The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.

The exercises I have described for attaining inspiration are actually only preliminary exercises for further supersensible cognition. Through them a person is indeed able to view the course of his life in the way I have characterized it; he is able to see the etheric world of facts unfolding in the expanse of earth existence behind man's thinking, feeling and willing. By discarding the picture images achieved in meditation, or in the consciousness following meditation, he also becomes acquainted through this empty consciousness with the etheric substance of the cosmos and the manifestations of the spiritual beings who rule there. When, however, a person becomes familiar in this way with human soul life, the astral organization of man, he realizes first of all how much the physical organism of man owes to hereditary development, that is to say what are the persistent factors in his physical body that have been inherited from his ancestors. Man also gains a glimpse of how the cosmos is active within the etheric organism, and he sees as a consequence what is not subject to heredity but breaks away from it and is responsible for man's individuality. He sees what it is that within his etheric and astral organizations sets him free from his inheritance and ancestors who gave him his physical body.

It is extremely important to distinguish clearly in this way between what is passed on in the continuing stream of physical inheritance from ancestors to descendants, and what, by contrast, is given to individual man by the etheric, cosmic world, for it is this whereby he becomes personalized and individualized and frees himself from his inherited characteristics. It is especially important in education, in pedagogy, to see clearly into these distinctions. Precisely such knowledge as is indicated here can provide teachers with some fundamental principles. I may perhaps refer here to the booklet, which contains a summary by Albert Steffen of the Pedagogical Course that I gave here in Dornach at Christmas a year ago, also to what is contained in the last issue of the English magazine Anthroposophy, (July/August), which contains interesting educational material.

The inspired knowledge developed by means of the exercises I have described only acquaints man with the astral organism within the framework of earth life. He learns to know what he is as a soul-spiritual being developing from birth to the present time. But this insight does not yet enable him to say that his soul-spiritual being begins with earthly life and ends with it. He arrives at the soul-spiritual element in his earth life but does not come so far as to perceive this soul-spiritual element as something eternal, as the eternal core of man's being. For that it is necessary to continue and broaden the exercises for eliminating the meditative pictures from consciousness so much that in doing so the soul becomes ever stronger and more energetic. Progress here really consists in nothing else but continued energetic training. One must struggle again and again with all the strength one can muster to remove from consciousness the pictures produced or created by imagination, so that it becomes empty. Gradually then, through practicing the elimination of the images, the soul's strength increases so much that finally it is powerful enough so that one is able to obliterate the overall picture of the course of one's life since birth, as it has been brought before the soul through imagination.

Mark well, it is possible to continue the exercises for eliminating a content of soul and producing empty consciousness, carrying them so far that the soul becomes strong enough to leave out the course of its own life. At the moment, when one is strong enough to do this, one lives in a consciousness that no longer has before it the physical organism, nor the etheric organism; moreover, one no longer confronts anything of the world absorbed through the physical and etheric organisms. For this consciousness, the sense world with all its sense impressions is no longer present, neither is the sum of all the etheric happenings in the cosmos that one had first gained through imaginative cognition. Everything of this kind has been removed. Thereby a higher degree of inspiration is brought about within the human soul.

What appears then by means of this higher level of inspiration is the condition of soul as it existed in a soul-spiritual world before it descended into a human physical organism through conception, embryonic life and birth. In this way one attains a perception of the soul's pre-earthly existence. One looks into those worlds where the soul existed before it received on earth, I may say, the first atom of physical substance transmitted to it with conception. One looks back into the development of the soul in the soul-spiritual world and learns to know its pre-existent life. Through this experience, a person has grasped one side of the eternal nature of the human soul's essence. When he has done that, he has, in fact, recognized for the first time the true nature of the human ego, of spirit man. This latter is accessible only to this form of inspiration that is capable of disregarding not only its own physical body and its impressions, but also its own etheric body and the latter's impressions as manifested in the course of life.

When one has advanced to this knowledge of the human soul as it existed before birth in its pure soul-spiritual existence, then one can also gain a conception of what thinking, what the forming of concepts really is, as we human beings experience it in the ordinary consciousness of our earth life. Even with the most careful self-examination of which the soul is capable we cannot, by using only the capacities and powers of our ordinary consciousness, grasp the real nature of thinking and the formation of ideas.

If now I am to make clear how the real nature of man's earthly concepts appears to inspired consciousness, I must make use of a picture, but this picture expresses complete reality. Bring to mind a human corpse; it still has the form that the man had in life. All the organs are still shaped the way they were when the person was alive. Even so, in looking at the corpse, we must admit that it is only the remains of what the living man was. When we now make a study of its essential nature, we must conclude that the corpse as it now lies before us can have no original, independent reality. It cannot be thought of as something that comes into being in the same condition as it is as a corpse; it can exist only as the remains of a living organism. The living organism must have been there first. The forms of the corpse, its members, point not only to the corpse itself but to what brought it into being. Anyone who rightly views a corpse in the context of life is directed by it to the living man who produced it. Nature, to which we surrender the corpse, can only destroy it; it cannot build it up as such. If we wish to see the upbuilding forces in the corpse, we must look upon the living man.

On another level, in a similar way, there is revealed to inspired consciousness the essential nature of the thinking or mental picturing that we have in ordinary consciousness. It is actually a corpse; at least, it is something which during earthly life is continually passing over into the corpse-like element of soul. Living thought was present before man came into earth-existence, but instead was a soul-spiritual being in the soul-spiritual world. There, this thinking and conceiving were something quite different; they were living elements within spiritual activities. What we have as our ordinary power of thinking is a remnant of that living spiritual entity that we were before we descended to the earth. It has remained just as a corpse remains of the living physical man. As we are referred back to the living man when we see a corpse, so, if we now look through inspired knowledge at the dying or already dead thoughts or concepts of the soul, we realize that we must treat this thinking as a corpse of the true “thought being,” we see how we must trace this earthly thinking back to a supersensible, life-filled thinking.

It is this that also reveals qualitatively the relationship of a part of our soul life to our purely soul-spiritual existence before birth. Through this, we really learn to know what our ordinary concepts and thinking signify, if we trace them back to their living nature, which is to be found nowhere within earth existence. On earth, it is only expressed in a reflection. This reflection is our ordinary thinking and forming of ideas. Therefore, the abstract character of this ordinary thinking is fundamentally remote from reality, as a corpse is remote from the true human reality. When we speak of the abstractness, of the merely intellectual aspect of thinking, we vaguely feel that the way it appears in ordinary consciousness is not what it should be, that it has its source in something else, which is its true nature. This is what is so very important, namely, that a true knowledge is able, not only in general phrases but in concrete pictures, to relate what man experiences here in his physical body to the eternal core of his being, as it was just done with the thinking and conceiving of ordinary consciousness. Then only will the significance of imagination and inspiration be seen in the right light. For then we comprehend that the dead or dying thinking is basically brought to life again through the exercises undertaken to achieve inspiration; brought to life within physical earth-existence. To acquire inspired knowledge is fundamentally to bring dying thoughts to life again.

Thereby we are not completely transposed into prenatal existence, but rather, through the soul's perception, we gain a true picture of this prenatal existence, of which we know that it did not originate here on earth but that it radiates out of a pre-earthly human existence into man's existence here on earth. We recognize through the picture's nature that it is cognitive evidence of the state of the human soul in pre-earthly existence.

What significance this has for philosophical knowledge will be discussed next.

Just as we are in a position in this way to investigate the true nature of our ordinary thinking, we can also, by means of the supersensible cognition referred to here, bring into view the essential being concealed behind the will. But for this, not only is the higher cognition of inspiration required, but also that of intuition which I described yesterday, when I said that in order to develop it, certain exercises of the will are necessary. If man carries these out, he becomes capable of releasing his own soul-spiritual nature from his physical as well as his etheric organism. He carries it out into the spiritual world itself. It is the ego and the astral organization, his own being, that he carries into the spiritual world. In this way, he learns to know what it signifies to live outside his physical and etheric organisms. He comes to perceive the state the human soul finds itself in when it has cast these aside. But that means nothing less than gaining a preview of what happens to man when he goes through death.

Through death, the physical and etheric organisms are cast off. Thus, laid aside, they can no longer form the covering for man as they have done during earth life. What happens then to the actual core of man's being is something one learns through a preview in intuitive knowledge, when, with one's spirit being, one is outside in the world of spiritual beings instead of within one's physical body. Man actually finds himself in such a condition. Through intuitive knowledge he is in a position to be within other spiritual beings, as otherwise here in earth life he is within his physical and etheric bodies. What he receives through intuition is an experience in a picture of what he has to go through when he passes through the event of death. Only in this way is it possible to gain actual insight into what underlies the idea of the immortal human soul. This human soul—inspired knowledge already teaches this—is on the one side unborn. On the other side, it is undying. Intuition teaches this.

Having thus come to know the true nature of the eternal core of man's being—insofar as it is to lead a life after physical death—one also learns to perceive what lies behind human will. We have just characterized what lies behind human thinking; that is discernible through inspiration. What is concealed behind human willing becomes perceptible, if, through exercises of the will, one brings about intuition. Then the will reveals itself so as to show that behind it something quite different is concealed, of which the will of ordinary consciousness is merely the reflection. It becomes evident that behind willing there is something that in a certain sense is a younger member of the human soul. If we speak of the thinking and forming of ideas as of something that is dying, indeed as something that is already dead, and we view it as the older part of the human soul, then, by contrast, we must speak of willing as the younger part. We can say that willing, that is, the actual soul element behind the will, is related to thinking as a young child is to an old man, except that in man's constitution old age comes after childhood, while in the soul the two exist side by side. The soul bears continually in itself both its old age and its youth—in fact, both its death and its birth.

In contrast to such a knowledge of the soul based on inspiration and intuition, which is quite definite, what one calls philosophy today is something extremely abstract, for this simply describes thinking and willing. Actual knowledge of the soul, on the other hand, reveals that when willing turns old it becomes thinking, and thinking that has become old—indeed that has died—has developed out of will. Thus, one truly becomes acquainted with this life of the soul; one learns to perceive the fact that what is revealed in this earth life as thinking was willing in an earlier earth life, and what is now willing, something still young in the soul, will become thinking in the following earth life.

So, in this way one learns to see into the soul and for the first time to know it as it really is. The will part of the human soul is revealed as something that leads an embryonic life. When we pass over into the spiritual world with what we harbor within ourselves as willing, we have a young soul, which by its own character teaches us that it is actually a child. Even as little as we can assume that a child does not grow on into old age unless it is sick, so little can we assume that what we perceive as a young soul—initiation reveals this to us—dissolves at death, for it has only just reached its embryonic life. Through intuition we learn to know how, in the moment of death, it goes forth into the spiritual world.

That means actually perceiving the eternal core of man's being according to its unbornness and its immortality. By contrast, modern philosophy works only with ideas taken from ordinary consciousness. But what does that mean? As we can see from what has been said, it means that these ideas are dead soul entities.

When philosophy, working with the ideas of ordinary consciousness, wants to consider the thinking part of the soul correctly in order to reach results, it will say, if it is sufficiently free of prejudice to investigate what is actually present in the thinking of ordinary consciousness, that thought cannot of itself explain its own existence, just as it must be said of a corpse that it cannot come from a corpse but must have come from something else. Physiology indicates this through observation. Philosophy, from what comes to light here out of intuition, should draw the conclusion that just because ordinary thinking and the forming of ideas have a dying character it is permitted to deduce from this fact that something else existed earlier. What inspiration discovers through contemplation, philosophy can find through logical conclusions, through dialectics, that is, through an indirect kind of proof.

What would philosophy have to do then if it were to choose to remain within ordinary consciousness? It would have to say, “If I will not lift myself up to some kind of supersensible knowledge I must at least analyze the facts of my ordinary consciousness.” If it does so without prejudice it fords that the thinking and ideas of ordinary consciousness are corpse-like in character. It would have to say, “Because that is something that does not explain its own nature out of itself, I may conclude that its real nature comes earlier.” Of course, this requires an unbiased attitude in analyzing the soul so that thinking may be recognized as possessing something corpse-like. But this impartial attitude is possible. For only a biased attitude discerns something alive in the thinking of ordinary consciousness. Freedom from bias reveals this thinking as something that in its very nature has withered away. This is why I said in the previous lecture that it is quite feasible to grasp the content of natural science with this deadened thinking. That is one side of the matter.

Intellectualized philosophy therefore can only come indirectly to a knowledge of man's eternal essence and indeed, only through recognizing what, in regard to earth life, must be viewed as preceding it. If then such a philosophy not only inquires into thinking, if it desires not only to be intellectual but also includes in its research the inner experience of the will and the other soul forces, which, in the cosmic scheme of things, are younger than thinking, then it can succeed in picturing to itself the kind of interplay through which thinking is linked to willing. Then it can come on one hand to the logical deduction: dying thinking is connected to pre-earthly soul existence. Even though philosophy cannot look upon such an existence and cannot perceive its nature, it can infer that something, although inaccessible and unknown, does exist.

When, on the other hand, philosophy centers its attention on willing or the feelings, and experiences the interplay between thinking and feeling, it will eventually discover not only something dying but incipient in willing. This you can find even in Bergson's philosophy, if you put what he says impartially into the appropriate words. You notice the impulse he himself feels in the way he speaks, the way he philosophizes, and sensing this impulse he attains an awareness of the eternal core of the human soul. But since Bergson refuses to take supersensible knowledge into consideration, he reaches only a knowledge of the soul's essence insofar as it reveals itself in earthly life. Out of his philosophy he cannot derive convincing indications of unbornness and immortality. Yet, on one side, he does characterize thinking—although he gives it a different name—as something old which superimposes itself over sense perceptions as a corpse-like element. On the other side he feels—because of the living way in which he characterizes it—the incipient, “embryonic” quality of the will. He can vividly enter into this and he senses that something eternal is contained within. Nevertheless, in this manner he arrives only at the characteristic of the soul-spiritual core of man in earth life, not at anything beyond.

Thus, we can say that, if they are unbiased, all philosophies using ideas based merely on ordinary consciousness can, through analyzing thought and will, come indirectly to the conclusion that the soul is a being unborn and immortal, but they cannot come to a direct perception of it. This direct perception, which would bring the philosophies of ideas to fulfillment, this perception of the real, eternal being of the soul, can be achieved only through imagination, inspiration and intuition as has been described here. As a consequence, although the subject is still discussed as part of philosophy, it remains true that anything really substantial concerning the soul's eternal nature must rely only on tradition that rests upon the dreamlike knowledge of the past. Philosophers often do not know this and believe that they produce it out of themselves. This content can be permeated by logic and dialectic. But a true renewal of philosophical life depends on the acknowledgment by our present spiritual culture of the existence of a fully conscious imagination, a fully conscious inspiration and a fully conscious intuition, and not only acknowledging the methods for attaining these capacities but putting their results to use in philosophical life. I will try to explain in the next two parts of my lecture how this relates to cosmology and religion.

When you consider that only through a higher form of inspiration can one arrive at the perception of the eternal core of man's being and how it lives in extra-terrestrial existence, then you will say that only through this higher inspiration and through initiation (as I have described it) can the human being really know himself. What plays into his own being out of the cosmos, he can know only through higher inspiration and intuition. Since this is the case, a genuine cosmology, that is, a picture of the cosmos that includes man's total being, can arise only on the level of inspired and intuitive perception. Only then does man gain insight into what is also working in his physical and etheric bodies during earth life.

In these organisms, the soul-spiritual nature of man is not merely hidden; during earth existence, it is actually transformed, metamorphosed in regard to waking, everyday life. As little as a root can reflect the exact form of the plant, so little can an observation of man's physical and etheric organisms reveal the eternal part of him. This is attained only when we look into what lives in man before birth and after death. Only then are we able to relate man's true being, which must be observed outside of earth existence, to the cosmos. This is why modern culture had no way of arriving at a cosmology that includes man during the period when it rejected any kind of clairvoyance. This I have indicated before, but it becomes especially clear from what I have described today. Nevertheless, in earlier times, even as late as the beginning of the last century, but chiefly at the end of the eighteenth century, a “rational cosmology,” as it was called, was developed from the philosophical direction as a part of philosophy.

This rational cosmology, which was supposed to be a part of philosophy, was also formed by philosophers with the aid of nothing but ordinary consciousness. But, if, with ordinary philosophy, one already had the above described difficulties in penetrating to the true nature of the soul, you will understand that it is quite impossible to gain a real content for a cosmology that includes man if one merely wants to stay within the ideas of ordinary consciousness. The contents of rational cosmology that the philosophers have developed even up to recent times, lived therefore in fact on the traditional cosmological ideas attained by humanity when a dreamlike clairvoyance still existed. These ideas can be renewed only by means of what has been described here as exact clairvoyance. In this sphere also, philosophers have not known that they actually borrowed from the old cosmology. Certain ideas occurred to them. They absorbed them from the history of cosmology and believed they had produced them out of themselves. But what they brought forth were merely logical connections, by means of which they assembled the old ideas and produced a new system. In such a way cosmologies arose in earlier times as a part of philosophy. But since one no longer had a living relationship to what one thus absorbed as ideas taken over from ancient clairvoyance, the ideas of the cosmologies became more and more abstract.

Just take a look at the chapters on cosmology in the philosophical books of earlier times and you will find how abstract and basically empty those ideas are that were developed on the subjects of the origin and end of the world, and so on. It is correct to say that they were all brought across from ancient times when they were alive, because man had a living relationship to what these ideas expressed. Gradually they had become unsubstantial and abstract, and people outlined only superficially what a cosmology should contain, a cosmology which extends not only to outer nature but can encompass the whole being of man, reaching to the soul-spiritual nature of the cosmos. In this connection, the extraordinary brilliant Emile Boutroux¹ gave significant indications of how to arrive at a cosmology.

But since he also wanted to build only upon what ordinary consciousness could encompass, he too only arrived at an abstract cosmology.

Thus, cosmologies became more and more devoid of real content, becoming merely a sum of abstract ideas and characteristics. No wonder then that gradually this rational cosmology was discredited. The natural scientists appeared who could investigate nature in the manner that led in recent times to so many scientific triumphs. They could formulate natural laws, postulating an inner ordering of nature from observation and experiment, and from this they put together a naturalistic cosmology. What was thus assembled from the ideas concerning outer nature as a naturalistic cosmology, had, to be sure, a content, the external sensory content. In the face of this, the empty, rational cosmology constructed by the philosophers could not maintain itself. It fell into disrepute and was gradually abandoned. One therefore no longer speaks of a rational cosmology, arrived at merely by logic; one is satisfied now with naturalistic cosmology, which, however, does not encompass man. One can say, then, that it is cosmology in particular that teaches, more than ordinary philosophy, how one must have recourse again to imagination, inspiration and intuition.

Philosophy can at least observe the human soul, and, through unbiased observation of thinking whose dying nature refers to something other than its present state, it discovers that something lies outside all human existence on earth that includes man inwardly; in the same way, philosophy can point beyond death. Therefore, out of conclusions drawn from the soul's rich life of thinking, feeling and will, philosophy can at least make its abstractions rich and varied. This is still possible. But cosmology as a spiritual science can only be established if it is given its content also from spiritual perception. Here one can no longer arrive at a content by deduction. To attain a content, one must borrow it from the old clairvoyant perceptions, as was the case in the ideas adopted from tradition, or one must attain it again by a new method such as has now been presented.

If, therefore, philosophy is still in a position to carry on in accordance with logic, cosmology can no longer do so. As a rational cosmology based only on ordinary consciousness, it has therefore lost its content and with it its standing. If we wish to advance beyond a naturalistic cosmology to a new one that embraces man's totality, we must learn to perceive with the aid of inspiration and intuition that element in man in which the spiritual cosmos is reflected. In other words, cosmology even more than philosophy is dependent upon the acknowledgement by modern culture of the methods employed by spiritual science for attaining fully conscious imagination, inspiration and intuition—and not only acknowledging them but making use of their results to construct with their aid a genuinely real cosmology. What can be said concerning religion from this standpoint will be described in conclusion.

If our religious life is to be founded on knowledge the experience of the spiritual human being among other spirit beings must be brought back to earth and described. In these experiences we are dealing with something that is entirely unlike life on earth; it is utterly different. In them man stands wholly outside this life; therefore, these experiences can only be undergone by those human powers that are entirely independent of his physical and etheric organisms and for this reason certainly cannot lie within ordinary consciousness. Only when this ordinary consciousness advances and develops clairvoyant capacities can it give descriptions of those experiences that a human being has in the purely spiritual world. Therefore, a “rational theology,” a theology that wants to rely upon ordinary consciousness, is in an even worse position than a “rational cosmology.”

Rational cosmology still possesses something, after all, that at least sheds a certain amount of light on man's earthly existence. The reason for this is that in a round-about way, to be sure, the form and life of physical and etheric man are to an extent brought about by spiritual beings. But the experiences that the human being has in the purely spiritual worlds and which exact intuition gets to know, can in no way be discovered with the ordinary consciousness, as is the case of philosophy. They cannot even be guessed at. Today, when people want to arrive at all human knowledge by means of ordinary consciousness, these experiences can only be adopted—this is even more true than in the case of cosmological ideas—from ancient traditions dating from those times when men found their way in dreamlike clairvoyance into the spiritual worlds and carried across into the earthly world what they experienced.

If someone fancies that he could state something about man's experiences in the divine world in the form of ideas based only on ordinary consciousness, he is very much mistaken. Therefore, theology has come increasingly to a point of forming a kind of historic theology, adopting, even more than does cosmology, merely the old ideas of the kingdom of God acquired in earlier clairvoyant vision. These ideas then are made into a system by logic and dialectic. Men believe that here they have something fundamental and original, whereas it is only a subjective system of those who worked on this theology. It is a product of history, poured at times into new forms. But everything that is of real content is borrowed—by those who want only to draw from ordinary consciousness—from tradition, or from history. But for this reason, the formulations of various philosophers—who in earlier times created a rational cosmology and wanted to create a rational theology as well—were through this procedure discredited more than ever. On the one hand, rational cosmology as against naturalistic cosmology fell into discredit. On the other, in the field of religion, rational theology as against purely historic theology was discredited—the historic theology that renounced pure reality—both the direct formulation of ideas about the spiritual world and the experience of it.

This direct relationship, these living connections with experience in the spiritual world, vanished for more recent humanity when, in the Middle Ages, the question arose of proof for the existence of God. As long as a direct relation to experience of the kingdom of God existed, one did not speak of dialectic or logical proofs for divinity. Such proofs, when they were put forward, were in themselves proof that the living relationship to the kingdom of God had died away. Fundamentally, what Scholastic theology said was correct: ordinary reason is not in a position to make pronouncements about the kingdom of God. It can only elucidate the ideas already there, systematize them. It can contribute only something toward making doctrine readily acceptable.

We can observe how in recent times this incapacity of ordinary consciousness to determine anything about the kingdom of God has given rise to two errors. On the one side are the scientists who want to talk about religion, about God, but feel the incapacity of their ordinary consciousness and so formulate merely a history of religion. A religious content cannot at the present time be obtained in this way. Therefore, the existing, or once existing religions are considered historically. What is in fact considered? It is the religious content once provided by the old dreamlike, intuitive clairvoyance. Or, people consider that aspect of the religious life of the present time that has survived as a residue of the old clairvoyant state. This is then called “History of Religion,” and people do completely without producing any genuinely religious life of their own.

Still other people realize that man's clear day consciousness is powerless to determine anything about experiences in the purely spiritual kingdom of God. Therefore, they turn to the more subconscious regions of the human soul, to the world of feeling, to certain mystical faculties, and speak of an immediate, elemental experience of God. This is quite widespread today. It is just the advocates of this kind of experience who are especially characteristic of the spiritual state of mind at the present time. With all their might they shun the possibility of bringing their awareness of God into clear ideas that are logically formed. They give long explanations as to why this instinctive experience of God which, according to their interpretation, is the true religious experience, cannot be logically proved. They conclude therefore that the idea of expressing any religious content in intellectual form must be abandoned. But it must be said that these proponents of a direct awareness of God are the victims of illusions, because what is experienced in any region of the soul can in fact also be expressed in clear ideas. If we were to follow their example and put forward the theory that the religious content is weakened when it is expressed in clear ideas, this would prove nothing but that we should have abandoned all our truly substantial ideas in favor of a series of dreamed-up notions. It is a characteristic feature of present-day religious life that people rely on something which, as soon as it has to be made clear, at once falls into error.

From this it is quite evident that we can succeed in renewing religious life on a basis of knowledge only if we do not reject a method of cognition that can guide us into having a living experience of the spiritual human being and other spiritual beings. We have special need of this method of cognition precisely so that religious knowledge can be placed on a firm foundation. In the realm of religion, ordinary consciousness can at most systematize perceptions, clarify them, or formulate them into a doctrine, but it cannot find them. Without these perceptions, religion is limited to the traditional acceptance of what is derived from quite different soul conditions of humanity in earlier times. It is therefore limited to what would never satisfy a mind trained in modern science.

Therefore, if we are to base our religion upon knowledge, I must repeat for the third time something that I have already expressed today in regard to other areas of culture, but that must be expressed specifically for each separate area. If, out of the spiritual needs of the present time, religious life is to be renewed and undergo vital stimulation, the spiritual life of our age must acknowledge fully conscious imaginative, inspired, and intuitive cognition. Especially for the religious area must this not only be acknowledged but, for a living religious content, our modern spiritual life must also apply these spiritual-scientific results in appropriate ways.

• 1. Emile Boutroux, 1845-1921; especially in his De la Contingence des Lois de la Nature (Concerning the Contingency of Natural Laws).

In recent times, the question of the unconscious has come to the fore and is often spoken of in psychology. Everything in human soul life that cannot be reached, observed or explained by ordinary consciousness is relegated to the region of the unconscious. When this unconscious realm is mentioned, it is always supposed—notwithstanding the assumption that it must remain unknown—that it contains forces that do work into the conscious soul life. The emergence of this idea of the unconscious is due wholly to the fact that a certain skepticism, indeed a feeling of impotence, has arisen in recent times in regard to solving specific problems of philosophy, cosmology and religion. The insight that we have described here as imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge has the task now of probing into this undefined reservoir, which figures in so many ways in recent science as “the unconscious.” It is just by means of this supersensible knowledge—by reaching other levels of consciousness in which a different soul condition exists, hence a different perceptual capacity—that the concrete facts, which are not accessible to ordinary consciousness, must be investigated. Today I would like to give you an example of such research in an unconscious region of the soul, namely the experiences the human soul undergoes between going to sleep and waking.

Ordinary consciousness remains quite unconscious of what happens to the human soul in sleep. But we should not believe that these experiences have less meaning or are less decisive in a man's life than experiences of waking consciousness. Certainly, for external life, for our work and activities, for humanity's outer progress, the waking hours are of primary consideration. But for the configuration and the development of man's inner being, the rich experiences of the state of sleep are of the first importance. Even though man remains unconscious of them, these experiences are real, and their after-effects play into waking life. Man's general mood of soul during his waking hours is permeated by the after-effects of sleep. His physical and etheric organizations, which are worked upon by his astral organization and his actual spiritual organization, that is to say his ego organism, are permeated also. They too are influenced during waking life by the after-effects of sleep.

For ordinary consciousness the phenomena of sleep appear as follows: sense perception begins to dim down, in the end it is entirely extinguished; the same also happens in the case of thinking, feeling and willing. Except for the transitional state when we are dreaming, man sinks into an unconscious condition. But what happens to the soul then—and this must be strongly emphasized—is something absolutely real. What remains unconscious to ordinary consciousness in this respect can be illuminated by imaginative, inspired and intuitive cognition. Therefore, I will describe for you

the soul's experiences during sleep. At least sketchily, I will describe how imagination, inspiration and intuition can perceive what, for ordinary consciousness, is unconscious. I will outline the soul's experiences as if they were lived through consciously, for they are experienced consciously through higher cognition. It is not as if the soul were unconscious throughout the night, but what would otherwise have remained unconscious can be seen by means of imagination, inspiration and intuition. Light can in this way be cast upon it so that it becomes visible. The following then comes into view.

When man first enters into the state of sleep, the sense world around him ceases to exist for the soul. He goes into an inner experience that is undifferentiated, in a certain sense indefinite. The soul feels—I say feels but it does not feel; if it were conscious, it would feel—it feels enlarged as in a widespread fog. In this inward feeling and experiencing during this first stage of sleep subject and object cannot at first be distinguished. No separate phenomena and facts are distinguishable; it is a general sensing of a nebulous universality, which is sensed as one's own existence. But simultaneously there appears in the sleeping person what may be called a deep need to rest in the divine essence of the cosmos. With this outflowing of experience into an undifferentiated condition is mixed an indefinite longing—one must use such a word after all—“to rest in God. “ As I said, I describe it as if the events, experienced unconsciously, were passed through consciously. Thus, the external world of daytime, everything the soul receives through the senses, is swallowed up. All the stimuli through which the soul feels in the body are gone and, likewise, all the impulses by means of which the soul sends its will through the body are gone. The soul has at first a general, universal sensation accompanied by a longing for God.

In this condition, which arises initially after falling asleep, dreams can intervene. They are either symbolic pictures of outer experiences, memory pictures, symbolic images of inner bodily conditions, and so on, or they are dreams in which certain true facts of the spiritual world can be intermingled without the ordinary dreamer being able to acquire a definite knowledge of what the dreams really contain. Even for one who views this condition of soul with imaginative cognition—for by means of it one can do this already—dreams do not throw light upon the inner facts, rather do they veil the real truth. For this truth, in relation to what is meant here, can only be perceived by a person, if, out of his own free will, he prepares himself in an appropriate manner through soul exercises such as have been described here. Only as a result of these soul exercises can a clear view of this first stage of sleep be attained.

If you look with such cognitional faculties into this first stage of sleep, when you can divine it, it shows itself to be similar to, but not exactly the same as the unconscious experiences of earliest childhood. Indeed, if man were in a position to bring these experiences to consciousness and pour them into the concepts and ideas of ordinary consciousness, such as philosophy is occupied with, then these philosophical ideas would attain reality. The philosophy to which we should thus attain would be something real. So it can also be said that in the first stage of every sleep man becomes an unconscious philosopher. He attains to what in waking consciousness is cultivated in his soul as ideas, as dialectics and logical laws. If the flowing into the cosmic mists of the etheric world and the soul's longing to rest in God could be permeated with the experience of actuality, if man could bring these two soul experiences to consciousness and pour them into abstract philosophical ideas, then these ideas would come alive. Philosophy would then be as it was in Greece before Socrates, and in still earlier epochs of humanity. It would be an inwardly experienced reality.

We have now learned to know two stages of man's unfolding: that of his earliest childhood, which, if brought to consciousness, would represent the reality of philosophical ideas and the experience of the first stage of sleep, which, as we have noted, is quite similar to the unconscious experience of childhood, and which, when brought to consciousness, could in the same way give a living experience of reality to a philosophy worked out during waking life. That describes the first, somewhat brief stages that a human being undergoes from the time of falling asleep to waking up.

After the soul has been for a time in the state of sleep described above, another condition sets in. This second stage of sleep is such that instead of the experience of his own physical and etheric bodies, which he has when awake, man has a form of experience through which he feels inside himself the cosmos that in daytime surrounds him. While in the first stage the soul experiences no clear distinction between subject and object, this difference now becomes increasingly meaningful except that during sleep man has come into the reverse condition from that of being awake. He now feels and experiences himself in the cosmos and looks back on his physical and etheric organisms as upon an object. Just as he vaguely feels his organs—lungs, liver, heart, and so on—in day consciousness, now, in sleep, he experiences the cosmic content within himself; he himself becomes, as it were, cosmos in his soul. Not as if he extended out into the whole cosmos; rather, he experiences something like a reflection of the cosmos within him.

The first unconscious experience—which even so is wholly real—is, I might say, a fragmentation of this inner soul experience. The soul feels as if it were divided up into many separate parts of a manifoldness. It feels itself not as a unity but as a multiplicity; as if, when awake, we were to experience ourselves in the brain not as a homogeneous being but as a multiplicity of eyes, ears, lungs, liver and so on, and we were missing the sense of unity. Thus, during sleep, we experience, so to say, the cosmic ingredients without at first experiencing their unity. That brings about a condition of soul which, if we were conscious of it, we should have to describe as permeated by anxiety, even fear. The soul, however, really experiences the objective processes that cause this nightly anxiety, just as the organic processes of the physical and etheric organisms underlie what might be experienced here or there by the soul as anxiety coming from within. They are, in fact, fear-inspiring occurrences that the soul has to live through.

In this stage of sleep, occurrences of waking life now reveal their effects. For modern man living after the Mystery of Golgotha there appear the after-effects of what he experiences in waking life as inner religious devotion to Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha. The attention man gives to it, all reverence and worship that he develops for the Christ and that Mystery during his waking life, have after-effects in this second stage of sleep. It was otherwise for those who lived on earth before the Mystery of Golgotha. They received from their religious leaders appropriate measures, religious functions to carry out, whose effects they could carry over into sleep and that worked there in such a way that this anxiety could gradually be overcome. For a person living after the Mystery of Golgotha his inner bond with Christ, his feeling of belonging to Him, the religious rituals directed to Christ Jesus, his whole relation to Him and his actual conduct in reference to this relationship, all this now works into the life of sleep and helps to overcome that anxiety which oppresses the soul.

As I said, I describe things as they appear to inspired consciousness, but they certainly are experienced by the soul as reality. So, while I present concepts taken from conscious life, the actual corresponding processes are really present in the life of the soul. If, in daytime, we have developed a relation to the Christ, we actually meet His guiding power during this second stage of sleep. It is this guiding power of Christ through which we overcome the anxiety that oppresses the soul. Out of this anxiety there develops a cosmic relationship of the soul to the world. As a result of the development of this relationship, but in such a way that the soul experiences it as its inner life, the movements of the planetary system in our solar cosmos stand before the soul. It does not expand out into the planetary world during sleep, but an inner replica of it lives in the soul. It actually experiences the planetary cosmos in a replica. Even if what the soul experiences every night as a small, inner globe, a celestial globe, does not illuminate day consciousness, it does stream into the reality of daily life and continues on in the physical and etheric organizations in the systems of breathing and blood circulation, the whole rhythmic system, we find that these processes are accompanied by impulses and stimuli that live in the physical and the etheric body and work into waking life out of the inner planetary experience which the soul has in sleep. While we are awake, therefore, the planetary movements of our solar system pulse through our breathing and circulation as after-effects of sleep.

During sleep—supersensible vision shows us that astral and ego organizations are outside the physical and etheric bodies—the planetary movements do not work directly. They are experienced by the soul outside the physical and etheric organisms. But within the sleeping physical body the impulses from the previous night echo and reverberate, the same impulses that have pulsated through breathing and circulation during the day. During the following night an after-effect of these impulses is present, and they are renewed the next morning as a consequence of what the soul experienced in the night as an inner replica of the planetary cosmos.

Now in addition to this cosmic experience during the second stage of sleep something else happens. The soul receives distinct impressions of all the relationships it has ever entertained with human souls in its various lives on earth. We actually have within us, I might say, “markings” of all the relationships we have had with other human souls in successive earth lives. They now appear before the soul in a certain pictorial form. Although unconsciously, the soul really experiences everything that has been good or bad in its dealings with other people. Likewise, it experiences its developing relationships with spiritual beings who dwell in the cosmos and never live in a physical body, who always live in a super-sensible existence as opposed to the physical life of man. The human soul in sleep thus lives in a rich network of relations with those human souls with whom it has established such connections. These connections reappear, as does everything that has remained from them as after-effects of the right and wrong a person has done to others, the good and evil he may have caused. In short, the existing destiny of a person confronts his soul in this stage of sleep.

What an older philosophy has called karma appears at this stage every night before man's soul. Since the planetary experiences continue to work as stimuli in the breathing and blood circulation, and thus in man's physical and etheric organizations, it is possible for someone capable of perceiving such things through inspired cognition to observe that this experience of repeated earth lives also plays over into day consciousness, even though it is not directly present. It is clearly evident to inspired cognition, which perceives what the soul experiences, that repeated earth lives are a fact, for to the view of inspiration they present themselves directly together with the relationships established at any time with other people. Man's development through repeated earth lives presents itself because these relationships are beheld. One relationship points back to one certain earth life, another points to another life, and so on. In this way, karma appears before man's eyes as an established fact.

The experiences of the soul during sleep work in such a manner into day consciousness that man's general mood, making itself felt during the day in the form of a dull awareness of himself, depends on what we undergo in this second stage of sleep. Whether we feel happy or unhappy in our dimly perceived inner self, whether we feel lively or languid, is to a great extent the result of what is experienced in this stage of sleep. So, during this stage we find ourselves actually outside in the cosmos, even though what we experience within the soul is a copy of the cosmos; and what we experience of repeated earth lives and karma appears before the soul as images and reflections. These replicas of the cosmos and our destiny that stand before our soul contain what can be called man's inner existence in the cosmos. If you are able to formulate in concepts and ideas what has been attained through inspired cognition by letting it stream back into ordinary consciousness, you arrive at a true cosmology that encompasses the whole of man. Such a cosmology then is an experienced cosmology. We can say that when this stage of sleep is consciously reflected back, man learns to recognize himself as a member of the cosmic order—a cosmic order that is expressed in a planetary sense, as a cosmic ordering of nature.

But now, within this cosmic order, the moral world order arises. This is not as it is in earth life, where on the one side we find the order of nature with its own systems of laws but lacking morality, and on the other side a moral world order experienced as far as earthly existence is concerned only in the soul. Instead, we have a unified world before us. What we experience as a planetary cosmos is permeated and spiritually impregnated by a continuous stream of moral impulses. We live simultaneously in a natural and a moral cosmos.

You realize the full significance of these nightly events for waking life. So, we can say that what the soul experiences in the cosmos between going to sleep and waking is more real and full of meaning for man's outward configuration than what confronts him by day, for the life functions of the physical and etheric bodies, as well as our own moral condition, are results of our cosmic experience during sleep.

The third stage of sleep is characterized by a gradual transition from experiences within the planetary cosmos to an experience of the world of the fixed stars, so that this world is experienced by the soul as a kind of reflection. Yet these are not reflections of those outer sense pictures of the constellations such as we have in waking life. Instead, the soul becomes familiar with those beings of whom it was said in earlier lectures that intuition recognizes as the spiritual beings corresponding to the stars. Here in the sense world in our physical consciousness we experience the physical sense pictures of the stars. When, as I have described, we penetrate the spiritual world with intuition, we recognize that the sun and other fixed stars as perceived by ordinary sense perception are merely the reflected physical images of certain spiritual beings. The soul lives within these spiritual beings of the stars during the third stage of sleep. It feels after-images of the star constellations, that is to say, it feels the relationships that exist between the activities of the spiritual star-beings. The soul experiences such constellations.

Ancient dreamlike science specifically described how the life of the fixed star constellations and zodiac streamed into the soul. This is, after all, the main part of the soul's experience in sleep. In the sense world you arrive at a better correspondence to the single spiritual beings if you look at the constellations as a whole instead of gazing at single stars. In sleep, the soul, being free of the physical and etheric bodies, becomes so liberated that it confronts them both as objects, just as we usually have around us the objects of the external world as perceived by the senses. The soul really finds its way as a spiritual being into a cosmos consisting of other spiritual beings. What it unconsciously goes through there can be illuminated by intuitive knowledge. But the experiences there also have their after-effects in waking life; the general well-being, health and vigor of the human body—not of the soul as in the first stage of sleep—are after-effects of what the soul experiences during the night among star-beings. Especially there comes before the soul, even if unconsciously, the whole event of birth in its broadest sense; that is, the way the soul enters a physical body through conception and embryonic life. Again, there comes before the soul how the body is abandoned in death and how man's spirit being passes into the soul-spiritual world. Every night, the truth concerning the events of birth and death really confront the soul. It is also an after-effect of the night-time experiences that man has a dim feeling during the day that birth and death by no means signify for human life only what they appear to be to sense observation. It is simply not true that a man with sound common sense could believe that birth and death are nothing but the events they appear to be in outer material life. Man in fact does not believe this, but it is not true to say that the reason for his disbelief is only because in his fantasy he imagines that he is an eternal being whose existence persists beyond death. No, man cannot believe it because of the picture experienced every night by the soul of how man enters earth life from the spiritual world and withdraws again into the world of spirit. This picture streams into the soul by day and is experienced by it as a vague feeling about the world and human life.

What appears during waking life as religious longing, as religious awareness, is an after-effect of the soul's experience among the stars. What I have just described is the stage of man's deepest sleep. In actual fact, it is out of his sleep that man derives the religious feelings of his waking life.

Just as religious life can be founded today in knowledge by means of the experience resembling that of primordial humanity but permeated and formulated in intuitions by the fully developed consciousness, it can also be said that man can attain this religious knowledge if, through super-sensible intuition, he is able to perceive and illuminate the condition of deepest sleep. For what rests in the depths of sleep was also the source of what preserved man's knowledge of the divine. Our day-consciousness is only a reflection of the potentialities for consciousness open to man. Likewise, what man bears within him as a natural religious feeling appears as a reflection of the glory and sublimity experienced by his soul, even if unconsciously, in the third stage of sleep. Man sinks into the life of sleep not only to renew his tired body, or to gain the stimuli from sleep that his breathing and circulation need, or to acquire from the spiritual world the other impulses he needs. What permeates him with religious feeling penetrates to the soul's surface, to the region of day-consciousness from the profound depths through which human soul life streams during sleep.

One might say that as man lives a philosophical life during the first stage of sleep, similar to that of earliest childhood—however paradoxical that sounds to present-day consciousness—and as in the second stage he lives a cosmological life, so, in the third stage, he lives a life of being permeated with divinity. From this third stage of sleep, man must then return to daytime consciousness.

Having retraced the above-mentioned stages in backward sequence during the last stage of sleep, man returns again to waking consciousness. Since man's soul and spirit are outside his physical and etheric organizations in sleep, if this phenomenon of sleep is to be comprehended fully, intuitive knowledge must answer the question: Why is man drawn back into his physical and etheric bodies again? What impulse is at work there? If the intuitive perception of sleep is extended far enough, it is possible to recognize this impulse. As man cognizes these spiritual beings who correspond to the sun or the constellations of the other fixed stars, he then recognizes that the impulse comes from the spiritual beings whose reflection in our physical world is the moon. Indeed, the forces of the moon permeate our whole cosmos, and when, through intuition, we recognize not only the physical existence of the moon but also her spiritual correlations, we find that these spiritual beings, who correspond to the physical moon, are the entities who, in their working together, produce the impulses to bring us back into our physical and etheric bodies after we have reached the deepest stage of sleep. It is above all the moon forces that connect man's astral and ego organization with his physical and etheric organisms.

Every night, when out of the spiritual world the soul desires to re-enter its physical and etheric bodies, it must place itself within the streams of the moon forces. It is of no concern here—that will be obvious to you—whether it be new or full moon. For even when, as new moon, the moon is not visible to the senses, those forces are nevertheless active throughout the cosmos that bring the soul back into the etheric and physical bodies from the spiritual worlds. They are active even though the moon's phases appearing to the senses as half-moon, full moon, etc., are metamorphosed sense pictures that correspond to events in the soul being of the moon; these, to be sure, have something to do with man's spirit and soul in the physical and etheric bodies. Indeed, the particular configuration in which man's soul-spiritual and physical-etheric natures are linked is determined by those forces that rule and interweave in the cosmos and come to physical expression in the moon, the sense object, with her various phases that we perceive.

Thus, we can also look into the concealed aspects of man's life of waking and sleeping and inform ourselves concerning what it is that brings him back each morning into his daytime life. He returns through the same stages in reverse order, and while he passes through the last stage, which is permeated by a longing for God, the dreams mix again into his sleep life and he gradually submerges into his physical and etheric organizations.

Why is it that when man goes through the gate of death he is no longer subject to the moon forces? How does he withdraw from them when he spends a long time in the spiritual world? These questions as well as the secrets of birth, death and repeated earth lives will be considered in the next two lectures.

From the descriptions I have given of inspired and intuitive knowledge it will be evident that it is possible for man to experience the cosmos in his inner nature, his soul and spirit. I was able to indicate yesterday that such an experience occurs during sleep, only that ordinary consciousness is unaware of it. Man experiences cosmically, but in ordinary consciousness he knows nothing of it. One can say that man in his physical sense life experiences himself in his physical and etheric bodies and considers their organs as his inner nature. In cosmic experience—as it occurs in sleep, for example—he experiences as his inner nature a reflection of cosmic beings. Thus, even in the state of sleep man's ordinary inner world becomes in fact an outer world. When he sleeps, he simply has before him as an outer world his physical and etheric bodies, which otherwise constitute his being, and the cosmos which to sense observation constitutes the surrounding world becomes in a certain sense an inner world.

But, during sleep, a continuing desire to return to his physical body exists in man's astral and ego nature. This is especially strong in that deepest stage of sleep which I pointed to yesterday as the sleep in what I have called “fixed star consciousness.” This desire to return to the physical and etheric bodies naturally is connected with the fact that these bodies continue to exist, fully alive, during sleep. Man develops this intense longing to return because of the spiritual moon forces active in the cosmos, as I described yesterday.

If spiritual science, anthroposophy, is to be rightly understood, one must keep clearly in mind that the various relationships must be presented from the greatest number of viewpoints. For instance, someone might hear me say that the reason why a man wants to return into his physical and etheric bodies in the morning is that his soul yearns to do so. Then someone else could say that this return depends upon the moon forces. Both are correct, only that the wish to return is aroused during man's cosmic experience by the moon forces that also permeate his astral and ego organizations between falling asleep and waking. These moon forces, that is their spiritual correlation, cannot function when man is in his pre-earthly existence prior to his descent from the spiritual world and prior to his having taken on his physical body. When he is in a purely spiritual cosmos in his prenatal existence, no such relation to a physical and etheric body is possible, for they are non-existent. During sleep, however, they wait to be ensouled and filled again with spirit by the actual inner human entity.

Such a physical-etheric organism is not present in pre-earthly man, but something else is. At a certain stage of his pre-earthly existence he experiences a kind of cosmos as his , inner world. In a way he feels himself to be a cosmos. But in this prenatal existence, this cosmos differs from the one that surrounds us between birth and death and is perceived by the senses. This cosmos, which is experienced at a certain stage of pre-earthly life, is a kind of cosmic seed of the later physical human organism with which man must clothe himself when he descends to earth existence. Just think of everything earthly man possesses as his physical organism, spread out boundlessly: lungs, liver, heart, etc., all their processes—naturally as forces, not as physical-material organs—spread out into cosmic infinity. Man experiences this in such a way, however, that his soul encompasses this cosmos, having it at the same time as his inner life.

When I say that man experiences his future physical organism as a germ, a seed, there is a difference between using the word germ in one instance for spiritual existence and in another for physical existence. In the latter one means something small that unfolds into a larger organism. But when I say that the cosmic germ of man's physical body is experienced in pre-earthly existence as a cosmos, this germ is immeasurably large, and gradually contracts until at last it is small. Naturally, one must consider that in this case—at least for the spiritual, the pre-earthly existence—the word large is used figuratively in relation to the later word small, for in pre-earthly existence one does not experience space as one does here in the physical world. Everything is experienced qualitatively. Space as we know it in our sense world exists only for this sense world. But in order to illustrate this so that we can take something from human language to characterize these conditions of pre-earthly existence, this distinction can well be made. So, we can say that the cosmic human germ is immense, and gradually contracts more and more, until it finally appears small in man's physical organism.

Thus, we must picture to ourselves that in his pre-earthly existence man does not have the same star-filled view of the cosmos as we perceive it from the physical world; he has a cosmos around him that contains soul-spiritual beings. Man feels himself bound up with them, he feels them, as it were, within him. He feels his soul nature spread out far across this cosmos. This cosmos is actually nothing else than his future physical body expanded to a universe. Man experiences his future inner world as a cosmic outer world, which, however, he experiences along with his inner being. Therefore, we can say that this whole cosmos—I would like to call it the cosmos of man—that man experiences as his own, is his own individual existence. At the same time, he experiences the life of other beings, of other human souls and spiritual beings who do not enter physical existence. He lives into these beings, so that he experiences a kind of universe of his own and at the same time a kind of being-together with other beings. I should like to call this being-together with other beings at this stage of pre-earthly existence an active intuition; a real, experienced intuition. What is at other times reproduced in supersensible perception by intuition is a living reality for pre-earthly existence.

Now, in the way I described it yesterday, while man in sleep lives in a replica of the cosmos—being outside his physical as well as etheric organizations which, however, possess finished and completed form—in pre-earthly life he has the developing physical organism as his being, I cannot even say, around, but within himself. Yet, at the same time, man is within as well as outside himself, and his life consists in active soul-spiritual labor on the development of this organism. Whereas, in physical life, we arrange our work so that outer sense-perceptible objects are purposefully transformed and we ourselves are changed with them, in our pre-earthly life we labor to make our physical organism as it should be. We incorporate into it what later in earth life must be present as wisdom-filled cooperation of the physical organs with each other as well as with the soul, and of the soul with the spirit. Before birth, we live in a universe (which is our own being), whose development consists in being molded purposefully to serve as our future earth organism.

In this pre-earthly condition, we possess consciousness because we are present in this universe not only with our perceptions but also with our activity of spirit and soul. Sleep, by contrast, is without consciousness because the physical and etheric bodies are no longer developing but completed, and we cannot work in sleep on what is already finished. But we experience them in the form described by me yesterday. In the pre-earthly condition, everything representing our link with the developing universe, which draws together increasingly so as later to become our physical organism, all this is force, an inner mobility that expresses itself as a form of consciousness differing from that of earth life. It is a bright, clearer state of consciousness than the one that comes into being in our physical existence. With it we are able to experience our own working toward earthly life that is to come. If, here in earth existence, we observe our physical organism externally, or in the way it is seen by anatomy or physiology, we certainly cannot compare it with the grandeur, the glorious majesty of the universe that surrounds us as the world of the stars, the clouds, and so forth. Yet, what has been compressed into this human physical organism is grander, more powerful, more majestic than the physical cosmos around us in earthly existence, when it is seen as the universe by the human soul before it descends to earth. If you think of everything contained in materialized form in the physical body, all that is hidden in man here on earth because it has been compressed and covered over by matter, and you picture all this transposed into the spiritual, then you would have to think of a universe with which our physical cosmos, despite all its stars, suns, etc., cannot in the remotest degree be compared for vastness, grandeur and majesty.

We find our way into earthly existence out of a spiritual, pre-earthly world view having a grand, mighty content. The highest cultural work in which we can ever participate here on earth is but a trifle compared to that in which man shares during his pre-earthly existence. I say shares, because countless spiritual beings of the most varied hierarchies work together with man in creating the wondrous structure of his physical organism. This work, when seen in its essence, is of an inspiring and blissful nature. Truly, nothing small and unimportant is indicated, when, to the question, “What does man do between death and a new birth in pre-earthly existence?”—the answer is: At a certain stage he works with the spirits of the cosmos on the configuration, the inner wisdom-filled structure of a physical human body by preforming it as an universal spirit-germ.¹ Compared to man's earthly existence, this is a celestial, blissful existence. But everything that happens in celestial existence is concealed in immeasurable depths in the physical organism in which man is clothed on earth. Indeed, as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned, these celestial events belong to the most concealed aspects of the human physical organization.

This is the tragedy of materialism that it believes it can know matter and speaks always of matter and its laws. But in all matter, there lives spirit, but not only in such a form that we can uncover it in the present; it lives in such a way that to discover it we must look back into very different ages and states of experience. What materialism knows the least about is the material human organism. Not until materialism came into being did the complicated material structures of physical earth existence become as concealed as they now are from the otherwise admirable natural science of the present time. We shall now proceed to discuss other aspects of man's pre-natal existence.

The stage of pre-earthly experience I have just described can also be characterized by saying that man experiences his given environment, which is at the same time his own being, as an existence he has in common with the spiritual universe.

That universe, however, is an association of living spiritual beings, among whom man experiences himself as soul and spirit. This consciousness, alive and luminous in the highest degree, begins to dim, to fade at a definite point in time. It is not that it is then experienced as a weak consciousness but compared to the clarity and intensity it possessed during a certain stage of pre-earthly existence, it dims down. If I should describe by an imagination what a significant and intense experience it is, I would express it like this. At a certain point of pre-natal existence, man begins to say to himself: Along with my own being I have seen other spiritual-divine beings around me. Now it appears to me as if these divine beings are beginning to cease to show their complete form to me. It now seems to me as if they were assuming an external figurativeness in which they envelop themselves. It appears to me as if they were becoming star-like—like the stars I learnt to know through physical sight when I was last on earth. They are not yet stars, but spirit beings which seem to be on their way to star-existence.

It is a feeling as if the real spirit world withdraws a little from the human being, then retreated more and more until only a replica of it stood before him as a cosmic revelation of this spirit world. Instead of the intuitive, active life with the spiritual world, it is as if we were becoming inspired by a cosmic replica of this spiritual world.

Parallel with this vision goes an inner soul experience that man must undergo, as it were, in which the spiritual world in its primal aliveness withdraws and bestows only a revelation of itself to him. This awakens in his soul in pre-earthly existence an experience that, if I may borrow a word from earth life, I could call a sense of privation which expresses itself—again describing it in earthly terminology—as a longing for what he is about to lose. In the first stage something he once possessed is in the process of being lost, but it has not yet been lost. To the extent that man feels that he is losing it, a sense of privation and a desire to have it back arises inwardly. It is at this stage of pre-earthly existence that the human soul becomes accessible to the spiritual moon forces of the cosmos. The sense of privation and longing just spoken of prepare the soul to be accessible to them.

Earlier, these spiritual moon forces seemingly did not exist for them. Now, as the spiritual cosmos begins to fade away, a connection arises between what vibrates through the universe as moon forces and the forces of desire that the cosmos, which previously appeared to man as inwardly and spiritually alive, changes into a mere revelation to the degree that the earlier active, living intuition becomes an active living inspiration, to this extent the moon forces cause an inner individual being of man to appear. As a consequence, he no longer feels himself to be in an universe where subject and object do not really exist for him and everything is subjective. Hitherto, he has lived within other beings. Now, subject and object once again begin to have some significance for him. He has a feeling that he exists subjectively as an individual soul, something that the moon forces bring about for him. At the same time, he now begins to sense the revelation of the cosmos as an objective outer world.

To make use again of an earthly way of expressing what is actually present in this pre-earthly existence, I could say that in this human soul, gifted with inwardness by the moon forces, something like the following thought springs to life: I must possess it, this physical body, toward which everything has tended, which I myself along with others worked on as on a cosmic, spiritual germ. In this way man becomes ready to descend to earth existence. The sense of privation and longing linked with the moon forces prepare him for desiring earthly existence, to wish he were down on earth. This wish is the after-effect of his earlier work on the universal, cosmic part of the physical body. I said already yesterday that the moon forces always represent the element that prepares man for another earth life. During sleep it is these forces which impel him back into earth life. As I said, in a certain stage of his pre-earthly existence man is unconnected with these moon forces, but then he penetrates them. To the same degree, the tendency arises in him to turn again to the life on earth. Even though the earthly physical body and etheric organism are not yet there, within him are contained the after-effects of what he himself worked on and brought about as the cosmic-spiritual preliminary stage of the earthly body. After the translation I shall proceed at once to discuss the additional processes leading to earth life.

If I am to speak further in the way I have thus far been characterizing the relationships of man's total life as perceived by inspired and intuitive perception, I must say now that what man experiences in full clear consciousness during pre-earthly existence, as I described it at the beginning of today's lecture, is what he experiences later in earth life as his religious disposition. This natural tendency consists of these experiences as they are reflected in his feelings and heart (Gemüt), the feeling of his connection with the divine foundation of the world. If therefore man as a soul being in pre-earthly existence wished to explain to himself how this soul nature places itself here in earthly existence, then, in the moment when he passes from sharing in the living-spiritual cosmos to the experience of mere revelation under the influence of the moon forces, he would have to say: I pass from an existence saturated with divine activity to a cosmic existence. Under the influence of the moon forces, I now begin to draw together that brilliant cosmic consciousness I previously developed out of the whole universe into a more inward consciousness.

I said, the brilliant cosmic consciousness grows dim, but the more it fades the more does a subjective consciousness arise in man's soul to which the cosmic revelations appear as something objective. So we can say that man passes over into an inspiration in which he knows himself as a member of the cosmos. In this second stage of pre-earthly existence he experiences cosmology.

What man bears within him on earth as a striving for cosmological wisdom is an after-effect of these experiences of pre-earthly existence that I have just described, in the same way that the religious consciousness is an after-effect of the earlier stage of divinely permeated consciousness. These things are lived through in pre-earthly existence. They have their after-effects in earthly existence in which they appear as the religious and cosmological endowments of the human soul. Every night, as I described yesterday, they are renewed afresh. They are present as man is born into earthly life; he brings them along as endowments. The sequences of day and night cause them to become dim, but each night man's cosmological inclinations are stimulated again by the experience of the world of planets and stars. In the same way, his God-permeated nature is kindled during the last stage of sleep as I have already indicated. Therefore, one could say that if man desires to come to a religious life founded on knowledge, and to a cosmology grounded in knowledge, he must be able in fully conscious earthly life to call forth pictures of what is experienced in pre-earthly existence, as has been described.

In the stage when man is seized by the moon forces, when the outer universal world, which earlier was the universe of his own physical body, now appears only as a revelation—in that moment there occurs what I may call the loss of his connection with what earlier was his own human universe. Man loses this universal germ of his physical body on which he had worked so long. At a certain stage of pre-earthly life, he no longer possesses it. Instead, he has an inner being, called into existence by the moon forces, shot through and permeated by the desire for earth life, and he is surrounded by images of a spiritual cosmos. If he reaches out spiritually for these pictures he pierces right through them. Their reality is no longer there, at a certain stage of his experience in pre-earthly existence, reality has been lost to his soul. The soul no longer has the reality of this, man's universe, around and within it. Shortly thereafter—after the loss of this universal reality—earthly conception of the physical body takes place. The physical body is now taken over, drawn together out of the spiritual universe and further developed within the course of physical, hereditary evolution. What man worked upon cosmically for a long time in the spiritual world falls away from him and reappears again as conception of the physical human body takes place on earth. The processes that man has undergone spiritually above and in which he collaborated now find their physical continuation on the earth below. For the time being man remains unconscious of this physical continuation in his prenatal spiritual existence, for it takes place below on the earth. His spiritual-physical organism has streamed down to the earth and contracts into the tiny physical human body. The whole majestic universe is drawn together and permeated and penetrated by what physical heredity contributes. What man previously had as reality now surrounds him only in pictures; it is a cosmic recollection of the cosmic reality of work done on the physical organism.

In this prenatal period of his pre-earthly experiences when man is surrounded by the cosmic pictures of his human universe in which reality is no longer contained, he becomes ready to draw the etheric element into these pictures from all directions of the cosmos—for the cosmos also includes an etheric nature and is in this respect an etheric cosmos. Out of the cosmic ether man now draws etheric elements into his cosmic picture world. What is within him only as cosmic memory, he fills with world ether, draws it together and so forms his etheric organism. He does this at the time his Physical organism has fallen away from him, finding its continuation below, through conception, in the stream of physical heredity. Thus, man clothes himself in his etheric organism.

Now everything that lives in the soul as a sense of privation and desires, as longing for earthly life, passes along into the etheric organism, which is accustomed to being united with a physical, bodily organization since it permeates the physical organization of the cosmos. From all this arise the forces that draw man down again into what he was unaware of earlier when he had cosmic consciousness. Now, the soul-spiritual human being, clothed in the etheric body, strives by its own wish down toward what his physical organism has become on earth, which he himself prepared in the first place in its spiritual form. This, then, after the above-described experiences, brings about the union of the soul-spiritual with the physical body. The remaining points that can be mentioned will be added in the last brief consideration.

I believe it has become clear where the boundary exists between that of what the human soul is aware and that of what the human soul is unaware in a pre-earthly sense during the last stage of prenatal experience which directly precedes earthly experience. The human soul is conscious of the subjective element that the moon forces have brought about in the soul; it is conscious of the universal tableau that is now merely present in pictures like a cosmic memory of the work done on man's universe; it is conscious of how the forces draw together out of the world ether to create the human etheric organism. It remains unconscious of everything that happens on the earth below in the physical human organism, which only now has come into form through its physical metamorphosis, and through conception will develop further in the line of physical heredity. But, as I indicated, there is a union of the last cosmic consciousness with what is unconscious; a submerging into this unconsciousness.

With this, the cosmic consciousness is extinguished, and in a tiny infant there appears something like an unconscious memory of what has been experienced in pre-earthly exis tence. An unconscious but active memory then works intensively upon the baby's development, using the undifferentiated, or little differentiated substance of the human brain and the rest of the organism. Already during the embryonic stage, during which the uniting process mentioned gradually takes place, and also later, after birth, man works like a sculptor on the formation of the brain and the remaining organs. This unconscious but active memory of pre-earthly life works on the organism most intensively in a child's first years. While what is most essential has been previously prepared and then is realized in its after-effects, much is still to be worked into this cosmic-physical, spiritual organism condensed into a physical human body. This is a contradiction but must be understood in the context in which I have described it for you today. Much is still to be worked into this organism. It is therefore the unconscious but active memory that works in the infant as an inner human, sculpturing element.

If the consciously experienced last stage of pre-earthly life could be brought into earth life, the pure philosophy of ideas would have its supersensible content. For just that cosmic etheric element that plays into the images of the human organism is what yields a truly alive philosophical conception. But, even so, in spite of its lively quality, something in this philosophical conception is lacking. It corresponds, after all, to a stage of pre-earthly experience where man is particularly estranged from his physical organism, when he is unconscious of it. This lends a somewhat otherworldly quality to even the most alive philosophy, for instance the kind that arises out of the dreamlike clairvoyance of primeval times. Because philosophy, if it is alive, corresponds an experience which earth life escapes, it always has a strong desire to comprehend earthly activities but feels itself hovering above earthly existence. Philosophy always has an idealistic quality, which implies that it is based on something not of this earth, particularly when it is inwardly alive. Actually, it is only in the last stage of pre-earthly existence that a man is a philosopher. It would be necessary to recall here in earth life what is spontaneously present in his conscious experience in that last period. There, man is a true philosopher, as earlier he was a true cosmologist when confronting the cosmic revelations, when the cosmic beings had already withdrawn from him; and he was a true perceiver of religion in the first pre-earthly stage I described today. But since an unconscious but active memory appears in the infant, it was also possible for me to say here: If you could include in the philosophy of ideas and bring to full consciousness what appears unconsciously in an infant, philosophy would arise. That is quite natural, because what an infant experiences is the unconscious memory of what the soul experiences in the last stage before its union with the physical body.

Therefore, religious insight, cosmology and philosophy must be gifts out of the supersensible world if they are to be right. Only if they become this again, and are recognized as such by man, will they fully satisfy humanity's spiritual needs.

Today I have sought to describe for you those matters connected with the mystery of birth. In the following days I will have to present the other side, the matters that are connected with the mystery of death, in order gradually to round out the picture that should represent for us how what is of the greatest spiritual value here in earth life must be a reflection, a replica, an effect of what man can experience, perceive and know in supersensible existence, because he is not only an earthly sense being but a soul-spiritual, supersensible being and therefore belongs also to the world of soul and spirit. And if he is to feel himself fully as man in human life at every stage of sense experience, he must also include knowledge of the supersensible in his life on earth.

• 1. For this concept see especially the cycle given in the Hague in November 1923 translated under the title of Supersensible Man, in the fourth lecture of which Rudolf Steiner explains how the spirit-germ of each organ is created in the different spheres of the cosmos during the life between death and rebirth.

Yesterday I tried to explain how man, who as a soul-spiritual being has been living in the spiritual world during pre-earthly existence, makes his transition to the physical earth. If we want to place before our souls the very real intervention of the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha in the evolution of earth-humanity, it is absolutely necessary to acknowledge the pre-earthly existence of man and thus come to understand the eternal essence of his being. For, in order to comprehend the actual nature of this Mystery, we must be able to follow this Being, the Christ, Who belongs to the spiritual worlds, in His descent from extra-terrestrial regions right down into earth existence. This Being had lived only in those regions where we too spend our pre-natal existence until the time came when in the man Jesus He took on an earthly form and began his earthly activity.

If man wants to arrive at such an understanding of the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha in relation to the event of human birth, of which I spoke sketchily yesterday, he must bear in mind first of all that man's soul constitution and his inner experience have passed in the course of mankind's evolution on earth through most significant and important transformations. Today, people often assume that the soul constitution, and those states of consciousness in which modern man finds himself in waking and sleeping, have always belonged to humanity, at least essentially, since human history began. At most, the world view arrived at in natural scientific cosmology points back to a primitive half-animal-like form possessed by early humanity, as we shall be discussing presently. Such a being's inner nature would of course have to be pictured as different from the thinking, feeling and willing of today's human being. But the transformations that man's consciousness, his whole inner soul structure, have passed through since the primeval times of earth evolution, are rarely pointed out today; yet in these transformations there lies something immensely important and substantial.

When we go back to ancient times of human evolution—we need not go back to the most primeval but to about the second or third millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha—we find that mankind had a quite different consciousness, a quite different configuration of soul, than later on. The pronounced difference that exists between waking and sleeping in man today did exist at that time, but it was not the only aspect of the daily change in human consciousness. Today man only knows the states of waking and sleeping, and between them, dreams. While we are aware of a certain content in dreams, we must admit that it is often misleading. In any case, this dream content does not point to any reality that man can control directly with his day consciousness, although he certainly can indirectly. But apart from these three states of consciousness, of which that of dreams is most questionable, at least as far as gaining knowledge is concerned, an intermediate state existed for ancient humanity. It was neither that of dreams, nor of full wakefulness. Nor was it a condition of deep sleep, or half-conscious dreaming as we have it today. Rather, it was a pictorial “waking-dreaming,” as one might put it. Pictures flowed within it as thoughts run today through our waking consciousness. These pictures were similar in form to our dream pictures, but what they contained pointed to a pronounced supersensible reality, as our perceptions point to a physical reality. Just as we know, when we see a physical being with colors and shapes, that it is a physical reality, so did ancient man experience pictures which moved freely and lightly in his consciousness as our dream pictures move in ours, except that it was impossible to doubt that their content pointed to a spiritual reality. Just as today, when our eyes perceive something, we know with certainty that something physical is out there, so did a man of the past know that he perceived something spiritually real when such images passed through his consciousness.

Among what ancient man experienced as spiritually real there was also an echo of pre-earthly existence. The human being of that epoch simply had every day in his soul inner experiences that proved to him beyond all doubt that he had lived in a soul-spiritual condition, in a purely spiritual world, before entering earthly life. Men of this ancient time knew of this throughout their lives. They therefore accepted as fully evident the existence of an eternal core of man's being, and of an extra-terrestrial world to which they belonged as much as they belonged to the terrestrial world. Those who, as initiates of the mysteries, were initiated in the more profound aspects of these truths were able to speak to their followers out of their initiation science in such a manner that these faithful could arrive at the conviction that they looked into an after-image of their pre-earthly existence, and at the same time into a spiritual world to which man belongs with the eternal core of his being. This, they felt, was a gift of grace bestowed by that spiritual being whose physical image is the physical sun we see in the sky.

Thus, someone who accepted the old mystery wisdom could say: I look up to the sun, but this outer, physical sun is only an image of a spiritual sun being. This spiritual sun being permeates the spiritual world from which I myself descended to an earthly existence, and the power of this sun being has endowed my soul with that faculty, which brings it about that among my soul experiences during the sojourn on earth, I also have this, namely, that in looking back upon my pre-earthly existence, I can be sure of the eternal core-being in my soul.

For a man who, in ancient times felt the grace of the Sun Being, human death on earth was no special riddle. He was supported by the power of his initiates and knew of his pre-earthly existence and of his own external nature. He realized that death concerned only the physical human organism. He knew of something within him that had at the beginning of his earthly life descended into his physical organism. For him, death was an event that did not touch his inner being. He knew of it through his outer form of consciousness.

This was the soul condition of human beings in ancient epochs preceding the Mystery of Golgotha. In those epochs, the secret of birth lay open to a vision turned inward that was striving toward the grace of the Sun Being. While they could comprehend this secret of birth, the riddle of death was not yet present in the manner in which it existed for men of a later time. I shall speak in the second part of this lecture about how all this changed in the course of time.

This consciousness of ancient mankind that lived in pictures—and the way it affected the remaining soul constitution—was aware of the soul in such a way that the active, intense ego consciousness, possessed by mankind today, could not yet arise at that time. Man had insight into his own eternal essence but lacked a pronounced inner sensation of his ego-hood. Nor would he ever have achieved it if that ancient picture consciousness had remained with him as his endowment. But in fact, it ceased. Just when the time for the Mystery of Golgotha was drawing near, it gradually dimmed, to be replaced increasingly by the kind of ordinary consciousness we possess today, with its sharp contrast between sleeping and waking, and, in between, the dubious world of dreams. Mankind had lost that part of self-knowledge that looked back in direct vision to pre-earthly life and with it to the eternal core of man's being. But this was precisely what was necessary if man was to reach gradually his full ego consciousness. Although in that middle period of human evolution, around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, full ego consciousness had not yet appeared in all mankind, it was being slowly prepared. With it people were confronted in full measure and with great intensity with the riddle of death. For they no longer knew anything through direct vision about the world from which they had descended into earthly existence.

In the age when humanity passed through this stage of its evolution the Christ appeared, descending out of the same world from which the human soul always descends again to birth, and, through the events of Palestine, united Himself with the man, Jesus. At that time the old traditions, namely the old methods of the initiation centers were still preserved. Although they were but a vestige of the ancient initiation, even in their weakened form they could still lead to a knowledge concerning the way the spiritual world looks and the kind of connection man has to it. The initiates of that time could address those willing to receive their words and say: The Sun Being, He who formerly bestowed grace upon men by granting them a vision of an after-image of pre-earthly life, He whose physical reflection is the physical sun, this Sun Being has descended to earth. He lived, or has lived in the man Jesus. He took on a physical body in order not only to remain connected from this time onward with the spiritual world, in which man lives between death and a new birth, but also to live within human evolution on earth itself.

Out of the remnants of the old initiation, the initiates, who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, spoke about the secret of the Christ to those who were willing to accept it and had confidence in them. Those who had this trust could learn how the Christ had entered an earthly body, so that not through some kind of teaching but through His deed He could resolve the riddle that only then affected humanity in full intensity—the riddle of death. The initiates pointed out to the people that the Christ had come in order to solve the riddle of death on earth in a way suitable for man. For at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place in the earth-realm, those who possessed the vestiges of the ancient methods of initiation spoke above all else about the spiritual being of Christ as He appeared in the spiritual world. The path was described which the Christ, Who never before had descended to earth existence, had taken from the spiritual world down to earth. In all these descriptions given by the initiated contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, the main teaching was about the way the Christ descended into the man Jesus and Himself became man in him. At that time people did not merely refer to the historical Jesus and ask: What position does this historical Jesus occupy in human evolution?—Ordinary consciousness was, after all, faced with him. Some of his contemporaries were in direct contact with him, while those who came later were aware of him in their physical sense consciousness through historical tradition. But those who knew something about the spiritual worlds because of their knowledge of ancient initiation science could say: That Being Who was once looked upon as the lofty Sun Being, the bestower of the grace we described, has taken the path leading to the earth and to the man Jesus. He has then passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, because man could no longer consciously see into pre-earthly life and so was unable to solve the riddle of death. Indeed, he could no longer be aware of this Being at all—the lofty Sun Being Who, by giving men the vision of the after-image of the world in which they had lived before birth overcame earthly death. This Being Itself descended to earth, took on human form and went through the Mystery of Golgotha in order, through what the event signified, to give back to men on earth—but this time from outside—the after-image of pre-earthly life that in earlier times He had been able to impart to them for their inner soul life in the form of pictures. It was in a manner somewhat like this that the initiated contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha expressed themselves.

Formerly, man through grace was blessed with a capacity in his consciousness that enabled him to experience his eternal essence directly when he looked back into his life before birth. But he had to develop further. He had to develop a clear earthly consciousness that could only be kindled and developed by means of the sense world. This is what caused the old consciousness, by means of which man had formerly been able to recognize his eternal nature, to recede. But that Being, Who had earlier enabled man to perceive his own eternal being from the spiritual world, accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha after His descent to earth so that man, by perceiving and understanding this event, might himself experience from outside what earlier he had experienced from within. From the Christ on earth man is to experience further what he had earlier experienced from the spiritual world through Christ.

In the third part of this lecture I shall explain the significance this had for the further course of mankind's evolution.

The vestiges of the old initiation methods through which the initiates at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and even their successors, were able to speak correctly about the descent of the Christ and the path He took until His embodiment in the man Jesus—these vestiges continued until the fourth century A.D., though weakening increasingly in regard to the effectiveness they had for mankind. By that time, they had ceased to call forth in the human organization the kind of capacities that afforded reliable insights into the spiritual world. Mankind now entered a period of its evolution in which it was chiefly dependent upon the perceptions and views that can be attained only in the sense world and upon a thinking based on impressions and observations in this world. This period of humanity's evolution, lasting several centuries, brought about what I have just indicated as the development, the unfolding of ego consciousness.

One cannot study history correctly unless one is able to see during the period from the fourth to about the fifteenth century A.D. how ego consciousness gradually takes form among civilized peoples. Of course, precursors of this developing ego consciousness also lived in earlier times, but fundamentally there is a great difference between even the most educated, cultured person of the fourth or fifth centuries, and one of the fifteenth or sixteenth. A person who can see—I wouldn't even say, into the soul of Augustine, whose ego consciousness can be studied quite clearly in a psychological way—but let us say someone who can look, for example, into the soul of Scotus Erigena in the ninth century, sees how the ego consciousness, possessed later by the simplest person, was only just beginning to develop and form itself. At the same time, the old kind of vision was ceasing through which it was possible, for instance, to develop alchemy, which represented an innate fusion between what the eyes see and the soul experiences when it contemplates things in the external world. Pure sense observation, as the basis of human knowledge, arose first about the fifteenth century. In this turning of man to mere sense observation—which reached a high point in the age of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno—to consciousness of the sense world, there also came into being the ego consciousness.

Ego consciousness, however, caused insight into the spiritual worlds to fall into the depths of darkness. The old perception of the mysteries, the initiation knowledge, had faded away by the fourth century A.D. and scarcely a trace of it continued in the ongoing stream of civilization. For what persisted of this knowledge was well hidden, and remained almost unknown to people in general, even to scholarly Occidental peoples. Initiation science had no real influence on general culture and civilization. It, therefore, could throw no light on the path taken by the Christ from the spiritual worlds to mankind on earth, as was still possible in the first Christian centuries, even though that had been but a vestige, but nevertheless a vestige of the old initiation science. As a result, it was only the historical Jesus who was recognized by mankind, even by learned men—that Jesus of whom history tells, a history which did not add to this historical Jesus, either by means of direct human vision or by teachings of initiation, the picture of the Christ Who was united with him.

Thus, for these centuries, the Church's development could not do otherwise than refer its believers ever and again to the historical Jesus, bringing the picture of him to life. Concerning everything, however, that those men, who knew something real about the spiritual world, could still speak about in the first Christian centuries, nothing could now be directly known. Only what was preserved by tradition from those times when there still existed human souls who really knew about the spiritual world from initiation science, only what had been preserved by tradition from old Christian knowledge—only this could be established by the Church in the form of dogmas concerning the Christ. No reference was made to those who still retained a view of the spiritual content of these dogmas, which were made the object of mere faith.

During the time when knowledge became increasingly perfected and extensive in regard to the sense world, alongside this knowledge of the sense world a content of dogmatic faith was placed, a dogmatic content that related to the Jesus figure only by means of an outward determination.

This Jesus figure had become established in mankind's ordinary consciousness and had assumed form. This attitude then continued on through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and finally led to a theology purporting to be Christian but concerned only with the man Jesus, because as a result of historical tradition ordinary consciousness was only aware of him.

Meanwhile, the consciousness that had developed experience of the ego and which had investigated the laws of the sense world had less and less inclination to abide by the established contents of faith. It was especially the leading personalities in whom the new consciousness had developed the most, who became emancipated from inclinations toward faith and thus the Christ. So it happened that in the nineteenth century the supposed Christian theology, which had completely lost all knowledge of the Christ in favor of Jesus and spoke only about “Jesus of Nazareth,” came to a special prominence. It wanted to recognize Jesus as a man only, although perhaps the most eminent one who had appeared in human evolution.

In the first Christian centuries, out of the vestiges of the old initiation wisdom, the attempt had been made to describe the path leading from the perception of the Christ Being to his incorporation in Jesus of Nazareth; in order to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, one started with Christ and later arrived at Jesus. By the nineteenth century, one began with Jesus, who was looked upon at first as a man, and tried to come from Jesus to Christ. But that was the path that as a matter of course led in the end either to the admission (or the refusal to admit) one's inability to rise to the Christ from the historical Jesus of whom ordinary consciousness alone was aware, the “simple man” Jesus who had lived in Palestine.

This situation can be changed only by modern initiation as I have characterized it in its main outlines in the past few days, which can lead to imagination, inspiration and intuition in a new form. By means of this new initiation wisdom it is again possible to go beyond the merely historical image of Jesus to a direct view of man's pre-earthly existence and the world in which this existence is spent. It thereby becomes possible to behold the Christ in His super-earthly spirituality and then, proceeding from Christ, to understand Jesus and thus the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha. The path that modern theology has taken, which, in emphasizing Jesus, has lost the Christ, can be reversed. Out of spiritual perception, men again can recognize the Christ, and through the perception of Christ behold Jesus in whom the Christ became Man. With this Christ perception, gained in the spirit, they can then contemplate the Mystery of Golgotha. Through anthroposophical perception, the Christ, Who for one branch of modern theology has already been lost, must now be recovered. I will explain in the fourth part of today's considerations what this signifies for man's inner development.

It has already been mentioned that through the lighting-up of ego consciousness the riddle of death confronted the human soul. This had to happen because, since the ego had become present in full clarity in the inner soul experience, man's physical organism thereby had become the actual basis for this ordinary human consciousness. This ego-permeated consciousness had its foundation in man's physical organism, and man learned to feel instinctively how only what has its foundation in the physical organism can be experienced by the soul. No longer did he see the eternal essence of his being through a direct picture consciousness. It was precisely his ego consciousness, his highest faculty in earth life, that drew his attention exclusively to his physical body and showed how this body, because of its constitution, could allow his ego-saturated consciousness to light up. In this state of consciousness we cannot say that there is anything in our soul that we carry through the gate of death.

It was precisely the ability of a retrospective view into pre-earthly life, which had been given to an older humanity by the grace of the lofty Sun Being, that had enabled ordinary consciousness to see forward into what is beyond death. Now, consciousness had become especially clear because, to its full extent, it had become an experience of the physical organism. But because of this man could not help saying to himself: You possess powers to brighten and illuminate your consciousness, but they come from the physical body. This body disintegrates at death. In this, of which you are aware in your ordinary consciousness, you perceive nothing of what can carry you over into another world. Something of this nature may exist—but with your ordinary consciousness you sense and know nothing of it.

This mystery of death had appeared with special intensity in the first Christian centuries when human beings were still more sensitive to these questions. The initiates, however, had drawn the attention of humanity to the Mystery of Golgotha, and in the following centuries, as Christianity evolved, its leaders had likewise directed humanity to that Mystery through their dogmas of faith. What was this Mystery to signify for man?

A person who can attain an inner person-to-person relationship to the Christ on earth, who can acknowledge and accept the Mystery of Golgotha, must take something into his consciousness that no material sense world can supply. It is precisely the person who looks most deeply into the constitution of the sense world who must deny the Mystery of Golgotha, for no understanding of this Mystery is possible to a comprehension derived from the senses. If, however, he can receive it into his heart, if he is then able, by means of a power of understanding rooted in the human soul (Gemüt), to grasp that event consummated only once in earth's evolution—an event comprehensible only out of the spirit—then, in his ordinary consciousness, he tears himself away from mere sense comprehension, which in its special clearness and intensity is precisely the essential feature of ego consciousness.

No one who wishes to remain only in the world of the senses can come to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. By contrast, if one renounces any understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha based on sense perception and acquires instead a relationship to if of faith and acknowledgement, if one looks up to the Mystery of Golgotha in an attitude of pious veneration and attains to an understanding of what Christ became for humanity when He came down from a spiritual existence into earth life, then one rises above the mere understanding of the sense world with the aid of that very power which, though it is itself a part of earthly consciousness, nevertheless constitutes man's highest faculty. Man thus generates and unfolds a force in his ordinary consciousness that does not spring from his own natural development. He must deepen himself inwardly and intensify his consciousness if he wants to go beyond his understanding of the sense world and develop enough strength to allow the spiritual significance of the Mystery of Golgotha to become a truth for his soul.

If we renounce all understanding based on the senses and acknowledge the truth of the Mystery of Golgotha; if we recognize that the Christ really did once live on earth in Jesus, and that in the Mystery of Golgotha a real, heavenly, super-earthly deed of enduring significance was accomplished in the midst of earth existence—then, by recognizing this truth we succeed in replacing that force that was once a part of ordinary consciousness but has now been lost.

In times past, the power to look back into pre-earthly life was present in ordinary consciousness, and out of this vision consciousness gained the strength to carry the soul through the gate of death. This power which now was no longer there was to enter into the soul through the Mystery of Golgotha; it was to enter through the strengthening that could occur in the soul, if, through inward soul experience, a person confessed to the truth of this Mystery. Then, as the saying of Paul, “Not I but the Christ in me,” came to life in man himself, the Christ, with the power that streamed out from His deed on Golgotha, could carry man beyond the point where, merely because of the condition of his consciousness, physical death could leave him. By these means, it was possible to regain a power of which man knew that with it he was able to reach beyond the portal of death.

How the mysteries of death, the opposite of the mysteries of birth, of which I spoke yesterday, can be described further in relation to the Christ Being, will be the topic of tomorrow's lecture.

Today, I would like to close my remarks by referring to what an old initiate said to those whose souls—as early as the first Christian centuries—were confronted with this whole riddle of death. He said: “Behold the condition of the human body, now that man has arrived at the use of ego consciousness. In this stage, the physical body conceals man's total entity. Since the unfolding of ego consciousness, man is so constituted that in and through his physical body alone he could never take hold of that element in him that belongs to the spirit. Look,” said such an initiate to his followers in the first Christian centuries, “look at the physical human organism just when the stage is reached when it is to offer the highest potentiality for ego consciousness; it turns out to be inadequate. The physical organism is therefore sick; it would be healthy only if it could give to man a consciousness of his spiritual significance. This physical organism developed in such a way that from the beginning there was sickness in it in relation to the life of the spirit. For this reason, the Christ descended and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, not only as a teacher but as the Physician of the soul, Who, through man's soul, heals him from what has fallen ill in his physical organism.” This is how those initiates of the first Christian century—who are no longer acknowledged by today's theology and who have been erased from memory—presented the Christ as the Physician of the soul, the Healer, the Savior of mankind. In presenting Him thus, they gave Him his due place as the true meaning of the whole of earth evolution. They showed how man's evolution took a descending course, descending to the point where his physical organism became completely corrupt and useless for the highest tasks of human consciousness. Then the Divine Savior as the Physician of the soul intervened to heal the relationship between man's soul condition and the divine-spiritual world. Thus, through the initiates of the first Christian centuries, a deeper understanding of the Christ came into being, namely, that of Christ as the Soul Physician of the world, the Healer of mankind, the Savior.

Because of all this one can say that in ancient times, before the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place on earth, the initiates could speak to wider circles of humanity, who were open to their teachings, about a spiritual, a divine existence that permeated and was the foundation of all sense existence. If man brings this teaching to life again in modern consciousness through imaginative insight, then, what otherwise is an abstract, thought-out philosophy is enlivened—not only in the sense I have earlier characterized it here, but by becoming permeated by Christ. By means of the knowledge through which modern imagination leads men again to an insight into the spiritual world, philosophy is filled with the Christ. What once existed in ancient humanity, namely, the awareness of the Divine-Spiritual Father of all physical existence can awaken in humanity again. It was basically toward this Divine Father-consciousness that the ancient, pre-Christian initiates strove along with the rest of mankind. In the highest grade of initiation in the mysteries, the initiate represented the Divine-Spiritual, Cosmic Father, and was called “The Father.”

If man allows this conception to arise in his mind, what may be called a Christian philosophy comes into being. Furthermore, through modern inspiration, he becomes acquainted with what was already prophetically expressed by the initiates of the early Christian centuries, who still possessed vestiges of an ancient inspiration. He learns to perceive how a Divine-Spiritual Being, the Christ, descended out of spiritual worlds, placed Himself into man's earthly development, and thus constitutes in Himself the fulcrum of this evolution. A meaningful content is thus brought into humanity's earthly evolution and its laws when man learns through the Mystery of Golgotha to link this evolution to the cosmos by means of looking up to the cosmic Christ Being. Further, man learns to recognize how earthly evolution has been a concern of heaven, how the cosmos has cared about the affairs of mankind. In this way, the nature of that cosmology, which I have always characterized here as a spiritual cosmology, is extended so as to become a Christian cosmology.

If, then, man achieves a living relationship to the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha in the sense of the words of Paul, “Not I but the Christ in me,” the Christ, by helping him solve the riddle of death, leads him into a renewed life in the spirit. He becomes acquainted with the new spirit, which once again is to make it clear to mankind that beyond the physical world there exists a spiritual world that rules, orders and permeates the physical. He learns to know the mission of the Healing Spirit, Who proceeds from Christ and is sanctified by Christ Himself. He learns to know the mystery of the Holy Spirit as the foundation for a new religious perception.

The Trinity, so long spoken of as a dogma, again comes to live for man. Looking back to the pre-Christian mysteries one can say that in these lived God the Father, Who also has a cosmic meaning for us. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, God the Son, in Christ, drew near mankind, and through what God the Son has brought to humanity, the connection was established with the Healing, the Holy Spirit. The Trinity is again a living conception; no dogma.

Through the vitalizing of the Father consciousness there arises a Christ-permeated philosophy. Through the vitalizing of the Son consciousness comes a Christ-permeated cosmology. In accordance with what the Christ referred to and has called the Healing Spirit and has mercifully poured over mankind, a new basis arises for a Christian religion, founded in knowledge.

Starting from such a Christian philosophy, a Christian cosmology and a Christian religious insight, we shall speak further tomorrow about the mystery of death in relation to the Christ Being and the course of humanity's evolution.