The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I remarked yesterday that what we have to say on the subject of anthroposophical moral principles and impulses will be based upon facts, and for this reason we brought forward a few facts in which moral impulses are pre-eminently exhibited.

It is, indeed, most striking and illuminating that in the case of a personality such as Francis of Assisi mighty moral impulses must have been active in order that he could perform his deeds. What sort of deeds were they? They were such that what they reveal is moral in the very highest sense of the word. Francis of Assisi was surrounded by people afflicted with very serious diseases for which the rest of the world at that time knew no cure. Moral impulses were so powerful in him that many lepers through him were given spiritual aid and great comfort. It is true that many could gain no more—but there were many others who by their faith and trust attained a stage when the moral impulses and forces which poured forth from Francis of Assisi had even a healing, health-giving effect.

In order to penetrate still more deeply into the question whence do moral impulses come, we must inquire in the case of such an exceptional personality as Francis of Assisi as to how he could, develop them; and what had really happened in his case. We shall have to look more deeply if we want to understand what was active in the soul of this outstanding human being.

Let us go back to the ancient civilisation of India. In that civilisation there were certain divisions of the people; they were divided into four castes, the highest of them being the Brahmins, who cultivated wisdom. The separation of the castes in ancient India was so strict that, for example, the sacred books might only be read by the Brahmins and not by members of the other castes. The members of the second caste, the Warrior caste, were only allowed to hear the teachings contained in the Vedas or in the epitome of the Vedas—the Vedanta. The Brahmins alone were allowed to explain any passage from the Vedas or have an opinion as to their meaning and it was strictly forbidden for all other people to have any opinion on the treasure of wisdom which was contained in the sacred books. The second caste consisted of those who had to cultivate the profession of war and the administration of the country. Then there was a third caste which had to foster trades, and a fourth, a labouring caste. And last of all, an utterly despised part of the population, the Pariahs, who were looked down upon so much that a Brahmin felt he was contaminated if he so much as stepped upon the shadow thrown by such a one. He even had to perform certain rites of purification if he had touched the shadow of such an outcast as a Pariah was considered to be. Thus we see how the whole nation was divided into four recognised castes and one that was absolutely unrecognised. Though these regulations may now be considered severe they were most strictly observed in ancient India. Even at the time of the Graeco-Latin civilisation in Europe, no one belonging to the Warrior caste in India would have ventured to have his own independent opinion about what was in the sacred books, the Vedas. Now, how could such divisions as these have arisen amongst mankind? It is certainly remarkable that we should find these castes exactly in the most outstanding people of human antiquity and in the very people who had wandered over to Asia from Atlantis at a comparatively early date and also precisely those amongst whom were preserved the greatest wisdom and treasures of knowledge from the old Atlantean epoch. This seems very remarkable, and how can we understand it? It almost seems as if it contradicted all the wisdom and goodness in the order of the universe, in the guidance of the world, that one caste, one group of people should be separated off, who alone were to preserve what was looked upon as the highest possessions and that the others should be destined from the very beginning, by the mere fact of their birth, to occupy subordinate positions.

This can only be understood by an examination into the secrets of existence. Development is only possible through differentiation, through organisation; and if all men had wished to arrive at the degree of wisdom reached in the Brahmin caste not a single one would have been able to achieve it. If all human beings do not attain to the highest wisdom, one may not say that it is a contradiction of the Divine regulation of the world, for this would have no more sense than if someone were to demand of the infinitely wise and infinitely mighty Deity that He should make a triangle with four angles. No god could make a triangle other than with three angles. That which is ordered and determined inwardly in spirit must also be observed by the divine regulation of the world, and just as the laws concerning the limits of space are strict, for example, that a triangle can only have three angles, so also if is a strict law that development must come about through differentiation, that certain groups of people must be separated in order that a particular quality of human nature can be developed. To this end the others must be excluded for a time. This is not only a law for development of mankind, it is a law for the whole of evolution.

Consider the human form. You will at once admit that the most valuable parts in the human form are the bones of the head. But by what means could these particular bones become bones of the head and envelop the higher organ, the brain? As far as the rudiments are concerned, each bone that man possesses could become skull-bone, but in order that a few of the bones of the whole skeleton could reach this height of development and become bones of the forehead or of the back part of the head, the hip bones or the joints had to stop at a lower stage of development—for the hip bones or the joints have within them the possibility of becoming skull bones, just as much as those which actually have done so. It is the same everywhere throughout the world. Progress is only possible in evolution through one remaining behind and another pushing forward, even beyond a certain point of development. In India the Brahmins passed beyond a certain average of development, but on the other hand the lower castes remained behind it.

When the Atlantean catastrophe took place, great bodies of people gradually wandered from Atlantis, that ancient continent which lay where the Atlantic Ocean is to-day, towards the East, and peopled the continents now known as Europe, Asia and Africa. We shall not at present consider the few who went westward, whose descendants were found in America by its discoverers. When the Atlantean catastrophe took place, the body of people which then migrated towards the East did not consist merely of the four castes which settled down in India and there gradually differentiated themselves, but there were seven castes, and the four which appeared in India were the four higher castes. Besides the fifth, which was completely despised and which in India formed, as it were, an intermediate body of the population, besides these Pariahs there were other castes which did not accompany them as far as India, but remained behind in various parts of Europe, Asia Minor and especially Africa. Only the more highly developed castes reached India, and those who remained in Europe had entirely different qualities.

Indeed, one can only understand what took place later in Europe when one knows that the more advanced sections of humanity in those days reached Asia, and that in Europe, forming the main body of the population left behind, were those who furnished the possibility for very special incarnations. If we wish to understand the special incarnations of souls in the most ancient European times in the general mass of the population we must take into account a remarkable event which took place in the Atlantean epoch. At a certain stage in Atlantean development great secrets of existence were betrayed; these were great truths, concerning life, which are of infinitely greater importance than all those to, which post-Atlantean humanity has since attained. It was essential that this knowledge should have been limited to small circles, but owing to the violation of the mysteries, great bodies of the Atlantean population became possessed of occult knowledge for which they were not yet ripe. In consequence of this, their souls were at that time driven, as one might say, into a condition which was a moral descent, so that there remained on the path of goodness and virtue only those who later went over to Asia.

You must not, however, imagine that the whole population of Europe consisted only of people in whose souls, were individuals who through being misled in the Atlantean epoch had suffered a moral downfall. Here and there in this European population were others who during the great emigration to Asia had remained behind to act as leaders. Thus, all over Europe, Asia Minor and Africa there were people who simply belonged to castes or races providing the requisite conditions for misguided souls to live in their bodies and there were also other better and more highly developed souls who remained behind to guide those who did not go on to Asia.

The best places for these souls who had to assume the leadership at that time—in the age in which they Indian and Persian civilisations developed—were the more northerly parts of Europe, the regions where the oldest mysteries of Europe have flourished. Now they had a kind of protective arrangement as regards what had previously taken place in old Atlantis. In Atlantis temptation came to the souls described, through wisdom, mysteries and occult truths being given them for which they were not ready. Therefore in the European Mysteries the treasures of wisdom had to be guarded and protected all the more. For this reason the true leaders in Europe in post-Atlantean times withdrew themselves entirely and they preserved what they had received as a strict secret.

We may say that in Europe also there were persons who might be compared with the Brahmins of Asia, but these European Brahmins were not outwardly known as such by anyone. In the strictest sense of the word they kept the sacred secrets absolutely secluded in the Mysteries, that there might be no repetition of what had once taken place in the Atlantean epoch among the souls whom they were now leading onwards. Only through Wisdom being protected and most carefully guarded did it come about that these souls were able to uplift themselves; for differentiation does not take place in such a way that a certain portion of humanity is destined from the beginning to take a lower rank than another, but that which is made lower at a certain time is to develop higher again at another period. But the conditions must be formed for this end to be attainable. Hence it came about that in Europe there were souls who had fallen into temptation and had become immoral, but they were now guided according to wisdom which proceeded from deeply hidden sources.

Now, the other castes who had gone to India had also left members behind in Europe. The members of the second Indian caste—the Warrior caste—were those who then chiefly attained to power in Europe. Where the wise teachers—that is, those who corresponded to the Indian Brahmins—entirely withdrew, and gave their counsels from hidden sanctuaries, the Warriors came out among the people, in order to improve and uplift them according to the counsels of those ancient European priests. It was this second caste that wielded the greatest power in Europe in primeval times, but in their way of life they were guided by the wise teachers who remained hidden. Thus it came about that the leading personalities in Europe were those who shone by virtue of the qualities of which we spoke yesterday—valour and bravery. Whereas in India, wisdom was held in the highest esteem and the Brahmins were revered because they explained the sacred writing; in Europe bravery and valour were the most valued and the people only knew of the divine mysteries through those who were filled with valour and bravery. The civilisation of Europe continued under these influences for thousands of years and gradually souls were improved and uplifted. In Europe, where souls existed who were the successors of the people who had undergone temptation, no real appreciation of the caste system of India could develop. The souls were mingled and interwoven. A division, a differentiation into castes such as existed in India did not arise. The division was rather between those who guided in an upper class, who acted as leaders in various directions, and the class that was led. The latter consisted principally of souls who had to struggle upward.

When we look for the souls which gradually struggled upwards out of this lower class, and which from being tempted developed higher, we find them chiefly in a part of the European population of which modern history tells but little. Century after century this people developed in order to rise to a higher stage, to recover again, as it were, from the heavy set-back the souls had received in the Atlantean epoch. In Asia there was a continuation in the progress of civilisation; in Europe, on the other hand, there was a change from the former moral collapse into a gradual moral improvement.

The people in Europe remained in this condition for a long time, and improvement only came about through the existence of a strong impulse in these souls to imitate that which they saw before them. Those who lived and worked among the people as the braver among them were looked up to as ideals and patterns, as leaders or chiefs, they were those who were called Fürsten (princes) and were imitated by the people at large. Thus the morality of the whole of Europe was raised through those souls mingling as leaders amongst the people.

Thereby something else became necessary in European development. If we wish to understand this, we must distinguish between the development of a single soul and that of a whole race. The two must not be confused. A human soul can develop in such a way that in one incarnation it embodies itself in a particular race. If in this race it gains certain qualities, it may re-embody itself in a later incarnation in an entirely different one; so that we may find incarnated in Europe at the present day souls which in a previous incarnation were embodied in India, Japan or China. The souls do not by any means remain in the same race, for soul development is quite different from race development, which goes its peaceful way forward.

In ancient times, souls who were unable to go over into the Asiatic races, were transposed into European ones, and were obliged to incarnate again and again in them. But as they became better and better, this led to their gradually passing on into the higher races; and souls which were previously embodied in quite subordinate races developed to a higher stage, and were able later to reincarnate in the bodily successors of the leading population of Europe. These bodily successors of the leading population multiplied, and as these souls increased in number in this direction, they became more numerous than they originally were. After having progressed and improved, they incarnated in the leading population of Europe, and the development then took place in such a way that, on the whole, as a physical race, the bodily forms in which the most ancient European population had originally incarnated died out; the souls forsook the bodies which were formed in a certain way, and which then died out. The offspring of the lower races decreased in number while the higher increased until gradually the lowest classes of the European population completely die out. This is a definite process, which we must grasp. The souls develop further, the bodies die out. For this reason we must be careful to distinguish between soul development and race development. The souls reappear in the bodies belonging to higher races. the lower race bodies die out. A process such as this does not take place without effect. When over large areas something disappears as it were, it does not disappear into nothing, but it dissolves and then exists in a different form. When in ancient times the worst part of the population of which I have just now spoken, died out, the whole region became gradually inhabited by demons, representing the products of dissolution, the products of the putrefaction of that which had died out.

Thus the whole of Europe and Asia Minor were filled with the spiritualised products of putrefaction from the worst part of the population which had died out. These demons of putrefaction endured for a long time, and later they acted upon mankind. It came about that these demons of putrefaction which were incorporated in the spiritual atmosphere, as it were, gained influence upon human beings and affected them in such a way that their feelings were permeated by them. The effect may be seen from the following example:—When at a later date, at the time of the Migration of the Peoples, great bodies of people came over from Asia to Europe, amongst them came Attila with his hordes. His invasion was the cause of great terror to many of those who lived in Europe and through this state of terror people laid themselves open to the demoniacal influences still persisting. Gradually through these demoniacal beings there developed—as a consequence of the terror produced by the hordes coming over from Asia—that which appeared as leprosy, the epidemic disease of the Middle Ages. This disease was nothing else than the consequence of the state of terror and fear experienced by the people at that time. But the terror and fear could only lead to this result in the souls which had been exposed to the demoniacal forces of former times.

I have now described to you why it was possible for people to be laid hold of by a disease—which was later practically exterminated in Europe—and why it was so widespread at the time we mentioned in our last lecture. In Europe the peoples which had to die out because they had not developed upwards became extinct, but the after-effect was seen in the form of diseases which attacked mankind. The disease we have mentioned, leprosy, is thus seen to be the result of spiritual and psychic causes.

This whole condition was now to be counteracted. Further development could only come about if that which has just been described was entirely removed from Europe. An example of how it was taken away was described in the last lecture, where we showed that while, on the one hand, the after-effects of what was unmoral existed as demons of disease, on the other hand, strong moral impulses appeared as in Francis of Assisi. Through his possession of strong moral impulses he gathered others around him who acted also in the same way as he, although in a lesser degree. Really there were very many who at that time worked as he did, but this activity did not last very long.

Now how had such a soul-power come into Francis of Assisi? As we are not gathered together to study external science, but to understand human morality from its spiritual and occult foundations, we must examine a few occult or spiritual truths. Let us inquire: Whence really came such a soul as that of Francis of Assisi? We can only understand such a soul as this if we investigate it a little; if we take the trouble to find what was hidden in its depths.

I must remind you that the old division into castes in India really received its first blow, its first shock, through Buddhism, for among many other things which Buddhism introduced into Asiatic life was the idea that it did not recognise the division into castes as something justifiable; that as far as it was possible in Asia it recognised the power of each human being to attain to the highest possible to man. We know too that this was only possible through the pre-eminently great and mighty individuality of Buddha. We also know that Buddha became a Buddha in the incarnation of which we are usually told and that in the earlier part of his life he was a Bodhisattva, which represents the stage next below Buddhahood. Through the fact that this son of King Suddodana, in the twenty-ninth year of his life, experienced and felt deeply in himself the great truth of life and sorrow, he had attained the greatness to announce in Asia the teaching known as Buddhism.

Connected with this development of the Bodhisattva up to Buddha, there was something else of which we must not lose sight, namely, the fact that the individuality which had passed through many incarnations as Bodhisattva and then risen to the rank of Buddha, when it became Buddha had to dwell for the last time in a physical body on earth. Thus he who is raised from Bodhisattva to Buddha enters into an incarnation which for him is the last. From this time onwards, such an individuality only works down from spiritual heights, he still works, but only spiritually. Thus we now have the fact that the individuality of Buddha has only worked down from spiritual heights since the fifth century before Christ.

But, Buddhism continued. It was able to influence in a certain way not only Asiatic life, but the spiritual life of the whole of the then known world. You know how Buddhism spread in Asia. You know how great is the number of its followers there. But in a more hidden and veiled form it also spread into the mental life of Europe; and we have particularly to point out that the portion of the great teaching of Buddha relating to the equality of man was especially acceptable to the population of Europe, because this population was not arranged on the plan of caste divisions, but rather upon the idea of the equality of all human beings. On the shores of the Black Sea there existed an occult school which lasted far into the Christian era. This school was guided by certain human beings who set themselves as their highest ideal that part of the teaching of Buddha which we have just described, and through their having taken into themselves the Christian impulse along with it, were able in the early centuries of Christianity to throw new light upon what Buddha had given to humanity. If I were to describe to you this occult school on the Black Seas as the occultist or spiritual investigator sees it—and you will understand me best if I do this—I must do it in the following manner:—

People, who to begin with had external teachers in the physical world, came together there. They were instructed in the doctrines and principles which had proceeded from Buddhism, but these were permeated by the impulses which came into the world through Christianity. Then, after the pupils had been sufficiently prepared, they were brought to where the deeper forces lying within them, the deeper forces of wisdom could be brought forth, so that they were led to clairvoyant vision of the spiritual world and were able to see into the spiritual worlds. The first thing attained by the pupils of this occult school, was, for example, the recognition of those who no longer descended to the physical plane. But this they could only do after they had been accustomed to it by the teachers incarnated in the physical body. In this way they came to know Buddha. Thus, these occult pupils learned to know Buddha face to face, if one may so speak of his spiritual being. In this way he continued to work spiritually in the occult pupils and thus his power worked down to the physical plane, although he himself no longer descended to physical embodiment in the physical world.

Now the pupils in this occult school were grouped according to their maturity into two unequal divisions, and only the more advanced were chosen for the smaller division. Most of these pupils were able to become so clairvoyant that they came in touch with a being who strove with all his might to bring his impulses through to the physical world, and although he himself did not descend into this world they learned all the secrets of Buddha and all that he wished to have accomplished. Most of these pupils remained as such, clairvoyants, but there were some who, in addition to the qualities of knowledge and of psychic clairvoyance, had developed the spiritual element to a remarkable degree, which cannot be separated from a certain humility, a certain highly evolved capacity for devotion. These, then, attained to where they could receive the Christ-impulse in an advanced degree precisely in this occult school. They could also become clairvoyant in such a way that they became the specially chosen followers of Saint Paul and received the Christ-impulse directly in life.

Thus from this school proceeded two groups, as it were, one group which possessed the impulse to carry the teaching of Buddha everywhere, although his name was not mentioned in connection with it, and a second group which, in addition, received the Christ-impulse. Now the difference between these two kinds did not appear very strongly in that particular incarnation, it only appeared in the next. The pupils who had not received the Christ-impulse but who had only gained the Buddha-impulse, became the teachers of the equality and brotherhood of man; on the other hand the pupils who had also received the Christ-impulse, in the next incarnation were such that this Christ-impulse worked up further so that not only could they teach (and they did not consider this their chief task) but they worked more especially through their moral power.

One such pupil of the occult school on the Black Sea, was born in his next incarnation as Francis of Assisi. No wonder, then, that in him there was the wisdom which he had received, the knowledge of the brotherhood of mankind, of the equality of all men, of the necessity to love all men equally, no wonder that this teaching pulsated through his soul and also that his soul was permeated and strengthened by the Christ-impulse.

Now how did this Christ-impulse work further in his next incarnation? It acted in such a way that, when in his next incarnation Francis of Assisi was transposed into a community in which the old demons of diseases were especially active—this Christ-impulse approached the evil substance of the disease-demons through him, and absorbed it into itself, thus removing it from mankind. Before this, however, the Christ-impulse incorporated itself in this substance in such a way that it first became visible to Francis of Assisi in the vision in which he saw the palace when he was called upon to take upon himself the burden of poverty. The Christ-impulse had here revived in him and streamed forth from him, and laid hold of these disease-demons. His moral forces thereby became so strong that they could take away the harmful spiritual substances which had produced the disease. It was through this alone that the power was produced to bring to a higher development what I have described to you as the after-effect of the old Atlantean element, to purify Europe from these substances and sweep them away from the earth.

Consider the life of Francis of Assisi; notice what a remarkable course it took. He was born in the year 1182. We know that the first years of the life of a human being are devoted principally to the development of the physical body. In the physical body is developed chiefly that which comes to light through external heredity. Hence there appeared in him first of all that which originated through external heredity from the European population. These qualities gradually came out, as his etheric body developed from the seventh to the fourteenth year, like any other human being. In this etheric body appeared primarily that quality which as the Christ-impulse had worked directly in him in the mysteries on the Black Sea. From his fourteenth year, at the dawn of his astral life the Christ power became particularly active within him, in such a way that there entered into his astral body that which had been in connection with the atmosphere of the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha. For Francis of Assisi was a personality who was permeated by the external power of Christ, owing to his having sought for the Christ power, in his previous incarnation, in that particular place of initiation where it was to be found.

Thus we see how differentiations act inhumanity, for differentiation must come about. For that which by earlier events has been thrust down to a lower condition is raised up once more through special events in the course of human development. On another occasion a particularly important uplifting took place in the evolution of humanity, one which exoterically will always be incomprehensible; for this reason people have really ceased to reflect upon, it, but esoterically it can be fully explained. There were some who had developed very quickly from the strata of the Western population, who had gradually wrestled their way up from the lowest rungs of the ladder, but who had not risen very high in intellectual development, but had remained comparatively humble and simple men, chosen ones as it were, who could only be uplifted at a certain time by a mighty impulse which reflected itself in them; these were those who are described as the twelve Apostles of Jesus. They were the cast-off extract of the lower castes which did not reach India. From them had to be taken the substance for the disciples of Christ Jesus.¹

Thus we have discovered the source of the moral power in that chosen personality, Francis of Assisi. Do not say that taking ordinary human rules into consideration, it would be too-much to expect a person to realise the ideals manifested in Francis of Assisi. Certainly what I have said was not with the intention of recommending anyone to become a Francis of Assisi. One only wished to point out by means of a striking example, how moral power enters man, whence it can spring and how it must be understood as something quite special, something that was originally present in man. But from the whole spirit of what I have said up to now you may gather one thing with regard to other forces in human evolution, namely, that humanity has first gone through a descent and has now undertaken an ascent again.

If we go back in human evolution we pass through the post-Atlantean epoch to the Atlantean catastrophe, then into the Atlantean epoch and then further back to the Lemurian epoch. When we then arrive at the starting-point of earthly humanity we come to a time when man, not only as regards his spiritual qualities, was much closer to the Deity, when he first developed not only out of the spiritual life, but also out of morality. So that at the beginning of earthly evolution we do not find unmorality but morality. Morality is a divine gift which was given to man in the beginning, it was part of the original content in human nature, just as spiritual power was in human nature before man's deepest descent. Fundamentally, a great part of what is unmoral came into humanity in the manner we have described, namely, by the betrayal of the higher Mysteries in the ancient Atlantean epoch.

Thus morality is something about which we cannot say that it has only developed gradually in humanity, it is something which lies at the bottom of the human soul, something which has only been submerged by the later civilisations. When we look at the matter in the right light we cannot even say that unmorality came into the world through folly; it came into the world through the secrets of wisdom being disclosed to persons who were not sufficiently mature to receive them. It was through this that people were tempted, they succumbed and then degenerated. Therefore in order that they might rise it was above all necessary that something should occur which would sweep away from the human soul all that is contrary to moral impulses. Let us put this in a somewhat different form.

Let us suppose we have before us a criminal, a man whom we call especially unmoral; on no account must we think that this unmoral man is devoid of moral impulses. They are in him and we shall find them if we delve down to the bottom of his soul. There is no human soul—with the exception of black magicians, with whom we are not now concerned—in which there is not the foundation of what is morally good. If a person is wicked, it is because that which has originated in the course of time as spiritual error overlies moral goodness. Human nature is not bad; originally it was really good. The concrete observation of human nature shows us that in its deepest being it is good and that it was through spiritual errors that man deviated from the moral path. Therefore moral errors must in course of time once more be made good in man. Not only must the mistakes be made good but their results as well, for where evil has such mighty after-effects that demons of disease have been produced, super-moral forces such as were in Francis of Assisi must be also active.

The foundation for the improvement of a human being always consists in taking away his spiritual error. And what is necessary to this end? Gather together what I have told you into a fundamental feeling; let the facts speak to you, let them speak to your feelings and perceptions, and try to gather them together into one fundamental feeling, and then you will say: What is the attitude which a man needs to hold regarding his fellow-man? It is that he needs the belief in the original goodness of humanity as a whole, and of each single human being in particular. That is the first thing we must say if we wish to speak at all in words concerning morality; that something immeasurably good lies at the bottom of human nature. That is what Francis of Assisi realised; and when he was approached by some of those stricken with the horrible disease we have described, as a good Christian of that day, he said somewhat as follows:-- “A disease such as this is in a certain way the consequence of sin; but as sin is in the first instance spiritual error and disease the result it must therefore be removed by a mighty opposing power.” Hence Francis of Assisi saw by the sinner how, in a certain way, the punishment of sin manifests itself externally; but he also saw the good in human nature, he saw what lies at the bottom of each human being as divine spiritual forces. That which distinguished Francis of Assisi most was his sublime faith in the goodness lying in each human being, even in one who was being punished.

This made it possible for the contrary power to appear in his soul, and this is the power of love which gives and helps morally, and indeed even heals. And no one, if he really develops the belief in the original goodness of human nature into an active impulse can arrive at anything else than to love human nature as such.

It is primarily these two fundamental impulses which are able to found a truly moral life. First, the belief in the divine at the bottom of every human soul, and secondly, the boundless love of man which springs from this belief. For if was only this measureless love which could bring Francis of Assisi to the sick, the crippled and those stricken with leprosy. A third thing which may be added and is necessarily built upon these two foundations, is that a person who has a firm belief in the goodness of the human soul, and who loves human nature, cannot do otherwise than admit that what we see proceeding from the co-operation of the originally good foundation of the human soul with practical love, justifies a perspective for the future which may be expressed in the fact that every single soul, even though it may have descended far from the height of spiritual life, can be led back again to this spiritual life. This third impulse implies the hope for each human soul that it can find the way back again to the Divine-Spiritual.

We may say that Francis of Assisi heard these three things expressed very very often; they were continually in his mind during his initiation in the Mysteries of Colchis, on the Black Sea. And we may also say, that in the life he had to lead as Francis of Assisi, he preached very little about faith or love, but was himself their embodiment. Faith did not work, hope did not work; one must indeed have them, but only love is effective. It stands in the centre, and it is that which, in that single incarnation of Francis of Assisi, really carried the actual development of humanity forward in the moral sense towards the divine.

How did this love—which we know was the result of his initiation in the Colchis Mysteries—develop in St. Francis? We have seen that in him appeared the knightly virtues of the ancient European spirit. He was a valiant boy. Valour, bravery, was transformed in his individuality, which was permeated by the Christ-impulse, into active practical love. We see the old valour, the old bravery resurrected once more in the love manifested in Francis of Assisi. The ancient valour transposed into the spiritual; bravery transposed into the spiritual is love.

It is interesting to see how very much of what has just been said corresponds also to the external historical course of human evolution. Let us go back a few centuries into the pre-Christian era. Among the people who have given the principal name to the fourth post-Atlantean age, the Greeks, we find the philosopher Plato. Amongst other things, Plato wrote about morals, about the virtues of man. By the way in which he wrote, we can recognise that he was reticent concerning the highest things, the actual secrets, but what he felt able to say he put into the mouth of Socrates. Now, in a period of European culture in which the Christ-impulse had not yet worked, Plato described the highest virtues he recognised, namely, the virtues which the Greeks looked upon as those which a moral man ought to have above all things. He described first of all three virtues, and a fourth with which we shall later become acquainted. The first was “Wisdom.” Wisdom as such, Plato looked upon as virtue. This is justified, for in the most varied directions we have found that wisdom lies at the foundation of moral life. In India the wisdom of the Brahmins lay at the foundation of human life. In Europe this was indeed withdrawn into the background, but it existed in the Norse Mysteries where the European Brahmins had to make good again that which had been spoiled through the betrayal in the old Atlantean epoch. Wisdom stands behind all morality, as we shall see in our next lecture. Plato also, described, in the manner corresponding to the Mysteries, as the second virtue—“Valour”—that which we meet with in the population of Europe. As the third virtue he described Temperance or “Moderation” that is, the opposite of the passionate cultivation of the lower human impulses. These are the three chief Platonic virtues: Wisdom, Valour or Bravery; and Moderation or Temperance, the curbing of the sensual impulses active in man. Finally, the harmonious balancing of these three virtues Plato describes as a fourth virtue, which he calls “Justice.”

Here is described, by one of the most eminent European minds of pre-Christian times, what were looked upon at that time as the most important qualities in human nature. Valour, bravery, is in the European population permeated by the Christ-impulse and by what we call “ I ” or the Ego. Bravery, which in Plato appears as virtue, is here spiritualised and thereby becomes “love.” The most important thing is that we should see how, moral impulses come into the human race, how that which formerly existed in the form we have described becomes something entirely different. Now without disparagement to Christian morality we cannot describe as the only virtues, wisdom, temperance, valour and justice, for we might receive the reply: “If you had all these and yet you had not love you would never enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Let us bear in mind the time when, as we have seen, there was poured out into humanity an impulse, a current of such a nature that wisdom and bravery were spiritualised and re-appeared as love. But we shall go still further into the question as to how wisdom, moderation or temperance and justice, have been developed, and thereby will appear what is the particular moral mission of the Anthroposophical Movement in the present day.

• 1. We are not here referring to previous or succeeding incarnations of the individualities of the Apostles, but solely to the physical ancestry of the bodies in which the personalities of the Apostles were incarnated. The succession of incarnations and the physical line of heredity must always be distinguished.

In the last lecture we found that moral impulses are fundamental in human nature. From the facts adduced, we tried to prove that a foundation of morality and goodness lies at the bottom of the human soul, and that really it has only been in the course of evolution, in man's passage from incarnation to incarnation, that he has diverged from the original instinctive good foundation and that thereby what is evil, wrong and unmoral has come into humanity. But if this is so, we must really wonder that evil is possible, or that it ever originated, and the question as to how evil became possible in the course of evolution requires an answer. We can only obtain a satisfactory reply by examining the elementary moral instruction given to man in ancient times.

The pupils of the Mysteries whose highest ideal was gradually to penetrate to full spiritual knowledge and truths were always obliged to work from a moral foundation. In those places where they worked in the right way according to the Mysteries, the peculiarity of man's moral-nature was shown in a special way to the pupils. Briefly, we may say: The pupils of the Mysteries were shown that freewill can only be developed if a person is in a position to go wrong in one of two directions; further, that life can only run its course truly and favourably when these two lines of opposition are considered as being like the two sides of a balance, of which first one side and then the other goes up and down. True balance only exists when the crossbeam is horizontal. They were shown that it is impossible to express man's right procedure by saying: this is right and that is wrong. It is only possible to gain the true idea when the human being, standing in the centre of the balance, can be swayed each moment of his life, now to one side, now to the other, but he himself holds the correct mean between the two.

Let us take the virtues of which we have spoken: first—valour, bravery. In this respect human nature may diverge on one side to foolhardiness—that is, unbridled activity in the world and the straining of the forces at one's disposal to the utmost limit. Foolhardiness is one side; the opposite is cowardice. A person may turn the scale in either of these directions. In the Mysteries the pupils were shown that when a man degenerates into foolhardiness he loses himself and lays aside his own individuality and is crushed by the wheels of life. Life tears him in pieces if he errs in this direction, but if, on the other hand, he errs on the side of cowardice, he hardens himself and tears himself away from his connection with beings and objects. He then becomes a being shut up within himself, who, as he cannot bring his deeds into harmony with the whole, loses his connection with things. This was shown to the pupils in respect to all that a man may do. He may degenerate in such a way that he is torn in pieces, and losing his own individuality is crushed by the objective world; on the other hand, he may degenerate not merely in courage, but also in every other respect in such a way that he hardens within himself. Thus at the head of the moral code in all the Mysteries there were written the significant words: “Thou must find the mean,” so that through thy deeds thou must not lose thyself in the world, and that the world also does not lose thee.

Those are the two possible extremes into which man may fall. Either he may be lost to the world, the world lays hold on him, and crushes him, as is the case in foolhardiness; or the world may be lost to him, because he hardens himself in his egoism, as is the case in cowardice. In the Mysteries, the pupils were told that goodness cannot merely be striven for as goodness obtained once for all; rather does goodness come only through man being continually able to strike out in two directions like a pendulum and by his own inner power able to find the balance, the mean between the two.

You have in this all that will enable you to understand the freedom of the will and the significance of reason and wisdom in human action. If it were fitting for man to observe eternal moral principles he need only acquire these moral principles and then he could go through life on a definite line of march, as it were, but life is never like this. Freedom in life consists rather in man's being always able to err in one direction or another. But in this way the possibility of evil arises. For what is evil? It is that which originates when the human being is either lost to the world, or the world is lost to him. Goodness consists in avoiding both these extremes.. In the course of evolution evil became not only a possibility but an actuality; for as man journeyed from incarnation to incarnation, by his turning now to one side and now to the other, he could not always find the balance at once, and it was necessary for the compensation to be karmically made at a future time. What man cannot attain in one life, because he does not always find the mean at once, he will attain gradually in the course of evolution in as much as man diverts his course to one side, and is then obliged, perhaps in the next life, to strike out again in the opposite direction, and thus bring about the balance.

What I have just told you was a golden rule in the ancient Mysteries. We often find among the ancient philosophers echoes of the principles taught in these Mysteries. Aristotle makes a statement, when, speaking of virtue, which we cannot understand unless we know that what has just been said was an old principle in the Mysteries which had been received by Aristotle as tradition and embodied in his philosophy. He says: Virtue is a human capacity or skill guided by reason and insight, which, as regards man, holds the balance between the too much and the too-little. Aristotle here gives a definition of virtue, such as no subsequent philosophy has attained. But as Aristotle had little tradition from the Mysteries, it was possible for him to give the precise truth.

That is, then, the mean, which must be found and followed if a man is really to be virtuous, if moral power is to pulsate through the world. We can now answer the question as to why morals should exist at all. For what happens when there is no morality, when evil is done, and when the too-much or the too-little takes place, when man is lost to the world by being crushed, or when the world loses him? In each of these cases something is always destroyed. Every evil or unmoral act is a process of destruction, and the moment man sees that when he has done wrong he cannot do otherwise than destroy something, take something from the world, in that moment a mighty influence for good has awakened within him. It is especially the task of Spiritual Science—which is really only just beginning its work in the world—to show that all evil brings about a destructive process, that it takes away from the world something which is necessary. When in accordance with our anthroposophical standpoint, we hold this principle, then what we know about the nature of man leads us to a particular interpretation of good and evil.

We know that the sentient-soul was chiefly developed in the old Chaldean or Egyptian epoch the third post-Atlantean age. The people of the present day have but little notion what this epoch of development was like at that time, for in external history one can reach little further back than to the Egyptian age. We know that the intellectual, or mind-soul, developed in the fourth or Graeco-Latin age, and that now in our age we are developing the consciousness-or spiritual-soul. The spirit-self will only come into prominence in the sixth age of post-Atlantean development.

Let us now ask: How can the sentient-soul turn to one side or the other, away from what is right? The sentient-soul is that quality in man which enables him to perceive the objective world, to take it into himself, to take part in it, not to pass through the world ignorant of all the diversified objects it contains, but to go through the world in such a way that he forms a relationship with them. All this is brought about by the sentient-soul. We find one side to which man can deviate with the sentient-soul when we enquire: What makes it possible for man to enter into relationship with the objective world? It is what may be called interest in the different things, and by this word “interest” something is expressed which in a moral sense is extremely important. It is much more important that one should bear in mind the moral significance of interest, than that one should devote oneself to thousands of beautiful moral axioms which may be only paltry and hypocritical. Let it be clearly understood, that our moral impulses are in fact never better guided than when we take a proper interest in objects and beings. In our last lecture we spoke in a deeper sense of love as an impulse and in such a way that we cannot now be misunderstood if we say that the usual, oft-repeated declamation, “love, love, and again love” cannot replace the moral impulse contained in what may be described by the word interest.

Let us suppose that we have a child before us. What is the condition primary to our devotion to this child? What is the first condition to our educating the child? It is that we take an interest in it. There is something unhealthy or abnormal in the human soul if a person withdraws himself from something in which he takes an interest. It will more and more be recognised that the impulse of interest is a quite specially golden impulse in the moral sense the further we advance to the actual foundations of morality and do not stop at the mere preaching of morals. Our inner powers are also called forth as regards mankind when we extend our interests, when we are able to transpose ourselves with understanding into beings and objects.

Even sympathy is awakened in the right manner if we take an interest in a being; and if, as anthroposophists, we set ourselves the task of extending our interests more and more and of widening our mental horizon, this will promote the universal brotherhood of mankind. Progress is not gained by the mere preaching of universal love, but by the extension of our interests further and further, so that we come to interest ourselves increasingly in souls with widely different characters, racial and national peculiarities, with widely different temperaments, and holding widely differing religious and philosophical views, and approach them with understanding. Right interest, right understanding, calls forth from the soul the right moral action.

Here also we must hold the balance between two extremes. One extreme is apathy which passes everything by and occasions immense moral mischief in the world. An apathetic person only lives in himself; obstinately, insisting on his own principles, and saying: This is my standpoint. In a moral sense this insistence upon a standpoint is always bad. The essential thing is for us to have an open mind for all that surrounds us. Apathy separates us from the world, while interest unites us with it. The world loses us through our apathy: in this direction we become unmoral. Thus we see that apathy and lack of interest in the world are morally evil in the highest degree.

Anthroposophy is something which makes the mind ever more active, helps us to think with greater readiness of what is spiritual and to take it into ourselves. Just as it is true that warmth comes from the fire when we light a stove so it is true that interest in humanity and the world comes when we study spiritual science. Wisdom is the fuel for interest and we may say, although this may perhaps not be evident without further explanation, that Anthroposophy arouses this interest in us when we study those more remote subjects, the teachings concerning the evolutionary stages through Saturn, Sun and Moon, and the meaning of Karma and so on. It really comes about that interest is produced as the result of anthroposophical knowledge while from materialistic knowledge comes something which in a radical manner must be described as apathy and which, if it alone were to hold sway in the world, would, of necessity, do untold harm.

See how many people go through the world and meet this or that person, but really do not get to know him, for they are quite shut up in themselves. How often do we find that two people have been friends for a long time and then suddenly there comes a rupture. This is because the friendship had a materialistic foundation and only after the lapse of time did they discover that they were mutually unsympathetic. At the present time very few people have the “hearing” ear for that which speaks from man to man; but Anthroposophy should bring about an expansion of our perceptions, so that we shall gain a “seeing” eye and an open mind for all that is human around us and so we shall not go through the world. apathetically, but with true interest.

We also avoid the other extreme by distinguishing between true and false interests, and thus observe the happy mean. Immediately to throw oneself, as it were, into the arms of each person we meet is to lose oneself passionately in the person; that is not true interest. If we do this, we lose ourselves to the world. Through apathy the world loses us; through uncontrolled passion we lose ourselves to the world. But through healthy, devoted interest we stand morally firm in the centre, in the state of balance.

In the third post-Atlantean age of civilisation, that is, in the Chaldaic-Egyptian age, there still existed in a large part of humanity on earth a certain power to hold the balance between apathy and the passionate intoxicating devotion to the world; and it is this, which in ancient times, and also by Plato and Aristotle, was called wisdom. But people looked upon this wisdom as the gift of superhuman beings, for up to that time the ancient impulses of wisdom were active. Therefore, from this point of view, especially relating to moral impulses, we may call the third post-Atlantean age, the age of instinctive wisdom. You will perceive the truth of what was said last year, though with a different intention, in the Copenhagen lectures on The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind. In those lectures we showed how, in the third post-Atlantean age, mankind still stood nearer to the divine spiritual powers. And that which drew mankind closer to the divine spiritual powers, was instinctive wisdom.

Thus, it was a gift of the gods to find at that time the happy mean in action, between apathy and sensuous passionate devotion. This balance, this equilibrium was at that time still maintained through external institutions. The complete intermingling of humanity which came about in the fourth age of post-Atlantean development through the migrations of various peoples, did not yet exist. Mankind was still divided into smaller peoples and tribes. Their interests were wisely regulated by nature, and were so far active that the right moral impulses could penetrate; and on the other hand, through the existence of blood kinsmanship in the tribe, an obstacle was placed in the way of passion. Even to-day one cannot fail to observe that it is easiest to show interest within blood-relationship and common descent, but in this there is not what is called sensuous passion. As people were gathered together in relatively small tracts of country in the Egypto-Chaldaic age, the wise and happy mean was easily found.

But the idea of the progressive development of humanity is that that, which originally was instinctive, which was only spiritual, shall gradually disappear and that man shall become independent of the divine spiritual powers. Hence we see that even in the fourth post-Atlantean age, the Graeco-Latin age, not only the philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, but also public opinion in Greece, considered wisdom as something which must be gained as something which is no longer the gift of the gods, but after which man must strive. According to Plato, the first virtue is wisdom, and according to him, he who does not strive after wisdom is unmoral.

We are now in the fifth post-Atlantean age. We are still far from the time when the wisdom instinctively implanted in humanity as a divine impulse, will be raised into consciousness. Hence in our age people are specially liable to err in both the directions we have mentioned, and it is therefore particularly necessary that the great dangers to be found at this point should be counteracted by a spiritual conception of the World, so that what man once possessed as instinctive wisdom may now become conscious wisdom. The Anthroposophical Movement is to contribute to this end.

The gods once gave wisdom to the unconscious human soul, so that it possessed this wisdom instinctively, whereas now we have first to learn the truths about the cosmos and about human evolution. The ancient customs were also fashioned after the thoughts of the gods.

We have the right view of Anthroposophy when we look upon it as the investigations of the thoughts of the gods. In former times these flowed instinctively into man, but now we have to investigate them, to make the knowledge of them our own. In this sense Anthroposophy must be sacred to us; we must be able to consider reverently that the ideas imparted to us are really something divine, and something which we human beings are allowed to think and reflect upon as the divine thoughts according to which the world has been ordered. When Anthroposophy stands in this aspect to us, we can then consider the knowledge it imparts in such a way that we understand that it has been given us so as to enable us to fulfil our mission. Mighty truths are made known to us, when we study what has been imparted concerning the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon, concerning reincarnation, and the development of the various races, etc. But we only assume the right attitude towards it when we say: The thoughts we seek are the thoughts wherewith the gods have guided evolution. We think the evolution of the gods. If we understand this correctly we are overwhelmed by something that is deeply moral. This is inevitable. Then we say: In ancient times man had instinctive wisdom from the gods, who gave him the wisdom according to which they fashioned the world, and morality thus became possible. But through Anthroposophy we now acquire this wisdom consciously. Therefore we may also trust that in us it shall be transformed into moral impulses, so that we do not merely receive anthroposophical wisdom, but a moral stimulus as well.

Now into what sort of moral impulses will the wisdom acquired through Anthroposophy be transformed? We must here touch upon a point whose development the anthroposophist can foresee, the profound moral significance and moral weight of which he even ought to foresee, a point of development which is far removed from what is customary at the present time, which is what Plato called the “ideal of wisdom.” He named it with a word which was in common use when man still possessed the ancient wisdom, and it would be well to replace this by the word veracity, for as we have now become more individual, we have withdrawn ourselves from the divine, and must therefore strive back to it. We must learn to feel the full weight and meaning of the word ‘veracity’, and this in a moral sense will be a result of an anthroposophical world conception and conviction. Anthroposophists must understand how important it is to be filled with the moral element of truth in an age when materialism has advanced so far that one may indeed still speak of truth, but when the general life and understanding is far removed from perceiving what is right in this direction. Nor can this be otherwise at the present time; as owing to a certain quality acquired by modern life, truth is something which must, to a great extent, be lacking in the understanding of the day, I ask what does a man feel to-day when in the newspapers or some other printed matter he finds certain information, and afterwards it transpires that it is simply untrue? I seriously ask you to ponder over this. One cannot say that it happens in every case, but one must assert that it probably happens in every fourth case. Untruthfulness has everywhere become a quality of the age; it is impossible to describe truth as a characteristic of our times.

For instance, take a man whom you know to have written or said something false, and place the facts before him. As a rule, you will find that he does not fear such a thing to be wrong. He will immediately make the excuse: “But I said it in good faith.” Anthroposophists must not consider it moral when a person says it is merely incorrect what he has said in good faith. People will learn to understand more and more, that they must first ascertain that what they assert really happened. No man should make a statement, or impart anything to another until he has exhausted every means to ascertain the truth of his assertions; and it is only when he recognises this obligation that he can perceive veracity as moral impulse. And then when someone has either written or said something that is incorrect, he will no longer say: “I thought it was so, said it in good faith,” for he will learn that it is his duty to express not merely what he thinks is right, but it is also his duty to say only what is true, and correct. To this end, a radical change must gradually come about in our cultural life. The speed of travel, the lust of sensation on the part of man, everything that comes with a materialistic age, is opposed to truth. In the sphere of morality, Anthroposophy will be an educator of humanity to the duty of truth.

My business today is not to say how far truth has been already realised in the Anthroposophical Society, but to show that what I have said must be a principle, a lofty anthroposophical ideal. The moral evolution within the movement will have enough to do if the moral ideal of truth is thought, felt and perceived in all directions, for this ideal must be what produces the virtue of the sentient-soul of man in the right way.

The second part of the soul of which we have to speak in Anthroposophy is what we usually call the mind-soul, or intellectual-soul (German—Gemütsseele). You know that it developed especially in the fourth post-Atlantean, or Graeco-Latin age. The virtue which is the particular emblem for this part of the soul is bravery, valour and courage; we have already dwelt on this many times, and also on the fact that foolhardiness and cowardice are its extremes. Courage, bravery, valour is the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice. The German word “gemüt” expresses in the sound of the word that it is related to this. The word “gemüt” indicates the mid-part of the human soul, the part that is “mutvoll,” full of “mut,” courage, strength and force.

This was the second, the middle virtue of Plato and Aristotle. It is that virtue which in the fourth post-Atlantean age still existed in man as a divine gift, while wisdom was really only instinctive in the third. Instinctive valour and bravery existed as a gift of the gods (you may gather this from the first lecture) among the people who, in the fourth age, met the expansion of Christianity to the north. They showed that among them valour was still a gift of the gods. Among the Chaldeans wisdom, the wise penetration into the secrets of the starry world, existed as a divine gift, as something inspired. Among the people of the fourth post-Atlantean age, there existed valour and bravery, especially among the Greeks and Romans, but it existed also among the peoples whose work it became to spread Christianity. This instinctive valour was lost later than instinctive wisdom.

If we look round us now in the fifth post-Atlantean age, we see that, as regards valour and bravery, we are in the same position in respect of the Greeks as the Greeks were to the Chaldeans and Egyptians in regard to wisdom. We look back to what was a divine gift in the age immediately preceding ours, and in a certain way we can strive for it again. However, the two previous lectures have shown us, that in connection with this effort a certain transformation must take place. We have seen the transformation in Francis of Assisi of that divine gift which manifested itself as bravery and valour. We saw that the transformation came about as the result of an inner moral force which in our last lecture we found to be the force of the Christ-impulse; the transformation of valour and bravery into true love. But this true love must be guided by another virtue, by the interest in the being to whom we turn our love. In his Timon of Athens Shakespeare shows how love, or warmth of heart, causes harm, when it is passionately manifested; when it appears merely as a quality of human nature without being guided by wisdom and truth. A man is described who gave freely of his possessions, who squandered his living in all directions. Liberality is a virtue, but Shakespeare also shows us that nothing but parasites are produced by what is squandered.

Just as ancient valour and bravery were guided from the Mysteries by the European Brahmins—those wise leaders who kept themselves hidden in the background—so also in human nature this virtue must accord with and be guided by interest. Interest, which connects us with the external world in the right way, must lead and guide us when, with our love, we turn to the world. Fundamentally this may be seen from the characteristic and striking example of Francis of Assisi. The sympathy he expressed was not obtrusive or offensive. Those who overwhelm others with their sympathy are by no means always actuated by the right moral impulses. And how many there are who will not receive anything that is given out of pity. But to approach another with, understanding is not offensive. Under some circumstances a person must needs refuse to be sympathised with; but the attempt to understand his nature is something to which no reasonable person can object. Hence also the attitude of another person cannot be blamed or condemned if his actions are determined by this principle.

It is understanding which can guide us with respect to this second virtue: Love. It is that which, through the Christ-impulse, has become the special virtue of the mind-soul or intellectual-soul; it is the virtue which may be described as human love accompanied by human understanding. Sympathy in grief and joy is the virtue which in the future must produce the most beautiful and glorious fruits in human social life, and, in one who rightly understands the Christ-impulse, this sympathy and this love will originate quite naturally, it will develop into feeling. It is precisely through the anthroposophical understanding of the Christ-impulse that it will become feeling.

Through the Mystery of Golgotha Christ descended into earthly evolution; His impulses, His activities are here now, they are everywhere. Why did He descend to this earth? In order that through what He has to give to the world, evolution may go forward in the right way. Now that the Christ-impulse is in the world, if through what is unmoral, if through lack of interest in our fellow-men, we destroy something, then we take away a portion of the world into which the Christ-impulse has flowed. Thus because the Christ-impulse is now here, we directly destroy something of it. But if we give to the world what can be given to it through virtue, which is creative, we build. We build through self-surrender. It is not without reason that it has often been said, that Christ was first crucified on Golgotha, but that He is crucified again and again through the deeds, of man. Since Christ has entered into the Earth development through the deed upon Golgotha, we, by our unmoral deeds, by our unkindness and lack of interest, add to the sorrow and pain inflicted upon Him. Therefore it has been said, again and again: Christ is crucified anew as long as unmorality, unkindness and lack of interest exist. Since the Christ-impulse has permeated the world, it is this which is made to suffer.

Just as it is true that through evil, which is destructive, we withdraw something from the Christ-impulse and continue the crucifixion upon Golgotha, it is also true that when we act out of love, in all cases where we use love, we add to the Christ-impulse, we help to bring it to life. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me” (Matthew 25, 40), this is the most significant statement of love and this statement must become the most profound moral impulse if it is once anthroposophically understood. We do this when with understanding we confront our fellow-men and offer them something in our actions, our virtue, our conduct towards them which is conditioned by our understanding of their nature. Our attitude towards our fellow-men is our attitude towards the Christ-impulse itself.

It is a powerful moral impulse, something which is a real foundation for morals, when we feel: “The Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished for all men, and an impulse has thence spread abroad throughout the whole world. When you are dealing with your fellow-men, try to understand them in their special, characteristics of race, colour, nationality, religious faith, philosophy, etc. If you meet them and do this or that to them, you do it to Christ. Whatever you do to men, in the present condition of the earth's evolution, you do to Christ.” This statement: “What ye have done to one of My brothers, ye have done unto Me,” will at the same time become a mighty moral impulse to the man who understands the fundamental significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. So that we may say: Whereas the gods of pre-Christian times gave instinctive wisdom to man, instinctive valour and bravery, so love streams down from the symbol of the cross, the love which is based upon the mutual interest of man in man.

Thereby the Christ-impulse will work powerfully in the world. On the day when it comes about that the Brahmin not only loves and understands the Brahmin, the Pariah the Pariah, the Jew the Jew, and the Christian the Christian; but when the Jew is able to understand the Christian, the Pariah the Brahmin, the American the Asiatic, as man, and put himself in his place, then one will know how deeply it is felt in a Christian way when we say: “All men must feel themselves to be brothers, no matter what their religious creed may be.” We ought to consider what otherwise binds us as being of little value. Father, mother, brother, sister, even one's own life one ought to esteem less than that which speaks from one human soul to the other. He who, in this sense does not regard as base all that impairs the connection with the Christ-impulse cannot be Christ's disciple. The Christ-impulse balances and compensates human differences. Christ's disciple is one who regards mere human distinctions as being of little account, and clings to the impulse of love streaming forth from the Mystery of Golgotha, which in this respect we perceive as a renewal of what was given to mankind as original virtue.

We have now but to consider what may be spoken of as the virtue of the Consciousness- or Spiritual- Soul. When we consider the fourth post-Atlantean age, we find that Temperance or Moderation was still instinctive. Plato and Aristotle called it the chief virtue of the Spiritual-Soul. Again they comprehended it as a state of balance, as the mean of what exists in the Spiritual-soul. The Spiritual-Soul consists in man's becoming conscious of the external world through his bodily nature. The sense body is primarily the instrument of the Spiritual-Soul, and it is also the sense body through which man arrives at self-consciousness.

Therefore the sense-body of man must be preserved. If it were not preserved for the mission of the earth, then that mission could not be fulfilled. But here also there is a limit. If a man only used all the forces he possessed in order to enjoy himself, he would shut himself up in himself, and the world would lose him. The man who merely enjoys himself, who uses all his forces merely to give himself pleasure, cuts himself off from the world—so thought Plato and Aristotle—the world loses him. And he, who denies himself everything renders himself weaker and weaker, and is finally laid hold of by the external world-process, and is crushed by the outer world. For he who goes beyond the forces appropriate to him as man, he who goes to excess is laid hold of by the world-process and is lost in it.

Thus what man has developed for the building up of the Spiritual-soul can be dissolved, so that he comes into the position of losing the world. Temperance or Moderation is the virtue which enables man to avoid these extremes. Temperance implies neither asceticism nor gluttony, but the happy mean between these two; and this is the virtue of the Spiritual-Soul. Regarding this virtue we have not yet progressed beyond the instinctive standpoint. A little reflection will teach you that, on the whole, people are very much given to sampling the two extremes. They swing to and fro between them. Leaving out of account the few who at the present day endeavour to gain clear views on this subject, you will find that the majority of people live very much after a particular pattern. In Central Europe this is often described by saying: There are people in Berlin who eat and drink to excess the entire winter, and then in summer they go to Carlsbad in order to remove the ill-effects produced by months of intemperance, thus going from one extreme to the other. Here you have the weighing of the scale, first to one side and then to the other. This is only a radical case. It is very evident that though the foregoing is extreme, and not universal to any great extent, still the oscillation between enjoyment and deprivation exists everywhere. People themselves ensure that there is excess on one side, and then they get the physicians to prescribe a so-called lowering system of cure, that is, the other extreme, in order that the ill effects may be repaired.

From this, it will be seen that in this respect people are still in an instinctive condition, that there is still an instinctive feeling, which is a kind of divine gift, not to go too far in one direction or another. But just as the other instinctive qualities of man were lost, these, too, will be lost with the transition from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean age. This quality which is still possessed as a natural tendency will be lost; and now you will be able to judge how much the anthroposophical world conception and conviction will have to contribute in order gradually to develop consciousness in this field.

At the present time there are very few, even developed anthroposophists, who see clearly that Anthroposophy provides the means to gain the right consciousness in this field also. When Anthroposophy is able to bring more weight to bear in this direction, then will appear what I can only describe in the following way; people will gradually long more and more for great spiritual truths. Although Anthroposophy is still scorned to-day, it will not always be so. It will spread, and overcome all its external opponents, and everything else still opposing it, and anthroposophists will not be satisfied by merely preaching universal love. It will be understood that one cannot acquire Anthroposophy in one day, any more than a person can take sufficient nourishment in one day to last the whole of his life. Anthroposophy has to be acquired to an ever increasing extent. It will come to pass that in the Anthroposophical Movement it will not be so often stated that these are our principles, and if we have these principles then we are anthroposophists; for the feeling and experience of standing in a community of the living element in anthroposophy will extend more and more.

Moreover, let us consider what happens by people mentally working upon the particular thoughts, the particular feelings and impulses which come from anthroposophical wisdom. We all know that anthroposophists can never have a materialistic view of the world, they have exactly the opposite, But he who says the following is a materialistic thinker: “When one thinks, a movement of the molecules or atoms of the brain takes place, and it is because of this movement that one has thought. Thought proceeds from the brain somewhat like a thin smoke, or it is something like the flame from a candle.” Such, is the materialistic view. The anthroposophical view is the opposite. In the latter it is the thought, the experience in the soul which sets the brain and nervous system in motion. The way in which our brain moves depends upon what thoughts we think. This is exactly the opposite of what is said by the materialist. If you wish to know how the brain of a person is constituted, you must inquire into what thoughts he has, for just as the printed characters of a book are nothing else than the consequence of thoughts, so the movements of the brain are nothing else than the consequence of thoughts.

Must we not then say that the brain will be differently affected when it is filled with anthroposophical thoughts than it will be in a society which plays cards? Different processes are at work in your minds when you follow anthroposophical thoughts from when you are in a company of card players, or see the pictures in a movie theatre. In the human organism nothing is isolated or stands alone. Everything is connected; one part acts and reacts on another. Thoughts act upon the brain and nervous system, and the latter is connected with the whole organism, and although many people may not yet be aware of it, when the hereditary characteristics still hidden in the body are conquered, the following will come about. The thoughts will be communicated from the brain to the stomach, and the result will be that things that are pleasant to people's taste to-day will no longer taste good to those who have received anthroposophical thoughts. The thoughts which anthroposophists have received are divine thoughts. They act upon the whole organism in such a manner that it will prefer to taste what is good for it. Man will smell and perceive as unsympathetic what does not suit him—a peculiar perspective, one which may perhaps be called materialistic, but is exactly the reverse.

This kind of appetite will come as a consequence of anthroposophical work; you will like one thing and prefer it at meals, dislike another and not wish to eat it. You may judge for yourselves when you notice that perhaps you now have an aversion to things, which before your anthroposophical days you did not possess. This will become more and more general when man works selflessly at his higher development, so that the world may receive what is right from him. One must not, however, play fast-and-lose with the words “selflessness” and “egoism.” These words may very easily be misused. It is not altogether selfless when someone says: “I shall only be active in the world and for the world; what does it matter about my own spiritual development? I shall only work, not strive egoistically!” It is not egoism when a person undergoes a higher development, because he thus fits himself more fully to bear an active part in the furtherance of the world development. If a person neglects his own further development, he renders himself useless to the world, he withdraws his force from it. We must do the right thing in this respect as well, in order to develop in ourselves what the Deity had in view for us.

Thus, through Anthroposophy a human race, or rather, a nucleus of humanity will be developed, which perceives temperance as a guiding ideal not merely instinctively, but which has a conscious sympathy for what makes man in a worthy way into a useful part of the divine world-order, and a conscious disinclination for all that mars man as a part in the universal order.

Thus we see that also in that which is produced in man himself, there are moral impulses, and we find what we may call life-wisdom or practical wisdom as transformed temperance. The ideal of practical wisdom which is to be taken into consideration for the next, the sixth post-Atlantean age, will be the ideal virtue which Plato calls “justice.” That is: the harmonious accord of these virtues. As in humanity the virtues have altered to some extent, so what was looked upon as justice in pre-Christian times has also changed. A single virtue such as this, which harmonises the others did not exist at that time. The harmony of the virtues stood before the mental vision of humanity as an ideal of the most distant future. We have seen that the moral impulse of bravery has been changed to love. We have also seen that wisdom has become truth. To begin with, truth is a virtue which places man in a just and worthy manner in external life. But if we wish to arrive at truthfulness regarding spiritual things, how then can we arrange it in relation to those things? We acquire truthfulness, we gain the virtue of the Sentient-Soul through a right and appropriate interest, through right understanding. Now what is this interest with regard to the spiritual world? If we wish to bring the physical world and especially man before us, we must open ourselves towards him, we must have a seeing eye for his nature. How do we obtain this seeing-eye with reference to the spiritual world? We gain it by developing a particular kind of feeling, that which appeared at a time when the old instinctive wisdom had sunk into the depths of the soul's life. This type of feeling was often described by the Greeks in the words: “All philosophical thought begins with wonder.” Something essentially moral is said when we say that our relationship to the super-sensible world begins with wonder. The savage, uncultivated human being, is but little affected by the great phenomena of the world. It is through mental development that man comes to find riddles in the phenomena of everyday life, and to perceive that there is something spiritual at the back of them. It is wonder that directs our souls up to the spiritual sphere in order that we may penetrate to the knowledge of that world; and we can only arrive at this knowledge when our soul is attracted by the phenomena which it is possible to investigate. It is this attraction which give rise to wonder, astonishment and faith. It is always wonder and amazement which direct us to what is super-sensible, and at the same time, it is what one usually describes as faith. Faith, wonder and amazement are the three forces of the soul which lead us beyond the ordinary world.

When we contemplate man with wonder and amazement, we try to understand him; by understanding his nature we attain to the virtue of brotherhood, and we shall best realise this by approaching the human being with reverence. We shall then see that reverence becomes something with which we must approach every human being and if we have this attitude, we shall become more and more truthful. Truth will become something by which we shall be bound by duty. Once we have an inkling of it, the super-sensible world becomes something towards which we incline, and through knowledge we shall attain to the super-sensible wisdom which has already sunk into the subconscious depths of the soul. Only after super-sensible wisdom had disappeared do we find the statement that “philosophy begins with wonder and amazement.” This statement will make it clear that wonder only appeared in evolution in the age when the Christ-impulse had come into the world.

It has already been stated that the second virtue is love. Let us now consider what we have described as instinctive temperance for the present time, and as practical wisdom of life for the future. Man confronts himself in these virtues. Through the deeds he performs in the world, he acts in such a way that he guards himself, as it were; it is therefore necessary for him to gain an objective standard of value.

We now see something appear which develops more and more, and which I have often spoken of in other connections, something which first appeared in the fourth post-Atlantean age, namely the Greek. It can be shown that in the old Greek dramas, for instance in Aeschylus, the Furies play a role which in Euripides is transformed into conscience. From this we see that in earlier times what we call conscience did not exist at all. Conscience is something that exists as a standard for our own actions when we go too far in our demands, when we seek our own advantage too-much. It acts as a standard placed between our sympathies and antipathies.

With this we attain to something which is more objective, which, compared with the virtues of truth, love and practical wisdom, acts in a much more objective, or outward manner. Love here stands in the middle, and acts as something which has to fill and regulate all life, also all social life. In the same way it acts as the regulator of all that man has developed as inner impulse. But that which he has developed as truth will manifest itself as the belief in super-sensible knowledge. Life-wisdom, that which originates in ourselves, we must feel as a divine spiritual regulator which, like conscience, leads securely along the true middle course. If we had time it would be very easy to answer the various objections which might be raised at this point. But we shall only consider one, for example, the objection to the assertion that conscience and wonder are qualities which have only gradually developed in humanity, whereas they are really eternal. But this they are not. He who says that they are eternal qualities in human nature only shows that he does not know the conditions attached to them.

As time goes on it will be found more and more that in ancient times man had not as yet descended so far to the physical plane, but was still more closely connected with divine impulses, and that he was in a condition which he will again consciously strive to reach when he is ruled more by truth, love and the art of life in regard to the physical plane, and when in regard to spiritual knowledge he is actuated by faith in the super-sensible world. It is not necessarily the case that faith will directly lead into that world, but it will at length be transformed into super-sensible knowledge. Conscience is that which will enter as a regulator in the Consciousness- or Spiritual-Soul. Faith, love, conscience; these three forces will become the three stars of the moral forces which shall enter into human souls particularly through Anthroposophy. The moral perspective of the future can only be disclosed to those who think of these three virtues being ever more increased Anthroposophy will place moral life in the light of these virtues, and they will be the constructive forces of the future.

Before closing our observations, there is one point which must be considered. I shall only touch upon the subject, for it would be impossible to analyse without giving many lectures. The Christ-impulse entered human evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha. We know that at that time a human organism consisting of physical, etheric, and astral bodies received the Ego-impulse or “I” from above, as the Christ-impulse. It was this Christ-impulse which was received by the earth and which flowed into earthly evolution. It was now in it as the ego of Christ. We know further that the physical body, etheric body and astral body remained with Jesus of Nazareth; the Christ-impulse was within as the ego. At Golgotha, Jesus of Nazareth separated from the Christ-impulse, which then flowed into the earth development. The evolution of this impulse signifies the evolution of the earth itself.

Earnestly consider certain things which are very often repeated in order that they may be more easily understood. As we have often heard, the world is maya or illusion, but man must gradually penetrate to the truth, the reality of this external world. The earth evolution fundamentally consists in the fact that all the external things which have been formed in the first half of the earth's development are dissolved in the second half, in which we now are, so that all that we see externally, physically, shall separate from human development just as the physical body of a human being falls away. One might ask: What will then be left? And the answer is: The forces which are embodied in man as real forces through the process of the development of humanity on the earth. And the most real impulse in this development is that which has come into earth evolution through the Christ-impulse. But this Christ-impulse at first finds nothing with which it can clothe itself. Therefore it has to obtain a covering through the further development of the earth; and when this is concluded, the fully developed Christ shall be the final man—as Adam was the first—around whom humanity in its multiplicity has grouped itself.

In the words: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me,” is contained a significant hint for us. What has been done for Christ? The actions performed in accordance with the Christ-impulse under the influence of conscience, under the influence of faith and according to knowledge, are developed out on the earth-life up to the present time, and as, through his actions and his moral attitude a person gives something to his brethren, he gives at the same time to Christ. This should be taken as a precept: All the forces we develop, all acts of faith and trust, all acts performed as the result of wonder, are—because we give it at the same time to the Christ-Ego—something which closes like a covering round the Christ and may be compared with the astral body of man.

We form the astral body for the Christ-Ego-impulse by all the moral activities of wonder, trust, reverence and faith, in short, all that paves the way to super-sensible knowledge. Through all these activities we foster love. This is quite in accordance with the statement we quoted: “What ye have done to one, of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.”

We form the etheric body for Christ through our deeds of love, and through our actions in the world which we do through the impulses of conscience we form for the Christ-impulse that which corresponds to the physical body of man. When the earth has one day reached its goal, when man understands the right moral impulses through which all that is good is done, then shall be present that which came as an Ego or “I” into human development through the Mystery of Golgotha as the Christ-impulse shall then be enveloped by an astral body which is formed through faith, through all the deeds of wonder and amazement on the part of man. It shall be enveloped by something which is like an etheric body which is formed through deeds of love; and by something which envelops it like a physical body, formed through the deeds of conscience.

Thus the future evolution of humanity shall be accomplished through the co-operation of the moral impulses of man with the Christ-impulse. We see humanity in perspective before us, like a great organic structure. When people understand how to member their actions into this great organism, and through their own deeds form their impulses around it like a covering, they shall then lay the foundations, in the course of earthly evolution, for a great community, which can be permeated and made Christian through and through by the Christ-impulse.

Thus we see that morals need not be preached, but they can indeed be founded by showing facts that have really happened and do still happen, confirming what is felt by persons with special mental endowments. It should make a noteworthy impression upon us if we bear in mind how, at the time when he lost his friend, Duke Charles Augustus, Goethe wrote many things in a long letter at Weimar, and then on the same day—it was in the year 1828, three-and-a-half years before his own death, and almost at the end of his life—he wrote a very remarkable sentence in his diary: “The whole reasonable world may be considered as a great immortal individual which uninterruptedly brings about what is necessary and thereby makes itself master even over chance.” How could such a thought become more concrete than by our imagining this Individual active among us, and by thinking of ourselves as, being united with him in his work? Through the Mystery of Golgotha the greatest Individual entered into human development, and, when people intentionally direct their lives in the way we have just described, they will range themselves round the Christ-impulse, so that around this Being there shall be formed something which is like a covering around a kernel.

Much more could be said about virtue from the standpoint of Anthroposophy. In particular long and important considerations could be entered into concerning truth and its connection with karma, for through Anthroposophy the idea of karma will have to enter into human evolution more and more. Man will also have to learn gradually so to consider and order his life that his virtues correspond with karma. Through the idea of karma man must also learn to recognise that he may not disown his former deeds by his later ones. A certain feeling of responsibility in life, a readiness to take upon ourselves the results of what we have done, has yet to show itself as a result of human evolution. How far removed man still is from this ideal we see when we consider him more closely. That man develops by the acts he has committed is a well-known fact. When the consequences of an action seem to have come to an end, then what could only be done if the first act had not taken place, can still be done. The fact that a person feels responsible for what he has done, the fact that he consciously accepts the idea of karma, is something which might also be a subject for study. But you will still find much for yourselves by following the lines suggested in these three lectures; you will find how fruitful these ideas can be if you work them out further. As man will live for the remainder of the earth development in repeated incarnations, it is his task to rectify all the mistakes made respecting the virtues described, by inclining to one side or the other, to change them by shaping them of his own free will, so that the balance, the mean, may come and thus the goal be gradually attained which has been described as the formation of the coverings for the Christ-impulse.

Thus we see before us not merely an abstract ideal of universal brotherhood, which indeed may also receive a strong impulse if we lay Anthroposophy at the foundation, but we see that there is something real in our earthly evolution, we see that there is in it an Impulse which came into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha. And we also feel ourselves under the necessity so to work upon the Sentient-Soul, the Intellectual-Soul and the Spiritual-Soul, that this ideal Being shall be actualised, and that we shall be united with Him as with a great immortal Individual. The thought that the only possibility of further evolution, the power to fulfil the earth mission, lies in man's forming one whole with this great Individual, is realised in the second moral principle: What you do as if it were born from you alone, pushes you away and separates you from the great Individual, you thereby destroy something; but what you do to build up this great immortal Individual in the way above described, that you do towards the further development, the progressive life of the whole organism of the world.

We only require to place these two thoughts before us in order to see that their effect is not only to preach morals, but to give them a basis. For the thought: “Through your actions you are destroying what you ought to build up,” is terrible and fearful, keeping down all opposing desires. But the thought: “You are building up this immortal Individual; you are making yourself into a member of this immortal Individual,” fires one to good deeds, to strong moral impulses. In this way morals are not only preached, but we are led to thoughts which themselves may be moral impulses, to thoughts which are able to found morals.

The more the truth is cultivated, the more rapidly will the anthroposophical world conception and feeling develop ethics such as these. And it has been my task to express this in these lectures. Naturally, many things have only been lightly touched upon, but you will develop further in your own minds many ideas which have been broached. In this way we shall be drawn more closely together all over the earth. When we meet together—as we have done on this occasion as anthroposophists of Northern and Central Europe—to consider these subjects, and when we allow the thoughts roused in us at gatherings such as this to echo and re-echo through us, we shall in this way best make it true that Anthroposophy is to provide the foundation—even at the present time—for real spiritual life. And when we have to part again we know that it is in our anthroposophical thoughts that we are most at one, and this knowledge is at the same time a moral stimulus. To know that we are united by the same ideals with people who, as a rule, are widely separated from one another in space, but with whom we may meet on special occasions, is a stronger moral stimulus than being always together.

That we should think in this way of our gathering, that we should thus understand our studies together, fills my soul, especially at the close of these lectures, as something by which I should like to express my farewell greeting to you, and concerning which I am convinced that, when it is understood in the true light, the anthroposophical life which is developing will also be spiritually well founded. With this thought and these feelings let us close our studies today.

I'd like to ask your forgiveness, first of all, for being unable to speak to you tonight in your native language. But friends who have been attending my lectures to members of the Anthroposophical Society this week have assured me that it would be all right to speak to you on a spiritual scientific subject in German.

The local members have also suggested the underlying theme of this evening's talk; I am to speak on the relationship of spiritual science—or anthroposophy, as it may also be called—to Christianity. In order to do so, I must first say something about the nature and significance of what is meant by spiritual science, about the point of view from which I shall be speaking.

This spiritual science is not trying to found either a new religion or a new religious sect of any kind. It hopes to be able to fulfill the tasks required spiritually of our contemporary culture.

Several hundred years ago, the dawning of the modern scientific age signified an advance in human cultural life which can be compared to the steps we must now take in mankind's development if further progress is to be made. Natural science opened the modern age for mankind through the knowledge of external physical laws. Spiritual science should play a similar role in the present and near future in recognizing the laws of the realms of soul and spirit and applying them to ethical, social, and all other aspects of cultural life.

Although it is still misunderstood and misrepresented—and understandably so—it can trust the power and effectiveness of its truth when it considers the course of natural science at the beginning of the modern age. Natural scientists, too, had to face prejudices hundreds and even thousands of years old. But truth possesses powers which always help it to victory against any hostile forces.

Now that we have mentioned the trust the spiritual scientist has in the truth and effectiveness of his work, let us turn to the nature of that research which is the basis for this spiritual science.

The spiritual scientist's way of looking at things is wholly in keeping with the methods of natural science. However, it must certainly be clear that since spiritual science covers an entirely different field from the external sense-perceptible field covered by natural science, researching the spiritual realm requires a fundamental modification of the natural scientific approach. The methods of spiritual science are in keeping with those of natural science in the sense that any unprejudiced person trained in natural science can accept the premises of spiritual science. However, as long as the natural scientific method is conceived one-sidedly, as all too often happens today, then prejudice will be heaped upon prejudice when it comes to applying the natural scientific approach to spiritual life. Granted, natural scientific logic must be applied to what most concerns man but which is most difficult to investigate for that very reason. Granted, this way of thinking must be applied to the very being of man himself. Granted, in spiritual science man must examine his own nature, making use of the only tool that he has at his disposal—himself. The premise of spiritual science is that in becoming an instrument of investigation into the spiritual world, man has to undergo a transformation that enables him to look into the spiritual world, something he cannot do in ordinary life.

I'd like to start with a comparison from natural science, not to prove anything but just to make it clear how the spiritual scientific way of looking at things rests entirely on the premises of natural scientific thinking. Let us take water as an example drawn from nature. Suppose we are looking at the qualities of water as we find it around us. Then along comes the chemist and applies his methods to the water, breaking it down into hydrogen and oxygen. Well, what is he doing to the water? As you all know, water doesn't burn. The chemist takes hydrogen out of the water, and hydrogen is a gas that burns. No one just looking at water can tell that it contains hydrogen and oxygen, which have totally different properties from water.

As spiritual science shows, it is equally impossible for us to see the inner qualities of another person. Just as the chemist can split water into hydrogen and oxygen, the spiritual scientist, by means of an inner process which must be prepared in the soul's very depths, is able to distinguish between the external physical and soul-spiritual aspects of what confronts him outwardly as a human being. He is interested initially in examining, from the spiritual scientific viewpoint, the soul-spiritual aspect as something separate from the bodily nature. No one can discern the real facts of the soul-spiritual from looking at the merely external bodily nature, any more than the nature of hydrogen can be discerned without first extracting it from water.

Nowadays it very often happens that as soon as one begins to say this sort of thing one hears: “This conflicts with monism, which must be adhered to at all costs.” Well, monism can't keep even chemists from splitting water into two parts. It's no argument against monism when something that can actually happen does happen—for instance, when the soul-spiritual is recognized as distinct from the bodily nature by applying the methods of spiritual research.

These methods, however, cannot be applied in laboratories or hospitals, but are processes that have to take place in the soul itself. They are not miraculous qualities; they are faculties which we possess to a certain degree in daily life. But they have to be infinitely heightened if we are to become spiritual researchers.

I don't want to beat around the bush with all kinds of general statements, so I'll come right to the point. We are all familiar with the soul capacity known as memory, and are aware of how much depends on it. Imagine waking up some morning with no idea of where we've been and who we are. We would lose everything that makes us human. Our memory, which has possessed inner coherence ever since early childhood, is essential to our life as human beings. The study of memory leaves contemporary philosophers perplexed. There are already some among them who go so far as to turn away from the monistic-materialistic view when it comes to looking at memory. In precise research they find that, although sensory perception (if one may refer to an activity of soul in this way) is superficially bound to the body, it will never be possible to say that memory is bound to the body at all. I am just calling this to your attention. Even the French philosopher Bergson, a man who certainly shows no tendency to delve into anthroposophy, has pointed to the spiritual nature of memory.

How do memory and the power of recall actually confront us? Events long past enter our soul as images. Although the events themselves may lie far in the past, our soul is actively involved in conjuring them up from the depths of our inner life. And what emerges from these depths can be compared with the original experience, though in contrast to the images provided by our sensory perceptions memories are pale. However, they are closely connected with the integrity of our soul life. And without memory, we would not find our way in the world. But memory is built upon the power to recall, through which the soul can conjure up what is hidden in its memories.

This is where spiritual science comes in. Please note that it is not memory as such, but the power of summoning up a mental content from the soul's depths, which can be infinitely strengthened. Then this power can be used not only for conjuring up past experiences but for quite other purposes as well. Methods of spiritual research are not founded upon any external procedures applicable in laboratories or upon anything perceptible to external senses, but rather upon intensive soul processes which anyone can undergo. What makes these processes valuable is the boundless heightening of our attentiveness or, in other words, the concentration of our thought life.

What is this concentration of thought life?

This evening I have only a short hour to speak, so I'll just be able to touch on the principles of the topic under discussion. You can find the details in my books, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Occult Science—an Outline, and The Threshold of the Spiritual World. Let me outline the basic soul activities which represent a boundless heightening of the attentiveness necessary for human life. Only this heightening makes spiritual research possible.

What activity does a person usually engage in when he confronts his surroundings? He perceives things; he applies his brain-bound thinking to them and forms mental images about them. As a rule he does nothing further with these images. But methods of spiritual science, based upon the concentration of thinking, begin just where our everyday mental activity leaves off. Anyone wanting to become a spiritual researcher must carry on from this point.

We must choose mental images which we ourselves can form for ourselves in detail and bring them into our field of consciousness. These should preferably be symbolic images that do not need to correspond with the external world. We must place these images, taken from the practice of spiritual science or suggested to us by the spiritual researcher, at the center of our full consciousness, so that for a longer period we turn our attention away from everything external, concentrating on a single image. Whereas we usually move on from one mental image to another, in this case we marshal all our soul forces, concentrate them on one chosen image, and devote ourselves totally to this image. A person observed in this activity seems to be engaged in something resembling sleep (although it is in fact radically different). For if such concentration is to be fruitful, that person must indeed become in some respects like a sleeper.

Just before we fall asleep, we feel how the will forces in our limbs quiet down, how a kind of twilight settles around us, how the activity of the senses ebbs away. Then we lose consciousness. In concentration, as in sleep, our senses must be wholly shut off from all impressions of the outer world; the eye should see as little, the ear hear as little as in sleep, and so on. Then the whole soul life is focused on a single mental image. This is what makes concentration radically different from sleep. In fact, it could be called fully conscious sleeping. Whereas in sleep the darkness of unconsciousness floods the soul, the aspiring spiritual researcher lives in a heightened state of soul activity. He mobilizes all the strengths of his soul and focuses them on the chosen image. The point here is not that we observe the mental image; it rather gives us the opportunity to pull our soul forces together and channel them. That's the important thing, because in this way we gradually succeed in wresting our soul-spiritual being free from our bodily nature. Again I refer you to my books for the details.

What I've just explained cannot be achieved all at once. Most people, even those who are not distracted by the demands of daily life, have to work for years on such concentration exercises; it is impossible to keep at them for more than a few minutes at a time, or for more than a fraction of an hour at most. We must repeat them again and again until we really succeed in strengthening the powers that otherwise slumber in everyday life (but are nevertheless there) so that they become effective in us to the point of freeing our soul-spiritual being from our bodily nature.

Let me share facts with you rather than talk abstractions, and say at once that if the spiritual researcher succeeds, by persevering energetically and devotedly in his exercises, in reaping the fruits of his efforts, then he arrives at an experience of what could be called purely inner consciousness. From then on, he can make sense of a statement that previously meant nothing to him: “I know that I am outside my body; in grasping and experiencing my inner being, I am outside my body.”

I'd like to describe this experience to you in detail. We notice first of all that the power of thinking, which is usually active only in the affairs of daily life, frees itself from the body. To begin with, this experience is faint, but it makes its appearance in such a way that, having had it, we know it for what it is. Only when we return to our body and have submerged ourselves in the life of the brain, manifested in physical substance, do we realize what resistance the brain offers. We are aware that we use the brain as an instrument for ordinary thinking; but now we know that we have been outside it. We gradually learn to make sense of the statement, “You are experiencing yourself in the soul-spiritual element.” We experience our head as though clothed in its thoughts. We know what it means to have separated our soul-spiritual element from our external bodily nature. First we get to know the resistance that bodily life puts up, and then to know life independent of the body. It is just as if hydrogen were to become aware of itself outside of the watery element. That is the case with a person who does exercises of this kind. And if he continues to do them faithfully, the great and significant moment comes when real spiritual research begins—a profoundly shattering moment that has far-reaching consequences for our entire existence. This moment can occur in thousands of different ways, but I will characterize it in the way it most typically comes about.

If we have carried on these exercises for a certain period of time, training our souls in conformity with the natural scientific approach, then that moment finally comes, either during waking life or in a sleep from which we awaken to realize that we are not dreaming but experiencing a brand new reality. The experience can be such, for example, that we say, “What is going on around me? It is as though my surroundings were receding from me, as though the natural elements were striking like lightning and destroying my body, and I nevertheless maintained myself, unlike this body.” We come to know what seers throughout the ages have always pictured as “reaching the gates of death.” This image brings home to us the true soul-spiritual state of man when he is living purely in the soul-spiritual element, instead of perceiving himself and the world through the instrument of his body (and this we experience only through the image; the reality is met only in death).

The shattering thing is to know that we have released ourselves from our body with our thinking capacity. And other forces can be similarly released so that we become ever richer and more inward as regards our soul life.

But the one exercise that I have characterized as concentration or as an unbounded heightening of attentiveness is not enough. We achieve the following result with this exercise: When we have arrived at the point where the soul experiences itself, images that we can call real imaginations make their appearance. Images rise up, but they are vastly different from those of our ordinary memory. Whereas ordinary memory contains only images of external experiences, these images arising now from the grey depths of our soul have nothing in common with anything that can be experienced in the outer world of the senses. Objections that we might easily be deceiving ourselves, that what thus arises from these grey depths of soul may merely be reminiscences produced by memory, don't hold up. For the spiritual researcher learns to distinguish exactly between what memory can summon up and something radically different from the content of memory.

We must keep one thing in mind, however, when talking about this moment of entering the spiritual world: namely, that people who suffer from visions, hallucinations, or other such pathological conditions are not well suited to spiritual research. The less a person tends in that direction, which is a mere reflection of ordinary experience, the more safely and certainly he advances in the field of spiritual research. A large part of the preparation for spiritual research consists in learning to distinguish exactly between something that arises in an unconscious and pathological manner from within, and the new element which can make its appearance as spiritual reality following a spiritual scientific schooling of our soul.

I'd like to mention a radical difference between visionary or hallucinatory experiences and what the spiritual researcher perceives. Why is it that so many people believe themselves to be already in the spiritual world, when they are only having hallucinations and visions? How unwilling people are to learn anything really new! They cling to the old and familiar. These sick soul-figments appear to us in hallucinations and visions in basically the same way as external sensory reality. They are simply there, confronting us; we do nothing to make them appear. The spiritual researcher is not in the same situation with regard to his new spiritual surroundings. I've told you how he has to concentrate and refine all the forces of his soul that are usually asleep. This requires him to exert a strength and energy of soul not present in external life. He must constantly hold on to this strength when he enters the spiritual world. It is characteristic of hallucinations and visions that a person remains passive; he doesn't need to exert himself. However, as soon as we become passive toward the spiritual world for even a moment, everything disappears. We have to stay with it and to be continuously active. That is why we cannot be mistaken, since nothing of the spiritual world can appear to us in the way a vision or hallucination does. We must be fully active in confronting every least detail of what appears to us out of the spiritual world, so that we grasp what we are facing. This uninterrupted activity is vital for true spiritual research. But only then do we enter a world radically different from the world of the senses, a world where spiritual actualities and beings surround us.

But another thing is still needed: Wresting the soul free of the body happens as described. This further need, however, can again be explained with a scientific comparison. When we extract hydrogen, it remains separate at first, but then it combines with other substances, becoming something quite different. The same thing must happen to our soul-spiritual being after its separation from the body. This being must link itself up with beings not of the sensory world. It must unite with them and thus perceive them.

The first stage of spiritual research is separation of the soul-spiritual from the bodily nature. The second is entering into relationship with beings that work behind the scenes of the sensory world. To say this is held against one nowadays, even more so than any vague talk of “spirit” in general. Many people today feel the urge to acknowledge the existence of something spiritual; they speak of a spirit behind the world order and are perfectly satisfied to be pantheists. But as the spiritual researcher sees it, pantheism is just like taking someone out into nature and remarking, “Look, all this around you is nature,” instead of saying, “Those are trees, clouds; that's a lily, that's a rose.” Leading a person from one experience of nature to another, from one being to the next, and saying, “All this is nature,” is to tell him nothing. The facts must be presented concretely and in detail. It is acceptable today to speak of an all-pervading spirit, but the spiritual researcher cannot rest content with that. After all, he is entering a realm of spirit beings and spiritual realities which are differentiated, just as the external world is concretely differentiated into clouds, mountains, valleys, trees, flowers, and so on. But although we differentiate natural phenomena into plant, animal and human kingdoms, it is not acceptable today to speak of concrete details and facts encountered upon entering the spiritual world. The spiritual researcher cannot help but point out that entering the spiritual world means entering a world of real, concrete spiritual beings and events.

Another exercise we need to do is to intensify our feeling of devotion—devotion felt in everyday life and in life's special moments as religious reverence. This devotion must be boundlessly heightened and developed, so that a person can reach the stage of giving himself devoutly over to the stream of cosmic events, as he does in sleep. In contemplation or meditation, he must forget about any bodily movement, again as he does in sleep.

This is the second exercise, and it must alternate with the first. The person doing the exercise forgets his body so completely that he not only stops thinking about it but can even shut out all stirrings of feeling and will, just as in sleep he shuts out all awareness of bodily stirrings. But this condition must be brought about consciously. Adding this exercise in devotion to the first, he will succeed in making himself at home in the spiritual world with the help of his awakening spiritual senses, just as he finds his way into his physical surroundings with the help of his external senses.

A new world now dawns before him, a world that is always inhabited by his soul-spiritual being. A reality becomes apparent to his inner observation—a reality still rejected by current prejudices, although it is just as much a fact of strictly scientific research as our modern evolutionary theory. I am referring to the fact that he comes to know the soul-spiritual core of his being in such a way the he realizes: “Before I was conceived and born into this life which clothed me in a body, I existed as a soul-spiritual being in a spiritual realm. When I pass through the gates of death, my body will fall away. But what I have come to know as the soul-spiritual core of my being, which can live outside my body, will pass through the gates of death. From then on, it lives in a spiritual world.”

In other words, we come to recognize the immortality of the soul already in this life between birth and death. We become familiar with something we know to be independent of the body and with the world that the human soul enters after death. We come to know this soul-spiritual core in such a way that we can describe it with scientific clarity.

Observing a plant, we see how the seed germinates, how leaves and blossoms develop, and how the fruit forms, producing new seed. We realize how its life culminates in this seed. Leaves and blossoms drop off, but the seed remains, bearing the promise of a new plant. We become aware that the seed, the essential part of a new plant, is already living in the plant we are observing. As we look at life between birth and death, we thus come to recognize that something develops in the soul-spiritual element that passes through the gates of death and is, moreover, the germ and essential core of a new life. The soul-spiritual core of our being, which is hidden in everyday life but reveals itself to spiritual science, carries the potential for a new human life just as certainly as a plant seed has the potential to become a new plant. Looking at things in this way, we arrive at the realization of repeated earth-lives in full harmony with the natural scientific approach. We know that the sum total of man's life consists not only of the life between birth and death but also of the life running its course between death and rebirth, from which man then embarks upon a new incarnation.

The only possible objection to what I've just said is that the germinating seed could perish if conditions didn't foster the development of a new plant. Spiritual science meets this objection by pointing out that, though the plant seed in its dependence on outer conditions may perish, there is nothing in the spiritual world to hinder the gradual ripening of the core of the human soul as it prepares for a new life on earth. In other words, the core of the human soul which matures during one earth-life will appear again in a further life on earth. I can only indicate briefly how the spiritual researcher, faithful to natural scientific methods of investigation, comes to this view of repeated earth-lives.

People have accused spiritual science of being Buddhistic because it speaks of reincarnation. Spiritual science certainly does not draw what it has to say from Buddhism; it is firmly founded on the premises and principles of modern natural science. But spiritual science widens modern natural science to cover the life of the spirit without even taking Buddhism into account. Spiritual science can't help acknowledging the truth of reincarnation. It can't change the fact that in ancient times Buddhism spoke out of old traditions about repeated earth-lives.

I'd like to mention in this connection that Lessing's mature thinking, deepened by experience, led him to speak about reincarnation. At the end of a long working life, Lessing wrote his treatise on the education of the human race, in which he advanced the idea of repeated earth-lives. He said somewhat as follows: “Is this teaching to be rejected just because it appears at the dawn of human culture, before any scholarly prejudice could cloud it?” Lessing refused to be swayed by the fact that this teaching was a product of ancient times, a teaching that was later pushed into the background by scholarly prejudice. Spiritual science also doesn't need to shy away from it simply because it appears in Buddhistic doctrine. That is certainly no reason to accuse spiritual science of Buddhistic leanings.

Spiritual science recognizes the truth of repeated earth-lives out of its own sources, and it points us to our connection with the totality of human life through the ages. For the souls living in us have been here many times before, and will return again and again. Let us look back on early cultural epochs—for instance, to the time when people lifted their eyes to the pyramids. We know that our souls were already living at that time and that they will appear again in the future; they take part in every epoch.

It is still perfectly understandable today that people have a bias against such teachings. There are also people who take everything the way they want to see it. They know that Lessing was a great man, but it makes them uncomfortable to know that he acknowledged the truth of reincarnation at the height of his career. So they say, “Oh, well, Lessing was getting senile in his old age.” That makes people more comfortable than to think that we have each been part of every civilization that ever existed on the earth.

Now, how does spiritual science want to introduce the facts I've just explained into contemporary culture? Why, no differently than natural science presents its findings, although this means that spiritual science is subject to the same prejudices as the initial findings based on the modern natural scientific approach. Just think of Copernicus, Galileo, or Giordano Bruno. What happened when Copernicus claimed that the earth didn't stand still, but revolved around the sun, and that the sun actually stood still in relation to the earth? How did people react? They thought that religion was at stake, that people's religious piety was jeopardized by this advance in knowledge.

It took the Church until the nineteenth century to remove the teachings of Copernicus from the Index and to integrate them into its doctrine. In every age advances in thought have had to fight against old prejudices. This young spiritual knowledge wants to make itself felt in human culture today in the same way as the new natural scientific knowledge did in its day. Spiritual science wants to emphasize the fact that mankind is ready to acquire knowledge of the spirit, just as in the achievements of Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno the need for a new science of nature was made evident at a time when mankind was ready for it.

In his day, even Nicholas Copernicus, a canon of the Church, was accused of not being a Christian. And now it is easy in certain respects to accuse spiritual science of being unchristian. When this happens, I always think of a priest who, on becoming rector of his university, delivered a lecture about Galileo. He spoke somewhat as follows: “In those days people had religious prejudices against Copernicus. But a truly religious person knows that God's glory and light are not dimmed when we consciously penetrate the secrets of the universe. He knows that the grandeur of our view of God has in fact only increased as a result of extending our knowledge beyond the realm of the senses to calculate the course of the stars and the particular characteristics of the heavenly bodies.”

A truly religious person can grasp that religion is only enriched and deepened by scientific knowledge. Spiritual science doesn't want to have anything to do with founding a new religion or to give rise to prophets or founders of sects. Mankind has matured; the time for prophets and founding religions is over. And in future people who feel the urge to be prophets will suffer a different fate from the prophets of old, who, in accordance with the ways of their times, were rightly revered as outstanding individuals. People of today who try to be prophets in the old sense will simply be laughed at. Spiritual science doesn't need any prophets because by its very nature it bases what it has to say upon the depths of the human soul, depths which our souls cannot always illuminate. And the spiritual scientist simply wants to investigate his subject as an unassuming researcher, drawing attention to vital matters. He says, “I've discovered it; you can discover it for yourself, too, if you try.” It won't take long until the spiritual investigator is recognized as a researcher just like any chemist or biologist. The difference is that the spiritual researcher does his research in a field of concern to every human soul.

Tonight I could only sketch the activity of the research done in this field. But if you study the matter in more detail, you will find that it addresses the most vital questions of the human soul, questions concerning the nature of man and his destiny. Both are questions which can stir human beings to their depths every hour of every day; they give us strength for our work. And because the concerns of spiritual science deal with the depths of the human soul, it is only natural that it should grip us and unite with our inmost self, thereby deepening and enhancing our religious feeling to an unusual degree.

Spiritual science does not want to usurp the place of Christianity; on the contrary it would like to be instrumental in making Christianity understood. Thus it becomes clear to us through spiritual science that the being whom we call Christ is to be recognized as the center of life on earth, that the Christian religion is the ultimate religion for the earth's whole future. Spiritual science shows us particularly that the pre-Christian religions outgrow their one-sidedness and come together in the Christian faith. It is not the desire of spiritual science to set something else in the place of Christianity; rather it wants to contribute to a deeper, more heartfelt understanding of Christianity.

Can it be said that when Copernicus was arriving at his concept of the solar system in the peace and quiet of his study, he wanted to reshape the order of nature? It would be mad to say anything of the sort. Nature stayed as it was, but people learned to think about nature in a way that accorded with the new view of the world. I've taken the liberty of calling a book on Christianity that I wrote many years ago Christianity as Mystical Fact. No one used to mulling over what he presents to the world would choose such a title without weighing it carefully. Why, then, did I choose it? Only in order to show that Christianity is not a mere doctrine to be interpreted this way or that; it has entered the world as a fact that can only be understood spiritually. Nature didn't change because of Copernicus, nor does the truth of Christianity change when spiritual science is used as a tool for understanding it more completely than was possible in times gone by.

I've taken more time than was intended, but perhaps you will let me draw your attention to one concrete aspect of Christian spiritual research. Studying ancient pre-Christian cultures from the viewpoint of the spiritual researcher, we find that they all had mystery places which were simultaneously centers of religion, art, and science. Although the exoteric cultures of earlier times did not allow people to delve into the spiritual world by means of the spiritual scientific methods I have described, it was possible for certain individuals to be admitted into the mysteries as pupils or candidates for initiation. The art of the mysteries helped them to achieve what I have just been describing—namely, withdrawing from the physical body and developing a body-free soul life. And what came of it? The achieving of this body-free soul life enabled them to experience the spiritual world and the pivotal event in man's evolutionary history, the Christ Event.

Exoteric scholarship pays far too little attention to the role played by these pupils of the mysteries, although this is not for lack of available material on the subject.

Let me mention a symptomatic instance. St. Augustine said that there have been Christians not only since Christ's appearance on earth, but even before His coming. Anyone saying that today would be accused of heresy. A Church Father could say it, however, and that was indeed St. Augustine's opinion. Why did this Christian teacher state such a thing? We get a sense of why he said it when we see in reading Plato, for instance, how he prized the mysteries and how he speaks of their significance for the whole life and being of mankind. Some words of Plato that seem harsh have come down to us. He said that human souls live in muddy swamps after death if they have not been initiated into the holy mysteries. Plato spoke out of his conviction that the human soul is essentially of a spiritual nature, and that he who withdraws his soul from the physical body as a result of initiation can behold the spiritual world. A person who has not worked his way into the mysteries seems to Plato to be cut off from his true being. The crucial point is that in ancient times the mysteries were the only way to leave the world of the senses and gain entry into the world of the spirit. So it was that those who were recognized as schooled in the mysteries, men like Heraclitus and Plato, were called “Christians” by the Church Fathers because the mysteries had taught them to see the spiritual world.

That, however, is no longer the case. The relationship of the human soul to the spiritual world is tremendously different today than it was in pre-Christian times. What I have been describing tonight about what every soul can undertake for itself to succeed in entering the spiritual world has been possible only since the founding of Christianity. Since then, every soul who applies the methods set forth in the books mentioned above can ascend to the spiritual world through a process of self-education. In pre-Christian times the mysteries and the authoritative guidance of teachers were essential; there was no such thing as self-initiation then. And when spiritual science is asked what brought about this change, the reply based on its research must be that it was brought about by the Mystery of Golgotha. The founding of Christianity has introduced to mankind a reality that can only be researched spiritually. Christ Himself could be found previously in the realm of the spirit only by a person who had learned in the mysteries to withdraw from his body. He can be found since the Christ Event by every human soul willing to make the effort. What the mysteries once introduced to human souls dwells since the Mystery of Golgotha in every human soul, shared by all alike.

How is this to be understood?

Those who were recognized as schooled in the mysteries, men like Heraclitus and Plato, were called “Christians” by the Church Fathers because the mysteries had taught them to see into the spiritual world. Spiritual science shows that while Jesus was living in the way the Gospels tell of it, there came a moment in His life—the baptism in the Jordan—when Jesus was transformed. A Being not there before entered into Him and lived within Him for the next three years. The Being that thus entered Him went through the Mystery of Golgotha. This is not the time to go into detail concerning the Mystery of Golgotha, but spiritual science, from its fully scientific point of view, confirms what the Gospels relate. Through the Event on Golgotha the Being Who could previously be experienced only in spiritual heights united with earthly humanity. Since the time He passed through death on Golgotha, Christ lives in all human souls alike. He is the source of strength whereby every soul can find its way into the spiritual world. Human souls on earth have been transformed by the Mystery of Golgotha. The Christ came, as He said, “from above,” but He has taken up His earthly abode in our human world.

Spiritual science is reproached for saying that Jesus was not always the Christ, but that Christ's life on earth began only when Jesus was thirty years old. Prejudiced humanity confronts spiritual science with one superficiality after another. The mere stating of the fact instantly invites prejudice. And the same holds true of almost everything that our opponents say regarding the position spiritual science takes on Christianity.

Don't we all agree that a child only begins to remember around his third year? Does this mean that what lives in him now was not already present before then? When we speak of Christ's entering into Jesus, are we thereby denying that Christ had been related to Jesus from birth on? We would not deny this any more than we would deny that the child has a soul before the soul becomes aware of itself during the third year of life. If we understood rightly what spiritual science had to say, we would not oppose it.

Anthroposophy is further reproached for making Christ a cosmic being; however, it only widens our earthly way of looking at things beyond merely terrestrial concerns into the far reaches of the universe. Thus our knowledge can embrace the universe spiritually, just as Copernicus, with his knowledge, embraced the external world. The need spiritual science feels to encompass what is most holy to it is simply due to a feeling that is religious and deeply scientific at the same time. Before Copernicus, people determined the movements of the stars on the basis of what they saw. Since Copernicus, they have learned to draw conclusions independent of their sensory perception. Is spiritual science to be blamed for doing the same with respect to the spiritual concerns of mankind? Up until now, people regarded Christianity and the life of Christ Jesus in the only way open to them. Spiritual science would like to widen their view to include cosmic spiritual reality as well. It adds what it has researched to what was known before about the Christ. It recognizes in Christ an eternal Being Who, unlike other human beings, entered once only into a physical body and is henceforth united with all human souls.

Those persons who make Christianity the basis for battling against spiritual science commit a peculiar error. Just inquire of spiritual science whether it opposes what it finds in Christianity! It affirms everything Christianity stands for and then adds something more to it. But to suppress what spiritual science has to add is not to insist on Christianity but rather to insist on a narrow view of it. In other words, it means to behave just like those who condemned Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno. It is easy to see the logical error at the root of this argument. People come along and say, “You talk of a cosmic Christ living in the far reaches of the universe; this makes you a Gnostic.” This is the same kind of error that we fall into if a person says to us, “I've just been given money by someone who owed me thirty crowns. But he gave me forty, because he was lending me ten in addition.” If we now insist that the man hasn't paid his debt because he returned forty crowns instead of thirty, we're talking nonsense, aren't we? If people reproach the spokesmen of spiritual science with the remark, “You are not only saying what we say about the Christ, but you add to it,” they don't notice what a monstrous mistake they've made; they are not speaking truly objectively, but out of strong emotion. Let people argue whether or not the findings of spiritual science about Christianity mean anything to them. That depends on what people think they need. Of course it would be possible for us to reject Copernicus, Galileo, or Giordano Bruno. But we cannot claim that spiritual science has less to offer on the subject of Christianity or that it is hostile to it.

And there's something else that must be added here when the relationship of spiritual science to Christianity is discussed. Mankind changes as each individual goes from life to life in succeeding epochs. Our souls incarnated in times before Christ united with the earth, and they will continue to be reborn into further earth-lives in which the Christ is joined with the earth. From now on, Christ lives in each human soul. If our souls acquire ever greater depth as they live through successive earth-lives, they become increasingly independent and inwardly ever more free. Therefore they need fresh means of understanding ancient wisdom and need to continue making progress out of this inner freedom. It must be stated that spiritual science confidently proclaims these ancient Christian truths in a new form because it has understood the depth, truth and significance of Christianity. Let those who insist on clinging to their prejudices believe that spiritual science undermines Christianity. Anyone familiar with modern culture will find that it is precisely those people who cannot be old-fashioned Christians who have been convinced of the truth of Christianity by spiritual science. For what it has to say about Christianity can be said by spiritual science to every human soul, since the Christ of Whom it speaks can be found by every human soul within itself. But spiritual science can also say that it sees Christ as the Being that once really entered into human souls and into the earth-world through the fact of the Mystery of Golgotha. Faith has nothing to fear from knowledge, for the elements of faith, raised to the level of the spirit, need not shun the light of knowledge. Thus spiritual science will win those souls for Christianity who could not be won by speaking to them like a prophet or as a founder of a sect, but instead they need to be addressed by an unassuming scientist who draws their attention to what can be found in the field of spiritual science and who sets the strings in every human soul vibrating in harmony.

Anyone can become a researcher in the field of the spirit; you can find the ways described in the books mentioned earlier. But it is also true that a person who is not a researcher in this field can be permeated by the truth if he lets it work upon him without bias. Otherwise, he won't be able to free himself from prejudices. All truth resides in the human soul. Not everybody may be able to achieve the seer's view of spiritual truth, but the more our thinking is freed from sensory realms, the more fully it can follow the spiritual scientist as he draws our attention to his findings along spiritual paths. He only wants to make us aware that there are truths that can spring to life in every soul because they are already dormant in it.

Before closing I'd like to point out how spiritual science fits into our cultural life today. Spiritual science is in full agreement with the natural scientific way of seeing and thinking about things. It wants to present itself to culture in the same way that the loyal canon Copernicus and Galileo and Giordano Bruno presented themselves in their times.

Let's think for a moment of Giordano Bruno—what did he really do? Before he appeared on the scene and spoke words so significant for human evolution, people gazed into the skies and talked of the heavenly spheres in the way they thought they saw them. They spoke of the blue vault of the heavens as the boundary of the universe. Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno had the courage to break through sensory appearances and to establish a new way of thinking. What was Giordano Bruno actually saying to his listeners? He said, “Look at the firmament, the blue vault of the heavens. The limitations of your knowledge have created it. That is as far as your eyes see; it is your eyes that create this boundary.” Giordano Bruno extended their view beyond these limits. He felt it permissible to point out that everlasting starry worlds were embedded in the vastnesses of space.

What is the task of the spiritual researcher? Let me try to express it in terms of recent spiritual evolution. The researcher must point to a sort of “firmament of time,” to birth and death as the boundaries of human life. He maintains that the exoteric viewpoint sees birth and death as a “firmament of time” because of the limitations of human understanding and perceptive capacity. Like Giordano Bruno, the spiritual researcher must point out that this “time firmament” doesn't really exist, but that people think it does simply because of their limited way of seeing. Giordano Bruno pointed beyond the supposed limits of space to endless worlds embedded in its vast expanses. The spiritual scientist must similarly explain that behind the supposed boundaries of birth and death there stretches never-ending time, in which the eternity of the human soul, the eternal being of man as it passes from life to life, is embedded. Spiritual science is in complete harmony with the impulses that brought about these changes in natural science.

May I be allowed to draw attention once again to the fact that spiritual science has no desire to found a religion of any kind; rather does it want to set a more religious mood of soul-life and to lead us to the Christ as the Being at the center of religious life. It brings about a deepened religious awareness. Anyone who fears that spiritual science could destroy his religious awareness resembles a person—if I may use this analogy—who might have approached Columbus before he set sail for America and asked, “What do you want to discover America for? The sun comes up so beautifully here in our good old Europe. How do we know if the sun also rises in America, warming people and shining on the earth?” Anyone familiar with the laws of physical reality would have known that the sun shines on all continents. But anyone fearing for Christianity is like the person described as fearing the discovery of a new continent because he thinks the sun might not shine there. He who truly bears the Christ-Sun in his soul knows that the Christ-Sun shines on every continent. And regardless of what may still be discovered, either in realms of nature or in realms of spirit, the “America of the spirit” will never be discovered unless truly religious life turns with a sense of belonging toward the Christ-Sun as the center of our existence on the earth, unless that Sun shines—warming, illumining, and enkindling our human souls. Only a person whose religious feeling is weak would fear that it could die or waste away because of some new discovery. But a person strong in his genuine feeling for the Christ will not be afraid that knowledge might undermine his faith.

Spiritual science lives in this conviction. It speaks out of this conviction to contemporary culture. It knows that truly religious thinking and feeling cannot be endangered by research of any kind, but that only weak religious sentiment has anything to fear. Spiritual science knows that we can trust our sense for truth. Through the shattering events in his soul life which he has experienced objectively, the spiritual researcher knows what lives in the depths of the human soul. Through his investigations he has come to have confidence in the human soul and has seen that it is most intimately related to the truth. As a result, he believes—signs of the times to the contrary—in the ultimate victory of spiritual science. And he counts on the truth-loving and genuinely religious life of the human soul to bring about this victory.

You must not expect that these four lectures can be a substitute for those which were planned for Munich. [It had been Dr. Steiner's intention to give a course of lectures on the theme ‘Occult Reading and Occult Hearing’ in August 1914, after the production of a new Mystery Play, but this was prevented by the outbreak of the War.] I will try to give a brief outline of what was to have been the content of the Munich lectures but the most important and essential information that was to have been given there must be reserved for less turbulent times. I am astonished to find certain people thinking that the strenuous efforts required for giving very important teachings of Spiritual Science—as was intended in Munich—can be applied in times such as those in which we are now living. But it will be realised one day that this simply is not possible, that the highest truths cannot be communicated when storms are raging. As far as my theme is concerned, I will give a course of lectures on it later on, when karma permits, in substitution for what was to have been given in Munich. But in view of the desire to hear something about this subject, I will try to meet this wish as far as is possible at the present time.

The essential findings of Spiritual Science are acquired through occult reading and occult hearing. We hear something about the methods by which the spiritual investigator reaches his experiences, when he speaks of the actual processes of occult reading and occult hearing. Absurd theories still prevail at the present time about the way in which results are obtained in Spiritual Science. Before I pass on to the central theme I will speak of a trivial matter—trivial, that is to say, in comparison with what our stream of spiritual life would like to attain. A certain modern Professor wrote a review of my book Theosophy. This review was published a few years ago, and the author was obviously irritated most of all by what is said in the book about the human aura, about thought-forms and so forth. Among many things that I will not mention here, this review also contains something that is absolutely comprehensible from the point of view of a typical thinker of the present day. It is said that if there is anything in these statements about the aura and thought-forms, some of those who can see thought-forms should subject themselves to an experiment. There would have to be an experiment where a number of those who claim to be able to see such things stand in front of others who have certain thoughts and feelings, and then the former should be asked: ‘What do you see in these people standing or sitting in front of you?’ Then—according to the reviewer—these so-called occultists should state what they have observed, and the others should confirm that they had actually had these thoughts and feelings. If the seers' statements all tallied with each other, then they could be believed.

Let me say here that there is nothing more natural than this argument. Any thinker schooled in modern natural, science must use it because it inevitably appears to be completely reasonable. Nevertheless, one thing holds good. The Professor who said this had certainly read the book before writing his review. We must assume this at any rate. As the review gives the impression of honesty, we can certainly assume it. But he could not read it in the real sense because, comprehensible as it is that the objections should be made as long as there is no knowledge of the truths contained in the book, it ought also to be comprehensible that such objections would not be brought forward if the book had been read with understanding. With these words I am saying something that will be considered outrageous by every normal scientific thinker of to-day—he will think it outrageous because it must inevitably be incomprehensible to him; he simply cannot understand it. Among the things to be found in that book, there is also the following.—It is said that if the seer really desires to look into the spiritual world and see the truth, he must, above all, practise a self-education which enables him to penetrate into things with absolute selflessness, to silence his own wishes and desires in face of the spiritual world. Yes, but if five or six people are brought together in order to make an experiment according to the methods of natural science, as is demanded, those four or five people start off with the wish to reach a certain result—as a matter of fact a result that is demanded by science itself. The whole thing is arranged as happens when there are desires and wishes in ordinary life—which is just what should be avoided. It is obvious that every true impression of the spiritual world will be eliminated by such an experiment. For this experiment is arranged entirely according to the thinking of the physical plane and it is just these thoughts of the physical plane that must be overcome, together with all the desires and wishes connected with them. It may be said that it is a question of being passive. Certainly—but such conditions cannot be arranged from the standpoint of the physical plane and with the methods of the physical plane. They must be arranged only from the standpoint of the spiritual world and with the methods of the spiritual world.

First of all, the matter in question would have to lie in the spiritual world itself, not in the brain of a curious professor. The intention would have to emanate from the spiritual world that human beings who are seers here on the physical plane should experience something of the thoughts and feelings of other human beings; through the karma of the spiritual world a handful of people would have to be brought together—brought together, not by a professor but as if through a nexus of destiny. Then, from the other side, the seers too would themselves have to be brought together by karma. Again, from out of the spiritual world the feelings and so forth within the individuals would have to be revealed to the various seers. If the experiment could be arranged in this way it would undoubtedly succeed.

If anyone reads my book Theosophy with real understanding, he will know that what I have just said is a self-evident truth of the spiritual world but that such procedures are not possible in our age. And one has, after all, to reckon with this fact.

Because the review in question showed me that people are not able to read the book with sufficient understanding to discover such a thought by themselves, in the sixth edition—the proofs of which I am now correcting—I have added what I have just told you. One of the essentials in a book that has grown out of Spiritual Science is that one not only assimilate its actual contents—that is of minimal importance—but that having read it a change shall have taken place in thinking and feeling; standards and judgments otherwise applied in the everyday world should have progressed. The difficulty still standing in the way of understanding books on Spiritual Science is that people read them just as they read other writings and imagine that their contents can be absorbed in the same way, whereas the truth is that something will be changed within us when we have understood a genuinely occult book. It is therefore quite understandable that genuine occult books are rejected by most human beings to-day. For what ought to take place in someone who reads such a book at the present time? He takes the book ... and he is clever ... as everyone is clever to-day. He considers that he is capable of judging the contents of the book, and he is convinced at the outset that there can be no better judge of that book than himself. And now, after having read it, is he supposed to learn to judge differently? Of course, he cannot do so; he is clever already and has impeccable judgment! He does not admit that there is anything to change in his power of judgment. Needless to say he will realise nothing of the basic trend and intention of the book. At most he comes to the conclusion that he has learnt nothing from its contents and that it is all so much juggling with words and concepts. It must necessarily be so if he does not constantly have in mind the basic principle of Spiritual Science which is that in any circumstance, no matter how trivial, after reading a genuine book on Spiritual Science, a different kind of perception and judgment of the world must arise.

There is one essential to be remembered if the words ‘Occult Reading and Occult Hearing’ are to mean anything to us. We must, as it were, say farewell to the ordinary kind of thinking, the ordinary judgments applied to the physical world. I have often emphasised that one must, of course, remain a reasonable human being. Although a new kind of judgment, of thinking and of feeling must be acquired for the spiritual world, healthy judgment as regards the events and beings of the physical plane must be maintained. That goes without saying. But there is something that is necessary for the higher worlds and does not hold good for the physical plane. I will start from an experience that is certainly familiar

On the physical plane we are accustomed through our thinking, feeling and willing to relate ourselves to that plane. When we think, we create for ourselves mental pictures of the things and beings of the physical plane and the processes connected with then. Anything of which we opine that it is present in space or takes place in time, we thereby make into our own spiritual property. We learn, through our mental pictures, to know something. It is the same with feeling. We confront some object—for instance, we delight in a rose; we take the rose into our world, into our feeling, into our own soul. We make something that goes out as an impression from the rose and works upon our soul, into our own inner possession. In willing, we incorporate into the external world something that is contained in our intention. Relationships between ourselves and the external world are clearly evident when we observe our behaviour and conduct on the physical plane. Nothing we thus apply in acts of thinking, feeling and willing, nothing we do when we enter into relation with the outer world through the physical body, serves us in the remotest degree—in the form in which it is practised on the physical plane—for getting to know anything of the higher world. Whatever helps us for example, to know something about the physical world, whatever we apply in the form of feeling or thinking in order to know about the things of the physical world—this can serve only as preparation for spiritual-scientific investigation.

Let it be remembered, therefore, that in the physical world whatever we do in thinking, feeling and willing in order to have some knowledge of that world or to do something for it—all this serves only as preparation for knowledge of the higher worlds. Whatever we may think about something belonging to the physical world, no matter how astutely, gives us no knowledge of the higher worlds. Through thinking our soul is merely prepared, merely trained in such a way that it gradually becomes capable of penetrating into the spiritual worlds. And the same applies to willing and feeling in connection with things of the physical world. In order to be doubly clear, let me say this. A learned researcher, through his scientific methods, gets to know something belonging to the external world. When he has investigated it he is wont to say: I know this and that belonging to the external world. This kind of investigation, this kind of thinking, does not help him in the very least to penetrate into the spiritual world. His thinking and investigation are of significance only because they exercise the powers of his soul. The effect, as far as penetration into the spiritual worlds is concerned, is that through this thinking and investigation the soul becomes more capable of living its own life, of activating its own forces. The activities that are normally carried out in the physical world are of use for spiritual-scientific investigation only as an education of a man's own soul.

I will choose still one more comparison to make the matter clearer. Suppose someone is a carpenter; he has learnt carpentry and intends to make furniture. In his work as a carpenter he makes certain pieces of furniture and continues to do so for many years. This is his job. But something else happens as well; he becomes more skilful, his manipulations more effective; he acquires something else, inasmuch as his own organism becomes more skilful. This is a kind of supplementary achievement. It is the same with spiritual activities. If, as a botanist, I think and make great efforts for years in the sphere of botany, that is all to the good, but as well as this my mind becomes more flexible. That is also of help. I am better ‘drilled’ than I was some decades ago. Please do not take the expression in its ordinary trivial sense, if I say that the spiritual scientist must have been previously ‘drilled.’ He must use his drilling to make his spiritual powers more mobile, more flexible. Then, when everything that is otherwise practised in the world is placed directly in the service of self-education as happens in meditation and concentration, in the exercises that are given for the purpose of penetrating into the spiritual world—we duly prepare ourselves for this. Please take the words, ‘we prepare ourselves,’ as something infinitely important, for in reality we can never do anything more than prepare ourselves to enter the spiritual world; the rest is an affair of that world itself; the spiritual world must then come to us. It will not do so if we remain in the usual state of human beings on the physical plane. Only when we have transformed our soul-forces in the way indicated can we hope that the spiritual world will come to us. It cannot be anything like investigation in the physical world, for then we go towards the things we are investigating. We can only prepare so that when the spiritual world comes towards us, it will not escape us, but make a real impression upon us.

It must therefore be said: All that we can do to develop the capacity for spiritual investigation is to prepare ourselves worthily, in order that when karma wills that the spiritual world shall confront us, we shall not be blind and deaf to it. We can so prepare ourselves, but the manifestation of the spiritual world is an act of grace by that world and must be thought of as such.

And so to the question: How can one succeed in penetrating into the spiritual world?—the answer must be: We must prepare ourselves by adopting every measure that makes our actions more skilful, more mobile, that trains our thinking, makes our feeling and perception more delicate, more full of devotion. And then: Wait, Wait, Wait! That is the golden rule—to be able to wait in restfulness of soul. The spiritual world does not allow itself to become accessible in any other way than this: individuals must make themselves worthy of it and then develop a mood of expectation in restfulness of soul. That is the essential. We acquire it in the way I have described in detail in my books, by making ourselves ready to receive the spiritual world. But we must also acquire that absolute restfulness of soul which alone makes it possible for the spiritual world to approach us.

In lectures I have used the following example. In the physical world, if we want to see something we must go to it. Those who want to see Rome must go to Rome. That is quite natural in the physical world, for Rome will not come to them. In the spiritual world it is just the reverse. We can do nothing except prepare ourselves through the methods described, in order to be worthy to receive the spiritual world: we must acquire restfulness of soul, poise where we stand ... then the spiritual world comes to us. We must wait for it in restfulness of soul—that is the essential. And this that comes to us, where is it? Of this too I have often spoken and will speak of it merely by way of introduction so that we may have a good foundation upon which to proceed.

You are all familiar with our anthroposophical literature. Where are the Elemental Beings, where are the Beings of the higher Hierarchies? They are here, everywhere—just where the table is, where the chairs are, where you yourselves are—they are around us everywhere. But in comparison with the things and processes of the external world they are so ethereal, so fleeting, that they escape the attention of men. Men pass unceasingly through the whole spiritual world and do not see it because through their constitution they are still unprepared for it. If you were able to enter the spiritual world, as is the case at night when you are asleep, you would realise that consciousness is so weak that in spite of the fact that man is in the spiritual world from the time he goes to sleep until he wakes, his consciousness is too dull to perceive the spiritual Beings who are around him. He is in the spiritual world the whole night long, he is within this delicate, fluctuating world, but he is not aware of it because his consciousness is too dull.

What must happen in order that man can learn to be aware of this world in which he is really living all the time? Here we have to consider something very important. Above all, we must keep the following in mind. I have tried to describe it more precisely, for the public as well, in the last chapter of the book Riddles of Philosophy. I want to see whether a few individuals who are not in the Anthroposophical Movement are capable of understanding it.

How does external perception come about? As you know, people generally think—especially those who imagine themselves to be very clever—that external perception arises because the objects are there and then man, inside his skin, receives impressions from the objects; they suppose that his brain (if they think materialistically) produces inner pictures of the external objects and forms. Now that is simply not the case; the facts are quite different. The truth is that the human being is not by any means confined within his skin. If someone is looking at a bunch of flowers, then with his Ego and astral body he is actually within it, and his organism is a reflecting apparatus which reflects it back to him. In reality you extend over the horizon which you survey. In waking consciousness, you are also rooted, with an essential part of your Ego and astral body, in your physical and etheric bodies. The process is as I have often described in lectures. Let us assume that here are a number of mirrors. As long as you walk through space and have no mirror, you do not see yourself, but as soon as you come to a mirror you do. The human organism is not the producer of what you experience in your soul, it is only the reflecting apparatus. The soul is united with the bunch of flowers outside. That the soul may be able to see the flowers consciously depends upon the eye, in unison with the brain-apparatus, reflecting back to the soul that with which the soul is living. Man does not perceive in the night, because when he sleeps he draws out what is within him all day—his Ego and astral body. Therefore, the eyes and brain cease to reflect. Going to sleep is just as though you had a mirror in front of you—you look into the mirror and see your own face; take the mirror away, and all at once your face is no longer there!

And so man, with his being of soul-and-spirit, is actually within that part of the world which he surveys; and he sees it consciously, because his own organism mirrors it back to him. In the night this reflecting apparatus is not there, and he sees nothing. We ourselves are the part of the world which we see; during the night that part of the world is withdrawn.

One of the worst forms of Maya is the belief that man remains firmly within his skin. He does not; in reality he is within the things he sees. When I am confronting a human being, I am within him with my astral body and Ego. If I were not to confront him with my organism I should not see him. The fact that I can see him is due to my organism; but with my astral body and Ego I am within him. The failure to realise this is one of the most dangerous results of Maya.

In this way we can form an idea of the nature of perception and experience on the physical plane.

And what about the spiritual world? If we want to experience that of which I have said that it is so fleeting, so mobile compared with the processes and things of the physical world that although we live within it as within the coarse objects of the physical world, we do not experience it because it is too tenuous—if we want to experience this fluctuating, ethereal reality, then our ordinary Ego, the bearer of our individuality, our egoity, must be damped down, must be suppressed. In true meditation this is what we do. What is meditation? We take some content, or mental picture, and give ourselves over entirely to it. We forget ourselves and suppress the egoity of ordinary waking consciousness. We exclude everything that is connected with the egoity of waking consciousness. Whereas we are accustomed to apply egoity on the physical plane, we now suppress it. Instead of living in the physical and etheric bodies, we gradually succeed, by suppressing egoity, in living in the astral body only.

Please note the essential point here. When we meditate or concentrate, our primary goal always is to suppress our egoity. This egoity must not transmit physical experiences; we try to suppress it, to press it into the astral body. When it is in the astral body it is not, to begin with, reflected in the physical body.

When you look at this bunch of flowers, you are, in reality, within it. The physical body is a reflecting apparatus and you see the bunch of flowers because the physical body mirrors it to you. If you suppress the Ego with its egoity, then you will be living within the astral body. And the astral body is so delicate that you can perceive the fleeting things of the external world consciously; but they too must first be reflected if you are to see them in reality.

There are many among you who faithfully and sincerely devote yourselves to meditation. Thereby you succeed in suppressing the everyday egoity, and experience in the astral body begins. But reflection must first take place if you are to have conscious experience in the astral body. There are numbers among you who through meditation have already reached the stage of living in the astral body. But now it is a matter of reflection, of mirroring. And just as in ordinary life the physical body must reflect what we experience, so, if we want to perceive consciously in the spiritual world, the experiences of the astral body must be reflected by the etheric body.

But what happens when a man's experiences in the astral body are actually reflected by the etheric body? Something happens of which we must realise, above all, that it is absolutely different from sight in the physical world. Things in the spiritual world are not as convenient as they are in the physical world. Even a bunch of cut flowers is a self-contained object; it remains as it is. We can take a bunch of flowers home and have pleasure in it, put it in a vase and so on. We expect nothing else when the bunch of flowers is there in front of us. But this is not by any means the case with the astral experiences that are reflected to us by the etheric body. Everything there lives and weaves; nothing is still for a single moment. But the essential thing is not how it appears in the reflection. The essential thing about the bunch of flowers is what it actually is, at the time. I take the flowers and I have them. When something is reflected to me by the etheric body, I cannot take it as it is and be satisfied with it. For it simply is not what it appears to be.

Understand me well, my dear friends. For this too I have often used the following analogy. Suppose there are a few strokes here (on the blackboard) let us say B ... A ... U. Now if I could not read when these signs are in front of me I should simply say: ‘I see a few strokes like this which, when joined, form a peculiar pattern.’ I cannot take this home like the bunch of flowers and put it in a vase! If I were to take what stands there, the word BAU (building) and put it in a frame, then I have not got what is essential. What is essential is the actual building outside somewhere. I express the building through these signs, and I merely read the essential thing, in the signs.

On the physical plate the essential things are actually there, in front of me. In ordinary reading I have not the essentials; I have signs for them. So, it is with what I experience in the astral body which is then reflected in the etheric body. It is correct only if I take it as so many signs, realise that these signs mean something else and that it is not sufficient simply to look at what is reflected and assume that it is the essential thing. It is not the essential, any more than the word BAU is the actual building. The essential thing is what these signs mean. First of all, I must learn to read them. In the same way I must learn to read what, to begin with, I perceive in the spiritual world—simply a number of signs which express the truth. We can acquire knowledge of the spiritual world only by taking what it presents to us as letters and words which we learn to read. If we do not learn this, if we think we can spare ourselves the trouble of this occult learning to read, it would be just as clever as a person taking a book and saying: There are fools who say that something is expressed in this book, but that is no concern of mine. I can just turn over the pages and see fascinating letters on them. Such a person simply takes what is presented to him and does not trouble about what is there expressed.

If what I have just said is ignored, one comes into an entirely false relationship to the spiritual world. The essential point is to learn to read and interpret what is perceived. We shall see in the next lectures what is meant by this reading and interpreting.

Thus, we have indications at any rate, which help us to understand the question: What is occult reading? Occult reading begins when man experiences himself in the astral body—just as in the physical world he experiences himself in the Ego—and when the experiences of the astral body are reflected in the etheric body, not as is the case in the physical world, when the experiences of the Ego are reflected in the physical body.

Something else must be remembered here. We are not, as I have also told you to-day, wholly within the objects outside us; we are not only in them with our Ego and astral body; but in waking consciousness the Ego also sends part of itself into the physical body. It is only during sleep that the Ego withdraws from the physical body. This means that in order to live in the physical world we must be able to dive down into our physical body. As regards perception and reading in the spiritual world, we realise, in the first place, that we can live in our astral body, and that things are reflected to us by the etheric body. But we must advance to the further stage of being able to live in the etheric body itself, to come down into the etheric body just as on waking from sleep we come down into the physical body. Please take note too that it is necessary to come down with the astral body into the etheric body.

When we learn to read, we learn to live outside the physical body. Just as on waking we come down into the physical body, so must the occultist, without sinking into the physical body, come down into the etheric body. Occultists call this, with reason, ‘being thrust into the abyss.’ What is necessary is that we should not be stupefied when this happens, that we should go down with consciousness and maintain our own bearings, for this descent into the etheric body is not as easy as the descent into the physical body. In very truth it is like being thrust into the abyss. Man's being is split into three. I have spoken of this in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Man becomes a threefold being. He cannot consciously descend into his etheric body without being multiplied in the way indicated.

When the human being lives in the physical world alone, and goes to sleep, his Ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies; his consciousness then is too dull to enable him to see the spiritual world. When he comes down into the physical body which reflects the physical world to him so that he perceives it, this too is a kind of thrust into the abyss; only it is made so easy for us that we do not experience it as a shock. But every morning, if through our exercises we progress to that stage where we can experience something in the spiritual world, if we learn to read in this condition which is like sleep that has become conscious, we also experience what it means to be thrust down, to be divided into three. If we retain our consciousness now, we are also able consciously to penetrate into the things and happenings of the spiritual world that are outside us.

Thus, we learn to live in the astral body and have our experiences reflected by the etheric body. We read as when we are reading a book. As soon as we have come down into the etheric body we become threefold. We can send out these three parts of our being—and they then move about consciously in the spiritual world. In their wanderings they then experience what we call ‘occult hearing.’ As soon as we have been consciously thrust down into our own etheric body, occult hearing begins. Now we penetrate into things in the real sense. Now we notice that what we have previously learnt to read we can actually experience.

Let us therefore repeat what has been said. Through his occult exercises man is enabled to suppress his egoity to such an extent that he learns to live consciously in his astral body. Then, gradually, the beings and happenings of the spiritual world are reflected by his etheric body. When he is able rightly to interpret this reflected world, he has learnt the art of occult reading. At a further stage, when he is able not only to read while outside his etheric body, but to awaken in the real sense in the etheric body, then he sends out the three parts of his being into the world and hears what is going on, hears its inner weaving and activity. At this stage he hears it.

Gradually he develops the faculty of occult reading and occult hearing in such a way that something quite definite is associated with the experience. He succeeds in actually penetrating to the reality of things. For what transpires on the physical plane is not the reality, indeed it is not! Simple contemplation shows us in every region and corner of the world that what we experience in our environment is not the reality, that we attach a false meaning to everything. Someone once said to me on the banks of the Rhine: ‘There is the ancient Rhine.’ It was a beautiful, deeply felt saying. But what, in reality, is ancient in the Rhine? Certainly not the water that one sees flowing by, for the next moment it is no longer there. It shows clearly enough that it is not what is ancient. Ancient, at most, is the hollow that has been burrowed out in the soil, but that is not what is meant when someone speaks of ‘the ancient Rhine.’ What is it, in reality, that is designated by the phrase, ‘the ancient Rhine?’ If one says ‘the hollow’ ... well, there are hollows in the sea-floor too, and also streams. When the Gulf Stream flows through the ocean, not only is the water different at every moment but the hollow too is different. Nothing is permanent in the Physical, nothing whatever. It is the same with the whole physical world. Your own organism is only a stream: the flesh and blood you have to-day was not yours eight years ago. Nothing is real in the Physical, everything is in flow.

To speak of ‘the ancient Rhine’ has meaning only when we are thinking of those elemental Beings who actually have their life in the Rhine, when we are thinking of the elemental River God Rhine—a spiritual Being who is truly ancient. Only then have we said something that has meaning. We must mean the words ‘ancient Rhine’ in a spiritual sense, or we are talking thoughtlessly. It is profoundly true that we penetrate to spiritual realities only when we are guided by the spiritual world. It is then that we penetrate into the true realities. That we do indeed penetrate into these realities will be clear when we describe the details of occult reading and hearing—as far as is possible—in the lecture tomorrow.

We will remind ourselves again of what I told you yesterday about the actual relationship of man to the world. I said: In reality it is Maya, illusion, to assume that as human beings of soul-and-spirit we are inside our skin, that things are merely round about us and we take their images into ourselves. In reality, as human beings of soul-and-spirit, we live in the things themselves. We could not become aware of them if our experiences were not reflected to us by our organism. Living in the ordinary physical world, the things are reflected by our physical organism, by its sensory system, by its thinking system, feeling system, willing system.

The truth, then, is this: our organism is a reflecting apparatus. What we experience is not produced in us by our physical organism—which is an erroneous conception of materialism—but it is reflected. Now just as little as a mirror produces what is seen in it, does our organism produce what we experience in our life of soul about the things around us. And the materialist who asserts that the brain or some other organ produces the experiences in our life of soul, is stating, in regard to these things, the same as one who declares that the face he sees when looking in a mirror, belongs not to him but has been produced by the mirror.

The truth of the matter, therefore, has to be experienced when we progress, in the way described yesterday, to the stage of occult reading. After due preparation we experience the more fleeting, more fluctuating beings and happenings of the spiritual world—more fleeting and fluctuating by comparison, of course, with the physical world. We see them inasmuch as we experience them in our astral body and they are mirrored by our etheric body. And we experience these reflections as pictures.

I said yesterday that, generally speaking, we can regard these pictures merely as signs of the spiritual reality. I made this clear by pointing out that anyone who experienced these pictures as dream-pictures (although they are far more living than ordinary dream pictures) would be subject to error. To regard these dream pictures as reality would be like someone who regarded the word BAU (building) not merely as the sign of the building but as the reality itself. We have to envisage that when those fleeting, fluctuating pictures of the spiritual world are reflected from outside by our etheric body, we have the world before us like an open book, like a book which has been opened for us but which we must first learn to read in the right way. In general terms, this is correct. But there is one principle which applies to experiences of the higher worlds far, far more strongly than to those of the physical plane: it is the principle that there are exceptions to everything, real exceptions. Especially are there exceptions to those things of which I have been speaking. Z his must be realised. What I have said holds good in general and if we pay heed to it we can find our bearings in the spiritual world. But there are exceptions and I will explain more concretely the extent to which this is so.

I will take a definite case. Let us suppose that somebody who has developed certain genuine clairvoyant powers, endeavours—and this lies near to the hearts of many people—to find, in the spiritual world, one who recently or some time previously has passed through the gate of death and is now living in the spiritual world in the existence which we describe as the life between death and a new birth.

As I emphasised yesterday, such a search is dependent upon the grace of the spiritual world. It is an act of grace on the part of the spiritual world to be able actually to behold the dead whom we are seeking. As a rule, in such striving, curiosity will certainly not be satisfied. Anyone who were to start merely with the intention of satisfying his curiosity in searching for someone who is dead, would either see nothing at all or inevitably be exposed to errors of every possible kind.

But now we will assume that this is not the case, that there is an important reason, recognised by the Beings of the spiritual world, for meeting the dead. Let us assume that everything is in order—to use a trivial expression—and that a meeting with the dead is permissible. Here again I speak quite generally. It will not be a simple matter of the clairvoyant concerned transporting himself through meditation into the spiritual world and there directing his desires, his wishes or his thoughts to the dead in order to have the grace of vision bestowed upon him. To embark on such an undertaking presuming in advance that it will succeed, would be an error. For as a rule, something quite different will happen.

Please realise that one can only describe special cases; it is not possible to give general, abstract theories when one is speaking, as I am doing now, of a theme like this which concerns the occult world. I can only give an example.

Let us therefore assume that a seer has a justified reason for coming into contact with someone who is dead and through meditation, through concentration of his thoughts finds measures which enable this contact to take place. To describe the character of these measures would lead us too far today but let us assume that they are right. If through meditation and concentration the soul is really in the condition in which the dead can be perceived, the seer may possibly, to begin with—if he has not already had experiences in this sphere—be very easily inclined to see something that he does not connect at all with the manifestation of the dead or with anything to do with him. He may see before him a widespread world of pictures, pictures that are far more living than those of ordinary dreams. Again, and again I must emphasise, because so many errors are current in this respect, that this world of pictures is a world of signs, signs of the higher world. It is this world of signs that we learn to understand. We experience inwardly mobile pictures, all kinds of happenings that are connected with this or that personality. This is experienced—only to begin with there is hardly any resemblance to be found between what we are seeking and the pictures that are experienced. But one thing reveals itself when we are not on the wrong track: within this moving world of pictures we shall experience something that seems to be the most essential point. In the case of the other pictures, you will say to yourselves: these pictures contain something that reminds you of all kinds of things which might also arise from your own memory. Although you have no remembrance of these actual events, nevertheless it is possible—because they are connected with what you have experienced—for them to have given rise to remembrances that are interwoven with fantasy. It is precisely now that the genuine clairvoyant must be on the alert and remember that he is here concerned with a world of pictures which might have been gathered together from his memories. But there is some one point which no memory presents. You can therefore make a precise distinction between what might possibly be the result of fantasy in connection with memories and the other element that is there on its own, and around which everything else groups itself. Of that one point you know that it is not a memory, that it could never have come in a dream into your field of vision. Certainly, one must have had a certain practice in distinguishing dream-pictures from reality before this difference can be seen quite precisely. But then the point comes where one knows: There is something there.

I will try to speak quite precisely. As a rule, this one thing among the pictures may, in a sense, seem even to be paradoxical, absurd. It is possible for something strange and very curious to appear in a sequence of pictures which may otherwise be so beautiful, so splendid, so powerful. The seer will very often find that this experience passes away from him again, that he really cannot begin to make anything of it. Then, of course, he must make the attempt over and over again, from the start. After he has had certain practice in seership, he will find as a rule that again and again such a sequence of pictures comes before him, pictures perhaps of a quite different kind, but there will always be among them something that is certainly the same as what previously constituted the central point of the series of pictures.

Now a certain stage of seership must have been attained if one is to succeed at the first or second attempt in doing the right things with these pictures. When the pictures are in front of us, we must grasp them, be completely conscious so that they do not fade away like dream-pictures. We must face them just as we face a thing in the external world, when we have it in our hand and can say: ‘I am here, and you are there.’ We must be able to distinguish ourselves from the picture and must not be absorbed by it.

In order to achieve this, it is good to try deliberately to change something in the picture as it stands before one. Let us suppose that the picture is there in front of us and we have a conscious hold of ourselves, being able to distinguish ourselves from the picture … let us suppose that some personality comes into the pictures and looks at us with a frowning, unfriendly expression. And now try, while remaining in the whole situation and without freeing ourselves from the clairvoyant vision, now try to feel: How would it be if I were really kind to this person, so that he no longer looks at me frowningly, but with friendliness? If something then changes in the world of pictures it is at once easier to maintain our position within it.

The next stage must be this … it is difficult to find the right words because the affairs of the spiritual world are so different from those of the physical world. ... The next stage is that we must identify ourselves with the picture, with all the pictures, sink down into them, become one with them. For by becoming one with them we put an important truth into execution, as we shall see. If I may use another trivial expression here—we have to consume this whole, series of pictures spiritually, devour them, take them into ourselves, identify ourselves with them, sink into them. In other words, we must realise and know: I have now distinguished myself from these pictures, I have maintained my position outside them, and now, by my own will, I sink into them, just as if I were jumping into water in order to swim in it.—And now comes the important experience—for now you experience in your own soul everything that is expressed in this series of pictures, as if one person were fighting or wounding another or being kind to him. The experience, therefore, is: I am the wounder, also the one who is wounded. I am everything that is in this picture. It is as if you had a picture before you, let us say, of someone who is being beheaded and you experience yourself simultaneously as the one who is doing the beheading and the one who is being beheaded. It is in this real way that you experience yourself in this whole fluctuating world of pictures. You yourself are every picture, every movement in it. Then the picture as such, as an Imagination, becomes invisible, but the inner experiences as such become all the more full of meaning. You cease, now, to behold the picture, but you live in a world of rich experience.

When we really succeed in living right in the pictures, the second act begins. But it needs by no means follow immediately.

From this point onwards, a great deal of discouragement may be in store for seership. It may quite well happen that the moment comes when the resolve is made to sink down into the pictures, to swim in them, and lo! they have vanished like a dream or like something that is forgotten. It may happen—but it will be in the rarest of cases—that the experience of which I shall now speak, comes immediately. But most often of all, what will happen is that the whole episode seems to have entirely vanished, like a dream. Now as genuine clairvoyants we must realise that it need not necessarily be a fact that it has gone altogether. The second experience—which, as I have said, follows in the rarest of cases immediately upon the first—may come much later, may come right out from among the day or night experiences. For very often, what we have thus consumed takes time to be wholly united with us, to be wholly ‘digested,’ by the soul. It may take a long time. ... But when we are sufficiently united with the experience, when it is sufficiently digested, the moment comes when we know: Now I am connected with the personality, or rather with the individuality of the dead and he is sending his thoughts into me. Now I am thinking what the dead is experiencing in his soul. That is what I am thinking now. I am connected with him; he is now speaking to me and I am listening to him.

In reality it is the picture with which we have united ourselves or the series of pictures we have taken into ourselves which has now become one with us—it is this that really hears and takes in the truth. As a rule, this hearing, this spiritual hearing is no longer bound up with pictures but is borne by the consciousness that the soul of the seer is connected with the dead and is enabling the dead to say to him things that cannot be heard by the physical ear, nor perceived with physical sight but are received together with the thoughts. Then the seer knows: This is not thy thought; it is what the dead is saying to thee.—

As you can realise, a certain preparation is necessary to come near an individual who has passed through the gate of death—a preparation which can be described as I have just done. Then, when we have reached this stage of hearing the dead, after having identified ourselves with the picture, all possibility of delusion is eliminated. For delusion could only be like a delusion on the physical plane if I were to meet a human being and take him to be somebody else. That, as a rule, will not occur; a human being is recognised on the physical plane. When I meet a Mr. X on the physical plane, I need not prove to myself on the basis of theoretical principles: ‘That is Mr. X.’ The being himself whom I meet enables me to recognise him. As soon as we stand before a being of the spiritual world, we know that we are in his presence ... although in the spiritual world he naturally speaks to us in a spiritual way, communicating something to us in a spiritual way.

What I have just described to you denotes the transition from the signs with so many meanings which we read and do not attempt to interpret with the intellect, but by absorbing, become one with them. We ‘consume’ them, as it were. Through the process which is set going in the soul as the result of having become one with the pictures, we prepare ourselves to hear the objective process, the objective reality.

The reading is a truly living process—one's very soul has to be directed to it. Something quite different is demanded than is ever demanded on the physical plane. Suppose someone were to publish a book on the physical plane and were to demand that in order to understand the book, we must first eat it, consume it ... Then suppose we were so organized that we could digest an ‘A’ in a different way from an ‘I’ and, through the inner process, realise the difference. If we could experience all this, then the process would be comparable with the spiritual process just described.

We cannot approach a spiritual happening or a spiritual being until we have given up our whole soul to understanding the happening or being concerned. We must ourselves have become one with the signs or letters of the spiritual world. We must read—and then, while we are reading, we must hear, spiritually.

I have said that this holds good as a general principle. But in Spiritual Science we must speak quite accurately. I say, ‘as a general principle,’ for there are also exceptions. For instance, it may happen that some seer, when in a clairvoyant state, does not only experience a series of pictures as I have described, but actually experiences as a picture, as an Imagination, something that resembles the dead as he was in life, as an external figure. Then, of course, the seer may think that he is confronting the dead. But he can never be quite sure. It may be so, but it need not necessarily be absolutely certain. In order to explain this case, let me again make a comparison. Our ordinary script, printed script or writing script, consists of signs. If I write the word BAU (building), this word in itself has no resemblance whatever to a building. But it was not always so in the evolution of writing. If we go back to olden times we find a picture-script. Men drew pictures which still had a resemblance to what they were meant to represent. And it was out of this pictorial script that our script, consisting of signs or letters, evolved.

It is the same with the clairvoyance which may arise as the result of development by our Rosicrucian methods or the atavistic, more or less primitive clairvoyance which may arise as the result of certain conditions.

Just as our modern script of signs and letters is something that has developed, and the pictorial script is more primitive, so the clairvoyance which immediately sees what is being looked for, is a more primitive form. It is precisely developed clairvoyance that often will not immediately be able to see what is there to be seen. With developed clairvoyance things will be as I have described. But there are also exceptions, as for example a man may have the powers, without having trained his clairvoyance, simply from the nature of his organism. In the pictures which come to a natural clairvoyant there may be far more similarity with the spiritual happenings than there is in the pictures which come to the trained clairvoyant who has to go through the whole procedure I have described. Naturally, however, primitive clairvoyance can never succeed in reaching true Imaginations, can never learn anything with certainty. And even when things are known with certainty, they are only happenings which are connected with earthly life.

I will give you an example. Suppose someone has died and before his death put a Will somewhere, without being able to tell anyone where it is. He dies. Some person endowed with primitive, untrained clairvoyance may, in a kind of trancelike, imaginative condition, come into connection with the dead man. This person can be led by the dead so that he can actually discover the place where the Will was placed. The clairvoyant in question may even be able to show the place, the cupboard, for example, where it lies. Such things may happen, but these cases are always connected with the physical plane and with something that has happened on the physical plane. They may be very complicated, but they are always connected in some way with the physical life.

One will not come much further than this in the sphere of primitive clairvoyance. To move about with absolute clarity and certainty in the spiritual world the preparations of which I have spoken are necessary.

In order that in the following lectures we may get down to details of spiritual reading and hearing, I must still say something more precise about what I have told you.

I said that what lies behind the Maya of external experience becomes a truth the moment we enter the spiritual world in the way described. It is not enough to see a picture through clairvoyance and just to see pictures as we see beings on the physical plane. That is not enough. We must be able to plunge right into the pictures, we must make it come true that we are in the spiritual world. We do this by submerging ourselves in the pictures. We put ourselves consciously into a condition in which we also are under other circumstances, but without knowing anything about it. If, therefore, I have this series of pictures, with what I have described as the centre-point of them, I must go right into them, I must consume them, must be within them.

What I have described is a spiritual experience and what matters about a spiritual experience is that we understand it. To understand it we must be able to practice spiritual self-observation. During the process of submerging ourselves in the pictures, something happens that we feel—we feel it in ourselves. Just think ... I have told you that we become conscious of our own position—separate from the Imagination ... and then we sink into the pictures. When we are still consciously standing before them, the feeling is different from what it is when we have sunk down into them. I must try to describe these two feelings.

The moment we have sunk down into them, knowing that now we have made these pictures disappear by identifying ourselves with them, in that moment we are seized with the feeling of insufficiency concerning ourselves. These things are difficult to describe. The feeling is this: ‘I am now only a part of what I was before—only one part.’

Naturally, such observations must be made again and again before we are able to interpret these things rightly.

Again, a comparison is best. It is just as though one had a 12 kilos weight, and then, without anything happening, the 12 kilos weight suddenly became only a 1 kilo weight. The feeling is: ‘You are only one-twelfth of yourself and the other eleven-twelfths are outside in the universe.’ It can be expressed in a diagram. One feels oneself somewhere out in the Universe, but with one's whole being. One feels: ‘Out there in the Universe are still eleven-twelfths of me; my being is distributed.’ It can be expressed by saying: ‘I myself am at some point in a circumference and the other eleven-twelfths are distributed around that circumference. Here am I, at the point AI and there are the other eleven-twelfths.’

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At this stage we realise that we are actually within the Universe; we have become one-twelfth part of ourselves. We have left the other eleven-twelfths of our being in a circumference.

The occult expression can be used here. We can say: Man becomes a living Zodiac. Man has himself become the Zodiac. Then comes the hearing; it comes from within that Zodiac. So, if I keep my former example, that of speaking with one who is dead, the dead is speaking from within the Zodiac.

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Just think of the difference between this and an experience in the physical world. In the physical world we feel enclosed within our skin; objects are outside, and they seem to come into us as we look at them. In the spiritual experience we are outside at some point, in one-twelfth of the spiritual horizon. Now the world at which we are looking is within our circumference. We look inwards from outside; in ordinary life we look outwards from within. And now there come what seem to be spiritual voices from within, with which the dead speaks to us—we become aware of them when we accustom ourselves to listen in a different way, when we learn to pay attention in a different way. More exact details will be given—I will now just indicate it figuratively. At this stage we may have the feeling: ‘I am aware of what the dead is saying; he is speaking within the circumference ... I hear him only when my spiritual ear is turned for instance, to the 5 (see diagram). Now he ceases to speak there ... but he goes on again, and now I only hear him when I turn my spiritual ear to another point (i i) and so on.’ Knowledge comes gradually when seven voices, seven different voices are distinguished within the circumference. Seven voices have to be distinguished. They are heard in the most diverse ways, according to the point from which they are heard. Everything that we experience here speaks from within the circumference, as it were from seven voices.

We have now gone out into the circumference of the Universe ... whatever we are to experience is within this circumference. We must learn to feel ourselves as one part of that circumference and with a kind of cosmic humility, shall I say, make no claim to be anything more than one-twelfth of the circumference. But the other eleven-twelfths have to be called to our aid. We must endeavour to acquire the faculty of distinguishing what speaks to us. We must differentiate in all kinds of ways what a being can say to us in this way.

Again here, only a comparison makes things clear.—What speaks to us from within this sphere can really be called: Spiritual Vowels. And everything that we ourselves are, everything that lives at the periphery are Spiritual Consonants. Consonants and vowels work together; the consonants are stationary when we have poured out our being in twelve parts into the Universe; the vowels move within it, bringing to expression what is to be voiced.

Once again, I will return to our example.—I am seeking for one who is dead, trying to come into contact with him. A series of pictures appears to me and, among the pictures, something that seems paradoxical, perhaps even absurd. I realise however that this is something which could not have come to me from my own life of soul. Then I succeed in sinking down into the pictures, I become one with them. At this moment I stand at a definite point—A.

My being is so submerged in what is outside that I have released, as it were, one-twelfth of my being.

You must remember that language must be precise when occult matters are spoken of. I have told you that the series of pictures belongs to us; we have this series of pictures in ourselves; the pictures are within that one-twelfth, and everything else that cannot become one with these pictures is now distributed over the periphery. At, this stage, for a short or long period, we may really be able to receive the spiritual voice, the communication of the dead. Then we hear the dead speaking from the periphery that we ourselves have formed around that with which we want to be related.

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What is it that has really been done? We have gone out of ourselves, have become one with the Universe, but with only one part of the Universe. Therefore, we have ourselves to become part of the Universe, to grasp with the whole of our being that of which we want to become aware. We have, as it were, built a spiritual aura around one part ... but we cannot build it completely, we can only stand at one point; we have to build the aura out of what we, ourselves, are not.

Again, let us repeat.—I perceive a series of pictures. To begin with I stand outside these pictures, but then I plunge into them; thereby I build a cosmic sphere around what I want to perceive; I build it with what I have given up, offered up. This cosmic sphere contains within itself—like seven planets—the vowels through which the dead can speak to us when we ourselves form the consonants through the twelve-foldness of our being.

We can only come into connection with a being of the spiritual world by enfolding him, embracing him in such a way that this very act of enfolding forms the cosmic consonants; the being can then announce himself to us in the cosmic vowels: The cosmic vowels can then act together with the cosmic consonants which we ourselves have fashioned. Then reading and hearing work together. Thus, do we penetrate into a particular sphere in the spiritual world.

Now I beg you not to be led by what I have said into the error of thinking that what I have described has anything to do with the physical Zodiac or with the seven physical planets. That is not the case and is not meant so. What happens is that in the twelve-foldness a cosmic sphere is built around the being whom we want to find. We build a world for ourselves.

Whenever, on the physical plane, we want to get to know something, we have to look at it from many different sides, from many standpoints; we have to go around it. In the spiritual world this must become a reality. Not only must we go around it with our whole being, we must so divide our being that we create a periphery around what we perceive. Every time there is a real spiritual perception, a spiritual periphery of this kind has been created. And only because those Divine Beings whom we have learnt to know as the higher Hierarchies have done this on a vast scale, has the Zodiac appeared.

Suppose that what I have described has been attained.—Intercourse with someone who is dead has been achieved. Suppose this intercourse could be consolidated, held static ... then this consolidation would represent a human being—a spiritual human being, of course, divided into twelve parts, twelve fixed stars. If that which is perceived could be consolidated, a planetary system would arise. Inasmuch as the Gods did this and consolidated it into a gigantic plan, our world-system arose. Whereas we, in our single acts of clairvoyance create something transitory which naturally passes away again when the clairvoyance is over.

Our whole world-system is consolidated clairvoyance of the Gods, of the higher Hierarchies. That is why we shall know this world only when our knowledge is based on spiritual foundations.

The physical world is something that is not at all real, it is just as little real as the water of a flowing river is real. The Spiritual alone is real. So it is too, with a whole solar system. Thus, we must learn to know the solar system in its reality, by deciphering it in spiritual reading and hearing. In many respects we have already done this.

From what was said yesterday and the day before, you will have realised that occult reading and occult hearing consist in experiences of the soul. I used various comparisons to show how man must become one, firstly with the signs which reveal themselves to the seer in Imagination, and then, needless to say, with what these signs signify of spiritual realities.

I should like to begin to-day by giving you a more precise idea—as far as is possible in the few lectures that can be given, and even although it can only be an approximately precise idea—of what is necessary in order to advance from disordered clairvoyance to the genuine clairvoyance that may be called occult reading and occult hearing.

The first thing of which I will speak may be called the ‘vowels’ of the spiritual world. The way in which man learns to hear and read the ‘vowels’ of the spiritual world is, of course, a far, far more deeply inward process than any process of ordinary life. Many roundabout descriptions are necessary before we can even begin to approach what may be called the experiencing of the vowels, of the intrinsic sounds of the Cosmos. From what I indicated yesterday you will have realised that we can speak of seven such vowels—a symbolic parallelism with the planetary system.

Let us go back once again to the example I gave yesterday: the search for someone who is dead. I took that as a starting-point and tried to describe the kind of experiences through which we gradually grow into the knowledge of the spiritual world. We heard that through the different forms of preparation which the seer has to undergo, he sees, first of all, a series of pictures, and he faces them just as he faces the things of the external world. We face a dream picture, too, just as we face the things of the external world. Only gradually do we learn to identify ourselves with the pictures, to consume them, as it were, to become one with these pictures, to live entirely in them.

But it must be clearly borne in mind that when these pictures finally lead us to find the dead or some other event or being in the spiritual world, they are signs of spiritual realities. As pictures they are realities in themselves; they express spiritual realities.

They are there, these pictures. And now the question must arise: Are these pictures only there when the seer has prepared himself in the right way and is actually able to behold them?

These pictures are not only there under such conditions. And it is very important to keep this in mind. Let us assume that you are sitting or standing somewhere and are sufficiently prepared to be able to see something. A series of fluctuating pictures appears before you. Now suppose that, instead of a seer there is an ordinary person who has no gift of clairvoyance and sees nothing of such pictures but only the pictures of the physical world. Are the pictures not there at all?—They are always there.

Let me put it as I did the day before yesterday. In reality, we are within the bunch of flowers in front of us; our perception of it depends upon its being reflected through our own organism. The moment the trained seer has a spiritual Imagination, he too is within it. In the subsequent procedure—of identifying himself with the pictures—he is simply enacting a process of consciousness; actually, he is within the pictures. Nor does this apply only to a seer; even when a man confronts an object with ordinary physical eyes and ordinary mental activity, not only is he within the physical object—which, as we have seen, is in itself merely an illusion—but he is within the Spiritual. He is always within the spiritual Beings who are not physically incarnate. He is really all the time within those spiritual pictures of which the clairvoyant sees a part. They are always in the environment and we are always within them. They remain imperceptible, invisible, because man's faculty of perception is too dull, too coarse to perceive these delicately weaving beings and formations with the ordinary senses.

But this is speaking in the abstract. We could also ask: All that weaves spiritually around the world—in which we ourselves are—why is it that we do not become aware of it? Why is this?

We begin for the first time to understand why this is so when we have identified ourselves with Imagination, when we actually carry out the process I described yesterday. We really understand, then, why the human being cannot be conscious in the spiritual world that is round about him. What is this experience?

Let us repeat once again.—A series of pictures is arrayed before the soul; we try to identify ourselves with these pictures. We know, then, through the experiences of our own soul, that we consume these pictures, as it were; we are united with these pictures. We now know that this is so.

But at this moment, too, we can answer the question as to why we have to be outside the body, why we have to go out of the body and identify ourselves with the pictures if we are to perceive them. They can only be reflected back from our own etheric body. When this has become an actual experience, we know why it is necessary.

Through our experiences in connection with these pictures with which we have identified ourselves, we know the following.—If, having completely identified ourselves with the pictures, we were to pass back again into the physical body, if we did not remain outside the body and wait until the etheric body reflected the pictures back, then we should take back into the physical body everything with which we had become one—we should take it back into the space that is enclosed by the skin, and we should immediately destroy the physical body to the point of death. The germ of death would be in the physical body. We may not carry into the physical body that with which we have identified ourselves. This can happen only when death comes in reality. When death does really come in earthly existence, the soul has reached the point where it can identify itself with what lives in the external world as Imagination in the natural course of life. But that is death.

So you see, my dear friends, we may take in deep, deep earnestness the great motto which runs through all occult studies. It is the utterance made by all those who have become occultists in the true sense of the world.—The moment genuine clairvoyance is attained, the experience is that of facing death. We reach the Gate of Death.

I have often emphasised this from another side. We learn to know how it is with a human being when he passes through the Gate of Death. Clairvoyance cannot be attained without passing through this most solemn moment which is described by occultists as ‘Standing before the Gate of Death.’

But we must learn something else as well. I have spoken of this from another angle in a lecture-course given at Munich. [The title of the lecture-course was: On Initiation, Eternity and the Passing Moment. (English translation available in typescript.)]

We learn in deepest earnestness to put a question that is a vital question of Spiritual Science. We ask: What is the truth of our existence as human beings, living as we do within the fluctuating web of spiritual Beings which we dare not carry into our physical body because that would always mean the germ of death? Outside, Imaginations are always around us, we are within a sphere of Imaginations ... and they must not pass into us. What comes from these Imaginations into us? Shadow-pictures, reflections, mirror-images—these come as our thoughts, our mental images. Outside, they are the real, full-blooded Imaginations. They reflect themselves in us and we experience them in the weakened, shadowy form of our thoughts and mental images. If we carried them in their full reality into ourselves and not merely had them as reflections, we should at each moment stand before the danger of death.

What does this mean? It means that the cosmic world-order guards us from experiencing, in their full reality, these spiritual Beings and happenings, which are always around us; we are protected, inasmuch as in our everyday consciousness we contact only the shadow-pictures of these spiritual Beings. And yet, a whole number of these Imaginations belong to us, belong to the forces which are creatively active in us. The creative forces that are within us live in this world of Imaginations. We may not experience them in their primal form, but only in the shadowy form in which they are within us as thoughts. This can only happen through someone taking away from us the experiencing of the Imaginations which belong to our thoughts.

They have, nevertheless, to be experienced! But we cannot experience them. They have to be experienced by Beings stronger than we are, by Beings who can endure them in their organisation of spirit-and-soul without coming to the danger of death. Whenever we are thinking, whenever we are active in our life of soul, a spiritual Being must hold sway over us all the time, depriving us of the experience of the Imaginations underlying our thoughts and mental pictures. If you have any thought, any experience in your life of soul, this experience corresponds to a world of Imaginations. And a Being must rule over you, guard and protect you, taking away from you what you yourself cannot accomplish.

Here we have reached a point where we can speak in a more real sense than hitherto, of the Beings of the next higher Hierarchy, of the Angeloi. They are now spiritually comprehensible. We see them there, we see how they must watch and guard what we ourselves are not capable of accomplishing.

But it can and must happen to the seer that he becomes aware with far greater distinctness of what I have just told you. And that is the case when he goes one stage further in his seership.

We spoke yesterday of what leads to identification with the series of pictures which appears before us. The Imaginations are consumed, sucked in. Thereby they disappear as pictures outside us—but we experience them within us, we have become one with them.

But the thing can go still further. I will start by describing the subjective experience. I told you yesterday something which I have repeatedly described. When one is sunk in meditation and concentration, something approaches which one is seeking—a series of pictures arises with which one can identify oneself. I said that something else can happen. When meditation and concentration have called forth these pictures and we have tried to get right into them, the occult reading and hearing, the real perception of the spiritual being of the dead does not necessarily arise. The whole process may break off just like a process in a dream and the consequences may appear only later.

But if we go further, if we have the necessary patience and endurance to make progress in occult development through meditation and concentration, then we experience the process in still another way.

It can be experienced in the following way.—We set ourself the task of observing some being or process in the spiritual world. We sink into meditation or concentration. Thereby we draw ourselves out of the physical world and pass into the condition where the meditation, that is to say, the content of the soul we ourselves have evoked, flows by and we can feel the transition. There seems to be greater darkness ... that which the soul has evoked flows away from the pictures, and they come up again, far, far more vividly than in a dream.

Now we confront them consciously and again dive down into them. Again, there may come a moment when we know: ‘You have now identified yourself with the pictures, you have become one with them, you are within them.’ But we no longer feel our own existence; we feel as though we have sunk into the Cosmos—nevertheless as if we were in universal nullity.

Thus, we have identified ourself with the pictures, have extinguished them—and have got nothing in their place. But now, through the practice of meditation, we have succeeded in not being brought to despair by the belief that we are losing ourselves in Nothingness. We have not the feeling of being utterly forsaken that might easily arise. In short, we plunge, as though swimming in an ocean of nullity, into the Cosmos. And then it is like waking up, but not out of a sleep, out of something with much stronger reality. At the moment of waking, we know: This was not sleep! We have not passed through the emptiness of sleep. Something has happened in the interval, something at which we were present, and now we have wakened again! We have in our consciousness the happenings which we could not experience at the time with full consciousness. But afterwards we know quite definitely that we have experienced them. It is like a memory! We remember something we have gone through not with the ordinary self, but with what transcends the ordinary self. Now it enters our consciousness and we experience that at which we aimed, the task we set ourselves. And now, when we meditate on what has happened, we know: ‘You have gone through something as a thinking being (only “thinking” here has a much higher significance than in the physical world). You have gone through this as a thinking being. But however highly developed you are as a human being, you cannot experience what you have now gone through.’ It is something that the human being himself cannot experience. Therefore, in the time that has transpired between the diving down and the re-emergence, another Being had to take over the function of thinking for you and think in you. You cannot yourself do the thinking. You can only remember afterwards what this Being thought in you. It was an Angelos who was thinking! And we know that in that intervening period we were interwoven with our Angelos. The Angelos experienced it for us and because the Angelos experienced it, our own consciousness was suppressed. Now we waken and remember with the ordinary life of thought what the Angelos experienced in us.

That is the process. This is the way in which, as a rule, spiritual experiences are attained. We attain them in such a way that we know: We must first pass into a condition where a Being of the next higher Hierarchy enters into us, identifies himself with us. What we cannot do in our own weakness, we can do through a Being of the next higher Hierarchy who is within us—but our consciousness is suppressed. We cannot have the experience in its immediate reality, but we have it afterwards, in memory and in full Ego-consciousness.

And so, it is that the spiritual experiences vouchsafed to us are experienced at one time, but we become conscious of them at another.

I spoke of an experience I had concerning our dear friend Christian Morgenstern—a real experience, needless to say. But we become conscious of such an experience afterwards, because a Being of the next higher Hierarchy must take over the function of knowledge during the actual experience.

Again, you will understand why this must be. If we were to bring into our own organism what a Being of the higher Hierarchies experiences in us we should not only kill our organism, but we should burst it, as through an explosion, into its very atoms. If we carried down these experiences into our own organism we should not only bring about its death, but simultaneously, its cremation.

Now you see again that seership brings us into connection with what we call the Gate of Death. We can really only know what death signifies by raising ourselves to that life of soul which can come from the experiences described. [See the lecture-course entitled, The inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and a new Birth. (Obtainable from Rudolf Steiner Press.)]

Only thereby can we understand the human individuality when it is outside the physical body. But then we also know how it has to be received into the higher Hierarchies—in order that it shall not work as a destroying, death-bringing force to a being of the physical plane, our own being, to begin with. The feeling of the human soul resting in the bosom of a Being of the higher Hierarchies becomes real, infinitely real. Now for the first time we get to know how things appear on yonder side of death. We know: Here in our earthly life we are surrounded by minerals, plants, the animal and the human kingdoms. On yonder side of death we enter the realm of the higher Hierarchies, to whose environment we belong just as here we belong to the environment of the physical beings around us. A feeling of kinship with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies comes into our soul. Then we learn to know that true entrance into the spiritual world is simply not possible without bringing in its train feelings of piety, feelings of being given up to the higher, spiritual world. But these feelings have the nuances I have described.

This is able to evoke a necessary ‘mood’ of soul. I can only express it by calling it that mood of soul in which we feel ourselves resting in the spiritual worlds. We need this mood of soul for any real experience of the spiritual worlds, just as here, in the physical world, in order that we may be able to understand our fellow-man, we have to use the larynx and other organs of speech, to utter the sound EE. What makes it possible in ordinary human speech to utter the sound EE, produces, in the higher worlds, the experience that flows from devotion. This kind of devotion is one of the vowels of the higher worlds. We can perceive nothing, read nothing, hear nothing in the higher worlds unless we can hold this mood of soul—and then wait for what the Beings of the higher worlds have to impart to us because we bring to them this mood of soul.

It is out of these moods of soul, out of this attitude to the higher worlds that the vowels of the Cosmos are composed.

If there is this feeling: Around you is a world but you cannot live in it with your feeble human powers. What surrounds you while you live in your physical body can be perceived only in the shadow-pictures of your thoughts and concepts, or rather is reflected by them. You may not experience these Imaginations directly. Your Guardian Angel must take this experience away from you in your ordinary life.—When a man feels this inwardly, with the necessary timbre of inner piety, he is able to become aware of one of the vowels of the spiritual world.

A next stage depends upon the development of something I indicated in my book, The Threshold of the Spiritual World. We grow into the spiritual world as I have there described. The process is that we emerge from ourselves as it were and identify ourselves with another being. But this is not sufficient, in no way is it sufficient. It is necessary not only to be able to identify ourselves with other beings but also to be able to transform ourselves into other beings, so that we do not merely remain what we are, but are able to metamorphose ourselves into other beings, actually to become that into which we penetrate.

A good preparation for this faculty is to practise over and over again a loving interest in everything that is around us in the world. It is impossible to express how infinitely significant it is for the developing occultist to awaken this loving interest for everything in the surrounding world. This is a hint that is, unfortunately, not usually taken deeply enough, hence the lack of success that often attends occultism. It is only too natural for the necessary power of interest to be maintained only in oneself. Even if a man will not admit it, the necessary power of interest is applied only to himself. It may be given another name, but none the less there is very little real interest in other things, and by far the greatest for oneself.

It must of course be said that cosmic law decrees that a man must have interest in himself, and indeed it requires great effort not to be interested the whole time in himself. It is after all a natural part of life on the physical plane. I will ignore the fact that if we have some illness, pain or disorder, this interest is always there. It cannot be otherwise. In such a case, of course, efforts might make it possible for a man not to be interested in himself—but that is extremely difficult. It might happen that a man falls ill and is not especially interested in the fact that he has this illness; he may be quite indifferent to it. What does interest him may be how this illness has arisen out of the whole Cosmos, how at some point in the Cosmos something arose that now is within his own skin. In such a case the man is interested in a severe illness in the same way as if it were something outside himself I

You will admit that what I have described is very difficult. And so it is with most things, at least on the physical plane. It is very difficult to take the most ordinary things we experience in our senses and thoughts as if we were standing outside them as objects. But this is just what we must try to do. And because it is so difficult it is not as a rule attempted. But everyone may be sure that if with great zeal he carries out the exercises described in the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, he will gradually attain this knowledge.

But for this we must adopt the standpoint therein described—the exercises are not practised at all adequately. The knowledge will be attained only along by-paths because it is extremely difficult. It will be attained in the same measure in which interest in our own self decreases, so that we are no longer an interesting subject for ourselves, but an interesting object. That does no harm; it is indeed very useful because we ourselves are an object which is always to hand—only it must not be confused with the subject!

Now in the same measure in which we ourselves begin to become an object, we begin to be interested in everything outside us, and then we develop loving interest in the world and its phenomena. When the loving devotion to the world and its phenomena develops more and more, the mood of soul is able to intensify to the point where we not only pass out of ourselves but are able to metamorphose ourselves into other beings. Gradually we become capable of this. But such things are difficult for the soul of man and all kinds of help must be sought if this loving devotion is to exist.

I will indicate something that can be a help. A beginning can be made by making the physical world a motive for a kind of occult reading. I have often given an example from which it is good to start. If we confront a human being and look at his countenance, we realise: this boundary of the skin, these lines, what the eye sees—that is not the essential, that is the physiognomic expression of the indwelling soul. And if we had a drawing of the lines—the lines would not be the essential, but the soul which has given itself these lines as its form. And then we can look at external nature around us as though it too were an outer physiognomy. Materialistic investigators face the things of external nature just as if one were to say of a human being: ‘To talk of an indwelling soul is unreal, it is fantastic superstition. All that concerns me are the forms that can be measured and investigated.’

This is how ordinary men investigate external nature. But we can say to ourselves: Just as it comes naturally to see a man's countenance as the physiognomy of his soul, so we can look at the whole of external nature, not in the ordinary way but as the physiognomy of spiritual Beings behind it. And it is good here to look at the whole world of animals as the physiognomy of outer nature. It requires further insight and study not to see in the animals what is usually seen but to see in them something that may be conveyed in the following words.—

There is the eagle, flying towards the Sun; that is the direction upwards, into the spiritual worlds. I will take you, the eagle, as the symbol of rising into the spiritual worlds. I look at the human brow and see something suggesting the eagle-nature, something that is striving upwards into the spiritual worlds. I see how what is expressed in the human soul gives the physiognomy. The eagle is part of the physiognomy of external nature. In the soaring eagle I see something suggestive of the brow in the human countenance. I look at a bull and see how it is bound to the Earth as it chews its food, how it is only in its real element when it is given over entirely to the process of digestion, how in its whole life-process it is bound up with what it takes from the Earth. The bull suggests earthly gravity to me. Then I look at the human being and feel, spiritually: There too there is something of earthly gravity, but it is held in check, kept in equilibrium by the eagle nature in man. I feel how the bull nature is also in man, but it does not express itself in the same way as in the bull itself. The bull nature- is seen to be a physiognomic expression. So, too, is it with the lion nature when I contemplate the heart in man and compare it with the lion in external nature. In this way we can look at the whole world of the higher and lower animals.

There have been men who have related eagle, bull and lion to the human soul and they have made drawings. Such men have attempted to read what is written in the animal world and to glean from it—but in this case separated into its single letters—what is experienced as a totality in connection with the human being. Briefly, we can say: The physiognomy of nature is the animal world.

But it is not only the physiognomy which interests us when we contemplate the human being. When we try to go more deeply into the soul, we are interested in what we call the facial expressions. When the physiognomy is in movement, we come nearer to the soul through the play of facial expressions than through the physiognomy as such. Again, in external nature we can find this play of expression of the spiritual world behind. We find it when we look at the world of plants, at its shades of colour, its budding in spring, its blossoming throughout the summer. The Earth first thrusts it out and then, from the other side, the forces of the spheres enter into it, charming forth living movements in its infinite blossoming, growing and greening. When we look at this world of plants and relate it to a spiritual reality of the Cosmos behind it just as we relate a man's facial expressions to his soul—then this again is an exercise.

Thus, we can say: The plant world is the mien of nature. And then come gestures, movements which emanate from the soul. Just as we can call the animal world the physiognomy of nature, the plant world the mien of nature, so we can now see the forms of the mineral world as the gestures of nature. And to one who is practising occult reading and hearing in the real way, it is one of the most beautiful things that can happen to him to experience the mineral world in such a way that in the forms of the surface-boundaries of the minerals, in their characteristic relations to the Cosmos outside, in their iridescence, transparency, in the crystalline clarity of the quartz, of the lime-salts, of emerald and chrysoprase, he sees the infinitely diverse gestures of the spiritual Beings behind nature.

If we carry out such exercises, if we can really experience in the otherwise dead stones what is expressed through this dead mineral kingdom and is as if a soul were expressing in living gesture what lives in it—this is a help towards acquiring loving interest for all the beings that are around us. Then we gradually reach a stage of development in which—when the attainment of seership is possible—we are also able to transform ourselves into the beings around us. We realise that we have the power to do this. We can transform ourselves into all other human beings, but practice is necessary in the way described. The human being is capable of infinite metamorphoses in this connection.

Again, we can put a question, but before doing so let me speak of the feelings that are bound up with what I have described. The first experience brings about an attitude to the Hierarchies; the consciousness of being protected becomes a feeling that is suffused with piety. The feeling of being able to transform oneself into all the diverse beings brings respect for the humanity of man. We learn to value it in all its preciousness—the humanity that we do not find in the physical world, that we do not find in ourselves, but only find when we have really become another being. The feeling that necessarily accompanies the faculty of transformation does not lead us to pride, for every single transformation tells us that we are not as worthy as the being into whom we must transform ourselves. Realisation of the faculty of transformation means, at the same time, humility. A feeling of deep religious humility is bound up with the realisation of the faculty of transformation.

But another question can be raised. We evoke these powers of transformation from our inner being. Are they, then, within us all the time? Yes; just as the Imaginations we call up in the way described yesterday and today are always around us, so too are these powers of transformation always within us. But in order to have conscious control of them, we must develop in the way I have told you. At every moment we are not only ourselves but every other being as well. It is only that we do not develop our consciousness highly enough. We shall best understand this by thinking of the cases in life where a man on the physical plane transforms himself into another being.

On the physical plane, of course, man uses the forces which are in other circumstances the forces of transformation. But he uses them without knowing anything of them. He uses them every time he dominates his fellow-men by unjustifiably exerting his will over them, every time he does injustice to his fellow-men. This incorporates into his fellow-man something that is unjustified. He gains a certain power thereby because the lie goes on living in the other man.

So is it whenever evil is done. The forces with which some evil is done in the world are these same forces of transformation, but in the wrong place. Everything evil in the world is the unlawful application of these powers of transformation. Profound insight into the secret of existence arises when we know whence come the injustice, evil, crime and sin that happen in the world. They happen because the best and most holy powers which exist in man, the powers of transformation, are applied in the wrong way. There would be no evil in the world if there were not these most holy powers of transformation.

Even in a public lecture 1 once indicated this mystery of the power of evil, saying that it is the distorted application of the power which, in its proper place, would lead to the highest good. [The title of the lecture was: Evil in the light of Knowledge of the Spirit. Berlin, x 5th January, 1914. (Not yet available in English translation.)] This mood in the soul which comes when we know: Here in each human soul is something which on the one side can transform itself into all beings, and on the other, into egoism ... this is the mood with which we must confront the Cosmos if it is our aim to have spiritual hearing. That is a second vowel.

The mood we can have in regard to the mystery of evil as I have presented it to you, is the third vowel—what we experience when we know whereby a man may become evil. If we understand the mystery that it is the highest forces that in evil are applied in a distorted way, then we have the mood of a third cosmic vowel. These moods of soul must be actually experienced.

Thus, we have spoken of three cosmic vowels. It has taken some time to-day; we will speak of the others tomorrow. I had first to speak of the principle that is essential for establishing in inner experience that relationship to the Cosmos whereby, in dedicating our own powers of soul, we become hearers and readers of what is happening out yonder in the spiritual world.

Yesterday I tried to speak of certain inner experiences which can be called the ‘vowels’ of the spiritual world.

We heard how occult reading and occult hearing are very living inner experiences to which the whole personality, the whole soul must be dedicated. I mentioned three such experiences for which careful preparation has to be made. One of these arises when we learn gradually to enter with consciousness that supersensible world in which we always are, but unconsciously, and thereby reach the Gate of Death. I also spoke of the experience which comes when we acquire the so-called faculty of transforming ourselves into other beings. And then I tried to show how we can so regard evil in the world that we recognise its origin in a misuse of higher spiritual forces which in their place and in their own mode of working are entirely justified.

Another such experience comes if we. take in earnest something that is linked with the last. We must transform ourselves into other beings but in such a way that the threads of inner soul-experiences are held intact. If they cannot be held intact it is just the same as when a man on the physical plane cannot remember what happened yesterday or some years ago in his physical life. Just as this continuity of experience has to be maintained in normal physical life, so the connecting thread must be maintained through the transformations in the spiritual world. This means that when a human being has transformed himself into a certain being or event he must not lose himself. He must retain a kind of higher, purely spiritual memory of other forms, processes and beings of the spiritual world. In other words: man has to become a multiple being, to ‘split up’ as it were in the spiritual world, to be able to divide himself. This inner experience produces a strange feeling: ‘You are here, you are this being, but you are also another being. You are within separate beings.’ Without this feeling of multiplicity, we should never be able to attain a real picture, for example, of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. Along the paths we described yesterday and along others too we can get a picture of the Angeloi, the Hierarchy immediately above us. But to reach a more spiritually adequate picture of the Archangeloi, we must understand through inner feeling something of the experience of being multiplied. For it is only gradually that we learn to understand these Beings of the Hierarchies. We only gradually learn to understand because in the physical world all human conceptions, all human thoughts are bound up with the ordinary conditions of space and time. But quite different conditions of space and time exist when we ascend to the Beings of the Hierarchy of Archangeloi.

Starting from the ordinary physical consciousness, we have a certain basic feeling which is quite natural to this physical consciousness. If, for instance, through seership, I want to approach a human being who is living between death and a new birth, then—I am not speaking of myself here but quite generally, of one who has seership and is seeking for a dead soul—I have this feeling: ‘The dead is there, together with me!’ So far as the time element is concerned I can seek him just as on the physical plane I can seek another human being who is a contemporary ... it is only a matter of finding the way to him. When we are seeking one who is dead, this idea is also quite correct. In a certain sense it is still correct when it is a question of finding a Being of the Hierarchy of Angeloi. But it is no longer correct if we are seeking for a Being of the Hierarchy of Archangeloi, because such a Being has concentrated his consciousness at a time that is not our present time.

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Suppose this line represents the flow of time. If the seer lives at this point, 1914, and is seeking a dead soul or a Being of the rank of the Angeloi, he finds that Being somewhere in the spiritual world at the same point of time. But this does not succeed if we are trying, for instance, to find a certain Being of the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi.

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In this case we have to transcend time, to overcome the principle of synchronism (Gleichzeitigkeit). In order to find a certain Archangelos we must go back, for example, to the fifteenth century. Thus we do not remain in our own epoch. Supposing this were the year 1914, we have to go back, say, to the year 146.5. and seek there (EE) for the Archangelos. His influence, it is true, rays over into our own epoch but here we have merely the influence, we do not find the Archangelos in his own real identity. Other Archangeloi must be sought for at different points (see the upper circles in the diagram). We have to go beyond time. It is a difficult conception, but we have to reach it.

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We must realise that the name ‘Archangelos’ has meaning. We know for the first time why they have this name when we find them in the way described. They are ‘Angeloi of the Beginnings.’ They are always to be found at the beginnings of epochs of time on the stage of world-history. It is there that we find them in their full consciousness, in their real self; this remains through the following epochs in the influences streaming into the flow of time. To find the Archangeloi we must not remain in the present; we must go out of time and seek for the beginnings of epochs. Thus, nobody whose soul is only able to live, let us say, in October 1914, is in a position to find all the Archangeloi—perhaps not even one. This is possible only to one who can transfer his soul back into other epochs, in such a way that he can actually experience those other epochs, live in those other epochs.

But then it is necessary not to forget how we got there—just as in the physical world we must not forget what we did yesterday. This is a law of the multiplicity, of the outpouring into number.

And as regards the Primal Beginnings, the Spirits of Personality, the Archai, we find them only by going back to the middle of the Lemurian epoch, when the Earth was at the beginning of its physical evolution. There we find the Archai in their essential nature. We cannot find the Archai if we remain in the present.

Thus, you can see that the whole relation of the soul to time must change before we can penetrate into the spiritual world with knowledge.

What We experience in this way—or even if we envisage these things and continue to feel them inwardly—imparts a kind of mood to the soul, a feeling of being outpoured into spiritual reality. This again is a ‘vowel’ in the spiritual world.

You can see how in the way described a man becomes more and more independent of the standpoint of Space, of the standpoint of Time, which are his in the physical world. He does not only go out of himself, but also into something: into the living weaving and working of the Cosmos, not only one-pointedly, inasmuch as he experiences himself in the spheres of Space, but many-sidedly, inasmuch as he experiences himself in Time as a living being, having in himself the centres of consciousness of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. When, therefore, a man no longer lives only in himself, no longer even in the Space and Time known to him as a physical being, but when he has ‘taken Space to his body’ and ‘Time to his soul’—mark this well, for its full meaning only dawns upon us gradually—when he has taken Space to his body and Time to his soul, he then experiences something that is not an abstract feeling in spiritual generality, but a living weaving and working in a cosmic existence full of meaning. Everywhere there is meaning; it pours into his soul. Universal meaning, weaving and living in the Universe forms itself out of individual meaning. The meaning of things bursts forth like fruit out of many centres. And the Spiritual bursting forth in the single individual meanings weaves itself into a Cosmic Word that is full of meaning. Man lives and weaves within the Cosmic Word. This experience again is another vowel of the spiritual world—the original, primal vowel of the spiritual world. This experiencing of the Cosmic Word which must be pictured in its living wealth and not merely as a spiritual hearing, is Inspiration in the higher sense. With this Inspiration we can say: ‘What I know in this Cosmic Word, the Cosmic Word knows in me. It is not I who know, but the Cosmos knows in me. I fall short in knowledge of the Cosmic Word only because I am an imperfect instrument which can only let the Cosmic Word sound into me in broken streams. But it is the Cosmic Word itself which sounds in me.’

Humility increases the more we succeed in surrendering ourselves selflessly, without any pretentiousness in regard to our own achievement, our thinking, feeling and willing. The more we succeed in letting the Cosmic Word hold sway in the weaving of our own being, the more objectively do we reproduce, through the Cosmic Word, the mysteries pervading the universe.

Thus, again we have spoken of a cosmic vowel. As I can tell you only the essential principles, I wanted to give you an idea—although quite a primitive one—of what may be called the ‘vowels’ of cosmic Being.

When a man is inwardly schooled in such feelings as I have described them in these five cosmic vowels, when he can experience what can be experienced in the life of soul as an echo of these feelings, then the soul can listen to what is going on in the spiritual world and is there in the spiritual world. And then the spiritual world can speak to the soul.

What is it that happens when real communion with the spiritual world is cultivated in the way described? Ego and astral body—but the Ego has reached a higher stage because it has become selfless and has been submerged in the astral body—Ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies. With his Ego and astral body man is outside the physical and etheric bodies when, during life between birth and death, he is engaged in acts of spiritual perception; but he looks back to the etheric body and it is the etheric body that reflects these ‘vowels.’

The etheric body has the power of a seven-fold reflection. I have spoken of five of these reflections. There are still two other experiences of which we could speak if it were possible to go into greater detail. But the characteristic weaving and working of the etheric body, what it reflects in its life-processes, may be described as these ‘vowels.’ In other words: something happens in the etheric body when a man has developed the feelings connected with the experience of standing at the Gate of Death, or is able to face Evil with understanding, or when he lives in the Cosmic Word. According to the particular mood with which he confronts the spiritual world, something is reflected in the etheric body which he is then able to perceive. It is very difficult to describe these things. Cosmic Being reflects itself in a sevenfold way in the etheric body. Let me make a diagram.

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If this represents man's etheric body (quite diagrammatically)—then, if a man confronts the spiritual world with the feeling that arises from the preparation for standing at the Gate of Death, his etheric body is as it were compressed up to here, at a, and acquires a certain radiance and resonance. And out of this radiance and resonance proceeds something that may be called one of the vowels of the spiritual world.

If a different mood is developed, the etheric body concentrates in another region—let us say, in the region of the heart (b). A different radiance and resonance are perceived, as emanating from the being into whom the Ego and astral body have been transposed.

What I have said up to now has referred to the ‘vowels’ of the spiritual world. But there are also ‘consonants’ of the spiritual world, twelve consonants. We get at these consonants most easily by taking the physical body in the same way as we have taken the etheric body with its ‘vowels.’ The physical body is then revealed in its twelve-foldness.

There is not sufficient time even to hint how we can experience the twelve-foldness of the physical body as we have experienced the seven-foldness of the etheric body. But this I must say: To a man who is conscious outside his physical and etheric bodies, they become something quite different from what they are when he is living in them. The etheric body, then, is what contains the life-process which makes us living beings. The physical body is that which builds up the organism of our senses. We are within and we use our physical and etheric bodies to make us the beings we are on the physical plane. But when, in the sense indicated, we are outside the physical and etheric bodies, they appear to us as signs. True, the etheric body is still composed of life; but its task, that of being the life-principle of our physical organism, does not now reveal itself. The etheric body reveals itself as the signs of the seven vowels. It becomes objective, something at which we look and which in its variability and mobility becomes the ‘vowels’ of the Cosmic All. We become as foreign to our etheric body as to the vowels of physical script. And we become as foreign to the physical body—which is now revealed as a totality of twelve consonants brought together- as we are to the consonants of ordinary script. And just as consonants and vowels interpenetrate in the words of ordinary script, enabling us to read or hear, so in the spiritual world do we hear or read the etheric body which reveals itself in a sevenfold aspect by being joined with two or with three consonants of the physical body. On the physical plane, when we meet a human being we can understand him because he speaks to us, perhaps also by gesture or facial expression—but we must have eyes to see and ears to let the word enter our soul. Just as everything that constitutes a relationship to other human beings is transmitted by way of the senses, a similar thing happens in the spiritual world.

We prepare ourselves, let us say, to find a human soul who is living between death and a new birth. We know through inner experience that we are now united with that soul, that we are having experiences with it at the same time and in the same place in the spiritual world. Just as in the physical world we have sense-organs in order to come, to terms with other human beings, so in the spiritual world we have to look back to the etheric body and the physical body. And in their interplay, they reflect how the single processes of the etheric body are joined with those of the physical body—vowel processes with consonant processes. This interplay expresses the speech that is going on with the soul of the dead and is therefore necessary for understanding that soul.

Try to picture the following.—In the spiritual world you are united with the soul of one who is dead and is living between death and a new birth. You look back on your physical form which you can observe because you lived or are living in it on the physical plane; you also look back on the etheric form, and this reflects back all that you speak with the dead, what he has to communicate to you, what he is thinking, feeling and willing. The etheric and physical bodies have become one collective sense-organ. And we can say: In our physical life we have received the physical and etheric bodies so that we may have sense-organs for the spiritual world. A new light is now thrown on the truth that life in the physical world is not merely life in a vale of sorrow of which we must long to get rid, as false asceticism teaches. We realise that life in the physical world has its sublime, divine mission. Within the physical world we acquire what becomes sense-organs for the spiritual world.

You will understand this still more precisely if I tell you about the perception of spiritual beings and happenings when we ourselves are living between death and a new birth, that is to say, when we are not seeing the spiritual world clairvoyantly from the physical plane but are united in the spiritual world with spiritual beings. As long as we bear a physical and an etheric body as a garment, so long have we instruments for reflecting; these bodies serve us as sense-organs. When we lay aside these bodies at death, we naturally no longer have them as external realities. You may easily ask: Does this mean that in the spiritual world between death and a new birth, we cannot become aware of what we experience in connection with the other beings and processes of the spiritual world? But then everything is different, we become aware of it differently I Even the seer in the physical world must have what he experiences in the spiritual world reflected by the physical and etheric bodies. This is correct as long as he is living in the physical world, as long as the physical body has not passed away through decay m•; to the physical world and the etheric body through dissolution into the spiritual world. When we are in the spiritual world and no longer have physical and etheric bodies, then we are able, out of what is the substance of the spiritual world, to form the world of signs out of which the physical body was put together, and also the world of signs out of which the etheric body was given shape.

Suppose, as a soul between death and a new birth, you are to live together with another human being. You are aware of this common life. What the other soul says to you or you say to him expresses itself spiritually in such a way that you inscribe into the spiritual world what, in other circumstances, would have been reflected. But now with your own power you inscribe the picture into the spiritual world. What you otherwise express in the signs of the physical and etheric bodies, in vowels or consonants, you now inscribe, you actually inscribe with your own power into the spiritual world, into the Akashic Record, what you are saying to the other soul—obliterating it again, figuratively speaking, when it is no longer needed.

These communications and experiences are to be read and heard in the spiritual world as the result of mutual activity on the part of the souls.

I gave the first indications of these things at the beginning of the chapter in my book Theosophy, where the so-called ‘Spirit-Land’ is described. It is there said that at a certain stage of development in Devachan, in the ‘Spirit-Land,’ the human being sees his previous incarnation in the ‘Continental Region’ of the Spirit-Land. It is an inscription of a spiritual record.

The ideal would be if study of a book like Theosophy were so zealous that many a reader, from the indications given there, would arrive at these things for himself. There is a very great deal in these books and merely through one's own reading—if the contents are read with the heart and experienced with deep inwardness—everything can be gleaned from them. But books on Spiritual Science are, as a rule, not read with the attention that they really require. If they had been so read, after Theosophy and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and perhaps also Occult Science—an Outline, had been written, the lecture-courses could have been written or given by someone else than me. Everything, really, is contained in these books, only people do not generally believe it. And how much could be written if everything contained in the Mystery Plays were really to be assimilated 1 I am not saying this for advertisement's sake—I have already said enough about the humility of the occultist and the spiritual investigator—but I say it in order to stimulate genuine reading of the writings which had to be given out precisely in our epoch, and for which one really has, personally, so little merit.

So you see that the human being, as he lives on the physical plane, develops something in regard to the spiritual worlds which can be a seed for experiences in these higher worlds. The etheric body of man as it is in the physical world is not only his life-principle, but it is at the same time an instrument of preparation for unfolding understanding of the vowels of the spiritual world. And the physical body also is an instrument of preparation for experiencing the consonants of the spiritual world.

Much can be done if we try in all earnestness to get rid of the purely materialistic conception of the human physical body. Much can be done in the way of preparation in order that these feelings for the vowels and consonants of the Cosmos, these inner experiences and impulses in the soul may awaken. For this preparation we must call up an experience which, as regards development into the higher worlds, is somewhat similar to what a child must do in order to be able to read in the physical world—what it must do in order to learn the words of our physical language.

With the materialistic conception of the physical body, this body is taken just as it presents itself in the physical sense. It is as though somebody were to write down the signs: I N K. ... and then someone comes and says that he will investigate it. This is how we approach the physical body. It is looked at as though it were a scroll with flourishes going up here and down there ... and then it is described. Heart, lung, and so on, are described just as they present themselves externally.

This really is the way it is done. But the only people who get anything out of it are those who have learnt to read the word ‘ink’ out of the signs.

Thus, must we ascend from the physical plane into the higher spiritual worlds with the experiences of which we have spoken to-day. What we learn to read and hear in this way is an individual experience of the soul. But we can prepare if in the physical world we try to comprehend the physical body in its sign-nature. What is meant by this?

I will give you a brief example of understanding this sign-nature. I can do it only very briefly and must leave it to your own earnest meditation to see what is meant. For in many cases speech is not really adequate for understanding these things. It will become adequate only when Spiritual Science has worked for a while in the world and has given the words a stamp which really links them with spiritual activity and spiritual reality. Speech must become more pliant, and this will only be possible when contact with Spiritual Science has been cultivated for some hundreds of years and people have become accustomed to taking words differently from what is the case to-day when they are applied only to things and happenings of the physical plane. Now for the examples.

We find what transpires in the human head to-day enclosed in the bony formation of the skull. There it all is. With a few exceptions it is all physically shut up, as it were, inside. When we begin really to think about the human head, and not merely describe it in its material appearance, we find a tremendous significance in the fact that inside it complicated processes are going on which are shut in practically on all sides by a bony sheath. One part of the physical human being is separated off, surrounded on all sides by the hardest substance, namely that of the bones. It is, however, only a part of the human organism. The human being is by no means a simple entity! The primitiveness of the ideas prevailing at the present time are revealed by the criticisms of my books which grumble at someone who speaks of a Sentient Soul, a Mind-Soul and a Consciousness—or Spiritual Soul, whereas it was a splendid achievement—so it is said—to have been able to conceive of the soul as a unit. It is understandable that our materialistic culture should prefer the hotchpotch that goes by the name of Psychology to-day, to the real membering of the soul. These members of the soul are a reality; they belong to different worlds and are not designated without reason. It is comprehensible that modern culture should consider this foolish, but thereby it simply characterises itself, not what it condemns.

The physical organism of man is highly complicated and study of it may give rise to the following thoughts which may, certainly, seem foolish to those who call themselves scientists to-day. Yes … but St. Paul said that much that is wisdom in the eyes of God is foolishness in the eyes of men. And so perhaps it will be profitable to think of this ‘foolishness in the eyes of men’ which may be ‘wisdom in the eyes of God.’

Let us think about the following.—What about our hands? Our hands are quite definitely connected with our soul. If anyone has a living feeling for what goes on in his hands, it is not without significance if what he says to another human being expresses itself in the gestures of his hands. This means something in itself! I will pass over many of the intermediate steps, leaving this to your own meditation. Just suppose that as the result, not of a process emanating from the human body, but of a process rooted in the Cosmos, our hands were not formed in such a way that we could move them freely or make them follow our will. Suppose our hands were fettered to our body, were obliged to remain quite rigid, having been affixed to the body, as it were from outside, by external Nature. How would things be then? We should have hands but be unable to move them. But if we had hands and could not use them, we should still have the urge to do so! Although we could not move them physically, we should always be wanting to move the etheric hands! The physical hands would lie still, the etheric hands would move. This, in reality, is what we do with our brain. Certain lobes of the brain which now lie enclosed in the skull were freely mobile during the Old Moon evolution. To-day they are rigid and can no longer move physically. But they do move etherically, when we think. We move the etheric brain when we think. If we had not this firm skull enclosing the lobes of the brain, we should stretch out with these lobes and make gestures with them—gestures such as we now make with the hands—but we should not think. The lobes of the brain had first to be made physically rigid and it had to be possible for the etheric brain to tear itself free.

What I am now saying is not fantasy. The time will come when our hands and much else too will become rigid. This will be in the Jupiter epoch. That which to-day appears so free—attached as it were to the heart-region—will then be enclosed by a sheath, just as the brain to-day is enclosed by a skull. That which is most visibly expressed in the hands is something that is preparing to become an organ of thought. For the time being we have only rudimentary organs which at present are small structures because they have not fully developed. Suppose that to-day we had only certain portions of the skull here in front ... behind there are the shoulder-blades. They lie in the plane which later on will enclose the brain of the future. You have a true conception of the shoulder-blades in the human body when you regard them as small pieces of bone which really belong to a skull that will form—only the other parts have not yet developed. Therewith you have, as it were, added a second man to the first. Moreover—and here I shall say something very strange—there are other organs in the body which are also pieces of another skull which will develop in a still more distant future. These organs are now quite tiny compared with the organism as a whole: they are the knee-caps. The knee-caps are now these tiny surfaces—mere indications which later on will turn into a different spiritual organ. We characterise the human organism aright if we say (though this is only one isolated example): The human being has, in reality, three skulls. One is fairly well developed, shut off on all sides. The second has only pieces, in the shoulder-blades, the third only in the knee-caps. But the two latter—shoulder-blades and knee-caps—can, in thought, be expanded and rounded off into spherical forms. Thus, we get three brains. What we are as inner men is only slightly developed externally in the second brain. To-day it manifests externally; later on it will become an inner brain. When you make gestures with your hands to-day you are preparing for what will be thoughts later on—thoughts which will be quite as capable of grasping processes of the elemental world as your head now grasps the processes of the physical world. And strange though it sounds: everything lying outside and beyond the knee-caps, that is to say, the lower legs, the feet—these are still quite imperfect organs connected with the gravity of the Earth. These organs, in conjunction with what they receive spiritually from the Earth to-day, are preparing to become not only physical but spiritual organs, which will lead into the spiritual worlds when the Earth is replaced by the later Venus evolution. The present physical form must fall away and something else take its place.

So you see, much, very much is contained in the occult study of the world. The most important is not that we know: This or that book exists and contains this and that concerning the higher worlds. That is not the most important. What the books contain must, naturally, be assimilated because that is the only way of finding what is right and true. But the necessary thing is a certain ‘temper’ of the soul, whereby a man relates himself in a new way to the world, whereby he learns to have a different view of the things of the world. The important thing is that by this reading we prepare for the inner mobility and movement of the life of thought, for the weaving of thought, for the experience of thought-in-itself; that we also prepare to see the physical world in a different way. For even in their outer form things are not as they seem. Strange as it sounds, the shoulder-blade is not what you see physically. That it has such definite limits is Maya, is false. The shoulder-blade expands, when we really set about comprehending it, into an organ with much greater detail. And when we see a man kneeling, we should gradually get the impression: That is a false picture! The knee-caps there, those tiny parts, are illusory; this kneeling man is surrounded by a great spherical surface and he lives within that orb. The surface becomes a sphere and when a man prays he is preparing himself in the brain to live in the sphere in which he will live when the sphere of which the knee-caps are only tiny parts, encloses him.

Thus, we gradually learn to read in the physical world. We do not merely look at a man kneeling or making some gesture, but we begin to realise that although what presents itself immediately, is reality, none the less it is false and untrue. In the ‘letters’ we learn what the Cosmos is, not only in the present but what it expresses in its ‘Becoming.’ A man in prayer becomes, in his form, what the Venus man will sometime be. Thus, do we learn, step by step, to decipher, interpret, read in the true sense, and grasp the world as it really is. The physical world is no more than a written page before us. If we only stare at it, we can observe it without being able to read it at all. Neither do we know anything of the world if we look at it merely with the faculty of physical perception, for then we do not decipher, we do not really penetrate into the world. We must read the world, learn its meaning.

If we become more and more conscious that the world is a book which the Hierarchies have written for us, in order that we may read in it, then only do we become Man in the full sense of the word. The building on which we are working is intended in its form to draw out those feelings and intimate moods of soul which make us capable of reading the world and of hearing the secrets of the Universe. The building is as it is in order that it may draw out what is within us—a certain part, at least.

It is good, my dear friends, to take a picture in our meditations of the task which Spiritual Science has in the world over against what is in the world to-day; it is good to picture what must develop out of Spiritual Science and how Spiritual Science must find its way into the further development of history.

If only there could be in the Anthroposophical Society a body of human beings filled with the living consciousness that Spiritual Science has to be worked and woven into the evolution of humanity!

It was not merely in order to impart truths to you, but to stimulate such feelings in your souls, my dear friends, that I have given these lectures.

Some time ago, we spoke here, at least in some allusions, of what is called occult reading and occult hearing, and today and tomorrow I will take up these considerations of those discussions about occult reading and occult hearing, because then I will be able to develop some important ideas about our structure in connection with them.

If we look at the outer scientific consideration, insofar as it concerns the life of the soul, today, we find many difficulties in this outer scientific consideration, as soon as we want to come to a reasonably satisfactory overview of the relevant concepts. Among the many difficulties, the one that arises when we consider the outer science of human memory is truly no small one.

Now I would have to cite a lot here if I wanted to talk about this or that that external psychology or the doctrine of the soul has to say about human memory. But it would not get us very far if I wanted to explain all of that. I just want to draw your attention to the difficulty for this external science when it comes to understanding memory and its peculiarities.

Human memory presents itself to us in such a way that we can recall to our consciousness at a later time perceptions, concepts, and ideas that we have absorbed at some time in the past. So there is the psychological fact that, for example, we have some kind of perception or experience today, and that after some time, without being confronted with the same fact that caused the perception or experience, we can vividly recall the idea of the fact, of the experience, from within.

This seems to indicate that the human soul stores everything it takes in from the outside. For example, when we meet someone, we get an impression of them. We transform this impression into a mental image and then store this mental image in our subconscious; when we need it, we retrieve it.

Wouldn't it then be the case that our soul, insofar as it develops the power of our memory, would be, let's say, a box in which all ideas and experiences can be placed and stored, and from which they can be taken out when needed to be brought up into consciousness. So all kinds of experiences would be stored down there in this soul cabinet, and they could be retrieved from there.

When you read books about memory today, you get the impression that the authors often believe that the soul is a kind of storage cabinet for all kinds of experiences. Now imagine walking around with your soul and carrying a cabinet for all your impressions and experiences with you in this soul. It must be freely admitted that there is a difficulty here. Various scientific concepts have been used to try to bridge this difficulty, but nothing particularly satisfactory has emerged from them. This difficulty will only be overcome when we acquire a deeper insight into the structure of the human being in the physical body, in the etheric body, in the astral body and in the I. For this etheric body of man must indeed be studied if one is to gain a real knowledge of the nature of human memory, and the astral body must be studied no less for this purpose.

Let us assume that we can at least form some kind of idea, comparatively speaking, of what this astral body of man actually is. In the waking hours of everyday life, the human being does not experience himself in his astral body, any more than he experiences himself in his ether body. The human being experiences himself in his I from waking up to falling asleep, and all experiences are I-experiences. In the astral body, the human being does not experience himself. This astral body is, as I have emphasized on other occasions, fundamentally infinitely wiser than the I-human being. It can do much more than the I-human being can do. This astral body can actually read what I have indicated to you as occult writing. The astral body can read this occult writing; it can really read it.

Among many other ideas through which one can evoke an understanding of the astral body, one can also have the idea that it is a reader of occult writing. And the etheric body, on the other hand, is, among many other qualities it has, something like a writing tablet in which the occult writing is continually being inscribed through the processes of the world.

While we live - and we always live, whether we are awake or asleep, between birth and death, and from death to a new birth - processes and events are constantly taking place in the universe, in the cosmos. There is essence in the cosmos. All this is imprinted and written into the etheric body. The etheric body of the human being is indeed a true reflection of the entire cosmos. There is nothing in the cosmos that is not impressively imprinted in the etheric body of the human being and, if one wants to use the expression, imaginatively mirrored. And the human astral body is constantly reading what the world inscribes into the etheric body. This takes place in the subconscious, so that the human astral body reads what the world inscribes into the etheric body.

But now, when we ourselves, in our conscious, waking day-life, encounter an event or even an object that makes an impression on us, we form a mental image of this object. When we form this mental image of the object, the astral body is the first to be involved. It is in a state of vehement movement while we form a mental image of an object or form the mental image of the impression of an external event. What we form as an idea, what we experience as soul, is also written into the etheric body of the human being and remains there. Just as the world with its events continually inscribes itself into our etheric body, we also inscribe into our etheric body what we ourselves experience as soul. It remains there inscribed. When we remember something, a complicated process actually takes place. Our astral body reads what has been written into our etheric body, and the result of this reading is the emergence of an image that we call a memory.

Now, in this way, memory would be traced back to a kind of reading of our astral body in the etheric body. And indeed, as soon as we know this, we will no longer arrive at the naive idea that the soul is a kind of storage cabinet for what we have experienced, but we will see: there are in fact few habits - I say explicitly habits, we will understand the word even better tomorrow - into which the astral body repeatedly places itself when it has experienced something, and which it then impresses into the etheric body. Just as our writing has few letters, so our astral body has few, very few habits. And just as we communicate the whole infinite abundance of what human beings have to say to each other about themselves and the world through various groupings of our few letters in writing, so what memory retains is formed from a few habits through their combinations.

If we know that it is a matter of reading, then we will no longer believe that every single experience has to be written down. Instead, a few habits of the astral body are combined and then fixed in the etheric body. Just as we can fix a new word with the old letters when we hear it, so we can fix each new experience in the etheric body with a few habits of the astral body. This is because both our etheric body and, in particular, our astral body are connected to the entire cosmos. We must not take what an older wisdom teaching has emphasized from the cosmos as something that was emphasized by chance, but rather it has a deep meaning and importance.

If we take the twelve constellations of the entire zodiac, we can say that our astral body is indeed in living connection with these twelve constellations. These twelve constellations really do mean twelve certain habits for our astral body, twelve certain ways of moving. And then our astral body is also connected with the seven planets, as we have often discussed. These in turn determine certain habits in him. Through these habits – I say expressly 'habits' – which are ignited in our astral body by the planets of our solar system, something similar arises in the astral body to the vowels; and through the habits that are stimulated in it by the influence of the zodiac, something similar arises to the consonants.

What I mean to say is this: Let us assume that at some moment in our lives – and such moments are always present because we are always in contact with the world – our astral body is in contact with the forces that stream out of the constellation of Aries. Because our astral body is in connection or under the particular influence of that which radiates out of the constellation of Aries, the possibility develops in this astral body to close itself in its particular form, to give itself a boundary; while if the astral body is more under the influence of Libra, a movement develops in it that allows it to be more open to the rest of the world.

Thus a definite tendency of motion develops under the influence of each constellation. Under the influence of this or that constellation, the astral body particularly stretches its upper part upwards, and under the influence of one of the other constellations, it particularly stretches its lower part. Twelve such special movements correspond to twelve such habits, and in turn seven special habits under the influence of the planets. These are more inner movements under the influence of the planets, whereby the inner parts move or bring themselves into a relationship with each other. Thus, our astral body has, in fact, 12 + 7 = 19 habits, implanted by the cosmos.

Just as we can write anything with our characters, with the signs for the vowels and consonants by combining them, if we want to express what we bring to light with our wisdom, so our astral body forms everything it has to form through the combinations of these nineteen habits. When a person comes up to us with a face that looks at us in a certain way, good or evil, our astral body makes certain movements that are combined from these nineteen habits. This is then written into the etheric body, and at a later time the astral body can read what is written into the etheric body. And that is what memory is based on! As soon as you go beyond what the senses and the mind bound to the senses reveal, you immediately come to the relationship of the human being to the cosmos. The physical body only conceals this relationship of the human being to the cosmos.

We therefore have a continuous inner reading, and if we could go back, also historically, to the origin of writing, we would find that in fact in the oldest pictographic writings, man is imitated in this inner reading of man. It is not the case that writing came about by chance, but the original consonant signs were imitations of the signs of the zodiac and the original vowel signs were imitations of the planetary images. The outer reading was nothing more than a reproduction in the outer world of what man had as an inner reading.

This is connected with the attitude that people in ancient times had towards the art of writing. It was considered to be something tremendously sacred because it was taken from cosmic secrets. And it is still known from Egyptian culture that the copyists, if they made mistakes, exposed themselves to the most severe punishments, even the death penalty, depending on the magnitude of the mistake they made, under the strict laws there, if the mistake was big enough. It was considered something infinitely high and sacred to write down what man could know of the sacred secrets, because one still had a sense of the context of these characters and all the sacred secrets of human nature and their connection with the divine.

That is the important thing, as we gradually absorb spiritual science within us, to regain the sense of the sacredness of the hidden pages of human nature. This sense is much more important than the mere theoretical absorption of spiritual-scientific things. But it is also connected with the fact that at the moment when, in the course of the development of humanity, one had to give up all connection with the sacred of Scripture, one also felt that, basically, I would say, something creepy was taking place in the history of humanity. Take a book from a library from the early Middle Ages and try to imagine how such a book came into being, how a monk, I would say, spent years, even decades, writing this book, how he spent a long, long time painting a single letter. Then one knew that writing was considered something sacred. One knew that through writing one was connected to the good gods, and in a sense what one entrusted to writing was a carrying out into the outer world of what comes from the good gods.

But you know, it is a sign of evolution that everything that comes from the good gods can be distorted in the world by Ahriman or Lucifer. The moment when the very ordinary art of printing was created, which then developed into that from which man mainly draws his wisdom today, by bending his head over the paper on which there are horrible signs, which are only the ape-like old characters that reveal to him what people thought or did not think about the world and its secrets, the art of writing was shifted. As a result, the written word has indeed entered a new stage, the stage where it has lost all nimbus of the sacred, where the Ahrimanic stage of written communication has begun, so to speak. And so, just as the ancient characters are the externalization of hidden secrets, albeit in a reproduction, in symbolism, just as these characters are the externalization of hidden secrets into the outer world, and just as these secrets correspond to the nature of the entities of the spiritual world that progress in the good sense. What we have today, especially in the form of printed matter – but in a broader sense it also applies to handwriting – is of a distinctly Ahrimanic character. And the people sensed this when they attributed the art of printing to the 'black forces', calling it a 'black art', and even attributing its invention to the devil.

There is a deeper connection when one associates the invention of the art of printing with Faust, just as Goethe associates the art of printing with what Faust goes through in a certain phase of his life. The Ahrimanic epoch of the art of communication has arrived with the invention of printing. We know, of course, that we must rightly unlearn to make a sign of the cross before all things that are called Ahrimanic. But we also know that we must call things by their right name and understand them. We, as spiritual scientists, must not be among those who say: the art of printing is Ahrimanic, so we must therefore eradicate it. We will not do that, it would never occur to us, because we understand that the Ahrimanic is also necessary in world evolution, that it also belongs to world progress. But we must also see things as they are. We must not reinterpret things in order to make it easier for ourselves, to allow ourselves to live in the world without Lucifer and Ahriman. It is more pleasant not to know that Ahriman stares at us from almost every book we read today. But it is necessary for those who see the world in its true light to endure this state and not to reinterpret it into something else. To understand the world is the task of those who feel more and more drawn to spiritual science.

In our time, we see an external natural science that would like to reduce everything to a kind of mechanical movement of the smallest mass particles. I have often spoken about this world view that external natural science is creating of our world. We are told: Oh, colors - red, yellow, green, violet, blue - are nothing but vibrations in reality! Color is only something that the eye causes. From so and so much vibration of the ether, red arises, from so and so much vibration yellow, from so and so much blue, from so and so much vibration violet. - And one would like to say that the modern world observer has the tendency to erase from the world picture that which he perceives with his senses in the world and to replace it with a material vortex.

One of the last great minds to have rebelled against this, which can be called a whirling dance of material particles, especially in the field of the theory of colors, is Goethe. And because the modern world has increasingly embraced this materialistic view, this obliteration of the manifold world around us, it has not been able to understand what Goethe actually wanted to say in his theory of colors.

Spiritual science will restore some order here, and Goethe's theory of colors will be appreciated to the extent that spiritual science permeates people. For Goethe, it undoubtedly seemed like a kind of madness - I say “madness”, but given his particular expressions, he might also have said “great madness” - to think that the colors flooding the world are nothing more than what the eye evokes from a vortex of vibrations, from a vibrating cosmos.

This vibrating cosmos – I have often referred to it as a fantasy of modern science – was simply not present for Goethe; for him, it was one of Mephistopheles's temptations. With his alert senses, Goethe was truly devoted to the full range of colors and the flood of colors in the world, and he lived in the flood of colors. It would have seemed to him the most desolate gray theory if he had had to replace this flooding sea of colors with the horrible vibrations of modern physics.

Why was that? Because Goethe - one may say the word in the deepest sense - had a universally developed, healthy human nature and through this healthy human nature always strove to place himself in the right relationship to the world. Such a healthy nature - I will now say something seemingly very trivial, but it is not trivial, rather it contains a significant wisdom - such a nature as Goethe's also sleeps healthily. Yes, a trivial truth! But for the spiritual researcher, healthy sleep actually means a great deal. During sleep, the human being is outside of his physical and etheric body, present in his I and his astral body. There he is truly immersed in the experiences that bring his astral body into connection with the entire starry cosmos, for example. Everything that can be influenced by the zodiacal constellations and the planets lights up in the astral body. Just as the human being lives with the external world in a state of wakefulness, so the human being lives with the world of the stars in a state of sleep. But you all know that: the human being does not know very much about this life with the world of the stars, and that is important to understand why the human being does not know much about this coexistence with the world of the stars. Why is that?

You don't overlook a landscape when it is covered with fog. The fog moves across the landscape and the parts of the landscape, the rivers, mountains, plains and so on, do not appear to us when they are interspersed with fog. In the same way, when a person sleeps, they are permeated by a fog, a mental fog. What is this mental fog? It is a fog of desires, consists of desires, and these desires are formed by the longing for the physical body. When the person is out of the physical body and etheric bodies, that is, in the time from falling asleep to waking up, he continually has the desire for the physical body; he wants to return to his physical body. He is taken out of the physical body by the forces of the cosmos, and only when these forces release him does he slip back into the physical body when he wakes up. There his desire for the physical body is satisfied again.

In a person like Goethe, healthy sleep is present because the desire for the physical body is less than in some other people, and therefore the influences from the cosmos are greater than in other people during sleep. You can easily imagine a person like Goethe being more receptive to the influences of the cosmos during sleep, and that is his healthy sleep. The desire for the physical body is there, but healthier than in other people. And why is it healthier? It is healthier precisely because Goethe is so healthily devoted to the impressions of the outside world while awake, because, for example, he did not allow himself to substitute something theoretical, such as vibrations, for colors, but because he observed colors themselves in their reality, in their full-bodied reality. There is a difference between a person like Goethe, who, although full of wisdom, walks through nature and sees green as green, violet as violet, and the relationship of green to violet or to yellow and so on, and thus sees the content directly as color, or whether a dry theorist walks through the field and does not see the colors, but speculates about what kind of a trillion or a million vibrations correspond to green or red or yellow.

Why does he then go through the world as such a dry theorist? Because he is not devoted to the world of colors, but because he is too strongly devoted to his physical body, even if it is initially his physical brain. All gray theory arises from being too devoted to the physical body during the waking hours. We would not have any materialistic theories today if people had not been so strongly devoted to the physical body. The more a person selflessly devotes himself to the things of the world during waking life, the more he has the opportunity to be devoted to the influences of the extraterrestrial cosmos during sleep, and then to bring back the healthy after-effects of these impressions into daily life. Then he will not, like the dried-up physicist described above, see swirling atomic vortices behind the flowing colors, but spirit, elementary spirituality, real spiritual activity.

Thus, to know that behind the impressions of the senses is the living spiritual world is an after-effect of healthy sleep. For when one cannot, during the waking hours, selflessly surrender to what is flowing outside in the world, but instead forms horrible theories about it, which are actually phantasms, then when one falls asleep one has a stronger overpowering urge for the physical body and not only darkens one's consciousness towards the impressions during sleep, but also lessens, besides one's consciousness, the intensity and strength of these impressions themselves. This is connected with the fact that, in fact, the more spiritual science is taken to life the human soul life, the more precisely such wisdom as Goethean physics will take hold of people again, compared to the dull theories that are now wreaking havoc in external science.

The assimilation of spiritual science in humanity is connected with many things. It will truly mean a tremendous change when the general consciousness is once imbued with the truth: at night, you as a human being are in the extra-terrestrial universe in a spiritual way and in the daytime you immerse yourself in your physical and etheric bodies. There is much that we will learn to feel and sense together with this knowledge.

For example, let us now turn to something more spiritual. We will have to learn that what we call life with the folk spirit, with the folk soul, to which we count ourselves in the narrower sense, is present when we enter the physical and etheric bodies of the human being. Thus, we are in contact with the national soul from the moment we awaken until we fall asleep, for that which the national soul is, the forces and activities it develops, are poured into the physical body and the etheric body: into the physical body more the racial aspect, into the etheric body more the national aspect. It is poured into the veils we enter when we awaken. In this way we are actually continually exchanging forces with our own folk soul. The science that is universally human, that has nothing to do with the configurations and differentiations that are poured into people through the folk souls, this science must indeed be won by that part of human nature that can free itself, can become independent of the physical, just as a person is independent of it when asleep. This science is necessarily general and human because it is gained through those members of human nature that are independent of the physical body and the etheric body.

If one were to assume that someone who can truly see into the spiritual world and gain knowledge of it could be bound by popular prejudices, then one would simply not take the secrets of initiation into due consideration. Just as life in sleep is quite different from waking life in the cases mentioned above, but the two are related, so it is also with regard to the relationship between the human being and the nature of the folk soul. From the moment a person falls asleep until they wake up, they are not together with the forces that come directly from the folk soul, for these can only be sent into the physical and etheric bodies alone. Thus, anyone who has attained conscious inner experience of their ego and their astral body is, while experiencing this, experiencing what they then have to form into spiritual science, yes, outside of the physical and etheric body; they experience outside of the physical and etheric body. But one is nevertheless not outside the world. While one is with one's folk spirit as soon as one slips into one's physical body and thus also into one's etheric body, one is outside one's own folk soul when one slips out of the physical and etheric bodies, as it is when sleeping or in initiation, which works into the physical and etheric bodies. One is outside, but one is not outside the realm of folk souls in general, because they are spiritual beings. And when one is outside one's physical and etheric body in the spiritual world, one is actually only outside of one folk soul that has a particular significance for one at the present time, namely, one's own folk soul, the one that is active in the physical and etheric bodies. By being in community with it or coming into community with it during waking hours, interest in it is lost during sleep and during initiation. The peculiar fact emerges that during sleep and during initiation one is essentially with all other folk souls, only not with one's own.

So if you imagine the round dance of contemporary folk souls, then as a human being, when you are in your physical body and perceive it while you are awake, you are together with your own folk soul; but when you are asleep or in a state of initiation, you are together with all the other folk souls, except your own. That is an objective truth.

Now you can see how nonsensical it would be for someone who can consciously be with other folk souls to fail to recognize the other folk souls, or to treat them with sympathy or antipathy. It is as if one did not want to recognize the folk souls. Only for the one who has not progressed to initiation does it make sense to feel sympathy or antipathy for this or that folk soul, because he does not know that he is really together with the other folk souls for the sleeping half of his life. But there is a difference now. While in waking life one is connected, so to speak, with one national soul, with one's own, in sleeping life one is connected with the other national souls, thus not with the effects that emanate from one, but with the interaction of the others, so to speak with what the other national souls perform as a round dance in harmony.

So you can easily imagine life with one folk soul and life with the other folk souls. The former is life when awake, the latter is life when asleep. During sleep or during initiation, you are with the interaction of the other folk souls. A person cannot be alone with their own folk soul unless they are constantly awake. It is quite impossible for him to do so, because he would have to be constantly awake. The difference is that when we are awake, we exchange forces with our own folk soul; when we are asleep, we do not exchange forces with our own, but with the totality, with the roundelay of the other folk souls.

But there is a way to be with a particular folk soul even in sleep, to be more influenced by the forces emanating from one folk soul rather than from the totality of folk souls. Then, in sleep, one is, as it were, spellbound by this one folk soul. The remedy for this is to particularly hate this folk soul when awake. A folk soul that one particularly hates while awake is torn out of the dance of the other folk souls and it captivates and fetters one to its particular characteristics. If I may express myself in a trivial way, my dear friends, it must be said - you will not hold it against me in this case: to really hate a national soul in the waking state is to condemn oneself to having to sleep with that national soul! This is truly an occult truth, albeit a distressing one, a truth about which there is really nothing to laugh. This must be faced if one also wants to gain an understanding from a certain point of view of how spiritual science must influence by spreading itself throughout the world, the attitudes of people, how it must permeate all feeling and sensing.

I have deliberately formulated what I have to say about the relationship between the human being and the folk soul in a way that makes you laugh. I had to do that because very often, as an occultist, one has the tendency to help people through what is most harrowing, most tragic, not by saying it in all its tragic gravity, since that would crush people, but by saying it in such a way that it helps people to be able to absorb it like any other scientific idea.

However, it should not be forgotten that spiritual science shows us in a very thorough way to what extent we want to accept the world as Maja. Because as soon as we penetrate into spiritual science with the deepest seriousness, it becomes serious, I would say, it becomes really deeply serious with it and with all that it should be for man. It may be said that most people today still have something against spiritual science because they cannot understand with their intellect what spiritual science is actually supposed to make of man. People today do not understand the basic nerve of spiritual science. But it is not only that they cannot understand it with their intellect, there is something much deeper. When we penetrate deeper into the wisdom of spiritual science, we find that it also makes demands on our minds and wills. It shows us the human being in a light that we usually do not want to have ourselves. Not only does our mind prefer to turn to Maja than to reality, but so does our will.

If I may speak in a trivial way again, I can say: it is extremely uncomfortable to live with the deeper wisdom of spiritual science, because life must take on a different face under the influence of spiritual science. In the moment when one knows what it means when Capesius and Strader stand opposite each other in their spiritual forms and exchange words, but in truth these words cause tumult and turmoil in the most elementary forces of the world, in that moment, when one knows what is is going on in the world, in the whole cosmos, when a person experiences this or that in his soul, then the full seriousness of spiritual science becomes apparent, and only then do we realize how people not only want to live in maya with their minds, but also with their wills. We need only develop this or that sympathy or this or that antipathy, and what we do there then becomes the cause of being driven as a sleeping or dead human being into the realm of this or that being of the cosmos and effecting this or that there. For through our being with this or that being of the cosmos, cosmic events happen again.

With such words, one would like to evoke a feeling of how spiritual science really wants to speak not only to people's minds, but to grasp the whole person, the whole soul, because people's lives today are at a stage from which the signs of the times clearly show us how this life must be grasped if it is to continue, by that wave which encompasses the spiritual secrets and does not merely leave man in Maya, but leads him into true reality. These are the things we must consider if we want to come to a deeper understanding of our spiritual scientific will. And tomorrow we will continue to speak of such things and will probably end up with something that is connected with a fundamental idea of our structure.

Yesterday I pointed out that much will depend on how at least the main concepts and main images of spiritual scientific knowledge are incorporated into general cultural life. Yesterday I tried to give some examples of how it might be thought that the way people think would really take up the main ideas of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I, and really make these ideas fruitful for the most diverse areas of life and science.

Today I would like to point out another example. What we distinguish as physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, these are members of the human soul, we could also say of the human soul life, which, of course on a much higher plane, are related to each other in much the same way as, I would say, on a lower plane the individual color nuances of our color scale. And just as there can be no real knowledge of the inner nature of light and its inner relationships to the rest of the world without imagining this division into color shades, so there can be no real knowledge of the soul without having ideas about how soul members such as I, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body relate to one another. But just as the individual colors do not simply stand next to each other, but merge into one another, so that one cannot always exactly indicate in the color scale where one shade ends and where the other shade begins, so it is also with these soul members: they merge into one another, and only our minds actually separate them as we usually do.

Now it is important to consider, for example, the transition of the I and the astral body into the eye. What we call the I of the human being really merges into the astral body, just as the red nuance of the color spectrum merges into the orange nuance. We must only realize once and for all what we are actually talking about when we speak of the human ego. We speak of the human ego, and we must of course be quite clear about the fact that the actual essence of the ego is outside of everything that can be observed as the physical human body. The ego experiences itself only in inner experiences. As is well known, the etheric body and the astral body are not experienced directly at all. Rather, the physical body is experienced through external observation, through external perception, and the I in its manifold experiences is experienced in an internal way. This is absolutely the case for experiences on the physical plane. Between the physical body and the I within stand the astral body and the etheric body; both belong to such facts of the event, we can say, that are not directly experienced by the human being on the physical plane. Neither can the etheric body be directly observed externally without prior esoteric training, nor can the astral body be experienced. It contains everything that is often called the sum of subconscious or unconscious mental experience.

The I is divided into the most diverse experiences of consciousness. And now let us single out one such experience of consciousness, or rather, one conscious mode of experience. Conscious life is indeed very diverse, but we want to highlight, as I said, a very simple, elementary mode of experience, the way we experience taste. Just as the I experiences the experiences of sight, hearing, smell and imagination, so it also has taste experiences, interactions with the external physical world. I am referring to the very ordinary taste experiences that are related to nutrition, not those that are called artistic.

What we experience when we have a taste sensation is an experience of the I, in that this taste experience is consciously occurring for us. So when we bring a food into our mouths and have a taste experience, this taste experience is an experience of our I. The manifold taste experiences are simply manifold experiences of the I.

Now, in an interesting way, we can study the transition from the ego to the astral body, from conscious experiences to subconscious experiences, through taste experiences. It is not difficult to see that the taste experiences, as it were, die away when the food has travelled a certain distance through the digestive system. For conscious life, the taste experiences die away, but this is only apparent. In reality, to put it in rough terms, the taste experience of the mouth merges into the taste experience of the whole organism; and the whole organism is basically permeated by taste experiences in the course of the food entering our body, in the course of digestion and so on; and what we consciously taste is only a small part of the general tasting that our whole body experiences.

Not only the nerve endings of our mouth taste, but our entire digestive tract tastes, and as the nutrients enter the organism, into the blood and so on, the whole organism tastes again what the digestive organs have prepared for it. One could say that the whole organism is permeated by taste sensations. And this organism is so permeated and permeated with taste sensations that one can speak of differentiated tastes. One can speak of organ tastes. Each organ has its own specific taste experience; the stomach has its own specific taste experience, the liver, lungs and heart have their own special taste experiences. The general taste differentiates into the organ taste.

Here we see how the sphere of I-experiences submerges into the sphere of astral experiences. These differentiated organ tastes are unconscious; they do not come to the consciousness of the human being, and yet they are infinitely significant. For the normal development of human life depends on the normal development of these organ tastes, and aging consists partly in the fact that the astral body gradually becomes dulled to the habit of tasting. Do understand me. The astral body dulls in relation to the habit of tasting; but the word “habit” is used in the sense in which I used it yesterday; little by little it dulls. But if the stimulus is no longer exerted on the astral body and thereby also on the etheric body and the physical body, which finds its expression in the fact that one tastes, then the possibility no longer exists for the astral body to permeate the life events of the etheric body and the physical body through taste experiences. A good deal of what we call aging is based on the astral body becoming dulled to tasting, and the fact that a single human organ loses the fresh ability to taste, that is, is not permeated by its astral body in the appropriate way, results in organ diseases.

Now you understand that certain perspectives arise under this condition. Firstly, there is the perspective that is important in a pedagogical-hygienic sense: it is not to be underestimated to have a well-developed sense of taste. I have already discussed this for our friends on one occasion when I was talking about child education. It is important to realize that one should develop a living relationship with the different foods one eats, that it matters to a certain extent whether one eats lettuce or spinach, but that one should have a living relationship with the differentiations of the plant world in lettuce and spinach. For what one experiences in tasting lettuce and spinach are living relationships between the macrocosm and the microcosm, and these living relationships continue in the subconscious taste experience of the astral body, which passes through all the organs. Those who become vegetarians, for example, should not associate this with false asceticism, for instance by using their vegetarianism to dull themselves as much as possible to the friendly relationship with the nature of nature. Instead, they should develop the ability to taste the subtle differences between the individual food types. One can do this particularly well as a vegetarian because one is able – if the word is not misunderstood, I would like to say – to taste those fine, refined differences between the individual plants and what one prepares from them as food, whereas, of course, if one is not a vegetarian, one has more brutal differences with meat dishes. Because if we become blunted in this respect, there is a real danger that we will extend this blunting from the conscious part of the astral taste experiences to the subconscious part of the taste experiences. But by doing so, we cut off the living influences that emanate from the astral body to the lower limbs of our organism. And it is an uncomfortable sight to come to some vegetarian restaurants and see how people pile a mountain of all kinds of mixed food on their plates and stuff it into their mouths without understanding, and then act particularly superior to what the ordinary person has in terms of a friendly relationship with their natural environment when it comes to taste experiences.

That is one thing, my dear friends. Once our understanding of the outer experience in relation to eating is penetrated by our understanding of the astral body and its workings, then a healthy hygiene of eating will really arise, and we will need it because the unconscious instinctive life of the human race will gradually be lost and must be replaced by a conscious relationship with the cosmic environment.

But on the other hand, there is also another perspective, and that is that there really is a certain relationship between the whole plant world that is spread out over the earth and the human organism, the microcosm. And this relationship is expressed in the specific taste of an organ. What I am saying is really true and not just a symbol: any plant growing outside tastes only to a certain organ in the human being, it does not taste to other organs. A particular organ can be stimulated by the forces of this plant, but not another. Once these relationships have been studied, something very important will have been gained.

I have told you on various occasions: although the plant, when we take its form, consists of the physical body and the associated etheric body, it stretches, as it were, as it develops upwards, its flowering into the surrounding astrality, and when we look over a bed of plants, we find astrality spread over the plants, astrality that belongs to the plants. Not every plant has its own particular astral body, but it is the case that the general astrality – spread over the surface of the earth as air is spread out physically – becomes specific. That which, as it were, descends from the earth's astral body to a particular flower, let us say a lily flower, expresses itself differently than that which descends to a clover flower. There the general astrality is specified.

This relationship that exists between the astrality of the earth and the entire spread out carpet of plants, this relationship also exists internally between the human astral body and its individual organs. In this respect, too, the human being is a microcosm, only that an unhealthy relationship can arise between the human astral body and its individual organs, in that individual organs lose their living sense of taste and become dulled. The relationship that exists between the general astrality of the earth and the entire plant cover is essentially - and I say essentially - a healthy one, and if one finds out the relationships between the individual plants and the human organs, then one also finds the possibility of stimulating the organs again by supplying the substances of the individual plants and making them healthy from within. For when the substances of a particular plant are introduced into the human organism, the affinity that the plant has with the general astrality of the earth is also introduced. If this affinity to the astrality of the earth is dulled in individual organs of the human organism, it can be stimulated again, also in the human astral body, by introducing the forces of the plant in question into the human organism.

You can see from this the possibility of setting up a plant system that corresponds in some way to the human organization and which at the same time represents a rational system of certain remedies for certain organ diseases. One would get beyond the purely empirical, trial-and-error search, and one would really be able to rationally ascend to a rationalization of plant therapy by parallelizing the human organ tastes with the forces of the plant world.

All these aspects arise in an extremely fruitful way if one really wants to engage in making anthroposophy or spiritual science fruitful for life. And just imagine, after the few samples that could be given yesterday and today, what wonderful and stimulating tasks for contemporary life arise from spiritual knowledge! One can only hope that humanity will not be too lazy in the near future to devote itself to a greater extent to the penetration of science with what spiritual science has to offer in detail.

It is certainly infinitely important that the central insights of spiritual science be communicated to humanity, because if these central insights were not communicated, the basis for further development would be lacking. But instead of taking these central insights, as many feel tempted to do, in all sorts of new, poorly written repetitions of what already exists, but to say the same thing over and over again, the focus should be on developing the individual chapters of these central insights and really introducing spiritual-scientific insights into science and life. I mention this for the reason that there are really quite a lot of people within our movement, and some of them stand out in particular, who find it more comfortable to reproduce and repeat what is already available in the literature, instead of getting involved in introducing spiritual scientific knowledge into the areas that are particularly close to them.

When we consider this, the repeated emphasis on the fact that spiritual science must become a pervasive attitude in human life takes on a different shade of meaning.

Not so much the setting up of these or those program points, as it was popular in the time immediately preceding our sad epoch, but rather the living-grasping of spiritual-scientific knowledge, that will bring about a more dignified epoch, that we can lead out of the chaotic events of our present time. The less people believe that what we have to defend now already exists in any real area of European humanity, the less they will believe that and the more they will believe that they have a new future to expect and hope for, a more spiritual future, a future of more spiritual views, the more they will find what is right.

The fact that there has always been a presentiment of what spiritual science must one day bring to clear consciousness has often been touched upon here, especially in this place, and even provided with external evidence. Again and again we have to be reminded that, while spiritual science is in a certain sense something radically new in our time, it was well prepared in the entire newer spiritual life, so that wherever there is active spiritual life, intuitions have arisen not only of spiritual scientific knowledge, but intuitions of the far-reaching significance of this spiritual scientific knowledge. You see, the following is an interesting example: a European spirit once tried to reflect on which influences had become particularly significant for his inner life. This European spirit, who was thinking about which influences had become particularly significant for his inner life, then mentioned three relatively newer spirits that had had a great influence on his life. He mentions Emerson, whom you have also characterized from certain points of view in these lectures, Ruysbroek and the German mystic Novalis. These three spirits have had a particular influence on this Central European spirit, as he himself explains. Now this European spirit seeks to gain a certain measure of what must enter into human spiritual life if this spiritual life is to truly experience the necessary new fertilization. And here the spirit says something most remarkable. It says: If you look, for example, at Shakespeare or Sophocles, you will find that human conflicts are presented, but ultimately - so the person concerned thinks - what kind of conflicts are they that play out around Hamlet and Ophelia, around Antigone or Electra? Of course, he says, they are highly significant conflicts for the earthly beings called human beings, but, he says, if a spirit were to come down from another planet, that is, from completely different experiences, from a planet where experiences are completely different, he would not be particularly interested in what is going on around Ophelia or Wallenstein or Mary Stuart. That may interest people from the earth, but if a spirit came from another planet, he would demand that people have something to tell him that is not only of interest to creatures from the earth, but that is of interest to creatures that belong to the cosmos in the broader sense. And the person in question believes that there are still very few such souls who have something to say that could also give a spirit descending to earth something. And the thinker in question counts the poet Novalis among these souls. He finds the soul experiences in Novalis's poetry so fine, so intimate, so brought out of what cannot only interest people, what does not only live in the temporal, but what weaves and lives in the eternal, so that for such a spirit as Novalis, a being could also be interested that descended from another planet. I will read to you the words he wrote when he got to know Novalis, or got to know what Novalis has to give as his soul experiences. They are very beautiful words, so beautiful that I would like to read what the thinker in question has to say with reference to the Novalis experiences:

“But if other proofs were needed,” says the thinker in question, in connection with what he himself experienced with Novalis, and which he thinks would also interest the spirits of other planets: “But if other proofs were needed, it would” - namely the human soul - “lead him among those whose works almost stir to silence. She would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without caring about the small gestures of her body. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness is heightened by a degree, and where all those who are plagued by restlessness about themselves attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are only in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and images that resemble her, and that are as imperious as she is. There humanity has reigned for a moment, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth to the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a higher reason; but in their works, the people mentioned have come out of the little village of passions and said things that are also of value to those who are not of the earthly community."

These are truly beautiful and glorious words! The speaker believes he experienced them through Novalis, beautiful and glorious words that characterize how humanity must truly come to something that directly connects with the eternal, that leads us beyond mere earthly experiences into the experiences of the cosmos. Maurice Maeterlinck spoke of Novalis in the words I have read to you, and that was some time ago, not in the last few months! But you can see from this that wherever there are people who are able to reflect, and when they have time to reflect, there is a true and genuine awareness of the path into the spiritual world that the evolution of humanity must truly take.

I would like to give you another example. In spiritual science today, we consciously speak of how, through initiation, one can experience oneself in the I and astral body, separate from the physical body and etheric body, a conscious experience of oneself, as otherwise happens unconsciously during sleep. At the same time, spiritual science is able to provide the necessary information about the experience of death. What the spiritual scientist experiences outside the body with regard to the physical body and ether body is the same as what the soul experiences after death, looking back at its physical body and the fate of the ether body. spiritual scientist speaks in a special way of a view of the physical body and the ether body merging into the world process from the point of view that the soul gains when it has passed through the gate of death. It means an infinity for the further development of all human consciousness, of all human spiritual-cultural life, that such conceptions can enter into this spiritual-cultural life, such as the conception that people will more and more come to know that when the soul has passed through the gate of death, it looks back on the whole past life and on what is happening to the body, just as you now look back in your memory on your experiences in the ordinary life between birth and death. When the time comes that it is as trivial as looking back at experiences in the body after death, just as one looks back at experiences of earlier times in the life between birth and death, when it has become natural to look back in this way, then something tremendous will have been achieved. And from various things that I have discussed with you, you will realize how necessary it is that such an awareness of general humanity be achieved as quickly as possible.

And now let us see whether these ideas, which are now being given fully consciously in such clear outlines in elementary spiritual science, whether such ideas - if we look for an intuitive understanding - were always completely foreign to the human race before spiritual science arose. When Fichte delivered a series of lectures in which he sought to transform the way his people were brought up - a transformation such as Pestalozzi had called forth, only more universally - Fichte said that there were certainly many people who could not go along with the idea that one could, as it were, reshape and revive the human race through such thoughts. Such people cling to the old that they can imagine, Fichte said. And now he sought a comparison to express very clearly what they have learned and to which they cling. Fichte sought a comparison, and this comparison is very strange. I will read it to you.

“Time,” says Fichte - he means all the people of the time who cannot imagine that something new can arise from the old - “time appears to me like a shadow that stands over its corpse, from which an army of of diseases has just driven out, stands and laments and cannot tear his gaze away from the once-so-beloved shell and desperately tries every means to get back into the dwelling of the plagues. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the deceased has entered, have already taken her in and surround her with a warm, loving breath. Secret voices of the sisters (by which he means the other spiritual beings that surround us) already greet her and welcome her, and she is already stirring and expands within her in all directions, in order to develop the more glorious form into which she is to grow; but she has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or if she had, she is overcome with pain at her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

Yes, is it not as if someone who comes from the field of spiritual science were to take a comparison from that field of looking at the corpse after death? This is how Fichte spoke in 1808. We can see from this how everything tends towards spiritual science, and how in the best minds this spiritual science arises as an inkling, but, as this example shows, as an inkling that expresses itself in very specific forms.

You will understand, from what you are accustomed to hearing from me, and especially how you are accustomed to hearing it, how such words are meant. But could not a very definite intuition, a very definite feeling arise in the souls of men when they read something like this, which was expressed in 1808? Could it not evoke a very definite feeling in the souls of those who take human culture seriously? Could these souls not say to themselves: Should we not, in view of the fact that such presentiments existed, have clung to them and actually have made some progress long ago in the spiritual-scientific knowledge of the world? And then such souls might perhaps come to the realization: How ashamed we are! If only many souls were to have such feelings, it would be a great blessing for the development of the spiritual life of humanity. But I think that many souls will continue to choose the easier way for a long time to come, accepting what they like, for example, in the words of Fichte, but reading right over the things they do not like. And when one points this out to them, they will say: Well, great minds are allowed to be contrary in certain respects. And then they make such comparisons that are not taken from reality at all.

It will be possible to permeate life with what spiritual science, through its concepts, stimulates in the human soul. And it is truly for no other purpose than to point out as forcefully as possible how life can be permeated by spiritual concepts that our building was actually built and will show all the details that it will contain.

In this building, no sin is to be committed against the naive life and feelings of human beings. All those who repeatedly emphasize that artistic creation must proceed unconsciously believe that they do not commit this sin in themselves or in others. In truth, it is only more comfortable when artistic creation proceeds unconsciously than when it is elevated to knowledge. For knowledge, when it becomes knowledge of the cosmos, is just as naive as the primitive unconscious, which so often in life, out of people's comfort, is presented as that which is necessary in art, in phrases such as I have just given.

Consider the following, which you can draw as a consequence from a variety of discussions. You will also get the impression that important impulses can and must be given from spiritual science for artistic details as well. When we look at a person in the light of today's spiritual science, we know that this person has not developed in the way that today's natural science presents it one-sidedly, but that this person needed a Saturn, Sun, and Moon development and then the previous Earth development to become what he has become. And we know, even when we consider the individual parts of the outer physical human form, that whole generations of beings from the higher hierarchies have been working on it over long periods of time, and that their activity was as specified as we have described it in the evolution of Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth.

We know that what appears today as a finished part of the human being, for example the head, first had to go through the evolution of the sun, moon and the whole of the earth so far in order to become what it is today, that it had to be transformed and remodeled, that it first existed during the evolution of the sun, that it reappeared and was transformed during the evolution of the moon, and that it was again transformed during the evolution of the earth. If we then consider how man should actually be studied, we will first come to feel the full complexity of this human organization and its connection with the macrocosm, and then gradually learn to recognize it.

Today I will only hint at a few things that will be explained in more detail in the near future. I will hint at them because they will lead us to a final thought. As I said, I will elaborate on this in the next few days. For example, we have parts of our organism which, in their configuration, still clearly bear the original impulses of the old Saturn development, but which have been transformed and reshaped many times, so that they cannot easily be recognized in their present form without studying the Akasha Chronicle. Schematically represented (see drawing p. 148, a), the bones surrounding the spinal cord were first laid down during the ancient Saturn evolution, still in the element of warmth, and were always transformed during the next evolutions. Those bones that attach as ribs were then added at the time of the moon evolution. They have been less remodeled because their first rudiments were laid less long ago.

Other organs have been set upward, first during solar evolution, and then remodeled. That which we today call the human skull, the human head, was laid down during solar evolution and then remodeled many times. But if only the changes that the evolution of the sun has brought about in the human skull had taken place, then man would have to carry his head in a way that it cannot be carried, namely, so that it would always be directed upwards. Therefore, during the evolution of the earth through the influence of the sun, a ninety-degree turn has occurred, so that what should be directed upwards is now directed that way. Instead of thus drawing the solar arrow for the evolution of the earth, we must now draw it for the evolution of the earth (see illustration). It is part of the normal evolution that the human form has undergone under the influence of the cosmos that the shape of the head, having been directed upwards, has been directed forwards, turned towards the front.

Those spirits, then, who have remained behind in their development on the moon, have brought with them the endeavour to turn people's heads upwards by penetrating and pervading them. People who have the tendency to carry their nose high in an unsympathetic way, as one says, are seduced by such Luciferic spirits. There is a real background to this. It is truly a truth of physiognomy and the cosmos, and one is quite right when one says of someone who carries his nose up: Well, Lucifer is in his neck! That is absolutely true. Therefore, it is infinitely important for life to really know these cosmic relationships.

If we take the human outer limbs – arms and legs – the legs are limbs that belong directly to the development of the earth and are completely aligned with the earth. However, the arms are developed in such a way that if a person had only followed the development of the earth, they could only lower their arms downwards. But since he can also raise them upwards, he can direct them at will towards the lunar evolution, that is to say, with each raising of the arms he gives them a Luciferic character. Therefore, anyone with a fine intuitive perception will feel that every arm movement performed in this way (arms raised forward and upward) has a Luciferic character. Let us bear this in mind and now imagine a person who simultaneously bows his head and raises his hand, but in such a way that these two movements are captured in a human gesture: the person bows his head and raises his arm. This bowing of the head is a counteraction against the luciferianity of the head. The raising of the arm is a bringing of a luciferian element into the arm. But now it is so: by letting Lucifer enter into the arm, and supporting the bowed head with the forehead on the arm, one redeems the Luciferic power flowing through the arm through the counteraction of the Christ-power in the head. One redeems, as it were, Lucifer in the arm through Christ in the head.

Paint the human figure with the correct gesture, the head resting on the arm, and you have expressed it in this gesture. Man forms a gesture that expresses: Lucifer is redeemed by Christ! - And if you add a bending of the knees, you have intensified this gesture. Raise both arms up and suppress the force of the lifting, as happens when folding the hands (so the arms are raised with folded hands), and then try to lead the Christ force with the folded hands to the Luciferic force streaming upwards, by paralyzing it, as it were.

Human gestures become an expression of the whole life of the world, of the spiritual life of the world. One must feel how such knowledge of the secrets of the cosmos can deepen the ordering of the human form in art! But you can also ask yourself: What actually happened when the upward orientation of the head, which can be compared to the Luciferic, was turned forward, and the human being stands on the earth with the head turned forward? He thereby became an earthly being! That which is not an earthly being cannot have legs and feet in the human sense. Man does not get his head, and with it his countenance, from the earth, but from the cosmos; but it comes into being in its form through turning to the earth. If we take other genii, other spirits, we cannot possibly make them with human legs. To make genii, who do not belong to earthly existence, with human legs is simply wrong, is actually wrong. This can really be seen from spiritual scientific knowledge. And our art in our building should take full account of these perceptions that come from spiritual scientific knowledge.

You can see, therefore, that a new impulse can really be given in relation to artistic design. When spiritual science is no longer understood as a gray theory, but as something that will enter into people as perception and feeling, then it will be recognized that it can have a fruitful effect on all endeavors of human cultural development. A small beginning is to be made with this in our building.

Today we want to undertake a consideration that may seem out of place in the series of considerations we have been pursuing here, but which will nevertheless be useful for understanding the whole.

It is an ancient question as to how man can bring that which is really in the world outside into his knowledge, into his world of ideas. For us, the question is not as urgent as it must be for people outside our spiritual-scientific stream, because we know that it is possible to live one's way up into the spiritual worlds and to gain certainty about a true being, about a true reality behind the external reality that is present on the physical plane, by penetrating into the spiritual worlds. But only from the present into the future will humanity in general be able to rise to such a point of view of extra-bodily knowledge, as it were, and for a long time to come the question will have an infinitely great significance, how one can get into the knowledge, into the world of ideas of existence, of reality.

It is important for us to have some knowledge of this question because we must try to pave the way for an understanding with those who are still somewhat outside or even very much outside our spiritual movement. We must be able to provide information about the riddles and questions that those who have not yet come closer to this spiritual movement feel when they hear one or the other of the results of spiritual research. The question I have in mind is truly the most profound, the most tragic question that humanity has ever asked itself. For however much philosophical and other scientific investigation has been carried out, the question I have indicated arises from a state of mind and has an effect on the whole state of mind and mood of the person.

Man, let us approach the matter from this point of view, wakes up in the morning from a world that must remain unknown and mysterious to him if he does not penetrate into spiritual science, and he makes his thoughts about the world into which he enters when he wakes up. In these thoughts, he then wants to obtain what can be called a world view. The person who truly approaches these things with all their soul senses something of the weakness of the life of thought, of the life of ideas. He senses, one could say, this: that he is condemned in his inner being to live in ideas about the nature of the processes of the outer world, to make such ideas for himself; and he finds, again, that these ideas are, so to speak, only ideas after all, that they are not strong enough to absorb real being into themselves.

We feel this weakness of the imaginative life particularly when we reflect on the memory images. We bring up from past epochs of life what facts and experiences we have gone through. We bring them up by imagining them afterwards, perhaps after a long time. We must keep saying to ourselves: Yes, we have the experience only in our imagination, and the imagination does not have the power to conjure up reality anew.

This is one way in which we can truly feel how powerless the human being is, so to speak, in the face of the full-bodied, full-bodied reality of his imaginative life. The other is when we enter the world of the creative imagination. In this world of the creative imagination, we can conjure up beautiful and satisfying images in our minds, and we can feel how we are unable to somehow penetrate into real existence with what we conjure up in our imagination. The more materialistically minded people assume that the feelings that one can have towards this world of fantasy images. They say: When you form ideas about a higher spiritual world, about God and the spiritual world, what guarantees do you have that these ideas you form are anything other than figments of the imagination? What guarantees do you have that with these ideas, even if they give you the deepest bliss, you are penetrating into a world of genuine reality? What underlies the feelings in the face of this powerlessness of imagining, of forming ideas, has led to the, one might say, millennia-old philosophical struggle with regard to the question: How can man, with his concepts, his ideas, penetrate into a reality?

There are enough schools of philosophy, even if we disregard the most extreme skepticism, which believe that a satisfactory answer to this question, a satisfactory solution to this mystery of the human mind, has not yet been found. Certainly, people can pass over these world mysteries, these questions, with a certain mental complacency. But even those who pass by with their consciousness and live their lives in this way will still feel that this dissatisfaction with the riddles of the world makes waves in their astral body and evokes certain moods towards the world, melancholic moods; moods that one might try to overcome with cynicism can arise. But such a passing by of the world's riddles can certainly not lead to real satisfaction in the inner soul life, to the harmony of the soul.

For us, it is necessary to approach these riddles of the world in the same way that we have to approach many things; it is necessary for us to look into the essence of human nature and ask where this riddle comes from, why it exists. That it can be experienced as infinitely tragic has been shown by certain philosophers who have almost despaired in the solution of this riddle and have spoken of a deity that, as it were, misleads humanity in the chaos of world phenomena and has created human nature in such a way that it cannot arrive at a satisfactory world view.

Now let us recall something that has been discussed often in this or that context, but which can be useful to us precisely in the face of these world riddles. We have often spoken about what our life of thoughts, senses and ideas actually is. I have said that basically it is a kind of reflection. It is indeed the case - I have dealt with this particularly clearly here - that in the case of human beings we are dealing with what I will schematically indicate here: This is the physical body. Outside of this physical body, there lives, as it were, in the infinite universe, that which is the actual soul-spiritual essence of the human being. In the waking life of the day, this spiritual-soul essence extends into the bodily-soul essence. This creates a reflection, and this reflection is actually what we perceive as the content of our waking life. Truly, our body is like a mirror, and just as we do not see the mirror, but rather what is reflected in the mirror, so when a person is awake, we do not see what is actually happening in the body, but we see the reflection, what is reflected in it from the external physical world.

But to the extent that we are in the waking consciousness of the day, our I, that which we are as spiritual beings, is also in this world of mirror images. For the world around us is Maja, it is a sum of mirror images. Our waking self is in this sum of mirror images, and basically, as beings on the physical plane, we are nothing more than a mirror image among mirror images.

Let us just realize that for a moment. What remains of our entire imaginative life, in so far as we are on the physical plane, when we extinguish our day-consciousness? Then the I is also extinguished. When it is not mirrored, as is the case in deep, dreamless sleep, then the I is also extinguished. And when we wake up and have the world of mirror images before us, then our I is also in this world of mirror images; so that, insofar as we live on the physical plane, we can have nothing of ourselves but a mirror image.

We go through the world as beings of the physical plane and never have anything of ourselves but a mirror image. We live in the world; but insofar as we are conscious, we have before us, not the living fact, but the reflection of this living fact. We live as mirror images among mirror images; and what we learn to recognize through spiritual science – that we live as mirror images among mirror images, as Maja among the components of the great Maja – is what man feels when he feels the powerlessness of all spiritual experience in the face of the fully-fledged reality. In everyday life, a person does not say to himself, “I am a reflection among reflections,” but he does feel it, and he feels it most keenly when he asks himself, “How can I, with this reflection, attain the real, fully-substantial existence?”

Let us try to understand what is going on here. Imagine you have a reflective wall in front of you; it reflects what is spread out in the room, for example a table. However, you do not see the table, but you see the reflection. Imagine you wanted to go into the reflection, take the table out and place something on it. You would not be able to do that because you cannot place plates or soup bowls on the mirrored table. Just as it is impossible to place plates and soup bowls on the mirrored table, it is equally impossible to derive the essence of the soul's immortality from what a person experiences on the physical plane and has around him between birth and death in a waking state. For the real soul is immortal, not its reflection, which we experience on the physical plane. Just consider that very clearly.

Man longs to recognize that which continually eludes him and which, while he lives on the physical plane, only continually presents him with a mirror image. The philosophies of all times have endeavored to deduce reality from the mirror images, to prove immortality from the mirror images. They have undertaken the task, symbolically speaking, of taking the table out of the mirror image, putting it in the room and placing plates and bowls on it.

If you go through the philosophies that are not fertilized by spiritual science, they appear to you as such a futile endeavor. Basically, if you try to go through my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, you will find in it the story of how, since the beginning of mankind's philosophical struggle, philosophy has, as it were, tried to get the table out of the mirror and put plates and bowls on it. Therefore, now that we do have such a spiritual-scientific movement, a final chapter had to be added to the book, which shows that what was there before must be supplemented by spiritual science, which is not concerned with mirror images but with realities. Now you might say: Then the book is certainly one that we do not need to read, because why should we concern ourselves with the futile struggle of humanity? Why should we take philosophy into consideration at all, since it is only concerned with the futile efforts of humanity? Yes, it is not like that at all, it really is not! What we do when we immerse ourselves in this struggle, which is indeed futile from a certain point of view, is nevertheless something infinitely meaningful, something that cannot be replaced by anything else. Philosophy will certainly always remain fruitless for the knowledge of the immortal soul nature, for the knowledge of the spiritual world and also of the divine being, but it will not remain fruitless for the development of certain human powers, for the development of certain human abilities. Precisely because philosophy as such proves unsuitable for attaining the things mentioned, because it remains, as it were, insensitive to them, it strengthens all the more the powers of the human soul. And even if it cannot convey knowledge, it does, by being a concentrated life of thought, prepare the soul to make itself suitable for penetrating into the spiritual world. What we gain by working out philosophy lifts us into the spiritual world more than anything else. Precisely because no forces are lost in acquiring real knowledge, therefore all forces are applied to the elevation of human abilities. But we must accept precisely from this consideration that experiencing on the physical plane, because it is an experience in images, has something unreal, something unreal, and that basically, by immersing ourselves in the philosophical world, we are experiencing something unreal in soul and spirit. But does it have a meaning, does it have a significance, that we experience soul and spirit on the physical plane as something unreal? Can we find a wisdom of the world order in this? We have to ask ourselves such a question, and to answer it, we have to bring some insights of spiritual science to mind.

When a person has progressed a little through meditation, through concentration, in short, through intensifying his spiritual-soul experience, he enters into an experience that is, as it were, an alert sleep, a living in the spiritual world. And the first experience that a person has when he is, as it were, at the starting point of the initiation, is such that the person experiences moments when the spiritual world enters his consciousness in a dream-like, shimmering, flickering way. He only realizes this afterwards, when he says to himself: Now you have experienced something of the spiritual world. Usually, disciples of initiation pay too little attention to this experience, otherwise they would progress more easily.

If man did not lose consciousness during sleep, he would live in this spiritual world during the whole time, from falling asleep to waking up. He is really in it the whole time in a world of objective weaving of thoughts. Those who carefully follow the instructions in “How to Know Higher Worlds” will find that, when they wake up, they know: you emerge as if you had been swimming under the sea and now you are emerging into the air; you emerge as if you had been weaving with your soul experiences in a world of thoughts. It is as if you were to catch the last shreds of this experience when you wake up.

This can make a great impression, although it is immediately lost and usually very difficult to hold onto in the memory. But it is important for those who want to move forward to catch just such moments of awakening, because that is when consciousness arises: Before you woke up, you were in a weaving objective world of thought with your astral body, and by immersing yourself in your physical body, you encounter your physical body, which reflects back to you what you have lived through all night, at first in such a way that it glitters in the soul. This awareness can arise and should be noted, and it is extremely important that it arises. When one has such an awareness, one begins to know why it is difficult to really get the thoughts one experiences during sleep and also during initiation into the physical world, into physical thinking; for one lives with one's thoughts quite differently out of the body than in the body.

To make this clear, let us consider the moment of waking up and being awake. When you wake up, you and your spiritual being dive into your physical body. It is not surprising that you continue to live in the weaving of thoughts, because you have been living in the weaving of thoughts throughout the whole night while you were asleep. What happens is as follows. Imagine – I will draw it schematically – you enter your physical body from the outside. While you are not yet inside, but still outside, you are in a wonderful world of weaving thoughts, in which the spirits of the next higher hierarchies develop their activity. Before you wake up, you are in the world of the angeloi, the archangeloi, the archai and so on with your soul-spiritual experiences. Just as you are in the physical world among animals, plants and minerals, you are in the world of the higher hierarchies during sleep. And this being-in, this working of the higher hierarchies on your soul being, that happens precisely with the powers of thought that prevail there. And now you dive into your physical body. By diving into the physical body, you concentrate your thoughts by being captivated by the small part of the body that your head encloses. There you have to concentrate and draw together what is spread out outside. What happens is that the life of thought moves in and submerges into the nervous system. The life of thought actually moves through the senses into the nervous system. And what happens then? It actually happens that the physical substance is continually seized by the thought experience, first the substance of the etheric body, then also the physical substance. And indeed, when you stuff a thought into the physical, it has a kind of killing effect; by grasping a thought in your physical body, you actually kill something in your nervous system. “Killing” is actually the right word for it.

We now think something – and after some time we reflect on what is inside us. So many nerve corpses as we have cherished thoughts are now in us. What remains when we have thought something is really nothing but corpses, so that when we fall asleep at night, we have to leave our physical body to itself so that it can dispose of the thought corpses that we have created during the day through our thinking.

Do these thought corpses have to be there? Yes, they have to be there, because these thought corpses are actually the imprints of thinking; and if we could not form these thought corpses, we would be just as unable to consciously grasp a thought during the day as we are at night. During the night we are involved in the weaving of thoughts in the spiritual world. We do not have a physical body at our disposal into which we could press the thought corpses. During the night, the thought passes away and dissolves in the universal life of thought. The difference is that during the day we can hold on to thoughts by turning them into corpses that we can bury in the physical body. There the life of thought hardens, and this hardening has the effect that we can have the life of thought consciously.

This is the more exact process. Here we have another example of how materialism fails to explain everything. The materialist believes that he must look for the cause of thinking in what goes on inside, in the process of putting corpses into the ground. But what actually takes place are processes of secretion of thought, processes of the dead body. And the nervous system is there so that the process of secretion can be produced through the activity of thought. What thought leaves over, what it cannot use, what it expels, is examined by physical physiology. But during the waking hours of the day something takes shape that can be called the dying away of thinking in the physical body. The powers of thought that one develops are used to produce, as it were, casts or imprints of oneself. The forces go into these casts. During the night they do not go into such casts, for then we live, as it were, in the general ocean of spiritual existence. But because we cannot form such impressions in normal life without initiation, our thoughts also dissolve in this general sea. When we want to grasp them in the morning, they have simply dissolved; not even memory can hold on to them.

So if we grasp the process very precisely, we can say: some thought process develops. As it enters our body, it produces those secretions in the nerves. But before it produces these secretions, it reflects itself. Before it passes into the body and the bodily activity, it first reflects itself; the evocation of this activity is a reflection.

Imagine looking at an object with your eyes or hearing a sound with your ears or tones resonating. The sound resonance is outside. This sound enters the ear. A process begins in the auditory nerves, namely this cadaverization and secretion. And what you hear is therefore the reflected sound, actually an inner echo.

In this way, in our everyday experience, we are completely in a world of mirror images, and our own being is interwoven into this world of mirror images. For we would grasp our true being if we felt ourselves floating outside our body in the spiritual realm, if we felt: Now one of the angeloi seizes you; now you are weaving in the angeloi, you merge into the realm of the archangels, into the realm of the primal forces and so on. - Then we would feel carried into the realms of the higher beings. We would feel the immortality of the soul and know: just as these beings carry the happenings in the world from world age to world age, so they carry us with them from world age to world age. But in ordinary life, man does not perceive this. He is immersed in the physical body, and the experience of one's own self in true being dies during life in the physical body, and only the world of mirror images remains.

We can therefore shine a deep light into the process of knowledge, and one would wish that an awareness of the nature of this process of knowledge would truly take hold of the age. For this recognition of the world as a sum of mirror images, and the recognition that the actual being lies behind it, that is already an ascent to what humanity is really meant to be led to through spiritual science. We can therefore say no more and no less than: Man enters the physical plane, and by entering the physical plane, he is actually transferred from the world of reality into a world of unreality, into a mere world of images. And we must feel the full gravity of this realization, that we stand within a world of images when we think on the physical plane, when we perceive and imagine.

Thus we can say that the spiritual entities, by handing us down to the physical plane, have taken us out of the world of real reality and placed us in a world of unreality. And we recognize this at first as a fact of the spiritual world, even if it is not yet the world plan. We only recognize it as a fact of the world plan when we raise the question: Why are we, insofar as we are beings of the real physical world, placed in a world of unreal images? Why? - Suppose we were not, suppose we were placed on the physical plane in such a way that we had not images but realities. What does that actually mean? It would mean that we perceive the physical world; for example, we hear a sequence of sounds. The effect of this sequence of sounds goes into our ear, into our auditory nerves, and causes a change there. If we were only able to enjoy what is going on in the auditory nerves and were unable to project it up into our imaginations, then we would be in reality; we would have realities, not images. But that is not the case. We are really thrown out of the world of realities and placed in a world of images, in a world of unrealities. If we were really in the world of realities, in a world of reality, then we could never have the opportunity to give reality to a world ourselves, because we cannot give reality to what we experience as reality. An object that I take in my hand from the outside is something. It is not just an image, the object is something. Just as I cannot push the table that I see in the mirror, I cannot do anything real with the world that is only given to me in images. But if it is a matter of us creating realities ourselves, then it is just right that we live in a world of images, because then the images have no reality, but we can give them reality. Do we do that?

Yes, my dear friends, we do, in one area of our lives we do that. We do that when we act morally. In the moment when moral impulses flash through our mental life, in that moment we create something in the world that would not be there without us. When we imagine the world, we have only images; when we act morally, we place realities into the world. We would never be able to live with our morality in a world that would already appear to us as real. For then we would encounter the world everywhere with what we want to do morally.

Take animals, for example. They experience the world quite differently from human beings. They do not experience it as a world of images, but as a world of real realities. This is why animals cannot develop morality. Human beings can develop morality because they can place moral impulses into the world themselves, which is otherwise only a world of mirror images. What man lets flow into the world as moral impulses flows into the world as a reality that comes from him. The gods have placed us on the physical plane and made our spiritual experience a world of unreality, so that we may be in a position to place moral impulses as reality into this unreality. There you have creation out of nothing, creation into nothing through images that are only pictures, only unrealities.

If we look again at the sleeping person, we can say: insofar as this sleeping person is outside of his physical body and his etheric body, he experiences the world of weaving thoughts, into which the beings of the higher hierarchies are interwoven. But something else also permeates and flows through this world. What is it? The beings of the higher hierarchies are not merely thought beings; they are real beings, they have substance, and what they have as substance we do not experience in our thoughts, but in our will, namely in the will that is permeated by love. In our will, by placing the moral impulses into the world, which is otherwise only a world of images for us, we bring down the substance of the higher beings into our world. What we really do out of moral impulses is nothing other than bringing down the substance of the beings of the higher hierarchies into our world.

Our thoughts, when we live with our spiritual and soul being in our physical body after waking up, are mirrored in a part of our body: so to speak, the products of the deposit of our waking thought life are formed in the nervous system. The nature of moral impulses, which basically come from the nature of the higher hierarchies, goes into our whole body, permeating our whole being, our whole organism, not just the nervous system; so that the human being can be seen as twofold: as a nervous human being, and alongside that, the whole of the rest of the physical human being, into which everything that is experienced in the person's moral impulses flows. But we come out of the world of spiritual realities by immersing ourselves in our physical body. As we immerse ourselves in our physical body, emerging from the worlds of thought, they flicker and glitter, reflecting back, forming the corpses of thoughts in the nervous system. We just do not perceive this flickering and glittering in our ordinary lives. Thoughts live in us, but they are not living beings in us; they are reflected, and what we perceive is a kind of reading of the dead thoughts. But these thoughts that reflect themselves are a living thing, and that has great significance in the order of the world. When a person stands before you and you look at this person and are aware: he perceives, he thinks, what is in his mind as a web of thoughts goes into his nervous system, is reflected in everything perceptible, in sounds and colors - what happens to the spiritual light that goes into him, that makes impressions on his nervous system? What happens to the impressions that arise? You see, the cherubim come, collect this light and use it for the further world order, and we are all the candlesticks that are set up in the world order. By thinking, perceiving and imagining, we are the candlesticks of the cherubim in the world order. Just as this light here in the physical world illuminates space, so we are the candlesticks in the spiritual world for the cherubim. When we think, light arises in us; the light of thought radiates out from us and illuminates the world in which the cherubim live.

When we carry into our body from the world of hierarchies those substances from which moral impulses are born and these penetrate our entire organization, our volitional impulses, our actions, take place. Everything we do is the result of these volitional impulses being active in us. It is not just what happens externally in the world through us, but, insofar as it is moral action, this moral action is gathered by the seraphim, and this moral action is the source of warmth for the whole cosmic order. Under the influence of people who act immorally, the seraphim freeze, that is, they receive no warmth with which they can heat the whole cosmic world. Under the influence of moral action, the seraphim acquire the powers by which the cosmic world order is maintained, just as physical warmth maintains the physical world order.

You see, the worldview that spiritual science gives us becomes very real. It brings us to the realization: When you think, when you imagine, you are the kindled light of the cherubim. When you act, when you do something, when you unfold the will, then you are the source of warmth, the source of fire of the seraphim. We stride through the world, conscious that we are not useless good-for-nothings in it, but stand in the world order for the benefit of the whole world order, and conscious that it is also in our power to be a source of darkness in the world. For if we want to be dull and stupid and not think, then we increase the darkness, and the consequence of this is that the cherubim have no light. If we are bad and immoral, we increase the coldness in the whole world order, and the seraphim have no warmth.

Spiritual science does not give us mere theories, as external science can do if it is not a practical science and leads to technical application. Spiritual science gives us something through which we first learn to know what we as human beings are in the whole order of the world. What follows from spiritual science, the essential, is what is important. It is a heightened sense of responsibility towards our humanity. One feels what tasks one has towards the cosmos by being human. One feels that one can be human in the right sense and can be human in the wrong sense, that one can give one's all to darkness and cold or to light and warmth in the world order.

With this practical goal in mind, one would like to bring spiritual science into the world so that it can take hold of hearts. For one can be sure that spiritual science will then really be able to create a new human soul condition and thus a completely new form of human experience on earth and further in the universe, that it is not just a matter of passing on knowledge, but a source of true, genuine life forces. It is so ardently desired that this be grasped, be grasped so very deeply by those who today feel the urge for this spiritual science! For this spiritual science is still too much taken as something external, still too much so that it, like other knowledge, is to satisfy curiosity or, let us say, the thirst for knowledge. But the seriousness with which spiritual science is placed in life must grow. That is what our time so urgently needs: not just belief in the spiritual world, but the possibility of relating to the spiritual world in such a way that the human soul truly draws near to the spiritual world. And as the child draws nourishment from its mother's breast, so does the human soul draw the substance of life for a new form of earthly experience, of earthly activity, of knowing itself in the spiritual order of the world, from what spiritual science is able to reveal to it.

Only when the relationship of people to spiritual science is imbued with this magical breath of feeling and perception will spiritual science be understood in its true, innermost core. But it will be necessary for it to take root in particular among those who participate in a common work of spiritual scientific endeavors.

What else should our building be if not something in which we all participate – especially those who are working on it – participate as a community, in a confluence of attitudes that spiritual science awakens! That is the tremendously important and significant thing. If the building is erected in this spirit, then it will not only be this dry building with its forms, but will be something that radiates far out into the world; it will be what those who worked on it have created in loving, genuine collaboration. Whatever they have poured into the structure, whatever they have left behind in it, no matter how loosely it may be connected with the structure, if it is directed in love towards what the structure should be, then it may be the smallest activity. And if it flows from the human attitude that seeks to merge with the cosmic order, then this structure will be something that is not just dead, but alive, truly alive.

That is the secret of our thought corpses, that we can always revive them again for a certain time. And the other side, that of remembrance, I discussed last time: that which thoughts have produced in us as thought corpses and which remains in its form, just as human corpses remain on earth, can be revived by later soul forces. And when a memory emerges, that which is only a thought corpse will shine again in us for a while in a living way.

Let us work to ensure that our building is similar in the human order, so that those who come to see it are unconsciously transported into the sphere of love with which it is built! For then it will not be merely a collection of dead forms, but something that comes to life when you look at it, like the thought-corpses of memory. And then, for all future time, the way we work on it will determine whether this structure will be something that can be revitalized again and again by those who encounter it.

By allowing these thoughts to work on our soul, we gain a living relationship to this building of ours, the living relationship that humanity really needs by living from the present into the future. For much will not be allowed to remain dead, but will have to live, but will only be able to live through the emergence of that new attitude that must be a result of spiritual science and spiritual knowledge.