The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Our time is not very inclined to build that bridge that must be built to the realm where the dead and the high spirits are; and our time, in many respects, my dear friends, one can even say it has a hatred, a truly hateful attitude towards the spiritual world. And it is incumbent on the spiritual scientist who wants to be a Christian, it is incumbent on the spiritual scientist to familiarize himself with the hostile forces of our spiritual scientific development, to pay a little attention to them, because the matter has really deep reasons. It has its reasons where the reasons are for all the forces that counteract true human progress today.

Isn't it truly wonderful – I have mentioned this often and I don't want to bore you today, but I must mention it at some point – isn't it truly wonderful that those who fight the hardest against that which wants to live in our Anthroposophical Society are often those who have emerged from this society themselves. We have witnessed the grotesque spectacle of what is alive in our Society being fought against, and the arguments used for this fight are taken from my writings! Everywhere else, people at least get their reasons from outside; here with us we experience the strange phenomenon that what is built on throwing filth at me — the expression is not exaggerated — is constantly being substantiated with quotations from my own writings. It is a phenomenon whose deeper reasons will have to be investigated, because they are connected with one another in many ways, my dear friends. There is a continuous line, a continuous current, from the quiet gossip that sometimes runs rampant in our society to the Ahrimanic attacks, but one must only grasp things by their right name; this is more necessary today, my dear friends, than at any other time.

Think – as I said, I don't want to bore you with this, but such things must be mentioned briefly – think: a short time ago, and following on from that, a series of other articles appeared that I have not read, by a man who was in our society for years, who went through everything in our society – in which the man in question wants to prove all kinds of contradictions in my works. The person in question knows very well what the situation is with these so-called contradictions; he is of course very well aware of all the nonsense he is asserting. But you can assert anything in the world if you want, especially if you find a community that believes in good faith; you can also refute such things. But what are the causes?

The same man who writes this very pompous article once published a small work with our publishing house, and after some time he again requested to publish another work with our publishing house. However, because he had used various things from my writings without authorization in this writing in an improper way, we could not exactly – since he said that the things in my writings are imperfect and he wanted to perfect them – we could not exactly publish this writing, and so we had to reject it. Today, if we had not rejected the writing, the man would still have been a good follower, despite always grumbling and grumbling. He does not tell the world that he now hates just because we could not publish the writing. But he now finds a whole edifice of all sorts of contradictions.

Such reasons, my dear friends, which are the real reasons, which are the most pernicious, selfish reasons, you will usually find behind the most shameful attacks.

Now, in addition to these disgraceful attacks, there is usually another phenomenon. There is a kind of person among us who does not turn their goodwill to those who are right, but to those who spread gossip, who do all kinds of wrong things, and who find that those who defend themselves against these things are terribly wrong. It is a very common phenomenon. Indeed, this phenomenon goes a step further, as things intensify. Some time ago, we were really quite badly insulted in our circle; although we were actually quite, quite reserved in our defense — we were not interested in this defense, because one has more important, more positive things to do — not the slightest thing was done from our side, but everything from the other side. But still – Dr. Steiner received a letter saying that she should do everything she can to help the people who throw things at us in this way, to meet them halfway and to help them in turn, to encourage them to live together with us in harmony. If the writers of such letters (and it is very often women who write them) then find that they are not obeyed to a T, they think: What despicable theosophists! They want to be called theosophists, and yet when they are insulted they cannot even find it in themselves to ask people for forgiveness!

Yes, you see, when I tell this to my dear friends, it seems grotesque; but that is really how these things are in the broadest sense. Because this attitude: to apply the most tremendous love and goodwill to sin, this attitude is an extraordinarily popular one, and one must stand in amazement before it again and again. These things are symptomatic of significance. And they are significant for the simple reason that the worst enemies of our cause will actually come from among those who take the weapons with which they wage a war of this kind from our own cause. And if these things are not properly appreciated, then nothing will come of it but that, as it happens so very often now, a spiritual movement that wants to do its best for the spiritual progress of humanity will, for some time, be made impossible.

I have often interwoven precisely this remark into my lectures; but this remark is not taken very seriously. And above all, one very often finds: That one harmonious mood should not be interrupted by such things.

But my dear friends, it is not I who am interrupting you, and I would certainly prefer it not to be necessary to interrupt the harmonious mood. But it is extremely important for the sake of the matter at hand that we consider this in the context of the great impulses that are to pass through our movement. For today's superficial humanity, it naturally means an enormous amount when opponents grow out of the circle of anthroposophists themselves. It is of course easier for outsiders to forge their credentials. For these things, one must be willing to develop an unprejudiced, absolutely unprejudiced judgment, and not develop unkindness – forgive the grotesque, paradoxical word – unkindness towards a person who, purely because because he has had a book rejected, trumpets all kinds of things out into the world, one must not be unkind to this person by keeping quiet about it, because that is the truth, and the truth must be told. And such truths underlie very many things which certainly harm society at first, but with society they harm the matter.

And when we consider how many Ahrimanic powers are waiting to place obstacles and hindrances in the way of our movement, then we will want to pay a little attention to what, despite having become bad enough, today still looks, I might say, like the beginning of a countermovement. It is the beginning. And this, in particular, is connected with the hatred and antipathy towards the rise of a spiritual movement. My dear friends, when it comes to certain phenomena, it is not true to keep repeating that these people are convinced of what they are saying. It is not true. If you trace this conviction back to its roots, they turn out as I have just explained in this specific case.

My dear friends! It is necessary to say these things because anyone who really looks into the spiritual life of the present and what is needed for it says to himself: It takes such an effort to overcome the obstacles that come from outside that there is truly no time to keep in mind what comes from within in the way I have indicated. But it will have to be considered.

Yes, my dear friends, the ways are not quite easy. If someone writes something in a magazine, no matter how well it is refuted, not much comes of it. And some of these things that have been written are so long since they could easily be condemned with a court action. But do you think that our movement would be served if we had to take part in 25 court cases? That is probably how many there would be. Then it would be easy to get a conviction.

In order to work with all our intensity on the impulses of our spiritual movement, it is necessary for those who want to be loyal to our movement to, above all, overcome the prejudices mentioned, which culminates in our not always turning our benevolence to the side that does something wrong; that those people are found to be the best members who go against us ourselves. Usually the people who act on this impulse are unaware of it, but I say it so that they will pay attention. The trivial gossip usually starts, then it ends somewhere, where someone can write, in a long, lying newspaper article, which is often only the last link in an avalanche that comes crashing down. The seed may be that someone could not keep his tongue, or out of his very ordinary selfishness found that someone should have done something that the person concerned had to refrain from doing for good reasons, and so on, and so on.

What matters most is that we rise above such prejudices and look at things in their truth, getting used to looking at things in their truth. Then we will also find ways and means to represent and carry things through in their truth, so to speak.

Please excuse me for linking this smaller reflection to the larger reflection after our time had already expired, but given the intensity and the outrageousness with which there is now a furor in private and journalistic life against what we do, it is necessary that at least the thing in which the reasons are to be found be pointed out.

And now I have, you must allow me, a few things to say about society, because I am compelled by all that has arisen in an increasingly serious way within society to communicate certain measures that have now become necessary and that must be understood. And I am convinced that those among our members who are serious about our cause will be the ones who best understand these measures.

Last time I spoke here, I already pointed out how necessary it is to look at the true motives of those attacks, which are now becoming more and more numerous. And I do not want to be misunderstood, my dear friends. You see, attacks that take the form of what are otherwise considered literary forms in the world, that make use of the means that are otherwise used in science, they may appear by the hundreds and thousands, but they will never do harm; they can be refuted objectively and should be refuted objectively; but I would not want to be misunderstood as meaning that I have anything against objective attacks, from whatever quarter they come. But these things are not at issue, my dear friends. Quite different things are at issue, and indeed things that are already beginning to cause our spiritual science to sink into gossip, through its connection with the Anthroposophical Society. At least we must keep an unbiased eye on such things.

You see, my dear friends: it is possible to spread spiritual science, anthroposophy, without an Anthroposophical Society; the Anthroposophical Society must have a content and meaning of its own, a meaning that a member of the Anthroposophical Society can also absorb, can to some extent identify with. Now, over the years, it has become apparent that within the Anthroposophical Society itself — partly due to its earlier affiliation with various members of the Theosophical Society, and partly for other reasons — all kinds of damage has arisen, serious and grave damage, and that precisely within this society, due to its peculiar nature, it is not possible to develop an unbiased, honest judgment about these things, despite me having pointed out these things many, many times. And if we need something in the Anthroposophical Society, insofar as it is to continue to exist, it is an unprejudiced, straightforward, true, unclouded judgment within this society; it is also necessary that things here are not taken differently, at least not worse than they are taken outside in the ordinary, decent world.

Let us just recall the case of Heindel-Vollrah, which I have already discussed publicly. What happened there? Everything connected with it is actually typical of what is possible in the Anthroposophical Society. One day, a Mr. Grasshoff turned up, dragged in by a member. Mr. Grasshoff listened to public and branch lectures and so on for many months. Of course, one cannot anticipate the future and turn away such a gentleman for reasons to which we may return later; one cannot simply turn away such a personality. Think of what would happen. You would then have to justify your judgment, which is impossible, because you cannot say to someone who is joining the Society: You cannot be admitted because later you will become – yes, I don't know how to put this – opposed to the Society and its teachings. You can't put that into words to anyone. You can't anticipate the future.

So this Mr. Grasshoff listens to the lectures for months, public and branch lectures; he visits the homes of members, borrows all kinds of written materials, copies them down, had a large package, one might say several packages with what was presented here, in part in the most intimate lectures, and traveled to America with it. There he made a book.

Before he left, he told me that he would write a book, but that he would write it properly. And so it happened that before he left, I gave him advice on everything except the title of the book. I couldn't tell him, “You will write the book as a bastard.” – excuse me for using the expression myself. For I myself coined the expression 'Rosicrucian World Conception'. So the man wrote a book that caused quite a stir in America. In the preface to this book, he explained that he had gained a lot from my lectures here; but when he had finished with these lectures, when he had heard everything he could hear, then, far away in Hungary, in the Transylvanian Alps, he was offered the opportunity by the higher powers of fate to visit an initiate who called him. And this mysterious initiate first gave him the deeper truths, which he then had to supplement with what he had heard. And then he “supplemented”; he wrote what he had copied here from members from private lectures that had not yet been published; so he “supplemented”; that was what he had received in the Transylvanian Alps. So it was what he had copied from the Zweig lectures and other lectures. The book was published in America.

Well, you can say: the book was published in America, the man is not particularly honest; but you have to accept it. But it didn't stop there. But a translation of this book by the American was published here in Germany by Hugo Vollrach as “Rosenkreuzerische Unterrichtsbriefe” (Rosicrucian Lessons). In this translation, it was said that the impure thing that was represented here first had to be purified in the Californian sun and should thus be presented here as purified Rosicrucian wisdom.

My dear friends! It is one thing that the Anthroposophical Society, formerly the Theosophical Society, had to be founded before something like this could happen at all. Because look for yourself in the decent world the possibility that something like this can happen outside the circle that does something like it is done within the Anthroposophical Society! I have repeatedly pointed this out: if the Anthroposophical Society is real, then this fact, this disgrace, must be made known; because one must know what one is actually dealing with, especially in the area that is so often identified with our cause.

Now I ask you: Isn't that man a kind of small case of what I just told you, [that man] who wrote a book “Who was Christ?”, also wrote all kinds of stuff in this book, and then wrote in the preface: I had hinted at some things, but he had to explain them first. But what he “explained” is from the cycles! Isn't the man who then sent this book to the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, where it had to be rejected, actually a little case of Heindl-Vollrath, who, from the moment when this book had to be legitimately returned to him, after having previously member of the society and as a member of the society has sought his goals, has now turned into an enemy – is this man worth much engagement with what he now puts forward in his foolish articles, sentences that seek to uncover apparent contradictions? The right thing to do is to point out the reality, the fact, where all the opposition comes from, as I have now presented to you, and to which I already pointed last time. But this man seems, despite the fact that he counts himself among the academically educated - he is, after all, an Imperial Court Councillor and Professor - despite the fact that he counts himself among the educated, he seems, since one can't achieve much with so-called theoretical refutations of spiritual science, cannot achieve much, he seems to be increasingly pursuing the goal that is now being pursued: to bring things into the false gossip that sometimes arises from the wildest fantasies. And how today's humanity is eager to read scandalous stories – whether they are lies or not, that is not the point – to let gossip and scandal have their effect, one should see through that; one should also see through the fact that today there are enough editors, of this or that journal, for whom it is much too inconvenient to get involved in any kind of objective refutation of spiritual science, but who, precisely from this side, want to unhinge spiritual science by publishing scandalous stories that are lies.

You see, it is an outrageous case that Bamler, who used to dangle around here in this branch, found sales opportunities for his articles. This man, who writes nothing but nonsense and lies, is now in danger of having his stuff spread, which is not only laughable but also spiteful. But what is the story behind this case of Bamler? Years ago, a Mr. Erich Bamler, who at the time lived in a small town in central Germany, wrote to Dr. Steiner that he was at a turning point in his soul and therefore wanted to turn to her. He did not know what he should actually do; if he should do this or that, or if he should somehow marry into a business, she could help him in this regard, and so on. Then the aforementioned Mr. Bamler appeared, after he had been informed that we were not there to help him marry into a business, then he appeared in the company. It was only recently that I was credibly informed that this man, under many pretexts, was determined to get a member, actually a female member, to marry into our business. Then, after the man, who had no idea of any declamatory art or the like, had once let loose a terrible-sounding declamation – I think it was “Kassandra” by Schiller – at a general meeting, to the horror of those who listened, it suddenly developed in that man the longing to become – yes, not to become, but to be – an artist. And one is always happy to support any endeavor; the man then went to Munich, and we tried to arrange for him to learn from this or that painter. But that hurt him. He knew nothing about painting, but the idea that he should learn something from painting was outrageous; he wanted to be a painter, and above all he wanted to be a genius. That was what he wanted above all. Well, all the things he wanted could not be achieved, and so the antipathy towards the Anthroposophical Society increased, which has not even managed to magically turn someone into a genius, to the point that it then erupted in that article. That, in turn, is what underlies the matter.

But what really matters is the right judgment of things, and without the right judgment developing in our membership, things cannot be managed in our society. Above all, it is actually necessary that things do not happen in our society that are of the following kind. I don't really want to talk about things from the immediate present that are very close at hand. But let us take something typical, because things really happen almost one after the other that are of a similar nature.

You see, years ago some people came to the Society and had two boys, two rather large boys; and among other things, they besieged me with letters asking me to take full charge of these two boys. I was to ensure that these boys become something very significant, that they develop in a way that is worthy of the anthroposophical cause. What people understood by that is another matter. Yes, suppose I had listened to all the fine speeches and pleas and wishes, which were always introduced and embellished with “dear master” after every third word — do you think I would have given in in this case, what would have become of it? What could have become of it? Now the boys could be seventeen to eighteen, fourteen years old, they could have become stubborn, it would have been easy for me to do so, since I cannot educate all children of anthroposophists, who must also remain under other influences. What would have happened if the boys had become stubborn? One would have said, of course: There we have the fruits of this anthroposophical education! People are corrupted by anthroposophy; they are ruined in body and soul by anthroposophy!

At the same time, I was confronted with another unreasonable demand: a picture was brought in, and I was told that I should somehow magically discover that this picture was a genuine Leonardo da Vinci. Now, it was clear by non-magical means that it was not a Leonardo da Vinci; but in any case, it was pointed out with a particular wink that if those millions, which today can be earned through a Leonardo da Vinci, were to come, then the building in Dornach — or I don't know what — would also receive a considerable sum of it.

You see there a few examples singled out, which could easily be multiplied by many, many more. But you see, not only do people like Max Seiling have a taste for the most incredible gossip, which basically has nothing to do with us, but through some members it is brought about to drag us into it, thus leading the whole thing onto a track that corresponds very well to many instincts of the present, and it seems that this is now starting from all sides; to start from all sides.

It is possible, my dear friends, that a member who, incidentally, turned out to have been dragged into the Society for years after being accepted at a special request, was also somehow society, that for years it basically always tried in a somewhat sophisticated way to undermine the ground, namely under my feet, and in a way that I will not describe further, but which does not represent anything particularly beautiful. This member became ill. This member now finds himself obliged to tell the most incredible things, which are purely invented. I would like to emphasize, my dear friends: for us, who are involved, in this case Dr. Steiner and I, none of this is significant when it is emphasized that it is a sick member, but for us, in this case, only the fact that the things are untrue from beginning to end, objectively false, is significant. That is what matters: the things that have sprung from the most wild and filthy imagination and that could have been invented, despite the fact that this member has recently had to admit that I have not spoken to her at all about anthroposophical matters since 1911, and before that only briefly about things that actually had very little to do with anthroposophical matters.

But, my dear friends, you may think about the matter itself as you like, but the important thing is that such purely invented, wildly invented, uncleanly invented things find editors today who accept them with open arms and with the will to destroy Anthroposophy; editors who can also be characterized at some point in the future. The latter fact is what matters. It is a matter that is as ridiculous on the one hand as the Goesch case is ridiculous, and on the other

hand as spiteful as the Goesch case is spiteful. It cannot be denied that these things are invented follies; but they are so ridiculously invented that sensible people immediately recognize the folly; people who are out to test the sensible and the nonsensible of a matter. All the things with the handshaking and the like, all the things that are present in the Goesch case, are on the one hand just ridiculous, and on the other hand just spiteful. But that is precisely what makes it so dangerous, so monstrously damaging to the anthroposophical cause. For the things are so ridiculous that they are likely to make the Society look ridiculous in the eyes of people who are malicious but reasonable, and to make people who are unreasonable look hateful. But in the case of people who, despite the great folly, have a basis for bringing society into scandal, especially the anthroposophical cause and myself into scandal.

These are things that do not stand alone. I have been saying for years that these things must come, that these things cannot fail to come. Because, my dear friends, one must see the inner connection between what must necessarily pulsate through our society and such things.

Do you believe that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, necessary for inner reasons, that I not only state the case for a matter everywhere, but also, as you can see from Zyklen, always state the arguments that can be brought against a matter from one point of view or another? In order to make progress in the humanities, one must have the opportunity to also have at hand that which belongs to free criticism. Therefore it is quite possible to quote from my books — which is now happening quite a lot — the material with which one can refute spiritual science, if one leaves out the material with which one can also prove it. Another method that is only used in our movement! Let us be clear about this: this is also something that is only used in our movement!

Spiritual science is something that goes to such depths that it is also connected with the depths of the human soul, and it is really no exaggeration when I say that among those who today associate more often in order to cultivate such a movement in general philanthropy, there are always potential enemies lurking. Of course, one can fight enmity, one can fight hidden hatred, but there is always the possibility that it will emerge at the right moment. Let us not deny it: Especially when one speaks esoterically to 120 people, there are 70 among them who have the potential for enmity, who have the potential for hatred. It is only a matter of time before the right occasion arises for them to transform themselves into open enemies. Unless we face these things squarely, such a society cannot endure. We must be clear about this.

And what is most damaging to our movement, my dear friends, is that so many things come to the fore that I can describe as sectarian. If you take what comes from me, you will be able to see from an unbiased judgment that there is nothing further from this spiritual scientific world view that I have come up with than anything sectarian. But just look at society in many ways, how great the tendency towards sectarianism is. Not to take a more obvious example, I would just like to mention the one that I like to mention again and again because it is extremely vivid. We once arrived at the Stettin train station for a lecture tour to Helsingfors. What do we see there? A little way from us, on the other side of the platform, a whole row of ladies with strange costumes and purple bishop's caps on their heads – they were the Anthroposophists who were taking the train to Helsinki. Yes, my dear friends, what is more obvious - in Helsingfors it was different, because the Helsingfors people were so terribly afraid when they got off the train that they could accommodate them somewhere where the idea of the fact that they belonged to the Helsingfors Anthroposophists; they were so taken up with this fear that they did not come to a judgment during the whole time – what is more obvious than to say: This belongs to Anthroposophy! This belongs to Anthroposophy, to go around so foolishly.

But the sectarianism, also in other things, is something that a gathering place can easily find in such a movement. But nothing should be more carefully kept out of such a movement than all sectarianism. It is not necessary, my dear friends, to see one's membership of the Society in such a way as to give the impression to the outside world that this Society consists entirely of oddballs and unhealthy natures. In the outside world, this judgment is often heard: This Society is one that believes in authority; this whole Society actually only listens to what Dr. Steiner says.

Now, there may be something similar in some other circles, but in general it can be said that if anything in this Anthroposophical Society may correspond to my will, then the opposite happens - even if it is often said, “That's what he wants, that's what he said, that he wants it.

For example: a lady or a gentleman - let's say a gentleman, out of politeness, although that is rarer - wants to travel to some cycle. She needs a reason to the outside world, to the man or to make herself important - she needs a reason. Instead of saying: I like it, it gives me pleasure, I want it, what do you say? One says: Doctor Steiner has given me the mission to travel to the cycle and so on, of course. These things do not happen in isolation. And there one has a very strange conception of this fact, my dear friends, one has the conception that when I am asked, “Should I travel to the cycle?” and I say, “Yes, what does it matter to me whether you travel to the cycle?” — “Do you have something against it?” – “Yes, I don't mind at all!” – “He is in complete agreement!” – It is one thing to love doing something, and then after a quarter of an hour it is translated as: “He said it should be done.” – This has been a very common occurrence.

But, my dear friends, it also happens very, very often that members come to seek advice on this or that matter and then do the opposite. That is their prerogative. Whether it is necessary, whether it makes sense, to then bother me with the question, that is another matter. But it is every member's prerogative not to follow this advice. Please do not misunderstand me. But they then say, when they do the opposite of what has been advised: He said I should do that!

It is a shame that one has to say these things; but now that the matter has progressed so far that there are actually numerous people <501> who tell the wildest fantasies about what is said to have been said or to have happened in private conversations, now it is necessary to speak of these things.

These private discussions with the members, my dear friends, which the privy councillor Max Seiling has now sharply criticized, although he has been seeking them for years, because he finds – despite the fact that, as I said, he sought them out himself – because he finds that the cycles should be better understood during the time when the private discussions with the members take place, these private discussions have not only taken up time, but also energy. Because if you are serious about what you have to say to a person, you need your strength to do so, even if sometimes you don't notice how the strength is used.

Things are developing in a very strange way. How I had to decide years ago, I would say under duress, to print the cycles in the form in which they are now printed. I resisted it with all my might. Why did the cycles have to be printed? Well, first of all, because the members insisted that they be printed. I explained that I couldn't review them. So each copy bears the inscription “According to a transcript not reviewed by the lecturer,” which Seiling criticizes again. But another reason was that, before they were printed, the transcripts – and sometimes what kind of things – passed from hand to hand and the most grotesque things wandered from member to member in the transcripts. We only need to remember that we once discovered a transcript in which it said that I had explained in a lecture cycle that prostitution was an institution of great initiates. It was in a transcript of a cycle from 1906. However, there was nothing that could be done about the principle of unauthorized copying and distribution of the cycles, so we had to take the distribution into our own hands in order to at least ensure that not the greatest nonsense circulated among the members and, of course, came to the public. That the cycles are not being preserved by the members in the appropriate way can be seen from the fact that almost anyone who wants to write something shameful about what is in the cycles can read them, that they can be bought from an antiquarian bookseller, and so on. All this points to certain underlying issues in the Anthroposophical Society. Overall, it provides a basis for those who are either unable or unwilling to engage seriously with anthroposophy or spiritual science, but who want to get rid of it. So now they can collect gossip at the gossip mills – of course, this includes men as well as women – which, especially within this society, is sometimes capable of inventing the most incredible things. These things, which young people's imaginations have invented and made up today, would never have occurred to a large proportion of the older people sitting here. The urge to deviate from the truth is, today, a very great one.

Well, you see, it is very unfortunate that when one is dealing with a society, the innocent within that society must suffer with the guilty. No one can regret this more than I. But I know that on the other hand, precisely those who are innocent, those who endeavor to keep spiritual science at its best, will understand what I now have to say. One must not wait until things have become an avalanche before tackling them; it is necessary to recognize this, especially with a movement such as ours. The avalanche initially consists of the small snowball up there. But as often as I pointed out the snowball, it went in one ear and out the other. Things first had to become avalanches. They have become avalanches in abundance and will become more and more avalanches.

A snowball, for example, is this, comparatively. For us, it is important to stick to the facts above all else. Telling facts is often done in the most peculiar ways by people today. Let's say A says something to B about C; he says this and that. I am merely schematizing, but I am actually recounting a specific fact that occurs over and over again. A says this and that to B about C. B now says to himself: From what A has said, he actually means that C is a bad guy. - That did not occur to A at all; but B now goes to C and says: Hey, A said you are a bad guy. Take this pattern, compare it with life, and you will see how often the greatest harm arises from the fact that a judgment that is passed is told as a fact; while it would be especially necessary in our movement to develop a sense of fact. Therefore, especially because private conversations, even those that did not take place, were misused in such a way, I am forced to take the following two drastic measures. And I ask that you do not relate one measure alone, because that would make it look wrong, but they necessarily belong together.

For the time being, I will be forced to eliminate all private conversations with members, so I will not be accepting anyone for a private conversation in the near future. In one place where it was announced, it has already led to people saying: Because of a few people, everyone has to suffer! - I can only say: Stick to those because of whom everyone has to suffer, and not to those who, in any case, have to suffer the most because of the matter and who are forced to take such measures. Do not turn what is right upside down in this area as well. We have also experienced this in Berlin. While a scandal was being made in Dornach by a few ladies, a lady wrote to Dr. Steiner saying that she should do everything she could to calm these ladies who had attacked her and to bring them back to the right path. In short, it was a blatant example of the fact that it is not the person who attacks who is held accountable, but the one who is attacked, that one's so-called philanthropy is directed towards the one who sins and not towards the one who has to suffer from the sin. Things are such that when you tell them to a person of straight thinking they actually sound incredible, and yet they are true and repeat themselves over and over again.

So it is necessary, my dear friends, that I no longer accept private interviews. Perhaps then, in a relatively short time, since a great deal of strength will be saved as a result, what is now being put in the most unfavorable light will be possible: that my older books will be published again. While people are well aware of why the older books could not be republished, since the funds had to be devoted to the Society, people are finding editors and journals today who write that I do not want my older books to be published because they contradict the newer books. And perhaps help will also come through this measure.

But the other measure, my dear friends, is this: that I release everyone from any obligation, insofar as they themselves want to not speak, not to speak - according to the truth - about what has been spoken in all private conversations. Insofar as each person wants to, they can tell the truth about it everywhere. And if it is not the truth, then one will find the means and ways to correct it in this very way – to tell the truth about what has ever been spoken in a private conversation!

There is no other way than to place the Anthroposophical Society in the full light of the public. For those who have a sincere esoteric will and an esoteric longing for development, I will find ways and means to find what is necessary despite this measure. Just give me a little time, and those who need esotericism will find it. But these two measures are absolutely necessary.

I know that those members who are serious about this movement will understand these measures and fully endorse them. And if one or the other should still take offense and say, “Why must the innocent suffer with the guilty?” Then I can only say: appeal to those who have made these measures necessary; that will be the only right way. I am just as sorry that these measures are necessary as anyone can be sorry; but one must also be able to carry out the painful, the sorrowful in the service of a higher necessity.

And in view of all the nonsense that has arisen from the private discussions, I see no other option than to stop these private discussions myself. And so that the world can know that these private discussions were always inviolable, it must also know that anyone can tell what happened in these private discussions, provided they tell the truth. If he tells the truth, no one will be offended by the things that have occurred.

My dear friends, spiritual science certainly has no need to fear true and serious attacks; it will always be able to stand up to these things. But with the gossip and scandal, with the dragging in of personal things, as they so easily arise from a society like this, one can endanger it indirectly, by actually not hitting the point at all, but by denigrating and slandering the persons with whom it is connected, and so forth.

Those who do not want to understand these things, who for example cannot grasp why the attacker should not be pampered in our society and why the attacked should not ask for forgiveness – which is really the opinion of some of them, they will of course be incorrigible; they will find that such measures, as I now have to take, are an attack on the first principle of the Anthroposophical Society and so on and so on. Oh, this first principle, with which so much nonsense is being done! Because you can subsume so much personal stuff under this principle, and you can cover so much hatred with the principle of universal love as perhaps with nothing else.

It was necessary, my dear friends, that we spoke these serious words; because these serious measures are necessary. And I must emphasize that, apart from the factual necessity, there is also the fact that, after I have been speaking for the walls for a long time in these matters, such measures have been taken that some will have to be felt, that attention is also drawn to the seriousness with which these matters must be approached. The mere word has not helped, so perhaps such measures must point out the seriousness and importance of the matter.

My dear friends!

I would like to combine the two lectures today and tomorrow into one unit, so that today we look up at certain ideas and facts of the spiritual world, which we then want to summarize tomorrow in a certain world view that is particularly important for the present time.

Perhaps it will already be understandable to some today that we are currently living in a time that, for all those who, in one form or another, are participating in and living through this time, means a time that demands the development of the soul in a way approaches the soul in such a way that this way cannot easily be compared with anything we know from before, whether it be through our own human experience or through anything else we have been able to take in. One could say many things. One could express through many symptoms and images what this very special thing about soul development consists of.

Let's start with an image. You know – either you have heard it or read about it in lectures or in cycles of lectures – that over the years in which we have spoken to each other in the sense of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I have often referred to the name Herman Grimm, to Herman Grimm as a spirit who, in the most eminent sense, has grown directly out of the development of German culture and has placed himself in this development of German culture and spirit. I can say, my dear friends, that when I spoke of Herman Grimm in the years up to 1914, it always seemed to me as if he were standing beside me spiritually, as if one could have had the thought: What does such a personality say, which - albeit in a completely different form than spiritual science makes possible - has participated intensively in German spiritual life? The feeling that such minds as Herman Grimm's — he died in 1901, at the age of 70 — such a feeling that such minds are standing beside you and quietly asking the question: What do I myself have to say about what is being brought forth from the spiritual life of humanity, be it in one form or another, and thus also in the sense of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? This feeling, we have not had it since 1914. That is significant. Today, my dear friends, there is no possibility, from the outside, to ask oneself: How would a personality like Herman Grimm behave in the context of our times and in relation to anything that is taking place in the development of the spirit in the sense of this time? Of course, Herman Grimm would be almost 90 years old if he were still alive, but if he were still alive today, one must imagine that, from the thoughts that such a personality could have, from the way he way of experiencing the present life of humanity, it would hardly be possible for such a personality, to gain a judgment, a position to that, which has gone on in these three years since 1914 over the development of humanity.

Now we can certainly ask ourselves the question differently from our point of view, we can ask ourselves the question like this: How does such a soul, after passing through the gate of death and having lived through almost twenty years in the spiritual world, look down on us and on what is happening here on earth? We come to the conclusion that it does not look down so uncomprehendingly as it actually should have done, considering how alien everything is to what such a personality has felt on earth.

It is not without reason, my dear friends, that I draw your attention to such a thought. We have thus hinted at a thought that, to a certain extent, cannot be completely real to us, cannot be completely real, a thought that asks: How understandingly or unintelligently would a personality like Herman Grimm face the present, the external present? We know very well that this thought has no reality, namely because the soul, when it passes through the gate of death, continues to develop in a completely different way – and that is the reality – in a completely different way than it would have developed if it had remained in the body for years. But to pose the question of how such a personality would face the external present today, to virtually present us with this unreal thought, the unreality of which we can be well aware of, is good material for meditation. Above all, such thoughts have great significance for our spiritual life, and it can be said that they will gain ever greater importance for our spiritual life. More and more, people will have to become accustomed to thinking that takes into account factors such as putting oneself in the place of such a thought: this is how it would have been if such a personality had remained on earth.

It will become more and more necessary for our thinking to become more agile through such thoughts than it unfortunately is in this day and age. For what is around us, my dear friends, what humanity is experiencing with such terror, what makes our feelings so different, is largely connected with the development of thoughts – or one could also say with the lack of development of thoughts in recent times. If I am to correctly supplement the thoughts expressed earlier, I would like to say that since 1914, when I think of Herman Grimm and his school of thought and world view, I feel something as I used to feel when I looked back centuries to a personality who was centuries before us, to a personality who had long since become historical. But, my dear friends, it will only gradually dawn on humanity that these years are now in reality a much longer time than they are in terms of the external, physical course. We have actually - it can be said that it is not an exaggeration - we have actually lived through centuries in these three years. But, my dear friends, we must not be afraid to add something else to the concept that we have acquired over the decades within our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, to the “we have lived through centuries”; we must not be afraid to add: in many, many respects, these times have not only been lived through, but in a certain higher sense they have also been slept through. What do we mean when we say that they have been slept through in a higher sense? These years contain so many possibilities for life and experience that for many souls these possibilities for life and experience pass by in much the same way as the events that take place around a person when he is asleep. They are there when he sleeps, but he does not perceive them.

I would like to speak to you today about some of the conditions of awakening in our time, of being awakened in our time, my dear friends, in these preliminary discussions. It will be necessary for humanity to see many things in a different light than it has been seen before. And so let us point out a basic fact, an important, important basic fact, which can bring our thinking in the direction, in the current, that we need to understand what is already preparing for many in this time. Let us look, my dear friends, at what is being said, thought, and expressed in words from various places around the world. From the outset, one must of course believe that when this or that is expressed in thoughts or in words, these words, these thoughts mean what – yes, I would like to say, what is found in the dictionary as the meaning of these thoughts, these words; one must believe this to be the case from the outset. But in many respects in our time this is not the case. And one should know that in our time it is not the case in many respects.

In our time, many things happen, and many highly significant things happen, that I would characterize as follows: Let us assume that two people come into a difference with each other, and we listen to the one person who is in difference with the other. He tells us: I came into difference with this person, I quarreled with him. We ask him why he has come into difference, why he is in conflict with the person in question. He answers us, “Yes, because this person has a bad character, because he has done this or that.” Of course, sometimes if you look into the facts, you may find something justified. If you are completely honest in looking into the facts today, you will very often not find something justified. The man says that the other man did this or that, or was such and such, and that is why he came into conflict with him. But why does he say that? Not because the other man is like that, but perhaps he says it for the same reason, because he needs to be reassured about the real reason why he came into conflict with him. What could this real reason be? This true reason can simply be that the soul life, the life of experience of this person who is telling us this, has developed in such a way that at a certain point in time it must discharge itself with a certain amount of hatred. Let us hold on to this, my dear friends, that this can simply be a primal fact of the soul of some human individualities. They grow up, they develop, and the soul develops in such a way that at a certain point in time it simply needs a certain amount of hatred. Just as a certain constitution, an abnormal constitution of the organism needs a fever, so a soul needs a discharge of a certain amount of hatred before itself, for the sake of what it has developed within itself. Because this certain amount of hatred is present in the soul, this soul mysteriously seeks someone on whom to discharge this hatred. But you can't say to yourself, without being frightened in a certain sense: I attack the person concerned because I have to discharge a certain amount of hatred. You have a sedative, a kind of anesthetic for the soul. This calming, this numbing of the soul occurs when one describes the other. The description may be true, the description may be false; but what it expresses is in any case not the real reason, but lies in the soul itself in the accumulated amount of hatred that must be discharged.

With this example, I wanted to show that anyone who is truly able to observe the world and makes an effort to do so can see today, wherever they look, how common it is to confuse cause and effect in our judgment of people. It is easy, my dear friends, to agree that in ordinary science, cause and effect are confused at every turn; but this confusion only occurs because in general human life there is a tendency to confuse cause and effect in the way described. Mankind, and I mean all of mankind, must learn to observe life and to live wisely. Without this observation of life, without this wisdom of life, my dear friends, which human beings must strive for, the complicated life that will come upon this earth cannot be lived through by mankind. For only through such striving will one come to feel with the necessary weight that which one needs to live. And in saying this, my dear friends, I may perhaps point out a certain fact that has occurred over the years of our anthroposophical endeavors within our previous considerations.

You can think back many years, a whole series of years, and you will remember that even in public lectures the question was quite often asked: How do repeated earthly lives relate to the increasing population of the earth? After all, the population of the earth is constantly increasing. If the same individuals keep reincarnating, how does this fact fit in with the increasing population of the earth? You will recall that I have given various reasons for understanding the apparent increase in the earth's population despite repeated lives on earth. But you may also remember that whenever this question came up, I always added a sentence to the other reasons I had given. I always added the sentence: “We shall wait, and perhaps the time will soon come when people will realize in a terrible way that the population of the earth will also be reduced in an extremely significant way by horrific events.” Of course, many will be able to remember these sentences. Many things could be remembered, but today I would like to remind you in particular that you will find in the cycle held in Vienna before the war, which dealt with life between death and new birth, how I tried to describe the general possibilities of the disease of social life across the globe. At the time, I even used the expression – it can be read in the cycle – that something like a social carcinoma is going through the world. The expression can be found printed in the cycle.

Such things, my dear friends, have been said to point out that much is going on around us that is as elusive to the ordinary consciousness as the tables and chairs of our bedroom are to us when we are asleep. And many, many passages in the lectures that have been given, they were given with the intention of touching souls, of touching hearts, to point out the utter seriousness of the forces that go through time in one direction or another. Because it does not help us, my dear friends, if we only try to gain, I would say in accessible concepts, some general ideas about the spiritual worlds. What we need, especially if these ideas that we gain are to be fruitfully integrated into our time, what we need is to acquire such concepts, such ideas from the experience of the spiritual world, that can intervene in reality in every area of life. But our present time is altogether poor, tremendously poor, in such concepts that can intervene in reality. And it is a concomitant of materialism, my dear friends, that the concepts that develop in the materialistic age have no power to intervene in reality in a directing, ordering, comprehending way. Man must learn to place himself in the world in a realistic way. This is only possible if spiritual science opens up an understanding for something without which understanding one knows nothing at all: for the relationship of man to the world.

If we are to take up the important things we have to say in this regard and bring them before our soul in the right way and with the utmost seriousness, we must start with three concepts that every religious mind today will inevitably see as the three most important concepts. We must start with the concept of the Father-God, with the concept of the Christ, and with the concept of the Spirit or Holy Spirit. Let us first consider today what spiritual science can say about the relationship of the human being to that which can be expressed by the three concepts of the Father God, the Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Today, we are indeed confronted with a world in which materialistic development has led to there being people who do not accept all these three ideas, the three concepts, I will not say, but do not experience them in their full seriousness, in their full depth. They will not be able to doubt, my dear friends, that many people today go through life without dealing with all their soul forces with these three concepts of Father-God, Christ, Holy Spirit.

What then does spiritual science have to say, based on what it can experience, about the just-mentioned lack in human souls, about this inability to deal with these three concepts? If you enter into the full meaning of our spiritual science, you will always be able to understand the following, because in what follows I would like to express a basic phenomenon for the soul's life in words that, I believe, express this basic phenomenon succinctly and precisely. I think that spiritual science can say from its point of view: the denial or misunderstanding of the Father-God is an illness; the denial or misunderstanding of the Christ is a misfortune of fate. Note the words carefully; I am using them in such a way that the matter is expressed very precisely. The denial or misjudgment of the Father-God is an illness; the denial or misjudgment of the Christ is an accident of fate for the soul; and the denial or misjudgment of the spirit is a blindness of the soul. I believe that anyone who combines the right approach with these three characteristics has much of what is needed to understand materialism in our time. I also believe that anyone who understands these three characteristics in the right sense has the key to understanding much, much more in our time.

Let us consider the first characteristic: the denial or misunderstanding of the Father-God is an illness. As an anthroposophically oriented spiritual scientist, I have to say this because, if the totality of the human being is organized in a healthy way according to the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of this being and the person does not physically, mentally or spiritually oppose themselves to allow their whole being to work healthily, then there is no possibility of not recognizing that which can be called the Father God. Every human being with a healthy organization, my dear friends, who does not allow prejudices to stand in his way – prejudices that have such an effect that everything organic no longer works properly – every human being, if he looks at the world in a healthy way and really applies his healthy spiritual power to this healthy view, comes to think of nature and the life of history as imbued with a Father-God. And the strange thing that offends today's materialists – the denial or misjudgment of the Father God – is not possible at all, except that something is not right in the human organization. So one can say: atheism is, under all circumstances, a real symptom of illness for spiritual science; something must be wrong in the human organization when atheism is present.

If people want to develop a relationship to human evolution, if they want to make sense of earthly development, then they have to be able to look at a certain point in time in this earthly development, when the mystery of Golgotha had to take place. But you can't say – just as you can say: that an atheist is actually more or less physically ill, one cannot say that anyone who does not find the Christ is ill. For finding the Christ is really something that is connected with a power to which the name 'grace' is fully applicable. The Christ must be found in such a way that He approaches the human being as an entity, so that the person can find His way to Him. Not to recognize God as such, to be an atheist, means — also in the physical sense — to be ill. But one can be healthy without finding the Christ. Therefore, not finding the Christ is not an illness like not finding God, but not finding the Christ is an misfortune of the soul. It is something that affects us, the failure to find Christ, that plunges the soul into misfortune. You can see this from the deeper meaning of the many discussions that have been held in our field for years: the soul needs the connection with Christ in order to find its way in the overall development of humanity. It was only until the Mystery of Golgotha that it was possible for the human soul to develop its entire life without coming into contact with the Christ. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ must permeate the human soul with His power, the Christ must connect with the human soul so that this human soul can find its way through the entire development of humanity. You can really find this within the development of spiritual life itself.

Just think of what a beautiful flowering of human spiritual life Greek culture was. People today have no real idea of what life was like for the ancient Greeks. And really, sometimes the only way to express one's admiration for Greek culture is to be negative. Spiritual science will first allow us to become positive again with regard to our admiration of Greek culture. Today, people take it for granted that they can read Sophocles or even Aeschylus, or perhaps even recite or act them. And so one is often asked: Is it possible to do anything with Aeschylus in terms of acting or reciting? It is possible if one has the right sense of Greek culture. If you have Aeschylus or even Sophocles as they exist today in modern languages as Aeschylus or Sophocles, then that is a shadow of the matter. Only the full, dense, reality-imbued concepts will be able to lie in the words again, when there will be [true] translations of Aeschylus or Sophocles or when the Greek words are to be understood. We must not forget that those whom we call intellectuals today, in the cultural life to which they go back in reality, only go back to Roman times. Our high school students may learn Greek, but they only learn Latin-Roman ideas. We have Roman law, Roman ideas in other areas of life as well. But Greece is actually a fairy-tale land. But it is deeply, deeply rooted in this Greekness, my dear friends, that we have been handed down the significant word of the Greek hero: Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows. Why? The soul concept of Aristotle answers that. No one has dealt so thoroughly with Aristotle's soul concept as the recently deceased excellent psychologist Franz Brentano. It can be said that spiritual research can agree with what Brentano discovered by philosophical means with regard to the soul and immortality concept of Aristotle, the Greek sage, for the reason that it is the Greek concept, but elevated to philosophy.

Aristotle was not initiated. The initiated Greeks knew something else about the immortality of the soul. But Aristotle was not initiated. He could only rise to that conception of the soul to which an uninitiated wise thinker of the Greeks could rise in the centuries before the entrance of the mystery of Golgotha. What is this conception of the soul and immortality? The ancient Greeks knew, they knew from an experience that people today no longer have, that everything they accomplish in the body as human beings is imbued with soul. The ancient Greeks did not speculate about whether their soul somehow lives, but they knew that when I move my hand, my soul moves with it. The ancient Greeks knew that the soul lives in everything they did, physically and mentally. But he had the idea that soul and body belong together internally. For him, it was a whole: soul and body. That is why Aristotle says: If they cut off one of your arms, then you are no longer a complete human being. If they cut off two of your arms, then you are even less so; if they take away your whole body, as death does, then you are no longer a complete human being. Aristotle speaks of human immortality, but he says, when man has gone through the gate of death, he is no longer a complete human being – he says this as a Greek – because he lacks the possibility of coming into contact with the environment in any way, which is only possible through the body. A person who has passed through the gateway of death is, for Aristotle, a maimed person. Although Aristotle still clings to the idea of immortality, within this immortality the soul lives in such a way that one is an incomplete human being. And that it can actually do nothing but continue this existence, I would say spiritually vegetatively, to reproduce, without coming into any contact with the environment. That is the concept of Aristotle, which could arise before the Mystery of Golgotha, when man was left to his own devices. And now think about what the concept of immortality would look like today if this had been propagated. Something new had to occur in human development to give the human soul the strength to come to the concept of immortality again: that is the Mystery of Golgotha. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, the power of Christ has permeated the evolution of the earth. But it must happen to people in a merciful way that the power of their soul coincides with the power of Christ. Otherwise, misfortune would befall them, and they would know nothing of the soul that has passed through the gate of death except that it is only an incomplete, mutilated human being.

These are only preliminary remarks, my dear friends, who want to explain the word, want to explain the characteristic: misjudgment or denial of the Christ is a misfortune of fate for the soul. You can be healthy, but you must be unhappy in soul if you do not find the Christ. People must be brought to make clear distinctions regarding the most important concepts if life is to go on and what the future will demand of people is to be achieved. But it is precisely such ideas that some people, especially those who are otherwise close to us, shy away from.

You see, for someone who is a humanities scholar, there is a theologian – such as Adolf Harnack, for example – in terms of the inner structure of thought, the Father God, but there is no actual Christ. Harnack does, of course, introduce the concept of Christ, but it is not organically connected with what he thinks. And what Harnack says about Christ are basically only the attributes of God the Father. The most important attributes Harnack presents about Christ and His nature are only attributes of God the Father. It will be a fundamental requirement of our time that humanity finds the way to the real Christ, that the confusion between Christ and God the Father ceases. Otherwise, some might believe that they have the Christ, when in fact they only have God the Father. We only need to remember that some Christian mystics of the Middle Ages claimed that they had found the Christ by delving into their souls. There is no reason for them to say that they have found the Christ – they have only found the Father God. One can find the Father God in this way, but not the Christ. Take the term that I initially developed as a characteristic. When our soul appears healthy for the organism, when it properly comprehends itself in the whole person, then it says “Ex Deo nascimur” – “I am born of God”. This saying “Ex Deo nascimur” should be nothing more than an expression of the complete health of human nature. So just living your life in the right way, living a completely healthy life, allows this life to culminate in the recognition of the Father God: “Ex Deo nascimur”.

The good fortune of being able to connect one's own soul with the power of Christ brings the gracious possibility to know oneself beyond death, not as a mutilated human being, but on the contrary, not only as a whole human being, but as a human being illuminated in the illuminated spiritual world. Therefore, “In Christo morimur” – “In Christ we die”.

But in order not to recognize the spirit, blindness of the soul is necessary; this is now more than ever characteristic of materialism. For if the soul really sees all that is around her, if she does not pass by in sleep but sees what is around her in an awakened state, she is therefore not blind but sees awakened, then she sees the spirit at work in all things. Therefore, it must be said that to fail to recognize or to deny the Spirit is blindness of the soul. I particularly want you to grasp this distinction: Not being able to see the mysterious working of the Spirit in world events when the soul is blind comes from not being able to see the Spirit. Being unhealthy in oneself, so that the soul does not fully experience itself, causes atheism, the non-recognition of the Father-God. The recognition of the Father-God therefore comes from the healthy inner being, the recognition of the spirit comes from the alert observation of the world facts and world events around us. The materialist is only a sleeper to the world facts and world events around us.

If what has just been said is plausible – and it is well-founded in spiritual science – then perhaps the question will arise: Yes, but why has there been no real possibility for so long in humanity to develop complete clarity precisely about these three ideas? Why is that so? Yes, you see, that has to do with what I would like to call the historical “misdeity” — “misdeity”. Three is the number: mis-deity, just “misdeity”. I had to coin a new word, and you will soon hear that it is quite good to coin a new word for this idea. In the future, we will have to coin many new words. People will coin many new words in general, because the old words are no longer sufficient for what we need to understand now. And for what we have to say to each other now, we take the word “abuse”, where three is taken from the number three.

You see, my dear friends, in the presentation that I have given in my “Theosophy”, I have pointed out from the most diverse sides in a clearly noticeable way that in order to understand the entire essence of man, it is necessary to consider the human and also the worldly trinity of body, soul and spirit - body, soul and spirit. If we go back to those times when there was only an atavistic, dream-like consciousness, but within this atavistic, dream-like consciousness there was an ancient view of reality, we find everywhere, especially in the wisdom of the mysteries, the threefold division of the world and man into body, soul and spirit. For neither the world nor man can be understood otherwise if one does not grasp the meaning of the threefoldness of body, soul and spirit.

Now something strange has occurred. The Council of Constantinople took place in 869; with it, the spirit was actually abolished. Until then, there was widespread awareness that one must distinguish between body, soul and spirit. Among the things established by the Council of Constantinople, the most important is that one should not assume a difference between soul and spirit, but in the soul one should only think of a thinking and a spiritual part. And from that time on, throughout the entire world-developmental currents of the Middle Ages, it became necessary that one no longer distinguished the human being into body, soul and spirit, but only into body and soul, whereby soul and spirit were conflated with each other. It was heretical to speak of the so-called “trichotomy” since the Council of Constantinople in 869, after which it was only permissible to distinguish the human body and the human soul as a thinking and spiritual being, but not the threefold nature, the trichotomy into body, soul and spirit. This is tremendously significant. Those who are familiar with medieval philosophy know how some medieval philosophers struggle with the fact that they still had the feeling from ancient times that the human being consists of three parts. But the misappropriation had occurred since the Council of Constantinople, and anyone who wanted to claim or philosophically teach the trichotomy of body-soul-spirit would have been declared a heretic.

We are experiencing the highly remarkable fact today that the gentlemen who pursue unconditional science, exactly according to the Council of Constantinople, divide man into body and soul, and have no idea at all about the division into soul and spirit, except at most as something that is only a verbal skirmish. Look at Wundt and other enlightened minds of the present day; they all have the division into body and soul. That is why these gentlemen are also “presuppositionless”, because they have only the Council of Constantinople as a presupposition. They just don't know that they have this presupposition, which is why they call this philosophy “presuppositionless science”.

In certain directions, order and, above all, strength and world understanding are not created if one does not penetrate the secret of “dreiung” again, if one does not overcome the “missdreiung” that has been going on for centuries through the world view, through the view of humanity in general. The deep significance of the division of the human being into body, soul and spirit must be recognized again. But then, in precisely this most important and essential area, one will find the possibility of speaking concretely, imbued with reality, and expressing the truth, whereas in this area, the present time speaks not in terms of reality but in abstract terms; it believes that it is not speaking abstractly but is presenting the greatest real ideals of humanity.

It was at the end of the nineteenth century, as you know, that three ideals of humanity resounded through Europe and as far as Asia: fraternity, freedom, equality. And you know that within the European discussion - which today is no longer a discussion, but is being written in blood - that within this discussion the three words keep coming up that are supposed to say: But let us ask the question that must be asked in relation to these three words, let us ask it from a spiritual scientific point of view: if we simply talk in general terms that man or humanity must strive for fraternity, freedom and equality, we are dealing with an abstraction, three abstractions that are still under the complete influence of “misdeity”. Why? Man is in reality a trinity: body, soul and spirit, and as body, soul and spirit man lives with other people, who are also body, soul and spirit, here on earth together. This gives rise to a relationship between those forces within people that experience each other here in the physical world, and that comes from the fact that a person is incarnated in a body, a relationship that arises from the fact that we interact with each other in our bodies.

If we are to formulate an ideal for the future, a social ideal based on the truth that man is incarnated in a body, then it must be the ideal of brotherhood. From what man is for man, because man is bodily, from that must grow brotherhood, my dear friends; that is a social ideal for the future. But there is no point in speaking of the ideal of freedom from the same point of view. That would be to speak in the abstract. Speaking of the ideal of freedom only makes sense if one knows that only the spiritual relationship between people can be free. Just as people can only develop a social relationship according to the ideal of brotherhood if they are incarnated in the body, so too can this striving for the ideal of freedom only be realized if one understands how one soul can live from another. People become free as souls, people can become free as souls just as they can be fraternal if they are incarnated in bodies. Equality is an ideal that only makes sense if it refers to man as spirit. For the way we are placed in the world means that we are specialized in having one body and one soul. In terms of our spirituality, we are equal. Therefore, when we have discarded the body and with it the specialization of the characteristics, the saying that aptly characterizes the event comes to mind: In death, all men are equal, because they all become spirits.

The three ideals are meaningless when they are mixed up in “misuse”; they only become meaningful when these three ideals will sound through humanity in such a way that one can recognize them.

Man is body, soul and spirit; he must become brotherly according to the body, free according to the soul, equal according to the spirit. You see, these three abstract, unreal words will only make sense when spiritual science can find this meaning for them.

But why were these words spoken at the end of the 18th century? You see, you say words – I gave you the example on a small scale earlier – you say words, you believe you have come to a difference [with someone]; in truth it was hatred that has been unleashed. I have shown you that. And now we have the application of this small example to the great world-historical event. And so these words were also spoken in historical time, not to express what one thought one could find in these words, but to compensate, as it were, for something else. In a sense unconsciously, the three words came historically from the human mouth as if in a play, out of ecstasy. Out of full reflection, the words should have been: Fraternity from the body, freedom from the soul, equality from the spirit. One speaks the words half consciously, not fully consciously, for only spiritual science will speak them fully consciously. One speaks the words half consciously, like a person in ecstasy, a visionary speaks the words. But of course no one will understand this who swears by the supposed weight of these three words today. What will he say? He will say: Are you saying that these words were spoken in ecstasy? They are something that is most imbued with self-confident human reason. That is the belief that is poured out over the whole fact. Because why? Because in the depths of the soul of the times, when these words were spoken, Ahriman was lurking; and Ahriman is the one from whom these words really emerged. That is why they rashly croak.

And Ahriman needed to unburden his soul. Just as a soul usually unloads hatred, so Ahriman sought to unload himself. And just as a soul that is discharging would say that so-and-so did this or that to me, Ahriman had above all to bring out of his soul a certain impulse towards the material. And this was expressed not by letting people say — imagine what would have been the fate of people if they had had to say: We must not oppose materialism, we must now forget that there is a soul and a spirit, we must ascribe everything to the material; not to the body fraternity, not to the soul liberty, not to the spirit equality, but we must ascribe everything to material man; we must finally wipe the slate clean with this trichotomy.

That did not work. Therefore, the three things had to be conjured up as an ideal. And because Ahriman was at work in these, they came out under ecstasy. When a person does something like this, he numbs himself, he is in ecstasy. When Ahriman raves in him, then he can believe that he is saying the wisest thing, that he has complete control over himself and is saying something quite natural, while in fact he is saying nothing else that is perfectly apt for outer development, but which in truth is the life of an Ahrimanic power in the human soul.

We will take up these matters again tomorrow, for they are truly important if we want to understand the present time. And tomorrow I will have many more important things to say, especially with regard to the present time.

But now, following these discussions, allow me to say something that I would rather not say, but must say. We have fulfilled our task today. But it is necessary because I am obliged to observe certain measures for the near future within the Anthroposophical Society, and I need to give some motivation for them.

You see, my dear friends, spiritual science is something that must — I have motivated you from a wide variety of perspectives, quite objectively — that must become part of human development. It is not something that has an end in itself, like the program points of other societies, which one can be passionate about, but something that must become established because humanity itself, if it understands itself correctly, demands spiritual science. Only a few people still know this objectivity over time to observe what really presents itself as a yearning in human souls. But from certain laws, which are already understandable through spiritual science itself, my dear friends, what I have indicated in the most diverse ways is being realized more and more. And those who have heard me speak often know that I have often pointed out that the forces that would like to extinguish the light of spiritual science are indeed already at work. These dear friends who have heard me speak often know this for certain. For those who observe things, they have not come as a surprise, but they must still be treated in the right way.

Is it not the case that spiritual science is something that has to become established? In a sense, the Anthroposophical Society should be an instrument for spiritual science. It is an instrument that is difficult to handle, that must be readily admitted. But my dear friends, we must also truly face the fact that the Anthroposophical Society must be taken extremely seriously. Otherwise it would be better to have very small groups of friends in different cities trying to organize public lectures, and spiritual science would be able to fulfill its current mission for humanity in this way. But if there is an Anthroposophical Society, then it must be something real. Now, from certain backgrounds, it is extremely difficult for this Anthroposophical Society to fulfill its ideals, but on the other hand, it must not be ignored that one must look at what is necessary in this Anthroposophical Society in order to advance it as a society - I am not talking about spiritual science now, but about the society.

You see, above all it is necessary to acquire a clear and healthy judgment within the Society, also for what exists in society, and about the way society works outwardly, and to shape one's feelings and one's judgment of the world in the sense of this judgment. I am not saying that I demand this of society, but society cannot be what it wants to be if it does not strive for it. I have nothing to demand of society, I emphasize that, but it cannot be what it should be and wants to be if it does not strive for this healthy judgment of the world and life, if this striving does not really take root in society.

Look, let me start from a specific point: there are things that, as they happen, are only possible within our Anthroposophical Society, that would not actually be possible outside. Take the most blatant case of Heindel-Vollrath. What I mean is this: a Mr. Grasshoff applied for admission to the Anthroposophical Society a few years ago. That is, he was one of those people who are dragged into it by other members, sometimes in a rather unjustified way. But he had an urgent desire to become a member of our society. He became one, attended all the lectures, perhaps even spent some time in Hamburg, took part in public and branch lectures, but he also borrowed all kinds of individual lectures from all kinds of members and diligently copied everything down. So that when he said one day that he wanted to go back to America, he not only had all the public lectures in his head, but also pretty much everything that had been presented in our cycles and branch lectures.

Now you may say: Why was the person accepted at all? Yes, my dear friends, you cannot anticipate the future in such a case. You cannot – I must ask for forgiveness for using a harsh word – you cannot reject someone and say: I am rejecting you because later on you will be a bastard! You cannot give prophecies as a reason for rejection. This is a dilemma that occurs in such a society, and it makes it necessary for every member of the society to develop correct judgment.

So Mr. Grasshoff went back to America one day, took all his things with him and said that he wanted to spread our spiritual science in America. The dependency was so great that he himself said, before he took leave and made the solemn promise, that the way he would represent spiritual science would be a thoroughly honest one. The matter went so far that he said at the time: How should one actually translate “Rosicrucian worldview” into English? Back then, it was very difficult to translate “Weltanschauung” into English, and we still discussed the “Rosicrucian World Conception”. Except for this word, it is from me, which is a word that had not been used before: “Rosicrucian World Conception”. So he packed this word into his suitcase and left.

What did he do? He sat down in America and wrote down in his own way what he had found in the lectures and in the printed books, changing it in his own way. But there is nothing in his books that he did not get here. But in the preface he wrote the following: He had learned many things in my lectures that he wanted to share in America, but it was not enough, and after he had listened to the lectures here - here with me, with us - he received a call from a wise master down there in Transylvania, in the Transylvanian Alps, who introduced him to the deeper secrets of the matter. Therefore, he would not only give what he had from me, but also what he had received from that wise master there in the Transylvanian Alps. But if you check what this wise master told him, it is what he copied here from the cycles, lectures and branch lectures. It is all worked into it. The book was published in America.

Well, that could still be tolerated, right? But it didn't stop there. This book was translated into German and published years ago in German translation as “Rosenkreuzerische Unterrichtsbriefe” under the aegis of Mr. Hugo Vollrath years ago, and on the bookplates and in the preface, you can read that some building blocks of this Rosicrucian worldview did indeed come to light here in Germany, but they were impure; they first had to be purified by the bright Californian sun. That is where Grasshoff, who later called himself Heindel, later lived. So not only was it possible in America, but the things were retranslated into German. That is possible. This is a scandal, my dear friends, and deserves to be made known. I have even mentioned it in public lectures. It has not become known. But if the Anthroposophical Society wants to fulfill its task, it is important that our cause be presented to the world in the right way; that it is not just said by me, but that one also gains the right attitude towards these things. Of course, it is wonderful and desirable to hear lectures and read cycles about spiritual things, but for that we do not need an Anthroposophical Society. The Anthroposophical Society must work and develop a field of activity.

Of course, where such things can develop, things move forward. What have we experienced recently? Recently we have seen that a man who for a long time truly appeared to be the most honest of the so-called followers of anthroposophy, was a member of the Anthroposophical Society who called himself true, he was so true that he even wrote a book that was published by the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House, and then he wrote a small booklet “Who was Christ?” In this booklet, he used some material that is also from the Cycles. Now, that might still be acceptable, but Dr. Steiner did not think it was quite right to introduce it. I did not take a stand on the matter, but Dr. Steiner did not think it was right – and she is the one who runs the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House – that if you take things from the cycles and then say: some hints have been given, but I must first explain them clearly. For these and other reasons, the booklet “Who Was Christ?” had to be rejected. Post hoc ergo propter hoc - after a thing, therefore because of a thing. This is often a disputed dictum, but I believe it is often a very correct dictum. What became of this man who had lived among us as a loyal anthroposophist and who had sought to find his own place for his work? This man became the most vehement and swollen opponent because his little book was not accepted by the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag. That is the only reason. All the foolish talk he has developed about alleged contradictions in “Psychische Studien” is just added. And one does not do justice to the matter if one believes that one has to go into this talk, but one has to know, in order to see the whole enormity, that a person who has last sought to publish his writing in the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag posophical publishing house, and thus had every intention, had his writing been accepted, to remain an anthroposophist as he had been before, that he would become a person producing defamatory writings if his writing were rejected. One has to - forgive me - found the Anthroposophical Society in order to experience such things, because otherwise this cannot actually happen with such intensity.

Now don't misunderstand me! Opposing writings must also appear, I will have no objection to that. Please do not take my words as if spiritual science should be afraid of opposing writings. They may appear, but they should be objective. But there is nothing objective here. This will become immediately apparent when we see what ground the whole matter is taking. Everywhere it is actually only seemingly a matter of all kinds of refutations, I might say, of contradictions that are pointed out; in truth, it is a matter of spreading gossip and scandal, most of which is even invented, but sometimes presented with great sophistication. So this is not said because of factual opposition, but because the aim is not to engage in a factual fight – that is far too uncomfortable – but because the aim is – by virtually driving the anthroposophical movement into scandal, into defamation, into slander, into inventing facts that have absolutely no connection with reality - to make this Anthroposophical Society impossible.

But so much can happen in the realm of this Anthroposophical Society! A man from a town in central Germany once wrote to Dr. Steiner: He is now at a particular point in his soul life, he does not know what to do next. He would like some advice, should he become involved in a business or should he seek his new soul path in some other way. Since he had been informed that it could not be our task to give advice on marrying into a family, he turned up one day. He made himself noticed by reciting Schiller's “Cassandra” with furious emphasis, although he had no idea of any art of recitation, and unleashing it on the unsuspecting members of the Anthroposophical Society. In this way he made himself felt in the Society; to individual members he made himself felt by, as I was credibly told, energetically exercising the will to marry the young girls of the Society.

Now, of course, such things happen in the course of the flow of anthroposophical life, but sometimes they take on even more forms. One day the good man was seized by the urge to be a genius, a painter genius. He was seized not by the urge to become a genius, but to be a genius, not by the urge to become a painter. If anyone expected him to become a painter, he took it as an insult.

He couldn't paint, couldn't do anything, but he wanted to be a painter. He moved to Munich, and we tried in every way – didn't we, to a certain extent anyone can become a painter – to get him teachers. He has been supported, but we just couldn't make him a genius. And this whole matter developed into what is now called the “Bamler case”, which is supposed to characterize the entire disgrace of the anthroposophical movement with invented stuff about exercises causing bruises on the skin and similar things. These articles are accepted with open arms, and not only that, by busy editors, by editors who are sometimes of such a nature that they make any old remark, and someone writes to them – I am only telling facts, a correct judgment can only be based on facts and I am accustomed to telling only facts —, someone wrote to the editor: Well, haven't you read the essay in your own magazine, which should have told you that this [illegible] is completely unjustified [illegible]? The editor replied to the person concerned: “Yes, do you think that I have time to read all the essays that are printed by me?”

Well, it is not about that when someone enters into a factual discussion, but rather that one wants to avoid it. For spiritual science has no need to fear factual discussions. One wants to collect all that is simply invented today from such things. For the things that are invented are indeed enough to make one want to climb up the walls – and are partly invented in the most obscene way.

I do not want to tell you obscenities today, which are already being printed, but I do want to give you a small sample of what is possible in this day and age; I will give you a sample that is sweet but no less ridiculous. I could come up with very thick chunks that would taste quite different, through which, in order to drive them into a scandal, anthroposophy is to be made impossible. I would like to give just a small sample. There is a nice / gap in the transcript] essay that contains things that are all made up. What matters is that they are made up. And what is not important is that attention is drawn to the fact that the personality who wrote this did so in a mentally ill state; that is not important, but that the things are objectively untrue. It says: Dr. Steiner often explained the Lazarus miracle to his students, the transformation of the human being through the Lazarus miracle. Dr. Steiner sent chocolate to a certain person who had to be taken to a sanatorium “to thicken the blood.” This chocolate had been chosen to bring about a transformation in the person in the sense of the Lazarus miracle.

There you have an example – as I said, I have chosen one that is still the most appetizing, but that does not make it any less likely for you to invent. But there are editors who write: “Even a healthy person could be put in an asylum because of such craziness.” - So you can imagine: someone thinks that Dr. Steiner wrote about the Lazarus miracle; Dr. Steiner wants to perform the Lazarus miracle by sending chocolate biscuits - now imagine during the war - to a sick woman in the sanatorium to send chocolate biscuits to thicken the blood so that the Lazarus miracle will take place. This will be printed today, and an editor can be found who says: “Through such follies, even a healthy person could end up in an insane asylum.”

Yes, it is ridiculous, but the very campaign that is starting today is characterized by the fact that on the one hand it is ridiculously ridiculous and on the other hand it is downright spiteful. For it has become possible for articles to appear in the “Psychische Studien” with comments by the editor that ridicule the anthroposophical movement and drive it into scandal. It has become possible for such an article to appear that one would have to experience first hand to believe that such things could appear. For against the prevailing attitude, everything that has been written in the scandal press so far does not come up. For to proceed in such a way would have been avoided until now – I will say, if not towards a man, then at least towards a woman, but that has also become possible.

And it has become possible that just people who cannot be rejected when they enter society – because the one who wrote this was, of course, a member of the Anthroposophical Society – because one cannot anticipate the future, one cannot reject them; it is possible for these things to happen. It is possible, my dear friends, that now, in the most incredible way, what really did not happen to my pleasure and at the request of the members, that the most incredible gossip and slander about the personal relationship between me and Dr. Steiner and the members – that all of this is being dragged into gossip and slander and – not to speak with my own words, but with the words of a friend who was at the Nuremberg lectures and heard the matter – into meanness. Not only did the Imperial Privy Councillor and Professor Max Seiling explain quite tastefully, despite the fact that he had come repeatedly over the years and did not even request brief private discussions, and now declares: the cycles would have a better style if they were corrected by me, instead of having private discussions with the members. Nevertheless, the imperial court councilor Professor Max Seiling knows very well how the cycles were wrested from me, because it was not my wish that they be published, but it was done out of two necessities: it was desired by the members, although I said there was no time to review them; on the other hand, the mischief that was done with the rewritten lectures. The rewriting went so far that one day we came across a lecture that had been rewritten. This transcript actually stated that I had said in a cycle that prostitution had been set up by the great initiates. This is just a sample of the things that were present in the private transcripts that were passed from hand to hand.

It was necessary that at least once the matter was taken in hand, that at least the follies that were passed from hand to hand in society in the form of private notes should cease. Nevertheless, the imperial court councilor Seiling had the nerve to say: if the private conversations had not taken place, then these lectures - while he was calculating and indicating prices - could have been corrected. All this is possible, other things are possible that I do not want to mention for the time being. All these things are possible, but it is precisely the private conversations that lead to things being invented, purely invented, and that are now beginning to be used because people do not want to fight objectively, that are now to be used to proceed in the most unobjective way against what the anthroposophical movement is.

What has been said over the years, and how have I emphasized: Those who know me know how opposed to everything sectarian what I have in mind is. And where is there more of a tendency towards it than in our society! I need only mention one external manifestation. We once wanted to travel to a course in Helsingfors. We arrived at the Stettin train station and found, walking on the other platform, a whole company of female members - I don't want to say anything against the female members, it could also be male members - so we saw a whole bunch of ladies with purple bishop's caps in incredible costumes heading for the Helsingfors train. When the ladies got off in Helsingfors: One should have seen the fright that the poor Helsingfors Anthroposophists got. They no longer had any sense of the aesthetics of these bishop's caps and so on, but only the sense of accommodating the ladies in such a way that at least the rest of the Helsingfors population would not notice that they belonged to the Helsingfors Anthroposophists.

But this is only an outward sign of the urge for sectarianism. Again and again, people on the outside have to hear: This is a society built on authority. They do everything that Dr. Steiner wants. I don't think there is a society where it is like ours, where if something is to happen according to my opinion, it certainly won't happen. I do not consider myself the master of the Society, so I cannot demand that what I want should happen; but I can demand one thing: that I should not be asked. But on a small scale it has been shown time and again: some lady or man, it can also be a gentleman, feels the need to justify to her husband or a friend why she is traveling on a cycle. What does she say? “Doctor Steiner said so.” — What do I care whether she goes to the cycle or not? — ‘Do you have anything against it?’ she asks me. — I can't have anything against it, that would be an infringement of human freedom, which I respect and value. But then one says: ‘Doctor Steiner said I should travel to the cycle.’

Well, these are the kinds of insinuations that make it necessary, after years of talking about these things, to take measures once, not to take them, but because they are necessary, even if they are as difficult for me as they are for some people, but to emphasize the seriousness that is necessary in these measures.

Firstly, I now have to stop having private conversations with members for the time being. I can no longer have private conversations with members. I can only say that I am as sorry as anyone can be, but you will have to turn to those who made this necessary. It was not I who made it necessary.

The second thing is – but I ask that the one not be told without the other, the one is not right without the other – the second thing is: I explain to everyone who has ever had a private conversation with me that they can tell everything that has been said in these private conversations or has otherwise occurred, that they can tell everything completely, as far as they themselves want. I urge no one not to tell anything, insofar as he himself wants, that has ever occurred in such conversations. Nothing need shun the light of day if it is truthfully communicated.

So first, the private conversations must stop; second, I authorize everyone, insofar as he himself wants, to tell everything that has ever been spoken or occurred in any private conversation. It remains to be seen whether, under the seriousness of these measures, one or the other may yet be achieved. For my part, I am completely convinced that those of our dear members who are seriously and with dignity seeking that which must now be sought through spiritual science within humanity not only understand these two measures, but also approve of them and find them necessary. For those who seriously want to advance esoterically – just give me a little time, and even without the private conversations I will find ways and means to ensure that no one is held back in their esoteric development; a fully valid substitute will be found, it just has to be created first.

I have only given you a small part of the characteristics of the campaign as it is now being launched, but something must be done, because it is not acceptable to be caught between personal spite and ridicule. After all, it could be said in Munich: One of the most serious attacks is yet to come, that of Goesch.

Yes, my dear friends, that can be said, even though Goesch's attack is typical of the stupid and ridiculous on the one hand, because he engages in magical effects of handshakes and the like, and on the other hand, just in mere spite.

Perhaps if we just have a little awareness / gap in the transcript] some things can be improved. I know that those who take the Anthroposophical Society and spiritual science seriously will understand me.

Today I would like to discuss certain research results that are suitable for understanding many a puzzling aspect of the time, because only by understanding it is it possible to act in such a way that our actions are integrated as part of all human activity in the evolution of the world. One must place human life in a period of time in a part of the great scope of life on earth.

Therefore, today I would like to discuss a development in the post-Atlantean period from a particular point of view. This winter in particular, many things have become clear to me, enabling me to say something important and characteristic about the time.

Yesterday it was shown how thinking has become unreal, no longer powerfully intervening in the present. Where does this come from? Because it is naturally necessary in the course of development. It is sometimes more important to do something right in a small circle than to give abstract thoughts and program points.

Let us consider the first post-Atlantean cultural period. Not even in the Middle Ages did people feel, think and want things as they do today. The state and mood of the soul change much more than one might think.

Let us now turn our spiritual gaze back to the primeval Indian period, which does not fall within the time when writing originated. Life was quite different then than it was later. From one point of view, you will already see how it was different from the other times. Today, a person grows old by turning 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years old. In the case of a child in the first years of life, the expressions of the soul are still entirely physical. Up to the ages of 7, 14, 21, from child to youth to maiden, the phenomena are parallel to the processes in the body and soul. The education of the soul must go hand in hand with the processes in the body. From a certain age onwards, the human being becomes independent of the body – when they feel like an adult.

Today, it would be considered an imposition to read Schiller's “Tell” and Goethe's “Iphigenia” at the age of 35; one would have read them as a young man. Learning more at a later age is an imposition. Today, writers start at the age of 20.

The soul then becomes independent of the body. This was quite different in the ancient Indian cultural period. There, until the age of fifty, the human being remained dependent on the physical and felt physically as a developing being. The change of the body is therefore so important. In those days, for example, it was known that a fifty-year-old had gone through five to six decades of what the body itself could give - for example, growth. Up to the age of 35, forces are integrated, the physical body increases. The spiritual life is contained in this growth. And when these forces break away, then, in healthy physicality, one feels that all material creation is based on the Father-God. The paternal principle, which rules and surges in everything, is felt to arise from one's own nature, from one's own bodily nature. Then, at the age of 35, the descent begins again.

Today, people do not experience this. In those days, however, people felt that their strength was no longer rising from the paternal. They became aware, now in a subdued consciousness, that their strength was reaching a standstill, but then people felt connected to the spiritual environment, right up to heaven. What later came down as Christ revealed himself as a cosmic principle.

Then, after the middle of life, one became aware of the ossification, the sclerotization of the body. In the states of sleep, the human being perceived the spirit, that which later became the Holy Spirit. Through this, people were witnesses here in life to the Father, Son and Spirit principle.

In the age of ancient Persia, this consciousness had already receded, and was only tangible until the 40s, from the 42nd to the 48th year. The experience of the spirit principle had already become weaker, and the independence of the spirit was already less emphasized. But the social life was quite different. Young people looked up to the old with reverence because they knew that they had experienced the Father, the Son and the Spirit within themselves. They also understood death earlier. In the Egyptian period, this experience only extended into the thirties, from the 35th to the 42nd year. After that, man no longer came to an inner experience of dependence on the spirit. Therefore, there is no longer any understanding of the spirit in the Chaldean-Egyptian period. But there was still a sense of what later became of the spirit of the surging, weaving, oscillating Christ-life.

In the Greco-Latin cultural period, it lasted until the 28th to 35th year (747 BC-1413 AD). Then one could only speak of the spirit in the mysteries, because normally one no longer felt it; only the Christ principle was felt. But this cosmic Christ principle ceased, only the Father principle could be experienced. But the people of this epoch still experienced the soul-spiritual within themselves, only they no longer experienced the outer spiritual.

Then it goes back to the 34th, then to the 33rd year. Then the possibility of knowing anything other than the physical was cut off. Then the great and powerful event occurred - in the fourth post-Atlantic period - that in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, who had previously been swaying up and down in the vicinity, that the Christ developed in the body of Jesus of Nazareth from the age of 30 to 33. Through this, a principle was gained for humanity that would otherwise have been lost. Mankind became ever younger, the Christ overcame death and introduced the son principle on Earth.

When one makes the discovery for the first time, how the year of the death of Christ coincides with the 33rd year of mankind, then one experiences a moment when one senses the very basis of the Mystery of Golgotha. That means an enormous amount. Christianity can only be deepened by deepening our understanding. We still know very little today, and it is becoming more and more important to know more and more about the mystery of Golgotha. All knowledge can only be a servant to help us grasp this mystery in the right way.

Then came our time, when a person is only capable of development up to the age of 27. Humanity is, in its declining age, 27 years old today. That is why spiritual science must appear. If we do not give our soul momentum, we will not get older than 27.

It took a great deal for me to bring this secret out of the underground. This immaturity - up to 27 - we therefore also find in older people - this immaturity continues to shine and have an effect. In Helsingfors, I have already described how the imperfect, the immature, manifests itself in abstract ideals, how youth speaks of this, which has all the characteristic features of immaturity. Woodrow Wilson's ideal of the freedom of nations is such an ideal. These are all beautiful ideas, but: Wilson writes a note that is intended to make peace, and leads his own country into war. You cannot rule the world with such ideals.

People lick their fingers when they have really nice ideas. But what good are they if they are not immersed in reality? - “The most capable should be in the right place.” - Such ideas, however beautiful they may be, are worth nothing if they are not immersed in reality. Eucken's philosophy is beautiful, but nowhere immersed in reality.

Today's man is only capable of development up to the age of 27. We must understand that in the future, the spiritual-seclely must be developed independently. In the sixth post-Atlantic period, man is only capable of development from the age of 14 to 21, then no longer. Then “dementia praecox” will occur, which is not pleasant. Only truth, which is immersed in reality, is suitable for life practice. How do people think today? They think in an almost unreal way. They fall in love with their concepts. Later they themselves will become rigid and will fight the spiritual terribly. In the past, there were councils as a spiritual remedy. Later, in the sixth post-Atlantic period, souls will also be cured by remedies. The “sound mind” that causes man to consist only of body will be instilled against the views of the spirit. Such a decline must come if today's humanity continues to sleep thoughtlessly. What this humanity needs are harsh truths; not just those in which one pleasantly indulges. Humanity needs to be helped. Humanity suffers from a fear of spiritual knowledge. Hence materialism, hence the helpless fear of spiritual science. For spiritual science leads you into responsibility for the spiritual development of humanity. Those who sleep through the times do not notice this. But this spiritual slumber weighs heavily on them. I will give you an example: an essay on the cultural-political movement in Austria in the 1890s – spirit in politics. The thoughts are clever, but not immersed in reality.

Without understanding today, one cannot act.

Second example: Russians are mystically inclined, they say today, and thus throw sand into their eyes out of inability. In truth, it is like this:

Mysticism – Middle Ages
Intellect – West
Russia – both together
(rather good = appropriately good
two = between – doubt)

One would like to have something other than tongue and words to indicate what time has so severely

Therefore, opposing forces are at work to extinguish the light of life in spiritual science. Contradictions such as the following are part of life today: mysticism is the highest knowledge – and: mysticism is foolish enthusiasm.

Spiritual science must speak the language of life, which is as deeply serious as life itself. It cannot be measured with the ordinary philistine language.

It is precisely because spiritual science is so intimately connected with the needs of the time, precisely for this reason, that now – when everything, I might say, is preparing itself for it, on the one hand, spiritual science is really beginning to be taken seriously here and there, where it can be taken seriously – that the opposing spiritual forces are setting about extinguishing the light of life of this spiritual science.

Do you see that it is necessary to apply completely new concepts and standards to cognition when approaching spiritual science from the usual, conventional cognition of today? People do not want to see this. And so this lamentable, infinitely foolish talk can arise, with all kinds of contradictions, which of course comes from spite, but not only from that, but above all from lack of understanding and from the will to lack of understanding. How can contradictions be pointed out in that which has emerged within spiritual science and its philosophical basis? Of course, anyone who does not take the standpoint of spiritual science but judges in a materialistic way can find such contradictions. But anyone who knows that spiritual science must be immersed in life must consider this immersion in life.

Take a specific case! Suppose someone says: Mysticism is the stream of knowledge through which a person attempts to unite his own inner being with the spiritual that permeates and interweaves the world. Now take my Philosophy of Freedom or the writing Truth and Science, where the proof is to be provided that through purified thinking man enters into connection with the web of the world; then I must say: these books in particular correspond completely to the definition of true mysticism. I must therefore say: I claim the expression “true mysticism” for my world view. Therefore, when I want to point out today's mysticism, am I not allowed to point out all the confused talk, [am I not allowed to] denounce this nonsense as mysticism? I must indeed denounce it, must reject it, must therefore have the pure concept of mysticism in mind on the one hand, on the other hand, because I have life in mind, I must have the nonsense in mind as well. If someone comes along who looks at one side and says: “There he says that mysticism is the ideal of knowledge”; and on the other side he says: “Mysticism is based on all kinds of ecstasy” – contradiction!

Such contradictions are part of life, and anyone who walks with life can always find these contradictions. But one must first succumb to abstractions if one wants to present such contradictions at all.

Or take another thing, my dear friends! Today, of course, it is easy to say: I have presented the significance of Haeckelism for the scientific knowledge of the world. Yes, my dear friends, just take the following. Suppose someone describes Goethe's activity as a theater director; he takes into account nothing but what Goethe did as a theater director; but he points out that he was not a theater director like a Mr. So-and-so so, but [that he] was Goethe; that as a theater director, he carried out his duties in such a way that, in the background, he was always completely Goethe as a theater director; then he can certainly describe Goethe's activity as a theater director. Let us assume that someone who has shown in “Philosophy of Freedom” and “Truth and Science” how scientific materialism is rejected, who has shown how in everything matter as such rests on the spirit, may afterwards also show how the spirit reveals itself to matter, reveals itself in the phenomena that Haeckel described. For the one who wrote about Haeckel in 1899 and presented the justified, /gap in the transcript] who in 1894 established the refutation of materialism, for whom the representation means something quite different than for the one who did not have “Truth and Science”, “Philosophy of Freedom” but rather took Haeckel's own point of view.

Now, one can understand the matter and will say: Of course, anyone who can appreciate Goethe as a whole may also portray Goethe as a theater director. The one who is a Holzbock – a journalist is named just like that, excuse me! – can portray Goethe as a theater director as if he were portraying Mr. So-and-so, and he cannot have more spirit in the portrayal. But the one who, in the complete spirit of Goethe, portrays Goethe as a theater director, that means something completely different. And so my characterization of Haeckel is something completely different, after the two books mentioned above [gap in the transcript], and one could assume [that it is not a materialist who is describing, but someone who describes the spiritual reality everywhere. ]. Therefore, anyone who is malicious can depict the contradictions. Goethe as a playwright, Goethe as the author of Faust, Goethe as theater director! Someone may say: Now this person used to think that Goethe is the author of Faust, and now he has revealed himself: He believes that Goethe is just a theater director! — Brought to its logical effect, what the folly is about the representation of Haeckelism is no different than if someone speaks like this.

But it is necessary, my dear friends, for the truth to come to light, [that] one approaches spiritual science with the assumption that this spiritual science must speak a different language than abstract, rational and therefore materialistic science, [even] if it sometimes behaves in a spiritual or spiritualistic way. Today, one can be a follower of spiritualism and, precisely for that reason, be a blatant materialist in one's concepts, because, as a spiritualist, one is trying to have the spirit in front of oneself in the material phenomenon. However, one does not arrive at the truth if one does not decide to recognize how spiritual science must speak the language of life and must therefore be as versatile as life, and must therefore speak a different language than the one that has been spoken so far. For it would not be true, my dear friends, if I were to tell you that spiritual science must intervene so deeply in the impulses of humanity; it would not be true if I did not have to emphasize to you at the same time: spiritual science must speak a language in such a way that it cannot be approached and criticized in the ordinary philistine language; it must be misunderstood. But one must have this prerequisite that one must misunderstand it as a result.

Of course, in this respect, because all the floodgates have been opened to it, one can criticize spitefulness; because when someone speaks from life, they themselves open all the floodgates to allow criticism to approach. You can also do it like Goesch, who takes everything I have said against one or the other and leaves out what I have said for one or the other; then you can [gap in transcript].

What must develop within that school of thought through which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science flows is, above all, a real sense of truth. Above all, one must have a real sense of truth in relation to events; one must never allow it to be reduced to adjusting any event to one's subjective needs, but one must describe events according to their objectivity. If someone has as little sense of truth as the Imperial Court Councillor Professor Max Seiling, he can, for example, write the sentence that is true, like all the other sentences by Professor Max Seiling are true, namely just as philistine and untrue: Well, yes, Dr. Steiner joined the Theosophical Society in order to represent the truths or the insights or the assertions of the Theosophical Society.

Of course, [Seiling] knows very well that this is an objective untruth. For what was the matter? I started giving lectures in Berlin in 1900, 1901, based on what had emerged from my own research; those lectures were then printed in excerpt in the book “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life”. At that time I had read nothing at all of the literature that the English Theosophical Society had produced, and I may confess to you that this literature was absolutely far too amateurish for me — if I am to express my personal opinion. The matter was presented from the direct progress of my research. I had read nothing. What happened? It happened that these lectures, as they were available in print at the time, were translated into the “Theosophical Review” without my involvement; some of them were translated. As a result, I was invited to join the Theosophical Society. I never deigned to say anything other than what came from my own research.

I didn't go after Haeckel either. Why shouldn't I have written that, since I wasn't connected to the Theosophical Society [gap in the transcript]. If you want to cure your cabbage with something sensible, why shouldn't that be done! Why shouldn't those who believe in cabbage be brought to their senses?

I was in London. Mead, who was still an acquaintance of Blavatsky's and who contributed a great deal to Theosophical literature in a scholarly way, told me at the time: “This book ‘Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life’ contains everything that is justified in literature; the rest is nothing!”

Why should I not have said to myself: Well then, so be it, let people accept it! — That they then became furious when they saw how things developed, and when they had taken the cabbage to that over-cabbage state with the Alcyones — that they then became furious and raving mad about the further assertion of where the gap in the transcript] and the theosophical worldview are established at the same time, you couldn't let that stand. But there was never any break in the continuous development of what I had presented in my lectures and books. Of course, I do not speak of the Hierarchies in Philosophy of Freedom and Truth and Science; that was not my task. Besides, from the very fact that I have presented the matter from the most diverse sides, I have the right to expect that the same terms will not be applied to me as to many others. I have written a “Theosophy”; but before that I wrote the “Philosophy of Freedom”, “Truth and Science”, “Goethe's World View”, and before that I had written the book, which was then called “World and Life Views in the 19th Century”, and in it I set down much of what you can still see today, which was later developed, which was only a germ at the time.

I have written a “Theosophy”; now what is contained in my world view is clearly indicated: “He is a theosophist!” This is just as clear as if someone had written a “chemistry” and one demanded of him that he had a chemical world view. I have written a book called “Theosophy” in which what is written in it is written from the point of view of Theosophy, just as one describes a certain area of the world. But the fact that someone should only have chemical thoughts when he has written a “chemistry” /gap in the transcript] means not building a system out of concepts, but judging from life; not setting up some new system, not founding some kind of sectarian movement, but grasping the spirituality of life in its various aspects in order to bring it to the world's consciousness, that is what matters: the truly concrete spirituality.

You see, therefore, that it is simply an objective untruth when Seiling claims today that I would somehow simply copy the things of the Theosophical Society after having copied Haeckelianism for a while. One must have the will to truth, and that can only come from the will to spirituality.

You can see, therefore, the sources from which what is asserting itself so spitefully today comes — in the addiction to insane inventions —, namely, to eliminate spiritual science in the form in which it actually arises out of the needs and longings of the time, because it cannot be fought. Fighting it is considered too inconvenient, because this spiritual science will emerge victoriously from this fight. Therefore, what is necessary now, when one wants to get involved in such things, must not be taken lightly. But I know that those of our dear friends who have a heart and mind for the seriousness of what is at stake in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will probably agree with the two measures I have mentioned to you. The first: In the future, these private gatherings, which initially arose from the center of society and led to the most incredible gossip, must be avoided.

I am sorry that I have to mention this here in Hamburg as well, although Hamburg is one of the cities that are more or less far removed from what is now occurring in such an untruthful manner. But all members need to know. One must not come with the objection that has just been raised in Munich, for example: “Everyone has to suffer because of these rioters.” – These rioters have been talked about long enough, something must be done that will permanently point out the seriousness of the situation and the sacredness of spiritual science for a long time.

And the other necessary measure is that I authorize everyone, insofar as they themselves want, to talk about what has ever occurred or been said in these gatherings. What spiritual science is does not need to shy away from the light of day. Spiritual science can be brought into the full light of day with all esotericism. It needs to shy away from nothing, absolutely nothing, in the full light of day.

Please forgive me, my dear friends, for having to point this out in all seriousness here in the presence of this society; but I have tried to make it clear that it is connected with higher, more far-reaching points of view points of view, for the reason that what is intended in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science creates out of a reality, creates out of the full reality, out of the developing reality. And it is necessary that we finally grasp this, that if we immerse ourselves in that which is currently to be overcome, we cannot arrive at a critique of it that not only speaks of something else, but must also speak of this other in a different way, must speak a completely new language. It is certainly a witty truth, my dear friends, when someone hears a person, when an Italian hears someone speak and says: “That's a language? That's nonsense, it contradicts every word I think!” The other person is speaking German. - It is very witty to say: “Every word contradicts the Italian.” You just have to learn the language first if you want to understand German when you are Italian.

If you do not want to learn the - I would like to say - novel language in which spiritual science has to appear, then it is impossible to come to an understanding of spiritual science.

My dear friends, it is absolutely necessary to grasp this quite deeply. This is one of the things that must be asserted again and again. Becoming friends with life, penetrating life, becoming related to life - that is what is necessary.

And in the face of the seriousness that today's seeker must have, one can still make very special discoveries about those people in the present who believe that they can criticize this seriousness today. I once had to say the following at a general assembly in Berlin: When I approached Nietzsche years ago, the truth as such came before my soul in Nietzsche. What does truth mean in life? That can become a mystery; the role of truth in life? And it becomes a bloody mystery; / gap in the transcript] one gives one's heart's blood to answer the question about the value of truth, the question that is posed in such a haunting way in Nietzsche's “Beyond Good and Evil”, even though Nietzsche, bleeding to death precisely because of this question, soon afterwards fell into madness. The question is posed in such a way that one must penetrate to the very depths of the sources of human knowledge. This is a question that one must solve with one's heart's blood.

Max Seiling finds, because I said at the time: “How can the problem arise according to the value of truth? One must solve this question with one's heart's blood. Especially with Nietzsche one can see it arise.

can see it happening.” Of course, one then comes to the important realization of our anthroposophically oriented dictum, ‘Wisdom lies only in truth,’ but that can initially be a problem to be solved with the heart's blood. Max Seiling, when people told him that I had the “tastelessness” to speak of the bleeding heart, he had to read it in the “Mitteilungen” to believe that I had the “tastelessness” to speak like that.

Today, we have to learn this and at the same time be convinced that Max Seiling von den Widersprüchen against the dictum had not yet spoken before his brochure was rejected, and only then came to speak as he then spoke after it had been rejected. It is important to see what flows from mere spite, from mere unwillingness to face the truth, not only from a general, but also from a deeper point of view.

Dear ones, when one insults the other, it is necessary that the one who insults be treated with the first principle of the Anthroposophical Society, namely lovingly and benevolently, and that the one who is attacked should ask for forgiveness. The attacker is a person one should feel sorry for, and the one who is attacked should think: 'How easy it is to go wrong!' Therefore, it is unconscionable of me – and there will be those who say so even now – that I point out Seiling's slanders and invective in this way and do not say: 'He rants in the most hateful way, but I find it appropriate that, above all, general philanthropy should prevail and say: Well, it is understandable that such fruits must also come into the world, one must be grateful that someone points out the contradictions, not merely needing to believe in authority. — Certainly, this judgment is also possible; but you will see how far we would get with it.

Now just a few remarks following on from what I said the other day, because I am almost afraid that some things could be misunderstood again. From a variety of symptoms, it is clear that some things could be misunderstood. Just remember that it must not be believed that I disapprove of or somehow complain about or even find it incomprehensible when articles appear that are opposed to spiritual science and take a factual point of view. Such articles cannot, of course, do any harm to the cause. Even what the privy councillor Max Seiling wrote about the alleged contradictions cannot harm the cause of spiritual science; for everyone can see from the literature what it is about. Therefore, when I speak of the damage to society, it cannot be the case that society could now have the task of dealing with what is factual from a social point of view; that is the concern of the individual. The individual who stands up for spiritual science – whether positively or polemically – will be able to do a great service to spiritual science as such. But spiritual science is most certainly not a matter for the Society as such in this context. I have to say this, otherwise it will seem ridiculous to say that meetings or discussions are being held on how to deal with the attacks on Dr. Steiner.

Of course anyone who wants to can write about the matter; that is their business. But it cannot be a matter for the Society. It can be a matter for individuals, but not for the Anthroposophical Society. So, for example, if special meetings have been held in one place and one of the main topics there was what should be done about such attacks, then that is of course completely off the mark. Such attacks, which are factual – even if they are not factual – want to be factual, must also be countered in writing, in the usual way that it generally happens. What is at issue now is that this method of trying to kill spiritual science by drawing people into a web of lies, slander and defamation is not used, but that spiritual science is made impossible because people find it too uncomfortable, or for other reasons, to engage with spiritual science themselves. They have to deal with it themselves. But someone who tells you the most stupid, fantastic orgies - you don't need to get involved in spiritual science for that. But with today's human disposition, it is something through which you can achieve a lot. But this is something that is quite connected - I say this fully consciously - with what has often been played out in the Anthroposophical Society, and also earlier in the Theosophical Society.

You see, after printing an article that is a pack of lies from beginning to end, an editor finds it appropriate to talk about how, I don't know, admirers or female disciples of Dr. Steiner everywhere emphasize that they consider him to be the Christ returned. This is not something that occurs in one place only, it occurs everywhere. Just yesterday it occurred to us again, in the following form: someone claimed that they could find witnesses that I had given a public lecture in a city from which it could be inferred that I had spoken of repeated embodiments of the Christ and pointed out that I myself was claiming such an embodiment.

But, my dear friends, do not believe that this does not already relate to certain murky things in the development of our society. Those friends who observe things with understanding will have found that from a certain point in time, which was very early on, I had begun to assert with complete determination, to emphasize again and again, that the Christ event is a unique one, and I emphasized it because, as I well knew, coteries had formed among us very early on that spread this, well, you can't even call it a fairy tale, but this nonsense, that it has penetrated everywhere, now it is appearing. Do you think I don't know those who in 1905, 1906, 1907 were already toying with all kinds of ideas of incarnation, who were spouting nonsense back then, and had connected with that what - I can't even repeat it because it's such trite stuff. Not only when the Alcyone swindle first appeared did I speak of the impossibility of repeated Christ incarnations, in order to counter what was going on here in this society. It became apparent very early on that a small group, small coteries, were forming, each of which wants to have been this or that, and of course, if one wants to be a Baptist, they need the other complementary piece, because they have to appear together again. Such John the Baptists, Apostles John - they just walked around like that, didn't they.

A lot of it also has to do with the fact that one has a selfish joy, a typically selfish joy, when one can say to someone: This is a secret! I am not allowed to tell you! This is only for the inner circle! - A lot of it has to do with all these things. These things have now been pushed far enough; these things have led to the gossip and scandal that has proliferated. I recently spoke not to counter this, which apparently or really deals with the facts, but about what threatens to let society sink into gossip and rumor, into slander and defamation, because spiritual science can be drawn into gossip and rumor as a result.

And what is a social matter is what has led to the fact that measures had to be taken. Do you think that articles that challenge one or the other sentence have led to such measures having to be taken now? No, they have not! But if you have powers of observation, you can see the intertwined paths everywhere, especially in what has been appearing for some time. As some of you may still remember, it all began with a mean article that appeared in the “Deutsche Tageszeitung” [German Daily Newspaper], which actually contained gossip that had been exaggerated in a very specific way. Since that time, no protest has ever been raised in the Anthroposophical Society against gossip and idle chatter, but it has been thought — as I generally emphasize, that as a rule the opposite of what I mean happens; I have always been misunderstood. As if I believed that this or that, which is apparently or really factually objected to spiritual science, should be dealt with by society. That can certainly be asserted by members, but that is a matter in itself. But we cannot continue the society if such swamp flowers arise as they are now; we cannot possibly do so. All kinds of things are sought after in one direction or another that have nothing to do with spiritual science, that depend on whether one has a society, so it happens that everyone in the society, no matter whether they represent the greatest nonsense, belongs to the society. So people say: This is the society that Dr. Steiner represents! He is responsible for all the nonsense that is carried out. And what a lot of cabbage it is! People go to the doctor and explain to him without any coercion: Yes, Dr. Steiner knows all this better than you do; he knows how to find the illnesses through the spirit.

It is obvious that these things, which accumulate and are always there in one form or another, make it impossible for society to continue in its present form. Apart from many other things that make it impossible, which in particular mean that there is hardly any kind of impudence to which we have not been exposed over time. Above all, everyone understands their membership in such a way that they can scold us according to their needs, preferably in writing or in some other way. We have not been spared any kind of unjustified impudence over time.

Now, these are not really impertinences, there is no need to get annoyed about them, you can accept them objectively, they do not harm you; but the things that then happen are factual. The person who writes an impertinence represents it in every respect; the impertinence becomes a lie, becomes a lie, and then it leads to gossip and slander. That is why it is so important to keep pointing out the factual judgment.

Do we have to overheat everything? Do we always have to put everything in a false light? Things on the physical plane are not so that they can be deified in every single link, in every single small phase. And can we not, when it comes to emphasizing as a social issue what has been said often and for the purpose of being said, so that what our society should be can really learn to distinguish itself from all the ghastly sectarian societies with which it is repeatedly and repeatedly confused. But what is happening?

Please take the whole stack of the Zyklen (a series of lectures) – I don't even want to mention the books – take the Zyklen, the lectures that were given, and please look up how much is in them about the purely physical question of nutrition: what one should eat or drink, what one should not eat or drink; please look up what is in them! Then ask how many members of the Anthroposophical Society are going around saying: Dr. Steiner said you shouldn't eat that, I know what, you shouldn't eat roots, that and that. - All sorts of things that make the Society look ridiculous! But it is arranged so that not only the Society is ridiculed, but I am always ridiculed with it; that is the technique that is followed.

It depends on the spirit in which things are done, because that is the spirit in which they are then driven. And I can observe this spirit from other symptoms. It is almost unbelievable when I see the kind of rubbish that is sent to me from members. If someone comes up with nonsense like cutting potatoes and placing them on warts to heal them, a member will ask whether this is right or not, or what should be done in such a case. This spirit also leads to telling members whether they should drink coffee, eat cheese, or consume mustard and paprika, and the like. I beg of you, take a look at the whole bunch of cycles and see if you can find any of these things there! So anyone who, even with the best of intentions, advocates these things as they are advocated and makes stories out of them that appear to be made in the name of the Society is falsifying what this is all about in the worst possible way.

Of course, I know that many, many, hopefully the majority of the members, feel the same way, but it is important to judge the things. If you have a society, you have to consider: everyone is a member of this society; but does that blind you to the qualities of the society? Is it necessary that it blinds you to the qualities of the society? Isn't it true that sometimes one has to deal with a person, one should also deal with him, one can perhaps do him some good by dealing with him. But does one then have to be blind to the person? Can't one walk alongside a person with seeing eyes? Does one have to justify oneself to oneself when one is friends with a person, that he is a high I or even a terribly great incarnation or the like?

I am talking about very specific things that have happened. Really, a lot would be kept back if one were to make the effort to judge. So it can happen, of course, as attitudes develop in our society, that I can't save myself whenever a certain personality, when I went on a trip, also bought a ticket and of course sat down in the compartment where I sat. That is something I can't prevent. I can't forbid any passenger to sit with me in the compartment, otherwise I would have to buy up all the tickets. — That is harmless; but if people from the Anthroposophical Society then come and, because the person in question always sits in my compartment and travels with me, they consider this person to be a highly initiated one, that is, an especially highly developed personality, then the damage of considering someone to be something begins. It is precisely this that matters, that one has first formed one's opinion.

I really don't always want to be 'betrayed' about these things, but the way these things are coming out of all 'clusters' now, how we really can't go on a journey and see in all places how far people go with the most sacred things. Of course, I never spoke in that place in the most distant of successive incarnations of Christ, but I least noticed that I myself was that incarnation, as in 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907 it was constantly whispered to the world, but not trumpeted, that is precisely the worst thing, that bears its fruits today.

But here we have a person who claims to have heard it, because he claims that he was sitting at the lecture and can also point to others who heard it too. So things go so far that you hear things that could never possibly have been said. But do you think, my dear friends, after the experiences I have had, that I would dare to be completely sure if someone were to say: Yes, there was someone there who took notes, who gave me the transcript, I can prove it! – Do you think I would claim that there can be no such transcript? I am even willing to believe, after all the nonsense that has been spread in the postscripts, that this too can be found in the postscripts.

Just as my dear friends, such nonsense, such ridiculous nonsense in such a hateful way has not really been written at all yet, as is now being written against us, so one must also say: the Anthroposophical Society had to be founded to bring such things to light, which would not actually be possible on any other ground. Nevertheless, many of those who engage in such things are, according to the state of their consciousness, fully convinced that it never occurred to them to ever participate in such things. They may not even know, those who do it.

It is only under such conditions that we are able to see the result that arises, among other things, from this. I will mention only the mildest: Dr. Steiner spoke about the Lazarus miracle, how the human being can be transformed. And then it is shown that he also wanted to perform the Lazarus miracle in a special case with a member. The member felt that the miracle should be performed on her. The way was that Dr. Steiner, when the person concerned was in a sanatorium, sent chocolate biscuits “to thicken the blood”. So, because chocolate biscuits were sent to the sanatorium, as the person concerned herself says, “to thicken the blood”.

Of course, Dr. Steiner only sent them to eat. If she had not walked past a pastry shop, but an orange and apple shop, she might have sent oranges or apples, but she sent chocolate biscuits.

But once the aspiration has arisen, my dear friends, to seriously tie in with the cultural movement of humanity in general, the society was generally not the right instrument for doing so. I once talked about the first attempts of this or that painter or sculptor and tried to show them. One would like it if one were interested in something that, even if it is only at the beginning, is hung in lecture halls for the sake of shame, and people walk past it; but all such endeavors were ignored. A boycott of everything that is not dilettantism is also an ingredient of the Anthroposophical Society, which weighs heavily on the soul.

On the other hand, if you came into the individual branches, the seven red “patches” over the black cross were everywhere, of course! Whether or not it was a work of art was not the point! Rather, the ugliest and most inartistic was that which was the deepest. And once when I was speaking in Dornach about how the big problem, if one can call it that, with Dürer's 'St. Jerome', but especially with 'Melancholy', lies in the use of chiaroscuro, in the entire spatial arrangement, and how I was trying to place that in the development, since we were able to show the picture as a slide at the time, and one could discuss this particular aspect of the Dürer picture, a voice suddenly arose that found this quite Botokudisch, of course, that I saw the important thing in the actually artistic problem: Can't you see anything deeper in it? He meant that one had to start explaining according to the pattern of how it had happened once – well, we had presented something and someone came and asked: Which person is Atma, which one is Buddhi, which one is spirit self? Everything should be an abstract symbol.

This, of course, leads to the factual, but I also had to mention it for the reason that these aberrations in the factual form the centerpiece; for on the other hand they lead into the abyss of that which presents itself as a love of the nebulous, which is then no longer far removed from all possible subjective deception and which is no longer far removed from objective untruth.

But today it is important not to confuse social issues – and these are very much social issues – with issues of spiritual science, which are something completely different. Otherwise, one could come up with the absurd idea, which someone has already come up with, of setting up a press committee to which anyone who wants to write something, in particular wants to write counterattacks or wants to make attacks, would have to submit. My dear friends, firstly, I believe that if such a committee had existed, Seiling would hardly have bothered to go and ask whether he could write his articles. And neither would the others. If they were forbidden to do so, they would at most resign. That is the second point. The third is that the whole thing would be nonsense.

My dear friends! We turn first again to the protecting spirits of those who are standing outside as a result of current events:

Spirits of your souls, watchers in action,

may your wings bring
the love of our souls
to the earthly people who trust in your protection;
so that, united with your power,
our request may shine helpfully
on the souls that it seeks with love.

And turning to the protecting spirits of those who have already passed through the portals of death:

Spirits of their souls, watchers ever-active,

Your wings may bear
Our souls' imploring love
To the Sphere-men you guard.
That, united with your power,
our request may shine forth helpingly
to the souls it seeks in love.

And the Spirit whom we seek to approach through our spiritual science, the Spirit who has gone to earth's salvation and to human freedom and progress through the Mystery of Golgotha, be with you and your difficult duties.

My dear friends, it would not be in the spirit of the spiritual science movement if the thoughts of the spiritual scientist in our difficult times did not turn again and again to that which goes through the world in our time as a test for humanity, as a difficult fate for humanity. And in the sense of our spiritual science, it must be so, above all, to turn our thoughts inquiringly to many a riddle that already exists in the broader context of what we call the present. For as soon as we ask about the causes that could bring such a difficult fate upon humanity, we are confronted, so to speak, with one mystery after another. And we may now try, from our point of view and with our impulses, to penetrate a little deeper into that which is at work in the present in the wider world. Since I am here so rarely, my task today may be not to speak in the external sense of current events. But it can certainly be my task to point out some things that, deepened by your own reflection, by your own recurring reflection, can solve many a question that today every feeling human heart, every feeling human soul, will want to solve. Things are indeed deeper than those who are unable to sharpen their vision through spiritual-scientific contemplation are often able to recognize. One can see, as one might say, in the most individual events what is actually happening in our time, something that is deeply, deeply incisive. It is just that this deeply incisive is not always seen, not always felt in the appropriate way. One would be a poor spiritual scientist if one believed that one could deepen one's own thinking and feeling and knowing by turning one's gaze away from that which so deeply affects people today and preferring to focus on all manner of more remote matters, at least in thought. As for the most isolated events, I said, today one can feel at every turn what time we actually live in within our immediate present.

Many of you will remember that I have often mentioned the name Herman Grimm among other contemporary figures in the broader sense in the course of the lectures, which have been given for over fifteen years now. Herman Grimm certainly did not stand on the standpoint of spiritual science; but he stood within a world-conception that he had won for himself and that was truly from the source of the spiritual development of the nineteenth century. And it was always interesting to hear, in particular, but also to read when Herman Grimm expressed himself on this or that question, which he then always considered in the sense of a person from the end of the nineteenth century.

I must say that when I mentioned the name Herman Grimm in this or that context within our spiritual-scientific considerations during the course of the twentieth century up to 1914, it was as if he were standing beside me. One always had the need, when considering such personalities who seemed particularly valuable for the development of the spiritual life of the present, to quietly ask oneself the question: How would such a personality have reacted to this or that event that has occurred since his death? Herman Grimm died at the beginning of the twentieth century. Of course, such a question is hypothetical. If we turn our gaze up to the souls of such people who have passed through the portal of death, something different comes out than if we ask ourselves the hypothetical question: How would a person, if still embodied in the body, express themselves about this or that that is going on in the world? Anyone who is interested in world events will, I believe, naturally want to feel the same way about their contemporaries; and if they have been personally close to these contemporaries, they will try to feel with them even beyond death. I said: It seemed to me as if Herman Grimm were standing beside me when I spoke of him up until 1914. That has changed since the difficult events befell us. Since then, it has seemed almost absurd to me to ask the question the way I used to. One would be tempted to say that such a personality, with whom one has still lived and who basically lived with one, even after he had departed from the physical plane, such a personality seems to one today, despite the fact that only three years have passed since 1914, like a mythical personality; like a personality who belongs to a distant history. Almost as if one were studying a personality from the Middle Ages, whom one could not ask, in the sense that I just indicated, how he would speak about the events of the present if he were still embodied in the body. It is really as if we had experienced a relatively short period of time being stretched out long.

It is almost as if one can hardly grasp it when one says: In this short time, we have lived through something like centuries, really like centuries. And what came before that has stormily entered the realm of history, even if we have also experienced it. And we can talk about the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century as if we were talking about events from centuries ago. Much of what we have lived with has become mythical, so deeply incisive were the events of the last three years. And now, however, we find that in many respects what I have said is true, that we can fully accept the complete truth of what has just been said; but on the other hand, we find that not many people, really not many people today, have fully realized what has certainly taken place in their subconscious, what they have experienced in their subconscious. And there is hardly anything better suited than our immediate present to make clear – excuse the harsh expression, but it has to be used – to make clear how much people actually oversleep, really oversleep, what is going on around them, happening. Just as we, when we sleep in some room, have no capacity to absorb what is otherwise going on in the room while we sleep, so many people show a certain drowsiness towards what is going on around them. And this is particularly evident when something so powerful, so great, so incisive is taking place.

The words have been spoken: there has never been such an event in the course of human development. But there is another thing, to feel this in all its depth and strength, not to oversleep it. On such an occasion, we must feel, my dear friends, what I have often said before you and what I would always like to emphasize again: the living nature of spiritual science. This spiritual science would be worth nothing if it were limited to making it quite clear to us, let us say, that the human being consists of four limbs, that there is karma, that there are incarnations, and so on, and we were to absorb these things into our minds as we absorb other things into our minds. Of course we need these things, they are fundamentals. But anyone who grasps them in the same way as other insights into the external world has not grasped the living source of spiritual science, which wants to become a living source of direct life at the same time; which should give us the opportunity to understand and grasp life around us in a fully alert state, to snatch us from sleepiness.

If you want to grasp spiritual science in a way that is full of life, my dear friends, the first thing you need to do is to realize the problematic, the doubtful nature of what is often called self-knowledge. For many people, self-knowledge is often nothing more than a kind of self-incubation, a kind of looking into their inner selves, through which they feel a certain mental voluptuousness, and also serve a certain mental voluptuousness when, in this so-called self-knowledge, they reproach themselves for this or that.

Self-knowledge in the sense in which spiritual science imparts it and in which it is already necessary today and will become ever more necessary in a rapidly maturing future: above all, self-knowledge must be clear to itself that the human being is organized in such a way that, precisely when it comes to recognizing himself, he is almost always inclined to confuse cause and effect. However simple it may appear, what I am about to say is something of immense importance and of far-reaching significance for life.

Let us take a simple case. We begin to treat a person whom we have perhaps been indifferent to, or who may even have been a friend, in a hostile and unfriendly manner, and do all kinds of things against him. What do we usually do when we are dealing with something that involves us to some extent? Well, what we usually do – just ask yourself – is say: Yes, I have to do this or that against this person because he is like this or that. He has done this or that, and it is simply the right thing to do this or that. Of course, such talk may be right in many cases, but in most cases it is not right at all for someone who knows life in its roots. Rather, in most cases it is the case that the person who begins to hate another has has gone through a certain development; not an esoteric development, but he has lived, has lived something out; and what he has lived through has brought it to the point that at a certain moment he felt an inner, subconscious necessity that discharges itself into an impulse of hatred. He must hate, it is as necessary for him as it is to eat when he is hungry. In the course of the development of the soul, it comes about that this soul only feels well when it hates; that it would become ill if it did not hate, and so on. This hatred is the real reason why we are hostile towards others. Of course it is not always so, but in a great many cases it is so; and one does not know life if one does not consider such cases. One wants to be self-sufficient when acting out this hatred, and one seeks out the object of hatred. The object will be found, because after all, something can be found in every person that makes it possible to hate them, to be hostile towards them.

But then we mask this hatred by surrounding it with the veil of justification. We deceive ourselves because we cannot admit to ourselves: You are lying now, you just have to hate. Isn't it, it's not easy to admit that. Because brooding over everything does not want to go so far as to say to oneself: I now have to hate for a while to not burst; so I live out this hatred.

Of course, it can be the same with love. Because love can also occur at a certain moment in life, and then, of course, one finds a lovable object to which one attributes all good qualities – perhaps it also has these qualities. But one must realize that especially in these matters, cause and effect are often confused in an outstanding way, and that what a person consciously says to himself actually consists only of him taking a kind of emotional opiate to numb himself to what actually lives in his soul.

It is remarkable what people can achieve in this area. I met a gentleman who wanted to do a certain job, but always explained that he did not want to do the job at all, that he only felt it was his mission to do the job. He would much rather do the opposite job. That is what he talked himself into believing. In reality, it was quite different. He felt totally incapable of doing the opposite work. He only believed that he could achieve something in this field. But, no, that was not a noble motivation. Especially when you want to talk to people about a mission, you will find them much more willing to make sacrifices if you say: I hate the work, but I feel that it is my mission. These are all soul opiates to disguise the impulses present in the soul – not only from others, but also from oneself.

Yes, the human soul is complicated, and above all, deep. And you can descend into deep, deep shafts, and you will still only partially understand it. From this you will understand, my dear friends, that so-called self-poreering can only be a very one-sided path to what can be called self-knowledge. In reality, self-knowledge can only be gained if one is able to measure one's own self against the great development of humanity, to enter into a relationship with the great development of humanity.

Now let us take such a building block for self-knowledge for a person of the present day, taken from a somewhat larger context. We have often spoken from the most diverse points of view about the post-Atlantic period, in the fifth epoch of which we are placed. Today we want to supplement what has been discussed from a different point of view, because it is precisely through such an addition, through such a consideration, that some foundations can be provided on which to build those thoughts that at least to some extent convey an understanding of the present, the present that is immediately around us. However, when one looks at the development of humanity, one makes a serious mistake almost without exception today. Today, people have certain ideas about what goes on in the human soul when the human soul thinks, feels and wills and so on. Man has the tacit assumption that what takes place in this human soul in thinking, feeling and willing has always taken place in the times that can be remembered and established through spiritual science, beyond the historical. But it is not so. Even in the soul of the Middle Ages, it looks quite different than in the soul of the Greek age. Our time is particularly suited to pointing out such things, because a waking soul today looks quite different than it did in 1913. But a soul of the Middle Ages was not created like a present-day soul, or even a Roman or Greek soul, or going back even further. Well, today we go no further back than the time of the first period after the Atlantic catastrophe.

You know, the first period, which begins after the catastrophe is over, is the time of the primeval Indian period; that time, of which no historical documents report. Everything that is reported belongs to a much later time. But we have often characterized this primeval Indian time. If we direct our research-oriented, spiritual scientific gaze to this time, we find that the whole of life, and in particular the life in which the human being lives with his soul in the social environment, was quite different during this primeval Indian time than what we can actually imagine today. Today, when we think about human development, we think the way we have to think when we look at a person around us. We see that a person develops in a particular way during childhood, that development stops at a certain age, and then a certain stationary state occurs. We all know that in childhood, the human being is very dependent on the physical in terms of soul and spirit. The various stages of physical development are also expressed in the soul and spirit. And vice versa: the soul and spirit are connected to the physical, to structural changes in the nervous system, to changes in the muscular system, in the metabolic system, and so on. But then there comes a certain age when we say to ourselves, in today's world: now we are adult human beings; so adult human beings, in fact, that no one can dispute our right to have a say in parliaments, to have as much say as the elderly. This is also evident in other areas, that in our time people have truly come to realize: they have become adults. It is not the case for everyone, the present are always excluded; but for many people today, if you expect them to read this or that at a certain age, they say: Oh, that belongs to school age; you read that at school; you have it inside you now.

All this is based on the fact that from a certain point in time, the spiritual-soul becomes independent of the physical-bodily. At this point, the physical-bodily comes to a certain conclusion. The soul-spiritual continues, and for most people it continues in such a way that they remain stationary, that they most decidedly reject further development.

This was different in the period we have to call the primeval Indian. In terms of their soul and spiritual life, people remained dependent on the physical and bodily well into their fifties. Just think what such a person went through. He went through the whole ascending life of childhood and youth, where one grows, thrives and blossoms and experiences the spiritual and soul life in this sense. Then he went through the middle of life in his thirties until the age of 35. Then one begins to develop in reverse. One begins to mineralize, to sclerotize. But today we no longer go along with this in our soul and spirit. Everything that today the child only feels as instinctive dependence of the soul-spiritual on the physical-bodily, thus only feels as a human being in the ascending, blossoming, thriving, growing , but also at the point of culmination; and then he felt again how the body sinks into itself, how the physical body recedes. He felt that the physical body recedes, something we do not sense today: the physical body no longer provides the foundation for the soul and spirit, it collapses into itself. But as the physical body declined, he perceived the spiritual life, especially in a dreamy or sleeping state. Just as the ascending and flourishing life connects one to matter, so the declining life frees one from matter. The soul feels more and more akin to the spiritual life. And that reached its peak between the ages of 48 and 56. In the first period after the Atlantic catastrophe, human beings were thus capable of development up to the age of 56. Then up to the ages of 55, 54, 53, and so on. And when the first cultural epoch, the primeval Indian one, had passed, human beings were still capable of development up to the age of 48. Therefore, the whole social life was different. It was the case that people in those days looked up to those who had reached their fifties; they knew that they had a special connection with the spiritual world.

The fact that the elderly were in contact with the spiritual world was simply a result of evolution. And the whole of social feeling, the whole of social life, was influenced by this. However, this was also connected with the fact that, in those days, the environment of the human being, the earthly environment of the human being, was different, so to speak. This earthly environment of man was such in those days that the spirits of the three nearest hierarchies - the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai - worked through the immediate elements. And the best, the noblest spirits of these three higher hierarchies worked through the elements, water, air, warmth, which man absorbed. It is particularly important to note that what we call the spirit of the age, that is, the essence of the hierarchy of the archai, worked directly through the elements in those days. One can say: in air and warmth, with the climate, man inhaled spirituality. And he inhaled this spirituality purely as spirituality in the most perfect way between the 48th and 56th year of life in the epoch referred to.

And then came the time that we call the proto-Persian period. During this time, people only remained capable of development in the manner indicated initially until the 48th year, then until the 47th, until the 46th and so on until the 42nd year, when the proto-Persian period had expired. So by that time, people had already come so far in their development that by the 48th year they no longer got anything for their development from the 48th year. If someone wanted to remain capable of development, he had to shape the soul in a way that was capable of development, independently of what the environment had to offer. But at least during this original Persian period, one remained capable of development until the 42nd year. And this was connected with the fact that although the archai, the spirits of time, had withdrawn more from the immediate elemental forces of the earth, the spirits of the people, the archangeloi, as they are called, still worked strongly through the elements, and these were the best spiritual beings of the spiritual hierarchies. Therefore, in a certain sense, what was the national context over the earth in the ancient Persian period was regulated according to spiritual laws. For that which regulated the relationships between the individual nations depended on spiritual laws. It may be more or less comprehensible to us, but that is not the point; in a certain sense, they were divine spiritual laws.

The spirits of the higher hierarchies withdrew even further during the third post-Atlantic period. And we find in this time that actually the human being, who at the beginning remained capable of development until the age of 42, now at the end of the third post-Atlantic period remains capable of development only until the age of 35. We find that during this time people still had a living relationship with the being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi that belonged to them. The individual people still knew very well: they have a spirit being with them, they are in contact with the spirit being. To speak of the fact that there is no spiritual world would have been nonsense for the time, because every single person knew that he was related to a being from the hierarchy of the angeloi. This is therefore the epoch in which people are capable of development until the end of the thirties.

Now the fourth post-Atlantean period began. During this time, the general age of humanity declined again. We know that the third period begins with the year 747 BC, before the Mystery of Golgotha, and ends with the year 1413 AD, after the Mystery of Golgotha. It was the time when the spirits of the higher hierarchies, who had worked directly through the elements and their forces in the earth, had withdrawn from direct human observation and human experience. The Greeks and Romans remained capable of development only into their thirties, into the middle of life. This is certainly connected with the whole view of life of the Greeks and Romans, which I have already touched on. On the one hand, we are entering an age in which every human being is still so close to those ancient times when people had a connection to the spiritual world because they were able to develop into old age. This is why the Greeks — and this must be know today if you want to judge the Greeks - the Greeks felt that when they moved their hands, when they grew, when they thought, when they ate and drank, they were glowing with a soul; that there is soul in everything that is in them. To doubt that there is something spiritual in everything that is physically lived out would have been inconceivable to the Greeks. But if a Greek or a Roman wanted to know more about the spiritual world, they had to seek this knowledge through the mysteries. There, indeed, one could still acquire the ability to see into the spiritual world, but it is quite interesting to consider those Greeks who rose to the heights of spiritual development but were not initiated into the mysteries, such as Aristotle. He was one of the greatest thinkers of all time. He was a thinker of this Greek period. He was able to think what only a Greek could think, but he did so in the sharpest way. That is to say, it was clear to him that the human being as a physical being had to be connected to a soul and spirit. But now Aristotle said to himself: If I take away one arm of a human being, he is no longer a whole human being. If I take away two arms, even less. But if I take away the whole body, as happens at death, then he is certainly no longer a whole human being. Therefore, for Aristotle, the human soul, when it has passed through the gate of death, is no longer “a whole human being”. For Aristotle, a whole human being is, of course, made up of body and soul. In a sense, the soul is only an incomplete human being when it has passed through the gate of death. Aristotle defended the immortality of the soul philosophically, but for him it is only what it was for Homer, who said: “Better a beggar in the underworld than a king in the realm of shadows.” A king in the realm of shadows is a soul among incomplete human souls.

So it had come about, on the one hand, that human ideas, powers of perception, unfertilized powers of perception, as a result of humanity having regressed in its age to the 28th year, could no longer comprehend or could only comprehend that everything physical is filled with soul, but that the soul is not complete when it is separated from the body. But anyone who makes an effort to understand Aristotle will find that this is the correct interpretation, which could easily be proved philosophically. On the other hand, however, we see that in those days, real full humanity, what man actually is in his deepest being, can only be known through initiation into the mysteries.

While the Greeks underwent a development – which is very interesting, as Aristotle showed up to the Stoics – in which they sought to know what human knowledge can know, Roman development went other ways. With the establishment of the Imperium Romanum, after the Roman Republic, the Roman emperors wanted to be full human beings. Through the power of the physical plan, they were able to force themselves to undergo initiation. And so we have the peculiar phenomenon that on the one hand we have Aristotle, who only made it to such a concept of immortality as I have described, and on the other hand we have the peculiar phenomenon that, without sufficient preparation, purely because they had the power, the Roman emperors were able to force the initiation upon themselves. Thus not only was Augustus an initiate who knew from the mysteries what a secret there is about man; but we also have to count Caligula among the initiates. For it is a truth and not a fairy tale that Caligula, through his initiation into the mysteries, was able to realize that which is expressed figuratively, but is correctly and truly expressed by what history relates – that he was able to commune with the spirits of the moon at night and from there draw inspiration. It is true that Caligula did not merely engage in dramatic posturing, but because he knew the significance of things, he sometimes had himself worshiped as Jupiter, as Bacchus, as Apollo, or as some other god, because he believed in the identity of man with the god.

Commodus, who was not only an initiate, but also an initiator, killed [gap in the transcript]

We finally have the initiate Nero. And, as incredible as it may sound, it must be said today what actually prevailed in the Imperium romanum – in this Imperium romanum, which has transmitted its developmental impulses through a thousand and one channels through the Middle Ages and into our time. Even today, when we think legally, we are still thinking in the sense of this Imperium Romanum, and we think in many other areas in the sense of this Imperium Romanum. On the one hand, these Caesars had certainly come to a view from which they could say how man is connected to the spiritual world. On the other hand, however, they had come to despise what was the world of the physical plane. What Nero did was largely based on misanthropy. Caligula already had this misanthropy. When, for example, an innocent man had been condemned at a court hearing, he said: What does it matter; he will be as guilty as the guilty man; and the judge will be no less guilty than the condemned man. And Nero was convinced – and this is important to know – that there can be nothing good about man, about the physical man here on earth; that everything that lives in the physical man is unchaste; that everything is permeated by physical drives.

If you want to fully understand the soul configuration of Nero, then you have to say: Nero is actually the first psychoanalyst, but - a psychoanalyst of greatness; compared to him, the “Freuderl” is actually just a - well, a “Neroerl”. But there is a relationship. Such relationships run through history without people seeing them, they are very much asleep. And this relationship can have an effect.

Now, 747 BC marks the beginning of the fourth post-Atlantic age. At that time, humanity lived to be 35 years old. A little later, it only lived to be 34 years old, and even later, 33 years old. This means that humanity reached this level of development at the moment when our era begins.

We can therefore say that in the post-Atlantean period, people began with an age of 56 years; up to the 56th year, the human being remained capable of development. Then, in the course of the second, third and fourth periods, the age of human development went down to 33 years. And what happened when the age of human development had gone down to 33 years? What happened? In the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ developed up to the age of 33. That is to say, He grew contrary to the age of humanity.

Consider, my dear friends, what this means! We can follow how people in ancient times had their development up to old age. And when the decline had occurred by the age of 33, the Christ Jesus being developed among them, so to speak, ran counter to the development of humanity, up to the age of 33. When one comes to this matter in a spiritually scientific way, something happens to the human soul. Then the moment arrives when one is confronted with the miracle, the mystery of humanity, in the greatest emotion: the sacrifice of Christ Jesus in the Mystery of Golgotha coincides with the descent of the age of humanity. This is as powerful as anything that can confront you today among the mysteries of humanity. It is something great and powerful that is revealed here from the history of humanity. And truly, spiritual science is, as you can see from this, not intended to somehow suppress those feelings and perceptions that a person can have in the face of the greatness and violence and miraculous effectiveness of the world. Because the further we progress in spiritual science, the better we understand the divine-spiritual forces that prevail in human development. We feel that we are only at the beginning of our understanding of Christ; that times will come when this understanding of Christ will reveal itself quite differently than it can be the case today. But it must develop quite differently. After all, we now live in the fifth post-Atlantic period, and the human being remains capable of development only up to the age of 27. After 1413, when the fifth post-Atlantic period began, people were capable of development until the 28th year. Today, until the 27th year. This means that, through what nature itself provides, we no longer remain capable of development even into the middle of our lives.

From this, however, you can see, my dear friends, how spiritual science truly does not arise from an arbitrary idea, from an arbitrary impulse for agitation. If natural science does not provide what makes human beings capable of development, then human beings must seek in their souls the development that is no longer given to them by nature. He must seek ways into the spiritual world by the soul turning to itself. And however strange and grotesque it may sound, it is true: if you do not seek to stimulate the innermost soul impulse that nature no longer gives us, then you will not live longer than 27 years, even if you live to be a hundred. We are now at that stage in human development where we cannot grow older than 27 years. This winter, in which I have come to a preliminary conclusion on many of the research questions that have occupied me for more than thirty years, has really kept me very much alive to what is actually connected with this realization, which comes from a completely different angle. Many phenomena of the present have made me wonder: yes, where does it all come from? Why is it that in our time we are experiencing precisely what could be called such a terrible unreality of thought and ideals?

This is what should be particularly noticeable to those people who are not asleep, that people are unable to immerse themselves in reality with their ideas and ideals. Of course, they have beautiful ideas, have beautiful ideals, but these ideas and ideals cannot be immersed in reality. They are not strong enough to grasp reality. Therefore they remain beautiful ideas and ideals, which people lick their lips over when they express them, but which have no driving force because they do not submerge into reality. We can see this most in everyday life. What is it when it is said today: “The most capable man must stand in the right place in the future.” We hear that today from all rooftops. It is a beautiful idea; certainly. But what is this beautiful idea worth when it is precisely the “nephew” who is the “most capable.” It is truly not a matter of having beautiful ideas, but of applying these beautiful ideas in reality; of developing a state of mind that is capable of immersing itself in life.

However, if everything that is unable to be realized in life were to be eliminated, then the whole science of states and nations could be eliminated. For all these things are abstract ideas, are unreal ideas. That is why some personalities are so enigmatic.

My dear friends, I am not saying what I am about to say out of chauvinistic sentiment. It has been hard enough for me to arrive at such realizations. I say it because I believe I possess the knowledge. If I look for a typical person – in order to avoid being offended by close personalities, let us take a somewhat more distant one – there is a personality in whom one can clearly see from everything it says world, that, however old he is, he is in reality no older than 27 years, and therefore expresses ideas that go beyond the whole earth today, but which are unrealistic. And this personality, who is so truly a type of our time that she cannot get older than 27 years because she rejects the idea of developing forces from within that nature itself provides, is the President of the United States of North America, Woodrow Wilson. I need only point out that I characterized Woodrow Wilson in the Helsingfors cycle before the war, so that one need not have the impression that I am doing so now under the impression of the present circumstances. But only because of this do the outbursts of Woodrow Wilson's ideas appear so unreal, so mere words, to those who know reality, because it is as I have discussed it. That is why it could happen that this man, who holds one of the most powerful positions of the present day, could publish a peace manifesto and thereby not achieve peace, but only war in his own country; because his ideas are not only unrealistic, but in many respects even opposed to reality.

But he is the representative of our time. That is what our time is like. And our time is fundamentally incapable of understanding reality. Anyone who expresses realistic ideas is understood in the same way as those who express abstract, unrealistic ideas. A spiritual-scientific education must first be created to create an understanding of reality.

As you can see, there is a way to get to know our time. But you have to start from a broad point of view. For someone who has a sense of reality, it is the most incredible thing that people today achieve in terms of ideas and ideals. These ideas are beautiful, wonderful, and Eucken's ideas are even more beautiful. They satisfy people very much. But Eucken is a philosopher who, although he is an old man, is no older than 27 years old, hence this peculiar jumble of beautiful ideas that seem beautiful to people. You see, you have to see through the periods that follow one another in history, in their true form, in their immediate reality. The Greeks still knew: the soul pervades the body. In the fifth epoch, this is known less and less, unless it is acquired through the soul, through a spiritual impulse that one seeks within oneself from within, because the body no longer gives this impulse to the soul by itself.

Now there is a beautiful search, my dear friends, a beautiful search for the human being who has become, as it were, dispirited, but now consciously, not unconsciously, as it was with the Persian, with the Egyptian - there was beautiful endeavor to lead the dead man in his soul back up into the spiritual world; now consciously, because the body no longer connects to the spiritual, now to connect with the soul to the spiritual. The path has been started and it leads directly into spiritual science. But it must be walked. This path is still little understood today. It is a sign, a deeply significant sign, how it was begun through Lessing, Herder, through Schiller and Goethe and those who were with them, to reconnect the dispirited human being to the spiritual world. And Schiller is greater as the writer of the Aesthetic Letters than as a poet. For in these Aesthetic Letters, Schiller seeks the way back for the human soul to the spiritual. He seeks it in a modern way, as modern man must seek it. Thus, through his “Letters on Aesthetic Education,” Schiller is one of the greatest educators of modern times, but he is also the least appreciated in this field of all – and so is Herder; [and also] Lessing, who is the first to point out the “education of the human race” in broad lines. Then Goethe, in his Imaginationen, linking all this in his “Fairytale” of the green snake and the beautiful lily. It is therefore not a coincidence but an inner necessity that our Mystery Plays should take up the first Mystery Drama from this fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily. This is where what is in store for humanity in the near future begins: that it will have to seek to re-establish contact with the spiritual world through inner impulses, but now consciously through the free, independent soul. But these things are difficult to understand today. It is difficult to create an understanding for them.

Oh, if you could go back to how our Anthroposophical Society and the Anthroposophical movement developed, you would see in several places: it should be pointed out. You will find a small booklet that contains lectures of mine from that time about Schiller's philosophical significance. And, as I said, you will find the link to Goethe's fairy tales in the Mystery Dramas. These things are more in touch with the times in which we live than the rehashing of intellectual achievements of earlier times that are no longer suitable for our time. And it was not a process of progress but of degeneration when, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Theosophical Society emerged and wanted to transplant oriental-Indian essence into Europe without realizing that with what arose in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, and what must develop on their soil, something much more significant and greater has been created for modern humanity than can ever come from any earlier source.

I myself have to think back to some personally strange things. When the president of the Theosophical Society in Germany, about whom she now writes so “kindly”, made her first appearance in Hamburg, I asked her whether it was not actually the task of the newer times to tie in with the spiritual life that had been achieved by Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Herder and so on. At the time, she replied, based on the process of degeneration of the Theosophical Society: “These are all people whose ideas were more distant from actual spiritual life. You have to penetrate much more deeply.” And so, through that reality, that materialistic construct, which the Theosophical Society as a theosophical doctrine contains, was placed in the place of the truly spiritual, which, basically, as from the very beginning, we wanted and needed. Because, whether you imagine the etheric body as a more or less dense or thin haze, you imagine it as a certain haze and so on. And even with the astral body, and with everything else, one still speaks of atoms and the like.

So the first steps, but only the first steps, had to be linked to the world view that finds expression in the “Letters on Aesthetic Education” and in the “Fairytale”. Just feel the necessities of a spiritual movement.

We will come to the sixth cultural period. We can then expect that humanity will remain capable of development into the 21st, 20th, 19th, and so on down to the 14th year. So humanity will remain infantile if it does not undergo an inner development, which can only come through spiritual knowledge.

But there are still quite different phenomena connected with what has been said. The estrangement from reality to which I have drawn attention is connected with this twenty-seven year-old age. Men must consciously find their way back into reality, for full reality also contains spiritual reality. He who does not recognize the spiritual world thereby becomes a man hostile to reality. That is why our political economy, our political science, is an insubstantial abstraction that can never create anything, because it treats reality like someone who sees nothing in a horseshoe magnet except a thing with which to shoe a horse's hoof. He does not know that the iron contains magnetic forces. Today, humanity must consciously regain what it once had instinctively, what has been lost to it. And here we are at a very important point. Much that people once had instinctively must now be consciously acquired, and this includes a sense of truth.

The world is taking giant strides towards people losing their instinctive sense of truth and having to acquire a new, conscious sense of truth. Therefore, we encounter things at every turn that we can only understand if we are able to see the world through the prism of the preconditions we have described today. Sometimes people are well-meaning, not ill-intentioned. But then they cannot help but harbor unrealistic ideas; they are incapable of responding to ideas that are rooted in reality. I can give you a good example of this that appeared recently in an article in the magazine 'Die Furche'. There you can read a relatively benevolent article about the relationship between spiritual science and religion. All sorts of strange things are said. And at the end, something is said about which one would have to scratch one's head to find any way of justifying that such a thing could be said about a person who is not malevolent:

[Rudolf Steiner has deeply recognized the power of self-love, with which one also loves what one should feel as ugly; but he says nothing against the most anti-divine power of this self-love, with which it only wants to ascribe the redemption of its own self to itself again and again, instead of only out of Christ Jesus, who wants to bring about his redemption in us.

So think about that. Think about this sentence in the light of what I have been saying for years about the Christ impulse in relation to human development. It is possible for something like this to be put forward by a source that is not malevolent.

[Rudolf Steiner deeply understood the power of self-love, with which one also loves what one should perceive as ugly; but he says nothing against the most anti-divine force of this self-love, with which it only wants to ascribe the redemption of one's own self to itself again and again, instead of solely from Christ Jesus, who wants to bring about his redemption in us.

While [but precisely] spiritual science is the only thing today that, in the face of the materialistic world view and also in the face of Christianity, which has become anti-Christian, restores the Mystery of Golgotha in its full depth. But people today do not read such things, and they do not think to test these things for their truth content. Today, people do not have enthusiasm for the truth. Therefore, they do not admit that such things are completely equivalent to lies, because it is a lie. People do not want to call things by their right name. There is an estrangement from reality. And it is necessary, because it is a very widespread evil, that someone who does not want to face the world while asleep but rather wide-awake should confront such a phenomenon with the impulses of spiritual science and in full consciousness.

A magazine called “The Invisible Temple” appears. In it, under the direction of a certain Horneffer, it is preached that a higher moralization of humanity should take place. Now, I am convinced that many people turn to such things with emotion - but emotion is rarely true today - in good faith. Now, there is a sentence in the magazine that

[However different the monists and the theosophists are, and however eagerly they fight and despise each other, they are strangely similar in one respect: they monopolize the word “science” for themselves. What they themselves do is true, pure science; what other people do is sham and pseudo-science. This can be read in Haeckel and Rudolf Steiner.

Now I ask you if I have ever written anything like this: what I write and say is science; what others write is pseudo-science.

What is this if not a lie! The people who put something like this together, even those who know that it is a lie, do not approach things with the feeling that they are dealing with dishonesty.

But today we need a new sense of truth. We must call a spade a spade. Such a magazine lies, and it is not ashamed to lie. And it writes about human ennoblement and human moralization by people who can be shown to be lying.

Keen observation, a real attention to the actual truth, that is what belongs above all to the duties of those who want to understand the anthroposophical world view, as a world view, as a view of life; not an easy acceptance of the facts of the world, whether on the spiritual or physical plane. Today, a tremendous magnitude and strength of earnest must permeate the world where a true world view is concerned; an earnestness that cannot be compared to any earnestness of earlier times. But for this to happen, people must become aware of how lightly humanity treats the truth today.

I will give you only a few examples that may be close to us. Under such circumstances, it is truly no wonder that this spiritual science, just at the time when it seems to be opening up from one side, is having some impressions and influences on the currents of our time – that this spiritual science, on the other hand, is experiencing attack after attack, and indeed such attacks that really arise from the nature of our time.

I truly did not consider it worthwhile to go into the matter for as long as the Freimarke and others were scolding the things. But the time has come when opponents are being recruited from within the Anthroposophical Society itself, and not opponents who fight honestly, but opponents who spread untruth after untruth in order to drive spiritual science into a scandal. The slander and vilification that have come our way during this time cannot be described. Allow me, however, to draw attention to some of them here as well.

I know that there are members among us, members of the Anthroposophical Society, who say with a haughty air: one does not get involved in these things, one only gets into personal squabbling. But one should turn to those who are the cause of this personal squabbling, not to those who have to defend themselves. We have gone through bitter enough times in which we had to defend ourselves.

I do not want to be misunderstood, my dear friends. Opposition to spiritual science may occur as much in the world as is always possible. It only depends on how this opposition occurs. I still count some of the opposition as justified, even if this opposition is often strange in expression. I would just like to remind you that a man who has done an enormous amount for our cause in recent years, Ludwig Deinhard, only slowly came around and became a sincere friend, and that at the beginning, when I had to appear in Germany, he could not approve of it and was quite in agreement with those who publicly attacked me at the time. I did not respond to such attacks, although at the time, when I gave a lecture in Munich, the sentence was said: “The Berlin traveler for Theosophy has appeared again.” I still consider such things to be justified. One can have opinions, no matter how trivially they are expressed. Therefore, I do not want to be misunderstood. If an opponent appears honestly, or even dishonestly, but in a literary form, that is not what I mean today. What I want to talk about today is opposition, not out of the matter itself, but out of objective untruth. And in this respect, there have been some terrible developments in recent times. It must be said that it has never happened before that such things have been thrown at a matter as the one I have to represent.

Anyone who speaks to esoteric impulses knows that he must naturally create opponents for himself. Because that which must be spoken by the real spiritual science, that just causes opposition. And it is perhaps not too much to say that if you speak to 120 people, in all seriousness about the deepest things, among these 120 there are probably 70 possible opponents; 70 possible enemies. That is the case. You must not be under any illusions about that.

And it is not a question of whether such opponents arise or not, but of whether they are decent or not. And certainly much in this area emerges from what I have characterized today. But we are experiencing the strangest things. And so please allow me to make a few brief remarks about this, because I simply have to take action against these attacks that are coming from within society, from members of society – who have now left, admittedly. I have to say a few words to you about this.

All in all, it has to be said: today is the time to raise the question: Can the Anthroposophical Society continue in this way if I am to give lectures in it – or not? The Anthroposophical Society is truly something other than anthroposophy or spiritual science. Spiritual science would not have the opposition that it currently has, which is currently coming from the fact that, firstly, people are relying on dishonesty and because other people, who are outside, are using this dishonesty. It is too inconvenient for these latter people to study spiritual science in order to attack it. It is much easier to drive spiritual science into a scandal. To attack it, one would first have to study it. It is easier this way, but what do we experience?

Above all, a positive, active judgment must develop in the Anthroposophical Society if it is to continue to exist as such. After all, spiritual science could very well continue without the Society. You could have three or four friends in every city who could arrange everything needed for lectures; you don't need an Anthroposophical Society for that. So we must not confuse anthroposophy with the Anthroposophical Society. I said that a more active judgment is needed. We have to recognize that things are possible in our Society that are actually only possible within it. We first had to found the Society for these things to become possible. I want to recall an older matter. But a new one is not out of place in telling this story.

A certain Mr. Grasshoff joined our society. He attended lectures in all cities for a while, was present everywhere. You may, of course, ask why the man was accepted. Yes, you see, there is no way to reject people under certain conditions when they are brought in; you would have to anticipate the future. Do you think that a Grasshoff would come in and I would say: We cannot accept you. – Yes, why not? – Well, because in the future you will be a swine against society!

You can't say that if something is only going to happen in the future but has not yet happened. So you have to let such people into society, that goes without saying.

This Mr. Grasshoff listened to all the lectures he could possibly hear; he borrowed all the notes taken by the members. He copied everything down. After a while he went back to America, where he had come from, and wrote a nice book. In this book, he put together everything he had heard in the various lectures, what he had found in the books, and what he had written from the unpublished lectures. But he did not say that. He wrote a preface to the book. There he says: I heard this and that from Dr. Steiner, but then I was not finished. But I was then given the task of going to a master, of course a master in the Transylvanian Alps, and there this master told me the deeper things that I still lacked. So this “deeper” and this “higher” all comes from this “master”. As I said, everything in this book is copied from my lectures and from books and notes of other members.

Now, the book was published in America. But what happened? The book, titled “Rosicrucian World Conception,” was published in America.

One could still say: Well, that's American, you couldn't expect much different over there. But then a book publisher was found here in Germany, run by a certain Dr. Hugo Vollrath. He was inclined to translate this book into German and to publish it in individual lesson letters. And a preface was written to the effect that some of the content had already come to light in Germany, but that it first had to be cleansed in the pure air of California, in America. Such a disgraceful piece is actually not possible in literary life outside. I even told this story in public lectures. It is a disgrace that should have become known everywhere if it had been understood with the necessary power of judgment. I would like to go and collect how many people know about it. But that is why things can always repeat themselves.

That is why it could happen that a member, a long-standing member, who of course could not be expelled for the same reason that Mr. Grasshoff - who appeared under the name A. M. Heindel - could not be expelled, could write a book called “Who Was Christ?” In this book, he did not go to the same lengths as Mr. Grasshoff, but he did compile all kinds of cycles under the motto that knowledge should not be kept secret but belongs to the times. The person from whom he copied this motto took it very badly because the person who wrote it meant it quite differently. But then he hinted: Dr. Steiner did indeed point out some of these things, but it is necessary to elaborate on all of them. — You can imagine, my dear friends, that this book had to be rejected by the Anthroposophical-Philosophical Publishing House in Berlin. Thereupon the man became an opponent.

So, a long-standing member, a member who has even done a lot for the Anthroposophical Society, a member who for a long time has appeared to be a quiet member, becomes an opponent because a brochure is rejected by the publisher. That is the real reason for the antagonism. That is the reason. Of course, one sometimes says, it is not quite true, post hoc, but one does not go far wrong with such things if one uses the expression. In any case, Seiling has not only become an opponent, but an enemy, after his brochure had to be rejected by the publisher. He did, however, admit to someone that he had suffered a great deal from me in recent years and therefore had to write some things from his soul. Yes, but I also had some strange experiences with this gentleman. You know that the gentleman speaks a very Berlin dialect and had no idea about recitation. He took a few lessons and was also very useful because he could use the dialect as a Berliner. But then the story got into his head. Then he appeared in Dornach: Now I, an old fellow, want to show you what reciting is. I even showed my nephew, I want to show you what I achieve before the world as a reciter. It is understandable that someone like this, who has a great deal of vanity, suffers when one cannot say 'yes' to such things as a matter of course. But with all the ridiculous contradictions that he has put together, this man could not have lured a dog out of the oven, because anyone can check them. That is not the point, but the point is that these contradictions had to be covered up with a lot of untrue stuff. And this untrue stuff, he concocts it out of “conversations”. He is one of those people who have been coming for years with requests for private conversations, for interviews. He now distorts what happened in these conversations, and what he cites is all objectively untrue. Objectively untrue! For example, that I had told someone – which he cites – that I had not agreed to the publishing house accepting another brochure that had appeared before. But Dr. Steiner had wanted this brochure from him in her publishing house, so I had given in. Now he talks about private conversations like that. If these private conversations can be misused like that, then it is a fatal thing.

The gentleman presents himself in a very strange light. He knows very well how things are in Dornach. He knows that the others caused a scandal there, but now he writes in the “Psychical Studies” that our marriage has led to scandals. — [But:] We were quite innocent of the scandal, the others caused it. This is a clever way of deliberately dragging things into scandal if that is what you want. You just have to look at things in the right way. And what do we experience next?

A man in a city in central Germany wrote to the present Dr. Steiner years ago, saying that he had reached a turning point in his soul and did not know what to do. Should he get involved in a business or should he help his soul in some other way? Dr. Steiner wrote to him that we could not deal with such things. Then he reappeared as a member of the Theosophical Society in Berlin. There he had initially surprised the members, despite having no idea of recitation, by pouring out Schiller's “Kassandra” over the eardrums [of those present] in a – well, let's say in a “surprising” way. The man did not aspire to become an artist, as he claimed, but: to be an artist. I was later told by a reliable source that he was now pursuing the strategy of marrying his way into our society, but he did not succeed. Then he turned to Munich. There, everything that could be done for him was done. He imagined that he had to paint. He couldn't paint, nor did he have any talent for it. But, you know, some talent, at least the small talents, only show up after some time. They got him a teacher, but you can't turn him into a genius in the blink of an eye. If he had wanted to become something, they would have accommodated that. But he wanted to be a painter, to be a genius, not just become one. That's a terrible crime, isn't it? In short, the man also became an enemy one day, and for some time now he has been engaged in some strange writing. His name is Erich Bamler.

Yes, it is extremely difficult to take this writing seriously. For example, one of the points mentioned is that I advised the man to do a deep occult exercise. The exercise: He should see everything in his environment as good and necessary. You only have to look it up in Schopenhauer's works to find this sentence. There you will find that Schopenhauer considers this behavior to be very beneficial for mental and spiritual health. Yes, as a result of this sentence, the man now claims to have developed blue bumps on his legs and other things that have given him a bad occult development. Things are so stupid, so terribly stupid, that you can only make something of them if you use defamatory things to smear the other person and use them as clothing. And today, of course, there are enough people who do this. It is even possible that university professors do not content themselves with a factual reply, but also dress it up in real madness. But today there are editors who do not go into spiritual science. They have no idea about it. But they do go into the things that are reported to them. And what is reported?

A few days ago I received a letter. A gentleman wrote to me saying that he had been to one of my lectures in a town in North Germany and that at this lecture he had, as he assured me, heard with his own ears that I had pointed out that the Christ would repeatedly appear on Earth and that I had made it clear that I myself was laying claim to this incarnation. Imagine that, my dear friends! And the man not only says that he himself has heard this, but he can also produce witnesses who have also heard it. Such things are happening today. Can it be incomprehensible that there are editors like those who come into question here in this case, who let themselves be told these things, especially when they are brought by members who have surrendered to the cultivated lack of judgment in society. But this is only the beginning, it will continue. Spiritual science truly has no fear of refutations, so I never think that there should be no opposition.

It has been said that a commission should be set up to examine the matter and put it right. I see this as foolishness. Hundreds and thousands of opposing writings may appear; there can be no opposition, if it is honest, that spiritual science has to fear. Spiritual science can stand up to scientific scrutiny. But that is not what this is about. Instead, it is about driving people into meanness, about defamation, about throwing dirt at them, as has never been seen before. It could reach such heights that a long-standing member writes fabricated things, fabricated follies from beginning to end, things that are completely untrue. These are accepted by the editorial team. This can happen today.

So a member writes to the editorial team: I have had to deal with anthroposophical matters, and I have come to the view that something similar should happen to me as the Lazarus miracle that Christ performed and that Dr. Steiner described. Dr. Steiner sent me chocolate, and I have to assume that this chocolate was sent to me to perform the Lazarus miracle on me.

Now, this madness can be said and also printed today, and the editor writes as a note under these follies: “Where such occult exercises are done, even healthy people can go insane.” Yes, such things happen. I do not care about the real side issues. Whether such people are to be regarded as mentally ill is not an issue here. That is important, of course, but here it is a matter of dealing with pure inventions, with inventions of the most disgraceful kind. These are the things with which one is supposed to present spiritual science today. And do not think that it is based on a superficial judgment when I say: It is necessary that the judgment in the Anthroposophical Society be strengthened. The silliness that is now appearing again, with this article about chocolate and the miracle of Lazarus, that the reincarnation of Christ has been spoken of and that I myself am being pointed to – do not believe that it is without connection to these follies, that I actually had to emphasize very early on, again and again: There is only one incarnation of Christ. Such things have already been done in abundance in society.

So it has become necessary, my dear friends, for me to take two measures. They certainly hurt me as much as they may hurt some of you. But they are absolutely necessary. As things stand now, there is no other way.

From now on, all private conversations that have been held so far must stop, because the worst objective distortions arise from a number of these private conversations. I have indeed been quietly pointing this out for years. So perhaps a fact will come to light. It is not so much about this measure itself, but rather that by taking this measure, our members are being made aware that it is necessary to take these things seriously. You see, these things are all carried out. What members carry out of the Society is the most outrageous. And outside, everyone tells you: Yes, this is a society in which everything is based on authority. In blind faith, everyone follows this Dr. Steiner! And in reality it is like this: there is perhaps no other society in which a person like me, who is active in it, finds that everything happens differently than they think it should. Because in this society, in reality, everything that happens is always against my will; in the details, and also in some big questions. How countless things develop under the type: someone wants to go to a lecture cycle; it is necessary to excuse it to someone; what does he say? Dr. Steiner sent me. - What is the point of all this sending? Well, the person in question comes and says: Should I travel to the cycle? - That is of course none of my business, because it can only be voluntary. So I say: That's none of my business, it's up to you. - Then the person asks: Do you have any objections? — Of course I have no objections, because such things are done of one's own free will. - But if my answer is passed on to a second or third person, then it is: I should travel, Dr. Steiner said so.

I am far from any kind of mischief of sectarianism. But there is a lot of sectarianism in the Anthroposophical Society. Of course, this is less prominent here, but the Society must be treated as a unit. Therefore, these things must also be said here.

I made a trip to [Stettin]. As I arrived, a strange group marched in through one of the station doors. They were all ladies, but they looked like cardinals. Of course, they were all wearing stoles, as we call them. Then they had these strange caps on. Well, in Munich something like that might be acceptable; there you just say: they are crazy; you are used to it there. In Berlin it is less so. But when the ladies arrived in [Helsingfors], all hell broke loose. The [Helsingfors] ladies had to sit separately so that it would not be noticed that they belonged together. You see, such outward appearances are only a symbol of inward sectarianism.

In short, it is therefore necessary that the first measure to be taken is to stop all private conversations from now on. Those who have an esoteric matter to bring forward must pass on a little time; I will try to create a substitute for these conversations. Everyone will find satisfaction in what they can receive esoterically, but the private conversations will have to be stopped. For it is precisely from these discussions that most of what is now coming to the world in such an enormous way originates. Therefore, the innocent must now suffer with the guilty. For this reason, let us turn to those who are to blame. For years I have been pointing out that this will come.

But one will not say the complete thing if one does not say a second measure. That is that I give everyone, as far as I am concerned, an absolute permission to tell the truth about everything that has ever been said or done in a private conversation, insofar as he himself wants it. Only in this way will it be possible to silence the incredible distortions and untruths, denigrations, and slanders that have now been spread throughout the world, if this second measure is taken. The one who will tell the one measure without the other will tell an untruth. The two belong together. They must be thought together and said together.

Therefore, firstly: All private conversations must be recorded. Secondly: I authorize everyone to pass on everything that has ever been said or done in private conversations, provided that they themselves want it.

My dear friends, spiritual science will simply have to be brought into the full light of the public, because our time cannot tolerate what is very often confused with esotericism, but which does not need to be confused at all. Esotericism can also be practiced when anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is brought into the full light of the public. It can do so because this spiritual science has nothing to fear. But it is not always to everyone's taste to be besmirched and to have to take a public stand against it, especially when the mud is being slung from places and by personalities one would prefer not to take a stand.

Please forgive me, my dear friends, for having to attach these remarks to our deliberations; I had to attach them to what I wanted to give you today as a striking characteristic of our time, which I believe will be of use to you if you want to observe with an alert eye of the soul what is going on around us and has been going on around us in the last three years.

What has happened in the last three years is truly so that what happened before seems to us to lie in a mythical past. But it is precisely when one observes the times and takes spiritual science in the fullest sense seriously that one does not consider 'personal bickering' and 'personal matters' to be what I have been forced to link to these arguments before.

My dear friends!

Let us first remember the protecting spirits of those who are out there in the fields of difficult present decisions:

Guiding spirits of your souls, watchers ever active,
May your wings carry
The love of our souls
To the earthly beings who trust in your protection.
So that, united with your power,
Our plea may helpfully shine
On the souls it lovingly seeks.

And turning to the protecting spirits of those who have already passed through the portals of death:

Spirits of their souls, watchers ever active,
Your wings may bear
Our souls' imploring love
To the sphere-men you guard.
That united with your power, our request may helpfully shine on the souls it lovingly seeks.

And the spirit that we seek to approach through our spiritual science, the spirit that has gone to the salvation of the earth, to the freedom and progress of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, be with you and your difficult duties.

My dear friends, it must be self-evident that in these difficult times that have befallen humanity, the thoughts of the souls that want to participate in the general destiny that can become human beings, that these thoughts turn to what is currently flowing through our time; what, above all, presents us with such difficult, difficult riddles in our time. For there is no doubt that difficult riddles are to be lived through in our time, which is truly - and this is certainly not a cliché - different from other times that we have not only been able to live through in our lives so far, but that humanity has been able to live through for a long time. When we think of some people with whom we lived before 1914, and who passed through the gate of death before 1914, we might well ask ourselves today: How would these people have related to what they are experiencing today in terms of their feelings and perceptions? Of course, if we think in terms of our spiritual science, how such souls, after they have freed themselves from the body in the spiritual world, look down, it is different. Then, when we understand what is happening from the records of the spiritual world. But it is perhaps still a need to think about how people who lived with us, if they were still alive, would judge the time in which we live.

In the lectures I have given and the reflections I have presented, I have often mentioned the name Herman Grimm. He is a personality who certainly did not stand on the ground of spiritual science, but who, with all his thoughts and ideas, grew out of the great impulses of spiritual life in the first half of the nineteenth century. And it was always interesting to either read or hear what Herman Grimm judged about what was going on in the world around him. If he were still alive today - he died at the beginning of the twentieth century - one cannot imagine how he would judge the violence of the events that surround us today based on his thoughts and feelings. Whenever I mentioned his name up until 1914, and that happened often, it was as if he were standing next to me, representing a different school of thought, but one that was always interesting to listen to. He could be thought of as a contemporary. Since 1914, it is as if he were a personality who could just as well have lived and died centuries ago. The way he thought, the way he related to world events, seems to one - as I said, not when one considers the soul in the spiritual world, but what it would have thought if it were embodied in the body - one cannot form any idea of how he would have expressed himself about current events, based on what he has otherwise judged, how he has formed feelings about them.

We have actually lived through so much in these three years that what we have lived through before must seem to us like a myth, like a legend, centuries behind us. And anyone who experiences our time with a truly feeling heart and a truly moving soul can already realize that in these three years he has lived through something that can otherwise only be lived through in centuries. All scales become different for the judgment of the events. We are confronted with things from the periphery of the world that could make one believe that humanity would not have been up to them at all before they appeared on the horizon of existence.

Of course, these things could be foreseen to a certain extent, my dear attendees, but the fact that they were so little foreseen testifies to how little people wanted to understand what was being pointed out about what was to come. I remind you of one thing today. Again and again, even after public lectures, I was asked how man's repeated lives on earth could be reconciled with the increasing population on earth, with the fact that the population is constantly growing. One would think that if souls were to return again and again, the population would remain constant in a sense. I had to say many things against this prejudice, but I always repeated one thing, as those who heard it will remember: the time could come when people would be horrified to realize that not only an increase in population but also a quite considerable decimation of the population could take place.

Of course, one could not point out the terrible prospect with dry words. But anyone who takes what I said at the time in the Vienna cycle in 1914, and considers it, will see that it points to stages in the development of humanity that make much of what has had to be experienced in the last three years understandable. Only, my dear friends, one could say that in many respects people have not yet really come to their senses. Experience and experience can be very different in the present. In this respect, it happens that people believe they are experiencing the present, but meanwhile they are oversleeping it. And today one can meet a great many people who, in the most important matters, always judge as they did in January 1914, although their hearts should be deeply moved by such terrible trials. But for the person who views the world from a certain spiritual-scientific point of view, what is now taking place within humanity must present not just one, but many, many riddles. The desire to solve these riddles with what are today superficial ideas, which pass through the general consciousness or general education in this way, should actually pass away. One should develop a longing, an urge to seek out the deeper forces that prevail in human development and that make it understandable why humanity has entered into such a crisis.

This evening, my dear friends, we want to occupy ourselves with such a consideration of the deeper developmental impulses of humanity.

We cannot understand the things that are happening in the present because they have far-reaching causes if we only look at the present itself. But over the years we have gathered enough ideas from the spiritual world to be able to gain an understanding from the wider perspective of world observation.

We must start from what we have already considered from different points of view, and what we want to consider today from such a point of view, which is of the greatest possible importance for our immediate present. But first, let us at least make a few comments on the particular way in which many things in the present show us their signature, their special nature. In this present time, I have often thought of an experience that goes back to my early youth and that is so very characteristic, although at first it seems far-fetched. It is so very characteristic of the deeper foundations of our current development.

An old friend of mine was very close to another man. This man was an excellent, fine spirit. He did not write much, did not have much printed, but what he did have printed had an enormously significant weight and would have, if it had penetrated, come to the consciousness of people, could have had a significant effect on people's souls in the second half of the nineteenth century. The man who had the little that was published printed — I will talk about this in more detail in a moment — once fell and broke his leg and died from it. The leg could easily have been set, but he could not be brought through the fall because he was malnourished. So it was said after his death, and rightly so: “You see, that was one of the deepest minds of Central Europe, Deinhardt. He died many decades ago. He remained undernourished because no one was interested in his particular kind of spirituality.

Now, what did he want? Yes, he wanted something that people today cannot even begin to grasp, that has actually been disregarded. And yet, precisely because we cannot grasp it, it is so significant for our time. My dear friends, this man wanted nothing more than to make the tremendous spiritual impulse that lies in Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man pedagogically fruitful for all of humanity. To this end, he wrote a small number of works that are tremendously ingenious. I believe that today they have all been pulped. I don't think that any of these writings can be preserved. And he died of hunger. No one was interested in the fact that something could be drawn from these letters about the aesthetic education of the human being that could raise the entire intellectual level of humanity through an incredibly profound social pedagogy. Of course, by the time the nineteenth century came to an end and the twentieth century began, humanity had absorbed other ideas. Let us also make clear to ourselves by means of an example what ideas humanity has actually absorbed.

You see, one of the leading spirits of France – but since before the war the world was not as divided into nations as it is now, he was also one of the leading spirits of the whole of Europe, and he was listened to in Germany as well as in France – was Maurice Barres. He initially belonged to the free-thinking French youth. As he went further and further in his aspirations, and actually could not befriend the materialism of the nineteenth century, he tried to find his way to a more spiritual direction, but he knew of no other spiritual direction than Catholicism. And so he surrendered to Catholicism, which made him “pious” to such an extent that he became one of the most rabid haters and denigrators of Germans. But let us turn to another side of his nature. Maurice Barres said the following words to justify that today a person who strives for the spiritual must profess Catholicism. I ask you to take these words with the full seriousness, because they are characteristic of the present-day life of ideas. Maurice Barres says:

["It is a futile effort to seek the hereafter. It may not even exist! And however we approach it, we cannot learn anything about it. Let us leave all occultism to the enlightened and the conjurers; whatever form mysticism may take, it contradicts reason. But let us give ourselves to the Church, first of all because she is inextricably linked with the tradition of France. And then, because she formulates with the authority of centuries and great practical experience the rules of that ethics that must be taught to nations and children. And finally, because it, far from abandoning us to mysticism, defends us directly against it, silences the voices of the mysterious groves, interprets the Gospels and sacrifices the generous anarchism of the Savior to the needs of modern society."

Now, my dear friends, in the deepest sense, one cannot imagine a greater frivolity or cynicism than when a person says: Whether there is a hereafter, one can never know; maybe there is none. But let us give ourselves to the Church, not because we are attracted by what it contains, but because it has been able to adapt the generous world view of the Savior to the needs of modern society.

Yes, my dear friends, there is a cynical judgment, but a judgment that lives today in many minds as a feeling; as that feeling that does not know how to take anything very seriously, that does not want to go anywhere into the true depth of reality, because then it would have to penetrate into the spirit, which belongs to reality. But we are not dealing with a light criticism of this time. We have to understand this time. Because only those who understand what is going on can really do their duty in the place where they are. And so we want to try to understand this time by answering the question of how it has developed. As I said, we have to gain a broader perspective and look at the whole time since the great Atlantic catastrophe from a certain point of view.

We have said, my dear friends, immediately after the great Atlantic catastrophe befell the earth, there came the first, the Ur-Indian cultural period; that cultural period of which no historical documents exist. For what is available as documents comes from later times. But the first spiritual culture that could be brought to humanity developed in this post-Atlantic period within the ancient Indian cultural epoch. Life in this time was quite different. And anyone who believes that life on Earth once took a similar course to that of the present time is quite considerably mistaken; they are just too lazy to recognize how humanity has developed through spiritual science. They do not want to recognize how it has developed, and so of course they cannot fully understand what is happening in the present.

Above all, for the people of the first cultural epoch, the ancient Indian cultural epoch, one can say that the whole environment was not yet as it is now. Now the environment for human beings is such that they have air around them; that they have around them what the mineral earth is; that cloud formations rise into the air, which in turn fall down as rain; the water that rises and falls in these cloud formations is contained in the rivers and seas; the air is interspersed with warmth and cold, that is, with the element that was called fire in ancient times. For people today, these are physical things: fire, air, water; physical things that they see in such a way that they ascribe to them the properties that they perceive with their senses. It was not so for the people of the ancient Indian cultural epoch. In those days, people did not yet perceive fire, air and water in the same physical way that today's people perceive fire, air and water in the physical sense. It was an enormous mystery for the people of this first cultural epoch when they saw the flame rise; when they felt the warmth sweeping over the earth with the breeze; when they perceived the air itself in its blowing; when they heard the water rushing; when they saw the water in the air as a cloud or falling as rain. And they had consciousness, these people of the first cultural epoch: just as in a person whom one stands before, not only what one sees with the senses lives in him, but a spiritual-soul life also lives in him , a spiritual soul that belongs to the spiritual worlds, so too does spiritual soul live in the fire that rises with the flame, lives in the blowing air, in the rising and descending water. And that is what they felt, these people: This spiritual-soul aspect belongs to us, belongs to the human being, just as the air, for example, belongs to us as a physical thing; we breathe it in and out. The air that is outside is inside us, then outside again; we are not a separate entity, but what is in us is inside, outside - inside, outside. But for them it was the same with the spiritual aspect of warmth. By sensing warmth, they sensed the spirit of warmth. And so with air and water. In the elements, they felt how spiritual things live in them.

But this feeling asserted itself in a very strange way in a young person during the first cultural period. He felt the elements of fire, air and water as a kind of riddle. But he could not solve this riddle. He had a feeling that it was actually his physicality, his physical corporeality, that prevented him from solving these riddles. He said to himself: “At night, when I sleep, I am outside of my physicality with my real self.” But during his youth he could not really do anything with this sleeping state. Although life in his sleep at that time was infinitely more lively than later or even today. Dreams were not so chaotic, they had some significance. But the physicality with which a person remains connected even outside of their body prevented young people in that first cultural epoch from perceiving the spiritual beings in the elements when they were out of their bodies, sleeping or dreaming.

But this physicality was arranged differently back then. Mankind changes quite a bit over the course of centuries. As strange as it seems, spiritual research shows us that in those days, people remained, one might say, childlike in their developmental capacity for much longer than they do today. Today, people complete the course of their development relatively early. In very early childhood and youth, our mental and spiritual development is quite strongly dependent on our physical development. The child can only scream when it needs something or when it is naughty. But then the structural conditions of the brain change and with the change of the physical, the mental and spiritual also change. And this continues throughout the years. We know that what is spiritual and soul-like is intimately connected with what is physical in development. How the muscles grow stronger, how the metabolism changes, all these things that occur in the human being are expressed in this spiritual and soul-like development. But this stops with increasing age. We will talk later about when it actually stops being important for human development in the present day. For people in the ancient Indian cultural epoch, it did not stop as early as it does now. The human being of the first cultural epoch went through his youth, his growth into his twenties. Then he came to that epoch of life where the human being, as it were, remains static, where he enters middle age, around 35, and enters the descending line. The body sags again, one mineralizes. Today we do not experience any of that. At most, we notice when we reach a certain age that memory declines a bit, but nothing else comes naturally instead. When old people complain that their memory is failing, and we know that this is because the brain and nervous system are becoming mineralized, then nothing else takes its place. It can be the same with the other spiritual powers. It was not so in the first cultural period. Then the soul and spiritual aspects of the human being fully participated in development, even when the human being entered the descending phase of life. Not only did their memory decline, but as their physical bodies decayed, their souls became more and more spiritual and were able to see into the spiritual world. It was precisely when their physical bodies were decaying and mineralizing that they were able to gain what they could not have during the time when their physical bodies were growing, flourishing and thriving. In this case, physical maturation and the strengthening of the imagination are hindered. The change in the physiognomy, in the nerves, holds back the soul and spiritual aspects. Today, we have no means in our external lives to counteract the body's tendency to collapse and mineralize. But in the first cultural epoch, this counteraction was there by itself. The soul still had the strength to draw directly on new forces from beyond the body, but these were spiritual forces. And then man underwent the strongest development, the actual development of maturity, immediately after the Atlantic catastrophe, at about the age of 56. Then it went down to the ages of 55, 54, 53 and so on to the age of 48. And when man had descended to the age of 48, the first, the primeval Indian cultural epoch was over. Therefore, in this leading culture, social life proceeded in such a way that everyone knew: if you ever reach your fiftieth year, you will become enlightened. The development of humanity itself provides the opportunity to live with the elements; to perceive in the fire how it is permeated by the archai, the spirits of personality; how the air is permeated by the archangeloi, the archangels; how the water is permeated by the angeloi, the angelic beings. That is why in those ancient times, the elderly were shown such tremendous respect and honor, because people knew that they were maturing and growing together with the elements. But by becoming so familiar with the elements, the spirit of the elements also took part in everything a person did. And so it came about that in those times, the way the elemental spirits worked on people was naturally specified according to the individual areas of the earth. That which lived in air and water and fire worked differently in India, in Europe, in Africa, and in America. And under the leadership of those who were enlightened in the 1950s, people drew the forces of their lives from their immediate natural surroundings, which were also perceived as spiritual. The land with air and water and fire, that is, its thermal conditions, imposed its peculiarity on those who lived on it. People were differentiated according to this. And just as our body is so differentiated that everyone grows a nose and not an ear, so the earth is such that a certain spiritual culture could only grow in India, and another in Greece, for inner reasons. Thus, out of the elemental nature of the earth, what the spirits of the elements brought into man grew.

If you imagine this, you have the earth itself as a spiritual realm of a very strange kind, which is properly expressed in the face. This gives this first cultural life in the ancient Indian epoch such a strange character. So you can say: the spirits themselves ruled on earth; the spirits. You see, the human ego did not yet have the significance that it had later. Just as little influence does man today have over his breathing, so little influence did he have in those days over what he thought and what he did. For that is what the elemental spirits in him thought.

In the next period, in the second cultural epoch, things were already different. People did not remain capable of development for as long. One could say that the age of general humanity decreased. Just as the second cultural epoch began, people only remained capable of development until the age of 48; then in the further course of time until the age of 46, 45 and so on until the age of 42. Then the second cultural epoch came to an end. So human development lasted well into the forties. Yes, but not everything was perceptible until that time. People would have had to develop well into their fifties if they were to feel and sense all the spirituality of the elemental forces and see it flowing through their beings. They could not do this to the same extent now, because in the 48th year the possibility of growing into it ceased, into that which one can naturally only grow into at the age of 48. The consequence of this was that people became duller in their feelings and perceptions, in their whole thinking and nature, towards the elements of fire, air and water. They did not become as dull as people are today, but they did become duller. One could say that they felt the elements more physically naked. They felt something like this during this time – but only when they reached their forties. Until then, they had to wait, until then they went through the ascending development of youth, went through the middle of life at the age of 35. But then, in their forties, they grew into a certain consciousness, which I could characterize in the following way.

They said to themselves: Yes, wherever there is wind and water and fire, there is also spirit; the bright spirit. When you reach your forties, you grow into this spirit. But the body itself, when it is really growing physically, really thriving physically, prevents one from growing into it. So with the soul one actually belongs to the bright spiritual realm, the spiritual that permeates all elements. The body hinders one, it pulls one back into the darkness again and again. And so, during this period, this struggle in which the human being finds himself between light and darkness was particularly emphasized. In the later Persian period, this became the struggle between the spirit of light, Ormuzd, and the spirit of darkness, Ahriman.

They felt, the people, by waking up, by coming back into the physical body: Yes, there we descend into darkness. And the youth, the young people, they knew: Because we are still in the state of growing, we have to wait until the forties, then we will be enlightened. They were not yet enlightened enough to have a living awareness of the human being's place in the struggle between light and darkness.

But with that, what was on earth ceased to be as strongly differentiated as it used to be. In the past, so to speak, every piece of culture that was above a certain area of the earth was so that it belonged there. But now that people were becoming more indifferent to the elements and were seeing more the light that fights against darkness, now came the time when less was adapted to the elemental forces that developed as culture on a stretch of the earth. There was more commonality across all of humanity. People did not have much in common in the first cultural epoch; they had as little in common as the nose has with the ear. Now the individual groups of people became more and more like one another in their belonging to their group souls.

In the third cultural epoch, things were even more different. There, in the 42nd year, people stopped being capable of development by themselves. They only remained capable of development until the 42nd year, into the 41st year and so on until the 35th year. They became even more dull to life in the elements, in fire, air and water. What lived in the elements became even more alien to them. But something else became more familiar to them. The workings of the great cosmos in light and darkness became familiar to them. Try to realize this clearly: during the day, people woke up, lived in their work, lived in the activities of the day. Then he felt that he was thrust down into the physical with his soul; there he lives in darkness. But when his soul and spirit are free, that is, from falling asleep to waking up, then this soul - in youth one did not know it, but between the ages of 42 and 35 one knew it - then the free soul is given to the spiritual environment. And one no longer felt the spirits of the elements, that is, the archai, archangeloi and angeloi, but one felt their signs shining in the stars, in the constellations, in the planetary constellations in the space in which the soul was when it was free outside the body. And so the person felt: if you descend into the darkness, then you are removed from the star constellations; but with your spiritual soul you are placed in them. There you are exposed to cosmic space; it is a star constellation where you are placed.

But consider, this star constellation is different at every point on earth. And if in the first cultural period one had directly sensed the spirits of the elements, one might say, as they descended into man, now one looked up at the stars in cosmic space and said: hence come the light forces of man. But they come differently to every place on earth. One place on earth is under this star constellation, another place on earth is under that. And it began in this third cultural period, when one became wise between the 42nd and 35th year – after that one had to become wise from the depths of the soul, one had to have what one still wanted to absorb from the stars. But it did not happen by itself, as I have characterized it now, so that one became mature between the ages of 42 and 35, and then knew very well about the dependence of the free soul on the star constellations; then people said to themselves: There are places on Earth that are under this star constellation, other places on Earth under that star constellation. If you look at Greece, you would have to say: Greece is not just this spot on Earth. It is the spot on Earth that is under a particular star constellation at a particular time of the year. Troy is the spot on Earth that is under a very specific star constellation at a particular time.

You see, it was out of these foundations that, in that third cultural period, what you have been taught as the strange struggles developed until the end of this third cultural period, when the Trojan War took place. Because what is told as the legend of Helen and Paris is only the reflection of a star constellation. And by fighting over Troy and Greece, or the Greeks fighting in Troy, and vice versa, they fought for the star constellation. And the wise men between the ages of 42 and 35 said what it meant in Greece or in “Troy to be, to possess Greece or Troy. To speak of the struggle between nations in that time, in this third cultural period, which ends in 747 BC, is to speak of something different than speaking of the struggle between nations today. At that time it meant observing how the souls of the nations fight in their own corner of the earth, how the leaders of the nations go forth to fight for their people, who are now no longer meant to express merely the physiognomy of a particular region of the earth, but something that flows down from the starry worlds, to fight for this piece of earth for this people. That is why I said: It is necessary to imagine how times will change, how something different will always happen.

To speak of the struggles between nations of that time in the same way as one speaks of them today means knowing nothing at all about the development of humanity, since this Trojan War was inspired by what the wise men of that time divined from the constellations that ruled over Greece and Troy. To speak of this war as one does today is to want to engage in fantasy and to want to know nothing of the actual nature and essence of man.

Then came the time when the general age of people had decreased again, the fourth post-Atlantic cultural period. Since one was no longer capable of development beyond the age of 35, the possibility of perceiving spirituality in the elements had disappeared altogether. One simply listed the elements in physical terms: fire, air, water, earth. At most, there was still a hint that something spiritual was in the elements, which the first Greek philosopher Thales said, that water is the origin of everything. That is not just physical water alone, but the spirit of water that lives in everything. This fourth post-Atlantic cultural period begins in 747 BC. But there was one thing that people still knew during this period, and it was still capable of development until well into the thirties. They no longer knew the spirit that ruled out there in the air, in the water, but they knew that there is a spirit within oneself. When you moved your finger, you knew that there was something spiritual living in you. To imagine the body as today's man imagines it, as today's science imagines it, that would not have been possible for the Greek. That was still something absolutely impossible for the Greek. But he perceives what is physical as spiritual and soul at the same time. He perceives that in every movement, in growth, in everything that happens in the body, the spiritual and soul-like prevails. Therefore, during this period, which begins in 747 BC and ends in 1413 AD after the Mystery of Golgotha, the view was developed that the human being consists of body and soul. But something remarkable developed within Greek culture. It is interesting to look at the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example. He reached the pinnacle of wisdom that a Greek could reach. But he was not initiated into the mysteries. This is very important.

Those who were initiated into the mysteries were also able to attain to that which was not given to people by themselves. But Aristotle could only come to what a person without initiation could come to. But there he was at the summit of this wisdom. How did Aristotle imagine immortality? That is characteristic. He said something like this: If I cut off one arm of a human being, it is no longer a complete human being. If I cut off two arms, it is no longer a complete human being at all. And if I take the whole body, then it is of course no longer a complete human being. Therefore, the soul, which Aristotle thought was immortal, in the sense of a Greek, in the sense of Aristotle, is immortal. But this immortal man is, after death, not a complete human being, but an incomplete one. Therefore, Aristotle expresses philosophically what I have often quoted from the Greek Homer, who says: “Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows,” because man could only be complete in the Greek view if he had body and soul. He is an incomplete human being, even though he is an immortal human being. The soul is no longer a whole human being for him. It is cut off from its surroundings if it has no body with its sense organs, which bring it into relation with the world.

You see, it turns out that what can be called: Man was brought more and more down to his physical nature. He remained incapable of development in the periods in which he could have received illuminations about the spiritual world. Only those initiated into the mysteries received such illuminations. So it came about that, to a certain extent, people lost their connection with the spiritual and were brought down to their physical nature.

This fourth period begins in 747 BC. You see, at the time the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, human beings remained capable of development until about the age of 33. They remained capable of development until the age of 33 at the time the Mystery of Golgotha occurred! What one can take up by oneself in development up to that point, people took up, but that did not give them the possibility – it can be seen best in Aristotle – to speak of an immortal in man. One could only speak of the fact that man is an imperfect human being when he goes through death; that he is actually no longer a whole human being. Not that this was true, but it was no longer possible through human insight to imagine what lives beyond death.

You can easily say: But why were people not simply initiated into the mysteries, and why did not the mysteries reveal to people the immortality of the human being? Yes, the mysteries were already there. They had to continue to have an effect little by little, because people would have lost their connection to the spiritual world through natural development. So there had to be at least one way into the spiritual world, but precisely because people were increasingly pushed down into the physical, in that the powers of the human being were claimed in order to thrive and prosper, it came down to the fact that one could only learn something [about the spiritual world] from the mysteries. On the one hand, man placed more and more value on the feeling of being in a body; on the other hand, he had to say to himself: Yes, you are connected to the spiritual world, but you can only gain insight into the spiritual world in the mysteries.

So what happened? What happened was that the rulers in the Greco-Latin period, the Roman Caesars, the Roman emperors, forced themselves to be initiated. The first Roman Caesar, Augustus, was an initiate. He had the power, he could force himself to be initiated. He made little misuse of it. You see, my dear friends, what has come about, this prevalence of external power, this placing of man in the development of the earth as a citizen of the Roman Empire - because one first became a “citizen” there - it only became possible when man no longer felt himself a citizen of the spiritual world. Only then did man become involved in everything that comes from the “flesh”. But one could force oneself - if one was the mightiest man in the flesh, if one was Roman emperor - to be initiated into the mysteries. And not only Caesar Augustus had forced himself to be initiated, but also a man like Caligula forced himself to be initiated. And what history reports refers to truths. Because Caligula was able to speak with the spirits of the elements, with the spirits of the moon. He could consciously use the formulas that were used at that time by the initiates. He knew that “man is of divine nature,” so he allowed himself to be worshipped as a god. But for people like Augustus, Caligula and Nero, who were all initiates because they forced initiation, their initiation led to an insistence on power in the physical world, but at the same time to a real contempt for the physical. For this Caligula, when he once heard of a court case in which an innocent man had been convicted, he said: That does not matter, because the innocent man was certainly just as guilty as the guilty man. And another time he said: Well, the judges who condemned the guilty man are just as guilty.

A personality like Nero's can also be understood from such backgrounds. For what did they say when they were as initiated as Nero? He did not understand Christianity. But when you were as initiated as Nero, you said to yourself: natural development no longer provides anything spiritual. The spiritual realm must come into the world in a different way. In a different way, the spirit must come to earth. It must descend in a different form than before, when one grew into what surrounded one as a spirit through natural development. This was wrung out in the insane mind of Nero and showed itself in how he wanted to demand the coming of the spirit. He knew from physics: it no longer gives the spirit, it has peeled itself out of the spiritual. Therefore, he wanted to set Rome on fire and from there ignite the world fire. It was his idea to destroy the earth because it no longer yielded the spirit. Nero was completely convinced that human physicality has now been completely abandoned by the spirit. Only if one does not rely on the body, but only on the spirit and soul, did he want to seek the spiritual realm from a completely different direction. Why then this earth, human flesh, which is in any case only unchaste? Neros called all human flesh, all physical unchaste. When one speaks of psychoanalysis today, one is strongly reminded of Nero. One can say: He was the first psychoanalyst who sought everything in the human flesh. That was the other side.

Briefly, before the time of Nero, the human race was actually only developing up to the age of 33. And now, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ grew up to the age of 33, to this lifetime of man. Human beings had descended in their development from 56 to 33 years of age; the Christ Jesus grew contrary to this age of man. He found death in the 33rd year of life and radiates his impulses into the earth. He merged with the earth's substance.

Imagine this miracle. The human race is getting younger and younger until it is 33 years old. The Christ comes at this time, he develops up to the 33rd year, then passes through the gate of death and radiates his own being there. It is a supreme moment when one contemplates this connection between the Mystery of Golgotha and the development of humanity. This is how the Mystery of Golgotha is part of human development. The 33 years of Christ Jesus are not a coincidence. It had to be so because his ascending age had to coincide with the descent of humanity.

You see, my dear friends: spiritual science does not take us away from an understanding of Christianity; spiritual science leads us more and more into this understanding of Christianity. We get more and more feeling for the great significance of Christianity. From this we can see how crazy it is to accuse spiritual science of not being able to relate to Christ in the right way. And by what kind of people is it accused? By people who want to relate to Christ in a strange way. Take a statement such as the one that was recently made in the magazine 'Die Furche' in 1915. There, in a way that is not actually initially unkind, spiritual science, insofar as it is represented by me, is spoken of, but then it is said:

Therefore, one must not only [call out the following words of Rudolf Steiner to certain aberrations of this spiritual activity, but to all those who are influenced by this movement: “Those who do not want to trust completely dark powers, whose true nature and origin they cannot know, should avoid getting involved in such things.”]

Yes, my dear friends, I am telling you this because otherwise this article is not without favoritism. But that also arises from a feeling that must be counted among the great lies of our time. What do people of this kind actually want? Well, that the Christ has redeemed them, no matter how they behave now; if only they can always speak the name “Lord, Lord” and talk about it.

Of course, spiritual science must relate to Christ Jesus in a different way. It must bear in mind the words of Christ Jesus: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Spiritual science does not want to leave unused the divine power that is in people, but seeks the path to Christ. Out of laziness, out of the great lie of life, that which speaks in such a way as is spoken at the end of this article is asserted. No attention is paid to how, especially in our time, the spiritual forces must flow in such a way that, through spiritual science, they can lead precisely to the secrets of the Christ being. Here again you have a glimpse of the terrible superficiality of the present time, through which humanity must pass. It wants to leave everything to Christ Jesus without making much effort or exerting itself. What a comfortable point of view! But this is the point of view of those today who call themselves Christians and reject spiritual science as un-Christian. True spiritual science, as you can see, dear friends, leads to such a deep understanding that one experiences the harrowing fact that the descent of the ages of humanity grows together with the 33rd year, the 'year of the death of Christ Jesus'. Right down to the last detail, spiritual science proves to open up understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

And now, since 1413, we have been living in the age where humanity is only capable of development on its own, from 1413 to the age of 28. Today we have come down to the age of 27.

From this you can see, my dear friends, that spiritual science did not arise out of an arbitrary whim or out of some principle of agitation, but rather: Man simply cannot develop further in our time through himself than up to the age of 27. What is to develop further, the soul must drive forward through its own inner impulses, which come from the spiritual world. The body can no longer provide it.

And anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has the task of leading souls beyond the development that they can find through the body alone. There you have a secret of our time. Anyone who does not try to understand spiritual science, even if only in a rational, intellectual way – you can understand spiritual science without undergoing an inner development – but this understanding must ignite the connection of the soul with the spiritual world, must feel it. If you don't come into contact with the spiritual world through spiritual science, you won't live past the age of 27. Today, one can only grow older through spiritual development. This is very significant, my dear friends, this is something tremendous. When the riddles of the present weigh heavily on you, when you want to know what has happened and what has to happen, when you are looking for an answer to the question: What is the purpose of spiritual science? How is it challenged by the interests and impulses of the present?

Then we look at the leading, most influential people, for example, of the present time. Going into more detail is not exactly appropriate in our time of non-existent freedom of the press. So one can choose an example, but it is truly not chosen from the chaos created by the war. I have spoken in cycles about what happened before the war, when the feelings that the war had produced were not yet alive in people. But you can see from this that I was already able to see certain personalities at that time as they are happening today. I always had to ask myself again: Which personalities clearly show that people cannot grow older than 27 years if they are not seeking a spiritual impulse? And then I found that a characteristic person of this kind is the President of North America, Woodrow Wilson. He is one of those people who cannot get older than 27 years old – even if they live to be a hundred – because he only takes in what humanity gives of itself. You see, that is why such a person can send great ideas into the world; one can have a spiritual and intellectual pleasure in these ideas, one can lick one's fingers because one feels such pleasure, but they are still only immature ideas. They do not even reach the age of 35, the middle of life, they are 27 years old – yes, they are boyish ideas. Humanity sleeps through these facts, that these ideas are no older than twenty-seven years, because it cannot think things in such a way that the man who sits in one of the most powerful places on earth today solves the mystery for us, why he sends nothing but abstract, nothing but big, resounding words without real reality into the world. Because his ideas are no older than twenty-seven years, therefore they cannot find their way into reality. The man who sits in the most important place today, who therefore says all the tirades in his / gap in the transcript] message, which speak of freedom of peoples and the like. So today people find beautiful words, ideal words. They sound so nice to people that they say: He is an idealist, he has good ideas.

But what matters today, my dear friends, is not that someone has beautiful ideas, but that someone has ideas that can reach into reality, that really have the power to work in reality. What matters is not that someone has ideas to secure peace and then issues a manifesto that in a few weeks creates war in their own country. There is a great difference between the beauty, logic and idealism of ideas and the reality of ideas. That is why I emphasized so strongly in my last book that today we cannot just have beautiful ideas and feel them with a certain voluptuousness, but that we can descend into reality with our ideas, that we have practical ideas for life that can become reality, that can have an effect on reality as a force. Today, beautiful ideas can be precisely those of the most immature people. I would like to give you a trivial example of this. You can hear people saying, “Oh, we are living in a great spiritual change; this war will bring about a completely new era. In the future, it will no longer be as it was before, but the most capable man will be in the right place.” What beautiful ideas! One can lick one's fingers with sheer voluptuousness at having uttered such beautiful ideas. But if the son-in-law or the nephew is “the most capable,” then the whole beautiful idea is worth nothing. These beautiful ideas do not intervene in reality. What matters is not that a person grasps the full reality and regards ideas only as the instrument for immersing themselves in reality, but that they grasp reality. Today, people do not even feel what is meant by such words. They do not feel how far they are from reality because they have become accustomed to listening for beautiful ideas that mean nothing at all. What is at stake is that we ourselves must immerse ourselves in reality with our souls, we must become akin to reality. That is why today, in every field of knowledge, there are only unrealistic ideas. Political economy has only unrealistic ideas. What is now called political science, you can go through it, everywhere at the universities it consists only of unrealistic ideas. Nowhere are the ideas suitable for immersion in reality. Now an excellent man, who is even sympathetic towards my ideas, has published a book – yes, from beginning to end the book is full of abstract ideas. Nowhere can one find the slightest sense of immersion in reality.

But my dear friends, what happens among people depends on what people think and feel. Therefore, it is necessary to realize: we need a wisdom that is related to reality. We must permeate the ideas with which we want to rule the world with the spirit that is taken from reality itself.

And so the task at hand is to become familiar with reality. But this can only be achieved by building on a spiritual-scientific foundation. We have already become very alienated from reality. People can think an awful lot in the present. Some people are so clever. But these clever ideas are all abstract and have no reality value, because the human being has no reality value when it comes to ideas. In the case of man, one speaks only of the dead product in physiology, in biology; of that which has no reality value itself. How can one have anything real in economic ideas, in political science ideas, if the starting points do not contain concepts that have reality.

Try to understand this correctly, my dear friends, and you will realize that this spiritual science must not be taken as many do, as a mystical, nebulous construct that wants to lead people away from the practice of life. The opposite is true. I have often used the example of a horseshoe magnet. You can say, “Well, that's a horseshoe, we'll shoe a horse's hoof with it.” That would be nonsense, of course, because the horseshoe-shaped magnet is to be used as a magnet. The world only sees the horseshoe and shoes a horse's hoof with it. This is what today's humanity does with the world. Namely with the social order of people, because it has no concepts that really grasp what is in reality, as magnetism in the horseshoe magnet.

And here, my dear friends, is what it is all about, because no one who does not understand this understands the deeper reasons for the terrible times in which we live. And as people have moved away from reality, they have also moved further and further away from the true, real understanding of the facts.

Today it can easily happen that, for example, A says to B: Hey, C did this and that. B thinks that because A said that C did this, B actually said: C is a bad guy. A didn't say that, he just listed facts. But B goes to C and says: Hey, A said you were a bad guy.

This is a paradigm for much of what happens today. People no longer know how to distinguish between what they think of things and the facts. Enormous harm is caused by this because people do not look at what arises from such inaccuracies received through thoughts. A sense of fact is what people need. But do they have it? Do they have this sense of fact? An example that could stand for hundreds, for thousands, for millions: There is a magazine called “The Invisible Temple”. A certain Horneffer publishes this magazine.

Many people now say: Oh, “The Invisible Temple”, that is certainly something very deep, something very, very deep. And now you read; you read all kinds of beautiful things; you can have voluptuous sensations from these beautiful things. But, you see, I have the February issue right now. It contains a discussion about monism and theosophy:

[As different as the monists are from the theosophists, and as eagerly as they fight and despise each other, they are strangely similar in one respect: they monopolize the word 'science'. What they do themselves is true, pure science; what other people do is sham and pseudo-science. This can be read in Haeckel and Rudolf Steiner.]

I ask you, where? Open all the things I have written, all the things I have said, and see if I have ever spoken these words! But this is in a magazine that now comes out with the pretension of calling itself “The Invisible Temple”. In the face of this, one must get used to calling a lie a lie. You have to call a lie a lie, because that is a lie. It does not matter whether it is he who lies or they who lie, those who appear with pretension, in the blue freemason magazine under the title “The Invisible Temple” to put forward all sorts of strange chatter, not to say anything worse, who do not want to make a judgment about where lies are present. By alienating oneself from reality with one's concepts and ideas, by saying this or that without having the sense to immerse oneself in reality, one also distances oneself from the sense of the truth. But this is something that must come first: a sense of the truth if salvation is to come for our time.

And so, my dear friends, since we have actually run out of time, I would like to add to this reflection something that really shows how, even in our circles, in the so-called anthroposophical circles, and only recently, what is alienation from the sense of fact plays a role.

I started today's reflection by saying that a person could, so to speak, starve to death by wanting to popularize Schiller's Aesthetic Letters. They are truly not popular. After all, who actually knows them? Who, in particular, understands the tremendously deep meaning of the impulses they contain?

Have we not seen how, in the course of the development of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural period, people have increasingly distanced themselves from the spiritual world and increasingly degenerated in their instincts? Schiller raises the big question in one of the first centuries of our time – the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period begins in 1413 – in his letters on aesthetic education: how do instincts find their way back to the spiritual? How do you find your way back? At that time there was still no spiritual science, as Schiller wrote, in the way one could think about these things at that time, how man finds his way back from instincts to spirituality. This is magnificently, powerfully, incomparably stated in these letters. And it was actually a regression in later times that one did not want to pick up the thread into the spirit that Schiller wanted to take.

And basically, within our ranks, little was understood of how everything was actually designed to truly follow the right path of spiritual science dictated by the times. One of the first publications is my lectures on Schiller, which I gave at the Berlin Free University, where we talked about the “Letters on Aesthetic Education” in connection with his spiritual development. This is one of the first publications of the Theosophical Society, which then became the Anthroposophical Society. There were difficult struggles. But, my dear friends, there is still much to come, because today we see the matter as having reached a kind of climax. I do not want to be misunderstood in this. Therefore, allow me to deal with matters in a few moments that only appear to be personal matters.

[In truth, they are really not personal matters for me. And when some members of the Anthroposophical Society, at the time when the terrible battle had to be fought against Annie Besant, withdrew in a noble way and said: we do not want to have anything to do with personal matters, is actually incomprehensible. Because you have to distinguish between who is the attacker and who is the attacked, otherwise things come about as they have now come about.

Let us take a harsh example, so that we can visualize how it is necessary to see with one's whole soul to form an opinion. You see, spiritual science could flourish without a society. If you had a few people in different German cities who organized lectures every winter, spiritual science could flourish for humanity without the Anthroposophical Society. There are two things: the Anthroposophical Society and spiritual science. The Anthroposophical Society must be something in itself, must be a reality in itself in its impulses. Therefore, one must stand within it with full judgment. Now, I have to discuss here things in which the Hanover branch is less involved, but which nevertheless affect the unity of the Society.

Do you see what happened years ago? There was a certain Mr. Grasshoff, who was pushed in by a member. He went from lecture cycle to lecture cycle, from lecture to lecture; he copied everything down, bought all the books, all the cycles? He also copied everything that was privately written down. After a few months, he had everything that had been said in the lectures and that had been written together.

Now you might say, after all that happened later: Why was the man admitted? Yes, you can't turn someone away because of what they will do in the future. That's a dilemma. When a person enters society, you can't tell them — forgive the harsh expression — you can't say: you won't be accepted because you would turn out to be a bastard later. So there is the dilemma. So the man had written down everything he could get his hands on. Except for the title he gave his book – “The Rosicrucian World Conception” – everything else is mine. But he had written a preface. In this book, he not only included what he had found in printed books, so that he had published something in America, but also things that had not yet been published here. But he wrote a preface. And in it he says: Yes, of course he used a lot in this book, included a lot that he had learned from me and my books. But that would not have been enough. Then one day he was called to a master in Transylvania, who then gave him the deepest knowledge, so he could give so much more in his book. But what you find “more” is just copied from cycles and lectures. That's how this book was made.

Now you can say: That's American. Fine. You can forgive a lot under that flag. But that wasn't the only thing that happened. A German publisher was found, but Hugo Vollrath's publishing house had this book translated into German and published it as individual Rosicrucian lesson letters in Germany. And there it had a preface in which it is said: “Some of it has already been said here, that is, in Germany, but much of it was unclean; it first had to be cleansed in the pure air of California.” And so you get so-called Rosicrucian letters in which everything is stolen, everything is theft, but on top of that, theft with defamation.

You see, such an outrage is impossible in the outer literary life, because something like that would become known and be dealt with accordingly. I have discussed this repeatedly, but with us it goes in at one ear and out the other. It is not discussed further. It is not taken into account that such an outrage must be reported and made known, otherwise it will have consequences. It will also be known if one only forms the right judgment about it. It depends on the judgment. Not only that one forms logical judgments, but that one also knows in such things how great the disgrace is that is possible in the world.

You see, things like that have consequences. You know that there was a member – a member until recently – who could not be rejected either. He was a member for a long time. In fact, because we were sympathetic to this member, one of his writings was even published by our publishing house. But then he wanted to publish another writing. In this book, 'Who Was Christ?' the author also makes use of all kinds of things from the cycles. But then he says: 'Dr. Steiner did hint at such things, but he never went into them in detail; one must treat the subject more thoroughly'. Dr. Steiner took offence at that. I myself only said that Dr. Steiner had probably taken offence, but that I had not dealt with it myself. I only read one passage, which was enough to understand that this book had to be rejected. This man had been looking for years to find some kind of field of work in the Anthroposophical Society — as a follower; he was a strange follower, though. You see, the man gets this book rejected and then becomes an opponent; even an enemy, not just an opponent. Yes, then he wrote an article in the so-called “Psychischen Studien” (Psychical Studies). An article in which he wanted to prove alleged contradictions in my writings. But if he had only written about the contradictions, he would not have attracted much attention. Whatever can be said objectively should be said. Yes, let a hundred or a thousand pamphlets appear; spiritual science has no opposition to fear. But objectivity is out of the question in this case. The man in question - it is Privy Councillor Seiling - weaves slander, defamation and lies into his foolish arguments about contradictions. He has adopted the strategy of trying to drive spiritual science into a kind of scandal, and he finds compliant editors who are far too lazy to fight spiritual science objectively; they would have to study it, and they don't want to do that. So they push the whole thing into scandal, defamation, by throwing mud at those who want to represent this spiritual science. Such things are sometimes done in a very subtle way, my dear friends! For example, Hofrat Seiling published an article that followed the article about the so-called contradictions. This article is a perfect example of what a subtle desire for defamation can do. You see, the most harmless thing that can happen is that it is of no concern to anyone – it was our marriage. A scandal arose about it among people who, of course, had no right to do so. It was nobody's business. But the fact that a number of women - not to use any other word - used the opportunity to create a scandal about this matter is characteristic of the way these women see things. This scandal was absolutely none of our business; the others made it. But how does Seiling formulate this matter? He formulates it in such a way that this marriage has led to scandals in Dornach. And so everyone must believe that the marriage itself led to a scandal, while it was these - yes, I am now making points - while it was these... women who made this scandal. - This is how you write sophisticated defamatory articles.

But other things were written as well. Many of our members know that I allowed the cycles to be printed. But I had to make up my mind to do so, firstly because the members wanted it; the transcripts that circulate among the members are often downright terrible. For example, we had to experience that we saw a transcript that was going around saying that I had said that prostitution was set up by great initiates in the sixteenth century. So I really had enough of these private transcripts. But I couldn't see all of these things.

Seiling was one of those people who did not make my life easy. Now he is noble enough to say: If Steiner did not give so many conversations to members, then he could see through the cycles and there would be no need for 'Unseen Postscript'. And Seiling cannot stop grumbling about the Anthroposophical Society and the way members behave. One can think of countless details in such matters. And just with Seiling, one only needs to think of it when he now speaks of how much time was taken for the discussions with members, then one only needs to think of the fact that it was Seiling who, for example, in Munich, saddled me with a completely insane person who did not visit me, whom I, to do Seiling a favor, visited more often. Of course, what the man wanted as advice turned into terrible vindictiveness and hatred for me.

Yes, my dear friends, to look into what happened there is a terrible thing. Therefore, one should not talk about opposing writings that only want to be factual. One must make a strict distinction. If someone has made a judgment that is as dismissive as can be, but remains objective, then I agree with it. You see, our dear, good Ludwig Deinhard – he died recently. He has done almost more than anyone else in recent times for spiritual science. Wherever he could, he published beautiful, significant articles. But he worked hard to get there because he was initially involved in a completely different field. And at the time when I began lecturing, under the influence of Deinhard — one may say this because he was later one of the most loyal and active supporters, and the latter is even more valuable — the following appeared: “The Berlin traveler in spiritual science has arrived!” That's okay. That's an opinion; anyone can take a position on this opinion. It is not a defamation, but an opinion, and one may have opinions. As I said, Deinhard has long since outgrown it, but even if he hadn't, you're allowed to do it; you're allowed to characterize, that's literary license. But you're not allowed to slander; you're not allowed to say things that are simply not true, that are objective untruths. But that is what distinguishes Seiling's attack from such attacks. And that is why it is quite worthless to refute this “discussion of contradictions.” Rather, the world must know: the man started this whole story purely because he was rejected by our publishing house with this brochure “Who Was Christ?” That is the real reason. And it is this real reason that must be pointed out, that is what matters.

Now another case. Many years ago, a man from central Germany wrote to Dr. Schüßler: He did not know what to do, whether to marry into a family or whether to turn to another change in his life. And when she wrote to him that we were not there to give advice on such matters, he gradually became more involved with the Theosophical Society at the time, initially within it in Berlin, albeit in a peculiar way, so that people got the impression – I am not saying that he did it, but that people got the impression, and very credible people – that he would now take care of the marriage for himself in the Society. Then, at a general assembly, without any artistic feeling and without a clue, he unleashed Schiller's Cassandra on the heads of the shocked members. Then he went to Munich. Now we had the misfortune of unsuspecting people approaching us and asking us to let him learn how to paint. But he didn't want to learn to paint, he wanted to be able to paint. He didn't want to become a painter, he wanted to be a painter. We just didn't know how to go about it. We wanted to help him in every way. A great deal has been done for the man, but he could do nothing. He wanted to be a genius, and he was terribly resentful that he could not be made a genius. Just as with what is called development, people resent the fact that they have to work for it. They would actually like me to take care of it: I turn to him, then I have to develop myself – he will do it. – Well, this man was concerned with not learning anything and yet wanting to be something. He went wild over it. That is the reason for his wildness. But now he writes that through the exercises he is supposed to have received – I don't know – he has developed spots on many parts of his body. And now he writes the most incredible articles in all sorts of places, which are as ridiculous on the one hand as they are defamatory on the other.

For example, he writes: The exercise would have particularly harmed him, that he should have thought: What is happening in my environment is good and necessary. — Isn't it, you have to be so ruthless as to give someone such an exercise! It bruised him in many places. But this exercise is actually in Schopenhauer's works. You will find the words in Schopenhauer, who considers it healthy for every human being. So he has not been given anything particularly magical, as you can see, but a very generally human exercise. But today – well, those editors who included the article by Erich Bamler also know Schopenhauer. The truth is that the man wrote these articles. What is in them are objective untruths and even stupidities. The truth is that the man did not become a genius and went wild about it. Yes, that's how it is.

And now we are happy that they have started - and that the story seems to be to be continued - that not only am I being thrown dirt, but they are now no longer stopping at Dr. Steiner - and in a “tone that is not there at all. Nothing like this has been printed yet, the way it is now being printed against what is being done and written here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Yes, for example, there is rambling about the disgracefulness of the exercises that the doctor is said to have given to a young girl. And how did she give these exercises? When the young girl was called to account for how she could claim that, since it is common knowledge that Frau Doktor never gives exercises, when she was asked how she could claim that Frau Doktor had given her exercises that had harmed her, since it is quite untrue, she said, “Yes, she didn't give them to me in such a way that she would have told me.” Yes, but how then, they asked her. Well, the young girl said, I listened to Dr. Steiner's recitations for eurythmists. Poems by Lienhard, poems by Uhland. Of course the poems were only meant for the others, but for me they contained exercises, so she gave me exercises. She didn't consciously receive the exercises, it was said, but she was simply Dr. Steiner's medium.

Yes, these things – that they are insane is not our concern, but that they are invented, that they are objective untruths, that is our concern. The matter has finally come to a head, that in the same article in the “Psychischen Studien” it says - the Anthroposophical Society really had to be found in order to have members who would believe something like this from a magazine - it says something like this: Dr. Steiner wrote about the Lazarus miracle in the book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”, and he wanted to perform the Lazarus miracle with me. He wanted to transform me as Christ transformed Lazarus. This is connected with the fact that she burst into my bedroom one morning in a terrible fit of raving madness. She actually wanted to assault Dr. Steiner, but her door was locked. She was then taken to a sanatorium. This does not prevent her from writing these things now. Among other things, she says that it is all because Dr. Steiner sent her chocolate. Dr. Steiner just wanted to do her a kindness and bought her chocolate and other times apples or oranges. They wanted to be kind to her. — Because at the time she was thought to be ill, she was in a sanatorium. Now she writes that this chocolate was sent to her to thicken the blood so that the Lazarus miracle could take place. That's what's in the magazine now, and the editor adds the note:

[These are the kinds of madness that can land a healthy person in the asylum! - Ed.]

That's what really makes it personal. So the treatment consisted of sending the sick girl chocolate to the sanatorium, not to thicken her blood, but to eat, that's the treatment.

These are the kinds of things that are so terribly ridiculous on the one hand, like the Goesch case. It was said: Yes, the Goesch case is yet to come and will be one of the most difficult. The Goesch case is also, on the one hand, so terribly ridiculous and, on the other hand, so defamatory and disparaging, because today the intention is to eliminate spiritual science not by honest debate but by discrediting the person, by telling things that are pure invention and so foolish that people can say, Well, if they go to such lengths to perform a Lazarus miracle, then you can't take this spiritual science seriously. On the other hand, people can say: people go crazy with spiritual science, it is dangerous. It is the best policy to count on people's addiction to scandal; it is the best policy one can adopt to make something impossible. It is written in a tone, in a way that is simply incredible. And the editor makes the comment that one could believe it.

If some defenders now come forward, so we know that there are people in this society who “consider Dr. Steiner to be the Christ”. Yes, my dear friends, anything is possible in this day and age! I recently received a letter from a neighboring town. The letter said that the gentleman had attended a public lecture of mine. I spoke about the repeated incarnations of Christ and made it clear that I am laying claim to the present one. And he noted that he heard this with his own ears and not only he, but also some friends who were sitting with him in this lecture. So today people tell stories that are the crassest nonsense; they swear by them under certain circumstances.

You see, people still have their secondary purposes. What do people want to achieve? The young lady's article was written from the attitude from which all things come. This article is entitled “Anthroposophy: Sexual Magic”. It is interesting that everything leads to the sexual realm.

People who are themselves under the influence of sexuality – well, it is easy to understand that they want to drag everything into this area. But there are other purposes behind it as well. The strange thing is that if you read Goesch's writing today - which has not yet been published, but they are threatening to publish it - if you read this writing, you will find the strange thing that he constantly proves what he says against me by referring to passages from the mystery dramas. He refutes me from books of mine, from lectures, from my writings. It has never happened before that such a method has been used. It is quite a novelty. A person in Dornach writes to Goesch to bring him a little more to reason. He receives the answer from Goesch, which is supposed to make it clear to him that he will not allow himself to be converted: “I only need to remind you of a profound saying - or something like that - that clarifies your situation:

I hear not the friend,
I hear a ghastly creature.

That is actually from the Rosicrucian Mystery. Yes, what people actually want is to get the matter onto a track where everything is made public. Whether they want to urge you to publish everything in a justification, or whether they want to urge you to bring a lawsuit in which everything must be made public. They want to have everything. In today's world, you can no longer keep anything secret from humanity, which is going through a crisis that is clearly evident in these matters.

For those who are familiar with spiritual science, this is not surprising, but the judgment must be brought into the right channels. Those who have to speak about spiritual matters, especially esoteric ones, know very well that if they speak to about 120 people, 70 of them are potential opponents. This is simply because one has to speak to certain depths of the human soul. At most, 50 can remain loyal. The others, if they do not die earlier, will become opponents. But the big difference is whether they become decent opponents. For the time being, we live in a time when most are not decent. One can be satisfied with decent opponents, because spiritual science will only slowly and gradually become part of human development. That goes without saying.

All this that I have explained to you shows the absolute necessity for me to take certain measures. For it is impossible to allow what spiritual science is supposed to achieve to be dragged through the mud. As long as only people like Freimark and the like spread their calumnies about spiritual science, the matter could still be ignored. But now that those who throw mud at everything and do the worst are recruiting from society itself, even if they are resigning, I have to take a measure - together with another one - a measure that means that I have to suspend all private meetings for the near future. It is no longer possible for me to hold private meetings. Those who are honestly seeking esoteric knowledge may be patient; a substitute will be found for these esoteric discussions. Anthroposophy must be brought into the full light of the public, and all private discussions must cease. No one can feel more sorry and wistful than I feel sorry and wistful, because I have enjoyed serving people. But since I have said many things so often in vain, it must now be pointed out by facts that a correct judgment must prevail. It cannot continue like this, that one considers fools to be initiates and the like. So it is impossible to get along. Therefore, all private discussions must stop in the near future. As I said, a replacement will be created for those who continue to strive esoterically honest.

But this measure must be supplemented by another, and anyone who does not say this second measure when saying the first, does not remain with the truth. This second measure is that I allow everyone to say everything that has ever been said to them in these private conversations, if they want to. Nothing need be kept secret that has ever been said in private conversations. For it is precisely about these private conversations that an enormous amount of lies are told. Precisely these private conversations are used to drag spiritual science into the mud, because they cannot be refuted by spiritual science itself. Therefore, these private conversations must cease; one must submit to this necessity; without exception they must cease. And besides, as I said, I authorize anyone to pass on the content of the private conversations if they so desire. This should help to silence those dreadful tongues that are now opening up such a campaign of defamation, if these measures are carried out for a while and if it is seen that not only spiritual science itself but also everything that happens in society does not need to shy away from the light of day.

But there would be a lot to do, because there would still be a lot of this mudslinging that has developed up to now, and there would be a lot to do if one had to deal with everything that has developed from the worst instincts.

You have to get to know people in society. So far, as a rule, it has been done the way a lady in Berlin did it. There were scandal-mongering ladies in Dornach who attacked me and the doctor in the most terrible way. A lady who was related to one of the scandal-mongering ladies in Dornach wrote to the doctor saying that she should do something to bring the scandal-mongering ladies to their senses in a benevolent way. It has become the custom to interpret the first principle of our society as meaning that anyone can commit any disgraceful act, so one must treat them with love and goodwill because one has to apply this principle to all people. The one who is attacked is seen as the sinner. At least we can assure you that there is no kind of impertinence that has not been directed at us in the course of anthroposophical work. I have to take these two measures not only because of the content, but also to make it clear that we must finally take the demand for sound judgment seriously, so that morbid judgments cannot persist. I also pronounced these measures in Munich. Someone said: Why should everyone have to suffer when a few people do such things? I had to answer: Yes, you turn to those who cause such things, and not to those who then have to carry out such measures under duress. If they had wanted to, they could have found a way, maybe not now that the avalanche has started – but they should have found ways and means at the time when it was still just a snowball. But in the future, the only way to help is to take such strict measures.

Please do not take it amiss that I had to add this consideration to the actual spiritual consideration that I wanted to make here.] One would like so much not to have only words at one's disposal to say what needs to be said in today's world, to find one's way to the hearts and souls of people. Language has already become a purely abstract product. And the words, how they are heard, already weak and abstract. I would like to give another example of this.

Just think, people today hear someone say, “He did it pretty well.” Who will think differently today if someone speaks as if they wanted to say “almost well.” “Pretty well” equals “almost well.” But “pretty” has the same root as the word “geziemt,” which means “what befits.” And 'pretty good' does not just mean 'almost good', but, if you feel the word in the right way, then you feel: 'in the way of 'good', so when something is done 'pretty well', that you have done it so that it can please, that it is appropriate, that it is well done. Who listens in this way today? However, spiritual science must speak in this way. Then the Seilingers come along and say: It is bad German. The worse Seiling writes, the worse he finds what is cultivated in my books or cycles as a “German style”, but which is entirely based on spiritual science.

Who today senses in the words “between”, “two”, “doubt”, that which divides? This lies in the doubt that something divides when one is confronted with a division. Who senses this so concretely in the word? Who also senses it in the word “purpose”? - “Zw” - And so with all the words. Language has also become abstract.

My dear friends, when one has to discuss such important contemporary issues as I have today, when one has to speak of the necessity to grasp reality again in a conscious sense, one would like to be able to handle something other than mere words, which have already become abstract today.

Perhaps some of you can still hear in your hearts, as today's abstract words are felt, what was said first about the demands of the time and about the position of spiritual science in humanity.

Think about it a lot, my dear friends; many of the riddles that confront us today in this terrible time find their solution in the development of today's reflection.

My dear friends,

We first commemorate those who are in the fields of the difficult confusions of the present and turn to their protecting spirits:

Spirits of your souls, watchers in action!
Your wings may bring
Our souls' imploring love
To earthlings trusting in your protection!
That united with your might
Our plea may helpfully shine
On the souls it lovingly seeks.

And while we turn to the protecting spirits of those who, as a result of these events, have already passed through the gate of death:

Spirits of your souls, watchers in action!
Your wings may bring
Our souls' imploring love
To the people of the spheres who trust in your protection!
That united with your power
Our plea may help to radiate
The souls she lovingly seeks.

And the spirit we seek through our spiritual science, the spirit that wanted to go to the salvation of the earth, to the freedom and progress of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, be with you and your difficult duties!

My dear friends!

In our present time - and I mean present in the broadest sense, so that it encompasses the centuries in which we live, the centuries of our fifth cultural period, which began in 1413 and we now stand in this our present – we find few such people who live life to the full like the now less well-known but once quite sensational philosopher Schelling, who died in 1856. Let us take a brief look at the nature of this philosopher Schelling. It is something that people of the present day find extremely difficult to understand. As early as the 1790s, the philosopher Schelling appeared in Jena, exerting a powerful influence at the university through the power of his speech, captivating everyone with the spirituality of his entire being. What he presented at the time was a kind of worldview, one might say, which attempted to grasp and depict reality from two points of view. He presented a natural philosophy and a spiritual philosophy. He wanted to grasp reality from these two sides – from the side of natural existence and from the side of spiritual existence.

It was in fact one of the high points of German intellectual life. For at that time one could, as it were, learn - you can read about it in my book 'Vom Menschenrätsel' - one could learn from a personality such as Schelling's, from the way the spirit speaks through the human being. Then came the time when Schelling had, as it were, taken a further step, when he presented what he had presented earlier in a different form. It was the time when he wanted to present more, not the world from one side, the side of its natural existence and from the other side, that of its spiritual existence, but rather that which underlies nature and spirit in common. And again he spoke, as it were, captivatingly, fervently, magnificently, but as if from a different key, presenting the same thing. Then came the time when he lectured less and devoted himself more to writing, when he immersed himself in Jakob Böhme's profound worldview. He then presented what he had previously presented as natural and spiritual philosophy from a different point of view, in very different words, in a very different way. And only by delving into this in such a way, by absorbing what he, one might say, was able to grasp more in abstract thoughts in his work with Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and by deepening this through the great, powerful insights of Jakob Böhme, was he able to present something like something like “The Mysteries of the Deities of Samothrace”, where he really brought to life again from certain spiritual depths what these strange mysteries of the first period of the fourth post-Atlantic period, the last period of the third post-Atlantic period, held in their bosom.

Then came Schelling's theosophical period, as it is called, the time in which he tried to penetrate to the deepest sources of being, in which he tried to depict human development from a unified world source.

So his theosophical period. And finally came the time – it was the time when he was called to Berlin by Frederick William IV – of his so-called positive philosophy, which has been preserved in his two-volume significant work “Philosophy of Mythology” and in his other two-volume work “On the Philosophy of Revelation”. There he attempts to present what has flowed into human development in the ancient mysteries and through the mystery of Golgotha. He was not well understood. He spoke, after all, about things for which our time has little time, and one can say, if one wants to compare someone with Schelling, not in terms of the intensity, comprehensiveness and artistry of his work, but in terms of his individual humanistic approach, then in modern times it could only be Goethe. What is the significance of a personality like Schelling? Schelling, who in his old age, with his eyes enlivened by the spirit, made an enormous impression on those who still got to know him – what was it that was most remarkable about Schelling?

Yes, my dear friends, what was remarkable about Schelling was the peculiarity that he, more than other people, was able to work independently, even though he was not fully aware of this activity, to work in his etheric body, not just, as is usually the case with modern people, in his physical body. The possibility of thinking and feeling in a healthy, relaxed etheric body was something that Schelling had.

And there was something else connected with this. It was connected with something that modern philistinism can understand so little: Schelling remained capable of development to a certain degree well into his old age; he remained capable of development well into his fifties. The modern person does not remain capable of development. The modern person concludes his ability to develop - we will have more to say about this later - at a relatively young age. And he is indeed proud of having concluded his capacity for development at a young age. Even today, one rarely encounters people who, let us say, at the end of their twenties or the beginning of their thirties, have the right sense to listen to fairy tales; indeed, even have the right sense to take in Goethe's Iphigenia or Schiller's William Tell with soulful vividness. That is what children absorb when they are young; adults do not concern themselves with it.

My dear friends, compare the extent of the difference in today's people between development in young years and later development. In young years, people are still completely connected with physical-bodily development in their spiritual-soul development. As we know, the child develops physically and bodily, but it is connected with this physical and bodily development, with the consolidation of the nervous system, with the strengthening of the muscular system and so on, with the inner configuration of all organs, that the child's spiritual and psychological development goes hand in hand with physical and bodily development. And how dependent people are on their physical body in their 14th to 17th year! This changes later. Then the spiritual-soul development goes its own way, and for most people today it does not go any way at all. They retain the same way of judging, the same way of relating to the world, and so on. If someone like Schelling appears in the present day, then, yes, then one finds that he has undergone transformations in his life, as they say; that in his forties he spoke from a different key than in his twenties. Of course, he spoke from the same source of truth, but in a different key.

And when Schelling presented his “Positive Philosophy” in Berlin in the 1840s, people could not understand how the man who had presented natural philosophy in his youth could now speak of positive Christianity in such a way. In modern times, Schelling was one of those exceptions who remained capable of development as a personality throughout their life, who were truly able to transform the stiffness and stuffiness of the original philistine that is found in people today, and remain agile in spirit.

Now there is something else about Schelling: the fact that modern man, if he does not undergo an inner spiritual development in the sense of our modern spiritual science, then he has an extraordinarily difficult time, if he does not remain as capable of transformation as Schelling, to also come to inner, positive, spiritual experiences. That is why it came about that what Schelling then called “positive philosophy”, as “philosophy of mythology”, in which he treated the mysteries, as philosophy of revelation, in which he treated the mystery of Golgotha - that is why he really spoke in quite abstract terms in this part of his later age. In terms that not only repelled people who said to themselves: Now what does he want, he used to speak of natural philosophy, now he suddenly speaks of the mystery of Golgotha? Not only did he repel people who could not understand such a thing, but also those who wanted something, one could say, more real.

When he spoke of potency a 1, potency a 2, of being before creating and after creating, and so on, these were abstractions that were alive for him, but he did not understand how to make them come alive. Where did it come from? Yes, you see, in a personality like Schelling's, you find something, let's say, like an atavistic retardation. Schelling was actually a transferred Indian rishi. Schelling was capable of development to the highest age, but so were all the people of the primeval Indian time. They remained as today only children are capable of development. They remained so dependent in their spiritual and soul life on the physical and bodily to the highest age - as children today are in their youth. But these people of the primeval Indian times, just the first time after the great Atlantic catastrophe, they did not feel as Schelling did, who was, so to speak, an atavistic latecomer. They remained capable of development well into their fifties; then they felt the spiritual radiating and flaming up within them in a special way.

When our children today show the dependence of the soul-spiritual on the physical-bodily, it is in the time when the physical-bodily is growing, becoming more perfect, is in ascending development. The consequence of this is that during this time children primarily feel how their etheric body promotes growth, blossoming and flourishing; how their etheric body works in the physical body. Between the ages of seven and fourteen, a person could already receive tremendous revelations, but they cannot do so today because the etheric body is busy with something else, because the etheric body is busy helping the physical body to grow and flourish. And if a person were to have significant experiences in the etheric body – in their forties or even fifties – then they are no longer capable of development today, the etheric body is no longer suitable for doing more than just store our memories of youth better than those of later experiences. We then say: memory decreases; but the memories of our youth then come to the fore. But there is another way in which we notice this downward development, which begins at the age of 25 and becomes particularly pronounced in these later years. We mineralize ourselves, one could say radically, we sclerotize ourselves. And with the hardening, the compaction of the physical body was connected in these ancient times, in the first period after the Atlantic catastrophe, in the primeval Indian times, that the human being did not now notice his etheric body being used for the physical body. The physical body collapsed, but the etheric body was particularly receptive to really receiving the spiritual world within itself. And the consequence of this was that in this first epoch after the Atlantic catastrophe, people remained capable of development until the age of fifty, until the age of fifty-six; then later until the age of fifty-five, fifty-four, fifty-three, fifty-two, fifty-one, fifty, forty-nine ; that these people could wait, so to speak, their whole lives for this great event, which then occurred according to the experiences of others; that the body collapsed, and the soul, so to speak, already here, still bound to the physical body, felt at home in the same spirituality into which it passed when it went through the gate of death. In this first, primeval Indian age, the transition into the spiritual world when passing through the gate of death was therefore not as significant as for a modern human being, because the human being was already inside, so to speak. He had become independent of the physical body at an advanced age. Today we are also becoming independent, but we do not notice it because we do not remain capable of development until this time.

You see, this is a peculiar and significant phenomenon, which, for certain reasons that we will discuss later, is particularly important for the present to be considered. The development in the old days, in the first days after the Atlantic catastrophe, was such that people remained capable of development without being stimulated from within, without them doing anything special; so immediately after the Atlantic catastrophe was over, they remained capable of development until the age of 56, then less and less, and finally until the age of 49. This, my dear friends, gives us the approximate age of the human race as a whole. We could say that at that time, humanity was declining from the 56th to the 49th year. The individual human being begins with the year one, two, three, and is getting older and older. Humanity as a whole began its age after the Atlantic catastrophe at the age of 56 and is getting younger and younger. And when the first post-Atlantean period, the primeval Indian period, was over, human beings only remained viable until the 49th year, then until the 48th year, and so on. They could not gain experiences of the spirit in such an intensive way as in earlier times. Imagine what a completely different impact that had on social life at that time than our kind of human development has on our present social life. Every person in those days knew in their youth that the patriarchs are those who are suffused and aglow with wisdom. And people looked up to these patriarchs as the leaders of humanity. This gave the social life of that time its character. Today, every young badger in his twenties already feels finished, wants to be elected to parliament and pass judgment like the oldest person. That is the big difference between that time and today, when people listened to those who had matured not only in their ascending physical life but also in their descent. And while the ascending physical life is such that it actually hides the spirit, the descending physical life, where we, as it were, mineralize, is such that – while the body declines – if one remains capable of development – people today no longer do – it is precisely then that the spirit blossoms in the soul. In the second post-Atlantean cultural period, things had already changed. People only remained capable of development until the age of 48, then until the age of 47, 46, 45, 44, 43, 42. So the whole human race is declining in age, and the human being is entering. That was the time when there were still people who, so to speak, remained capable of development even as their physical bodies were declining, who had direct experiences from the spiritual world. But these experiences were no longer as strong as in the older times. This is because in this period people could no longer use the etheric body to the same extent as in the older times. That is the peculiarity of the ancient Indian cultural period, that people were able to use their etheric body in a quite extraordinary way, in a quite independent way, and therefore to experience in the etheric body that which a person then goes through when he has passed through the gate of death and discarded the etheric body. But with the etheric body, one can experience this to a certain extent if one remains capable of development in the way that was still the case in the primeval Indian period.

The time when people only experienced things in the sentient body, as was the case in the ancient Persian epoch, was already more divorced from the spirit. But even so, it was the case in this ancient Persian epoch that, especially in a state of sleep, in a state similar to a sleep interspersed with real dreams, people felt when they reached their forties: Yes, this soul that dwells in me, it belongs to the spiritual world, it lives in the spiritual world within me; when it has passed through the gate of death, it enters into this spiritual world. Those who died young at that time were not excluded from the feeling of happiness that consisted in being able to say: One grows old and then wise, spiritually mature; for those who died young knew at the time that there are repeated earthly lives – but they also knew that when someone dies young, they are used for something else in the spiritual world, that they have a good task there, that the gods need this soul, which has not fully lived out its earthly lifetime. On the whole, however, social life was particularly meaningful because of this atmosphere, so that one knew: if you live to be so old, you will reach your forties, then you will experience that you know, your soul belongs to the spiritual world. Only when you are fully awake during the day does your body prevent you from seeing it. That is why it was called the “dark world”, in which only the body sees physically; and the other was the “world of light”, in which one was in such exceptional states. This is the origin of the teaching that came to mankind, somewhat coarsened, as the Ormuzd and Ahriman teaching, as the teaching of light and darkness.

On the whole, however, it can be said that in these two oldest periods, in the first and second post-Atlantean periods, people still truly perceived the spirituality of nature around them. Air was not just air to them. Nor was the air just air for these people back then, as it is now when I pick up a living being, which is just matter. It is matter that has been lived through and ensouled. So at that time the air was not just air, the flame of fire not just a flame of fire and water not just water. Rather, people knew that spiritual life was in all these elements. Therefore, they were in a certain way dependent on the air that they took in with their breathing, dependent on the water that they absorbed and that lives in the human being from the environment, dependent on the warmth of the environment. What do people today know about these elements in which we live? They know in a pinch: Well, now the air is inside me, then it is outside.

The fact that the air is sometimes inside and sometimes outside still gives people today a thought about their dependence on the world of elements, but it is a feeling of a purely physical dependence. That spiritual things enter me through air and warmth is something that people today no longer know, and they know even less about the significance of this. That, for example, what is called the national soul lives in these elements was still something that people of the first and second cultural periods experienced as perception; something that was as certain to them as anything that we perceive physically and sensually today. What does a Frenchman know, for example, when he drinks wine from his country, when he drinks water, that his national soul is in these elements? As truly as the soul of our individual human being manifests itself through our flesh and blood, so truly does the national soul manifest itself in French wine and water, that is, in that which is connected with the national element, the national soul. This is the body of the national soul. Likewise, the Italian national soul lives in all that is air and permeates the air. The Russian national soul lives in all that flows into the earth as warmth, into the soil and then rises up from the soil. The Russian national soul lives in the warmth, but not in the warmth directly, but in the warmth absorbed by the earth and flowing back again. And so we can point this out about every single nation. Some just do not allow it because then they would call us names and say: we are being arrogant about them. But these are truths. The truths that are drawn from spiritual science are not always convenient, but they are the truths that one must know if one wants to stand in reality today.

What lives in the elements in this way was known in the first post-Atlantic periods; people felt it. But this went back further in time, when people in the third post-Atlantic cultural period, in the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, could only use this sentient soul. There, people were only capable of development in the beginning up to the age of 42, then up to the age of 41, 40, 39 and so on, until the age of 35. Then they entered the period of non-developability. From then on, they only remained capable of development if they took in spiritual life through the mysteries. It came less and less from within. The spiritual life united with the human being less and less by itself. This was also connected with the fact that people no longer felt their belonging to what lived as elements on the particular stretches of the earth. That the same does not happen from above over Indian soil as over Persian soil or even Greek soil was as clear to people in the first period after the Atlantic catastrophe as we know today that the nose cannot be in place of the ear and the ear cannot be in place of the nose. What developed as Indian culture had to well up at this particular point on the Earth. What developed as Greek culture could only well up at a certain point on the Earth. This gave the whole Earth a physiognomy. But there was not the same discrepancy within as there is today in our experience. Just think what people today know about how they are spiritually connected to their piece of Earth! What do they know about it? They also do not think about why the nose is at the place where it is, and why the ear is at its place. And so we can experience that today people have no idea about the most important things.

Many people of the white race emigrated to America. That they become quite different people in America than in old Europe, that is not realized today. And again, they do not realize that they are different people in eastern America than in western America. In eastern America, the gaze will be quite different, the human hands will be much larger than in Europe! The skin color will be different. That turns out. The people resemble the old population of America in some ways. This is not the case in California, but it is the case in the east.

Reality is there, but people do not live in that reality. They live in abstract concepts. That was precisely the difference between the ages when people remained capable of development well into old age, that they felt dependent on what they belonged to; that they also felt it spiritually.

You see, humanity is getting younger and younger. The older person grows into a certain age, and humanity is getting younger.

Now we come to the fourth cultural period, the Greco-Latin epoch. Yes, humanity remains capable of development only up to the age of 35, at the beginning. The Greco-Latin cultural period begins in the year 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha and ends in the year 1413 after the Mystery of Golgotha. In the early days, humanity was capable of development until the 35th year, then until the 34th year, into the 33rd, 32nd, 31st year. When the year 1413 approached, they were only capable of development up to the age of 29. Beyond that, people could only remain capable of development by kindling spiritual life in their souls. Nothing comes to people by itself anymore; that is the important thing.

But still, in this fourth cultural period, people were still capable of development until the time when, at the age of 35, man reaches the height of his life. During the ascent, they were capable of development. 35 is the middle of life, then the descent begins. That is why the Greeks still felt to the utmost: in everything that lives physically, the soul lives. The Greeks, for example, could not imagine that one walks without the soul moving the legs; that one moves the hands, the arms, without the soul doing so.

Only: They could only experience the soul as being connected to the body - no longer as in ancient times, when it went downhill from the age of 35 onwards, that the soul was experienced as being active in the spiritual world. Therefore, something peculiar occurred to those who were not initiated into the mysteries. For them, it was different, of course; those who were initiated into the mysteries learned there how the soul lives in the spiritual world after passing through the gate of death. But those who were not initiated into the mysteries could become very wise in Greece, as Aristotle was very wise. But from what could be achieved by mere human knowledge, people without mystery wisdom could not achieve anything other than a knowledge of how the soul animates the body. But they could not learn that the soul lives without the body after death. That is why Aristotle's idea of immortality is that if I cut off one arm, he is no longer a complete human being; if I cut off two arms, even less so; if I take his whole body, then he is no longer a complete human being at all. Aristotle, therefore, clings to his wisdom even after death, but the person who has passed through the gate of death is an incomplete human being. For the Greeks, a complete human being was one who consisted of both body and soul. The independent life of the soul in the realm of spirits could only be achieved through the mysteries.

Aristotle, who was only a supreme sage, but who certainly stood at the highest level of historical wisdom, regarded the dead person as an incomplete person because he lacks the body that belongs to the complete person.

You see, it was under such conditions that the time came when great changes had occurred in the linear development of ancient humanity, which alone made possible that peculiar human condition that we then find in the Greco-Latin age of Romanism. This Romanism is quite different from Greek culture. Greeks really experienced in the most eminent sense what had become of humanity, they experienced in the most eminent sense the 35th, 34th, 33rd year of life. The Greeks experienced it as I have described it. The Romans did not want to experience it that way. The Romans were either striving to gain power. They extended their power over the whole earth known to them at that time. Or they endeavored to use this power to gain easy access to the soul, if possible. That is why, when Romanism was dominated by Caesarianism, the mysteries were misused in this way, and the Roman Caesars forced themselves to be initiated. The first Caesar was already an initiate. As a powerful man, he was of course able to force the initiation. What had been kept secret in earlier times was forced by the Roman Caesars. “Caligula” - the word would mean something like “little soldier's boots”, “little conscript boots” in our language - he was initiated into the mysteries. And it is no fable when we are told that Caligula was able to commune with the spirits of the moon's existence during the night. He was able to do so because he had been initiated into the mysteries.

And Nero was an initiate. And what did people like Caligula, who knew Nero from the initiation? What did they know? They knew that the development of humanity had now reached a stage where physical experience no longer yields the spirit. The Roman Caesars and their friends, the initiates, knew the secrets of existence so well that physical existence on earth no longer yields the secrets of the spirit. Nero, who added the necessary madness to the initiation, therefore made the decision: Since the world no longer provides the spiritual anyway, the whole world should perish. Thus the fire of Rome was ignited, from which the whole known world should perish. He wanted to ignite the world fire! He was convinced that people had become so depraved, because people only remain capable of development until they are about 30 years old, that they were no longer worthy of continuing to exist. He wanted to convert the entire life of the soul into the spiritual, but he wanted to do it his way: through the destruction of the earthly.

Now, something else is happening. We have seen that humanity is regressing in terms of spiritual experience. In the first post-Atlantic cultural epoch, this experience lasted until the 56th year. Then it lasted until the 55th year, the 54th, 53rd, and so on. Humanity as a whole became younger and younger. And when the human race in the fourth post-Atlantic cultural epoch had only reached 35, then 34, then 33 years of age, when the ability to develop had declined to the age of 33, it happened in history that in the body of Jesus of Nazareth the Christ lived until the 33rd year of the humanity living backwards from above after the 33rd year. So that the 33rd year of Christ Jesus, when he died, coincides with the declining age of humanity. Think about what that means! Christ Jesus grew towards humanity, which was getting younger and younger, humanity, which first reached the age of 56 in the primeval Indian epoch, then reached the age of 55 and so on backwards. When it had descended to the age of 33, the Christ developed in the body of Jesus of Nazareth in order to live here on Earth for 33 years and then to bring humanity that which we have called the assimilation of the Christ impulse into earthly existence, to bring that which humanity could no longer attain. For Aristotle, the deceased human being was already an imperfect human being. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, it was possible to grasp immortality again, to absorb impulses again in order to recognize the connection between man and the spiritual world. When the development of humanity had regressed to the age of 33, humanity would have perished without the Mystery of Golgotha, without the ignorance of the spiritual world, had Christ Jesus, who had become 33 years old, not come to meet humanity, having become 33 years old himself, and poured out his love upon humanity.

This is a profoundly significant truth that spiritual science reveals to us about the connection between the Mystery of Golgotha and the entire development of life of humanity on Earth. And it really is one of the most harrowing truths that can come to us from spiritual science when we feel such a colossal connection between the development of humanity up to the 33rd year, the growing towards of Christ Jesus to this humanity, and their meeting. It is one of the greatest insights that can be gained by people in their earthly existence. From it they can see how short-sighted and obtuse are the people who claim today that spiritual science detracts from Christianity; whereas it supports it in the most decisive way by deepening it, by knowing how to make such great and powerful things out of the historical truths and will do more and more. The anti-Christian people are truly not the intellectuals, but those who want to be within the positive denominations, and who thereby exclude the real insights that humanity needs today from Christianity. That is the terrible thing, that today we see people at work who join one or the other denomination as pious people, and who actually fight Christianity with the words of Christ Himself, by not letting arise what is in the Christ-word:

I am with you until the end of the world.

But not for the reason that people can lie on the lazy bed and say: We no longer want to strive, the Christ will make us happy. Rather, Christ Jesus is on earth so that we can accept him into our souls and develop our knowledge more and more, develop it more and more.

But you can see that we are now living in a crisis in the fifth post-Atlantic period, which you will recognize from what I have discussed. Because the human race is declining, it declined until 1413 to the age of 29, then to 28. And now we live in the age where people only remain capable of development until the age of 27. Then, if a person wants to remain capable of development, he must absorb an independent soul impulse through the study of spiritual science or something similar. Otherwise, a person who only wants to absorb what human development itself provides will always remain 27 years old, even if he lives to be a hundred.

This, my dear friends, is something that makes so much understandable to us in the present time, when we are surrounded by so many riddles. We cannot solve these riddles, at least not to the extent that we need to solve them, with the concepts and ideas that humanity has today, which know nothing of spiritual science. Only by looking at the bigger picture of existence, only by learning to recognize that humanity has regressed to the age of 27, can the riddles that surround us today be resolved. And today it is really the case that we see people who want to rule life with their ideas, but who do not grasp life because they do not want to take up an independent spiritual development, but stop at the age of 27. There the ideals have not yet been permeated by reality. There the ideals have not yet been permeated by reality. Oh, it is so difficult for people today, so very difficult, to grasp the difference between ideas that are related to reality and mere euphonious ideals, which, if I may put it trivially, make one lick one's chops with spiritual and mental voluptuousness. But they are not capable of intervening in reality.

In the realm of world observation, people do not want to profess ideas that are akin to reality. They look at a clock, which is a real thing, it is an object that is there. Fine. That is what it is. They also look at a flower that they put in front of them, just as much as a real object as the clock. But that is not what it is. The clock is something complete, it can exist in itself as it is. I have to cut the flower, there has to be a root. If there is no root, it is not real. If I imagine a flower without a root, then I have an unreal thought. Mankind will have to learn this again, that a thought must not only be logical, but that it must also be real. Today, mankind has forgotten this because it does not develop beyond the age of 27; because people stop at words that merely sound beautiful. What use is it, my dear friends, when someone declaims: We are entering, through the great trials of this war, into an age in which people will think and feel differently, in which every person must be placed in their rightful place, and in which each person's abilities must be recognized in that place. You can't object to fine words. A right word – but must it [then] also be a word of reality? If the person concerned is then convinced that his nephew is just the most capable person for a place, then the whole tirade, the whole phrase of “the most capable in the right place” is of no use.

If only people could grasp the difference between ideals that are close to reality and those that are abstract ideals! It is not so bad, relatively speaking, when we mistake a flower for something real. But it is bad when we want to introduce and incorporate unrealistic concepts into social life, into state life. This is how it has come about that we have the most unrealistic concepts in science. Because what is being peddled today as economics, and especially what is being peddled as political science, is not just not a science, but it is a completely unrealistic talk; because people do not even know how to form real concepts about state connections.

Let us put this to the test: there is a person who is actually an excellent person, who is even sympathetic to my aspirations, the Swede Kjellén, who has now published the book “The State as a Way of Life”. Study this book from beginning to end. One can say: If someone today were to want to build something in the natural sciences with similar dilettantish, abstract concepts, as Kjellén did with the state as a form of life, they would simply be laughed out of the room. If someone were to talk about a botanical question the way Kjellén talks about the state as a form of life today, it would be so ridiculous that even someone with only a primary school education would laugh. The concepts are so unrealistic. But that is not apparent today. It is stated in the book: the individual human being relates to the state as the cell relates to the human organism. The individual human being is therefore the cell. Yes, my dear friends, that is the most ridiculous thing you can imagine in the face of reality.

If anything can be compared, then it can only be the whole development of the earth, and only individual deeds can be compared with the earth. The comparison would be valid. But to regard the individual human being as a cell in relation to the state as an organism – that is mere talk.

You see, this is what is so little understood today, this growing together with reality, which must come through inner spiritual development. That is why we live today in a time that is so infinitely full of trials for man. Man must go through this crisis, this estrangement from reality, but one must learn to understand it.

Rather than mention a nearby example, which would be difficult for the audience to understand, let us take a more distant example. I can choose this example because I characterized this personality long before the war, so that one need not believe that the jingoism generated by the war is evoking this characteristic. I was looking for a typical person who is no older than 27. Yes, but because this person is in the most important position, one could even say in the very first position today, a great deal depends on whether the ideas of a twenty-seven-year-old are poured out over the world or those of a person who has undergone spiritual development. Today, one has to grow into it through spiritual development.

A typical personality, who, even if he lived to be 100, would still be no older than 27, is Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States of America. He is truly a typical personality. And, one might say, the cross of the present, the immediate present, hangs on it. Hence those intoxicating ideas that this man sends around the world in his rallies, all of which are so alien to reality – so alien that he sends a proclamation of peace around the world and then, in a few weeks, has a war in his own country. So little does what this man is able to say engage with reality. His ideas are fine: freedom for all peoples, and so on. The ideas are fine as such. In Germany there are outstanding writers who call these ideas profound. But it is not a matter of liking ideas. What matters is not that one should feel, as it were, a sensual pleasure in ideas, but that ideas are capable of sustaining reality, of immersing themselves in reality. But when people who do not live past the age of twenty-seven come across ideas that are full of reality, they consider them to be unrealistic.

So, my dear friends, it is with the human being of the present time that he, as it were, removes himself from reality. Since spirit is also present in reality, one simply, one might say automatically, removes oneself from reality when one removes oneself from the spirit. But one cannot place oneself in reality if one remains capable of development only up to the age of 27.

Now, this is also connected with what we feel to be such a depressing mystery in our time. People are moving away from reality. As a result, they are also losing their sense of proportion to a high degree, the sense of simply grasping the facts correctly. Because this sense of fact is diminishing to an enormous degree. And these things are connected with what we feel to be such terrible, earth-shattering events. But it was difficult, before these times, to even talk about these things. Read what has been said about the social development of humanity in the cycle that was given in Vienna about life between death and a new birth, where there is even talk of cancer in a social context. These things have not been taken with full seriousness and full importance. Do you remember an answer that was given often? Even during public lectures, people kept asking: How does the increase in the Earth's population correspond to repeated Earthly lives? I gave the various reasons that suggest that things are quite compatible. However, I never forgot – you will remember – to add: But the time may come very soon when people will be horrified to realize that humanity can also decrease. Of course, one could not speak directly of the serious misfortune that awaited humanity. But that is connected, my dear friends, with this distance from reality. And when we face this difficult time today, we must realize that it is above all important to live through it in real wakefulness, in genuine wakefulness.

You will recall that in earlier times, up until 1914, I mentioned a variety of people, including Herman Grimm, who died at the beginning of the 20th century. Certainly, if we now follow the soul of such a person in the spiritual world, it relates itself in a certain way to the momentous events of the present. But one can also have the thought of asking oneself how a spirit like Herman Grimm, who expressed great and meaningful things, who spoke in a very penetrating way from the point of view of the nineteenth century, can think about world events. You see, Herman Grimm, for example, coined the beautiful word in the last days of his life: 'mankind's reckoning is at hand'. But how did he imagine this reckoning? He indicates it in his collected essays, called “Fragments”, in the volume that he himself published. A reckoning of the time is at hand, he says, great figures that today history cites as great figures will disappear into the nullity; others that today humanity pays little attention to will be highlighted. And when the year 2000 has come, people will talk about a completely different story.

And Herman Grimm expressed many other profound things in a similar way. So that one can ask: He did not have spiritual science, he also rejected it, but one could always imagine: He stands beside me as a spirit of the nineteenth century. But since 1914, I can no longer think that he is standing beside me when I mention him. Since the summer of 1914, he appears as if he had lived centuries before and had become a stranger to what he loved on earth in his last life on earth; he stands there like a mythical figure. For we have really lived through more in these three years than we otherwise would have in decades, if we have lived through what has been compressed into these years. And what has gone before seems, one might say, to have become as alien as what one has taken on from the history of past centuries; even those personalities with whom one has lived, with whom one has exchanged words and thoughts. And one would like to see an awakening of humanity. But this awakening can only come about through spiritual science penetrating much deeper into the human soul. As you can see, spiritual science does not come as something arbitrary. Because humanity has declined in age, because it only ages 27 years by itself, that which makes people capable of development must come from within. The soul must be made capable of development independently of the body. But this can only be done in a spiritual way. Those who do not want to know anything about the spiritual will always remain 27 years old, even if they live to be a hundred. Therefore, today one would really like to be able to enliven what one has to say, what is necessary to awaken humanity; one would like to be able to enliven it in a different way than through words; for words themselves have already taken on something of abstractness. What words were in earlier times! When people said “doubt,” they felt that the “dou” and “two” were in it; that, so to speak, the idea was split into two; they still felt the connection between “two,” “dou,” “conflict,” “although.” All of that has become abstract; people have turned away from reality itself in language. Or who today feels a reality pulsating through language in a deeper sense? We say “human being” today. Then we open the dictionary and find the Latin “homo”, also human, and we believe it is the same. We find the Greek dictionary and find the word “anthropos”, human; we believe it is the same. We have become “lexical”, that is, unreal in such matters. But “human being” is related to “Manas”, to the Sanskrit word “Manas”. But that means: the “spiritual self” in man. And the one who uses the word “human” as a word for that which walks and acts on two legs, which has hands and thinks and so on, who uses this word “human”, which is the adaptation of the oriental word “Manas”, he looks at the spiritual in man and describes man above all as spirit. The one who, like the Greeks, says “anthropos”, refers to the “speaking of the soul from the eyes”. The “shining eyes” are called “anthropos”, the soul that speaks from the eyes, from the face. We can already see that this is something different from when we use the word “homo” or the French word “homme”. In this case, French points to its origin.

So you see how people from different nations describe the human being itself, this gives the language special nuances of reality. Who has a feeling for this today? Isn't this feeling lost when we open the dictionary and read one for the other? We no longer even have a feeling for it. When we say, for example, “pretty good,” we mean “almost” or “nearly” good today. While the word “pretty” is related to “befitting,” “befitting,” “befitting.” So that you can actually only use the word if you want to imply: It is completely good, pleasantly good, befittingly good; so good, as befits.

But we feel how the unreal sense of the present extends even into the words. One would like to have something other than words today, because the words themselves have already become unreal, if one wants to speak through what, as spiritual science, wants to come into humanity again, so that the human soul may become related to reality again.

It is therefore not surprising that unfortunately what we have just spoken about is also evident in our field. A friend who had heard from me about this 27th anniversary of humanity, a friend who is involved in the political struggle of our time, said to me: Yes, that is a ray of light that finally illuminates much for me that is now passing away around us. One would like people to try to understand with this ray of hope what is so enigmatic in reality. Then one cannot be surprised that even within our small section of reality, what we are seeing now is happening.

I know very well, my dear friends, that in this society there are always people who do not want to see this because they see it as something ordinary that is spoken of in such terms; they would like to withdraw gracefully because, as they say, they want to promote peace. But this has finally led to the emergence of an attitude in our society that the person who is attacked is actually a bad guy, and that we should feel as much compassion as possible for those who attack.

But this can only lead to disaster; as has become quite clear to date. Therefore, because we have to talk about the necessary measures to be taken, I have to mention a few things here that are truly not “personal”. Because by trying to push things into the personal sphere, they are trying to eliminate spiritual science, which is already becoming uncomfortable; they know that this would not be possible with a decent polemic. They try something else, and I must say: our members must keep their eyes open for this, and they must know how this society actually had to be founded so that things are possible that are actually only possible here, that would not be possible outside. They will come, but today they are not yet possible to the extent.

Let us assume that I have discussed the case often, but it should have been discussed much more often; it should not have been kept secret in such a distinguished way. There we have it, a man being pushed into the Society by members. He comes to the lectures, takes part in everything, gets hold of everything that can be read, and copies down everything he can get hold of from other members in private transcriptions and so on.

You may ask: Why is such a person accepted? Yes, you see, that's a dilemma. You can't say to him, because of something a person will do in the future, “You're a bastard – excuse me – and that's why I'm not accepting you!” Even though you know full well that the man shouldn't be accepted – he has to be accepted. Well, this man, after he had obtained everything he could, went to America. Before he left, he solemnly swore that he would behave decently. He would publish a book, he was still discussing the title because it was so difficult to translate; I myself had given him the instruction to say “world conception”. It's not really a word that the English appreciate, but [gap in transcript]...

Well, he went over there. He wrote down everything he had heard here in his book, but he also wrote down everything he had received from private transcripts and notes that had not yet been published. But he did it like this: he wrote a preface to the first edition in which he says that he had heard a lot from Steiner, but that it did not give him the final conclusion. This conclusion was brought to him when he was called to a master in the Transylvanian Alps; he gave him the final touch, the last truth.

And now look: what he had received as the final polish, as the final truth in the Alps from a master: these are the things that he had copied here from the unpublished lectures. Now you can say: that's American! Fine. One says to oneself: something like that can happen when one knows American ways. But that's not all. Here in Germany, a bookstore was found,

a book publisher who had the book translated, and a translator who translated the whole book. So we have the outrage of things migrating to America and being brought back again, of the publishing house of Hugo Vollrath having the book printed in German, and saying: Yes, the things would have had to be brought from the impure air into a purer air, which the other had copied from the one who had lied about the Transylvanian master.

You see, for something like this to be possible in literary life, this society had to be founded, because if something like that were done outside, one would immediately have the right judgment about such an outrage, about such disgrace, which is also done to the publishing industry. I have mentioned this more than once, nothing has happened except that these “lesson letters” — as such he publishes the book — are sold everywhere. That was a great outrage. But these things happen. We have no way of intervening unless discernment sets in, unless the members stop regarding everyone who is a little twisted as a “high initiate”; unless they stop regarding everyone who rants about everything as a victim, but rather start making their own judgment.

For we are indeed experiencing in the worst possible way how people are distancing themselves from reality. Along comes a magazine called “The Invisible Temple”! Yes, that's very nice, you have to find something deeply mystical: “The Invisible Temple”! It is a magazine published by an association that is tremendously “significant”.

In one of the issues of this magazine, it says: the philosophers – and I am also called a philosopher – claimed that only they themselves had wisdom; all others had only a sham and false wisdom. “So to read with Haeckel and with Dr. Steiner.

Now I ask you: Where does it say that what I said can only be found in me, that all others have only a sham and an after-wisdom? Or where is there even something similar? Yes, do you dare to call such things by their right name today, no matter whether the tirade maker Horneffer calls his magazine “Invisible Temple” or something else? One should not be misled by the mystical verbiage on the title page, but call a lie a lie – because it is a lie. One should really strive towards the truth, because it is important that we seek the truth, that we develop a sense of fact, not mystical fantasies, but a sense of truth. For with a sense of truth, we must also enter the spiritual world; otherwise we will not find it.

You see, a man from a town in central Germany once wrote to Dr. Steiner saying that he had now reached a turning point in his spiritual life and did not know what to do. Should he [marry into a business] or should he devote himself to Theosophy? How understandable, Doctor Steiner told him, that it was not her job to help him marry into a family and so on. After some time, he appeared in the then Theosophical Society. Those who were present at the general assembly could hear how he, without a trace of recitation talent or skill, poured Schiller's “Cassandra” over the unfortunate audience. Then he decided not to become a painter, but to be a painter. We really did everything possible to give him the opportunity to learn in Munich. But he didn't want to learn anything, he wanted to be a painter, not become a painter. However, we couldn't declare him a painter overnight. We could have declared him, but not made him a painter. So he was so disappointed that he now wrote all kinds of foolish things, for example that he got bruises from exercises and so on. In short, a person who approaches us with such questions as to whether he should marry into [a business] and who behaves as this man did should be looked at with a critical eye, that's what matters.

And then we had a member, a man whom many knew as a loyal member who even wrote articles advocating anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. He wanted to publish a book through our publishing house one day: “Who Was Christ?” Until then, he was a follower who grumbled here and there, especially when he knew that it could not come directly to our ears – but some people do that. But you see, this writing is only a small-scale edition of what the Heindel writing is. Grasshoff called himself Heindel in America, here he was Grasshoff and copied. In America, he published what he had copied here as Heindel, as the master's emissary in the Transylvanian Alps. That is in Transylvania. People always pointed to such areas where there are castles that you don't usually go to because not even small trains go there, right, where the mountains form a triangle.

However, a man from Budapest once said to me: “Mrs. Besant has pointed us to a master who lives deep in Hungary in a certain castle.” We went there and found a castle, but nothing that reminded us of a master. We found that the castle belonged to the Hungarian treasury.

Everything Mrs. Besant said was wrong, but: “You have to believe her!”

Well, you see, in the book “Who was Christ?” that the person in question wanted to publish, there were things in it that simply could not be published by the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House because they were partly borrowed from cycles; but in particular it was a certain audacity - at least it made such an impression on Dr. Steiner - that he said: Dr. Steiner has indeed made allusions, but these allusions must now be further explained. Well, that could not exactly suit the manager of the publishing house, that the person concerned brought the explanations that not only came from cycles and lectures that were not published. To a certain extent, it is a Heindel case again. But this member has now become an enemy! A real enemy.

As far as I am concerned, people should write about “contradictions”. [gap in the transcript] Well. “Mysticism”, for example, is not the same for everyone. If you talk about mysticism in two places, you have to characterize it in this way and in that way; everyone can find contradictions there. But you don't attract a dog with such “contradictions”. Therefore Seiling would not have made an impression - because that is his name, who was previously seen as a loyal supporter. It is very telling that the man simply becomes an enemy after his writing is rejected. No one would want to claim that there is no causal connection here. Talking about contradictions - factual articles - can never harm the humanities, even if such articles are incomprehensible and foolish.

Or the Dessoirs and others. I make a strict distinction between what is factually possible, even if it is disapproved of, and what is indecent and impossible.

You see, the good, dear Deinhard, who died last week, is one of those who has done the most for what I call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and he has come to us from the position of opposition. And he must be considered one of the most meritorious people in our field. When I started going to Munich to give lectures at the beginning of the century, the following announcement appeared: under the influence of Deinhards, the announcement “The traveling salesman for Theosophy from Berlin is here again”. I did not consider that to be something bad, but rather something quite possible. Someone can express his opinion in crude words that I am concerned with peddling Theosophy on my travels. There is nothing wrong with such a judgment.

Or when Meyrink wrote an article in “Simplizissmus” in which he describes “Doctor Schmuser” – or something like that – with which he means me and those who are friends with me, it is extremely amusing, but it does no harm. But Seiling is not about anything like that. He started off by writing an article about the silly arguments about the contradictions, embellishing them with what I supposedly said at the meeting. But he then told objective untruths. I never said that I felt offended by the part about contradictions, but I told him that the doctor would have been annoyed by it. It came down to the fact that vanity was at play [gap in the transcript] So he spun a very nice yarn.

Or he went further in a sophisticated way to the fact that he wrote an article “in defense”, in which he speaks of the most harmless thing there is – because there is nothing more harmless than our marriage; but other women have made a scandal. How does he use this scandal that others have made? By cleverly weaving his sentences so that he says: Our marriage led to an incredible scandal. But it wasn't meant to; because it was no one else's business. But others made a scandal. This is an addiction to vilification! An addiction to vilification taken to the point of vulgarity that one can hardly imagine being increased any more.

And when these things were discussed in Munich, it was said that the worst case, the case of Goesch, was yet to come. This Goesch, who has concocted handshakes and other absurdities, whose entire attacks consist of nothing but a smorgasbord of absurdities and spite. But there are editors who print such things. Things will get worse, because people today, when they are sexually aroused, consciously sexually aroused, see it in others. That is one of the secrets of our time. That is why it could happen that a member – she had been a member for a long time – who actually always had to be turned away, who was never given serious exercises, and with whom I have not spoken since 1911, except [a gap in the transcript] an information about her mother - that she wrote an article that above all also vilified Dr. Steiner, an article of such nonsense, such hatred and such foolishness that nothing like it had ever been written before. This personality is capable of writing: Dr. Steiner spoke of the Lazarus miracle, where the human being is transformed. He apparently wanted to perform this miracle with me. Therefore, when I was in a sanatorium, he sent chocolate to thicken my blood and so on and so on.

So this sending of chocolate is a particularly magical act. And think: such a personality finds paper and printing ink at his disposal and the editor even makes the comment

[These are follies that could send a sane person to the insane asylum! - Ed.]

So, if Frau Doktor had gone to a fruit shop, she would have probably taken oranges with her; instead, she went to a pastry shop and bought chocolate – because she was supposed to perform the Lazarus miracle on my behalf! Yes, it cannot be said. For example, there is a note that Dr. Steiner sent sculptures or the like to the person in question. I would have stepped in from behind and performed magical acts.

The whole thing refers to the fact that once group photos came from Norway. The personality in question brought something she wanted to give up. I had not yet seen the picture and looked at Frau Doktor over my shoulder. That was the whole thing. It is stamped as a magical operation.

But that comes from the fact that such chatter has arisen and been particularly cultivated in certain circles. Therefore, such a judgment must be suggested from time to time. And so I am compelled to speak of it because such things have occurred in society, because, for example, a person like Seiling has the audacity to say: There are mistakes in my cycles, but I have not checked them because I supposedly have no time; but I would have time if I did not spend so much time in private conversations with members! - Seiling was one of those who repeatedly sought private conversations, though when he still felt like a friend and supporter. So he knows better than to say such a thing. He knows the facts. That is the / gap in the transcript].

Now, the one who has to speak particularly esoterically today before a number of people, he knows because he has to express things that are connected with the [gap in the transcript]

Today, speaking things that are meant to move people again, is something that humanity cannot bear. Therefore, the one who has to speak about such things in front of 120 people knows that among these 120 people there are 70 possible enemies; but those who can become enemies. With 120 listeners, 70 possible enemies! It is only a question of whether these enemies will then be decent or indecent. All in all, it is a necessity today, and it is as difficult for me as it can be for those who will be affected by it. It is difficult for me, but two measures must be taken. Two measures. And it would be untrue to mention one without the other.

The first is that all private conversations must cease from now on. Because of what has been made of these private conversations, by “Seiling and Co.” for example, and also by others - that is what is likely to lead to slander in the hands of dishonest editors who find it much too inconvenient to attack spiritual science directly - then they would have to study it. So they attack it by involving it in scandals, defamations and so on, up to the last article that is so foolish as to talk about Dr. Steiner having given exercises to that personality. When the personality was asked: How dare you say that you were given exercises? “Yes,” she said, ”Dr. Steiner showed me some forms in a eurythmy lesson; for the other people, the lines meant what is written in the letters and lines, but for her they were instructions for exercises that Dr. Steiner gave her on my behalf.

Now Dr. Steiner had done nothing but recite poems. Nothing at all was said about that. But then it is claimed: And if Dr. Steiner did not mean the exercises, then she is simply the involuntary medium of Dr. Steiner. So, it is imperative that the private conversations be completely avoided for the time being. I will make sure — you just have to be patient for a while — that a replacement is created. But private conversations cannot continue if such things are made of them. They must stop in the near future. Not because of the content of the slanderings - I have often said that such things must come - but so that people finally see how serious things are. One must not say, as it has been said in Munich: Because of a few people, we must now all suffer! One must turn to those few people, one will find them, and one will also find the right way to find them – not to those who, under the compulsion of an iron necessity, have to take such measures.

The second thing is that I authorize everyone to tell everything, as far as they want, that has been said in private conversations with me. What I have said to any member must never be shunned from the light of day. [Gap in the transcript] is not considered to be objectively untrue, as Seiling [Gap in the transcript] But it will be proven if such a measure is taken: Without exception, anyone can tell the truth about what has been discussed in private conversations with me.

These two measures belong together. It is sad that these measures have to be taken, but, as I said, especially those who are serious will understand that these measures are good in this day and age, when people are driven into scandals and slander.

These measures, my dear friends, must be taken. These things are also connected with the crisis through which humanity is passing. Here, too, knowledge must lead us forward. And it will lead us forward.

Humanity has become extremely frivolous. Finally, let me read you a sentence from a person who also sought the spirit, who sought it on the path through Catholicism: [von] Barres, [von] Maurice Barres.

[It is a futile effort to seek the afterlife. It may not even exist! And however we approach it, we cannot learn anything about it. Let us leave occultism to the enlightened and the charlatans; whatever form mysticism may take, it defies reason. But let us turn to the Church, first of all because she is inextricably linked with the tradition of France. And then because she, with the authority of centuries and great practical experience, formulates the rules of that ethics that must be taught to nations and to children. And finally, because, far from abandoning us to mysticism, she defends us directly against it, silences the voices of the mysterious groves, interprets the Gospels and sacrifices the generous anarchism of the Savior to the needs of modern society."

There is the church, let's go inside, even though we say: the afterlife may not even exist! Imagine the cynicism! This is the attitude that Maurice Barrös, a truly characteristic person of the present day, has expressed; this is how one seeks the spirit in Catholicism. He has no desire to become Catholic, but: Catholicism has deigned to interpret the Gospels in such a way that [gap in the transcript], where the Savior is only taken as he suits modern humanity.

Humanity must pass through this test. But we must know that the realization of the spirit is to be sought from the impulses of the spirit. If we familiarize ourselves with it, we will find the way that is to be sought for humanity today.

When you undergo a spiritual development, you get to know the spiritual life. But there it is always, this spiritual life. For the ordinary human mind, it is much too fine and unfamiliar compared to the external world, and man cannot go beyond the familiar.

This spiritual world is the area where man lives between death and the new birth. With those souls with whom one had no connection at all here in life, no relationships can be established from here after death. The moral and intellectual life continues over there. In ordinary life, one cannot achieve such a strong ability to get in touch with that area.

Here, in the physical world, we hear what someone else says. If the disembodied soul wants to connect with another person here, it is the other way around. The disembodied soul tells us what we ask it. What comes from us, the dead person tells us, what comes from the “dead resounds in us. It is very easy to say this, but it is so difficult to fulfill, because it is usually overlooked that the messages come from us, which we think we are receiving from there. The moments of falling asleep and waking up are the most favorable for the usual communication between this world and the spiritual one. The spiritually developed person can, of course, also use other [moments].

If you want to come together with a [deceased] soul at the moment of falling asleep, then it is good to summarize what you feel for the dead person in a question to the dead person, just as you would have done when he was still alive, as far as possible in the same way as you were accustomed to during his lifetime. This can have an effect in dreams. It can lead to illusions; it is not the dead person who speaks, but what we have thought, felt and wished during the day in relation to the dead person. This comes back to us from the dead person in a dream. It is right at the moment of waking up, when something comes from the dead person into one's own soul and this comes up again during the day. During sleep, what we have thought of the dead during the day comes up; during the waking hours, what has come to us from the dead during falling asleep and waking up.

Spiritual science does nothing other than grasp with the mind's eye what is in the spiritual world. Much more plays out of the spiritual world – including the one in which the dead are – into our world than we know.

For a long time, not enough attention has been paid to what changes in the different periods. What we have experienced during life between death and a new birth lives in us. What we bring with us from the spiritual world is woven into the inherited physical body - into the blood, the nervous system, the muscles and so on. The soul that moves in with the birth is wise. We are actually tremendously wise; enchanted, we carry this wisdom within us. And we have to release what pulses as a wise being in our blood, nerve, muscle and respiratory systems. What soul mood is most suitable for this? The one that has been lost to people in recent centuries: faith in life. This is connected to a casualness in relation to religious life.

We now only really believe in our youth and young adulthood into our twenties; only up to that point can we get something out of the development of the body – up to around the age of twenty-seven. In ancient Greece, it was still possible up to the age of thirty, and so on.

But we have to replace the physical and bodily, which no longer has anything to offer, with the spiritual and soul. We must learn to believe in the whole of life. Even if I want to be able to experience something different at forty than at thirty, I have to imbue myself with the spirit that makes us capable of always experiencing something new. Not like today, of course, when twenty-year-olds are already saying, “From my point of view.” How can you have a point of view at twenty? A person must give himself impulses. Today it is the case that a person stops at the age of 27; he does not live further. That would be a person who, in terms of character, is rooted in our time, a self-made man, not a grammar school student, who already takes up traditions, not only

not only what comes from the time. Coming from a poor background, gifted with an active intellect, elected to parliament at the age of twenty-seven, and thus committed for life: that is Lloyd George, a true representative of our time.

We must rediscover our faith in the meaning of life. The different parts of the human body have different speeds, so to speak. What is in the head and what is in the trunk has different rates of development. The main organization develops relatively quickly and is completed by the twenties. The heart organism – let us call it that – develops throughout life. Our educational and social lives actually only serve the development of our minds. Our head would be ready to die at the age of 27. But there is also a spiritual side to this. If people only cared about developing their minds, humanity would soon become decrepit, physically too. It must become a principle of education that memories of youth appear like a paradise. The head that is ready to die at the age of 27 must always be able to draw new strength from what radiates from youth. Those who study spiritual science know that there are things they cannot know in their 30s or 40s, because only in their 50s can this or that enter into them. If we acquire a sense of the whole of life, then we will not be thrown back by the leap from the physical to the spiritual life, but will develop more quickly.

The leap from the physical to the spiritual life does not bring us back, but develops us faster. People today can demystify much more of the “wise” than was possible in an earlier time.

Only by starting from the point of view that Goethe can now tell us something completely different than in 1832, only by finding the strength to live with the Goethe of 1882, have I been able to achieve what is called Goethe research, which I have done.

One must set age higher, in the social higher than twenty-seven, where people are elected to parliament.

The dead should be allowed to speak. For example, Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years”, what is said there about social issues, should be allowed to affect the soul of people who are socially active. We can always give something to the world after we die – let the dead be fruitful for the living. This is to be taken together with what was said at the beginning about the relationship to the dead.

Dessoir: “Philosophy of Freedom”, one of Dr. Steiner's “first works”; [in the second edition] a first work in the theosophical field - all the more wrong.

It is necessary to develop a sense for the concrete, a sense of truth; to feel pain at what is not true. Full participation, pictorial participation, has declined sharply today; that wants to get into the souls later than in the 28th year.

A speaker once said, after raising many questions: “Now I have presented you with a forest of question marks.” You just have to imagine that. You have to be careful not to slip up in your speech.

How a person expresses himself in his thoughts - the “how” of thoughts - from the way a person thinks, you can see how he stands in life. A Herman Grimm has won and fought for what he says. A Woodrow Wilson seems to be possessed by his point of view, by demons. Today it is not so much the content of what one says that matters, but the “how”, whether it is identical with the personality or whether the personality is possessed. Today it will matter less and less what the content of theories is, but rather how they are presented.

We must gain a sense of the whole of life and make it fruitful for the whole of life, including life after death, and how the hereafter is referred to here. Today, despite the catastrophic events taking place outside, life is being overslept a great deal. Many people today have not yet realized that since August 1914 we have had to think differently.

In the spring of 1914, Dr. Steiner said that there was a cancer in social life and so on. This cancer soon broke out. You have to rethink and learn to feel.

When physics and so forth speak of negative and positive and so forth today, that is quite correct, but what we say about Lucifer and Ahriman is just as correct. But there must be balance between the two poles. The Luciferic lives in the spiritual world as well as here, it lives in the selfish drives. This has long been taken into account in the social structure: medals, titles and so on. In our social structure, far too much has been attributed to the one-sided Luciferic. Now the Ahrimanic is rising. The public is at the mercy of what is printed. Now it is the case that people want to take the social structure into their own hands, so to speak, in an Ahrimanic way. Through aptitude tests, they want to find out whether a child has intellectual potential. Nothing but Ahrimanic forces are revealed by these tests, nothing of the soul itself. It would be terrible from a social point of view if the aptitude tests were to continue. The child is a mystery. Belief in the meaning of life could also have a positive effect on pedagogy, not what is achieved through aptitude tests and so on.

I wanted to make sure that what has happened in these four years would not be forgotten.

My dear Theosophical friends!

During the years in which this catastrophe that has befallen humanity has called so many of our human brothers to difficult, responsible posts, we have always turned to the protecting spirits of those fighting in the field at our meetings:

Spirits of your souls, watchers ever active,
Your wings may bear
Our souls' imploring love
To earthlings trusting in your keeping,
That, joined with your might,
Our plea may helpfully shine
On the souls it seeks in love!

My dear friends!

We have not seen each other for a long time here in Vienna, but this difficult present, this present, which makes so much of what we now have to remember so necessary, so much of the past gathering of strength for the present and the future, this present necessitates so much. And we have to accept – as so much has to be accepted today – that we will see each other less on the physical plane. On the other hand, however, at such a meeting it will be particularly important to remember those souls who have been holding us together in our spiritual movement for years. One of the main thoughts, one of the main impulses that hold us together, is that through spiritual science we must increasingly come to the conviction that whatever is to help all of humanity, to help it on , must be spiritually motivated. The more we can truly feel, sense, and understand this in our souls, that humanity needs spiritual insights to warm and illuminate our souls, the more we will

we will find the opportunity to fruitfully engage with the difficult tasks that are actually posed today to every person who does not dreamily, sleepily pass by the events of the present. And so, after such a long time of not being together, it may be good today, when we tie in with this reflection, to think about ideas that, on the one hand, are connected with the present-day insights that are necessary, but which, despite being necessary, are not present in general humanity, and which, on the other hand, are again suitable to penetrate us soulfully, to strengthen us, to permeate us with strength precisely for the task we have in the present for this present.

In particular, my dear friends, if we turn our attention to what we have been doing for years in spiritual science, one main thought, above all, will remain before our soul. The thought is that if we want to gain spiritual-scientific knowledge, we must shape many a concept, many a feeling, and many a volitional impulse differently than we have done so far. We must think differently about many things, and perhaps the time is not far distant when many more people than today will see that something else also teaches us to think differently about time, about human development, and about human tasks. And this other thing is the catastrophe itself that has befallen humanity, the whole of humanity on earth, and the goal of which can hardly be grasped at all by anything other than an understanding of the spiritual path of human development.

But let us start with seemingly very distant thoughts. We can ask: Why is it that, as soon as they are present, the majority of people actually show either irony, mockery, annoyance, or some other kind of dislike or opposition to what we call spiritual science? It can be said that this is often because this spiritual science makes demands on people that have to be met, but first a firm decision of the heart must be made. The spiritual world, as everyone says, as we gradually learn to understand it through spiritual science, looks quite different from the world that our senses must actually be the spiritual world. We only learn when real spiritual research brings us close to how fundamentally different the ideas about it are; only then do we learn to understand why people are so dismissive of spiritual science.

Let us then start from an obvious thought, or I could just as easily say: from a remote thought, to show you why humanity has so much to say against spiritual science. To help us understand this idea, let us first take those spiritual beings that are closest to most people, towards which most people long most intensely, let us take the human souls that have passed through the gate of death itself. The one who enters the spiritual world with clear vision gradually comes to an understanding, although this understanding is one of the most difficult in the realm of spiritual vision. There is also a certain correlation that draws him to the so-called deceased human souls. But it is precisely then that it becomes apparent that when one enters into this spiritual communication with the departed human souls, one must become accustomed to different concepts than those to which one is accustomed from the sense world. When we stand here in the sense world and speak to another person, it is the case that when we say something to him, we know that what we speak to him as sound comes from our own soul. We hear ourselves speak; and when he answers us, we hear him speak. We know that what he has to communicate to us is coming from him to us.

We become accustomed to such communication with the outside world as a matter of course, and therefore it can only seem quite strange, quite paradoxical to us when the spiritual researcher claims the absolute opposite about communication with the dead. When he has to say that he has struggled to make contact with the deceased, when he can tie the karmic threads that connect people even beyond death, then one has to get used to perceiving what the dead person has to communicate as coming from one's own soul. What comes from the dead person resounds from one's own soul, and what we have to communicate to him, what we have to say to him, is clothed

so that it is as if we heard it spoken to us by him. So you have to completely change your habits when you are confronted with a spiritual being, when you compare the external experience you have with it to the experiences of the sensory world, when someone who has become a spirit speaks to us in that wordless language that is spoken on the spiritual plane, that when he communicates or seems to communicate something to us, then we have to say to ourselves: that is what you yourself say to him. On the other hand, when he really communicates something to us, when something really comes from him, then it rises up from the depths of our own soul.

It is easy to say such things, but to develop this habit of our soul life, to truly change our habits, that is somewhat more difficult. Now you will understand that it is not easy for a person to cross this bridge to a completely different kind of experience, to a completely different way of experiencing. [You will understand] that he instinctively, unconsciously, withholds his soul life, which, if he did not withhold it, would lead to communication with the so-called dead. But then one would have to communicate in the way I told you. On the other hand, it cannot be said that people who live here on earth in the physical body do not do so; they actually do it all the time, only they misunderstand the whole nature of this communication. The simplest thing that happens in this area for most people is that they dream about people with whom they have been in contact. But these dreams, even if they are partly subjective experiences, can also arise from a real interaction with the dead.

If one really wants to establish a right relationship with the spiritual world, then it is necessary to see two experiences in the right light. Two experiences that man actually pays no attention to in ordinary life. And these two experiences are falling asleep and waking up. The other two states of the four states of consciousness, sleeping and waking, last, and man is generally inclined to follow attentively what lasts a long time, but what passes quickly, like waking and falling asleep, man is not accustomed to follow with the same attention. And in the times when we are awake, we do experience important things for our physical life, but in the time of actual sleep, we experience, with the exception of dreaming, which we find very difficult to interpret, not much consciousness. On the other hand, we actually experience a lot in the moments of falling asleep and waking up, but we do not pay attention to it because at the moment we wake up and fall asleep, we are at our most inattentive. The moment of waking up and falling asleep has already passed by the time we want to look at it and take notice of it; that is why we are so unaware of how infinitely important and significant these two points of falling asleep and waking up are.

We know from spiritual science, at least in theory, what falling asleep is: a stepping out of the physical body. In the present state of development of humanity, we are too weak to be conscious in the time between falling asleep and waking up, and so it happens that when we fall asleep, we pass from our conscious state to the unconscious one; we do not develop enough attention to observe the falling asleep itself; and it is the same when we wake up from the spiritual world. The physical world with its impressions of light, colors and sounds overwhelms us immediately, physical sensations overwhelm us immediately as well, and we do not have time to grasp the moment of waking up in a spiritual way; our attention cannot develop that fast, and when it does develop, we are already overwhelmed by the external influences, then our consciousness is no longer attuned to grasp the more subtle things. The spiritual researcher must learn to develop attention for these two moments, for falling asleep and waking up.

Now, for us, falling asleep is a stepping into the spiritual world. By stepping into the spiritual world, we are in the realm of existence where the so-called dead are. We are with the dead. In the world in which we then are, they live and weave. But as I said, our consciousness is too weak in the present cycle of humanity to perceive our surroundings in this state. But just because we do not perceive something, it does not mean that it is not there! It is all around us, we just cannot perceive it. So we are together with the so-called dead, but at first we are not aware of this togetherness. But sometimes it does emerge from dreams, and, as I said, these dreams can only be completely subjective experiences, reminiscences. So there are dreams that, by showing us that the dead person is saying this or that to us, bring us into a real interrelationship, into a real communication with the dead. But as a rule one interprets the communication wrongly. One has the image of the dead person before one, the dead person says this to one, one takes this for an order. It is not that. Perhaps we have thought and felt about the dead, and if we are in spiritual science, we also know that we can become more and more aware of these thoughts about the dead. We can almost reshape our thoughts about the dead in such a way that they offer a certain guarantee of the reality of our contact. We can vividly remember this or that occasion when we were together, but we do not think in general, abstract terms in such a case; rather, we think of something that we really experienced with him, we think of it with the vividness with which we experienced it, and then we make the decision to to behave in our thoughts with the dead person as we would like to behave with him if he were standing in front of us. When we do this, we address a question to him, or we communicate something to him that we believe he or we might need to tell him. What we do consciously and more and more consciously – but in a sense it is what I say, what we want to send into it during our waking life – we take that into our sleep consciousness. We will then have not a subjective but an objective, real dream. But we must interpret this dream in the right way. People do not interpret it correctly, because this “dream means the echoes of what we ourselves have addressed to the dead; even if it seems to us in the dream image that the dead person is speaking to us, it does not mean that he is speaking to us in the words he is saying to us, but only that he is hearing us, that what we are saying to him is reaching him. There you have a living application of what I have told you.

I said that when we turn to the dead, we have to get used to the fact that it seems as if it comes from him. This also occurs in dreams. The dream seems as if it brings us something from the dead. But in reality it is only proof that it has been transformed in a certain way, that it has reached him; he has heard us. When we dream of the dead, that is no more than proof that they hear us, that what we have sent to them in loyal love really reaches them.

These facts of spiritual life are often misinterpreted. When someone dreams of the dead, they believe that what the dead person tells them is directed to them. But this is only proof that what they have said to the dead has been understood by the dead. I have to say to myself: Yes, I really spoke to the dead, since he tells me so in my dream. This is proof that what I said to him has reached him. For it is only the reflection of what has reached him from me.

Through the moment of falling asleep, we carry into the spiritual world what we say to the dead. By waking up, we carry into the physical world, conversely, what the dead person says to us. And what the dead person speaks to us must resound from the depths of our soul in the state between waking up and falling asleep in the everyday state of consciousness. As in the “dream, what we speak to the dead lingers, so what the dead speak to us lingers in the waking state.

But here again, people are unaccustomed to interpreting it correctly – unaccustomed for a different reason than we stated in the previous case. People, as they are predisposed for physical life, are, firstly, not very inclined to really listen to the inspirations that come from the depths of the soul. Most people, who do not consider anything that arises from the depths of the soul to be anything other than subjective ideas, think: Yes, that just occurred to us, it comes from ourselves. But one must learn to distinguish, just as there are dreams that are subjective and others that are objectively true, there are so-called ideas that are purely subjective and others that are inspirations from the depths of our soul. We must learn – and we can learn – to listen attentively to our waking daily life, so that we become aware of how thoughts penetrate from the depths of our soul, and even when we are in conversation with others, how this or that thought, which we are not inclined to pay attention to, emerges from the depths of our soul, and then we will recognize the objective character of these inspirations, which softly sound in the midst of our daily life from the soul. Then we will experience that in such inspirations the dear, so-called dead speak to us from their realm. For what the dead person tells us must come from within ourselves.

For the spiritual researcher, it is the case that he directly experiences what he has told you: What the dead person says comes from the soul, and he has to reorganize himself. For those who have not acquired this state of mind, it takes place in such a way that what we experience in our thoughts when we address a message and question to a dead person in the time between falling asleep and waking up, and what the dead person tells us, sounds from the depths of the soul.

Human life is much more connected with the spiritual world than we usually believe. Today, we have not only become [materialistic] in our views, we have also become vain and proud, dismissive of the spiritual world, presuming to say that everything that resonates within us is our own inspiration. Materialism also makes the human soul selfish and vain, leading to a certain conceit, in which we ascribe everything to ourselves. What we consider our own ideas are actually the thoughts of those who have already passed through the gate of death, who, by addressing our souls, are working together with us in this shared human life.

It is not enough for us to develop the thought: We will not perish when we die. It is certainly true, but it has something selfish about it. Rather, it is more important to grasp it practically, vigorously for life, to grasp it in such a way that we know: Not only our life does not perish, but the dead do not perish for life either. They influence our soul, and we will only understand our dreams correctly if we see them as inspired by the realm of the dead.

This is the first thought from which I started today. It should show you that the real contemplation of the spiritual world makes demands on people, in the face of which people see, consciously see: after all, all this contradicts the world in which I have become accustomed. Man does not say to himself in his conscious mind: I do not enter the spiritual world because those who fantasize about the spiritual world describe it to me in such a way that it contradicts the physical world. But instinctively man would rather say: There are limits to human knowledge, one cannot enter it - than to admit to himself: I must grasp the strong, courageous thought [and imagine] the spiritual world quite differently. If this healthy courage to think about the spiritual world replaces much of the morbid thinking that still prevails today, our earthly life can be fertilized by spiritual thoughts in a completely different way than it is fertilized when these spiritual thoughts are merely conceived in the abstract.

Let us now take up another thought. The thought that is linked to a question: What does an understanding of the spiritual world offer people with regard to ordinary physical life on earth?

There, you see, we can already penetrate a little more into the practice of contemporary life. For how could one not admit to oneself that - after humanity was so proud of its great cultural and human progress until 1914 - that what has been happening since 1914 could befall it? How could one not admit to oneself that this must pose a difficult question? And how can we not admit to ourselves in the face of this question that perhaps something in the overall state of humanity was not quite right after all? Of course this is not meant as a criticism. But we can understand this life. So when I say that something must have been wrong, I do not want to say that I condemn what happened. For spiritual science has nothing at all to do with such thoughts about the past. These are critical thoughts from which one learns and should learn. When I say that something is not right, I mean that it could not have been otherwise in the development that has now passed, but on the other hand, the human being must pull himself together, then many things will be different. Criticism is unfruitful. Only recognition of what should be from what was is fruitful.

In humanity, from old states of consciousness, it has now become so that since the middle of the fifteenth century, mainly with regard to the consciousness soul, that on the one hand man - although he does not believe it - that man preferably hangs on to abstract concepts; and [although] precisely those who believe they are very practical. So people are theorists, often completely steeped and infected by all kinds of theories. But theories are quite barren. Theories only have value when what they contain bubbles up directly, welling up from living together with the spiritual world. But in his present cycle of development, this is precisely how the human being acts. On the other hand, there is justification: the consciousness soul must be developed. But on the other hand, countervailing forces must be developed so that it does not become one-sided. The sensing, feeling, and willing that one develops primarily through the consciousness soul is tied to the human brain. One should not ignore the fact that today man develops a consciousness that is tied to the brain. And so he believes that all consciousness is bound only to the brain. But this has a very specific consequence for the coexistence of people and for practical life, that man preferably develops a thinking that is bound to the brain. This forces him to develop thoughts that come from his interaction of the ordinary brain with the external, sensual world. He cannot free himself from what the brain can experience. The consequence of this is that a general cultural trait takes hold in the human soul. This is narrow-mindedness, narrow-mindedness. This is not to be criticized. On the other hand, I would like to point out that it is necessary. But it is the case that present-day humanity is most inclined to hold only to that which arises in the brain with the outside world; only when we reach out to the spiritual world do we expand it. This is something that today's development of humanity brings with it. Spiritual science is called upon to counteract the narrow-mindedness in the intellectual field. It has this cultural task of broadening the horizon again, of raising the horizon.

Yes, my dear friends, the matter at hand is much more serious than one might think. I think most of you have known me too long to know that I don't say this or that out of some personal sympathy or antipathy. When I observe how one of the most outstanding character traits is narrow-mindedness, I must at the same time see it in important things that go beyond the world. I may mention it, one must always remind, I may mention it because I am not saying it only now, but because I have said what I am saying before this catastrophic event befell our humanity. [In Helsingfors, that is, at a time before the war began, I have already pointed out] the fact that at such an outstanding position there is a person like Wilson, who today is associated with many catastrophic events that have befallen humanity. At the time, I drew attention to the most salient trait of Wilson's character, to the narrow-mindedness and bigotry that is encroaching on the social structure of humanity.

But what [humanity] does depends on what people think. That thoughts are realities and that realities flow out of thoughts is something that humanity must come to understand: to understand life precisely on the basis of genuine spiritual science, to come to an understanding of the spiritual world from an understanding of what underlies life. We must not only recognize that spiritual science can give us those experiences that can make us whole in our entire soul life, because they prove to us that we belong to a spiritual world, but also the thought: When what lies in the spiritual world flows into our moral and social will, then thinking does not remain limited and expands. Then it will also get better, otherwise not.

If only we could grasp this thought in all its depth! Then we would become aware of much of what is going on in the present. With regard to our feeling, with regard to our thinking, the present age makes us limited. With regard to our feeling: what does it do to us? That which arises from the consciousness soul. Feeling is that these abstract thoughts, which are at the same time the most materialistic thoughts, that these actually no longer grasp our feeling and sensing in reality.

How often do we hear people say: Oh, it's just a thought, you have to feel! That is as true as it is false. You cannot have a truly fruitful influence on life, you cannot truly lead life fruitfully if you do not want to think, but instead you let everything be absorbed into the mush of feeling. You turn life into a mess. What matters is to bring the light of thought into feeling and to elevate feeling. Thinking feeling, feeling thinking, that is what is needed. What the consciousness soul wreaks, because the abstract brain cannot grasp our /gap in transcript]

Therefore, the spiritual state of present-day people in relation to feeling, the present spiritual state will tend more and more towards narrow-mindedness the more materialistic it becomes. Narrow-minded, philistine – that is what the spiritual state is currently leaning towards.

If the light of thought, the realm of light of thought, does not penetrate feeling, it makes people narrow-minded, their interests are limited to the very immediate. Thoughts must be wide-ranging, but they can only do that if we carry the sense that the world that surrounds us sensually is something quite different [from what] expresses itself spiritually, that the dead express themselves; [then our interests, then spiritual science - just as narrow-mindedness and limitation in the field of the intellect - will have to work against narrow-mindedness in the field of feeling. It needs a view of a social structure that is imbued with broad interests, namely, interests that will arise in us when we look at the wonderful, mysterious human being himself. For today's anatomist and philosopher, this human being is only a kind of physical organism, not mysterious and wonderful enough. Such ideas must kill our ethics in particular, but also our social conception of life. We must be clear that the spiritual is reality, that thoughts are what the reality of life flows from. In theory, most people agree with what I am saying on this point. In terms of their life practice, however, they do not agree. They act contrary to it. From what people say, we can see which thoughts are unfruitful for life due to the narrow-mindedness of their emotional life.

My dear friends! To have thoughts in such a way that the thought stands vividly before us, as something we see directly, that is something that people have gradually lost in the materialistic age. In the 1980s, I attended a lecture by a professor who was extraordinarily impressive for people at the time. He kept asking the question, “What should one ask?” [gap in the transcript] And finally he said: I think I have led you into a forest of question marks. Who not only expresses the thought in the abstract, but develops views on these thoughts: It is neither beautiful nor meaningful, [so] a forest of question marks. Who is not satisfied with expressing thoughts – thoughts must be immersed in reality – does not speak of the truth.

A statesman has expressed a remarkable thought. He says: Our relationship with Austria is the point that indicates the direction of our future policy. Anyone who is out of touch with reality must say to themselves: A relationship is a point and a point is a direction.

Those who think like this are not rooted in reality with their thoughts. He separates thought from feeling. But realities can only be real thoughts. He who works with such thoughts can accomplish nothing healing. He who has a feeling for such things can hear a great deal of this kind today. Recently, for example, someone said in regard to the peace treaty with Romania: [gap in the transcript] that Romania is putting itself on an open, honest footing with us. We would like it not to be on just an “open” foot, but to be on a foot at all. In the future, the Romanians should have an “open” foot in order to enter into a proper relationship with us. Is such a thought present in reality as a thought? It is not! Speech is used because the brain is in motion.

But something beneficial for humanity can only arise for the social structure when it flows from the real. It is precisely for this reason that one must respect reality and also the spiritual life. Mere criticism does not make it. You can study the life of humanity today. It would certainly be necessary to study the life of humanity in order to develop thoughts that are in line with reality. And one should not study it in such a way that every thought becomes a matter of sympathy or antipathy, of praise or blame.

You know from my lecture cycle 191[0] in Kristiania, also with regard to the present time, that I have ascribed to the British nation that it is preferably called upon to develop the consciousness soul. On the one hand narrow-mindedness, on the other hand small-mindedness. It does not apply to the individual Englishman, but to the whole English national soul. One has only to study the language. We must really, I might say, for the sake of the spirit, hold on to the idea that language is inwardly effective; it forms feelings that are effective in language. The British language simply drops whole broad sections of the word into nothingness; it is the most abstract language.

That is it, my dear friends. What matters in the present is not to create theoretical concepts, but to draw these concepts from the depths of the soul. We need such concepts. You can be a traveler, a scientist, a political scientist, you can travel to entire countries, but if you have no sense of what lives inside people, the descriptions for practical life will not be of much use. People in the materialistic age have said many a witty and apt thing about the various European and non-European national souls. When it comes to expressing the true essence of the national soul, they fail. If one wants to be effective in practical life, because people are so reluctant to get to know each other in terms of their soul qualities, they are bound to end up in a catastrophe that is only the result of incorrect thoughts.

There are two aspects to the human soul: materialism strives towards one, and spiritual science must counteract the other. The area of will: thoughts that do not want to unite with our will, they do not attack it, they do not intervene in the whole person, they arise from the brain. The result of this is that in our lives, materialistic thoughts make people clumsy, narrow-minded, philistine. This must necessarily result. Those who observe life notice the clumsiness. What can a person do today? What he has been taught and learned with difficulty. Today you can be an excellent professor of Chinese, you can be an excellent civil servant, carpenter, and yet it can happen that you cannot sew on a trouser button, but that someone else has to sew it on for you. We are highly inept at everything we have not learned, because what we absorb in our education in feeling and thinking is suited to our body and blood and muscles.

The spirit, when it takes effect on a person and has a living effect, takes hold of the whole person, makes him skillful out of the spirit. [This is] a test for the reality [of spiritual science] that it forms people out of us who are more and more able to cope with life, that what it lets flow in out of the spirit, [people] can also carry into life.

But that is what triggers another thought. What we need, out of an understanding of the spiritual world, is to come to life at all.

Let us take a truth of spiritual science: I will list it briefly today. Today I want to elaborate on the idea that When a person passes through the portal of death, he should immerse the first third between death and rebirth mainly in the imaginative, the second third between death and rebirth mainly in the inspirational, and the third third between death and rebirth mainly in the intuitive; in the last third of our life between death and rebirth – the Viennese cycle – the person immerses himself in the life he has to live here on earth. In the continuation of this, we would have to lead an imitative life between birth and the seventh year, an immersion in childlikeness. Thus, in the imitative immersion of the child, in every action, is the continuation of the life of the last third between death and new birth. We just have to grasp life in the right way. We see the human being growing into life and we can tell from his faculty of perception that he is continuing a spiritual life in the physical one, that he is continuing an imitation of the intuition from the last third. We see the human being growing into life. — What a thought!

Imagine, my dear friends, if it becomes socially fruitful for the human being to be together: this is the continuation of spiritual life, we see it in him! Life is the proof of the immortality of man. As it is, it is the continuation. To grasp the thought of immortality, the departure from the spiritual world through birth into physical life on earth! Imagine what that must be like for life! Imagine this thought! That is also why we recognize the value of thoughts. Imagine this even more in a concrete sense. Imagine: I look at this body, which comes from spiritual life, then you will believe in the whole of human life. Do we believe in the whole of human life today? No, we do not believe in the whole of human life, we only believe up to the age of 25 or 26 at the most. Most young people no longer believe that we can be educated, that life gives us something new. We still believe that we can acquire something new well into our 20s, but after that we only believe that life goes on. That what is brought in through birth is to be developed through the whole of life must, may not be a theoretical truth, it must become a concrete truth of life. Ask how many people there are today who, when they turn 30, say: When I turn 40, life will have revealed more to me. I am waiting for what life will bring me. I have not lived in vain. I live in anticipation of life, waiting for each year to reveal new secrets.

Do we believe in life like that? No, we don't expect anything more when we turn 27. Today, when we turn 20, we consider ourselves mature enough to make decisions about the whole of human life, if we are not [even] elected to parliament, where we already decide everything. [Gap in the transcript] Greeks atavistically.

We will once again look into the developing, the expectant. We should not express such a thought, nor think it, we should feel it through and through. Imagine what would have to be different in social life if people faced each other like this. Today, one person may be 60 years old and another 17. The 17-year-old has his point of view. Today everyone has their point of view. Life experiences develop and become ever richer. How different our interactions will be if we lead a life of hope and expectation. And every new

year brings me something new, and when I am ten years older, I will be completely different. [A] different view of life then arises from the view of the world, that we grasp the concrete thought of reality from the meaning of the world and the meaning of human life, that the whole of human life, the whole of the human being has a meaning [gap in the transcript]

Historical science must change completely!

Today, anyone who looks at the life of humanity at most says to themselves: the life of humanity is developing, and the individual human being is also developing. That is only an external comparison. Spiritual observation yields something quite different. Humanity is becoming ever younger.

People who are capable of development through their natural powers alone – if I may put it this way – in body and soul until their 50s [Unclear transcript; gap in transcript].

The ancient Persians 40 years to 30 years.

Today, the human being remains [only] capable of development for 27 years. Today, people believe only in youth, not in the whole of humanity. It is an important truth that man can experience through his natural powers, without intervention, [that he] can actually only develop for 27 years. He does not become more perfect through the outer world.

If we ask the question: Who is a particularly characteristic person for the present day? - A person who grew up without the advantages that one has through the past, without inheritance; [a person] who did not go to many high schools, but is open and receptive to everything in his environment, who had to grow into and only take in what today's world offers into his education. A self-made man. [He] absorbs his environment in an elementary way. Up to the age of 27 – then he enters public life, gets himself elected to parliament, becomes a minister. Now he is engaged, he has no need to develop further. A person born of poor parents, growing up wild, but receptive to his environment /gap in the transcript]: Lloyd George. — Ministry wonders what to do with the man – just take him on. What do you give him? What he understands least: transportation.