The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Through baptism, he saw how darkness prevailed around him and was able to speak in such a way that the darkness recognized his nature and fled. To do this, he demanded trust. He had to speak of the kingdom of God and work from it. He had to do things that aroused the opposition of those who were outside his kingdom. His kingdom is increasingly being recognized; he gains a beginning. But he can only give what he has to give to the elect within. Those who do not accept the kingdom within must not know its secrets. He must emphasize the otherness of that kingdom even to his own. Only in his kingdom should the light be lit. Only for the others, when their opposition has become apparent. He shows that the opposition is a legion of demons and belongs in the animalistic. He finds within himself the strength to transform the disease into health. The others must not know this secret, otherwise they would be masters at transferring it and applying it badly.

His essence lives in those who have “faith”. He sends the twelve to found the Kingdom of God. John is killed – he has judged, Jesus radiates power.

The Parousia has occurred. The spiritual power is at work. The 5000 are fed. Jesus appears to the disciples by the lake. The 4000 are fed in an even more spiritual way. The Kingdom of God is now at work, the scribes are excluded from it. They shall have no sign. He now also works on that which is beyond the Jewish people, if they have “trust”. But only on this. The “blind man” is healed. Peter speaks of him as the Christ. But when he is supposed to understand that he must speak of the Kingdom of God, he still does not understand. The transfiguration, when Peter, James and John enter into the Kingdom of God, is taking place. Elijah has returned. But this must be understood. One can only be healed by one who fasts and prays. The Kingdom of God must be felt “disembodied”. (Pluck out your eye and hand). Man must surrender to it completely. Even in childhood. The Kingdom of God requires a different order.

Even in thoughts and feelings, the Kingdom of God is in conflict with the environment. When Jesus speaks to his disciples about the Kingdom of God, he characterizes it by speaking of the decline of the un-realm.

Mary Magdalene is already completely in the Kingdom of God, acting accordingly. Jesus is now approaching death.

Judas betrays. From that point on, Jesus is no longer in conflict with the ideas of the scribes about Scripture, but with Scripture itself.

After his capture, he is only the “King of the Jews” —

the people are only emotionally moved; physically, they cry, “Crucify him!”

The general education of the present time has brought the knowledge of the body to a high level – the knowledge of the spiritual has not progressed equally. However, if this unconscious does not penetrate into consciousness, then all human life remains an illusion.

But it does enter: 1.) In the free concept, which is a spiritual one – to which nothing else corresponds but itself – if it could not actualize itself, then nothing would actualize it.

2.) In sense perception, for which I have nothing within me; if I could not experience the external world through myself, I would have no experience at all. Therefore, the judgment can only be experienced, not proven. But therefore, there is also no sharp boundary between feeling and will for the inner self (Brentano) – the judgment simply connects the body to the external world; the will connects it to the spiritual world.

The soul experiences in the imagination what it has become; in the will, what it is to become. I can only imagine what I can imagine by virtue of my body; I will what the spirit predisposes in me. The will that works in the imagination is soul; the imagination that works in the will is soul; that will is corporeal; this imagination is spiritual.

The body is will-bearing matter. The soul is the spirit that acts upon perception.

Actual perception arises when unconscious matter meets with corporeal matter in sensory perception. Actual will arises when the conscious soul meets with the spirit that acts upon perception in the voluntary decision.

In the very general concept, the body immediately reveals a spiritual aspect.

In the material process, which corresponds to a volitional impulse, the spirit immediately reveals itself materially.

No matter how much one may resist it, the mathematical judgments are revelations of the substance. And likewise, the chemical processes of the organism are spiritual: in mathematics, the substance is so spiritual that we no longer notice it. In digestion, the spirit is so material that we no longer notice it either.

In ordinary feeling, the imagination and the will meet in such a way that they harmonize.

In pain, the imagination cannot find a will equal to it. In pleasure (joy), the imagination lags behind the will.

Pessimism arises from a lack of imagination. Optimism is a sign of a wealth of imagination. The average thinker discusses pessimism. The humanities scholar takes it as a sign of a lack of imagination. And he finds that pessimism is rooted in a body that is not sufficiently spiritually active. He regards optimism as a sign of a body that is so well formed that it reflects the will. —

Does man really perceive nothing spiritual? Or has he been educated only to forbid himself to recognize the spiritual? —

Whether the spirit in the universe also works directly materially?

Whether the material directly reveals itself spiritually?

That is, whether man can will something that is not merely earthly? “My kingdom is not of this world”.

Whether the spirit accomplishes something that shows the extraterrestrial? “I and the Father are one”.

Many religions - could the “second coming” reconcile them? If it became clear to others that the Christ is just as universally human as the sun. — The Jesus mystery would have to be individual, the Christ mystery could then become universal. Detachment of the Christ from a particular religious form. Seeing the essential in a spiritual event. Not to convert, but to share. — The peoples who have embraced Christianity needed it as a counterweight to their materialism. Those who have not accepted it have not needed it – those who are of the earth will not understand each other; those who are of the sky will. “What is the Christ to us? The same one from whom you have your religion. To you he gave it from the extraterrestrial. To us in the earthly. He revealed himself to you as Father, to us as Son. If they are one, then we are one.” The heresy of filioque.

From Notebook 21, undated, around 1917

The sense impression (physical) dies away in the sense organ - meets the physical there (this is where the physical mirror image is created); this mirror image is inwardly enlivened in the image body - it then runs in the nervous system - the ether process coming from outside - this comes up against the physical body at the nerve endings – it runs in the breathing system – the astral process – this comes up against the physical body at the end of the inhalation system – the I-process runs right into the metabolism – there it is reflected.

The opposite process: the metabolic process forms and collides with the ego process – it then penetrates as a movement into the breathing – collides with the astral process – penetrates through the breathing into the nervous process, collides with the ether process.

The middle process: the inhalation brings the formless substance, which meets with the ether process - then penetrates as an astral process and encounters the physical body - is detached from the exhalation, which underlies the astral - the astral remains in the person; the etheric goes further into the nervous process - remains there - and the physical (exhaled air) goes outwards. In the nervous process, the disconnected, I would say the killed thoughts, are the only ones that can be in the human body - the spiritual researcher must represent in thoughts which have not undergone this transformation through the body.

Who knows the essence of the life of imagination?

Schopenhauer's “the world is my imagination” is as if someone were to say of a person standing before him in the fullness of life: “this person is a corpse”. —

Ordinary thinking is such that the power of imagery inherent in the sensations is taken away; if it were not, man would not be able to distinguish himself from the external world - the power of the ether must flow into thinking - in which thinking is fulfilled through imagination. -

As the sensation becomes an idea, the inner ether process paralyzes the outer one - and in the imagination, the disconnected, paralyzed ether process comes to a continuous effect in the nerves - in the nerves, the after-effects of the ethereal processes: now one can animate thought to imagination – precisely at the thought processes that lead to boundaries – such boundaries represent the attempt to approach spiritual reality; but one cannot approach it because one has dead thoughts.

The belief must not arise that materialism has already spoken its last word; it will only have that after about six centuries. If “knowing ones” now want to claim that materialism has spoken its last word in the realm of their people, then a real effect is to be exerted by this, regardless of whether the originators of this claim are aware of its scope. That which abandons man in death shall come under the spell of earthly life – the originators want to connect themselves post mortem with their brotherhood sites – and thereby detach all earthly life from its origin.

The etheric Christ would thereby be excluded from his earthly region, and another being would be substituted for him; on the other hand, the Christ would also be excluded from the earthly sphere by the propagandists of the sixth period, but he would take on the true form. Men would withdraw with him from the physical world.

The Indian sages have given up the fight; they have no interest in the etheric Christ – they want to introduce older forms instead, they want to work with the old gods, the etheric shells of the ancestors, which were taken over by these old gods. – The Anglo-Americans want to take possession of the dead. The dispute is actually about the Christ-being - it should be eliminated. It must not - through the connection of his will waves with electrical and magnetic waves, man must not be brought into too close a connection with the earth; he must not, through treatment by suggestion, realize the “latent earth” in him; he must not, by influencing birth, shape the earth ego as Ahrimanic. And not by replacing the regular angels with spirits of form, exiling the 6th epoch.

In the fifth post-Atlantic period, spiritual effects are breaking through the veil that shrouds the spiritual world. These effects come from the spirits of personality, just as the effects of the spirits of form occurred in ancient Lemuria. These spiritual effects want to be understood. They show themselves by causing phenomena to occur that, through their own essence, urge the will to view them spiritually. It is the relationships between people that should no longer be judged by what has become of them through the course of nature. What is reported for Russia about the relationship between descendants and ancestors is significant: a person comes into a relationship with the spirits of the personality while awake, which is an echo of a prenatal relationship.

Through the mechanisms that replace human strength, however, beings enter into development that contradict the spirits of personality revealing themselves as creators. From the connection with the mechanism springs a state of mind that drives into the most violent struggle against the newly revealing spirits of form. This new form of the spirits of darkness will have to be brought into the inner soul process of man - for through man the new spirits of personality will be able to take possession of the conditions of the earth - the earth conditions will cause difficulties for man in the future if he wants to adapt to them; he must adapt to spiritual conditions. On earth equilibrium would be necessary; but this equilibrium is the manifestation of a struggle – the struggle in the spiritual field is not evil; it is the element of life: man must find the means to transfer the struggle into his inner being; at first he still resists under the guidance of the spiritual powers that want to keep the struggle external. But the external is not to be spiritualized mechanically, but a new external is to grow alive out of a new spirituality - the spirits of form are to give up their forming and the spirits of personality are to take their place - the archangeloi are to enter into the personality, i.e., man is to learn to understand the spiritual order; the Angeloi are to give the power for this - but man is to find that he is not in his body; he can only do so if he understands it spiritually - in spiritual understanding he will slip away from it.

People feel that demands are being made of them by the spiritual realm, if their spiritual life is adapted to the fifth period; by pretending that they are dealing with fantasies, they want to keep people at the present stage of their development – the shaping of social life that depends on the mechanical order could serve this purpose.

We cannot continue to move the process of redemption behind the scenes, as churches and masonic societies want to do with rituals and dogmas of redemption: It must be summoned before the scene. One must have the courage to face the spirit. Symbolism must end and reality must take its place, that is, the contemplation of the spiritual. The strongest enemies of this process will be the keepers of the confessional and ritual traditions will be the strongest enemies of this process - they will use the unconscious moments to sneak in and pursue their business - they still have much that enables them to catch dull minds with this business. —

The astrological element is most likely to seduce one into helping the mechanism to gain control, for it draws on the last dying impulses. At present it can only be useful if it leads to a defensive council that refers to something that cannot be averted in any other way. Old Christianity is still full of astrology, but this must be recognized as a disguise. The world of men, not of nature, ordered according to the astrological mode of thinking, would be the death of the human race. The astrological classes, the keepers of ritual, the historical classes, etc., all represent residues; they all refuse to enter into the mode of thinking of the fifth period.

1.) Natural science creates the necessity for man to know himself. But it contains no means of acquiring such knowledge. Behavior of natural scientists: Nägeli, Hertwig, Ziehen.

2.) In discussions about scientific questions, e.g. about the life force, I am always on the side of the natural scientists: according to du Bois Reymond. But he too used a dictum to inhibit the transition into the spiritual realm.

3.) One cannot speak of a speculated life force, but one can speak of a perceivable body of formative forces. But in order for such perception to come about, mere imagining must be transformed into perception. The “seer” and the “non-seer”. —

4.) For a long time, only body and soul have been spoken of. This was acceptable as long as the soul was attributed spiritual properties. When this was no longer done, the natural consequence was “psychology without soul”.

5.) The spirit cannot be known through the usual soul experiences. Not even if these are “mystically” intensified.

The physiologist says: a chemical change in the blood is necessary for the feeling of hunger. The spiritual researcher says: for an idea to have a will-arousing effect, it must undergo a change in its imaginative content.

6.) One speaks of the phenomena of the soul in such a way that one regards as its laws precisely that which causes the spirit to perish: associations.

7.) Drawing from the “I”, which is “spirit” after all.

8.) In the soul, mere sensing, etc. of the truth, the soul allows a glimpse of a supernatural world, etc. The spirit allows it to be recognized: it is the eternal.

Du Bois Reymond believed that where supernaturalism begins, science ends: a future view of the world will only recognize a knowledge of nature to the extent that it is based on supernaturalism:

Where supernaturalism ends, science dies.

Because you have: atoms without content.

Laws without entities.

Apparitions of souls without ego entities, etc.

In ordinary life, the soul does not have the strength to know itself as “spirit”. It has even less strength to recognize the spirit in the outside world. In the outside world, the soul encounters the supersensible when it becomes more powerful within. When the ability to live in mere imagination is developed, when it is heightened to an imaginative cognitive faculty, then the world of life presents itself as an impression from the outside – one gets to know the different pace between one's own and the foreign course of life – for this it is necessary to go back 2-3 days in one's life – then behind it lies the true soul. This is no longer influenced by the remnants of sensation - to see it as a product of the brain would be like wanting to see the table or another person as a product of the brain, because one knows: with everything one is through the brain, one stands outside of this true soul. It includes practical realization: Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu nisi ipses intellectus. —

This “true soul” must not evoke dreams or fantasies, or even visions or hallucinations. For all these arise through the bodily organism: what is no longer bodily must be sensed like an external object -: one returns to the sensation - one senses the “spirit”.

At this moment, nothing can be achieved with mere abstract programs. What matters is to address the instincts of the masses, which assert themselves with elemental force, and to organize through their honest and truthful shaping that which the bourgeoisie, in the time when it was the leading section of the population, neglected to organize. But action in this direction can now, at this moment, only be based on personal thought and action that directly encompasses the individual concrete situations. Above all, it requires an understanding of what lives in the masses. The classes that have been leading up to now have neglected everything in order to gain this understanding. They have missed every opportunity to interact with the proletarian classes at the moment when they awaken to self-awareness of their personalities. And as long as there is still a belief in the bourgeoisie that one can do something in the necessary development if one takes one's ideas of social order according to the way of thinking of the previously valid education and science, then one will only drive into the destruction. Socialists have these ideas drummed into them by bourgeois science, literature and the press. They swear by everything they have inherited intellectually from the old ruling classes, as if it were infallible. They just draw different conclusions from these ideas than the bourgeoisie. Only by speaking a completely new language can anything be achieved. For the time being, the continuity of economic life must be assured by the leading personalities in the economic bodies not excluding themselves by their lack of understanding from the councils that are being formed, for example in education, but, insofar as they are inclined to speak the language of the new era, including themselves in it. No one who is a leader in economic life need do anything other than voluntarily place himself within the proletarian formations in the position to which his insights into economic management will easily lead him if he has an understanding of the instincts of the masses. But he must not believe that this understanding will come to him “by itself.” The proletariat has, over decades, absorbed ideas about capital, wages, surplus value, class struggle, and materialist historiography. Many a proletarian today knows more about these things than a university economist, or especially than a statesman. While the proletarians were absorbing these things in their evening meetings, the bourgeoisie were playing cards, reading newspapers or watching “entertaining” theater performances. The proletarian knows this. That is why it is difficult to gain his trust. Of course, he will not simply accept the bourgeois into the order he wants to establish when they declare themselves ready to sit with him. They have to behave in such a way that he can see they will be useful to him. They do not have to conform to him, but they have to apply their knowledge and skills, and they have to decide to engage with the way of thinking that he has about entrepreneurial profit, rent and wages. The proletarian wants to paralyze the harmful characteristics of these three types of economic values for his understanding by socializing all means of production. It is necessary to show him how these three types of values can function in the economic process so that entrepreneurial profit never goes to a private sector, rent never flows into an economic channel other than that of intellectual life and support for the disabled, and wages can never be less than the proceeds of labor – less the entrepreneurial share that does not flow into the private sector and the necessary rent share as defined above. By communicating with the proletariat about these things, one must at the same time achieve an understanding of the radical reorganization of the entire educational system. It is necessary to create an understanding of the necessity for this revolution to precede the building of a new economic life. And one must know how to secure the free individuality of movement in this area. To do this, it is necessary that all educational monopolies come to an end and that in the field of intellectual life, completely free private mobility and competition enter into their full possibilities. Free competition and private freedom in the intellectual field can only be realized under the coming conditions if the intellectual sphere remains within its own field and does not, for example, by the use and exploitation of entrepreneurial profit or rent, want to put the intellectual sphere in the service of the material, especially in the service of financial speculation. —

Jah-veh is the impulse of heredity; he lives in the process that transmits the earth consciousness through heredity. Through this, man has the abstraction that reveals itself in him. Evil now comes when the abstractive power that is transmitted in material existence comes into existence. The will then enters the sphere of spirits that distract. Yahweh directs consciousness out of sleep, but he does not direct in consciousness. The cosmos revealing itself to waking consciousness - the spatial cosmos - is not God-revealing. No divine can be recognized through the wisdom of Yahweh. It appears only in the process of love under the validity of this wisdom, insofar as this is bound to the blood. At the time when the impulses of revelation through the blood cease, something else must step forward to complement this revelation, something that understands the human being as soul and as spirit. The human being is understood as a soul through a science of freedom and as a spirit through an anthroposophy. Modern science has simply revealed what was contained in the Jah-veh revelation; but the time has come when this revelation is in danger of falling prey to its opponents. The spirits of space want to destroy the spirit that works in space but is not present in space. They will not be able to do so if the spirit, of which man knows himself to be part in space, turns to the extra-spatial spiritual.

In the West, a consciousness directed only towards the spatial threatens to turn people into mere spatial beings, imitating a crusade; in the East, the spatial impulses want to prevent the incoming spiritual impulses from uniting with the human consciousness. In the West, people would like to make the soul forget that it has an existence outside of space; in the East, people would like to make them forget the conditions of the spatial existence itself.

The West is leading itself through its legal system into a dead end - from which it will only turn back at the “Threshold” when it perceives this legal system as a ghost; in the East, the soul, which does not want to fit into space, leads to an insoluble wavering between spirit and matter, - from which an attachment will only occur at the “threshold”, when the sensations hostile to space are felt as an nightmare. The West must not expel the Father; it is on the way to doing so – it can only come to the right way if it realizes that its present path leads to a spectre; the East must not seek the Son on the wrong path; it can only come to the right way if it perceives the confused intellect as an nightmare. The way out must be found in the spirit. The West must place the human being in the place of abstraction – by perceiving its human being as a ghost; the East must perceive its human being as a nightmare, so that it comes to understand it as a spatial being. The East must come away from its fight against the Father, the West from its fight against the Son; the West needs a spiritualization of science; the East a scientific penetration of its religious consciousness.

In the cosmos, the West must find the inner essence of nature – its inspiration; the East must find the revelation of inner spirituality through nature.

To the West it must be said: What appears to you as a human being is a spectre; you do not see the spectre because you avoid the abilities for this seeing; to the East it must be said: what appears to you as a human being, the seer feels as a nightmare; you do not feel the nightmare because you keep away from the associated sentience. To the west: You destroy the future by leading humanity into a dead end; to the east: You destroy the future by taking the light for the following path of humanity and wanting to walk it in darkness. To the west: You cut off the way; and make humanity a prisoner of the earth; to the east: You make it impossible to walk the way because you do not want to fan the light that illuminates the way. To the West: You make humanity unfree by not leading them into the sphere of freedom; to the East: You make humanity unfree by depriving them of the ability to use their own will in the sphere of freedom. To the West: You paralyze people; to the East: You blind people. —

Of all the Elohim, Jah-veh is the one who has turned to the world of physical processes in human development; to nature in humanity. His rule over human nature is the result of a struggle that ended with man coming into natural necessity with his soul life: Jah-weh is not originally “born”, but is present in the cosmic-soul element within the sphere of elective affinity; but he leaves this sphere to enter the “realm of birth” by starting a fight against the other Elohim, whom he expels into those realms that are accessible to man only through the powers of “illusion” as long as man stands at the level of intellectual consciousness - they only become apparent again at a different level of consciousness. The worship of God in the form of the child is essentially a beginning of a liberation from Jah-veh; for the latter can only reveal himself in processes that end with birth; Jah-veh's birth is an apparent one - he cannot enter into earthly forms that are “born”. He can only be represented in symbols whose content belongs to a form of life that reveals itself in the “unborn” state: the mineral-mathematical and part of the plant world.

Jah-veh is not the “Word made flesh”.

The development of the consciousness that man has a relationship to Christ that is not inherent in his natural existence, that in him he has a being to whom he is related through the powers that transform the air in him (in his heart) make him a being that can grasp thought; through the flesh, which does not live in the process of the prenatal natural order, but only in that which begins with birth; which proceeds personally in the interrelationship of man to the world.

As a Christian, one cannot see in the manifest universe the revelation of “God the Father”, but that it comes from the same source as the “born human being”: what is manifest in the universe is only insofar as it is reclaimed through Christ], for Jah-weh has confined divinity to the embryology of the world, pushing the other Elohim into the “sphere of illusion”. The fate of humanity, which can no longer see Jah-weh in the revealed universe, is therefore atheism - the worship of the mere natural order, which, however, only came about because Jah-weh removed the other Elohim from this natural order in the human realm. Yahweh has chosen his people; but in so doing, he has inserted them into the mere order of nature; they have thus become the opponents of all other spirit beings, all spirit beings that do not reveal themselves through human nature; they have also become the opponents of the spirit being that reveals itself in the flesh after birth – the opponents of a spiritualized natural science. Man can attain knowledge through the powers he has at birth; but with this knowledge he cannot consciously bring himself into a relationship with the spiritual world; he must gain this through other spiritual beings if it is not to remain instinctive. otherwise he remains an “animal with the capacity for abstraction,” ideas remain images, and his reality is guided by instincts - that is, by the spiritual beings whom Jah-veh has pushed into the “sphere of illusion.” In order to make man free from the other Elohim, he has driven the other Elohim out of the nature of man – he has moved back in time, that is, materially effected what would later have been spiritually The totality of the Eloh[lim] has been led back [by Christ]; first the “healer” - the “Hermes” - the next will be the “seer”. —

Yahweh is working through the process of the sleeping, not the waking, fleshly organism – therefore the waking is exposed to lower spirit beings – it is now the age in which Yahweh himself cannot sustain himself against the lower spirit beings. –

When the body is alone, it decays: that is to say, the causes of its continued existence do not belong to this world.

Because Jah-weh has assumed the autocracy of consciousness, the flesh in man, which is included in the waking process of life, has come under the rule of lower spirit beings than those in whose spheres Christ lives. The establishment of the personal relationship with Christ] returns to man his conscious kinship. Otherwise, only reason remains, turned to the Christ-Divine, as it was in fact in pre-scriptural times; but now reason too is seized by the animalistic.

Now the consciousness nourished by Jah-weh, the Christ-Christus-Revelation, is in preparation.

I was born on February 25, 1861. I was baptized two days later. It happened in the Croatian-Hungarian border town of Kraljevec, where my father worked as a telegraph operator for the Austrian Southern Railway. At that time, the Southern Railway still had a unified administration in Vienna, and the employees were alternately deployed on the later Hungarian and Austrian lines. My father had only been transferred from a small southern Styrian railway station to Kraljevec shortly before my birth.

My father and mother came from the Horn area in Lower Austria; my mother was born in Horn and my father came from Geras, the seat of a Premonstratensian monastery in Lower Austria. In 1862, my father was transferred from Krajelvec to Mödling near Vienna and in 1863 to Pottschach in Lower Austria.

My two siblings were born in the latter place and I spent my childhood years there until I was eight. The daily passing of the trains, a spinning factory in the immediate vicinity, the Austrian Schneeberg with the other Alpine mountains around it formed the objects of daily experience. In Pottschach there was a Lichtenstein estate with a castle. The accountant's family often visited us. The pastor of the neighboring village of St. Valentin was an almost daily visitor. This man was completely without priestly airs in his profession. He was a man of the world in his own way. His visit to us was the end of his walk, and he was probably more interested in observing the passing and stopping trains than in talking to my parents. The pastor of Pottschach also frequently came to such a train, but he was not taken particularly seriously by his counterpart in St. Valentin. The pastor of St. Valentin was tall, the pastor of Pottschach was short; and I once witnessed the spectacle of the former taking the latter under his arm, picking him up and carrying him like a package for quite a distance.

I soon became familiar with the workings of the railroad. My favorite places to spend time were the waiting room of the small train station and my father's tiny office. I was sent to school at the age of six, but was soon taken out of it because my father had fallen out with the old schoolmaster. After his retirement, I then went to school for a short time with a young teacher in Pottschach. My father taught me most of the lessons.

The whole atmosphere was unsuitable for developing any kind of enthusiastic interest. All the people I saw were interested in the railway and the spinning mill nearby. The “Valentiner Pfarrer” was a sober man with a somewhat cynical tendency in his conversations, often something of a prankster.

The following experience made a deep impression on the boy. My mother's sister had died in a tragic way. The place where she lived was quite far from ours. My parents had no news. I saw it all while sitting in the waiting room at the train station. I made some allusions in front of my father and mother. They just said, “You're a stupid boy.” A few days later, I saw how my father became pensive when he received a letter, and then, without me being present, he spoke to my mother a few days later and she cried for days. I only found out about the tragic event years later.

During this time I only learned reading and arithmetic; I made no progress at all in writing.

When I reached the age of eight, my father was transferred to Neudörfl (L[ajta Sz[en]t Miklös) near Wiener-Neustadt. I now went to school there. The teacher was horrified by my writing. I rounded all the letters, ignored the capitals and wrote all the words unorthographically. But in the teacher's library I discovered a book “Mo£nik's Geometry”. I borrowed it for a while and studied it eagerly. I always listened to the piano lessons, which were given in my teacher's room.

This teacher was an excellent person. He was a good drawer and also gave me drawing lessons, although I really needed thorough writing lessons. The teacher only had an annual salary of 54 guilders, and ate with the head teacher. The latter came to school very rarely, as he took care of the secretarial business of his community. We children thought that our substitute teacher was a “real” teacher; the schoolmaster “doesn't understand anything.”

My parents were not particularly pious people. Even in Pottschach, my father always said that “service to the Lord comes before service to God” and used this as an excuse for never going to church, saying that his work left him no time to pray. Nevertheless, in Neudörfl I became a “church boy” and a favorite of the pastor, who also liked my father very much, even though he never saw him in church.

This pastor was a man of pronounced character. He was Magyar through and through, a die-hard cleric. He could preach so powerfully that all the pews in the small parish church would shake. I owe him an enormous debt because he introduced me to an understanding of the Copernican system as early as the age of nine. He did that with the help of very instructive drawings. He came to our school twice a week. All the children enjoyed his catechism and Bible lessons because of his likeable personality. As a church boy, I served at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, at the afternoon service, at funerals, and at the Feast of Corpus Christi. This service came to an abrupt end one day. Several altar boys, including myself, were late for the service one morning. They were all supposed to get a beating at school. I had an irresistible aversion to such beatings and knew how to avoid them. I always managed to avoid being beaten by evading the task. However, my father was so indignant at the thought that “his son” should have been beaten that he said: “Now you're through with being an altar boy. You're not going anymore.”