The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Once again we want to look back at those principles of initiation described in yesterday's lecture as having been paralyzed by the advancing intellectualization of culture. Looking back we shall see how those people, in whom these older, atavistic principles of initiation were still alive, confronted Christianity. Out of their perceptions they formulated what subsequently became the contents of dogma and, as such, could no longer be understood after about the eighth or ninth century.

We need only to remember that before the mystery of Golgotha the impulse of the true principle of the human self, the I, was essentially missing in human civilization. The human being was, of course, always organized in such a way as to have the I principle within him; furthermore, he or she was created to shape outer and inner being out of the I principle. But only slowly and by degrees did people come to feel and be conscious of the essence and power of the I. Thus we can say that although the human being, even in the times preceding the mystery of Golgotha, consisted of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and the I, human consciousness did not include within it this I being. The I was more or less unconscious. In those olden times people walked on the earth who basically did not live with full consciousness of the I. But it is actually only possible for the I to be active in the human being when the physical body is no longer developing in its full, original freshness. Those human beings who were still unconscious of their I developed their physical bodies in greater freshness than those who had entered into a full consciousness of the I. This arrival of the full consciousness of the I did not occur suddenly; it was taking place both before and after the mystery of Golgotha, but it is clearly perceptible to a spiritual-scientific observation of history.

That which can be maintained in its full freshness in the human physical, etheric, and astral bodies—that can only be maintained as long as something from the divine, spiritual nature is flowing into the human being out of the cosmos. But we could never have become free beings if the I had not appeared on the scene, if the divine-spiritual had not ceased to flow into us in the old sense. Human beings only became free through at the same time achieving mastery of the I within their consciousness. But that was only possible when humanity became involved in the sphere of abstract thoughts. Abstract thoughts are, however, actually the corpses of the spiritual world. I have already pointed this out in these lectures. Just as a corpse is left over from our physical nature when we die on the earth, so too, there remains a corpse left over from the being of soul and spirit that we were in the spiritual world before coming down into the physical world. However, this has only been the case since the human being has been equipped with consciousness of his I. And thoughts, abstract thoughts, represent this corpse. When we become able to take hold of abstract thoughts, we take hold of the corpse of our spiritual and soul being as it was before our descent into the earthly world. But a precondition for our taking hold of the corpse of our spiritual and soul being is that something of the dying and paralyzing principle of death must enter our physical body.

Indeed, the evolution of the human being is such that his nature has changed in the course of his development on earth. The bodies of human beings in olden times were different from those of the newer bodies. The bodies of old were such that within them the human being was unfree, but as he moved about, all the freshness of primal being was manifested in his physical, etheric, and astral activity. Thus one can say that in the civilized world we already live in a period of the evolution of humanity when the body is beginning inwardly to decay. And we attain our freedom precisely through this decaying body, which is the base for our intellectual, abstract thoughts. Through this decaying body the human being has attained all that which a person, as an intellectually imbued scientist, is so proud of today.

Considering this, we must say that before the mystery of Golgotha full consciousness of the self as an I was not yet present in human beings on the earth. Nevertheless, in those times there were a few people who had already developed this full I consciousness, who had developed it through the mystery cults. These people were called initiates. We have already said much concerning what happened to those who underwent initiation in the places of the ancient mysteries, how they ascended to the experience of the fully conscious I at a time when it was the general condition of humankind not yet to have a fully conscious I. But the initiate of old could ascend to this fully conscious I because something entered into him through the sacred enactments in the mysteries, something which had been felt and experienced in all ancient civilizations as the eternal Father in the cosmos. And when the initiate, the mystic, had reached a certain point of his initiation in the ancient mysteries he had an experience that allowed him to say to himself (if we were to imagine such an initiate within the ancient Hebrew civilization): The Father lives in me.

This initiate would characterize what had happened within him through his initiation in the following way: The nature of human beings in general is such that the Father indeed sustains and bears them, but the Father does not enter their consciousness and does not kindle their consciousness to an experience of the I. To ordinary human beings the Father gives only the spirit of breath; he breathes in the human being the breath which is the living soul. But the initiate felt that the living soul that had been breathed into a person was a special spiritual reality, the living Father principle of the cosmos which also entered into the human being. And then when this divine Father principle had entered into such an initiate of the ancient Hebrew world and he had become conscious of it, then he could say, with full justification, what the I meant to him: “I am the I am.” Such a person who went about among ancient peoples and, through the divine Father principle dwelling in him, was qualified to speak the I—which in the entire ancient world was the unutterable name of the Godhead, of the Father God—such a person was seen as the representative of the Father on the Earth. These initiates were called the Fathers who walked among the peoples. They were called Fathers because they represented the divine principle of the Father to other human beings. It was said of them that the divine Father had entered into them in the mysteries. Thus the mysteries were seen as the places within the earthly world where the principle could develop that otherwise only weaves and surges externally through the entire cosmos. Within the mystery centers and through the mystery centers, a tabernacle was built in the human being for the divine Father principle. The human being himself became a tabernacle for the divine Father principle.

Through the mysteries human beings felt the surge of God the Father through the earthly world; and looking out into the cosmos, into the great world beyond, they called it the macrocosm, the great world, inasmuch as they thought of it as permeated by and woven through and through by the divine Father principle. They looked then to the mystery centers, within which a tabernacle had been built for this Father God, within which human beings had themselves become tabernacles of the Father God through initiation; and they called the mysteries, and what a human being had become through the mysteries, the little world, the microcosm. This distinction persisted even into the days of Goethe, for when Goethe became a member of certain lodges he picked up the phrase, “The great world and the little world.” By “great world” he understood the macrocosm and by “little world,” the lodge that was, for him, an image of the “great world.”²⁹

All of this entered into another phase when the mystery of Golgotha was drawing near in the evolution of humanity. Hence, something essentially different had to be considered. During the mystery of Golgotha there were human beings walking on the earth who experienced within themselves something of the independent I. The consciousness of the I had begun to enter into human beings. But at the same time something else began to appear: The human physical body began to be inwardly brittle, to decay. And so at this time, in the middle of earth evolution, human evolution faced a great danger. There was the danger of more and more losing connection with the spiritual world and now there was the danger that the physical body could increasingly decay and fall apart.

To help with this danger the being we know as the Christ resolved to pour himself into Jesus of Nazareth just as the divine Father principle had poured into the initiates in earlier times. This divine Father principle had poured into the initiates. In this way the I was enkindled in, and added to, the physical body, etheric body, and astral body. As I have already said, only those into whom the divine Father had entered were allowed to speak the I, which was itself the unutterable name of God.

But now, in the middle of earth evolution there lived human beings who were beginning to say I of themselves, human beings who had raised the I into consciousness. The Son principle, the Christ principle, now entered into just such a human being, into Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ principle now entered into the I. Whereas in earlier times the Father principle had entered into physical body, etheric body, and astral body, now the Christ principle entered into the human being who had developed himself to that stage further in evolution.

Now remember how I described the human being in the second lecture. I said to you that the plant nullifies within itself physical nature. One might also say that the plant corrupts physical nature. The animal then corrupts the physical and the etheric. And the human being corrupts the physical, the etheric, and the astral. The human being did not corrupt them completely in the period of human development before Golgotha. But thereafter he corrupted them completely as the I really entered fully into our being. Of course, the initiate of the ancient mysteries freed himself entirely from physical body, etheric body, and astral body when he let the divine Father principle flow into him and, already in those days, became an I.

In entering into Jesus of Nazareth, Christ nullified, through his entrance, not only the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body, but also the I, to the extent that it was developed in Jesus of Nazareth at that time. So that in Jesus Christ there dwelt the higher Christ principle, which is related to the I in the same way the I of the human being is related to the astral body.

The Christ event was something that the old initiates, in whom higher faculties of vision had developed, were still just able to perceive. When these ancient initiates observed the human being as he was in their time they found him uniting within himself all the forces of the other beings of nature and, as it were, standing above them uniting them all. They saw how one can find in the human physical body the mineral kingdom, in the human etheric body the plant kingdom, in the human astral body the animal kingdom, and then they saw what is actually human. When tidings of this Christ event, of the approaching event of Golgotha, came to the initiates who had achieved clairvoyant seeing in ancient times, to these Fathers of the peoples, at least to those few who were still present—when these tidings came, these initiates could see a being in Christ in whom still more was contained, in whom not merely had earthly being been elevated to the human level but in whom humanity itself had been elevated to the level of being that is spiritual and divine.

If we bear in mind how there is present in the human being something that lives in the external physical body as an expression of essential humanity then we can understand how these initiates saw more in Christ Jesus than a mere man, how they saw walking around on the earth something that went beyond the human, beyond humanity. These initiates saw Christ Jesus in a special radiance. They saw him covered not only with the color of human flesh but with a special shimmering radiance.

Initiates in ancient times could, of course, see this special shining radiance in their fellow initiates. It was the power of the Father principle that dwelled within them. But now they perceived not only that which lived in the old initiates as the divine Father principle; now they perceived something that radiated forth from Christ Jesus in a special way, because not only had physical body, etheric body, and astral body been nullified in him, but also the I—to the extent that the I could be present in a human being at that time.

For this reason not only initiates but also other specially gifted people were able to see Christ Jesus as an especially radiant being. And this was the radically new reality at the time of the mystery of Golgotha—new even to the initiates: that other human beings, though perhaps few in number, who were only endowed with natural powers, not with powers otherwise acquired only in the mysteries, could recognize in Christ Jesus this higher nature.

From this fact came the realization that now, with the mystery of Golgotha, something was supposed to happen that, in earlier times, had taken place only within the mysteries themselves. Something that had formerly taken place only within the mysteries—within the microcosm, the “little world”—had been carried out into the macrocosm, the “great world.” And it is actually the case that, to begin with, the Christ mystery was proclaimed in its clearest and most pure form in the last remaining mystery centers of antiquity. And precisely this proclamation of the mystery of Christ was lost to later civilization in the course of the first four centuries of European evolution. Because in Christ Jesus there lived, not the Father principle alone, but also the Son principle, the old initiates knew that he represented something absolutely unique in earthly development. It was unique in this respect: In the further advance of the earth never again could another mystery of Golgotha appear, never again could such an indwelling of the Son principle in a human being take place, an indwelling such as had occurred in Jesus of Nazareth.

And these initiates knew that Christ had entered into humanity as the healer, as the great healer, as the being who prevents the human body from suffering damage caused by the brittleness which was brought about through the entrance of the I. For what would have happened if Christ had not appeared as the healer? If Christ had not appeared as the healer, then when human beings die, when they lay aside the decaying body, the products of this decay would radiate back into the soul being that the human being unfolds after death. The dead would have been disturbed, tortured, by what the decaying physical body represented in earth existence. These souls who had passed through death would have been forced to see how the earth itself suffers injury when it has to take in a decaying body. And the old initiates knew how those who called themselves Christians in the true sense of the word, who had filled themselves inwardly with the Christ principle, how such men could now look down upon the body taken from them by death, and say: Because we received Christ into ourselves while we were children of the earth we have healed the physical body to the extent that it can be placed into the earth without becoming a principle of decay for the earth itself. What the human being needed in order to become an I had to be healed for the sake of the earth. For in order to become an I he had to have a decaying body; but if this decaying body had persisted the earth would have been harmed. And after death the souls, looking down upon the physical bodies now received by the earth, would have been tormented because they could feel the harm being inflicted upon the earth itself by their decaying physical bodies.

What entered through the mystery of Golgotha was this, that the souls of human beings could say to themselves after they had passed through the gate of death: Yes, we carried this fallen physical body on the earth and we can thank it for the possibility of developing a freer I in our human being. But Christ through his dwelling in Jesus of Nazareth, has healed this physical body so that it is no longer harmful to the earth's existence; and we can calmly look down into earthly existence knowing that after the mystery of Golgotha bad seed is not falling into the earth with the physical body that the human being otherwise needs for the development of the I. And so Christ passed through the mystery of Golgotha in order to heal and sanctify the human physical body for the earth.

But now think what would have happened in the course of earth evolution if things had remained as they were after the Christ event. If things had remained that way then the following could have been said: In ancient times the Father God entered into human beings so they, as souls, could rise up to the I and as initiates could proclaim to others the actual essence of the human being, the being of the I. Then the Son, the Christ, entered into the being of humanity. Those who raise themselves so that Christ can dwell in them rescue their bodies for the earth. Just as through the Father principle, and the indwelling of the Father principle made possible by the mysteries, the human soul nature was rescued—so now the bodily nature of the human being has been saved through the healer, the savior-redeemer, through Christ who went through the mystery of Golgotha.

If this had remained the situation, then those who knew of the redemption of their bodies would have had to bear Christ as the being who is actively working within them, as the being who is even actively working on their bodily nature. And then again human beings could not have become free beings. When inner freedom would have arrived in the fourteenth century A.D., human beings would have evolved so that they could receive the Christ into themselves for the peace of their souls after death, so that their souls would be able to look down upon the earth as I have just described. But they could not have become free. If they had wanted to become good then they would simply have had to let Christ work within them in the same way that the Father worked in ancient times in human beings who were not initiates. In those times human beings became free when the I was developed within them. The initiates became free human beings in ancient times whereas others were unfree, because the Father lived in them beneath their consciousness. If Christians had been beings who were merely conscious of the Christ within them, then whenever they wanted to be good they would have had to extinguish their own I consciousness in order to let Christ awaken within them through the extinguishing of their own I-consciousness. They themselves actually would not have been able to be good; it would only have been Christ in them who was good. Human beings would have had to walk about upon the earth with the Christ dwelling within them, and inasmuch as Christ would have availed himself of the bodies of human beings, the healing of these bodies would have occurred. But the good deeds accomplished by human beings would have been the deeds of Christ, not the deeds of human beings.

That was not the task, the mission, of the divine Son, who had united himself with the evolution of the earth through the mystery of Golgotha. He wanted to live within humanity without clouding the dawning I consciousness of human beings. He did this once—in Jesus, in whom, from the baptism onward, the consciousness of the Son God lived in place of the I consciousness of Jesus. But this was not to happen in the human beings of the times to come. In the people of future times the I was to be able to raise itself to full, clear consciousness, while Christ nevertheless continued to dwell within them.

For this to happen it was necessary for Christ, as such, to disappear from the immediate sight of human beings. Although he remained united with earthly existence, he disappeared from the direct view of human beings. A saying common in the ancient mystery centers became also applicable to him. In the mysteries it was said that when a physically visible being, a being whose existence can be followed by human beings with their perception in the physical world, ceases to be visible—it was said that such a being had “ascended to the heavens,” and passed into those regions where physical visibility no longer exists. And so Christ ascended to heaven and became invisible. In a certain sense he would have retained his visibility if he had dwelled in human beings and eliminated the I, so that they could have become good only because, in reality, the Christ was acting in them.

The kind of vision that enabled the apostles, the disciples, to behold Christ even after his resurrection—that kind of vision disappeared. Christ had ascended to the heavens. But he sent to human beings that divine being who does not extinguish I consciousness. This is the being to whom the human being raises himself, not with earthly perception, but with imperceptible spirit. Christ sent humanity the Holy Spirit.

So actually it is the Holy Spirit who is sent by Christ in order that man might retain his consciousness of self, of his I, while Christ himself lives in the unconsciousness of human beings. Thus, if he realizes in the full sense of the word what his being really is, the human being will say: When I look back to what the ancient initiates knew, then I see that in me lives the Father principle which fills the cosmos and which arose in these initiates and developed the I in them. That is the principle that lives within us before we come down into the physical world. Through the Father principle dwelling in them, the ancient initiates remembered, with complete clarity, the way they had lived before they descended into the physical world. They sought the divine in the realm of being that precedes birth, in the realm of preexistence: Ex deo nascimur.

After the mystery of Golgotha human beings could no longer say, “I behold the Christ.” Otherwise they could not have become good through themselves, only Christ within could have done the good. And the truth could only have been In Christo morimur. The human being could die in Christ, through the principle of death within him he could unite with Christ. But the human being's new consciousness could be awakened through the Holy Spirit, the being sent to him by Christ: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

There you have the inner connection of the Trinity. This shows you, too, something else that is definitely a part of Christianity. Even without perception of Christ within, a human being can achieve the awakening of the spirit. By sending the Holy Spirit Christ gave humanity the ability to raise itself to an understanding of the spiritual out of the life of intellect itself. Hence it should not be said that the human being cannot grasp the spiritual, the super-sensible, through his own spirit. A man could only justify his inability to understand the spirit if he ignored the Holy Spirit, if he spoke only of the Father God and the Christ God. For those willing to see and read it is also clearly indicated—for it is a revelation in and of itself—that the human being can understand the super-sensible through the spirit dwelling within him, if he only inclines himself to Christ. It is for this reason that we are told that the Holy Spirit appeared at the baptism of Christ. And with the appearance of the Holy Spirit these words resound through the cosmos: “This is my beloved Son; this day I have begotten him.”

The Father is the unbegotten begetter who places the Son into the physical world. But at the same time the Father uses the Holy Spirit in order to tell humanity that in the spirit, the super-sensible is comprehensible, even if this spirit is itself not perceptible but only works inwardly to elevate the merely abstract intellect to the realm of the living. In the spirit the super-sensible can be understood when the corpse of thoughts that we have from our pre-birth existence is raised to life through the Christ dwelling within us. And when Christ sent the Holy Spirit to his disciples—this imparting occurred through the Christ, through the Son. For this reason it was an ancient dogma that the Father is the unbegotten begetter, that the Son is the one begotten by the Father, and that the Holy Spirit is the one imparted to humanity by the Father and the Son. This is not some kind of arbitrarily asserted dogma but rather the wisdom of initiation living in the earliest Christian centuries; only later was it covered over and buried along with the teachings concerning the Trichotomy and the Trinity.

The divine principle working as Christianity within evolving humanity cannot be understood without the Trinity. If, in the place of the Trinity, some other teaching concerning God were to enter, then basically speaking it would not be a fully Christian teaching. One must understand the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit if one would understand the teaching concerning God concretely and in a genuine way.

The Gospel itself was no longer understood when Scholasticism decreed that the human being has revelation only in faith, that he cannot reach the super-sensible through his own human knowledge. This decree concerning human knowledge, which was separated off from faith, was itself a sin against Christianity: it was a sin against the proclamation of the Holy Spirit through the Father at the baptism of Jesus and through Jesus himself when he sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Thus within the development of European civilization many sins were committed in what continued to call itself Christianity, many sins were committed against the original impulses of Christianity. Today it is really necessary for humanity to turn back to these original impulses of Christianity. In many ways these original Christian impulses have hardened into dogmas. But if one penetrates into the living spirit then what is essentially true in these dogmas can catch fire. Then they will cease to be dogmas. What is false in the Church is not that it has propagated the dogmas but that it has frozen and crystallized them, has taken them away from the realm of human knowledge. Because human knowledge was limited to only what is in the world of the senses the dogmas had to be crystallized, had to become no longer understandable. For it is an impossibility that faith alone could ever really bring understanding. What must be rescued within humanity is knowledge itself; knowledge must be led back to the super-sensible.

Fundamentally speaking, this challenge reaches to us from Golgotha when we rightly understand it, when we know how, after going through the mystery of Golgotha, Christ sent into humanity, in addition to this divine Father principle, the Holy Spirit. Whoever beholds the cross on Golgotha must at the same time behold the Trinity, for in reality Christ shows and makes manifest the Trinity in all the ways he is interwoven with the earthly evolution of humanity.

This, my dear friends, is what I wanted to bring to you today, which will provide us with the basis for further studies in the future.

• 29. Goethe was a member of the secret fraternal order of Free and Accepted Masons. Not restricted to stoneworkers, it retains much of the spirit and code of the medieval mason's guild.

I would like to respond to your kind invitation to speak here this evening by telling you something about how, through unmediated research, one can come to spiritual knowledge, and I would like to explain the educational consequences of that knowledge. At the outset today I would also like to say that I will be speaking primarily about the method for entering and researching super-sensible worlds; perhaps on another occasion it will be possible to impart some of the results of super-sensible research. Everything I have to say today will refer to the researching of spiritual, super-sensible worlds, not to the understanding of super-sensible knowledge. Supersensible knowledge that has been researched and communicated can be understood by ordinary healthy human understanding if this ordinary understanding has not lost its unbiased perspective. A biased view is present when the understanding takes as its starting point the proof or logical deduction appropriate for dealing with the outer world of sense. Because of this hindrance alone it is often said that the results of super-sensible research cannot be understood by anyone who is not a researcher of the super-sensible.

What will be imparted here today is the object of what is known as initiation knowledge. In previous ages of humanity's development this knowledge was cultivated in a form different from the form appropriate for today. As I have already said in other lectures, the things of the past are not to be brought forward again; rather the path of research into super-sensible worlds is to be entered upon in a way appropriate to the thinking and feeling of our age. When it comes to initiation knowledge, everything depends on the individual's ability to undergo a fundamental reorientation or revisioning of his entire soul configuration.

An individual possessing initiation knowledge is distinguished from those who have knowledge in the present-day sense of the word, not merely because his initiation knowledge is a step above ordinary knowledge. Of course, it is achieved on the foundation of ordinary knowledge; this foundation must be present; intellectual thinking must be fully developed if one wants to acquire initiation knowledge. However, a fundamental reorientation is then necessary. The possessor of initiation knowledge must come to see the world from a point of view altogether different from the way it was seen without initiation knowledge.

I can express the fundamental difference between initiate and ordinary knowledge in a simple formula: In ordinary knowledge we are aware of our thinking; indeed, we are altogether aware of the inner soul experience through which we, as the subject of knowing, acquire knowledge. For example, when we think and believe that we know something through thought we think of ourselves as thinking human beings, as subjects. We are looking for objects when we observe nature or human life or perform experiments. We always look for objects. Objects are supposed to present themselves to us. Objects should surrender themselves to us so we can encompass them with our thoughts, so we can apply our thinking to them. We are the subject and that which comes to us is the object.

With a man who strives for initiation knowledge an entirely different orientation comes into play. He must become aware that as a human being, he is the object; then, for this object, this human being, he must seek the subject. A situation exactly the opposite of ordinary knowing must occur. In ordinary knowledge we experience ourselves as subject and look for the object outside of us. In initiation knowledge we ourselves are the object, and we seek the corresponding subject; in other words, genuine initiation knowledge leads us to find subjects. But that would be the object of a later knowledge.

It is as though the mere definitional concepts already force us here to see that in initiation knowledge, we must actually flee from ourselves; we must become like the plants and stones, like thunder and lightning, which are, for us, objects. In initiation knowledge we slip out of ourselves, so to speak, and become objects that seek the corresponding subjects. If I may express myself somewhat paradoxically, I would like to say that from the point of view of thinking the difference is as follows: In ordinary knowing we think about the things; in initiation knowledge we seek to discover how we are being thought by the cosmos.

This is nothing more than an abstract guiding principle. But you will find that this abstract guiding principle is followed everywhere in the concrete methods of initiation. To begin with, if we want to receive initiation knowledge appropriate for today we must proceed from thinking. The life of thought must be fully developed if we want to come to initiation knowledge today. This life of thought can be especially well schooled through an immersion in the natural scientific development of the last centuries, the nineteenth century in particular.

People react in different ways to natural scientific knowledge. Some listen to the pronouncements of science with what I would like to call a certain naïveté. They hear, for example, how organic beings have developed from the simplest, most primitive forms up to the human being. They think about this development but have little regard for their own involvement in these ideas. They do not stop to consider the fact that they themselves unfold something in the seeing of external processes, something which belongs to the life of thought.

But someone who receives natural scientific knowledge with critical consideration of his own involvement must ask himself: What does it mean that I myself can follow the development of beings from the imperfect to the perfect? Or he could say to himself: When I do mathematics I create thoughts purely out of myself. Properly understood, mathematics is a web spun out of myself. I then apply this web to the outer world and it fits. Here we come to the great question, I would like to say the really tragic question: How do things stand with respect to thinking itself—this thinking that is involved every time I know something?

No matter how long we think about it we cannot find out how things stand with thinking; for thinking remains always stuck in the same place. We merely spin, so to speak, around the axis we have already built for ourselves. We must accomplish something with our thinking. With our thinking we must carry out what I described as meditation in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.³⁰

We should not think mystically about meditation but then neither should we think of it lightly. It must be completely clear what meditation is in the modern sense. It also requires patience and inner energy of soul. Above all there is something else that belongs to meditation, something that no one can ever give to another human being: the ability to promise oneself something and then keep that promise. When we begin to meditate we begin to perform the only really fully free act in human life. We always have the tendency toward freedom within us. We have also attained a good measure of freedom. However, if we stop to think about it, we will find we are dependent upon our heredity, our education, and our present life situation.

To what extent are we in a position to suddenly leave behind all we have acquired through heredity, education, and life? We would be confronted with nothingness were we to suddenly leave that all behind.

Although we may have decided to meditate mornings and evenings in order gradually to learn to see into the spiritual world, we can, in fact, on any given day, leave this undone. There is nothing to prohibit this. And experience teaches us that most people who approach the meditative life, even those with the best intentions, soon leave it again. In this we are completely free. Meditation is an essentially free act.

If we are able to remain true to ourselves despite this freedom, if we promise ourselves, not another but ourselves, that we will remain faithful to this meditation, then that is, of itself, an enormous power in the soul.

Having said that, I would like to draw your attention to how, in its simplest form, meditation is done. I can only deal with the basic principles today. This is what we are dealing with: An idea or image, or a combination thereof, is moved into the center of our consciousness. Although the content of this thought complex does not matter, it should be immediate and not represent anything from our memory. For this reason it is good if the thought complex is not retrieved from our memory but rather given to us by someone experienced in such things. It is good for it to be given to us, not because the one who gives the meditation wants to exercise any suggestion but because we then can be certain that what we meditate is, for us, something entirely new.

We could just as well find a passage for meditation in any old book that we know we have not read. What is important is that we not pull a sentence out of our subconscious or unconscious, which would then overwhelm us. We could never be absolutely certain about a sentence like that. All kinds of things left over from past feelings and sensations would be mixed in. It is essential that the meditation be as transparent as a mathematical equation.

Let us take something very simple, the sentence: “Wisdom lives in the light.” To begin with, the truth of this sentence cannot be tested. It is a picture. But it is not important for us to concern ourselves with the content in any other way than to see through and understand it. We are to dwell upon it with our consciousness. In the beginning we will only be able to dwell in full consciousness upon such a content for a very short period of time. But this period of time will get longer and longer.

What then is essential? Everything depends upon our gathering together our whole life of soul in order to concentrate all our powers of thinking and feeling upon the content of the meditation. Just as the muscles of the arm become strong as we work with them, so too soul forces are strengthened by focusing them on a meditative content again and again. If possible the content of meditation should remain the same for months, perhaps for years. For genuine super-sensible research the forces of the soul must first be strengthened, empowered.

If we continue practicing in this way, the day will come, I would like to say, the big day, on which we make a very special observation. Gradually we observe that we are in a soul activity entirely independent of the body. We notice that whereas previously we were dependent upon the body for all our thinking and feeling—for our thinking upon the nervous system, for our feeling upon the circulatory system, and so on—now we feel ourselves in a spiritual-soul activity that is fully independent of any bodily activity. And we notice this because we are now in a position to cause something in our head to vibrate, something that had remained entirely unconscious previously. We now discover the strange difference between sleeping and waking. The difference consists in this: when man is awake there is something vibrating throughout his entire organism—except in his head. What is otherwise in movement in all the rest of the human organism is, in the head, at rest.

We will better understand what we are dealing with here if I draw your attention to the fact that, as human beings, we are not these robust solid bodies that we usually believe ourselves to be. We are actually made up of approximately 90 percent fluids; and the 10 per cent solid constituents are immersed in the fluids, they swim around in the fluids. We can only speak of the solid part of the human being in an uncertain way. We are, if I may put it this way, approximately 90 per cent water; and to a certain extent, air and warmth pulsate through this water.

If you can imagine the human being this way—to the least extent solid body and to a greater extent water and air with warmth vibrating therein—then you will not find it so difficult to believe that there is something even finer and more rarefied within us. This finer element I will call the etheric body. This etheric body is more rarefied than air. It is so fine that it permeates us without our being aware of the fact—at least in ordinary life. This etheric body is what is in inner movement when we are awake—in a regular movement throughout the entire human body, except in the head. In the head the etheric body is inwardly at rest.

In sleep it is otherwise. Sleep begins and then continues when the etheric body also begins to be in movement in the head. So that in sleep the whole human being—the head as well as the rest of the human being—has an etheric body that is in inner movement. When we are dreaming, for example, just upon awakening, we are then still just able to perceive the last movements of the etheric body. They present themselves to us as dreams. We are still able to perceive the last etheric movements in the head; however, when we awaken quickly that cannot happen.

Someone who meditates for a long time in the fashion I have indicated arrives at a stage where he can form pictures into the etheric body which permeates the head when it is at rest. In the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. I have called these pictures Imaginations. These Imaginations, which can be experienced in the etheric body independently of the physical body, are the first super-sensible impressions we can have. They bring us to the place where, entirely without regard for our physical body, we can behold, as in one picture, our life in its movement and its actions. What has often been described by people who were submerged in water and about to drown—that they have seen their lives backward in a series of moving pictures—that vision can be developed here systematically so that everything that has happened in our present earth life can be seen.

The first result of initiation knowledge is a view of our own soul life. This turns out to be entirely different from what one usually expects. We usually abstractly suppose this soul life to be woven from ideas and mental images. When we discover it in its true form we find that it is something creative and, at the same time, that it is what was working in our childhood, what shaped and molded our brain, what permeates the rest of the body and brings about a plastic form-building activity within the body as it enkindles and supports our waking consciousness, even our digestive activity. We see this inner activity in the organism as the etheric body of the human being. This is not a spatial body but a time body. For this reason you can describe the etheric body as a form in space only if you realize that what you are doing is the same as painting a bolt of lightning. When you paint a picture of a lightning flash you are, of course, painting only a moment of its existence. You are holding the moment in place. The human etheric body also can only be captured as a spatial form for a moment. In reality we have a physical body in space and an etheric body in time, a time body, which is always in movement. And it is only meaningful to speak of the etheric body if we speak of it as a body of time which we can behold. From the moment we are in a position to make this discovery we see it extending backward all the way back to our birth. This is, to begin with, the first super-sensible ability we can discover in ourselves.

The development of the soul, brought about through processes such as I have described, shows itself above all in a change of the entire soul mood and disposition of those people who strive for initiation knowledge. Please do not misunderstand me. I do not mean that someone who arrives at initiation knowledge suddenly becomes an entirely transformed and different human being. On the contrary, modern initiation knowledge must leave a man standing fully in the world so that he is able to continue his life, when he returns to it, just as he once began it. But when super-sensible research is carried out man has become, through initiation knowledge, for those hours and moments someone different than he is in ordinary life.

Above all I would like to emphasize an important moment that characterizes initiation knowledge. As a person penetrates further into experience of the super-sensible he feels more and more how his own bodily nature disappears. That is, it disappears for him with respect to those activities in which this bodily nature plays a part in ordinary life.

Let us consider for a moment how our judgments in life come about. We grow up and develop as children. Sympathy and antipathy become solidly set in our lives—sympathy and antipathy for the things that appear to us in nature and for other people. Our body is involved in all of this. Of course, this sympathy and antipathy that, to a large extent, actually have their foundation in the physical processes in our body, are then placed and located in the body. In the moment when people about to be initiated rise into the super-sensible world, they live into a world in which, for the duration of the time spent in the super-sensible, the sympathies and antipathies connected with their bodily nature become increasingly foreign to them. They are lifted above that with which their bodily nature is connected. When they wish to take up ordinary life again they must again fit themselves, so to speak, into their usual sympathies and antipathies—something which otherwise occurs by itself.

When we awaken in the morning we fit into our bodies, develop the same love for things and people, the same sympathy and antipathy we had before. This happens by itself. But when we stay for a while in the super-sensible and then wish to return to our sympathies and antipathies, then we must exert an effort to submerge ourselves into our bodily nature. This condition of separation from our own bodily nature is a phenomenon that shows that we are really making progress. The appearance of wide-hearted sympathies and antipathies is, altogether, something that an initiate gradually makes a part of his being.

There is one thing that shows the development toward initiation in a particularly strong way: the working of the memory during initiation knowledge. We experience ourselves in ordinary life. Our memory is sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse; but we acquire a memory. We have experiences and later remember them. This is not the case with what we experience in super-sensible worlds. We can experience greatness, beauty, and meaning, but after it has been experienced it is gone. And it must be experienced again if it is to stand before the soul again. It is not imprinted in the memory in the usual sense. It is imprinted only if we bring into concepts what we have seen in the super-sensible, only if we can also bring our understanding along with us into the super-sensible world. This is very difficult. We must be able to think just as well on the other side but without the body helping with this thinking. For this reason our concepts must be strengthened beforehand; we must have become proper logicians before, so that we do not always forget when we look into the super-sensible world. It is just the primitive clairvoyants who, although they can see quite a bit, forget their logic when they are over there. It is just when we want to share super-sensible truths with someone else that we notice this change in our memory with respect to these truths. From this we can see how our physical body is involved in the exercise of memory, not in thinking, but in the exercise of memory, which always plays into the super-sensible.

If I may be permitted to say something personal, it is this: When I myself hold lectures it is different from the way lectures are usually held. People often speak from memory, they often develop from memory what they have learned, what they have thought. Anyone who really presents super-sensible truths actually must always produce them in the moment when he presents them. I can hold the same lecture thirty, forty, fifty times, and for me it is never the same. Of course, that would be so in any case, but it is even more so with this independence from memory that comes into play when a higher stage of memory is reached.

I have already told you about the ability to bring forms into the etheric body of the head. This then makes it possible to see through the time-body, the etheric body, all the way back to birth. It also brings the soul to a very special mood with respect to the cosmos. One loses one's own bodily nature, so to speak, but feels oneself living into the cosmos. Consciousness expands, as it were, into the widths of the ether. One can no longer look at a plant without becoming immersed in its growth. One follows it from the root to the blossom. One lives in its juices, in its blossoms, in its fruits. One can steep oneself in the life of animals according to their forms, but especially in the life of other human beings. The slightest gesture encountered in another human being leads one, so to speak, into the entire soul life of the other person. One feels as though one is no longer in oneself, but is out of oneself during this super-sensible knowing.

But it is necessary that we be able to return again and again, otherwise we are lazy, nebulous mystics, dreamers, and not knowers of super-sensible worlds. We must be able to live in super-sensible worlds while simultaneously being able to return at any time to stand firmly on our two feet. For this reason, whenever I explain such things about super-sensible worlds, I must stress that it is far more important for a philosopher to know how a shoe or a coat is made than it is to know logic, that he must really stand in life in a practical way. Actually no one should think about life unless he really stands in it in a practical way. This is even more so the case for someone seeking super-sensible knowledge. Knowers of the super-sensible cannot be dreamers or fanatics or people who cannot stand on their two feet; otherwise they would lose themselves, for one must, as a matter of fact, get outside of oneself. But this “getting outside of oneself” must not lead to the loss of one's self. The book Occult Science—an Outline was written out of knowledge such as I have described here.

Then it is important that we penetrate further into this super-sensible knowledge. This happens when we further develop our meditations. With our meditations we rest upon certain ideas or mental pictures or a combination thereof, thereby strengthening the soul life. But this is not enough to bring us fully into the spiritual world. It is also necessary that we practice the following: Beyond dwelling with our meditations upon ideas, beyond concentrating our entire soul upon these ideas, we must be able, at will, to cast them out of our consciousness. Just as, in the life of the senses, we can look at something and then away from it whenever we want, so too, in the development of super-sensible knowledge we must learn to concentrate on a content of soul and then be able to cast it out of the soul again.

Even in ordinary life this is not easy. Just think how little we have it in our power to drive our thoughts away at will. Sometimes they will pursue us for days, especially if they are unpleasant. We cannot get rid of them. This becomes much harder after we have become accustomed to concentrating on the thoughts. A thought content we have concentrated upon eventually begins to get a firm grip on us; then we really have to work hard to remove it. When we have practiced for a long time we can manage the following: We can remove, we can cast out of our consciousness, this entire retrospect of our life from birth onward, this entire etheric body, as I have called it, this time body.

This is, of course, a stage to which we must develop ourselves. We must first become mature for this step by ridding ourselves of this colossus, this giant being in our soul. The whole terrible specter that embodies life between the present moment and our birth is standing there before us. This is what we must do away with. If we can get rid of it then something will appear for us that I would like to call a more wakeful consciousness. Then we are merely awake without anything in the waking consciousness. Then it begins to fill. Just as air streams into lungs that need it, so too the real spiritual world now streams into the consciousness that has been emptied in the way described.

This is Inspiration. Now something streams in that is not a finer, more rarefied matter. It is related to matter as negative is related to positive. The opposite of matter now streams into the human being who has become free of the ether. This is the most important thing we can become aware of. It is not true that spirit is merely an even finer, more etherealized form of matter. If we call matter the positive (it really does not matter if we call it positive or negative; these things are relative), then in terms of the positive we must call spirit negative. It is as if I had the vast fortune of five dollars in my wallet. If I give one away then I will have four left. But say, alternatively, that I accumulate debts. If I owe one dollar then I have less than no dollars.

If through the methods described I have removed the etheric body then I come, not into a still finer ether, but into something that is the opposite of ether, in the same way debts are the opposite of assets. Now I know from my own experience what spirit is. Through inspiration the spirit comes into us and the first thing we experience is what surrounded our soul and spirit before our birth, that is before conception, in the spiritual world. That is, the preexistent life of our soul and spirit. Previously we had seen into the etheric realm back to our birth. Now we look back beyond birth, that is conception, into a world of soul and spirit and reach the point where we can perceive how we were before we descended from spiritual worlds into a physical body taking on a line of heredity.

For inspiration knowledge these things are not thought-out philosophical truth. They are experiences, but experiences which must only be acquired after a preparation such as I have indicated. So the first thing that comes to us when we enter the spiritual world is the truth of the preexistence of the human soul, that is, of the human spirit. We learn now to see the eternal directly.

For many centuries now European humanity has considered eternity from one side only, from the point of view of immortality. Europeans have asked only: What becomes of the soul after it leaves the body at death? Of course, it is the egotistical right of human beings to ask such a question. They are interested in what will follow after death for egotistical reasons. We will presently see that we too can speak about immortality, but immortality is usually discussed for egotistical reasons. People are less interested in what happened before their birth. They say: We are here now. What went on before has value only as history. But knowledge of history that has any value is only possible if we seek knowledge of our existence before birth, that is, before conception.

We need a word in modern languages that makes the eternal complete. We should speak not only of immortality but also of unborn-ness. For eternity consists of both immortality and unborn-ness; furthermore, initiation knowledge discovers unborn-ness before it discovers immortality.

A further stage of development in the direction of the spiritual world can be reached if we strive to free our soul and spiritual activities still further from the support given by the body. We can achieve this freeing by guiding our exercises, meditations, and concentration more in the direction of will-exercises. As a concrete example I would like to describe a simple will exercise that will allow you to study the principle under consideration. In ordinary life we are accustomed to think along with the flow of the world. We let the things come to us as they happen to come. What comes to us first we think first, what comes to us later we think later. And even if in more logical thinking we are not thinking along with the flow of time, still in the background there is the effort to stick with the external, “real,” flow of events and facts. In order to exercise our soul and spiritual forces we must get free from the external flow of events. And a good will exercise is this: We try to think back through the experiences of the day, not as they occurred, from the morning to evening, but backward, from evening to morning, paying attention to the details as much as possible.

Suppose we come to the following in this backward review: We walked up a set of stairs. First we picture ourselves on the top step, then at the one before the top, and so on down to the bottom. We descend the stairs backward. In the beginning we will only be able to visualize backward the episodes of the day's experiences in this way, say from six o'clock to three o'clock, or from twelve to nine, and so on, back to the moment of waking. But gradually we will acquire a kind of technique by means of which, as a matter of fact, in the evening or the next morning we will be able to let a tableau of the day's events, or the events of the day before, pass before our soul in reverse order.

When we are in a position (and everything depends on our achieving this position) to free ourselves entirely from the three dimensional flow of reality, then we will see how a powerful strengthening of our will occurs. The same effect can be achieved if we are able to hear a melody backward or if we can picture a drama of five acts running backward from the fifth, fourth, and so forth back to the first. We strengthen our will inwardly with all of these means, and outwardly we tear it free from its bondage to events in the world of the senses. Other exercises that I have mentioned in previous lectures can be added. We can take stock of ourselves and our habits. We can take ourselves in hand, apply iron will in order, in a few years, to acquire another habit in place of the old. As an example, I mention the fact that in his handwriting everyone has something that reveals his character. Making the effort to acquire another handwriting, one which is not at all similar to the former, requires a powerful, inner strength. Of course, the second handwriting must become just as habitual as the first. That is a small thing. There are many such things through which we can alter the fundamental direction of our will through our own energetic efforts.

In this way gradually we are able to do more than just bring the spiritual world as inspiration into us. With our spirit freed from the body we are really able to immerse ourselves in the other spiritual beings outside us. Genuine spiritual knowing means that we enter into spiritual beings around us when we behold physical things. If we want to know spiritual things we must first get out of ourselves. I have described this freeing of ourselves from the physical. But then we must also acquire the ability to sink ourselves again into spiritual things and beings.

We can only do this after practicing the kinds of exercises just described; then, as a matter of fact, we are no longer disturbed by our own bodies but can immerse ourselves in the spiritual side of things; then the plants no longer merely appear to us, but we are able to dive down into the color itself. We live in the process whereby the plant colors itself. By not only knowing that the chicory growing alongside the road is blue, but by being able to enter into the blossom inwardly and participate in the blue we dwell intuitively in this process. From this point we can extend our knowledge more and more.

From certain symptoms we can tell we have really made progress with such exercises. I would like to mention two, but there are really many. The first symptom consists in this, that we acquire entirely different views concerning the world of morality than we had before. For the pure intellect the moral world is something unreal. Certainly, if he has remained a decent person during the age of materialism, a man feels himself obligated to do what the old traditions prescribe. Yet even if he does not admit it, he thinks to himself that doing the good does not make something happen that is as real as what happens when lightning flashes or when thunder rolls through space. He is not thinking of reality in this sense when he thinks of morality. But when he lives into the spiritual world he becomes aware that the moral order of the world has not only a reality such as is found in the physical world, but actually a higher reality. He gradually comes to understand that this entire age, with its physical ingredients and processes, can decay and be dissolved; but the morality that flows forth from our actions continues to exist in its effects. He becomes aware of the reality of the moral world. The physical and moral worlds, being and becoming are then one. He really experiences the truth that moral laws are also objective laws of the world.

This experience intensifies our sense of responsibility with respect to the world. It gives us an altogether different consciousness, a consciousness much needed by modern humanity. Modern humanity looks at the beginning of the earth, how it was formed from a primal plasma in space, how life, man, and—much like a fata morgana—the world of ideas arose out of this primal matter. Our present-day humanity looks at the cold grave of the universe that entropy will bring us to. According to this materialistic idea, everything in which human beings live will again sink into a great graveyard. Humanity needs knowledge of the moral order in the world, the knowledge that can be achieved through super-sensible sources. This I can only touch on in this lecture.

Another symptom of our progress must be mentioned: the intensified suffering that we experience. We cannot come to intuitive knowledge, to this submerging of ourselves in things external to ourselves, without having gone through an intensified suffering. This suffering is intensified compared with the pain involved in imaginative knowledge, the pain that always arises when we must find our way again into our sympathies and antipathies. The great effort required to find our way back always hurts. The pain now becomes a cosmic co-experiencing of all the suffering that rests upon the ground of existence.

It is easy to ask why the gods, or God, created suffering. Suffering must exist if the world is to arise in its beauty. We have eyes because, to begin with, in a still undifferentiated organism something organic was, so to speak, “dug out” and transformed into the power to see and, then, into the eye. If we were still able today to perceive the tiny, insignificant processes that go on in the retina when we see, then we could perceive that even those processes represent a pain that rests upon the ground of existence. All beauty rests on the foundation of suffering. Beauty can only be developed out of pain. We should be able to feel this pain, this suffering. We can only really find our way into the spiritual by going through pain. To a lesser degree this can already be said for a lower stage of knowledge. Anyone who has acquired even a little knowledge will admit to the following: I am grateful to my destiny for the happiness and joys life has brought me, but my knowledge has only been achieved through my pains, through my suffering.

If this is felt with respect to more elementary knowledge, it can then become an even greater experience when we overcome ourselves, when we find our way through the pain that is felt as cosmic pain to a neutral experience in the spiritual cosmos. We must struggle through to a co-experiencing of the events and essential nature of all things; then intuitive knowledge is present. We are fully within an experience of knowledge that is no longer bound to the body. We can then return to and live again in the sensible world until death but with full knowledge of what it means to be real, to be real in the soul-spiritual outside the body.

If we grasp this experience of intuitive knowledge, then, in a picture, we have knowledge of what happens when we leave the physical body at death, then we know what it means to go through the gate of death. The reality we encounter, that the soul and spirit go over into a world of soul and spirit when they leave the body behind—we experience this reality beforehand when we have ascended to intuitive knowledge. That is, we know what it is like in a world where there is no body to provide support. When we have then brought this knowledge into concepts, we return to the body. But the essential thing is that we learn how to live without a body and acquire thereby the knowledge of what it will be like when we can no longer use our body, when we lay it aside at death and step over into a world of soul and spirit. Once again, this is not a question of philosophical speculation concerning immortality based upon initiation knowledge. It is, I would like to say, an experience, a pre-experience of what is to come. We know what it will be like. We do not experience the full reality of dying, but we experience immortality. This experience also becomes a part of our knowledge.

I have attempted to describe how you can rise through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition and how, through this development, you can learn to know yourself in your full reality as a human being. In the body we learn to know ourselves for as long as we are in the body. But we must free our soul and spirit from the body, for only then can the whole human being be free. What we know through the body, through our senses, through thinking based on sense experience and bound up with the body's nervous system—with all this we can know only one part of us. We only learn to know the whole human being if we have the will to ascend to the knowledge that comes from initiation science.

Once again, I would like to stress that once the research has been done, then the results can be understood—just as what astronomers and biologists say about the world can be understood and tested—by anyone approaching them with an unprejudiced mind, with ordinary, healthy human understanding. Then you will find that this testing is the first step of initiation knowledge. Because man does not seek untruth and error but truth, we must first get an impression of the truth in initiation knowledge. Then, as much as destiny makes it possible for us, we will be able to penetrate further and further into the spiritual world.

In our day, and in a higher sense, the words which stood inscribed above the Greek temple as a challenge must be fulfilled: “Man, know thyself.”

Those words certainly did not mean that we should retreat into our inner life. They were, rather, a challenge to search for our being: to search for the essence of immortality, which is found in the body, to search for the essence of unborn-ness, which is found in the immortal spirit, and to search for the mediator between earth, time, and spirit which is the soul. For the true human being consists of body, soul, and spirit. The body can only know the body, the soul can only know the soul, and the spirit can only know the spirit. Therefore, we must try to find the spirit active within us so that the spirit can also be recognized in the world.

• 30. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, vol. 10 in the Collected Works, repr. (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1983).

Today we would like to look at some things that will bring together for a wider circle of anthroposophists many of the truths already known to us. Perhaps you are already familiar with the description I have given in my book Theosophy³¹ I described there the worlds that the human being has to live through between death and a new birth. Today I will describe something of these worlds from a point of view somewhat different from the one given in that book.

For the most part in that book Imaginations are used for the soul and spiritual worlds through which a human being passes—after going through the gate of death—in order to develop and advance to a new life on earth. Today I will describe these things not so much from an Imaginative point of view, but rather from a point of view resulting more from Inspiration.

In order to acquire the possibility of understanding at all, we can begin with the experiences we have during earthly life. At any given point in time between birth and death we stand here in our physical body confronted with the outer world. What is contained within our skin, what is contained within our physical bodies, we call ourselves, our human being. We assume that this human being contains not only anatomical and physiological processes, but we also assume that somehow soul and spiritual processes are going on in there. We speak of “ourselves” and mean thereby what is contained within our skin. We look out into the world and see it around us; this we call our “outer world.” Now, we know that we make mental pictures of this outer world and then these mental pictures live within us. We have, then, the outer world around us and something like mirror images of the outer world within our soul life.

When we are in the life between death and a new birth we are in the very same world that is outside of us here on earth. All that you can see clearly, or only dimly sense, as an external world, becomes then your inner world. To all that you then say “my I.” Just as you now regard your lung as belonging to your I, so do you regard—in the life between death and a new birth—the sun and moon as your organs, as being in you. And the only outer world that you then have, is you yourself, as you are on the earth, that is, your earthly organs.

While on the earth we say: In us is a lung, in us is a heart; outside us is a sun, outside us is a moon, outside us is a zodiac. But during the life between death and a new birth we say: In us is a zodiac, in us is the sun, in us is the moon, outside us is a lung, outside us is a heart. Between death and a new birth everything we now carry within our skin becomes more and more our outer world, our universe, our cosmos. Our view of the relationship between world and man is exactly opposite when we are living between death and a new birth.

So it is that when we live through death, that is, when we go through the gate of death, we have, to begin with, a distinct picture of what was before, of how we were on earth. But it is only a picture. Yet you must think of this picture as having an effect on you like the outer world. At first you have this picture like a kind of appearance within you. In the first period after death, you still have a consciousness of what you were on earth as a human being—consciousness in the form of earthly memories and earthly pictures. These do not last long; in your view of the human being you advance more and more to the following: I is the world; the universe is the human being. This is more and more the case. But you must not imagine that the human lung, for instance, looks the same as it does now; that would not be a sight to compensate for the beauty of the sun and the moon. What the lung and heart will be then is something much greater, something much more wonderful than what the sun and moon are now to the human eye.

Only in this way do you really get an impression of what maya is. People speak of maya, that this present earthly world is a great illusion, but they do not really believe it. Deep down people still believe that everything is just as it appears to earthly eyes. But that is not the case. The human lung as we see it now is mere semblance; so is the heart. The truth is that our lung is only a magnificent part of our cosmos, our heart even more so. For in its true essence our heart is something much more majestic, something vastly greater than any sun.

We gradually begin to see a mighty cosmic world arising—a world in which we can say that below us are the heavens. What we actually mean is that below us is what is preparing the human head for the next incarnation. Above, we then say, is what was below. Everything is turned around. Above are all the forces that prepare man for his earthly life, so that in his next earth life he can stand and walk on two legs.

All this we can then sum up in these words: The closer we approach to a new life on earth, the more this universe that is the human being contracts for us. We become increasingly aware of how this majestic universe—it is most especially majestic in the middle period between death and a new birth—how this majestic universe, so to speak is shrinking and contracting, how, out of the weaving of the planets that we bear within us, something is created that then pulsates and surges through the human etheric body, how out of the fixed stars of the zodiac something is formed that builds our life of nerves and senses. This all shrinks together, it shapes itself to become first a spiritual and then an etheric body. And not until it has grown very, very small is it taken up into the mother's womb and clothed there with earthly matter.

Then comes the moment when we draw near to earthly life, when we feel the universe that was “ours” until recently vanishing from us. It shrinks together and becomes smaller. This experience begets in us the longing to come down again to earth and once more unite with a physical body. We long for the earth because this universe is withdrawing from our spiritual sight. We look to where we are becoming a human being.

However, we must reckon here with a very different scale of time. Life between death and rebirth lasts for many centuries. If a person is born in the twentieth century, his or her descent has been prepared for gradually, even as early as the sixteenth century. And the person himself has been working down into the earthly conditions and events.

A great, great ... grandfather of yours, way back in the sixteenth century, fell in love with a great, great ... grandmother. They felt the urge to come together, and there, in this urge, you were already working into the earthly world from spiritual worlds. And in the seventeenth century when a less distant great, great ... grandfather and great, great ... grandmother loved each other, you were, in a sense, once again the mediator. You summoned all these generations together so that finally those who could become your mother and father could emerge.

In the mysterious and indeterminate aspect of such earthly love relationships, forces are at work that proceed from human souls seeking future incarnations. Therefore full consciousness and complete freedom are never present in the external conditions that bring men and women together. These are things that still lie entirely outside the range of human understanding.

What we call history today is actually only something very external. Little is known to us in outer life today of the soul history of human beings. People today are completely unaware that the souls of human beings even in the twelfth or thirteenth century A.D. felt very differently than they do now. Not as distinctly as I have just described but in a more dreamlike way, the men and women in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries knew of these mysterious forces working down to earth from spiritual worlds, working down, in effect, from human souls. In the West little was said about repeated earthly lives, about reincarnation, but there were human beings everywhere who knew about it. Only the Churches always excluded or even anathematized all thoughts concerning repeated earth lives. But you should actually know that there were many people in Europe, even into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who were aware that a human being passes through repeated lives on earth.

Then came the time during which humanity in the Western world had to develop through the stage of intellectuality. Man must gradually achieve freedom. There was no freedom in ancient times when dreamlike clairvoyance prevailed. Neither is there freedom—there is, at most, belief in freedom—in those affairs of human life, governed, shall we say, by earthly love such as I have just described. For here the interests of other souls on their way down to earth are always in play.

Yet within the course of earth evolution humankind must grow freer and freer. For only if mankind becomes freer and freer will the earth reach its evolutionary goal. For this to happen it was necessary that intellectuality reign in a certain age. The age in question is, of course, our own. For if you look back into earlier times and conditions upon earth when human beings still had a dreamlike clairvoyance, you will see that spiritual beings were always living in this dreamlike clairvoyance. A person at that time could never say, “I have my thoughts in my head.” That would have been quite false. In ancient times one had to say, “I have the life of angels in my head;” and then in later times one had to say “I have the life of the spirits of elemental beings in my head.” Then came the fifteenth century; and in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries we no longer have anything spiritual in our heads; only thoughts are in our heads—mere thoughts. By not having any higher spiritual life but only thoughts in our heads, we can make pictures of the outer world for ourselves. Through the fact that we no longer have any kind of higher spirituality within ourselves, but only thoughts, we are able to form pictures of the external world within ourselves.

Could human beings be free, so long as spirits were indwelling them? No, they could not. For spirits directed them in everything; everything was due to them. We could only become free when spiritual beings no longer directed us—when we had mere pictures, mere images, in our thoughts. Thought pictures cannot compel one to do anything. If you stand in front of a mirror the reflections of other people, no matter how angry they may be, will never be able to give you a box on the ears, never a real box on the ear because they have no reality; they are mere pictures. If I decide to do something, I can arrange for this to be reflected in a mirror but the reflection itself, the picture, cannot decide on anything.

In the age when intellectuality puts only thoughts into our heads, freedom can arise because thoughts have no power to compel. If we allow our moral impulses to be only pure thoughts—as described in my book, The Philosophy of Freedom—then we can achieve true freedom in our age.³² The intellectual age, therefore, had to arise.

Yet strange as it may sound, in essence the time is already past in which it was right for us to develop mere intellectuality, mere thinking in pictures. Along with the nineteenth century, that has become a thing of the past. If we now continue to develop mere thoughts as images then our thoughts will fall prey to Ahrimanic powers. The Ahrimanic powers will then find access to us and, having just reached our freedom, we will lose it—lose it to Ahrimanic powers. Humanity is confronted with this danger right now. Human beings today are faced with the choice: either to comprehend the spiritual life—to understand that the kinds of things I have described to you today are realities—or to deny this. But if we deny the spiritual today we will no longer be able to think freely. Rather Ahriman, Ahrimanic powers, will then begin to think in mankind. And then all humanity will undergo a downhill evolution.

Therefore, in the highest degree, it is necessary that an increasing number of human beings in our time understand the need to return to the spiritual life. This feeling that we must return to a spiritual life is what people today should seek to awaken within themselves. If they fail to seek this, humanity will fall prey to Ahriman. Seen from a higher standpoint, this is how serious the situation of humankind on earth is today. We should actually put this thought before all others. All other thoughts should be seen in the light of this one. This is what I wanted to present as the first part of today's lecture.

Descriptions such as these may help illustrate the fact that the life we go through in the spiritual world between death and new birth is entirely different from what we go through here between birth and death. Therefore, pictures taken from the earthly life, however brilliantly conceived, will always be inadequate to characterize the actual spiritual life of the human being. We can only slowly and gradually be led to an understanding of the kind of reality present in spiritual worlds. Let me give some examples.

Suppose a human being leaves his earthly body and, with his life of soul and spirit, enters the world of soul and spirit. And let us suppose that someone here on earth, who has achieved initiation knowledge in the deeper sense, is able to observe human souls in their continued life after death. Much preparation is necessary for this to happen; also necessary is a certain karma that connects the human being upon earth with the one on the other side. What is of importance is that we find some means of mutual understanding with the deceased. I am speaking to you here of spiritual experiences that are extraordinarily difficult to achieve. In general it is easier to describe the world spiritually than to approach a departed soul. People like to believe that it is not so difficult to approach a deceased person. But it is actually far more difficult to really come close to the dead than to achieve spiritual knowledge in general.

I would like now to relate some features characteristic of communication with the dead. To begin with, it is only possible to communicate with them by entertaining memories of the physical world that can still live within them. For example, the dead still have an echo of human speech, even of the particular language that they spoke most of the time while on earth. But their relationship to language undergoes a change. So, for example, when conversing with a soul who has died, we soon notice they have no understanding, not the least, for nouns. The living can address such words to a dead person; a dead person, if I may use the term, simply does not hear them. On the other hand the dead retain an understanding for all verbs, words expressing action, for a relatively long time after death.

As a general rule you will only be able to converse with a deceased person if you know the right way to put your questions to him. With these questions you must sometimes proceed as follows. One day you try to live with him in something concrete and real, for he has pictures in his soul rather than abstract thoughts. Therefore you must concentrate on some real, concrete experience which he very much enjoyed during earthly life; then you will gradually get near him.

As a rule you will not get an immediate answer. Often you will have to sleep on it, perhaps for several days, before you get the answer. But you will never get an answer from the dead if the question is posed in nouns. You must try to clothe all nouns in verbal form. Such preparation is absolutely necessary. What the deceased understands most readily are verbs made as pictorial and vivid as possible. The deceased will never understand for example, the word “table,” but if you manage to imagine vividly what is happening when a table is being made, which is a process of becoming rather than a finished thing, then you will gradually become intelligible to him. He will understand your question and you will get an answer. But the answers too will always be in verbal form, or often they will not even be in verbal form; they may only consist of what we on earth would call interjections, exclamations.

Above all, the dead speak in the actual sounds of the alphabet—sounds and combinations of sound. The longer a soul has lived in the spiritual world after death, the more he will come to speak in a kind of language we on the earth must first acquire. We do this when we develop the ability to understand and distinguish the sounds of earthly language, when we go beyond the abstract meaning of words and enter into the feeling content of the sounds. It is just as I was saying in the educational lectures held here. With the sound a (a as pronounced in father) we experience something like astonishment and wonder. In a certain sense we even take this sense of wonder into our soul when we not only say a but ach (ch here pronounced as in the German or Scottish Loch. Ach is the German equivalent of the exclamation ah!). Ach signifies: A—I feel wonder, and with the sound ch the sense of wonder goes right into me. And if I now put an m in front and say mach (German for make or do) the result is a kind of following of what awakened wonder in me as if it were approaching me step by step—mmm—until I am entirely within it. The answers of the dead often come in this kind of understanding, an understanding carried by the meaning in sounds. The dead do not speak in English, they do not speak in German, nor in Russian; they speak in such a way that only heart and soul can understand them—if heart and soul are connected with the ears that hear. I said just now that the human heart is greater and more majestic than the sun. Seen from the earthly point of view the heart is somewhere inside us, and if we cut it out anatomically it will not be a pretty sight. But in reality the heart is present in the entire human being, permeating all the other organs; it is also in the ear.

More and more we must get used to the language of the heart used by the dead, if I may so describe it. We get used to it as we gradually eliminate all nouns and noun-like forms and begin to live more in verbal forms. The dead understand words of activity and becoming for a relatively long time after death. At a later stage they understand a language that is no ordinary language. What we then receive from the dead must first be translated back into an earthly language.

Thus the human being grows out of his body and ever more into the spiritual world, as his entire life of soul becomes altogether different. And when the time approaches for him to come down to earth again he must once again change his entire life of soul. For then the moment draws ever nearer when he is confronted with a mighty task, when he himself must put together, first in the astral form and then in the etheric form, the whole future human being who will be standing here physically on earth. What we do here on the earth is external work. When our hands are at work then something happens in the external world. When we are between death and a new birth our soul is occupied with the work of putting our body together. It only seems as if we come into existence through hereditary forces. Actually we are only clothed in the outermost physical sheath through heredity. But even the forms of our organs we must develop for ourselves. I will give you an example of this, but I would like to borrow a glove for this purpose.

When a human being approaches a new earthly life, he still has the sun and moon within him. But gradually the sun and moon begin to contract together. It is as though you were to feel the lobes of your lungs shrinking together within you. In this way you feel your cosmic existence, your sun- and moon-organ shrinking together. Then something detaches itself from the sun and from the moon. Instead of having the sun and moon within you as before you have before you a kind of copy or image of the sun and moon. Glistening and luminous, you have before you two, at first, gigantic spheres, one of which is the spiritualized sun, the other the spiritualized moon. One sphere is a bright and shining light, the other sphere is glimmering in its own warmth, more fiery warm, holding the light more to itself in an egotistical way.

These two spheres that separate themselves from the cosmically transformed human being—that is, from this Adam Kadmon that still exists to this day—these two spheres draw closer and closer to one another. On our way down to earth we say: Sun and moon are becoming one. And this is what guides and leads us through the last few generations of ancestors until finally we reach the mother who will give us birth. As the sun and moon draw ever closer together they guide us.

Then we see another task before us. We see, far in the distance like a single point, the human embryo that is to be. We see, like a single entity, what has become of sun and moon drawing near our mother. But we see a task before us, which I can describe as follows. Think of this glove as the sun and moon united and going before us, leading us. We know that when our cosmic consciousness has completely vanished, when we go through a darkness (this happens after conception when we become submerged in the embryo), that we will then have to turn this inside out. What is on the inside then comes to the outside. What the sun and moon have been you must turn inside out and then a tiny opening appears; through this you must go with your I, your ego, and this becomes a copy or image of your human body upon earth. And, actually, this is the pupil of the human eye. For what was one, again becomes two, as though two mirror images were to arise. These are the two human eyes; at first they were united, as the united sun and moon, and then they turned inside out.

This is the task that then confronts you, and you fulfill it unconsciously. You must turn the whole thing around and push what is on the inside outward and go through the tiny opening. Then it separates into two. In the embryonic state two physical images are formed. The physical embryonic eyes are two pictures representing what has become of sun and moon.

In this way we work out the formation of the several parts of the human body. We gather together what we experience as the entire universe and give to every part its destined form. Only then does what has been formed in the spirit get clothed in, and permeated by, a plastic material—matter. The matter is only taken on; but the forces that form and shape us we ourselves had to develop from the entire universe.

Say, for example, that in the time between death and a new birth we pass through the sun while it is in the sign of Leo. (It need not be at birth; it can be farther back in time.) We do not then form the eyes that are made of the sun and moon—that occurs at a different time. But during this time we unite with the interior of the sun. If we could walk in the interior of the sun it would look very different from what contemporary physicists imagine. This physical imagination of theirs lacks even a suspicion of the truth. The interior of the sun is not a ball of gas; it is something even less than space—a realm where space itself has been taken away. If you begin by imagining space as something extended, with pressure everywhere present within it, then you must picture the interior of the sun as negative space, as space that is emptier than empty, a realm of suction. Few people have an adequate idea of what this means. Now, when you pass through there, you experience something that can be elaborated and worked upon, something that can be formed into the human heart. It is not the case that only the form of the eyes is made out of sun and moon; the heart form is also fashioned from the sun. But this is only possible when the sun also contains the forces that come from the constellation of Leo.

So the human being builds his entire body from the constellations of the stars and their movements in the universe. The human organism is indeed a kind of copy or image of the world of stars. A large part of the work we have to do between death and new birth consists in this—that we build our body from the universe. Standing on the earth the human being is indeed a universe, but a shrunken universe. Natural science is so naive as to suppose that the human form is produced from the physical embryo alone. This is as naive as it would be for someone who sees the needle of a magnet pointing to the north and south magnetic poles to imagine that the forces causing it to point are only within the needle itself, not realizing that the earth itself is a magnet. It is exactly the same when someone says that the human being comes from the embryo.

The human being does not come from the embryo at all but rather from the entire universe. Furthermore, his life of soul and spirit between death and a new birth consists in working with the spiritual beings on the super-sensible form of the human being. This form is created first in the astral and etheric realms and only then shrinks and contracts in order to be clothed in physical matter. The human being is really only the arena for what the universe—and he himself with his transformed powers—achieves with his physical body.

Thus the human being gradually develops himself. It begins with language, as he no longer uses nouns but finds his way into a special language, a more verbal form of speech. He then goes on to an inner beholding of the world of stars; then he lives within the world of stars. And from the world of stars he then begins to separate out what he himself is to become in his next incarnation. This is man's path: out of the physical through the transformation of language into the spiritual, and then back again through the transforming of the universe once again into the human being. Only if we can understand how the soul-spiritual part of the human being, which thus loses itself in language, becomes one with the world of stars and then draws itself back from the world of stars—only then do we understand the complete cycle of human life between death and a new birth.

These things were still clear to many people at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on earth. At that time people never thought of Christ Jesus as merely the being whom they saw developing on the earth. They thought that Christ Jesus was formerly in the same world to which they themselves belonged during the life between death and new birth. They thought about the question: How did he descend and enter into the life of earth? It was the Roman world that then exterminated the science of initiation. They wanted only the old dogmas to remain. In Italy in the fourth century of our era there was a special organization, a specific body of people who made every effort to insure that the old methods of initiation should not be transformed into new ones. Only the knowledge of the outer physical world should be left to human beings on earth. Only the old dogmas could have any say concerning the super-sensible. Gradually these old dogmas were received into the intellect as mere concepts that could no longer even be understood but only believed. So the knowledge that at one time had in fact existed was split in two: into a knowledge of the earthly world and faith in another world. This faith has even shrunk to the point where, for some, it only consists of a sum of dogmas no longer understood, while for others it is nothing more than a mere basis for believing anything at all. What then is the substance of modern man's belief, when he no longer holds to the dogmas of the Trinity? He believes something altogether nebulous. He believes in a generalized, vague kind of spirituality.

We now need to return to a genuine perception of the spiritual, one made possible by living into the spiritual itself. That is, we need a science of initiation once again, a science that can speak to us about things such as the human eye, which we should look at with wonder, for it is actually a little world in itself. This is no mere picture or figure of speech; it is a reality for the reasons I have explained. For in the life between death and new birth this eye of ours was single, and this unity which was then turned inside out was actually a flowing together of the images of sun and moon.

Furthermore, we have two eyes because if we were equipped with only one, like the Cyclops, we could never develop a sense of self, an 1, in an outward and visible world; we would develop it only in the inner world of feeling. Helen Keller for example has an inner world of feeling and ideas very different from that of other people; she is only able to make herself understood because language has been taught her. Without this we would never be able to develop the idea of our I, or self. We reach the idea of 1 because we can lay our right hand over our left, or, more generally speaking, because we can bring any two symmetrical members together. We develop a delicate sense of self or I because we cross the axis of vision of our two eyes when focusing upon the outer world. Just as we cross our hands, so do we cross our eyes' axes of vision whenever we look at anything.

Materially two, our eyes are one in spirit. This single spiritual eye is located behind the bridge of the nose. It is then reproduced in a twofold image—in the two outer eyes you see. By having a left and a right hand side, the human being is able to feel and be aware of himself. If he were only right or only left, if he were not a symmetrical being, all his thinking and ideation would flow out into the world; he would not become self-possessed in his own 1.

By uniting the twin images of sun and moon into one, we are preparing ourselves for the coming incarnation. It is as though we were saying to ourselves: You must not disintegrate into the widths of the whole world. You cannot become a sun man and have the lunar man there beside you. You must become a unified being. But then, so that you can also feel this oneness, this unified, single sun-moon eye of man comes into being, and metamorphoses into the eye as we know it. For our two eyes are copies, or images, of the single, archetypal sun-moon eye of man.

These are the things I wished to tell you today, my dear friends, about the entirely different kind of experience we have when we are in the spiritual world, so very different from our experiences in the physical. But the two experiences are related to one another. The relationship is such that we are turned completely inside out. Suppose that you could take the human being as you see him here and turn him inside out so that his inside—the heart, for instance—would become the outer surface. Then he would not remain alive as a physical human being—you can believe that. But if this could be done taking hold of him in the inmost heart and turning him inside out like a glove, then man would not remain man as we see him here; he would enlarge into a universe. For if we had the faculty to concentrate in a single point within our heart, and then to turn ourselves inside out in spirit, we could become this world that we otherwise experience between death and a new birth. That is the secret of the inner side of the human being. Only while he exists in the physical world the human being cannot be turned inside out. The heart of the human being is also a world turned inside out. That is how the physical, earthly world is really connected to the spiritual world. We must get used to this “turning inside out.” If we do not, we will never get the right idea concerning how the physical world that surrounds us here relates to the spiritual world.

• 31. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man, (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 32. Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (The Philosophy of Freedom), (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).

Human beings must return to the point where they can understand the mystery of Golgotha with all the forces that live in the human soul. We must understand it not only from the limited standpoint of present-day civilization but in a way that allows all the forces of our human being to be united with the mystery of Golgotha. But this will only become humanly possible if we are prepared to approach the mystery of Golgotha once more from the point of view of spiritual science. There is no intellectual knowledge in a position to do justice to Christianity and the impulse it carries for the world; for every form of intellectual knowledge reaches only as far as our thinking life. And if we have a science that speaks only to our thinking, then we must seek the sources of our will impulses (and these are the most important for a true Christianity) within our instincts; we cannot sense them within the world where they are really present, within the spiritual world. In our present time it is essential to turn our attention to the great question for humanity: How and in what sense is the mystery of Golgotha the meaning of the entire development of the earth?

What I am here speaking of I would like to express in a picture that appears somewhat paradoxical. If a being were to descend to the earth from another planet, this being—because it could not be a human being in the earthly sense—would probably find everything on the earth unintelligible. But it is my deepest conviction, arrived at from the knowledge of earth evolution, that such a being, even if it came from Mars or Jupiter, would be deeply moved by Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the Last Supper. Such a being would find in this painting something that says to him that a deeper meaning is associated with the earth and its development. And beginning with this meaning, which encompasses the mystery of Golgotha, a being from an entirely different world would be able to understand the earth and everything appearing on it.

We who live in the present age have no idea how far we have gone into intellectual abstraction. For this reason we can no longer feel our way into the souls of people who lived a short while before the mystery of Golgotha. Those human souls were entirely different from the souls of human beings today. We imagine human history as being more similar to the events and processes that happen today than it really was. But the souls of human beings have undergone a very significant development.

In the times before the mystery of Golgotha human souls were such that all human beings, even those with only a primitive education, could see within themselves a being of soul. This soul being could be called a memory of the time the human being lived through before descending into an earthly body. Just as we today in ordinary life can remember what we have experienced since our third, fourth, or fifth year of life, in the same way the human soul in ancient times had a memory of its life before birth in the world of soul and spirit. In terms of their souls, human beings were, in a certain sense, transparent to themselves. They knew: I am a soul and I was a soul before I came down to earth. And they also knew certain details of their life of soul and spirit before the descent to the earth! They experienced themselves in cosmic pictures. They looked up and saw the stars not merely as abstract configurations as we see them today; they saw them in dreamlike Imaginations. They saw the whole world filled with dreamlike Imaginations. They could say: That is the last glimmer of the spiritual world from which I have come. When I descended as a soul from this spiritual world I entered a human body. Human beings of ancient times never united so intensively with the human body that they lost the ability to experience real soul life.

What did these human beings in ancient times experience? They experienced something that enabled them to say: Before I had descended to the earth I was in a world in which the sun is not merely a heavenly body radiating light. I was in a world in which the sun was a gathering place for higher spiritual hierarchies. I lived not in a physical space but in a spiritual space, a world in which the sun sends out not merely light but radiant wisdom. I lived in a world in which stars are essences of beings whose wills are manifest. And for these ancient people two distinct experiences were united with this feeling: the experience of nature and the experience of sin.

Modern humanity no longer has this natural experience of sin. For us sin lives only in a world of abstract existence; for us, sin is merely something projected upon nature from the world of moral abstractions. We cannot bring sin together with the necessity found in nature. For people in ancient times these two separate streams of existence, this duality, natural necessity on the one hand and moral necessity on the other, did not exist apart. All moral necessity was a necessity of nature; all necessity in nature was also a moral necessity.

So a person in ancient times could say: I had to descend from the divine spiritual world. But in entering into a human body I have actually become sick when compared with the world from which I have descended. The concepts of sickness and sin were interwoven for the ancients. Here on the earth man felt that he had to find within himself the power to overcome sickness. Therefore, these ancient souls increasingly came to the consciousness: We need an education that is, at the same time, a healing. Education is medicine, education is therapy. And so, shortly before the mystery of Golgotha, we see the appearance of such figures as the Therapeutae, the healers. In Greece, too, the spiritual life was thought of as connected with the healing of humanity. The Greeks felt that the human being had been healthier at the beginning of earth's development and had evolved gradually in such a way as to distance himself from divine-spiritual beings. That this was the concept of “sickness” has been forgotten. But this concept was widespread throughout the world in which the mystery of Golgotha was placed in history.

In ancient times the human being felt the reality of all spiritual things by looking into the past. He said to himself: I must look back to the time before my birth if I want to seek the spirit, back into the past. That is where the spirit is. I was born out of this spirit; I must find it again. But I have distanced myself from it.

In the past the human being felt the spirit, from whom he had separated himself, as the spirit of the Father. In the mystery religions the highest initiate was an individual who had developed himself within, within his heart, within his soul forces; through this development as a human being he could represent the Father in the external world of earth. When the students of the mystery religions entered through the gates of the mystery centers, when they entered those sacred places that were institutions of art, science, and religious consecration, when they stood before the highest initiate, they saw this highest initiate as the representative of the Father God. The “Fathers” were higher initiates than the “Sun Heroes.” The Father principle ruled before the mystery of Golgotha.

Humanity felt how it had distanced itself more and more from the Father, the one to whom we can say: Ex deo nascimur. Humanity needed healing, and those who knew were expecting the healer of humanity, the healing savior, to come. Christ is no longer alive for us as the healing savior; only when we once again experience him as the world physician, as the great healer, only then will we be able to understand his true place in the world.

That was the underlying feeling that lived in human souls before the mystery of Golgotha, a feeling for the connection with the super-sensible world of the Father. In Greece it was said: “Better to be a beggar upon earth than a king in the realm of shadows.” This saying expresses what was felt at that time; it bears witness to how deeply humanity had learned to feel the distance it had placed between its own being and the being of super-sensible worlds. At the same time a deep longing for the super-sensible lived in the souls of human beings.

But if humanity had gone on evolving with a consciousness only of the Father God it could never have come to full consciousness of self, of the I, it could never have come to inner freedom. In order to come to inner freedom something that could only be seen as a sickness had to make a place for itself in the human being. It was a sickness compared to humanity's former, pristine condition. In a sense, all humanity was suffering from the Lazarus sickness. The sickness was not unto death but rather for liberation and for a new knowledge of the eternal in the human being. We can say that human beings had increasingly forgotten their past life of soul and spirit. Their attention was directed more and more to the physical world around them. When souls in ancient times looked out through the body into the physical world surrounding them, they saw, in the stars, pictures of spiritual beings they had left behind when they descended to this life through birth. They saw in sunlight the radiant wisdom that had been like an atmosphere for them in the spiritual world, an atmosphere in which they had lived and breathed. They saw in the sun itself choirs of the higher hierarchies from which they had been sent down to earth. But humanity came to forget all that.

And that is what people were experiencing as the mystery of Golgotha approached in the eighth and the seventh and the following centuries before Christ's appearance on earth. If external history says nothing of this, that is simply a failing of external history. One who can follow history with spiritual insight can see that a mighty consciousness of the Father God was present at the outset of the evolution of humanity, that this consciousness was gradually paralyzed, and that, with time, humanity was gradually supposed to see around it only nature without spirit.

Much of this process remained unspoken at the time, much was in the unconscious depths of the human soul. However, what was most of all at work in unconscious realms of the human soul was a question that was not so much expressed in words as felt in the heart: Around us is the world of nature but where is the spirit whose children we are? Where can we see the spirit whose children we are? This question lived in the best souls of the fourth, third, second, and first centuries before Christ without being consciously formulated.

It was a time of questioning, a time in which humanity felt distanced from the Father God. In the depths of their souls people felt: It must be true: Ex deo nascimur! But do we still know it? Can we still know it?

If we look even deeper into the souls of those people living at the time when the mystery of Golgotha was approaching we see the following. There were the simpler, more primitive souls who were able only to feel deep within their unconscious life how they were now separated from the Father God. They were the descendants of primeval humanity, which was in no way as animal-like as natural science today imagines. These primitive human beings carried within their animal-like form a soul that enabled them, in an ancient dreamlike clairvoyance, to know this: We have descended from a divine-spiritual world and have taken on a human body. The Father God has led us into the world of earth. We are born out of him.

But the oldest souls of humanity knew they had left something behind in the spiritual worlds from which they had just descended. What they left behind was afterward called, and we now call: the

Christ. For this reason the earliest Christian writers maintained that the most ancient souls had been Christian; they also had known how to worship Christ. In the spiritual worlds in which they had lived before descending to the earth Christ was the center of their attention. He was the central being, toward which they directed the vision of their souls. The people on earth remembered being together with Christ in their pre-earthly existence.

Then there were other regions (Plato speaks of them in a very special way) where students were initiated in the mystery religions, in which vision of the super-sensible world was awakened, in which forces were released from the being of man that allowed him to see into the spiritual worlds. Nor was it only in dim memory that the students of the initiates learned to know the Christ, the one with whom all human beings lived before their descent to earth. In the mysteries the students learned to know Christ once again in his full stature. But they knew him as a being who had lost his mission, as it were, in the worlds above the earth.

In the mystery religions of the second and third centuries before the mystery of Golgotha initiates looked, in a very special way, to that being in the super-sensible worlds, who was later called the Christ. In looking at him they said: We see this being in the worlds above earth but his activity in those worlds has become less and less. This is the being who had planted into human souls memories of the time before birth, memories which then came alive in earthly existence. In super-sensible worlds this being was the great teacher for what the soul could still remember after having descended to the earth. The being who was later called Christ appeared to the initiates as a being who had lost his mission. This was because human beings gradually could no longer have, could no longer even receive, these memories.

As the initiates lived on, the consciousness arose in them more and more: This being, whom primeval humanity could remember during its life on earth, this being, whom we see having an ever lessening amount of activity in spiritual worlds, will have to seek a new sphere of life. He will descend to the earth in order to awaken super-sensible spirituality in man once again.

And they began to speak of that being later known as Christ as the one who in the future would come down to earth and take on a human body—as he later took on a body in Jesus of Nazareth. Speaking of the Christ as the one who is to come formed the chief content of much of their teaching in the last centuries before the mystery of Golgotha. In the beautiful and powerful picture of the wise men from the Orient, the three kings or magi, we see representatives of the initiates who in their places of initiation had learned: the Christ will come when the time has been fulfilled; signs in the heavens will proclaim his coming. Then we must seek him at his hidden place. A deeper secret, a deeper mystery can be heard sounding through the Gospels. When the evolution of humanity is looked at with spiritual vision this deeper mystery is revealed.

Primitive human beings looked up, as if lost, to the super-sensible. In their unconscious they said to themselves: We have forgotten Christ. They saw the world of nature around them and the question rose in their hearts: How can we again find the super-sensible world? And the initiate in the mysteries knew: This being, who will later be called the Christ, will come and take on human form; what human souls had formerly experienced in their pre- earthly existence they will then experience in looking upon the mystery of Golgotha.

Thus, through the mighty fact of the greatest event ever to take place on earth—not in an abstract intellectual fashion—answer is given to the question: How can we again come to higher worlds that transcend the world of sense? The people of that time who had developed a feeling for what had happened, these people learned from those who knew that a real God dwelt in the human being Jesus. A God who had come down to earth. He was the God whom humanity had forgotten because the forces of the human body were evolving toward freedom. He appeared in a new form so that he could be seen and so that history could now speak of him as of an earthly being. The God who had only been known by human souls in the spiritual world descended and walked in Palestine. He consecrated the earth through the fact that he entered an earthly body. For this reason the great question for those souls educated according to the culture of that age was this: What path had Christ taken in order to come to Jesus?

In the earliest times of Christianity the question concerning Christ was purely spiritual. The earthly biography of Jesus was not an object of research. The object of research was Christ and how he had descended from heaven. They looked up to super-sensible worlds, saw the descent of Christ to the earth, and asked themselves: How has this supra-earthly being become an earthly being? For this reason it was possible for the simple people who surrounded Christ as disciples to speak with him as a spirit also after his death. The most important part of what he could say after his death is preserved in only a few fragments. But spiritual science can find out what Christ said to those who were nearest to him after his death when he appeared to them in his purely spiritual form.

He spoke to them as the great healer, as the Therapeut, the comforter who knew the secret, the secret that human beings had once had a memory of him because they had been together with him in super-sensible worlds in their pre-earthly existence. Now he could say to them on earth: Earlier I gave you the ability to remember your super-sensible, pre-earthly existence. Now, if you take me into your souls, if you take me into your hearts, I give you the power to go through the gate of death with consciousness of immortality. And you will no longer recognize the Father alone—Ex deo nascimur. You will feel the Son as the one with whom you can die and yet remain alive—In Christo morimur.

What Christ taught those who were near him after his bodily death was not, of course, expressed in the words I just used, but the meaning was the same. Primeval human beings had not known death, for from the moment they awakened to consciousness, they were aware of the soul that lived within. They knew about what lived in the soul and could not die. They could see people dying around them but this dying was a mere appearance, an illusion, among the facts surrounding them. They did not feel it as death. Only as the mystery of Golgotha approached did human beings begin to feel the fact of dying. By then their soul life had become so much bound up with the life of the body that they could feel doubt concerning how the soul could continue to live when the body decays. In more ancient times no such question could have arisen because human beings knew the soul.

Christ now came as the one who said: I will live with you on the earth so that you can have the power to awaken your soul with a new inner impulse. Your soul will be alive when you carry it through death. This is what Paul did not at first understand. He only understood it when access to super-sensible worlds was opened to him and he received living impressions of Christ Jesus here on the earth. Pauline Christianity is less and less valued today for this reason—that it claims that Christ can be seen as coming from supra-earthly worlds and uniting his supra-earthly power with earthly man.

Thus, in the evolution of humanity, in human consciousness, the “out of God (that is, out of the Father God) we are born” was supplemented by the words of comfort, of life, and of power: “In Christ we die.” That is: We live in him.

We will best be able to place before our souls what humanity has become through the mystery of Golgotha if I now describe, from the point of view of a present day initiate, the evolution of humanity in the present and how we must hope for human beings to evolve in the future. I have already attempted to place before your souls the point of view of the ancient initiates, the point of view of the initiates at the time of the mystery of Golgotha. Now I would like to attempt to describe the point of view of an initiate of the present day, of someone who approaches life with more than a mere knowledge of external nature, of someone in whom deeper powers of knowledge have awakened. These are powers we can awaken in the soul with the means given by spiritual literature.

When a modern initiate acquires the scientific knowledge that is the triumph of our time, the glory in which so many people feel so comfortable (a comfort subtly enjoyed even by a certain higher consciousness) when they acquire it, the initiate feels himself in a tragic situation. When the modern initiate unites his soul with forms of knowledge especially useful and valuable in the world today, he experiences a kind of dying. The more a modern initiate, in whose soul the world of supra-earthly spheres has been resurrected, is permeated with what the modern world calls science, the more he feels his soul dying. For the modern initiate the sciences are the grave of the soul. The soul feels itself living united with death when it acquires knowledge of the world in the fashion of modern science. Sometimes he feels this dying deeply and intensively. He then seeks the reason why he always dies when knowing things in the modern sense, why he experiences something like the odor of a corpse just when he rises to the heights of modern scientific knowledge, the greatness of which he can truly appreciate, even though such knowledge brings him a premonition of death. Then, from his knowledge of the super-sensible world he says something to himself that I would like to express through a picture. We live a life that is soul-spiritual before we come down to the earth. What we experience in its full reality in the spiritual world during our pre-earthly existence we now experience on the earth in our souls as mere ideas, concepts, and mental pictures. These are in our souls. But how do they live in our souls?

Let us look at the human being as he stands in life between birth and death. He is fully alive, filled with living flesh and blood. We say that he is alive. Then he steps across the threshold of death. Of the physical human being only the corpse remains, the corpse which is then given over to the elements of the earth. We look at the physically dead human being. We have the corpse in front of us, the remains of the living, blood permeated human being. The human being is physically dead.

With the vision of initiation we now look back into our own souls. We look at our thoughts in the life between birth and death, at the thoughts arising from modern wisdom and science. And we recognize that just as the corpse of a human being is related to a fully alive human being, so too, our thoughts, the ones we revere as the highest riches knowledge of external nature can bring us, are merely the corpse of what we were before we descended to the earth. That is what the initiate can experience. In his thoughts he does not experience his real life; in his thoughts he experiences the corpse of his soul. That is a fact. That is not spoken out of any sentimentality. It is rather what comes before the soul today with all intensity just when the soul is actively seeking knowledge with energy. This is not something that a sentimental, mystical dreamer would say to himself out of some dark and mystic depths of his own being.

Someone who walks through the gates of initiation today discovers these thoughts in his soul, thoughts that, precisely because they are not living, can make living freedom possible. These thoughts, which are the whole basis of human freedom, do not coerce us, precisely because they are dead, because they are not alive. The human being today can become free because he works not with living but with dead thoughts. Dead thoughts can be grasped by us and used for freedom; but they are also experienced as a tragedy, as the corpse of the soul. Before the soul descended into the earthly world, everything that is a corpse today was full of life and movement. The beings of the higher hierarchies standing above us in the spiritual-super-sensible worlds moved between the souls of human beings who had already passed through death and now lived in the spiritual world or had not yet descended to earth. Elemental beings who underlie all nature were also moving within this sphere. There everything in the soul was alive. Here the thoughts in our soul are the heritage from spiritual worlds and these thoughts are dead.

However, if as modern initiates we fill ourselves with Christ, who makes his life manifest in the mystery of Golgotha, if we understand Paul's words, “Not I, but Christ in me,” in their deepest sense, then Christ will also lead us through this death; then we can penetrate nature with our thoughts. Christ walks with us spiritually and he sinks our thoughts into the grave of the earth. In as much as we usually have dead thoughts nature becomes a grave for us. Yet, if, with these dead thoughts, accompanied by Christ in the sense of the words, “Not I, but Christ in me,” we approach the minerals, the animals, the world of stars, clouds, mountains, and streams, then we experience in modern initiation—if for example we immerse ourselves in quartz crystal—that thought arises from nature, from the quartz crystal as a living thought. As from the tomb of the mineral world, thought is raised up again as a living thought. The mineral world allows the spirit to resurrect in us. And just as Christ leads us everywhere through the plant world of nature, here too, where otherwise only dead thoughts would be found, living thoughts arise.

We would feel sick and unhealthy if we were to approach nature, looking up into the world of stars, with only the calculating vision of the astronomers, and if we then allowed these dead thoughts to sink into the world; we would feel sick and the sickness would be unto death. But if we let Christ accompany us, if we carry our dead thoughts in the presence of Christ into the world of stars, into the world of the sun, of the moon, of the clouds, mountains, rivers, minerals, plants, and animals, into the whole physical world of man, then in our vision of nature everything comes alive. As if from a grave, from all beings in nature, the living spirit, the Holy Spirit arises, the one who heals and awakens us from death.

We must regain this in a spiritual knowledge, in a new knowledge of initiation. Then we will understand the mystery of Golgotha as the meaning of the entire earth existence; we will know that we need Christ to lead us to knowledge of nature now when human freedom is being developed through dead thoughts. We will know how Christ joined not only his own destiny to the earth with his death in the mystery of Golgotha, but, furthermore, how he gave to the earth the great freedom of Pentecost when he promised earthly humanity the living spirit—the spirit who, with his help, can arise from everything on the earth. Our knowledge remains dead, remains a sin even, if we have not been awakened by Christ so that from all nature, from all existence in the cosmos, the spirit speaks to us, the living spirit.

The idea of the Trinity of the Father God, of the Son God, and God of the Holy Spirit is not a cleverly thought-out formula. It is something deeply united with the entire evolution of the cosmos. When we bring Christ himself as the Resurrected One to life within us, then our knowledge of the Trinity is not dead but alive, for Christ is the bringer of the Holy Spirit.

We understand it is like a sickness to not be able to see the divine from which we are born. The human being must secretly be sick if he is an atheist. He is only healthy if his physical nature is so constituted that he can say, “From God I am born!” as the summation of how he feels within his own being. It is a blow of destiny if, in his earthly life, a man does not find Christ, the one who can lead him, who can lead him through death at the end of his earth life, can lead him through death to knowledge. If we feel the In Christo morimur, then we also feel what can approach us through the presence of Christ, through the guidance of Christ. We feel how the Spirit resurrects again from all things, resurrects even in this lifetime. We again feel ourselves to be alive in this earthly life. We look through the gate of death, through which Christ leads us; we look at the life that lies on the other side of death and know now why Christ sent the Holy Spirit—because we can unite with this Holy Spirit already here on earth if we let ourselves be led by Christ. Then we can say with certainty that we die in Christ when we walk through the gate of death.

Our experience of nature on earth with our natural scientific knowledge points significantly to the future. What otherwise would be dead science is resurrected through the living Spirit. For this reason, if we have understood the saying “Out of the Father are we born; in Christ we die,” then when the death of knowledge is replaced by the real death that takes away our body, then in looking through the gate of death we can also say: In the Holy Spirit we shall be awakened again. Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

Since we can come together so seldom and would like to include as much as possible in these lectures, it could easily happen that too much is included. Nevertheless, today, from a certain point of view, I would still like to try to characterize for you what could be called the other side of human existence on earth. I would then like to relate that to the significance of a deeper spiritual knowledge of our time.

How much do we finally know about our existence if we use only our senses and the intellect bound up with those senses as our source of knowledge? Ordinary sense-consciousness only allows us to spend the waking part of our existence in full consciousness. The spiritual powers that lead the world did not add the sleeping state to human existence for nothing. From falling asleep to waking up a very great deal happens to the human being. Indeed, most of what the spirit has to effect through human beings in earthly existence is actually achieved during the sleep state.

During the waking state, all that can occur on earth is what we can undertake with ourselves and the things around us. But what higher, spiritual beings undertake with the human soul in human evolution, in order to bring the soul to complete development within earthly existence—this happens during the sleep state. We should not lose sight of the fact that modern initiation knowledge can look closely at the significance of the events that occur when the human being is asleep. Of course, these events occur not only for initiates but for all people; the development of all human beings depends upon them. The initiate can only draw attention to these sleep state events. However, every human being who gives any thought at all to the meaning of earth existence should increasingly feel and sense the significance of what occurs while he sleeps.

Today I would simply like to describe all that plays into the sleeping state of the human being. As you know, when a person falls asleep we characterize what happens externally by saying that the astral body and the I are loosened from the physical and etheric bodies. The I and the astral body are then in the spiritual world; they no longer permeate the physical and etheric bodies as they did in the state between waking and falling asleep. When we look at what happens with human beings in the sleeping state our attention is drawn to the various ways they are connected to the earth during waking. To begin with, we are connected to the earth through our senses—we perceive and know the appearances of the various kingdoms of nature. However, we are also connected with the earth through what we do unconsciously while awake. For example, we breathe—for the most part, unconsciously—and the entire earth, if I may put it this way, plays into the air we breathe. Innumerable substances dispersed in a very fine state are present in the air we breathe. Precisely because they are in this finely dispersed state they have an extraordinarily significant effect when inhaled into the human organism. What enters the human being when he perceives through his senses enters consciously. But a great deal also enters the human being unconsciously when he is awake. And this unconscious element has more substance than what enters through the abstract, ideal state of perceiving and thinking. The world around enters us in a more substantial form through our breathing.

If you would only take into consideration just how dependent the human organism is upon everything that it takes in with the various substances of earthly nourishment, then you would be able to acknowledge that there is much that affects us in our waking state. But this fact is of less interest to us today. We are much more concerned with what is working on the human being in his sleeping state. The point here is this: Just as we see external earthly substances connected with us during our waking state, so too, when we enter the sleeping state, we enter into a certain connection with the entire cosmos.

That is not to say that we should imagine a human being taking on the magnitude of the cosmos every night with his or her astral body—that would be an exaggeration—but we do grow into the cosmos every night. Just as we are connected here on earth during the day with the plants, the minerals, and the air, so too we are connected during the night with the movements of the planets and with the constellations of the fixed stars. From our falling asleep until our waking the sky full of stars becomes our world just as the earth is our world in the waking state.

Now, to begin with, we can distinguish various spheres through which we pass between falling asleep and waking. The first sphere we pass through is that in which the human I and the human astral body—that is, the human soul when asleep—feels itself connected with the movements of the planets. When waking in the morning and, as it were, having slipped into our physical body we can say that we have in us our lungs, our heart, our liver, our brain. Likewise when we enter the sleep state we must say that in the first sphere with which we come into contact after falling asleep—which is also the sphere we are again in contact with just before awakening—in this sphere we have within us the forces of planetary movement.

It is not that we take the entire movements of the planets into ourselves every night. But what we carry within us as an image or copy is a small picture, in which the movements of the planets are actually copied, reflected. And this is different with every human being. We can say that, when falling asleep, every human being experiences the movements of the planets. Everything that goes on as movement “out there” in the space of the universe between the planets is experienced inwardly in a kind of globe of planets in the astral body. That is the human being's first experience after falling asleep.

Do not ask, my dear friends, what this has to do with you. Do not say that you do not perceive this. You may not see it with your eyes nor hear it with your ears. But in the moment you fall asleep, at that moment, that part of your astral body that during waking permeates and is a part of your heart—that part becomes an eye. We see with this organ, which I will call a “heart-eye.” When we enter the sleep state this organ begins to perceive what is happening in the way I have just described. This heart-eye really does perceive what the human being experiences there—even if the perception is, for present-day humanity, very dim and obscure.

What we experience there is perceived by this heart-eye in such a way that, in the time after falling asleep when the physical and etheric bodies are lying there in bed, this heart-eye looks back at us. The I and the astral body look back at the physical and etheric bodies with the heart-eye. What the I and the astral body experience in their body inwardly as a picture of the movements of the planets, radiates back to the heart eye from their own etheric body. The I and the astral body see the mirror image of the planetary movement coming out of their own etheric body.

Upon awakening, because of the way the human being is presently constituted, we immediately forget the dim consciousness provided by our heart-eye during the night. This consciousness is dim and, at the most, can only be found echoing in certain dreams; in their inner flexibility these dreams still have something of the planetary movements. As we approach wakefulness, images from our lives settle into these dreams which, fundamentally speaking, are actually dependent upon the movements of the planets. The images enter at this point because the astral body is being submerged into the etheric body, which preserves our memories of earthly life.

The following is a specific example: You wake up in the morning; you have once again gone through the spheres of planetary movement. Let us say you have experienced there a special relationship between Jupiter and Venus because such an event is connected with your destiny, your karma. This could happen. You could have experienced a special relationship between Jupiter and Venus. If you could lift what was experienced there between Jupiter and Venus into the light of your day consciousness, then much concerning your human abilities would be clear to you. For those abilities have come from the cosmos, not from the earth. How you are related to the cosmos determines how you are gifted, how you are good, or at least how you are inclined to good or to evil. You would be able to see what Jupiter and Venus discussed with one another, and what you perceived with your heart-eye. (I could just as well say heart-ear, for it is hard to distinguish such things.) But this is all forgotten because it has been perceived so very dimly. As this exchange between Jupiter and Venus continues within you it causes corresponding movements in your astral body and something else, from your etheric body, mixes in—for example, what you experienced around noon when you were seventeen, or when you were twenty-five years old, say, in Oxford or Manchester or anywhere. Such earthly images are mixed with the cosmic experiences. The pictures in dreams do have a certain significance; but the pictures arc not what is of primary importance. They are, so to speak, the fabric woven to clothe cosmic events.

Concerning the experience that thus comes into existence for the perception of the heart, we can say that it is bound up with a certain anxiety. For almost everyone there are feelings of a spiritual kind of anxiety mixed in with this experience, especially when what was experienced cosmically shines back and echoes from the human etheric body. For example, this anxiety arises for the perception of the heart if what has been brought about through the special relationship between Jupiter and Venus radiates back with a ray—which would say a lot for your heart perception—radiates back from the human forehead, and if this ray is then mixed with the sound and light from another ray, say, from the region just below the heart. This perception of anxiety leads every soul not entirely hardened to such perceptions to actually say to itself in sleep: The mists of the cosmos have taken me into themselves. It really feels like you have become as thin as the mists of the world and are swimming like a cloud, just a part of cosmic fog, within the larger mists of the cosmos. This is the experience immediately after falling asleep.

Then out of this anxiety, out of this feeling of one's self as just another mist within the cosmic fog, something comes into the human soul that could be called devotion to the divine that is weaving through the world. Those are the two basic feelings that come over the human being in the first sphere after falling asleep: first that I am within the mists of the world, and then that I would like to rest in the bosom of God so as to be safe from dissolution in these mists. These feelings must be carried by the perception of the heart when we again awaken in the morning and enter into our physical and etheric bodies. If this experience were not carried over into life then all the substances we take into our bodies for nourishment the next day, or whatever else our metabolism may process—even if we starve, for then the substances are taken from our bodies—these substances would assume solely their earthly character and would thus bring about disorder in the whole human organism.

It is simply a fact that for the human waking condition the significance of sleep is enormous. In this epoch of earth's development man is still spared the task of having to carry the divine from sleep into waking. Because of the way human beings in the present age are constituted they could hardly muster the strength to carry these things in full consciousness from the other side of existence to this side of existence.

After the experiences connected with the planetary movements, the human being goes into the next sphere. In doing so we do not leave the first; it remains for the perception of the heart. The next sphere is much more complicated and is perceived with that part of the astral body that, during the day, during waking, permeates and is a part of the solar plexus, permeates and is a part of our entire limb system. The solar plexus and limb system of the human being, that part of the astral body that penetrates and permeates the solar plexus and the arms and legs—this part of the astral body perceives what happens in the night in the next sphere.

In the next sphere we feel the forces in our astral bodies that originate in the constellations of the zodiac. These forces come in two forms, the first consisting of those forces which come directly from the constellations of the zodiac, the other form arising when these forces from the zodiac pass through the earth. It makes a very big difference whether the zodiacal signs are above or below the earth.

In this sphere the human being perceives with what I would like to call “sun perception” because that part of the astral body connected with the solar plexus and the limb system is involved in the perception. I would like to call this perceiving part of the astral body the “eye of the sun” or the “sun-eye.” Through it we become aware of our entire relationship to the zodiac and the movements of the planets. In this sphere the picture is enlarged, we grow more into the picture of the cosmos.

This experience is again mirrored to us by our own physical and etheric bodies, which we are now looking at. What comes forth from our body every night is brought into connection with the entire cosmos, with the movements of the planets and the constellations of the fixed stars. The experience with the fixed stars may occur for some people half an hour after falling asleep, for some after a longer period and for others very shortly after falling asleep. A person experiences himself in all twelve constellations. The experiences with the fixed stars are extraordinarily complicated.

My dear friends, I believe you could have visited the most important regions of the earth as a world traveler and still you would not have had the sum of experiences that your sun-eye gathers for you from a single constellation of the zodiac. Because the people who lived in ancient times still had powerful dreamlike powers of clairvoyance and perceived, in a dreamlike way, much of what I have been describing, all of this was relatively less confusing to them. Today, a person's sun-eye can hardly come to any kind of clarity—and we must come to clarity even if we forget it in the day. We can hardly come to any kind of clarity concerning what we experience in twelve-fold complexity during the night unless we take into our hearts and minds what Christ wanted to become for the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. Simply having felt what it means for the life of the earth that Christ went through the mystery of Golgotha, simply thinking about Christ in our ordinary life on earth brings such a tinge, such a hue, into our astral body, by the indirect path through the physical and etheric bodies, that Christ can become our leader through the zodiac from falling asleep to waking.

Once again the human being wonders: Will I be lost in the multitude of stars and their activities? But if we can look back to thoughts, feelings, and will impulses turned toward Christ during our daytime waking state, then Christ becomes a leader who helps us to bring order into the complex and confusing events of this sphere.

Only when we observe the other side of life do we realize the full significance of Christ for the earth life of humanity since the Mystery of Golgotha. In the present, ordinary civilization, there is actually no one else who understands what Christ must still become for the life of earth. All these things, which have not yet been experienced by many people, are wrongly explained. Only when you know what I have just explained can you understand the various ways in which people who have not yet been touched by the Christ event bring their nightly experiences while asleep into waking day consciousness. When we have gone through the misty existence in the sleep state and entered the second sphere we stand before a complicated and confusing world. Only when Christ steps forward as a spiritual sun and becomes our leader is complex confusion resolved into a kind of harmonious understanding.

This point is important because our karma appears, actually appears to our sun-eye, the moment we step into this sphere of whirling confusion, this sphere of planetary movement and of the fixed star constellations of the zodiac. All human beings perceive their karma, but only in the sleeping state. The afterimage or afterglow of this perception slips into our waking state through our feelings.

Much of the condition of soul that we can find in ourselves—if, to some extent, we strive for self-knowledge—is a very dim echo of this zodiacal experience. People can receive strength for their daily lives because Christ appeared as the leader and led them from Aries through Taurus, Gemini, and so forth, and explained the world to them in the night. What we experience in this sphere is nothing less significant than this: Christ becomes our leader through the complex and confusing events in the zodiac; he stands there as the being who leads us, who leads us from constellation to constellation, in order for us to take into ourselves, in an orderly fashion, the spiritual forces that we once again need—and they are, indeed, ordered—for our waking life.

Fundamentally speaking, this is what the human being experiences every night between falling asleep and waking. He experiences this because he is related to the cosmos as a soul and spirit. Just as he is related to the earth through his etheric and physical bodies, he is also related to the cosmos with his soul, with his spirit and his astral body. When the human being has separated from his physical and etheric bodies and so grown out into the cosmic world, he then feels within himself a strong kinship to the world he is entering. He feels this kinship in his experience of the pictures reflected back to him from what has been left lying in bed. He feels a strong tendency to move out beyond the zodiac with his inner life. But this he cannot do between birth and death because another element mixes into all these experiences during the time when the human being is asleep, another element which, compared with what comes from the planets and the fixed stars, is of an entirely different nature. This is the element of the moon.

During the night the element of the moon, even during the new moon, tinges to a certain extent the entire cosmos with a special something that is like a substance. This tingeing is also experienced by us. But we experience it in such a way that these moon forces hold us back within the world of the zodiac and lead us once again to waking. With a dimly conscious awareness we already experience this moon element in the first sphere. But during the second sphere we experience the secrets of birth and death in an especially powerful way. With an organ lying even deeper than the heart-eye and the sun-eye, with an organ that is, so to speak, apportioned to the whole human being, we actually experience every night how our soul-spirit being descends—that is, has descended—from the world of soul and spirit and has entered into physical existence through birth; and we experience how the body gradually goes over into death. The human being is actually always dying. In every moment he only subdues death until death then really occurs as a single event. But in the moment we experience how the soul, so to speak, goes through earthly nature, bodily nature, in this same moment we also experience—and through the very same forces—our connection with the rest of humanity.

You have to remember this: Not even the most insignificant encounter, insignificant relationship—or even the most decisive—is without a connection to our total destiny, to the total karma of the human being. All our involvement with other human beings, all human relationships, which have, of course, an intimate connection with the mystery of birth and death, appear, I would like to say, before our spiritual eye at this point during the second sphere. This comprehension of karma happens whether the souls with whom we have ever had a connection in past lives, or with whom we now, in this earth life, have a relationship, are presently in the spiritual world or are on the earth. We feel ourselves at this point to be in touch with and living within our total life destiny.

This experience is connected with the fact that all the other forces, those of the planets and the fixed stars, want to draw us out into the cosmos while the moon wants to put us again into the world of people, basically tearing us out of the cosmos. The moon has forces that are actually opposed to the forces of the sun as well as the forces of the stars. It constitutes our kinship to the earth. For this reason every night, in a certain sense, it brings us back from the experiences of the zodiac into the planetary experiences and once again into earthly experiences, in that we are brought back into the physical body of a human being. From a certain point of view this is the difference between sleeping and dying: When a human being merely falls asleep he or she maintains a strong connection to these moon forces. Every night, in a certain sense, these moon forces also point out to us again the meaning of our life on earth. But this can only be the case because we receive everything reflected back from the etheric body.

In death we pull the etheric body out of the physical body; the backward view of memories from the last life on earth then appears. For a short while, a few days, the etheric body permeates the cloud of which I have spoken. As I said, every night we experience ourselves as a cloud, as a cloud of mists in a world of fog. But this cloud of mists that we ourselves are, this cloud is without our etheric body during the night. When we die the cloud is, to begin with, in the first days after our death, with our etheric body.

Then the etheric body gradually dissolves into the cosmos and our memory disappears. And now, in contrast to what we had earlier when our experience of the stars was only radiated back from the human being, who remained lying in bed, now, after death, we have an immediate, inner experience of the movements of the planets and the fixed star constellations.

If you read my book Theosophy³³ you will find, described from a certain point of view, what these experiences after death consist of. I describe what appears as if surrounding the human being between death and a new birth. But just as the world would have no color if there were no eyes in your body, no sounds if you were without ears, just as you could not breathe without lungs and a heart, so too, after death you would not be able to perceive what I have described as the soul world and spirit land, your environment in the spiritual world, unless you had Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, and so forth. That is then your organism: with your cosmic organism you experience all of this. The moon can no longer bring you back because it could only bring you back to an etheric body; but your etheric body has been dissolved into the cosmos.

As I described the process in Theosophy, there is still so much left of the power bequeathed to the human being by the moon that after death we must remain a while in the soul world. We keep looking at the earth intently, until we go over into what I described as spirit land. There we experience ourselves as being beyond the zodiac, beyond the realm of the fixed stars. In this way we live through the time between death and a new birth. I could describe the details of this entry into, and life within, the spiritual world—the entry made every night. But the concepts I use for this description must not be pushed too far; these things can hardly be expressed with earthly concepts. Nevertheless, I can describe it to you as follows.

Picture a meadow and picture flowers in this meadow; from every blossom in the meadow and on the trees, a kind of spiral goes forth unwinding upward into cosmic space. The spirals contain the forces through which the cosmos regulates and effects the growth of plants on the earth. For plants grow not only out of their seeds; plants grow out of the cosmic, helical forces that surround the earth. These forces are also present in winter, also in the desert, and also when there are no plants present. In order to enter into the movements of the planets every night we must use these helical forces as a ladder. Using the ladder-like quality of the spiraling forces of the plants we climb up into the movements of the planetary world. With the force that the plant uses to grow upward, a force coming forth from its roots (you see, it has to apply a force in order to grow upwards) with this force the human being is carried into the second sphere that I described. When it comes to those experiences I have described for you—when we are beset by a certain anxiety and say: I am a figure of mists in the universal cosmic fog, I must rest in the bosom of God—when we consider these experiences with respect to conditions on the earth, then, again, the soul can say to itself: I rest in all of that which lays like a cosmic blessing over a field of grain when it blossoms, which lays over a meadow when it blossoms. Everything that sinks down to the plants lives and expresses itself in the spiraling lines of force, is, fundamentally speaking, the bosom of God, the bosom of God enlivened and active within itself. Therein the human being feels embedded in every period of sleep.

The moon leads us back again to our animal nature while the forces of plants constantly strive to carry us further out into the universe. In this way we are connected with the cosmos. In this way the cosmos works between our falling asleep and our waking. And the heart-eye, sun-eye, and human eye go through the night feeling things in a way similar to the way, say, that we experience any kind of relationship to another human being. But we are not told this, neither do we think this out by ourselves, but rather the plants tell us this, the plants, which give us a ladder to climb up into the planetary world where we are then forced out into the world of the zodiac.

One could have an experience like this: I have a relationship to a particular person; the lilies tell me, the roses tell me, because the forces of the roses, the forces of the lilies, the forces of the tulips have driven me precisely to this place. The entire earth becomes a kind of “book of life” that enlightens us about the human world, the world in which we live, the world of human souls.

The people of various ages and epochs have had these experiences in different ways. If you look toward old India you will see that those wanting to discover something through the sleeping state, through a relationship with the world of the stars, wanted information only from those fixed stars and constellations that happened to be above the earth at any given time. They never wanted connections to the constellations below, the constellations whose forces had to go through the earth. Just take a look at the Buddha posture or at the posture of any sage whatsoever from the Orient, who strives for spiritual wisdom through exercises! Look at how he crosses his legs one over the other and sits on them. He assumes this posture because he wants only his upper body and what is connected to the stars above to become active within. He does not want what also works through him through the sun-eye, what works through the limb system, to become active within. He wants the forces of the limb system more or less excluded. Therefore, you can see, in the position of every Oriental striving for wisdom, how he wants to develop a relationship only to what is above the earth. He wants only to develop those connections leading to knowledge in the soul realm.

The world would have remained incomplete if this had remained the only kind of search for knowledge, if, in order to acquire knowledge, humankind had been restricted to the Buddha posture alone. Already, during the age of the Greeks, a human being had to enter into a relationship with the forces encountered when he develops in the direction of those constellations that, at any given time, are below the earth. This tendency is hinted at in a wonderfully intimate way in Greek tales. You are always told of a kind of initiation in Greek tales. When it is said that certain heroes in Greece have descended into the underworld, that they have experienced initiation, this means that they have become acquainted with those forces that work through the earth. They have come to know the chthonic powers.

Every age has its special task. In order to teach other people, the Oriental initiate learned primarily about what was to be found before birth, before conception actually, that is, what lay in the soul-spiritual realms human beings live through before descending into the earthly world. What approaches us in such a magnificent way in Oriental writings and in the Oriental worldview comes to us because people back then could look into the life human beings led before they descended to the earth.

In Greece people began to know the forces that depended upon the earth itself: Uranus and Gaia. Gaia, the earth, stands at the beginning of Greek cosmology. The Greek always sought to find out about, to know, the mysteries of the earth itself, mysteries that were, of course, also cosmic mysteries that worked through the earth. The Greeks wanted to know about the mysteries of the underworld. In this way the Greeks developed a proper cosmology.

Consider how little knowledge of history (as we call it) the Greeks had. Yet the Oriental never had any at all. The Greeks were far more interested in what was going on when the earth was being formed in the cosmos and then later when the inner powers of the earth, the Titanic forces, fought against other powers. The Greeks pointed to these gigantic, powerful spiritual forces that form the foundation for earthly conditions and in which humanity is so entangled. It is incumbent upon us in the new age to understand history and be able to point out that humanity has come out of an old, dreamlike clairvoyant condition, that we have now arrived at an intellectually colored consciousness that is merely tinged with the mythical. We must now work our way out of this consciousness and once again into a seeing into the spiritual world.

This present epoch marks the transition to a conscious experience of the spiritual world that can only be achieved with effort. For this purpose we must, above all, look at history. We have, therefore, in our anthroposophical movement, again and again reviewed the various historical epochs from our time all the way back to the time when human beings still received knowledge from higher, supra-earthly beings. We have followed the historical development of humanity.

The external knowledge of our time views this historical development of man in a completely abstract way. What abstract lines are drawn when people today develop knowledge of history! Ancient peoples followed a history still clothed in mythos, a history that included nature and its events. We can no longer do that. But people have not yet acquired a faculty that would lead them to ask: What was it like when the first human beings received wisdom from higher beings? And what was it like as that wisdom gradually faded away? What was it like when a God himself descended in order to incarnate in a human body through the mystery of Golgotha, in order to fulfill a grand, cosmic mission with the earth, so that the earth could receive its meaning?

The whole of nineteenth and twentieth century theology suffers from the inability to understand the spiritual significance of Christ. You see, modern initiation science must bring this understanding. There must be a modern science of initiation that can penetrate once again into the spiritual world, that can speak once again about birth and death, about life between birth and death and life between death and a new birth, and about the life of the human soul in sleep just as we here today have spoken to one another. Once again it must be possible for man to know about this spiritual, other side of existence. All of humankind's progress in the future will be possible only if human beings also become acquainted with this other side of existence.

Once people turned to the upper worlds alone for their knowledge. This can easily be observed in the posture of the Buddha. Later people came to their cosmology by reading it out of the development of the earth; they were initiated in the Greek chthonic mysteries, as passages in the Greek myths recount again and again. Now that the secrets of heaven and the secrets of earth have been studied in the old science of initiation we need a modern science of initiation that can move back and forth between heaven and earth, that can ask heaven when it wants to know something about earth and that can ask the earth when it wants to know something about heaven.

If I may say so in all modesty, this is how the questions are posed and given preliminary answers in my book An Outline of Occult Science.³⁴ The attempt is made there to describe what the modern human being needs, just as the ancient Orientals needed the mysteries of heaven and the Greeks needed the mysteries of the earth. In our present age we should observe how things stand with this modern initiation and its relationship to modern man.

To characterize briefly the tasks that form the foundation of modern initiation I will say something now that I was already able to say to a few of you in Oxford during these days of my visit to England. Namely, I would like to begin by pointing out that while it was important for the most ancient initiates to look up into the spiritual world from which man descended when he clothed himself with an earthly body, and while for later initiates such things as I characterized by pointing to Greek portrayals of a descent into the underworld were important, it is the obligation of modern initiation, as I have already said, to seek as knowledge the rhythmical relationship of heaven and earth.

This can only be achieved if we consider the following. Certainly, we must know heaven, and certainly we must know the earth. But then we must also look at the human being, in whom, among all the beings around us, heaven and earth work together to create a unity. We must look at—that means with our sun-eye, with our heart-eye, with the entire human eye—we must look at the human being. The human being! For humanity contains infinitely more secrets than the worlds that we can perceive with our external organs of perception, that we can explain with an intellect bound to the senses. The task of present-day initiation knowledge is to come to know the human being spiritually. I would like to say that initiation science wants to come to know everything for this reason: in order to understand the human being through knowledge of the whole world, through knowledge of the whole cosmos.

Now compare the situation of the present-day initiate with the situation of the ancient initiate. Because of all the abilities that existed in the soul of ancient humanity the initiate then could awaken memories of the time before the descent into an earthly body. For this reason initiation for the ancient was an awakening of cosmic memories. Then, for the Greeks, initiation meant looking into nature. Modern initiates are concerned to know the human being directly as a spiritual being. Now we must acquire the ability to set ourselves free from the grasp of earth, from the ties connecting us with the world. I would like to repeat an example that I have just recently mentioned.

Achieving a relationship to the souls who have passed through the gate of death, who have left the earth, either recently or long ago, is one of the most difficult tasks of initiation knowledge. However, it is possible to achieve such a relationship by awakening forces that lie deeper in the soul. Here we must understand clearly, however, that we have to accustom ourselves, through exercises, to the language we must speak with the dead. This language is, I would like to say, in a certain sense, a child of human language. But we would go completely astray if we thought that this human language here could help us to cultivate communication with the dead. The first thing we become aware of is that the dead are only able to understand for a short time what lives as nouns in the language of earth. What is expressed as a thing, a closed off thing, the characterization of a noun, is no longer present in the language of the dead. In the language of the dead everything is related to activity and movement. For this reason we find that some time after the human being has passed through the gate of death, he has a real feeling only for verbs. In order to communicate with the dead we must sometimes direct a question to them by formulating it in such a way that it is understandable to them. Then, if we know how to pay attention, the answer comes after a while. Usually several nights must pass before the deceased person can give us an answer to our questions. But we must first find our way into the language of the deceased; finally the language appears for us, the language the dead actually have, the language the deceased has had to live into after death, distancing himself from the earth with his entire soul life. We find our way into a language that is not at all formed according to earthly conditions, but is rather a language arising from feelings, from the heart. It is a kind of language of the heart. Here, language is formed in the way vowels or feeling sounds are formed in human language. For example, when we are amazed we say “Ah!” or when we want to lead ourselves back to ourselves we speak the “ee” sound. Only in such instances do the sounds and sound combinations receive their due, their real meaning. And beginning with such instances language becomes something that no longer sounds bound up to the speech organ. It is transformed into what I have just described, a language of the heart. When we have learned this transformed language, the forces that rise from the flowers give us information about humankind and we ourselves begin to speak with what comes from the flowers. When we enter into the tulip blossom with our soul forces we express, in the Imagination of the tulip, what is expressed here on the earth in the formation of words. We grow again into the spiritual aspect of everything.

From the example of language, just characterized, you see that the human being grows into entirely different conditions of existence when he has gone through the gate of death. You see, we really know very little about a human being if we only know his or her external side; the modern science of initiation must know the other side. This begins with language. Even the human body, as it is described if you read the relevant literature, becomes something else for us. The body becomes a world in itself when we grow into the science of initiation.

While the initiate in ancient times reawakened an ability in people that had been lost, while he brought to memory what they had experienced before descending to the earth, the initiate of the present age must do something entirely new, something that represents progress in the human being, that will still have significance for us when humanity itself will one day have left the earth, indeed, when the earth is no longer even present in the cosmos. This is the task of modern initiation science. Out of this strength modern initiation science must speak.

As you know, from time to time the science of initiation enters into the spiritual development of the earth. This has happened again and again. The initiation science we need actually sees only a beginning in the assumptions of contemporary science. This initiation science will be increasingly contested. You will need strength to get through all that stands against modern initiation. Before modern initiation, which is a conversation with super-sensible powers, actually first received its proper power in the last third of the nineteenth century, the adversarial powers were already at work to bring about a condition of human culture and civilization, in many ways an unconscious condition, which actually amounts to a complete extermination of modern initiation.

Just consider how popular it has become to respond to everything that appears in the world as knowledge with the words: This is my point of view. People say “This is my point of view” without having gone through any kind of development. Everyone is supposed to make his own point of view count from the location where he just happens to be standing at the moment when he speaks. And people are offended, even angry, when a higher knowledge is mentioned, a knowledge that can only be acquired through the work of self-development.

When the possibility of achieving a modern initiation appeared, primarily in the last third of the nineteenth century, adversary powers were already at work. Above all they wanted to bring about a great leveling of people, also in the spiritual realm. There are many people I could mention through whom these enemies of modern initiation have worked.

My dear friends, you must believe that the words I must speak out of the spirit of this initiation science must also sound the way they do from the point of view of ordinary conditions here on the earth. If I attempt to make clear to you how the sounds of human language become different when language is to be used in the presence of the beings of the spiritual world, then you will not misunderstand me when I say: I myself will never misunderstand the great significance, spoken from the merely earthly point of view, of someone like Rousseau; and if I speak from the merely earthly standpoint I will set out with all élan to praise and speak well of Rousseau, just as others speak of him.³⁵ But if I should rise to an attempt to clothe in earthly words what initiation knowledge says concerning Rousseau I would have to say that with his equalization, with his spiritual leveling, Rousseau represents the supreme babbler of modern civilization.

This is something that humanity cannot readily assimilate, that someone like Rousseau can be called a great spirit, a great personality, from the earthly point of view but—if we really want to get to know this person through the modern science of initiation (where we must know heaven and earth and describe the rhythm between them from both sides)—must be called the supreme babbler from the point of view of initiation. Only the harmony of what resounds from the one side and from the other side leads to a true knowledge of the human being. For this true knowledge of the human being must be built upon the same wisdom the old initiates build upon: Ex deo nascimur. All remembering must by built upon what comes to meet us when we look out into the world where, as I have today described the process, we have unconsciously allowed Christ to become our leader. But we must bring him into our consciousness more and more. Then we can recognize what belongs to death in the world as standing under the leadership of Christ. Then we can recognize that we live into the dead world with Christ: In Christo morimur.

Finally, because we are submerged in the grave of the earth and its life we experience with Christ the resurrection and the sending of the Spirit: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

The modern initiate must strive above all for this Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus. If you consider this counsel and compare it with the modern attitude coming from science you will recognize that there will still be immense opposition, perhaps of a kind you cannot even imagine today, which will take the form of external actions and deeds that, above all, will have a tendency to make initiation science entirely impossible. What I would like to leave in your hearts, in your souls, when I speak in such an intimate circle of friends, is this: Through the descriptions given by modern initiation science, I would like to awaken strength so that a few people are actually present in the world who can find the proper place between what wants to come into the earthly world from spiritual worlds and what, from the direction of the earthly world, wants it to be impossible for spirituality to penetrate into the life of earth. This is what I have wanted to draw attention to, in such an intimate circle of friends. An opportunity had already been given to speak in a more external lecture, such as, to my great satisfaction, we were able to have in Oxford. Since the opportunity was given to describe the external side, so the esoteric side must also be handled in this smaller circle, it must also be described. I believe it would be good if you could get beyond the fact that there is much that sounds paradoxical when I speak out of spiritual worlds. It has to sound paradoxical because the language of spiritual worlds is so different from any earthly language. What should actually be expressed differently can only be brought into earthly language with a great exertion of force. Therefore, it should be understandable if some things are shocking when they appear unmediated as a simple description of spiritual worlds.

My dear friends, in addition to characterizing the fundamental intention that was behind today's lecture, I also want to express my deep satisfaction that I have been able to be here and speak to you in London. It is always gratifying. As I have already said, we are seldom together here. May what we can found in our hearts, in our souls, through such rare gatherings bring about a togetherness that should always be present among those who call themselves anthroposophists—a togetherness of hearts and souls extending over the whole world. Today's lecture has been given with this goal in mind, that we use such brief times together as an inspiration for the greater togetherness that unites all our hearts and all our souls. And to document, as it were, this intention I would like to add the following words. Speaking out of this frame of mind I would like to say: Let us remain together, my dear friends, even as we leave now to go in such widely separate directions.

• 33. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man, (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 34. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline Of Occult Science, vol. 13 in the Collected Works, repr. (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1989).
• 35. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), French philosopher. Influential in shaping Romanticism. Contending that people are good by nature and corrupted by civilization, Rousseau advocated a social contract to uphold the sovereignty of the people as a whole.

With his ordinary consciousness man knows only a fragment of all that is bound up with his existence. Looking out into the world with our ordinary consciousness we get pictures and images of the outer world through our senses. And when we proceed to think about what the senses have thus given us, when we form thoughts about what we have perceived, memory-pictures of these thoughts remain. Our life of soul is such that we perceive and live with the outer world and bear within us memory-pictures of what is past.

The process of memory, however, is not rightly understood by the ordinary consciousness of man. He thinks that he has known and perceived certain things in the outer world, that pictures have remained somewhere in the background of his being and that he can call them up again in his soul as memory-pictures. But the process is by no means so simple. Consider for a moment what goes on in man, step by step. You are certainly familiar with the ‘after-images’ that arise from what is perceived by the senses, by the eye, for example. As a rule we do not stop to think about them, but they are aptly described by Goethe in his Theory of Colours. He speaks of them as ‘vanishing after-images.’ We look intently at some object and then close the eyes. Different images or pictures linger for a while on the retina and then die away like an echo. In ordinary life we pay little heed to these images because we set up a more forceful activity than that of mere perception. We begin to think. If our thought-activity is weak when some object in the outer world is perceived, an after-image remains on the retina. But if we really think, we take the outer stimulus further inwards, as it were, and a thought-image lingers on as a kind of echo.

A thought-image is stronger and its ‘echoing’ more intense than that of an after-image produced by one of the senses, but it is really only a higher development of the same process. And yet these after-images of thought would also fade away, just as an after-image fades away from the eye, if they came into being merely as thought ¬pictures – which, however, they do not. Man has a head, but as well as this the rest of his organism, which is of quite a different nature. The head is pre-eminently an after-image of what happens before the human being descends from the spiritual to the physical world through birth, or rather, through conception. The head is much more physical than the rest of the organism. The rest of the organism is less developed, so far as the Physical is concerned, than the head. Let me put it thus: In the human head the Spiritual is present only as an image; in the rest of the organism the Spiritual works strongly as spirit. The head is intensely physical; it contains little of the spirit as being spirit. The physical substance of which the rest of the organism is composed is not a faithful after-image of what the human being was before his descent to birth. The Physical is more highly developed in the head of man, the Spiritual in the other parts of his organism.

Now our thoughts would fade away just as visual after-images fade away, if they were not taken over and worked upon by our spiritual organism. But the spiritual organism could not do much with these images if something else as well were not taking place. For something else is taking place while we are perceiving these images of which we then make the fleeting thoughts that really only reside in our head. Through the eye we receive the pictures which we then work up into thoughts. We receive these visual images from the physical and etheric universe. But at the same time, in addition to the pictures, we absorb into us the Spiritual from the remain¬ing universe. We do not only bear the spirit within us, but the spirit of the remaining universe is constantly pouring into us. We may therefore say that with the eye we perceive something or other in the physical and etheric universe and it remains within us as an image. But behind this an absolutely real spiritual process is working, although we are unconscious of it. In the act of memory, this is what happens: We look inwards and become aware of the spiritual process which worked in our inner being during the act of perception.

I will make this clearer by a concrete example. We look at some object in the outer world – a machine, perhaps. We then have the image of the machine. As Goethe described it, an after-image lingers for a short time and then ‘echoes’ away. The thought of the machine arises and this thought remains a little longer, although it too would ultimately fade away if something else were not taking place. The fact is that the machine sends something else into our spiritual organism – (nothing very beautiful when the object is a machine, far more beautiful if the object is a plant, for instance). And now – perhaps after the lapse of a month – we look inwards and a memory arises because, although we were entirely unconscious of it, something else passed into us together with the perception of the object which stimulated the thought. This thought has not been wandering around somewhere in the depths of our being. A spiritual process has been at work and later on we become aware of it. Memory is observation, later observation of the spiritual process which ran parallel with the act of physical perception.

In his onward-flowing stream of existence man is contained within the ocean of the spiritual world. During the period between death and a new birth his existence continues within this spiritual world. But there are times when with his head he comes forth from the spiritual world. In other words, with a part of his being he leaves the spiritual world like a fish that tosses itself above the water. This is earthly life. Then he plunges once more back into the ocean of spirit and later on again returns to an earthly life. Man never leaves this ocean of spiritual existence with the whole of his being but only with his head. The lower part of him remains always in the spiritual world, although in his ordinary conscious¬ness he has no knowledge of what is really going on. Spiritual insight, then, tells us the following: Between death and a new birth man lives in the spiritual world. At birth he peeps out with his head, as it were, into a physical existence, but the greater part of his being remains in the spiritual world, even between birth and death. And it is well that this is so, for otherwise we should have no memories. Memories are only possible because the spiritual world is working in us. An act of memory is a spiritual process appertaining to an objective and not merely to a subjective world.

In his ordinary consciousness man does not regard memory as being a real process, but here he is in error. It is as though he were looking at a castle on a mountain just in front of him and seeing it actually there, believes in its reality. Then he moves away a certain distance, sees the castle in greater perspective, and says to himself: Now I have nothing but a picture, there is no longer any reality. And so it is in ordinary life. In the stream of time we imagine that we get further and further away from reality. But the reality of the castle in space does not change because our picture of it changes, any more than does the reality of that which has given rise to our memory-picture. It remains, just as the castle remains. Our explanation of memory is erroneous because we cannot rightly estimate the perspective of time. Consciousness which flows with the stream of time is able to open up a vista of the past in perspective. The past does not disappear; it remains. But our pictures of it arise in the Perspective of time.

Man’s relation to the more spiritual processes in his being between birth and death has undergone a fundamental change in the course of earthly existence. If we were to regard man as a being consisting merely of physical body and etheric body, this would be only the part of him which remains lying there in bed when he is asleep at night. By day, the astral body and Ego come down into the physical and etheric bodies. The Ego of those men who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha – and in earlier incarnations we ourselves were they – began to fade in a certain sense as the time of the Mystery of Golgotha drew near. After the Mystery of Golgotha there was something different about the process of waking. The astral body always comes right down into the etheric body and in earlier times the Ego penetrated far down into the etheric body. In our modern age it is not so.

In our age the Ego only comes down into the head-region of the etheric body. In men of olden times the Ego came right down and penetrated into the lower parts of the etheric body as well. Today it only comes down into the head. The outcome of this is man’s faculty of intellectual thinking. If the Ego were at any moment to descend lower, instinctive pictures would arise within us. The Ego of modern man is quite definitely outside his physical body. Indeed his intellectual nature is due to the fact that the Ego no longer comes down into the whole of his etheric body. If such were the case he would have instinctive clairvoyance. But instead of this, modern man has a clear-cut vision of the outer world, albeit he perceives it only with his head. In ancient times man saw and perceived with his whole being – nowadays only with his head. And between birth and death the head is the most physical part of his being. That is why in the age of intellectualism man knows only what he perceives with his physical head and the thoughts he can unfold within his etheric head. Even the process of memory eludes his consciousness and, as I said, is interpreted falsely.

In days of old, man saw the physical world and behind it a world of spirit. Objects in the physical world were less clear-cut, far more shadowy than they are to the sight of modern man. Behind the physical world, divine-spiritual beings of a lower and also of a higher order were perceived. To state that ancient descriptions of the Gods in Nature are nothing but the weavings of phantasy is just as childish as to say that a man merely imagines something he has actually seen in waking life. It was no mere phantasy on the part of man in olden days when he spoke of spiritual beings behind the world of sense. He actually saw these beings and against this background of the spiritual world, objects in the physical world were much less clearly defined. Thus the man of antiquity had a very different picture of the world. When he awoke from sleep his Ego penetrated more deeply into his etheric body and divine-spiritual beings were revealed to him.

He gazed into those spiritual worlds which had been the forerunners of his own world. The Gods revealed their destinies to him and he was able to say: ‘I know from whence I come, I know the divine world with which I am connected.’ This was because he had the starting-point of his perspective within him. He made his etheric body an organ to perceive the world of the Gods. Modern man cannot do so. He has no other starting-point for his perspective than in his head and the head is outside the most spiritual part of the etheric body. The etheric counterpart of the head is somewhat chaotic, not so highly organised as the other parts of the etheric body, and that is why modern man has a more defined vision of the physical world, although he no longer sees the Gods behind it. But the present epoch is one of preparation for what lies in the future. Man is gradually progressing to the stage where the centre of his perspective will be outside his physical being. Nowadays, when he is really only living in his head, he can have nothing but abstract thoughts about the world. It may seem rather extreme to say that man lives in his head, for the head can only make him aware of earthly, physical existence. But it is none the less a fact that as he ‘goes out of his head’ he will begin to know what he is as a human being. When he lived in his whole being he had knowledge of the destinies of the Gods. As he gradually passes out of himself he can have knowledge of his own destiny in the cosmos. He can look back into his own being. If men would only make more strenuous efforts in this direction, the head would not hinder them so much from seeing their own destinies. The obstacle in the way of this is that everyone is so intent upon living only in the head. It is simply an unwillingness to look beyond what the head produces that makes people loath to admit that the wisdom which Anthroposophy has to offer in regard to the being of man is something that can be understood by ordinary, healthy intelligence.

And so man is on the way to a knowledge of his own being, because he will gradually begin to focus his perspective from a point that lies, not inside, but outside himself. It is the destiny of man to pass out of his etheric body and so, finally, to attain to knowledge of himself as a human being. But obviously there is a certain danger here. It is possible for man to lose connection with his etheric body. This danger was mitigated by the Mystery of Golgotha. Whereas before the Mystery of Golgotha man was able to look out and see the destinies of the Gods, after that Event it became possible for him to see his own world-destiny. In the course of his evolution, man’s tendency is more and more to ‘go out of himself ‘ in the sense described above. But if, as he does so, he understands the words of Paul: “Not I but Christ in me” in their true meaning, his connection with the Christ will bring him back again into the realm of the human. His link with the Christ sets up a counter¬balance to the process which gradually takes him ‘out of himself.’ This experience must deepen and intensify. In the course of world-destiny the outer Gods passed into twilight, but just because of this it was possible for a God to work out His destiny on the Earth itself and thus be wholly united with mankind.

Think, then, of the man of olden times. He looked around him, perceived the Gods who arose before him in pictures, and he then embodied these pictures in his myths. Today, man’s vision of the Gods has faded. He sees only the physical world around him. But as a compensation he can now be united in his inner life with the destiny of a God, with the death and resurrection of a God. Looking out with their clairvoyant faculties in days of yore, men saw the destinies of Gods in fleeting pictures upon which they then based their myths. The difference in the myths is due to the fact that experience of the spiritual world varied according to men’s capabilities of beholding it. Perceived by this instinctive clairvoyance the world of the Gods was dim and shadowy – hence the diversity in the myths of the various peoples. It was a real world that was seen but it arose in a kind of dream-consciousness. The figures of the Gods were sometimes more and sometimes less distinct, but never distinct enough to guarantee absolute uniformity in the different myths.

And then it happened that a God worked out His destiny on the Earth itself. The destinies of the other Gods were more remote from man in his earthly life. He saw them in perspective and for that reason less distinctly. The Christ-Event is quite near to men—too near, indeed, to be seen aright. The old Gods arose before men’s vision in the perspective of distance and for this reason somewhat indistinctly. If it had been otherwise, the myths would have been all alike. The Mystery of Golgotha is too near to man, too intimately part of him. He must first find the perspective in which to behold the destiny of a God on Earth and therewith the Mystery of Golgotha.

Those who lived in the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place could behold with spiritual vision and so understand the Christ. They could readily understand Him for they had seen the world of the Gods. So now they knew: Christ has gone forth from the world of the Gods. He has come to this Earth for His further destiny beginning with the Mystery of Golgotha. As a matter of fact they no longer saw the Mystery of Golgotha itself in clear outline but until this moment they could see the Christ Himself quite well. Therefore they had very much to say of the Christ as a God. They only began to discuss what had become of this God at the moment when he came down into a human being at the Baptism of John in Jordan. Hence in the earliest time of Christianity we have a strongly developed Christology but no ‘Jesuology’.

It was because the whole world of the Gods was no longer within man’s ken that Christology afterwards became transformed into mere Jesuology—which grew stronger and stronger until the nineteenth century, when Christ was no longer understood even with the intellect and modern Theology was very proud of understanding Jesus in the most human way and letting the Christ go altogether.

Precisely through spiritual knowledge the perspective must be found once more to recognise what is the most important of all—the Christ in Jesus. For otherwise we should no longer remain united with the human being at all. Increasingly we should only be looking at him from outside. But now, by recognising Christ in Jesus, through our union with the Christ we shall be able to partake once more with living sympathy in man and in humanity—precisely through our understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus we may say: In going more and more out of himself, man is on the way by-and-by to transform all spiritual reality into mere abstract concepts and ideas. Mankind has already gone very far in this direction and such might be its impending fate already at this moment. Men would go farther and farther in their abstract, intellectual capacity and would develop within them a kind of faith whereby they would say to themselves: Yes, now we experience the Spiritual, but this Spiritual is a Fata Morgana. It has no weight. It consists of so many ideas.

Man must find the possibility once more to replenish these ideas with spiritual substance. This he will do inasmuch as he takes the Christ with him and experiences the Christ as he passes over into the intellectual life. Modern intelligence must grow together with the consciousness of Christ.

In olden times man spoke of the Fall into Sin. He spoke of this picture of the Fall as though with his own being he had belonged to a higher world and had fallen down into a lower, into a deeper world. Take it in a pictorial sense and it is quite true to the reality. We can in a very real sense speak of a Fall into Sin. But just as the man of olden times felt truly when he said to himself: ‘I am fallen from a spiritual height and have united myself with something lower’—so should man of modern time discover how his increasingly abstract thoughts are also bringing him into a kind of Fall. But this is another kind of Fall. It is a Fall that goes upwards. Man as it were falls upward, that is to say he ascends, but he ascends to his own detriment just as the man of olden times felt himself fall to his detriment. The man of old who still understood the Fall into Sin in the old sense could recognise in Christ Him Who had brought the human being into the right relation to this Sin, that is to say, into the possibility of a salvation. The man of old, when he developed the right consciousness, could recognise in Christ the Being Who had lifted him again out of the Fall. So should the man of modern time as he goes on into intellectualism see the Christ as the one who gives him weight so that he shall not spiritually fly away from the Earth or from the world in which he should be.

The man of old perceived the Christ Event paramountly in relation to the unfolding of the will which is, of course, connected with the Fall into Sin. So should the man of modern time learn to recognise the Christ in relation to thought—thought which must lose all reality if man were unable to give it weight. For only so will reality again be found in the life of thought.

Mankind indeed is going through an evolution. And as Paul might speak of the old Adam and of the new Adam, of the Christ, so too may the modern man in a certain sense. Only the modern man must realise it clearly. He must perceive that the man of old who still had the old consciousness within him, felt himself lifted up by the Christ. The man of the new age, on the other hand, should feel himself protected by the Christ from rushing forth into the spiritual emptiness of mere abstraction, mere intellectualism.

The modern man needs Christ to transform within him this sin of going out into the void, to make it good again. Thought becomes good by uniting itself once more with the true reality, that is, the spiritual reality. Therefore, for a man who can see through the secrets of the universe there is the fullest possibility to place the Christ into the very centre even of the most modern evolution of human consciousness.

And now go back to the image with which we began. I began by speaking of the faculty of memory in man. We human beings live on and on in the spiritual world. We only lift ourselves out of the spiritual world inasmuch as with our heads we peer forth into the physical. But we never emerge from the spiritual world altogether. We only emerge with our head. So much do we remain in the spiritual world that even our memory processes are constantly taking place within it. Our world of memories remains beneath, in the ocean of the spiritual world.

Now so long as we are between birth and death and are not strong enough in our Ego to perceive all that is going on down there even with our memories—so long are we quite unaware of how it is with us as humanity in modern time. But when we die, then it becomes a very serious matter, this spiritual world from out of which we lift ourselves in physical existence, like a fish that gasps at air. Then we no longer look back on our life imagining that we perceive unreal memory-pictures, giving ourselves up to the illusion that the perspective of time kills the reality. For that is how man lives in relation to time when he gives himself up to his memory. He is like one who would consider what he perceives in the distance, in the perspective of space, as unreality, as a mere picture. He is like one who would say: ‘When I go far away from it, the castle there in the distance is so small, so tiny that it can have no reality, for surely no men could live in so tiny a castle. Therefore the castle can have no reality.’ Such, more or less, is the conclusion he draws in time. When he looks back in time he does not think his memory-pictures realities, for he leaves out of account the perspective of time. But this attitude ceases when all perspective ceases, that is to say when we are out of space and time. When we are dead it ceases. Then that which lives in the perspective of times emerges as a very strong reality.

Now it is possible that we had brought into our consciousness that which I call the consciousness of Christ. If we did so, then as we look back after our death we see that in life we united ourselves with reality, that we did not live in a mere abstract way. The perspective ceases and the reality is there. If in life we remained at the mere abstract experience, then too, of course, the reality is there. But we find that in earthly life we were building castles in the air. What we were building has no firmness in itself. With our intellectual knowledge and cognition we can indeed build, but our building is frail, it has no firmness. Therefore the modern man needs to be penetrated with the consciousness of Christ, to the end that by uniting himself with realities he may not build castles in the air but castles in the spirit. For earthly life, a castle in the air is something which in itself lies beneath the spirit. The castles in the air are always at their place, only for earthly life they are too thin and for the spiritual life too physically dense. Such human beings cannot free themselves from the dense physical, which in relation to the Spiritual, after all, has a far lesser reality. They remain earthbound. They get into no free relation to earthly life if in this life they build mere castles in the air through intellectualism.

So you see, precisely for intellectualism the Christ consciousness has a very real significance. And this significance is in the sense of a true doctrine of salvation—salvation from the building of castles in the air, salvation for our existence as it will be when we have passed through the gate of death.

For Anthroposophy these things are no articles of faith. They are clear knowledge which can be gained as clearly as mathematical knowledge can be gained by those who are able to manipulate the mathematical methods.

Mankind is reaching out to apprehend the Mystery of Golgotha once more with all the forces of the human soul; to understand it not only from the limited standpoint of present-day civilisation, but so as to unite with it all the forces of man's being. But this will only be possible if we are ready to approach the Mystery of Golgotha once more in the light of spiritual knowledge. Intellectualistic knowledge can never do justice to the full World-impulse of Christianity. For such knowledge only takes hold of the thinking life of man. So long as we have a Science whose only appeal is to our life of Thought, we must derive the sources of our Will (and these for Christianity are the most important) from our instinctive life, and cannot realise their true origin in spiritual Worlds.

Thus it will be indispensable to turn attention in our time once more to this the greatest question of mankind, inasmuch as the essence and meaning of the whole evolution of the Earth lies in the Mystery of Golgotha. I would fain express it in a parable, however strangely seeming. Imagine some Being descending from another planet to the Earth. Unable to become an earthly man, the Being would in all likelihood find the things on Earth quite unintelligible. Yet it is my deepest conviction, arising from a knowledge of the evolution of the Earth, that such a Being—even if he came from distant planets, Mars or Jupiter—would be deeply moved by Leonardo da Vinci's picture of the Last Supper. For in this picture he would discover that a far deeper meaning lies hidden in the Earth,—in earthly evolution. Beginning from this deeper meaning which belongs to the Mystery of Golgotha, the Being from a distant world could then begin to understand all other things on Earth.

We men of to-day little know how far we have gone in intellectual abstraction. We can no longer feel our way into the souls of those who lived a little while before the Mystery of Golgotha. They were very different from the souls of men to-day. We are apt to imagine the past history of mankind far too similar to the events and movements of our day. In reality the souls of men have undergone a tremendous evolution. In the times before the Mystery of Golgotha all human beings—even those who were primitive, more or less uncultured in their souls,—perceived in themselves something of the essence of the soul, which might be thus described: They had a memory of the time the human soul lives through, before he descends into an earthly body. As we in ordinary life remember our experiences since the age of three or four or five, so had the human soul in ancient time a memory of pre-existence in the world of soul and spirit. In a deeper psychological sense, man was as if transparent to himself. He knew with certainty: I am a soul, and I was a soul before I descended to the Earth. Notably in still more ancient times, he even knew of certain details of the life of soul and spirit which had preceded his descent to Earth. He experienced himself in cosmic pictures. Looking up to the stars, he saw them not in the mere abstract constellations which we see to-day. He saw them in dreamlike Imaginations. In a dreamlike way he saw the whole Universe filled with spiritual pictures or Imaginations, and as he saw it thus he could exclaim: “This is the last reflected glory of the spiritual World from which I am come down. Descending as a soul from yonder spiritual World, I entered the dwelling of a human body.” Never did the man of ancient time unite himself so closely with his human body as to lose this awareness of the real life of soul.

What was the real experience of the man of ancient time in this respect? It was such that he might have said: “I, before I descended to the Earth, was in a world where the Sun is no mere heavenly body spreading light around, but a dwelling-place of higher Hierarchies, of spiritual Beings. I lived in a world where the Sun not only pours forth light, but sends out radiant Wisdom into a space not physical but spiritual. I lived in that world where the stars are essences of Being—Beings who make felt their active will. From yonder world I descended.”

Now in this feeling two experiences were joined together for the man of ancient time: the experience of Nature, and the experience of Sin.

The old experience of Sin: the modern man has it no longer. Sin, for the man of modern time, lives in a world of abstract being. It is a mere transgression, a moral concept which he cannot really connect with the necessities or laws of Nature. For the ancients the duality was non-existent, of natural law upon the one hand, and moral on the other. All moral necessities were at the same time natural, likewise all natural [necessities] were moral. In those ancient times a man might say, “I had to descend out of the divinely spiritual World. Yet by my very entry into a human body—compared to the World from which I am descended—I am sick and ill.” Sickness and Sin: for the man of olden time these two ideas were interwoven. Here upon Earth man felt that he must find within himself the power to overcome his sickness. Increasingly the consciousness grew on the souls of olden time: We need an Education which is Healing. True Education is Medicine, is Therapy. Thus there appear upon the scene shortly before the Mystery of Golgotha such figures as the Therapeutæ, as the healers. Indeed in ancient Greece all spiritual life was somehow related to the healing of humanity. They felt that man had been more healthy in the beginning of Earth-evolution, and that he had evolved by degrees farther and farther from the Divine-spiritual Beings. “The sickness of humanity” was a widespread conception, forgotten as it is by modern History, in that ancient world in which the Mystery of Golgotha was placed.

It was by turning their gaze into the past that the men of those ancient times felt the reality of spiritual things. “I must look back beyond my birth, far into the past, if I would see the Spiritual. There is the Spirit; out of that Spirit I am born; that Spirit must I find again. But I have departed far from Him.”

Thus did man feel the Spirit from whom he had departed, as the Spirit of the Father God. The highest Initiate in the Mysteries was he who evolved in his heart and soul the forces whereby he could make manifest the Father in his own external human being. When the pupils crossed the threshold of the Mysteries and came into those sacred places which were institutions of Art and Science and of the sacred religious Rites at the same time, and when at length they stood before the highest Initiate, they saw in him the representative of the Father God. The “Fathers” were higher Initiates than the “Sun-Heroes.”

Thus, before the Mystery of Golgotha the Father Principle held sway. Yet it was felt how man had departed ever more and more from the Father, to whom as we look up we say. Ex Deo nascimur. Mankind stood in need of healing, and the seers and initiates lived in expectation of the Healer, the Hælend the healing Saviour.¹ To us the conception of Christ as the Healer is no longer living. But we must find our way to it again, for only when we can feel His presence once more as the Cosmic Physician, shall we also realise His true place in the Universe.

Such was the deep-seated feeling in human souls before the Mystery of Golgotha, of their connection with the spiritual world of the Father. A strange saying coming down to us from ancient Greece—“Better to be a beggar upon Earth than a king in the realm of shades”—bears witness, how deeply humanity had learned to feel the estrangement of their being from the world of Spirit. Yet at the same time their souls were filled with a deep longing for that World.

But we must realise that if a man had gone on evolving with the old consciousness of the Father God alone and unimpaired, he could never have attained the full self-consciousness of the “ I ” and inner spiritual Freedom. Before he could attain true spiritual Freedom, something had to take place in man, which, in relation to his primæval state, appeared as sickness. All humanity was suffering as it were the sickness of Lazarus. But the sickness was not unto Death; it was unto liberation and redemption, unto a new knowledge of the Eternal within man.

Men had increasingly forgotten their past life of soul and spirit before birth. Their attention was directed more and more to the physical world around them. The physical environment was now the real thing. The souls of olden time, looking out through the body into their physical environment, had seen in all the stars the pictures of the world of spiritual Being which they had left behind when they descended to this life through birth. In the light of the Sun they saw the radiant Wisdom which they had indwelt, which had been their very breath of life. In the Sun itself they beheld the choirs of Divine Hierarchies by whom they had been sent down to Earth. These things mankind had now forgotten, and as the Mystery of Golgotha approached—in the 9th, 8th, 7th, 6th centuries B.C.—they felt that it was so. If external History says nothing of these things, that is its failing. He who can follow History with spiritual insight will find it as I have said. He will see at the beginning of human evolution a wonderful consciousness of the Father God; he will see this consciousness gradually weakened and paralysed, till man at length should only see around him a world of Nature, void of spiritual Beings.

Much of these things remained unspoken in the unconscious depths of the soul. Strongest of all, in the unconscious depths, was a question unexpressed in words, but felt the more deeply by the human heart. Around us is the world of Nature, but where is the Spirit whose children we are? In the best of human souls, in the 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st centuries B.C., this question lived, unconscious and unformulated. It was a time of questioning, when mankind felt their estrangement from the Father God,—when human souls knew in their very depths: “It must be so indeed: Ex Deo nascimur. But do we know it still? Can we still know it?”

If we look still more deeply into the souls of those who lived in the age when the Mystery of Golgotha was drawing near, the following is what we find:—First there were the more primitive and simple souls who felt, deeply in their subconscious life, their present separation from the Father. They were the descendants of primæval humanity, which was by no means animal-like as modern Science conceives; for within the outer form, however like the animal, primæval man had borne a soul, in the ancient dream-clairvoyance of which he knew full well: “We have come down from the Divine-spiritual world, and have assumed a human body. Into this earthly world the Father God has led us. Out of Him we are born.” But not only so; the souls of primæval humanity knew that they had left behind them, in the spiritual worlds, That which was afterwards called and which we now call the Christ. For this reason the earliest Christian authors said that the most ancient souls of humanity had been true Christians, for they too had looked up to the Christ and worshipped Him. In the spiritual worlds in which they dwelt before their descent to Earth, Christ had been the centre of their vision—the Central Being to whom they had looked with the vision of the soul. It was this communion with Christ in the pre-earthly life which they afterwards remembered when on Earth.

Then there were the regions of which Plato speaks so strangely, where pupils were initiated into the Mysteries—where the vision of super-sensible Worlds was awakened and the forces in the human being were liberated to gaze into the spiritual Worlds. Nor was it only in dim memory that the pupils of the initiates learned to know the Christ, with whom indeed all human beings lived before their descent to Earth. For by this time Christ was already a half-forgotten notion in the souls of men on Earth. But in the Mysteries the pupils learned to know Him once again in His full stature. Yet at the same time they knew Him as a Being who, if we may put it in these words, had lost His mission in the Worlds beyond the Earth. It was so in the Mysteries of the second and first centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, that as they looked up to the Being in super-sensible worlds who was afterwards called the Christ, they said: We still behold Him in the spiritual worlds, but His activity in those worlds grows ever less and less. For He was the Being who implanted in the souls of men what afterwards sprang forth within them as a memory of the time before their birth. The Christ-Being in the spiritual worlds had been the great Teacher of human souls, for what they would still bear in memory after their descent to Earth. Now that the souls of men on Earth were less and less able to kindle these memories to life, He who was afterwards called Christ appeared to the initiates as One who had lost His activity, His mission.

Thus as the initiates lived on, ever and increasingly there arose in them the consciousness: “This Being whom primæval humanity remembered in their earthly life—whom we can now behold, though with ever lessening activity, in spiritual worlds—He will seek a new sphere of His existence. He will come down to the Earth to re-awaken the super-sensible spirituality in man.” And they began to speak of the Being who was afterwards called Christ, as of Him who would in future time come down to Earth and take on a human body—as indeed He did, when the time was fulfilled, in Jesus of Nazareth. In the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha it was one of the main contents of their speech, to speak of Christ as the Coming One. And in the beautiful picture of the Wise Men of the East—the three Kings or Magi—we see the typical figures of initiates who had learned in their several places of Initiation that Christ would come to Earth when the time should be fulfilled, and the signs in the Heavens would proclaim His coming. Then must they seek Him out at His hidden place. Indeed, there resounds throughout the Gospels what is made manifest as a deeper secret, a deeper Mystery in human evolution, when we approach it once more with spiritual vision.

Meanwhile the simple and primitive among mankind felt as it were forlorn when they looked up to Worlds beyond the realms of sense. Deep in the subconscious they said to themselves, we have forgotten Christ. They saw the world of Nature around them, and there arose in their hearts the question of which I spoke above: “How shall we find the spiritual World again?” But in the Mysteries the initiates knew that the Being who afterwards was called Christ, would come down and would take on a human form. And they knew that what human souls had formerly experienced in their pre-earthly life, they would now experience on Earth by looking up to the Mystery on Golgotha.

Thus, not in an intellectual or theoretic way, but by the greatest fact that ever took place on Earth, answer was given to the question: How shall we come once more to the Supersensible—to the Spiritual that transcends the world of sense? The men of that time, who had a certain feeling for what was taking place, learned from those who knew, that a real God dwelt in the human being Jesus. He had come down to Earth. He was the God whom mankind had forgotten because the forces of the human body were evolving towards Freedom. He, whom man on Earth had forgotten, appeared again in a new form, so that man could see Him and behold Him, and future History could tell of Him as of an earthly Being. The God who had only been known in yonder spiritual World, had descended and walked in Palestine, and sanctified the Earth inasmuch as He Himself had dwelt in a human body.

For those who were the educated men according to the culture of that age, the question was. How did Christ enter into Jesus, what path did He take? In the earliest times of Christianity the question about Christ was indeed a purely spiritual one. Their problem was not the earthly biography of Jesus. It was the descent of Christ. They looked up into the higher Worlds and saw the descent of Christ to Earth. They asked themselves, How did the super-sensible Being become an earth Being?

And the simple men who surrounded Jesus Christ as His disciples were able to converse with Him as a spiritual Being even after His Death. Nay, what He was able to tell them after His Death is the most important of all. Only a few fragments have been preserved, but spiritual Science can re-discover what Christ said to those who were nearest to Him after His Death, when He appeared to them in His purely spiritual being.

Then it was that He spoke to them as the great Healer—the Therapeut, the Comforter—to whom the great Mystery was known, how human beings had once upon a time remembered Him, because they had been with Him in super-sensible spiritual worlds before their earthly life. Now He could say to His disciples upon Earth: In former times I gave you the faculty to remember your spiritual life, your pre-earthly existence in higher worlds. But now, if you receive Me into your hearts and souls, I give you power to go forward through the Gate of Death, conscious of immortality. And you will no longer merely recognise the Father—Ex Deo Nascimur—you will feel the Son as Him with whom you can die and yet remain alive: In Christo morimur.

Such was the purport—though not of course expressed in the words I am now speaking—such was the meaning of what He taught to those who were near Him after His bodily Death. In primæval ages men had not known Death. Since ever they came to consciousness on Earth, they had an inner knowledge of the soul within them; they were aware of that which cannot die. They saw men die, but to them this Death was a mere semblance among the outer facts around them. They felt it not as Death. Only in later years, as the Mystery of Golgotha drew near, did men begin to feel the real fact of Death. For by degrees the soul within them had grown so closely united with the body that doubt could arise in their minds: How shall the soul live on when the body falls into decay? In olden times there could have been no such question, for men were aware of the living, independent soul.

But now there came the Christ Himself, and said: I will live with you on the Earth, that ye may have power to kindle your souls to life again, that ye may bear them, once more a living soul, through Death.

This was what St. Paul had not understood at first. But he understood it when the spiritual worlds were opened out before him and he received here upon Earth the living impressions of Christ Jesus. For this reason the Pauline Christianity is less and less valued in our time, for it requires us to recognise the Christ as One who comes from real worlds beyond the Earth, uniting with earthly man His cosmic power.

Thus in the course of human evolution, in the consciousness of man, the “Out of God—out of the Father God—we are born,” was supplemented by the word of life, of comfort and of strength, “In Christ we die”—that is to say, in Him we live.

In order to bring before our souls what came upon humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, I shall best describe the present evolution of mankind, and that which we must hope for the future, from the standpoint of the initiate of modern time. I have already sought to place before you the standpoint of the initiate of olden time, and of the initiate of the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. I will now try to describe that of the initiate of our own time. The initiate is one who does not approach life with external natural Science alone, but in whom those deeper forces of knowledge have been awakened which can be kindled from depths of the human soul by proper methods. Such methods are indicated in the spiritual literature,² and I have referred to them in my other course of lectures in this College.

When the modern initiate enters into the Sciences of our time (which are the glory and triumph of the age, and in the study of which so many people, possessed even of a certain higher consciousness, feel the greatest satisfaction) he finds himself in a tragic situation. For when he unites his soul with that form of Science which is valued above all by the world to-day, the initiate feels it as a slow process of Death. A sphere of existence higher than all earthly things has risen up before his soul. And yet, the more he imbues himself with that which all the world to-day calls Science, the more he feels his soul to die within him. For the modern initiate, the Sciences are indeed the grave of the soul. While he acquires knowledge about the world in the manner of modern Science, he feels himself bound up, even in life, with Death. Again and again he feels this Death deeply and intensely. Then he may well seek the reason why, whenever he acquires knowledge in the modern sense, he dies. Why is it, he asks himself, that he has a feeling comparable even to the presence of a corpse—the odour of decay—just when he rises to the highest points of modern scientific knowledge, the greatness of which he is truly able to appreciate, though to him it is the premonition of Death.

From his knowledge of spiritual worlds he finds the answer, which I will try to convey to you this evening, my dear friends, in a picture.

Before we come down to Earth, we human beings live in a life of soul and spirit. Now of that life in full reality of soul and spirit, in yonder pre-earthly realms, here upon Earth we retain only our Thoughts—our concepts and ideas. These are in our soul: yet how are they there? Look at the human being as he stands before you in the life between birth and death. He is fully alive, filled with the living flesh and blood. We say, he is alive. Then he passes through the gate of death. Of the physical man, the corpse remains behind, and this is given over to the Earth—to the elements. We see the dead physical man; we have the dead corpse before us, all that is left of the man who was filled with living blood. Physically he is dead.

Now we look back, with the vision of Initiation, into our own souls. There we behold our thoughts—the thoughts we have in the present life between birth and death—the thoughts of modern Science, modern wisdom. And we recognise; These thoughts are the dead corpse of what we were before we descended to the Earth. As the dead body is to the human being in the fulness of his life, so are our thoughts (the thoughts which we respect above all things in this age, which bring us knowledge of external Nature)—so are our thoughts to what we were in soul and spirit before we came down to Earth.

This is what the modern initiate discovers, and it is a very real experience. He experiences in Thought, not his real life, but the dead corpse of the soul. I am stating a simple fact. It is not uttered out of any sentimental feeling: on the contrary, it comes before the soul in modern time with all intensity, just when the soul's knowledge is active and courageous. It is not what the sentimental mystic says to himself out of some dark and mystic depths of his being.

He who passes to-day through the Portals of Initiation discovers in his soul the real nature of the thoughts of man. For the very reason that they are unalive, they can make way for living spiritual Freedom. These thoughts are in truth the only ground on which man's spiritual Freedom grows. Because they are dead—because they are not alive—they have no power to compel. Man can become a free Being in our time because he has to do, not with living thoughts, but with dead ones. He can take hold of the dead thoughts and use them towards Freedom. And yet, it is with all the tragedy of Worlds that we experience these thoughts as the dead corpse of the soul—of the soul that was, before it came down to Earth. For in the pre-earthly life all this, which is a corpse in man to-day, was alive and filled with movement. In spiritual Worlds it lived and moved among other human souls—those who had passed through the gate of death and were now dwelling in those Worlds, and those who had not yet descended to the Earth. It lived and moved among the Beings of the Divine Hierarchies above humanity, and in the sphere of the elemental beings that underlie all Nature. There, everything in the soul was alive, while here, the soul possesses Thought as its heritage from spiritual worlds, and Thought is dead.

Yet if as initiates of modern time we fill ourselves with Christ, who made manifest His life in the Mystery of Golgotha; if we take hold in its deepest, inmost sense, of the word of St. Paul: Not I, but Christ in me,—then will Christ lead us even through this Death. We penetrate into Nature with our thoughts, yet as we do so Christ goes with us in the Spirit. He sinks our thoughts into the grave of Nature. For Nature does indeed become a grave, inasmuch as our thoughts are dead. Yet if, with these dead thoughts, accompanied by Christ Himself, we approach the minerals, the animals, the world of stars, the clouds, mountains and streams, then we experience in modern Initiation the resurrection of dead Thought as living Thought out of all Nature. With the dead Thought, we dive down into the crystal quartz, letting Christ be our companion, according to the word: Not I, but Christ in me. Then the dead Thought arises again as living Thought out of the crystal quartz, out of all Nature. As from the tomb of the mineral world, Thought is lifted up again as living Thought. Out of the mineral world the Spirit is resurrected. And as Christ leads us through the plant-world of Nature, here too, where otherwise only our dead thoughts would dwell, the living thoughts arise.

Truly we should feel that we are sick and ill as we go out into Nature, or gaze into the Universe of stars with the restricted calculating vision of the astronomer, thus sinking our dead thoughts into the world. We should feel that we are sick, and indeed it would be a sickness unto Death. But if we let Christ be our companion, if accompanied by Him we carry our dead thoughts into the world of the Sun, the Moon, the clouds, mountains and rivers, the minerals, plants and animals and the whole physical world of man, then in our vision of Nature it all becomes alive, and there arises from all creation, as from a tomb, the living, healing Spirit who awakens us from Death: the Holy Spirit. Accompanied by Christ, in all that we have hitherto experienced as Death we feel ourselves called to Life again. We feel the living and healing Spirit speaking to us out of all the creatures of this world.

These things must be regained in spiritual knowledge, in the new Science of Initiation. Then only shall we take hold of the Mystery of Golgotha as the true meaning of all Earth-existence. Then shall we know that in this age, when through the dead thoughts human freedom must be evolved, we need the Christ to lead us into a true Knowledge of Nature. For He not only placed His own destiny upon the Earth in the Mystery of Golgotha, but gave to the Earth the mighty liberation of Pentecost, in that He promised to mankind on Earth the living Spirit, which can arise through His help from all things on the Earth. Our Science remains dead—nay, our Science itself is Sin—until we are so awakened by the Christ that from all Nature, from all existence in the Cosmos, the living Spirit speaks to us again.

It is no formula devised by human cleverness: the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It is a reality deeply bound up with the whole evolution of the Cosmos, and it becomes for us a living, not a dead, dogmatic knowledge, when we bring to life within ourselves the Christ who as the Risen One is the Giver of the Holy Spirit.

Then do we understand how it is like an illness if man cannot see the Divine out of which he is born. Man must be secretly diseased to be an atheist, for, if he is healthy, his whole physical being will find as it were its summation in the spontaneous inner feeling which exclaims: Out of God I am born. And it is tragic destiny if in this earthly life he does not find the Christ who can lead him through the Death that stands at the end of life's way, and through the Death in Knowledge. But if we thus feel the In Christo morimur, then too we feel what is seeking to come near us through His guidance; we feel how the living Spirit arises again out of all things, even within this earthly life. We feel ourselves alive again even within this life on Earth, and we look through the gate of Death through which the Christ will lead us into yonder Life that lies beyond. We know now why Christ sent us the Holy Spirit, for if we let Christ be our guide we can unite ourselves to the Holy Spirit already in this life on Earth.

If we let Christ become our leader, we may surely say: We die in Christ, when we pass through the gate of Death. Our experience here on Earth, with our Science of the world of Nature, is indeed prophetic of the future. By the living Spirit, what would otherwise be a dead Science is resurrected. Thus we may also say, when the Death in Knowledge is replaced by that real Death which takes away our body:—Having understood the “Out of the Father we are born,” “In Christ we die,” we may say as we look forward through the gate of Death: “In the Holy Spirit we shall be reawakened.” Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

• 1. German Heiland, Anglo-Saxon Hælend, meaning Christ the Saviour
• 2. See especially “Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment” (“The Way of Initiation”) by Rudolf Steiner.

Before I begin my lecture today may I express to our esteemed guests my heartiest greetings out of the spirit that prevails here in the Goetheanum and that underlies all the work that is developed here. This kind of spirit does not spring from any human one-sidedness, but from a total all-encompassing humanness. For this reason, what is offered and accomplished here can originate in scientific knowledge, art and religious devotion while at the same time its spirit should be that of a free humanness, combined with generosity of heart and soul.

Now when the construction of the Goetheanum was begun in 1913 it was upon this spirit that it rested, as on the finest foundation stone. At a period when the whole of Europe and vast areas beyond were embroiled in warfare and bitter hostilities, here in Dornach people from all the nations of Europe worked together out of a free, encompassing humanness. Here, the international work never ceased. Allow me to point to this fact especially today because I desire to bring you this greeting out of such an international spirit. Out of no other spirit can the work done here be carried on, for only this spirit of many-sided, universal, free humanness can produce genuine spiritual science, spiritual art and truth-filled religion, which in itself can only be spiritual and international. But this spirit also gives, I think, that largeness of heart that is able to welcome and greet every human being affectionately. So, it is out of this spirit that rules here at the Goetheanum that I speak of these first words of greeting. They are therefore meant from the heart. In this heartfelt manner, then, may I express the wish that in the days to come we may successfully work together and exchange ideas on some topics drawn from the most varied areas of science and life, something that everyone who had wanted to come here will carry home with a certain measure of gratification. When we who have worked at the Goetheanum for years find that our visitors look back with joy to what they have experienced here, we are filled with special satisfaction. With this feeling let me welcome you and thank you for coming and express the wish that your visit may prove gratifying to you all.

As already indicated, the aim here is to engage in spiritual research so that it will be the foundation for making life in all its aspects more fruitful. The spiritual knowledge we seek here at this Goetheanum should not be confused with much that today is promoted as occultism, or the many things that go by the name of mysticism. This occultism, pursued today in many forms, actually runs contrary to the spirit of our age, the spirit of real modern life, which results from the development of natural scientific knowledge in recent times. What is cultivated here as spiritual knowledge must certainly reckon with what in the strictest sense of the word is in keeping with the spirit of modern scientific knowledge. What is frequently called occultism today is founded on ancient traditions; it is not directly governed by the spirit of the present time. Old traditions are revived. But since present-day humanity cannot unfold corresponding perceptions from the same substrata of soul, one can say that these old traditions are often misunderstood; as such, they are presented in dilettante fashion by one or the other group today as a knowledge intended to gratify the human soul.

We have as little to do with such partly misunderstood traditional occultism as we have with the kind of occultism that seeks to do research in the supersensible worlds by borrowing the usual scientific methods of sense observation and experimentation. If this is done, the fact is overlooked that the methods of scientific research developed during the past few centuries are preeminently adapted for gaining knowledge of the external sense reality; for this very reason, however, they are unsuitable as a means of research into the supersensible realm.

On the other hand, much is said today about mystical immersion, inner mystical experience. There, too, one often has to do with nothing else than immersing oneself in the soul experiences of the old mystics, trying to repeat these soul experiences of the past. But again, the unclear introspection that is used can lead only to a dubious knowledge.

I only pointed to these things in order to warn against confusing the work here at the Goetheanum with what is often carried on in such an amateur, dilettante fashion, even if out of sincere good-will. Here a scientific method for gaining supersensible knowledge as being cultivated, as rigorous, as exact and as scientific as is demanded today of the methods in the area of natural scientific research. We can reach the supersensible realm only if we do not remain limited to the paths of research suited only to the sense world. We cannot, however, scientifically ascend into the supersensible worlds by proceeding in a spirit other than the one that has proven itself so well in the domain of the sense world. Today I should like to give just a few indications concerning the purposes and goals of the work carried on here. Therefore, more detailed discussions of what I will but mention today will follow in the days to come. May I point out first that for the purpose of supersensible research here we are concerned with drawing from the depths of the human soul those forces for gaining knowledge that can penetrate the supersensible world in the same way as the forces of the outer senses penetrate the physical sense world. What the spiritual research requires first of all is to direct his soul's attention to his own soul-spiritual organism, which is able to approach the super-sensible. This distinguishes the spiritual investigator from the ordinary scientist. The latter uses the human organism as it is, directs it toward nature, and employs the exactness needed to gain results about the facts of outer nature. But the spiritual researcher, just because he is grounded in correct natural scientific knowledge, cannot proceed in this way. He must first direct his attention to the soul-spiritual organ of knowledge—I can perhaps call it 'eye of the spirit.' But this attention, which initially prepares and develops the spiritual eye, must be such that the inner conformity of this spiritual eye appears before it exactly; as exact, for instance, as a mathematical problem appears to a mathematician, or the content of his experiment appears to the experimenter. This work that must be applied by the researcher upon himself in preparation for the actual attainment of knowledge is the essential point in spiritual research. Thus, as the mathematician or natural scientist is exact in the search for results, the spiritual researcher must be exact in preparing his soul-spiritual organism, which then can perceive a spiritual fact as the eye or ear perceives facts in the sense world.

The spiritual research referred to here must be exact, in the same way that mathematics or natural science is exact. But I should say that where natural science with its exactness stops, spiritual science with its own kind of exactness begins. It must be rigorous in developing one's own human nature, so that all the work man does on himself in order to become a spiritual researcher is carried on in rigorous manner. For this exact work, then, fully justifiable to science, turns, as it were, into the inner spiritual eye when it begins spiritual research and encounters the existence of the supersensible world. While what is often termed mysticism has little clear understanding of the soul, in genuine spiritual research every minute step must be taken with the same clarity and insight as is required of a mathematician confronted by a mathematical problem. This will then lead to a kind of awakening, an awakening on a higher level of consciousness comparable to what we experience when we awaken from our usual sleep and have the sense world around us again.

When I speak here of the exactness needed especially for spiritual research, the word relates to the exact, scientific preparation of what must precede the research, namely the soul-spiritual organization of man. It is this above all that must stand before the spiritual researcher in transparent clarity. Then he may begin to penetrate within the world of supersensible phenomena.

This is just a preliminary indication, not one that proves anything. Because one strives for this exactness in preparing for genuine spiritual perception, if one is to call the kind of spiritual perception meant here 'clairvoyance,' one can indeed speak of 'exact clairvoyance.' It is to be the specific characteristic of the spiritual research carried on here that it is based on methodologically exact clairvoyance. The exactness of the clairvoyance is to be the distinctive mark of the spiritual research practiced here. From this point of view, one would want to consider not only a narrowly circumscribed area, but to attain to something into which flow all other sciences and patterns of life of the present age. What is spiritually achieved here is not merely to be a spiritual super-structure having as its foundation the natural scientific mode of observation; what humanity has developed in the spirit of this modern natural scientific point of view should also be led up into the spiritual region in order that the attainments of natural science may be crowned with what spiritual research can provide.

As an example, I may cite medicine. The way this science has developed today out of materialistic knowledge, and has achieved its admirable results, is fully recognized by what is cultivated here as spiritual knowledge. But it is possible to carry further by means of the spirit of an exact clairvoyance what has now been achieved out of a purely external approach to medicine. Only then will the whole fruitfulness of natural scientific medicine as presently practiced be attained. Similarly, we desire to gain here in a spiritual way knowledge that is in a position to lead the artistic into the spiritual. We strive for an artistic element here, which in a spiritual way arises out of the totality of man's nature, as does the knowledge we seek. A religious, a social element is also to be cultivated here in such a way that they both arise as something self-evident flowing from the spiritual knowledge attained.

The spiritual knowledge we strive for is to lay hold of the whole man, is to come forth from him, not from a single human faculty. It is therefore the nature of this knowledge that it desires to have all areas of theoretical as well as practical life flow into the spiritual life, and that thereby only the completely human, the universally human, is to be achieved. From this standpoint I would like to speak to you in these lectures mainly about three areas of knowledge, using these three examples to show to what extent the spirit of modern science can lead into the spirit of higher spiritual science. I would like to speak to you about philosophy, cosmology and religion, in a manner that shows how through anthroposophy they are to gain a certain spiritual form.

Philosophy was once the all-inclusive knowledge, which, in ancient times, threw light on all the separate areas of reality that men experienced. It was not a specialized science. It was the universal science, and all the sciences we cultivate today developed fundamentally out of the substance of philosophy as it still existed in Greece. In recent times, a specific philosophy has arisen by its side that lives in a certain sum of ideas. The strange thing that came about is that this philosophy, out of which all other sciences actually have grown, has now come to the point of having to justify its own existence before them. The other sciences, which have indeed grown out of philosophy, busy themselves with this or that recognized field of reality. The field of reality is there for the senses, or for observation, or experiment.

One cannot doubt the justification for all this scientific pursuit of knowledge. In spite of all these separate areas of study having been born out of philosophy, it is forced today to justify its own existence, to explain why it develops a certain body of ideas, whether these ideas are perhaps quite unreal, do not relate to any reality, are merely something people have thought out. Just consider how much hard thinking is devoted nowadays to justifying those ideas, which, incidentally, have already taken on a quite abstract character and today are called the content of philosophy, in order that they can still enjoy a certain standing in the world. They have nurtured the sciences, which, I might say, are well accredited in regard to their own specific areas of reality. Philosophy, on the contrary, is not accredited today. It first has to prove that its existence is justifiable. In ancient Greece that was never brought into question. There, a man who was capable of developing himself far enough to attain a philosophy felt the reality of philosophizing in the same way a healthy person feels the reality of breathing. But today, when a philosopher examines his philosophy, he experiences the abstract, cold, sober quality of the ideas he has developed in it. He does not feel that he stands solidly in reality. Only a person working in a chemistry or physics laboratory, or in a hospital, has matters well in hand, so to say. One who nowadays has philosophical ideas and acts upon them often feels miles removed from reality.

There is an additional consideration. It is with good reason that philosophy bears a name that does not point merely to theoretical knowledge. Philosophy is “love of wisdom,” and love exists not only in one's reason and intellect but has its roots in the whole human heart and soul. A comprehensive soul experience, the experiencing of love, is what has given philosophy its name. The whole human being should be engaged in the development of philosophy, and one cannot love, in the true sense of the word, what is mere theory, matter of fact and cold. If philosophy is love of wisdom, those who have experienced it assume that this Sophia, this wisdom, is something worth loving, something real and tangible, whose existence does not require to be proven. Just think a moment. If a man were to love a woman, or a woman a man, but would find it necessary to first prove the existence of the loved one—, quite an absurd thought! But this is just the case with philosophy taken in its present sense. From something that was warmly alive and received in a heartfelt way by man, the existence of which was self-evident, philosophy has turned into something abstract, cold, dull and theoretical. What caused this?

When one turns back to the origin of philosophical life—not through outer history but with an inwardly experienced and felt knowledge of history—one finds that philosophy originally did not live in man as it does today. Man, today, basically only recognizes as valid what is achieved through sense observation, or through experiments developed in the field of the senses, when he thinks in a scientific way; this is then put together by the intellect. But these achievements belong to physical man, for the senses are physical organs imbedded in the physical body. What man's physical body attained in knowledge is today considered scientifically acceptable, but in this way one only reaches as far as physical man. In him what the ancients considered as philosophy cannot be found. I will go further into this in the days to follow but must here point out that what was called philosophy in the golden age of Greek philosophy—that spiritual substance experienced within the soul—was not experienced in the physical body but in a human organization that permeates the physical body as etheric man.

In present-day science we really know only physical man. We do not know the body that, as a fine etheric organism, permeates man's physical body and in which the Greek philosopher experienced his philosophy. In the physical body we experience breathing, and the process of seeing. But just as we have this physical organization before us, so man also has an etheric body; he is an etheric man. When we look at the physical body we see something of the breathing process; physically and biologically we can make clear to ourselves the process of seeing. When we look at supersensible, etheric man we see the medium in which the Greek carried on his philosophizing. The Greek constitution was such that a man of that time felt—lived—in his etheric organism. In the activity of exerting himself through his organism—as one does physically in breathing and seeing—philosophy came into being in the etheric man. As there never can be any doubt about the reality of our breathing, because we are conscious of our physical body, so the Greek never doubted that what he experienced as philosophy, as wisdom, which he loved, was rooted in reality, for he was conscious of his etheric body. He was clearly aware that his philosophizing took place in his etheric body.

Modern man has lost perception of the etheric body. In fact, he does not know he has one. Therefore, traditional philosophy is a sum of abstract ideas for the reason that it considers to be reality only what one experiences as reality while philosophizing. If one has lost the knowledge of etheric man, the reality in philosophy is also lost. One feels it as abstract; one feels the necessity to prove that it really exists.

Now imagine that man were to develop an organism still more powerful, solid and material than his present physical body. Then the breathing process, for instance, would gradually appear to be almost imperceptible by comparison with this more powerful experience, until finally he would no longer know anything about what is now his physical body, just as modern man knows nothing about his etheric body. The breathing process would be a theory, a sum of ideas, and one would have to 'prove' that breathing was a reality, just as one must now prove that philosophy is rooted in reality. Doubt as to the reality of what one should love in philosophy has arisen because the etheric body has been lost to human perception, for it is in the etheric, not in the physical body, that the reality of philosophy is experienced. If, then, one is to recover a feeling for philosophy as a reality one must first gain a knowledge of etheric man. Out of this knowledge a true experience of philosophy can come. The first step in anthroposophy therefore is to bring out the facts concerning man's etheric organism.

I want to proceed in three steps and would like to ask Dr. Sauerwein¹ to translate now. After the translation I shall continue.

In philosophy man has initially an inner experience of himself, of his etheric body. From the time humanity began to think it has also felt the need to incorporate each single human being into the whole cosmos. Man not only needs a philosophy, he needs a cosmology. As an individual firmly grounded within his organism at a certain place on the earth, he wants to understand in how far he belongs to the whole universe, and to what extent he has evolved out of it.

In the earliest stages of human evolution man felt himself to be a member of the whole cosmos. As physical man, however, he cannot feel himself as part of the cosmos. His experience as physical man between birth and death belongs directly to the life of his physical sensory surroundings. Beyond this he has his inner soul life, which is completely different from what he bears in his physical body out of his physical sensory environment. Since man wishes to feel, to know himself as a member of the whole cosmos, he also must feel and know his inner life of soul as part of the universe.

In the most ancient periods of human evolution men were actually able to see the soul life in the cosmos, not only by means of what today is mistakenly called anthropomorphism, but through an inner power of vision. They could perceive their own soul life as part of the soul-spiritual life of the universe, as one can see one's physical bodily life as part of natural sense existence. But in most recent times men have only developed in an exact way natural scientific knowledge based on sense observation, experiment, and a thinking similarly limited. Out of the natural scientific results achieved in this way, bringing together all the separate findings, a universal science, a cosmology, has been formed. But this cosmology contains merely the picture of facts from sense reality that are combined by thinking. One constructs a picture of the universe, but the separate parts of this picture are only the recognized laws of physical sensory phenomena.

This picture produced by the natural scientific cosmology of modern times is not like that of ancient times, which also contained the life of soul and spirit, for it contains only the sense world that natural science is able to examine. In this picture that stands as cosmology of the modern age man can re-discover his physical body, but not the inner life of his soul. In ancient times the inner soul life could be derived from the picture of cosmology; the soul's inner life cannot be derived from the cosmological view based upon natural science. This is in turn connected with the fact that modern perception cannot see the soul-spiritual in the same way as an old primitive perception was able to do. So, when modern knowledge speaks of the soul element in the body it speaks of the manifestations, the inner experiences of thinking, feeling and willing. It views the soul's life as being an outflow of what comes to expression in what is thought, felt and willed, separately and intermingled. It makes a picture of those three activities as phenomena playing a role in the soul's inner life.

When one observes the inner life of soul and spirit in this way one is forced to say, “Yes, what you have recognized and designated as an intermingling of thinking, feeling and willing arises in embryonic life, develops in the child, and perishes at death.” A scientist holding this view cannot fail to conclude that the soul must disappear at death. For actually, this thinking, feeling and willing between birth and death appear to be intimately bound up with the life of the physical body. Just as we see its members grow we watch thinking and feeling grow. As the body calcifies and we see it approaching physical decline, we see also how the phenomena of thinking, feeling and willing gradually diminish.

The distinguishing quality of the ancient viewpoint was a perception of the inner soul life that went beyond what lives in mere thinking, feeling and willing. The ancients perceived hidden within these a foundation for the life of soul of which they are only a reflection. We see thought, feeling and will originating and then developing further between birth and death. What lies beneath—of which thinking, feeling and willing are but the outer reflection—was beheld by the old primitive clairvoyance as the astral being of man.

So, as one at first recognizes the etheric body as a super-sensible member in physical man, one recognizes the astral body as a higher member in physical etheric man. This astral being of man does not consist of thought, feeling and will. It is the basis for them. It is the being which, out of soul-spiritual worlds, finds its way into our existence between birth and death. This astral man clothes himself between birth and death with the physical and etheric bodies, and after death goes out into a soul-spiritual world. In regard to this astral nature of man birth and death are only outer manifestations. Thinking, feeling and willing can be understood only in the context of man's physical organization, and can be found only between birth and death. There they develop, gradually decline, and disappear. The astral being underlying them, the foundation for the inner life of the soul, extends above physical and etheric man and is incorporated in a cosmic world. It is not enclosed within man's physical organism.

In order to arrive at a comprehensive cosmology, we need a knowledge of etheric and astral man, of which thinking, feeling and willing are a reflection. But, as manifested in each individual man, they cannot be incorporated in the cosmos. What constitutes their background, what is concealed in them between birth and death and is only accessible to a primitive or an exact clairvoyance—that can be incorporated in a spiritual cosmos of which the physical sensory cosmos is merely the reflection.

Modern cosmology is but a super-structure founded on the results of natural scientific research; a combination of facts found in the physical sense world. In such a cosmic picture man's inner life cannot be incorporated; but we only have such a cosmology because modern knowledge does not provide a picture of astral man. Anyone conceiving soul life as merely a combination of thinking, feeling and willing cannot defend the idea of its continuing beyond birth and death. Only if one first advances from these three activities to what lies concealed within them, to astral man, only then does one arrive at the human element that is no longer bound to the physical body and can be thought of as membered into the soul-spiritual universe. But man will never re-discover such a spiritual cosmos after abandoning it, because he has lost the perception of astral man. He will never be able to construct a picture of such a spirit-soul cosmos until he regains a picture of man's astral being. The possibility of a cosmology that again has soul-spiritual content depends upon the development of a perception of man's astral being. If we have merely an external cosmology comprising the physically perceptible, man himself has no place in it. We have come to such a physical cosmology because the perception of astral man has been lost. If the perception is again achieved, it will be possible to have a picture of the cosmos in which man himself is incorporated.

So, our concern is to succeed in developing a knowledge of man's astral being. Then we will also be able to attain a true cosmology that includes man. This is to be the second step for anthroposophy.

After Dr. Sauerwein has been so kind as to translate the second part, I shall discuss how matters stand with the third step in the last segment of my lecture.

Man experiences himself as condensed together into himself as for example when he philosophizes—and he also feels himself to be a part of the cosmos as depicted by cosmology. But in addition, he experiences himself as an entity independent of his own physical body as well as of the cosmos to which he belongs. He feels himself to be independent of his own corporeality and does not even feel part of the cosmos when he points to his own higher spiritual being—something that is today only hinted at when we utter the word 'I.'

When we say, 'I,' we do not refer to that part of us encompassed by our physical, our etheric, or our astral body, insofar as through the latter we are part of the cosmos. We refer to an inner, self-contained entity. We feel it as belonging to a special world, to a divine world, of which the cosmos is only the outer reflection, the external replica. As human beings who address themselves as “I,” we feel that this entity, this spiritual man indicated by the word “I,” is only enclothed with everything in the cosmos; that even the physical sense body is a covering of the actual being.

Because man in ancient times—through an inner if primitive vision—experienced his human entity as independent both of his body and of the cosmos, he knew he belonged to a divine world. But he also knew that between birth and death he was placed outside of this world and was clothed in a physical body. He knew he was placed in the soul-physical cosmos. He knew that his ego, the essence of his being, is concealed by the cosmic, by the physical-bodily elements, and he sought for union of this I-being with the divine world to which it belongs. In this way primitive man—with his clairvoyant experience of his egohood attained above and beyond his physical and etheric bodies and his astral nature—attained a union, religion , with the divine world. Religious life was that into which flowed a perception that was both philosophical and cosmological. Man found himself united with that from which he had been separated by his own body and by the outwardly visible soul-sensory cosmos. In religious experience he was united with the divine world, and this religious experience was the highest flowering of the perceptual life.

This religious experience on a primitive level, however, depended on a real inner experience of egohood, of the real spirit man. Only when the ego is experienced can the longed-for union with the divine world be attained—the religious feeling.

But to the modern way of thinking, what has the ego, this true spiritual man, become? It has become nothing but the phenomena of thinking, feeling and willing conceived of as a single, abstract idea. The ego has now become a kind of cosmic, or at most one or another composite formulation made up of thought, feeling and will—in any case something abstract. Philosophers themselves arrive at a notion of the ego by combining the experiences of thought, feeling and will into an abstract concept. But in this composite, nothing has been found that is not disproven every night when a person sleeps. Take the characterizations of modern philosophers concerning the “I,” for example, Bergson. Throughout, you will only find in these characterizations something that is disproven every night in sleep, for what the ego absorbs of these concepts, these ideas, is extinguished every night in sleep. Reality refutes these definitions, these characterizations of the ego. Furthermore, what I say here is not refuted by claiming that memory reconnects us after sleep with the “I.” It is not a matter of interpretations, but of facts. This implies that modern knowledge, even the finest philosophical knowledge, has lost perception of the ego, the true spirit man, and with it also the way to an understanding of religion.

So it has developed that in recent times, alongside the knowledge resulting from the attainable world of observation and experimenting, there are traditions handed down from a true religious life of past ages. They are accepted in a historical sense. But man's knowledge no longer has access to them; therefore, he only believes in them. Thus, for modern man, who will not extend knowledge to cover religious experience, science and faith confront each other. The whole content of the faith of today was once knowledge and is brought up only as a memory retained in tradition. No declaration of faith exists that is not a reminder of ancient knowledge. Because mankind today does not have a living perception of the true ego through exact clairvoyance—the ego that is not extinguished with every sleep but underlies both the sleeping and waking conditions—the path of knowledge is not pursued all the way into religion. Faith, which actually only perpetuates the memory of old traditions, is then placed alongside knowledge.

Today, therefore, what once was a unity—knowledge both of the physical and the divine worlds—has split into two external, parallel fields, knowledge and faith. That has come about because the old, primitive clairvoyant vision of the true ego—the foundation of man's being even when sleep extinguishes thought, feeling and will—that ancient knowledge has been lost, and exact clairvoyance is not yet advanced enough to see man's true egohood, the spiritual man. Only when it wants to advance to this point—as it must advance to seeing the etheric and astral parts of man's constitution—only then will a direct extension of knowledge of the outer world into knowledge of the divine world take place. Then, again, the content of science will pour into religious life.

This gap between knowledge and faith exists because the living, clairvoyant vision of the true ego, the fourth member of man's being, has been lost. Therefore, it is the task of the new spiritual life to restore knowledge of the true ego through exact clairvoyance. Then the way will open for advancing out of world knowledge to divine knowledge, out of the knowledge of the world to a renewal of religious life. We shall be able to view faith only as a special, higher form of knowledge, not, as now, something specifically different from knowledge.

So, what we need is the possibility for a real knowledge of the ego. From that will also result the possibility for a new experience of religion. We need to bring about this ego knowledge so that it takes its place within spiritual science just as does the previously characterized cognition of etheric man, who is not perceived in the human physical body, and the perception of astral man, who endures beyond birth and death. Thus, too, a perception of the ego, which exists beyond sleeping and waking as the foundation for both, needs to be cultivated to bring about a revitalization of life. This is to be the third step of anthroposophy. What should result organically from the viewpoint of anthroposophical research is therefore:

A modern philosophy through an exact clairvoyant knowledge of the ether body.

A cosmology that includes man, through a clear grasp of his astral organism.

A renewal of religious life through an exact clairvoyant comprehension of the true human ego which exists beyond sleeping and waking.

From this point of view, I will make further observations in the next lectures on philosophy, cosmology and religion.

• 1. Dr. Jules Sauerwein, born in 1880; one of the most prominent French journalists between World War I and World War II; he met Rudolf Steiner in Vienna in 1906 and translated a number of his works into French.

Philosophy did not arise in the way it is carried on at the present time. Now it is a sum, a group of connecting ideas whose inner, real content is not experienced by the philosophers; instead, they seek theoretical proof for it to show that it relates to reality. So the philosopher is not able to verify his ideas in reference to reality as directly as one always can in the case of any given fact in the real world. Of course, people can certainly harbor some illusions concerning a given fact, but they can easily come to mutual understanding about it when confronting it. In philosophy, the ideas, which despite one's belief to the contrary are actually taken only from tradition, can be related in various ways to reality because this reality is not experienced. In this way the various, diverging systems of philosophy arise. The validity of none of them can be absolutely established because, as reasons for the one or the other system are presented, one can always bring forward opposing reasons to refute them. Since it is only a matter of relative correctness, one can say then that the one who proves something and the one who refutes it are, in most cases, equally in the right. While at the present time a philosophy can be attained that differs from that of one or the other philosopher, it is impossible to arrive at anything that both could be felt directly as real and that also carries conviction because of the directness of observation.

Philosophy has originated out of a state of consciousness differing completely from that of abstract thinking in which it is now produced. Therefore, one must learn once again to live with one's soul in that state of consciousness. But since humanity has in the meantime progressed in its evolution, one cannot just resume the ancient consciousness that gave rise to philosophy. While something similar must be attained if one is to have a philosophy today, it is nevertheless something quite different. The old state of consciousness, which gave birth to philosophy and by means of which a philosopher experienced the activity of his own etheric organism, was partly unconscious.

Compared to modern consciousness in which we think scientifically, that consciousness was dream-like. What we must keep in mind as an ideal for a new philosophy is to be able to experience philosophy in the etheric body, but not in that dream-like way as was the case in olden times. But it must be realized that these dreams of ancient philosophers were not dreams in the same sense as dreams are today. Today's dreams are pictorial conceptions in which, however, the reality factor is nowhere assured by the content of the dream conceptions themselves. These conceptions may consist of all kinds of reminiscences of life; they may relate to processes of the physical organism. In the dream conception itself one never has a convincing indication of any reality. With the consciousness that cultivated philosophy in ancient times it was otherwise. Those conceptions were also pictorial, but they arose in such a way that the picture absolutely guaranteed the presence of a spiritual, an etheric reality, indicated by the picture itself. Today we cannot abandon ourselves to this dreamy, half-conscious soul state. Our scientific manner of forming concepts requires that we think in a fully conscious way, that in all respects we live in full consciousness in our soul life if we want to attain knowledge. Therefore, to achieve a new philosophy we must develop a way of thinking that takes its course in the etheric organism, but at the same time is as fully conscious as the scientific thinking we utilize in mathematics or natural science.

Such fully conscious, pictorial thinking that relates itself to an etheric reality is achieved today in anthroposophical research by means of an inner meditative exercising of the soul. These meditative exercises consist basically in the concentration by the soul on a conceptual content easily visualized at a glance. I shall have to describe details concerning this meditating in the following lectures. You will find it also in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and in my An Outline of Occult Science. Here I shall only mention in principle that it consists in concentrating all the forces of the soul, disregarding everything that makes impressions from outside or from within, so that the soul's forces may rest undisturbed upon an easily surveyable concept. If, with the necessary energy and perseverance, you repeat for months or perhaps for years such a meditative exercise, you arrive one day at the point where you notice that in your soul-spiritual life you are becoming entirely independent of the physical organism so that you can actually come to the realization, “When I think in the physical organism I am making use of it as a tool. To be sure, thinking itself does not run its course in the physical organism, but, because of its finer organization, the latter gives a reflection of the thinking; thereby I become conscious of it. “

Without the physical organism the thinking of ordinary consciousness cannot be carried out; ordinary consciousness, therefore, is bound to the physical organism. Just as we realize clearly that all ordinary thinking takes place only with the help of the physical organism, we also see clearly that in meditation a pictorial thinking activity is brought into play; for by means of meditation, through these ever-recurring periods of the soul's resting on an easily visualized conceptual content, in this inner soul activity we are set free of the physical body. Now, a picture world is experienced that surrounds us, which, in regard to this pictorial quality, resembles the picture world of the ancient thinkers who acquired their philosophy from it. It is experienced, however, with the same clear presence of mind found in any clear concept produced by the observations and experiments of natural science.

In this picture world that he has before him, man now gains an overall view of those forces in his own being that have been active since birth as the forces of growth, and that were responsible for the increase in his bodily size. He also gains a view over the forces active in the metabolism, in nutrition, and in the processes of digestion. In other words, he gains in picture form a complete survey of the life forces that permeate him out of the spiritual etheric world, and build up in him a particular etheric organism, bringing about his form and his life. Again, there arises in man, but in full consciousness, what was present in the earliest philosophers in a dream-like condition, from whom later philosophers have simply taken, in a more abstract form, what is now commonly known as philosophy. In other words, he now rises to the level of supersensible knowledge, which may be designated as imaginative knowledge, the knowledge of imagination. In this imaginative knowledge he surveys the forces of his own growth and life.

But what one perceives here as the etheric or life organism is not as sharply separated from the outer world as, in sense observation, objective things are separated from what is subjective. In sense perception I know: the object is there, I am here. In etheric imaginative perception one's own etheric organism grows together, so to say, with the etheric cosmos. In like manner, one experiences oneself within one's own etheric organism and in the etheric cosmos. What is thus experienced through the confluence of his own etheric nature with the etheric weaving and pulsing in the cosmos, man is now able to bring into sharply outlined picture concepts, and then also to formulate and to express it in human language. In this way man can acquire a philosophy once again.

This philosophy, therefore, can be recovered through the fact that man works himself up to the development of imaginative thinking. But when the imaginative thinker—at the level of exact clairvoyance it may be called imagination—expresses his insights in speech and in thought forms, the matter is formulated in such a way that another person, who cannot perceive imaginatively on his own, can carry over into the full consciousness of ordinary thinking what the philosopher says, and, because it is different, it is also felt and experienced differently. But through the verbal communication and its comprehension, that reality is also experienced in ordinary consciousness. The imaginative thinker can imbue his words with this reality, for he acquires his conceptions out of the real etheric world.

Thus, a philosophy can again be achieved that has been won out of the etheric world, out of the human etheric organism and the etheric cosmos. It affects the listener in such a way that in taking it in with his ordinary, healthy understanding he feels: It has been brought out of the super-sensible—first of all from the etheric—reality. So, when imaginative thinking is attained, a true philosophy will be restored to the world whose authenticity is guaranteed.

For cosmology, the meditative life must be extended. This can take place, if—with the whole range of its forces—the soul accustom itself not only to dwell on a surveyable concept, or complex of concepts, and to dwell on it over and over again in order to enter into an increased intensive activity—which finally is torn loose from the physical organism and continues in the purely etheric—but the soul must also reach the point of being able to eliminate from its consciousness again those concepts on which it has been dwelling. In the same fully willed manner in which it concentrates totally on certain concepts, holding them in its consciousness, so the soul must be able to eliminate them again and to enter a condition of mere wakefulness and full consciousness, devoid of any soul content derived from the senses or from thinking. The soul must be awake but have within itself nothing of all the contents acquired through ordinary consciousness.

When, in full wakefulness, the soul brings about an empty state of consciousness after meditation and attains a certain invigoration with inner strength in maintaining this emptiness of soul while fully awake, then the moment finally comes when a soul-spiritual, cosmic content not previously known flows into this emptiness—a new spiritual world, a spiritual outer world. This, then, is the stage of inspiration, which follows the stage of supersensible perception through imagination.

If one has this capacity for receiving a soul-spiritual cosmic content into the emptied consciousness through inspiration, one is also able to take hold of what I called yesterday man's astral organism. It is that part of him that lived in a soul-spiritual world before it descended to earth and clothed itself in a physical and etheric body. Man becomes acquainted with his own soul-spiritual life before the embryonic life, before birth. He learns to know the astral organism that leaves physical man at death and lives on further in the soul-spiritual world. In inspired cognition he thus learns to know the astral organism that in ordinary consciousness lives itself out in thinking, feeling and willing.

But at the same time, he learns to know the spiritual cosmos. As man has the physical cosmos before him by means of his senses and his sense-bound thinking, he now confronts the spiritual cosmos; only, what within his physical and etheric organism is the work of this spiritual cosmos is much more real than the sense impressions received in ordinary consciousness. One can indeed say that what flows into man through inspiration, whereby he comes to a soul life independent of his body, can be compared with the breathing in of real oxygen. Among other things, through this inspired knowledge one gains a more exact insight into the nature of the human breathing process, and also into the process of blood circulation, which is rhythmically connected with the process of breathing. Through inspired knowledge, one gains an actual view of all the rhythmical processes in man. One attains a view of how the astral organism works in rhythmical man, and further, how this organism, ensheathed by the physical and etheric organisms, is connected with the breathing, with the whole rhythmic system, inserting itself directly in the rhythm of breathing and blood circulation.

Now we are also in a position to comprehend through cognition what is merely hereditary in the physical and etheric organisms and is therefore subject to the laws of heredity that are of the earth, and what man brings with him out of the supersensible, cosmic world, as soul and spirit being. This being enters the earthly world and only clothes itself in the physical and etheric organisms. One can then distinguish between man's inherited characteristics and what he brought with him out of a spiritual world into his physical existence.

In what we now perceive through our astral organism and its reflection in the rhythmic human processes, we have something that can now be integrated into the spiritual cosmos surrounding us, made accessible to us through inspiration. We attain a cosmology that can include man. One gains a cosmic picture of how man's astral organism, with the ego—of which I shall speak shortly—enters the physical organism on the waves of breathing and the other rhythmic processes. We see the cosmos in its fundamental, lawful order as it continues into man through his rhythmic processes. We arrive at a cosmology by which the astral organism is understood; likewise, the rhythmic processes in each individual person.

Thus, inspired knowledge becomes the source of a genuine, modern cosmology that is on a par with that ancient cosmology, which by man's dream-like forces of soul made him similarly a member of the whole cosmos, of a soul-spiritual, cosmic world. The knowledge gained in inspired perception, however, is gained in full consciousness, and can then be seen in its reflection in the etheric body. It is like this: The experiences of inspiration project themselves in pictures upon the etheric body. The insight thus gained in inspiration in the cosmos connects itself with the experiences of fantasy in the activity of the etheric body. What is inspired out of the cosmos is to a certain degree inwardly in motion and cannot at once be brought into sharp outlines. This only happens when it links itself with the experiences of fantasy in the ether body. Then, cosmology also can be brought into sharp outlines. Thereby arises a cosmic philosophy completely appropriate for modern man; a philosophical cosmology, which in this way is formed through a flowing together of inspired knowledge with the imaginations experienced pictorially in the ether body. It is such a cosmology that I have sought to give in my book, An Outline of Occult Science, translated into French as La Science de l'Occulte.

In order to establish the religious life on a basis of knowledge, further development of the meditative life, of soul exercises, is necessary. These exercises must now be extended to the human will. So far, we have chiefly described a form of soul exercises based on a special development of the life of thought. Now the soul's life, insofar as it is revealed in the will, has to be set free from the life of the spiritual researcher's physical and etheric organisms. That happens when the will is employed otherwise than in ordinary consciousness. I will illustrate this method by an example.

The events in the outer world are ordinarily observed as following one upon the other: the earlier one first, subsequently the later one—and thus we trace them also in our thinking. Now, however, we must try to place these events in reverse order, putting the last one first, then the immediately preceding one next, and so on back to the first event. In this way, through an exertion of the will in the soul, we accomplish something not achieved in ordinary consciousness. Normally, you follow the course of outer events with the will that lives in thinking. By means of this thinking in reverse order, thinking differently from the actual course of events in nature, you tear the will free from the physical and etheric organisms. The will that otherwise is merely a reflection of the astral organism is thereby bound to this astral organism. Since the latter is lifted out of the physical and etheric organisms through the other meditations, the will is carried along out of the physical organism into the spiritual world outside. In thus taking the will out of your own organism in the astral body, you also take with it, out of the physical and etheric bodies, what is the real spiritual man, the 'I.' Now, it is possible to live with the ego and the astral organism in the spiritual world together with the spiritual beings. As we live by ourselves in our own body in the physical world, we now learn—through such a training of the soul's life—to live together in the outer spiritual world with all the beings who first revealed themselves in imagination and inspiration. In this way we attain the ability to lead a life in the spiritual world independent of our own physical organism.

Such exercises can be strengthened still more, so that the will puts forth another kind of effort. The more exertion needed for this development of the will, the better it is for experiencing the spiritual world outside the physical and etheric organisms. Man can change his habits by making the deliberate, conscious resolve, “This or that habit you have had for many years; you will now change it into something else by an energetic use of your will so that in four, five or ten years it is so transformed that in regard to it you will appear like a different person.” They may, for example, be small, insignificant habits, of the kind that persist without being given much attention. If you work at them they are the most effective for the sort of supersensible knowledge I am now characterizing. For example, you have a certain form of handwriting. With all your energy, you apply yourself to changing it into a form different from what you are accustomed to and have developed since childhood.

When one devoted oneself for years to such will exercises, the soul finally becomes strong enough to live outside the physical and etheric organisms with the spiritual beings of the outer spiritual world, with human souls either before they are incarnated, or after they go through death and are living in the spiritual world before returning into physical existence and also with those spiritual beings who are only in the spiritual world and dwell there in such a way that, unlike human beings, they never have a physical and etheric body. In this way one arrives at living with one's soul and spirit in that world where the content of religious consciousness is experienced. In full consciousness one enters that world described by the ancient teachers of religion as the divine world; at that time this happened through a more dream-like familiarization with the divine, but now, it is through a fully conscious one, the same fully conscious state of mind as is only developed in mathematics or the exactness of modern natural science. In this way the third level of supersensible knowledge is cultivated, that of true intuition.

Through this true intuition by which we learn to live in the divine-spiritual world, we are able to bring back experiences from that world so as to form them into the content of religious consciousness. Once again, we learn to recognize a basic fact of human nature: how man, with his true 'I' and his astral organism, can live in a purely spiritual world. We now gain a view of man's condition in wakefulness and in sleep; we gain insight into how the ego and astral organism envelop themselves during the waking state in what I have described earlier as the processes of breathing and circulation, the rhythmic processes; but how, as the 'I' creates a reflection of itself in the physical organism, the metabolic processes that live in the circulation of the blood are included in this reflected nature. What man in his ordinary consciousness calls his 'I' is merely a weak reflection of his true 'I.' The true ego is rooted in the divine-spiritual world characterized above. In ordinary consciousness this ego is perceived through the permeation of the circulatory system by the metabolic processes. In these latter, pulsating in the circulation, one senses, feels, what in ordinary consciousness is perceived as the ego. But that is only a weak reflection of the true ego.

In the waking state the reflection of the ego lives in the metabolism that circulates through the rhythmic system of man. That is to say, the true ego exists, but ordinary consciousness only contains its reflection produced in metabolism. When, however, the human physical and etheric organisms use the processes of breathing and circulation, permeated by metabolism, when they use the forces of this rhythmical man themselves, as is the case in the state of sleep, then the true ego, with the astral body, lives in the outer spiritual world. Breathing and circulation, with the pulsating metabolism contained within, then care for the needs of the physical and etheric organisms on their own; the true ego and the astral organism carry on an existence aside from the physical and etheric bodies in the spiritual world. One beholds these alternating conditions by means of true intuition—how the physical and etheric organisms need the breathing and blood circulation, with the metabolism contained in them, to renew their forces. During this time the true ego and the astral organism stay for a while in the spiritual world, carrying on their own existence. When the forces of the physical and etheric bodies are regenerated through rhythmical man to the extent that further rhythmical regenerative processes are not needed, the astral body and ego return and permeate the metabolic process pulsating through the breathing and blood circulation, and man is then awake again.

Thus, one sees how the true ego and astral organisms pulsate in the metabolism. Thus, one learns to know that world designated by the old religions as the divine world in which the ego of man, the true ego, has its innate home. Since what one grasps in this way through intuition is once again reflected in the physical and etheric organisms as in a mirror, one can also express in words, in pictures, in concepts, what one experiences in the purely spiritual world, independent of all human corporeality. This can then be grasped in turn by man's healthy human reason. It can be felt and sensed, it can be experienced in the human heart, and then it forms the content of religious consciousness, which thereby is founded on knowledge.

It is not necessary for every person to find his way into the divine world through intuition. That must be done by one who becomes a researcher of the spirit. But when the spiritual researcher puts what he discovers in the spiritual world into words in the manner characterized above, it then takes on such forms that, through what comes to be revealed in this way, one experiences in the ordinary state of consciousness: “Here, words are spoken that do not relate to this world, but with the power of the reality inherent in them they fully come to life in the human soul.” It is through this power that what is drawn from the spiritual world by spiritual research through an intuitive experience of the divine-spiritual world has its religious influence upon our consciousness.

If men want to acquire once more through their own efforts a religious life based on knowledge, they must accept what the spiritual researcher is able to reveal as his own experiences in the divine-spiritual world gained through true intuition. The religion will return to what it once was. In its inception, every religion was a revelation from the divine-spiritual world: a revelation of those experiences that can be had with those divine beings that earlier reveal themselves to imaginative and inspired perception, but whom one meets on their own level only through intuition.

The kind of thinking that can live in abstractions, that is chiefly employed in scientific research and on which we base our observations and experimentations, has been attained only in the course of human evolution. It did not exist among those people from whom the early philosophers and teachers of religion came—those who founded the old philosophy, cosmology and religious life, of which much has been preserved by way of tradition. In those times, half-conscious dreamily imaginative, inspired and intuitive experiences prevailed. It is from these experiences that men of earlier ages drew their knowledge in every domain of life. Only since the rise of modern natural science do we have what we experience as abstract thinking. One should not believe that only scientists think in this way. Nowadays, it is absorbed through the ordinary schools and by the simplest person living in a rural area far from all urban culture.

No trace of the consciousness that is spread through the civilized world today by this abstract thinking existed in any part of humanity even in the eighth and ninth centuries A.D. Everywhere there lived what had been attained by means of the other three states of consciousness. But the fully conscious condition, which we must interpret as the true expression of mankind today, could be achieved only by the fact that abstract thinking, now the pride of scientific life, has integrated itself into the human experience. In other words, the form of thinking that utilizes man's physical organism and needs it in order to think as is the case today—such thinking did not exist in ancient times. Then, man thought only with the etheric and astral elements in his nature and with his ego organization. His thoughts were given him by the revelations of imagination, inspiration and intuition. This is still the case today with people who, through some circumstance that we will mention later, possess a kind of clairvoyance. That is not the modern, exact clairvoyance but something inherited from ancient conditions of dreamlike clairvoyance. Such persons are never able to control their soul experiences, but they can have them, as people in earlier times had them. It is often surprising what clear thoughts are given to such people in their dream-like visions; thoughts based on a far more brilliant logic than even a philosopher can produce. Those are just the thoughts revealed out of the spiritual world. In ancient epochs of human evolution, only such thoughts existed, that is, revealed thoughts.

Abstract thinking, the only kind known today, is obtained by using the physical body as a tool. It is experienced through the instrument of the physical body. This characterizes what modern humanity has achieved in rising to its full consciousness. In regard to the spiritual world, such thinking achieved through the physical body is actually a displaced thinking. For particularly through what I have just characterized, thinking shows that it belongs to the spiritual world. It is now displaced when man employs his physical organization in his thinking. Thereby, thinking lives in an element that is not its very own. But man, nevertheless achieves something in this thinking that he could never attain if thinking would merely result as a revelation out of imagination, inspiration and intuition. Because thinking is obtained through the physical organism it substantially contains nothing from the spiritual world. It is fundamentally an activity taking place solely in the physical body. In other words, this abstract thinking experiences nothing real; it is as if pressed out, filtered out of imagination. What is experienced is illusion. What we experience in abstract thinking is an illusory experience just because we become fully conscious in this thinking.

We can experience two facts in this thinking. First, the illusion in it, which does not itself pretend to express something, becomes a reflection of objective nature. Only thereby has man attained what he is so proud of today, an objective natural science. Outer occurrences in nature could not be objectively presented by a thinking filled with substance of its own. We cannot acknowledge such descriptions of natural processes as were given in olden times as objective natural science. Just because thinking has only a life of semblance, the outer world can reflect itself in this semblance. In a thinking that does not have a substance of its own, the substance of the outer occurrences of nature appears in picture form. So, humanity in its progress is indebted to objective natural science for the fact that it attained full consciousness in an illusory experience of thinking. The epoch in which abstract thinking arose also became the time when objective natural science was attained.

A second fact that man owes to this advance into abstract thinking is his experience of freedom. What man experiences as moral impulses through imagination, inspiration and intuition, even when he experiences it in a dream-like manner as in ancient times—when it was always experienced through dreams, instincts and emotions and thus became an impulse to action—this always puts a constraint on man. An instinct underlying an action in man's organism is something that drives him, forces him here and there. What is brought out of the real etheric world in imagination as moral impulses impels me; I cannot do otherwise than follow it. So it is also with what derives from inspiration and intuition.

Between birth and death man experiences the illusory life of abstract thinking, of pure thinking that is nothing but thinking, yet is carried out through the physical organism. If man now takes moral impulses into this thinking, they then live in the pure thinking that has only an illusory life and cannot force him to do anything, anymore than a mirrored image can compel one to some action. Something that thrusts at me in reality does coerce me. But something that has a mere semblance of life, as, for example, what we experience in pure thinking, cannot compel a person. I myself must decide whether or not I want to follow it. In this way, through the illusory experience of thinking, the possibility of human freedom is given at the same time. Even though a man's thinking is able to experience nothing but semblance, when moral impulses rooted in the spiritual world enter into it and form its content, then they become free impulses.

Man, therefore, owes two things to his advance to illusory experience in thinking: the era of objective natural science, and the attainment of real freedom. Just as I have described the ascent into supersensible worlds in the books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, in An Outline of Occult Science, and in Theosophy, likewise have I sought to present the basis for attaining the consciousness of freedom in the modern age in my Philosophy of Freedom. Thus, we can say that in the epoch in which man has achieved his full consciousness because thinking has streamed down into his physical organism and makes use of it, this thinking has rejected the old dream-like clairvoyance that was once the basis of an old philosophy, an old cosmology and an old religious life. Thereby man has gained the possibility of developing objective natural science in his physical organism between birth and death, and further, the possibility of developing freedom.

Today, however, man is at the point where, retaining his full consciousness, he must again travel the road into the supersensible world in fully conscious imagination, inspiration and intuition. He must do this in order to attain—in addition to what he can experience in objective natural science, and in freedom—a new philosophy, a new cosmology, and a new religious life built upon knowledge of the super-sensible world. These, as revelations from the supersensible world, satisfy modern man in the same way that he is satisfied when by means of his wideawake consciousness in the sense world he attains to an objective science, and to freedom.

Thus, we have now characterized freedom and objective natural science on the one side, and on the other modern spiritual science, and thereby shown how humanity must go forward from the present into the future, so that through attaining supersensible knowledge it can participate in the true human advancement demanded by the world order.

Through the meditative exercises that are to lead to imaginative cognition man's whole inner soul life becomes transformed. Likewise, the relations of the human soul to the surrounding world change. Meditation, as meant in the previous lectures here, consists in concentrating all the soul's powers upon a definite, easily grasped complex of ideas. It is important to keep this clearly in mind: it should be an easily envisioned complex of ideas to which the soul-spiritual part of man can give its immediate, undivided attention, in such a way that while the soul rests on this complex of ideas nothing flows into it of soul-impressions that well up from the subconscious or unconscious, or from our memories.

To bring about imaginative knowledge in the right way, it is necessary to confront the whole idea-complex, on which all one's powers of soul in meditating are centered, and view it as one would a mathematical problem, in order that neither emotion-filled thoughts nor impulses of the will play into the meditation. When we concentrate on a mathematical problem we know at every moment that our soul activity remains concentrated on what our mind is focused. We know that nothing emotional, no feelings, no reminiscences of past experiences may be allowed to enter the process of bringing about a solution of the problem. The same soul condition is also necessary for rightly carrying out a meditation.

It is best then if we concentrate on an idea-complex that is completely new, something we are certain we have never thought about before. For if we were simply to choose an idea from our store of memories, we could never be sure what would be playing into the meditation from unconscious impulses or feelings. Therefore, it is especially good to be given advice by an experienced spiritual scientist, because he can see to it that the conceptual content will not have been previously thought of by the person meditating. In this way, the subject of meditation enters his consciousness for the first time, nothing out of memory or instinct plays into it; only the purely soul-spiritual is engaged in meditating.

When such a meditation, which requires only a short time each day, is repeated over and over again, a state of soul is finally brought about that lets man have the definite feeling, “Now I live in an inner activity that is free of the physical body; a different activity from that of thinking, feeling, or exercising my will within the physical body.” What one encounters especially is the definite feeling that one lives in a world separated from one's physical corporeality. Man gradually finds his way into the etheric world. He feels this because the nature of his own physical organism takes on a relative objectivity. Man looks upon it as if from outside, just as he looks ordinarily from within his physical body out upon external objects. But what appears in inward experience if the meditation is successful, is that the thoughts become, as it were, more compact. They not only bear their usual character of abstraction, but in them one experiences something akin to the forces of growth that turned one from a small child to a grown man, or the forces daily active in us when metabolism nourishes our body.

Thinking certainly takes on the character of reality. Just for this reason—that man now feels himself in his thinking the same way he felt himself previously in his processes of growth, or his life processes—this imaginative thinking must be acquired in the manner just described. For if unconscious, or perhaps physical elements had played into meditation, those forces, those realities now experienced in supersensible thinking would also reflect back into man's physical and etheric organisms. There, they would unite with the forces of growth and nutrition; and by persisting with such super-sensible thinking man would alter his physical and etheric organisms. But this cannot in any circumstances be allowed to happen! All activity engaged in for the purpose of achieving imaginative knowledge, all the forces used in this task, must be applied exclusively to man's relationship with his surrounding world, and in no way may they be allowed to interfere with his physical or etheric organism. Both of these must remain wholly unchanged, so that when man achieves the faculty of hovering, as it were, with his thinking in the etheric world, he can look back in this thinking upon his unaltered physical body. It has remained as it was; this etheric thinking has not interfered with it.

With this etheric thinking you feel quite outside your physical body. But you must always be able freely to alternate at will between remaining outside and being completely within your physical organism. A person who has correctly brought about imaginative perception through meditation must be able to be in this etheric thinking one moment—which is experienced inwardly like a growth and nutritional process and felt to be entirely real—and in the next moment, as this thinking disappears, to be able to return into the physical body and see with his eyes as usual, hear with his ears and touch as he did before. At his absolutely free discretion he must always be able to bring about this passing back and forth between being in the physical body and being outside it in the etheric realm. Then a true imaginative thinking is achieved. I shall demonstrate in the second part of the lecture how this imaginative thinking works.

For one who wants to become a spiritual scientist it is necessary that he carry out the most diverse exercises, systematically, for a long time. Through what I have just indicated in principle, one will experience etheric thinking to such a degree that one can test what the spiritual scientist asserts, even though this testing is also possible by the usual healthy human understanding if it is sufficiently impartial and free of prejudice.

If meditation is to bring results in the right way one must support it by certain other soul exercises. Above all, soul qualities such as strength of character, inner truthfulness, a certain equanimity of soul, and especially complete presence of mind must be increasingly developed. It must always be repeated: a presence of mind that permits us to carry out, with the same attitude and disposition of soul as are required in mathematics, the meditative exercises and the exact clairvoyant research that is then undertaken. If such qualities as strength of character, integrity, presence of mind and a certain tranquility of soul have become habitual, then the meditative process, if continually repeated—perhaps for some requiring a few weeks, for others many years, depending on their predisposition—will come to the point of impressing its results into the whole physical and etheric organisms. Then man will really attain an inner activity in imaginative cognition comparable with that called forth in his physical organism when he uses it for perceiving the world through his senses and for thinking.

When man has achieved such imaginative cognition, he is in a position first to view the course of his own life from childhood up to the present moment as a unity, as a tableau in time. It reveals itself as a continuous, inwardly mobile, flow of development. This, however, is not the same as what usually comes into our mind as our store of personal memories. What man has gained through imaginative cognition that now confronts him, is as real as those forces of life and growth that bring forth from the small child's body the whole configuration of his soul, and then, in the further course of development, thinking, and so on. Man now surveys everything that evolves inwardly and represents the development of the etheric organism in the course of life. From what is thus surveyed—and it is much more concrete than the tableau of memories—the recollections that enter ordinary consciousness appear only as a kind of reflection, a surface ripple cast up from processes in the depths of our life. We now penetrate these etheric processes in the depths of our being, which otherwise do not enter consciousness at all, but have in fact formed and shaped out life from birth to the present moment.

These facts, these processes, confront imaginative consciousness. This gives man a true self-knowledge concerning, at the outset, his earthly life. How we can acquire knowledge of life beyond the earth will be shown during the following days. The first step in supersensible perception consists in confronting our own etheric life—the way it was spent from childhood to the present—in its supersensible character. Thereby we learn to understand ourselves rightly for the first time. What is experienced in this way is mirrored in our physical and etheric organisms in such a way that, in what is thus experienced as our own etheric processes, we have something that shows us how the entire etheric cosmos lives in the individual human being—how the outer etheric world, I might call it, reverberates and resounds in man's etheric organism.

Now, one can say that what is thus experienced can be put into verbal, conceptual forms, and out of the imaginative experience of the world in etheric man, a true philosophy can arise. But what is thus experienced remains completely unconscious for ordinary consciousness. Only the small child, in the time before it has learned to speak, lives wholly within this activity into which man enters through imaginative perception. For in learning to speak, as language develops in the soul's life, those forces that then are experienced as abstract thinking separate from the general forces of growth and other life processes. A child does not yet have this faculty of abstract thinking. The metamorphosis of a part of its forces of life and growth into the forces of thinking has not yet occurred. Therefore, in relation to the cosmos, a child is caught up in an activity into which an adult feels himself carried back through imaginative perception; only, a child experiences it unconsciously. The imaginative thinker experiences it fully consciously with clear presence of mind.

For the person who does not achieve imaginative thinking it is impossible to survey what it is that plays between man's etheric organism and the etheric realm in the cosmos. A child cannot perceive it even though it experiences it directly, because it does not yet possess abstract thinking. A person with ordinary consciousness cannot perceive it because he has not deepened his abstract thinking through meditation. When he does this he actually looks consciously upon that interplay of the human etheric organism with the etheric in the cosmos in which the infant still dwells undividedly.

So I should like to make this paradoxical statement: Only he is a true philosopher who, as a mature adult, can become again like a little child in the disposition of his soul, but who has now acquired the faculty of experiencing this soul condition of the small child in a more wakeful state than that of ordinary consciousness; who can lift again into his whole soul life what he was as a small child before he advanced to abstract thinking through speech. What one thus experiences, surveyed in full consciousness, turns one into a philosopher of the modern age. A present-day philosopher lives, fully conscious, in the condition of a little child before it has learned to speak. This is the paradox which, I think, makes it especially clear how the human soul within modern spiritual life will actually lift itself to a real, genuine philosophical disposition of soul.

For complete supersensible perception, it is necessary to widen the meditative exercises so that they can lead to inspiration. For this purpose, the soul must not only practice resting upon a complex of ideas as previously described, but also—in principle, this has also been mentioned already—it must become capable of obliterating the pictures that enter one's consciousness because of or following meditation. As one has brought about the pictures of imaginative perception quite freely and arbitrarily, one now has to be able to eliminate these pictures from consciousness, from the soul life. It requires greater energy to do this than to eliminate from consciousness ideas that have entered either from memory or from ordinary sense perception. One needs more strength to eliminate meditative ideas and imaginative pictures from consciousness than one needs for such ordinary ideas. But this increased power that the soul must bring to bear is necessary for advancing in supersensible perception.

Man attains this power by striving more and more to free his consciousness from these imaginative pictures when they have appeared, and to permit nothing else to enter in. Then there occurs what one may call mere wakefulness, without any content of soul. This condition then leads to inspiration. For when the soul has achieved empty consciousness in this way by means of the powerful force released by the act of freeing itself from the imaginative pictures, the spiritual contents of the cosmos stream into the emptied but awake soul. Then man gradually has before and around him a spiritual cosmos, as in ordinary consciousness he is surrounded by a physical sense cosmos.

What man now experiences in the spiritual cosmos represents itself to him in a manner that points back to what he has experienced in the sense world. There, he has experienced the sun, moon, planets, fixed stars, and the other facts of the physical sense world. Now that he is able to comprehend the spiritual cosmos by means of the emptied consciousness in which he experiences inspiration, the spiritual being of the sun, the moon, the planets and stars is revealed to him. Again, it is necessary that by his free will man should be able to relate what he experiences spiritually as the cosmos to what he experienced through his physical body as physical sense cosmos. He must be able to say, “I now experience something like a spiritual being that manifests itself. I must relate it as `sun-spirit' to what I experience in the physical sense world as physical sun. Similarly, I experience the manifestation of the soul-spirit being of the moon and must be able to relate it to what I experience in the physical sense world as moon; and so on.”

Again, man must be able to move freely to and fro while he is simultaneously in both the spiritual and the physical sense worlds. In his soul life he must be able to move freely between the spiritual revelation of the cosmos and what he is accustomed to experience as physical sense manifestations within earth life. When one thus relates the spiritual element of the sun to its physical counterpart, the spiritual moon element to the physical moon element, and so on, it is a soul process similar to having a new perception and being reminded of what one experienced earlier. Just as one combines what meets one in a new perception with what one has already experienced in order to throw light on both, so, in the truly free, inspired life, one brings together what one experiences as revelations of spiritual beings with what one has experienced in the physical sense world. It is as if the experiences in the spirit brought new inklings of what has been experienced earlier in the sense world through the physical body. One must have absolute presence of mind in order to experience this higher degree of supersensible knowledge, which is something overpowering, in the same quiet state of soul as when a new perception is linked with an old recollection.

Experiencing something through inspiration differs greatly from any imaginative experience a person could have had earlier. With imagination he lives in the etheric world. He feels himself as alive in the etheric world as otherwise he has felt in his physical body. But he feels the etheric world more as a sum of rhythmic processes, a vibrating in the world ether, which, however, he is certainly in a position to interpret in ideas and concepts. Man senses events of a universal nature in the etheric-imaginative experience; he feels supersensible, etheric phenomena. In inspiration he feels not only such supersensible, etheric facts merging into each other, metamorphosing and taking on all manner of possible forms, but now, through inspiration, he senses how in this etheric, billowing world, in this rhythmically undulating world, as if on waves of an etheric world-ocean, real beings are weaving and working. In this way one feels something reminiscent of the sun, moon, planets and the fixed stars, and also of things on the physical earth, for example, the minerals and plants, and all this is bathed in the cosmic ether.

This is the way we experience the astral cosmos. While here in the physical sense world we perceive only the exterior of everything, there we recognize it in its essential, spiritual existence. We also attain a view of the inner nature and form of the human organism, as well as the form of the separate organs, lungs, heart, liver and so on. For we see now that everything that gives form and life to the human organism originates not only in what surrounds us and is active in the physical cosmos, but also proceeds from the spiritual beings within this physical cosmos—as sun-being, moon-being, animal and plant being—permeating with soul and spirit the physical and etheric activity, and working so as to give man's organism life and form. We only comprehend the form and life of the physical organism when we have risen to inspiration.

What is experienced there remains for ordinary consciousness completely concealed. We should be able to perceive it with ordinary consciousness only if we saw not merely with our eyes, heard with our ears and tasted with the organs for tasting, but if the process of breathing in and out were a kind of process of perception—if one could experience the in- and out-streaming of the breath inwardly throughout the whole organism. Because this is so, a certain Oriental school, the school of Yoga, transformed breathing into a process of knowledge, metamorphosed it into a process of perception. By converting the breathing into a conscious, even if half dreamlike way to knowledge, so as to experience in it something like what we experience in seeing and hearing, the Yoga philosophy actually develops a cosmology, an insight into how spiritual beings in the cosmos work into man, and the way he experiences himself as a member of the spiritual cosmos. But such Yoga instructions are not in accord with the form of man's organization which Western humanity of the present time has acquired. Yoga exercises like these were only possible for the human organization in past ages, and what Yogis practice today is fundamentally already decadent.

For a particular 'middle epoch' of earth-humanity's evolution, as I should like to call it, it was appropriate, so to say, for man's organization to make the breathing process into a process of consciousness, of knowledge, through such yoga exercises, and in this way to develop a dreamlike but nevertheless valid cosmology. This knowledge, which led in that epoch to a correct cosmology for the education, in their sense “scientific,” humanity of that age, must be re-attained on a higher level by today's human being with his present composition of body and soul—not in the half dreamlike, half unconscious condition of that time, but with full consciousness as I have explained in speaking about inspiration. If Western man were to carry out yoga exercises he would not leave his physical and etheric organisms undisturbed under any circumstances; he would alter them precisely because he now has a quite different constitution. Elements out of his physical and etheric organisms would enter into his process of cognition, and something non-objective would interfere into the cosmology. Just as one must recapture, as a philosopher, the soul condition of one's earliest childhood, but now in full consciousness, so, in regard to cosmology, one must call up in one's soul life that soul state which was formerly valid for mankind, when it was possible to make use of the yoga system. But one must experience it with a total presence of mind, in full consciousness, in a wakefulness higher than the ordinary one.

So we can say that in this fully awakened state of mind the modern philosopher must again bring about in his soul the childlike soul condition belonging to the single human being, while the modern cosmologist must again bring about that condition of soul which belonged to humanity in a middle epoch of human evolution—and now again in full consciousness. The modern philosopher must bring an individual soul condition, that of the child, into full consciousness, while the modern cosmologist must restore in a fully conscious manner that soul condition present in the cosmologists of an earlier humanity. Consciously to become a child means to be a philosopher. The restoration of the condition of the soul, in which a Yogi lived during a middle period of earth evolution, and its transformation into full consciousness means becoming a cosmologist in the modern sense. In the last portion of this lecture, I would like to describe what it means to be a religious person.

Yesterday, I described how the third level of supersensible knowledge, true intuition, is reached through exercises of the will. You can read about them more specifically in the writings I have mentioned, and they will be further described in more detail in the coming days. Here man is brought into a soul disposition such as existed in a dreamlike soul condition in the humanity that lived as the first, primeval humanity on our earth in the beginning of human evolution. What existed, however, among this primordial humanity was a dreamlike, half unconscious, instinctive intuition.

This intuition must be brought again into full consciousness by a modern person with cognitive faculties for the religious life. The more instinctive intuition of primeval mankind still appears, to be sure, like an echo in some people of the present age, who express what they instinctively perceive in their environment as spiritual forces, with which they live as if in their outer world. These intuitions, which are echoes of the dreamlike intuitions of primeval humanity, can be made use of by such people when they write poetry or create works of art. Original scientific ideas may also stem from such intuitions, and they play a major role in mankind's life of fantasy.

What I am now describing as true, fully conscious intuition, and what is attained in the manner I described yesterday, are two entirely different things. Primitive man had a completely different soul disposition from that of modern man. He lived, as it were, in the whole outer world, in cloud and mist, in stars, sun and moon, in the plant as well as animal kingdoms. He lived in all of it with almost the same intensity as he felt himself living in his own body. It is extremely difficult to make this soul condition of primeval man clear for ordinary consciousness today. But everything that can be recognized by external history points back to such a soul disposition in primeval humanity. It was rooted in the fact that primeval man's bodily conditions were not submerged in the unconscious to the extent they are today. We modern men no longer live with our processes of nutrition and growth, with the processes in our physical organism. Spread out over this experience, which remains entirely in the subconscious, is the more or less conscious soul life of our feeling and willing and the fully conscious soul life of our thinking. But below our direct experiences of thinking, feeling and willing are to be found the actual processes of our human physical organism, and these remain wholly unconscious as far as our ordinary awareness is concerned.

This was fundamentally different in primitive man. As a child he did not experience definite conceptions such as we do. His conceptual life was often almost dreamlike, while his emotional life, although vehement, was even less distinct. The soul's life of feeling resembled bodily pain and pleasure much more than is the case with modern man. By contrast, primitive man felt how he grew in childhood. These processes of growth were felt by him as the life of body and soul. Even as an adult he sensed how food and drink course through the digestive system; how the blood circulates and bears the nutritive juices through the organism. Someone endowed with an organization like that whose development I described yesterday, can still gain an idea today, even though on a lower level, of this bodily experience of primitive man, when he observes how cows, after grazing, lie down, digest and are absorbed in the specific activity of digesting. It is an experience of both body and soul in these creatures that appears simply like the instreaming and inward lighting-up of cosmic processes. The animals experience an inner sense of well-being in digesting, in feeding, in the coursing of nutritive substances through the blood's circulation. You need not be a clairvoyant to be able to tell by the whole external condition and behavior of these animals how they follow their digestion with their animal consciousness.

This is how primitive man, when he entered the development on earth, followed his physical processes that were directly united and formed a unity with his soul processes. Because he could experience his own physical inner being in this way, primeval man could also experience the physical and soul elements of the outer world nearly as intensely as, if I may put it this way, he experienced himself in his lungs, his heart, the processes in his stomach, liver, and so on. In the same way, he felt himself in the flashes of lightning, the rolling thunder, in the ever-changing clouds and in the waning and waxing moon. He lived with the seasons, the phases of the moon, in the same way that he experienced the processes of his digestion. His environment was almost as much an inner world to him as his own inner being. What was experienced inwardly was to him the same as what he experienced in a flowing stream, and so on. The surging waves of the river were to him an inner process in which he participated, in which he immersed himself as he did in his own blood circulation.

Primitive man lived in the outer world in such a way that it appeared to him like his own inner being—as, indeed it actually is. Today this is called animism. But the use of this word gives rise to a complete misunderstanding of the essential nature of his experience, for it supposes that he projected his inner experiences into the outer world. What he actually experienced in the external world was to him an elementary fact of his consciousness, as much a matter of fact as the meaning we ourselves attribute to the phenomena of color and tone. We ought not to assume that primitive man dreamily projected fantasies into the outer world, and that these have been handed down to us as the content of his consciousness. He actually observed these things and to him they were as self-evident as the things we observe today. Sense observation is only a transformed product of primitive man's original way of observing. He actually perceived in the outer world what those beings were accomplishing in the etheric and astral cosmos, who, in creating, maintain the activity of the cosmos. This he perceived, even as though in dreams, in quite a dull way. But he did perceive it, and this perceiving was at the same time the content of his religious consciousness. Primeval man possessed a certain soul disposition in regard to the surrounding world, but this disposition intensified so much that, in the cosmos surrounding him, he beheld simultaneously the spiritual beings with whom he himself as a human being felt related. In his cognition man acquired the relationship to the spiritual beings that came down to us in derivative forms in the content of our religions. For a man of that early time his religious consciousness was only the higher stage of his primitive cognition.

If we wish to establish a new religious consciousness based on true knowledge, we could not do better than return to the soul disposition of primitive mankind, with the difference that it must now be neither dreamlike nor half-conscious. Our soul must be more awake than in ordinary consciousness, as awakened as it must be for the purpose of attaining genuine intuition, as I have already described. To reach genuine intuition we must acquire the ability to emerge consciously with our ego out of our body and immerse our own being within the other spiritual beings of the cosmos, living with them as we live in our physical organism during our life on earth in a physical body. In earth life we are submerged in our physical organism; in true intuitive knowledge we immerse ourselves with our ego in the spiritual beings of the cosmos. We live with them, and thereby bring about a link between our ego and the world to which it truly belongs. For this ego is a spirit being like those others to whom I have just alluded; and through a religious consciousness we acquire a direct relationship to those spirits, among whom we ourselves are counted. Primitive man was endowed only with a dull, instinctive religious consciousness. We must through our own activity bring back that ancient soul disposition and experience it now in full consciousness. Then we shall attain a religious perception, a religion firmly based on knowledge and suitable for modern man.

As we have to recover the soul condition of childhood and immerse ourselves in it in full consciousness if we want to become modern philosophers; as we must recover in our own age the soul condition of humanity of an intermediate epoch—men who were able to make the breathing process into a perceptual process of knowledge in dreamlike fashion—and permeate it with full consciousness if we are able to become cosmologists in the modern sense; so we must also revive in ourselves the soul condition of primeval man as it was in its relation to the outer world, and permeate it with our full consciousness in order to attain a religion based on knowledge in the modern sense of the word.

To experience once again the soul disposition of childhood in full consciousness, is the prerequisite for genuine, modern philosophy. To relive, in full consciousness, in our soul life an earlier intermediate epoch of humanity's evolution, in which the process of breathing could become a process of perception, is the prerequisite for modern cosmology. To revive the soul condition of primeval man—the earliest on this earth, who still lived in direct connection with the gods—to activate it in the present soul mood of modern man and to pervade it with full consciousness, is for modern man the prerequisite for a religion based on knowledge.