furthering the art of formulating concepts about the external world.

The necessity for this began already in ancient Greece. In Greece, though strongly influenced by the Orient, arose the first cultural life within Europe. A system of education developed which included a rudimentary cultivation of mental activity. In the Orient no appeal was made to mental effort and this still influenced Greek cultural life; in general, no exertion was made to form one's own mental pictures of external objects. Socrates¹ is rightly admired within Western culture as one of the first to induce people to form their own concepts.

However, it would be quite wrong to conclude that man was obliged to produce his thoughts by his own effort within the cultural life of the West, while there was no life of thought in the Orient. Indeed, a powerful thought life existed and the further we go back in Oriental culture the stronger and the more powerful it was. We find already before the existence of the Vedas and the Vedanta philosophy a powerful thought life. As I have often pointed out, the Vedas, the Vedanta philosophy, do not represent the very first stages—which were not written down—of Oriental spiritual life. It had all fallen into decadence two or three millennia ago. People of the Orient today live in the afterglow of a once quite remarkable thought life, but a thought life utterly different from ours. We must exert ourselves—indeed, we have to sweat inwardly—forgive the crude expression, which is meant only figuratively—in order to produce our thoughts, whereas Oriental thought life was inspired. Thoughts and thought combinations arose in the ancient Oriental of their own accord. His picture of the world was inspired in him; he felt that what he thought was bestowed upon him. Inner exertion in combining thoughts was unknown to him. Between waking and sleeping he felt that thoughts were granted him. This colored his whole soul life; he felt grateful to the Gods that they bestowed thoughts upon him. The Oriental felt that when, as a human being, thoughts lived within him, it was because divine spiritual power streamed into him. It was a completely different attitude to thought life from ours.

In ancient times in the Orient the life of thoughts and feelings were not so separate as they now are for ordinary consciousness. Because man felt his thoughts bestowed upon him he also felt uplifted by them and a religious feeling united itself with every thought. He felt he must approach, with religious devotion, the powers that bestowed the readymade thoughts and thought combinations upon him.

If one seeks the external objective reason why Oriental man experienced the world in this way, one finds that it is because his sleep life was different from that of modern man. During sleep our soul and our `I' abandon the body mainly in the region of the head; the organs of metabolism and limbs are not separated from man to the same degree. These parts are still penetrated by man's `I' and soul being during sleep. I have often spoken of this but should like to place it before you once more schematically. Let this be man when awake (see drawing, left). The `I' and soul being, which I have drawn in red, penetrate the physical and etheric bodies. It would be wrong if I drew sleeping man in such a way that I had the physical and etheric bodies lying on the bed and simply drew the `I' and astral body (or soul) alongside. I must draw it so that—when the physical organs and limbs are here (drawing, right, white lines)—I draw the `I' and soul being outside man only in relation to the head. For, strictly speaking, it is only in regard to this region that man in sleep is separated from his physical and etheric bodies (red).

When we go back to those ancient times of which we spoke, the situation was different. During man's sleep the organs of his head—mainly the system of nerves and that part of the breathing system that penetrates the head—were the scene of activity for those divine spiritual beings who were concerned with the earth.

It is simply describing the reality to say that in the very earliest days of mankind's evolution on earth, divine spiritual beings withdrew from man when he woke up. When he slept they took up their abode in the human head, which was then bereft of man's `I' and soul being. During his sleep, divine spiritual beings carried out their activity in the head. When man woke in the morning—i.e., when he again sank into his head—he found the result of this activity. The divine spiritual beings regulated his nerve processes and worked right into the blood circulation. Through the ether body they exerted their influence even in the organic processes in the physical body. In general, the human beings were not clearly aware of this. Only those schooled in the Mysteries realized it; the great masses of humanity experienced it but without full awareness. Thus, when he woke man found the result of the Gods' activity in his head. And when he perceived the configuration of his thoughts, during waking life, it was because during sleep Gods had been active in his head. Thus, ancient Oriental man found every morning a heritage left by the Gods during his sleep, with the consequence that he felt his thoughts to be inspired within him. He felt the Gods' deeds as inspiration. In other words, the divine spiritual beings did not inspire man directly during his waking life; they did it during his sleep by pursuing their own activity in his head.

In those ancient times man's social behavior was induced by inspiration. Divine spiritual beings could completely regulate earthly affairs. Through their activity during man's sleep they brought about a mutual trust among human beings and also the obedience felt by the great masses towards their leaders, and so on. There was interaction throughout between the divine spiritual world and the earthly world in the ancient Orient. It was possible because man's whole organization was different.

I have often mentioned the fact that people nowadays imagine that throughout history man has always been as he is now. They assume that the physical nature of his body was the same and so, too, his soul being and the spirituality of his `I'. When a modern historian writes about ancient Egypt and deciphers its documents, then he thinks that though the people were not as clever as he is, they nevertheless thought, felt and acted more or less as he does. The view is that if one goes back far enough then man appears as a kind of higher ape, a state from which he then progresses to—well, to whatever the historian imagines. Nevertheless, it is assumed that from the time historical records began, man has been the same as he is now. This is assumed both in regard to his thinking, feeling and willing, and in regard to his etheric-physical organization.

However, that is not the case; man has altered quite considerably, also during historical times. Just consider the instance I mentioned earlier of how the physical sight of the ancient Greeks differed from ours. They did not see the color blue as we see it; they saw in fact only the reddish color shades. Modern man is mistaken when he thinks that the Greeks, because they were surrounded by beauty, particularly appreciated the beautiful blue of the sky. The Greek did not really differentiate between blue and green; he saw plainly the warm reddish-yellow colors. The sky to him therefore looked quite different from the way it is seen with normal consciousness today. The eyes have changed in the course of mankind's evolution, though in inner subtle ways. In fact, the whole sense system has become different in the course of historical times; and in the Orient, in those ancient times we are considering, the senses were so organized that man could not be deluded by them, nor did they prevent his devoting himself to the result of the divine deeds that remained in his organism when he woke from sleep.

Gradually, man's senses changed and caused him to become so intensely connected with the external world that the moment he woke his attention was drawn away from that which as a heritage was left in his organism. Because man was now differently organized the Gods no longer carried out their activity in his head during sleep. This activity no longer furthered mankind's evolution; had it continued it would not have benefited man. On the contrary, as man has now, through his senses, become so strongly absorbed in the external world he would no longer be able to pay attention to what the Gods bequeathed to him during the night. Their activity would no longer be felt as inspiration, and as a consequence of not being taken into man's consciousness it would flow back into the body, causing the organism to become old prematurely.

Man could live united with the world of the Gods because in ancient times, unlike today, his senses were not particularly orientated towards the external world. In his waking state he could absorb what he had experienced in sleep. This was a real living with the Gods, for though he could not behold them with his senses, man, in ancient times, was at least adapted to experience their deeds.

Later, in the millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, man's senses, particularly the eyes, began to develop—also in the Orient—the sensitivity to external impressions which they have now. The system of senses gradually developed to what it later became. At first man retained, in addition, in his system of nerves, what still enabled him to experience the divine spiritual deeds. His experience of them had formerly been in their purity—i.e., not mingled with sense perceptions. But now they were taken up by the senses. This had the strange result that for a large part of mankind the Gods, the spiritual beings, were drawn, as it were, into the physical organization. In consequence, what had formerly been a pure spiritual experience of divine spiritual beings, became a belief in ghosts.

The belief in ghosts is not so very ancient; what is ancient is the pure spiritual beholding of divine spiritual beings. Belief in ghosts arose first through the mingling of sense perception with beholding the divine. When the culture of the Oriental Mysteries penetrated into Europe, for example, into the magnificent spiritual life of Greece, into Greek art and philosophy, there followed in its wake, also, the seeing of ghosts by the general masses of people.

Thus, in the last millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, the former pure spiritual perception which the Oriental people possessed, had fallen into decline. It had become, particularly by large sections of the masses, a kind of perception of ghosts. This belief in ghosts wandered over into Europe; in the Orient it had been pure spiritual perception but had now become transformed into something physical. Thus, it can be said that the belief in ghosts is the last offshoot, the end product of a lofty, albeit dreamlike, spiritual seeing, which had once signified a cultural flowering in mankind's evolution.

I have described how in ancient times Oriental people felt that during sleep the head was the earthly scene of activity for divine spiritual beings. This was something of which people in general were dimly aware; those who had undergone initiation in the Mysteries were fully conscious of the fact. What I have described has a counterpart in the cultural life that has since developed.

The cultural life of more recent times is still in its early stages. The further West we go the stronger it comes to expression. To the ancient Oriental it would have made no sense had he been told that thoughts do not pulsate through the will. He knew from experience that what lived in his will, and even in his blood, was something bestowed upon him by the Gods. They formed his thoughts and during sleep they developed a powerful force in him which he experienced as inspiration.

Even today, when we look towards the East, we find, for example in the philosophy of Soloviev,² the last remnants of how things were experienced in the past. And, clearly, Soloviev would have found it incomprehensible if told that thought is not a force that impels and carries the will. However, it is the opinion today, especially in America, that thought is not the ruling factor in man. Physiology and biology as developed in America are clear demonstrations of this view. When one goes into the finer details one finds that science in America is, in this respect, something quite different from that of Europe, let alone the Orient. Modern man in the Western world is all too aware that he produces his thoughts himself. Thoughts, however, must relate to something, so it is maintained that far more important for man than the thoughts he absorbs, is the kind of family into which he is born, the way he is brought up, the political environment in which he grows up, the religious denomination he might join. All these things act on his emotions and determine his will. Thus, the will is supposed not to be directly influenced by thoughts, but is determined by such environmental factors as family, politics, country and so on. Thus, in America, in fact, Western man in general, is of the opinion that thought is not the ruler in man; at most its position is that of prime minister. The ruler is the human organism with its instincts and will impulses. Quoting Carlyle² it is said that thought may be a devoted minister, but its function is only that of an executive. And it must be emphasized that today's broad mass of humanity thinks likewise, shown by its eagerness to confirm that ancient traditions should be superseded. This is why there is today such an interest in the study of primitive man. It is thought that he lived through instincts and desires of which his thoughts were only a kind of mirror image.

Thus, today Western man looks into his inner being and asks why it is that he is driven by instincts and cravings. To him they appear devoid of spirit because he is not yet organized to perceive the spiritual in them. Yet every instinct or craving, whether good or bad, is spiritual. It may be a very evil instinct that comes to expression in one or another person, but even the most brutal urge is spiritual. The human race is always in the process of development; it must advance to such spirituality that when man looks into himself and perceives his instincts, urges and cravings he sees everywhere in them the spiritual. This will come about in the future.

It makes no difference in this respect whether a person has good or bad instincts; if they are bad it is because either Luciferic or Ahrimanic spirits hold sway in him. But they are spirits.

The assumption that the driving force in man is his instincts is, as far as being aware of the spiritual reality is concerned, similar to the earlier assumption in regard to ghosts. In ancient times spirituality was perceptible to man in the Orient. As it evolved further it became, as I have described, in the first millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, a belief in ghosts, a perception of ghosts (see drawing, blue).

From where we are at present within world evolution we look back to a time when a belief in ghosts emerged from a former spirituality; at the same time, we look towards the future and foresee a time when once again pure spiritual perception will emerge. But at present we also have a belief in ghosts, in inner ghosts. Those who believe in outer ghosts fail to see the spiritual reality in them and regard them as something that can be seen with physical eyes. Western man today, when he looks into himself, also fails to see the spiritual reality. The way he regards instincts, urges and cravings makes them into ghosts which today precede a future spirituality (red), while the ghosts of old followed an earlier spirituality (blue).

One could also say that from East to West an ancient pure spirituality developed which was followed, in the course of time, by a belief in ghosts, of which remnants are still with us. From West to East, approaching us, a later spirituality is developing which will become reality in a far distant future. The way modern man visualizes urges, instincts and cravings, in which the beginning of the new spirituality reveals itself, makes them as ghost-like as the former ghosts. This outlook makes the educated person regard with disdain the common belief in ghosts. At the same time, he attributes to man ghost-like instincts, urges and cravings. What he does not realize is that the belief in ghosts held by the masses, has as much scientific validity as his belief in desires, urges and instincts. His belief is in ghosts announcing a new beginning just as the masses have a belief in ghosts that marks an ending. Our European civilization has become so chaotic because it is the scene of collision between the old and the new ghosts.

In a West-East aphorism I have briefly characterized how, on the one hand, modern man has been for some time influenced by the ancient heritage of Oriental spirituality which has become a belief in ghosts, and how, on the other hand, he is influenced by the beginning of a spirituality that is now germinating which, through a materialistic interpretation, has turned man's instincts, urges and desires into ghosts. Those which are usually called ghosts are spirits which appear materialized through man's organization. The modern ghosts, pointing to the future, consisting of man's urges, instincts, desires and passions, have not yet become dematerialized; they have not yet become spiritual.

Man's inner soul life, particularly in Europe, takes its course within this peculiar chaotic condition created by the interaction of old and new ghosts. It is essential that man attain spiritual insight in order to arrive at a clear understanding of both. Not only man's view of the world is dependent upon such insight; but also, human life on earth as a whole is dependent upon it. That this must be so follows from the fact that it is not only man's spiritual or cultural life that is derived from his particular nature; but also, his life of rights or political life and his economic life.

But what is the origin of this particular development? I said that the earthly concern of the Gods, of the divine spiritual beings, was within the human head. We differentiate threefold man into the nerve-sense man, whose abode is mainly in the head, the rhythmic man, who lives in the middle, and the metabolic-limb man consisting of the limbs and their continuation inward in the organs of metabolism (see drawing). We differentiate this threefold man and we know that during the sleeping state of humanity in ancient times the Gods, when carrying out their earthly task, made the human head their scene of action. What is the situation at present?

The Gods also carry out their activity in present-day humanity during sleep, but no longer in the head; now it takes place in the metabolic-limb organism. The significance, the all-important point about this is, that for man, the metabolic-limb system remains unconscious also during his waking state. You will remember how I have often spoken about the fact that man is awake in his conceptual life, but completely unaware of what happens deep down in the organism to cause a muscle to carry out a movement. When present-day man has a mental picture of lifting his arm or moving his hand he has, in his ordinary consciousness, no awareness of how his mental life affects his organism. This remains unconscious even during the waking state. In other words, the scene of action of the Gods on earth nowadays is such that—unlike the situation in ancient times—man's natural evolution prevents him, to begin with, from taking possession of the divine heritage when he wakes.

Divine spiritual processes take place in man, today, between falling asleep and waking, but his present nature prevents him from having any impression while awake of the Gods' activity during sleep. In ancient times, man was so constituted that his very organization enabled him to feel his thoughts to be inspired. Present-day man produces his own thoughts, and divine spiritual deeds do not yet enter into this activity; mankind must first reach the appropriate stage of development. This is precisely the task—I would say cosmic task—which Spiritual Science must set itself. And a system of education must be part of such a plan, to enable human beings to recognize, out of their own effort and in full consciousness, the divine spiritual deeds within them. When this stage is reached man will also cease to see his urges and instincts as inner ghosts. The way they are imagined at present they are as much ghosts as the external ones. The external ghosts are not mere delusions; they are divine spiritual forces which appear materialized by being incorrectly seen through man's senses. The divine spiritual forces active in man today are seen incorrectly when they are visualized as urges and instincts.

The external ghosts are scorned today, but what is looked upon as a science deals with nothing but inner ghosts. Man must participate to bring about the transformation intended for him within cosmic evolution. Impulses in this direction ought to permeate every aspect of our culture. This would provide the possibility for man to overcome the forces of decline in their chaotic interaction with forces of ascent against which man still fights, and then strive towards the future stages in mankind's evolution by being inspired and motivated from the spirit. On this everything depends.

What I have tried to convey to you today can be seen as a kind of contemplation of the East in relation to the West, though from an esoteric point of view. Contemplation of East and West is at present altogether timely—I do not use the expression in a trivial sense. It is only through such considerations that mankind can arrive at the relevant level of consciousness.

Thus, in earlier times of earth evolution during sleep (the human being is “man” also during sleep when he does not have his physical body about him) man was in such a relationship to the Gods that he could behold, with eyes of soul and spirit, how they took up their abode in his head. In his waking state all that remained of this experience was a kind of afterglow in his life of feelings. Man became ever more distant from the divine spiritual world which he nevertheless perceived as in a dream when he looked back after having plunged into the body. That was the earlier situation; later, he only felt after waking that he was inspired.

Since then the Gods have drawn deeper down, as it were, into his physical body and man has now entered into such a connection with the Gods that they make his metabolic-limb system the scene of their activity within his earthly nature. However, as man does not completely forsake his earthly nature during sleep, he will, as a consequence, be able to experience again—coming from the divine world—impulses of will and also impulses for his life as a social being—i.e., for his relationship to other human beings—not, however, during sleep—he must experience these spiritual impulses as a complete human being while awake. It can only be attained through increasing conscious knowledge of the spiritual world. To attain this must become man's strongest aim.

This was what I wanted to convey to you as a contribution to an East-West contemplation.

• 1. Socrates, 469-399 B.C. Athenian philosopher.
• 2. Wladimir Soloviev, 1853-1900. Russian philosopher.
• 2. Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881. English philosopher and historian.

Today¹ I should like to discuss a theme which can perhaps lead to some points of view from which to assess present-day cultural and spiritual life in connection with what has gone before in human evolution. As I have often said, cultural life since the first third of the fifteenth century is entirely different from that of earlier times, and now we are faced with the necessity to return, but in full consciousness and with deep thought, to an understanding of the spiritual part of our life in the cosmos. The spiritual part of our life in the cosmos was understood in ancient times by an instinctive clairvoyance, and this was the case most of all in the most ancient ages of earthly civilization. Then the capacity to push through to the spirit receded more and more, until a time came when mankind needed a new impetus, whereupon the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

Today I should like to mention that, before the Mystery of Golgotha, people who were concerned with spiritual life looked to those institutions known in general human cultural life as the Mysteries. In those most ancient days of human evolution it was unthinkable that spiritual vision and spiritual knowledge could have any other source than the Mysteries. When we try to observe the consciousness of those who turned to the Mysteries in those ancient days, if knowledge was what they desired, we arrive at the following picture: All external knowledge not stemming from the Mysteries, all intellectual knowledge gained by human beings by themselves, did not come into being until the later part of the Greek era. Only then did people want to discover certain truths out of themselves, without the help of the Mysteries. That is why the course of scientific development is reckoned, by those who understand these things, to have started in the time of Thales.² I have discussed this in my book Riddles of Philosophy.³ Before that time knowledge was sought with the help of the Mysteries. When we examine the consciousness on which this was founded, we discover that those who conducted the Mysteries, and also their pupils, saw something most important in what they called ‘the prince of this world’—they meant the earth—as opposed to the princes—that is, the spiritual beings—of other worlds.

In today's language, ‘the prince of this world’, as he lived in the consciousness of ancient times, would be called the being of Ahriman. The being of Ahriman would more or less be equivalent to this prince of earthly life. The spiritual revelations which can be derived from ‘the prince of this world’ are none other than those of intellectual knowledge. The leaders of the Mysteries would certainly have considered all that lived in the knowledge that grew up in Greece outside the Mysteries to have been inspired by ‘the prince of this world’. In contrast, they saw it as the task of the Mysteries to lead human beings towards a spiritual vision which tends away from ‘the prince of this world’, which tends to lead human souls into realms which are not ruled by ‘the prince of this world’. We cannot help but make use of such expressions in order to show properly what is meant, and no one should think that there is anything superstitious about using these expressions.

Let me give you a picture of what someone initiated in the ancient Greek, or the Egyptian, or Persian Mysteries would have thought in those old days about ‘the prince of this world’. We have to understand that these people also spoke about the Christ-being, though they used other names. Using the name of Christ is not the only way of speaking about the Christ-being. We naturally use the name of Christ when we want to speak about the Christ-being, for Christ to us actually means that Being who underwent the Mystery of Golgotha and united himself with earthly civilization. Before the Mystery of Golgotha this Being was not yet united with earthly civilization. He still lived as the great Sun-being outside the earthly world. The Mystery of Golgotha denotes the uniting with the earthly world of this Being who lived outside the earthly world. But those initiated in the Mysteries certainly knew this Being who lived outside the earthly world. And the being known as ‘the prince of this world’—that ahrimanic being—also knew him. That being—I am describing what lived in the consciousness of the initiates—felt himself to be the lord of the earth. He considered that whatever human beings possessed through the forces of the earth was something they had from him. But he knew that the Christ-being lived outside the earth and also had an influence on human life by way of the Mysteries, whose teachings were then popularized and brought amongst the peoples.

To describe more closely what lived in their consciousness, we may say that the initiates in the Mysteries thought as follows: The chief influence of ‘the prince of this world’ is on the physical bodies of human beings. These wholly do his bidding and he feels he is the lord of human physical bodies. But he could not feel himself to be the lord of the etheric and astral natures of human beings, of their life-bodies and their souls. The life-body and the soul were seen to be under the influence of a Being who lived outside the earth; the forces of the Christ-being had always been seen to flow into these. But with the forces of their own soul human beings were quite unable to receive what ought to flow into them from the Christ-being. They could only do so by turning to what the Mystery initiate received after the proper preparation. The Mysteries were seen to take hold of what came from outside the earth and pass it on to human beings. So ‘the prince of this world’ said to himself: Here on earth I am the master. From the earth the physical bodies of human beings draw their forces, and one of these forces is the human earthly intellect. Here I am the master and nothing can contest this here on earth. By way of the Mysteries, something from outside the earth flows into it. This I will tolerate.

But ‘the prince of this world’ rebelled against the Mystery of Golgotha because from then on he would have had to share his supremacy with the Christ who descended to the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. ‘The prince of this world’ felt the Christ to be a rival in his mastery of the earth. He would have tolerated the sharing of the rulership with another being from outside the earth, but he would not tolerate a rival here within the earthly realm.

Here, then, out of the spirit of the ancient Mysteries, we have an indication of the real opposition of ‘the prince of this world’ towards the Christ. Among those with knowledge about such things this opposition was strongly felt throughout the Middle Ages until well into the fifteenth century. Any mention of ‘the prince of this world’ and of the Christ took it into account. There was a certain awareness of two dominions. One of these had rightfully ruled the bodily nature of man before the Mystery of Golgotha, but since then this sovereignty over the bodily nature of man has had to be shared with the other, with the Christ. For now Christ no longer influences only man's soul element, that is, his astral and etheric bodies; his purpose is now to influence also man's physical bodily nature, or rather whatever is expressed by this physical bodily nature, namely, everything to do with the intellect and with man's own capacities in the widest sense. Christ should live in every aspect of human nature. This is what entered into mankind through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha it never occurred to those who knew about such things to seek knowledge of external matters in any sphere which the human head or even the other soul or heart forces can reach on their own. Such things were left to the Mysteries. So before the Mystery of Golgotha there was certainly a strong awareness of the distinction between earthly wisdom and earthly sensing on the one hand, and a sensing of super-earthly forces on the other. The unique spiritual configuration of the early medieval centuries is only comprehensible in the light of a clear understanding of this fact.

Now this fact can be greatly clarified by something that was regarded as being of paramount importance in very many Mystery centres. The preparation and subsequent trials undergone by the Mystery pupils on the path of initiation varied, of course, in the different centres. But these variations were only really like the different paths up a mountain which, despite their different routes, all lead to one and the same summit in the end. They all led to one and the same Mystery goal. Despite the modifications, there were two measures within the Mysteries which every pupil had to undergo and which could be termed as being of paramount importance. These were, on the one hand, the draught of forgetfulness and, on the other hand, something which worked on the human being during the Mystery procedures like a powerful shock—like entering into a powerful fear. It is no longer permissible to use either of these for the purpose of achieving higher super-sensible knowledge. Today everything has to take place in the realm of soul and spirit, whereas the Mystery pupils in ancient times underwent procedures which always had to call on their physical body. What is achieved today is similar, but higher knowledge must now be striven for in the sphere of consciousness only, whereas in earlier times it took place in the sphere of instincts and dreams. Because all the Mysteries included something akin to the draught of forgetfulness and also something akin to the physical shock, the pupils’ external intellect was damped down. This intellect was less clear than it is today, but it nevertheless held sway in connection with everything relating to the external world.

So the pupil was led into a dulled consciousness both by the draught of forgetfulness and by the shock, which might be compared with the inducement of a state of fear. What was the significance of the draught of forgetfulness? The point was not the forgetting, though the pupil did forget. The effect it was to have came from its ceremonial preparation, from the special way it was mixed, to the accompaniment of certain preparations before it was drunk by the pupil. It was definitely a physical draught which, through the way it was served, brought it about that the pupil forgot the whole of his life since birth. This is something which is achieved nowadays through development in the realm of soul and spirit. Nowadays a clear consciousness of a great tableau of life encompassing everything that has occurred since birth is first conjured up. This is then suppressed and, in consequence, the human being is led into the spiritual form of his life before birth, or before conception. The same was achieved in a more physical way through the ancient draught of forgetfulness.

But the forgetting was not the essential point. Negative things are never the essential point. The positive thing achieved was that the pupil's thinking became more mobile and more intense. At the same time it became less clear. It became dreamy because the effect was achieved by influencing the physical organism. The effect of the draught of forgetfulness on the physical organism—it can be exactly described—was that the brain, if I may put it this way, became more fluid than it is in everyday life. Because the brain was made more fluid, because the pupil began to think more with his cerebral fluid than with the solid parts of the brain, his thoughts became more mobile and more intense.

Nowadays this must be achieved more directly, by means of developing soul and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of Occult Science. But in those days the brain was made more fluid by external influences. The goal was to make the spirit and soul element of the pupil—as it was before he made the connection with a physical body through conception: in other words, as it is in the spiritual world—capable once more of penetrating through the brain. This is the essential point.

In a drawing it would look like this. Suppose this is the mass of the brain (green). Once the human being has been born his spirit and soul element stops short before it (red). The brain is so constituted that the human being's inner spirit and soul element cannot pass through the brain. In his brain the human being is not filled with his spirit and soul element. Instead, external perceptions can enter and make themselves felt in the brain through the senses—let me draw an eye here. Put another way, the constitution of the brain is such today that the eternal aspect of the human being cannot rise up into it. Instead, external impressions can enter. By being given the draught of forgetfulness the pupil gained the possibility of receiving into his brain what was his spiritual and soul element before conception or before birth (red). That is the one side.

The other side is the shock which was administered to the pupil. Think how a shock affects human beings. They are as though paralysed. There can be shocks which bring about the paralysis of the whole human being. A paralysed person, a cataleptic person, cannot move about because his muscles are rigid. But in a human being who can go about his life in the ordinary way, his body absorbs this eternal aspect (white with red). In our blood, in our muscles down below, the element of spirit and soul, the eternal element, is absorbed. But because of this it cannot be perceived. It cannot penetrate the brain, but lower down it is absorbed. It cannot be perceived, but when the muscles go rigid it steps out freely as a matter of course.

The rigidity of the muscles was brought about by the effect of the shock. As a result, the element of spirit and soul was not absorbed by the rest of the organism—apart from the brain—but was freed. So now the spirit and soul element was in the brain because the brain had been softened by the draught of forgetfulness, while the rest of the organism was at the same time prevented from absorbing it. Thus the element of spirit and soul came to be perceived. From two sides came the possibility of perceiving the element of spirit and soul. In ordinary life the human being was incapable of perceiving it because the brain, with which everything else was perceived, was unable to take it in; it could not enter the brain. Neither could it be perceived from the rest of the organism, the will and so on, for the rest of the organism had absorbed it. But now the pupil's brain was softened—of course, only for the moment at which knowledge was to enter. So his element of spirit and soul rushed into his brain. Meanwhile, the rest of his body became rigid so that it could not absorb the spirit and soul element. There the pupil stood, with his softened brain on the one side and a rigidified organic system on the other, as though encased in a capsule. There he stood in his spirit and his soul which had been given to him from two sides.

This is the aim of these procedures which are described in such a practical manner. I must expressly point out, though, that these things cannot be imitated nowadays. People would, anyway, be at a loss as to how to imitate them and, if they tried, the result would not be agreeable. These days all such things have to be attained by working with soul and spirit. But of the past it can certainly be said: Having been enabled to perceive their element of spirit and soul by partaking of the draught of forgetfulness and by being shocked into physical rigidity, the pupils in the Mysteries became ‘Christians’. In the Mysteries they became Christians.

The early fathers of the church were certainly aware of this. But today people are not told about it, or it is even denied. But the early church fathers knew that human beings had been made Christians through the Mysteries. There are passages in the writings of the early church fathers⁴ which state that Heraclitus and Socrates, though they lived before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, were Christians, even though they were called atheists in their own time. I have often quoted from such passages in the writings of the early church fathers. It was the view of the ancient Mystery leaders and initiates that ‘the prince of this world’ was not interested in that human being who came forth out of the other; he left this human being to Christ. But he did not want Christ to come down to the earth in order to take hold of the human being in his entirety. This is described in the gospels in the way it is said that the demons, the lower servants of ‘the prince of this world’, when they heard that Christ had come, began to rebel. They recognized him and were furious.

We have to understand, when speaking about earthly evolution, that the spiritual powers whose influence on the human physical body was perfectly legitimate before the Mystery of Golgotha had, after the Mystery of Golgotha, to share this influence with the Christ. This is an essential aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha. That is why in the Middle Ages ‘the prince of this world’ came to be called ‘the unlawful prince of this world’. This expression would not have been justified in the ancient heathen world but when it came to be used in the Middle Ages it was a correct title, befitting the circumstances.

The essential aspect of all this, with regard to the spiritual evolution of mankind, is that in more ancient times the physical body was withdrawn from the element of spirit and soul. The working of the brain was counteracted because the brain was softened by the draught of forgetfulness, and the powers of absorption of the rest of the organism were counteracted by the hardening of the rest of the organism by means of the shock. So in these older times the body was withdrawn from the element of spirit and soul.

Today, our aspiration is not to withdraw the body but to draw out the spirit, by strengthening and enhancing our forces of spirit and soul. The opposite of what used to take place must happen now; now the spirit must be drawn out. No changes must be allowed to take place in the physical, bodily aspect. Since the fifteenth century the human being has been organized in such a way that changes in the physical body, of the kind that were customary in those of Mystery pupils, would denote a condition of sickness. It would be a pathological condition, which must not be allowed to come about in normal development.

I am describing all this in order to give you an idea of what is to be understood by the concept of ‘the prince of this world’, which keeps recurring in olden times. ‘The prince of this world’, who in the Middle Ages became ‘the unlawful prince of this world’, is an Ahriman-like being. We can find such a being everywhere, in external nature and in the inner being of man. Indeed, only when we are in a position to find such a being in its manifestation both in external nature and in the inner being of man can we gradually come to an understanding of its essence.

Look at external nature. You will find there two contrasts, but what matters is to be able to sense the essence of these contrasts. Think of the blue sky. Of course in southern climes the blue sky must be seen rather differently than is the case here. When the envelope of air round the earth is filled by the effect of the sun, this is not the pure essence of the blue sky, for it is then overcast with something else. But the pure effect of the blue sky is that of coldness. The blue sky as such is cold. What you sense in the coldness of the blue sky, unmitigated by earthly sultriness—this is an all-embracing ahrimanic influence. The ahrimanic influence causes space to be petrified, congealed into blueness. Take note of this expression! It is unusual, but if you gradually come to sense what it means to say that space is petrified, congealed into blueness, you will have discovered the ahrimanic tendency in external nature.

The contrasting effect is that of the reddish, yellowish clouds sailing past. The effect is one of warmth, exactly the opposite. This, too, can be disguised by the coldness of the earth's environment but, all in all, a cloud lined with red, a yellowish cloud, has something warm about it. This is the contrasting effect, the effect of air. Between these two polar opposites something takes place, and that is what benefits the earthly life of man. We can say, then, that the effect on the earth of space petrified, congealed into blueness was seen in the Middle Ages to be the cosmic working of ‘the prince of this world’.

And when we look into human beings we find that they can be in a condition which makes them pale. You know how there is something livid, something blueish about palor in human beings. When human beings turn pale, when they feel their way into coldness, they are then sensing something ahrimanic working in them. Flushed redness, on the other hand, shows something luciferic at work in their nature. Out of all these details together we can gradually build up a full picture of what this ahrimanic being, ‘the prince of this world’, really is. People's pallid, often so clever, thoughts, running along always in straight lines—the whole intellectual aspect of man—this is the ahrimanic influence, the influence of ‘the prince of this world’, on the working of the human head.

These things must be understood from the point of view of spirit and soul. In the livid blueness, in the way human beings grow pale, in the way they devour themselves inwardly and feel their way into coldness, in the way they are filled with pale, abstract thoughts—in all this we have to feel the ahrimanic influence, the rulership of ‘the prince of this world’. And then we have to feel the warming influence of the Christ-impulse.

For the present time it is rather revealing and also necessary to recognize how different was initiation in ancient times compared with the principle of initiation today. There are certainly people today who still lack the courage to approach the Anthroposophical Movement but who have a deep longing for what, in the end, only the Anthroposophical Movement can give. They long for a transformation of their soul, after which they would find their way to the knowledge they seek. Obviously the greater part of mankind today rejects this transformation of the soul and imagines that any knowledge man is capable of reaching can be achieved through the ordinary state of soul which is brought about by our ordinary education and through our ordinary life. On my last tour I met a man who was greatly concerned to achieve some knowledge through the philosophical possibilities offered today, but not through Anthroposophy. He said that it would be interesting and important to ascertain in Anthroposophy how this higher knowledge might be achieved, for everywhere—this ‘everywhere’ is very relative, of course—the different world views were recognizing that the achievement of real knowledge was a matter not only of the intellect but also of the will. And in the ancient Mysteries, too, it was a matter of transforming the will.

In the description of the ancient Mysteries in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact⁵ you will find that the decisive, radical difference between the ancient striving for knowledge and that of today lies in the fact that in ancient times it was necessary to prepare the will. The will had to be turned in a direction different from that of ordinary life. The will had to be purged, purified; it had to be transformed and lifted to a higher stage. The pupil had to give a new direction to his everyday will, which was dominated by ‘the prince of this world’. Through cultivation of his will, the pupil had to reach the point at which knowledge can be attained. Today, on the other hand, people imagine that we can stop at whatever point we have reached through our ordinary studies. And our intellectual life is merely the product of the ordinary configuration of our brain. If it is softened, as I have indicated, there is a strong possibility that thoughts can be willed, that everywhere thoughts can be willed. And when will becomes conscious through the rigidifying of the body, then thoughts appear in the will itself. This can also happen today when, on the path I have described, knowledge of higher worlds has become possible.

It is a very important sign today that once more there are people who know that the intellect alone is not enough and that it is necessary to cultivate the will in order to reach whatever knowledge is possible for man. So by looking at what is going on in a general way we come to see that a great many people are approaching who want to hear about spiritual matters. Also, from things which are shown to us as we go along, we see that there are people who once again realize that the will must be cultivated, if knowledge is to be achieved. All this goes to show that there is an urgent need for spiritual life today. Unfortunately, though, because people lack the courage to approach Anthroposophy, because they think Anthroposophy is something peculiar, they imagine that they can achieve what they are searching for along some other path. The world will have to come to the conviction that what is wanted can only be achieved on the anthroposophical path. Please do not misunderstand me. It is not my intention to maintain that what Anthroposophy has revealed so far is necessarily generally valid or particularly obvious. But I want to point out the importance of the direction in which Anthroposophy is going. This is what can lead to the satisfaction of the powerful longing that exists today, a longing which must be satisfied if human civilization is to move forward at all.

• 1 . Today: In his introduction to this lecture (contained in GA 255), Rudolf Steiner spoke words of appreciation for the way in which Albert Steffen had reported in the journal Das Goetheanum on a lecture denigrating Anthroposophy.
• 2 . Thales of Miletus, c.640-545 B.C.
• 3 . Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1973.
• 4 . For instance, St Justin Martyr, Apologia I, 46.
• 5 . Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1972.

Yesterday I tried to show how a more intimate study of man's dream-life can lead us towards the Science of Initiation. To a certain extent, the point of view was that of ordinary consciousness. Today it will be my task to enter more deeply into the same subject-matter from the point of view of ‘imaginative’ cognition—i.e. to present what we were studying yesterday as it appears to one who has learnt to see the world in ‘imaginations’.

For the moment we will neglect the difference between the two kinds of dreams discussed yesterday, and consider dreams as such. It will be a sound approach to describe ‘imaginative’ vision in relation to dreams which a man endowed with imagination may have. Let us compare such a dream with the self-perception attained by the imaginative seer when he looks back upon his own being—when he observes imaginatively his own or another's organs—or, perhaps, the whole human being as a complete organism. You see, the appearance of the dream-world to imaginative consciousness is quite different from its appearance to ordinary consciousness. The same is true of the physical and etheric organism. Now the imaginative seer can dream too; and under certain circumstances his dreams will be just as chaotic as those of other people. From his own experience he can quite well judge the world of dreams; for, side by side with the imaginative life that is inwardly co-ordinated, clear and luminous, the dream-world runs its ordinary course, just as it does side by side with waking life. I have often emphasised that one who attains really spiritual perception does not become a dreamer or enthusiast, living only in the higher worlds and not seeing external reality. People who are ever dreaming in higher worlds, or about them, and do not see external reality, are not initiates; they should be considered from a pathological point of view, at least in the psychological sense of the term. The real knowledge of initiation does not estrange one from ordinary, physical life and its various relationships. On the contrary, it makes one a more painstaking, conscientious observer than without the faculty of seership. Indeed we may say: if a man has no sense of ordinary realities, no interest in ordinary realities, no interest in the details of others' lives, if he is so ‘superior’ that he sails through life without troubling about its details, he shows he is not a genuine seer. A man with imaginative cognition—he may, of course, also have ‘inspired’ and ‘intuitive’ cognition, but at present I am only speaking of ‘imagination’—is quite well acquainted with dream-life from his own experience. Nevertheless, his conception of dreams is different. He feels the dream as something with which he is connected, with which he unites himself much more strongly than is possible through ordinary consciousness. He can take dreams more seriously. Indeed, only imagination justifies us taking our dreams seriously, for it enables us to look, as it were, behind dreaming and apprehend its dramatic course—its tensions, resolutions, catastrophes, and crises—rather than its detailed con-tent. The individual content interests us less, even before we acquire imagination; we are more interested in studying whether the dream leads to a crisis, or to inner joy, to something that we find easy or that proves difficult—and the like.

It is the course of the dream just that which does not interest ordinary consciousness and which I can only call the dramatic quality of the dream—that begins to interest us most. We see behind the scenes of dream-life and, in doing so, become aware that we have before us something related to man's spiritual being in quite a definite way. We see that, in a spiritual sense, the dream is the human being, as the seed is the plant. And in this ‘seed-like’ man we learn to grasp what is really foreign to his present life—just as the seed taken from the plant in the autumn of a given year is foreign to the plant's life of that year and will only be at home in the plant-growth of the following year. It is just this way of studying the dream that gives imaginative consciousness its strongest impressions; for, in our own dreaming being, we detect more and more that we bear within us something that passes over to our next life on earth, germinating between death and a new birth and growing on into our next earthly life. It is the seed of this next earthly life that we learn to feel in the dream.

This is extremely important and is further confirmed by comparing this special experience, which is an intense experience of feeling, with the perception we can have of a physical human being standing before us with his several organs. This perception, too, changes for imaginative consciousness, so that we feel like we do when a fresh, green, blossoming plant we have known begins to fade. When, in imaginative consciousness, we observe the lungs, liver, stomach, and, most of all, the brain as physical organs, we say to ourselves that these, in respect to the physical, are all withering.

Now you will say that it cannot be pleasant to confront, in imaginations, a physical man as a withering being. Well, no one who knows the Science of Initiation will tell you it is only there to offer pleasant truths to men. It has to tell the truth, not please. On the other hand, it must be remembered that, while we learn to know the physical man as a withering being, we perceive in him the spiritual man; in a sense, you cannot see the spiritual man shine forth without learning to know the physical as a decaying, withering being.

Thus man's appearance does not thereby become uglier but more beautiful—and truer, too. And when one is able to perceive the withering of man's organs, which is such a spiritual process, these organs with their etheric content appear as something that has come over from the past—from the last life on earth—and is now withering. In this way we really come to see that the seed of a future life is being formed within the withering process that proceeds from man's being of a former life on earth.

The human head is withering most; and the dream appears to imaginative perception as an emanation of the human head. On the other hand, the metabolic and limb organism appears to imaginative vision to be withering least of all. It appears very similar to the ordinary dream; it is least faded and most closely united, in form and content, with the future of man. The rhythmic organisation contained in the chest is the connecting link between them, holding the balance. It is just to spiritual perception that the human heart appears as a remarkable organ. It, too, is seen to be withering; nevertheless, seen imaginatively, it retains almost its physical form, only beautified and ennobled (I say ‘almost’, not ‘completely’).

There would be a certain amount of truth in painting man's spiritual appearance as follows: a countenance comparatively wise looking, perhaps even somewhat aged; hands and feet small and childlike; wings to indicate remoteness from the earth; and the heart indicated in some form or other reminiscent of the physical organ.

If we can perceive the human being imaginatively, such a picture which we might attempt to paint will not be symbolic in the bad sense that symbolism has today. It will not be empty and insipid, but will contain elements of physical existence while, at the same time, transcending the physical. One might also say, speaking paradoxically (one must begin to speak in paradoxes to some extent when one speaks of the spiritual world, for the spiritual world does really appear quite different from the physical): When we begin to perceive man with imagination we feel in regard to his head: How intensely I must think, if I am to hold my own against this head! Contemplating the human head with imaginative consciousness one gradually comes to feel quite feeble-minded, for with the acutest thoughts acquired in daily life one cannot easily approach this wonderful physical structure of the human head. It is now transformed into something spiritual and its form is still more wonderful as it withers, showing its form so clearly. For the convolutions of the brain actually seem to contain, in a withered form, deep secrets of the world's structure. When we begin to understand the human head we gaze deeply into these cosmic secrets, yet feel ourselves continually baffled in our attempts.

On the other hand, when we try to understand the metabolic and limb system with imaginative consciousness, we say to our-selves: Your keen intellect does not help you here; you ought properly to sleep and dream of man, for man only apprehends this part of his organisation by dreaming of it while awake.

So you see, we must proceed to a highly differentiated mode of perception when we begin to study man's physical organisation imaginatively. We must become clever, terribly clever, when we study his head. We must become dreamers when studying his system of limbs and metabolism. And we must really swing to and fro, as it were, between dreaming and waking if we want to grasp, in imaginative vision, the wonderful structure of man's rhythmic system. But all this appears as the relic of his last life on earth. What he experiences in the waking state is the relic of his last life; this plays into his present life, giving him as much as I ascribed to him yesterday when I said of his life of action, for example, that only as much of man's actions as he can dream of is really done by himself; the rest is done by the gods in and through him. The present is active to this extent; all the rest comes from his former earthly lives. We see that this is so when we have a man before us and perceive his withering physical organisation. And if we look at what man knows of himself while he dreams—dreams in his sleep—we have before us what man is preparing for the next life on earth. These things can be easily distinguished.

Thus imagination leads directly from a study of the waking and sleeping man to a perception of his development from earthly life to earthly life.

Now what is preserved in memory occupies a quite special place in the waking and in the sleeping man. Consider your ordinary memories. What you remember you draw forth from within you in the form of thoughts or mental presentations; you represent to yourself past experiences. These, as you know, lose in memory their vividness, impressiveness, colour, etc. Remembered experiences are pale. But, on the other hand, memory cannot but appear to be very closely connected with man's being; indeed it appears to be his very being. Man is not usually honest enough in his soul to make the necessary confession to himself; but I ask you to look into yourself to find out what you really are in respect to what you call your ego. Is there anything there beside your memories? If you try to get to your ego you will scarcely find anything else but your life's memories. True, you find these permeated by a kind of activity, but this remains very shadowy and dim. It is your memories that, for earthly life, appear as your living ego.

Now this world of memories which you need only call to mind in order to realise how entirely shadowy they are—what does it become in imaginative cognition? It ‘expands’ at once; it becomes a mighty tableau through which we survey, in pictures, all that we have experienced in our present life on earth. One might say: If this¹ be man, and this the memory within him, imagination at once extends this memory back to his birth. One feels oneself outside of space; here all consists of events. One gazes into a tableau and surveys one's whole life up to the present. Time becomes space. It is like looking down an avenue; one takes in one's whole past in a tableau, or panorama, and can speak of memory expanding. In ordinary consciousness memory is confined, as it were, to a single moment at a time. Indeed, it is really as follows: If, for example, we have reached the age of forty and are recalling, not in ‘imagination’, but in ordinary consciousness, something experienced twenty years ago, it is as if it were far off in space, yet still there. Now—in imaginative cognition—it has remained; it has no more disappeared than the distant trees of an avenue. It is there. This is how we gaze into the tableau and know that the memory we bear with us in ordinary consciousness is a serious illusion. To take it for a reality is like taking a cross-section of a tree trunk for the tree trunk itself. Such a section is really nothing at all; the trunk is above and below the mere picture thus obtained. Now it is really like that when we perceive memories in imaginative cognition. We detect the utter unreality of the individual items; the whole expands almost as far as birth—in certain circumstances even farther. All that is past becomes present; it is there, though at the periphery.

Once we have grasped this, once we have attained this perception, we can know—and re-observe at any moment—that man reviews this tableau when he leaves his physical body at death. This lasts some days and is his natural life-element. On passing through the gate of death man gazes, to begin with, at his life in mighty, luminous, impressive pictures. This constitutes his experience for some days.

But we must now advance farther in imaginative cognition. As we do so our life is enriched in a certain way and we accordingly understand many things in a different way from before. Consider, for example, our behaviour towards other people. In ordinary life we may, in individual cases, think about the intentions we have had, the actions we have performed—our whole attitude towards others. We think about all this, more or less. according as we are more or less reflective persons. But now all this stands before us. In our idea of our behaviour we only grasp a part of the full reality. Suppose we have done another a service or an injury. We learn to see the results of our good deed, the satisfaction to the other man, perhaps his furtherance in this or that respect—i.e. we see the results which may follow our deed in the physical world. If we have done an evil deed, we come to see we have injured him, we see that he remained unsatisfied or, perhaps, was even physically injured; and so on. All this can be observed in physical life if we do not run away from it, finding it unpleasant to observe the consequences of our deeds.

This, however, is only one side. Every action we do to human beings, or indeed to the other kingdoms of Nature, has another side. Let us assume that you do a good deed to another man. Such a deed has its existence and its significance in the spiritual world; it kindles warmth there; it is, in a sense, a source of spiritual rays of warmth. In the spiritual world ‘soul-warmth’ streams from a good deed, ‘soul-coldness’ from an evil deed done to other human beings. It is really as if one engendered warmth or coldness in the spiritual world according to one's behaviour to others. Other human actions act like bright, luminous rays in this or that direction in the spiritual world; others have a darkening effect. In short, one may say that we only really experience one half of what we accomplish in our life on earth.

Now, on attaining imaginative consciousness, what ordinary consciousness knows already, really vanishes. Whether a man is being helped or injured is for ordinary consciousness to recognise; but the effect of a deed, be it good or evil, wise or foolish, in the spiritual world—its warming or chilling, lightening or darkening action (there are manifold effects)—all this arises before imaginative consciousness and begins to be there for us. And we say to ourselves: Because you did not know all this when you let your ordinary consciousness function in your actions, it does not follow that it was not there. Do not imagine that what you did not know of in your actions—the sources of luminous and warming rays, etc.—was not there because you did not see or experience it. Do not imagine that. You have experienced it all in your sub-consciousness; you have been through it all. Just as the spiritual eyes of your higher consciousness see it now, so, while you were helping or harming another by your kind or evil deed, your sub-consciousness experienced its parallel significance for the spiritual world.

Further: when we have progressed and attained a sufficient intensification of imaginative consciousness we do not only gaze at the panorama of our experiences, but become perforce aware that we are not complete human beings until we have lived through this other aspect of our earthly actions, which had remained subconscious before. We begin to feel quite maimed in the face of this life-panorama that extends back to birth, or beyond it. It is as if something had been torn from us. We say to ourselves continually: You ought to have experienced that aspect too; you are really maimed, as if an eye or a leg had been removed. You have not really had one half of your experiences. This must arise in the course of imaginative consciousness; we must feel ourselves maimed in this way in respect to our experiences. Above all, we must feel that ordinary life is hiding something from us.

This feeling is especially intense in our present materialistic age. For men simply do not believe today that human actions have any value or significance beyond that for immediate life which takes its course in the physical world. It is regarded, more or less, as folly to declare that something else takes place in the spiritual world. Nevertheless, it is there. This feeling of being maimed comes before ‘inspired’ consciousness and one says to one's self: I must make it possible for myself to experience all I have failed to experience; yet this is almost impossible, except in a few details and to a very limited extent.

It is this tragic mood that weighs upon one who sees more deeply into life. There is so much in life that we cannot fulfil on earth. In a sense, we must incur a debt to the future, admitting that life sets tasks which we cannot absolve in this present earthly life. We must owe them to the universe, saying: I shall only be able to experience that when I have passed through death. The Science of Initiation brings us this great, though often tragical enrichment of life; we feel this unavoidable indebtedness to life and recognise the necessity of owing the gods what we can only experience after death. Only then can we enter into an experience such as we owe to the universe.

This consciousness that our inner life must, in part, run its course by incurring debts to the future after death, leads to an immense deepening of human life. Spiritual science is not only there that we may learn this or that theoretically. He who studies it as one studies other things, would be better employed with a cookery book. Then, at least, he would be impelled to study in a more than theoretical manner, for life, chiefly the life of the stomach and all connected therewith, takes care that we take a cookery book more seriously than a mere theory. It is necessary for spiritual science, on approaching man, to deepen his life in respect to feeling.

Our life is immensely deepened when we become aware of our growing indebtedness to the gods and say: One half of our life on earth cannot really be lived, for it is hidden under the surface of existence. If, through initiation, we learn to know what is otherwise hidden from ordinary consciousness, we can see a little into the debts we have incurred. We then say: With ordinary consciousness we see we are incurring debts, but cannot read the ‘promissory note’ we ought to write. With initiation-consciousness we can, indeed, read the note, but cannot meet it in ordinary life. We must wait till death comes. And, when we have attained this consciousness, when we have so deepened our human conscience that this indebtedness is quite alive in us, we are ready to follow human life farther, beyond the retrospective tableau of which I have spoken and in which we reach back to birth. We now see that, after a few days, we must begin to experience what we have left un-experienced; and this holds for every single deed we have done to other human beings in the world. The last deeds done before death are the first to come before us, and so backwards through life. We first become aware of what our last evil or good deeds signify for the world. Our experience of them while on earth is now eliminated; what we now experience is their significance for the world.

And then we go farther back, experiencing our life again, but backwards. We know that while doing this we are still connected with the earth, for it is only the other side of our deeds that we experience now.

We feel as if our life from now onwards were being borne in the womb of the universe. What we now experience is a kind of embryonic stage for our further life between death and a new birth; only, it is not borne by a mother but by the world, by all that we did not experience in physical life. We live through our physical life again, backwards and in its cosmic significance. We experience it now with a very divided consciousness. Living here in the physical world and observing the creatures around him, man feels himself pretty well as the lord of creation; and even though he calls the lion the king of beasts, he still feels himself, as a human being, superior. Man feels the creatures of the other kingdoms as inferior; he can judge them, but does not ascribe to them the power to judge him. He is above the other kingdoms of Nature.

He has a very different feeling, however, when after death the undergoes the experience I have just described. He no longer feels himself confronting the inferior kingdoms of Nature, but kingdoms of the spiritual world that are superior to him. He feels himself as the lowest kingdom, the others standing above him.

Thus, in undergoing all he has previously left unexperienced, man feels all around him beings far higher than himself. They unfold their sympathies and antipathies towards all he now lives through as a consequence of his earthly life. In this experience immediately after death we are within a kind of ‘spiritual rain’. We live through the spiritual counterpart of our deeds, and the lofty beings who stand above us rain down their sympathies and antipathies. We are flooded by these, and feel in our spiritual being that what is illuminated by the sympathies of these lofty beings of the higher hierarchies will be accepted by the universe as a good element for the future; whereas all that encounters their antipathies will be rejected, for we feel it would be an evil element in the universe if we did not keep it to ourselves. The antipathies of these lofty beings rain down on an evil deed done to another human being, and we feel that the result would be something exceedingly bad for the universe if we released it, if we did not retain it in ourselves. So we gather up all that encounters the antipathies of these lofty beings. In this way we lay the foundation of our destiny, of all that works on into our next earthly life in order that it may find compensation through other deeds.

One can describe the passage of the human being through the soul-region after death from what I might call its more external aspect. I did this in my book Theosophy, where I followed more the accustomed lines of thought of our age. Now in this recapitulation within the General Anthroposophical Society I want to present a systematic statement of what Anthroposophy is, describing these things more inwardly. I want you to feel how man, in his inner being—in his human individuality—actually lives through the state after death.

Now when we understand these things in this way, we can again turn our attention to the world of dreams, and see it in a new light. Perceiving man's experience, after death, of the spiritual aspects of his earthly life, his deeds and thoughts, we can again turn to the dreaming man, to all he experiences when asleep. We now see that he has already lived through the above when asleep; but it remained quite unconscious. The difference between the experience in sleep and the experience after death becomes clear.

Consider man's life on earth. There are waking states interrupted again and again by sleep. Now a man who is not a ‘sleepy-head’ will spend about a third of his life asleep. During this third he does, in fact, live through the spiritual counterpart of his deeds; only he knows nothing of it, his dreams merely casting up ripples to the surface. Much of the spiritual counterpart is perceived in dreams, but only in the form of weak surface-ripples. Nevertheless in deep sleep we do experience unconsciously the whole spiritual aspect of our daily life. So we might put it this way: In our conscious daily life we experience what others think and feel, how they are helped or hindered by us; in sleep we experience unconsciously what the gods think about the deeds and thoughts of our waking life, though we know nothing of this. It is for this reason that one who sees into the secrets of life seems to himself so burdened with debt, so maimed—as I have described. All this has remained in the subconscious. Now after death it is really lived through consciously. For this reason man lives through the part of life he has slept through, i.e. about one-third, in time, of his earthly life. Thus, when he has passed through death, he lives through his nights again, backwards; only, what he lived through unconsciously, night by night, now becomes conscious.

We could even say—though it might almost seem as if we wanted to make fun of these exceedingly earliest matters: If one sleeps away the greater part of one's life, this retrospective experience after death will last longer; if one sleeps little, it will be shorter. On an average it will last a third of one's life, for one spends that in sleep. So if a man lives till the age of sixty, such experience after death will last twenty years. During this time he passes through a kind of embryonic stage for the spiritual world. Only after that will he be really free of the earth; then the earth no longer envelopes him, and he is born into the spiritual world. He escapes from the wrappings of earthly existence which he had borne around him until then, though in a spiritual sense, and feels this as his birth into the spiritual world.

• 1. The drawing is not reproduced.

From the foregoing lecture it will be clear to you that it is only possible to gain a correct view of the historical evolution of humanity when one takes into consideration the totally different conditions of mind and soul that prevailed during the various epochs. In the first part of my lecture I attempted to define the Asiatic period of evolution, the genuine ancient East, and we saw that we have to look back to the time when the descendants of the races of Atlantis were finding their way eastwards after the Atlantean catastrophe, moving from west to east and gradually peopling Europe and Asia. All that took place in ancient Asia in connection with these peoples was under the influence of a condition of soul accustomed and attuned to rhythm. At the beginning of the Asiatic period we have still a distant echo of what was present in all its fullness in Atlantis—the localised memory. During the Oriental evolution this localised memory passed over into rhythmic memory, and I showed how with the Greek evolution that great change came about which brought in a new kind of memory, the temporal memory. This means that the Asiatic period of evolution (we are now speaking of what may rightly be called the Asiatic period, for what history refers to is in reality a later and decadent period) was an age of men altogether differently constituted from the men of later times. And the external events of history were in those days much more dependent than in later times on the character and constitution of man's inner life. What lived in man's mind and soul lived too in his entire being. A separated life of thought and feeling, such as we have to-day was unknown. A thinking that does not feel itself to be connected with the inner processes of the human head, was unknown. So too was the abstract feeling that knows no connection with the circulation of the blood. Man had in those times a thinking that was inwardly experienced as a “happening” in the head, a feeling that was experienced in the rhythm of the breath, in the circulation of the blood, and so on. Man experienced his whole being in undivided unity.

All this was closely connected with the altogether different experience man had of his relation to the world about him, to the Cosmos, to the spiritual and the physical in the Cosmic Whole. The man of the present day lives, let us say, in town or in the country, and his experience varies accordingly. He is surrounded by woods, rivers and mountains; or, if he lives in town, bricks and mortar meet his gaze on every hand. When he speaks of the cosmic and super-sensible, where does he think it is? He can point to no sphere within which he can conceive of what is cosmic and super-sensible as having place. It is nowhere to be laid hold of, he cannot grasp it: even spiritually, he cannot grasp it. But this was not so in that ancient oriental stream of evolution. To an Oriental, the world around him which we to-day call our physical environment, was the lowest portion of a Cosmos conceived as a unity. Man had around him what is contained in the three kingdoms of nature, he had around him the rivers, mountains, and so forth; but for him this environment was permeated through and through with Spirit, interpenetrated and interwoven with Spirit. The Oriental of ancient time would say: I live with the mountains, I live with the rivers; but I live also with the elemental beings of the mountains and of the rivers. I live in the physical realm, but this physical realm is the body of a spiritual realm. Around me is the spiritual world, the lowest spiritual world.

There below was this realm that for us has become the earthly realm. Man lived in it. But he pictured to himself that where this realm ends another realm begins, then again above that another; and finally the highest realm which it is possible to reach. And if we were to name these realms in accordance with the language that has become current with us in anthroposophical knowledge—the ancient Oriental had other names for them, but that does not matter, we will name them as they are for us—then we should have above, for the highest realm, the First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; then the Second Hierarchy: Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai; and the Third Hierarchy: Archai, Archangels, Angels.

And now comes the fourth realm where human beings live, the realm wherein according to our method of cognition we to-day place the mere objects and processes of Nature, but where the ancient Oriental felt the whole of Nature penetrated with the elemental spirits of water and of earth. This was Asia. Asia meant the lowest spirit realm, in which he, as human being, lived. You must remember that the present-day conception of things that we have in our ordinary consciousness was unknown to the man of those times. It would be nonsense to suppose that it were in any way possible for him to imagine such a thing as matter devoid of spirit. To speak as we do, of oxygen and nitrogen would have been a sheer impossibility for the ancient Oriental. To him oxygen was spirit, it was that spiritual thing which worked as a stimulating and quickening agent on what already possessed life, accelerating the life-processes in a living organism. Nitrogen, which we think of to-day as contained in the atmosphere together with oxygen, was also spiritual; it was that which weaves throughout the Cosmos, working upon what is living and organic in such a way as to prepare it to receive a soul-nature. Such was the knowledge the Oriental of old had, for example, of oxygen and nitrogen. And he knew all the processes of Nature in this way, in their connection with spirit; for the present-day conceptions were unknown to him. There were a few individuals who knew them, and they were the Initiates. The rest of mankind had as their ordinary everyday consciousness a consciousness very similar to a waking dream; it was a dream condition that with us only occurs in abnormal experiences.

The ancient Oriental went about with these dreams. He looked on the mountains, rivers and clouds, and saw everything in the way that things can be seen and heard in this dream condition. Picture to yourself what may happen to the man of to-day in a dream. He is asleep. Suddenly there appears before him a dream-picture of a flaring fire. He hears the call of ‘Fire!’ Outside in the street a fire engine is passing, to put out a fire somewhere or other. But what a difference between the conception of the work of the fire-brigade that can be formed by the human intellect in its matter-of-fact way with the aid of ordinary sense-perception, and the pictures that a dream can conjure up! For the ancient Oriental, however, all his experiences manifested themselves in such dream-pictures. Everything outside in the kingdoms of Nature was transformed in his soul into pictures.

In these dream-pictures man experienced the elemental spirits of water, earth, air and fire. And sleep brought him again other experiences. Sleep for him was not that deep heavy sleep we have when we lie, as we say, ‘like a log’ and know nothing of ourselves. I believe there are people who sleep so in these days, are there not? But then there was no such thing: even in sleep man had still a dull form of consciousness. While on the one hand he was, as we now say, resting his body, the spiritual was weaving within him in a spiritual activity of the external world. And in this weaving he perceived the Beings of the Third Hierarchy. Asia he perceived in his ordinary waking-dream condition, that is to say in what was the everyday consciousness of that time. At night, in sleep, he perceived the Third Hierarchy. And from time to time there entered into his sleep a still more dim and dark consciousness, but a consciousness that graved its experiences deeply into his thought and feeling. Thus these Eastern peoples had first their everyday consciousness where everything was changed into Imaginations and pictures. The pictures were not so real as those of still older times, for example the time of Atlantis or Lemuria, or of the Moon epoch. Nevertheless they were still there, even during this Asiatic evolution. By day, then, men had these pictures. And in sleep they had an experience which they might have clothed in the following words:—We ‘sleep away’ the ordinary earthly existence, we enter the realm of the Angels, Archangels and Archai and live among them. The soul sets itself free from the organism and lives among the Beings of the higher Hierarchies.

Men knew at the same time that whereas they lived in Asia with gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, that is with the elemental spirits of the earth, water, air and fire,—in sleep, while the body rested, they experienced the Beings of the Third Hierarchy in the planetary existence, in all that lives in the whole planetary system belonging to the Earth.

There were however moments when the sleeper would feel: An utterly strange region is approaching me. It is taking me to itself, it is drawing me away from earthly existence. He did not feel this while immersed in the Beings of the Third Hierarchy, but only when a still deeper condition of sleep intervened. Though there was never a real consciousness of what took place during the sleep-condition of the third kind, nevertheless what was then experienced from the Second Hierarchy impressed itself deep into the whole being of man. And the experience remained in man's feeling when he awoke. He could then say: I have been graciously blessed by higher Spirits, whose life is beyond the planetary existence. Thus did these ancient peoples speak of that Hierarchy which embraces the Kyriotetes, the Dynamis and the Exusiai. What we are now describing are the ordinary states of consciousness of this ancient Asiatic period. The first two states of consciousness—the waking-sleeping, sleeping-waking and the sleep, in which the Third Hierarchy were present—were experienced by all men. And many, through a special endowment of Nature, experienced also the intervention of a deeper sleep, during which the Second Hierarchy played into human consciousness.

And the Initiates in the Mysteries,—they received a still further degree of consciousness. Of what nature was this? The answer is astonishing; for the fact is, the Initiate of the ancient East acquired the same consciousness that you have now by day! You develop it in a perfectly natural way in your second or third year of life. No ancient Oriental ever attained this state of consciousness in a natural way; he had to develop it artificially in himself. He had to develop it out of the waking-dreaming, dreaming-waking. As long as he went about with this waking-dreaming, dreaming-waking, he saw everywhere pictures, rendering only in more or less symbolic fashion what we see to-day in clear sharp outlines; as an Initiate however he attained to see things as we see them to-day in our ordinary consciousness. The Initiates, by means of their developed consciousness, attained to learn what every boy and girl learns at school to-day. The difference between their consciousness and the normal consciousness of to-day is not that the content was different. Of course the abstract forms of letters which we have to-day were unknown then; written characters were in more intimate connection with the things and processes of the Cosmos. Reading and writing were nevertheless learned in those days by the Initiates; although of course by them alone, for reading and writing can only be learned with that clear intellectual consciousness which is the natural one for the man of to-day.

Supposing that somewhere or other this world of the ancient East were to re-appear, inhabited by human beings having the kind of consciousness they had in those olden times, and you were to come among them with your consciousness of the present day, then for them you would all be initiates. The difference does not he in the content of consciousness. You would be initiates. But the moment the people recognised you as initiates, they would immediately drive you out of the land by every means in their power; for it would be quite clear to them that an initiated person ought not to know things in the way we know them to-day. He ought not, for example, to be able to write as we are able to write to-day. If I were to transport myself into the mind of a man of that time, and were to meet such a pseudo-initiate, that is to say, an ordinary clever man of the present day, I should find myself saying of him: He can write, he makes signs on paper that mean something, and he has no idea how devilish it is to do such a thing without carrying in him the consciousness that it may only be done in the service of divine cosmic consciousness; he does not know that a man may only make such signs on paper when he can feel how God works in his hand, in his very fingers, works in his soul, enabling it to express itself through these letters. Therein lies the whole difference between the initiates of olden time and the ordinary man of the present day. It is not a difference in the content of consciousness, but in the way of comprehending and understanding the thing. Read my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, of which a new edition has recently appeared, and you will find right at the beginning the same indication as to the essential nature of the initiate of olden times. It is in point of fact always so in the course of world-evolution. That which develops in man at a later period in a natural way had in former epochs to be won through initiation.

Through such a thing as I have brought to your notice, you will be able to detect the radical difference between the condition of mind and soul prevalent among the Eastern peoples of prehistoric times and that of a later civilisation. It was another mankind that could call Asia the last or lowest heaven and understand by that their own land, the Nature that was round about them. They knew where the lowest heaven was.

Compare this with the conceptions men have to-day. How far is the man of the present time from regarding all he sees around him as the lowest heaven! Most people cannot think of it as the ‘lowest’ heaven for the simple reason that they have no knowledge of any heaven at all!

Thus we see how in that ancient Eastern time the Spiritual entered deeply into Nature, into all natural existence. But now we find also among these peoples something which to most of us in the present day may easily appear extremely barbarous. To a man of that time it would have appeared terribly barbarous if someone had been able to write in the feeling and attitude of mind in which we to-day are able to write; it would have seemed positively devilish to him. But when we to-day on the other hand see how it was accepted in those times as something quite natural and as a matter of course that a people should remove from West to East, should conquer—often with great cruelty—another people already in occupation and make slaves of them, then such a thing is bound to appear barbarous to very many of us.

This is, however, broadly speaking, the substance of oriental history over the whole of Asia. Whilst men had as I have described, a high spiritual conception of things, their external history ran its course in a series of conquests and enslavements. Undoubtedly that appears to many people as extremely barbarous. To-day, although wars of aggression do still sometimes occur, men have an uneasy conscience about them. And this is true even of those who support and defend such wars; they are not quite easy in their conscience.

In those times, however, man had a perfectly clear conscience as regards these wars of aggression, he felt that such conquest was willed of the Gods. The longing for peace, the love of peace, that arose later and spread over a large part of Asia, is really the product of a much later civilisation. The acquisition of land by conquest and the enslavement of its population is a salient feature of the early civilisation of Asia. The farther we go back into prehistoric times, the more do we find this kind of conquest going on. The conquests of Xerxes and others of his time were in truth but faint shadows of what went on in earlier ages.

Now there is a quite definite principle underlying these conquests. As a result of the states of consciousness which I have described to you, man stood in an altogether different relation to his fellow man and also to the world around him. Certain differences between different parts of the inhabited Earth have to-day lost their chief meaning. At that time these differences made themselves felt in quite another way. Let me put before you, as an example, something which frequently occurred.

Suppose a conquering people has made its way from the North of Asia, spread itself out over some other region of Asia and made the population subject to it. What has really happened?

In characteristic instances that are a true expression of the trend of historical evolution, we find that the aggressors were—as a people or as a race—young, full of youth-forces. Now what does it mean to-day to be young? What does it mean for men of our present epoch of evolution? It means to bear within one in every moment of life sufficient of the forces of death to provide for those soul-forces that need the dying processes in man. For, as you know, we have within us, the sprouting, germinating forces of life, but these life forces are not the forces that make us reflective, thoughtful beings; on the contrary, they make us weak, unconscious. The death forces, the forces of destruction, which are also continually active within us—and are overcome again and again during sleep by the life forces, so that not until the end of life do we gather together all the death forces in us in the one final event of death—these forces it is that induce reflection, self-consciousness. This is how it is with present-day humanity. Now a young race, a young people, such as I have described, suffered from its own over-strong life forces, and continually had the feeling: I feel my blood beating perpetually against the walls of my body. I cannot endure it. My consciousness will not become reflective consciousness. Because of my very youthfulness I cannot develop my full humanity.

An ordinary man would not have spoken thus, but the initiates spoke in this way in the Mysteries, and it was the initiates who guided and directed the whole course of history.

Here was then a people who had too much youth, too much life forces, too little in them of that which could bring about reflection and thought. They left their land and conquered a region where an older people lived, a people which had in some way or other taken into itself the forces of death, because it had already become decadent. The younger nation went out against the older and brought it into subjection. It was not necessary that a blood-bond should be established between conquerors and enslaved. That which worked unconsciously in the soul between them worked in a rejuvenating way; it worked on the reflective faculties. What the conqueror required from the slaves whom he now had in his court was influence upon his consciousness. He had only to turn his attention to these slaves and the longing for unconsciousness was quenched in his soul, reflective consciousness began to dawn.

What we have to attain to-day as individuals was attained at that time by living together with others. A people who faced the world as conquerors and lords, a young people, not possessed of full powers of reflection, needed around it, so to say, a people that had in it more of the forces of death. In overcoming another people, it won through to what it needed for its own evolution.

And so we find that these Oriental conflicts, often so terrible and presenting to us such a barbarous aspect, are in reality nothing else than the impulses of human evolution. They had to take place. Mankind would not have been able to develop on the earth, had it not been for these terrible wars and struggles that seem to us so barbarous.

Already in those olden times the Initiates of the Mysteries saw the world as it is seen to-day. Only they united with this perception a different attitude of mind and soul. For them, all that they experienced in clear, sharp outlines—even as we to-day experience external objects in sharp outlines, when we perceive with our senses—was something that came from the Gods, that came even for human consciousness from the Gods. For how did external objects present themselves to an Initiate of those times? There was perhaps a flash of lightning (to take a simple and obvious illustration). You know very well what a flash of lightning looks like to a man of to-day. The men of olden time did not see it thus. They saw living spiritual Beings moving in the sky, and the sharp line of the flash disappeared completely. They saw a host, a procession of spiritual Beings hurrying forward over or in cosmic space. The lightning as such they did not see. They saw a host of spirits hovering and moving through cosmic space.

The Initiate also saw, with the rest, this spiritual host, but he had developed within him the perception that we have to-day, and so for him, the picture began to grow dim and the heavenly host gradually disappeared from view, and then the flash of lightning could become manifest.

The whole of Nature, in the form in which we see it to-day, could only be attained in olden times through initiation. But how did man feel towards such knowledge? He did not by any means look on the knowledge thus attained with the indifference with which knowledge and truth are regarded to-day. There was a strong moral element in man's experience of knowledge. If we turn our gaze to what happened with the neophytes of the Mysteries, we find we have to describe it in the following way. When a few individuals, after undergoing severe inner tests and trials, had been initiated into the view of Nature, which to-day is accessible to all, they had quite naturally this feeling: consider the man with his ordinary consciousness. He sees the host of elementary beings riding through the air. But just because he has such a perception, he is devoid of free will. He is entirely given up to the Divine-spiritual world. For in this waking-dreaming, dreaming-waking, the will does not move in freedom, rather is it something that streams into man as Divine will. And the Initiate, who saw the lightning come forth out of these Imaginations, learned to say: I must be a man who is free to move in the world without the Gods, one for whom the Gods cast out the world-content into the void.

Now you must understand, this condition would have been unbearable for the Initiate, had there not been for him moments that compensated for it. Such moments he did have. For while on the one hand the Initiate learned to experience Asia as God-forsaken, Spirit-forsaken, he learned also to know a still deeper state of consciousness than that which reached up to the Second Hierarchy. Knowing the world bereft of God, he learned also to know the world of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

At a certain time in the epoch of Asiatic evolution, approximately in the middle—later on we shall have to speak more exactly of the dates—the condition of consciousness of the Initiates was such that they went about on Earth with very nearly the perception of the kingdoms of the Earth which is possessed by modern man; they felt it, however, in their limbs. They felt their limbs set free from the Gods in a God-bereft earthly substance.

In compensation for this, however, they met in this godless land the high Gods of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. As Initiates they learned to know, no longer the grey-green spiritual Beings that were the Pictures of the forest, the Pictures of the trees, they learned as Initiates to know the forest devoid of Spirit. Theirs, however, was the compensation of meeting in the forest Beings of the First Hierarchy, there they would meet some Being from the Kingdom of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

All this, understood as giving form to the social life of humanity, is the essential feature in the historical evolution of the ancient East. And the driving force for further evolution lies in the search for an adjustment between young races and old races, so that the young races may mature through association with the old, with the souls of those whom they have brought into subjection. However far back we look into Asia, everywhere we find how the young races who cannot of themselves develop the reflective faculties, set out to find these in wars of aggression.

When, however, we turn our gaze away from Asia to the land of Greece, we find a somewhat different development. Over in Greece, in the time of the full flower of Greek culture, we find a people who did indeed know how to grow old, but were unable to permeate the growing old with full spirituality. I have many times had to draw attention to the characteristic Greek utterance: Better a beggar in the world of the living than a king in the realm of the shades. Neither to death outside in Nature, nor to death in man, could the Greek adapt himself. He could not find his true relation with death. On the other hand, however, he had this death within him. And so in the Greek we find, not a longing for a reflective consciousness, but apprehension and fear of death.

Such a fear of death was not felt by the young Eastern races; they went out to make conquests, when as a race they found themselves unable to experience death in the right way. The inner conflict, however, which the Greeks experienced with death became in its turn an inner impulse compelling humanity, and led to what we know as the Trojan War. The Greeks had no need to seek death at the hands of a foreign race in order to acquire the power of reflection. The Greeks needed to come into a right relation with what they felt and experienced of death, they needed to find the inner living mystery of death. And this led to that great conflict between the Greeks and the people in Asia from whom they had originated. The Trojan war is a war of sorrow, a war of apprehension and fear. We see facing one another the Greeks, who felt death within them but did not know, as it were, what to do with it, and the Oriental races who were bent on conquest, who wanted death and had it not. The Greeks had death, but were at a loss how to adapt themselves to it. They needed the infusion of another element, before they could discover its secret. Achilles, Agamemnon—all these men bore death within them, but could not adapt themselves to it. They look across to Asia. There in Asia they see a people who are in the reverse position, who are suffering under the direct influence of the opposite condition. Over there are men who do not feel death in the intense way it is felt by the Greeks themselves, over there are men to whom death is something abounding in life.

All this has been brought to expression in a wonderful way by Homer. Wherever he sets the Trojans over against the Greeks, everywhere he lets us see this contrast. You may see it, for instance, in the characteristic figures of Hector and Achilles. And in this contrast is expressed what is taking place on the frontier of Asia and Europe. Asia, in those olden times, had, as it were, a superabundance of life over death, yearned after death. Europe had, on the Greek soil, a superabundance of death in man, and man was at a loss to find his true relation to it. Thus from a second point of view we see Europe and Asia set over against one another.

In the first place, we had the transition from rhythmic memory to temporal memory; now we have these two quite different experiences in respect of death in the human organisation. To-morrow we will consider more in detail the contrast, which I have only been able to indicate at the close of to-day's lecture, and so approach a fuller understanding of the transitions that lead over from Asia to Europe. For these had a deep and powerful influence on the evolution of man, and without understanding them we can really arrive at no understanding of the evolution we are passing through at the present day.

I have received a question regarding the colors, and I have been asked to say something about it.

First, I will address the question that was asked first here. That is the question about the world view that Dante had. So the gentleman has read Dante. And when you read Dante, this poet from the Middle Ages, you see that he had a very different world view than we do.

Now I ask you to consider the following. People, as I have often told you, think that what people know today is actually the only thing that is true. And when earlier people thought differently, people imagine: well, that was just the way it was. And they waited until they could learn something sensible about the world.

You see, what people learn in school today, what becomes second nature to them in terms of the world view, has actually only been around since Copernicus first conceived of this world view. According to this 16th-century world view, it was imagined that the sun is at the center of our entire planetary system. Mercury (see drawing on page 70), then Venus, then the Earth revolved around the Sun. The Moon revolves around the Earth. Mars comes next, revolving around the Sun. Then there are many other planets, tiny in relation to the universe, which are called planetoids – oids, meaning similar to planets. Then comes Jupiter, then Saturn. And then Uranus and Neptune; I don't need to draw them, because they're not visible from here. That's how we imagine it today, we learn it at school, that the sun stands still in the middle. Actually, these lines, in which the planets revolve, are somewhat elongated. That's not what matters to us today. So we imagine that first Mercury, then Venus, then the Earth revolves around the Sun. Now you know that the Earth orbits the Sun in a year, or 365 days, six hours, and so on. Saturn orbits once in about thirty years, so much slower than the Earth. Jupiter, for example, orbits in twelve years, so also slower than the Earth. Mercury orbits quite quickly. So the closer the planets are to the Sun, the faster they orbit.

Well, that's not the right idea today, it's what they teach in school. But we only need to go back to the 14th century, around 1300, and such an extraordinarily great mind as Dante, who wrote the Divine Comedy, had a completely different idea. This goes back a few centuries to before Copernicus. And the greatest man of all, the greatest man in terms of intellect, Dante, had a completely different idea.

Now, today, let's not decide whether one is right or the other is right. Let us just imagine how Dante, the greatest mind of his time, conceived the matter in a time - now it is 1900, then it was 1300 - that is only six hundred years ago. Let us not think that one is wrong and the other is right, but let us just put ourselves in Dante's shoes and see how he imagined it. He imagined (see drawing): The Earth is at the center of the world system. And this Earth is not just there so that the Moon, for example, reflects the light that it receives from the Sun back to the Earth, but this Earth is not only surrounded, but completely enveloped by the sphere of the Moon. The Earth is completely inside the sphere of the Moon. Dante imagined the Moon to be much larger than the Earth. He imagined: That is a very fine body, which is much larger than the earth. It is therefore fine, but much larger. And what you see is only a small piece, namely the solid piece of the moon. And this solid piece, it only goes around the earth. Can you imagine that? With Dante, it is so that the earth is inside the moon, and what you see of the moon, that is only a small, fixed piece of the moon. That goes around. But actually we are all inside the forces of the moon. I have drawn that in red.

And now Dante imagined: Yes, if the Earth were not inside these forces of the Moon, then, by some miracle, people would come to Earth, but they would not be able to reproduce. It is the reproductive forces that are contained in the red-drawn area. They also flow through people and make them capable of reproduction. So Dante imagined: The Earth is a solid, small body; the moon is a fine - much finer than the air -, a fine large body in which the Earth is inside like a core. You can imagine it as if the Earth were a plum kernel in the soft flesh of a plum. And out there is the solid piece; that moves around. But that there (see drawing, moon) is also always there, and that causes that man is capable of reproduction, and the animals are also capable of reproduction.

Now he imagined further: The Earth is not only in the moon's forces, but the Earth is also in other forces, which I will show here in yellow, and they permeate everything. So the moon's forces are in there, stuck in there, so that the Earth and the moon are in turn in there in this yellow. And there is another solid piece. This solid piece is Mercury, and it goes around there. And if man were not constantly permeated by these Mercury forces, he could not digest. So Dante imagined: the Moon forces cause reproduction; the Mercury forces, in which we are also always immersed, only finer than the Moon forces, cause us to digest and cause animals to digest. Otherwise, our body would be nothing more than a chemical laboratory, he imagined. The fact that our body functions differently than a chemical laboratory, where you only mix the substances and then separate them again, is caused by the Mercury forces. Mercury is larger than the Earth and larger than the Moon.

And now all this is in turn contained in an even larger sphere, as Dante called it. So we are also immersed in the forces that come from this planet, from Venus. So we are immersed in all these forces, which permeate us. We are also permeated by the forces of Venus. And the fact that we are permeated by the forces of Venus means that we can not only digest, but also absorb the digested into the blood. Venus forces live in our blood. Everything that is connected with our blood comes from the forces of Venus. This is how Dante imagined it. And these Venus forces also cause, for example, what a person has in his blood as feelings of love; hence “Venus”.

The next sphere is the one we are in, and there the sun revolves as a fixed body. So we are in the sun everywhere. For Dante in 1300, the sun is not just the body that rises and sets, but the sun is everywhere. When I stand here, I am inside the sun. Because what rises and sets, what moves around, is only a piece of the sun. That's how he imagined it. And it is mainly the powers of the sun that are active in the human heart.

So you see: the moon, human and also animal reproduction; Mercury: human digestion; Venus: human blood formation; the sun: the human heart.

Now Dante imagined that all of this is in turn contained in the huge sphere of Mars. There is Mars. And this Mars, in which we are also embedded, is just as connected to the human heart as the sun is, and is also connected to everything that concerns our breathing and especially our speech, to everything that is the respiratory organs. That is in Mars. So Mars: respiratory organs. And then it continues. The next sphere is the Jupiter sphere. We are again immersed in the forces of Jupiter. Now, Jupiter is very important; it is connected with everything that is our brain, actually our sense organs, our brain with the sense organs. Jupiter is therefore connected with the sense organs. And now comes the outermost planet, Saturn. In this, everything is included again. And Saturn is connected with our thinking organ.

Moon: Human Reproduction
Mercury: Human Digestion
Venus: Human Hematopoiesis
Sun: Human Heart
Mars: Respiratory Organs
Jupiter: Sensory Organs
Saturn: Organs of Thought

So you see, that Dante, who was only six hundred years behind us, imagined the whole world differently. He imagined, for example, Saturn as the largest planet, albeit made of fine material, but as the largest planet, in which we are embedded. And these Saturn forces, our thinking organs bring about that we can think.

Outside of all this, but in such a way that we are also inside it, is the fixed starry sky. So there are the fixed stars, namely the zodiacal fixed stars (see drawing). And even greater is that which moves everything, the first mover. But it is not only up there, but it is also the first mover here everywhere. And behind it is eternal rest, which is also everywhere. That's how Dante imagined it.

Now, today's man can say: It's just that people saw all this imperfectly; but today we have finally come to know how things are. – Of course, that can be said on the one hand. But Dante was not exactly stupid either, and what the others see today, he also saw. So he was not exactly stupid. And the others from whom he took it, they all believed it back then, they were not all foolish people either, but they imagined it differently. And now the question is: how is it that in world history, people used to think differently about the whole world, and then suddenly in the 16th century everything is turned upside down and a completely different idea of the world is presented?

That is, of course, a very important question, gentlemen. And you can't get around saying that these earlier ideas were just childish, but that these people saw something completely different from what people see today. You have to be clear about that: they saw something completely different. Today's people are terribly good at thinking. Yes, today's people are so good at thinking that the ancients could not match them. Thinking had only just emerged. The ancients always had a terrible respect for Saturn, which is connected with the organ of thinking. They thought that Saturn corrupts the human being. Too much thinking is not good. Saturn has always been considered a dark planet. And the forces that came from Saturn, they thought, if they were too strong in a person, he would become very melancholy. He would think all the time and become melancholy. So these people did not particularly like the forces of Saturn, and they imagined them much more in images. They did less calculating. Today we calculate everything. This whole world view here from Copernicus is calculated. But these ancient people did not calculate. But these ancient people knew something else that today's people do not know. They knew that everywhere in the world, wherever we look, there are many forces. But the forces that are within man are not in that which is seen with the eye, but are within the invisible.

And so Dante said to himself: There is a visible world, and there is an invisible world. The visible world, well, that is the one we see. When we look out at night, we see the stars, the moon, Venus and so on. That is the visible world. But the invisible world is also there. And the invisible world is these - they were called spheres back then. The invisible world consists of these spheres. And a distinction was made between the world that is seen with the eyes, which was called the physical world. That was the physical world. And then there was the world that is not seen with the eyes. That is the world that Dante meant, and it was called the ethereal world. So the ethereal world, the world that consists of such a fine substance that you can see through it all the time.

Yes, gentlemen, I don't know if it has happened to you, but I have met people who have claimed that there is no air because you can't see it. They said: Yes, when I go from there to there, there is nothing there; I'm not walking through something. — You know that there is air where I am walking through. But, as I said, I have met people who were not as schooled as today's people are schooled, and they didn't believe that there was air; they said: There is nothing there. - Dante, who knew that there is not only air, but also the moon, Venus and so on. It is exactly the same. They say: I walk through the air. Dante said: I walk through the moon, I walk through Venus, I walk through Mars. — That's the whole difference. And all that you do not see in the usual way, and what you can not perceive by the usual physical and chemical instruments, that was called the ethereal world. So Dante described a completely different world, an ethereal world. And what is the reason for the fact that six centuries ago Dante saw the world differently? The reason is that he described something different, that he described the invisible, the ethereal world. And Copernicus said nothing other than: Oh, let's not worry about the ethereal world and let's describe the physical world. That is where progress lies. One should not imagine that Dante was a “fool”, but he simply described the etheric world and not the physical. The physical world was not particularly important to him. He described the etheric world.

Now, you see, this situation basically only changed significantly at the end of the 18th century. Until the end of the 18th century, people still knew something about this etheric world. In the 19th century, they no longer knew anything about it. We come to this again through anthroposophy. In the 19th century, people knew nothing about this etheric world.

Regarding the other question:

If we go back to the 18th century, people did the following, for example. They said: Here we have a candle; there is the wick; there the candle is burning. Now you know that when a candle is burning, it is bluish in the middle and yellowish at the edge. You can work this out in detail using what we have said about colors. Namely, in the middle it is dark, and here it is light (on the outside at the edge). And the consequence of this is that one sees the darkness through the light. And you know, as I told you the other day, when one sees the darkness through the light, it appears blue.

That is why the inside of the burning candle appears blue, because you see the darkness through the light there. I just wanted to draw your attention to this so that you see: the color thoughts, the color views that I told you last time can be applied to everything.

But now you know that when the candle burns, it becomes less and less. The flame is at the top, and what melts here (on the candle) merges into the flame. Finally, the candle is no longer there. What is in the candle has spread into the air.

Now imagine someone, let's say in 1750, so not even two hundred years ago; who said: Yes, when the candle burns and everything disappears into thin air, then something of the candle goes out into the free space. Ultimately, there is nothing left. So the whole candle must go out into free space. He went on to say that it consists of very fine matter, fire matter. This fine fire matter connects with the flame and goes out in all directions. So that the man in 1750 still said: There in this wax, there is a substance that is only piled up, sealed. When the flame makes it fine, it goes out into the free space. This substance was called phlogiston in those days. So something goes out of the candle. The fuel, the phlogiston goes away from the candle.

Now, at the end of the 18th century, another one came along. He said: No, I don't really believe the story that there is a phlogiston that goes out into the world. I don't believe that! - What did he do? He did the following. He also burned the whole thing, but he burned it in such a way that he collected everything that had formed there. He burned it in a closed room so that he could collect everything that could form there. And then he weighed it. And then he found that it does not become lighter. So he weighed the whole candle first, and then he weighed the piece that was left when the candle had burned so far (it is drawn); and what was formed during the burning, he caught it, weighed it and found that it was then a little heavier than before. So, when something burns, he said, what is formed is not lighter, but becomes heavier.

And this person who did that was Lavoisier. So what was it that gave him a completely different view? Yes, it was because he used the scales first, he weighed everything. And then he said: if this is heavier, then something must not have gone away, phlogiston must not have gone away, but something must have been added. That is oxygen, he said. So, first, it was imagined that the phlogiston flew away, and then it was imagined that when something burns, oxygen actually enters, and combustion is not the dispersion of phlogiston, but precisely the attraction of oxygen. This has come about because Lavoisier weighed first. In the past, people did not weigh.

You see, gentlemen, here you can grasp with your hands what actually happened. At the end of the 18th century, people no longer believed in anything that could not be weighed. Of course, phlogiston cannot be weighed. Phlogiston is already leaving. Oxygen is also approaching. But oxygen, when it combines, can also be weighed. But the phlogiston cannot be captured. Why not? Yes, everything that Copernicus observed in Mars and Jupiter is that which is heavy when weighed. What Copernicus calls Mars is that which, if placed on a large scale, would weigh something. Likewise, what he calls Jupiter. He merely observed the heavy bodies.

Dante did not just observe heavy bodies, but precisely that which has the opposite of heaviness, that which always wants to escape into space. And phlogiston is simply one of the things that Dante observed, and oxygen is one of the things that Copernicus observed. Phlogiston is the invisible that dissipates, the ether. Oxygen is a substance that can be weighed.

So you see how materialism came about. This is something that can become extremely important to you. Materialism came about because people began to believe only in what they could weigh. But what Dante still saw cannot be weighed. If you walk around here on earth, you can also be weighed. You are heavy, and if you call only what is heavy a human being, then you have only the earthly human being. But just imagine that this earthly human being becomes a corpse. Everything heavy, everything that can be weighed, becomes a corpse. Then the corpse lies there. You can still live in what is not heavy, in what surrounds the earth, and what materialism denies, what Dante still speaks of, what we must speak of again, that it is there. So that we can say: When man lays aside his outer, heavy body, which can be weighed, he remains in the etheric body for the time being.

But now I want to tell you what is actually contained in this etheric body. You see, when there is a chair here, I can see this chair. I have an image of this chair within me. But if I turn around, I don't see it. But I still have an image of it inside me, really still an image. This image is the memory image.

Now think of the memory images. Think that a long time ago you experienced something. For example, let's say you were somewhere and saw people dancing merrily in a marketplace and so on. I could also mention something else. You have kept the image. That is no longer there, gentlemen, what you have as an image, especially no longer there among the things that can be weighed, that are heavy, it is no longer there anywhere. It can only be imagined in you. You can go around today and, if you have a vivid imagination, you can easily imagine what it was all like, right down to the colors of those who jumped around. You have the whole picture in front of you. But you won't think for a moment that what you saw back then can be weighed. You can put this on a scale. The individual people have their own weight. But what you carry within you today as memory pictures cannot be put on the scales. It does not exist in that form. It has remained, although the thing itself is no longer there in the physical sense. How is it, then, that what is in you is a memory picture? It is in you in an ethereal form. It is no longer in you in the physical sense, but in an ethereal one.

Now imagine you are swimming and, by some misfortune, you are close to drowning; but you are saved. Such people, who were close to drowning and have been saved, have mostly told of a very interesting memory picture. This memory picture can also be had when you are not drowning, but when you are training in spiritual science, anthroposophy. Those who were close to drowning have an overview of their entire earthly life, right back to childhood. Everything rises up. Suddenly a memory picture is there. Why? Yes, gentlemen, because the physical body, which is now in the water, is going through something very special. And then you have to remember something that I told you at the time. I told you: if you have water here and a body in it, the body in the water becomes lighter. It loses as much of its weight as the water weighs, which, as a watery body, is just as large as itself.

It's a nice story about how this was discovered. It was discovered in ancient Greece that every body in the water becomes lighter. Archimedes thought a lot about such things. And once Archimedes was bathing. The people were highly astonished – yes, in Greece they bathed in such a way that the others saw it too; it was in Sicily, which belonged to Greece at the time – the people were highly astonished when Archimedes suddenly jumped out of the bath and shouted: Eureka! Eureka! Eureka! That means: I've found it! – The people thought: What on earth could he have found in the bath? He was submerged up to his head in the bath, with one leg sticking out of the water, and he realized that when he took one leg out of the water, it became heavier; when he put it back in, it became lighter again. That was the first time he had realized in the bath that every body becomes lighter when it is in the water. This is the so-called Archimedes' principle. So every body is lighter when it is in the water. So also, when a person is drowning, his physical body becomes lighter, very light. Now, what he has in the etheric body can still hold on, and that is where all his memories arise. And you see, the memories arise from the bottom because he is no longer so heavy. When a person dies, when he has completely left his physical body, his physical body, he is very light. He lives entirely in the etheric sphere. And after his death, a person always has a complete memory of what he has experienced on earth, up to childhood. That is the first experience one has after death: a complete memory.

This memory can be examined. Namely, it can be examined by training oneself in the way I have described in my book: “How to Know Higher Worlds.” Then one can always have this memory. Then one knows that the soul becomes independent of the body. Then it first receives this memory, because at first it does not live in the material that can be discarded, but on the contrary, it wants to go out into the world. That is the first state after death. Then one remembers. I would like to describe the second state to you next time. But now I want to describe something that prepares us. Because the question that has been asked is an awfully difficult one.

If we consider that Dante had a conception of the world that modern man regards as childish, then what he further imagines is even more childish for modern man. For if there is a man standing for Dante on the earth (it is being drawn), then Dante imagines: Here on Earth, turned away – so if you go through there – you would have what he imagines as hell inside the Earth. So he thinks: out there, there is celestial ether everywhere. But if I were to drill into the Earth, there is hell on the other side. Before I come out of the Earth, there is hell.

Now, to see this as childish is terribly easy for today's man. One need only say: Yes, but Dante would not have needed to stand there, but here, then he could have drilled in there, and then there would have been (on the other side) hell! - Of course, today's man can say that because today's man knows that there are people living on the other side as well. So he can easily say: Yes, Dante was just stupid; he was not able to understand that the earth has people on all sides, and that therefore hell could be just as easily here as there. Because the one who is standing there now receives heaven from that side, and for him hell would then be on the other side.

You see, gentlemen, that is how it is. For the physical world, it can only be like this: if there were heaven, hell could only be here; for the physical world, it could only be like this. If a chair is standing somewhere, it can only stand there. There is no other place where it could be.

But that is not how Dante imagined it. He did not imagine the physical world at all, but he did imagine forces. And he said: Yes, when a person stands there, and he moves with his own etheric body in the upward direction, then he becomes lighter and lighter. Then he overcomes more and more the force of gravity. But when he goes into the earth, he has to make more and more effort, and this effort is greatest when he has reached the other end. There everything presses on him. There the heaviness is greatest. It does not depend on there being some particular hell there, but on having gone through it to get there. (see Drawing)

And if Dante imagined it that way, then he could also stand there (at the other end). When he moves out from there, he becomes lighter and lighter, as he enters more and more into the ether. But when he moves into the earth, he has to go through that (heaviness). Then he experiences the state where I have drawn green; but earlier, where I have drawn yellow. So it depends on that. Dante does not say that this is precisely where hell is, but rather that when someone has to work their way through the earth with their etheric body, it is so difficult that wherever they go, whether up or down, they experience hell. It is only in recent times that people have begun to imagine hell as a specific place. Dante had in mind the experience that one has when one, as an etheric human, has to work one's way through the earth.

If someone says: Dante was stupid – then that reflects badly on him, because he is stupid enough to say that Dante imagined that hell was at the other end of the earth. No, Dante imagined: wherever I fly above the earth into heaven, I become lighter in soul; wherever I go into the earth, wherever I go to the other end: hellish.

So the whole idea was different. And only when you can take into consideration the very different way in which people have imagined it, can you also understand what I will answer you next time: What remains of the earthly man when he has passed through the gate of death?

If today was a little more difficult than usual, you must bear in mind that it was because of the question. I hope it has become a little clearer. We will then move on on Saturday and look at the human being when he passes through death and what then becomes of him.

We have tried to throw some light upon the character of our present age as it shows itself in relation to the working of cosmic law. This is a matter that should not be lightly passed over. For when we speak of the spiritual forces, the spiritual influences of a particular age, these are likewise the forces and impulses which are working in the soul of each one of us. We cannot understand our own souls, unless we are able to place ourselves in right relation to these forces and influences of our age which are at the same time the spiritual forces and impulses of our own souls. In whatever way individuals among you may account for your belief in something that is given in Spiritual Science, it is absolutely true that in the souls of all those who fairly and honestly come to Spiritual Science there lives, perhaps unconsciously, an urge that comes from the genuine spiritual impulses of our time.

In the last lecture I endeavoured to show you that at the present time we are living in what one may call the Michael Age. An understanding for spiritual things is now becoming possible for an increasing number of souls. Whereas during the course of previous centuries it was possible to acquire an understanding above all for the things of external natural science, for physical, chemical and physiological laws, for everything related to external space and time, whereas during the Gabriel Age understanding was awakened for all that went from triumph to triumph in the natural sciences, and inclined men to a scientific conception of the world, we are now entering upon an age in which it will be just as possible to understand the things of the spirit.

At no time in human evolution have two successive epochs been so radically different from one another as that which has just run its course and the epoch upon which we are now entering. And never before have souls been more alien to one another than will be the souls of those who incline to what is spiritual and the souls who still adhere to what past centuries have brought. Nor will it be long before those who believe they stand firmly in materialistic Monism will be quite out of date in comparison with those who are earnestly seeking an understanding of super-sensible worlds. For since the last third of the nineteenth century a spiritual ‘tidal wave’ from higher worlds has been flowing into our world, and making it possible for man to understand the way in which human and world evolution are spiritually guided.

My dear friends, nearly two thousand years ago the event took place which you all know under the name of the Mystery of Golgotha. Of this Mystery of Golgotha we have often spoken here. We have approached it from many different sides, and have seen it to be the great centre of gravity of all human evolution. It has been possible to show quite clearly that without reference to any religious views or creed, but purely out of spiritual science itself, an understanding of this Event is possible, and in such a way that one may expect understanding from every shade of current religious belief. We have also spoken at some length about the reasons why certain people are not prepared to accept the Christ Event as the great centre of gravity of human evolution. But now we must turn our minds to something else which was mentioned yesterday in the public lecture.¹

It might well be that out of prejudice a person wished to know nothing of what took place in a certain small country at the beginning of our era, did not want to trouble himself about what we call the Mystery of Golgotha. Very well, let us even assume that it would be natural for him to imagine the whole course of history in such a way that what happened on Golgotha could be struck out. Let us make that hypothesis. In the course of his study of the evolution of mankind, such a person will nevertheless discover a special characteristic of that age. We spoke of this yesterday. The epoch immediately preceding the Mystery of Golgotha was a time of transition in the attitude and direction of the human soul. From having been directed more to the surrounding world in an external way, man's soul began to be turned within to its own inner nature—and this, quite apart from the Mystery of Golgotha. At the time into which the Mystery of Golgotha was placed, the great transition was occurring from a life in outward surroundings to a more inward life. And anyone can feel this, even if he ignore the Mystery of Golgotha altogether. Mankind was in that time at a turning-point. It is not necessary even to speak of the Mystery of Golgotha, one can point to quite other events to show that formerly man's life had an outward direction, but that afterwards those who are animated by the impulse of the age, by the true genius of the age, begin to make their life more inward.

When anything of this kind happens, it does not happen without being prepared beforehand. I have no desire to quote the trite saying: Nature, or history, does not proceed by leaps. The expression holds good only within certain limits. Even the blossom is already prepared in the green leaves—although here we have, have we not, a clear case of a ‘leap’ in development? Similarly there was a preparation beforehand for what appears as a sudden incision in human history at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. When we go deeply into what we can find of the teaching and outlook of the last centuries of ancient Hebraism, we find a spirit—of a Hebrew kind, of course—a spirit of preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha; and not in Hebraism alone, for in other regions of the earth too we can find such a spirit of preparation.

In Hebraism new features began to show themselves of quite a different order from those that were there formerly. In the sixth century before the Mystery of Golgotha we find an altogether new mode of regarding the world, compared with what we find earlier in the spiritual life of the Hebrews; it marks a new epoch. This reveals itself clearly enough to the careful observer. And if it shows itself here in a different manner since the old Hebrew people were differently constituted, yet it is the same spirit, expressing itself differently, which prevails in Greek philosophy and even in the Greek art of poetry, in the last centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha. We find it everywhere. One has only to make a serious study of spirits like Plato and Aristotle,—yes, and even Socrates, to see that this turning point is everywhere being prepared.

Now events that happen here on earth are guided and controlled from the super-sensible world. Before the incision entered into the physical life of the earth which we call the Event of Golgotha, the earlier guidance of evolution sent out a Messenger—at that time still a Messenger of Jehovah—to guide this event. He was the Spirit who prepared the period of civilisation up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, the same Spirit who is the Leader of our own culture epoch just beginning, the Spirit we have called Michael. Just as Michael gives its character to our age, so did he give its character to the whole civilisation which prepared the way for the Mystery of Golgotha. The Power however who sent forth Michael from the higher worlds was at that time Jahve or Jehovah.

In those days it was not as it is in our time, when, as soon as one speaks of spiritual things, the objection is so easily raised: You often speak of the Folk Spirit or Time Spirit, and of other spiritual facts, but you rarely speak of God.—People do not notice why one does not speak of God,—for the reason, namely, that no human concept can embrace that in which we live and move and have our being. Here one also meets with points of view which are, from a certain aspect, very interesting. When I gave a public lecture recently in a certain town, and as the practice often is, questions were sent up to be answered, one man put a very clever question. He asked: “If logically one recognises an object through the fact that one looks at it as an object and can stand before it, if we cannot have an objective picture of an object which we have in ourselves—like the pupil of the eye, for example—because we cannot look at it, then how does this fit in with the opinion of many Mystics that one must remove oneself from God in order to be able to contemplate Him?”

Certainly many Mystics have maintained that one must withdraw from God in order to contemplate Him. It was a clever question, but the only answer that can be given is: “You may withdraw from God as much as you please, but you still remain in Him, you cannot get out of God.” Logic may often be very logical but fall short of reality.

In times when men stood nearer to the spiritual, they had a feeling of reverence for the Divinity in which we live and move and have our being, the Divinity which it was not even always right to call by name; and for that reason the ancient Hebrews, in order not to pronounce the name, used the expression the ‘Countenance of Jehovah.’ In man, the countenance is what he turns outwards, that by which he reveals himself. It is not the whole of man. One knows a man as he is in his inner being by the features of his countenance, but one does not on that account presume to speak of the whole man when one means his face or countenance.

At that time therefore, Michael was called the ‘Countenance of Jehovah’; men preferred to speak of the representative through whom Jahve revealed Himself to mankind as in an external countenance. Even in intimate circles they would rather name the representative than speak of Jahve Himself. Michael was in fact at that time looked upon as the spiritual Regent of the age, as the Messenger of Jahve, as the member of the Hierarchies from whom streamed forth the impulse that was to come for the understanding of he Event of Golgotha.

In the intervening centuries other Beings from the rank of the Archangels have had the guidance of mankind's spiritual evolution, but the Being who had the guidance when preparation had to be made for the Mystery of Golgotha is the same Being as is now again sending the floods of super-sensible life down into the world of the senses. There was a Michael Age then, and a Michael Age is the one that is now beginning. There is, however, a vast difference between that Michael Age and ours which has just begun.

It would take us too far to-day to describe what kind of understanding men have been able to bring to the Mystery of Golgotha during the period which has elapsed between that Michael Age and ours. There have been deeply fervent souls who out of a more or less intense need for belief have gained a relation to the Mystery of Golgotha and its Bearer; there have been deeply religious natures all through the centuries since the Mystery of Golgotha down to our own time. But the Mystery of Golgotha is a Mystery which, notwithstanding that it took place as a real fact, at the beginning of modern times, is yet of such a nature that human souls cannot presume to understand it fully without preparation. New epochs will continually arise which will bring a greater deepening to human souls, and which will have an increasing understanding for what happened in the Mystery of Golgotha. The Event itself stands there as the great turning-point in human evolution; the understanding of the Event will continuously grow and ripen in the spiritual evolution of the Earth. This fact cannot be engraved deeply enough into our minds and hearts.

Let us grasp in a certain metaphysical abstraction what actually took place at that time. We have described it from various points of view; let us now choose a more abstract point of view, but one which, if we allow it to work upon us, can call forth a deep feeling in our souls.

When with ordinary powers of observation and even with scientific observation we study the things around us, we learn to know by means of ordinary thinking and ordinary science the laws of existence in the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms. These laws all culminate in an ideal,—to understand life. But life is not to be understood here on earth. Occultism alone can give knowledge of life; external science can never fathom it. It would be the wildest fantasy to believe that one could ever penetrate the laws of life as one can physical or chemical laws. To do so remains an ideal; it can never be reached. On the physical plane there is never any possibility of giving a knowledge of life. This knowledge of life must remain the preserve of super-sensible knowledge.

But now, impossible as is a sense knowledge of life, equally impossible is a super-sensible knowledge of death. There are conditions of terrible isolation of consciousness in the spiritual worlds, there is such a thing as a temporary immersion as though into a condition of sleep, but there is no death in the higher worlds. Death is impossible in the higher worlds. All the Beings we have learned to know as Beings of the higher Hierarchies have this distinguishing characteristic; they do not know death, they never pass through death. Just as we are told in the Bible that the Angels covered their faces before the secret of birth, the secret of Man's becoming, so must they and all other Higher Beings cover their faces before death. For death is an event that is only possible in the sense world, not in the super-sensible.

Among all the Beings of the higher worlds there was One and One alone Who had to go through death,—we may also say, Who willed to go through death; that is, the Christ. To that end He had to come down to Earth. In order that a Being of the higher worlds might be able to accomplish what was necessary for Earth evolution, the Christ had to descend from a world in which there is no death to the world in which there is death.

If such ideas are at first abstract, it is for us to change them into feeling and experience. The full understanding of what I have now described in an abstract way will become a concern of the evolution of humanity. With a certain reverence, together with humility and delicacy let us approach to-day the secret of the Mystery of Golgotha.

For what was it that really happened then? It has often been described. The Christ descended from the super-sensible worlds into the world in which He has since lived as a hidden Force—a Force however which will make itself manifest from this century onwards. He descended out of a world in which there is no death, into the world of death, and He—this Force—has united Himself with the Earth; from being a cosmic Force He has become a Force of the Earth. He went through death, in order to come to life in Earth existence, in order to be within the Earth world. And all through the centuries there has come to expression in souls which were filled with this Impulse the striving of mankind to understand Him. But the nearer evolution approached the close of the Gabriel Age, the more this understanding receded, until to-day just where there should be understanding, it is sadly lacking, and materialism prevails not only in modern science but consequently in Theology too. The real understanding of the Christ Impulse has grown less and less. Materialism has seized upon men's souls and deeply ensconced itself in them. Materialism became in many respects the fundamental impulse of the epoch which has just elapsed. Countless souls died during that epoch who went through the gate of death with a materialistic outlook. For such numbers of souls to go through the gate of death with a materialistic outlook would have been impossible in earlier ages. These souls then lived in the spiritual world between death and a new birth without knowing anything of the world, in which they lived. A Being came towards them; they perceived Him in that world. They had to perceive Him because this Being had united Himself with the Earth, although for the present He rules invisibly in physical Earth existence. And the exertions of these souls who had gone through the gate of death succeeded—we cannot express it otherwise—in driving the Christ out of the spiritual world. The Christ has had to experience a renewal of the Mystery of Golgotha, although not in the same magnitude as before. At that time He went through death; now He had to undergo banishment from His existence in the spiritual world. And thus there was fulfilled in Him the eternal law of the spiritual world,—that what disappears for the higher spiritual world arises anew in the lower world.

If it is possible in the 20th century for souls to evolve to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, then it is due to this Event,—that Christ, through a conspiracy of materialistic souls, has been driven out of the spiritual worlds, and transferred into the sense world, into the world of man, so that even in this world of the senses a new understanding for the Christ can begin. Hence, too, Christ is still more nearly and intimately united with the destiny of men on Earth. And while in the past man could look up to Jahve or Jehovah and know that He was the Being who sent out Michael to prepare the way for the transition from the Jahve Age to the Christ Age,—while in earlier ages it was Jehovah who sent Michael, it is now the Christ who sends us Michael.

This is the new and important fact which we must transform into a feeling. As formerly man could speak of Jahve-Michael, the Leader of the age, so now we can speak the Christ-Michael. Michael has been exalted to a higher stage—from Folk Spirit to Time Spirit, inasmuch as from being the Messenger of Jahve he has become the Messenger of Christ. And so when we speak of a right understanding of the Michael Impulse in our age, we are speaking of a right understanding of the Christ Impulse.

An abstract understanding always deals in names, simply in names, and thinks it will arrive somewhere if it asks: “What kind of Being is Michael?” and wants to be told that he comes from this or that Hierarchy, that he is an Archangel, that Archangels have such and such qualities. Then it is all defined and people think now they know what such a Being is. They do not know it by speaking of Michael in this way. If one wants to understand the evolution of mankind, one must understand that Michael too has evolved: one must understand that it is the same Being who paved the way for the preparation of the Mystery of Golgotha, and who now in our day paves the way for the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then, however, he was a Folk Spirit, now he is a Time Spirit; then he was the Messenger of Jahve, now he is the Messenger of Christ. We speak of the Christ in the right way when we speak of Michael and his mission, knowing that Michael, who was formerly the bearer of the Jehovah-mission, is now the bearer of the Mission of the Christ.

My dear friends, we have been able to follow the path of Michael, a Spirit who has, so to say, ascended in order to communicate a new impulse to mankind; who has ascended, or rather is ascending, from the rank of the Archangels to the rank of the Archai. His place will be filled by another Being who succeeds him.

I have spoken here on different occasions of the evolution which Buddha passed through. The puerile objections which are now being made against us² are brought also against our understanding of the Christ Impulse in the world,—as though we had ever been one-sided in our representation of the Christ Impulse. We turn our gaze to evolution as a whole and describe what different impulses underlie it, giving to each its due value. Again and again we have spoken of the Bodhisattva who was born as Gautama Buddha and have shown that for us it is truth that he became ‘Buddha’. We have followed his evolution until the time when he received his mission on Mars. And of that mission we have also spoken here.

As long as man dwells on Earth, there is always for each human being, however high he may stand, an individuality who guides him from incarnation to incarnation. The individual guidance of human beings is made subject to the Angeloi, the Angel Beings. When a man from being a Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha, then his Angel is, as it were, set free. And it is such Angel Beings who, after the fulfilment of their mission, ascend into the realm of the Archangel Beings.

Thus if we really understand how to penetrate ever more deeply into the super-sensible evolution which lies behind our sense evolution, we are actually able to perceive at some point how an Archangel ascends to the nature of the Archai, and an Angel Being to an Archangel Being.

My dear friends, what I have said to you about the spiritual background of the world in which we live and in which we wish to take our stand as Anthroposophists—I have not said it in order that you may merely theorise over these things, but that you may transform into feeling and experience what has been expressed in words and ideas. Yes,—to be an Anthroposophist in our age means to know the nature of the super-sensible world which underlies the sense world of human evolution, to feel oneself in the spiritual world, as physical man feels himself physically in the atmosphere. But we do not feel ourselves in the spiritual world by merely repeating: Spirit, Spirit, Spirit is in us! Just as one has to gauge in a practical concrete way—from the formation of the clouds, from the humidity and other phenomena—the state of the atmosphere of the Earth, so we must ‘feel’ in quite a concrete way the spiritual world into which we are submerged every night when we fall asleep; we must feel and know how there lives in this spiritual world what is now happening as a result of the mission entrusted by Christ to Michael,—that is, to the same Spirit of the Hierarchy of Archangels who in earlier times had been used by the impulse of Jahve for the preparation of the Mystery of Golgotha. That is what is happening behind our physical sense evolution. And to feel ourselves within such happenings in the spiritual world, in the same way as we feel ourselves physically within the atmosphere which we breathe in and out, means to have the right consciousness to-day in relation to the spiritual world.

Try to receive into your whole heart and soul these results of occultism which I have now endeavoured to lay before you; try to have a sensitive understanding of them, and to consider what it means now in this age to live consciously in the spiritual events that are taking place around us, to live consciously in that world whither our soul goes every night when we fall asleep and whence we come every morning when we awake. Try to lead the soul into the direct and concrete experience of what is so often abstractly called Divine Providence. For it lies in the true character of our age to do this. Try now in this present time to know and experience as individual Beings what men in past ages could only feel in an undefined way as a Providence moving through the world.

Place as a picture before your souls that the task of the previous epoch was to find natural science. At that time the laws of nature were good if they were rightly used by man to build up external world conceptions. But there is nothing absolutely good or bad in this external world of Maya. In our time the laws of Nature would be bad and evil, were they still to be used to build up a world conception at a time when spiritual life is flowing into the sense world. These words are not to be taken as directed against what past ages have done; they are directed against what wants to remain as it was in earlier ages and will not put itself at the service of the new revelation.

Michael did not fight this Dragon in the ages that are past, for then the Dragon which is now meant was not yet a Dragon; it will become a Dragon if those concepts and ideas which belong only to natural science were to be used to construct the world conception of the coming age. For the monster that will then rear its head amongst mankind will be rightly seen in the picture of the Dragon that must be vanquished by Michael, whose Age begins in our own time.

That is an important Imagination,—Michael overcoming the Dragon. To receive the inflow of spiritual life into the sense world,—from now on, that is the service of Michael. We serve Michael by overcoming the Dragon that is trying to grow to his full height and strength in ideas which during the past epoch produced materialism and which now threaten to prolong their life on into the future. To defeat this means to stand in the service of Michael. That is the victory of Michael over the Dragon. It is the old picture over again, which for earlier times had another meaning and which must now acquire the right meaning for our age. When we are conscious of the part we have to play as men of a new age, then our task can stand before us in the picture of Michael conquering the Dragon.

Let us take this picture and make of it an Imagination. Let us try to understand our times through knowing ourselves to be in a spiritual guidance that is the true spiritual guidance of our age, and that can be the spiritual guidance of every human soul who is sincerely and honestly seeking evolution on the path of spiritual life.

• 1. Lecture on “Raphael and his Mission in the Light of Spiritual Science.” Stuttgart, 19th May, 1913.
• 2. A reference to the attempts made among some members of the Theosophical Society to put forward Krishnamurti as the new Bearer of the Christ for the West.

As human beings we stand in the world as thinking, contemplative beings on the one hand, and as doers, as beings of action, on the other; with our feelings we live within both these spheres. With our feelings we respond, on the one side, to what is presented to our observation; on the other side, feelings enter into our actions, our deeds. We need only consider how we may be satisfied or dissatisfied with the success or lack of success of our deeds, how in truth all action is accompanied by impulses of feeling, and we shall see that feeling links the two poles of our being: the pole of thinking and the pole of deed, of action. Only through the fact that we are thinking beings are we human in the truest sense. Consider too, how everything that gives us the consciousness of our essential humanity is connected with the fact that we can inwardly picture the world around us; we live in this world and can contemplate it. To imagine that we cannot contemplate the world would entail forfeiting our essential humanity.

As doers we have our place in social life and everything we accomplish between birth and death has a certain significance in this social life. Insofar as we are contemplative beings, thought operates in us; insofar as we are doers, that is to say, social beings, will operates in us. It is not the case in human nature, nor is it ever so, that things can simply be thought of intellectually side by side; the truth is that whatever is an active factor in life can be characterized from one aspect or another; the forces of the world interpenetrate, flow into each other. Mentally we can picture ourselves as beings of thought and also as beings of will. But even when we are entirely engrossed in contemplation, when the outer world is completely stilled, the will is continually active. And again, when we are performing deeds, thought is active in us. It is inconceivable that anything should proceed from us in the way of actions or deeds—which may also take effect in the realm of social life—without our identifying ourselves in thought with what thus takes place. In everything that is of the nature of will, the element of thought is contained; and in everything that is of the nature of thought, will is present. It is essential to be quite clear about what is involved here if we seriously want to build the bridge between the moral-spiritual world order and natural-physical world order.

Imagine that you are living for a time purely in reflection as usually understood, that you are engaging in no kind of outward activity at all, but are wholly engrossed in thought. You must realize, however, that in this life of thought, will is also active; will is then at work in your inner being, raying out its forces into the realm of thought. When we picture the thinking human being in this way, when we realize that the will is radiating all the time into the thoughts, something will certainly strike us concerning life and its realities. If we review all the thoughts we have formulated, we shall find in every case that they are linked with something in our environment, something that we ourselves have experienced. Between birth and death we have, in a certain respect, no thoughts other than those brought to us by life. If our life has been rich in experiences we have a rich thought content; if our life experiences have been meager, we have a meager thought content. The thought content represents our inner destiny—to a certain extent. But within this life of thought there is something that is inherently our own; what is inherently our own is how we connect thoughts with one another and dissociate them again, how we elaborate them inwardly, how we arrive at judgments and draw conclusions, how we orientate ourselves in the life of thought—all this is inherently our own. The will in our life of thought is our own.

If we study this life of thought in careful self-examination, we shall certainly realize that thoughts, as far as their actual content is concerned, come to us from outside, but that it is we ourselves who elaborate these thoughts. Therefore, in respect to our world of thought we are entirely dependent upon the experiences brought to us by our birth, by our destiny. But through the will, which rays out from the depths of the soul, we carry into what thus comes to us from the outer world, something that is inherently our own. For the fulfillment of what self-knowledge demands of us it is highly important to keep separate in our minds how, on the one side, the thought content comes to us from the surrounding world and how, on the other, the force of the will, coming from within our being, rays into the world of thought.

How, in reality, do we become inwardly more and more spiritual?—Not by taking in as many thoughts as possible from the surrounding world, for these thoughts merely reproduce in pictures this outer world, which is a physical, material world. Constantly to be running in pursuit of sensations does not make us more spiritual. We become more spiritual through the inner, will-permeated work we carry out in our thoughts. This is why meditation, too, consists in not indulging in haphazard thoughts but in holding certain easily envisaged thoughts in the very center of our consciousness, drawing them there with a strong effort of will. And the greater the strength and intensity of this inner radiation of will into the sphere of thinking, the more spiritual we become. When we take in thoughts from the outer material world—and between birth and death we can take in only such thoughts—we become, as you can easily realize, unfree; for we are given over to the concatenations of things and events in the external world; as far as the actual content of the thoughts is concerned, we are obliged to think as the external world prescribes; only when we elaborate the thoughts do we become free in the real sense.

It is possible to attain complete freedom in our inner life if we increasingly efface and exclude the actual thought content, insofar as this comes from outside, and kindle into greater activity the element of will which streams through our thoughts when we form judgments, draw conclusions and the like. Thereby, however, our thinking becomes what I have called in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity ‘pure thinking’. We think, but in our thinking there is nothing but will. I have laid particular emphasis on this in the new edition of the book (1918). What is thus within us lies in the sphere of thinking. But pure thinking may equally be called pure will. Thus from the realm of thinking we reach the realm of will, when we become inwardly free; our thinking attains such maturity that it is entirely irradiated by will; it no longer takes anything in from outside, but its very life is of the nature of will. By progressively strengthening the impulse of will in our thinking we prepare ourselves for what I have called in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, ‘Moral Imagination’. Moral Imagination rises to the 'Moral Intuitions' which then pervade and illuminate our will that has now become thought, or our thinking that has now become will. In this way we raise ourselves above the sway of the 'necessity' prevailing in the material world, permeate ourselves with the force that is inherently our own, and prepare for Moral Intuition. And everything that can stream into us from the spiritual world has its foundation, primarily, in these Moral Intuitions. Therefore freedom dawns when we enable the will to become an ever mightier and mightier force in our thinking.

Now let us consider the human being from the opposite pole, that of the will. When does the will present itself with particular clarity through what we do? When we sneeze, let us say, we are also doing something, but we cannot, surely, ascribe to ourselves any definite impulse of will when we sneeze! When we speak, we are doing something in which will is undoubtedly contained. But think how, in speaking, deliberate intent and absence of intent, volition and absence of volition, intermingle. You have to learn to speak, and in such a way that you are no longer obliged to formulate each single word by dint of an effort of will; an element of instinct enters into speech. In ordinary life at least, it is so, and it is emphatically so in the case of those who do not strive for spirituality. Garrulous people, who are always opening their mouths in order to say something or other in which very little thought is contained, give others an opportunity of noticing—they themselves, of course, do not notice—how much there is in speech that is instinctive and involuntary. But the more we go out beyond our organic life and pass over to activity that is liberated, as it were, from organic processes, the more do we carry thoughts into our actions and deeds. Sneezing is still entirely a matter of organic life; speaking is largely connected with organic life; walking really very little; what we do with the hands, also very little. And so we come by degrees to actions which are more and more emancipated from our organic life. We accompany such actions with our thoughts, although we do not know how the will streams into these thoughts. If we are not somnambulists and do not go about in this condition, our actions will always be accompanied by our thoughts. We carry our thoughts into our actions, and the more our actions evolve towards perfection, the more are our thoughts being carried into them.

Our inner life is constantly deepened when we send will, our own inherent force, into our thinking, when we permeate our thinking with will. We bring will into thinking and thereby attain freedom. As we gradually perfect our actions we finally succeed in sending thoughts into these actions; we irradiate our actions—which proceed from our will—with thoughts. On the one side (inwards) we live a life of thought; we permeate this with the will and thus find freedom. On the other side (outwards) our actions stream forth from our will, and we permeate them with our thoughts.

But by what means do our actions evolve to greater perfection? How do we achieve greater perfection in our actions? We achieve this by developing in ourselves the force which can only be designated by the words: devotion to the outer world.—The more our devotion to the outer world grows and intensifies, the more does this outer world stir us to action. But it is just through unfolding devotion to the outer world that we succeed in permeating our actions with thoughts. What, in reality, is devotion to the outer world? Devotion to the outer world, which permeates our actions with thoughts, is nothing else than love.

Just as we attain freedom by irradiating the life of thought with will, so do we attain love by permeating the life of will with thoughts. We unfold love in our actions by letting thoughts radiate into the realm of the will; we develop freedom in our thinking by letting what is of the nature of will radiate into our thoughts. And because, as human beings, we are a unified whole, when we reach the point where we find freedom in the life of thought and love in the life of will, there will be freedom in our actions and love in our thinking. Each irradiates the other: action filled with thought is wrought in love; thinking that is permeated with will gives rise to actions and deeds that are truly free.

Thus you see how in the human being the two great ideals, freedom and love, grow together. Freedom and love are also that which we, standing in the world, can bring to realization in ourselves in such a way that, through us, the one unites with the other for the good of the world.

We must now ask: How is the ideal, the highest ideal, to be attained in the will-permeated life of thought?—If the life of thought were something that represented material processes, the will could never penetrate fully into the realm of the thoughts and increasingly take root there. The will would at most be able to ray into these material processes as an organizing force. Will can take real effect only if the life of thought is devoid of outer, physical reality. What, then, must it be?

You will be able to envisage what it must be if you take a picture as a starting point. If you have here a mirror and here an object, the object is reflected in the mirror; if you then go behind the mirror, you find nothing. In other words, you have a picture—nothing more. Our thoughts are pictures in this same sense. How is this to be explained?—In a previous lecture I said that the life of thought as such is not a reality of the immediate moment. The life of thought rays in from our existence before birth, or rather, before conception. The life of thought has its reality between death and a new birth. And just as here the object stands before the mirror and what it presents is a picture—only that and nothing more—so what we unfold as the life of thought is lived through in the real sense between death and a new birth, and merely rays into our life since birth. As thinking beings, we have within us a mirror reality only. Because this is so, the other reality which, as you know, rays up from the metabolic process, can permeate the mirror pictures of the life of thought. If, as is very rarely the case today, we make sincere endeavors to develop unbiased thinking, it will be clear to us that the life of thought consists of mirror-pictures if we turn to thinking in its purest form—in mathematics. Mathematical thinking streams up entirely from our inner being, but it has a mirror-existence only. Through mathematics the make-up of external objects can, it is true, be analyzed and determined, but the mathematical thoughts in themselves are only thoughts, they exist merely as pictures. They have not been acquired from any outer reality.

Abstract thinkers such as Kant also employ an abstract expression. They say: mathematical concepts are a priori.—A priori, apriority, means ‘existing in the mind independent of experience’. But why are mathematical concepts a priori? Because they stream in from the existence preceding birth, or rather, preceding conception. It is this that constitutes their ‘apriority’. And the reason why they appear real to our consciousness is because they are irradiated by the will. This is what makes them real. Just think how abstract modern thinking has become when it uses abstract words for something which, in its reality, is not understood! Men such as Kant had a dim inkling that we bring mathematics with us from our existence before birth, and therefore they called the findings of mathematics ‘a priori’. But the term ‘a priori’ really tells us nothing, for it points to no reality, it points to something merely formal.

In regard to the life of thought, which with its mirror existence must be irradiated by the will in order to become reality, ancient traditions speak of semblance. (Diagram XI, Schein.)

Let us now consider the other pole of man's nature, where the thoughts stream down towards the sphere of will, where deeds are performed in love. Here our consciousness is, so to speak, held at bay; it rebounds from reality. We cannot look into that realm of darkness—a realm of darkness for our consciousness—where the will unfolds whenever we raise an arm or turn the head, unless we take super-sensible conceptions to our aid. We move an arm; but the complicated process in operation there remains just as hidden from ordinary consciousness as what takes place in deep sleep, in dreamless sleep. We perceive our arm; we perceive how our hand grasps some object. This is because we permeate the action with thoughts. But the thoughts that are in our consciousness are still only semblance. We live in what is real, but it does not ray into our ordinary consciousness. Ancient traditions spoke here of Power (Gewalt), because the reality in which we are living is indeed permeated by thought, but thought has nevertheless rebounded from it in a certain sense, during the life between birth and death. (Diagram XI.)

Between these two poles lies the balancing factor that unites the two—unites the will that rays towards the head with the thoughts which, as they flow into deeds wrought with love, are, so to say, felt with the heart. This means of union is the life of feeling, which is able to direct itself towards the will as well as towards the thoughts. In our ordinary consciousness we live in an element by means of which we grasp, on the one side, what comes to expression in our will-permeated thought with its predisposition to freedom, while on the other side, we try to ensure that what passes over into our deeds is filled more and more with thoughts. And what forms the bridge connecting both has since ancient times been called Wisdom. (Diagram XI.)

In his fairy tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Goethe has given indications of these ancient traditions in the figures of the Golden King, the Silver King, and the Brazen King. We have already shown from other points of view how these three elements must come to life again, but in an entirely different form—these three elements to which ancient instinctive knowledge pointed and which can come to life again only if we acquire the knowledge yielded by Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

But what is it that is actually taking place as we unfold our life of thought?—Reality is becoming semblance! It is very important to be clear about this. We carry about with us our head, which with its hard skull and tendency to ossification, presents, even outwardly, a picture of what is dead, in contrast to the rest of the living organism. Between birth and death we bear in our head that which, from an earlier time when it was reality, comes into us as semblance. From the rest of our organism we permeate this semblance with the element issuing from our metabolic processes; we permeate it with the real element of the will. There we have within us a seed, a germinating entity which, first and foremost, is part of our humanity, but also means something in the cosmos. Think of it—an individual is born in a particular year; before then she was in the spiritual world. When she passes out of the spiritual world, thought which there is reality, becomes semblance, and she leads over into this semblance the forces of her will which come from an entirely different direction, rising up from parts of her organism other than the head. That is how the past, dying away into semblance, is kindled again to become reality of the future.

Let us understand this rightly. What happens when we rise to pure thinking, to thinking that is irradiated by will?—On the foundation of the past that has dissolved into semblance, through fructification by the will which rises up from our egohood, there unfolds within us a new reality leading into the future. We are the bearers of the seed into the future. The thoughts of the past, as realities, are as it were the mother-soil; into this mother-soil is laid that which comes from the individ ual egohood, and the seed is sent on into the future for future life.

On the other side, we evolve by permeating our deeds and actions, our will-nature, with thoughts; deeds are performed in love. Such deeds detach themselves from us. Our deeds do not remain confined to ourselves; they become world happenings. If they are permeated by love, then love goes with them. As far as the cosmos is concerned, an egotistical action is different from an action permeated by love. When, out of semblance, through fructification by the will, we unfold that which proceeds from our inmost being, then what streams forth into the world from our head encounters our thought-permeated deeds. Just as when a plant unfolds it contains in its blossom the seed to which the light of the sun, the air outside, and so on, must come, to which something must be brought from the cosmos in order that it may grow, so what is unfolded through freedom must find an element in which to grow through the love that lives in our deeds.

Thus do we stand within the great process of world evolution, and what takes place inside the boundary of our skin and flows out beyond our skin in the form of deeds, has significance not only for us but for the world, the universe. We have our place in the arena of cosmic happenings. By reality in earlier times becoming semblance in us, reality is ever and again dissolved, and in that the semblance is quickened again by the will, new reality arises. Here we have—as if spiritually we could put our very finger upon it—what has also been spoken of from other points of view.—There is no eternal conservation of matter! Matter is transformed into semblance and semblance is transformed into reality by the will. The law of the conservation of matter and energy affirmed by physics is a delusion, because account is taken of the natural world only. The truth is that matter is continually passing away in that it is transformed into semblance; and a new creation takes place in that through the human being, who stands before us as the supreme achievement of the cosmos, semblance is again transformed into Being (Sein).

We can also see this if we look at the other pole—only there it is not so easy to perceive. The processes which finally lead to freedom can certainly be grasped by unbiased thinking. But to see rightly in the case of this other pole needs a certain degree of spiritual-scientific development. For here, to begin with, ordinary consciousness rebounds when confronted by what ancient traditions called Power. What is living itself out as Power, as Force, is indeed permeated by thoughts; but the ordinary consciousness does not perceive that just as more and more will, a greater and greater faculty of judgment, comes into the world of thought, so, when we bring thoughts into the will-nature, when we overcome the element of Power more and more completely, we also pervade what is merely Power with the light of thought. At the one pole of man's being we see the overcoming of matter; at the other pole, the new birth of matter.

As I have indicated briefly in my book, Riddles of the Soul (Mercury Press, 1996), the human being is a threefold being: as nerve-and-sense being, the bearer of the life of thought, of perception; as rhythmic being (breathing, circulating blood), the bearer of the life of feeling; as metabolic being, the bearer of the life of will. But how then does the metabolic process operate in us when will is ever more and more unfolded in love? It operates in that, as we perform such deeds, matter is continually overcome. And what is it that unfolds in us when, as a free being, we find our way into pure thinking, which is, however, really of the nature of will?—Matter is born!—We behold the coming-into-being of matter! We bear in ourselves that which brings matter to birth: our head; and we bear in ourselves that which destroys matter, where we can see how matter is destroyed: our metabolic-limb organism.

This is the way in which to study the whole human being. We see how what consciousness conceives of in abstractions is an actual factor in the process of World-Becoming; and we see how that which is contained in this process of World-Becoming and to which the ordinary consciousness clings so firmly that it can do no other than conceive it to be reality—we see how this is dissolved into nothingness. It is reality for the ordinary consciousness, and when it obviously does not tally with outer realities, then recourse has to be taken to the atoms, which are considered to be firmly fixed realities. And because one cannot free oneself in one's thoughts from these firmly fixed realities, one lets them mingle with each other, now in this way, now in that. At one time they mingle to form hydrogen, at another, oxygen; they are merely differently grouped. This is simply because people are incapable of any other belief than that what has once been firmly fixed in thought must also be as firmly fixed in reality.

It is nothing else than feebleness of thought into which one lapses when accepting the existence of fixed, ever-enduring atoms. What reveals itself to us through thinking that is in accordance with reality is that matter is continually dissolved away to nothingness and continually rebuilt out of nothingness. It is only because whenever matter dies away, new matter comes into being, that people speak of the conservation of matter. They fall into the same error into which they would fall, let us say, if a number of documents were carried into a house, copied there, but the originals burned and the copies brought out again, and then they were to believe that what was carried in had been carried out—that it is the same thing. The reality is that the old documents had been burned and new ones written. It is the same with what comes into being in the world, and it is important for our knowledge to advance to this point. For in that realm of the human being, where matter dies away into semblance and new matter arises, there lies the possibility of freedom, and there lies the possibility of love. And freedom and love belong together, as I have already indicated in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

Those who, on the basis of some particular conception of the world, speak of the imperishability of matter, annul freedom on the one side and the full development of love on the other. For only through the fact that in us the past dies away, becomes semblance, and the future is a new creation in the condition of a seed, does there arise in us the feeling of love, the devotion to something to which we are not coerced by the past, and freedom, action that is not predetermined. Freedom and love are, in reality, comprehensible only to a spiritual-scientific conception of the world, not to any other. Those who are conversant with the picture of the world that has appeared in the course of the last few centuries will be able to assess the difficulties that will have to be overcome before the habits of thought prevailing in modern humanity can be induced to give way to this unbiased, spiritual-scientific thinking. For in the picture of the world existing in natural science there are really no points from which we can go forward to a true understanding of freedom and love.

How the natural-scientific picture of the world on the one side, and on the other, the ancient, traditional picture of the world, are related to a truly progressive, spiritual-scientific development of humanity—of this we will speak on some other occasion.