The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It must be my intention during these days to bring something home to our souls that is able to throw some light from the spiritual-scientific point of view on our big events. Therefore, it is also my task next Sunday to turn our sensations to certain points of view which can bring some light just in that which must now move our hearts and souls in the deepest sense. I would like to prepare the basis of that, directing your souls to certain powers and forces which have an effect in the historical existence of human beings which can be only recognised by those insights spiritual science can give and are not immediately discernible for the everyday consciousness. I want to point to developmental facts of human life, to more or less subconscious facts today which express themselves in the historical course of human life.

We go out from the fact- you know it from the representation in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?—that what takes place in secrecy with every human being is recognised on successive levels of supersensible knowledge, of the so-called Imaginative knowledge, of the Inspirative knowledge and of the Intuitive knowledge. In the public lecture yesterday, I have already emphasised that one has always to keep in mind that the spiritual scientist who states something of the spiritual worlds on the basis of his knowledge of Imaginative, Inspirative and Intuitive perceptions, does not add anything that does not exist in the spiritual realms in which every human soul lives without being aware of them. The spiritual scientist only draws attention to that which always weaves and lives in the world and in which way the individual human soul is put in it. So that not only for somebody who has the intention to make his way into the current of esoteric experiences, but for every human soul the knowledge of them is important what is internal reality for it at any rate, only a reality which cannot be recognised by means of the everyday awareness of life.

Thus I would like to go out from some facts of the Imaginative perception of the human nature generally. We observe daily that an event full of riddle, at least an event full of riddle for the external science intervenes rhythmically in our life by turns: the waking and sleeping states. We know for a long time that we belong with our four human members, the physical body, the etheric body, astral body and ego, in the waking state to the physical earth. We know that we are during sleep, from falling asleep up to waking, in the physical world only with our physical and etheric bodies that we withdraw as it were into the purely spiritual world with our astral bodies and egos. We can characterise that which presents itself now to the view of the spiritual researcher and say: the spiritual researcher looks at that which takes place, for example, constantly with the human being when he leaves his physical and etheric bodies while falling asleep and advances to the region of the higher world with his astral body and ego. The spiritual researcher simply watches what happens there with the human being—with every human being falling asleep. So that we can say: the spiritual researcher only observes what would show itself to every human soul if it could look down not in the dream state, but in the complete sleeping state at the world, so that it would find its physical and etheric bodies as something among the things of the world that is outside of it, of the sleeping soul.

We must not imagine that we see that which we have left there, in which we have left behind our physical and etheric bodies, from the point of view of sleep as we see our physical surroundings with our physical eyes. We have to use our physical senses, our physical eyes to see our surroundings from waking up to falling asleep. We do not use them when we are beyond our physical and etheric bodies. If we became suddenly clairvoyant in the sleeping state, we would perceive nothing of that what surrounds us in the waking state, as it is in the waking state. We also do not perceive our physical and etheric bodies as we perceive the physical body looking into a mirror. It is quite wrong to believe that one looks at the physical and the etheric bodies as if one bends with his astral body and ego over the physical and etheric bodies. This is not the case.

That what the Imaginative knowledge—we keep that in mind now: Imaginative knowledge—shows us that everything disappears to us, really disappears for the time being that we are used to see in the waking state. Also while we see our physical and etheric bodies, these are not like they are in the waking state, but our physical and etheric bodies appear to be enlarged to a world; they appear to us as connected with the whole earth. We are looking; we are aware that we are looking at the physical and etheric bodies. But we behold them, so that they are the only world for us at first. As well as we have mountains, rivers and clouds, the sun and stars et cetera round ourselves and look at them as our surroundings in the waking state, we look, while we look at our surroundings, when we are beyond our physical and etheric bodies, at our physical and etheric bodies as something that is extended to a world. We look at nothing else at all. We look at this as we look, otherwise, at the different things of our earth. We look there at our own physical nature like at a whole world.

It is strange that we feel this world at which we look there falling asleep that we feel it as we feel the earth in spring when it produces the single green rungs, after it has been freed from the snowy cover of the winter, when it makes the vegetation grow on it again, when everything begins shooting and sprouting. Falling asleep we look at the physical and etheric bodies enlarged to a world, we look at them, so that we can feel them like a planet waking in spring. And this goes on through the whole sleeping state that way. What we see there in mighty pictures which really appear to us in the expansion of a planet, begins going to its summer like the earth is about to go towards its summer when the spring comes to an end. We experience the sleeping state that way if we experience it properly.

We go in the sleeping state up to that point where we feel: our physical and etheric bodies bear something sprouting and shooting up to bloom, up to fruit; everywhere everything grows and blossoms. If I may express myself in detail, I have to say—for the Imaginative view that is paradoxical which shows itself that way, indeed: while looking physically we feel our earth's surface and experience its sprouting upwards, its growing and blooming in our consciousness. It is different when we now observe that from outside which takes action with our body and compare it with the plant world, as if its roots penetrate from above and grows with its flowers into our body. Thus we feel a completely reverse world, and the fruits are immersed. We learn then that with this immersion of the fruits is really expressed what becomes clear to us as the refreshment of sleep.

We know thereby that our physical and etheric bodies receive the forces from the whole universe—because everything is forces at what we look Imaginatively,—while we go on sleeping. We watch forces coming from the universe which are active in the creation of plants. We see the universe driving a vegetation into our physical nature. We get the sure knowledge of the fact that we leave our body while falling asleep, because we take away our physical and etheric bodies from the effects of the cosmic forces with our egos and astral bodies from waking up to falling asleep. Because we ourselves go out, the whole universe is able to have an effect on our physical and etheric bodies. It sends elemental, not physical forces into us which express themselves in the described Imaginations. Thus a relation is produced between physical body and etheric body with the whole universe every time when we fall asleep. While we live in the waking state in the physical world, our physical and etheric bodies really live during sleep in that what we call the elemental world, the world of the bare forces which show themselves just in the described Imaginations.

Where are we with our egos and astral bodies? We have often described, and it is also shown in different writings: we are with our egos and astral bodies in the world that has been described as the world of the higher hierarchies among the beings we call angeloi, archangeloi, archai et cetera. The egos and the astral bodies dive into these beings and their world. As well as we know about the beings of the animal, the plant, the mineral realms, when we are waking, and stand as human beings as it were above this world while we take up them in our thoughts, we are taken up like thoughts by the beings of the higher hierarchies. This is the significant matter that we can say: while here below our physical and etheric bodies are connected with the forces of the whole universe, we are thought from falling asleep up to waking, as if we were real beings, woven of thoughts and the will being; we are thought by the beings of the higher hierarchies.—As we think nature, the beings of the higher hierarchies think us. Hence, it is not right at all, exactly speaking, to say if one comes out of the physical body, he thinks the world. It is correct to say that one experiences to be thought by the world of the higher hierarchies. As the thought would have to feel itself during the waking life if it had consciousness, we would have to experience ourselves as the thoughts of the higher beings when we are outside our physical bodies.

How do we experience the reawakening Imaginatively? While we prepare to wake up gradually, we experience that really as we experience—we can compare the Imagination again to the external nature—the winter coming with its forces destroying and paralysing the sprouting summer life. As well as the winter above the earth brings frost and cold and the destruction of the summer splendour, we ourselves dive into the physical body and etheric body. Waking up we prepare the decline of the forces which entered our physical body and etheric body really like a vegetation, even like an animal realm from the elemental world of the universe as the winter prepares the decline of the summer splendour. While we are awake, we really transport our physical and etheric bodies as a result of our presence into such a condition as the cosmic relations transport the earth when it is winter. We spread out the winter over our own physical and etheric bodies, entering them. You see at the same time that what one uses from physical points of view often as a comparison is not right for the spiritual view. Indeed, the human being already has the consciousness instinctively that he is connected with the whole universe and that his experience is a microcosmic image of the macrocosm. But the human being prefers to say when he really wants to compare something in his microcosmic life to the macrocosmic life: waking is like the spring coming in our life and the waking life is like the summer. The autumn is like becoming tired in the evening and sleeping is like the winter.—Just the reverse is reality. The summer life is the sleeping life and the winter life is the waking life. This is the truth of the matter.

If the spiritual researcher investigates these relations, he finds that, while his ego and astral body rise to the realms of the higher hierarchies and are thought by the higher beings, not only the elemental world but also certain beings of the higher hierarchies work on his physical and etheric bodies. It is not only the elemental world which consists of forces, but real beings of the higher hierarchies, which work on our physical and etheric body. Something strange comes to light then that we can notice that we get to quite different conditions at the moment when we fall asleep as those in which we are while we are awake. As I have said, everything that can be expressed that way is based on the fact that the spiritual research permits us to watch the conditions of falling asleep and waking. Then it appears that also that being of the higher hierarchies has an effect on our physical and etheric bodies from waking up to falling asleep whom we must feel as the folk-soul to whom we belong. When the human being wakes up, he does not only dive into his physical and etheric bodies, but also into the processes which are carried out in his physical and etheric bodies by that which his folk-soul accomplishes. Something strange becomes apparent that the human being dives with falling asleep not only into those beings of the higher hierarchies who correspond to his individual development, but also into such spiritual beings we must regard as folk-souls. I ask to notice that, because it behoves us, who want to penetrate into spiritual science, to look deeper at the world interrelation than external perception can do it. Namely, the human being dives into the relationship to all folk-souls except his own folk-soul from falling asleep up to waking.

Let us remember: during the waking state we live immersed in the spiritual facts which our own folk-soul carries out in our physical and etheric bodies. We live together with our own folk-soul from waking up to falling asleep. Beside our folk-soul all the folk-souls of the other peoples are existent in the world. With falling asleep we dive into the relations of the other folk-souls, not in a single other folk-soul—make a note of that,—but in what they accomplish together, what they accomplish as it were in association, as a society. Only the own folk-soul is taken away from this relationship during night. We cannot escape to have also a relationship with all those folk-souls which belong to the other peoples in whom we are not incarnated in a certain incarnation. Since, while we belong to our folk-soul in our waking state, we belong to the other folk-souls in the sleeping state, indeed, only to their sounding-together; while we belong in the waking state to the intentions of the individual folk-soul in whose area we are born in a certain incarnation.

But there is a means to dive sleeping also into an other folk-soul. While we live in the normal awake state in our own folk-soul or its activity and in sleep in the harmony of the other folk-souls, we can dive sleeping in an individual folk-soul if we acquire a rather burning hatred of that which this other folk-soul accomplishes. So absurd it may sound, it is true—and we must be able in our movement to endure such a truth quietly: if the human being really feels burning hatred of a nation's area from his inner being, he condemns himself to sleep with the folk-soul of this nation's area at night, to be together with it.

We just touch a truth where we can see that life begins to have a deep seriousness behind that veil which covers the spiritual worlds for the everyday view, and that it is quite uncomfortable in a certain respect to be a supporter of spiritual science. Since spiritual science begins to be most serious about circumstances which one thinks uncomfortable in life and over which we are generously helped to get because life does not reveal the truth in the everyday sense. Although we must stand, of course, in the external life on the ground which this external life requires from us, we have to be serious about such a principle if we rise in spiritual science to those realms where other characteristics of life begin.

In my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? I spoke of the fact that at the moment when one rises in the spiritual world—and every human being is in the spiritual world, it concerns here only to a knowledge of that which is there always,—then that comfortable unity of the human being stops in which we live in the physical world. The human being experiences some splits; apart from those splits which are mentioned there, and which one can observe after the meeting with the guardian of the threshold, some other splits happen, for example, that is of deep importance for the soul-life. We have to accept while we live in a certain incarnation in a certain nation that it is involved in the whole process of the earth's evolution. We have to do our duty for the nation in which we stand and we have to offer our love to it. It must be clear to us that we really belong, because we are also spiritual beings in our ego and astral body, to the whole humankind and feel with our impulses with the whole humankind. Spiritual science does not allow that we live in it in one-sidedness, but we must be able to harmonise these both sides completely.

We have to realise that we harmonise—although we can love as a person of the present incarnation, even if we are spiritual scientists, our nation as intensely as somebody else is able to love his nation—this feeling with that which combines us with the whole humankind. And just spiritual science raises us to be brought together with the whole humankind because it shows us that we are connected with the whole humankind in our egos and astral bodies. Spiritual science demands more and more to harmonise contrasts from those who devote themselves to it with seriousness and dignity. It is bad if true spiritual science is confused with that unclear mystic activity which wants to combine the needs of the external, physical life with that for which we must rise diving into the spiritual world. Because unclear mysticism wants to bring in that everywhere in the everyday life what spiritual science only shows in the right light. That unclear mysticism will never be able to harmonise, for example, the love of the own nation with the love of the whole humankind, it leads to a hazy mystic cosmopolitism.

One can compare it, as I have already done, to that which hazy theosophists say all the time about equality and about the equal validity of any religion. Indeed, you can say in the abstract: all religions contain the truth. But this is exactly the same, as if one says: pepper, salt and paprika and everything possible are on the table, and all are food ingredients. Sugar, pepper, salt, and paprika—everything is the same. So I give paprika once into the coffee and sugar into the soup, because they are all food ingredients. Exactly on the same point of logic are those who drivel in an unclear mysticism only about the uniform core of all religions instead of getting involved in the real being of any detail that appears in our earth development. It does not depend on emphasising always: all peoples are only expressions of the generally human, but that we recognise the specific tasks which are given to the individual peoples by their folk-souls. A key is given for that in the series of talks which was printed long ago, which was held several years before the outbreak of the war, which did not come into being under the influence of the war, which one cannot reproach that it originated under the impressions of the war: The Mission of the Individual Folk-Souls in Connection with the Germanic-Nordic Mythology.

Just in our time it is important to call to mind such serious matters, so that the human being can find the harmony between general charity and patriotism. One does not need to shy away from characterising of any individual people, in so far as it is a people—the individual human being always rises up above his people. However, you can derive from my remarks that that has to take place without hatred, of course. Anybody does not recognise the real being of the individual plant if he hates the plant and describes what he feels as hatred. And also anybody cannot recognise the characteristics of a people if he describes what he hates of the people, or if he takes up that in the portrayal which comes from the emotions of hatred.

Thus somebody who is able to rise up to the points of view of spiritual science has to be eager all the time to see the being of the world not in a uniform unity, but just in the harmony of a variety. The human being has to find the possibility to feel all possible warmth for his people, concerning which he needs not show less commitment than anybody who does not strive for spiritual science, and to combine, on the other side, what brings us together with the whole humankind as a big complete being.

I said that we resume such matters the day after tomorrow. Now, however, I want to note that we take off that which brings us together with the single incarnation by our physical and etheric bodies at the same time, while we pass from our waking state into sleep and are thereby taken up in the beings of the higher hierarchies. So we take off our national being in sleep, too. We become only human beings, human beings with all the characteristics which we must have by that which we have acquired as human beings. If we look as spiritual scientist at that which happens to the human being, waking and sleeping, we perceive at the same time that in sleep the human being lives in the spiritual world with his ego and astral body, just as now also his physical and etheric bodies belong to the big world. The independent existence stops, which passes as it were in our skin, and we extend our selves to the big self.

Take into account that we go through a summer state and a winter state always in the course of twenty-four hours. The earth goes also through this summer and winter states, but the earth goes through them in the cycle of the year. Why does the earth go through these states in the cycle of the year? Because the earth is a being as we are, only on another level of the hierarchies. The whole earth, if we look at it physically, as it is around us, is only the body of the earth; and as well as we carry our soul and spirit in ourselves, the earth also has its soul and spirit. Only that is the difference that we are awake and sleep in the course of twenty-four hours, and the earth is awake and sleeps in the cycle of the year. It is awake from the autumn up to the spring and sleeps during the summer. So that we can always say, actually when we live in the summertime: we live embedded in the sleeping earth.—When we live in the wintertime: we live embedded in the waking earth.—It does not hold true that the earth is awake in summer and sleeps in winter as we can say in the trivial comparison taken from everyday life. But it is correct that when autumn comes the earth wakes up as a psycho-spiritual being and is most awake in the midwinter. The earth spirit thinks in the midwinter the most and starts stopping its thinking bit by bit while spring is approaching; and it sleeps when the external life sprouts; in the summertime the earth spirit is sleeping.

We as human beings are not only in connection with the body of the earth by our physical body, but also with the spirit of the earth. We know from various talks that the spirit we call the Spirit of Christ was united with the spirit of the earth by the Mystery of Golgotha. The Christ Spirit lives in the spirit of the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha. If the human beings want to commit a festival which should express that the Christ Spirit is in the earth spirit—in which time they have to set this festival? They must not set it in the summer, but in the winter, in the midwinter. This is Christmas. For this reason one sets Christmas and that which develops from it in the wintertime. This arose from a right knowledge of those who once arranged the Christian year. Out of esoteric truth Christmas was determined, not account of historical facts. For the human being, while he is embedded with his soul and spirit in the soul and spirit of the earth, is together with that most awake condition of the earth in the wintertime. There he lives in the waking earth.

And what did the ancient peoples do about whom we know that they worked and got knowledge with the help of a kind of dreamlike clairvoyance? They must refer preferably to that which lives in the sleeping earth spirit when the earth spirit sleeps mostly, has withdrawn mostly to its sleeping state. There they have risen to that—in contrast to the modern humankind—which gave them the truth unconsciously, as it had to be for them. Hence, in the midsummer we find the St John's-tide festival with the peoples who belonged to the cult which scooped its knowledge from the more sleeping, dreamlike state. It is the summer festival in contrast to Christmas which is fitting for the modern humankind.

What is determined so externally, and what our materialistic time does not understand at all, this actually has its deep bases in the spiritual reality. We live now in a time in which the human beings must start again thinking and feeling quite differently as it was the case in the past time. The past time had the task to bring the realm of materialistic thinking and feeling home to the human beings. And just the last centuries which the human souls lived through should bring them home to the materialistic thinking and feeling. The earth development had to go through the materialistic time. We do not do well to harshly criticise materialism. It had to come once in the earth development. But now we live in a time when materialism must be overcome again when spiritual beholding has to enter human souls again. This is the more or less bright or dark sensation of those who are attracted in their own souls to our spiritual-scientific attempts, to our spiritual-scientific world view. They just feel that now the time is there when one has consciously to take up this spiritual world, while the spiritual world was once seen in a dreamlike condition. Spiritual science is there for that.

The past time was that of materialism. Because humankind had to dive into materialism, the strong impulse which takes up humankind again had to work just through the time of materialism. This is the Christ Impulse. When the Christ Impulse came into the earth evolution, the preparation already began. It came in the 14th, 15th centuries all the more. But when it approached, humankind already prepared itself to dive into materialism. The Christ Impulse was there as an objective fact in the world evolution, but the human beings of that time were not able to understand it least of all. Now we live in the time when one has to start to really understand it.

What do we see, hence? We see a strange course of the Christ Impulse in the previous development. We see that this Christ Impulse when it has entered in the human development as a result of the Mystery of Golgotha is not understood at all by the human beings. Let us try once to form an idea about that which people did in their cleverness. Just in the first and the following centuries, after the Christ Impulse had entered, we find that any possible theological system forms, that the people argue about how they have to imagine the Trinity et cetera. We see an infinite theological squabbling through centuries, and it would probably be the worst way to want to understand the Christ Impulse today from this theological squabbling how the Christ Impulse has worked during these centuries. The people who quarrelled there about its understanding have also understood nothing of the way the Christ Impulse stands in the evolution.

Let us try to realise how this impulse really worked once. I may give you single facts. I take the event that happened in the fourth century A.D., in 312, on the 28th October, which determined the later map of Europe completely: this was that Constantine, who was called “the Great,” the son of Constantius Chlorus, moved against Maxentius, the ruler of Rome, and triumphed over him. That is why Christianity also was victorious in the western world in an external way. Constantine declared Christianity the state religion et cetera. However, did he act out of his cleverness? Did that happen, which happened in those days, out of cleverness? We cannot say this. What happened then, actually? When Maxentius, the ruler of Rome, got to know that Constantine was approaching, he asked the Sibylline Books at first. That means that he set about understanding the world phenomena in a dreamlike way. He got the statement out of these books that somebody would accomplish the right action if he left the city as a ruler of Rome and went into battle outside Rome. This was something most unusual that one could think. Because Constantine had a much smaller army than Maxentius and could have achieved nothing without doubt if Maxentius had remained in Rome. But Maxentius moved out of Rome on the advice of the Sibylline Books. However, also in the army of Constantine the generals were not victorious. Rather Constantine had a dream showing him the symbol of Christ. On account of this dream he made his armies carry the cross as the symbol of Christ. He made his behaviour dependent on that which the dream had revealed to him. This battle by which the map of Europe was determined at that time was not decided by means of human cleverness, nor did the generals triumph, but dreams and prophecies. Everything in Europe would have changed if in those days the matters had taken place according to the consciousness of the human beings and not according to that what worked out of the subconsciousness what the human beings just did not know.

The theologians have argued about the question who is Christ, whether He is born with the Father in eternity, whether He is born in time whether He had the same validity as the Father et cetera. In their thoughts nothing of the Christ Impulse was included. But it worked within the human beings in the subconscious regions. It worked not by the egos, but by the astral bodies. The Christ Impulse was reality and worked without human beings understanding it. This is the important, essential part. The working of Christ is so independent of that what human beings understood of it like the course of a thunderstorm is independent of that what human beings have learnt about electricity or in the physical laboratory. Now it is the time to immerse oneself consciously in the effectiveness of the Christ Impulse. But Christ was always working as a force in the historical events.

We go over from this to another, later example. However, there we have to remember of what I explained to you. For the time when materialism approached it is important to know that the human being, while he wants to immerse himself in the spiritual world, must do that best of all in the wintertime. Hence, the view arises everywhere for this time that at the mentioned nights of midwinter especially talented people are endowed with inspirations from the spiritual world. There are legends everywhere with the peoples that tell us how the especially talented human beings who experience no initiation but are endowed by their nature, by elemental forces working in them to be inspired, how these are inspired during the nights from Christmas Eve up to the Epiphany day, in thirteen winter nights.

There is a very nice legend which was found in Norway not long ago, the legend of Olaf Åsteson who approaches the church at Christmas Eve and falls asleep. He sleeps up to the sixth January; and when he wakes up, he knows how to tell in imaginations about that which has taken place in the soul land, in the realm of spirits, as we call it. He expresses it in pictures, but he has experienced it through these thirteen nights. Such legends are found everywhere. They are just not that which one calls legends today. Indeed, there have always been endowed human beings who have gone through a physical initiation by elemental forces working in them which the human being can go through if he carefully follows the instructions of the initiatory path by his will.

So that we can say: in the time of materialism there could always be human beings who could unite with the earth spirit and receive inspirations when the earth spirit is most awake, in the midwinter. This was also the time when the Christ Impulse was able to work which united with the earth. Imagine especially endowed souls who are receptive for the spiritual world. It became apparent to them that they just got the impulses to that what they had to accomplish from the spiritual world in these thirteen nights up to the sixth January. This had to appear and appeared always again in little and big examples that there were human beings in the historical course who were inclined spiritually so that if the right point in time entered when they lived through those thirteen nights in winter the spiritual impulse—and in this time the Christ Impulse in particular—came into them. Initiations by nature, initiations which did not take place by means of conscious work have been carried out in the time of materialism always the easiest in these thirteen nights. We can find out that where such initiations appeared they took place in these thirteen nights.

And now we have a fact that even those will accept, who have only a little good will to recognise the spiritual world—the fewest people have this today,—that spiritual forces entered the historical course in the 15th century in the form of a virgin, the Maid of Orleans, as can be proved. You can verify this also historically that again the whole map of Europe was arranged differently, because the Maid of Orleans helped the French against the English at that time. Who thinks about it can find out that everything would have formed differently after that what human beings are able to do unless the shepherd girl had intervened—and in this shepherd girl just the forces of the spiritual world. The Maid of Orleans was only the instrument for that which was caused in those days. The Christ Impulse worked in her.

However, she had to have a physical initiation for that—and this physical initiation had to be carried out the best in the thirteen nights up to the sixth January. The Maid of Orleans had to get a sleeping state in the time from the 24th December to the sixth January when she would have been especially receptive for the spiritual influence which can be there just in this time. So that one had to demand that the Maid of Orleans would have experienced the time in a not quite conscious state from the 24th December to the sixth January and would have got the Christ Impulse.—Yes, the Maid of Orleans went through this state in a quite striking way. One cannot go through it more strikingly, than when one is still in that sleeping state in which somebody is before his birth, in the last times which he/she spends as a child before the birth in the body of the mother. The external consciousness is not able, of course, to take up anything. There is a sleeping state, and if it is the end of the time in the womb, it is the ripest condition of the internal-motherly sleep.

Indeed, the Maid of Orleans is born on the sixth January. This is the great secret of the Maid of Orleans that it went through an initiation by nature during thirteen days, which preceded her birth. That was why especially sensitive people gathered on that sixth January, when the Maid of Orleans was born in the village, and said that something quite particular must have happened. They sensed that something particular had come to the village. The Maid of Orleans was born. She worked through an initiation by nature in that sleeping state which she experienced in the body of the mother in the last time before her birth. There we see the spiritual beings working behind the threshold of that which takes place for the human consciousness, which are under this threshold of consciousness.

We see what history can mean if it counts only on that which is given in documents and external communications. The gods go differently through the course of history. The gods work by other means and in other ways. They put a Maid of Orleans into life who is able because of her special karma of this incarnation to take up the Christ Impulse and to work with it. They allow the Christ Impulse to flow in at the right moment. Of course, both were right for that: the special individual karma of the Maid of Orleans had to be added. Not any child that is born on the sixth January could accomplish the same.

Thus we can really say: the Christ Impulse worked in the human being using those forces which did not become clear to these human beings. Only today do we live in the time in which we must consciously take up that which used another way for centuries than the conscious way to be effective in history.

I wanted to arouse a feeling in your souls how the subconscious powers work definitely, what external history is which can be studied according to the external documents, that it is trivialities. It is good if one does such a study in particular in our time. We see, nevertheless, just in our time something great, something immense, something valiant, combined with sacrificial actions, occurring. But we see this great that takes place in our time, being really accompanied from the consequence of the extreme materialism, from that consequence which tries to explain everything that takes place in our time by means of bare external circumstances. This finds expression in the fact that one nation puts the blame on the other nation for the present events and wants to judge everything externally, so that one finds the guilt with the other for that which takes place. Also for our time the causes and reasons of the events are right down at the bottom in the subconscious processes. We will speak about that the day after tomorrow.

Our time will be suitable—also because of the bloody events—to remind the human beings of spiritual impulses of cognition. If once again peace is in the countries waging war today, one will realise that one cannot explain such immense wars of world history out of external causes. One will find out that one cannot explain them. Today people still say, especially the clever ones: nobody is allowed to speak about everything that has caused this war, history will speak about that.—They regard themselves as especially prudent who say there: only in fifty, in hundred years history will speak the right thing about that.

What one calls history today will never explain the causes of these events; however, one will see that from the historical consideration the causes cannot be fathomed. But other support will be there. An esoteric observation of our present just shows this.

What is one of the most remarkable facts in this destiny-burdened time? Oh, one of the most remarkable facts is without doubt this that so countless human beings go through the gate of death in their youth. We know what happens with the human being when he goes through the gate of death. We know that he comes out of the physical body with his etheric body, astral body and ego and that he takes off his etheric body after relatively short time and makes his journey with the essence of the etheric body. However, you can imagine that a difference must be between an etheric body, which is taken off between the twentieth and thirtieth years which could still have supplied the functions of human life for decades, and an etheric body, which is taken off at the later age. Yes, there is a big difference. If a human being dies because of age or illness, the etheric body has fulfilled its task. But countless young human beings go now through the gate of death, and their etheric bodies could not yet fulfil everything that they could fulfil.

I would like to show you at a concrete example how it is in a certain way with such etheric bodies that are torn away by force from the physical bodies. One could give many examples, of course. But today I want to give you an example which we ourselves experienced in Dornach in autumn. We experienced it at the site of our construction. A family which lives near the construction had a little son of seven years—a family which belongs to our anthroposophical circle. It was a dear boy of seven years, really a boon boy. He was so well-behaved that when his father had gone to war the seven-year-old Theo said to his mother: now I must be especially diligent, because I must help you where the father has helped you.

One evening after a lecture, a person belonging to our circle came and reported that this little Theo has disappeared since the evening. One could imagine nothing but that he has had an accident. A removal van had driven in that evening by what one calls in the external life chance at a place where for years indeed no van has gone, and since that time also not. Here the carriage had tipped over. The little Theo had been in that small house which one calls the canteen because there our friends who work on the construction are supplied with food. Strangely enough—he would have left sooner—he was detained by somebody, and while he wanted to go out through a door through which he would have gone on a certain way, this time he had to go through another door, and he thereby passed the removal van, just when the removal van toppled over. The van fell on him. This is one of those examples where we see clearly karma working.

I often used the simple comparison to show how often cause and effect are totally confused: we see a person going along a river. Suddenly we see the person falling into the river. We go and find a stone lying where the person has fallen. The person is drawn out of the water. He is already dead. If one does not go on examining the matter, one tells the matter with the best external conscience in the following way: the man fell over the stone and then into the river, and drowned.—One would have only needed to examine, and one would have thought that death did not happen because the person fell into the water, but the person fell into the water because he was dead; he had got a heart attack. Just the opposite happened as one imagines. You see how easy it is to confuse cause and effect everywhere in life. However, in the usual science this happens everywhere that causes and effects are confused.

Of course, here is the case that this Theo just caused it. He was the cause that the van passed at this time, he steered it to himself. You have to imagine this as the real secret of the matter. But now I will go on: a human child is killed in an accident in the very first blossom of life. If anybody is combined wholeheartedly with the construction work in Dornach and has the possibility at the same time to observe what is working on this construction, then one can say: this etheric body which was separated by force from the little Theo is in the atmosphere of the construction. Thus one gains the best Inspirative forces for the construction combining his own soul with that what lives, expanded to a little world, in the atmosphere of the construction. Never will I hesitate before confessing unreservedly that I have to thank for much that I could find for our construction in that time that I directed my soul to the etheric body of the little Theo working in the atmosphere of the construction. Thus just the connections are in the world. The real individuality of this human being goes on, but the etheric body remains which could have still supplied a human life for many decades.

Imagine the number of the unused etheric bodies which are floating there in the spiritual atmosphere over us and over those who will also live after us. Those etheric bodies which are left behind by those who went in young age through the gate of death in our destiny-burdened time. We do not speak of the way the individualities go through, but we speak of the fact that an own spiritual atmosphere is created by these etheric bodies. The human beings, who will live there, will live in this atmosphere. They will be submerged into a spiritual atmosphere which is filled with these etheric bodies which sacrificed their lives, because just in our time humankind can advance by these events. But it will be necessary that one feels what these etheric bodies intend which are the best inspirators of the future humankind. A good time of spiritualism comes if human beings show understanding, internal heart understanding for that what these etheric bodies want to say to them. All these etheric bodies are assistants of the spiritual impetus of the future. That is why it is so important that there are souls who are able to feel that what comes into the atmosphere of the future by these etheric bodies.

You do not learn anything about the nature of the etheric bodies that you can tell: the human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, but that you also know such a secret of the effective spirituality of the etheric bodies as it is there in future.

Those have to prepare themselves who already tend to stand up for spiritual science, to receive that which these etheric bodies want to say. If we turn our souls to the spiritual world, we prepare ourselves and those who come after us to feel that which the legacy, the etheric legacy of the dead wants from the future humankind. If human souls are stimulated by spiritual science, so that they are able to direct their spiritual senses to the spiritual worlds, then something great and immense will certainly sprout up as an effect of the blood, of the courage, of the sufferings, and of the sacrifices. Hence, I would like to summarise at the end of this consideration in some words that what may now inspire, invigorate us if we as spiritual-scientific supporters direct our senses to the big, destiny-burdened events of our time.

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the nation's sacrifices
Will grow up the fruits of spirit
If souls aware of spirit turn
Their senses to the spirit-land.

In connection with some spiritual-scientific considerations, I have often said that it concerns within our spiritual-scientific movement and its efforts of taking up those concepts and ideas not only in theory which one can learn by spiritual science, but that the spiritual-scientific results have to penetrate the innermost movements, the innermost impulses of our soul life. Indeed, we have to start from the results of the spiritual-scientific knowledge, and we can gain such knowledge if we just study it if we occupy ourselves with it. But spiritual science is not to be taken up like another science, so that one knows only afterwards that one has heard this or that, that this or that is true concerning one or another matter in the world. Spiritual science has to work on our souls so that the souls become different in this or that field of feeling that they become different taking up what can flow out of spiritual science. The concepts, ideas and mental pictures which we take up by means of spiritual science have to rouse our souls in the core, have to unite with our feelings, so that we learn through spiritual science to look at the world not only differently, but also to feel differently than without it. The spiritual scientist, actually, has to familiarise himself with certain circumstances quite differently than this is possible without spiritual science. If he is able to do this, he has basically only arrived at what has to flow to us from spiritual science.

We live in a grievous time today, in which to us one of the most important questions of spiritual science, the question of death, appears in so countless cases before our eyes, before our souls, before our hearts, closer to one, closest to the other. The spiritual scientist has also to be able to prove spiritual science in his feelings in this grievous time. He should be able to have a different attitude to the events of time than the others, even if these events touch him so near. Indeed, the one needs consolation, the other needs encouragement; but both should find this also in spiritual science. If this can be the case, we have only correctly understood the intentions of spiritual science.

We have thereby to experience a certain shock in our souls through the ideas of spiritual science already that we learn to feel quite differently about some matters than we can feel without spiritual science about anything in the world. If you summarise all that which has already been said about the mystery of death within our spiritual science, you can understand what I would also like to explain today not only repeating, but something adding to former considerations. We must learn to think about death not only differently, but we must learn to feel about death differently. Since, indeed, the mystery of death is connected with the deepest world mysteries. We should be quite clear to ourselves that we take off all that through which we get perception and knowledge in the physical world, through which we experience something of the external world when we go through the gate of death. We get impressions about the world in the physical world by means of our senses. We take off these senses when we enter the spiritual world. Then we do not have the senses any more. This must already be a proof to us that we must try if we think about the supersensible world to think differently than we have learnt to think by means of our senses.

Indeed, we have a clue of sorts, while also in the everyday life, which we spend between birth and death, something analogous, something similar of the experiences in the spiritual world projects. These are the dream experiences projecting into the everyday life. The dream experience does not come into being to us through our senses; our senses have really nothing to do with the dream experience. Nevertheless, it is in the pictures that sometimes remind of the sensory life. We have in these dream pictures, even if a weak reflection, just a reflection of that type, as the spiritual existence faces us as an Imaginative world between death and a new birth. We have Imaginative perception, however, after death; the experience appears in pictures. Only if you see, for example, a red colour in the sensory world and must have the thought: what is behind this red colour?—Then you will say to yourselves: there is something that fulfils the space, something material is behind it.—The red colour also appears to you in the spiritual world, but there is nothing material behind it, nothing that would exercise a material impression in the usual sense. Behind the red is a psycho-spiritual being; behind the red is the same which you feel as your world in your soul. One would like to say: from the sense-impression of the colour we descend externally in the physical down to the material world, from the Imaginations we ascend to spiritual regions of the spiritual world.

Now we must be aware—this has been emphasised strongly in the new edition of my Theosophy—that also these Imaginations do not appear to us like the sensory impressions of the physical world. They are there indeed, these Imaginations, but they appear as experiences: the red, the blue colours are there experiences. One can rightly call these Imaginations red or blue, but they are something different than the sensory impressions of the physical world. They are more intimate; we unite more intimately with them. Without the red colour of the rose you are yourself; within the red colour of the spiritual world you feel to be therein, you are united with the red colour. While you perceive a red colour in the spiritual world, a will, a very effective will of a spiritual being develops. This will shines, and that which it shines is red. But you feel to be in the will, and you call this experience red, of course. I would like to say that a physical colour is like the frozen spiritual experience. Thus we must get the possibility in many fields to think something different, to give our ideas other values and meanings if we really want to rise to an understanding of the spiritual world.

Then we have to realise that above in the spiritual world the Imaginations do not have the same relationship to the spiritual beings—whose expression, for example, the colours are—as a colour has to a sensory being. The rose is red; this is a quality of the rose. But if a spirit comes to the nearness and we must have the consciousness according to that which I have now said: the spirit shines red, and then the red does not mean a quality of the spirit like the red of the rose is a quality. This red colour is more something like a revelation of the inside of the spiritual being; it is more a character which the spiritual being puts in the spiritual world. You have only to behold through the Imaginations. The activity which you develop there is to be compared in the physical world only with its ahrimanic image, namely with reading. We look at the red colour of the rose and know: it is a quality of the rose. We do not only look at the red colour in the spiritual world, but we interpret it, but not fantasising—I must warn about it always again. However, our soul itself already finds that something is given like a sound, a letter, like something that should be deciphered, should be read, so that it recognises the meaning.

The spiritual being means something if he manifests himself as a C sharp or G sharp or as red or blue or green colours. The spiritual being means something with it; one starts speaking with him, one starts reading his writing. The external culture is based on it that such matters which have their deep wisdom in the spiritual world are transplanted then also to the external world. We speak rightly of an occult reading, because somebody who attains the clairvoyant consciousness, who enters the spiritual world, who is able to see out over the Imaginations and reads in them, looks through them at the bottom of the souls living in the spiritual world, not only through colours, but also through other impressions, such impressions which remind of sensory impressions, and those which are added in the spiritual worlds.

This activity which is a purely psycho-spiritual activity is subordinate, as it were, to the government of the really progressive spiritual beings. Here in the physical world, Ahriman creates a reflection just of that which I have characterised now. The external reading of characters in the physical world is an ahrimanic reflection of this occult reading. Since reading in the physical world by signs which were developed artificially is an ahrimanic activity. Not without good reason, the invention of the art of printing was felt as an ahrimanic art, as a “black art,” as one called it. You are just not allowed to believe that you could escape the claws of Lucifer and Ahriman using any performances. Lucifer and Ahriman must be in the external culture. It is only that you find the balance, the way if life turns perpetually to the luciferic or the ahrimanic side. If anybody did not want to be touched at all by Ahriman, never would he have to learn reading. But this is why it concerns not that we flee Ahriman and Lucifer, but that we get the right relationship to them, that we position ourselves correctly to them, although they are as forces round us. If we know that we follow what we have described so often as the Christ Impulse which lives in us, and if we get the spiritual sensations which impose the intention to follow Christ to us at every moment of our life, then we are also able to read. Then we can get to know—and we already shall do it if it is right according to our karma—that Ahriman also established reading, and we see this ahrimanic art in the right light. If we do not experience this, we declaim something about the ahrimanic culture, about the progress and the splendour of the ahrimanic culture, for example, about reading.

But all these matters also impose duties, and this is why it concerns that such duties are also kept. Just in our present time, a lot can be stated to defend or accuse this or that. Really, we have what we can call a flood of war literature. Every day produces not only brochures, but also books et cetera. There you can often read: this country has so and so many illiterates, in this country so and so many people can read and write, and the like. Adopting this easily would not be according to what somebody who is well-versed in spiritual science has to say out of his responsibility. If I wanted to indicate, for example, that which I have to state with regard to our time, all the especially bad of a nation and say that in this nation are so and so many people who cannot read and write, I would not correctly speak spiritual-scientifically. There only matters must be stated for which one can take responsibility to the occult duties.

You see—I wanted to give only an example—that spiritual science must go over into life and imposes duties in this deeper sense. If the spiritual scientist says such things which the others also say, you are always able to notice that they are said in a different context, and it depends on this. Hence, something appears rather strange to somebody who does not know spiritual science, if it is said in spiritual science, because he is accustomed to have other ideas and must say to himself sometimes: this spiritual science calls the black white, and the white black.—This is necessary sometimes, because if one ascends to the spiritual world with the usual ideas and concepts which one learns in the physical world, some ideas and concepts must be changed thoroughly.

From this point of view let us take one of the most important, most enigmatic concepts which we have to acquire out of the impressions of the physical world, the concept of death. In the physical world, the human being sees death always only from one side, from the side that he sees developing the human life up to the point where the human being dies. That is where the physical body is separated at first from the higher members of the human nature and is dissolved then within the physical world. One can really say what the human being sees as death within the physical world: looking at death from one side. However, looking at death from the other side means to look at it in an opposite light, to see it as something totally different.

When we enter the physical life by birth, we experience something at first in such a way that the peak of our physical consciousness is not yet reached. You know that we do not remember the first years of our experience with the usual physical consciousness. Nobody can remember his birth with the usual physical consciousness. At least no one will appear in the world who states that he can remember with his usual consciousness how he was born. We can say: this is a characteristic of the physical consciousness that the birth of the human being must be forgotten. It is forgotten; also the first years are forgotten. If we look back at our life between birth and death, we remember up to a certain point. Then memory ends. The point where it stops is not our physical birth, but an experience precedes. Nobody can know from experience that he is born. He can only conclude it. We conclude that we are born—and only from that—that after us human beings are born whose birth we perceive. If the naturalist states that he only admits what can be seen, nobody could claim his birth after this principle if he wants to be logical, because it is impossible to perceive his own birth without being clairvoyant; one can only conclude it.

Now exactly the opposite takes place with regard to death. The whole life through between death and new birth the moment of death which he experienced stands before the soul eye of the dead as the liveliest, as the brightest impression. However, do not believe that you are allowed to possibly conclude from it that this would be a painful impression. Then you would believe that the dead looks back at what you see in the physical world of death, of decay, of decline. He sees death, however, from the other side; he sees something in death what one must call the most beautiful also in the spiritual world. Since the human being can experience nothing more beautiful than the sight of death in the spiritual world first of all. Seeing this victory of the spirit over the material, this lighting up of the spiritual light of the soul from the deep darkness of the material is the greatest, the most significant that can be beheld on the other side of life which the human being goes through between death and a new birth.

If the human being takes off the etheric body between death and new birth and has fully developed his consciousness what happens not very long time after death, then he has not the same relationship to himself as here in the physical world. If the human being sleeps here in the physical world, he is unaware, and if he is awake, he realises that he knows now: I have a self, an ego in myself. After death in the spiritual world, this is something different—there is his self-consciousness on a higher level,—then it is not just the same. I will immediately speak about that. But there is also something like a self-contemplation. Exactly the same way as one must call to mind the self in the morning while waking up it is in the spiritual world. But this self-contemplation is a looking back at the moment of death. Always it is in such a way, as if we say to ourselves to perceive our ego between death and a new birth: you have really died, so you are a self, you are an ego.

This is the most important thing: one looks back at the victory of the spirit over the body, one looks back at the moment of death which is the most beautiful of the spiritual world that can be experienced. In this looking back one notices his self in the spiritual world. This is always, one cannot say like waking up—one would stamp the concepts one-sidedly,—it is the self-contemplation to look back at his death. That is why it is so important that the human being has the possibility to look really back at the moment of death with full postmortal consciousness—with a consciousness which enters after death. So he dreams not only in any way what he beholds there but can completely understand what he beholds; this is extremely important. We can already prepare ourselves during life while we try to practice self-knowledge. In particular, this is necessary for humankind from now on to practice self-knowledge. Basically all spiritual science is there to give that self-knowledge to the human being which is necessary to him. For spiritual science is an introduction to the enlarged self of the human being, that self by which one belongs to the whole world. I said that the consciousness after death is something different than here in the physical world. If I might to plot the consciousness after death diagrammatically to you, I could do it in the following way.

(sehendes Auge = seeing eye, sinnlicher Körper = material object, geistige Wesenheit = spiritual being)

Imagine we would have an eye here, and here we would have an object. How do we attain the consciousness that there is an object outside us? Because the object makes an impression on our eye. The object makes an impression on our eye, and we learn to know something about the object. The object is outside in the world, it makes an impression on our senses, and we take up the mental picture, which we can form of the object, in ourselves, in our souls. The object is outside us. Then it has delivered the mental picture which we form then. It is different now in the spiritual world. Because I cannot draw it graphically differently, I would want what I always call soul eye to draw as a soul eye, although it is wrong strictly considered. Now this soul eye which the human being has after death has the disposition that after death the human being sees, for example, an angel or another human soul who is also in the spiritual world not as he sees a flower in the physical world, but this soul eye has the disposition—we disregard a human soul at first, we look only at a being of the higher hierarchy—that it does not have as an eye the consciousness if here an angel, an archangel is: I see this angelic being outside myself,—but: I am seen by the angelic being, he sees me.—It is just the opposite of the physical world. We familiarise in the spiritual world so that we get the consciousness of the beings of the higher hierarchies that we are known by them that they think us. We feel embedded in them, we feel that we are conceived by the angels, archangels, spirits of personality like the realms of minerals, plants, and animals feel to be conceived by us.

Only concerning human souls we have the feeling that they see us as we also have the feeling that our view goes into them. We see them and the human souls see us. As to all the other beings of the higher hierarchies, we have the feeling that we are perceived by them, are thought, imagined by them; and while we are perceived by them, are thought, are imagined by them, we are in the spiritual world. Now imagine that we walk around as souls in the spiritual world, like we walk around in the physical world. We then have the feeling everywhere to get a relationship to the beings of the higher hierarchies, like we have the feeling here in the physical world to get a relationship to the mineral, plant, and animal realms. Only we need the meditation repeatedly that we have a self. Then we look at our death and say to us: this is you.—This is a continual consciousness, continual contents of our conscioussnes.

What I have said today is to be added to the various ideas which you can take up from talks and books. It is spoken more emotionally than that which is spoken, for example, in the book Theosophy more from an external point of view. But only while you look at such a matter emotionally, you can feel as if you are in the sensations which one must have towards these matters and generally towards the spiritual world.

Hence, self-knowledge is that which supports us which makes us strong for the life between death and a new birth. That could face me recently again with particular liveliness when I had the task to speak several times at the cremation, after some of our friends had deceased. There it was necessary to speak about something that is connected intimately with the character, with the self of that who had gone through the gate of death. Why did this Inspirative or Intuitive come into being to speak something to the dead that is connected with their beings? This appears in the life of the persons concerned after death. It comes to their assistance what invigorates the forces of their self-knowledge. While speaking about these qualities, which they feel in themselves, immediately after death when their consciousness had not yet awoken, one let flow, as it were, something of the strength towards them that they need to gradually develop the ability to look at the moment of death. Their whole being seems to be concentrated there, as it has developed between birth and death. One helps the dead if one lets flow something towards them just after death that reminds them of their qualities, of their experiences et cetera. One thereby fosters the strength of self-knowledge. If anybody has the possibility as clairvoyant to familiarise himself with the soul of such a dead person, then he feels the desire in his soul to hear something just in this time about the kind, as he was, about this and that which he has gone through or which his main qualities are. You can understand that here on earth the life of a human being does not resemble the life of the other, but that all human beings have lives which are different from each other. It is the same with those who have gone through the gate of death. Not one soul-life resembles the other between death and new birth. I would like to say: every soul-life which one can observe there is a new revelation, and one can always emphasise individual particular qualities only. I would like to speak about such matters today and then also in Cologne the day after tomorrow. I would like to speak of a concrete case as an example.

In Dornach before some time, we saw a member leaving the physical plane who was rather old-aged (Lina Grosheintz-Rohrer). A member who had spent her life, in any case, in industrious work, caring work, but during the last years, since longer time already, she was connected in the deepest soul with our spiritual-scientific world view and had completely developed it in her heart, in her soul. So that one may say: this personality had come so far that in the last times of her physical existence she was completely one in her feeling with our world view. Now you know that the human being if he/she goes through the gate of death takes off his physical body first, carries the etheric body in himself still for a while and then takes off the etheric body, too. There comes a time when the human being must only gain the consciousness gradually which he has to possess between death and a new birth. Immediately after death, the human being is in his etheric body. There he experiences, we know this, a complete review of his life as a big life tableau. In this time, particularly the powerful impulses also appear in his soul, I would like to say, all at once, so that something that is important just in this regard can appear after death that is completely different than during life.

During life the human being is often tied up by the restrictions which his physical body places on him. Immediately after death, the human being has overcome what burdens, presses, solidifies him, and also the physical that weakens the clearness of some soul impulses. One has not yet lost the etheric body and, hence, the memory of life. It is an Imaginative world which contains the pictures of the past life, and also contains the especially strong impulses. If now a soul has taken up the impulses of spiritual science during life so intensely, if this soul has brought these impulses up to the innermost feeling in herself, she can develop these impressions after death also in another way, because she has the elastic, malleable etheric body at her disposal, then she is no longer tied up to that which the physical body allows.

One could see this with that personality in particular about which I have just spoken who shortly after death let flow out of her soul what had lived from the spiritual-scientific impulses in her, after I had just succeeded in transporting myself completely into this soul. Of course, it would not have stamped this in such words during her physical life. Because the etheric body was still there, she could dress it in physical words. It was not yet out of her elastic etheric body, when she developed what she had taken up from spiritual science, so that it became the expression of her soul. Then I had the necessity at the cremation of the concerning personality a few days later that I had to speak these words, which sounded from her being, which belonged to her, not to me:

Into cosmic distances I will carry
My feeling heart, so that it grows warm
In the fire of the holy forces' working;

Into cosmic thoughts I will weave
My own thinking, so that it grows clear
In the light of eternal life-becoming;

Into depths of soul I will sink
Devoted contemplation, so that it grows strong
For the true goals of human activity;

In the peace of God I strive thus
Amidst life's battles and cares
To prepare myself for the higher Self;

Aspiring to work in joy-filled peace,
Sensing cosmic being in my own being,
I seek to fulfill my human duty;

May I live in anticipation,
Oriented toward my soul's star
Which gives me my place in spirit realms.

I would like to say that these are the words expressing the sensation after death what the soul has become through spiritual science. Then came the time which everybody has to go through after death more or less which one improperly calls the time of sleeping. Because if you have taken off the etheric body, you are actually in the spiritual world, only the fullness of the spiritual world is dazzling you. You cannot have an overview of everything, you have only to adapt your strength which you have brought into the spiritual world; you have to belittle yourself. You see too much after death; the consciousness is there, you have to reduce it to the level of the forces which you have acquired. Then you can orientate yourself and live really in the spiritual world. It is spoken not quite properly if anybody says that one becomes conscious after some time, but one has to say that somebody has too much consciousness and has to reduce it to the levels which he can endure. This means waking up. That is why the soul of which I have just spoken to you reached this condition—when the etheric body is taken off—that she was unable to endure the spirit light. But she had a lot of strength in herself. You notice that in the words which I have read, and that this strength had been completely filled bit by bit with that which spiritual science can make of the human feeling and willing. That is why this being, this soul got a consciousness which was tolerable to her some time after death. Of course, one would have to describe a lot of the time which begins then for a soul when one wanted to describe everything that such a soul experiences there. One only describes parts always; and while we are within our movement, it belongs, of course, to the most significant matters you can observe in the souls what connects these souls with our movement. You can learn what generally human souls connects with the whole world after death; but you can observe best of all in such souls what is the life of the soul after death, particularly when it has approached you like this soul of whom I speak now. Therefore I could observe just with this soul how she got the orientating consciousness while taking part in our meetings, really taking part in our meetings. And she completely took part in a Dornach Easter festival of this year, in that Easter festival when I tried to explain the particular depth of the Easter thought to our dear friends there in Dornach. This soul was present there. She took part as she had taken part once with intimate warmth; she took part now as a soul. She wanted to express herself like somebody has the need in the physical body to express himself afterwards about that which he has taken up. She wanted to express herself, and the peculiar is that she stamped such words, because thereby the possibility exists to communicate, that she formed such words describing her present life and its experience of this Easter lecture. The soul added something like a supplement of that which had come from her at that time after death. This supplement which came out of the consciousness is the following:

I will steer in human souls
Spirit feeling, so that willingly
It wakes in hearts the word of sacrifice;

I will think with human spirits
Soul warmth, so that powerfully
It can feel the Risen One;

I had taken care just in those Easter talks and in some other talks, which I held at that time, to draw attention—as I did it repeatedly—to the significance of spiritual science not only here for the life on earth, but for the whole world. Somebody who goes through the gate of death can also experience and get to know what is done here in spiritual science. That is why I advise so many people if they have dear dead to read out to them or to tell about the spiritual-scientific teachings, because what is stamped in spiritual-scientific words has not only significance for the souls living in physical bodies, but it has full significance also for the souls who are disembodied. It is to them like spiritual air of life, like spiritual water of life, or one could also say, they perceive light by us here below. This light is for us symbolic at first, one would like to say, because we hear words and take up them as thoughts in our souls; the dead see it, however, really as a spiritual light.

Now it is very significant that just this soul who has often heard this wanted to say really: I have understood this, and it is real that way.—Since her words in this regard are:

The earthly flame of spiritual knowledge
Brightly illuminates death's appearance;

This is the fact for the soul. She wants to say: what you speak there below shines like a flame.—She expressed this, while she said “earthly flame:” it “brightly illuminates death's appearance ...” Why does she say “death's appearance?” If you meditate, you find out it. She said it, because she had always heard that we call the world maya: on earth she is in the appearance of the senses; now she is also in an appearance by which she only has to behold the being:

The earthly flame of spiritual knowledge

Brightly illuminates death's appearance;—

And something that she also confirms now:

The Self becomes cosmic eye and ear.

She means cosmic ear. She means that now the whole self becomes a powerful sense-organ, becomes the perception organ for the whole universe. It is a nice way by which the dead shows how she becomes conscious that that becomes true which spiritual science says. For this soul it is typical that she wants to express herself straight away after death and wants to say: yes, now I am so far that that which I have learnt on earth appears to me as the right thing.

These words were to me of a certain importance, because they came after some time, maybe a few weeks later, from the spiritual world from that soul of which I have spoken, after shortly before, a few weeks before, another event satisfying me took place.

Friends of our movement lost a rather young son in the current war who had volunteered for the army. The young man fell. He had half approached spiritual science; one would like to say, in his last earth time which he went through. He was only seventeen, eighteen years old. Now he had gone, he had fallen. After some time I could behold the soul of this young man really approaching his parents. With many souls who have now gone through the gate of death during the war this is the case that they become conscious rather rapidly. It was thus—I could really hear it,—as if he said to them: now I would like to make it comprehensible to you that that which I have often heard of spiritual science, of spiritual light and spiritual beings in your home can become clear to me that it is true that it helps me what I heard there.

I do not mention this, because it is something special, but because it just shows how the relationship is between the earthly life and the spiritual life. Nevertheless, I want to mention something strange besides. At that time after a lecture which I held in one of our branches—I had written down the words which had come through to me, I went to the parents of the young man and told this to them and also gave the night in which the young man approached his parents and spoke as it were to their souls. There said the father: this is quite strange, I dream very seldom. However, I dreamt this night, this same night of my son that he appeared to me and that he wanted to say something to me; however, I have not understood it.

It touches those people strangely even today who are outside our spiritual movement if these matters are explained to them. Hence, we keep them among us. But it must be important to us to deal specifically also with these matters, because our knowledge is composed of these single stones of the experiences of the spiritual world. We only get a concrete picture if we do not want to limit ourselves only to hear nice theories of the spiritual world but if we can enliven spiritual science in our souls, so that we endure that which one speaks of the spiritual world really, like reasonable human beings just speak of that which they experience in the sensory world. Spiritual science thereby becomes life in the right sense in us, and it should become life in us, that we gain a life by it—not only a teaching, a knowledge. It should bridge the abyss which results from materialism which extends outside spiritual science and must become bigger and bigger. It bridges this abyss between the physical-sensory realm, which we go through between birth and death, and the spiritual realm in which we live between death and a new birth, so that we gradually learn to become citizens also of the spiritual world. What matters is that we learn to feel: somebody who has gone through the gate of death has only taken on another condition of life and has an attitude towards our feeling after death like somebody who just had to move because of the events of life to a distant country in which we can follow him only later. So we have to endure nothing but a time of separation. But this must be felt vividly by means of spiritual science. If you risk forming an idea about single concrete facts, you will already see that these facts also correspond to it and support each other for somebody who does not look into the spiritual world. That is why the confidence, which one has, before one beholds in the spiritual world, is actually no blind confidence, no trust in authority, but a confidence which is supported by the feeling which is deeper than critical knowledge, by the original feeling of truth indigenous to the human soul.

We live in a time in which the external destiny-burdened events make it clear that the human life has to be deepened. It would be much better if the human beings looked at these military events as a warning to deepen the souls more than the predominating majority of the human beings do. They discuss instead who has the war guilt, who does this or that. I said, while I discussed the most important matters before you: concerning some matters we must learn by spiritual science to change our ideas, our concepts. We can count the concept of war to these concepts—today this may be still added to our consideration about such a significant object like death.

One will be right, also from the spiritual-scientific point of view, to consider the war as an illness of development. Indeed, it is an illness, but you remember only once that you also do not do justice to an illness if you condemn it. What matters in illness is often that which has preceded the illness in the human body: the disorder, the disharmony has preceded. Then the illness comes into being which often is there to work just against the disorder in the body. Even if the human being goes through an illness before death, it is this way. He carries disharmonies in himself which make it impossible for him to enter the spiritual world. Perhaps, the spiritual world would be obscured to him too long, or other obstacles would be there, because disharmonies are in him which cannot just be brought into the spiritual world. This is why an illness infects him before death. It frees his soul from disharmony so far that he can enter the spiritual world.

If it is an illness which leads to recovery, then this illness is there to compensate that which has preceded the illness which was caused by the karma of previous lives, maybe of thousands of years. One would not do well to say at all: the child has the measles; had it not got these measles.—One cannot know what would have come about the child if it had not got the measles. Because that came out which sat deeply always in the child and looked for its compensation.

It is also good to consider the war, and to see the evil not so much in that which must be experienced now in blood and iron but also to look at that which happened since long, long times in the cultural currents. The human beings must learn to look deeper at the connections. After this war, a time will come when the human beings start thinking about this war. There they will get on how many hollow words were talked if one said: this one has the guilt, that one has the guilt.—Something will just happen, even if it takes place only long after the war. Then the people will say something different than today. There will be people who say: if one studies history the way as one studied it up to now, indeed, one finds in these acts of the diplomats this, in those acts of diplomats that; here and there or this and that was written.

But if one proceeds that way as history treated all that up to now, and wants “to objectively judge” everything, as one says, then one never finds out why this war came into being. Then one will discover that it is necessary to look at the deeper reasons beyond the external causes which then spiritual science has to explain. Unfortunately, I can make only remarks about these matters. One will find that at various places just at the outbreak of this war this or that happened where not the consciousness played the most significant role, but something unconscious, something under the threshold of the external events was a contributory factor; so that those matters are not exhausted at all which the historian is accustomed to consider as something decisive for the causality. Just with this example one learns: history, as we are accustomed to it up to now, explains nothing at all to us. It is an admonition to go into deeper reasons.

As I had to admonish our souls at the end of almost each talk which I held in the last time, I would like to do it also again today.

A certain responsibility arises for you simply from the fact that you have approached the spiritual-scientific world view. You must become able to have the thoughts by the spiritual-scientific world view at least that those superficial judgments which are delivered everywhere today, because materialism controls the world, should also not become judgments of ours who we are supporters of spiritual science. What plays a role in the world today is a superficial hatred from nation to nation. I have often spoken about that in our branch talks. It must not penetrate us to the same degree, but we also must not become unfair. For we can learn from the old Theosophical Society to become rather unfair. They have impressed on their supporters with regard to the religions: all religions are equal.

This is approximately the same, as if one liked to impress on the human beings: on the table are pepper, salt, sugar, paprika; now, they all can be used as spices, one should not prefer anything. So, here I have a cup of coffee, I put some pepper into it, because everything is the same. The identical logic is in it if one speaks of the fact that the same core of truth forms the basis of all religions. This logic saves one from studying the great miraculous world development in its details, because one gets by with the sentence: a core of truth forms the basis of everything. But we have freed ourselves from the most superficial judgments since long. Thus that cannot prevent us from recognising rightly to go into any national characteristic with affectionate understanding, where we have to stand with our hearts out of knowledge. It is not possible that all friends agree in this regard. That does not matter, but that our souls try to get over the point of view of the external world and to deal with the characteristics of the different folk-souls.—Then we will already see that the belief in our spiritual-scientific world view imposes a certain responsibility to us in many respects, the responsibility to deal with the matters as thoroughly as possible and to pay more attention on them on the basis of spiritual science.

One experiences painful things sometimes. Not any human being does remember the big admonition of our destiny-burdened events, so that he feels obliged to turn his heart really deeper, more thoroughly to the events instead of judging superficially in the way of the external materialism we just want to overcome. In this regard, one would like to wish and long for that the human beings who are within our movement form a host, as it were, which deals thoroughly with the deeply moving questions of today. Thoroughness is necessary concerning a lot of matters. You do not imagine at all what is possible in our time.

Oh, I could tell a lot about that which can make the heart bloody to somebody who pursues the time really with the goodness of his heart. Today a lot of views and thoughts are spread, sometimes with the best intention, from an unhealthy, ahrimanic world view. But looking at the flood of war literature we have just to deeper meditate about the tasks of the cultural development. I attempt this now in my talks showing the real position of the single human beings. Because it is often a matter of defending thoroughness against superficiality. You could experience something very strange, for example, during the last weeks. Because of comprehensible reasons I would not like to mention the title of a book which has appeared abroad, even in German, and some people state that a German would have written it. Expressly I would like to stress that you can bring yourselves to understand any point of view. Perhaps, you can understand the most anti-German standpoint if the one or the other shows it. You may try to understand it, you need not share it, but perhaps you are able to understand it.

But the concerning book has characteristics to which it does not depend on the fact that it takes a thoroughly anti-German standpoint, that it reviles Germanness and the German nature on every line. One may understand that it is written viciously. But nobody is allowed to come and say: if a German speaks about the book that way, we can understand this, because he talks disparagingly about Germanness.—However, it depends on something different. The book is written, so that somebody who has a little feeling for internal professionalism and internal thoroughness, who is educated a little, must find: it is the most terrible simulation of the cheapest literature.—Completely apart from its standpoint, its literary level is so low that somebody who finds something in the book shows that he accepts the most trivial literature as something that one can take seriously, a book cobbled together with ignorance, I would like to say, with the most obvious ignorance.

So the standpoint does not matter; but you see from the way, as it is written like anybody who learnt thinking would not write, that one deals with a quite inferior sort of book. Nevertheless, I also had to hear judgments that this book whose title I do not mention because of particular reasons is taken seriously. If such matters appear, it is just to us not to shrink from forming a judgment on the basis of certain versatility. If anybody agrees to certain sentences which are expressed in that book as regards content, he does not need to take such a book seriously, already because the book is a terrible concoction, and because one does not take a terrible concoction seriously, because one cannot wish that even the truth is expressed terribly in the worst affect and in an uneducated way. I wanted to characterise such an example, because I would like to draw your attention to the fact that it depends on various things if the spiritual scientist tries to form a judgment about the world.

If it were possible to take a book for good, even if it is stylistically a horror book, then somebody would admit that he has not enough enlivened the spiritual-scientific feeling in his heart, in his soul. Not to express anything differently but to draw attention to the fact that spiritual science has to penetrate our feeling and thinking vividly in the most profound sense, concrete examples are also given in this field. It is very necessary that such concrete impulses are searched for in our souls. I have to admit what satisfied me particularly up to now, travelling through Germany, that I could not notice terrifying cheering after great victories. One noticed that pain about the enormous losses was in every soul at the same time. I believe that it is that way. Futile joy of victory must not be there. Since these destiny-burdened days demand not only enormous sacrifices, but they open up enormous wounds, also spiritual wounds if one considers the behaviour of many human beings. That is why it is very necessary that we remember now and again, just if we look at important matters in the field of spiritual science which responsibility is imposed on our souls and that we must long for times in which the effects of the young, unused etheric bodies and the souls can really meet who still are below in the bodies of the human beings and can send their sensations and abilities up to them.

A time will come after this war when the unused etheric bodies of those work who went through the gate of death and developed forces out of the sacrifices they made and which they could send down now for the spiritualisation of humankind. But below there must be souls who are able to receive this, who look up in lively confidence at that which went up in the spiritual world from the early deceased to shine down the forces of the spiritualisation of humankind.

There I would want that it appears to our eyes in the sense of the words which I would like to speak at the end of this consideration again:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the nation's sacrifices
Will grow up the fruits of spirit
If souls aware of spirit turn
Their senses to the spirit-land.

Notes

The earthly flame of spiritual knowledge
Brightly illuminates death's appearance;
The Self becomes cosmic eye and ear.

The translation of these verses in Our Dead contains some mistakes; perhaps, they occurred because Steiner used a script consisting of normal Latin but also of old German letters (Sütterlin script):

Es leuchtet hell dem Todesscheine
Des Geisteswissens (not: Geisteswillens) Erdenflamme;
Das Selbst wird Welten (not: Wellen)-Aug und Ohr.

a book which has appeared abroad: Richard Grelling J'accuse. By a German. Third edition, Lausanne, 1915

Yesterday I drew attention to the way in which a man is able with the higher members of his being - his etheric body, astral body and ego—to leave his physical body; and I pointed out how, having left his physical body, he then makes his first steps in initiation, and learns that what we call man's spiritual activity does not come only with initiation but, in reality, is there all the time in everyday life.

We had particularly to emphasize that the activity which enters our consciousness through our thoughts actually takes its course in man's etheric body, and that this activity taking its course in man's etheric body, this activity underlying the thought-pictures, enters our consciousness by reflecting itself in the physical body. As activity it is carried on in soul and spirit, so that a man when he is in the physical world and just thinks—but really thinks, is carrying out a spiritual activity. It may be said, however, that it does not enter consciousness as a spiritual activity. Just as when we stand in front of a mirror it is not our face that enters our consciousness out of the mirror but the image of our face, so in everyday life it is not the thinking but its reflection that as thought-content is rayed back into consciousness from the mirror of the physical body. In the case of the will it is different.

Let us keep this well in mind—that what finds expression in thinking is an activity which actually does not enter our physical organism at all, but runs its course entirely outside it, being reflected back by the physical organism. Let us remember that as men we are actually in our soul-spiritual being all the time.

Now this is how it might be represented diagrammatically. If this (a) represents man's bodily being, in actual fact his thinking goes on outside it, and what we perceive as thoughts is thrown back. Thus, with our thinking we are always outside our physical body; in reality spiritual  knowledge consists in our recognizing that we are outside the physical body with our thinking.

It is different with what we call will-activity.  This goes right into the physical body. What we call will-activity enters into the physical body everywhere and there brings about processes; and the effect of these processes in man is what is brought about by the will as movement.

We can thus say: While living as man in the physical world there rays out of the spiritual into our organism the essential force of the will and carries out certain activities in the organism enclosed within the skin. Between birth and death we are therefore permeated by will-forces; whereas the thoughts do not go on within our organism but outside it. From this you may conclude that everything to do with the will is intimately connected with what a man is between birth and death by reason of his bodily organization. The will is really closely bound up with us and all expressions of the will are in close connection with our organization, with our physical being as man between birth and death. This is why thinking really has a certain character of detachment from the human being, a certain independent character, never attainable by the will.

Now for a moment try to concentrate on the great difference existing in human life between thinking and what belongs to the will. It is just spiritual science that is capable from this point of view of throwing the most penetrating side-lights on certain problems in life. Do we not all find that what can be known through spiritual science really confronts us in life in the form of questions which somehow have to be answered? Now think what happens when anyone goes to a solicitor about some matter. The solicitor hears all about the case and institutes proceedings for the client in question. He will look into all possible ingenious grounds—puts into this all the ingenuity of which he is capable—to win the case for his client. To win the case he will summon up all his powers of intelligence and reasoning.

What do you think would have happened (life will certainly give you the answer) had his opponent outrun the client mentioned and come a few hours before to the same solicitor? What I am assuming hypothetically often happens in reality. The solicitor would have listened to the opponent's case and put all his ingenuity into the grounds for the defense of this client—grounds for getting the better of the other man. I don't think anyone will feel inclined to deny the possibility of my hypothesis being realized.  What does it show however?

It shows how little connection a man has in reality with his intelligence and his reason with all that is his force of thought, that in a certain case he can put them at the service of one side just as well as of the other. Think how different this is when man's will-nature is in question, in a matter where man’s feelings and desires are engaged. Try to get a clear idea of whether it would be possible for a man whose will-nature was implicated to act in the same way. On the contrary, if he did so we should consider him mentally unsound. A man is intimately bound up with his will—most intimately; for the will streams into his physical organism and in this human physical organism, induces processes directly related to the personality.

We can therefore say: It is just into these facts of life which, when we think about life at all, confront us so enigmatically, that light is thrown by all we gain through spiritual science.  Ever more fully can spiritual science enlighten men about what happens in everyday life, because everything that happens has supersensible causes. The most mundane events are dependent on the supersensible, and are comprehensible only when these supersensible causes are open to our view.

But now let us take the case of a man going with his soul through the gate of death. We must here ask: What happens to his force of thinking and to his will-force? After death the thinking force can no longer be reflected by an organism such as we bear with us between birth and death. For the significant fact here is that after death this organism, everything present in us lying beneath the surface of our skin, is cast off. Therefore, when we have gone through the gate of death, the thinking cannot be reflected by an organism no longer there, neither can an organism no longer there induce inner processes. What the thinking force is continues to exist—just as a man is still there when after passing a mirror he is no longer able to see his reflection. During the time he is passing it his face will be reflected to him; had he passed by earlier the reflection would have appeared to him earlier. The thinking force is reflected in the life of the organism as long as we are on earth, but it is still there even though we have left our physical organism behind.

What happens then? What constitutes the thinking force cannot, in itself be perceived; just as the eye is incapable of seeing itself so also is the thinking, for it has to be reflected-back by something—and the bodily organism is no longer there. When a man has discarded his physical organism what will then throw back the thinking force for whatever the thinking force develops in itself as process? Here something occurs that is not obvious to human physical intelligence; but it must, be considered if we really want to understand the life between death and rebirth. This can be under stood through initiates' teachings. An initiate knows that even during life in the body knowledge does not come to him through the mirror of his body but outside it, that he goes out of his body and receives knowledge without it, that therefore he dispenses with his bodily mirrors. Whoever cultivates in himself this kind of knowledge sees that what constitutes the thinking force henceforward enters his consciousness outside the body; it enters consciousness by the later thoughts being reflected by those that have gone before.

Thus, bear this well in mind—when an initiate leaves his body, and is outside it, he does not perceive by something being reflected by his body, he perceives by the thinking force he now sends out being reflected by what he has previously thought. You must therefore imagine that what has been thought previously—not only because it was thought previously—mirrors back the forces developed by the thinking, when this development takes place outside the body.

I can perhaps put it still more clearly. Let us suppose that someone today becomes an initiate. In this state of initiation how can he perceive anything through the force of his thinking? He does this by encountering, with the thinking forces he sends out, what, for instance, he thought the day before. What he thought the day before remains inscribed in the universal cosmic chronicle—which you know as the Akashic record—and what his thinking force develops today is reflected by what he thought yesterday.

From this you may see that the thinking must be qualified to make the thought of yesterday as strong as possible, so that it can reflect effectively. This is done by the rigorous concentration of one's thought and by various kinds of meditation, in the way described from time to time in lectures about knowledge of the higher worlds. Then the thought that otherwise is of a fleeting nature is so densified in a man, so strengthened, that he is able to bring about the reflection of his thinking force in these previously strengthened and densified thoughts.

This is how it is also with the consciousness men develop after death. What a man has lived through between birth and death is indeed inscribed spiritually into the great chronicle of time. Just as in this physical world we are unable to hear without ears, after death we are unable to perceive unless there is inscribed into the world our life, with all that we have lived through between birth and death.  This is the reflecting apparatus.

I drew attention to these facts in my last Vienna cycle.¹ Our life itself, in the way we go through it between birth and death, becomes our sense-organ for the higher worlds. You do not see your eye nor do you hear your ear, but you see with your eye, you hear with your ear. When you want to perceive anything to do with your eye you must do so in the way of ordinary science. It is the same in the case of your ear. The forces a man develops between death and rebirth have the quality of always raying back to the past earth-life, so as to be reflected by it; then they spread themselves out and are perceived by a man in the life between death and rebirth.

From this it can be seen what nonsense it is to speak of life on earth as if it were a punishment, or some other superfluous factor in man’s life as a whole. A man has to make himself part of this earthly life, for in the spiritual world in life after death it becomes his sense-organ.

The difficulty of this conception consists in this that when you imagine a sense-organ you conceive it as something in space. Space, however, ceases as soon as we go either through the gate of death or through initiation; space has significance only for the world of the senses. What we afterwards meet with is time, and, just as here we make use of ears and eyes that are spatial, there we need temporal processes. These processes are those carried out between birth and death, by which the ones developed after death are reflected back. In life between birth and death everything is perceptible to us in space; after death everything takes its course in time, whereas formerly it was in space that we perceived it.

The particular difficulty in speaking about the facts of spiritual science is that, as soon as we turn our gaze to the spiritual worlds, we have really to renounce the whole outlook we have developed for existence in space; we must entirely give up this spatial conception and realize that there space no longer exists, everything running its course in time—that there even the organs are temporal processes. If we would find our way about among the events in spiritual life, we have not only to transform our way of learning; we must entirely transform ourselves, re-model ourselves, acquire fresh life, in such a way that we adopt quite a different method of conception. Here lies the difficulty referred to yesterday, which so many people shun, however ingenious for the physical plane their philosophy may be. People indeed are wedded to their spatial conceptions and cannot find their bearings in a life that runs its course entirely in time.

I know quite well that there may be many souls who say: But I just cannot conceive that when I enter the spiritual world this spiritual world is not to be there in a spatial sense.—That may be, but if we wish to enter the spiritual world the most necessary thing of all is for us to make every effort to grow beyond forming our conceptions as we do on the physical plane. If in forming our conceptions of the higher worlds we never take for our standards and models any but those of the physical world, we shall never attain to real thoughts about the higher worlds—at best picture thoughts.

It is thus where thinking is concerned. After death thinking takes its course in such a way that it reflects itself in what we have lived through, what we were, in physical earthly life between birth and death. All the occurrences we have experienced constitute after death our eyes and our ears. Try by meditating to make real to yourselves all that is contained in the significant sentence: Your life between birth and death will become eye and ear for you, it will constitute your organs between death and rebirth.

Now how do matters stand with the will forces? The will-forces bring about in us the life-processes within the limits of our body—it is our life-processes which they bring about. The body is no longer there when a man has gone through the gate of death, but the whole spiritual environment is there. True as it is that the will with its forces works into the physical organism, it is just as true that after death the will has the desire to go out from the man in all directions; it pours itself into the whole environment, in the opposite way to physical life when the will works into man. You gain some conception of this out—pouring of the will into the surrounding world, if you consider what you have to acquire in the way of inner cultivation of the will in meditation, when you are really anxious to make progress in the sphere of spiritual knowledge.

The man who is willing to be satisfied with recognizing the world as a merely physical one sees, for example, the color blue, sees somewhere a blue surface, or perhaps a yellow surface; and this satisfies the man who is content to stop short at the physical world. We have already discussed how, even through a true conception of art, we must get beyond this mere grasping of the matter in accordance with the senses; how when we must experience blue as if we let our will, our force of heart, stream out into space, and as if from us out into space there could shine forth towards what shines forth to us as blue something we feel like a complete surrender—as if we could pour ourselves out into space. Our own being streams into the blue, flows away into it. Where there is yellow, however, the being, the being of the will, has no wish to enter—here it is repulsed; it feels that the will cannot get through, and that it is thrown back on itself.

Whoever wishes to prepare himself to develop in his soul those forces which lead him into the spiritual world, must be able in his life of soul to connect something real with what I have just been saying. For instance, he must in all reality connect the fact that he is looking at a blue surface with saying: This blue surface takes me to itself in a kindly way; it lets my soul with its forces flow out into the illimitable. But the surface here, this yellow surface, repels me, and my soul-forces return upon my soul like the pricks of a needle. It is the same with everything perceived by the senses; it all has these differences of color. Our will, in its soul-nature, pours itself out into the world and can either thus pour itself out or be thrust back. This can be cultivated by giving the forces of our soul a training in color or in some other impression of the physical world. You will discover in my book "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds" how this may be done.

When, however, this has been developed, when we know that if the forces of the soul float away, become blue (becoming blue and floating away are one and the same thing), this means to be taken up with sympathy whereas becoming yellow is to be repelled and is identical with antipathy—well, then we have forces such as these within us. Let us say that we have experienced this coloring of the soul when we are taken up sympathetically and that we do not, in this case, confront a physical being at all, but that it is possible through our developed soul-forces for a spiritual being with whom we are in sympathy to flow into us. This is the way in which we can perceive the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies and the beings of the elemental world.

I will give you an example, one that is not meant to be personal but should be taken quite objectively. We need not develop merely through the forces in our color-sense, it is possible to do so through any forces of the soul. Imagine that we arouse in our self-knowledge a feeling of how it appears to our soul when we are really stupid or foolish. In everyday life we take no notice of such things, we do not bring them into consciousness; but if we wish to develop the soul we must learn to feel within us what is experienced when something foolish is done. Then we notice that when this foolish action occurs will-forces of the soul stream forth which can be thrown back from outside. They are, however, thrown back in such a way that on noticing the repulsion we feel we are being mocked at and scorned. This is a very special experience. When we are really stupid and are alive to what is happening spiritually we feel looked down upon, provoked.  A feeling can then follow of being provoked from out of the spiritual world. If we then go to someplace where there are the nature-spirits we call gnomes, we then have the power to perceive them. This power is acquired only when we perceive in ourselves the feeling I have just described. The gnomes carry-on in a way that is provoking, making all manner of gestures and grimaces, laughing, and so on. This is perceptible to us only if when we are stupid we observe ourselves. It is important that we should acquire inward forces through these exercises, that with our will forces we should delve deeply into the world surrounding us; then this surrounding world will come alive, really and truly alive.

Thus we see while our life between birth and death becomes an organ, an organ of perception, within the spiritual organism that we bear between death and rebirth, our will becomes a participator in our whole spiritual environment. We see how the will rays back in initiates (in the seeing of gnomes, for example) and in those who are dead. When gnomes are seen it is an example of this, out of the elemental world.

Now consider how there once lived a philosopher who in the second half of the nineteenth century had a great influence on many people, namely, Schopenhauer. As you know, he exercised a great influence both on Nietzsche and Richard Wagner. Schopenhauer derived the world—as others have derived it from other causes—from what he called conception, or representation, and will. He said: Representation and will are what constitutes the foundation of the world.

But—obsessed by Kant’s method of thinking—he goes on to say that representation are never more than dream-pictures and that it is impossible ever to come to reality through them. It is only through the will that we can penetrate into the reality of things—this is done by the will. Now Schopenhauer philosophises in an impressive manner about representation and will; and, if one may say so—he does this indeed rather well.  He is, however, one of those who I have likened to a man standing in front of a door and refusing to go through it. When we take his words literally—the world is representation, the world is a mere dream-picture—we have to forgo all knowledge of the world through representation and can then pass on to knowledge of the representations themselves, pass on to doing something in one's own soul with the representations—in other words to meditate, to concentrate. Had Schopenhauer gone a step further he would have reached the point of saying: "I must renounce representations! If a representation is something produced within me, I must put it to an inward use.’ Had he made this step he would have been driven to cultivate his representations, to work upon them in meditation and concentration.

When he says: The world is will—when, as in his clever treatise on the "Will in Nature", he goes on to describe this will in nature, he does not take his own proposition in earnest. In describing the will we seek the help of representations and he denies those all possibility of knowledge. This reminds us of Munchausen who to pull himself out of a bog catches hold of his own pigtail. What would Schopenhauer have been obliged to be if had taken in earnest his own words—the world is will? He would have had to say: Then we ought to pour out our will into the world; we must use our will to creep inside things. We must delve right into the world, send into it cur will, no longer taking the color blue as mere representation, but trying to perceive how the will sinks down into it; no longer thinking of our stupidity as a representation, but realizing what can be experienced through that stupidity.

You can see that here too it is possible to arrive at a description which needs only to be taken in earnest. Had Schopenhauer gone further he would have had to say: If the representation is really only a picture we represent to ourselves, then we must work upon it; if the will is really in the things, then we must go with it right into the things, not just describe how things have the will within them.

 You see here another example of how a renowned Philosopher of the nineteenth century takes men to the very gates of initiation, right up to spiritual science; and how this philosopher then does everything he can to close these gates to men. Where people really take hold of life they are shown on all sides that the time is ripe for picking the fruits of spiritual science—only things must be taken in earnest, deeply in earnest. Above all we must understand how to take people at their word. For it is not required of spiritual science to stand on its own defense. For the most part this is actually done by others, by its opponents, though they do not know this, have no notion of it.

Now consider a certain class of human beings to which very many in the nineteenth century belonged—the atomistic philosophers, those who conceived the idea that atoms in movement were at the basis of all the phenomena of life. They had the idea that behind this entire visible and audible world there was a world of atoms in movement, and through this movement arose processes perceived by us as what appears in our surroundings. Nothing spiritual is there, the spiritual is merely a product of atomic movement, and all—prevailing atomic activity.

Now how has the thought of these whirling atoms arisen? Has anyone seen them? Has anyone discovered them through what they have experienced or come to know empirically?  Were this the case they would not be what they are supposed to be, for they are supposed to be concealed behind empirical knowledge.  Had they any reality, by what means would they have to be discovered? Suppose the movement of atoms were there—the understanding cannot discover them in what is sense-perceptible. What would a man have to be in order to possess the right to speak of this world of atoms?  He would have to be clairvoyant; the whole of this atom-world would have to be a product of inner vision, of clairvoyance. The only thing we can say to the people who have appeared as the materialists of the nineteenth century is: There is no need for us to prove that there are clairvoyants for either you must be silent about all your theories, or you must admit that to perceive these things you are possessed of clairvoyant vision—at least to the point of being able to perceive atoms behind the world of the senses.  For if there is no such things as clairvoyance it is senseless to speak of this material world of atoms. If you find it a necessity to have moving atoms you prove to us that there are clairvoyant human beings. 

Thus we take these people seriously, although they do not take themselves seriously when they say things of this kind.  If Schopenhauer is taken in earnest we must come to this conclusion—“If you say the world is will and what we have in the way of representation is only pictures, you ought to penetrate into the world with your will, and penetrate into your thinking through meditation and concentration.  We take you seriously but you do not take yourselves so.” Strictly speaking, it is the same with everything that comes into question.

This is what is so profoundly significant in the world—conception of spiritual science, that it takes in all earnest what is not so taken by the others—what they skim over in a superficial way. Proofs are always to be found among the opponents of spiritual science. But people never notice that in their assertions, in what they think, at bottom they are at the same time setting at naught what they think. For the materialistic atomist, and Schopenhauer too, set a naught what they themselves maintain.

Schopenhauer nullifies his own system when he asserts: Everything is will and representation. The moment he is not willing to stop there, however, he is obliged to lead men onto the development of spiritual science. It is not we who form the world-conception of spiritual science; how then does this world-conception come into being? It enters the world of itself—is there, everywhere, in the world. It enters life through unfamiliar doors and windows; and even when others do not take it in earnest, it finds its way into men’s cultural life.

But there is still something else we can recognize if, through considerations of this kind we really have our attention drawn to how superficially men approach their own spiritual processes, and how little in a deeper sense they take themselves seriously—even when they are clever and profound philosophers. They weave as it were a conceptual web, but with it they shy away from really fulfilling the inner life’s work that would lead them to experience the forces upon which the world is founded. Hence we see that the centuries referred to yesterday, during which ordinary natural science has seen its great triumphs, have also been the centuries to develop in human beings the superficial thinking. The more glorious the development of science, the more superficial has become investigation into the sources of existence.

We can point to really shining examples of what has just been touched upon here. Suppose we have the following experience—a man, who has never shown any interest in the spiritual world undergoes a sudden change, begins to concern himself about the spiritual world and longs to know something about it. Let us suppose we have this experience after having found our way into spiritual science. What will become a necessity for us when we experience how a man, who has never worried about the spiritual world, having been immersed in everyday affairs, now finds himself at one of the crossroads of life and turns to the spiritual world? As spiritual scientists we shall interest ourselves about what has been going on in this man’s soul.  We shall try as often as possible to enter into the soul of such a man, and it will then be useful for us to know what has often been stressed here, namely, that the saying in constant use about nature making no sudden jumps is absolutely untrue. Nature does make sudden jumps.  She makes a jump when the green leaf becomes the colourful petal, and when she so changes a man who has never troubled himself about the spiritual world that he begins to interest himself in it, this too is like a sudden jump; and for this we shall seek the cause.  We shall make certain discoveries about the various spiritual sources of which we have spoken here, and see how anything of this kind takes place. 

When doing this we shall ask: How old was the man? We know that every seven years something new is born in the human being: From the seventh year on, the etheric body; from the fourteenth year on, the astral body, and so on.  We shall gather up all that we know about the etheric and astral bodies, taking this particularly from an inner, not an outer, point of view.  Then we shall be able to gain a good deal of information about what is going on in a human soul such as this.

It is also possible to proceed in another way.  We can become interested in the fact that men in ordinary life suddenly go over to a life concerned with spiritual truths, and the profundities of religion. Some men may look upon spiritual science as a foolish phantasy, and when we examine into what is going on in the depths of his soul it is possible for us to discover what makes him find it foolish. But we can then do the following. We write, let us say 192, or even more, letters to people whom we have heard about as having gone through a change of this kind. We send these letters to a whole continent, in order to learn in reply what it was that brought about this change in their life.—We then receive answers of the most diverse kind….someone writes: When I was fourteen my life led me into all manner of bad habits. That made my father very angry and he gave me a good thrashing; this it was which induced in me a feeling for the spiritual world.—Others assert that they have seen a man die, and so on. Suppose then that we get 192 answers and proceed to arrange them in piles—one pile for the letters in which the writers say that they have been changed by their fear of death or of hell; a second pile in which it is stated that the writers come across good men, or imitated them; a third pile—and so on. In piles such as these matters easily become involved and then we make an extra pile for other, egocentric motives.  Then we arrive at the following.  We have sorted the 192 letters into piles and have counted how many letters go into each one; then we are able to make a simple calculation of the percentage of letters in each pile. We can discover, for example, that 14 per cent of the changes come about through fear, either of death or of hell; 6 per cent come from egocentric motives; 5 per cent because altruistic feelings have arisen in the writers; 17 per cent of them are striving after some moral ideal—supposedly those belonging to an ethical society; 16 percent through pangs of conscience, 10 per cent by following teachings concerning what is good, 13 per cent through imitating other men considered to be religious, 19 per cent by reason of social pressure, the pressure of necessity and so forth.

Thus, we can proceed by trying with love to delve into the soul who confesses to a change of this kind; we can try to discover what is within the soul; and for this we have need of spiritual science.  Or we can do what I have just been describing. One who has done this is a certain Starbuck who has written about these matters a book which has aroused a good deal of attention. This is the most superficial exposition and the very opposite of all we must perceive in spiritual science.  Spiritual science seeks everywhere to go to the very root of things.  A tendency that has arisen to the materialistic character of the times is to apply even to the religious life this famous popular science of statistics.  For, as it has clearly pointed out, this means of research is incontrovertible. It has one quality particularly beloved by those people who are unwilling to enter the doors of spiritual science—it can truly be called easy, very easy.

Yesterday we dwelt on the reason for so many people being unwilling to accept spiritual science, mainly, its difficulty.  But we can say of statistics that it is easy, in truth very easy. Now today people go in for an experimental science of the soul; I should have to talk about this science at great length to give you a concept of it.  It is called experimental psychology; outwardly a great deal is expected from it.  I am going just to describe the beginning that has been made with these experiments. We take, let us say, ten children and give these ten children a written sentence—perhaps like this: M… is  g… by st… We then look at our watch and say to one of the children: “Tell me what you make of that sentence.” The child doesn’t know; it thinks hard and finally comes out with “Much is gained by striving.” Then it is at once noted down how much time it took the child to complete the sentence. Obviously there must be several sentences for effort has to be made to read them; gradually this will be done in a shorter space of time. Note is then made of the number of seconds taken by the various children to complete one of these sentences, and the percentages among the children are calculated and treated further statistically. In this way the faculty of adaption to outer circumstance and other matters, are tested.  This method of experimental psychology has a grand-sounding name, it is called “intelligence tests”; whereas the other method is said to be the testing by experiment of man’s religious nature.

My dear friends, what I have given you here in a few words is no laughing matter.  For where philosophy is propounded today these experimental tests are looked upon as the future science of the soul to a far greater extent than any serious feeling is shown, not for what we subscribe to here, but for what was formerly discovered by inner observation of the soul.  Today people are all for experiment.

These are examples of people’s experiments today and these methods have many supporters in the world.  Physical and chemical laboratories are set up for the purpose of these experiments and there is a vast literature on the subject.  We can even experience what I will just touch upon in passing.  A friend of ours, chairman of one of our groups, a group in the North, had been preparing his doctorate thesis.  It goes without saying that he went to a great deal of trouble (when talking to children one goes to a great deal of trouble to speak on a level with their understanding) to leave out of his thesis anything learnt from spiritual science. All that was left out.  Now among the examiners of the thesis there was one who was an expert in these matters, who therefore was thoroughly briefed in these methods; this man absolutely refused to accept the thesis. (The case was even discussed in the Norwegian Parliament.) Anyone who is an experimental psychologist is firmly convinced that his science of the soul is founded on modern science and will continue to hold good for the future.

There is no intention here of saying anything particular against experimental psychology. For why should it not be interesting once in a way to learn about it? Certainly one can do so and it is all very interesting. But the important thing is the place such things are given in life, and whether they are made use of to injure what is true spiritual science, what is genuine knowledge of the soul. It must repeatedly be emphasized that it is not we who wish to turn our back on what is done by people who in accordance with their capacities investigate the soul—the people who investigate what has to do with the senses, and like to make records after the fashion of those 192 replies. This indeed is in keeping, with men's capacities; but we must take into consideration what kind of world it is today in which spiritual science takes its place. We must be very clear about that.

I know very well that there are those who may say: Here is this man, now, abusing experimental psychology—absolutely tearing it to shreds! People may seek thus just as they said: At Easter you ran down Goethe's "Faust" here and roundly criticized Goethe. These people cannot understand the difference between a description of something and a criticism in the superficial sense; they always misunderstand such things. By characterizing them I am wanting to give them their place in the whole sphere of human life. Spiritual Science is not called upon to play the critic, neither can what has been said be criticism.

Men who are not scientists should behave in a Christian way towards true spiritual science.

Another thing is to have clear vision. Thus when we look at science we see how superficially it takes all human striving, how even in the case of religious conversion it does not turn to the inner aspect but looks upon human beings from the outside.

In practical life men are not particularly credulous. The statisticians of the insurance companies—I have referred to this before—calculate about when a man will die. It can be calculated, for instance, about when an 18-year-old will die, because he belongs to a group of people a certain number of whom will die at a certain age. According to this the insurance quota is reckoned and correctly assigned. This all works quite well. If people in ordinary life, however, wanted to prepare for death in the year reckoned as that of their probable death by the insurance company, they would be taken for lunatics. The system does not determine a man’s the length of life. Statistics have just as little to do with his conversion.

We must look deeply into all these things. Through them we strive for a feeling which has within it intuitive knowledge. It will be particularly difficult to bring to the world-culture of today what I would call the crown of spiritual science—knowledge of the Christ. Christ-knowledge is that to which—as the purest, highest and most holy—we are led by all that we receive through spiritual science. In many lectures I have tried to make it clear how it is just at this point of time that the Christ-impulse, which has come into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha, has to be made accessible to the souls of men through the instrument of spiritual science. In diverse ways I tried to point out clearly the way in which the Christ-impulse has worked. Remember the lectures about Joan of Arc, about Constantine, and so on. In many different ways I tried to make clear how in these past centuries the Christ-impulse has been drawn more into the unconscious, but how we are now living at a time when the Christ-impulse must enter more consciously into the life of man, and when there must come a real knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. We shall never learn to know about this Mystery of Golgotha if we are not ready to accept conceptions of the kind touched upon at Eastertide²—about Christ in connection with Lucifer and Ahriman—and if we do not permeate these conceptions with spiritual science.

We are living in a terribly hard time, a time of suffering and sorrow. You know that for reasons previously mentioned I am not able to characterize this time; neither do I want to do so but from a quite different angle I will just touch upon something connected with our present studies.

This time of suffering and sorrow has wakened many things in human souls, and anyone living through this time, anyone who concerns himself about what is going on, will notice that today, in a certain direction, a great deepening is taking place in the souls of men. These human souls involved in present events were formerly very far from anything to do with religion, their perceptions and feelings were thoroughly materialistic. Today we can repeatedly find in their letters, for one thing, how because of having been involved in all the sorrowful events of the present time they have recovered their feeling for religion. The remarkable thing is that they begin to speak of God and of a divine ordering when formerly such words never passed their lips. On this point today among those people who are in the thick of events we really experience a very great religious deepening.

But one fact has justly been brought before us which is quite as evident as what I have now been saying. Take the most characteristic thing, in the letters written from the front, in which can be seen this religious deepening. Much is said of how God has been found again but almost nothing, almost nothing at all—this has been little noticed—of Christ. We hear of God but nothing of Christ.

This is a very significant fact—that in this present time of heavy trial and great suffering many people have their religious feeling aroused in the abstract form of the idea of God. Of a similar deepening of men's perception of the Christ we can hardly speak at all. I say “hardly", for naturally it is to be met with here and there, but generally speaking things are as I have described.  You can see from this, however, that today, when it behooves the souls of men  to look for renewed connection with the spiritual world, it is difficult to find the way to what we call the Christ-impulse, the Mystery of Golgotha.

For this, it is necessary for the human soul to rise to a conception of mankind as one great whole. It is necessary for us not merely to foster mutual interest with those amongst whom we are living just for a time; We should extend our spiritual gaze to all times and beings, to how as souls we have gone through various lives on earth and thorough various ages. Then there gradually arises in the soul an urgent need to learn how there exists in man a deepening and then an ascending evolution. In the evolution of Time we must feel one with all mankind; we must look back to how the earth came originally into being, focus our gaze on this ascending and descending evolution, in the centre point of which the Mystery of Golgotha stands; we must feel ourselves bound up with the whole of humanity, feel ourselves bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha. Today the souls of men are nearer the cosmos spatially than they are temporally, that is, to what has been unfolded in the successive evolutionary stages. We shall be led to this, however, when with the aid of spiritual science we feel ourselves part of man's whole course of evolution. For then we cannot do other than recognize that there was a point of time when something entered the evolution of mankind which had nothing to do with human force. It entered man's evolution because into it an impulse made its way from the spiritual world through a human body—an impulse present in the beginning of the Christian era. It was a meeting of heaven with the earth.

Here we touch upon something which must be embodied into the religious life through spiritual-science. We shall touch upon how spiritual science has to sink down into human feeling so that men come into a real connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, and find the Christ-impulse in such a way that it can always be present in them not only as a vague feeling but also in clear consciousness. Spiritual science will work. We have recognized and repeatedly stressed the necessity for this work. In reality, the fact of your sitting there is proof that all of you in this Movement for spiritual science are willing to put your whole heart into working together. When in the future hard times fall again upon mankind, may spiritual science have already found the opportunity to unite the deepening of men's souls not only with an abstract consciousness of God but with the concrete, historical consciousness of Christ.

This is the time, my dear friends, when perceptions, feelings, of a serious nature can be aroused in us and they should not avoid arousing in ourselves these serious, one might say solemn, feelings. This is how those within our movement for spiritual science should be distinguished from the people who, by reason of their karma, have not yet found their way into this Movement—that the adherents of spiritual science take everything that goes on in the world—the most superficial as also the profoundest—in thorough earnest.    

Just consider how important it is in everyday life to see that with our ordinary understanding bound up with our brain and with our reason we are outside what mostly interests us in ordinary physical experience, and that hence—as is the case with our hypothetical solicitor—we are strangers to our own thinking, strangers to ourselves. When we enter spiritual science, however, we develop a heart outside our body, as we said yesterday, and what we thoroughly reflect upon will once more be permeated by what is full of inner depth and soul. We can make use both of the understanding bound up with our body and of our reason, in various directions, only if we do not draw upon what unites us most deeply with the spheres in which we live with our thinking. Through spiritual science we shall draw upon this, and in what we think we shall become, with our understanding and with our reason, men of truth, men wedded to the truth; and life has need of such men. What we let shine upon us from the sun of spiritual science grows together with us because we grow together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. Then our thinking is not so constituted that like that solicitor we can apply it to either party in a legal case. We shall be men of truth by becoming one with those who are spiritual truth itself. By discovering how to grasp hold of our will in the way described today, we shall find our path into the very depths of things. This will not be by speaking of the will in nature as Schopenhauer did, but by living ourselves into things, developing our forces in them.

Here we touch upon something terribly lacking at the present time, namely, going deeply and with love into the being of things. This is missing today to such a terrible degree. I might say that over and over again one has to face, the bitter-experience in life of how the inclination to sink the will into the being of things is lacking among men.

What on the ground of spiritual science has to be over-come is the falsifying of objective facts; and this falsifying of objective facts is just what is so widespread at the present time. Those who know nothing of previous happenings are so ready to make assertions which can be proved false.

When a thing of his kind is said, my dear friends, is to be taken as an illustration, not as a detail without importance. But this detail is a symptom for us to ponder in order to come to ever greater depth in the whole depth that is to be penetrated by our spiritual movement. This spiritual movement of ours will throw light into our souls quite particularly when we become familiar with what today cannot yet be found even by those whose hearts are moved by the most grievous events of the times in which they are living, and who seek after the values of the spiritual world. Spiritual science must gradually build up for us the stages leading to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha—an understanding never again to be lost. This Mystery of Golgotha is the very meaning of the earth. To understand what this meaning of the earth is, must constitute the noblest endeavor of anyone finding his way step by step into spiritual science.

• 1. see..{"The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and Rebirth."
• 2. (*see Festivals of the Seasons)

Our task to-day will be to bring the knowledge gained in these lectures on the Gospel of St. Luke to the culminating point indicated by spiritual investigation—the culminating point we know as the Mystery of Golgotha.

Yesterday's lecture endeavoured to convey an idea of what actually took place at the time when for three years Christ was on Earth, and the preceding lectures indicated how the convergence of streams of spiritual life made this event possible. The writer of the Gospel of St. Luke gives a wonderful account of the mission of Christ Jesus on the Earth, as we shall realize if the light of knowledge derived from the Akashic Chronicle can be brought to bear upon what he describes.

The following question might be asked: As the stream of Buddhism is organically woven into Christian teachings, how is it that in the latter there is no indication of the great Law of Karma, of the adjustment effected in the course of the incarnations of an individual human being? It would, however, be sheer misapprehension to imagine that what the Law of Karma enables us to understand is not also implicit in the words of the Gospel of St. Luke. It is indeed there, only we must realize that the needs of the human soul differ in different epochs and that it is not always the task of the great emissaries in world-evolution to impart the absolute truth in abstract form, because men at different stages of maturity simply would not understand it; the great pioneers and missionaries must speak in such a way that men receive what is right and suitable in a particular epoch. The teaching received by humanity through the great Buddha contains, in the form of wisdom, everything that in conjunction with the teaching of compassion and love and the synthesis of this in the Eightfold Path, can enable the doctrine of Karma to be understood. Failure to achieve this understanding only means that no effort has been made to use faculties in the soul leading to knowledge of the teaching of Karma and Reincarnation.

In the lecture yesterday it was said that in about three thousand years from now, large numbers of human beings will have progressed sufficiently to unfold from their own souls the teaching of the Eightfold Path and—we may now add—that of Karma and Reincarnation. But this must inevitably be a gradual process. Just as a plant cannot unfold its blossom immediately the seed has been sown but leaf after leaf must develop according to definite laws, so too the spiritual development of humanity must progress stage by stage and the right knowledge be brought to light at the right time.

Anyone possessed of faculties that can be kindled by spiritual science will realize from the voice of his own soul that the teaching of Karma and Reincarnation is indispensable. It must be remembered however that evolution is not fortuitous and in point of fact it is only now, in our own time, that human souls have become sufficiently mature to discover these truths through their own insight. It would not have been a good thing to give out the teaching of Karma and Reincarnation exoterically a few centuries ago; and it would have been detrimental to evolution if the present content of spiritual science—for which human souls are longing and with which research into the foundations of the Gospels is connected—had been imparted openly to mankind a few hundred years earlier. It was necessary that human souls should be yearning for it and should have developed faculties able to accept such teaching; it was essential that these souls should have passed through earlier incarnations, even in the Christian era, and have undergone the available experiences before reaching a degree of maturity capable of assimilating the teaching of Karma and Reincarnation. Had this teaching been proclaimed in the early centuries of Christendom in the form in which it is proclaimed to-day, this would have meant demanding of human evolution the equivalent of demanding a plant to produce the blossom before the green leaves.

Humanity has only now become sufficiently mature to assimilate the spiritual content of the teaching of Karma and Reincarnation. It is therefore not surprising that in what has been imparted to humanity for centuries from the Gospels, there is much that gives a quite erroneous picture of Christianity. In a certain respect the Gospel message was entrusted prematurely to men and it is only to-day that they are becoming mature enough to develop all the faculties that could lead to an understanding of the actual content of the Gospel records. It was absolutely necessary that what was proclaimed by Christ Jesus should take account of the conditions and the attitude of soul prevailing in those days. Therefore Karma and Reincarnation were not taught as abstract doctrines, but feelings were cultivated through which human souls would gradually become ready to receive this teaching. What was needed at that time was to speak in a way that could lead by degrees to an understanding of Karma and Reincarnation rather than any enunciation of the teaching itself.

Did Christ Jesus and those who were around Him speak in this way? In order to understand this we must study the Gospel of St. Luke and interpret it rightly. If we do so we shall realize in what form the Law of Karma could be made known to men at that time.

“Blessed be ye poor; for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now; for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now; for ye shall laugh. Blessed are ye when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man's sake. Rejoice ye in that day and leap for joy; for behold your reward is great in heaven”—i.e. in the spiritual worlds. (Luke VI, 20–23.)

Here we have the teaching of ‘compensation’. Without going into the subject of Karma and Reincarnation in an abstract way, the aim is to let the feeling of assurance flow into the souls of men that one who for a time is still hungering will eventually experience the due compensation. It was necessary that these feelings should flow into the souls of men. The souls then living, to whom the teaching was given in this form, were not, until they were again incarnated, ready to receive, as wisdom, the teaching of Karma and Reincarnation.

What was to ripen in human souls had to flow into these at that time. For a completely new epoch had begun, an epoch when men were preparing to develop their Ego, their self-consciousness, to maturity. Whereas revelations had hitherto been received and the effects made manifest in the astral, etheric and physical bodies of men, the Ego was now to become fully conscious but be filled only gradually with the forces it was eventually to acquire. Only the one Ego¹ which came to the Earth as the Nathan Jesus and into whose bodily constitution, when this had been duly prepared, the Individuality of Zarathustra passed this Ego-Being alone could bring to fulfilment within itself the all-embracing Christ-principle.

The rest of humanity must now, in imitation of Christ, gradually develop what was present for three years on the Earth in the one single Personality. It was only the impulse, as it were the seed, that Christ Jesus was able to implant into humanity at that time and the seed must now unfold and grow. To this end provision was made that at the right times there shall always appear on Earth individuals able to bring the truth that humanity will not be ready to assimilate until a later period. The Being who appeared on Earth as Christ had to take care that His message would be accessible to men immediately after His appearance, in a form that they could understand. He had also to make provision for Individualities to appear later on and care for the spiritual needs of human souls at the stage of maturity reached in the course of time.

In what manner Christ made such provision for the ages following the Event of Golgotha is related by the writer of the Gospel of St. John. He shows us how, in Lazarus, Christ Himself ‘raised’, ‘awakened’, that Individuality who continued to work as ‘John’, from whom the teaching proceeded in the form described in the lectures on the Gospel of St. John.² But Christ had also to provide for the appearance, in later times, of an Individuality who would bring to humanity in a form compatible with subsequent evolution, that for which men would by then be ready. How an Individuality was ‘awakened’ by Christ for this purpose is faithfully described by the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke. Having declared that he would describe what ‘seers’ endowed with the vision of Imagination and Inspiration could say about the Event of Palestine, he also points to what would one day be taught by another—but only in the future. In order to describe this mysterious process the writer of St. Luke's Gospel has also included an ‘awakening’, a ‘raising’, in his account (Luke VII, 11–17.) In what we read concerning the ‘awakening’ of the young man of Nain lies the mystery of the progress of Christianity. Whereas in the case of the healing of the daughter of Jairus, to which brief reference was made in a previous lecture, the mysteries connected with it were so profound that Christ admitted only a few to witness the act and charged them not to speak of it, this other ‘raising’ was accomplished in such a way that it might immediately be related. The former healing was an act presupposing in the healer a profound insight into the processes of physical life; the latter healing was an ‘awakening’, an Initiation. The Individuality in the body of the young man of Nain was to undergo an Initiation of a very special kind.

There are various kinds of Initiation. In one kind, immediately after the process has been completed, knowledge of the higher worlds flashes up in the aspirant and the laws and happenings of the spiritual world are revealed to him. In another kind of Initiation it is only a seed that is implanted into the soul, and the individual has to wait until the next incarnation for the seed to bear fruit; only then does he become an Initiate in the real sense.

The Initiation of the young man of Nain was of this kind. His soul was transformed by the event in Palestine but he was not yet conscious of having risen into the higher worlds. It was not until his next incarnation that the forces laid in his soul at that earlier time came to fruition. In an exoteric lecture names cannot now be given; all that is possible is an indication to the effect that the Individuality awakened by Christ in the young man of Nain subsequently appeared as a great teacher of religion; in later time a new teacher of Christianity arose, equipped with the powers implanted into his soul in a previous incarnation.

Thus Christ provided for the subsequent appearance of an Individuality able to bring Christianity to a further stage of development. Moreover the mission of the Individuality who had been awakened in the young man of Nain is destined to permeate Christianity later on, and to an ever-increasing extent, with the teachings of Karma and Reincarnation—teachings which when Christ was on Earth could not be proclaimed explicitly as wisdom, because the human soul had first to receive them into the life of feeling.

Christ indicates clearly enough (according to the Gospel of St. Luke too) that an entirely new factor had now entered into the evolution of humanity, namely, Ego-consciousness. He shows—it is only a matter of being able to read the meaning—that in earlier times the spiritual world did not flow into the self-conscious Ego, for men received this spiritual stream through the physical, etheric and astral bodies; a certain degree of unconsciousness was always present when, as in previous epochs, divine-spiritual forces flowed into men. In the stream in which Christ Jesus was actually working, men had had formerly to receive the Law of Sinai, which could be addressed only to the astral body. The Law was imparted to man in such a way that it did indeed work in him, but not directly through the forces of his Ego. These forces could not operate until the time of Christ Jesus because it was not until then that man became conscious of the Ego in the real sense. This is indicated by Christ in the Gospel of St. Luke when He says that men must first be made ready to receive an entirely new principle into their souls. He indicates this when speaking of His forerunner, John the Baptist. (Luke VII, 18–35.)

How did Christ Himself regard this Individuality? He said that before His own coming the mission of John was to present in its purest and noblest form the old teaching of the Prophets that had been handed down, unadulterated, from bygone times. He regarded John as being the last to transmit, in its pure form, the teaching belonging to past ages. The ‘Law and the Prophets’ held good until the coming of John. His mission was to set before men once again what the old teaching and the old constitution of soul had been able to impart. How did this old constitution of soul function in the times preceding the advent of the Christ-principle?

Here we come to a subject—incomprehensible as it may seem at the present time—that will some day become a teaching of natural science as well, when it allows itself to be inspired to some extent by spiritual science. I must now refer to a matter of which I can touch only the very fringe but which will show you what depths spiritual science is destined to illumine in the domain of natural science. If you survey the branches of natural science to-day and perceive the efforts that are made to penetrate the mysteries of man's existence with the limited faculties of human thought, you will find it stated that the whole human being comes into existence through the intermingling of the male and female seeds. One of the basic endeavours of modern natural science is to establish this theory. Searching microscopical examination of substances is made in order to ascertain which particular attributes proceed from the male or from the female seed, and the researchers are satisfied when they believe, it can he proved that the whole human being is thus produced. But natural science itself will eventually be compelled to recognize that only one part of the human being is determined by the intermingling of the male and female seeds and that however precisely the product of the one or the other may be known, the whole nature of man in the present cycle of evolution cannot be explained by this intermingling.

There is in every human being something that does not arise from the seed but is, so to speak, a ‘virgin birth’, something that flows into the process of germination from a quite different source. Something unites with the seed of the human being that is not derived from father and mother, yet belongs to and is destined for him—something that is poured into his Ego and can be ennobled through the Christ-principle. That in the human being which unites with the Christ-principle in the course of evolution is ‘virgin-born’ and—as natural science will one day come to recognize through its own methods—this is connected with the momentous transition accomplished at the time of Christ Jesus. Before the Christ Event there could be nothing that did not enter into man's inner being by way of the seed. Something has actually happened in the course of the ages to bring about a change in the development of the Ego. Humanity has not been the same since the Christ Event; but the element that has been added since then to what is produced by the seeds must be gradually developed and ennobled by assimilating the Christ-principle.

We are here approaching a very subtle truth. To anyone conversant with modern natural science it is extremely interesting that already to-day there are domains where investigators are faced with the fact that there is something in man not derived from the seed. The preliminary conditions for realizing this are already there, only the investigators are not yet intellectually capable of recognizing what is present in their own experiments and observations. More is at work in the experiments than is known to modern natural science and little progress would be made if it were entirely dependent upon the ability of the investigators. While one or another is working in a laboratory, in a clinic, or perhaps in his own study, there stand behind him the Powers which direct and guide the world, and these Powers allow that to come to light which the researcher himself does not understand and for which he is merely the instrument. It is therefore also true that even objective investigation is guided by the ‘Masters’, that is, by higher Individualities. The facts now indicated are not usually observed; but they certainly will be when the conscious faculties of researchers are permeated by the spiritual teachings of Anthroposophy.

As a result of the fact of which I have just spoken, a great change has taken place in connection with the faculties of the human being since Christ came to the Earth. Previously, the only faculties available to man were those derived from the paternal and maternal seeds, for these faculties alone were able to develop in him. Between birth and death we develop through our physical, etheric and astral bodies such faculties as we possess. Before the time of Christ Jesus the instruments employed by man for his own life could be developed only from the seed. After the appearance of Christ Jesus that element was added which is of ‘virgin birth’ and does not in any sense arise from the seed. This element can of course be gravely impaired if a man is entirely given over to materialistic thought; but it can be sublimated if he lets his being be suffused by the warmth issuing from the Christ-principle and he then brings it into his following incarnations in an ever higher and higher form.

What has now been said necessarily implies that in all the proclamations made to humanity prior to that of Christ, there was an element bound up with faculties originating from the line of descent and from the seed; and it also imparts the conviction that Christ Jesus addressed himself to faculties that have nothing to do with the seed arising from the Earth but from out of the divine worlds unite with the seed. Teachers before Christ Jesus could speak to men only by using the faculties transmitted to their earthly nature through the seed. All the prophets and forerunners, however exalted, even when they descended as Bodhisattvas, were obliged to use faculties transmitted by way of the seed. Christ Jesus, however, spoke to that in man which does not pass through the seed but comes from the realm of the Divine. He indicates this when He speaks to His disciples of John the Baptist (Luke VII, 28): "For I say unto you, among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist"—that is to say, among those who, as they stand before us, can be explained as having come into existence through physical birth from male and female seeds. But then Christ adds words to the effect that the smallest part of that which is not born of women and which unites with the man from the kingdom of God is greater than John. Such are the depths hidden beneath these words! Some day, when study of the Bible is illumined by spiritual science, it will be found to contain physiological truths of far greater significance than any finding of the blundering thinking applied in modern physiology. Words such as those just quoted can lead to recognition of one of the very deepest physiological truths. Profound indeed is the Bible when it is truly understood!

Christ Jesus exemplifies in manifold ways, and also in a different form, what I have now told you. His purpose is to indicate that the element which is to come into the world through Him is something altogether new, a truth differing from any hitherto proclaimed, because it is connected with faculties derived from the kingdoms of Heaven—faculties that have not been inherited. He points out how difficult it is for men to learn to understand such a teaching, and that they will demand to be convinced in the same way as formerly. He tells them that they cannot be convinced in the old way of the new truth that has now come; for what could be proof of truth in the old form could not bring conviction of the new. The old truth was presented in comprehensible form when symbolized by the ‘Sign of Jonah’. This symbolized the old way in which man gradually attained knowledge and penetrated into the spiritual world, or how—to use biblical terms—he became a ‘Prophet’.

The old way of attaining Initiation was this: first the soul was brought to maturity and every necessary preparation made; then a condition lasting for three-and-a-half days was induced in the candidate, a condition in which he was completely withdrawn from the outer world and from the organs through which that world is perceived. Those who were to be led into the spiritual world were carefully prepared and their souls trained in knowledge of the spiritual life; then they were withdrawn from the world for three-and-a-half days, being taken to a place where they could perceive nothing through their external senses and where their bodies lay in a deathlike condition; after three-and-a-half days their souls were summoned back again into the body and they were awakened. Such men were then able to remember their vision of the spiritual worlds and to testify of those worlds. The great secret of Initiation was that the soul, prepared by long training, was led out of the body for three-and-a-half days into an entirely different world, was shut off from the environment and penetrated into the spiritual world. Men who could bear witness to the realities of the spiritual world were always to be found among the peoples; they were men who had undergone the experience referred to in the Bible in the story of Jonah's sojourn in the whale. Such a man was made ready to undergo this experience and then, when he appeared before the people as an Initiate of the old order, he bore upon him the ‘sign of Jonah’ the sign of those who were able themselves to testify of the spiritual world.

This was the one form of Initiation. Christ said, in effect: ‘In the old sense there is no other sign save the sign of Jonah.’ (Luke XI, 29.) And He expressed Himself even more clearly according to the meaning of words in the Gospel of St. Matthew. ‘As a heritage from olden times there remains the possibility that without effort of his own, without Initiation, a man can develop a dim, shadowy kind of clairvoyance and through revelation from above be led into the spiritual world.’ The indication here is that there were also Initiates of a second kind—men who went about among their fellows and who, as a result of their particular lineage, were able to receive revelations from above in a kind of sublimated trance condition, without having undergone any special Initiation. Christ indicated that this twofold manner of being transported into the spiritual world had come down from ancient times. He bade the people to remember King Solomon—thereby pointing to an Individuality to whom, without effort on his own part, the spiritual world was revealed from above. The ‘Queen of Sheba’ who came to King Solomon was also the bearer of wisdom from above; she was the representative of those predestined to possess, by inheritance, the dim, shadowy clairvoyance with which all men were endowed in the Atlantean epoch. (See Luke XI, 31.)

Thus there were two kinds of Initiates: the one kind typified by King Solomon and the symbolic visit paid to him by the Queen of Sheba, the Queen from the South; the other kind typified by those who bore upon them the ‘sign of Jonah’, meaning the old Initiation in which the candidate, entirely cut off from the outer world, passed through the spiritual world for a period lasting three-and-a-half days. Christ now added: ‘A greater than Solomon, a greater than Jonah is here’—indicating thereby that something new had come into the world. The message was not to be conveyed to the etheric bodies of men from outside, through revelations, as in the case of Solomon, nor was it to be conveyed to etheric bodies from within through revelations imparted by the duly prepared astral body to the etheric body, as in the case of those symbolized by the sign of Jonah. ‘Here is something which enables a man who has made himself ready for it in his Ego, to unite his being with what belongs to the kingdoms of Heaven.’ The forces and powers from those kingdoms unite with the virginal part in the human soul, the part that belongs to the kingdoms of Heaven and that men can destroy if they turn away from the Christ-principle, but can cultivate and nurture if they receive into themselves what streams from the Christ-principle.

As indicated in the Gospel of St. Luke, Christ's teaching is imbued with the new element which came to the Earth at that time, and we see how all the old ways of proclaiming the kingdom of God were changed through the Event of Palestine. Christ says to those from whom, because of their preparation, He could expect some measure of understanding: ‘Of a truth there are some among you who are able to see the kingdom of God, not only in the manner of Solomon, through revelation, or through the Initiation symbolized by the sign of Jonah; if any among you had attained nothing further than that they would never see the kingdom of God in this incarnation before their death.’ The meaning is that before their death they would not have seen the kingdom of God unless they had attained Initiation in some form; but then they would also have had to pass through a condition similar to death. Christ wished to show that because of the new element now present in the world there can also be men who, even before they die are able to behold the kingdom of Heaven. The disciples did not at first understand what this meant. Christ wanted to convey to them that they were to be the ones who would come to know the mysteries of the kingdoms of Heaven before natural death or the death experienced in the old form of Initiation. The wonderful passage in the Gospel of St. Luke where Christ is speaking of a higher revelation, is as follows: "But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God." (Luke IX, 27.) The disciples did not understand that it was they themselves who, being closely around Him, were chosen to experience the tremendous power of the Christ principle which would enable them to penetrate directly into the spiritual world. The spiritual world was to become visible to them without the sign of Solomon, and without the sign of Jonah. Did this actually happen?

Immediately after these words in the Gospel comes the scene of the Transfiguration, when three disciples—Peter, James and John—are led up into the spiritual world. The figures of Moses and Elijah appear before them in that world and, simultaneously, Christ Jesus in Glory. (Luke IX, 28–36.) The disciples gaze for a brief moment into the spiritual world—a testimony that insight into that world is possible without the faculties designated by the sign of Solomon and the sign of Jonah. But it is evident that they are still novices, for they fall asleep immediately after being torn out of their physical and etheric bodies by the stupendous power of what was happening. Christ finds them asleep. This account was meant to indicate the third way of entering the spiritual world, apart from the ways denoted by the signs of Solomon and of Jonah. Anyone capable in those days of interpreting the signs of the times would have known that the Ego itself must develop, that it must now be directly inspired, that the Divine Powers must work directly into the Ego.

It was also to be made evident that the men of that time, even the very best among them, were not capable of taking the Christ-principle into themselves. The event of the Transfiguration was to be a beginning but it was also to be shown that the disciples were not able, at the time, to receive the Christ-principle in the fullest sense. Hence their powers fail them immediately afterwards, when they want to apply the Christ-power to heal one who is possessed by an evil spirit but are unable to do so. Christ indicates that they are still only at the beginning, by saying: I shall have to stay a long time with you before your forces are able also to stream into other men. (See Luke IX, 41.) Thereupon He heals the one whom the disciples could not heal. But then He says, again hinting at the mystery behind these happenings, that the time has come when “the Son of Man shall be delivered into the hands of men”. This means: the time has come when the Ego, which is to be developed by men themselves in the course of their Earth-mission, is gradually to stream into them, to be given over to them. This Ego is to be recognized in its highest form in Christ. “Let these sayings sink down into your ears; for the Son of Man shall be delivered into the hands of men. But they understood not this saying; it was hid from them, that they perceived it not.” (Luke IX, 44–45.)

How many have understood this saying? Greater and greater numbers will, however, eventually understand that the Ego, the ‘Son of Man’, was to be given over to men at that time. And the explanation that was possible in those days, was added by Christ Jesus. He spoke to the following effect: As he stands before us, man is a product of the old forces that were active before the Luciferic beings had laid hold of human nature; but the Luciferic forces drew man down to a lower level. The results of all these processes have passed into the faculties possessed by him to-day. Everything that comes from the seed, as well as all human consciousness, is permeated by the influence that dragged man to a lower sphere.

Man is a twofold being. Whatever consciousness he has developed hitherto is permeated by the Luciferic forces. It is only the unconscious part of man's being, the last remnant of his evolution through the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods when no Luciferic forces were at work—it is only this that streams into him to-day as a virginal element of his nature; but it cannot unite with him without the qualities and forces he is able to develop in himself through the Christ-principle. As he stands before us, man is primarily a product of heredity, a confluence of what derives from the male and female seeds. From the beginning he develops as a duality—a duality already permeated by Luciferic forces. As long as a man is not illumined by self-consciousness, as long as out of his own Ego he cannot fully distinguish between good and evil, he reveals to us his earlier, original nature through the veil of his later nature. Only the part of man that is ‘childlike’ still retains a last remnant of the nature that was his before he succumbed to the influence of the Luciferic beings.

Hence there is a ‘childlike’ part and also a ‘grown’ part in man. It is the latter part of his being that is permeated by the Luciferic forces but its influence asserts itself from the very earliest embryonic stage onwards. The Luciferic forces also permeate the child, so that in ordinary life what was already implanted in the human being before the Luciferic influence, cannot make itself manifest. The Christ-power must re-awaken this, must unite with the best forces of the child-nature in man. The Christ-power may not link itself with the faculties that man has corrupted, with what derives merely from the intellect; the link must be with that which has remained from the child-nature of primeval times. That is what must be reinvigorated and must thereafter fructify the other part (of man's nature).

“But there arose a reasoning among them, which of them should be the greatest,” that is, which of them was most fitted to receive the Christ-principle into his own being. "But Jesus, perceiving the thought of their heart, took a child and set it by them and said unto them. Whosoever shall receive this child in my name"—that is, whosoever is united in Christ's name with what has remained from the times before the onset of the Luciferic influence “receiveth me; and whosoever shall receive me receiveth him that sent me” (Luke IX, 46–48)—that is, He who sent this (childlike) part of the human being to the Earth. Emphasis is there laid upon the great significance of what has remained ‘childlike’ in man and should be fostered and nurtured in human nature.

We may say of a human being standing before us that he has the rudiments of very good qualities. We may try our hardest to develop those qualities of his so that he makes real progress, but the methods usually adopted to-day take no account of what is present in the foundations of man's being. It is essential to pay heed to what has remained ‘childlike’ in man, for it is by way of this childlike nature that warmth can be imparted to the other faculties through the Christ-principle. The childlike nature must be developed in order that the other faculties may follow suit. Everyone has the childlike nature within him and this, when wakened to life, will also be responsive to union with the Christ-principle. But forces—of however lofty a kind—that are dominated by the Luciferic influence will, if they alone work in a man to-day, repudiate and scoff at what can live on Earth as the Christ power—as Christ Himself foretold.

The Gospel of St. Luke, brings home very clearly the purport and meaning of the new proclamation. When a man who bore on his forehead the sign of Jonah went about the world as an Initiate of the old order, he was recognized—but only by those who were knowers—as one who had come to testify of the spiritual worlds. Special preparation was needed before the sign of Jonah could be understood. But a new kind of preparation was now necessary in order to understand what was greater than anything indicated by the signs of Solomon and of Jonah—a new preparation which was to pave the way for a new understanding, a new way of maturing the soul. The contemporaries of Christ Jesus could at first understand only the old way, and the way preached by John the Baptist was the one known to most of them. That Christ was now bringing an entirely new impulse, that he was seeking for souls among those who did not in the least resemble men who would formerly have been considered suitable, was utterly incomprehensible to them. They had assumed that He would associate with those who practised the old kind of disciplinary exercises and would impart His teaching to such men. Hence they could not understand why He sat among those whom they regarded as ‘sinners’. But He said to them: If I were to impart in the old way the entirely new impulse I have come to give to mankind, if a new form of teaching were not to replace the old, it would be as if I were to sew a piece of new cloth on an old garment or pour new wine into old wine-skins. What is now to be given to humanity and is greater than anything indicated by the sign of Solomon or the sign of Jonah, this must be poured into new wine-skins, into new forms. And you must rouse yourselves sufficiently to understand the new teaching in a new form! (See Luke V, 36–37.)

Those who were to understand must now do so through the powerful influence of the Ego—not through what they had learnt but through what had poured into them from the spiritual Christ-Being Himself. Hence the chosen ones were not men who according to the old doctrines were properly prepared but men who in spite of having passed through many incarnations, proved to be simple human beings, able to understand through the power of Faith what had streamed into them. A ‘sign’ was to be placed before them as well, a sign now to be enacted before the eyes of all mankind. The ‘mystical death’ that had been a ceremonial act in the Mystery Temples for hundreds and thousands of years was now to be presented on the great arena of world-history. Everything that had taken place in the secrecy of the Temples of Initiation was brought into the open as a single event on Golgotha. A process hitherto witnessed only by the Initiates during the three-and-a-half days of an old Initiation was now enacted before mankind in concrete reality. Hence those to whom the facts were known could only describe the Event of Golgotha as being what in very truth it was: the old Initiation transformed into historical fact and enacted on the arena of world-history.

That is what took place on Golgotha! In former times the three-and-a-half days spent in deathlike sleep had brought to the few Initiates who witnessed it, the conviction that the spiritual will at all times be victorious over the bodily nature and that man's soul and spirit belong to a spiritual world. This was now to be a reality enacted before the eyes of the world. An Initiation transferred to the outer plane of world-history such was the Event of Golgotha. Hence this Initiation was not consummated only for those who witnessed the actual Event, but for all mankind. What issued from the death on the Cross streamed into the whole of humanity. A stream of spiritual life flowed into mankind from the drops of blood which fell from the wounds of Christ Jesus on Golgotha. For what had been imparted by other Teachers as ‘wisdom’ was now to pass into humanity as inner strength, inner power. That is the essential difference between the Event of Golgotha and the teachings given by the other Founders of religion.

Deeper understanding than exists to-day is necessary before there can be any true conception of what came to pass on Golgotha. When Earth evolution began, the human Ego was connected physically with the blood. The blood is the outer expression of the human Ego. Men would have made the Ego stronger and stronger, and if Christ had not appeared they would have been entirely engrossed in the development of egoism. They were protected from this by the Event of Golgotha. What was it that had to flow? The blood that is the surplus substantiality of the Ego! The process that began on the Mount of Olives when the drops of sweat fell from the Redeemer like drops of blood, was carried further when the blood flowed from the wounds of Christ Jesus on Golgotha. The blood flowing from the Cross was the sign of the surplus egoism in man's nature which had to be sacrificed. The spiritual significance of the sacrifice on Golgotha requires deep and penetrating study. The result of what happened there would not be apparent to a chemist—that is to say to one with the power of intellectual perception only. If the blood that flowed on Golgotha had been chemically analysed it would have been found to contain the same substances as the blood of other human beings; but occult investigation would discover it to have been quite different blood. Through the surplus blood in humanity men would have been engulfed in egoism if infinite Love had not enabled this blood to flow. As occult investigation finds, infinite Love is intermingled with the blood that flowed on Golgotha. The writer of the Gospel of St. Luke adhered to his purpose, which was to describe how, through Christ, there came into the world the infinite Love that would gradually drive out egoism. Each of the Evangelists describes what it was his particular function to describe.

If these things could be explained in still greater depth we should find that all contradictions alleged by materialistic research would be invalidated, as they are in the case of the antecedents of Jesus of Nazareth when the true facts of his early childhood are known. Each Evangelist describes what concerned him most closely from his own standpoint. St. Luke describes what his informants, who were ‘seers’ and ‘servants of the Word’ were able to perceive as the result of their special preparation. The other Evangelists are concerned with different aspects—the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke perceives the out-streaming Love which forgives the most terrible of all wrongs the physical world can inflict. Words expressing this ideal of Love, words of forgiveness even when the most terrible of wrongs has been committed, resound from the Cross on Golgotha: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” (Luke XXIII, 34.) Out of His infinite Love, He who on the Cross on Golgotha accomplishes the Deed of untold significance, implores forgiveness for those who have crucified Him.

And now we turn once again to the doctrine of the power of Faith. Emphasis was to be laid upon the fact that there is something in human nature that can stream from it and liberate man from the material world, no matter how firmly he may he bound to that world. Let us think of a man embroiled in the material world through every imaginable crime, so that the forum of that world itself inflicts the punishment; let us conceive, however, that he has saved for himself something that the power of Faith can cause to germinate within him. Such a man will differ from another who has no Faith, just as the one malefactor differed from the other. The one has no Faith, and the judgment is fulfilled. In the other, however, Faith is like a faint light shining into the spiritual world; hence he cannot lose the link with the spiritual. Therefore to him it is said: ‘To-day’—since you know that you are connected with the spiritual world—‘you shall be with me in Paradise!’ (See Luke XXIII, 43.)

Thus do the truths of Faith and Hope, as well as the truth of Love, resound from the Cross in the account given in the Gospel of St. Luke.

There is still something else, belonging to the same realm of the soul's life, upon which the writer of this Gospel wishes to lay emphasis.

When a man's whole being is pervaded with the Love that streamed from the Cross on Golgotha he can turn his eyes to the future and say: Evolution on the Earth must make it possible for the spirit living within me gradually to transform the whole of physical existence. We shall in time give back again to the Father-principle which existed before the onset of the Luciferic influence, the spirit we have received; we shall let our whole being be permeated by the Christ-principle and our hands will bring to expression what is living in our souls as a faithful picture of that principle. Our hands were not created by ourselves but by the Father-principle, and the Christ-principle will stream through them. As men pass through incarnation after incarnation, the spiritual power flowing from the Mystery of Golgotha will stream into what they achieve in their bodies—which are the creations of the Father-principle—so that the outer world will eventually be imbued with the Christ-principle. Men will be filled with the confidence that resounded from the Cross on Golgotha and leads to the highest Hope for the future, leads to the ideal that can be expressed by saying: I let Faith germinate within me, I let Love germinate within me and I know that when they grow strong enough they will pervade all external life. I know too that they will pervade everything within me that is the creation of the Father-principle. Thus Hope for humanity's future will be added to Faith and Love, and men will understand that in regard to the future they must acquire firm confidence, saying: If only I have Faith, if only I have Love I may entertain the Hope that what has come into me from Christ Jesus will gradually find its way into the outer world. And then the words resounding from the Cross as a sublime ideal will be understood: “Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!” (Luke XXIII, 46.)

Words of Love, of Faith and of Hope ring out from the Cross according to the Gospel which indicates how spiritual streams that had previously been separate united in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. What had formerly been received in the form of wisdom, streamed into men as an actual power of the soul, exemplified by the sublime ideal of Christ. It is incumbent upon human beings to acquire deeper and deeper understanding of what is communicated in a record such as the Gospel of St. Luke, in order that the three words resounding from the Cross may become active forces in the soul. When with the faculties that the truths of spiritual science can develop in them men come to feel that what streams down to them from the Cross is not lifeless exhortation but vital, active force, they will begin to realize that a truly living message is contained in the Gospel of St. Luke. It is the mission of spiritual science gradually to unveil what is enshrined in such records.

In this course of lectures we have tried to penetrate as deeply as possible into the content of St. Luke's Gospel. In the case of this Gospel too, one course of lectures cannot possibly unveil everything and you will realise at once that a very great deal has inevitably remained unexplained. But if you pursue the path indicated by lectures such as have been given here you will be able to penetrate more and more deeply into these truths and your souls will be better and better fitted to receive and assimilate the living Word hidden beneath the outer words.

Spiritual science is not a body of new teaching. It is an instrument for comprehending what has been given to humanity. Thus for us it is an instrument for understanding the Christian revelation. If you have this conception of spiritual science you will no longer say: ‘It is Christian theosophy or just another form of theosophy!’ There is only one spiritual science and we apply it as an instrument for proclaiming the truth, for bringing to light the treasures of the spiritual life of mankind. It is the same spiritual science that we apply in order to explain the Bhagavad Gita on one occasion and on another the Gospel of St. Luke. The greatness of spiritual science lies in the fact that it is able to penetrate into every treasure given to humanity in the realm of spiritual life; but we should have a false conception of it if we were to close our ears to any of the proclamations made to humanity.

It is with this attitude of mind that you should listen to the proclamation made in the Gospel of St. Luke, realizing that it is pervaded through and through by the inspiration of Love. And then the increasing knowledge that can be acquired from this Gospel with the help of spiritual science will contribute not only to insight into the mysteries of the surrounding Universe and of the spiritual ground of existence but to an understanding of the momentous words in the Gospel of St. Luke: ‘And peace be in the souls of men in whom there is good will.’ When thoroughly understood, the Gospel of St. Luke is able, more than any other religious text, to pour into the human soul that warmth-giving Love through which peace reigns on Earth—and that is the most beautiful mirror-image of divine mysteries revealed on Earth. What can be revealed must be mirrored on Earth and, as mirror-image, rise up again to the spiritual Heights. If we learn to understand spiritual science in this sense it will be able to reveal to us the mysteries of the divine-spiritual Beings and of spiritual existence, and the mirror-image of these revelations will live in our souls. Love and Peace—here is the most beautiful mirror-image on Earth of what streams down from the Heights.

In this way we can receive and assimilate the words of the Gospel of St. Luke which resounded when the forces of the Nirmanakaya of Buddha streamed down upon the Nathan Jesus-child. The revelations pour down from the spiritual worlds upon the Earth and are reflected from human hearts as Love and Peace to the extent to which men unfold the power, the ‘good will’, which the Christ-principle enables to flow from the centre of man's being, from his Ego. The proclamation rings out clearly and with the glow of warmth when we truly understand the meaning of these words in the Gospel of St. Luke:

The revelation of the spiritual worlds from the Heights and its answering reflection from the hearts of men brings peace to all whose purpose upon the evolving Earth is to unfold good will.

• 1. See references to the nature of this Ego in Lectures Four, Five and Seven.
• 2. See the lecture-courses given at Hamburg, in May 1908, and at Cassel, in July 1909;
  also the book Christianity as Mystical Fact, Ch. VIII.

[Dear attendees:] During their beautiful friendship, so significant for the newer intellectual life, Goethe and Schiller exchanged the works they were working on during the time of their friendship, and when Schiller received some parts of the “Wilhelm Meister” from Goethe, he wrote him strange, one might say, at first, peculiar words. Overwhelmed by the impression of the chapter he received at the time, he wrote:

The poet is the only true human being, and the best
philosopher is only a caricature compared to him.

These words may seem strange, but they will no longer seem so strange once we have delved a little into Schiller's soul and examined how he actually meant this saying. We will gain insight by comparing these words with the content of that famous letter that Schiller wrote to Goethe shortly after the two had formed their friendship, the letter that I have mentioned many times before. There Schiller wrote:

For a long time now, [although from a considerable distance, I have observed the course of your mind and noted the path you have mapped out with ever-renewed admiration. ...]

And now he is spreading it across the way in which Goethe views the world. He says that Goethe directs his gaze freely and openly and objectively over the things of the world and that he tries to gain an insight not by speculative means, but by seeking what is necessary in the totality of the world's phenomena. A “heroic” undertaking, as Schiller calls it. And then he explains in his own way why he finds this undertaking so heroic, and then he says: All your powers, your powers of mind, work together harmoniously and ultimately align themselves with the unifier of all powers of mind in your soul, with imagination.

So we see from this that Schiller sees something in Goethe's way of looking at the world, and indeed in the soul activity of Goethe, from which his artistic works have flowed, that it can lead people very deeply into the secrets of existence. Schiller therefore sees something special in the way Goethe developed his imagination, his fantasy, and if one examines what thoughts and opinions were actually exchanged between Goethe and Schiller, one finds that Schiller absorbed a meaningful concept of fantasy in the contemplation of the highest spiritual, and that is what one could call the “inner truth of fantasy”.

Schiller strove, and this can be seen again from his letters, to recognize how man, through development, can become a complete human being. In every human nature, he saw a higher human being, a representative human being, whom the ordinary everyday human being must increasingly approach. In Goethe's way of letting the powers of the mind work together in the imagination, of letting the imagination radiate what assigns each other soul power its place — in this kind of soul activity Schiller found something that makes man a complete human being, that best brings him to unite with the very foundations of the world from which man and things have flowed.

When we hear our great minds talk about imagination, it looks a little different than when, not only in everyday life, but also in many circles close to or even devoted to science today, imagination is talked about. Today, imagination is contrasted with the objective pursuit of truth as if it were directly opposed to the mental faculties that lead to the investigation of truth, as if it only served to combine things in an arbitrary way. If we can bring ourselves to understand Goethe and are convinced that Goethe was an expert in these matters, then perhaps a Goethean saying will be enlightening for us:

Man strives to fathom the secrets of nature and longs for its most worthy interpreter, art.

Yes, Goethe addresses the beautiful, that is, the creations of the imagination, the content of artistic creation, in such a way that he says: art, the beautiful, and thus the children of the imagination, are a manifestation of secret laws of nature that could never be fathomed without their activity.

Now, however, we have to agree with common sense, which describes imagination as a capacity for association that works according to the desires of the soul, that is, out of pleasure and other impulses that have nothing to do with objective knowledge. We have to admit that imagination often leads people away from the truth. Where would it lead us if we were to admit that imagination plays a role in external scientific research? Admittedly, no one will deny that imagination may play a preliminary role in scientific research. Those who are able to work with combining imagination are able to recognize hidden connections that others do not see, who work in the laboratory or in the physics cabinet and structure experience upon experience. But of course it must be fully admitted that for certain areas of research, of life, it is absolutely necessary that when someone makes such combinations through their imagination, they prove what they have combined in strict external evidence through experience. Thus imagination can be a guide to this or that connection, but it must be verified by the means of external, objective research; we are willing to concede that.

Nevertheless, a word such as Goethe's – or a position on the matter such as Schiller's – indicates that Goethe sees something in the works of imagination, in the creative activity of imagination, that also contains a truth, in contrast to the arbitrary, unfettered play that we might better call a fantastic play of ideas. But anyone who speaks of fantasy in such a way that it contains something of truth, you will readily admit, cannot speak of being forced by the external world to recognize this truth.

When we string fact after fact and seek to fathom the laws, then the results of our observations force us to our judgment. When we let our imagination speak, then there is no such external compulsion. That which underlies imagination, that which imagination brings forth, would therefore be something that, as truth, permeates imagination. Accordingly, an inner lawfulness would have to prevail in such a way that certain thoughts, brought together by imagination, appear before a higher forum as real, that certain conclusions of imagination, through an inner necessity, present an expression of truth.

Therefore, if creative imaginative activity is to have true justification, there must be something at work that acts as an inner guide to direct a person in their imaginative work, that does not allow him to fertilize his thoughts at random, according to his desires and pleasures, but rather what guides him to stringing thought to thought with a sure inner direction and thereby obtains something that is, in a certain sense, an expression of truth.

When we hear a true and great poet speak of imagination as a means of unraveling inner truths, then it is certainly permissible to measure this creative soul activity, this imagination, against that soul activity, that soul capacity, which, in the sense of spiritual science or theosophy, is suitable for leading into the foundations of existence.

Over the years, we have spoken at length about this spiritual world that underlies the material world. The methods that lead to the results we have so often discussed are – as terrible as the word may sound to some modern people – the so-called clairvoyant methods. Spiritual science offers information about facts and beings of the spiritual world, and these facts and beings are found through clairvoyance. It will not be my task here to discuss certain lower forms of clairvoyance – they can only be touched on – because these lower forms can never lead to any real results of spiritual science. On the other hand, it will be my task, in accordance with the time allotted to us, to discuss the method and scope of so-called higher clairvoyance, that is, clairvoyance achieved through genuine, truly appropriate training.

Many people today only know clairvoyance in the form of so-called lower clairvoyance, where it occurs to us as an accidental gift or disease, in somnambulism and other forms. There are conditions in human nature through which a person does not relate to his environment in the usual way, but in which he has filled his soul life, we might say, with images from another world. For the outside world, the somnambulist is in a kind of sleep. This sleep may be present to such a slight degree that the layman will always reply: Yes, he is indeed completely awake, he just sees differently than the ordinary person in his waking state. And such a person who sees differently is called a clairvoyant. When he perceives images in this more or less sleep-like state, these images sometimes form strange content, sometimes quite meaningful content. He can communicate these images and amaze those around him with the things he sees. In this somnambulistic state, he himself knows certain things through prediction, which then come true despite all objections. Such a person, who has tuned down his external daytime consciousness, can make statements about certain conditions that lie ahead of him, which appear astonishing. Such a patient can indicate exactly what can help him and how he is to be treated. In such states, the human soul does indeed penetrate through the shell of the external sense world and has another world before it. This cannot be denied, and anyone who denies it has simply not done any research in this field.

But all these forms are not what really interest us. That which is gained through such lower clairvoyance cannot be the subject of the spiritual science we are talking about here. The subject of this spiritual science is only that which is gained through the path of trained clairvoyance, the clairvoyance that man has acquired through the fully conscious application of the methods given to him by the corresponding schools. The aspiring clairvoyant performs each step with strict self-control, in complete awareness, just as other people behave in relation to the external world that they perceive with their senses. The only question now is this: how do we visualize the process of becoming such a clairvoyant?

If we want to define its nature, we can say: In terms of scientific methodology, it can be compared to what we call external research in the modern sense of the word. The researcher makes use of all kinds of instruments and tools to explore what is within the sensory world. He invents scientific methods by which he can systematically see things in such a way that they reveal their secrets to him, so to speak. Thus the scientific researcher surrounds himself with instruments, he equips himself with methods that enable him to arrange things in such a way that they tell him something. The spiritual researcher also works with his instrument, with a very complicated one at that, and he cannot explore anything without this instrument. What is this instrument?

It is himself. But he is not himself in the state in which the soul is in everyday life. Man only becomes this instrument when he has so transformed his entire capacity for knowledge, his soul constitution, through the methods that can be given to him, that he has acquired other, indeed now spiritual organs. He must have experienced the moment when he can say from his own experience: Now, every reasonable person says to himself, it cannot be that what surrounds us is exhausted by the tools of our five senses, because if someone does not have one of these senses, he lacks the possibility to see with seeing eyes, so the world of light is not there [for him]. It is there when the organ is there. With each new organ, a new content of the external world presents itself, so we must not limit reality. There must therefore be or be able to be hidden, invisible supersensible worlds around us, and insofar as one expresses this in this cautious way, 'they can be there', logically there is no objection to it.

Someone who becomes clairvoyant in the sense just described reeducates themselves in such a way that this hidden world becomes as perceptible to them as the world of light and color is to ordinary eyes. And just as a new world, the world of light and color, opens up for the one born blind, so a new world streams in from the surroundings of the thus awakened clairvoyant, which then becomes their world of observation. But one must not believe that this is achieved by any means that could be described as superstitious or prejudiced. It is accomplished by a strict transformation of the human cognitive faculty into an instrument of higher perception. Of course, I can only hint in general terms at how this happens. But we also want to go to such, so to speak, higher chapters, also in public lectures, and at least sketch out how research is done.

Man, when he perceives the surrounding world, will be most true to that surrounding world if he lets it tell him what it has to say to him, as far as possible without the interference of arbitrariness. Therefore, we see that the scientist is rightly endeavoring, and carefully endeavoring, to ensure that nothing of subjective arbitrariness of any kind is mixed into what he strives for as a result, that everything is dictated by the things themselves, that man, through his methods, only gives nature the opportunity to express itself. The less arbitrariness we apply in doing so, the better it is. But man cannot help reflecting on the things of the external world, and a little consideration will show you that you gain your perception, your sense impressions, from the external world, from observation; that you let the individual things of external life flow in; but you will also understand that what is called the concept does not flow into us from the external world. Even an external fact can provide you with the proof that, where man investigates the external world, he actually brings the concepts from his inner being; and modern thinking in particular will have to admit this. If this thinking looks back a few millennia and considers the concepts about the structure of our solar system, it must say to itself: When the eye looked up, external perception saw the same as Copernicus and Galileo saw; but the laws that govern it, the concepts and ideas about the structure of the world, have only been acquired over time. How did Copernicus, for example, come to his view of the starry sky? By combining the same observational material that his ancestors had in a different way, by applying the mind, the world of concepts that ruled in him, in a different way than his ancestors. Through what he added to the observation, he saw the essential for our century.

We could show this for all fields. The most orthodox Darwinian must admit: people looked at the facts of the world before Haeckel, too. That they came to their theory does not depend on Haeckel experiencing the environment in a different way, but on his approaching things in a different way. So it is essential what the person brings to it.

And there is another example that shows how concepts and ideas are not something that flows into the human being from the outside, but something that he himself must bring into the world. Try to think about it when you go out to sea to a point where you only have sea, sea, on which the vault of heaven seems to rest all around you. You will then say to yourself: the vault of heaven seems to rest on the surface of the sea in the form of a circle; but you will not understand the circle through such observations. You will only understand it when you disregard the external observation and are able to construct the circle in your own mind, independently of the observation, when you are able to draw the picture mentally, in which all points are the same distance from the center. To have this image in your mind, to understand the [circle], you do not need chalk, no external observation. You can construct it in your mind and realize all the laws in your mind. And when you step out into reality and see arrangements that are in a circle, then it must correspond to what you have thought up in your study as the laws of the circle. The great Kepler would never have been able to discover the laws governing the movement of the planets if the orbit of the planets had not first appeared to him in his mind and he had then realized that when he looked out, the stars moved in the lines that he had first constructed in his mind.

Thus we carry the world of concepts and ideas within us in the higher sense of the word. We bring them to the external things, and these tell us: What you have thought, we carry out. The star says, as it were: You have conceived a line in your soul; but I move in the sense of this line. And so you come to realize that what lives in your soul, without you taking in an external sensory observation, that this underlies the spiritual basis and laws of this sensory world; but you have to get the confirmation from this sensory world. You can only make a statement about this sensory world when it offers you phenomena that correspond to what you have thought.

Now imagine that a person — and in this case I am indeed quoting the simplest things from the so-called school of esoteric science — tries to hold on to a thought that is constructed in his own soul, such as a circle, without going out into the world of observation with the image in his soul. If a person can now manage to refrain from all external observation for a while and is able to hold the attention to such an inner image, if he makes himself blind and deaf to his surroundings and remains attached to such an image, if he concentrates his soul on this image, then he is practising the first elementary activity on the way to clairvoyance – that which is called concentration.

Everything assumes that the human soul initially clings to something that lives within itself alone, for which it is initially unimportant whether or not there is something external to which it corresponds. What matters is the activity of the soul, to hold fast in strict inner direction such activity that is directed towards a soul image. That is what matters. Now, of course, a single such activity is not enough; it must be repeated often; and even if it is repeated over and over again, what is actually effective is not what the person can gain in terms of mental images, when he is actually still completely dependent on the stimulation of the external sense world.

There are thousands of years of experience in relation to clairvoyance, experiences of people who know and give their advice to develop inner soul forces. Above all, I just want to point out that there are certain truths, core statements. One need not be convinced of the truth of such sentences, which in a certain sense are the possessions of researchers in this field. Suppose someone says: I cannot be convinced from the outset of the truth of such sentences, which perhaps relate to an eternal. That is not necessary; that is not the beginning. The greater the impartiality, the better. When the teacher gives the student something and says, “Fill your soul so that during the time it lives in your soul, you perceive nothing around you and give yourself entirely to this soul content,” then you do not need to believe in this soul content. The teacher can even say, “Don't believe in it, but let it work in you.” That is what matters. Focus on that and you will see that such a resting of the soul on that content has an effect. Not that you gain a conviction, but that this content works in your soul, that is what matters. — If someone says that the teacher gives his student something that is not true at all, it can be calmly retorted: It may be that it is not true, that the external truth is not applicable to such a sentence; but that is not the point, but rather that it becomes a working force in the soul, that out of the soul comes forth what was hidden and of which the soul was not previously aware. One will see that with constant repetition of such instruction one can have inner experiences.

Certain symbols and symbolic representations are particularly effective for bringing hidden soul abilities to the fore. And a symbolum will be used to characterize how something like this actually works. I would like to speak of the symbolum that I have often referred to, the black cross surrounded by red roses. Let us first consider the abstract meaning, which is not of great importance for the training of clairvoyance. It will be best if we recall Goethe's words:

He who does not have
this dying and becoming,
is only a gloomy guest
on this dark earth.

Die and become – what does that mean? It means nothing other than that in the development of our soul we must rise above the things of our sensory world, that these things must first disappear around us, so to speak, so that we find ourselves in a state in which we are unconscious of the sensory world, which can be compared to the process of battle and death. The sensory world must first die. But whoever remains without content, whose soul remains empty when the content dies, is a dull guest. This is more or less what Goethe means: when you succeed in diverting your attention from all external things, when you are certain that nothing from the external world is flowing in, when you can then draw something out of the hidden depths of your soul that fills the field of vision of your soul, that is different from the external, then you have risen anew in another world, then you have “become”. Die and become – the dying of the lower nature, of outer sense perception, is characterized by the black cross. The dawning of a new world out of this death of the sense world is characterized by the red roses on the cross. And if we then interpret this rose cross in a comprehensive cosmic sense, we must say: in the mineral kingdom, in the plant kingdom, in what is called unconscious nature, there is a spiritual element. This underlies everything. The human being directs his gaze to his environment, he perceives it. To those who have an inkling of the spiritual, this environment appears only as an external expression of the underlying spiritual. They say to themselves: The whole unconscious nature is based on a divine-spiritual; but it is as if it were in a grave, it is as if it were dead. The human soul is like steel on flint; when it strikes it in recognition, what lies hidden within it shines forth. In the human soul, divine spiritual content arises; it comes to life. Thus, the spirit must first pass through the death of the unconscious world in order to come to new life.

And I could tell of all possible areas of spiritual life. I could cite what could serve as a first intellectual explanation of this symbol. But that is not the point at all. The only point is that we do not entertain the thought that it was invented arbitrarily. For the budding clairvoyant, it is not a matter of what it might mean. Someone might say: Well, you may talk about the Rose Cross all you like, but to the objective researcher it makes no difference, because he gains nothing about the secrets of nature by imagining a black cross; that tells him nothing. When we carry out experiments with the falling-body machine or other apparatus, we discover a law. This, expressed in words, means something to us; it corresponds to an objective truth; a rose cross means nothing to me. That is how the person concerned can say. He who has undergone clairvoyant training may reply: That does not matter, it is not the point. The images in question are not meant to depict anything in external reality, so they are most effective when they are symbols that are open to multiple interpretations. What matters is not that one wants to express in such a symbolum the things of the outer world as they are, but that one forms such a symbolum in purely inner soul activity, initially in dependence on the outer expressions, that one contemplates such a symbolum in the soul in a way that is as concentrated as possible and excludes outer things. What this symbolum brings about in the soul is what matters.

When a person allows something like this symbol to live in his soul with ever-increasing inner concentration – and many other things as well – then these are the means to awaken the forces slumbering within him. Something very special happens to the person. He can experience – and these are real experiences – that the proofs, the real guarantees of this matter arise within him. In the end, the human being will experience the following feelings, which I ask you to observe carefully. He will say to himself: What I imagined was really only a kind of bridge; this rose cross is a bridge. Now I have received something that is not connected with it, to which the rose cross has only helped me, which rises in my soul and which is first of all an experience that cannot be obtained through external stimulation. At first, the student does not know whether what is arising within him is a bubble, a mirage, a fantastic construct, or whether it corresponds to some kind of reality. He does not know, but what matters is that he acquires the ability to experience and see such things within himself. For even that is still a detour for higher clairvoyance. What occurs at first are images.

But now, when the student continues to do such exercises, a further feeling arises for him that can be proven by nothing more than by the experience, the feeling that tells him: It now also does not depend on the images, but on what is expressed in these images. And now he knows that it is with these images, which he experiences in his innermost being, something like this: If you press on your eye or let an electric current pass through it, then any light impulse can pass through the eye, a light can shine within you. In this case, you have a light impression that is caused by the constitution of the eye. It is the same when the images first appear, which are evoked by following the appropriate advice. Then, like spiritual flashes, things flash through the soul that are indeed new, but they really appear the same as the light that you generate in the eye through a blow or an electric current. But you know very well when you are confronted with an external object that although the nature of the eye enables you to perceive light, you can say to yourself through experience, through a certainty gained in the experience: that which has been evoked only by my eyes is nothing, the real thing is the object. I stand facing the object, it communicates itself to me through my eye as an object.

This moment occurs for the clairvoyant person. These images ultimately become a means by which a new reality is expressed. Just as surely as the person who faces an external object with his eye knows that the object is expressing itself, so the clairvoyant knows that although it depends on his nature whether such images arise, he also knows quite precisely: in the way these images are now experienced by him, objective entities and facts of the spiritual world are expressed.

This can only be attained through strict inner schooling in a completely natural way. Just as one can distinguish fantasy from reality in outer experiences, so it is necessary for the pupil to maintain a sound judgment and a sound mind in this area, for here it is much easier to mistake illusion for reality than in outer life. Therefore, in such schooling for real higher clairvoyance, something else must go along with it.

If the student were to allow only what has been described to approach him, then he would be exposed to the danger of becoming a madman in a sense, and that is because in this realm of changing images of the higher spiritual life, he can conjure up appearances for reality through his subjective feelings, through his personality. This training must go hand in hand with the fact that the person, through certain instructions given to him, learns to renounce everything in this higher spiritual world that is connected with his desires, that is connected with his personality.

Here we come to a chapter where it is very difficult to be understood. For what do all contemporary psychologists say? They are not familiar with what has just been described and what is experienced as reality by hundreds. They therefore say: When a person is confronted with the external world, the sensory world corrects him by giving him realities; but when a person abandons himself to his inner activity, then, of course, feeling and subjective inclination are involved, and then feeling is transformed into such images; this can never claim to be objective. In the area where these gentlemen think they are right, they are right, because they have no concept of what must take place in terms of the actual eradication and obliteration of subjectivity, subjective opinions and inclinations. These must be completely eliminated. One must learn to renounce any preference or sympathy.

There are again very special exercises for this, so that what our popular psychologists rightly describe for ordinary human life does not occur, namely, that the arbitrary interferes. Man must have thrown out everything that could conjure up appearance for him as reality. But then he can keep the objective spiritual in its true form.

Something else needs to be said. Where clairvoyance is prepared in this way of training, where expertise prevails in this field and not dilettantism — the latter of which is terribly rife in the world — great importance is attached to not starting the path without certain prerequisites. For there is a great difference between setting out on this difficult path as an ignorant person, equipped only with the ordinary concepts of the world, and setting out after having absorbed higher concepts about certain secrets of existence, which can be explored and tested. There is a great difference whether one advances in this or that way. One can also go through this path with a small amount of outer experience. But then the soul's content is poor, and everything that can be seen is compressed into a few images. And then the incorrectly trained clairvoyants come into being, whom you will find again and again, who present in their writings: Now I have come so far that I have united with God through concentration, through the expression of my soul; and then they express God as a diamond illuminated by light or something like that. This is a mistaken idea, an idea that is basically no different from the usual description of an external thing of the senses, except that the person concerned calls it God.

When such “clairvoyants” repeatedly discuss their higher world and express all the glories of the higher world through nothing but such trivial descriptions, it is because they have not approached this training properly prepared. But when someone approaches these things with a proven teacher, then what he achieves, what flows into the images he has prepared, is a diverse world view, and everything that the surrounding external nature can offer people, with all its beauties and glories and secrets, is only a small part of the whole world that surrounds them. Much more magnificent and glorious is that which lies as the unknown world behind the known and which shines forth as the primal source of all that is visible. But it is also the case that the person who experiences this knows that he is not deceiving himself, that he is not, for example, projecting external impressions into this realm; he knows full well that what he experiences there, he can never experience in the external sense world.

This is the path of calm development by which man comes to truly see into the spiritual worlds. This is trained clairvoyance.

Now, what objectively happens to a person when he applies such methods? We remember that for spiritual science, the human being is not limited to what the senses can perceive, but that this external, this physical body, is merely one part of the whole human nature. For spiritual science, this physical body is permeated by supersensible parts, first of all by the etheric body, and the astral body is incorporated into the physical and etheric bodies. In the astral body we have the carrier of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, of drives, instincts, desires, of all inner experiences. Integrated into this is the fourth link of the human being, the carrier of self-awareness.

What sleep actually is in the sense of spiritual science has already been characterized here before you. What happens then when, in the evening, for the human being's subjective perception, all the impressions of the day sink down into the sea of forgetting, when, so to speak, forgetting or unconsciousness spreads around the person? What has happened to this person? The physical body and ether body remain in bed; but the astral body, together with the ego, has moved out and now acts on the physical and ether bodies from the outside. Our inner worlds sink into oblivion because the astral body does not make use of the external sense organs during the night. In the morning, the astral body with the ego then descends again into the physical and etheric bodies; it makes use of the senses again, and the world of the senses emerges for the human consciousness. How can a person perceive the external world of the senses? Because he has eyes and ears and the other sense organs. If these organs did not exist, the environment would be silent and lightless for the human being. When the astral body is externalized at night, it is also in a world, a spiritual world. But it has no organs to perceive it. In its fine substantiality, it has no organs like those that the human being has today in the coarse physical substance. Only through organs can a world around the human being be perceived. If the astral body had organs, then it would be able to perceive its environment just as well when it is outside the physical and etheric bodies as it can perceive what surrounds a person in the physical world with the help of the physical senses.

Now the question is: if a person is to perceive the spiritual world, then his astral body must be given organs, spiritual ears and spiritual eyes. How does this happen? This happens through the methods that have been mentioned, through concentration, through living in certain ideas and images. When such a person's astral body goes out at night, this astral body is quite different. This is known by those who have attained clairvoyant consciousness. It is as if you were to imagine that in the physical body the organs begin to differentiate and perceive the environment. What was a disorderly mass is divided into organs. It takes a long time for the organs to form in the astral body, until what was once like an undifferentiated mist begins to emerge in beautifully formed organs. But then what was possible for man before, to have these images in his soul, which were characterized earlier, occurs. This world of images arises from the fact that the human being integrates such organs.

Since ancient times, the process that occurs for the human being has been called purification, cleansing, catharsis, for the reason that the human being thereby learns not only to sense the spiritual world through the veil of external sensuality but because he then looks into this spiritual world in such a way that his vision is purified from the outer sensual world, that the outer sensual world is blurred and yet unconsciousness does not occur. Catharsis, purification, cleansing has always been correctly described as the first stage of trained clairvoyance.

Then a later stage occurs for the clairvoyant. At first, when the person returns to the physical and etheric body in the morning, the external organs are working again and have more power. He cannot, so to speak, handle the internal, still fine and mobile organs; the external impression of the eye and ear drowns out what the internal astral organs can see. It is always present, because the spiritual world is within the sense world — but as long as the human being still has these organs weakly developed, as long as they are only in the astral body, they are drowned out by the sensory organs and the powers of the etheric body. By working diligently in this way, the human being develops organs so strong and capable of being controlled internally that when he enters his physical and etheric bodies in the morning, he can see through these organs not only sensory perceptions but also the spiritual. At that moment, the person has attained what has always been called enlightenment or photism within the schools that work in this field.

These are all very real processes that can be experienced, and they do not arise from something happening to the person that is beyond his control. Step by step, the person applies the methods used in the corresponding schools to transform himself into the instrument through which he can perceive the spiritual world. What is it that enables a person to become clairvoyant? It is the organization of his inner invisible being, the transformation of the chaotic structure of this inner being, which otherwise only has an experience when the outer world is affected, into an organization that is just as regular as the outer physical body has become through outer nature.

Exactly the same path of development that nature has taken with man, to transform him from a lower stage to today's being with perfect organs, the same path of development is taken up by man himself, is continued by him. Where nature leaves man, he himself continues to work. Whoever reflects on this will not find the slightest illogicality in the fact that the one who sets out on the path can have real experiences.

When man gains insight into the spiritual worlds in this way, he owes it to the fact that he has made his inner man so strong that he is an independent being in relation to the external organs. Man has become his own master. This is a principle that is expressed in all such schools as an abstract characteristic of this matter. If man has come to this stage, he owes it first of all to the control over his etheric body. In the undeveloped human being, the life body is, so to speak, somewhat inelastic, following only the forces of nature. In the clairvoyant, it is something that the astral body adapts to its forms. It has become elastic because the stronger power is at work in it.

If we now touch on the kind of clairvoyance that is evoked by lower states, which we generally characterize – and this is of course speaking in a laymanly way – as human states of weakness, then we have to say: this comes from something quite different and can never be controlled, but it is based on the same laws. Whenever a person becomes somnambulant of their own accord, or when a person is influenced by unlawful means, or when a person is going through this or that illness, it may happen that their etheric body is dissolved in the physical body, so that the compact connection between the physical body and the etheric body does not exist, as it does in the normal state. This can actually happen as a result of disease processes, and basically most of what is seen in the field of low-level clairvoyance can be traced back to pathological conditions. Then the person has an etheric body that is not so firmly bound. While in the trained clairvoyant the loosening occurs because the astral body strengthens and gains control of the etheric body, in the case of low-level clairvoyance it occurs because an organ becomes diseased. Through the illness, it is released from the etheric body to a certain extent; the etheric body becomes free for such people.

As long as the physical brain is still in a normal, intimate connection with the etheric, the astral body cannot do anything with the etheric; the physical brain holds the etheric body. If an abnormality occurs, a larger or smaller piece of the etheric body will separate from the physical body; it can be handled more easily, and it is handled by the astral body so that a kind of natural enlightenment occurs, but which in its content cannot offer any higher world, cannot lead to higher results, because all control, all certainty, all conscious pursuit of things is excluded. People who have become clairvoyant in this way can, because their condition is based on the same principle as that of the trained clairvoyant, namely, on the control of the etheric body by the astral body, can have unordered insights into the higher worlds; what they relate may be fact, but a real result of spiritual science can never arise from it. What has been said here is not a denial of the reality of what such people see, but an alerting to the fact that the strict results of spiritual science can only be achieved through the path of trained clairvoyance.

I would just like to touch on one possible objection. Someone might say: So lower clairvoyance is always based on pathological conditions; how can a disease process produce real insight? — That is a shortsighted view. Health and insight do not go hand in hand. A person can become ill, and precisely through this process of illness the supersensible world can be opened up for influences from the higher world; there is nothing contradictory about this. Nor does it imply that a person should be made ill in order to become clairvoyant.

Thus we see what it is that brings the facts and beings of a higher world into the field of consciousness in the same way that the world around us is brought into this consciousness through sensory observation. It is exactly the same thing, only in a different field of vision. And just as we perceive plants and minerals in the world of the senses, so in the spiritual world we have around us that which makes this world of the senses explicable to us in the first place, because it has emerged from the spiritual world. And when the clairvoyant makes statements about what he has seen, he does so in order to tell. He does not want to prove anything, he wants to tell what he experiences by applying strict methods to his own soul development. And by telling, he imparts a world that can be logically understood, that can be grasped by the ordinary mind.

If we express the experiences of the clairvoyant in a different way, we have to say: our inner world, our soul world, is determined in ordinary life by what is going on outside. That I, for example, imagine a green stem with leaves on it, that I assert this image, comes from the fact that I am organized in a certain way. The rose out there determines me, its forces stream into me, by conveying to me the idea of its outer being.

It is the same in the spiritual realm. These spiritual entities reveal themselves to the developed person, they are reflected in his inner soul life, just as external sense perceptions are reflected in ordinary thinking. Thus the clairvoyant experiences the spiritual external world in his soul life and says to himself: When I look at the sense world, I know that this sense world is created, ordered and determined by the beings whose activity and rule is revealed to me when I direct my clairvoyant gaze to the sense world. He says to himself: The fact that the sensory world appears to me in an organized way is because it has been shaped by the beings I see. The flower before me, a crystal, a mountain range, it is all worked out of the spirit. I see the spiritual foundations. I would see nothing of them if I left it to my own discretion. I must, so to speak, sacrifice my soul life and let the world of the higher spiritual self flow into my soul; it must have an effect on me, it is the determining factor.

And now imagine something: Imagine that this world is there, that it is at work, that it is always at work on people, even if not on their consciousness. Imagine that a person is standing in the world; around him is the world that the clairvoyant sees; it has an effect on every person. On the merely sensual observer it has an effect in that it presents an external face; on the clairvoyant it has an effect in such a way that he does not see this spiritual world at first, but that it works as a determining force, that he cannot look up to a world of spiritual forces, but that the forces of these entities flow to him in an unconscious way. He does not see them, but they send forces, order his life of ideas, determine what his soul experiences. A person sees another person; if he saw nothing more, he would only receive a picture of the external world. Now the spiritual world works by sending him its forces. Now he is not satisfied with the ideas of the external, sensual world. He is transforming himself, in order to gradually make himself into the sublime image that the Greeks, for example, represented in the statue of Zeus. The same power and essence that the clairvoyant sees works, as it were, on the person endowed with true imagination, so that it stands by his side, guiding and leading him, combining the images.

And so imagination works like a soul force that is fertilized by the worlds into which the clairvoyant looks, a soul force into which the higher worlds send their laws, so that the person gifted with imagination transforms the external things so that the truths of the spiritual worlds live in them. There we have the real basis of imagination, and there we understand that Schiller could say of Goethe, how with him understanding and reason and feeling and all the soul powers work together harmoniously and are fertilized by imagination. We understand that he could say: What is created in this way characterizes the human being as the only true human being, because he does not work only through a single soul power, but takes everything together, and everything works towards the imagination — which does not have to agree with external truth —, towards the imagination. And so we can also understand that Goethe can be the view: There is a form of imagination that does not need to agree with external truth, but which has its own certainty. We have seen this. There is a form of imagination that does not yet lead to clairvoyance, but which is fertilized by the forces that the clairvoyant sees. It is understandable that Schiller finds all other human activities one-sided, but in the contemplation of Goethe it dawns on him: the artist who takes the individual soul forces together in order to allow the spiritual worlds to fertilize what he receives as an external new formation in the sense world; such an artist is the only true human being.

Of course, Schiller knew nothing of spiritual science, but he sensed what it was about. Likewise, what Goethe says about imagination is absolutely right. It is true when Goethe says that genuine art, that is, art that creates out of imagination, is the revelation of secret laws of nature that could never be discovered without imagination. While external observation may provide us with purely external sensory facts and truths, inner truth is something that the imagination, fertilized from above, is much closer to than the powers of reason.

And so we see how things are distributed in the world, so to speak. Man is predisposed to ascend into the higher worlds. The higher abilities lie dormant in every soul. Those who have the patience and endurance — perhaps through many lives — may hope to glimpse into the worlds that make the outer sense world understandable in the first place. But until then, until man achieves this, something is given him as a forerunner, a representative for insight into the higher worlds. He can allow himself to be inspired by these higher worlds and then, in the work of the artist, for example, transform the external world in such a way that it offers a reflection of the spiritual worlds.

And so, in art, we do not merely see the world of the senses as nature creates the world of the senses, but in great works of art we see the Creator Himself, Who has passed through the medium of the human spirit and human imagination. We see in the surroundings of the work of art an external reflection of that which, although not an immediate sensory reality, is an expression of spiritual worlds, insofar as spiritual worlds can find expression through the sensual-material. And so we see that in the spiritual life of humanity, imagination lights the way to the great goal of clairvoyance, of looking into the spiritual worlds. Individual people have already achieved this goal by using the means mentioned. This spiritual world appears to us as the ruler of all lower existence and clairvoyance as that through which the human being gains a share in the spiritual world; it calls the human being up into the spheres of a higher world. And imagination is the representative of clairvoyance in the world of the senses, so that a person can already have a reflection of the spiritual world, for example through art. And the deeper we look into this context, the more we recognize: Clairvoyance is the ruler of the human mind in the broadest sense of world knowledge and understanding; and imagination is the deputy of clairvoyance within the sensual world.

In my first lecture, which I gave here in Amsterdam on the 19th of this month, I tried to explain how spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy fits into present-day civilization. This anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which today already has an artistically executed outer place of care in the Free University for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum in Dornach near Basel in Switzerland, wants to add supersensible knowledge through exact spiritual scientific methods to the tremendous, great results of natural scientific knowledge, which it fully recognizes. And in my last lecture here on February 19, I took the liberty of pointing out that in the present time, numerous souls long for knowledge that is just as securely based as the knowledge that is considered scientific today, but precisely knowledge that extends to the realms of the world with which the eternal in the human soul is connected.

I pointed out that these supersensible insights can only be attained by developing certain abilities that are present in the human soul. These abilities are, however, still unknown to broad sections of our educated society today. Yet it is precisely this ignorance of these abilities that is the cause of the catastrophic developments of our time, which are apparent to everyone.

If we want to approach what is meant here by spiritual science, we must first start from what I called 'intellectual modesty' in my lecture on February 19. This intellectual modesty will be regarded as a paradox in our own time, which is particularly proud of its intellectuality. But anyone who wants to penetrate into the supersensible worlds — to which the human soul with its essential being does, after all, belong — needs this starting point of intellectual modesty. And I would like to repeat the parable, which I already used the other day to point out this intellectual modesty, because I have to assume that, due to the change of venue, a large number of the audience gathered here today were not present at my first lecture.

If we have a five-year-old child in front of us and we give him a volume of Shakespeare, he will play with it, perhaps tear it up, but in any case not do what is appropriate for the volume of Shakespeare. But if the child has lived for another ten or fifteen years, then those abilities that were previously latent in the child's soul will have been developed through education and instruction; he will now read the volume of Shakespeare. The child has ascended to a higher level of human existence, has become a different being after fifteen to twenty years.

If you really want to penetrate into the supersensible world, you have to be able to say to yourself: Perhaps as an adult you are in the same position as the five-year-old child in relation to the volume of Shakespeare, with regard to nature with its secrets and its deeper laws, and perhaps there are forces within the soul that first have to be brought out. If we seriously approach these slumbering powers and abilities in our soul with this intellectual modesty as adults, we will develop higher insights than the ordinary ones of everyday life and ordinary science.

First of all, the faculty in the human soul must be developed, which in ordinary life we know as the ability to remember. Through this ability to remember, we bring coherence into our lives. Through this ability to remember, our soul conjures up images of what we have experienced up to a very early age in childhood. This ability to remember makes permanent what would otherwise flash by as a mere idea. If we could only surrender ourselves to the outside world, if we would only surrender ourselves to ideas of the events and experiences that flash by, our whole soul life would be different. If one now further develops what is present in memory as lasting images, then one attains a quite different capacity for knowledge. And one can develop this through methods that I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science” and in other of my writings. One can develop this through certain processes of meditation and concentration, through a devoted resting on certain easily comprehensible ideas, which must not be reminiscences, must not be based on any kind of auto-suggestion; therefore they must be easily comprehensible.

One must rest with the whole structure of one's soul on such ideas. And these studies, which the true spiritual researcher must make regarding the knowledge of the supersensible worlds, are no easier than the studies one does in the clinic, in the physics or chemistry laboratory, or in the observatory, and they by no means take less time. This meditation, this concentrating with the whole power of the soul on certain ideas, which one does continually and on which one rests, must be continued for years. The powers of knowledge that lie dormant deep within the soul, of which the human being has no other idea, must be brought up. When they are brought up, one is able to perceive, through these higher powers of knowledge, that which surrounds us just as the physical-sensory world surrounds us. At first one perceives one's own experiences, but not as the vague stream of consciousness that goes back to just before birth, where the memory fragments emerge. Rather, one perceives the whole panorama of what one has gone through in this life since birth, like a unified, all-at-once present life panorama. And when one gets to know this, one experiences what it means to live in one's soul outside of the body. Materialism usually claims – and at first glance it seems justified – that all ordinary thinking, all ordinary remembering, all ordinary feeling and willing is bound to the physical body. But in ordinary life, this feeling, this willing, this thinking is interrupted. Every day, through sleep, that which is the ordinary soul life bound to the body is interrupted. People do not feel deeply enough the significance of the riddle associated with falling asleep, sleeping and waking up again. After all, the human being must be present in sleep, otherwise he would have to arise anew each time he woke up. But one only learns to recognize the form in which the human being is present in sleep by doing the exercises, some of which I have mentioned here.

When you are actually able to imagine mentally in such a way that you do not use your external eyes, do not use other senses, and do not use the ordinary mind that is connected to the brain, but only the purely spiritual-soul - and you achieve this when you develop the ability to remember in the way I have described it - then one comes to know that from the moment of falling asleep until the moment of waking up, the human being does indeed exist as a spiritual-soul entity outside of his body and that only the desire to return to his body then asserts itself. And this desire, which obscures consciousness.

Anyone who develops their powers of recollection as I have described will be able to behave exactly like the sleeping person – that is, not to perceive with the senses, not to combine the sensory perceptions with the mind – only to be fully conscious. He knows the spiritual soul independently of the body. This also enables him to recognize this spiritual soul before birth or conception and after death in its true essence and in connection with the rest of the supersensible world.

And if, in addition, he further develops a second soul power that is also present in ordinary life, namely the power of love, if he makes the power of love a power of knowledge, then the human being gets to know the images, which he otherwise experiences as a supersensible panorama, in their direct reality as well.

Today I would like to draw attention to something that is, in the most eminent sense, a link in a life practice that must interest all people. I would like to draw attention to the way in which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as I am referring to here, can enrich the art of education and teaching.

What do you actually gain from such a spiritual science, the methods of which I have now very briefly outlined? Above all, one acquires a real knowledge of the human being. Without being able to see into the supersensible, it is indeed impossible to have knowledge of the human being. After all, the human being is not only the outer physical organization, about which the outer scientific world view gives us such great, powerful, and insufficiently appreciated insights. Man is also soul and spirit. Man harbors within himself the eternal core of his being, which passes through births and deaths, which has a consciousness after death, because then he has no desire for the body, which lies in bed during sleep and after which he has desire during sleep, which his consciousness in ordinary sleep extinguishes.

When this physical body is discarded at death, the human being attains an all the more clear consciousness because it is not extinguished by any desire for a body. Through all this and much more, which I do not wish to describe now but which you can read about in my writings, the human being attains true knowledge of the human being. And only out of real knowledge of the human being can true teaching and true educational art arise.

We have tried to address this area of practical life in the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which I run and whose pedagogy and didactics flow entirely from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Firstly, the attitude of the teaching staff is such that something is brought into the classroom with every lesson, with every new morning, which turns teaching and educating into a kind of spiritual service. Does it not mean something special when we know through anthroposophical spiritual science that this human being, who reveals himself to us so wonderfully in the growing child, has descended from the spiritual worlds through conception or birth? If this is a true realization, if it is conveyed through anthroposophical spiritual science, then we face the developing human being, the child, in such a way that we have a task entrusted to us from the spiritual worlds. Then we see how the eternal, which has descended from spiritual worlds, works its way out of the initially indeterminate physiognomic features and the indeterminate movements of the child from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, with ever greater certainty. We see the spiritual soul at work on the physical development of the human being.

This is not the place for a careless criticism of what pedagogical geniuses have produced over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. Certainly, some beautiful principles have been expressed with regard to pedagogy. For example, it is rightly emphasized that pedagogy has such principles as “one should not graft anything from the outside into children; one should draw everything one wants to introduce to children from their own abilities and capacities”. Quite right, an excellent principle – but abstract and theoretical. And so, by far the greatest part of our life practice confronts us in abstractions, in theoretical programs. For what is needed to carry out something like this, to extract from individuality what the child should develop within itself, requires real knowledge of the human being. Knowledge of the human being that goes into all the depths of the human being. But the science that has existed in modern civilization so far, despite its great triumphs, cannot have such knowledge of the human being.

I would now like to show you very specific things that will help you to see how this spiritual science, as it is meant here, can achieve real knowledge of the human being. There is a cheap saying that is thoughtlessly repeated over and over again: “Nature does not make leaps!” In fact, nature is constantly making leaps, and this expression is only thoughtless, as I said. Think of a plant: it develops green leaves, then it makes the leap to the calyx, then the leap to the colored petals, the stamens, and so on. And so it is with all life. It is just a phrase to say that nature does not make leaps. And so it is especially in human life. We have in human life, when we can observe it uninhibitedly through the impulses that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science provides, clearly distinct life epochs. The first life epoch goes from birth to the change of teeth, around the age of seven. It ends, then, with the year in which we start sending children to primary school. If one has the necessary insight and impartiality of observation, if one gets into the habit of observing life only at a higher level in the same way that one would otherwise observe at the lowest level in the natural sciences, one can sharply characterize the major differences between the first and second phases of human life. The first phase of life ends with the change of teeth, the second with sexual maturity. Both phases of life are quite distinct from one another. The first phase shows us the child as an imitative being. Even in play, the child is an imitative being. Of course, some believe that a certain imaginative being is formed during play. This is also the case, but if you study play in its deepest essence, you will perceive the moments of imitation everywhere, especially in children's play. And in connection with this play, I would like to remark right away how tremendously important knowledge of the human being, knowledge of the human being in relation to his totality, is for an education and pedagogical art that is full of life and truly engages with the world.

You see, every child plays differently. Anyone with an unbiased sense of observation can tell exactly how one child plays and how another child plays. Even if the difference is not a big one – you have to be a psychologist to be able to observe something like this if you want to become an educator at all. But if you can do that, then you have to relate the different ways of playing to a completely different epoch of a person's life. In terms of observing human beings, the natural sciences are such that they only rank what is nearest to what is nearest. But you won't get very far with that. What can be observed in children's play does not remain in the next phase of life. The child is turned to other things, that is, in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. Even if it continues to play, the actual play age is no longer as characteristic as it used to be. What the play passions are withdraws into the depths of the soul and only comes to light again at a much later age: in the second half of the twenties, when the human being is supposed to enter into practical life. Some adapt themselves with great skill to the tasks of fate, while others become dreamers far removed from the world. The way in which a person can adapt to practical life in these years can be fully explained if one knows how the person played at the age of four, five, six, or seven.

Therefore, it is of the utmost importance for the pedagogue and educator to guide the child's play; to observe what the child wants to express and to guide what should not be expressed, because it would make the child awkward in later life. For when we guide play in the right way at the earliest age, we give the child something for life practice, as it develops in the twenties. The whole life of a human being is interrelated, and what we plant in the child's soul in youth only comes to light much later in life in the most diverse metamorphoses. Only a total knowledge of the human being, as provided by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, can truly see through the connections that lie as far apart as the twenties and childhood, as well as the finding of one's way into practical life and the play instincts; only such spiritual science can see so deeply into life. This will give you an idea of the scope of human knowledge that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to work with in order to develop a pedagogical art.

I said that the child is an imitative being until about the age of seven. And I do not say the number seven out of some mystical inclination, but because the change of teeth is actually an important event in the child's overall development. The child learns the particular nature of his movements, and also his speech, through imitation; he even develops the form of his thoughts in this way. Because the connection between the child's environment and the child itself depends not only on external factors but also on imponderables, parents or educators who live in the child's environment must be clear about how the child adapts to what the adults around him do, not only externally – not only what they speak – but also what they feel, what they sense, what they think. It is usually not believed in our materialistic age that there is also a difference in terms of the child's education, whether we indulge in noble or ignoble thoughts in the presence of the child, because we see the connections in life only in terms of external material entities, and not in terms of how things are connected internally by imponderables. This can be seen if one really observes life according to its internal structures.

I would like to give an example of what is actually important in such matters: a father once came to me and complained bitterly – and I could give many similar examples – that his five-year-old boy had stolen something. He was very unhappy about it. I said: Let's see if the five-year-old boy really has stolen. – I had the case described to me. What had actually happened? The boy had taken some money out of the drawer where his mother kept her pennies, which she always needed for her daily needs. He had not even done it out of selfishness, but had distributed the money among other children. I said to the father: The child did not steal, but what the mother always does, the child also considers right to do, because at the age of five she is still very much an imitative being. We must be aware of this: we do not influence children through admonitions, through commandments, but only through what we do in their environment.

And we can only arrive at a sound judgment of the child's entire soul configuration if we know that this soul configuration of the child will change significantly with the change of teeth. The mere imitation is replaced by the mental behavior towards the environment as a self-evident authority. And we are dealing with this desire of the child for the self-evident authority of the teacher, the educator or whoever else is around the child throughout the entire school period. One only has to know what it means for the whole of life if, in this childhood from the seventh to the fifteenth year, one has looked up with a real, great inner awe to those who, as adults, were around with educational authority were around, that what we thought was true and false emerged from the way these educators saw true and false; from what was the standard of true and false for the educators. We enter into the human, not into some abstraction, when we want to distinguish true and false, good and evil in this childhood age.

You will not believe that I advocate this necessity – that all teaching and education between the ages of seven and fifteen should also be based on unquestioning authority – out of some kind of preference for conservative or reactionary ideas when I tell you that as early as 1892 I wrote a small pamphlet in which I firmly presented the individual freedom of the human being as a basic social requirement. But no one can become a truly free human being, no one can find the right social relationship with their fellow human beings in freedom if they have not recognized an authority beside them between the ages of seven and fifteen, and from this authority learned to shape the standard for right and wrong, good and evil, in order to only later arrive at their own standard of intellectual or other purely internal, autonomous judgment.

And then the soul of the child at this age is still so constituted that it is still completely merged with its surroundings. Only when we come to the end of this phase of life, which falls in the twelfth or thirteenth year, do we see that the child is clearly different from its surroundings, that it knows that the I is within and nature is without. Of course, self-awareness is present in the very earliest childhood, but it is more of a feeling. If you want to educate properly, you need to know that an extraordinarily important point in a child's development lies between the ages of nine and ten and a half. It is the point where the child becomes so absorbed inwardly that it learns to distinguish itself from nature and the rest of the external world. Before this point, which is a strong turning point in human life, the child basically sees his surroundings in images, because they are still connected to his own inner life, in images that are often symbolic. He thinks about his surroundings in a symbolic way. Later, a different era begins. The child differentiates between nature and the external environment. It is of immense importance that the educator is able to assess this point in life, which occurs a little later for one child and a little earlier for another, in the right way. For how the teacher and educator behaves in the right way between the ninth and tenth year – fatherly, friendly, lovingly guiding the child over this Rubicon – that means an incursion into human life that is lasting for the whole of the following existence until physical death. Whether a person has a zest for life in the decisive moments or carries inner soul barrenness through life depends in many respects - though not in every respect - on how the teacher and educator has behaved towards the child between the ages of nine and ten and a half. Sometimes it is a matter of simply finding the right word at the right moment when a boy or girl meets you in the corridor and asks a question, or of making the right expression when you answer. The art of education is not something that can be learned or taught in the abstract – any more than painting or sculpting or any other art can. Rather, it is something that is based on an infinite number of details that arise from the rhythm of the soul. This sense of rhythm is derived from anthroposophical spiritual science.

It is also important to distinguish between what we need to teach children before and after this important point in their lives between nine and a half and ten and a half years of age. Above all, we must bear in mind that in our present, advanced civilization, we have something that has become external, abstract and symbolic. Go back to ancient civilizations, take any pictographic writing, and what was grasped by the senses was fixed. This was made into an image with which the human being was connected, with which the human being lived through feeling and emotion. Today, however, all this has become a symbol. We must not introduce reading and writing to the child as something alien, because it wants to grow together with its environment before the age of nine; we must not teach it from that abstract level, as is the case today. In Waldorf schools, we begin teaching in an artistic way by letting the child draw, even paint, the forms that arise out of the fullness of humanity. We let the child do this at first, and then, when we guide the child further in this drawing-painting way, we develop the letter forms, the writing, from this drawing. We proceed from the artistic, and from the artistic we first bring out writing and then reading. In this way we really correspond to what lies within the child.

It is not a matter of saying in some abstract way in education that one should only bring out what is in the child. One must know how to do it practically, how to really meet human nature. Anthroposophical spiritual science is never theory, but always real practice. That is what enables it to develop such an art of education.

What I have said about authority can also make us aware of something else that may perhaps seem paradoxical to you. In today's materialistic age, an enormous amount of emphasis is placed on so-called illustrative instruction. To anyone who understands the true nature of the child, it is a terrible thing to see the abstract calculating machines and all the things that children are often subjected to today. Today, children are expected to understand everything immediately. The aim is to organize teaching in such a way that nothing goes beyond the usual eight- or nine-year-old understanding. It seems extraordinarily scientific. But believe me, ladies and gentlemen, even a person with thorough anthroposophical knowledge can grasp the obviousness of such a principle just as well as those who defend such principles today as something that should be taken for granted. But what is self-evident is that, above all, between the ages of seven and fourteen, the child must have its memory and sense of authority developed in a healthy way, as I have just described.

Those who only want vividness and vividness that is adapted to the child's understanding do not know the following: they do not know what it means for the whole of life if, let us say in the eighth or ninth year or in the tenth to fifteenth year, one has taken something on the authority of the teacher; because the revered authoritative personality tells one, one considers it to be true. It is still beyond the horizon, but it is absorbed into the soul. Perhaps it is only in the thirty-fifth or fortieth year that it is taken out again. What one has already had in one's memory is now understood through the power that has matured. This awareness of having matured, this awareness of being able to bring something up, refreshes and invigorates the soul's strength in a way that is not appreciated in ordinary life, whereas it deserts the soul if one wants to tailor everything to the understanding of the child in the eighth, ninth, twelfth year. This is something that must be said today, because people, out of their materialistic cleverness, are no longer able to see what is natural, right and essential in such matters.

And from the foundations of human nature, from what seeks to develop from week to week, from year to year, the curriculum of such a school is derived, as it is the Waldorf School. This curriculum arises entirely from the knowledge of the essence of man. It is not an abstract curriculum, but something that underlies the pedagogy of this school, just as painting can do for the painter, sculpting for the sculptor.

Here, I have described to you how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science enters into practical life from the fields of education and teaching. But just think about what kind of spiritual life would be needed if such educational and teaching practices were to really take hold! We are accustomed to seeing this spiritual life only as an appendix to the state, perhaps as an appendix to economic life. We are accustomed today to having the most important part of intellectual life, namely the teaching and education system, prescribed by the state. What anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must now assert for modern civilization, based on a truly penetrating knowledge of teaching and educational methods that are based on true human knowledge, is that intellectual life, teaching and education must be placed in its own free administration. I would like to be quite specific: teachers and educators should not only teach and educate, but they should also have the entire administration of teaching and education in their hands, freely and independently of the state and economic life. From the lowest elementary school up to the highest teaching institutions, every teacher and educator should be so busy teaching that there is still enough time left for them to also be administrators of the teaching and education system. And only those who are still actively involved in teaching and education, the real teachers and educators in any field, not those who have become civil servants and are no longer involved in education, should also be the administrators of the education system. Nothing should be spoken into the teaching and education system except what also speaks into knowledge and art and religious world view. People do not want to recognize that what was necessary for one period of historical development, and perhaps extraordinarily good, does not apply to every period of history. When the modern era dawned, with its centralized state, it was a good and self-evident thing that the old confessional administrations should be relieved of the schools. At that time, it was a blessing for the development of humanity. But now we have arrived at a point in human development where this cannot continue; where what the state could do for the school system has been exhausted and where the free spiritual life, the spiritual life that draws from real spiritual sources, wants the independent administration of the school system.

Here the school question, the question of education, touches directly on the great social question, on everything that is the very essence of the social question. You see, regarding the social question, many people think that the essence of it lies in external institutions, that one only has to look at these external institutions to recognize the social question, that one has to work on these external institutions to do something for the social question. Those who have really come to know life cannot think this way. I have come to know proletarian thinking. I had the opportunity to do so not only in my own youth, but also because I worked for many years as a teacher of various subjects at a workers' education school and saw what actually lives in the broadest strata of the proletariat, which basically only emerged as a class, as a social stratum, through modern technology.

There it is not the external institutions, not even the bread-and-butter questions, from which the actual social question arises; there it is the state of mind, which is connected with the fact that the kind of intellectual life that has developed among the leading classes over the last three to four centuries has passed over to the broad masses of the proletariat like a kind of religion. I have seen this world view arise from materialistic principles in serious people, in deeply-rooted souls who were part of the bourgeoisie, who belonged to the leading classes, and I have learned the following: They said to themselves: Take the external scientific world view seriously; look at how it shows how the Earth developed from some kind of nebulous state through purely natural necessities to its present stage and how the various living beings have gradually developed along with it up to the point of humans. And a time will come again when either glaciation or heat death will occur to the earth – one may imagine it either way – but then the great churchyard will be there. What will have become of that which man must surely see as the noblest in human nature, which arises within him as moral ideals, as religious impulses, as art, as science? I have known people who seriously asked themselves this question, while the majority of modern people thoughtlessly juxtapose these two worlds, the world of external natural necessity and the world of what is actually humanly valuable, of moral ideals, of religious convictions, of knowledge, of artistic creation. Then serious souls say to themselves: Yes, man becomes aware of that which wells up from the soul; but that is an illusion, it is like smoke rising from the material basis. But one day the great churchyard will be there, and what we call the great ideals will have disappeared and faded away. - I have come to know the tragedy and pessimism that deeply inclined people have come to. But I also witnessed how this world view then penetrated into the proletarian soul and how a word was encountered that has a tremendous impact but denotes many things. If one understands how it lives in the proletarian soul, then one knows a lot about the foundations of contemporary civilization and its social issues. The word “ideology” lives in the souls of proletarians. What these proletarian souls know as intellectual life, as custom, law, science, art and religion, they call a superstructure above the production processes, which are historically the only real thing for them. This is the legacy of the world view that I have just described as tragic and that the proletarian souls, the millions of souls, have desolate.

One may appear an idealist today if one seeks the actual proletarian question in what the terrible word ideology expresses. But these idealists will be right. And those who believe that they have a monopoly on human wisdom and the routine of life will see history marching over them. This 'ideology' means that the souls of these masses remain desolate, have no connection with the living spirit – just as the leading classes do not either, who prevent this science from reaching the proletarians.

And here I may say something that should make clear to you the essential task and mission of Dornach, of the Goetheanum in Dornach, in the present age of civilization. Many people today realize that enlightenment and science must be brought to the broad masses. People's libraries and people's colleges are being founded, and all kinds of other things, in order to bring the science that is in our universities and our secondary schools to the people. Dornach cannot go along with this. Dornach wants to do what was the purpose of that autumn course that we held in the fall of 1920 and which we will repeat at Easter on a smaller scale, in keeping with our modest circumstances. The aim was to fertilize the individual sciences from the perspective of spiritual science. Thirty lecturers from all branches of science, including industrialists, merchants and artists, presented at this autumn course to show how all branches of science, art and life can be fertilized by this spiritual science. The aim is to renew science. The aim is to bring the spiritual into the sciences, to bring in a spirit that does not arise from a culture of the head but from the fullness of the human being.

That, then, is the purpose of the Goetheanum in Dornach: that a new spirit be brought into the colleges, only then will it be able to become popular. - One wants to bring the spirit of our college into the people - can one not see in modern civilization what use this spirit has been to those who have it? This spirit must be renewed. It is not that the schools must spread education among the people, but that a spiritual education must first be brought into the schools. That is the point in which Dornach differs from all other efforts along these lines today. For in this field people are thoroughly convinced that they are very free-thinking, but that they have a terrible belief in authority when it comes to conventional science. I say this not out of disdain for modern scientific thinking, but out of decades of engagement with all branches of this thinking. We need to work towards the liberation of spiritual life and thus the liberation of the school and education system, just as the state was once forced to take on teaching and education and wrest them from the old denominations.

I know what objections can be raised to developing a free spiritual life as the first link in the tripartite social organism. But when people express their fear that people would then not send their children to these free schools, it means looking at the matter wrongly. The question is not whether people voluntarily send their children to school or not, but rather that a free system of teaching and education is a necessity for humanity today and that one must then ensure that children go to school despite this. This should not be seen as an objection to a free spiritual life, but should merely lead to a consideration of how to get the children of negligent or unscrupulous parents into school despite a free spiritual life. This is the first link in the impulse of the threefold social organism, as formulated by the anthroposophical world view, to move towards possible solutions to social issues: a free spiritual life, administered by spiritual workers alone.

One can find logically slighted terms that teach all sorts of things in defense of this necessary freedom of spiritual life, as well as to attack it and condemn it. But that is not the issue. Anthroposophy proceeds everywhere from life practice and life observation. Those who know what a real spiritual science will mean to humanity also know how necessary the liberation of spiritual life is. People speak of ideology because spiritual life consists of abstractions, because they have no concept that an idea, that which lives in the soul, is something other than the image of something, because they no longer know that the old religions have given to man, that living spirit lives in every human being, that man with his eternal belongs to the living spirit and not only in his soul live abstract images. A living spiritual world that fills us inwardly and connects us with the eternal is not an ideology. It is the rise of ideology that has led to the catastrophes of our time. But a school and education system that aims to bring the living spirit into humanity must be a school system that is as free as the one I have described. This free school system appears to me as something that must be understood in the most eminent sense as a necessity of modern humanity - provided that it is sincere about human salvation and human progress.

Therefore, I consider it – I say this without wanting to agitate – as absolutely necessary to eliminate many of the forces of decline in our modern civilization by means of forces of ascent, that something be created on the broadest international basis, such as what I would call a world school association. This world school association would have to include all nations and the broadest circles of people. These people must be aware that a free spiritual life is to be created. It is of no use at all if people think that our Waldorf School in Stuttgart is something practical that one must see for a few hours or for a few weeks. To want to see something that arises out of a whole spiritual life is like cutting out a piece of the Sistine Madonna to get an idea of the whole picture. You cannot learn anything about the spirit of the Waldorf School by sitting in on lessons, but by getting to know anthroposophy, the anthroposophical spiritual science that lives in every teacher, in every lesson, in the children, and that also lives in the school reports. I would like to briefly describe how we at the Waldorf School gradually get to know each child, despite the fact that we also have large classes. We do not give them grades, certificates that say “almost satisfactory”, “hardly sufficient” - that is all nonsense. You cannot grade like that. Rather, we give the children a true description of their character, which holds up a mirror to them for the whole of the following year, and a saying that has been chosen from the depths of our souls. We have also seen the value that these reports have for Waldorf school children. So we have experienced what the anthroposophical spirit has brought to this Waldorf school.

But we do not want as many Winkel schools as possible to be established along the lines of the Waldorf School. Rather, we want the widest possible international recognition that the old idea of basing the school system only on the state must be fought. We must strive to force the state to allow the free spiritual life to create its own free schools. We do not want to establish isolated schools by the grace of the state; we will not lend a hand to this, but what is necessary is an understanding of the kind of alliance of peoples that would lie spiritually in a world school association. This would bring people together across the wide expanse of the earth in a great, a gigantic task.

This is what I want to say first about the first link of the threefold social organism. I can only touch on the other links, because they belong to life in other areas. Over the last four to five centuries, we have developed the unified state in today's civilized world. On the one hand, it has absorbed intellectual life with the school and education system; it has also absorbed economic life, at least to a large extent. And social democracy, of course, strives to use the entire state, the state framework, to basically set up a kind of barracked economy, whereby all economic freedom and individuality is destroyed, as we see in Trotskyism, in Leninism, precisely in what has become there, what is happening there in such a terrible way in Eastern Europe and as far as Asia, causing humanity to convulse. The point is that people learn how certain things are necessary for humanity today.

Economic life has its own conditions, just as intellectual life has its own. Anyone who, like me, has spent thirty years, half of his life, in Austria, which was precisely the experimental country for the work of the socially destructive forces – which is why Austria became the first victim of this world catastrophe – anyone who has lived in Austria with open eyes could see as early as the 1970s how it was rushing towards its end. I can refer to an example of how this country worked its way into decline on a large scale. In the 1970s, they also wanted to democratize parliament. How did they do that? They set up four constituencies: the constituency of the large landowners, the constituency of the chambers of commerce, the constituency of the cities, markets and industrial towns, and the constituency of the rural communities. All economic interests were drawn into parliament. The representatives of mere economic interests in four curiae were to make the decisions for everything concerning the state. They made them, of course, according to economic interests. As a result, neither the legitimate state interests nor the economic interests were given their due.

I could give you hundreds and hundreds of reasons that would show you that just as intellectual life must be separated from actual state life on the one hand, economic life must also be separated on the other. Just as intellectual life must be organized for the completely free human being and the administration of free human beings, economic life must be organized according to the associative principle.

What does that mean, an associative principle? Well, today we already have a striving for the formation of consumer associations. People who consume join together. And we have a movement in which people from the most diverse circles who produce join together. But ultimately we actually only have a surrogate, composed of consumers and producers. Only when production is organized according to need, not the barometer of profit, when the interrelations between consumers and producers are guided by those people who are experts in the various branches of the economy, when we we strive for totality in relation to spiritual life, but never in economic life, where we are in contact with people in other sectors, as soon as we take this seriously, the associative principle will be introduced into economic life. Association will not be organization. Although I have spent some of my life in Germany, the word 'organization' has a terrible connotation for me, and it was in Germany that I first experienced what it means to want to organize everything possible. You achieve terrible things when you always want to organize from a central point. Association is not organization. There the individualities remain in full effect, join together, so that through the union a collective judgment comes about. You can read more about this in my book “The Crux of the Social Question” and in the book “In Ausführung der Dreigliederung” (In the Execution of the Threefold Order), which summarizes a number of articles that I have published in the Stuttgart journal “Die Dreigliederung”, which is published by the Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus.

In it, I showed how these associations can be formed out of real practical economic life; how these associations will lead to fair pricing, to tolerable pricing. Whereas today we only have random pricing, it will be a matter of pricing that really arises from associative cooperation between consumers and producers. For in economic life, the price question is the central question of the whole economic existence. Those who do not realize that prices must be regulated above all by associations and not by statistics or the like, but by the living interaction in associations, do not know what is important. There is no need to be afraid of bureaucracy; it will certainly not be greater than it is today. But the fact that the same people who are involved in practical business life will also be the leaders will simplify the whole process. And everyone will receive enough when they produce something for themselves and their families, for the other things they have to provide for, until they have produced the same product again. Roughly speaking: if I make a pair of boots, I must receive enough for it to make another pair of boots. This is not to be laid down in some utopian way, but will be the final result when the associations are in existence as I have described them in my book, The Core of the Social Question. The essential thing about this impulse of the threefold social organism is that it contains nothing utopian, but is born entirely out of practical life and the demands of the time. Knowledge of the subject and expertise must guide spiritual life; knowledge of the subject and professional ability must guide economic life in associations that combine to form a large world economic association independent of national borders.

With regard to the spiritual and economic life, majority decisions are an absurdity; everything must develop out of expertise and professional competence. Majority decisions, real democracy, is only possible for those matters in which every person is competent. There is a wide range of political and legal matters that then remain between a free spiritual life and an economic life based on the principle of association. These are all those matters in which every mature person faces the other as an equal in parliamentary life, where all the questions are decided that then remain by themselves from economic life and spiritual life.

Strangely enough, the experts have objected that they understand that in the tripartite social organism there must be free spiritual life and associative economic life, but then there is nothing left for state life. — This is very characteristic. Modern state life has absorbed so much of the economic and intellectual life, even in terms of ideas, that it has not developed the most important things, so that experts have no idea what tasks state life can perform.

What I have presented to you today is only a sketch. It is further developed in the books mentioned. But it is basically linked to the most intense historical necessities.

We see the great human ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity radiating from the 18th century into our own. How could we not feel what lies in these three great human impulses! And yet, there were clever people in the course of the 19th century who showed irrefutably that freedom, equality and fraternity cannot coexist in a unified state. Thus, on the one hand, we have the strange phenomenon that our hearts beat faster when we hear about these three great human ideals, when we feel them inwardly, but on the other hand, the clever statesman - and I say this quite without irony - can prove that these three ideals are incompatible in the unified state. What is the reason for this? The reason is that in the eighteenth century people felt that liberty, equality and fraternity were incontrovertible ideals and impulses of humanity. But they were still under the illusion that everything had to be done by the unified state. Today we must mature to the threefold social organism. Only in it will liberty, equality and fraternity be truly realized. In a free spiritual life, which I hope can really be brought to light by a world school association, real freedom for people will prevail. In the state life, which stands between the free spiritual life and economic life, everything will be built on equality; in its administration there will only be those things in which every mature person is competent and can face another mature person as an equal. In economic life, consumer and producer interests will join together in associations, find a balance and ultimately culminate in a pricing structure that respects people.

We will have an opportunity to incorporate the three great ideals of human development if we free ourselves from the suggestion of the unitary state by striving for: freedom in the spiritual life, equality in the state life or political or legal life - the second link in the social organism - and fraternity in the associatively organized economic life, which results from the objectivity of production and consumption.

Freedom in spiritual life, equality in state life, fraternity in economic life: only this gives the three greatest social ideals of humanity – freedom, equality, fraternity – their proper meaning.

Spiritual science that wants to live into the modern cultural current does not want to be something new and precisely in this way differs from the many world views and other schools of thought that come forward and believe that they can prove their right to exist by claiming to bring something new to this or that question of spiritual life. In contrast to this, the subject that is called spiritual science should emphasize that the sources of its knowledge and its life have been present in the same way at all times when people have thought and striven for the highest questions and riddles of existence. I have often been able to emphasize this, also in this city, when I had the honor of speaking in previous lectures.

It must now be particularly appealing to consider not only the various religious beliefs and world views that have emerged in the development of humanity from this point of view, but also to look at personalities who are close to us from this perspective. For if something is to be true in spiritual science, then at least a kernel of this truth must be found in all those who have honestly and energetically striven for knowledge and for a dignified human existence.

Now when spiritual science is discussed today, the most diverse judgments are asserted from one side or the other, and those who have not penetrated deeper into the corresponding field, who have gained a superficial knowledge from these or those lectures or pamphlets, will, depending on his point of view, regard this spiritual science as the fantasy or reverie of a few unworldly people who have strange ideas about life and its foundations. It must be fully admitted that, if one does not look more closely, such a judgment may seem understandable, because although today we are not talking about a specific topic, it should be pointed out that some of the main insights of this spiritual science are based on a special theme. And as soon as these are mentioned and characterized, our contemporaries may well feel, in all honesty, “What curious stuff is this?”

On the whole, spiritual science, if taken seriously, is based on the premise that what surrounds us in the sensual world, what we can perceive with our senses, what we can grasp with the mind that is bound to our senses, is not the whole world, but that behind everything that is sensual lies a spiritual world. And this spiritual world is not in an indefinite hereafter, but is always around us, just as the phenomena of color and light are also around the blind. But in order for us to know about something that is around us, we need to have an organ to perceive it. And just as the blind man cannot see color and light, so too, as a rule, people in our age with normal abilities cannot perceive the spiritual facts and beings that are around us. But when we have the good fortune to operate on a blind person, then there comes for him the moment of the awakening of the eye, and what was not there for him, light and colors, now floods into his inner being. From the moment of his operation, this is a perceptible world for him. In the spiritual realm, there is a higher awakening, the awakening through which a person becomes initiated into the spiritual world. To speak with Goethe, there are spiritual eyes and ears, but as a rule, human souls are not ready to use them. But when we apply the means and methods by which these powers come into existence, then something happens in us on a higher plane, as when a blind person is operated on and is then flooded with the world of colors and light. When a person's eyes and ears are opened, he becomes awakened. A new world is around him, a world that was always there, but which he can only perceive from the moment of awakening. But then, when a person is ready, he learns to make various insights his own, insights that brighten life, insights that can give us strength and security for our work, that enable us to see into the essence of human destiny and the secrets of fate.

And only one of these insights will be discussed here, one of those insights that, if not crazy, must often seem strange and dreamy to today's people. It is an insight that is nothing more than the revival of an ancient process of knowledge, its continuation in a higher realm, a truth that was only recently attained for a lower realm. In general, humanity has a short memory for great events in the spiritual world, and that is why so few people today remember that in the 17th century not only laymen but even scholars believed that lower animals, even worms and fish, would develop from river mud. It was the great naturalist Francesco Redi who first pointed out that no earthworm or fish grows out of dead river mud unless an earthworm or fish germ is present in it beforehand. He stated that life can only come from life, and from this it can be seen that it is only an inaccurate way of looking at things to believe that a fish or worm can grow out of lifeless river mud. A closer examination shows that we have to go back to the living germ, and that this living germ can only draw from its environment the forces that are there to bring to the greatest development what is alive in the germ.

What Redi said, that living things develop only from living things, is taken for granted by science today. When Redi uttered these words, he only just escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Such is the way of the development of humanity. First, a truth must be so hard won that those who first express it are branded as heretics. Then it becomes a matter of course, the common property of humanity. What Redi did for natural science should be done for the spirit through spiritual science today, by transferring the sentence that Redi pronounced for natural science from the knowledge of the awakened spiritual eye and spiritual ear to the soul realm. And there this sentence means: The spiritual and soul can only arise from the spiritual and soul. This means that it is an inaccurate way of looking at it when we see a human being come into existence, to believe that everything that comes into life comes only from the father and mother and the ancestors. Just as we have to go back from the developing earthworm to the living earthworm germ, so we have to go back from the human being, who develops from the germ into a specific being, to an earlier spiritual existence, and we have to realize that this being, which comes into existence through birth, draws from its bodily ancestors only the strength for its development, just as the earthworm germ draws strength from its inanimate surroundings. And in a corresponding extension, this sentence: Living things can only come from living things, leads to the other sentence: The present life, which comes into existence through birth, not only leads back to physical ancestors, but through the centuries back to an earlier spiritual-soul. And if you delve deeper into it, you will see that it is scientifically shown that there is not just one, but repeated lives on earth, that what is in us now between birth and death is the repetition of a spiritual soul that was already there in earlier stages of existence, and that our present life is in turn the starting point for subsequent lives. Spiritual-soul-like comes from spiritual-soul-like, goes back to spiritual-soul-like, which was there before birth, which descends from the spiritual world and lives in physical embodiments. We now see something completely different when, for example, we as educators are confronted with a child who gradually develops his powers. At birth we see something indeterminate on his face, how something unfolds from within, ever more distinctly and distinctly, which does not come from heredity but from previous lives. We see how this center of the spiritual soul unfolds more and more from birth through talents.

Today, spiritual science has something to say about repeated lives on earth. Today it may be a mere reverie, as what Francesco Redi said in the 17th century was considered a mere reverie. But what is considered a mere reverie today will become a matter of course in the not too distant future, and the sentence: spiritual-mental comes from spiritual-mental, will become common knowledge for humanity.

Today, heretics are no longer treated as they were in the past. They are no longer burned at the stake, but they are considered fools and dreamers who speak out of random fantasy. They are ridiculed, and those in the know sit in the high chair of science and say that this is not compatible with real science, not knowing that it is true, genuine science that demands this truth. And now we can cite a hundred and a hundred such truths that would show us how spiritual science can illuminate life by showing that there is an immortal essence in man that passes through death into the spiritual world and, when it has fulfilled its destiny there, returns to physical existence to gain new experiences, which it then carries up through death into the spiritual worlds. We would see how the ties that are woven from person to person, from soul to soul in all areas of life, those traits of the heart that go from soul to soul and cannot otherwise be explained, can be explained by the fact that they were formed in previous life circumstances. And just as the spiritual bonds we weave today do not cease when death draws over existence, but just as what passes from soul to soul as bonds of life is immortal like the human soul itself, how it lives on through the spiritual world and will revive again in other, future earthly conditions and new embodiments. And it is only a matter of development that people will also remember their earlier experiences on earth, what they have gone through spiritually and soul-wise in earlier lives and states of existence.

Such truths will become established in human life in the not too distant future as necessary things, and people will gain strength and hope and confidence from such conditions. Today we can only see that a few individuals in the world are drawn by their healthy sense of truth to what spiritual researchers have to proclaim from their experiences in the spiritual world. But spiritual-scientific knowledge will become the common property of mankind and will be assimilated by those who earnestly seek the truth. And those who have trodden the paths of earnest seekers after truth have always, in all that they have offered to mankind, developed the great wisdom and knowledge that spiritual science brings again today.

An example should arise before our soul in a personality that is close to our modern life: the example of Goethe, and with him again that which occupied him as his most comprehensive and greatest work throughout his life: his “Faust”.

If we approach Goethe and try to illuminate his striving with what spiritual science can give, we can actually start quite early on. One can say that from his entire disposition, one recognizes in Goethe how there was soul and spirit in him. Everything that pushes one to seek a spiritual element behind the phenomena of the sensual world was an early predisposition in him. There we see the seven-year-old Goethe, who could have absorbed ordinary ideas from his surroundings, as a boy can absorb them, for his first soul perception. That does not satisfy him; he recounts it himself in 'Poetry and Truth'. There we see how the seven-year-old boy begins something quite remarkable to express his yearning for the divine. He takes a music stand from his father's collection and makes an altar out of it, placing all kinds of minerals and plants and other products of nature on it, from which the spirit of nature speaks. The boy's soul builds an altar, puts a little incense on it, takes a burning glass, waits for the morning sun to rise, collects the first rays of the rising sun with the burning glass, lets them fall on the little incense, so that the smoke rises. And in his later years, Goethe remembers how, as a boy, he wanted to send his pious feelings up to the great god of nature, who speaks through minerals and plants, who sends us his fire in the rays of the sun. This grows with Goethe. We see how, at a more mature stage – but still out of a yearning soul, as it lives in Goethe – after he comes to Weimar and is appointed by the duke as his advisor, how this feeling for the spirit that speaks through all of nature is expressed in the beautiful prose hymn. There he says: “Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by it, unable to step out of it and unable to get deeper into it. Unwarned and uninvited, it takes us into the cycle of its dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall into its arms. We have not done what we do, she has done everything; she is constantly thinking and pondering, looking at the world with a thousand eyes.” And again later, in the beautiful book about Winckelmann, ‘Antiquities’: ”When man's healthy nature works as a whole, when he feels in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when the harmony of pleasure gives him pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult in reaching its goal and admire the summit of its own becoming and being. Thus Goethe felt, like everything that lives and moves outside in nature, a resurrection celebrating from the human soul, and like a higher nature, a spiritual nature is brought forth from the spirit and soul of man. But it took Goethe a long time to fully grasp the spiritual realization of nature. And there is no clearer or more obvious example of how Goethe was a lifelong seeker who never rested or paused, always striving to reshape his knowledge and reach higher levels, than his life's poem, “Faust.”

From his earliest youth, he had begun to put everything that filled his yearning and intuitive soul into his poem; and as an old man in his later years, shortly before his death, he completed this poem, on which he had worked for over fifty years and into which he had put the best of his life. The second part was sealed at his death, like the great testament he had to give to humanity. It is a momentous document. We can only understand this document if we follow Goethe a little, as he himself sought to struggle towards knowledge.

For example, there is the student Goethe at the University of Leipzig. He is supposed to become a lawyer, but that is of secondary concern to him. Even then, the young student was possessed by an invincible urge to fathom the secrets of the world, to seek the spiritual. He therefore immerses himself in everything Leipzig has to offer in the way of knowledge about nature. He seeks to eavesdrop on what nature has to say to us in its phenomena, to eavesdrop on the world's riddles of existence. But Goethe needed, in order to rework what natural science could offer him, to re-melt it in his soul to that all-powerful urge of his inner being, which does not seek abstract knowledge but warm hearted a great experience, an experience that really leads the human being to that knowledge which is the gate toward which we intuitively look, the gate that closes for today's normal human being, the invisible, the supersensible: the gate of death. At the end of his student days in Leipzig, he experienced death. A serious illness had prostrated him, brought him close to death. For hours and days he had to face the fact that at any moment he could pass through that mysterious portal. And the mysterious, impetuous urge to understand demanded the utmost seriousness in the pursuit of knowledge. With this newly formed attitude of knowledge, Goethe returned to his native city of Frankfurt. There he found a circle of people, headed by a woman of great and profound talent: Susanne von Klettenberg. Goethe created a wonderful monument to her in his “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul”. He showed how this personality, to whose spiritual world he had such close access at the time, contained something that can only be described as a soul. In Susanne von Klettenberg, there lived a soul that sought to grasp the divine within itself in order to find, through the divine within itself, the spiritual that lives through the world. Goethe was introduced at that time by the circle to which this lady belonged, to studies that, if you, as a truly modern person, let them have an effect on you today, seem crazy. Goethe immersed himself in medieval writings. Those who pick them up today cannot do anything with them. When you see the strange signs in them, you ask yourself: what is the point of this in the face of science's modern quest for truth? — There was a book called “Aurea catena Homeri”, “The Golden Chain of Homer”. When you open it, you find a strange symbolic illustration: a dragon at the top in a semicircle, a dragon full of life, bordering on another dragon, a withering dragon dying within itself. All kinds of signs are linked to it: symbolic keys, two interlocking triangles and the planetary signs. To our contemporaries this is fantasy, to today's science it is fantasy, because one does not know what to do with these signs. Goethe senses in his intuition that they express something, that one can do something with them when one looks at them. They do not immediately express something that can be found here or there in the world. But if you let these signs take effect on you, by memorizing them so that you become deaf and blind to your physical surroundings, only letting these signs take effect on you, then you experience something very peculiar, then you experience that the soul within itself senses something that was dormant before, like a spiritual eye that opens. And if you have enough stamina, you will grasp what you can call meditation, concentration, which will develop your soul to such an extent that you will actually undergo something like an operation of the spiritual eye, through which a new world will open up. At that time, a new world could not yet be opened up for Goethe; he was not yet that far. But what came to life in his soul was the inkling that there are keys to this spiritual world, that one can penetrate into this spiritual world. One must visualize this mood; the vivid sensation, the vivid feeling: something is being stirred in me, something is coming to life; there must be something that leads into the spiritual world. But at the same time he senses: he cannot yet enter it. If Goethe had ever been identical with Faust in his life, we would say: Goethe was in the same situation in which Faust appears at the beginning of the first part, when Faust, after having studied the most diverse fields of human science, opens books in which there are such signs and feels surrounded by a spiritual world, but cannot enter into the spiritual world. Goethe never felt identical with Faust. Faust was a part of him, but he outgrew what was only a part of himself. And so, what went beyond Faust in Goethe grew because he, fearing no discomfort, always strove further and further, saying to himself: “One does not get behind the secrets of existence in a flash , not by incantations and formulas, but by patiently and energetically penetrating, step by step, in a truly spiritual and soulful way, whatever comes our way in the physical world. — It is easy to say: “What is higher knowledge must be absorbed by the soul.” This higher knowledge must penetrate the soul, but it only takes on its true form when we strive with patience and perseverance to get to know the real phenomena of the physical world step by step and then to seek the spiritual behind these phenomena of the physical world. But with what Goethe took with him from his time in Frankfurt, he was able to summarize everything else, he was able to see everything in a different light.

Goethe came from Frankfurt to this city, Strasbourg. We could cite many things that led him higher here. But what is particularly characteristic is how that which has such great significance in this city came before his soul: the cathedral, the minster. At that time, the idea of this wonderful building presented itself before Goethe's soul, and he understood why every single line is as it is. He saw with spiritual vision, with the vision gained through his immersion in Frankfurt, every triangle, every single angle of this significant building as belonging to the whole, and in his soul the great idea of the master builder celebrated a resurrection, and Goethe believed he recognized what had flowed into this building as a thought, as an idea. And so we could cite many instances of what had entered this soul as an inner vision and what it had taken up from external world processes entering into a marriage in Goethe's soul. Therefore it is not surprising that when he later came to Weimar, he took up natural science from a new angle, botany, zoology, bone theory and so on, in order to consider everything like letters that together make up the book of nature, leading into the secrets of existence. This is how his studies of plant development and the animal world came about, which he later continued as a student, only that he sought the spirit behind the sensual phenomena of existence everywhere. Thus we see how, during his Italian journey, he regarded art on the one hand and natural objects on the other, and how he observed the world of plants in order to recognize the spirit that reigns in them. The words he wrote to his friends, while he was engaged in this kind of spiritual natural science, are great and beautiful. He said: Oh, here everything presents itself to me in a new way; I would like to travel to India to look at what has already been discovered in my own way. — That is to say, as his development demanded, according to the indications we were able to give. And so we see how he also looks at the works of art that come to him. He writes in a letter: “This much is certain: the ancient artists had just as great a knowledge of nature and an equally sure concept of what can be imagined and how it must be imagined as Homer. Unfortunately, the number of works of art in the first class is all too small. But if one also sees these, one has nothing to wish for but to recognize them correctly and then to go there in peace. These lofty works of art are at the same time the highest works of nature, produced by man according to true and natural laws. All that is arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God.” Just as the great spirit of nature spoke to the seven-year-old boy from the altar he had erected, so the great spirit of the existence of the spiritual world spoke to him from these works of art, which he regarded as a unity. Thus Goethe gradually arrived at the contemplation of the individual in energetic, devoted work. Then he could calmly await the moment when a real insight into the spiritual world leaped out of his observations, a true spiritual science, which then confronts us, artistically transformed and reworked, in his “Faust”.

Thus the first sections of Faust that were written have all the atmosphere of a man who senses the secrets of existence but is unable to penetrate these secrets. We see how Faust allows the signs to take effect that surround him with spiritual reality, but we also see how he is not yet mature enough to really feel this spiritual reality. These are the sentences where Faust, as the Nostradamus aura, allows the signs of the macrocosm and the earth spirit to take effect on him, where the spirit of the earth appears before him. Faust characterizes the earth spirit in wonderfully beautiful words. We see how he senses that what the planet Earth is, is not simply the physical sphere that natural science regards it as, but rather, just as the body contains a soul, so the Earth body contains a spirit.

In the tides of life, in the storm of action,
I surge up and down,
I weave to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I create at the whirling loom of time
And work the living garment of divinity.

That is what lives in the earth as the spirit of the earth, just as our spirit lives in us. But Goethe characterizes Faust as not yet mature, his spirit as still unfinished. He must turn away from the terrible sign like a timid worm curled up. The earth spirit answers him: “You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me.” In Goethe's soul there lived the realization, even if at first only a presentiment, that we cannot declare ourselves satisfied at any stage, but must strive from each stage to higher and higher stages, that we cannot say at any stage that we have achieved something, but must always strive higher from each stage. Goethe was led into these secrets by his diligent studies from phenomenon to phenomenon. And now we see him grow.

The same spirit that he first summoned, and of whom he could only say, “Terrible face!” is addressed by Goethe through Faust, after Goethe himself had reached a higher level after his trip to Italy, after his journey, which I have characterized as one in which he wanted to permeate all of nature and art with his vision. Now Faust is attuned to the same spirit that Goethe himself was attuned to. Now Faust stands before the same spirit, which he thus addresses:

Eminent Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
Why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
Turn thy face to me in fire.
Gavest me the glorious Nature's kingdom,
Strength to feel it, to enjoy it. Not
You only allow cold, amazed visitors,
Grant me into their deep chests
To look as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
Before me, and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce topples, brushing neighboring branches
And squashing neighboring trunks,
And the hill thunders hollowly hollow;
Then you lead me to the secure cave,
Then you show me myself, and my own breast,
Secret, deep wonders open up.
And when the pure moon rises before my gaze,
Soothingly across: silver figures of primeval times,
and ease the strict desire of contemplation.

There Goethe has arrived, and with him Faust, to the heights, no longer turning away from the spirit that he had wanted to reach by leaping. Now the spirit presents itself as such that he no longer needs to turn away from it. Now he recognizes it in all living things, in all realms of nature: in forest and water, in the silent bush, in the giant spruce, in storm and thunder. And not only there. After it has appeared to him in the great outdoors, he also recognizes it in his own heart: its secret, deep wonders open up.

This is a step forward in Goethe's knowledge of the spirit, and Goethe did not rest on his laurels. We then see how, spurred on by Schiller, he sought to deepen his knowledge, particularly in the 1890s. This knowledge enabled him to go beyond the vague characterization of spiritual consciousness that a spirit lives in everything. He succeeded in grasping this spirit in a concrete way. But Goethe needed much preparation before he was able to depict the life of the human spirit in the sense that spiritual and psychological things can only come from spiritual and psychological things. However, the fact that Goethe never failed to attempt to get deeper is shown by some of the works he created before the second part of Faust was completed. The second part of Faust shows the heights to which he has risen. Some have already turned away from him when they got to know the introspective Goethe in Pandora. Even today we hear people say: the first part of Faust is full of life, it breathes direct naturalness, but the second part is a product of Goethe's old age, full of symbols and contrivances. Such people have no idea what is in it, what infinite wisdom is in this second part of “Faust”, which only the Goethe of his rich life could have produced in his old age, leaving it as a testament. Therefore, we also understand when Goethe writes the lines about some works that already breathe the spirit of “Faust”, and we know that he presents Faust as a struggling soul, a soul that has been overtaken by something new. We recognize it in the anger he poured out on those who called “Faust” an inferior work of old age. He says of them:

They praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars
In their favor;

The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
They think the riffraff,
It would no longer be!

Goethe once put into words his feelings towards those who believe that only what Goethe achieved in his younger years has validity, who do not want to ascend to what he achieved in his more mature years.

After Goethe has introduced Faust into the life that directly surrounds us, and has allowed him to experience that wonderful tragedy of Gretchen, he leads him out into the world that is outwardly the great world, first of all into the world that is outwardly the great world: the world of the imperial court. There Goethe now wants to show that Faust should now really penetrate spiritually into the secrets of this world. But then Faust should be introduced to the real spiritual world, to the supersensible world.

Right at the beginning of the second part, we see how Goethe has Faust surrounded by all kinds of spiritual beings. This is to express that Faust is not only to be led into an external physical world, but that he is also to experience what can be experienced by someone whose spiritual eye is open, whose spiritual ear is learning to perceive. Therefore, in the second part, Goethe shows us step by step the nature of the human soul, human development. What is Faust to experience? He is to experience the knowledge of the supersensible world. He is to be initiated into the secrets of the supersensible world. Where is this supersensible world?

When we consider the spiritual content of “Faust”, we can only begin to address the question of Mephistopheles, the spirit that surrounds Faust from the very beginning and plays a part in everything Faust undertakes. But it is only in the second part, where Faust is to be led into the spiritual world, that we see what role Mephistopheles plays. After Faust has gone through the events at the “imperial court”, he begins to see what is no longer there in the sensual world: the spirit of Helen, who lived centuries and centuries ago. She is to be found for Faust. She cannot be found in the physical world. Faust must descend into the spiritual world. Mephistopheles has the key to this world, but he cannot enter this spiritual world himself; he can describe it intellectually. He can say: You will descend. One could also say: You will ascend. He then actually describes the spiritual world into which Faust is to descend in order to get to know it supersensibly, to find in it the spirit, the immortal, the eternal that has been left behind from Helena. A word is spoken, a wonderful word: Faust is to descend to the Mothers. What are the “Mothers”? One could talk for hours if one wanted to characterize exactly what the Mothers are. Here we need only say that the Mothers were for spiritual science at all times what man gets to know when his spiritual eye is opened. When he looks into the physical world, he sees all things limited. When he enters the spiritual world, he comes into something from which all physical things come out as ice comes out of a water pond. As one who could not see the water would say: Nothing is there but ice, it piles up out of nothing — so says he who knows not the spirit: Only physical things are there. He sees not the spirit that is between and behind physical things, out of which all physical things are formed as ice is formed out of water. There, where the source of physical things is, which is no longer visible to the physical eye, are the Mothers. Mephistopheles is the being that is to represent that intellect which only knows what is outwardly formed in space, which knows that there is a spiritual world but cannot penetrate into it. Mephistopheles stands there beside Faust, as the materialistic thinker stands today beside the spiritual researcher, and says: “Ah, you spiritual scientist, you theosophist, you want to see into a spiritual world? There is nothing in there, it is all a dream. It is all nothing. To the materialist, who wants to build firmly on what the microscope and the telescope reveal, but who wants to deny everything that lies behind physical phenomena, the spiritual researcher cries out: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” Thus the materialistic thinker stands opposed to the spiritual man, who hopes to find the spirit precisely where the other sees nothing. These two powers will confront each other forever. And from the very beginning, Mephisto confronts Faust as the spirit that can lead to the door, but cannot cross that threshold. The theosophist or spiritual scientist does not say: material science is nothing, is unnecessary. — He says: we must take this science seriously, study it, but it only has the key, it leads us to where the true spiritual life is to be found.

Faust then descends into the realm of the mothers, into the spiritual world; he succeeds in bringing up the spirit of Helen. But he is not yet mature enough to truly connect this spirit with his own soul. Hence the scene where passion stirs in Faust, where he wants to embrace the image of Helen with sensual passion. That is why he is repulsed. This is the fate of everyone who wants to approach the spiritual world from personal, selfish feelings. He is repulsed, as Faust is repulsed when he has brought up from the realm of the mothers the spirit of Helen. Faust must first mature, learn to recognize how the three members of human nature really come together: the immortal spirit that goes from life to life, from embodiment to embodiment; the body that lives between birth and death; and the soul that stands between the two. Faust is to learn how body, soul and spirit are connected and how they belong together. Faust has already sought the archetype of Helen, the immortal, the eternal that passes from embodiment to embodiment, from life to life, but in an immature state. Now he is to mature in order to become worthy of truly entering the spiritual world. To do this, Faust must learn how this immortality first approaches the human being when he can embody himself again in a new life between birth and death in his physical existence. Therefore, Goethe must show how the soul lives between spirit and body, how it places itself between the immortal spirit and the body that stands between birth and death. This is what Goethe shows us in the second part of “Faust”.

In Goethe, the soul is hidden in that wondrous structure about which Goethe researchers do not know much to say, in which spiritual researchers who are well-versed recognize the archetype of the soul. This is nothing other than the wonderful structure of the homunculus, the little human being. This is an image of the human soul. What does this soul do? It is the mediator between body and spirit; it must draw the elements of the body from all realms of nature in order to connect with them. Only then can it be united with the immortal spirit. Thus we see how Faust is led by this homunculus into the realm of the natural philosophers Anaxagoras and Thales, who have been reflecting on the origin of nature and life.

Therein is shown the true doctrine of evolution, which goes back to the fact that not only an animalistic element underlies human development, but also a soul that gathers the elements from nature to gradually build up the body. Hence the advice given to the homunculus: you must start from the lowest realm in order to ascend to higher and higher ones. The human soul is first referred to the mineral kingdom. Then it is told: “You have to go through the plant kingdom.” There is a wonderful expression here: “It grunts so” to describe the passage through the plant world, the juicy green. There the soul gathers all the elements of the natural kingdoms in order to ascend. It is explicitly said: “And you have time until you reach the human being.” Then we see how the spirit of love, Eros, approaches after the soul has formed the body out of all the realms of nature. There it unites with the spirit. Body, soul and spirit are united. Here that which is the soul of the homunculus, that which it organizes into the body, unites with the spirit of Helen. That is why Helen can appear to us in the third act of the second part in the flesh. We see the doctrine of re-embodiment poetically and artistically enshrined in the second part of Faust. One does not unite with Helena by drawing her to oneself in stormy passion, but by truly living through the secrets of existence, truly living through the re-embodiment.

Goethe was not yet able to express the idea of repeated lives on earth in the way we can today, but he did include it in the second part of his “Faust”. That is why he was able to say to Eckermann: “I have written my ‘Faust’ in such a way that it is suitable for the theater; that the images it presents are outwardly sensually interesting for those who only want to see outwardly sensually. But for those who are initiated, it will be evident that the deepest things have been woven into the second part of “Faust”. - Goethe expressly pointed out that one can find his view of life, his spiritual view, in this poetry. And so we now also understand that Goethe was able to illustrate to us in this reconnection of Faust with Helena what true mysticism is.

Faust unites with the spiritual world. Not an ordinary child is born, but Euphorion, who is as true as he is poetic. He represents for us what comes to life in our soul when it unites with the spiritual world. When the soul penetrates into the secrets of the spiritual world, there comes a moment of development in the soul that is of tremendously deep significance for that soul. Before the soul can go further, it must first, for brief moments, gain connection with the spiritual world, to know for a very short time what the spiritual world is. Then it is as if a spiritual child were born out of spiritual knowledge. But then come the moments of life again, when this spiritual child seems to have disappeared into the spiritual world. One must grasp this with the heart, full of life, then one feels, like Euphorion, the mystic's spiritual child, despite all the poetic truth of life, sinks down into the spiritual world, cannot yet fully enter Faust, but as he passes over, something else does. That is an experience of the spiritual researcher, the spiritual seeker, when our soul has the hour when it truly senses its relationship to the spiritual world, and when knowledge appears as a child of a marriage with the spiritual world. Then it experiences it deeply when it sinks into the everyday, and it is as if it takes with it the best that we have. It is as if our own soul were to escape and go with it into the spiritual world. When one has felt this, one feels the spiritual words of Euphorion, who has sunk down, and who cries out from the dark depths: “Let me not alone in the gloomy realm, mother, let me not alone.” The true mystic knows this voice, the voice that calls from the spiritual child to our soul as its mother.

But this soul must go further. It must break away from that which is only personal passion. We must be able to devote ourselves to the spiritual world impersonally. As long as there is still self-interest, self-will, we cannot grasp the spiritual world. Only then can we grasp this spiritual world when all that is personal has been erased before the higher things of the spiritual world; only then can we truly enter the spiritual world permanently. But there are still many moments when we have already experienced that moment that pushes us back into the physical world, moments that take away all mysticism for a long time. These are the moments when we have to say to ourselves: Yes, even if we have overcome all selfishness and self-will, there still remains this or that, as it is left behind in Faust, even after he has said: “I stand here in the open, I only want to work, to gain everything from nature, to do something only for others.” But he has not yet come that far. As he looks at the hut of Philemon and Baucis, something disturbs his view, he shows: he has not yet overcome the selfishness that wants to be pleased by the sight. He wanted to create a possession, selflessly, but he cannot yet bear what disfigures him: the hut of Philemon and Baucis. Then the spirit of evil approaches him once more. The hut is burnt down. Then that appears to him which appears to everyone who undergoes development: the worry that approaches everyone who still has selfish aspirations within them and which does not allow them to ascend into the spiritual world. Here it is, worry, and we learn to recognize it in its true form; then it is something that can lead us to the last of real spiritual knowledge. It is not intended to show that man should become unworldly, hostile to the world, but how man in the world should get to know that which does not let him go from the world. In wise self-knowledge, we should let worry take a back seat so that we can become free from the selfishness of worry, not from worry itself, which is illustrated by the fact that worry says it creeps in through a keyhole. When we get to know this worry, not just feel it, but learn to bear it, then we attain that degree of human development that opens the spiritual eye to us. This is illustrated by the fact that Faust goes blind in old age, can no longer see with his physical senses, but can look into the spiritual world. “The night seems to penetrate deeper and deeper.” It is dark on the outside, but inner bright light, the light that can illuminate the world, shines, the light in which the soul is between death and birth: the realm of the mothers. Only now can Faust begin his journey into the spiritual world, where his ascension is so beautifully described.

Then Goethe can summarize what has become of Faust, from the intuitive striving of that person who despairs of science and turns away, to what he has become from that stage to the highest spiritual knowledge. He can summarize it in the Chorus mysticus, which, as its name indicates, is intended to signify something deeper. In this Chorus mysticus, it is intended to summarize paradigmatically in a few words what holds the key to all the secrets of the world, how everything that is transitory is only a parable for the immortal. That which the physical eye can see is only a parable for the spiritual, the immortal, of which Goethe showed that he even attained the knowledge of re-embodiment when he entered into this spiritual. It shall finally be shown that when man enters into the spiritual kingdom, then all that is present in the physical world as presentiment, as hope, is there a truth. What is striven for in the physical world becomes a presentiment in the spiritual world.

It may appear pedantic when I state here something that one must know to understand the final words.

Goethe spoke somewhat unclearly in his old age because he was toothless. He dictated the second part of his “Faust” to a scribe. Since he still had some of the Frankfurt dialect, some words and sounds came out a bit unclear. So for some words, the scribe used g's where there should have been ch's. For example, “Erreichnis” was written as “Ereignis”. When dictating the final words of Faust, Goethe spoke “Erreichnis”. The inadequate becomes here something that can be achieved, an “Erreichnis”, that is, with two r's and two ch's. Everywhere, in all editions of Goethe's works, you will find “Ereignis” written. Goethe researchers know so little about penetrating into the sense. That which is inadequate in the physical world becomes “achievement” in the spiritual world. What cannot be described in the physical world is done in the spiritual world. There it becomes a living deed.

And finally, we experience the great thing that Goethe is allowed to express in the closing words of the second part of “Faust”: “The eternal feminine”. Oh, it is a sin against Goethe to say that Goethe means the female sex by this. Goethe means that depth which the human soul represents in relation to the mystery of the world, that which longs as the eternal in man: the eternal feminine, that draws the soul up to the eternal immortal, the eternal wisdom, and that gives itself to the eternal masculine. The eternal feminine draws us up to that which is the eternal masculine. It does not refer to something feminine in the ordinary sense. Therefore, we may well seek this eternal feminine in man and woman: the eternal feminine that strives towards the eternal masculine in the cosmos in order to unite, to become one with the divine-spiritual that permeates and interweaves the world, towards which Faust strives. This secret of men of all times, towards which Faust has been striving from the very beginning, this secret to which spiritual science in a modern sense is to lead us, is expressed by Goethe in a paradigmatic and monumental way in those beautiful words at the end of the second part of Faust, which he presents as a mystical spirit-choir, that all physical things which surround us in the world of sense, Maja, illusion, deception, are a parable of the spiritual. But we see this spiritual when we penetrate to what covers it like a veil. In this spiritual we see what cannot be achieved here on earth. We see that which is indescribable for the mind bound to the senses, transformed into real action when the spirit of man unites with the spiritual world. “The indescribable, here it is done.” And we see that which is significant, where the soul unites, lives together with the eternal masculine of the great world, which lives through and weaves through this world. That is the great secret that Goethe expresses with the words:

All that is transitory
Is but a parable;
The inadequate,
Here it becomes reality;
The indescribable,
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
draws us on.

Goethe was able to say to himself: Now I have done my life's work. It does not really matter now what I accomplish on earth during the rest of the time I have left to live.

Goethe sealed up the second part of his “Faust”. And this second part was not given to mankind until after his death, and mankind will have to draw on all of its spiritual science to penetrate the secrets of this mighty work.

Today, only sketches could be given. One could spend hours and weeks using all the means of wisdom to illuminate what Goethe gave to mankind as a testament. May humanity open up this testament more and more! Seal after seal will fall, the more people will have the will to penetrate the secrets of the second part. The voices of those who say, “You are seeking to find something in there that Goethe never intended to put in his work,” will fall silent. Those who speak thus do not know the depths of Goethe's soul. Only those who see the highest in this work and in what Goethe condenses into the mystical chorus, which can conclude so many reflections that are intended to lead to the spirit, recognize this.

Who could doubt that one can look at astronomy hopefully if the talk is of the world origin? For astronomy is rightly a science for which we not only have high respect because it leads us with weighty knowledge in the vastnesses of the universe. It is also something that speaks in spite of any abstractness and roughness most intensely to our souls and minds. So one can say: one can understand that the human soul hopes to get explanation of the deepest secrets of existence looking up at the starry heaven, which speaks so deeply to our mind if we open ourselves to it at night.

We want to ask ourselves from the viewpoint of spiritual science, what has astronomy to say about the origin of the universe? Perhaps, that what results from these considerations appears to somebody in such a way, as if a flower of hope is picked to pieces in a certain way. Someone who gets this impression, nevertheless, consoles himself with the fact that astronomy has just brought such miraculous results to us in the last decades that we have enough reason to be very glad about these results as such—also intellectually. However, we are led by this deeper knowledge of the newer time in this field to the fact that just this deepening of astronomy makes us less hopeful if we try to get explanation about the big questions of origin and development of the universe directly. There we can point to the fact that just to that what the physical research experienced as an immense deepening since Copernicus by observations or by courageous speculations in the course of the nineteenth century something was added that introduces us in a before unexpected way in the material character of the universe. Whereas one had once to confine oneself to state out of the boldness of the human thinking that if we look at the stars worlds face us at which we should look similarly as at our own world, the spectral analysis by Kirchhoff and Bunsen enabled us to investigate the material nature of the stars directly by the physical instrument. Hence, one can venture an assertion reasonably based on immediate observation that we detect the same materials with the same qualities in the different suns, in the nebulae and in the other things that face us in space as we find them on our earth.

That is why one can say that since the middle of the nineteenth century our science was seized by the knowledge: we rest here as human beings within a material world with its laws, with its forces. From the effect which these material laws of the earth show in the so-called spectroscope, and because the same effects are sent from the most distant space to the spectroscope, one can conclude that in the whole space, as far as the material world is considered, the same materiality and the same laws of materiality have poured forth. While it was once in certain respect only a kind of geometrical calculation to investigate the movements of the stars, the brilliant connection of spectral analysis with the so-called Doppler effect enabled us to observe not only those movements which happen before us in such a way that we recognise them as on a surface drawn as the movements of the stars. But since that time we can also include the Doppler effect, a little shift of the spectral lines, in those movements of the stars because the stars come closer or go away from us; while it was only possible once to calculate really what happened in a plane which stands vertically to our line of sight. Such a principle, as it is the connection of the Doppler effect with spectral analysis, is the basis of tremendous achievements of astronomy. What now the human being could invent as a kind of worldview as it turns out if we consider the space filled with suns, planets, minor planets, with nebulae and other things and their intertwined movements and their lawful affecting each other—about this worldview we say: we can understand that such a picture appeared to the human mind that strove for knowledge as a model of clearness, of inner substantiality, if one pursues to encompass reality with the thinking.

If we visualise what it means to calculate a thing that fulfils the space: the big and the small things move in such a way, the one has an effect on the other. If we visualise, what it means to be able to think such a clear thought in the space, we visualise it comparing it to any other physical effect that we see in our surroundings, for example, with the turning green of the trees in the spring or with the blossoming of a plant. Some people who stand or stood vividly in science know how bitter it is if they are compelled at first on the ground of completely outer consideration repeatedly to reach for concepts that can be thought by no means to an end if it concerns, for example, imagining a growing, developing plant, apart from more complex phenomena like animal organisms. Even already in the phenomena of chemistry and physics of our earth evolution some rest remains to us in the effects of heat et cetera even if we want to understand things, which our eyes see, and our ears hear, with clear concepts. If we look at space and can comprise it in such a picture that expresses itself in clear changes of location, in mutual relations of movement, then it is comprehensible that this has a beatific effect on our inside. Then we say to ourselves: such explanations that we can give of the movement of the stars in space and their mutual effect are very clear in themselves so that we can generally consider them as an example of explanations. Small wonder, hence, that this thought of the fascinating clarity of the astronomical worldview seized numerous human beings. It was very instructive for someone who pursued the theoretical science of the nineteenth century that the excellent spirits of the nineteenth century used approaches that were predetermined by the just characterised fascinating sensation.

Excellent spirits of the nineteenth century thought possibly in that way, we see out in space, see the mutual relations and movements of the stars, if we transform them into thoughts, a picture of miraculous clearness originates. Now we try to see into that little world into which, however, only the speculating thought can see which one built up as hypotheses in the nineteenth century more and more: the world of atoms and molecules. One imagined that every material consists of smallest parts which no eye and no microscope can see which one has to assume, however, hypothetically. Thus, one assumed that—as one has many stars in space—here are as it were smallest stars, the atoms. Then from the mutual arrangement of the atoms, as they are grouped together, arises—indeed, only hypothetically—that what can wake the picture in us in microcosm: here you have a number of atoms, they relate to each other in a certain respect and move around each other. If the atoms relate to each other and move, this means that the material, which composes these atoms, for example, is hydrogen or oxygen. All materials can be referred to small atoms of which they consist. These small atoms are grouped again, and then certain groups form the molecules. However, if one could look into these atoms and molecules, one would have in microcosm an effigy of the clearness, which we have outdoors, where the space is filled with stars. It was attractive for some thinkers of the nineteenth century if they could say to themselves, all outer phenomena, light, sound, elasticity, electricity and so on lead back to such effects that are caused by the movements and forces of atoms that happen as the forces and movements on the large scale if we see out into space. A strange picture originated in some spirits: if we look into the human brain, it also consists of materials and forces, which we find in the world outdoors. If one were able to look into the smallest things of the human brain, in the circulating blood, one would recognise something like smallest atomic and molecular worlds that are effigies of the big universe in microcosm. One believed if one could pursue mathematically what arises from the atoms and their movements, then one would be able to recognise that a certain kind of atomic movements—working on our eye—cause the impression of light, another kind the impression of warmth. Briefly, one imagined to be able to reduce all phenomena of nature to a small, tiny astronomy, to the astronomy of the atoms and molecules. Almost the word had been stamped which played a big role in the sensational talks that during the seventies Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1815-1896, German naturalist) held about the “limits of the knowledge of nature,” the word of the “spirit of Laplace.” This had become a kind of catchword and meant nothing else than that it would have to be the ideal of a physical explanation to reduce everything that we see round us to astronomical knowledge of the movements of atoms and molecules. Laplace was that spirit who surveyed the celestial mechanics. That spirit who could bring in this overview of the stars in space in smallest molecular and atomic things would approach, so to speak, more and more the ideal to recognise our nature astronomically.

Hence, we can say that there were people who believed: if I have the impression, I hear a tone, or I see red, a movement goes forward in truth in my brain. If I could describe these movements as the astronomers describe the movements of the stars, then I would understand what it concerned understanding the natural phenomena and the human organism. Then we would have the fact in our consciousness: I hear the tone C sharp, I see red. However, in truth it would be in such a way: if we perceive red, a little atomic and molecular universe takes place in us, and if we knew how the movements are, we would have understood, why we perceive red and not yellow, because with another movement yellow would happen.

Thus, astronomical knowledge became an ideal in the course of the nineteenth century, penetrating any physical knowledge with the same clear concepts, which apply to astronomy. One can say, it is interesting largely to pursue how under the influence of such a thought the theoretical natural sciences developed. I would like to point to something that faced me many years ago. I knew a headmaster who was an excellent man, also as a headmaster. However, he occupied himself during his remaining school activity to invent such a physical system along which one can also get without the attractive or repulsive forces valid since Newton's time. Thus,, that headmaster—Heinrich Schramm—whose works are rather significant, tried in his book The General Movement of Matter as a Basic Cause of All Natural Phenomena to get rid of the gravitational force except that what already the astronomical knowledge had removed.

It was very interesting what this man tried in a certain ingenious way at first. For if we believe that light, sound and heat are nothing else than movements of the smallest mass particles, if astronomical knowledge is able to shine everywhere, why should we still assume those weird, mystic forces reaching from the sun to the earth through the empty space? Why should one not also be able to assume instead of this mystic gravitational attraction in which one had believed up to now such a force between the atoms and molecules? Why should one not be able to shake this too? Indeed, this man succeeded—without considering a special attractive force—in understanding the attraction of the heavenly bodies and the atoms. He showed: if two bodies are confronted in space, nevertheless, one does not need to suppose that they attract each other, because someone does not assume such an attraction—so Schramm meant—who does not believe in such a thing like hands shaking in space. The only thing that one is allowed to assume is that small moved mass particles which push from all sides like small balls, so that from all sides small balls push the two big balls. If one exactly calculates now and does no mistake, one finds that simply because the hits between both balls and those that are caused from without result in a difference. The forces, which one assumed, otherwise, as attractive forces from without can be substituted by hits from without, so that one would have to replace the attractive forces by pushing forces, which attract the matter.

With tremendous astuteness, you find this thought carried out in the cited writing. I could bring in later writings of the same character; however, Schramm treated the thing first. Thus, Schramm could show how completely according to the same law two molecules exercise attraction just like the biggest heavenly bodies. Thus, astronomical knowledge became something that gained ground in the biggest space and worked into the smallest, assumed particles of matter and ether. This stood as a great ideal before the thinkers of the nineteenth century. Who did his studies in this time knows that one applied this ideal to the most different phenomena that astronomical knowledge was just a radical ideal. One is allowed to say that everything was suitable—at first during the seventies—to promote this ideal, because to that all the results of the more precise investigation of the conditions of heat were added. In the sixties, one recognised more and more what Julius Robert Mayer had shown already during the forties of the nineteenth century ingeniously: the fact that heat can be transformed into other natural forces according to particular numerical ratios. The fact that this is the case, we realise if we touch a surface with the fingers intensely, for example, the pressure changes into heat. If we heat a steam engine, the heat changes into the locomotive forces of the machine. As heat changes into motion or compressive force into heat, the other natural forces, electricity et cetera change likewise into natural forces of which one thought that they are transformable. If one connected this thought with the laws of astronomical knowledge, one could say, what faces us there differs in relation to reality only because a certain form of movement within the world of the atoms and molecules changes into another. We have a certain form of movement in the molecules, a little, complex astronomical system, and the movements change into other movements, one system into another system. Heat is transformed into locomotive force et cetra that way.

One believed to be able to figure everything out this way. So big and tremendous was the impression of astronomical knowledge that it provided such an aim. We have now to say that at first still a little was gained concerning a theory of world evolution with all these thoughts. Why? There we have to look around at the ideas of those people who were in the immediate cultural life and ideals of their time. For I do not want to start immediately from that which spiritual science has to say and what can be easily contested by its opponents. We can convince ourselves the easiest how these things happened if we look a little closer at that speech About the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature that Du Bois-Reymond held on the Conference of German Naturalists and Physicians in Leipzig on 14 August 1872.

There Du Bois-Reymond spoke highly of this ideal of an astronomical knowledge and said that true natural sciences exist only where we can lead back the single natural phenomena to an astronomy of atoms and molecules, anything else is not valid as an explanation of nature. Thus, somebody would have explained the human soul life scientifically if he had succeeded in showing how after the model of astronomical movements the atoms and molecules must form a group in the human being to let appear a human brain. At the same time, however, Du Bois-Reymond drew attention to the fact that we have done still nothing for the explanation of the soul and its facts by such an astronomical explanation. For he said, assuming that the ideal is fulfilled that we can really say, the movements of the atoms happen within the brain after the model of astronomical movements: by the perception of the tone C sharp this movement complex arises, by the perception of the colour red another—then we have satisfied our need of causality scientifically. However, no one, Du Bois-Reymond emphasised, could realise, why a certain kind of movements just changes into the experience of our soul: I perceive red, I hear organ tone, and I smell rose smell or such.

For Du Bois-Reymond drew attention to something that already Leibniz had stressed and that nothing can be objected. If we imagine—if it depends only on movement—a gigantic human brain, so that we could walk in it like in a factory where we can observe all movements of the wheels and belts and could show: there is a certain movement—we draw it nicely and calculate it as we can calculate the movements of the planets around the sun. However, nobody would know if he did not know it from other things that this movement, which I observe there, corresponds in the soul to the experience: I see red. He would not be able to figure this out, but he would be able to find out only laws of movement and can say to themselves, the movement runs this or that way, this and that happens in space. However, he would not be able to find the connection between these movements thought according to the model of astronomy and the peculiar experience: I see red, I hear organ tone, and I smell rose smell. If he did not know from anywhere else where from these experiences are, he would never be able to conclude them from the movements of the atoms. Du Bois-Reymond even said rather crassly: “Which conceivable connection exists between certain movements of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and, on the other hand, with the original, not further definable, undeniable facts: I feel pain, I feel desire, I taste sweet, smell rose smell, hear organ tone, see red, and the immediately flowing certainty from that: so I am? It is absolutely and forever incomprehensible that it should not be irrelevant to a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen etc. atoms in which way they lie and move in which way they lay and moved in which way they will lie and move.”

What Du Bois-Reymond said there did not completely comply with natural logic; for just in this crass expression we can see that it is not irrelevant to a number of molecules—to material parts—in which way they lie and move. For you know that it is not irrelevant to sulfur, saltpetre and coal in which way they lie side by side. If they lie side by side under certain conditions, they yield gunpowder. It is also not irrelevant in which relation one has brought the carbon to the hydrogen; but it concerns whether the material is led with the movement to another material with which it is used and can maybe form an explosive force. This quotation was overshot if it also had a shade of correctness. However, already Leibniz had recognised the correct thing: the fact that there no kind of transition exists between the astronomical movement of the molecules and atoms and between the qualities of our experience and our inner soul life. It is not possible to bridge this abyss with the bare astronomical science as a “movement.”

We have to get out this clearly from the various mistakes in the speech of Du Bois-Reymond. Nevertheless, this is the valuable of this speech: it was something like a reaction, like a feeling against the omnipotence and the infinite wisdom of the astronomical knowledge. If we take into consideration what we are able to make evident so clearly, we find the possibility to transfer it to the big astronomical knowledge. If we assume what is certainly justified that one cannot find the bridge to the experiences of soul and mind from the astronomical knowledge of the movement of the smallest mass particles anyhow, then, however, one cannot bridge from that what the big astronomy offers to any effects of soul and mind which fill the space! If it is true and we imagine the human brain so increased that we could walk in it and look at the movements in it like at the movements of the heavenly bodies, and if we could perceive nothing of mental counter-images in these movements of our brain, we do not need to be surprised if we stand in such an enlarged brain—namely in the universe—and cannot find the bridge between the movements of the stars in space and the possible mental-spiritual activities which cover the cosmic space. They would also relate to movements of the stars like our thoughts, sensations and soul experiences relate to movements of our own cerebral mass. When Du Bois-Reymond spoke this, everybody who could think could conclude what was never done up to now: if that is right which Du Bois-Reymond showed with some certainty, one must also say, if anything mental or spiritual fills the space, no astronomy, no astronomical knowledge can say anything against or for that spiritual or mental filling the space, because one cannot conclude anything spiritual from movements.

With it, it was necessary to say, the astronomer must restrict himself at the description of that what goes forward in the universe. He cannot at all judge about the fact that on a large scale soul experiences of cosmic kind belong to the movements of the stars as our soul experiences belong to the movements of mass particles in the brain. With it, already in the seventies of the nineteenth century astronomy was limited. However, one would have had to ask quite different from Du Bois-Reymond asked, namely, is there any possibility to penetrate in another way to find the mental and spiritual beings filling the cosmic space?—Therefore, spiritual science points in contrast to astronomy to something that we discussed repeatedly in these talks: the fact that the human being is able to develop his cognitive forces to higher levels than he has them in the normal life. If these cognitive forces have been lifted to a higher level, it is possible to find other things in space and time than that at what one looked as the ideal fulfilment of space and time in the nineteenth century: the astronomic movements of forces and atoms in space.

However, we must not think too poorly about what the external natural sciences have to say concerning the evolution of the world. For the scientific facts, which have led, indeed, to a certain radical ideal of an astronomical molecular and atomic knowledge, developed something that we have to regard almost as a model of a scientific, deeply in the secrets of existence shining fact. Even if it has a limited significance, nevertheless, it is a fact of very first rank. Today it can be indicated only because what it concerns is the answer of the question: “What has astronomy to say about the origin of the world?”

  In order to answer this question, one has to point to the fact that within the scientific thinking, research and experimentation it is clearly proved that it is right, indeed, in general that we can transform natural forces into each other that we can transform, for example, heat into work or if we have done any work this into heat. However, that is right with a quite weighty restriction. While on one side it is valid: heat can be transformed into mechanical work, into kinetic energy and kinetic energy again into heat—we must say on the other side that if one wants to transform heat back into work, in kinetic energy, this cannot happen unlimitedly. We realise this the clearest with the steam engine. We produce the movement by heat, but we cannot at all transform all heat into kinetic energy. Some heat gets always lost, so that we always have to calculate with all processes in nature where heat is transformed into movement with a loss of heat, as it is sure with a steam engine. For even with the best steam engines we can only transform about one quarter of the heat into movement, the other is emitted into the cooler, into the surroundings et cetera. We are able to do it only in such a way that we must realise that a part of the heat—as heat—is emitted in the cosmic space.

The knowledge that, indeed, kinetic energy can be completely transformed into heat but heat cannot completely retransformed into kinetic energy has also become in exterior relation one of the most fruitful knowledge for the science of the nineteenth century. Since thermodynamics is based merely on this knowledge, so that a big part of our present physics is built on it what has been characterised just here as the knowledge that heat cannot be retransformed completely into kinetic energy, but that always a rest of heat remains which is emitted. This has been shown apodictically by such investigations as for example those of the famous physicist Clausius (Rudolf C., 1822-1888, German physicist) who generalised this sentence that with all processes in the universe this sentence must be applied. Hence, we deal with all conversion processes where heat plays a role, with a transmission of heat in that work which is just considered with the facts of our nature. However, because always by the transformation a rest of heat remains, one can easily understand that the final state of our material development will be the transformation of all kinetic energy, of all other work in nature into heat. This is the last that must result: every physical process must convert itself into heat because always a rest of heat is left. Thus, all world processes run in such a way that heat will become bigger and bigger which results as a rest and at last the result must be that all movement processes will have been transformed into heat. Then we would be concerned with a big world chaos that exists only of heat, which can no longer be retransformed. Every life process that the sun causes on earth leaves rests of heat; at last, everything that shines from the sun to us tends to pass over to a general heat death.

This is the famous “Clausius's heat death” into which any material development of the universe must discharge. Here physics delivered a knowledge for that who generally understands something of knowledge that is quite apodictic against which one cannot argue. Our material universe heads the heat death in which all physical processes will once be buried.

There we have something from physics that we can transfer immediately on the entire astronomy. If we were only able to see movement changing into heat, we could say, the universe could be infinite forwards and backward, does not need to end. However, physics shows in the second law of the mechanical theory of heat that the material processes of the universe head the heat death. One can be convinced: if it were not so difficult, if one must not have such a lot of mathematical prior knowledge and go into difficult physical processes, much more people would know something of Clausius's heat death than it is really the case.

There we have brought something in our astronomical worldview that signifies development as it were. Imagine how fatal it must be for a materialistic knowledge to open itself to this apodictic result! Someone who only considers the spiritual and mental as concomitants of the material movements must suppose immediately that everything mental and spiritual is buried in the heat chaos, which our material world heads. Thus, all culture for which the human beings strives, all beauty and effectiveness of the earth would once meet their death with the general heat death at the same time.—One can now say that in particular this general heat death has become somewhat fatal for the astronomical knowledge. Not all astronomers take the easy way out like Ernst Haeckel in his Riddle of the Universe. He means, the second law of the mechanical heat theory contradicts, actually, the first one that all heat is convertible. Indeed, one cannot deny—Haeckel also knows this—that our solar system hastens to such a heat death, but he consoles himself saying: if the whole solar system is doomed to die the heat death, it will once collide with another world system, then heat originates from the collision again—and then a new world system originates!—However, he does not consider that a clash of the slags and rests is already considered in the general heat death, so that one cannot hope for consolation from that.

There are also serious people who feel urged to get the possibility from the physical-astronomical knowledge to understand the world development almost try to come beyond the general heat death. There the attempt of the Swedish researcher Arrhenius (Svante A., 1859-1927) may be mentioned who refers in his book The Becoming of the Worlds (1908) in manifold way just to such questions from the viewpoint of physical chemistry, physics, astronomy, and geology. One can say, here the attempt is already done in somewhat wittier way than Haeckel did to overcome the theory of the general heat death. However, if one regards everything that Arrhenius tries to adduce, one must say, it is persuasive in no way. Only briefly, I would like to characterise what is taught from this side about the overcoming of the general heat death. Of course, one cannot deny that our solar system heads the general heat death. However, besides it Arrhenius represents another idea that is based on certain assumptions of Maxwell (James Clerk M., 1831-1879, Scottish physicist) and his so-called pressure of radiation. This is something that is opposite to the former attraction of the world masses that perpetually radiates from the single heavenly bodies into space to the other heavenly bodies generating pressure caused by various natural forces.

This pressure which as it were the heavenly bodies send into space is able—because it is a force radiating in the cosmic space—to carry the smallest particles of matter which are pushed off by a heavenly body. Arrhenius now tries to show by all kinds of considerations that it is natural that, as long as special conditions do not take place, these phenomena caused by the radiation pressure prevent the general heat death by no means. But Arrhenius believes that such special conditions are caused by the fact that as it were this cosmic dust becomes nebulae which are in particular material states—for example, by the fact that in such nebula any star drives from anywhere, would have compressed the matter that it has taken away, and increased the temperature that way. If it were possible that such a star that meets the matter drives in such a nebula, attracts the matter and compresses it, increases the temperature, we would have something that causes an increase of temperature in the cosmic space again, and we would have something that could be transformed again into work. Arrhenius shows wittily that the cosmic dust that approaches to such a nebula is in another position—as it were, it is carried away in such a position in which it escapes from the general trend of the heat death.

I could indicate only briefly, what is also indicated too briefly in Arrhenius's writing. However, someone who goes into that which has led to the assumption of the general heat death cannot help admitting that the possibility is only virtual, that in a nebula, even if the temperature rises, the heat death could be detained. Since, nevertheless, these are only fallacies, and the law of the general heat death is such a general one that we must admit if we properly proceed: according to the physical laws the stars, which collide with a nebula, have only to bring the rest of their former existence with them. Thus, these processes, which happen in the nebula, must also be included in the trend of the universe to the general heat death.

Now it is typical that Arrhenius still goes on and includes the possibility in his idea of the radiation pressure that a heavenly body could push seeds of living beings to the other by the radiation pressure. Indeed, one can prove—with a big appearance of correctness—that the cold through which certain plant seeds and animal gametes would be carried would work preserving on them, so that one could suppose by calculation only that life was carried from one heavenly body to the other heavenly body by the radiation pressure. One could work out this, for example, for the distance from the earth to Mars. Then one spares the earth—instead of saddling the earth with it—the possibility, as one wants it, otherwise, in physics, geology et cetera, to have produced life because then one can say: the earth does not need to have produced life, because it can have flown to it from other heavenly bodies.—Besides, it does not issue a lot. For, will one attain anything special with it that one moves the question of the origin of life to other heavenly bodies? There we have the same difficulties, only that on the earth the conditions hinder us to accept the origin of life on other heavenly bodies. Generally, these matters can show how apparently materialistic prejudices influence well-intentioned enterprises of the present, which start from the eternity of life. Since the whole line of thought is materialistic, so that one does not take into account that life could have its origin here as well as in that what could be thought as radiation from one heavenly body to the other. This shows that in the present even well-intentioned thoughts suffer from placing themselves on the ground of materialism.

Thus, the same faces us everywhere: the study of physical laws, material laws, material forces is used, so that as it were everything that physics finds is transferred to the big world edifice, and one tries to imagine the origin of the universe with these forces. We have realised that such thoughts exceed the limits of the astronomical knowledge everywhere. Since the astronomer cannot at all conclude anything that deals with the forces, which cause the becoming of the world from that what he has before himself. We can realise again that our thinking and feeling are mental processes which cause material processes quite certainly, for example, in our brain, even in our blood. Someone who feels sense of shame to whom the blush rises in his face can convince himself of the fact that mental processes entail material processes. However, someone who admits that the mental-spiritual causes material processes in us has to say to himself, if I stood in the human brain and studied the outside movements, I would only see movements in the movements; there I would not at all anticipate that I include the movements that are caused by the spiritual-mental processes. I ignore the spiritual-mental causes.—May it not seem comprehensible that the astronomer studying the heavenly bodies is urged to develop the causes one or the other way that any star moves one or the other way? Are we allowed to conclude from the bare movements or from the dynamic laws: the sun must be positioned in a certain way to the earth, the moon must be positioned in a certain way to the earth, must orbit the earth in a certain way, and thereby these movements can result? Astronomy can generally decide nothing in what way they are caused in the mental-spiritual. Therefore, we can come just from the field of astronomy to the necessity to point by quite different means to the true causes also of the universe. There I can point—today just only with a few words—to the connection of earth, sun and moon.

Their mutual life and their relations of motion have developed, as these three heavenly bodies relate to each other. If we want to recognise why the sun, earth and moon relate to each other just as they relate today, we must not only move up from those forces on earth which we recognise as the physical-mechanical to the space, but we must still move up from other processes which happen on earth. Most certainly we have if we look at the human being something before us that belongs to the whole earth and its connection with the sun and moon as the blossoming of flowers or any other process—or as an electric process in the air. Certainly, the human being belongs with all that he is to the earth, and it is an abstraction if one only thinks the earth as the geologists do, as an only inorganic, inanimate thing, but one has to include the human beings in the whole processes of the earth.

At first, we have the difficulty that we must distinguish two things if we want to understand the difference between human being and animal in the right way. With the animal, the type predominates, so that an individual ego is not effective in its whole development between birth and death in so determining way, as this is the case with the human being with his individual ego, which expresses itself in education and the cultural life. This distinguishes the human being from the animal with which the type predominates. Now it is in such a way that such things go over by transitions into each other. With the animal, the type predominates, but the type goes into the human nature.

The further we to go back in time, the more we find that the human being is also a generic being, and we see the individual more and more originating from the type. On the ground of the type, the individual emerges. We have the ideal of a human future before ourselves, which says to us, the individual, the ego-nature of every human being will be victorious over the type in the course of the earth development. Nevertheless, going back we just realise the type on the ground of human development. Going back, we have also approached another condition of consciousness more and more in which the human being was connected dream-like, vividly with a spiritual world. That is why we must regard these two things as related: the type and the pictorial, dreamlike consciousness of the ancient times on the one hand and, on the other hand, the development of the individuality and our individual consciousness by that what the human being has to obtain in the course of the times. Such an emergence of the individuality from the type, the intellectual from the clairvoyant-dreamlike must be searched in its origins within the whole world development. Since, so to speak, as the stone which falls to the earth is controlled by the general world laws, this emergence of the human individuality and intellectuality from the human type and clairvoyance is also connected with the big cosmic laws which work everywhere in space. We have already done a step in this direction when we characterised the significance of geology for spiritual science.

We could show there that we can trace back the earth to a condition in which such processes are earthly, telluric, which only happen today if our thoughts and sensations work like decomposing in our organism, so that we find—if we go back to the earth origin—such epochs in which the earth was in a process of decomposition. That knowledge shows—what is shown more exactly in the Occult Science—which has been characterised in these talks that as it were the whole earth has sheltered from too extensive a decomposition process by the fact that it has separated the moon. The moon had to be separated from our earth so that that condition could be overcome which can be described as a decomposition process within the earth evolution.

We do not only have a mechanical-physical process, but we have to regard the extrusion of the moon as such a process that became necessary because the earth sheltered, while she expelled the moon, from too extensive a process of decomposition. The earth could thereby get a new relation to the sun directly. Since while it had the moon in itself, this decomposition process was so that the effect of the sun could not penetrate the terrestrial atmosphere—if we imagine the terrestrial atmosphere at that time. Therefore, only a new condition had to be caused, so that earth and sun could catch sight of each other. With it, with the cleaning of the terrestrial atmosphere—what became only possible with the extrusion of the moon—the condition of forces came into being which gradually transformed the old generic consciousness into the self-consciousness, into the intellectual consciousness. Thus, the extrusion of the moon, the cleaning of the terrestrial atmosphere and the direct relation of earth and sun are connected with the entire human development. We could now go back even further and would find such a condition of our earth development in which the earth was still connected with the sun.

We would also find that the separation of sun and earth happened in order to make the existence of conscious beings generally possible on earth. Only by the repulsion of the earth from the sun that force system came about which made it possible that beings could become conscious. Thus, the ancient clairvoyant consciousness became possible by the repulsion of the earth from the sun—and the advance to a higher consciousness, an intellectual consciousness by the extrusion of the moon from the earth. If we ascend clairvoyantly to that what external astronomy cannot give, we have to regard the cosmic forces as the reasons of the separation of the sun and the remaining planets from the earth—that is we come to spiritual causes.

I could only indicate the principle. Of course, everybody could ask, did the human being already exist, when earth and sun separated? Indeed, he existed, only under other conditions. It is a matter of course that the human being, as he lives under the current conditions, would not be possible if the sun were together with the earth. However, this would be no objection. We receive spiritual causes for the movements of the heavenly bodies. Now we do no longer stop at that to which astronomy pointed more than one century ago at the mere utilisation of physical laws saying: the earth was once connected with the sun in a big gas ball, that started rotating, and thereby the planets and also the earth were separated and later also the moon from the earth. - Now, we do no longer get around to asserting that such a thing happens only due to mechanical-physical laws, but inner, spiritual reasons must be there why the earth separated from the sun.

The earth was separated from the sun, so that the human being was raised to the conscious experience, and the moon was separated from the earth, so that he can advance to his higher consciousness. Briefly, we start bringing that in the astronomical worldview what we must bring in—namely into the astronomical worldview of the small brain that what we must bring in if we want to go over from the mere movement of the cerebral atoms to the conclusion: I see red, hear organ tone, I smell rose smell et cetera.—Thus, we must go forward if we want to find the transition from that what the popular astronomy can give us, to that what the causes of the events are in space. Hence, those who want to stop at the ground of external physics should confine themselves to investigate this only what movements or what forces are what is to be recognised astronomically. They should confess that another progress of knowledge is necessary if astronomy wants to come to an explanation of the becoming of the universe, should confess that they would have to stop as representatives of a rationalistic and empiric astronomy at the explanation of the becoming of the universe.

Considering this, it turns out that the great and significant results of modern astronomy fit in our spiritual-scientific world edifice quite wonderfully. Take the Occult Science. There is shown how our earth has gradually developed, how it goes—just like the single human being in the successive earth-lives—through developmental stages how, so to speak, a planet goes through developmental stages. There our earth is led back to a former planetary stage, this stage to an earlier one, so far, as one can trace back it, up to a stage, which is called “Old Saturn” with which, however, not our today's Saturn is meant, but a planetary predecessor of our earth.

The same cognition that is quite independent of any outer physics and any speculation, shows that a planetary predecessor of our earth, just this Old Saturn, was mere heat and that spiritual forces intervened in this condition of heat, so that spiritual forces took possession of the heat chaos. All development is thereby caused up to our earth. In addition, spiritual science shows that really the material under our feet is dying off. In the talk What Has Geology to Say About the World Origin?, we have shown that geology has advanced so far to agree with us that the earth crust is dying off. We understand everything that we know of the earth crust only well if we understand it as dying off. However, in this fact is contained that the spiritual becomes free from the material. If among us the planetary material dies off, the spirit gets free from it.

We have another possibility now! We can point to the nebula—there we have no speculations after the model of the physicists, nevertheless, do not stop at the heat death—and can say, indeed, there we have the things in which all remaining processes are transformed into heat. However, as with the beginning of the earth spiritual powers seized the heat state, spiritual powers lead the nebulae into which by the heat death the solar systems discharge from the heat death to new solar systems. There is, actually, nothing more astonishing than the accordance of one of the most admirable laws of the nineteenth century in its application to astronomy—like the application of the second law of the mechanical heat theory—with the positive, actual results of astronomical observations.

If you do not take the speculative inventions of all kinds of radiation, but if you start from that what one can obtain from the spectroscope or from the photography of the astronomical phenomena, you realise that everything complies down to the last detail with that what one can obtain as evolution of the worlds from spiritual science. For it shows how that what one sees as an astronomical spatial picture is the result - the spiritual result—of spiritual beings. We can say different from the modern astronomical physicists: the human being has no reason to fight against the heat death or to be afraid of it, because he knows that from it new life will blossom as from the old heat chaos life blossomed which we have now before ourselves. Because a real repetition and increase of life is possible this way—not only from that what Arrhenius assumes that life is winded up like in a clockwork anew and takes place in the nebula anew, but development is only possible if a spiritual element works from one heat state to the other. If our world substance is buried in the grave of heat, the spirit has advanced a step and conjures up higher things, higher life from the heat chaos. Hence, the final state of the earth embodiment—the Vulcan stage—is in the Occult Science that which points to this what looks out as a new life from the grave of the heat death. Therefore, the name “Vulcan” is used. If we challenge astronomy, we can just realise that the external science complies deeply with that what spiritual science has to give.

Indeed, people will say repeatedly, you spiritual scientists are daydreamers, because the right result of exact science absolutely contradicts what you believe to get from spiritual science.—Anybody could then say, you have seriously spoken even of Moses, but we know that all that is overtaken. Since the glorious natural sciences have taught us long since, we are way beyond the world development of Moses—natural sciences have shown this.—Those speak that way who only are present from without. However, let us ask the others who were present not from without, but more from within. There I know a very significant physicist who has considerable share of the development of optics, Biot (Jean-Baptiste B., 1774-1862), who said, either Moses was as deeply experienced in sciences as our century, or he was inspired.

A leading physicist of the nineteenth century said this. Now those who write popular books about worldviews maybe mean, indeed, a physicist thinks that way who deals only with the outside of the phenomena. Nevertheless, those who go deeper into the being of the organic show that one was chased away from the spirit in the course of the nineteenth century where one searched the natural causes. -- How did Liebig (Justus von L., 1803-1873, chemist) think, who deeply penetrated into the being of the organic, about the relations of the world, to which he had dedicated his research efforts, to the spiritual world? He says that these are the opinions of dilettantes who derive the authorisation of their walks on the border of the fields of physical research to explain to the unknowing and gullible audience how world and life originated, actually, and how far, nevertheless, the human being has come concerning the investigation of the highest things.—People may say: have you never heard that Lyell (Charles L., 1797-1875) founded a geology? Have you never heard about the big progress, which came with him, that he overcame those worldviews, which still count on spiritual forces?—I could bring writings by Lyell forward to you that make deep impression today. However, just Lyell said once, in which direction we pursue our investigations, everywhere we discover the clearest proofs of a creative intelligence, of its providence, power and wisdom.

The founder of the newer geology says this. Now the people could come and say, nevertheless, Darwin (Charles D., 1809-1882, English naturalist) has overcome the influence of any spiritual forces. Darwin showed how by purely natural processes the evolution of the organisms happens.—However, Darwin himself wrote: “I opine that all living beings that ever have been on earth are descended from a prototype into which the creator breathed life.”—So people can also not quote Darwin who says there, we are daydreamers if we speak of spiritual beings and spiritual forces. Then still people maybe come and say, do you not know the basic nerve of any scientific development of the nineteenth century, which has deeply influenced any development? Do you know nothing about the basic law of the transformation of the natural forces?—We have just spoken of it today, have realised that the transformation of the natural forces does not contradict what spiritual science has to say.

However, the people could want to refer to Julius Robert Mayer (1814-1878, German physician and physicist), to the founder of the law of the mechanical heat equivalent as well as of the transformation of the natural forces. However, Julius Robert Mayer did the strange dictum: I exclaim wholeheartedly, a right philosophy can be nothing else than propaedeutics for the Christian religion!—The things are different everywhere if one goes back to the origins and to those who created these origins who are the great pathfinders on the way of human knowledge, and not to their followers, nor to those who want to find lightweight ideas—like the newer astrophysicists—and want to encompass the whole world with it. If one goes not to the latter but to the former, one can say, spiritual science completely agrees with the great pathfinders.

Hence, spiritual science knows that it can position itself in the development of the human mind, and that it advances harmoniously with the development of humanity with everything that has promoted the human development. If a merely external, physical astronomy wants to devise the evolution of the universe, one may remind those who act in such a way of a general quotation in the Xenien by Goethe and Schiller:

To infinite heights the firmament extends,
However, the little mind also found the way to them.

We must shelter from the fact that the little mind finds its way to the firmament. For we can show that just as little as the consideration of the brain leads us to a spiritual-mental life, but that this is separated from the mere movements and this can go beyond them, just as little the consideration of the external movements and laws is able to penetrate in the spirit of the universe. Hence, there it remains true in a certain way what Schiller means speaking to the astronomers:

Do not chat to me so much about nebulae and suns!
Is nature only great, because she gives you to count them?
Your object is the most elated, admittedly, in space;
But, friends, the elated does not live in space!

Schiller means that. It is right if one regards the movable appearance in space only. It is not right if one goes into what—as a spiritual—emits the laws of space.—Thus, the words remain true: ascending with the mind to the stars always causes the notion of the spiritual-divine in every mind. If we want to ascend, however, with our cognition, our cognition has to go the way: per aspera ad astra—through severity to the stars, through the thorns to the roses

However, this is the way of spiritual knowledge. Just the spiritual-scientific way to the stars shows that it brings along the human being to say to himself: as my materials and those which are in my surroundings are spread out in the whole universe—as the spectroscope shows--, the spiritual that lives in me is spread out in the whole universe and belongs to it. My corporeality is born out of the universe—my soul and mind are born out of the universe. It remains true what should be characterised here once again with some words which I already stated on another occasion: it remains true that the human being can only come to the entire world consciousness if he gets clear about the question which astronomy cannot answer: the question of his share of the world and his destination in the world. It is true that the answer to this question can give him security of life, optimism, hope of life if he knows from the spiritual-scientific knowledge what the words mean:

The wealth of materials approaches the human sense
Mysteriously from the depths of the universe.
The spirit's word flows clarifying
In the soul's grounds from cosmic heights full of contents.
They meet in the human inside to reality full of wisdom.

One idea Goethe had for his ‘Faust’ was that at the end of Part II, Act 3, Mephistopheles, who in this Act had worn the mask of Phorkyas, should step in front of the curtain, take off the mask, descend from the Kothurni and deliver a kind of Epilogue. The idea, as the now meaningless stage instruction tells us, was that this Epilogue was to indicate the manner in which the final figure of Faust was to be taken. The words Mephistopheles was to speak as Commentator are not in ‘Faust,’ but they have been preserved on a single sheet among Goethe's literary remains. Through the mouth of Mephistopheles Goethe seeks to tell the public in a not unhumorous way what attitude to adopt towards his Faust. These words are worthy of notice, and in a certain respect to-day's study is to be conducted in their spirit. They refer to Euphorion who was born in some spirit fashion, and jumps and hops about immediately after his birth and utters ‘a tender word.’ In this way these words refer to him:

‘Enough, ye see him, though it is much worse
Than on the British stage, where a small child
Grows step by step to take heroic shape.
Here it is madder still: for, scarce conceived,
He's also born:
He leaps and dances, speaks a tender word.
If many criticize,
There are who think this is not to be taken
So straight and crudely, that there's more behind.
One scents the Mysteries, perhaps withal
Mystifications, Indian and may be
Egyptian; for the man is right who knows
How to squeeze all together, brew it well
And twist and turn in etymology.

We say it also, and the true disciple
Of the newer symbolism will agree.’

Thus all such explanations as rest on a basis of old traditions are to be straightway excluded. On the contrary, an explanation is demanded drawn from the depths of spirit-life. Therefore also Mephistopheles says: ‘We say it also, and the true disciple of the newer symbolism will agree.’ If you read carefully Part II of ‘Faust,’ you will know that Goethe is rich in word-construction in this poem, and that we must not therefore cavil at what appears to be ungrammatical. Here in this sentence is clearly expressed that the man who understands Faust rightly in Goethe's sense, also sees that deeper things lie behind. But everything that rests on study or might lead to a merely symbolic explanation is discouraged. The demand is that the explanation of Faust is to depend on the faithful discipleship which is aware of the spiritual experience which we may call ‘experience in the sense of the new Spiritual Science.’ ‘The true disciple of the newer symbolism’ is the commentator of Faust in Goethe's sense. Thus it is to be done by drawing direct from spirit-life; and Goethe no doubt here betrays that he has put something into it which made it possible for him to get away from old symbols and to coin new and independent symbols out of direct spirit-life. If we want to compare the presentation of the spiritual world in the two parts of ‘Faust,’ we might say that Part I presents to a large extent the fruits of knowledge—the outer influences on one who has dim ideas of the spiritual world, and who tries to enter it through reading all kinds of things and conducting all kinds of experiments. Part I contains this studied view of the supernatural world.

Part II contains experience, living experience, and if you understand rightly, you know that it can derive only from a personality which has learnt to know the reality of the spiritual, supernatural worlds behind the physical world. Truly, Goethe was consistent in his presentation, although some things in Part II are so dissimilar from Part I. What he had learnt in Part I, he experienced in Part II, he has seen it. He was in the spiritual, supernatural world: he indicates this, too, clearly enough, where in Part I he makes Faust say:

‘What says the Sage, now first I recognize:
“The Spirit-world no closures fasten;
Thy sense is shut, thy heart is dead:
Disciple, up! untiring, hasten
To bathe thy breast in morning-red!”‘

Scene I, p. 15.

Goethe can point—from personal knowledge—to what he sees who ‘bathes his breast in morning-red,’ in order to await the rising of the spiritual sun. We find in the whole of Part I—no doubt you realize it from yesterday's discourse—an energetic upward-striving of Faust the student, to this dawn, but we also find clearly indicated that the path is nowhere traversed in a satisfactory way. Now how does Part II begin? Is the advice of the wise man, ‘to bathe the breast in morning-red,’ carried out in one respect?

We find Faust ‘bedded on flowery turf, fatigued, restless, endeavouring to sleep,’ surrounded by spiritual beings. We find him withdrawn from all physical vision, veiled in sleep. Beings from the spiritual world are busy with his spirit, which is withdrawn from the physical world. Marvellously and forcefully we are told what direction Faust's soul takes in order to grow into the spiritual world. Then we are shown how his soul really does grow into that world which is described as the spiritual world in the ‘Prologue in Heaven,’ in Part I. Goethe says from deep experience what was always told the pupil in the School of Pythagoras, that he who enters the spiritual world is met by the secret music of the universe:

‘The sun-orb sings, in emulation,
'Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round:
His path predestined through Creation
He ends with step of thunder-sound.’

This must be the music from the worlds of the spiritual life, if they are to be depicted as they are. What is said here of the ‘music of the spheres’ is not a poetic image, nor a metaphor, but a truth, and Goethe remains consistent to it, in that Faust, withdrawn from the physical world, now proceeds to grow, like an initiate, into that world from which this music comes. Therefore, in the scene where at the beginning of Part II Faust is withdrawn into the spiritual world, it is written again:

‘Hearken! Hark!—The Hours careering
Sounding loud to spirit-hearing.
See the new-born day appearing!
Rocky portals jarring shatter,
PhSbus' wheels in rolling clatter,
With a crash the Light draws near!
Pealing rays and trumpet-blazes—
Eye is blinded, ear amazes:
The Unheard can no one hear!’

Faust II, Act I.

Would that those people who think that they can understand a poem only if they can say ‘Such things must be taken as the poet's images, created by right of poetic licence’—would that they would cease to call these things realistic. The physical sun makes no sound! It is the spiritual sun behind the physical which sounds in the ears of him who is entering the spiritual life. They are spiritual, not physical sounds. In this passage, again, we hear the sounds of thousands of years harmonizing. Unconsciously he who can follow the course of the human spirit through thousands of years will be reminded in this passage of some great words spoken thousands of years ago; words spoken by one who through his initiation knew that what appears to us as the physical sun is the expression of the sun-spirit and the sun-soul, as the physical human body is the expression of the human spirit and the human soul. He looked up to the spiritual sun and called it ‘Ahura Mazdao,’ ‘The great sun-aura.’ We are reminded of Zarathustra, who, looking thus at the sun, and feeling the world full of spirit, spoke the great and powerful words:

‘I want to speak! Listen to me, all ye who from far or near, desire to listen: Mark well, for He will be revealed. No more shall the False Teacher destroy the world—he who has professed evil faiths with his tongue. I shall speak of what is the highest in the world, what He, the Great, Ahura Mazdao, has taught me. Whosoever will not hear His Words, as I speak them, will suffer misery when the Earth-Cycle is fulfilled!’

Before the spiritual sun rises in the soul, the learner must bathe in the dawn which precedes it. Hence the words of the Wise Man: ‘Disciple, up! untiring hasten to bathe thy breast in morning-red!’ Does Faust, the disciple, do this?

After the spiritual beings which surrounded him had been busy with him while his soul was for a time withdrawn from his body, he awakes as a changed man. The soul has entered the body, so that he has a dim idea, or he bathes in the morning-red, of the rising sun of the spirit:

‘Life's pulses now with fresher force awaken
To greet the mild ethereal twilight o'er me;
This night, thou, Earth! hast also stood unshaken,
And now thou breathest new-refreshed before me,
And now beginnest, all thy gladness granting,
A vigorous resolution to restore me,
To see the highest life for which I'm panting.—
The world unfolded lies in twilight glimmer,
A thousand voices in the grove are chanting;
Vale in, vale out, the misty streaks grow dimmer;
The deeps with heavenly light are penetrated;
The boughs, refreshed, lift up their leafy shimmer
From gulfs of air where sleepily they waited;
Colour on colour from the background cleareth,
Where flower and leaf with trembling pearls are freighted,
And all around a Paradise appeareth.’

Faust II, Act I.

Faust now feels also that he has awakened in that world, into which he has been translated during his unconsciousness, and he bathes his earthly breast in the morning-red. But it is only the beginning of the journey. He feels that he is at the gate of initiation, and thereupon he cannot yet bear the direct vision of the spiritual sun:

‘But if there burst from those eternal spaces
A flood of flame, we stand confounded ever;
For Life's pure torch we sought the shining traces,
And seas of fire—and what a fire!—surprise us.’

Wherefore he sees at first the world of the spiritual—but still, as we shall see in a moment, as a symbol.

‘Behind me, therefore, let the sun be glowing!
The cataract, between the crags deep-riven,
I thus behold with rapture ever-growing.
From plunge to plunge in thousand streams't is given,
And yet a thousand, to the valleys shaded
While foam and spray in air are whirled and driven.
Yet how superb, across the tumult braided,
The painted rainbow's changeful life is bending,
Now clearly drawn, dissolving now and faded,
And evermore the showers of dew descending!
Of human striving there's no symbol fuller:
Consider, and 't is easy comprehending—
Life is not light, but the refracted colour.’

Faust II, Act I.

This is Faust bathing his earthly breast in the morning-red, in order to prepare himself to look straight at the spiritual sun, which rises at initiation.

Now Faust is to go into the great world with the gifts he has received as one approaching illumination. It might be thought remarkable that Faust is now transplanted to the Imperial Court, when he is in the midst of all kinds of masques and revels. All the same, these masques and pranks contain deep truths and are everywhere significant. It is not possible to enter upon this significance to-day. It will be in any case the task of this study to bring out only a few moments from the whole content of Part II of ‘Faust’ Many lectures would have to be given, if we wanted to throw light on everything. We shall say only this about the general idea of these Masque scenes: For a man who surveys human life with an enlightened eye, certain words will have a different meaning from what they have in ordinary external life. Such a man, steeping himself in the whole great course of human evolution, knows that such words as ‘Folk spirit’ (Volksgeist), ‘Time-spirit’ (Zeitgeist), are not mere abstractions. He sees in the spiritual world the true and real beings corresponding to what one ordinarily calls abstractly ‘Folk spirit and Time-spirit.’¹ Thus, since he has the vision, it is made clear to Faust as he enters the great world where decisions affecting the world are made from a Court, that in all these happenings there are supernatural powers at work. Outside in the physical world one can observe only individual people and the laws they have. In the spiritual world there are beings behind all that. Whereas people are under the impression that what they do is prompted by their own souls, and that they make their own resolutions, human acts and human thoughts are really pervaded and permeated by beings from the supernatural world—national spirits, time-spirits, and so on. People think they are free to make resolves, to think and to form ideas, but they are guided by spiritual beings behind the physical world. What men call their understanding, by which they believe they can control the course of time, is the expression of spiritual beings behind. Thus, the whole Masque, which is to have some meaning, becomes for Faust the expression of the fact that one can realize how in the course of world-events a part is played by powers originating in those beings which Faust met already in Part I, originating, in short, in Mephistopheles. Man is surrounded by such spiritual beings, towering above him. Thus Mephistopheles appears at the turn of the modern age as that being which prompts the human intellect to the discovery of paper money. And Goethe presents the whole affair with a certain humour: how the same spirit, the same intellect which in man is bound to the physical instrument of the brain, when inspired by the related spirit which lets nothing count but the physical, gives rise to such phenomena as can control the world—phenomena however which have an importance only for the physical world. In this way the deeper sense of development is indicated precisely in this Masque and mummery. But we are soon led out of the world which lies before us, where we are shown the part played by supernatural powers, and into the really spiritual world.

After it has been made rich, the Court wishes to be amused by the presentation of figures from ancient history. Paris and Helena are to be conjured up from the past. Mephistopheles, who belongs to those powers of the spiritual world which inspired the discovery of paper money, cannot penetrate to the worlds which give rise to the whole deeper development of men. Faust carries in him the soul and spirit which can penetrate these spiritual worlds. For he is the disciple who has bathed the earthly breast in the morning-red, and we are shown how Faust has already experienced something which can be looked upon as the first stage of clairvoyance—the stage completed by the clairvoyant when he has put his soul through the appropriate exercises. There are certain exercises which the student has to perform, in meditation, concentration, and so on, which are set him in occult-scientific symbols, in which he steeps himself, whereby the soul, withdrawing from the physical and etheric body, is transfigured in the night, as it at first becomes clairvoyant in the spiritual world. What is it that the student experiences here, when he has received the effect of those exercises?

The first stage of clairvoyance is something which can bring people to a condition of great confusion. We shall see best why this is if we look at what are sometimes called the ‘dangers of initiation.’

Living in the physical world of the senses, one sees the objects round one in sharp contours, outlined in space, and the human soul makes halt at or attaches itself to these firm outlines, which one finds everywhere, filling the soul when it gives itself to sense-phenomena. Now just imagine for a moment all these objects round you becoming misty, losing their contours, merging into each other, becoming like cloud-pictures. It is something like this in the world into which the clairvoyant enters after the first exercises have taken effect. For he arrives at what is behind the whole sense-world, what lies behind all matter, what gives rise to the sense-world. He arrives at the stage where the spiritual world first approaches him. If you think how, in the mountains, crystals form themselves out of their mother-substances into their shapes and lines, so is it, roughly, when the clairvoyant human being comes into the spiritual world. At first it all appears confusing if the student is not sufficiently prepared. But the figures of the physical world grow out of this chaotic world, like the crystal shapes out of their mother-substance. At first the spiritual world is experienced like the mother-substances of the physical world. Into this realm man enters by the gates of death. The images, indeed, will take on other, fixed shapes, when the clairvoyant is further developed, shapes which are interwoven with those outlines which exist in the spiritual world, and which resound with what we have called in the spiritual sense, the music of the spheres. The clairvoyant experiences this after a time, but at first it is all confusing. Still, into this realm enters man.

Now if the images of Helena and Paris are to be brought up, it must be from this world. Faust alone, who has bathed the earthly breast in the morning-red, and found the entrance to the spiritual world, can step into this world, Mephistopheles cannot. He can achieve only what the world of reason can achieve. He can go as far as the key that opens the spiritual realm. But Faust has the confidence and certainty that he will find there what he seeks: the everlasting, the permanent residue when the physical form of man is dissolved at death into its elements.

Now it is wonderful how we are told the way in which Faust is to descend into the spiritual realm. The introduction already shows us that the man who depicts it is well acquainted with the facts—as well as with the perceptions and feeling which come over anyone who really knows these things and does not merely play at them. It all stood in grand manner before Goethe's soul—all that exists of this world of feeling when the seed for initiation, described yesterday, was opened by a particular event.

He read a passage in Plutarch, where is described how the city of Engyium seeks an alliance with Carthage. Nicias, the friend of the Romans, is to be arrested. But he poses as a man possessed. The pro-Carthaginians want to seize him, but they hear these words from his mouth: ‘The Mothers, the Mothers press hard on me!’ That was a cry which in old times one heard only from a man who was in a condition of clairvoyance and withdrawn from the physical world. Nicias could be regarded either as a fool, as one possessed, or as a clairvoyant. But how could this be known? Because he said what those who had some knowledge of the spiritual world recognized. At the utterance of: ‘It is the Mothers who press hard on me!’ the citizens realize that he is not possessed, but inspired; that he can say something as a real witness which can be learnt in the spiritual world—and so he remains unmolested.

On reading this scene, there is released in Goethe's soul something which had been sown as the kernel of initiation already during his Frankfort period. He knew what it meant to penetrate into the spiritual world. Hence also the words put into the mouth of Faust, when Mephistopheles speaks of the ‘Mothers,’ Faust shudders. He knows what it means—that lie touches on a holy but forbidden kingdom, forbidden, that is, for him who is not sufficiently prepared. Mephistopheles, indeed knows also of this realm, that he may not enter it unprepared. Hence the words: ‘Unwilling I reveal a loftier mystery.’ Still, Faust must descend into this kingdom in order to bring to pass what has to be brought to pass—into this kingdom where one sees what is otherwise firm and solid in transfigurations of eternal being. Here the spiritual sense catches sight behind the physical forms of the sense-world of what penetrates into this sense-world to maintain in it its sharp outlines. And then Mephistopheles says, describing this realm as it appears to all who step into it:

‘Escape from the Created
To shapeless forms in liberated spaces!
Enjoy what long ere this was dissipated!
There whirls the press like clouds on clouds unfolding.’

One cannot depict more vividly a real experience of a man truly initiated. The things ‘long ere this dissipated’ will be found in this world, when it is presented thus. ‘To shapeless forms of liberated spheres,’ i.e., into that realm where the forms of the sense-world are no more, where they do not exist, which is ‘liberated’ from them—there where ‘what long ere this was dissipated’ does exist—into this realm Faust is to betake himself. And when one reads ‘There whirls the press, like clouds on clouds unfolding,’ one recognizes again something which is characteristic in the highest degree. Let us think of the entry into the supernatural world as a gate. Before one enters, the soul has to be prepared by means of worthy symbols. One of these is taken from the appearance of the rising sun, and completes the image of bathing the earthly breast in the morning-red: the sun making a particular triangle round itself. The soul goes through this symbol and experiences its after-effects when it has passed through the gate, when it is within, in the spiritual world. Hence these effects: ‘There whirls the press, like clouds on clouds unfolding.’ Every word would be a living proof of what this scene is meant to be: Faust's penetration to the first stages of the supernatural world, which you find called the ‘imaginative world.’ When Goethe presented this, he was not obliged to compound a picture of the spiritual world from old Indian or Egyptian descriptions; he was able to put down quite realistically what he himself had experienced; and this he did.

Now Faust brings up the ‘glowing tripod,’ round which the Mothers sit, the sources of existence in the spiritual world. With its help Faust is able to conjure up Paris and Helena before men, and to present pictures from the spiritual world. It would lead too far to explain in detail the important symbol of the glowing tripod. We are concerned to show how a kind of initiation is really depicted in Part II of ‘Faust.’ But we see how carefully and correctly Goethe proceeds by the fact that he shows us the way into the spiritual world which he only who is worthy can tread slowly and with resignation. He shows us that Faust is not even yet worthy enough. Only he is worthy to enter the spiritual world who has put off everything that is connected with narrow personality so that no wishes or desires, arising from it, any longer exist. This is apparently to say little, but in truth it is saying a great deal. For usually between what is sought and what is to be achieved by the cancellation of all personal wishes and desires, there lies not only one human life, but many. Goethe shows with the certainty of knowledge that Faust is not yet worthy. Desire awakes in him; he wants to embrace Helena from a personal desire. Whereupon the whole thing collapses—it vanishes. He has committed a sin against the spiritual world. He cannot hold her. He must penetrate further into the spiritual world. And so we see him in the course of Part II going further on his way. We see him after being ‘paralysed by Helena’ again in another state of consciousness, withdrawn from the physical body and fallen into sleep; and how something happens around him which as it were clambers from the sense-world into the supersense-world. What this is shows us nothing other than that Faust, once again withdrawn from the physical world, experiences something which can only with full consciousness be experienced in the supersense-world. What he has now to go through is the complete growth of man. He must go through those mighty events which take place behind the scenes of the stage of the physical world, so that he really can behold what he wants to behold. Helena must be brought back again into the physical world, she must be reincarnated into a new body. When he brings back the merely imaginative image from the spiritual world the whole thing breaks down. He must go deeper. We see him now overcoming a second stage. In this state in which he is put we now see how the consciousness gradually lives upward from the sense-world into the supersense-world. This is done in a poetically masterly way. It is not a case of marvelling at the reality of it, for that is explained simply by the fact that Goethe depicts Part II of ‘Faust’ from his own experience. But the way is masterly in which Goethe represents the secret of Helena's becoming mortal, it is also poetic.

Whoever is acquainted with the elementary truths of Spiritual Science, knows that man, in assuming life on our earth, brings with him an eternal, spiritual part from quite other realms, that this spiritual part is combined below with the physical hereditary line, taken from the physical-sense-world and bequeathed finally by father and mother. On the whole—taking the various parts of man altogether without entering more precisely upon human nature—we may say that in man are combined something eternal and something earthly. The eternal part, going on from life to life, which descends from the spiritual world to be embodied in a physical form—this we call ‘spirit.’ And in order that this spirit can combine with physical matter, there must be an intermediate part, and this in terms of Spiritual Science is the soul. Thus spirit, soul and body are combined in the formation of a human being.

Now Faust with his increased consciousness is to experience how these parts of human nature combine. The spirit descends from spiritual spheres, gradually surrounds itself with the soul which is derived from the psychic world, and then draws the physical covering round itself in accordance with the laws of the physical world. If one knows the principle which attaches itself as ‘soul’ around the spirit, and often called by us the ‘astral body,’ if one knows what is between spirit and body, one has that intermediate member, which as it were binds together spirit and body.

The spirit Faust finds in the realm of the Mothers. He knows already where to look for it, whence it comes, when it betakes itself into a new embodiment. But he has yet to learn how the tie is formed, when the spirit comes into the physical world. And now we are shown in that remarkable scene, how, starting from the sense-world and touching the boundary of the supersense-world, the ‘Homunculus’ is produced in Wagner's laboratory. Mephistopheles himself has a hand in it, and we are told in spirited words that only the conditions of his creation are provided by Wagner. Thus this remarkable figure, the Homunculus comes into being, assisted as it were by the spiritual world. Much thought has been spent on this Homunculus. But thinking and speculating on such things lead nowhere. The problem who he is can be solved only by real creation out of Spiritual Science. To those who spoke of him in the Middle Ages he was no other than a definite form of the astral body.

This scene is not to be pictured in the sphere of sense—but in such a way that it must be thought of as quite removed into the spiritual world. You must follow all the events in Faust's condition of consciousness. The way in which the Homunculus is described in the subsequent scenes shows him to be really the representative of the astral body.

‘He has no lack of qualities ideal
But far too much of palpable and real.’

That is the characteristic of the astral body, and he says of himself:

‘Since I exist, then I must active be.’

an astral figure, which cannot stay still, compelled to live in continuous activity. He must be taken away to those spheres, where he can actually combine spirit and body.

And now we see the creation of man, which Faust experiences, represented to us in the ‘Classical Walpurgis-Night.’ There we are shown the sum of all the powers and beings which are active behind the physical-sense-world, and spirits from the physical world are continually being interspersed, which have trained their souls so far that they have grown together with the spiritual world, and that they are at the same time conscious in the spiritual world. The two great philosophers Anaxagoras and Thales are figures of this kind. The Homunculus wishes to find out from them how one can come to be, how one can proceed to a physical form, when one is spiritual. All the figures which we see in this ‘Classical Walpurgis-Night’ are there to assist—figures of the realization of the astral body which is ready to enter the material, physical world. If one could follow it all exactly, every detail would be a proof of its meaning. The Homunculus seeks information from Proteus and Nereus as to how he can enter the physical world. He is shown how he can wrap himself in the elements of matter, and how the spiritual qualities are in him—viz., how the soul gradually betakes itself into the physical-sense elements—through that which has played its part in the realms of nature kingdoms. We are shown how the soul has to traverse again the states of the mineral, the plant and the animal realms, in order to rise to human shape:

‘On the broad ocean's breast must thou begin!’

that is, in the mineral realm; then you must go through the plant realm. Goethe, indeed, invents an expression for it, which does not otherwise exist. He makes the Homunculus say: ‘Es grunelt so:’²

‘Here breathes and blows a tender air;
And I delight me in the fragrance rare.’

It is pointed out to him what road he has to take till a physical body is formed by degrees round him. Finally comes the moment of love. Eros will complete the whole. Thales gives the advice:

‘Yield to the wish so wisely stated,
And at the source be thou created!
Be ready for the rapid plan!
There, by eternal canons wending,
Through thousand, myriad forms ascending,
Thou shalt attain, in time, to Man.’

Then, when the Homunculus has entered upon the physical world, he loses his qualities, the ego becomes his master!

‘But struggle not to higher orders:
Once Man, within the human borders,
Then all is at an end with thee.’

So says Proteus—i.e., at an end with the astral body which has not yet penetrated into the human realm.

Goethe's whole theory of nature, with its relationship between all life, and its metamorphosic development from the incomplete to the complete appears here in the picture. The spirit can at first be only like a seed in the world. It must pour itself into matter, into the elements, and dive below in them, in order to assume from them a higher form. The Homunculus is shattered on Galatea's shell-chariot. He dissolves into the elements. It is a marvellous presentation of the moment when the astral body has enwrapped itself in a body of physical matter—and can now live as man.

These are experiences Faust goes through while he is in another state of consciousness, a condition outside the body. He is becoming gradually ready to behold the secrets lying behind physical-material existence. And now he is able to behold the spirit of Helena, from the realm of things ‘long ere this dissipated’ appearing in bodily shape before him. We have in Act 3 of Part II the re-embodiment of Helena. Goethe represents the idea of re-incarnation cryptically—as he had to in his day; how spirit, soul and body unite from the three realms, to form a human being—and before us stands the re-incarnated Helena.

We must of course remember that, since he is a poet, Goethe presents in pictorial form the experience of the clairvoyant consciousness. Wherefore we must not rush in with heavy-fisted criticism and ask: ‘Is Helena now really re-incarnated?’ We must keep in mind that a poet is speaking of what he has himself experienced in spiritual worlds.

In this way Faust, after having conquered a new stage of life, is able to experience harmony with what is ‘long ere this dissipated,’ the union with Helena. We see now how a being springs from the union of the human soul with the spiritual when the soul has raised itself up into higher worlds; a child of the spirit, subject not to the laws of the sense-world, but to the laws of the spiritual world: Euphorion. We shall understand what springs from the union of the raised spirit with the sense-world if we remember the previously-quoted passage from the proposed Epilogue of Mephistopheles-Phorkyas at the end of Act III, and if we realize that Goethe has in ‘Euphorion’ put in traits which belong to Byron, whom he much honoured. In doing so he may, after all, apply the laws of the spiritual world to it, since he is concerned with events in the spiritual world. And so Euphorion, though scarce conceived, may be already born and at once jump about and stir himself and say spirited things. Once more we see how strictly and conscientiously Goethe takes the entry into the spiritual world. In his aspiration for supernatural worlds, Faust is far beyond his present experiences. But even so he is not free from those powers from which he must liberate himself, if his soul is to unite completely with the spiritual world. He is not free from what Mephistopheles mixes into these spiritual experiences. Faust is what one calls a mystic, who—in the Helena-Euphorion scene—lives and moves completely in the spiritual world. But because he has not yet scaled the necessary step which makes him capable of being absorbed entirely by the spiritual world, so, once more, what he can experience in it escapes him: viz., Helena and Euphorion. What he had brought by his experience from the spiritual world eludes him yet again. He has become capable of living in the spiritual world, of experiencing Euphorion, the child of the spirit, who springs from the marriage between the human soul and the world-spirit—but it escapes him again and vanishes. Now there sounds from the depths a remarkable call. He is now like a mystic, stumbling for a time, one who has had a glimpse into the spiritual world and knows what it is like, but could not remain, and sees himself suddenly cast out again into the material world: he feels his soul to be the mother of what was born from the spiritual world, but what he has born sinks again into the spiritual world, and it is as if it were to call out to the soul itself:

‘Leave me here, in the gloomy Void,
Mother, not thus alone!’

as if the human soul had to follow into the realm which has once more disappeared. Faust retains nothing more than Helena's robe and veil. The man who goes deeper into the meaning of such things, knows what Goethe meant with the ‘robe and veil;’ it is so exactly what remains when one has once peeped into the spiritual world and has then had to withdraw. There remains with one what is nothing else but the abstraction, the ideas, which stretch from epoch to epoch—nothing else but robe and veil of spiritual powers which endure from age to age.

So the mystic is again thrust out for a time and confined to his thoughts, like the intelligent historian, with everywhere robe and veil which carry him from age to age. These ideas are not unfruitful; for him who is limited to the sense-world, they are very much of a necessity. For him, who has already a feeling and an experience of the spiritual world, they contain another importance. They stand out dry and abstract for the man who in any case is an abstractionist, but the man who has once been touched by the spiritual world—even if he grasps only these abstract ideas—is carried by them through the world into quite another age, in which he can again experience something of the effect of the powers throughout the great world.

Faust is transplanted again into the world he once before experienced at the Court. He sees again how the beings, in whose deeds man is only embedded, play the chief part. He sees again how supernatural threads are spun, and how the same power which he knows as Mephistopheles helps to spin them. So his life passes once more from the sense-world into the super-sense—he learns how powers worm themselves into our sense-world which we see out there in the world of nature, how Mephistopheles leads, as it were, the spirits behind the forces of nature on to the battlefield: ‘Hill-folk,’ he calls them. The powers behind the material world are represented as if the hills themselves bring their people into the war. But here is a life that stands on a subordinate plane. This participation of a world that lies below the realm of man, though directed by spiritual forces, is here plainly depicted. There follows, grandly shown, the description of the part played by the historical forces, which are real forces for the spiritual spectator. Out of the old armouries and storerooms where lie the old helmets, come those beings of whom the abstractionist would say they are ‘historical ideas’—of whom, however, he who can look into it knows that they live in the spiritual world. And we see how Faust in his higher state of consciousness is led to the great powers in history, we see these powers of history arise and being led into the field. Faust's consciousness is to be raised still higher. The whole world must appear to him spiritualized—all the events we see around us, which the ordinary abstractionist describes only with his understanding, for being limited to a physical brain, he imagines he has done everything when he describes the externals. But all this is connected, and is guided and directed by supernatural beings and forces.

When man's life is carried in this way to spiritual heights, he discovers the whole might of that which is to drag him down again into the material world. He gets to know in a remarkable manner him whom he has not quite got to know before. So it is now with Faust. He stands now at an important point in his inner development: he has to complete the journey: Mephistopheles is involved in everything he has seen up to now. He can be free from Mephistopheles—from those spiritual forces which bind man to the sense-world, and try to prevent his liberation—only when he accosts Mephistopheles as the Tempter. There where the world with its realms, nature and history with its spirituality confront Faust, he experiences something in which the man who understands these things can without difficulty recognize from what depths Goethe spoke. The ‘Tempter,’ who would drag man down when he has risen a certain way into the spiritual world, comes to man and tries to give him false feelings and sensations concerning what he sees in the supernatural world. The approach of the Tempter to man is presented in the grand manner. He is the same who came to the Christ and promised him all the kingdoms of the world and their glories.

Something like this happens to the man who has entered into the spiritual world. He is promised by the Tempter the world with all its glories.

What does this mean? Nothing else than that he may not believe that anything of this world could still belong to his narrow egoism. That all personality with its egoistic wishes and desires must be thrust away, that the ‘Tempter’ must be overcome, Goethe points out through Mephistopheles in such a way that it may be a touchstone for us of what his meaning is:

‘Yet now, with sober season to address thee,
Did nothing on our outside shell impress thee?
From this exceeding height thou saw'st unfurled
The glory of the Kingdoms of the World.’

(Matt. 4.)

One might say that Goethe points out with these words, more than clearly enough for those who refuse to understand, what he really intends, in order to represent also this important stage in the spiritual growth of man. Then Faust succeeds in so far overcoming the egoism of persona! wish and desire, that he dedicates all his activity to that piece of land with which he has been enfeoffed. He does not desire possession of this land—he does not desire fame—nothing of all that—he wants only to devote himself to work for other people:

‘Stand on free soil among a people free!’

We must take these words to mean that personal egoism gradually departs from the human soul. For no one who has not overcome this personal egoism, can really reach the last stage, which Goethe still wants to depict. So he shows Faust at the point where the garments of human personal egoism fall away like scales, where Faust gives himself absolutely to the spiritual, where in fact all the frippery of fame and external honours in the world are nothing more to him. But one thing Faust has not even yet overcome. And again we see from a spiritual point of view deep, deep into Goethe's heart, as he now describes what happens next.

Faust has become a selfless man up to a point. He has learnt what it means to say: ‘The act is all, the glory is nothing.’ He has learnt to say: ‘I desire to be active. My activity must flow out into the world—I will have nothing as reward for this activity!’ But in one small incident it is revealed that his egoism has not completely disappeared. On his wide territories there stands an old cottage on rising ground, in which lives an old couple, Philemon and Baucis. In all things Faust's egoism has disappeared, except with regard to this cottage. Here there is a last remnant of egoism which speaks in his soul. What he could do with this rising ground! He could stand up there and survey at a glance the fruits of his labour—and rejoice at what he had accomplished! That is a last bit of egoism, the enjoyment in a physical survey. Gratification in a commanding material view, that remains to him still. He must get beyond. Nothing of desire and comfort, i.e., of direct surrender to the outer world, with which egoism is connected, may remain in his soul. And once more we see Faust in touch with spiritual forces. In the ‘Midnight’ scene, enter four Grey Women. They come up near to him. Three of them, Want, Guilt and Necessity cannot do anything to him, but now something emerges which belongs to the experiences of the Way of Initiation. Along the Way of Initiation there is a secret connection between all that a man's egoism can make him do and that attitude of soul which is expressed by the word ‘Care.’ In that man who is far enough to look selflessly into the spiritual world, there is no care. Care is the companion of egoisms. And as little as some can perhaps believe that when Care is present, egoism has not disappeared, so true is it that on the long, self-denying path into the spiritual world, egoism must completely vanish. If man steps into the spiritual world and brings with him into it any trace of egoism, Care comes and reveals itself as a disturbing power. Here we have something of the dangers of initiation. In the material world, the kindly powers of the spiritual world take care to see that the power of Care cannot thus come near human beings. But the moment they grow together with the spiritual world, and learn to know powers which are at play there, such things as Care become disturbing forces. Some things may have been overcome by means of the keys which lead into the spiritual world, but Care slips through all key-holes. To be sure, if man is far enough, and faces Care bravely, Care becomes a power that can remove from him this last remnant of egoism. Faust goes blind. Why? He goes blind because the power of the last bit of egoism remaining in him is cancelled by the power of Care. The last possibility of personal enjoyment is removed. It gets darker and darker all round. Now his soul feels the last remnant of egoism when he has ordered the cottage to be pulled down, from whose site the selfish pleasure of satisfaction in his work could have been derived.

‘But in my inmost spirit all is light!’

Now Faust's soul belongs to that world over which Care and all the disturbing elements which vex the body have no power, and he experiences what those about to be initiated into the spiritual world experience. He takes part as an outside observer, in events which he does not experience in the physical world, his own death and burial. He looks down from the spiritual world upon the physical world and upon all that happens to him as if it were another. The events concern now only those powers which are in the physical world.

It would take us far to explain how Goethe now makes the ‘Lemures’ appear, which consist only of sinews and bones, so that they have no soul; they represent man at the stage before he has received a soul. But Faust himself is carried into the spiritual world. We see Mephistopheles fighting a last battle for Faust's soul—a significant and remarkable battle. If one were to divide this battle up into its details one would see what a deep knowledge of the spiritual world Goethe had.

There lies the dying Faust. Mephistopheles fights for the soul. He knows that this soul can leave the body at several places. Here there is much to be learnt by those who read in one or other handbook how the soul leaves the body. Goethe is further. He knows that it is not always the same place, but that the soul's departure from the body in death depends entirely on the state of development of the person. He knows that the soul, while in the body, receives a shape corresponding to the body only because of the elastic power of love. Mephistopheles believes Faust's soul to be ready for the Kingdom of darkness. In that case it could have only the shape he describes as a ‘hideous worm.’ When a soul has given itself to its own powers, it can have only a shape expressing its virtues or vices. If Faust's soul were ripe for the Kingdom of darkness, its shape would have been as Mephistopheles thought. But now it is developed and is carried away, because its virtues are such as correspond to the spiritual world and spiritual worlds take possession of it.

Next we meet those people who are, so to speak, the connecting units between the physical and the spiritual world, who stand as initiates in the physical world and range with their spirit into the spiritual world: supernatural men of experience and observers—so they are introduced to us. Goethe tells in his poem that he has inscribed as ‘Symbolum’ how two voices resound out of the spiritual world:

‘Still call from beyond
The voices of spirits,
The voices of masters:
To exercise fail not
The powers of goodness.’

Here also Goethe is consistent with his knowledge. He represents the spirits which are not incarnate in the material world. But first he represents those to whom the name ‘Masters’ is often applied, who are incarnate in the material world. He represents them in the garb which was the handiest in his day, as ‘Pater Ecstaticus,’ ‘Pater Seraphicus,’ and ‘Pater Profundus.’ Concerning this he said to Eckermann: ‘In any case you will allow that the ending, where the rescued soul rises to heaven, was very difficult to do, and that I might have easily lost myself in vagueness with such supernatural, scarcely guessable things, unless I gave my poetic intentions a delimiting form and firmness by means of the sharply-outlined, ecclesiastical figures and ideas.’

Whoever heard here the lectures on ‘Christian Initiation’ will recognize again to what extent Goethe was initiated into those things.

Thus Faust's soul rises through the regions, through which those souls have passed which have grown accustomed to the spiritual world and are active in it, and assist in bringing other souls into it. And then we see how Goethe lays down, so to speak, his ‘credo’—that ‘credo’ which marks him as a member of that spiritual-scientific stream, which has also so often been spoken of here, especially in the lecture ‘Where and how does one find the Spirit’³ in which an example was given of how man ‘lives’ himself into the spiritual world. There was mentioned the ‘black Cross with the red roses.’ Powers are awakened in the soul when man yields himself to this ‘Cross of roses,’ which represents in the black cross the sinking down of the sense world and in the red roses the blossoming up of the spiritual world. It represents what the abstract words say:

‘And until thou this thing hast,
This death and birth,
Thou art but a sorry guest
On the dark earth.’

What man attains through spiritual understanding, through the power of the red roses, Goethe was well aware, and he confesses it: the red roses fall down from the spiritual world, as the immortal part of Faust is taken up. And so we see how Goethe really shows us the path of the human soul into the spiritual world.

Some things could be presented only sketchily. For there is something peculiar about this ‘Faust’ of Goethe: it becomes deeper and even deeper, the more one grows into it, and only then one learns what Goethe can become for humanity. One learns to recognize what he will one day become, if Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy will illuminate Goethe's esoteric poetry, where he speaks of the spiritual world from his own experiences. Goethe depicts realistically what he knows to be facts of the spiritual world. This second Part of Faust is a realistic Poem—closed of course to those who do not know that the spiritual worlds are realities.⁴ What we have are not ‘symbols,’ but only a poetic clothing up of quite realistic, albeit supernatural events, such as the soul experiences when it becomes one with the world that is its original home; when it feels itself possessed, not of knowledge which is only an abstraction, a growing together with sense observation or abstract understanding, but of knowledge which is a real fact of the spiritual world. Certainly one will for a long time yet be far from an understanding of Goethe's ‘Faust;’ for one will first have to learn the language of ‘Faust’ if one wants to get inside it. One can take up commentary after commentary: not only once are the words explained by otherwise quite clever people. As Wagner sees the ‘Homunculus’ sprouting in the retort, he says—(you can read in commentaries what his words are supposed to mean):

‘'Twill be! the mass is working clearer!
Conviction⁵ gathers, truer, nearer!’

I say it as wrongly as all those since Goethe have said, who make it mean that Wagner has the conviction that the Homunculus will come into being: ‘The conviction in Wagner is working clearer!’ And the explainers of ‘Faust’ imagine they can ladle out the whole of its depth with such trivialities! Certainly our age, which has also another word coined by Goethe in its mouth, viz. ‘superman,’ without grasping its deeper meaning, could not explain these words otherwise. Their true meaning, however, is this: that which is conceived in the physical world is a ‘conception’ (‘Zeugung ‘); that which is conceived here in the astral world is a ‘super-conception,’ (Uberzeugung—conviction). One has first to learn how to read Goethe, when like all great minds, he makes his own words. Then one will be able to measure the whole earnestness, out of which the Faust arose. Then one will, above all, not commit the triviality of understanding the final words of Faust to mean by ‘eternal-feminine,’ something which has to do with the feminine in the sense-world.

The ‘eternal-feminine’ is that power in the soul which lets itself be fertilized by the spiritual world, and thereby grows together in its clairvoyant and magical deeds with the spiritual world. What can be fertilized there is this ‘eternal-feminine’ in every human being, which draws him up to the spheres of the eternal; and Goethe has depicted in Faust this course of growth of the eternal feminine into spiritual worlds.

Look round in the physical world: we really see everything properly for the first time, when we see in it, not the true reality, but a symbol of eternity. This eternity is experienced by the soul when it passes the gates into the spiritual world. There it experiences what can be explained in matter-of-fact sense terms, if they are used in a quite special way. On this point Goethe has also expressed himself—and as a great warning for all who of set opinion insist in abstractions concerning something or other. In two successive poems Goethe has expressed, like a great exhortation to mankind, that when someone speaks of a thing in the spiritual world, he can express it in diametrically opposite views. In the first poem he says:

‘The eternal must persist through all:
For into nothing all must fall
If it insists in being.’

While he here gives utterance to the thought of his ‘eternal flux’ philosophy, he says immediately afterwards in the next poem:

‘No being can to nothing fall,
Eternity persists in all,
Rejoice in that thou art.’

While the opposite thoughts of the sense-world are used as the contrasted reflexions of the super-sense world, the latter cannot be described in terms of the former. Material words are always insufficient when used in a special sense.

So we see how Goethe, while representing the ‘indescribable’ from the most diverse sides, causes it to be done before the eyes of the spirit. What is ‘unattainable’ for the material world is within the reach of spiritual vision, if the soul schools itself in that part which can be developed by means of the powers which Spiritual Science can give it. It is not for nothing that Goethe makes that work in which he has exposed the most exquisite and richest of his experiences, ring forth in a ‘Chorus Mysticus,’ which of course must contain nothing trivial. For in this Chorus Mysticus he points out to us how that which is indescribable in material words is done, when the language of imagery is used: how the soul, by means of the eternal womanhood in it is drawn into the spiritual world.

‘All things transitory
But as symbols are sent:
Earth's insufficiency
There grows to Event:
The Indescribable,
Here it is done:
The Woman-Soul⁶ leadeth us
Upward and on!’

In such words could Goethe speak of the way to the spiritual world. In such words could he speak of the powers of the soul, which when developed, lead mankind step by step into the spiritual world.

• 1. See Cycle XIII, Mission of the Folk-Souls, by R. Steiner.
• 2. Dictionary: grows green. – Ed.
• 3. 15th October, 1908, Berlin.
• 4. See Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Scientific Elucidation of Goethe's Faust, Vols. I and II, in course of translation (1933).
• 5. Uberzeugung.
• 6. Ewig-Weibliche; the Eternal Feminine.

For a gradual acquisition of that science which we designate as spiritual science, it is necessary that we should have the good will of filling out the thoughts and thought-connections which are indicated almost in the form of a plan with real ideas relating to those things which can at first only be given in a more general outline. We say that the human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, Ego, etc. This is quite correct, to begin with, for it is necessary that we should orient ourselves with the aid of encompassing schematic ideas. But if we wish to continue in the acquisition of spiritual science, we must penetrate more accurately into everything which has thus been given in a schematic form. We already possess quite a considerable number of lecture-cycles, which are read particularly within the more restricted circle connected with our Society; but these cycles of lectures still contain relatively little of what should be known to humanity in a near future, at least to a certain number of people! This would be most desirable. To begin with, we say: We designate as man’s physical body his external appearance, which can be perceived through the physical senses and which can be observed with the aid of that science that is linked up with the intellect, with experiments and observations. We know that the etheric body lies at the foundation of the physical body. Let us, first of all, cast our spiritual eye upon these two members of human nature.

Spiritual science as such, needs to say least of all (of course, this is at first only apparently the case) about the physical body, for the physical body is the only thing which the ordinary science, dealing with the physical world, is willing to contemplate with the aid of its methods. But although the physical body may at first seem to be what natural science considers, it to be, its true significance and its position within the universe can only be recognised if the higher members of the human organisation are also borne in mind.

You will undoubtedly recollect that man’s physical body, in the form in which it envelops him here upon the. earth, could only arise during the Earth-epoch, but it received its first foundation during the ancient Saturn-epoch. During the Sun, Moon and Earth epochs, it then underwent a constant transformation. It was gradually transformed under the influence of the processes which were taking place: it was transformed through the fact that the etheric body was incorporated with it. When the physical body passed on from the Saturn epoch to a new epoch, it had to change, for it became permeated with the etheric body. And it also had to change when it became permeated with the astral body upon the Moon. Not only has the astral body been added to the physical body, but the physical body has been transformed through the fact that the etheric body penetrated into it, as it were, during the Sun-epoch and the astral body during the. Moon-epoch, whereas the Ego is gradually developing in every direction here, upon the Earth; of course, it develops first of all within the astral body, then within the etheric body, but then also within the physical body.

If we now pass on from the human being to the cosmos, we only need to remember what is contained in our lecture-cycles. We must remember, in this case, that just as the first foundation of the physical body has been made possible through the outpouring, as we may call it, of the Spirits of the Will or the Thrones, so the transformation during the Sun-epoch became possible through the Spirits of Wisdom, and the transformation during, the Moon-epoch through the Spirits of Movement. The transformation during the Earth-epoch, that is to say, the change entailed through the fact that an Ego now dwells within the physical body, has been made possible through the Spirits of Form, This is a most significant fact, which we must bear in mind. When we encounter man’s physical body upon the Earth, we must think of it as being endowed with an Ego, and since it is endowed with an Ego, we must bear in mind that it has received a certain form, the form which is most appropriate to it. During the Moon epoch, it has merely received the inner movement which was most adapted to it. The form which was most suited to it, is a gift of the Spirits of Form, and is in keeping with the fact that an Ego had to be Implanted in it.

We may thus say: Our earthly body, which has a physical form, has been formed in such a way as to become a bearer of the Ego. Together with the Ego, the Spirits of Form gave the human physical body the form which it now has and which is in keeping with the fact that it is the bearer of an Ego. The beings that belong to the other kingdoms of Nature, have received their forms later. If you read the more intimate descriptions of the Moon-epoch,¹ you will find that they describe all the other beings in such a manner that it is not possible to say that also these beings had their forms at that time. They are described with a certain mobility. Bear in mind, for instance, the description contained in my Occult Science.

Also the other kingdoms of Nature have received their stable forms through the Spirits of Form, during the Earth-epoch. Let us now contemplate the animal kingdom. Also the animal kingdom has its definite forms. It has acquired these forms only during the Earth. epoch. But think of the great difference between the forms of the animal kingdom and of the kingdom of man! If we cast our gaze over the surface of the earth, we may indeed find certain differences among men, but these differences belong to another field of study. We also come across certain differences in the external human form. All the interesting peoples which the West Europeans now lead into the field against Central Europe of course present a different aspect from the European populations! Differences can of course be perceived when we cast our gaze over the surface of the earth and study the form of various individual human beings. The colour of the skin must, for instance, be considered in connection with the bodily form. But if you compare the differentiations which exist in regard to the human being with the great differentiations which exist in regard to the various animal species, you will have to admit: The various species of animals differ far more from one another than the human beings. In comparison to the various animal species we can speak of an individual human species; in the human kingdom, however, we cannot find such a great difference as may be found, for instance, between a lion and a nightingale. If there would be such a great difference in the kingdom of man as that between a lion and a nightingale, we would not hear even such peculiar observations that it is not possible to notice the differences which exist among human beings. The fact to be borne in mind is that the animals show infinitely greater differences than the human being, within his own general human species.

Although the things which I have just now explained to you are undoubtedly right, they are only right within certain limits, if we consider them from the aspect of spiritual science. The following fact should be looked upon as a truth: In your thoughts and, in your observation, add the etheric body to man’s physical body and imagine that a certain experiment is to be made; in reality, of course, this experiment cannot be made. Imagine the following experiment and that you see it being enacted; imagine that the whole physical body of man can be separated from him, detached from him scientifically, piece by piece and that before we begin to detach the physical body from the human being we are in the position to invoke the Spirits of the higher hierarchies—to send an invocation to the Spirits of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. We would have to utter this invocation in such a way that its request would be granted, namely, that the Spirits of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai might withdraw from the human being and cease; to influence his etheric body. We would, therefore—we cannot say, excoriate—but we would have to take away from the human being everything pertaining to his physical body and then we would have to ask the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai to withdraw their influences, so that man’s etheric body may be left entirely to its own resources, and may no longer be influenced by anything else. For the etheric body is subjected to certain influences; it is inserted in the physical body and the physical body has its own solid form, to which the etheric body must adapt itself. If you take a very soft piece of rubber and put it into a glass, it will adapt itself to the form of the glass and will no longer maintain its own form. But if you take it out of the glass, it will bound back into its own form. In a similar way, the etheric body must adapt itself to the physical body, without a form of its own. Consequently, if we draw away the physical body, we eliminate the forces to which the etheric body had to adapt itself; however, it would not immediately take on its own form, owing to the fact that the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai still work upon it, but we have asked them to withdraw, so that the etheric body can now obey its own forces to the fullest extent. In that case, the etheric body would take on its own elasticity. And this would be visible; we would see the etheric body jumping out. And what would occur?—You would have before you the whole animal kingdom! The etheric body would split up into portions, and these would show in their fundamental types the forms of the whole animal kingdom. In other words: etherically, the human being carries about within him the whole animal kingdom, which is simply held together by the form of his physical body and by the activity of the Beings of the above-named hierarchies. It is unquestionably true that the human being bears within him, as a disposition, the whole animal kingdom. From this standpoint, the animal kingdom differs from man only through the fact that every animal-species has assumed a form of its own, which it has developed independently into a physical shape. Consequently, the animal kingdom is the expanded etheric body of man,

A strange fact should be borne in mind. At the turn of the 18th and of the 19th century, something special arose within the world-conception of Europe, and we may observe this, for instance, more in detail in the case of Oken. From the standpoint of his time, the scientist Oken could not as yet speak of etheric bodies; indeed, he was far from doing so. But in his books we may find the following peculiar statement: “The animal kingdom is the human being, expanded.” This means that in his fantasy he had caught, a glimpse of the truth. It rose up on his spiritual horizon at a time when the great ideas of the Central European world-conception had developed. Indeed, this truth even rose up on Schelling’s horizon, and this same statement can also be found in Schelling’s books. Those who were unable to penetrate into such a lofty idea, which could not, of course, be developed fully, those who were unable to penetrate into such a great idea, went through a terrible time. We should think of Oken in such a way, that the things which he could not as yet grasp clearly, nevertheless lived within his soul as a marvellous conception, so that he could feel the single parts of the human being really consist of animal forms. He even had the courage to express this, but this courage very much annoyed the learned Philistines. Just think that Oken conceived the following idea: What is the tongue?—Well, he said that the tongue is a cuttlefish. Of course, the things which I have just explained to you lay at the foundation of this statement ... but just imagine what the learned Philistines thought about it! If we wish to grasp the development of man’s spiritual life we must become broad-minded and we must realise that things which may apparently sound like nonsense may bear within them a great truth. Oken subdivided the human being as follows: The tongue is a cuttlefish, other organs are something else. After all, it was merely the exact repetition of a truth which existed in a very ancient conception of man and which brought into evidence the fundamental types, subdividing the human being in accordance with the four fundamental animal types: Lion, eagle, angel and calf.

Thus we may say: Things are not as easy as they appear to be, for in reality, the human being bears within his etheric body the whole animal kingdom. As a philosopher might express himself, he bears it within him as a disposition.

Now you should bear in mind the following fact: If the things which I have just now described to you would not take place, if in addition to the fact that the physical body holds together the whole animal kingdom, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai would not exercise their influence, then the process explained above would necessarily take place, when the human being lays aside the physical body and passes through the portal of death; namely, the etheric body would, in that case, jump out elastically into the world when the astral body and the Ego have abandoned it, and a whole etheric animal kingdom would rise out of the etheric body. But in reality, this does not take place; this animal kingdom does not rise out of the human being, for the etheric body detaches itself in an entirely different form; it detaches itself and becomes incorporated with the universal ether and interweaves with it.²

What lies before us in that case? The fact that the Beings of the hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai work upon our etheric body and do not allow it to reach the point of splitting up into the animal kingdom. What does really take place?—You see, I would like to describe these things by drawing in a comparison. Here upon the earth we human beings work. We build machines, for instance, machines made of wood or of iron. Wood and iron are our fundamental materials. We use them to construct machines. The way in which these materials are put together is our own work, but wood and even iron are raw materials which we take from the earth. We take them from a kingdom which lies below our human kingdom.

If you now imagine that the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai live above us, you will also realise that these Beings do not exist in the universe simply in order to have a perpetual holiday. They have their work, tasks which they must fulfil. What do they really do? They, too, must use a material for their work, just as we use wood and iron which we take from the earth, and they, too, will work upon this material. Our etheric bodies are the material used by the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. For the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, our etheric bodies have the same value that the wood and iron which we take from the earth have for us, when we use them to build machines. The Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai work upon our etheric bodies, and when we walk about upon the earth and harbour, as it were, the thought (if we have such thought at all!) that we carry about within us our etheric body, believing that we carry it about as something that belongs to us in the same way in which the lungs that we carry about within us belong to us—then the whole essence of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai is active around us and works out forms for the spiritual world, forms that are needed there, just as machines are needed here upon the earth. They work out what is needed in the spiritual world. What aids these spiritual beings in their work?

You see, throughout our life we think; we think, from the moment that we attain the capacity of thinking up to the moment of death. Our thinking consists therein that it weaves and lives in our etheric body. Yet, while we live within our physical body, we believe that only the things we mould in the shape of thoughts belong to us. But what we thus possess in the shape of thoughts, what we thus form and mould within our thoughts is, as it were, only the inner aspect of our whole thought-life. From outside, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai work upon our thoughts, particularly in regard to our etheric body. As human beings, it is not at all unnecessary that we should think. Our thoughts are necessary not only for the physical earth, but also for the cosmos. For what we transform within our etheric body through our thinking, is employed during our earthly life as a material which is used in accordance with higher standpoints. While we pass through the world as thinking human beings, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai work upon our thoughts, so that after our death something may arise that can be incorporated with the whole ether of the universe. When our astral body and our Ego lay aside our etheric body, they sew into the cosmos the wool of our etheric body, that has arisen essentially through our manner of thinking.

As human beings, we do not only live for ourselves; we also live for the whole universe. We know that Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan will follow our Earth. But all this must be prepared; it must be interwoven with the universe as forces. This entails work. It forms part of this work, for instance, that the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai carry it on in accordance with our thoughts. (Stupid thoughts are not the same kind of material as clever thoughts). Coarsely speaking, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai work upon these etheric machines in accordance with the material that we supply to them, and these “machines” then exist, in order that the evolution of the universe may continue. When our etheric body is handed over to the cosmos after our death, this kind of work is therefore handed over at the same time to the Beings of the three, above-mentioned hierarchies.

Let us now contemplate from a similar standpoint man’s astral body. We always contemplate things from different standpoints, so that we always obtain other connections with the surrounding kingdoms, and those who cannot read (an encompassing view of things is needed in order to be able to read) may discover many contradictions in our descriptions, but this is only due to the fact that they ignore the standpoints from which these things are viewed.

You see, our astral body is connected with the earthly surroundings in a similar way as our etheric body. From the standpoint just indicated, our etheric body is the whole ANIMAL KINGDOM. Our astral body is, instead, the whole VEGETABLE KINGDOM. In exactly the same way in which I spoke to you of the etheric body in connection with the animal kingdom, I would now have to speak to you of the astral body in connection with the vegetable kingdom. All the vegetable forms of our earth are contained in the astral body. And again, we find that if nothing else were to occur, if the Beings of the higher Hierarchies would not work upon our astral body, if during the time between death and a new birth, when we live backwards through our life, nothing would occur except the fact that the astral body is discarded, then the astral body would appear as the whole vegetable kingdom outside in the world. Indeed, this would even take on the form of a sphere, it would follow its own elasticity. The astral body would really take on the form of a sphere; but it cannot do this because during our life between birth and death the Spirits of Form have been working upon our astral body, also the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Wisdom, and even the Spirits of the Will. When after years or decades we have lived backwards through our earthly life and have thus gradually freed the astral body from its connection with earthly existence, then the astral body will contain the results of a work, results that the Spirits of Form, the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Wisdom and the Spirits of the Will require in order to incorporate something with the cosmos, namely, to incorporate with it, what they MUST incorporate with it. Of course, what thus becomes incorporated with the cosmos is to our own profit; for this must be contained in the cosmos. However, this becomes inwoven with the cosmos in a manner that differs from the process described above.

When we discard our etheric body, this becomes inwoven, I might say, with the universal ether of the cosmos. But what appears now, as a woof woven out of our astral body as a result of the work of the Spirits of Form, the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Wisdom and of the Thrones, cooperates with our Ego that is passing through its time between death and a new birth and contains forces which must be active, in order that we may once more enter a new incarnation. Many things are needed in order that we may enter a new incarnation! Many things, indeed! To-day, the ordinary science of the physical world really knows quite a lot about the structure of the skull and of the human brain; such a lot, that many people find it is too much to learn all these things! It is undoubtedly a lot. But suppose that all the knowledge which is acquired through external science were to be considered from a particular standpoint ... from the standpoint that the _skull containing that wonderful structure of the brain has actually arisen, that it could really be formed in its minutest details, whereas if all this had to be formed with the aid of our ordinary external science, very little indeed could be achieved!

Here we face a significant mystery, a mystery that obtuse men (the sort of men whom we can really designate as obtuse) think to cope with so easily by saying: “Well, the human being simply arises! In the course of the generations, it so happened that human bodies develop spontaneously within the bodies of mothers. This is quite spontaneous.” Indeed, the arguments adopted by such people can be grasped ... but let me show you, with the aid of a comparison, how clever they really are!

For instance, you may take for granted that here in Munich there are certain Beings able to perceive many things, but unable to perceive man, and thus unable to see his activities. It is quite possible, to imagine this! But those Beings who cannot see man, nor his activities, may, for instance, be able to see—a clock. They would, therefore, know that there are clocks and also how they are made. They would not, however, see the man who makes the clock; they would only see how a clock arises from its single parts. They would perhaps see the different kinds of pincers taking hold of the clock’s parts, but they would see them gripping, as it were, out of the air. What a conception would these Beings have of a clock? They would not say: “In Munich there are clock-makers”, but they would say: “Clock-makers do not exist; the clocks arise spontaneously, of their own accord, for we can see how they form themselves.” This is the manner of thinking adopted by people who take for granted that things that gradually develop in a physical way must arise quite spontaneously! However, everything that arises is the result of actions fulfilled by spiritual Beings belonging to the higher Hierarchies. Indeed, the human being does not arise spontaneously, merely through the interchanging influence of father and mother and through what develops within the mother’s body, but the whole cosmos participates in his development.

Particularly the external world, as far as its highest regions, cooperates in the formation of the human head. It participates less in what is attached to the head, and participates in a particular way in the development of the human head. In a not too distant future, even ordinary science will learn to think differently in embryology concerning all the organs and also concerning the human head. It will discover that the other organs depend very strongly upon hereditary qualities, whereas the formation of the head depends upon them only very slightly. The form of the head is simply pushed together after the formation of the other organs. The whole cosmos participates in the forming of the head and the influences of the cosmos penetrate into the mother’s body. Those who do not see these forces ... well, also a farmer does not see the forces that are active in a magnet, but this does not prove the non-existence of these forces. What exists in the human head, has been worked out, as it were, in connection with all that the human being has received from the Spirits of Form, the Spirits of Movement and the Thrones, with what he bears along within his Ego, carrying it over into the time between death and a new birth, as a mighty spherical form. What is thus elaborated is gigantic; it is a sphere and within this sphere everything is worked out.³.

Imagine a gigantic sphere, upon whose surface is engraved, as upon a globe, everything that must be worked into it in accordance with what the human being handed over, to begin with, to the universal cosmos through his etheric body, through the extract of his etheric body; this forms, as it were, something that is copied on to the surface of the sphere. We then work into it what should be engraved upon it in accordance with what we have brought along with us through the work done upon our astral body. And then comes the time—it begins with that moment designated by me as the world’s midnight hour—when the sphere gradually grows smaller and finally this sphere, upon which, the higher Spirits work, becomes quite small, it grows smaller and smaller, until it unites with the human germ conceived within the mother’s body. This, above all, gives rise to the form of the head. The gradual development of the form of the head is the result of centuries of work on the part of the higher Hierarchies.

Just imagine how man’s feelings in regard to his relationship with the world could be deepened if he would be aware of his position within the whole cosmic connections! The human being who carries his head upon his shoulders should learn to think in all humility, without any pride and arrogance, that human wisdom and all that may be found in it, contains very little indeed of what is required for the forming of the head bestowed upon the human being! Man bears within him everything that is contained in the cosmos. If we consider things from this standpoint, spiritual science acquires an immense value through, the fact that it becomes the point of departure for certain feelings, that may, indeed, endanger souls filled with pride and arrogance.

In my second Mystery Play I have alluded to this fact, in the scene where Capesius, conversing with Benedictus, feels the approach of truths telling him that the deeds of gods are needed in order to give rise to man. Truths of this kind may increase the vanity of many, who may at first be disposed to vanity. They may attribute enormous importance to themselves. Yet it would be far more reasonable to foster the feeling showing us how little of all that wisdom which gave rise to the human being really exists within our own consciousness! Of course, we may snare the opinion of those who say: “Of what use is it to know all these things? We can quite well do without this knowledge. Indeed, we can live quite comfortably without knowing, all these, things” ... Yet a great error is contained in the belief that we can quite well do without this knowledge! For, in reality, we cannot live without it. Indeed, at the present time we easily yield to the erroneous belief that we can lead quite a decent life without having a knowledge of the spiritual world; that is to say, that we can breakfast, etc., and do many things in between ... Undoubtedly, it is very easy to believe this at the present time; nevertheless, such a belief is not based upon truth. We should gradually be brought to the point of feeling that such beliefs are not based upon truth. For this reason, I mention a subject such as that of Planck. I mention Planck, that strange man, who lived for many years an extremely lonely life at Ulm and was not even offered a chair at the university of Tübingen, because nobody really understood his true value and significance; the significance of a man concerning whom obtuse persons would certainly say: “Towards the end of his life, he grew so nervous that he said all manner of things that sounded like megalomania.” Well, obtuse men may argue like that. But even someone who had not to endure the sufferings that Planck had to endure, would have grown nervous through the way in which his fellow men treated him, and he would also have uttered the words which may be found in Planck’s introduction to his “Philosophy of Nature and of Mankind”, the words of an ancient Roman: “Ungrateful country of mine! You shall not even have my bones!” I am quoting these words purposely; they were uttered in 1889, the year of Planck’s death, and they really convey exactly what we tried to explain just now.

The reality could be perceived by a man with idealistic conceptions, because the forces that develop within us when we are able to think in this manner, are, at the same time, the most practical thing in the world. The most practical thing is not at all as imagined by those who believe that they really are in touch with the most practical things in life; this can only be explained through the brutality with which they face life’s practical aspects. When I advance such examples, I only advance them in order to show you that all those human forces which are also needed in practical life, can give rise to clear thoughts filled with insight, only if the soul is fertilized by spiritual scientific truths.

Is it possible to-day that people actually believe that human life on earth is possible, without the slightest idea of spiritual scientific truths? Why do people believe such things?—Because they are so terribly short-sighted! If they were not so short-sighted, it would be possible to prove, even in an entirely external way, how mistaken are those who say: “Well, people simply believe that they need not concern themselves with a spiritual world. They are born without doing anything towards this, and they grow ...” Of course, some kind of education must be offered to man. Modern pedagogy is so extremely clever, that it sets up clever principles, reaching the gigantic heights of Forster’s pedagogy! And then we gradually become mature men, who concern themselves with the problem of what we should do, in order to give others something to eat and to drink.

Yet it was not always so within the human race. It is not so long ago that the present conditions arose, inducing men to believe that they can live upon the earth without possessing any spiritual knowledge. External proofs may be advanced, in support of this.

Let me advance one of these proofs. Probably, if we had time to spare (but here in Munich, people do not have much time), we might even come across a similar proof here in Munich. At the Museum of Art, in Hamburg we recently discovered a proof that may be advanced externally. It results from the following fact:

Let us bear in mind that great symbol at the beginning of the Old Testament: Adam and Eve’s Temptation, what is known to us as the Luciferic temptation. Let us think of this. When a modern painter paints this (his standpoint is quite an indifferent matter; it is all the same whether he is a realistic or an idealistic painter, an expressionist, impressionist, or futurist), he thinks that the reality can be conveyed best of all if he paints Adam and Eve in a more or less ugly way; between them, he will paint the Tree of Paradise and upon it the Serpent, with a real serpent’s head, as large as the Tree. Can this be termed realistic, in the true meaning of the word? I do not think so. Leaving aside the present assumption, it is impossible to believe that the archetypal mother Eve could have been so stupid as to be tempted by a real serpent. Imagine, a real serpent creeping through the green grass should have caught mother Eve! Even the present serpent can only be looked upon as a symbol of something else. Let us recall the thoughts that should really be connected with the Luciferic temptation. The serpent is Lucifer. It can only symbolize Lucifer. The fact that this being remained behind upon the Moon-stage of development, is connected with the Luciferic principle. It is therefore impossible to see Lucifer through physical eyes, for these have only developed upon the earth. Lucifer can only be perceived through the inner eye, and so he cannot resemble an earthly serpent that can be seen through our ordinary earthly eyes. Lucifer should be imagined as spiritual science is able to represent him. Imagine now that man carries upon him his head, as the most perfectly formed member of his body. Attached to it (it suffices if you study a skeleton) is the remaining organism; the spine is attached to the head. Everything that has, later on, developed physically, was formed in advance. If we go back into evolution, if we were to perceive Lucifer through our inner power of vision, we would see him in the form which he had upon the Moon, when he was preparing the earthly human head, a human head that was not so dense and solid as the present one, for it was inwardly mobile, manifold in its forms, and attached to it was a human spine, a spinal cord, that may be imagined in the form of a serpent’s body. Lucifer would, therefore, have to be painted with a countenance as expressive as possible, and attached to it, a serpent’s body, but one that resembles the archetypal human spine. This would be a kind of picture of Lucifer.

At the Museum in Hamburg there is a picture by Master Bertram representing a Story, of the Creation, and there the Paradise-symbol is represented in such a way that Lucifer is portrayed as described, exactly in accordance with spiritual science. In the 13th and 14th century, Master Bertram therefore painted Lucifer correctly, in a spiritual-scientific sense. This can be seen; it is a historical fact. We have frequently spoken of the ancient atavistic clairvoyance. What Master Bertram painted, shows that up to the 13th and 14th century it was possible to paint Lucifer correctly, in accordance with an ancient spiritual science. It can therefore be proved, it can be proved externally, that the human beings have become, so abandoned by the spirit as they are now, only a few centuries ago. This can be proved, and you will be able to discover such proofs.

In other words: What the obtuse people of to-day consider as the everlasting human nature ... the fact that they look out into the world through their eyes and then combine the things they see through their intellect, has become a human soul-quality only a few centuries ago. Before that time, man was aware of his connection with the spiritual world. This has faded. But we can learn to know that even in the 13th and 14th century people were still able to paint in such a way that this was in keeping with the ancient spiritual science. It is important to bear in mind such a fact. It shows us that the ancient spiritual science had to vanish for the sake of the development of human freedom, for in the 5th post-atlantean epoch arose something that has often been described: namely, the, consciousness-soul had to develop and consequently the old spiritual science had to recede. But it must be brought back again.

In regard to what constitutes the spirit of invention, the creative spirit, humanity still lives to-day upon the old inheritance in every sphere, upon the old inheritance that entered human evolution with the ancient spiritual science. When someone has a new idea to-day and invents something quite new, he does this because the ancient spiritual science still continues to be active. But in less than a hundred, in less than fifty years time, every kind of invention, every creative kind of thought shall have disappeared; it shall have disappeared even in the mechanical sphere, unless spiritual science influences humanity in a fruitful way. Spiritual science must begin to penetrate livingly into the development of the human race, for otherwise, the human race must grow barren.

In the sphere of art, this, fact is more or less evident to-day. In art it is strongly evident that the human beings are, as it were, abandoned by the spirit, seeing that they can only weave into their works of art what they find as a model, outside, in Nature; thus the inner fertilization on the part of the spirit is completely lacking.

These facts stand on one side. They show us how necessary it is for the human being to become aware of the fact that he is connected, as a whole human being, with Beings belonging to the higher kingdoms. We may think of people—some still exist to-day—who do not know that air exists. For them, space is empty. At least this fact does not reach their consciousness. After all, the physical body cannot be thought of without the environing air—for what would we be with our physical body without any air! We imagine that the physical body is closed up, because it is enveloped in its skin,—but here is the air outside the body: we breathe it in, and now it is inside us; we breathe it out, and then it is outside. Does not the air belong to the physical body in the same way as the muscles? Do you not have within you what is outside, and outside what is within? In the same way in which we are connected with the air in regard to our physical body, so we are connected, in regard to our soul-element, with the Beings that weave through the world as Spirits of Form, Spirits of Movement and Thrones; through our astral body we are united with the Beings who weave through the world as spiritual Hierarchies; they are incessantly active in us, just as the air is active within our physical body. If we know this, we have the right kind of consciousness of man’s being.

This is one aspect of the matter. But then there is still another aspect. Now I wish to awaken in you a conception of these things, by contemplating them from several aspects, as it is necessary to-day.

Read, for instance, (I might also indicate another example) Dostojevski’s “Karamasov Brothers”. Four characters appear, among others, in this book: the four sons of the old Karamasov, Ivan, Dmitri, Aljosha, Smerdiakov. It is very strange to see what an influence this novel of Dostojevski had, particularly in Europe. I would have to say many things if I wished to explain the whole way in which such things rise out of human life and pass through a soul such as that of Dostojevski where they develop into a work such as his “Brothers Karamasov”. Let me only say this: In spite of the greatest admiration which we may have for the penetrating psychological art (this is the name given to it by many modern people, because they know so little what psychology really is!), in spite of the penetrating insight of Dostojevski’s psychological art, also in spite of his fine and penetrating observation of life, those who have really reached the point of taking up spiritual-scientific conceptions not only in such a way as to say, man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, but so that they are filled with what may be experienced in connection with these members of human nature—those who strive to build up feelings in the way in which we endeavour to do it, will have an uncomfortable feeling when they read the frequently chaotic descriptions of the Karamasov brothers. For this book contains many things that may indeed be designated as fine observations of life, if we simply bear in mind an external, superficial observation of life ... for instance the fact that the eldest brother is the son of another mother and has an entirely different character than that of his two younger brothers; the fourth son is again the offspring of another mother (the old Karamasov is namely a thorough scoundrel!), whereas the third son has a most peculiar mother. One does not know if he is really the son of the old Karamasov ... But I do not intend to tell you the story of the book. Indeed, if we also bear in mind the aspect, who were the mothers, we may feel throughout: there is something behind all that! In fact, this is so, for a Central-European writer would not describe things in that way; he would describe things far more consciously and thus he would not bring into his description so many sub-conscious factors; as is the case with Dostojevski, he constructs more, and since he only brings into his book what he more or less knows, his book will not contain such a wealth of things as that of Dostojevski, who takes the things he writes from LIFE.

Life contains more than that which rises up in the consciousness of the human soul. Towards all these things we feel that in the case of Dostojevski we have before us an extremely chaotic mind, rendered chaotic through his epilepsy; but, in spite of this, many things passed through his entirely diseased soul, things which could pass through it, because human nature is, in our time, inclined, as it were, to reveal certain Things. We may then come to the following result: If we have acquired the right kind of feeling, the right kind of idea in regard to what is meant by physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, we shall find in the four Karamasov brothers four human beings who can only be understood in the right way if we say to ourselves: In one of them, we have before us a human being in whom the physical body is specially active; in the other one, a human being in whom the etheric body is particularly active; in the third one, a human being in whom the astral body is more active; and in the fourth one, a human being in whom the Ego is more active. It is indeed so: If you take the Karamasov brothers and study them from an inner aspect, you will be able to say that, in accordance with. the present cycle of human evolution, and in a case where everything is active in such a way that the poet is influenced and stimulated to describe things more from out his sub-consciousness, the various members of human nature are active so that in one brother one particular member has the upper hand, and in another one, another member; the four brothers therefore appear like the drawn-out image of humanity. In Dmitri we find that the Ego is preponderant; in Aljosha, the astral body; in Ivan, the etheric body; and in Smerdiakov, the physical body. Though at first this may seem strange, it is nevertheless so, from the standpoint of reality.

You see, here we have the strange case of a poet who produces chiefly from out his sub-conscious depths and even has a chaotic soul life owing to his epilepsy, but who is nevertheless pushed towards the reality and whose astral body, that is to say, his sub-consciousness, becomes connected with what weaves and lives in the world.

We may well believe that the experience of standing beneath the gallows and. being unexpectedly pardoned at the last minute (Dostojevski’s comrades have already been hung, while Dostojevski himself is facing the moment of being hung), is not an indifferent experience; indeed, such an experience awakens in a human soul altogether different feelings than those of a soul that has never passed through a similar experience. This is a fact that should be borne in mind. But all this shows us that at the present time, in particular, a soul of Dostojevski’s kind could be influenced by the real facts in such a manner that his soul felt induced to describe throughout his book, in a chaotic way, these four brothers, who possess the qualities just described, whom we can only understand if we know this and if we are able to feel it. In that case, we shall understand why the brother in whom the etheric body predominates and the one in whom the astral body predominates, must be the sons of a mother afflicted with hysterical fits. If we know this, the details in particular become wonderfully transparent. This reveals the tendency of our time within the sphere of a nation inclined to offer (I have already explained this to you), as it were, those blood qualities which must become united with the Central European qualities. We can grasp what is taking place, also in the case of men in whom these events are still inwoven unconsciously; but we can grasp this only if we understand spiritual science.

Even though it may seem stupid, let me nevertheless say that the world is deep, and that it is not such a simple matter to gain some knowledge in regard to it, nor to judge it; it is not so simple a matter as imagined by those who lead the usual kind of life. The human beings pass through life in a dream or in a state of intoxication. Yet great things are preparing and it is not so easy to attract people’s, attention to these things.

Through your Karma you belong to those who are gradually penetrating into these things; you have been listening to them for many years and have thus gradually become familiar with them, acquiring an idea of all that lies concealed beneath the surface of life. But in regard to outsiders:—we may sometimes allude to such things in their presence and the very people may be sitting there, who belong to the clever set and believe, above all, that the person who speaks in a spiritual-Scientific manner and mentions this or that thing to them, does not really know anything beyond what he is saying. They have not the slightest idea that this knowledge must be drawn out of an all-encompassing knowledge, one that can really be proved in every detail and that becomes interesting just when it can be substantiated through details.

That many things in human evolution must change, can be seen therein that I have put before you two facts: I have shown you, on the one hand, what is connected with the human being, but on the other hand, I have also shown you the way in which we should contemplate the events that are now taking place. If someone who knows nothing of microscopy looks through a microscope, he will see nothing whatever. In a similar way, nothing whatever can be discerned when we contemplate human experience. Nothing whatever can be discerned in the experiences of the East during the 19th century; nothing can be seen in a Dostojevski, who wrote the book, “The Brothers Karamasov”, a book that indicates a sub-earthly element. In the East, in the Russian East, people have become aware of this, for a certain attitude towards life has been designated, as “Karamasovshchina”. It is difficult to explain this word; it is a far more qualitative concept than, for instance, the word “Strizitum” (a word in Austrian dialect, indicating a loose, half rascally, half good-fellow attitude towards life). “Karamasovshchina” is a far more concrete thing. We may come across this in life itself and even in art, and in order to perceive what is taking place, it is easy to realise that when we contemplate things, it is necessary to have in our soul’s background a knowledge that can only come from spiritual science.

Even the external processes rising up before us at the present time in particular, reveal this necessity; if we only look upon life thoughtfully, they reveal the necessity to which I allude and which I illuminated from two aspects. For instance, a very distressing phenomenon of the present is the following one:—General opinions existed long before the war. Certain people were considered to be prominent in this or in that sphere. There was no reason to object to this because they really achieved extraordinary things in the meaning of modern civilisation. Then war broke out. These prominent people expressed their views, they wrote letters. It is almost incredible what nonsense these prominent men wrote! For instance, Krapotkin, who enjoyed a great reputation in England. But read the letters written by him at the beginning of the war! He was looked upon as a broad-minded free-thinker, yet how stupid were the letters he wrote!

These are weighty facts. Indeed, I might say: Particularly now that humanity is facing such a sudden and powerful situation, we can see how little their thoughts are capable of grasping something that does not, for once, break in upon mankind in accordance with an ordinary, easy programme. From their own standpoint, the ordinary Philistines are better off than others, for they judge things in accordance with their views. But how do these views generally arise? At the present time, people despise authority and have their own views! Yet their opinions are merely based upon the fact that they have forgotten where they have read them! These are the “individual opinions”, that are simply characterised through the fact that they have been read or heard somewhere. All these things show that particularly the so deeply incisive events of the present contain something that must become a distinctive mark of humanity: namely, the fact that many, many things in spiritual life must change completely; human beings must make up their mind not to pass through life in the same way as the materialists, who merely dream of the world ... Of course, they think that the others are dreaming, nevertheless it is THEY who really dream, for they have never really woken up properly. Spiritual life must indeed change, and this fact must penetrate into the consciousness of those who wish to become united in their heart with the true life-essence of the spiritual-scientific world-conception.

Earnest words had to be said at this meeting, simply because to-day things present such an aspect that every opportunity must be used which may, perhaps, not always be available. It is difficult to travel about, at present.

It is therefore necessary to discuss these earnest things. They are also connected with questions discussed on previous occasions, questions that may be considered in connection with those of to-day. I explained that our etheric body is not something that may be designated as the bearer of our thoughts; it does not simply evaporate: no, the etheric body does not evaporate ... it becomes inwoven with the world-ether. When, however, as is the case at present, hundreds and thousands of deaths prevent human beings from carrying their etheric bodies through several decades, as would be the case normally, when these etheric bodies are handed over to the spiritual world, then something arises which I have frequently described: They remain here, with that part of the etheric body which may still have been used, and this will be found ABOVE. But its INFLUENCE in the future will depend upon the constitution of the souls BELOW. Strength for a spiritual progress will in future be found by those souls below who say to themselves: Many men have passed through the sacrifice of death and if we grow conscious of the forces contained in what they leave behind, then a spiritual growth will be possible. Souls must be there who are open to the comprehension of the spiritual world. In that case, the forces existing through the death-sacrifices can become fruitful for the earth. Otherwise, they must fall a prey to Ahriman. It need not NECESSARILY arise that these forces become fruitful for the earth ... for this will depend either upon the greatest possible number of souls that are inclined to unite in their feelings with what has arisen spiritually through the death-sacrifices; it will depend upon the possibility of utilising this later on, or else it will depend upon whether this will fall a prey to Ahriman. Meditate this thought, for then it will acquire significance and you will be able to feel the words with which I once more wish to conclude my lecture:

Aus dem Mut der Kämpfer,
Aus dem Blut der Schlachten,
Aus dem Leid Verlassener,
Aus des Volkes Opfertaten:
Wird erwachsen Geistesfrucht,
Lenken Seelen geistbewusst
Ihren Sinn ins Geisterreich.

(TRANSLATION)

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the nation's deeds of sacrifice,
Shall spring forth a Spirit-fruit,
If souls, in spirit-consciousness,
Lead their heart and mind into the Spirit-realm.

• 1. See The Akasha Chronicals
• 2. Compare: Inner Being of Man and Life Between Death and a New Birth
• 3. “MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM”