The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] In Max Dessoir’s book, From Beyond the Soul¹ there is a brief section in which the systematic noetic investigation, or spiritual science, called “anthroposophical” and associated with my name, is stigmatised as scientifically untenable. Now it might well be argued that any dialogue between someone with the scientific outlook of Dessoir and an upholder of this anthroposophical method must be a waste of time. For the latter necessarily posits a field of purely noetic experience which the former categorically denies and relegates to the realm of fantasy. Apparently then one can speak of spiritual science and its findings only to someone who is antecedently convinced of the factuality of that field.

This would be true enough if the spokesman for anthroposophy had nothing to bring forward but his own inner personal experiences, and if he then simply set these up alongside the findings of a science based on sensory observation and the scientific elaboration thereof. You could then say: the professor of science, so defined, must refuse to regard the experiences of the spiritual researcher as realities; the latter can only expect to impress those who have already adopted his own standpoint.

[ 2 ] And yet this conclusion depends on a misconception of what I mean by anthroposophy.² It is quite true that anthroposophy relies on psychic apprehensions that are dependent neither on sense-impressions nor on scientific propositions based on these and these alone. It must be conceded therefore that prima facie the two types of apprehension are divided from one another by an unbridgable gulf. Nevertheless this turns out not to be the case. There is a common ground on which the two methodologies may properly encounter one another and on which debate is possible concerning the findings of both. It may be characterised as follows.

[ 3 ] The spokesman for anthroposophy maintains, on the basis of apprehensions that are not merely his private and personal experiences, that the process of human cognition can be further developed after a certain fixed point, a point beyond which scientific research, relying solely on sensory observation and inference therefrom, refuses to go. To avoid a lot of tedious paraphrases I propose, in what follows, to designate the methodology based on sensory observation and its subsequent inferential elaboration by the term “anthropology”; requesting the reader’s indulgence for this abnormal usage. It will be employed throughout strictly with that reference. Anthroposophical research, then, reckons to begin from where anthropology leaves off.

[ 4 ] The spokesman for anthropology limits himself to the method of relating his experience of concepts of the understanding with his experience through the senses. The spokesman for anthroposophy realises the fact that these concepts are capable (irrespective of the circumstance that they are to be related to sense impressions) of opening a life of their own within the psyche. Further, that by the unfolding of this energy they effect a development in the psyche itself. And he has learnt how the psyche, if it pays the requisite attention to this process, makes the discovery that organs of spirit are disclosing their presence there. (In employing the expression ‘organs of spirit” I adopt, and extend, the linguistic usage of Goethe, who referred to “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears” in expounding his philosophical position).³ These organs amount to formations in the psyche analogous to what the sense-organs are in the body. It goes without saying that they are to be understood as exclusively psychic. Any attempt to connect them with some kind of somatic formation must be ruled out as far as anthroposophy is concerned. Spiritual organs are to be conceived as never in any manner departing from the psychic and entering the texture of the somatic. Any such encroachment is, for anthroposophy, a pathological formation with which it will have nothing whatever to do. And the whole manner in which the development of these organs is conceived should be enough to satisfy a bona fide enquirer that, on the subject of illusions, visions, hallucinations and so forth, the ideas of anthroposophy are the same as those that are normally accepted in anthropology.⁴ When the findings of anthroposophy are equated with abnormal experiences, miscalled “psychic”, or “psychical”, the argument is invariably based on misunderstanding or on an insufficient acquaintance with what anthroposophy actually maintains. Moreover no-one who had followed with a modicum of penetration the manner in which anthroposophy treats of the development of spiritual organs could possibly slip into the notion of its being a path that could lead to pathological syndromes. On the contrary, given such penetration, it will be realised that all the stages of psychic apprehension which a human being, according to anthroposophy, experiences in his progress towards intuition of spirit, lie in a domain exclusively psychic; so that sensory experience and normal intellectual activity continue alongside of them unaltered from what they were before this territory was opened up. The plethora of misunderstandings that are current upon this aspect of anthroposophical cognition arise from the fact that many people have difficulty in focusing their attention on what is purely and distinctively psychic. The power to form ideas fails them, unless it is supported by some surreptitious reference to sensory phenomena. Failing that, their mental capacity wilts, and ideation sinks to an energy-level below that of dreaming—to the level of dreamless sleep, where it is no longer conscious. It may be said that the consciousness of such minds is congested with the after-effects, or the actual effects, of sense-impressions; and this congestion entails a corresponding slumber of all that would be recognised as psychic, if it could be seized at all. It is even true to say that many minds approach the properly psychic with hopeless misunderstanding precisely because they are unable, when it confronts them, to stay awake, as they do when they are confronted by the sensory content of consciousness. Such is the predicament of all in whom the faculty of vigilant attention is only strong enough for the purposes of everyday life. This sounds surprising, but I would recommend anyone who finds it incredible to ponder carefully a certain objection raised by Brentano against the philosopher William James. “It is necessary,” writes Brentano, “to distinguish between the act of sensing and that upon which the act is directed and the two are as certainly different from one another as my present recollection of a past event is from the event itself; or, to take an even more drastic example, as my hatred of an enemy is from the object of that hate.” He adds that the error he is nailing does “turn up here and there”, and he continues:

Among others it has been embraced by William James, who endeavoured to establish it in a longish address to the International Congress on Psychology in 1905. Because, when I look into a room, there is evidently not only the room but also my looking; because fancied images of sensible objects only distinguish themselves gradually from objectively stimulated ones; because, finally, we call some bodies beautiful, and yet the difference between beautiful and ugly relates to different emotions—therefore we must stop regarding physical and psychic phenomena as two different classes of appearance! I find it hard to understand how the speaker himself could be unaware of the weakness of these arguments. To appear simultaneously is not to appear as one and the same. For simultaneity is less than identity. That was why Descartes could recommend his readers, without fear of contradiction, to deny, at least to begin with, that the room which I see is, and to hold fast to the-fact-that-I-see-it as the one thing free from doubt. But if the first argument falls to the ground, then obviously the second one does also. For why should it matter that fancy differs from seeing only by the degree of intensity, since, even if the degrees of intensity were the same total similarity between fancying and seeing could prove no more than the similarity of fancying to a psychic phenomenon? Finally there is the argument from beauty. Surely it is a very odd sort of logic which draws, from that fact that pleasure in the beautiful is something psychic, the conclusion that that, with the appearance whereof the pleasure is connected, must also be something psychic! If that were so, every displeasure would be identical with what we are displeased about; and a man would have to be very careful not to regret a past mistakes, because the regret (being identical with the mistake) would repeat the mistake itself.

For all these reasons there ought not to be much fear that the authority of James, which he unfortunately shares with that of Mach among German psychologists, will seduce many people into overlooking such a glaring distinction.

All the same, this “overlooking of glaring distinctions” is far from rare. The reason is that our faculty of ideation only operates vigilantly with the somatic component of representation, the sense-impressions; the concurrent psychic factor is present to consciousness only to the feeble extent of experiences had during sleep. The stream of experience comes to us in two currents: one of them is apprehended wakefully; the other, the psychic, is seized concurrently, but only with a degree of awareness similar to the mentality of sleep, that is, with virtually no awareness at all. It is impermissible to ignore the fact that, during ordinary waking life, the psychology of sleep does not simply leave off; it continues alongside our waking experience; so that the specifically psychic only enters the field of perception if the subject is awake not only to the sense world (as is the case with ordinary consciousness), but also to the existentially psychic—which is the case with intuitive consciousness. It makes very little difference whether this latter (the slumber that persists within the waking state) is simply denied on crudely materialistic grounds or whether, with James, it is lumped in with the physical organism. The results in either case are much the same. Both ways lead to ill-starred myopias. Yet we ought not to be surprised that the psychic so often remains unperceived, when even a philosopher like William James is incapable of distinguishing it properly from the physical.⁵

[ 5 ] With those who are no better able than James to keep the positively psychic separate from the content of the psyche’s experience through the senses, it is difficult to speak of that part of the soul wherein the development of spiritual organs is observable. Because this development occurs at the very point on which they are incapable of directing attention. And it is just this point that leads from intellectual to intuitive knowledge.⁶

[ 6 ] It should be noted however that such a capacity to observe the authentically psychic is very elementary; it is the indispensable precondition, but it assures to the mind’s eye no more than the bare possibility of looking whither anthroposophy looks to find the psychic organs. This first glimpse bears the same relation to a soul fully equipped with the spiritual organs of which anthroposophy speaks as an undifferentiated living cell does to a full-blown creature furnished with sense organs. The soul is only conscious of possessing a particular organ of spirit to the extent that it is able to make use of it. For these organs are not something static; they are in continual movement. And when they are not being employed, it is not possible to be conscious of their presence. Thus, their apprehension and their use coincide. The manner in which their development and, with that, the possibility of observing them, is brought about will be found described in my anthroposophical writings. There is one point however I must briefly touch on here.

[ 7 ] Anyone given to serious reflection on the experiences occasioned through sense phenomena keeps coming up against questions which that reflection itself is at first inadequate to answer. This leads to the establishment by those who represent anthropology of boundaries of cognition. Recall, for instance, Du Bois-Reymond’s oration on the frontiers of natural knowledge, in which he maintained that man cannot know what is the actual nature of matter or of any elementary phenomenon of consciousness. All he can do is to come to a halt at these points in his reflection and acknowledge to himself: “there are boundaries of knowledge which the human mind cannot cross”. After that there are two possible attitudes he may adopt. He may rest content with the fact that knowledge is only attainable inside this limited zone and that anything outside the fence is the province of feelings, hopes, wishes, inklings. Or he can make a new start and form hypotheses concerning an extra-sensory realm. In that case he is making use of the understanding, in the faith that its judgments can be carried into a realm of which the senses perceive nothing. But, in doing so, he puts himself in peril of the agnostic’s objection: that the understanding is not entitled to form judgments concerning a reality for which it lacks the foundation of sense-perception. For it is these alone which could give content to judgments, and without such content concepts are empty.

[ 8 ] The attitude of an anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit to boundaries of cognition resembles neither the one nor the other of these. Not the second, because it is in substantial agreement with the view that the mind must lose the whole ground for reflection, if it rests satisfied with such ideas as are acquired through the senses and yet seeks to apply these ideas beyond the province of the senses. Not the first, because it realises that contact with those “boundaries” of knowledge evokes a certain psychic experience that has nothing to do with the content of ideation won from the senses. Certainly, if it is only this content that the mind presents to itself, then it is obliged, on further introspection, to admit: “this content can disclose nothing for cognition except a reproduction of sensory experience”. But it is otherwise if the mind goes a step further and asks itself: What is the nature of its own experience, when it fills itself with the kind of thoughts that are evoked by its contact with the normal boundaries of cognition? The same exercise of introspection may then lead it to say: “I cannot know in the ordinary sense with such thoughts: but if I succeed in inwardly contemplating this very impotence to know, I am made aware of how these thoughts become active in me”. Considered as normally cognitive ideas they remain silent, but as their silence communicates itself more and more to a man’s consciousness, they acquire an inner life of their own, which becomes one with the life of the soul. And then the soul notices that this experience has brought it to a pass that may be compared with that of a blind creature, which has not yet done much to cultivate its sense of touch. Initially, such a creature would simply keep on knocking up against things. It would sense the resistance of external realities. But out of this generalised sensation it could develop an inner life informed with a primitive consciousness—no longer a general sensation of collisions, but a consciousness that begins to diversify that sensation, remarking distinctions between hardness and softness, smoothness and roughness and so forth.

[ 9 ] In the same way, the soul is able to undergo, and to diversify, the experience it has with ideas it forms at the boundaries of cognition and to learn from them that those boundaries are simply events that occur when the psyche is stimulated by a touch of the spiritual world. The moment of awareness of such boundaries turns into an experience comparable with tactile experience in the sense world.⁷ In what it previously termed boundaries of cognition, it now sees a pneumato-psychic stimulus through a spiritual world. And out of the pondered experience it can have with the different boundaries of cognition, the general sense of a world of spirit separates out into a manifold perception thereof.

This is the manner in which the, so to say, humblest mode of perceptibility of the spiritual world becomes experiential. All that has been dealt with so far is the initial opening up of the psyche to the world of spirit, but it does show that anthroposophy, as I use the term, and the noetic experiences it ensues, do not connote all manner of nebulous personal affects, but a methodical development of authentic inner experience. This is not the place to demonstrate further how such inchoate spiritual perception is then improved by further psychic exercises and achievements, so that it becomes legitimate to use the vocabulary of touch in this context, or of other and “higher” modes of perception. For a cognitive psychology of this kind I must refer the reader to my anthroposophical books and articles. My present object is to state the principle basic to “spiritual perception” as it is understood in anthroposophy.

[ 10 ] I shall offer one other analogy to illustrate how the whole psychology of anthroposophical spiritual investigation differs from that of anthropology. Look at a few grains of wheat. They can be applied for the purposes of nutrition. Alternatively they can be planted in the soil, so that other wheat plants develop from them. The representations and ideas acquired through sensory experience can be retained in the mind with the effect that what is experienced in them is a reproduction of sensory reality. And they can also be experienced in another way: the energy they evince in the psyche by virtue of what they are, quite apart from the fact that they reproduce phenomena, can be allowed to act itself out. The first way may be compared with what happens to wheat grains when they are assimilated by a living creature as its means of nourishment. The second with the engendering of a new wheat plant through each grain. Of course we must bear in mind that, in the analogy, what is brought forth is a plant similar to the parent plant; whereas from an idea active in the mind the outcome is a force available for the formation of organs of the spirit. It must also be borne in mind that initial awareness of such inner forces can only be kindled by particularly potent ideas, like those “frontiers of knowledge” of which we have been speaking; but when once the mind has been alerted to the presence of such forces, other ideas and representations may also serve, though not quite so well, for further progress in the direction it has now taken.

[ 11 ] The analogy illustrates something else that anthroposophical research discovers concerning the actual psychology of mental representation. It is this. Whenever a seed of corn is processed for the purposes of nutrition, it is lifted out of the developmental pattern which is proper to it, and which ends in the formation of a new plant, but so also is a representation, whenever it is applied by the mind in producing a mental copy of sense-perception, diverted from its proper teleological pattern. The corresponding further development proper to a representation is to function as a force in the development of the psyche. Just as little as we find the laws of development built in to a plant, if we examine it for its nutritive value, do we find the essential nature of an idea or a representation, when we investigate its adequacy in reproducing for cognition the reality it mediates. That is not to say that no such investigation should be undertaken. It can all be investigated just as much as can the nutritive value of a seed. But then, just as the latter enquiry throws light on something quite different from the developmental laws of plant growth, so does an epistemology, which tests representations by the criterion of their value as images for cognition, reach conclusions about something other than the essential nature of ideation. The seed, as such, gave little indication of turning into nourishment: nor does it lie with representations, as such, to deliver copies for cognition. In fact, just as its application as nutriment is something quite external to the seed itself, so is cognitive reproduction irrelevant for representation. The truth is that what the psyche does lay hold of in its representations is its own waxing existence. Only through its own activity does it come about that the representations turn into media for the cognition of some reality.⁸

[ 12 ] There remains the question: how do representations turn into media for cognition? Anthroposophical observation, availing itself as it does of spiritual organs, inevitably answers this question differently from epistemological theories that renounce them. Its answer is as follows.

[ 13 ] Representations strictly as such—considered as what they themselves originally are—do indeed form part of the life of the soul; but they cannot become conscious there as long as the soul does not consciously use its spiritual organs. So long as they retain their original vitality they remain unconscious. The soul lives by means of them, but it can know nothing of them. They have to suppress (herabdämpfen) their own life in order to become conscious experiences of normal consciousness. This suppression is effected by every sense perception. Consequently, when the mind receives a sense impression, there is a benumbing (Herablähmung) of the life of the representation, and it is this benumbed representation which the psyche experiences as the medium of a cognition of outer reality.⁹All the representations and ideas that are related by the mind to an outer sense reality are inner spiritual experiences, whose life has been suppressed. In all our thoughts about an outer world of the senses, we have to do with deadened representations. And yet the life of the representation is not just annihilated; rather it is disjoined from the area of consciousness but continues to subsist in the nonconscious provinces of the psyche. That is where it is found again by the organs of the spirit. Just as the deadened ideas of the soul can be related to the sense world, so can the living ideas apprehended by spiritual organs be related to the spiritual world. But “boundary” concepts of the kind spoken of above, by their very nature, refuse to be deadened. Consequently they resist being related to any sense reality. And for that reason they become points of departure for spiritual perception.

[ 14 ] In my anthroposophical writings I have applied the term “imaginal” to representations that are apprehended by the psyche as living. It is a misunderstanding to confound the reference of this word with the form of expression (imagery) which has to be employed in order to analogously suggest such representations. What the word does mean may be elucidated in the following manner. If someone has a sense-perception while the outer object is impressing him, then the perception has a certain inner potency for him. If he turns away from the object, then he can re-present it to himself in a purely internal representation. But the intrinsic strength of the representation has now been reduced. Compared with the representation effected in the presence of the object, it is more or less shadowy. If he wants to enliven these shadowy representations of ordinary consciousness, he impregnates them with echoes of actual contemplation. He converts the representation into a visual image. Now such images are no other than the joint effects of representation and sensory life combined. But the “imaginal” representations of anthroposophy are not effected in this way at all. In order to bring them to pass, the soul must be familiar with the inner process that combines psychic representation with sense-impression, so familiar that it can hold at arms length the influx of the sense-impressions themselves (or of their echoes in after-experience) into the act of representing. This keeping at bay of post-sense-experiences can only be achieved, if the man has detected the way in which the activity of representing is pre-empted by these after experiences. Not until then is he in a position to combine his spiritual organs with the act itself and thereby to receive impressions of spiritual reality.

Thus the act of representing is impregnated from quite another side than in the case of sense-perception. And thus the mental experiences are positively different from those evoked by sense-perception. And yet they are not beyond all possibility of expression. They may be expressed by the following means. When a man perceives the colour yellow, he has an experience that is not simply optical but is also affective and empathetic, an experience of the nature of feeling. It may be more or less pronounced in different human beings, but it is never wholly absent. There is a beautiful chapter in Goethe’s Farbenlehre on the “sensuous-moral effect of colours”, in which he has described with great penetration the emotional by-effects for red, yellow, green and so forth. Now when the mind perceives something from a particular province of the spirit, it may happen that this spiritual perception has the same emotional by-effect as the sensory perception of yellow. The man knows that he is having this or that spiritual experience; and what he has before him in the representation is of course not the same as in a representation of the colour yellow. But he does have, as emotional by-effect, the same inner experience as when the colour yellow is before his eyes. He may then aver that he perceives the spirit experience as “yellow”. Of course he could choose to be more precise, always being careful to say: “the mind apprehends somewhat that affects the soul rather as the colour yellow affects it”. But such elaborate verbal precautions ought to be unnecessary for anyone who is already acquainted through anthroposophical literature with the process leading to spiritual perception. This literature gives a clear enough warning that the reality open to spiritual perception does not confront the organ of spirit after the fashion of an attenuated sense-object or event, nor in such a way that it could be rendered in ideas that are intuitions of sense (sinnlich-anschauliche) as commonly understood.¹⁰

[ 15 ] Just as the mind becomes acquainted through its spiritual organs with the spiritual world outside of a man, so does it come to know the spirit-being of the man himself. Anthroposophy observes this spirit-being as a member of the spiritual world. It proceeds from observation of a part of the spiritual world to ideas of human being which represent to it the spiritual man as he reveals himself in the human body. Anthropology, too, coming from the opposite direction, proceeds to ideas of human being. Once anthroposophy has reached the stage of developing the methods of observation already described, it attains to intuitions concerning the spiritual core of the human being as that reveals itself, within the sense-world, in the body. The acme of this self-revelation is the consciousness that permits sense-impressions to persist in the form of representations. Proceeding, as it does, from experiences of the extra-human spiritual world to the human being, anthroposophy finds the latter subsisting in a sensuous body and, within that body, developing the consciousness of sensible reality. The last thing it reaches is the soul’s activity in representation which is expressible in coherent imagery. Thereafter, and at the end, so to speak, of its journey of spiritual investigation, it can extend its gaze further; it can observe how positive activity in representation becomes half-paralysed through the percipient senses. It is this deadened representation process that anthroposophy sees (illumined from the spirit-side) as characterising the life of man in the sense-world, in so far as he is a representing being. Its philosophy of man is the final outcome of prior researches conducted purely in the realm of the spirit. Through what has transpired in the course of those researches, it comes at its notion of the human being living in the sense-world.

[ 16 ] Anthropology investigates the kingdoms of the sense-world. It also arrives, in due course, at the human being. It sees him combining the facts of the sense-world in his physical organism in such a way that consciousness arises, and that through consciousness outer reality is given in representations. The anthropologist sees these representations as arising out of the human organism. And at that point, observing in that way, he is more or less brought to a halt. He cannot, via anthropology alone, apprehend any inner structural laws in the act of ideation or representation. Anthroposophy, at the end of the journey that has taken its course in spiritual experiencing, continues contemplating the spiritual core of man so far as that manifests itself through the perceptions of the senses. Similarly anthropology, at the end of the journey that has taken its course in the province of the senses, can only continue endeavouring to contemplate the way in which sensuous man acts on his sense-perceptions. In doing so, it discovers that this operation is sustained, not by the laws of somatic life, but by the mental laws of logic. But logic is not a region that can be explored in the same fashion as the other regions of anthropological enquiry. Logically ordered thought is answerable to laws that can no longer be termed those of the physical organism. Inasmuch as a man is operating with them, what becomes apparent is the same being whom anthroposophy has encountered at the end of its journey. Only, the anthropologist sees this being after the fashion in which it is illumined from the sense side. He sees the deadened representations, the ideas; he also concedes, in acknowledging the validity of logic, that the laws governing those ideas belong to a world, which interlocks with the sense-world, but is not identical with it. In the process of ideation carried on by a logical being, anthropology discovers sensuous man projecting into the spiritual world. By this route it arrives at a philosophy of man as a final outcome of its investigations. Everything that has led up to it is to be found purely in the realm of the senses.¹¹

[ 17 ] Rightly pursued, therefore, the two approaches, anthroposophical and anthropological, converge and meet in one point. Anthroposophy contributes the image of the living human spirit, showing how, through sense existence, this develops the consciousness that obtains between birth and death, while at the same time its supersensible consciousness is deadened. Anthropology contributes the image of sensuous man, apprehending in the moment of consciousness his selfhood but towering into a subsistence in the spirit that extends beyond birth and death. In this coincidence a genuinely fruitful understanding between anthroposophy and anthropology is possible. It cannot fail, if both disciplines, terminate in philosophy and humanity.

Certainly the philosophy of humanity which stems from anthroposophy will furnish an image of man delineated by methods quite other than those of the image furnished by the humanist philosophy stemming from anthropology. Yet close observers of the one image and of the other will find that their ideas accord, as the negative plate of a competent photographer accords with his positive print.

[ 18 ] These observations began by posing the question whether fruitful dialogue is possible between anthropology and anthroposophy. They have perhaps succeeded in showing that the answer, at least from the anthroposophical point of view, is in the affirmative.

• 1. See Introduction, p. 16.
• 2. An exposition in greater detail together with a justification of this conception of “organs of spirit” will be found in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (4th Edition) as well as in my writings on Goethe’s philosophical outlook.
  
  Editor’s Note. And the English reader should compare Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, Chapter XII): “...all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense—and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: though the latter organs are not developed in all alike.”
• 3. An exposition in greater detail together with a justification of this conception of “organs of spirit” will be found in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (4th Edition) as well as in my writings on Goethe’s philosophical outlook.
• 4. The inner experiences, which the psyche has to undergo in order to be able to make use of its spiritual organs, are dealt with in a number of my writings and particularly in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and the second part of >Occult Science: an Outline.
• 5. This quickening of psychic faculties which in ordinary life remain unawakened is dealt with in greater detail in my Vom Menschenrätsel.
• 6. See also Section II. The Philosophical Bearing of Anthroposophy.
• 7. The boundaries of cognition referred to are not only those, comparatively few in number, of which there is general awareness. A great many are encountered along the avenues of self-reflection—4 which have to be explored on the way to immediate relation with reality. See also Section III. Concerning the Limits of Knowledge.
• 8. All this is dealt with at greater length in the final section of Vol. 2 of my Die Rätsel der Philosophie, under the heading: “Sketch Plan for an Anthroposophy”.
• 9. See also Section IV. Concerning Abstraction.
• 10. See also Section V. Concerning the Nature of Spiritual Perception.
• 11. Compare Section II.

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! Has anyone thought of a question?

Herr Dollinger: I would like to ask if Dr. Steiner would speak again about the creation of the world and man. There are many newcomers here who have not yet heard it.

Dr. Steiner: It is asked if I could speak again about the creation of the world and of humanity, since many new workers are here. I will do this by first describing the original conditions on the earth, which have led on the one hand to all that we see around us and on the other hand to man.

Now man is really a very, very complicated being. If people think they will be able to understand him by dissecting a human corpse, they are mistaken, for naturally they will not arrive at a real understanding. Just as little can they understand the world around us if all they do is collect stones and plants and look at the individual items. We must be able to realize that what we examine does not show at first sight what it actually is.

You see, if we look at a corpse, perhaps soon after the man has died—he still has the same form, if perhaps a little paler—we can see that death has seized him, but he still has the same form that he had when alive. But now think: how does this corpse look eventually if we do not cremate it but let it decay? It is destroyed; there is no longer anything at work in it that could build it up again; it is definitely destroyed.

The beginning of the Bible is very much smiled at, and indeed justifiably, when it is understood to say that once upon a time some god formed a man out of a clod of earth. People regard that as impossible and naturally they are right. No god can come along and make a human being out of a lump of earth; it would be no more a man than a statue is, however similar the form might be—no more than the mannequin children make can actually walk. So people smile rightly when some divinity is supposed to have made man out of a lump of earth.

That corpse that we were looking at is, in fact, after a certain time just such a clod of earth as it becomes in the grave somewhat decomposed, dissolved. So to believe that a human being can be made out of what we then have before us is really just as great a folly.

You see, on the one hand it is asserted today that it is incorrect to suppose that man could be formed from a lump of earth; on the other hand one is allowed to suppose that he consists of earth alone. If one wants to be logical, then the one is no better than the other. One must be clear that while the man lived there was something in him that gave him his shape and form, and when it is no longer in him he can no longer keep his form. Nature forces do not give him this form; nature forces merely break it apart, they do not make it grow. So we must go back to the soul and spirit of the man, which were really in control as long as he was living.

Now when we look at the lifeless stone outside, if we imagine that it has always been the same as it is today, that is just as if we would say of the corpse that it had always been like that even while the man was living. The stones that we see today in the world outside, the rocks, the mountains, are just the same as a corpse; in fact, they are a corpse! They were not always as they are today. Just as a human corpse was not always what it is now that the soul and spirit have gone, so what we see outside has not always been in its present condition. The fact that plants grow on the lifeless corpse, that is, on the rocks, need not surprise us; for when a human corpse decays, all sorts of tiny plants and tiny animals grow out of it.

Of course, what is outside in nature seems beautiful, and what we see on a corpse when all sorts of parasitic plants are growing out of it does not seem beautiful. But that is only because the one is gigantic in size and the other is small. If we were not human beings but were tiny beetles crawling about on a decaying corpse and could think like human beings, we would regard the bones of the corpse as rocks. We would consider what was decayed as rubble and stones; we would-since we were tiny beetles-see great forests in what was growing on the corpse; we would have a whole world to admire and not think it revolting as we do now.

Just as we must go back to what the man was before he died, so, in the case of the earth and our surroundings, we must go back to what once lived in all that today is lifeless, before indeed the earth as a whole died. Unless the earth as a whole had died there could be no human being. Human beings are parasites, as it were, on the present earth. The whole earth was once alive; it could think as you and I now think. But only when it became a corpse could it produce the human race. This is something really everyone can realize if he will just think. But people today do not want to think. Yet one must think if one would come to the truth.

We have, therefore, to imagine that what is today solid rock with plants growing, and so on, was originally entirely different. Originally there was a living, thinking, cosmic body-a living, thinking, cosmic body!

I have often said here: What do people today imagine? They imagine that originally there was a gigantic mist, that this primeval mist came into rotation, that the planets then split off, that the sun became the center. This is taught to children quite early, and a little experiment is made to show that everything really did start in that way. A few drops of oil are put in a glass of water; one lets the oil swim on the water. A piece of cardboard has a pin stuck through it; then with the pin one makes the cardboard revolve; little oil-drops split off, go on revolving, and a tiny planetary system actually forms with the sun in the center.¹

Well now, it is usually quite a virtue if one can forget oneself, but in this case the teacher should not! When he makes the experiment, he ought then to say to the children: Out there in the universe is a giant schoolteacher who did the rotating!

What it amounts to is thoughtlessness—not because the facts oblige one to be thoughtless, but because one wants to be. But in that way one doesn't arrive at the truth.

We must therefore imagine not that a gigantic schoolteacher was there who rotated the world mist, but that there was something in the world mist itself that was able to move and so on. But there we come back to the living. If we want to rotate, we don't need a pin stuck through us with which a teacher rotates us. That's not for us; we can rotate ourselves. This schoolroom variety of primeval mist would have to be rotated by a schoolteacher. But if it is living and can feel and think, then it needs no cosmic schoolteacher; it can cause the rotation itself.

So we must picture that what today is lifeless around us was once alive, was sensitive, was a cosmic being. If we look further, there was even a great number of cosmic beings animating the whole. The original conditions of the world are therefore due to the fact that there was Spirit within the substance.

Now what is it that underlies everything material? Imagine that I have a lump of lead in my hand, that is, solid matter, thoroughly solid matter. Now if I put this lead on red-hot iron or on anything red-hot, on fire, it turns to fluid. If I work on it still further with fire, the whole lead vanishes; it evaporates, and I see nothing more of it. It is the same with all substances. On what does it depend then that a substance is solid? It depends upon what warmth is in it. The appearance of a substance depends only upon how much warmth is in it.

You know, today one can make the air liquid, then one has liquid air. The air we have in our surroundings is only airy, gaseous, as long as it contains a definite amount of warmth. And water—water is fluid, but it can also become ice and therefore solid. If there were a certain cold temperature on our earth there would be no water, but only ice. Now let us go into our mountains: there we find the solid granite or other solid rock. But if it were immensely hot there, there would be no solid granite; it would be fluid and flow away like the water in our brooks.

What then is actually the original element that makes things solid or fluid or gaseous? It is heat! And unless heat is there in the first place, nothing at all can be solid or fluid. So we can say that heat or fire is what is underlying everything in the beginning.

That is also shown by the research of spiritual science or anthroposophy. Spiritual science shows that originally there was not a primeval mist, a lifeless mist, but that living warmth was there at the beginning, simple living warmth. Thus I will assume an original cosmic body that was living warmth. [See drawing – red.] In my Occult Science I have called this original warmth condition the “Saturn condition”; it has been called this from ancient times, and though one must have a name, it is not the name that matters. It has, in fact, something to do with the cosmic body Saturn, but we will not go into that now.

In this original condition there were as yet no solid bodies and no air, only warmth; but the warmth was living. When you freeze today, it's your ego that freezes; when you sweat today, it's your ego that sweats, that becomes thoroughly hot. You are always in warmth, sometimes heat, sometimes cold, but always in some kind of warmth. In fact, we can still see today that man lives in warmth. The human being lives absolutely in warmth.

When modern science says that originally there was great heat, in a certain sense it is right; but when it thinks that this great heat was dead, then it is wrong. There was a living cosmic being, a thoroughly living cosmic being.

Now the first thing to come about in connection with this warmth-being was a cooling down. Things cool down continually. And what happens when what has been nothing but warmth now cools down? Air arises, air, the gaseous state. For when we go on heating a solid object, gas is formed in the warmth; but when something not yet substance cools down from above downwards, air is formed at first. So we can say that the second condition to come about was gaseous, definitely airy. [See drawing-green.]

In what has been formed, in a certain sense, as a second cosmic body everything is air. There is as yet no water, nothing solid within it; it consists entirely of air.

So now we have the second condition that formed itself in the course of time. You see, in this second condition something else developed along with what was already there. I have called this second condition “Sun” in my Occult Science; it was not the present sun, but a kind of Sun condition, a warm air-mist. The present sun, as I have told you, is not that, nor is it what was originally this second cosmic body. Thus we get a second cosmic body formed out of the first; the first was pure warmth, the second was of an air-nature.

Now man can live in warmth as soul. Warmth gives the soul sensitive feeling and does not destroy it. It destroys the body, however; if I were thrown into the fire my body would be destroyed but not my soul. (We will speak of this more exactly later, for naturally the question needs to be considered in detail.) For this reason the human being could already live as soul during the first, the Saturn, condition. But although man could live then, the animal could not, for in the case of the animal when the body is destroyed the soul element is injured too. Fire has an influence on the soul element of the animal. In the first condition, therefore, we have man already present but not the animal.

When the transformation had taken place to the Sun condition [see drawing], both human being and animal were there. That is the important fact. It is not true that the animals were there originally and that man developed out of them. Man was there originally and afterwards the animals evolved out of what could not become man. Naturally the human being was not going about on two feet when there was only warmth—obviously not. He lived in the warmth and was a floating being; he had only a condition of warmth. Then as that was metamorphosed into an air-warmth-body, the animals were formed and appeared beside man. Thus the animals are indeed related to man, but they developed only later in the course of world evolution.

Now what more happened? The warmth decreased, and as it gradually decreased, not only was air formed but also water. Thus we have a third cosmic body. [See drawing—yellow.] I have called it “Moon” because it was slightly similar to our present moon, although it was not our present moon. It was a watery, a thoroughly watery body. Air and warmth naturally remained, but now water appeared which had not been present in the second condition. After the appearance of water there could be man, who was already there, animals, and, pushing up out of the water, plants. Plants originally grew in water, not in earth. So we have man, animal, plant.

You see, plants seem to grow out of the earth, but if the earth contained no water, no plants would grow; they need water for their growth. There are also as you know, aquatic plants, and you can think of the original plants as being similar to these; the original plants swam in the water. The animals too you must picture as swimming animals and in the former, second condition, even as flying animals.

Something still actually remains of all that was there originally. During the Sun condition, when only man and animal were in existence, everything had to fly, and since the air has remained and still exists, those flying creatures have their descendants. Our present birds are the descendants of the original animals that developed during the Sun condition. However, at that time they were not as they are today. Those animal creatures consisted purely of air; they were airy clouds. Here, later [Moon condition], they had water in them. Today—let us look at a bird. Usually a bird is observed very thoughtlessly. If we are to picture the animals as they existed during the Sun condition, we must say that they consisted only of air; they were hovering air-clouds. When we look at a bird today, we should realize that it has hollow bones filled with air. It is very interesting to see that in the present bird. There is air everywhere in this bird, in the bones, everywhere! Think away whatever is not air and you get an air-being—the bird. If it did not have this air, it could not fly at all. It has hollow bones; within, it is an air-bird, reminding us of former conditions. The rest of the body was built around it in later times. The birds are really the descendants of the Sun condition.

Look at modern man: He can live in the air, but he can't fly; he is too heavy to fly. He has not formed hollow bones for himself like the bird, or else he too could fly. Then he would not just have shoulder blades, but his shoulder blades would stretch out into wings. The human being still has the rudiments of wings up there in his shoulder blades; if these were to grow out, he would be able to fly.

Thus man lives in the air surrounding him. But this air must contain vapor. Man cannot live in purely dry air; he needs fluids.

There is a condition, however, in which the human being cannot live in the air: that is the very earliest human state, the embryo. One must look at these things rightly. During the embryonic time the human germ or embryo obtains air and all that it needs from the body of the mother. It must be in something living.

You see, it is like this: If the human embryo is removed by operation from the body of the mother, it cannot yet live in the air. During the embryonic condition the human being needs to have live surroundings. At the time when man, animal, and plant existed, but as yet no stones or minerals as we have them today, everything was alive and man lived surrounded by what was alive just as now he lives as embryo in the mother's body. Naturally he grew bigger. Think of this: If we did not have to be born and live in the air and breathe on our own, then our span of life would end with our birth. As embryo we could all live only ten moon-months. As a matter of fact, there are such creatures that live only ten months; these do not come to the outer air but get air from within a living environment. So it was with man a long time ago. He certainly grew older, but he never came out of the living element. He lived in that state all the time. He did not advance to birth; he lived as embryo. At that time there were as yet no minerals, no rocks.

If the body of a human being is dissected today, the same carbonate of lime will be found in his bones as you find here in the Jura Mountains. There is now a mineral substance inside the body that was not present in the earlier condition. In the embryo too, particularly in the first months, there is no deposit of mineral; everything is still fluid, only slightly thickened. And so it was during this earlier condition; man was not yet bony, having, at most, cartilage. Of such a human being we are reminded today only by the human embryo. Why cannot the human embryo come immediately out of the mother's body? Because the world today is a different world. As long as the Old Moon lasted—I will now call it the Old Moon, as it is not the present moon but the former state of the earth—as long as the Old Moon period lasted, the whole earth was a womb, inwardly alive, a real womb. There was nothing yet of stone or mineral. It was all a gigantic womb, and we can say that our present earth came forth from this gigantic womb.

Earlier this immense womb did not exist at all. What was it then? Well, in fact, earlier there was something else in existence. Let us just consider what came before. You see, if a human being is to develop in the mother's body, if he is to be an embryo, he must first be conceived. The conception takes place. But does nothing precede conception? What precedes conception is the monthly period in the woman; that is what precedes. A very special process takes place in the female organism that is connected with the expulsion of blood. But that is not the only thing; that is only the physical aspect. Every time the blood is expelled something of a spiritual-soul nature is born at the same time, and this remains. It does not become physical, because no conception has taken place. The spiritual-soul element remains without becoming a physical human body. What for a human being must be there before conception was also there during the cosmic Sun condition! The whole Sun was a cosmic being that from time to time expelled something spiritual. So man and animal lived in the air-like condition, thrust out, expelled by this whole body. Between one condition (Sun) and the other (Moon), it came about that the human being became a physical being in water. Formerly he was a physical being only in air. During this Moon condition we have something similar to conception, but not yet anything similar to birth. What was the nature of this conception during the ancient Moon condition?

The Moon was there, an entirely female being, and confronting it was not a male being, but all that was still outside its cosmic body at that time. Outside it were many other cosmic bodies that exerted an influence. Now comes the drawing which I have already made here.

So this cosmic body was there and around it the other cosmic bodies, exerting their influence in the most varied ways. Seeds came in from outside and fructified the whole Moon-Earth. And if you could have lived at that time and set foot on this primeval cosmic body, you would not have said when you saw all sorts of drops coming in “It is raining,” as one says today. At that time you would have said, “Earth is being fructified.” There were seasons when the fructifying seeds came in from all directions, and other seasons when they matured and no more came in. Thus at that time there was a cosmic fructification. But the human being was not born, only fructified; he was only called forth by conception. The human being came out of the entire Earth-body, or Moon-body, as it was then. In the same way fructification came from the whole cosmic surroundings for animal and plant.

Now later through further cooling there came about a hardening of all that lived then as man, animal, and plant. There, in the Moon condition we still have to do with water, at most, a hardening through the cooling. Here on the earth the solid, the mineral appears. So now we have a fourth condition [see drawing]: this is our earth as we have it today, and it contains man, animal, plant, mineral.

Let us just look at what the bird, for instance, has become on the earth. During this time (Sun condition) the bird was still a sort of air-sack, it consisted of nothing but air, a mass of air floating along. Then during this time (Moon condition) it became watery, a thickened watery thing, and it hovered as a kind of cloud—only not like our clouds but already containing a form. What for us are only formless water structures were at that time forms. There was a skeleton form, but it was fluid. But now came the mineral element, and this was incorporated into what was only water structure. Carbonate of lime, phosphatic lime and so on went the length of the skeleton, forming solid bones. So at first we have the air-bird, then the water-bird, and at last the solid earth-bird.

This could not be the same in the case of man. Man could not simply incorporate into himself what only arose as mineral during his embryonic period. The bird could do this—and why? You see, the bird acquired its air form here (Sun condition); it then lived through the water condition. It is essential for it not to let the mineral come too close to it during its germinal state. If the mineral came to it too soon, then it would just become a mineral and harden. The bird while it is developing is still somewhat watery and fluid; the mineral, however, wants to approach. What does the bird do? Well, it pushes it off, it makes something around itself, it makes the eggshell around itself! That is the mineral element. The eggshell remains as long as the bird must protect itself inwardly from the mineral; that is, as long as it must stay fluid. The reason for this is that the bird originated only during the second condition of the earth. If it had been there during the first condition, it would now be much more sensitive to warmth than it actually is. Since it was not there at that time, it can now form the hard eggshell around itself.

Man was already present during the first condition of the earth, the warmth condition, and therefore he cannot now hold off the mineral while he is in the embryonic stage. He can't build an eggshell; he must be organized differently. He must take up the mineral element from the womb, and so we have mineral formation already in the embryo at the end of its development. Man must absorb some mineral from the womb; therefore, the womb must first possess the mineral that is to be absorbed. So in the case of man the mineral element is incorporated quite differently. The bird has air-filled bones; we human beings have marrow-filled bones, very different from the bones of the bird. Through the fact of our having this marrow a human mother is able to provide mineral substance to the embryo within her. But once the mineral element is provided, the human being is no longer able to live in the womb environment and must gradually be born. He must first have acquired mineral constituents. With the bird it is not a matter of being born, but of creeping out of the eggshell; man is born without an eggshell. Why? Because man originated earlier and therefore everything can be done through warmth and not through air.

From this you can understand the differences that still exist and that can be observed today. The difference between an “egg-animal” and such a being as man, and also the higher mammals, lies in the fact that man is far older than, for instance, the bird species, far older than the minerals. Therefore, when he is quite young, during the embryonic stage in the womb, he must be protected from the mineral nature and may only be given the prepared mineral that comes from the mother. In fact, the mineral element prepared in the mother's body must even for a certain time after birth still be given to him in the mother's milk! While the bird can be fed at once with external substances, man and the higher animals can only be nourished by what the mother's body provides.

What the human being has today in our present Earth condition from the mother's body he had during the previous cosmic condition from the air, from the environment. What he had around him during his whole life was of a milk nature. Our air today contains oxygen and nitrogen but relatively little carbon and hydrogen and particularly very, very little sulphur. They have gone. During the Moon condition it was different; in the surrounding air there were not only oxygen and nitrogen but also hydrogen, carbon, sulphur. That made a sort of milky pap around the Moon, a quite thin milk-pap in which life existed. Today man still lives in a thin milk-pap before he is born! For it is only after his birth that the milk goes into the breast; before birth it is in those parts of the female body where the human embryo is lying. That is an amazing thing, that processes in the mother's organism that belong to the uterus before birth afterwards go to the breast. And so the Moon condition is still preserved in man before he is born, and the actual Earth condition only comes at the moment of birth with the Moon-nature still present in the breast milk.

This is how things connected with the origin of the earth and mankind must be explained. If people do not press forward to a spiritual science, they simply cannot solve the mystery of why a bird slips out of an egg and can at once be nourished with external substances, while a human being cannot slip out of an egg and must come out of the womb to be nourished by mother's milk. Why is it? It is because the bird originated later and is thus an external being. Man originated earlier, and when he was undergoing the Moon-condition, he was not yet as hardened as the bird. Hence today too he is not yet so hardened; he must still be more protected, for he has within him much more of the original conditions.

Since people today on the whole can no longer think properly, they misunderstand what exists on earth as plant, animal, and man. Thus materialistic Darwinism arose, which believed that the animals were there first and that man simply developed out of the animals. It is true that in his external form man is related to the animals, but he existed earlier, and the animals really developed later after the world had gone through a transformation. And so we can say that the animals we see now present a later stage of an earlier condition when they were indeed more closely related to man. But we must never allow ourselves to imagine that out of the present animals a human being could arise. That is a thoroughly false idea.

Now let us look not at the bird species but at the fishes. The bird species developed for the air, the fish species for the water. Not until what we call the Moon condition were certain earlier air-like bird-beings transformed in such a way as to become fishlike—because of the water. To the bird-like beings were added the fish. One could say that the fish are birds that have become watery, birds received by the water. You can gather from this that the fish appeared later than the birds; they appeared when the watery element was there, that is, during the Old Moon period.

And now you will no longer be astonished that everything swimming about in a watery state during the Old Moon time looked fish-like. The birds looked fish-like in spite of flying in the air and being lighter. Everything was fish-like. Now this is interesting: if we look today at a human embryo on about the 21st or 22nd day after conception, what is its appearance? There it swims in a fluid element in the mother's body, and it looks really like a tiny fish! The human being actually had this form during the ancient Moon period and he has it still in the third week of pregnancy; he has preserved it.

You can say, then, that man worked himself out of this Old Moon form, and we can still see by the fish form he has in the embryo how he has worked himself out. When we observe the present world, everywhere we can see how formerly it all had life, just as we know of a corpse that it had life earlier. So today I have described to you the earlier condition of what we now have on earth as mineral. We look at a corpse and say that he can no longer move his legs, his hands, no longer open his mouth or his eyes—everything has become immobile; yet that leads us back to a human state when everything could be moved—legs, arms, hands—when the eyes could be opened. In just the same way we look around us at the corpse of the earth, the remains of a living body, in which man and animal still wander about, and we look back to the time when the entire earth was once alive.

But there is something more. I said that with conception the potentiality of the physical human being is there, and gradually the embryo develops. I also described what happens earlier, the processes in the female organism, what is pushed out in the monthly periods, and how a spiritual element is pushed out too. Now in this process there is always something of the nature of fever, even in a perfectly normal, healthy woman. This is because there is a warmth condition; it is the warmth condition that has been preserved from the ancient first condition that I have in the drawing called Saturn. This fever condition still endures.

One can say that the whole of our evolution proceeded from a kind of fever condition of our earth, which the cooling down finally brought to an end. Most people today are no longer feverish but thoroughly dry and matter-of-fact. Yet even now, when there is something not caused by outside warmth but appearing inwardly as warmth, giving us something of an inward life, now too we have a condition of fever.

So it is, gentlemen: One sees everywhere in the conditions of present mankind how they can be traced back to conditions of the past. Today I have told you how man, animal, plant, and mineral gradually evolved as the entire cosmic body with which all are connected grew more and more solid.

We will speak further of all this—today is Monday—on Wednesday at nine o'clock.²

• 1. “The little Plateau experiment,” worked out by the physicist J.A.E Plateau, 1801 – 1883. Compare the description by Vincent Knauer in his lectures, “The Main Problem of Philosophy,” Vienna and Leipzig 1892: “One of the nicest experiments is the Plateau experiment. A mixture of water and alcohol is prepared, having the exact weight of pure olive oil. Into this is poured a rather large drop of oil. This does not float on top of the liquid but sinks to the middle of it, in the form of a ball. A small disc of cardboard is then perforated in the center by a long needle and lowered carefully into the middle of the ball of oil, so that the edge of the cardboard becomes the ‘equator’ of the ball. The disc is now set into motion, at first slowly, then faster and faster. Naturally the movement is imparted to the ball of oil, and as a result of the strength of the movement, parts of the oil drop away and continue the movement separately for some time, first in circles, then revolving as tiny balls. In this way there arises something surprisingly similar to our planetary system: in the center the largest globe, like our sun, and moving around it smaller balls and rings, like our planets with their moons.”
• 2. This lecture was postponed to Thursday, July 3rd.

HERR DOLLINGER wishes to ask a question about the honeycomb. There are people who eat the wax as well as the honey, and in restaurants they used at times to serve honey in the comb. He would like to know if it was a bad thing to eat the comb.

As to the diseases of bees, he thinks these could not formerly have been as bad as they are today when the bees are over-exploited.

HERR MÜLLER said that eating comb-honey was an idiosyncrasy with some people. Naturally, these are the natural combs and not artificial ones. He does not think that bee diseases are the result of exploitation, but that formerly they were less considered. In those days there were not so many weak stocks and so one was not so much on the look out for them. A disease had appeared in Switzerland from England which had not been known in the past. Herr Erbsmehl thinks this may perhaps be owing to the use of artificial manures, even the flowers sicken as the result of this.

DR. STEINER:

With regard to these two points, one might say it is quite true that the eating of honey-comb is a fancy with some people; the real question is whether it is good for them, and this can, unfortunately only be answered medically. It is only possible to answer this question when one is really able to observe these people who eat the honey-comb, thus the wax, from the point of view of their state of health. I have seen various people who eat the comb, but they always spat it out when they had sucked out the honey. I have not so far come across people who eat any considerable quantity of wax. One should take into consideration that people digest in very different ways, not everyone in the same way. There may be people who would get some kind of gastric trouble simply by eating the wax, and such persons should be advised not to take it. But there can also be people who are able to digest the wax without any trouble and get rid of the residue by excretion. With regard to these people one could certainly say that because they eat the wax with the honey, (thus leaving the honey as long as possible still in connection with the wax which has entered the body), the honey is digested more in the intestines, whereas otherwise it is not digested till it has left the intestines and has passed into the lymphatic vessels. It is a question of the state of health of the person concerned. There are people who digest more in the intestines, and others more in the lymphatic vessels; one cannot say that one way is better than the other, for one is just as good as the other. It depends on the individual. One could only speak with certainty if one took a number of people who eat honey in the comb, and others who eat it without the comb, and then investigated how these two matters are related.

With regard to bee-diseases the question is, as is usual in disease, namely, that we must take into account what Herr Müller has just said. It is so even with human beings that certain things were not much noticed formerly, whereas today they are most carefully studied. But here something essentially different comes in question. The bee-keeper of the past had really many good instincts: he did many things without being able to say just why he did them. Today these instincts no longer exist. Today people always want to know the reason why. To determine this why it is, however, necessary to study the whole matter very fundamentally. Modern knowledge is not as a rule in a position to do this.

You see, the bee-keeper of old had very good instincts as how to treat the bees, I should like to say, in quite a personal manner. For instance, you should consider that there is already a considerable difference between giving the bees the old straw skeps as in former days, and giving them wooden hives as one does today. Box-hives are made of wood, and wood is an entirely different substance to the straw of which the old skeps were made. Straw attracts quite other substances from the air than does wood, so we have already a difference in the external handling. When I add to this all the bee-keeper did in former times, and above all, the strong instincts he had to do them even if he did not always know the reason why, he would, for example, place his bee-hives on some chosen spot, where the wind would blow more often from one quarter or another, and so on. Today one sets the bee-hives wherever there is room for them, from reasons of convenience. The climatic elements are still considered, but no longer to the same degree.

HERR MÜLLER stated that he pays great attention to this; he places his hives on a ridge where they are sheltered from the north wind and the east wind, and so on.

DR. STEINER:

In such matters wood is less sensitive than straw. I have no intention of agitating in favour of straw skeps; nevertheless differences do exist, and just such things as these certainly, very definitely, affect the bees with regard to their inner activities. A tremendous activity goes on in the body of the bee when it must first gather the nectar from the plants, and in absorbing it, transforms it. This is really an immense work. How does the bee accomplish it? It is accomplished through the quite special relationship between the two different fluids in the bee. One of these is the gastric juices and the other the blood-fluid. When you study the bee you find the whitish gastric juice and the reddish sap of the blood; these are the two main elements of which the bee is constituted, and all the other parts are arranged according to the workings of the gastric juice and the blood. The main point then is this definite proportion between these two fluids; they differ very considerably in themselves. The gastric juice is what one calls acid in chemistry, and the blood sap is chemically called alkaline, which means that it is not acid though it can be made so; in itself it is however, not acid. When the pepsin is insufficiently acid, something takes place within the bee which greatly disturbs its inner organism in the honey-producing process. The blood sap is only kept sufficiently strong when the necessary climatic conditions of light and warmth, etc., are present.

It will therefore be very important to take the right means of establishing the proper balance between the gastric fluid and the blood if one is to overcome the many diseases which have recently appeared among the bees. As bee-keeping can no longer be carried on as in past days, it is no longer possible to arrive at preventive methods through climatic conditions of warmth, etc., for these are no longer able to work so effectively upon the stocks of bees today; one will have to discover what will be able to work most favourably on the blood sap of the bee. It will be necessary in the future that bee-keepers take special care that the blood sap of the bee is rightly provided for. The following is important: you all know that there are years when the bees are obliged to get nectar almost exclusively from trees. In such seasons the composition of the blood sap is endangered, and the bees are much more liable to disease than at other times. It will be necessary in the future that the bee-keeper even contrives a small green-house—it need not be a large one—in which he can cultivate those plants which the bees not only like, but must have at certain times of the year. It will be necessary to have at least some small plot of flowers for the bees especially, for instance in the month of May. They will not fail to discover them for themselves whenever the plants they need have failed elsewhere. By this special cultivation of the necessary plants in the neighbourhood of the hives it will be possible to combat these diseases. These are methods I can recommend; I am giving only indications, but they will most certainly prove satisfactory for they are derived from a knowledge of bee-keeping, If they are put to the test you will find that one day they will bear very good fruit for the bee-keeper, for he will find that the diseases of bees can be prevented by these means. But if one is to proceed in a practical way all the connections mentioned above must be taken into account. I have no wish to make assertions; I only wish to say that these things arise out of the whole nature of the bees, and that it would be well to make experiments with especially cultivated plants in seasons when those most needed have failed, either partially or altogether. It should be possible in this way to considerably improve the health of the bees. I am myself quite convinced that these methods will prove successful when one is able to enter once again into these questions with a true understanding of nature. You see, it is not possible to go back to the old methods of bee-keeping. Just as little as there is any need to be reactionary in the realms of politics, or of life, is there any necessity to be a reactionary in any other domain. One must move with the times; but what really matters is that while we leave the old methods we are careful to balance this by something which will replace what we have lost. This is essential.

HERR MÜLLER stated that bee-keepers were already working in the direction of the special cultivation of certain plants. For example, the yellow crocus, which is grown in large quantities for the bees; other plants were cultivated also with similar small yellow blossoms. Indeed, more than this, for a large amount of American clover is now planted; a clover which grows six feet in height and flowers the whole year round. It is cut only in the autumn; till then the blossom is left for the bees. This might also be necessary perhaps?

DR. STEINER:

Certainly, such things are no doubt done, but as a rule the right connections are not known. What Herr Müller had mentioned at first, was excellent and should be continued, but with regard to the American clover that flowers all the year round, this will in future be avoided, for this plant cannot bring about any improvement at all in the blood-sap of the bees; it acts only as a stimulant, and for a very short time. It is very much the same as trying to cure a man with alcohol, the bees are stimulated to more activity for a certain time. The very greatest care should really be taken today not to grow plants for the bees that are totally foreign to them; bees in their whole organic nature are bound up with a particular country. This is very evident, for the bees from different parts of the world differ widely from one another. There is, for instance, the mid-European bee already referred to here, the common domestic bee. The Italian bee again is quite unlike the Spanish bee, and so on. Bees are most strongly bound by their habits to their native country, and one cannot help them in any real way by giving them the nectar or honey belonging to entirely different countries. They have then, so much work to do in their own bodies that there are great disturbances there; the bees are forced to try and adapt themselves, to make their organisation as much as possible like that of the bees over there, in those countries where the clover comes from. Hard facts will prove in time that though such methods may appear successful for a few years, disastrous results will follow. It is quite true as has been said, that so far there are no definite indications of this, but it will none the less occur, and then people must abandon all such methods, or continue them as was done in the case of the vines. You will remember that in the seventies or eighties, phyloxera appeared and is destroying the vineyards of Europe, over immense areas. At the time I was able to study this matter, as I had a very good friend who was a farmer, and who also edited an agricultural paper, and gave much attention to this whole problem. People began to wonder why the American vine appeared immune to this disease. But what did it all amount to? It amounted to this, that the remedies by which the disease could be got rid of with the American vine, could not be used with the same result on the European vine. The consequence was, that even when everyone began to cultivate the American vine, they could succeed in keeping it in health, whereas the European vines died out. The cultivation of the European vine had to be given up altogether; the whole cultivation of the vineyards was Americanised, and everything has been completely changed. This has happened in many places. To think in this mechanical manner is valueless; one must be quite clear that things through their whole nature may be bound up with definite localities, and this fact must be taken into account. Otherwise though some temporary success may follow, it cannot be permanent.

Are there any other questions you would like to ask? Or are all you gentlemen content to eat honey without so much discussion about it? Perhaps some question may occur to one or another of you.

Meanwhile, I should like to say something quite briefly about the nature of this honey-making process of the bees. It is something so really wonderful that there should be these tiny little creatures that are able to transform what they have gathered from the flowers or plants in general, into the honey which is so health-giving, and which should really play a far greater part in the nourishment of men and women today. It is not realised how important the consumption of honey actually is. For example, if it were possible to influence the social medicine of today, it would be discovered that if people about to be married would eat honey as a preparation for the future, they would not have rickety children. Honey when assimilated can affect the reproductive processes, and greatly influence the building up of the body of the child. The consumption of honey by the parents, and above all by the prospective mother, works especially into the bony structure of the child. Results such as this will appear when these questions are considered in their essential aspects. In the place of the trivialities put forward in scientific journals today, it will be asked, when once we have some real knowledge of these things: “What is it best to eat at this or that time of life?” “What is best at another time of life?” Indeed, gentlemen, this will be of immense value, for the general state of health will then essentially improve, and more especially will this affect a man's vitality. Today people attach very little value to such matters. Those whose children do not suffer from rickets are naturally very pleased, but they do not think very much about it, it is taken as a matter of course. Only those complain whose children are born with rickets. It is just in the case of such most valuable social and medical methods that people remain indifferent, for it is generally taken for granted that such measures are concerned merely with what they regard as a normal condition. They have first to be persuaded that this is not the case. It should, however, be recognised that extremely favourable results would appear in this direction, and I am sure that if it could in this way be realised that through spiritual science it is possible to arrive at such conclusions, people would begin to look towards the things of the spirit. They would do this to a far greater extent than at present, when they are only told to pray that this or that may happen. Truly, gentlemen, these things which can be learnt by the spirit, and which modern science ignores, are such that one is able to know that during the times of betrothal and pregnancy, honey can be of inestimable value.

I have just said that it is a most wonderful thing that the bee should be able to gather substances from the storehouse of nature and then transform them into this honey which is of so great value to human life. You will best understand on what the origin of honey actually rests if I describe to you the sane process in the quite different form in which it appears in those relatives of the bees, if I may call them so, the wasps.

The wasps do not provide man with honey, but they prepare a substance that can be made use of medicinally, though of a very different kind to that prepared for us by the bees. In the next lecture I will also speak about the ants, but first, will we consider a certain species of wasp. There are wasps that have the peculiarity that they do not deposit their eggs at random, but place them on plants or on the leaves or bark of trees, even into the blossoms of trees. [Drawing on the blackboard.] Here for example is the branch, here an oak-leaf, and the wasp with its ovipositor which is hollow, (the sting would be here) lays its egg in the oak-leaf, or in some other part of a plant. What then happens? Where the egg has been placed the whole surrounding tissue of the leaf is changed; the leaf would have been quite different if the egg had not been laid there. Very good, let us now see what has happened.

The whole growth of the plant has been affected, and protruding from the leaf, entirely surrounding the little wasp-egg, we find the so-called gall-nut or gall-apple, those little brownish coloured nuts or apples so often seen on trees. They are there because a wasp deposited an egg at this spot, and all round the egg there is this metamorphosed plant-substance which entirely envelops it. The wasp egg would perish if it were laid in any other place; it can only exist and develop because this protective substance encloses it which the gall-wasp steals from the plant. The wasp robs the plant of this substance. You see, the bee lays its egg in the cells of the comb; the larvae develop and emerge as bees, which in their turn steal the substance of the plant, and elaborate it within themselves. The wasp does this at an earlier stage, for in the depositing of the egg the wasp already takes from the plant the substance it needs. The bee, as it were, waits a little longer, the wasp does it earlier. In the case of the higher animals, and with man, the egg is already surrounded with a protecting sheath within the body of the mother. In this instance what the wasp has to take from the plant is provided by the mother. This gall-nut is simply built up from the substance of the plant, just as the chorion is formed as a sheath round the egg in the body of the mother, and is ejected later with the after-birth. You see how close is the relationship between the wasp and the plant. In districts especially rich in wasps one can find trees almost entirely covered with these galls. The wasp lives with the trees; it depends on them, for its eggs would never develop if it could not procure this protective covering from the different trees or plants. These galls have very many and various forms, there are some which do not look like small apples, but are interwoven and hairy, but everywhere the small germ of the wasp is in the centre. At times these galls look like shaggy little nuts. We see how close is the relationship between the wasps and the plants with which they share their existence.

When the wasp has matured, it eats its way with its sharp jaws out of the gall-nut, and emerges as a wasp, and after a period of living in the outer world lays its eggs on a leaf or the bark of a tree; the egg and larval stages are always passed through as a living together with the plants.

Well, gentlemen, you may perhaps say—what has all this to do with the production of honey? It has actually a great deal to do with it, for when such things are observed in the right way one learns to know how the honey was first prepared in nature, and we find once more an instance of how the instinctive knowledge of the people in older times took these things into account.

Perhaps some of you know that in the south, and more especially in Greece, the cultivation of fig trees is of much importance. These are the so-called wild figs which are certainly rather sweet, but there are people with a still sweeter tooth, who wish to have fig trees that bear still sweeter figs than those of the wild trees. What do these people do?

Now just imagine you have a wild fig tree; this wild fig tree is a special favourite with a certain kind of wasp which lays its eggs upon it. Let us picture this tree, and on its branches a wild fig into which the wasp inserts its egg. Now the grower of the figs is in his way a clever fellow; he lets the wasps lay their eggs in the wild figs which he cultivates just for this very purpose. Later this fellow gathers two of these figs, just at the moment when the wasp eggs are not quite fully developed, when the wasps are not yet ready to creep out, and he takes a reed and ties the two figs together so that they are held firmly. And now he goes to a fig tree that he wants to improve, and he hangs the two figs he has tied together, and within which are the eggs of the wasp not yet fully developed, and binds them on to the fig-tree which he wishes to sweeten. And now the following happens: the wasps within the figs feel that something has happened, for the figs which were gathered now begin to dry up, for they are no longer supplied with the sap of the tree, and get very dry. The immature wasp inside senses this, even the egg is aware of it, and the result is that the wasp is in a terrible hurry to come out of the fig. The grower always starts this process in the spring; he first lets the wasp lay its eggs, and in the month of May he quickly gathers the two figs and carries out his plan. The little creature inside thinks, now I must hurry up, now the time has come when the figs dry up. In a terrible hurry the wasp emerges much earlier than it would otherwise have done. If the fig had remained where it was before, it would only have crept out in the late summer; now it must creep out in the early summer with the result that there is a second brood. It lays eggs in the summer which would otherwise have been laid in the following spring. Now these late eggs which are deposited on the tree that is to be further cultivated, do not reach full maturity, they only develop to a certain stage. The result of this is, that those figs into which the second brood has been placed become twice as sweet as the wild figs. This is the method of improving the figs, of making them twice as sweet.

What has actually happened here? The wasps, which though they differ from the bees are yet related to them, the wasps take just that substance from the plant which is on the way to become honey. If in the clever way of the cultivator of the fig trees, the figs of the wild tree containing the eggs of the wasp are thrown up and tied so that they remain hanging up there, and if one then is clever enough to induce the wasps to weave again into the tree what they have taken from the other tree, then honey in the form of sweetness is, as it were, filtered into these grafted fig-trees; it enters into the figs in the form of sweetness because the wasps have prepared it in an extremely fine state of dilution; Nature itself has brought it about in an indirect way.

You see, gentlemen, nothing has been taken away from Nature, the essence of the honey remains within Nature. The wasp cannot prepare the honey in the way the bee does, for its organisation is not adapted to this. But when, by this by-path, it is compelled during the stages of its growth, to carry the sweetness of the honey from one fig-tree to another, the sweetness of the grafted figs can be increased; a kind of honey-substance is then within them.

You see, gentlemen, we arrive here at something very interesting. It seems that these wasps have a body which is unable to gather the nectar, the honey-substance from Nature, and transform it into honey within itself. But man can bring it about that from one fig-tree to another a kind of honey-making takes place. The bee is therefore a creature that develops a wasp-like body so much further that it is able to accomplish this quite apart from the trees; in the case of the wasp the process must be left within the tree itself. So we must say: the bee retains within itself more of that force which the wasp only possesses at a very young stage, as long, that is, as it is in the egg, or larval state. When the wasp develops further it loses the power of producing honey; the bee retains it and can make use of it as a fully matured creature.

Just think, gentlemen, what it signifies that one can in this way look into Nature's processes, and can say to oneself: within the plants there is concealed this honey, this substance that tends towards sugar-sweetness. It is there; it shows itself, if only one follows the right path; one has only to assist Nature by seeing that the wasp comes at the right moment to the tree that is to be improved.

Here, in our country such things cannot be done, it is no longer possible today. There was once a time in the evolution of the earth when from the wasps, which as long as 2,000 years ago, and indeed, still today, could be persuaded by some clever fellow to produce a second brood as I have described. These wasps crept out and were given the opportunity of laying their eggs in the figs, which were then again and again gathered. Thus, in the course of time, it was possible that bees could be developed from these wasps.

The bee is a creature which in very ancient times was developed from the wasp. Today one can still see that it is by means of an animal activity, namely that of the wasps, that honey is first prepared in the realms of nature.

So now, you can also understand how closely related to this is the fact that the bees place their honey in the cells of the honey-comb. This comb consists mainly of wax, and wax is not only necessary in order that the bees may deposit their honey there, for the bee can only produce honey when its whole organism is active in the right way. It must therefore secrete wax.

The second fig tree in which sweetness arises of itself, is also richer in wax than the wild tree. It differs especially from the wild tree in that it is richer in wax. Nature has herself increased the wax so that the cultivated figs, the sweetened figs, grow on a tree which in a certain way, Nature has made richer in wax.

You can already see here a model, as it were, for what appears in bee-keeping.

If you now go to work very carefully, and make a cross-section from the trunk of the cultivated fig tree, you will find, if you look carefully, patterns just like the wax cells of the comb. Within the tree-trunk you find certain growths similar to the honey cells, formed from the precipitated wax of the tree. The tree that is richer in wax uses it in a kind of honey-cell formation.

So we can say: when we study this special cultivation of the fig trees we discover a kind of honey production in Nature that has not yet appeared openly, for the honey remains within the figs. The bees, if I may so express it, bring out into the open what remains still within Nature in the sweetened figs. Thus, what would otherwise have remained within the tree-trunk, forming there these natural cells, which are only less definite, less substantial than the bee cells, and fade away again, this whole wax and honey-making process is driven up into the figs, so that Nature is herself a bee-keeper. The bees have drawn it forth from Nature and have these processes within themselves.

What does the bee then do? The bee deposits its eggs within the hive, and the egg matures there. It does not need to change the substance into a gall-apple, it takes the nectar directly from the plants, neither does the bee need to go to the tree that is richer in wax, for she accomplishes in herself what takes place in the tree-trunk, and deposits in the comb the juices of the plant which she transforms into honey, which in the case of the cultivated tree, remains in the juices of the fig. One can say that what in Nature lies concealed in the tree through the wasps, now happens outwardly, and it becomes clear what it really is that we have before us, when we look into the hive with its marvellously built comb of waxen cells. It is indeed, gentlemen, a wonderful sight, is it not Herr Müller? A wonderful sight is the artistic construction of these waxen cells with the honey within them.

You have only to look at it gentlemen, and you will say to yourselves—the bees with their waxen combs really show us a kind of artistically formed tree-trunk with its many branches. The bee does not need to go to the tree to lay her eggs there, but they build for themselves a kind of picture of a tree, and in the place of the figs growing there, she puts honey into the finished cells. We find, as it were, a copy of the artificially cultivated fig tree which the bees have made.

Truly, gentlemen, this is to look into the very heart of Nature, and realise what can be learnt from her. Men have yet to learn much from Nature, but for this they must first learn to recognise the spiritual in Nature. Without this recognition of the spirit in Nature, one merely stands and gapes, and should one journey to the south and see how those clever fellows there tie the figs together, the figs pierced by the wasps, and throw then up into the trees and bind and fix them there we shall gape as tourists do, even when they are scientific gentlemen, and not know what to make of it, They do not know that he saves the bees their labour, for Nature will put the honey into the figs for him.

In those countries where figs are plentiful, they are as health-giving as honey, for it is honey at an earlier stage of development that is already in the figs.

You see, these are things which we ought to know if we are to discuss a matter of such importance as bee-keeping. I believe that by such means we shall in time arrive at points of view of true value.

Today I will summarize some truths that will serve us in turn to provide further explanations in a certain direction in the coming days. If we consider our soul life, we can say that towards one pole of this soul life lies the element of thinking, towards the other pole the element of will, and between the two the element of feeling, that which in ordinary life we call feeling, the content of the mind, and so on. In the actual life of the soul, as it takes place in us in our waking state, there is never just one-sided thinking or will, but they are always in connection with each other, they play into each other. Let us assume that we behave very calmly in life, so that we can say, for example, that our will is not active externally. However, when we think during such outwardly directed calmness, we must be aware that will is at work in the thoughts we unfold: in connecting one thought with another, will is at work in this thinking. So even when we are seemingly merely contemplative, merely thinking, at least inwardly the will is present in us, and unless we are raving or sleepwalking, we cannot be willfully active without letting our volitional impulses flow through thoughts. Thoughts always permeate our volition, so that we can say: the will is never present in the life of the soul in isolation. But what is not present in this isolated way can still have different origins. And so the one pole of our soul life, thinking, has a completely different origin than the life of the will.

Even if we only consider everyday life, we will find that thinking always refers to something that is there, that has prerequisites. Thinking is mostly a reflection. Even when we think ahead, when we plan something that we then carry out through the will, such thinking is based on experience, which we then act upon. In a certain respect, this thinking is, of course, also a reflection. The will cannot be directed towards what is already there. In that case, it would always be too late. The will can only be directed towards what is to come, towards the future. In short, if you reflect a little on the inner life of thought, of thinking and of the will, you will find that even in ordinary life, thinking relates more to the past, while the will relates to the future. The inner life of feeling stands between the two. We accompany our thoughts with feeling. Thoughts please us, repel us. Out of our feeling we lead our impulses of will into life. Feeling, the content of the mind, stands between thinking and willing, right in the middle.

But just as it is the case in ordinary life, even if only in a suggestive way, so it is in the great world. And there we have to say: what constitutes our thinking power, what makes up the fact that we can think, that the possibility of thought is in us, we owe it to the life before our birth, or rather before our conception. In the little child that comes to meet us, all the thinking abilities that a person develops are already present in the germ. The child uses thoughts only - as you know from lectures I have already given - as directing forces to build up its body. Especially in the first seven years of life, until the change of teeth, the child uses the powers of thought to build up its body as directing forces. Then they emerge more and more as actual thought forces. But they are thoroughly predisposed in the human being as thought forces when he enters physical, earthly life.

What develops as will forces - an unbiased observation readily reveals this - is actually connected with this thought force only to a small extent in the child. Just observe a wriggling, moving child in the first weeks of life, and you will already realize that this wriggling, this chaotic movement, has only been acquired by the child because his soul and spirit have been clothed with physical corporeality by the physical external world. In this physical body, which we only develop little by little from conception and birth, the will initially lies, and the development of a child's life consists in the fact that gradually the will is, so to speak, captured by the powers of thought that we already bring with us into physical existence through birth. Just observe how the child at first moves its limbs quite senselessly, as it comes out of the activity of the physical body, and how gradually, I might say, thought intrudes into these movements, so that they become meaningful. So there is a pressing and thrusting of thinking into the life of the will, which lives entirely within the shell that surrounds the human being when he is born, or rather, conceived. This life of the will is contained entirely within it.

So that we can draw a schematic picture of a human being, in which we say that he brings his life of thought with him when he descends from the spiritual world. I will indicate this schematically (see drawing, yellow). And he begins his life of will in the physical body that is given to him by his parents (red). The forces of will are within, expressing themselves in a chaotic manner. And within are the powers of thought (arrows), which initially serve as directing forces to spiritualize the will in its corporeality in the right way.

We then perceive these forces of will when we pass through death into the spiritual world. But there they are highly organized. We carry them through the gate of death into spiritual life. The powers of thought that we bring with us from the supersensible life into earthly life, we actually lose in the course of earthly life.

With human beings who die young, it is somewhat different. For now, let us speak first of normal human beings. A normal human being who lives past the age of fifty has basically already lost the real powers of thought that were brought along from the previous life and has just retained the directional powers of the will, which are then carried over through death into the life that we enter when we go through the gate of death.

One can assume that someone is now thinking: Yes, so if you are over fifty years old, you have lost your thinking! - In a sense, this is even the case for most people who are not interested in anything spiritual today. I would just like you to really endeavor to register how much original, inventive thought power is produced by those people today who have reached the age of fifty! As a rule, it is the thoughts of earlier years that have automatically moved on and left an impression on the body, and the body then moves on automatically. After all, the body is a reflection of our mental life, and the person continues in the old rut of thought according to the law of inertia. Today, the only way to protect oneself from continuing in the old rut of thought is to absorb thoughts during one's lifetime that are of a spiritual nature, that are similar to the thought-forces in which we were placed before our birth. So that indeed the time is approaching when old people will be mere automatons if they do not take care to absorb thought-forces from the supersensible world. Of course, man can continue to think automatically; it may appear as if he is thinking. But it is only an automatic movement of the organs in which thoughts have been laid, have been woven in, if the human being is not grasped by that youthful element that comes when we absorb thoughts from spiritual science. This absorption of thoughts from spiritual science is certainly not just any kind of theorizing, but it intervenes quite deeply in human life.

But the matter takes on particular significance when we now consider man's relationship to the surrounding nature. I now understand by nature all that surrounds us for our senses, to which we are thus exposed from waking up to falling asleep. This can be considered in a certain way in the following way. One can visualize what one sees — I mean before spiritual eyes. We call it the sensory carpet. I will draw it schematically. Behind everything that one sees, hears, perceives as warmth, the colors in nature and so on – I draw an eye as a schema for what is perceived there – there is something behind this sensory carpet. Physicists or people of the present world view say: Behind it are atoms and they swirl -, and afterwards, right, as they continue to swirl, there is no sensory carpet at all, but somehow in the eye or in the brain or somewhere or not somewhere, they then evoke the colors and the sounds and so on. Now, please, imagine, quite impartially, that you begin to think about this sensory carpet. If you start thinking and do not assume the illusion that you can observe this huge army of atoms, which the chemists have arranged in such a military way of thinking, let us say, for example, there is Corporal C, then two privates, C, O, O, and then another private as an H; isn't that right, that's how we arranged it militarily: aether, atoms and so on. Now, if, as I said, you do not succumb to this illusion but remain with reality, then you know: the sensory carpet is spread out, the sensory qualities are out there, and what I still grasp with consciousness about what lies in the sensory qualities is just thoughts. In reality, there is nothing behind this sensory carpet but thoughts (blue). I mean, behind what we have in the physical world, there is nothing but thoughts. We will talk about the fact that these are carried by beings. But you can only get behind what we have in our consciousness with thoughts. But the power to think we have from our prenatal life or from the life before our conception. Why is it then that we can penetrate behind the sensory curtain by means of this power?

Just try to familiarize yourself with the idea that I have just mentioned, and try to properly present the question to yourself on the basis of what we have just hinted at, which we have already considered in many contexts. Why is it that we can reach below the sensory level with our thoughts, when our thoughts come from our prenatal life? Very simply, because behind it is that which is not in the present at all, but which is in the past, which belongs to the past. That which is under the carpet of sense is indeed a past, and we only see it correctly when we recognize it as a past. The past has an effect on our present, and out of the past sprouts that which appears to us in the present. Imagine a meadow full of flowers. You see the grass as a green blanket, you see the meadow's floral decoration. That is the present, but it grows out of the past. And if you think through this, then underneath it you do not have an atomistic present, but in reality you have the past as related to what comes from you yourself from the past.

It is interesting: when we begin to reflect on things, it is not the present that is revealed to us, but the past. What is the present? The present has no logical structure at all. The sunbeam falls on some plant, it shines there; in the next moment, when the direction of the sunbeam is different, it shines in a different direction. The image changes every moment. The present is such that we cannot grasp it with mathematics, not with the mere structure of thought. What we can grasp with the mere structure of thought is the past, which continues in the present.

This is something that can reveal itself to man as a great, as a significant truth: When you think, you basically only think the past; when you spin logic, you basically reflect on what has passed. - Anyone who grasps this thought will no longer seek miracles in the past either. For in that the past is woven into the present, it must be in the present as it is in the past. If you think about it, if you ate cherries yesterday, that is a past action; you cannot undo it because it is a past action. But if the cherries had the habit of making a mark somewhere before they disappeared into your mouth, that mark would remain. You could not change this sign. If every cherry had registered its past in your mouth after you had eaten cherries yesterday, and someone came and wanted to cross out five, he could cross them out, but the fact would not change. Nor can you perform any miracle with regard to all natural phenomena, because they are all intrusions from the past. And everything we can grasp with natural laws has already passed, is no longer present. You cannot grasp the present other than through images; that is a fluctuating thing. When a body lights up here, a shadow is created. You have to let the shadow properly define itself, so to speak, and so on. You can construct the shadow. That the shadow really comes into being can only be determined by devotion to the picture. So that one can say: even in ordinary life, limitation, I could also say logical thinking, refers to the past. And the imagination refers to the present. In relation to the present, man always has imaginations.

Just think, if you wanted to live logically in the present! No, to live logically means to draw one concept from another, to move from one concept to another in a lawful manner. Now, just imagine yourself in life. You see some event: is the next one logically connected to it? Can you logically deduce the next event from the previous one? When you look at life, are not its images similar to a dream? The present is similar to a dream, and only that the past is mixed into the present, which causes the present to proceed in a lawful, logical manner. And if you want to divine something in the future in the present, yes, if you just want to think of something you want to do in the future, then that has happened in a completely non-representational way in the first instance. What you will experience tonight is not in your mind as an image, but as something more non-pictorial than an image. At most, it is in your mind as inspiration. Inspiration relates to the future. Logical thinking: past Imagination: present Intuition Inspiration: future.

We can also use a simple diagram to visualize what is involved. When a person – let me characterize him here by this eye (see drawing on page 198) – looks at the tapestry of the senses, he sees it in its transforming images, but he now comes and introduces laws into these images. He develops a natural science out of the changing images of the sensory world. He develops a specialized science. But think about how this natural science is developed. You investigate, you investigate while thinking. You cannot possibly, if you want to develop a science about what spreads out as a carpet of senses, a science that proceeds in logical thoughts, you cannot possibly gain these logical thoughts from the external world. If what is recognized as thoughts and laws of nature were to follow from the external world itself, then it would not be necessary for us to learn anything about the external world. Then the person who, for example, looks at this light would have to know the exact electrical laws and so on, like the other person who has learned it! Equally, if he has not learned it, man knows nothing at all, let us say, about the relationship of an arc to the radius and so on. We bring forth from our inner being the thoughts that we carry into the outer world.

Yes, it is so: what we carry into the outer world as thoughts, we bring forth from our inner being. We are first of all this human being, who is constructed as a head human being. This human being looks at the carpet of senses. Inside the carpet of senses is what we reach through thoughts (see drawing page 198, white) and between this and between what we have inside us, what we do not perceive, there is a connection, so to speak an underground connection. Therefore, what we do not perceive in the external world because it extends into us, we bring out of our inner being in the form of thought life and place it in the external world. This is how it is with counting. The external world does not present anything to us; the laws of counting lie within our own inner being. But that this is true arises from the fact that between these predispositions, which are there in the external world, and our own earthly laws, there is an underground connection, a sub-physical connection, and so we draw the number out of our inner being. It then fits with what is outside. But the path is not through our eyes, not through our senses, but through our organism. And that which we develop as human beings, we develop as whole human beings. It is not true that we grasp some law of nature through the senses; we grasp it as a whole human being.

These things must be considered if we want to properly bring to mind the relationship between man and the environment. We are constantly in imaginations, and one need only compare life with dreams without prejudice. When a dream unfolds, it is certainly very chaotic, but it is much more similar to life than logical thinking. Let us take an extreme case. If you take a conversation between reasonable people of the present day, you listen and you talk yourself. Think about what is said in the course of, say, half an hour, and whether there is more coherence in the succession of thoughts than there is in dreams, or whether there is as much coherence as in logical thinking. If you were to demand that logical thinking develops there, you would probably be greatly disappointed. The present world presents itself to us entirely in images, so that basically we are actually dreaming all the time. We have yet to bring logic into it. We wrest logic from our prenatal existence; we first bring it into the context of things and thereby also encounter the past in things. We embrace the present with imagination.

When we observe this imaginative life that constantly surrounds us in the sensual present, we can say to ourselves: this imaginative life gives itself to us. We do nothing to it. Just think how hard you had to work to arrive at logical thinking! You didn't have to make any effort to enjoy life, to observe life; it reveals its images to you by itself. Now, that's how it is in life with imagining the images of the ordinary world around us. But all one needs is to acquire the ability to make images – but now through one's own activity, as one otherwise does in thinking – and to experience images through inner effort, as one otherwise does in thinking. Then one not only sees the present in images, but one also extends pictorial imagination to life before birth or before conception, and one sees before birth or before conception. And when you look into these images, then thinking is populated with the images, and then prenatal life becomes reality. We just have to be able to think in images by training the abilities that are spoken of in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, without these images coming to us by themselves, as is the case in ordinary life. When we make this life of images, in which we actually always live in ordinary life, into an inner life, then we look into the spiritual world, and then we do see the way in which our life actually unfolds.

Today, it is considered almost exclusively spiritual when someone – I have spoken about this often – truly despises material life and says: I strive towards the spirit, matter remains far beneath me. This is a weakness, because only the one who does not need to leave matter below him, but who understands matter itself in its effectiveness as spirit, who can recognize everything material as spiritual and everything spiritual, even in its manifestation as material, only he truly attains a spiritual life. This becomes especially significant when we look at thinking and willing. At most, language, which contains a secret genius within it, still has something of what leads to knowledge in this field.

Consider the basis of will in everyday life: you know that it arises from desire; even the most ideal will arises from desire. Now take the coarsest form of desire. What is the coarsest form of desire? Hunger. Therefore, everything that arises from desire is basically always related to hunger. From what I am trying to suggest to you today, you can see that thinking is the other pole, and will therefore behave like the opposite of desire. We can say: if we base desire on the will, we have to base thinking on satiation, on being full, not on hunger.

This actually corresponds to the facts in the deepest sense. If you take our head organization as human beings and the other organization that is attached to it, it is indeed the case that we perceive. What does it mean to perceive? We perceive through our senses. As we perceive, something is actually constantly being removed within us. Something passes from the outside into our inner being. The ray of light that enters our eye actually carries something away. In a sense, a hole is drilled into our own matter (see drawing on page 201). There was matter, but now the beam of light has drilled a hole into it, and now there is hunger. This hunger must be satisfied, and it is satisfied from the organism, from the available food; that is, this hole is filled with the food that is inside us (red). Now we have thought, now we have thought what we have perceived: by thinking, we continually fill the holes that sensory perceptions create in us with satiety that arises from our organism.

It is extremely interesting to observe, when we consider the organization of the head, how we fill the holes that arise in our remaining organism through the ears and eyes, through the sensations of warmth; there are holes everywhere. Man fills himself completely by thinking, by filling that which is there, in the holes (red).

And it is similar with us if we want it to be. Only then it does not work from outside in, so that we are hollowed out, but it works from within. If we want, hollows arise everywhere in us; these must in turn be filled with matter. So that we can say, we receive negative effects, hollowing out effects, both from outside and from inside, and constantly push our matter into them.

These are the most intimate effects, these hollowing effects, which actually destroy all earthly existence in us. Because by receiving the ray of light, by hearing the sound, we destroy our earthly existence. But we react to this, we in turn fill this with earthly existence. So we have a life between the destruction of earthly existence and the filling of earthly existence: luciferic, ahrimanic. The Luciferic is actually constantly striving to partially turn us into something non-material, to completely remove us from our earthly existence; for if he could, Lucifer would like to spiritualize us completely, that is, dematerialize us. But Ahriman is his opponent; he works in such a way that what Lucifer excavates is constantly being filled in again. Ahriman is the constant filler. If you form Lucifer plastically and make Ahriman plastically, you could quite well, if the matter went through in confusion, always push Ahriman into the cavity of Lucifer, or put Lucifer over it. But since there are also cavities inside, you also have to push in. Ahriman and Lucifer are the two opposing forces at work in man. He himself is the state of equilibrium. Lucifer, with continuous dematerialization, results in continuous materialization: Ahriman. When we perceive, that is Lucifer. When we think about what we have perceived: Ahriman. When we form the idea, this or that we should want: Lucifer. When we really want on earth: Ahriman. So we are in the middle of the two. We oscillate back and forth between them, and we must be clear about ourselves: as human beings, we are placed in the most intimate way between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. Actually, you only get to know a person when you take these two opposing poles in him into account.

This is an approach that is based neither on an abstract spiritual reality – for this abstract spiritual reality is, after all, nebulous and mystical – nor on a material one, but rather everything that is materially effective is also spiritual at the same time. We are dealing with the spiritual everywhere. And we see through matter in its existence, in its effectiveness, by being able to see the spirit in everything.

I have already told you that imagination comes to us of its own accord in relation to the present. When we develop imagination artificially, we look into the past. When we develop inspiration, we look into the future, just as one calculates into the future by calculating solar or lunar eclipses, not in relation to the details, but to a higher degree in relation to the great laws of the future. And intuition encompasses all three. And we are actually subject to intuition all the time, we just sleep through it. When we sleep, we are completely immersed in the outside world with our ego and our astral body; there we unfold that intuitive activity that one must otherwise consciously unfold in intuition. But in this present organization the human being is too weak to be conscious when he is intuiting; but he does intuit in fact at night. So one can say: Asleep, the human being develops intuition; awake, he develops—to a certain extent, of course—logical thinking; between the two stands inspiration and imagination. When a person comes out of sleep into waking life, his I and his astral body enter into the physical body and the etheric body; what he brings with him is the inspiration to which I have already drawn your attention in previous lectures. We can say: Man is asleep in intuition, awake in logical thinking, when he wakes up he inspires himself, when he falls asleep he imagines. - You can see from this that the activities we mention as the higher activities of knowledge are not alien to ordinary life, but that they are very much present in ordinary life, that they only have to be raised into consciousness if a higher knowledge is to be developed.

It must be pointed out again and again that in the last three to four centuries, external science has summarized a large number of purely material facts and brought them into laws. These facts must first be spiritually penetrated. But it is good - if I may say so, although it sounds paradoxical at first - that materialism was there, otherwise people would have fallen into nebulosity. They would have finally lost all connection with their earthly existence. When materialism began in the 15th century, humanity was in fact in danger of falling prey to Luciferic influences to a high degree, of being hollowed out more and more and more. That is when the Ahrimanic influences came from that time on. And in the last four or five centuries, the Ahrimanic influences have developed to a certain extent. Today they have become very strong and there is a danger that they will overshoot their target if we do not counter them with something that will effectively weaken them: if we do not counter them with the spiritual.

But here it is important to develop the right feeling for the relationship between the spiritual and the material. In the older German way of thinking, there is a poem called “Muspilli”, which was first found in a book dedicated to Louis the German in the 9th century, but which of course dates from a much earlier time. There is something purely Christian in this poem: it presents us with the battle of Elijah with the Antichrist. But the whole way in which this story unfolds, this fight between Elijah and the Antichrist, is reminiscent of the ancient struggles of the sagas, the inhabitants of Asgard with the inhabitants of Jötunheim, the inhabitants of the realm of the giants. It is simply the realm of the Æsir transformed into the realm of Elijah, the realm of the giants into the realm of the Antichrist.

This way of thinking, which we still encounter, conceals the true fact less than the later ways of thinking. The later ways of thinking always talk about duality, about good and evil, about God and the devil, and so on. But these ways of thinking, which were developed in later times, no longer correspond to the earlier ones. Those people who developed the struggle between the Gods' home and the giants' home did not see the same in the Gods as, for example, today's Christian understands in the realm of his God. Instead, these older ideas had, for example, Asgard, the realm of the Gods, above, and Jötunheim, the realm of the giants, below; in the middle, Man unfolds, Midgard. This is nothing other than the same thing in the Germanic-European way that was present in ancient Persia as Ormuzd and Ahriman. There we would have to say in our language: Lucifer and Ahriman. We would have to address Ormuzd as Lucifer and not just as the good God. And that is the great mistake that is made, that one understands this dualism as if Ormuzd were only the good God and his opponent Ahriman the evil God. The relationship is rather like that of Lucifer to Ahriman. And in Middlegard, at the time when this poem “Muspilli” was written, it is still not imagined that The Christ sends his blood down from above – but: Elijah is there, and sends his blood down. And man is placed in the middle. At the time when Louis the German probably wrote this poem into his book, the idea was still more correct than the later one. For later times have committed the strange act of disregarding the Trinity; that is, to understand the upper gods, who are in Asgard, and the lower gods, the giants, who are in the Ahrimanic realm, as the All, and to understand the upper, the Luciferic ones, as the good gods and the others as the evil gods. This was done in later times; in earlier times, this opposition between Lucifer and Ahriman was still properly envisaged, and therefore something like Elijah was placed in the Luciferic realm with his emotional prophecy, with that which he was able to proclaim at that time, because one wanted to place the Christ in Midgard, in that which lies in the middle.

We must go back to these ideas in full consciousness, otherwise we will not come back to the Trinity: to the Luciferic Gods, to the Ahrimanic powers and in between to what the Christ-realm is. Without advancing to this, we will not come to a real understanding of the world.

This is the topic I wanted to broach, and we will continue to discuss it in the coming days in various ways.

It is already the case that the methods of observation, consideration and judgment that are otherwise customary today, according to the habits of thought that have developed over the last three to four centuries, cannot simply be applied to anthroposophical spiritual science. What is initially pointed to by intellectual concepts is actually only a kind of guideline in anthroposophy, to help us focus our observation of life and the world in the direction that will allow us to see reality, the full reality. Therefore, in the initial concepts of spiritual science, one has little more than a kind of scheme that draws attention to certain observation methods. These schemes are taken from the spiritual science that is to a certain extent complete, so that those who engage with spiritual science do indeed get something that may initially make sense to common sense, but which can only be fully understood when one brings what science and life otherwise give to these schemata.

One receives such a schema relatively early on when one begins to get to know anthroposophical spiritual science. And it is such a schema that guides us to look at the human being in such a way that we take the physical body, etheric body, astral body and I as the basis of this approach. In my book Theosophy, I immediately tried not to provide a mere scheme with these four elements of human nature, but to fill these abstract four concepts with a certain concrete content through the way they are presented there. So that to a certain extent - more can never be done - one realizes how justified it is to consider the human being according to these four categories.

But these things only come to life in a truly objective way when one enters into what is revealed in human life, in man's relationship to the world, and in the world in general, and then what the initially schematically defined concepts fill with a very specific content. From a certain point of view, we will try to do so again today.

We will start with what we call our self, insofar as we consciously experience this self, what this self actually represents. You know that this self as consciousness is interrupted in the course of life by all the states that occur between falling asleep and waking up. With the exception of dreaming, and actually to a certain extent even during dreaming, this sense of self is lost for the time between falling asleep and waking up. We can say: this sense of self is always kindled at the moment of waking up – whereby, of course, kindling is only an expression used in a figurative sense – and it fades away at the moment of falling asleep.

I have often presented this as a finding of soul observation. I made it particularly clear in a lecture I gave at the Philosophers' Congress in Bologna in 1911, where I tried to show how what is experienced as the self should not be separated from the whole range of sensory experiences. We must therefore say: the I is essentially bound – I am always speaking of experience – to the sense perceptions. Right? We are not considering the I as a reality now; on the contrary, we want to point to the I as a reality in the course of these three lectures, today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. We now want to focus solely on what we call the I-experience in the realm of our lives.

You know how difficult it is to live in abstract ideas, in ideas that are not imbued with the content of sensory experiences. This goes so far that there are many philosophers who claim that such thinking, such imagining, that is free of sensuality, without any sensory perceptions being present at the same time, even if they are only sensory perceptions reflected from within, is not possible at all. But now, when we really observe our soul, it soon becomes clear that our inner experience is not exhausted by sensory perceptions, that we simply penetrate from sensory perceptions to what we call ideas. We only get the pure picture of the presentation when we look clearly at what arises from a complex of sense perceptions, which we have turned away from and which we still imagine afterwards, but now with the help of the same forces that otherwise serve us in remembering. Of course, it cannot be said that the content of the sense perceptions does not enter into these presentations. But the activity that can be observed in the human soul is different when we experience a sensory perception in connection with the outside world or when we merely imagine this sensory perception.

But this life of imagination leads us away to a great extent from what is actually the essence of our ego experience in sensory perception. We cannot say that we have a strong sense of self when we are merely imagining; on the contrary, when we are merely imagining, there is always the tendency for this sense of self to become obscured, which manifests itself in the transition to a dreamy state or even to a kind of drowsy state when we are merely imagining. We delve deeper into our inner being when we merely imagine than when we live in connection with the outer world through sense perception. In this regard, each individual must turn to self-observation. One can observe how there is a tendency to dampen the I when sense perception is dampened. We can then make progress if we link the experience of the senses to the idea of our I in our astral body.

So that we can say: just as life in sensory perception belongs together with the experience of the I, so the experience of the idea belongs together with the astral body. Above all, this damping of the ego is expressed – and this is actually the most significant thing to take into account if one wants to understand what I am actually explaining now – by the fact that, when we perceive with our senses, we have something quite individual. The complex of sensory perceptions that we are currently experiencing cannot be experienced exactly the same way by anyone else. It is something quite individual, and in this quite individual we have at the same time our I-experience. In so far as we ascend to the experience of thinking, we have at the same time the power to arrive at something more general, for example to form abstractions which can then be communicated in the same form to others, and which others can understand in the same way that we do. We ourselves can only understand the individual sensory perceptions that we have throughout our lives; but the images that we attach to them take on a form that is more general , that it can, as it were, be communicated to a larger number of people.

But this already testifies that the I attenuates as we move from sensory experience to imaginative experience. But at the same time we go deeper within ourselves; that is also an immediate experience. Now, as the images, or rather what takes place within us for their formation (which we will leave undetermined for today), as this continues to develop, the images become memories. Images actually initially disappear from our consciousness. From some unknown source – let us leave it undefined for today – facts arise, in the wake of which we can evoke the same ideas.

That is the only thing we can assert. If we stick to the facts, we cannot go along with those psychologists who say that the representations then go down into the subconscious, where they go for a walk without the consciousness knowing anything about it, and when one remembers, they come up again. That is not the fact of the matter. There is initially nothing to suggest that an idea that I formed three years ago continued to exist until today and went for a walk somewhere in the depths of the soul, only to come up again today when I remember it. Rather, the only thing that can be said, if one wants to speak precisely, is this: At that time I formed the ideas; those abilities that followed on from the formation of these ideas are capable, in their further development, of bringing these ideas consciously to the surface again today. That is the only fact. And if people were inclined to look at the facts everywhere, there would certainly be far fewer theories and hypotheses in the world than there are. For precisely with regard to what I am now explaining here, most people believe that what they have once formed as an idea lives somewhere in the indefinite and then comes walking back.

But we also know that the idea that one forms in connection with a sensory experience is precisely temporary, and that, even if this is sometimes concealed, an inner force must be developed that can be experienced when a past experience in the memory becomes an idea again. That which becomes the cause of a memory-image is seated deeper within us than the ordinary image linked to a sensory perception. It is a memory-image grounded in our organization. It is also connected with what we are as a temporal being. We know that images can be remembered in different ways, depending on how far back in time they lie. If we summarize all the facts that come into consideration, we have to say to ourselves: in any case, what has been experienced in a sensory perception has entered the stream of time in which we ourselves live. Certain sensations that we have while a memory emerges tell us how remembering is actually connected to our entire organization. We also know how, in the different stages of life, that is, in the succession of time in our life between birth and death, the power of remembering is greater or lesser.

If we follow all these facts, then we will be able to say that, just as the power of imagination lies in the astral body, the power of remembering lies in the etheric body. So that, if we summarize remembering in the word memory, we can say: Memory is as one with the etheric body as the life of imagination is with the astral body, as sense perception is with the I. In any case, what underlies the imagination is taken up in the course of time of our existence. Just as our growth and development between birth and death is contained in a certain stream of time, so what is experienced as memory, what is experienced as memory, is contained in this same stream and we feel the connection. Now, however, something is added to those things that I have discussed so far, and which can already be found by anyone with some subtle attention in faithful self-observation. That the I is connected with sense perception is a very obvious fact, and the one who does not admit it simply does not want to observe a very obvious fact. That the experience of imagination is connected with the astral body is something that can be discovered through ordinary observation. However, more subtle observation is required if one wants to examine the interconnection of the etheric body and memory. But even here one can still, I would say, manage scientifically, especially if one observes pathological cases, memory disorders and the like, and sees how they are connected with growth and nutritional disorders in particular. And we must consider the nutritional forces as lying in exactly the same direction as the growth forces or the reproductive forces. It is certainly possible to put together a series of observations that still show this connection between memory and the etheric body.

On the other hand, what I have to add now only arises from imaginative observation, and I would say that it can at best be sensed by ordinary observation. But when it has been found through imaginative observation, the whole context in which these things can be placed gives the healthy human mind complete assurance of the matter. We penetrate further and further into our own being, so to speak, starting from the outside and going inwards, if we start from sensory perception and the I, from mental experience and the astral body, from memory experience and the ether body, and then descend into the physical body.

In the physical body, we are indeed dealing with something that is still connected to memory, but not in the same way as the etheric body. To better understand what is present in imaginative observation and what I will characterize in a moment, we can take the result that is present in some pathological disturbances. The person then acquires certain inclinations, I might say tendencies, in their physical body; these do not have to go so far as to cause involuntary movements or spasms, but they could of course go so far as to cause death, but that actually belongs to a different field. When involuntary movements occur, I would like to say, of a more innocent kind, then the person who wants to deal with such things at all can already see that in a certain category of involuntary movements there are after-effects of experiences. If someone shows a tendency to do this or that habitually but involuntarily with his fingers, then one can always point out, if one has only enough examination records, how this or that complex of experiences leads precisely to these things. These must not be movements beyond a certain degree of involuntariness, but, I would say, semi-involuntary movements.

You see, it is the case that what has been experienced is too strongly imprinted in the physical body; it may still be imprinted in the etheric body, but not too strongly in the physical body. If it leaves too strong an impression on the physical body, then the physical body comes under the influence of the memory. It must not do so. Imagination shows us that what works in memory is still movement in the etheric body, is still, as it were, evolving movement in the etheric body. It accumulates in the physical body. It must not completely permeate the physical body; it must be repelled by the physical body.

If I wanted to draw a diagram, it would be like this: Let us assume that we have the physical body here (see drawing, red), we have the etheric body here (orange), we have the astral body here (green), and finally we have the I here (white). Now a sensory experience takes place. This sensory experience is first taken up into the I. An idea is attached to it by becoming rooted in the astral body; the power takes effect, which then makes remembrance possible by becoming rooted as a movement in the etheric body. But now it has to be stored. It must not go further, it must not penetrate the physical body completely, but must be stored here. In the physical body, an image arises, of course at first quite unconsciously, of what lives in the memory. The image is not at all similar to what the experience was, it is a metamorphosis; but an image arises. So that it must be said: just as the memory is connected with the etheric body, so an actual inner image is connected with the physical body. We always have an impregnation, an image, in our physical body when such a movement originates in the etheric body; of course, this image can only be reached through imaginative visualization. There you can see how the physical body actually becomes the carrier of all these images. You may say: But I cannot possibly have the image of a church tower in my physical body! I will first give you an idea of how you can indeed have the image of a church tower in your physical body by picturing the matter for you.

Suppose, for my sake, you have a face in front of you, and you let this face be reflected in some mirror that completely distorts the face (it is drawn). Let us assume that something terrible arises within, something terrible. Now I do not mean that from the external experience, say of a church tower, something terrible arises as an impregnation in the physical body, but in any case, of course, something unlike it must arise. Now think, if you get such a monster here from this beautiful forehead, it is caused by the curvature of the mirror. If you can take into account the curvature of the mirror, then you can reconstruct the face from the caricature in connection with the curvature of the mirror, even if you do not have this face in front of you right now. So, if you understand the nature of the caricaturing mirror through which you receive the caricature, you can reconstruct the beautiful face. So there is no need for something similar to a steeple or a drama to be present inside the person, something that one has experienced or the like, but what arises in connection with the nature of the whole person naturally makes it possible to reconstruct the thing in reconstruct the matter in the same way.

So no objection can be made from the fact that, of course, because the world is large and shaped differently from the human interior, the image cannot be there in the human interior. The image is there, and in a sense the image is the last thing in the human being, where the external experience arrives. The other, imagining, remembering, are transitional moments. What we experience in the outer world must not simply pass through us. We must be an insulator; we must hold it back, and in the end our physical body does that. Our astral body changes it, makes it pale in our imagination; our etheric body takes away all content and contains only the possibility of evoking it again. But what is actually produced in us is pictorially impressed upon us. We live with it. But we must not let it pass through us. Suppose we were to let the image pass right through; it would not be reflected back by the etheric body in an elastic way, so to speak; it would pass through the etheric body, pass through the physical body, and we would always fidget around in the world as the events command us to. It is not easy to describe more complicated things, but if, for example, I saw a person moving from right to left, I would immediately want to dance from left to right, to imitate everything I see. I would want to imitate in myself, in my form, everything that I experience externally. It first arrives in the astral body, which already has a paralyzing effect, then in the resiliently reflecting ether body, then especially in the physical body, which accumulates the whole thing. In this, there is an isolation of what I perceive from the outside. And in this way, what I experience in the outside world works in me.

From knowing that a person consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego, we know a scheme; but what matters is that we then fill in the concrete results into this scheme, in this case sense perception, imagination, memory and then the very concrete image. This is what gives content to these schematic concepts. And one must arrive at such content more and more if one wants to advance to an understanding of what is reality in the world. One cannot, for example, say: Yes, one divides the human being into physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, as if there were boundaries! If you are a reasonable person, you do not initially claim that there are other boundaries than those that arise when you take the formation of images, the experience of memory, the experience of imagination and the experience of sensory perception. But you have to have an open mind about the differences between these four types of experience.

That is one way of approaching these things. But now let us approach the subject of human beings and their behavior in the world from a different direction. Suppose we go for a walk. When we walk around – I have already touched on this here in another context – we cannot, in our external observation, distinguish between our walking and the movement of an inanimate object. Whether I observe a stone in its trajectory from the outside, merely in terms of movement, or whether I observe a person running – if both have the same speed, then the same fact is present in the external image. If I disregard everything else and look only at the body in motion, then in the case of both the stone and the person, I am dealing with a change of location. I observe this change of place, this speed. And this is ultimately what we are aware of when we move in everyday life; for we must distinguish between the intention to carry out a movement and the actual movement. When I think about a movement, I can remain completely calm. I can think myself into motion, and if I have some imagination, I can visualize myself moving. The idea that I then have when I really move is no different from the imaginative idea that I have when I am still and just think about moving.

So we have to distinguish very carefully between thinking about our movements and our real movements. But these real movements, we also imagine them only externally, no differently than we imagine motionless objects. We see how we thereby obtain different distances from these or those objects. We perceive our movements quite externally; that is added. And when we speak of movements – I do not want to go into the question of whether this is a hypothetical idea or a more or less well-founded idea, that is a matter for another chapter – but when we have movements, we also have force.

So, first of all, I will stick to the usual facts: where there is movement, there is naturally the development of a certain force. So we can say: The moving human being unfolds a certain force. We cannot speak of more than force, and we must also identify this force that it unfolds with some object, even an inorganic one. So let us consider only the physical body, either as a whole or in its individual parts; in that it moves, it moves like any other inanimate object. So, when we imagine ourselves moving and look at the physical body, we can only speak of force here.

The situation is different when we begin to look inside the being. We must be clear about one thing: while we are moving, inner processes are taking place in us. Substances are being consumed. Something is happening that is connected with the forces of growth, nutrition and reproduction. These are forces that we cannot address in the same way as we address the forces that we perceive in the external movement of an inanimate body. When we observe a plant in its growth, we must be clear about what is present when the plant grows larger and larger – and the same applies to the growth forces of animals and humans – that the unfolding of forces is different from that which underlies it when we have a merely externally observable moving body, be it the externally observable moving of one's own body or a human body in general. What is present when growth processes take place – and I also call growth processes in the broader sense those that take place when we are in motion, for example – what takes place there, we must look for in the etheric, in the etheric body. What we observe in the external movement, in the relationship of the person who is in external movement to this external world, does not cause us to look at the etheric body. At the moment when we observe what is happening internally, we must look at the etheric body. And if we define the concept of growth as broadly as I have just done, we can say that the specific growth force, which also includes nutrition, the use of materials, and so on, this specific force now urges us to move up to the etheric body. We see this growth force in the plant world.

To show you that these things are not merely contrived but can at the same time be corroborated by spiritual scientific observations, I would like to expressly say that what we see in the growing or generally internally changing organism , namely in the plant organism, where it appears purely, is entirely due to the fact that the power which otherwise expresses itself only in external movement comes into a certain relationship with what may truly be called ether. I would also like to convey this to you figuratively.

You are familiar with the often-mentioned fact that a solid body in a liquid loses as much of its weight, receives a lift, as the weight of the displaced water body. Now, the forces that underlie the external movements of physical bodies are, in a sense, rigid. They have an inner rigidity, just as a solid body has a certain weight. When you put a solid object into water, it loses some of its weight. When you combine the forces that normally cause external movement with the forces of the ether, they lose their rigidity; they become internally mobile. Thus a force, which as the moving force of the inorganic is so great and cannot become greater if it is only an external moving force, loses its rigidity when it combines with the ether, it can expand or contract. And as such a force it is then active in growth, and in all internal processes.

This Archimedean principle can be expressed as follows: Every solid body loses in a liquid as much of its weight as is the weight of the displaced liquid body. Every force, so one can continue to say, loses, when it combines with the ether forces, of its rigidity, as much as the ether forces are of their suction forces, as the ether forces bring to it in suction forces. It becomes movement, and with that it becomes what it becomes active as, say, in the plant organism, but also remains active in the animal organism and in the human organism. If we now go further up from the etheric body to the astral body, thus in the outer view from the plant to the animal, what was initially an inwardly mobile force in the growth force is now free – as I have already described in the case of the forces that are released in the seventh year with the change of teeth – inwardly free, so that what is taking place is no longer bound to the forces of the physical body. What expresses itself as free forces are the instinctive forces in animals and in humans. So we penetrate up to the astral body and what is still force below is given to us as instinct. And if we penetrate up to the I, instinct becomes will.

I: sense perceptions will
Astral body: life of imagination instinct
Ether body: memory growth power
Physical body: image power

This relationship of the will to the instincts, which arises in an unbiased observation of ordinary mental life, is in turn suitable for a rational self-examination. From another side, we have filled what is here only a mere scheme with the content of experience.

We can say that when we look at the physical body, from the inside it presents itself to us as that which continually accumulates experiences and images; when viewed from the outside, it is an organization of forces. And it is also correctly observed in the physical body that it actually consists of an interaction of forces with images. If you imagine a painted picture, you would have to imagine it spatially, in such a way that it is not a rigid picture, but an inwardly moving picture, with forces at work at every point. Then you get something of what must be imagined in reality under the physical body.

If you imagine the growth forces from the inside and think of them as imbued on the other side of what underlies memory – but now not as mutually concealing ideas, but precisely as what underlies memory – so ether movements on the one hand, which swell up, accumulate through the inner processing of the absorbed nutrients, which accumulate through the movements of the human being, in conflict with what sinks down from all that has been perceived by the senses and imagination and then vibrates downwards in the ether body to preserve the memory, if you imagine this interaction of above and below, that is, of what vibrates downwards from the imagination and what comes up from below, from the process of nutrition, growth and eating, both interacting: then you get a vivid picture of the ether body. And again, if you think about everything you experience yourself when instincts are at work, where you can clearly understand how blood circulation, breathing, how the whole rhythmic system works works in the instincts, and how these instincts depend on our upbringing, on what we have absorbed: then you have the living interplay of the astral body. And if you finally imagine an interplay between the acts of will, there is kindled everything that you want with what the sense perceptions are, so you have a living picture of what lives into consciousness as the I.

But this is only a rough scheme. We have only had a very small sample of experiences, and they have to be fitted into a scheme. You first have to have the cupboard before you can put the objects in it. Not so, the ordinary psychologist or physiologist, who first observes these things. And if someone happens to have all kinds of linen and clothes but no cupboard, and just piles them up, well, then it will turn into chaos in the course of time! That is our present-day psychology and physiology. You really need a closet. Just as the person who makes the closet should know in a certain way how the closet needs to be organized so that you can really get in what you want to put in, so now what is being organized must what is being organized must still be inexplicit in a certain way, even though it can only be abstract – just as a cupboard is abstract when it is still empty, but not when it is full. If there is an empty cupboard somewhere, it is also inexplicable.

So you see, there are of course an awful lot of points of attack on anthroposophy, depending on where you start. But one can also, and I have tried this in my “Theosophy”, already let it be known that while one is obliged to set up the cabinet first, something concrete is already pressing to do so. But then one must have the patience to ascend to that which brings abundance into the scheme. And this is what must always be said to anthroposophists in particular: one should not create the impression in the world that everything has already been said when such abstract terms as physical body, ether body, astral body and I are used. If one merely says: 'The human being consists of a physical body, ether body, astral body and I', then one has said nothing at all except four words. For there is, of course, a great difference between saying this out of the fullness of knowledge, as a structure that can be used as a guide to build upon, and dogmatizing it and communicating it as dogmas.

That is why it makes such a repulsive impression when it is simply handed down: The human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. It all depends on how you say such things. You don't have to go as far as was once said in an anthroposophical lecture: “For the sake of simplicity, we divide the human being into seven parts.” The nonsense is already great if you believe that you can capture something real just by putting it into some kind of scheme. It is there to provide guidelines within which observations can be made.

After I have shown you how certain viable concepts, such as will, memory and so on, can be incorporated into the anthroposophical conceptual scheme, we will move on to a further consideration of the human being tomorrow.

We have now put together a number of building blocks that should be suitable for erecting a kind of building to penetrate deeper into the essence of the human being through this building of contemplation. In order to proceed from the discussions we had yesterday and the day before yesterday, it is necessary that we expand our considerations today to areas that we have touched on, in such a way that we consider the soul-spiritual, which of course works in man, and the bodily-material, which also works in him, in connection. In the scientific development of modern times, it has become difficult to combine this view of the interaction of the spiritual-soul and the physical-material in the human being in a fruitful way, because modern man actually only knows a duality in this area. He is familiar with the material world and its effects and configurations, and then he also looks at this material world in the human being. He looks at it in the human being by studying physiology, chemistry and biology. Certain views then arise from these studies and are absorbed into popular consciousness. People cling to them with a certain tenacity, and it must be emphasized again and again that even those who, in their Sunday best, still live in old traditional religious ideas, fully recognize as authority what popular science says about the physical body of the human being, perhaps even more so. On the other hand, certain people do have ideas about the spiritual and mental. But these ideas about the spiritual and soul are so abstract, sometimes they are actually just empty words about something that was once known more precisely, but the knowledge of which has been lost, so that not much can be done with them. People today do talk about thinking, feeling, and willing; they talk about imagining. But they do not really have any experiences of these things. One might say that words have been handed down and humanity clings to these words without associating much meaning with them. One also sees that his game is introduced into the literary works on psychology and the like that appear today, where thinking, feeling and willing are nothing but empty abstractions.

Then people realize that on have the material view on the one hand, which they cannot deny because they have eyes, hands with which the material can be grasped and seen, because they have scales with which it can be weighed, because they can measure and the like. Thus, the material is recognized as such from direct inspection, from sensory perception.

On the other hand, people do speak of a spiritual soul, but in the way I have just discussed. And then they cannot somehow find a relationship between this spiritual soul and the bodily physical, the material physical. All kinds of theories have been proposed as to how the spiritual-mental is supposed to interact with the physical-material. But all these theories are just figments of the imagination. Before gaining insights into these things, it is absolutely necessary to be able to look at the whole person. In the whole human being, it is ultimately the case that no expression of soul or spirit occurs between birth and death that is not accompanied by a physical manifestation. And when we speak of the physical and the spiritual as opposites, we are talking in abstractions, for it is the same thing seen from different sides. But this is not realized, that it is one and the same thing, and one sees only the difficulties in constructing a theory of how the two interact. But only what we grasp in a truly heightened, trained observation is what helps in this field. And for this it is necessary to draw attention to the things that arise in such an observation. It is natural that a certain schooling in the sense I have described in “How to Know Higher Worlds” must precede exact observation in this field. But if one has the goal in mind, if one knows what has been observed there, one can indeed make use of one's common sense, if one really wants to, if one is willing to follow the ideas that are then brought to light through spiritual scientific observation, in their content properly to pursue.

These ideas are of course always such that, if you apply to them what is familiar to you from ordinary science, then you will not keep up. You have to get involved with the ideas that are given. But you can always get involved with ideas using common sense. Ideas could come from the most unknown worlds; if they are there, one can engage with them. If only the experiences from the corresponding worlds are really brought into such comprehensible ideas, then one can engage with them. But one must rise to that, for which one does not need occult training: to grasping ideas.

Of course, most people today are unable to do this, and least of all today's scientists. They are accustomed to having ideas only when these ideas are borrowed from the external sense world. And they are willing to engage in mathematics at most, but otherwise they do not engage at all in grasping ideas, which are then pursued from within, just as mathematical structures are pursued from within. Everything that the humanities scholar brings can be followed if one develops the will to engage with such ideas, and in fact one can verify everything conceptually. But one must want to. To do this, one does not need occult training, but one does need to overcome what one takes on board as recognized scientific methods of thought, which do not coincide with common sense, because they have produced the habit of thinking that only what has a correlate in the sensory world is valid. Today we have to develop a number of ideas that can lead us further in the considerations we have gained. When our imaginative life takes place, when we imagine, something is going on in us. And what is going on there is not the abstract process that is often described today, but it is a process in which something that is called material processes is also alive. One does not become a materialist by pursuing the spiritual into its material effects, one only becomes a materialist by rejecting the spiritual out of prejudice.

As soon as one becomes fully aware what actually takes place in the soul when one thinks, when one visualizes, then one will gradually be able to arrive at an inner grasp of the soul-physical process that is taking place, even without occult training. And this soul-physical process of thinking, of imagining, is one that, even in its soul characteristics, shows that it is the opposite of another process. Just try to find, in the realm of ordinary consciousness, what the opposite process of thinking is. It is the process in which our thoughts fade away, where we become incapable of pursuing thoughts in a bright, clear way, where, in other words, what we call consciousness in ordinary life ends, at least where our control over what we call consciousness in ordinary life ends. Now you can see how this counter-image of thinking has a physical correlate: Wherever the actual growth process, the process of becoming in us, the process of nourishing and growing, is particularly strong, the thought element, the element of imagination, recedes. You only need to look intelligently at the lively organic growth activity in the first years of childhood. This growth activity is particularly vivid then. But thinking is only present in the germ, at least the power of the human being over thinking. Or follow disease processes through which, as in feverish phenomena, the organic activity becomes particularly vehement, where it becomes intensified, there the conscious control over the life of imagination fades away.

We can see a contrast that we could describe in more and more detail, but I would like to point out only the main lines. One is the life of the imagination; we understand this primarily in its spiritual aspect. The other is the life of growth. In order to point out more clearly what is actually involved, I will write “growth proliferation”, since the contrast is now more physically grasped.

But try to go further from this starting point. Remember that I have often pointed out how man, in his ordinary consciousness, only has this bright, clear day-consciousness, which he carries from waking to falling asleep, through his life of ideas, while what goes on in us when we develop the will plunges into a darkness like the life between falling asleep and waking up. We sleep, as I have often said, not only completely from the time we fall asleep until we wake up, but we also sleep partially for our will activity when we are awake. Everything in us that lives as a volitional activity is actually shrouded in a state of sleep. We are aware of our intentions, our volitional motives, when we want to raise our hand, but we relate to what is actually going on inside us by actually raising our hand, that is, by unfolding our will, just as we relate to ourselves when we are asleep. What is actually happening? What is actually going on?

What is going on is this: What underlies the will in us organically is to be found below, in the growth processes that remain unconscious to us. The will has plunged down into the growth processes. Everything that proliferates as growth in us is at the same time akin to the will, is a growth process when viewed externally in the body, and will when viewed internally in the soul. So we can already see how the growth proliferation, like everything that lies within the currents of strength that express themselves in growth, in nourishment, in life itself, is akin to the will. If we look at it from the soul, we can say that it is connected to the will.

Now, if we look at the human being between birth and death, we see that what we call our will is an abstraction in every single activity. This will does not run separately by itself. There is always a metabolic process within us, a process of growth, a process of nutrition or a process of malnutrition, in which the will unfolds. In a lesser degree, the same thing is present that, let us say, extinguishes consciousness in a particularly heightened growth or life process. That is why our consciousness is also extinguished in the actual region of the will. This region of will is where the growth proliferation is; therefore it is in the unconscious. We must therefore distinguish in ourselves as human beings an area - I am drawing it schematically, of course - where the growth proliferation is, and in this growth proliferation, which does not fall within the scope of ordinary consciousness, the will is rooted. But this is actually one thing in the concrete human being. Only in thinking do we separate the will from this growth proliferation.

Another area that we have initially only considered in terms of the soul is that which encompasses our thinking. This thinking, this imagining, develops either in connection with external ideas or through the process of remembrance being transformed into imagining when experiences are remembered.

Now, in our soul we can basically see very clearly that this life of imagining is the opposite pole of the life of will and also the opposite pole of the life of growth, of the life in the organism in general. This thinking life, this life of imagination, is precisely where we are fully in control of ourselves, where we string together our ideas, where we analyze and synthesize within the life of imagination. We can contrast thinking with the will. The will, in its essence, is completely unconscious to us. We now know that we are unconscious of it because the will is rooted in growth, in the processes of life, in the processes of metabolism. Thinking stands opposed to the will. We have it under control.

However, in the moment when the spiritual researcher advances to imagination, it immediately becomes clear to him what is actually present in thinking. For just imagine this process that the human being undergoes, who advances from ordinary thinking to imagination.

Ordinary thinking is abstract. Man, in thinking, is conscious only of the life of thought (yellow). When, through the methods I have described in “How to Know Higher Worlds,” this thinking condenses into imaginative life, then the images of imaginative life arise. But it is understandable that nothing that takes place in the soul, that is, is experienced, does not also have some kind of physical correlate in ordinary life between birth and death. One perceives something in oneself when one ascends to the imagination. And what one perceives is precisely the process that takes place in thinking in general, because this imaginative cognition is only a further development of thinking. I have already said that the facts about a person do not change when one ascends to higher, supersensible cognition. One only learns to recognize what is always present in a person. What one learns to recognize always happens, but one does not know it with the ordinary consciousness. If one now has the images in the advanced consciousness, then one knows that certain figural deposits, correct material deposits (red), correspond to these images in the human organization. These correct material deposits are always present in man; they are just not noticed. For what one experiences in the imagination are not new deposits, but the imagination only enables one to see the ever-present deposits. One would not be able to have imaginations if one did not see in a certain way - one can hardly call it 'seeing' - if one did not become aware of these deposits, because the imaginations are reflected in these deposits. One then notices that these deposits are present even in ordinary thinking. They are connected with the delicate organization of our nervous system and with that which belongs to the nervous system. They constitute the nervous system. The life of our nervous system depends on these deposits. As I said, they remain unknown to ordinary consciousness. They are recognized by imaginative consciousness.

This concludes a series of considerations that can be undertaken as follows: the life of imagination is opposed to the will. But the will is bound – as can be experienced through such considerations as I have presented to you – to growth proliferation. Now we can consider: So the life of imagination is bound to the opposite of growth proliferation, to dying away. And indeed, what takes place in us and what is, as it were, inwardly perceived in imaginative knowledge, is the falling out of the material as organic matter from the process of growth proliferation.

Soul: Life of Imagination

Will: Death of Growth and Growth

It is indeed the case that we have within us the process of growth and proliferation, that is, the process of metabolism, and dying matter is constantly falling out. We are continually being filled with such dying matter by thinking. We perceive this dying of matter when we ascend to the imagination. And our thinking, our imagination is bound to this dying matter.

It is really the case that we human beings carry the metabolic process within us, the dissolution and composition of the substances and so on, that the life of the will lives in it, and that matter continually dies within itself, that is, that it excretes parts that are no longer included within its organizing forces. Inorganic matter is constantly being eliminated from the organic, and the life of imagination is connected with this falling away. If the growth process, the metabolic process, becomes overgrown, our imaginative life fades. If this dying process predominates, then our ideas become increasingly rigid and pedantic. It cannot be expected that a person without occult training can easily arrive at such self-insight; but he could arrive at it, he can come to a self-insight through which it becomes clear to him: just as when his consciousness fades away in any way, even if only when falling asleep, there is a victory of the growth and metabolic forces over those forces that underlie this inner activity and dominate the thoughts. But one can also perceive, if one is only unbiased enough to acquire such inner self-insight, how an inner fatigue, a lowering of matter takes place within, in that thoughts are developed, in that one lives more and more consciously and consciously in one's imaginative life.

We do indeed carry birth and death within us continually. And what is at the beginning of life as birth, where the forces of growth are still most active, where consciousness has yet to arise, that lives with us continually until death and is basically the bearer of our will, our unconscious will, which only becomes conscious when the light of thought is thrown into it. But what is rampant is permeated by continual processes of dissolution, by a continual, continuous fulfillment of that which is then compressed into one at the moment of death, by a process of dying. And just as the growth and proliferation process reveals the element of will to the outside world, so the inward process of dying reveals the element of thought and imagination. If we cultivate this insight within us, we come to the conclusion that we are actually born and die continually, and that the single birth at the beginning of an earthly life is nothing more than a summation of what runs through our whole life until death in miniature.

For mathematicians, one could say that the real birth is an integral of all the birth differentials that are effective throughout life. But the death differentials are also effective, and real death is only the integral of this. This means that if we are continually dying inwardly, so that dying is constantly being suspended, so that it is already suspended at the moment of its arising, then this is the material basis of the life of imagination. When dying occurs, when what is constantly active in us simply becomes more intense in an unlimited way, then the moment of death is there, just as in real birth that which is constantly a process of growth in us is more intense in us in an immeasurable way. Thus one sees the spiritual-soul process and the physical-material process as one. And without this, one cannot really arrive at spiritual knowledge at all.

Now, at a certain moment in our lives, we are always very close to the point where we make a transition between thinking, which, after all, must fill our healthy consciousness from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep, and between what is proliferating and what thinking constantly seeks to extinguish. That is the moment of falling asleep. We can say that we arrive at a maximum proliferation of growth that life must initially reckon with. Those who advance to imaginative knowledge get to know it very well. For at the moment when imaginative knowledge arises, he is also able to have such experiences that are overslept in ordinary consciousness, where ordinary consciousness extinguishes itself because it is overgrown by the development of the will-growth.

These are such states into which ordinary consciousness must not enter. If the ordinary consciousness enters, then, so to speak, the growth proliferation takes hold of that which lies in the dying life of the imagination; it drives up - I must now express myself in images, but one also speaks in the imagination or out of the imagination - the growth proliferation that which lies in the dying life of the imagination. It, so to speak, does not allow the dying life of the imagination to reach its higher development.

This is the process that occurs in hallucinatory life and, to a certain extent, in life in illusions, in visions. Visions are pathological formations, hallucinations are also pathological formations. One understands them, I would say, in a soul-physical sense, when one sees the will in a certain harmony with the growth proliferation, which then takes hold and, as it were, tears apart what should consolidate in the dying process of thinking. In a sense, the continuous inward mortification is suspended. Something is torn out of the person and proliferates that should die in him if he were healthy. These are bloated masses of thoughts, and we only understand them as bloated masses of thoughts if we see what is physical and material in harmony with what is spiritual and soul-like. Something of the growth processes in man always proliferates when he has hallucinations or visions. You will recognize certain preparatory training sessions for the imaginative; if these preparatory training sessions are done in the appropriate way, then the person is able to consciously immerse themselves in what is constantly taking place in the change of life, namely, that we really live into the complete state of sleep through the dream images. In this state, where ordinary consciousness is taken from us, one learns to live by advancing into the imagination. One thus arrives where the dying process is in a certain way really overcome. It is overcome in everyday life in a state of sleep. But it is into such a state, which is then a conscious state, that man is introduced to higher knowledge. And when man rises above his ordinary consciousness in this way, then he learns to recognize that this ordinary consciousness cannot enter into this state. A person in the ordinary state of consciousness goes out of his physical and etheric bodies asleep; a person with imaginative knowledge goes out while awake. But the region one enters first, I would say the first region one enters when one enters this spiritual world, which then opens up in the imagination, one initially perceives as an absolutely empty, dark space, and one cannot actually enter the spiritual world without making this detour through this empty darkness.

But that is what lies beyond the limits of our sensory perception. If you remember the schematic drawing I made on the board yesterday – sensations that are sent into us, as it were, and are the waves on which the I moves – you will see from this drawing how the I goes out into the environment, where it is otherwise also. But in waking it stretches its feelers into the body. Now, however, it withdraws from the body and comes with those parts that have become accustomed to sharing in the life of the body, out into the world that lies beyond our senses. It gets to know the spiritual realm. It does not get to know atoms, it gets to know the spiritual world beyond the senses. But it must go through the absolute dark emptiness, because only out of this dark emptiness is the spiritual born.

You have the one boundary, I would like to say, where human experience borders on, or has, towards the world. There you have the one boundary. This boundary must be there. If it were not there, we would not be separated from our surroundings as if by an empty abyss, so to speak; we could never develop what real love is, because that requires that the human being around him can get to know emptiness. Because if he were to fill everything around him, he would never be able to flow over into the other with his being. But that is what develops in the essence of love.

If you want to know the essence of love in a real process of knowledge, then you just have to know how a person, especially when feelings of love develop in him, expands, so to speak, where his consciousness has emptiness. Therefore, he can fill himself with something else. The development of love is precisely the opposing of the emptiness of consciousness to the other, which then fills the consciousness.

But if the right harmony does not exist between the spiritual-mental and the physical-bodily – you will notice that this is only an expression that does not fully capture the fact, because we speak of harmony as a harmony for the other processes, but it is understood in this way of speaking what it is about - if the right harmony does not exist, if the one-sided spiritual-mental or physical-bodily develops too much in one or the other direction, so that the two sides are not fully expressed, then a morbid state occurs. On the one hand, a morbid state occurs when a person pours his own being into that place where he should feel an emptiness. He then lives in this empty being, in the world of his visions and hallucinations. This is precisely what is overcome by a real occult training: having hallucinations and visions. For it cannot be emphasized enough: this is precisely what is morbid. And what occult training develops is the development of forces that are opposed to the forces that arise when hallucinations or visions occur.

In hallucinating and having visions, people develop forces within themselves that are opposed to what is needed for imaginative life. We will therefore experience time and again that there are people who, for this reason, do not have to be extremely ill, but who have visions. I do not want to say hallucinations, because then one must speak of being ill, but who have visions. There are even very many people who go through life with visions and are very proud of them and live in these visions, believing that a real spiritual world is revealed in them, while it is only the proliferation of their vital forces pouring out into the void. There are also those who are so arrogant, who become megalomaniac, that they say they are undergoing an initiation, whereas what they are experiencing is merely an abnormal growth that overgrows their thinking. And when such people then approach what must seriously be recommended as exercises for imagination, then sometimes something very special happens. Because when they then say, “Yes, I have now lost my spiritual vision,” they have in fact lost their visionary visions; and that is because the exercises for true imagination that they apply to themselves counteract their morbid power of vision. Those who believe in this way, in the spiritual world through natural forces to live, they live morbidly in it, and they usually lose what they have become so fond of in a rather haughty self-love. This can always be experienced again, and this only proves, when it is experienced, how the visionary powers are morbid powers, and how what is striven for in imaginative seeing is the opposite, healing powers.

From this it can be seen that beyond sense perception there is an area of human experience that can only be grasped objectively in imaginative life. In the visionary life, we only radiate our own life into emptiness. But when we experience emptiness, then into this emptiness comes — just as the external world works through our senses — that which I have already described as the weaving, active world of the angeloi hierarchy. The weaving, active world of the angels-hierarchy is at work around us.

But now we can also find the other side of the area bordering on human experience, and that is the one that lies more inwardly beyond thinking. We can indeed say: This perception is connected with the I (see drawing on page 135). Now we enter the astral body: we have imagination. Now we go down into the etheric body: we have the activity of memory. And in the physical body, images. Ordinary consciousness does not come down into the etheric body; nor does it go out of it. Outside, there is the world, which must be said to be the world of living, weaving angels. It is therefore a spiritual world that exists above our world of consciousness. It is not outside the realm of human life, but it is outside the realm of ordinary consciousness. For our ego, it was explicitly said that it lies outside the sense perceptions and carries them in, so our ego is definitely connected to this world. It is the world that we can only enter with strengthened consciousness, because otherwise we would have our consciousness diminished, that is, we would fall into unconsciousness. We do indeed fall into this unconsciousness every time we fall asleep, and then we descend into this world. So that is how we penetrate beyond sense perception into this realm.

But now we can also descend down to the other side into our own true being. This happens when the destructive powers of dying within us take hold of us more than they usually do; or rather, when they become conscious. Just as we can penetrate beyond the boundaries of the life of the senses, so we can also penetrate downwards through that which I call occult schooling.

But what is experienced there must, if it is not to occur in a certain pathological way, remain entirely within the human being. The human being must not allow it into his ordinary consciousness. He must leave this area below, where it is otherwise unconscious. That is to say, the human being must not allow this area, which lies in the etheric body, to flow up into his ordinary consciousness, but must guide his ordinary consciousness down into the etheric body. So what is down there must not penetrate into ordinary perception, but ordinary perception must penetrate down there.

From this you can see, however, that it is an area that, just like the other one I have described, is, so to speak, the physical body of the human being, so that this area is always present within the physical body of the human being. This belongs to the inner human entities, which are often referred to in spiritual scientific contexts, and this field is always referred to in such a way that those who have recognized it, who have glimpsed something of it, say: It is impossible to express in human words what is down there. You can follow this from the descriptions of the older Egyptian initiations up to Bulwer.

But in a certain way, and in a suggestive way, it is already possible today to speak about this area. In this area, namely, all that is rooted in the human soul-body life, which in the ordinary sense should not actually develop in the outer behavior of the human being. Human evil is rooted there.

You can see from this that it is a very remarkable fact. This source of evil is actually constantly within us. We must not for a moment be under the illusion that the source of evil is not in us. It is, if I may say so, located below the level of our thinking. It must not infect our thinking, otherwise our thoughts become motives for evil; it must remain below. And the one who wants to look at it there must be morally strong enough not to let it up, so that he really only sends the consciousness down. Now you may say: But why is that in man? Yes, this question can only be raised by someone who would say, for example: Why does a plant not stop growing when it has got green leaves? It just continues to grow through its own power. We carry within us the process of dying that develops our thinking. This process is still conscious, but it must descend into the unconscious. For if this process were to cease, our thoughts would never consolidate in such a way that memory could arise in us, that thoughts could later arise in us again from the experiences we have had. So the process of dying away must continue for us to have a memory. And the beingness to which we owe our memory as human beings is the same beingness that, when it emerges in the wrong way, emerges when the motives of evil arise in man. To some extent, the tendency towards evil present in certain people is a spiritual-soul belching, forgive me for using this expression, of what should remain down and take care of the memory.

The power of memory is rooted in the human being. And just as there is a physical burping, there is also this spiritual-soul burping. When that which is granted to us in divine wisdom in the depths of our being as the power of remembrance, when that comes up into consciousness, just as something – forgive the unsavory expression – physically , then you have the criminal tendency.

There is nothing in the world that does not have its place and that cannot turn out badly when it is out of place. When something in the world appears to us as if it should not be, we must ask the question: Where must it be so that it can fulfill its task there? And here, by diving down there, we then come to the other realm, to the realm of the hierarchy of seraphim, cherubim, thrones, just as we go beyond the realm of the senses to the realm of the angels, archangels and archai. We come down into a realm where we now see clearly how that natural force that is connected with our memories has a moral side.

Just consider what that means: spiritual science discovers something where a natural process has a moral side, that is, where something that seems out of place takes on a moral character! That is precisely what ails our time, that the moral life is on the one hand an abstract one, and the natural, the causalistic, is on the other. The method of how the two can come together is not found. Here you have a very concrete process in which something natural carries within itself what, in contrast to the moral, can become immoral.

But doesn't something strange appear to you here? If we look at the matter from the point of view of degeneration, we come, as it were, into the anti-moral under our consciousness. We need it for the sake of remembrance. But, as I said, if we go beyond the sensations, we enter the realm of love. This is basically the power of the moral. We enter the moral. We are on the way to being able to build the bridge better and better between the moral-religious world on the one hand and the physical-bodily world, the world of natural causality on the other. This bridge must be built. And indeed, when we go out, we enter the spiritual, when we go down, we enter the spiritual, and we enter the world of hierarchies. We have been able to strike, so to speak, from two sides the field of hierarchies.

Of course, this consideration can only proceed in such a way that we approach the goal in a circle, so to speak. It cannot be done as in mathematics, where one starts from elementary concepts and builds up, but rather one must approach in a circle that which is to be understood last.

Automated Translation

We have tried to visualize the main ideas that are struggling for expression, or one might say for existence, in our fifth post-Atlantean period, struggling for existence in such a way that they develop one-sidedly under the characterized twofold impulses. Under the influence of the one impulse, more or less everything that can be connected to the fact of birth, the fact of the relationship between living beings, and in general the beings and forces within our earthly existence, is formed and shaped. Influenced by the other impulse, we see the facts that follow death, what is called suffering, pain, evil. And how one-sidedly the series of facts in human thinking develop, which follow on from what has been characterized, we have tried to illuminate from various sides. Now it must be clear that the two most important ideals for this fifth post-Atlantic period are: firstly, the ideal of presenting purely what is present in the sense world and tracing it back to the original phenomena, as Goethe did, as we have already discussed, who tried to trace the phenomena back to what he called the archetypal phenomena. On the other hand, the fifth post-Atlantic period must strive to achieve free imagination arising in the human soul. In the synthesizing of imaginations, which the human being receives from the spiritual world, of which only a few can be present now, because the fifth post-Atlantic period, as we know, only began in the 15th century. With these free imaginations, the human being should comprehend what presents itself in the outer world of the senses. As you can see from various of my statements, some of which have been given in lectures and some of which can be found in my books, it was Goethe who made a great beginning with such a view of the world. That is why Goethe can also be the genuine, appropriate basis for a world view that is truly required by the fifth post-Atlantic epoch.

It is a peculiar feature of world evolution that it must, as it were, take place in waves, that certain impulses arise, have a strong effect, then subside and can only arise again later, and so on. This is felt particularly strongly by those who understand the Goethean worldview in its nerve. Of course, spiritual science itself cannot yet be found in the Goethean world view, but it will be able to arise more and more under the influence of the understanding of the Goethean world view. For it is truly the case that everything that could still be given without the actual form of spiritual science as a world view is given in the Goethean world view. And this Goethean world view has cast its light first into circles that are narrow for the world at large, but wide for spiritual life, and much in spiritual life has already been influenced by the Goethean world view, even if what has been influenced has basically also been swept away, just as the Goethean world view itself has been swept away. For there is no need to deceive ourselves: even if Goethe is mentioned by many today, even if many believe they know his works, that which actually lives and breathes in his world view is still something that belongs to the most unknown in the development of mankind and which, when it enters more and more into human evolution, will substantially transform not only scientific and social thinking, but also the rest of human thinking, but also the impulses of human action. In our time, there are still few favorable forces and impulses working outside of the anthroposophical movement for an understanding of Goethe's world view. For as justified and as magnificent as the so-called democratic principle is for the development of humanity, when it is understood in the right sense, it has a corrupting effect in our time, when it is often grasped and applied in the wrong way. In our time there is an intense dislike, antipathy, yes more than that, in many souls an intense hatred and antagonism towards a world view of the kind that has its sources in Goethean thinking and Goethean sentiment. For this world-view requires much that our time, in particular, is least willing to accept. In our time, everyone wants to have, as it were, their own world-view, to build up their own world-view, to be a loner in their world-view, without having laid the foundations for it. And the next feeling that everyone has is something like that the individual world-views stand side by side with equal rights. What Goethe so uniquely characterizes in Faust's striving, is something that every journalistic drip and everyone who parrots these drips speaks of today; but today, there can be no question of knowing the innermost nerve of this Faustian striving. And we will still have much to discuss when we consider what has only been sketched out here, and what is unfavorable to a harmonious balance of the impulses mentioned in modern times, and then also discuss how this harmonious balance of the one-sided impulses that we have come to know should be brought about.

Today, I would like to add a few more random thoughts to help you understand how it could come about that Goethe's world view, which was already at such a high level, petered out in the 19th century and all sorts of other world views came to the fore. This nineteenth century increasingly came to find the world surrounding man uninteresting. One often pays little attention to this, but it is nevertheless the case. This is because in the nineteenth century, in the spiritual development of mankind, there arose a crisis that caused the contemplation of the spiritual life in things to dry up more and more. People only saw the external sensory qualities, sensory properties, and modes of activity of things, and these became less and less interesting. What lives and breathes through the sensory world spiritually was no longer seen. The sensory world as such became less and less interesting. Hence the dream of seeking something hidden within this world of sense itself, which after all was the only thing that corresponded to the spirit of the time. The spiritual hiddenness in the world of sense was not perceived. So people sought the hidden in the world of the senses itself, and that led to the fact that one sought to deepen the view spatially in another direction, though in a highly fruitful way, through microscopic and telescopic research, through that which can be seen purely sensually in the smallest and largest. Faith in the spiritual and hidden vanished. So people wanted to be allowed to believe at least that the riddles of the world would be solved by exploring what was immediately hidden from the senses, and in this field they did indeed go an enormous way. One need only think of the great and powerful progress that microscopic research has made in relation to living things in the 19th century. The science of cells has emerged from this. It was realized that the living organism of plants and animals and humans consists of the smallest parts, cells, and the perfection of microscopic research made it possible to study the life of these smallest cell creatures, about which one could previously only make more or less guesses. In this way, one wanted to explain the sensory from another sensory. And this mode of explanation became especially important for a series of facts that emerged in the fifth post-Atlantic period, for the facts that are connected with birth, with the becoming of living beings. One saw a living being, up to and including the human being, emerge from a cell; one saw it develop by observing the progressive life and multiplication of cells, and one finally arrived at an understanding of how the simple round cell that multiplies gradually in the course of its life before birth, also in humans, and finally becomes the human form, how it comes into existence through birth, is transformed.

As I said, people began to develop ideas about how the simple cell becomes that which then enters into existence through birth as a human being, and these ideas led to what can be called the problem of birth, the riddle of birth in humans, being closely linked to the processes in animal life. It was seen that the animal world in its simplest forms presents itself in such beings, which themselves are only like a single cell, that there are therefore animal beings in the world which, so to speak, take on the form throughout their entire life that humans only take on in the very earliest period in the mother's body. Other animals present themselves in forms that are similar to a later developmental form of man. In a certain period of development before birth, that is, in embryonic development, the human form presents itself in such a way that it looks, or at least resembles, a little fish, and between the cell form and the form of a little fish lie the other forms, which in turn live outside as independent beings. In a sense, then, through his embryonic development, the human being gradually recapitulates the forms that are outside. As we know, this led to the formulation of the biogenetic law, made famous by Aaeckel, which states that during his development before birth, the human being recapitulates the animal forms in abbreviated form, as it were. This, however, led to the belief that man, as he enters earthly existence, must have descended from animal forms. It was thought that in ancient times only cell-forms existed, and that somewhat more complicated beings developed from these cell-forms through these or those processes, which were thought of as being more or less accidental or purely scientifically necessary – which is ultimately the same. So that in the next stage of the development of the world, we have the simple cell creatures and somewhat more complicated ones, but the somewhat more complicated ones first go through the stage of simple cell development; then came the more complicated ones, which in turn had gone through cell forms, that is, what had emerged earlier, and then their form. And so, it was thought, the whole animal world had developed, finally man, who, during his embryonic development, briefly recapitulates all animal forms.

In this way, an idea arose about the connection between what one can call human birth and the gradual emergence, as one thought, of organic life forms. This linked man directly to the various animal forms, and since man is easily dazzled by what he sees directly, in the course of the 19th century one forgot to take into account anything other than what thus appeared to be a similarity between human embryonic development and the formations of the other organic forms. The thoughts and ideas by which the connection that had been recognized or believed to have been recognized through the advanced means of research was recognized were only as narrow as they were, and could only take on the materialistic form that they did because, in the course of the 19th century, Goethean thinking and imagination had really dried up completely. One need only recall how Goethe, in the course of his life, came to what he calls his theory of metamorphosis.

Before arriving at his theory of metamorphosis, Goethe was probably concerned with the knowledge of the spiritual world that was available to him in his time, and he became familiar with various ways, various means, through which man can try to approach the spiritual world. Only after Goethe's mind had been greatly deepened by his experiences with these means and ways did he begin to formulate scientific ideas. And there we see, first of all, how Goethe, after coming to Weimar and gradually having the resources of the University of Jena at his disposal, does everything to enrich his scientific knowledge and insights, but at the same time does everything to gain coherent ideas about the various forms of organisms. And then again we see how Goethe sets out on his Italian Journey, how he, while on the Italian Journey, takes in everything he encounters in plant and animal forms, in order to study the inner relationship of the plant and animal forms in the rich diversity that now presents itself to him. And in Sicily, finally, he thought he had found what he then called his 'primordial plant'. What did Goethe have in mind when he thought of the primal plant? This primal plant is not a physical structure. Goethe himself calls the primal plant a physical-supernatural form. It is something that can only be seen in the spiritual, but it is seen in this spiritual in such a way that when you see a particular plant, you know: this particular plant is a special manifestation of the primal plant. Every plant is a particular form of the original plant, but the original plant is not a plant that can be perceived by the senses. The original plant is a being that lives in all plants, both sensually and supernaturally. Goethe's idea was to not just follow the various sensory forms, but to seek the one original plant in all plants. In doing so, he had, one might say, essentially deepened, very, very much deepened, what had always existed as a doctrine of metamorphoses, and it was obvious to him that he should now also apply the idea of this doctrine of metamorphoses to a broader extent to the organic, to the living.

It is interesting to see how he now describes how he wanted to conceive of the human form itself in such a way that its individual limbs represent transformation products, so to speak, that the human being is the complication of an idea. He recounts how, in 1790, he found a sheep's skull in the Jewish cemetery in Venice that had decomposed particularly well, so that he could see from the individual skull bones how these skull bones are formed in such a way that one can recognize in them transformed vertebral bones. He had noticed that the spinal column consists of individual bones, which I will only draw schematically, but that the skull then consists of such remodeled vertebral bones. Of course, when they are remodeled, they take on completely different forms, but then the skull bones are only remodeled vertebral bones. The vertebral bones lie one above the other in a ring shape. By thinking of them as rubber and pulling the rubber apart in a variety of ways, one can imagine that the forms of the skull bones arise from the vertebral bones (see drawing a). For Goethe, it was something extraordinarily important to be able to say: in the vertebral bone that envelops the spinal cord, something is given like a basic element of human development, which only needs to be transformed in order to shape itself into more complicated elements of this human development. Thus, on the one hand, Goethe had recognized in the plant leaf: When a plant grows, it develops leaf after leaf; but then, at a certain point, the development of the leaf comes to an end. Through the transformation of the leaf, first the petals arise (see drawing b), but then also the stamens, which are organs of a completely different design, which are also nothing other than leaves, but transformed leaves. For Goethe, the whole plant is contained in the leaf.

There is much that is invisible and supersensible in a leaf; the whole plant is in a leaf. In the same way, however, the whole skull skeleton is already in the spinal column. The spinal column and the skull together form a whole, and the complicated skull bones are just as much transformed vertebral bones as the petals, just as the stamens and pistils are transformed green leaves of the plant. Thus Goethe has the idea that that which underlies the leaf in a supersensible way is transformed in the most diverse ways and then becomes the whole plant; that that which lies in the spine is transformed in a complex way and becomes the head. Goethe came to this conclusion in his views.

Spiritual science did not yet exist at that time, and it is particularly interesting to see how Goethe is a spirit who always remains at the level of consciousness to which he can penetrate through his rich observation, and does not does not grasp any speculative thoughts, does not hypothesize, for example, in order to penetrate beyond this point, to which he can penetrate through his rich experiences, in an unjustified way, in a fantastic way.

Now, although it is a long way, but it is a way that can now be taken, more than a hundred years after Goethe formulated these ideas. In relation to the human being, Goethe more or less stopped: the human being has a spinal column, one vertebra lies on top of the other, then the vertebra transforms into the skull bone. Goethe stopped there. Today, there is no longer any need to stop at what he stopped at. For from there to an idea that allows a wide, wide view, there really is a path, and a path must even be created through spiritual science. When one looks at the human being as a whole, with the same spirit with which Goethe, after — as they say, by a “coincidence” — a sheep's skull happily came across him in the Jewish Cemetery in Venice, when one looks with the same spirit with which one examined the individual bones of this sheep's skull and recognized through this spirit that they were transformed vertebrae, one sees the human being as a whole, then one notices something today. I have already hinted at this, but I must mention it again in this context and illuminate it from a different point of view. Today we recognize that the human being is essentially a twofold creature: he consists of his head and the rest of his organism. Just as the petal develops from the stem leaf of the plant, as the petal is a transformation of the stem leaf of the plant, so the human head is also a transformation of the whole rest of the organism. I have said that in order for this transformation to come about completely, the human being must develop from one incarnation to the next. What we carry today, as I said, in our other organism, that becomes our head in the next incarnation.

You see, this view is only a fully developed impulse that arises when one inwardly follows what began in Goethe's world view. If one really stands on the ground of this doctrine of metamorphosis, one attempts to describe the organism in its individual members; but these members are conceived in their connection in such a way that the connection is only possible if one sees through to something that lives there as a spiritual essence. For, of course, if a leaf were what the senses see, it would never be able to become a petal or a stamen; if a vertebra were what the senses see, it would never be able to become a be able to become a limb of the head skeleton; if the human body were to be what it presents to the external senses, then, however much it might transform its powers, it would never be able to become a human head. But now, even with regard to external observation, this Goethean world view is clearer in the demands of the fifth post-Atlantic period than the natural science of the 19th century, which prided itself so much on its external observation and experimentation. Goethe is truly better at looking, and those who try to rely on him are better at looking at what happens in nature and what is present in nature than the biological science of the 19th century in particular.

As two members, I said, man presents himself to us: as the head and as the rest of his organism. This fact, that the head is, so to speak, a transformed rest of the organism, must first be understood if one wants to build further. Only then will one be able to ask: Yes, what then is on the one hand this human head, and what on the other hand is the rest of the human organism? To answer this question, one must take quite different things as important than the usual modern natural science takes.

You see, when you imagine an animal, the essential thing about the animal is that its spinal cord - I have also mentioned this several times - is parallel to the earth's surface, and that the animal stands on the earth's surface with its front and hind legs (a) and carries its head horizontally in the extension of the spinal cord, essentially as an extension of this spinal cord. What is known as the human spinal cord is now aligned vertically, exactly perpendicular to the direction of the animal's spinal cord (b).

But we do not want to consider this spinal cord for the time being, because it does not belong to the head; it belongs to the rest of the organism. We want to consider another spinal cord first. Yes, but what kind of another spinal cord? We want to consider the human brain. You will say: Is that a spinal cord? Yes, that is a spinal cord! It is nothing more than a transformed spinal cord, so to speak, an expanded spinal cord. Imagine a horizontal spinal cord, as found in animals, expanded, transformed, metamorphosed, and you get the human brain (c).

The true fact is this: during the development of the moon, what is now the brain looked like the spinal cord of an animal today. And only during the transition from the lunar to the terrestrial development did this spinal cord, which man had on the moon, become more complicated, becoming the present human brain; but it retained its horizontal position. For essentially its axis is perpendicular to the spinal cord belonging to the body, and this spinal cord belonging to the body was only acquired by man during his time on earth. That is still at the stage at which the spinal cord that became brain was on the moon during the lunar evolution (d).

What appears simpler in humans today, their spinal cord, was acquired later in the course of evolution than what appears more complicated today, their brain. Only the brain that humans have today used to be a spinal cord. So we see that humans have a spinal cord that has been transformed into a brain, and only later in the course of evolution was an original spinal cord added to it.

Thus, when we look at the human head, it does not appear to us to be very different from that of an animal; for the direction of the head is like the direction of the backbone of the animal, which is also the direction of the head of the animal, horizontal, parallel to the earth (f).

And many other characteristics could be indicated that would show that the human head, when viewed as it is in the whole development, is a transformed 'animality', and that the rest of the human organization has been added to this transformed animality. This idea is not at all similar to the one that natural science development in the 19th century came to. For the scientific development in the 19th century, because it places the main emphasis on the external-sensual, will find precisely the human head most different from the animal. Here (see drawing) the human head does not appear to us to be so different from the rest of the animal, only ennobled: the brain is a fluffed-up spinal cord, which the animal also has.

You will now have the question on your lips: Yes, do you perhaps believe that the rest of the human organism is now even nobler than the head organism in terms of external form, that the rest of the human organism might even resemble the animal less than the head? And you yourself may find it paradoxical today, but you will already find your way into the idea that this must be said. And basically, doesn't our head, after all, look most like animal forms, of all our limbs taken as a whole? At least for a large part of our lives, we are hairy on the head, men more so than women. The rest of the organism is by no means as hairy. This already strongly suggests its relationship to the animal organism. I will leave it at this suggestion for the time being, but we will elaborate on this over time. But it will lead us more and more to the realization that something quite different takes place in nature than what is very often believed. Man looks down from man to the lower animals and sees, for example, a turtle or a shell or a snail, and he believes in the sense of today's natural science that the snail, the shell, in fact the lowly creatures, first developed gradually, and the human head was added to the lowly organisms of the lowly animal world. This is nonsense, complete nonsense! If you look at a shellfish or a turtle today, you see a human head at a subordinate level, and the rest of our organism has been added to it. After what are lower animal forms – I will schematize them – have gradually been transformed into the human head, the rest of the organism has been added to it.

So we have an evolution that goes from lower animal forms further and further, and what is animal nature has formed the human head and the rest of the organism is attached to this human head as the later. In our head alone we carry within us what connects us to the other animals, not in our other organism. Therefore, the human head has the same direction in its main axis as an animal: parallel to the earth's surface. The rest of the organism is built upright, perpendicular to the earth's surface.

It is very unfortunate that this false idea, which is characterized by this, has been incorporated into the scientific development of the 19th century. For this reason, it is thought that man as such, as he is, emerges with his whole organism as a somewhat more developed form from earlier animal forms. The truth is that what could have become of earlier animal forms can only be the head, but that what is completely new within the evolution of the earth has been added to this head.

Now, therefore, we are dealing with two things at once. The first is this: that in our head we actually have a transformed form for the other animal forms. And yet, from that which has only just been added to the head and which we have as the rest of the organism in an incarnation, we develop the form of the head through corresponding forces in the next incarnation. This might seem like an apparent contradiction. We shall see, by looking at these things more closely, that it is not a contradiction.

I wanted to show you, by recalling the fact that man actually carries the animal within himself, that with his earthly organism he supports the animal that has become his head, just how wrong today's external ideas can be. But I would also like to show you something else in a positive way. If the human head is only a transformed animal, how did the human head become what it is today? How can the head, as it is today, develop through being prepared by an earthly organism in a previous incarnation, to become the human head? Well, the animal walks on the earth with its two pairs of legs, that is, with four legs. Anyone who believes that this animal only walks over the earth and that nothing else happens but that this animal walks over the earth is greatly mistaken. Forces are constantly rising from the earth into the animal, going up through the spine, and then, as it were, always influencing the brain, going back down into the earth again (a). The animal belongs to the earth. And the way it stands on it, how the forces that are active in the earth go through its legs into its spine and back again, that is part of the animal's whole life.

The relationship that the animal has to the whole earth is what the human being, the human head, has to the rest of the human organism. The fact that the human being has an organism that stands vertically out of the earth makes this rest of the organism the same for the human head as the earth, the whole earth, is for the animal. Thus, in our head-attached organism, we have the secrets of the whole earth within us. And it can easily be shown, though today it can only be hinted at, that when we study the head and the brain within it, the rudiments, the appendages, are there for front and back limbs , by means of which man, with his head, stands on himself like the animal on the earth, as we do, only transformed into internal, other organs, have hind limbs and forelimbs. And the whole formation of the head is such that it is in fact related to the rest of the human organism as the animal is to the earth (b).

This is so significant that one can see what kind of significance such an idea, which of course only arises from the views fertilized by spiritual science, has. For with this idea one must now go back to what the 19th century, with its crude means, observed only insufficiently; with this idea one must now go back and follow embryonic development. Then something quite different will emerge from what 19th-century science was able to find. But then, in turn, ideas will arise that can be fruitful for human life, even beyond mere inanimate technology. But without these ideas, humanity will not get out of the deadlock it has now entered. For the real progress of humanity is based on the development of ideas, not of general ideas, which are cultivated today in associations with great ideals, not in these ideas, which anyone can grasp by spending three hours in a coffee house, but in the ideas that are borrowed from reality through research and are then applied to life. It is easy enough to come up with fine ideas that can be used to found associations, but they do not prevent culture from reaching dead ends like the one it is in now. Only concrete ideas can prevent this.

We must truly feel this, then we will first understand the great tasks of spiritual science, and we will correctly assess the reality around us. This reality is bent on preventing spiritual science from emerging, especially in its most important form. The spirit that caused the Goethean world view to dry up in the 19th century is still present to a sufficient extent, and this spirit finds expression in a certain mania for persecution: a mania for persecuting everything that strives for ideas saturated with reality. To this spirit of the age, these ideas, saturated with reality, often seem fantastic, because it is not suited to assimilate them. And what will increasingly come to be faced by spiritual science and its strongest adversary is this: a worldview that seeks real spiritual paths and seeks to research realities without prejudice will be rejected precisely because one wants to reject this research into realities. It is too uncomfortable to get to know what is necessary to arrive at a truly comprehensive worldview. Therefore, this comprehensive worldview will be vilified and will not let the world see how comprehensive it is, but will pretend to the world that it is based on just as superficial, narrow-minded, limited concepts and research results as other worldviews are at present. And more and more will be felt a certain recognition of the dishonesty of the pursuit, namely, that pursuit which insists on narrow-mindedness and a rejection of precisely that which, with the consciousness that only leads satisfactorily forward, really wants to research the realities and thereby also come to a certain comprehensive point of view. Arrogance and presumption are qualities that have not yet reached their peak. What will yet come about under the influence of that arrogance, which will be fostered not by natural science but by the world view that is often drawn from natural science, is something that people of the present still have no conception of. And what tyranny will arise when more and more external powers allow themselves to be privileged by materialism in the field of medicine, in the field of other so-called science, what will arise from this, the present man is still far too comfortable to even feel. He much prefers to accept bit by bit how, day by day, the spiritual is allowed to be privileged more and more by the external powers. And there are still few people who feel what a dreadful future humanity is heading for if they do not learn to feel what is at stake in this very area, what a decline can be observed in this very area compared to the points of view that have already been reached.

I just wanted to hint at this feeling, which is necessary for people of the present day. For this feeling is countered by an enormous sleepiness, especially among the idealistically minded people of the present. In the face of what one should feel to be one's task, it seems to be the worst sin when those who, precisely imbued with idealistic attitudes, find their way into a newer world view, then withdraw from the rest of the world's work and life and found all kinds of colonies and the like, while the most urgent thing is that the newer world view, the spiritual-scientific world view, be fully integrated into life and not sleepily stumble towards the enormous abyss that opens up from what one can thus hint at, as I have hinted at again today.

I wanted to present something episodic today. Because to explain the very important things that I still have to say, I need three consecutive lectures.

The waking state is, of course, what we know most directly, but it is not within this familiar realm that the riddles of existence are actually revealed. If the solution to the riddles of life could be found in the waking state, as it serves us in our ordinary lives and in ordinary science, then these riddles would not actually exist, because they would be constantly being revealed. Man would never come to ask the question. That man asks: What are the deeper reasons for life? That he may not arrive at an exact formulation of this question of the riddle of life, but that from the depths of his soul he has the longing to know something that is not answered by ordinary consciousness , testifies to the fact that something comes up from the depths of the human soul, that is, in a more or less unconscious way, something that belongs to the human being but that must first be sought if it is to come to clear consciousness. And this leads those who observe life less to speculate and develop all kinds of philosophies. Such philosophies then ultimately remain unsatisfactory. But anyone who looks at the phenomena of life with a certain impartiality must realize that in the other state, the state opposite to waking, the state of sleep, something is veiled, and that an understanding of sleep could lead to an understanding of life. We have often discussed such things; but these things must be returned to again and again from the most diverse points of view, for anthroposophy can only be grasped if one tries to grasp it from the most diverse sides.

Now, out of sleep, the dream life surges up first. The dream life proceeds in images. One can very soon notice, when one begins to observe this dream life, that the images do indeed point to something in life, in ordinary conscious life. Even if one can often say that things are dreamed that one has not experienced in this way, I would like to say that the pieces from which the dream is composed, the pieces of images, are of course nevertheless taken from ordinary consciousness. But the drama of the dream, the way in which the dream builds up its tensions, how it can evoke inner feelings of fear, inner feelings of joy, feelings of momentum, is something else. What the course of the dream images means goes even deeper into human nature, and one can see this if one considers the following.

You dream that you are walking along a path and come to a mountain. You enter a mountain cave. At first it is still dark. It gets darker. But an unknown urge causes you to keep going. Anxiety sets in. This all increases until you are finally in a state of fear, let's say, of falling into an inner abyss. You can awaken from this state of fear by continuing to experience this state of fear during awakening.

You can also dream that you are standing somewhere and see a person coming from afar. He comes closer and closer, but he has a terrible expression. And as he gets closer, you realize that he intends to attack you. Your anxiety grows. He comes ever closer. He may transform the initially harmless instrument that he showed you from afar – after all, dreams are transformers – into a terrible murder weapon. Your anxiety increases again to fear, and you now wake up with this fear, which in turn continues into the waking life of the day.

These are two very different images. One time it is a series of images that takes you into the interior of a mountain, the other time it is a series of images that is associated with an approaching enemy. The soul can go through the same thing, even though the two series of images are quite different. What the soul goes through is something quite different from what consciousness experiences when waking up. One could say that it is not the images that are important at all, but rather how the soul undergoes a certain inner drama: how the soul initially has an urge, or how something comes to the soul instead of the urge, but how this then transitions into anxiety, into fear, and then, in a sense, causes the person to shake themselves out of sleep and into ordinary consciousness. What is important is the increasing forces behind the dream, which are not perceived themselves, but which clothe themselves in images. And the two series of images that I have characterized could be multiplied many times over; the same soul content could clothe itself in ten, twenty, a hundred different images. We must therefore say: there is something - if I draw schematically - that takes place in the soul (blue, green. See drawing on page 46). But what takes place in the soul, the human being does not notice; he does not know it. What he does know are images. I draw them schematically on it (yellow). These images are then experienced by the person in his consciousness of the dream. But what matters is the escalation: weak anxiety, stronger anxiety, greatest fear. The dream images are more or less taken from life, because both the mountain and the mountain cave, everything is basically borrowed from life. The enemy that approaches is borrowed from life, his weapon is borrowed from life. The images take their content from life. But that is only the clothing. If, through what I have often characterized as the imaginative consciousness, you have the opportunity to go beyond this clothing, not to form images at all, but to remain here in the soul forces, which are anxiety, fear, and extreme fear, to remain with the imaginative consciousness, if you are able to form images within, then something completely different comes about.

Because when you are asleep, you are initially outside of your etheric body and physical body, with only your ego and your astral body. When you wake up, if you are in a normal state, you enter your etheric body very quickly – you pass through it very quickly – and then immediately enter your physical body. But if you are in some abnormal state and do not enter the physical body immediately, but enter the etheric body before entering the physical body, that is, enter the etheric body first, then these images from life are formed. For in ordinary consciousness, the human being has no perception in sleep itself, and only at the moment when he either penetrates into his body and passes through the etheric body does he receive images, or when he goes out of the physical body while falling asleep but still remains in the etheric body, then he has dream images again. So only in these intermediate states do such dream images form, which are taken from life.

But imaginative consciousness leads to the fact that one can live completely outside of the body in that which stands there as the forces of the soul behind the dream. And then one lives in another reality. Then one lives in the world in which man is from falling asleep to waking up. Man lives from falling asleep to waking up in a world in which he becomes unconscious. You can imagine it as if a person were to submerge in water and lose consciousness, and only regain it when the water carries him out and releases him again. The same thing that happens physically also happens to the soul when a person falls asleep. He submerges into the spiritual world. There he loses consciousness. He leaves his body with his soul and loses consciousness. When he wakes up, he reappears and regains consciousness. But reappearing means entering the body. And if, as I said, one does not immediately enter one's body, but still notices the transition in the etheric body, then the dream images arise. But if one does not get involved in this and need not get involved in getting such dream images, but if one gets images entirely outside of the physical body in the spiritual world itself, then not just any images come out, but images come out that you can find as a description of the evolution of the world in my “Occult Science”. And everything that is presented as I have presented it in my “Occult Science” has this origin, which I am now characterizing for you.

If you ask yourself: What is actually written in this “Occult Science”?, then you will say to yourself: Well, thoughts are in it. You can also think about it. I always emphasize that again, with common sense you can think about all of this. Thoughts are in it, but they are not ordinary thoughts. They are the thoughts that are creatively active in the world outside. Man can live in these thoughts when he stands beyond the threshold that leads into the spiritual world. Man can live in these thoughts that work on the world. It is the first thing he finds when he enters the supersensible world.

These are not dream images, because, as I have explained to you, dream images come about in a completely different way. Instead, they are experiences in the spiritual world. I would like to say: Imagine a person who is asleep. During sleep, the most comprehensive and intense processes take place in the soul. The person is unconscious during sleep and is therefore unaware of them. In the morning he enters his physical body, and immediately he is immersed in it. He uses his eyes, sees colors and light, he uses his ears, hears sounds, and so on, and thus he becomes conscious. But there is this intermediate state: he does not immediately enter the physical body, he enters the etheric body. Then he has a dream or dreams. But imagine if a person became conscious before he even entered his etheric body. He would become conscious while still in the outer ether that fills the whole world. Then he becomes aware of what is described in my “Geheimwissenschaft.”

If, for example, you became conscious in the middle of the night without returning to your physical body, so that the physical body emerged next to you and you saw it – because you could see it then – then you perceived this cosmology, then you perceived what I described in my Secret Science. I may call what I have described: the formative forces of the world, or even world thoughts.

This presents itself in such a way that one can say how one otherwise has individual thoughts in daily life: the earth came into being in such and such a way, used to have a moon existence, a sun existence, a Saturn existence; in short, everything that I have described in my “Occult Science”.

But this way of perceiving in the spiritual world is only one of three. When a person looks at his state of daytime consciousness, he knows that in this state of daytime consciousness he can distinguish between thinking, feeling and willing. But just as the day-consciousness has these three states, thinking, feeling and willing, so also the night-consciousness, which in the case of the ordinary person is unconsciousness, has three states. One does not always sleep in the same state from falling asleep to waking up, just as one does not always wake in the same state. One wakes by thinking, or also by feeling, or also by willing. One can wake in three states, and likewise one can sleep in three states. For the fact that someone who has imaginative consciousness sees the world-forming forces, the formative forces of the world, comes only from the fact that he has acquired a consciousness of them, a knowledge of them. But every person falls asleep in these formative forces of the world, in the thoughts of the world. Just as you submerge when you jump into the water, so when you fall asleep you initially submerge in the formative forces of the world.

But in addition to this life in the formative forces of the world, there are two other states for the sleeping state, just as there are feeling and willing in addition to thinking for waking. When we consider thinking, having thoughts, in sleep this corresponds to life in the formative forces of the world. This means that when you become aware of the lightest state of sleep, then in this lightest state of sleep you live in the formative forces of the world. It is as if you were swimming through the universe from one end to the other, moving through thoughts, but these are forces. This is the lightest sleep, where you move in the thought-forces of the world. But there is a deeper sleep, a sleep from which, if one does not do special soul exercises, one cannot bring anything into one's daily life through dreams. One can only bring something into one's daily life from the lightest sleep through dreams. But then the dreams, as I have described to you, are not decisive as images, because the same dream can take on the most diverse images. But even the lightest sleep can lead to dreams, that is, one can bring something into consciousness, one can at least sense that one has experienced something during sleep. But one can only sense from this lightest sleep that one has experienced something.

Only those who attain an inspired consciousness can know anything of the deeper sleep. Such a one then perceives more than just what I have described in my “Occult Science”. In this “Occult Science” I have, to be sure, described some of what comes through from the inspired consciousness, but let us just realize what can only be described through anthroposophy – what the transition is like in experience from the quiet sleep to the deeper sleep, to the sleep from which the person in ordinary life can bring back no dreams.

When sleep is so quiet that one can bring back dreams in ordinary life, then the person who can look into these worlds sees the surging, weaving thought images, the imaginations of the world that reveal the secrets of the world to him, which reveal to him which world the human being belongs to, except for the one in which he is with his consciousness from the moment he wakes up until he falls asleep. For what I have described in my “Occult Science” is not something that is merely painted on a surface, but is in perpetual motion, in perpetual activity. But from a certain moment on, images begin to appear in this world, which every person experiences in a quiet sleep – they just do not know about it. These images become clear, they increase their splendor, they reveal certain underlying essences. They subside again, these images. Once again, one has nothing in consciousness but a kind of feeling that the images have been dulled. Then the images appear again. But while the images become more active and then fade away, something occurs that can be called the harmony of the spheres, a kind of cosmic music occurs, but a cosmic music that does not merely live in melody and harmony, but that represents the deeds and actions of those beings that inhabit the spiritual world, the deeds of the angels, the archangels, the elemental forces, and so on.

In a sense, you can see the beings moving on the surging sea of images, directing the world from the spirit. It is the world perceived through inspiration, the second world. I can call them the appearances of spiritual world beings. And this world, this world of manifestation of the spiritual beings of the spiritual world, is just as much the second element of sleeping as feeling is the second element of waking. So that during sleep man not only enters into the world which the thoughts of the world present, but within these surging world thoughts the deeds of the beings of the spiritual world are revealed.

But now, in addition to these two states of sleep, there is a third one. Most of the time, people have no idea about this third state of sleep. They usually know that they have a light sleep, and they also know that dreams reveal themselves from this light sleep. That he has a dreamless sleep, he notices. But that there is a third kind of sleep, that is something that people become aware of at most when they feel when waking up: there was something very heavy in them during sleep, it is something that they must first overcome in the first hours when they are awake again. I am quite sure that a number of you are familiar with this state in the morning, when you know that you have not slept in the usual way, but that there was something within you that leaves you with a certain heaviness that you first have to overcome over a longer period of time when you are conscious in the morning. This points to a third kind of sleep, the content of which can only be grasped by intuitive consciousness. And this third kind of sleep has a great significance for the human being.

When a person is in the lightest sleep, he actually experiences much of what he otherwise goes through when awake. He still participates, albeit in a different way, in his breathing. He still participates, if not from the inside, then from the outside, in his blood circulation and in the other bodily processes. When a person is in the second type of sleep, they no longer participate in physical life, but one could say that they participate in a world that is common to their body and soul. Something still passes over from the body into the soul. Something passes over, as light passes into the plant when the plant develops in the light during the day. But when a person is in the third phase of sleep, there is something in him that has become, if I may say so, like a mineral. The salts in his body are particularly strongly deposited. There are strong salt deposits in the physical body during this third phase of sleep. But in return, the human being is connected with his soul to the mineral world within.

Imagine you could do the following experiment: you go to bed, first fall into the light sleep, from which dreams can come out for the ordinary consciousness, then you fall into the deeper sleep, from which no dreams come, but which still leaves the soul of the person in a connection with the physical body. But now you are sleeping in a way that there are strong salt deposits in your body. You cannot have a relationship in your soul to what is going on in your body. But if you had placed a rock crystal on the nightstand next to you, you could be completely inside the rock crystal with your soul. You would slip into the rock crystal and perceive it from within. You cannot do that in the first or second kind of sleep. In the first kind of sleep, the content of which can enter into dreams, if you dream of the rock crystal, you would still experience it as a kind of rock crystal. You would experience something shadowy, but still something rock-crystal-like. If you sank down into the second kind of sleep, you would no longer experience the rock crystal in such a limited way. If you were still able to dream — you usually cannot, but let us assume that you could — then you would experience that the rock crystal becomes indistinct and forms into a kind of sphere or ellipsoid and then withdraws again. But if you could dream, that is, if you could access intuition from the deep sleep, from the third kind of sleep, then you would experience the rock crystal in such a way that you feel as if you are running along these lines inside, then running towards the tip, then running back again: you then experience the rock crystal within. You inhabit it. And so for other minerals. And not only do you experience the form, you also experience the inner forces. In short, the third type of sleep is something that brings the human being completely out of his body and completely into the spiritual world. During this third type of sleep, the human being stands in the third kind of world, in the essence of the spiritual world itself. That is to say, you are surrounded by the essence of the angels, the archangels, all those beings that one otherwise perceives only externally, that is, only in their revelations. You see, if you apply your sense consciousness from waking to sleeping, you see, so to speak, the external revelations of the gods in nature. During sleep, you enter either into the world of images in the lightest sleep, or in the second type of sleep into the world of appearances, into the world of revelations, or else, when you come to the third type of sleep, into the inner being of the divine spiritual entities themselves.

Thus, just as man lives himself out during the day through thinking, feeling and willing, so he lives himself out during sleep, either by flowing into the thoughts of the world, or by the deeds of the divine spiritual beings being revealed to him out of the thoughts of the world, or but these entities themselves take up the human being, so that he, as it were, rests with his soul in them. Just as thinking or imagining is the brightest, clearest, most distinct for the day-consciousness, just as feeling is somewhat duller - because feeling is actually always a kind of dreaming - and how willing, the most dull state of consciousness during the day, is, in a sense, a sleeping, so we have three states of sleep: the sleeping state in which ordinary consciousness experiences dreams and higher consciousness, the seeing, clear-sighted consciousness experiences the thoughts of the world. We have the second kind of sleep, which remains unconscious even for ordinary consciousness, but which appears to the inspired consciousness in such a way that the deeds of the divine-spiritual entities reveal themselves everywhere. We have the third kind of sleep, which presents itself to the intuitive consciousness, in which it lives in the divine-spiritual entities themselves. As I said, this announces itself by, for example, submerging into the interior of minerals. But this third kind of sleep has a special meaning for man.

If you take the second kind of sleep first, then you will find, as I said, the world beings of the angels, the archangels and so on, in the appearing, disappearing, surging images, but you will also find yourself. You find yourself in it as a soul, not as you are now, but as you were before your birth or before conception. You get to know yourself, how you have lived between death and a new birth. That belongs to this second world. And every time we sleep without dreaming, we live in the same world in which we lived before we descended and took on a physical body. But if you were to enter the third stage of sleep and were able to wake up there – the intuitive consciousness wakes up – so if you imagine entering the third stage of sleep and waking up there: then you experience your destiny, your karma. Then you know why you have special abilities in this life, from the nature of your previous lives. Then you will know why you are brought together with these or those personalities in this life. Then you will get to know karma, then you will get to know your destiny. This destiny can only be recognized if one - I am now approaching the matter from a different point of view - is able to penetrate into the interior of minerals. If you are able to see a rock crystal not only from the outside but also from the inside – of course you must not chop it up, because then what you see would always be on the outside, naturally – but you must, as I have described, be inside it; if you can do that, if you can see the crystal from the inside, then you can also understand why you are struck by this or that blow of fate in this life. Take any crystal, take an ordinary salt cube.

You see it from the outside: that is how you see it with ordinary consciousness. In this state, your life remains opaque to you. If you can penetrate into it - the spatial size does not matter - if you can see it from the inside out, then you are in the world in which you can also understand your destiny. But you are in this world every night when you enter the third stage of sleep.

But this third stage of sleep still has something very special. You see, people before the Mystery of Golgotha – and we were all there ourselves in our earlier lives on earth – people in the development of time before the appearance of Christ on earth, they very often came into this third kind of sleep. But even before they sank, I might say, into this third kind of sleep, their angel appeared and brought them back up again. For that is the peculiar thing: one can always get oneself out of the first and second kinds of sleep as a human being, but not out of the third. In the third kind of sleep, a person would have had to die before the appearance of Christ on earth if he had not been brought out by angels or other entities. Since the appearance of the Christ, the power of the Christ, as I have often emphasized, is connected with the earth, and every time a person must awaken from this third kind of sleep, then the power of the Christ, which through the Mystery of Golgotha has united with the earth, must come to his aid. Without the power of the Christ, a person could no longer awaken from this third kind of sleep. He can slip into the crystals, but he cannot get out again without the power of the Christ. For when one looks behind the scenes of existence, one already realizes what significance this Christ impulse has for life on earth. I therefore emphasize it strongly: man could enter the crystals, but he could not get out again.

These things were felt particularly strongly wherever, after the Mystery of Golgotha, after the appearance of Christ on Earth, a strong, ancient, pagan consciousness still existed and yet the Christ Revelation was already there, as for example in Central European regions. There were people known to have died as a result of falling into a deep sleep. They would not have needed to die if the Christ had come to their aid.

So, for example, people felt - I do not want to say anything other than what people felt - with Charlemagne or with Frederick Barbarossa. Despite the fact that Frederick Barbarossa drowned in the physical world, that was how it was felt. But it was felt particularly clearly with Charlemagne. Where did this medieval consciousness believe such a soul went? Into the interior of crystals. That is why it was placed in mountains, where it was supposed to wait until the Christ came and awakened it from its deep sleep. This kind of myth formation is connected with this consciousness. The strong connection with the Christ impulse since the Mystery of Golgotha on Earth, that is what now causes the world of the Angeloi, the Archangeloi and so on, to get man out again, because otherwise he would not be able to be brought out again when he sinks into the third kind of sleep. This, then, is connected with the power of Christ, not with belief in the power of Christ; for whether one belongs to this or that religious denomination, what Christ did on earth is done in the objective sense, and what I am describing here as objective takes place for man quite independently of belief. We will discuss the significance of faith in the next few days. But what I am talking about now is an objective fact that has nothing to do with faith.

But how did this happen? It happened because a different fate has entered the world of the gods than was previously in it, a fate that I would characterize by saying: People here in the physical world are born and die. It is the peculiarity of the divine spiritual beings that belong to the higher hierarchies that they do not die and are not born, but merely transform. The Christ, who lived with the other divine spiritual beings until the time of the Mystery of Calvary, decided to experience death, to descend to Earth, to become a human being, to go through death within human nature, and then to regain consciousness after death through the resurrection.

This is a very significant event in the divine spiritual world, that a God has gone through death in order to be able to do all that we already know or that I have now described again. We can therefore say: there is the significant event in the history of the development of the earth that the God became man and thereby floods his power into such significant phenomena as those that I have now characterized for you. The God who became man has such power in earthly life that He can bring human souls out of the depths of the soul if they have descended there. So that when we speak of Christ we speak of a World Being, of whom we must say: He is the God who became man. What would be His counter-image? His counter-image would be the man who became God. It does not have to be an absolutely good God; but just as Christ descended into the human world and accepted death, that is, first accepted the human body in order to share in the fate of human beings, so we are led to the opposite pole, to the human being who frees himself from death, frees himself from the conditions of the human body and becomes a god within the earthly conditions. He would then cease to be a mortal man, but would walk on the earth, though not under the same conditions as an ordinary mortal man, who goes from birth to death and from death to a new birth, but such a man, having become a god, would be found as a god who had come to earth unlawfully. Just as Christ is a legitimately incarnate god, so we would have to look for his counter-image in the illegitimately god-become human, the no-longer-mortal-but-wandering-about human who has assumed the nature of god in an unlawful manner. And you are aware that just as the Christian tradition points to the rightly incarnated God, to Christ Jesus, so it points to Ahasver, to the man who has become God unlawfully, who has laid aside the mortality of the human nature. Thus we have in Ahasver the polar opposite of Christ Jesus. That is the deeper reason, the deeper meaning of the saga of Ahasver, the saga that speaks of something that must be spoken of because it is a reality: of a being that wanders the earth. This figure of Ahasver is there. He wanders the earth, he wanders from people to people. Among other things, he does not allow the Hebrew faith to die out. This figure is present, this Ahasver figure, the god who has become unlawful.

Man has every reason, if he wants to get to know real history, to turn his attention to such ingredients of this history, to see how the forces and beings play down from the supersensible worlds into the sensual world, how Christ came out of the supersensible worlds into the sensible world, but also how the sensible world in turn plays a role in the supersensible world, and how we also have in Ahasver a real, actual world power, a world being. There has always been an awareness of this wandering of Ahasver, who of course cannot be seen with physical eyes, but only under the condition of a certain clairvoyance. And the legends that point to him have a good, objective basis. One does not understand human life if one looks at it only externally, as described in the history books, if one does not look at the special forms it takes.

For it is true that just as Christ lives in our inner being since the Mystery of Golgotha, and can be perceived in our inner being when we first awaken our inner gaze, so when we look around us at human life, and since the seeing glance arises in us for most people, for those to whom the seeing glance arises, it is the case, then, as it happens unexpectedly to the person who crosses the threshold of consciousness, Ahasverus, the eternal Jew, will appear to us. Man will perhaps not always recognize him, he will mistake him for something else. But it is just as possible that the eternal Jew will appear to man as it is possible that the Christ will shine forth when man looks into his inner being.

These things belong to the secrets of the world which must needs be revealed in our time, when many secrets should be revealed.

Yoga means striving for union with the source of divine truth. The one who strives for this is a yogi. A yogi must lead a certain way of life; in so doing, he seeks to open the source of truth within himself. Certain things that a yogi must strive for cannot be carried out in our [Western] life. But that doesn't make them any less true. Sometimes it is better to renounce than to not renounce in terms of development. For example, every killing takes a person back in development. The Hindu strictly adheres to this. He would not kill vermin, for example. But within our Western way of life, one cannot adhere to such a rule, even if it remains true.

Man achieves union with the primary source of divine truth by purifying his three bodies more and more.

In the Christian mystery, the mystic says to himself: “I should achieve union - the unio - with the Holy Spirit, the Word or the Son and the Father.” This is achieved by purifying the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body.

When the astral body is purified, then man can unite with the Holy Spirit.

If we want to form thoughts about the world, then there must be thoughts in it. The whole world must carry within it the plan that one subsequently thinks. The [creative] world thought is called the “Great Architect” by the Freemasons and the “Holy Ghost” by the Christians.

If you look at the world, you will find wisdom. The whole world, down to the last detail, is built by this wisdom. For example, a bone is so wisely [built] from infinitely fine beams that no engineer could even begin to imagine it. Everywhere you look, you will find the wisdom of the world, which we extract in our everyday thinking and in science. The ordinary person does not consider how to organize his actions so that they fit into the plan of the world. The yoga student transforms his drives; he consciously follows the laws of logic. Thus, his astral body no longer works against his ego, but his ego illuminates his astral body. In this way, he achieves catharsis. Then he becomes one with divine wisdom; this is the union with the divine spirit. Our astral then unites with the spirit of the world. This can only be achieved in stages, by going through certain meditations. He tries to live within himself by devoting himself in a certain way to exercises according to the instructions of experienced people.

The religions strive to fill man with thoughts that are independent of space and time. Our everyday thoughts are largely produced by the environment in space and time. Just think about how many of our thoughts have arisen from the fact that we live at a certain time, under certain circumstances, in a certain place, in a certain environment.

The union with the Holy Spirit or the World Tree Master is the first step of yoga that transforms our animal nature into a life of virtue. Man then imprints the eternal in the world through his actions, if he regularly, even if only a few minutes a day, occupies himself with thoughts of eternity. Even if the actions of the meditator and the non-meditator appear the same on the outside, everything that comes from a meditator has a completely different effect because something of the general world spirit flows into his actions.

The etheric body must also be transformed. It is also worked on alongside during the transformation of the astral body. The astral body can be transformed through great, ideal feelings, through immersion in great truths; but this does not go beyond the soul. But working on the etheric body goes beyond the soul. To achieve this, a person must study those things that are related to their external nature, for example, temperaments. Usually one of the temperaments prevails in a person. The melancholic person lets little affect himself from the outside, but he is very attached to these effects. The phlegmatic person also lets little affect himself, but he is not very attached to these effects. In the case of the choleric person, there is a strong influence [from the outside] and also a strong after-effect. In the case of the sanguine person, one also sees strong impressions, but no after-effects.

Only when we know ourselves well in this way can we begin to educate our temperament. The yogi must bring harmony to the four temperaments. This already reaches down into the etheric body. Much has been achieved by the person who, for example, is able to curb his attention through self-education. Much has been achieved by the person who has become a level-headed person out of an irascible person. (Usually, a person gives up the temperament he was born with even at death). One must delve into the way the temperaments work. The yogi studies them and also applies them. He is constantly striving to educate the missing aspects of his being. If you have managed to change your temperament, you have achieved a lot. If a person who is hot-tempered becomes harmonious in one lifetime, it is much more significant than if a person was harmonious all his life. With every change in lifestyle, a person acquires a bit of vitality. Some people cannot stand “working on their temper. But if he can endure it, he gains vitality and becomes younger at the same time. This also applies to the physical when he changes his way of life. If he can endure it, if he can successfully make such a fundamental change to himself several times, then he will also grow older in years, he will then become younger. This intervention in the inner being is a real rejuvenation process.

The etheric body is the carrier of life, [and when the human spirit works into this etheric body, it supplies it with spiritual powers, rejuvenating powers].

The yogi must regulate the life functions; he must do what evolution demands. Those who want to understand how to nourish themselves as yogis must take into account the connections with nature to some extent.

This also applies to their food.

We can observe various currents in the historical development of humanity. In the period from Augustine to Calvin, the inner life of Christianity attained great depth in mysticism. External science, on the other hand, stood still. It was an involution of science and an evolution of the mystical life. Then, starting with Copernicus, there began an involution of the mystical life and an evolution of science. Now an evolution of the mystical life has begun again. Thus life swings back and forth. Man has gone through such congestions and forward movements in his evolution. The first great congestion occurred when man entered into the Saturn existence. He came from a different development. He could have undergone a one-sided high development without this, but he would not have been able to reach the earth. The sun existence is then a progress of development; the moon existence is a congestion. The earth existence is an equilibrium.

On Saturn, man was a mineral being; that was a congestion. On the sun, he was vegetable; that was a furthering. On the moon, there was another congestion, and on the earth, the equilibrium. There, man must choose for himself whether he wants to remain in the congestion or whether he wants to develop further into new stages of existence. Everything that is animalistic, that originated on the moon wave, signifies a retrogression. Everything that is on the sun promotes progress. That is why eating plants has a beneficial effect. In contrast, animal food contains inhibiting lunar power. This is how man brings himself back.

Initially, as the earth developed, humans first repeated the earlier conditions on earth. There is a great difference between what is warm-blooded and what is cold-blooded in the animal kingdom. Warm-blooded animals are created by Kama working from within. Passion, or Kama, produces warm blood. In fish, on the other hand, Kama works from the outside as the World Kama. The fish egg is hatched by the sun. This is the case with all cold-blooded animals. The warm-blooded animals are the ones most closely related to humans. For those who aspire to purify their Kama, it is a good exercise to abstain from all warm-blooded animals. If they eat a piece of meat, they eat the whole animal. The Kama of the animal is undivided in every single piece of meat.

Before man had reached the stage of becoming warm-blooded, he warmed his body from the outside. In the case of lower animals, kama also acts from the outside. A fish is the expression of the whole world kama. When you eat a fish, you eat the whole world kama with it. He [man] then basically works against evolution because he associates himself with the blockages from the outside. He fraternizes with something that is tremendously inhibiting. It is similar with the consumption of eggs. They are shaped by the general Kama. With them, one absorbs the general Kama.

Favorable for the yogi, on the other hand, is everything that grows directly in the sun: grains, fruits, and so on. Less favorable is what thrives in the moldy earth, under the earth, including everything onion-like and garlic-like. Potatoes are also not among the beneficial things. The potato is a stem transplanted into the earth, a shoot from an older plant that grew above the earth. It only migrated into the earth with the later development of the earth. The leek-like plants grew on the moon, firmly rooted in the living things within. Mistletoe is also a harmful plant, a parasite. Some plants are just as harmful as lower animals, snails and so on.

[Mistel, which still today parasitically takes root on living things, is a remnant of the moon; also mushrooms that thrive on soil that still contains living things.

There are two natures in man, a lower and a higher one.

[So wrote Goethe:]

Two souls, alas! dwell in my breast:
The one wants to separate from the other:
The one, in its crude love of pleasure
Clings with clinging organs to the world,
The other forcibly lifts itself from the dust
To the realms of high ancestors.

Everything that belongs to the formation of warm blood, flesh, muscles, and bones is of a lower nature. Flesh, muscles, and bones are something that has hardened from the development on the moon. The development on earth should be an upward development. Therefore, man should only enjoy what is connected with it.

Everything in the animal that is connected with life itself, that belongs to the animal's life process, is beneficial, for example milk and everything that is prepared from it. From the occult point of view, milk, cheese and so on have a beneficial effect because they belong to the beneficial life process of the animal.

[Milk is therefore beneficial, also because animals give it up voluntarily. Some seek a substitute for meat, especially those who live as vegetarians because they do not want to kill. They eat plants that contain substances similar to those found in animals: they eat legumes. However, these are detrimental to occult development. They originate from the moon in that they are embedded in a shell. This separates them from the sun's energy and they tend towards hardening. Therefore, they are not favorable for occult development. Their consumption often has dire consequences. They make the dream life impure, it becomes desolate and confused. This can often be observed in vegetarians. But the vision of the higher worlds should begin with the vision in dreams. It is therefore desirable that this vision only allows pure, beautiful images to arise.

Roots also tend towards hardening. In contrast, anything that is bathed in sunlight is beneficial: flowers, leaves, fruits.

From the mineral kingdom, anything that separates out of mineral solutions as a sediment is harmful, for example, all salts. These should be avoided if possible.

Wine has only existed since the Earth cycle. It would have been impossible earlier. Everything that has the composition of alcohol disappears again in the future. Two thousand six hundred years ago, wine was a great rarity. Eight hundred years before Christ, the consumption of wine began. In the past, it was something extraordinarily rare. Eight hundred years before Christ, a new world cycle begins, the fourth sub-race of the fifth root race. In the previous races, the consumption of spirits played a minor role. In the first races, it was completely out of the question for them to drink wine. They knew that those who consume wine cannot go beyond the four principles that nature has given them. He cannot purify the astral body to such an extent that the manasic develops. The ancient Indians knew this; only the later Persians knew something about the enjoyment of wine. The enjoyment of wine was only really introduced in the fourth sub-race. In this race, man was to refrain from the higher principles. [His earthly personality was to emerge and be purified through man's own work.] He should purify his earthly personality. It was the education in Kama-Manas, the resurrection of the fleshly, the personal in Kama-Manas [- Noah - Melchizedek -]. In Christianity, the education of man was to emphasize the personality, the one life between birth and death. It was still natural for the Egyptian slave to return one day. The teaching of reincarnation and karma had to be excluded for a time, so that the valuable part of the personality, of Kama Manas, could come out. This is physically achieved by drinking wine. In Christianity, drinking wine is permitted.

Water is really the drink of him who wants to look up into the higher worlds, wine is the drink of him who does not want to look up into the higher worlds. The yogi must therefore refrain from drinking wine, because only then can he truly grasp the higher worlds. When a person begins to work on his etheric body, he must take himself in hand in this way.

The work on the astral body takes place, as it were, within the soul. The work on the etheric body is done by acting on the temperament and purifying the physical body. When man forces the etheric body under the power of his ego, then man becomes such that he absorbs into himself what works as [spiritual] substance in the world plan.

[Part of proper thinking is being able to reason logically. Coffee has the same effect in the digestive tract and on thinking [...]. It causes logically ordered thinking, but in a dependent way [...]. If a person wants to think independently, they must free themselves from the craving for coffee.

Erratic, unstable thinking is correlated with tea. It has a dispersing effect on the upper levels.

The question is what kind of person we should become. The organs that we have in common with predators should disappear; the organs that plants require should develop. Man should eat food that comprehends the meaning of his becoming. Not too much, but not too little protein either. Legumes contain too much protein. Those who eat them are overwhelmed by a lower mode of thinking. The vegetarian must at the same time acquire a spiritual mode of thinking. Comprehend nature in its becoming! [...]

The significance of the Lord's Supper: to move from the nutrition of dead animals to that of dead plants. This is to be replaced by a nutrition that does not kill the life in the plants [...]. At the end of the fifth cultural epoch, no animal products will be consumed anymore. Through Christ, the physical body is being killed in the entire human race. In the middle of the sixth root race, there will be no more physical bodies. Then the human being will be ethereal. Then the human being will produce mineral nutrition in the laboratory.

At the end of the Atlantean era, everything that produces egoism will be done. In the sixth cultural epoch of the fifth root race, the I will again come to higher development. Meditation:

I break the pride of the Philistines
And tear the bloody flesh from their mouths
And the abominations from their teeth
Surely your King will enter with you.
He is just, full of victory and humility
And he rides on a donkey
On a young foal of the she-donkey.

Hosiana [...]

The Lord will help him
Like precious stones they will
Rise up on his soil.
For what good things do they have
And what beauty do they have:
Grain that makes the young men [...]
And must [...]
That makes the maidens bloom.

[Sach 9,6-17]

Blood of plants, which retains vegetative blood and milk. ([Soma] was an intoxicating drink among the Indians made from rice).]

Thought is the substance that flows to us through becoming word. [Through the word, one person can communicate to another what lives substantially in each of them as thought.] The air wave is only the form for this substance. Imagine this applied to the world. At first, everything there is in outer forms: minerals, plants and animals. The divine word corresponds to the outer world. This divine Word resounds in the world, and the forms of things arise.

In the divine soul rests the hidden Father-thought. Then it streams out as the divine Word [the second Logos]; then the divine Word becomes the forms of things. We understand the spirit as the form of things; but the Word itself is within the forms. [It is also in the human form.] The union with the Word, which the yogi strives for, takes place during the transformation of the etheric body. [The yogi strives to experience the Word of the creative deity in the living currents of his etheric body.] Then he becomes a chela. Then he hears the Logos resounding in all things with his etheric body. This is the union with the Son.

The third stage is the union with the Father. This is the stage of mastership. [Then man can himself continue to build upon his physical body.]

The great principle the yogi has in view is one: the union with the Father. He says to himself: In so far as you become similar to the Godhead, you approach the Godhead.

[This happens first through the purification of the astral body. Through this, he achieves the unio mystica, the union with his divine self. Then he strives further. He experiences union with the Son by experiencing world thinking and world feeling through his transformed etheric body. And finally, the last thing is that man experiences union with the Father and thus consciously works on his physical body. That is the great perspective, the work of the human being for the future of the human race.

Supplement from the transcript by Camilla Wandrey

Thus, yoga is the path to higher knowledge, and also to participation in the higher worlds in general. Yoga means union with the divine source of existence, with the spiritual sources of the world. The yogi develops the powers within themselves to penetrate into these worlds of origin. He seeks the sources of knowledge that come from spiritual life itself. Anyone who wants to become a yogi must, without fail, acquire a belief in the higher development of the human race. This is not a blind faith, but an active belief that it is possible to go beyond the present state of the human race, that forces within human nature can be developed that have not yet been expressed and are waiting to be developed. Yoga is a path that consists largely of abstinence and requires patience and endurance. In today's cultural life, it is indeed difficult to achieve yoga. That is why the theosophical movement was necessary.

One may ask how long it takes to achieve yoga. That depends on the person striving for yoga. It can take incarnations, it can take seventy years, seven years; there are people who achieve it in seven months, seven weeks, even in seven hours. It depends on the stage of existence at which a person finds himself. Often he can be further than he realizes. He may already be inwardly capable of exercising his willpower and mental powers in higher worlds. It may also be that someone in a previous incarnation was much further along than he has come today. In this life, it may not have emerged through the conditions of physical life, which was already within him. The previously acquired powers must then be brought out again through the powers of the present life. For example, someone may have been a wise priest with a magical will, and this would now have to be brought out in a later incarnation. But perhaps the brain development in the later incarnation is not so far advanced as to make this possible. Perhaps other powers are also lacking. Perhaps love and kindness are missing. Then the earlier powers cannot be brought out again, and it takes longer for some people and shorter for others until yoga is achieved.

Above all, it is necessary to develop an inner life that is as intimate as possible, in order to explore what is within us. We must distance the concept of yoga more and more from what is externally tumultuous. Yoga must take place entirely in the seclusion of the inner life.

Higher spiritual qualities should never be developed without strengthening the character at the same time. Just as a blue liquid and a yellow liquid, when mixed, produce a green liquid, so are the spiritual and physical powers of man united. When the spiritual is brought out, the physical nature remains behind, as it were, as a sediment. Much depends on these remaining properly mixed. It is through this that man becomes a particular man, that this higher nature is connected with the lower nature. In the yogi, the higher nature is withdrawn, and all those qualities that are bad in man then come to the fore if absolute character development does not go hand in hand with it. If you strive for yoga, you must always be prepared to face the strangest things in life. These were, for example, the temptations of St. Anthony. When you seriously begin to do yoga exercises, you have to be prepared for the lower nature to come out. Some people who have been truthful up to that point begin to lie, to cheat, to become unreliable. This happens if the yoga student is not required in the strictest sense to constantly strengthen his character. That is why the greatest emphasis is placed on the development of morality in the old, genuine yoga schools. Annie Besant says: spiritual training without morality can only lead to wrongdoing.

The yoga training consists of bringing certain things that a person would otherwise do unconsciously into consciousness. In this way, the student brings the unconscious breathing process into consciousness. The Hatha Yoga training places the greatest emphasis on this process from the outset. However, it only leads to a certain point in development. It breaks off at the realization of the astral. That is why man should not follow the path of Hatha Yoga, but that of Raja Yoga. This leads the disciple, if followed correctly and with earnestness and perseverance and devotion, into the highest spiritual worlds. In the Raja Yoga school, a process such as the breathing process is seen as part of the whole. Many other things that we do unconsciously must be brought into consciousness.

The thought process is largely ignored. We must learn to follow the inner process of thinking with attention. This is only possible through complete calmness towards the outside. No thought from the outer world must be in the soul. And then we must bring thoughts into this calmness ourselves and focus all our attention on a specific thought.

It is best to devote yourself to a thought that contains strength. To consciously devote yourself to such a thought in complete outer seclusion, to immerse yourself completely in it, that is meditation. The disciple must repeatedly live intimately with such thoughts, resting completely on them in all silence. It is difficult for a European man of culture to immerse himself in such a concept for a long time. But the yogi must do so. In this way he develops powers in his soul that were not there before. These powers arise from the unconscious depths of the soul when we rest so quietly in ourselves in a thought. The thoughts of ordinary life call upon the soul for various emotions. But one must learn not to be led by the soul's powers, but to lead them. One must learn to hold back an arising outburst of anger. We must maintain complete mastery and control over our inner selves. This is achieved through this silent devotion to thoughts that contain forces.

Each exercise requires a counter-exercise to prevent one-sided overdevelopment from leading to deformity – as in gymnastics. The so-called secondary exercises are very important.

For meditation it is necessary:

1. To fix a thought of strength in the soul - concentration.
2. To identify oneself with the thought.
3. To remain in it for a time in complete calm.

The regulation of the breathing process is connected with such training of thought. If it is tackled alone, it is Hatha Yoga; if it is a part of the other training, it is Raja Yoga. The seven degrees of the Persian initiation are based on this: Raven, Occultist, Warrior, Lion, Persian, Sunrunner, Father.

Sun runners were those who had made their lives a very rhythmic one. In this way, the human being integrated his thinking, feeling and soul life into the natural process. Everything in nature lives in rhythm: the sun, the moon, the wandering stars go or come in a certain rhythm. Plants and animals are connected to the seasons in a very specific way. Everything that lives outside lives in rhythm; life is based on rhythm. In the case of human beings, however, everything has become arbitrary, the arbitrariness of the astral body. It makes life unrhythmic. The human being must make it rhythmic again, because rhythm generates strength and life. Therefore, the yogi must meditate every day at a certain hour.

If he meditates at seven o'clock today and tomorrow at eleven o'clock, then again one day not at all, the rhythm is disturbed. But if you decide to say a prayer every day at seven o'clock, then one at twelve o'clock and another one before going to bed, then these are fixed points that bring rhythm into your life. Part of the rhythmization of life is the rhythmization of the breathing process. This is connected with the deep things that exist between a person and the whole universe.

In a sense, plants and human beings belong together. Human beings breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. In the case of plants, it is the other way around. They release oxygen and, from the carbon dioxide that human beings exhale, they form their bodies by retaining the carbon. Apple trees, for example, need children to play around them. There is a connection between plants and human nature. The plant grows rhythmically according to natural laws. It is chaste through and through, since it does not yet have astral life within it. Thus, on the one hand, it is higher than man, but on the other hand it is lower. It stands as an ideal before the yogi. He must become similar to it by rhythmizing the breathing process.

The yogi knows that one day the human being will be able to absorb the plant existence within themselves, to carry out within themselves the process that they now leave to the plant. This means that he will retain the carbon in himself and consciously build his body with it. Man will develop an organ in himself through which he will prepare oxygen for himself, so that he does not need to take it from plants. He combines this oxygen with carbon to form carbonic acid and then stores the carbon in himself again. In this way he will later build his own body structure, as plants do today. His body will consist of transparent, clear, soft carbon. In this way he transforms his body into the “philosopher's stone”. This is a future perspective that the yogi already anticipates today through his rhythmic breathing process, which he carries out according to the instructions of his teacher. He breathes in rhythmically and holds his breath for longer. In this way, one develops carbon in oneself – and thus approaches the nature of plants by using it to build one's body. The yogi gradually unites with the divine source of existence, becoming a co-creator of the world. He experiences new worlds.

When we sleep, we cannot hear the most beautiful music. It is there; we do not perceive it. In this way, the human being is asleep with respect to the higher worlds. And just as there is waking up to the melodies of this world, there is waking up in the spiritual world through the rhythmic breathing process.

When you consciously invest your entire soul life in the breathing process, then imaginative knowledge begins. Ordinary life brings us material knowledge through the senses of the physical body. Imaginative knowledge consists in our being able to awaken images in the soul that are not mere visions, but that are grounded in the source of existence. The outer world also only stimulates images in our soul, ideas that correspond to it. Images that arise through the yoga process stimulate the inner being in the right way. In the right way, that is to say: truthfully. They correspond to the truth that permeates the world and is wisdom. But to do that, a person must be true within. That is the difficulty in the training of yoga. As long as a person has personal desires, he cannot distinguish truth from untruth in the higher world. That is why there is a constant need to become selfless, to renounce everything personal.

The Pythagorean disciple was told: Only when a person is no longer concerned about whether he is still alive or not, can he learn something about life after death. All personal desires must be eliminated. When personal desire is eliminated within, wisdom expresses itself and the wisdom that permeates the world can shine in. Man then comes to imaginative knowledge.

The third stage is that of the rational will; and the fourth stage is that of [intuition]. The third stage involves the complete restraint of what is in us as desire, urge, craving, passion, through the strengthened will. As long as one does not completely master this, one only makes the truth illusory.

One must develop absolute inner calm, patience, endurance, steadfastness. One must never lose the indispensable harmony with one's surroundings. If the wisest person were to fall asleep here, he could not receive anything there with his wisdom. He would be considered insane. All madness is a lack of harmony with one's surroundings. Then one cannot progress when that happens. One should not become a drunken person, but a sober one, says Plato, and that applies to the person who strives for yoga. He must not neglect his daily duties in any way. This is absolutely necessary for the practice of yoga. And in this it is important to develop modesty. Only under the influence of the highest modesty can one speak of the higher worlds in the right way. An inner high degree of humility must go hand in hand with the yoga training. The oriental student has an easier time in the respect and esteem of other people; the western student has a harder time of it. But a lot depends on this. It is also necessary to have the most profound trust in the teacher. This is necessary because one must have a fixed point. The yoga student, in a sense, leaves the whole rest of the world. His relationship to the world changes, is reversed, so to speak. All things take on a new meaning. He becomes alienated from his surroundings, all things change; a certain spiritual alchemy takes place in him. Now he must do everything the physical world demands of him out of a certain inner sense of duty. He must find a completely new point of view towards it. If the yogi does not develop full strength of character in this, then he can easily lose touch with his surroundings. That is why the teacher is the fixed point for him. In the East, the guru regards the teacher as the embodiment of the divine in man. In reality, divine beings are truly present and active in the higher human nature that the teacher must have developed. It seems obvious to the Oriental that there is a higher being in the guru. This is not the case in the West. When someone in the West undergoes the yoga training, they also find the opportunity to reach their goal through their inner trust in the teacher.