The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Indeed, it is attractive to become engrossed in the past and to look around among the great spirits who preceded us. However, with the personality about which we want to speak today quite another matter than the charm of historical consideration comes into question as point of view. It rather matters with Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493-1541, physician, occultist) that he can give the human beings very much still today. Just a movement of the spiritual investigation of matters as spiritual science is particularly suitable to unearth the treasure, the spirit of knowledge, the investigation, and enlightenment of nature, which is hidden with Paracelsus. Today, indeed, modern research turns more or less also to spirits like Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus, and others of the end of the Middle Ages. However, the approach of our present science is so different from the spirit, the point of view of a man like Paracelsus that it cannot do justice to him in the true sense of the word.

For Paracelsus has to be understood in another way than it normally happens if one becomes engrossed in a spirit of the past. One has to develop a living feeling of the object and the direction of thinking to which he dedicated himself. This is in certain respect such a deepening in the spiritual life, in particular in the spiritual forces and beings that form the basis of nature, and only the spiritual-scientific approach does this. Paracelsus already belongs to an interesting time. It was the time from 1493 to 1541 in which he lived that was either just over or was still right in the middle of the emergence of the bourgeoisie. This exerted a significant influence on the entire spiritual life.

Two classes only had the greatest say concerning the spiritual life before the emergence of the bourgeoisie: nobility and clergy. After bourgeoisie had emerged, the intellectual culture was based more on the single personality and its efficiency. Before, the blood relationship, the clanship had a say within the nobility in the worth and the social position of the human being, on the one side, and, on the other side, the whole power and intellectual culture of the church supported the priests. It stood as a whole behind the single personality. Only in the time of the bourgeoisie, the performance of the single was based on the personal efficiency. Hence, everything that meets us in this time of the ending Middle Ages, the emerging bourgeoisie, gets a personal character and the personality has to fight for himself much more. We could quote many of such personalities who had to use their very own forces at that time.

One of the strangest and most interesting personalities is just Paracelsus. Other things still came into consideration in his lifetime too. This has been just in the time when the scene of the peoples increased enormously when the big discoveries of distant countries were done, in the time when the just invented art of printing pointed the spiritual life to quite different directions and currents than it was once the case. All that delivers the basic tableau, so to speak, from which this personality of Theophrastus Paracelsus emerges. To all that is to be added that we are concerned with a seldom-prominent person, with a person of revolutionary character in the spiritual sense. He was a person who was aware of that which was performed once in the realms of the spiritual life and how much his own work contrasted with it.

In order to understand Paracelsus, one must look at the basic character of his work as a doctor and as a philosopher, and grasp him as a theosophist, as he combined these both soul characters with each other. This personality was uniform. With brilliant look, he tried to grasp the construction of the world edifice. His surprised sight looked up at the secrets of the starry heaven, became engrossed in the construction of the earth and in particular in the construction of the human being himself. This brilliant sight penetrated also into the secrets of the spiritual life. He was also a theosophist, while he tried to enclose the nature of the astronomical knowledge and at the same time the nature of anthropology, the doctrine of the human being in connection with the doctrine of all living beings. Nothing was mere theory in him, everything was immediate in such a way that it was bent on practise, that he wanted to use all that he knew for the welfare, the spiritual and physical health of the human being. This gives his work, his thinking, and investigations the big, immense unity. This makes him appear as sharply carved from one single piece of wood. Thus, he stands before us as an original, elementary personality.

There were two schools for him in the field with which he was mainly concerned, with the medical art. The one went back to the old Greek physician Hippocrates (~460-370 B.C.), the other to Galenus (129-200 or 216 A.D., physician, philosopher). The father of medicine, Hippocrates, stood before him like a big ideal. The modern scholar can cope neither with that which that Greek was, nor with that which Paracelsus saw in him. Indeed, it seems rather problematic today if we hear that this medicine differentiated four humours in the human being: black bile, white or yellow bile, blood and phlegm, which were said to have a certain relation to earth, water, air and fire. These should be components of the human nature. Of course, the modern naturalist regards as a childish point of view, which a detailed knowledge had to overcome in the course of time. He does not anticipate that it depends, nevertheless, still on anything else.

That is why the modern academic view understands Paracelsus so exceptionally. He did not at all understand these four members of the human nature as usual physical humours and. The naturalist of that old time regarded the substances with which the human body builds itself up from the physical, sense-perceptible substances, only as the external expression of something spiritual, of the real builder of this external body.

In spiritual-scientific talks, we have often spoken about this builder of the human body. We have spoken about the etheric body, a fine body, forming the basis of the physical body and all its manifold materials, substances and humours. This etheric body or life body contains the forces to build up the physical body. It is in such a way that this etheric body builds up any. Sensuous research does not suffice to study this etheric body; something else belongs to it, namely intuition, spiritual research. If one uses sensuous expressions of that which is considered for this spiritual research, like black, white, yellow, green et cetera, one only means metaphors of something that is behind. It is quite wrong if one identifies them with our material things.

The way in which the old doctors approached the ill human beings in the medical centres was another. It was the intuitive view, which they directed not to the physical, but to the finer, the ethereal underlying the physical. One started out from the idea: if anything is ill, it is less crucial, which external changes are discernible, but what has caused them. The disorder in the external physical body corresponds to the disorder in the etheric body. The old doctors recognised how the etheric body changes in the ill organism, and they were out to cure that force, which is behind the physical body as the sculptor. If I may express myself somewhat roughly, one can say, if anybody has fallen ill with the stomach, he suffers not from the stomach, but from the finer body the expression of which the illness only is.

Paracelsus had taken up the spirit of such an intuitive medicine in himself. However, the Roman doctor Galenus worked everywhere like an authority. Indeed, he bases his medicine on these old principles, and if one reads Galenus externally, one gets the idea: what does Paracelsus really intend fighting in such a way against Galenus and taking the older medicine under his wings? Is it not the same?—It could almost seem that way, however, it is not in such a way. For Galenus externalised medicine while he materialised the originally spiritual view. The pupils of Galenus already understood by that which was once meant intuitively, as something externally material. Instead of using the intuitive view, they researched only in the matter, speculated, invented theories. The moral view had got lost.

Paracelsus opposes this method, this loss of the intuitive view. He wanted to go back; he wanted to find the means to cure the human beings from the knowledge of the big nature. Therefore, all that was antipathetic to him, which prevailed in those days officially as medicine. He did not want to take as basis that which one can read in the books, but wanted to open the fundamental book, the big book of nature. Everything that had emerged gradually as medicine was spun out from a completely deduced speculation, from a research that knew nothing of the original spiritual view. There one could no longer see the connection between a medicament and an illness because one just did no longer behold what is behind the body because one looked only materially at everything. This caused that Paracelsus said, the light of nature should shine again.

It brought him into a sharp conflict with the medicine of his time. Such a great insight, as he had it, his reasonable nature that grasped the big connection with the universe gave him the intensive self-confidence, which has something lovely, in the way in which he behaved towards those who practised science in generally accepted way at that time. However, the pharmacology of that time bears big analogy to that of today, with the difference that our time has no Paracelsus in the medical field. However, confusion and insecurity were almost the same as they are today. This reminds very well of that old time of Paracelsus. If we pursue medicine today, we see how a remedy is invented and then is regarded and rejected as something noxious after five years, how so and so many people are examined, but the big view of the coherence of the human being with nature has completely got lost. That reminds rather well of the time of Paracelsus. It is true that most people do not anticipate that they are again embedded in such a time and that the belief in authority has such an immense power just in this field. One struggles against the belief in authority on one side, and one considers oneself superior campaigning against the old superstition that sends people to Lourdes.

One may be right with it, but one does not anticipate that only the form of superstition has changed and that superstition becomes hardly smaller if one sends anybody to Wiesbaden (spa town) and other places. One can see in it something similar as it existed with Paracelsus and his time when one was inclined to oppose the conventional. Paracelsus said, “As I take the four for me, so you have to take them also and to follow me and I have not to follow you, you have to follow me. Follow me, you Avicenna (~980-1037, Persian polymath), Galenus, Rasis (854-927, Persian polymath), Montagnana, Mesue (~777-857, Assyrian physician) and all those from Paris, from Cologne, from Vienna and from the regions of the Danube and Rhine rivers, from the islands, from Italy, from Dalmatia,Sarmatia, Athens, you Greeks, you Arabs, you Israelites, follow me, I do not follow you. I become the monarch and the empire will be mine, and I lead the empire and gird your loins.” That as a characteristic and expression of his personal strength. He believed to owe this strength to his original relationship with the secrets of nature. She expressed herself for Paracelsus in such a way that he saw not only what he saw with his eyes, but with his being, which combined with nature.

He undertook big journeys. He did not want to listen to anything scientific from the chairs, but from the dark intuitiveness of the simple people outdoors who had not yet cut the band of feeling with nature; he wanted to learn from them. I would like to bring his soul condition to your mind by a comparison. It is rather nice to see how the animals know instinctively for sure in the field what they have to graze and what they have to leave what serves them for their welfare and what would become detrimental to them. This is based on the relationship of the being with its environment. This relationship exists in the soul forces and is able to choose what is good and what is not good.

The being breaks free from nature by the intellect and speculation. It is no superstition, if one says that the simple human being who lives in the countryside has still something of the original forces, which lead the animal to its food instinctively, that this relationship still delivers something of the knowledge how the single herb, how the single stone works on the human being. This feeling is different from the usual knowledge, which, however, is no longer so important for him. Hence, one finds with a human being, who has not yet gone through education, an original certainty what is useful for him within nature. Paracelsus feels related to this original feeling for nature. He emphasises repeatedly that those people are not the right ones who wander the world in such a way that they travel around the world in carriages and apart from the immediate contact with the rural population. Paracelsus travelled differently. He listened to that which the simple man could say to him. The instinct of the simple man became to him the intuition of the ingenious human being. He did not cut the connection between nature and the original intuitive force in the human being. He expresses this in such a way: “By nature I am not spun subtly, it is also not the way of life in my country to acquire something with silk spinning. We are not bred with figs, nor with mead, nor with wheat bread, but with cheese, milk, and oat bread. That cannot make subtle fellows because one is dependent on that which one has got as adolescent. Such a human being is almost rude compared to the subtle men feeling superior, to superfine people, and to those who have grown up in soft clothes and in boudoirs, whereas we grow up in fir cones, therefore, we do not well understand each other.”

He knew that he always walked on his journeys through Poland, Hungary to Turkey in the sun, not only in the sun of the physical world, but also in the spiritual sun. What distinguishes Paracelsus is the uniform sight in the spiritual. Hence, the human being is to him not the human being in whom one slips in with the sensory examination, but he is connected with the whole nature. He says, look at the apple and then at the apple pip. You cannot understand how the pip grows if you do not look at the whole apple.

That is why one also does not understand the elementary human being if one does not recognise the earth with all its substances and forces, because it has all its strength from the earth. Then a force incorporates a finer materiality in this physical elementary human being. Paracelsus calls it the archaeus. From the elementary body, he distinguishes the finer body, which is the builder of the physical body and the builder of the earth. Thus, he looks from the externally sense-perceptible at the cause, from the body at the life body, from the externally physical at that which as a force forms the basis of it. This is the first member of the human being in the sense of Paracelsus.

He regards the second member as a pip in a certain different way. For this second member the apple is the whole world of stars. Just as the elementary body draws his forces and humours from the earth and from that which belongs to it, the second human being draws his forces from that which lives in the stars, from the principles of the stars. Just as the blood, the muscles, the bones, and food juices are composed and the food juices change, are transformed, and as these are dependent on the earthly, Paracelsus summarises the instincts, desires, and passions, the ideas, joy and sorrow, all that as the two basic forces of the human mental nature, sympathy and antipathy. They are expressions of the whole world of stars, as the pip is an expression of the whole apple. Therefore, he calls the second body the astral body or the body related to the world of stars.

What works outdoors as gravity or gravitation, as force of attraction and repulsion is in the human being like in an essence as desire and listlessness, as sympathy and antipathy, so that nothing of that which is in the human being as instincts and passions can be understood different from the astrological astronomy as Paracelsus calls it. This is a science about which our time knows precious little. Astronomy took another path. Paracelsus as a doctor wants to know nothing about it. He wants to know how the astral forces are connected in space with the astral body of the human being. He behaves compared to an astronomer like a priest to a requiem parson. A requiem parson is someone who reads the mess and is paid for it, whereas a right priest is someone who penetrates into the spirit. Paracelsus uses clear expressions what others often call rudeness. We have now understood the second part of human wisdom.

The third part is that which he calls spirit. This spirit relates to the spiritual world like the pip of the apple to the much bigger apple, like the divine spark in the human being to the whole sum of divine forces in the world. Thus, Paracelsus differentiates in the world: the divine-spiritual, the astrological-astronomical, and the elementary-earthly. The human being contains an essence of them: the human mind from the spiritual-divine, the astral body from the astrological-astronomical, and the physical body from the elementary-earthly.

Just as one has to study the material, the plants, and animals and so on if one wants to understand the body of the human being, the doctor has to study and understand what goes forward in the world of the stars if he wants to understand the human being. Because Paracelsus says to himself, one understands an illness only if one goes back to its origin, he looks for the reason of the illness in the desires and passions. He considers the illness as a result of mental fallacy and finally he leads it back to moral qualities even if he also does not lead back these qualities to the stars, because he knows very well that the effect does not happen so fast.

He sees an expression of the spiritual everywhere in the physical. That is why he says, someone who wants to investigate the reason of an illness has to study the reason of all the sympathies and antipathies of the soul, and he can study this only if he studies the stars of the human being. Thus, you imagine how he approaches an ill human being. With an intuitive view, this soul digresses from the externally ill limb to that which lives internally in the soul of the human being.

From there he goes to the astral influence of the stars and to the elementary influence of the earth. He has this in every single case before him. Just this is spiritual medicine. How he imagines this, and how he tries to make clear with his own picture, he expresses this nicely in this deciphering of the whole world: “This is something great you should consider. Nothing is in heaven and on earth that is not also in the human being, and God who is in heaven and on earth is also in the human being.”—I have often quoted another nice saying where he compares what he wanted to say here. He says, look out at nature. What is there? He sees a mineral, an animal, a plant, these are like single letters and the human being is the word that is composed of these single letters. If one wants to read the human being, one has to collect the single letters in the big book of nature.—This does not mean that Paracelsus picks up the things, but that he tries to get a synopsis of the things in nature. This has always enabled him to keep in sight the whole world with the single special case, which he has to cure as a doctor. Behind all that, the ingenious-moral strength works from which all that arises with him. At last, it is something like moral indignation that rebels in him against the way conventional at that time to cure and to find mixtures for all possible things. He says, I am not there to enrich the apothecaries; I am there to cure the human beings.

One has to realise that Paracelsus used words quite unlike in later time if one fairly wants to read his writings. If you read salt, mercury, and sulphur with Paracelsus, one has no right idea automatically, one thinks of what today the human being calls in such a way. Everything that one reads with Paracelsus seems then to be imperfect and childish. Who knows science today has a certain right to regard Paracelsus as childish, but one has to penetrate somewhat deeper. I want to give you an idea how you can get around to understanding what he means if he uses the terms salt, mercury, and sulphur. Paracelsus looks far back into the evolution of the earth, in the evolution of the beings, which live round him, and of the human being. If he looks back in such a way, a time faces him in which the human beings still had forms of existence very different from now.

Nobody gets as clear about what has become as Paracelsus. The earth was completely different millions of years ago. We have spoken of the transformation of the earth often enough. He looked back at a human figure that was still completely animal where the hands were still locomotive organs where the human being still lived in air and water. The earth, the surroundings were quite different. Even modern physics looks back at an age in which that which is solid today was still in a liquid state. Paracelsus, who started from the spiritual, saw a spiritual human being in connection with such an earth that still looked quite different from today. On an earth, which was so much warmer than today, the present human being could not live.

At that time, the human beings also lived under other conditions. At that time, the metals were still liquid, they could hardly be contained as steam in the air. At that time, the living beings could also not take shape; however, they have developed. Just as today the elementary human being is connected with the physical world as the pip with the apple, the primeval human being was differently connected with the primeval earth and with the entire surrounding astral world. Therefore, that which constitutes the present physical human being, his soul as the astral body and his mind as a divine human being had still to emerge. This was quite different from once. The human being was still closer to the divinity. The astral human being is born out of the astral world, and the physical human being is born out of the entire physical world. Paracelsus spoke in a much greater and nobler sense of the origin of the physical human being from the physical surroundings than our modern theory of evolution. Paracelsus understood this, and he emphasises it also repeatedly, but for him the human being is a confluence of all that which lives outdoors in nature. The human being has passions; he has them in himself, only in reduced form as the lion has them, for example, and as they exist in the environment. If the human being looks at the lion in the sense of Paracelsus, he sees the same force that lives today as his passion in him born out of the astral world.

In the lion, it is one-sided, with the human being it is mixed with other forces. The entire animal realm is to Paracelsus like a fanned-out humanity. He sees everything that is distributed in the forms of the animals in himself, invisible in his inner human being. That also applies in certain respect if the human being looks at the earth. The metals that have become physical today are born out from the same being from which the physical human being is born out. Please, understand me properly, because it is far from present ideas. Paracelsus sees back to the time when the physical human body had only built the heart. There are lower animals that have no hearts that still preserve the form that the human being had at that time. This was to Paracelsus the same time when from a much more general essence of the earth the gold also developed, so that a connection exists between the origin of the gold and the human heart. He also sees a connection between abnormalities like cholera and the arsenic. He says to himself, the possibility that cholera could originate depends on the fact that the arsenic is developed from the external world. He considers any single organ as belonging to the human unity and it is in such a way that it belongs to him like any animal, any plant, or any substance in the external world.

I would like to read out another remark that shows you how he expresses himself in particular. This is a remark that is got out of a number of remarks of Paracelsus, which one could multiply by thousand. He regards the single human being as specifically related to the physical world and the astral world concerning his single organs and the recognition of their illnesses. It is differentiated in the most certain way. One admires the general expressions of modern pantheism, of the modern view of nature, but this is the purest dilettantism if one does not know that the great Paracelsus cannot be pleased with an all-life, which enjoys life in the single human being. Paracelsus speaks of something concrete: “That is why you should not say, this is cholera, this is melancholia, but this is arsenicus, this is aluminosum; and also he is a Saturnian, that is a Martian, and not: this man suffers from melancholia, that man suffers from cholera. For one part is from heaven, one part is from earth, and they are intermingled like fire and wood, because everything loses its name; since these are two things in one.”

As he explains the connection of the heart with the gold, he also explains the connection of certain phenomena with Saturn and another with Mars and that, which is related to Mars. The peculiar mind of Paracelsus positions the human being that way in nature, in the world. Even if there is to correct anything with Paracelsus: it depends on the great, on the comprehensive that lives in this soul.

He attributes this to single certain types. Thus, everything that originates as a precipitation in the mineral is elementary to him. At the same time, it originated in the developmental time when the human-bodily formed and took on the figure on earth, which it has today. Hence, every deposit of the mineral, everything salty is connected with the human-bodily, with the animal-bodily. He calls everything Mercurial, changeable that remains liquid after a certain precipitation has taken place. Mercury is to him a typical example of it. Thus, we have a trend towards the solidification of the liquid metal. The soul is also born out of the same universal forces from which the Mercurial was born out. The deeper connection is in such a way that one cannot discuss it publicly at all.

Sulphur and the present form of mind have a parallel cause of origin. However, they are not connected allegorically. No—these three things outdoors in the world correspond exactly to the body, the soul, and the mind of the human being.

Sulphur is connected according to its nature with the mind, mercury with the soul, and salt with the body of the human being. What the human being takes up besides is related to these in a certain respect because they are born out of them. Therefore, such an example shows us that we have to go in deeper. It is not enough if we understand the expressions of Paracelsus only; we must approach the books of Paracelsus with a deepened preparation, and then we understand him. We have to realise that he always has the whole in mind. Therefore, he says to himself, if the human being has an illness, it is an interruption, a disturbance of a certain balance. He calls it magnetic balance and—as there is never one pole in the magnetic needle, but always north pole and south pole together—, any digestion in the human body belongs to a digestion outdoors in the world, which he searches then. In the etheric human being, he searches the cause of the individual, in the material; he searches the expression of the spirit. In this respect, he calls the material the mummy. One has only to understand this significant expression. It is a certain essence that forms the basis of the bodily; the mummy is different in the healthy and the sick person because the whole and the individual is changed. Therefore, one needs only to recognise the mummy, the changes in the etheric body to recognise what a person lacks.

Briefly, we see there into the depth of a spiritual life from which one can learn quite a lot. We have to realise that only a detailed spiritual research can understand again what is contained in Paracelsus. If one understands so detailed, he does no longer appear as a spirit whom one regards only as an interesting historical object, but as a spirit whom one has to consider from a higher point of view and from whom one can still learn quite a lot also in our time—at least from his method. One should position himself to Paracelsus in this way. Someone who does this finds in his lovely-rude manner a difference between the modern way of research and his way, a difference that he already made for his contemporaries. He distinguishes two reasons, the reason that looks into the whole realm of the spiritual life, and the reason that is only bent on the single one. He calls the one the first reason. He calls it in such a way because it leads to the concealed spirit of the things He calls the other reason a public folly compared with the concealed wisdom. He expresses himself even lovelier or more rudely saying, one has to distinguish a human-divine reason and a bestial reason.

He does not express himself in such a way that he speaks of the animal and spiritual nature of the human being, but of the bestial one. He considers the human being as a son of the animal genus. The animal is spread in single facets; the animal is summarised in the human being. He says once, the human being is the son of the remaining animal realm. However, if he wanted to be like the other animal beings, they would not understand this, they would look like at a wayward son and would be surprised about that which he has become.

Apart from that, you can also receive elementary instructions of certain theosophical basic concepts from Paracelsus. What Paracelsus argues about dream and sleep is in the most eminent sense what also spiritual science has to say about it, only he expresses it in his superb language. If the human being sleeps, the elementary body is in the space, and the astral human being is active. Then the astral human being can dialogue with the stars, so that he only needs to remember the dialogue with the stars to help, to cure the sick person. He is able to lead back all that to the prophets. He esteems them more than all the later ones. He calls Moses, Daniel, and Enoch not magicians, but he says, if one understands them properly, they are the precursors of this great astronomical-astrological medicine, which has worked for humanity.

Such a man was allowed to have a self-confidence in certain ways, and the strength of his work flows out from this self-confidence. However, he was clear in his mind also that what he had donated must live on and will live on with those who can recognise it. In spite of it all, a lot of gossip and historical gossip approached him. One examined his skull to slander him because this skull had a hole and one has to think much of such external things. One verified that he fell a victim to drunkenness and broke his skull. One wanted to judge his whole life this way. One can state the parable of Christ Jesus with the dead dog where Christ Jesus pointed to the nice teeth of the animal. The other things of such a personality do not concern us, besides that which we can learn from him, by which he has become a benefactor of humanity who overcame so much and by which he has become immortal.

Let me close with his own words that he throws in the teeth of his adversaries: “I want to elucidate and argue in such a way that until the last day of the world my writings must remain and will remain true, and yours are recognised as full of bile, poison, and brood of vipers and are hated by the people like toads. It is not my will that you should fall down or be knocked down a year hence, but you must show your shame after a long time and you certainly fall through the cracks, I shall judge you more after my death than before, and even if you eat my body, you have only eaten filth: the Theophrastus will struggle for the body with you.”

The talks on the basic concepts of theosophy should give a short outline of the world view and way of life which one normally calls theosophy. However, I have to say something in advance in order to prevent misunderstandings about this theosophy. Anybody could believe that the Theosophical Society or the theosophical movement propagates the world view which I will give as something dogmatic. This is not the case. What is reported in the Theosophical Society by single persons is a personal view, and the Theosophical Society should be nothing else as a union where such world views are cultivated which lead to the higher spheres of spiritual life; so that nobody should believe that theosophy means the propaganda of any dogmas.

Indeed, if today one speaks of ideological associations if one speaks of monistic or dualistic views, one understands by such associations or societies those which have united on account of any dogma unless they have committed themselves to any dogma whether it is a justified or an unjustified dogma. That does not apply to theosophy. However, one has to emphasise on the other side that only someone who has penetrated into the nature of the theosophical world view is able to represent his personal view of it.

For the theosophical world view is such that the individual human beings freely agree without committing themselves externally to a dogma. They not need to commit themselves because everybody who gets to know the facts must come to the same views. The differences between the single investigators are much slighter in these fields than in the fields of the sensuous-scientific investigation of the external facts. You will not hear if you really penetrate into these matters that this or that theosophist who really has the mastery over the method of the theosophical world view does not agree with any other in essential matters. For the errors do no longer happen which simply happen in the fields of the external sensuous facts if we ascend to the higher fields of existence. It is not possible that one theosophist produces this world view, the other theosophist another one. Only this is possible that the one is less advanced and can only represent a part of the theosophical world view. If he then believes that that which he has recognised is the whole of the world view, it may happen that he is apparently contradictory to those who are more developed. The theosophists standing on the same level will not be contradictory to each other.

Further I would like to emphasise in this introduction that it is a bad misunderstanding if one often supposes that the theosophical world view has to do anything with the propaganda of Buddhism or Neo-Buddhism as some like to call it. That is out of the question. When Mrs. Blavatsky, Sinnett and other theosophists spread the basic theosophical views, they got their first stimulation from the East, from India. From there the first great teachings came during the seventies. This was stimulation; but what are the contents of the view which lives within the theosophical movement is a common knowledge not only of all times, but also of all those human beings who have penetrated into these matters.

It would be wrong to believe that one must make a pilgrimage to India or become engrossed in Indian writings in order to get to know theosophy. This is not the case. You can find the same philosophies and the same theosophical teachings in all cultures. However, only in the Indian Vedanta nothing is dirtied as it were by the external sensory science. In certain way there has been preserved that core of the world view which has always lived as theosophy. So it does not concern Buddhist propaganda but a world view which everybody can get to know everywhere. Moreover, I would like to emphasise in particular that it has something strange, however, for the modern human being if he reads of the origin of this world view in theosophical books which were published in the beginning. Esoteric Buddhism by Sinnett was most spread and stimulated most people who have occupied themselves with it to continue their study of theosophy. In the first chapter of this book it is pointed to the great teachers from whom the theosophical teachings come. However, such a thing is a little bit unpleasant to the European civilisation. Nevertheless, it is for somebody, who thinks clearly and strictly, nothing that does not correspond with the generally accepted ideas. For who wanted to deny that among the human beings are more or less developed ones? Who wanted to deny the big distance between an African black and possibly Goethe? And why should there not be on this ladder upward still much more developed individualities?

It was basically only like a surprise that in our development really so advanced personalities are found as they are described in Sinnett's book. However, such personalities have a quite extraordinary knowledge, a universal wisdom. It would have been pointless to them appearing before the world. It is no strange idea if we say that the so-called masters are for us nothing else than great initiators in the spiritual fields. Indeed, their development goes far beyond the degree which the current culture offers. They are great initiators to us; however, they do not demand the belief in any authority, in any dogma. They appeal to nothing else than to the own human knowledge and give instructions how to develop forces and capacities using particular methods which exist in every human soul in order to ascend to the higher fields of existence.

So I give you an apparently personal view in the first talks, because I deliberately say nothing that I could not prove. On the other side, I have also convinced myself that that which I have to say that way absolutely corresponds with those who have represented the theosophical world view at all times and in particular with those who represent it today. They are like people who stand on different points and look at a city. If they draw a picture of the city, these pictures are somewhat different from each other, according to the perspective of the point of view in question. Also the world views are different which are described according to the own observations of the theosophical researchers, of course. But it is basically always the same. The world view, which I give, corresponds to the world views, which other theosophical researcher give. It absolutely corresponds and differs only in the perspective of the point of view.

In this talk, I will give a picture of the basic elements of the human being according to his physical and spiritual entity, at first in a more describing way. Then in the second talk, I move on to two essential concepts of the theosophical world view, on reincarnation or re-embodiment and on karma or on the big human destiny. Then in the following talks, I give a picture of the three worlds which the human being has to go through on his big pilgrimage from the physical world, which everybody knows, from the astral world, which not everybody knows which, however, everybody can get to know if he applies the corresponding methods in patient way and from the spiritual world, which basically the soul-being has to go through. Then I will give the theosophical world view on a large scale: origin and development of the world and of the human being, what one can call theosophical anthropology and theosophical astronomy. This is the plan.

Above all, the components of the human nature have to be clear to us. With a careful study which theosophy provides we get to know that of these components of the human being for the usual consideration only the first main part exists: the physical nature of the human being in the broadest sense of the word, that which we call body. The materialist considers this human body as the only component of the human being. The theosophical world view still adds two other components: what one has called soul at all times, and as the highest component the imperishable being of the human being, which has no beginning and no end in our sense of the word: the mind or spirit.

These are broadly the basic elements of the human being. Who learns to observe in the higher realms of existence learns to observe soul and spirit like the physical eye learns to observe the sensuous, the physical. Indeed, people have lost the consciousness and also the ability of observing in these higher psychic and spiritual realms to a large extent since the spreading of the pure sensory science in the West. It has remained restricted only to small circles. The last who spoke something of these higher fields of human observation from the podium was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the great German philosopher. He still spoke in such a sense that one can recognise that he knew something about that which one can know. When he opened his talks in Berlin at the new-founded university he spoke quite differently than other professors of philosophy since the 17th century. He spoke so that one recognises: He does not only want to teach what one can understand with the reason, but he wants to point to the fact that the human being himself can develop that sensory perception is something secondary and that the human being can develop capacities in himself which simply do not exist in the everyday life. In the history of the German cultural development these lectures of Johann Gottlieb Fichte were epoch-making. Today, however, they can be important only for somebody who digs them out again. The following passage is unforgettable: “This teaching requires a totally new inner sense-organ with which a new world is given that does not exist for the everyday human being ... Imagine a world of blind-born to whom therefore only the things and their relations are familiar which can be touched. Go among those and talk to them about colours and about the other relations which exist only by the light for the sighted people. You talk to them of nothing, and this is the better case if they say it; for you will soon notice the mistake and stop speaking, unless you are able to open their eyes.”

The human beings should pay attention to the observation of soul and spirit. Theosophy is not at all in any contradiction to the generally accepted science. The theosophist does not need to deny only one of the tenets of modern science. All that holds good. Like people who are blind to blue can perceive everything that exists in yellow and red colour nuances, however, nothing in blue those who are spiritually blind cannot perceive soul and spirit. This becomes completely obvious if the blind person becomes sighted using appropriate methods. If he becomes sighted, a new world lights up around him which was there just as little for him as for the blue blind person the blue colour nuances were there, before he was able to see the blue beside the red after an ocular operation.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte knew that. The human beings also knew this in those times in which humanity was not yet dazed I do not say that in a reproving sense. The human beings of that time knew this, and with few of them the tradition was also kept always and the methods were developed. They knew that if one speaks of the entity of the human being one has to do it not only with the body, but that the soul can be also perceived, that the soul has laws and is also embedded in a world like the body. In higher sense it is also with the spirit. The human body is controlled by the same laws by which the other things round us are controlled. In the human body we have the same that we have in the physical world; we find the same chemical and physical laws also in the human body. This physical world is perceptible for the physical senses. It exists not only subjectively for the human being, but also objectively for his perception. The human being carries out his physical activity subjectively. He digests, he breathes, he eats and drinks, he carries out that internal physical activity of the brain which mediates the internal activity of thinking; briefly, the whole activity which biology, physics and the other physical sciences teach us is carried out by the human being. And one can also perceive that. If the human being faces his fellow man, he perceives immediately or by means of science what he is subjective, what he is also objective.

However, the human being is subjectively something higher; he is also a sum of feelings, of desires, of passions. Just as you digest, you feel, you long for. You are also that! A human being does not perceive this objectively under everyday circumstances. If he faces his fellow man, he does not see his feelings, desires and passions externally. If the human being were blind, he would not see a lot of physical activities. Only because he can carry out a physical sensory activity the physical-subjective is also objectively perceptible to him. Because he does not carry out a sensory soul-activity at first, the subjective part of the soul, the feelings, the desires, the passions exist subjectively in every human being. However, if he faces his fellow men, he cannot perceive this. He can develop his soul-eye to perceive the world of desires and passions in order to be able to perceive the soul objectively just as he has developed a physical eye to perceive the body activity.

We call this world the astral world or the soul-world in which the average human being lives today, indeed, without perceiving it. He can perceive it, however, if he develops the corresponding forces within himself using the appropriate methods. What our generally accepted psychology describes as soul is not what theosophy understands as soul-life, but only the external expression of it.

An even higher world than the astral one is the spiritual world. However, someone who is able to perceive the soul because his organs are opened to the soul cannot yet perceive the spirit in his environment. He can perceive the soul, but not the thought itself. The soul seer beholds desires and passions, but not the thinking, not the objective thoughts. Hence, those who cannot see the objective thought deny the objective thought generally. One did not understand Hegel when he spoke of the objective existence of the thought-world. And those who cannot perceive it are also right, of course, from their point of view if they deny it. However, they can say nothing else than that they do not see it, just as the blind-born states that he sees no colour.

Body, soul and spirit are the three basic elements of the human being. Every basic element has three components or graduations again. The body is not as simple as the materialistic researcher imagines. It is a composed thing which consists of three members or three components. The lowest, coarsest part is as a rule what the human being sees with his physical senses, the so-called physical body. This physical body has the same forces and laws in itself as the whole physical world round us. Modern natural sciences study nothing else of the human being than this physical body; for also our intricate brain is nothing else than a part of this physical body. The theosophist calls everything physical body that is room-fulfilling, what we can see with the bare eye or with the microscope, briefly, everything that is composed of atoms for the naturalist. This is the lowest component of the physical being. However, many researchers already deny the next member of the physical being, the etheric body. The term etheric body may not be the best. But it does not depend on terms. The fact that one denies the etheric body is only the result of modern scientific thinking. The denying of this etheric body is connected with a permanent scientific quarrel for a long time. I want to indicate provisionally only briefly what is to be understood by this etheric body. If you look at a mineral, a dead, lifeless body, and compare it with the plant, then you say to yourselves and all people have said this up to the turn from the 18th to the 19th century, because then the quarrel began because of the etheric body: the stone is lifeless, however, the plant is imbued with life. Theosophy calls etheric body what must be added, so that the plant is not a stone. This etheric body is probably better called life-force in future, because the etheric force or life-force is something that natural sciences have spoken of up to the 19th century. Modern natural sciences deny anything like the life-force or vital force.

Goethe has already mocked at those who do not accept that life requires something to its explanation that is higher than the lifeless. Everybody knows the passage in his Faust:

To understand some living thing and to describe it,
the student starts by ridding it of its spirit;
he then holds all its parts within his hand
except, alas! for the spirit that bound them together.
(Faust, verses 1936-1939)

Goethe meant the band of life-force. I have explained this case in my book Goethe's World View. Today there are some naturalists again who believe to not manage with the lifeless who assume at least anticipating what the theosophists call the etheric body. They are called neovitalists. I need to refer only to Hans Driesch (1867–1941, German biologist, representative of vitalism) and others to show how the naturalist comes again to this etheric body as something really existing, even if under another term. The farther natural sciences advance, the more they will also recognise that the plant already has such an etheric body, because, otherwise, it could not live. Also the animal and the human being have such an etheric duplicate body. That human being who develops the higher bodies can really observe this etheric body also with the simplest, most primitive organs of mental view. One only needs a quite simple trick; indeed, only the esoterically qualified theosophist can do it. You know the word suggestion. Suggestion consists in the fact that the human being can perceive things which are apparently not there. At first we are not interested in the suggestion with which one talks a person into believing something.

Another kind of suggestion is more important for us to behold the etheric body. Someone who has occupied himself with the theory of suggestion knows that the hypnotist is able to suggest things away from a person, so that he does not see the existing things. Imagine that a hypnotist would suggest to a person that here is no clock. Then the person concerned would see nothing here in the room. This is nothing else than diverting the attention to an unusual field, an artificial diverting of attention. Everybody can observe this process with himself. The human being is able to suggest away what is before him.

The theosophist must be able to carry out the following trick, and then he gets to the view of the etheric body: he has to suggest the physical body of an animal or a person away. If his spiritual eye is woken, then he does not see anything at that place where the physical body was, but he sees the room filled with particular colour pictures. This instruction must be carried out, of course, with the greatest care, because illusions of all sorts are possible in these fields. Who really knows with which care with which precision exceeding any scientific accuracy just the theosophical research is usually done knows about that. The room is fulfilled with luminous pictures. This is the etheric duplicate body. This luminous picture appears in a colour which is not included in our usual spectrum from infra-red to ultraviolet. It resembles possibly the colour of the peach-blossom. You find such an etheric duplicate body with every plant, with every animal, generally with every living being. It is the external, sensuous expression of that which the naturalist anticipates today again, of that which one calls vital force. Thus we have the second member of the physical body of the human being.

However, the physical body still has a third component. I have called it the soul-body. You can get an idea of it if you imagine that not any living body is also able to feel. I cannot enter into the discussion whether the plant can also feel, that is a different matter. You have to consider what one roughly calls feeling. We want to keep in mind how the plant differs from the animal. Just as the plant differs from the stone by the etheric body, the body of the animal is different as a feeling body again from the mere plant body. We call soul-body or astral body what goes in the animal body beyond mere growth and reproduction what makes sensation possible. In the physical body, in the etheric body and in the soul-body, the bearer of the sentient life, we only have the external side of the human being and the animal. Thus we have observed what lives in space.

Now we get to that which lives inside, what we call the feeling self. The eye has a sensation and leads it to that place where the soul can perceive the sensation. Here is the transition from the body to the soul if we ascend from the soul-body to the soul, to the lowest member of the soul which is called sentient soul. The animal also has a sentient soul, because it transforms to emotions, inner life or soul-life what the body prepares to it for sensation. The clairvoyant cannot separately perceive the soul-body and the sentient soul. These are, so to speak, inserted into each other and constitute a unity. Roughly one can compare what here forms a whole the soul-body as an external cover and the sentient soul within it with the sword in the scabbard. This forms a whole for the mental observation and is called kama-rupa or astral body in theosophy. The highest member of the physical body and the lowest member of the soul form a whole and are called astral body in the theosophical literature.

The second member of the soul encloses memory and the low reason. The highest member contains the consciousness in the proper sense. The soul as well as the body consists of three members. As the body consists of physical body, etheric body and soul-body, the soul consists of sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness-soul. Only someone can get the correct concept of it that develops the capacities which lead to the real beholding using the spiritual-scientific methods. What we feel of the things from without sticks to the sentient soul. What we call feeling, feeling of love, feeling of hatred, feeling of longing, so sympathy and antipathy, sticks to the second soul member, to the intellectual soul, to kama-manas. The third member, the consciousness-soul, is that which the human being can observe only in one single point. The child only has a consciousness of the two first soul members as a rule. It lives only in the sentient soul and in the intellectual soul, but it does not yet live in the consciousness-soul. In this consciousness-soul the human being starts living in the course of his childhood, and then this consciousness-soul becomes the self-conscious soul.

Those who know to observe their own lives well consider this point in their life as something especially important. You find this point described in Jean Paul's own biography (1763–1825, German Romantic writer), where he experiences the consciousness of the inner self. “Never will I forget the appearance in me not yet told to anyone where I stood at the birth of my ego-consciousness of which I can give place and time. In a morning, I stood as a very young child in the front door and saw on the left to a woodshed, when all at once the internal face: I am an ego! Like a thunderbolt from the heaven went before me and stood still luminously. There my ego had seen itself for the first time and for ever. Delusions of memory are hard to imagine, because no other stories could add anything to this occurrence which only in the veiled sanctum of the human being took place whose novelty only gave permanence to such everyday accidents.” Thus I have shown the highest member of the human soul to you.

Indeed, the clairvoyant can perceive the three members of the soul externally. Like the etheric body the three members of the soul really present themselves to the external soul observation. I already said that one cannot behold the sentient body and the soul-body separately. This higher part of the human being, the soul, shows itself in that which the theosophical literature calls aura. Who wants to have knowledge of it must learn to behold it. The aura is threefold. Three members are inserted into each other like three oval nebulous formations which wrap up and veil the human guise. In this aura, the soul-body of the human being presents itself to our observation. It gleams in the most manifold colours which can only be compared with the spectral colours. In these colours which are on the higher octave of red and violet the aura gleams in the most manifold way. The human being is embedded in this like in a cloud, and in this cloud the desires, passions and impulses of the human soul express themselves. The whole feeling organism of the human being expresses itself in the wonderful play of colours of the aura. This threefold aura is the human soul. This is the soul if one understands it objectively. Everybody can perceive it subjectively: everybody feels and desires and has passions. He lives them in such a way as he lives digesting and breathing.

But the external usual school of psychology only describes what I have called the soul-body, or it still describes the external expression of the soul-life at most, but not what theosophy regards as soul. What it understands of the soul is an objective fact. But one can indicate it as Fichte did when he called attention to the fact that in this world higher experiences exist toward which the only sensually perceiving human being is like a blind-born.

Thus we have described the three members of the human physical body and the three members of the human soul. Since the third member of the physical body forms a unity with a member of the soul, we have first two parts plus one plus two, so five parts: physical body, etheric body, soul-body, intellectual soul, consciousness-soul in which the ego lights up. This ego is a quite interesting point in the aura. At a certain place this ego becomes discernible. Within the outer oval you find a strange, blue shimmering or blue fluorescent place, also oval-shaped. It is real in such a way, as if you see a candle flame; but with the difference which the astral colours have compared with the physical colours it is in such a way, as if you see the blue in the middle of the candle flame. This is the ego which is perceived within the aura. And this is a very interesting fact.

If the human being develops ever so far, if he develops his clairvoyant capacities ever so far, at this point he sees this blue ego-body at first, this blue light body. This is an overcast sanctuary, also for the clairvoyant. Nobody is able to behold into the real ego of the fellow man. This remains a secret at first also for somebody who has developed his soul senses. Only within this blue shimmering place something new begins to gleam. There is a new flame which begins to gleam in the centre of the blue flame. This is the third member, the mind. This mind again consists of three members like the other components of the human being.

The Eastern philosophy calls these members manas, buddhi and atma. These three components are developed with the present-day human beings so that, actually, only the lowest part, the spirit-self this is the correct translation of manas is developed as a rudiment. This manas is connected as firmly with the highest member of the soul as the sentient soul with the soul-body, so that again the highest part of the soul and the lowest part of the mind form a whole because one cannot distinguish them. One just beholds in the aura the highest member of the soul in the centre of the blue shimmering place where the ego is, and one sees the mind lighting up within the ego. Today the mind is developed with humanity up to the manas. The higher parts, buddhi and atma life-spirit and spirit-man are developed as rudiments, and we will see how they will develop speaking about reincarnation and karma in the next lecture.

The highest part of the soul and the lowest part of the mind are bound together. The theosophical literature calls manas what cannot be observed separately. The two highest parts, buddhi and atma, are the core of the human being, are the immortal human mind. Thus we have three times three members of the human being whose third member is linked with the fourth one to a whole and whose sixth member with the seventh one. The notorious heptad, which you can read so often, thereby comes about in the composition of the human being. In reality, the human being consists of body, soul and mind and any member again of three parts; two times two members are combined to a whole so that seven instead of nine members result. The human being lives in the second of the three members, the higher one. He cannot perceive them with his outer senses.

I have already mentioned in the introductory talk that the theosophical literature gives not only a description of the different fields of life, but shows also the means and ways with which the human being can get the methods enabling him to perceive all that. However, a certain spiritual development is necessary to get a correct view of that which I have described just as the naturalist has to learn microscoping to gain insight into the physical nature. Everybody can get to know this; it is not the property of few favourite, but common property of everybody. Those who have got involved with the instructions of the Theosophical Society and have themselves come to these views can tell of their experiences like an Africanist tells of his experiences. These cannot be checked unless you yourselves go to Africa. However, the methods are normally not taken seriously enough. If that were carried out really and seriously which is given in the last chapter of my book Theosophy, then a person could come already very far in the observation of the higher fields of human mind.

Who can make a theosophical world view to himself understands something that he could not understand before in the usual course of life. In fact you cannot understand particular fields with Goethe unless you have any idea of theosophy. Only somebody understands Goethe's explanations of the plant realm who has an idea of that which Goethe calls life processes or metamorphosis of the plants. That Goethe was a theosophist follows from a “concealed” writing which exists, indeed, in every edition, however, is read by the fewest: from the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. This contains the whole theosophy, but in such a way as the theosophical truths have always been communicated. Only since the foundation of the Theosophical Society they have been expressed externally; in former times they could be shown only figuratively. The Fairy Tale is such a pictorial expression of the theosophical teachings. In Leipzig Goethe gained insight into that world of which we speak profoundly. Something in Faust points to the fact that Goethe belonged to the initiated theosophists. Something is with Goethe like the creed of a theosophist. I would like to finish this lecture with Goethe's words which could be like a motto of this lecture because they announce in general lines and in terse style that the world is not only physical nature, but also a psychic and a spiritual being. And Goethe expresses the fact that the world is a spiritual being where he allows the earth spirit to say the words which reveal the weaving of the spiritual life all over the world:

In the tides of life, in action's storm,
I surge and ebb,
move to and fro!
as cradle and grave,
as unending sea,
as constant change,
as life's incandescence,
I work at the whirring loom of time
and fashion the living garment of God.

(Faust I, verses 501-509)

Already eight days ago, I pointed to the fact that the basic question should be solved in Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily how the human being develops from his lower self to the higher one, and that a big view of the future underlies the fairy tale.

How can the human being get to the gate which leads into the spiritual land? This was a basic problem for Goethe. He seizes this problem emphatically and tries to explain in many ways how the human soul forces develop.

Starting from this great point of view, he tries to show as a knowing man in all details which inner ways the human being has to finish.

We have stopped at the moment when the old man with the lamp and the snake meet in front of the statues of the kings, the representatives of the highest spiritual powers. We have to regard the temple as a symbol of the great occult schools which have always existed and exist even today. Into this temple the human beings are led and come gradually so far by the teachings and instructions which they receive there if they exercise them really that, finally, the initiation can be given to them.

We have seen that the snake hisses a word into the ear of the old man. We know that this is the resolution of the riddle, the most important word of which Goethe and Schiller said: “One reads the resolution in the fairy tale.”

In these words is the resolution, the behaviour of the old man reveals that to us. Immediately after the snake has spoken the words, the old man replies significantly: “The time has come!”

The snake knows the fourth secret; this is why the old man says: “The time has come!” When later the beautiful lily is informed about these words, she regards them as a ray of hope, as an indication of her redemption.

The old man returns home; he finds his wife upset. She tells him that two will-o'-the-wisps were there which did not behave adequately, licked off the gold from the walls, and then cast it off from themselves. The pug has eaten the gold and died. Then the wife still had to promise to pay the debts of the will-o'-the-wisps to the river. The old man approves this, because the will-o'-the-wisps would turn out grateful now and then. At first he neatens the house while he lets his lamp shine and covers the walls with gold anew that way.

A contradiction seems to be here. The golden king says to the old man: why do you come, although we have light? The old man answers: you know that I am not allowed to illuminate the dark. The human being must obtain an internal light first of all which he shows to the ancient wisdom; then only it can shine to him. However, when the old man has sunk to the west and walks with his lamp through the veins of the earth, one reads: all veins filled with gold behind him straight away; for his lamp had the miraculous quality to transform all stones into gold, all wood into silver, dead animals into precious stones and to delete all metals. However, it had to shine all by itself to show this effect. If another light was beside it, it only caused a nice bright light and refreshed everything living.

Thus you can understand this contradiction that it only shines if it meets with light; however, if no other light is there, it shines particularly and transforms everything that is round it: the stones become gold; the dead pug becomes an onyx. In such a way an interpretation results that gives the gist.

The old man now says to his wife: go to the ferryman, bring him the three kinds of fruit, and carry the dead pug to the beautiful lily; as she kills life, she brings the dead animal back to life touching it. His wife starts on her way. The basket with the dead pug is quite light; it becomes heavy when she adds the fruits. This is a significant feature.

The giant crosses her way; his shade robs one of each fruit and he consumes them. The ferryman cannot be contented with the remaining fruits; within 24 hours he must deliver the toll to the river. The woman commits to the river and dives her hand in it. Her hand becomes smaller and smaller and black and, in the end, it becomes invisible, while it is there according to her feeling; if the woman brings the toll, she will receive her hand again.

Just as the old woman arrived, the ferryman ferried a young man over who is like paralysed. Finally, both get across the bridge, which is formed by the snake at noon, to the kingdom of the lily. They find her surrounded by three servants, harp playing. She is of miraculous beauty, but sad, because the bird whose singing delighted her has fled from a hawk to her and has been killed by her touch. She is sorrowful about this new fright. Also the old woman complains her grief; however, at the same time she announces the message of her husband that the time has come.

Meanwhile, the snake and the will-o'-the-wisps have also arrived. The snake comforts the beautiful lily. The old woman asks for the missing fruits; however, in the kingdom of the lily nothing grows that blossoms and yields fruit, hence, she cannot receive them.

The point in time of something important seems to have come closer; there the young man tries to embrace the lily and sinks down dead. The snake draws a magic circle around the body to protect it against putrefaction which must meet it, otherwise, at sunset. Finally when the sun sets, the man with the lamp, led by the hawk, comes as well as the will-o'-the-wisps which the old woman has summoned.

Everybody prepares himself for contributing his part so that the harmonious resolution can take place. The will-o'-the-wisps have to open the temple; however, they cannot find the way to the temple. The dead young man and the body of the bird are carried off, the snake spreads about the river; when they all are over this bridge, it agrees to sacrifice itself.

All events are changed due to the sacrifice of the snake. The ancient wisdom once worked in all religions which were given to humanity by initiates. The religions brought refreshment to the souls which joined them vividly. The old man sinks to the west; he goes to the realm of the human beings. The snake, the intellect, which strives for enlightenment, sinks to the east, because from the east the spiritual light of the sun always shines bringing knowledge to the human soul.

The temple resounded, the metal statues sounded , this is a picture of the soul condition that takes the principles of the spiritual world upon itself by the sacrifice. In devachan everything sounds, expresses its being in sounds. Goethe speaks of a sounding sun in his Faust in the Prologue in Heaven this is devachan:

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

Goethe means the spiritual sun, for the physical sun does not sound.

As long as the intellect strives only for enlightenment, as long as it acquires more and more inner light to itself by its striving one is able to do this also with the reason which becomes brighter and brighter , the old man with the lamp must have a soul light in which he can shine his light. Because the soul wants to sacrifice itself, the enlightenment takes place and everything changes. Everything is beheld in its spiritual condition, no longer in its physical one. Here conditions are described that the human soul goes through in the initiation.

The young man is reanimated by the sacrifice of the snake; however, he is still lacking consciousness. The body of the snake disintegrates into beautiful precious stones which the old man throws into the river. From them a nice constant bridge to the other bank comes into being. Thus a free transition from the sensuous realm to the spiritual land is created.

However, we have to hear first what happens within the temple. The gate is opened, the old man says again: the time has come! The temple lifts itself above the river; the hut of the ferryman forms a nice small temple within the other, an altar of sorts. The old man becomes a young man again; also the ferryman and the wife of the old man are rejuvenated. The latter joins the three companions of the beautiful lily and is the fifth in the alliance. The young man experiences the initiation in the further course of the fairy tale. The three kings give him what they have to give. The bronze king gives him the sword with the words: the sword on the left, the right hand free! The silver king presents the sceptre to him, speaking: graze the sheep! While the golden king presses the wreath of oak leaves on his head and reminds him: recognise the highest! He is endowed with strength, beauty and knowledge.

Now the young man is not only alive, but is also mind-endowed. Hitherto he followed the old man with the lamp mechanically as it were from the world into the temple which is still subterranean. Then the temple rises upward. The man with the lamp gives light to the young man; he always stays on his side and leads him, finally, to the three kings who give him their gifts. You read then: “His eyes shone out of inexpressible spirit” , then the initiation is carried out! The young man is now allowed to unite with the beautiful lily, to embrace her in love, to consummate the marriage with her.

The fourth king collapses in himself, after the will-o'-the-wisps have licked all gold out of him. The giant arrives on the scene; in the beginning the young man is astonished, however, the shade does no longer cause damage. The giant becomes a kind of obelisk; he serves as a sundial with which artificial human figures instead of the numbers display the time.

The bridge and the temple are admirable buildings; people come in flocks, the bridge seethes with travellers, and the temple is the most visited on earth.

This is the end of the fairy tale.

This point in time is neither a present one nor a past one; it is one of a distant future of the human development when the consciousness of the present humanity which is directed completely unilaterally to the sensory world has gone through the soul path. This is described in the fairy tale; when the human being has got the wisdom, the initiation which grasps the things not only but also masters them. Then the whole humanity is able to receive the initiation.

What does this mean now? The old man with the lamp is, as already explained, the ancient wisdom, that wisdom which works by means of intuition which has the power to develop divine force not human force, to master the things, and to transform all things. It imprints the spirit into all things. It knows how to transform the stones into gold, how to destroy the metals. These are all qualities that are attributed to the elixir of life of the true alchemist. A profound knowledge is indicated with it. In the whole progress of the events which are shown in the fairy tale, Goethe shows a future condition of humanity and indicates how to attain this condition. If we consider Goethe wants to say what happens round us, we see the human development in a perpetual transformation; also nature changes perpetually. It is the task of the human being to penetrate the whole physical nature with his thinking.

The human being is able due to the progress of technology to transform the raw product of nature into something that serves the civilisation. In his art he breathes his mind into the lifeless marble. The human being converts nature into an art product; he transforms everything that nature presents to him into something that carries his character. Today nature is rationally spiritualised that way. The human being becomes the creator of a higher nature.

This is the development of humanity, this alchemy: bit by bit the human mind is imprinted on everything lifeless. Goethe looks in big perspective at a world where everything in the world is transformed, is infiltrated with the human mind, so that nothing of the realm of nature exists, but everything is converted by the human mind in such a way that everything lifeless is infiltrated with it.

This external transformation of the lifeless matter is shown in the fairy tale with the light that shines from the lamp of the old man and changes the stones and metals. However, if this light shines into the human soul, it has attained a quite different power, it not only controls the dead matter but it spreads also over life. The human being becomes able, taking up the ancient profundities in him and obtaining internal knowledge, to attain quite different forces. He will not only rule over the lifeless matter in future times but also over life. He will also change living beings by his spiritual alchemy. He takes up the same wisdom which once created the world, the ancient wisdom of the world, and that is why he is able to transform dead matter into living matter.

Wisdom transforms the plant which is lignified and withered. The dying plant realm becomes silver, the glamorous appearance. However, the living, the feeling, the animal goes another way; its lower nature is sacrificed, must die to ascend to the height. What Jacob Böhme said who probably knew these secrets of the alchemists: “death is the root of all life” and:

Who does not die, before he dies,
Ruins himself when he dies.

And what Goethe puts into the words:

As long as you don't have
This dying and growing,
You are any dull guest
On the dark earth only. (From West-Eastern Divan)

Hence, the human being is able to attain the ability to develop his higher self in himself if he deadens the lower one in himself. The human being is only able to approach the godhead if he has overcome his lower nature.

Only the prepared human being who has experienced the hard ordeals, the internal purification, and the catharsis can understand the divine. Hence, the young man is killed who approaches the lily, before he is prepared and purified.

Who lifts the veil of Isis, who walks through guilt to the image of the goddess must perish. Only after he has slowly prepared himself, has familiarised himself with all probations, he is able to receive the initiation. The young man, who faces us in the fairy tale at first, has not yet purified his inside. He is paralysed when he wants to get to the spiritual world with such a soul constitution, and later when he forces entry, he is killed by the lily. In Faust we find how Faust can probably get to the spiritual world using magic where those are who are no longer in the physical existence: Paris and Helena. But he is led by Mephistopheles, not by own internal soul work, and he is paralysed. Only the human being, purified by grief and pain, carried by serious desire and striving can find entry, after he has been well prepared by the “lamp.” Only then he can hope to get to the initiation.

The old man with the lamp returns to the hut. The will-o'-the-wisps have been there in the meantime. He finds his wife in big distress, because the will-o'-the-wisps were ill-behaved to her and have licked off all gold that covered the walls since ancient times. They have called her their queen wantonly, and then they have shaken off the gold licked from the walls. The pug has eaten of it, and now it lies there dead. The will-o'-the-wisps are the representatives of the lower personality full of desire; they take up all gold of knowledge wherever they find it, but in futile, complacent, selfish attitude. They cannot recognise the high value of the gold; they do not respect it and cast it off from themselves. They spread the gold to the ferryman. The ferryman is terrified from this gold in which the personality full of desire is involved. He says: the river the pure cosmic astrality cannot use it; the river wildly foams up.

However, the snake transforms the gold; it uses it for its searching striving. It feels that it has to bend its head to the earth to stir from the spot. Thanks to the gold the will-o'-the-wisps have ideas and concepts, but these are abstractions, are rigid; the will-o'-the-wisps themselves are unproductive. The snake makes the gold valuable; it becomes luminous from within. It makes the gold fertile; the gold changes its thinking, so that it can penetrate the nature of the things. With the will-o'-the-wisps it leads only to the vertical line, to the soul constitution, flitting about, without life. It loses the relation to that which is below.

The animal, the pug, cannot take up wisdom; it is killed. Now the effect of the lamp comes to the fore. As long as the pug lived, the lamp could not lead it to God; this is only possible by deadening the lower qualities. The old man with the lamp can transform the dead pug into a nice onyx. The change of the brown and black colours of the precious rock makes it the rare piece of art but he cannot reanimate it. Wisdom only cannot give life; other forces must be added. The pug can only receive life if it has gone through death. Death means deadening everything, all lower desires. Thus Goethe points to the fact that also the animal is developing, even if not the single animal; the animal type is determined to perfection.

Goethe was a theosophist; that is why he knows this ancient wisdom of ascending; from the purification of all beings which all religions contain in their core. The ancient wisdom of the world gleams in all religious systems; its truth shines on all confessions of the different peoples of the earth. Goethe shows this wisdom in the old man. But what suppresses the lower desires and passions only does not suffice. An even higher wisdom must come; the ancient wisdom will be replaced by an even higher wisdom. The events in the hut of the old man point to it: “The fire of the fireplace had burnt down, the old man covered the coal with a lot of ash, put the luminous golden pieces aside and now his lamp shone brightly again.”

The secret doctrine in which the ancient wisdom is hidden is a property of humanity since many thousand years. There was the strictest secrecy of it; only to somebody who was prepared the light of wisdom was allowed to shine. The snake sacrificing itself represents the higher self of the human being which gets to knowledge. The lamp must not illuminate the dark; the wisdom of the teacher is not allowed to approach anybody who wants to accept it only, but anybody who meets it with inner life. But this refers only to the highest enlightenment. The great teachers of humanity, the great initiates are always active. The effect of the ancient wisdom always takes place, takes also place if no other light shines unless it is disturbed. Thus we find profound significance in this apparent contradiction. Everything that happened in the course of human development was caused by the ancient wisdom. The administrators of this ancient wisdom, the initiates stood behind everything that happened from culture to culture by human beings; they direct the destinies and events that happen on the external plane of world history.

We look now at the wife of the old man; we face a female figure. Mysticism shows the different soul states of the human being as different female figures. The old woman is the soul state of the present humanity remaining in the sensuous life. With it something low is meant; it is the general condition of the human beings. She is married to the old man with the lamp. humanity is married to the ancient wisdom. The ancient wisdom also works on the present-day humanity; humanity could not survive without it. This ancient wisdom has always combined with the sensuous humanity.

The woman goes to the ferryman who represents the natural forces. She must clear away the debt of the will-o'-the-wisps. The present humanity owes something to nature. The lower self, the human being who feels himself gifted with the body has to pay the price to the remaining nature which also belongs to him even if he does not feel it belonging to him. The flickering soul-life of the will-o'-the-wisps does not accept this; they cannot get to such concepts. Nevertheless, the law has an effect: “they feel chained to the soil in incomprehensible way, it was the most disagreeable sensation which they ever had.” The will-o'-the-wisps represent, as already mentioned, the lower knowledge. The human being who is gifted with sensuousness has become this only because he has gone through the whole nature. This is shown in the picture of the river

The river, the passing current of passions, must receive the toll in form of “earth fruits.” Three bowl-shaped fruits are the single covers which surround the true human being, the real self. This self descended from the kingdom that is beyond the river. The river must be crossed in order to land in the astral kingdom; the river has to get the skinned fruits. The old woman the healthy prudent human soul-force is able to give the toll to the ferryman, the representative of the unconsciously active soul forces, but she cannot pay the complete one; for the present general consciousness does not suffice for that. Because the old woman remains in debts, the sense-perceptible disappears. It can reappear to new life only if she penetrates to the spiritual.

The giant hindered the old woman to pay the debt to the ferryman; he robbed and ate a part of her fruits which she wanted to carry to the river. Previously the snake said to the will-o'-the-wisps when they required knowing how they can get to the kingdom of the beautiful lily: “The giant is capable of nothing with his body; his hands lift no straw, his shoulders would carry no faggot; but his shade is capable of a lot, of everything. That is why he is most powerful with sunrise and sunset, and one needs only to sit down on the nape of his shade in the evening; the giant then gently approaches the bank and the shade brings the traveller over the water.”

The will-o'-the-wisps refuse the way over the snake which wants to lie down as a bridge over the river at the bright midday. What is the giant? About the snake that soul gets to the spiritual world which developing its own forces is able to devotedly cross the threshold with bright daytime consciousness. However, there is a second way, when this bright daytime consciousness is lessened, in the somnambulistic states. The human being is weak there, without own consciousness. Lower forces then work on the human being; the soul itself is without own forces, is powerless. Nevertheless, the human being can also experience something of the spiritual world that way even if it is subjected to errors.

There is grief in the kingdom of the beautiful lily. The lily is desolate; to her feet the canary, her last joy, lies dead who usually accompanied her songs. The lily is mourning; for the bird is dead which reminded her of the sensuous. However, the spiritual and sensuous realms belong together; harmony is there only where both penetrate each other. But a new harmonisation between both should be attained; this is why the memory of the sensuous has to go through death to become new afterwards.

In the companions of the lily again three beings face us. We hear about them next time. They complement each other with the lily. The old woman represents the present condition of consciousness, the human intellectual soul, the lily the higher consciousness that the human being obtains if he sacrifices himself like the snake. The old woman is the bright daytime consciousness, the lily the clairvoyant consciousness that will be given to the human being. Before humanity got the present consciousness, three former states of consciousness which are shown as the three companions led the way. These are states, like they appear in trance today; still appear in certain atavisms sometimes, dreamy, vague, but comprehensive states of consciousness. The human being experienced other conditions of consciousness, before he got his present waking consciousness. In them the harmony between sensory being and spiritual being was given by nature. The three companions sleep, while the transformation takes place; they live over into the new state without noticing the transformation. They already got by nature what the other soul forces have to acquire for themselves.

With the rise of the temple the lily also brings the old woman with her. Then the human being will combine all five states of consciousness, the previous ones and the future ones, in him. The young man attains the highest consciousness in the last scene which can be given to the human being for the time being.
The hawk has killed the canary. The harmonisation of the sensuous and the spiritual has no longer to be sought looking back at old achievements of humanity, but looking at the future. The hawk is the herald of the future, of the prophetic. He collects the last rays of the setting sun with his crimson chest. The sign leads the old man with the lamp who causes the transformation and leads all to the temple of initiation. The hawk hovers about this temple and throws the light of the newly rising sun to the temple, so that it is illuminated with a heavenly shine. Thus the hawk connects a setting world day with a newly dawning one. The hawk is that in the human soul which senses in advance what should come true in future.

In the temple the initiation takes place. There is shown how the young man is gifted with the three forces: manas, buddhi and atma. We see next time why Goethe depicts these three forces just as the three kings,

The temple was once in the abysses of the earth. One had to join an occult school which deeply hidden from the external world unfolded its effectiveness in order to get to the higher secrets. However, the time comes when the temple of the esoteric training does no longer rest in concealed depths, but ascends, is there open and free in front of the whole world, accessible to all human beings. When does this time come?

Remember the mystery word which the snake whispers into the ear of the old man in the subterranean temple; the solution of this mystery word is reserved to our time. What did it answer to him on the question what it has decided? I want to sacrifice myself, before I am sacrificed.

The time comes for humanity when the human being is really ready to sacrifice himself, to enter the whole nature, to feel effective in the elements of the whole nature, not in his narrow own being; when he will be ready to give up his self as single egoistic self and to enter the all-embracing self, to regard himself as part of the all-embracing self. Then the human being has achieved his goal, the gate of higher knowledge uncloses itself to him, as well as he gives up everything that closes him from the remaining world. The true initiation can now take place for humanity.

This time is when “the three are there who rule on earth: wisdom, appearance and power.” – The old man with the lamp says who brings about this state. The initiation is now described: “With the first word the golden king got up, with the second one the silver, and with the third one the bronze king slowly stood up, when the composed king suddenly sat down clumsily.” The golden, silver and bronze kings are the three highest forces of the human being in their purity. In these three forms the human being experiences the divine in himself. Only when the human being can survey the forces in him and in their origin worlds in full purity and integrity, he is ripe to initiation. These are the pure, divine forces which experience themselves in the human being as human thinking, feeling and willing. The course of the fairy tale shows the purification of these forces from the lower personal.

All that still lives chaotically in the human being. As long as the human being is still undeveloped, chaos prevails in the interaction of these forces. The fourth king is a representative of the present humanity; but he collapses in himself, that means that this state of humanity is replaced by the new state which the initiation of the young man shows. Everything is transformed. Then that happens which the hawk prophetically announces, while it collects the rays of the sun which shines to the new world day: “the king, the queen and their companions appeared in heavenly shine in the twilit vault of the temple;” there will be peace and the harmony which will bring the rest in the all-embracing consciousness of humanity.

The representative of humanity, the young man, is endowed in the temple with this new consciousness of humanity. He is endowed with a new life; previously he was directed mechanically by other forces, so to speak, not by his own forces. Now he has gained these new forces, he can get married to the beautiful lily, the clairvoyant consciousness, and this world and the next world can be combined with each other by the sacrificing snake which establishes the foundation of the bridge on which all human beings can walk to and fro.

The young man receives the force for that from the three kings. He is led by the old man first to the third, the bronze king. He receives a sword from him in a bronze scabbard; this is the symbol of the highest human force: atma. The king shouts: “the sword to the left, the right hand free!” In the left hand that should be which represents the human strength, where it does not serve quarrel, but only defence. The right hand should be free to the work, to the service of humanity. The young man is endowed by the silver king with that which buddhi can give the human being: wisdom in harmony with feeling is true philanthropy. With this love the young man should live among people and graze the sheep. The golden king presses the wreath of oak leaves on the head of the young man and speaks: “recognise the highest.” The young man receives the knowledge of the most perfect kind, manas, from the golden king. Now he can enter into the bond of marriage with the beautiful lily and the bond is much influenced by love: “love does not rule, but it cultivates, and this is more.”

The subconsciously working soul forces the giant have lost their destroying force; the giant damages for the last time when he staggers about the bridge to the temple. He is seized by the soil and is only a pointer of a past human cycle, a gigantic statue which displays the course of the hours and days and human cycles like a sundial.

If we want to summarise what Goethe wanted to express with his fairy tale, we can say: Goethe wanted to show the development and final redemption of the single human being and the whole human race in poetic pictures. The fairy tale contains the secret of the decay of the lower and of the rise of the higher human being and of the condition of the final union with the divine which any mysticism strives for as its loftiest goal, as salvation, as rest in salvation, as union with God. When this moment of sacrifice has come, when this “dying and growing” has become fact, then not only the spiritual comes to the sensuous, but also the sensuous to the spiritual. When this time has come, not only single esoteric students, single inspired mystics are able to get to the temple, but all human beings walk to it, to and fro, to the spirit-land.

Goethe pointed to this great moment in the evolution of humanity in his fairy tale. A lot could still be said that is included in this fairy tale. But one can indicate a lot only. If one can usually say of the poet:

Who wants to understand the poet
Has to walk to poet's land,

we must realise speaking of Goethe that we apply this saying to Goethe in such a way that Goethe's land is the land of spiritual reality. Only somebody who knows the mysteries and the mystery knowledge can completely penetrate into the rich contents of this fairy tale. What has only been indicated here can serve as a signpost to a more and more intimate understanding of the contents of this fairy tale.

[ 1 ] Enlightenment is the result of very simple processes. Here, too, it is a matter of developing certain feelings and thoughts which are dormant within all men, but must be awakened. Only he who carries out these simple processes with complete patience, continuously and strenuously, can be led by them to the reception of inner illumination. The primary step is taken by observing different natural objects in a particular way; and these are as follows: a transparent stone of beautiful form (a crystal), a plant, and an animal. One should endeavour at first to direct one's whole attention to a comparison of the stone with the animal, in the following way: The thoughts which, accompanied by strong emotions, are thus induced, must pass through the soul, and no other emotions or thoughts must be mixed with them, or disturb the intense contemplation. One then says to oneself= “The stone has a form and the animal changes his. It is impulse (desire) which causes the animal to change its place, and it is these impulses which are served by the form of the animal. Its organs and instruments are the expression of these impulses. The form of the stone, on the contrary, is fashioned, not in accordance with impulses, but in accordance with an impulseless force.” [The fact here mentioned, in its bearing on the contemplation of crystals, is in many ways distorted by those who have only heard of it in an outward (exoteric) manner, and in this way such practices as crystal-gazing have their origin. Misrepresentations of such a kind are the outcome of misunderstanding. They have been described in many books, but they never form the subject of genuine (esoteric) teaching.]

If one sinks deeply into such thoughts, and while doing so observes the stone and the animal with fixed attention, then there arise in the soul two separate kinds of emotion. From the stone into the soul there flows one hind of emotion, and from the animal another. Probably in the beginning the experiment will not succeed, but little by little, with genuine and patient practice, these emotions become manifest. Again and again one should practise. At first the emotions only last as long as the contemplation. Later on, they work afterwards, and then they grow to some thing which remains alive in the soul. One then needs only to reflect, and both emotions invariably arise, apart from all contemplation of an external object.

Out of these, emotions, and the thoughts which are bound up with them, clairvoyant organs are formed. For should the plant be added to the contemplation, one will notice that the feeling out-flowing from it, both in its quality and in its degree, lies between that which emanates from the stone and that from the animal. The organs which are so formed are spiritual eyes. We learn by degrees and through their means to see both astral and mental colours. As long as one has only attained, the condition described as Probation, the spiritual world with its lines and figures remains dark, but through Enlightenment it will become clear. It must be noted here that the words “dark” and “light,” as well as the other common expressions, do but approximately describe what is really meant. But if ordinary language is not used, there is none possible and yet this language was only constructed to suit physical conditions.

Occult science describes what emanates from the stone and is seen by clairvoyant eyes, as “blue” or “bluish-red:” that which is observed as coming from the animal is described as “red” or “reddish-yellow.” In reality they are colours of a spiritual kind which are discerned. The colour proceeding from the plant is “green.” Plants are just those natural phenomena whose qualities in the higher worlds are similar to their qualities in the physical world. But it is not so with stones and animals. It must now be clearly understood that the above-mentioned colours do but suggest the prevailing shades of the stone, the plant, or the animal. In reality, all possible overtones exist. Every animal, every stone, every plant has its own peculiar shade of colour. In addition to these there are also the creatures of the higher worlds, who never incorporate themselves with their on colours, often marvellous, often horrible. In fact, the variety of colours in the higher worlds is immeasurably greater than in the physical world.

[ 2 ] If a man has once acquired the faculty of seeing with spiritual eyes, he then, sooner or later, meets with the beings here mentioned, some of them higher, some lower than man himself, beings who never entered into physical existence.

If he has come so far, the way to a great deal lies open before him; but it is inadvisable to proceed any further without an experienced guide. Indeed, for all that has been here described, such experienced guidance is desirable. For the rest, if anyone has the power and endurance to travel so far that he fulfils the elementary conditions of enlightenment here described, he will assuredly seek and discover his guide.

[ 3 ] But under all circumstances it is important to give one warning, and he who will not apply it had better leave untrodden all the steps of occult science. It is necessary that he who would become an occult student should lose none of his attributes as a good and noble man, and one susceptible to all physical truths. Indeed, throughout his apprenticeship he must continually increase his moral strength, his inner purity, and his powers of observation. let us give an example: During the preliminary practices of Enlightenment, the student must be careful to be always enlarging his sympathy with the animal and human worlds, and his sense of Nature's beauty. If he is not careful to do this, he persistently blunts that sense and that feeling by the use of these practices. The heart would grow cold and the senses become blunted, and that could only lead to perilous results.

[ 4 ] How enlightenment proceeds, if one rises, in the sense of the foregoing practices, from the stone, the plant, and the animal, up to man, and how, after enlightenment, under all circumstances, the gentle hand of the Pilot comes on a certain day, and leads to Initiation—of these things the next chapter will deal in so far as it can and may do so.

[ 5 ] In our time, the path to occult science is sought after by many. It is sought in various ways, and many dangerous and even objectionable practices are tried. Therefore it is that those who know something of the truth concerning these things have allowed part of the occult training to be communicated. Only so much is here imparted as this permission allows, and it is necessary that something of the truth should be known in order that it may counteract the great danger of these errors. If nothing be forced, there is no danger for him who follows the way already described; only one thing should be noted: nobody ought to spend more time or power upon such practices than what is at his disposal with due regard to his circumstances and his duties. No one, for the sake of the occult path, ought suddenly to change anything in the external conditions of his life. If one desires genuine results, one must have patience; one should be able to cease the practice after a few minutes, and then peacefully to continue one's daily work, and no thought of these practices ought to be mingled with the work of the day. He who has not learned to wait, in the best and highest sense of the word, is of no use as an occult student, nor will he ever attain results of much real value.

[ 6 ] He who is in search of the paths to occult knowledge, by the means which have been indicated in the foregoing pages, must fortify himself throughout the whole course of his efforts by a certain thought. He must ever bear in mind that after persevering for some time he may have made very real progress without becoming conscious of it in the precise way which he had expected. He who does not remember this is likely to lose heart, and in a little while to abandon his efforts altogether. The mental powers and faculties about to be developed are at first of the most subtle kind, and their nature differs entirely from the conceptions of them which are formed in the student's mind. He was accustomed to occupy himself with the physical world alone. The mental and astral worlds eluded his gaze, and baffled his conceptions. It is, therefore, not remarkable if, at first, he fails to realise the new forces, mental and astral, which are developing in his own being. This is why it is dangerous to enter the path leading to occult knowledge without experienced guidance. The teacher sees the progress made by the pupil, long before the latter becomes conscious of it himself. He sees the delicate organs of spiritual vision beginning to form themselves, before the pupil is aware of their existence, and a great part of the duties of the teacher consists in perpetual watchfulness, lest the disciple lose confidence, patience, and perseverance, before he becomes conscious of his own progress. The teacher, as we know, can confer upon the student no powers which are not already latent within him, and his sole function is to assist in the awakening of slumbering faculties. But he may be a pillar of strength to him who strives to penetrate through darkness into the light.

[ 7 ] There are many who leave the occult path soon after setting foot upon it, because they are not immediately conscious of their own progress. And even when higher experiences first begin to dawn upon the seeker, he is apt to regard them as illusions, because he had anticipated them quite differently. He loses courage, either because he regards these first experiences as of no value, or because they appear so insignificant that he has no hope of their leading to any appreciable results within a measurable time. Courage and self-confidence are the two lamps which must never be allowed to burn themselves out on the pathway to the occult. He who cannot patiently repeat an exercise which has failed for an apparently unlimited number of times, will never travel far.

[ 8 ] Long before any distinct perception of progress, comes an inarticulate mental impression that the right road has been found. This is a feeling to be welcomed, and to be encouraged, since it may develop into a trustworthy guide. Above all, it is imperative to extirpate the idea that any fantastic, mysterious practices are required for the attainment of higher experiences. It must be clearly realised that ordinary every-day human feelings and thoughts must form the basis from which the start is to be made, and that it is only needful to give these thoughts and feelings a new direction. Everyone must say to himself: “In my own sphere of thoughts and sensations lie enfolded the deepest mysteries, but hitherto, I have not been able to perceive them.” In the end it all resolves itself into the fact that man, ordinarily, carries body, soul, and spirit about with him, yet is conscious only of the body, not of the soul and spirit, and that the student attains to a similar consciousness of soul and spirit also.

[ 9 ] Hence it is highly important to give the proper direction to thoughts and feelings, in order that one may develop the perception of that which is invisible in ordinary life. One of the ways by which this development may be carried out will now be indicated. Again, like almost everything else we have explained so far, it is quite a simple matter. Yet the results are of the greatest consequence, if the experiment is carried out with perseverance, and in the right frame of mind.

[ 10 ] Place before you the small seed of a plant. It is then necessary, while contemplating this insignificant object, to create with intensity the right kind of thoughts, and through these thoughts to develop certain feelings. In the first place, let the student clearly grasp what is really presented to his vision. Let him describe to himself the shape, colour, and all other qualities of the grain of seed. Then let his mind dwell upon the following train of thought: “This grain of seed, if planted in the soil, Will grow into a plant of complex structure.” Let him clearly picture this plant to himself. Let him build it up in his imagination. And then let him reflect that the object now existing only in his imagination will presently be brought into actual physical existence by the forces of the earth and of light. If the thing contemplated by him were an artificially-made object, though such a close imitation of nature that no external difference could be detected by human eyesight, no forces inherent in the earth or light could avail to produce from it a plant. He who thoroughly grasps this thought and inwardly assimilates it will also be able to form the following idea with the right feeling. He will say to himself: “That which is ultimately to grow out of this seed is already as a force now secretly enfolded within it. The artificial duplicate of the seed contains no such force. And yet both appear to be alike to my eyes. The real seed, therefore, contains something invisible which is not present in the imitation.” It is this invisible something on which thought and feeling are now to be concentrated. [Anyone who might object that a microscopic examination would reveal the difference between the two would only show that he has failed to grasp the intention of the experiment. The intention is not to investigate the physical structure of the object, but to use it as a means for the development of psychic force.] Let the student fully realise that this invisible something will later on translate itself into a visible plant, perceptible by him in shape and colour. Let him dwell upon the thought: “The invisible will become visible. If I could not think, then I could not realise, already, that which will only become visible later on.”

[ 11 ] Particular stress must be laid on the importance of feeling with intensity that which one thinks. In calmness of mind a single thought must be vitally experienced within oneself to the exclusion of all disturbing influences. Sufficient time must be taken to allow the thought, and the state of feeling connected therewith, to become, as it were, imbedded in the soul. If that is accomplished in the right way—possibly not until after numerous attempts—an inward force will make itself felt. And this force will create new powers of perception. The grain of seed will appear as if enclosed in a small luminous cloud. The spiritualised vision of the student perceives it as a kind of flame. This flame is of a lilac colour in the centre, blue at the edges. Then appears that which one could not see before, and which was created by the power of thought and feeling brought into life within oneself. That which was physically invisible (the plant which will not become visible until later on) has there revealed itself to the spiritual eye.

[ 12 ] It is pardonable if, to many men, all this appears to be mere illusion. Many will say: “What is the value of such visions or such hallucinations?” And many will thus fall away, and no longer continue to tread the path. But this is precisely the important point—not to confuse, at this difficult stage of human evolution, spiritual reality with the mere creations of phantasy, and to have the courage to press manfully onward, instead of growing timorous and faint-hearted. On the other hand, however, it is necessary to insist on the necessity of maintaining unimpaired, and of perpetually cultivating, the healthy attitude of mind which is required for the distinguishing of truth from illusion. Never during all these exercises must the student surrender the fully conscious control of himself. He must continue to think as soundly and sanely in these conditions as he does with regard to the things and occurrences of ordinary life. It would be a bad thing if he lapsed into reveries. He must at every moment be clear-headed and sober-minded, and it would be the greatest mistake if the student, through such practices, lost his mental equilibrium, or if he were prevented from judging as sanely and clearly as before the matters of work-a-day life. The disciple should, therefore, examine himself again and again to find out whether he has remained unaltered in relation to the circumstances among which he lives, or whether perchance he has lost his mental balance. He must ever maintain a calm repose within his own individuality, and an open mind for everything, being careful at the same time not to drift into vague reveries or to experiment with all sorts of exercises.

The lines for development here indicated belong to those which have been followed, and whose efficacy has been demonstrated in the schools of occultism from the earliest ages, and none but such will here be given. Anyone attempting to employ methods of meditation devised by himself, or which he may have come across in the course of promiscuous reading, will inevitably be led astray, and will lose himself in a boundless morass of incoherent fantasies.

[ 13 ] A further exercise which may succeed the one described above, is the following: Let the disciple place himself in front of a plant which has attained the stage of full development. Now let his mind be absorbed by the reflection that a time is at hand when this plant will wither and die. “Nothing,” he should say to himself, “nothing of what I now see before me will endure. But this plant will have evolved seeds which in their turn will grow into new plants. I become again aware that in what I see something lies concealed which I cannot see. I will fill my mind wholly with the thought that this plant-form with its colours will cease to be. But the reflection that the plant has produced seeds teaches me that it will not disappear into nothing. That which will prevent this disappearance, I can at present no more see with my eyes than I could originally discern the plant in the grain of seed. The plant, therefore, contains something which my eyes are unable to see. If this thought fully lives in me, and combines with the corresponding state of feeling, then, in due time, there will again develop a force in my soul which will ripen into a new kind of perception.” Out of the plant there grows once more a flame-like appearance, which is, of course, correspondingly larger than that which was previously described. This flame is greenish at the centre, and is tinged: with yellow at the outer edge.

[ 15 ] He who has won this vision has gained greatly, inasmuch as he sees things not only in their present state of being, but also in their development and decay. He begins to see in all things the spirit, of which the bodily organs of sight have no perception. And he has thus taken the initial steps on that road, which will gradually enable him to solve, by direct vision, the secret of birth and death. To the outer senses, a being begins to exist at its birth, and ceases to exist at its death. This, however, only appears to be so, because these senses are unable to apprehend the concealed spirit. Birth and death are only for this spirit, transformations, just as the unfolding of the flower from the bud is a transformation enacted before our physical eyes. But if one desires to attain to direct perception of these facts, one must first awaken the spiritual vision by the means here indicated.

[ 16 ] In order to meet an objection which may be raised by certain people already possessed of some psychical experience, let it be at once admitted that there are shorter and simpler ways than this, and that there are persons who have direct perception of the actualities of birth and death, without having had to pass through all the stages of discipline here set forth. There are human beings endowed with high psychical faculties, to whom only a slight impulse is necessary for the developing of these powers. But they are exceptional, and the methods described above are safer, and are capable of general application. Similarly, it is possible to gain some knowledge of chemistry by special methods; but in order to make safer the science of chemistry, the recognised, reliable course must be followed.

[ 17 ] An error fraught with serious consequences would result from the assumption that the goal could be reached more simply by allowing the mind to dwell merely on an imaginary plant or a grain of seed. It may be possible by such means to evoke a force which would enable the soul to attain the inner vision. But this vision will be, in most cases, a mere figment of the imagination, for the main object is not to create arbitrarily a mental vision, but to allow the veritable nature of things to form an image within one's mind. The truth must well up from the depth of one's own soul, but the necromancer who shall call up the truth must not be one's ordinary self, but rather must the objects of one's perception themselves exercise their magical power, if one is to perceive their inner reality.

[ 18 ] After the disciple has evolved, by such means, the rudiments of spiritual vision, he may proceed to the contemplation of human nature itself. Simple appearances of ordinary life must be chosen first. But before making any attempts in this direction, it is imperative for the student to strive after an absolute sincerity of moral character. He must banish all thoughts of ever using the insight to be attained in these ways for his own personal benefit. He must be absolutely determined that under no circumstances will he avail himself, in an evil sense, of any power which he may gain over his fellow-creatures. This is the reason why everyone who desires to gain direct insight into the secrets of human nature must follow the golden rule of true Occultism. And the golden rule is this: For every one step that you take in the pursuit of the hidden knowledge, take three steps in the perfecting of your own character. He who obeys this rule can perform such exercises as that which is now explained.

[ 19 ] Begin by observing a person filled with a desire for some object. Direct your attention to this desire. It is best to choose a. time when this desire is at its height, and when it is not yet certain whether the object of the desire will be attained or not. Then surrender yourself entirely to the contemplation of that which you observe, but maintain the utmost inner tranquillity of soul. Make every endeavour to be deaf and blind to everything that may be going on around you at the same time, and bear in mind particularly that this contemplation is to evoke a state of feeling, in your soul. Allow this state of feeling to arise in your soul, like a cloud rising on an otherwise cloudless horizon. It is to be expected, of course, that your observation will be interrupted, because the person on whom it is directed will not remain in this particular state of mind for a sufficient length of time. Presumably you will fail in your experiment hundreds and hundreds of times. It is simply a question of not losing patience. After many attempts you will ultimately realise the state of feeling spoken of above as fast as the corresponding mental phenomena pass through the soul of the person under observation. After a time you will begin to notice that this feeling in your own soul is evoking the power of spiritual vision into the psychical condition of the other. A luminous image will appear in your field of vision. And this luminous image is the so-called astral manifestation evoked by the desire-state when under observation. Again we may describe this image as flame-like in appearance. It is yellowish red in the centre and reddish blue or lilac at the edges. Much depends upon treating such experiences of the inner vision with great delicacy. It will be best for you at first to talk of them to nobody except your teacher, if you have one. The attempt to describe such appearances in appropriate words usually only leads to gross self-deception. One employs ordinary terms not applicable to such purposes and therefore much too gross and clumsy. The consequence is that one's own attempt to clothe this vision in words unconsciously leads one to blend the actual experience with an alloy of imaginary details. It is, therefore, another important law for the occult inquirer that he should know how to observe silence concerning his inner visions. Observe silence even towards yourself. Do not endeavour to express in words that which you see, or to fathom it with reasoning faculties that are inadequate. Freely surrender yourself to these spiritual impressions without any mental reservations, and without disturbing them by thinking about them too much. For you must remember that your reasoning faculties were, at first, by no means equal to your faculties of observation. You have acquired these reasoning faculties through experiences hitherto confined exclusively to the world as apprehended by your physical senses, and the faculties you are now acquiring transcend these experiences. Do not, therefore, try to measure your new and higher perceptions by the old standard. Only he who has already gained some certainty in his observation of inner experiences ought to speak about them with the idea of thereby stimulating his fellow-beings.

[ 20 ] As a supplementary exercise the following may be set forth. Direct your observation in the same way upon a fellow-being to whom the fulfilment of some wish, the gratification of some desire has just been granted. If the same rules and precautions are adopted as in the previous instance, you will once more attain to spiritual perception. You will distinguish a flame-like appearance which is yellow in the centre and greenish at the edges.

[ 21 ] By such observations of one's fellow-creatures one may easily be led into a moral fault—one may become uncharitable. All conceivable means must be taken to fight against this tendency. Anyone exercising such powers of observation should have risen to the level, on which one is absolutely convinced that thoughts are actual things. He may then no longer allow himself to admit thoughts incompatible with the highest reverence for the dignity of human life and of human liberty. Not for one moment must he entertain the idea of regarding a human being as a mere object for observation. It must be the aim of self-education to see that the faculties for a psychic observation of human nature go hand in hand with a full recognition of the rights of each individual. That which dwells in each human being must be regarded as something holy, and to be held inviolate by us even in our thoughts and feelings. We must be possessed by a feeling of reverential awe for all that is human.

[ 22 ] For the present, only these two examples can be given as to the methods by which an insight into human nature may be achieved, but they will at least serve to point out the way which must be followed. He who has gained the inner tranquillity and repose which are indispensable for such observations, will already, by so doing, have undergone a great transformation. This will soon reach the point at which the increase of his spiritual worth will manifest itself in the confidence and composure of his outward demeanour. Again, this alteration in his demeanour will react favourably on his inner condition, and thus he will be able to help himself further along the road. He will find ways and means of penetrating more and more into the secrets of human nature, hidden from our external senses, and he will then also become ripe for a deeper insight into the mysterious correlations between the nature of man, and of all else that exists in the universe. By following this path, the disciple will approach closer and closer to the day on which he will be deemed worthy of taking the first steps of initiation; but before these can be taken one thing more is necessary. At first it may not be at all apparent to the student why it should be necessary, but he cannot fail to be convinced of it in the end.

[ 23 ] The quality which is indispensable to him who would be initiated is a certain measure of courage and fearlessness. He must absolutely go out of his way to find opportunities for developing these virtues. In the occult schools they are cultivated quite systematically; but life in this respect is itself an excellent school of occultism, nay, possibly the best. To face danger calmly, to try to overcome difficulties unswervingly, this is what the student must learn to do; for instance, in the presence of some peril, he must rise at once to the conception that fears are altogether useless, and ought not to be entertained for one moment, but that the mind ought simply to be concentrated on what is to be done. He must reach a point where it has become impossible for him ever again to feel afraid or to lose his courage. By self-discipline in this direction he will develop within himself quite distinct qualities which he needs if he is to be initiated into the higher mysteries. Just as man in his physical being requires nervous force in order to use his physical senses, so also, in his psychic nature, he requires the force which is only produced in the courageous and the fearless. For in penetrating to the higher mysteries he will see things which are concealed from ordinary humanity by the illusions of the senses. The latter, by hiding the higher verities from our gaze, are in reality our benefactors, since they prevent us from perceiving that which, if realised without due preparation, would throw us into unutterable consternation, things which we could not bear to behold. The disciple must be able to endure this sight. He loses certain supports in the outer world which were owing to the very illusions that encompassed him. It is truly and literally as if his attention were suddenly drawn to a certain danger by which for some time he had already been threatened unconsciously. He was not afraid hitherto, but now that he sees his peril, he is overcome by terror, although the danger has not been rendered any greater by his knowledge thereof.

[ 24 ] The forces at work in the world are both destructive and creative. The destiny of manifested beings is birth and death. The Initiate is to behold this march of destiny. The veil, which in the ordinary course of life clouds the spiritual eyes, is then to be uplifted. The man is himself, however, interwoven with these forces, with this destiny. His own nature contains destructive and creative powers. As undisguisedly as the other objects of his vision are revealed to the eye of the seer, his own soul is bared to his gaze. In the face of this self-knowledge, the disciple must not suffer himself to droop, and in this he will only succeed if he has brought with him an excess of the necessary strength. In order that this may be the case he must learn to maintain inner calm and confidence in the most difficult circumstances; he must nourish within himself a firm faith in the beneficent forces of existence. He must be prepared to find that many motives which have actuated him hitherto will actuate him no longer. He must needs perceive that he has hitherto often thought or acted in a certain manner, because he was still in the toils of ignorance. Reasons like those which influenced him before will now disappear. He has done many things out of personal vanity; he will now perceive how utterly futile all such vanity is in the eyes of the Initiate. He has done much from motives of avarice; he will now be aware of the destructive effect of all avariciousness. He will have to develop entirely new springs for his thought and action, and it is for this that courage and fearlessness are required.

[ 25 ] It is a matter especially of cultivating this courage and this fearlessness in the inmost depths of the mental life. The disciple must learn never to despair. He must always be equal to the thought: “I will forget that I have again failed in this matter. I will try once more, as though nothing at all had happened.” Thus he will fight his way on to the firm conviction that the universe contains inexhaustible fountains of strength from which he may drink. He must aspire again and again to the Divine which will uplift and support him, however feeble and impotent the mortal part of his being may prove. He must be capable of pressing on towards the future, undismayed by any experiences of the past. Every teacher of Occultism will carefully ascertain how far the disciple, aspiring to initiation into the higher mysteries, has advanced on the road of spiritual preparation. If he fulfils these conditions to a certain point, he is then worthy to hear uttered those Names of things which form the key that unlocks the higher knowledge. For Initiation consists in this very act of learning. to know the things of the universe by those Names which they bear in the spirit of their Divine Author. And the mystery of things lies in these Names. Therefore is it that the Initiate speaks another language than that of the uninitiated, for the former knows the Names by which things were called into existence.

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.

Last time I took the liberty of saying a few words about the task or the significance of a theosophical branch. What I said then is really something that cannot be emphasized enough, perhaps, for those who are in the theosophical movement or who want to participate in what is called theosophy today. Nothing is more common today than opposing, than fighting against mere theory, against mere teaching, and on the other hand, again, the desire for life, for sensation and feeling, for that which is not theory and not teaching; for no time has been so caught up in theories, teachings and dogmas - without one really knowing it - as the present one.

That seems to be a strong claim, and yet I would like to maintain it, even against those who object: Isn't that the dark ages, the dark dogma, and isn't our time beyond that? You will find a well-known magazine on display this week, in which the first page talks about a book that deals with Christianity and that comes from the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann. It is not obvious enough for us today to deal with the ideas of this writing. But a well-known fighter for the current renewal of Christian ideas has expressed ideas in the “future” in connection with this writing, which do give us food for thought because they are very widespread in our present time. Jentsch says that Hartmann said in this writing something that has often been said before, but that the logical mind of Eduard von Hartmann has stated as clearly as possible once again, so that everyone now knows that one can never again deal with any theoretical or systematic, doctrinal basis of religious views or truths. The time when religion was philosophically or theologically justified is over. Today we know full well – and in saying this he expresses something that will resonate in many hearts – that all systems of thought become entangled in contradictions and that only life, looking up into a world beyond, to a divine world order, can truly interest us.

The good man does not realize that, although he rejects all other dogmatics, two or three dogmas, even if they remain merely abstract, have a certain value for him. He wants to cast off all dogmatics, and he is precisely a dogmatist of the most pronounced kind. Although one does not want to be a dogmatist, and yet one is one, without knowing how strong one is as a dogmatist. This has also led to the fact that all similar movements - be it the “Giordano Bruno League” or the “Society for Ethical Culture” - more or less stand on a strictly doctrinal point of view, that it is therefore more important to them to spread teachings. Whether they are teachings about the right moral action or about monism or about a reform of our religious education in schools, which is to be replaced by a moral education that only amounts to a certain moral dogmatics - because something has to be taught after all - it makes no difference. So the old dogmas are replaced by new ones, by the dogmas of liberalism. Everywhere it comes down to doctrine, everywhere to the content of the word.

This is not at all necessary in the theosophical movement. I wanted to emphasize this point: Whatever we teach, whatever one or the other writes or teaches in his books, may it be high truths, and may there be many people who feel addressed by such truths because they represent a world system without contradictions and so on – that is not what matters in the theosophical movement. What matters is not what we teach, what we assert, what we say, but how we live together in the theosophical movement, what kind of attitude we develop. This attitude, which we should develop and want to develop, is that in our soul lives the consciousness of spiritual activity, the consciousness that thoughts, sensations, feelings are just as real forces in the world as magnetism, electricity, light or steam power. Not the one who admits that there is truth in the things spread in our literature is a true theosophist, but the one who, together with his fellow human beings, finds himself in the ever-recurring awareness in his soul that when he thinks, feels or wills something that may not even be translated into an external action, that it will then have an effect.

And when one of us speaks to such a congregation, which brings this awareness to him, then his words are quite different from the words of any other lecturer or any other speaker. Because then you will be sitting here in the knowledge that not only your physical body, which is here, is something real, but that your feelings and emotions and your thoughts, which pass through your mind, are as present as your physical body. And when you cross the threshold with this awareness and absorb the words that are spoken here, then these words will find the way they are meant to find into the world. The words of the theosophist are not spoken for the sake of one or the other agreeing or disagreeing with them. It is not whether they are true or not that is of primary importance, but the fact that they are forces. No matter how beautiful and excellent the thoughts expressed in the words of the individual may be, this is of less importance; what is of primary importance is through which channels these thoughts pass. A theosophical lodge or branch is the starting point for numerous channels through which these thoughts, when spoken, find their way out into the whole world.

But these words will only be heard in this way if the listeners are aware of a spiritual world. Then the speaker's powers are strengthened by the consciousness of each person present; then the spiritual forces are like those in an electric battery, and they penetrate out into the world like waves and are effective wherever the opportunity arises. It is this attitude, this consciousness, this life in the teaching that is important, not the content. Our teachings are drawn from the contemplation of the great spiritual connections of existence and from the contemplation of the nature of the human being. The goal is not that we know them, but that they have an effect. And this effect is important for the reason that these thoughts are the same ones through which everything in the world has happened for millions of years, ever since there has been a time. And as true as the world has become as it is now through these thoughts, so true will the world become in the future through the same thoughts, as it should and must become.

But there is a factor that must be involved in order for the right thing to happen in the future, and this factor is called “human being”, this factor is called “knowing and conscious human being”. We can say: There was a time when the great thoughts of the world order were realized by what we call the gods. At that time, man was still completely unconscious. At that time man could not yet participate in the building of the world. You see, man is now at the beginning of the development of his consciousness. He will approach times when this consciousness will draw ever wider and wider circles. Thus he will be ever more called upon to collaborate in what the gods once did. That is why we call our theosophy 'Divine Wisdom', because we have the wisdom from it, and because we must have our share if we want to set up our construction in the future.

In the future, man will be called upon in a broader sense to participate more consciously than he does today. Just as today's society creates a moral world order for itself, so too will a time come when spiritual forces will permeate the soul of man to a much greater extent than they do today, and the rigid social order will have a much deeper, more intense meaning. And just as man today only uses the laws of nature on the surface in order to do what lives and works in industry, so a time will come when man will use the spiritual laws of the world to make our institutions. Man will gain mastery over health and disease by applying the great laws of the world. There is a divine being in man at the beginning of his development, and to bring out this divine being and make it a creative one is the goal of Theosophy or 'divine wisdom'. Theosophy does not exist to satisfy the curiosity of those who want to know something about God, but to give people the strength to fulfill their task as a divinizing being. Although it may not happen in a short period of time, we will be able to realize this more and more.

What I would now like to summarize in one sentence may seem quite peculiar to some people, but it is a truth that the occultist knows as a natural scientist knows some other truth, some external truth. There is such a truth. I have already pointed this out in the twenty-seventh issue of Lucifer-Gnosis. It is connected with health in the world. It is a truth, admittedly, in the spiritual sense, and the connection is not so obvious. Ultimately, it is absolutely true that a healthy external physical body is the result of an inner life of the spirit in truth. To express myself more clearly, but somewhat remotely: a theosophical lodge, a theosophical branch is also a source of health. As you sit here together in the attitude of mind of which I have spoken, and absorb into your consciousness those truths which are nothing other than an echo of the great world thoughts that have created the harmonies of the world, tremble and vibrate through your soul the true thoughts of the world. And just as it is true that everything physical is an effect of the spirit, it is just as true that the state of the physical will be determined by the vibrations, by the waves that now tremble through your soul. If the thoughts that stimulate the wave vibrations of your soul are healthy, then these will also stimulate the physical vibrations, and these must then be healthy. By radiating these vibrations in all directions throughout the world, we are creating a source of health. A source of health emanates from the theosophical lodges. You will not notice this recovery in your life tomorrow or the day after. But in the future you may find that health is the result of the current pursuit of truth. We build healthy bodies for future generations by allowing our souls to cultivate the truth in spiritual life. We place ourselves in the whole course of time, we place ourselves in the course of the world, if we have the right faith.

Many say, yes: What harm has materialism done us? It has brought us many powerful devices and so much knowledge and understanding of life at all naturalist and medical gatherings. You can hear so much about life there. You can hear how great the hygienic progress is and so on, how much lower the mortality rate is today than it was a century ago. All this has been brought to us by the study of natural laws, a study that works with pure matter. But you also have to see deeper. You have to see that the outside does not always correspond to the inside, and that the outside is a very deceptive indicator of the inside.

Yes, we do not want to deny that great and magnificent things have been created in our age of materialism. But who created it? Here we come to a point that teaches us the difference between what man merely thinks, what merely lives in the human mind, and what lies deep in the bottom of his soul. You must strictly distinguish these two things. You go through the world and do your daily tasks according to what you think today. But what you think today is based on a reason that is not from today. What you think today is based on a deeper soul reason that is the result of the past. Even from a purely external point of view, even the materialistic thinkers of the nineteenth century grew out of the thinking of the past. They were educated in schools that had not yet fallen prey to materialism. Where did the great teachers of materialism such as Büchner, Vogt, Moleschott learn their subject, and why do their books have such a seductive quality? It is because their school was in a time when it had not yet been so taken over by materialism. In truth, we carry within us the essence of what we were in past lives. Indian philosophy tells us with profound wisdom: What you think today, you will become tomorrow. This applies to people and to all facts and beings in the world. Today, our thinking is superficial. Today, we are what we thought in the past.

They believe that we have overcome the old. People speak of the dark, gray Middle Ages. But the first times of the Middle Ages rest as our deepest being in our soul. At that time we lived in an earlier incarnation. What we think today, we will only be in a future incarnation. We should not be surprised that we think in a materialistic way, but nevertheless have reaped fruits that are the result of earlier epochs. What we have today is only the result of an age that we are inclined to look down on with ridicule and scorn. It was out of this deep realization that the impulse arose that led to the theosophical movement in the last third of the nineteenth century.

We are now facing the fruits of earlier times and earlier ways of thinking. But those who are watching over the signs of the times know that our thoughts, what we have in our souls today, determine our future life. This future will be an ever faster and faster unfolding of life. You must be aware that life does not proceed at the same pace in all ages. All those sitting here have heard many theosophical lectures, and I may therefore often say a word that is taken from deeper wisdom. We know that besides the physical plan there is the astral plan, and he who knows the higher life also knows how to predict the course of development in this higher world and to follow the course of progress.

If we compare the period from the time of Charlemagne to the end of the eighteenth century with the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, thus comparing a millennium with a century, we note the surprising fact that approximately the same things happened in both periods. The progress of the human wave was only ten times faster and it will be faster and faster in the time to come. Therefore, we must be prepared for the things that our thoughts bring about to become external reality in the not too distant future. This shows you the impulse from which the theosophical movement has flowed.

The recovery of the following generation should be due to our thoughts, just as we owe the progress we have made to the preceding generations. Those who look at the theosophical movement in this light may be called 'prophetic' in nature. But at all times, prophets have been, and had to be, those who really wanted to guide the course of events. For to determine what should happen in the future, on a large scale, one must first know what is lawful for that future. The great individuals who know what is lawful for the future have therefore given us the opportunity to get to know again the great laws of the world, which had been forgotten for so long, and to feel them for the spiritual and physical recovery of our race. Take this quite literally, that true thoughts have a healing physical effect, and that those thoughts, which are awakened in the theosophical lodge through our soul vibrations, are medical-medical forces that pulsate through humanity. Feel this truth, this truth of life, with all your soul and feel the importance in the theosophical movement, then you will come to another chapter and be able to grasp it.

There are many among us who say: Yes, the theosophical movement spreads a beautiful, high ethics, it spreads beautiful teachings that are consistent in themselves. But one should stick to it and not raise one's eyes and confuse people in mystical, mysterious, abstract and mental worlds. How many there are in the Theosophical Society who say: Leave us alone with the astral and mental realm, we want to develop the consciousness of unity. A certain shyness can be noticed towards what we know as the doctrine of the astral and mental. But one day it must be said: The one who wanted to exclude this teaching of these higher worlds from the theosophical movement was acting against the intentions that the great individuals, whom we call the masters, gave us. We might as well abandon the theosophical movement if we ban the teaching of the higher worlds from it. Certainly, one can speak of an ethic, of an ethical teaching today. This ethical teaching is already being introduced in schools. Ethical societies have been founded that attempt to establish and introduce general human duties without regard to this or that worldview, to this or that religious belief. But you can only establish duties based on what you know. But take a look at these teachings of duty. They are a true reflection, a perfect imprint of the material age in which we live. What you find in the way of new duties among the new enlightened ones is nothing more than the consequence of a materialistic world view, the consequence of what the eyes can see, ears hear and hands can touch. This is certainly idealism, and one can be a noble idealist in this field – without doubt. But this is the last consequence, the last outflow of a materialistic time.

And because even those who believe themselves to be idealists, and who aspire with their thoughts and feelings to a higher world and at least want to retain a dark foreboding of a higher world, because they want to start thinking, feeling and acting and not just talk, immediately fall back into materialistic habits of thought. Because there are many such people in the theosophical movement, the idea is spreading in it too: we should limit ourselves to such a materialistic ethics, to a unity consciousness that one cannot grasp and does not want to grasp because people are afraid of touching the higher worlds in a certain way.

The theosophists, who say that one should not speak of the astral and mental planes, also point out that a certain amount of theosophical truth can be spread with the mere intellect. They also want to hint at what is the deeper essence and foundation of all reality, as a divine reality underlying all realities. But to see it for themselves, to grasp it, to face it as it is, they shrink back from that. That would be just as if someone wanted to say: Yes, there is an electrical force, we want to admit it; but to apply it, to study it in order to construct electrical machines and so on, we do not want to get involved in that. That is dangerous, we could confuse ourselves, that gives the world a different picture. But such a one does not really approach the power of electricity. Rather, the right approach is taken by the one who says, “I want to get to know the power of electricity in every respect, so that I can bring it into existence and use it in the outer arrangements of men.” The first follower of the power of electricity would resemble the theosophist who says, “Let us not concern ourselves with the astral and mental worlds, but only with the consciousness of unity.” He would not apply spiritual power to the immediate present.

But if we do not want to just dream of the divine, not just have hunches, not just talk and at most feel vaguely, but actually implement it in reality, then we have to get to know it in its individual forms, as it reveals itself in the higher worlds, and then we can penetrate into the higher worlds. Just as we conquer our physical world by getting to know the individual forms of electrical power, we get to know our life as a tangible reality when we make this power our own. In the future, this power, which today is only realized in the world by universal beings, will be consciously realized and controlled by human beings.

It is not to satisfy our curiosity that we look into the spiritual world, not in vain do we seek to open the eyes of the mind and soul to those beings who do not live in the physical body, but as if from our passions and instincts and inner soul forces. It is not without reason that we rise to those beings whose body is not physical, whose body is woven from the same material as our thoughts are woven, to those beings whom we call the beings of the mental world. We rise to them in order to learn what needs to be woven into the world in which we live. That is a fundamental truth, that the spirit is always present. When you see a flower, you do not just see a physical object – today's science does not want to know anything about that: this flower is spirit, and its sensual form is only an expression of the spirit. I have said many times: if you have a surface of water and you let the water cool more and more, ice will form. Someone will now come and say: ice is real water, only in a different form. Then another person comes and says: But it is not water, it is solid and not liquid. Everyone knows that ice is condensed water, shaped by cold and differently formed. It is quite similar with the flower. In this flower you have only a differently formed spirit. Just as you can transform ice into water, so you can also dissolve the flower into its spiritual essence. Our physical world is nothing but astral and mental substance that has become too solid. All those sitting here are also mental beings and express themselves in their physical bodies in a condensed form. If you want to work for the greater good, you have to know the forces. If you want to create ice, you need to have cold and water. If you want to shape the physical world in the right way, you have to know the spirit.

You have to explore the forces of the spirit, not to satisfy our curiosity about the higher worlds and to learn all kinds of interesting things, but because we draw from them our knowledge for our practical life. What is astral today will be physical in the future; and what is mental today will be astral in the future and physical in the more distant future. When we speak of the astral plane in a theosophical lodge and allow these astral truths to permeate our soul and create vibrations in it, these souls will in the future be incarnated in people who are disposed to the astral plane. If we are then incarnated on earth again, these truths will flow out of us. What will then take physical shape through us are the things that descended into our soul as parts, as children of the astral world. We are here to bring down the laws of our work and life from the higher worlds. Therefore, the question cannot be whether one or the other likes to ascend to the higher worlds, but only whether we should and must ascend. That we should ascend, that there should come again an age which spiritualizes the world, which spreads spiritual views among mankind, this was the realization of the great beings who inspired the theosophical movement.

The age that lies behind us, the epoch in which man became material, was preceded by another. This era relied on great, exalted spiritual beings who were the teachers and guides of humanity. In ancient times, when great holy leaders guided humanity, all of these leaders were at least deeply imbued with the truths that the theosophical movement is spreading among humanity today, including the truth of the repeated incarnation of the human soul. If you imagine the relationship of the great teachers of antiquity to the masses, you will get an idea of the way of teaching in ancient times. Think back to those times and to the great advanced individuals who looked into the mysterious, secret structure of the world, which was closed to the eyes of others - as St. John expresses it in the Apocalypse. They spoke to people in a pictorial form that they could not yet grasp with their minds, but which they had to be prepared for in order to grasp with their minds in later incarnations. And that led to the form of language that was spoken at that time, to the language of legends, myths and fairy tales.

This is where you are sitting today. But all your souls were once embodied in those distant times, all your souls listened to one of the great teachers of the distant past as he told the fairy tales. These fairy tales were not of the same kind as those conceived from light, superficial fantasy, as today's are, but in these fairy tales the great truth of existence lived and breathed. And even if the truth was not expressed conceptually in them, it was not the conceptual that descended into your souls with the figures and persons of the fairy tale, but rather the intuitive perception. The fairy tales that you read in the Grimm's Fairy Tale Collection mostly contain such teachings of wisdom. When they were absorbed into the human soul, you learned them in such a way that today you are able to grasp the truths that were once contained in the fairy tale. It is the greatest untruth to say that fairy tales contain no truths. They contain the most ancient truths of the human race. The soul that allows the fairy tale to flow into it receives the seed of feeling for the truth, which later unfolds. In our youth, because everything in the world must repeat itself that has been there in the past, we must briefly relive those souls and states of mind that we went through in earlier times when we heard the eternal words of the saints of humanity. And when today a mother tells her child a fairy tale from the treasure of ancient times, then truth flows into the soul of the child. Thus the child is repeatedly prepared for his later age, when he is then able to absorb these truths with his mind.

If we look at it this way, we understand the course of time. We hear about the time that we have described, when the great mysteries of humanity were given, down to our time. Our time should become great through what man himself can produce. It had to gradually develop out of what was wrapped up in fairy tales, just as a child develops into greatness and independence.

It was good that humanity referred to itself, to its own soul, for a while. That is a middle state. And what has it led to? It has led to the saying: we cannot know anything about the beyond. We know nothing about what first opens up beyond death. It is a great immodesty to speak like that. Not those who know nothing about it can speak about it, but those who know something about it. Those who have correctly understood the theosophical movement in its deepest essence have also tried to grasp the right thing through this feeling. The insistence on itself has inevitably led man to ignorance. In the beginning, man's intellect sees only what lies on this side of death. So when he looks at himself, he cannot know anything of what lies beyond death. But they will get used to listening to the teachers who have already crossed the threshold of death in this life and who know how to tell about this life from their own experience.

What is happening here is giving rise to a new modesty. It is not immodesty when those who speak for the Theosophical Society emphasize time and again: “We do not speak our wisdom, no, we speak not our wisdom, we speak that which the great leaders and sages of humanity still teach us today. We do not speak of masters because we presume to draw the higher truths from ourselves, from our own source. We sit at the feet of the masters because we know that as long as we insist on our own rightness, as long as we do not make ourselves disciples of the masters, we must remain at the “I do not know” level. Out of this humility, we do not express our own thoughts. I speak through that which we want to inspire in the world, I speak the wisdom of the great, superior, wise guides who have left our stage of development behind them. And we try in every way to hear the voice of these masters. That is why teachings such as those in “Light on the Path” have been spread as the golden teachings of the theosophical movement. That sentence

Before the Masters can speak the voice, the wounding must be unlearned.

becomes our guiding principle. We try to unlearn the wounding. We try to break off the tip of each of our thoughts that wounds, because we know that words that hurt others reflect badly on the Word of the Master. Sharp thoughts that hurt reflect badly on the Master's words. But when our heart opens up like a bell flower, when our words are soft and mild and do not wound, then the voice of the masters, the word of the masters, goes through us purely and brightly like a bell.

You will hear the voice of the master when you can pass through the words that do not wound without resistance. Then you will hear the words of the master. Through such thoughts the thoughts of the masters flow. And when a person behaves in this way, the voice of the masters resounds through him, through what he thinks and says. The “masters of the harmony of thoughts and feelings” become audible to him. Those who have a true relationship with the Master speak in this sense. Only in this sense may they speak. Otherwise their word is not truth, but deception and falsehood. Everything that is brought as a message from the Master in any other sense is not true. It is true, however, that the thoughts and impulses of higher beings flow through the theosophical movement, if we do not want to spread our thoughts but make ourselves the instrument of those who today want to rekindle spiritual life in the world.

From the Questions and Answers

Can one cultivate the art of listening to the inner voice while out in nature?

The school of solitude in nature is very important. Most people cannot associate any true sensation with what was once called “silence in the forest”. And yet there is something very significant behind it. Imagine a very loud sound becoming weaker and weaker, and then imagine it falling completely silent. Otherwise, think of nothing. Then you will hear nothing around you. Imagine the same with light. You see light. The light grows dimmer and dimmer; then you see darkness. And yet, the darkness is not nothing. Darkness is as positive a sensation as whiteness. But you see, the nothingness of hearing and seeing is caused by the gradual weakening of light and sound. The complete darkness and soundlessness has occurred gradually. Ask yourself now, could this weakening and weakening of the sound not be continued even further? Below this nuance, down to where it is even quieter than when you hear nothing. In ordinary life, everyone admits this. One who always and always spends his money has nothing; but he can still have even less. He can get into debt. Then he has even less than nothing. When the tone goes deeper and deeper, you come to the point where you hear the tone again on the other side of nature. But first you have to learn to live the voice. In the beginning, this can be felt as a mood. If you did such exercises, you would already find that on the other side of the mental world, the new day is born for spiritual ears. Those who can do this are on the right track. A lot can be achieved with it. In our cities, however, it is almost impossible. It is easy in nature, where spring really greens, where the trees, the leaves and the forest look different every day. It is not for nothing that the occult sites where culture was cultivated were located in nature.

Are plant colors audible? I read a sentence from Stifter: “I heard the blue color of the flower.

Sounds in colors, and not just colors in sounds, also appear to have a less extensive sensitivity. This goes even further, that when another 'I' is pronounced, certain people have a certain color in their consciousness. The beginning of the Ninth Symphony has already been recomposed in colors. The physiologist Nussbaumer has studied this, as have French physiologists.

Do cities also have certain colors?

Yes, Berlin is gray, Vienna is red. The Gothic church is a piece of music in the astral, a sound structure in the mind.

I would like to say a few words about the building idea, with the supporting, direct view of the building. From the outset, the view could arise that if one must first speak about such a building, it indicates that it does not make the necessary impression as an artistic work; and in many cases, what is thought about the building of Dornach, about the Goetheanum in the world, is thought from a false point of view influenced by a sensory view. For example, the opinion has been spread that the building in Dornach is meant to symbolize all kinds of things, that it is a symbolizing building. In reality, you will not find a single symbol when looking at this building, as is popular in mystical and theosophical societies. The building should be able to be experienced entirely from artistic perception and has also been created from these artistic perceptions in its forms, in all its details. Therefore, it must work only through what it is itself. Explaining has become popular, and people then want explanations; but in mentioning this here before you, I also say that such explaining of an artistic work always seems to me to be not only half, but almost completely unartistic, and that I will now give you a kind of lecture in the presence of the building, a lecture that I fundamentally dislike, if only because I have to speak to you in abstract terms about the details that arose in my mind when designing the building, the models and so on, and what was created from life. I would rather speak to you about the building as little as possible.

It is already the case that a new stylistic form, a new artistic form of expression, is viewed with a certain mistrust in the present. I can still hear a word that I heard many decades ago when I was studying at the Technical University, where Ferstel gave his lectures. In one of them, he says: “Architectural styles are not invented, an architectural style grows out of the character of a nation.” Therefore, Ferstel is also opposed to the invention of any new architectural style or type of building. What is true about this idea is that the style that is to stylize the characteristics of a people must emerge not from an abstraction, but from a living world view, which is at the same time a world experience and, from this point of view, comprehensively encompasses the chaotic spiritual life of contemporary humanity. On the basis of this thoroughly correct idea, it becomes necessary to transform what was peculiar to previous architectural styles into organic building forms by incorporating the symmetrical, the geometrically static, and so on.

I am well aware of what can be said, and rightly said from a certain point of view, by someone who has become inwardly attuned to previous architectural styles, against what has been attempted here in Dornach as an architectural style: the transference of geometrical-symmetrical-static forms into organic forms. But it has been attempted. And so you can see in these forms of construction that this building here is an as yet imperfect first attempt to express the transition from these geometric forms of construction to the organic. It is certain that the development of humanity is moving towards these forms of construction, and when we again have the impulses of clairvoyant experience, I believe that these forms of construction will play the first, leading role. This building should be understood in the same way through its relationship with the organizing forces of nature as the previous buildings are understood through their relationship with the geometrical-static-symmetrical forces of nature. This building is to be viewed from this point of view, and from this point of view you will understand how every detail within the building idea for Dornach must be completely individualized here. Just think of the lobe of your ear: it is a very small part of the human organism, but you cannot well imagine that an organic form such as the lobe of the ear is suited to grow on the big toe. This organ is completely bound to its place within the organism. Just as you find that within the whole organism a supporting organ is always shaped in such a way that it can have a static-dynamic effect within the organism, so too the individual forms in our building in Dornach had to be such that they could serve the static-dynamic forces. Every single form had to be organized in such a way that it could and had to be in its place what it now appears to be. Look at each arch from this point of view, how it is formed, how it flattens out towards the exit, for example, how it curves inwards towards the building itself, where it not only has to support but also to express support in an organic way, thereby helping to develop what only appears to be completely unnecessary in organic formation. Ordinary architecture leaves out what goes beyond the static, which the organism develops. But one senses that the building idea has been transferred to the organic design of the forms, and that this is also necessary.

You will have to look at every column from this point of view; then you will also understand that the ordinary column, which is taken out of the geometric-static, has been replaced by one that does not imitate the organic – everything is so that it is not imitated naturalistically – but transferred into organically made structures. It is not an imitation of an organic structure. You will not understand it if you look for a model in nature. But you will understand it if you understand how human beings can live together with the forces that have an organizing effect in nature and how, apart from what nature itself creates, such organizing forms can arise. So you will see in these column supports how the expansion of the building, the support, the inward pointing, and, in the same way as, say, in the upper end of the human thigh, the support, the walking, the walking and so on, is embodied statically, but organically and statically. From this point of view, I also ask you to look at something like the structure with the three perpendicular formations at the top of the stairs here below. The feeling arises here of how a person feels when he climbs the stairs. He must have a feeling of security, of spiritual unity in all that goes on in this building, indeed in everything he sees in this building. Everything came to me entirely from my own intuitive perception. You may believe it or not, but this form came to me entirely from my own artistic intuition. As I said, you may believe it or not, but it was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this form is somewhat reminiscent of the shape of the three semicircular crescents in the human ear, which, when injured, cause fainting, so that they directly express what gives a person stability. This expression, that stability is to be given to the human being in this structure, comes about in the experience of the three perpendicular directions. This can be experienced in this structure without having to engage in abstract reflection. One can remain entirely in the artistic.

If you look at the wall-like structures while handling them, you will find that natural forces have been poured into the forms, but in such a way that these forms, which are radiator covers, are first worked out of the concrete material of the building, and then further up out of the material of the wood, and that they are thereby metamorphosed. You will find that in these structures the process of metamorphosis is elevated to the artistic. It is the idea of the building that should have a definite effect on such radiator covers, which are designed in such a way that you immediately feel the purpose and do not need to explore it intellectually first. This is how these elementary forms, half plant-like, half animal-like, came to be felt. Only after having shaped them out of the material does one realize that they must be so. And it also follows that it is necessary to metamorphose them, depending on whether they are in one place or another, depending on whether they are long and low or narrower and higher. All this does not result from calculating the form, but the forms shape themselves out of the feeling in their metamorphosis, as for example here, where we have come so far, where the building is a concrete structure in its basement and where one has to empathize with the design of what concrete is. You enter here at the west gate. This is the room where you can leave your coat. The staircase, which leads up here on the left and right, takes you up to the wooden structure containing the auditorium, the stage and adjoining rooms.

Please follow me up the stairs to the auditorium.

We are now entering a kind of foyer. You will notice the very different impression created by the wooden cladding compared to the concrete cladding on the lower floor.

I would like to note here: When you have to work with stone, concrete or other hard materials, you have to approach it differently than when you have to work with soft materials, such as wood. The material of wood requires you to focus all your senses on the fact that you have to scrape corners, concaves, and hollows out of the soft material, if I may use the expression. It is scraping, scraping out. You deepen the material, and only by doing so can you enter into this relationship with the material, which is a truly artistic relationship. While when working with wood you only succeed in coaxing out of the material that which gives the forms when you focus your attention on deepening, when working with hard material you do not have to do with deepening. You can only develop a relationship with the hard material by applying it, by working convexly, by applying raised surfaces to the base surfaces, for example when working with stone. Grasping this is an essential part of artistic creation, and it has been partially lost in more recent times.

You will see when we enter the auditorium how each individual surface, each capital, is treated individually. A capital in this organic structure can only be such that one feels: in what follows each other, a kind of repetition cannot be created, as is otherwise the case with symmetrical-geometric-static architectural styles. In this building, which is the product of an organic idea, you have only a single axis of symmetry, running from west to east. You will find a symmetrical arrangement only in relation to this, just as you can find only a single axis of symmetry for a higher organism, not out of arbitrariness but out of the inner organization of forces of the entity in question.

At this point, I would like to mention that the treatment of the walls also had to be completely different under the influence of the organic building idea than it was before. A wall was for earlier architects what demarcates a space. It had the effect of being inside the room. This feeling had to be abandoned in this building. The walls had to be designed in such a way that they were not felt as a boundary, but as something that carries you out into the vastness of the macrocosm; you have to feel as if you are absorbed, as if you are standing inside the vastness of the cosmos. The walls had to be made transparent, so to speak, whereas in the past every effort was made to give the wall such artificial forms that it was closed and opaque. You will see that the transparent is used artistically at all, and that was driven from elementary foundations into the physical in these windows, which you see here and which you will see under construction. If you see windows in the sense of the earlier architectural style, you will actually have to have the healthy sense that they break through the walls, they do not fit into the architectural forms, but they only fit in through the principle of utility. Here, artistic feeling will be needed down to the last detail. There was a need to present the wall in such a way that it is not something closed, but something that expands outwards, towards infinity. I could only achieve this by remembering that, using a single-colored windowpane, you can, as it were, scratch out designs using a kind of etching method, a glass etching method. And so monochromatic window panes were purchased, which were then worked on in such a way that the motifs one wanted could be scratched out with the diamond pencil. So for this purpose, a glass etching technique was conceived, and the windows emerged from that.

When you consider the motifs of the windows, you must not think that you are dealing with symbolic design alone. You can see it already on this larger windowpane: nothing is designed on these windowpanes other than what the imagination produces. There are mystics who develop a mysticism with superficial sentences and strange ideas and constantly explain that the physical-sensual outer world is a kind of maja, an illusion. People often approach you and say that so-and-so is a great mystic because he always declaims that the outer world is a maja. There is something about the human physical countenance that is maya, that is thoroughly false, that is something else in truth. What appears on this windowpane is not something that symbolizes; it is a being that is envisaged, only it does not look to the spiritual observer as it appears to the senses. The larynx is the organ of vision for the etheric; the larynx is already Maja as a physical larynx, and that which is a mere physical-sensual view is not reality. What is behind it spiritually? The spiritual fact that what is whispered into the ear, left and right, are world secrets. So that one can truly say: the bull speaks into the left ear, the lion into the right ear. If one wants to express this as a motif in a picture or in words, then one can only attach to the word that which is already in the picture itself. However, one must be clear about the fact that one can only understand such a picture if one lives in the world view from which it has emerged. A person who does not have a living Christian feeling will also not be able to behave sympathetically towards the pictorial representations that Christian art has produced.

The artist experiences a lot when he lives into a vision; but such an experience must not be translated into abstract thoughts, otherwise it will immediately begin to fade. An example of the artist's experience is this: When Leonardo da Vinci painted his Last Supper, which is now so dilapidated that it can no longer be appreciated artistically, people thought it was taking too long. He could not finish the Judas because this Judas was to emerge from the darkness. Leonardo worked on this painting for almost twenty years and was still not finished. Then a new prior came to Milan and looked at the work. He was not an artist; he said that Leonardo, this servant of the church, should finally finish his work. Leonardo replied that he could do it now; he had always only sketched the figure of Judas because he had not found the model for it; now that the prior was there, he had found the model for Judas in him, and the painting would now be quickly completed. - There you have such an external, concrete experience. Such external, concrete experiences play a much greater role in all the artist's work than can be expressed in such brief descriptions.

Dear attendees, you have entered the building through the room below the organ and the room for the musical instruments. If you look around after entering, you will see that the architectural idea is initially characterized by the floor plan depicting two not quite completed circles, whose segments interlock. It seems to me that the necessity for shaping the building in this way can already be seen when approaching the building from a certain distance and if one has an idea of what is actually supposed to take place in the building. I will now explain in more detail what the building idea is. First of all, I would like to point out that you can see seven columns arranged in symmetry solely against the west-east axis, closing off the auditorium on the left and right as you move forward. These seven columns are not formed in such a way that a capital shape, a pedestal shape or an architrave shape above it is repeated, but the capital, pedestal and architrave shapes are in a continuous development.

The two columns at the back of the organ area have the simplest capital and pedestal motifs: forms that, to a certain extent, strive from top to bottom, with others striving towards them from bottom to top. This most primitive form of interaction between above and below was then metamorphosed into the following forms of architraves, capitals and pedestals. This progressive metamorphosis came about through artistic perception, in that, when I was developing the model, I tried to recreate what occurs in nature. What takes place in nature, where an unnotched leaf with primitive forms is first formed at the bottom of the plant, and then this primitive form metamorphoses the further up it goes, into the indented, intricately designed leaf, even transformed into petal, stamen and pistil, which must be imitated - albeit not in a naturalistic way. One must place oneself inwardly and vitally into it and then create from within, as nature creates and transforms, as it produces and metamorphoses. Then, without reflection, but out of much deeper soul forces than those of reflection, one will achieve such transformations of the second out of the first, of the third out of the second, and so on.

It can be misunderstood that, for example, in the fifth column and in the architrave motifs above the fourth column, something like a kind of Mercury staff appears. One could now believe that the caduceus was placed in these two positions by the intellect. I believe that someone who had worked from the intellect would probably have placed the caduceus in the architrave motif and below it - the intellect has a symmetrizing effect - the column motif with the caduceus. The person who works as we have done here finds something else. Here, with the motif that you see as the fourth capital motif, only by sensing the metamorphosing transformation, without me even remotely thinking of forming a Mercury staff, this Mercury staff emerged as a petal emerges from the sepal. I did not think of a past style, but of the transformation of the fourth capital motif from the third. One can see how the forms that have gradually emerged in the development of humanity have developed quite naturally.

Then we come to the epoch when man intervenes in the evolution of his soul-life. When this is individualized and worked into the column, it follows later what is worked on this architrave surface earlier. That is why you see the caduceus on the capital later than on the architrave.

A plant that is thin and delicate develops different leaf shapes than a sturdy one. Compare just a shepherd's purse with a cactus, and you will see how the filling and shaping of space is expressed in the figurative design. At the same time, a cosmic secret emerges in it, as one feels evolution all around. There has been much talk of evolution in recent times, but little feeling for it. One only thinks it out with the mind. One speaks of the evolution of the perfect from the imperfect. Herbert Spencer and others have done much harm in this regard, and the idea has arisen that is completely justified in the mind, but which does not do justice to the observation of nature: In intellectual thinking, one starts from the assumption that in evolution, the simpler forms are at the beginning and that these then later become more and more differentiated. Spencer in particular has worked with such evolutionary ideas. But evolution does not show it that way. There is indeed a differentiation, a complication of the forms; but then one comes to a middle and then the forms simplify again. What follows is not more complicated, but what follows is simpler again. You can see this in nature itself. The human eye, which is the most perfect, has, so to speak, achieved greater simplicity than the eye forms of certain animals, which, for example, have the xiphoid process, the fan, which has disappeared again as the eye in evolution moved further up to become human.

Thus it is necessary that man connects with the power of nature, that he feels the power of nature, that he makes the power of nature his own power and creates out of this feeling. So it has been attempted to design this building in an entirely organic way, to design every detail in its place as it must be individualized from the whole. You can see, for example, that the organ is surrounded by sculpted motifs that make it appear as if the organ is not simply placed in the space, but that it works out of the entire organic design as if growing out of it. So everything in this building must be tried to be made in the same way.

You see here the lectern on which I stand. With it, the first consideration was to create something in this place that would, as it were, grow out of the other forms of construction, but in such a way that it would also express the idea that from here, through the word, one strives to express everything that is to be expressed in the building. At the moment when a person speaks here, the forms of the spoken word must continue in such a way that, like the nose on a face, its form reveals what the whole person is. Anyone who has made artistically inspired nose studies can turn a nose study into the “architectural style”, the physiognomy of the whole person. No one can ever have a nose other than the one they have, and there could never be a lectern here other than the one that is here. However, if one asserts this, it is meant in one's own view; one can only act in one's own view.

That an attempt has been made here to truly metamorphose the body can be seen from the fact that the motifs here in the glass windows are in part really such motifs that arise as images of the soul's life. For example, look at the pink window here. You will see on the left wing something coming out like the west portal of the building; on the right wing you see a kind of head. There you see a person sitting on a slope, looking towards the building, and another person looking towards the head. This has nothing to do with speculative mysticism; it is an immediate inner visual experience. This building could not have been created in any other way than by mysteriously sensing the shape of the human head in it, and the organic power on the one hand and the shape of the human head on the other hand result in the intuitive shape of the building. Therefore, the person sitting on the slope sees the metamorphosis of the building in his soul, sometimes as a human head, sometimes as the building revealing itself to the outside world. This provides a motif that leads, if I may say so, to an inner experience.

There you will find in the blue windowpane a person who is aiming – on the left – to shoot a bird in flight. In the right-hand pane you will see that the person has fired. The bird in the left-hand field is in a sphere of light. Around the man you will see all kinds of figures vividly alive in the astral body, one when he is about to shoot, the other when he has fired. This is a reality, but one from mundane life. I can imagine that those who always want to be dripping with inner exaltation may be offended if they experience such things as they are meant here, simply as a human being shooting. Yes, I was pleased when an Italian friend once used a somewhat crude expression about theosophists, who are such mystics. The friend who had already died said it, and I may say it in the very esteemed company here, because the person concerned was a princess, and what a princess says, that can also be said. She glossed over such people, who always want to live in a kind of inner elevation, by saying that they are people with a “face up to their stomachs”. I also repeat her not quite correct German. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the same idea was also implemented in painting. I can only talk about the actual painting, about spiritual painting, by referring to the small dome. Only in the small dome was it possible for me to carry out what I have indicated as the challenge of a newer painting: that behind the effort to create a window experience, drawing disappears altogether. I had one of my characters in the first mystery drama express this as follows: that the forms appear as the work of color. For when one feels with the feeling for painting, then one feels the drawing, which is carried into the pictorial, as a lie. When I draw the horizontal line, it is actually a reproduction of something that is not there at all. When I apply the blue sky as a surface and the green below, the form arises from the experience of the color itself. In this way, every pictorial element can be formed. Within the world of color itself lies a creative world, and the one who feels the colors paints what the colors say to each other in creation. He does not need to stick to a naturalistic model; he can create the figures from the colors themselves. It is the case that nature and also human life already have a certain right to shape the moral out of the colored with a necessity.

Yesterday, Mr. Uehli quite rightly pointed out how newer painters already have an intuitive sense of such effects resulting from light and dark, from the colors themselves, and how they come to paint a double bass next to a tin can. They are pursuing the right thing in itself, that it is only a matter of seeing how the light gradates in its becoming colored when it falls on a double bass and then continues to fall on a tin can. That is the right thing. But the wrong thing is that this is again based on naturalistic experience. If you really live in the colors, it arises from the colored something other than a can and a bass violin. The color is creative, and how it puts together, but it is a necessity of the mere colored out, you have to experience. Then you do not make a can next to a bass violin, because that is again outside the colored.

So here I have tried to paint entirely from the colors. If you see the reddish-orange spot here next to the blue spot and the black spot, this is initially a vivid impression from the colors. But then the colors come to life, then figures emerge from them, which can even be interpreted afterwards. But just as little as one can make plants with the human mind here, so one can just as little paint something on them that one has thought up with the human mind. One must first think when the colors are there, just as the plant must first grow before one can see it.

And so a Faust figure with Death and the Child emerged. The entire head emerged from the colors with all its figuration. Only in the human soul does a spiritual-real object form by itself.

For example, you can see above the organ motif how something is painted that a philistine, a person attached to the sensual world, will naturally perceive as madness. But you will no longer perceive it as madness when I tell you the following: If you close your eyes, you will, as it were, feel something inside the eye, like two eyes looking at each other. What takes place inwardly can certainly be developed further in a certain way. Then what, when viewed in a primitive way, looks like two eyes glowing out of the darkness towards you, and what is experienced inwardly, can be shaped in such a way that, when projected outwards, an entire beyond, an entire world-genesis can be seen in it. Here again an attempt has been made to create out of color what the eye experiences when, by narrowing the pupil, it sees itself in the darkness. One need not merely read the secrets of the mind, one can see them - suddenly they are there.

In a similar way, attempts have been made to bring other motifs into reality, again not from the naturalistic imitation of signs and forms, but entirely from color. The ancient Indians and their inspiration, the seven Rishis, who in turn were inspired by the stars to paint with an open head, is, if you do it that way now, abstract, actually nonsense; I say that quite openly. But when one experiences what was experienced in the ancient Indian culture in the relationship between the disciple and the guru, the teacher, one feels as if the ancient Indian did not have a skullcap, but as if it had evaporated, and as if he were not a human being who lives in his skin, but one feels as a sevenfold being, as if his soul power were composed of the seven soul rays of the holy Rishis of ancient Atlantis, enlightening him, and that he then communicated to his world that which he revealed, not from his own spirit but from the spirit of the holy Rishis. The more one works out what is said here, the more one comes closer to what has been painted here. The intuitive perception has first placed itself in ancient India, in ancient Atlantis. That which can be seen there has been painted on the wall here, and only afterwards can one speculate when it is there. This is how the message can relate to artistic creation. This is how everything in this building should actually come about.

You will find this building covered with Nordic slate. The building idea must be felt through to the point of radiating outwards. The slate, or the material used to cover it, must shine in a certain way in the sunlight. It seemed to happen by chance here – but of course there is always an inner necessity underlying it. When I saw the Nordic slate in Norway from the train, I knew that it was the right material to cover the building. We were then still able to have the slate shipped from Norway in the pre-war period. You will certainly feel the effect when you look at the building from a distance in good sunshine.

My main concern while the building was being constructed was the acoustics. During the construction, the building was of course also provided with scaffolding on the inside so that work could be carried out upstairs. This did not produce any acoustics, the acoustics were quite different, that is, they were a caricature of acoustics. Now it so happens that the acoustics of the building were also conceived from the same building idea. My idea was that I could expect the acoustic question to be solved for the lecturer by occult research. You know how difficult it is; you cannot calculate the acoustics. You will see how it has been achieved, but to a certain degree of perfection, to carry out the acoustics. You may now ask how these seven pillars, which contain the secret of the building, are connected with the acoustics. The two domes within our building are so lightly connected that they form a kind of soundboard, just as the soundboard of a violin plays a role in the richness of sound. Of course, since the whole, both the columns and the dome, are made of wood, the acoustics will only reach perfection over the years, just as the acoustics of a violin only develop over the years. We must first find a way to have a profound effect on the material, to be able to feel through the building idea what is now sensed as the acoustics of this building. You will understand that the acoustics must be sensed best from the organ podium. You will also see that when two people here in the middle talk to each other, an echo can be heard coming down from the ceiling. This seems to be an indication from the world being that one may only speak from the stage or the lectern within the building and that the building itself does not actually tolerate useless chatter from any point.

Now, dear attendees, I have tried to tell you what can be said in this regard while looking at the building. I will have to supplement what I have spoken today in my presentation of the building idea, which I will give at the final event next Saturday. Then I will say what can still be said. Now we have to clear the hall for the next lecture.

[Ladies and gentlemen present!

The last time I drew attention to the fact that I wanted to talk about Pythagorean teaching. Pythagoras had founded a school in Lower Italy. It was not so much a school, but rather a discipleship whose spiritual leader was Pythagoras. He formed a doctrine. We can no longer say how much of it belonged to Pythagoras and how much to his disciples.

The world view of the Pythagoreans emerges before us, and this shows itself to be one of the most profound world views we have. Since it is very important for us to really introduce the things we are dealing with, I would like to introduce a modern Pythagorean before I mention Pythagoras himself, a Pythagorean who lived in Germany himself and whose world view always seems to me like a forecourt to Pythagoras.

You can understand this world view much better if you are familiar with the works and views of Baron von Hardenberg - Novalis, a poet of a thoroughly mystical nature. No one who knows his writings will doubt this.

Take his "Apprentices at Sais". This is something that can only be understood in its esoteric meaning. But anyone who knows the personality of Novalis - he was born in 1772 and died in 1801, so he was 29 years old - will understand this. This Novalis seems to have remained the most innocent youth throughout his life. He seems to us more like the revelation of an unearthly individuality than an earthly personality. It is quite impossible to understand that this immersion, this contemplation, could have been acquired in his immense youth.

When we read his "Heinrich von Ofterdingen", we find that he drew from direct sources, from the sources of mysticism. He then incorporated these into his novel "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" and thus showed that he understood the mysticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. If we look at his basic ideas, we will find a certain similarity with other mystics.

He searched for the "Blue Flower. People have often mocked this "Blue Flower. We will understand each other better if we remember Goethe's "Prophecies of Bakis", where he speaks of the serpent's thread and the flower, where he says that man can walk the path that is long and narrow. When man then walks this path, he sees knots before him. He also sees the knot in which lives are tied together. Behind him, he trails a snake. The snake disappears and the knot transforms into a flower in front of him.

This image, which Goethe repeatedly refers to, is egoism, the approach to the highest spirituality or deepest knowledge. The symbol for this is the "blue flower. It is also a symbol of that which arises for man as an entanglement of life when he progresses along the path of knowledge. It is this "Blue Flower" that Novalis has in mind for his Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

We also find this flower in Master Klingsohr, who can prophesy. The future lies open before him. Goethe says: The future also lies open before him who really has a complete overview of the past. [...] - Master Klingsohr reveals the future to Heinrich von Ofterdingen. This satisfies him to such an extent that he is able to see the individualized Blue Flower in the daughter, as he has progressed so far that he can see the highest in the female being.

Matilda dies away from Henry of Ofterdingen. He decides to die after his beloved. For him, reality turns into a dream. What he was previously inclined to regard as a dream, the higher spiritual world, is now reality. He no longer finds this highest in the individual being, but he

finds it in other beings as well. He finds a second girl. It is the same for him. He finds Mathilde again in Cyane. She is like a new embodiment of him. He lives a life of the afterlife.

We find the idea of this in his "Apprentices of Sais". A beautiful fairy tale is woven into it about the boy Hyacinth, who loves the girl Rosenblüthe. Only the trees and birds of the forest know of this love. Then we find Hyacinth changed. He is overcome by a longing to seek something deeper. He leaves Rosenblüthe without sufficient reason. Then he comes to the evil old man, who plants in him the longing to seek the mother of all things, or the veiled maiden. He sets off on his journey to the temple of Isis, comes upon an image, and when he unveils it, he finds nothing but roses. [He finds the beloved as the solution to the riddle, as the veiled image of Sais.

This is reminiscent of the higher concept of "Know thyself", as he expressed it in an epigram. He stands before the veiled image at Sais. He lifts the veil and - wonder of wonders - he finds himself. A magical individualism consists in the fact that one can find the infinite in the finite, [that one can turn the spirit into immediate reality].

So in Novalis we undoubtedly find a mystical personality. So if we assume that in Novalis we are dealing with a deep-seated, mystical nature, and if we then get to know him, he does not appear to us as a mystic, as he has just been described, but as a resurgent old Pythagorean disciple.

When we let Novalis pass us by, when he seems more like a memory, and when we then see how this touch of the earthly, how this personality nevertheless stands firmly in life, has tendencies that we would least expect to find in such romantically inclined natures, then we are referred to the Pythagoreans as to fleeting ghosts.

We must by no means equate this view and philosophical contemplation, as we have it of Romanticism in him, with the view of the other Romantics, with contemporaries of his who lack any depth. Friedrich Wilhelm Schlegel or Tieck, [E-T.A.] Hoffmann and so on must not be confused [with him]. But anyone who allows Novalis to have an effect on them will not be tempted to make such a confusion. What is astonishing about Novalis - despite his [poetic] nature - is that he is one of the most enthusiastic admirers of everything mathematical. He has a thoroughly educated, mathematical psyche, an immediate revelation of what he calls the magical in nature. In this he finds the law of the spirit. That which he who wishes to enter the higher regions would like to leave behind, we find in Novalis as the main thing, as that which led him to emphasize the magical in his [idealism]. In the concatenation of basic mathematical concepts he sees the most intriguing revelation of the mystery of the world. He sees free matter at the bottom of things. Mathematics is the foundation on which existence rests, it is therefore nothing other than the highest form, the purest form of spirituality.

If we find this as the basis of his view, then he appears to us as a representative of Pythagoreanism. We can understand Pythagoreanism much better if we imagine it like Novalis. The Pythagorean soul must be imagined in this way, then we arrive at where Novalis stands; [just as] Pythagoras was able to arrive at the view that the basic structure, the basic essence, the basic spirit of the universe is actually given in the connection between numerical quantities and spatial quantities in this harmony.

If we want to gain an insight into a Pythagorean soul from the first elementary beginnings, we must imagine it in the following way. The pupil was led up step by step to the knowledge to which he was to come. He was guided in a very careful way. The first was mathematical knowledge, the second astronomical. Astronomy was preferably mathematical. The regularity resulted from the numerical relationship in the universe. He was first introduced to these numerical relationships. Then he was gradually led on to the knowledge of man himself. The fulfillment of the desire "Know thyself" [came] last. First he was introduced to mathematics.

How can one imagine that man can actually come to the idea that mathematics is the spiritual foundation of the entire universe? How can this be imagined in the form of harmony, formed in space and time? If we immerse ourselves in those areas of space and time which outwardly already show a regular grouping, such as the movement of the celestial bodies, if we immerse ourselves in that, then we have basically given nothing other than an embodied mathematics, an embodied arithmetic, in this construction of the celestial vault that we perform in our minds.

No human being can actually find anything of a mathematical structure, of a spatial structure of geometric figures in the world and in reality, if he has not first formed these mathematical figures in his mind. If someone described a circle or an ellipse, we would not know what it is that he is describing as an object. We would be able to trace the line in the various places in space and connect these places. But we would not be able to connect a concept with the whole line that describes the object if we had not already formed the concept. We can draw a star and then think about what kind of line the star describes. But only then can we find the figure if we already have it in our minds. The same is also the case with other things, even if we take the numerical relationships. We will only recognize the objects outside in space in their certain mutual numerical relationships, in their numerical diversity, if we have formed these relationships in our minds. If we know that 2 x 2 = 4, then we can also recognize it outside in space. We would not be able to connect any concepts with reality, we would not be able to grasp them at all, they would pass us by like nothing, they would not be there for us at all, if we had not formed the images in a purely spiritual way in our psyche.

So it is that the Pythagoreans could say: That which I see outside must also be contained in a certain way in my mind. What emerges from the source point of my soul is the same as what I perceive outside as the primordial ground of the world itself. The Pythagoreans thought about this more deeply and said to themselves: "It is impossible that two things that are completely separate from each other, spirit outside and world inside, [merely] exist side by side [and do not agree]. The coincidence would only have meaning if what is in the spirit is exactly the same as what is outside in space. If the circle, the ellipse that I perceive within me, the numerical relationships, are the same as those outside, which I see in the outer world, then it makes no sense at all if [the Pythagorean] does not have something that he forms within himself. If he sees the spirit of things and has it within him, then it has only one meaning.

Therefore the Pythagorean did not initially think like the philosophers of the nineteenth century under the influence of Kant. He did not ask: How is it that my imagination inside me corresponds to the things outside? My experience is quite different. That is the unquestionable unity of what is outside and what is in my mind. This is how the Pythagorean thinks.

It makes no difference whether I take the ideas of the Pythagoreans' astronomy or apply the new ones. It doesn't matter at all. So when the Pythagorean sees the celestial body describing an orbit in the form of an ellipse, it is a direct experience for the Pythagorean that the ellipse that he perceives within himself and the ellipse that exists outside as the orbit of a star are not two ellipses, but only one. And that is experience.

Schelling also expressed this, and this makes the matter clear in the simplest way. He has taken up the "power of attraction that physicists have always [known]. They imagined that objects exert a force of attraction on each other. The earth attracts the moon, the sun attracts the earth. When the sun attracts the earth, it acts on the earth. It is difficult to attribute an effect to a body where it does not exist. But the fact is that when a body acts on the earth, it is on the earth. A body is where it acts. The boundary of light is not the boundary of the real sun. The sun is in the entire space where it exerts its gravitational pull. The space that the earth fills is also part of solar space.

Imagine this Schellingian idea as [already] underlying the Pythagorean doctrine. The human spirit fills the entire world space. It is not enclosed in a single organism. The spirit is where it perceives.

For the philosophers of the nineteenth century who followed Kant, the question is this: How is it that the mind perceives what is outside it? - The Pythagorean does not say this at all: How is it that the mind perceives that which is apart from it? The Pythagorean says: If the mind perceives an ellipse in the sky, then it is a fact that the mind is not enclosed in the organism, that it is not there where it perceives with the senses, but that it is there where it perceives [mentally]. The limit of the spirit is not the sense, but the spirit is where it perceives. - There is a separation between the numerical relationships in space and what exists in our head as numerical relationships, which does not exist for the Pythagoreans. The Pythagoreans do not recognize the idea that man is initially a sensual, finite being, enclosed with the psyche in a fabric that connects the senses with the outside world. This gives people today the impression that the mind is also enclosed in [a] housing.

When other philosophers take this for reality and ask: "How is it that we perceive external things?", the Pythagoreans take the opposite view. They do not ask: How is it that the mind is enclosed in such an organism? - It is perhaps better that I do not say "individual", but "individual being". This then leads to an understanding of a world view such as the Pythagorean one. It leads to an understanding that can only be grasped if one sees in the mathematical that which constitutes the basic structure in the universe, and which, if one thinks of the whole world as filled with spirit, constitutes the basic structure of the spirit itself.

So we actually have in the basis of the thing that can be perceived with the senses deep down, on a lower level, in the spatial-temporal of the universe, commonalities that can be expressed through spatial sizes and numerical ratios, that which appears to the spirit on a higher level. The spirit has a numerical, geometrical basis. The spirit has its origin where things are regular. The spirit grows out of the mathematically constructed world. Therefore [the Pythagorean] seeks the primordial grounds of existence in the mathematically constructed world.

I have pointed out that there is a difference between the Greek worldview, as represented by Heraclitus, and the Pythagorean one. At the time, I constructed my remarks in such a way that they came back to Goethe's basic view. I said then that Goethe says that the seed and the plant are one and the same being. The material seed contains everything that is still in it in complete concealment. It is the same as the fully developed plant. The plant is not in it, but it has the sense that in a spiritual way the plant is the same in every form as in another form, so that the plant with its foliage and petals, with its whole fruit and with all that is in it, is to be regarded as that which has become material, materially, which is in the seed in an ideal way. Goethe therefore says that the seed is the whole plant, except that the spirit is still concealed behind it. That which is ideal in the seed becomes material reality in the whole plant.

The same image can be applied to the whole world. One can understand the world by observing it in its highest state, by immersing oneself in its blossom and fruit, in the human soul, by studying the "Know thyself" and going to the human being. There, where the purely spiritual-soul then appears directly, i.e. in the deepening, in the direct immersion into the self, one can first look for a world view, a world view. But you can also examine a seed. You can find ways and means to examine the seed. One can assume that what lies in the seed is already indicated and that the world view that is gained from the human being is the highest. The Pythagoreans do not seek man where he is soul, nor where he appears as spirit, but where he is apparently not spirit at all, where he apparently is not at all. The Pythagorean seeks certain reality through indifferent numbers. And that is why he seeks the spirit where he already knows the spirit. That is why he also finds the primal source, the basic structure of existence, in mathematics.

I just wanted to say that this world view of the Pythagoreans can only be understood if one understands the immersion of Novalis, which must be understood mathematically - of Novalis, who was of a thoroughly poetic nature and as such was what literary history calls a "Romantic", yet was rooted in such laws that he could see strict mathematics as the primal source of existence. That is why the Pythagoreans, because their spirit was powerful enough, were able to find spirit in the relationships of numbers. They started from the lowest level of the spiritual. Just as the seed is not yet a plant, but can become a plant, so they ascended from the seemingly unspiritual to the spiritual.

This is what can make us understand the whole world view of the Pythagoreans. The Pythagorean worldview is usually presented as if it were the numerical aspect of the world that led the Pythagoreans to regard number as the origin of things. And one cannot quite imagine what they meant by that. I must confess that if we follow what is written in the textbooks and read that the Pythagoreans regarded number as the origin of all things, it would seem meaningless to me. Only if I imagine how it is in reality, if I assume that they grew up in a completely different theory of knowledge, can I understand what they meant. Their view is simply described by the word: the Pythagorean did not look for the spirit where it appears to be a sensual entity, but where he perceives it as something that fills the whole of space.

That is one side of the Pythagorean world view, that is the reason why they descended to numbers and geometric shapes. On the other hand, the reason is also because they found something in these numbers and geometric figures that they could address as spirit.

What do geometric or mathematical ratios mean? Anyone who can only imagine a circle or an ellipse when they are drawn on the blackboard cannot be said to have any idea of the real geometric or mathematical relationships. If he has to put five peas or beans on the table when he wants to imagine the number <>, we cannot say that he has an idea of the real numbers.

On the contrary, we are aware that what we call a circle, what we call an ellipse, can only be represented approximately in material reality. We know that the material circle we draw is only an approximation of what we can create in our minds. We also know that what the celestial bodies in outer space describe is only an approximation of a circle. However, it is the same law that governs the creation of the world as the law that governs us when we imagine a circle in our minds, when we no longer need to deduce the spiritual from the sensual. That is why mathematics would be the best thing to introduce us to the spiritual. This is also why the Pythagoreans placed the highest value on mathematics. So if you really want to recognize the spirit, you have to be able to disregard everything sensual. You must be able to realize that it is not what you draw on the blackboard with chalk that is a real circle, but what remains for the spirit without the chalk drawing on the blackboard. Using the salt cube, it was possible to show that the cube is something completely different from the [salt] cube. In this way, the pupils could be shown that the spiritual - also of other things - can only be understood if the sensual remains absent. This is easy to show with the salt cube. The spiritual content is not the same as the outer cube.

But if we understand this for the whole sum of world phenomena, if we understand that the spiritual can be detached from the material, then this leads us up to higher levels. Everyone admits that mathematics has nothing to do with the things of the world, but with the spiritual. But if this goes further up, people confuse the spirit with reality

A strange document on the confusion of the spirit with reality has just come out these days. A book has been published entitled "Kritik der Sprache" (Critique of Language) by Fritz Mauthner, which aims to show how all our knowledge floats in the air, how nothing is given to us but the sensory world, and if we disregard the sensory world, we have nothing more in our imaginary world than empty words.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is something that someone who is unable to detach the spirit of things at a higher level of reality, as he can do with mathematical entities, can very easily come to. He who has no intuition, who does not really have from the source point of his spirit what he has to hold up to things, who is sterile and barren, who cannot fill his soul with spiritual realities, believes that he has nothing more when he goes beyond [the sense world] than words. Instead of a "critique of knowledge, he writes a "critique of language.

The book comprises two volumes. It seems to me as if someone wanted to write a critique and had not mastered what he wanted to criticize. He confuses what the mind adds to the formations. What Mauthner gives would be - compared to what spiritual content can and should give - a critique of pencil drawing. It shows how much the pencil is capable of depicting circles. Thus sterile views cling to those who are unable to feel the true content. He does not know that the spirit gradually acquires the ability to ascend to the higher realms of existence and is aware of its difference from material things at every stage of spiritual life, just as the mathematician is able to detach the spiritual, the spiritual from things, i.e. to advance from what is not yet spirit to the immediate God in the world.

This was something that the Pythagoreans sought to achieve step by step by trying to lead the student from the lower to the higher. They were convinced that by ascending from the lower to the higher, man was not merely having an experience within himself, but was fulfilling a task in the universe itself. They were convinced that he was doing something in the world, they were so convinced that they only compared the ascent with the numerical relationships themselves. They said to themselves: The individual human being who perceives is apparently a duality. The perceiver and the perceived. These two great opposites stood for the Pythagoreans at the basic level of their table of knowledge.

But they said to themselves: All this is only apparent because man does not stand on the highest level of perfection, but on the lower levels. The perceiving and the perceived must be overcome if they are to become one. Thus the Pythagorean imagines that, just as now in human cognition, unity triumphs over duality, over what is separate in the world, the Pythagorean must imagine everything according to numerical relationships and specifically again in such a way that what is separately a duality presents itself to him as unity.

Now the Pythagorean is convinced that the whole multiplicity of the world, the fact that there are many things in the world, derives only from the fact that man first sees the appearance, not the thing, that he does not see things as they are, but that he sees them as they are not, because of the limitations of his own existence. He sees that this multiplicity, when he overcomes appearance, then presents itself in reality, in truth, as unity. What man ultimately achieves is the primordial unity, the primordial One of the world, and the Pythagorean also sees this as the foundation from which everything springs.

This is what makes it possible for man to perceive something in space. This is the general unity of the world, but man can only gradually ascend to it. What is revealed last is there first, and that is because it is a member of this multiplicity. After it has been placed in a corner for a while, it integrates itself into the world structure and becomes one with the world harmony. The numerical harmony, the geometric regularity of the world view embraces the human being. And so he finds it by integrating himself into the structure of numbers. Therefore, the Pythagorean can say that all good, all virtue consists in man overcoming appearances and finding numerical, geometric regularity, whereby he integrates himself into the great world existence.

Thus man appears to himself like a tone in harmony, and because he appears to himself like a tone in harmony, he has to give himself the right tone and the right proportion. He does not fulfill a task for himself, but fulfills a moral task. If he does not fulfill it, then he is not in the right numerical proportion. He has something to [contribute] not to himself, but to the whole structure of the world. Through every transgression, man brings upon himself an unlimited responsibility, and, recognizing this, he should strive more and more to attain the mood that he has to fulfill in the great music of the world.

So to the Pythagorean, what is spread outside in space and time appears as a moral task itself. For the Pythagoreans, the moral task is not to be understood as a mathematical one on a higher level. The mathematical task is that he discovers the world space, but in such a way that he is thereby integrated, that he is thereby integrated like a tone in the world music, like a number in the law of numbers. He then discovers that when he does something - because he is not just his own redeemer - it is not just important for himself, but something that concerns the whole universe. The spirit is not only in me, but also where it works. He then sees that the spirit not only has to work on its own moral perfection, but also on the harmonization of the whole universe. When the Pythagorean imagines the harmony of the universe in such a way that he thinks of the world as permeated by musical tones, by music of the spheres analogous to music itself, this happens because music is based on tonal relationships.

The Pythagorean translates this by saying: Just as the tonal relationships become perceptible to our senses as a harmony of tones, there is also a harmony of tones, a music of the spheres in the world, which acts like the numerical relationships in the world. But if it does not find the right numerical relationship, the right tonal relationship to the world within itself, then it disturbs the harmony of the world.

This is why the insights of the Pythagoreans had to lead to the strictest educational system. The Pythagorean is aware, when he teaches the individual this or that, that he is taking upon himself a responsibility, not only towards that person, but towards the whole universe.

Answer to the question:

Everyone's special disposition enables them to gain knowledge of the spirit. The Pythagoreans endeavored to create this possibility for everyone.

[Mathematical ideas are only easy to prove because they are simple, almost without content.

For those, however, who are not at all suited from the outset to immerse themselves in the content of the world, the best and safest school will be to go through mathematics. Plato therefore demanded a thorough knowledge of mathematics from his students. Otherwise it might not have worked for everyone. I would like to explain this to someone who has gone through the Pythagorean school: Let's imagine a person who can only feel. Such an organism would be able to perceive geometric shapes and also be able to conceive of numbers. In fact, blind and deaf people have been taught these relationships and turned into accomplished mathematicians. Such an organism can also arrive at music in a mathematical way. The numerical relationships only appear to him in a shadowy way. Now let us imagine that such a person suddenly hears. He will then perceive the same thing that he had previously understood. He now perceives it with his ears. It is the same with the blind. Through an explanation of the vibrations of the world, he can get an idea of the colors through the numerical relationships. The Pythagorean should now also bring the higher senses to rise. It is the same thing as when a mathematician comes to a musician who is constructing his work himself and calculates it for him. Then the musician can say: "Stay away from that. If you have the necessary receptivity, you can have perceptions even without mathematical representation.

I have contrasted two currents. One current within Hellenism, which starts from Heraclitus, and the other, which starts from Pythagoras. Heraclitus and Pythagoras stand before us as two who have the same object. Heraclitus, as it were, as the composer, Pythagoras as the one who mathematically calculates his subject. It is the same with us as with Pythagoreanism. You first have to teach the blind and the deaf and then you can lead them to higher levels.

Mathematical concepts devised by humans are often confirmed in the outside world. In the case of electricity, people calculate that this or that must be one way or the other. If you then carry it out in reality as an experiment, it must agree [with the calculation].

I would like to cite a famous conversation between Schiller and Goethe. Goethe and Schiller left a scientific lecture together and got into a conversation about what they had heard. In the course of the conversation, Goethe took a piece of paper and drew a symbolic plant, an ideal plant, saying: "This plant is actually in every plant. Every plant is actually an individual embodiment of this general plant. To which Schiller replied: Yes, but that's just an idea! To which Goethe replied: But then I see my ideas with my eyes.

[Or let's take a] triangle [it is presumably drawn]: The angles add up to 180 degrees. Because we have seen a triangle, we can form a quadrilateral by connecting the blue one with the green one. This can be extended in the mind. We can move from the triangle to the square. But we cannot go from one shade of color to another. We can only perceive sensually what belongs to the world of the senses. In mathematics, the spiritual is the easiest to grasp. The mathematical is the most spiritual.

You don't know how to perceive sounds from numerical relationships? Sounds are not perceived [with the ears], only thought. Composers who become deaf therefore only have a surrogate. It is the same as when we deduce one mathematical entity from another. It is not [sensory] perception, but a mental experience.

The sensual is transformed [into the spiritual], it is elevated.

Studying mathematics makes no difference, but recognizing the essence of mathematics does. The most superficial person just splashes and splashes around in the primordial being. Someone can also have studied mathematics. Goethe studied little mathematics. But no one understood the essence of mathematics more than he did. Goethe arrived at his magnificent world of metamorphoses precisely because he had such a great idea of the nature of mathematics, even though he was only able to arrive at the [gap in the transcript] theorem.

He who can make razors may not be able to shave, and he who can shave usually cannot make razors. Thus the mathematician who knows mathematics [only] in form need not know its meaning and its application to the primal being.

To-day we shall begin to consider the inner activities of the soul which can gradually lead man to acquire conceptions, to acquire thoughts, about karma. These thoughts and conceptions are such that they can ultimately enable a man to perceive, in the light of karma, experiences which have a karmic cause.

Looking around our human environment, we really see in the physical world only what is caused by physical force in a physical way. And if we do see in the physical world something that is not caused by physical forces, we still become aware of it through external physical substances, through external physical objects of perception. Of course, when a man does something out of his own will, this is not caused by physical forces, by physical causes, for in many respects it comes out of the free will. But all that we perceive outwardly is exhausted in the physical phenomena of the world we thus observe. In the entire sphere of what we can thus observe, the karmic connection of an experience we ourselves pass through cannot reveal itself to us. For the whole picture of this karmic connection lies in the spiritual world, is really inscribed in what is the etheric world, in what underlies the etheric world as the astral world, or as the world of spiritual beings who inhabit this astral outer world. Nothing of all this is seen, as long as we merely direct our senses to the physical world.

All that we perceive in the physical world is perceived through our senses. These senses work without our having much to do with it. Our eyes receive impressions of light, of colour, of their own accord. We can at most—and even that is half involuntary—adjust our gaze to a certain direction; we can gaze at something or we can look away from it. Even in this there is still much of the unconscious, but at all events a fragment of consciousness. And, above all, that which the eye must do inwardly in order to see colour, the wonderfully wise, inner activity which is exercised whenever we see anything—this we could never achieve as human beings if we were supposed to achieve it consciously. That would be out of the question. All this must, to begin with, happen unconsciously, because it is much too wise for man to be able in any way to help in it.

To attain a correct point of view as regards the knowledge possessed by the human being, we must really fill our thoughts with all the wisdom-filled arrangements which exist in the world, and which are quite beyond the capacity of man. If a man thinks only of what he can achieve himself, then he really blocks all paths to knowledge. The path to knowledge really begins at the point where we realise, in all humility, all that we are incapable of doing, but which must nevertheless come to pass in cosmic existence. The eye, the ear—yes, and the other sense-organs—are, in reality, such profoundly wise instruments that men will have to study for a long time before they will be able even to have an inkling of understanding of them during earthly existence. This must be fully realised. Observation of the spiritual, however, cannot be unconscious in this sense. In earlier times of human evolution this was possible even for observation of the spiritual. There was an instinctive clairvoyance which has faded away in the course of the evolution of humanity.

From now onwards, man must consciously attain an attitude to the cosmos through which he will be able to see through into the spiritual. And we must see through into the spiritual if we are to recognise the karmic connections of any experience we may have.

Now it is necessary for the observation of karma that we at least begin by paying attention to what can happen within us to develop the faculty of observing karmic connections. We, on our part, must help a little in order to make these observations conscious. We must do more, for example, than we do for our eye in order to become conscious of colour.

My dear friends, what we must learn first of all is summed up in one word: to wait. We must be able to wait for the inner experiences.

About this “being able to wait”, I have already spoken. It was in the year 1889—I tell about this in the Story of my Life—that the inner spiritual construction of Goethe's “The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” first came before my mind's eye. And it was then, for the first time, that the perception as it were of a greater, wider connection than appears in the Fairy Tale itself presented itself to me. But I also knew at that time: I cannot yet make of this connection what I shall some day be able to make of it. And so what the Fairy Tale revealed to me at that time simply remained lying in the soul.

Then, seven years later, in the year 1896, it welled up again, but still not in such a way that it could be properly shaped; and again, about 1903, seven years later. Even then, although it came with great definition and many connections it could not yet receive its right form. Seven years later again, when I conceived my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation—then only did the Fairy Tale reappear, transformed in such a way that it could be shaped and moulded plastically.

Such things, therefore, demand a real waiting, a time for ripening. We must bring our own experiences into relation with that which exists out there in the world. At a moment when only the seed of a plant is present, we obviously cannot have the plant. The seed must be brought into the right conditions for growth, and we must wait until the blossom, and finally the fruit, come out of the seed. And so it must be with the experiences through which we pass. We cannot take the line of being thrilled by an experience, simply because it happens to be there, and then forgetting it. The person who only wants his experiences when they are actually present will be doing little towards ultimate observation of the spiritual world. We must be able to wait. We must be able to let the experiences ripen within the soul.

Now the possibility exists for a comparatively quick ripening of insight into karmic connections if, for a considerable time, we endeavour patiently, and with inner activity, to picture in our consciousness, more and more clearly, an experience which would otherwise simply take its course externally, without being properly grasped, so that it fades away in the course of life. After all, this fading away is what really happens with the events of life. For what does a man do with events and experiences, as they approach him in the course of the day? He experiences them, but in reality only half observes them. You can realise how experiences are only half observed if you sit down one day in the afternoon or in the evening—and I advise you to do it—and ask yourself: ‘What did I actually experience this morning at half-past nine?’ And now try to call up such an experience in all details before your soul, recall it as if it were actually there, say at half-past seven in the evening—as if you were creating it spiritually before you. You will see how much you will find lacking, how much you failed to observe, and how difficult it is. If you take a pen or pencil to write it all down, you will soon begin to bite at the pen or the pencil, because you cannot hit upon the details—and, in time, you want to bite them out of the pencil!

Yes, but that is just the point, to take upon oneself the task of placing before the mind, in all precision, an experience one has had,—not at the moment when it is actually there, but afterwards. It must be placed before the soul as if one were going to paint it spiritually. If the experience were one in which somebody spoke, this must be made quite objectively real: the ring of the voice, the way in which the words were used, clumsily or cleverly—the picture must be made with strength and vigour. In short, we try to make a picture of what we have experienced. If we make a picture of such an experience of the day, then in the following night, the astral body, when it is outside the physical body and the etheric body, occupies itself with this picture. The astral body itself is, in reality, the bearer of the picture, and gives shape to it outside the body. The astral body takes the picture with it when it goes out on the first night. It shapes it there, outside the physical and etheric bodies.

That is the first stage (we will take these stages quite exactly): the sleeping astral body, when outside the physical and etheric bodies, shapes the picture of the experience. Where does it do this? In the external ether. It is now in the external etheric world; it does this in the external ether.

Now picture to yourself the human being: his physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, and the astral body is outside. We will leave aside the ego. There outside is the astral body, reshaping this picture that has been made. But the astral body does this in the external ether. In consequence of this the following happens—think of it: the astral body is there outside, shaping this picture. All this happens in the external ether which encrusts, as it were, with its own substance that which is formed as a picture within the astral body. So the external ether makes the etheric form (dotted (dark) outline) into a picture which is clearly and precisely visualised by the eye of spirit.

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In the morning you return into the physical and etheric bodies and bear into them what has been made substantial by the external ether. That is to say: the sleeping astral body shapes the picture of the experience outside the physical and etheric bodies. The external ether then impregnates the picture with its own substance. You can imagine that the picture becomes stronger thereby, and that now, when the astral body returns in the morning with this stronger substantiality, it can make an impression upon the etheric body in the human being. With forces that are derived from the external ether, the astral body now stamps an impression into the etheric body.

The second stage is therefore: The picture is impressed into the etheric body by the astral body.

There we have the events of the first day and the first night. Now we come to the second day. On the second day, while you are busying yourself with all the little things of life in full waking consciousness, there, underneath the consciousness, in the unconscious, the picture is descending into the etheric body. And in the next night, when the etheric body is undisturbed, when the astral body has gone out again, the etheric body elaborates this picture.

Thus in the second night the picture is elaborated by the man's own etheric body. There we have the second stage:—The picture is impressed into the etheric body by the astral body; and in the next night the etheric body elaborates the picture. Thus we have: the second day and the second night.

Now if you do this, if you actually do not give up occupying yourself with the picture you formed on the preceding day—and you can continue to occupy yourself with it, for a reason which I shall immediately mention—if you do not disdain to do this, then you will find that you are living on further with the picture. What does this mean—to continue occupying yourself with it? If you really take pains to shape such a picture, vigorously, elaborating it plastically in characteristic, strong lines on the first day after you had the experience, then you have really exerted yourself spiritually. Such things cost spiritual exertion. I don't mean what I am going to say as a hint—present company is, of course, always excepted in these matters!—but after all, it must be said that the majority of men simply do not know what spiritual exertion is. Spiritual exertion, true spiritual exertion, comes about only by means of activity of soul. When you allow the world to work upon you, and let thoughts run their course without taking them in hand, then there is no spiritual exertion. We should not imagine, when something tires us, that we have exerted ourselves spiritually. Getting tired does not imply that there has been spiritual exertion. We can get tired, for instance, from reading. But if we have not ourselves been productive in some way during the reading, if we merely let the thoughts contained in the book act on us, then we are not exerting ourselves. On the contrary, a person who has really exerted himself spiritually, who has exerted himself out of the inner activity of his soul, may then take up a book, a very interesting one, and just “sleep off” his spiritual exertion in the best possible way, in the reading of it. Naturally, we can fall asleep over a book if we are tired. This getting tired is no sign at all of spiritual exertion.

A sign of spiritual exertion, however, is this: that one feels—the brain is used up. It is just as we may feel that a demand has been made on the muscle of the arm when lifting things. Ordinary thought makes no such strong claims upon the brain. The process continues, and you will even notice that when you try it for the first time, the second, the third, the tenth, you get a slight headache. It is not that you get tired or fall asleep; on the contrary, you cannot fall asleep; you get a slight headache from it. Only you must not regard this headache as something baleful; on the contrary, you must take it as actual proof of the fact that you have exerted your head.

Well, the process goes on ... it stays with you until you go to sleep. If you have really done this on the preceding day, then you will awake in the morning with the feeling: “There actually is something in me! I don't quite know what it is, but there is something in me, and it wants something from me. Yes, after all it is not a matter of indifference that I made this picture for myself yesterday. It really means something. This picture has changed. To-day it is giving me quite different feelings from those I had previously. The picture is making me have quite definite feelings.”

All this stays with you through the next day as the remaining inner experience of the picture which you made for yourself. And what you feel, and cannot get rid of through the whole of the day—this is a witness to the fact that the picture is now descending into the etheric body, as I have described to you, and that the etheric body is receiving it.

Now you will probably experience on waking after the next night—when you slip into your body after these two days—that you find this picture slightly changed, slightly transformed. You find it again ... precisely on waking the third day you find it again within you. It appears to you like a very real dream. But it has undergone a transformation. It will clothe itself in manifold pictures until it is other than it was. It will assume an appearance as if spiritual beings were now bringing you this experience. And you actually receive the impression: Yes, this experience which I had and which I subsequently formed into a picture, has actually been brought to me. If the experience happened to be with another human being, then we have the feeling after this has all happened, that actually we did not only experience it through that human being, but that it was really brought to us. Other forces, spiritual forces, have been at play. It was they who brought it to us.

The next day comes. This next day the picture is carried down from the etheric body into the physical body. The etheric body impresses this picture into the physical body, into the nerve-processes, into the blood-processes. On the third day the picture is impressed into the physical body. So the third stage is: The picture is stamped into the physical body by the etheric body.

And now comes the next night. You have been attending throughout the day to the ordinary little trifles of life, and underneath it all this important process is going on: the picture is being carried down into the physical body. All this goes on in the subconscious. When the following night comes, the picture is elaborated in the physical body. It is spiritualised in the physical body. First of all, throughout the day, the picture is brought down into the processes of the blood and nerves, but in the night it is spiritualised. Those who have vision see how this picture is now elaborated by the physical body, but it appears spiritually as an altogether changed picture. We can say: the physical body elaborates the picture during the next night.

1st Day and 1st Night:

When outside the physical and etheric bodies, the astral body shapes the picture of the experience. The outer ether impregnates the picture with its own substance.

2nd Day and 2nd Night:

The picture is stamped by the astral body into the etheric body. And the etheric body elaborates the picture during the next day.

3rd Day and 3rd Night:

The picture is stamped by the etheric body into the physical body. And the physical body elaborates the picture during the next night.

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Now this is something of which you must make an absolutely correct mental picture. The physical body actually works up this picture spiritually. It spiritualises the picture. So that when all this has really been gone through, it does happen—when the human being is asleep—that his physical body works up the whole picture, but not in such a way that it remains within the physical body. Out of the physical body there arises a transformation, a greatly magnified transformation of the picture. And when you get up in the morning, this picture stands there, and in truth you hover in it; it is like a kind of cloud in which you yourself are. With this picture you get up in the morning.

So this is the third day and the third night. With this picture, which is entirely transformed, you get out of bed on the fourth day. You rise from sleep, enveloped by this cloud. And if you have actually shaped the picture with the necessary strength on the first day, and if you have paid attention to what your feeling conveyed to you on the second day, you will notice now that your will is contained in the picture as it now is. The will is contained in it! But this will is unable to express itself; it is as though fettered. Put into somewhat radical terms, it is actually as if one had planned after the manner of an incredibly daring sprinter, who might resolve to make a display of a bravado race: I will run, now I am running to Ober-Dornach, I make a picture of it already, I've got it within me. It is my will ... But in the very moment when I want to start, when the will is strongest, somebody fetters me, so that I stand there quite rigidly. The whole will has unfolded, but I cannot carry out the will. Such, approximately, is the process.

When this experience of feeling yourself in a pillory develops—for it is a feeling of being in a pillory after the third night—when you again awake in it, feeling in a pillory as it were, with the will fettered through and through, then, if you can pay attention to it, you will find that the will begins to transform itself. This will becomes sight. In itself it can do nothing, but it leads to our seeing something. It becomes an eye of the soul. And the picture, with which one rose from sleep, becomes objective. What it shows is the event of the previous earth-life, or of some previous earth-life, which had been the cause of the experience that we shaped into a picture on the first day. By means of this transformation through feeling and through will, one gets the picture of the causal event of a preceding incarnation.

When we describe these things, they appear somewhat overpowering. This is not to be wondered at, for they are utterly unfamiliar to the human being of the present time. They were not so unknown to the men of earlier culture-epochs. Only, according to the opinion of modern men who are clever, those other men—in their whole way of living—were stupid! Nevertheless, those ‘stupid’ men of the earlier culture-epochs really had these experiences, only modern man darkens everything by his intellect, which makes him clever, but not exactly wise.

As I said, the thing seems somewhat tumultuous, when one relates it. But after all, one is obliged to use such words; for since the things are utterly unknown to-day, they would not appear so striking if they were worded more mildly. They must appear striking. But the whole experience, from beginning to end, throughout the three days, as I have described it to you, must take its course in inner intimacy, in rest and peace of mind. For so-called occult experiences—and these are such—do not take their course in such a way that they can be bragged about. When one begins to brag about them, they immediately stop. They must take their course in inner repose and quietude. And it is best when, for the time being, nobody at all notices anything of the consecutive experiences except the person who is having them.

Now you must not think that the thing succeeds immediately, from the outset. One always finds, of course, that people are pleased when such things are related. This is quite comprehensible ... and it is good. How much there is that one can learn to know! And then, with a tremendous diligence people start on it. They begin ... and it doesn't succeed. Then they become disheartened. Then, perhaps, they try it again, several times. Again it does not succeed. But, in effect, if one has tried it about 49 times, or, let us say, somebody else has tried it about 69 times, then the 50th or the 70th time it does succeed. For what really matters in all these things is the acquisition of a kind of habit of soul concerning them. To begin with, one must find one's way into these things, one must acquire habits of the soul. This is something that certainly ought to be carefully observed by the Anthroposophical Society which, since the Christmas Foundation, is intended to be a complete expression of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Really a very great deal has been given within the Anthroposophical Society. It is enough to make one giddy to see standing in a row all the Lecture-Courses that have been printed. But in spite of it, people come again and again, asking one thing or the other. In the majority of cases this is not at all necessary, for if everything that is contained in the Lecture-Courses is really worked upon, then most of the questions find their own answer in a much surer way. One must have patience, really have patience. Truly, there is a great deal in anthroposophical literature that can work in the soul. We must take to heart all that has to be accomplished, and the time will be well filled with all that has to be done. But, on the other hand, in regard to many of the things which people want to know, it must be pointed out that the Lecture-Courses exist, that they have been left lying there, and after they have been given many people trouble about them only inasmuch as they want a “new” Course; they just lay the old ones aside. These things are closely connected with what I have to say to-day.

One does not reach inner continuity in following up all that germinates and ripens in the soul, if there is a desire to hurry in this way, from the new to the new; the essential point is that things must mature within the soul. We must accustom ourselves to inner, active work of the soul, work in the spirit. This is what helps us to achieve such things as I have explained to you to-day; this alone will help us to have, after the third day, the inner attitude of soul in connection with some experience we may wish to see through in the light of karma.

This must always be the mode of procedure if we are to learn to know the spiritual. To begin with, we must say to ourselves: the first moment when we approach the spiritual in thought in some way, was the first beginning; it is quite impossible to have any kind of result immediately; we must be able to wait. Suppose I have an experience to-day that is karmically caused in a preceding incarnation. I will make a diagrammatic sketch. Here I am, here is my experience, the experience of to-day (right). This is caused by the quite differently-constituted personality in the same ego in a previous earth-life (left). There it is. It has long ceased to belong to my personality, but it is stamped into the etheric world, or into the astral world, which lies behind the etheric world. Now I have to go back, to retrace the way backwards.

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I told you that at first the thing appears as if some being were really bearing the experience towards me. This is so, on the second day. But after the third day it appears as if those who have brought it to me, those spiritual beings, withdraw, and I become aware of it as something of my own, which I myself, in a previous incarnation, laid down as cause. Because this is no longer within the present, because this is something I must behold in the past earth-life, I seem to be fettered. This state of being fettered ceases only when I have perceived the thing, when I have a picture of what was in the previous incarnation, and when I then look back to the event which I have not lost sight of through the three days. Then I become free, as I return, for now I can move about freely with the effect. As long as I am only within the cause, I cannot move about with the cause. Thus I go back into a previous incarnation, there become fettered as it were by the cause, and only when I now enter right into this present earth-life, is the thing resolved.

Now let us take an example: suppose somebody experiences at a certain time on a certain day that a friend says something to him that is not altogether pleasant—perhaps he had not expected it. This friend says to him something not altogether pleasant. He now ponders what he experiences in listening to what his friend says. He makes a vivid picture of what he has experienced, how he got a slight shock, and how he got vexed, perhaps he was also hurt, or the like. This is an inner working, and as such it must be brought into the picture. Now he lets the three days elapse. The second day he goes about and says to himself: ‘This picture which I made yesterday has had a strange effect upon me. The whole day long I have had within me something like an acid, as it were, something that comes from the picture and makes me feel inwardly out of sorts ...’ At the end of the whole process, after the third day, he says to himself: ‘I get up in the morning and now I have the definite feeling that the picture is fettering me.’ Then this event of the previous incarnation is made known to me. I see it before me. Then I pass over to the experience which is still quite fresh, which is still quite present. The fettering ceases, and I say to myself: ‘So this is how it was in the previous earth-life! This is what caused it; now there is the effect. With this effect I can live again ... now the thing is present again.’

This must be practised over and over again, for generally the thread is broken on the very first day, when we make the first effort. And then nothing comes.

It is particularly favourable to let things run parallel, so that we do not stop at one event, but bring a number of. events of the day into picture-form in this way. You will say: ‘Then I must live through the next day with the greatest variety of feelings.’ But this is quite possible. It is not at all harmful. Only try it; the things go quite well together. ‘And must I then be fettered so and so often after the third day?’ This does not matter either. Nothing of this matters. The things will adjust themselves in time. What belongs, from an earlier incarnation, to a later one, will find its way to it. But it will not succeed at once; it will not succeed at the first attempt; the thread breaks. We must have patience to try the thing over and over again. Then we feel something growing stronger within the soul. Then we feel that something awakens in the soul, and we say to ourselves: ‘Until now you were filled with blood. You have felt within you the pulsation of the blood and the breath. Now there is something within you besides the blood. You are filled with something.’

You can even have the feeling that you are filled with something of which you can say quite definitely that it is like a metal that has become aeriform. You actually feel something like metal, you feel it in you. It cannot be described differently; it really is so. You feel yourself permeated with metal, in your whole body. Just as one can say of certain waters, that they ‘taste metallic’, the whole body seems to ‘taste’ as if it were inwardly permeated by some delicate substance, which, in reality, is something spiritual.

You feel this when you come upon something which was, of course, always in you, but to which you only now begin to pay attention. Then, when you begin to feel this, you again take courage. For if the thread is always breaking and everything is as it was before—if you want to get hold of a karmic connection, but the thread is always breaking—you may easily lose courage. But when you detect within yourself this sense of being inwardly filled, then you get courage again. And you say to yourself: it will come right in time.

But, my dear friends, these things must be experienced in all quietude and calmness. Those who cannot experience them quietly but get excited and emotional, spread an inner mist over what really ought to happen, and nothing comes of it.

There are people to-day in the outside world who know of Anthroposophy only by hearsay. Perhaps they have read nothing at all of it, or only what opponents have written. It is really very funny now.—Many of the antagonistic writings spring out of the earth like mushrooms—they quote literature, but among the literature they quote there are none of my books at all, only the books of opponents! The authors admit that they have not really approached the original sources, that they know only the antagonistic literature. Such things exist to-day. And so there are people outside who say: “The Anthroposophists are mad.” As a matter of fact, what one can least of all afford to be in order to reach anything at all in the spiritual world is to be mad. One must not be mad in the very slightest degree if one hopes to come to anything in the spiritual world. Even the tiniest fragment of madness is a hindrance to reaching anything. This simply must be avoided. Even a slight fancifulness, slight capriciousness, must be avoided. For all this giving way to the moods of the day, the caprices of the day, forms obstacles and handicaps on the way to progress in the spiritual world. If one desires to progress in the field of Anthroposophy, there is nothing for it but to have an absolutely sane head and an absolutely sane heart. With doting sentimentality (Schwärmerei) which is already the beginning of madness, one can achieve nothing.

Things such as I have told you to-day, strange as they sound, must be experienced in the light of absolute clarity of mind, of absolute soundness of head and heart. Truly, there is nothing that can more surely save one from very slight daily madness, than Anthroposophy. All madness would [disappear] by means of Anthroposophy if people would only devote themselves to it with real intensity. If somebody were to set himself to go mad through Anthroposophy, this would certainly be an experiment with inadequate means!

I do not say this in order to make a joke, but because it must be an integral part of the mood and tenor of anthroposophical endeavour. This is the attitude that must be adopted towards the matter, as I have just explained to you, half in joke, if we want to approach it in the right way, with the right orientation. We must set out to be as sane as possible; then we approach it in the right spirit. This is the least we can strive for, and above all, strive for in respect to the little madnesses of life.

Once I was friends with a very clever professor of philosophy, now long since dead, who used to say on every occasion: “We all have some point or other on which we are a little mad!” He meant, all people are a little mad ... but he was a very clever man. I always believed there was something behind his words, that his assertion was not altogether without foundation! He did not become an Anthroposophist.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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).

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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).

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.